Suspected of What?

This morning's newspapers across the country carried the same front-page story, using, no doubt, some variation of the headlines I saw in the L.A. Times--"Suspect in Court Killings Caught"--and the Santa Barbara News-Press--"Murder rampage suspect gives up". It's a story that zipped straight to the top of our "My Gawd!" meters, when it hit on Friday, and pegged there until the next day when we heard that this menace had been captured. Though it was still morning in Atlanta when Brian Gene Nichols surrendered, the print media had until their evening deadlines to put together a sensible sequence of events for folks to consume with their Sunday morning coffee.

In transit from jail to his rape trial in downtown Atlanta Friday morning, Nichols over-powered his armed escort, dashed upstairs to the courtroom, fatally shot the judge and a court reporter, left the court house, killing a sheriff's deputy on the street, carjacked a vehicle, pistol-whipping its owner, and fled the scene. A second stolen vehicle, found 20 miles to the northeast where Nichols was captured, belonged to a Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who was found shot to death at the site of a home he was building for himself and his wife. Nichols still had the agent's pistol and badge with him when he surrendered.

The country is more than shocked. We're starting to wonder if our world has any place left that's off-limits for sudden violence and psychopaths venting their rage. Still sickened by last week's story of the judge in Chicago whose husband and mother were executed by a former litigant in the judge's courtroom, we now realize that even our legal system cannot defend itself from the scum it tries to protect the rest of us from.

Doesn't it just add to the insanity, then, to insist on referring to someone like Brian Nichols as a "suspect"? What do we suspect he has done? We KNOW all too well what he's done, and it isn't pretty. The media and law enforcement, though, are now obligated to refer him as a "suspect" and his actions as "alleged" behavior.

To give him the benefit and respect of legal pleasantries doesn't substantiate the principle of due process; instead, it mocks the notion of fairness with facetious application. You don't have to be an English teacher to understand that the term "suspect" descends from the idea of suspicion. But what is the essence of suspicion? Any dictionary you select will define the idea in terms of doubt and uncertainty. The first definition from Dictionary.com calls it "the act of suspecting something, especially something wrong, on little evidence or without proof." It can be used to indicate "a minute amount or slight indication; a trace." And the punctilious use of "alleged" just reinforces this bizarre level of denial. In some cases there is no element of doubt or need for further proof.

So does our legal system and the press need to subvert language itself to ensure a fair trial? This man is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination or the English language, a "susepct." He is a known killer. This misguided sense of fairness and suspension of judgment could, in fact, be responsible for the whole tragic mess. Nichols was able to over-power his armed escort because it is illegal in that jurisdiction to bring a defendant into court wearing handcuffs, lest the jury get the impression that he is a dangerous fellow.

This is a guy who held his girlfriend tied up for three days while he raped her repeatedly and snacked on goodies he'd brought for the occasion in a cool box. God forbid that he should not enjoy all the rights and respect of the unconvicted. The question is, how can you convict someone who kills the judge, the court reporter, and everyone else in uniform in the vacinity of the courtroom? Isn't such a man perpetually "innocent until proven guilty"?

And how about Jesse James Hollywood? He's been on the lam for over four years, enjoying life in a pretty little coastal town near Rio de Janeiro. He's a "suspect," too, even though after individual trials of his four accomplices, there is no one on earth who doubts that he was the petty gangster behind the killing of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz in August 2000--not even his parents who were wiring him $1,200 a month to live on. But now that he's been captured and returned to jail, the press and the public must refer to him as a suspect, someone with a trace of evidence against him, someone we must treat fairly and suspend judgment of until a jury agrees that he is a kidnapper and murderer.

I'm not suggesting that we abandon the basic tenets of due process and a fair trial, but I do believe we actually chisel away at those principles when we ignore reality, when we deny what we know is true and stand behind sweet-sounding ideals stretched and contorted to absurd lengths, all the while pasting over the resulting folly with debased language. We honor those principles when we apply them consistently and sensibly, but we damage them when we forget that blind Mother Justice is a metaphor. She doesn't hold a defendent's skin color or place in society against him, but sometimes the evidence piled up in those scales weighs so obviously and so heavily in one direction that we turn a blind eye very much at our own peril.

What Shakespeare knew that Bush & Co. don't

In case readers haven't noticed, Jan writes about a great, broad array of subjects that pop into her mind. I admire that catholicity. I, on the other hand, am stuck barking at the moon over our current American nightmare--the depressing saga of the Bush administration's rape of America.

So be it. It doesn't take watching the evening news or reading the daily papers to set me off; nearly everything I read or observe gets me to frothing. This past weekend--ironically a holiday dedicated to a couple presidents of certain stature--it was going to the movies to see the recent film of Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons that set me reflecting at how tragically little these vandals in Washington know about how to do their jobs

It doesn't take a very long association with Shakespeare's plays and poems to notice that he was able to clearly articulate how people and the world in general operate. And one doesn't have to be particularly perceptive to notice that our current president and his cronies haven't a clue about anything important.

So, whether you know the intricacies of Shakespeare play or not, understand that there comes a point in the play where a young man of limited means and borrowed array comes to court a beautiful young heiress. The courtship, though, is not quite the normal sort: Portia's suitors are all required by her father's will to play out a little game of chance in which they must select from among three ornate jewel boxes--one made from gold, one of silver and one of lead--to find Portia's portrait and thereby win her hand in marriage. Ignore for the moment that were he around today Shakespeare could have had a career cooking up game shows or reality schemes for TV. Anyway, Portia has already survived two rounds of this sort of Russian roulette, and now the man she really craves, Bassanio, has come to take his chances at Let's Make a Deal. Though Portia is reluctant to get down to business, Bassanio knows that no amount of loving chatter on her part can change the requirement that he must play the game. He wants to get down to business:
BASSANIO
Let me choose
For as I am, I live upon the rack.

PORTIA
Upon the rack, Bassanio! then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.

BASSANIO
None but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love:
There may as well be amity and life
'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.

PORTIA
Ay, but I fear you speak upon the rack,
Where men enforced do speak anything.

BASSANIO
Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth.

PORTIA
Well then, confess and live.

BASSANIO
'Confess' and 'love'
Had been the very sum of my confession:
O happy torment, when my torturer
Doth teach me answers for deliverance!
But let me to my fortune and the caskets.

Now, I've read and watched this scene literally dozens of times. But it's always been just clever word play to me. After all, these scenes at Belmont are clearly intended as fairy tale counterpoint to the somber plot line developing in downtown Venice, where smug, self-righteous Christian businessmen bait and bully the city's Jews, even as they seek to borrow a few thousand ducats of gold. Now, though, suddenly Shakespeare's words ring a bell with a disturbing article I'd just finished from the current New Yorker magazine. Senior staffer Jane Mayer has written a powerful piece on a deeply secret, on-going U.S. intelligence procedure known as "extraordinary rendition." In essence this is our government's end-run around America's squeamishness about torturing political prisoners for information.

There's no substitute for Mayer's precise research, but here's the deal: for about a decade now U.S intelligence operatives have been capturing foreigners--both in the U.S. and elsewhere--with suspected terrorist connections, and immediately flying them by private jet to countries like Egypt, Morocco, Syria, or Jordan, where American operatives or local authorities proceed to torture them into confession.

What started out in the mid-90s as a rare, "extraordinary" solution to the C.I.A's problem of what to do with, for instance, suspects from the first WTC bombing in 1993 whom they had already questioned so roughly that they could not be usefully brought to justice in the U.S., has since 9/11 become a course of action for hundreds of suspects. Our "final solution" now is simply to seize suspects off the streets abroad or as they pass through an American airport, stuff them secretly on a Gulfstream V jet and send them, usually via U.S. overseas military bases, to one of these countries--all of which have been cited for human rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture prisoners--and dig deeper for information. This, of course, is just a shaded alternative to our relatively "open" torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

All this, of course, despite President Bush's recent proclamation in a New York Times interview that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture."

The "ah-hah" moment with Shakespeare came, though, when Portia says, "I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak anything." This is exactly the point Mayer makes when she quotes from former F.B.I and C.I.A. agents who remind us that the information we are getting from tortured prisoners is generally worthless; after being tortured, they confess to anything and everything they sense their tormentors want to hear. Experienced intelligence agents know that successful interrogators build relationships with even the most despicable suspects. Just contemplating the concept of "due process" can make a suspect more compliant, they say. Bottom line: as one former F.B.I. agent puts it "Brutalization doesn't work. We know that."

So did Shakespeare. When he has characters speak of being "upon the rack" it isn't necessarily a metaphor, as it is here for Bassanio and Portia, for romantic angst. Shakespeare lived in an era when the rack had a literal place in the affairs of church and state. Elizabethan and Jacobean protestants were quite experienced at using this sort of device to wrest confession of Popish plots from Catholic activists, Guy Fawkes and his demolition crew being only the most famous.

But Shakespeare knew the limitations of physical torture, and he can have even a pampered young woman of little or no experience of the world like Portia speak the obvious: a person enduring torture will tell some real whoppers to gain release from pain and humiliation. Bassanio, though clearly no traitor to Portia, is quick to appreciate the interrogator's tendency to provide the answers sought through inflicting agony. "O happy torment," he says, "when my torturer doth teach me answers for deliverance!" Of course, in this context, it is a matter of clever lovers playing with words, but the kernel of truth is what gives their banter its bite on stage.

Our current problem is that the Bush clan keeps ignoring this ancient insight, to the point where Mayer can cite case after case of our intelligence community falling for ridiculous lies extracted from tortured detainees. Perhaps the most embarrassing of these came when Secretary of State Colin Powell went in front of the United Nations Security Council in February 2003 and spoke authoritatively about Saddam Hussein's offer to train Al Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical and biological weapons.

This information, it turns out, came from an Al Qaeda operative who ran a training camp in Afghanistan and had virtually no knowledge about Iraq operations at all, but had been sent under the U.S. rendition program to Egypt for a few months of outsourced torture. He gave his interrogators the kind of information they where looking for--later discovered to be entirely untrue--and thus even though imprisoned had his full measure of revenge upon his embarrassed enemy.

The New Yorker piece goes on to note that our British allies have already learned this lesson from their long-running nightmare with the Irish Republican Army. For years they tried to get the upper hand through subjecting detainees to brutality. Eventually, though, they came to the conclusion that it simply doesn't work. A former M.I.5 officer says he discovered that it was far more effective to simply be more "creative" about traditional intelligence gathering techniques such as infiltration and eavesdropping.

Mayer quotes this agent saying, "The U.S. is doing what the British did in the nineteen-seventies, detaining people and violating their civil liberties. It did nothing but exacerbate the situation. Most of those interned went back to terrorism. You'll end up radicalizing the entire population."

The Brits seem to have rediscovered what their national poet knew 400 years ago, so why haven't George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, and the rest? Don't they read?

The verb "to teach"

I love teaching!

In just the last week or so, Charlie and I have been back in the classroom. I did a lesson on writing for a friend and former colleague who wanted his AP World History students to get off on the right foot as they ready themselves for the spring exam. And then both of us worked with the cast of the upcoming spring production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," teaching and refreshing them on Shakespeare's verse, as well as working with small groups of actors on particular scenes in the play. It has been a complete pleasure.

It reminds us that we both deeply enjoy the rigor and rewards of working with young people on something worth learning. And what has made it particularly pleasurable, is that we park our car, walk straight across campus and get to work with students who were attentive and eager to learn. The enervating red tape of a typical high school day was nowhere in sight. No administration-mandated surveys, no fun and games at lunch time, no leadership kids interrupting class with the latest reminder about some dress-up day, no strange schedule for WASC or career day or late start, no call slips or campus security guards arriving to summon a student . . . none of the stuff that make up the gantlet that every teacher runs every teaching day throughout the school year.

And that is just a sampling of the distractions that impede a teacher and reduce the actual teaching that occurs on any given day. No wonder so little real education goes on during a day, or week or whole school year. To tell you the truth, a teacher succeeds in spite of all these oh-so important distractions. All that talk about "support" is generally just cant.

Revisiting the classroom this past week has reminded us what the profession should and could be. It reminded us of why we chose it, and what good things could happen when the capricious gods were not conspiring against those of us in the classroom.

My UCSB student teaching supervisor always reminded us that the verb "to teach" takes two objects: you always teaching something to someone. I loved literature and I enjoyed teenagers. The job of teaching high school English was right up my street. She never mentioned anything about subordinate clauses filled with distractions and red tape. And luckily, none of them materialized during these last few days when I was leading students through a refresher on writing thesis statements, or Charlie and I were exploring the intricacies of Shakespeare's text.

Teaching is still a pleasure.

Back in town, back online

Considering how long it's been since our last post, it would not be surprising if anyone who might have checked this space from time to time had given up hope of anything new. We've been entirely immersed in home improvement activities--sprucing up the 1968 upstairs addition with new carpet, doors, paint, etc--and then visiting and traveling with close friends from abroad, rediscovering well-loved areas of the Southwest as well as Santa Barbara County by showing it to visitors. Besides the simultaneous relaxation and stimulation of travel and conversation, we are convinced anew that we live in a beautiful, well-protected portion of a great country.

As we drove through vast portions of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, transitioning gradually from Sonoran desert surrounding the marvel of Frank Lloyd Wright's compound at Taliesin West to the Alpine slopes of the lower Rockies and then back to our own South Coast, we were always reminded that this land is worth fighting for. On numerous occasions along our route through the homeland of the Navajo and Hopi, we were reminded of how the Indians have fought for the preservation of their land and way of life for nearly 400 years--alas, with only marginal success.

And walking the Carpinteria Bluffs and Elwood Mesa with our friends, or watching them photograph whales in the channel, seals at the Carpinteria rookery, or Monarch butterflies in Goleta we were could see evidence of how much we, too, have had to fight and negotiate to maintain the wonders of our environment--fortunately with remarkable success at the local level.

Didn't watch a second of the inauguration, confirmation hearings, or the State of the Union, but we can still read the papers and get pissed enough without the living image of the vandals who've taken over in Washington. Now, with the initial presentation of the Bushie budget, we can see exactly where things stand.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell used to talk about how you can always tell what is important to a culture by looking for the tallest building in town; Is it the hotel? The museum? The mostly vacant but impressive office tower? The church spire? Depends on whether you're visiting New York City or Salt Lake City. But the same judgment can be rendered as you look at the state and federal budgets.

On our trek through the Southwest we drove over 2600 miles in a rented SUV on absolutely perfect interstate highways and bought gasoline throughout--including California--at under $2.00 per gallon. Our European friends, used to paying three times that, were absolutely gob-smacked! This is clearly what Americans value above all--humongous cars, well-maintained highways, and cheap gas. We've got it all and are willing to pay handsomely for it, both from our pocketbooks and from our environment.

Yet our healthcare system seems permanently broken; we can't afford to rebuild our decaying urban neighborhoods, and aren't willing to pay what it takes for quality education. And now we're turning against the concept of a guaranteed subsistence for retired workers. The Bush budget proposal "reads like a hit list against almost every social program paid for by US taxpayers," says the independent radio news program Democracy Now! The administration wants to slash 150 government programs, with one third of those programs involving education.

Bush's plan would reduce aid to cities by a third, drop health insurance for thousands of low-income families, reduce veterans' medical benefits, cut funding for police and sheriffs, wipe out child care subsidies for 300,000 families, trim funding for clean water and soil conservation and close down dozens of programs for preschool children and at-risk youth. Also on the chopping block is the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency--to the tune of $450 million. Our compassionately conservative president also proposes cutting $100 million from a Bureau of Indian Affairs program that helps build schools, as well as cutting $200 million for home-heating aid for the poor.

This is all necessary, of course, to protect and carve in stone the embarrassingly huge tax cuts for the wealthy, and naturally to pack more sand down that five-sided rat hole called the Pentagon as we pursue a pointless war in Iraq.

This can be opposed, though. We don't have to lie down and roll over. I'm reminded of the great Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the long-suffering native inhabitants of the Southwest rose up against their pious Spanish rulers, slit their throats and dumped the bodies off cliffs and into ravines. Homeland security indeed!

Fat Funnies

I am eternally amazed and amused by life's coincidence, irony and downright absurdity. Life seems to have a sense of humor about the unharmonic convergence of events and trends.

Consider the colliding coincidence of the recent release of the latest health news noting the rise of obesity in pre-schoolers with the opening of the movie "Fat Albert."

On New Year's Eve the American Heart Association announced that recent surveys revealed that about ten percent of the nation's preschoolers were obese, which is a three percent jump from a decade ago. But those preschoolers are not unique; indeed they are just part of a growing nationwide trend that now shows four million elementary school children overweight or obese and 5.3 million teens in that category. The news release also noted that "Since 1991, the prevalence of obesity among American adults has increased 75 percent." Those 62 million adults represent about 30 percent of the U.S. population.

On Christmas Day, Twentieth Century Fox released "Fat Albert," the live action-animation movie based on the character Bill Cosby made famous in his stand-up comedy routines. So far the movie has grossed (pardon the pun, but, hey, that's what the industry calls it) nearly $34 million at the box office, raking in more than Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator," James L. Brooks' "Spanglish" and "The Phantom of the Opera." The marketing department for the movie blithely quotes the critics who tell us it is "delightful, wholesome, fantastic!" has "lots of laughs" and is "a holiday treat for the whole family." The print ad in the Los Angeles Times also reminds the potential moviegoer that "Cosby's appeal is timeless." And there's Fat Albert himself swelling out from one side of the advert, a Hollywood example of the four million 6-11 year olds who are overweight or obese.

So what are we to do? When we fork over our movie bucks to see "Fat Albert" we are supposed to have "lots of laughs" at the fat kid, and then when we open our morning newspaper we should shake our heads in indignation at the dire state of our children's health.

Three or four decades ago when Bill Cosby first created Fat Albert, the neighbor from his Philadelphia circle of childhood friends, an overweight kid was an anomaly, the only one out of all the students in your grade school. But what was once uncommon has, in recent years, become prevalent. And those children who are overweight or obese in their younger years will probably continue to be so in adulthood, taking their fast food nation eating habits with them. There the health risks--and costs--rise. They will face the threats of heart disease, diabetes and stroke. Some will enter the category of the morbidly obese, where even simple mobility is a problem. And none of that is a laughing matter.

But until corporate profit gluttony tightens its belt, fighting fat is a losing battle. And it is not just Hollywood players to blame, the real con men, pandering to mere tykes, are the fast food hucksters, who are laughing all the way to the bank.

One, two, three, what are we fightin' for?

If you're old enough to have ever seen even a video of the movie Woodstock, you can't help but remember the curious figure of "Country Joe" McDonald kicking things off with "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die." But just in case that little gem is not stashed as securely in you memory bank as other more recent lyrical gems by important figures such as, say, Seal or Christina Aguilera, here's a sample of three of the verses and, of course, that infectious chorus:

Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He's got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.

And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

Well, come on generals, let's move fast;
Your big chance has come at last.
Gotta go out and get those reds —
The only good commie is the one who's dead
And you know that peace can only be won
When we've blown 'em all to kingdom come.

Well, come on mothers throughout the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam.
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send 'em off before it's too late.
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.

By 1969, when the Woodstock festival took place, the war was still building in intensity, but the country--at least its draft-age youth--had already wised up and knew that the whole enterprise was more than just a failure, but a national catastrophe in the making. Yet it took us another five years to face that fact, a time during which we reaped tens of thousands more body bags from the jungles and rice fields of Vietnam.

Last spring the news from Iraq led to common discussion of whether the progress of the war there wasn't starting to resemble our misguided pursuits in Southeast Asia, and whether it was too early to haul out that Vietnam-era epithet "quagmire." Can anyone doubt that now? If anything, Vietnam was rather more rational, more "winnable" an enterprise, where the enemy was more discernable and our goals more clear-cut: South Vietnam had established leaders, had experienced generals and thousands upon thousands of troops willing to fight for their country. We were, at least at first, fighting alongside, providing support and matériel. We at least knew what victory would look like. The vicious invaders from the North would cease their efforts to unify the nation under Communist rule and retreat beyond a specific, traditional line on the map.

Despite the black pajamas, the jungle trip wires and the hit and run tactics, compared to Iraq, Vietnam was textbook warfare. Iraq as a nation has existed only since the British drew its arbitrary boundaries on a map of the region, and it has never found a way to hold its disparate religious factions together peacefully. For us to blunder in there and think we can make them into a Western-style democratic society is the height of folly, and it's absolutely predictable that our occupying force would now be literally taking fire from every direction at once. Trying to do it on the cheap just makes our folly more pathetic, but we have thrust ourselves into a position that makes the term "exit strategy" meaningless.

We can't win this war, because we refused to think through what could ever be a realistic goal there. We claim concern about terrorism, but every day we make the area more amenable to terrorists and provide greater and greater motivation to average citizens to resist our presence. George W. Bush has clearly become the number one recruiting officer for Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi. When things get that screwed up, you just know it's going to get a lot worse before it gets just miserable. We're committed to staying at least four more years. That means that we're about where we were in 1969--at best. Troop commitment will have to rise--as we're already hearing--and even if we can keep deaths to the current level of a mere 100 or so per month, that's another 5,000 young American men and women sacrificed for this war of vanity and delusion. And when do we even START counting Iraqi lives lost?

It's collective madness, and the American public is hardly making a peep. Middle-aged newspaper columnists are churning out modestly impassioned analyses, but our college students are still sitting in their dorm rooms downloading music onto their iPods instead of raising hell in the streets. That will no doubt be true as long as military conscription stays in the closet, but why is there no Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, or Stephen Stills to sway the generation that is doing the fighting and the dying on a volunteer basis? Hell, there isn't even a Country Joe ready with a little Fish Cheer and a jolt of grim irony.

Listen to this...

Somehow this has been the only thing to cheer me up of late:

Bruce Springsteen News: brucespringsteen.net

Won't Get Phooled Again

Everyone I know has been pretty depressed this past week contemplating the larger meanings of the election: We didn't just elect a president; we declared ourselves a nation of gullible morons willing to trade our own self-interest for the chance to ensure particular sectors of the populace don't enjoy the same liberties as the rest. Whatever commentary we listen to, whatever rationalization we soothe ourselves with, sensible people can't quite make sense of this trend toward boneheadedness. Garrison Keillor was not entirely facetious Saturday night when he told his radio audience that he had become the chairman of a national campaign for a Constitutional amendment to take the right to vote away from born again Christians.

When the anger subsides, I recognize a sense of despair that is best depicted in To Kill a Mockingbird when the guilty verdict is delivered in the Tom Robinson case. Even a child can feel the depth of injustice that is being done, and Atticus has his hands full answering Jem's simple question: "How could they do it, how could they?" All Atticus can come up with is, "I don't know, but they did it. They've done it before and they did it tonight and they'll do it again and when they do it--seems that only children weep." Though that's where the analogy breaks down somewhat. This time, anyone who pays attention and is fully engaged with civic affairs at least feels like weeping.

We're told the American public turned out to vote for strong "moral values." Yep, I know exactly which values we're talking about here: stopping people in love from marrying, taking reproductive choice away from women, denying scientific progress, and breaking down our country's hard-won separation of religion and government. And don't forget the guns. Value-oriented Americans can always be counted on to vote with their trigger fingers.

The best comment on values I've heard recently came from Bruce Springsteen speaking at the final Kerry rally before the election. After singing "Promised Land" and a couple other well-chosen songs for the crowd, Bruce said, "I believe our American government has drifted too far from American values: The human principles of economic justice, healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage so folks don't have to break their backs and then come home and not be able to make ends meet, an open American government that's unburdened by unnecessary secrecy, protection of our environment, a sane and responsible foreign policy where we take our place amongst a community of nations, civil rights and the safeguarding of our precious Democracy here at home."

I guess we all voted our values last week. Evangelical Christians just seem to have the more popular ones.

Home Again

We had every intention of blogging at least once or twice while away in Europe last month and this, but we really had more than enough to do just experiencing things without tackling more writing than we normally do, which is actually quite a lot since we always keep a daily journal (we call it "the bullshit book") and write a couple thousand words about each piece of theatre we see. So the description and reflection have had to wait until now.

We shifted our annual trip abroad by a couple months this year to celebrate our newfound freedom to travel outside the peak tourist season and also to see what difference it would make to experience familiar locations at a different time of year.

The result? London is pretty much the same all year round, except for average temperatures being somewhat lower or higher. Rain is a constant. The crowds, the congestion, the pollution, the malfunctioning services, and the brilliant cultural attractions are steady factors year round.

But the French countryside in October is...well, seriously transformed compared to August. Rural France is a seasonal affair attuned to the eternal cycle of planting and harvest, not to mention the cycle of teaming vacationers drawn to the many remarkable tourist sites, such as picturesque medieval villages, walled cities, grottoes, and prehistoric cave art-- overrun in summer, charmingly deserted in the fall.

Along these lines, we had two distinct sorts of experiences this year: very rich theatre and museum going taken at breakneck pace in London, and very relaxed and inspirational participation in the rural activities of the Dordogne region of southwest France.

I know no one really wants to read more than superficially about someone else's vacation. Even bloggers mustn't be arrogant enough to think otherwise, so let's just take one sample of each of those experiences and call it done.

In our opinion the most significant theatrical event of the current season is David Hare's new play "Stuff Happens" at the National Theatre. Hare sets himself the task of depicting in full detail how America and Britain came to be entangled in the Iraq mess that we seem to share. It is an even-handed, but powerful examination of history that's so recent that it's still bleeding. Alex Jennings, one of England's most exciting classical actors, is a slack-jawed, but not dim-witted George W. Bush; the comic genius Des Barrit is a VERY SCARY Dick Cheney; Nicholas Farrell the deeply betrayed but ever-stalwart Tony Blair, and the American actor Joe Morton is the closest we have to a hero here as the cautious, loyal, sensible, diplomatic, and ultimately frustrated Colin Powell. All your other favorites are there as well, Rummy, Condi, Wolfy and many more speaking lines taken from the public record and, then, when necessary, remarkably scripted by Hare to fit as well as possible with what is known about private meetings and conversations.

"Stuff Happens" is about as timely as theatre gets, and Hare has crafted a work that could, if it were seen by enough people, change attitudes and affect elections more than any debate or stump speech. Of course, the problem is that maybe three or four thousand people see it in a week, and very few of those are American voters. But it will run for awhile, and I'd not be surprised if it becomes a film one day soon.

Our most memorable day in France, though, was timely only in the sense that mid-October is harvest time for the local vineyards, and when it's time to pick grapes they can use all the hands they can get. We stay with friends who are just retired from teaching like ourselves, and their neighboring village commune invited us all to lend a hand last Saturday with the vendange of a relatively small vineyard--the size that about 20 people can rip through in one day. So there we are amidst all these very friendly, loquacious French men and woman--many of them considerably older than we are--stooping over the vines with our secateurs and snipping off all those little bunches of wine grapes and filling our paniers time after time. It's the kind of healthy labor that must at least in part account for the longevity of these folks, and it was the kind of experience that many California urbanites would pay for.

We, of course, didn't have to pay, nor were we paid except by inclusion in the most incredible communal mid-day meal. There's no need to detail the seven courses, except to say it wasn't anything like having dinner at some trendy French restaurant in, say, San Francisco. It was simple peasant fare prepared with love and gratitude, served to all hands at one long table in the landowner's--Jean-Claude and Claudette's-- living room which for the day had been converted into a dining room. Indeed, our hostess talked assertively about preferring the term "peasant" to describe her station in life. She sees nothing to be ashamed of, and neither do we.

Needless to say the meal was received and consumed with authentic appreciation and enthusiasm over a period of two hours before we all trekked back out to the vineyard to finish off the harvest. Absolutely unforgettable!

Real Reading

I have been riding on Charlie's coattails of summer reading, but I have had time to reflect on the sort of books we have been choosing lately. And I have noticed an interesting pattern to my reading choices--each book included at the end an acknowledgment, or bibliography or appendix or the author's research. All are firmly grounded in historical fact. "The Dante Club," "The Road to Wellville," and most recently, British novelist Ian McEwan's 1997 novel, "Enduring Love," are all the creations of gifted novelists who have grounded their stories in deep and meticulous research.

Matthew Pearl is, himself, a Dante scholar, but it is clear that he is equally an expert in the New England poets who are the reluctant detectives of this literary murder mystery. The story is alive with the details of post-Civil War Boston and Cambridge; you can smell and feel the crowds on the horse trolleys, the closeness of Longfellow's study, and the iciness of winter. But more griping is the psychological underpinnings of Longfellow, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes and the dynamics between them. Clearly Pearl has done his homework.

T.C.Boyle's "The Road to Wellville" like "The Dante Club" has a number of characters that are purely the author's invention, but they swirl around the very real Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the historic phenomenon of the cereal wars of Battle Creek, Michigan. The story is chocked full of bizarre cures, and a reader might be tempted to dismiss them as Boyle's satiric fancy if it weren't for the fact that the novel is peppered with authentic photos of some of these therapies from Dr. Kellogg's sanitarium. Couple that with the serious bibliography and you can tell you are firmly grounded in the world of historical fact.

"Enduring Love," an apt pun for a book about a man putting up with an obsessive and unwanted fixation, is McEwan's 1997 novel. The object of the attention is a science writer, who eventually pinpoints the problem as de Clerambault's syndrome. Yes, that is an authentic psychotic disorder, and not only does McEwan have the appendix at the back of the novel to prove, it, he also includes the case history that was the basis for his novel. McEwan has transformed the case study into a work of literature; nevertheless, the characters and plot have a real life existence.

Although each of these novelists has a unique style, and each book is as different from the other as it is possible to be, what Pearl, Boyle and McEwan have in common are stories grounded in real life events. They are all delving deep into libraries, archives and studies for the bones of their characters and plots, but then crafting their research into works of literary art. Rather than taking their readers on flights of fancy or trips of magical reality, these writers find meaningful themes in the complex and subtle behavior of folks who have walked among us.

At moments I have paused to think about these figures in a way I haven't in other novels. I have really wondered at man's complexity, and infinite variety.

Leisure. What a concept!

So, you may ask, what's it like to be retired from teaching? After the sudden hot spell that hit over Labor Day weekend, clearly it's much cooler than the alternative. We remarked between us several times last week how glad we were not to be spending our days in those stifling classrooms, but that's not the only way that retirement appeals to us.

It's the pace of life that changes: the true relaxation that comes when you're not under constant pressure to accomplish some teaching-related task--short-term preparation, long-range planning, correcting student writing, writing college recommendations, going to meetings, analyzing test data, and dealing with school politics. It's all draining and stressful, and it lasts throughout the school year. In the brave new world of immutable standards and accountability, it really carries on through the summer as well.

Yeah, I know, everybody's job is stressful, everybody has more to do than is possible to accomplish in a day, but a fully-engaged teacher has it in spades: You are paid to teach students, which most of us relish doing, but the actual classroom contact time somehow becomes time subtracted from the hours in the day that must be used to do all the other behind the scenes tasks that are piled on. You teach all day, but it's only after the students take off, late in the afternoon, that the job begins. And that part of the job never finishes; you just have to decide on your own appropriate quitting time. For us, that was about usually 10 p.m., if we were lucky.

It's escaping that desperate, hopeless pace that makes retirement so attractive. Suddenly there's time commensurate with what's on the agenda for the day. And when that sinks in, it's glorious. Summer acts as a sort of buffer zone that seems familiar, but now that school has started again, we can't help reciting all the routines of launching the academic year that aren't playing out this year: that first set of writing samples from ninth graders that you need to mark meticulously--preferably this first weekend--to give students an idea of what high school writing standards are going to be, or laying the ground work for the first reflective essay from a 10 GATE class, or working through our English Lit. overview unit tying together writers ranging from the Anglo-Saxons, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare to Kipling and the Clash. And then there's always the department's writing format to plough through.

Part of the relief is not having to repeat one's own brilliant lessons another time, but even better is the sense that you don't have to keep beating your head against that wall anymore. The enterprise is generally one of continually trying your best to give something very valuable to someone who doesn't want it. The energy involved in perfecting the gift and making it useful to each individual student is inexorably drained away in the mere process of handing it over to unwilling recipients--convincing them simply to accept the gift for what it is.

Leisure, then, becomes this refreshing feeling of using one's time effectively, even selfishly, having space to fill rather than infinite obligations to cram into limited space. It's taking one thing at a time rather than everything at once.

And having the opportunity to reflect on the events of our life and times.

Garrison Keillor on the Republican Party

This piece by Garrison Keillor arrived in today's email as a sort of chain letter, and deserves being passed on by one means or the other. I suspect it comes from his just-published book Homegrown Democrat. It's hard to find fault with this analysis:

WE'RE NOT IN LAKE WOBEGON ANYMORE

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

By Garrison Keillor

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy—the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president’s personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

Our beloved land has been fogged with fear—fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn’t the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it’s 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn’t the “end of innocence,” or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn’t prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn’t made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we’re not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It’s a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.

Summer Reading

One of the great things about summer vacation has always been the unstructured time that allows reading for personal pleasure. The school year was always like a dark tunnel that allowed almost no time to read other than keeping up with a few essential periodicals and, of course, reading student essays. This is a pathetic position for an English teacher to find himself in, but the predictable pattern was that any novel I started after Labor Day was not likely to be finished until Christmas vacation, and if I dared to start something else at that time, it would not be finished until spring break. At that point I was likely to give up entirely until summer started. I could usually read a half dozen sizable novels during that glorious span, choosing and consuming books even more quickly while traveling abroad when there wasn't even household projects or gardening to get in the way.

Now, summer reading can extend year 'round, but I thought I'd use this blog space to record--perhaps seasonally--comments and reactions to what I'm reading. Jan used to ask Englophile readers to recount and review their summer reading in her first or second edition of the year, so naturally, anyone reading this (either of you!) is encouraged to add your own book picks or comment on whatever I've said here. Just click that "comments" link below and you're ready to blog.

THE DANTE CLUB/Matthew Pearl: A literary mystery set in post Civil War Boston/Cambridge. The sleuths here are the American poets Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr., not Jr. the jurist., who does, though, figure here peripherally), their publisher and the historian George Washington Greene. Together they form the "Dante Club," whose devotion is the first American translation of Dante's Comedy. Before Longfellow, the mastermind of the project, and his helpers can even get through The Inferno, Boston's civic elite start falling one-by-one to a serial killer with a penchant for copying Dante's hellish designs. Our club realizes that America's cultural advancement depends on finding and taking out the killer without letting on their understanding of the pattern at work. A first novel; brilliant combination of detective fiction conventions with literary history. Wonderfully researched, buoyant writing.

VERNON GOD LITTLE/DBS Pierre: The quirkiest, most outrageous novel I read this summer. The stylistic homage to Catcher in the Rye is unmistakable, but Pierre makes Salinger seem a little timid and restrained in all directions. Teenage protagonist Vernon G. Little (middle name varies with context) takes us on an insightfully guided tour of trailer trash Texas in the grips of a school shooting hysteria. Black comedy with a silver lining. This is an invigorating must-read for teachers who have plowed though Catcher time and again.

THE LIFE OF PI/Yann Martel: I'd "conferenced" this with several students last year when it was Santa Barbara Reads' novel of the season, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much more there is to the book that I'd previously thought. This is great reading no matter how popular it gets. Martel starts with an authentic sounding "author's note," which blends logically and immediately into the novel so as to smoothly blur the distinction between fact and fiction. Perhaps I'm just gullible, but I got thinking this really happened. There's powerful commentary here about Man's relationship with animals and the essential nature of living creatures. Controlled, precise prose that deserves the accolades heaped on it.

THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE/T.C. Boyle: Boyle writes 'em faster than I can read 'em, but it's hard not to get caught up in his characters and their lives. This one takes us to Battle Creek, Michigan in the days of the charismatic health nut Dr. John Kellogg and the breakfast cereal boom, sharing a good deal of territory with Boyle's other tale of American health fads for the pre-income tax monied class. It becomes clear just how much ground vegetarianism and alternative medicine has had to make up to reach modern-day acceptance.

PASADENA/David Ebershoff: A big, sprawling, melodramatic novel, consciously retreading ground first covered by the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy. In fact, the opening chapters welcome readers with a brilliant evocation of Wuthering Heights re-set in Southern California in the waning months of World War II. Having grown up in Pasadena, it is particularly easy to follow Ebershoff's meticulously detailed narrative and descriptions, but the story is about interesting people as well as interesting times. It's an intricately built love story of grand scope that makes you want to tell someone "the story," just as it's being set out in the novel by a real estate agent providing what amounts to "full disclosure" for an important piece of property she's trying to move. Jan hates it when I do that, so it has been difficult keeping it to myself. The writing takes us back to an earlier era when people felt things deeper but talked less than we do now--or at least than contemporary authors portray. It's satisfying reading, but takes a little getting used to if you're coming off something spare, understated, or persistently ironic-- John Updike or Phillip Roth, for instance--but give it a chance to grow on you.

Happy reading,
Chas.

Gone But Not Forgotten

A newly retired colleague asked me recently, "If I recycle/burn all evidence of my teaching past, does that mean it is gone forever?"

My initial reaction was that she was asking about larger issues. As King Lear says, "it smells of mortality."

I guess what retirement makes us contemplate is whether we have vanished or not. At a practical level, it is nearly impossible to obliterate all evidence of a lifetime career; there are always little scraps left behind. I recall a fellow teacher telling me how she kept running across little treasures, of the teacher whose room she inherited when he retired. She regarded them as clues as to who he was.

I have liquidated nearly all of my files, at least in hard copy; I have, in fact, bequeathed whole drawerfuls of lessons and materials to younger colleagues who might find them useful. There are still folders full in my computer. But there are plenty more stored in my mind, as well. And memory is a powerful force. I believe that my "teaching past" and my influence continues to exist in both my mind and in the minds and lives of students I taught and touched.

Of course, you can't make a difference in every student's life, but I always tried to work at "my personal best." I always felt that what I was doing was a noble calling, and looking back, I feel I spent my life in a worthwhile fashion. If I moved a student to think or feel more deeply or differently about the world and people around him, then I had really accomplished something. Those successes didn't come every day, but they occurred often enough.

As long as those students love reading and discussing literature and pondering the human condition, then I leave a legacy behind that exists wholly apart from my lesson plans and teaching tenure. The human touch outlasts the tangible evidence.

In addition, there are a number of my students who decided to be English majors, and even teachers. So even if I could eradicate every shred of lessons, or other paper trail detritus, there are students out there, keeping my "teaching past" burning bright.

Jan

Lying Veterans and the Lies They Tell

"[I]n the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts." -Sherwood Anderson, "Winesburg, Ohio"


Does it come as a surprise to anyone that this presidential campaign has turned nasty? Not just nasty, but REALLY NAAAASTY! We are seeing Navy veterans in their late 50s and 60s who have stored up resentments for over 30 years viciously leap at the opportunity to vent their spleens now that someone may listen to them spew. Typical of this sort of bitterness gone rancid is that its purveyors want to pass it off as "truth." What a loaded, ironic, and ultimately useless word for political passions born amidst our ill-fated military exploits in Vietnam.

The muck these days is being brewed and stirred by a small collection of former naval officers who built very successful careers in the military, in business and in corporate law over the past three decades. Part of their comfortable lives has, of course, been founded in their allegiance to the party of ever-growing military budgets and substantial tax cuts for the wealthy. Like sleeping dogs, though, they were recently prodded as if kicked in the ribs by a pointy boot--in this case a Kerry biography published this spring titled "Tour of Duty" by Douglas Brinkley. On top of that, the Democrats have had the audacity to tout the uncontested military heroism of their candidate.

So the "truth" has to come out. In service of that truth, though, all manner of lies, deceptions, distortions, and disgraceful behavior is justified. The origin of the current vitriol is doubtlessly in the guts of these disgruntled veterans who never adjusted to our nation's obvious defeat in a protracted, unpopular war. John Kerry had the courage to both do his duty as a naval officer, but then when mustered out, also do his duty to his conscience and to the larger citizenry in whose name so much damage had been done.

The second ad from the Lying Swift Bush Hatchetmen gets a lot closer than the first to what has really been gnawing at these until now disorganized and disaffected veterans: Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The "script" here is the message of outrage these veterans feel toward Kerry's description of "atrocities" committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. What the script doesn't tell the audience is that Kerry is not making accusations, is not spreading stories about his former comrades, nor is he making assertions that all soldiers fit those descriptions. What he is doing at that point in his testimony is reviewing for the senators information and anecdotes that came to light during the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit earlier in 1971, where more than 150 honorably discharged veterans talked openly about war crimes they had committed in South East Asia. He was essentially passing on the confessions of soldiers who were still in the process of unburdening their souls.

If it's Truth, this current group wants to stand for, then why are they so willing to lie and distort?

The answer is that for years these guys have lived with images of Kerry in his camouflage fatigue jacket mixing with the scruffy combat vets protesting what they'd witnessed in the rice fields and hamlets of Vietnam; they'd had to suffer quietly while figures such as Ron Kovic held the spotlight from his wheelchair chained to the White House fence; and until now they've had to content themselves with targets the size of Jane Fonda.

Now, following the Democratic National Convention, they've finally found a chance to howl. So they whip out these ads, which, of course, the nation has to at least cock an ear to and dig back for a few facts to evaluate.

But the facts are there, and I think this country still has a taste for truth if they have time to find it. To begin with, we could check out exactly what John Kerry said in his Senate testimony

Chas.

Child's Play

Several years ago, when I was cleaning up and clearing out my kitchen bookshelves, I realized that the biggest space-wasters were Julia Child's two volumes of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." So, despite the fact that they were personally inscribed and autographed copies, and had the added sentimental value of being a gift from my dear mother-in-law, I decided they were headed for the discard box in the attic.

Sitting there on the kitchen floor that particular June day, I faced the fact that I didn't really use the books to cook from. To tell the truth, I think I had really only made three recipes out of them over the two decades I had had them. I had kept them primarily for their sentimental worth, and their iconic value.

In the last two days, the newspapers have been full of testimonials to Julia Child. Just today our local paper printed fond reminiscences of people at the farmer's market and local restaurants. I have always found her rather irascible, and some of her pronouncements about food were downright annoying. And French cooking is not particularly appealing, if you ask me.

But we can thank Julia Child for fostering a revolution in food and eating that has taken place in the last thirty years. When Julia came into American homes over the airwaves of PBS, she was the first to make cooking a fine art. It wasn't another tuna casserole, she was making. She was empowering American women in what had heretofore been the domain of European men. Her show and books signaled the start of a revolution in dining and entertaining at home . . . and in American restaurants, too. She taught us to be eclectic and undaunted in the kitchen. And it is the legions of accomplished home chefs who are Julia's children, happily at play in our kitchens.

Many of us have realized that mastering the art of French cooking isn't the highest aim. Personally I like a recipe with ingredients that you can count on the fingers of one hand. I don't generally like a multipage recipe with twenty ingredients, but that is an informed preference. I prefer the simplicity of Italian cuicina. Julia's books left my bookshelf to make way for Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray, and Jamie Oliver.

Julia's real power play was opening the door to possibilities.

Jan

Why Is It Even Close?

Perhaps the most amazing and depressing aspect of the current presidential election campaign is the fact that all the polls tell us that at this point it is going to be a close race. How can that be?

Barely six weeks ago a group of 26 highly respected former American diplomats and military leaders came out against the Bush administration's conduct of foreign policy as "unilateral" and damaging to U.S. interest and prestige abroad. Their group, "Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change," includes former ambassadors appointed by presidents from both major U.S. political parties and retired career military leaders. Some members are quoted in newspapers as saying Bush's policies have undone the diplomatic results they and their colleagues have worked hard to achieve during their careers.

But still it's an extremely close election.

Piling on this week were 200 business leaders endorsing Kerry/Edwards. These individuals join the growing ranks of prominent business leaders like Warren Buffett, Lee Iacocca, Steve Jobs, Jim Sinegal, John Thompson and Barry Diller who are supporting change in Washington. The newest group includes Owsley Brown, Chairman and Chief Executive Brown-Forman; Peter Cheering, President and Chief Operating Officer News Corporation; Charles Gifford, Chairman of Bank of America Corporation; Charles Phillips, President of Oracle Corporation; and Penny Pritzker, President of Pritzker Realty Group.

But still it's an extremely close election.

And the next day, a broad range of America's most respected recording artists announced a six-pronged, eight-day concert blitz of key battleground states under the banner of a "Vote for Change Tour." How directly or passionately the artists may speak up on stage for John Kerry will vary among the individuals, but they all feel deeply that America is in danger at this point in history and the Bush/Cheney ticket must be turned away in November.

But still it's an extremely close election.

Equally noteworthy, to say the least, in mid-July more than 4,000 scientists — including 48 Nobel Prize winners and 127 members of the National Academy of Sciences — accused the Bush administration of distorting and suppressing science to suit its political goals. "Across a broad range of policy areas, the administration has undermined the quality and independence of the scientific advisory system and the morale of the government's outstanding scientific personnel," the Union of Concerned Scientists said in their letter.

But still it's an extremely close election.

Let's point out the obvious here: We are not hearing this message from a fringe of predictable political partisans. Set aside the vocal left in Hollywood--though they represent thoughtful analysis from some of our culture's most creative individuals. And ignore for the moment the not insignificant impact that Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is having nationwide. The outcry this year is coming from highly responsible, moderate, generally cautious leaders from every corner of American society. It makes one wonder, just who is left to support the Republican cause and its leadership.

How can this race be neck-and neck? And why would anyone at this point respond with "undecided" when ask for a choice? This week's New Yorker's lead commentary in The Talk of the Town asserts that "George W. Bush is the worst President the country has endured since Richard Nixon, and even mediocrity would be an improvement."

Yet, we are told, the contest will be a squeaker. How can it be?

This may sound dumb, but one has to wonder where all the bright-eyed, thoughtful, informed, logical, progressive-minded people who register as Democrats early-on in their adult lives go over the years. It's clear that youth leans left. When MTV celebrities urge their fans to Rock the Vote, or P-Diddy warns that it's a Vote or Die situation this year, they're not thinking of sending that vital 18-24 demographic to the polls to support the Republican agenda.

It's not universal, of course; there are plenty of Young Republican enclaves on college campuses across the nation, and there is no shortage of Democrats over 50, but stand back and look for broad political trends and it's clear that if all those young Democrats kept faith with their ideals as they aged and sorted themselves out into careers and personal pursuits, a presidential race with this degree of stark contrast between candidates would never be a close call. A lot of leopards, it would seem, are changing their stripes.

So what's happening?

First, let's dispense with those useless labels "liberal" and "conservative." They have become so laden with inaccurate connotations that they condemn any discussion of the American political spectrum to endless tail-chasing. I prefer the universal markers, left and right.

For various reasons, people move to the right as they experience more, compete for advancement, work toward lifetime goals, and start to feel successful. Selfishness, cynicism, stubbornness, and callousness all have a tendency to evince themselves in our behavior as we move from youth to middle-age. When we enter adulthood we have high ideals but little stake in the society that we'd like to reform. We have a natural urge to share and not to worry about where or when those shared resources will be replenished or repaid. As we take partners in life's enterprise, then become heads of families, we find there is territory to defend, careers to advance, wealth to guard, and even descendants to provide for.

We become evermore scornful and impatient with those who aren't keeping up. Why should we want to tie our fate to elements of society that aren't as competitive as we are, or who seem to always remain on the margin. Catch phrases like social justice, equality of opportunity, due process, civil liberties may ring clear when we are sitting in college seminars or when we first become aware that poverty and discrimination have human faces and historical consequences, but something tells us that no matter how we try, we won't be the breakthrough generation that cures this disease.

All this generates momentum toward the right. Those who don't make such great strides toward the American Dream are likely to remain firmly, even actively, on the left. Call it the Ma Joad effect, if you like, but ingrained humility goes a long way toward opening one's heart to fellow citizens.

Our Calvinist heritage, on the other hand, leads others to believe that success in life is a matter of divine pre-election. Our wealth, our stature, our popularity is a matter of personal virtue. This is precisely where that smarmy, almost lubricious smirk on George Bush's face and that Beavis and Butthead cackle in his voice comes from whenever he tries to defend the indefensible. He is the wealthy scion of an important family, not because of native intelligence or charisma, but because such people are pre-ordained to power and influence. Money, in this view of things, is not the result of virtue, but rather its worldly emblem.

And one other process seems to be a work as well. Voters tend to simplify their thinking and let their opinions calcify as they live through election after election. They long to be done with critical thinking, get over the need to follow issues in depth, or listen to lively debate. It's the "been there, done that" approach to politics. Life is messy enough without having to keep listening to diplomats, scientists, entrpreneurs, and artists, much more so reading broadly on one's own.

Does that explain the drift? Perhaps not, but something's going on here. This is clearly not a contest between differing but equally credible viewpoints, If we were a rational nation that fully understood its place in the world, there would be no contest at all.

Four years ago we made a huge mistake, the sort that a true democracy--even one as crippled by special interest influence as ours is--is entitled to make now and then. But the facts are now in plain sight, the record is public, the investigations have been conducted, the informed parties have made their public statements, the news media have done their job; there are no acceptable reasons to repeat the blunder.

Chas.

Chords for Change--Springsteen letter

Today's New York Times carried this letter from Bruce Springsteen on its Op-Ed page. Though he has voiced his opinions on national and international issues for years, this is his first step into overtly partisan politics. It is an extremely careful and thoughtful statement about the state of affairs in this election season:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Chords for Change
By BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Published: August 5, 2004

A nation's artists and musicians have a particular place in its social and political life. Over the years I've tried to think long and hard about what it means to be American: about the distinctive identity and position we have in the world, and how that position is best carried. I've tried to write songs that speak to our pride and criticize our failures.

These questions are at the heart of this election: who we are, what we stand for, why we fight. Personally, for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. Instead, I have been partisan about a set of ideals: economic justice, civil rights, a humane foreign policy, freedom and a decent life for all of our citizens. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out.

Through my work, I've always tried to ask hard questions. Why is it that the wealthiest nation in the world finds it so hard to keep its promise and faith with its weakest citizens? Why do we continue to find it so difficult to see beyond the veil of race? How do we conduct ourselves during difficult times without killing the things we hold dear? Why does the fulfillment of our promise as a people always seem to be just within grasp yet forever out of reach?

I don't think John Kerry and John Edwards have all the answers. I do believe they are sincerely interested in asking the right questions and working their way toward honest solutions. They understand that we need an administration that places a priority on fairness, curiosity, openness, humility, concern for all America's citizens, courage and faith.

People have different notions of these values, and they live them out in different ways. I've tried to sing about some of them in my songs. But I have my own ideas about what they mean, too. That is why I plan to join with many fellow artists, including the Dave Matthews Band, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., the Dixie Chicks, Jurassic 5, James Taylor and Jackson Browne, in touring the country this October. We will be performing under the umbrella of a new group called Vote for Change. Our goal is to change the direction of the government and change the current administration come November.

Like many others, in the aftermath of 9/11, I felt the country's unity. I don't remember anything quite like it. I supported the decision to enter Afghanistan and I hoped that the seriousness of the times would bring forth strength, humility and wisdom in our leaders. Instead, we dived headlong into an unnecessary war in Iraq, offering up the lives of our young men and women under circumstances that are now discredited. We ran record deficits, while simultaneously cutting and squeezing services like afterschool programs. We granted tax cuts to the richest 1 percent (corporate bigwigs, well-to-do guitar players), increasing the division of wealth that threatens to destroy our social contract with one another and render mute the promise of "one nation indivisible."

It is through the truthful exercising of the best of human qualities - respect for others, honesty about ourselves, faith in our ideals - that we come to life in God's eyes. It is how our soul, as a nation and as individuals, is revealed. Our American government has strayed too far from American values. It is time to move forward. The country we carry in our hearts is waiting.

MoveOn PAC

Big news this week about musicians getting together to encourage voter registration and to sway voters in the direction of positive change in our nation's political scene. Bruce Springsteen is just one of many taking part. "I felt like I couldn't have written the music I've written, and been on stage singing about the things that I've sung about for the last twenty five years and not take part in this particular election," said Springsteen.

For the full story check this site: MoveOn PAC

Happy Anniversary

We spent much of today--our 36th wedding anniversary--opening this blog. As simple as Blogspot.com makes it, it still takes awhile to make all those decisions and settings. But here we are. Probably not your typical blog. Research indicates that 92.4% of bloggers are under 30 years old. That's not us. That big picture below will gradually be buried among other postings, and ideas will dominate here. But for today...Happy Anniversary to us.