Listen to stuff happening

We've written recently about the play Stuff Happens that is currently on at the Taper in L.A. Finally, it's gotten the attention of NPR, and, of course, they've done a great presentation. Check out this link and listen to both their story and some additional audio clips from the production: NPR : 'Stuff Happens': The Iraq War as History Play

Once Around

For us the passing of a year was always measured by the cycles of the school year. The year began, not on January first, but on the Tuesday after Labor Day, and rolled by school holidays, winter vacation, spring break, and pushed over the hump of Memorial Day to the last school day in mid-June. Summer vacation was literally free time, before the year began again in the fall. For the first time since we both headed off to kindergarten back in the early 1950's, we have had an entire year off.

"How's retirement; what do you do?" friends ask. One former colleague, long retired, warned us that we would get bored, and need to go out and get jobs. So far, we haven't felt any burning desire to do anything like that. Retirement is great! And we do lots of different things.

Our weeks have found a rhythm. The structure of the week is anchored by the gym. Just like our high school students would build their schedules around particular classes, we, too, have picked out our favorite teachers and classes in the group fitness schedule. It is a balanced array of workouts--some weightlifting, lots of cardio and some yoga. Toward the end of the week we work in a mid-morning sit in the Starbucks nearest the gym. It's a little treat to talk books, plan menus and inevitably run into friends.

Our social calendar seems to be pretty full and delightfully flexible. We have long-time friends over for dinner, and we have a wide-open choice of days. And we have acquired a whole new circle of friends from the gym, people we really do have a lot in common with, whether they are our instructors or fellow students.

All in all, it's what can only be called "the good life" that is associated with that other clichéd ideal, "the golden years"--but if that metaphor is intended to imply sunsets and autumnal pursuits, it doesn't fit here yet. This is the good life that kicks in with the sun still over head, with high tide, with active appetites, and with peaches that have a little further to ripen before being picked.

So where did a whole year without academia go? What did we accomplish? It was not so much a matter of quantity or even quality, but rather timing and pacing. It was, in a word, sane. But for the record:

• We did a little traveling in the fall, covering some familiar territory but in a season that created a fresh experience. London theatre starts to get a bit more serious in the fall, and the bulk of American tourists thin out, improving the whole experience. The French countryside in October is at its best and, again, the Euro hordes have gone back to work. We helped harvest a wine grape vineyard one Saturday and enjoyed the most incredible rural déjeuner as a reward. We got into the last of the prehistoric polychrome cave painting sites open to the public with just a day's advance booking.

• In January we took ten days to show some of our favorite spots in the Southwest to our English friends who so often host us in London and the south of France.

• The garden gets near-daily attention now and is starting to show it. We've defined anew some portions of our modest backyard with rocks dug up on the property or scavenged from the neighborhood, brought plants to a once barren area in the center of things, re-engineered the irrigation system, and replaced two very aged orange trees with a couple youngsters, who we wish were as hardy as their predecessors.

• Perhaps most remarkable has been the chance to read fiction for pleasure, something previously restricted to summer and winter breaks. Just write to Englophool if you're interested in specific recommendations; we now have plenty!

• In February and March we had the pleasure of working with the cast of DP's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, helping a group of very sharp, eager, and talented students understand what can be discovered in the language of Shakespeare.

• Most days we can find an hour to do the crossword puzzle from the L.A. Times. We do it online in shifts, each lending his or her expertise, and thus try to keep both our minds limber.

• We're cooking and eating more creatively than ever, and also able to entertain friends much more frequently, even--gasp!--on weekday evenings or lunch.

• And we get up in the light.

Not on Television

Back in the 1970s the black jazz poet Gil Scott Heron was angry that the struggle for civil rights seemed to be deteriorating around the assassinations of black leaders. But his famous jazz song, "The Revolution will not be Televised" was seen by many as a metaphor for widespread disgust with government secrecy and insensitivity. It ominously predicted that those who had waited for truth and justice in America were fed up and were ready to make it happen. The soporific of television commercials and hollow politicians would not do. From Xerox to Richard Nixon, it was all going down when the people took to the streets. America was simmering with injustice and lies.

"You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out...
Because the revolution will not be televised."

There was a keen sense in the nation that our society was out of whack, and something must done.

Heron was right. The revolution was live in the streets. Poor Black neighborhoods went up in flames at some final indignity. Anti-war protesters took to the streets, in Chicago and on campuses across the nation, including Kent State Ohio where the National Guard shot into the crowd killing four students. And then the Nixon presidency collapsed in the wake of a clumsy break-in of the Democratic party offices in the Watergate office building. There was a revolution all across America in the streets, on the campuses and down the halls of power.

But Heron got it wrong, too; the revolution WAS televised. We saw all that and more on the nightly news. We sat stunned as the LAPD shot up and torched the house where members of the Symbionese Liberation Army were holed up. We watched the footage come back from Vietnam and took in weekly body counts on the network news. We sat glued to the TV hour after hour as the Watergate hearings unfolded daily in congress.

We were shocked by the carnage, heartened that we were learning the truth and galvanized to turn things around. The on-the-ground reporters in Vietnam brought the truth home, and we were reminded of the toll in human life every Thursday when the networks reported the casualties. The corrupt and insidious Nixon White House was exposed because journalists, notably Bernstein and Woodward at the Washington Post, got the story.

The media, both print and television, aggressively dug out the stories, and exposed the lies, corruption and downright ineptness of our leaders and policies.

"The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live."

We lived it, but we also read it and saw it. It gave us faith that the truth will out.

But what about nowadays? Now our reporters are "embedded" with invading troops in Iraq, and they don't go looking for the real story, but stay close to their unit, rooting them on. And when they do get a whiff of the truth, they are discredited by the Bush administration because a minor detail is "uncorroborated." Additionally, news stories are often supplied ready-packaged to stations with administration spokesmen delivering the story as if they were legitimate newscasters. The journalistic estate is widely dismissed as unreliable; I think they are running scared. And indeed reporters are not out digging up stories, but rather waiting for Washington to tell them what is news. They are learning to keep their heads down.

But worse yet, is the public apathy. No one is taking it to the streets. Or shouting in outrage. I don't know what it will take. But it is not the conniving and secrecy of planning a nation's energy policy behind closed doors, or passing a Patriot Act that makes checking out a library book suspect. Nor is it the arcane sham of a prescription drug plan that doesn't really save folks money, or the mean-spirited attack on Social Security. And the snake pit of Abu Ghraib, the humiliation of prisoners at Guantanamo, and the ingenious scheme of flying prisoners to third-party torture nations have not been enough to rouse the American public. Have we been lulled by the Soma of the Brave New World of reality-tv, special effects movies, outrageous crime stories and rapid-fire connections across cyberspace, so that real-life injustice and iniquity does not touch us?

Like Bruce, who nightly asks his audience the crucial question, I, too, want to know, "Is there anybody alive out there?"

Stuff is still happening, but who cares?

Very strange that the L.A. Times and the national media in general should give so little attention to the American premiere of David Hare's play Stuff Happens. It opened about a week ago at the Taper in L.A. and the Times gave it a very positive review, but minimal space at the bottom of the page in Calendar that devoted most of its real estate to some trendy designers of ridiculously decadent women's clothes. The reviewer was not even a Times staffer, but merely a stringer who had seen the play, as we have, in its original London production and could make knowledgeable comparisons about set design and performances, but was entirely disinclined to write about the play's themes, social significance, or central political debate.

This is a piece of high impact theatre that takes its audience directly to the heart of the issues most pressing on our national consciousness, and the Times, local television, CNN, NPR are giving it less coverage than they would a touring production of the Music Man. Admittedly, the play hasn't made an appearance in New York, so it naturally wouldn't pick up any of the Tony awards' media spotlight, which, of course, was so generously focused on Monty Python's latest silliness called Spamalot. But then serious theatre, not surprisingly, often skips Broadway. It's a definite honor that Hare's play should come first to Los Angeles, but logical and well-deserved for director Gordon Davidson's final project at the Center Theatre Group.

In case you don't know what the work is about, it is a history play that presents in brilliant detail the story of how the U.S. and Britain became bound together in the enterprise of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying Iraq for its own good and our own glory. The title comes from an early post-invasion press conference of Donald Rumsfeld's where he writes off the looting and chaos that followed "liberation" with his famously nonchalant "Hey, stuff happens..."

Hare depicts Rummy and all the other public figures--George W. Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan, Hans Blix, the whole array of French diplomats, and more--as characters in this huge tragedy of hubris and arrogance. Their lines are a blend of words on the public record and, when no record exists, those imagined by the author for meetings that actually took place.

It is an extremely provocative piece of theatre--especially for Americans seeing it in Britain a month before the U.S. presidential election--but not as slanted or one-sided as the summary above might lead us to assume. Hare's meticulous research and even-handed approach creates a very objective record of how it all unfolded in the period between the opening days of the Bush administration, when cabinet meetings focused on maps of Iraq and very little on issues of terrorism, through to the declared finish of "major combat." All sides of the issues are given voice and we are taken to the inside of the diplomacy and decision making process that got us where we are today.

It is a powerful story that seemed to affect the two audiences we've been a part of very differently. In London, at the National Theatre, the audience was thoroughly engrossed and clearly moved, but they allowed the whole work to be presented before taking the discussion onward to the lobby and beyond, but in the L.A. the audience was from the start prone to taking sides and expressing their disapproval or support for the figures on stage--through hissing, booing, whistling, applauding, talking back aloud to the actors--as if they were unaware of the difference between art and life. It was an experience we'd never had before in a professional commercial production and at one point brought an actress delivering a monologue as an anonymous Palestinian commentator to an abrupt halt while audience members alternately shouted, shushed, and wrangled over first what she was saying and then over how to behave in the theatre.

After nearly 40 years of active theatre going both here and in the UK, we have our opinions about what accounts for the difference in audience reaction, but the bigger issue is that this is a play that is timely and so well-crafted that it really wakes people up. So why is this being ignored? The Taper advertising seems rather minimal, and we got our tickets on a special discount deal that seemed to indicate little confidence in the play's power to attract audiences for its 6-week run.

The unfortunate fact is that what's going on in Iraq has dropped off this country's radar screen. Somehow we've realized the situation is a hopeless morass, but as opposed to the previous hopeless morass of Vietnam, we have lost the stomach for confronting the problem and lack the energy for protest. To have a nation actually discussing the facts that Hare brings back to our attention would be deeply disturbing, but would eventually ignite political reaction. We instead seem content to keep our heads buried in "reality" television and leave the dying and suffering to the relatively few who have volunteered for it.

But those are just the people who can't be expected to discontinue their investment in this failing enterprise. Once you've lost a son or daughter, an arm or a leg, you aren't likely to turn back and admit you've been sacrificed for someone else's folly. It's the rest of us, though, who can still be somewhat objective, who still have the luxury of reading discomforting analysis and not blinking, or of going to live theatre without blinding pre-judgments who must at least make enough commotion to get back into the headlines.

Stuff is still happening, and we're being told that if we just are patient and believe in the wisdom of our current policy makers, that eventually it will stop happening and we can go home again secure in the belief that democracy is rooted, nurtured and blossoming in the heart of the world's least reasonable, least cooperative territories.

The big problem is that our main purpose in "doing Iraq," as the neocons put it, was to showcase American power and efficiency--"shock and awe" they call it--as a shortcut to the hard work of international diplomacy. We figured that the real trouble spots in the Middle East and Asia were too chancy to engage with, but that we could slap around a petty brute like Saddam much more easily and effectively whether there was any real threat or not. Now that that approach has been exposed as a ruse and proven untenable anyway, we are left with a simple choice: either we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate without further provocation or justification to our enemy or we plod on, losing more soldiers and fueling the opposition for another six to ten years before we leave the mess we've created to deteriorate.

It's a rotten choice, but it appears to be all that we've got. We didn't want to face it in 1975 and we'd rather not face it now, but unless something counteracts the administration's ability to deny and deflect attention, the decision will be made by default and we'll just have to accept the defense that "Stuff happens."

Bruce is Back!

What with the new Devils & Dust CD/DVD just out, recent TV appearances, a solo acoustic tour just starting, some new DVDs of past concerts arriving in the house, we've been heavily into our Springsteen obsession of late, and are once again reminded that there is no more exciting time than when Bruce is on the road with a new "album" (he still calls them that, even though he knows it's an outdated term, so I will too).

One elemental truth about a Springsteen show is that he will start at a level of intensity that any other artist would strive for as a climax and then head for peaks well beyond anything you could imagine or hope for. I remember the first Springsteen concert I saw 25 years ago, just a few days after the release of The River. Until this point he had just four albums under his belt--two acknowledged masterpieces and two early efforts filled with remarkable songs known mostly to his eastern seaboard fan base. His toe-hold on stardom, such as it was at the time, was the album Born to Run and its title song. So instead of working up to his "hit" at the end of the show, he comes onstage and says to the band, "Let's go," and kicks right into "Born to Run." He had a double album of new songs to introduce (which most of us could already sing with him word-for-word) and the standards of his repertoire to work through, but he was starting on the top floor, intending to take us upward from there.

Four years later, when "Born in the U.S.A." made him a bigger name in the music business than he'd ever desired to be, he was still working the same way--starting a four-hour marathon with a gut-busting, ear-splitting performance of the hit single and then building the show's intensity from there. No one else works this way--not musicians, not actors, not authors, not athletes, and not the rest of us working stiffs who have to pace ourselves to reach payday in one piece. But Bruce is Bruce.

We saw him two nights ago at the beautiful and remarkably intimate Pantages Theatre in Hollywood, and he did something similar, this time in the context of an evolving set list crafted out of the character driven narratives of the new solo album and surprises from his monumentally varied songbook. Until this second night in L.A., he'd been starting the show with a very unusual rendition of "Reason to Believe," a seldom performed song from Nebraska, his first shot at stripped down solo recording from over 20 years ago.

But Tuesday night he comes out and sits himself down at a humble little pump organ that looks and sounds as if it came out of some country church that had been long since pulled down. And Bruce is dressed like one of the local workmen who might have been day-hired to work the demo job and had set aside the curious relic on a whim. A few chords in and we're not sure what he's going to spring on us, but we know whatever it is, it's the first time he's tried this on anybody. When he starts singing, though, we recognize the ethereal hymn, "My Beautiful Reward," that he used to close his Human Touch/Lucky Town shows with after the raucous road-housing had worn the audiences down enough to accept the fact that it was, perhaps, time to go home.

It is a slow, almost mournful song about the insight we gain from discovering our own frailty:

"I was so high I was the lucky one
Then I came crashing down like a drunk on a barroom floor
Searching for my beautiful reward"

The song finishes, though, with a dreamlike vision of a soaring spirit:

"I'm flyin' high over gray fields, my feathers long and black
Down along the river's silent edge I soar
Searching for my beautiful reward"

This was the blessing he laid on his audience as if to say, no matter what we may go through, there will eventually be something transcendent in a life of passionate pursuit and humble acceptance. This was the note that the Lucky Town album ended with and the concert performance strove to arrive at. And it was, indeed, "beautiful."

Now, a dozen or so years later, he regards this as a starting point! In a creative tactic similar to his working backwards in time from the gruesome and tragic opening of "Matamoros Banks," he now works from the benediction back through an exploration of the peaks and valleys of human experience. The goal here is not to celebrate or protest, not to judge, exalt, or complain, and not even to understand or triumph over our condition, but to see and simply feel the complexity of humanity.

So with the pump organ notes fading, he steps out center stage and launches into the most stark and chilling performance any of us are ever likely to behold on a "concert" stage. He grabs a harmonica and a microphone that bluesmen like Paul Butterfield or "Sonny Boy" Williamson might have selected to squish and distort their harp notes for extra reediness. No guitar, no keyboard, no proper vocal mic. Just a 15-inch or so square plank sitting on the stage, mic'd so that he can stomp his foot ferociously to mark the rhythm of "Reason to Believe." He sings into the harp mic and his words comes out about 98% distortion. Under a dim amber light, Bruce alternately blows into the harmonica and sings into the same mic, looking mostly at the floor, belting out this one he's described as "a song about blind faith with tragic results...a song about believin' in ghosts." The words are all but indistinguishable from the fuzz and the boot stomping, but here's how it opens:

"Seen a man standin' over a dead dog
lyin' by the highway in a ditch
He's lookin' down kinda puzzled pokin'
that dog with a stick
Got his car door flung open, he's
standin' out on Highway 31
Like if he stood there long enough that
dog'd get up and run
Struck me kind funny, seem kinda
funny, sir, to me
Still at the end of every hard day people
find a reason to believe"

We seem to be transported back to the rural South of the Great Depression, witnessing some roadside performance on a truck bed with a cheap amp and portable speaker set up to draw in a few field hands as they file home. (Perhaps we notice John Lomax off to the side with his portable recording equipment.) His jeans are torn at the knee, the boots noticeably dusty, his plain dark shirt's sleeves rolled above the elbows, and the hair, longer and wilder than usual. Hang a cigarette from the man's lip and he's the image of Woody Guthrie.

But we are in fact in this elegant deco theatre at Hollywood and Vine watching Bruce Springsteen wail and stomp so hard that he rattles things across the stage on his piano, even seems to short out the leaded glass lamp he's borrowed from home for the bare set's centerpiece. (When it's all over and he notices the damage, he says, "Patti's going to kill me!") The drama, though, is as consummate as any piece of theatre I've experienced. This is Man crawling from the inchoate morass and defining himself as human through sheer will power and a raspy voice.

Where can Bruce go from here? Upward. He brings in the comparatively melodic "Devils & Dust" next, a new song about doubt, fear, and the loss of innocence that's as anthemic as they get on the new album. From this tale of an American G.I. serving in Iraq we move on, as if considering nominees for a geographical center for our national angst. Immediately we're back in the faded glory of rust belt "Youngstown," then in post-9/11 New York's "Empty Sky." Before long he's moved to his piano bench and in an impromptu moment pulling up his socks, reflecting that a man can't make music with his socks falling down around his shoes--a lesson, he says, his mother taught him long ago--and his mind is already absorbed with mothers and sons, a theme that comes back repeatedly throughout the evening, first in "Silver Palomino," then in "Jesus Was An Only Son" and "The Hitter," as well as remarks between songs.

Once we've contemplated death, devastation, and various dimensions of loss, only then are we allowed to mention love. The set piece introduction he'd been using of late about coming to write love songs comparatively late in his career and looking back to find them disguised in earlier work lulls us into anticipating "For You" or "Incident on 57th Street," which he's done the night before, but then he tells us he's never done this next one on the piano and he'd just have to hope for the best. And we get this lovely, more-haunting-than-ever version of "The River," followed right away, again at the piano, by "Tougher Than the Rest," and then we know for certain that this is going to be an extraordinary evening of powerful moments. The intense personal moments of the Devils & Dust material like "Reno" and "Leah" or the surprise appearance of the sad narrative of conflicted loyalties for an INS agent on "The Line" are in no way diluted by the satire of "Part Man, Part Monkey" or its introductory remarks about a President who, contrary to appearances, may actually believe in evolution while he merely "does what he has to do so he can do what he wants to do." (Karl Rove he's not as charitable to!)

This is the most significant popular music artist of our era at the pinnacle of his creative and performing powers. He is working without the support of his supremely talented back-up musicians, who have themselves refined their talents over years on stage with Bruce, but at this moment must stand aside while their leader delves even deeper into his art. He has set aside the lush sound and ensemble energy of the E Street Band, moved into much smaller venues, and asks for nothing more than quiet and attention in exchange for an exquisite performance of unbelievable complexity and emotional resonance.

And where does it end this time? The audience hasn't been dancing, jumping, waving their arms, or singing along all evening, and there isn't going to be any "Quarter to Three," "Detroit Medley," "Twist and Shout," or "Light of Day," no "Ramrod," and no rock & roll exorcism tonight to send us out the door with our spirits lifted but bodies exhausted. And we've already heard "My Beautiful Reward" two and a half hours ago.

After three encore numbers--"Johnny 99" back at the harp mic, "If I Should Fall Behind," and "Waitin' on a Sunny Day" (joined by Nils Lofgren on guitar and vocal harmony)--we get an intense blue light aimed right in our eyes, and we lose sight of Bruce, except for what's captured on the video screens left and right of the stage, while he returns to a rhythmic tapping on the guitar body and a simple patting of strings in an open tuning for a very slowed down, deliberate, almost spooky version of "The Promised Land." The light in our eyes blinds us, but forces us simply to listen, to become lost in space that his words guide us through in a mood that captures God's parental dismay at his creation and a promise of redemption:

"The dogs on Main Street howl
'Cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister, I ain't a boy, no I'm a man
And I believe in a promised land"

It's been an evening's journey from the side of Highway 31 with an insane figure poking at a dead dog all the way to Main Street where we find a mature protagonist forged through hard times, still in possession of fundamental beliefs. If Bruce tells us we can pull through with our spirits intact, then perhaps it's true.

Dynamic Duo

I recall the first time Charlie and I went over to Ted and Judy's house. It was a Sunday evening in the fall, probably about thirty years ago now. I remember we were picking up one of Ted's watercolors—one of his big abstract map paintings, I think—and Judy had made a pie—apple pie to be precise. The tender flaky crust surrounded apples that were tart and buttery with all the flavor of a fall harvest. Judy's pie was what happens to apples when they go to heaven. We suspected we were in the presence of a pastry goddess.

But she is not alone in culinary heaven; Ted is a geni of the kitchen, too. Together Ted and Judy are simply the best cooks I know. Indeed they are ambitious, accomplished and dauntless. I am repeatedly bowled over by the fantastic and memorable meals at chez Villa. Only Ted would buy a paella pan that could hold dinner for twenty-four, and then, over an open fire in his backyard, make a masterpiece of rice, seafood, and saffron, preceded by an array of hors d'oeuvres that would do any mere mortal proud, and make the whole evening seem casual for the crowd lucky enough to enjoy that delicious meal. Besides his knowledge of Spanish wines, Ted prides himself on making cooking look effortless. Indeed he and Judy both make it all look easy.

The Villas are adventuresome and fearless in the kitchen. One Christmas they baked a savory Italian Crostada in pastry for the pseudo family of us who have gathered annually at their house. For Ted's fortieth birthday, Judy made a surprise dinner for him, and hid the entire meal, including the pies, until we partygoers who had assembled in a nearby park could ring the doorbell and shout, "Surprise!" Not long ago, Ted and Judy organized dinner guests into cooking teams to assemble and cook an awesome array of Spanish tapas.

Judy's desserts are legendary, from her chocolate roly-poly, to her frozen raspberry pie, to her absolutely perfect lemon meringue pie. But her soups, salads and imaginative hors d'oeuvres are always delicious and frequently fresh from her garden.

Ted likes to brag about his dishes, but he has every right. "I make the best crab cakes," he proclaims. I love crab cakes, and I am tempted by them every time I see them on a menu. And, although the chef may have a delicious sauce or aioli on the side, I am always measuring the cakes themselves against Ted's. So far his are "the best." His short ribs are pretty good, too. And then there's his posole.

On Saturday night we were at Ted and Judy's for his "frogified" posole. His cross-cultural stew was humble and elegant at the same time. Leftover barbecued ham, some hominy, a little sherry and a handful of rosemary—heaven in a bowl. Carrying on with the French theme, Judy had made chocolate-filled cream puffs and chocolate dipped strawberries for dessert, and served them with her own limoncello.

Dinner at the Villa's is an occasion; I am filled with anticipation and excitement all day when we are going there. They are inspiring. I know my cooking has been inspired and encouraged by Ted and Judy's example. And I know when I am going to be cooking for them, I had better be ready to step up to the plate.

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