Striking Terror

If we were somehow actually fighting militant Islamic bogeymen in Iraq with our occupying army, I'd probably say, "Go to it, boys; I'm with you all the way." If Iraq had been a home base for terrorist plotters, I could see the sense in this senseless enterprise which is neither full-scale war nor legitimate nation-building, since there is very little direct engagement with anything resembling a military force, and we have pointedly stepped aside from Iraq's political arena.

I'm not the first to point out that Iraq, rather than being a terrorist breeding ground, was, in fact, one of the few countries in the region that refused to truck with Muslim fanatics and had the wherewithal to keep them at bay. It's safe to say that Iraq had fewer al-Qaeda operatives at work within its borders than--take your pick--New York, New Jersey, California, or Florida.

As the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld triumvirate continues asserting that U.S. operations in Iraq are on a crucial mission to fight international terrorism, I'm thinking, "How clueless and short-sighted do you think we Americans are?" We aren't fighting terrorists there; we are their greatest, most effective supporters and enablers.

There WERE no terrorists in this location until we drew them in and gave them the biggest, juiciest targets they could possibly have ever imagined. They don't even have to fake passports, kill time in sleeper cells, or spend their lightly-laundered money on flight schools. They just drift over unguarded borders into welcoming neighborhoods and bingo! There's more defenseless targets than they can count. Imagine how difficult things would have been for these zealots after 9/11 if Bush hadn't worked so diligently to spin world sympathies around 180 degrees and make the U.S. the most hated nation again, and then bait the trap with 150,000 pieces of cheese.

If there were something akin--but antithetical to--the Nobel Peace Prize that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat shared in 1978, it would be an Anti-Peace Prize shared by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and George W. Bush. Neither could do it alone, but together--why, they're dynamite. Literally.

So, now we're supposed to believe that Bushy has a "Plan for Victory." Of course, the plan is to keep on doing what we've been doing so successfully until. . .well, that's exactly what's not in the plan. Bush says we'll leave when the Iraqi security forces are ready to take over. And when will that be? The military brass are quick to explain that the Iraqis will be ready to take over by the time we leave. Exactly! Set your clock by it.

The misadventure of the Iraq invasion is a catastrophe of untold proportions and uncountable dimensions. Not only did the neo-con cabal distort intelligence so badly to "confirm" the existence of non-existent weaponry that our nation is smeared permanently with egg on its face, but in doing so they have undermined the effectiveness of our own intelligence gathering forces for perhaps decades, and tarnished the reputation of an extraordinary ex-soldier serving as an extraordinary diplomat. This same crew of Keystone Cowards have sent over 2,000 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians to their graves for the big lie (repeat it often enough and people believe it without proof) that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots.

This war on terrorism has so consumed us that we are expected willingly to trade liberty for security and look the other way as our leaders institutionalize torture and then lie straightfaced to us and the world to deny it.

I have to admit, I'm thoroughly terrified.

Bob Dylan and Me

"Me and you we've known each other
Ever since we were sixteen
I wished I would have known
I wished I could have called you
Just to say good-bye, Bobby Jean."
Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Jean

We were pals back in the early 60s, Bob and I, but then he went on without me. As Bruce says about his adolescent confidante Bobby Jean, "We liked the same music...we liked the same clothes," but then he plugged in that guitar and started singing about God knows what. I was left wearing my Bob Dylan uniform, strumming away on sanctimonious anthems of soaring ideals, secure in my pre-packaged condemnations of social injustice and certain that the times they were a-chanigin'-- just not too much. But he didn't need me anymore, and I had other friends anyway.

I'm reminded of this episode, of course, by the recent release of Martin Scorsese's brilliant film about Dylan's early career and first artistic metamorphosis No Direction Home. I'd watched the DVD and inhaled the soundtrack days before the PBS broadcast aired. It was absolutely riveting to see not only Dylan in that era but all the other important figures of my formative years--the teenage Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Dave Van Ronk ...

But I have been "assigned" to write about my own memories of the 1965-66 Dylan transition by a former student who always has had a great awareness of important music and a nose for a human story. I remember his asking ingenuously once or twice as a teenager for my take on the 60s as an important era of social turmoil. I always brushed him off, saying it wasn't that exciting to hear about. I did so not because the era wasn't pretty exciting or the music extraordinary, but because I didn't want to come off as stuck in the past when there was so much going on at the moment. But you asked, Jonathan, so here goes.

I got my first guitar for Christmas 1960. I hadn't even heard of Bob Dylan at the time, but I guess he'd gotten his first guitar a few years earlier because now we can hear his first recording--a low-fi tape made by a high school friend in 1959. He's moaning away on a solemn folk spiritual, "When I Got Troubles." Didn't we all.

I'd been working on my guitar chords for a year or so when I discovered the music I wanted to learn and duplicate. It came to me via an L.A. FM station, KRHM, and the d.j. was a very witty and knowledgeable host named Les Claypool. So it was folk music for an hour every weeknight at 9 p.m. and four hours on Saturdays, from 8 'til midnight. For the longest while, everything I knew about folk music was provided in recordings and commentary from Les Claypool. And as soon as Dylan's first album came out, it was on the air at KRHM.

It's hard to describe a first exposure to Bob Dylan. We folkies were used to musicians with the raw frankness of Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly. Many of the traditional balladeers and bluesmen even had quite melodious singing voices--think of Cisco Houston, Brownie McGee, or Bill Broonzy--yet we didn't expect everyone singing this stuff to sound like Glenn Yarborough or Joan Baez, but Dylan was something else. That twang was an uneasy mix of the Minnesota prairie and Oklahoma plains transplanted to Greenwich Village. He seemed to be intentionally abrasive, so rough around the edges that you had to take him or leave him alone, but could never ignore him or lump him together with others of his sort.

But most of us--and we were a vast, youthful army of folk freaks--loved him, loved the craggy voice, attended every word of the early songs, adopted the sneer for ourselves because we felt the same way about racism, poverty, and pointless war. We were relieved of the need to discover the world's rottenness and corruption because we had only to sign on to this visionary's articulation of the problems we faced. Learn the chords, learn the words, copy the intonation, wear the blue work shirt...and voilà, you were a serious, sensitive person also.

That (and the inspiration of several others like the Native American song-writer Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Canadian duo Ian and Sylvia, and an array of hot-picking bluegrass bands) got me nearly though my sophomore year of college. That year, though, was when Dylan took the first steps toward re-defining his place in the music world. He clearly needed to say more than he had been, play differently that he had been, and rattle the complacency he had inadvertently created.

He "came out" as a decisively rock artist in the summer of '65 at, of all places, the serene and scholarly Newport Folk Festival, but his fans were already dealing with the electric shock of half the tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. I remember discussing the "Dylan's new sound" with one or two friends of the folk faith. We were more amused than dismayed. Dylan seemed to be trying so hard to put people off, which in a way had always been his gig, so we refused to be as shocked as we were supposed to be.

Most of our major folk heroes, remember, were men and women much older than ourselves--the generation that was recording in the fifties, forties, and even the thirties. People like Pete Seeger or Jack Elliot were still youthful liaisons to an older group of icons--Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, the Rev. Gary Davis, Elizabeth Cotton and others. Hell, some were even dead already. Dylan was one of us. Our age. He could change his groove any time he wanted, and we would just wait and see how it turned out. Nonetheless, I do remember doing an early form of Amazon mail order, sending a copy of Bringing It All Back Home to my brother for no reason or occasion other than to gross him out.

I was premature, though. Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, soon to follow, were more outrageous and undeniably the work of genius. I wasn't aware at the time of the reaction he had gotten across England on his 1965 tour filmed by D.A. Pennebaker, but I don't think I would have been one of those creepy Dylan worshippers who shouted imprecations at him nightly as he tried to bring them something curious he'd just come up with, such as, say, "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Ballad of a Thin Man." I always liked the iconoclasts, the ass-kickers, the dare-devils of pop culture. Nothing kept me from going to clubs like the Ash Grove in Hollywood, the Ice House in Pasadena, or the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach just because Bob Dylan had stopped appearing at Gerde's Folk City in New York.

Dylan was at the height of his creative powers and naturally his music was controversial, not just because it was no longer folk or "protest" (whatever that is that something like "Desolation Row" isn't), but because he was breaking loose from literalism and sober metaphor into regions of wild subjectivity and free association. This, of course, is what painters and orchestral composers had been doing for over a half century, while "popular music" remained bound by the restraints of objective report. I wish I'd paid closer attention at the time, but a solo acoustic guitar player had fewer options if he lacked the amp, the Fender and a few mates to fill out a band--especially if he was working on something of importance that Dylan and other budding musicians, like the guy down the hall in my UCSB dorm, Robbie Krieger, weren't working on, a college degree.

So it wasn't until nearly a decade later--after I'd graduated, gotten married, and launched into a teaching career and Dylan had fully recovered from his motorcycle accident and regained interest in making new music--that we connected again. The album was Blood on the Tracks, and I was onboard again. It was not until this mid-seventies period that I would see him live for the first time, and then watch him wade through his born again phase. Now THAT was agonizing, especially when the music was so strong and the sentiment so sappy.

But we got through that together and moved on. Don't think twice, pal, it's all right.

Testing...testing

Ok, I guess it's best to accept the fact that the current educational panacea is testing and more testing. The high-stakes testing lifestyle seems to be unavoidable these days, though I also sense the mood of educators is starting to shift toward defiance now that it's clear where things are headed: inescapable, unmerited humiliation for all involved--students, schools, school districts, and whole communities.

While schools are doing better, more professional work than ever, solving more students' problems than ever, and tackling more of the obstacles society tosses in the way of their mission, along comes a legion of politicians--from both the federal and state levels--anxious to rap somebody's knuckles with punitive testing and (bend over, please!) "accountability" schemes.

A week or so ago the L.A. Times editorialized passionately against a bill currently kicking around in Sacramento that would offer a very limited number of students in the state to receive a high school diploma even though they'd been unable to pass the state's High School Exit Exam. These students will have fulfilled all their school districts' unit and course requirements, will have taken all possible remedial courses, and have failed the exit exam at least three times.

The Times was horrified that the legislature should even consider backing down on the newly established testing hurdle. Fact is, the State Department of Education backed off two years ago from their original plan to enforce the law for the class of 2004 and dodged the firestorm of protest and lawsuits sure to come their way from some 75,000 (mostly underprivileged minority) families of students denied diplomas at the eleventh hour of their pathetically underfunded, but free public education.

But now the ax is poised to fall and everyone--politicians and students alike--are going to have to live with their shortcomings. Or will they? Predictably, the politicians are looking for a way around the inevitable. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of their prehistoric brains, these people know what teachers everywhere learn in a couple semesters of service--that when you attempt to teach a challenging curriculum to the entire range of pupils and set reasonable expectations for achievement, you will inevitably still have students who don't succeed.

It's just how things are. It isn't a matter of how high or low the expectations for success are set, and it's not a matter of how skilled the teacher is or how much pressure is put on the school's principal. It just can't be avoided.

Let's go even further, though. Let's admit that it's not just that some students don't or won't work hard enough to meet expectations, but, in fact, in any school there are students who CAN'T meet our reasonable standards. There are more of them than we would care to acknowledge. They don't read because after years of trying, they still can't get beyond decoding some simple letter combinations, and words never come alive for them on a page, as they do for the rest of us. They never catch on to the magic of numbers and the power of symbolic logic because they just aren't wired that way.

They are the ones who belie our beautifully stated little mission statements that assert that all students can learn.

Well, all students can learn something, but the days of trying to evaluate what these unfortunate individuals can and can't accomplish individually have long since expired. Schools now exist in the realm of universal content standards and assessment goals. It's all measurable in terms of an Academic Performance Index and precise calculations of Adequate Yearly Progress,

Here's how one state's Web site summarizes it: No Child Left Behind requires each state to define adequate yearly progress for school districts and schools, within the parameters set by Title I. Each state begins by setting a "starting point" that is based on the performance of its lowest-achieving demographic group or of the lowest-achieving schools in the state, whichever is higher. The state then sets the bar--or level of student achievement--that a school must attain after two years in order to continue to show adequate yearly progress. Subsequent thresholds must be raised at least once every three years, until, at the end of 12 years, all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments in reading/language arts and math.

As schools fall behind--as any statistician or Vegas bookie can tell you they all inexorably will--they are designated as PIS. The No Child Left Unscrewed folks tell us that's an acronym for Program Improvement School, but we all get the message. Obviously, the fatal ingredient in this witch's brew is the phrase, "until...all students in the state are achieving at the proficient level on state assessments..."

Now, if we can't bring ourselves to admit that's not going to happen, then at least we can acknowledge the consequences and stand behind our choices as resolutely as we launched into the scheme. For instance, the state legislature--and indeed the L.A. Times--should tell us how admirable it is that a high school diploma is beyond the reach of so many young people who have hung in there to the bitter end, how good it is for character building to face one's limitations and accept "no" for an answer. This is doubly ennobling when your experience with English is limited to just a few years and you go to a decaying, overcrowded school in an immigrant neighborhood where standard formal English is rarely heard except on school campuses.

If we aren't quite that cynical yet, then why shouldn't we make some effort to regard a pubic education as a win-win proposition for everyone. If we don't want to hand out diplomas to the undeserving, then let's hand out certificates of completion that testify to a student's motivation and perseverance. By all means, make a high school diploma stand as a credible academic degree, but perhaps we shouldn't push every child toward that degree when our society also needs people with non-academic skills. It's reasonable to assume that even the shiftless, the recalcitrant, and the learning disabled will eventually build on their rudimentary educations and pick up the skills of their trades--whatever they may be.

Let's face it, the extent of unameliorated poverty in this country, exposed by recent experiences with natural disasters, is not the result of faulty schools or languishing academic standards. It's the result of callous attitudes and perpetual neglect.

Would that there were standardized tests for those traits.

Death Be Not Proud

It's often occurred to me that religion is mislabeled poison. It parades as a cure, but is, in fact, a gruesomely destructive element in a culture. Most of the time we don't notice, because within a particular society everyone is partaking of the same concoction and enjoying the same sense of euphoria. It's when folks within a culture start breaking into coteries with different tastes in poisons that the chaos ignites--or when we stick our noses univited into someone else's Kool Aid binge.

But I hadn't thought much about how time and tide move us along past the sticking points that could make things even worse. That is, until I had a chance to see an exhibit of Rembrandt paintings at the Getty Center in L.A. this weekend. Grim insight into what's going on within the world of Islam may be a curious connection to make with the Dutch master's marvelous series of late religious portraits, but nonetheless, that's what popped up for me after looking at a roomful of saints, apostles, and sorrowful virgins created by arguably the greatest portrait painter since the Renaissance.

The exhibit, which ended yesterday, collected sixteen of Rembrandt's paintings from late in his life, when he suffered poverty and personal loss. The paintings, though apparently not consciously a suite or series, are consistent in subject, size, tone, and palette. They are, without variation, dark, somber, brooding, and focused on death. The painting of St. Bartholomew above is pretty typical: a deeply contemplative figure placed before us because of his commitment to his beliefs, symbolized both in the pose and facial expression, but also, just for good measure, in his obvious display of the tool of his own martyrdom--in this case a large knife.

The paintings, which thoroughly blur the distinction between religious iconography and portraiture, are brilliant, moving work, but when I finished with the whole show, it struck me that Christianity has historically been absorbed with death and martyrdom as central to its sway over followers of the faith. In Rembrandt's day--some 350 years ago--Christianity made its most forceful pitch to the faithful by reminding them of inevitable death and the glory of self-sacrifice.

Since the Reformation, of course, the message has eased off the gloom and eventually moved toward more of a "praise the lord" and "born again" campaign that sells better to an upwardly mobile middle class demographic. Modern day Christians not only don't see any conflict between piety and plutocracy, but can't conceive that God should ask more of us than self-realization. Good Christians network and thrive to model for the world the benefits of divine grace.

But when you stare into the faces of those early Christian martyrs, you see faces that express a brooding sorrow for mankind and a need to live up to the logical demands of religious commitment. And then you realize that this is the religious mode that ticks us off so much when we encounter it today in our dealings with Muslim zealots. We are revolted that someone who follows a major religion of the world-- a religion that seems to promote tenets of peace and brotherhood--should have sects and ideologues who also praise and practice martyrdom and ultimate commitment to a deity.

The problem is not a conflict between Christianity and Islam--they are as consanguineous as cousins raised in different towns--but rather the tendency of a branch of modern Muslim thinkers to revere the past and detest what has become of their society in the course of time. But then, is that any different from the new breed of Christian fundamentalists who long for a return to an America of 150 years ago or so? What's the difference between an imam with his knickers in a twist over women who won't keep their faces hidden in public and a pastor who goes to a school board meeting to take a stand against teaching evolution?

Religion itself is an excuse to close your mind, indulge your prejudices, and act out your hostilities. Christ's sacrifice and the nobility of Christian martyrdom has a certain poetic and transcendent beauty because it's enshrined in a distant, sepia-toned past, while suicide bombers and paradise-bound jihadists turn our stomachs because they live in today's headlines and spread their message on the Internet. Beyond that, God is God, Allah is Allah, and Death is Death.

A Little Deal

With California gasoline prices boldly surging over $3.00 a gallon, and a barrel of sweet crude trading upwards of $65.00, can the gas crisis be far behind? But no one speaks of that. No one predicts shortages or long lines at the gas pumps. Sure scooter sales are up, but SUVs still dominate the road and consume more than their share of the gasoline supply. They are road hogs in more that one sense.

Yesterday a jaunty school-bus yellow Hummer sped past me on the freeway and it came to me. We could solve our gas problems and enlistment quotas at a swift and simultaneous stroke.

Here's the plan: Let's tell the guy who walks onto the showroom floor shopping for a shiny H2, that he can have a great price anytime he wants as long as he's willing to stop by the recruiter's desk conveniently located in the office. In fact, the ONLY way he is gong to get that boxy sex machine is to FIRST sign on the dotted line with the man in the uniform. If he wants the Hummer, he's gotta do the hitch.

Heck, he can get his wheels right away. He and his H2 can be on their way to streets of Baghdad within a matter of hours.

The plan is sooo beautiful and simple. The Hummer driver is the very one who is patrolling and protecting the very thing he has to have to keep his love alive--oil. He's the guy who's using up the gasoline, and he's the one out there making sure the petrol is in our pumps. Makes sense doesn't it? Who can argue with that? The military meets its quotas; the folks who use the most oil are those taking an active interest in securing it, and GM still sells cars.

America's taste in cars and policy in the Middle East are not one thing and another, they are hand in driving glove. As an English teacher I can read the symbols, and we need look no further than the SUVs clogging up the highways to see why we invaded Iraq. The globe is littered with brutally repressive dictators. Hell, many have been or still are our allies. But these are generally third-world agrarian fiefdoms. What's so vital about the freedom of Iraqis that we should care so deeply?

Let's face it, it's the oil, not the freedom, not the democracy, and certainly not the WMDs that put our boots on their ground. What kind of war are we in, when no general public sacrifice is required to support our efforts. The only sacrifices are those made by the two thousand families whose soldiers have died in a pointless war while the rest of America tools around on the nation's fine highways.

That guy in the yellow H2 could have gotten the same charge with a prescription for Viagra, and I'll bet filling up the gas tank on the HumVee cost about as much as a stop by his local pharmacy.

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!