C’est le vie in Washington: The name of pomme frites has been changed in the U.S. capitol to “freedom fries.” Viva la difference. Homeland Security now monitors video rentals for suspicious characters viewing films by Truffaut, Godard, Agnes Varda, Renoir and Jacques Tati. An amendment to the Patriot Act will now make it a federal crime to read Moliere, Flaubert, Baudelaire and above all, Alexis de Tocqueville.


TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY

A gallon of the cheapest gas: $2.25

A month of "reality" shows, reruns, war hype, studio wrestling
and Rudi Bachtiar but without HBO and BBC America: $41.45

A month of catastrophic health insurance with a
several thousand dollar deductible : $200

War, tax relief for the wealthy, and no response
to the climate crisis : priceless



TODAY IN HUMBOLDT COUNTY I saw my first homeless person with a cell phone.

But when you think about it, who needs a cell phone more? Actually, who else really needs a cell phone at all?



I get a kick out of Zen. I enjoy meditating though I don't do much, and I have really enjoyed books on Zen and Buddhism by (among others) Charlotte Joko Beck, Mark Epstein and Shunryu Suzuki, who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and is credited for being largely responsible for bringing Buddhist practice to America (though there has been some kind of Buddhist presence in America for a long time. Emerson was fascinated by it, for example, as was William James especially.) (Wasn't that a song on Blonde on Blonde? William James Especially?)

I've never visited the Zen center in San Francisco and wondered if I should. Somewhere I recall reading about a scandal there, and the other day I came across a book about it: "Shoes Outside the Door" by Michael Downing. It begins with that characteristic Zen wit (he quotes an elderly Zen priest advising him at breakfast, "You can't change your karma, but you can sweeten your cereal.") before it turns decidedly grim, and even that enlightened drollery takes on tragic meanings.

I'm only part way through the book, but I've already gotten to the place where the American Abbott who succeeded Suzuki has everyone lined up to bow to him as he drives away in his BMW. His excesses and autocratic abuses went on for years, pretty much in full view of everyone, until a few events (not all that different from those that came before) brought him down suddenly and completely. Apparently the Zen Center just about collapsed in anguish and confusion, and felt the effects for many years (the crisis occurred in 1983).

There's a lot already that's reminiscent of other situations in which a charismatic leader who is apparently succeeding, especially in bringing in money, gets away with a lot because people around him look the other way, or just don't see what they see. But there's also the particular abuse of the leader sanctified by religious belief.

The first thought that came to me is that I have a reason after all to be grateful for the abusive nuns and hypocritical priests in my own twelve years of Catholic schools and 14 or so of practice. I, too, looked the other way even when I noticed that the parish priest who hectored the congregation for money every Sunday was driving a new Chrysler when my father could barely afford a second hand Ford.

I had a number of painful personal experiences in which either my rebellious spirit or my idealism or most often a combination of the two got me into the kind of trouble that involves being accused of not having faith, or being a stubborn and willful sinner. They could have been right about that, I thought, they're the experts. But then I started putting things together, such as my expectation that if, for instance, the Church couldn't quite live up to its teachings, it could at least not deny its mistakes. (I vividly recall questioning the morality of giving safe passage to an accused heretic to defend himself in Rome, hearing him out and then burning him at the stake. Sister Cornelia explained that safe passage didn't mean safe passage back.)

Ever since I've erred on the side of being too skeptical of authority, and the older I get the more impatient I am with officiousness. So I feel for those Zen students who got sucked in, but if I ever seriously abdicated my own moral responsibility to others, I've repressed the memory. (My problem is an often misapplied Hero complex, but that's another story.) I've never had authority for long enough to seriously abuse it, and I probably have morally shortchanged myself on occasion, but thanks to those nuns and priests of my childhood, not for very long. So in the spirit of Zen I won't not say thanks.

The voice of wisdom in this book, as he is on many matters, is Gary Snyder. Of how to view the fallibility of “roshis” or the Buddhist teacher-authorities, he says, “So you get the best you can from the guy, and you don’t imitate his bad sides. That’s basically the way monks and laypeople approach the teacher in Japan.”

I expect some Democratic party funds are going to research the wealth of statements prominent Republicans have made about the sanctity of the balanced Federal budget and the devil of the deficits. But I wonder if there is a reporter out there with enough guts, enough time and access to Lexis-Nexis to ferret out the vituperative statements of Republicans who considered Bill Clinton's lack of military service a scandalous disqualification for the post of Commander in Chief.

I'm reminded of this partly by Chris Hedges' interview on Bill Moyers the other night. Hedges has covered many wars and wonders why each generation cannot seem to learn from the awful experiences of the past. (Even the Gulf War I: he said for example that the Marines there loathed CNN and its sensationalistic coverage of a clean, technological war in which no one at all got bloody, maimed or killed, and the war was conducted with high efficiency, instead of being the fractious, confused, bloody mess we've since learned it was. And this was a war that Hedges supported; yet knowing war's cost is a heavy consideration in deciding to wage war. He believes Gulf War II is irresponsible.)

I wonder, too why every generation has to learn it all over again---that war is not a video game or a commercial, any more than it is a patriotic song or John Wayne movie. I suppose what links these thoughts with those prompted by the Zen Center book is something else I'm grateful for: an imagination. I experienced the war against the war in Vietnam in the United States, and all those painful and tumultuous years. I was a witness to the war itself only through information and imagination. Information, and judging information, are important. But was through imagination-through feeling the experiences of others, through entering into the published descriptions and accounts, as well as through the poetry and the films and novels of that war and of previous wars-that I learned enough of the realities of war to form my convictions, and inform my judgments. It is through imagination as well, through analogous experience, through empathy for the victims of authoritarian abuses and injustice, that I judge the rightness or wrongness of such situations, and above all, judge the rightness or wrongness of my participation in them and support of them.

It makes me feel again that to create works of the imagination that speak to the imaginations of others, that first of all help create the capacity to imagine more fully, and then to give the imagination something worth engaging, is a high calling, and a social necessity, particularly in our times, when we are aware of so much and experience so little of it.

Cartoon of the day: Satan gathers his minions in hell and says, “I know it’s tempting to rest on our laurels but it’s time to think ahead to 2004.”

Instant Karma

This is exciting--- the first actual blog-like entry in this blog space, a series of formally unrelated items...

Reaction by some who've attended the meetings of Humboldt County Democrats and Greens described in the piece below (“Thoughts on the Politics of Blue and Green.”)
prompts me to this clarification. At the end of the piece I mention that I'm unlikely to attend future meetings and I say why. My reasons have more to do with me than the meetings, and I certainly support the continuing dialogue between Dems and Greens. My essay was merely an attempt to contribute to that dialogue. I wish everyone well who attends these meetings, and I salute their commitment, especially those who travel considerable distances (50 miles or more) to attend them. Nor did I intend to leave the impression I definitely wasn’t going to go to such meetings in the future.

This reminds me of an essay I read recently from the Atlantic magazine on being an introvert in an extravert world. It probably helps explain my meetings phobia, though again I must hasten to add that I am fully capable of functioning at meetings. Some people find writing difficult, but they do it when it's part of their job, or they feel so strongly about something they have to do it and it's the only way to get accomplished what they want to accomplish. I'm the same way about meetings. I don't find writing all that difficult (writing well is always a challenge, however). But I do find meetings difficult, especially the recovery period. I doubt that my attendance at these makes much of a difference.

Here's a link to the introvert essay.

Comment on President Bush's prime time press conference: the Washington Times noted that it defied tradition when Helen Thomas, the senior White House correspondent, was not only not called on first, she wasn't called on at all. It's not hard to figure out why. When she was a wire service correspondent, her questions were mainstream. Now that she's a columnist, she is much more combative, especially on the topic of the upcoming bombing of Iraq. She thinks its immoral to bomb Iraqi civilians and she is relentless in questioning on the subject. See
http://AmericanSamizat.blogspot.com, the archive for Friday, January 24: “Milky Way in Review.”

Department of polls I wish to quote because they agree with me, as opposed to the polls whose methodology I question when they don't:
a Quinnipiac University survey shows that American voters favor "an as yet unnamed Democratic party candidate" for President over President George W. Bush by a 48% to 44% margin.

And the television network Americans trust most for news: PBS.
I don't know the source of this poll, though I heard it from an unbiased reporter during a PBS pledge drive.

Accepting Fred Rogers

Rege Cordic, Bob Prince, Bill Burns, Don Shannon, Hank Stohl, Patti Burns, Ed and Wendy King---depending on your response to these names, I can tell not only that you lived in the Pittsburgh area at one time (and if you grew up there, I've likely already spotted your accent) but when you lived there.

These are some of the legendary names of Pittsburgh media. Pittsburgh has more of a local culture than a lot of places, but like all cities these days, the cast of celebrity names is heavy with local media---the radio jocks, sportscasters, television anchors and weatherpeople, and the hosts of occasional local entertainment programs.

Few become known outside their city, and like these Pittsburgh icons, they almost never achieve anything like their local fame even if they go elsewhere. About the only exception in Pittsburgh was Fred Rogers. He became a part of childhoods from Alaska to Mexico for more than thirty years. He died in late February.

He was part of Pittsburgh TV just about from its beginnings in the 1950s. I was already in college when he began "Mr. Roger's Neighborhood" as a local program in the mid 60s, but I'd seen his work---even some of the same puppets---watching Josie Carey's show for children in the fifties. He was that show's producer.

That's maybe the aspect of Fred Rogers that was least noticed---he was a TV professional. He started out on production teams---doing everything from fetching coffee to being floor manager---for early TV outings like the Lucky Strike Hit Parade and the Kate Smith show.

I remember seeing him in the late 80s or early 90s on a local TV retrospective of the early years in Pittsburgh, surrounded by other on-camera pioneers, sensing their camaraderie from the days when they had essentially created an industry. He was one of the few who was still working in TV by then.

Even though I spent some time at the WQED studios and lived in the same part of Pittsburgh for awhile as he did, I only met Fred Rogers once. The word on him in Pittsburgh was that while his company was a bit dysfunctional at times, he was a very smart guy with not a whiff of hypocrisy about him. He was genuine---genuinely Mr. Rogers.

I met him in 1996 or so, after watching the taping of one of his shows. Even then it was rumored that the neigborhood's days were numbered. His musical director, Johnny Costa (another legendary Pittsburgh name in music as well as TV), was ailing, and Fred was said to be inclined to fold the show if Costa retired. But he kept making new programs for several more years, until 2000.

Even in a brief meeting, you could tell he was one of those people who is alive to the moment. Some people have to fight through their self-absorption, their thoughts or emotions, just to see and hear and feel what's in front of them. He took in everything with his senses, which made him perfect for television, and perfect for understanding how children perceive the world. He could be vulnerable in front of the camera, and behind it he could pick out the shadow in the background of the camera shot that might feel threatening to a watching child.

He was way out in front in understanding the power of accepting children for who they are, and for children accepting themselves. Yet he fed their ability to change and grow by realizing that curiosity is the essence and the joy of childhood. He knew how much children sensed, and how much they thought about their world.

He used what he sensed to develop ideas about how to speak to children's concerns. Some of his on-screen rituals, like changing shoes, still seem weird to me, but he somehow knew their symbolic function for kids. It took considerable courage to do what he did. He was one of those rare people who seemed made for exactly what he was doing, and maybe not much else. It was mutual good fortune that Mr. Rogers found his neighborhood, and it found him.

Thoughts on the Politics of Blue and Green

A couple of months ago I attended a meeting of people who identified themselves as Green Party members and Democratic Party members here in Humboldt County. The idea was to explore ways the two groups could work together.

We introduced ourselves and talked briefly about how we got to where we were politically. As I recall, many of the Greens spoke of being part of other movements that failed, such as socialist parties, before gravitating to the Greens. The Democrats often spoke of family and community loyalties in past generations of Democrats.

I was invited as a Democrat. I don't go to many meetings nor work in many groups anymore, so group dynamics are always interesting. I talked about my background as a third generation Democrat, who as a teenager worked for John F. Kennedy's presidential campaign, went to his Inauguration and shook his hand, and a couple of years later returned for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which is what that famous 1962 civil rights march was called. I said I worked registering voters for the Democratic party in support of Lyndon Johnson, and marched against Johnson, including at the Pentagon in 1968, pretty much short-circuiting what could very well have been a political future in my home area of western Pennsylvania.

Maybe I didn't get to say all of that, but I did mention that I supported Robert Kennedy in 1968 and still consider myself a Robert Kennedy Democrat. It was interesting how emotional I felt in support of this identity, in that company. For the truth of the matter is that in terms of many basic beliefs and political positions, I could have just as well been on the Green side. For instance, I believe that the overriding issue of our times is global heating, the climate crisis. Much of my work has been in environmentalism on one level or another. I wrote the video script for "Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact," which the Humboldt Watershed Council has used as an organizing tool and as a potent weapon in court cases involving Maxxam and their repulsive logging practices. I designed and put together the "official" web site for the late Paul Shepard, one of the most important ecological thinkers of his generation.

My work since I've been in Humboldt County has been mostly involved in the arts and with or for local American Indian organizations. I used my one contact very highly placed within the Clinton Administration exactly once in 8 years: to advocate for a pardon for Leonard Peltier. So obviously, I am not proud of everything the Clinton administration did, or didn't do.

But identifying yourself on one side or the other inevitably makes you an advocate for your side. So I was looking at the Greens from the perspective of a third generation Democrat (the first that I know of being my father's father, who I knew only as an old man who lived in his own basement, retired from the coal mines with black lung; the second was my father, who held a few minor township offices in addition to his regular job as a salesman. He was on the county Democratic committee for many years, so I remember the piles of pink "specimen ballots" distributed to Democrats to take to the polls; I used the backs of the extras to draw my cartoon panels on.)

So from this perspective, one of the places the Greens are ideologically vulnerable is class. There is insufficient attention paid to the working class and the poor in their ideology; moreover, when they oppose Democrats who have at least some institutional memory of being a party of the working class and minorities, they sever that last lifeline, however frayed. That's why at this meeting I quoted Harry Hopkins, FDR's chief advisor, who advocated programs to help those in need as well as programs to foster economic growth in the Depression. "People don't eat in the long term," Hopkins said. "They eat every day."

This got a laugh but the next Green to speak said that he also worried about the long term, which of course is also what I believe. I worry about life on earth as we know it surviving the 21st century. The future is one of my political concerns.

So this is the problem and the opportunity of dividing this way. Issues at least get raised. But you tend to get locked into a particular point of view that doesn't necessarily even represent what you really believe, at least not totally.

What I do think is that Humboldt County in particular has a great opportunity for what I've seen elsewhere called a blue-green coalition: blue collar and environmentalists. For after all, the facts about the extractive industries as well as other economic and non-economic, community and family interdependencies with the environment, should favor such coalitions.

Instead, the ruling class has managed to pit blues against greens on issues of jobs especially, but also by playing to class prejudices on both sides. It's a political tragedy, with vast consequences.

Such a coalition requires a search for a common language, which will require much soul-searching on the part of individuals and groups of both hues. And here in Humboldt we also have the great advantage of indigenous Native communities, elders and activists. Native groups and environmentalists have worked together on some issues, and have opposed each other on others. There is great skepticism among Native activists I've met about how much environmentalists understand about their point of view. (This goes double for attitudes towards the frequent soft-green allies among the New Agers.)

One notable item from this first meeting was that nobody was very interested in hashing over the 2000 election. In part, this was a kind of denial, for I noticed that it kept coming up in the discussion of other issues. In part I'm sure it was a genuine impulse to move on.

Some Greens, including the co-chair of the meeting, are apparently unrepentant about supporting Ralph Nader to the bitter end. Some (evidenced by discussions after the meeting) are shocked by how extreme the Bush administration is, and have realized that in important ways a Gore administration would be very much better, despite the "Bore or Gush" rhetoric of the Nader campaign. Some spoke of their "vote swapping" efforts, trading Nader votes in safe Gore states like California for Gore votes in more hotly contested states. They realized to some degree what a disaster Bush would be, prior to election day.

Before the meeting, attendees got an email copy of an article by a former Nader aide urging Nader not to run in 2004, which he apparently is intent on doing. This wasn't discussed either.

I wanted to discuss this issue, not because I wanted to argue that Nader cost Gore the election. I was thinking about the future. I said that on specific issues-the war in Iraq which was brewing even then, or California issues such as single-payer health care or state campaign finance like Arizona's-I'd be happy to work with anybody, regardless of what party they belonged to. But that I wasn't interested in entering into a coalition that did not recognize the realities of electoral politics.

Do you vote for the lesser of two evils, or make your vote a protest vote, to possibly influence future elections? I've gone through my own very painful process on this issue. When Robert Kennedy was killed in June 1968 I vowed I would not vote for a candidate who supported the Vietnam war. And I didn't. But I still found myself watching the late returns on television on election night, rooting for a Humphrey victory. Hubert Humphrey didn't seem to be the courageous visionary he once had been, but even then I knew that Richard Nixon was a functionally evil politician. And nobody, at least until Bush II, did as much damage to constitutional government as President Nixon.

I went through this process in every presidential campaign thereafter, mostly in the primaries. Do I support the best candidate, or the best candidate who has the best chance of winning the presidency?
I knew how corrupt and compromised the whole system, and the political dialogue was. Even in 1972, for awhile I went around wearing a campaign button for the Firesign Theatre's imaginary candidate George Papoon, whose slogan was "Not Insane." But eventually I advocated strongly for George McGovern, who even members of the national press felt had a chance of winning right up to the last week or so of the campaign. Despite the poll numbers, he drew large and enthusiastic crowds.

I supported Bill Clinton even in the primaries in 1992, because it was essential that a Democrat be elected, just to slow down and reverse at least some of the damage that a generation of mostly Republican administrations had done. Reagan had come close to destroying the federal government along with the untold suffering his policies caused.

I saw Clinton try to do the right things in his first term, and the kind and quality of vicious opposition this inspired. I was surprised by the vehemence also of people who had supported him and now were ready to castigate him as a failure, if not a traitor to the cause. I realized again how much of our collective unconscious we invest in a President (or presidential candidate). We project so much onto a person who is after all just a human being, that our disappointment is all but inevitable.

I think I became especially conscious of this because Bill Clinton and I are almost precisely the same age. In fact, he is about six weeks younger. Our first baby boomer president had some strange effects on other baby boomers. I remember one of the commentators on TV covering the Inaugural Parade, when the new President and Mrs. Clinton were walking part of the way. He mentioned that he and Clinton were about the same age. And now he's President of the United States, he said, and I'm...covering his parade.

Part of Clinton's problem with fellow baby boomers was that he was president and we weren't. I suppose we felt that there was still time, until he showed up. But there was another side to this identification. I remember talking about Clinton with people who were so disappointed in him, and then talking to a friend even closer in age to Clinton than me, who was working in state government. When we talked about Clinton, it was in terms of not only political realities but of what one person could reasonably do in one day's work. It seemed nearly a miracle anything got done at all. To us he wasn't only the symbol, the President. He was a guy like us with a job. A very tough job.

There was also a lot of class prejudice against Clinton in Washington. Class warfare of the Bush kind has been going on for a long time, and that's another reason that class has to become part of our political dialogue again.

But there are actions Clinton took and didn't take that are more than just disappointing. The human costs of the Iraq sanctions to the utterly innocent, the human costs of so-called welfare reform, are just the first that come to mind. Still, activists bear some of the blame, too. The civil rights progress of the mid 1960s happened because of the coexistence of strong pressure from outside government with an administration that was persuadable, and willing to take advantage of political opportunities this outside pressure created, even to the extent of taking political risks. (For don't forget that one cost of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s was the end of the Solid South for the Democrats and the beginning of a new Republican stronghold, which the Kennedys and other Democrats knew would happen.)

But in the 90s, activists relaxed a bit too much, in my view. Environmentalism in particular got flabby and institutional. Instead of using radical activism as energy and threat, the established environmental movement got bogged down in technical lobbying and basically in waiting for the Clinton-Gore administration to do stuff.
Clinton needed more visible pressure from the left, to begin to counter or at least challenge the power of corporate lobbying.

On the other hand, Clinton did stem the destructive tide in many areas. There were lots of environmental victories along with compromises. For someone who was fighting for his life most of his eight years, he and his administration left the country in far better shape that it was when they took office.

Then came the election of 2000, and the eventual Supreme Court coup. At this moment it is difficult to exaggerate the folly and the evil being perpetrated by the Bush administration in just about every way imaginable. Damage is being done that even with luck could not be undone for many years. We have two more years before the next presidential election.

So the point I was trying to make to that mixed group was this: I'm not interested in assigning relative blame for Bush to Nader draining key votes in Florida versus Gore's campaign mistakes or how fed up many Americans are with the whole system, or more sinister scenarios. What does concern me is 2004, and the lessons learned or not learned. The reality is that Ralph Nader is not going to be elected President in 2004, nor is any candidate the Green Party is likely to nominate. The reality is that the election in practical terms is about hiring somebody to be president, and by the day of decision there are only two candidates for the job. You choose one or you choose the other.

The time to build a new party is long before election day. The place to build it is on the local level. Sure, a presidential candidate with enormous media appeal might beat the two party candidates---and just who might that be? Jesse Ventura?

I want to hear Greens say, we were wrong to support Nader to the bitter end in 2000, because it at least helped make Bush possible, and we won't make that mistake again.

Then I can work with them. Despite the institutional confusion and in-fighting apparently occurring within the Green party on whatever state or regional or national or international levels.

I can work with them anyway, on individual issues-or so I thought until a recent event which in fact prompted this column. I attended an "Education Summit" at Humboldt State recently. It was mostly about alternative education, and I found the sessions I attended stimulating, thought-provoking and even exciting, and I felt everybody was on the right track, as well as having their hearts in the right place.

Just outside the main assembly room on the last day of the conference there was a table. On it was a petition for a single-payer, government funded health insurance system in California. I moved towards the table to sign the petition. But then I saw some more literature on the table. One sign said something to the effect of "Reasons why the Republicans and Democrats are the Same." It was a Green Party table.

Despite the commonalities fostered by the current system of campaign contributions, lobbying and corporate power, I don't believe the Republican and Democrats are the same. They don't support the same policies, or appoint the same judges, and they come from different constituencies. The differences in some aspects may be marginal, but that margin makes a very big difference, if you're interested in, say, a woman's right to choose, some limits on the rapacity inflicted on the natural world, and decisions on when and how and why to go to war or not.

To say they are the same may help convince people to support the Green party. But on every level, this turns out to help Republicans win elections. One Republican candidate here in Humboldt County was quite open about pitting a Green against a Democrat in order to split the vote.

I voted for a couple of Green candidates myself in local elections. But to do so on a national level is profoundly self-destructive. To do so even on intermediate levels is risky, because there is no real reliable Green party structure to back anybody up. Not in the way that there is a Democratic party infrastructure, as well as a tradition that can be appealed to.

To say there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats is personally insulting as well as foolishly inaccurate. In 2003 it tells me the judgment of these people can't be trusted. I wound up avoiding that table like the plague. I didn't sign the petition. I'll make my views known to my representatives, who at the moment are all Democrats, in other ways.

I'm probably not going back to those meetings of Greens and Dems. I'm not a Democratic party insider anyway. No Democrat here has hired me for anything, and I'm not economically able to volunteer much time, especially for activities my presence doesn't enhance in ways as possibly valuable as, say, what I'm doing right now. There will come a time, however, when licking envelopes and making phone calls for free will be more useful than writing for free. I've done that since I was 14, and I'll probably do it again in 2004. And it won't be at Green party headquarters.

Welcome to the Chaos.

As evidence of the Iraqi threat, the U.S. Secretary of State lauds a report of purported new findings by British intelligence, which turns out to be a thoroughly disreputable cut-and-paste from old and questionable sources, including the work of students, revealing information that is a more than a decade old. The plagiarism itself was so complete that it reproduced not only the very words of one of the student's papers, but also the grammatical errors and misspellings.

Sorry, but if my opponents from St. Philomena High in rural western Pennsylvania had tried to pass off that kind of evidence in a scholastic forensic league debate held in an empty classroom and witnessed by a track coach and two nuns, my high school debate partner and I would have been embarrassed for them.

Turns out it wasn't British Intelligence but Tony Blair's press office that produced it. British Intelligence was actually saying that there are no ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

No wonder Powell's attempt to tie Al Qaeda to Iraq on the basis of a purported bin Laden tape inspired skepticism. (Let's not embarrass the emperor by pointing out that last year's Satan and Public Enemy #1 is apparently still at large.) His other evidence previous to the tape---which even if genuine doesn't establish a relationship, others say---was a supposed base and chemical weapons plant in Iraq which turned out to be a few falling down shacks with minimal electricity outside Saddam's territory.

But look closer at the case the Bushies are making and it gets even more sinister: Sure, bin Laden despises Saddam as an apostate, but lots of terrorist groups are finding common cause as war nears, because they have a common enemy. We can expect terrorist acts even in the United States, possibly including dirty nuclear devices, chemical or biological weapons, planted by Al Qaeda and possibly supplied by Saddam, because the U.S. is preparing to attack Muslim territory.

In other words, the Bushies are making the case that we need to attack Iraq because it supports terrorist Al Qaeda, and the reason Al Qaeda and Iraq may be combining forces is because the U.S. is going to attack. Where is Joseph Heller when you need him, may he rest in peace.

Meanwhile North Korea is preparing to make nuclear bombs, and warns the U.S. that it isn't the only country that can engage in a pre-emptive strike so don't even think about it. A few days later, Iran announces it is doing some new nuclear fuel processing of its own, but not to worry, they aren't going to make bombs, which is just what North Korea says, wink wink, nudge nudge.

This is while France and Germany are joined by Russia in supporting a plan to put UN people on the ground in Iraq before the U.S. bombs can fall. Stayed tuned for Security Council: The Dueling Vetoes. In their different ways, all of these countries are responding to the Bush foreign policy of arrogance and bullying

They're seeing consequences of American arrogance in more terrorism in Europe and Britain. The closer war gets, the more menacing the threat. The U.S. is put on alert. Nobody seems to know if much has actually been done to protect the country's most vulnerable and potentially destructive terrorism targets. The head of the International Association of Firefighters says nobody has provided equipment or training to most firefighters in most places to cope with bio, chemical or radiation attacks, and they're understaffed in most cities even for more conventional threats. Communications is still a mystery in most places, and while Americans are being urged to buy battery-powered radios, there may be nothing to hear on them but the latest from British intelligence.

Congress holds hearings on plans for postwar Iraq and finds that practically speaking there are none. NGOs and the UN aren't prepared to deal with "humanitarian needs," which is nicespeak for starving, bleeding, thirsty, maimed and terrorized civilians. But the Bushies did say they expect Saddam to blow up his oil wells, creating a blanket of deadly pollution we'll probably all get a taste of.

Conservative estimates have the U.S. occupying Iraq for two years. An army of occupation is likely to face armed opposition, as it tries to restrain the opposing ethnic and religious groups in Iraq from savaging each other. The retired general who led relief efforts in the region after Gulf War I said that even without those responsibilities, tens of thousands of American troops remained for the next 11 years, long after the cameras went home. "The war never ended," he said. "We aren't going to go home from whatever we do in Iraq."

Meanwhile back in Iraq the inspectors say Iraq is cooperating better, but everybody knows the Bushies won't take yes for an answer. They insist that war isn't inevitable, and if it happens it will be regrettable, but nothing anybody does gets any reaction other than derision. Everybody else is deluded; only the Bushies are right.

Thanks to that self-righteousness, Americans will be paying for the war and the occupation of Iraq into the indefinite future. It doesn't look like France and Germany will help much.

Instead Bush stands shoulder to shoulder with his staunch ally, the prime minister of Australia. He shouldn't expect much from that country in the long term either. Everybody in Australia knows that come the next election, this guy is toast. Why? Because he stands shoulder to shoulder with Bush.

Bush submits a budget with huge tax giveaways for the rich and the largest deficit in U.S. history, batteries and the cost of the war not included. All the voices that despaired over government deficits are silent. State governments are already saying it and pretty soon the federal government will say it, too: Gee, there's no more money! We'll have to tighten our belts, so the majority of families in America can look forward to worse education and health care, and an old age of poverty and untreated illness. I guess they're hoping we'll suffer in silence, ashamed of not being billionaires and getting tax cuts, too.

The ax is already starting to fall here in California, thanks to state budget cuts. People will be thrown out of work and others will be overworked, students and their parents will pay more for less education, and as for the poor---let them eat tax cuts.

A draft proposal for Patriot Act II circulates in Washington. Patriot Act I already allows homes to be searched secretly, without a warrant. Patriot Act II apparently proposes secret arrests. You know, the very definition of totalitarian government---the knock on the door in the middle of the night, and somebody disappears. Only they won't knock. Of what form of government is this act a patriot of? Where are Stalin and Pinochet when we need them?

If there's another terrorist attack, we'll probably find out. Just don't keep this column on your hard drive.

Meanwhile, the crashing sound of icebergs falling apart, the chainsaws and bulldozers and the drills cut the life out of the planet, the quiet dying of the last of their kind as species vanish forever.

Welcome to the Madness.

What To Do When the War Starts


War may be imminent, it may be delayed, but war is probably coming. If it does not, the growing global peace movement and demonstrations can rightly take the credit. But assuming it does, what then?

For however long it lasts, many people---and all politicians--- will feel that protest must quiet, in deference to the soldiers who are endangering their lives. As a practical matter, protestors risk seeing their message subsumed in a debate over the seemliness as well as the patriotic duty involved in protesting at such a moment.

Of course, if the war goes on for years as Vietnam did, the taboo weakens, though the emotions involved don't.

Apart from protest, there is much that those who oppose this war can do, and should do. Here are a few of my suggestions:

1. Pressure the press to report fully and accurately. The media will be under intense pressure to say what the Pentagon wants them to say. They've gotten fat and lazy with their inbred cynicism and their chirpy personae, and there seem to be fewer correspondents with journalism training, at least in the era that differentiated between reporting news and making commercials. Getting the real news will be hard, since the Pentagon will try to stop them. They will need relentless badgering and counterpressure to even get motivated.

Don't let them off the hook for a minute. They are acutely sensitive to viewer feedback, so get on their case relentlessly. It's your patriotic duty to have the truth, because we actually do care about the welfare of our soldiers, both in what they'll be facing and what damage it does to them for the rest of their lives.

2. Actively support organizations and efforts dedicated to mitigating the suffering of Iraq's people, particularly the children. Millions have already suffered and died because of sanctions. A report by the International Study Team, an organization comprised of academics, researchers and physicians, warns that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of children will be among a war's casualties.

Half a million children in Iraq are malnourished now. Efforts must be made to ensure that supply lines of food and medicines are established and maintained, and that refugees are supplied. The outlook is especially grim because, according to a doctor on the team, "No one is ready for this war. Not the national government [of Iraq], not the United Nations."

3. Pay close attention to the weapons used in this war and make your feelings known about the bombing of civilians and the use of depleted uranium in munitions such as shells, which as called DU weapons. This is low-level nuclear waste used to both pierce armor when used to tip bullets, and to shield against bullets when used in tank or bunker armor.

DU weapons create a burning radioactive cloud. The radioactivity of these weapons stays in the environment for 4.5 billion years. It's likely that DU weapons used in the last Iraq war is among the factors responsible for the marked increase in cancers there, including among children. The U.S. has done the usual Gulf War dance, promoting flawed studies as proof there's no link. American soldiers were also affected, and they will be again.

Summarizing the rationale for using them, a defense analyst said, "This is war, and a destroyed enemy tank is less dangerous than one that's shooting at you, regardless of whatever residual effects DU may have."

That's the logic of war, all right. Someone has to assert the logic of life. That someone is you.

At least some of us who protested in the Vietnam era learned what supporting our boys, our fighting men, really means. I wasn't very charitable towards my contemporaries who voluntarily went to Vietnam to fight, and I thought I had little in common with the veterans who came back. Until one day when I was hitchhiking on an interstate highway near an exit. Down the road I saw a soldier in uniform who was also hitching. I saw him see me, and he walked briskly toward me. I had long hair and was carrying a guitar case. I wasn't expecting this meeting to be friendly. But it was. He was happy to see me. He wanted to tell somebody, "You guys were right."

After 1969 or so, about the time that John Kerry returned from Vietnam to lead Vietnam Veterans Against the War, that kind of encounter was the norm, though it hadn't been before. But the fact that some veterans realized they'd been had is not what I learned. That was just the ice-breaker. I remember watching in horror the kind of treatment wounded vets were getting in veterans hospitals, as depicted in the movie, Fourth of July. I couldn't believe that the people who sent them over there would treat them like that when they came back. But that's the history of war. It happens just about every time.

The Vietnam vets had it the worst. But even the Gulf War vets who came back to official honors, were ignored when they started getting sick.

It's the message of every war poem, novel or film worth the name: the people who pay the price for war are the soldiers. Thanks to the unspeakable immorality of bombing civilian populations, wars of our age have many other victims, almost none of whom have much of a say in the decisions to go to war.

If we want to support our brothers and sons, our grandsons and now granddaughters, we must go to war in our own way, and fight for their health and well-being. If we can't stop the war, we can do our best to help the victims: soldiers on both sides, and the people and the children in harm's way.

A Different Agenda
Last fall, the press and politicians as well as scholars paid considerable attention to the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. We'll see whether they will all take equal note this summer and fall of the 30th anniversary of the chief outcome of that crisis (apart from the continuing presence of human civilizations): the nuclear test ban treaty and the beginning of détente.

President Kennedy had begun pushing for such a treaty some six months before the missiles of October. The immediate focus was ending nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere, and to encourage the Soviets to stop, Kennedy imposed a unilateral ban on such tests by the U.S. Eventually, not quite a year after the Cuban crisis, the two superpowers took this step.

Kennedy probably selected this step because the U.S. military could be convinced that the ban hurt the Soviets more than America (U.S. technology was suited to underground tests) and because the harm caused by fallout in the atmosphere was a present danger and easy to dramatize. Still, it wasn't an easy sell in the midst of the Cold War.

But clearly Kennedy considered it only a step. In one of his most important (and most ignored) speeches, at American University in June 1963 he made the definitive statement on the subject of peace of his generation.

He asked that we examine our attitude toward peace itself. "Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control."

And in the sentence that sums up Kennedy's core belief better than any other, he asserted: "Our problems are man-made; therefore they can be solved by man."

Kennedy asked for perspective. He called for nations to submit "their disputes to just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations do not last forever. However fixed our likes and dislikes may seem, the tide of time and events will often bring surprising changes in the relations between nations and neighbors."

Think of how the world has changed since 1963, particularly the relationship of the U.S. and the Soviet Union: Russia is almost an ally, while other nations in the former Soviet bloc are among the staunchest supporters of the U.S. now.

"So let us persevere," Kennedy said, in something of a reference to his own Inaugural call to action of "Let us begin."
"Peace need not be impracticable, and war need not be inevitable."

But the key statement in this speech for our time, for all time, is this: "There is no single, simple key to this peace, no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process, a way of solving problems."

At a time when we are openly urged to wage war as an instrument of foreign policy, and covertly told it will be to our economic benefit (eight times the current yield of oil from Iraq), it is well to remember that it was once a political judgment of what is best for the American future as well as the moral statement by a President of the United States, that peace, not war, is a way of solving problems.

Peace is a process. It is a matter of choice. It is a hard, sometimes painful commitment. It requires effort, attention and self-knowledge. Marching for peace when war is threatened is a political necessity and part of the process. But marching and protesting alone are not enough.

The Ought Decade

Happy New Year Three of the---the---what the hell are we calling this decade anyway?

Say the 60s, and everybody knows what you mean. Say the 70s and they laugh, and do a disco move. Say the 90s and they smile, feel their wallets and groan. But we're three years into this decade, and we don't know what the hell to call it.

So the 60s are retro, the 80s are nostalgia, the 90s are but a memory, and we're going into the third year of the---the-the whats?

Could it possibly be? Two whole years of a Decade Without A Name? How could this happen-here in America, where marketing is our most important product---so important in fact that we don't need a product, we've gotten that good.

We'd have to call this a major embarrassment. It's a tricky problem, certainly. There's no easy solution. The zeros? The double o's? The blanks? The nothings? It's a dilemma. But as the world's only marketing superpower, we should be up to the challenge.

Sure, it's an artificial dilemma, but isn't that what marketing is all about?

Still, this practice of dividing the centuries into decades, and acting as if these divisions mean something, was pretty much a twentieth century fashion. Maybe this is an opportunity to just let it quietly die off. At best it produces images that don't really correspond to the ten year spans they label. Everybody knows what "the Sixties" means. It means a few soundbites from 1961 to 1965 ("Ask Not," "I have a dream," etc.) plus music and fashion and other eye candy from 1966 to some time in the early 1970s, with roots in the 1950s and before. Unless it means something else.

As far as that goes, the ideas we have of what the centuries mean are also deceptive. The 19th century and the 20th century conjure distinctly different images in our minds. The 19th century is the Civil War and horsemen in the western dust. The 20th century is atomic power and the automobile. But in fact only 40 years separates Abraham Lincoln from Einstein's special theory of relativity. Less than a decade went by between Wounded Knee and the Model T, with the quantum theory, the first airplane and radio popping up somewhere in between. Many if not most of the scientific theories and discoveries, the basic technological breakthroughs, and a good deal of the art that dominated the twentieth century were accomplished between 1880 and 1920. The century marker means no more than the division into decades, which is nothing.

But at least until now such arguments haven't cut any ice when the marketing people, the trend writers and media pop historians. But then, it used to be easy. You just called the decade by its numerical name. But now, the going has gotten tough. And apparently the tough have stepped away from their desk.

Because if you want to call this decade by the numbers, what numbers will you use? There seems to be no easy answer. Call them the 2000s, but that's the whole century. Can't call them the 20s, unless like legislators approaching Social Security, we simply want to give the problem to the next generation, and let them figure out what to call the decade before the thirties.

We could call them "the ohs", if we want a whole decade to sound like a generic breakfast cereal or a California baseball team or a very weak expression of recognition. Considering our current befuddled view of the future, that last may be appropriate.

Especially considering who we have in the White House, some of us would be tempted to call this decade the Zeros. If things get any worse, we might wind up calling them the Voids. Or somebody else will, probably extraterretrial historians. Since there hasn't been anything particularly noteworthy in terms of style, fashion or ideas so far, maybe it's accurate to think of them as the Nothings. There's the war on terrorism, of course, but that's turning out to be 1914 crossed with "Nineteen Eighty-Four."

The problem is the absence of satisfactory precedent. Naming the decades wasn't so popular as the twentieth century began. There was however a way people referred to dates in that first decade. They might refer to the year 1902 as "nineteen ought two," with "ought" meaning zero. Popularized in England when a version of Tick Tack Toe was called "crosses and oughts" for x's and o's, it's an archaic alteration of "naught," or nothing. But that's an obsolete use of "ought" that hasn't been used for generations, except sometimes to refer to that antique decade.

Still...there's a certain appeal. "Ought" is a word that seems to have gone out of our public language in more ways than this one. In its sense of moral imperative, the English "ought" developed over centuries, always associated with obligation and duty. Duty became a complicated concept during the mutable 20th century, due in part to its obliterating technologies of war combined with mendacious politics and economics, and floods of sociological and science-inspired changes: so many shifting borders and frames of reference. Then there was that planetary portrait from the lunar point of view, and duty seemed poised to undergo another transformation.

In defining "ought", the Oxford English Dictionary cites this 19th century example from William Gladstone: "The two great ideas of the divine will and of the Ought, or duty, are the principal factors in the government of our human world." Perhaps this is the Ought that we ought to be concentrating on as we begin the 21st century. Instead of buzzing about the profit opportunities of globalization, we ought to be attending to our duty to the globe.

For as smugly or dazedly blank as we might feel and the future might seem, we hear convincing voices suggesting that this decade will be crucial and defining. If humankind really sees its duty to the planet and does the right things, it may survive intact (but not unchanged) and continue without serious setback (though with altered course), in concert with the natural world that nurtures all life. If this duty towards all life, past and present and to come, is not met and the right things are not done, this young century could be more cataclysmic than any previous one, taking us to the tipping point of an inevitable downward spiral. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this century could be the last in the series.

It's probably not going to happen this year, and it's not going to happen at all without some mighty big changes, but we can hope that by the time this decade acquires a name it will mean something, as a goal and a guide. That is, if the name we can legitimately give to this decade turns out to really be the Oughts.

Of Popcorn and the Internet

The Internet, and its best search engines have made a dramatic difference in researching all kinds of facts, and this fact is often extolled. For example a recent David Kippen piece in the San Francisco Chronicle noted that tracing the origins of popular expressions, which was next to impossible before, is now often a simple matter of wading through the Google hits.

It's all true as far as it goes, but the truth is there is still a limit to how far that is, and how revolutionary Internet research actually may be. There is a lot of information that isn't on the Internet, or isn't generally accessible. There are still proprietary data bases and search engines that cost big bucks to use (Lexus/Nexus being the prime example, but there's also the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary for etymologies and origins that go back past the last scouring of web sites on the net.)
And of course there is all the inaccurate and/or contradictory information endlessly replicated as it echoes across cyberspace.

I ran into some of these difficulties in trying to trace down what would seem to be a simple fact--- trying to find a kernel of truth as it were, concerning the origin of popcorn.

I was reading a collection by the eminent contemporary American essayist Edward Hoagland, specifically an essay about a cross-country train trip. One brief aside caught my eye: in recounting his transit through the American Midwest on one of the Amtrak Zephyrs (a route west from Chicago), he produces this catalogue: "A bulldozer factory at Aurora; pig farms at Princeton; the Spoon River at Kewanee. Popcorn was invented in Galesburg. Monmouth is where Wyatt Earp was born."

Popcorn was invented in Galesburg. I don't suppose that would be of more than momentary interest for most readers, but I went to college in Galesburg, Illinois, and I had never heard that particular fact stated before. I knew that Galesburg was the birthplace of Carl Sandburg, that Ronald Reagan lived there for awhile in his boyhood, that Eugene Field, Edgar Lee Masters and Jack Finney (Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, etc.) went to college there at least briefly, that Lincoln and Douglas debated there and that it was an important stop on the Underground Railroad, that Dorothea Tanning escaped from there to become the only woman surrealist painter in France and to marry Max Ernst and then become an important American painter. I even knew that the inventor of the Ferris wheel, George Ferris, was born there, and that Galesburg had once supplied the nation with bricks. But I'd never heard anything about popcorn.

Still, the place was and in surrounded by corn fields, so popcorn made sense. Then shortly after I read this, I found myself mentioning it in a book review I was writing, on a book about the French New Wave filmmakers. It so happens that I saw my first French New Wave films---in fact, my first non-Hollywood films---in Galesburg, thanks to the Cinema Club at Knox College. The Cinema Club was a student run organization; in fact, a one-student organization, and that one was David Axlerod, who has since been involved in movies and TV. (Unfortunately, there are a number of David Axlerods in the entertainment business, and I'm not sure of his resume. A problem, incidentally, one would encounter when researching on the Internet.)

David and the Cinema Club constituted my first education in film. As I recall, these films were usually screened in the big theatre in the Fine Arts Center. It wasn't a bad venue for seeing movies, but it wasn't a real good one, either. It was an multi-purpose venue, used mostly for main-stage live theatre productions. I saw my first production of Hamlet there, starring a student named Jim Eichelberger, who later became known as Ethel Eichelberger, a theatrical legend on the East Coast. I've seen a half dozen film versions and probably that many stage productions of Hamlet since, but that was the definitive one. That was Hamlet. The only time I acted in Shakespeare (the absolutely key role of the Thane of Ross in Macbeth) was on that stage.

But it wasn't the best place for watching films. Even if it had been, I'm sure my memory of the "foreign films" I saw there would be murky. I didn't know the language. Not just the languages the films were in---French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Japanese---but the film language. It took me a year of just showing up and watching before I knew how to see what I was seeing.

I mentioned this, with much greater brevity, in the first paragraph of my review. I thought it would be amusing to identify Galesburg as the birthplace of popcorn, since these days especially, popcorn is the more reliable pleasure to be found at the movie theatre. So I put it in there as a coy parenthetical, and sent my copy hurtling through cyberspace to my editor's email account.

It was days later that I started having second thoughts. I think it was one night as I was falling asleep, although it may have been just as I was waking up. But it was in one of those regions of foggy illumination that a nagging suspicion that had been in my mind from the beginning forced itself to the surface: that popcorn thing just didn't sound right.

Specifically, I had the image of a popcorn necklace in the Pilgrim's Thanksgiving story. And something about the Mayas. I realized that I knew that popcorn was a Native American legacy, and unless Hoagland's source referred to the Illinois Indians, the Galesburg reference was wrong.

Of course I should have researched it before. I learned at least as long ago as high school debate and probably even in seventh grade not to trust a single source. What does "invented" popcorn mean anyway?

Still, there was probably---here it comes again---a kernel of truth in this corny story. Galesburg probably had something to do with popcorn.

So I went to Google. And therein lies my tale about Internet research.

First I tried "popcorn invented Galesburg." (Google ignores "common words" like "in," so I didn't bother writing "popcorn invented in Galesburg"). Sure enough, several references popped up. One was an article by the travel writer Paul Theroux, an even better known source that Hoagland. There were several others. But oddly, they all said the same thing in almost exactly the same way: Galesburg, where popcorn was invented.

One of the sources was trainweb.com, and I think this is the mother of them all. From what I can tell, Amtrak must supply a list of fun facts about places along the way (I don't think they were doing that when I traveled these routes, which I did pretty often from my college days through the early 1980s.) It looks to me like Hoagland and Theroux were cribbing from the same cheat sheet (especially since that bit about Wyatt Earp comes right after Galesburg in both their accounts, and in the Amtrak p.r.)

I did find one additional bit of information in this search: that the inventing was supposedly done by someone named Olmstead Ferris. Well, there were Ferrises in Galesburg, I knew that from the story of George and his Big Wheel. But a search for "Olmstead Ferris" on the web turned up next to nothing.

So I tried another approach. I typed in "invention popcorn" and "popcorn invented." This yielded a completely different set of sites. They told several different stories. Eskimo.com said popcorn was invented by Quadquina in 1630 at the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Another site ascribed popcorn to Chinese war lords. But most referred back to the "Encyclopedia Popcornia" at popcorn.org. The origin story on this site said simply that Native Americans invented popcorn, and that the earliest fossil popcorn found was dated at 4,000 years old.

Other sites gave different dates and facts, often enough contradicting each other. One site said popcorn was 5,000 years old. Though several said Native Americans simply threw corn on the fire to make it pop, one credited Indians with inventing the first popcorn machine, some 1500 years ago.

Europeans found popcorn being popped by Native tribes throughout North, Central and South America (though its presence at the Pilgrim's first Thanksgiving is disputed.) The Aztecs introduced popcorn to Cortes in 1519. Spaniards munched some in Peru in 1650. And so on.

But among all the names and places these sites mentioned, none referred either to Olmstead Ferris or Galesburg. In other words, there were two parallel universes coexisting on the Internet: one in which popcorn was invented in Galesburg, and one in which Galesburg had nothing to do with it at all.

As we all know by now, computers exist to help us waste time. The Internet is an admirable instrument in this effort. After several hours of frustrating and ultimately ridiculous research, I tried a computer age variation of an old research stand-by: I thought I'd ask somebody.

I pretty easily found the Galesburg Historical Society site, and a name to contact. I sent a somewhat frantic email outlining my problem and the urgency of its resolution, since I needed to correct my copy before exposing myself to ridicule and worse. (On the other hand, I might find out if people actually read book reviews. But maybe that's something I'm better off not knowing.)

I got a quick reply from Joel Ward of the Historical Society, who wrote: "To the best of my knowledge, popcorn was not invented here, but Olmstead Ferris is claimed as the man who introduced it to Europe. There's even a children's story book about it"-and he provided this Internet link:
http://hallkidsillustrators.com/M/634.shtml.

At this site there's a 1997 Kirkus Review of Popcorn at the Palace, by Emily Arnold McCully, which tells the story of Olmstead Ferris and his daughter traveling to London with Europe's first supply of popcorn, and popping some for Queen Victoria. She liked it.

So for my more urgent and narrow purpose, I had an even better story---that Galesburg first supplied Europe with popcorn, thus contributing to the French New Wave movie experience in France. I accept this popcorn story with a grain of salt, because---well, that's how I like my popcorn. Although Joel Ward suggested a couple of other people to talk to, I thought his statement plus the children's book was sufficient evidence for a much more modest claim, so for a parenthetical reference in a book review, I went with it. I sent my editor the correction, and the explanation for same, and with noticeable tact he simply accepted it. The review has not yet been published, and I fully expect this line to be cut in editing anyway, but I did my duty.

About the Internet I learned one has to employ the same standards for evaluating information as in any other research, because the Internet is simply not going to do the work for you, especially when it involves judgment. One cannot count on the Internet to (yet) carry all the information you might require: there are lots of un-digitized books that presumably tell the history of popcorn, and the history of Olmstead Ferris, as well as where they might intersect, in greater detail, perhaps even with attributions. One also cannot count on Google or any other single search engine to turn up everything that is on the Internet. (The reference to this children's book didn't turn up on my searches, though when I varied the terms a little on a later search, it did.) And on the Internet as in other kinds of research, persistence and creativity count.

And finally, that even after exhausting every reference on the Internet, you may still not know the answer. Either it isn't there, or you need some other reference you can trust to help you know what to believe. For instance, a person with credentials and credibility, who will answer your questions.

By the way, Olmstead Ferris was George Ferris's uncle. Somehow popcorn and the Ferris Wheel do belong in the same family.

Of course, there is a site that says that George's uncle---the one who introduced popcorn to Europe---was named Nate.

The Inner Beatle

A Paul McCartney concert was broadcast on one of the TV networks in prime time recently. I didn't see it all, but I gather it was from his most recent U.S. tour, perhaps selected from several shows.

I was impressed by one thing I did see: the audience. Unlike some other concert films (the famous Simon and Garfunkel appearance in New York's Central Park which was recently rebroadcast on PBS, for instance) there were lots of shots of audience members while Paul and his new band were performing. Not wide pans of screaming and waving figures, but shots of individuals. That's perhaps partly in deference to the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, which also focused on individuals in the audience reacting-screaming, crying, moaning, jumping joyfully up and down, swooning, mooning and so on, to wonderful effect.

It still seems especially appropriate during Beatles songs. They don't scream anymore, though they do cry---more because of the songs and the lyrics (to "Let It Be" for example) than because they're overwhelmed by a Beatle's presence. But mostly they sing.

As far as America was concerned, the Beatles existed for maybe six years, from 1964 or so until the end of the decade, from "She Loves You" to "The Long and Winding Road." But their music-and some of the music made by each member since the Beatles broke up-has been essential to lots of people in several generations now. And it's not just one generation introducing another to this music. I remember visiting some college friends in the 1980s whose son had seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" with that great "Twist & Shout" parade scene, and at first he thought the Beatles were a new group. Several generations have discovered the Beatles on their own.

So as Paul sang his Beatles songs, the camera found many individuals in the audience, of all ages and races and genders, transported not just by listening but by singing along, or at least lip- synching the lyrics. And clearly, it was more than audience participation. You could see it in their faces: though the only person who actually looked like a Beatle was Paul, they were all Beatles inside.

That was the secret of the Beatles. Girls swooned, women were turned on; they wanted the Beatles. But boys and men wanted to be the Beatles. There's even a line like that in a short film I saw in the late 1960s I'm convinced is the fabled "Amblin'"-Steven Speilberg's first film, the one he named his company after. A young woman picks up a young male hitchhiker and takes him to a secluded cabin. As they sit before the fire she asks him what he wants to do with his life. He shrugs and says he wants to be a Beatle.

We are who we pretend to be; or more properly, we are some ongoing mixture of what we were born with, what happened in our lives, and an amalgamation of everyone we pretend to be.

The first way we learn is by imitation. Kittens learn to kill mice by watching their mothers. The Haida woodcarver learns by imitating a master. Humans probably learned to sing by listening to birds and animals.

Imitation deepens with admiration. Observing, we identify. Later we may enact what we observed, and become who we imitate. This is very probably how dance and narrative began: enacting the animals.

Our era gives us thousands of fully enacted stories in books, pictures and especially on screens of our choosing. We identify; we experience vicariously. It is another way we learn, and another way we become. For the length of a movie, we are the hero. We are the bard and the star, the singer, the words and the music, for the length of the song.

Now when they hear those songs, everyone can get in touch with his or her inner Beatle. That part of them that wants to sing their heart, the "crosscurrents of wit and pain" as somebody once described the Beatles music, that swirl from their lives.

For those moments, you can see they are transformed. It doesn't matter what they look like on the outside. They become what they see and hear, and for a moment they experience a communion not only with the real Beatle up there, but with something otherwise hidden, partly formed and unexpressed but important, essential, in themselves.

Being Mechanical

In the same week or so our household experienced the following: the dishwasher stopped draining the water after the dishes were washed, the stereo refused to play the last cuts on CDs, the dryer stopped drying though it kept tumbling, and my computer began opening e-mail with excruciating slowness and would no longer download anything, although it navigated the web normally.

Things are in the saddle and ride mankind, Emerson said, before horses were obsolete. Horses and saddle metaphors were replaced by machines and machine metaphors, which were replaced by whatever hybrids we have now. As I watched the first repair guy take it apart, I was somehow comforted that the dishwasher seems to be still mostly a machine, without computer circuitry and little in the way of electronics. He couldn't figure out what was wrong, though. I was less enthusiastic when the second repair guy said that the motor needed to be replaced after only four years, which actually means that it's more cost-effective to buy a whole new machine. Machines should last. But then there's planned obsolescence. Theoretically, computers should last longer, but then there's progress, marketing and Microsoft.

I have a fairly complicated relationship with machines. My father and one of my grandfathers worked with machinery-my grandfather had a tailor shop, with sewing machines and a big pressing machine. My father made his living selling and sometimes repairing sewing machines and vacuum cleaners. But I am not what you would call mechanically inclined, although I can actually program a VCR and I'm not bad with stereo and recording equipment. Once when I was trying to impress a lady, I actually repaired her sewing machine with very little idea of what I was doing. But I know nothing about the insides of cars. It seems like prying.

I know some things about machines. For instance, machines are supposed to work. Shakespeare uses "mechanical" to refer to people who work. Julius Caesar begins with the Tribune Flavius protesting to a carpenter and a punning cobbler that they shouldn't be idly hanging about in the streets of Rome. "Being mechanical," he says, "you ought not walk, upon a laboring day, without the sign of your profession." He complains to the carpenter that he is not wearing his leather apron and carrying his rule, and so on. Now mechanicals have been replaced by mechanical devices. And they aren't supposed to be idle, either.

The other thing I know about machines is that they are supposed to make sense. They are the physical manifestation of cause and effect, input and output, lever and pulley, wheels within wheels, male and female (electrical connections, that is.) Newton showed that the universe makes sense as an intricate but rational machine. Even now we think of our brains and our bodies as machines, more or less; if we give them the right fuel and maintenance, they work, but if they break down, we have experts who know how they work and can usually fix them.

But machines-and those computerized, electronic hybrids-get complicated, and pretty soon, so much can go wrong in so many combinations that they are no longer easy to figure out, even for the people who work with them and repair them professionally.

As we know from Star Trek, anything of sufficient complexity can be alive, and even sentient. Essayist Maria Lauenstein married a Buddhist from Sikkim in the Himalayas, who (back in the States) talked to their car and trusted it to find the way when they were lost. It usually did, even when she was driving. That's one kind of evidence. There's also an opposite kind: Sometimes when cars and other machines break down for no apparent reason, they start working again, also for no apparent reason. Entities that do things for no apparent reason must be people.

Machines are important personages in just about every room and every part of our lives. People who aren't Buddhists talk to their cars, and not always in profanities. Some may pat their TV set affectionately as they pass. We conspire with the dishwasher, and feel a sense of common accomplishment when the silverware shines and the wine glasses twinkle. We have relationships with our machines.

Which is why they upset us when they break. It's not just the inconvenience, the cost of repair; it's the betrayal. And it's the guilt. What did we do wrong? Can this relationship be saved? Was it something I did, or is this just another indication that I am not in harmony with the forces of the universe?

This is only my second dishwasher. I hated the first one. I liked this one, mostly because in addition to making noise and noxious fumes, it washed and dried the dishes. You got clean dishes out of the first one only if you washed them before putting them in.

I've only had two cars in my life, and I'd still have the first one if I'd been confident it would make it over the Rockies. I try to do my part in meeting the needs of the machines I'm entrusted with, and I do think of the machines in my life as alive. I'm grateful for their efforts and I take sort of a parental pride in their accomplishments. I don't mind if they have little idiosyncrasies, as long as that doesn't include additional noise or fumes.

Also I don't take machines for granted, and I try to keep them to a minimum. I don't own a cel phone. I've never used a pager or palm organizer. I'm still using a stereo amplifier, now hooked up to a portable CD player, that was built in 1970. It's a good amp. I expect the best from the machines in my life. And I can be stubborn. I'll keep after a problem, no matter the time or energy wasted, which is almost always considerable.

But these days, I am totally surrounded and there are just too many. I don't know why that stereo is skipping like mad just on the last CD cuts. Or why the computer won't download, even after I ran the recovery program which restored all the programs to their original state. I'm sure there are reasonable explanations. But it seems like they've just gone nuts. Or gotten old before their time.

The dryer, however, just needed to breathe better. The intake pipe is free of lint now, and that dryer is hot and tumbling, as good as new.

"The power to create context is the recipient's skill...He or she must acquire that skill by learning or by lucky mutation, that is, by a successful raid on the random. The recipient must be, in some sense, ready for the appropriate discovery when it comes." Gregory Bateson
Mind and Nature

FEAR FACTOR

"FEAR, fear, is a man's best friend," John Cale once sang, only partly in jest. In some ways it must be---after all, such a strong emotion must have had survival value in repeated situations. Healthy fear, we call it: the fear of large and noisy, fast-moving objects that keeps pedestrians wary at the sidewalk's edge. But like the famous fight- or- flight response set off a dozen times during a normal day in western civilization, fear can be inappropriate, disproportionate and misdirected.

Fear's frenzy contends with areas of awareness, intention and responsibility that are our best excuses for calling ourselves human. Fear abides in the darkness, especially if we see "consciousness as the light of clarity," as does poet Charles Simic, "and history as the dark night of the soul."

Fear is our most important media product, as seen in Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine." The rush of fear jolts our attention, the promised prize of every sponsored moment on television. Fear sells papers.

Fear as entertainment exorcises the tension, but it ritualizes the fear. We don't admit it, but we know it's there. In every act of violence we see, we are victim and executioner. We feel their fear.

The swoon of fear demonstrably clouds our judgment, but then, judgment isn't the point of fear. The point is to move real fast out of harm's way. The body would rather be wrong about the threat than dead from it. The body will forgive mistaking the benign for the dangerous over and over---and perhaps has adapted the laugh response in compensation---in preference to the one possibly fatal mistake of failing to fear the mortal threat.

But for the body politic, it's another story. Fearing the wrong threat blinds the ability to see the real ones; even if the target is correct, excessive fear-and obsessive fear-- can lead to disastrous decisions.

Fear can distort our perceptions in less fraught moments, more quietly, but with greater consistency. A persistent background fear that shapes incoming information, even blocking some out entirely. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something," observed Upton Sinclair, "when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Fear-mongering is a tried and true tactic of the unscrupulous. These days it is injury accompanied by insult. We threaten your job unless you convince us you're doing it for love. When you're downsized, you're cut down to size: it was your fault. You know they rule by your justifiable fear, but you can't ever let them know you know.

We seem only to recognize how leaders cynically exploit unjustifiable fear years after they are successful in doing so. I will slay the invisible enemy, the emperor cries, and I will tell you when it's been slain. Wearing our fear as a shining suit, this emperor would otherwise have no clothes. Neither would the enemy.

How is it that our enemy is always wrong about us, but we are never wrong about our enemy? Until perhaps these two are no longer enemies, but allies against a common foe. Sometimes fear is all we see.

A society that thrives on fear forgets the future. It burns up the present. The rich oil barons fear a future of taking risks on renewable energy and a different kind of economy, perhaps a different kind of democracy. The middle class fears the loss of the warmth of status even more than the loss of cool stuff. Without hope and without imagination, we fear a future that might be too much like a fearsome image of the past.

" You would think global warming and extinction of species would scare us to death," says author Frances Moore Lappe, "but the truth is that we're even more scared of being different, of breaking with the pack."

What happens to humans when fear becomes a permanent condition? What does it look like then? Is it invisible?

The primal fear is death, or is it? One's definition of death depends on one's definition of life. There is also the fear of losing what you depends on for life, regardless of whether life is possible without it. Or fear of losing yourself, or your conception of yourself. Fear of abandonment. Of insufficiency from within, without, around.

When you face a threat that others don't understand, your fear is amplified; your fear may be of them as much as of the threat itself. "Nobody loves you when you're down and out…Everybody loves you when you're six feet in the ground," John Lennon sang, and everybody loves him, now that he's dead. But during his lifetime: "Everybody's hustling for a buck and a dime. I'll scratch your back, you knife mine."

Fear is not itself an illusion. Fear is felt, tasted. When the object of fear is not an object but a subject, a situation, an idea of safety, normality, peace…then fear may be mistaken, misdirected, misconceived. Or it may be dead on. It may tell you what you don't want to know. Fear, fear is a man's best friend.

But fear awakens fear. Fear may be where the night goes hunting. Fear is the dark forest where the mind stalks itself.

Fear is not an illusion. Fear has to be faced.

And what happens when we lose what we fear to lose, because we fear to lose it?

Or because we are so afraid of the invisible enemy, that we don't pay attention to the ones we could see if we only opened our eyes?

The face of fear may be the face in the mirror.

We Were Warned

by William Severini Kowinski

"Power is a poison...The effect of unlimited power on limited mind is worth noting in Presidents because it must represent the same process in society, and the power of self-control must have limit somewhere in face of the limit of the infinite." Henry Adams


"From a marketing perspective, you don't introduce a new product in August."
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, explaining why the administration waited until after Labor Day to push for war with Iraq.


With an apparent election day mandate and a UN Security Council resolution on the way, an American attack on Iraq again looms on the near horizon. But if it happens, we can't say we weren't warned of the consequences.

One such warning comes in a book by an ex-President, about prior calls to get rid of Saddam. "Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.'s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish," he stated.

The ex-President's name is George Bush.

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq," according to Bush the First and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft in a 1998 book, "...would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq....Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

Besides ex-presidents, the columnists and analysts warning of the dire geopolitical, economic and moral consequences of attacking Iraq, we have the benefit of other voices speaking with the authority-and anguish-of experience in past conflicts.

Notably among them are two men who observed and to some extent participated in decisions early in the Vietnam war. Daniel Ellsberg began working for the Pentagon the same week that Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964 authorizing President Lyndon Johnson to openly deploy American bombs and troops in Vietnam. In what he describes as an unhappy coincidence, Ellsberg was promoting his new book, "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers" in September, as Congress was passing its authorization to attack Iraq, which Ellsberg called "Tonkin II."

In media interviews and promotional appearances Ellsberg drew strong parallels and lessons from Vietnam to Iraq, from the questionable facts behind the reasons given for attacking, to the lack of understanding concerning the historical and political dynamics of the region.

He also asserted that the U.S. military leadership is unanimously against an invasion of Iraq. Other have pointed out-perhaps Ellsberg's book does as well-that many U.S. military analysts concluded as early as the 1950s that America could not win a war in Vietnam.

Coincidentally or not, Ellsberg's views--that an unprovoked attack would violate international standards and American principles, that it would never lead to democracy in Iraq but would embroil the U.S. in wider warfare for years to come-showed up in a Doonesbury series depicting "previews" of future years' cartoons.

Ellsberg claimed that as in the Vietnam era, American citizens are not getting the information they need. He praised those who have leaked information from inside the government which cast doubt on the official premises for a war on Iraq. He especially emphasized that others should not wait until the killing starts to leak documents, as he did. It wasn't until 1969 that Ellsberg finally sent to the New York Times a top secret Pentagon study revealing that the government had repeatedly and knowingly lied to the American public to justify the war in Vietnam.

Bill Moyers was President Johnson's press secretary in 1964. In a commentary on his weekly PBS program, "Now," Moyers emphasized constitutional and moral issues in arguing passionately against an invasion of Iraq. He recalled that President Johnson became so distraught over the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam war that he sometimes took to his bed and pulled the cover over his eyes. Moyers urged President Bush to heed this lesson before he had to face such consequences.

October marked the 40th anniversary of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and in a commemorative event at the John F. Kennedy Library, Kennedy aide Ted Sorenson pointedly contrasted the decisions made then with the proposed attack on Iraq, in particular the decision that a large country like America should not invade a small one like Cuba without being attacked first, not even with nuclear missiles in place there.

Both Sorensen and former Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara noted that President Kennedy made reference several times that week to "The Guns of August," Barbara Tuchman's history of the beginning of World War I. Kennedy emphasized the book's descriptions of miscalculations on both sides that led to the prolonged tragedy that engulfed the world.

Just as Vietnam was America's trauma, there was turmoil in Europe for a generation after World War I. Many Europeans hadn't believed a war would really come, and leaders on both sides were confident of quick victory once the war started. The length and savagery of trench warfare, the growing destructiveness of weaponry and technology, and the huge number of deaths and crippling injuries were intensely shocking.

When I heard from friends who said Bush would never really invade Iraq because it is so clearly self-destructive, or I saw the TV commentators assuring the U.S. of a brisk and easy victory, I thought of World War I.

Then I read a Jon Carroll column in the San Francisco Chronicle which said, "Folks with a sense of history think of the days before World War I, when everyone was sure that somebody sensible would stop this madness and no one sensible did, and the century of unprecedented carnage began."

Seeing that thought in print produced a real jolt. That my private fears were shared now made it really scary. It sent me to three remarkable films released when war seemed imminent again in the 1930s, including two that directly depicted World War I.

The most famous of these films is "All Quiet on the Western Front," released in 1930. The novel by Erich Maria Remarque about a group of young German soldiers in World War I was an international best seller. The movie version had an equally profound effect. "Image after image was burned into the brain of all of us for whom seeing All Quiet was one of the major experiences of growing up in the 1930s," writes Harvey Swados in the foreword to the novel's paperback edition.

The novel is a first person account from the trenches, simply but eloquently told. The horrors that comprise their daily reality soon transform these young men forever, so that they will never again quite fit into civilian life. "The war has ruined us for everything," the narrator says. "We will be superfluous even to ourselves." After reading this book, no one could think of "post traumatic stress syndrome" as new, or anything but tragically predictable.

At least until recently, this novel was taught in American high schools-possibly because it is short. But it also has a long history of being banned (by the Nazis first of all) when a nation is about to go to war.

The film version, adapted by American playwright Maxwell Anderson, featured mostly American actors playing German soldiers. Their obviously American regional inflections (not yet homogenized a standard mid-Atlantic movie accent) has an odd effect. Their accents and American expressions aren't distancing or awkward at all, but give the film an additional innocence and immediacy, serving the point Remarque makes that soldiers on both sides had more in common with each other than with their leaders, or even with civilians back home. This aspect of the film inevitably also results in some weird moments of displacement, as the viewer realizes that the soldiers we are observing and rooting for, are being attacked by "the right side,"---our side--- in that war.

Remarque quietly dramatizes the disconnect between the realities of war and the noble-sounding shibboleths leaders used to promote eager participation in it. Anderson's adaptation emphasizes this with additional scenes of a teacher whipping his students into a frenzy so that they march off to enlist. The teacher shouts the same Latin phrase ( "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori," meaning "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country") that British poet Wilfred Owen, killed in action at the front, used as the title of a famous war poem published in 1920, calling it "The old Lie."

Another movie pointedly using the horrors of World War I was "J'Accuse," directed by one of the great film innovators, the French auteur, Abel Gance. He made this film twice-a silent version in 1919, and a new talking version in 1938. Though it was mostly a love story, the "special effects" climax showed dead soldiers rising from their graves to warn the populace against another war. The 1919 version was shot during World War I, and real soldiers played this scene, including some who were killed in battle shortly afterwards. The eerie power of this sequence is indescribable.

Scenes in a third film of this era also convey an eerie power, though in a different way. When H.G. Wells adapted one of his books for the screen, his primary intention was not necessarily to produce a cautionary tale about war. Wells was more interested in suggesting a new, better and more sensible world society of the future, but he believed that only a major war would shock humankind into creating it. The resulting movie, "Things to Come" (directed by William Cameron Menzies) has since become something of a science fiction classic. But those first scenes depicting the war to end all wars (which was Wells' phrase before Woodrow Wilson adopted it) turned out to be the most prophetic.

Wells' had a remarkable ability to foresee the technologies of modern war: he was the first novelist to describe what aerial bombing might mean for warfare, as well as predicting armored tanks (which he called the 'land ironclads') and the atomic bomb ( which he named). Perhaps his visions also inspired Menzies' direction in the film's opening sequence, set in London just as war breaks out. To today's veteran movieviewer, these scenes may appear similar to many films depicting the London blitz, perhaps merging newsreel footage with artificial re-creation. But that perception changes as soon as you realize that this film was made in 1935, before any bombs had fallen on London, and before any major bombardments of English or European cities.

This was the aspect of "Things to Come" that Jorge Luis Borges praised in a contemporaneous review, for its salutary effect on "those people who still imagine war as a romantic cavalcade or an opportunity for glorious picnics and free tourism." It can still remind us that bombs meant to punish Saddam Hussein will randomly kill and maim the innocent in Iraq.

How strange it must have seemed to the first audiences of "Things to Come," to see the center of a city, populated only by civilians, suddenly destroyed by the bombs and missiles of an invisible enemy, when it had never happened in reality. This scene, too, was science fiction. But today it is a reality of every war. All of these movies are about the realities of every war. We can't say we haven't been warned.



While several of these films are blatantly anti-war, not all of these warnings say or imply that war is never necessary. Ellsberg and Moyers, for example, are not pacifists. But the consequences of war must be realistically anticipated, and the decision to inflict war is extremely serious, requiring (unless in the act of actually repelling an attack) scrupulous consideration, honest information and debate. It is very easy to get swept up in war fever.

It is interesting what might break that fever. Perhaps one of these voices, one of these films. Or something as simple as a painting.

I was struck by something Robert MacNamara recalled during the Kennedy Library symposium (shown on C-Span), about that fateful week in 1962 when the world faced imminent nuclear destruction, and a group of men around a table in Washington were deciding the fate of the earth.

The meetings of that committee had to be secret, and so they weren't held in the official offices of the White House. These leaders met instead in the Yellow Oval Room in the presidential residence portion of the White House. MacNamara recalled-forty years later-that sitting there they were surrounded by the paintings of Cezanne.

It seemed to me to be a remarkable thing to remember. It obviously meant something to him. Intrigued, I checked with the Kennedy Library and learned that there were indeed two Cezanne paintings in that room in 1962 ( "House on the Marne" and "The Forest") and perhaps one other elsewhere in the White House. A single donor had given eight Cezannes to the White House; the others were transferred to the Smithsonian.

MacNamara's comment seemed to suggest he saw more than two paintings, but perhaps their effect was powerful enough to produce a memory of more. Even two Cezanne landscapes would certainly stand out, especially in comparison to the paintings in the West Wing and the Oval Office itself, which tended to depict historical moments, battles and western scenes painted by American artists.

If MacNamara remembered these paintings, isn't it possible that sitting there that week, those men were affected by their presence? Could they have played a part in reminding them of the beauty that would disappear forever if they got too caught up in the Great Powers, Cold War, standard catalogue of acts and responses? Could "The Forest" have cooled the fever? Could beauty really tame the beast?

THE SPEED OF LIFE
by William Severini Kowinski

From the Pony Express to the expressway, America has always loved speed. We invented a culture based on the efficiency of the assembly line and time-saving technology, on rapid promotion and upward mobility, the can-do and the quick fix, hot jazz and hard rock, instant coffee and instantaneous communications, the quarterly report and doing better than dad; on fast cars on fast highways making fast deliveries of the newest products, promising quick results and fast relief for those on the fast track. Among our icons are Speedy Alka Seltzer, Quick Draw McGraw, Fast Eddie, and a number of fast women.

But now we're not so sure. America looks increasingly like the land of the frazzled and the home of the frayed. What was once America's pride is becoming a cause of collapse. It's crept up on us unconsciously but now in one way or another we're saying it out loud: We're worried about the speed of life.

Some years back, in the early 1990s (does anybody remember?) we made a book called The Overworked American a best seller. Its author, Harvard economist Juliet Schor, contends Americans in every income category are working much longer hours than forty years ago. Even the rapidly diminishing number of women who stay home put in more time doing housework, despite their "labor-saving" devices.

From the ups and downs of the economy through the 1980s and 90s until today's uncertain economy, one thing remains consistent: many people are either working longer hours in the hopes of keeping their jobs or businesses, or putting in frenzied unpaid hours looking for work, while spending a month once a week coping with the stolidly maddening bureaucracy of the unemployment office.

The impact of so many hours spent wrapped up in scrapping for sustenance sends out devastating ripples through private life and society. More and more must be done in less and less time, leading to stress-related health problems, and contributing to alcoholism, prescription and illegal drug use, child and spouse abuse and neglect, suicide, and accidents on the job and on the highway caused by the sleepy and the wired.

But it's more than overwork. The speed of life involves many other factors, such as technology, values and the subjective experience of time in this paradoxical society where people wait impatiently for their instant dinner to emerge from the microwave oven.

We experience the speed of life as too many things happening too fast. It's split focus, divided selves and cognitive dissonance that have become the norm. It's disappearing leisure, but also vanishing civility, tolerance, deliberation, craftsmanship and reflection. We're outrunning our own senses--of sight, smell, taste and hearing as well as of perspective, decency, hope and humor. It all adds up to a dizzying, exhausting and distressing daily spin. Increasingly we're confronted with a vital question: does life have a speed limit, and are we exceeding it?

No institution has felt the impact more than the family. When half of American fathers and a third of mothers work more than 40 hours a week, poor parents must often leave children unattended, and even higher income parents rush around from jobs to child care, schools to swimming lessons, scheduling residual "quality time" when they can. Meanwhile their hurried children are pressured to learn more faster, take more tests affecting their future sooner, while spending more time in the work world, learning valuable lessons in fryer management and smileology. While time management consultants offer to start with six year olds, the tension of overorganized lives can reach the breaking point--we never know when one of us will snap like elastic, or like an overregimented postal worker with a grievance-loaded gun. The Girl Scouts now give a merit badge in stress management.

It's this speed that has helped turn the suburban dream of peace and surcease into a blur of entrances and exits, and made the famous New York Minute seem about forty-five seconds too long.

Friendships and community bonds also take time, and so they suffer. Our community institutions wither: no one has time anymore to volunteer for the food bank or the art museum. Combined with our individualism and the breakdown of all binding forms and loyalties, the speed of life makes us lonely: it leaves us bereft when we feel a loss, and even forlorn when we triumph.

Meanwhile, speed batters our hearts and minds. Information floods us constantly, but it blips and vanishes faster than we can take it in; every item masquerading as vital knowledge in the competing clutter is a perishable product clamoring for our attention so insistently that inflated claims and distortions routinely add to the constant rush of inescapable ballyhoo.

Our memories are overrun, and our battle to just keep up obliterates our appreciation of the present and our vision of the future, so that today we are literally destroying the forests for the trees. In what Joni Mitchell memorably calls this "land of snap decisions, land of short attention spans", we are overbooked, overextended, overstimulated and overloaded; but we are also spiritually, intellectually and experientially underfed.

Time seems abstract and ethereal until you realize you don't have enough of it. Then it becomes clear that time is the very substance of life. But the quandary is how to slow down without giving up: how to get control of the speed of life.

To the jobless and underemployed as well as to those who are working harder in the desperate hope of staying even, the problems of speed and time may seems secondary but they are not. As Schor's statistics show, working longer hours does not mean being more productive, nor is an virtually indentured workforce necessary to a strong economy. Constantly responding to the same pounding uncontrollable schedule leads to high stress, fatigue, boredom, hostility--and inefficiency. Some American experiments as well as contemporary European practices indicate that more leisure and a workday "slowed down" by meaningful participation can increase productivity.

Still captives of obsolete Industrial Age attitudes towards time, American companies irrationally resist flex-time and parental leave, while both work and workers suffer. The quality of intellectual work clearly deteriorates in the manic clamor. But workplace innovations such as quality teams, fostering creativity and honoring achievement, and new forms of employment security, can also contribute to slowing down the speed of life.

That's because the speed of life is also subjective. Anxiety frenzies time; security blesses it. Powerlessness poisons time; autonomy reifies it. The paradox of time is that a moment experienced fully--a moment infused with meaning--slows down the overall sense of life speeding by. We need to assert more control over our time and begin to seek meaning as a way of slowing things down.
The issue of control is crucial. We feel empty and impatient standing on line and sitting in traffic partly because we're conditioned to constant stimulation and anticipation--we don't know what to do with the moment when we're not struggling to ride the tide. We've ceded control over how we experience our time. We have to reclaim our own rhythms.

In many ways, speed is a boundary problem. Americans started out with the motto, "Don't fence me in." Although we still crave for the minimally wide-open spaces of suburbia, we seem content to let everyone and everything invade our time. But even if we can move to a better place, we're stuck in our allotted space of days, moments, years. And the time may have come to defend the boundaries around the substance of our freedom: the integrity of our time.

If we start looking at societal problems in terms of time, there's hope for structural and attitude changes that allow us more variation, more control and more leisure. We can also slow down the speed of life by changing our experience of time. We've learned to ignore what our bodies and spirits tell us. We ignore the world's time--the cycles, the seasons, our life time. But our experience of speed involves our relationship to the rhythms of the natural world--from the seasons of leaves to the lifetime of a redwood, to the seasons of a child and the lastingness and goodness of what we leave behind for them and future generations. We must reintegrate cyclical time into consciousness and culture, as counteractive to the linear rush to nowhere.

We have to reintroduce some forgotten elements into the mix of our days--such as dreamtime, reflection, reverie--and legitimize and readmit to daily life a sense of the sacred. We can see ourselves in the fabric of generations, through art and culture.

Getting back in control of the speed of life is not easy.Not everyone can fold their mortgaged tent and head for rural villages in search of a simpler and slower life. But giving time its value and priority can lead to slow progress in slowing things down. Schor asserts that one reason Americans work so hard is to finance the time and money they spend in what another author (I believe it was me) called our cathedrals of consumption, the shopping malls (real or virtual.) When economic pressure forces reappraisals of consumption, we may come to realize that the real material of life is time. When calmer and fuller moments of your life begin to mean more than status or a new speedboat, then you can begin to design a lifestyle according to how much money you can make in the time you want to devote to making it. (Today's underemployed have an unwanted but perhaps valuable opportunity to begin this reevaluation.)

This is an inevitable component of seeking a better future while creating a better present. In addition to a sustainable economy and sustainable environment with sustainable energy sources, we must find a speed of life that we can sustain, and that can sustain us.