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.

West Nile Virus: Tip of the Global Heating Iceberg?

It's perhaps an intemperate metaphor-and one tending toward the wrong end of the thermometer-to suggest that the West Nile virus outbreak throughout North America is the tip of the iceberg. But so far, few seem to realize why this might be so.

Media attention has focused on the geographical progress of the virus which has infected hundreds and killed at least 45 by mid September, and whether the blood supply is contaminated. Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont suggests it could be a bioterrorism plot. While there are many factors potentially involved, one is conspicuously unmentioned in most reports: global heating.

But even though the dots are all there, nobody is connecting them.
The September 14 San Francisco Chronicle reported the first confirmed case of West Nile virus in California. The front page of the same edition proclaimed "Hottest summer since 1930s" and "2002 drought worst since Dust Bowl."

Why press reports aren't making the connection is suggested in another pair of story in the next day's Chronicle: one story reports that the West Nile virus is killing more than 110 species of birds, including red-tailed hawks and great horned owls "by the thousands," and naturalists are worried about the endangered California condor. On the very next page, there's a story headlined "EPA report ignores global warming, with White House OK" by Andrew C. Revkin, reprinted from New York Times. It begins "Nearly every mention of global warming has been stricken from the annual federal report on air pollution..." quotes an EPA official "There's a complete paranoia [in the White House]about anything on climate...and everything has to be reviewed widely."

But at least one observer close to the ground at least alluded to the connection. When press attention was focused on the outbreak in Louisiana earlier this summer, a state health official commented, "As long as the warm weather lasts, we're going to have a problem."

As global heating continues, we're going to be having the problem for a long time. West Nile virus is only one of a number of diseases carried by mosquitoes and other bugs that are flourishing because of global heating. In many places in North America, the summers are not just hotter, they're longer. The winters are also warmer in places like Pennsylvania, so the usual diebacks in wood ticks, for instance, during the cold months isn't happening as much. Ticks can carry and infect humans with Lyme Disease, among other health hazards.

The drought in California is driving animals from their usual niches and into suburban and even city neighborhoods. Rats are drinking from the swimming pools in Beverly Hills.

The West Nile virus is in the news now, but the problem of mosquito-borne diseases has been quietly growing. Locally transmitted malaria outbreaks were recorded from Texas and Florida to New Jersey and New York, and as far north as Toronto in the 1990s, which was the hottest decade in 600 years. In September of 2002, malaria-carrying mosquitoes were found in Leesburg, Virginia, near the homes of two teenagers infected with the disease.

Malaria has also been found in southern Europe and parts of Asia and South Africa. Globally, the areas on mountain tops where it remains below freezing all year have shrunk; now mosquitoes are mountain climbing. Insect-borne diseases have reached the highlands of South and Central America, Asia and areas of Africa. There were cases of dengue fever in Mexico a mile from sea level.

The connection between global heating and the spread of these diseases has been made by scientists but hasn't yet reached the press or public. But if global heating ever becomes a major emotional issue in the U.S., it will likely be because of disease epidemics. Chunks of Alaska could sink into the vanishing permafrost without bothering anybody in Manhattan (NY or Kansas) but an epidemic of Lyme Disease in the Hamptons or malaria in Los Angeles might break the ice.

Note: This essay is also a kind of prologue to a longer piece, "Empire of the Ants," which enlists H.G. Wells and the 1950s sci-fi classic "Them!" to discuss the cultural evolution of human self-extinction. You can find it over at http://kowincidence.blogspot.com.

Something unusual happened to me the other night: I got involved in an intellectual conversation. Since I live on the fringes of academia, and what little socializing I do is likely to be with professors and students, you might think this kind of thing happens all the time. But in my experience college teachers talk mostly about the same things that other middle class American adults talk about: office politics, their houses, children, food, health, absent friends and colleagues. Here in northern California there is a lot of talk about gardening. Did I mention food? People love talking about food.

I don't know what students talk about amongst themselves these days, but when I was a student we did have intellectual discussions, even though we didn't know very much and we had little in the way of life experiences, however many we were getting at the time. We also had intellectual discussions with faculty members, not only in class but in their offices or informally around the oak tables in the campus coffee shop. I remember taking my paper cup of coffee to a table where two faculty members were talking-I knew one of them pretty well, but not the other one. It took me a moment to understand what they were talking about. Was it Sartre or Hemingway? Was it particle physics or analytic philosophy or political organization in Southeast Asia? No, it was tires.

They were talking about tires. About buying tires, the different kinds of tires and which was better for what vehicle, and how much they cost. I think disillusion is too weak a word for what I felt. I actually felt embarrassed for them. Here they were, two professors, caught talking about tires.

But of course that was before I went out into the world and learned the hard way that poets don't talk about poetry, but about money, grants, publication and enemies. And so on. Some of the topics change according to age and relationship status: untold hours describing and analyzing sex and sex partners and identity crises, which eventually morph into years of hours on children and midlife crises, followed by descriptions of surgeries and senior moments. And the gender, class and race variations: so we add sports, shopping, traffic, travel and encounters with the law and bureaucracies, to the staples of job, family, stuff and other people. And food.

It wasn't always so. Among educated people, conversation used to mean what we call intellectual conversation: a combination of inquiry, wit, storytelling and gentle debate that involved matters of broad importance and meaning even when grounded in the specific. In Europe through the nineteenth century those who could talk well, who had wit, powers of description or analysis, were prized as friends and dinner guests. "In my opinion the most profitable and most natural exercise of our minds is conversation. To me it is a more agreeable occupation than any other in life, " Montaigne wrote. Jane Austen's heroines prize it; even Lewis Carroll's Alice is fond of it.

This kind of conversation, which in the west must go back to the walking talks in the Greek gymnasium and Persian gardens, defined civilized discourse at court and in the salons in many cultures. It can be characterized by a light and breezy wit. But it can also excite the mind and heart and spirit.

At various times the prevailing styles of such conversation veered towards superficial sophistication and poseur cynicism. But three other possibilities occur to me as reasons why conversation has largely died out in our time and place. The first is front and center in Sinclair Lewis' Main Street, in which a barely educated young American woman finds herself trapped in a small town on the American prairie in the early twentieth century, where rigid and narrow mercantile values suppress any intellectual inquiry, political dissent or even much fun.

Carol Kennicott, the American Bovary, yearns not so much for sexual romance as for a little bit of transcendence from the everyday. She yearns specifically for what she calls conversation: the entertainment of ideas, the play of serious questions.

Our society is more affluent and less rigid in some ways, but the values of Main Street have hardened to become the ground of reality. There is what you do to earn and how you spend, and that's pretty much it.

On the Main Street of my hometown there was a public library. In high school in the early 1960s I took out a book by historian Richard Hofstader called "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." When I was back in my hometown researching and writing "The Malling of America" I went back to the public library-now housed in a much bigger building a block below Main Street-to look for the Hofstader book. This was the early 1980s, before computerized card catalogues, and the books still had those pockets with cards in the back. The cards had the names of borrowers and the date due. I found "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life"---it was the same dark blue bound copy I'd taken out in high school. And there was my name at the top of the card. It was the only name on the card.

As Stan Lee, the great intellectual of comic books was wont to say, 'Nuff said.

The second factor stems from the increase in the sheer amount of knowledge-or let's say data-and especially the resulting specialization that became a fact of everyday life in the twentieth century. Nobody today can possibly be familiar with as high a proportion of the available knowledge as an educated person in Europe or England or perhaps even America in the eighteenth or even the late nineteenth century. Along with specialization has come the special languages, which at best allow specialists to communicate efficiently about their specialty, but more often results in jargon impenetrable to any non-specialist, and not terribly meaningful even to those who purport to understand it.

This must certainly be a factor in the rarity of intellectual conversation in academic circles, where people from different disciplines may be engaged in very specific topics perhaps too complex or just of little interest to anyone else even if they could understand the jargon, but in any case the jargon itself is sufficiently discouraging. (My own view is that jargon is often an elaborate mask hiding its own triviality and emptiness, but that's another story...)

The third factor is how rushed and overstuffed most lives are today. Much of that is unavoidable, but much of it would lessen with less consumption and less TV, but again, that's another story.

What they add up to, I fear, is a culture which avoids and suppresses intellectual conversation. Somehow it has become suspect, embarrassing almost. It's particularly eerie here on the fringes of academia. You meet all these people who supposedly know something, but they never talk about it. They talk about tires. Does that mean they don't care about their subject-it's just their job? After hours and years of teaching, are they tired of talking about it? Do they think we're too dumb to understand, or that we'd all really rather talk about tires? Or maybe they all know something I don't, which is that talking about food is much more interesting to people and there's something wrong with me. Which, to be frank, is how I feel most of the time in social situations.

Sometimes I've thought that academics believe others are uninterested in their subjects, or that if they talked about them they would sound elitist and snobbish. But I have some evidence that they don't even talk this way with their colleagues.

A few years ago my partner and I went to a play with another couple and chatted afterwards in the car coming home. Two of the four occupants were teachers in the same department, and they chatted about a faculty meeting earlier that day. One of the faculty members in the car-the one I wasn't living with-was a full professor who just returned from an interesting teaching experience while on sabbatical, and he mentioned a colleague who had just returned from a year of research in a foreign country. What was this colleague researching? I asked. The professor didn't know.

It was then I spoke wistfully of my old naiveté, when I thought departmental faculty meetings were occasions for professors to discuss their research and current thoughts in the discipline that they presumably all had in common. He was astounded at this idea, and a little excited. He vowed to bring it up at the next meeting.

Later I learned that indeed he did: he suggested that all the faculty members talk briefly about whatever research or ideas in their field was occupying them. The response was tepid, I was told, a little confused and with some suspicion that it was trick, a kind of covert performance review. The topic failed to become a regular item on the agenda.

Then, I imagine, somebody asked if anyone knew of an ongoing special on oil change, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Of course, now that I have a car (which I didn't as a student) I also talk about tires. I talk about daily life, and enjoy the exchange of information and opinions of others about their daily lives. Even about faculty meetings. (Not about food, though. Unless it's Italian.) It's just that I'd like this to not be the only topics or kind of conversation.

So in many ways the other night was a surprise. My professor partner and I went to the home of friends-one of her colleagues (though in a different department) and the colleague's husband, a musician and lately a student, finishing a degree in English. A friend of his from New York, another musician, was visiting, which was the occasion for this gathering. We've had enjoyable afternoons and evening there before, of conversation and music (and food-though it is not high on my list of conversational topics, I do enjoy consuming it.) But this time it was a little different.

Maybe it was because we got there early, and there were only six of us, sitting around the living room, eating from the buffet and drinking wine.
We talked about New York, about northern California, and several of the above mentioned topics appropriate to our age and class. We talked politics and war. Then our mature English student mentioned the reactions of other students to some tenets of deconstruction, and suddenly, we were off.

We went flying across literary theory, the reputed death of the author and romantic concepts of creativity to whether it was possible to know Truth or define Nature, swooping down to the conflicts over rivers and water here in California, the relative efficiency of rural versus urban life, and so on. We disagreed, challenged each other, threw support one way and then the other, got ticked, laughed. I had a great time, and I can tell you a little of why.

Conversations like this are explorations, not only of the topics, but of the process of discussion and argument. They are explorations of ourselves and of each other. The experience is far from being only cerebral. I enjoyed hearing myself say things I didn't know I knew, but I also rolled my inner eyes at hearing myself pontificating, and I felt bad when I realized something I said might have sounded insulting. I enjoyed what others said and how they said it. Sometimes it struck a nerve. It was exciting.

I discovered aspects of people I didn't know about. One was a stranger, an environmental sciences student who came in a little later and was immediately drawn into the debate-his immediate and impromptu comments on the water issue were pertinent and well informed. I admired his knowledge and his eloquence. Hey, this younger generation might not all be like the students across the street, bullet headed hulks drinking beer while being pulled on their skateboards by one of their huge dogs.

One of the original six-the hostess of the evening, wife to our mature English student-added her comments on Derrida (a primary deconstructionist). She is a scholar who has published a book in her field and is working on another. But I've never heard her talk about the substance of her work. I had no idea she had read Derrida. I had no idea it was even possible to read Derrida-what little I had read was impenetrable. (I had to turn to essays and commentaries by reliable interpreters to tell me what it said. But of course that doesn't stop me from pontificating.) It was a different side to her. And in a few words it told me something about how she thought and approached things beyond deconstructionism. More perhaps even than learning the name of her favorite restaurant might.

This conversation, this part of the evening, lasted no more than a half hour, but it stayed with me the next day. I felt I had to learn more about the water issue, and I should have more specific information on how agri-business wastes water. I thought about the urban versus rural uses of energy, and what else was involved in evaluating their relative merits.
I even thought about looking up a little Derrida, but that feeling passed almost immediately.

I was motivated to learn more, which became a more generalized feeling. I felt validated in my concerns and preoccupations that ordinarily seemed to have no relevance to anyone or anything else in the day to day.

We are more than our jobs and daily worries and wants. We are more even than our families and webs of relationships. We are more than our stuff. That "more" is not just an add-on either. It is as essential and as integral. It contributes to the form and the contents of our lives, our relationships, our moment on the planet. It's worth going there once in awhile, and sharing that aspect of ourselves.

It's easy enough for me to remember that, since I never stopped consciously being a student, even though I left school long ago. It's not so easy when other responsibilities take precedence, and particularly when you need to fit into the cultures of a particular place or occupation that don't include this kind of expression or these concerns.

But here we are, adults of some education, with years of living and intellectual, emotional, spiritual and practical experiences, who have seen and participated in history simply by virtue of being around this long, who have tested ideas in the world and in our internal responses, who have observed and shared aspects of many other lives and possibly other cultures. Why should we limit ourselves to a culture of the exclusively mundane?

What are we doing here? What is Truth, what is Reality?

Here, let me fill your glass.

What they did on their summer vacation

As the summer of 2002 comes to a close, here's the best story I heard this year about a summer adventure. It's an old fashioned American story, and it starts on the Fourth of July. And it's all true...

What could be more American than watching fireworks on the Mississippi River on Independence Day? But for Bara Dockolova, a twenty-five year old student from the Czech Republic, a different kind of American experience was a few days away---an unexpected afternoon speaking the Czech language with residents of a tiny town in South Dakota founded by Czech immigrants more than a hundred and thirty years ago.

Bara is a student at Charles University in Prague, which was the first university founded in the Holy Roman Empire in the 14th century, and is perhaps the oldest university in continental Europe. Though she spent last year studying drama at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, she didn't see much of America. So she returned for a seven week visit this summer.

At the top of her wish list for what she wanted to see was the Mississippi River. "I read Mark Twain when I was eight or nine," she said. The Misssissippi figures in much of Twain's writing, including the novels Bara read as a child, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. "And I knew it is a really big river, bigger than any we have in the Czech Republic. So I wanted to see it."

John Heckel, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance at Humboldt State, was Bara's sponsor for her academic year in America. Since he was going to be in Iowa when Bara was scheduled to arrive in the United States, he volunteered to take her to the Mississippi. John had gone to college in Iowa, and knew the area well.

John met Bara's plane at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, and drove through Illinois, arriving on the banks of the Mississippi in the evening, just in time to watch fireworks erupt all up and down the river. It was the Fourth of July, America's Independence Day, and all the river towns were celebrating by sending rockets of light into the night.

They spent the next day on the Iowa side of the river, at a state park near Dubuque where the Mississippi is widest. "It's farther north than Huckleberry Finn went," Bara said, "but the smell of the river, the heat and the feel of the air-it was one of my favorite days, that day on the Mississippi."

But Bara's adventure was just beginning. John's plan was to drive the 3,400 miles to California in seven days, staying off the major highways as much as possible so they could see more of the American landscape. They would be traveling through the long heartland in the middle of the continent, from flat farmland and prairie in Iowa, north to the high plains and mountains of South Dakota and Wyoming.

Taking backroads requires planning, and it was while Bara was studying a roadmap that she came upon the name of a very small town in southeastern South Dakota that sounded familiar. "I saw this little spot on the map that said 'Tabor,' and I thought, 'this sounds Czech-this is a Czech word," Bara said. "'Tabor' means 'camp' in Czech, and it's also the name of a town in the south of the Czech Republic, a very old town. I told John and he said 'do you want to check it out?' and I said 'yes,' so we went there."

"'Do you want to check it out' became an ongoing, continuous joke," John Heckel added, "especially when we got to the outskirts of Tabor and saw the billboard sign: 'Czech it out.'" It was obvious then that the name of the town was more than a coincidence, or something from a forgotten past.

Many cities and towns in America have names that refer to places in Europe that immigrant settlers once called home, but as these towns grew and people of different ancestries arrived, the connection to these origins was largely broken. That's not true of Tabor, South Dakota, as Bara and John quickly learned.

Tabor is a very small town-its official population is 403-located in Bon Homme County, in an isolated corner just over the eastern South Dakota border, about 62 miles south of Sioux Falls and 144 miles north of Omaha, Nebraska.

The first place they saw in town was the "combination gas station, ice cream parlor and grocery store" (as John described it) called "The Czech Stop." The 17 year old girl behind the counter confirmed that "Everybody here is Czech," and directed them to the home of Mildred Cimpl for information on the town's history. (Though the name would be pronounced "Chimp-el" in Czech, Bara said, everyone in Tabor pronounced it as the Americanized "Simple.")

John and Bara were greeted at the door by Leonard Cimpl, who waved away their explanations and invited them to come inside out of the heat. "He didn't seem surprised, " Bara said. "It was as if he was expecting us."

Bara and Leonard immediately began speaking in Czech. "He apologized for his accent," Bara said, "but he spoke Czech very well. His vocabulary was excellent." In his 70s, Leonard Cimpl was born in the United States, and learned his Czech in Tabor. Some Tabor citizens visit the Czech Republic often, but others who learned the language from parents and grandparents and in local Czech language classes have never been there.

After meeting Mildred Cimpl, the treasurer of the Czech Historical Preservation Society, Bara and John followed Leonard Cimpl to see Vancura Memorial Park in the center of town, which contains several of the original buildings from Tabor's early years in the 19th century.

Czech pioneers settled here in 1869. Among the buildings preserved in the park is the original 1873 log schoolhouse, believed to be the oldest surviving public building in South Dakota. Also reconstructed was the first church built in the Dakota Territory by Czech pioneers, and an early Czech log house which Bara recognized as a "chalupa"---a house commonly found in rural areas that sheltered a farm family and livestock separately but in the same structure.

Leonard Cimpl and another man in his seventies conducted a private tour for Bara and John, and the two Tabor men delighted in speaking Czech with Bara as they did so. One highlight both John and Bara remember was viewing the interior of the log home, and a living area furnished as it would have been in the 1870s. This area was roped off, and they stood for a moment silently appreciating it. "It was like looking at a picture of how people used to live," John said. "But then one of the men suddenly crossed the rope, stepped into the picture, and pulled out a book that had been sitting on the desk there, and handed it to Bara."

John was startled by this museum piece suddenly taken out of this picture of the past and placed in the real world, but when Bara saw what the book was, she was even more surprised.

"It was an old Czech prayer book," she said. "At Charles University, we study books like this in our language classes, to see how grammar has changed, how the language has changed over time. But to study them we have to go to the archive, fill out a special form and have the book brought to you. You can't have any food or drink, and you must turn the pages very carefully. Now someone had just handed me a book like that, and I was holding it. It was amazing for me to imagine that long ago a woman carried this book with her in a ship from Europe and then in a wagon across the prairie-she didn't know what was in front of her, and the only thing she had, her only hope, was this book, and she looked in it every day to pray-it was very strange to be holding it now."

If they thought the surprises and coincidences were over at that point, Bara and John were in for at least one more. They were escorted into another room where photographs lined all the walls. The photos were of actors in the annual Czech play, done in Czech by Tabor's townspeople.

"That was amazing-to walk around that room and see pictures from plays in 1905, 1908, 1892," John said, "and to see these people from the town all dressed up in costumes, and the sets they made."

"They told us that the play always includes young people, so even if they haven't learned to speak Czech fluently, they can at least learn a few words by being in the play," Bara said.

Did the men from Tabor react to the information that their visitors happened to be involved in theatre, and that one of them performed in plays in the Czech Republic?

"Not really," John said. "I think for them the plays they do-19th century Czech melodramas-are still more of a community event, rather than theatre pieces."

Still, "I might send them some new scripts," Bara said.

The annual play is not the only Tabor heritage event. Every June for the past 54 years, the community has hosted "Czech Days." This year the weekend program featured band concerts, the Tabor Beseda Dancers, a Czech Polka Mass at St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church, the crowning of a festival king and queen, and of course plenty of food-especially the Czech pastries called "kolaches." The event typically begins with a big parade, which has attracted as many as 5,000 people to Tabor.

They missed the parade and the play, but for Bara Dockolova, the accidental visit to Tabor was a unique experience in a week of wonders. "It was one of the best weeks of my life," she said, a day before she was scheduled to fly back to Prague.

For John Heckel, the best part of the afternoon was seeing how pleased the two Tabor men were that Bara was so interested, especially when Tabor is starting to change, and its identity is endangered by growth from a larger nearby town. "I was really neat," John said, "to see these two older guys enjoy the fact that somebody Bara's age would appreciate what they had spent their whole lives keeping alive."

Will Bush Invade Florida?

Today's newspaper carries an article that says America wants to bring democracy to Iraq. It also contains an article that suggests America is having enough problems bringing democracy to Florida. Two years after the 2000 election debacle, several Florida counties are again having problems counting ballots. There's a picture of two officials apparently hypnotized by the chads they're staring at-and it's déjà vu all over again.

But two years has also allowed Judge Mark Wagstaff of Florida's Fredonia County Superior Court to refine his instructions on how to intepret the ballots. Though his instructions are specifically about the 2000 presidential election, they can be applied to primary races through a second document not available at press time, but which reportedly involves a manual, a spreadsheet and a pair of dice.

The Judge's instructions read in part:

1.Hanging or dangling chads: If the chad appears to have a noose around its neck, assume it is a black voter. Count for Gore.

2. Swinging chad: if the swinging chad appears to be holding a martini, count for Bush.

3. Pregnant chads: If the chad became pregnant in wedlock, count for Buchanan. If the chad is now married but became pregnant out of wedlock, Bush. If the chad is unmarried, Gore. If it is a false pregnancy, Nader.

4. Dimpled chads: Is it a Shirley Temple type dimple? Bush. Is it a Cary Grant type dimple? Gore.

If a chad detaches itself while you are examining it:

Ask one of the TV camera operators to rewind the tape to the appropriate moment, and review in slo mo. Note that the evidence must be convincing to change a previous ruling at the table.

If after detaching, the chad begins dancing on the table, take an immediate one hour break.

If you are still not sure, call anyone in the county named Chad and ask how he voted. In alternate cases, do the opposite of what he says. However, Chad's response is disqualified entirely if:

1. His response begins with "Gosh"

2. He says he must first confer with current or former fraternity brothers.

If a ballot appears completely unmarked, open the door and throw it on the floor in front of the ladies and gentlemen in the brown shirts being led in screaming and pounding by a genial p.r. person. After 30 seconds, retrieve the ballot and begin interpreting the tears, holes and smudges. See the John Cage Method for Decision-Making for further instructions.

YOU'D DO THE SAME FOR ME: MARKING 9/11

This is an unpublished piece I wrote last year, shortly after 9/11. It's something I'd been thinking about for awhile, but it also represents as aspect of the 9/11 aftermath most apt to be forgotten at its anniversary: the expressions of a social ethic, of brotherhood and altruism and what I consider the social contract of community.

But as the 9/11 anniversary approaches, America is apparently abuzz about a television show called American Idol, which seems to mostly celebrate meanness and zero-sum competition. This show, along with the brief popularity of "The Weakest Link" and various permutations of "Survivor"-a show with a dishonest premise (that this is how survival in the wild is accomplished) carried out dishonestly (i.e. manipulated if not rigged)-seem to say that people are reveling in the opposite of altruism or that spirit of 9/11. They want to watch people being mean and manipulative.

I tend to think the entertainment value of such programs has less to do with a social ethic than with a compensatory rebellion for all the forced niceness and phony images of "have a nice day" friendliness demanded in most jobs today, from corporate managers to badly paid fast food clerks.

Still, if 9/11 changed many things, its effect on civility wasn't all that lasting. But its anniversary shouldn't go by without a reminder of the kind of behaviors we're capable of, and perhaps even desire.

"You'd Do the Same for Me"


A few days after the World Trade Center towers came down, a fireman from Michigan or some other place distant from New York City was explaining to the TV reporter why he was starting a 24-hour shift digging through the rubble: because the firemen working there and buried there were his brothers. And because "they'd do the same for me."

That phrase once before had prompted a moment of illumination for me. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time, nursing a coffee one afternoon while reading and writing at a table in a restaurant in my neighborhood. I knocked a pen to the floor which was immediately picked up by a maintenance worker, a black man who I judged to be past 60 years old. As he handed it back to me I thanked him, and he said simply, "You'd do the same for me." He said it with a casual gravity, as though it was something he said regularly, but it also had the quality and weight of a personal mantra of some importance.

It wasn't the first time I'd heard it of course, but this time it hit me differently, mostly because of who said it to me and the sound of his voice. Gradually I realized what an important statement it is. It sums up entire philosophies and puts many book-length ethical treatises to shame. "You'd do the same for me" is nothing less than the basis of civil behavior, from courtesy to heroism.

By saying it to me, moreover, this man was stating both his own moral standard and his faith that others share it in the delicate informal system of day-to-day civilization. In the simplicity of this statement, in its simple assumptions, he was educating me and challenging me to rise to this standard. It is in some ways an ultimate equality, and a testament of faith in human possibility and the human heart.

I've thought about this for years. I wanted to write about it, about how I saw its truth in the ordinary behavior of so many ordinary people, there on the Murray Avenue and everywhere I traveled, and now where I live in Arcata. I confess I hesitated. I really don't need more rejection in my life, and this idea seemed so counter to the attitudes that news media, entertainment and books like to present as the prevailing one in society: Look out for number one, dog eat dog (and top dog fires disposable little dog); he who dies with the most toys wins.

And then after the shock of epic violence came the surprises of the response: not just the volunteers in the hell of lower Manhattan, but the people bringing food and flowers to them, or giving blood and contributing money when the economy is doubly uncertain, and being conspicuously kind to each other. Such behavior may be temporary, or our attention to it may be what's fleeting. And its opposite has also emerged in racist violence. But I am struck also by the biographies of the random victims in this deadly episode. So many of these people are remembered for their dedication to others, their efforts to benefit future generations as well as those around them in their lifetime.

And among them are heroes, quite probably including someone from our own community. Those who study altruism notice that people who go to extraordinary lengths to help others often don't think there's anything unusual about it. "They'd do the same for me" is the foundation of beliefs they can't otherwise explain.

That fireman's words-spoken diffidently, as if he didn't expect anyone to really understand-also illuminated a very different phrase that was stuck in my mind. I don't remember who said it but it struck me as true, though I couldn't say why: "the reason academic infighting is so vicious is that so little is at stake." In the light of those too-often repeated explosions, I realized this could be applied to any arena-business, family, politics, small towns.

Compared to life and death and to our common interest in the basic behaviors of living together, the envy, betrayal, cynicism and denial that rule so often in so many arenas can't be accepted as the inevitable responses of human nature nor the unfortunate byproducts of a generally beneficial economic system. They are what some in past generations would call them: small and mean. Because most often so little is really at stake for the perpetrators, while the consequences are profound for others, and for the fabric of our common lives. In times of crisis our best instincts seem to tell us this.

All of this emboldens me to assert that "you'd do the same for me" is a mantra in the heart of millions. Perhaps they do not always hear it, or even literally believe it, but it is our common faith, the ideal we live by as citizens of human civilization. It gives new meaning to the concept of the brotherhood of man. Beyond gender, and beyond any other distinction, this is what brotherhood means.

It is not too early to say that not honoring and acting upon this impulse enough is one reason-not the only reason, but one reason-- we're in this tragic mess.

Of course, the terrorists probably consider themselves brothers (and some may actually be brothers), but if they are who the U.S. government thinks they are, their reasons for loyalty are different. They are loyal to a dogma, to leaders, to blood. They are not really loyal to each other, or to any others who do not conform to their specific beliefs. The dispossessed of the world have grievances against the powerful who have ignored and abused them. But our fates excuse none of us-powerful or abused-from decency in our dealings as individuals.

"You'd do the same for me" may not tell us much about those who name themselves our enemies, but it might tell us something about ourselves, and what we need to defend in our own lives together.

Copyright 2001 by William S. Kowinski

Finished reading Milan Kundera's Slowness. The inventions continued, the two time periods (which meet in one scene towards the end) the planes of reality that suddenly intrude on one another, the multiple points of view and voices---at one point, a penis speaks. If all this seems irredeemably postmodern, consider that Tolstoy does much the same in Anna K. At one point in that novel, we hear directly from a dog. With Tolstoy I got the feeling of sheer exuberance, of the writing itself taking over. Tolstoy's art was so much more powerful----and so much smarter---than the man. With Kundera it seems more controlled, but who knows? I'm curious how he wrote this book: did he improvise and then select to illustrate his ideas, did he have it all worked out before he started, or did he just improvise and let it all dictate itself...?

A few of the philosophical passages in the last 50 pages or so:

"In a sudden flash, his whole past appears to him not as a sublime adventure, rich in dramatic and unique events, but as a minuscule segment in a jumble of events that crossed the planet at a speed that made it impossible to see their features....When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, not even about himself."

....I recalled the well-known equation from one of the first chapters of the textbook of existential mathematics: the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting. From that equation we can deduce various corollaries, for instance this one: our period is given over to the demon of speed, and that is the reason it so easily forgets its own self. Now I would reverse that statement and say: our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed; it picks up the pace to show us that it no longer wishes to be remembered; that it is tired of itself; sick of itself; that it wants to blow out the tiny trembling flame of memory."

"Be happy you've forgotten. Snuggle into the soft shawl of universal amnesia. Stop thinking about the laughter that wounded you-it no longer exists just as your years on the scaffoldings and your glory as a victim of persecution no longer exist. The chateau is quiet, open the window and the fragrance of the trees will fill your room. Breathe. Those are three-hundred-year-old chestnuts...."

And then this intriguing ending:

"I beg you friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope."

When I lived in Cambridge, Mass. in the early and mid 1970s, I had one Saturday ritual for awhile. The Boston Globe published a column on Saturdays called "The Lit'ry Life," by George Legendary (note: sometimes I make up names to protect the innocent, sometimes the guilty, and mostly myself, but in some cases-like this one-because I can't remember the real name...) It was mostly odds and ends about people in various print media: the Boston book authors and publishers, periodical poets and the newspapers, including the ones I wrote for (the weekly alternatives, and a couple of rock music/pop culture regional rags).

I lived in east Cambridge, in the ragged end of what I believe was John F. Kennedy's old congressional district. It was a healthy walk up to Mass. Ave (pronounced "Mass Ave") at Central Square. I got my major groceries at the Purity Supreme supermarket, which had a deli attached next door. Before or after my weekly shopping, I stopped there for a sandwich (always had the same kind--tuna, I think, but I definitely remember the pickle) and coffee, and to read "The Lit'ry Life" column in the Globe.

Even though I was at various points the book review and book supplements editor, and then the Managing Editor (Arts) for the Boston Phoenix, and had some poems published in Arions Dolphin and other locally produced magazines, I never got a mention in that column. (Though I did get a complimentary one in the famous "Ear" in the Washington Star some years later.)

At the moment I have no lit'ry life to report on but my own, so in what I gather is the true spirit of Blogging, I'll do my own Saturday chatter.

Current Reading: Apart from the books I'm examining or reading for assigned reviews (My two-book review of The Atrocity Paradigm and Altruism and Altruistic Love is nicely placed at the top of page two of the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Book Review tomorrow, 8-18-02. The Chronicle is at www.sfgate.com, and the Sunday sections are retrievable for the week, and the reviews are searchable. But I won't have an actual link until tomorrow.)-

As I was saying, apart from those, I am reading:
Almost finished Milan Kundera's short novel, Slowness. On the surface his books are very absorbing, entertaining monologues, you can almost hear him inventing. He explores ideas through character and story, and I often wonder which came first (assuming at least some of the characters and events are based on "reality"), the character or story that suggests the idea, or the idea that he works out by inventing characters and story. I suspect it's a mixture, but that's one of the things you don't usually get to explore in reviews-maybe a very astute reading group with a penchant for research would be interesting-so you can go into detail about which parts are invented from ideas, which involve actual people (several in Slowness are public figures.)

I'm also re-reading the first book I ever took out of the library as a child. It's called The Space Ship Under the Apple Tree by Louis Slobodkin. I remember it was a hardback with a red cover, with white letters and a white flying saucer line drawing. I found a thrift store copy of the paperback edition. The basic plot is a lot like E.T. More as I get into it.

On my visit back in Pittsburgh this May, I had dinner with an old friend, Jim Hayes, who later emailed me a list of the books he'd talked about. I've started with Mark Epstein's "thoughts without a thinker", which is excellent. This is one of the areas of what you might loosely call spirituality that I'm exploring, and at the moment the chief one: which is Zen. (The other would be Native American spiritualities.) I've read a few really good books in the field, Joko Beck's books, Shunryu Suzuki (he makes me laugh). For a bit I was into a book called Zen and the Brain but my interest in neuroscience is limited. This one is more like it---it relates Zen and western psychotherapy, and it's very, very good. Thanks, James!

One of the reasons I re-reading "Space Ship..." is that I'm getting into the science fiction section of the book I'm writing, SOUL OF THE FUTURE. I've spent part of the spring and all of the summer so far on the first sections: introductory chapters about apocalyptic futures, which involves 9-11 but mostly the nuclear age apocalypse scares that I grew up with in the 50s and 60s; and many chapters about London in the 1890s, H.G. Wells and The Time Machine.

Now I'm bridging the science fiction gap between Wells and Gene Roddenberry, since Star Trek is going to be a major focus for the next set of chapters (right now they're tending to be about 2,000 words long.) I'm about to read through (rather than just reference) Brian Aldiss' Billion Year Spree, a history of science fiction that so far is the most nuanced of the several I've already read. I don't share all of Aldiss' tastes but I do share his enthusiasm for Olaf Stapledon, the obscure (in the U.S. anyway) novelist of the 1930s on. Something of a disciple of Wells (they came to know each other, and eventually it was Stapledon who influenced Wells' last science fiction and other books) I'm almost finished with what I regard as Stapledon's masterpiece (and Aldiss does as well), called "Starmaker."

My book-in-progress addresses scenarios for a hopeful future of the two basic kinds (which, with a different outcome, are also the two basic kinds of apocalyptic fictions for a really bad future), and they are: with technology, and without technology (meaning without so much, or so dominant.) So science fiction-particularly through Wells and Star Trek, and the familiar stories they tell---addresses a hopeful future in which technology is emphasized. Then comes the second kind of story, which emphasizes ecology and spiritual emphases. Then finally a synthesis of the two, to suggest what qualities and activities today can help create a hopeful future.

Which is a long way to saying I'm only getting started. (Though a lot of research and preliminary writing is accomplished. After all, I've been working on this stuff for several years.)

But I've got a lot of other work to do before I can get back to SOUL OF THE FUTURE-and a lot of work to FIND. The paying kind. So progress on reading these books is apt to be slow. I'm also tempted by Robert Johnson's "Ecstasy," another thrift store find, partly because he's an easy read, and it's short.

FILMS OF THE WEEK: We saw "Signs" at the theater, which I suppose is obvious from the preceding column. (Although I guess it's the following column in this format...) What I liked most about it is the director's style of storytelling, and how well Mel Gibson and the other actors responded to it. The mixture of (realistic) family comedy, the dead-on characterizations, along with how the suspense aspects are structured, are all admirable, and advance current filmmaking. The scene in which dad is outvoted by the kids on whether to stay or head for the hills (or the lake) to escape the aliens is really good. Shamalyan (I'm probably not spelling that right) has absorbed Speilberg (of E.T. and Poltergeist, say) as well as suspense directors, and he is very good at the pacing etc. necessary to keep his elegantly wrapped mysteries moving, and keeps you surprised, even when you sort of know what has to happen. The man of the cloth loses faith and collar, regains same, is still a cliché and is a serious flaw. I don't quarrel with spiritual content, but that was too heavy handed.

Another film we saw was on video, Preston Sturges' "Christmas in July." I had a big Sturges phase a few years ago, and this was the first time since then I'd screened this one, his first. It's a very interesting film to watch during the current corporate revelations. The idea of businesses being "a family", and of people thinking of others first, all seem sadly obsolete. Sturges movies are utterly unique-nobody else does comedy like his, and his scripts are gems. The characters are at once recognizable as movie characters and with complexity and individuality. You pan in on some of the minor ones, convinced you're going to meet a cliché, and by the time they start talking they turn out to be more nuanced and surprising, like the office manager in this film who at first seems to be the stereotype of the bean counter, but turns out to be a dignified, intelligent and kind man, bearing his disappointment and compromise with honor.

Poetry: In the past few weeks I've read A. R. Ammons for pretty much the first time, read a little Shelley, but find myself fascinated with Yeats. Really for the first time-I read the required work in college, even saw one of his plays performed, but didn't care for him much in comparison to the other Moderns of that moment, Pound and Eliot. Now I'm content to let Pound and Eliot fight in the captain's tower, and explore Yeats, from the early work to The Tower.

Signs?

copyright 2002 by William Kowinski

Two crop circle investigators from England arrived here in Pluto, California this week, and since "Signs" has been cleaning up at our local cinema, it seemed like a timely time to find out what's new in the world of bent corn.

"Signs" is that movie about crop circles and aliens, with Mel Gibson playing the part of Bruce Willis, and there's an army recruiting officer who talks just like Laurie Anderson. You've seen it, right? It says that the crop circles are navigational markers for space ships carrying hostile aliens. If there are such crop circles in our town and a hostile alien invasion is imminent,the public has a right to know.

Or if the English investigators discovered a corn field in Pluto, that would be news, too. Pluto is a little bay town in far northern California. We have a year round climate that doesn't vary much--it always seems to be about 60 or 65 degrees Farenheit. That's not hot enough to grow corn really, but we do have a lot of dairy farms and clover fields, and lots of flowers in the bottoms over close to the coast.

Our population is more seasonal than the temperature. When the students at the local college leave in the spring, we lose about half. Tourists pick up some of the slack in the summer, and the migrating hippies who congregate on the Plaza downtown. Right now the students are only starting to drift back in, so we're a little slow on news.

But when I caught up with the investigators as they gingerly eyed the denizens of the Plaza just after the noon whistle, it turned out that Nigel and Bruce-the two Brits-- weren't interested in corn, or any other crop circles. They were here to investigate a new possibility.

"We've gone right off crop circles," Nigel confirmed. "We're onto something new."

"Something big," Bruce whispered.

"Very big," Nigel agreed.

Bruce looked both ways before he talked. "Traffic circles," he breathed. "That's why we're here."

Apparently news travels a little slow from here to Jolly Old, since Bruce and Nigel were under the impression that Pluto's traffic circles had just appeared. However, hearing they've been here for a couple of years didn't discourage them.

"But you never saw them being built, did you?" Nigel said. "One day they weren't there, and the next time you drove that way, they were. Isn't that right?"

I had to admit this was true. They nodded wisely. "And come to think of it, they all appeared at pretty much the same time," I added.

"Of course," Bruce said. "That's how it works."

"And don't you think it's odd," Nigel intimated, "that your town has no stop lights, but suddenly acquires six traffic circles?"

I did think that was odd. This all was making me a little edgy. But did they think traffic circles were really the work of aliens?

"They don't make much sense otherwise, do they?" Nigel said. "I mean, what kind of intelligence would think up traffic circles?"

"Not human," Bruce said. "Clearly."

I had to agree. But what is their purpose? The same as the crop circles?

"We think so," Nigel said slowly. "Same idea, different aliens."

"Somewhat smarter, we think," Bruce added. "Than the crop circle variety."

That didn't sound good. "Smarter?" I asked. "How much smarter?"

"Well," Bruce considered, "I'd say, at least smart enough to avoid a planet that's mostly water when you're allergic to the stuff. Or at least capable of the forethought to equip the fleet of faster-than-light flying saucers with some rain coats."

"We feel they have in fact invented Gore-Tex," Nigel stated.

"That doesn't sound good," I suggested.

"It's not all bad," Bruce said, smiling. "Just remember what they've created as navigational aids."

Nigel stared at me. I guess I looked baffled. "Traffic circles," he said. "Confusing. Disorienting. Nearly impossible to navigate."

"If traffic circles are an indication of how they think," Bruce said, "it's entirely possible they'll never get here."

"They probably won't find their way out of their own solar system."

"Think of it. Thousands of huge space ships circling around each other, nobody knowing who is supposed to stop for who, and where to get on or off the orbital path."

"They'll be there forever." Nigel and Bruce smiled at each other. I too was relieved.

Until I saw Nigel cast a wary eye around the Plaza. "Unless," he said ominously, "they're already here..."