In the Middle


"In the middle of the journey of our life, I awoke in a dark wood, where I had lost my way."

Or words to that effect, depending on the translation (of Dante's "Inferno" as it begins.)

This passage has been used to help define what in common parlance is called the "mid-life crisis."

It seems to me every time we pause---or are forced by circumstances to "re-evaluate"--- we find ourselves in the middle of the journey, and most of the time it is in the middle of a dark wood.

Clearly I am in that second half of my life, maybe even in the middle of the second half. I don't know how much time I have left, and how much of that will be with relative freedom and reasonably good health and energy. I face as well a very uncertain immediate future. So I am looking at what I need to do and want to do, assuming I can clear my own path.

The most obvious sort of project, and the one I've been fitfully yet consciously engaged in for several years, is to pass on in the best form I can what I've learned and what I've experienced in five decades plus of sentience. That project continues, and I see it moving into a new phase, in which I share more specifically the elements of my own story.

Publishing a new edition of my mall book was one such effort, especially since it included a personal account of my experiences in the course of writing it and its first publication. So far I can't count those chapters as a stunning success in terms of response, which makes the future look bleaker, but you need a lot of stubbornness in this game. Sometimes people wonder why I'm not more gratified by praise. I am gratified, but I am often puzzled because I never know why I'm praised for one thing and not for something else that I believe is just as good if not better.

I've also been posting old articles and columns on one or another of these blogs, with contemporary comments and contexts. Eventually, if I'm able financially and otherwise, I'll publish a collection in book form.

Also, if I'm able, I want to take this a step further with some personal essays, and eventually go back to fiction and dramatic forms. These are hard. It's easier to be topical and riff on politics. But the journey of my life, if it is my life, should include these.

Besides these and other efforts that have to do with personal history and history in general (I told my first 'historical society' audience that I got really interested in history when I'd lived long enough to have some), I find myself in another place it's becoming apparent I've been moving towards for the past several years.


Jung wrote of changes, some of them revolutionary, which often occur in the second half of life. I don't think I've experienced the flip into the opposite, from extravert to introvert, for example. I'm as introverted as ever, and probably more so. But I do detect one change in emphasis.

I've seldom been accused of optimism. I've been called "cynical," which I'm not, and "skeptical," which by nature and on principle, I am.

I don't trust optimists, as a rule. If they're not conscious or unconscious con artists, their innocence is often unearned, and they can be dangerous. Cheerful people are nice to run into, but I wouldn't necessarily want to live or work in a building designed by an optimist, at least of the kind who believes things will just work out for the best, with or without fireproofing and emergency exits.

Optimism really lets you off the hook. If you say the glass is half empty, they laugh at you and call you a pessimist. But if they drink half a glass and there's no more water, they throw up their hands and say, "We didn't know! Don't blame us!"

Still...the truth is that bitterly enumerating everything that's wrong with the world, proving there's no hope and all is lost with incisive despair, is all much easier when you're young. You may channel your hormonal anger into apocalyptic pronouncements, but your skin tone is telling you that you will live forever and be immune from every disaster that befalls others.

I've been living with the analysis of apocalypse since the 60s. And yes, as Abbie Hoffman said, "We were reckless, we were headstrong, we were impatient, we were excessive. But goddammit we were right." And the decades have rolled out one analysis after another showing just how bad things are, how complex and intertwined and embedded the destructiveness is, how powerful the agents of destruction are.

There will be hell to pay, and there was a moment when I thought I might not live to see it, and that was good enough. I wasn't the only one doing that kind of calculation. I took boxes of my LPs to a used record place in Pittsburgh shortly before I left for California (hauling with me, it must be said, other boxes of old LPs). The place was run by a guy roughly my age, a fellow early baby boomer. At some point in the conversation he mentioned the crap to come we all know is coming and said, "but fortunately, we'll be dead by then," and we both laughed.

I don't think the calculation has changed much since then, in terms of when, for instance, the climate crisis wreaks pervasive havoc, but I don't feel much comfort in that, if I ever really did. For it was at about that time that I really started trying to put together some meaning, some pattern, that could possibly sustain a future, that could be a direction for hope.

Somewhat by accident, or at least coincidence (which should make Jungians etc. all warm inside), I found some directions to at least pursue a pattern of hope. And that became more and more central to the work I wanted to do. It’s not what you would call optimism, but it is an attempt to leave behind a way of hope, which has me in the odd position of accentuating the positive.

Again, I found writing about it, writing that way, is difficult. And again, I'm not getting a lot of positive response to being positive. My first efforts have been in the "Soul of the Future" projects. I've worked hard and written a lot, and so far with little to show for it in finished work. Just a lot of unpaid for time that’s gone.

My most recent efforts in a different but related area are going to show up in some form here and there in the coming months, all concerned with what I've been calling the "skills of peace." Just as waging war requires knowledge and practice, strategies, concepts and attitudes, so does making peace. These skills of peace have little to do with organizing demonstrations or petition drives, though they do bear significantly on how people talk about war. They are the skills required for peace in schools and the workplace, peace in the home, and peace of mind as well as peace on earth.

They are tools of compassion, skills of empathy, strategies of cooperation, tactics of conflict resolution, paths of facing up to the good and evil in each and all of us. I've talked to a number of people engaged in such activities in the past couple of months, and if things work out I may have a book proposal on the subject soon.

Unfortunately, this project is going to have to be more sustaining financially than it has been so far. Or something else has to materialize if I'm going to be able to continue with this program. Or be in reasonable control of just about any program.

Pausing in the middle, you try to look ahead. But you wind up looking back, and wondering how you got so lost, or at least you wish you used your time better when the way was clear. I wonder if I tried too hard to stay in the middle, being too stubborn and at the same time not ruthless enough.

But then, so what? Is the intense masterpiece so important, and kindness isn't?


The difference between publishers and writers, some wise person once said, is that publishers care about markets, while writers care about readers. Which implies that the readers don't have to be many. You don't have to know who they are. They don't even have to be alive until after you aren't. You don't make any money that way perhaps, and you maybe don't get to live as a consequence of your writing and its contribution, but the writing that gets done has some possibility of that life.

But at least one form of publishing---in the sense of making it public, even if there's no financial reward--- is available and not dependent on markets, and you're looking at it.

Doing these blogs and posting on the Internet has been vitalizing. Thanks to the Internet and email, I'm now back in touch with old college friends I haven't seen in decades, and far-flung extended family, including the first person I ever corresponded with, one of my cousins in Maryland. I'm in touch with writers I've read, people I've just met briefly, and people I've never met at all. My writing becomes part of a dialogue, it prompts a response in someone else's thoughts, feelings and memories. And sometimes I find out about it, very quickly.

I hope I can continue. I hope I can continue a lot of things, resume others, and do some new things. I'm sending out chapters of a novel for young readers (I figure middle school through high school) and proposals for a couple of biographies for the same age group. It takes me back to when reading first became really important to me. It would be nice to be able to do some of that. But the chances aren't real good. Saving the postage and putting that into lottery tickets is probably a sounder investment than sending out this stuff unsolicited.

Gee, did that sound cynical, pessimistic? Some say the glass is half full, some say it is half empty. Some say the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Some say it is half full of bilge water and half of hot air. Some say it is entirely empty of fossil fuel. Some say the glass is half full of milk and half full of cream, which makes it entirely full of half and half. Some say the glass is half-naked, some say it is half-crazy.

Here is an opinion on a similar subject by Shunryu Suzuki. Asked the old favorite of philosophy students, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?", he replied:
"It doesn't matter."

This War

In 1954 or so, Carl Jung was asked if he thought there would be nuclear holocaust. His reply: "I think it depends on how many people can stand the tension of the opposites in themselves."

What we are seeing is war. The consequences of releasing the dogs of war. We are seeing the havoc.

What we are seeing is all wars. The state of the art violence, death, heroism, blunders, unforeseen consequences, adaptations, lies, crimes,hysteria, back-biting, glorifying, vilifying, relentless unfolding of havoc. People become their group, because they are attacked and because they are attacking. Most do what they must do, to stay alive, which at times is the same as winning, the same as killing, and at other times and places is the same as escaping, surrendering. Many do what they must do as captives of their allegiance in a particular situation, which is to kill and die, to glorify and vilify. There are always those seeking personal advantage from death-dealing and dying, while in lofty safety elsewhere.

War evokes love and unleashes hate. It dictates behaviors that generate hate and liberate love. War is not necessary but when we will not understand ourselves, war will happen to provide us with object lessons. As this war began, it seemed to make sense that the best chronicles of World War II were the works of absurdity, of black humor or gallows humor: Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five. But they were written two decades after the war. The absurdities of the moment are much too grim. They are cause for shock and awe.

War unleashes and liberates everything inside us, especially from the unconscious. We act with emotional certainty that appears even to us to be rational deliberation, and react with rage, fear and impulse, whether fighting the war, fighting against the war, reporting the war, running the war. We are immersed in events. The events matter, but they will control us until we understand ourselves.

Everything soon becomes the good guys against the evil ones. And so at the moment every war begins, it is lost. It doesn't have to be that way, even as a consequence of defending against the evil that men do. But until we can understand that this tension exists, of the opposites within ourselves, every war will do what every war has done, which is to prepare the ground for the next war.

Living with this tension is essential. Acknowledging it is basic to taking effective action. Sometimes taking a step back is to take a step forward. In our world taking a step back is to look more deeply in the mirror.

On the Sunday before the war...

On the Sunday before the war, Margaret and I walked down to the Arcata plaza to participate in a candlelight vigil for peace that had begun, I'm told, in New Zealand, and circled the world until it got to us. You can't get more than maybe five miles any farther west than we were, anywhere in the lower 48 states, so as Margaret said, we were sending the light back across the Pacific towards where it began.

When we arrived shortly before seven p.m., some people had already gathered in the center of the plaza, a concrete circle ringed with planters, and around an absurd statue of William McKinley. Even though it's mid March, our coastal climate doesn't vary much, and there's always something growing. The Iris were conspicuously in bloom; they are Margaret's favorite flower.

Margaret carried in her backpack a tall candle in a glass tumbler, a clear-glass version of the candles usually decorated with the images of saints that are apparently favored by Mexican Catholics. Until recently, it was possible to buy them pretty cheaply in the ethnic food section of the Safeway supermarket. But somebody caught on to the fact that they've become a bit stylish---now they're with other decorative candles, and they've doubled in price.

These candles burn for days, and Margaret's idea was to light it at the vigil and keep it lit on the mantelpiece at home, where she would always have such a candle lit, until there was peace again.

I carried a bare white candle, very cheap to buy and also long-burning, the kind that many people had at the vigil I attended just a few weeks ago. That vigil was an annual event, a memorial for the Wiyot slain on Indian Island during their "fixing the world" ceremony in 1860. That vigil had also begun at around dusk, a few feet from Humboldt Bay. The candle was the very same one I had held from dusk into darkness that evening. For the last several years it had rained---a couple of times it really poured---but this year it was clear and bright. We watched geese fly over in V formation. Then it got windy and eventually cold. I was colder than most; I was in the middle of some strange flu or cold or whatever bug it was.

But on the Sunday before the war, the evening was pretty warm. At the Wiyot memorial there had been prayers and talk, songs of a half dozen Indian cultures, and drumming. Here there was only silence.

We stood in the silence, a nearly full moon sliding in front of clouds. I thought of the first candle-light demonstration against a war I had attended, in 1965 or 66, in Galesburg, Illinois, also in the town square. There couldn't have been more than ten of us, a mix of students and young faculty from Knox College. It was not a popular thing to be doing, and people hooted at us from cars and trucks and nearby sidewalks. There was real danger in opposing that war too visibly. I seem to remember we huddled a little closer together, for more than warmth, for more than shelter against the wind for the flickering candles.

Eventually there were several hundred people in the Arcata Plaza. I'd say 400 at the peak. That's a pretty impressive number, since Humboldt State was on spring break, and when the students leave the population of the town drops by half.

There was a little noise around us---people smoking in front of the bars across the way, and there was one camper that circled the plaza a few times, with an American flag waving from the radio antenna. But that was about it.

I noticed that the flag at the post office seemed to be at half mast.

This was a day after the largest peace march in Eureka-lots of color and noise, clever signs and rhythmic chants, then a rally and speeches.

But in the Arcata Plaza no one said anything. There were no signs. Just people holding candles, people of all ages, descriptions, pairings, groupings. Most candles were more practical than mine---if they weren't in glass, they had little aluminum foil wax-catchers. I had to keep spilling the wax from mine or it would drip down over my hands. This was a new problem--I'd never been able to keep my candle lit for very long out by the Bay.

We stood for an hour in silence, holding small flames, small scratches of light. A few people sat on the concrete or on the grass. Some meditated. I stood and watched, watched the camper circling the plaza, watched the faces of all these strangers, watched the moon through the bare branches of a tree.

(Later Margaret remarked that she recognized only a few people and we didn't see anyone either of us knew. I remarked that it must be a peace demonstration for introverts.)

The silence started to seem a little strange, a bit surreal after an hour. I was thinking that in the old days people would at least sing "We Shall Overcome," but I thought that idea probably just dated me. And then it started, very softly from the other side of the statue, until it got to the verse that says "we shall live in peace, someday," and then it got louder. After wanting to sing it, I was so moved I couldn't.

As we walked home, I noticed some light down a side street. There was a traffic circle there, something of a new addition to Arcata culture, and the neighborhood had turned the center of it into a flower garden. Now it was ringed with candles. Perhaps they'd had their own vigil there a little earlier, and left the candles there.

I heard a reporter next evening on Bill Moyers remark that in walking around Washington on Monday she'd noticed people standing in small groups here and there, silent, holding lit candles. I crossed the plaza in Arcata on Wednesday afternoon, before the bombing started, and a scattering of people were standing, facing outward, silent. They were standing on the corner where Women in Black assemble on Friday evenings, facing that same way, silent. But these weren't just women, and they weren't all in black.

Silence and candles. To me the message---and certainly my thoughts when I was standing there---was part memorial, and part hope, the endurance of hope. I was thinking of the people who were going to die, as I looked at the children with their parents holding candles. People who got blown to bits suddenly out of the silence would be the lucky ones. Yet some in Baghdad would endure, would rebuild, would have children who would endure. Some of the children of America would come home, and though few would ever be the same again, some would endure, and have children. And those here would still be here, and some through whatever disasters are unleashed, would endure.

The candles burn for the living who might soon be dead, they burn as the light of hope. There is reason to hope, even in this moment of peril. Though so much of what is happening has happened before, and some have learned nothing from the suffering and stupidity of the past, some have learned something.

I've spent much of the last several weeks learning that there is reason to hope, in the work that people are doing towards furthering compassion and cooperation, in creating systems of communication and participation, in schools and organizations, in daily life. They've been working at this all along, when few of us were looking.

There's reason to hope in what we were doing there, we silent strangers, holding candles, on the Sunday before the war. That George II didn't heed us does not mean that what happened here and around the world for the past several months is meaningless. Not at all. The worldwide opposition to a war expressed openly in huge demonstrations is a reason for hope.

Jonathan Schell wrote in The Nation magazine about the demonstrations on February 15: "When terrorists attacked the Pentagon and knocked down the World Trade Center on September 11, everyone marveled that nineteen men had coordinated their actions for evil with such efficiency. On February 15, 10 million coordinated their actions for good. February 15 was the people's answer to September 11."

Parts of Schell's new book have been published in the last two issues of Harper's Magazine. After reading the first one, it became much clearer to me why people in Europe, by from 85% to 92% in polls, opposed this war. He describes some of what has been going on in Europe, and put it in historical perspective. This is the part of the world, he reminds us, that was mostly at war for centuries, and plunged the world into horrific warfare twice in the twentieth century. But the nations that fought those wars are now becoming so intertwined in the European Union, that war among them is virtually impossible.

These are nations where the wreckage of world war is still physically present. Nations that lost generations of young men. Nations stripped of their fondest and proudest notions, stripped of illusions in bitter pain, and still wounded by the pain they caused each other and themselves. The Holocaust, the terrors of empire. The denial is not over, new illusions replace the old, not every part of Europe is there yet, it isn't the perfect society, and yet...look at what they have done. The nations of "old Europe" have banished war. Yet they are economically strong, culturally alive, and socially much more responsible and enlightened than the self-satisfied North Americans. They know something we apparently don't.

Schell wrote one of the best and most hopeless books about the prospect of nuclear war, "The Fate of the Earth." At least I experienced reading it with hopelessness. But his new work strikes me as hopeful. A few years after "The Fate of the Earth" was published, the apparently fatal blind alley the U.S. and the USSR had gone down suddenly opened up. It was the largely peaceful collapse of the Soviet empire in a few short years that changed everything. The Reaganites have tried to take credit for it, but as Schell writes now, it was really the people of eastern Europe who did it. We forget the changes of the twentieth century for the better that happened in the same way, from the liberation of India from the British to the end of apartheid in South Africa to the end of the Cold War: they were brought about by the people, and they were brought about without war.

I don't know that I'll go back down to the Plaza on the Sunday after the war has started. But there will be a candle burning.

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.