DCJNov2005

Volume 26

NOVEMBER 2005

26. 8: CULTURE WARS I 11.30.2005

What has come to be called the “culture war” in America probably had its origins in World War II. The Depression was over, the evil Axis (the old one) was vanquished, but a new war was already forming adversaries. There was all that fighting to save the world for democracy and preserve the “American way of life,” but not much understanding of what that really meant by those notions. Both a new national order and a “new world order” were already taking shape and we didn't quite get what either of them were about. Maybe we still don't get it. But it does seem somewhat clear that we need to reconsider what we mean by notions like democracy, the American way of life, and the place of America in the world. If “globalization” means anything, it means that our domestic concerns are more than ever mingled with our international behavior, economically and politically.

So pulling the two dimensions apart is difficult. It's a slippery and unwieldy topic, so these thoughts might wander off point because it's a bit of thinking out loud. So I'll start with what I think are the origins and outlines of the Culture War, and leave some other aspects to subsequent postings.

First of all, America never was a monoculture, say the way, maybe, Lichtenstein probably is, or some clannish aboriginals in the Amazon rain forest. We were sometimes brought up to think that it was, typified by Norman Rockwell illustrations and Andy Hardy movies. But we weren't “one-of-a-kind” right from the get-go; just ask a slave. In the 1960s, in graduate school, I was reading books about the American “melting pot,” that America had this homogenizing process that turned us all into . . . what, the Cleavers? But the country was already coming apart at the seams over racial, ethnic, gender and generational identities, interests and differences. We had our North and South, our aristocracies and serfs, rich and poor, gradations of melanin, and a myriad of ethnic groups, languages, cuisines and religions, that we thought got processed into some bouillabaisse of red, white and blue. People liked the myth but secretly hated being homogenized, particularly when that meant having to take on the cultural trappings of the “other.”

WWII set in motion momentous social changes that, in my view, are the prime fuel for our domestic Culture War. Blacks who went off to fight, and women who went off to fight and work in defense industries, and neither cohort were going to be the same after the war, so the Civil Rights and Women's movements got a major push from the war and the battle lines for a second “civil war” were being drawn.

America may not have had an all out “culture war” before Patrick Buchanan evoked the term a few years back, but it had always had its culture skirmishes—lynchings, gang behavior, ethnic spatial competition in the cities, regionalisms, and such. You don't have to scratch very deep through the surface of our popular culture to see that our cultural differences are alive and hot.

By the time of the arrival of the Vietnam War all the elements of the culture war were in place. Vietnam gave the combatants a real as well as a surrogate war to fight. Youth, who since the mid fifties had begun to form their own culture around their rock and roll, new forms of dress, new forms of substance abuse, and their shared sexual angst, now refused to fight the “commies” the way their fathers had fought the “fascists.” Women could hold to the Mrs. Cleaver model or burn their bras. Minorities could participate in freedom marches and be arrested or set upon by police dogs, or join the Simbianese liberation army or change their name to “X”. These are oversimplifications, but they stand for more complex and deeper rifts that were sundering the myth of monocultural America. There were not many happy, Norman Rockwell dinner tables in the turbulent 60s.

The Cultural Right never seemed for forgive or forget what they regarded as the Liberal Left's betrayal of the country, the reason that America lost its first war, that racial minorities had become “uppity,” that women wanted to become the sovereigns of their own bodies, that homosexuals were coming out of the closet, and youth, . . . well, it was descending into a hellish stew of sex, drugs and rock and roll. “America has lost its bearings” was lamented by people who never really had any idea where America was going anyway. What they did know is that its notion of freedom, democracy, and the American way had gone far enough for their liking. Some of those “counter-culture” people and minorities don't seem to be practicing democracy they way we think it should be practiced.

The course correction that the Cultural Right deemed necessary was just as profound in its ways, but essentially it centered on a “return” to basics, many of which have a familiar ring these days: church, family, love of country, all somewhat wrapped in a patriarchal obeisance. Brown vs the Board of Education in 1954 and The Civil Rights Act a decade later convinced the South that the humiliation of the Civil War was not over and it was time to flip from Democrat to those Republicans who have a penchant for liking things “the old way.” That was what they meant by “conservatism.” In that soil of social reaction sprouted the fundamentalist evangelical churches that would, “praise Jesus!” become the “useful idiots” of a Republican Party that would no longer recognize a Barry Goldwater, a Nelson Rockefeller, and certainly not a Teddy Roosevelt.

To be fair, the Cultural Left didn't know where things were going either, and to some extent that has been its problem in fashioning its concerns into an apprehensible and politically viable vision. The Cultural Left was, and has been, more of a loose “coalition” of interest groups (sometimes in competition) allied to concerns about freedom and equality. They never were what that the Right characterized them to be, a bunch of commie “pinkos” bent on turning us into the USSA, and they let that great word, liberal , get turned into an epithet by the glib media minions of the Republican Party. The Left believed in the possibility of the melting pot; the Right mouthed it, but operated politically to exploit the politics of division. To them America was a place that could handle different cultures, but the cultures had to stay in their place.

And so the Cultural Left's dilemma is that it can't come up with a vision of America that has the simplicity (and myopia) of the Cultural Right. The Right knows that fear is the best motivator; and war is very scary.

[To Be Continued]

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26: 7: THE INQUISITOR'S DILEMMA 11.26.2005

The point of all this torturing that Torquemada Cheney and his acolyte Little Georgie are so passionate about is supposed to be that the “intelligence” rendered from it will be useful in interdiction of terrorist attacks and other militarily useful information. That is, beyond the entertainment value of looking the other way while some of the troops force some people who even scream in a different language to perform obscene acts for the camera, soil themselves and otherwise be subjected to things that make sadists feel powerful. [1] (Gee, remember when Bob Hope used to entertain the troops?) Then there is getting a little “payback” for 9-11 on anyone with even a faint swarthiness to Mohammad Atta wherever you can find them.

Throughout history torture has never been out of fashion, but I never understood how it could remain in fashion [2] as any more than pure sadism because there was always this built in contradiction: people would tell you the truth or lie to you when they weren't under duress; but when you turned the thumb screws you had only than a twenty-five percent chance that you wouldn't get the truth from them. That is, they knew the information you want and, to stop the pain, they divulge it truthfully then torture is an effective intelligence strategy. But, they might know the truth and give you false information; or, they don't know it but make something up to get you to stop; or, they let you torture them until they die without saying anything. Those are bad odds.

Torture is especially bad odds when you are a bunch brutal dimwits like Bush and his pals. The point of all of this is that we are supposed to be fighting terrorism and doing something to make Americans safer. Uhhuh, did you see the reaction around the world when the Abu Ghraib photos were made public? Talk about a bunch of recruiting posters for Al Qaeda! Paid for by the American taxpayer, who no longer needs the money to travel safely in many areas of the world because there are going to be more people out there who would like to attach electrodes to our tender parts. Then there is the shock that people who used to admire America received that the great defender of freedom and democracy has established secret detention centers to circumvent its own rules for detainees and POWs. The Geneva Conventions, and secretly ships of those it singles out for special treatment to torturers on brutal regimes.

Put yourself in the position of the torture victim. What happens when you do ”spill your guts”? You get really your guts spilled, that's what. You are not longer of use and now your tormentors can have some fun with you. Remember the Inquisition? Talk about a losing proposition for the victim. If you don't admit that you had sex with the devil (or with “that woman”), or whatever the inquisitors want you to admit to, they just move you over from the thumb screws, to the strappado, to the rack, to the red hot pincers . . . well, you get the idea. Deny having sex with that woman, and they just keep it up; they know the answer they want: it's the answer that will justify taking you out to the town square, tie you to a pole and turn you into a tiki torch to the amusement of the slavering crowd. They often did this even if you didn't confess, but their tribunal judged you guilty anyway. [3] (“Yes, yes, I did have sex with that woman! Now would you please remove those wires from my testicles?”)

I tried to torture my own child one time. I was convinced that daughter Lisa, then about 4 years old I think, had been playing with her mother's ring and dropped it and chipped the opal stone. Lisa liked to play with that ring. We just wanted the truth, but Lisa just wouldn't fess up to breaking the stone. I figured that she feared the punishment because she had been instructed not to play with the ring; so she figured what was the point in telling the truth, better to do the torture. We pleaded, I threatened, to no avail. We tried to assure her that if she told us the truth nothing would happen to her, but she had been baptized a Roman Catholic.

Torture was the only way to get the truth, I was sure of it. I thought of ordering her to play with, Sondra, the girl next door, two-years older and a bona fide sadist and bicycle thief. Sondra made the Gestapo look like Teletubbies. No, we might never see Lisa again. I settled on bedroom detention without the company of favorite stuffed animal; at certain ages this can be considered “cruel and unusual punishment.” After two days she was released because now Laura was torturing us because she didn't have a sister to play with. A week or so later Lisa was helping her mother baking cookies and she just casually said, “Mom, I'm sorry I broke your ring. I'll buy you a new one.” See?

So what does this all mean about torture? I don't know! I just got this far and wondered the same thing myself. At least it means that for every suspected terrorist from which we might get the location of a bomb (which has probably long been exploded anyway) our pictures and torture policies for detainees probably get us a dozen new terrorists. Does that mean we should let them all go? Of course not. But give them some due process, the kind we're always saying we use and want Iraq to have; don't ship tem off in the night to a former Soviet gulag or some Egyptian chamber of horrors. Oh, and all this might mean is that, if we really want some truthful information from these detainees, we might try baking some cookies with them. Cheney already looks like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

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[1] See also essays on or related to torture, nos. 16.2, and 16.9

[2] While it might seem that torture by the American military is an issue that has arisen with our preemptive war in Iraq we have been teaching torture for many years to South American dictators through our School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

[3] Ya gotta love those Inquisitors. This was called an auto da fe (literally an “act of faith”; not a “barbeque”). Not that they couldn't be merciful; if you were willing to confess before the flames roasted you to death they would let you kiss a crucifix and then someone would garrote you to death (quicker that being roasted). But they still burned your body. The Inquisitors would be proud of their work; they would have “saved a soul” and provided some local entertainment.

26. 6: PANEM ET CIRCENSES, America's Finest(?) City, Part 1 11.10.2005

Even though I have been a resident of California longer than I lived in New York, I have never quite felt like a San Diegan. Maybe the migrant always holds onto a bit of “home,” even though home blends with reveries of youth and other habits of memory that filter out unpleasant details. Moreover, San Diego has been a city that my profession forced me to scrutinize well beyond the interests of residency per se .

I believe that I am on safe grounds in saying that if one took a survey that the overwhelming reason respondents would give for their approval of San Diego is that it is endowed with one of the finest physical settings and micro-climates in the world. Yet I always found it difficult to swallow the local boosters' hubris that San Diego is “America's Finest City.” So, somewhat in paraphrase of former Philadelphia mayor, Frank Rizzo's statement that "the streets are safe in Philadelphia, it's only the people who make them unsafe ,” San Diego is not America's finest city because its government is not the finest. (If, by extension it can be said that people get the government they deserve, then San Diego's people are not so great either.)

If that sounds a bit petty and querulous, perhaps it is; but it's mainly to engage your attention to what I really want to address, and that is the mayoral election and the issues that surrounded it. Nobody is going around these days trumpeting the “America's Finest City,” nonsense because San Diego got itself in a bit of a mess. That's a long and somewhat complicated story that needs no recounting here. It became a national story that obliterated all of the years of “finest city” hype with a public enterprise fiscal mismanagement to rival some of the notorious ones in the private sector, a sleazy sellout for campaign funds by three council members, and the tragi-comedy of a mayor who first didn't want to run again, then did, then lost (by the numbers), then won, by the grace of a judicial decision worthy of Scalia, then resigned (presumable after time enough to vest his pension), leaving the city only immeasurably leaderless than it was with him in office.

San Diego had always prided itself on its putatively clean and professional council-manager form of government (I believe it was the largest city with that form) until it finally overcame the editorializing of the only daily paper in town that prints “all the new that's fit to wrap your fish guts in” and for years frightened the politically neutered local populace that any change would give Hizonner Dick Daley and his “political machine” the keys to the city.

But anyplace where there is a buck to be made – and San Diego's gold is right under your feet and over you toasting your epidermis to that fabled California golden tan – will have a “machine” in operation if you are willing to scratch the surface. The traditional machine has been the real estate – highway complex; its formula was (and is) as old as John Jacob Astor's dictum that “landlords grow rich while they sleep.” Where there is demand make the land accessible and real estate value pops out of the ground like poppies on an Afghan farm. It makes that 49er gold look like chump change.

There was some “old money” around; San Diego's location in the lower, left-hand corner of the country put it closest to where the Humboldt Current routed shoals of tuna and other “chickens” of the sea. There are some neighborhoods of large, fine old houses owned by the Portuguese fishing families. Then that was eclipsed by what might be called the “Lindberg Effect”: al those nice flat mesas, those updrafts off the ocean, and the cloudless skies proved ideal for trying out new-fangled flying things. Toss in the Navy (good harbor), huge aerospace and defense budgets, and you pretty much have the recipe for a rip-roaring (albeit at times booming and busting) metropolis. As that has abated with some relocations and the “peace dividend” the weather has helped again in seducing Jonas Salk and bunch of Nobel Laureates and now some 150 or so bio-tech enterprises are mining DNA in the latest gold rush (once you get to paradise you expect to live longer).

Hey, he hasn't even mentioned the Chargers and Padres, you're thinking. That's right, and it's intentional. Think of it this way: remember those gold and silver mining towns of the 49er days? Well, the second thing that moved into those towns after the general store was a saloon with an attached whorehouse. Too bad if you are a fan, but if the analogy escapes you, you should spend less time at the stadium or the ball park and a bit more time reading. Whatever they tell you, these enterprises probably eat up as much local wealth as they contribute when all the (legitimate) accounting is in. They are the fiscal parasites, and they get the sweetheart stadium deals and the new ballparks because, if they don't, they will unleash the 30 or 40 thousand yahoos they keep off the streets eighty or so days a year on your city council meeting. Their owners are big egos with bucks to match that know how to play wannabes who want tickets to sky boxes the way a cat plays a sparrow with a broken wing.

Nevertheless, pro sports franchises lend a certain sort of Las Vegasy glitz and glamour to a city, and are an index in the minds of local boosters of having “made it into the urban big time.” Being the site of a Super Bowl, or a World Series puts a city on the map, especially when there is little else to put it on the map. But they are transient events, a quick jolt of financial crack-cocaine for the economy that is swept away like the programs ad paper cups at the stadium. They do not make cities great.

And that, in a sense, is what is at the root of San Diego's self-inflicted fall from its self-constructed pedistal as “America's Finest City.” Like a woman (I'm going to hear about this analogy) that has been blessed with beautiful and bounteous physical endowments, and never had much of a tough go at things beyond the occasional brush fire, it really hasn't proved itself a city worthy of the title, much less that of a “great city.” Having had things relatively easy it hasn't, it seems, built much urban “character” or earned much respect.

“Having it all” has also played into the political culture of San Diego. Its economic blessings have endowed a public purse that could play to the fiscal parsimony of its political culture without having to make many hard choices. The tax rate can stay low and the streets could get paved. It has been the perfect domain for the “cheapskate” local citizen, and the politician who can pledge never to raise your taxes. It was a long, good, and easy run. San Diego has always been able to have its “bread and circus.”

But that was then. [To be Continued]

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26. 5: THE KANSAS SCHOOL BOARD SCIENCE NEWS 11.16.2005

Students from science teacher Evangeline Suggs' class were given the assignment of going out and finding the best examples of the Lord's “Intelligent Design.” The top three examples were:

The Kansas City School Board has endorsed the petition of Flat Earth Society to have their theory given equal consideration as prevailing “round earth” theories in school books.” Students will be taught that California and New York are ”off the edge” and junior year school trips will no longer go to these states. Angry parents, who have waited years to be rid of their kids for a couple of weeks were assuaged when the Board told them that children who are in those states will “not be taken up by the Rapture when they are there.”

Kansas School Board met out of doors last Tuesday where its president pointed skyward and said that “anyone could see that it looks likes the sun revolves around the earth.” Schoolbooks will be changed accordingly to give equal weight to a terracentric universe theory. Board member Purvis Naskar said he couldn't believe why anyone ever believed “a dangfool theory by some crazy old Italian guy who dropped his balls offa a leanin' tara of pizza!”

The School Board voted unanimously to declare that it is accepting research done by Rev. Jedadiah Suggs of Bob Jones University that microscopic evidence proves that germs look too much like evil spirits to be ignored in textbooks. The Rev. showed the Board pictures from his microscope that looked like this.

Rev. Suggs said that sick children no longer need to be sent to the school nurse, when any “saved” teacher can cure the child with a sharp slap on the child's forehead and a shout of “Praise Jesus!” “Under ultraviolet light the little devils can be seen fleeing the room,” Rev. Suggs added.

Kansas School Board declared that new proof that dinosaurs lived as recently as 5,000 years ago and were killed off by the army of the lost tribe of Israel that was led by the Angel Moroni. The new theory was advanced by Paleontologist Methusaleh Suggs, of Liberty University, who also maintained that “there never existed any dinosaurs that were larger than three feet high.” Prof. Suggs says he can prove that the giant bones that have been unearthed have been swelled by the many years of water that has seeped through the soil. The Prof. maintains that the dinosaurs had to be killed by the Angel's legions “because they were attacking and eating too many buffalos.” [1]

Beginning next school year Kansas school children will be taught sex education, but pictures or representations of human genitalia will not be allowed to be shown. Human reproductive organs, said School Board member Hortense Suggs, may be only referred too as a “man thingy” and “woman thingy.” However, Mrs. Suggs, who had to leave the meeting early to birth her 17 th child, was unsuccessful in getting her proposal that sex ed curriculum teach that homosexuals are the product of people using their “man thingies and woman thingies out of wedlock.” The text will continue to teach that homosexuals are the offspring of shepherds who could not channel their long nights of loneliness into prayer.

A Kansas City parent is suing to have high school textbooks changed. Clarence Suggs, owner of Suggs Savings and Loan and Car Wash, has filed a claim that school officials have doctored photos of clouds in school science textbooks to look like face of Jesus. Suggs told news reporters that “Anyone can go outside and see that clouds look like the face of Elvis.”

The Rev. Billy Sunday High School “Judean Anglers” took this year's football championship from Falwell High's “Fighting Pharasees” by a score of 28 – 23. Angler Coach Caleb Suggs said Jesus had appeared him the night before and told him that “on a third and three in the red zone the Messiah said I should send in the play: ‘Ark of Covenant Right – split left – blue – zag - on halleluelia'.” The Anglers are the first team to win the championship since the Kansas School Board required all schools sports to adopt Biblical team names.

Hortense Suggs, was elected president of the Kansas School Board yesterday. Visibly pregnant with her 18 th child Mrs. Suggs announced that her priority this year will be to get the section on Homo Erectus removed from science textbooks. “Aroused sodomites belong in their gay bars, not in our textbooks!” thundered the new president.

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[1] The buffalo is the official state animal of Kansas. The state flower is the sunflower, The state song is “Home on the Range”. The official state kitchen appliance is the blender. The official state dog is named “Toto.” The state god is The Christ.

26. 4: THOUGHTS ON VETERANS DAY 11.12.2005

Uncle Pat and band members board a C-47. They also

Every Veteran's Day we are supposed to honor the men and women who fought and died for this country in past wars. It is natural to think of people you know or knew. I always think of my uncles; they were my heroes when I was a kid and I saw them in their uniforms from WWII I was proud indeed. One fought in North Africa and Italy, another who fought in Burma, one who test-flew B-25s, and another who played violin in the Army-Air Force Orchestra. They served in what some have come to call “the good war.” Those that survived are now dying by the thousands every day, casualties of aging. They are venerated by Americans and peoples of other nations almost universally and almost without equivocation.

I know some who served in Vietnam as well, all non-combat veterans, guys I went to college and grad school with. Veterans Day isn't as pleasant a day for many vets from this conflict; they didn't get parades and many were unfairly mistreated because they served in a foolish conflict with ill-defined objectives and fueled with ideological myopia and were the nearest ones to ventilate frustration upon. Some were, and remain, like the Swift Boat Veterans and their ilk, gung ho and unequivocal about that conflict; others have made some sort of accommodation with their experience. The Johnson administration couldn't stop it and the Nixon administration stubbornly protracted it until we sent a nasty little nebbish with a comical German accent to Paris with a white flag. We left with our Huey tail-rotors between our legs and consigned the South Vietnamese Army to slaughter. Half the world and half of us despised or disrespected us for that one.

Now we are at war again, a putative preemptive war to save us from WMDs that were never there and our leaders knew were not there. A dirty little war cooked up in the scheming cabal of the neo-cons who operate a dim-witted president and with the lethal undertone of reciprocal jihadism. This one isn't just about political hegemony, but about religious hegemony as well. This one isn't against an ideology already dying of its own rigidities, but against a faith and its extremist elements that are nurtured by the very misdirected blunt instrument way in which we have addressed its crimes against us. This one just won't stay nicely, and remotely, confined to a sliver of Indochina.

You just have to wonder how far down this loony president and the theopathic American Taliban that shores him up will take us. We were the laughing stick of the world when we impeached an internationally very popular president for committing adultery with a consenting intern. Now most all of the world dislikes us for a preemptive invasion of Iraq, and the people we were supposed to be liberating despise us for grabbing some of its citizens who we think might be terrorists and torturing them. Then they have watched as insurgents in gallabyas and flip-flops and toting outmoded weapons have held their own against American soldiers who look like robots from outer space and have tanks, planes, hummers, and high-tech weaponry. The Bush administration then botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and said they couldn't get to go where news crews with cameras had been days ahead of them. So the world got to watch as Americans looked like Somali refugees than like citizens from the richest, strongest nation on earth. Now the world will watch as we start teaching a form of pseudo-science worthy of the 14 th Century that has no scientific evidence or experimentation to support it as equal to Darwinian theory. The sum of it is the work of a plurality of bellicose, mean-spirited idiots, supporting an idiot, who now want to make the nation's children as stupid as they are. That's how far down he has taken us. Is this the sort of America that so many have died for? Is this the sort of America that honors its veterans with deeds rather than parades?

If you have to travel out into the world with your American passport, be embarrassed, be really embarrassed. And be scared, be more scared than you were before. And, oh, you might want to leave those pseudo-patriotic flags and “support our troops” sticker-ribbons home.

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26. 3: PARIS IN THE FIFTIES, by Stanley Karnow, 1997 [BR]

The last time I saw Paris / Her heart was warm and gay

I heard the laughter of her heart / In every street café

Jerome Kern

Forget Paris? Since the “F-word” made it's indelible appearance in feature films not too many years ago the reality of everyday speech has been a problem for producers getting to the money that is blocked by that PG-13 rating because of “strong language.” This caused many a 13-year-old to protest with the blistering scatology of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas The answer? Dub the word “forget” wherever the “F-word” appears and, voila , a new rating! So, are 13-year-olds going around telling their parents “ forget you, dad!” and “this dinner forgetting sucks, mom!” And are rappers rapping on about how many “ motherforgetters” they have shot? No forgetting way, man.

There may have been other motivations for Billy Crystal naming his film Forget Paris (1995), unless, like some of those Midwestern package tourists who have asked a Parisian waiter how to get to Notre Dame and ended up closer to the one with the football team, he has had a dark experience in the City of Lights. But, if you've seen Casablanca , you know that even an experience in Paris that goes sour can be unforgettable. [1] Some of my own unforgettable (at least by me) experiences in Paris over several years are recorded in these pages [20.1, 18.7, 5.13, 4.12, 4.9. 4.2, and 2.5], but I'm mentally re-visiting Paris this time through the memories of Stanley Karnow.

Paris is often referred to by its “ages”:medieval Paris, the Paris of St. Louis, Paris in the Terror, Belle Epoque Paris, The Paris of the Lost Generation. Then there is that post WWII Paris of The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954) with Liz Taylor and Van Johnson romping around the wehrmacht -vacated streets. [2] It was a heady time, halcyon days, some might say, when Parisians still loved Yanks for a while and the old cafés that Hemingway and Fitzgerald used to hang at were again available for the next generation of aspiring ex-pat writers. This is the time Karnow evokes so well because his book draws upon the lengthy dispatches he sent to New York as a young reporter for Time magazine during the fifties. A lot of what he wrote ended up on the “cutting room floor” at Time's offices, but has been swept up into Paris in the Fifties in a way that feels very vivid and current.

Karnow went to Paris on what was to be a brief European backpack after graduating from Harvard and ended up there for nine years, along the way turning his schoolboy Français to a fluency that allowed him to research stories and conduct interviews with many of the famous and infamous of the time. Karnow, great journalist that he is, [3] never gets in the way of stories even, despite his extra-journalistic associations, with many of his subjects. They include the fifties generation of William Burroughs, Brendan Behan, Otto Friedrich, and James Baldwin, among a number of French literati and political figures.

One learns that a Time correspondent gets to interview and hang out with the prevailing gourmands (Cournonsky), intellectuals (Malraux), political figures who flew across the secular French firmament, such as the right-winger, Pierre Poujade, whose acolyte at the time (and who barely receives a mention) was an Indochina veteran named Jean Marie Le Pen, and couturiers like Dior. Karnow grounds these stories in historical material that is equally interesting in helping us try to understand the French. Many people might know that Louis XIV used to invited lesser royalty into his morning toilet to watch him make his morning merde , and then give one of them the privilege of wiping his royal derriere ; but how many of you know that Ho Chi Minh (who did not go by that name at the time) once served as a pastry chef for the renowned George-Auguste Escoffier (would you like to try our new croissant stuffed with C-4, monsieur?).

Although my own time in Paris has been far briefer than Karnow's I felt a kinship with him when after, a couple of years there, he could write a sentence like: “After a while, I began to feel, a Time subscriber might conclude that, by and large, France was a degenerate nation of gourmets, adulterers, leftist intellectuals and volatile politicians who could not prevent their government from collapsing every few months.” It's that sort of familiarity one gets with a foreign culture that such stereotypes do not ring true when they are invoked, but one can never quite write them out of the subtext.

Sometimes that is difficult to do. A dear French friend of mine used to instruct me gently, and without the slightest tinge of snobbery or superiority, that with the particular wine she had opened we must have cet specific frommage, cet specific pain, and finish it all off with a Gauloise cigarette (or was that a Gitane?). This is what the French call le savior-vivre, knowing how to live (as long as it's not too many of those Gauloise, or was it Gitane?). Perhaps the French [4] must be experienced to be appreciated, but Karnow gets you about as close to that as one can be without “being there.”

Forget Paris? How could Karnow ever do that; he met his first and second (current?) wife there. I won't ever forget Paris either; over the years I have been there when her heart was “warm and gay” and when it felt a bit more froid. An outsider might never get into their le savior-vivre they way they do, but would the French, and particularly those Parisians, be as much fun to write about, or as interesting, any other way? [5]

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[1] What?! You haven't seen Casablanca ? Where the hell have you been, in the witness protection program in Borneo? “This could be the end of a beautiful friendship.” Rent it.

[2] What?! You haven't seen The Last Time I Saw Paris and hummed that haunting melody for a week? Rent it when you rent Casablanca. There'll be a quiz on Monday

[3] Karnow is a multiple Pulitzer Prize journalist and author of what many regard as the best book on the Vietnam war.

[4] The Parisians are often considered a separate breed from the French in general and the latter cohort can react to their compatriots in the capitol the way those American Midwesterners react to Parisian waiters.

[5] I also highly recommend Sanche De Gramont, The French (1969) if you can locate a copy. I read it before I went to Paris as a visiting professor in 1989 and it saved me a faux-pas , or deux .

26. 2: A LINE IN THE SAND 11.6.2005

Like Whigs and Tories, No-Nothings and Free Silverites and other anachronisms it's time for some more up-to-date and accurate rubrics for our political parties. I have a proposal, but, first, to get you in the proper frame of mind, I want to tell you a joke I heard many years ago, but today it seems to have the ring of a parable. It goes like this.

Back in the Dark Ages a village was attacked by a band of barbarians. They robbed the livestock, burned the granaries, and worse. One of the barbarians stormed into one of the huts where a couple is cowering. He grabs the woman and throws her on the bed, turns to the husband and says “I'm gonna rape your wife.” Then, with his sword he scores a line across the dirt floor front of the husband. “You're gonna watch from behind this line; but if you even take one step over it I'll run this sword through you.”

Then the barbarian commences raping the man's wife, glancing occasionally over his shoulder at the husband standing meekly behind the line. The wife protests and fights back, but the barbarian has his way with her and, after a few minutes, gets up and leaves.

The husband rushes to his wife's side. She sobs to him “Why didn't you do something? You just stood there and watched while that filthy beast was raping me!”

“But I did, I did,” replied the husband.

“What do you mean? You just stood there are watched him rape me,” she sobs angrily.

“I did not. Didn't you see?” The husband gets a satisfied look on his face. “When he wasn't looking I stepped over that line three times !”

Today I wonder whether this is a joke, or an allegory for the state of our two-party political system. It seems not too much of a stretch that we have evolved a political system that consists of a party of pillaging barbarians \and wimpy victims lacking the courage to fight them. We need to rename the Republicans and Democrats; they are (respectively, of course) “Scumbags” and “Weenies”.

Getting overrun by barbarians is the metaphorical equivalent of America getting the government it deserves. Is it the kind of government that the Scumbags grabbed off with their sucker-punch tactics in Florida in 2000, with the assistance of the greaseball of the Supreme Court? [1] Or, you could say that it is the kind of government you get when a Weenie like Al Gore, as they say, “bends over.” Take your pick. The amazing thing is that the Weenies apparently didn't get enough of a working over the first time and still think that they can abide by the Marquis de Queensbury when those Scumbags have tire irons and baseball bats.

So we now have the following political strategies: the Scumbags have been given an additional four years to pillage everything that isn't nailed down and some things that are. A putative “war on terror” and a couple of natural disasters provide sufficient cover for unprecedented government expenditures, financed by debt, [2] much of which ends up in the pockets of their fellow Scumbags who, in turn, are given a pass when it comes to tax time. No wonder that the number of lobbyists in Washington have more than doubled to nearly 35,000 during the Scumbag years. It's a reveille for Scumbags. And while our pockets are being picked our freedoms to control our own lives are classified as immoral and legislated against. The Scumbags snuck into the village in the guise of supposed “conservatives” with frugal and non-intrusive government among their commandments, then changed all that, but still have the support of the American Taliban and Red State “useful idiots.”

The strategy of the Weenies seems to be like spectators at a gang rape and let the Scumbags rob the national store in the hopes that somebody will call 911 and the country will wake up and throw the rascals out. Weenies want to follow the rules nicely, believing and wanting to teach the world to sing the anthem that “nice makes right.” But Scumbags don't play nice; nice is a sign of weakness, a sign that Weenies will stay on their side of the line. Nice is another word for loser to a Scumbag. They are not even nice with their own; go ask Colin Powell. And the only 911 they respond to is how 9-11 can fatten the military budget and Halliburton's profits. If you are nice you can't make preemptive wars that result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocents (let God sort them out from the insurgents), or set up foreign gulags so they can engage in torture, or commit what amounts to treason when they go after people like Valerie Plame.

Maybe letting these arrogant bastards self-destruct is a strategy of a sort, but the Weenies might be laying a sucker bet that the new American two-party system will consist of extreme Scumbags and moderate Scumbags and Weenies will be relegated to permanent seats in the bleachers. The Weenies have largely stood by as the Scumbags have flaunted campaign financing laws, had minions in high places (like brother Jeb and Mr. Black in Ohio) to mess with elections, have gerrymandered loads of electoral districts, and unleashed slandering hit squads like the Swiftboat Veterans, among other banana republic practices they have engaged in.

Now, it looks like the Weenies, who have lost control of the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government are about to surrender the third and last branch to the Scumbags pretty much without a fight. Will they will wimper and waddle back to their comfy sinecures with sore butts once again, or will they rise and fight? If they do, they might find that the people, or enough of them, are ready to rally behind them.

It's a hope that dims by the day. The Las Vegas money is that the Scumbags will continue their rapacious ways and the Weenies will wait until nobody is looking and, courageously, gingerly dance over that line in the sand for the third time .

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[1] Yes, the “greasball” crack does refer to Antonin Scalia. In invoke the privilege of using ethnic epithets on my own ethnic group.

[2] The debt will be paid off by generations of Weenies; Scumbags will be getting a permanent tax break.

26. 1: THE MULTI-TASKING MIND 11.1.2005

We are still in the Jurassic of brain research, at least compared with what we know about the rest of our physiology, of which there is also a great deal left to learn. So, as the reader might well learn from this piece—a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing. But, here goes anyway.

One of the things we have learned is that the brain can do some of its own “re-wiring.” People who have had brain injuries, or even lost parts of their brain have shown us that other parts of the brain (remember, it's sort of compartmentalized, like a butcher's cow diagram, into different functions) can take over for missing parts. So, while a lot of brain function is the product of biology and inheritance, we also, by way of the things we ask our brains to do, do a bit of re-wiring of our own.

What my brain has been wondering of late is: Is there something going on with our brains these days that we need to be more attentive to? We basically have the same brain that Cro-Magnon man had (except for Republicans, who got the Neanderthal version [1] ), but our brains are being asked to do some stuff that even our immediate ancestors did not have to deal with. One is that our brains need to work longer than ever before because the increase in life span. Cro-Magnon people were senior citizens by their teens and were lucky to get to their late twenties. Go back a hundred years and most people were kicking off before they were fifty. These days, a fifty-year-old brain is still trying to figure out how to program a VCR and planning to enjoy a span of retirement that may be longer than their working years, hopefully without getting Alzheimer's, or developing prostate problems or osteoporosis, diseases people didn't live long enough to get.

Second, for all of human history except recent decades our brains didn't have to deal with so many forms of knowledge, assess the validity of some many forms of “expertise” and increasingly, even change professions in order to survive. Our modern brains have to process enormous amounts of information, much of it designed to exert influence on our minds through various means of indoctrination, and subliminal persuasion. The brain might be bombarded with thousands of images in a single day. Some people try to simplify the process of dealing with vast and often contrary information my surrendering their minds to simplistic formulations, cults, superstitions, and especially religions that purport to explain or make sense of it all. This is LBD, “Lazy Brain Disease,” which is particularly virulent in Red States.

Third, our brains are increasingly asked to perform multiple tasks at the same time, like driving an SUV and making an appointment to have your nails done over your cell phone, or to have three applications open on your computer so you can compose email, download some music to your iTunes, while talking to someone on your speaker phone with the radio and/or the television on in the background.

Often we go for long periods of time in which our brains are being stimulated with multiple tasks we must perform, but in our“leisure” as well. Some people go from their TV, to their iPod, to their cell phone for long periods external stimulus without any “down time” for just reflection and introspection. Some people are never “alone”; that cell phone with its speed dialer always at the ready to be “with” someone else. Even though we live longer, putatively “save time” with our computers, easier communication, and faster transportation, we might be spending less time with “ourselves,” with our own brains, than ever before.

Now comes an item in Newsweek (10/17/05, page 61) titles “A Problem in the Brain.” It's about ADHD, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. It reports that this disorder, which we used to associate with hyperactive kids has been growing exponentially in adults. It is still increasing in kids (0-19), fifty-seven percent in the 2000-04 period; but by ninety-eight percent in adults (20-64) for the same period. There are now about 1.5 million adults taking medication for symptoms such as hyperactivity, inattentiveness, or both. [2] So, . . . . Hey! Stay with me here!

So, might some of this ADHD be the result of long periods in which brains are asked to do more and more things, faster and faster? Might such multi-tasking and less un-reflective brain time be resulting in “re-wired” brains that aren't able to stay focused, or always telling us that there is something else we are supposed to be doing? Could it be that all this time surfing the Internet while listening to the 1000K tunes on your iPod, or frantically trying to beat some computer game of wiping out zillions of pixilated aliens faster than you did last time, or fiddling with your PDA, emailing on your Blackberry, or the composing a ext message on your cell phone, is preparing us for jobs that expect us to multi-task, and at which, it was announced recently, workers are averaging 54 hours a week? These are just rhetorical questions, but they might be formed up into researchable hypotheses about the sorts of work-leisure patterns we have evolved and the “re-wiring” consequences they might have. Big Pharma will probably be researching a different dimension of the problem; in 2004 their sales on drugs for ADHD were over $3.1, up three-quarters of a billion from 2000.

Hey! Hold on a sec . . . that's the phone . . . no, wait, it's the cell phone . . . where did I put that damn thing . . . huh? . . . wait a sec, will ya . . . there goes the fax . . . aha! There's the cell phone, it was by the fax machine . . . hello . . . Hey, No, I told you Nigerian con artist bastards I'm not giving you my bank account numbers! Go eat some yellow-cake! . . . let's see what this fax is about? Chilloutin , a new drug to relax your . . . right, I'll ask my doctor . . . Oh, oh, that's the email chime . . . hold on, sorry, let me just check these . . .

OK, I'm back. Now, where were we . . . ?

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[1] They are not going to get this anyway. So I have made available a one-syllable version they can access at www.bushbrain.dim

[2] Of course, anything that is measured with increases in uses of pharmaceuticals has to be taken (excuse the pun) with a grain of salt, since Big Pharma has been pushing its medicaments in every medium, telling you to “ask your doctor” to let you try them out. Hence, there might have been a good deal of ADHD around before, but un-self-diagnosed. (Cf. DCJournal, No. 6.5)