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After 35 straight veto victories, intense lobbying fails president with election in offing
By Elaine S. Povich
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
WASHINGTON - Despite intense White House lobbying, Congress has voted to override the veto of a cable television regulation bill, dealing President Bush the first veto defeat of his presidency just four weeks before the election.
Monday night, the Senate overrode the veto 74-25. the same margin by which the upper house approved the bill last month and comfortably above the two-thirds majority needed.
Not one senator changed sides, a blow to Bush's prestige after he had heavily lobbied Republican senators, urging them not to embarrass him this close to the election.
Both California senators, Republican John Seymour and Democrat Alan Cranston, voted to sustain the veto.
The bill was immediately sent to the House, which voted 308-114 for the override, 26 more than needed. A cheer went up as the House vote was tallied, ending Bush's string of successful vetoes at 35.
Among those voting to override in the Senate was Democratic vice presidential nominee Al Gore, a co-author of the bill. He then left the chamber to join Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton on 'Larry King Live' on CNN.
Asked whether it was a blow to Bush for the override to fall so close to the election, Clinton said, "It won't do him any good."
Bush attributed the vote to effective lobbying by the TV broadcast networks on Capitol Hill.
"I think I was right on principle," Bush said in an interview on ABC's 'Good Morning America.'
"I think the approach I had would have kept consumer costs down. It was a battle between the networks against cable, and the networks did a very good job of convincing people that their approach would keep costs down."
Of his first veto defeat, Bush said: "We've had a good streak. We won 35 straight. Lost one. Not a bad record."
The administration, all but giving up on the House, had concentrated its efforts on the Senate. Bush lobbied eight Republican senators over the weekend, telephoning them from the campaign trail and inviting a select group to breakfast at the White House on Sunday.
But it became apparent Monday evening that the pressure had failed when, one after another, the lobbied senators voted against their president. As each of their votes was announced, an "ooooh" was heard from the packed galleries.
Some of the targeted senators had indicated they would switch and support Bush, but when it became apparent the president would lose, not one changed his vote - including Senate Minority Whip Alan Simpson of Wyoming, who had tried to sway other senators to Bush's side.
"There was no point for those who wanted to support the president to switch when he wasn't going to win anyway," said Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash.
In the House, 230 Democrats, 77 Republicans and one independent voted for the bill while 29 Democrats and 85 Republicans opposed it.
The bill was passed in the Senate by 50 Democrats and 24 Republicans and opposed by seven Democrats and 18 Republicans.
Many Republicans, especially those up for re-election, viewed the cable television re-regulation bill, which was aimed at lowering cable rates, as a boon to consumers.
But the politics of the issue were visible. As an example, Democratic leaders in the Senate allowed Republicans to control the debate for and against the bill, a highly unusual move and an apparent effort to show Bush at odds with members of his own party.
"This is an effort to embarrass President Bush 30 days before the election," Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas said before the vote. "I urge my colleagues to sustain the president's veto. He hasn't asked for much."
Bush put his reputation of governing by veto on the line in urging the Senate to sustain him one last time before the election.
Some Republican senators said they had advised Bush not to sign or veto the cable legislation but instead let it go into law without his signature, thus avoiding the high-profile veto fight.
The cable television re-regulation bill was drafted in response to consumer complaints to Congress that cable prices had risen at three times the inflation rate and that many cable companies hold monopolies.
But it soon became a high-stakes fight between the cable industry and over-the-air broadcasters, each using their own medium to press their opposing points.
In frequent ads, the cable industry argued that rates would actually rise, not decrease, if the bill became law because of a provision that requires the cable companies to reimburse broadcasters for programming the cable companies now get for free.
Broadcasters and consumer groups used their airwaves to argue for the bill, noting that it would limit rates for cable service, require cable operators to meet customer-service standards and make it easier for competing cable companies to enter the market.
Clinton follows rivals to 'talk TV'
But few callers get through to candidate
EXAMINER NEWS SERVICES
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton went boldly where his presidential rivals have already gone - CNN's 'Larry King Live' - but callers to the show didn't get much of a say in the proceedings.
For a show billed as an opportunity for voters to question Clinton and running mate Al Gore, only six callers got through as King did most of the asking. One of the callers was Clinton's mother, Virginia Kelley.
President Bush appeared on the King show Sunday night - and took no viewer calls. Independent candidate Ross Perot has had several sessions with King, including one in February during which he first said he was interested in running for president.
Clinton and Gore made their foray into TV-talk politics after a daylong bus caravan across central Florida as they tried to pad a narrow lead in a state that last supported a Democrat for president in 1976.
The Democrats were wrapping up their Florida trip with a morning rally at the University of Florida before heading on to Nashville and another unorthodox campaign appearance - this time on the 'Donahue' show.
With the first of three presidential debates set for Sunday in St. Louis, Clinton said he was eager to engage Bush. And he disputed the president's assertion, made in Florida over the weekend, that Bush's military service made him more qualified to be commander-in-chief.
"That's a matter of honest disagreement, but I just disagree, and history indicates we have had a lot of good commanders-in-chief with no military service," Clinton said.
Clinton also upped the ante somewhat in his rhetorical war with Bush over the president's dealings with Saddam Hussein prior to the Persian Gulf war, saying a special prosecutor should investigate the Bush administration's favorable trade dealings with Iraq and the extent to which Bush continued helping Hussein after the U.S. administration learned Hussein was using agriculture credits for military purposes.
Asked by King whether there should be "a special prosecutor, special investigation," of the administration's pre-war trade agreements with Hussein, Clinton responded, "I think there should be."
Clinton also defended his 1970 travels, which Bush's camp has insinuated were somehow connected to his alleged organization of at least one anti-Vietnam War protest as a graduate student in England.
A statement by the Bush campaign, echoing a report in the Washington Times Monday, charged that Clinton had "turned up in the Soviet Union ... six weeks after he helped organize a massive anti-war protest in London."
"They're pretty good at starting stuff, those guys are," Clinton said of the Republicans.
He said that starting in the first week of 1970 he had toured Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland before spending a week in the Soviet Union. He said he had returned to England via Czechoslovakia during a 40-day break from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar in 1969 and 1970.
Newsweek magazine reported Sunday that the FBI had been called to investigate after State Department officials found that several pages had been ripped out of a Clinton passport file.
Newsweek suggested that the material could have been removed or destroyed by someone sympathetic to the Clinton campaign. Or, the magazine speculated, a supporter of the Bush administration might have taken the documents to give the appearance that incriminating material had been removed.
"I didn't even know I had a State Department file until this rumor came up," Clinton said.
On the campaign trail Monday, Bush attacked Clinton during campaign stops in Dover, Del. Bush concentrated his fire on Arkansas' poor standing among the 50 states in the death rate for children under 14, the number of children in poverty and the violent death rate of youngsters.
In all those categories, Bush said the national average had improved but the average in Arkansas had slipped. The president accused Clinton of "not leveling with the American people" on his dealing with the problems.
Bush also criticized Clinton for his qualified endorsement of the North American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico, saying his opponent had wavered on the pact, which will be initialed by negotiators Wednesday in Texas.
"Once upon a time he said he was for NAFTA, the free trade agreement," Bush told the crowd. "Then the labor bosses told him they were against it, so he said he wasn't sure he was for it or against it.
"Now he's looked at the polls, and he sees the American people want NAFTA, so just yesterday he said he's for it."
But the president said Clinton "saddled his support with all kinds of reservations and qualifications."
Clinton endorsed the agreement Sunday but said additional steps should be taken to ensure the protection of American jobs and the environment as the agreement was implemented.
Taunting disrupts campaign stroll
Vice president's visit to S.F. raises money, ire
By John Jacobs
EXAMINER CHIEF POLITICAL WRITER
Like a moth to flame, Vice President Dan Quayle is drawn to controversy in San Francisco.
Last May, he unleashed a national uproar here for rebuking fictional TV newscaster Murphy Brown for her decision to have a baby without a husband.
Late Monday, four weeks before the Nov.3 election, he drew crowds of angry, obscenity-spouting protesters who forced him back into his black Cadillac El Dorado limousine as he tried to walk along Grant Avenue in Chinatown.
Gay protesters chanting anti-Quayle slogans prompted the vice president's press secretary, David Beckwith, to charge that Democrat Bill Clinton "advocated affirmative action for gays."
"It is our view," he said, "they are not a protected class. The only way to determine who is in that class is to ask people, and we don't think that's anybody's business."
Even people in oats and ties were shouting "four more weeks" and "shame" as Quayle, always smiling, tried to walk from St. Mary's Chinese Catholic Center, where he toured several preschool classrooms, to Miriwa Restaurant. There, he appeared at a fund-raising dinner for Republican Senate candidate Bruce Herschensohn. Earlier in the day, Quayle appeared at a closed fund-raiser for Herschensohn in Palo Alto.
"We are going to win California - put it in the bank," Quayle told some 400 guests at the Miriwa, about half of them Asian, who paid $125 each to give the vice president a warm welcome.
Angry protesters
Across the street at the Ping Yuen Housing Center on Pacific Avenue, the local Clinton-Gore campaign sponsored an 'in-your-face' event criticizing Quayle.
"How dare you come to Chinatown and walk through her and think that's all we want from you, a photo op?" said Alicia Wong, a teacher at City College of San Francisco and a member of the Democratic National Committee. "Do you think we are so stupid we don't know what you've been doing to our community for the past 10 years? There are 7,000 children here living below the poverty line. Is that a good photo op?"
During his evening remarks, Quayle recounted his "magnificent experience" at the preschool, but he got the name wrong and called it "St. Francis."
Describing his "walk" afterward, Quayle said: "You'll probably see it on TV.
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U.S. CONGRESS RUSH TOWARD ADJOURNMENT
Dilemma headed Bush's way
Senate readies to pass a tempting but tax-tainted bill
By Michael Kranish
BOSTON GLOBE
WASHINGTON - Just as President Bush is trying to assure voters that he will not raise taxes, the Senate is putting his political will power to the test by preparing to pass a bill filled with programs that Bush has sought for months - but also including items that might be interpreted as tax hikes.
The bill is politically attractive to the president because it includes many measures that Bush has called for, including enterprise zones to revive urban and rural areas, and increased tax deductibility for individual retirement accounts. Moreover, it eliminates the luxury tax on boats and airplanes, as Bush has requested.
But some critics say the bill is a giveaway to special interests such as boat manufacturers and real estate tax shelter sales people. The $27 billion bill is such a political football that Democrat Bill Clinton has decided to take no position on it because it is too complicated, his spokesman said.
If this were any other time than a month before the presidential election, Bush would probably sign the bill and declare a great victory. After all, on Saturday, after Bush threatened to veto the legislation, Senate negotiators eliminated the two major taxes in the bill, leaving only some lesser tax items, some of which Bush had supported in the first place.
The bill appears a classic example of congressional compromise, not the 'gridlock Congress' that Bush has spent the year bashing for refusing to enact his programs. With the elimination of most of the tax hikes, some Republicans said it was tilted in Bush's favor. Bush seemed aware of his dilemma Monday when he acknowledged that he was not sure whether he would veto the bill.
"I have some real reservations about part of it, but the problem is they always send me something that has some of the things I want, and then loaded up with, in this instance, taxes," Bush said on ABC-TV Monday. "So I'll have to wait and see what final form it is in, because there are some things in there I like and have been fighting for."
That might seem like a natural opening for Clinton to accuse the president of waffling on the bill. But the bill is so politically sensitive that Clinton is avoiding the issue.
It is also possible that Republicans will help Bush avoid the issue altogether by filibustering the bill, delaying a vote until after the election. But many Republicans, such as Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon, said that Bush should sign the bill because it had so many elements that the president had backed.
Hard line on taxes
With Clinton remaining out of the fray, the focus is on whether Bush will get in political trouble if he signs a bill that could be interpreted as a tax hike.
Bush may have put himself in a bind because, in an effort to erase the memory of his broken "no new taxes" pledge, Bush has said he will not accept new tax increases. The dilemma for Bush is that the tax items in this bill are not normally considered tax increases. They are mostly technical measures, such as changing the way securities dealers calculate their inventory to bring in more tax revenues.
In this campaign, however, Bush has made an issue out of saying that anything that brings in more money to the government is a tax increase. For example, in charging that Democrat Bill Clinton has raised taxes and fees 128 times as governor, Bush has said that everything from the extension of a racing season to a fee for mineral rights is a tax or fee.
If Bush now signs a bill that has several items that would qualify as a tax or fee, it might undermine Bush's claims about Clinton's tax record.
Energy bill running out of time
Nuclear waste dump opponents stall measure in the Senate
EXAMINER NEWS SERVICES
WASHINGTON - After nearly two years and countless compromises, a long-awaited energy bill is in danger of stalling because of a dispute over a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada - and the rush by the 102nd Congress to adjourn.
The legislation, which would boost conservation through tax incentives and new efficiency standards and speed construction of nuclear power plants, cleared the House on Monday by a 363-60 vote.
But it immediately ran into problems in the Senate, where Nevada's two members vowed to delay the bill because of a provision they said would weaken health standards for a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain 100 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
The bill's supporters said they still expected Senate approval of the complex and sweeping energy package, which would mark the first major overhaul of U.S. energy policy in more than a decade.
But with most lawmakers eager to adjourn, the Nevadans hoped a delay threat might force Sen. Bennett Johnston, D-La., the bill's manager, to abandon the Yucca Mountain provision. Early Tuesday as Congress met, neither Johnston nor Nevada Democrats Richard Bryan and Harry Reid had budged.
Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, said that if necessary he was prepared to call adjournment-minded senators back on Thursday, after the Yom Kippur holiday break, to deal with the bill - something few lawmakers would relish. It then would take the approval of 60 members to bring the measure up for a vote.
The bill, more than 900 pages long, touches on virtually every area of U.S. energy policy, from requiring new efficiency standards for lights and shower heads to making it easier to build nuclear reactors.
By voice vote, both houses approved a $250 billion defense spending bill for the 12 months that began Oct. 1. It earmarks $3.8 billion for the Strategic Defense Initiative anti-missile system; Bush had asked $5.4 billion. The measure also would pay for completing a fleet of 20 B-2 Stealth bombers.
Also in the House of Representatives' bill was more than $65 million for refurbishing the Presidio over the next two years.
The bill also included language that protects San Francisco against legal damages caused by the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard's massive hazardous waste problems.
"This protects us from any lawsuit stemming from toxic wastes," said San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Executive Director Edward Helfeld, noting that the federal action - assuming it is signed by President Bush - would remove a principal barrier to conversion of the shipyard to civilian use.
The shipyard has been discussed as a possible expansion site for the UC Medical Center as well as a principal source of future jobs.
But before new uses can be developed, much public investment will be needed to improve the 540-acre site's rundown systems for water delivery, storm runoff, sanitary disposal, fire protection and transportation.
In other action:
A handful of conservative Republicans killed a bill that would have lifted the federal prohibition on using tissue from induced abortions in research on transplantation. Although 85 senators had indicated support for ending the Ban, 12 senators who oppose abortion voted against limiting debate on the measure. Their threat of a new filibuster was enough to force abandonment of the measure.
The threat of a filibuster also killed the so-called "Brady bill," requiring a five-day waiting period before a handgun sale could be completed.
The House and Senate cleared for Bush's signature a $14 billion foreign-aid bill. It guarantees $10 billion of loans that would be used to build housing and create jobs for Jewish immigrants in Israel. Israel also would get $3 billion of aid; Egypt, $2.1 billion; republics formerly in the Soviet Union would get $417 million if they meet human rights criteria.
Both houses completed a $2.3 billion bill to finance congressional operations over the next 12 months. That is a $29 million cut from last year.
Brazil's uncertain future
Democracy fragile despite orderly impeachment
By Gary Marx
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
BRASILIA, Brazil - The process of impeaching Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Mello for corruption was smooth, quick and efficient. There was no whitewash, no military coup.
Collor - Brazil's first freely elected president in 29 years - was suspended by the lower house of Congress after being accused of skimming millions of dollars from a bribery and kickback scheme operated by his 1989 campaign treasurer.
And though last week's action suspends him for only 180 days, until the Senate votes on whether to make impeachment final, his removal has been described as a triumph of democracy - an affirmation of change in a country and continent known for coups, assassinations, mind-boggling corruption and government ineptitude.
"It is the first time in Brazilian history that a president has been put out of power by the interplay between Congress, the Supreme Court and the population, without any threat, any military pressure at all," said Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a prominent senator who was named Brazil's new foreign minister. "The significance is that democracy is well-rooted in Brazilian society."
But is democracy secure in Brazil? And what about the rest of South America, where freely elected leaders govern the 10 largest nations?
In a continent with weak democratic traditions, where power is still wielded by individuals, Collor's removal by constitutional means demonstrates to South Americans that democracy can work.
There were massive demonstrations demanding his removal. Congress heard the voice of the people. And the president was ousted.
But Collor's removal may prove to be the exception rather than the rule: While South Americans prefer democracy, in most countries their elected leaders have not even begun to solve dire economic and social problems - unequal distribution of land, the lack of basic health care and education, a huge gap between rich and poor.
Most elected officials in South America continue to be the elite, using political power for personal gain rather than to help the impoverished masses. What South Americans are demanding is a system of government that helps them, and there is little consensus that democracy is the only answer.
"Our democracy is fragile. We need to get the population to believe that democracy is working for them... The most important need in Brazil is to achieve equality," said Jose Murilo de Carvalho, a leading political scientist.
Democracy is most secure in Chile and Colombia, two nations with long democratic traditions that have prospered in the last decade. It also seems relatively stable in Argentina, primarily because the memory is fresh of that nation's bloody and disastrous military rule in the 1970s and early 1980s.
But it's also because President Carlos Menem has brought economic stability to Argentina after decades of hyperinflation and financial insecurity. All bets are off, however, if his free-market economic program collapses. A military coup is unlikely; political instability is not.
In Venezuela, few people rallied behind President Carlos Andres Perez when he was nearly ousted in a military coup in February. Perez, who was elected to a second term as president in 1988, has carried out an ambitious free-market reform program that shows signs of reversing a steep economic decline.
Many Venezuelans believe he has lined his pockets at a time of economic crisis. Most Venezuelans think their Congress is no better: just a collection of thieves looting the treasury.
The young military officers who led the coup promised an honest and efficient government. It's a familiar chant, but many Venezuelans believed it. The nation's last military dictatorship ended in 1958, and its mercurial and strong-armed rule are a distant memory.
In Peru today, President Alberto Fujimori has a 74 percent approval rating six months after suspending the constitution and assuming near-dictatorial powers, up from 60 percent just before Shining Path guerrilla leader Abimael Guzman was captured last month.
Since democracy was restored in Peru in 1980, poverty has soared and Shining Path has spread its war across the nation. Fujimori said the nation's Congress and judiciary were frustrating his efforts to defeat the leftist guerrillas and reverse the nation's economic decline.
Fujimori, a political novice elected in 1990, is seen as an honest and hard-working leader. But Peruvians also will turn against Fujimori if the guerrilla war intensifies and the economy fails to improve.
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Bush Wants to Double Size of U.S. Economy
By James Gerstenzang
Los Angeles Times
Detroit - President Bush, struggling to demonstrate a comprehensive plan to pull the nation out of its economic doldrums while hoping to boost his re-election campaign, set a goal yesterday of building a $10 trillion U.S. economy.
If achieved, the target for post-recession growth would nearly double the size of the U.S. economy - as measured by the value of the goods produced in its factories and the services workers offer - by the early years of the 21st century.
In a lengthy speech that focused on the failures of the past and the challenges of the future - and little on the most immediate and pressing problems facing American workers - the president offered no new plans or short-term solutions to ease recession-induced fears over job security.
Instead, the speech pulled together the variety of programs Bush has proposed in the past to deal with such pressing problems as job training, health care and education. He related them to their potential effect on the U.S. economy, and tried to make a case for the ever-growing links between the U.S. economy and global markets.
The speech to the Economic Club of Detroit, titled "Agenda for American Renewal," outlined a philosophical approach that calls for cutting taxes, paying for the tax cuts by reducing government spending and producing a shrunken government, in the process providing incentives to a streamlined business community so that it can reach the $10 trillion goal.
"That's the direction I want to go: Tax less, spend less, cut the deficit and redirect our current spending to serve the interests of all Americans," Bush said.
For the first time, Bush attached a specific figure to the across-the-board tax cut that he says he would seek from Congress if re-elected. But the 1 percent figure he cited was offered only as an example of what could be achieved if all the spending cuts for which he has called, valued at roughly $130 billion, were approved by Congress.
"That is an illustration because it would depend on if you could get the $130 billion," a senior administration official said, explaining that Bush's purpose in using the figure was to demonstrate the sort of break taxpayers would get in return for cuts in government spending.
And in what he called "right-sizing" government, Bush said that he would cut the operating budget of the executive office of the president, which includes his immediate staff of assistants and secretaries and hundreds of people working in the Office of Management and Budget and other executive branch agencies, by 33 percent if Congress - with a staff many times larger - agrees to a similar percentage reduction in its operating budget.
"And," he said, "I'll cut the salaries of all federal employees earning more than $75,000 by 5 percent. Taxpayers have tightened their belts. The better-paid federal workers should do the same."
Such a cut would trim his own $200,000 salary by $10,000 a year.
Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton said that the president's proposals amounted to more of the same programs that have led the nation into economic decline.
"I strongly believe we have to go beyond the failed policies of this administration, beyond trickle-down economics. We need real incentives to invest in this country, to educate our people, to control health care costs and to compete around the world," he said in a statement made by satellite from the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Ark.
Clinton contended that under Bush's plan, Americans with incomes of more than $200,000 would get a $14,000 tax cut, while those making $20,000 would get about $50.
Despite Clinton's critique and Bush's own description of a "grand canyon" between himself and the governor, Bush's speech and an address Clinton delivered to the same organization on August 21 demonstrated the degree of similarity in their approaches.
Clinton based his economic program on "job-creating investment," including job training, education reform, and improved health care; and investing money saved from reduced defense spending on new civilian technologies.
Clinton's principal difference with Bush, as outlined in the August 21 speech, is over the formation of a "national economic strategy," which the president labeled an "industrial policy" that he says would give government too great a role in directing the nation's businesses.
House OKs President's Plan
Family Leave Bill
Margin isn't enough to override a Bush veto
By Adam Clymer
New York Times
Washington - After a debate marked by emotion, sarcasm and political one-upmanship, the House yesterday passed and sent to President Bush a bill that would require employers to give workers 12 weeks of unpaid leave for family and personal medical emergencies.
Despite a threatened veto, Democrats and some Republicans said that passing the measure was essential if lawmakers believe in "family values." But the 241-to-161 vote was far short of the two-thirds majority required to override, and a White House spokeswoman, Judy Smith, said she is "confident of strength to sustain a veto."
Yesterday's action, which followed passage on a voice vote in the Senate last month, was Congress' most forceful entry into the presidential campaign, a measure that Democrats believe will help Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.
He supports the bill and can be expected to say that electing him is the only way to enact the legislation, which polls show is very popular.
The bill, similar to a measure that Bush vetoed in 1990, would require employers of 50 or more people to allow their workers unpaid leave, with health insurance kept in force, to care for a sick child, parent, husband or wife, or for the workers' own medical needs, such as pregnancy.
It would not apply to employees who worked less than 25 hours a week, and employers could exclude the highest-paid 10 percent of their workers. About 5 percent of employers and 50 percent of all employees would be covered.
A Gallup Poll for Life magazine in the spring found that 83 percent of adults backed the measure and 16 percent opposed it.
Smith said Bush opposes the bill but does not oppose family leaves. She said the president thinks such leaves should be negotiated between employers and workers.
A White House aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the administration would prefer a system of tax credits to small employers to help them finance such leaves.
House majority leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri told of getting a leave from his law firm years ago to care for an 18-month-old son with cancer. "For the parents whose employers do not provide this benefit voluntarily, the choice between keeping one's job or caring for a new child or sick family member is a choice no American should have to make," he said.
"We believe we can honor the values of work and family," Gephardt added. "We can demonstrate our commitment to family values by our deeds, not just by our words. We can rise above the partisan differences that often justifiably divide us."
But Representative Robert Michel of Illinois, the Republican leader in the House, contended that the bill dealt with neither family values nor labor issues. "This bill is only about one thing: election-year politics, pure and simple - or at least simple."
If the Democrats really care about the measure, Michel asked, why did they wait until now to bring it to the House floor. It was passed in both houses last fall and a compromise had been reached in August.
Most Republicans contend that the bill will hurt employers and thus cost jobs.
Representative Cass Ballenger, R-N.C., called the requirement "just one more burden placed on small businesses struggling to survive."
Some Republicans disagreed. Representative Marge Roukema of New Jersey, for instance, said there was "not one shred of evidence that this will be costly to business."
And Representative Henry Hyde, R-Ill., said: "A woman should not have to choose between having a baby and keeping a job. It would be one less thing to worry about for a woman who is pregnant or a father whose child is sick. Family values require you to support this bill."
But in the end, only 37 Republicans voted for the bill, and 119 opposed it and 10 did not vote. Two hundred and three Democrats voted for it, 42 voted no and 22 did not vote.
Japan Criticized for Hard Line on Kuriles
New York Times
Tokyo
President Boris Yeltsin's sudden cancellation of his trip to Japan unleashed an unusual round of recriminations as the Japanese government was accused of pressing an embattled Russian leader so hard on its territorial claims that it lost its best chance in decades to improve relations with Moscow.
Although it remained possible for Russia and Japan to work out a cooperative relationship on some levels, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa left little doubt yesterday that he thought that a resolution of the long-standing territorial dispute with Russia is years away. The issue concerns a handful of islands in the Kurile chain north of Japan that were seized by the Soviet Union in the closing days of World War II.
"Let's wait patiently," Miyazawa told reporters yesterday morning, adding that "we won't make any approaches" to revive talks on the issue any time soon.
Japan has demanded the return of the islands, or at least recognition of Japanese sovereignty over them, as a prerequisite to improving relations with Moscow and considering large-scale economic aid and investment.
The country's elite seems to be sharply divided between those who say that a geographically small, resource-poor nation must never give up an inch and those who argue that Japan is rich enough to afford placing the issue on hold until Russia is stable.
The unusual criticism of Japan's hard-line approach came from the governor of Hokkaido, the Japanese territory closest to the disputed region, who told reporters that Japan had "aimed to gain 100 points and eventually got zero." Because of Hokkaido's proximity to Russia, popular sentiment there has favored a compromise on the territorial issue as a means to improve economic ties.
Business officials, who have been critical of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's preoccupation with the islands, said yesterday that they feared that the trip's cancellation would doom any chance for Japan to make major investments in the Russian Far East for years.
Moreover, diplomats speculated that Japan would increasingly find itself in conflict with its Western allies over Russian policy. Although the United States supports Japan's position, Germany and other nations have grown testy about Japan's continued refusal to shoulder much of the aid burden for Russia.
In a rare split on a major national foreign policy initiative, there were also widespread charges yesterday that Tokyo had unwisely allowed latent nationalistic instincts to prevail in its dealings with a longtime rival.
Critics claimed that Japan's leaders pushed the embattled Russian president too far, wildly misjudged the depth of public sentiment in Moscow and ultimately set their own cause back by years.
"This is the clearest case of the Japanese government still being trapped in its Cold War thinking," said Haruki Wada, a professor of Russian history at the University of Tokyo.
"Everyone was so intent on exploiting the moment that no one stopped to listen to the Russians," he said - or to seriously consider arguments that funneling large-scale aid to Russia should take priority over the reacquisition of a group of ice-encrusted volcanic islands.
Yeltsin Agrees to Double Subsidized Price of Crude Oil
By Fred Hiatt
Washington Post
Moscow
Russian President Boris Yeltsin, one day after scrapping a visit to Japan, approved a doubling of Russia's subsidized oil prices, indicating that he is more willing to expend political capital on unpopular economic reform than on unpopular foreign policy ventures.
The higher oil prices, which a deputy prime minister said will take effect soon, are needed to bring in dollars and encourage investment in Russia's vital but aging oil industry, officials said. But the higher prices also will deal another blow to the nation's already battered consumers, farmers and factories.
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Tokyo Plays Down Yeltsin Cancellation
Diplomacy: Officials urge patience, but anger emerges. Russian press blames Japan's "hysterical" environment for trip postponement.
By TERESA WATANABE and JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG
TIMES STAFF WRITERS
TOKYO- One day after Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin abruptly canceled his impending visit to Japan, Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa and other officials scrambled Thursday to put the best face on the diplomatic debacle, while public opinion was split over whom to blame.
Miyazawa urged his country to "wait patiently" for Russia to sort out its domestic problems, while Foreign Minister Michio Watanabe urged people to "keep a cool head" and not respond in an "exaggerated way."
The pleas came as the Russian press began blaming Japan's "hysterical" environment for contributing to Yeltsin's abrupt postponement. However, only about 100 people gathered outside the Japanese Embassy in Moscow for what was supposed to be a massive anti-Japanese protest- and half of those present were journalists.
Watanabe also announced that Japan would not renege on any of its international aid pledges to Russia. Tokyo has promised $100 million in humanitarian aid and cooperation for the safety of Russia's nuclear power plants, part of a $24-billion package offered by the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial nations earlier this year to help the former Soviet Union pull out of its economic crisis.
But the Japanese press reported Thursday that Russia had been seeking a whopping $50-billion package of long-term aid from Japan, a request categorically turned down by officials here as long as there is no progress in settling the dispute over four small islands seized by the Red Army at the close of World War II. The islands, at the southern end of the Kuril chain, are off Japan's northernmost main island, Hokkaido.
Yeltsin's sudden action, coming just three days before his scheduled arrival in Tokyo on Sunday, is almost without precedent in Japan's modern diplomatic history, and it included a snub of the imperial family, which had planned a welcome party.
While most officials kept to low-key utterances of "regret," public anger and frustration has also emerged over what is being dubbed here the "postponement shock."
"This is childish diplomacy," fumed one high-level Foreign Ministry official, who asked not to be identified by name. The official said that the postponement has shattered Tokyo's trust in Moscow and that any Russian pronouncements will be taken with even more skepticism in the future.
Junichi Takemi, chairman of a ceramics firm, said it is just as well that Yeltsin will not come, because investing in Russia is like "throwing money down a sewer."
The Russians were criticized here for everything from having the gall to inform South Korean President Roh Tae Woo before telling Miyazawa- Yeltsin had been scheduled to go to Seoul after visiting Japan- to damaging local merchants, to wasting the efforts that thousands of workers put into preparing for the state visit.
Members of the National Police Agency, which had completed elaborate security arrangements involving 12,000 officers, took the news in "open-mouthed" amazement, according to local press reports. They were particularly irked about having to comply with Russia's fussy demands for security at a sumo wrestling hall, which entailed building a bulletproof shield around the entire ring- only to see it go to waste.
The New Otani Hotel, where most of the Russian delegation would have stayed, suddenly found itself with about 70% of its rooms vacant for four days.
And the emperor's family had to call off plans for a welcome party of 70 guests and a menu specially planned to accommodate Yeltsin's tastes: grilled fish, cold smoked chicken, lamb roast and an ice cream dessert arranged in the shape of Mt. Fuji.
However, public criticism of Japan's hard-line diplomacy also began to surface. Hokkaido Gov. Takahiro Yokomichi, whose prefecture in northern Japan has begun building trade links with the Soviet Far East, criticized officials for pushing too hard on the issue of the Northern Territories, as the islands are referred to in Japan.
"The government aimed for 100 and ended up with zero," Yokomichi said.
Gregory Clark, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo and a former Australian diplomat, called Japan's diplomacy over the territorial issue "lousy." To cling tenaciously to all claims of territory is not in keeping with international practice, he said, citing as an example Poland's retention of its World War II territorial gains from Germany.
Others criticized Tokyo's insistence on linking large-scale economic aid to a territorial resolution. But a top Japanese official revealed Thursday that the Miyazawa administration views the linkage as crucial for its political survival.
"If I do not get economic aid separated from the territorial issue, I will not be able to remain in office," the government official quoted Yeltsin as telling Watanabe when the two men met recently in Moscow.
"[If Japan] began full-scale aid without progress on the territorial issue, the Miyazawa administration would not last," Watanabe reportedly responded.
Still, the postponement is seen as a setback in the prime minister's attempt to forge a more assertive foreign policy, which includes such unprecedented actions as the emperor's scheduled visit to China later this year and the dispatch of peacekeeping troops to Cambodia- Tokyo's first overseas military mission since World War II.
In Moscow, Sergei Skvortsov, co-chairman of the Russian Committee for the Defense of the Kurils, handed a letter to a Japanese diplomat protesting Japan's demand for the islands' return and the way the Japanese media cover the issue.
"I'm glad Boris Yeltsin has called off his visit to Japan, because I think that postwar borders must not be violated," a former hard-line member of the Soviet Parliament, Col. Viktor Alksnis, said.
Europe Holds Its Breath as France Prepares to Vote on Unity
By JOEL HAVEMANN
TIMES STAFF WRITER
BRUSSELS- The European Community's far-reaching treaty on political and economic union, which Danish voters narrowly rejected in June, is growing increasingly unpopular throughout the 12-nation EC.
France, which with Germany is one of the EC's original twin pillars, could effectively bury the treaty in a Sept. 20 referendum that, according to the polls, could go either way.
And even if French voters ratify the treaty, mounting opposition elsewhere will make its goals- including a common EC currency and mechanisms for setting joint European foreign and security policy- difficult to achieve in practice.
France is the last EC country to conduct a referendum on the treaty, which has been ratified by voters in Ireland and parliaments in Greece and Luxembourg. Elsewhere, national parliaments hold the power, and all are expected to ratify if the French vote 'yes.'
But if voters had the chance, they might well turn thumbs down in Germany and Britain.
Germans are alarmed over the prospect of abandoning the deutschemark, Europe's strongest currency and a symbol of Germany's postwar economic success, in favor of a currency that they might have to share with such economic emergency-room cases as Italy.
And the insular British worry that the treaty would give the EC's bureaucrats license, as their foreign secretary once charged, to meddle in "the nooks and crannies" of British affairs.
To Martin Bangemann, the ranking German official at the EC Commission, the growing doubts about the treaty reveal the danger of popular referendums. "People are using arguments without knowing" what the treaty would do, he told reporters recently at the EC Commission's Brussels headquarters.
Others draw the opposite conclusion. Voter skepticism, they argue, demonstrates that Europe's leaders forgot to marshal public opinion behind them when they initialed the treaty behind closed doors last December in the Dutch town of Maastricht.
"The trouble is the arrogance of our leaders in believing that the public doesn't need to know what the treaty says and couldn't understand anyway," said Stanley Crossick, chairman of the Belmont European Policy Center. "We need to be more democratic, something you Americans understand."
Throughout the EC, Europeans are sounding alarms that the Maastricht treaty, by shifting more authority from national capitals to Brussels, would erode national identities.
It is a charge the treaty supporters such as British Prime Minister John Major dismiss as a "phantom." In a speech Monday, Major said, "Whatever happens in the Community, the French will be no less French, the Germans no less German, the Danes no less Danish and, I promise you, the British no less British."
Also working against the treaty are anemic national economies. After booming since the mid-1980s, the EC predicts overall economic growth of only 1.25% this year and 1.5% next year, with unemployment rising from 9.7% now to 10%. Voters are typically less likely to endorse the sorts of changes envisaged by the Maastricht treaty when they feel their own welfare is insecure.
What's more, the EC's inability to stop the bloodshed on its doorstep in the Yugoslav crisis has made Europeans wonder whether the EC is ready for the common foreign policy-making mechanisms that the Maastricht treaty would establish.
In an EC-wide survey conducted in June, London's Market & Opinion Research International found substantial dissatisfaction with key elements of the treaty.
A majority of respondents in Britain and Germany opposed abandoning the British pound and the German mark in favor of a common European currency. The treaty establishes a common currency no later than 1999 for nations with low inflation and manageable budget deficits, although the British Parliament retains the right to reject the common currency.
Likewise, more respondents in half of the 12 EC countries- France, Germany, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg- said the treaty would make them personally worse off than better off. This reflects the EC policy, which would be accelerated by the Maastricht treaty, of transferring funds from the richer nations to Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland.
Doubts about the treaty probably matter most in Germany, the EC's biggest member and its economic powerhouse. In Germany, the future of the deutschemark is the overriding issue.
"The people are very proud of this symbol of national strength and postwar achievement," said Jochen Hansen, a researcher with Germany's Allensbach Institute. "They can't understand why they should give up their currency in the absence of an urgent need."
Hansen said he thought Germans would probably turn down the Maastricht treaty, if- as is impossible under the German constitution- they had a chance to vote on ratifying it. Recent Allensbach public opinion surveys bolster this view.
By 41% to 25%, Germans said in June that the government should have rejected the treaty's provision for a common European currency. By 34% to 26%, they expressed satisfaction that Danish voters had refused to ratify.
And last January, a month after Chancellor Helmut Kohl initialed the Maastricht treaty, fully 39% of Germans said they feared a gradual loss of German identity in a homogeneous Europe. Fifteen months earlier, in October,1990, only 21% had expressed such a concern.
Britain is the other EC powerhouse where public sentiment toward the Maastricht treaty is, at best, uncertain. A Gallup Poll in June found the public almost evenly split, with 38% saying they would vote for the treaty and 35% saying they would vote 'no.' A majority, 51%, said European integration was proceeding too quickly, against 25% who said the pace was right and 14% who called it too slow.
Prime Minister Major, who pulled the treaty back from Parliament pending the outcome of the French referendum, admitted Monday that the treaty probably faces a "bruising passage." But he rejected calls for a referendum, arguing that many voters would probably base their decisions on matters unrelated to the treaty.
Meanwhile, in tiny Denmark, where the treaty's troubles began, sentiment against it seems to be hardening. Recent polls show that the treaty's opponents- a bare 50.7% of those who voted in the June 2 referendum- have grown to as much as 57%.
That puts the Danish government on the spot. Under EC rules, the treaty cannot take effect until it is ratified by all 12 member nations.
If Denmark will not accept the treaty as negotiated last December, either the treaty will have to be changed- which would require a complicated renegotiation followed by another round of ratification votes in all EC countries- or Denmark will have to finesse its voters' opposition.
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Bush proposes $10-billion in job training
The president says he would cut spending for unspecified federal programs to cover the plan's cost.
Associated Press
ANSONIA, Conn. - Plagued by high unemployment and a weak election-year economy, President Bush on Monday proposed a $2-billion-a-year package of new and retooled job-training programs and said they could be paid for without raising taxes.
"We can get everybody engaged in high-tech jobs with this retraining approach," Bush promised at a campaign stop at a vocational training school in Union, N.J.
The plan's centerpiece calls for $3,000 vouchers for adults to use for retraining at trade schools or community colleges. These would go to people who had lost their jobs, been notified their jobs were being cut or who worked in declining industries and wanted to sharpen their skills.
Bush said the plan's $10-billion cost over five years would be paid for by cutting spending for other unspecified federal programs.
At a news conference in Little Rock, Ark., Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton took issue with the cost, saying Bush had no way to finance his proposals.
"He just got through telling us at the convention we were going to have huge tax cuts paid for by huge spending cuts in amounts to be unspecified, and now he's come out with a huge spending program," Clinton said. "I think it's very difficult to take this seriously."
Clinton has proposed requiring employers to spend an amount equal to 1.5 percent of payroll for job-training and education programs for workers.
Paul Tsongas blasts Bush's economic plan
But he didn't embrace Clinton's ideas. Still, he says they're evolving in a "positive" direction.
Associated Press
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Former Democratic rival Paul Tsongas stood at Bill Clinton's side Monday and attacked President Bush's economic plan, saying it would guarantee "four more years of gridlock" in Washington.
But while Tsongas called Clinton's plan superior to Bush's, he still did not strongly embrace it.
Tsongas said that Clinton's policies "have evolved in a direction that I think is positive" and that he would "work with Gov. Clinton and press my views upon the people around him." When Tsongas was asked if that was a way of saying Clinton's program didn't go far enough, Clinton chimed in, "That's a way of saying it."
During the Democratic primary season, Tsongas was critical of Clinton's economic proposals, which included a sweeping tax cut for the middle class.
In Monday's appearance with Clinton on the lawn of the Arkansas governor's mansion, Tsongas was even more negative toward Bush's call for a broad tax cut at last week's Republican convention.
"The fact is that George Bush gave a speech Thursday night with a program that he knows will never pass," said Tsongas. "...It has no coherence, has no support."
Tsongas, who strongly advocated reduction of the federal budget deficit, said Bush delivered "a promise of four more years of gridlock."
"So if the question is who do you trust for four more years of blaming, four more years of finger pointing, it's George Bush," Tsongas said.
Israel's Rabin says 11 Palestinians won't be deported
Associated Press
JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Monday canceled deportation orders against 11 Palestinians in a further effort by his moderate government to bolster the peace talks opening in Washington.
That follows an announcement Sunday that 800 Palestinian prisoners would be freed, that Arab access from the occupied territories to Israel would be eased and that some punishments imposed for anti-Israeli violence would be lifted.
The deportation orders were issued by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in January before a round of peace talks. Shamir lost the June 23 election to Rabin. Rabin's reversal of the orders came with his government's debut in the talks Monday, signaling a radical change of approach.
The 11 West Bank and Gaza Strip Arabs had been ordered out for allegedly fomenting the violence that had killed four Israelis in the preceding three months. Their appeals are now before the Israeli Supreme Court.
A statement by Rabin in his capacity as defense minister said that circumstances had changed since the expulsion orders were issued.
He apparently was referring to the decline of anti-Israeli unrest in the occupied territories and the divisions between Palestinian supporters and opponents of the U.S.-brokered peace process.
Reports: No-fly zone over Iraq could be delayed
Reuters
WASHINGTON - Defense officials said Monday the U.S. military was ready to enforce a ban on Iraqi military flights over southern Iraq, but diplomats in the Persian Gulf said the plan was being held up by Arab concerns that it could dismember Iraq.
The announcement that U.S., British and French planes would begin enforcing the no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel to protect dissident Shiite Moslems had been slated for today, "but that may not be the case now," said an administration official.
Defense officials, who asked not to be identified, said in Washington that the aircraft carrier Independence, carrying fighter and reconnaissance planes, headed north from Abu Dhabi in the Persian Gulf on Sunday. Air Force fighters were also in position in the region, they said.
The U.S.-led alliance, which drove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait in last year's gulf war, already is enforcing a no-fly zone north of the 36th parallel in Iraq to protect Kurds there from Iraqi attacks.
Western diplomats said more time was needed for gulf war allies to consult among themselves and for the United States, Britain and France to reassure Arab states they do not intend to divide Iraq.
So far, Kuwait is the only Arab state to openly declare its support for Western plans to protect the Shiites. Syria, Jordan, Yemen and Algeria have denounced the move.
Iraq issues warning to West
The warning comes after the U.S. and others say they will shoot down Iraqi military planes.
Associated Press
NICOSIA, Cyprus - Iraq's army newspaper on Sunday warned the West against ordering air patrols to protect Shiite Muslims in southern Iraq and said "invaders" would find a watery grave in the marshes below.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein urged Iraqis to be "aware of their national and patriotic responsibilities" and protect the nation against those who wish "evil for the country," said the official Iraqi News Agency, monitored in Cyprus.
The United States, Britain and France plan to notify Iraq this week that military planes flying over southern Iraq will be shot down to protect Shiite Muslims.
The White House said Sunday that President Bush may make the announcement Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a leading Shiite opposition group claimed shelling on villages near Nassirya, 190 miles south of Baghdad, had killed several women and children in the past three days, according to a statement sent to the Associated Press.
The reports from the Tehran-based Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq could not be confirmed.
The group said Iraqi warplanes recently intensified reconnaissance missions over the marshlands "apparently to test the will of the international measures to protect the Iraqi people."
Al-Qaddissiya, Iraq's defense ministry daily, described Bush as a "cursed criminal," British Prime Minister John Major as "worthless" and French President Francois Mitterrand as "the mean old man."
"The aggressors have no one but themselves to blame," the newspaper said in a front-page editorial.
"We will tear them to pieces ... and the marshes will be the graveyards to the invaders."
In Kuwait, the U.S. military announced that all 2,400 American soldiers scheduled to take part in monthlong exercises with Kuwaiti forces were now deployed. About 1,000 U.S. soldiers will move into position near the Iraqi border for the maneuvers, to begin in a week, according to U.S. military officials.
Many of Iraq's neighbors are wary of the allied plans to create a safe haven for the Shiite Muslims, saying it might partition Iraq into three sections. After the Persian Gulf war last year, the allies created a security zone for Kurds in northern Iraq.
In Egypt, Iraq's representative to the Cairo-based Arab League urged Arab countries to intervene against the allied plan.
"The Iraqi people are one people, they cannot be split along sectarian or racial lines," the Iraqi representative, Nabil Nejm, said after meeting with the league's secretary-general.
Government troops battle against Serbs
Casualties were heavy in shelling in downtown Sarajevo and on the west side of the city.
Associated Press
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - In a blaze of mortar, grenade and machine-gun fire, government troops on Sunday launched a new offensive to break the Serb siege of Sarajevo.
Casualties were heavy in shelling downtown and on the west side of the city, where government forces were trying to reach Sarajevo's airport, now under U.N. control for an international aid airlift.
U.N. peacekeepers closed the airport to aid flights after shells hit the runway.
Dr. Arif Smajkic, head of the Bosnian Ministry of Health, said 46 people were killed and 303 wounded in the previous 24 hours of fighting in Bosnia, including 22 dead and 100 wounded in Sarajevo.
Smajkic said the city's main hospital had no water or electricity. Many wounded, mostly soldiers with serious wounds, were being brought in. "It is very critical at this moment," he said. "We need water for operations, and we don't have any."
The offensive appeared to be a last-ditch attempt by Bosnian defenders to gain a military advantage before a peace conference on Yugoslavia begins Wednesday in London.
The republic's Muslim president, Alija Izetbegovic, told reporters that his forces had made headway on the west side, but government military officials gave mixed signals.
Izetbegovic said that even if the new offensive failed, his forces would fight on. "Sarajevo shall survive," he said. "We shall fight many, many months more."
Bosnia's ethnic Serbs, who want to remain part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, rebelled after the republic's majority Croats and Muslims voted for independence on Feb. 29. Serbs now control two-thirds of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
At least 8,000 people have been killed, but recent estimates by U.S. Senate investigators put the total at up to 35,000. About 1.3-million people have become refugees, many in 'ethnic cleansing' campaigns to empty regions of unwanted ethnic groups.
Throughout Saturday night and Sunday, explosions and heavy machine-gun fire could be heard throughout Sarajevo. Shells landed near the main Kosevo hospital in the city center, around government offices and on the west side.
A mortar crashed into the second floor of a student hostel in the old city, killing at least two people and wounding several others.
One victim remained alive for several minutes after both legs were cut off by a falling wall. His screams faded into deathly quiet, perspiration covering his face, and he was dead by the time he was taken to a hospital.
One government soldier with gaping stomach and chest wounds arrived at the hospital in a U.N. armored personnel carrier manned by French soldiers, who said Serb forces allowed them to cross their lines to pick up the victim.
Clinton: GOP attacks "deeply offensive"
Associated Press
CHAUTAUQUA, N.Y. - Bill Clinton said Sunday that President Bush invoked a "deeply offensive" political ploy in questioning Democrats' commitment to God and said Republicans should be ashamed of their "off the wall" attack linking his values to Woody Allen's.
Clinton, counterattacking as he and running mate Al Gore wrapped up their Rust Belt bus tour, said Republicans were floundering because Democrats had a superior economic plan to put Americans back to work and help raise their children.
Bush, seeking to shore up Republican strength in the key Midwest battleground, told a cheering crowd at the Illinois State Fair that Clinton would be a "rubber stamp president that will rubber stamp this spendthrift Congress.
"We're not going to let that nightmare happen," Bush shouted. He told reporters that Clinton had started to "whine and complain" in the face of a stepped-up Republican campaign.
Vice President Dan Quayle, in Florida to campaign among Reagan Democrats, told his audience that voters face "a big choice between the governor of Arkansas and the president of the United States. These two individuals are miles apart on the important issues of the day."
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Debates to become "blood sport"
By Judy Keen
USA TODAY
Contributing: Debbie Howlett
One year ago this weekend, Bill Clinton officially began his presidential quest.
Back then, President Bush's grip on a second term was still considered secure.
But both candidates have been buffeted by the turbulence of a political year that Bush labeled - in what turned out to be an understatement - "weird."
And now, just when the campaign was supposed to jell, it has been re-created. The accumulated rhetoric and drama of those 12 months might not count. What might matter most is what happens next.
There will be four debates in nine days, starting Sunday in St. Louis. Ross Perot is back and will probably share the stage with Clinton and Bush for three presidential face-offs, adding who knows what new variables to the equation.
"We always thought Perot getting in would throw all the cards up in the air and cause people to take a new look at the race," says Charles Black, senior adviser to Bush's campaign. "Combine that with four debates and all bets are off."
Adds Democratic consultant Duane Garrett: "This is probably going to be the potentially most volatile period since the Democratic convention" when Perot dropped out.
The campaign might be reinventing itself or the new wrinkles just might be "weird" distractions that won't halt Clinton's victory march.
The Bush campaign has ample reason to hope all that has gone before has been erased: With Clinton holding a double-digit lead, the president's last best chance may be a surge borne of political chaos.
But polls show voter dissatisfaction with Bush's stewardship - especially over the economy - and skepticism about promises he's making.
Those sentiments may not be budged - not even by unruly debates or the wild card called Perot - and therein lie the reasons for Clinton's confidence that he can stave off any Bush comeback.
"I really don't think Perot alters the landscape," says Texas Democratic Party chairman Bob Slagle.
A primer for the campaign's final four weeks:
Debates. Bush - hoping to lob firepower at Clinton without giving the Democrat enough time to recoup - wanted to shove the debates as close to Election Day as possible.
Clinton prevailed in debate negotiations, ensuring himself two weeks after the last debate Oct. 19 to recover from any gaffes and to return the campaign dialogue to the themes he thinks will win the election.
But the dizzyingly dense debate schedule - Oct. 11, Oct. 15, Oct. 19 - means each of the three candidates will have to repair wounds in the next debate, not in the news media or TV ads.
"I think it's going to truly turn debates into a blood sport," says GOP pollster Ed Goeas, "both in terms of what the candidates have to do and because there isn't going to be time in between for voters to refocus on something else."
More than 50 million people are expected to watch the prime-time duels, and if it's true a quarter of voters make up their minds the final week, the debates could sway some.
Almost every presidential debate has a crystallizing moment that either erodes support or multiplies it - the instant everybody talks about at work the next day.
This year, if it's a Perot 'moment,' the impact may be negligible.
"I think that Perot in the debates will be a spectacle to behold," says Jim Oberwetter, Bush's Texas campaign chairman. "He has nothing to lose and is going to be on a roll."
If Perot shines, "then it's a wash for both Bush and Clinton," says Ron Walters, political science chair at Washington's Howard University. "It's much harder to figure out who won a three-person debate."
Bush has the most to gain: He must create a theatrical event that either embarrasses Clinton or makes the president soar by rhetorical comparison.
But many analysts say Clinton's task is easier: He must only reassure voters who doubt his stature or trustworthiness.
Clinton needs only "to stand on the same platform with George Bush and hold his own," says Garrett.
"Bush has got to both damage Clinton and make himself an acceptable alternative. And Bush's greatest danger is that if he peels support away from Clinton it ... may be siphoned off to Perot."
Perot. OK, so he won't be sworn in as president in January, but he still could create plenty of mischief.
"There is no realistic prospect ... he'll recapture the magic of June," says Walter Dean Burnham, a University of Texas political scientist.
Perot I had evidence he could win Texas and Florida and take chunks out of Clinton's support among voters who want anybody but Bush.
Perot II can't alter the outcome in any state, analysts say, but he could make life uncomfortable in close battlegrounds such as Ohio, Michigan and Illinois. If undecided voters swing to Perot, Bush will have little chance to woo them back. If Perot talks only about the economy he could actually elevate political discourse and force the other two candidates to talk about the issue that matters most to voters.
"His emphasis on the deficit ... will work to the detriment of Bush," says Walters, but Perot's military background and POW heroism may remind voters of Clinton's draft record.
"He highlights in a very interesting way the negatives on both sides," Walters says.
Tone. This weekend, Bush flooded the airwaves with two negative TV ads, Clinton rebutted and each trotted out even sharper attacks on the campaign trail. Outlook: unremittingly negative.
"When you're frustrated and you're behind, you do anything you can," says Walters.
Bush's 1988 attacks on Michael Dukakis have taught Clinton to fight back and may have hardened the electorate to nasty ads. "People expect it," says former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips.
"The alternative," says Goeas, "is political candidates saying a bunch of positive things about themselves that we really have to question."
Few expect the campaign to slog on to a tepid conclusion.
"Voters are saying they've never seen a year like it," says Oberwetter. "It's like, 'Isn't that amazing?' and then the next thing happens and they say, 'Isn't that strange?' The surprises are not over."
Some think clerks wield excess clout
Their influence as justices' aides debated
By Tony Mauro
USA TODAY
As the Supreme Court convenes for its fall term today, a new question is in the air: Who's in charge?
The query pertains not just to the power struggles among the justices - subject of a summer's worth of speculation by court-watchers.
Also in the spotlight are the 34 clerks - fresh-scrubbed lawyers, mostly white males - who help screen cases and write opinions.
Some conservatives point to last term's law clerks in their search to explain why Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor seemed to shift from the right to the middle in the landmark Pennsylvania abortion case.
The clerks, it was said, were dispatched by left-leaning law schools - 12 were from Harvard - with the mission of turning their justices into liberals.
Adding to the debate is the fact that eight of nine justices now pool their clerks for the initial screening of cases.
The arrangement means that for those eight, most of the incoming cases are looked at by only one pair of young eyes, not by the justices themselves or their own clerks. The pool clerks write a brief memo on each case that goes to the eight justices.
Do clerks, who also write rough drafts of actual opinions for most justices, have too much power?
That's a debate that has simmered ever since Justice Horace Gray hired the first law clerk 110 years ago.
Justices now have four clerks each - except Chief Justice William Rehnquist and John Paul Stevens, who get by with three.
Rehnquist, a clerk himself 40 years ago, emerged fearful about their liberalizing influence. Most of them, he said back then, showed "extreme solicitude for the claims of communists and other criminal defendants."
Now he minimizes their role. "Individual justices still continue to do a great deal more of their own work than do their counterparts in the other branches of the federal government," Rehnquist wrote in 1987.
Still, concern is growing that too much responsibility is invested in young clerks, most of them no more than a year out of law school.
"It is really rather remarkable how little they know when they arrive ... and how fast they have to learn," says E.W. Perry Jr., a Harvard government professor who has studied the court.
Most of the clerks work for only one very intense year - dawn-to-midnight, six- or seven-day work weeks are common - at a salary currently set at $38,861. During the year, the clerks are virtually constant companions to their justices - who themselves complain they have little contact with other justices or the outside world.
Clerks are justices' lunch companions, tennis-mates, sounding boards, and, in some instances, ghostwriters.
"Most of the writing that comes out of the court is done by law clerks ... " says Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, a former clerk for Marshall. "But clerks don't run things. The justices call the shots."
Privately some clerks boast they changed their justices' minds on decisions during their year, or that a draft they wrote emerged untouched by the justice.
"When you give the job to clerks, you get more footnotes and less original thinking," says University of Southern California law professor Susan Estrich. "Original thinking is what we pay the justices for, isn't it?"
Estrich, who managed Michael Dukakis's presidential campaign in 1988, clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens 10 years earlier.
But most clerks insist that they are helping, not steering, their justices through a staggering writing load.
"There's a lot of puffery that goes on, but really, the importance of law clerks has been exaggerated," says J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Richmond, Va., federal appeals judge who wrote a book about his clerkship 20 years ago for Lewis Powell.
The newest concerns focus not on drafting opinions but on screening cases - one of the court's most important tasks, sometimes making the difference literally between life and death.
Routinely, the justices consider fewer than 150 cases each term, rejecting more than 5,000 and leaving lower court rulings in place.
The last two justices to leave the court - William Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall - had refused to join the pool arrangement during their tenure, preferring to rely on their own reading of new cases, or on assessments by their own clerks, more attuned to their legal views and interests.
Both justices, according to former clerks, occasionally discovered important cases pool clerks had passed over.
David Souter and Clarence Thomas, who replaced Brennan and Marshall, have joined the pool, leaving only Stevens outside it as a check on screening new cases. Clerks for other justices can supplement the pool memos, as an additional check.
The chief target of conservative concern last term was Michael Dorf, who clerked for Justice Kennedy - a conservative whose middle-of-the-road votes in the abortion case and a school prayer case surprised many.
Dorf co-authored a book with liberal Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe before working for Kennedy.
Dorf, now teaching law at Rutgers University Law School in Camden, N.J., says it is "insulting and ridiculous" to suggest that he pushed Kennedy toward any position he was not prepared to take. "He makes all his decisions for himself," says Dorf.
Election Day is high court's judgement day
By Tony Mauro
USA TODAY
Officially, Election Day is just like any other day at the Supreme Court - whose 1992-93 term opens today.
Justices will hear cases Nov. 3 and may hand down rulings, barely noting the momentous events occurring in other branches of government.
Yet the presidential election will have a tremendous effect on the court - more than any individual case on the court's docket this fall.
Washington, D.C., lawyer Richard Willard was discussing upcoming cases recently when he paused and said: "This is like critiquing the playing of the band on the Titanic. Something big is going to happen to the court on Election Day."
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Clinton in '69: Mostly Typical, in a Most Untypical Time
By Michael Kelly and David Johnston
New York Times Service
WASHINGTON - In the fall and winter of 1969, several important things happened in the life of a bright, ambitious young man named Bill Clinton.
After months of elaborate effort, he finally beat the draft for the Vietnam War, drawing a number high enough in the new national lottery that he would never be inducted.
He became, in a small way, a figure within the anti-war movement, helping to organize one of the largest marches on Washington the movement ever produced and serving as a chief organizer of two small demonstrations in London. He took a trip through the Scandinavian countries, Russia and Czechoslovakia.
In later years, as Mr. Clinton charted the political course toward the presidency, he did not often publicly speak of the events of that year, and when he did, it was in vague and passive terms, as if he had been a sort of accidental tourist of his times.
Now, in the fall of 1992, with Mr. Clinton close to his goal, those who would stop him have turned their increasingly frightened attention to events 23 years ago, hoping to find in them something that will, in the end, convince voters that a change from President George Bush is not worth the risk of Mr. Clinton.
The story, as far as it is clear, of Mr. Clinton's anti-war activities in 1969 and what he and the Republicans alike are saying about those activities in 1992 is illustrative of several points about that time and this one.
It shows, as Democrats are saying publicly and even some Republicans are saying privately, how desperate the Republicans have become. It shows, as Republicans like to say, how Mr. Clinton has tended to shade the edges of his life.
But above all, it shows how sharp the difference remains between Mr. Bush's world and Mr. Clinton's, between the clear moral absolutes of the generation of World War II and the muddied gropings of those who came of age during the Vietnam War.
The exact nature of Mr. Clinton's anti-war activities has been confused by both Republican exaggeration and Democratic obfuscation. But a basic outline seems clear.
Although Mr. Clinton has described his participation in peace demonstrations as limited to that almost of a curious passer-by, the candidate's previous statements and those of several friends and of anti-war protesters indicate a more substantial involvement.
Mr. Clinton was an organizer of two London rallies in the fall of 1969 and also helped, to an apparently much lesser degree, organize a huge march on Washington on Oct. 15, 1969.
Yet, if Mr. Clinton appears to have minimized his activities, it also appears true that the Republicans are wrong to depict him as a major anti-war organizer or Communist sympathizer.
No evidence has surfaced indicating that Mr. Clinton took part in any violent political actions or was an important anti-war organizer.
Many of those involved with him at the time recall him as something of a milquetoast by the standards of late 1960s radicalism, a young man driven by a desire to remake his country, not to reject it.
It is also clear that the actions of Mr. Clinton at age 23 - in avoiding military induction, in demonstrating against U.S. foreign policy, even in traveling to the Soviet Union - were not unusual. Indeed, they were almost prototypical of those who, like him, were part of the intellectual elite of that generation.
But if Mr. Clinton was typical of his class and time, the actions of that class and the tenor of that time were not at all typical of American history. No other generation has ever acted in quite the fashion that Mr. Clinton's did, nor stirred more unresolved passions. Now, in the person of Mr. Clinton, American voters face the possibility that a generation that once took to the streets to publicly denounce American policy will lead it.
What is unknown - but will be known on Nov. 3 - is whether it matters much anymore.
As Mr. Clinton pointed out Thursday: "Mr. Bush in his Inaugural Address had a wonderful phrase about how the Vietnam War cleaves us still and it was time to put it behind us.
"And now, because he's behind, he's tried to raise all the challenges of that time."
The Republican campaign to paint Mr. Clinton as a man with a secretly militant history began on Sept. 18, the first night of eight in which a quartet of conservative congressmen - Robert K. Dornan, Randy Cunningham and Duncan Hunter of California, and Sam Johnson of Texas - took to the deserted floor of the House to denounce Mr. Clinton.
The speeches were extraordinary for a level of strident, hyperbolic accusations that echoed the red-baiting rhetoric of 40 years ago.
The speakers described Mr. Clinton as a "useful idiot" to the Soviet government, as a man who in other countries would have been "tried as a traitor or even shot," as a "full-time organizer for demonstrations against his country in a foreign country," as a man "directly responsible" for the deaths of American military men in Vietnam.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bush picked up the brush.
"I cannot for the life of me understand mobilizing demonstrations and demonstrating against your own country, no matter how strongly you feel, when you are in a foreign land," Mr. Bush said, in an interview on the CNN program 'Larry King Live.'
Mr. Clinton said, as he has always said, that he had been an outspoken opponent of the war, but defended his activities in 1969 as innocent and minor. He said that he "helped put together a teach-in at the University of London" and that that had been "the only thing I ever helped put together."
He acknowledged that he had "participated" in a demonstration at the U.S. Embassy.
Mr. Clinton's own words, included in a letter he wrote on Dec. 3, 1969, appear to belie the claim that he organized, or helped to organize, only one event, the teach-in.
"I have written and spoken and marched against the war," he wrote in a letter to the director of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps program at the University of Arkansas, explaining why he had decided not to join the program. "After I left Arkansas last summer, I went to Washington to work in the national headquarters of the Moratorium, then to England to organize the Americans here for demonstrations Oct. 15 and Nov. 16."
The "Moratorium" Mr. Clinton referred to was one of two enormous international anti-war protests of 1969, culminating in a huge protest march in Washington on Oct. 15.
David Mixner, a national co-chairman of the Moratorium, recalls Mr. Clinton as "not at all a major player in the anti-war movement" but as someone who helped, in a small way, in the summer of 1969 to organize the fall protests.
In the fall, Mr. Clinton returned to England for his second year as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. On Moratorium Day, about 300 people, mostly American students, demonstrated peacefully outside the U.S. Embassy in London. It is apparently this rally that Mr. Clinton claims in his December 1969 letter to have organized.
Ira Magaziner, who was a fellow student at Oxford in 1969 and is now a senior economics adviser to the Clinton campaign, said he remembered the October rally but did not recall Mr. Clinton as an organizer. Like several of Mr. Clinton's friends of that time who were interviewed this week, he remembers the student from Arkansas as intensely interested in issues like the war and racism, but not as a radical.
"This was a very conventional group of people, not people who were burning flags or shouting 'pig' at the police," he said. "It was a very moderate group of people."
On Nov. 15, another demonstration was held in front of the American Embassy. This rally was larger than the October rally, drawing about 1,500 people, who filed silently in front of the embassy.
The marchers bore a coffin and, according to a contemporary account, carried cards with the names of servicemen who died in Vietnam. They walked to a megaphone in front of the embassy, called out the name and then dropped the card into a makeshift coffin.
Republicans have said Mr. Clinton took part in this demonstration and even helped negotiate with American Embassy officials to take the symbolic coffin inside. It is not clear if this is true.
What is clear is that Mr. Clinton played a role in organizing a related, but separate, demonstration on Nov. 16, which also took place near the embassy. That rally was peaceful, according to both witnesses and news accounts.
A second aspect of Mr. Clinton's activities that has come under heavy Republican assault is a 40-day trip in late 1969 and early 1970 to several Northern European and Eastern bloc countries, including the Soviet Union. Mr. Clinton has been vague about the details of the trip, and his New Year's Eve visit to Moscow in 1969 has been the subject of the most searing attacks by Republicans.
Mr. Bush elevated the attack on the issue Wednesday evening, when he was asked about the trip on 'Larry King Live.'
"I don't want to tell you what I really think," Mr. Bush said, adding, "To go to Moscow, one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, not remember what you saw there."
Mr. Clinton said Thursday that he traveled alone as a tourist and did not attend any gatherings or meet with any Soviet officials.
Although some Republicans have made many and varied insinuations suggesting Soviet control or financing of the trip, no Republican has produced evidence or a witness to back up that notion.
China Affirms Zhao Erred in Support For Protesters, but Ends Its Inquiry
By Lena H. Sun
Washington Post Service
BEIJING - China's ruling Communist Party ended its investigation Friday of the former party leader Zhao Ziyang, upholding a hard-line decision three years ago that Mr. Zhao made serious mistakes in supporting the 1989 democracy demonstrations, Xinhua press agency said.
The three-paragraph announcement by the party's policy-making Central Committee effectively ruled out any return to political life by the former protégé of the senior leader Deng Xiaoping. At the same time, the news agency appeared to indicate that no further action, such as criminal proceedings, would be taken against him.
The timing of the announcement took some analysts by surprise because it was believed that internal party differences over his case were still too great to allow a conclusion before a major party congress is to open here on Monday.
The congress is expected to promote some younger, more reformist leaders into the top echelons of the party. The fact that the party has officially closed the chapter on Mr. Zhao before the congress suggests that hard-liners opposed to even a partial clearing of his name were hoping to use that strategy to prevent any newly elected reformist leaders from reopening the case, according to some analysts.
"This just sweeps it under the rug so they don't have to argue about it during the congress," said a Western diplomat.
It is now almost certain that the party will not reconsider the issue while Mr. Deng and the other party elders who rule China are still alive.
It is not known what immediate effect the decision will have on Mr. Zhao, 74, who has not been seen in public since May 19, 1989. He has been living under virtual house arrest in central Beijing with his family. The news agency still referred to him as "comrade." It is highly unlikely that he would be expelled from the party.
His case has been under investigation for so long because it goes to the heart of the 1989 crackdown: Whether Mr. Deng and China's other ruling elders were wrong to order the Chinese Army to fire on demonstrators. Any backpedaling on Mr. Zhao's case would be interpreted to mean a reassessment of the decision to crack down.
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Russia's Archives Get Their Dose of Glasnost, But Sensitive Secrets Are Still Closely Guarded
By Elisabeth Rubinfien
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
MOSCOW - Rem Usikov punches a numbered code into a lock panel, pulls open a heavy metal door, and strides into a labyrinth of carpeted corridors leading to the secret files of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.
Past office doors where name plates still say tovarisch, or comrade, the archive's director comes to Preserve No. 9, a temperature-controlled, spotless cave of a room filled with metal cabinets stacked six high.
He randomly pulls out a binder on Central Committee discussions in 1983. The handwritten scraps and typewritten memos range from the mundane approval of a bureaucrat's business trip to the U.S. to communication from the Guyana People's Progressive Party.
The heavily guarded doors of the Russian archives have opened, wider than anyone would have expected a few years ago. Foreign journalists can walk these halls with men whose lives were once dedicated to secrecy. Almost every day, revelations appear - about U.S. prisoners of war held in the Soviet Union after World War II, or Soviet involvement in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
The court challenge to Russian President Boris Yeltsin's constitutional authority to outlaw the Communist Party has brought a flood of testimony that the party intruded into state activities, used the state budget to finance revolution abroad, and, even under former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, supported Mideast terrorists.
Conservatives Prevail
But for all the hoopla about secrets revealed, the vaults are still mostly closed. While Russia's Committee on Archival Affairs, Roskomarkhiv, may want to quickly declassify as much material as possible, more conservative thinking prevails in many subordinate agencies. Many restrictions keep scholars from research materials and individuals from their own surveillance files. When ideology doesn't stand in the way, shortages of funds, space and personnel slow the process.
Those details that have dribbled out in the Russian news media seem to be available less because of archival openness than because they are suitable weapons in the political battle raging between supporters of President Yeltsin and hard-line Communists.
"It's hard to talk about serious openness of archives today," says Konstantin Akinsha, an art historian whose archival research uncovered the fact that the Soviet Union had squirreled away millions of dollars worth of art treasures confiscated at the end of World War II from the Nazis - who had looted them in the first place. "These are only the first steps, and they're very far from total openness."
Mr. Usikov's Central Committee files are one of the treasure troves Russian and foreign scholars have long wondered about. With 40 separate archives, they include the most secret files of the Central Committee, from 1952 until the day of the failed coup against Mr. Gorbachev last year. Earlier Central Committee records are in a different archive.
Expert Review
Documents from before 1942 have been declassified and experts are working to declassify those from 1942 to 1962. But of some 200 million to 300 million Central Committee documents, Mr. Usikov estimates that only a third are open. These cover the more mundane party work such as propaganda and organization. The hotter topics of foreign policy and military and security affairs, are to be declassified after study by 'experts,' including members of the former KGB, and the foreign and defense ministries.
Ultimately, says Mr. Usikov, the archives must be fully opened. "It gives us the opportunity to understand history and to restore the true past," he says, "without the deviations, the distortions, without the ideological layers that were put on it."
While many archivists share that feeling, some institutions that have their own archives feel secrecy is safer than truth. Take the former KGB, now split into the Ministry of Security and its external intelligence counterpart. Roskomarkhiv chairman and historian Rudolf Pikhoia believes the central archival administration has jurisdiction over the KGB stores, but the security ministry disagrees.
"All KGB documents are still closed," says Mr. Pikhoia. "That is a very serious problem." Mr. Pikhoia recalls that in the heady days after the coup attempt, Roskomarkhiv "didn't press hard enough" to gain control of the KGB files. Overwhelmed with an unexpected 70 million Soviet Communist Party files, the 4.5 million KGB files seemed like small change that would be easy to pocket later. "Now I say that was a mistake because the situation turns out to be more complicated," he says.
At the former KGB headquarters in the Lubyanka building, which now houses the security ministry, some three million files on victims of repressions and on repatriated World War II prisoners are ready to be handed over to Roskomarkhiv - but it hasn't enough space to take them in.
Meanwhile, the remainder of the KGB files are untouchable. "The question of jurisdiction over the archives is still to be worked out," says Aleksandr Zubchenko, head of the security ministry's archives.
It is in these archives that the surveillance files on individual citizens are kept. Russia has no law allowing people easy access to such files, as in Czechoslovakia or the former East Germany. Here, a citizen who asks for his own file will be given a summary of the contents, carefully screened to exclude information still classified under law, such as who the informants were.
Even Boris Yeltsin himself has yet to cooperate with giving up the president's special files. These archives were created by dictator Joseph Stalin, who assiduously gathered compromising material on his opposition and colleagues. That material, which covered Politburo activities from 1919 until 1986, was commandeered by Mr. Gorbachev in 1990. Mr. Yeltsin took it over when he claimed the Kremlin at the end of last year.
Mr. Yeltsin has long promised to hand the material over to the central archives, but no transfer has taken place yet. "We have asked Boris Yeltsin during all these months, but there is still no answer," Mr. Usikov says.
Brazil Panel's Inquiry Report Criticizes Collor
Influence-Peddling Scheme Is Linked to Payments Of Personal Expenses
By Thomas Kamm
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
BRASILIA, Brazil - President Fernando Collor de Mello faces a battle to hold on to his job after a congressional panel investigating activities of his campaign treasurer alleged that Mr. Collor received "undue economic advantages" during the 29 months of his presidency.
In a report capping an 85-day investigation, the special panel contended that millions of dollars of Mr. Collor's living expenses, including the refurbishing of the presidential mansion in Brasilia and his luxury dwelling in his home town in eastern Brazil, and the acquisition of a car, were paid for by his 1989 campaign treasurer, Paulo Cesar Farias, or companies Mr. Farias controls, with funds derived from "an industry of influence-peddling" set up around the presidency.
"Extraordinary payments were made to cover the personal expenses of the president of the republic, either to maintain the Casa da Dinda [the president's Brasilia home] or in favor of his ex-wife, his mother, his sister and his wife and her secretary." the report said.
"The facts described are contrary to the principles enshrined in the constitution, as they are incompatible with the dignity, the honor and the decorum of the chief of state's function," it said.
Mr. Collor, the first freely elected Brazilian president after two decades of military rule, has previously denied any wrongdoing and had no immediate reaction to the report. His spokesman said over the weekend the president is likely to address the nation this week. Mr. Farias, in a televised telephone interview, denied wrongdoing and said he would "prove his innocence."
Impeachment Request Expected
The investigative panel stopped short of incriminating President Collor or formally requesting impeachment procedures against him, arguing that it wasn't empowered to do so. But panel members said the evidence they turned up can be used in court against Mr. Collor or serve as the basis for impeachment. The findings are being turned over to the attorney general, and several groups say they will submit impeachment requests to Congress.
If Mr. Collor decides to fight, the battle could throw Brazil into turmoil. But yesterday, the Sao Paulo stock market index rose on speculation that the report's harsh conclusions could force Mr. Collor out of office quickly and forestall a crisis.
An anti-corruption demonstration took place in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, and a similar demonstration is expected to be called by the governor of the state of Sao Paulo later this week.
Congressmen and lawyers say opposition members will step up their pressure for impeachment or for Mr. Collor's resignation, arguing that he has lost the moral standing to govern. "Collor is still there, but he has no political life anymore," says Sen. Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Mr. Collor's involvement, he says, "is total and direct. We have common crimes, uncommon crimes and extraordinary crimes."
Pro-Government Defense
Allies of the government will try to prove that Mr. Collor had no direct involvement in the scheme allegedly set up by Mr. Farias, that the panel went beyond its assigned role to investigate Mr. Farias and that it obtained evidence illegally by violating bank secrecy. "We'll contest the link with the president," says Roberto Jefferson, a pro-government federal deputy. "We'll fight it in the Chamber of Deputies and we'll fight it in the judiciary."
An impeachment process must be approved by two-thirds of Brazil's 503 federal deputies. By funding social programs supported by pro-government parties, Mr. Collor could gain enough support to ward off impeachment, though it's unclear what the economic consequences of such a policy would be.
The panel's findings provide unusual insights into corruption and influence-peddling in Brazil. In its report, the panel says Mr. Farias's personal and corporate fortune appears intimately linked with Mr. Collor's political fortunes. Companies Mr. Farias controls had "unimpressive" revenue until Mr. Collor took office in March 1990, and then became highly profitable, the report says.
This income, the panel concluded, came largely from influence-peddling. Mr. Farias, the report said, "making use of the president's friendship and prestige, obtained large sums of money by selling nonexistent services" in apparent return for help on obtaining government contracts. The report says companies controlled by Mr. Farias received about $200,000 per instance for consulting work that they were clearly unequipped to perform. The payments were made without bills and the companies couldn't prove that any effective work was done. His jet-leasing companies also billed flights that never took place, it concluded. Mr. Farias has also denied any wrongdoing.
"Tens of Millions of Dollars"
The panel said it couldn't determine how much money the alleged Farias scheme took in, but says it detected financial movements totaling "tens of millions of dollars."
Part of this money was used for Mr. Collor's expenses and was channeled to him through the account of his personal secretary, Ana Acioli Gomes de Melo, it said. Mrs. Acioli's account was funded by fictitious people, whose handwriting has been traced back to employees of Mr. Farias.
The panel said it doubts Mr. Collor's claim that his bills were paid with a $5 million loan contracted in Uruguay in 1989 and administered by his former top aide, Claudio Vieira. The panel said it found no trace of deposits by Mr. Vieira in Mrs. Acioli's account.
Bush Set to Ban Iraqi Warplanes In Shiite Area
Order Could Go Out Today, Though Florida Visit Might Prompt a Delay
By Gerald F. Seib
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON - President Bush is preparing to announce, perhaps as early as today, that the U.S. and its allies are ordering Iraq to stop flying its aircraft over the Shiite Muslim region of southern Iraq, U.S. officials said.
Most significant details of the agreement have been worked out by the U.S., Britain, France and Saudi Arabia, the nations that will be responsible for policing the ban on Iraqi flights, Bush administration aides said. Those nations are imposing the blockade to make it more difficult for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to use his military power to attack Shiite dissidents who have been an irritation for him in the past year.
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Somali clan hampers U.N. aid
Powerful militia rejects more troops
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mogadishu, Somalia - The most powerful clan militia in Somalia said Saturday that it opposes a U.N. plan to send more troops to protect food deliveries for more than a million starving Somalis.
Aid workers worried that without support from Gen. Mohammed Farrah Aidid's United Somali Congress, the arrival of the troops would spark new fighting in the ravaged country.
Mohammed Sahnoun, the United Nations's special envoy to Somalia, said Saturday that the international body would proceed slowly and win the support of warring factions before sending any additional troops.
Meanwhile, a U.S. airlift to help save Somalis from starvation continued smoothly for a second day.
The United Nations estimates that 1.5 million Somalis are in danger of dying and that another 4.5 million require food and other emergency assistance.
The United Nations voted late Friday to send 3,000 troops to guard relief shipments, in addition to 500 troops already promised. Looting has hampered relief aid to the war-torn country.
The dangers of delivering food were underscored Friday when two unarmed U.N. military observers were shot and wounded near Mogadishu's port. Gunmen backed by three tanks attacked the port, stealing 50 trucks, tons of food and 199 barrels of fuel, U.N. officials said.
"I consider this open aggression and provocation against the United Nations," Mr. Sahnoun said.
The first 500 U.N. troops, drawn from Pakistan, are not expected for another two weeks and will be limited to Mogadishu.
"We believe the 500 are enough," Abdulkarem Ali Ahmed, secretary-general of General Aidid's United Somali Congress, told The Associated Press on Saturday. "Let's see if that works before we talk about larger numbers."
General Aidid's forces occupy the southern half of Mogadishu and much of the southwest of the country. Their main rival is Ali Mahdi Mohammed, who holds the title of interim president but controls only a small section of northern Mogadishu.
General Aidid's militia fears that a large U.N. presence would amount to an occupying force recognizing Mr. Ali Mahdi's claim to be president. It has requested that instead of troops, the United Nations send money and other resources to rebuild Somalia's police force.
Mr. Sahnoun acknowledged that the United Nations would have to win General Aidid's support before sending additional soldiers. It took months of talks before General Aidid accepted the first 500 peacekeepers.
A senior aid worker said in Nairobi, Kenya, that there probably would be problems if the fighting factions did not agree. The worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, pointed to the bloodshed and raid at the Mogadishu port.
"We support any security effort to protect our workers," said Dennis Walto of the Los Angeles-based International Medical Corps, which has worked in Somalia for the last 10 months. "But we're all kind of holding our breath."
Somalia dissolved into anarchy after rebels overthrew dictator Mohammed Siad Barre in January 1991. Some aid officials estimate as much as half of the more than 110,000 tons of food delivered since the beginning of the year has been looted. Thousands of people are dying daily from the combined effects of drought and clan warfare.
The U.S. airlift into Somalia began Friday with four planes and a total of 37 tons of food to Belet Huen, on the border with Ethiopia.
On Saturday, three U.S. C-130 Hercules cargo planes delivered about 30 tons of rice, beans and cooking oil to Belet Huen. A fourth plane was grounded by maintenance difficulties, said Army Lt. Col. Robert Donnelly, 43, of Suffern, N.Y.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has been caring for Belet Huen's starving since early this year, estimates about 200,000 people in and around Belet Huen need help.
One ton of food will feed about 2,200 people for one day. It would take nearly 700 tons of food a day just to feed all of the Somalis in immediate danger of starvation; the Red Cross' relief effort is getting about 22,000 tons of food a month into the country.
The United States also has delivered 1,350 tons of food on 77 flights to the northeastern Kenyan town of Wajir since starting the airlift Aug. 21.
The United Nations has been criticized for responding too slowly to Somalia's crisis. On Saturday, the British aid group Save the Children charged that thousands of lives are being needlessly lost in Somalia because the United Nations has failed to provide effective leadership.
Anti-foreign riots spread in Germany
Thousands protest neo-Nazi terror
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Rostock, Germany - Extremists rampaged near refugee shelters and attacked foreigners across eastern Germany on Saturday in an apparent widening of right-wing terror.
Police and media reports said clashes occurred in at least 10 cities and towns, including Rostock during a march to show solidarity with foreign asylum-seekers. Similar marches were held in Bonn and the university city of Marburg to protest the rise of neo-Nazi violence.
About 13,000 leftists, residents, foreigners and others held an anti-extremist rally outside the refugee shelter in Rostock, where the riots began last week. One banner read "Youth Against Racism in Europe" with a red fist smashing a swastika; others said "Never Again Hitler" and "Nazis Out."
About 3,000 police and border troops patrolled the city, and there were several clashes with local residents. Organizers said the demonstration was delayed by police searching cars and busses for weapons.
"Foreigners stay! Kick out the Nazis! Never again Auschwitz!" the protesters chanted as they began marching through the Lichtenhagen district. They shouted back at a man in black leather who raised his right arm in a Hitler salute and shouted "Heil!" five times from behind a wall of police with riot shields.
There were sporadic clashes between marchers and neo-Nazis in Rostock, but there were no immediate reports of injuries.
A flood of asylum-seekers
The anti-foreigner violence is evidence of the growing resentment toward the foreigners who are flooding into the country, especially in economically depressed former East Germany. German Chancellor Helmut Kohl has acknowledged that authorities will have to stem the flow of asylum-seekers to keep the discontent in check.
Before the Rostock riots began, residents had complained of unsanitary, crowded conditions at the city's refugee shelter.
Police across Germany were on alert Saturday after reporting overnight disturbances involving rightists and refugees. Germany's ZDF television said the anti-foreigner violence had spread to 10 towns and cities, many in former East Germany.
In Spremberg, police said 15 skinheads threw stones at asylum seekers and beat up a Pakistani refugee.
In Griefswald, right-wing extremists attacked a home for refugees, breaking several windows, and four extremists were arrested, police said. No injuries were reported.
In Cottbus, about 200 right-wingers tried to attack a home for refugees, but an estimated 300 police officers drove them back, authorities said.
In Oschersleben, 70 miles west of Berlin, about 40 radicals armed with clubs tried to storm a refugee shelter that had been hit by a firebomb the night before, but police thwarted the attack.
A second night of violence also was reported in Stendal, where rightists armed with baseball bats and firebombs sought to storm the local refugee shelter.
Other trouble was reported in the eastern German communities of Soemmerda, Eisenach and Luebbenau.
Police in the western German town of Bad Lauterberg in the Harz Mountains said a refugee shelter there was hit by a fire-bomb overnight. No one was injured.
Rampant anger, frustration
The extreme rightists who rampaged in Rostock appeared to include skinheads, neo-Nazis and aimless young people at the center of the anger and frustration rampant in eastern Germany.
Many of the leftists come from what is known as the 'alternative scene' that thrives in major German cities. They include students, squatters and those benefiting from Germany's generous welfare programs.
Among the marchers Saturday were hard-core leftist street fighters known as 'autonomen,' or the autonomous, who often battle with police over issues including squatters' rights and opposition to extreme rightist rallies.
"Racism is growing, and we're trying to do something against it," said one marcher from Berlin, who identified himself only as Martin. He said the leftists want a safe climate in Germany for refugees and others.
Rostock resident Fred Grosser, 28, a member of the Party for Democratic Socialism, the former Communist Party, claimed that local officials were trying to discourage the anti-racism protest.
"We decided to protest against the violent actions here in the past week," said Mr. Grosser, whose party sent several national leaders to the demonstration.
State and local officials have come under biting criticism for failing to cope with the violence.
More cuts in military expected
Pentagon plans foresee bigger hit
NEW YORK TIMES
Washington - Anticipating that steeper cuts in future military spending are inevitable, the Pentagon is quietly preparing to reduce its forces below the lowest levels the Bush administration has said would be acceptable, senior Defense Department officials say.
The cuts, which would affect fundamental military programs - including troops, weapons purchases, and military bases - could free as much as $80 billion in military spending by 1997 for use in other domestic programs.
No decisions have been made on the deeper reductions, and none are likely until after the election in November. Officially, the military services are complying with a budget-review process this summer that requires them to submit long-range plans meant to conform with the Pentagon's strategic outline for a post-Cold War world.
These classified plans, copies of which were obtained by The New York Times, assume a continuation of the Bush administration's 'base force' of 1.6 million uniformed troops through the late 1990s, as outlined by the Pentagon in the summer of 1990. Among the plans' proposals that are likely to generate debate is placing land-based Marine Corps aircraft on Navy carriers and assigning Air Force bomber pilot jobs to reservists.
But senior Defense Department officials privately acknowledge that they consider many details of these plans already out of date. Regardless of the political outcome in November, they say, the military budget is going to have to take a bigger hit than the administration has publicly proposed. The services probably will have to rewrite much of their budgets after November before submitting them early next year, these officials say.
"Most people believe that whether Bush or Clinton is elected, the cut will be the same," said one senior Pentagon official. "The only difference will be that with Clinton it'll come faster, and with Bush it'll be slower."
Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton said last week that his proposed military budget over the next five years would be only 5 percent less than President Bush's, but that he would make deeper cuts in the number of American troops based in Europe and in the Strategic Defense Initiative anti-ballistic missile system.
Last year, the Pentagon confronted similar budget pressures, and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ordered a comprehensive review of future military needs. As a result, the Pentagon canceled several expensive weapons, such as the B-2 bomber and the Seawolf submarine, to avoid deeper troop cuts.
This time, military planners say they are reluctantly looking at shrinking the size of the overall force itself. They say projected military spending simply will not cover the costs required to equip, train and maintain the troops and accompanying ships, aircraft and ground units called for in the long-range budgets.
"Today's fiscal environment shows no sign of being cyclical in nature," said the Navy's long-range planning document. "Reversal of current projected resource reductions is not foreseen."
One senior Army official elaborated, saying, "No one believes we'll have these numbers to play with. You won't see a $280 billion defense budget in the future. It'll be more like $250 billion or $240 billion, or lower."
The Pentagon's budget for this fiscal year was $291 billion.
The administration publicly continues to resist cuts beyond those envisioned by current Pentagon plans: a 25 percent reduction in forces by 1995. Under that base-force plan, the Navy would have 12 aircraft carriers, the Air Force 15 tactical air wings and the Army 12 active-duty divisions.
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BILL CLINTON
Arkansas governor's strengths also are his potential weaknesses
By John King
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - Bill Clinton is a master of detail politics and retail politics, never at a loss to answer questions with a laundry list and never ready to leave a room or a rally until one last hand is touched.
But in a political year filled with strange twists and irony, it is perhaps fitting that Clinton enters the campaign's stretch run facing this irony: Many of his strenghts are also potential weaknesses.
He is a polished politician, but he is running in a year when voters are tired of politics and politicians as usual.
The details that Clinton rattles off often impress voters. But they also give ammunition to critics who cast Clinton as a politician promising all things to all people.
As he tries to persuade voters to trust him in the White House at a time of domestic distress and global change, Clinton cannot escape the contrast of a baby-boomer, small-state governor up against a man with one of the longest government resumes in American political history.
Nor can he avoid the comparison that voters will make between men who went in opposite directions during the wars of their generations.
Here's a look at Clinton's areas of strength and weakness:
STRENGTHS
The economy. Bad news is good news for Clinton, and there has been no end to reports detailing an economy stuck in a rut, with growth slower than at any time since World War II.
"Clinton is seen as caring much more about average people than George Bush, and he is seen as being much better prepared to provide leadership for economic change," Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin said.
A focus on domestic issues. Clinton has offered a long list of proposals, although some are more framework than programs. He has plans to create jobs by building roads, bridges and communications infrastucture; to povide universal access to apprenticeship programs and college for high-school graduates; to provide basic health care to all Americans; and to shift money from defense into new civilian research and jobs.
Youth. Just turned 46, Clinton projects himself as the personification of voter yearnings for change and new leadership.
Al Gore. Reaction to Clinton's choice of the Tennessee senator as his running mate has been overwhelmingly positive, with Gore seen by voters as a far superior pick than Bush's choice of Dan Quayle. Gore brings to the ticket environmental, foreign-policy and arms-control credentials that Clinton lacks, helps the ticket in the South and reinforces the Democrats' generational theme.
Political skills. Unlike Michael Dukakis four years ago, Clinton responds quickly and sharply when attacked. More importantly, he tries to play offense by constantly going after Bush.
"We're up against a tough customer here," GOP strategist Haley Barbour said.
WEAKNESSES
Inexperience. This is the flip side to the benefits of youth. Clinton's work over 20 years in Arkansas, even if viewed favorably, cannot match Bush's lengthy resume of service in national and international affairs.
"Who do you trust to make change work for you?" is a favorite Bush line aimed at exploiting Clinton's inexperience on the national stage and absence of foreign-policy credentials.
A senior Clinton strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "His biggest weakness is that he is so new to so much of the general electorate."
The draft controversy. The debate over whether Clinton has been candid in discussing how he avoided the Vietnam draft could feed critics' portrayals of Clinton as slick and untrustworthy.
"Whether he did or did not go isn't fair game," said South Carolina GOP Gov. Carroll Campbell, a key Bush ally. "But his veracity is fair game."
Promises, promises. Clinton has promised to be a real education president, real environmental president, a true friend of veterans, of senior citizens and of middle-class families needing help with health care and college money. He is vulnerable to charges that he is promising far more than the nation can afford at a time of record deficits.
Being a Democrat. Although Clinton has led efforts to moderate his party, most voters don't know that. Republicans are quick to compare Clinton to Dukakis, Walter Mondale and Jimmy Carter.
"He has to overcome all the bad things people associate with Democrats, whether they apply to him or not," Clinton spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers said.
Arkansas. Clinton can point to some remarkable progress in his state, particularly in education and recent economic growth. Still, Arkansas has been among the nation's poorest states for decades and ranks near the bottom in many statistical analyses, giving Republicans ample ammunition as they try to paint Clinton as 'the failed governor of a small state.'
GEORGE BUSH
Foreign-affairs whiz judged back home as a man without a stand
By Terence Hunt
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - There's no mystery about Geroge Bush. He's the broccoli-hating, dog-loving, war-winning president who wants to devote the same energy to America's problems that he's applied to crises overseas.
But wait, look again.
He's the read-my-lips promise breaker, tax hiker, status quo defender and protector of the wealthy, a leader more interested in the economic distress of Russians than the misery of unemployed Americans.
One man, two distinctly different judgments. It depends, in part, on the political prism you use.
Yet, after more than a quarter of a century in politics and nearly 12 years at the White House, Bush has a record of achievements and failures, a history that can be examined and assessed.
A quick appraisal: strong on foreign policy, weak on domestic affairs. That's the verdict which repeatedly emerges from the polls. Also evident is an underlying finding that nearly 80 percent of Americans think that the nation's on the wrong track.
Here's a look at the president's record:
STRENGTHS
Bush has arguably the most impressive resume in Washington: Yale grad, war veteran, Texas oil man, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican Party, envoy to China, chief of the CIA, vice president and president. Ready to lead from Day 1, he boasted.
In Bush's view, it comes down to a simple question: Who do you want sitting in the Oval Office? Who's got the temperament, the experience, to make the tough decisions in a crisis?
Sure, he paid a lot of attention to foreign policy in his first 3 1/2 years in office, Bush acknowledges. But children don't have to hide under their school desks anymore in drills preparing for a nuclear attack.
"I saw the chance to rid our children's dreams of the nuclear nightmare and I did," Bush says.
Bush crams a lot of history into his foreign-policy portfolio: The Berlin Wall fell on his watch, and Germany was reunited. The Soviet Union collapsed, and communism died in Eastern Europe.
"The Cold War is over, and we won," Bush says, wrapping himself in the cloak of triumph.
When Saddam Hussein's troops stormed into Kuwait, Bush rallied world leaders and forced Iraq to withdraw. Those were the glory days, when Bush's popularity ratings hit a record 90 percent. He seemed unbeatable.
When critics ask what he's done at home, Bush points to enactment of a sweeping Clean Air Act Bill, although the administration has failed to complete dozens of regulations to put the law into effect; a landmark Civil Rights Act, which Bush signed a year after vetoing a similar measure; and the 'America 2000' movement to spur fundamental changes in the nation's classrooms.
Bush's biggest strength, Republican strategist Eddie Mahe says, is that "Americans sense he really is a decent human being. People really have a sense that he is a quality person who is basically driven by pretty decent instincts and motivations. Barbara Bush is a real strength of his."
WEAKNESSES
What does Bush stand for? What does he believe in? He has flip-flopped on everything from abortion to 'voodoo economics.' In the 1960s, he was against civil-rights and open-housing legislation and then voted for the 1968 Fair Housing Act. As president, he promised that there would be no net loss of the nation's swamps, marshes and other wetlands, but then he endorsed a plan that would allow development on tens of millions of acres, including parts of the Florida Everglades.
Bush, Clinton TV spots focus on economy
President blames Congress, foe vows jobs package
By John King
The Associated Press
President Bush and Bill Clinton competed on national television Sunday for voters' trust to revive the anemic economy, the Democrat promising a jobs package as his first move and Bush blaming sluggish economic growth on "the gridlock Congress" blocking his recovery plan.
Both also were questioned about past actions that could prove a major factor in the campaign. And both said they expected debates, although Bush again shied away from a three-debate plan Clinton said he has accepted.
For Clinton, the nagging episode from his past was his avoidance of the draft during the Vietnam War. For Bush, the subject was new questions about his knowledge of the Reagan administration's alleged arms-for-hostages dealings with Iran.
But as it does on the campaign trail, the economy dominated the debate as Clinton and Bush appeared for rare, live 10-minute back-to-back interviews on an NBC election special.
"Pass a jobs program," Clinton said in listing his first priority if elected.
Controlling health-care costs would be second, he said.
"I don't pretend that it is going to be easy or quick," the Arkansas governor said. Still, "We can cut (the deficit) in half in the next four years if we have real discipline."
Bush said he believes the majority of Americans are better off now than they were four years ago, although he added, "Certainly, anyone who is out of work cannot say he is better off."
Still, Bush blamed the Democrat-controlled Congress for refusing to pass a Bush administration package he said contained the incentives businesses need to buy new equipment and hire more workers.
"What we're trying to do is turn things around and get people back to work," Bush said in Michigan. "The gridlock Congress said, 'No.' ... I have been stymied in those incentives and more by the Congress."
The Labor Department last week said there were fewer private-sector jobs in August than when Bush took office. But Bush said he is "not prepared to buy into those statistics."
"I'm not sure there are fewer people at work," he said.
Bush also sought to convey the sense that the economy, despite recent government figures, is on the upswing.
"I think things are getting better," he said. "We are poised for a strong recovery."
When anchorman Tom Brokaw said Clinton's answers about his draft status were "inconsistent", Clinton retorted that he had never changed his story, but added, "Maybe I haven't handled it as well as I should."
Clinton said he did not know until earlier this year that an uncle had lobbied to get him a spot in the Naval Reserve. Clinton never took the slot, although he did briefly commit to an ROTC program before putting his name into the draft when a lottery was implemented.
Much like Clinton on the draft, Bush brushed aside the notion that his role in the Iran-contra scandal might become a 1992 presidential-campaign issue. Recent documents submitted in court cases have suggested that Bush, Reagan's vice president, knew more about the arms-for-hostage scandal than he has indicated.
"If I had done anything wrong ... they would be all over me like you can possibly imagine," Bush said.
He called the revival of the issue "a late smoke screen ... I have nothing to explain."
As for debates, Clinton said he accepts the plan of a bipartisan panel to begin a three-debate series Sept. 22 in East Lansing, Mich. But Bush said he is leaving the details to his aides.
Also in the program, NBC released a new poll showing Clinton leading Bush 49 to 40 percent. The survey was taken Sept. 3-5 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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White House
Mourning in America
BY ANN McDANIEL
With Clara Bingham on the road with Bush
It was a gesture familiar to Bush watchers. A sudden flick of the lanky wrist, a quick glance down at the watch. George Bush knows no angle of repose; he has been restless and fidgety, a man in a hurry through his long political career. But last Thursday, when Bush obviously and impatiently checked the time half-way through the second presidential debate, some 80 million viewers could not help but read a larger meaning into a familiar habit. It said: Outta time. Outta here.
After 12 years, the Reagan-Bush revolution appears to be in its Final Days. Staffers have not exactly draped black crepe over the White House, but within the West Wing can be heard the whine of axes grinding and the churn of Xerox machines cranking out résumés. Barring the greatest performance in the history of presidential debates on Monday night, the appearance of a terrible ghost from Bill Clinton's past, or an act of God, George Bush seems fated to be a one-term president. The Republican Party may not even make it to Election Day before a period of mourning sets in.
Before acceptance, of course, must come denial, anger and depression. As he left the stage on Thursday, Bush gave a less-than-gung-ho reply when a TV reporter asked him how he'd done. "I just don't know," he muttered. In a conversation last week with an old and close friend, Bush grudgingly conceded that his days in the Oval Office may be numbered, but he refused to accept the blame for it. The timing was bad, he said. The recession lasted too long. The cold war ended too soon. Anyways, he said, there's still time. "It's been a screwy year."
That thin hope keeps Bush's inner core of top advisers whistling as they pass the political graveyard. Pulling all-nighters, they thought up snappy comeback lines for the president, none of which Bush managed to use. (When Clinton pledged to be the president of change, Bush was supposed to shoot back, "like you changed your story on avoiding the draft?") Before the second debate, when tracking polls showed a slight narrowing in the race, Bush campaign strategist Charlie Black jauntily declared a return of the Big Mo. He neglected to mention a very big But: according to the Bush campaign's own polling data, the gap between Bush and Clinton had not closed in many key states. After Thursday night's fade-out, the staffers were left grasping at an even flimsier document: a fax-smudged advance copy of the December Penthouse, in which Gennifer Flowers purports to detail her steamy love life with Clinton. Even Bob Guccione, the Penthouse publisher, refused to vouch for Flower's credibility.
The only road left to the Bush campaign was the low one. Bush advisers urged the president to shed his diffidence and come out swinging against Clinton in the final debate. Dan Quayle had scored with his harsh attacks on Clinton and Al Gore during the veep debate, although the vice president appeared manic at times. (Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales wrote that Quayle's "forced laugh was reminiscent of Richard Widmark's when he played weirdos in films noir of the '40s.") The president's last campaign-ad buys will make the unsubtle point that the president's opponent is a liar.
Lower down in the Bush-Quayle campaign ranks, the blame game has begun in earnest. "It's like living the 'Lord of the Flies'," said a staffer. "We haven't been able to eat Bill Clinton so we've begun eating each other." While staffers were not sending out their curricula vitae over the White House fax machines, they were sticking pins in the already deflated reputations of Bush's former chiefs of staff. It was all John Sununu's fault, some argued. He foolishly thought the president could surf back into office on his gulf-war surge. No, it was Sam Skinner's, said others. The former transportation secretary couldn't organize a car pool. The one person everyone could agree to trash was Richard Darman. The wily budget director had given his best friend, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, a self-serving account of the Bush administration's failure to manage the economy. The plot of the four-part series was: Darman tried to do the right thing, but low-rent pols (Jim Baker, the president) stopped him. Staffers jokingly put a Bush-Quayle sticker on Darman's Mercedes, to remind him whom he was voting for, and yukked it up over a Christopher Buckley parody in The Wall Street Journal of Darman's memoirs, entitled 'A Legend in His Own Mind.' One cabinet secretary was more blunt. The only way Bush could repay Darman, he said, was to buy 30 minutes of TV time, take Darman on stage and shoot him.
Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, only Jim Baker has escaped universal scorn from the staff. The president's best friend has obviously failed to play miracle worker in his latest role as chief of staff and campaign czar, but most aides shurg that the patient was too far gone by the time Baker arrived in late August. Baker does have bitter critics in the office of Vice President Quayle. The veep's aides accuse Baker of a lack of boldness; Baker loyalists scoff that the Quaylemen are just sore because they have been cut out of the loop.
Inside the First Family, depression has sunk in. Friends say that George W., Bush's eldest son, and the president's daughter, Doro, are particularly low over their father's apparent demise. When George Bush announced in the debate that his wife, Barbara, probably could have won the election but it was "too late," the First Lady wore an expression on her face that must have reflected her true feelings 44 years ago when her husband announced that they were moving from Connecticut to Midland, Texas.
In his public moods, the president himself alternates between the odd passivity he showed in the debates and flailing on the campaign trail. Hoarse and tired after the Thursday debate, his syntax a shambles, Bush laced into Clinton for evading the draft at a sparsely attended rally at Middlesex County College in Edison, N.J. For good measure, he also denounced a group of hecklers, most of whom were not even born during Vietnam War, as "draft dodgers."
But that is the sad and angry side of Bush. There is also a stoic and strong Bush, and he showed himself in a private conversation with a friend last week. He hadn't decided where to live if he lost the election, he said. But "if it happens, it happens. There's life after this, and a damn good life." Bush could decide to go out with dignity - and leave the last assaults to surrogates. More likely, he will follow the rough-and-tumble code of the schoolboy and play hard to the end.
Perot: Pulling the Race Out of the Mud
Eleanor Clift with Ginny Carroll in Dallas
For 48 hours last week, Ross Perot was on a roll. He won the first presidential debate. His 'infomercial' - a kind of truth-or-dare on the economy - drew high ratings. Washington pundits speculated on whether he could take off and perhaps affect the outcome of the presidential race. Then, in a condensed version of last spring and summer, the latest flirtation with Perot bumped up against reality. Perot's running mate, Adm. James B. Stockdale, faltered in the vice presidential debate, reminding voters of the improbability of their ticket. By the time Perot left the stage after the second presidential debate in Richmond, there was no pretending. Though he inched up in Newsweek's Poll, he had about as much chance of being elected the next president as Madonna.
Maybe Perot has been telling the truth all along, that he doesn't really want to be president. What counts is his reputation, which was sorely damaged after his abrupt withdrawal from the race last July. He is spending millions on TV ads so he can look into the shaving mirror and not see a quitter. Perot's one-liners on the economy are beginning to sound like a stand-up comedy routine; he needs new material. But by focusing attention on the deficit, Perot has helped elevate the last stage of a race that might otherwise have been preoccupied entirely with mudslinging.
Perot has been a reluctant warrior for his own program. He could have avoided criticism of his second debate performance if he had gone beyond one-liners to stress solutions. In his latest infomercial Perot's sober twin emerges. Grim-faced, he urges further taxing of social-security benefits, higher Medicare premiums and increased gasoline taxes. Yet with the exception of the gas tax (50 cents a gallon over five years), he glides over his proposals so quickly that they get lost in the shuffle of pie charts and bar graphs. He spends little time bracing those who will lose benefits. This is Stone Age television, yet it is oddly riveting. Perot sits at a desk with a 'voodoo stick' pointer, a play on voodoo economics, while the charts pile up along with the bad news.
Perot must be wondering what might have been had he not acted so impetuously last July. Only three weeks before he withdrew, some polls showed him leading in a three-way race. Newsweek has learned that Perot flew to Washington at that time, undetected by the press, to meet with Dr. Bernadine Healy, head of the National Institutes of Health, who he had hoped would be his running mate. (Stockdale was meant to be a stand-in.) Healy, a Republican and a Bush appointee, ultimately turned him down. But as Stockdale struggled on the stage to hold his own last week, the thought of Healy - a brilliant heart specialist and an articulate advocate for women's health issues - must have given Perot a what-if pang.
With his re-entry into the race, Perot is trying to recapture those heady early days when the faithful treated him like a rock star. But running for office takes more than revving up volunteers. "Dad is on a very steep learning curve on how to be a politician," says Ross Perot Jr. If the cold war were not over, Perot would never have been taken seriously as a candidate: his mercurial temperament would have labeled him as someone who could not be trusted with his finger on the button. Even so, Perot can still play a leadership role in the economic battles of the '90s: his warnings about the deficit may make it easier for the next president to get the country to swallow some tough economic medicine.
Welcome to 1993
Forget the struggles over Maastricht. Europe's Single Market will change the world.
By Scott Sullivan
Europe is dying, Europe is dying, Europe is practically dead. Its vaunted exchange-rate mechanism lies in tatters. The pound sterling, the lira and the peseta have dropped like stones. Britain wallows in its longest postwar recession. French economic growth is slowing, and France's president has cancer. Italy faces the worst labor disturbances in decades. Even mighty Germany is hard up for cash. The Maastricht Treaty on European political and monetary union looks like a goner. Not for years has the European scene looked so bleak. And yet, the Old Continent is on the verge of accomplishing its most spectacular feat ever - the creation of a vast 'frontierless' economic space with 360 million consumers and a combined GNP of $6.5 trillion.
On Jan. 1, 1993, the Single Market - or most of it - will come into effect. Henceforward, travelers within the 12-nation European Community and the seven-nation European Free Trade Association will travel without passports or visas throughout a vast European Economic Space. Internal customs duties will disappear. Trucks will carry no special documents. Physiotherapists, architects and students will be able to practice or study anywhere in the Single Market on the basis of degrees they earned at home. Builders and telephone suppliers will bid for public contracts on equal terms in all 19 countries. Insurance companies and banks can establish branches anywhere in the area.
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BUT SERIOUSLY, FOLKS...
Dan Quayle's wacky attack on TV's Murphy Brown character obscures a serious discussion about motherhood, morality and government's responsibility
By LANCE MORROW
With reporting by Tom Curry and Georgia Harbison/ New York
AMERICANS TALKED ABOUT IT in coffee shops and check-out lines and elevators. In the Rose Garden of the White House, George Bush stood with Brian Mulroney, trying to hold a press conference about matters of state. The hounds of the press frisked and barked in excitement until their intermingled questions sounded something like Murf! Murf! Murf!
The Prime Minister of Canada turned to the President of the U.S. and asked in some puzzlement, "Who is Murphy Brown?"
The basic answer was easy: Murphy Brown does not exist. She is the TV character played by Candice Bergen. Murphy is a blond media anchor-goddess and wise-guy and now a defiantly unmarried madonna. In last week's episode she delivered a baby boy - the boy being played by a seven-week-old girl named Danica Fascella. (A perfect Murphy Brown, post-Quayle touch: Danica and her twin Cynthia were conceived in vitro and carried to term by a surrogate mother.) In triumphant autonomy, Murphy will raise the child as a single parent.
But an outpouring of emotion and opinion about Murphy Brown has proved to be unexpectedly interesting and bizarre. A Murphy Brown debate has gone layering up through a dozen levels of American life - political, moral, cultural, racial, even metaphysical. The exercise has seemed amazingly stupid, obscurely degrading and somehow important at the same time.
Vice President Dan Quayle precipitated it. He and Murphy Brown collaborated in one of those vivid, strange electronic moral pageants, like the Thomas-Hill hearings, that are becoming a new American form. This is national theater: surreal, spontaneous, mixing off-hours pop culture with high political meanings, public behavior with private conscience, making history up with tabloids and television personalities like Oprah Winfrey. The trivial gets aggrandized, the biggest themes cheapened. America degenerates into a TV comedy - and yet Americans end up thinking in new ways about some larger matters. The little television screen, the bright and flat and often moronic medium of these spectacles, works in strange disproportions of cause and effect: often, in wild disconnections of cause and effect, video Dada.
Quayle was in San Francisco, market-testing a line of traditional-values rhetoric for more elaborate use as the presidential campaign progresses. The Los Angeles riots were still flickering on the edges of everyone's mind. In a speech before the Commonwealth Club, Quayle came down hard on "lawless social anarchy" - as opposed, presumably, to lawful anarchy. He spoke of "the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society," of "a welfare ethos that impedes individual efforts to move ahead in society ..." He acknowledged the "terrible problem with race and racism," adding that "the evil of slavery has left a long legacy." But the core of the speech was law and order. It bristled with words like "indulgence and self-gratification ...glamourized casual sex and drug use."
The speech - if one deleted the Murphy Brown passage - was a reasonably persuasive and sometimes eloquent sampler: a punitive-inspirational hymn to hard work, family integrity and personal responsibility. Some people later took Quayle's words to be fatuous white-bread truisms - Norman Rockwell evocations of an America long gone. But if the ideas could be considered outside the inflammatory political and racial context of the moment, they had a ring of common sense. A number of black leaders, including Jesse Jackson, might have made the same points without controversy - and have. The family, Quayle said, is important, and "the failure of our families is hurting America deeply ...Children need love and discipline. They need mothers and fathers. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father ...Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong."
Then Quayle dropped in a paragraph that produced the spectacularly silly media effect: "It doesn't help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown - a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman - mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another 'life-style choice.'"
F. Scott Fitzgerald said it is a sign of genius to be able to entertain in the mind two mutually contradictory ideas without going insane. America does not think of itself as a genius anymore. A number of Americans went crazy when they heard Quayle's line about Murphy Brown.
At the first level, Quayle's Ozzie and Harriet universe, with its freckle-faced nuclear-family suburban reassurances, collided with that of successful autonomous career women like the one portrayed in Murphy Brown. The executive producer of Murphy Brown, Diane English, had a well-machined answer for Quayle: "If the Vice President thinks it's disgraceful for an unmarried woman to bear a child, and he believes that a woman cannot adequately raise a child without a father, then he'd better make sure abortion remains safe and legal." Given that Murphy Brown was pregnant, what did Quayle expect her to do? Have an abortion? Her decision to go ahead and have the child was in harmony with the Administration's pro-life convictions. Why criticize her then? Harrumph: she should never have got pregnant in the first place. Or, more pertinently: the creators of the program should not have concocted the pregnancy dilemma for Murphy, thereby making her ultimate choice seem like a legitimizing and glamourizing of single motherhood.
At a second, less explicit layer of meaning, the Quayle line took on complex racial colorations. He suggested that Murphy Brown was a bad role model for unmarried females. In the speech's context, he was talking about single mothers in the ghetto. But like so much in last week's odd episode, there were signs of hip shooting and inadvertence.
In fact, few young black females watch Murphy Brown. The show, which in overall audience is the third most popular on network television, ranks 56th in popularity among American blacks. So the idea that Murphy's single motherhood encourages black adolescent girls to follow the same course loses its force.
The racial dimension flows naturally into the political, where the uglier side of Quayle's mission begins to become apparent. One of Quayle's amazing but unlikable feats last week was metaphorically to transform old Willie Horton into a beautiful blond fortyish wasp has-it-all knockout. (Horton was the black murderer who raped a housewife while on furlough during the time that 1988 Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was Governor of Massachusetts; the Bush campaign used Horton to ridicule Dukakis.) So in 1992, by Quayle's interesting subliminal design, Murphy carries at least some of Willie's message: mindless liberalism allied with black anarchy (ruined families, unwed mothers, crime, drugs) leads quickly to social breakdown.
If Quayle has no malign racial-political intent, he might point out, when discussing the miseries of families, that, for example, Eastern prep schools are filled with children packed off to get them away from divorce, incest, alcoholism, child abuse, wife battering and other horrors at home. The willingness to let the racist implication stand unchallenged, unexamined, loitering on the threshold, is the ugliest aspect of all this.
Quayle in part plays the Spiro Agnew role to Bush's Richard Nixon. But when Agnew went after the 'nattering nabobs' and student protesters, he did so with a thuggish menace that Quayle lacks. Quayle smacks more of Midwestern Americana, of The Music Man's Professor Harold Hill, and Quayle's lines about unmarried mothers sounded like an echo: "We got trouble, right here in River City!" - brazen hussies strutting around town in a family way: Make your blood boil? Well, I should say!
In the Bush-Quayle synecdoche, attitude, symbolism and code words stand in for real action and accomplishment. The Bush Administration is short on both coherent programs and resources of leadership to approach the problems. An elaborate rhetorical porch, with gorgeous traditional columns, fronts an empty house. In any case, Presidents, Vice Presidents and other public officials are elected to lead and act first of all. Moral leadership and vision are vital, but somehow the right to deliver sermons has to be convincingly earned.
Quayle makes much of the theme of the absent father; America under the Bush Administration looks like a house with an absent father. A man has no right to abandon the family for years and then show up one day and go upstairs and start spanking the kids.
Television, which has all but taken over the American political process, turning the parties into the old technology, is the perfect medium for a battle of weightless, sensational symbolisms. Not that the images don't have real effect: a homemade video of a black motorist being beaten by police succeeded in burning down a sizable part of Los Angeles. The moral struggle between Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown seemed perfect and fascinating, as if all the weaknesses of both politics and television (the short attention span, the brainless evanescence, the disconnection) were leaking into one another.
If the Vice President wanted to attack television's effects on the American young, he might have hit the medium on 30 or 40 more serious matters before coming to Murphy Brown's marital status. By age 20, an American child will have watched 700,000 TV commercials. According to New York University professor and media critic Neil Postman, "There are several messages in these ads: that all problems are solvable, that the solutions are quickly available through use of some chemical, food, drug or machine." Television creates the culture of immediate gratification, not primarily through its comedy shows but through its advertising. Says Postman: "If anyone wants to relate the Los Angeles riots to TV shows, everyone in the U.S. sees television shows communicating the message that these are the things all Americans are entitled to: TV sets, cars and so on. The riots were in part driven by this sense of entitlement."
Issues of family, morals and values are important - and may ultimately be central to solving problems, especially those of the black underclass. But if they are to be discussed merely on the level of Murphy Brown, it is going to be a long and loathsome campaign.
Dial D for Democracy
In the near future, an electronic town meeting in the U.S. as envisioned by presidential hopeful Ross Perot could work. But is it a good idea?
By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT
IMAGINE IT IS 1994. THE U.S. economy is still stagnating, Japan remains in the doldrums as well, interest rates are rising, and the deficit has reached $600 billion. Something has to be done - and quickly. President Ross Perot, making good on a campaign promise, gets on the horn to the TV networks and organizes one of his famous electronic town meetings. That night, before a television audience Murphy Brown would die for, he lays out America's precarious economic situation and the stark choices the nation confronts. Even before his presentation is over, the returns begin to pour in - by telephone, fax, computer modem, videophone and two-way interactive cable TV. By morning, the will of the American people is clear: they have decided to cut back on Social Security payments, further slash military spending and raise their own taxes.
That's how teledemocracy is supposed to work, according to Perot, the billionaire computer executive and putative presidential candidate. The concept has a certain gut-level appeal. To voters fed up with the paralysis of the U.S. Congress and the special-interest outrages that characterize politics-as-usual, the idea that the citizenry might bypass all the musty machinery of representative democracy and directly influence the government seems enormously attractive.
Perot suggests that the technology required to create an electronic town meeting is already in place - an impression reinforced by events like his satellite broadcast last Friday that linked Perot rallies in six different states. Participants in five U.S. cities could hear one another cheer Perot as he spoke to them from Orlando, Florida. To have a truly interactive town meeting, however, a number of technical barriers must still be hurdled. And even if that happens, it is not clear that the result will be any way to run a country.
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Racial Riot Shows Buried Tensions At a High School
By David Holmstrom
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BOSTON
THERE should have been 1,168 noisy students filling the halls and classrooms of Medford High School on Dec. 15. But except for a handful of tense administrators and a few students and teachers, Medford High in Medford, Mass., was virtually empty.
A racially triggered brawl had erupted in the school cafeteria on Dec. 10. Fighting between black and white students quickly spread. Dozens of state troopers and police officers clad in riot gear were called in to restore order. Fifteen students were arrested.
The superintendent of Medford schools, Philip Devaux, closed the school for several days. United States Department of Justice officials arrived on the scene as fact finders, along with experienced mediators from the Massachusetts attorney general's office.
A quiet suburban town of just under 60,000 people about 10 miles north of Boston, Medford is now being forced to ask itself two questions: How closely does an ugly racial incident at the high school reflect attitudes throughout the town? And how do educators at the high school improve racial understanding?
"The incident took me by surprise," says Medford Mayor Michael McGlynn, who also chairs the School Committee. "There had been some uneasiness at community meetings last year about kids, but not an indication of this kind of problem."
Some teachers, parents, and students - both black and white - insist that the signs of trouble were already there at the high school. Despite some efforts by administrators to resolve racial charges and countercharges involving white teachers' attitudes and allegedly excessive defensiveness by some black students, some teachers and parents say dealing with racial issues was never a priority at the school.
In fact, the high school experienced a similar racial incident in 1977. "Not much has changed," says a teacher who has taught for nine years at Medford.
"Everybody knew there was tension," says Daiena Masciarelli, president of the student council, who said that once the football season ended and the focal point of school enthusiasm faded, "a lot of friendships seemed to end."
As for the incident itself, she says, "It started out just as a fight and grew from there into a black and white battle. I think society has put this racial thing on us. To me race doesn't matter; we should judge people on their minds, not their skins, but I don't think a lot of adults believe that."
About 15 percent of the student body at Medford is black; the rest is almost all white. There are four black teachers. A black senior, who did not want to be identified, says, "There are white teachers here who make racial slurs and treat black kids differently. Everybody knows this, but how are you going to take that out of some teacher's head when it's been there for forty years?"
Miss Masciarelli criticized the school's curriculum for not having enough material on different cultures.
A black mother of a Medford junior sat in the superintendent's office last week after the incident and said she had never seen her son so upset. "He's got lots of white friends," she says, and they're on the phone now wondering if they can speak to each other in public when they go back to school."
On Dec. 14, Superintendent Devaux held a community-wide meeting to assure parents that "we are working to create a safe and controlled school environment before reopening." He said "20 actions" were being implemented, including work by a team of state mediators who are meeting with students and teachers.
"What we will be trying to do" says Alice Comack, the head of the mediation team, "is not find out who was right or wrong, but to listen to them to get an understanding of what is bothering them." The first step was separate confidential sessions with black and white student leaders, then a joint session before school reopened Dec. 18 for seniors and juniors only.
"Mediation seeks to create an environment," says Denis Gray, one of the mediators, "in which future relationships can be improved. We don't suggest solutions, or try to change the human heart. We work out what the people can live with."
In the sessions, the mediators listen as long as needed to the students and then move toward more precise definitions of terms and the meaning of words. "People want to be heard," Mr. Gray says, "and when they realize they are being heard, they are being empowered and will be more willing to find solutions."
One of the issues at Medford was the confused racial significance of the caps many students were wearing.
"Some kids just want to wear the [baseball-style caps] just because they like a team," Masciarelli says, "but if you wear a UNLV cap [University of Nevada at Las Vegas, nationally prominent in basketball and controversial because of recruiting standards], some people say it means 'us niggers love violence.'"
Devaux has now banned all of the caps from classrooms.
"In the community at large," Mayor McGlynn says, "all these racial problems aren't going to be cleared up in one week. I don't think we have talked to each other enough to build a respect for different cultures. Some of the adults have to stop making racial and ethnic slurs, and learn to respect people and work together."
Inner Cities Pose Tough Task for Clinton Team
By David Holmstrom
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BOSTON
SIX months ago, as they walked through the smoking ruins of riot-torn Los Angeles, all of the presidential candidates had on their lips the heady promise of urban aid for inner cities. Today the delivery of urban aid is in President-elect Clinton's lap.
How quickly and effectively the new president delivers on promises hinges on three factors: his ability to keep the problems of inner cities from being crowded out by other domestic and international issues; his ability to coax bipartisan congressional action; and his ability not to add to the federal budget deficit with short-term, money-swallowing social programs.
Mr. Clinton more than once has indicated a concern for inner cities and his determination to create jobs there.
"Cities have not been treated very well over the last two decades by presidents," said Joseph Boskin, director of the urban studies public-policy program at Boston University. Yet "they are crucial to the economic and psychological viability of this nation.
"Clinton's first priority should be job creation. I'd like to see such efforts as Job Corps programs connected with universities and colleges, so that there are some long-term development of skills going on, and not just cleaning the streets."
Efforts by Republican and Democratic administrations over the last 30 years to solve a host of deepening inner-city problems read like a badly told story that never seems to end. The Great Society programs of President Johnson spent enormous amounts of money on poverty and inner cities, but came away with only two enduring legacies, Head Start and the Job Corps.
Much-heralded programs like the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act [CETA] under President Nixon and the Model Cities program under Mr. Johnson saw many funds end up in middle-income projects - or become lost in bureaucratic delays and policy shifts, some urban specialists say.
During the Carter and Reagan years, poor, unemployed blacks remained very heavily concentrated in cities, leading to more pronounced residential segregation. Whites, Asians, and Latinos are increasingly less likely to live near blacks in many inner cities; many whites have departed for the suburbs.
In Chicago, for instance, 71 percent of all blacks now live in one-race census tracts bordering other all-black census tracts, a pattern repeated in many other cities. This kind of downward spiral in social integration, when exacerbated by joblessness, has had broad social impact.
Violent crime in all major cities has increased over the last decade, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Schools have deteriorated and many businesses and banks have abandoned the inner cities. According to the National Urban League, an estimated 50 percent of all urban black children now live in poverty.
Such programs as enterprise zones in inner cities with special tax breaks for businesses were proposed under Ronald Reagan, but have hung in limbo for years.
A $27 billion urban-aid package approved by Congress this year was vetoed by President Bush six months after the Los Angeles riots. He said it included "numerous tax increases and would destroy jobs and undermine small business."
Many urban specialists agree with Clinton's promised pragmatic approach, to launch projects and programs that are prudently balanced between inner city needs and the need to cut the deficit. As yet, Clinton has provided few details about inner-city programs, whether he favors a heavy federal commitment or a combination of public and private funds.
Enterprise zones should be high on Clinton's list of priorities," said Robert Hill, director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University at Baltimore.
"But," he says, "equally as important, he should target established community-based groups such as the resident-management corporations in public housing. Many of these are setting up businesses and hiring former welfare recipients. These groups should get all the reinforcement they need."
The first priority, however, many experts say, should be jobs programs. Since 1980, adult black men have had unemployment rates above 10 percent every year. In 1972, the unemployment rate for black men was 7.2 percent. And per capita income for blacks in 1990 was $9,017. For whites it was $15,265.
"There are hard choices to be made," said Billy Tidwell, director of research for the National Urban League.
"Clinton has to deal with the deficit," he said, "but the economic conditions that feed into it, such as the costs associated with the neglect of inner cities, need a high priority. There will be a good deal of pressure from reasonable people to move the Clinton administration in that direction."
If Clinton should turn to a network of public-work programs, would the effort result in inflationary federal spending?
"More money is expended to stop crime," Mr. Boskin said, "than is spent in putting people to work. When a riot occurs, like the one in L.A., rebuilding the city is much more expensive to deal with than putting people to work in the first place."
Consensus Rule Is Aim of Washington State's Governor-Elect
Observers see parallels between his plans and Bill Clinton's on taxes and economy
By Mark Trumbull
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
OLYMPIA, WASH.
THE transition team is hard at work preparing for an important 'first 100 days.' Task forces are being convened with representatives from all sides of knotty issues. The incoming chief executive is trying to make good on the image he set forth in the election campaign, which balanced Democratic Party principles with the need to revive a lagging economy.
But the man is not President-elect Clinton and the seat of power is not Washinton, D.C., but Washington State.
Governor-elect Mike Lowry (D), like Mr. Clinton, has won cautious praise from many in the business community for his efforts at 'consensus government.' This is one of several interesting parallels between these two winners of November's election.
By considering moderate Republicans for some key posts and seeking views from many task forces, Mr. Lowry is "actively operating in this transition period as he campaigned," says Bill Jacobs, executive director of the Washington Forest Protection Association, sponsored by the timber industry. Lowry plans to consult a diverse "citizen's cabinet" throughout his tenure.
"It's very difficult to get consensus," Mr. Jacobs says.
Like Lowry with his task forces, Clinton will face this challenge when he holds his 'economic summit.' Lowry, however, has an advantage: State law requires that the budget be balanced.
A former congressman and Seattle University teacher, Lowry has a particularly difficult budget in the works. Although this state weathered the recession better than most, its economy is now fragile, with thousands of jobs in aerospace and timber lost or at risk due to industry troubles and environmental concerns.
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CLINTON ALREADY?
The Manufactured Candidate
By Andrew Kopkind
Manchester, New Hampshire
It was said of Belgrade after World War II that there was nothing in the shops except dead flies and pictures of Tito. So it is this winter in Manchester, minus the pictures. There are enough empty storefronts on Elm Street to serve as headquarters for a hundred candidates in the February 18 presidential primary. Once home to the biggest textile mill complex in the world, Manchester seems to have no future save as a theme park about the devolution of America. In this Decline World, factories have flown, malls are empty, condos are bankrupt, banks are failing, the service-sector boom of the Reagan 1980s has gone bust and unemployment has almost tripled since the 1988 primary. And the elms are all dead.
On a damp Sunday morning in January, Elm Street is a dead zone. Traffic lights blink on and off gratuitously to lanes devoid of cars. Torn sheets of green plastic flap idly around an abandoned construction site. Except for a posse of transient advance men, handlers and media persons gathered to start the day campaigning with Bill Clinton, only one local citizen is visible, a tall, disheveled youngish man with a graying beard, camouflage cap, tattered parka and dark aviator glasses. His hands are plunged in his pockets and his shoulders seem permanently hunched against the cold.
"Going down, isn't it?" he says suddenly as we pass, in front of a shuttered porn mart the Clinton people call "the adult book store."
"It looks that way," I agree tentatively.
"Going down," he repeats, and walks away without turning.
In many ways, Bill Clinton is the prophetic candidate of decline. The young and personable Arkansas Governor begins his basic rap - at house parties, club meetings, nursing homes and wherever else a crowd is collected - with a litany of economic deterioration. "We [candidates always assume the identity of the places they seek to represent] used to be the world's banker, now we're the world's biggest debtor," he says. "American workers used to be the best paid, now we're tenth. We used to be eighth in income equality, now we're dead last. The Fortune 500 have announced 300,000 layoffs in the last thirty days." Infrastructure is crumbling, education doesn't work, pollution is pandemic, there's no health system to speak of, manufacturing is disappearing: Clinton counts the woes.
Clinton is arguably the most articulate and certainly the best informed of the candidates chronicling decline in this recession season, when economic failure provides the context for politics. It is not unreasonable, however, to ask, "Compared to what?" Mario Cuomo might have done it with more zing, but he has assigned himself the role of kibitzer rather than player, and that vastly diminishes his impact. Jerry Brown has a strong but one-note message about a single "incumbent party" and the "corruption" of the political system, Paul Tsongas is passionless and unpresidential, Tom Harkin is bombastic and unattached to any populist movement he pretends to lead and Bob Kerrey is fixated on his own war record and sinking fast.
That leaves Clinton in front of the pack (already preshrunk by the departure of Douglas Wilder and George McGovern) and perhaps unstoppable except by an obstacle of his own erection. The experience of 1988 suggests that Democrats are eminently capable of destroying their own campaigns, both by suicidal behavior (Gary Hart's philandering, Joe Biden's plagiarism) and by sudden blackouts of imagination (Dukakis's collapse after the party's national convention). The Primary season has just begun (it doesn't end till June), and a slip of the tongue or a fall on a banana peel could derail any one of these characters.
Barring such disasters, Clinton has a clear shot at the nomination. He is now winning the all-important 'first primary' - fundraising - after pulling ahead of PAC-man Harkin in the December sweeps. It's true that mainly the money and political elites - not the masses - are giving him initial momentum, and that leaves an opening for a candidate who can rouse the common man somewhere down the line. But already the media are swooning in his wake: Joe Klein of New York and Michael Kramer of Time act as if they're part of the campaign (Klein actually 'spins' for Clinton and explains his policies to reporters on the trail; he maintains for all to hear that Clinton is "the smartest politician I've ever met"). The New York Times is employing another pro-Clinton tactic by bashing Kerrey for his personal business practices. Economics columnist Bob Kuttner of The Boston Globe detects "a genuine bandwagon" for Clinton, "a Democrat ... who is not only adroit as a candidate but who also might govern competently." He neglects to say he helped assemble said wagon. Even Times columnist William Safire, an anti-Bush Reaganite, is boosting Clinton, for his uncompromising defense of Israeli demands on the U.S. Treasury.
The enthusiastic support of political intellectuals has been the key to Clinton's success so far. While Harkin had some Big Labor, Tsongas some high-tech business, Wilder some blacks and Brown some self-identified progressives, Clinton organized the opinion-leaders and gatekeepers in the cool center of the political establishment. It didn't happen by accident. A founding member (and recent chair) of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, he directed the development of an ideology to support his campaign. As Clinton and friends begat the D.L.C., so the D.L.C. begat the P.P.I., the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that fires off neoliberal proposals like a Salad Shooter spews lettuce shreds.
Not only that, but P.P.I. heavies and adherents have converged on Op-Ed pages all over the United States in a deliberate drive to legitimize Clinton and the ideology of Clintonism that the institute has created. For example, Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, a P.P.I. senior fellow and Clinton groupie, is now a regular contributor to both the Los Angeles Times and Newsday. Her first effort posed six "killer questions" for candidates, all of which only Clinton would answer to her liking; the second was an out-and-out endorsement of Clinton's "centrist ways" as the best antidote to Bush. In a similar conceit, the op-edible Abe Rosenthal of The New York Times listed ten "errors" he said Bush made in foreign policy, virtually all of them on the 'left' side of the issues (failure to devastate Iraq fully and murder Saddam, skepticism on Israel). Clinton, among all the Democrats, is on the Rosenthal side.
What Kuttner calls "an astonishingly broad diversity of Democratic activists" have reported for duty in Camp Clinton. Harold Ickes, son of F.D.R.'s Interior Secretary of the same name and four years ago a Jesse Jackson stalwart, is shepherding Clinton around New York City and organizing local labor leaders for his cause. He has already attracted some key unionists, such as Stanley Hill and Dennis Rivera (co-chairman of Jackson's drive last time); Rivera likes Harkin but is helping Clinton too, his aides say, for the "winnability" factor. James Carville, the political consultant who scored the season's first hit by masterminding Harris Wofford's senatorial victory in Pennsylvania, is always inches away from Clinton's ear. Liberals like pollster Stanley Greenberg (out of Senator Christopher Dodd and Governor Jim Florio), media man Frank Greer (Fred Harris in '76, et seq.) and campaign manager David Wilhelm (Senator Paul Simon's ex) have moved to the right and into the Clinton center. Such swarming of the columnists, academics and political mandarins recalls the time thirtysomething years ago when the likes of Joe Kraft, the Alsop brothers, Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow and the future knights of Camelot bought their tickets to ride with John Kennedy into the White House.
The more America declines, the better will Clinton's chances be to become President. If the recession is as deep and intractable as now seems the case, the candidate who can give voice to suffering citizens and provide clear plans for action at least stands a chance against the expected Bush blitzkrieg.
The only problem for Clinton at this point is Clinton himself. His policy papers have great preambles and solid introductions, but then they go blank. If there are no second acts in Americans' lives, there are no second pages in Clinton's proposals. Take health care (please!). Clinton begins with an eloquent statement of the problem: "We are the only advanced nation in the world that doesn't provide health care to all its citizens and doesn't take the lead in controlling costs. In the first year of the Clinton Administration, Congress and I will deliver quality, affordable health care for all Americans." And then? There is no then, then. He says he'll base his health system on models in Hawaii, Germany and "Europe." He promises coverage for the uncovered but doesn't say how much or what kind. He vows to control costs with vague notions of "insurance reform" and the elimination of "administrative waste" and "billing fraud." To solve the elder-care crisis, he would provide "choices" for old people who still have a lot of money. And to cap off his health plan he swears he won't increase taxes. Read his lips.
His long-term economic strategy is, if anything, even more indistinct. The devastating statistics of the decline he cites do not lead to ideas of equal weight. He does give New Hampshire audiences a taste of his short-term plans for the economy: speed up work under the new transportation bill (which Bush signed in Texas before he flew to Asia), help small businesses with capital gains and investment tax breaks, beef up federal housing loans and, tastiest of all, cut "middle class" taxes by 10 percent, giving the average family about $400 to spend "paying off credit card loans" and, perhaps, sending the kids to Yale or buying a new Buick.
The United States is the only major country in the world without an economic strategy, Clinton points out, and that's why manufacturing is dwindling, the Japanese are winning and wages are dropping. His solution is to "deliver quality, affordable health care," encourage manufacturing, reduce interest on the national debt and train young people for skilled work. Is it my imagination or is the dog chasing its own tail? Everything is dependent on a contingency. American cars, he says, have more than $700 in health insurance costs "built into them," while Japanese cars roll off the line with only 200 health care dollars in each chassis. Provide cheaper health care and Detroit will boom and spark a significant reindustrialization of America, Q.E.D. Tax revenues will rise and the debt will decrease. There will be skilled jobs at high wages for young people who go through Clinton's apprenticeship program. Cut military spending and spend the "peace dividend" on social improvements. But wait. Re-examine the premise, and the logical train is derailed before it leaves the station.
Like Michael Dukakis in 1988, Clinton refers to the marvels of his home state as models for national action. Dukakis's promise of "good jobs at good wages" had as its basis the high-tech, service-rich 'Massachusetts miracle,' fueled by the Carter-Reagan military expenditure extravaganza and by the explosion of consumption in the 1980s. Elect Dukakis, we were told, and the whole country will experience Massachusetts' Wirtschaftswunder. Unfortunately for the Duke, the Iowa caucuses had not yet been held when the Wunder started to go under. A year later, when Dukakis assured his voters he would not stand again for Governor of the state he helped run into the ground, Massachusetts was the basket case of the country, and it soon brought the rest of New England under with it.
Clinton also promises a "high-wage, high-growth, high-opportunity society" and he refers to many programs in Arkansas as models for his national plan. But even a cursory look at his state shows that his investment strategy over eleven years as Governor there has been the opposite of what he claims. Arkansas is essentially an anti-union state with a 'right-to-work' law that depresses wages and benefits for workers and inhibits the expansion of a skilled labor force.
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Toronto pitching biggest concern for Oakland
By Frank Blackman
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
TORONTO - One of these years Pat Gillick is going to buy the Toronto Blue Jays a trip to the World Series.
The A's just hope it isn't this year. Gillick, the Jays' general manager, is a believer in the rent-a-pitcher approach to pennant races, hiring talent for the final push in September and October.
Mike Flanagan in 1987. John Candelaria and Bud Black in 1990. Tom Candiotti in '91. None was able to help the Jays reach the World Series.
Undeterred, Gillick went out in '92 and obtained David Cone, who many considered the best pitcher in the National League. Like his predecessors, Cone can become a free agent after the postseason, and it's anticipated he'll hang a U-turn and head back to New York and sign with the Yankees.
But what Cone does next year is of less import to the A's than what he will do in the next 10 days. He's scheduled to start twice against Oakland in the American League Championship Series that begins here Wednesday night. It will be the first time the A's hitters have seen him up close and personal this year.
"What worries me is the unknown factor of David Cone," batting coach Doug Rader said. "I think we match up OK with everyone else, but David Cone, because he's unknown, it's naturally frightening."
Cone hasn't had a chance to test himself against Mark McGwire, presumably a frightening prospect, too. And he's only watched Rickey Henderson take his hacks on TV. Pitching to the A's has to be a daunting challenge for someone who hasn't done it before, right?
"Big advantage to the pitcher," Rader said. "He throws from a different angle, so you're not comfortable with him. Another major thing is that you need reaffirmation. If you've already had success against someone, even though it might be limited, that counts for something. It's a different scenario when you haven't faced someone."
The A's respect the Jays - how could you not when a club has Joe Carter, Roberto Alomar, Dave Winfield, Jack Morris and Tom Henke? But it is also obvious they are not awed by Toronto. Dave Stewart, who will start Game 1 against Morris, has said he believes his team has the right stuff to handle the Jays and thinks the Jays believe that, too.
Toronto hasn't won a season series between the teams since 1985. This year, the Blue Jays won the first four games but then lost six of the next eight, an ego boost for the A's going into the playoffs. And the SkyDome is not an enclosed house of horrors for the A's, who have won 13 of the 19 games they've played there. Not to mention the A's beating the Jays in five games for the 1989 AL pennant.
Morris, who can start three times if necessary, finished the regular season 21-6 but with a 4.04 earned-run average. And the A's have a history of success against him. If he loses Wednesday, the Jays might crumble. Cone goes Thursday night.
Manager Cito Gaston is hedging on his third starter, either Jimmy Key or Juan Guzman. Key was very strong down the stretch, but the A's are 28-8 against left-handers this season. Guzman struggled after returning from a shoulder injury but was impressive in his final start Saturday.
On paper, the A's rotation is daunting. But ...
Stewart is a proven money pitcher. But he's pitched all year with a tender elbow that could flare up. Mike Moore has a lifetime 4-1 record in the postseason, 2-0 with an 0.69 ERA in the playoffs. But which Moore will show up, the overpowering one who led the staff with 17 wins or the guy who can occasionally look overmatched?
Ron Darling arguably was the team's most consistent pitcher this year but has little margin for error. If he isn't on, he's in the clubhouse. Bob Welch, who has been on and off the disabled list three times, does quality work. But how deep can he go into a game before being replaced?
Moose Stubing is one of California's advance scouts. Because the Angels spent much of the season following Oakland into cities on road trips, he wound up watching the A's play more than he probably wanted to and also is familiar with the Jays.
"I think they'll match up fine as far as starting pitchers," he said. "I think the difference will be in the sixth and seventh inning. Who can get to their ace relievers first. I think Jeff Russell setting up for (Dennis) Eckersley is the same as (Duane) Ward setting up for Henke.
"The fourth inning or fifth inning in their games are going to be very important. Whoever has the advantage going into the sixth or seventh inning is going to win."
Henke and Ward are obvious strengths for Toronto. Even though Eckersley was uncharacteristically shaky the final week of the regular season - blowing a save and failing to keep his team tied in another appearance - the assumption must be those were aberrations. Russell, out since Sept. 16 with an elbow injury, returned to pitch two perfect innings Sunday. The bad news for Oakland is Rick Honeycutt will miss the playoffs because of the recurrence of the injury to his right side, and that means the lefty short-relief role will be handled by rookie Vince Horsman.
With Jose Canseco in Texas, the A's have to work a little harder for their runs. That's not necessarily a disadvantage. All season this team has been remarkably resourceful, able to capitalize on a Jerry Browne double as much as a shot into the seats by McGwire.
Toronto is the equivalent of a big-play team in football. Its offense is structured around Carter or Winfield going deep. And if the big guys start flailing at pitches, the Jays might not be as resilient.
One scout, who asked to be unnamed for obvious reasons, thinks the difference in this series will be the matchup between managers Tony La Russa and Gaston. La Russa used all his people this season, while Gaston has given his reserves limited playing time. Hence they will be less prepared for the pressure of the playoffs. Also, the scout argued, Gaston has a tendency to stay with his starters longer than desirable. And finally, no one runs a game better than La Russa.
La Russa says that's nonsense. Gaston's been good enough to get his team into the playoffs three of the last four years, and anyway, "the game is not won by managers."
We'll see.
Cal taking level-headed approach
Bears to keep it simple against No. 1 Washington
By Edvins Beitiks
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
BERKELEY - Two years ago, Cal's football players went to Seattle wearing miniature roses in their lapels, so sure of themselves they challenged the Huskies before the game and in the tunnel at halftime. Washington turned the Bears upside down, 46-7, shaking all the change out of their pockets.
Last year at Berkeley, undefeated Cal took No.3 Washington to the last play of the game before losing, 24-17. The season ended with Cal beating Clemson in the Citrus Bowl and the Huskies winning half a national championship.
That was then. This is now.
As both teams prepare for Saturday afternoon's game at Husky Stadium, Cal coach Keith Gilbertson and Washington coach Don James point out that things have changed. Gilbertson said the Bears still don't know how good they are, while James argued the Huskies aren't as good as they were last season, even though they're rated No.1.
"When (USC coach) Larry Smith said we're a better team than last year, I almost wanted to throw up," James said. "I don't think we're even close. I don't think you can be when you lose 16 letter-men, 11 drafted. Three wide receivers, a tight end, a center, weakside guard ..."
In spite of being 4-0, the Huskies aren't as dominating as they were a year ago. Cal is ahead of Washington in almost every offensive and defensive category - the Huskies are in the middle of the Pac-10 offensively, last in rushing defense, eighth in total defense.
"We're a big-play defense," cracked James. "We give up big plays."
Cal receiver Sean Dawkins said, "Looking at the USC game (a 17-10 win), you saw them make a lot of mistakes defensively. They're not as good as last year, but they're still good."
James expects the Bears to be as solid as they were last season, when "they played us better than any team on our schedule." Asked if Gilbertson has an advantage because he was Washington's offensive coordinator a year ago, James said, "I would think the advantage would be the same. We would know as much about him as he knows about us."
Gilbertson agreed, saying it'll come down to how the game is played, not how well he knows Washington.
He's going to keep his game plan simple, explained Gilbertson. "Everyone who has gone in with a real elaborate, 'sophisticated' plan has come out with a black eye. They're too fast, too talented, to get cute with 'em."
Two years ago Cal tried to play a get-tough, get-cute game with Washington and it didn't work, said Dawkins. "We talked a lot of bullcrap that week. This time we're going in there level-headed, not saying anything that's going to get them stirred up."
On the plane to Seattle in 1990, an alumnus passed miniature roses around and the Bears pinned them to their lapels. A couple of players pasted roses on their jerseys during warmups at Husky Stadium, said Dawkins, "and there was a bunch of pushing and shoving going on. Our guys were just kind of barking at Washington."
Offensive lineman Todd Steussie said Cal was trying to compensate for its underdog status. "This year it won't be so much a big dog going against a smaller dog as two good teams playing 60 minutes of football," he said. "This is a different team than it was last time. We're more concerned about how we play than how they play."
Defensive lineman Scott Roseman said, "This year we're going to be a lot more humble. Last time we went in there with too much of an attitude. Little roses on our suits coming off the plane ... people saw that and figured we were cocky."
Roseman remembered that at halftime of the game, with Washington leading, 24-0, Cal started fighting in the tunnel with the Huskies. "It was behind me," he said. "I heard this yelling in the back. It's an unwise thing to do - you don't need to get in a conflict at halftime."
Those roses, said Roseman, shaking his head. "When you think back, that didn't work too well with our attitudes."
Dawkins smiled at the memory of it. "I don't know whose idea that was, but I'd like to kick their butts," he said. "That was the backbreaker right there."
But that was then. This is now.
Pats not likely to surprise 49ers
New England will have a hard time exploiting S.F.'s coverage weakness
By John Crumpacker
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
SANTA CLARA - Is there a false bottom to the 49ers' fast start this season? Is some evil little gnome waiting to pull the lever on the trap door?
If so, it probably will not happen this week, when the 49ers travel to the mythical kingdom of New England to play the 0-4 Patriots.
New England rallied for three touchdowns in its loss to the Jets on Sunday, but its offense is still ranked 24th in the NFL.
However, in the first five weeks of a 4-1 season, the 49ers have shown a pronounced inability to defend the forward pass, particularly quick, short passes in the middle of the field. San Francisco's pass defense is ranked 26th, down there in the Land of Not Good.
Coach George Seifert admitted Monday that the 49ers played a soft zone defense against the Rams.
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Delmatoff continues Hart's air domination
By Ron B. Stapp
Special to the Daily News
Throwing under pressure took on a new meaning for Hart quarterback Davis Delmatoff during a 43-6 victory over Pasadena Friday at College of the Canyons.
Delmatoff had plenty of time to throw in the season-opener. His pressure was self-induced.
The thought of taking over quarterbacking duties at a school that had produced four straight All-Southern Section performers at the position made him feel nauseous earlier in the day.
But once the game started, he put aside those fears and threw for six touchdown passes and 380 yards on 23 of 34 passes. He tied Jimmy Bonds' school-record for scoring passes.
"I was a bit nervous before the game, I thought I was going to get sick a couple of times," Delmatoff said. "But things worked out all right."
He led the Indians 63 yards to a touchdown on their first possession. His 34-yard touchdown pass to Soren Halladay capped the drive.
"It took me until the second or third series before I got into the flow," Delmatoff said. "Everything was working well. The receivers were running good routes."
Delmatoff led the Indians to scores on each of their first three drives. He hooked up with Halladay again, this time for 36 yards to build the lead to 15-0 with 1:22 left in the opening period.
The Bulldogs' lone score came thanks to star running back Treyvone Towns, who broke through Hart's secondary for a 56-yard touchdown early in the second quarter.
In addition to Halladay, who finished with 92 yards on 3 receptions, Delmatoff hooked up with four other receivers. Jared Halverson had 8 catches for 132 yards and 2 touchdowns, including a 5-yard pass from Delmatoff which gave Hart a 36-6 lead with 3:24 left in the third quarter.
The Bulldogs were held to just three first downs in the first half, all three coming from Towns and his cousin, quarterback Lester Towns. The two combined for 149 yards on the ground, 120 by Treyvone.
Canyon wins with comeback
By Kevin Scattareggia
Special to the Daily News
For nearly one half Friday night, the Canyon High football team looked anything but the power-house program that head coach Harry Welch has assembled in his 10 years at the school.
But over a 15-minute stretch, covering the end of the first half through the early stages of the fourth quarter, the Cowboys woke up to score 35 unanswered points en route to a season-opening 35-21 win over host San Clemente.
"We started the game with a team that didn't have too much varsity experience," said Welch. "But we finally began to feel more confident as the game wore on."
The Cowboys, held to just 100 yards total offense in the first half, came out with a vengeance following intermission.
After taking the kickoff, Canyon scored on its second play - a 92-yard screen pass from Sean Connelly to fullback Sean McDermott. The play began innocently enough, but McDermott turned a short gain into a play that would begin a scoring frenzy.
On San Clemente's next possession, Triton running back Cyril Foster fumbled at the Canyon 46, with the Cowboys recovering. It took Canyon just five plays to score, as Ed Williams went in on a 10-yard run.
With 8:13 left in the quarter, the Cowboys had tied the score, 21-21, and the momentum was clearly on their side.
"Once we got it going, it was really tough to stop us," said Williams, the game's leading rusher with 181 yards on 26 carries, with 3 touch-downs.
It took just three plays for Canyon's defense to come up with yet another timely turnover. This time, it was Ken Moody's interception that he returned to the San Clemente 42.
Canyon kept the ball on the ground six straight plays, with McDermott going up the middle from the 14 to give the Cowboys a 28-21 lead at the 3:34 mark of the third quarter.
"It was tough containing them once they got going," San Clemente coach Mark McElroy said.
Highland gets dose of reality in 38-0 loss to Foothill
By Bob Condotta
Daily News Staff Writer
Thud.
That sound you just heard was the Highland High football team coming down to earth.
Highland, in its first year with seniors on its roster after opening its doors in 1989, was talking Golden League title entering its opener Friday.
But they might settle for merely winning game after taking a 38-0 pounding Friday night by visiting Foothill High of Bakersfield at Quartz Hill High School. The loss was the worst in Highland's four-year history.
The Bulldogs committed four turnovers and were thoroughly manhandled after a scoreless first quarter by a Foothill team rated No. 1 in Kern County.
"I tried to let people know that we were overrated in the polls," Highland head coach Lin Parker said. "Tonight we just couldn't get our defense off the field."
Foothill led 14-0 at halftime after scoring on the final play of the second quarter, then dominated the second half.
Highland committed all four of its turnovers in the second half, and got only one first down in the final two quarters.
After being held to only 2 yards in the first quarter, Foothill took command in the second quarter.
The Trojans scored first with 3:39 left in the first half when quarterback Victor Diaz hit Jason Brown with a 3-yard touchdown pass concluding a seven-play, 49-yard drive.
The Trojans got the ball back with 2:20 left in the half and drove 55 yards, scoring on a Diaz pass to Aaron Straw with no time left on the clock. Rashaan Shehee's conversion run made it 14-0 Foothill at the half.
The score could have been worse at halftime, but a 41-yard touch-down run by Shehee in the second quarter was nullified by a holding penalty.
Diaz completed only seven of 19 passes in the first half, but they went for 112 yards. He finished completing nine of 24 for 141 yards.
Highland gained only 67 yards in the first half, 49 by senior running back Cleveland Williams on 12 carries.
But Williams suffered a calf bruise midway through the first half and missed the rest of the game. Highland had only 41 yards in the second half.
Foothill scored on its first possession of the second half on a John Thomas 39-yard field goal. Highland then fumbled on three of its next four possessions.
"Our goal is still to use these games to prepare us for the league," Parker said. "These kids are resilient. They will bounce back."
Turnovers seal 14-7 victory for Notre Dame
By Dave Shelburne
Daily News Staff Writer
The way those Notre Dame running backs were cranking out yardage early, it looked like it might be a long night for Alemany.
It turned out differently, however, and Alemany first-year head coach Pat Degnan and his Indians can take some satisfaction in that - even though they lost a 14-7 season opener to the 10th-ranked Knights on Friday at Alemany.
Notre Dame fullback Lei Malietuina rushed for a game-high 104 yards, halfback Jabbar Craigwell ran for another 83, and reserve Jon Velasquez bolted 35 yards on his first carry.
But the visiting Knights ultimately needed as much from their defense on a night Alemany kept finding ways to stay within striking distance and had all of Notre Dame's attention at the finish.
It came down to turnovers on the Indians' final two drives - a fumble recovery by Knights linebacker David Dupetit at the Notre Dame 39 with 2:50 remaining, then a game-sealing interception by Joey Orlando with nine seconds left.
"They were pretty tough - better than I thought," Orlando said of the Indians. "Thank God, we hung tough."
In the process, Notre Dame backed up its strong running game with some accurate passing by quarterback Kelly Moran, who completed five of seven passes - including a 23-yard TD pitch to Orlando.
That score, coming in the closing minutes of the first half, produced a 14-0 lead for the Knights, who had scored on a 29-yard run by Craigwell on their opening drive of the game.
It just got tougher after that, starting immediately. Alemany responded with an 80-yard touch-down drive to pull within 14-7 on a one-handed TD catch by Chris Engler with nine seconds left in the half.
From there, it was surge and counter-surge, as Malietuina and Craigwell ran impressively - only to be matched by the passing accuracy of Alemany quarterback Chris Tashima.
Tashima started slowly, missing his first six attempts, then went on a 10-for-11 run to ring up 98 yards before Orlando's late interceptions.
Tailback David Eastham, held out most of the week with an injury, got into the game early for Alemany and contributed a team-high 79 yards rushing.
"I learned a few things tonight," said Degnan after his high-school coaching debut. "I'm disappointed that we didn't win but I'm not disappointed the eayway we played."
Notre Dame went 53 yards in five plays for its first touchdown, Craigwell running the final 29 one play after Malietuina rumbled 19 on a third-and-six call from near midfield.
Alemany, held to 63 yards until the final three minutes of the first half, fell behind 14-0, just before halftime on Moran's 23-yard TD pass to Orlando.
That seemed to put the Knights in excellent shape, but Alemany put together its best drive of the night - going 80 yards to score on Engler's one-handed TD catch 11 seconds before halftime.
That put the Indians back in the game but as it turned out, they never got closer.
Rooney made that sound like a "Whew!" after Orlando's victory sealing interception.
"They were real tough," he said of the Indians. "I'm happy we held them to seven points."
Three turnovers help Lynwood beat Granada Hills
By P.C. Shaw
Special to the Daily News
The team that controls the line of scrimmage usually wins the football game and that was the case as Lynwood overpowered the host Granada Hills Highlanders enroute to a 28-7 season-opening victory.
Granada Hills committed three turnovers with the Knights capitalizing on each one. Two plays after Granada Hills punter Jimmy Landress fumbled the snap, Lynwood junior quarterback Joe Austin scored from 1 yard out to give the Knights a 7-0 lead.
On its next possession, Lynwood drove 78 yards on 5 plays, culminating in a 33-yard touchdown run down the left sideline by Jeff Ridgeway.
Granada Hills was held to 68 yards of total offense in the first half, 43 of them coming on a pass from Matt Livingston to Raheem Kyle. Livingston, who only played in the first half finished with two completions in 11 attempts for 51 yards and two interceptions.
Just before halftime Lynwood increased its lead to 21-0 on an 18-yard touchdown run by Ridgeway. Ridgeway finished with a game-high 108 yards on 14 carries.
With 7:48 remaining in the third quarter Austin sprinted 35 yards for the Knights' final score.
Landress scored on Granada Hills lone touchdown on a 2-yard run with 2:22 left in the game.
Taft lets lead get away
Canoga Park rallies, 20-19
By Rick Marquardt
Special to the Daily News
Tailback Rashaud Vaughn scored the winning touchdown on a 7-yard sweep with 1:42 left in the game as host Canoga Park edged Taft, 20-19, Friday night.
The Hunters' comeback win spoiled the debuts of Taft head coach Troy Starr and sophomore tailback Jerry Brown.
Brown, half-brother of ex-USC star Charles White and uncle of ex-Crespi standout Russell White, rushed for 166 yards on 19 carries and two touchdowns in his varsity debut. He was up to 174 yards at one point in the fourth quarter but lost yardage on each of his last three attempts.
Vaughn led Canoga Park back from a 16-point deficit despite a painful ankle sprain suffered in the third quarter. He finished with 118 yards on 24 carries.
With the Hunters trailing, 19-3, late in the third quarter, Vaughn made up for an earlier fumble on the Taft 5-yard line by smashing in from the 1 after Canoga Park blocked a Mike Ferguson punt.
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Shinn Feels Confident He Can Keep Giants in San Francisco
The Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO - Charlotte Hornets owner George Shinn said he is working with local investors to come up with an offer to keep the San Francisco Giants from a possible move to Florida.
Shinn met with Mayor Frank M. Jordan, developer Walter Shorenstein and potential investors on Monday. Shinn and Jordan later took in a Giants game at Candlestick Park.
Jordan said the group hoped to have an offer ready within seven days to present to baseball owners. The eight local investors weren't identified, except for Shorenstein, and the amount of any potential offer wasn't disclosed.
Shinn said he was satisfied with the progress made Monday.
"Baseball has been an ultimate dream of mine. Since I was a kid, I wanted to play the game and realized somehow along the way that I didn't have the talent to do that," Shinn said. "Then as I became successful in my business career I realized the next step that maybe I could own a team some day, and that's the reason I'm here."
The NBA owner is said to be prepared to put up $30 million and borrow an additional $30 million for the team. Local investors would contribute another $50 million. Shinn wouldn't comment Monday on any dollar figure about his commitment to the Giants.
"Our goal is very simple. Our goal is to put together a presentation next week to deliver to major league baseball to keep the San Francisco Giants where they belong - in San Francisco," Shinn said.
Giants' owner Bob Lurie announced on Aug. 7 his intention to sell the team in principle to a group of Tampa Bay area investors for $111 million. The investors plan to move the Giants to the Suncoast Dome in St. Petersburg.
"The ownership group has an exclusive agreement with Mr. Lurie which we are working to bring to a successful conclusion in September," said Rick Dodge, St. Petersburg's assistant city manager. "Any interference with that agreement by any third party creates serious legal issues that we are prepared to pursue."
Lurie has tried for years to move the team from its current home at windswept Candlestick Park, which he considers unsuitable for baseball. Area voters have turned down four separate ballot measures to build a new stadium for the Giants.
The Florida sale must be approved by 10 of 14 National League owners and eight of 14 American League owners. Lurie has said he will not consider any other offers for the team until the owners vote on the sale.
Shinn, who also owns two minor league baseball clubs, reportedly would keep the team at Candlestick until a new stadium could be built.
At Candlestick later Monday, an airplane flew overhead during the Giants game against the New York Mets with a sign reading "George - Save Our Giants." When Shinn and Jordan appeared at the ballpark, shouts of "George!" were so resounding that play was temporarily halted.
Shorenstein said the meetings Monday were designed to "get acquainted" with Shinn and determine the extent of his commitment to the Giants.
"We're prepared to take it to the next step with him, to discuss the business arrangement. We hope to be able to penetrate all the difficulties that exist in putting a transaction of this nature together and we're hopeful we can carry through to the next step. We're very optimistic," Shorenstein said.
The developer also would not comment on a specific dollar amount. He would only say that Shinn's offer was "within our working range."
"We obviously could not buy the team if we weren't able to take a competitive offer to the owners," Shorenstein said.
Jordan said the project was on the right track and that additional meetings with Shinn would be held today.
Walsh Excited About Return to College Game
The Associated Press
Sitting in front of Cinderella's castle in Anaheim, Calif., flanked by Mickey, Minnie and the Three Little Pigs, Bill Walsh was back in the college spirit again Monday.
No way would some pro coach, except maybe Jerry Glanville, willingly come to Disneyland and clown with Mickey in front of a pack of reporters and television cameras. But Walsh handled the prelude to his return to college coaching with poise.
"This is the happiest and most excited I've been in my career," said Walsh, who returned to Stanford after 10 years in the pros and a stint as an analyst for NBC. "The National Football League is really a tough arena to spend a lot of time in because the pressures are immense.
"I can't say I was excited (as a pro coach). I was just trying to survive in the NFL."
As for Wednesday's Pigskin Classic between his 17th-ranked Cardinal and No. 7 Texas A&M, the man who coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl titles is a little edgy.
"We're faced with playing our first game with a completely new coaching staff," Walsh said. "That is a challenge in itself. Just the mechanics of managing a game has us concerned. We don't quite know how all of us will react as a unit and a coaching team."
While it will be the first test of how Walsh's coaches work together, Stanford returns 16 starters from last season's squad that went 8-4 under Dennis Green.
The Cardinal, which brings a seven-game regular-season winning streak into the game, will be facing one of the nation's toughest defenses after having practiced only two weeks.
The Aggies, the 1991 Southwest Conference champions who went 10-2, have had three weeks to prepare for their earliest game ever and also return 16 starters. But the big question is at quarterback, a job won by Jeff Granger despite having missed spring football while playing baseball.
R.C. Slocum of the Aggies, entering his fourth year as a college head coach, said going against someone of Walsh's stature is an honor.
"He's done as much as anyone who's ever coached a team," Slocum said. "I probably even appreciate him more after all the tapes I watched this summer, especially the execution of his teams. It may not be as fun to watch it up close."
MISSISSIPPI: The Rebels began to wind down two-a-day practices, working on passing drills and kickoff-punt coverage. In addition, the Rebels scrimmaged inside the 20 yardline. The last two-a-day practices will be held today, as classes at Ole Miss start Wednesday. The team will then revert to a regular practice schedule.
CLEMSON: Clemson tail-back Ronald Williams may miss the 1992 season as a result of a knee injury suffered midway through last year, coach Ken Hatfield says.
"If he gets well and is able to play, it would be a big plus for us this year," Hatfield said. "When his leg gets stronger, we'll test it in the training room to determine if we can take the pounding.
"But I think that's a long way off. He's not even close now. I think you can put a P.S. on him and see you later."
Williams, the 1990 Atlantic Coast Conference rookie of the year after he rushed for 941 yards that season, injured his knee in pregame warmups before the North Carolina State game Oct. 26. He had rushed for 585 yards before the injury.
Williams, a junior, underwent knee surgery Dec. 16. The type of surgery Williams had generally requires a full year to rehabilitate.
KENTUCKY: Sophomore Pookie Jones is prepared for his second year as Kentucky's starting quarterback while senior Ryan Hockman is confident he can lead the Wildcats in his final season.
Jones spent the summer fine tuning his game after missing much of spring practice playing baseball for the Wildcats. He hit .283 with eight home runs and 24 RBI.
"I feel real good," Jones said. "I had a good summer. Basically, I felt last year helped me because I got to learn the offense. I felt this summer I had to catch up and I feel I accomplished that."
He was sharp in Kentucky's first major scrimmage last Saturday, completing nine of 15 passes for 102 yards and four touchdowns.
Jones is an avid supporter of Kentucky's switch from a Pro-I offense to a triple option this season.
"I think we can score on anybody with our offense," he said. "And it's a little bit easier on the offensive line because they don't have to hold the line as long."
Jones started in seven of nine games last season, connecting on 81 of 138 passes for three touch-downs. He was intercepted four times.
His best effort came against Southeastern Conference champion Florida, when he rushed for 77 yards and three touchdowns and passed for 216 yards in a 35-26 loss. Florida hosts Kentucky Sept. 12 in its 1992 opener.
If Jones falters, Hockman will be ready to take control of the offense.
Hockman, who has been hampered in preseason camp with lower back problems, has been a steady reliever the past two years.
TENNESSEE: Heath Shuler says Tennessee coach Johnny Majors is going to have to make up his mind this week and pick one quarterback.
"We can't have two quarter-backs in during one game," Shuler said.
"It will make one of the quarterbacks try to force the issue and make big plays instead of being conservative when it's necessary."
The decision between Shuler and Jerry Colquitt must be made this week since Tennessee opens the 1992 season at home Sept. 5 against Southwestern Louisiana. Majors has never operated a two-quarterback platoon system in his 15 years with the Volunteers.
"If we switched out on every other series it would be a disaster. You can't play the defense and play against your own quarter-back, too," Shuler said.
Majors said Saturday he is looking for "a reaction under pressure, poise under blitzing ... quickness and reaction under pressure situations" from his quarterback.
That's because Tennessee returns only six of its offensive starters from last season, and the heart of the offensive line is gone.
"The (offensive) line isn't really struggling. Our (defensive) team knows what plays we run out of what formations, what checkoffs we use. They know exactly where the ball's going, and they're cheating in that direction," Shuler said.
Hill, Newton Among Buc Cuts
By DOUG FERNANDES
Staff Writer
TAMPA - The ink on Tim Newton's contract had barely dried when the Tampa Bay Bucs decided Monday the whole idea wouldn't wash.
So rather than pay someone $600,000 a year to possibly ride the bench, Tampa Bay waived Newton, its starting nose tackle last season, along with cornerback <O_>illegible_word<O/> Carter and 11 other players, several of whom may resurface on the Bucs' practice squad.
Others cut loose were wide receiver John Garrett; center Todd McGuire; tight end Kirk Kirkpatrick; running back Willie McClendon; defensive lineman Curtis Maxey; linebackers James Malone and Ken Swilling; defensive backs Sammy Lilly, Marcus Hopkins and Herbert James; and punter-/place-kicker Klaus Wilmsmeyer.
The Bucs also unconditionally released holdout wide receiver Bruce Hill and reached a contract agreement with linebacker Kevin Murphy. The cuts leave the Bucs with 61 players on the active roster. They must cut one more by 4 p.m. today.
Newton's release came as a surprise. The veteran nose tackle signed a two-year deal last Wednesday, then played briefly in Saturday night's game against Miami.
Defensive coordinator Floyd Peters, who coached Newton when both were at Minnesota, said it was Newton's inability to play more than one position that caused his release.
"We need to have guys who can play more than one spot," Peters said. "It's better to let him go this week so he can latch on with another team rather than hold onto him until the final week."
Newton (6-foot, 275 pounds) started all 16 games last season. He came to the Bucs in 1990 as a free agent. Peters said he will look for a starting nose tackle among Reuben Davis, Mark Duckens and rookie Mark Wheeler.
"In the case of Newton, I feel bad about that one," said head coach Sam Wyche.
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Several owners say fighting doesn't make cents
PRO HOCKEY
By ROY CUMMINGS
Tribune Staff Writer
ST. PETERSBURG BEACH - When the National Hockey League's board of governors sits down to determine the future of fighting in their game today, they will be talking as much about dollars and cents as hooks and jabs.
Among the anti-fighting sect, a growing number of owners fear the NHL's economic growth will be stifled if fighting is retained. So with fiscal survival as their theme, the abolitionists will use the fear of economic disaster as the basis for their pitch to have fighting banned from the game.
"We have to create new resources through television, expansion and additional licensing, and to do that, one of the things we've got to do is eliminate fighting," said Minnesota North Stars owner Norman Green, who is among a group of at least seven anti-fighting proponents who will push for a ban on fighting during meetings today at the Don CeSar Resort. "We cannot expect to grow either economically or otherwise unless we take a firm stand on this issue and send out the message that we do not condone these bare-fisted battles."
In particular, the abolitionists fear that retaining fighting will hinder or even destroy the NHL's chances of securing a national network TV contract, which is something the league desperately needs to combat increasing costs and ensure economic survival in the 90s.
"We cannot get a network TV contract as long as we have fighting in the game," Los Angeles Kings owner Bruce McNall said. "Believe me, I know, because I've tried. I've talked with the TV executives."
Acting NHL President Gil Stein, who remains neutral on the fighting issue, has talked - and is still talking - with network TV executives about a TV deal for the upcoming season, and he said the NHL still can land a network package with fighting as a part of the game.
"The thing we have to do is take a stand on this one way or the other and stand behind our decision," he said. "The only way we lose is if we run from the debate."
There seems little chance of that. Although a few other issues are on today's agenda, Stein is adamant about debating and eventually taking a vote on fighting.
He has ordered sub-committees on each side of the debate to produce position papers explaining their side, and those will be presented today when the governors meet.
The papers show that what the pro-fighting forces fear most is that a ban on fighting will lead to an increase in illegal stick-work.
"The issue comes down to what kind of confrontation is desirable," the pro-fighting paper says. "Hockey players carry weapons. Is the player who is frustrated by illegal tactics to respond with an accepted, safe and natural release of emotions through fisticuffs or is he to resort to stick-work."
The pro-fighting paper also counters the abolitionists claim that retaining fighting will hurt the growth of the game and NHL's chances of securing a network TV deal.
"There is a common misconception that the NHL cannot attract a national network TV deal as a result of fisticuffs," it says. "[Yet] the NHL plays to 92 percent capacity. This indicates that season-ticket holders, the casual fans, and sports fans in general like the game as it is."
On the issue of excessive stickwork, both sides agree that penalties need to be increased in an effort to cut down on the amount of hooking, slashing and high-sticking that takes place.
"You will certainly see something done there that will be a step in the right direction," Stein said.
Stein said he also expects to get a reading on the Dream Team concept and to discuss the league's pending TV deals. He said proposals have been submitted to Sports-Channel America/NBC and ESPN/ABC and that both call for a specific number of games to be carried via the national networks.
On the fighting issue, though, Stein says it's still too close to call.
"It's a real toss-up," he said. "That's the only way to describe it."
Three more starters from 1991 were released while linebacker Kevin Murphy agreed to contract terms.
By NICK PUGLIESE
Tribune Staff Writer
TAMPA - The Bucs continued their purge of starters by lopping three more off their roster Monday, including unsigned wide receiver Bruce Hill.
While Hill was given his unconditional release to no one's surprise, unsigned outside linebacker Kevin Murphy agreed to terms on a new contract amid speculation that the seven-year veteran will be traded.
On the waiver front, two more defensive starters, nose tackle Tim Newton and right cornerback Carl Carter, were a couple of notable cuts.
Three draft choices bit the dust: linebacker James Malone (sixth round), linebacker/safety Ken Swilling (seventh) and kicking specialist Klaus Wilmsmeyer (12th).
Others who were told to turn in their playbooks were tight end Kirk Kirkpatrick, fullback Willie McClendon, wide receiver John Garrett, center Todd McGuire, defensive tackle Curtis Maxey and defensive backs Sammy Lilly, Marcus Hopkins and Herbert James.
With the roster at 61, the Bucs still must waive one player to get down to the limit by 4 p.m. today.
First-year coach Sam Wyche has dropped four starters from last year's 3-13 team, including Hill, Newton, Carter and middle linebacker Jesse Solomon, who was given his unconditional release last Friday.
Also, guard Tom McHale, defensive tackle Reuben Davis and Murphy might not be on the roster when the season starts. Interestingly, all seven of those players were hold-outs.
"We had a lot of tough cuts, but next week, it's like digging out part of your guts," Wyche said, referring to the final cutdown to 47. "You got to keep improving. Every year sees turnovers. Even Super Bowl teams come back looking differently<&|sic!>.
"I wasn't trying to send any kind of message. A lot of it goes back to the agents. There's an implicit feeling that management's still trying to screw you one way or the other. You got to be here. Every day you're not here, you're giving us a chance to fall in love with somebody else."
Hill, a six-year veteran who started the first six games last season before having knee surgery Oct. 14 and finishing the year on injured reserve, skipped three of the four minicamps and asked the team to trade or release him a month ago. He worked out for Cleveland last Thursday, but the Browns did not make an offer for him.
Newton, who had 56 tackles and 5 1/2 sacks last year despite playing with a broken hand late in the season, was released in favor of third-round pick Mark Wheeler, who apparently has won the job.
However, Newton's agent, Jeff Durand, said Newton's exit had more to do with a personality clash between himself and Wyche and Vice President Rich McKay, the team's contract negotiator.
"I'm not surprised; I'm disappointed," Durand said. "I tried to hold them to their promise to reward Tim Newton and I took personal offense at the slander against my character. I called Sam this morning and told him he was a coward and a bully."
Wyche said he felt bad about releasing Newton, but a 27-day hold-out and the inability to play more than one position on the line hurt the former Florida Gator.
"This was a football decision," Wyche said. "I liked Tim and he worked hard in the off-season. Floyd spoke to him and I spoke to him and we didn't beg him, but we said as strongly as we could, 'Please be in camp. You're going to have tough competition. We drafted a kid [Wheeler] who's going to be a whale of a player.'
"It wasn't Tim. It was the agent. I can't say this strongly enough because I don't want Tim to be damaged in this in any way. He felt he was getting an edge on things by holding Tim out, but he left this guy with not enough time to make his team."
Durand said the negotiations, which concluded last Wednesday when Newton signed a two-year, $1.2 million contract, were degrading and unprofessional. Newton earned $275,000 in 1991 and Durand wanted to push him to the average income for a starting defensive lineman of $687,000. But Durand said McKay's first offer was $1,000 above what Newton made last season.
Davis, who agreed to terms last Thursday and did not play in Saturday's 22-7 loss at Miami, hopes he does not share Newton's fate. He said it will be different not to line up next to Newton, but that change is constant in the NFL.
"It's been like that for me the last three or four years," Davis said. "I came in with a bunch of guys I made friends with and they started going off one by one. I made friends with John Cannon and I ended up taking his position. That's what the NFL is about - no job security."
The Bucs currently have roster exemptions for Davis and McHale. Both are expected to be activated for Friday's preseason finale against Cleveland at Tampa Stadium.
"I got a lot on my mind right now and there are things I can't carry to the field," Davis said. "I have to let nature take its course."
Carter, who started 10 of the last 11 games, had been burned repeatedly in the exhibitions after signing 12 days into training camp. His days were numbered when the Bucs signed several cornerbacks off Plan B, including Milton Mack, and drafted Rogerick Green in the fifth round.
Of the rookies, Swilling might be the most disappointing. Two years ago, the Georgia Tech product was projected as a first-round pick. But injuries and a switch of positions dropped his stock so far that he fell to the second day of the draft.
Defensive coordinator Floyd Peters said attitude played a role in Swilling's cut.
"The guy has intelligence and speed and you can see why everybody likes his talent," Peters said. "But he just doesn't have that fire and competitive spirit. He's not a mean, tough kid, and this is a tough business. I would say he no longer wants to punish people and throw his body around."
Ex-Vikings safety Joey Browner passes physical with Bucs and may sign today.
By NICK PUGLIESE
Tribune Staff Writer
TAMPA - The reunion between former Minnesota strong safety Joey Browner and Bucs defensive co-ordinator Floyd Peters could happen as soon as today.
Browner, who was waived on the eve of training camp after the Vikings said he failed his physical, spent Monday holed up in a local hotel waiting for his agent, T.J. Pantaleo, to work out a deal with Bucs Vice President Rich McKay.
Browner, who worked out and passed a physical for the Bucs on Sunday, was scheduled to earn $1 million this season with the Vikings. The two sides were trying to hammer out a new pact that would pay him somewhat less and probably be based on incentives.
"If it all works out and we think he can help us, then he enters the picture," Coach Sam Wyche said. "If he looks like one of the best 47, then he makes the team.
"Floyd knows this guy. We feel we have some inside information on him as a player."
Peters talked on Monday as if Browner already was wearing a Bucs uniform.
"If there's a good football player out there, I'm going to bring him in every time," Peters said. "We've got to get better."
If the six-time Pro Bowl performer joins the team, he would not be the first Browner to wear a Tampa Bay uniform. His brother, Keith, who plays for Arena Football's Tampa Bay Storm, played for the Bucs from 1984-86.
Joey Browner, a 10-year veteran, could push eight-year veteran Mark Robinson out the door. Robinson, who spent 1991 on injured reserve with a shoulder injury, was expected to regain his starting spot but has been bothered by a foot injury during the preseason. Second-year pro Marty Carter has started all three games at strong safety and has seven tackles and one interception.
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Evans, Biondi Qualify For Swimming Finals
By BETH HARRIS
AP Sports Writer
BARCELONA, Spain - Janet Evans and Matt Biondi, the golden swimmers for the United States four years ago at Seoul, qualified for finals today in vastly different fashions.
Evans easily qualified for the women's 400-meter freestyle, an event she won as she claimed three individual golds in Seoul. Biondi, who won seven medals in Seoul, reached the final of the 100 freestyle but only finished fourth.
In the women's 100 backstroke, Kristina Egerszegi of Hungary set an Olympic record of 1 minute, 00.85 seconds to shave one-hundredth of a second off the mark set by Rica Reinisch of Germany in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.
Egerszegi, who holds the world record of 1:00.31 in the 100 backstroke, already has one gold medal at these Olympics. She won the 400 individual medley Sunday.
Lea Loveless of Crestwood, N.Y., qualified second behind Egerszegi in 1:01.19. The top U.S. backstroker, Janie Wagstaff of Mission Hills, Kan., finished fifth in 1:02.29 to make the final.
Loveless, 21, was second to Wagstaff at the U.S. trials with a personal best of 1:01.14.
Monday's gold medal went to Pablo Morales in the 100 butterfly. Eric Namesnik won a silver in the 400 individual medley and the 800 freestyle relay team earned bronze.
In the men's 200 backstroke, American record-holder Royce Sharp of Houston failed to qualify, but Tripp Schwenk of Sarasota, Fla., did.
Sharp, who has the best time in the world this year in 1:58.66, finished 11th in 2:00.97. Only the top eight times advance to finals. At the U.S. trials, Schwenk became the third American ever to better 1:59. He qualified sixth today in 1:59.92.
World record-holder and crowd favorite Martin Zubero of Spain led all qualifiers in 1:59.22.
In the same event, Raymond Papa of the Philippines caused a stir when judges ruled he deliberately false started. Thousands of fans booed Papa's disqualification, which delayed the start.
The team of Angel Martino of Americus Ga., Ashley Tappin of Metairie, La., Crissy Ahmann-Leighton of Tucson, Ariz., and Dara Torres of Gainesville, Fla., finished first in the 400 freestyle relay preliminary with a time of 3:41.57. The German women were second in 3:43.58.
The race marked Martino's debut in the Olympics after the 25-year-old was banned from the 1988 U.S. team. Martino, then Angel Meyers, qualified in three events, but was kicked off the team after testing positive for a banned substance.
Jenny Thompson of Dover, N.H., and Nicole Haislett of St. Petersburg, Fla., were expected to replace two of the preliminary swimmers in tonight's final. They were rested during the heats.
Thompson is going for gold again after a disappointing start in the Olympics. She finished second in the 100 free and failed to qualify for the 200 free final, which Haislett won.
Evans, 20, from Placentia, Calif., has not lost in the 400 freestyle in six years. She led the entire way in her heat to win in 4:09.38, well off the world and Olympic records of 4:03.85 she set in her gold-medal performance four years ago in Seoul.
American Erika Hansen also made the final. Hansen, who failed to qualify for the 400 individual medley final, was third fastest in the morning preliminary with a time of 4:12.08.
Hansen, from King of Prussia, Pa., trailed German Dagmar Hase, who stayed close to Evans and finished in 4:10.92.
Biondi qualified for the 100 freestyle final in 49.75 seconds, but his time was only the fourth-best and not as fast as teammate Jon Olsen, who was third in 49.63.
Alexandre Popov of the Unified Team led the way in 49.29 seconds, followed by Brazilian Gustavo Borges in 49.49. Borges, who swims for the University of Michigan, is the NCAA champion in the event.
Biondi's finish cost him a prime center lane. By finishing first and second, Popov and Borges will swim in lanes four and five. Biondi will start in lane six and Olsen is in lane three.
Biondi is the world record-holder in the 100 free with a time of 48.42.
Thompson, Haislett, Anita Nall and Summer Sanders - swimming's 'New Kids on the Block' - weren't supposed to need Evans to help the U.S. team win Olympic gold medals.
Now they need her more than ever.
Nerves have gotten the best of the youngsters, especially Thompson and Nall - two world record-holders who missed gold in their signature events.
So far, the women have won only one gold, one silver and two bronzes. That's about two gold medals short of what was expected.
The medal count was expected to rise today, since Evans was the heavy favorite in the 400 freestyle. She also is favored in the 800 freestyle on Thursday.
In 1988, Evans and Biondi took turns winning the only Olympic gold medals captured by U.S. swimmers. Evans won three in the distance races; Biondi won two in the sprints.
Evans hasn't lost a 400 freestyle race since the U.S. Long Course Nationals in 1986.
"I want to do well for myself just to prove to myself that I can do it," she said.
Her performance in the grueling 400 should steady the shaky U.S. women, unnerved by Thompson's failures.
"We had a lot of pressure on us coming into this meet. We didn't swim poorly, we just didn't swim as well as we had hoped," said Haislett, who narrowly hung on for gold in the 200 freestyle Monday.
Evans said her second Olympics is different than Seoul, where as a 16-year-old sprite she fearlessly took on and beat the East Germans.
"I've been through all this before and it's not as much of a novelty," she said. "I think it's helped me because I can relax and kind of take it all in stride."
Nall, 16, of Towson, Md., faded in the stretch of the 200 breaststroke to finish behind 14-year-old Kyoko Iwasaki of Japan, who set an Olympic record of 2:26.65, and Lin Li of China, who was clocked in 2:26.85.
Magic's Injury Isn't Considered Serious
By BILL BARNARD
AP Basketball Writer
BARCELONA, Spain - Point guards Magic Johnson and John Stockton are hurt and Charles Barkley is still making mischief.
So what happens?
The U.S. Olympic basketball team beats medal favorite Croatia 103-70 Monday night, the closest victory the Americans have had in nine games, but still a blowout.
They did it without Johnson for more than three-quarters of the game because of a strained muscle in his right knee. Stockton has been out with a cracked bone in his right leg since June 29.
"I stepped away and felt it pull," said Johnson, who stood up for interviews after the game.
An MRI showed nothing serious, and Johnson was listed as day-to-day. He'll have full rest Tuesday, with no game or practice scheduled.
Johnson, the only player who has started every game for Team USA, was unconcerned that one injury would stop the parade of blowouts.
"If I have to miss, I will," Johnson said. "This team could play without a lot of people."
For the Dream Team, whose previous closest game was 38 points over Puerto Rico in the Olympic qualifying tournament, the game against Croatia was an opportunity to measure the size of its dominance.
"It was good for our team to be focused on a challenge," Michael Jordan said. "Our focus on this game was a lot better. In our minds it was a tough game, even though we overwhelmed them with our manpower. We knew this was a team that would challenge us."
"We wanted to gauge our team with this game," Johnson said. "I'd say we still have a passing grade."
Croatia, with six players from Yugoslavia's 1988 Olympic silver medalist team, figured to be one of the American's toughest tests.
Drazen Petrovic of the New Jersey Nets scored 19 points and Stojko Vrankovic of the Boston Celtics had 11 points and four blocked shots. Dino Radja, a Celtics draftee, scored 14 points on 6-of-10 shooting.
But the man Team USA concentrated on was Toni Kukoc, considered by many to be the most talented player in Europe.
The absence of Johnson and Stockton left the U.S. team without a true point guard on the roster. But Chicago Bulls Jordan and Scottie Pippen did the job anyway.
Pippen blanketed Kukoc for most of the game and then said the Croat superstar, who scored just four points, is overrated.
"He's OK, not as great as people said and I anticipated," Pippen said. "I don't know he's even the best European player here. That's probably Drazen Petrovic."
Petrovic hit three 3-pointers in a one-minute span late in the first half to lead a Croatia rally, but he had foul trouble and scored just two of his 19 points in the second half.
Kukoc, courted intensely by the Bulls last year, was defensed superbly by Pippen, who made just his third start for Team USA. Pippen and Jordan both resented the attention given Kukoc by Bulls general manager Jerry Krause.
Barkley, whose intentional elbow foul against Angola in the U.S. opener on Sunday turned the fans against him, heard more derisive whistles in the first half against Croatia.
Spikers Shave Heads To Support Teammate
By NESHA STARCEVIC
Associated Press Writer
BARCELONA, Spain - Bob Samuelson promises to play hard. That's what the U.S. teamsteam needs. Just turn down the volume a bit.
With its opening-game victory against Japan taken away because Samuelson yelled at officials, the Americans will have to be on their best behavior against Canada today.
Their feelings will be apparent - they cut off their hair Monday night to show support for Samuelson.
The Americans, hoping to become the first to win three straight volleyball gold medals, saw their five-set, comeback victory against Japan overturned into a four-set defeat Monday by the International Volleyball Federation.
"We've got our backs to the wall, but we have faced and handled adversity before, and we are prepared to handle it again," coach Fred Sturm said. "Our goal of winning the gold medal has not changed."
The trouble began when Samuelson, a firebrand of Playa del Rey, Calif., got a second yellow card for yelling at officials at match point for Japan in the fourth set. The rules clearly call for a red card to be issued at that point and the awarding of a technical point to Japan.
Leading 2-1 in games and 14-13 on its serve when the Samuelson incident occurred, Japan would have won the match if the rules had been applied, but referee Ramis Samedow of Azerbaijan didn't want to end it that way and allowed play to continue.
But the FIBV officials, acting on a Japanese protest, decided that the rules were clearly broken and declared Japan the winner in four sets.
The ruling did not take away U.S. chances of defending the gold medal, but it reduced the safety cushion.
Four nations from the six-team pool will advance to the quarterfinals and the Americans should still make it. Samuelson was praised by Sturm after the Japan game for "making so many things happen" and "lifting the team in so many areas."
But that was before the impact of Samuelson's outburst became known.
Samuelson came into the game only as a replacement for Bryan Ivie, the middle blocker from Manhattan Beach, Calif., who went out with a right knee injury and is doubtful for today's game.
"This is a very disappointing situation, but I am prepared to come back versus Canada on Tuesday and play as hard as I have ever played," Samuelson said. "I think the decision will be used to fire our team for the rest of the Olympics.
"I did not realize that they assessed me a second yellow card, but it is something that I will have to deal with. There is nothing that we can do about the decision except play hard the remainder of the Olympics."
Anthony, Astros Slam Braves
By BILL ZACK
Atlanta Sports Wire
ATLANTA - Questioned about his lack of work this month, Atlanta Braves reliever Mike Stanton shrugged Monday afternoon and offered, "Throwing on the side every day keeps me pretty sharp and the rest of it is state of mind."
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ARE THEY KIDDING?
The Dream Team is everyone else's nightmare. It should be no contest, unless...
By PAUL A. WITTEMAN
Reported by Brian Cazeneuve / Portland
THE PLAYERS ON THE BENCH SAW IT coming, edging forward on their seats in anticipation. Michael Jordan was about to take the defender from Argentina on a quick and not-so-flattering trip to the hoop. Two-hundred-kilo sneakers: that's what it appeared the Argentine was wearing as Jordan effortlessly rose as from a trampoline for one of his trademark, gravity-defying pirouettes above the rim. The Argentine seemed to shrink to the size of a circus midget. As Jordan dunked the ball, the players on the bench leaped up and cheered the best basketball player the world has ever seen. In Spanish.
That's right. The players cheering Jordan so wildly were the very Argentines whom he was reducing to the level of kids playing pickup on the playground. No matter. "I played with great happiness against the monsters," Argentine center Hernan Montenegro said later. Added guard Marcelo Milanesio: "When we met at the center of the court, I was very excited that it was Magic Johnson shaking my hand."
So it went at the Tournament of the Americas in Portland, Oregon, last month, where the Argentines and everyone else came to pose for pictures with Michael, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and their merry band of National Basketball Association All-Star troubadours. In between, they played a little basketball. Very little. Take Cuba: with 3 1/2 min. remaining in the game, the team was behind by 70 points, and only the final horn saved it from losing by 100 or more. Panama dropped a cliff-hanger by a mere 60.
When the tournament ended, with the Americans barely breaking a sweat except on the golf course, where they seemed to spend most of their time, everyone was ready to concede the gold medal in Barcelona to the assemblage now and forever more to be known simply as the Dream Team. Nevada bookmakers, who never miss an opportunity to make a dollar, have fastidiously refused to post odds or take a bet. The only surer wager than the Dream Team may be that George Foreman will not try to make it next as a featherweight.
U.S. coach Chuck Daly has at his disposal the greatest arsenal of offensive and defensive weapons ever gathered on a basketball court. There are passers with 360<*_>degree<*/> vision like Bird (despite his creaky back), John Stockton and Magic. Chris Mullin and Jordan are excellent three-point shooters. No one in possession of his faculties and desirous of retaining them would dare drive down the lane into territory defended by Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and Karl Malone. Jordan and his Chicago Bulls teammate Scottie Pippen are tenacious open-court defenders. Then too there are Clyde Drexler and the Admiral, David Robinson. Twelfth man Christian Laettner will probably get a great view of all this talent mostly from the bench.
And what of the Olympic opposition? The dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has eviscerated the teams that won the gold and silver medals in Seoul in 1988. The best former Soviet players now wear the uniform of Lithuania. Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac led Yugoslavia to the silver medal at Seoul. This time, however, Yugoslavia as such has been banned from Barcelona. Petrovic, a New Jersey Net, will play for Croatia. Divac, a Los Angeles Laker and a Serb, will not be allowed to play. The Germans will be competitive; N.B.A. star Detlef Schrempf will make them so. And in Oscar Schmidt, the Brazilians have one of the game's best three-point shooters. But even if you put all these players on one squad, it would make no difference. The remaining 11 teams in the Olympic tournament will be scuffling for silver.
Still, American coach Daly is not known as the 'prince of pessimism' for nothing. He is publicly worried that since games in the Olympics are eight minutes shorter than those in the N.B.A., his juggernaut might dawdle, fall behind and wait until it is too late to mount a rally. Hey, chill out, replies Jordan. "We have too much talent, and we'll turn it on whenever we have to." Daly frets that the three-point shooting line in international basketball is closer to the basket than in the N.B.A. and that the lane is wider, both tending to nullify the Americans' height advantage. However, after seeing how little difference these factors made in his team's 136-57 loss to the Yanks, Cuban coach Miguel Gomez seemed transported to a Zen mode. "One finger cannot cover the sun," he said.
But the dream that must give Daly the worst night sweats features a player like Butch Lee. Back in 1976, Lee was not invited to the U.S. Olympic basketball trials. Instead, he played for the team from his native Puerto Rico. Spurred by a desire for revenge over the slight he felt he had suffered at the hands of the U.S. selection committee, Lee whipsawed the Americans with the performance of his life. He scored 35 points and almost single-handedly took the highly favored U.S. team to within seconds of a humiliating loss.
In Daly's updated nightmare, the Butch Lee role is played by Lithuanian Sarunas Marciulionis, an N.B.A. star who plays for the Golden State Warriors. Daly sees Marciulionis sinking three-pointers like an automaton from nine meters, with Lithuanian center Arvidas Sarbonis playing for one night like Bill Russell in his prime.
Maybe. All sporting contests before they are played contain an element that Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril calls "glorious uncertainty." Anything can happen, as Carril's teams have proved season after remarkable season against superior opposition. But not this superior. "This is not a great team," says Carril. "This is the greatest team ever." Don Nelson, the shrewd and artful coach of the Golden State Warriors, whose son Donn is helping to coach Marciulionis and the Lithuanians, agrees. "The once-in-a-lifetime game is not going to happen," he says. "The Dream Team will not allow any second shots. Even if the Americans play poorly, there shouldn't be a close game. They haven't even tried yet."
When they do, is a shutout conceivable? Now there's a fantasy for the Dream Team to ponder. Sleep on it, Michael. Just don't forget to set your alarm clock.
BENVINGUTS TO THE CATALAN GAMES!
Barcelona flashes its many stylish differences as the arc of the opening arrow begins the dazzling five-ring show
By PICO IYER BARCELONA
IMAGINE A PROUD, SERIOUS OLD man, not without some gruffness. Imagine that he is a prosperous merchant, having made enough money, on his own terms, to indulge himself in moments of whimsy, flashes of dandy vanity. Imagine further that he has seen empires and invaders come and go. Now, having dusted the furniture and repainted the house, he throws open the doors to his elegant old home to reveal ... a dazzle of tropi-colored tricks.
That was a little how it felt as Barcelona, the often unshaven but designer-crazy capital of Catalonia, set flame to the Games of the 25th Olympiad. The occasion was a golden opportunity for presenting the city as a shiny new capital of a postnational world. It was also a quadrilingual glimpse into a multicultural future. Music at the celebrations that opened the Games came from an atlas of names - Ryuichi Sakamoto, Angelo Badalamenti (of Twin Peaks fame), Andrew Lloyd Webber; Pl<*_>a-acute<*/>cido Domingo was followed by a sea of 'living sculptures' designed by a man from the West Indies. And some of the grandest cheers of all came as the unfamiliar Lithuanian flag hung over costumes fashioned by Issey Miyake.
As soon as the opening ceremonies began, moreover, records began falling like tenpins: the most nations competing (172), the most athletes in attendance (almost 11,000, or five times as many as in the Winter Games), the highest number of television viewers (a projected 3.5 billion). But numbers did scant justice to emotions: to the sense of quiet pleasure as one of the first teams to enter was South Africa, here after a 32-year absence; to the shiver of unease as Iran alone paraded behind a man, not a woman, bearing its name; to the bewilderment that met the Unified Team, amid its cacophony of 12 republics' flags. And when Bosnia-Herzegovina appeared, after an eleventh-hour entry, people rose spontaneously around the stands to cheer.
The most prominent country in the early going, however, had been one that did not march but made its presence felt at every turn: independent-minded Catalonia, which is determined to cast these as the Catalan, not the Spanish, Games. A longtime enemy of Castile, delighting in a language that Franco had banned, Barcelona was eager not just to show off its faster, higher, stronger self - reconstruction is almost as trendy as deconstruction here - but to emphasize its distance from the Spain of myth, and of Madrid. FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA signs (in English) were draped from balconies and shoulders, and buttons and stickers proclaiming Catalonian independence were handed out even to kids from California. The Catalan flag, four bloodred fingers on a field of yellow, seemed to be fluttering from every window - 28 of them on a single building! - and not one Spanish banner was in sight. As the opening arrow approached, every other shop seemed to be saying benvinguts - 'welcome' in the new Olympic language of Catalan - to what was locally known as the Jocs Olimpics.
In a deeper sense, though, the weathered, down-to-earth city seemed too rooted and too various to be greatly transformed by pervasive Cobi (as the Olympic mascot is called). Barcelona appeared ready to take over the world, and not the other way round. In Seville, when the Olympic torch arrived on its way to the opening ceremonies, crowds flocked into the Plaza de San Francisco to snap up Cobi dolls, key rings and T shirts, and catch a flash of history. In Barcelona, by contrast, life continued as usual. It flows and crests from dawn to dawn here: sunny Sunday mornings watching the albino gorilla in the zoo; early evenings in the stained-glass quiet of Santa Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a del Mar; late, late evenings with thrashing guitars at the penumbral nightclub KGB. Old women dance stately sardanes in front of the cathedral, and men in silk ties ride scooters to the office. Smiling pickpockets filch bank notes from the wallets of sightseers while placing roses in their hair.
In the balmy beach-front Olympic Village, as the teams began arriving, 50 or more Iranians could be seen sitting in rows in dull beige uniforms, like nothing so much as condemned POWS, fending off questions about why their team consisted of 40 men and zero women ("Their records are not strong." "Women are not interested in sports"). On the other side of the room, Enos Mafokate, the lone black member of South Africa's equestrian contingent, was red-eyed with exhaustion and excitement. "For 30 years," he said, "I have dreamed of this. When they told me I was going to the Games, I could not open my mouth for three hours. I could not even move my jaw. This is something I will never forget!"
Around him, other athletes were pounding away at a Super Monaco GP video game, driving through a simulated Monte Carlo, even as the stars of the U.S. basketball team were in the real Monaco, driving the lane. Their performances were eagerly anticipated. Along the main promenade of town, the tree-lined Ramblas, sidewalk artists had already added Magic Johnson's face to the standard repertoire of Marilyn Monroe and Emperor Hirohito, and copies of Magic's biography were piling up next to canine pianists, peep shows and Ecuadorian panpipers.
Meanwhile, more and more newcomers could be seen trying to figure out a city where pijamas are desserts and streets have periods in the middle of their names (Paral.Lel). Journalists were struggling to work out why three different coins were worth a peseta (less than a cent) and whether the regal Pla<*_>c-cedille<*/>a de Catalunya really was enhanced by an enormous inflatable M&M.
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Cubs Face Challenge With Gross
Dodgers Pitcher Coming Off No-Hit Performance
By Joe Goddard
Staff Writer
LOS ANGELES - The Cubs knew all about Kevin Gross before they faced him Saturday night.
They knew him as the man who struck out 12 of them in just seven innings last May 18, and read all about him last week when he no-hit the Giants.
"Our game was the first time I saw him," Cubs manager Jim Lefebvre said of the Dodgers veteran. "He had great stuff. I mean, great. He had his hook [curve] going. He was really breaking 'em off. We were lucky to catch up to him."
Mark Grace wasn't surprised at Gross' achievement.
"He got me twice in that [12-strikeout] game," the .308 hitter said. "Fortunately, we beat him. Otherwise, he'd have made us all look silly."
It was a somewhat silly game for Grace personally. He had two triples, but also made his last two errors of the season.
"I know Kevin doesn't have a winning record, but that doesn't always mean you're not a good pitcher," Grace said. "He's played for some bad teams."
Gross has had four days to think about the gem he achieved. He threw only 99 pitches, 71 for strikes.
He felt the odds are heavily stacked against duplicating Johnny Vander Meer's consecutive no-hitters in 1938 for Cincinnati.
"It's such a longshot to do two of them in a row," said Gross, who has a 3.37 ERA, but only a 6-12 record.
"The time has gone by so fast between starts that I really haven't had time to think about it.
"I threw on the sidelines Thursday and had fantastic stuff. I've actually had good stuff all season, but that doesn't always mean anything.
"I started off sharp before the no-hitter, too. The Reds didn't get a hit until the fifth inning.
"I'll go out there and give it my best shot and see what happens."
The only Giant close to getting a hit off Gross was Robby Thompson.
His line drive in the eighth inning was speared by shortstop Jose Offerman, who had to leap.
Gross draws a blank on what happened after Willie McGee flied to left field for the final out. "It was a blur," he said.
It has been the only no-hitter of the season. There were seven last year and eight in 1990, but none the previous two years.
Gross' only claim to fame before the no-hitter was embarrassing. He was caught using sandpaper to scuff baseballs in a 1987 game with the Phillies and was suspended 10 games.
Holder of a 96-113 record, Gross has not had a winning season since 1985, when he was 15-13 with the Phillies.
He did, however, make the All-Star team in 1988, finish second to Mark Langston in league strikeouts in 1989 with 158 and stop Lenny Dykstra's 23-game hit streak in 1990.
Both teams came into the game a little tired from a 12-inning Friday night game the Cubs won 3-2.
Steve Buechele drove in the first and last runs of the game, but had a throwing error at third that allowed the Dodgers to get back in the game off Greg Maddux.
"Strange night," he said.
Bob Scanlan earned his eighth save in 10 opportunities to take over the club lead from Paul Assenmacher and Jim Bullinger.
The Dodgers had tied the game in the ninth off Maddux on a double by Offerman that sent pinch-runner Eric Young home from first base.
Young tripped rounding second, but was able to beat Buechele's throw home when center fielder Doug Dascenzo overthrew the cut-off man, Jose Vizcaino.
Buechele mad up for it with his game-winning, loop single in the 12th.
"I'll take 'em any way I can get 'em," he said.
It's Testing Time for Fernandez
By Toni Ginnetti
Staff Writer

The only thing old about young Alex Fernandez is the refrain he gets tired of hearing.
That he's still just a kid.
That his climb to the majors was too quick.
That he has much to learn about pitching in the major leagues.
"That gets real old," Fernandez admitted: "Yeah, I'm young. I just turned 23. But I'm here for a reason - and it's that I can pitch in the big leagues."
Only this year, though, that has been a test for the tender-aged White Sox pitcher who reached the big leagues two years ago after a meteoric two-month ascent through the minors.
Even for one of baseball's most heralded rookie phenoms, his was an almost unheard-of climb:
Fernandez, then but 20, drafted as the first-round pick of the Sox in June, 1990 out of Miami Dade South Community College after having collected National Junior College Player of the Year honors, the Golden Spikes Award as amateur baseball's top player and the Dick Howser Award.
Fernandez, winning six of seven decisions for the Class A Sarasota and Class AA Birmingham affiliates with a 1.83 over-all ERA, and 1.08 at Birmingham.
Fernandez, arriving Aug. 2 at Milwaukee County Stadium for his first major league start and making it memorable, throwing seven innings of five-hit ball before leaving with a 2-1 lead, though not getting the Sox' eventual victory.
Fernandez posting a 5-5 mark and 3.80 ERA for the remainder of the big league season.
"When I came up it was an unbelievably great feeling," he said. "But it dies. And it becomes a job.
"I was talking to my father the other night and he said 'Gee, you get to the park at 3 p.m. and you leave at midnight.' I said, 'Yeah, Dad, it's like an eight-hour job.'"
But in June Fernandez was handed his first pink slip - a ticket to Class AAA Vancouver.
"I've learned a lot of things about the game as a business," he said. "I'll leave it at that. But there's no question you grow up and mature and learn how to deal with things - with adversity, with success."
Until this season, Fernandez considered adversity the likes of the a losing 9-13 season in 1991. Even after struggling through a 3-7 first half of 1992 with 4.23 ERA, the demotion June 22 to Class AAA was unexpected - and resented.
"It was a total surprise," he said. "I was shocked. And it's still something I say I didn't need to do, something that was uncalled for.
"But I'm not going to second guess their opinions because that's why they're my bosses. As long as I'm here, I have to do what they say.
"So instead of making it worse, I did what I had to do to come right back up."
In some ways, Fernandez' three-week stay at Vancouver was an exercise in both futility and success. He dominated with a 2-1 record and 0.94 ERA in four games. Yet he remains defiant that the move was wrong.
The two aren't necessarily counter-productive forces in the opinions of his manger and pitching coach.
"I know he was shocked," Gene Lamont said of Fernandez' demotion. "But I thought he took it all right.
"I'm sure when you get to the big leagues, you think you're here forever. I think usually it's best when you get experience in the minors, but it really all depends on how good you are and what the needs of your team are. Alex showed he could pitch in the big leagues.
"But it's hard to learn at the big league level. He went down and I think it helped him."
If it reinforced Fernandez' fierce self-confidence, that, too, could be a plus, pitching coach Jackie Brown believes.
"You want that strong will, but it's tougher sometimes because it does make it difficult in the learning stage. But I think he's figuring out who he is.
"Alex is still trying to figure out what kind of pitcher he is. Is he a power pitcher or a finesse pitcher? I think his last game [a 3-2 comeback victory Thursday over Texas in which he worked eight innings and allowed two runs on four hits and a walk] is what he is - a fastball pitcher who needs to use his other three pitches."
Fernandez is the first to agree that learning is part of the game, but his best lessons have come from big league teammates and coaches, he says, especially catcher Carlton Fisk and pitcher Charlie Hough.
"They've been in the big leagues for 20 years," he said.
"Some things they'll tell me I don't agree with, but most I do. You take in what you want to take in and learn from that.
"Jackie Brown's been a big help to me, too," he said in acknowledging another lesson learned in spring when for the first time he was faced with playing for a new manager and coaching staff.
"The only manager I had known in my major league career was Jeff [Torborg] and his staff, but in this profession you have to get used to that. You never know who's going to be your coach the next year."
For coaches, Fernandez is his own challenge, a pitcher wealthy in both potential and impatience.
"He might be a little hard-headed, but all good pitchers are that way," Lamont said. "And I've never heard Alex say 'I'm young' as an excuse if things don't go well."
"I like his attitude and I like young kids because I like the part of coaching that is teaching," Brown said. "Alex has four average to above average pitches and all he needs is to learn how to use them.
"And any time you have someone with four average to above average pitches, they have the chance to be dominating in the game."
In some ways Fernandez' potential might have been a hindrance this season, one that began with many pointing to him as a key to the Sox' hopes.
"I heard that, but they singled out a lot of people, not just me," he said. "It didn't make me feel all the pressure was on me."
Fernandez' focus always has been on his ability to succeed, even when victories have eluded him.
"He believes in himself," said catcher Ron Karkovice, one of Fernandez' closer friends. "The only thing you have to tell him is to slow down. If someone gets a hit, he'll tend to try to blow away the next hitter.
"I didn't think he needed to go down. He was getting some bad breaks and they were trying to get him to avoid big innings. But I thought he was throwing well and now he hasn't given up the big inning.
"I think he could be a 15- to 20-game winner, and in years to come he could be a dominating pitcher in the league."
That so many years are yet to come fuels Fernandez' desire to win.
"Sometimes you say to yourself, 'You've bee in the big leagues almost three years and you're only 23.' I'm young and glad to be young because all that tells me is I'll have a lot more years in the big leagues."
Air War Likely For Minnesota
Wacker Planning To Throw More
By Terry Boers
Staff Writer
On the cover of the Minnesota media guide, new coach Jim Wacker is pictured leaning out the side window of an airplane with his right fist raised.
Does this mean the dawning of Air Wacker?
After the Great Golden Gopher Offensive Crash of 1991, Minnesota fans are hoping that Wacker can put the program back in an upright position.
As the befuddled regime of former coach John Gutekunst came to an unsatisfactory (2-9) conclusion, it became clear that even if the other team had left the field on third down, Minnesota would have been forced to punt.
In 11 games last season, the Gophers scored a grand total of 12 touchdowns and 104 points.
And the defense wasn't all that hot, either.
They were outscored by an average margin of 27.5-9.5 and were outgained by more than 800 yards during the year.
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Catholic leaders reeling from Sinead stunt
EXAMINER NEWS SERVICES
NEW YORK - Catholic leaders expressed shock at singer Sinead O'Connor's having ripped a picture of Pope John Paul II to pieces on 'Saturday Night Live.'
"I have no idea why she would do that," said Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for Cardinal John O'-Connor of New York. "The pope is an advocate for peace. It sounds like she is spreading hatred and intolerance."
Frank DeRosa, a spokesman for Bishop Thomas Daily of Brooklyn, said: "It's a pity she embarrassed herself that way. I'm sure the Holy Father would be the first to say a prayer for her so that she could come to grips with whatever is angering her."
O'Connor shocked the 'Saturday Night Live' studio audience, the show's producers and millions of viewers when she tore the picture on live television.
"Fight the real enemy," the smooth-scalped Irish singer shouted as she held up the 8-by-12 photo of the pontiff and methodically shredded it during her appearance toward the show's end.
From the show's conclusion through Monday, NBC received more than 900 calls from people who didn't like the show - and seven who did. That was among the highest number generated in the history of the often-controversial 17-year-old show.
"A lot of people were as offended as we were," said NBC spokesman Curt Block, who was in the control room when O'Connor pulled the surprise stunt.
The Dublin-born singer, wearing a long white gown, tore up the photo after performing 'War' - an a cappella song about racism, war and child abuse.
After the song, she blew out candles on the stage and walked off; the studio audience was silent.
Block said that during dress rehearsal, O'Connor performed the song and ripped up a picture of an unidentified baby at its conclusion.
The segment was aired nation-wide, including on the West Coast, where the show is tape delayed. "There were discussions after the show on what to do," Block said. "One of the thoughts was that in editing it out, it could even draw more attention to it. In hindsight, seeing what the reaction has been, we might have managed it differently."
Block said it was undecided whether O'Connor, 26, would ever be invited back to the show. He added that she returned to her dressing room after the song, reappeared for the 'goodnight' segment, then quickly left the studio.
O'Connor has criticized the church's stand against abortion and earlier this year led an abortion-rights march through Dublin.
O'Connor drew the ire of many in 1990 when she refused to allow the national anthem to be played before a performance in New Jersey. And she canceled an 'SNL' appearance after she learned that foul-mouthed comic Andrew 'Dice' Clay would be the host.
The real Reagan, according to Lyn Nofziger
Aide's memoirs not just presidential pap
ASSOCIATED PRESS
SACRAMENTO - Lyn Nofziger is one of Ronald Reagan's oldest and most loyal political confidants, but Nofziger's memoirs don't gloss over the former president's weaknesses or failures.
"It's not a book about how Ronald Reagan saved the world," Nofziger says of his candid and entertaining book, titled simply, 'Nofziger,' published last week by Regnery Gateway Inc.
Nofziger's admiration of Reagan, both as an individual and political leader, is evident throughout his book, but it doesn't blunt either his insight or humor.
"Reagan has a great 'in' button, but his 'out' button sometimes gets stuck on open," Nofziger writes, describing Reagan's ability to quickly absorb and understand a great deal of information and sometimes blurt out politically embarrassing jokes or observations such as trees causing pollution.
Nofziger, whose association with Reagan goes back to 1966, when he was press secretary in the actor-turned-politician's campaign for governor, also confirms that Reagan often embellished on true stories to make a point or that he denied embarrassing gaffes.
But Reagan did it honestly, Nofziger said, genuinely convincing himself that he was telling the truth.
For example, Nofziger wrote, Reagan "got away with denying that ... he ever said, 'A tree is a tree. How many do you have to see?'
"My secretary, Judith Kernoff, had it on tape, but that was something we didn't tell him or anyone else, so he was free to do one of the things he has always done best - convince himself that the truth was what he wanted it to be," Nofziger writes.
Nofziger also confirms in his memoirs that Reagan first discussed running for president in a meeting at his Pacific Palisades home with key advisers in December 1966, a month before he became governor of California and 14 years before he finally was elected to the White House.
But, Nofziger says, it was political supporters like himself who were pushing the idea of a presidential campaign in 1968. Reagan took part in the discussion, but he was skeptical then and still didn't have his heart in it when he formally launched his first, short-lived, campaign for president two years later, Nofziger says.
"He was a very, very reluctant candidate in 1968," Nofziger says. "He was doing basically what (political advisers) Cliff White, Tom Reed and I pressured him into doing. He seriously at that time thought it was wrong for him. He didn't think he was ready for it."
In general, Nofziger is critical of Reagan's top White House staff, saying they limited Reagan's presidential news conferences because they didn't have confidence in him.
That was a mistake, Nofziger says, because more frequent news conferences, such as he had as governor, "would have forced Reagan to stay on top of things better, and the media would have discovered that he's not dumb."
A new atonement
Contemporary Judaism accounts for modern sins during Yom Kippur
By Al Morch
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
YOM KIPPUR, the most important Jewish holy day, begins at sunset Tuesday in the new Hebrew year of 5753, and lasts until sunset Wednesday. It is a day of atonement and fasting, during which devout Jews think of their sins, repent and ask forgiveness from God and others.
(The idea of a collective confession stems from an ancient belief that the gods became infuriated with a whole tribe when one of its members transgressed. Hence, in those times collective crops, live-stock and wells suffered the wrath of the gods.)
"But it goes beyond tribal feelings," says Rabbi Mark Schiftan of Temple Emanu-el, a reform congregation located at Arguello Boulevard and Lake Street.
"None of us as Jews can ignore what's happening in the entire American community. We are very concerned when we hear of more people out of work, more students who cannot learn, more people without adequate social service. Such bad news strikes a strong note in the Jewish heart. Because of our unique past, something in our very being resonates toward the powerless and the oppressed," says Schiftan.
Within the liberal tradition, he says, there is an attempt to combine both the ancient admission of human frailty and shortcomings along with the contemporary area of human neglect and abuse.
However, he believes, now that Jews have made a comfortable place for themselves in American life, there is a need to return to rituals that tie them in a very public fashion to their faith and to their people.
"There has been a return to more use of the Hebrew language in services, and the prayer books we've used for the past 15 years are much more traditional than one used for 50 years before that," he says.
On the other hand, Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun, a 6-year-old liberal bimonthly Jewish magazine formerly based in Oakland but now published in New York, says the liturgy of the prayer book, while a balance of source material, is not inclusive enough to cover instantaneous events that need response at the time.
"So I've written a supplement (appearing in the September issue of Tikkun) to Al Cheyt, the traditional confessional prayer recited on Yom Kippur," says Lerner. Tikkun is a Hebrew word meaning 'to heal, to repair, to transform the world.'
"The idea is that you either use my supplement or create your own, then discuss in small groups what particular aspects make the most sense, what they are going to do differently in the coming year, what support they need from others to help make changes in their lives and what they are going to do to secure that support."
Lerner believes that contemporary society has such a self-centered consciousness that "it's time we had a serious engagement with prayers not said by rote. In doing so I think we can validate a lot of peoples' sense of what is important and what is not, and allow for simple acts of caring and kindness.
"I take repentance seriously," Lerner says. "The contemporary mode is to dismiss all guilt as a bad thing because guilt was used so much to impose rigid standards in a patriarchal society. I've taken that into account, but want to show there is still room for some guilt."
Lerner's prayer asks for a multitude of forgiveness, at the same time imprinting and reinforcing the listener/reader with what should be done. He lists 54 sins. Among them, "the sins of feeling so worn out when we hear about oppression we finally close our ears ... for the sins of even pretending that the (racist) problem had gone away until others began to burn down cities in their despair ... for the sins of turning our back on - or participating in - the oppression of gays and lesbians ... for the sins of making social change leaders, teachers and activists feel they are foolish to be giving their lives to the community and their highest ideals ...
For the sins of not recognizing the humanity and suffering of the Palestinian people and the injustice they face living under the unwanted occupation ... for the sins of allowing conservative or insensitive leaders to speak on behalf of all American Jews ... for the sins of being critical of Jewish life from a distance rather than from personal involvement and commitment ... for the sins of being insensitive or insulting to non-Jews ... for the sins of insisting that everything we do have a payoff ... for the sins of not helping single people to meet potential partners."
Rabbi Schiftan's personal atonement wish this year would be to give more time to his family, and have more patience with his children.
Lerner declined to disclose his atonement wishes ("that's between me and God").
Husband OK'd her affair with millionaire
Mistress says she was promised house
By Linda Deutsch
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LOS ANGELES - The ex-husband of one of Henry Mudd's seven mistresses testified Monday that she had returned to the millionaire industrialist after breaking off their relationship because she missed his money.
Vincent Oliver, whose former wife, Lorraine, is suing the estate of the late founder of Harvey Mudd College for $5 million, has said he knew of his wife's affair with Mudd and approved of it.
The case has sent details of Mudd's private life spilling forth in elaborate detail. Witnesses have said the business high-flier kept a different mistress for each day of the week and lavished gifts and money on them.
Eleanor Oliver is suing Mudd's estate for control of a $600,000 house in Los Angeles, among other things. She claims Mudd promised she could have the house rent-free until she died. Oliver says Mudd reneged on the contract after marrying one of his mistresses shortly before his death in 1990 at age 77. Oliver was later evicted.
In his testimony Monday, Vincent Oliver said that after they married in 1976, he and his wife had had "an open marriage" in which both of them had extramarital lovers.
Vincent Oliver said he had joined his wife in borrowing $10,000 from Mudd to start a business before she became Mudd's mistress in 1977. At least one witness has suggested that Eleanor Oliver began having sex with Mudd to pay off the loan. She denies this.
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He'll prosecute baby Kerri case
Deputy district attorney says her parents got more help than most do
By Erin McCormick
SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
OAKLAND - Most of the 2,000 or so children who have come into Bob Hutchins' life over the last 12 years have had one thing in common: They've been missing.
As one of Alameda County's top experts in child abductions, the deputy district attorney has handled 1,031 cases of children who have been snatched from nurseries, abducted by estranged parents or simply disappeared.
Now, as Hutchins takes on the role of prosecutor in the high profile kidnapping case of the 2-day-old baby Kerri Mammini, he cannot forget that not all kidnapping victims are nearly so lucky.
While Kerri, who was kidnapped from her mother's hospital room in June, was recovered after an exhaustive three-month police investigation, Hutchins says many parents reporting stolen children have trouble even getting help from police authorities, much less recovering their children.
These are the victims of the most common, yet most neglected, type of kidnapping: parental abductions.
"In the baby Kerri case, the public automatically sees the horror of it," Hutchins said. "But when someone's child is taken by the other parent, everybody says, 'Oh, it's just a parent.'
"But any parent who has a child secreted away from them for three or four years feels the same way baby Kerri's mother did," he said. "I don't think there's much difference."
In upcoming court proceedings against Karen Lea Hughes, who was arrested Sept. 15 for allegedly abducting baby Kerri from her mother's hospital room, Hutchins will act as a traditional prosecutor - digging up witnesses and presenting evidence to get a conviction. The next court appearance for Hughes is Oct. 13 for pretrial motions.
In other cases, Hutchins has played a much wider role. The deputy DA has become almost a one-stop resource center for parents who feel they have nowhere to turn.
"Historically these (parental abduction) cases were just hated by police and law enforcement officers," he said. Even now, "the police often tell parents there is nothing they can do."
Georgia Hilgeman found out the hard way.
In October 1976, the Santa Clara County mother let her 13-month-old daughter come to Alameda County for a weekend visit with the baby's father, whom she had recently divorced.
Before the weekend was over, the ex-husband, college instructor Juan Rios, reported that the infant had mysteriously disappeared at an event at Oakland's Civic Center.
A massive police search of the area turned up nothing. Soon Rios became the prime suspect.
As soon as police authorities realized that the case was probably a parental abduction, their interest waned, Hilgeman said.
"I was basically left to my own resources," she said. "I was ripped off numerous times by unscrupulous bounty hunters, private eyes, psychics and whatnot."
Hilgeman did not see her daughter until more than four years later, when she went to Mexico with a posse of lawyers and found the little girl living with the former husband's impoverished relatives near Mexico City.
With Hutchins acting as prosecutor, the district attorney's office took Rios to trial on charges of child imprisonment. The father received a three-year prison sentence.
"You have to see how frustrated these people get, calling all these agencies and not finding help," Hutchins said.
His goal is to make the criminal justice system available to anyone who has had a child stolen, whether it was by a parent or not.
He has gone far beyond the prosecution duties of an everyday district attorney. He has spearh-eaded investigations and worked to train police on handling these matters.
"I use the criminal system to force children out of the wood-work," he said. This can mean issuing a warrant against a parent abductor, extraditing them from another state or even taking the children into custody.
While more than 90 percent of his cases involve parent abductions, Hutchins said he's had at least one that was markedly similar to the baby Kerri case.
About three years ago, he said a woman disguised herself in a nurse's outfit and a wig and took a newborn baby from a room in Oakland's Highland Hospital.
The big difference in the case was that the abductor never got out of the hospital. The baby's mother realized what was happening and the woman was caught before she left the premises.
"They arrested her on the spot," Hutchins said. "But otherwise, the case was very similar to baby Kerri. That woman was prepared to keep that baby too."
'Ladies lunch' for Hillary
Hundreds gather in Bay restaurants to support Demo contender for first lady
By Mandy Behbehani
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
In a powerful display of unity, more than 700 women paid from $20 to $50 to eat lunch Monday at 12 Bay Area restaurants owned or operated by women, to show their support for Hillary Clinton and to raise money for the California Democratic Party Nominees' Fund.
"I believe in intelligent women who have careers and can be family oriented, and I think the treatment of Hillary has been unjust and unfair," said Joyce Goldstein, owner of Square One restaurant, where one of the lunches was held. "I don't usually do politics in my business, but I thought it was a wonderful idea and that I should support it."
'Ladies Who Lunch' was the brainchild of writer Alice Adams, arts administrator Diana Fuller, literary agent Bonnie Nadell, activist Marjorie Traub, Oakland Tribune book editor Diana Ketcham and former Dance Coalition director Suki Lilienthal, who wanted, as Nadell puts it, to talk back to the "spin doctors who tell us women fear and dislike Hillary Clinton."
Invitations were sent out by people such as writers Amy Tan and Susan Faludi. Neither was at the lunch, but they lent their names to the event.
Guest speakers slated to appear at the restaurants included ACT Artistic Director Carey Perloff; her mother, Marjorie Perloff, a professor at Stanford; writers Kathy Acker and Deirdre English; restaurateur Alice Waters; Project Open Hand founder Ruth Brinker, city attorney Louise Renne; screen-writer Diane Johnson; former Mayor Dianne Feinstein (who was unable to attend the event); and Clinton campaign co-director for Northern California and Professor at UC's Boalt Hall, Willy Fletcher.
Before the speeches, guests were treated to an impersonation of Hillary Clinton by local stage actress Lorri Holt, who, dressed to look like Clinton - complete with red suit and headband - went from location to location giving a rousing speech set in the year 1996.
"Who would have thought that Bill Clinton would have been as wonderful as to turn over his second term to me and become my chief of staff?" Holt asked the Cypress Club audience to laughter. "Let's go out and win this election because we can't afford to put the leadership of this country into the hands of Marilyn Quayle."
At the Cypress Club, 40 women, most of them wearing their 'Bye! George' and 'Blow Bill Blow' buttons (the latter feature Bill Clinton playing his sax) gathered to hear the two Perloffs and attorney David Robertson speak.
The crowd was mostly over 40 with a couple of exceptions.
"I used to raise money for Mr. Bush, but I really disagree with his stand on abortion and the environment and those are really important issues to me," said Barbara Ann Caulfield, 26, an attorney with the San Francisco law firm of Hough & Moss.
Marjorie Perloff, author of the article in the Oct. 5 issue of New Republic about how Barbara Bush's image as a super stay-at-home mother is fabrication, said, "Hillary is very accomplished. She has a real political interest. We've had first lady after first lady who has to have a project. And it's so demeaning. Hillary doesn't need a project because she has projects. She will prove that all women really can be equal to men and don't have to be assigned projects like beautifying the White House or fighting drugs."
Daughter Carey agreed.
"She's an extraordinarily important role model for women. Hillary's life is much like the average woman's day-to-day struggle, for those women in this country who have to work, and do work, and who have a primary responsibility to their family."
Robertson, a partner at Morrison and Foerster, knew the Clintons at Yale Law School and calls them "extraordinarily impressive and nice."
Over at Square One, about 80 women, including Anne Halstead of the Port Commission, gathered to hear Willy Fletcher and retired investment banker and former Republican fund-raiser Martha Fray speak.
Fletcher, who was a Rhodes Scholar with Bill Clinton at Oxford and was at Yale Law School with both the Clintons, said he believes the Clintons will pay attention to issues that have long gone untended.
"Issues like choice," said Fletcher, "like the Family Leave bill that Bush just vetoed, the NIH bill for ovarian and breast cancer research that he vetoed in the spring, the Head Start program that he has refused to fund fully, his voucher system, the economy. I have to say we have enormous problems before us, it's not going to be easy. But they will make an honest attempt to deal with our problems."
Fray said, "I asked myself, what would it take to make it possible for me to continue to align myself with a party that limits my life? A lobotomy, winning the lottery or magically transforming my husband into something reactionary - like the prince of Wales? ...It was clearly more sensible for me to support instead the Women for Hillary ladies lunch."
Leno responds to imbroglio
Takes "full responsibility" in answer to reporters
By Louis Chunovic
SPECIAL TO THE EXAMINER
LOS ANGELES - 'Tonight Show' host Jay Leno took it on his ample chin repeatedly but without complaint Monday, answering show business reporters' pointed questions about the 'Tonight'/'Arsenio' booking wars and the recent summary dismissal of his longtime manager Helen Kushnick from her post as 'Tonight's' executive producer.
The comedian did not duck responsibility for the show's recent controversies, and he gave as good as he got, challenging reporters to look into the existence and influence of the "old boy network" of which Kushnick said she had run afoul.
The occasion was the Academy of Television Arts & Science's (ATAS) forum luncheon, and Leno was the guest speaker.
After a brief monologue ("It's every comedian's dream," he quipped, "to perform in front of industry people who are eating"), Leno took questions.
"Am I bitter?" he said of the controversies in general. "I'm in show business, which means you make a lot of money."
Leno added that he hates "whiny show business people that are bitter. I think the show is going great, but if for some reason I was out of here, and I lost the show, 'Hey, I'm back on the road again.' OK, it's my fault. Everything that happens on the show is my fault. ... And that's the way it's going to be from now on. I'm not blaming anyone else."
To a question about Kushnick's treatment, Leno, who reportedly stirred NBC's ire by publicly disagreeing with the decision to dismiss her, replied: "Yes, she's gotten a bad rap."
Of the 'Tonight'/'Arsenio' booking wars and the highly publicized feud with Arsenio Hall, Leno said, "I take full responsibility for all those things. ... There were probably excesses on both sides."
"Arsenio's fine," Leno said before the luncheon. "I saw Arsenio the other night. Arsenio and I speak once in a while. I called him about a month ago and we talked and he made me laugh, and I made him laugh, and I think that it reminded us, we used to be friends. As far as the situation now, I think it's been mended. I saw him the other night at (a charity event) and said, 'Look, if some things went down, it's changed. Between you and me, no more of that stuff.' And that's it. I'll probably talk to him in the next day or so."
Of the Kushnick imbroglio, Leno said at another point, "I take total responsibility for everything that happened."
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Star-Studded Sex Scandals
By BOB ROSS
Tribune Staff Writer
TAMPA - Americans love sex scandals. We enjoy seeing the rich, the famous and the powerful squirm and explain, charge and countercharge.
Let's face it: Nothing makes our own troubles seem so bearable as the knowledge that someone in the stellar stratosphere has it even worse. Besides, it gives us all something to talk about.
The latest such gratifying eye-popper comes from Manhattan and, indirectly, from 'Manhattan,' the 1979 movie in which writer-director-star Woody Allen plays a 42-year-old man who falls in love with a 17-year-old schoolgirl.
That poignant fiction turned to tawdry tabloid fare with last week's revelations and accusations about Allen and his longtime companion/co-star Mia Farrow.
Allen's infatuation with Farrow's 21-year-old adopted daughter has led to a lurid chain of claims and denials. The whole story has yet to unfold, and the interim is being filled with tales that may or may not be true.
The important part is not who slept where and when, but how uncomfortably we can keep the spotlight on those involved.
And although we can always count on politicians, athletes and evangelists to contribute their share of moral outrages, we leave it to the professionals - those whose livelihoods require acting out fantasies - to distract us most often from the humdrum melodramas of our own existence.
The 'Golden Age'
There have been movie-star sex scandals almost as long as there have been movies.
In the early silent era, movie actors were more or less anonymous. The only 'scandals' that bluenoses could get huffy about involved the film plots themselves.
But by 1920, an ingenue named Mary Pickford had become a certified star, recognized by millions.
That was also the year she suffered her first scandal. Pickford apparently divorced her first husband under such unusual circumstances that the attorney general of Nevada began proceedings against her for fraud, collusion and untruthful testimony.
The divorce was upheld two years later - which was lucky for the movie star, because she and Douglas Fairbanks had gotten married right after she got her Nevada quickie. Both stars' popularity survived.
The little tramp
Less lucky - and apparently more promiscuous - was silent comedy genius Charlie Chaplin.
Chaplin raised eyebrows with his marriage to 16-year-old actor Mildred Harris in 1918 and his marriage to actor Lita Grey, also 16, in 1924. His bitter divorce from Grey three years later produced sensational headlines and accusations of sexual impropriety.
But worse was to come for Chaplin in the early 1940s, when a brief romance with an aspiring starlet, Joan Barry, resulted in both a prosecution on a federal morals charge and a paternity lawsuit.
Chaplin was acquitted in the federal trial, but a different jury ruled against him in the paternity case even though tests showed he was not the father of Barry's daughter, born in October 1943. That same year, he married playwright Eugene O'Neill's daughter Oona over O'Neill's strong objections. She was 18; he was 54.
Because of the Barry scandal, Chaplin's left-leaning political views and his decision not to become a U.S. citizen, the federal government in 1952 revoked his entry permit while he was abroad, saying he would have to submit to an inquiry on his fitness to be in the country.
He chose exile in Switzerland instead, and made only two films after that before his death in 1977.
Fatty's follies
Screen buffoon Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle - the 266-pound 'Prince of Whales' and $5,000-a-week Paramount comedy star - had one narrow escape in 1917.
On March 6, at a Boston roadhouse, someone peeped over a transom, saw Arbuckle and a dozen hired 'party girls' stripping, and called police. Kenneth Anger's 'Hollywood Babylon,' a reference for scandal-lovers, says the magnates on the guest list paid city officials $100,000 to keep it quiet.
But Arbuckle's wild ways finally crashed his career. To celebrate his new $3 million Paramount contract, Arbuckle threw a party in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend, 1921.
On Monday afternoon, Arbuckle withdrew to a bedroom with a dark-haired starlet named Virginia Rappe. Before long, screams, moans and pounding noises were heard. Arbuckle came out grinning, but Rappe had to be taken to a hospital, where she sank into a coma and died days later. She was 25.
A coroner found that Rappe died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder. After a police investigation, Arbuckle was charged with rape and murder.
The charge was reduced to man-slaughter and after two hung-jury mistrials, Arbuckle was acquitted in April 1922.
But his career was over. His contract was canceled, his unreleased films were scrapped and he never acted on screen again. He died, broke and alcoholic, in 1933. He was 46.
Murder and madness
The '20s really roared in Hollywood. High-ranking studio executive William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his bungalow on Feb. 1, 1922.
Before police were summoned, silent star Mabel Normand searched the place for letters she had written to him. She didn't find them, but the cops did. They also found love notes from a young Paramount star named Mary Miles Minter, age 22. Taylor was 50.
Later it came out that he had been carrying on simultaneous affairs with Normand, Minter and Charlotte Shelby - Mary Minter's mother. The murder remains officially unsolved.
Seventy years later, another mother-daughter mix-up hits the headlines, and we gasp as if it were a scandalous first.
Other movie scandals of the '20s included the hush-hush liaison between multimillionaire William Randolph Hearst and would-be star Marion Davies. That one stayed out of the papers because Hearst owned so many of them.
Now, our most familiar version of that romance is the heavily fictionalized one in Orson Welles' classic, 'Citizen Kane.'
Handsome leading man Rudolph Valentino, who died tragically young in 1926, was married twice in his 31-year life - both times to lesbians. And he managed to marry the second one before his first divorce was final, leading to an arrest for bigamy.
But his popularity remained undiminished by his death, which was officially listed as caused by peritonitis following an appendix operation. His funeral was a near riot, and at least three suicides by distraught fans were reported. Two of them were women.
In like Flynn
In 1942, swashbuckling movie star Errol Flynn was brought up on charges of statutory rape in an incident involving two underage teenage girls. His acquittal was followed shortly thereafter by the release of 'Gentleman Jim,' a hit with the critics and the crowds. His career continued undiminished.
In 1948, Carole Landis killed herself after the breakup of an affair with Rex Harrison. As a result, 20th Century Fox delayed release of Preston Sturges' comedy 'Unfaithfully Yours' for several months. The film is about an orchestra conductor, played by Harrison, who suspects his wife of adultery.
Ingrid Bergman, the gorgeous star of 'Casablanca' and 'The Bells of St. Mary's,' ran afoul of moralists in 1950 when she bore a son to Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini while she was still married to her first husband. Her popularity plummeted, and she didn't return to Hollywood until 1956, when she won an Oscar for 'Anastasia.'
In 1977, director Roman Polanski fled the United States after he was charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in a hot tub at Jack Nicholson's home.
Prior to his arraignment, Polanski was about to start work on 'The First Deadly Sin,' a film for Columbia Pictures. After the hearing, he had a change of heart and went to work on a film shooting in Tahiti and never returned to face trial.
Polanski now lives in Paris, where he continues making movies.
Playboy centerfold
Director Peter Bogdanovich's 'They All Laughed' also had a dark aura about it: One of the principals in the comedy, made in 1980 but not released until late the next year, was Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten - a 20-year-old former Dairy Queen employee from Vancouver with whom Bogdanovich had a nine-month affair.
The aspiring star was sodomized and murdered by her estranged husband (who then killed himself) shortly after she finished work on 'Laughed.'
Bogdanovich, more than 20 years her senior, was hopelessly in love with Stratten and wrote a highly personal account of the tragic affair, 'The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten 1960-1980.'
In 1989, Bogdanovich, then 49, married Stratten's younger sister, Louise Hoogstratten, who was 20.
Will the Allen-Farrow scandal hurt their respective (and now, presumably, quite separate) careers?
We should get a clue soon. Allen's latest movie, portentously titled 'Husbands and Wives,' is scheduled to open in eight cities on Sept. 23 and in the rest of the country, including the Tampa Bay area, on Oct. 9.
The picture, described in studio publicity materials as "an insightful comedy exploring contemporary relationships," is about two couples who face change and have to re-evaluate "trust and love."
And last week, New York gossip columnist Liz Smith reported that Allen is already at work on his next project: 'Manhattan Murder Mystery,' in which he has reportedly cast Diane Keaton in the role he'd originally intended for Farrow. Keaton, of course, was his paramour before he met Mia.
Music may rock 'n' roll young voters to the polls
By STEVE KNOPPER
of Knight-Ridder Newspapers
Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton plays Fleetwood Mac songs after his speeches. George Bush invokes the "Nitty Ditty Great Bird" - most likely referring to a Colorado-based country group, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, but it's hard to say - in his stump speeches. Who's next for Bush? Garth Brooks?
Pop music has emerged as a strange political sideshow this election year. Consider these issues:
Rock 'n' roll may, in fact, get more young people to vote.
Away from the stage at the traveling Lollapalooza festival - which features seven youth-oriented rock 'n' roll bands - fans can try their skills at "Wake Up George Bush - $1 a swing" strength tests. Like last year's show, mostly liberal political groups such as Refuse and Resist and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals set up camp during the tour, which stopped in Orlando Sunday.
Then there's MTV, which sent correspondent Dave Mustaine, the slightly twisted, long-haired member of heavy-metal stalwarts Megadeth, to cover the Democratic National Convention. He stumbled through an interview with one-time presidential candidate Bob Kerrey and later asked a young conventioneer, "How does a guy with long hair and an earring through his nose get to be a delegate?" MTV's 'Choose or Lose' coverage, with its emphasis on young voters, ought to encourage the Video Generation to hit the ballots.
Some rap music has become a political issue.
Because non-rap fans are actually beginning to pay attention, some rap musicians and their feisty lyrics have become sort of a political sound bite. Ice-T's speed-metal song 'Cop Killer' (which he unveiled during Lollapalooza last year) has won scorn from police lobbying groups, Charlton Heston, Bush and Dan Quayle.
Sister Souljah, a some-time member of the rap group Public Enemy, got a verbal hand-slap from Clinton after she'd proposed a week of killing white people. Both rappers' publicity and album sales sky-rocketed.
Rock bands have been rebelling against the Democratic vice presidential candidate's wife for seven years.
When Tipper Gore, wife of Sen. Al Gore Jr., pushed for 'Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics' stickers on nasty-talking pop albums, she sparked a tizzy in the rock world. At the time, Frank Zappa called her campaign "fundamentalist frog-wash." Musicians from John Denver to Randy Newman to John Fogerty ripped Gore in print.
Though Gore has said she's currently satisfied with the industry's self-sticker methods, high-profile executives like Giant Records' Irving Azoff have expressed reservations in print. Still, Clinton probably realizes most rock fans are liberal and likely won't take this as an excuse to jump to Bush's camp. For that matter, maybe her presence will give rock 'n' roll something concrete to attack.
Women have league of their own to play bocce
By ANGELA CARELLA
of The Stamford Advocate
STAMFORD, Conn. - At the Thursday night bocce games in Scalzi Park here, only quiet men are welcome.
That's the night the women of the Stamford Bocce League take to the courts, and they do not want a bunch of men telling them how to play.
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S.F. supervisors crack down on use of city cars
Irate board reacts to reports of abuse by top-level staff
By Jane Ganahl
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors, irate over the discovery that department heads were driving "fully loaded, top of the line luxury cars at taxpayer expense," unanimously passed legislation Monday to restrict officials' future use and purchase of city-owned cars.
"Enough is enough," said Supervisor Terence Hallinan, who drafted the three-piece package of legislation. "This has been a clear violation of the law and the public trust."
Hallinan introduced the legislation following an Examiner story that revealed that some city bureaucrats were commuting in style at taxpayer expense despite a severe budget crunch that has required reduction of some vital health services. Many city officials, it was reported, take city seals off their new cars when they commute, in violation of the law.
"I had been looking at the situation for several months, but the Examiner article turned up the heat," said Hallinan.
The City maintains a fleet of more than 400 cars for department heads and managers at an annual cost of about $1.5 million, some of which Hallinan hopes to recoup by implementing his three-pronged legislation. The package calls for:
Urging Mayor Jordan to instruct city departments to reduce the use and purchase of city cars.
Ending purchases of luxury automobiles and ensuring that all cars purchased are economical and affordable, without luxury features such as leather seats and sunroofs. The ordinance also lobbies for employees to use public transportation, or use their own cars and receive mileage reimbursement.
Proposing to penalize city employees who have driven their city-owned cars to and from their residences. They would be required to pay back The City at three times the normal mileage reimbursement rate. The amount would be docked from their pay.
Among those singled out in The Examiner for their extravagant tastes were Muni General Manager Johnny Stein, who traded in his 2-year-old Ford Crown Victoria with less than 20,000 miles for a new model at a cost of $14,000 to The City.
Stein, feeling the heat, has decided to sell the new car and will get by with his old 1990 model.
Others who were noted by Hallinan were Ken Butori, a Muni official who drives his top-of-the-line $16,000 GMC Silverado home to Concord each night; Housing Authority Director David Gilmore, who got a loaded 1992 Explorer, at a cost of $16,000 to The City; and Kirk Lawson, chief assistant to PUC General Manager Tom Elzey, who got a new Ford Taurus, one of 41 such cars being delivered to the PUC and Muni.
"I mean, we depend on department heads to keep their employees honest, and then we find out they are being less than honest themselves," said Hallinan. "Something's got to be done."
Hallinan has asked for a report in 30 days from the mayor's office on how Jordan plans to deal with the problem, from the city purchaser on procurement policies for cars and from the chief administrator's office on how the fining process can be implemented.
Jordan has already sent out a memo canvassing department heads on automobile use. In it, he asks officials to list how many city-owned cars are currently in use, who is using them and for what purpose.
Korean church's sale authorized
Congregation OKs resolutions to put site on market
By Donna Birch
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Chinatown's Korean Methodist Church - the oldest in the continental United States - is one step closer to being put up for sale.
Church members approved two resolutions Sunday that would put the church's current 1123 Powell St. site up for sale and allow a committee to look into purchasing a larger site in the Sunset District.
"We hadn't put the church on the market because a resolution hadn't been passed by the congregation," said the Rev. Suk-Chong Yu, the church's minister.
Sunday's votes were the latest actions in a bitter battle between members who want to sell the Powell Street property and those who want to preserve it as a historical legacy.
Yu and the church's new building committee want to sell the Chinatown site and buy the Christian Science Church at 3030 Judah St. Yu said the congregation had out-grown the Powell Street building and needed a bigger building.
"We value the history of our church, and we want to keep it wherever we are," Yu said, "but we also want to make a new legacy for future Korean generations. That's the rationale for the relocation."
But Steve Hong, longtime member of the Korean Methodist Church and leader of the effort to preserve the church as a historical site, called the proposal to sell the building short-sighted.
"They're acting like politicians," Hong said. "They think there is no historical value in the church. They are obligated to preserve the church's history, but they haven't even tried."
Officials in the United Methodist Church California-Nevada conference voted to approve the church's sale last month. Hong blasted their decision.
"They don't know the background of our Korean history," Hong said. "They don't know the traditions; they're not qualified to judge."
The white stucco, Spanish tile-roof building on Powell Street is venerated by Koreans as the "mother church" in America and home of the Korean independence movement early in this century.
The preservationist group petitioned City Planning Sept. 11 to have the church declared a historical landmark. A hearing date before the department's Landmarks Board has not been set.
Meanwhile, Yu said that anyone wanting to buy the church should "make an offer and come to the negotiating table."
Hong said he and other activists had tried to do just that, but that Yu and the new building committee had refused to confer with the group. He said they hadn't had the property appraised yet, but were asking varying prices that ranged from $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
He said the Korean Center Inc., a multiservice agency on Post Street, wanted to buy the building and had recently held a fund-raiser, hoping to be able to offer the church's trustees $10,000 as a deposit.
Yu disputed Hong, saying he welcomed offers from groups trying to preserve the church. "Now they can come to us with a plan to buy it," Yu said. "I don't know why they haven't waited patiently."
State to hire 27 more workers' comp probers
New law makes possible more fraud investigations
By Steven A. Capps
EXAMINER SACRAMENTO BUREAU
SACRAMENTO - State insurance czar John Garamendi says he now will be able to hire 27 additional investigators to look into workers' compensation insurance fraud, a crime he believes is costing the state more than $1 billion a year.
Garamendi's announcement Monday came as the Legislature prepared to convene a special session on California's troubled workers' compensation system. California employers pay among the highest rates in the nation, yet injured California workers collect some of the lowest benefits.
Out of every dollar spent on workers' compensation insurance, doctors and lawyers get 42.3 cents, insurance companies get 28.2 cents, and injured workers get only 29.5 cents, according to the Association of California Insurance Companies.
Republican Gov. Wilson called the special session for Thursday, less than a month before the Nov. 6 election in which all 80 Assembly seats and half of the Senate's 40 seats are on the ballot. Wilson said he hoped election-year pressure would lead to enactment of his proposals.
Democratic legislative leaders have said they expect that the session will last only a day or two, and that the issue will then be assigned to further study by committees. Wilson said last week that if the legislators did not act quickly, he might summon them back into a second special session.
But Garamendi said Monday he already had some of what he needs to curb fraud in the system. Wilson signed a bill - AB3660 by Assemblyman Burt Margolin, D-Los Angeles - authorizing $7 million for investigation and prosecution of workers' compensation insurance fraud.
About half of the money will go to local district attorneys for prosecution of such cases, while the other half will be used by Garamendi's Department of Insurance for investigations.
Garamendi said the money would allow him to hire 27 new investigators - tripling the number he now has assigned to workers' compensation insurance fraud cases - and predicted it would eventually "put hundreds of scam artists behind bars and save tens of millions of dollars in premiums."
Garamendi contended that his department's anti-fraud efforts resulted in $7 in savings for every $1 spent. He said last year his department's investigators had arrested 247 suspects in conjunction with $53.4 million in fraudulent insurance claims of all types. He estimated that the department would investigate 15,000 cases of suspected workers' compensation insurance fraud alone this year.
Last week, Wilson said he hoped the pressure of the upcoming election year would force law-makers to act on his reforms. The issue of workers' compensation pits some of the state's most powerful special interests - doctors, lawyers, insurance companies and businesses - against one another.
"Do I apologize for using this election to pressure for change?" Wilson said. "Absolutely not."
Wilson's plan would require that workers prove their injuries were caused predominantly by work-place conditions before they would be entitled to workers' compensation benefits. It also would limit the number of medical evaluations workers could receive and would encourage use of health maintenance organizations to treat injured workers.
If lawmakers agree to his reform measures, Wilson said, he is willing to repeal the controversial 'minimum rate' state law that guarantees insurance companies 32.8 per-cent profit on their workers' compensation business.
While many view Wilson's proposals as similar to ones adopted by the Legislature - and vetoed by the governor - there is at least one significant difference. Wilson's proposal would not increase benefits paid to injured workers until businesses have saved at least $1 billion of the $10.5 billion in workers' compensation insurance premiums they now pay annually.
S.F. investors say they're nearing a bid for the Giants
"We will make an offer within the next few days," vows Shorenstein
By Andrew Ross
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
Local investors have apparently tentatively agreed on a bid for the San Francisco Giants, but details of the offer were not immediately made public.
"We're making progress, we're moving forward, and we will make an offer within the next few days," downtown real estate developer Walter Shorenstein said Monday after a meeting between local investors and North Carolina sports promoter George Shinn ended at 6:30 p.m. Shorenstein, who is leading the effort, declined further comment.
However, a source close to the negotiations said investors had reached an accord to present to Major League Baseball by week's end.
"It will be competitive," said the source, in reference to a purchase offer of from $105 million to $115 million by Florida investors who want to move the team to the Tampa Bay area.
Sources had predicted earlier the local bid would be from $90 million to $95 million, or possibly more if they offered Giants owner Bob Lurie a share of the franchise.
Although no firm deadline has been set, league officials have indicated they want an offer by the end of the week.
Monday's meeting was the first time in several weeks that most of the key participants had gotten together in one room to try to hash out an agreement to keep the Giants in San Francisco.
It capped a day of intense lobbying by Mayor Jordan, who has been working to keep everyone at the table since he returned late Saturday from his week-long honeymoon in Hawaii.
Larry Baer, a CBS executive who has been helping to negotiate the deal, said the participants had reached a general consensus where we should be.
"Everyone is moving towards an offer at the end of the week," Baer said. "We're moving forward with the league and its guidelines."
However, no formal meetings were planned for Tuesday, and Shinn, the expected lead investor and general partner, flew home late Monday without comment.
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Pioneer statue faces monumental decision
Official quandary over pointing it toward City Hall
By Gerald D. Adams
EXAMINER URBAN PLANNING WRITER
Most details of a controversial proposal to move the 47-foot-high Pioneer Monument from where it has rested for almost a century to another Civic Center spot were approved unanimously Monday by the Arts Commission.
The City's art mavens, however, could not decide which way the wedding cake-like pillar of bronze and cement should face - toward City Hall or Market Street. The monument has been on the corner of Hyde and Grove streets since 1894.
Commissioners hesitated to commit themselves after one of the monument's chief admirers raised objections to the Western orientation.
Noted preservationist Winchell Hayward pointed out that, historically, the spear-carrying female bronze figure representing California has gazed from the pre-1906 City Hall southward toward Market Street.
Now, plans by the Bureau of Architecture would turn it 180 degrees to face the existing City Hall, he complained.
Commissioners agreed to withhold a final decision on direction pending a study by their Civic Design Committee.
As a result of Monday's vote, the 850-ton monument is slated to be moved sometime in spring 1993, according to City Architect Russ Abel. The cost to move the monument, estimated at $750,000, would be paid by the Department of Public Works, he said.
The Pioneer Monument's final resting place would be in the middle of Fulton Street, halfway between Hyde and Larkin streets and midway between the new and old library buildings. In the meantime, Abel said, the representation of California and the pioneers who huddle at her feet will be temporarily moored at the east end of Fulton Street for about two years, pending completion of the new library building.
For the past two years, the notion of moving the Pioneer Monument at all was so controversial that it threatened to torpedo plans for the new $105 million Main Library, slated for the area on which the statue currently stands. That issue was resolved in April when the Arts Commission agreed that it should be shifted to make way for the oncoming structure.
Air disaster toll may hit 250
Crews seek bodies, stabilize building in Amsterdam cut in two by big jet
By Robert J. Wielaard
ASSOCIATED PRESS
AMSTERDAM - Search crews started a full-scale hunt for bodies Tuesday after stabilizing a 11-story apartment building that was sliced in two by an Israeli jumbo jet.
Officials feared the death toll from the Sunday evening crash of an El Al cargo plane could exceed 250, most of them residents of the low-income housing project. That would make it the worst plane crash in terms of casualties on the ground.
By Tuesday morning, only 12 bodies had been recovered from the mountain of rubble.
Workers had been digging by hand because of fears the building might collapse. Cranes were used to pull down tottering slabs of concrete and other rubble, and experts said the danger of collapse has now been reduced.
Authorities also were looking for the Boeing 747's flight data recorder (the 'black box'), which could explain why two engines fell from the plane after it took off from Schiphol Airport. It crashed as the pilot tried vainly to return for a landing.
Late Monday, Seattle-based Boeing issued a service bulletin asking all airlines to inspect fuse pins that help connect engines to the wings of 747-200s, -100s and -300s.
The pins are designed to break off and allow an engine to fall if the engine malfunctions.
Boeing cited similarities between Sunday's crash and one last December in which a China Air 747-200 freighter dropped two engines from its right wing shortly after takeoff in Taipei. The crash killed five crew.
"We have not found any evidence linking these fuse pins to either accident," said Boeing spokesman Christopher Villiers. "This is just a precaution at this point."
Search teams filled stretchers with bits of charred human remains that were barely recognizable as fingers, legs and other body parts. The stench of burnt flesh hung in the cold, damp air at the site in the suburb of Bijlmermeer.
Workers began digging deep into the wreckage to search apartments that were sealed off by falling concrete.
Mayor Ed van Thijn said the crash and the ensuing fire were so ferocious that a full identification of all victims could prove impossible.
"We may never know who they are," he said at a dawn news conference at City Hall.
Huub Windhagen, a city spokesman, said the recovery operation was now going ahead at full speed but stressed that searchers had to be wary of the building's precarious state.
Windhagen declined to predict how long the operation would take, but officials said earlier it would last several days.
The first 12 bodies recovered were those of three men, three women, one child and five whose sex could not be immediately determined.
The corpses were taken to a makeshift morgue in an airport hangar for identification by dentists and other specialists.
The task of identifying victims was expected to be difficult, because many are believed to be illegal aliens. The apartment complex is home to many immigrants from SurinameSurinam, Ghana, the Dutch Antilles, Cape Verde and Pakistan.
Officials said they wouldn't act against victims' relatives who might be illegal aliens, if they help identify the bodies.
The disaster could prove to be the worst plane crash involving casualties on the ground.
Hutton Archer, spokesman for the International Civil Aviation Organization in Montreal, said the crash of a Boeing 707 cargo plane in 1976 killed 77 people on the ground and seriously injured 78 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
On Sunday, the El Al 747-200 slammed into the angle of the V-shaped building 14 minutes after takeoff. Its pilot had reported one starboard engine on fire six minutes after takeoff and the other starboard engine ablaze six minutes later.
The engines fell into a lake as the pilot dumped fuel and tried to control the plane for an emergency landing. The pilot, the two other crew members and the plane's one passenger all died.
Investigators said it was too early to say why the two engines caught fire. "Our first impression is that it was technical malfunction," said Transportation Minister Hanja Maij-Weggen.
El Al spokesman Nachman Klieman said the plane was in excellent mechanical condition. He said the airline wouldn't comment on possible causes until the investigation was finished.
The plane was 13 1/2 years old. Officials said it underwent routine maintenance last week. Fire department crews were draining ponds and ditches near the crash site in their search for the plane's flight recorder and bodies. Windhagen said 424 police, 74 fire-fighters and three dozen identification experts were searching the apartment building.
Officials said 80 apartments were ripped away altogether and 150 others were heavily damaged. More than 150 families were left homeless.
Judge tells flight attendants to work
They had voted to honor USAir mechanics strike
By Jim Urban
ASSOCIATED PRESS
IMPERIAL, Pa. - A federal judge ordered USAir flight attendants back to work Monday night after they voted to honor a strike by ground crew workers.
Ground crews for USAir, the nation's sixth-largest airline, walked off the job Monday in a dispute over job security, canceling flights for thousands of people.
Monday night, U.S. District Judge Timothy Lewis issued a ruling ordering flight attendants back to work. The Association of Flight Attendants - which represents 9,000 USAir employees, voted to honor the strike by the International Association of Machinists.
"It should be plain that the public interest is best served by issuing the requested order, in order to avoid passenger disruption," Lewis said in his ruling.
Flight attendants will be advised to obey the order and report for work until another hearing before Lewis Thursday afternoon, said David Melancon, a union spokes-man.
The airline's pilots said they would continue to work.
The striking union represents about 8,300 employees, and many of them said the main issue was job security - not wages or benefits.
Union and airline negotiators were unable to agree on a new contract after lengthy weekend talks that lasted into Monday morning. National Mediation Board spokes-man Lew Townsend said early Monday no other talks were scheduled. He couldn't immediately be reached late Monday.
USAir is asking all employees for wage, benefit and work rule concessions, so it can cut costs by about $400 million this year. Pilots agreed to salary concessions in June.
After talks with the machinists broke off, picket lines sprouted at airports around the country, including San Francisco. The airline runs 18 USAir Shuttle flights from SFO to Los Angeles each day.
Ten flights out of SFO were canceled Monday, said USAir spokeswoman Agnes Huff. "We operated 37 out of 47 scheduled flights. We will try to maintain that number of flights, and hopefully build onto that number in the days ahead," she said.
Huff suggested that passengers call a day before their scheduled flight to check its status.
USAir said 75 percent of its 2,600 daily departures were taking off and other carriers were accepting stranded passengers.
The airline said its overseas flights - three departures daily to London, two to Frankfurt and one to Paris - were not affected, nor were the USAir Express and USAir Shuttle services.
New UC president asked to simplify executive pay
System faces crisis in public confidence over compensation to top administrators
By Katherine Seligman
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
LOS ANGELES - In his first tumultuous week on the job, University of California President Jack Peltason has been asked to solve the public relations crisis stemming from how the university pays its top administrators.
University regents at a special meeting Monday requested that Peltason devise a way of simplifying executive compensation. The new method could eliminate some or all of the generous and controversial perks given to high-ranking administrators.
Regents praised a report by former legislative analyst A. Alan Post that called for dropping all such "ill-advised" benefits, but they did not recommend that Peltason embrace all of Post's suggestions. Peltason stressed that he would not consider a plan that cut executive pay.
"The consensus today is that we need to simplify," said Peltason. "We need to not only pay adequate wages but those that people understand."
Peltason will make his recommendations to regents in November. Monday's meeting was an attempt to assuage to public anger over a host of complicated benefits given to top administrators that boosted their salaries more than 20 percent.
Post reiterated to regents a major theme of his report: that public confidence in UC has been at an all-time low since news leaked out about a retirement deal given to former President David Gardner.
Gardner, who was not at the meeting but has called Post's report a "series of assertions" not rooted in fact, is scheduled to get a one-time payment of about $900,000 plus a yearly pension of a $126,000.
Post criticized the secretive manner in which regents had given Gardner the benefits as well as the motivation for using a system of deferred compensation that awarded money at the end of a set period of service instead of in a regular paycheck.
Post said regents were unwilling to take the political heat by raising salaries outright. He urged regents to review all special forms of compensation, including deferred income, special supplemental retirement pay, special severance pay for spouses and housing allowances.
Pay raises instead of perks?
If Peltason recommends dropping some of the perks, regents will still have to face the thorny issue of raising executive pay to make up for the lost benefits. Legislators, faculty and students have expressed outrage over Gardner's and other top administrators' compensation when faculty salaries have been frozen for two years and student fees have jumped 85 percent in the past three years.
Terminating the deferred compensation plan would mean that UC's nine chancellors would make an average of 21 percent less than chancellors at a comparable group of universities researched by the California Postsecondary Commission. With perks, UC chancellors make an average of $190,000, about 5 percent less than the comparison group, whose average pay is $200,200.
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LA&S dean addresses critics, problems
By Eric Krol and Sean McClellan
Staff Reporters
Answering critics and improving undergraduate advising were among the topics brought forth Friday at an annual meeting of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
LA&S Dean James Norris gave his annual state of the college address to a nearly-packed Collins Auditorium at Cole Hall on Friday afternoon.
LA&S faculty gathered to hear Norris review the past year and highlight the upcoming one.
Norris addressed the media's summertime attacks on higher education, calling them a bundle of "errors, ignorance, and truth." Norris was referring to articles which stated that professors were unconcerned with educating undergraduates and that universities are inefficient on the whole.
"We need to be more aware in answering our critics," he said.
Norris also had praise for the appointment of J. Carroll Moody as Acting Provost. Moody replaced the North Dakota-bound Kendall Baker during the summer.
He also discussed the recommendations of last semester's Academic Resources Advisory Committee. ARAC was charged with the task of identifying 3 percent of each college's budget for reallocation; however, Norris said the committee's report is already dated. The Illinois Board of Higher Education has now shifted its policy towards productivity, quality and demand, he added.
The IBHE will be meeting to discuss these issues Sept. 3 and also have started releasing 'hit lists' of unproductive programs to state universities.
Norris expressed concern that paring down universities will become a trend. "This is not a one-time sacrifice of the virgin to the volcano," Norris said. "This will be every year."
Norris offered many methods of battling attacks on higher education and state funding cuts.
Departments should eliminate bottlenecks, he said, which are required classes offered once every few semesters. Professors should look at courses and ask themselves, "Are they designed for undergraduates or my research topic?" he added.
Norris also recommended looking at faculty work-loads and target credit-hour production, but admitted that different disciplines have different methods. "I don't have a magic formula," he said.
Norris said Associate Dean Donald Cress examined the situation and found that if every faculty member was forced to teach one more class, there would not be enough space for all of the added classes.
A question-and-answer session followed the speech, where the subjects of advising undergraduates and consolidating departments were discussed.
Norris suggested rewarding faculty for doing student advising work. This would counter the public perception that professors are consumed with research and don't care about undergraduates.
IBHE approves Lincoln Hall renovation
By Rob Heselbarth
Business Affairs Reporter
One of NIU's aging residence halls will be receiving a facelift next summer.
The Board of Higher Education has given the nod for the renovation of two Lincoln Residence Hall wings to be completed by fall 1993.
Student Housing Services Director Carl Jardine said the renovation will turn the wings into "suite-type arrangements.
"We distributed written surveys to the residents last spring to get their input regarding the renovation," he said.
Suites will consist of three rooms - a living area and two sleeping areas.
"We have not decided which two wings to do, but that is all part of the process," Jardine said. The type of furniture also has not been determined, he added.
Any vacancies in Lincoln Hall this fall will be turned into demo-rooms displaying different types of furniture under consideration, he said.
Because Lincoln Hall was built in the 1960s, Jardine said now is the appropriate time to make significant changes.
Business and Operations Vice President James Harder said the project money will come from revenue bond funds, which support the residence hall system.
The initial estimated cost for the project was $600,000 to $700,000, but plans are not far enough along to come up with any definite figures, he said.
Patricia Hewitt, associate vice president of business and operations, said the final price will be determined by room options students choose before they move in and the number of floors renovated.
However, Jardine said the project's cost will be kept at a minimum to keep the cost of residential rooms at the same level next year.
Acting chair named to HFR
By Alex Gary
Staff Reporter
NIU has a new chair of the human and family resources department.
Mary Pritchard, who has been at NIU for nine years, was named acting chair for the 1992-93 academic year.
Pritchard is succeeding Earl Goodman, who retired after 20 years at NIU. Goodman had been chair of the HFR department for the past five years.
One of Pritchard's objectives will be to improve alumni relations, she said. "My goal is to get at least one newsletter out," Pritchard said.
Pritchard has a long list of accomplishments in her years at NIU. She has been coordinator of the family and child studies program since 1990. Also, Pritchard helped develop the university's new student mentoring project. She chaired NIU's Undergraduate Coordinating Council for one year.
As acting chair, Pritchard, who is a faculty member, said her role in the university will be very different. "I will be a full-time administrator. I will not be teaching classes this year," she said.
Pritchard, an expert on family economics, has a master's degree from Iowa State and a doctorate in consumer economics from Purdue University. In addition to her work at NIU, Pritchard is a former president of the Illinois Consumer Education Association and has presented papers to the American Council on Family Relations and the National Health and Nutrition Survey.
NIU student takes over board position
By Philip Dalton
Student Association Reporter
One of NIU's very own has been chosen to replace Tim Bagby on the DeKalb County Board for the seventh district.
NIU student Eric Carter was chosen by a Republican caucus to replace Bagby, who stepped down earlier this year. Carter was chosen from a number of candidates in the district. He will be running for the position in the Nov. 3 election.
Carter is a senior pursuing a degree in political science. He is also an active member of the NIU College Republicans Club.
He said he hopes to represent student issues on the county board and also would like to see the board work more closely with the growing cities of Sycamore and DeKalb.
Carter also plans to be involved with the county budget, an issue he said he considers to be one of the major ones.
The board soon will begin a $25,000 study to research user fees. He said the study might result in the lowering of certain fees. Other issues he said he regards as important include the funding issue at the DeKalb County Nursing Home, 2331 Sycamore Road, and the treatment of the area forest preserves.
In order to keep in touch with city issues as well as student concerns, Carter invited students and all residents of the district to come to the county board meetings, which always are open to the public.
Carter said he is open for student suggestions or questions, and so is Margaret Phillips, area coordinator for Neptune and Gilbert Halls, who is also a member of the DeKalb County Board.
Presidential election inspires student activity
By Philip Dalton
Student Association Reporter
The heat of this year's presidential election is sparking activity on NIU's campus this fall.
NIU's College Republicans and Young Democrats kicked off their fall election year activities at Friday Fest in the MLK Commons.
Both groups distributed literature and answered questions pertaining to their party candidates in upcoming elections.
Kevin Hir, president of the College Republicans, said he would like to get people involved in order to help erase labels of apathy he believes are attached to younger Americans.
Young Democrats' President Bradley Strauss said he has "lots of enthusiasm about the election," and he would like to register every student on NIU's campus to vote.
Student Regent John Butler said the Student Association hopes to begin a campaign of registering student voters for local, state and national elections.
"Paralleling that will be efforts at exposing students to issues of the 1992 campaign with the help of the Young Democrats, College Republicans and other organizations interested in helping," he said.
"We hope to have forums and if possible, visiting speakers," he added.
Hir said the Republicans are enthusiastic about debating the Democrats. Strauss also expressed an interest in a public forum.
Butler encouraged any other group interested in participating to contact the SA office at 753-0482.
The Young Democrats will be holding an open meeting Wednesday at 9 p.m. Anyone interested in attending should call Strauss at 758-2712.
The College Republicans also will be holding an organizational meeting Wednesday at 9 p.m. in DuSable Hall 220. Both meetings are open to all students.
Grant to fund workshops for blind, deaf
By Heather Pingel
Staff Reporter
Recently NIU received a rather large three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Rehabilitation Services Administration.
NIU's Institute on Deafness will benefit in more ways than one from a $250,458 grant, which officials already have plans for.
Project Coordinator Greg Mosher said the money will be used to fund workshops for specialists who want to work with those blind and/or deaf. People are currently being recruited from Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Minnesota.
He said training for specialists will include a ten-week long intensive workshop for a total of 180 people. Ninety of these professionals will be working with the blind, and the other half will be working with the deaf.
The first week-long workshop will run from Sept. 29 into the first week of November. Those who attend workshops will be charged a small registration fee, which has yet to be decided.
Mosher said there is a great need for workshops for the blind and deaf in the Illinois area.
"Illinois, the only state that has conducted research units for the deaf and blind population, has identified 1,868 residents who are both blind and deaf," he said.
But NIU has been on top of such programs from way back. The Northern Institute on Deafness has a 15-year reputation of maintaining both pre- and in-service training in deafness rehabilitation and training in visual impairment.
Mosher also said that it is difficult to find workers who are able to deal with the problems of a person who has one disability, let alone handle the problems of people with two disabilities.
He said he is looking for rehabilitational professionals who have knowledge of psychosocial, medical, educational and vocational aspects of the disabilities. Also, persons who are familiar with sign language, mobility and helping devices.
"Few rehabilitation professionals possess all these skills, so qualified workers are scarce," he said.
Mosher added that the grant will also aid the salary of hiring professionals to come in and train all willing applicants.
Anyone interested in a possible position with the Institute on Deafness can contact Mosher at 753-6545.
Golden Key offers 'College Connection'
By Kevin Lyons
Staff Reporter
The NIU chapter of the Golden Key National Honor Society presented its newest program, College Connection, at a national Golden Key Honor Society convention in Scottsdale, Ariz. this summer.
In addition, for the third year in a row, the NIU chapter was one of 28 to receive the Key Chapter Award from the national society.
College Connection is a program geared at encouraging high school students to continue their education, Cory Flanagan, faculty adviser, said.
Flanagan said the program is worked in three phases and the chapter is currently in the third phase of its first year of College Connection.
The first phase involves speaking at local high schools on furthering education. Last year, Golden Key members spoke at DeKalb and Sycamore High Schools.
Flanagan said the talks can be geared to a certain student group or students in general. She said the talks do not necessarily promote four-year universities, but also junior colleges, technical schools and military opportunities.
"We want to provide as much information as possible for viable educational opportunities," she said.
"If we influence anyone to continue his education, we've met our goal," Flanagan said.
In the second phase, high school students are brought to NIU and allowed to go to classes, social events and sporting events, Flanagan said.
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Lure of circus persists
By Jan Hicks
Staff Writer
"I'm in my second childhood," said Len Zajicek, 63, formerly of Waukesha, Wis. "I ran off and joined the circus. When I found out I had cancer, I said 'Hell with it, I'm going to go out and have fun.'"
Zajicek, a retired plant manager, travels with the Culpepper and Merriweather Circus which gave two shows in Sycamore Saturday, sponsored by Sycamore's Fraternal Order of Police. Zajicek estimated that over 1,000 people attended the two performances.
Zajizek is the father of elephant trainer Jim Zajicek, who joined the circus at 16. One of Zajicek's three sons became a history teacher, one a surgeon's assistant. Jim knew early on that he was cut out for the circus. He became a high wire acrobat and fire-eater, and later the trainer of a 4,000 pound African elephant named Barb.
"I'm glad he's off the high wire," Zajicek said. "He fell and cracked his ankle and next season, he was up again - they just don't quit."
Other performers explained how they got into circus performing. "I was born into it, I had no choice. I'm a third generation circus performer," said Heidi, who's performed various acts for 31 years and now juggles flaming pins while riding horseback. "I started at three. My family were hand-balancers."
Acrobat Jens Larson, 33, says he got into the circus "by mistake."
"I was a gymnast in school and one coincidence led to another," he said. "Everybody's got a different story."
"They treat me like a king around here," Len said of the 28 circus employees who travel the midwest during summer months. Most employees are working hard after the show to tear down the big top, and load equipment into the brightly painted trucks on the lot.
Circus owner Robert 'Red' Johnson is out of his sequined emcee tuxedo and, dressed in a White Sox shirt, he's tugging at the canvas corners of the tent sides, tearing down the big top with the rest of the crew. Johnson also performs with the cast. Many employees do more than one thing - they perform, run concessions, sell tickets, put up the tent.
"We lost a fire-eater a couple weeks ago, so Red does it now," Len said of the circus owner.
Circuses were Hitler's model for efficiency in moving large numbers of people and equipment, Zajicek said.
"When he was planning how to move his army, Hitler came over to America to see how circuses moved. He wanted to know how the hell they did it," Zajicek said.
"Ho!" the crew yells, as they tug the blue and white canvas, fold it and roll it around a spool on a 'spool truck,' like filling a bobbin.
"We leave a nice clean lot. The only thing you're going to see when we're gone is the ring on the grass under the ponies," Zajicek said.
After the show Saturday, some performers went to see the Clint Eastwood movie, he said.
"Some go eat, some just take a shower and sack out," he said.
Some people in the audience were "circus fans," he said.
"Circus fans are all over. You get to know them. They come out to the lot every year," he said.
District to treat landfill leachate
By Kathy Guyer
Staff writer
The DeKalb County Landfill is expected to soon begin bringing its leachate, the naturally occurring liquids that are created when garbage decomposes, to the DeKalb Sanitary District for treatment.
Mike Zima, sanitary district manager, said the treatment of leachate at sanitary districts is allowed by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA).
The IEPA requires that leachate be removed from landfills and treated before it is returned to the environment, Zima said. The DeKalb Sanitary District returns its water to the Kishwaukee River after treatment.
Dale Hoekstra, general manager of Waste Management, Inc., the company that owns DeKalb County Landfill, said they must obtain two permits from the IEPA before they can start bringing their leachate to the sanitary district.
They have already received one of the permits from the IEPA division of land and they are waiting for the second permit from the IEPA division of water, Hoekstra said.
Treatment of leachate at sanitary districts is common, Hoekstra said. He noted that currently DeKalb County Landfill leachate is transported to Calumet City to Waste Management's own treatment facility or to Elgin's sanitary district.
Under the agreement, Waste Management will pay 2 cents per gallon for all leachate brought to the sanitary district, Zima said. No more than 20,000 gallons per day of leachate can be brought to the district, he added.
Zima said that 2 cents per gallon was cheap and other treatment facilities charge up to 10 cents per gallon. He added that people use an average of 100 gallons of water that ends up being treated at the sanitary district each day and 20,000 gallons was the equivalent of the amount of sewage water created each day by 200 people.
"It will certainly help us keep our costs down," Hoekstra added, noting the low per-gallon price and savings in transportation.
Hoekstra said the leachate is not hazardous.
Waste presents dilemma
By Kathy Guyer
Staff Writer
A 55-gallon drum filled with an unidentified substance sits on the DeKalb parkway at Greg Protano's auto parts yard on Industrial Drive.
For a week the drum has sat there, roped off by the DeKalb Fire Department, awaiting a representative from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) to show up, test the liquid inside and determine if it is a hazardous material.
DeKalb Police Lt. Richard Moudy said his department received the report from Protano on Aug. 19. Protano had arrived at the scrap yard about 7 a.m. and found the abandoned barrel on the parkway in front of his business.
DeKalb Assistant Fire Chief Reuben Nelson said the fire department went out and checked the barrel and found it contained about five or six gallons of liquid.
'Mineral spirits' was written on the barrel, Nelson said.
"We're pretty certain that it's mostly water and paint thinner," Nelson said. Firefighters attempted to ignite some of the liquid and it wouldn't catch fire, he added.
Although the liquid has not been tested, Nelson said he doesn't believe it is hazardous material. Firefighters put the barrel in a reinforced steel containment cannister and the IEPA was contacted, he said.
However, the city officials won't move the barrel because if they do it becomes their responsibility, Nelson said.
"It's an abandoned material, nobody has possession of it now," Nelson said.
If the city took possession of it and the material turns out to be hazardous, it would then be the city's responsibility to dispose of it, he said.
Nelson said the fire department has not been notified that any IEPA worker has been to the site. He added that if no one shows up in another week, he will contact the IEPA.
Knight gets no satisfaction
Fish kill results linger on
By Jan Hicks
Staff writer
Hartmann Farms will be required to pay for the loss of 15,284 fish killed by a hog manure spill from their property, but a Sycamore resident who lives near the river thinks they should do more than that.
Thousands of fish died after 30,000 gallons of manure spilled into the east branch of the Kishwaukee River on Tuesday, Aug. 11. Sycamore residents began discovering the dead fish on Friday, Aug. 14, and Peggy Knight was one of them.
Knight thinks the $3,676.80 fine, the Department of Conservation's estimated value of the fish, is not enough. She'd like someone to remove the piles of dead fish that have collected in the creek bed behind her home.
"I can't understand why the company responsible for the fish kill didn't have to clean it up," Knight said Monday.
"Right after the fish count, they should have picked them up, not just let them decay," Knight said. "I really think the EPA should have forced the hog farmer to clean up the residential areas. It's OK where it's out in the middle of a field."
Knight's trailer home sits beside the river in Evergreen Park. Behind her neatly clipped back lawn, about 70 large carp lay rotting in the shallow water. At 7:20 p.m. Monday, the stench overwhelmed the smoke from a barbecue grill nearby.
"They're half decayed and full of maggots," she said. "These things are attracting tons of flies. I can't imagine it's not some sort of health hazard."
The river behind her trailer is only 4 inches deep, she said, adding the creek is only 50 feet from her bedroom. Since her trailer doesn't have central air conditioning, she said she has had to leave the windows open.
"There's not enough water at this part of the river to wash them away," Knight said.
Knight said she called both the DeKalb County Health Department and the Environmental Protection Agency and both said they couldn't help.
"The health department told me if it bothered me, I could clean it up," Knight said, adding the EPA told her she could submit a bill for clean-up to the Hartmann Farms but that if the company didn't pay it, she might end up having to file a civil suit.
"We have never picked up fish. It's not possible for us to go out and collect 15,000 fish," said Gene Forster, of the Rockford EPA field office. "The first rain we get and the first rise in the river will take that all away."
The EPA's legal division in Springfield has not determined whether to charge penalties to Hartmanns, over and above the value of the fish and the expense of counting the fish, Forster said.
Knight said parents try to keep children away since the fish kill.
Suffers attack on job
Department action saves firefighter
By Mike Crase
Staff writer
Sycamore firefighter Ben Henderson is living proof that one of the Sycamore Fire Department's latest pieces of life-saving equipment, a heart defibrillator, works.
Henderson, 44, a 16-year veteran of the Sycamore Fire Department, is recovering from a near fatal arrhythmia of his heart that he suffered while on duty on July 18. Quick action by his fellow firefighters saved his life. Arrhythmia is when a person's heart starts beating irregularly.
"This is what the doctors call an instant death episode," Henderson said Monday. "In other words had I not been around a defibrillator, I probably would have died instantly."
"He was at the right place at the right time," said Sycamore Fire Chief Larry Haffner.
Henderson said he doesn't recall much of what happened.
"We were sitting around the kitchen table, smoking and joking and I started feeling bad and before I knew it the only thing I could do was put my head on the table," Henderson said. "I couldn't holler for help, I couldn't do anything. It started about five minutes after eight and lasted until about 10 or 15 minutes after eight. I really can't say, I was blacking out at the time. What I thought was blacking out, I was actually dying on duty."
Todd Turner, a fellow firefighter, was working the same shift Henderson was when the incident took place, about an hour after they had started their shift. He said firemen started the necessary procedures on Henderson.
Henderson said he was hooked up to a heart monitor which determined that his heart beat could be brought back to a regular beat with the defibrillator.
A defibrillator, Henderson said, uses an electrical charge to establish a normal heart beat.
Firemen defibrillated Henderson and his heart returned to a regular beat. He was taken to Kishwaukee Community Hospital, stabilized and flown by helicopter to SwedishAmerican Hospital in Rockford where he spent three days in intensive care. He was then transferred to Sinai-Samaritan hospital in Milwaukee where he remained for another five days.
Henderson said while in Milwaukee, doctors implanted a small defibrillator in his chest which would automatically apply an electrical charge if an irregular heart beat is detected.
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Owners say topless clubs facing increased scrutiny
City denies it wants to crimp growing business
By Michael Utley and Martin Zimmerman
Staff Writers of The Dallas Morning News
Bob Bishop lost his shirt in the topless club business.
The owner of Sugars Dallas on Greenville Avenue lost his operating license in January when local officials said he violated the city's 6-year-old topless bar ordinance.
"I can't tell you what this has done to me," Mr. Bishop said during a recent interview. "I put my entire savings into that place. Then all of a sudden, the city says I have to shut down, and what am I supposed to do for a living?"
Mr. Bishop is just one of several club owners who believe that the city is out to put a major dent in Dallas' booming topless club industry. City officials deny that they are, but seven club owners have lost their licenses already this year.
A rash of regulatory actions has once again focused attention on Dallas' bevy of topless clubs. The clubs have become a huge business, both in Dallas and around the country.
Based on gross liquor sales, five of the top 10 non-hotel bars in Dallas are topless clubs. Alcohol sales in all Dallas topless clubs have grown 37 percent since 1988.
During the past 12 months, the city's 20 topless clubs rang up $25.7 million in alcoholic beverage sales alone. Cabaret Royale, on Restaurant Row, grossed $3.3 million from drink sales - six times more than a nearby T.G.I. Friday's, according to state records.
On a typical Friday night, nearly 700 women are dancing topless in Dallas clubs. About 1,200 women work as topless dancers in Dallas - some earning $500 and more a night, all in tips.
The clubs' popularity doesn't stop at the city limits. Arlington officials are alarmed by the growing number of topless bars in their city and are considering tough new laws to control them. Several topless clubs are operating in Arlington, and two more are in the works.
$3 billion business
In the United States, the trade magazine Gentleman's Club estimates, there are now more than 1,300 topless clubs, where 10 million customers - almost all men - spend $3 billion a year. And the growth is at the high end of the spectrum, where upscale clubs such as Dallas' Cabaret Royale and The Men's Club are transforming the industry.
"The topless industry is an American phenomenon," said Kevin King, publisher of Gentleman's Club. And Dallas, to aficionados such as Mr. King, is the Mecca of the topless industry.
"The clubs in Dallas are leaders in casting aside the seamy image of topless clubs and dressing them up to cater to the tastes of a free-spending, white-collar clientele," Mr. King wrote in a recent issue.
Some consider that a dubious distinction at best. Upscale or down, they say, topless clubs make lousy neighbors.
"People see (topless clubs) around, and they don't want to live anywhere near them," said Coffer Realty president Gerry Coffer, who fought the license renewal for Sheer D'Lite, an East Dallas topless bar that is appealing its recent license revocation.
Also, women's advocates argue that clubs degrade women and exploit them economically.
"It's definitely exploitation. Women can't get a job that pays them a decent salary, so they work in a topless bar," said Karen Ashmore, co-founder of a local chapter of the National Organization for Women. "It's a backlash to women being more a part of mainstream society."
Says El Arnold of the Dallas Association for Decency: "(Topless clubs) take young girls and put them in very degrading situations. It's not the kind of thing you'd want your daughter to undergo."
Still, a recent city licensing hearing for the Million Dollar Saloon, another Greenville Avenue topless club, drew no protesters despite ample advance publicity. In fact, several nearby business owners attended the meeting to express support for the club.
Convention clients
Dallas' emergence as a top market for topless entertainment stems in part from its ability to attract conventions, which supply a steady stream of topless-club patrons.
"You do have a call for that type of business at conventions," said Michelle Bogard of Ticket To The City, whose convention-going clients have snapped up more than 10,000 passes to the Million Dollar Saloon in less than a year. "It's a fact of life."
One local businessman says: "When I have a client come in town from Des Moines, he wants to go to a topless club. Dallas is famous for that."
Club owners go to great pains to distinguish between the new-style topless clubs and old-line strip joints. Salah Izzedin, the main principal in Cabaret Royale, argues that such clubs have cleaned up a sleazy business and given it sophistication and cachet.
"We are very proud to have set new standards for this business across the country," said Mr. Izzedin, a former Houston-based topless-club impresario who plans to open Cabaret Royales in several U.S. cities.
On the surface, at least, it would be hard to confuse The Men's Club in North Dallas, the newest of the city's upscale topless clubs, with more traditional clubs such as Baby Dolls on Northwest Highway or Showtime on Lover's Lane.
The upscale clubs target well-heeled business executives and they charge prices to match. At Cabaret Royale, for instance, the evening cover charge is $10, parking costs $3, and beers are $4.95 apiece. At the Men's Club, the cover is $7. By contrast, Showtime charges $3.
Not surprising, net profit margins in the topless business can be 50 percent higher than the 20 to 25 percent margin regular nightclubs can achieve, said John Kirkendoll, chairman of the company that owns Gold Club topless clubs.
Competition heats up
Mr. King foresees a shakeout in the topless business as cities such as Dallas begin to crack down on the clubs. Older, under-capitalized clubs at the seedy end of the scale will be closed, he says. Upscale clubs, with millions invested and plenty in reserve to finance court battles with regulators, will flourish, he predicts.
Even the high-dollar clubs may get squeezed as competition heats up. Mr. Kirkendoll said the opening of The Men's Club in July may have signaled the saturation point for Dallas. Future clubs probably will draw from the existing customer base.
But as long as the city allows the existing clubs to stay open, money will continue to be made, says Mr. Kirkendoll, who hopes to sell stock in his Dallas-based Entertainment Corp. of America to the public later this year to raise money for expansion.
"I don't see anybody going under economically," he said, "because the demand is so high."
When Mr. Kirkendoll talks about demand, he's got men like Carl and John in mind.
The men, who didn't want to give their last names, were sitting in the Million Dollar Saloon on a recent weekday afternoon, jackets off, ties loosened - a couple of 40-something white-collar types out for a good time. To them, there's no big mystery about the allure of topless clubs.
"We come here to see all these gorgeous girls, what else?" Carl said. "The women are just beautiful, unbelievably beautiful."
Says John, "It's every guy's fantasy to have a bunch of great-looking women falling all over him, and that's what you get here."
According to industry experts, topless club patrons routinely spend as much as $100 on each visit to a topless club. About a third of that buys drinks. The rest finances the entertainment - the dancers.
"Some girls walk out with $500 for a night, some with $50," said Nikki, a fresh-faced 23-year-old from Minneapolis who dances at Cabaret Royale. "It all depends how hard they work."
The money is a powerful lure for attractive women in their late teens and early 20s, especially if the employment alternative is a low-paying service job.
Recalls Nikki: "I was working as a waitress in a topless bar, and one night a guy bought a $4.95 drink and gave me a $5 bill. At the same time, he tipped a dancer $100. Three days later, I was dancing."
Mr. Kirkendoll said some dancers make six-figure incomes. But the norm is probably less than half that, given that most dancers'dancers rarely work five days a week.
The dancers are independent contractors with no paychecks and no regular schedule. The managers trust the dancers' money-making instincts to know when the clubs are crowded and more dancers are needed.
Dancers' pay comes in cash. Patrons either tip a dancer while she is on stage, slipping a bill beneath her G-string, or they buy a dance at their tables, which costs about $20 a song.
A dancer at Showtime, who asked to remain unidentified, said she and her colleagues often prey on a customer's loneliness or sexual frustration to siphon as many dollars as possible.
"That's the bottom line," she said. "Dancers aren't here to find a boyfriend. They're here to pay the rent."
Not surprisingly, as Nikki notes, the dancers "get propositioned all the time." Often enough, in fact, that Cabaret Royale provides business cards for dancers to give to aggressive customers reading: "What you are suggesting is illegal. ... If you persist, a manager will ask you to leave immediately."
Alert for vice
Vice officers and club owners say prostitution is rare. Dancers make enough money legally, they say. And the club owners have an economic interest in keeping illegal activity, both prostitution and drug use, out of their clubs.
Most topless clubs have strict no-drugs policies. Places such as the Gold Club randomly test employees for drug use, Mr. Kirkendoll said.
But dancers and others familiar with the business say drug use remains a problem, especially among dancers at the mid- to lower-level clubs.
Earlier this year, the city suspended the operating license of Caligula XXI on Northwest Highway for 15 days after employees were arrested for allegedly selling cocaine in the club. And drug arrests played a role in the city's decision to close down Sugars altogether. However, the owner, Mr. Bishop, said the arrests didn't lead to any convictions.
Club owners said they try to keep drugs out of their clubs. But the topless club lifestyle - attractive women making a lot of money mixing with high rollers - creates an environment that can lead to drug use.
"It was a constant battle," recalls Steve Albeck, who owned several Dallas topless clubs in the 1980s. "I'd talk to the dancers about it over and over and over again, but it was hard to make it sink in."
The strain of dealing with the dancers' lifestyles eventually helped drive Mr. Albeck from the business. He sold out and with partner Mike Murphy opened Cowboys, the popular country-Western dance hall in Lakewood.
He doesn't regret the change. "Cowboys is 10 times the size of Showtime," he said, "but it's 10 times easier to run."
Legal restrictions
One reason may be Chapter 41A of the Dallas City Code.
The law was one of the first in the nation to regulate both the locations of sexually oriented businesses and the character of their owners. It bans such businesses from locating within 1,000 feet of a residential zone, school, church, park or other sexually oriented businesses. It also attempts to keep convicted sexual offenders out of the business.
The city keeps track of topless clubs by requiring them to obtain a cabaret license that is reviewed annually by the Dallas Police Department's special investigations bureau.
If a club is in violation of the ordinance - as many are - Dallas police automatically revoke the license. The club owner then must seek an exemption from the city's Permit and License Appeal Board, which can grant exemptions from some city ordinances. The board is made up of 15 citizens appointed by the City Council.
In the past year, 17 topless clubs have asked for exemptions; four have received them, seven have been denied, four are pending, and two requests were dropped.
Of the seven licenses denied this year, at least two have challenged the decision through lawsuits. Sheer D'Lite is suing the city in state district court and El Jardin Club, a Love Field-area dance hall, has filed suit in federal court.
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City attorney: No notice needed for meeting
Public or private?: At least one alderman who did not know about the meeting with the police department is "miffed."
By NEAL JUSTIN
The Register Star
BYRON - More than half of the City Council attended a Police Department meeting last week that was not announced to the public or media.
City Clerk Judy Gentry said she was not notified of the Tuesday-night meeting and a notice was not posted on the door, which is the method the community uses to inform the public.
City attorney Dennis Riley said the meeting did not have to be made public because the conversation was expected to be about interdepartmental gripes and police department policies.
"That doesn't fall under the auspice of a public meeting," said Riley, who did not attend the meeting. "My understanding beforehand was that city policy and procedure were not going to be discussed."
Beth Bennett, the government affairs manager for the Illinois Press Association, disagreed.
She said police morale and the running of a police department was city business and should be discussed in open meetings.
"If the City Council is ultimately responsible, that's public business," she said.
Byron Sgt. Jim Wilcox said the meeting included questions about raises and, in part, was intended to help train new officers.
Ald. Herb Johnson, who attended the meeting, said the group discussed the possibility of a retirement plan for police officers.
When asked if discussion about a retirement plan would constitute city business, Riley said he would not respond to a "hypothetical question."
In addition to Johnson, Ald. Mary Paquet, Ald. Sam Finnochio and Mayor Kathy Hamas attended the meeting. Hamas remains a council member because she took over as mayor in the middle of a term.
Ald. John McGhee, who did not know about the meeting, said he was told by Riley that it was a "parliamentary meeting" and did not have to be public.
McGhee said he did not know what that meant and that he was upset he could not be there.
"I was a little miffed about it," he said.
Ogle County States Attorney Dennis Schumacher said he would not address the issue unless a formal complaint was submitted to his office.
Former jailer, 37, faces charge of impersonating police officer
Mugshots found at home: The man is accused of stopping a teen-age girl's car and searching it while wearing what looked like a police uniform.
By NEAL JUSTIN
The Register Star
A Winnebago County jailer has resigned from his position after being accused in Ogle County of impersonating a police officer.
Gregory J. Stobart, 37, 1624 Prairie Ave., who was a jailer for more than three years, is scheduled to appear in Ogle County Court on Sept. 11 on the charges of unlawful restraint.
On April 13, a 17-year-old Davis Junction woman was stopped by a man wearing what appeared to be a police uniform. He searched her car and let her go, Ogle County Sheriff Mel Messer said.
When police believed Stobart to be a suspect and searched his home in early August, they discovered 11 mugshots taken at the county jail, Winnebago County Sheriff Donald J. Gasparini said.
Gasparini said they charged Stobart with official misconduct based on the mugshots found in his home and would have dismissed him if he hadn't resigned.
Stobart was expected to return to jail duty in mid-August, coming off a 90-day leave of absence he took to care for a sick uncle.
Messer and Gasparini said the suspect may have been trying to live out a fantasy of being a police officer.
"They have that uniform and they want to believe they're a cop," Gasparini said.
Victory Lane residents getting free ride, Elm Ave. residents say
Court challenge promised: Fourteen property owners are paying for last year's improvements on Elm, while Victory's nine won't be assessed.
By BRIAN LEAF
The Register Star
MACHESNEY PARK - Victory Lane's million-dollar facelift won approval from the Village Board yesterday. Now it may need approval from a judge.
Jeffrey Heid, who resigned last year as the village's public works director, said he would seek a restraining order against the project because it did not include a special assessment for owners of nine properties on Victory Lane.
"For years, people have been told the only way a street will be reconstructed is if they share the cost," Heid said. "Hopefully, they'll go back and set it up as a special assessment or special services area."
Heid said the village rebuilt Elm Avenue last year, and 14 residents are paying a portion of the project's cost. Heid said his assessment was $4,200.
The assessment was levied after a majority of Elm Avenue residents asked the village to improve the street. Mayor Frank Bauer said Victory Lane residents did not petition for improvements, and, therefore, wouldn't have to pay for the reconstruction.
Since 1983, Heid said 1,000 homes had been given special assessments for street improvements, including the one owned by retiree Betty Bauscher, 64.
Bauscher said her special assessment for Elm Avenue was $10,000 and she couldn't understand why Victory Lane residents should get a free ride.
"I really can't understand why they should get it for nothing when we didn't," Bauscher said.
An ordinance to award the project to Schlichting & Sons Excavating Co. for $1.02 million passed when Bauer broke a 3-3 tie on the Village Board. The village will borrow the money to pay for the project.
Bauer said Marquette Elementary School children were at risk because of Victory Lane's poor condition, particularly during the winter when they must walk on the street.
The village contends that traffic on Victory Lane will increase when the Harlem Road-Elmwood Road bridge opens next year and northwest Rockford residents begin using it to get to the Machesney Park Mall.
But to set up a special assessment district, five of the nine property owners would have to petition the village and agree to pay a share of the project. Bauer said that getting a majority wasn't likely.
"I know we could never get them to petition us," he said. "Are we going to wait for those people to get 51 percent, or are we going to build the road?"
Shooting suspect gets his wish: A trial
Plea bargain thrown out: The man, 20, says his public defenders pressured him into the plea involving the death of a 17-year-old boy.
By TRACY DELL'ANGELA
The Register Star
A man who said his public defenders coerced him into pleading guilty to killing another teen-ager last summer will get a new day in court.
Edmond Lilly, 20, goes on trial this week for the murder of 17-year-old Tyree Little, who was shot July 27, 1991, after a melee on Blaisdell Street.
This trial comes six months after Lilly pleaded guilty to attempted murder in a plea bargain negotiated on the opening day of his first trial.
The plea bargain angered Little's family, who said they didn't understand how Lilly could get a first-degree murder charge reduced to attempted murder.
Assistant State's Attorney Robert Miller said he agreed to the plea because the testimony about the fight was confusing and attempted murder carried a stiffer sentence than second-degree murder.
According to court documents, an argument between two teen-age girls over a boy they liked grew into a street fight that involved up to 40 youths. Lilly was standing behind a tree when he allegedly fired three shots from a rifle, hitting Little in the chest and another man, Robert Johnson, in the leg.
Two weeks after the plea, Lilly wrote a letter to Judge David Smith blaming his public defenders - Edward Light and Gary Pumilia - for pressuring him into the plea by bringing his parents in to convince him.
"They started telling me I was going to get 90 years, saying that Judge Smith might not like you so he's going to give you a stiff sentence. They were too interested in getting the case over with," Lilly wrote in the letter, asking for a new lawyer and a new chance at a trial.
"They persuaded me into taking a plea for something I didn't do," he wrote. "I was so upset. I wanted to tell you, but I didn't want you to get angry with me."
At the Feb. 27 plea hearing, Lilly never indicated that he was upset with the agreement. When the judge asked Lilly if he understood his rights and if he was satisfied with his lawyer, Lilly said "yes." Lilly also said no threats or force were used to get him to plead guilty.
Both Light and Pumilia testified later that they did not pressure Lilly or make threats about a stiff sentence.
After a hearing in June, Smith allowed Lilly to withdraw his plea and scheduled a new trial date. The case was re-assigned to Judge David Englund's courtroom, where opening arguments are expected today.
Schools talks yet to produce deal
Strikes loom: Talks continue at Harlem today and at Belvidere on Thursday.
By CATHY WARD
The Register Star
Teacher talks resume in Harlem today as leaders meet to head off a strike, while in Belvidere, teachers yesterday threatened to strike if the next round of talks don't produce a settlement.
In Belvidere, the School Board and teachers met about nine hours with a federal mediator yesterday, but failed to reach an agreement. The teachers' union also filed an intent-to-strike notice. The notice doesn't mean a strike will happen, only that it could.
State law requires that teachers wait five days after filing a notice before they strike. That means classes in Belvidere will start on schedule Thursday, but could be halted later. The next talks will begin at 4 p.m. Friday.
In a joint news release, Belvidere teachers and board members said "progress was made on several issues," but did not outline the stumbling blocks.
At Harlem, where talks resume at 9 a.m. today, teachers there could strike Thursday, the day classes are scheduled to start. Teachers there filed an intent-to-strike notice last week and said they would strike without an agreement. The teachers are scheduled to meet at 4 p.m. today to review the latest contract offer.
Harlem Superintendent Don Parker said school leaders there are working hard to reach an agreement.
"If it's up to me, there will not be a strike," Parker said yesterday. "My intention is to keep meeting Tuesday (today) until an agreement is reached."
Parker declined to release details of the dispute, but said the major holdup is money.
"Our district does not have a lot of discretionary money to negotiate with," Parker said, "and I know our board is intent on a balanced budget and keeping the financial integrity of the district in tact. The board is pretty certain the public is not apt to increase its tax rate for higher teacher salaries."
Both districts have been negotiating with federal mediators after early sessions of contract talks failed to produce deals.
Harlem, which last had a teacher strike in 1989, has about 5,000 students. Belvidere, which hasn't had a teacher strike since 1975, has about 4,850 students.
But while the threat of strikes hovers over Belvidere and Harlem, three other Rockford-area schools, DeKalb, Hononegah and Rockton, are scheduled to start on schedule, even without contract agreements.
David Martin, superintendent of the Rockton district, said teachers will be there in force on schedule.
"We have good people on both sides, still talking, and both have the best interests of the community in mind," he said. "We'll keep talking while school starts."
'KKK' spray-painted on sidewalk
The Register Star
Three letters have June Grant concerned for her safety: KKK.
Someone spray-painted the letters - which stand for the Ku Klux Klan - on the sidewalk in front of her home yesterday.
"I'm frightened. Of course I'm frightened," said Grant, who is black. "I don't know what's going to happen through the night. I don't know what's going to be on my house in the morning.
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1-million flee as Florida braces for worst hurricane
Staff writer David Barstow compiled this story with reports from staffers Bill Adair, Chris Lavin, Charlotte Sutton, David Olinger, Susan Benesch and correspondent Randy Cremer.
Hurricane Andrew bore down on Miami this morning, its 145-mph winds and 20-foot seas certain to deliver a vicious uppercut to the most densely populated region in the state.
"The hurricane of our nightmares," the Miami Herald called it in a Sunday extra edition headlined "The Big One."
Disaster planners could only hope that years of preparation would save lives and property as the awesome magnitude of Andrew became clear: Winds strong enough to lift a bus. Waves tall enough to swallow buildings. A storm surge that, coming with high tide, promised to lay waste to some of the priciest real estate on Earth. The most powerful hurricane ever to hit South Florida.
Near midnight, Metro-Dade police completed a final sweep of the city, urging residents through loudspeakers to seek out emergency shelters.
"We'll help them as long as we can, but when we have to get off the streets, they're on their own," said Fred Taylor, director of the Metro-Dade police.
All day and all night, the people of South Florida braced for the worst.
They fled in cars and planes and ships. They pounded plywood over doors and windows. They filled sandbags, and then more sandbags. Some panicked. Some prayed. A few got drunk.
Panic buying hit grocery stores and home-supply stores, money machines were emptied, and everywhere residents in their cars lined up for gas and then headed north along the few major thorough-fares out.
Virtually all employers throughout the region closed down for at least today while school officials quickly delayed the start of classes.
By mid-afternoon, Gov. Lawton Chiles declared a state of emergency, calling for a mandatory evacuation of more than 1-million people from coastal areas of Broward, Dade and the northern Florida Keys.
"This is right now the strongest storm that has hit Florida since 1935," Chiles said. "It is stronger at this stage than Hugo. The outlook for this is we can have major, major property damage in South Florida.
"Anybody that's thinking about riding this one out in an area in which they've been told to evacuate is making a tragic mistake," he said.
Officials expected 127,000 permanent residents and tourists to flee the Keys, 350,000 to evacuate Dade County and 200,000 to leave Broward County. Chiles said there was enough space in the local shelters for Southeast Florida's evacuees, though there was some misinformation about where to go. Many people went to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami only to find out it was not a shelter. And many shelters were filled by Sunday evening with people being re-routed to others.
By 12:30 a.m. today, 50,000 people were in Dade County shelters, with room for another 20,000. In all, 179 shelters in 19 counties had been activated.
Kate Hale, director of emergency management for Dade County, said early today that the massive evacuation went smoothly, although there was one glitch involving elderly and disabled residents who needed special transportation to shelters.
Plans called for the transportation to be provided by 50 school buses. But only 19 buses were available Sunday because Dade County officials couldn't find enough qualified drivers, Hale said.
More than 2,000 people who had signed up in advance were bused to shelters. But 50 to 100 elderly or disabled people who called for rides after 7 p.m. Sunday were told no buses were available. It's unclear how many of those people made it to safety.
"I'm concerned that there were people out there who needed help that we couldn't get to," Hale said.
Broward Sheriff's officials complained through most of the day that not enough people were going to the shelters. They feared that too many people in evacuation zones were trying to ride out the storm.
At the Sheraton on the beach at Fort Lauderdale, representatives from the Broward County Transit Authority pleaded with guests to get on buses and go to emergency shelters. Refusal was a second-degree misdemeanor.
"Get an inflatable raft so you'll have something to sleep on," bus driver Dennis Malone shouted to the guests. "There's no more water in the stores, so get some sodas. And get some food, but nothing with mayonnaise. Maybe get some peanuts. You'll need the protein."
Malone's supervisor, Tom Schillo, said few guests heeded the advice. "We've only moved out 50 people, and we've been here all day. We're trying to give helpful information to get people out.
"But we can't stay all night. If you're crazy enough to want to stay here, I don't see why somebody should risk his life to get you out."
In Richmond Heights, more than 1,300 people crammed into an evacuation center designed to hold 1,000. Food and medicine were scarce, though there was a sudden turn for the better when Fred Young, a local caterer, arrived at 10 p.m. with enough fried chicken, baked chicken, chicken wings, yellow rice and corn to feed 500 people. It was all he had in the freezers, he said, after a weekend of weddings. During the night, Young said, he and his staff would make 1,000 sandwiches to bring to the shelter in the morning.
It was all a bit dizzying to two German tourists who wandered in at about 11 p.m. Christa Behner and Gisela Hilgers of Cologne had not heard the hurricane would be serious, so they went off Sunday morning to Parrot Jungle, a tourist attraction near Homestead. As they left Parrot Jungle, an attendant there sent them to the emergency shelter. There, they said they wanted to go back to their hotel on Miami Beach to get their passports. They were gently told that Miami Beach had been completely off limits for hours.
The governor's executive order suspended all highway tolls south of Orange County. Even so, traffic jams stretched for miles while thousands of other fleeing residents headed for airports, even as they were being closed.
At the United Airlines ticket counter at Miami International Airport, passengers were willing to pay virtually anything to get out.
"It was just a panic situation," said United ticket agent James Pierce. "You would ask them where they wanted to go and they would say, 'Anywhere.' You could book them to Hong Kong, Germany - anywhere."
Travelers at other airlines reported waits of more than three hours just so they could be told that no seats were available. Some people rented cars and drove to Orlando or Tampa, while others used their suitcases as makeshift cots on the terminal floor.
By 11 p.m., Miami International was closed, with some 2,500 people stranded there for the night.
At Fort Lauderdale International Airport, people were clamoring to get on Continental Airlines' last flight of the day to Newark, N.J.
"We've seen hurricanes in New York, so we didn't want to see one down here," said Ross Balkin, who with his wife, Jodie, was headed home to Long Island.
The airport was shutting down about 6 p.m. Sunday, said airport spokesman Jim Reynolds. No stranded travelers would be allowed to linger.
"The highest place at the air-port is 12 feet above sea level, and we're right next to Port Everglades, which is a deep-water port," he said. "The airport is not a safe place to be in a hurricane."
Across the region, major institutions scrambled to prepare.
Military and U.S. Customs air-craft based at Homestead Air Force Base were being put in secure hangars or flown to safer bases out of the storm area.
State officials moved 1,120 prisoners out of facilities in Dade, Collier and Monroe counties to points north.
At Miami Metrozoo, keepers gathered up flamingos and put them in the public restrooms.
A Southern Bell spokesman said the phone company had 2,600 workers in South Florida and another 1,000 workers out of state standing ready to repair phone lines.
The Miami Herald delivered 50,000 free papers to the evacuation shelters Sunday night. The paper did not plan to publish a paper this morning.
"We couldn't even get our papers out there if we wanted to," said Arden Dickey, vice president for circulation.
About 250 Herald employees and family members were camped out overnight in the paper's water-front building, designed in 1963 to withstand 200-mph winds.
Florida Power & Light's two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point began going into a "hot shutdown" about 6 p.m. Sunday, said spokesman Ray Golden. A hot shutdown lowers the reactor temperature from 560 degrees to between 200 and 350 degrees. This is done to guard against the sudden loss of cooling water and the resulting risk of meltdown from overheated uranium.
The plant, designed to withstand a 22-foot storm surge, did not go to complete shutdown because that would delay restoration of power after the storm by at least 36 hours, Golden said.
The state's largest hospital, the aforementioned Jackson Memorial in Miami, canceled all non-emergency surgery Sunday.
Officials at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach were looking for "alternative facilities" for some of their 370 patients, but had no major evacuation plans.
Some local hospitals were opening empty rooms to pregnant women within three weeks of delivery. Officials warned on radio broadcasts that the drastic change in barometric pressure has been known to stimulate labor.
Meanwhile, the National Guard sent a C-130 medical aircraft to evacuate 24 patients from Fisherman's Hospital in Marathon in the middle Florida Keys.
Everywhere in South Florida on Sunday, life seemed an odd mix of fear and excitement. This was, all were constantly reminded by newscasters, "the big one" that has been talked about for decades. But for many in this transient region, it was also the first real hurricane they would face and there was curiousity mixed in with the fear.
Ramon Rosario, a cook at Wendy's and a would-be rap music star, strolled along deserted Miami Beach listening to the latest hurricane reports on a Walkman.
"It ain't going to be what everybody is expecting," he said. "I'm sticking around."
As a rapper, Rosario goes by the name Mo Chill. And that's how he feels about Andrew: "I just chill. Why worry about it?"
A few minutes earlier, the Miami Beach police had shooed him away from the water and told him to leave the area. But Rosario, a 25-year-old New Yorker who has lived in Florida only one year, planned to stay in his fifth-floor apartment a few blocks from the ocean and ride it out.
"I want to see this Andrew thing," he said.
Rosario was the exception. It appeared that most Miami Beach residents had evacuated in plenty of time. At 5 p.m., the streets were practically empty. At 7 p.m., police closed the bridges to the beach.
On Ocean Drive, facing the Atlantic Ocean, trendy night spots and restaurants were boarded up, while homeless people wandered the sidewalks panhandling the few people remaining on the deserted streets. Others pushed shopping carts containing their few belongings, or clung to plastic bags.
"I can't imagine being here when the waves start rolling in," Miami Beach firefighter Bob Sistik said as he organized a group of seniors at a beachfront evacuation point. "This whole place will be under at least 10 feet of water. Everybody on the Beach must go."
Two tourists from Holland found themselves stranded on South Beach, wondering how dangerous their situation was and what their options were.
"Where are we to go?," said Irma Kreike. "We have no place to go, do we? So we are just going to stay here."
They planned to stay in a $23-a-night first-floor room in an old Art Deco-style hotel.
"It won't come up to our door will it?" said Johan Mendes. "How high could the water get?"
Residents arriving at the luxurious Fountainbleau Hotel, expecting to spend the night in a $175-suite, were herded back onto chartered buses and taken to inland hotels.
Just down the beach, Chris Woods and two friends weren't worrying about the approaching storm.
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Volunteers Winning War to Save Prairies
By K.O. Dawes
Nature Writer
"The buckthorn stops here," is the slogan adopted by the North Branch Prairie Project to celebrate its 15th anniversary next month.
Buckthorn, an invasive, European weed that kills native plants with its shade, is one of the banes of prairie restoration, but North Branch volunteers have battled it and other take-over plants for years with matches and machetes.
Now purple blazing stars, lavender monarda and legions of goldenrods light up the nine prairie patches managed by the group along the North Branch of the Chicago River.
And in their seasons, according to their sites, pink shooting stars, vibrant orange butterfly weeds, purple prairie clover, columbines, pink-lavender Joe-Pye weeds and asters, white lady's slippers and ladies' tresses orchids, gentians, false indigos, golden hoary puccoons and purple milkweeds bloom in abundance.
"We've learned you don't need a fancy degree to play an important role in ecological restoration," said Steve Packard, a founding member of the project and director of science and stewardship for the Nature Conservancy of Illinois.
"We have carpenters, nurses, computer programmers, pharmacists, architects, lawyers and all kinds of people" volunteering, he said. Last year 1,200 individuals logged 3,700 hours working on the North Branch prairies.
"They know more stuff now than most trained biologists," he added.
It began 15 years ago when a few bicyclists using the bike paths in Morton Grove asked, "Gosh, what are those plants?" said Karen Holland, a volunteer and editor of the group's newsletter.
On the cyclists' next outing, the plants - probably something showy like blazing stars or cone flowers - had been mowed down. The cyclists contacted the Cook County Forest Preserve District with the idea of saving remnants of Illinois prairie with volunteer labor.
The idea took.
From the first project at Wayside Woods Prairie the effort has expanded to nine natural areas, the largest being the 200-acre Somes Prairie and Groves in Northbrook, the smallest, Morton Grove Prairie, a 1.2-acre virgin tract.
Within Chicago city limits are Sauganash Prairie Grove, 25 acres, and Edgebrook Flatwoods/Bunker Hill Prairie, 86 acres.
But a funny thing happened on the way to restoring the prairie - the volunteers realized that the grasslands studded with oak trees that they encountered were not prairies, but their own ecosystems - savannas.
Prairies are now defined as grass-lands with forbs (wildflowers) in full sun with no trees. Savannas are grass-lands with oak canopies of up to 50 percent and woodlands have more than 50 percent canopy cover, said Laurel Ross, Northern Illinois field representative for the Nature Conservancy.
The wild prairie seeds that the volunteers had labored to collect (51 garbage bags full last year alone) would not take when thrown in the partial shade of the savannas. But some other plants - thistles, cream gentians, yellow pimpernels, bottle-grass and mullein foxglove - popped up when the land was cleared of foreign brush.
By consulting old settlers records Packard gradually realized that the upstart plants were the natives of the "Illinois barrens," the name settlers gave to the savannas.
"I guess the most important thing we learned was what happened when you got to the edge of the trees," said Packard. "We used to burn the prairies but not the woods, because people have this Smokey Bear sense of protecting the woods from fire.
"But in the Midwest, burning was as much a part of the woods as the prairie." Thick, corky bark protected the burr oaks and other trees from the prairie fires that scoured the landscape of woody brush and fertilized it with ashes.
These fires were originally set by lightning or Indians. Now, controlled burns are the restorers' primary tool, but they have other tricks. More than 100 amateurs grow prairie plants in home gardens and donate the seeds.
People were always a part of the prairie as predators or cultivators, Packard said.
"Nature needs people to care for it. Most Indian [tribe] names mean the 'true people of this place.' The volunteer stewards are becoming the true people of the nature preserves," said Packard.
Robinson Defiant at Sentencing
By Rosalind Rossi
Federal Building Reporter
Even in defeat, he was defiant.
Chicago businessman Noah Robinson raised a clenched fist in a sign of power Friday, after he was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison and assessed a $6 million fine on racketeering charges.
U.S. District Judge Marvin E. Aspen also ordered maximum sentences for Robinson on five other counts - one of them a second life sentence.
After three prosecutions since 1989, Friday's sentence ensures that Robinson "will never get out of prison," said Assistant U.S. Attorney William Hogan Jr. The mandatory term of life without parole came on charges that Robinson used El Rukn gang members as hit men and partners in the heroin trade.
Robinson, 48 and the father of eight, was among 65 El Rukns and their associates to be indicted in 1989 and among the three most dangerous defendants, Hogan said. Robinson kept a poster of 'The Godfather' in his Chicago office and dreamed of becoming the moblike "don" of his own Rukn "army of killers," Hogan said.
"He could have been the greatest example," Hogan said of Robinson, who has a master's degree from the Wharton School. "The tragedy is that he's the worst possible."
Hogan and co-prosecutors Ross Silverman and John Hartmann said Robinson was responsible for the gang's "turning point" in 1983, when he directed it to high-volume heroin and cocaine dealers to raise bond money for jailed leader Jeff Fort. The connections catapulted Robinson into a multi-million-dollar partnership with Fort, Hogan said.
Fort's former brother-in-law, "General" Henry Harris, described at the trial how Robinson jumped up from his chair and squealed with delight when his $333,000 cut of a $1 million heroin deal was dumped on his office desk in 1985.
Robinson also encouraged the gang to "let down their braids" and venture into legitimate businesses as avenues of drug laundering, "General" Eugene Hunter testified. Hunter said Fort chose him to become the first El Rukn millionaire, and ordered him to learn the fine points of business from Robinson.
There also was a violent side to Robinson, Hogan said.
He used El Rukn hit men to kill a troublesome former employee and to try to kill a former business partner, the prosecution said.
In addition, evidence indicated, he hired a longtime friend to slit the throat of a South Carolina grand jury witness against him. The witness, a woman, was stabbed six times but not killed.
Robinson is serving a six-year prison term for skimming $650,000 from six South Side Wendy's restaurants and a consecutive 10-year sentence for his role in the plot to kill the grand jury witness.
Friday's $6 million fine, imposed in case Robinson has a secret cache of drug profits, is in addition to a $600,000 fine in the Wendy's case and a $43,000 fine imposed for violating a court order by writing 43 of his own motions in his racketeering case.
Robinson resorted to writing even Friday. Rather than addressing Aspen, he filed a 13-page typed statement, complete with legal citations, exclamation marks and numerous passages underlined for emphasis.
Previously, the Robinson likened himself in writing to South African leader Nelson Mandela and said he was the victim of a political and racist conspiracy.
"Mr. Robinson is not a victim of the political apparatus," Aspen said in ordering a sentence that will not be imposed until a post-trial motion on a companion El Rukn case is resolved. "He is a victim of himself."
Hurt Drunken Drivers Rarely Ticketed: Panel
By Gary Wisby
Staff Writer
Drunken but injured drivers rarely are ticketed for drunken driving, panelists said Saturday at a meeting of the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists.
Dr. Richard J. Fantus, director of trauma services at Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, said a study showed that only 7 percent of intoxicated drivers treated there were charged.
"We are tired of seeing these people coming in after killing other people, without being able to do anything about it," Fantus said.
Even more dramatic data were noted in preliminary results of a study being done by Northwestern University's Traffic Institute.
Researcher Roy E. Lucke said medical records of 660 injured drivers treated at two suburban trauma centers were compared with police crash reports. As in the Illinois Masonic study, nearly half were drunk but only 2 percent were ticketed for driving under the influence, he said.
The panelists spoke at a meeting in a Schaumburg hotel marking AAIM's 10th anniversary. They blamed:
Lack of cooperation by hospitals. One reason is that emergency rooms often are too crowded for police officers "to get anywhere near the patient," Fantus said. He said staffers are more concerned about treating patients than collecting evidence.
Time constraints. Police frequently don't reach a crash scene until the driver already has been taken to a hospital, Lucke said. They gather information by phone without ever seeing the offender, he said. A former volunteer paramedic, the NU researcher said he had heard many drunken drivers plead, "I'm injured. Get me to the hospital before the cops get here."
Sympathy. "Especially with single-vehicle crashes ... the officer says, 'This one has got enough troubles. I've got other things to do, and I'm going to go do them,'" Lucke said.
Fantus called for legislation requiring medical personnel to report DUI cases, just as they must notify authorities of child abuse. The law also could mandate alcohol testing of all injured drivers.
Reached after the meeting, Skokic attorney Larry A. Davis said a 1988 law already specifies that hospital blood tests, the most accurate indicator, may be used in DUI prosecutions.
And legislation effective last year says DUI testing can be required of people who are hurt in crashes.
Singles Swap Shoes, Pickup Lines At Zazz's Get-together for Charity
By Philip Franchine
Staff Writer
Jennifer Jurges knows how to pick a single man: by his shoes.
The 26-year-old Tinley Park woman Friday night threw her left sandal (from a Greenwich Village shop) into a pile of shoes on the floor of the China Club, 616 W. Fulton, drew out a shiny-black man's shoe, then held it aloft waiting for the owner to claim it.
Jurges' approach?
"It looked like a businessman's shoe - well polished, black, kind of like a wingtip" but not as busy, Jurges said.
The shoe-matching game was one of many ways in which singles could meet at the fourth annual All That Zazz Bash for singles sponsored by Sun-Times advice columnist Jeffrey Zaslow.
Jurges guessed right: The black shoe belonged to Dana Marzillo, 30, of Palatine, whom she described as "cute and well dressed" and with whom she carried on an animated conversation for some time.
With a big smile, Marzillo said, "We're eloping tonight," then decided he wanted to know more about Jurges. "Let me see your notes," he said to a reporter.
The party was a benefit for the Chicago Sun-Times Charity Trust.
"It's a congenial crowd," said North Sider Diana, 41. "There are a lot of nice people here." Earlier, she said friends "dragged" her to the party because it was "time to get out" after breaking up a relationship.
Other events included a dance contest and a competition seeking the best flirting methods.
"Faint. It's very effective," advised John Panozzo, 44, of Tinley Park, who won a compact disc for his answer.
"The men who come here are here to meet women, and they are ready for a relationship, marriage, kids," said Jodi, 36, of the North Side.
Activities continue today at Zazz's Singles Symposium, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, 151 E. Wacker, which will include talks titled "Sexual Etiquette in the '90s," "Cold Feet - Why Men Won't Commit" and "Letting Go and Moving On."
Cabbies Threaten Big Tie-up
The leader of a group of Chicago cabdrivers upset over violence against cabbies said Saturday they will shut down a major city highway or drive unless the City Council requires cab companies to put bulletproof shields in taxis.
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Upping the Pressure On Serbian Aggression
The U.N., the E.C. and the Orthodox Church condemn Belgrade's war
FINALLY, IMPELLED BY SCENES OF CIVILIAN slaughter in Sarajevo, the U.S. and its European allies went to work last week to impose economic sanctions on Serbia. The Serbs, who fill the ranks of both regular and irregular forces, are now seen as the main aggressors in the war in the ruins of Yugoslavia.
Though the Serbs make up only a third of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, they are, says U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia Warren Zimmermann, "trying to take over two-thirds of the country." In their campaign to carve out a Greater Serbia and expel Croats and Slavic Muslims, the Serbs have created hundreds of thousands of refugees; Serbs have been pushed out by Croats and Muslims in response. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said, in a report to the Security Council, it was the largest uprooting of population "in Europe since the Second World War."
In Brussels, the European Community imposed economic sanctions at midweek. The Serbian Orthodox Church said it was "openly distancing itself" from the government. Then came the revolting images of death in Sarajevo's marketplace, and the U.S., Britain and France pressed the U.N. Security Council to impose full, mandatory sanctions. "Diplomacy and persuasion have been used for some time and they now need the reinforcement of sanctions," said British Prime Minister John Major.
Russia and China, who are permanent members of the Council, and among Yugoslavia's main suppliers of oil, had been reluctant to go along with the sanctions plan. Its measures range from a complete trade embargo, including oil shipments, to cutting air links and freezing Serbian assets abroad. After quiet negotiations, the Security Council passed the resolution Saturday. Even so, no one was predicting that Serbia and its hard-nosed President Slobodan Milosevic would quickly move to end the bloodshed.
Fresh Faces,
Fresh Starts?
Austria and Italy choose leaders to restore prestige at home and abroad
STUCK IN POLITICAL QUAGMIRES, TWO EUROPEAN neighbors hope their new Presidents will not stand on ceremony but pull them out of trouble. Thomas Klestil, 59, of the conservative Austrian People's Party, upset the ruling Social Democratic Party's candidate in a runoff election last weekend. Klestil won the presidency by the largest margin in 40 years. Key to that victory was support from far-right voters whose own candidate had been eliminated. Klestil, a former envoy to Washington, played down the swing vote, mindful of the task ahead: repairing Austria's international standing after the stigma of Kurt Waldheim's presidency.
In Italy a death was needed to produce a President, nearly two months after inconclusive general eclections. The funeral for top Mafia fighter Giovanni Falcone, assassinated by a bomb blast, became a protest over the delay in forming a government when mourners chanted insults at visiting party bosses. Shaken, the bosses picked Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, 73, the Christian Democratic Speaker of the lower house of Parliament, to succeed Francesco Cossiga. Scalfaro must now tackle the same Mafia terror to which he owes his election.
The Most Amazing Show Trial Ever
In an explosive court case, Russia will put the communist Party in the dock
THE APOTHEOSIS OF TOTALITARIANISM; THE Communist Party of the Soviet Union, will be remembered by Russians for replacing czarist repression with wholesale slaughter by the Commissars: tens of millions perished in a welter of purges, deportations and terror. So it comes as a delicious irony reminiscent of the regime's infamous show trials that communist orthodoxy has itself become the target of an inquisition. To complete the party's fall, the Russian government announced it will argue before the nation's highest court that the C.P.S.U. was not actually a political entity but a criminal organization. The aim, says Sergei Shakhrai, leader of Boris Yeltsin's legal team, is to turn the hearing into "the second Nuremberg trial of this century."
While the proceedings are more morality play than criminal inquest, the evidence could prove incendiary. The government has promised to release a "special dossier" dating back to 1917 that contains some of the C.P.S.U.'s most closely guarded secrets. One tantalizing sample unveiled by Shakhrai: a 1975 KGB directive to provide arms to a Palestinian terrorist organization for "operations against American and Israeli personnel in third countries."
Whether the trial can exorcise the demons of the past and forever bar communists from power, as the government seems to hope, the hearing will be of little help in enabling Yeltsin to extract his nation from its present economic tailspin. A trip through Siberia offered a glimpse of the toll this struggle has taken on the President: barely a year into his tenure, Yeltsin announced to a group of cheering workers that he would not be seeking re-election for a second term. It was unclear whether the crowd's enthusiasm had more to do with the President's plans or with the cargo plane that accompanied him: it carried 500 million rubles for unpaid wages.
The Generals Continue To Hold On
Thailand's military loses a battle but is not ready to retreat
THE THOUSANDS OF THAIS WHO TOOK TO THE streets in the name of democracy last month had two objectives: to force the resignation of an unelected army officer as Prime Minister and, more broadly, to end the military's dominance of politics. After great bloodshed, the demonstrators won on the first score when Suchinda Kraprayoon stepped down from the premiership. The official count of those killed when troops opened fire on protesters stands at 53, but an Interior Ministry spokesman said last week that more than 500 people are still unaccounted for.
Parliament met the day after Suchinda went into hiding, and it quickly approved a constitutional amendment requiring future Prime Ministers to be elected members of the national legislature. Another provision would limit the powers of the military-controlled Senate. Final action on the constitutional reforms will be taken next week. Still, the goal of breaking the military's grip on political life is not yet within reach. The leading candidate to succeed Suchinda as Prime Minister is Somboon Rahong, a member of parliament but also a former air force officer and therefore unacceptable to the opposition. They warned that his appointment would set off more street demonstrations, and offered New Aspiration Party leader Chavalit Yongchaiyudh as an alternative. Another potential flash point is the last-minute amnesty Suchinda handed himself and his military cronies, a step many Thais believe is illegal.
Sibling Warfare Before The Rio Summit
Brazil's President is accused by his brother of involvement in corruption
ASK ANY OLDER CHILD: A YOUNGER SIBLING JUST loves to mess up a big event. As President Fernando Collor de Mello was preparing to welcome 100 heads of state to the Earth Summit in Rio, charges erupted in Brazil's press that he was involved with cocaine and corruption. The source of the mudslinging was none other than his younger brother Pedro, 39, who accused the President of using Paulo César Farias, the treasurer of his 1989 election campaign, as a front man for various illicit activities.
Farias, said Pedro, has built a multimillion-dollar empire through kickbacks for government contracts that were arranged with help from the Chief Executive. One of the President's rewards, his sibling said, was a $2.7 million apartment in Paris. Pedro Mello (he uses his father's surname, while Fernando uses that of his mother) also claimed that his older brother had 'induced' him to use cocaine back in the 1960s. The President, 42, told Brazilians on national television that the charges were false, that he had ordered a police investigation, and that he would sue his brother for libel. The Congress appointed a commission of inquiry - but only to look into charges of wrongdoing against Farias.
Even before the allegations against Collor were published, his mother Leda had dismissed Pedro, her youngest son, as head of the family business, a media group based in the northeastern state of Alagoas. She claimed that he was suffering from emotional problems. Mello took psychiatric tests to prove that he was sane. Later he admitted that he had no direct proof of his brother's corruption and backed away from his original accusations - at his mother's behest, he said. "Mama put it this way: Family is family."
Rebels on the Run
More than 50 die in a Colombian push against leftist insurgents
ARMY COMMANDER GENERAL LUIS EDUARDO ROCA had had enough. Colombia's leftist guerrillas, angry because the government had cut off peace talks in Mexico, were on a terror spree, overrunning nine villages across the country, adding 12 people to the 250 they already held hostage and dynamiting the country's most important oil pipeline four times. In response, Roca launched the most comprehensive effort yet to win a military victory in Colombia's 36-year-old war against a variety of insurgents. At week's end, more than 50 people, including 19 soldiers, had died in rural battles between 1,400 U.S.-trained government troops and fighters of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (E.L.N). By one report, FARC's longtime leader, Manuel Marulanda, 58, had fled to Peru.
The Republicans Battle over Abortion
The party platform will not find room for pro-lifers
SEPARATED BY A BROAD AVENUE AND A SCORE OF cops, two knots of demonstrators in Salt Lake City, Utah, debated the abortion issue with chants and placards. THE TIME TO CHOOSE IS BEFORE BEDTIME, advised a pro-lifer sign. PARTY PLATFORM: OUT OF BOARD-ROOMS, INTO WOMEN'S WOMBS took the originality prize among the pro-choicers. Ann Stone, a conservative who usually supports the President, elicited smiles on both sides of West Temple Street when she cracked, "George Bush knows there are pro-choice Republicans; he's married to one!"
There was no good humour indoors at the official proceedings last week, as the Republican Platform Committee staged its hearing on social questions. Since 1980 the platform has taken a hard line against abortion. Now, with the U.S. Supreme Court poised to undermine or demolish a woman's right to an abortion, many Republicans want the party to moderate its stance. Stone, a direct-mail entrepreneur who has raised millions for conservative causes, is collecting money for pro-choice candidates.
She told the platform drafters that a party opposed to government intrusion into other sectors of society has no business promoting antiabortion legislation. "Are you all Republicans?" she demanded rhetorically. "I'm not clear on that." Mary Dent Crisp, a moderate who once served as the party's co-chair, warned of wholesale defections at the polls: "A woman's fundamental right to choose is far more important than party loyalty."
While the rebellion by Stone, Crisp and others captured media attention, their opponents held the high cards. Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Republican National Coalition for Life, insisted that neither Bush as a candidate nor the party as an institution could afford to waffle "on a high moral principle." The Bush campaign's representatives at the session quietly agreed. Campaign officials, who control the platform, will permit no compromise language and will probably be able to quash efforts to debate the issue at the Houston convention. A representative of the National Abortion Rights Action League murmured, "This is an exercise in futility."
But from Bush's viewpoint, the exercise is also painful. While his stance mollifies the moral conservatives whose support he must have in the November election, it offends moderates whose votes he would love to claim too. The House of Representatives gave him another headache by voting, 260 to 148, to overturn the Administration's ban on the use of fetal tissue obtained from planned abortions for medical research. The restriction had been imposed in response to pro-lifers' contention that use of such tissue increases the number of abortions. Bush promises a veto, which will amost certinly stick. His bona fides with his party's far-right wing will be strengthened, but so will the argument that he is a prisoner of a minority faction.
Closed-Door Policy
Bush switches signal on the Haitian boat people
PRESIDENT BUSH MAY HAVE UNWITTINGLY COINED himself a new campaign slogan: "Read my lips. No new Haitians."
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Bank bailout called near certainty
Taxpayers' tab may top $100 billion
FROM EXAMINER STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
Despite record profits this year, the banking system is still in trouble and almost certainly will require a taxpayer bailout that could exceed $100 billion, according to a new study.
"America now has two banking industries. One is strong, profitable and internationally competitive. The other is dying," wrote economists Roger J. Vaughan, a Santa Fe, N.M., consultant, and Edward W. Hill, a professor at Cleveland State University.
In 'Banking on the Brink: The Troubled Future of American Finance,' the economists estimate that out of 12,000 U.S. banks with $3.4 trillion in assets, 1,500 banks with $1 trillion in assets "are in deep trouble."
Among the lenders it labeled "Crippled Giants" were Wells Fargo & Co. and Security Pacific Corp. Both, according to the study, began the year with "severe shortages of capital" and could have a difficult time meeting tougher equity standards, given the weak California real estate market. (Los Angeles-based Security Pacific was merged into BankAmerica Corp. earlier this year.)
At Wells, officials took issue with the report's findings and methods. "This is the kind of superficial analysis that people have been doing for years," said Wells' investor relations director, Leslie Altick. "They're giving a broad-brush analysis of the market that we think is wrong."
She said because the study was based on 1991 year-end figures, it was out of date and misleading. "We have been adding substantially to our capital ratios and are well-capitalized" by regulatory standards.
The authors of the "briefing book" went on to say that of the 1,500 "troubled" banks, 1,150 were "now insolvent - and would be shuttered if their books revealed the true value of their assets."
Although extremely low interest rates - probably a temporary phenomenon - have boosted industry profits this year, the underlying deterioration in banks' commercial real estate loans remains, they said.
If regulators immediately close weak banks, the cost to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. would range from $45 billion to $59 billion, they said. But if, as they expect, the closure of weak banks is delayed, the cost to the FDIC will range from $75 billion to $95 billion, according to the study.
That would swamp the banking industry's ability to repay the FDIC's federally backed borrowing and "means some form of taxpayer bailout for the bank insurance system is virtually certain," the authors said.
Vaughan and Hill's estimate of FDIC losses is the highest yet. Several private economists have put the losses in the $50 billion range. The FDIC projects costs of $39 billion to $48 billion, while the White House Office of Management and Budget predicts a $72 billion cost.
Bankers, who have been fighting higher FDIC insurance premiums, have much lower estimates. Analyst Bert Ely of Alexandria, Va., a consultant to the Association of Bank Holding Companies, projects FDIC costs at $15 billion to $20 billion.
At the crux of the disagreement is whether loans should be on the banks' books at current market value or at their original value. In California, for instance, where real estate values have tumbled, a loan originally worth $500,000 might only be worth $400,000 now.
Banks such as Wells do write down the value of loans but only when the lender doubts the borrower's ability to repay, not based on general real estate market conditions.
Bargain hunters on the prowl
Investors hungry for good stock buys
By Kathleen Sullivan
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
In the public lobby of Charles Schwab & Co.'s office on Montgomery Street, investors waited patiently in line for a chance to use a Quotron machine to check stock prices and get the latest Wall Street news. Others watched the parade of prices march across a neon green electronic ticker tape from a row of built-in seats.
Some came hunting for bargains on Monday, searching for good buys after the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 105 points in the first two hours of trading. The index of 30 key stocks - a barometer of the stock market's health - gained steadily throughout the afternoon to close at 3,179, down 21.61 points.
Tom Taggart, a spokesman for discount broker Charles Schwab, said the market rallied in the afternoon as individuals and institutions bought up undervalued stocks.
The crowd at Charles Schwab was a little larger than normal for a Monday morning, said Ray Brann, who comes to "visit his money" every day.
Brann took the stock market's current gyrations in stride. He compared the stock market to the new movie 'Mr. Saturday Night,' a portrait of the life and times of a Jewish comedian from his youth until age 72. In the stock market - as in life - things change, Brann said.
"The market can't keep going up and up," he said. "It has to have its peaks and valleys, otherwise there would just be robots here buying stocks and that would be no fun."
Brann said the current stock market presents more opportunities to make money than to lose it. But Brann said he's too old to take risks with his money, which is invested in railroad, utility and oil stocks. "At my age, I don't even buy green bananas," he said with a smile.
Another stock market aficionado in the Charles Schwab lobby said investors are concerned, but not panicking about the stock market. However, he warned that if the market takes a precipitous fall, that would be the last straw for the nation, which has been battered by layoffs, corporate cutbacks and high unemployment rates, and it would signal the end of George Bush's presidency.
"George Bush's chances of getting re-elected now are poor," he said. "If the stock market continues to fall, his chances will be zero."
Ed Cole, who is vacationing in The City and stopped by Charles Schwab's office to check out the latest stock market news, said he hopes the market will continue to fall this week, so that overpriced stocks will reach a "reasonable level."
Cole said he owns some stocks, and is waiting for the right moment to invest in more. "There will come a point when stocks become so unpopular that people don't even want to talk about them," he said. "That's when I'll start looking at stocks."
Pressure on Fed to drop rates
Market news adds to grim outlook
By Martin Crutsinger
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - A sharp drop in U.S. stock prices on Monday underscored the economy's bleak prospects and added renewed pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, analysts said.
Many economists forecast that further rate cuts could come at the end of a key meeting of Fed policy makers Tuesday.
If the Fed does move, analysts said that a variety of consumer and business interest rates, already at levels not seen in more than two decades, will fall as well.
But they were not at all certain that a new round of rate cuts would have any more impact than 24 previous reductions in curing what ails a sick economy.
Rate-cut speculation gained urgency Monday after the Dow Jones industrial average plunged by more than 100 points in early trading. It later recovered, when traders, believing it had hit bottom, began buying. Nonetheless, the index still closed down 21.61, at 3,179, the lowest finish since the first day of trading this year, Jan. 2, when it ended the day at 3,172.41.
Some analysts blamed Monday's sell-off, which followed a 54-point drop on Friday, on investor disappointment that the Fed did not immediately act to lower interest rates following release of the unemployment report Friday.
That report, the last before the November election, showed that while the overall unemployment rate dipped to 7.5 percent in September, 57,000 Americans were laid off as the job market remained extremely weak.
"The big sell-off is what the Fed gets for not easing on Friday," said Michael Evans, head of a Washington economic consulting firm. "The only thing that has been supporting stock prices all year long is that every time it looked like the economy was failing, the Fed would come along and ease again."
Other economists noted that the Wall Street tailspin followed declines Monday in stock prices in Tokyo and Europe.
Analysts cited various factors such as the continued turmoil on European currency exchanges and widespread economic weakness not only in the United States but also in Europe and Japan as major contributing factors to the market jitters.
"A worldwide recession is a distinct possibility and stock markets are selling off on that concern," said Allen Sinai, chief economist of the Boston Co.
"The U.S. economy is in deep, deep difficulty. Germany continues to run a very dangerous high-interest rate policy that could bring down all of Europe and Japan is going nowhere," Sinai said.
Economists said that while the overall U.S. economy has been growing since the spring of 1991, the recovery has been the weakest on record despite the Fed's repeated moves to push interest rates down over the last three years.
"I am not nervous about another recession. I am worried about how we are going to get out of this one," said David Wyss, an economist at DRI-McGraw Hill Inc.
Many analysts said they believe the Fed will have no choice but to lower interest rates again given the fact that high federal budget deficits have eliminated the possibility of boosting government spending or cutting taxes to stimulate a weak economy.
Some economists said they were looking for the Fed to cut its discount rate, the interest that it charges banks, from 3 percent down to 2.5 percent, which would put this bellwether rate at its lowest point in 33 years.
Analysts said that any reduction in the discount rate would be accompanied by another cut in the Fed's target for the federal funds rate, the interest that banks charge each other on overnight loans. This rate, currently at 3 percent, was last reduced by the Fed on Sept. 4. The last discount rate cut occurred on July 2.
If their expectations on Fed moves are correct, analysts said they believed that various consumer and business loan rates would promptly decline. They forecast that banks' prime lending rate, to which many business and consumer loans are tied, would drop from the current 6 percent to 5.5 percent. That would be the lowest level for the prime rate in two decades.
Analysts did not expect as dramatic a change in long-term mortgage rates, which in recent weeks have fallen to levels not seen since 1973. The national average for fixed-rate loans stood at 7.93 percent last week, according to a survey done by the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp.
Economists said that long-term interest rates, which are more tied to movements in financial markets, may not fall further given investors' concerns that a victory by Bill Clinton might spell higher budget deficits if the Democrat decides to boost federal spending to get the economy going again regardless of what it might do to the deficit.
"If Clinton gets in, he will turn to fiscal stimulus and that will mean higher deficits," Evans said. "The markets are concerned about who will buy that extra debt."
Market pessimism may jeopardize area economy
High-tech, biotech firms endangered
By Sally Lehrman
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
The stock market's gyrations could hurt the technology and biotechnology companies leading the Bay Area economy - and consumers may stash their cash under a mattress instead of spending in local stores, economists and market watchers said.
If the market pessimism continues, local technology and biotechnology companies could feel some pain, said Michael Murphy, editor of the California Technology Stock Letter in Half Moon Bay. These companies have relied on the public markets to raise money for research and development as bank loans have become more difficult to obtain. And they count on strong share prices to keep their employees feeling wealthy and motivated.
Fortunately, many biotech companies have already tapped into public offerings for financing this year and the older technology companies can support their research with sales.
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Investors May Seek Vote on Executive Pay Consultants
BY GILBERT FUCHSBERG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The controversy over executive pay is escalating again.
Some of the nation's biggest investors and shareholder groups are considering pushing a new plan: Let shareholders vote each year on a company's choice of pay consultant, much as they already do on a company's auditor.
The groups also intend to target companies that are reported to be threatening compensation consultants who discuss pay plans with government regulators and media organizations.
Supporters of these moves, including some of the nation's biggest pension plans, say they consider the steps essential to curb what they see as excesses in the compensation of many top executives.
The most striking element of their plans is the proposal for shareholder votes on compensation consultants, who have gained increasing visibility and influence in corporate boardrooms as the pay debate has developed. Proponents believe that if they can wrest control of the consultants away from management, they can better control the pay packages the consultants recommend.
The proposal faces an uphill fight. It hasn't been formalized yet and would require approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission, where it would probably face stiff opposition from companies.
But the Council of Institutional Investors in Washington, D.C., the principal trade group for pension funds, says it will discuss seeking SEC approval of the plan when it convenes next month.
"We've let management have control of the consultants for a long time, but the world needn't be that way," said Carol O'Cleireacain, who heads the council's executive committee. "The independence of the consultants must be guaranteed." Ms. O'Cleireacain is also New York City's commissioner of finance and helps direct five pension funds with some $49 billion in assets.
In interviews, several other members of the council, including those who help direct big pension funds in California and New Jersey, expressed support for the plan. They said they hoped that the SEC would approve the plan, citing the commission's recent move to allow shareholder votes on pay policies and its proposals to improve disclosures about executive pay in company proxy statements.
If approved, shareholder voting on compensation consultants would be a blow to corporate executives and directors, who have held the power to hire and fire consultants and other advisers. Shareholder groups contend that compensation consultants are so beholden to management that they can't help but endorse generous executive pay practices.
The SEC declined to comment on the matter. A spokesman for the Business Roundtable, a New York-based group of corporate executives that has opposed efforts to increase regulation of executive pay, called the plan "completely unnecessary."
The spokesman added: "By the same token, you can have shareholders review every consultant you have, from design consultants to management consultants to pollution consultants."
Thomas E. Jones, executive vice president of Citicorp, said it was "somewhat strange that of all the services rendered to a corporation, someone would focus on compensation consultants." While companies are required to undergo an annual audit, he noted, not all companies hire consultants on pay issues.
Mr. Jones said, "It strikes me as being somewhat of a sledgehammer to an issue that is already fully vented."
Several compensation consultants also reacted negatively to the idea, rejecting any comparison with auditors and suggesting that shareholders aren't qualified to judge their work.
"Auditors certify, but we don't certify anything. We provide information and advice," said Geoffrey A. Wiegman, director of compensation consulting for Buck Consultants, New York. "The concept of having shareholders approve the hiring of advisers, which is what we are, would be a mistake."
Jude Rich, chairman of consultants Sibson & Co., Princeton, N.J., termed the idea "window dressing, just like the auditor's choice is," and asked: "When's the last time anyone voted down an auditor?"
Dallas M. Kersey, a principal with consultants Towers Perrin, New York, said his firm believes that "the issue of an executive's pay and how that pay relates to performance issues is an extremely complicated one that is extremely difficult for an outsider to pass good quality judgment on."
Institutional investors are targeting corporate ties to compensation consultants partly in reaction to reports that some companies are pressuring consultants to avoid cooperating with requests for executive pay information from news organizations and regulators. These consultants said the pressure, reported this week in the New York Times, has included letters and calls from clients suggesting that the clients may pull business if the cooperation doesn't stop.
Several big shareholders, saying they find the pressure tactics offensive, have vowed to increase their vigilance on pay issues. They said they will target for scrutiny some high-paying companies that unduly pressure consultants.
"This will double and triple our efforts to see that the pay issue is pursued," said Richard Koppes, general counsel of the California Public Employees' Retirement System, which at $68 billion is the nation's largest public pension fund. After a year of working quietly in a "kinder" way to press companies for change, Calpers will return to "a more aggressive route" in pressing for corporate governance changes, including holder resolutions, Mr. Koppes said.
Ms. O'Cleireacain of New York City said that she intends to "make our position very clear to corporate executives that we won't tolerate threats to the information investors get." She also said that she plans to meet with consultants "about ways that make it easier to do their business independently." And, echoing the view of several institutional investors, Ms. O'Cleireacain said that she would press for more companies to give primary responsibility for setting executive compensation to committees of independent directors.
As institutional investors plotted their strategies, one of the more visible shareholder activist groups, United Shareholders Association, Washington, D.C., tentatively added Citicorp and General Mills Inc. to the list of companies it considers unfair to shareholders. Ralph Whitworth, president of the group, said the action stemmed from reports that the chairmen of the two companies, John S. Reed of Citicorp and H. Brewster Atwater Jr. of General Mills, had helped spearhead a campaign against a proposed accounting rule that would deduct from corporate earnings the estimated value of stock options granted to executives and other employees.
That campaign has included letters of protest by companies to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which is mulling the rule and which is the chief rule-making body for accountants.
Some companies also contacted compensation consultants about their concerns. Last month, for example, the chairman of Towers Perrin received a letter from Richard J. Mahoney, chairman of Monsanto Co., a Towers Perrin client, expressing concern about "the recent political and media attention devoted" to stock-option accounting. The letter urged the firm's "active and timely communication" with FASB to retain the current rules, which don't account for stock options. (Stock options give holders the right to buy stock in the future at a predetermined price, a potential bonanza if the stock price rises well above the issue price.) Towers Perrin is part of an FASB task force weighing the stock-option proposal.
"The main problem here is they are using shareholder money to fight against shareholder interests," Mr. Whitworth said. "That has to change." He said that his group won't make a final decision about listing the companies for several weeks, pending meetings with executives of the two companies. Mr. Atwater of General Mills has already agreed to a meeting.
Mr. Whitworth said that his group urges shareholders to vote against the director slates proposed by companies on its target list. The group also presses for change in meetings with top executives, and it has produced results: It reached settlements with more than a dozen of the 50 companies on its 1991 list. Among them: ITT Corp., which agreed to tie the pay of its executives more closely to performance, and UAL Corp., which said that it would more clearly disclose in its proxy statement certain elements of its pay plans.
Mr. Atwater, who called Mr. Whitworth to discuss the group's action, denied in an interview that General Mills "has been lobbying consultants." Further, he defended efforts to fight the new accounting rule, saying that deducting the value of options from earnings "is not an appropriate way to account for them" because that would "hit earnings twice" - once when the options are issued and again when they're exercised. As a result, he contended that the adoption of such a rule would "kill" most stock option plans. At General Mills, Mr. Atwater said, stock options have been "truly motivating" to managers and represent a key method of linking pay to corporate performance.
At the same time, Mr. Atwater said that General Mills supported the SEC's proposals to increase disclosure of executive compensation data in proxy statements. He said that the company had adopted many of the proposed changes in its latest proxy statement.
Mr. Reed couldn't be reached. But Mr. Jones of Citicorp, who has worked with Mr. Reed on behalf of the Business Roundtable in opposing the accounting rule, denied that Citicorp had ever pressured or threatened compensation consultants. He further disputed Citicorp's tentative inclusion on the United Shareholders list, saying that "how you account for employee stock options is a legitimate topic for open discussion."
Leader in Videoconferencing Faces Expanding Field
PictureTel's Stock Price Has Fallen; It Calls Problems Overblown
BY JOSEPH PEREIRA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Earlier this year, a school district in northern Alaska went shopping for a videoconferencing system to link teachers with classes in scattered communities.
But it didn't buy from market leader PictureTel Corp. Instead, it chose a system made by VideoTelecom Corp., an upstart that offered to install equipment and train staff at eight sites for $700,000 - well under PictureTel's $800,000 bid.
"It wasn't a hard decision to make," says Martin Cary, coordinator of information and technology at Northslope Borrough School District in Barrow. "We went with the checkbook."
VideoTelecom isn't the only rival that industry pioneer PictureTel in Danvers, Mass., has to worry about. "Very soon consumers will have 36 products in the videoconferencing market to choose from," says Elliot Gold, publisher of Tele-Span, a telecommunications newsletter. "By the end of the quarter, there'll be several competitors with comparable systems and lower prices." Among the rivals are corporate giants with deep pockets, such as Hitachi Ltd.'s Hitachi America unit, Northern Telecom Ltd. and American Telephone & Telegraph Co.
The increasingly crowded market has slowed the growth of high-flying PictureTel and caused its stock to plummet 79% from a peak of $53 a share earlier this year. The stock closed yesterday at $11 a share, down 25 cents, in trading on the national over-the-counter market. While analysts still expect the company's revenue to grow sharply from $78 million last year, they now estimate 1992 revenue of $130 million - down from $150 million predicted earlier. And the company, which started making money in 1991 after years of losses, says it will only break-even in the third quarter.
PictureTel insists that its problems are overblown and have been compounded by the sluggish economy. Many new products announced by rivals haven't been introduced. "There will be some confusion for quite a bit of time with new announcements," says Joan Nevin, vice president for finance. But, she adds, "Those products compared to ours is like a two-wheel bicycle versus a Mercedes."
And some agree short-term problems shouldn't overshadow the company's long-term potential. "The past has been very bright and I think the future can also be very bright, too, if PictureTel decides now what practical steps it needs to take to get to that yellow brick road," says John Rohal, an analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons.
But others are more skeptical. "PictureTel was just sailing along so smoothly their recent developments come as a shock to many of us and I think PictureTel may be headed for some tough times," said Sarah Dickinson, an analyst at Personal Technology Research.
PictureTel isn't the only company feeling the effects of new competition. Long-time rival Compression Labs Inc., No. 2 in the market, recently cited lower margins and increased competition for its first-half loss of $1.4 million despite an increase in revenue to $48 million from $30.9 million.
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Buying binge continues on Wall Street
By Tom Walker
STAFF WRITER
A buying frenzy continued in the stock market for the second straight day Wednesday, pushing one broad-based stock index to a record in the heaviest trading since mid-January.
The buying was reminiscent of the record-setting trading early in the year, when drastic interest rate cuts sent a flood of money out of low-yielding certificates of deposit and into stocks.
Low interest rates are also responsible for the latest stock buying rally, analysts say.
But this time the buying is driven by falling long-term Treasury bond yields instead of cuts in the Federal Reserve's discount rate, which triggered the earlier rally.
Investors looking for better yields - and afraid to miss a rising market - pushed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index to a record 422.23 on Wednesday, surpassing the old mark set in January.
The Dow Jones average of 30 blue chip stocks surged 45.12 points to 3,379.19, on top of Tuesday's 51.87-point gain.
The Dow's two-day increase of almost 3 percent brought the index within 34.02 points of its record, set June 1.
Analysts said the S&P 500 record was significant, because that index measures a broader array of industrial and other New York Stock Exchange issues than the Dow average.
Equally significant was the trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange, which hit levels not seen since Jan. 17.
T-bond yields down
Yields on 30-year Treasury bonds are declining for the same reason that stock prices are rising: There is great demand among investors for bonds, reflecting the bond market's conviction that inflation will not be a problem for some time.
While falling yields make stock market returns more attractive by comparison, analysts say long-term bond yields are still attractively high for investors who prefer the security of fixed-income securities, and the prospect of low inflation is good for both stocks and bonds.
Economy slows down again
2nd-quarter report sparks recession talk
By Bill Hendrick
STAFF WRITER
If you can visualize the economy as a roller coaster, then picture it now as careening downward for the third time since 1989.
And some experts fear it's derailing into a new recession.
"This recovery is so extremely weak, there's a real danger there could be another recession," Georgia Tech economist Thomas D. Boston said Thursday after the Commerce Department reported that economic growth had slowed to a crawl.
The report put the second quarter's growth rate at only 1.4 percent, less than half the first quarter's 2.9 percent rate and considerably less than the 2 percent needed to keep unemployment from rising.
The slowdown marked the third time since 1989 that the economy has gotten sicker after appearing to be on the road to better health.
Declining gross domestic product
The news was a blow to President Bush, who has presided over the most prolonged period of economic lethargy since the Great Depression.
The value of goods and services produced within U.S. borders, known as the gross domestic product, expanded 2.5 percent in 1989, his first year in office, and 0.8 percent in 1990, but declined in value by 1.2 percent last year.
The economy's growth rate picked up strongly in the first three months of 1992 from a near-recessionary 0.6 percent pace in the final quarter of 1991. Many economists attributed the growth spurt to unilateral steps announced by Mr. Bush in his State of the Union speech that pumped new money into consumers' pockets and a little life into businesses.
He ordered corporations to withhold less tax from employees' paychecks and federal department heads to speed up $10 billion in discretionary spending.
But S. Jay Levy, a respected New York economist, said the temporary magic has dissipated and the economy may be lumbering toward a new slump. Consumers who had more to spend because less tax was withheld will get no refunds, or smaller refunds, next tax season, and may even have to borrow money to pay Uncle Sam, he said.
"We are nearer recession," said Kurt Karl of the WEFA Group, a Philadelphia-based consulting firm. "There's no indication at this time we can look for strength."
Recession worse than thought
The Commerce Department also said its revised figures show the recession of 1990-91 was worse than previously thought. Economic growth actually declined for three quarters instead of just two - in the third and fourth quarters of 1990 and 1991's first quarter.
'Recession' is a technical term, and most economists say the slump that began in mid-1990 ended in the spring of 1991. But most people don't feel the recession is over because jobs are scarce, 10 million people are unemployed and buying power is inching up slower than consumer prices.
The report also said:
Real disposable income is growing at an annual rate of only 0.7 percent.
Consumer spending, the lifeblood of the economy, actually declined in the second quarter by 0.3 percent, down from a 5.1 percent gain in the first quarter.
The personal savings rate fell from over 5 percent to 4.9 percent, low compared with the historical average of 7 percent.
Consumers aren't spending on new items, but "they are saving very little" because it's taking most of what they make to pay bills, Dr. Levy said.
Given such news, it's no wonder the Conference Board's consumer confidence index suffered one of its worst monthly declines ever in July, said Albert W. Niemi Jr., dean of business at the University of Georgia.
Public perception
"The average person looks on recession as whether jobs are being created, and the situation has clearly gotten worse," he said. "People don't believe it's over."
Worse, the unemployment rate is likely to rise from 7.8 percent to 8 percent, he said.
"This expansion is so weak, it's not able to create more than enough jobs to offset the demographics of new people who want to work," Dr. Niemi said. "I don't think we're going to crash into a new recession, but it's like a plane taking off, just bouncing along the runway, and barely inching up."
Though not all the news is bad - the government said new claims for unemployment compensation fell by 21,000 to 400,000 this week - it should be enough to worry the president, Dr. Niemi said.
With economic growth this slow, there's no way the unemployment rate can fall much if at all before Election Day. And that's the one economic measure everybody understands.
Industrial recovery in metro area outpacing state, survey indicates
By Tom Walker
STAFF WRITER
Metro Atlanta's economy regained much of its industrial momentum at the beginning of the third quarter, ahead of the state, a survey of purchasing managers showed Thursday.
The index of purchasing managers in metro Atlanta moved up in July to 62.7 from 58.7 in June, according to Kennesaw State Ekonometrics of Kennesaw State College, which compiles the survey.
Statewide, the index of Georgia purchasing managers dropped to 60.1 in July from 60.8 in June.
"Both readings are well above the benchmark for recovery, suggesting continued economic strength for the state and metro Atlanta," said Kennsaw's Don Sabbarese.
The readings were also consistent with forecasts of other economists that Atlanta, which led the state into recession, is leading it out.
The monthly state and local indexes, compiled from surveys of the Purchasing Managers Association of Georgia, provide a trend line of industrial activity based on new orders, production, employment, suppliers' delivery speed and inventories.
Factory production increased at both local and state levels in July. Employment, however, increased only in metro Atlanta while remaining flat statewide.
According to Dr. Sabbarese, the failure of employment to increase was a sign that firms "continue their cautious use of temporary workers and/or longer workweeks to boost production."
Ford reports $502 million profit in 2nd quarter
Bulk is from financial, not auto, units
FROM OUR NEWS SERVICES
Detroit - Ford Motor Co. reported second-quarter earnings of $502 million Wednesday, its best in two years, but more than half came from a record performance by the automaker's financial services business.
Ford's automotive operations in the United States and Europe were profitable, contributing $213 million. But Ford Motor Credit and The Associates, a banking subsidiary, accounted for $289 million.
On a per-share basis, Ford earned 93 cents in this year's second quarter, compared with a loss of $324 million, or 68 cents a share, a year ago during the depths of an industry recession.
The No. 2 U.S. automaker's earnings were the best since the $771 million profit reported in the second quarter of 1990. Company officials were cautious about predicting continued gains, however.
"The U.S. economy, while improving, is still fragile, as are the economies in many of Ford's key overseas markets," Ford Chairman Harold Poling said.
David McCammon, vice president for finance, predicted that third-quarter results, normally the weakest of the year, would be down from the second quarter.
That caution was reflected among investors, as Ford stock fell $1.50 to $44.25 in New York Stock Exchange trading.
Lower credit losses and higher net interest margins - the difference between what was paid on deposits and the interest rate charged on loans - were credited for the financial services improvement.
Good long-term outlook
"Long term, I think Ford's in real good shape," said Chris Cedergren, an auto industry analyst with AutoPacific Group in Thousand Oaks, Calif. "The only question in the near term is what's going to happen in the current market for cars and trucks."
Although more people are buying vehicles, there is growing concern about how long that will last because of new signs that the economy is weakening.
Ford's pretax earnings were higher than analysts had expected, and even after taxes they were within the range of forecasts. The earnings came a day after Chrysler Corp. reported surprisingly strong profits for the period. General Motors Corp. will report earnings next Thursday.
For the first six months of the year, Ford earned $840.3 million, or $1.53 a share, compared with a loss of $1.2 billion, or $2.56 a share, in the first half of 1991.
SouthTrust Branches Out
Buyout pact would boost presence here
Prime Bancshares deal called beneficial
By Nancy Nethery
STAFF WRITER
SouthTrust Corp. is negotiating another deal that would extend its reach into the Atlanta banking market.
If an agreement with Decatur-based Prime Bancshares succeeds, Birmingham, Ala.-based SouthTrust would bolster its network here with $686 million in assets and 14 more branches.
The letter of intent announced Thursday is the second buyout pact between a Decatur-based thrift and an out-of-state bank this summer. In June, First Union Corp. agreed to buy DFSoutheastern Inc., parent of Decatur Federal.
Prime Bancshares operates Prime Bank.
Under the proposed deal, each share of Prime Bancshares would be exchanged for 50 cents per share plus 0.89 share of SouthTrust stock, the companies said.
Based on Thursday's closing price for SouthTrust - $24.62 1/2 in over-the-counter trading - the deal is worth a little more than $22.41 a share for Prime Bancshares stockholders. Prime Bancshares closed up $3.75 to $19 in American Stock Exchange trading.
"Stronger toehold"
The deal gives SouthTrust "a much stronger toehold in Atlanta," said John J. Mason Jr., senior vice president of Interstate/Johnson Lane.
Thomas H. Coley, chairman, president and chief executive officer of SouthTrust Bank of Georgia, said the purchase lets SouthTrust "continue our commitment to the Atlanta market."
"It's our intent to continue most of their lines of business," he said. "We do not see much overlap in the branch system."
Mr. Coley added that the acquisition would give SouthTrust about 95 branches in metro Atlanta.
Analysts said the deal would benefit both parties.
"The deal is another example of a company that stubs its toe - but has a decent franchise - selling out at what appears to be a reasonable price," Mr. Mason said, referring to changes Prime Bancshares made at the request of regulators.
Prime Bancshares was forced to restate its results this year, after regulators told the company to reduce the value of its portfolio of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. Last week, the thrift voted to discontinue its quarterly dividend.
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Let's Make a Deal
America's diplomats are learning a new credo: Sell! Sell! Sell!
For two years American International Group had played by the rules. Eager to sell travel insurance at Tokyo's teeming Narita airport, AIG had courted Japanese officials over sake and sushi, worked the maze of government agencies and filed mountains of forms. But when the company learned last March that the concession would go to a Japanese rival, it traded in that old strategy for a new one: intervention by U.S. Ambassador Michael Armacost. After Armacost and his staff made some unpublicized phone calls, including one to the prime minister's office, the Ministry of Transportation suggested that the Japanese company share one of its new booths at Narita with AIG. "They had their old-boy network. We had ours," says Evan Greenberg, who runs AIG's business in Japan.
George Kennan, meet Willy Loman. While weighty matters of war and peace, negotiation and intelligence gathering still hold top priority in U.S. embassies, the diplomatic corps has new marching orders: sell. For ambassadors and consuls from Bonn to Bombay, brokering business deals has become a basic part of the job. Says Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, "The world has changed. Today, activity to improve America's economic interests is as important as anything we do."
The French, Germans and Japanese have long been known for rolling out the big diplomatic guns to advance their commercial interests, and they are freer with financing and foreign aid when it helps to clinch a deal. But until the late 1980s the local U.S. Embassy was about the last place an American exporter would look for assistance. Consular officers were famously uninterested in dealing with visiting executives, and they were often inept: when U.S. diplomats threw a party in Sao Paulo in 1984 to promote American printing equipment, they offered their Portuguese-speaking guests a sales pitch in Spanish. Many officers were only too glad to lose responsibility for aiding business in 1982, when Congress established the U.S. & Foreign Commercial Service at the Department of Commerce. But economics is king of the new world order, so old diplomats have been forced to learn new tricks. Says Donald Gregg, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, "The fruits of the cold war lie in our ability to trade."
Eagleburger has pushed exports hard since he became deputy secretary of state in 1989. All new Foreign Service officers, chiefs of mission and ambassadors now get a class on commerce as part of their basic training. Last year, for the first time, USFCS chief Susan Schwab was invited to meetings of U.S. ambassadors to Europe and Asia. "This is a tremendous difference from 10 or 20 years ago. It's not easy for any of us to recycle ourselves for this purpose," says Thomas Simons, U.S. ambassador to Poland. Simons should know: the 30-year Foreign Service veteran spends almost a quarter of his time helping U.S. companies.
That kind of high-level involvement is what drew Terry Martin to Singapore. Martin, sales manager for Raynor Garage Doors in Dixon, Ill., attended a Chicago briefing by five U.S. ambassadors last March on how to do business in Asia. That persuaded him to visit a trade show in Singapore in May. Last week he was back in the island nation to sign up local agents. "It's not every day you can get all these ambassadors and commercial counselors in one room and just go up and talk to everybody," Martin says. "We were going to come out here anyway, but they certainly made it a heck of a lot easier."
Drumming up business, of course, is Martin's problem. But increasingly, diplomats are getting involved in specific transactions, particularly when a foreign government has a role in the buying decision. U.S. officials have successfully pressed China to allow a larger presence for U.S. carmakers like Chrysler, which assembles Jeeps in Beijing. Last week Hong Kong awarded a consortium led by Sea-Land Servicing a half share - worth $2.6 billion - in the construction and operation of a new container terminal, after Consul General Richard Williams spent months emphasizing how the American-led group could infuse competition into cargo handling. When German officials appeared to favor a French proposal to build the $700 million Friedrichstadt-Passage office and shopping complex in the former East Berlin, New York developer Tischman-Speyer asked the embassy in Bonn to write a letter on its behalf. "They were very effective," says chairman Jerry Speyer. "They knew exactly where they had to go." Tischman-Speyer won a 45 percent stake in the project, which got underway last month.
Trade diplomacy isn't new, of course; U.S. diplomats have been battering away at foreign import barriers for years. But lobbying on behalf of particular companies is a very different sort of work. Discretion is everything, and press attention is unwelcome. "The transactions generally take place quietly in a meeting, and there's no publicity, so government officials are not embarrassed," explains one official in Washington. Nonetheless, using diplomats as salespeople has its dangers. Gregg has helped persuade the South Korean government to hire U.S. architects to design a new airport terminal, but some in Seoul consider his hard sell excessive. In China, U.S. commercial interest ran headlong into other diplomatic concerns. Using contacts in the local government, the U.S. Consulate in Guangzhou helped Boeing Co. plan a pitch to China Southern Airlines last spring. Then, in September, the Bush administration angered China by agreeing to sell fighter planes to Taiwan. The Boeing deal is on hold - and French diplomats are aggressively trying to persuade China Southern to buy Airbuses instead.
Helping whom? Diplomatic salesmanship has less obvious complexities, too. The governments of rival companies can take offense; when Eagleburger recently wrote the Czech Energy Commission in support of American bidders, a German official called to complain. And then there's the question of whom to help. "The biggest problem we have is defining what is a U.S. company," one ranking official confesses. Officially, the State Department lets diplomats work on behalf of U.S.-owned companies that want to sell products with at least 51 percent U.S. content. In practice, however, there's no neat line. When Canada's Northern Telecom Ltd. bids for a sale against AT&T, the Americans can count on the local embassy's aid, but when the Canadian company's U.S. subsidiary is doing the bidding, the diplomats must remain neutral.
How real is the Foreign Service's transformation? Arthur Kobler, who recently left for the private sector after 25 years as a diplomat, says that while it pays lip service to its new commercial role, State's heart is still in traditional diplomacy. "There remains a clear bias in favor of political officers," he says. "The apparatus still is not geared to the post-cold-war reality." Eagleburger admits the difficulty of reorienting the bureaucracy, but he says that success in promoting trade is now part of every diplomat's personnel file. With exports certain to be a front-burner issue in Washington for years to come, the most vital of the diplomatic arts may soon be the art of the deal.
Marriages Made in Air
Are foreign airline deals good for America?
Rich Thomas
Last week Continental Airlines announced that it would tie the knot. There will be no dowry; Continental is already under bankruptcy protection. But the new suitor, Air Canada, has deep pockets, bringing $450 million to the marriage. Continental CEO Robert Ferguson III said he's now looking for partners across the Atlantic and Pacific to "establish a global presence."
On the surface, the transaction is just another example of a troubled airline looking for a savior. But the deal comes at a time when everyone from politicians to air-freight-carriers is questioning whether mergers between U.S. and foreign airlines are good for America. In the short run, such deals seem to benefit consumers. If, for example USAir and British Airways are permitted to merge their routes as planned, an American traveler can soon check her bags in Champaign, Ill., and fly a single air system through to, say, Rome, or even Lilongwe in Malawi, in southern Africa. Some 12,000 such city-to-city combinations would be made possible by the merger. Wonderful, right? Maybe so, concedes American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall. "But in the long run," Crandall says, "the BA-USAir merger will shaft all Americans ... We'll be forced to cut back and lay off employees. American choices and incomes will shrink." That's the sort of thing you'd expect a rival to say. But Ross Perot and Bill Clinton also attacked the British Airways-USAir hookup during their campaigns. The stand proved a touchy one: some of Clinton's own people even contend that the 7,000 USAir jobs in North Carolina were a big factor in Clinton's loss there - the only state he targeted but did not win.
It's no mystery why America's ailing airlines are looking for affluent partners abroad: the industry has been in a deep recession for five years. Passenger boardings and mileage earnings per passenger, adjusted for inflation, have been almost flat since 1987. The foreign connections and capital could save several U.S. lines. Some might fail anyway. But as Alfred Kahn, who launched airline deregulation as Civil Aeronautics Board chairman under Jimmy Carter, puts it: "If we had only three or four domestic airlines, I'd be nervous. But I'd feel perfectly safe being supplied by seven or eight world-class companies. These foreign deals are great insurance for America's fliers."
While the deals could bail out struggling airlines, they certainly won't help the stronger American carriers like American and Delta. For one thing, U.S. airlines do not have equivalent access to foreign markets. Most other nations bar foreign airlines from domestic operations. Further, Britain has no airline that an American line could buy and operate in local competition with British Airways. No other large foreign country has a buyable big airline either; almost all are government owned. (U.S.-Canadian air relations have been more open, and American Airlines is seeking a stake in Canada's second largest carrier.) In addition: Britain and most other big countries severely limit "beyond rights," which would let carriers like United compete internationally against, say, BA by picking up passengers in London and flying them to cities in other countries. Crandall argues that letting BA buy into the largest air market on earth without giving U.S. carriers the same opportunity abroad is "the equivalent of unilateral economic disarmament." And foreign airlines are leery of such concessions: a report in The Journal of Commerce last week said British Airways would rather scrap the USAir deal than have the British government grant U.S. carriers broader access to London's Heathrow airport.
Little wonder, then, that Perot and Clinton opposed the BA-USAir deal. Aware of their objections, Transportation Secretary Andrew Card is negotiating furiously with the British this week to open the British market. Delta, United and Federal Express are poised to join American in suing to block the BA-USAir merger unless more rights for them are forthcoming. The deal could also encounter President Clinton's opposition after Jan. 20. But despite Washington's wishes, the future holds fewer - and fewer U.S.-owned - airlines. And that's a trend no politician can legislate away.
Billows of Smoke
East Europe is desperate for cigarettes, and the West is happy to oblige
A muddy field on the outskirts of Warsaw is not the obvious place to search for a camel. But wait a while. By late 1993 the small town of Piaseczno will possess one of the world's most modern cigarette factories: a 9,500-square-meter plant owned by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco International, part of America's second largest cigarette empire. Once it is running at full capacity, the Piaseczno factory will annually churn out 8 billion Camels, Monte Carlos and other smokes in the Reynolds pack for Poland and its neighbors. A gamble on the future? Not to company executives. "The market over here is so absorbent that even five factories will not be enough," says Piotr Piwkowski, RJR's Polish general manager.
Anyone who has ever ducked into a smoke-clogged cafe in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest or Moscow already knows that Eastern Europeans are among the world's most enthusiastic puffers.
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Temptations member Eddie Kendricks dies
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. - Eddie Kendricks, a founding member of the Temptations who was the lead singer for such hits as 'The Way You Do the Things You Do,' died Monday night of lung cancer. He was 52.
Mr. Kendricks died at Baptist Medical Center-Princeton, said spokeswoman Betty Ingram. He had been hospitalized since Sept. 25.
Singer Stevie Wonder had visited Mr. Kendricks on Saturday.
When the Temptations were formed in Detroit in 1961, the group consisted of Kendricks, Otis Williams, Melvin Franklin, Paul Williams and Elbridge Bryant. David Ruffin replaced Bryant in 1964 and the group signed with the Motown label.
The group had its first No. 1 hit with 'My Girl' in 1965, followed by 'It's Growing' and 'Since I Lost My Baby' that same year.
"Eddie just had that great, great tenor voice that just was so captivating," Esther Edwards, the Temptations' first manager and the sister of Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr., said recently. "He had such admirers, men and women. But the ladies really loved Eddie and his style. ... He just had a sweet melodious captivating tender sound."
The Temptations went on to become Motown's most successful male group, with more than a dozen hit singles. They trailed only the Supremes for supremacy on the charts.
"While the Four Tops covered the frenetic side of the Motown sound and the Miracles monopolized its romantic side, the Temptations quite simply stood as the finest vocal group in '60s soul," Joe McEwen and Jim Miller wrote in the Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll. "They could out-dress, out-dance and out-sing any competition in sight."
Mr. Kendricks began a solo career in 1971, but rejoined the group in 1982 for a "Reunion" tour. He was reunited with the band again in 1989 as it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Mr. Kendricks and Ruffin began working together after their 1985 album, 'Live at the Apollo,' with the singing duo Hall and Oates.
Williams killed himself in 1973, two years after he was asked to leave the group because of alcoholism and related health problems. Ruffin died last year from a drug overdose.
Mr. Kendricks underwent surgery in Atlanta last year to have a lung removed. He later said the disease was caused by 30 years of smoking and he urged children not to smoke.
A strange vision all his own
N.Y.'s Met adds new twist on surrealist Magritte
By David Bonetti
EXAMINER ART CRITIC
NEW YORK - René Magritte (1898-1967) remains, a generation after his death, one of the most lively of the modern masters who revolutionized art and the way we look at things.
His representations are part of the modern lexicon of visual images. Giant apples and roses expanding to fill entire rooms. Tubas in flame. Pipes that are not pipes. Kissing lovers with sheets wrapped around their heads. Night-darkened streets under blue skies. Storms of raining men wearing bowler hats. Gigantic boulders floating weightless in the sky. Thanks to advertising, people who never heard of him recognize his disquieting work with pleasure.
The traveling retrospective, tersely titled 'Magritte,' shows us the complete artist in 150 works in various mediums. (Organized by the Hayward Gallery in London, it is at the Metropolitan Museum through Nov. 22). Included are his seldom-seen and highly twisted essays in impressionism and the crude jokester works he called his vache (cow) paintings done during the late '40s in occupied Brussels.
Every responsible retrospective of a complex artist tries to re-present him or her in a manner that makes sense to a contemporary audience. The last great Magritte retrospective in the United States took place in 1965-66. (It was the first major art exhibition I saw, and I remember standing in front of the famous painting of a pipe labeled "This Is Not a Pipe" fascinated, but uneasily unsure of what it meant.)
That exhibition aimed to show Magritte as a surrealist. That might not seem so ambitious - after all, if Magritte wasn't a surrealist, who was? But even as late as 1965 people had a hard time seeing how he fit - he had had his differences with André Breton, surrealism's dictator. Most people saw him at best - or at worst - as a surrealist fellow traveler, a Belgian provincial slightly out of step with Parisian cosmopolites.
The 1965 retrospective showed that being slightly out of step was his virtue. Magritte had his own visions, and he remained true to them. The dreams he depicted so laboriously in paint were curiously apposite metaphors for 20th century experience. As the shock of several of the Parisians faded, Magritte at his best continued to tweak expectations.
The current retrospective, curated by David Sylvester and Sarah Whitfield, accepts Magritte's surrealism, and includes plenty of paintings and objects where the surrealist goal to make strange the everyday is clearly evident.
What could be more surreal than 'Time Transfixed' (1938), a painting with an image of a locomotive steaming out of a fireplace? A thoroughly normal living room is utterly changed by the invasion of a train, miniature in scale, but real. What makes the incongruous juxtaposition surreally logical is that the opening of the fireplace resembles the mouth of a railroad tunnel.
All the elements of the pared-down picture contribute to its theme. On the mantel is a clock with its time stopped at 12:43 - has the train arrived on time? On either side of it are two candlesticks empty of candles, traditional symbol in still lifes of the irredeemable passage of time. Magritte is saying he doesn't need to fall back on such hackneyed symbols to make his point. Behind the clock is a mirror that reflects the clock's back and one of the candlesticks, but which otherwise reflects only the gray nothingness of the room, the existential void that is always the real subject of Magritte's paintings.
The current retrospective aims to make Magritte relevant by showing him to be an early practitioner of conceptual art. Gathered together are paintings that reveal his interest in linguistics and appropriation of previously existing imagery, two popular contemporary practices linked to conceptual art.
Magritte's conceptualism is most evident in a group of paintings from the late '20s that incorporate images and words.
The most famous of these is 'The Treason of Images' (1929), the painting of the pipe with the inscription "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" ("This Is Not a Pipe"). Of course it is not a pipe - it is a representation of a pipe, a painting realized on a flat canvas surface with oil paint. Magritte is able to fool the eye. This representation looks like a pipe - although it's so big, only a giant could smoke it.
The other word paintings are as interesting. 'The Palace of Curtains' represents two identically shaped framed panels leaning against the dado of a paneled room. One is a painted representation of the sky; the other is the word "ciel" (sky). The word is sufficient to conjure the image; the image is sufficient to conjure the word. Which came first? Are they equal?
IN 'THE LITERAL Meaning,' two oddly shaped panels, one large, one small, lean against the wall. The small one carries the word "for<*_>e-circ<*/>t" (forest); the large one "salon." Is painting the name of the image enough to create the picture in the viewer's mind? (From the scale of the words, the forest must be seen through a window in the salon.) In another painting with the same title, the rounded framed panel on the floor has the words "femme triste" (sad woman). Is it too much to ask to see her heaped on the floor in tears?
Sometimes the images and words don't line up. In 'The Interpretation of Dreams' (1935), the canvas is divided into quadrants. An image of a horse is labeled "the door"; a clock, "the wind"; a pitcher, "the bird"; a valise, "the valise." Words are free-floating signs that alight according to agreed-upon convention, but what if they land on the wrong place? What if they land on the right place?
Is it any wonder that both philosopher Michel Foucault and semiotician Jacques Derrida have written books about Magritte?
(Interestingly, Jasper Johns owns 'The Interpretation of Dreams.' During the '60s, he painted a series of pictures in which color panels were labeled, but wrongly. He would stencil "Yellow" over a rectangle of blue.)
In a 1928 precursor to the series 'The Use of Speech,' Magritte painted two splotches of brown on a gray ground. One blob is labeled "corps de femme" (body of a woman) and the other, "miroir" (mirror). Both paint blobs are in this singular case not representations - they are blobs of paint, and out of them Magritte suggests he can paint both a beautiful nude and her mirror reflection.
Representation and the void behind it are Magritte's themes. In other works from the late '20s and early '30s he codifies his images as signs that recombine according to linguistic models to make different visual meanings. In his formulation, paintings correspond to sentences.
IN 'THE SIX Elements' (1929), Magritte paints a six-paneled freestanding object, each panel of which contains a different image from his repertoire - a wall of fire, a nude female torso, a deep forest, a window wall, a cloudy sky, a lead sheet fastened with bells.
In 'The Threshold of Liberty' (1930), the same elements - with a panel of wood graining and a panel of paper cutouts added - form the walls of a room. A cannon is aimed into the corner. Ready to blast away his images, to which he has become enslaved, Magritte announces himself to be on the threshold of liberty.
As the rest of the exhibition shows, however, it was not so easy to break the patterns of convention - even for a surrealist. With the break of the six years during which he painted his hideous impressionist pastiches and his 'vache' paintings (which show his disdain for a world that has gone out of its mind), Magritte would continue to recirculate his ever-more-complex images to achieve the sublime simplicity of his final works.
ACT hoping to find payoff in 'Creditors'
Will first season under new director infuse passion, a new aesthetic?
By Nancy Scott
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
TRADITION HOLDS that the 19th century Swedish playwright August Strindberg was a dour Nietzschean nut who overdosed on misogyny.
Tradition could do itself a favor and go talk to Carey Perloff.
Perloff, who took over as artistic director for the American Conservatory Theater in June, makes her directorial debut Wednesday with Strindberg's 'Creditors,' the story of one woman and two men - and a perfect shipwreck of a marriage.
No matter that 'Creditors' is a dark horse, and Strindberg, too, so far as most audiences are concerned. Perloff is practically incandescent with enthusiasm. She knows the play well, has directed it before (at New York's Classic Stage Company), believes that it has infinite levels of meaning. "I think," she says, "that it's an absolutely remarkable piece of literature." Strindberg, for her, is also absolutely remarkable, and profoundly underrated in this country, and she will, by God, help us to discover him.
Discovery appears to be Perloff's middle name (thus inspiring this year's ACT slogan: "A Season of Discovery"). By implication we shall find treasure. Could be bits of old rubbish here and there, too. Time will tell.
As the opener for ACT's 1992-93 season, 'Creditors' marks a shift in the wind for a company that has lived through a couple of serious storms this past decade. First, in 1986, came the departure of ACT founder William Ball, who left under what may be charitably called a cloud. Then came the 1989 earthquake, which ravaged the Geary Theatre, ACT's home since 1967.
Under the guidance of Edward Hastings, who took over following Ball's departure, ACT survived with honor, expanding its roster of actors and its repertory to include plays and performers of color, and this was worth cheering, but there was also something missing.
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Kirov kicks in for 'Nutcracker' centennial
By MAGGIE HALL
Special to the Tribune
ST. PETERSBURG - This year will mark the 100th birthday of 'The Nutcracker', the only ballet that has wide appeal in the United States. Since the 1950s, it has become an important part of our Christmas traditions.
The holidays wouldn't glitter as brightly without the Sugar Plum Fairy, dancing candy canes and the Nutcracker's battle with the wicked Mouse King.
For much of this century, Peter Illych Tchaikovsky's classic ballet about a doll who comes to life and transports a little girl to a wonderland of dance wasn't the hit it is now. Thanks to an opulent production by George Balanchine in 1954, the New York City Ballet's version set the standard for future 'Nutcrackers.'
This year, St. Petersburg will be the host for another 'Nutcracker' milestone. To celebrate the ballet's centennial year, the Dance Theatre of Florida and the Kirov Ballet will collaborate for 10 performances at the Mahaffey Theater Dec. 11-13 and Dec. 17-20.
Dancers from the Kirov - keepers of the flame of classical ballet and one of the more respected companies in the world - and the St. Petersburg dance ensemble will perform a 'Nutcracker' as Russian audiences might have seen it a century ago.
"Many companies have done the ballet and some of them have given their unique interpretation," said M.A. Musselman, the Dance Theatre of Florida's president. "This version is going to be true to the original. It won't be a futuristic one. It will be an old-fashioned 'Nutcracker.'"
"Chance of a lifetime"
The joint production will see 12 to 15 Kirov dancers in the divertissements of the second act, except for 'Waltz of the Flowers' and the Snow pas de deux. Dance Theatre children and dancers from its group will fill those roles. Kirov dancers will join them in the first act to play toys in the party scenes.
"This is basically the chance of a lifetime, a once-in-a-century thing," said M.A. Musselman's husband Sean, who is artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Florida.
Sean Musselman and Oleg Vinogradov, artistic director of the Kirov Ballet, presented plans for their joint production of 'The Nutcracker' at a recent news conference in St. Petersburg.
Tickets for the centennial performances are on sale at the Bayfront Center and through TicketMaster. Prices are $30, $24, $19 and $14 plus a service charge. For more information, call the Bayfront Center box office at (813) 892-5767 or TicketMaster at (813) 287-8844.
Vinogradov has been the Kirov's artistic director since 1977. Then only 40, he had made his mark as a choreographer for the Kirov and Bolshoi and as a ballet director.
Following in the footsteps of 19th-century genius Marius Petipa didn't faze Vinogradov. He opened up the Kirov's repertory to include works by foreigners such as Maurice Bejart and Roland Petit, a first for the tightly structured Russian ballet establishment.
Last year, the Kirov let in more fresh air with works by British choreographer Antony Tudor and George Balanchine, a master who learned his craft at the Kirov early in the century.
Before Vinogradov's staging of pieces such as 'Scotch Symphony' during Kirov's most recent tour, Balanchine's work had never been presented by a Russian company.
Vinogradov solidified plans for the St. Petersburg run with the Musselmans when he invited them to see his company perform 'Swan Lake' in New York this summer. The Tampa Bay area girls sharing the role of Clara, the character who is given the Nutcracker doll in the ballet, will travel with the Musselmans and chaperones to Russia this fall.
At Vinogradov's invitation, they will see the premiere of the Kirov's own centennial production of 'The Nutcracker' on Oct. 25.
The recent visit to the Tampa Bay area was Vinogradov's first chance to look over the Mahaffey Theater's facilities before staging begins on the centennial 'Nutcracker.'
Back to his roots
The collaboration with the Kirov is a return to roots for Sean Musselman. He formed the Dance Theatre of Florida in 1986 after dancing with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the Chicago City Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet and other companies, but his training is pure Balanchine.
Musselman studied at the school of American Ballet (SAB), New York City ballet's training ground. While at the school that Balanchine founded, Musselman was in the last SAB generation to work under the great choreographer before illness forced him to retire.
Even though he is the choreographer and artistic director of the Dance Theatre of Florida, Sean Musselman is still dancing at 32 and teaching at the company's ballet school. He danced the role of the Cavalier in last year's Dance Theatre production of 'The Nutcracker.'
In the centennial show, he will dance the Snow pas de deux with a dancer from the Kirov.
"I think that some of the best ones from the Kirov are coming because Oleg is very excited about doing this," said Musselman.
The fanfare surrounding the centennial of 'The Nutcracker' would have surprised Tchaikovsky; the composer considered his own score inferior. It was never a big hit in Russia, but Balanchine had a fondness for it after playing small parts in it and then graduating to dancing the role of the Nutcracker Prince in his youth.
Because of Balanchine's production, Americans are the world's only 'Nutcracker' fanatics.
Americans were obsessed by phrenology
By JOHN BARRAT
of the Smithsonian News Service
His bald head is as white and shiny as a porcelain bathtub, tattooed with a curious diagram of lines and letters. Many once believed this prophet, who claimed to have solved the age-old mysteries of the human mind.
Today, antique and forgotten, he stares blankly into space from a storage shelf inside the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.
Meet the Phrenological Man, a life-size bust from one of the oddest social movements in American history. Fashioned in the mid-1800s by a New Yorker named Lorenzo Fowler, this porcelain head was once used to teach the wonders of phrenology - "the science of the mind" - to the American public.
For centuries people have struggled to understand the relationship between human actions and the processes of the brain.
Today, a procedure known as Positron Emissions Tomography - which measures levels of neuron activity in the brain - is one high-tech method neuroscientists use to learn which areas of the brain relate to human activities and emotions. Scientists have confirmed much of the PET-scan work with Magnetic Resonance Imaging, a faster technology. Still, exactly what is goinggoing onin those areas of the brain remains a deep mystery.
Skull topography
Not to phrenologists. From 1832 into the 1900s, itinerant phrenologists traveled from town to town in America, solemnly handling people's heads before large crowds and preaching that human character could be learned from the topography of the skull.
"Phrenologists believed the strength of each faculty determined the physical size of the specific part of the brain in which it was located, and that the shape of the brain determined the shape of the skull that surrounded it," Michael Sokal, a historian at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Mass., explained at a recent lecture at the National Museum of American History.
An individual's combative organ, for example, was supposedly located "an inch and a half behind the tops of the ears." If a person's skull bulged at this spot, his or her combative tendencies were high.
By combining all of an individual's faculties, phrenologists believed that they could draw an accurate reading of his or her character. By exercising certain organs with specific thoughts, phrenologists believed a person could willfully change the shape of his or her skull.
Although today phrenology is widely regarded as fraud and fakery, "an understanding of any past science requires careful analysis of the context in which it developed," Sokal says. "It's all totoo easy to dismiss what isn't fully understood."
Phrenology originated in Vienna, Austria, in the late-18th and early-19th centuries when physician and brain-research pioneer Franz Joseph Gall observed that students with good memories also had striking eyes. From this, he inferred that human memory was located in the part of the brain directly behind the eye. Gall went on to assign more than 30 other human faculties to specific brain regions.
Austrian scientist
Phrenology made its American debut in New England in 1832, when a visiting Gall protege, Austrian scientist Johann Spurzheim, gave a series of popular lectures and occasionally demonstrated a brain dissection. Spurzheim died in the United States and was followed in 1838 by another reputable phrenologist, Englishman George Combe.
America's highways during this time were frequented by "salesmen of all kinds - peddlers with knapsacks, people selling patent medicines, lecturers, religious people, musical performers, circuses and carnivals," explains Roger Sherman, a historian at the Museum of American History.
Men (and a few women) of all ages studied phrenology's easily learned principles, bought a few books, charts and busts, and set out on the lecture circuit. Phrenology was transformed from a scientific theory into a sort of pseudoscientific character analysis akin to palm reading. It was great entertainment.
Before the Civil War, itinerant phrenologists blanketed the countryside 'reading' thousands of heads and doling out advice on everything from marriage to child rearing, careers, health, religion, personal happiness and even sex.
"They'd typically hire a town hall or a large church and open their visit with a free lecture at which they'd sell books and charts," Sokal says. Lecturers demonstrated their skill by randomly examining heads from the audience - sometimes while blindfolded.
"Private readings"
The phrenologist's bread and butter, Sokal explains, came from "a series of private readings conducted on a fee basis, often at hotels, on mornings and afternoons before each lecture."
Among American phrenologists, none achieved greater recognition than Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, two brothers who, in 1835, opened a 'Phrenological Cabinet,' or museum, in New York City, which eventually contained hundreds of busts, including busts of Michelangelo, pirates, thieves and a Bengal tiger.
The Fowlers lectured widely, employed a number of traveling phrenologists and published many books with copious titles such as 'Marriage: Its History and Ceremonies; with a Phrenological and Physiological Exposition of the Functions and Qualifications for Happy Marriages.'
Most major U.S. cities had their own libraries, club rooms and collections of plaster busts. Employers asked for written phrenological examinations from job applicants, and women wore their hair in ways that showed their best phrenological qualities. A number of famous citizens had readings done, including President James Garfield, abolitionist John Brown and poet Walt Whitman.
Many people didn't buy into the phrenology craze, and it was criticized widely. The Fowlers embraced the criticism, however, and used it as a springboard for publicity. They fervently believed in and defended their 'science.'
Modern scientists can find no rational basis for the principles and techniques of phrenology. According to Sokal, phrenology owed much of its success to practitioners who gave character readings "so vague and general that they could apply to almost anybody."
Like a mix between Sherlock Holmes and P.T. Barnum, phrenologists became expert showmen who used small details of a subject's clothing, mannerisms, hands, reactions and even their smell to draw up convincing character profiles.
After the Civil War, a more skeptical nation lost faith in phrenology. By the early 1900s, phrenology was a closed chapter in the history of American science.
TNT drama offers 'adult' programming
By FRAZIER MOORE
of The Associated Press
NEW YORK - Even if it went unspoken, the last word on television - well, the last six - always used to be "and they lived happily ever after."
Then, happily, TV got a little more serious.
Witness - please! - 'The Water Engine,' which premieres on cable's TNT channel tonight at 8, followed immediately by two repeat showings.
Kicking off a series of original films called TNT Screenworks, 'The Water Engine' is a deadly serious look at the American Dream, written by the celebrated dramatist David Mamet.
Its impressive cast includes Joe Mantegna, John Mahoney, Patti LuPone, Charles Durning and Treat Williams. It is engrossing and disturbing. It's even entertaining.
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The mature rocker - a hard sell
<*_>square<*/>Demographically, it makes sense for pop music to court the over-30 crowd. But that has been slow to happen.
By Bruce Britt
LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
Is the pop-music industry committing financial suicide by alienating the music's older fans? In an industry so blinded by youth, it appears that the smaller players are the ones creating a ground-swell of support for music by and for people in the 30-to-50 age range.
Rock 'n' rollers in their 30s and 40s with lingering dreams of making it in pop music have only a slight chance of getting signed to major, rock-oriented labels. Rock 'n' roll is traditionally a young person's industry, and aging signs such as a receding hairline or a paunch take a performer out of the rock 'n' roll sweepstakes.
But recent trends indicate that adult pop and rock is a gold mine waiting to be explored. Though the record industry is still youth-oriented, it seems that yuppie musicians and consumers are quietly waging a revolution that is putting a dent in rock record and concert sales.
Country music sales and radio ratings are soaring - an intriguing turn of events in light of the fact that 30-ish 'new country' pioneers such as Garth Brooks, Billy Ray Cyrus, Travis Tritt and the Kentucky HeadHunters specialize in a distilled brand of Southern rock 'n' roll. Older established rockers are getting into country as well. For example, Don Henley has collaborated with singer Trisha Yearwood and recorded in Nashville.
Henley isn't the only one flirting with the country business. Ken Kragen used to manage such rock and pop heavyweights as the Bee Gees, Lionel Richie and the J. Geils Band. Now Kragen deals almost exclusively with country acts such as Tritt. Kragen and other insiders believe Nashville could supplant Los Angeles as the nation's music capital.
"Though the country business is becoming more complicated all the time, it is still easier to deal with than pop," Kragen said. "Country music is probably the most exciting trend in music right now. You hear radio stations touting their 'new country' or 'hot country' sound."
"Maybe that's the lesson our country cousins are teaching us," said Phil Walden, president of Capricorn Records. "Music - not age or anything else - is the most important thing."
Capricorn's hottest acts are involved in the burgeoning 'neo-hippie' movement, which is gaining record- and concert-sales steam every day. Blues Traveler, Spin Doctors and Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit - older and thoroughly unglamorous bands that play countrified rock, blues and jazz - are such popular concert attractions that a theme tour recently was organized to satisfy the demand for these performing warhorses.
Other trends indicate that adults are begging to be courted by the music industry. Ratings at adult contemporary radio stations are on the upswing, and older acts such as Steve Miller, Jimmy Buffett and the Grateful Dead have continued to draw sellout crowds, while rock-oriented packages continue to struggle to draw fans.
Some of the biggest sleeper successes in recent years have been major-label baby-boomer acts, with Bonnie Raitt, Michael Bolton and Natalie Cole creating the peak. All these acts struggled to win creative control and break out of the rigid, youth-oriented visions the music industry had dictated to them.
In contrast to all this adult-oriented activity, rock record sales slowly have been declining since the mid-1980s, while country and other music forms have been enjoying steady gains, according to Recording Industry Association of America's Statistical Overview for 1991.
Some theorize that Nashville is enjoying renewed popularity because of the country music industry's more inclusive nature. Walden's Capricorn Records put Southern rock on the map in the 1970s with such acts as the Allman Brothers Band and the Marshall Tucker Band. Walden attributed country music's resurgence on the country industry's more inclusive nature.
"I think country is more willing to take in refugees from rock n' roll and allow them the space to redefine themselves in some country context," Walden said. "Country is expanding rather than restricting, where rock is quite the opposite."
Inclusiveness is a buzzword used by Walden and other independent label heads, who are courting older rock and pop consumers. Walden, who recently reactivated his company after a decadelong absence, said the secret of his success is simple.
"I really think, in terms of the new hippie movement, the emphasis is primarily on the music," Walden said.
Walden's comment must resonate with well-known former teen idols such as Ringo Starr and David Cassidy - acts with built-in cult followings who have had to sign deals with independent labels. Older rock acts able or fortunate enough to finagle a major label deal claim they are often persuaded to sing about adolescent concerns rather than from a more mature perspective.
"It frustrates me that [record industry] people can't see a way forward for a band like the Who," said former Who singer Roger Daltrey. "It frustrates me that some of the best musicians in rock 'n' roll are our age and don't seem to be able to put their emotions into music."
Daltrey is lucky - at least he has a legacy that makes him more appealing to record company talent scouts. But there are many older rock 'n' roll lovers who will probably never get the chance.
Sterling Haug is founder of the Musicians Contact Service, a Hollywood-based referral service. He said at least half of his clientele consists of musicians in their 30s still struggling to break into the big time.
"You have to consider that everybody lies about their age by about five years, so there are a lot of guys around 40 still playing original material and trying to break through," Haug said.
Though trends would suggest an adult pop phenomenon would be well-received by consumers, some experts say mature music is a very hard sell. Ron Goldstein is president and chief executive officer of Private Records, a Los Angeles-based company with a largely adult-oriented pop roster that includes Starr, guitarist Leo Kottke and Andy Summers, formerly of the Police. He said it is difficult winning exposure for older acts.
"Some guy in the industry might think, 'Hey, Carole King is still around, and she's still in good voice. I'd like to sign her'," Goldstein said. "But then he's got to consider how he's going to get her on radio or how he's going to get any exposure for her. That's just part of the battle record companies face."
Goldstein believes that for the music industry to reach 30- to 50-year-old consumers, existing promotional methods such as radio must invent a format specifically geared toward baby boomers. Adult contemporary radio, Goldstein claims, is almost as rigid as the Top 40.
In addition, he suggested that other avenues, such as direct mail marketing, should be explored. That would allow record companies to bypass radio, television and MTV altogether and take it straight to the consumers.
Fox's 'young' shows are old and tired
By Greg Dawson
SENTINEL TELEVISION CRITIC
The Fox network has publicly tabbed 18 to 34 as its prime demographic target. The producers of Martin and The Heights must have thought they were talking about IQs, not ages.
Martin, a hyperactive sitcom about a brash, young radio talk-show host, assaults the senses with decibels and dumbbells. If this were the Olympics, you might want to have Martin tested for steroid use.
The Heights, another Aaron Spelling fashion statement masquerading as a drama, is Spelling's attempt to get a third cup of tea from the same soggy bag that yielded Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place, and it's a mighty thin brew, indeed.
Together, these series demonstrate how shows can scream "young!" in every way and still seem achingly old and tired.
It's possible to feel some regret over Martin as a lost opportunity. The star, stand-up comic Martin Lawrence has loads of natural charm and operates smoothly in the sitcom format. But he's undermined by relentlessly horrid writing.
His character, a Detroit talk-show host, is a grating hybrid that combines the snickering macho arrogance of Eddie Murphy and the cloying, puppy-dog cuteness of Bill Cosby in his bedroom scenes with Phylicia Rashad on The Cosby Show.
One minute Martin is strutting an obnoxious under-my-thumb brand of chauvinism to impress his Neanderthal buddies, the next he's on his knees whimpering for forgiveness from his girlfriend (Tisha Campbell). It might be laughable if it weren't so pathetic.
Martin, known for his comedy work on HBO, arrives with a reputation as a gifted mimic. Besides the title character, Martin plays his nosy mother and a busty love machine across the hall named Sheneneh. But they just seem like Lawrence in bad wigs. He never goes beyond dress-up to create a distinct character, the way Flip Wilson did with Geraldine.
Nor do Lawrence and his producers do anything interesting with the talk-show format. The studio is just another set for the delivery of bad lines. Adrift in this debacle is Garret Morris (Saturday Night Live), playing the manager of Martin's radio station.
Let us travel now from the depths of comedy to The Heights of commercial exploitation.
It's not uncommon for TV producers to copy themselves, but two times in less than two years? Spelling's 90210 begat Melrose Place, which created a market for The Heights - same song, different verse.
The Heights looks less like a drama than it does a product tie-in, the product being all the accouterments of youth culture, from jeans to music videos.
In a nutshell - which is plenty large enough to hold the originality that went into it - The Heights is about young people who couldn't afford the rent at Melrose Place, an upscale West Hollywood address.
Whereas the residents of Melrose Place are aspiring actors and artists and doctors, the denizens of The Heights hold down classic blue-collar jobs such as auto mechanic, beer truck dispatcher, produce clerk and plumber's assistant - all portrayed as purgatories to be escaped from at the earliest opportunity.
In their off-hours (when they aren't striding six abreast down the street, the better to model their 'look') these sons and daughters of the working class play in a rock band - their ticket out of the unspeakable agony of real jobs.
Pretension and phoniness greet you on every corner in The Heights. This is the sort of show in which a drop-dead beautiful character (Cheryl Pollak) says to a pursuing guy (James Walters), "I don't get it. All this romance. Why me?"
It isn't exactly clear where The Heights is. What is clear is that if these fresh-faced youth without a callous among them are blue-collar, I'm Ron Rice the suntan lotion king.
Trying to follow the interchangeable cast parts of these Spelling brands reminds me of the sign above airport luggage carousels: "Many bags look alike."
I would suggest Aaron Spelling heed the comment of a character in The Heights who says of their sound-alike band, "We need to do an original."
A fresh TV idea set in the 1300s
By Greg Dawson
SENTINEL TELEVISION CRITIC
Everyone's Irish on St. Patrick's Day, and when the new fall TV season rolls around (in late summer now), everyone's from Missouri: Viewers are in a show-me state of mind as in, 'Show me something new.'
So the networks give us a couple dozen comedies and dramas with all the freshness of discount bread. There are exceptions, of course, and tonight the new fall season lives up to its billing as ABC premieres Covington Cross, the boldest deviator from the norm among the 33 new series.
The schedule is jammed with family sitcoms and dramas, but Covington Cross is the only one set in 14th-century England and filmed on location in and around a real castle, with a mostly British cast.
It's a hoot - a high-spirited, handsomely mounted, tongue-in-cheek romp that blithely mixes swordplay and slapstick, feudalism and feminism, in a whimsical meeting of the 1390s and the 1990s.
This is the story of a widowed dad, Sir Thomas Gray (Nigel Terry), who could be Fred MacMurray in My Three Sons, except that he has a beautiful daughter (Ione Skye) in addition to three rambunctious sons, and he carries a broadsword instead of a briefcase to work.
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Fairy Tale
by Karen Bair
Features Writer
Once upon a time, a determined, dark-eyed ballerina traveled to a dangerous city called New York. She danced principal roles with famous people from the United States and Russia in one of the best ballet companies in the world, and they traveled the globe.
A tall, dark, handsome man also journeyed to New York to learn to dance with beautiful ballerinas. Because he was tall, he played the princely roles.
At about the same time, a dainty little ballerina ventured to New York. She was so naive, she did not know enough to be frightened. She danced elegantly with one of the world's most respected danseurs.
They danced to the edge of their world.
Many of their dreams came true. Some did not. It was not easy, but they knew when the time had come to pursue new dreams.
It happened that their new paths wound to a magical Southern city with grand oak trees and gracefully swaying Spanish moss.
The dark-eyed ballerina and the tall, princely danseur danced there together for the first time. They fell in love and married.
Before she had left New York, the tiny ballerina was hurt and decided she would never dance again. But when she came to the Southern city, a friend convinced her to put on her toe shoes. She danced, and danced, and soon was dancing with the dark-eyed ballerina and the princely danseur. Then she fell in love, too, and married a handsome local television newsman.
And so ...
The room - with its barre, mirrors and American Ballet Theatre posters from around the globe - is alive with dancers' energy. They pose with an innate sense of performance, and both the photographer and the camera love them.
"You don't need me in this picture. I'm a third wheel."
"No, no. Come back over here. We need you in this picture."
"How does this look?"
"Great. Perfect."
"Move your head this way."
"Like this?"
"Great. Perfect. You guys are wonderful. Hold it."
"Are you sure you need me in this picture?"
Thus cavorted Karena Brock-Carlyle, her husband John Carlyle and Gaye Baxley Manhatton, who last month officially became artistic directors of Savannah's Ballet South community dance troupe. The trio had temporarily stepped into the role after the mid-season resignation of Gayla Davis Lehotay in January. Last month new contracts continued their tenure through August 1993.
Their official titles vary according to the source, but from their viewpoint, they are a team. They refer to one another as co-artistic directors.
"We all work together so we don't overpower one another," Brock-Carlyle said in an interview after the photo session. "None of us wants power.
"Although, they usually let me have my way. I don't know why."
<*_>three-black-squares<*/>
For 14 years, she danced as Karena Brock with American Ballet Theatre (ABT), performing as a principal for five of those years. Famous Russian ballerina Natalia Makarova offered her some of her first principal opportunities. She later partnered with Mikhail Baryshnikov after he defected from Russia and joined ABT.
The walls of the Carlyles' Hilton Head Dance Theatre offer an introduction to the past: each dancing with other partners, Brock in costume at the White House with the Shah of Iran and former President Lyndon Johnson; and, a framed letter of appreciation to her from former President Richard Nixon.
Brock-Carlyle leads Ballet South's senior company dance classes, also attended by her husband and Manhatton. She believes a few of the dancers could be destined for such premiere companies as ABT.
"It's only 50 percent talent," she advised. "The rest is perseverance."
She has persevered since she was in elementary school and her parents bought tickets to a Sadler's Wells' performance of 'Sleeping Beauty,' starring Margot Fonteyn.
"I think we sat in the very last seat in the balcony," she recalled. "Margot Fonteyn came out, and she just bounced all the way up to the balcony to me, and I said that's what I want to do. That was my vision from that point on."
She began taking classes at 9. At 14, she danced with a professional company in San Francisco. The last two years of high school were devoted to learning technique and physical therapy to realign muscles.
"I never dated," she said. "I never went to my high school prom. It didn't matter to me."
She studied in Los Angeles with David Lichine and then spent a year with the National Ballet of Holland, but ABT was her goal. A friend snared a closed audition for her with former ABT director Lucia Chase. She spent four years in the corps and five years as soloist before becoming an ABT principal.
For 13 years, she was married to ABT principal Ted Kivett.
"We were maturing as artists - not necessarily as people," she remembers. "We worked on our dance, and our marriage was crumbling. Ted was in line to become the golden boy, then Baryshnikov arrived. Ted gave up and left."
Somewhere in the interim, she recalls, they were divorced.
She has fond memories of Makarova. Brock-Carlyle tosses her black hair and imitates Makarova gently prodding the ballerinas with a "dahlink."
"She was beautiful," she said. "I love her."
Her recollections of Baryshnikov are not as fond. She partnered with him in the ballets 'Petrouchka' and 'Les Patineurs.'
"He's a very serious artist," she said. "He demanded perfection. That's good.
"He's very quiet. Very introverted. No one will ever know him.
"He's not very tall."
Brock and Baryshnikov are the same height, making her taller than he on pointe. When Baryshnikov took the ABT helm, he began promoting inexperienced dancers.
"Ballet is turned down from dancer to dancer," interjected Karena's husband John. "He broke that line. He made young dancers stars. They weren't grown."
"Artistry isn't developed over-night," Karena added softly. "It develops with time."
She was offered a sixth year as an ABT principal, but turned it down. She speaks little about that turning point in her career.
"I was having personal problems," she said. "I stayed in New York for a year after I left ABT.
"It was difficult. I would walk past the theater and start crying."
She freelanced and eventually traveled to Savannah to direct the Savannah Ballet. Carlyle, whose parents lived in Savannah, came as a guest artist. She convinced him to stay.
<*_>three-black-squares<*/>
Unlike Brock, Carlyle did not begin dancing until after high school. He studied graphic design and wanted to create comic books until an artist's model convinced the 6-foot-1-inch former high school football player to take a ballet class. He waited tables in New York and studied on scholarship for two years at the acclaimed Harkness Ballet. Then dancer Melissa Hayden took him under her tutelage.
"We did New York Times cross-word puzzles after class," he said. "One day the puzzle said, 'Name a famous Canadian ballerina.' To my surprise, it was her."
He soloed with the Tampa Ballet, then detoured permanently to partner Brock. When Brock left Savannah Ballet, they formed the Hilton Head Ballet Theatre.
Seven years ago, they married. In September their son Timothy will be 5.
Karena discovered new priorities.
"I gave up performing for Tim, " she said. "I wanted more time with him.
"To feel the body move beyond its limits and to move expressively, it's wonderful. It's addicting. But I will never dance again. I would have to give up my mornings with Tim."
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Manhatton knows what it is to withdraw from addiction to dance. She abandoned ballet after partnering in New York with Edward Villella, considered by some the greatest classical danseur ever born in the United States.
A feminine, blond-haired, brilliant blue-eyed Savannah native, Manhatton knew she wanted to be a ballerina at 13. Her mother took her to a ballet at Savannah High School.
"I leaned over to my mother," she said in her honey Southern drawl, "and I said, 'I think I've made a decision.'"
She studied locally and joined the Savannah Ballet. The directors - Bojan and Stephanie Spassoff, formerly of ABT and friends of Karena's - arranged for her to 'sit' the New York apartment of traveling ballet friends one summer. Every inch the Southern belle, she was befriended by upstairs neighbor Stanley Williams, a New York City Ballet school instructor revered by dancers. She was invited to observe a class.
"Here I was in my little flowered Savannah dress," she remembers. "It was a huge studio. Nureyev was standing there and he winked at me. I thought I would faint."
She studied at the Harkness and the famed Joffrey Ballet. Villella was a protege of the New York City Ballet's legendary George Balanchine, and when Villella suffered a recurring hip injury, he assumed directorship of the Eglevsky Ballet and formed a touring company. Villella knew Manhatton and asked her to tour. Eventually they became dance partners.
Tiny and compact, she became adept at the furious pace of the Balanchine style. Then Villella's company began to fold.
"It was such a learning experience for me," Manhatton said. "You can be a star one day, and you have an injury and you're out and somebody's taking your place.
"I just woke up one day. I'm not sure why I didn't want to go on. I guess I had New York burnout."
She tells the story with a pensive smile. Smiling is her custom.
"I think Gaye was raised in the Southern tradition," Karena surmised. "You always hold up and go on, no matter what. She is always bubbly, no matter what she might be feeling inside."
Manhatton returned to Savannah and became an interior designer for five years. Then Madeleine Walker, one of the community ballet troupe's founders, asked her to teach.
"I really owe Madeleine," Manhatton said. "She asked me one day, 'Why aren't you dancing?' She asked if I would perform in a student performance. I thought it would be interesting to put on a pair of pointe shoes again. Not in five years had I had pointe shoes on.
"It felt good."
She began dancing with Carlyle and studying with Karena. During this period of renewal, she fell in love with WTOC television newsman Mike Manhatton, and they were married.
"Dancing for me is not the same as when I was younger," she explained. "It's like reading a good book and going back and reading it again. I understand more now. I always danced so emotionally. I want to keep that this go round, but I want to think about the technical aspects. It's like a fresh start.
"Teaching makes you analyze."
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Manhatton's responsibilities include teaching the junior company - a step she considers vital in their progression toward the senior ranks.
"I'm very strict with them," she said with delicate force. "It's very difficult for a 9-year-old to be serious about anything. I ask them to extend themselves beyond casual involvement."
"Gaye is wonderful with the kids," said Karena. "She does it in a very gentle and sweet way. But firm."
In addition to technique and artistry, Karena said her goal for the senior corps is "dedication, discipline and commitment." Stage presence evident even in the studio, she commands the teen-agers' respect.
"John gets closer to the kids," she said. "I never had a teacher with a sense of humor. I stay aloof."
John - the wily jester of the trio - relieves class tension by imitating improper technique. Eliciting giggles, he then demonstrates the correct approach.
"I teach them through laughter," he said. "Then if I get stern, it's very effective."
The trio is conscious their lessons came from sweat equity and the school of life, not the relative security of a liberal arts college. John's favorite studio poster is one emblazoned with the word "Read." Under it is a photo of a dancer reading a Russian novel as he leaps across the room.
"Teach kids to read," he said. "It makes better dancers. Kids don't use their imaginations anymore. They watch television. When I get angry is when they're not using their minds. When they just go through the motions. Life's more interesting than that."
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Concerned producer prescribes remedies for networks' doldrums
By Steven Bochco
Los Angeles Times
Hollywood - Here's a little quiz, multiple choice:
Complete the following sentence: Network television stinks because of: A. Producers. B. Advertisers. C. Networks. D. Dan Quayle. E. All of the above.
You could make a case for any of these choices, but my pick would be: C. Networks. Let's face it, if you've spent more than 20 minutes in the television business, you know you can run a network better than "those guys."
I mean, c'mon, let's be honest about it. If television was a dog, that dog wouldn't hunt. It's not very smart. It's not very funny. It's not very truthful, or very real. It's not very enlightening, and only occasionally thoughtful. In short, it's just not very good. No wonder viewers are deserting the ship. The ship is going down, folks.
Listen, I feel bad for the networks. Really. They're scared to death, notwithstanding their annual frenzy of optimism about their new seasons, and with good reason. The economy is lousy. Viewership is down. Advertising is down. Revenue is down. Costs are up. Pressure groups are up. No one's having fun anymore. And it shows.
The television business, like it or not - and I don't - has become politicized. Networks have become increasingly skittish about any program content that is perceived by pressure groups as objectionable. Does this mean that television shows have, by and large, become more conservative? You tell me. The airwaves are filled with law-and-order shows, both fictional and quasi-fictional, which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be identified as espousing liberal sentiments. And, Dan Quayle's remarks about Murphy Brown notwithstanding, half-hour TV sitcoms generally remain a bastion of traditional and overly simplistic moral preachment.
Gutting of program content
The net result is that pressure groups have succeeded in bullying advertisers and networks into gutting program content as never before. Networks don't want controversy. They don't want bad language. They don't want sex. They particularly don't want sex between individuals of the same gender. What they do want is big ratings and lots of advertising revenue, yet they're not willing to take the risks necessary to achieve those goals.
So, how do you change things around? How do you revitalize the television business in an environment gripped by fear? If I were king of the forest - i.e., a network president - here are some of the things I'd try:
I'd eliminate network censors. Let viewership determine what's appropriate and what isn't.
I'd eliminate jobs. Lots of them. Sorry, but how many network executives does it really take to screw in - or screw up - a light bulb?
I'd stop relying on research as a network tool. It doesn't work. If it did, TV wouldn't have a failure rate in excess of 90 percent. I think I can manage to fail nine out of 10 times on my own, thank you, without some big fat research department's help.
I'd eliminate pilots. Which, by definition, would eliminate pilot season. If you believe in something, order it. Put your money where your mouth is. And never order less than a full season of episodes of any new show. Not six. Not 13. But 22. In a cluttered viewing landscape, 13 episodes just aren't enough to gain the viewer's attention, let alone loyalty.
Acknowledge that you can no longer operate in old ways in a new environment. Buy only what you need. The extensive stockpiling of backup shows is a waste of talent, time and money.
Mess with traditional program lengths. If there's a really great 45-minute show you want to put on, do it.
Watching the fall season is like watching the start of the New York Marathon. Eliminate it. Once you've bought something, give its chefs the time to cook it. When it's ready - only when it's ready - put it on and leave it on.
Reduce commercials
How's this for a plan? Everybody's screaming - rightfully so - about screen clutter. Too many credits. Too many logos. Main titles are too long. Not enough program time. Well, how about reducing the number of commercials you put on the air and charging more for them? Less advertising time means less glut, which in turn means more attention to the advertising that's there. I bet they'll pay.
Finally, and most importantly, I'd acknowledge television as an art form and challenge those working in the medium to redefine their standards of excellence accordingly. I'm weary of feeling embarrassed about using the "a" word in connection with television. At our best, we are artists.
The problem, however, is that art isn't always politically correct. Which means we'd have to tell the pressure groups - all of them - to take a hike. We're going to give our talented writers and producers the chance to make shows they're passionate about. How many shows do you really see on TV where you just know the men and women making them are truly passionate about their work? Not many, I'll bet. But the ones that are informed by someone's passion are usually the ones you make an appointment to see.
These are only a few of the things I'd do if I were running a network. Maybe they wouldn't work. But what the four major networks are doing now doesn't work. So what the hell? What have we got to lose that we aren't already losing?
Art Detour goes monthly
'Afterhours' to open studios, galleries, more
RICHARD NILSEN
The Arizona Republic
An Art Detour once a year isn't enough anymore, so an enterprising group of Phoenix artists and galleries has conspired to create an informal "detour" once a month through the cooler season.
Called Phoenix Arts Afterhours, it will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. on the second Wednesday of each month from September through June. It begins Wednesday.
Twenty-two art spaces, including the Phoenix Art Museum and the Heard Museum, will take part in the self-guided tour of downtown studios, galleries, bookstores and museums.
Modeled on Philadelphia's First Friday program, with its 31 galleries and 10 restaurants, and Tucson's popular Downtown Saturday Night, the program is planned to benefit area artists, restaurants and businesses.
"The idea surfaced a couple of weeks after the Art Detour in April," said Catherine Spencer, director of Radix Gallery.
"It was the intention of the group to have special performances, demonstrations and individual studio tours. The variety of works is so tremendous. I think that's what makes it unique.
"In one evening, you can see a museum show, a gallery installation and then a completely alternative performance piece within two miles and four hours of each other."
This variety is the strength of the downtown Phoenix arts community, Spencer said.
"There isn't a regional history, found in other parts of the metro area," she said diplomatically, meaning "This isn't Scottsdale."
That can surely be said for Tony Zahn's Volksgemeinschafthalle at 208 S. Fifth Ave.
"It's a display area where people can look at an exhibit for fun, without being burdened by the label 'art,'" Zahn said. "It is just like art, but it's not."
He calls it a "metaesthetic theme park."
"But I don't want to give away what people will see," he said.
Will there be a roller coaster?
"Not this time, but I'm working on that."
Metropophobobia will host readings in experimental and "obscure areas of endeavor," according to owner Peter Ragan. And there will be coffee and espresso.
For the less adventurous, the Phoenix Art Museum is free on Wednesdays and is open until 9 p.m., and the Heard Museum will be free from 5 to 9 p.m.
The current show at the art museum, 'Transcending Turmoil: Painting at the Close of China's Empire, 1796-1911,' contains more than 100 fine Chinese paintings.
The Heard is showing 'Eclectica: Recent Acquisitions,' and '<*_>initial-exclamation-mark<*/>Chispas! Cultural Warriors of New Mexico.'
The Afterhours will give people a chance to visit studios, too, to see what artists do.
"I'm going to be here working," said sculptor Kevin Irvin, who shares a studio with painter Marta Boutel at an old trolley depot at 10th and Sheridan streets. "When people stop by, I'll take them around and show them what we do and talk to them. There will be a little food and drink.
"And up at this end of the tour, we have a cluster of studios, including those of Ed Mell, John Kleber and Nick de Matties, making a very convenient grouping."
Not officially part of the tour is CityArts, the city of Phoenix's Visual Arts Gallery at 214 E. Moreland St., which is open from 6 to 9 p.m.
Currently showing are mixed-media paintings of Jeff Falk.
Note: CRASHarts and Gallery X will not take part until the second Phoenix Arts Afterhours on Oct.14.
'Sneakers' has Oscar winners galore
By James Ryan
Entertainment News Wire
LOS ANGELES - With ground-breaking performances, Sydney Poitier and Robert Redford have earned their places among the icons of American cinema.
Poitier, 68, made a name for himself in the late 1950s and '60s, starring in such film dramas as Blackboard Jungle, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, To Sir With Love and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. His films challenged the conventions of the time and helped lead to a new era in race relations.
Redford, 55, was Hollywood's favorite leading man in the '70s with such films as The Candidate, The Sting, The Way We Were and All the President's Men - films that exploited his cool gaze, square jaw and all-American smile.
Thus it was strange to see both men before the microphone at a recent news conference discussing their participation in the movie Sneakers, a lightweight romp through the world of computer hackers and high-tech espionage. Sneakers opens Friday.
The movie stars Redford as a former '60s radical and dedicated hacker who heads a ragtag team of computer nerds and ex-criminals hired to penetrate sophisticated security systems and point out their flaws.Playing the team members are Poitier, Dan Aykroyd, River Phoenix and Mary McDonnell. Ben Kingsley plays Redford's one-time college chum-turned-archnemesis Cosmo, and James Earl Jones makes a brief appearance as a National Security Agency honcho. As the production notes proudly boast, there are eight Oscars and 38 Oscar nominations among the bunch.
But why this movie?
"I got involved with the project through a phone call basically (from director Phil Alden Robinson)," Poitier said. "By the time I got off the phone, I was had."
Poitier, who has carried many movies with his performances, says it was a relief to share some of the load this time.
"I had never done an ensemble piece before," he says. "This was a new and very satisfying experience.... And it was a learning experience every day. It's nice to work without the pressure of carrying the whole thing."
Redford said he'd been interested in working with Robinson, who previously wrote and directed Field of Dreams and had been trying to get Sneakers made for a decade.
"I can't say I got into it because of the cast - the cast materialized around me," Redford said. "But the cast certainly made the experience pleasurable, one of the best I ever had.... It was a piece of entertainment touching on an important issue, and it was smart."
One problem both actors have in choosing new material is the knowledge that filmgoers hold them to a higher standard because of their previous accomplishments. Poitier is very aware of this burden.
"I have a responsibility if I am perceived that way to prove that I am worthy of that," he said. "Because this film is ... without great weight, doesn't mean I just come in and wing it."
Contrary to some of his statements in the past, Redford insists Sneakers was not part of a bargain he has struck to enable him to do other more personal projects.
Besides, he says, the bottom line for any movie, be it Sneakers, Incident at Oglala or All the President's Men, is that it is entertaining.
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Moribund MGM Lion Shows a Few Signs of Life
By Bob Strauss
LOS ANGELES - There's little talk these days about the Lion roaring. People just seem grateful that old Leo is, at least, still breathing.
The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer trademark, recently spruced up and relieved of a debilitating tie to Pathe Communications, once again symbolizes a going filmmaking concern. Certainly, today's MGM is not the Hollywood powerhouse that Louis B. Mayer operated from 1925 through the mid-'50s.
But neither is MGM the industry deadbeat that it had become by 1991. Unlike many independent and mini-majors that have recently succumbed to recessionary pressure, the onetime Tiffany studio has been slowly stripped of itits former glory for nearly a quarter century. After two decades of dividing and parceling out the company's assets - the film library to Ted Turner, the legendary Culver City lot to Lorimar, Warner Bros. and now Sony Pictures Entertainment - the aviation and casino kingpin Kirk Kerkorian finally sold MGM's film entertainment division to Pathe boss Giancarlo Parretti in November, 1990.
Within six months, the Italian financier was reneging on deals with major Hollywood talent, unpaid service suppliers were trying to force MGM into bankruptcy, and cash could not be found to release such films as 'Thelma and Louise' and 'Delirious.'
Soon after, a very different lion - Credit Lyonnais Nederland, the French nationalized bank that backed the highly leveraged, $1.3 billion buyout - made moves to oust Parretti. Late last year, after an agonizing court battle, a Delaware chancery court removed Parretti from MGM's board. New owners Credit Lyonnais handed the studio over to veteran Hollywood executive Alan Ladd Jr., who, though hired by Parretti, sided with the bank during the custody fight.
Sterling reputation
And with good reason. Perhaps the only studio executive widely beloved by Hollywood's creative community and respected by his peers, the shy, 54-year-old 'Laddie' (yes, he's the cowboy star's son) hated having his name linked to the notorious Parretti's. And Ladd's reputation, the Euro-bankers know, is one of MGM's best remaining assets; the very fact that it's intact is testimony to how highly Ladd is regarded.
He's also got an impressive track record, which includes perhaps the smartest decision in movie history: Ladd gave the green light to a goofy little science-fiction film called 'Star Wars' when he was running 20th Century Fox. Even Ladd's earlier stint as production chief at the Kerkorian-owned MGM was one of the brighter plateaus in the studio's long decline, marked by such hits as 'Moonstruck' and 'A Fish Called Wanda.'
Now, Ladd hopes that MGM's upcoming slate of fall films will erase the bad taste of 1991, when only 'Thelma & Louise' turned a profit.
"It's nice to be able to go to rushes of a picture or a rough cut and be very thrilled with what you're seeing," Ladd said. "As opposed to going to see something like 'Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man' and thinking, 'My God! What a disaster.'"
Among MGM's upcoming releases is Gary Sinise's acclaimed remake of John Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men,' with John Malkovich; Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of Marguerite Duras's memoir 'The Lover,' a big European hit that has run into commercially exploitable censorship difficulties here; 'Rich in Love,' which re-teams the Oscar-winning 'Driving Miss Daisy' team of writer Alfred Uhry, director Bruce Beresford and producers Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck, and the erotic thriller 'Body of Evidence,' starring Madonna.
Also on tap are another Beresford-Zanucks collaboration about blues legend Bessie Smith; 'The Baboon Heart,' a restaurant romance with Christian Slater and Marisa ('My Cousin Vinny') Tomei; the comedy thriller 'Cloak and Diaper' with Kathleen Turner; new films directed by Robert Townsend, John Schlesinger and Wes Craven, and 'Son of the Pink Panther,' in which Blake Edwards revives his old comedy franchise, with Italian comic Roberto Benigni in place of the late Peter Sellers.
This slate of films bears a great responsibility; most of them have to, at the very least, perform as well as MGM's mildly profitable skating romance 'The Cutting Edge' did earlier this year. Estimates of how much money Credit Lyonnais currently has invested in MGM range from $800 million to more than $1 billion.
If the bank ever hopes to recoup, or even to find a buyer for MGM, the upcoming features have to do better than the recent run of such under-achievers as 'Crisscross,', 'Rush,' 'Shattered,' 'The Indian Runner,' 'Life Stinks' and 'Diggstown,' which opened in 12th place last weekend.
Looking for hits
"Who knows?" said Steven E. Hill, an entertainment industry analyst for Hancock Institutional Equity Services in San Francisco, when asked about the commercial viability of upcoming MGM films. "The list doesn't particularly excite or worry me, one way or another. There's nothing that makes me feel like they have some sure hits. Then again, they have a list of films that may be solid. It's hard to say.
"But the key to successfully reviving the company will be having hit movies. They have to have hit films, or at least profitable films one after the other, and a substantial release schedule."
"First and foremost, we need to build up our production program in feature films," acknowledged Dennis Stanfill, Ladd's former boss at Fox who was brought in as MGM's co-chairman and chief executive officer earlier this year. Stanfill oversees the company's financial end, outstanding legal entanglements and corporate restructuring, freeing up Ladd to concentrate on creative, production and marketing tasks.
Stanfill admits that, considering the hangover from Parretti's regime, rebuilding MGM is a daunting assignment. "How big of a problem?" he asked rhetorically. "Let me put it this way: This is a major challenge. It was left by Parretti with a very heavy debt load and ongoing obligations. As well, it went through a period of misdirection, if not mismanagement.
"We have now set on a course, the purpose of which is to make MGM, again, a great movie company in its finest tradition. That's going to take a considerable amount of time. It's not a quick task, but we are building, I believe, solidly and well - in close co-operation with Credit Lyonnais, which is committed to the long term."
Blue-Collar Slant Is Gold for Fox
Programs Recognize Class Differences
By David Zurawik
Baltimore Sun
Fox Broadcasting is doing it again. Most American viewers had their channel scanners locked on NBC in July and early August because of the Olympics, but this is the summer of Fox.
Once again, Fox went against the old rules of showing reruns in summer and last month debuted a new series called 'Melrose Place.' It's a brand-new hit show, a series that is all the buzz.
Thanks in large part to 'Melrose Place,' Fox finished ahead of one of the big three networks, NBC, in over-all household ratings for the week of July 13-19. That marked a first for Fox Network. And some industry analysts are predicting that Fox will finish ahead of NBC for the entire 1992-93 season.
And driven by all that, plus its hammerlock on young viewers (whom advertisers most want to reach), it looks as if Fox will start the fall season with more advertising time sold for more money than any network except CBS, which finished first last year.
Not bad. And Fox is doing all this growing and money-making when audiences for other broadcast networks are eroding.
What is Fox doing that NBC, ABC, CBS or PBS aren't? Or, as one English journalist put it as he was leaving a Fox presentation on the fall preview press conference in Los Angeles recently: "What makes these Fox people - with all their shows about garbage men and shoe salesman - so bloody smart, anyway?"
The shoe salesman and garbage man are, of course, Al Bundy of 'Married ...With Children' and Roc Emerson of 'Roc,' respectively. And they are very much part of the answer to the question of what makes Fox such a success. They are part of a blue-collar sensibility driving some of the most popular Fox shows, such as 'Married,' 'Roc' and 'The Simpsons.'
'Blue collar' is an adjective that isn't used much lately when talking about prime-time television. The only other important blue-collar family in prime time is the Conners of 'Roseanne' on ABC.
In fact, prime-time television rarely admits that there are class differences in this country and that life looks very different, depending on which side of the working-class boundary you happen to live on. Almost everyone on prime-time television lives in a shiny, suburban world like that of the Taylors on 'Home Improvement' or a shiny, yupscale world like that of 'Murphy Brown' - except on Fox.
'Roc' lives in a row-house in Baltimore. In last year's premiere episode, he delivered his comic, working-class version of Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech. His dream, he said, was to own a semi-detached home at the end of the row. Roc furnishes his rowhouse with repaired or restored furniture collected on his garbage route. What shines in 'Roc' are the dreams.
Two new Fox shows with that same sensibility will debut soon: 'The Heights' (on Thursday) and 'Class of '96' (in late September or early October). They look like winners.
'The Heights' is about a rock 'n' roll band of working-class adults in their 20s. The band members - who live in the smokestack-and-factory landscape of Bruce Springsteen's New Jersey - work during the day as mechanics, truck dispatchers and grocery store clerks. And, like Roc, they dream. Their dreams are expressed in their music.
'Class of '96' takes place in what might seem like the unlikely setting of an Ivy League college. But the series is told in part through the narration of David Copperfield Morrissey, a working-class kid from New Jersey on a scholarship. Most of the two-hour pilot is about class differences and Morrissey's dreams. It's smart stuff - like the answers that Fox president Peter Chernin gave during a recent interview in California when he was asked about that working-class sensibility at Fox.
Chernin started his explanation with the 'Marxist-Leninist' quote, but added quickly that he was only kidding.
"I think that we have strived to do a number of things - one of which is to make television a little less sort of saccharine or standard or predictable," he said. "We do live in a world in which there are class differences."
And class differences mean different audiences, in the words of media scholar John Fiske, of the University of Wisconsin, who insists you can't talk about TV viewers as a single audience.
"Pluralizing the term into audiences at least recognizes that there are differences between viewers that must be taken into account," he writes in Television Culture. "We are not a homogenous society ...Our social system is criss-crossed by axes of class, gender, race, age, nationality, region, politics, and so on, all of which produce strongly marked differences."
Unlike CBS, for example, which still primarily thinks of the TV audience as one huge homogeneous mass, Fox acknowledges such differences and develops programs based on them, Chernin said.
"We have always tried very hard to think about audiences that are underserved," he said. "If you look at some of our biggest hits - 'In Living Color' and 'Beverly Hills 90210' - they came from audiences that had been traditionally underserved by television. In the case of 'In Living Color,' it was sort of a contemporary, hip-hop minority culture. And in the case of '90210,' there hadn't been a realistic teenage show."
Working-class viewers make up one very large and underrepresented audience, Chernin said. And Fox has tried to serve them. It's as simple as that, he said.
The success of the fourth network is not by any means due only to this blue-collar sensibility. Two other major reasons for the success of Fox are surely the network's youth appeal and a certain derring-do in programming - like the decision to broadcast 'Roc' live this season.
And, while much is starting to be made of the youth appeal of 'The Heights' and 'Class of '96', the two shows do have a working-class sensibility.
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The Opera of 'The Scarlet Letter'
Alfred Kazin
Why is there no opera of The Scarlet Letter? The novel opens on a scene, "The Prison-Door," that is so dramatic in its starkness that one half-expects to hear an audience burst into applause. "A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes."
The cruel public spectacle that follows is contained in the fact that although this is a primitive Boston, only some fifteen or twenty years old, "the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave yet a darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the new world." To a 'new world' the Puritans have transferred intact from the old everything rigid, intolerant, aged, and cramped in spirit.
The contrast between old world and new, between the dour old Roger Chillingworth and his estranged and lively young wife Hester Prynne, is fundamental to a novel so overwhelming in its images and driving in its symbols that Henry James said that Hawthorne's method amounted to "importunity."
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
No opera could begin with a scene of more violent contrasts of costume, color, and personality than in what follows. A young woman, tall, "with a figure of perfect elegance," stands on a scaffold before the whole town clasping a three-month-old baby.
On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore.
Hester Prynne, a married woman with a missing husband, could have been sentenced to death for adultery. Condemned always to wear the letter A as a badge of shame, this gifted seamstress has turned it into a resplendent work of art. To make the contrast between Hester's condemnation and the splendor of the scarlet letter, between her dignity on the scaffold and the deadly crowd of gray, bitter old, women watching her, even more operatic and instantly thrilling, she is beautiful, with "dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam," and "deep black eyes."
As she stands there, about to be castigated for her sins by two leading clergymen of Boston who demand the name of her lover, Hester is horrified to see in the crowd her shriveled, twisted husband, Roger Chillingworth, who has been a captive of Indians in the wilderness. Talk about opera! While the town chorus is murmuring against her, her silently fanatical husband staring at her, the ethereal-looking young clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale, frightened and trembling, is also compelled to demand the name of her partner in crime. Since there seems to be no one else in this crude settlement likely to interest Hester Prynne, it is obvious from his double-edged aria that he is her lover.
The extraordinary narrowness of Puritan life and thought is vividly brought out by the little space Boston occupies between the wilderness and the ocean. Theatrically, almost all the action takes place between any two of the four main characters. Hester's only companion is her mischievous, provocative daughter Pearl - an emblem of the "lawlessness" in her mother's suppressed nature. Because Roger has mysterious medical knowledge he is called in to treat the hysterical Hester after her public humiliation, then Arthur, who is deteriorating under his inability to confess his guilt. Roger soon manages to take up residence with Arthur in order to investigate to the full and eventually expose the man he has spotted as his wife's lover.
With Hester trying to control her flamboyant daughter, with Roger secretly preying on Arthur, and Arthur helplessly trying to resist his supposed benefactor who is his "fiend-like" enemy, the concentration of repressed thought and emotion on the part of all the characters becomes more and more explosive, and breaks out only in the grand denouement, the most operatic imaginable. The formal procession of the townspeople in celebration of Arthur's overcharged Election Day sermon ends in Arthur's public confession on the scaffold, embracing Hester and Pearl, before he triumphantly dies. Repression at the heart of this Puritan civilization, a necessary way of life, induces such a consistency of tone that Hawthorne said the novel "is positively a hell-fired story, into which I found it almost impossible to throw any cheering light." He recalled years later "my emotions when I read the last scene of the Scarlet Letter to my wife, just after writing it - tried to read it, rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean, as it subsides after a storm."
Why was he more disturbed by this book than by anything else he ever wrote? He was invading the country of his ancestors, but he had done this in story after story in the collections so wearily named Twice-Told Tales and Mosses From an Old Manse. In The Scarlet Letter, however, he was not just beautifully (and often defensively) invoking the old Puritan world in bits and pieces. Now there surfaced the long interior conflict between natural respect for the past and his equal abhorrence of its theological cruelty. (And Hawthorne was not a church-goer, not even a liberal one.) Only a work of art, of the intensest emotions, could even begin to answer to his struggle with himself over a past in which, dreamlike, he often felt he was living. There was no rejecting the past in the transcendentalist style, which he despised. So there was no great comfort for him in writing this "hell-fired" book. The only relief this bitter man gave himself was in creating his heroine. The only fully admirable character in The Scarlet Letter is Hester. Quite apart from her "elegant figure" and "dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam," Hester is the only character in the book big enough to sustain a conflict with the harsh Puritan world equal to Hawthorne's own. In a book without heroes, Hester has to carry the love story all by herself.
The Scarlet Letter was immediately recognized on its publication in 1850 as the masterpiece a young and self-conscious country was waiting for. It was assimilable in a way that works by two New Yorkers, Melvilles Moby-Dick (1851) and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), were not. New England still seemed the source and center of an Americn civilization founded on Protestant tradition. It is impossible to imagine Melville and Whitman sounding as institutional as Hawthorne. They were engaged, like true American originals, in the prodigious language experiment necessary to their 'primitive' understanding of life, meaning life at the bottom.
Hawthorne was a true son of clerical New England in his formal and even stately style. It had great tonality of sound and enormous suggestiveness - irony was Hawthorne's favorite maneuver in telling a story. The dark and solemn music of his unrelenting commentary on the story he is presenting intervenes in the way an orchestra does at the opera - setting the emotional background and reinforcing it at crucial points. The Scarlet Letter is an elaborately stylized and formal performance in every sense. It never bursts out from the depths of our hidden animal nature as Melville and Whitman do. Just as the novel's climax is a sermon, so the long tradition of reading sermons to an audience that always knew what to expect is also behind Hawthorne's novel. He is constantly beckoning to the reader to join him in sighing over the "positively hell-fired story" he feels compelled to tell. There is a literary domesticity in Hawthorne's many gestures to the reader that is very New England, based as they are on the sermon, the chief medium of Protestantism, and on a congregation to hear it.
In The Scarlet Letter, for once in his anxious literary career, Hawthorne and his immediate New England audience were not at home with each other. An aggressive religious conservative, Orestes A. Brownson, thought the book grossly immoral. "There is an unsound state of public morals," he complained, "when the novelist is permitted, without a scorching rebuke, to select such crimes, and to invest them with all the fascination of genius, and all the charms of a hightly polished style." An article in the Church Review asked, "Is the French era actually begun in our literature?" No, it was just the revisionist era, the literary emancipation of New England from its old clerical tyranny. But this rear guard guessed a vital fact behind the book that admirers did not. Hawthorne was a deeply sexual man. Hester was the creation of someone who loved women, saw them, as Verdi did, as necessarily tragic and alone, but emotionally sacred in a diminished world.
In revisiting the old Puritan tyranny, Hawthorne was lucky, for once, in his opportunity. The Scarlet Letter was his first and only great literary success in a peculiarly hard and solitary career as a writer. He was forty-five when he set out to write the book. He was passionately married to Sophia Peabody, but except with a few college friends, a bitter, usually silent, man hard to know and to like. He scorned the uplift philosophy of the transcendentalists in Concord. Emerson, a prig for all his genius, could not read fiction intelligently. Hawthorne was unique in the literary New England of his day - a grimly honest storyteller fascinated by the perversity in human affairs central to his hereditary Calvinism.
Always worried about money, Hawthorne made an uneasy living writing for magazine editors who paid him a pittance for some of his greatest stories without recognizing their uniqueness. There was a lot of hack work behind him. Like so many other American authors in the nineteenth century, Hawthorne aspired to political appointments. He was a solid adherent of the Democratic Party, which as the party of Andrew Jackson officially represented the masses but so dominated the South that it rejected criticism of slavery. This suited Hawthorne's lack of political idealism. He claimed that New England was as large a lump of earth as his heart could hold. He was fortunate in having as his closest friends Bowdoin classmates who were influential in the Democratic Party. One of them was Franklin Pierce, who in 1852 became the fourteenth president of the United States. In 1846 Hawthorne's party friends secured him appointment as Surveyor of Salem, his native town. He needed to show himself in the Custom House for only a few morning hours before getting back to his writing. In 1848, however, the Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor, running as a Whig, was elected President, and when he assumed office in 1849 Hawthorne was replaced.
This was devastating. Friends - including Longfellow and James Russell Lowell - had to raise a subscription for his support. Hawthorne took his being fired as a summons to begin The Scarlet Letter, long in his mind.</doc></docx>
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Clinton as a free-trader
The Democratic presidential candidate took a sure step by giving support to a North American common market
GOV. BILL CLINTON deserves credit for endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement at the risk of offending major labor organizations whose backing he counts on in the presidential election.
In deference to these constituents, Clinton put some conditions on his promise to advance the accord if he is elected next month. But as president, he would have sufficient leeway to reach supplemental deals with Mexico and Canada on stronger protections for the environment and labor standards, and against unexpected surges in imports damaging U.S. industries.
The free trade pact, on which negotiation was completed in August, would knock down remaining barriers and join the three nations in the world's largest trading bloc - 360 million people with a combined annual output worth $6 trillion. It is an issue in the presidential campaign because President Bush has accused the Arkansan of waffling on the question.
While endorsing the pact, Clinton needled the administration by asserting that the text had "serious omissions," which he proposed correcting with additional accords before ratification.
Clinton suggests creating international commissions on environmental and labor standards. He would reserve the right to re-erect barriers against import surges. Bush's trade representative, Carla Hills, believes there are enough such protections already in the agreement.
Clinton's pro free trade announcement is welcome, and might steer the Democratic leadership away from protectionist demagoguery, such as that espoused by House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who seeks renegotiation of the pact.
Clinton sees far enough ahead to know that free trade is not a killer of jobs but a necessity for creating them through increased exports and greater international prosperity.
Democrats used to be champions of that truth, and should be again.
Shipping sushi to Osaka
IT MAY SOUND like the modern-day equivalent of taking coals to Newcastle, but shipping sushi to Osaka has much to recommend it.
It means jobs, as American workers fashion the sushi, which is then frozen and sent to Japan. It means lower prices for Japanese diners - American sushi costs about half as much as Japanese-made.
And finally, the westbound sushi trade means the United States has made a small rent in Japan's rice curtain, which unfairly shelters a $35 billion a year market from foreign competition.
So, it was good news the other day when Japan relented and let in a shipment of 950 frozen sushi samples from Escondido to the 44-restaurant, Osaka-based Sushi Boy chain. Japanese food inspectors had held the samples hostage for several days in an Osaka warehouse.
The sushi met the requirement that 20 percent of their weight be from ingredients other than rice. But inspectors worried: What if the fish and the rice separate? Well, they decided, sushi just isn't sushi without attachment of fish and the sticky vinegar-flavored rice.
Sushi Boy plans to start making sushi in its Escondido plant in November, shipping about 2 million pieces a year to Japan. In Sushi Boy restaurants (coming soon to the U.S.), a conveyor belt carries sushi in endless circles to diners, who help themselves.
We'll leave to Sushi Boy whether Japanese eaters will buy defrosted, prefab American sushi instead of its fresh domestic counterpart, even at half price.
But we do think an important principle comes out of this sushi skirmish: Governments shouldn't tell consumers what to eat or what not to eat. Protectionism limits choices and raises prices.
If Japan had a kernel of sense, it would open its rice markets to everyone. Protectionism only benefits Japanese rice farmers, co-operatives and a few government bureaucrats. A free market works in the interests of everyone else in the world.
Save the tiger
-Chicago Tribune
WITH SO much international concern about the dwindling number of great beasts such as elephants and rhinoceroses, little attention has been accorded the plight of the tiger.
Elephants are slaughtered for the ivory in their tusks, highly prized for ornamental carvings; rhinoceroses are killed for their fibrous horns, which are used as medicines, aphrodisiacs and for such ceremonial accouterments as dagger handles.
Now comes word from the World Conservation Union in Switzerland that there are perhaps only 7,000 tigers left in the wild, scattered in regions of Asia and Siberia, with most of them in India. Within 10 years, there may be none, except for those in zoos.
The tigers are being killed for their bones, which, crushed and powdered, are a prime ingredient in ancient folk medicines used in China and Chinese communities in variouspartparts of the world.
The Chinese believe that these medicines and 'tiger wine' made from the bones can enhance strength and cure a variety of ailments, among them rheumatism, ulcers, malaria, typhoid, burns, nightmares - even eruptions under the toenails.
The poaching is so severe that in one wild preserve in India, the tigers were reduced from 44 to 15 in two years. And the price for the bones is so rewarding - as much as $170 a pound and escalating - that poaching is expected to increase, leading to almost certain doom for the tigers.
In response, the Chinese have begun experimenting with breeding farms to produce enough 'industrial tigers' to satisfy the demand for bones.
Ours will be a richer world with tigers still in the wild; it would be richer still if such animals weren't diminished by ignoble or dubious human activity.
All shook up
Once somnolent, the campaign awakens suddenly with agreement of the Bush and Clinton camps to hold three debates
AFTER WEEKS of horsing around, the presidential candidates have agreed to debate. This is good. The American people will finally get to see how George Bush and Bill Clinton match up. That's the best way to make a choice: the old-fashioned way. No sound bites or slick ads, just a contest of mind vs. mind.
Coupled with Ross Perot's re-entry, the debates save the race from boring inevitability. Clinton's lead was growing steadily. Nothing Bush did worked. Not family values. Not going negative. Not the pork barrel. Not train trips through mid-America.
Say what you want about Perot (and we have), his sprite-like dashes on and off stage kept us from falling asleep. He's turned the campaign from something resembling, say, 'King Lear,' into something more like 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'
Was it coincidence that Clinton and Bush agreed on debate dates within hours of Perot's self-resuscitation? Perhaps.
More fun under the Big Top is suggested by Perot's inclusion in the debates.
His running mate, James 'Man of Steel' Stockdale, a graduate of a North Vietnamese prison camp, apparently will join Al Gore and Dan Quayle in a single vice-presidential debate. Public-school graduate Quayle says he's at an educational disadvantage against private-school grad Gore, who's also a Vietnam vet. We doubt Quayle will bring up the Indiana National Guard.
In the main events, Perot will undoubtedly force discussion of the budget deficit, not a favorite topic of the Big Two. Bush has piled more than $1.2 trillion onto the national debt, and critics think President Clinton would be an even bigger contributor.
For settling the debate, we commend both the Clinton and Bush camps. They did the right thing, and each side compromised to do so.
Three presidential debates ought to bring the candidates, and the issues, into focus. All that's required is for voters to tune in. Let the shows begin.
Enact workers comp reform now
GOV. WILSON'S new list of 'reforms' for the state's workers compensation system increases the mystery of why - politics aside - he vetoed all of the Legislature's plan to achieve $1.15 billion in savings. Several parts of the Republican governor's package match or closely resemble the Democrat-sponsored legislation he rejected.
He challenges the legislators to approve his new version without hearings and without much change at a special session starting Thursday.
Similarities between the vetoed bills and the governor's new plan include limits on numbers of medical evaluations of injured workers, higher standards of proof in claims of mental stress and use of managed care organizations to hold down costs of treating injuries. Wilson also renewed his backing for repeal of the minimum rate law assuring profits for workers' compensation insurance companies - they get 32.8 percent of the premium dollar for profit and expenses whatever their inefficiencies.
The overriding need in realizing savings is to control costs borne by employers for the $11 billion program covering workers' on-the-job injuries. Savings also would permit increases in the inadequate benefits that finally reach workers. The seemingly clear aim of public policy, unfortunately, is buried in partisan rhetoric, with Wilson vowing to seek the electoral defeat of legislators who oppose him on the question.
The two sides should call a truce in the political war and quickly enact the reforms - including sensible anti-fraud measures - on which they agree or almost agree.
Those savings can be realized now. Then the governor and Legislature should give longer consideration to proposals that call for deep thought - like changes in the law that would profoundly affect the rights of injured workers.
With the state's economic health and the welfare of millions of jobholders at stake, this is no matter for political game-playing.
The last lion
VINCENT HALLINAN died Friday at age 95. He lived just long enough to:
Scan the obituaries of J. Edgar Hoover and the rest of his devoted enemies: "They're all dead," he once said. "It's a great disappointment to me."
See most of what were once his ultra-radical notions, such as civil rights, become the law of the land: "How anybody could stay out of the civil rights disturbances and still hold up his head, I don't know."
Become a very wealthy man, doing well by doing good. As probably the best trial lawyer of his era, he pioneered in bucking the system with personal injury suits that required Big Business to pay damages to victims of corporate negligence: "The only reason for going to law is to get money, except in criminal cases."
Justify all those years of serious boxing. In his 90s, confronted by a mugger, he knocked the man flat. He didn't condemn such people. "I think that men have become more cynical and more desperate. I think we are in a period that is marking the collapse of an economic system."
Soften his views on religion. Once an altar boy, he was a Navy officer in World War I when he read the works of Thomas Paine and became an ardent atheist who sued the Catholic Church to prove the existence of God. Much later: "A lot of people need religion. The world is a rough, tough place."
See one of his sons, Terence, elected as a member of the Board of Supervisors in a city of refuge for Vincent Hallinan's father, an Irish fugitive from British law.
Note how editorialists of The Examiner regarded him in the early years with choleric contempt, then with furious respect, later with a certain esteem and, finally, with proud admiration.
We won't see his like again.
Hands off the library
The plan to cut the budget of San Francisco's libraries by 10 percent is insane; Jordan should reconsider
WE URGE Mayor Jordan to attend one of the upcoming meetings of community residents who are concerned about the effects his proposed budget cuts of $1.7 million would have on our city library system.
The mayor needs to see firsthand what the branch libraries are doing for our city.
Visit North Beach, for example, on Wednesday nights, when the branch is open, and ask the many elderly residents. You'll find how much they rely on it.
Or the Richmond branch, where many of our recent Russian immigrants are learning new career skills, and where every day a goggle of students go to do homework.
Or the Main Library across Civic Center Plaza from City Hall, where the chess program provides the only warm, safe neighborhood magnet for the 5,000 children of the Tenderloin.
</doc><doc register="press editorial" n="02">
Powerless, but not hopeless
FPL STRUGGLES TO COPE
HURRICANE Andrew has darkened not only moods and spirits, but blacked out homes and businesses as well. That is causing all sorts of inconveniences, and in some cases endangering personal health and security. It's just one of the countless grim legacies that the killer storm left behind.
As of yesterday afternoon, more than 750,000 people in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties had no electricity, and Florida Power & Light was urging many of them to brace for a long wait. Bothersome as that situation is, it demands patience and a general understanding of what is prolonging the darkness.
FPL personnel are being flooded with complaint calls from people demanding immediate restoration of their electric power. Their frustration is of course understandable. But that frustration is being inflamed, irresponsibly, by some local radio hosts and a few hysterical listeners who are urging the public to call the company to protest. They are part of the problem, not the solution. The effect of their behavior is to make it harder for FPL to do an already overwhelming job.
South Floridians must understand that FPL is scrambling to restore power as soon as possible. Crews are working around the clock to achieve that goal, beginning with priority areas such as hospitals, shelters for Andrew's thousands of homeless victims, police, and fire stations. They labor under intense national scrutiny, which adds to the pressure.
Some power outages are actually a pre-cautionary measure, safeguarding people and property from potential harm. In most cases, though, power is out because FPL equipment in the three counties suffered severe damage that can't be repaired overnight. A case in point is FPL's Turkey Point nuclear plant, which was not producing any power because Andrew blew away virtually all of its transmission wires.
Admittedly, Turkey Point was supposed to have done better. Supposedly hurricane-proof power pylons there collapsed in the onslaught. No doubt FPL will soon learn of other storm plans that failed, and will have to recoup and explain.
But pledging an all-out restoration effort, the company says that it expects to restore electricity to all of Broward County by Thursday. In Dade, many residents north of Kendall will be without power for a week, and those south of Kendall can expect to spend three weeks or more in the dark. That is roughly consistent with the pace of power restoration in Charleston, S.C., in the wake of Hurricane Hugo - a less destructive storm.
Unfortunately, no amount of complaining will shorten those timetables. It may, in fact, slow recovery, destroy morale, and feed a darkness that is more than literal.
Dry well rings hollow
WATER PROMISES UNKEPT
WATER IS proving to be the most critical problem left behind by Andrew - not the anticipated flooding, which was not as bad as expected, but broken pipes and seepage elsewhere. The latter left much of the region's water-distribution system with zero pressure and residents without safe drinking water. For safety's sake, all of Dade County remains under a boil-water order, but given the total destruction in Florida City, Homestead, and Southwest Dade, and absent electricity, those were difficult demands with which to comply.
The inconvenience and annoyance of Monday and Tuesday could turn to something much worse later in the week. Especially if the damaged Black Point sewage treatment plant can't be brought back on line or bypassed. Functioning public water and sewer systems are society's first line of defense against epidemic illnesses such as cholera and typhoid. With health department officials predicting that it may be two weeks before the water system is fully operational, delivering water safe to drink, there is a sense of alarm assuaged only by the willingness of people to share. Indeed, bottlers who showed up to distribute free water were a Godsend for many of the hardest-pressed residents.
When the crisis passes, however, there must be some answers to the question: Why? Following Hurricane Hugo, water and sewer officials were assuring Dade residents that they, and their system, were prepared and would function even in a Category 4 storm. Emergency generators were in place at every pump station. The assurances ring all too hollow now, and a full investigation is warranted.
We shall overcome
THE REBUILDING BEGINS
THOUSANDS of South Floridians have the numb feeling of mourners, seeing little reminders of normal life that offer sharp contrast to the depth of despair.
Some of us have lost only the familiar comforts of the nice old oak, or electricity. Many others, though, have lost the houses that were home, that were built with hope, sweat, and large, scary mortgages. A few have lost loved ones, paying the storm's ultimate price.
Will South Florida, especially Cutler Ridge, Homestead, and Kendall, ever recover? In a way, no. Those of us who have taken great losses will bear scars in our souls. Some of us now have financial burdens from which we may not fully recover. Nearly all of us will carry the new and clear knowledge of our vulnerability. How so much can be lost in a few hours. Only fools can say today, it can't happen to me.
Some day, though, the rubble will be cleared. The canopy of green will spread anew. Institutions will be reborn and rebuild <&|>sic, and so will families. South Florida has proved - again and again - its resiliency through hurricanes, through financial collapses, and through sudden, large waves of penniless refugees.
Miami and all of South Florida have always emerged stronger and it <&|>sic will again. Pioneers and refugees alike have amply proved, we can and we do rebuild from little.
We have the most important resource - ourselves. We have neighbors who continue to report to duty at our police and fire departments, utility companies, hospitals, and other essential work places, despite their own worries at home. In fact, some are working even though they have no homes.
We also have neighbors who have performed those big and little acts of heroism and kindness: the rescue of trapped families, the sharing of fresh water, the two hours of time with a chain saw to clear a driveway.
We will need much more kindness and heroism, big and little, for months to come. We will need patience now to restore basic services, and in the long-term to restore the flow of commerce. We will need courage, too - and confidence drawn from the knowledge that we have coped. We can cope. And we will cope.
Bush: A fighting speech
LET THE DEBATE BE JOINED
AMERICANS have waited nearly four years to hear what George Bush gave them on Thursday night: an animated, tough, and forthright defense of his approach to American government. It was an impressive and remarkable moment. Impressive, because the president combined strong terms with passionate argument. Remarkable, because he has waited four years to do it.
His supporters would protest, as he himself did before a jubilant Republican convention, that he has been pressing the main elements of his program for his entire term. But his vigorous convention address effectively disproves that. The speech, and the far-flung program that it contained, had earnestness and urgency, if not always freshness. In the 48 months since the last Republican convention, the president has displayed such fervor only in foreign affairs.
George Bush can - and on Thursday did - argue forcefully for his brand of supply side economics: for spending freezes and income tax cuts, tort reform, unregulated enterprise, and his beloved tax cut on capital gains. He defended open trade. He rejected national programs for health care (and even, by implication, threatened to freeze or cut Medicare and Medicaid). Like these ideas or not, there was no mistaking his commitment to them.
But this ferocious advocacy is a skill that, however potent, he has hardly ever employed. Nearly all of the achievements in domestic affairs for which he took credit - the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and (incredibly) a Civil Rights Act that he had first vetoed - were conceived and promoted by others. His curious passivity has persisted even through 19 or more months of economic hardship.
So how to explain the sudden vigor of Thursday night? Insiders give incoming Chief of Staff James Baker much of the credit. Some of the speech's most forceful language was reportedly inserted in the final day or two. That would suggest Mr. Baker's belated influence.
Mr. Bush, on the other hand, insists that advocacy would be wasted on an intractable Congress. True enough, Congress has acquitted itself miserably. (The president expended nearly a third of his speech saying just how miserably.) Yes, Republicans hold little sway there. And no, presidents don't have much power to steer domestic policy on their own. But those are all the reasons why the fire of Thursday night should have been lit 20 months ago, when Mr. Bush's popularity was stratospheric. Instead, he squandered that opportunity and now must scurry to recoup.
One speech won't achieve that for him. Nor will several. Americans must come to believe, in the next 73 days, that the zeal of this convention won't promptly go back into mothballs if George Bush goes back to the White House. That won't be easy.
But on Thursday night, he proved that it is possible, and that he means to do it. If so, the historically important differences between Mr. Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton should get a sprightly airing and hearty debate. The public deserves no less, and is hungry for more.
Still better in the Bahamas
AS THE PINDLING ERA ENDS
SOUTH Florida has intimate ties to the Bahamas. It's as if both places formed part of the same Caribbean country, a land of islands and seaside cities that transcends national borders, joined by history, geography, and the perpetual movement of peoples. Indeed, Miami is closer in spirit to the Bahamas than to much of Florida.
Hence, events on the islands have a special resonance in South Florida. They needn't even be Earth-shattering events. This week, for example, an era came quietly to an end in the Bahamas. It ended peacefully, as Great Britain's dominion of the islands ended in 1973. As peacefully as life in general passes in the Bahamas, islands of openness and relaxed tolerance.
Lynden Pindling, the founding father of Bahamian independence and the country's prime minister during the last 25 years, lost Wednesday's general elections to Hubert Ingraham. Mr. Pindling graciously conceded defeat. That is how he has mostly governed these lovely islands - with graciousness and steadiness. Even when his government was accused of being autocratic. Even when he was under international scrutiny, accused of corruption and of letting drug-traffickers ship their wares through the Bahamas. The allegations, though worrisome, were never proved.
The end of the Pindling era will leave most things as they are in the Bahamas. The new prime minister does not intend to alter an economic policy that relies on tourism and on conveying the Bahamas's tranquility and stability to the world. Who would be so foolish as to alter paradise?
Two cases, two concerns
CHILDREN IN THE MIDDLE
SHARON McCRACKEN, a 50-year-old lesbian from Fort Lauderdale, was convinced that she would be an excellent foster mother. So she worked doggedly through the system to convince officials too. Now she has done so.
Meantime, a longtime Dade County wrestling coach, a man revered by children and admired by adults, worked through a different system - the courts. Now he is suspected of using it to get young boys for his sexual pleasure.
Nothing binds these dissimilar cases except this: They both offer compelling reasons for the South Florida community to examine continuously what it means when it avers to do "what is best for the children." Both cases demand that people as individuals, not as part of arbitrary classifications, be judged fit - or not - to contribute to the welfare of children.
Dick Jordan stands accused of sexually molesting dozens of young athletes over a 14-year period. The torment, sadly, stills haunts many who trusted him.
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What voters should watch for - and ignore
The season of campaign sleaze is upon us, but there are ways for voters to filter it out.
So you think the presidential campaign has been nasty so far? You ain't seen nothing yet.
As Election Day grows nearer and the stakes get higher, this contest will head where all the others have - mudward.
Despite the candidates' high-minded pledges to steer clear of personal attacks, ample amounts of dirt have been hurled by both sides already.
Don't despair. Tune out the discouraging spectacle of infantile antics and tune in what's really important.
The three most important topics are: Deficit, deficit and deficit. How the next president plans to eliminate this $333.5 billion drag on the economy will dictate everything else the government can and cannot do. Listen for a credible commitment to deal with the deficit, get the economy growing and create jobs before launching programs.
Next: Everything else. How will the candidates resolve the nation's other pressing problems, and how will they pay to do it?
On their agenda should be coping with the health care crisis; repairing crumbling bridges, highways and water mains; reversing and preventing environmental damage; reviving educational achievement; reducing crime; and stemming a growing intolerance of racial and other differences.
No president can, or should be, solely responsible for curing these ills, but his leadership will be crucial. Acknowledging the limitations of the highest office and envisioning a role for individual and community efforts are also vital elements of being 'presidential.'
At last as many topics are safe to ignore: Murphy Brown's baby, Hillary Clinton's legal theories, Barbara Bush's motherly mien, anyone's cookie-baking proclivities, Dan Quayle's creative spelling and Bill Clinton's creative grammar.
By following these guidelines, you may discover precious nuggets of leadership gleaming amid the slime. With luck and effort, you'll be able to cast a vote in November without feeling dirty.
Help protect home buyers
Home buyers deserve the right to know what condition home they're buying - warts and all.
It's a maxim of home buying that during the first hard rain after you move in, the basement turns into a scale model of Okefenokee Swamp.
Or the wiring opts for early retirement. Or the furnace emits noises usually associated with processing raw scrap metal.
And, innocently or not, the sellers knew but didn't mention the flaw before pocketing your cash and leaving town.
Mandatory sell-disclosure laws promise to lower the frequency of such unpleasant, often litigious surprises - although they may never be eliminated, given the cantankerous potential of both houses and humans.
Five states have such statutes, ending at least some of the uncertainty inherent in buying a home - the costliest purchase most people ever make.
That's why everyone gains from the get-it-on-the-table openness that mandatory disclosure laws foster.
Buyers appear to file fewer complaints, say regulators in California, which has required disclosure the longest, since 1987. Most brokers and agents say such laws short-circuit debate about whether they told buyers of defects - the accusation behind two of three lawsuits now filed against them.
Even sellers gain. They needn't rip houses apart seeking flaws - just disclose known ones. That can nudge them to fix faults that could slow a sale - or leave them liable afterward.
Disclosure laws also wouldn't end buyers' need to get houses inspected, or absolve agents and brokers from their legal duty to disclose known defects.
But such laws would smooth home buying for all involved. More states should adopt them. Making the first mortgage payment should be the biggest jolt most home buyers have to face.
Andrew's lesson: Disaster planning pays dividends
Florida's smooth evacuation is a testimony to federal, state and local emergency planning.
When Hurricane Andrew struck, South Florida was ready.
That doesn't happen by accident.
A remarkably well-choreographed evacuation effort succeeded in convincing an estimated 700,000 people to move out of harm's way.
Such plans are a testimony to intense federal, state and local preparation.
The federal government chipped in with a remarkable piece of computer wizardry called 'SLOSH,' for "sea, lake and overland surges from hurricanes," that predicts which areas due to be hit by a hurricane will be flooded.
Another computer model predicts how long it will take to evacuate specific areas, so state offices of emergency preparedness know when to start issuing evacuation orders.
Then there are local efforts, like Miami Beach's mock disaster drills for the elderly over the past three weeks.
More grim news is probably on its way, as reports from hard-hit areas come in and the hurricane rages on. But the teams who prepared for this disaster, and those who heeded their warnings, deserve credit for keeping that bad news from being far worse.
Protect telephone privacy
Congress should ensure that federal snoops after our phone records get the busy signal more often.
As you read this, some FBI, IRS or other federal agent could be trolling through your phone records to learn who you called, when and for how long.
You don't have to be a criminal. Or even under suspicion. And you can't stop it: The Supreme Court has agreed your phone records belong to the phone company - which routinely provides tens of thousands of them to anyone with a federal subpoena.
But Congress, where legislation is now being studied, can do something: Tighten the standards government agents must meet to get local and toll-phone records. Those records can disclose as much as conversations and should get equal protection from casual government 'fishing expeditions.'
They don't now. Just ask the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Its phone records were among those the IRS subpoenaed when trying to learn who leaked an embarrassing story to reporter Gregory Millman - even though, at the time, Millman's only contact with the group had been to call for an application.
The foundation's phone network, Bell Atlantic, got 22,000 such federal orders in 1991. Pacific Bell already has received more than 12,000 this year.
Clearly, reviewing phone records has become routine. An agency need claim only that they're relevant to some investigation; neither judge nor grand jury reviews such claims. But to wiretap, an agency must affirm to a judge that the subject is under investigation. Then, it can record only those parts of conversations linked to the activity being probed.
Congress should make it just as tough to see and copy phone records.
Law officers should find this no more a burden than the workable laws that regulate wiretaps. In a democracy, the focus should be protecting the rights of the majority, not nabbing a few crooks.
Where the feds go fishing should be determined by more than just a hunch.
Don't reject private initiatives in education
Private corporations could help the USA's public schools make higher grades.
When school bells ring this fall, hundreds of businesses will show up in the nation's classrooms. Corporations provide mentors, scholarships and equipment, from notebooks to computers.
A 1991 study found 65% of grade-school students surveyed were enrolled in districts that received a total of nearly $1 billion in cash, materials or services from businesses.
Now a bigger experiment is in progress - contracting businesses to run public schools - and, despite misgivings, it's an experiment worth trying as long as public oversight is retained.
The private firms hire teachers, maintain school buildings and select subjects the students are taught.
Baltimore and Miami school officials have given Minnesota-based Educational Alternatives a contract to manage some schools. The company's new approach promises personally tailored study programs and smaller classes.
Entrepreneur Christopher Whittle's Edison Project plans 1,000 for-profit schools that he says could replace publicly run schools.
With test scores falling and dropout rates rising, such new approaches should be welcomed, albeit with caution.
For-profit public education raises a daunting question. How will these schools make money for themselves without cutting educational corners?
For-profit schools must not be allowed to skim off highly motivated and affluent students, a guaranteed cost cutter that would hurt those most in need.
They cannot be permitted to skimp on the product they produce - education - the way a fast-food chain can cut down the size of a hamburger. The goal is not to churn out products driven by profit margins, but well-rounded students who can succeed in college, in vocational school and in life.
And the schools must not become an excuse to shift accountability away from public officials, parents and taxpayers.
School officials must assure that for-profit schools avoid those pitfalls. But they can't afford to rule out new ideas thoughtlessly. For-profit schools deserve a chance to make their case.
Soaked by Andrew
On another subject, USA TODAY argues the storm shows federal flood insurance should be junked.
Taxpayers will be lucky if Hurricane Andrew lets them dodge another bailout - of the federal flood insurance fund.
Flood insurance - sure to be soaked in claims by Andrew - is supposed to be self-funded but has been only since 1987. The fund now has $359 million from premiums. But there is no certainty that will be enough.
If Hurricane Andrew does its worst, moving from the Gulf coast to flood inland areas, the fund will be hard pressed. And this is only the first hurricane of the season.
If the fund runs out of money, taxpayer loans will be the only alternative to default.
That's a needless risk. Congress and Bush should consign flood insurance to the same scrap heap reserved for other storm detritus. Those who use it can buy insurance from private companies.
The federal fund puts taxpayers at risk to provide insurance for those who can afford to buy costly coastal property - 82% of all policies - or those who build in flood plains. Such unsafe areas now have 40% more structures than before the insurance began.
Structures for which taxpayers could be left footing the bill after the next 'big one,' unless Congress acts now.
Federal jobs programs must be made to work
The federal government should play a vital role in providing job training for those hit by economic forces.
There's nothing like the fear of losing a job to change someone's tune on federally funded jobs programs.
President Bush joined the chorus this week with a belated but welcome call to increase federal spending for jobs programs he once sought to cut.
Bush's proposal: Raise job-training spending from $740 million to $2 billion over five years to train the unemployed, youth and displaced workers, including those threatened by the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Bill Clinton has a similar job-training plan that has one great advantage over Bush's: He says how to pay for it.
Clinton calls for a 1.5% payroll tax on employers, but Bush won't say how he'll finance his proposal unless he wins re-election.
Apart from spending, both candidates have the right idea about a strong federal role in job training. When trade agreements, a prolonged recession, global competition and technological advances leave workers stranded, government has every reason to intervene - and a track record to prove that intervention helps.
The few studies there are of federal jobs programs show most have succeeded at improving the employability of those who go through them: They raise average wages of disadvantaged trainees between $400 and $800 a year, teach life skills and speed up re-employment.
Some changes that could improve that record:
Get a clear picture of private-sector job needs before funding new programs. Some programs persist in training people for the kinds of low-skill manufacturing jobs that are rapidly disappearing.
Make sure programs work by measuring the success of their graduates. That enhances the value of the training for those who complete it, as well as holding the programs accountable.
Streamline the administration of the 60 federal programs and 51 state programs to eliminate duplicate efforts.
Federal jobs programs may not work miracles, but they do work.
Unite the United Way
On another subject, USA TODAY outlines the challenges facing United Way's new head.
After a stormy year of financial mis-management and falling revenue, the United Way of America could use a bit of peace.
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Quit Feeding the Flab
Here's one of the iron invariables of U.S. politics: Someone will always come up with another reason to draw more money into Washington and parcel it back out to the governments back home. We of course have the limitless 'unmet needs' of which state and local officials readily make us aware, but now our Keynesian economists fear that forced public-sector thrift during the recession could spiral into something more depressing for the whole country.
Sounds like something the Democrats might propose. But leave aside the doubtful theory and take a hard look at the premise: Where are the jolting cuts at the state and local levels? The broad, outrageous truth is that while nearly every other corner of American life has had to economize lately - even the Postal Service is downsizing, for heaven's sake - the governments closest to home have just kept growing and growing and growing.
To be fair, much of it is to attend to mandates from the next level up. A lot, however, is just nest feathering or the building of empires. Nor is this the first thing cut, either; that honor usually belongs to library hours. But before revving up the fiscal engines, consider our favorite measurement arrow, the payroll.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that growth in state and local employment - mostly the latter - actually accelerated between July 1991 and last month. As the rest of the nation cinched its belt, 250,000 more names were added to the 15 million on these payrolls, which include school districts. Seasonally adjusted numbers show this increase continued as spring became summer, when the start of an 'austere' new fiscal year was finally supposed to cut into the ranks. And it's not all because of a youth-jobs program, either.
BLS has broken down the numbers by states, through June. In some instances, there's evidence of real tightening: in Massachusetts, New York and Illinois. Elsewhere, some progress on the state rolls has been undone at the various local levels, which are often adjuncts of state government; this mixed record is true in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, California and especially Florida. Finally, there are states growing fatter in both categories; Wisconsin, Arkansas, Washington, Hawaii and, most strikingly, Texas. While Ann Richards was wowing the press corps, the public payroll grew by more than 30,000, or nearly 3%, over the past year in her strapped state.
An organization of conservative elected representatives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, this month fleshed out the municipal side of the story. The nation's mayors are constantly caterwauling about federal cutbacks, but ALEC found that though Washington is sending the cities less to administer, overall federal aid to urban residents increased in the 1980s.
More important, the statehouses and the tax bases of the cities themselves more than made up the revenue difference - $3.57 for every federal dollar lost. New York City over this period gained $7 for every $1 it gave up.
Detroit and St. Louis lost ground in funding, but they also suffered huge depopulation during the 1980s. But some shrinking cities, Atlanta and Philadelphia in particular, made out like bandits, according to the ALEC study. And Washington, D.C., which lost a quarter of its population during the cunning Marion Barry years, not only collected considerably more locally, it increased its federal handle.
Denizens of the nation's capital know that the boodle didn't go toward improved public services. What was it spent on, in cities across the U.S.? ALEC found the biggest gainers, more than the woeful schools and hospitals, were the public-housing bureaucracies and mass transit. The culprit? Inefficiency. ALEC calculated that operating costs, adjusted for inflation and population changes, rose an average of 28% in the 1980s in 41 surveyed cities. The biggest leap was in the District of Columbia, but New York, San Jose and San Francisco were close behind.
The reason, according the ALEC, comes to down to having too many people on staff, and paying them too much relative to the private sector. Not only has this practice been unabated by the downturn, but specialists in public finance seem to think it will continue.
And why not? The Center for the Study of the States reports that state tax revenue was up 8.9% for the second quarter of 1992 over the same period a year ago. It attributes the bulge to the higher taxes enacted last year during the supposed fiscal crises. The payroll numbers nationwide confirm that this money is being extracted from gaunt taxpayers to perpetuate flabbiness in government. It lies with the voters to stop the bloat.
The Korea-China Calculus
It had to happen that South Korea and China would finally go public with their status as political bedfellows. The two announced in Beijing that they are normalizing diplomatic relations. Now is the time to start thinking about how to help Taiwan.
Ties between China and South Korea have been growing at North Korea's expense since the late 1980s. China's tyrants don't mind running their own communist state, but they expect better sense from their friends. And China's party leaders have apparently noticed that their old flame, gaunt communist North Korea doesn't stack up to the rich, democratic-capitalist South.
So far, so good. We can all celebrate this Beijing-Seoul embrace as one more way of isolating communist North Korea, and so bringing Asia one move closer to polishing off the regional end games of the Cold War.
The dark side of this otherwise pleasant development, however, is that Pyongyang is not the only place in Asia where a government is waking up lonelier today for Seoul's tryst with Beijing. The other odd man out is the democratizing Nationalist Chinese government on Taiwan.
This is where the world's leading democracies would be wise to step in as a friend and escort, right away. It is not remotely in the interest of peace, stability or generally ending the Cold War in Asia to isolate Taiwan further. By virtue of its trade, investment and brilliantly successful economic example, Taiwan happens to be one of the most powerful forces engendering liberal change in mainland China.
Now, however, Taiwan stands alone as China's declared prey in the region, recognized by only 29 countries, while 197 others recognize the communist mainland regime. Notified last week, of Seoul's imminent diplomatic shift, Taipei pre-empted the break by announcing that it would freeze out South Korea - cutting diplomatic ties, suspending all air links as of September 15 and ending preferential trade treatment.
The actions of both Seoul and Taipei are understandable. South Korea in recognizing China is seeking foremost to eliminate the immediate local threat posed by North Korea. And Seoul, in ditching the democratizing capitalists of Taipei for the communists of Beijing, is following a precedent set in the 1970s by many free countries that have pandered to China with far less to gain. On Taiwan, President Lee Teng-hui is under pressure to take some face-saving action against South Korea. Democratization on Taiwan has come far enough so that President Lee must answer to an electorate that is irate over this latest diplomatic defection. Taiwan's people have been throwing bricks at the South Korean Embassy in Taipei, and boycotting dealers of South Korea's Hyundai cars.
But the important fight here is not the current tiff between Taiwan and South Korea. What matters on a world scale is the basic fight to end the communism that continues to endanger the peace in East Asia. China is for South Korea a convenient bedfellow right now, but not a worthy one. The world's democracies could greatly lessen the blow to Taiwan by moving fast to show that they appreciate their natural friends.
America, instead of threatening to wall out China-made underwear in the name of supporting free trade and human rights, could more clearly and consistently penalize China's faults simply by showing support for Taiwan's virtues. The General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade could stop holding up Taipei's application pending Beijing's admission, and wave Taiwan through the gate first. The goal should be to insure that South Korea's gain is a loss of status not for Taiwan and Chinese liberalism, but for communism in Asia.
The Clintons and the Lawyers
President Bush claimed last week that Bill Clinton "is being backed by practically every trial lawyer who ever wore a tasseled loafer." But don't take his word for it. Listen to the trial lawyers who know Mr. Clinton best.
"I can never remember an occasion," writes David H. Williams, when Mr. Clinton "failed to do the right thing where we trial lawyers were concerned." Mr. Williams should know. As president of the Arkansas Trial Lawyers Association, he's been sending out fund-raising pleas for Governor Clinton to his fellow plaintiff's attorneys around the country.
"Can I recommend that your folks put their money behind Bill Clinton for president? Not just yes, but hell yes," Mr. Williams wrote on July 10 to the head of the Houston trial lawyers' group. "Dig down deep and give."
Some of our best friends are lawyers, but their solicitude as a class for Mr. Clinton deserves more exposure than it's so far received. The decline of the U.S. justice system is one of the major political issues of the 1990s. A nation that has 70% of the world's lawyers, and its most backlogged courts, is in danger of becoming less a nation of laws than a nation of lawyers and lawsuits.
Studies out of Brookings and elsewhere have estimated the burden of lawsuits on the economy from $120 billion to as much as $300 billion a year. But the social cost may be even higher. The threat of lawsuits has stopped the development of birth-control devices and made delivering babies a high-risk profession. A family is now suing in Maryland because of injuries its daughter sustained playing high school football. Her enterprising attorney claims the board of education failed to warn her of football's risks, a sport whose violence is on TV every autumn weekend. Had she been barred from playing, of course, the school could have been sued for Title IX sex discrimination. Now the costs of her playing will be borne by the school district's taxpayers - not to mention that some judge may well force them to drop football.
This social impact, by the way, is why Hillary Clinton's legal ideas are a legitimate issue, contrary to the view that every criticism of her intellect is somehow unfair. Pat Buchanan and other Republicans strain credibility when they say she equates 'marriage' with 'slavery'. It's her advocacy of "children's rights" that is fair game. Mrs. Clinton has said that children should be "competent persons" under the law with standing to sue.
The law already allows for this in cases of abuse, as it should, but Mrs. Clinton wants to go much further. "Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child's future should not be made unilaterally by parents," she wrote in 1979. This is the sort of litigation liberalism that uses 'rights' as a cudgel against the common sense decisions of communities. (In a letter nearby, the Children's Defense Fund denies that it's litigious.)
This world view is also why the plaintiff's bar so loves Clinton&Clinton. In Mr. Williams's fund-raising letter, he explains how legal reform was stopped dead in Arkansas in 1987. "We immediately got on the horn to the Governor about this and the tort reform part of the legislative package was pulled," Mr. Williams boasts. "It has never come back up."
He can barely contain himself. "During another session, I remember a bill that had whistled through the Arkansas House and Senate that would have given immunity from liability to 'good Samaritan' doctors who provided medical care to indigent patients," the trial lawyer writes. "Once again we got on the horn" to Governor Clinton, who vetoed the bill. This is the same candidate who claims to be outraged by the lack of health insurance for the poor.
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The Primary Results
Tuesday's primary election had more than its share of surprises and close races. The voter turnout in the Savannah area - somewhere around 50 percent - was encouraging as well.
The biggest shocker on the local scene was Joe Mahany's upset of incumbent Chatham County Commission Chairman Robert McCorkle in the Democratic primary. Mr. McCorkle, who has served on the commission for 22 years, was beaten by Mr. Mahany by nearly a 2-to-1 margin.
The chairman's defeat by members of his own party is a clear indication that voters want a change in leadership. The victor, Mr. Mahany, will face one of two Republicans, Commissioner Julie Smith or Ray Gaster, who were the top vote-getters in the Republican primary. No matter who wins in the November general election, Chatham Countians will begin 1993 with a new commission chairman on board.
In other contests, the crowded fields in the 1st District and 11th District congressional races virtually guaranteed runoff elections, which will be held Aug. 11. Barbara Christmas, a Democrat, ran a strong campaign in the 1st District and will face either Buddy DeLoach or Bryan Ginn in the runoff. That winner will run against State Rep. Jack Kingston of Savannah, who easily won the Republican nomination.
In the newly-drawn 11th District, Cynthia McKinney and George DeLoach will vie for the Democratic nod, while Republicans Woodrow Lovett and Savannahian Michael Pratt will fight to carry their party's flag. All four have an unenviable task, since this crazily configured district stretches from Atlanta to Augusta to Savannah.
In various judgeship races, Charles Mikell handily won the election for Superior Court judge, proving that his experience on the State Court bench paid off. State Supreme Court Justice Leah Sears-Collins, a Savannah native, won her race to keep her seat, guaranteeing a measure of diversity on the high court.
One disappointment was the statewide race between Labor Commissioner Al Scott and challenger David Poythress for the Democratic nomination. Mr. Scott has been doing an admirable job as labor commissioner; Mr. Poythress has been manufacturing issues and tossing mud. Unfortunately, the below-the-belt tactics apparently had an impact in the three-person race (Savannahian Frances Bright Johnson did surprisingly well) and Mr. Scott and Mr. Poythress go into the runoff.
On a more upbeat note, local voters wisely chose to return Dorothy Pelote and Tom Bordeaux to the Georgia House. There, they will be rejoined by Diane Harvey Johnson, who had little trouble reclaiming her old House seat.
On the Chatham County Commission, Republican David Saussy turned back former chairman Bill Stephenson's bid to get back on the board in the 1st District. He goes on to face Democrat Marty Felser. Incumbent Deanie Frazier was the leading vote-getter in the 5th District, but Democratic challenger Clifton Jones Jr. forced her into a runoff. In the 7th District, Eddie DeLoach won his race and will follow in the footsteps of his father, outgoing Commissioner James DeLoach.
In school board races, congratulations are in order for incumbents Daniel Washington and Andy Way and former State Rep. DeWayne Hamilton. All three won their respective nominations, and Mr. Washington and Mr. Hamilton will join the board because they have no opposition in the fall. Mr. Way, a Republican, goes on to face Democrat K.B. Raut.
Credit is also due Tax Commissioner Barbara Kiley, who handily won the Democratic nomination. She meets Republican Bill Atkinson in November.
A final winner Tuesday was the voting public. Getting people to the polls for primaries isn't easy. Yet, half the voters in Chatham County did their duty.
That's a positive trend. It's also one that the public, and the politicians, should try to build on through November and beyond.
President Should Settle Up
Some local Democrats are getting some cheap laughs at the expense of President Bush, who still owes the city some $14,000 for a campaign visit here back in March.
Actually, that's not too surprising. Most politicians are notoriously slow in paying their debts. Sitting presidents are no exception.
Still, it would behoove the president if he settled up with City Hall sometime soon. While the delinquency isn't going to mean a thing to most voters, it has to be a little embarrassing to his supporters.
Besides, it's not as if he's strapped for cash. Published reports say that his campaign is sitting on a $7 million surplus from his primary campaign fund that he has to spend before the Republican convention, so as to qualify for federal campaign funds in the general election.
Coming across with $14,000 for the city of Savannah should be painless. And while that's not a lot of money to the city either, local taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bills for political rallies, no matter which party stages them.
Thousands of area residents jammed the riverfront to see and hear the president. He got its money's worth for the pre-Georgia primary pick-me-up. Now he should finish the job and pick up the tab.
An Unpleasant Surprise
A month ago, Savannah seemed on its way to getting a 5-percent cut in federal flood insurance premiums. That was welcome news for residents and business owners who could use the discount.
But lately, representatives for the Federal Emergency Management Agency changed their mind. The agency says it won't cut rates because of "serious deficiencies" in flood control here.
Why the sudden turnabout? And more importantly, how can it be resolved?
Taxpayers are spending millions of public dollars to improve drainage in the community. Not so long ago, FEMA was applauding Savannah for some of the measures it was taking to improve flood control and reduce the risk of flood damage. Happily, it looked as though the investment would soon be paying off through reduced insurance premiums.
Now it appears the anticipated rate cut may be headed down the drain.
The feds are faulting the city for allowing five buildings - four private homes, scattered from Coffee Bluff to west Savannah, and the Goodwill Industries building - to be built below the nationally designated flood plain without adequate protection.
They also contend that several structures were given certificates of occupancy before the elevation was formally established, as required by FEMA regulations.
City Manager Don Mendonsa says this is the first he has heard about any problems. He says all previous contacts with the agency had been positive.
But Glenn Woodard, who works for the state Department of Natural Resources and serves as FEMA's representative, tells a different story. He contends that trouble was spotted last November, and that state and federal officials have unsuccessfully prodded the city for months to make corrections.
It's clear that a breakdown occurred somewhere. But what's most important is to correct what's wrong so Savannahians can save a little money on their premiums.
Mr. Mendonsa says he will send a detailed explanation to FEMA about the buildings constructed below the flood plain. That's a start. Perhaps the agency can be persuaded to change its mind. After that, city and FEMA officials need to do a better job of comparing notes so that such unhappy surprises don't happen again.
Ugly Campaign Tactics
Responsible voters in Georgia have reason to be concerned about the tone and direction of the state labor commissioner's race.
Al Scott, the incumbent labor commissioner, is the target of a barrage of ugly charges from challenger David Poythress, who has wound up opposing the incumbent in a runoff set for August.
A Savannahian and a former state legislator, Mr. Scott has performed capably at the Department of Labor, but you wouldn't know that if you listen to his opponent.
It is fair for a candidate to question his opponent's qualifications and competence. But Mr. Poythress goes well beyond that. He exceeds the limits of fairness. He emphasizes at every opportunity the race of Mr. Scott. This is blatant. There's nothing subtle about it.
A black, Mr. Scott was appointed to his post by Gov. Zell Miller. He is the first person of his race to hold the statewide office.
In addition, Mr. Poythress claims Mr. Scott took a bribe. This is an unsubstantiated charge that is not borne out by the FBI tapes Mr. Poythress claims are supportive of his allegations.
The tapes were made by an undercover agent operating a 'sting' against another state legislator. The legislator, Rep. Frank Redding, has not been convicted. A mistrial was declared in his case. Al Scott was a government witness at the trial. He was not a co-defendant.
If the investigators had evidence that Mr. Scott took money for his vote, why wouldn't they have sought his indictment along with Rep. Redding?
If they had suspected Mr. Scott, wouldn't they have gone to him and tried to trap him the same way they set up a trap for Mr. Redding?
Mr. Poythress also complained to the State Ethics Commission about Mr. Scott, claiming the incumbent broke the rules on raising campaign money. The commission dismissed the complaint.
Ironically, Mr. Poythress is supported by the forces of former Labor Commissioner Sam Caldwell, who was forced to resign his office under a cloud of scandal and wound up spending time in jail. Mr. Poythress obviously is not as sensitive about his support as he is about Mr. Scott's alleged conduct.
Political contests should be settled at the polls by citizens who are not confused or misled by unconfirmed rumors and charges. We deplore this type of political attack whenever and wherever it is made. We hate to see it happening in Georgia.
Jones Falls; Newt Hangs On
Among those who got jolted in the Georgia primary voting was Democratic Rep. Ben Jones, the former TV actor. Among those who got scared but escaped defeat was Republican Rep. Newt Gingrich.
Rep. Jones fared poorly in a Democratic race won by state legislator Don Johnson. Mr. Johnson, chairman of the state Senate Appropriations Committee, accused Rep. Jones of working for perks and privileges, voting against voluntary prayer in school, and being out of touch with voters in eastern Georgia's 10th District.
"The commercials and the rumors and things like that are as tough as we've ever faced," Mr. Jones complained. Yes, they were tough. But they summed up his House stint pretty well. He has been doggedly liberal.
Mr. Johnson, however, is not home free. He must still survive a fall contest.
Newt Gingrich, the House minority whip and Georgia's only Republican in Congress, edged Herman Clark, a former state legislator who ridiculed Mr. Gingrich for writing bad checks, voting himself a pay raise and using a limousine. In this case, the criticism was also fair because Rep. Gingrich did all those things. But he was not a major culprit in the House overdraft scandal, he apologized for having been involved, and he voted to publicize the names of all those who had written overdrafts. He redeemed himself somewhat by properly supporting openness and reform of the system that brought about the scandal. He also has given up his limousine.
One of Mr. Gingrich's prime virtues as a congressman is his ability to put burrs under the saddles of the Democratic House leadership. For that reason, Democrats will work hard to beat him in the fall. But the minority whip's abrasiveness doesn't void the fact that what he says often needs to be said. Washington wouldn't be quite the same without him.
Keeping Up With Crooks
The days of the police six-shooters became numbered when more criminals started packing semiautomatic pistols. The Chatham C ounty Police Department is the latest to modernize.
County police officers are being issued .45-caliber pistols, which hold 8-shot clips, to replace their 5- or 6-shot .38 revolvers.
It's good that officers will be less likely to be out-gunned. With more sophisticated hardware on the market, those who protect and serve shouldn't be put at a disadvantage.
Still Needed: Great Orators
Great oratory is still missing from the presidential election campaign.
Most of us who like it are still smarting from President Bush's lackluster State of the Union address in January.
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Bush gets back in the game
"Good judgment," George Bush said, launching into the hardest part of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, "comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."
He then went on to confess that "with my back against the wall," he made a "bad call" in 1990 on "the Democrats' tax increase." It was, he said, a "mistake" he would not repeat in a second term.
Not to raise taxes wasn't the only lesson he learned in his first term. He also learned not to make ironclad pledges like the one he had to explain away Thursday.
His acceptance speech contained nothing remotely similar to his 1988 vow of "no new taxes." Even his promise of possible across-the-board tax cuts was carefully hedged: He will "propose" such cuts, to be offset with "specific spending reductions that I consider appropriate, so that we do not increase the deficit."
Bush did not win the election with his speech. But he did get himself back in the game. He displayed spirit and determination, combined with an appearance of mastery and control that had seemed to elude him for many months.
For that matter, his running mate, Vice President Dan Quayle, also showed himself to better advantage than he customarily does. Quayle was no Pericles, but neither was he a laughingstock.
Bush left no doubt that he intends to try to repeat the 1948 strategy of Democrat Harry Truman: run hard against a do-nothing Congress dominated by the opposition. Given the bad odor that currently envelops Congress, it could be both a successful gambit and a justified one.
Bush's speech was filled with derisive references to the "gridlock Democrat Congress," and he persistently linked opponent Bill Clinton to Congress and its financially undisciplined ways.
But Bush led, appropriately, with his strength: foreign policy. He sketched the dramatic changes over the last four years in the geopolitical landscape and claimed a rightful share of the credit:
"I saw the chance to rid our children's dreams of the nuclear nightmare, and I did. Over the past four years, more people have breathed the fresh air of freedom than in all of human history. I saw a chance to help, and I did. These were the two defining opportunities - not of a year, not of a decade, but of an entire span of human history."
But celebrating his foreign policy triumphs was the easy part. Bush's real challenge was to persuade the American people that he has a domestic vision and a plausible program to get the economy moving again.
The vision was captured in a couple of sentences: "The defining challenge of the '90s is to win the economic competition - to win the peace. We must be a military superpower, an economic superpower and an export superpower."
The economic program was more problematic, largely because of the issue of taxes and the sense of betrayal that many people - especially conservatives of his own party - feel because of Bush's abandonment of his no-new-taxes pledge.
The president made the necessary apology. But, hewing to his overall theme, he laid the blame principally on the Democrats. "I underestimated Congress' addiction to taxes," he explained.
Except for the suggestion of tax reductions and a gimmicky plan to let taxpayers earmark 10 percent of their payments for debt reduction, Bush proposed nothing economically that he had not offered before. That's good, because anything he could have proposed probably would have been irresponsible.
What was different was the perspective in which he placed his proposals: as the sharp, "whom do you trust?" alternative to the alleged profligacy of Congress and a Democratic presidential nominee who already has spoken of new spending and a new tax increase.
Indeed, the question for voters in November is the one that Bush returned to again and again in his speech: Whom do you trust? Bush has made himself, once again, a plausible answer.
It's time for these to go
A political campaign is often filled with a language all its own. Fortunately, outsiders aren't usually subjected to it unless they wander into the wrong bar on election night.
Not this time. The 1992 presidential campaign is in serious danger of being captured by the clichéd interests. A plea to the campaigns: Stop it.
For instance, there is the once-pithy five-word phrase that emanated from the anger over the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings into Clarence Thomas' nomination to the Supreme Court: "They just don't get it."
For a brief time, "they just don't get it" meant something. It was directed by women toward men who thought that women got some hidden pleasure out of crude, graphic pickup lines or other forms of sexual harassment. It has been diluted into a cliché line uttered by any politician or single-issue activist to describe the other side. Just the other night, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) searched for a way to describe how Democrats have responded to the fall of communism, and he settled on, "They just don't get it." Three times he said it. Enough.
Next up, the multiplying variations of Lloyd Bentsen's "I knew John Kennedy" quip. It was one of the most memorable lines of the 1988 campaign, used by the Democratic vice presidential nominee to put down his GOP counterpart, Dan Quayle. "I knew John Kennedy," Bentsen told Quayle, and ... everyone knows the rest. Now it is a standard campaign put-down.
Granted, it was used quite cleverly by Ronald Reagan ("I knew Thomas Jefferson"), who managed to be charmingly self-deprecating while he took a slap at Bill Clinton. But Quayle couldn't leave it alone. He had to trot out his own version in his acceptance speech Thursday night and, predictably, it fell flat.
Remember, Bentsen lost.
The leading candidate for future cliché status has to be, "It's time for them to go." This is a surprise, because it was a clumsy, instantly forgettable conceit when Al Gore used it at the Democratic convention. But the Republicans revived it at their convention, and it was as clumsy and forgettable for them as it was for the Democrats. So, forget it.
Drop the political clichés. Before it's too late.
The taxman's knocking on the door
This is dodge-the-bullet week for Cook County property owners. In the next few days, a postcard will hit the mailbox with all the impact of a brick hurled through a window. It'll be the property tax bill - more specifically, and confusingly, the second installment of the 1991 tax bill, payable nine months into 1992.
Some homeowners will greet the bill with a sigh of relief. It will be high, a little higher than last year, but not too dramatic. These are the folks who didn't go through reassessment roulette in the past year. Chances are, though, they have a pretty good idea when the assessor next will darken their door.
Many homeowners in Chicago will be astonished when they see their bills. They were reassessed in the past year, and chances are their property assessments soared. Those who were savvy enough to calculate the reassessment's impact when that notice arrived will have some inkling of what to expect. But many people aren't that savvy, and the bill will come as a shock.
The reassessment notice's "fair market value" probably didn't reflect their property's true value. The tax due will have little to do with their ability to pay it.
And this passes for tax policy in Illinois.
The new tax rates issued last week are another reminder of how confusing, and often unfair, the property tax system has become. Anyone attempting to figure out one's own bill in advance has to run a daunting gantlet of figures: assessment, state equalizer, homeowner's exemption, new tax rate.
Property taxes can have a depressing effect on a community's ability to draw business and industry, and often the biggest burden falls on those towns that most desperately need more business and jobs.
The new tax rate in Dixmoor (14.639) is more than twice the rate in Lincolnwood (7.162), largely because property values in the southern suburb are much lower than those in the northern suburb. But kids in Dixmoor still have to go to school, fires have to be doused, police have to be on patrol. Without a strong property tax base, the burden on property owners has to be that much higher.
Property tax caps in the collar counties will help dampen the rise in bills, and a law that delays the use of new reassessments for one year in Cook County will cause some easing of the confusion and suburban 'sticker shock' next year.
But if property owners want relief from their tax bills, they will have to acknowledge that the burden must shift to some other tax. And they will have to encourage the Illinois legislature to accomplish this.
At this point, too many people in the legislature are too petrified of a tax-backlash to consider a shift that would lower property taxes and raise income taxes. They expect they would get the blame for the tax increase and no credit for a drop in property taxes.
Maybe they just need a little encouragement.
China and South Korea make up
In late August 1950, as events moved toward China's entry into the Korean War, the Chinese government declared: "North Korea's friends are our friends. North Korea's enemy is our enemy. North Korea's defense is our defense."
Forty-two years later, North Korea has almost no friends left and its economy is collapsing. Meanwhile, an infinitely more pragmatic China makes common cause with the North's enemy, capitalist South Korea, and worries along with the rest of the world about North Korea's nuclear intentions.
Dramatic evidence of how things have changed came Monday when South Korea and China, putting economic aspirations ahead of ideological differences, signed an agreement restoring diplomatic relations.
Clearly, both Seoul and Beijing recognized that formally ending decades of enmity could further the already robust trade and investment activity between them. And neither, understandably enough, was willing to be held back by outmoded policies.
"The normalization of ties between our two countries marks a significant turning point in world history in that it heralds the beginning of the end of the Cold War in East Asia," South Korean President Roh Taewoo told Koreans in a televised speech.
For his part, Chinese Premier Li Peng declared that the official rapprochement "has great significance for peace and development in Asia and the world."
The new relationship comes at the expense of a couple of old ones. In Seoul, Taiwan lost standing as South Korea accepted that the Beijing government is "the sole legal government of China." And North Korea, despite China's assertions that it remains a friend and ally, is now more isolated than ever.
How the totalitarian regime of President Kim Il-sung reacts to its worsening situation is a crucial question.
If there is any political wisdom at all in Pyongyang, North Korea will begin to moderate its austere, oppressive policies now that it can no longer expect any real support from China.
Beijing would like the North to get on with the process of reunification with South Korea. Movement in this direction has snagged on Pyongyang's failure to live up to an agreement calling for inspections of nuclear facilities in both North and South Korea.
Neither South Korea nor the West believes North Korea's contention that its Yongbyon nuclear complex is for peaceful purposes only. In fact, the fear is that the North is trying to build nuclear weapons. Hence the urgent need for rigorous inspections.
Until the world is satisfied that North Korea poses no danger of triggering a nuclear weapon, welcome news like the China-South Korea deal cannot be received with the wholehearted joy it deserves.
A military stance that's hard to defend
Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer served as an Army officer for 26 years. Along the way, she won a Bronze Star during the Tet offensive in Vietnam, earned a Ph.D. in nursing and rose to the position of chief nurse of the Washington State National Guard.
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The school board must move on reform
Those who put together the Chicago school reform law had a clear intent: to bust up the central bureaucracy under which education had so sadly deteriorated and to push decision-making and dollars down into local schools.
From long experience, though, legislators and reform advocates were wary about whether the bureaucracy would willingly redefine itself. So they built in an enforcement mechanism, adding educational and administrative reform to the oversight responsibilities of the School Finance Authority.
The reform architects' fear proved unfortunately justified. Despite the seating of a new school board, the hiring of a superintendent from outside the system and the explicit mandates in the 1988 law, the status-quo crowd at Pershing Road headquarters has generally prevailed, fighting true decentralization at every turn.
Now the finance authority, after four years of frustrating struggle on the issue, has finally said to the school board: enough. The authority is insisting that the board develop a realistic, meaningful reform plan.
The reform plan as outlined by the School Finance Authority is not flawless. Neither is the amended version the board is to vote on today. There are inherent risks in sweeping dispersal of decision-making, and the process cannot be expected to work perfectly.
But it's clear that what exists has not been effective. And it's clear the authority is only doing its duty -to the law and to the children of Chicago -after the board failed to do its own.
Some board members, administrators and their supporters have put up an ugly, vitriolic battle. But let's call this fight for what it is.
It isn't, as imputed by the likes of State Rep. Monique Davis -who just happens to be a $54,971 school board administrator -a power grab by white business interests or a fifth column for school vouchers. This is a fight by the school superintendent, his staff and his allies to hold onto power that, by law, they no longer possess. This is purely a matter of their own political and personal interests.
The finance authority itself happens to be three-fifths minority. It includes parents of Chicago public school students. But the real issue here is what's in the interests of more than 400,000 city children. Propping up a stubborn bureaucracy is not.
Meanwhile, the board has until Monday to get its budget genuinely into balance and meet a deadline for finance authority approval. The board's arbitrary action Tuesday to void labor contracts would not seem to make for a legally balanced budget. If the board fails to work out a realistic spending plan, state law would transfer even more control to the School Finance Authority. Despite this potent threat, the board is still playing games with bogus budgets and -incredibly -hasn't even met with teachers to discuss options.
The verdict's not in on whether sweeping decentralization will make the city's schools better or even worse overall. But no one will know until the board gives it an honest trial.
The ticklish politics of ethanol
More than the heat and humidity made Gov. Jim Edgar uncomfortable Sunday at the Illinois State Fair.
Preparing for President Bush's campaign stop, Edgar, an unabashed cheerleader for ethanol, wondered what Bush would tell farmers about the future for the corn-derived alternative fuel.
Would he side with corn growers and promote expanded markets for ethanol? Or would he accede to those concerned about air quality and uphold proposed restrictions on its use in some major cities?
Bush met privately with farm leaders, but he said nothing publicly about ethanol. His silence bespoke volumes about the delicate politics of clean air and special interests in this election year.
In Illinois, corn farmers sell about 17 percent of their crop at premium prices to ethanol producers such as Decatur-based Archer-Daniels-Midland. The producers, in turn, get a federal tax subsidy to make ethanol-blended fuels competitive at the pump.
But science has turned what would seem like an easy political home run into a potential foul ball. Burning ethanol-blended gasoline reduces emissions of carbon monoxide, but it also creates more harmful ozone and smog than pure gasoline, especially on warmer days.
That's why William Reilly, Environmental Protection Agency administrator, favors a proposed rule that would restrict the use of ethanol during the summer in nine major cities, including Chicago. The limitation would begin in 1995.
Although they took part in negotiations on the rule last year, the ethanol proponents say they misunderstood. Now facing slower growth in ethanol sales, they want the rule changed, contending new evidence will show ethanol-blended fuels can be used in the largest cities year-round without damaging air quality.
Corn growers have been promising such data for some time without delivering. In the meantime, the White House is said to be looking for a political compromise. One possibility might be to push an ethanol derivative that meets the clean air standards and likely can be processed in oil-company refineries.
Such a step would please farmers because it would boost ethanol use. Some oil companies would be happy to run the product through their refineries, although ethanol producers, undoubtedly, would object.
Lost in this high-wire balancing act, unfortunately, is good public policy. Everyone should be looking for the most efficient, least expensive way to reduce pollution.
Bush has reason to worry about political support from Illinois farmers. But in seeking a compromise that won't alienate too many voters, he shouldn't turn his back on good science and clean air in the cities. For now, unfortunately, that means restricting ethanol's use.
Is there life without political signs?
From the Department of Laws You're Not Likely To See Passed in Your Lifetime:
A Lake County Board member -Larry Leafblad of Grayslake -has this extraordinary idea that people wouldn't object if they were deprived of political signs, posters, stickers and handbills. He has proposed an ordinance to ban them from utility poles and road rights-of-way and has been trying to whip up support for the idea -a notion that is as popular with most politicians as northern spotted owls are with loggers.
You are familiar with this material. If you were not before the March primary, when there were more candidates than registered voters in Illinois, you probably were in some emirate where elections aren't necessary. It was a banner season for political paraphernalia, with scarcely a sign, sign post, tree, telephone pole or highway shoulder neglected in the metropolitan area.
It also brought the proliferation of a new concept: candidates vying to see how many political signs they could stake consecutively in the shortest distance along a roadway. This presumes, apparently, that the more people see a name, the more likely they are to remember it. But while this may enhance recognition, it is not as entertaining as those old Burma-Shave signs.
Therein lies the principal objection to this campaign strategy: It is annoying. There are some folks who plain don't like being bombarded with political messages wherever they travel and bristle at the unsightly nature of them, especially in the abundance they were this spring. It is more annoying when the signs, posters, stickers and handbills remain up long after an election. And sometimes -when they obscure important road signs -they can be hazardous.
Of course, if we start passing laws just because something is annoying, then we should pass laws just because some people are jerks, or too silly. Hmmm.
No one knows for sure if these messages do any good. No one knows if they do any bad. This probably is why they are so popular. And once the first signs appear, they breed faster than wire coat hangers.
Because Leafblad's proposition would have to be approved by colleagues up for re-election, he is swimming against a strong current. The most novel argument against his plan came from board member Robert Depke: Since we incumbents already are known to voters, it would be terribly unfair to our challengers to deny them this opportunity. Is it any wonder that this guy got to be board chairman?
A ruling on the law, not abortion
Circuit Judge Thomas O'Brien issued a legal ruling, not a political statement, when he refused to block the resumption of abortions at Cook County Hospital.
The judge's decision in the dispute between Cook County Board President Richard Phelan and a handful of county commissioners will be viewed as a victory for abortion rights and a defeat for opponents of abortion. That's not the case. The judge was asked to rule on the delineation of authority between Phelan and the board. That's all he did.
The commissioners argued that Phelan lacks the legal authority to restore abortions at County Hospital without the board's approval. But the court proceedings demonstrated that their argument didn't hold up.
No ordinance or policy rule clearly restricts the authority of the president or hospital administrators regarding health procedures. The obvious precedent for this case was former President George Dunne's unilateral decision to stop abortions at the hospital and Dunne's subsequent orders, on a case-by-case basis, to allow them in certain circumstances. The board has never set an explicit policy prohibiting abortion.
Board members argued that public funds cannot be spent without their approval, but there is no budget line item for abortion, just as the board does not direct precisely how much money will be spent on appendectomies, heart surgery or gunshot wounds.
It is possible O'Brien's ruling will be overturned on appeal. More likely, this dispute will drag on through other lawsuits once this one is resolved. Abortion opponents are waiting in the wings to file more litigation.
Abortion doesn't belong in the courts; it belongs in the legislatures. In this case, the judiciary has been asked to rule only on government procedure and not on the appropriateness of abortion. But it shouldn't have gone to court at all.
O'Brien rightly called this case "a perfect example of legislative timidity" by lawmakers who wanted the court to be a "surrogate decision-maker." Commissioners might yet seek a board vote on the issue, but they probably won't, and the abortion foes don't have the votes to override a Phelan veto, anyway.
Abortion is a legal medical procedure, one that can be performed at a reasonable financial cost. As long as it is legal and not prohibitively expensive, County Hospital should provide it for the largely indigent clientele it serves.
One aspect of all this that has not drawn much attention is that Phelan's plan includes several reasonable restrictions, guidelines that probably come close to reflecting much of the public's sentiment about the availability of abortion.
A woman would be allowed only one abortion at the hospital in a year's time. Abortion would be performed only in the first trimester of pregnancy, except in cases of fetal anomalies, rape or incest, or when the health or life of the woman is endangered. Patients would receive counseling, including discussion of alternatives to abortion. In effect, this would create a waiting period. If the guidelines were followed, abortion at County Hospital would not become a mere substitute for birth control, as some have feared.
This matter belongs in the County Board, not in court. If the board doesn't have the temerity to challenge Phelan on its own turf, it ought to leave the matter alone.
Bush's necessary risk in Iraq
When a president who trails badly in a political campaign takes military action, his motives inevitably become the object of scrutiny. George Bush's latest move against Saddam Hussein -sending planes to enforce a ban on Iraqi military flights in southern Iraq, site of a rebellion by Shiite Muslims -is bound to create suspicion that he might be exploiting an international crisis for his own ends.
But the president's action in this case ought to be judged on the merits of the policy, and Bush has done what needed doing: He has confronted the Iraqi dictator in a way that punishes him for defying the peace terms imposed last year, while making it a bit harder for Saddam to keep his grip on power.
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FROM THE PUBLISHER
Smoking out the true nature of an American presidential contender is never easy, but with not-yet-declared candidate Ross Perot, the journalistic challenge has been especially tough. The billionaire businessman comes with neither a political track record nor detailed position papers, and two weeks ago, he announced he was cutting back on press appearances. Sensitive to criticism when it hits home, Perot made no secret of the fact that he was unhappy with his coverage in TIME - especially a story in the April 6 issue that said he had displayed a "thirst for publicity."
So when Houston bureau chief Richard Woodbury approached Perot to arrange the in-depth interview that appears in this issue, the first thing Woodbury got was an earful. "Perot is a quirky, prickly guy," says Woodbury. "We defended our reporting, but he wouldn't stop complaining. He really held our hands to the fire." It took a series of extended phone calls, a formal letter and a long phone conversation with managing editor Henry Muller before TIME finally got its foot in the door.
It was worth the effort. The session, conducted in Perot's Dallas offices by Muller, Woodbury and senior writer Walter Shapiro, ended up running for three hours. Shapiro, who has covered every presidential campaign since 1980, describes it as one of the most extraordinary experiences of his career. "For once we had the luxury of waiting out the sound bites, asking the follow-up questions and then getting on to totally fresh stuff. It's a wonderful moment when you realize you've been able to sort out those things he really knows, those things that are smart but that he has not been able to explain well, and those things that still do not make much sense. You can't do that on TV. You can't do it in a one-hop fuselage interview with Bill Clinton. And you certainly can't do it with George Bush."
That kind of access may grow scarce as the campaign warms up. Woodbury, who has covered Perot since 1986, notes that the take-charge Texan still works without handlers, travels without aides and returns his own phone calls. But with his funds unlimited and his polls still zooming, Perot can afford to be eccentric. "As the pressures grow, it will be interesting to see how long the homespun style can endure," says Woodbury. "I'll know it's a new ball game if a media adviser starts returning my calls instead of the man himself."
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Three weeks ago, our art department cover coordinator, Linda Freeman, received a phone call from Maurice Skinazi, an international businessman and art collector. Mr. Skinazi suggested that if by any chance TIME was going to do a story on the Rio summit, we should consider using something painted by his friend, Brazilian painter Lia Mittarakis.
Mr. Skinazi, who might consider a second career as an editor, had guessed our plans exactly right. Yes indeed, we were readying a special report on the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio, and yes, we were in need of a cover illustration. Freeman asked Skinazi to send a transparency of the painting. Even though TIME rarely uses unsolicited artwork for the cover, the simple beauty of this painting delighted everyone, and art director Rudolph Hoglund decided to use it. "Before I told Lia about the situation, I asked her to name the most famous magazine in the world, and of course she said TIME," recalls Skinazi. "She was simply elated that you would consider her painting for the cover."
Mittarakis' style is commonly known as 'naive art,' a term that describes contemporary works that are painted in a folk manner. Mittarakis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, lost both her parents by the time she was 10 years old. She took up painting during her teenage years while living in an orphanage. For years the artist supported herself and two daughters by selling tropical scenes at Rio street fairs. Her vibrant works - which have been called 'painted poetry' - eventually attracted the attention of European critics.
Although a detached retina has robbed Mittarakis of sight in her right eye and she has lost 60% of the vision in her left eye, she continues to produce canvases at home on Paquet<*_>a-acute<*/> Island off the coast of Rio. The work reproduced on this week's cover is an acrylic portrayal of the Tijuca forest overlooking Rio.
Our special report on the summit is part of TIME's commitment to cover environmental issues, which began when we named Endangered Earth as the Planet of the Year for 1988. Says senior editor Charles Alexander, who edited the stories: "The summit itself can't save the earth, but it can put the nations of the world on the right path." Mittarakis shares that optimism and hopes that "by portraying the beauties of nature, we can remind the world about what is at stake." That is exactly our intent.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Every journalist dreams of working on the big story. Here at TIME that means reporting or writing a cover story. By that measure, veteran writers George Church and Ed Magnuson have had enough dreams realized to last a lifetime - even if they live to 100. For Church and Magnuson are the only men in the magazine's history to have written more than 100 cover stories each.
From the agony of the Vietnam War to the exhilarating fall of the Berlin Wall, a scrapbook of their work could serve as a comprehensive index to the most momentous events of the past quarter-century. Says editor-in-chief Jason McManus: "Church and Magnuson excel at the most demanding newsmagazine art: writing fast news covers. Masses of information must be quickly absorbed, mentally structured, and the relevant facts, anecdotes and quotes smoothly mortised into place while writing on the run."
Church, 60, joined TIME in 1969 after spending 14 years at the Wall Street Journal. He wrote his first cover, on the inefficiency of American business, just one year later. Since then, George has efficiently produced 104 more covers, hitting the 100 mark last summer with an elegant analysis of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. But his own favorite is the 1986 cover on the secret sale of arms to Iran. "That's the one in which I was really challenged," says George. "I was writing while the files were coming in and then rewriting to incorporate the new things the correspondents had found out. I like that kind of pressure. It's kind of suicidal. But I love it."
No one understands that better than Magnuson, whose first cover was a crash effort on nuclear testing that ran in 1962. He has specialized in late-breaking stories ever since. "There is a real pleasure in putting them together under pressure," he says, "where you just stay up all night and get the job done." Ed has got 118 of them done, including 21 covers on Watergate, four of them written in consecutive weeks in May 1973 for the U.S. edition of TIME. This year Magnuson, 66, will retire after 32 years at the magazine. Looking back over his distinguished career here, Ed recalls handling our coverage of the My Lai massacre in 1968; the publication of the Pentagon papers - the secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam - in 1971; the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979; and "a lot of plane crashes. I guess you could say I was a bad-news guy." For us and our readers, though, it has always been good news when he and Church handled the bad news.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Great ideas are often generated in the most unlikely places, or so claims photographer P.F. Bentley, whose latest brainstorm occurred while he was having dinner at a sushi bar in Nashua, New Hampshire. Bentley was part of the press corps covering the state's first-in-the-nation primary, and he was trying to devise a more personal approach to the U.S. presidential campaign. Then it hit him: Why not portray a run for the presidency from the inside looking out? A few days later, P.F. told associate picture editor Rick Boeth that he'd like to hook up with the Clinton campaign, a risky choice because the Arkansas Governor's candidacy was in trouble at the time and his aides were suspicious of becoming involved with the press. "P.F. used all his diplomatic skills to convince everyone in the campaign that he could be a part of their lives," recalls Boeth.
That hunch led to the special series of photos that appear in this week's issue. Initially, Bentley and Clinton agreed to a one-month trial run, but the candidate felt sufficiently comfortable with the arrangement to continue it indefinitely. "We both understood that he would have to instantly trust me," says Bentley. Campaign advisers were told to get used to the photographer's presence in meetings, and Hillary Clinton welcomed him to the family home in Little Rock. The first photos, published in late March, ended with a Clinton win in Illinois. Since then, Bentley has been privy to the Clinton campaign's controversies, days of triumph and stolen moments of calm. His photos capture the gritty reality of rumpled hotel rooms, late-night strategy sessions and dinners of cold pizza, all shot in black and white to emphasize the documentary nature of the project.
P.F., 39, lives in Stinson Beach, California, grew up in Honolulu and has been a TIME photographer for 13 years. His TIME presidential-campaign coverage won first place in the Pictures of the Year Competition in both 1984 and 1988. In addition to his U.S. political coverage, Bentley has shot assignments in Panama, El Salvador and Haiti.
"Clinton often acts as if I am not in the room at all, and we can go a couple of days without speaking to each other," observes Bentley. "I've found him to be the most casual politician I have ever worked with." So casual, in fact, that P.F. actually followed Clinton into the steam room of his New York City hotel last week. The intrepid photographer could take only two exposures at a time before the cameras fogged up and had to be cleaned - but eventually got the shot he wanted.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Olympic athletes know that extensive preparation contributes to a great performance, and that's a lesson our photo department has taken to heart. Operations manager Kevin McVea spent more than a year mapping out TIME's technical requirements for the Barcelona Summer Games. Readers will begin to see the results this week in our coverage of the opening ceremonies. Thanks to new equipment in place at our press center, we will be able to bring high-resolution images to our readers in special sections on the Olympics so long as there's a medal yet to be won.
In Barcelona, the daily work of seven photographers will be reviewed by associate picture editor MaryAnne Golon, Paris-based picture editor Barbara Nagelsmith and picture researcher Mary Worrel Bousquette. Imaging specialist Kin Wah Lam will transmit the edited selections to picture editor Michele Stephenson and assistant picture editors Karen Zakrison and Eleanor Taylor. A new Eastman Kodak 2035 scanner will be used to send pictures to us here at headquarters in a mere 45 seconds. The editors will sift through these low-resolution 'first drafts' and pick the photos to be sent via satellite to them in publishable form.
Using scanning and transmission workstations developed by Israel's Scitex Corp., Kevin and his crew will be able to produce the final, high-quality photographs on site. The images will have the same sharp quality as those scanned on our premises and will be ready for use in the magazine. Notes McVea: "These innovations actually extend our deadlines. Four years ago, it took up to five hours to process and send a single image from the Seoul Olympics. With this technology, all that work takes just 35 minutes."
McVea, 30, makes it his business to keep track of cutting-edge technical developments. He worked at Newsweek as head of picture operations before joining TIME in 1988.
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S. African Realism
POLITICAL realism may be getting the upper hand in South Africa. The decision of the African National Congress to adopt a more moderate policy toward negotiating with the administration of President Frederik de Klerk could open the door to more rapid progress toward a multiracial transitional government and democratic elections.
The ANC's move comes after intense internal discussion. Nelson Mandela has represented the middle ground of negotiation and compromise in these discussions, with ANC militants pushing for heightened mass action.
The latter tactic has failed in its immediate goal of toppling leaders in the so-called black homelands.
Mr. Mandela recognizes, realistically, that his organization's best opportunity to secure a grasp on power is through continued bargaining with the white National Party regime inn Pretoria. And he rightly concludes that Mr. De Klerk - for all the ups and downs in their relationship since the ANC leader left prison almost three years ago - remains the white leader most likely to cut a reasonable, politically valid deal.
De Klerk, too, is constrained by realism to move toward productive talks. Revelations concerning efforts by the South African military to subvert the ANC have left the president little room to maneuver. Judge Richard Goldstone, who heads the government commission looking into allegations against the security forces, doubtless has more revelations to come - even if De Klerk continues to refuse his request for wider investigative authority.
De Klerk needs political damage control. His best recourse is expedited negotiations with the ANC. He, like the ANC, may have to settle for a short-term resolution that doesn't give him everything he wants in terms of long-term goals - for example, a guarantee of substantial white representation in any future government. Not only political stability in the country, but economic recovery, hinges on progress in negotiations.
ANC and government representatives have secluded themselves for intensive talks in the days ahead. South Africa, meanwhile, will shift into its summer vacation season, when little governmental business is conducted. By early 1993 the negotiators should have a plan for power-sharing.
That plan will be born of political necessity, and it will be criticized from many angles. But the process of negotiations should also bring greater good will - an honest desire to move beyond confrontation.
That, along with realism and pragmatism, will be needed to implement any plan.
Talks Worth Continuing
THE latest phase of the three-strand talks about the future of Northern Ireland either "has collapsed" or "has been concluded," depending on where one takes one's reading of events, from the headlines or from diplomatic sources.
No, the talks did not reach a comprehensive settlement of the question of governing the six counties of the North. But for the first time since the partition of Ireland in the 1920s, unionist leaders sat down with ministers from the Dublin government. This historic fact should not be minimized.
That said, however, we must also note that once the whole talks process moved from the procedural to the substantive, and the various parties set forth their positions, the width of the divide between them only became more apparent. The discovery of unexpected areas of common ground that one might have wished, if not hoped for, did not occur.
Still, scoping out the breadth of a disagreement, finding out which positions a party really holds to and which may be negotiable, can be valuable.
A next phase of talks is to be held in the new year, after a new Irish government has been established (Nov. 25 is election day) and has met with its British counterpart some time after mid-December.
The same 'strands' approach will be taken as has been the case so far; that is, talks are to occur among constitutional parties in Northern Ireland (those seeking unification with the south, and those seeking to retain the link to Britain), between the north and south within Ireland, and between Dublin and London. And as is always the case in these situations, the informal contacts - quick conferences in the corridors - are at least as important as the formal ones.
Meanwhile, it is clearer than ever that a unilateral British military pullout from Northern Ireland would precipitate a civil war, and the Dublin government has every bit as much interest as London - indeed, more so - in preventing that.
Skeptics may well be right that the current negotiations have only a small chance of reaching a genuine political settlement to the Northern Ireland issue. But realists would have to counter that there is no chance of a settlement without such talks.
Tolerating Atrocity
SERBIA'S brutal "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia has been going on since May. The barbarity of the crimes has been known in every world capital since June. But only recently has the heinous nature of the acts been fully understood.
Journalists in Bosnia have persistently found savagery beyond the telling. They have shown that early ethnic cleansing was a form of "elitocide" - killing off the educated, thoughtful Muslims who could have led a resistance. Former US Secretary of State George Shultz was filled with "a sense of fury" when reading of systematic internment and rapes of girls and women in Bosnia.
Decent people find it hard to live with such atrocity. As Mr. Shultz put it, "When forces of intolerance go wild, you get a result that is intolerable."
Yet so far the West has tolerated the wildness. Intervention was ruled out in favor of the joint United Nations-European Community talks in Geneva. But Western leaders have lost faith in them. Last week, US Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger indicated this by naming war criminals from the former Yugoslavia, including Serb President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadizc.
Mr. Eagleburger seeks enforcement of the "no fly" zone over Bosnia. This made for tough talk and high drama - especially after UN mediator Cyrus Vance disagreed with the no-fly zone enforcement. But step away from the headlines, and what has actually happened? The answer: Little. All the essential problems in Bosnia remain. Indeed, they are worse. Facts on the ground have changed since the summer. Serbs are no longer trying to take 70 percent of Bosnia: They now have it. Mr. Milosevic also now knows the West won't act.
The enormity of "ethnic cleansing" has sunk in, but doing something about it has now become more complicated. Delay has cost. Reiterating the decree of a no-fly zone and shooting down a few planes will do little. Even lifting the arms embargo to let Muslims defend themselves is late. Nor can the West afford to act just to seem engaged, since even a minor scrape could give either side a pretext for starting something bigger.
Western action now will require a more serious effort. Doing nothing out of concern that the cost might be great has ensured that the cost will be great. Unchecked, ethnic cleansing is a mentality of systematic hatred more dangerous by far than found among, say, Somalia's war lords. It is a dynamic that could spread east, beyond Yugoslavia; it already has adherents in Russia.
The question isn't, What is the cost? The question is, Can the West deal with aggressive evil?
IBM in Perspective
IBM may be down, but it's not out. The computermaker still produces and sells more than all other US high-tech firms put together. Some of its products are doing well, its staff still includes many brilliant engineers, and its financial resources are considerable. But, like other giants of American industry, IBM may have lost its ability to dominate a whole field of enterprise.
Critics point out that the company once prided itself on holding a top position in all facets of the computer market. Its chief competitors were thought to be overseas, especially in Japan. But, in the end, it was smaller companies in the United States - like Intel, Sun Systems, and Microsoft - that carved out profitable niches and nudged "Big Blue" to the periphery.
In the personal computer realm, particularly, IBM lagged. The company's biggest profits had always been in large, mainframe machines, and it continued to push those products even as the market shifted toward desktop units that were both more agile than and as powerful as the larger computers. IBM is hustling to catch up now, and its PC line includes some popular items. The road ahead, however, will be difficult.
The degree of difficulty was shown by IBM's announcements last week - possibly its first-ever forced layoffs, a $1 billion reduction in research, a 1992 profit picture that shocked investors.
IBM executives talk of a devolution of power within the corporation, with pieces of the business, like the PC branch, gaining independence. But the greatest need may be an honest assessment of the firm's greatest strengths and a determination to build on those, letting other product lines fall away.
When companies like IBM - or General Motors, or Sears - are shaken, the whole country feels a jolt. Concerns about industrial decline are rekindled. It's worth remembering that it has happened before, when the railroads, of Big Steel, collapsed.
Lots of people who thought their working lives were secure are put out of work. A still-vigorous and competitive US high-tech sector will absorb some of them, but there's no doubt IBM's dark news gives Bill Clinton's promise to "grow the economy" even more urgency.
No Time For Hate Conspiracies
CONCERN about US racism is renewed by the political campaign of David Duke and the nod it gives to white racial anger.
But what about new forms of black racism?
Black anger is understandable. But racism, and the discontent it spawns, is wrong in every form.
That's why New York City College President Bernard Harleston is right to remove Dr. Leonard Jeffries Jr. as head of the African-American Studies Department. Dr. Jeffries would still teach.
A conspiracy theorist, Jeffries plays something of the intellectual harlequin to his classes (blacks only, please) and the public. His ideas, which as department head he sanctions as 'academic freedom,' run from kooky to dangerous: As "sun people" blacks are superior to "ice people" (guess who) because of a chemical in the skin named melanin missing in whites. Or, that AIDS was put in Africa by whites in the World Health Organization to attempt genocide. And this is the tame stuff.
While it's true, as the white male Shakespeare said, that "there are more things in heaven and earth ... than are dreamt of in your philosophy" - a factual basis for Jeffries's ideas is probably not among them. Yet sadly many blacks - 40 percent in a Harlem poll - believe this conspiracy theory.
Jeffries, like grandstander Al Sharpton, has a following. But most New Yorkers are uncomfortable with Jeffries's message. Last summer he went too far. In an anti-Semitic public speech he conjured up a movie industry conspiracy against blacks planned "by people called Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani" that Gov. Mario Cuomo denounced.
No faculty would allow David Duke to teach the thinking that made him a Grand Wizard; CCNY must discipline Jeffries. By demoting him, Dr. Harleston (himself black) can send a needed message that there are moral and academic standards.
Now is a time for blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, and others to respect diversity. No nation has ever done so. It can only work by seeing that all folks under the sun are brothers and sisters.
Gerrymander Wars
A HANDFUL of people seated before computer screens are changing the face of American politics.
They are engaged in outlining new congressional districts in 43 states to reflect population shifts recorded by the 1990 census. Most of these states require new district lines because they gained or lost seats in the House of Representatives.
Sophisticated computer programs facilitate drawing with precision district borders that satisfy the Supreme Court's 'one man, one vote' standard and also the mandate under the Voting Rights Act to create black- or Hispanic-majority districts. Within these parameters, however, the line drawers have a lot of leeway. Thus, in many states political battles are being waged over which party controls the computers.
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GATT: WHO SAYS BUSH IS A LAME DUCK?
The transition from George Bush to Bill Clinton has temporarily given the U.S. powerful leverage to move the long-stalled Uruguay Round of trade talks ahead. Now relatively free from domestic lobbying pressures, President Bush has turned his lame-duck status to advantage by breaking the deadlock with the European Community over farm subsidies. That clears the way to resume serious bargaining at Geneva under the 108-nation General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade on the full range of global trade issues, from textile quotas to protecting patents.
Until Jan. 20, President Bush has more political leeway to make tough trade-offs among the demands of competing U.S. economic sectors than incoming President Clinton is likely to have. But Bush certainly will insist that key trading partners dismantle long-standing trade barriers. Tokyo, for one, can't be allowed to block rice imports while it benefits from open global markets for its huge exports of cars and electronic goods. And India and Brazil can't rip off U.S. pharmaceutical patents on the pretense that economic under-development gives them the right to do so.
The GATT negotiations can lift the global economy out of the doldrums by unleashing a vast surge of new trade. More than that, the bargaining is a chance for each country to unshackle its productive powers by getting rid of protections and subsidies that hobble domestic producers. President Bush, in what could be one of his greatest achievements, has led the way.
HOW TO SPREAD THE GOSPEL OF QUALITY
Big U.S. corporations on the front lines of the global economy have taken to heart the principle that success begins with high quality, to the advantage of consumers and workers alike. Defect rates on U.S.-built cars are barely distinguishable from those of their Japanese counterparts, and such companies as Xerox and Motorola have become case studies in how quality drives corporate performance.
But there still are plenty of medium - to smaller-size U.S. companies to enlist in the effort. And because quality practices know no borders, the lessons these companies learn can be applied around the world<O_>(page-64)<O/>.
A lot is at stake. Most new jobs in the U.S., Asia, and Europe are created by smaller companies. In America, they account for one-half of exports. And big manufacturers often rely on smaller suppliers for more than half the value of finished products.
Recognizing this, bigger companies, most notably in autos and electronics, have set stringent quality standards for suppliers. More important, Detroit's carmakers and other companies are working with suppliers to demonstrate how to achieve higher quality. That still leaves many smaller companies without guidance, particularly if they can't afford consultants' fees.
Here, then, is an area where government and nonprofit institutions can play a key role. In the U.S., 16 states have initiated their own versions of the Commerce Dept.'s prestigious Baldrige award to provide guideposts to upgrading quality. The Minnesota Council for Quality also provides grants to local chambers of commerce for education. The non-profit American Productivity & Quality Center disseminates information that lets companies compare their procedures with the best in various fields through benchmarking.
These programs deserve support. Another initiative long advocated by BUSINESS WEEK, a nationwide network of technology-extension services offered through federal research laboratories or community colleges, would also help. The skills and the information to significantly enhance the international competitiveness of medium and smaller companies already exist. A small investment in spreading knowledge would pay big dividends.
WESTINGHOUSE'S DO-LITTLE BOARD
Westinghouse Electric Corp.'s board of directors provides yet another example of failed corporate governance. Even though the company was teetering on the brink of financial disaster, it was investor pressure - not the board - that moved CEO Paul E. Lego to act <O_>(page-26)<O/>. The activist institutional investors that began agitating this summer can take heart that Lego finally moved. Getting action at other recent activist targets, such as GM and Sears Roebuck, took years.
Interestingly, Westinghouse's diversified nature made it more vulnerable to activist shareholders because its disparate businesses lend themselves to a fire sale. The activists demanded an easy remedy, and the market applauded, pushing up the company's stock by 24% on the day of the restructuring announcement - despite a dividend cut.
But a more important point is involved. Westinghouse shows just how dysfunctional corporate boards can be - particularly at diversified companies. No one believes, anymore, that a professional manager can manage any kind of business. If making a conglomerate work takes exceptional management, it takes exceptional directors, too. Yet despite the need for greater vigilance caused by problems in many of Westinghouse's diverse businesses, the company's board did little. The company's finances deteriorated, its market performance declined, and its investors grew angry, but its directors didn't rise to the challenge. What made Westinghouse directors think they could be effective monitors of management at a troubled, diversified company without an extra effort? Notes Stanford law professor Joseph A. Grundfest: "Where you find conglomerates, you often find a dysfunctional governance process."
If the board wants to burnish its tarnished reputation, it should enact many of the reforms activists seek, notably creation of a nomination panel to replace departed directors.
CHANNELING BIG STORES' AWESOME CLOUT
With enormous marketplace power, a small circle of merchants is determining more and more how consumer products are made and sold in the U.S. They're telling even the mightiest of manufacturers what goods to make, in what colors and sizes, how much to ship, and when. They are forcing suppliers to rethink whom they sell to, how they price and promote products, and how they structure their own organizations<O_>(page-40)<O/>.
A vast consolidation in U.S. retailing has produced giant 'power retailers' that use sophisticated inventory management, finely tuned selections, and, above all, competitive pricing to crowd out weaker players and attract more of the shopper's dollar. The top tier of superpowers includes Kmart, Target, Toys 'R' Us, Home Depot, Circuit City, Dillard, and a few others. Leading the pack, of course, is Wal-Mart Stores. The nation's No.1 retailer is expected to grow 25% this year, to some $55 billion in sales, at a time when retailers as a whole will be lucky to grow 4%.
The increasing influence of these retailers has obvious benefits for consumers. For starters, the stores are continually wringing excess costs out of the U.S. distribution system while squeezing price concessions out of suppliers. Many shun the constant promotions, coupons, and 'sales' that introduce big inefficiencies. Much of the savings gets passed along to consumers in the form of lower prices. And because these retailers use sophisticated information technology to keep close tabs on what's selling and what's not, consumers are likelier to find what they want in the stores.
The risk is that small manufacturers, who lack the resources or savvy to cope with the inherent bias toward large manufacturers, won't be able to compete. Innovation and risk-taking could also be diminished. Those dangers must be monitored vigilantly by federal and state antitrust authorities. But pressure from the power retailers also benefits manufacturers by forcing them to become leaner and more nimble themselves. They're becoming more competitive with each other - and with overseas rivals. Some have wrested U.S. markets away from foreign manufacturers by cutting costs or reducing cycle time, and some have even been able to penetrate overseas markets, thanks to their new efficiency.
SEASONED ADVISERS CAN TAKE CLINTON ONLY SO FAR
In selecting leaders of his economic team, President-elect Bill Clinton seems to be off to a good start at filling the most important jobs in his Administration. His early choices, short on fresh faces and long on Capitol Hill experience, are safe, intended to convey a commitment to competence and moderation rather than innovation<O_>(page-24)<O/>.
Senator Lloyd Bentsen (D-Tex.) built a solid reputation as a student of the economic impact of government policy during his six years as Senate Finance Committee chairman and his earlier tenure as Joint Economic Committee chair-man. His passion is tilting the tax code to promote savings and investment, which should sit well with the Clintonites.
Representative Leon E. Panetta (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Budget Committee, would run the Office of Management & Budget with a fervor for cutting the deficit. The plan to nominate him is a welcome signal that Clinton is serious about cutting the deficit in half during his first term.
Others who seem headed for senior jobs - investment bankers Robert E. Rubin and Roger C. Altman, and former Congressional Budget Office Director Alice M. Rivlin - are also familiar with the levers of power in the capital.
In his desire to staff up with folks who know how to get things done in Washington, however, Clinton could overload his Administration with the sort of insiders who have given Washington a bad name. Experience is a virtue - but only to a point. We also hope to see some of those bright faces from state governments, business, and the universities that Clinton told us he was going to bring to the capital.
HONG KONG NEEDS A QUICK, QUIET SETTLEMENT
To an outsider, the dispute between Hong Kong and China seems like a tempest in a teapot. After all, the argument is about increasing the number of directly elected seats on the Crown Colony's legislative council - from 20 to perhaps 40 out of 60. By no means does this amount to representative government, as the Chinese fear. Yet Beijing's stern warnings to desist from the plan have upset the Hong Kong business community, triggering gyrations in the stock market <O_>(page-16)<O/>.
The dispute has been inflamed by two issues: Governor Chris Patten went public with the plan apparently without much consultation with the Chinese. This mortified Beijing, which felt it had lost face. Second, the Politburo is afraid that any change could quickly spread to South China, whose booming economy is directly linked to Hong Kong's.
It's easy to be cynical about the British timing. After all, they have been ruling Hong Kong for 150 years, so why the sudden interest in democracy? But it is because of the British that Hong Kong enjoys fundamental rights that don't exist in China, such as the rule of law and civil liberties. Preservation of these rights, they say, is the motive for making changes before the 1995 elections - the last Hong Kong will hold before China takes over in 1997.
There is plenty of common ground for resolving the dispute quietly, without China losing face. Any backsliding by Beijing could deter the foreign investment so crucial to the Chinese boom. For Washington, the proper response is to support bilateral talks on electoral reform. But the U.S. should also make it clear that China must move toward democracy and human-rights guarantees in both Hong Kong and China. If Beijing is unwilling to accept reform, pressure is likely to build in Congress to deny it most-favored-nation status. That would hurt both China and Hong Kong. The two sides should work things out - pronto.
THE MARKETS ARE APPLAUDING - SO FAR
Presidential elections take place every four years, but the financial markets vote every day. And because participants vote with their money, their message is always worth pondering. As BUSINESS WEEK's editors and writers detail in the 1993 Investment Outlook, investors like what they're hearing from Bill Clinton<O_>(page-40)<O/>.
They like the focus on economic growth and his attentiveness to the role that private investment plays in financing that growth. They like the emphasis on getting a long-term plan to reduce the budget deficit. And they like the investor-friendly leadership of his economic team.
Keeping the confidence of the markets is critical. If the bond market senses that Clinton is backpedaling on deficit reduction, investors will bolt - and interest rates will jump. That would raise the cost of capital and choke off the economic growth this country so desperately needs.
There are other areas where the market may turn on Clinton. The President-elect is already committed to boosting taxes on very high-income individuals. That is palatable to the markets as a method of deficit reduction but will be repudiated if it becomes the first step in a Democratic plan for a major redistribution of income.
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STEPHANIE SALTER
Ted Kennedy: Product of the '70s
THE LAST thing I want is for anybody to feel sorry for Teddy Kennedy. So that is not what this is about. As far as I'm concerned all of those Kennedy boys - dead or alive - have wreaked more personal havoc than they'll ever pay for.
But this ratty new book, 'The Senator: My Ten Years With Ted Kennedy,' is lower than low. Written by a former aide to the senator from Massachusetts, one Richard E. Burke, the book rankles me not because of the dirt it dishes on Edward M. - allegations of cocaine, hot tubs, bimbos - but because of the period of time it covers: 1971-1981.
Come on, Burke, play fair.
That was The Seventies, thus far the nadir in post-war U.S. history. You could have followed millions of adult Americans around during that same period and come up with a slimy, embarrassing book about each of them.
For many, the '70s was the decade of "Whatever turns you on." Situation ethics of the personal persuasion reigned supreme. The unofficial national credo was, "If it feels good - do it," and the anthem should have been, "Call Me Irresponsible."
The '70s was before Mothers Against Drunk Driving slapped a whole nation in the face and told it to grow up about its drinking. Herpes was something only medical students heard about, and AIDS was unknown and unimagined.
THERE WAS a recession for part of the '70s, but it did not carry with it legions of homeless and unemployed as we have now. Consequently, whatever money you had was for spending. And we Baby Boomers - deep into our I'm-gonna-live-forever 20s - spent it.
In the '70s that I remember, a lot of adult Americans behaved pretty badly. Oh, not all of them, I know (I heard Marilyn Quayle's speech at the Republican Convention, too), but more than ever before.
Granted, I spent the first half of the '70s in the fast-lane in New York, New York, living on the lower West Side, allegedly working in Midtown and drinking Scotch all over. But I kept in touch with high school and college friends from the Midwest; they were not at Marilyn Quayle's house swilling RC Cola and discussing creationism.
As much as I hate it that Ronald Reagan ever got his hands on the presidency of the United States, I'm not surprised. The '70s were at once wild but depressing - not of a Weimar Republic caliber, but wild and depressing nonetheless. They were fertile ground for the emergence of a 'leader' who talked a great game of old-fashioned American values - no matter how lame his actual follow-through.
IN MANY WAYS, that wild-but-depressing character is best symbolized for me by the grotesque fashions of the '70s, especially men's fashions:
Helmets of hair with mutton-chops or skinny, earlobe-length sideburns; bib-like wide ties with polyester suits the color of ice cream; white shoes and matching belts; platform shoes (yes, for men); florid polyester Nik-Nik shirts; hip-hugging, bell-bottom trousers; shag haircuts.
Even sex, of which there was no shortage during the '70s, was sort of wild but depressing. When Jimmy Carter confessed to Playboy that he felt bad because he had lust in his heart for women other than Rosalynn, a lot of people thought he was a schmoe.
Big deal, they said; he looks and dreams. Why not do?
I remember, in particular, a personable woman, about my age, with whom I worked in New York. Before she was 25 she was semi-responsible for the break-up of two marriages and very nearly a third.
"I think marriage sucks," she said one night, after the requisite six Dewars and waters. "Why should I respect a man's marriage vows when he doesn't?"
"Why indeed?" I probably said. My own observations had led me to a similar cynicism, and I had not yet grasped the feminist truth that, whatever you do to one of your sisters, you do to yourself.
No, the '70s was not America at its best. (Not that this decade is much better.)
And when I think about it, the words from a song in a minor Broadway musical, 'Salvation,' come to mind. Written in late 1969 by Peter Link and C.C. Courtney, it's called, 'Let's Get Lost in Now.'
WITH ITS WILD-but-depressing refrain - "So let's make love and maybe tomorrow, if we still feel the same, we can do it again" - it foreshadowed a mentality that I believe drove the '70s. Here's the best/worst part:
Time is a butcher, killing everything in sight.
He ain't lookin' at you, but in a minute he might.
So, come on, pretty baby, drive tomorrow from your head;
'cause in the long run, you know, we're all dead.
All I'm saying is, from 1971 to 1981, Teddy did not act alone.
IAN SHOALES
The song of Muzak
AN OAKLAND rapper named Tupac Shakur was recently attacked by Dan Quayle, who believed that the killer of a Texas policeman had been listening to Mr. Shakur's '2Pacalypse Now,' before he pulled the trigger. Mr. Quayle, apparently, was mistaken.
The killer, in fact, had been listening to a rapper named Gangster Nip. Despite having been listened to by a murderer, Mr. Nip remains at large.
No wonder the country's going to hell in a handcart.
Inspired by Dan Quayle and by Bill Clinton's attack on Sister Souljah, I've been thinking of making a citizen's arrest of Debby Boone for the traffic accident she caused 12 years ago.
I was driving along, minding my own business, when 'You Light Up My Life' came on the radio. I couldn't help myself. Something snapped. I began punching the dashboard with my fist, causing me to veer into a parked car.
Who's to blame if not Debby Boone? Is there a statute of limitations on a provocation like that?
We used to believe that the person who did the crime was also guilty of it, but the times they are a'changing.
IT'S JUST LIKE when Dylan went electric. Sure, it was upsetting to the folk purists among us, but it was a shot in the arm to the electric guitar industry. That meant jobs, folks, American jobs.
And if the Republicans and Democrats are so concerned about musical morality and job creation, why did the Democrats choose for their theme a song by Fleetwood Mac, an English band?
Why did the GOP choose for their theme a song from a musical based on 'La Cage aux Folles,' a French movie about a gay couple? Is there a bipartisan conspiracy going on to undermine America's precious musical heritage?
It's a complicated issue. Music itself is problematic. On the one hand, we believe that music hath charms to soothe the savage breast. Muzak in the mall puts us in the mood to shop. KOIT in the workspace makes us more productive.
ON THE OTHER hand, music awakens savage impulses. Didn't the waltz scandalize Europe? Didn't rock 'n' roll lead to juvenile delinquency and bad Elvis movies?
And if response to music is a learned behavior, how are musical prototypes created?
Theme music for westerns, for example, always seem to employ a full orchestra, heavy on the French horns. What do French horns have to do with cowboys? Try tootling a French horn next time you lasso a dogie.
Western fans may also have noticed that cowboys around camp-fires play the exact same harmonica songs as movie convicts on death row. What would Dan Quayle make of that?
Movie music is frequently used as a kind of shorthand. Whenever we hear those 'wokka wokka' guitars, we know that Shaft is in town. If we hear a 'rinky-tinky-tin-tin' figure, we can be certain we're close to Chinatown. Of course this is racist. We never hear Debby Boone when we have establishing shots of white suburbia, now do we?
The process is mysterious.
WHY IS IT when we hear two notes on a cello we know immediately there's a shark in the water?
Why do shrieking violins make us want to get out of the shower?
"Bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum" means it's time to circle the wagons. A wailing saxophone means it's time for a beer. And the theme from Perry Mason always means it's time for Perry Mason.
Should we be reassured or frightened by this? Or both? If it takes me back, for example, to hear Fever Tree do 'San Francisco Girls,' the nostalgia is offset by the terrifying fact that I had once liked this song in the first place.
In this political year, here are some other musical questions to ponder:
Who do we hold responsible for the lambada?
Why wasn't 'Cop Rock' a TV hit?
Why is a tango sexy and a polka square?
Why do armies always march?
Why don't they waltz to war?
WHEN A PRIMITIVE ancestor first banged on a hollow log with a mastodon femur, did it shock a Cro-Magnon traditionalist who felt that femurs should only be banged on rocks?
Finally, if somewhere over the rainbow bluebirds fly, why the hell can't I? Personally, I still blame Debby Boone.
KAREN O'LEARY
Perot's quiet running mate
JAMES STOCKDALE, chosen by H. Ross Perot as his candidate for the vice presidency, has lived since 1981 the quiet life of a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Hardly a conventional politician, he grants few interviews. His articles and speeches address public virtue, personal heroism and moral leadership, as well as stoic philosophy and endurance in the face of adversity.
These are subjects he came to know only too well when, as a Navy fighter pilot, he spent 7 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. If he had yielded to torture, he might have seriously damaged U.S. credibility.
Stockdale had information that could have undermined America's justification for escalating the Vietnam conflict.
As it was, his courage, personal philosophy, and physical stamina empowered him to stand up to torture and to lead his fellow POW's to do the same.
And if Stockdale's wife, Sybil Bailey Stockdale, had not recognized a covert message in one of his letters, torture of POW's might have remained undetected by the U.S. government or the American people.
Galvanized by the knowledge of her husband's suffering, she launched a major effort to bring a halt to the abuse of all POWs.
A YEAR BEFORE Stockdale was captured, he had been commander of the air squadron that was covering the Maddox, an American destroyer, on the night it was supposedly attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin.
The alleged attack on the Maddox by Vietnamese PT boats was used to justify U.S. retaliation and became the pretext for escalating the war dramatically.
However, Stockdale knew that there had been no PT boats close enough to attack.
Rather, he says the incident was due to confusion caused by stormy weather, an inexperienced Maddox crew and misinterpretation of an intercepted Vietcong radio message.
He informed Washington, but the United States went to war anyway and continued to maintain that the Maddox had been attacked.
Stockdale was caught in the middle: He knew the truth, but did not want to give the North Vietnamese a valuable propaganda card to play.
When he refused to divulge information to his captors, he was put in hand and leg irons for periods of torture that lasted up to three days.
For eight agonizing months, Sybil Stockdale didn't know if her husband was dead or alive. His first letter brought both relief and anguish, as she picked up a covert reference to torture: "One thinks of Vietnam as a tropical country ... but there's cold and darkness, even at noon."
She recognized the reference to Arthur Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon,' a book that chronicled Soviet abuse of prisoners. She concluded that her husband and fellow POWs were being tortured.
She then developed an elaborate code for communicating with Stockdale in the prison camp. In one encoded letter, he sent disheartening information that his wife translated as: "Experts in torture.
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Political conventions are devoid of, disconnected from, reality
Charley Reese
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF
One word describes the Democrat and Republican national conventions: disconnected.
Both conventions were so surrealist, so disconnected from the reality of American life, that the Comedy Channel convention coverage seemed normal. After all, what were 15,000 journalists doing at non-news events - two pre-planned, pre-programmed charades designed for television in which every event and every word spoken was pre-planned, pre-written, pre-edited and predictable?
The anchors, commentators and Rolodex experts were all reduced to banal chitchat - pretty expensive chitchat. As an aside, the spectacle of a horde of journalists on expense accounts staring at a Disney-like animation show reminds one that perhaps the nation's news executives have a lot in common with General Motors executives.
Now I know what it was like to wake up and brush your teeth in Hiroshima in the summer of 1945. I know what it was like to be playing bridge on the Titanic, to be sleeping off a hangover at Pearl Harbor in 1941. To hear the political rhetoric, one would think America was in great shape - some minor problems with recalcitrant Democrats or some minor problems resulting from uncaring Republicans, but nothing really to worry about.
One of two things is occurring, and neither is reassuring. Either the major candidates are unaware of the economic peril this nation is facing or they are deliberately misleading the American people until one of them is elected.
I despise the greedy Wall Street types who amassed so many millions of dollars engineering job-destroying mergers and acquisitions. At the same time, however, I recognize that these parasites are smart when it comes to finances and money. I'm beginning to think the explanation for the orgy of greed in the late 1980s was that these rats knew the nation's economic ship was going to founder and decided to grab some provisions for their personal life-boats while there was still time.
The present situation - an accumulated $4 trillion debt, an annual interest cost of $200 billion or so, an annual deficit pushing $400 billion, a continuing loss of jobs, and not a hint of any political courage or economic understanding in either party portends a dark future. We are on the eve of what Arnold Toynbee called "a time of troubles."
But just as the politicians are avoiding the problem, so also are they avoiding the solution, part of which is a government that works. Neither the legislative nor the executive branch of the federal government works. They are inefficient on a mind-boggling scale and seem to lack the will to correct even the most obvious defects in the process.
It's hard for me to believe that we as a nation have somehow become genetically incompetent to govern ourselves. After all, the same people who do not seem able to make government work in a competent manner nevertheless show a great deal of ability in terms of improving their own personal financial status.
The American people, as a whole, have been sold down the river. They have become largely a propertyless proletariat, dependent on paychecks for survival, but paid in a currency others are free to inflate. That means the wage-earner can work to the point of exhaustion and never get ahead. The average American has been rendered economically impotent. He has no control over the businesses he works for and he has no control over the value of the money in which he is paid for his labor.
Thus the average American today is worse off, really, than a slave. At least in the slave's case, the owner had a selfish interest in keeping the slave healthy enough to work.
Today, however, the wage-earner is as expendable to the capitalist as any other piece of equipment.
Unless Americans relearn the art of thinking, they don't have much of a future.
It's not OK to do whatever you want
Cal Thomas
LOS ANGELES TIMES SYNDICATE
Mary Fisher, the woman with AIDS whose eloquent, compassionate and compelling address to the Republican National Convention silenced the delegates even more completely than the invocations and benedictions, left something out of her speech.
She forgot to mention the role her ex-husband played in her infection. She failed to use her moment in the sun to address men who use intravenous drugs and risk acquiring infectious diseases they then pass on to their wives.
Fisher sought to identify with all persons who have AIDS, as if the circumstances which led to her infection were common. She may be the medical equivalent of everyone with AIDS, but the source of her infection was different from most. She contracted it from her husband who used intravenous drugs.
Fisher is part of a tiny minority - women infected by their husbands during marital intercourse. But her ex-husband is part of a large majority, those who acquired the disease because of personal behavior that could have been avoided.
In her speech to the Houston Republicans, Fisher should have addressed men who use drugs or those who commit adultery, and who get AIDS and other venereal diseases that they pass along to their unsuspecting wives. Married women have a fundamental right to avoid being put at risk of disease and death by their mates.
If a married man is going to cheat on his wife or abuse drugs, the very least he should do is tell her so she can protect herself. Why aren't women and editorial writers speaking out on this?
The attempt by Mary Fisher to link her AIDS to all other AIDS carriers is disingenuous and part of the politicization of a disease that is handled differently from all others. It is also part of an advocacy program led by the gay rights lobby and their fellow travelers in the press whose condemnation is reserved only for those who oppose their attempts to impose immorality on a reluctant country.
Appearing on CNN's Sonya Live program the day after her speech, Mary Fisher said that "people should be able to do whatever they want." Sonya Friedman should have noted that it is precisely because Fisher's ex-husband did what he wanted - abused drugs - that Fisher now has AIDS. Why do some say it is hateful to state this fact?
When a nation fails to set boundaries for acceptable behavior, people believe there are none and do whatever they want. Why shouldn't Woody Allen be surprised at the nearly universal condemnation he has received for his acknowledged affair with the adopted daughter of his lover, Mia Farrow? Time magazine quoted Allen as saying he didn't feel it was a moral dilemma to have an affair with Farrow's child. If he thinks having sex with Farrow is OK, who's to say it is out of bounds to have sex with her daughter? Only those who wish to impose their morality on him, right?
If there are no rules for such things, no objective standard to which people can appeal for right and honorable and decent behavior, then Allen can say he was just doing what he wanted.
It is the same with the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson. The London tabloids published pictures of a topless Ferguson cavorting with a man not her husband while her children watched. Hey, why not? They were just doing what they wanted, and to say that there is anything wrong with this is to summon people to hate and fear.
Give the adulterers and incest practitioners time to get organized. As soon as they become big enough or loud enough, we can expect to hear appeals from them for 'tolerance' and condemnation of those who say that what they are doing is wrong.
"Woe to those who call evil good, and good, evil," says America's most banned and least consulted book. There are growing numbers who are saying and doing precisely that, and the woe they, and we, are feeling is the price we pay.
Your candidates won't fight for your economic independence
Charley Reese
OF THE SENTINEL STAFF
I was sitting in a mall recently, waiting for a relative to finish shopping, and out of 200 to 300 faces, I saw only one - that of a young person - that reflected any happiness or joy. The others were glum, worried or simmering with hostility.
Why is this? I invite you to conduct your own survey. Observe a crowd and note how many happy faces you see. If indeed we are the best country on Earth, the freest and most prosperous, there ought to be a lot of happy and content faces in every crowd. Why aren't there?
Obviously, regardless of what the politicians and the institutional poohbahs say, Americans as a whole are worried of dissatisfied or both.
Neither Bill Clinton nor George Bush is going to discuss the really important matters because they are both establishment candidates. But here is the nut of the problem.
Our goal as a nation should be, to the greatest and widest extent possible, to be a nation of people who are economically independent, which is to say owners of property - homes, farms and businesses.
Mortgage holders are not owners of property. What they own is a debt. Usually these days, if it's a home mortgage, that debt is three times larger than the just value of the property.
To build a nation of economically independent property owners should be our goal for the following reasons: (1) political rights are meaningless to the economically dependent; (2) property owners have a vested interest in stability, which means good government; and (3) economically independent property owners can afford to act on principles, whereas the desperate must always put survival first.
It's clear from the writings of early Americans that it was their intention that America would in fact be a nation of economically independent property owners.
People, however, who lust for power over their fellow men also recognize that the greatest barrier to their seizure of power is a population of economically independent citizens. Thus, those people do everything they can to prevent Americans from becoming economically independent and to bankrupt those who are.
It follows then, if we had honest political leaders, they would be discussing this basic issue: What helps Americans become economically independent and what forces them into economic dependency?
Instead they argue generalities - family values, liberal vs. conservative, education, abortion, TV characters and other trivia - anything in order to avoid addressing the main issues.
The main methods of depriving people of their property or preventing them from acquiring any are: taxes, usury, inflated currency and establishment of monopolies.
Do you hear any of the candidates discussing these subjects? They only mention taxes, and that only in the sense of demagoguing some minor cosmetic change. They won't open their mouths on the subject of usurious interest rates, the corrupt monetary system or the ever-growing concentration of business and industry into fewer and fewer hands.
This is the reason why in the past it never made any real difference whether the man in the White House was a Democrat or a Republican, a so-called liberal or a so-called conservative. It is the reason why it won't make any difference whether you elect Bill Clinton or George Bush. Neither one of them will stop the monopolization and internationalization of business and industry. Neither one will even talk about usury and bringing it under control. Neither one will even mention the monetary system, which robs both the active and retired worker through inflation. Neither one will seriously consider lifting the tax burden and the regulatory burden, which crush people's attempts to build successful businesses.
Watch and see for yourself.
Not all wives like their mates the way Barbara likes George
Mike Royko
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
After listening to Barbara Bush talk about her husband, I asked the blonde: "What would you say about me?"
"What do you mean?" she said.
"Well, Barbara Bush just publicly stated that her husband is, and I quote: 'The strongest, the most decent, the most caring, the wisest and, yes, the healthiest man I know.'"
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Bush's Regulations: The Unkindest Cut
James J. Kilpatrick
Washington
These are hard times for George Bush. Everybody is picking on our kindly Caesar, and the most unkindest cuts of all are coming from such a right-wing Brutus as the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
The conservative think tank has hung around his neck the scornful label of "the regulation president."
This is a bum rap but an understandable one. The immemorial political custom is that a sitting president gets thorns when things go bad and bouquets when things go well, and generally he deserves neither one.
Herbert Hoover will be forever remembered for the Hoover Depression, but the poor fellow was as blameless as Little Orphan Annie.
In the same fashion, Bush bears some of the responsibility -but only some of it -for the increase in regulatory activity on his watch. On the surface, the figures are sobering.
The Federal Register, which records all federal proposals for regulatory measures, ran to 53,376 pages in Reagan's last year in the White House. In 1991, under Bush, the Register carried 67,716 pages.
Under Reagan, the government hired 104,360 persons in 53 regulatory agencies. Under Bush the figure has grown to 124,994.
In 1988, spending on regulatory programs amounted to $9.5 billion. Last year the same agencies spent $11.2 billion, and the data are reckoned in constant dollars that give account to inflation.
These figures from the Heritage Foundation are substantially confirmed in analyses from the Center for the Study of American Business in St. Louis.
In May the center predicted that regulatory spending will reach $14 billion in 1993, with 126,000 workers engaged in administering rules and regulations.
A slowdown, says Heritage, "is desperately needed."
Not many persons, and certainly not many persons in the business community, would disagree with that assertion. Bush imposed a moratorium last January on new regulations, and it looks as if the regulatory budget for 1993 will show a tiny decline.
Meanwhile, Vice President Dan Quayle is leading the administration's charge against regulations that damage the competitive position of American industry. This helps.
To what extent is Bush personally to blame for the burgeoning budget? The Heritage critics single out two laws for particular attack -the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act. Bush signed the former in July, 1990, and the latter the following November.
This is what gets overlooked. The disabilities bill soared through the Senate in September, 1989, on a vote of 76-8. Eight months later it passed in the House 403-20.
The conference report cleared the Senate 91-6, the House 377-26. Is Bush alone to bear the blame for what this law will cost?
Consider the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. The bill cleared the Senate in April 89-11. It passed the House in May 401-21. In October the conference report won approval 401-25 in the House, 89-10 in the Senate.
What the record does not show is that Bush worked doggedly for three months before the first Senate vote to pull some of the sharpest teeth out of the bill. Minority leader Bob Dole threatened a filibuster. Bush threatened a veto.
In its final form the bill imposed heavy new burdens, but it could have been much worse.
The Heritage critics acknowledge that "the precise cost of regulation is extremely difficult to determine." Having said that, they proceed to give us some figures anyhow.
Different scholars place the direct costs of regulation on the economy between $636 and $857 billion a year. After subtracting benefits, the net cost supposedly comes to $364 to $538 billion.
Such figures are mostly moon-beam conjectures. Given a sharp pencil and a large tablet, even a sophomore economist could draw up a plausible tally.
Some expenses under the disabilities act will be clearly identifiable: It costs money to build a ramp for wheelchairs. To meet clean air standards, expensive equipment will be required.
Benefits are not so easily quantified, but they should not be minimized. Fair treatment of 43 million disabled Americans is a desirable goal to go for.
My own feeling is that marginal improvements under the Clean Air Act probably will cost more than they're worth, but it's a close call.
Anyhow, my point is that George Bush didn't add to the regulatory burden all by himself. Congress voted overwhelmingly for these programs. It's the guy in the kitchen who takes the heat.
Why the GOP is Ignoring 'Desert Storm'
Art Buchwald
Washington
Last year the wise people in Washington predicted that Desert Storm would be the centerpiece of the Bush political campaign. The president could not miss with all the film of our boys striking a blow for freedom.
You can read George Bush's lips from here to California, and not one word has been uttered about the war.
"Why," some may ask, "has Desert Storm become a bigger secret in Washington than Deep Throat?" The answer is that while it was the greatest show we've had on television in ages, there was more to the Gulf War than met the eye.
Capablanca was assigned eight months ago to put together an entire "Desert Storm Bush" campaign. He was told to spend all the money he wanted as long as he showed yellow ribbons hanging on old oak trees.
But although he is ready, he just can't get the 'go' sign from the White House and is starting to suspect that he never will. He told me:
"The hitch is that since no one bothered to knock off Saddam Hussein, he's telling everyone that we gave him agricultural grants that he managed to turn into weapons to invade Kuwait. This makes George Bush look bad."
"I should think so. Didn't the president know that Saddam Hussein would attack Kuwait?"
"No, Mr. Bush thought that Iran was going to attack Kuwait."
"Why did he think that?"
"Because the White House always gets Iran and Iraq mixed up. They both start with an 'I.'"
"Even if Saddam got the weapons from us to fight, he didn't do very well in the field," I said.
"No, but he is still getting away with murder by building atomic weapons and germ warfare projectiles. If we bring up Desert Storm, some wise guy Democrat is going to ask where the supplies came from for Saddam to try to go for the big one."
"From the United States," I volunteered.
"Yeah, but just because we gave forbidden material to him doesn't mean we considered him a friend. In any case, the Republican big shots think that if we mention Desert Storm, somebody is going to say, 'Has Kuwait changed from the way it was before we helped them?'"
"It's ruled by a royal family. How can it change?" I asked.
"The president promised the American people that our boys were over there to fight for freedom and to liberate the Kuwaiti people from the yoke of totalitarianism."
"I don't believe that," I said.
"We have it on tape, but we're not going to put it in a TV spot because there are independents who will say 'What the heck is he talking about?'"
"Why don't we ask for a filmed statement from Saddam denying that American money was used to equip his army?"
"He won't do it. He says that he never interferes in the internal affairs of another country. The truth is that Desert Storm is a dead issue politically, and the whole exercise is one that we can't cash in on, particularly if Congress appoints a special prosecutor before the election."
"It's a pity," I said, "since it was Bush's finest hour."
"You better believe it. If you had had your pick of Iran or Iraq, you would have done the same thing."
As Customary, Reflections on Tuesday's Elections
Tom Coffey
Please permit, as has been your tolerant custom, some reflections on the recent primary elections:
First it was John Rousakis, and now Bob McCorkle, the latter experiencing on Tuesday what the former did last November when the voters ended his 21-year reign as mayor. A lesson perhaps to local politicians: two decades is sufficient.
Or, as many a mother has admonished a teen leaving the house all dolled up on Friday night: "Don't stay too long at the party, Son."
Still, Joe Mahany's upset of McCorkle in the race for the county commission chairmanship came as a surprise to Yours Truly. Didn't have nerve enough to predict in print, but I told anyone who asked me, one-on-one, for a prediction that I thought Ol' Bob the populist would win, especially considering the difference between him and the challenger in name recognition.
But Bob's 22 years in public office, Joe's low-key but steady and make-sense campaigning, and the anti-incumbency wave -too much.
No surprise in the Republican runoff in the chairman's contest. Two excellent campaigners in Julie Smith and Ray Gaster, and with aired differences while stumping they have helped to demonstrate that the GOP has come of age as a political entity in our neck of the woods. Used to be that offices went uncontested in Republican primaries.
And Mahany will have a formidable foe in whoever wins the runoff.
Good Loser of the Night Award is shared by McCorkle and Tom Taggart, who lost to Charlie Mikell in the race for Superior Court judge. Both were gracious in defeat.
Happily, there's no Poor Loser award. The others (at least those who appeared on television) took defeat admirably.
Barbara Kiley, who won her first-round race for tax commissioner and faces opposition in November, may be the rare exception among longtime incumbents. The lady has demonstrated how to win ever since she and John Rousakis co-honchoed the late Carl Griffin's first race for sheriff. Her second-round test against Republican W.D. Atkinson will be the biggie.
State Rep. Dorothy Pelote -now there's a political lady who always has known how to win, even before she ventured out to seek public office, first as a county commissioner and of late as a legislator.
Years ago, she was her neighborhood's spokesperson and unofficial ombudswoman in seeking such improvements as play-grounds, drainage, better streets, lighting, etc. And whatever Miss Dorothy wanted, she usually got. Her political success is due to years of built-up respect from dedication to constituents.
David Saussy's first-round triumph in his race for a district County Commission seat was nip-and-tuck against Bill Stephenson, whose one-on-one method won him the county chairmanship 12 years ago in an up-hill battle against the so-called Establishment.
Saussy used pretty much the same technique, but obviously with slightly more persuasion. His race against Democrat Marty Felser in November will be among the more interesting ones.
Consider such factors as the accent on women candidates at the recent Democratic National Convention... a woman in the Savannah mayor's chair, women on Tuesday's ballot for statewide, congressional, countywide and district offices, and the Constitution which has, since 1920, accorded women the right to vote.
Now, imagine a lady's surprise the other day when, campaigning by phone for a candidate, she was told by the lade on the other end of the line: "Call back and talk to my husband. He does the voting in this family."
As usual, there was confusion at some polling places, and the tallying into the night was slow. It's obvious we need a faster method of tallying, and when the money is available the county should consider converting everything to computer.
Still, it wasn't all bad, at least not in my polling place. I stood in line behind friend Willie Remley, who had six ahead of him. When his turn came, he allowed that he had waited only about 10 minutes. Willie took just about a minute. I took less than that because I voted GOP and had fewer offices to confront.
The Dedication Award goes to those supporters of various candidates who stood on street corners to wave placards and give motorists the old high-sign. In mid-July heat, that's dedication.
And who got rich off the primaries?
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Abortion debate is becoming moot
Marilyn Geewax
Few issues in U.S. history have stirred as much vehement disagreement as abortion. In modern times, only conflicts over race and Vietnam could match the nastiness that now characterizes abortion debates.
In many countries, ending a pregnancy is a quiet matter involving a woman and her doctor.
In the United States, abortion has been turned into a political screen on which partisans project their fears. Each views the picture clearly and can't understand why others don't see it.
'Pro-lifers' look at the screen and perceive a nation in moral decline. They see people having sex without concern for commitment, marriage or the children they might conceive.
When 'pro-choicers' view abortion, they see government officials taking away a woman's right to self-determination. Recognizing that all forms of birth control can fail, they believe that forcing an unwilling person, perhaps even a young girl, to give birth is simply barbaric.
With the two sides engaged in this furious debate, few seem to realize the outcome already has been determined. Abortion opponents are losing - not to liberals, but to new drugs and technology.
Anti-abortion firebrands can block clinics and push states to regulate the procedure. For now, they are having some success. But power to control the issue inexorably is slipping from their hands.
In coming years, women who wish to end pregnancies will be able to take medication, such as RU-486, a pill now widely used in France and England. The drug, which is banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is bound to make its way into this country, legally or illegally.
Recently, the Supreme Court stopped a California woman from bringing her dose of RU-486 into this country. That ruling was intended to settle the issue - but it won't.
Sooner or later, RU-486 will become available to U.S. women. Doubt it? Just look at cocaine.
Cocaine is a drug that many Americans want. They can buy it in any city, even though government has spent billions to keep it from entering the country.
If enough Americans want a drug, they will find a way to get it. Prohibition lasted just 13 years because so many citizens chose to ignore the alcohol ban.
Even if the U.S. government somehow can stop RU-486 from being distributed widely here, no one will be able to stop the proliferation of home-abortion kits. Women are using legal equipment - glass jars, syringes and coils of aquarium tubing - to end pregnancies in private.
According to the Federation of Women's Health Centers, roughly 2,000 U.S. women are volunteering now to help pregnant women perform home abortions. More women are learning to do the procedure every day.
Whether anti-abortion arguments make moral sense is an issue for each person to decide. But right or wrong, abortions won't go away. More types of abortion pills will be developed soon and more laywomen will learn to how tolearn how to end pregnancies without doctors present.
Trying to turn back the clock to a time when women didn't have access to reproductive information or birth-control technology is futile.
The ability to end a pregnancy is just a fact of modern life. Blocking clinics and passing laws may be emotionally satisfying to some, but such actions won't stop most women from choosing whether to give birth.
Political pro strings along press corps
By Leonard Larsen
Secretary of State James A. Baker III's descent from the heavens to take over another George Bush presidential campaign has moved backward from "sure thing" to "maybe" and that just goes to show how smart the man is.
There'll be more drama in it now: Will the brilliant star risk his reputation and pedigree on a mission impossible to rescue his Texas sidekick, a president who's lower than a snake's belly in the polls and sitting unhappily as first in a collection of dunces?
It can't be done. So, of course, Mr. Baker will do it. And the Washington-headquartered herd journalists who have built the Baker reputation might soon be reporting a rejuvenated Bush campaign, a new verve and savviness in an effort that was about to be given up for dead.
It was Mr. Baker himself, in the midst of another trot around the globe, who deliberately dampened talk of the "done deal," orchestrating staff leaks at his pique with underlings in the White House who were already talking about Mr. Baker's return to Mr. Bush's side.
As his staff leaked it and the trailing herd journalists reported it, Mr. Baker - at the edge of a break-through to peace in the Middle East - feared his work in foreign affairs might lie unfinished without him.
But there was the tug of loyalty back to his floundering friend, it was also said, and there was the prospect that all would be lost - Mr. Baker's monumental good works as well as Mr. Bush's sorry presidency - if Mr. Baker didn't go back and save Mr. Bush from what looks like approaching disaster.
Mr. Baker stage-managed the sure thing prospect of his role in the presidential campaign back to "maybe" with polished expertise, even acting aggravated during a joint news conference in Cairo with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek.
To a reporter inquiring about Mr. Baker's intent to leave the peace process to go back to political campaigning, he suggested the poor fool "ought not to believe everything you read in the papers .... There has been no decision made."
So now it won't look so much like Mr. Bush and his friend have been planning it for the past several weeks when Mr. Baker - probably after helping cut the deal for $10 billion in guaranteed loans for Israel - will move to salvage the pitiful Bush campaign.
If - probably when - the reassignment puts Mr. Baker back in presidential politics, Washington herd journalism will dwell for a while on his sacrifice and selflessness but will quickly turn to marvel at his miracles.
There'll probably be leaked stories of the new mood at the White House as Mr. Baker dispels gloom, stories of the new clarity of purpose in the Bush campaign, the sharpening of its message, the spring in the president's step and the lift in his spirits.
There'll be herd journalism's analysis by leak, revelations of Bush and Baker man-to-man talks, palsy stuff but important in stiffening the Bush backbone.
And pretty soon, with the brilliant Baker back at the controls, the media herd will report on the rehabilitation of the Bush campaign and the Bush presidency: lean and mean, ready at last to make a fight of it.
All that, of course, will be pretty much Mr. Baker's view of it and pretty much the way his Washington career has been reported by a Baker-friendly media. If President Reagan was Teflon on which nothing would stick, Mr. Baker is rubber, bouncing always away from harm.
It's seldom recalled by the herd that Mr. Baker was secretary of the Treasury when the economic slide into debt and recession was quickening and the savings and loan scandal was coming to an untended boil.
He left Treasury to head the 1988 Bush presidential campaign but herd journalism never attached the dirty business done there to Mr. Baker.
And while State Department small fry and the president himself have been pilloried for ignoring Saddam Hussein's belligerency and for actually strengthening the Iraqi dictator, it all happened while Mr. Baker was directing American foreign policy.
What's to remember about Mr. Baker - whether White House aide, Cabinet secretary, political pro or presidential pal - is that he's not only smart; he's always his own best press agent.
2 is enough? For families, that's the subtle message
By Ana Veciana Suarez
In the beginning, there were two of us.
At restaurants we were seated immediately. We drove compacts, small cars we could slide into tight parking spaces. Our grocery bill was insignificant, our electric bill a source of admiration. We even had trouble filling a large top-loader with our weekly laundry.
Now with four children, I look back at those days and wonder if they ever truly existed.
Our lifestyle was transformed subtly with the first child, but it changed exponentially with each child thereafter, as much our doing as the doing of the shrinking-family society that surrounds me.
America, I have concluded, has become the home of the two-child family. An extra kid or two throws off the delicate balance of the economy. Why, even most board games - a popular (and inexpensive) pastime for our family - allow only four players. Someone is invariably left out.
For most people, four children constitutes a large family. We discovered that when I was pregnant with our youngest more than two years ago. The announcement was met with a modicum of apprehension by friends.
My husband's side of the family, most of whom have only one child, accepted the news with raised eyebrows.
"How will you ever keep track of all of them?" asked his cousin, a mother of one.
Admittedly, such reaction has taken me by surprise. I'm one of five children, and that, among my extended clan, was considered a small troop. Family get-togethers were a blast, and you never needed classmates for birthday parties.
Nowadays, more than two children invites unwelcomed speculation. Everybody hints at what you do on cold evenings.
There is a pernicious belief, too, that those of us who have more children are single-handedly destroying the environment, perhaps even enlarging the hole in the ozone.
Society plots, in small but cutting ways, against families with more than two children.
Contests invariably award prizes for a family of four, which means you can leave part of the gang behind or pay for them to come along. The latter choice tends to offset any contest gain, though.
I am no longer fooled by the kids eat-fly-stay free advertisements, either. They mean one paying adult per free child. It's as if the remaining children in the family did not exist in the minds of Madison Avenue.
I've always been comfortable with whatever number of children I've had, though each took some adjusting and expanding, particularly in the furniture department. When there were two, I thought of this as a nice even number, yet three turned out to be more fun. And four made it possible for each child to have an ally - an important strategic move in sibling wars.
I became accustomed to eating at a large dinner table as soon as we outgrew dinettes, and I've long stopped buying single servings or anything smaller than family size.
But one thing still gets me: How come all the close parking spaces are for compacts only?
Balanced budget a bitter bill
Strapped states, cities would have to face consequences
By David Rapp
GOVERNING MAGAZINE
Washington - The balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution flamed out in Congress this summer. But it will almost surely be back.
Anti-deficit sentiment is too strong across the country for the amendment's sponsors not to try again sooner or later.
In the end, it may still be up to the states - with their power to ratify constitutional amendments - to decide whether a balanced federal budget is necessary or even desirable.
Just about everyone in Washington believes that a balanced-budget amendment would sail through the 38 states needed to ratify it. After all, the states balance their own budgets; all except Vermont are required to do so. Wouldn't they want Washington to play by the same rules?
Not necessarily. The whole balanced-budget issue presents states with some puzzles they probably want to think through before the amendment ends up in the legislatures' lap.
In most states, a balanced budget is more fiction than reality. Some regularly borrow from pools of money outside the 'general fund,' such as capital budgets or pension funds. Others count revenue that won't really arrive until the next fiscal year. Many more simply delay making obligated payments - to suppliers, to salaried employees or to local governments.
But there is a more important reason why states should think twice about ratifying a balanced-budget amendment.
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Poor, Misunderstood Garbage
By William Rathje and Cullen Murphy
BOSTON
In the spring of 1987, all eyes were on Mobro 4000, the infamous garbage barge that sailed from Long Island in March and spent 55 days plying the seas in search of a place to deposit 3,000 tons of municipal solid waste. Five years later comes the summer of the trash trains, two of which, laden with tons of New York City's garbage, wandered the Midwest in search of landfills before heading home and dumping their loads where most city garbage goes in the first place: the Fresh Kills Landfill, on Staten Island.
One could not drive through the Midwest this summer and escape the radio reporters tracking the trains. Nor could one escape the barrage of commentary, some directed generically at New York, most of it focused on the garbage 'crisis'. The message was that Americans are generating far more trash per capita than they can ever hope to deal with and that we're desperately short of solutions.
That is an unfortunate message, because it happens not to be true. The trash trains and garbage barge are imperfect examples of what they are supposed to symbolize. The barge's voyage was the result of an economic gamble by an entrepreneur that went awry. It was not the result of a lack of ways to dispose of Long Island's garbage. The farce of the trains involved labor and permit disputes, equipment failures, bad weather and court orders that combined to disrupt what is otherwise the vast daily shipment of garbage from the country's most congested areas to less congested ones with landfills.
The U.S. does have serious garbage problems. We produce more municipal solid waste per capita than many other industrialized countries, and we dispose of it less efficiently. But it is also true that we sometimes exaggerate our problems and emphasize the wrong ones. In fact, there seem to be few subjects of public significance on which opinion is so consistently misinformed. And misinformation can lead to alarm, despair and bad decisions.
The misperceptions involve matters as diverse as per capita garbage volume (we're not producing more by leaps and bounds) and biodegradation (not much of which happens in landfills). One especially significant misperception concerns landfills. The landfill problem we face is usually described like this: 50 percent of existing landfills will close within five years. But all landfills are not equal: Many of those being closed are small and environmentally dubious, whereas newer ones are much larger and much safer. And it has long been the case that 50 percent of all landfills will close in five years. The waste-management industry has never seen the need to maintain limitless capacity. The difference today is that new capacity is getting harder to find.
Why ? The reasons often have nothing to do with the claim that we're running out of room for safe landfills. Yes, in some parts of the country we have run out of room. But few nations are as endowed with open territory as the U.S., and suitable land is available even in relatively populous areas. A survey of eastern New York state in the late 1980's for possible landfill sites pinpointed locations that together made up only 1 percent of the land under study but added up to about 200 square miles. The obstacles to new sanitary landfills are less territorial than psychological and political.
This brings us to the heart of the matter. The garbage crisis is not a crisis caused by growing amounts of garbage. It is caused by an evaporation of political will.
Sensible ways of dealing with disposal exist. Sanitary landfills can safely handle garbage in many places around the U.S., perhaps even most. Recycling is no panacea, but it is essential everywhere. Consumers can help by buying products that are recyclable or that have a high post-consumer recycled content.
Incinerators are necessary in some places, and her and there may even have to shoulder most of the burden. Incinerators are not the smoke-belching monsters of yore and can operate within stringent environmental guidelines. And they can be made safer if some items, like batteries and some plastics, are disposed of separately. Incinerators do require, however, that workers be trained to think of pollution control as more important than energy production.
Beyond these means of disposal, market forces, in the form of graduated fees linked to the volume of garbage that households and businesses throw away, can be harnessed to give consumers - and, through them, manufacturers - an incentive to reduce the volume of discards.
Clearly, we have ways to dispose of our garbage. What seems no longer to exist is the capacity to make important decisions about fundamental policies - a problem that afflicts us in many arenas.
New York City's leaders recently arrived at a tentative compromise on a long-term plan for the disposal of city garbage, one that relies heavily on recycling and incineration. Whether that plan would work is probably less open to doubt than whether the city has the will to adopt any plan at all. When it comes to political gridlock on this issue, New York remains a world-class city.
Recycling, Minus the Myths
By John Schall
NEW HAVEN
Recycling is a noble idea, its critics concede, but they say it won't work and costs too much. Many supporters say recycling and composting can take care of the entire solid waste problem. Both sides perpetuate misconceptions that New York City's proposed solid waste management plan should help dispel. As the City Council prepares to vote next week on this plan, it should not be dissuaded by any of the following myths.
Recycling is costly and an environmental extravagance. The city's proposed recycling program may be costly but it is also cost-effective. Managing solid waste is expensive, regardless of the method used. The city's plan shows that half of the waste could be captured in well-planned recycling and composting programs, at a lower cost than it would take to bury or burn it.
Recycling is too difficult and people don't participate. True, not all New Yorkers will sort their trash, but the success of the proposed plan does not depend on 100 percent participation. By making the program simple and consistent, 65 percent to 80 percent of New Yorkers could reasonably be expected to participate, based on experience in New York City and elsewhere.
Currently, the city's patchwork recycling programs differ from neighborhood to neighborhood. Under the new plan, recycling would be uniform throughout every borough. People would be required to sort recyclables into only two containers - one for paper and textiles, the other for glass, metal and plastic. It would be complemented by a public education campaign, and perhaps every block would have a volunteer recycling coordinator. More products would be recycled, including textiles, junk mail and plastic bags. More recycling facilities would be built, and the current collection method, in which two trucks stop at every building, would be streamlined to require only one truck.
A lack of markets for recycled materials will make recycling meaningless and uneconomical. Dozens of states have passed laws in the last two years that require makers of packaging and many consumer goods to reuse up to 50 percent of all the materials they produce. Many other states including New York are considering such mandates, and Congress may pass similar Federal laws. These laws create markets, and the trend will only continue as landfills nationwide fill up and pressure from environmentalists increases.
Recycling makes economic and environmental sense. A study released in June by the Tellus Institute, a nonprofit research organization in Boston, reports that most industries have found using recycled materials technologically feasible, and that this has reduced toxic pollutants, greenhouse gases and ozone-depleting emissions. According to the American Paper Institute, paper mills using recycled materials were five times more profitable last year than those using virgin fiber.
The issue is recycling versus incineration. Under the proposed plan, from 50 percent to 65 percent of the 28,000 tons of waste the city produces each day would be prevented, recycled or composted. The remainder cannot be sent indefinitely to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island. Unless new ways of handling the waste are developed, including more energy producing incineration, New York will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year exporting garbage. The city's proposed plan isn't a recycling vs. incineration plan: it maximizes recycling and composting and buries or burns only the remainder. Recycling works. By approving the plan, the City Council can take a giant step toward an environmentally and economically rational approach for handling waste.
The World Needs An Army on Call
By David Boren
WASHINGTON
Americans are not enthusiastic about having the United States stand alone as the policeman of the world. There is a feeling that we simply no longer have the resources, given the pressing need to rebuild our strength at home, to play that role any longer.
This does not mean, however, that Americans have been lulled by the dangerous siren song of the new isolationists. We understand more clearly than ever that our economic well-being and national security depend on developments and relationships outside our borders.
No American, for example, wants to allow Saddam Hussein to thwart United Nations weapons inspections and rebuild his military capability. No American can remain indifferent to the images of starvation and brutality in detention centers in Bosnia and Herzegovina; the hideous policy of "ethnic cleansing" is something many of us never expected would occur again in our lifetimes. It has filled our people with a sense of moral urgency and an overwhelming feeling that we must do something to stop it.
But while Americans want something done, they do not want to do it alone. For the United Sates to act, the burden must be shared. It is time to create a genuine multilateral mechanism that can deal not only with these crises but also those that inevitably lie ahead.
Instead of shrinking from the task, we should welcome the fact that we are the first generation, perhaps in centuries, to have the opportunity to act boldly in the absence of confrontation between great powers.
The opportunity for the United Nations is clear. In the aftermath of World War II, President Truman wanted to empower the new United Nations to create a new world order. Addressing the General Assembly at its opening session in October 1946, he said, "We shall press for the preparation of agreements in order that the Security Council may have at its disposal peace forces adequate to prevent acts of aggression."
That promise was never realized because of the cold war and the Soviet Union's use of its veto power on the Security council.
But under Article 43 of the United Nations charter, the Secretary General still has the authority to ask member nations to designate military units that can be deployed in the event of a crisis "to maintain international peace and security." In June, Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asked member countries to make that authority a reality.
Richard Gardner, a professor of international law at Columbia University, proposes that 40 to 50 member nations contribute to a rapid-deployment force of 100,000 volunteers that could train under common leadership and with standardized equipment. Intelligence could also be shared to allow the United Nations to anticipate problems and take pre-emptive action.
It is time for us to create such a force, and the United States should take the lead in proposing it.
Of course, details would have to be worked out. The War Powers Act would have to be amended to insure that the United States does not surrender its right to final approval of committing American troops to life-threatening situations. Members of the United Nations that lack veto power in the Security Council could condition their commitment to a rapid-deployment force on the right to withdraw units for their own urgent national security interests.
Still, the existence of such a force, uniformly trained and ready to act, would go a long way toward making the 'new world order' more than just a slogan.
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Prejudice and 'problem people'
Clarence Page
There is an old story about a cat who jumped onto a hot stove once and found the experience to be so profoundly unpleasant that he never jumped on a hot stove again. Of course, he never jumped on a cold stove, either. Ruth Jandrucko of Miami, who was mugged in a parking lot in 1986, can identify with that cat. Ever since she was mugged, the 65-year-old woman says she panics at the sight of black men.
She's not alone. As a black man who has had the experience of being passed over by taxis, seeing women wait for the next elevator rather than get on alone with me or seeing people suddenly lock their car doors at a red light when they see me standing on the nearby corner, I know she's not alone. Shelby Steele, the black, middle-class conservative writer, calls these "little slights" that I should best ignore while keeping my eyes on life's larger prizes.
I try. Still, it's tiring. And enraging.
Anyway, what separates Mrs. Jandrucko's story from countless other cases of individuals coping privately with the aftermath of a violent crime, according to USA Today, is this: She has persuaded Florida authorities to sympathize with her enough to award her full disability and $50,000 in workers' compensation, since she says she can no longer work at the racially integrated company where she was employed before the accident.
Maybe Dan Quayle is right. Maybe we do have too many lawyers. The news sparked inspiration of a financial kind in the imagination of the friend who called to tell me about it. "I've got a business proposition for you, Clarence," she said. "We can consult people on things to be afraid of so they can collect workmen's compensation."
Prejudice for profit? Now, there's a twist on Reagan-era enterprise. Ah, yes, I can see it now:
Can't work in high-rises because you fell off a ladder, and now you panic at the sight of anything taller than a chair? Sue. Can't get to work because a fast-closing door caught you in the rear, and now you panic at the sight of doorknobs? Sue. Spurned by a baseball player, and now you panic at the sight of sports fans? Sue.
Maybe my friend, who happens to be white, and I are being too heartless. Or maybe we're just being too jealous.
After all, I might like some compensation for the two unpleasant occasions in my southern Ohio youth when I was assaulted by roving bands of young white males who happened to have rural Southern accents. They weren't after my money. They just wanted to beat me up. They didn't like black people. Who knows? Maybe each one of them was mugged by a black man, too. I didn't stop to ask.
I escaped serious injury, but I confess that the experience causes me to flinch even today when I am approached by a pickup truck that has a gun rack in the rear, a Confederate flag on the bumper and a hound dog riding shotgun. I know better than to expect all good ol' boys to be racial bigots, but prejudices are not rational.
Yet, if my unpleasant personal experiences had left me with a phobia so fierce that I panicked at the sight of white people, I would have a tough time not only finding work but also living in this country, my home, which I love in spite of its flaws and occasional foolishness.
Unfortunately, America is infested with a national fear of young black males that exceeds rational basis. Since urban blacks commit more crime proportionately (although not numerically) than whites, many people reason that it's better to be safe than sorry and dodge all young black males.
Of course, most victims of black criminals also are black, although that brings little comfort to whites caught in the spillover. I received a memorably poignant letter from an aging white Chicago woman whose family I know. She was mugged with extraordinary brutality by several young males who happened to be black. She wanted me to know that her resulting wariness of all young black males on the street was based on something more than irrational prejudices.
She was writing in response to an essay I had written about how sad I felt that, when my cute little 3-year-old son grows up in 10 years to become a teen-ager, chances are good that he will suddenly be perceived as someone you should cross the street to avoid.
If we haven't taken steps to heal this problem by then, don't tell me how proud you are of America's racial progress.
A national phobia has grown up around a distorted picture of poverty and its bitter fruits, like crime, and the news story about Mrs. Jandrucko's personal phobia symbolizes it. Since the '60s, when poverty, high crime and broken families usually were reported as a problem that touched all races, it has been transformed through the distortions of media and political processes into something else: a black problem.
By every index, poverty, high crime and broken families continue to plague white communities, too, but, by transforming all of these problems into black 'pathologies', it is easier for Americans to think of blacks as a 'problem people,' in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow Americans with problems.
Mrs. Jandrucko's case symbolizes a country that avoids engaging its national racial hang-ups directly in a way that can lead to long-term healing. Instead, we make short-term pay-outs while our irrational fears fester.If Mrs. Jandrucko has a severe psychological problem with black folks that resulted from one bad experience, maybe we'd all be better off if she received psychological help instead of help in avoiding black folks. Maybe that's another good argument for national health insurance. We need to plug the gaps in physical and psychological care we have in this country. We need to bridge some social gaps, too.
Gore's book is good case against him
George Will
Someone retrieved Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional (the one about "dominion over palm and pine" and "lesser breeds without the Law") from the wastebasket where Kipling had tossed it. Whether that someone did literature a favor is debatable. Clearly Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance is wastebasket-worthy.
The senator says our civilization is a "dysfunctional family." He favors "wrenching transformation of society," altering "the very foundation of our civilization." Some leaders have effected such changes. Moses, Jesus, Mohammed. But the U.S. government?
His environmentalism is a caricature of contemporary liberalism, a compound of unfocused compassion (for the whole planet) and green guilt about "consumptionism" (a sin that Somalia and many other places would like to be more guilty of). His call to "make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization" is embarrassing. Who wants politicians who are unaware of the comical figure they cut when announcing new "central organizing principles" for civilization?
When Mr. Gore asserts, as he did yet again on television last Sunday, that "the world scientific community" is in "consensus" about global warming, he is being as cavalier about the truth as the Bush campaign has been about Mr. Clinton's tax increases. Mr. Gore knows that his former mentor at Harvard, Roger Revelle, who died last year, concluded: "The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time. There is little risk in delaying policy responses." Mr. Gore knows, or should know before pontificating, that a recent Gallup Poll of scientists concerned with global climate research shows that 53 percent do not believe warming has occurred, and another 30 percent are uncertain.
Mr. Gore is marching with many people who not long ago were marching in the opposite direction. New York magazine's Christopher Byron notes that Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, is an "environmentalist for all temperatures." Today Mr. Schneider is hot about global warming; 16 years ago he was exercised about global cooling. There are a lot like him among today's panic-mongers.
Mr. Gore complains that the media, by focusing on controversy, threatens the planet by creating skepticism about the agenda for which he insists there is scientific consensus. Actually, too often skepticism (about Love Canal, acid rain, the - it turns out - non-existent Northern Hemisphere hole in the ozone layer) is vindicated long after being portrayed in the media as a moral failing, rather than an intellectually debatable position.
Mr. Gore, who has spent most of his life in Washington's governing circle, overflows with the certitude characteristic of that circle. He knows the future and knows exactly what it requires, which turns out to be an unprecedented expansion of government - spending, regulating, evaluating technologies, and transferring wealth abroad.
He has mastered the Washington art of arguing that his agenda won't really cost anything. You know: This or that program or regulation will make us healthier or smarter or better behaved, and therefore will make us more productive, so economic growth will increase and so will revenues, and thus everything will "pay for itself." Mr. Gore's new wrinkle on this is environmentalism-as-business-opportunity. We shall prosper by making environmentally "necessary" products. Perhaps.
But we know who certainly will prosper. Ronald Bailey in National Review reports a Rand study that shows that 80 percent of the money spent by an environmental program Mr. Gore sponsored - the Superfund, for cleaning up contaminated sites - has gone in fees to one of the Democratic Party's most powerful, and financially grateful, constituencies: lawyers.
The hoariest cliche in modern American politics is "Marshall Plan" for this or that (nowadays usually "the cities"). It is being given another trot around the track by Mr. Gore's call for a "Global Marshall Plan." He is vociferous against the "hubris" of our technological civilization but he partakes of the hubris of the government class which, having failed at its banal but useful business down the street (schools, bridges, medical care), has an itch to go global.
Mr. Gore's particular ideas (lots of new taxes, treating the automobile as a "mortal threat" to civilization, and much more) have no constituency. But what is dismaying is the way he trades in ideas, uncritically embracing extremisms that seem to justify vast expansions of his righteousness and of the power of the government he seeks to lead.
His unsmiling sense of lonely evangelism in a sinning world lacks the sense of proportion that is produced by a sense of history - and of humor. The planet is more resilient, the evidence about its stresses more mixed and the facts of environmental progress more heartening than he admits. His book, a jumble of dubious 1990s science and worse 1960s philosophy ("alienation" and all that) is a powerful reason not to elect its author to high office in the executive branch, where impressionable people will be bombarded by bad ideas in search of big budgets.
Congress avoids fiscal restraints for its staff
Stephen Moore
It is often said that Washington, D.C., is a city where people come to do good and end up doing well. Nowhere is that more evident than on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress and their growing legions of staffers are doing well indeed.
This past January, as the U.S. economy continued to sputter, unemployment continued to escalate and congressional approval ratings sank to a near all-time low, Congress rewarded itself with a $4,400 pay raise. Members now 'earn' $129,500 a year - a larger income than that of 96 percent of all Americans and four times more than the median wage earner makes.
Speaker of the House Tom Foley, D-Wash., and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, D-Maine, even do better. Mr. Foley makes $166,200, and Mr. Mitchell makes $143,800. Remember that the next time Mr. Foley and Mr. Mitchell start one of their demagogic rich-bashing escapades. They are the rich.
A case might be made that the 535 elected members of Congress deserve to be handsomely paid.
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Nukes for Sale
KARL GROSSMAN AND JUDITH LONG
"The time has come to consider creating a global system for protection of the world community," Boris Yeltsin said on January 31, addressing President Bush and the United Nations Security Council. "It could be based on a reorientation of the U.S. Strategic Defense Initiative to make use of high technologies developed in Russia's defense complex." Yeltsin's proposal is a hot deal for the former enemies: Russia gets cash, the United States, nuclear technology - and power through the militarization of space. The losers are the planet and its peoples.
A deal to buy Russia's Topaz 2 space reactor was struck more than a year ago and announced in January 1991 at the eighth annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems in New Mexico. Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, first deputy of the Kurtchatovis Institute of Atomic Power in Moscow, explained at the time, "Our institution got its budget cut 50 percent and ... we need to look for finances from different sources." As for the cost to the United States, Richard Verga, director of key technologies for the Pentagon's Strategic Defense Initiative Organization, said that Topaz 2 would be used in a program with an overall cost of $100 million. The Topaz, a reactor that produces energy through nuclear fission as it orbits the Earth, uses a "thermionic" design - technology in which Russia outstrips the United States. It could be mass-produced here to provide power to weaponry on Star Wars battle platforms.
The Topaz 2 deal poses stiff competition to General Electric, which is developing a Star Wars nuclear reactor of its own, the SP-100, and is causing a split among U.S. policy-makers. In a January 6 memo the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered the Energy Department and NASA to give preference to the Topaz 2 because "the potential availability of the Topaz 2 ... offers new possibilities," and it cut D.O.E.'s SP-100 budget for 1993 from $40 million to $30 million. The Pentagon also favors the Topaz, claiming it can be deployed in three years at a tenth the cost of the SP-100, which has a price tag of $1.6 billion and can't be tested until 2004. But D.O.E., longtime friend to G.E., insists SP-100's liquid metal heat system is "ahead of thermionics."
This past January the Russians were back with more deals - and some veiled threats of selling to Libya - at the ninth annual Symposium on Space Nuclear Power Systems. This time they were peddling their nuclear-powered rockets. Coincidentally, the Pentagon had just disclosed some of its own plans for nuclear-powered rockets. Scrubbed in 1972 after seventeen years of development as too dangerous and too costly (at $1.5 billion already spent - $6.5 billion in today's dollars), the project was covertly reopened for Star Wars in 1987, code-named Timberwind and kept in deep secrecy. Nuclear-powered rockets, with a stronger blast force than conventional ones, would theoretically be able to loft the massive lasers, particle-beam devices and other heavy Star Wars weaponry into orbit. Air Force spokesmen admitted to a cost of $800 million for the project. The designer and manufacturer of the U.S. nuclear-powered rocket engine is Babcock and Wilcox, of Three Mile Island fame.
Lost in the scramble for dollars and technology is careful consideration of what the nuclearization of space can cost the planet - in dollars and in lives. In dollars: The Star Wars budget jumped from $2.9 billion in 1991 to $4.1 billion this year. The White House in calling for a record 1993 Star Wars budget of $5.4 billion.
In danger: There has been a 15 percent failure rate in both U.S. and Soviet nuclear space hardware. The most serious U.S. accident occurred in 1964, when a plutonium-powered satellite fell toward Earth, breaking up i the atmosphere and showering plutonium over vast areas of the planet. Russian nuclear-powered satellites have also fallen to Earth. The 1978 crash of Cosmos 954 covered a broad swath of Canada with radioactive debris. Topaz or SP-100, Timberwind or Russian rocketry, they're Chernobyls in the sky.
Government documents on Timberwind told of a prototype of the nuclear rocket failing on the ground. Still, the Pentagon planned a test flight, which for "safety" reasons would take place mostly over water around Antarctica, though New Zealand is on its path. A government analysis put the chances of the nuclear rocket crashing into New Zealand at 1 in 2,325. (For some perspective on these odds, recall that the chances of a Challenger-type disaster were estimated at 1 in 100,000.) The Topaz 2 has been used in only two missions, in 1987. Both ended because of a malfunction in the reactor.
This past July, insuring against accidents with U.S. nuclear space machinery, NASA and D.O.E. signed a Space Nuclear Power Agreement limiting U.S. liability in the event of a nuclear accident in space to $7.3 billion to Americans for property damage or death from radioactive contamination and $100 million, total, for citizens of all other nations. Five months earlier, the United States withdrew support for U.N. draft guidelines on the use of nuclear space devices because the Defense Department and NASA feared that Star Wars might be hindered by such a treaty. It's the nuke world order.
Toxic Banking
DOUG HENWOOD
"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." The publication of these words, from a leaked internal memo, caused a rush of bad publicity for their author, World Bank chief economist Lawrence Summers, who now claims he was being ironic and provocative. There were calls for his resignation. But Summers was expressing honestly the logic of his discipline and his employer.
Summers - whose salary is 225 times the per-person income of the bank's Third World clientele - is a whiz-bang Harvard econocrat, a class that believes religiously that money is the final measure of value. Happiness is a growing G.D.P. Legal issues can be resolved as competing economic claims, and ethical decisions can be translated into dollar terms, with the cheaper alternative always preferable.
In his memo, which criticized a draft of the bank's World Development Report, Summers was applying cost-benefit analysis, which measures the value of a human life by the stream of wages remaining to it. Say it will cost Global Megatoxics $1 million to install a state-of-the-art scrubber in its chimney. If Global determines that not spending this sum will shorten the lives of five people by ten years apiece, all that would be lost would be the present value of these fifty years of wages. At a wage of $1,000 a year, the cost of the five lives can be figured at $41,000, thanks to the magic of compound interest; at $30,000 a year, they're worth $1.2 million. As Summers said in his memo, "health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages."
Since the costs of pollution - always priced in dollars or their equivalent - rise with development, Summers argued, it makes sense costwise to dump in Africa. If a pollutant is going to cause "prostrate" [sic] cancer, a disease of old age, why not locate it in countries where people aren't likely to live long enough to get it? He concluded this section by saying that disagreement with this logic suggests the belief that things like "intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc. could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization." Exactly; as they should be.
It makes no sense for Summers to resign; he expressed the bank's logic perfectly. It's a bank, and acts like one. It may preside over a steady erosion of Third World incomes relative to First World ones, but it makes big money. Last year, after paying $7 billion in interest and fees to its investors and bankers, it had a $1.2 billion surplus and a rate of return that commercial banks would envy.
What's a public institution to do with that kind of surplus? The bank's executive board spends a lot of time working that question over. In 1991 it decided to contribute $267 million to its soft-loan affiliate, which lends to very poor countries at concessional rates, $29 million to the Global Environment Trust Fund and stuff the remaining $904 million into its hoard of 'retained earnings,' which now stands at $11.9 billion. According to Unicef, preventing vitamin-A-deficiency blindness would cost $6 million. Preventing "the great majority" of childhood malnutrition deaths would cost $2.5 billion. But adding to the World Bank's surplus is a higher priority.
In recent years, the bank has moved away from project-oriented lending - power plants and dams - and toward structural adjustment lending, in which credit is conditional on adoption of a standard austerity/deregulation package. Not surprisingly, these schemes have savage effects, to which the bank has a ready answer - more loans. The bank is lending its clients more money to treat the poverty, social dislocation and environmental damage that earlier loans helped create. The bank funds greenhouse-gas reduction schemes in countries where the greenhouse-gas producers were initially financed by the World Bank.
Bank publicity makes much of a new environmental consciousness, but actions tell a different story. The bank exempted structural adjustment programs from environmental review even though their point is to work human and physical resources harder which can't be friendly to people or their environment. It has redlined its environment department, leaving it little power. World Bank claims to a larger role in global environmental politics - to be pressed, for example, at this spring's United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development - should be beaten back with heavy sticks.
Whether or not Summers returns to Harvard, waste export will be a growth industry for these sluggish times. The practice of shifting dirty industries to poor countries is well established. Greenpeace follows the routine stuff all over the world - German (per capita income: $20,440) plastic to Argentina ($2,160), U.S. ($20,910) mercury to South Africa ($2,470), car batteries from everywhere to Brazil ($2,540). Plastic dropped into recycling bins is likely to be shipped to Malaysia ($2,160). The logic is impeccable.
IMPLANTS: TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES
KATHA POLLIT
The F.D.A. hearings into the safety of silicone gel breast implants have ended with a split recommendation by the advisory panel: Rejecting an out-right ban on the devices, it urges that implantees be registered in clinical trials, to which only women who needed the surgery for reconstructive, not cosmetic, purposes would be guaranteed admittance. Which is it - "Panel Backs Marketing of Implants" (The Washington Post) or "Experts Suggest U.S. Sharply Limit Breast Implants" (The New York Times)? You be the judge.
Whatever else they were, the hearings were great theater. There was the perfidy of Dow (Napalm? Agent Orange? What's that?) Corning, the largest manufacturer of the implants, which was revealed to have lied and stonewalled for almost thirty years. There was the pious greed of plastic surgeons, who aggressively marketed the devices as a "cure" for "micromastia" (small breasts, to you) and now warn of an epidemic of "hysteria" in breast-enlarged women newly enlightened about the risks of autoimmune disorders, painful scarring, obscured mammograms. There was a hero, too, if a few decades late - David Kessler, the F.D.A.'s energetic new head. But most of all there were breasts - sex, beauty, fashion, women, women's bodies. Does anyone think the implant story would have been plastered all over the news media if it was about orthopedic shoes?
The real breast-implant story, though, isn't about women's bodies; it's about their minds. In the postfeminist wonderland in which we are constantly being told we live, women's lives are portrayed as one big smorgasbord of "choices" and "options", all value free and freely made, and which therefore cannot be challenged or even discussed, lest one sound patronizing or moralistic. Thus, women "choose" to have implants, we are told, to please men - no, wait, to boost their self-esteem - and who are you to criticize their judgment?
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Task Proves Too Great for Bush
George F. Will
HOUSTON - The Republican convention succeeded in the sense that the party clearly spoke its mind. It was, perhaps, a costly success, because it proved that there can indeed be indecent exposure of the mind as well as the body. Let us begin with the president's speech, which had the merit of being merely inadequate rather than, as many others were, strange.
His speech was not up to the demands that his political condition placed upon it. Judged, as the speech must be, against the background of behavior that his condition has caused, his speech was (in T.S. Eliot's phrase) "dry sterile thunder without rain."
It is not news that when Nature was dishing up rhetorical gifts, Bush did not hold out his plate. But by the verve of his delivery here he proved, again, that practice makes adequate. Unfortunately, this adequacy was a reminder that his problem has not been his lack of style but rather his abundance of insincerity.
The speech would have been far better for a candidate for a first term. As the umpteenth reiteration of mostly familiar items, from tax cuts to school choice to term limits, for which he has been only intermittently and impotently ardent, it repeatedly raised a ruinous question. For example, when the man under whom domestic spending and regulations have exploded says, "government is too big and costs too much," people wonder why years five through eight will be better than years one through four have been.
Once upon a time political parties talked about things that were clearly public matters, things like land for homesteaders, anti-trust policies, rural electrification, Social Security, medical care, defense and so on. Not so Wednesday night.
Then Republicans made "family values" their focus. In the process they showed that their view of government is out of focus, and they pounded the phrase "family values" into shapeless mush with a bad odor.
Marilyn Quayle's speech was evidence for those who say women should be kept out of combat not because they are too physically frail or morally fine but because they are too fierce to respect the rules of war. In a speech that launched an evening of sustained innuendo, she said - well, tip-toed to the edge of saying - that Bill Clinton "took drugs" and "joined in the sexual revolution" and "dodged the draft" ("ran from his responsibilities" was Lynn Martin's version an hour later.) And he probably believes "that commitment, marriage and fidelity" are "just arbitrary arrangements."
As for Mrs. Clinton, Mrs. Quayle implied that Mrs. Clinton is one of those women who "wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women" and who in the 1960s believed - may still; can't be sure - that "the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it."
Next, Barbara Bush said: "However you define family, that's what we mean by family values." Fogginess is, apparently, a Bush family value. Her contribution to the evening's thoughts about government was that families are good. But coming hard on the heels of Mrs. Quayle's philippic, and later spiced with Pat Robertson's revelation that the Clintons are hatching "a radical plan to destroy the traditional family," Mrs. Bush was just a kinder, gentler coda to one long innuendo: Democrats may hug their children, but probably don't really mean it.
The Republicans' graceless rhetoric here compelled two conclusions.
For all their talk about America's "strength" and "greatness," their tone is of frightened timidity. These are "America the Endangered Species" Republicans, terrified that neither "family values" nor the nation can survive Mrs. Clinton.
And Republicans have caught a particularly virulent version of the Democrats' quite-virulent-enough tendency (remember the Bork confirmation fight) to turn political disagreement into moral assault.
Times Change and So Does Writer's Task
Carole Ashkinaze
The ghosts of "Bugs" Moran and Dion O'Banion don't lurk here any more. Having an alderman in the family doesn't mean you have a job. It's easier to find a cappuccino on Clark Street than a chili dog. Chicago has changed and is changing in some disorienting ways.
That much has been obvious since the Sun-Times gave its blessings three years ago to an Op Ed column with a liberal, feminist slant - a radical departure for what a colleague described (I think unfairly) at the time as a "working man's newspaper" in a "'dems' and 'dose' kind of town."
Lacking the perspective of a native Chicagoan, I couldn't accept either characterization. The Chicago I knew prided itself on the excellence of its universities and libraries. The Sun-Times was chock full of women's bylines. The "dems" and "dose" I heard tended to be the affectations of college-educated Bears fans from Beverly; they might swill "brewskis" and festoon the Picasso at Daley Center Plaza with a Cubs cap - but they stood in line for hours outside the Art Institute when a Monet exhibit came to town.
The women I met - from Operation PUSH's Willie Barrow, philanthropist Marge Benton and Personal PAC's Marcena Love to politician Miriam Santos, the ACLU's Colleen Connell and educator Paula Wolff - were formidable.
There had to be others.
We didn't have a happy hodgepodge of cultures, either, despite the hype. Our town's racial and ethnic boundaries were straining at the seams. Its schools were on the brink of disaster. Its infant mortality rates rivaled those of Third World nations. It seemed full of invisible people.
Chicago was their town, too, but it was just beginning to feel their behind-the-scenes machinations, gentle persuasions and rage. Though renowned for the fearlessness of its journalism, it had more than its share of columnists who wanted to slow the rate of change, so far as women and families were concerned. I had a chance to write a different kind of column, and I jumped at it.
Is this beginning to sound like the reminiscence of somebody who isn't going to be writing in this space any more? Right you are. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Wanting to make the most of my allotted space on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays, I decided that nobody would ever have to wonder where I stood on the 'gag' rule, abortions at Cook County Hospital or the exploitation of ancient Indian burial grounds. There would be no cavalier dismissal of sexual harassment or women candidates here; no turning away if rabid anti-Semites questioned the rights of Jews to participate in elections.
And the result has been gratifying. If Carol Moseley Braun's campaign hasn't proved that change is stirring, nothing does. Remember the smiles that women who didn't even know each other exchanged on elevators the morning after her primary victory? Everybody's writing and talking about women now.
My columns have made some people, especially abortion foes, angry. But I've heard from single mothers, rape victims, priests and people with disabilities, too. They've taught me about their struggles and thanked me for making them visible. Sometimes, they moved me to tears.
They also got me thinking about missed opportunities and roads not taken, things I addressed in a social policy context (with co-author Gary Orfield) in a 1991 book, The Closing Door, about the persistence of poverty in Atlanta, my hometown. Then I heard that Jimmy Carter, the ex-president, had declared war on poverty in Atlanta. And that there was a task for me, if I was interested.
Imagine that. So without further ado, and with the hope that women will continue to be visible in these pages, I return this space to the editors.
I'll miss you, Chicago, but I'm off to Atlanta for a while. Bye, y'all.
Bush Plays the Shell Game With Proposal for Tax Cut
Carl T. Rowan
WASHINGTON - Give a clever, cynical politician an audience of his blindly faithful and together they can make snake oil seem like the elixir of life.
George Bush and the power-protecting conservative delegates proved that anew Thursday night in the closing hours of the Republican convention in Houston.
Consider the issue of taxes on which Bush flamfloozled voters in 1988 with his "read my lips" deception. This time the media and key delegates were propagandized for a week with leaks that President Bush would make a "stunning" promise of an across-the-board tax cut.
"What a great political coup this will be, because everybody loves a tax cut," some pundits said. Well, let's look at what Bush actually promised:
"I will propose to further reduce taxes across the board - provided we pay for these cuts with specific spending reductions that I consider appropriate."
The party faithful could shout and cheer, but the average American, in debt, jobless, laid off, worried about keeping kids in college, fearing the loss of a long-cherished home, had better be smart enough to ask: "What the hell did Bush mean?" Would his "across the board" tax cut mean that his friends making a million bucks a year would get a $100,000 windfall while the family struggling along on $20,000 would get a $2,000 saving? That would fit Bush's demonstrated mentality.
The president gave a clue that his obsession is still to get tax laws that reward his rich friends when he demanded for the umpteenth time a reduction in capital gains taxes on the money those friends make from selling stocks, bonds, real estate and other investments. The tax cuts Bush 'promises,' but did not spell out, will not bring relief to one percent of the Americans who now suffer.
But listen again to the words Bush used to explain how he would ensure that the tax cut did not add to budget deficits that have crippled America throughout his and Ronald Reagan's administrations: " ...we pay for these cuts with specific spending reductions that I [I meaning Bush] consider appropriate."
We'll have probably 150 new faces in the Congress after the November elections, but we sure won't get a majority of lawmakers who would cut spending in areas that Bush regards as "appropriate." Bush would cut spending on Medicare and Medicaid, even as he rails against any reasonable national health insurance plan. This president would cut the food stamp program, which has provided life-sustaining food for 27 million Americans during a recession that he said didn't exist. The WIC (Women, Infants and Children) program that provides vital nutrition to poor pregnant women and their babies would get zapped by Bush.
Mr. Bush's lollipop promise of a tax cut is more cruel and diabolical than was his "no new taxes" lie of 1988.
Even snakes wouldn't slither through the oily proposal that each taxpayer be able to check a box on his or her return saying "reserve 10 percent to reduce the national debt." Suppose Congress ever were stupid enough to enact this gimmick and taxpayers checked off $100 billion. That would reduce the $4 trillion national debt by $100 billion while increasing the current budget deficit by the same amount - unless Mr. Bush found a way to cut spending by another $100 billion. Note that in four years he hasn't cut a nickel out of White House spending, either for staff and its uses of airplanes and limousines, or for his patently political trips at taxpayers' expense.
Mr. Bush's "tax cut" proposal and his "checkoff box" to reduce the national debt are part of a shell game that surely has won the admiration of every swamplands real estate con man in Houston and 3,000 miles beyond, in every direction.
President Bush seemed to exult in his jibe at Bill Clinton's so-called "Elvis economics." He said that under Clinton, "America will be checking into the 'Heartbreak Hotel.'" It was as though Bush was unaware that millions of Americans have checked out of their homes and bankrupt businesses, including the Houston hotel where he claims to have his official residence. But the faithful were in no mood Thursday night to ask George Bush how much he knows about "heartbreak."
Mr. Bush may get a big upward 'bounce' in the polls just because people who see his party faithful cheering think momentarily that they must open their gullets to join the clamor.
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Here Come the Eager Beavers
Liberals, thinking government is a scalpel, are hot to operate on the body politic
George F. Will
James Carville, Bill Clinton's Clausewitz, talks like an Uzi, in bursts. He should do the president-elect a final favor by firing off for him the story of the traffic lights on Florida Street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
A decade ago, Carville helped elect as mayor of that city a man who promised to synchronize the traffic lights on the main drag, Florida Street. By God, said the candidate, using a rhetorical trope then fashionable, if we can put a man on the moon, we can smooth out the herky-jerky stop-and-start nonflow of traffic. So the new mayor straightaway turned to Carville and said: Get it done. Carville called the city's traffic engineer and said: Make it happen. The engineer said: OK. But it will cost bushels of money. The computers will have to be jiggered. And there will be these problems with left-turn lanes. And, besides ...
The traffic on Florida Street still does not flow.
But even if Carville tells this cautionary tale to Clinton and to the swarms of eager beavers now bearing down on Washington it probably will not do a lick of good. Washington had better brace itself for the arrival of a lot of liberals who really believe that government is a sharp scalpel, and who can hardly wait to operate on the body politic. Or, to change the metaphor, they are eager to go marching as to war.
The Cold War is over, but the governmental hubris that the war engendered lingers on. Liberals, who often have faulted U.S. foreign policy for its alleged bellicosity, are enamored of 'wars' on the home front. Burton Yale Pines, a leading conservative, believes the Cold War gave rise to a misplaced confidence in Washington's capacity to do things not related to the Cold War, but which were called 'wars' anyway. The powers Washington acquired to run containment of Communism seemed to give Washington legitimacy as architect of ambitious domestic undertakings. Washington declared 'wars' on poverty, crime, drugs and AIDS, spoke of a "Marshall Plan" for the cities and a "Manhattan Project" for education. The language of war lent spurious plausibility to the idea that the government's skills in foreign policy could be as successfully applied to solving the social problems of an individualistic, pluralistic society.
Actually, the importation of martial language into domestic governance began before the Cold War. Franklin Roosevelt, in his first Inaugural Address, said he might ask Congress for "broad executive power to wage war against the emergency as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe." Eight months before that, FDR had told the Democratic convention that the nation should resume the "interrupted march along the path of real progress." The 12-year interruption had been the interval of Republican rule between Woodrow Wilson - a war leader - and FDR, domestic 'commander in chief' treating a domestic difficulty as the moral equivalent of war. Wilson, who disliked the Founding Fathers' purposes in designing the separation of powers, was impatient with institutional inhibitions on government's freedom to alter the balance between "the power of the government and the privileges of the individual."
Before Clinton surrenders to the siren call of the Wilsonian presidency, read Terry Eastland's 'Energy in the Executive: The Case for a Strong Presidency.' Eastland traces some problems of the modern presidency to Wilsonian grandiosity in the conception of the president's duties. Wilson, writes Eastland, was the first holder of the office to believe "that Presidents are to lead the people ever onwards and upwards - to an unknown destination only history can reveal, but which, as the decades have passed, inevitably seems to have required larger and more costly government whose reach extends more deeply into the states and the private sector." Wilson declared that "the size of modern democracy necessitates the exercise of persuasive power by dominant minds in the shaping of popular judgments." Thus began the inflation of the presidential function: The president as the public's tutor, moral auditor and cheerleader.
"Salvation by society": Clinton, who will be the sixth Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson, leads a party still awash with Wilsonian liberalism's desire to conscript the individual into collective undertakings. Wilson presided over the 'war socialism' of modern mobilization. Walter Lippmann and other 'progressives' thought war could be a healthy antidote to America's excessive 'individualism' and "the evils of localism." The public, properly led by a "dominant mind" at the pinnacle of the executive branch of the central government, could be nationalized and homogenized and made into good raw material for great undertakings. The greatest of these was to be what Peter Drucker calls "salvation by society" - society, controlled by government, would perfect individuals. Hence, Lyndon Johnson. One of his aides, Harry McPherson, described how LBJ envisioned the nation as a patient whose pathologies were to receive presidential ministrations:
"People were [seen to be] suffering from a sense of alienation from one another, of anomie, of powerlessness. This affected the well-to-do as much as it did the poor. Middle-class women, bored and friendless in the suburban afternoons; fathers, working at 'meaningless' jobs, or slumped before the television set; sons and daughters desperate for 'relevance' - all were in need of community, beauty, and purpose, all were guilty because so many others were deprived while they, rich beyond their ancestors' dreams, were depressed. What would change all this was a creative public effort ..."
It is a wonder we did not wind up with a Department of Meaningful Labor and an Agency for Friendly Suburban Afternoons. LBJ promised a Great Society "where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community." Today Americans would settle for cities where the basic needs of the body (such as protection from bullets) and the rudimentary requirements of commerce (order; adequate education and transportation) are provided.
Clinton's eager beavers should ponder that, perhaps during a herky-jerky drive down Florida Street.
Europe, Our Former Ally
The bitter trade dispute reveals isolationism is growing on both sides of the Atlantic
Robert J. Samuelson
We call the Europeans our 'allies'. This reference is an increasingly outdated relic of the cold war. The bitter trade dispute now raging between America and Europe merely captures a larger reality: Western Europe is so self-absorbed that it's aggravating the conflicts of the post-cold-war world. An alliance presumes common goals. In practice, Europe gives only lip service to the common goals we supposedly share.
Ever since World War II, Americans have correctly favored greater European unity. The Common Market spurred economic recovery and helped subdue the hatreds of two world wars. But the latest exercise in unity - embodied in the 1991 Maastricht Treaty - no longer deserves our admiration or support. It aims to create a single European currency by 1999 and to remake the European Community (EC) into something of a superstate. These foolish ambitions are bad for Europe, bad for the United States and bad for the world. They inhibit Europe from playing a constructive role in international affairs.
Everyone knows the basic problems of the post-cold-war era. The first is to help Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union establish prosperous and democratic societies. The second is to nurture cooperative mechanisms that enable countries to maintain peace, healthy world trade and a cleaner environment. And the third is to foster strong global economic growth. On every count, Europe has been unhelpful.
It has been unimaginative and stingy in dealing with the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It has been totally ineffectual in Yugoslavia. Its heavy farm subsidies threaten the global trading order: precisely the type of cooperative framework that's now needed. As for the economy, Europe's slump is self-inflicted and is hurting the rest of the world. The slowdown resulted from poor economic policies - rigid European exchange rates and high interest rates - adopted to cope with German reunification.
Europe aspires to join the United States as a superpower. The trouble is, Europe provides no practical or moral leadership. Building a more grandiose Europe serves as an all-purpose excuse to shirk global responsibilities. Europe's message to everyone else is: be selfish like us.
Consider the current trade dispute. In 1962 the EC eliminated its tariff on soybeans. As soybean imports rose, the EC sought to stem the tide by massively subsidizing its own farmers to grow competing oilseeds: sunflower seeds and rapeseed. Europe's oilseed production jumped from 1.5 million metric tons in 1976 to 11.7 million in 1991. Meanwhile, its imports of oilseeds (mainly from the United States) dropped from 7.6 million tons to 6.3 million tons over the same period. In effect, the EC's subsidies revoked the 1962 tariff concession. That violates the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).
In 1989 Washington complained to GATT. The GATT twice ruled in our favor. The Europeans refused to remedy their violation. Only after long negotiations did we retaliate: 200 percent tariffs to be imposed on $300 million worth of European food imports (mainly wine) in December.
Global leadership requires the capacity to identify larger international interests - consistent, to be sure, with a nation's own interests - and pursue them, even at some immediate domestic political cost. This has been the hallmark of postwar U.S. leadership. We helped Europe and Japan rebuild after World War II, kept a strong military and maintained relatively open trade policies. It is precisely this capacity that Europe lacks.
Irrelevant goals: On trade, perhaps the worst calamity - a breakdown of GATT - will be avoided. By threatening Europe with real penalties, the tough U.S. retaliation may prompt a settlement of the soybean dispute and the broader GATT talks. Even if this occurs, though, Europe seems fated to remain self-absorbed by the impractical and irrelevant goals of the Maastricht Treaty.
Take a common European currency, which would replace national ones, like the French franc. In the United States, a single currency works because, among other reasons, people migrate from a region of economic weakness to one of strength. Europe, divided by language and culture, lacks our flexibility. It's hard to create an economic policy that suits all countries. The bad experience after German reunification confirms that.
Even if a common currency could work, it is irrelevant to Europe's immediate needs. If Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union slide into chaos, it won't matter whether or not Western Europe has a common currency. The economic and social effects of this anarchy - unwanted immigration, perhaps more strife as in Yugoslavia - will be overwhelming. But Western Europe focuses on Maastricht instead of the more critical problems in the East.
Europe cannot be made into a nation: it is a permanent cluster of nationalities. The unrealistic effort to do so is increasingly unpopular. The Danes rejected Maastricht, the French approved it by 2 percentage points. People fear being submerged by a faceless EC bureaucracy. To overcome hostility, Europe's leaders pander to local interests. They are insensitive to outsiders, including us. Farm policy is one area where we've suffered; Airbus - Europe's subsidized commercial jet maker - is another.
What Europe should do, as columnist William Pfaff writes in the International Herald Tribune, is follow its "past model of progress through pragmatic economic integration." Specifically, it should bring Eastern countries into its market as quickly as possible.
The Persian Gulf crisis showed that Europe needs us. But we also need Europe as a superpower. All nations are looking inward, perhaps (as after World War I) dangerously so. Americans won't make the sacrifices for global leadership unless other rich nations do likewise. Unfortunately, the Europeans won't play. They merely want to advance their own agenda. Their isolationism feeds ours. Down that path lies a world without superpowers.
This Economy Won't Walk
Yup. But it may not be quite as crippled as you've been led to believe.
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Judge Bea's case
This is to correct inaccuracies and to supply facts neglected by your writer in his article about me ("Judge profits from poverty program," Sept. 27). Far from abusing the U.S. Department of Transportation Minority-Disadvantaged Business Enterprise program as charged by your article, our family business (Ampac) met the letter and the spirit of the legislation.
The program is not a 'poverty program.' It was never designed to provide benefits to the needy. It is an 'affirmative action' program that provides an opportunity for minority enterprises to participate at all levels of government contracting, not just in the low-scale janitorial and house repair sectors. The hope is that minority entrepreneurs will hire and promote minority persons. Ampac did just this. We had 80 percent minority employees, placed at all levels of the company.
Manufacturing reinforced concrete pipe is not a backyard industry. It requires a factory, land, capital and people. Ampac's competitors in the Southern California market were all companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, either directly or through their parent companies.
One of our competitors, Hydro (a subsidiary of Consolidated Gold Fields, which received over 45 percent of its income from South African gold diggings and is largely owned by De-Beers, the South African diamond cartel) challenged Ampac's disadvantaged business enterprise (DBE) certification before Caltrans. We demanded a hearing at which evidence was challenged and presented. We won. Hydro appealed to Washington. We won again.
We didn't win based on any 'legal argument.' We won, fair and square, on the substance and merits.
Your article also charged that I misused office stationery by seeking "to advance the private interests of others" in responding to Caltrans inquiries and implied I refused to supply the information requested. Nothing could be further from the truth.
My letter of April 20, 1990, to Caltrans was not a response on behalf of Ampac or Radco. It was a response to Caltrans demands for information regarding my relationships with Ampac and Radco. Your writer again "neglected" to print that after questioning the legality of the department's request. I nonetheless answered the specific requests of the Caltrans letter writer.
I continue to consider the matters submitted to the U.S. Senate to be inappropriate for comment at this time, due to the pending nomination [for a federal judgeship]. That includes financial matters.
CARLOS BEA
San Francisco
It amazes me that a well-intentioned program that provides minority businesses with government contract opportunities can be so easily manipulated. I am equally amazed and angered that a person like Superior Court Judge Carlos Bea, who is not Latino, African American, Native American or Asian American, can legally be considered a disadvantaged minority. After all, he is a white European (he was born in Spain).
Many of us in the Latino community have lamented over this predicament that people like Bea, who have a Spanish surname, are the first to say they are Latino (they hail from Latin America) and have faced historical discrimination in this country, when they in fact fail on both accounts.
FILIMINO REYES
Menlo Park
Bush can't manage
I was very disappointed in the column by William Randolph Hearst Jr. ("Why Bush may win," Op-Ed, Sept. 27). Hearst definitely seems out of touch with the impact of the current economy, deficit, AIDS and other significant problems, and the lack of action by the Bush administration.
Bush simply lacks management skills, and is unwilling to recognize problems and unable to develop actions to resolve them. The more I read, the more I am convinced that Bill Clinton and Al Gore have the energy, intelligence, vision and management skills to tackle our significant problems.
If the U.S. were run as a business, Bush and Dan Quayle would be fired for poor management, incompetence and complacency.
GEORGE M. HUNT
San Francisco
State plans for extra income don't endanger parks
For the record, no one in the state parks systems has 'embraced' such ludicrous notions as a Disney-run railroad at Mount Tamalpais State Park, as implied in your editorial, "Turning parks into profits: the Ansel Adams Marriott" (Sept. 27).
Although the editorial notes that I as state parks director asked for a study of whether additional concessions can be granted without "violating our resources," it seems to suggest that this department has a cavalier attitude toward parks resources.
At one point in this year's state budget process, the Department of Parks and Recreation came within just a few votes of having to close 100 of the 270 state parks. Your suggestion that parks be closed rather than that serious studies of alternative funding be conducted simply won't work without serious adverse impacts on the parks.
State parks are not enclosed by barbed-wire fences that allow them to be protected when money is not available to staff and maintain them. A closed state park unit is not immune to trespassers and vandals.
A continuing decline in general fund support for state parks has already resulted in a stiff increase in visitor fees. I am most troubled by your suggestion that state parks have a historic mandate to enact fees that "exclude all but the affluent." We are exploring ways to reduce fees to make parks more accessible to people of all income levels.
This year the department has begun a restructuring that will save over $10 million annually by eliminating supervisory and headquarters positions. We will also shift personnel to field positions so that we end up with more people working at the parks themselves. The California state parks system has fewer staff positions than it did in 1986.
With a mandate to protect and preserve California's natural, historic and cultural resources and to provide for public enjoyment of those resources, this department would be remiss if it did not study every possibility for reversing the decline in financial resources.
One such possibility is an expansion of privately operated concessions that provide legitimate visitor services in a manner that won't harm precious resources. No development, no matter how financially lucrative, will be undertaken in the state parks if it degrades natural and cultural resources.
DONALD W. MURPHY
Director
Department of Parks and Recreation
Sacramento
City Hall salaries and automobile perks
The Insiders' salary story ("Jordan's pay tops all U.S. mayors," Sept. 28) combined with their car story ("City Hall brass rides high while pinching pennies," Sept. 24) only reinforces the cynicism the average person feels toward government.
These salaries have no relation to any kind of reality concerning productivity or efficiency. The way these salaries are set is nuttiness run rampant. No wonder most people think of themselves as caught in the pincers of greedy "public servants" and greedy "public service consumers."
RICHARD N. PREVOST
San Francisco
I got very angry when I read The Insiders column Sept. 24 (on city automobiles). I feel that the leading problem in the San Francisco city government is fiscal irresponsibility.
On one hand we are promised our second increase of Muni fares within a six-month period. On the other hand, Muni head Johnny Stein gets a 1992 Ford for his use. He is not alone. Other city officials are abusing their privileges. These vehicles are being used outside of The City, during off hours, without any city markings.
Meanwhile, Mayor Jordan requests budget cuts and the Finance Committee debates them. I hope the committee decides to cut the personal transportation perks of city employees. I call for the Board of Supervisors and the mayor to conduct an investigation into abuse of the privileges of these people. Find a way to put the city seal on these vehicles in a way it can't be removed. These are not times for fiscal irresponsibility.
MARTIN P. VOJEWODA
San Francisco
In regard to the recent "scandal" about the use of city cars by top S.F. executives, it would seem to me that the general manager of a "company" with more than 3,000 employees, such as Johnny Stein of Muni, might just be entitled to a "luxury" ($14,000 is luxury?) Ford Crown Victoria. I'm sure he has occasion to transport officials from transit agencies around the world as he shows off Muni's facilities. I imagine transporting three or four people in an economy car (sub-compact) can't be impressive or comfortable. The same probably holds true for other city department heads to one degree or another, but let us be reasonable.
Rather than a "meat ax" approach, taking these vehicles back and assessing city officials what I think would be exorbitant fines (three times the normal mileage rate for past use, in one proposal) for what has obviously been a practice (right or wrong) for many years, let's take a reasonable look at the use of city vehicles. A reasonable solution will benefit the needs of department managers and their subordinate managers, their ability to respond to emergencies and their general overall service to The City as a whole.
MARK DONOVAN
San Francisco
Marines vs. AIDS ad
I grew up in a U.S. Marine Corps family. My father was in the corps for 38 years and I am a proud son. The Marines have always been my idea of the highest and finest branch of service. But today I feel differently.
These men who valiantly raised the flag at Iwo Jima have taken on a new foe: A grass-roots organization dedicated to saving lives from the devastation of AIDS. Marine Corps lawyers have taken on the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, a non-profit education organization. Why? A model in an anti-AIDS ad wears a tattoo of the Marine Corps emblem.
Even if this were proved a "trade-mark violation," what American would give consent to this mean-spirited lawsuit? And if the Marines win this suit, what would they gain?
The Marine Corps will pay any price and pursue any action to distance themselves from the stigma of homosexuality. What they don't realize is that AIDS is everyone's problem - gay and straight - and that education is one of the few ways of preventing it.
The AIDS Foundation has a slim budget and could quickly spend all its money on this case. The Marines obviously have no budget problem. We, the taxpayers, are picking up the bill. How sad that the Marines are spending tax money to pursue legal actions against an organization that is working to put an end to AIDS.
As a proud member of a longtime Marine Corps family, I feel betrayed.
JOHN HOFFMAN
San Francisco
Electoral win-lose folly
The presidential race has become a heated and fierce footrace to the White House. As mere spectators we find ourselves almost breathless, tense with anticipation to see who will win.
The most disturbing part of this win-lose format is that it polarizes the candidates. Each tries to represent the winner, the good, while making his opponent out to be the loser, the evil.
This notion of a winner and loser in a presidential race is absurd because the only losers are voters.
ALEX COSTA-STEVENS
San Francisco
500 years from now?
This being the 500th anniversary of the beginning of colonization of this land by the European nations from over the horizon, it might be interesting to try an exercise.
From today's perspective, let us imagine what the world 500 years from now would look like? I would wager that a significant number of people have difficulty perceiving what human life will look like-- provided we make it that long.
If more corporate high guys and their political friends would think ahead several generations, we might see a different set of decisions being made in behalf of the Earth and those of us who inhabit it.
Of course, we may choose to picture the Earth in 500 years with no human life on it. The choice is ours.
DON L. EICHELBERGER
San Francisco
Bush's bid for 'trust'
So we're supposed to trust George Bush. Bush said he knew nothing about illegal arms sales to Iran. He brushed aside evidence showing his complicity in illegal acts, saying it was an underling's "error of judgment" and wouldn't happen again.
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Help Aristide return to power in Haiti
To The Editor:
Over the past 10 months, The Herald has attempted to cover the coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti.
Does the Bush administration want President Aristide to return to power? If yes, what is President Bush doing to secure President Aristide's return? If no, then President Bush owes an explanation to Haitian Americans, Haitian nationals, and the American people.
Why must this matter take so long to resolve? How is it that the leader of the world is unable to assist the Organization of American States in bringing about an end to this untenable situation in Haiti? Why did State Department officials meet with army-backed Marc L. Bazin's minister of foreign affairs recently? Does that imply a tacit recognition of the Bazin regime?
The United States traditionally has portrayed itself as the bastion of democracy. Would it not then be correct to reinstate President Aristide to power immediately? Has President Bush forgotten that he pressured the OAS and the United Nations to facilitate elections in Haiti in December 1990? These were recognized as the first truly democratic elections held in Haiti's history, and Father Aristide emerged as a winner with over 67 percent of the electorate.
What is the World Bank's explanation for inviting to its annual meeting an unconstitutional, de facto regime headed by the former finance minister of dictator Jean Claude Duvalier? Is the World Bank considering lending money to the Bazin regime? Even if the Haitian Chamber of Deputies votes on such a loan, only President Aristide's signature can validate that action.
We are definitely at an impasse. The Haitian problem needs to be resolved soon. We the Haitian people want our president back.
PAUL SYLVESTRE
North Miami
On unincorporated Dade residents' needs
To The Editor:
I am a member of the Dade County Citizens' Advisory Committee on Incorporation. I wonder whether the legal reasoning upon which U.S. District Judge Donald Graham based his judgment (declaring the present countywide system of electing county commissioners to be in violation of the Federal Voting Rights Act) considered the dilution or debasement of all of the nearly 2 million unincorporated Dade residents' votes. The current system allows the residents of Dade's 27 municipalities to vote on what in fact is the municipal government of the unincorporated area of Dade County, to wit: the Metro Commission.
Unfortunately, and perhaps unknowingly, Judge Graham's judgment has failed to mention the express finding of the advisory committee's February report that the votes of all of Dade County's unincorporated-area residents in any election for county commissioners are diluted or debased by as much as 46 percent. That is because residents of the county's 27 municipalities participate in this particular election.
Furthermore, the dilution or debasement of the unincorporated-area residents' vote will continue if the 27 municipalities' residents continue to vote for county commissioners, no matter whether there are countywide or single-member election districts. That is particularly true if each unincorporated-area resident will now be limited to voting for only one commissioner.
I respectfully suggest that Judge Graham review the Citizens' Advisory Committee's report. He should include in any redistricting plan the committee's recommendation to divide the unincorporated area into municipal-service areas based upon communities of common interest and geography, so that unincorporated area residents can elect their own true municipal officers.
BRIAN. W. PARISER
Coral Gables
Address the issues
To The Editor:
Did the president condone Deputy Campaign Director Mary Matalin's reference to "bimbo eruptions" in the Clinton campaign? If he did, then I'm really disappointed.
Once again the Republicans will lose my vote. Whatever happened to addressing the issues, keeping one's integrity, and promoting constructive political discourse? Mary Matalin should join the 7.7 percent of Americans without a job.
JIMMY BLACK
Miami
Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o's reality check
To The Editor:
I am disgusted at County Manager Joaquin Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o's $30,000 salary increase (to $157,000 from $127,000)!
We are in the midst of recession, and as both local and state taxes increase, government services seem to get worse.
Mr. Avi<*_>n-tilde<*/>o should give himself a reality check. Many people have lost their jobs and no longer can make their mortgage payments. As a public official who earned over $10,000 a month, he was well compensated.
CARLOS E. RUIZ
Miami
Free trade mugs the U.S.
To The Editor:
A new, great menace to our struggling economy and dwindling jobs is in the making. This one is a creation of President Bush, under the misleading name of "North American Free Trade Agreement." A more descriptive title would be, 'The Upcoming Economic Mugging of the United States and Canada by Mexico.'
The present negotiations covering this trade agreement will produce devastating results for the average American still lucky to have a job today. Not just companies, but whole industries will begin moving south of the border to the land of low-cost labor and high profits.
Proponents in the United States maintain that Mexico, through this newly found prosperity, will be in a position to become our best customer. But for 50 years, Japan has refused to buy U.S. output of 95 percent of our products. Mexicans will do the same, because in a short time they will be in a competitive position to make more cheaply for themselves the very products that we want them to buy from us. As with Japan and Germany, Mexico will end up being our Frankenstein monster, and competitively devour us.
BOB RIJOCK
North Bay Village
Eastern Europe tragedy merits front-page play
To the Editor:
On Aug. 5, an article describing the bombing of Serbia during the funeral of two children appeared on page 14A of The Miami Herald. This same story appeared on the network news on Aug. 6 as a headline story. More progressive reporting of events in the former Yugoslavia appeared in Anthony Lewis's excellent column (Aug. 5, View-points, 17A) provided by The New York Times News Service.
There are relevant international issues being addressed through the reporting of European events, the importance of which The Miami Herald seems to miss.
There is an international situation going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Even though much of the American public does not understand the political subtleties of such an issue, they at least will be interested enough to turn to pages 14A and 17A in order to read more about it, having been informed of some of the atrocities believed to be going on in that corner of Europe.
Even though the article on page 14 was simply factual reporting of an incident, it should not only be encouraged, but should be given front- or second-page attention.
I hope that the editor will give these European concerns better exposure in the future, and contribute to American humanity's general awareness of worldwide events in doing so.
JILL GILBERT
Pembroke Pines
Hispanic isn't a race
To the Editor:
Gary Illas's July 25 Readers' Forum letter neatly summarizes the confusion we all experience in distinguishing between race and ethnic background.
A classic example was on your front page: Peru's President Alberto Fujimori obviously is Hispanic and at the same time is of Asian extraction. Hispanic is an ethnic background, not a race.
The difficult question arises: If Pik Botha immigrated to the United States and was naturalized, would he check the 'African-American' block on his census form?
ROB CARDWELL,
West Palm Beach
Simpson isn't the only popular Homer
To the Editor:
On July 28, Herald writer Tracie Cone wrote about Howard Robinson's ad asking people to call him if they'd be interested in reading and discussing Homer's Iliad.
Surprise, surprise! Some 30 to 40 souls met at the bandstand in Hollywood Beach. For over two hours we read and discussed. One woman was an expert in Greek history, and Robinson himself provided background material and information.
What thrills me is to find that a literary oasis exists and can thrive in the midst of sleaze a la Channel 7 and its ilk of grocery-line checkout 'journalism.'
Some of the people who attended already belong to Great Books clubs (one from the North Miami Public Library) but are ready for more, more!
Several young people joined the group, so fuddy-duddy - Not.
Thank you for having the wit to pick up on a unique story, and for publishing it.
MARION L. HALLAM
North Miami
Welcome garbage police!
To The Editor:
Herald staff writer Charles Strouse's attitude toward enforcement of the ordinance against illegal dumping of trash in stations designed for residential use is one of ridicule (Garbage police on patrol, July 30). Yet if more county enforcement officers did their jobs, we would have fewer zoning violations, building code violations, and yes, illegal dumping.
Unfortunately, some people just won't get with the program unless there is a penalty - and even then, some won't comply.
For example, since July 1, businesses and multifamily units were supposed to have recycling programs for employees and residents to participate in. The management of my office building (in Coral Gables) tells me that it's the waste-hauler's responsibility to set up the program; the waste-hauler tells me that the owner has to sign a recycling contract so it can put out a bin ($26 per month); and the Coral Gables Public Works Department tells me that it isn't enforcing its own ordinance.
When I confronted the owner about the law, he basically said: "Oh, that won't go into effect for another year." So what's the point in having an ordinance if it's not enforceable? How many businesses and condos don't care about saving resources or about the solid waste problem? Plenty. To them, recycling is just another bureaucratic scheme to plague private enterprise.
When we have to permit yet another landfill or, God forbid, shell out millions for a polluting garbage incinerator, those who now smirk at the thought of a "garbage police" ought to remember how silly they thought mandatory recycling was.
KAREN YOUNG
Coral Gables
Overrun by aliens
To The Editor
I disagree with Herald Editor Jim Hampton's Aug. 2 column, Toss a legal lifeline to Haitians. I and a lot of other men didn't risk our necks defending this country from our many enemies all through the past 200 years just to see the place overrun by a bunch of humanity from Third World countries.
When a place gets overrun like this, it has a depressing effect on wages for everybody. No one gets ahead. I have lived in this town almost all of my 40 years, and it is apparent just by looking around Miami that when a load of poor people washes ashore, the place gets poorer. A few fast buck operators might make a killing in the short term, but the rest stay broke.
In a way, I take it personally about Mr. Hampton and his Editorial Board colleagues wanting to be nice guys. I think that their hearts are in the right place, but their brains ain't.
As far as worrying about any other Third World country going down the tube, that is too bad. Some places on this Earth are blessed, and some are not. We are, and others are not. Life is essentially cruel, and I for one have enough problems without worrying about getting overrun again. If you want them here that bad, give them your job. I need mine.
BRIAN SHARP
Miami
On the bosom beat
To The Editor:
Those who have written concerning crime downtown and in support of Rafael Kapustin's Aug. 6 Viewpoints Page article, Downtown Miami: 'Mayday!': should be aware that all is not lost. The police are focusing on more- important offenses.
Just visit Rickenbacker Causeway or Virginia Key Beach and watch what happens when a tourist from Europe or Brazil drops their bathing suit top.
You will witness the finest display of police tactical response and command and control performed with immediate precision. Yes sir-ree!
As citizens and taxpayers, you should be proud. The next time you or your co-workers are victims of crime, take comfort in knowing there are no bare bosoms on Miami's beaches.
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How Taxpayers Might Stop Deficit Spending
Editor:
It seems to me the foremost problem to be addressed by candidates in the coming presidential election should be the federal deficit.
Amazingly, the general public hasn't protested with the ferocity a problem of this magnitude demands. I feel this is due in part to the fact that the dollar amounts involved are so large the common taxpayer can't relate to them easily.
Time magazine of June 22 took projections of government spending and revenues for 1992 and scaled them down, based on household incomes from $20,000 to $100,000.
Example: Annual income, $40,000; total existing debt, $144,981; annual interest on debt at 5.1 percent, $7,398; other spending, $47,472; total annual spending, $54,870; additional debt acquired, $14,870.
If you had $144,981 left to pay on your mortgage and were earning $40,000 a year, would you borrow an additional $14,870 in 1992?
I feel the recently exposed congressional check-writing scandal inspired such public outrage because it somehow proved to some people what they've always suspected. It's not that our elected officials can't balance the budget (or their own checking accounts). It's that they choose not to.
Perhaps we should be made to write two checks to IRS at tax time - one for our normal tax and one for our share of what the government spent beyond its means in the previous year.
First, it would be fair in that people who actually benefited from services provided by deficit spending in the previous year would have to pay for them rather than passing the bill on to future generations.
Second, the general public would be outraged to the point of demanding a truly balanced budget.
ROB MAHARREY
Court's Beachfront Decision Reinforces Property Rights
Editor:
The Sierra Club to the contrary notwithstanding, the Supreme Court's June 29 decision in Lucas vs. S.C. Coastal Council does not "gut environmental law."
It merely returns a small measure of protection to the rights of property owners that the founders of this country created when they added the Fifth Amendment to our Constitution.
The property rights and takings clauses are models of clarity and brevity: "No person shall be deprived of property without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation."
Mr. Lucas was clearly the victim of an unconstitutional taking (the Coastal Council forbid him to build on his beachfront lots because of erosion), but cases such as this involving total loss of value due to an act of a governmental entity are, and will continue to be, relatively rare.
Mr. Lucas bought the property (near Charleston) in reliance on the land-use regulations then in force, but the S.C. Coastal Council changed the rules retroactively and he was forced to seek relief through the judicial system.
Mr. Lucas's perseverance may encourage others to sue when their property rights are taken from them by administrative procedures.
It's very disturbing that the reaction of the Sierra Club to the Lucas case is to equate property rights to greed. Carried to its logical conclusion, the Sierra Club seems to be saying that all undeveloped property should be taken by the government, without compensation, in the name of public welfare.
It's becoming increasing<&_>sic<&/> apparent that "the Green tree has Red roots."
JOHN C. SNEDEKER
Our Judicial System: A Retort
Editor:
I hope attorney Kevin Street (Letter, Sunday, July 12, 'Is Our Judicial System Sick? No, It's the Best in the World') wrote a letter to Terry Santiago expressing his sympathy over her husband's June 6 death as I'm sure he has written to the Saltysiaks, MacPhails, Kellys, Valerie Armstrong's mother and others, assuring them the judicial system will do everything in its power to protect the rights of individuals who perpetrated the ultimate crime against their loved ones.
I'm sure they'd like a lesson in how the criminal is treated versus how criminals treat their victims. Apparently the fact the chief witness for the prosecution in a murder case is dead means little to Mr. Street.
He feels the rights of the defendant must be protected and is glad courageous lawyers and judges have improved our society. I only wish he would direct me to this improved society he and his peers have created.
Perhaps this society is the one described by Cade in Shakespeare's 'Henry VI,' where everyone "agrees like brothers." The only problem is, Dick wants to "kill all the lawyers."
I made no threat of violence in my tirade, as Mr. Street labels it. I only pointed out the direction the country is going. And I suggest Mr. Street spend some time in court, as even I know the jury doesn't plead a case.
RICHARD F. TUYLS
A Humanist Speaks Out
Editor:
Priscilla Carlton explained in her Sunday, June 14, letter ('Atheism and Humanism: Dispelling the Ignorance'), in a clear and powerful style, the definitions and differences of the terms 'atheism' and 'humanism.'
Nancy Buttimer's June 28 letter ('Religion, Character, Decency') is a beautiful example of tolerance with believers and non-believers.
Then came Luther Nichols's July 5 letter ('Some Thoughts on Humanism') with his anxiety concerning humanism. What kind of laws would we have, he asks, if atheists (and humanists) were in control? Perhaps he should re-read the Carlton and Buttimer letters.
As a member of the American Humanist Association, I can say we presently number less than 20,000 in the United States. We are made up of various levels of believers, agnostics and atheists.
If we were in control (which we don't want to be), there would be much less federal and state law concerning control of individual behavior of the victimless type.
The current domestic war on drugs would be throttled back and turned over to health agencies rather than police. There would be considerable<&_>sic<&/> more research and education on the effects of harmful individual behaviors.
Crimes against individuals and property would be managed much more rapidly. There would be no difference between the sexes in the eyes of our law.
Our goal would be a lot less government and much more freedom.
We would hope all individual behavior would be based upon rational choices, tolerance, and the courage to accept choice consequences rather than the fear and punishment model presented in Mr. Nichols's letter.
Most of all, we would encourage all people to take control of and become responsible for their lives.
If you wish to know more about humanism, go to your local public library and read some issues of the Humanist magazine.
Also, check out and read Corliss Lamont's book, 'The Philosophy of Humanism.'
HORACE W. SHEWMAKER
Cobbtown
Get Rid of the Rebel Image
Editor:
I like to add some input on the flag issue. The great state of Georgia has come a long way since the days of old and if we're to keep moving ahead, we must forget the past.
It's hard to forget when the flag reminds us of the way it used to be in Georgia.
I think changing the flag would change the way other states look at Georgia. In ridding ourselves of the rebel image, we can only advance further.
Thank God for Gov. Zell Miller and others who favor the change and the new image for this great state of ours.
God bless Georgia.
GENE MINOR
A Perot Backer's Plea: Come Join Us
Editor:
Ross Perot has a debt on his shoulders that makes the national debt seem comparatively trivial. He owes his supporters and all those who favor the concept of an independent political party one thing, a presidential candidate.
Personally, I'm glad Mr. Perot is gone now rather than after he took office, if he had no stomach for it. But he should at least name an heir to his place in his movement. The 20,000,000-plus volunteers and uncounted millions of voters who were willing to hand him their voting blocks on a silver platter know the two-party system in America is dead.
The 'Perot Party' wasn't really about Ross Perot anyway, it was about freedom of choice and recognition of the failure of both the Democratic and Republican parties to run this government by and for us. That hasn't changed, even if Mr. Perot's resolve has.
Those of us who dreamed the dream can't go back to the two-party system, regardless of how warmly and hungrily Bill Clinton or George Bush want us. We'll likely write in ourselves first. But what we really should do is stay united and bring in a new independent party, candidate and platform to a yearning America.
The 'Perot Party' (new nomenclature needed) would carry on the ideals we believed in and fought for in the first place, and win - forcing an entirely new form of democracy in this country for generations to come. Imagine the possibilities.
I'd also say to supporters of Bush and Clinton that, rather than us join them, they could now vote with a clear conscience and be part of the future by joining us, that powerful new grass-roots independent party with all the momentum instead.
Applications and resumes for prospective officeholders are now being accepted.
JIM ESHLEMAN II
Statesboro: Grow Up
Editor:
In a recent article in the Savannah Morning News, staff writer Laura Milner quoted Statesboro City Councilman John Newton as stating the city of Statesboro helps "maintain the integrity of what a single-family residential area should be" by limiting the number of unrelated roommates living together and the number of vehicles parked on private property in certain neighborhoods. These limits are set by city ordinance.
Councilman Newton goes on to say, "A family unit has people working in the daytime and coming home and wanting a little peace and quiet." He further states he thinks all Georgia Southern University freshman students should live on campus and implies they need to "learn responsibility toward the public and the folks around them."
If these attitudes are shared by the majority of the city fathers and the 'movers and shakers' of the city of Statesboro, then as a city, Statesboro is undeserving of a university the magnitude and caliber of GSU. It's precisely these close-minded and socially-retarded attitudes that cause many of the growing pains communities in our country experience as they undergo the transition from big towns to small cities.
If Statesboro wants the prestige and social and economic benefits of being host to such a fine, sophisticated institution as GSU, then as a city it needs to learn to accept some of its own inevitable 'urbanity' and 'grow up' in mind, as well as in size.
JACK FLETCHER
Pembroke
Change in DUI Law Was Unfair
Editor:
Maybe someone can give me some advice. I'm running out of options for a solution.
I recently called the State Department of Public Safety in Atlanta in hopes of obtaining my temporary driving permit. The date I was to get it was April 27,1992.
It was then that I found out about a new law.
The clerk informed me it would cost $690, plus completion of DUI school at a cost of $155, and also SR22 insurance, which is very expensive. The clerk said the $690 was because of a new law passed April 1, 1992.
Let me explain my feelings on this. First, I don't condone drinking and driving. It's a very serious offense. It's very dangerous and does cost many lives everyday.
But like any crime, there's a price to pay. I honestly believe I've paid mine. I spent 5 1/2 months at Hardwick (GWCI) and six months on intense probation, meaning curfew, alcohol tests nightly, and considerable restrictions on freedom.
During that time I did some serious soul-searching, and began to turn my life around. I started taking medicine, and getting treatment. I am a recovering alcoholic. This was not something anyone made me do. I did it on my own, and by the grace of God, I'm finally, after all this time, somebody.
I guess the thought that most goes through my mind is, if a person commits armed robbery, or even manslaughter, they're allowed to go free, after being deemed 'fit for society,' and are allowed every privilege and freedom provided by law after time served.
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Who's Behind Hysteria in the Main Woods?
To the Editor:
Your Aug. 2 news article on Mainers who are worried the Federal Government will take their land for a wildlife refuge implies that there is a genuine threat this might happen. There isn't.
You report that last year the Government bought 318,000 acres to add to national parks, forests and other public land units. Three of the four agencies that purchased these areas did not use condemnation at all. The fourth, the National Park Service, did use its condemnation powers in some cases, almost exclusively to purchase tracts in Florida's Everglades eco-system, which the owners had bought sight unseen and do not live on.
The Mainers are suspicious of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the adjacent Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge. Last year, not one of the 235,727 acres aquired by the agency around the country was obtained through condemnation. The landowners near Moosehorn should believe the refuge manager's assurances that they can either keep their land or sell it.
This is one more example of nationwide efforts, financed mostly by the extractive industries and their allies, to whip up hysteria among citizens by convincing them that steps to protect our environment will hurt them.
GEORGE T. FRAMPTON JR.
President, Wilderness Society
Washington, Aug. 12, 1992
Monterey Safeguarded
To the Editor:
An ad from members of the environmental community criticizing the recently announced designation of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary makes accusations that do not reflect the hard-fought safeguards for this treasured portion of California's coast (Op-Ed page, July 22). To counter a few of the more obvious misrepresentations:
No offshore oil drilling will be allowed in the area.
No contaminated dredged materials can be dumped in or adjacent to the sanctuary. Through a unique, co-operative planning effort joining the Corps of Engineers, state and other Federal agencies, ports, fishermen and environmentalists, a permanent ocean dump site is being studied to the west of the sanctuary. But the eventual plan is required by law to prevent damage to the sanctuary; and sediments disposed at the site must be sands and muds that are as clean as or cleaner than current conditions found in this pristine area.
All pesticide runoff and sewage disposal into the sanctuary must meet the strict state and Federal requirements. Further, all discharges must be upgraded to secondary treatment, and the state has committed itself to revise its coastal water-quality plan in keeping with the purposes of the sanctuary.
Finally, the state has entered into a joint agreement with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to insure meaningful regulation of water quality in the sanctuary. To complement the agency's proposed sanctuary staff of five, who will implement all regulations, this agreement brings to bear hundreds of the state's water-quality experts.
The remaining claims in the ad similarly distort the purposes and achievements of this largest marine sanctuary in the country. Fulfilment of the sanctuary purposes will be difficult, given its size and that this is also the first marine sanctuary adjacent to major population and agricultural centers. Under Gov. Pete Wilson, California has committed its resources to working with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in bringing this dream to reality.
KEN WISEMAN
Undersecretary for Environmental Protection, California E.P.A.
Sacramento, Calif., Aug. 3, 1992
Alaska's Park Pennies
To the Editor:
'City Dwellers Want U.S. Park Funds to Go East' (front page, July 27) makes a good point: that the public really does need more accessible open spaces.
But national park lands in Alaska do not, as you state, use a large percentage of the National Park Service's budget.
The Alaska region receives only 3.4 percent of the Park Service's $1.3 billion budget, though 70 percent of national park lands for the entire United States are situated there. Now 3.4 percent is not a big slice of the pie, when national park lands in Alaska exceed 54 million acres and some Alaskan national parks are the size of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont combined.
In 1980 you supported increasing National Park lands in Alaska from close to 8 million acres to more than 54 million acres. We warned at the time that management of new Alaska National Park lands would affect the budgets for recreation lands in the southern 48. No visitor access by road is possible to at least 10 of the 15 national parks in Alaska, and demand for that access in Alaska's national parks is up too.
TED STEVENS
U.S. Senator from Alaska
Washington, Aug. 2, 1992
In Algeria, Not French, But Arabs Suffered
To the Editor:
Re 'Still Aching for Algeria, 30 Years After the Rage' (Toulon Journal, July 20):
In describing what is generally identified as one of the most brutal colonizations suffered by Africa, the Fench historian M. Bandicourt relates how French troops occupying Algeria in 1830 would sever the limbs of Arab women to retrieve the silver leg and arm rings they wore.
Such violence continued more than a century, as the colonial authorities ruthlessly subdued the Arab population and confiscated and settled tribal land with French 'colons', also known as 'pieds noirs'.
There is not a word of this in your article. Instead, you tell us only that the pieds noirs enjoyed a 132-year "presence" in a country they considered their home, but were forced to leave en masse because of an Arab "blood bath", your epithet for Algeria's revolutionary struggle. Now, their former residences and neighborhoods in that country are "run-down" or "in ruins". You would have us believe that a great injustice was done to the French by the Algerians.
In detailing the experiences of the pieds noirs during the revolutionary war, you speak only of Arab "atrocities". But it was the French who showed a penchant for gross brutality: they killed a million Algerians in the eight-year war against the nationalists, and uprooted large sections of the rural population by a relentless bombing campaign.
The use of torture by the French military was widespread. Why is this aspect of the war denied? Among the ideological precepts of the 'new world order' is one that describes the third world as brutish and backward, and justifies continuing domination by the advanced Western countries in economic, political and military terms. This outlook can be seen in your article.
One would expect you to maintain a certain objectivity about such crucial issues.
MUHAMMAD SAAHIR LONE
Briarcliff Manor, N.Y., Aug. 3, 1992
Must Doctors Always Do Something?
To the Editor:
After reading your news article on the risks associated with the drug ritrodrineritodrine, used to prevent premature births (front page, July 30), I was left with a flood of emotions.
I am among the lucky. My only cross to bear for having been born to a mother who took the drug DES in the 1950's to prevent miscarriage was to remain on strict bed rest for the last six months of my two pregnancies, to have two sutures surgically placed around my cervix and to take ritodrine. At the end, with much praying, I had two glorious children.
The scars of others run deeper: malformed reproductive organs, multiple miscarriages, premature births, vaginal cancers and the curse of sterility. And yet, lucky or unlucky, the feelings of having been indelibly damaged by a drug whose effectiveness was ultimately found to be nil persist in all of us who were exposed.
Given my history and knowing I took ritodrine while pregnant, imagine my terror as I read your report. The word ritodrine popped out, my pulse began to race, and I began to shake, not knowing what fate awaited me. Was it to happen to me again - a "double dose," as my physician husband called it? What would it be this time - my health, my children's, some other hidden time bomb?
Fortunately, the newest information on ritodrine does not seem to hold out the same horrors as DES. Yet the experience is the same: an ineffective drug exposing pregnant women to needless risk and sometimes even death. How is it that such a thing should happen again?
Most disturbing of all was the statement of a prominent obstetrician that although he thought the new data on ritodrine should "sway doctors to use no drugs in most cases," he himself was not sure he or others would follow that course: "most doctors would rather give some treatment than do nothing." Who is being treated, the physician or the patient?
Isn't it possible that if physicians were more highly developed and educated in doctor-patient relations - that is, in empathy, understanding and communication - it would offset their driving need always to do something?
JANET RIVKIN ZUCKERMAN
Mamaroneck, N.Y., Aug. 1, 1992
Treat Hypertension With Right Mix of Drugs
To the Editor:
'Treating Hypertension Without Giving Up Sex' (letter, Aug. 1), by Dr. Elliot Wineburg leaves the impression that all medications used in high blood pressure management cause impotence, and that nondrug measures are usually effective.
A new generation of drugs lowers elevated blood pressure: ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, alpha-adrenergic blockers, centrally acting agents, beta blockers and diuretics. In skilled professional hands and with some patience, the right combination of drugs can almost always be found - without intolerable side effects, and that includes impairment of sexual function.
Most doctors agree that hypertensive patients of whatever race should first be treated with a low-salt diet and a weight-reduction program. However, such measures alone suffice in only a minority of cases: when the blood pressure level is only mildly or moderately elevated; when the disorder is salt-dependent (less than 50 percent are), and when the subject is significantly obese.
Severe hypertension, however, with its risk of serious vascular complications, requires normalization more qickly than diet and weight loss can possibly effect. In such cases, medication is necessary early on.
Biofeedback and psychotherapy may play a supportive role in some anxious individuals, but they cannot be considered mainstays of treatment.
ISADORE ROSENFELD, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Medicine
N.Y. Hospital-Cornell Medical Center
New York, Aug. 1, 1992
Let's Reject Concept of Dogs as Designer Jeans or Sports Cars
To the Editor:
Larry Shook in 'Bad Dogs' (Op-Ed, Aug. 8) raises the important issue of the increasing frequency of genetic diseases in pure-bred dogs. However, he misses the point when he suggests that this should be dealt with by having the American Kennel Club refuse to register such animals or by forcing the pet store to cover the owner's associated medical expenses.
First, Mr. Shook ignores that there are individuals knowingly responsible for the suffering of sick dogs. For every dog suffering from a genetic disease that survives to adolescence or adulthood, there are many more that die as puppies or shortly thereafter. Second, and most important, the vast majority of people do not show dogs and therefore do not need pure-breds.
There are millions of adorable, loving, healthy mixed-breed dogs waiting for homes in shelters across the country. The majority will be destroyed. Puppy mills and irresponsible show breeders will churn out defective dogs as long as there is a market for them, even as shelters are forced to destroy dogs that can provide love and companionship. The problem can only worsen as the frequency of deleterious genes increases in the pool.
People should ask themselves whether what they want from a pet can be fulfilled only by a pure-bred and whether they must accept that, for this, the mixed-breed dog they reject must die. Few people who want pure-bred dogs are themselves pure-bred! Are dogs now to be considered on the same level as designer jeans and sports cars?
KAREN S. ZIER
New York, Aug. 9, 1992
Relief on Auto Alarms
To the Editor:
'Wailing about Wails' (Topics item, Aug. 12) echoes the feelings of New Yorkers on the usefulness and nuisance of car alarms. Gov. Mario M. Cuomo has signed a bill I sponsored that outlaws the sale of new car alarms that sound for more than three minutes or that can be set off by other than direct physical contact.
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NAFTA Seen as Resulting in Devastation for Mexico's Corn Growers
Regarding Part 3 of the series 'Farming a Shrinking Planet,' the article 'Trade Deal With the United States Puts Many Mexican Farmers at Risk,' Nov. 4: If the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is passed, I am concerned about the possible effects it could have on the 2.7 million corn producers in Mexico.
Any benefits NAFTA might bring to Mexico would be outweighed by the problems brought on by the displacement of millions of farmers and their families due to a drastic reduction in the production of the nation's largest agricultural product - corn. Under NAFTA, Mexican farmers could not hope to compete with US farmers, due to climate conditions and geographical disadvantages.
I fail to see how an agreement such as NAFTA, which is intended to benefit all participating countries, can justify the risk of possible economic disaster for a nation by reducing or eliminating the production of its main food staple. A nation cannot eliminate the livelihood of millions of its people without causing an economic domino effect. One problem leads to another. If NAFTA is passed it will not be as profitable or beneficial to the overall economy of Mexico as expressed by the proponents of the agreement.
Alisha Whitaker
Burnsville, Miss.
Empathy for French farmers
Regarding the editorials 'Against the Grain,' Oct. 28, and 'Back From the Trade-War Brink,' Nov. 12: About one-third of the farmers in Nebraska have been forced from the land by rising costs and falling farm prices during the last 10 years. Similar statistics apply to other agricultural states. This is 'progress' under the so-called free-market system? During this time agricultural-business giants such as Con-Agra of Omaha, Neb., and Cargill of Minneapolis have become bigger and richer.
I sympathize with the French farmers because, under the international free-market system of GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, they will also see their numbers greatly reduced by rising costs and falling farm prices.
Hank F. Bohling
Auburn, Neb.
A mandate for the UN
Given the emerging regional trends in the direction of peace, it is time that the United Nations General Assembly changes both the tone and the content of its resolutions regarding Israel. With the sole exception of the United States, UN member nations continue to pass resolutions which repeatedly have the effect of hindering - not helping - the peace process.
One important case in point is the UN's refusal to allow Israel, like other countries, to hold key positions such as a nonpermanent membership on the Security Council, the presidency of the General Assembly, and chairmanships of various committees. Without this, Israel uniquely continues to be denied full participation in the work of the UN, and an opportunity is being missed to grant Israel the international acceptance it needs as it considers the risks it must take in the peace process.
The current (47th) session of the General Assembly provides the chance to reverse the UN's defamation of Israel. It is crucial that all Americans seeking constructive change in the fragile Middle East encourage our government leaders to work with foreign representatives to end this trend of 'Israel-bashing.'
Mark J. Levinson
Boston
President, American Jewish Committee
Greater Boston Chapter
A Two-Sided Coin: Feeding the Hungry and Preserving the Land
While I applaud the four-part series 'Farming a Shrinking Planet,' there are serious oversights in the perspective from which the articles were reported. In Part 1, 'Can the Earth Feed Everyone?,' Oct. 21, the question presumes that our current norms of eating must be maintained. Nutritional research and environmental awareness have lent great weight to the argument that we must change our food consumption patterns dramatically.
Regarding Part 2, 'How Far Can Technology Boost Output?,' Oct. 28: The emphasis is on new genetics and new varieties. Why not emphasize the value of intensive gardening and the role of policy in encouraging subsistence and sustaining farming rather than export production?
Regarding Part 3, 'Will Trade Barriers Fall,' Nov. 4: In looking at the global arena, examples are given of the counter-productive nature of agricultural subsidies. The underlying assumption is that the global marketplace is the best way to provide the world's food. The tragedy is that the cost of such production is hardly borne by consumers in the short term.
Regarding Part 4 How Is Change Affecting Farmers?,' Nov. 12: Where is the discussion about programs to link consumers directly with producers? Where is the discussion about the awareness among farmers that the land cannot continue to produce with agribusiness practices? The global economy will work only when farmers, the land, and consumers enter into a mutually enhancing relationship.
Marilyn Welker
Columbus, Ohio
The immigration issue
The article 'Immigration Issues Land in Clinton's Lap,' Nov. 18, points out our continuing problem of hordes of people from already-crowded countries trying to enter the United States regardless of quotas. In addition to seeking answers to our present dilemma, we should take a long-range view and give more help to fast-growing countries in their efforts to spread family planning.
The US devotes less than 3 percent of its total foreign aid appropriation to bringing down the birthrates of less-developed countries. In contrast, billions go to military aid and to developmental and infrastructural projects that will soon be overwhelmed with too many people. Let us hope that the new administration will resume our contributions to the United Nations Population Fund and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. No additional money is needed; just modified priorities.
Keith C. Barrons
Bradenton, Fla.
The Opinion page article 'US Refugee Policy Faulted,' Nov. 12, is an excellent review of the issue. The author notes that our refugee policy has outlived its historical mission. The same could be said for our entire immigration policy.
The United States currently allows entrance of more immigrants each year than the rest of the world's nations combined allow into their countries. And this quota does not take into account refugees and family members of immigrants who enter the US each year.
Do the immigration-policy makers truly understand the long-term implications? Through natural increase and legal and illegal immigration, America is adding at least 3 million people to its population each year. Conservatively, in 50 years, there will be at least 400 million Americans.
If the US limited its total number of immigrants to the total number of people leaving the US each year, which is approximately 200,000 people, would not that be a wise policy in the long run? Responsible policymaking must be based on long-term not short-term benefits.
G.B. Lloyd
Southwest Harbor, Maine
The US Government's 'Tough Love' Approach to Somalia
The good news is that Washington has decided to apply 'tough love' principles in Somalia, where disorder is so severe that less than half the donated food and medicine gets past warlords and looters to reach the multitude of innocent victims. The bad news is that our troops risk undertaking a dangerous mission without a clear objective. An open-ended notion of why they are there could lead them into the very quagmire everyone wants to avoid. We need to be explicit with ourselves, our allies, and Somalia that our sole objective is to safeguard the humanitarian relief operation - not to take charge of the country politically. Drawing the distinction is vitally important:
Troops should be used to take control of ports, airfields, and storage facilities used for relief purposes; to escort food convoys and personnel; to protect distribution sites; to provide a communications network and air-mobile rescue capability; and to organize and train local civilian guard forces. And they should do so in the face of opposition from warlords, using whatever force is necessary.
American troops should not be used to settle clan feuds, chase down warlords, or police political truces or cease-fires. The time may come when outside forces are needed for these purposes, but that is another mission, involving a different set of policy judgments.
Inevitably, the presence of an imposing modern military force will lend political stability to the situation. But for now, let's focus squarely on saving innocent lives from needless starvation.
T. Frank Crigler
Arlington, Va.
US Ambassador to Somalia, 1987-90
A serious peace proposal
The Opinion page article 'Peace Process Hang-Up,' Nov. 25, implies that Israel has made significant confidence-building moves which are not reciprocated by the Arab participants to the Middle East peace process. The steps described are largely cosmetic and aimed at the United States, not Palestinians or other Arabs.
Considering the scale on which Palestinians have been stripped of their property and human dignity during 25 years of Israeli occupation, Israel has a long way to go to convince anyone that it is serious about peace. Real confidence-building steps include: an end to torturing prisoners, collective punishments, and land confiscations; permission for diaspora Palestinians to return as permanent residents to their former homes in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem; and an end to the taxation system. These are reasonable expectations of a country that describes itself as a Western-style democracy.
Lee Elizabeth Britton
Petoskey, Mich.
The author of the Opinion page article 'In Occupied Lebanon,' Nov. 25, distorts Israeli and Hizbullah policy in Lebanon.
Israel's policy is clear: It has no territorial claims against Lebanon, and its sole concern is the safety of its northern population, which continues to experience cross-border infiltration attempts from Lebanese territory. With proper guarantees and a peace treaty, Israel is prepared to withdraw from the security zone.
Hizbullah's policy is also clear: It is an anti-Western, anti-Israel terrorist organization bent on taking American and Israeli lives. Hizbullah does not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East and has launched terrorist attacks against Israel's northern population.
The complexities of the Middle East must not blind observers to stark realities. The Lebanese practitioners of violence and their Syrian and Iranian patrons are responsible for delaying progress on the Israeli-Lebanese front.
Bluma Zuckerbrot
New York
Anti-Defamation League
Clinton's Middle East Policy
Regarding the article 'Mideast Talks Hinge on Clinton,' Nov. 10: I find it distressing that "Clinton's own definition of Palestinian self-determination" does not entail Palestinian statehood. What then does it entail? What does President-elect Clinton think is the appropriate resolution for the question of Palestine? It is unwise for Mr. Clinton to make statements concerning such a delicate and complex matter without being informed of the facts and realities of the situation.
His understanding of the situation does not take into account prevalent, accepted positions and decisions of the international community or statutes of international law. This includes his position on Israeli settlements in the occupied territory, on Arab East Jerusalem, and on the right of Palestinians to self-determination.
The settlements are illegal, according to international law and are major obstacles to peace. The overwhelming majority of the nations of the world, including the nation Clinton will lead, does not recognize Israel's annexation of Arab East Jerusalem, and the right to self-determination is an inalienable right to all human beings.
In this regard, it is imperative that Clinton appoint specialists who understand the history, politics, and culture of the region and its people to advise Clinton and enable him and his administration to deal with the issue in a responsible manner.
F. Abdelhadly
Cliffside Pk., N.J.
Winter in Bosnia
The continued fratricidal fighting in the former Yugoslavia, the revelations about the death camps, and the coming of winter underscore the need for effective and immediate humanitarian action to relieve the suffering in Bosnia and the region. Because of the sophistication of Serbian forces, military intervention is not easily attainable but should not be ruled out.
In the absence of immediate military intervention, the following interim should be undertaken: Resettlement must be provided for far greater numbers of concentration camp survivors; aid to United Nation's agencies must be increased and speeded; protected shelters must be available for those who will be forced to leave their homes owing to freezing temperatures and conflict; Croatia must be induced to accept additional refugees on a temporary basis.
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'BESSIE' & ANITA HILL
New York City
I agree with Nell Irvin Painter's conclusion that the black woman's role in history, past and present, is largely ignored or demeaned ['Who Was Lynched?' Nov. 11]. However, she incorrectly cites Bessie, in Richard Wright's Native Son, as the first murder victim of Bigger Thomas. Bessie was the second murder victim. In contrast to the essentially accidental killing of the white woman, Mary Dalton, Bessie's murder is depicted as premeditated and particularly brutal, making Bessie's death far more horrifying. Thomas rapes Bessie, smashes her head with a brick and finally tosses her down an airshaft, where she freezes to death.
As Trudier Harris points out in her essay "Native Sons and Foreign Daughters" (New Essays on 'Native Son', Cambridge University Press), "Wright does not respect his own creation [Bessie] .... Bigger and the whites for whom she works use Bessie to their own physical and emotional ends." Painter is on the mark when she states that black women are treated as two-dimensional both in Wright's novel and in real life - as all could see in the treatment of Anita Hill.
Elise Fischer
GIRLS & BOYS IN THE BAN
New York City
In his recent editorial, 'Ecce Cuomo' [Dec. 2], Tom Gogola refers to two cases of antigay bias in the U.S. Armed Forces. Would that the odious discriminarory policy of the Pentagon were limited to those two instances. Unfortunately, gay service personnel like Joe Steffan and the lesbian reservist Gogola mentioned are released from the military at an astonishing rate. Since 1982, more than 10,000 men and women have been discharged from military duty on the basis of perceived or admitted homosexuality. That translates roughly into 1,110 individuals per year, or just over three persons per day.
My colleague Barbara Boxer and I have recently introduced a resolution in the House to instruct President Bush to rescind the ban on lesbians and gay men in the military. Our resolution has forty-seven sponsors. The resolution is straightforward, acknowledging what at least three studies by the Pentagon itself have already concluded: that gay men and lesbians have served our nation, at peace and at war, with the same dedication and professionalism as heterosexual service personnel.
Ted Weiss
Member of Congress
N.E.C.L.C. & C.O.s
New York City
Bruce Shapiro, in his article on Gulf War conscientious objectors, 'The High Price of Conscience' [Jan. 20], asks, "Where are all the civil libertarians?" I can speak only on behalf of myself and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (N.E.C.L.C.); we are, and have been, on the front lines representing, pro bono, hundreds of soldiers seeking advice and serving as counsel for many of the resisters named in the article.
As one of only three attorneys representing approximately twenty resisters held at Camp Lejeune, both in the hearings on their C.O. applications and in their criminal trials, I spent eight months working solely on their behalf; my time was donated by the N.E.C.L.C. Other attorneys, also acting for the N.E.C.L.C., fielded hundreds of telephone calls from soldiers seeking legal advice relating to their military status.
Indeed, those of us who spent most of our time on the front lines at Camp Lejeune often wondered where the press was. For example, Enrique Gonzalez, a first-year law student, activated with only two weeks left on his contract, found medically unfit for duty and recommended for discharge as a C.O. by the Marine Corps, was found guilty of desertion and missing troop movements after a mere thirty minutes of deliberation by a Marine Corps colonel. He was then sentenced to thirty months' imprisonment and given a dishonorable discharge. This outrageous conviction received virtually no press coverage. As Shapiro mentions, Amnesty International adopted Gonzalez as a prisoner of conscience and named him a worldwide prisoner of the month. However, this resulted not from some spontaneous action by the European peace movement but from a tremendous effort by the War Resisters League and Hands Off! Moreover, the clemency granted Gonzalez was the consequence of months of hard work by myself and others and not merely by virtue of Amnesty's campaign, as Shapiro intimates.
N.E.C.L.C.'s contribution to the anti-Gulf War effort was a natural consequence of its commitment to civil liberties. We were active during the Vietnam War, representing draft resisters and challenging the legality of the war. While I agree in large part with Shapiro's critique of the American left's inaction, I believe credit should be given where credit is due. Not all civil libertarians sat on the sidelines; some of us actually engaged in hand-to-hand political combat.
Hillary Richard
GRANDMAS
Sacramento, Calif.
Do add to your "handful of groups" that have kept the C.O.s "at the center of their attention" an organization of which I am a member, Grandmothers for Peace. A number of us worked on behalf of California's Erik Larsen and many others. I think the war frenzy and all the tragic so-called 'patriotism' that fevered the nation helped keep publicity about the peace movement's support for military resisters to a minimum. I wrote to my Congress members and others to ask their help for the C.O.s. I had no reply from any of the men to whom I wrote.
Margaret M. Waybur
GREENS
Keene, N.H.
The Monadnock Greens of Keene, New Hampshire, would like to inform Nation readers that in December we adopted conscientious objector Paul Cook through the organization Hands Off! During the horror of the Gulf War, the courage of the conscientious objectors was a source of strength for many of us facing the blinding rhetoric of flag-waving enthusiasts. The Monadnock Greens hope to support Paul during his imprisonment at Camp Lejeune and also to educate the public on the unfair treatment of conscientious objectors.
Darcie Boyer
SHAPIRO REPLIES
New Haven, Conn.
Not just credit but honor is due the handful of attorneys, including Hillary Richard, who defended Gulf War resisters in the military. My comments were directed not at them or at the tireless, always admirable N.E.C.L.C. but at the many prominent civil liberties advocates who remained silent and at large, well-funded organizations like the A.C.L.U., which failed to lend its legal resources and publicity apparatus to what was after all a free-speech fight.
Several community-based peace organizations like the Grandmothers for Peace and the Monadnock Greens have contacted me about their efforts on behalf of C.O.s. The passion these scattered groups brought to adopting imprisoned military resisters proves an important point: Support for C.O.s should be central to the peace movement's efforts. Support for C.O.s is not only just but gives citizen-activists concrete tasks and attainable victories - so essential to the morale of any movement, and so often elusive during the Gulf War.
Readers may be interested in developments since my article went to press. In late December, Dr. Yolanda Huet-Vaughn's sentence was reduced on military appeal to fifteen months. She is imprisoned under medium security at Leavenworth, even though by the Army's own standards she merits less restrictive confinement. In January the Marine C.O.s released last fall from Camp Lejeune filed a lawsuit (with help from the N.E.C.L.C.) challenging their commanders' right to prohibit them from speaking publicly. The court-martial of Tahan Jones has been set for late February at Camp Lejeune.
Bruce Shapiro
'ABOUT THAT AD ... '
Portland, Ore.
You are right: The ad for Positive Realism's program to "straighten out" gays and lesbians is thoroughly offensive to queer readers and flies in the face of everything The Nation stands for, with the possible exception of free speech. The ad strikes me, a proud gay man, as equivalent in its obscenity to an ad for child pornography or a recruitment ad for the K.K.K. In your 'apology' for running the ad ['About That Ad,' Feb. 10] you make the common progressive mistake of treating gay issues as merely political. It is more than a political issue; the ad insults the integrity and dignity of gays and lesbians.
An ad like this is dangerous. Someone struggling with his or her sexuality might attempt this program. It would inevitably fail and reinforce the belief that being gay or lesbian is a disorder and that the person must truly be diseased because he or she failed to become straight.
Here is a good idea for all the lesbians and gays who came away from that ad with that familiar dull sense of rage. Call that silly outfit and tell them exactly how happy we are being what we are, and that even if we could change, we would never want to.
Bill Wilkerson
ABOUT THAT DISCLAIMER ...
Studio City, Calif.
Please stop confusing censorship with editorial policy. You don't run right-wing editorials. Is that censorship? Surely you reject unsolicited manuscripts that are well written but politically incorrect. Is that censorship? Well, guess what? You don't have to run a politically, humanly incorrect ad just because it "does not seem fraudulent." It's a free country! You have the right to reject ads! In fact, your other disclaimer, the one on the Classified page, begins with your "right to ... reject ... any advertisement." So if you didn't reject this ad what do you reject? Disclaimer or no, your acceptance of that ad endorses it. I considered canceling my subscription, but I'll wait for your Institute for Historical Review double truck.
Sharon Bell
FROM THE ADVERTISER
Culver City, Calif.
I appreciate The Nation's spirit of open discussion. I don't view homosexuality as evil or a disease. I consider it an unhealthy choice - nothing more or less. There are many people with homosexual feelings who are unhappy about it. I help them change. I am against eliminating a homosexual from any job he is qualified for. I also think homosexuals should be allowed to marry, even though I don't recommend it. My gripe is not with homosexuals. I have no licenses or degrees. For the last seven years I have been helping people make the change from gay to straight. My gripe is with the 'experts' who claim it can't be done.
Joe Zychik, director
Positive Realism
'TWOFOLD OVERSIGHT'
Paris
Why was Gilberto Perez - whose name is unfamiliar to me but whom I take to be an informed film scholar - so unkind, indeed so unscrupulous, as to fault at some length (for "modernism" and "proletarian sentimentalism," which is fair enough) an article of mine on W.S. Porter published some fifteen years ago, at the very outset of my work on the period, while studiously ignoring my book Life to Those Shadows, which appeared early this year and which, being entirely devoted to the early cinema, would have fit nicely, it seems, into a review dealing with recent publications on the subject ['In the Beginning,' Nov. 4]. The book devotes exactly 100 pages to the question of the social composition of early film audiences in Britain, France and the United States and shows that I believe that blanket answers, encompassing different social formations, are wholly inadequate.
As for the "modernism" of the early cinema, I have shown the fallacy of this projective reading (including my own early tendency to sacrifice to it) in an article published eight years ago and collected in another book that also appeared at the beginning of this year, In and Out of Synch. A twofold oversight seems unlikely. My impression is that any scruples were simply overridden by the desire to produce a 'neat' article.
No<*_>e-umlaut<*/>l Burch
PEREZ REPLIES
New York City
The three books I chose to review (among several others I could have reviewed, including Burch's) were a sampling that enabled me to consider certain important issues pertaining to early cinema and to film history and theory more widely. Because Burch made a significant contribution to the rethinking of early cinema that has taken place in recent years, I mentioned him in my article even though I wasn't reviewing his book. I thought I was recognizing him rather than attacking him (for me "modernism" is not a term of attack, and "proletarian sentimentalism" - his term, not mine - is nothing to be ashamed of), and it didn't occur to me that he would take offense.
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Has Bush Really Flipped on Abortion?
DEBRA J. SAUNDERS
FINDING GEORGE BUSH'S definitive position on abortion before Bush became Ronald Reagan's running mate is no easy feat.
Groups such as the National Abortion Rights Action League insist that Bush has flip-flopped from an earlier pro-choice position. Yet Bush's pre-running mate public statements on abortion are such a mish-mash, it's hard to pinpoint just where he stood. And the search to pin down Early Bush is made harder by the fact that most databases start with stories printed in 1985.
Supporting those who argue that Bush was pro-choice are the president's one-time affiliation with Planned Parenthood, his erstwhile championing of family planning and his tendency to eschew social conservatism in pre-Reagan days.
The most damning bit of evidence is an interview in the March 1980 Rolling Stone in which Bush said, Ronald Reagan "opposes me for not wanting to amend the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I happen to think it was right."
The Stealth Position
A 1980 position paper, supplied by the Republican Mainstream Committee, from the Bush Iowa campaign belies a pro-choice stand. The paper stated that Bush is "personally opposed to abortion" - which in those days often was code for personal opposition but support for choice. But it also said that Bush supported states' rights on abortion and opposed federal funding except in cases of rape, incest or to save the mother's life.
The paper said Bush was opposed to a constitutional amendment banning abortion because he "believes there is a need to recognize and provide for exceptional cases - rape, incest or to save the life of the mother."
At no point did the paper assert that Bush was pro-choice or pro-life. The curious voter reading this paper could assume basic agreement with Bush, whatever the reader's abortion persuasion. In 1980 pols got away with such fudging.
Bush has flip-flopped on rape and incest; he has vetoed measures to fund such abortions.
But was he pro-choice? By NARAL's current standards, no. What's more, you have to figure that if Bush publicly supported Roe vs. Wade, there would be much more than the Rolling Stone article to show for it. (NARAL also produces an NBC transcript in which early 1980 Bush said, "I do not want to change the Constitution. There is some freedom of choice that exists under the law today, and I would support the law." But that's it for contemporary evidence.)
And the thing with Bush and the elliptical way he talks, well, it makes you wonder whether he was being goofy and left out words that would have changed the meaning. More likely, Bush was talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Before becoming Reagan's running mate, Bush didn't seem particularly concerned about abortion; if he were, he would have talked about the issue more frequently and with specificity. Now Bush evokes the subject at every chance.
Evolution, the Wrong Way
The president has admitted to a change in his position; he calls it an "evolution."
Vice President Dan Quayle's position seems to be evolving too. He has supported outlawing abortion. Then Tuesday Quayle said, "What I am trying to do and what the president's trying to do is to get more reflection on the issue of abortion before the decision is made."
That's a move to mushy ground, and a natural one. Many who have called themselves pro-life blink when they realize their agenda could bring a return to the days of coat-hangers. They are appalled by abortion, but as the prospect of victory approaches, they hesitate for good reason. Whether Quayle sustains this worthy doubt remains to be seen.
What Bush calls evolution, I call decline. After years of throwing sops at the far right, his presidency brought an end to the days when the GOP gave the religious right mere lip service.
Technically, Bush's abortion position may not be a flip-flop. It's worse, because Bush went from being wishy-washy to solidly on the wrong side. It's perverse: He flips on hard promises, then stands tough on the one issue where few want or expected him to. Figure that, having betrayed fiscal conservatism, Bush felt he had to embrace social conservatism or he wouldn't be able to portray himself as a conservative at all.
Burma's Quiet Prisoner Maintains Her 'Presence'
KAREN SWENSON
DAW AUNG San Suu Kyi's goal is a democratic government where all regions and ethnic groups are represented, said the Nobel Prize committee in awarding the 1991 Peace Prize to this woman under house arrest in Rangoon, Burma.
While the award honored Suu Kyi, it was a threat to the government which under Ne Win has steadfastly fought against his country's ethnic groups. In fact, the government cites its struggle with the ethnic population as the reason for spending over half of its budget on defense.
Meanwhile, it meets this expenditure by selling gems and logging franchises to the Thais, who help out with money and arms. The Chinese in 1990 also supplied $1.2 billion in arms. Japan cut back on its aid to Burma in 1991, but it remains the only major nation outside China, to keep up high-level contacts with Burma.
Burma's human rights record is one of the worst in the world, as cited by both Amnesty International and Asia Watch. The Nations Commission on Human Rights has sent officials to Burma.
The U.S. Senate last year passed a resolution congratulating Suu Kyi and condemning the Burmese government for repression and human rights violations, yet a number of U.S. businesses continue to conduct business there.
Pressure from the outside world, however, has had some effect. The Burmese regime recently released a few political prisoners and allowed Suu Kyi's husband, Michael Aris, to visit his wife for the first time since December 1988.
Guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, Suu Kyi has as visitors only a young girl who looks after her, and an intelligence officer. Still Rangoon is filled with rumors about her: that she converts her guards so that they must be changed frequently; that she heard about winning the Nobel prize on her shortwave radio; that she gave up playing the piano because her strings broke.
Her absence is a presence in the minds of her countrymen and women, just as her silence has spoken to the world.
Benicia Home
THE WHITE HOUSE has bestowed a singular honor on a Benicia recovery home for men with alcohol problems, citing the Adobe center's participants for developing good character and values while devoting themselves to serving their community.
The Adobe home, which helps the residents build self-esteem through activities such as repairing houses and cars for the elderly, received the Daily Point of Light from the Bush administration.
The award is designed to recognize those who successfully address the country's most pressing social problems through acts of voluntary commitment to the community. The Daily Point of Light program is a welcome promotion of volunteer service.
Poignant Pleas
WHEN ALL THE HOOPLA and campaign rhetoric of the Democratic National Convention are long since forgotten - probably a few weeks from now - Elizabeth Glaser's heart-felt plea on behalf of present and future AIDS sufferers should remain burnished in the nation's memory: "America, wake up. We are all in a struggle between life and death."
Glaser, who contracted the HIV virus in a blood transfusion and unwittingly passed it on to her two children, joined fellow AIDS sufferer Bob Hattoy Tuesday night in wrenching open the closet that has kept AIDS mostly isolated from the political agenda. In separate, prime-time speeches, they displayed to the Democratic delegates and the TV audience a quality of compassion, anger, frustration, fear and love that transcended politics and spoke directly to the moral core of America. As Representative Pat Schroeder of Colorado exclaimed afterwards, "If that didn't touch your heart, you don't have one."
PART OF what was said was partisan - dealing with an alleged Bush administration failure to respond adequately to the AIDS epidemic. But the broader message that came across was a plea to respond to AIDS not as a political or moral problem, but as a public health catastrophe that affects the entire spectrum of the human family.
As Hattoy, the Clinton campaign's environmental adviser who discovered a month ago that he has AIDS, put it so eloquently: "We are your sons and daughters. Fathers and mothers. We are doctors and lawyers. Folks in the military. Ministers and rabbis and priests. We are Democrats. And yes, Mr. President, Republicans. We're part of the American family."
U.S.-Mexico Nearing Deal
AS DEMOCRATS basked in the warmth both of New York's humidity and the uncharacteristically smooth functioning of their nominating process, President Bush was demonstrating practical, effective leadership out here in California.
At a San Diego meeting with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Bush told reporters that the North American free-trade talks were in the "top of the ninth inning" and that domestic politics will not prevent speedy conclusion of a treaty.
That's good news. Divisive voices have been raised about this U.S.-Canada-Mexico pact: The usual retrograde protectionist ones; the cry by labor that jobs will be lost and wages affected; the sounds of environmentalists who fear Mexico will become a low-cost refuge for polluting U.S. companies. But many of these problems have been addressed, and there is no doubting the ultimate benefit to all parties involved of a free trade zone extending from the Yukon to the Yucatan.
A MAJOR HURDLE was surmounted recently when Mexico agreed to open its financial services industry - long shielded from competition - to the U.S. and Canada.
The parties will be meeting for final negotiations on July 25. And while the U.S. Supreme Court's decision giving tacit approval to the kidnaping of a Mexican charged with complicity in a drug case may have cast a shadow over U.S.-Mexico relations, there are indications the process will stay on the rails.
President Bush is quite properly pressing ahead, and will not allow the election to deflect this important effort. That's leadership.
Greatest Female Sex Symbol of All Time?
CONTI
(Asked at various locations)
Edward Myotte, 38, not working, Vallejo:
Marilyn Monroe. What a body. She was so soft looking. She must have had some good cosmetology work. Being on drugs, she couldn't have kept up that way without it.
Paul Uliana, 50, electrician, San Bruno:
Brigitte Bardot. She was totally animalistic and it was the way she pouted. She gave the appearance of being self-assured, and anyone who has respect for themselves is sexy.
Eric Thorsen, 29, electrician, the Sunset:
Kelly Bundy from 'Married With Children.' She's naive and makes herself available to the opposite sex, which is appealing. She's very easy. She's a possibility.
Jim Simms, 31, electrical maintenance man, Fremont:
Cindy Crawford. She's sleek looking. It could be her hair. The different ways she fixes her hair. It's always wild looking. It doesn't look all perfectly in place.
Seth Kilbourn, 27, public policy major, Berkeley:
Madonna. She exudes a real sensuality and sexuality that's refreshing. It's honest and it challenges the status quo. It challenges conventional notions of female sexuality.
David Jay, 33, claims examiner, the Richmond:
Grace Kelly exuded class and sensuality. She had an air of sophistication and seemed to be someone that would be out of reach. Someone you would put on a pedestal.
Camille Paglia - born to be mild. Not.
IF YOU have any sense, I kept telling myself, you will stay out of the Camille Paglia House of Horrors. No feminist writer gets near Camille Paglia without losing a pint of blood and at least one eye.
Paglia was born ticked off because she's a girl and not a boy. She fights like a man - viciously and to conquer - which excites the hell out of a lot of people but has nothing to do with the advancement of feminist dialogue.
Camille Paglia calls Susan Sontag a "bitch." She calls 'Backlash' author Susan Faludi "stupid and naive," 'The Beauty Myth' author Naomi Wolf "profoundly hypocritical" and "bourgeois," and Gloria Steinem "an outmoded tyrant."
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Chilling Specter
Editor - Ross Perot claims his mission is to serve the American people, to do whatever it is we want him to do. The tragic consequence of his billion-dollar fantasy, fed by a host of well-paid sycophants, is that he fails to understand we Americans do not speak with one voice. We are, in fact, a nation with many voices crying out on behalf of countless interests. Even given the clear choice between a candidate supporting a more prominent role for government and a candidate advocating a laissez faire approach, we were not a decisive bloc.
From which quarter would Ross Perot get his mandate? From an 800 line set up to count only the yea votes? How would he hear from the rest of us? We are not like the 'shareholders' in a business. Investors have a single-minded goal: bottom-line profit. Sell more widgets for the best price while incurring the least cost. But we in this nation do not sell widgets, and the definition of profit is different for each of us.
Ross Perot opted out of the chance to plead his case, to answer the voices of defiance that had only begun to be heard when he quit the race in July. The specter of Ross Perot on the political landscape, with his bag full of money to buy out the fair process of debate, sends a chill up my spine.
BETH CONNOR
Los Altos
Ross for Boss
Editor - Naturally we are hesitant with Mr. Ross Perot, but why must we continue to be this way when we finally have someone who doesn't care to race because of name calling or because of candidates who are playing up to the media?
We finally have a candidate who is running because of the issues that are affecting the United States as a whole, as a democracy. Why must we burden ourselves by turning the candidacy into a soap opera?
Right now we need a president who is a businessman, who can project where we are 50 years from now. We do not need someone whose own state is bankrupt and someone who is walking around with no concept of the people. We need someone to help us, the American people, not to define who we are or our beliefs, but to aid in the economy and give us the chances we need again to fulfill the American Dream ... of freedom.
F.P. DERWILLERBY
Oakland
Titillating
Editor - Golly gee-whiz gang, seems I had to check my 'family values' at the door when I opened Wednesday's Chronicle. Those titillating photos of Madonna's mounds and Crawford's cleave ... butts in Berkeley ... it was all too much for me! I snapped. I'm now casting my vote for Joe Bob Briggs for prez.
STEVE SALAZAR
Santa Rosa
'Sore Sport'
Editor - Ross Perot; the Will Rogers wanna-be, the candidate was-a-be, the contender never-be. We've got him back: the buffoonish, bumpkin billionaire who claims to be different, a change and an outsider. Outside and different from what? Here's a guy who made a bulk of his money from dealings with General Motors and the Pentagon. How much more inside can you get? How many billionaires do you know who are not "ego-driven, power-hungry people"?
Anagrammatically speaking, Ross Perot = Poser Sort and Sore Sport.
BRIAN LEHMAN
San Rafael
Women for Clinton
Editor - Bush and Clinton are running neck and neck among men, but Clinton far out polls his rival among women. A quick comparison of their records reveals that there are very good reasons for women's preference for Clinton. Bush vetoed the following provisions in legislation passed by Congress, all of which Clinton supports: establishment of an Office of Research on Women's Health; a requirement for inclusion of women in clinical trials in medical research; increased funding for research on breast and ovarian cancer, osteoporosis and contraception; the Family and Medical Leave Act; over-turn of the 'gag rule' that forbids health-care providers that receive federal funds from giving low-income women information about abortion.
In addition, Bush opposes and has threatened to veto the following other provisions, supported by Clinton: the Freedom of Choice Act, which would protect women's legal right to choose abortion even if Roe vs. Wade is reversed; full funding of Head Start, WIC and childhood immunization by 1996; and restoration of the U.S.'s contributions to the United Nations Population Fund.
This adds up to a remarkable record of indifference by Bush to women's health, to their reproductive freedom and to the health and well-being of infants and young children. Women support Clinton because we know that he supports us.
EMILY STOPER
Oakland
Diversity at Boalt
Editor - Boalt Hall's changes in its admissions policy are wise and welcome. Contrary to what critics say, the new policy poses no threat to diversity. The new admissions rules will promote real diversity - diversity of life experience, culture, political belief and outlook - and replace the old diversity which was based on immutable characteristics, such as race, which aren't directly related to how an applicant has spent his or her days on Earth.
CLINT N. SMITH, student
Boalt Hall Law School
Oakland
Why Bush
Editor - Enough! We have been blitzed by constant media propaganda consisting of subtle, too extremely obvious, anti-Bush messages! One cannot read a newspaper or watch TV without being subjected to biased political statements.
On the other hand, Clinton has been allowed to smooth talk his way across the country, telling every special-interest group exactly what they want to hear, and leaving many of the negative campaign tactics to a very willing, primarily Democratic media, eagerly scrambling to help him in his attempt to win the White House.
Think America! And put the blame where it belongs: a Democratic Congress, a changing world economy and worldwide recession, an open door policy and a negative media.
There has never been a more crucial time for experienced leadership, if the U.S. is to remain a superpower. It is vital that we continue with a president who has the respect and admiration of world powers and the strength of character to do what is in the best interest of the American people rather than what is politically expedient and 'attractive.' And that man is President Bush!
KRIS GUILIANI
San Francisco
Sex, Abortion And the GOP
Editor - I am dumbfounded by the conservative Republicans who prefer a Democratic victory in California to a platform compromise on their definition of family values ('Bickering Hurts State's GOP Candidates,' Chronicle, September 22).
The right claims the moral high ground and implores its disciples to stand firm and seek the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. The position is so extreme, lacking in thought and common sense, that there is no longer room for Republicans like myself. Why is a party that professes the virtues of parental responsibility asking the government to outlaw something it is incapable of enforcing? Parental responsibility means explaining sex and birth control to adolescents when the hormones start ragging. I grew up in the ivory tower of the upper middle class and have found to my amazement that more than half of my friends never had a discussion about sex with their parents. Outlawing abortion ignores the all important parental role in preventing pregnancy in the first place.
When conservative Republicans stop seeking a simplistic and unworkable solution to a complex moral dilemma, maybe the party can get on with the business of winning an election.
STEVE FILLIPOW
Alameda
Oust Congress
Editor - Congress has deliberately attempted to sabotage the Bush administration at the expense of the country. They should be ousted not Bush.
Voting for Clinton is a vote for socialism and a sucker's bet.
With inflation low, interest rates low and no outside threat, the reason for the recession is clear - over-regulation.
KENNETH DEKKER
Lafayette
No Contest
Editor - The radical right-wing of the Republican Party has been promoting an anti-environmental theme throughout the 1992 election campaign. No candidate is more pronounced in this view than Bruce Herschensohn. Mr. Herschensohn believes that environmentalists are socialists, that the Environmental Protection Agency and Endangered Species Act should be abolished, that offshore oil drilling should take place up and down the California coast and that both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts are "con jobs ... unworthy of a free society." Not only are these positions absurd, they expose Mr. Herschensohn as being unworthy of high public office.
The Senate needs leaders who understand the reality of the environmental threat and are willing to advocate solutions. Candidate Herschensohn who would repeal both the Clean Air and Clean Water acts is not such a person.
Barbara Boxer, however, is such a leader. She has consistently been one of the strongest environmental advocates in the Congress. She understands that if our grandchildren are to inherit a clean, liveable environment, public policy favoring the environment will have to be established now. Clearly, if one cares about the environment and the health of the planet there is no contest between the candidates. 'Senator' Herschensohn would allow further degradation of the environment. 'Senator' Boxer would lead the fight to preserve and restore it.
ROBERT H. SULNICK
American Oceans Campaign
Topanga (Los Angeles County)
Man of Change
Editor - As California headed into a recession, the Congress voted itself a 40 percent pay raise. Among those voting for the raise was the self-proclaimed candidate of 'change,' Barbara Boxer.
Boxer made her name in Congress by attacking the Pentagon for spending $7,500 on coffee pots - then she turned around and voted against firing the House elevator operators.
Her definition of government waste is simple: if it's spent on her and her pals in the Congress, it's a bargain - no matter what the cost.
Bruce Herschensohn delivered more than a dozen television and radio commentaries against the 1989 congressional pay raise. I trust him to bring change to the Congress.
GERRY SNYDER
Danville
No Gimme's
Editor - Re: Sharon Johnson's letter, 'Unshackle Women' (Chronicle, September 29). I read and hear many opinions akin to those expressed by Ms. Johnson. She states that "women will flourish in any position if they are given a level playing field in the workplace." Who wouldn't?
I realize it is not in vogue, but nevertheless I offer Ms. Johnson and anyone who thinks like her to reconsider. In real life no one is given anything. Respect, position, renumeration, success and anything else worthwhile, are earned by hard work, dedication, perseverance and personal responsibility. Not by gimme!
ART WALLSTEAD
Merced
7th on Sale: a Zoo
Editor - "7th on Sale" I hope was a huge success in spite of itself. Friday night I'm told was wonderful, but for the rest of us peons, Saturday and Sunday was a zoo!
Too crowded, slow moving, long lines, sessions starting way too late, and worst of all old, old merchandise - more like a high-class rummage with a tax write-off for the designers.
I'm not the only one who said "never again."
NINA STONE
San Francisco
WAVES Reunion
Editor - I am trying to locate WAVES that we served with during the Korean War to have a 40th reunion. I am looking for all WAVES stationed at El Toro Marine Base in Santa Ana, Calif., working in Navy supply of the infirmary during 1953-1956. Please contact Mona (Foster) Benson, 16713 E. Queenside Dr., Covina, Calif., 91722, regarding a 40th reunion in the spring.
MONA BENSON
Covina (Los Angeles County)
'FAMILY VALUES'
Editor - It's laughable to see a scoffer like Quayle acting as a press agent for family values.
The very system that bestowed him with privileged status - the modern industrial system - has from the very beginning declared war on the family by dragging fathers and mothers out of the home to go to work for someone else, by turning people and nature into objects to exploit and transform into money and by forcing everyone to work harder and longer for less pay. Our system idolizes money and judges everyone in terms of it. Thus, family values are constantly under fire from the very processes of the 'free' market and everyday life.</doc></docx>
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Earplay's Peterson premiere
'Diptych' shows composer's wide experience
By Allan Ulrich
EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC
A PREMIERE by the Bay Area's Wayne Peterson, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for composition, proved both the most absorbing and most instructive work featured on this season's first Earplay concert of contemporary music Monday evening at Fort Mason's Cowell Theater.
'Diptych,' a 21-minute opus, co-commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and the Earplay ensemble, makes no radical statement and realigns no aesthetic priorities. But Peterson, the senior contributor to Monday's concert, revealed a quality only intermittently evident in his colleagues' offerings - the gift of wide experience, and the ability to learn from intense listening. They are not surprising virtues from someone you encounter at almost every new music concert in town.
(Peterson's next local premiere will be a string quartet for the Alexander Quartet. Composers, Inc. will present it Nov. 10 in the Veterans Building Green Room.)
Much of the accompanying fare in Earplay's eighth season curtain-raiser was honorably wrought, even arresting at moments. Yet, except for James Dashow's 'Mnemonics' (1990) for violin and tape, distinctive personalities failed to emerge.
The program also included Gustavo Moretto's 'Silenciosamente' (1990), David Vayo's 'Poem' (1990) and Scott Wheeler's 'Night Owl Variations' (1987). The hard-working performers were Joseph Edelberg, violin; George Thomson, violin/viola; Sarah Freiberg, cello; Peter Josheff, clarinet/saxophone; Janet Kutulas, flutes; Andrew Lewis, percussion, and Karen Rosenak, piano. J. Karla Lemon conducted the Peterson, Vayo and Wheeler works.
Peterson's wasn't the only piece on Monday's concert to reconsider the past; he favors the dotted rhythms found in baroque dance forms. Yet, it was the composer's gift for striking instrumental sonorities and the constant direction of the two-movement work that won the evening.
Scored for flute, clarinet, piano, viola, cello and an impressive array of percussion, 'Diptych' consistently surprises in the clarity of its counterpoint and in its deployment of instrumental timbres for both sensuous and dramatic possibilities. Tensions grow organically from the material without seeming imposed upon it.
The first section, 'Aubade,' is a morning song in which Peterson deftly conjures an emotionally charged landscape. Burbling sounds from a vibraphone, soft drumrolls and descending chords glory in pictorialism, yet there's an arch effect here that derives from the subtle manipulation of textures.
Peterson arranged 'Odyssey,' the second part, in rondo form, but a rich vein of lyricism and widely contrasting textures sustain the interest even when a breakdown seems imminent. And one discerns a sophisticated wit. The strings, in one extended passage, are assigned a syrupy theme that suggests Franck or Faure. A coda highlighting piano and gentle percussion leaves the listener wanting a bit more.
Less, however, would have been preferable for 'Mnemonics.' Chicago-born Dashow has worked extensively in both acoustic and electronic music. Here the solo violinist (Thomson) finds his sonority matched by the sound on type; that, in part, has been determined by the harmonic structure of the string sound.
The explanation in the program stresses the complexity of the method. What one hears is elegantly assembled, but about halfway through, the attention wanders. The aesthetic relationship of live musician and electronic sound seems under-defined.
'Silenciosamente' offered eight minutes of provocative and inconclusive sounds for clarinet, violin and piano. Less is more for Argentine-born Moretto, who favors dynamic extremes and isolated notes, from which the violin line rises to occasional lyrical statements.
Vayo's 'Poem' (for flute, piano, clarinet, violin and cello) often hints at a warm, almost Brahmsian sonority, from which jocularity is not excluded. Wheeler's 'Night Owl Variations' separates its four instruments (flute, clarinet, cello and marimba) in agreeable, almost improvisatory fashion. Twelve minutes of the work, however, left an impression of grayness.
Family struggles in 'God's Hands'
Theatre Works musical just misses its calling
By Robert Hurwitt
EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC
PALO ALTO - A crisis of faith has always been good grist for a dramatist's mill, whether it's a religious leader's loss of faith in his God (as in Ingmar Bergman's 'The Silence') or an artist's in his craft (Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' John Osborne's 'The Entertainer,' et al.). But when the artist is a kid just discovering that others are as talented as he, or when the crisis is an adolescent's belated discovery that his father isn't omnipotent ... well, let's just say that not all crises are created equal.
That's one of the main problems with 'God's Hands,' a semiautobiographical new musical by Douglas J. Cohen that opened Theatre-Works' Stage II season at Palo Alto's Cubberley Theatre Saturday. You want to like these people. You want to believe that their story has significance beyond its particulars. You certainly sympathize with them at times. But the whole thing feels like an exercise in self-indulgence.
The story starts in medias res, when Rabbi Daniel Levy (Stephen Gill) heads for New York to search for his 18-year-old son, Benjamin (Mark Phillips), who's been missing from Juilliard for several days. We're not worried though. We already know what the rabbi won't discover for another 2 hours and 20 minutes: Ben's dropped out and taken a job at a supermarket.
Meanwhile, we flash back through the story of Ben's life, from his birth - with Dad dreaming of his son, the first Jewish president - through his prolonged adolescence. Ben has a mother, of course, the quiet homemaker Ellie (Diana Torres Koss), and an older sister Ruth (Rebecca Fink), eclipsed by her brother from the moment he's born. But except for a brief look at Ruth's struggle for her own identity, and a superfluous, obligatory nod to woman's lot in the song 'Bloomin' Time,' they have little to do with the story.
THE CENTRAL relationship is between Ben, his father and his father's mother, Rhea (Miriam Babin), a concert pianist determined to turn her grandson into the keyboard prodigy her son refused to become. The close tie between Ben and Rhea not only fosters Ben's musical talents but also precipitates his first crisis of faith, when his father, who "wears God's hands" (the hands of the rabbi raised in benediction), admits he can't pray Rhea back to health after a stroke.
Though played as background to Ben's story, his father's crisis is more fertile dramatic ground. A reform rabbi whose progressive views lose him congregations in Walnut Creek and Illinois, he's a grown man still struggling for his mother's approval. The show's most interesting moment, too soon over, is a flashback to their mother-son, God vs. piano confrontation and her complete rejection of a deity who couldn't protect her family against Hitler.
Cohen doesn't follow up on this theme, however, nor on the rabbi's failure to recognize that his daughter has taken on the social conscience side of his calling. Instead, what we get mostly is a study in generic middle-class adolescent angst, packaged as a swiftly flowing musical that rarely comes to rest on a dramatic moment or a distinct melody.
Few of the songs - not even a mildly sardonic hymn to Manischewitz - have anything like a definable personality. Most of Cohen's tunes fall into that gray netherland between recitative and actual melody, easily adaptable to whatever mood the composer wishes to indicate: a heavier hand on the keys for emotional turmoil; a slide into falsetto for added poignancy. The music is professional, painless and forgettable, capably performed by Dan Casper on keyboards and Bryan Lanser on percussion.
Director Barbara Valente gives the show a sharp-looking production on a wondrously versatile set (by Joe Ragey) of cylindrical blocks and slide projections, all framed between Torah-like scrolls. Led by an engaging Phillips, who pushes the cute side of Ben just a bit, the cast works hard, but often isn't up to the demands of the store.
NEITHER Gill nor Babin, though they handle their acting chores well enough, quite manages to bring off their major confrontation in 'What Good Is Prayer?' The chorus fails sadly in 'It's a Dirty Job,' Ben's vision of the congregation as a Damon Runyonesque gang (Ben's Broadway-style fantasy life is another theme that falls by the way-side). Fink, bursting with teen attitude, and Koss, in the underwritten role of Ellie, shine in their musical moments together.
But at this point, 'God's Hands' isn't exactly a mitzvah.
'Mad Dog' Ellroy sounds off
By Cynthia Robins
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
JAMES ELLROY'S latest book, 'White Jazz' (Knopf, $22, 349 pages), makes previous detective fiction, including his own, read like Dr. Seuss. Pared down to the verbal equivalent of Gillespie-Kenton rebop, Ellroy's prose scans nervous, jittery, polyphonic and blood-soaked. A fugue for tinhorns, hookers, extortionists, dopers, window peepers, porno kings, crooked cops, vicious Feds, millionaires, mobsters, murderers and molesters.
For a man whose fiction treads a very thin line between violence and art, James Ellroy is deceptively charming - used to performing, spinning out catchy quotes and off-handedly telling his life story. But if life and art forge some kind of fidgety truce on his pages, you can bet that somewhere under the engaging, clownish exterior, Ellroy's more profligate, dangerous instincts lie in wait.
Right now, it's time to feed the beast - the author who answers not only to James Ellroy (not Jim, not Jimmy, certainly not Mr. Ellroy) but also 'Dog,' short for 'Mad Dog.' If you're especially nice, he'll even bark for you.
Enjoying his fame
Mr. Mad Dog's day started at an indecently early hour - 5:30 a.m. - in Houston. As he folds his long legs into a booth at Postrio, he peruses the menu, ordering up a charcuterie plate. "You share it with me," he says. "You eat the stuff with liver. I hate liver."Ellroy is enjoying every bit of new fame and burgeoning bank account, ordering two entrees at this very expensive restaurant and then flourishing a $20 tip on top of the gratuity left by his book escort. He talks fast, eats with his fingers, slurps mineral water out of his interviewer's glass and complains about his thinning salt-and-pepper hair.
A rangy, lanky guy given to teensy round glasses ("they match my beady little eyes," he jokes), Ellroy bears a passing resemblance to Adolf Hitler and nurtures a passion for cashmere sweaters. He says that when he first started writing, long "before I started marrying women," when he had $22,000 in the bank and a $600-a-month flop, he treated himself to a $1,300, zillion-ply cashmere. The navy one he's got tied around his neck over a faded red and white Hawaiian shirt is as soft as a kitten.
Twelve years ago, when Ellroy, a self-confessed druggie, alcoholic, thief, went on the wagon and wrote his first book - 'Brown's Requiem,' an elegiac stroll into Los Angeles' seedy underbelly of itinerant golf caddies, crooked cops, Mexican whores and white powder traffickers - all the elements of his well-hewn prose style were there: the offbeat hero not afraid to soil his hands or use his gun; a rogue's gallery of characters who, morally corrupt or not, are always riveting; a plot that zigs when you expect it to zag.
But Ellroy was wordier then. His sentence structure parsed. He didn't believe in italics or words in all caps. In the last five years, since he began what he calls his 'Los Angeles Quartet,' four books about the crime-garnished margins of L.A. circa 1958, he's dropped verbiage and parts of speech like a clumsy waiter with a tray full of dirty dishes.
That's not to say that Ellroy's next step is a comic book interspersed with Batman-style sound effects, but 'White Jazz,' for all its lean-mean-rat-a-tat-machine cadences, was tough to finish. It took 21 months.
"The story was all there when I started," he says. He began with a complicated 164-page outline that led to five separate rewrites. Beginning the book in a more traditional first person, Ellroy says it "felt a little flaccid to me, so I went back and cut, cut, cut, subtracting words, adding words, taking out again." Basically, he laughs, "it is bebop - it's this racist cop getting into black jazz."
Only it's an invented syntax, as artful and riveting as the dialogue in a David Mamet play, that reads just like the title - jazz.
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Romance of War in Old Asia
THE GREAT GAME
The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
By Peter Hopkirk
Kodansha; $30; 565 pages
REVIEWED BY ANDREW LEONARD
The events in Peter Hopkirk's new history, 'The Great Game,' sound like front-page headlines from the past decade:
Angry mobs fueled by religious passion take over a foreign embassy in a Middle Eastern nation bordering the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, a Western army bogs down in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, and thousands of young soldiers die. To the north, wily Muslim leaders, heirs to the tradition of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, play one superpower against another.
But Hopkirk, a onetime foreign correspondent for the London Times, has turned the clock back 100 years, to a time when the insatiably expanding empires of Russia and England were gobbling up Central Asia, seeking strategic advantages in their global struggle for commercial and military domination.
The British feared that Russia would not stop until it invaded India, the jewel of the British Empire. The Russians were obsessed with protecting their borders, psychologically scarred, suggests Hopkirk, by a disastrous Mongol invasion centuries earlier. The meeting ground, where Russian military outposts came closest to British India, was Afghanistan.
'The Great Game' is old-fashioned history written with engrossing flair. Hopkirk tells the story of this massive confrontation between the 19th century superpowers through the personal stories of the various British and Russian explorers, spies and diplomats who mapped out the uncharted mountains and deserts of Central Asia. The British wanted information on the passes where Russian troops could come storming across the mountains. The Russians sought to convince the khans of the kingdoms to their south - Bokhara, Khiva and Khokand - that it was in their best interest to accede to Russian demands. On rare occasions, the two sides met, with sometimes gallant results.
"'We will shoot at each other in the morning,' one Russian told [British explorer Captain Frederick] Burnaby, handing him a glass of vodka, 'and drink together when there is a truce.'"
The place names are exotic - Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Kashgar. Russian and British-er alike engage in thrilling feats of derring-do, dressed as Buddhist pilgrims infiltrating cities never before seen by Western eyes, or riding 700 miles over the most inhospitable terrain on Earth to relay news on the latest Russian or English advance, or simply dying alone, the victims of unspeakable treachery in remote mountain valleys.
Hopkirk tells the story well, playing up the romance and glamour while never losing sight of the overarching historical picture. Of particular relevance to current-day events is the role of Afghanistan and the history of the Central Asian Muslim khanates.
Afghanistan, with its fabled Bolan and Khyber passes, notes Hopkirk, was the traditional staging ground for the many successful invasions of India during the past 3,000 years. But when the British tried to place their own puppet on the throne, they ended up losing a 16,000-man army almost to the last soul. The fierce Afghan tribesmen were practically unbeatable, something the Soviet Union also learned after its own foray into Afghan politics.
And Central Asia? A look back at the 19th century proves that the domination of this vast area by Russia had nothing to do with Marxist ideology. The overriding imperative, demonstrates Hopkirk, was a strategic concern for the protection of the heartland. Communism may have collapsed today, but Russian interests remain the same.
England may no longer be a player in the "Great Game," argues Hopkirk, but in these post-Cold War days, America and Russia will be certain to seek their advantage, through diplomacy, intrigue and perhaps even military force, in the new republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nadzhikistan and many others.
"If this narrative tells us nothing else," writes Hopkirk, "it is that little has changed in the last hundred years." It is a point well taken.
A Vietnam War Nurse Tells Her Story
AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR
On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam
By Winnie Smith
William Morrow; 352 pages; $22
BY ALIX MADRIGAL
When nurse Winnie Smith joined the Army in 1963, she had never heard of Vietnam.
"I was 19," the San Francisco writer said on a recent visit to The Chronicle. "I grew up with very romantic notions about war, and I wanted to travel. My hope was to go to Korea so I could wear fatigues and run around in a jeep." Smith was so naive that, although a nurse, she didn't know what a condom was.
By 1966 she was in the thick of it - Long Binh, Vietnam, where "time passes quickly but the day drags on forever," as she writes in 'American Daughter Gone to War.' Hard work, exhaustion and tragedy were "facts of life," and soldiers were "put aside to die because of lack of space or staff even to try and save them."
A heart-wrenching account of Smith's wartime experiences, the book tells of her odyssey from being an idealistic young nurse who feared the war would end before she got there to becoming a battle-hardened veteran.
An important book, it is also a painful one, with its graphic scenes of young bodies torn apart: Removing a dirty bandage from the head of a wounded soldier, Smith lifted his wounded eye right out of its socket; another soldier wrapped his intestines around his neck before throwing himself off a building.
Harder still is the psychic mutilation Smith describes. Early on, she had visions of helping the "most innocent victims of war, the children." Later, she prayed the Vietnamese children would leave her alone. Although she dimly realized that bombing Vietnamese villages and shooting their children was a peculiar way to "save" them, she was so outraged at the suffering of American soldiers that she came to hate the "gooks." Once, unable to stand the sight of them, she refused to let a Vietnamese couple visit their dying 4-year old son.
Though sickened by the My Lai massacre, Smith feels that she understood it. "Inside, I scream at those who condemn the lieutenant in charge at My Lai," she writes. "I'd like them to get off their self-righteous asses and learn about war first hand ... .To watch a couple of buddies get blown to pieces and then see how long they can hang on to their high and mighty ideals."
'American Daughter Gone to War' is also the harrowing story of what happened to Smith when she got back to the "world" - cigarets and alcohol, emotional isolation, lethargy and depression, all from memories she didn't know she was suppressing.
It was difficult for Smith to talk about her war experiences, "especially because I moved to San Francisco, where there was a lot of anti-war sentiment." But she couldn't talk to her patriotic family, either. "They only wanted to hear the funny stories," Smith remembers. Her mother's chatty, chirpy letters form an ironic counterpoint to Smith's story: "Well, Winnie," she wrote, "with the way things are going I really think it would be a pleasure to stay in Vietnam for a while to get away from the world's problems ..."
The book began as therapy for Smith, a way to exorcise the grim and bloody visions she later learned to identify as flash-backs, a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. "I discover writing helps me regain control of my mind," she writes. "The reels won't stop, but I can slow them enough to record portions, and once they're put to paper, they fade back into the past, change from experience to memory."
Until the flashbacks and tears began in 1983, 16 years after her return from Vietnam, Smith says, she was so out of touch with her feelings, she didn't realize the war had left a scar.
She remembers working in the recovery room at San Francisco General Hospital when she saw an article in The Chronicle on groups for women veterans. "When I read it I almost cried," she says. "But I pushed the feelings down and just put the whole thing out of my mind."
Soon after Smith procured a vial of potassium chloride with which she intended to end her life, a cousin sent her a copy of Lynda Van Devanter's account of her time as an Army nurse in Vietnam, 'Home Before Morning.'
"The first page does not impress me," she writes. "Twelve years later she's blaming Vietnam for not being able to sleep at night. What nonsense, I think." But the book brought it all back; soon the flash-backs started, and the tears, and Smith remembered the article about women veterans, with the number of the Concord Veterans Assistance Center. The call marked the beginning of Smith's recovery.
"I'm hoping that when vets and their families read this," she says, "they'll see the value of getting out of the pattern of suppressing the pain and find a way to heal. Whatever it takes."
Caribbean Family Saga
TREE OF LIFE
By Maryse Condé, translated by Victoria ReiterBallantine; 371 pages; $18
REVIEWED BY TERESA MOORE
'Tree of Life,' a newly translated novel by West Indian author Maryse Condé, is a rococo pageant that stretches from Guadeloupe to Panama to San Francisco to Paris to London to New York to Jamaica to Haiti and back. A family saga that moves from the early days of this century to the 1970s, 'Tree of Life' follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the descendants of a dreamy peasant who vaults from the cane field into the bourgeoisie.
Condé, author of the acclaimed family sagas 'Segu' and 'The Children of Segu' is a native of Guadeloupe and has taught Caribbean literature at several American colleges, including the University of California at Berkeley.
Reading this book is like stuffing oneself on a delicious, well-cooked meal and feeling oddly ill-nourished and hungry again before the plates are cleared. So much happens so fast to so many in 'Tree of Life' that at times the book is hard to follow. Matters are further complicated by a rich, almost poetic writing style that seems at odds with such a busy narrative.
Everything that happens in 'Tree of Life' seems bigger, brighter and faster than anything that has ever happened before. This is the novel as Broadway extravaganza - lots of flashy effects and whirling about in gothic/exotic locales, strong choruses and a huge cast of head-strong lovers, wild men and wicked women, wise crones and hapless buffoons.
Albert Louis, the patriarch of the far-flung clan, loses just about everyone he has ever loved to early death. During different fits of mourning, Albert is an ascetic, a drunk or a hermit. Nicknamed "Soubarou" or "Wild Man," Albert spends so much time in the throes of grief that one is relieved when the self-absorbed old man finally dies his own death.
One might think the deaths of several characters would simplify the novel, but in 'Tree of Life,' death is simply another country, like France or America. Many of the dead, more vindictive and vigilant than ever they were in life, return to meddle in the lives of the living.
Condé employs the style of legend and fairy tale to limn these figures: "Jacob was born far away from the Boyer-de-l'Etang plantation, in a forest in Massachusetts, three years after Albert's head had slipped down between Théodora's tortured thighs while she prayed to God: 'Let it be a boy! A boy!'" The result is like a highly imaginative and detailed woodcut - within the tilt of a head or the design on a skirt, one might get an outline of a people, but such one-dimensional forms give few clues to an individual soul. Condé uses punctuation to heighten her linguistic arabesques: If all the exclamation points in 'Tree of Life' were deleted, the novel would probably be a full two pages shorter.
The novel's narrator further contributes to the book's maddening opacity. The story is told by young Claude Ela<*_>i-circ<*/>se Louis, the illegitimate daughter of Thécla, a spoiled, dissolute beauty who flees the comfort of the family compound in Guadeloupe for a series of lovers in Paris, London, Manhattan and Jamaica.
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POP REVIEW
MTV Show: Where's the Bite?
By CHRIS WILLMAN
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Even in the realm of pop-culture vulgarity, as the MTV Video Music Awards demonstrates, this is the era of down-sized expectations.
Remember that special MTV moment just a few years back when, in the middle of 'Vogue,' an unidentified male dancer heartily squeezed Madonna's corseted bust on cue for all the cable-equipped world to see?
The closest thing to that 'high-light' in Wednesday's telecast came when Howard Stern, costumed in his bare-derriered 'Fartman' persona, pointed to his saggy behind and ordered Luke Perry to "touch it for power." This prompted the TV hunk to gamely give the radio personality a good bun-rubbing.
In this recessionary age, even bad taste isn't what it used to be.
Not that everything about the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards didn't shout bigger. The telecast lasted more than three ear-boggling hours, and was broadcast live from UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, which offers twice the seating capacity of the show's previous home, the Universal Amphitheatre. Thirteen major pop acts performed, all but two of them on the premises, all but one live.
Despite this exponential growth, this year's show may be the first in MTV history without a single genuinely, memorably provocative moment - the best (or worst) attempts of Stern and a few other shock therapists notwithstanding.
And from a live audience point of view, the move from Universal to Pauley proved a big - emphasis on big - mistake, with the arena's massive size decidedly dampening rather than heightening the intended excitement. Unlike previous MTV blowouts, TV really was the place to watch this one.
Musically, the telecast was rich with star talent, albeit only one female act - En Vogue - showing that Wednesday, at least, the M in MTV stood for 'men.'
At the climax of a diverting, if not adventurous show, Elton John showed up to share adjoining pianos with Axl Rose on Guns N' Roses' 'November Rain,' after having earlier performed his own 'The One.' Also on hand for this big finale was a 40-piece orchestra, although making out its contributions over the roar of GNR proved an impossibility for anyone at Pauley.
Bringing along their own posse of onstage partyers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers directly followed Pearl Jam in what was announced as a "battle of the bands," both of the groups agreeably turning up the musical tension level for one of the few palpable times in the proceedings.
And in a show historically dominated by high-energy barn-burner production numbers, Eric Clapton's quiet, tender 'Tears in Heaven,' written as a response to the death of his young son, was a clear favorite. In the midst of so much failed tastelessness, his inherent touch of class and his ballad's bittersweet emotion carried perhaps even more import than they might have in less frivolous company.
But as frivolity goes, another highlight was host Dana Carvey - as Garth of 'Wayne's World' - sitting in on drums with U2, via satellite, performing 'Even Better Than the Real Thing' from Detroit. Garth also joined in some rock 'n' roll repartee with Bono. "I don't mean to bug ya!" said the young Auroran, mocking one of Bono's better-known recorded quips.
Carvey's overall reception as master of ceremonies was mixed. In moments, his impressions and characters from 'Saturday Night Live' - Bush, Perot, Church Lady, et al. - brought down the house; at other times, he was dying and seemed to know it. But erratic as Carvey was, nearly everyone on hand seemed to agree he was a far preferable choice to prior host Arsenio Hall, whose benign cheer-leading had always seemed out of character for the show's intended rock 'n' roll attitude.
Not surprisingly, Nirvana went furthest in providing the show a sense of tension, some of it off-stage. Originally the band was scheduled to open the telecast with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' but, reportedly, when they began doing a new song called 'Rape Me' at rehearsals instead, nervous producers bumped their segment to the middle of the show.
Nirvana ended up performing the less incendiary 'Lithium,' complete with the by-now entirely predictable set-smashing finale. Having tossed himself into the drum set, singer Kurt Cobain proceeded to drool, perhaps showing off a new trick borrowed from his infant daughter.
(Other rockers felt compelled to mock Cobain's antics, on and off stage, most notably Elton John, who capped his ballad by picking up his piano cushion and dropping it to the floor.)
With Nirvana bumped from the opening slot, first-song honors unfortunately instead went to the Black Crowes, with a standard run-through of 'Remedy' that provided anything but the kind of provocation MTV usually depends on to kick off its annual showcase.
Even less impressive was the second live act, Bobby Brown, whose usually supple singing voice was inexplicably a hoarse rapper's shout during most of 'Humpin' Around,' and whose dancers looked like a mini-version of the Hammer aerobics troupe. Endearing himself to few, Brown superfluously concluded his appearance by winning the annual race to be the first star to smugly brandish the F-word on the live telecast.
(Sammy Hagar came in second in that contest, prompting Carvey to announce: "For those of you at home, he just said clucking - 'We clucking appreciate it.'")
Brown's elder statesman and rival, Michael Jackson, didn't fare much better. Whereas once a Jackson appearance of any sort would have produced some sort of anticipation, a taped performance of 'Black or White' in London seemed almost like an after-thought.
Jackson's presence was felt elsewhere, as well, albeit in less flattering ways: Axl Rose took a minor stab at him in accepting the so-called Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award on behalf of Guns N' Roses. And in the weirdest proxy acceptance speech since Marlon Brando sent an American Indian to the podium to turn down an Oscar, Nirvana sent a Jackson impersonator up to accept the first of the band's two awards, with the impostor announcing that he was changing his self-anointed title from King of Pop to "King of Grunge-Rock."
When the band later did deign to personally accept another award, Cobain - apparently alluding to stories of drug use by he and his wife - looked straight into the camera and warned against "believing everything you read."
All this mayhem might have seemed more entertaining to the 12,000 attendees, and the performances more galvanizing, had the show not been plopped down in uncomfortable Pauley Pavilion, a venue only a Bruin could love. The sole measurable benefit of the big hall: a safe distance from Howard Stern's flatulence, verbal and otherwise.
BOOK REVIEW
Terrorist Women: Muddled Thought of Maternal Ideals
By CONSTANCE CASEY
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
We women don't make up more than 10% of the world's judges and law enforcement officers but, by God, close to half of the terrorists are women. It's hard to imagine which feminist group would point with pride to this female representation among the grenade-throwers, hijackers, car-bombers and knee-cappers of the world.
The first book to deal exclusively with women terrorists, 'Shoot the Women First' may not precisely praise this group, but its author, British journalist Eileen MacDonald, at least seeks to understand it.
MacDonald wanted to find out what these 20-some violently political women had in common and to answer the question, Are women more dangerous than men? ("Shoot the women first" is reputedly an order given to Germany's anti-terrorist squad.)
MacDonald is all over the map - Palestine, Northern Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany - diligent in tracking down women to interview. She gives us complicated women and tells the violent things they've done - blowing up planes, assassinating bank presidents, setting off bombs in shopping malls, ambushing bus loads of soldiers - but doesn't supply a unifying thread or convincing conclusions.
The author's own story might have worked as an organizing principle. She put herself in danger by talking to these women, some of whom suspected she was a police agent. We wonder what set her on the trail.
"I had always been interested in how women succeeded in what were considered to be male-dominated environments," she explains, and the reader gets a little nervous about what the author believes constitutes success.
It's odd that MacDonald's book lacks tension. Part of the blame rests with the fact that many of the people she interviewed were, so to speak, retired. Those currently active are in the Palestine Intifada, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque movement. These women stand out in the story because they are fighting, as they see it, a civil war to erase long-standing injustice.
Kim Hyon Hui, a North Korean woman who was responsible for 115 deaths when she set a bomb on a South Korean airliner, couldn't be any sort of feminist heroine. This beautiful and delicate woman, raised singing "Hack to Death the Capitalist Dogs," was just following orders. Aiming to please her North Korean bosses, she got off when Korean Air Lines flight 858 made stop, having planted a ticking bomb inside a radio in the overhead compartment.
The West German and Italian women seem to MacDonald to have muddled motives, primarily anger at authority. She finds the most interesting group closest to home. The women of the Irish Republican Army don't much like what they're doing, but can't imagine not doing it. "No one hates this war more than us," says one. "It is our country, and we hate the bloody war."
MacDonald's theory that the women terrorists hold maternal feelings for the cause is pretty hard to swallow. Khaled, who now works in a refugee camp near Damascus, remembers watching a little girl playing in the airport lounge before they boarded: the girl with her toys, Khaled with her grenades and gun. It worried her that the girl might die. "Then," she says, "I remembered all the countless thousands of Palestinian children in the refugee camps. They were depending on me to tell the world about them."
It's a big stretch from that to MacDonald's conclusion: "One can begin to see why a woman fighter should be more feared than a man: she views her cause as a surrogate child ... ." MacDonald turns out to be guilty of the same anti-feminist thinking she criticizes: the stereotype that a woman doesn't get angry on behalf of a cause; she has to be the mother bear protecting her cub.
In fact, MacDonald's interviews show that women can find ecstasy in being immersed in a cause. Their attachments to fellow cadre members are intense, and the drama of their lives is heightened by the possibility of being captured, tortured or even killed.
In her conclusion, MacDonald makes a rushed, halfhearted attempt to link the women to a common past. A few lost one parent when they were young, she finds, but the majority were "disturbingly normal." She quotes the head of Germany's anti-terrorist squad, who states with weird pride, "German women are more liberated and more self-aware than Italian and French women ... ."
Then she writes, equally bizarrely, "German women have thrown off the shackles of the traditional woman in society and have realized that there is no reason why they should not be violent." Are we supposed to get up and cheer, "Go, fight, win, German terrorist women"?
Instead of drawing her own conclusions, MacDonald keeps going back to one German anti-terrorist who definitely believes that the female of the species is deadlier than the male. Really? With a grenade in your hand, a package with a bomb under your arm, and a gun tucked in your belt, does it really matter whether you are female or male?
MOVIE REVIEW
'Bridge': Buddy Story With a Drug Twist
By MICHAEL WILMINGTON
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movies have some built-in traps and Mike Binder's 'Crossing the Bridge' (city-wide) tumbles right into them. In this rock 'n' roll '70s reverie about a trio of high school buddies bumbling a drug-smuggling adventure, Binder mines his own memories, sometimes movingly or humorously, sometimes opportunistically. But, just as in his script for 1990's 'Coup de Ville,' he tends to pump them up, restage his past in action movie or teen-sex comedy terms.
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Kim Hunter tackles Dickinson
Belle of Amherst at Theatre Club of Palm Beaches
By CHRISTINE DOLEN
Herald Theater Critic
Julie Harris, among the greatest American actresses to grace a stage, played an integral part in developing what came to be one of the strongest of the one-person shows: William Luce's The Belle of Amherst. Her incandescent portrayal of 19th Century poet Emily Dickinson won Harris the 1977 Tony Award as best actress, and on long tours she shared her vibrant vision of the famously reclusive, innovative, romantic literary figure.
Though created for and identified with Harris, The Belle of Amherst offers actresses of a certain age - Dickinson is 53 at the time of the play - the all-too-rare opportunity to entertain and enlighten an audience, and solo yet. So it is easy to understand the ongoing appeal of the piece, both to performers and audiences.
Another strong actress, Kim Hunter, has put The Belle of Amherst into her repertoire, and she's tackling it again at the Theatre Club of the Palm Beaches. Hunter, who was on the receiving end of Marlon Brando's bellowed "Stella!" in A Streetcar Named Desire (and who won an Oscar for that performance), moves adeptly through the taxing two-hour show. But is it a perfect hand-in-glove, actress-in-role fit, as it was for Harris? Not really.
The playwright, drawing on Dickinson's poems and letters and the writings about her, presents an engaging woman who was almost self-consciously "eccentric" - a woman who, as a teenager, speculated that she might soon become the belle of her hometown of Amherst, Mass., though fate and choice turned her into a "half-cracked" spinster who habitually dressed in virginal white.
Talking with her "visitors," as she calls the audience, she confides the facts and emotional content of her life, discussing the "austere" father who never kissed her good night, the brother she adored, the married Presbyterian minister who made her lonely heart soar, the Atlantic Monthly editor who was both mentor and crushing critic to her.
Interwoven, of course, are passages of Dickinson's glorious poetry, touching on her recurrent themes of death, nature, unrequited love and immortality.
"I dream about father every night, always a different dream," she says after speaking of Squire Dickinson's death. "His heart was pure and terrible."
Or, absorbing her mentor's refusal to publish her poems, she asserts, "My business is to sing. What difference does it make if no one listens?"
And, naturally, "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul."
Hunter, moving comfortably over Allen D. Cornell's evocative set with its carefully arranged antiques, takes us on Dickinson's journey from hopeful youth to underappreciated artist. Her long fingers comb through the gossamer light as she emphasizes a point or exudes excitement.
The performance is solid, professional. What it lacks, though, is a kind of inhabiting passion, a deep communication of the contradictory soul that was Emily Dickinson. One of the poet's comments about a friend and fellow writer could just as well describe Hunter's work in The Belle of Amherst: "She has the facts, but not the phosphorescence."
Weight-loss obsessions explored in often-sad Famine Within
By RENE RODRIGUEZ
Herald Staff Writer
Diets. Open the newspaper or turn on the TV, and you're bound to come across a story or ad dealing with yet another fast way to lose weight. According to The Famine Within, an often-fascinating documentary by Canadian-based filmmaker Katherine Gilday, one out of every two American women is on a diet at any given time.
Through interviews with psychologists, models and their agents, writers, doctors and normal everyday women, Gilday has taken a look at a part of American culture that has grown into a billion-dollar industry. What she has produced is an enlightening, often-sad film about why some women spend their entire lives battling their own bodies.
The documentary is divided into three segments: The first focuses on the fashion-model industry and its "ideal" woman - 5 feet, 11 inches, 115 pounds, measurements 35-25-35 (even agents admit that this ideal is very hard to find). Since the 1960s, the film tells us, the gap between the "average" American woman and this "ideal" has ballooned. What's worse, Gilday notes, today's fashion models have become role models for younger women, and even little girls, who will do their best to reach that unrealistic ideal.
Next comes a look at anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder that causes mostly young women to starve themselves. "I'd rather be dead than fat," one anorexic woman says nervously into the camera. The final section deals with bulimia, another eating disorder in which the sufferer gorges and then forces herself to vomit. The interviews here are among the film's most painful.
At its best, The Famine Within explores the American female psyche and why women often go to extreme lengths to achieve the popular image of beauty. In modern society, Gilday states, obesity is a moral, not physical, trait; being fat is often associated with being lazy, dirty or stupid, a connection of which we're often only subconsciously aware.
The film covers a lot of ground and is full of revealing, sometimes startling bits of information: One California study, for example, found that 80 percent of fourth-grade girls have already been on their first diet.
But Gilday tends to overuse the 'talking head' shots, and the material she uses to connect her interviews - shots of models on a runway, women on a beach - aren't always very interesting. And toward the film's end, some of the subjects repeat what has already been said.
Still, The Famine Within is a stimulating look at a widespread American phenomenon. After seeing it, you'll never think of miracle diets or lose-weight-quick schemes in the same way.
RECORD REVIEWS
King King brings the real blues to life
The Red Devils, King King, Def American
MICHAEL CORCORAN
Dallas Morning News
With shovels of dirt thrown down by creative laziness, horn charts, yuppies and something called the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the blues are dead. Or so I thought until greeted with this scintillating debut. Not since Muddy Waters' mid-'70s band (featuring Jerry Portnoy, Guitar Jr., Pinetop Perkins and others) has a blues group had such a good sense about what is so thrilling about real blues. That these five guys are young, white Los Angelenos doesn't detract from their powerful performance. The Red Devils do for the blues what Dwight Yoakam did for country six years ago.
The franchise here is singer-harmonica player Lester Butler. Besides blowing a cool, dusty harp, he's a singer who reaches down, deep down, to pull out beads of emotion. Though most of the songs are covers of artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Muddy Waters, Butler is no mere imitator. He sounds like he's earned the right to play the blues.
Chalk up another big victory for producer Rick Rubin in his quest to return grit, sweat and street to modern music. Even though this record starts to drag a little halfway until the ending - which almost becomes a relief because of too much compulsory riffing - for several glorious minutes, the Red Devils revive the blues.
English Chamber Orchestra, World Anthems, RCA-Victor
TOM MAURSTAD
Dallas Morning News
I know what you're thinking: What would anyone want with an album of 30 national anthems? It IS true that the scenario in which one would want to cue up, say, Norway's national anthem (Ja, vi elsker dette lander) is an elusive one. Which makes it tempting to view this timely collection as one of the more absurd examples of the marketing bonanza that has overtaken the Olympic experience, now more a selling spree than a sporting event.
Then again, an album gathering national anthems is at least an interesting product. After enduring that procession of crassness, the songs-videos making up Barcelona Gold (the official collection of Olympic-inspired songs by contemporary pop artists), the Lithuanian anthem sounds pretty good. In fact, listening to 30 national anthems strung together makes for instructive listening.
Because I recognized only a handful of these anthems, I was able to play the game in which I tried to name that country. Consequently, I discovered how discrete the relationship between a country and its anthem can be (with so many featuring a regally blaring brace of horns, I kept guessing Austria). Another quickly evident pattern is how so many anthems are military processionals, calls-to-arms marches (such as Egypt's Hail, Gallant Troops). It makes you think about how seemingly intractable is the rooting of national identity in war-making. Or maybe I've just been watching too much CNN lately.
It remains unclear why this collection was limited to these countries. Maybe this is something like a greatest-hits package - the world's Top 30 anthems. Not to sound an unpatriotic note, but in that context, The Star-Spangled Banner doesn't fare very well. I prefer the more forthright self-celebration of Hungary's anthem, God Bless the Hungarians, or Ethiopia's 30-second trumpet exercise with the post-modern title, Instrumental. I can't wait for the extended dance mix.
Al Jarreau, Heaven and Earth, Reprise
JONATHAN EIG
Dallas Morning News
Al Jarreau has been moving steadily away from jazz since the Moonlighting theme, and with this album his journey is nearly complete. The man with the mellow voice pulls out all the stops in search of the broadest possible audience, but he ends up trying too hard. Instead of a plush, soulful album that showcases his silky voice, Jarreau goes pop crazy. The 10 songs take on the atmosphere of a musical circus - albeit a mellow one - as clammy synthesizers, electric drum machines and sappy background vocals compete for attention. Each song seems produced by committee and performed by a small army. Jarreau's greatest strenghth, his improvisational doodlings, suddenly sound rehearsed.
Blue Angel begins with a sharp, funky groove that quickly becomes mired in a bog of heavy-handed instrumentation. Even on the straightforward ballad Heaven and Earth, synthesizers mimic the singer's every syllable, mocking the album's only asset. Instead of inducing romance, this sugary goop leaves the listener feeling sticky. Superfine Love is not content to open with a pretty horn solo or a simple whistle, so it uses both. Still, it's the best song on the album because it maintains a relatively gentle swing for Jarreau to work out on.
If there is a nod to jazz here, it's Jarreau's stringy arrangement of Miles Davis' Blue in Green. But the pop singer can't leave it alone. After a few choruses of pleasant if uninspiring swing, he flicks the echo switch on his microphone, cues the electric bass and punches up an even less inspiring hyperactive rhythm.
If record buyers reward this effort, expect Jarreau to drop even the pretense of jazz on future efforts.
ANN WHITE THEATER PRESENTS WALLS DON'T TALK
By GEORGE CAPEWELL
Special to The Herald
Jody Hart's The Walls Don't Talk to Me Anymore - winner of the eighth annual Ann White Theatre New Playwright Competition - aspires to be a morality play for the '90s, and it partly succeeds. But much of its message is diffused through old-fashioned overextension.
Selected from among more than 500 manuscripts submitted, the play is about a small group of teenagers who ingratiate themselves with an 84-year-old man, then go about methodically stealing his most prized possessions.
Everett (Charles Mace) and Harry (Gust Miller), two very different men, have shared the same park bench for the last five years. Harry spends his time feeding pigeons and expounding his own special brand of cynicism; Everett, a former English teacher, has lived a rather protected life, occupied for the most part by intellectual pursuits. (Sounds an awful lot like Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport.) One day, two gruff teenage girls, Gina (Carol Ann Ready) and Patsy (Lori Sherman), engage the older men in conversation. Everett befriends the girls and after a second meeting, invites them to his condominium. Everett's nephew, Martin (Jeff Stevenson), wants him to sell the condo, and although Martin's intentions are not totally amoral, Everett is well aware that his only living relative covets his small estate.
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MAGAZINES/BY DEIRDRE DONAHUE
Revamped 'Bazaar' a picture of elegance
We all have our blind spots. And, indeed, some of us cherish them as though they were distinctive leopard spots revealing character. Quite simply, this reader doesn't entirely understand the purpose of fashion magazines and their ceaseless chronicling of changing hemlines, color schemes and fresh new faces and forms. Frankly, it always seems a bit sad that by the time most women have the money to devote to fashion, they no longer possess the waistlines nor the firm young flesh so necessary for haute couture. Sometimes those Women's Wear Daily society page icons end up resembling E.T. in their designer frocks.
These caveats aside, the newly redesigned, much-anticipated, thoroughly gossiped about Harper's Bazaar displays in its September issue a calm, elegant new design and absolutely lush photos by Patrick Demarchelier. His work displays a posed perfection that seems to celebrate the pre-'60s, less hysterical world of fashion photography. Indeed, his work is so spectacular, it makes the other photo spreads in this issue look a touch drab by contrast. Compared to the sometimes frantic Vogue, the new Harper's Bazaar unveils a distinct simplicity, although the typeface is so tiny as to strain the eyeballs.
The articles explore topics ranging from the fate of ritzy department stores to Detroit-born designer Anna Sui to issues of women's health and multiculturalism in the schools.
But hey, the Hearst organization hired editor Liz Tilberis to go designer heel to heel with the stylish Anna Wintour at Vogue and those lesser lights at Elle and Mirabella, over the nebulous direction of style. You know, all that elan, fluffy stuff women are so conflicted about: i.e., can a female neurosurgeon look at a series of pages devoted to how designers treat the neck, the wrist, the waist this season and not have her IQ drop several points? Or is this just reverse sexist snobbery on the part of the blusher-shunning feminists? After all, no one claims that Car&Driver requires serious mental lifting on the part of all those male readers who happily inhale the Lamborghini dream. They never fear that wives and girlfriends will consider them rivetheads on the basis of their heavy-metal manuals.
And in the end, both fashion and car magazines are both in the fantasy business of youth, beauty, adornment and the magical dream of never saying die.
BOOK REVIEW
Leonard's agreeable but diluted 'Rum Punch'
Rum Punch
By Elmore Leonard
Delacorte Press
297 pp., $21.
By Peter S. Prichard
USA TODAY
Rum Punch is not Elmore Leonard's best work.
Oh, the sharp dialogue is there. Leonard's ear for the cadence of street talk is as keen as ever. And the lowlifes are their usual despicable selves. The Principal Villain, gun-runner and killer Ordell Robbie, thinks he's as slick and untouchable as John Gotti thought he was.
But Rum Punch is, well, not dull, but maybe thin is the best word. Not quite the novel you would expect from the man critics call "America's finest crime fiction writer."
I would argue with that. I think James Lee Burke, with his New Orleans detective, Dave Robicheaux, is better. I think Tony Hillerman, whose Navajo mysteries evoke the spirit of the Southwest, constructs more compelling protagonists. Carl Hiaasen, who does south Florida at its most outrageous, is funnier. Charles Willeford, the Miami Herald reviewer who wrote several good crime novels before he died, did bad guys as well or better than Leonard.
Even so, Rum Punch keeps you turning the pages. Ordell Robbie steals guns, rips off guns from nutso neo-Nazis and sells them to crazed Colombian drug dealers. Then he blows away anyone who might snitch on him.
Max Cherry sells bail bonds. He gets mixed up with Ordell and Jackie Burke, the pretty airline attendant who smuggles Ordell's money into the USA from his stash in the Bahamas. Then they get all mixed up together, each trying to rip the other off, <*_>a-grave<*/> la The Grifters. The big question is whether Max Cherry will stay straight or go on the grift. "You plan to rip me off," Ordell tells Max. "(But) lost your nerve. Gonna have to stay a bail bondsman, deal with the scum while you try to act respectable, huh? The rest of your life."
Trying to figure out whether Max will beat the lowlifes or join them makes for decent entertainment in this mildly satisfying summer book.
BOOK REVIEW
Edwardian letters, intimate literature
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume I: The Private Years. 1884-1914
Edited by Nicholas Griffin
Houghton Mifflin
553 pp., $35
Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
Edited by Nigel Nicolson
Putnam, 452 pp., $29.95
By Diane Cole
Special for USA TODAY
Read together, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell and Vita and Harold provide the spiciest picture of Edwardian England imaginable. Here are the ups and downs of marriages among patrician Britons whose extramarital flings and romantic flights would put even bohemians today to shame. Yet even as their private foibles unfold, Russell in his letters and Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West in theirs also display the wit, intellect and qualities of mind that not only made them attractive to their contemporaries, but captivate us today.
Famous as a philosopher, mathematician and political idealist, Russell eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, and these letters demonstrate his abundant gifts not only as a thinker, but as a stylist.
Nicholas Griffin has edited this first of two projected volumes of selected letters (Russell's total correspondence numbers 40,000 to 50,000, Griffin estimates) with an emphasis on Russell's more private dilemmas. In doing so, he has crafted an informative, entertaining and often moving novelistic chronicle of Russel's passage from the earnestness of young adulthood through the muddles of early middle age.
Born in 1872 to one of England's most famous political families, Russell suffered the deaths of both his parents by the time he was 4 and was brought up in relative seclusion by his grandmother. She struggled to hold on to her favorite grandson, even in adulthood, by setting up extraordinary emotional obstacles to his marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith. But as his letters show, not only was Russell equally tenacious - he and Alys wed in 1894 - he seemed to thrive on emotional turmoil. As soon as the scene seemed set for a comfortable married life, Russell slowly but surely became disenchanted with Alys and devoted himself for some years almost exclusively to his work. The result was some of the most brilliant philosophical writing of the century, but inwardly Russell felt he had become "a logic machine."
Then, in 1911, he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, the famous society hostess who became the love of his life - an emotionally tumultuous courtship that spawned Russell's most passionate, despairing, charming and agitated letters, sometimes all at once.
Like Russell, the novelist Sackville-West and her diplomat-writer husband Nicolson also seemed to compose a letter for every mood. But how different their moods - and their loves - were. Russell, famous logician though he was, is all romantic intensity in his courtship of Alys and his wooing of Lady Ottoline. By contrast, Nicolson and Sackville-West display a sense of perspective (and, under the circumstances, a singularly strong commitment to their on-going marriage) even when their independent love affairs are at their most intimate.
Vita and Harold married in 1913 and had two sons, the youngest of whom, Nigel, wrote the well-known memoir of his parents' unusual union, Portrait of a Marriage, to which this collection of letters is an apt companion. Both books dramatize the mutual devotion these partners shared throughout 50 years of marriage; both books also make the reader wonder at how they managed to balance that allegiance with the many homosexual and lesbian love affairs each had and sometimes discussed with each other.
To judge from these letters, part of the answer lies in simple logistics. Nicolson preferred the city, where he kept a pied-<*_>a-grave<*/>-terre, while Sackville-West kept primarily to their country estate, where she wrote her books and cultivated what became world-famous gardens. Nicolson's diplomatic duties also took him abroad frequently, usually alone.
With so much physical separation, each may have felt freer to develop emotional ties outside their time together. Moreover, writing these letters seemed to serve as a way of re-assuring each other of the deeper ties of friendship, loyalty and - yes - love that bound them.
Thus their correspondence, like Russell's, provides sympathetic insight into otherwise mystifying arrangements. Both collections also make us privy to the storms and calms that only international telephone operators could possibly know if these most literate of letter writers lived today.
TV PREVIEW/MATT ROUSH
Shining knights may not save 'Cross'
NEW SERIES
Covington Cross
ABC, tonight, 10 ET/PT
<*_>star<*/><*_>star<*/> (out of four)
There's plenty of iron, but not near enough irony, in the squishy swashbuckling of ABC's inexplicable Covington Cross, the first and far from the best (or worst) new show of the traditional fall TV season.
ABC couldn't seem to wait to inflict this cheerful anachronism on us, as if all too aware how tough a sell this knaves-and-waifs-in-shining-armor saga would be. Tonight's pilot repeats a week from Friday night, with new episodes not expected until Sept. 19, when it moves to low-impact Saturday.
Having already exhausted the teen Western in The Young Riders, ABC now leapfrogs several centuries backward for this lavishly produced but creaky Excalibur Jr.
More like a medieval High Chaparral, the biggest charge in this pilot - which I caught this weekend during previews at a movie theater - comes after a rambunctious opening of swordplay and havoc, interrupted when grumpy dad Sir Thomas Gray (Nigel Terry) yells at his errant-knight sons: "How many times have I told you: Not in the castle!"
Cute. Cute. But something short of a hoot.
As the convoluted plot gets under way, the tone shifts from this sort of deadpan Full Castle sitcom spoofery (raunchy table manners, rebel kids, what's a widower dad to do) to deadly earnest melodrama with obviously villainous scheming neighbors. They wear black.
Is this a joke? Is it for (un)real? A bit of both, and not enough of either.
Two of Sir Thomas' boys are so interchangeable one will be sent to the Crusades by the time episode 2 rolls around, replaced by yet another brother. That leaves us with youngest bro Cedric, a reluctant clerical student who wants to be knight. He's played by punkish Glenn Quinn, best known as Roseanne's oldest daughter's squeeze and who's not entirely at ease in a jerkin.
Similarly out of place is Ione Skye (... Say Anything) as proto-feminist daughter Eleanor. She prefers archery to harp lessons, and says her lines with flat zoned-out inflections that make her seem as if she'd beamed in from some suburban mall Renaissance fair.
Maybe this is what's meant by an "international" cast.
With a grating score that sounds like John Williams at his most redundant, and plotting so familiar it ends in a duel fought in slo-mo, Covington is just the first Cross ABC will have to bear this fall.
But, no doubt, not for long.
INSIDE TV
Andrew gives momentum to The Weather Channel
Long the lightning rod of material for stand-up comics, The Weather Channel has been at the center of the Hurricane Andrew story.
"We've tweaked the programming to really feature the hurricane," says Stu Ostro, the channel's senior meterologistmeteorologist. "We've sent a crew to the Miami area to file reports not only for us but for a number of local stations."
Local outlets that are affiliates of the news co-op Conus have had live Weather Channel updates, which can only bolster the channel's identity. "This is the political convention, the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled up into one," Ostro says. "As early as (Sunday) morning, when the other TV media were giving the storm little attention, we were already at the update desk saying how dangerous it was. That lets people know we are not a joke."
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Jackie Gleason's Dark Side Revealed in New Bio
The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason.
By William Henry III. Doubleday, $21.95.
Kay Gardella
He had everything: talent, fame, money and power. Jackie Gleason's public adored him. His 'Honeymooners' is spoken of as one of the great classics of television's half--century.
Yet, with it all, 'The Great One', as he called himself, had a dark side. He was deeply sensitive, introspective, and suffered fits of depression, loneliness and anger. If you were a Gleason fan, then let Time magazine's culture critic William Henry III take you along on a journey through the deepest recesses of this great comic's life and times in his excellent biography, 'The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason.'
This is not your typical celebrity book, but a real journalist's-eye-view of Gleason, warts and all, a tome that captures the man's flamboyance, generosity and showmanship, as well as his many faults, insecurities and contradictions.
It's the end result of 150 interviews with those who worked closely with Gleason - including Art Carney, Joyce Randolph, Sheila McRae, Audrey Meadows, his writers, friends and enemies. Although Henry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, conceded in an interview that he found "very few who disliked him."
That even includes the great comic's head writer, Coleman Jacoby, who, as Henry said, "had epic battles over credit where serious money was involved. Still, he considered Gleason the most talented and interesting man he ever worked for."
The thoroughly researched, exquisitely written biography covers Gleason's life from his poor boyhood in Brooklyn, where at an early age his father deserted him and his mother, through his early struggling years as an entertainer and his ultimate success on television (he spent 18 years on CBS), films and on Broadway ('Take Me Along'). Along the way there were three marriages. The book is about a man who, despite his outgoing personality, remained an enigma to many.
"Who was Jackie Gleason?" writes Henry. "To Art Carney, he was 'the greatest talent I ever worked with,' but far more boss than friend, so distant that he would be out of touch for years, until the next deal came along. To Joyce Randolph, the original Trixie on 'The Honeymooners', Gleason was an unknowable man, hidden behind psychic walls, touchy and temperamental, whom she didn't even dream of inviting to her wedding. But to Audrey Meadows (who played Alice Kramden), Gleason was a man of boundless warmth and great restraint, a genius on stage and almost a saint off it."
What intrigued him about Gleason, the 42-year-old Henry said, was that "the bigger and more extreme Gleason got, the more real he became," when usually, "most actors, to convey reality, pull everything in until they're almost catatonic.
"Borrowing George Abbott's old phrase, he was louder, faster and funnier. He consumed more, did more, sinned more, repented more, and simply plunged into life when most of us dip our toes into it."
If as the book suggests, Gleason was a moody and angry man at times, he was also loyal and given to bursts of generosity.
As Henry, quoting sources, said: "If you were his secretary, you'd be it as long as you could get yourself into the chair and answer the phone. And if you were his driver, you'd be it until your license was revoked."
For those who miss Gleason, and appreciated his talent, Henry's book will be a revelation. The author, who writes that he felt like the reporter in 'Citizen Kane', after all the searching and digging, and exposing of his subject's darker side, said he still admires the man. "There were aspects of him that were very brave, and even noble, but I wouldn't have wanted to work for him."
Cuba: A Journey. By Jacobo Timerman.
Translated by Toby Talbot, Vintage paperback, $9
Charles Solomon.
Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman casts an unflinching eye on the self-proclaimed 'workers' paradise' of Castro's Cuba in this vivid journal.
Instead of a Marxist Elysium, he finds a depressingly typical dictatorship, whose ruler, 'El Commandante', insists on being referred to by a string of titles as long as any Holy Roman Emperor's.
A former prisoner of conscience, Timerman has firsthand knowledge of the ruses despots employ, and he immediatly notes the glaring discrepancy between Castro's image as the caring, all-knowing savior of his country and his alleged ignorance of the mismanagement and corruption that have reduced the inhabitants of this once-prosperous island to poverty.
Kai Bird Introduces Readers to 'The Chairman'
THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. MCCLOY, THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT. By Kai Bird. Simon&Schuster, $30.
Bill Barnhart
Writer Kai Bird has produced a long, intensely researched account of the man who was called the chairman of America's establishment, yet who is unknown to most Americans.
Despite humble beginnings in Philadelphia, lawyer John J. McCloy became the essence of the behind-the-scenes operative, advising and obeying presidents and tycoons from the 1930s until his death in 1989.
Walking in McCloy's footsteps, we tread an astounding amount of American history and witness the development of an establishment mind-set that brought us Iran-Contra on the one hand and a diminished nuclear threat on the other. Along the way, we see McCloy reshape one of America's leading banks, Chase Manhattan, as well as the World Bank. He helped set the tone for relations between the country's private-sector elite and its federal government.
McCloy, from his base in the Wall Street legal fraternity, was a ubiquitous participant in world history, who shunned publicity and never stood for electoral review by the American public. As Bird tells it, he was not motivated by money but by a keen instinct for problem-solving and a sense of duty. He never displayed power or wealth ostentatiously and worked well into his 80s to support his ailing wife.
The peculiarities of McCloy's beliefs worked themselves into the core of American policy, especially foreign policy, under the last six presidents. Deeply involved in investigations of German espionage during World War I, McCloy came to espouse a strong - some would say radical - ends-justifies-the-means approach to national security.
The roots of Central Intelligence Agency excesses, and even the Watergate burglary, can be traced to the McCloy mind set. He aquiesced in the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II and facilitated the release of Nazi war criminals to improve U.S. relations with postwar Germany.
On the other hand, he worked to integrate the U.S. Army. He was a strong advocate of nuclear disarmament negotiations and pushed a liberal view toward the sovereignty of such pivotal countries as Egypt.
Excellent historical writing draws on personal dilemmas to illuminate events. In this regard, Bird has produced a monumental achievement. At the risk of overstating McCloy's role, Bird presents history through the decisions McCloy made in his career.
Excellent biography, on the other hand, requires more. And if 'The Chairman' can be faulted, it would be for not probing deeper into McCloy. The beginning and end of the book explore McCloy's personality and character. In between, we learn a lot of McCloy but not enough about him. There is little discussion of his relationship with his wife of 56 years, Ellen, or their children. We don't hear enough about McCloy from those who knew him best professionally and socially.
Just as the monarchy seems to be unraveling in tabloid headlines in Great Britain, America's gentlemanly East Coast establishment - our approximation of royalty - has lost much of its credibility and utility in an age of no-holds-barred public debate and opened-collared billionaires like Microsoft's Bill Gates.
The idea of an American elite imbued with a beneficent sense of America's place in the world and able to "rise above private interests" and "discern public good," as Bird puts it, is looking a bit threadbare and even dangerous. It's important to walk in John McCloy's footsteps, but there don't seem to be many Wall Street lawyers willing or able to fill his shoes.
THE NEW ROADSIDE AMERICA.
By Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith and Doug Kirby.
Fireside paperback, $13.
Charles Solomon
Thomas Carlyle wrote that it was America's mission to vulgarize the world, but this tongue-in-cheek guide to roadside tourist attractions (with pictures!) suggests that vulgarity, like charity, begins at home.
The authors highlight such tacky landmarks as the largest tree stump, in Kokomo, Ind. (57 feet in circumference); the 4 1/2-story muskellunge (the world's largest fiberglass structure) at the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis.; the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas; Riverside, Iowa, which bills itself as 'The Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk,' and the $15 million, 45,000-square-foot 'World of Coca-Cola' pavilion in Atlanta.
Enterprising readers might copy particularly awful listings and send them to the kids of people they dislike just before they depart for a cross-country vacation.
Larry Powell
Works on Crime And Punishment
Crime and Punishment: The king of the crime writers, Elmore Leonard, is back with 'Rum Punch' (Delacorte, $21), a novel about a bail bondsman, a stewardess and a gun dealer.
The stewardess and the bail bondsman concoct a scheme to fleece the gun dealer, which is a dangerous way to get rich. Like most of the earlier Leonard novels (he's written 31, with a high degree of excellence), the twists in the story grow out of his characters' nature. It's also a funny story, with some of the best dialogue being written today.
Jerry Oster, the author of 'Fixin' To Die' (Bantam, 20$), also has a knack for writing dialogue. That's one of the attractions of his crime tale in which a thief named Elvis Polk escapes from police custody and is pursued by New York detective Joe Cullen. The detective appeared in earlier Oster novels. 'Fixin' To Die' is also about police politics and the private devils that betray police officers. Oster, former New York newspaper-man, has the city's sights and sounds down pat.
As Elmore Leonard knows Florida and Detroit, as Jerry Oster knows New York City, so Edna Buchanan knows Miami. Buchanan is a crime reporter who has been covering Miami violence and vice for 20 years. Her book, 'Never Let Them See You Cry: More From Miami, America's Hottest Beat' (Random House, 20$) is a second collection of her crime pieces. She claims to have written about 3,000 murder cases in her career and is famous for her hard-boiled, jived-up leads. If you're just discovering Buchanan, you should also pick up her first true crime collection, 'The Corpse Had a Familiar Face.'
Buchanan also published a novel, 'Nobody Lives Forever,' and has a second work of fiction coming from Hyperion in the fall. 'Contents Under Pressure' is the title.
"Fiction is so much fun," Buchanan recently said. "It's so liberating. As writers, we like everything to be tidy. We like to wrap up the loose ends. There are murders that go unsolved forever, missing people who are never found and bodies that are never identified - no matter how hard you try."
Buchanan came to Miami on vacation from New Jersey in 1961 and fell in love with the city. She has been married twice, to a reporter and to a policeman, and she likes cats.
Paragon House is publishing a remarkable series of reference books about crime. Their author is Jay Robert Nash, who won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for his six-volume Encyclopedia of World Crime. He has written many books about crime, including the famous volumes on American desperadoes and lawmen called 'Bloodletters and Badmen.'
The first reference work in the Paragon series was 'World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.' The second, recently published, is 'World Encyclopedia of 20th Century Murder.' Scheduled in September is 'Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws.' The hefty volumes, more than 600 pages long and containing 300 illustrations as well as an extensive bibliography, cost $49.95 each.
Nash's guide to organized crime contains profiles of individual gangsters, histories of crime families, and accounts of events such as the St. Valentine's Day massacre.
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Belated Tribute to a Visionary
By AUSTIN CLARKSON
STEFAN WOLPE'S MUSIC has long been admired for its uncompromising strength, vitality and adventurousness by professional composers and performers, but like many other émigrés, Wolpe was never fully at home or accepted in his adoptive countries. Still, he lived and taught in New York from 1938 until his death in 1972, so it is with a firm sense of timing that Parnassus, a New York ensemble led by Anthony Korf, is marking the 90th anniversary of Wolpe's birth, which occurred last Tuesday, with the release of an album of his music.
Although musicians in Germany, England and elsewhere are now discovering Wolpe's music, the musicians in New York remain the principal custodians of his legacy, and the Parnassus CD (Koch International 7141) is a document that splendidly affirms and carries forward that tradition. There is no better introduction in the current CD catalogue to Wolpe's visionary contribution to 20th-century music.
The eight pieces are well chosen. They range from 1929 to the year before Wolpe's death in 1972, and show various sides of his output yet emphasize masterworks of his last decade. Several of them have been recorded before, but only two have thus far been heard on CD.
The earliest item was for a Berlin production of 'Hamlet' in 1929. The five-minute movement for flute, clarinet and cello probably accompanied the dumb show in the play-within-a-play. A remarkable vignette, it gives evidence of a richly polyphonic imagination, fastidious workmanship and an early mastery of free 12-tone Expressionism.
Wolpe's active service from 1929 to 1933 in the army of antifascist artists alongside Hanns Eisler, Wladimir Vogel, Ernst Hermann Meyer and others is recalled by the Three Songs of Bertolt Brecht, composed for a Brecht tribute at the Hecksher Theater in Manhattan in 1943. The melodies reflect the agitprop 'Kampflieder' (fighting songs) of the 30's - hard-driven, modal, acrid, rejecting the allure of Tin Pan Alley - but the richly textured and harmonized piano parts raise the songs to the level of recital pieces. One hears in them the ethos that marks so much of Wolpe's music: a revolutionary utopianism that reconciles a deeply felt populism with profound faith in the value of the individual imagination.
After Wolpe fled Berlin in 1933, he settled in Palestine from 1934 to 1938, teaching at the Palestine Conservatory in Jerusalem. He wrote many solo songs and choral settings of biblical texts and contemporary Hebrew poems. 'To the Dancemaster' by Chaim Nachmann Bialik is typical of the poetry of revolt, whether by biblical prophets or modern-day authors, that moved Wolpe to musical action: "The wrath of our soul -/ our burning heart/ will now be poured out/ in our raging dance./ And the dance will rise/ with thunder and lightning/ to terrify the earth/ and stir up the heavens."
Wolpe was fascinated by the sounds of the Semitic languages, Yemenite folk songs and classical Arabic oud players, but was opposed to the practice of creating "a national Jewish style along the lines of a chemical formula." For his settings of Hebrew texts he created a ruggedly modernistic yet tonal idiom richly infused with elements of Middle Eastern melos. Joyce Castle, mezzo-soprano, and Edmund Niemann, pianist, are superb partners in the Brecht and Bialik songs. And Alan Kay's brilliant clarinet adds a wild klezmer quality to the Bialik. The songs are recorded for the first time here, and Ms. Castle, with her trenchant voice and lively, accurate enunciation, sets an enviable standard for Wolpe lieder, in both German and Hebrew.
The Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano, composed in 1950 and revised in 1952, lies at the juncture of the first and second phases of Wolpe's career in the United States. During the 40's Wolpe worked out systems of atonal harmony and spatial proportions that served as the bases for a series of works he composed in the 50's, of which the first was the quartet.
His music of this period has often been likened to the Abstract Expressionism of his friends Guston, Kline, de Kooning and Rothko. The forms are nonhierarchical, yet they maintain a charged flow. The quartet contains music of expansive actions and intense affects. Wolpe revealed that the work's first movement is a lament for the suffering of the Chinese people during the Long March, and the second is a street celebration of Mao Tse-tung's victory. After the powerful drum patterns, mysterious piano sonorities and keening of the trumpet and saxophone in the first movement, the second opens with a boppy unison theme that reminds many listeners of jazz.
But as with Middle Eastern music, Wolpe here is exploiting the affinity between his own language and that of jazz rather than incorporating jazz structures as such. The jazz element is one among a number of levels of language that Wolpe works with in this piece to develop what he called "its craziness and openness."
Conveying the movement's craziness and openness in performance poses a mighty challenge. Of the four recorded performances to date, the one that comes closest to Wolpe's tempo indication and to the sense of delirious joy he sought to express is Arthur Weisberg's 1974 version (Nonesuch 79222-2; CD). Mr. Korf's tempo makes possible crystalline definition of the colors and instrumental planes but fails to generate the requisite feelings and gestures.
During his last decade Wolpe was preoccupied with paring the complexities of his earlier music to essentials. He focused attention on creating sequences of intensely contrasted shapes and gestures that achieved a balance between spontaneously intuited images and logically ordered processes. In these late works, Wolpe mixes various levels of language, from unique formulations to echoes of tonal tunes, from jazzy riffs to rubbings of Beethoven and Scriabin.
Each of the four late works of the Parnassus CD (Piece in Two Parts for Six Players, Piece for Two Instrumental Units, Solo Piece for Trumpet, and Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments) needs to be heard as a play of intense contrasts - gathering and scattering actions, stable and mobile shapes and masses, symmetrical and asymmetrical proportions, mixed and pure colors, wit and grimness, grace and roughness.
It is from the remarkably rapid interplay of so many strongly opposing factors that Wolpe's music of the period acquires its electrifying power and haunting beauty. In these late pieces the alternation of gathering and scattering actions gains in intensity until the final scattering seems almost to throw the piece off its rails. It is often a moment of stark danger and disorder, which the final gathering close just manages to contain.
Wolpe's music pushes performers to the limits of their ability and listeners to the utmost bounds of comprehension. The juxtaposition of apparently irreconcilable elements challenges the listener to rivet absolute attention until some unforeseeable illumination appears as a kind of grace.
Mr. Korf and his Parnassians perform Wolpe's late music with a technical mastery of its labyrinthine intricacies and a lively understanding of its lightning shifts of structure, mood and image that bespeak many years of familiarity with it. They are worthy heirs to a 30-year tradition of Wolpe performance in New York.
Gorecki: A Trendy Symphony and Beyond
By JOHN ROCKWELL
IT'S EASY TO BE CYNICAL ABOUT the recent flurry of mainstream enthusiasm for the music of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. The interest centers on a few pieces - the Symphony No. 3, in particular - that are consonant and songful, far from any hint of off-putting modernist abrasiveness. It is fueled by trendy artists like the Kronos Quartet and a trendy record company, Elektra Nonesuch. Mr. Gorecki's music is being promoted to the same young audience that laps up Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidulina and, horror of horrors, the American Minimalists.
But cynicism slights the quality of Mr. Gorecki's achievement. Born in 1933, he studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and briefly became the darling of the Polish avant-garde around 1960, with huge, clashing exercises in orchestral sonority like 'Scontri' ('Collisions').
By the early 60's he began to find his true voice, which lost him two important sources of patronage. His individualism put him at odds with the Communist regime in Poland. And his increasing absorption in folk music and religion lost him the sympathy of the modernist establishment. He lives now in the polluted southern Polish industrial city of Katowice, but spends much of his time in the Tatra mountains on the Czechoslovak border, a home of particularly wild and bracing forms of folk music.
The Third Symphony (1976) dominates the Gorecki discography primarily because of a recent Nonesuch CD (79282-2) that holds a place on the classical top-10 sales chart. But of the six current CD's that include music by the composer, three contain this symphony.
Subtitled 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,' it is a mournful three-movement work lasting about 52 minutes. The movements are almost uniformly slow: Lento, Lento e Largo and Lento. The texts, sung by a soprano, were drawn from various sources suggesting broken bonds between mother and child, from Mary and Christ to an imploring Polish teen-ager who scratched a prayer to the Virgin Mother on the wall of a Gestapo prison in 1944.
The singing, though crucial, is set into long stretches of purely instrumental texture. The first-movement lament is flanked by the two halves of a huge canon for strings, building from near inaudibility to surging, shining triumph, and then receding. Elsewhere the music recalls not only the mystical Minimalists but also Shostakovich's late, world-weary song-symphonies, Wagner's 'Parsifal' and even the radiant simplicity of Copland's 'Appalachian Spring.'
The Nonesuch recording, with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta, is a fine one. The soprano, Dawn Upshaw, sounds pure and steady yet manages to dig soulfully into this primally Slavic music. But buyers should also explore one of the competing versions.
The 1987 account on the Polish Olympia label (OCD 313; CD) offers an even better orchestral performance, by Jerzy Katlewicz and the Polish Radio National Symphony of Katowice. And Stefania Woytowicz, the soprano most closely identified with this score, makes up in experience and idiomatic fervor what she lacks in tonal steadiness.
Mr. Katlewicz plays the long opening movement a shade faster than Mr. Zinman does, and his more natural, flowing, organic account makes the score pulse with an emotional intensity that is never sentimentally exaggerated. Unlike Nonesuch, Olympia offers enticing bonuses: the 'Three Pieces in Olden Style' (1963) for string orchestra, which will be welcomed by anyone who responds to the symphony, and a short, sweet 'Amen' (1975) for unaccompanied boys' choir.
The final competitor in the Third Symphony (Koch Schwann Musica Mundi 311 041; CD) places a poor third. Wlodzimierz Kamirski's account of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony and an even less steady Miss Woytowicz sounds prosaic, and the final movement is much quicker than in the other performances (12-plus minutes versus 17-plus).
What is missing in the current Gorecki discography is documentation of his more overtly modernist style of the late 50's and early 60's. But ultimately, his gentler works will undoubtedly come to seem part of a unified sensibility. He has always been a composer of wild extremes. He has long shown a fascination, as in the Third Symphony, for a formal elegance that doesn't preclude intense emotion, and some of his recent music is far from calm and meditative.
There are two recordings of the 40-minute 'Lerchenmusik' ('Lark Music'; 1984) for clarinet, cello and piano. The title, which suggests Messiaen's aviary enthusiasms, also derives from Lerchenborg Castle in Denmark, where the score was first performed. It and the String Quartet No. 1 ('Already It Is Dusk'; 1988) alternate furious eruptions with mystic quiescence in the best Messiaen manner.
The two pieces are paired on another Nonesuch CD (79257-2), with Kronos playing the quartet and members of the London Sinfonietta 'Lerchenmusik.' This release is clearly preferable to the other 'Lerchenmusik,' performed by unnamed members of the Camerata Vistula (Olympia OCD 343; CD). The London musicians, especially the clarinetist Michael Collins, are full of personality and passion; the Polish players sound sober and bland.
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Vignettes pay homage to the icons of Santeria
ART REVIEW
'Las Siete Potencias: Mestizaje and the Aesthetics of Santeria'
Chastain Gallery, 135 West Wieuca Road N.W.
Through Sept. 2. 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.
257-1747 or 257-1804.
By Jerry Cullum
Arturo Lindsay calls these shrines to the seven African powers "secular art with a spiritual intent." Each shrine is filled with objects associated with the New World religion of Santeria (based on Yoruba worship from West Africa), but nothing has been actually used in religious ceremonies.
However, most viewers will find these pieces charged with aesthetic and religious energy. Each installation consists of a painting and wall sculpture, a "throne" (more resembling an elegantly modern chair), statuary, candles and votive offerings appropriate to the spirit, or orisha, being honored. (The throne and offerings sit in a low boxlike enclosure in front of the painting.) Mr. Lindsay's paintings are starkly abstracted renditions suggesting the West African version of the orisha, while the surrounding imagery often is appropriated from Catholicism.
For example, Eshu-Elugg<*_>u-acute<*/>a is shown in the paintings in his capacity as guardian of the cross-roads. The religious statue in front of the throne is that of St. Anthony of Padua, whose imagery reminded Santeria worshipers of Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a's.
Mr. Lindsay uses the traditional colors of the orishas to superb effect - pure white for Obatala, vivid red for Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a and Shango, yellow for Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n, green for Orula and Ogun, and blue for Yemaya. The theme is carried out spectacularly in the Obatala shrine, in which the whiteness is carried through from the white background of the line-drawn painting to the cotton lining of the enclosure and bowl of popcorn used as the offering. The various shades of blue in Yemaya's water-associated imagery are equally striking.
It should be pointed out again that these aren't traditional shrines but artistic homages. Mr. Lindsay's paintings and thrones are crisply modern (and extremely beautiful examples of a semi-geometric style). The seashells and fragrant dried flowers spread around Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n's shrine, the iron implements of Ogun or the moss at the feet of Orula are thoroughly traditional. But the traditional materials are part of an imaginative homage, not a traditional worship ceremony. Some traditional symbols, such as Shango's double ax, appear in a non-traditional form.
This imaginative reinvention of Santeria symbolism has been a significant part of recent Latino art in the United States. A symposium on Santeria aesthetics in contemporary Latino art, featuring an array of scholars, artist and intellectuals, will be held Aug. 6 at Spelman College. Because of limited seating, reservations are essential; call 223-7515.
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' has Valley Girl bite
FILM REVIEW
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'
A comedy. Starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui. Rated PG-13 for language and violence.
At metro theaters.
By Eleanor Ringel
FILM EDITOR
"I can't believe I'm in a graveyard looking for vampires on a school night!" complains the stake-wielding heroine of the nimble new comedy 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'
There are vampires on the loose in Southern California and, according to a grizzled stranger (Donald Sutherland goofing on his Deep Throat role in 'JFK'), the only one who can stop them is the chosen Vampire Slayer - Buffy (Kristy Swanson), an airhead cheer-leader.
Buffy is not exactly what you'd call vampire-slaying material. Her favorite pastime is mall-crawling. And all she wants to do with her life is graduate from high school, go to Europe and marry Christian Slater. Her transformation into the scourge of the living dead is as unlikely as it is hilarious.
Lighthearted and light on its feet, 'Buffy' is basically a one-joke affair - Dracula's age-old nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing, reimagined as a vacuous Valley Girl. But it's handled with airy aplomb by everyone involved.
Rutger Hauer plays the suave head of the undead. Paul Reubens (the former Pee-wee Herman) is Mr. Hauer's right-hand bloodsucker. Teen idol Luke Perry is a rebel-drifter allied with Buffy in her battle against the forces of evil.
Ms. Swanson ('Deadly Friend,' 'Mannequin Two') makes a killer fearless vampire killer. She (and her doubles) can do back flips to rival Catwoman's; she's even better at handling gymnastic exchanges with her Heather Squad friends ("Puuhleese, that's so five-minutes-ago" is a typical put-down).
Maybe Buffy could guest-star on 'Wayne's World.' She's just their type.
Just call it her 'Death' by vanity
FILM REVIEW
'Death Becomes Her'
A comedy. Starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Rated PG-13 for possibly scary special effects.
At metro theaters
By Eleanor Ringel
FILM EDITOR
The special-effects era in movies hasn't been especially nice to actresses. After all, no one's paired Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg in a blow-'em-up buddy flick or suggested Jessica Lange as the new RoboCop.
But that wrong has been riotously righted by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in 'Death Becomes Her,' a wicked sick-joke comedy that blends the black wit of Billy Wilder with some of the best effects money can buy. This movie takes our nation's Eternal Youth obsession with anti-aging creams and cosmetic surgery to surreal extremes.
Madeline Ashton (Ms. Streep), a vain actress, and Helen Sharp (Ms. Hawn), a vengeful author, are deadly rivals in the style of the old '40s movies when men were men and women were Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
In the film's hilarious late-'70s prologue, Madeline is starring on Broadway in 'Songbird!' a musical version of 'Sweet Bird of Youth.' Helen, her mousy childhood friend, brings her fiance, superstar plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis), backstage. With the merest flutter of a false eyelash, Madeline gets the good doctor in her thrall.
Madeline and Ernest go to the altar. Helen goes to the fridge, blows up to Roseanne-times-two size and lands in the loony bin.
Cut to the present. The erst-while lovebirds are locked in a mutually loathing marriage. She worries about her face ("Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star"); he's so permanently pickled that the only cosmetic job he can hold down is at a funeral home. Helen, meanwhile, has been tranformedtransformed into a ravishing redhead with long Rita Hayworth tresses, a hard body to kill for and a best seller called "Forever Young."
Her secret? Well, it has something to do with a mysterious beauty (Isabella Rosselini, slinking around like a '20s vamp) who dispenses a certain magic elixir. An elixir that Madeline is about to try out herself.
Director Bob Zemeckis, who took us "Back to the Future," turns his back on the future, with its sagging breasts and spreading middles. Instead, he concentrates on our lust for a cosmetically perfect here and now, with nipped tummies and tucked buttocks. He takes a story at least as old as 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' and jazzes it up with some astounding state-of-the-art effects ("The Morphing of Dorian Gray?").
More importantly, Mr. Zemeckis realizes that the best effects are best served by the best actors available. The cartoon craziness of his 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' was anchored by Bob Hoskins's expertise; Ms. Streep and Ms. Hawn do the same for this film. Both are terrific comedians - whether suffering eye-popping physical mutations that would flummox Alice in Wonderland or spitting out their spite-laced dialogue (at one point, Ms. Streep sounds eerily like Elizabeth Taylor in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?').
'Death Becomes Her' loses some steam in its last half-hour, with Mr. Willis on the loose in Ms. Rosselini's Gothic castle, running into such supposedly pretty-but-dead celebs as James Dean and Jim Morrison. But it pulls itself together for one of the sickest slapstick finales in memory.
This is one strange movie. See it with one of your stranger friends. Say, someone who loves to hear Joan Rivers dish about her latest facelift.
Wonder will thrive among extinct species at Fernbank
PREVIEW
Fernbank Museum of Natural History
Opens at noon Oct. 5. Regular hours: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Sunday. $5; $4 senior citizens and ages 2-12; free under 2. 767 Clifton Road N.E. 378-0127.
By Catherine Fox
VISUAL ART CRITIC
Atlanta is experiencing an unprecedented decade of cultural expansion. Art and science museums, performing arts facilities and libraries in the metro area have blossomed like azaleas, and there are more to come. The Center for Atlanta History, the Auburn Avenue Library for Research on African-American Culture and History, and an expanded Michael C. Carlos Museum are being readied for 1993 debuts.
But there's a big unveiling to celebrate this fall: the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. When the $43 million facility opens Oct. 5, Atlanta will have the largest science museum south of the Smithsonian. Fernbank will fill a vacuum in science education, to be sure. But it will play a larger role in Atlanta's psyche as well.
Fernbank is certainly a plus in the civic pride department. After all, can a city be world-class without a dinosaur or two? The museum gives us our dinosaurs - including a cast of a stegosaurus and the skeleton of a giant sloth, an 18-foot-tall Georgia native recently dredged up from the Frederica River west of St. Simons Island.
But this museum is not merely following in the paw prints of its predecessors.
"Lots of museums are built to house collections," director Kay Davis says. "We focus on the public first. Atlanta doesn't have a place where basic research can be translated for the public. This is a learning facility."
To that end, Fernbank will be the first museum of its kind, she says, "to tell a story."
The story is both specific and epic. The 12 galleries devoted to 'A Walk Through Time in Georgia' present the history of the Earth's evolution and its flora and fauna from the big bang to the future. Walk-through dioramas and interactive exhibits pair the big picture with Georgia's varied natural history.
Fernbank will be "the first truly interactive science museum," says Edwin Schlossberg, the New York exhibit designer.
The emphasis is on hands-on experience. Children learn through play in two discovery rooms geared to different age groups. Adults can research their own finds in a well-equipped lab set up for that purpose. And watching a movie on the 50-by-72-foot IMAX Theatre screen is, as anyone who has experienced one can tell you, the next best thing to being there.
Fernbank takes the integrated approach to learning a step further in establishing connections to other disciplines. The museum commissioned Atlanta composer James Oliverio to write a choral work for chorus and chamber orchestra for its opening. It will link art and science in upcoming exhibitions including 'Winterland,' a show of Norwegian paintings that will kick off Atlanta's Cultural Olympiad. (The art show will be complemented by a related science exhibit and programs.) The museum co-sponsored 'Mountain Gorilla,' its IMAX theater debut film, and plans to sponsor others.
In addition, the museum has recognized its civic responsibilities as a city builder: Like other cultural institutions here, its building offers a high level of design. Whether or not one cottons to Boston architect Graham Gund's postmodern vocabulary, at least the architecture and plan befit its purpose, unlike, for example, so many of our new governmental buildings, which look like average office buildings. Both the approach from Clifton Road and the interior offer a sequence of spatial experiences and an elevated tone.
Fernbank is undoubtedly an important new 'attraction.' An item to check off on the list of big-city amenities. Something that encourages conventioneers to bring their spouses and spend more money in Atlanta. Somewhere to take one's kids on a rainy day.
But Fernbank offers more than diversion. If it does its job, it will be a resource that helps us understand who we are and why we are. Like all of our cultural institutions, it helps us come to terms with a mystifyingly complex world.
Taking on the topical or the tried-and-true
Diverse exhibits blur boundaries of culture, mediums
By Catherine Fox
VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
In the art world, blurring boundaries is a mission, and it is a theme or subtext for some of the more intriguing exhibitions planned for Atlanta museums and galleries in the coming year.
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Beans of wrath - the rise, fall of Brazil's cacao trade
THE GOLDEN HARVEST
By Jorge Amado; translated by Clifford E. Landers (Avon, $12.50)
By C.W. Smith
That chunk of chocolate you love so much will never taste the same after you've read The Golden Harvest, Mr. Jorge Amado's novel about the Brazilian cacao industry.
Though the novel, written in 1944, has only now been published in English (translated by Clifford E. Landers), the story of the cacao bean boom and bust during the 1930s in the Bahia region of Brazil seems vibrantly fresh. It will also be familiar to any who have seen oil, cotton, silver and real estate follow a similar rise and fall in recent decades with attendant human misery.
Because it was written in 1944, the novel is not afflicted by the current fashion in fiction to explore the surface of a narrow subject. The Golden Harvest is refreshingly maximalist; it follows the intersecting paths of many lively characters over the course of several years. They are peasants, drovers, poets, lawyers, prostitutes, landowners or exporters; their fates and fortunes are tied to the production and exportation of the cacao bean, and the novel charts their ongoing lives in a manner that recalls the scope and thematic intent of Dresier, Tolstoy, Norris or Steinbeck.
Working solidly in that older tradition of realism, Mr. Amado sets the book among a conspiracy of exporters in Ilheus, Brazil, who want to manipulate the price of cacao so that the growers on nearby plantations will fall into their debt and have to sell their lands to them. Because the Bahia region produced most of the world's cacao beans, from which chocolate is made, the exporters will then have almost complete control over the global market.
As might be expected of a Latin American novelist, Mr. Amado seems to use the fictionalized events to indict capitalism and a vicious free-market economy. He dramatizes the plight of plantation workers and their ceaseless, unrewarding toil in scenes reminiscent of portraits of slaves and tenant farmers in the American cotton fields. The exporters' conspiracy results in widespread hunger among the peasants, and near the end of the book, the novel's communist Joaquim, says "one day the land will belong to everyone."
But given the time and place of the novel's composition the didacticism is remarkably low-keyed when compared, say, to The Grapes of Wrath, and it's hard to tell whether Mr. Amado's implied critique of capitalism is merely obligatory or was restrained for aesthetic reasons. In any case, he doesn't allow the need to take such a stand interfere with his ability to make the characters sympathetic and fully human, no matter which side they're on.
Even the plot's mastermind, the exporter Carlos Zude, fails in the end to achieve what he has always wanted more than money: the love and fidelity of his young and beautiful wife, Julietta, who carries on an affair throughout the book with a proletarian poet, Sergio Moura.
The story focuses as much on passion as on politics, which should not surprise readers familiar with Mr. Amado's best-known translated work, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. It's here, in his interest in the characters' emotional lives, that Mr. Amado changes The Golden Harvest from tract to tragi-comedy.
Despite the large cast, dozens of characters are etched clearly because their individual quirks are described so vividly:
Raimunda was ... querulous and angry, a woman of few words who hated the parties and dances, with their harmonica and guitar music, held now and again in the houses of workers and small growers ... When she did go, she refused to dance, remaining off in a corner and complaining that her shoes hurt her feet; she would end up taking them off right there ..."
But "Whether it was picking and splitting open the cacao pods, dancing over them in the drying frames on sunny days, removing the visgo or mucilaginous pulp from the trough, she could do it all like the best worker on the plantations. And there she felt happy, among the cacao trees, waking at dawn, going to bed at dusk for the deep sleep of weariness."
Bacchic Inferno
A macabre tale of six college students, horror and murder
SECRET HISTORY
By Donna Tartt (Knopf, $23)
By Annemarie Marek
In Greek mythology, two gods of opposing character war within the human psyche - Apollo, the god of reason, and Dionysus, or Bacchus, the god of the irrational, who embodies the power and fertility of raw, unrelenting nature and its primordial forces. In The Secret History, first-time novelist Donna Tartt weaves a tale of horror and psychodrama with her macabre story of six New England college students who, under the tutelage of their professor of classics, explore the deepest, darkest realms of Greek culture.
The tale unfolds through the eyes of 28-year-old Richard Papen, whose middle-class upbringing in the small suburb of Plano, Calif., smacks of tract homes, fast food drive-throughs and supermarket specials and contrasts sharply with that of his wealthy class-mates. Richard happens upon Hampden College at age 19 almost by accident and largely from financial need.
It is here, at this rather elitist liberal arts college in the remote village of Hampden, Vt., that Richard meets Julian Morrow, the classics professor, and the five students who prove to be fatally drawn together under the auspices of pursuing the higher realms of thought and culture of the ancients - Henry Winter, tall stoic multilinguist; Francis Abernathy, elegant, dapper, gay heir to a Boston family fortune; Charles Macaulay, the alcoholic, and Camilla Macaulay, twin sister to Charles, both orphans from Virginia; and imposing, blond-haired, blue-eyed Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, son of a football star turned banker.
Naively, Richard abandons his first-year curriculum when he learns about Julian Morrow's small, select classical studies group, for Richard lives a two-faced life, hiding the details of his plain and embarrassingly uneventful middle-class childhood with fictitious stories about his past in an effort to be accepted within this inner sanctum of peers. What Richard has no way of knowing is that this inner circle, with which he has nothing in common except his knowledge of the Greek language, will pull him into a dark and vicious vortex of deceit, lies, drugs and the eventual murder of one of his own classmates, Bunny Corcoran.
The story is divided into two distinct books, the first leading up to the account of Bunny's death; the second, the murder and aftermath. Much of Richard's relationship with his classmates is superficial in nature. Initially, Richard knows little about the Dionysian experiments - using various paraphernalia to send them into uncontrollable frenzies - of Camilla, Charles, Francis and Henry until Henry's probing. In fact, it is not until the second half of the novel that Richard himself begins to understand his naivete and the horror of the incidents that have occurred.
Julian Morrow portrays the revered classics scholar whose insights about the Greek and Roman cultures lead to the teen-agers' clandestine Bacchic rites in the Vermont woods and the death of an innocent Vermont farmer. But it is Henry Winter who orchestrates the actual Dionysian rites and is the central figure who plots the subsequent murder of Bunny.
So methodical is Henry's plotting of Bunny's death and his subsequent efforts to cover up any evidence from the police and FBI that Henry assumes more and more the role of the psychopath, the true killer who has lost any sense of what is real or right.
One of the more fascinating aspects of The Secret History is the series of Dante-like dreams scattered throughout the second half of the novel. They plague Richard who, like the rest of his classmates with the exception of Henry, is haunted by Bunny's death and his hand in it, long after the funeral.
Still, if it were not for secondary characters like Judy Poovey, the frosted-haired arty animal and cocaine addict from Los Angeles who drives a red Corvette with personalized tags, and Bunny's best friend, Cloke Rayburn, one of the biggest drug dealers on campus, who believes he might have been responsible for Bunny's death, this story might be too oppressive to tell.
The Secret History is a large book, more than 500 pages and heavily laden with Homeric references. Structurally, the novel experiences rough transitions between important scenes and moves somewhat awkwardly to its climax. The biggest disappointment is Donna Tartt's failure to achieve the appropriate denouement that this story-telling deserves.
Nonetheless, The Secret History is bound to be a best-seller and, most likely, will head for the silver screen, too.
The midwifery of abortion rights
A QUESTION OF CHOICE
By Sarah Weddington (Gosset/Putnam)
By Ann Vliet
When Sarah Weddington argued Roe vs. Wade and won by a margin of 7-to-2, she was 27 years old, it was 1973 and all over the country forces for women's rights were on the rise. This June, after a series of Supreme Court decisions allowing states more and more regulation of abortion, Roe survived a complete reversal by only one vote.
In the meantime, an entire generation of women, whether or not they sanction abortion, have reaped the indirect benefits of Roe, taking for granted what their mothers could not: to be able to finish their educations, to be hired instead of being passed over for a man who "wouldn't get pregnant," to work while pregnant, to establish their own credit, to make their own plans as to careers, family and lifestyles.
A Question of Choice, Ms. Weddington's history of Roe from its beginnings at an Austin garage sale through its 19-year erosion, is a well-argued brief for pro-choice voters to get back to the ballot booths and make their wishes known.
The issue was and still is, as Ms. Weddington puts it, a question of choice. As women in the '70s discovered that "they could not truly determine their own destinies ... until they could control the number and spacing of their children," the abortion issue became symbolic of "whether women would have decision-making power over the issues that most affected their lives."
Roe vs. Wade never asked the Court to advocate abortion, but only to rule that "whether or not a particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual, that she has that constitutional right." The 1973 court concurred that, with a few rights reserved to the state, she did.
No matter which side of the issue you come down on, Ms. Weddington's explanation of how she came to argue Roe is an interesting and informative memoir. We learn in detail how Texas women joined forces with Austin activists and evolved from lobbyists to legal defenders; how previous Supreme Court decisions paved the way for Roe; how the trimester formula (never mentioned in the hearings) got into the Supreme Court decision as dictum; how Presidents Reagan and Bush have shifted the balance of the court by anti-abortion appointments.
We also learn how Sarah Weddington herself evolved from a "prim and proper" small-town preacher's daughter to a champion of women's rights in the Supreme Court, the Texas Legislature and the Carter White House.
Although most of Ms. Weddington's arguments are remarkably free of emotional language, her dander does rise over the smugness of the vociferous minority imposing their values on the rights of others.
She makes a clear distinction between true pro-life, with its commitment to quality child care, and merely pro-birth. She also resents having to re-fight in the legislature and executive branches decisions guaranteed by the Constitution. But she warns that the only place to re-win disappearing rights is at the polls, and outlines a plan of action.
It goes without saying that A Question of Choice should have a wide audience. For those over 40, it will be a reminder of the dangers of a return to pre-1973, where most decisions about women were made by men. For those who don't remember women's previous entrapment by states with both contraception and abortion laws, or the suffering or death many of them faced attempting illegal abortions, it will demonstrate that, in practice anyway, not all rights are inalienable.
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A Singer's Penchant For Enigma
By PETER WATROUS
David Byrne started his show at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Wednesday night with a good idea. The stage, cleverly lit by just one or two lights that gave a slightly industrial look, offered up Mr. Byrne alone. Playing his acoustic guitar and accompanying himself with occasional rhythms from a drum machine, he performed a set of tunes that were beautifully spare. Taken from all over, the songs - 'Cowboy Mambo (Hey Look at Me Now),' 'Nothing but Flowers,' 'Road From Nowhere,' 'Girls on My Mind,' among others - worked perfectly, with just Mr. Byrne's voice to scratch out the melodies. His singing vocabulary, full of strangled cries, shouts, a yodel or two and all sorts of textures, seemed stronger than ever, ideal for the often enigmatic songs.
As soon as his band appeared, however, Mr. Byrne's material sank under the weight of bad arrangements and an overloud sound system. And a lack of dynamic change - usually a sign that the music's genesis is the recording studio and not the stage - rendered the songs similar.
This was a shame, because over the last decade Mr. Byrne, as a member of the group the Talking Heads and on his own, has produced some of the oddest music to have influenced pop culture, and it deserved to be heard well. Though it's obviously rock, the music is also full of ideas that seem completely antithetical to rock. Where rock assumes the artist on-stage means what he's saying, Mr. Byrne is clearly writing from the point of view of another character or imbuing the material with so much irony as to render it slippery. He treats rock, a deeply adolescent musical form, as a vehicle for art world topics. And where grace, through rhythm and virtuosity, is often popular music's province, Mr. Byrne has opted instead to be clumsy, and to develop his own vocabulary of gestures, musical and vocal and physical, that never tie into rock's myth of power and ability.
His personality clearly retains some appeal, at least in New York, where this concert sold out. But, understandably, it hasn't been doing well across the country. The logical college-age audience for Mr. Byrne's music now has its own favorites, from the slew of Seattle bands to hiphoppers, all more blunt than he is in their intent and their politics. Mr. Byrne is now an oldies act, defined by his ethos and his audience. In concert that audience, mostly older than at an average rock show, seemed transfixed by Mr. Byrne, who dresses like a mixture of an Elvis impersonator - including long sideburns and slicked-back hair - and a SoHoite. On Wednesday, any movement, from his St. Vitus dancing to the occasional rock posturing, brought on huge uproars and a few standing ovations.
On his new records, Mr. Byrne has found a balance between Latin influences and his rock leanings. When heard live the songs, enormously loud, lost their definition, leaving a large blur instead of detail. Where his newer songs are loaded with strange, idiosyncratic melodies and abrupt structural movements, in concert the absence of articulation robbed the pieces of their individuality. Mr. Byrne's weakness in the past has been his coldness, and his lack of evident commitment to anything besides artistic production. His inability to do anything more than hide behind the personality has always limited the work and made it cute at worst. A new piece like 'Something Ain't Right,' an angry denunciation of God as a fraud, was lost in the blare. All that was left was Mr. Byrne's character, which didn't do the song, or the singer, justice.
Woody Allen as Political Metaphor
Middle America faces off with the bicoastals.
By WALTER GOODMAN
For the uncertain television voter in this season of the family, the political choice was sharpened this week. The election came down to a contest between the score or more Bushes and the dozen or so Farrow-Previn-Allens who populated the tube during the days of public embraces in Houston and domestic disruption in New York City. Ms. Farrow's family was reportedly valued at $7 million. The value of Mr. Bush's was the White House.
At the sight of that screen of Bushes at the Astrodome on Wednesday night, hard-nosed political commentators went gooey. David Gergen, who usually maintains a sober mien on the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,' could scarcely contain himself. It was a very important moment, he kept saying, incredibly important. Professional skepticism gave way to open-mouthed awe as the grandmother of all First Ladies presided over the mother of all photo opportunities. It was repeated Thursday with the Quayle family and balloons.
Meanwhile, television news and quasi-news shows were scrambling to get an exclusive shot of the house in which Mia Farrow was sequestered and rerunning clips of the famously reclusive Woody Allen making a declaration of love in front of other people's cameras. Marilyn Quayle countered with a prime-time confession in Houston about how rewarding it has been to live with Dan Quayle all these years.
So for the television fan, the lines are drawn. It is the soap opera of the bicoastals versus the soap opera of middle America, the late-night jazz club (clarinet and saxophone) versus Sunday morning in church, the separate dwellings versus the double bed.
Television has helped make the campaign issues manageable: Has Mrs. Quayle sacrificed more than Ms. Farrow? Has Maureen O'Sullivan contributed as much as Barbara Bush? Was Hillary Clinton spotted in line for 'Annie Hall' when she should have been watching 'Mary Poppins' with Chelsea? The race may come down to a montage of the multi-culturally with-it Farrow ménage opposed to a Bush family Thanksgiving Day card inspired by Norman Rockwell.
This is a contest made for Republicans. When Mr. Quayle picked on Murphy Brown, her admirers pointed out that she was mere fiction, as though that mattered. But Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow are said to be real, although given the treatment of celebrities on television and in the tabloids, one can never be sure. Either way, for admirers of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, television personalities both, who thundered forth the us-against-them organ peals that dominated the week in Houston, the Manhattan story is a morality tale on the paths of godlessness.
Has anybody ever seen Woody Allen in church or at a Fourth of July parade or any of the other places where Mrs. Bush revealed she spent her time during the best years of her life as a young wife and mother in Texas? For Mr. Allen the very word Texas is a punch line. (If Mr. Bush and Mr. Quayle plan to attempt more campaign jokes like those in their acceptance speeches, they might study his timing.)
In the religious war conjured up by Mr. Buchanan, Woody Allen is a general on the wrong side. Show business being what it is, can anyone doubt that he consorts with homosexuals? And he has never been a closet atheist. In more than one of his movies he has taken delight in kicking around men of the cloth and milking the amusement in scenes of real church-going Americans, whom he plainly finds ridiculous, being confronted with a neurotic Jew from New York. This man has been known to kid God, that Underachiever.
When Republican sermonizers in Houston kept reminding their audience that the Democrats had met in Madison Square Garden, which happens to be in New York City, they may have thought they were only connecting the opposition with crime, homelessness and dirt; add now intimations of hanky-panky among those whom Dan Quayle likes to call the elite, known for their liberal inclinations and contributions to the other party.
Here is the quintessential made-for-television debate. The candidates may drone on about growth packages whose details few will ever understand, but who can fail to understand the wholesome images that were packaged on that stage in Houston? A big audience without much patience for differences between this health plan and that one can be counted on to pay attention to the minutiae of any story involving romance or worse among actors.
For the Democrats, the conjunction could hardly have been more unfortunate. Their only hope now is that despite the predictable recycling in Republican commercials, this week's images will be shaken off by others as the campaign bounces along. For the time being, Bill Clinton will probably avoid being photographed in the company of stars, and Hillary and Chelsea may be seen whipping up a batch of their mother-daughter cookies with Regis and Kathie Lee.
Psychodrama With a Desperate Grin
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Sylvia DeSayles, Kay Stevens, Fay McKay, Carol Jarvis, Dorothy Squires and Libby Morris are hardly names that, when dropped, produce a universal nod of recognition. But in the performance artist John Epperson's newest show, 'Lypsinka! Now it can be Lip-Synched,' these nearly-forgotten singers are placed in a vocal pantheon side by side with Ethel Merman, Connie Francis and June Christy.
'Lypsinka! Now it can be Lip-Synched,' which plays at the Ballroom through Sept. 6, is the newest one-man show starring Mr. Epperson as his drag alter-ego, Lypsinka. The hourlong performance offers further proof, as if any were needed, that yesterday's pop culture never really dies. And if it happens to involve a sequined pop diva with a taste for loud costumes and brassy music, it will probably sooner or later find its way into Mr. Epperson's museum of pop trash.
For those not already acquainted with the performer, his increasingly famous character is a willowy red-headed showgirl with popping clown eyes, penciled brows raised in continual astonishment and a ferociously cheery smile. A composite of Delores Gray, Carol Channing, Shirley Bassey and dozens of other famous and forgotten divas of stage, screen, television and nightclubs, the character never speaks.
Instead Lypsinka mouths the words to these women's usually obscure recordings from the 1940's, 50's and 60's while dramatizing the lyrics in a meticulously choreographed body language of shimmying arms and legs, swiveling hips and clawing fingers. His physical vocabulary is as brilliantly precise a distillation of traditional female stage mannerisms as the movements of a Japanese Kabuki performer.
Interwoven with the songs are snatches of movie dialogue that offer the spoken equivalent of the music. As a ringing telephone punctuates each bit, Lypsinka changes character every few seconds, eventually becoming a hysterical, multi-phrenic personality. The new show's more familiar excerpts include a fragment of a Gloria Swanson monologue from 'Sunset Boulevard' and a scene from 'Valley of the Dolls.'
Mr. Epperson's lip-synching is not the only thing that sets him apart from more conventional drag performers. 'Now It Can Be Lip-Synched,' like his previous shows, holds together as a high-tension comic psychodrama that offers a scathingly funny critique of modern show business iconography and the role of women.
Behind Lypsinka's desperate grin is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Periodically the lights around her suddenly flicker and turn greenish, and she clutches at her face in a parody of Joan Crawford in her 1960's ax-murder epic, 'Berserk.' All the show's emotions, whether sung or acted, have a grotesque larger-than-life quality. That's partly because of Mr. Epperson's shrewd selection of material that emphasizes extremes of self-pity (June Christy's 'Lonely Woman' and cheery, look-at-me grandiosity ('I'm the Greatest Star,' sung by Mimi Hines, 'I've Gotta Be Me,'by Miss Squires and 'I've Got Everything I Want' by Karen Morrow).
If 'Now It Can Be Lip-Synched' celebrates a glitzy kind of stardom as an ultimate form of American glory, it portrays its attainment as an empty desperate 'Valley of the Dolls' sort of existence in which women, to succeed, have to be a little monstrous.
Mr. Epperson serves up his vision as pure unfettered comedy executed with dazzling juxtapositions of songs and dialogue and virtuosic high-drag clowning. The new show's funniest moment is Lypsinka's increasingly slurred performance of 'The 12 Days of Christmas' (sung by Fay McKay), in which the true-love's gifts have been changed from turtle-doves and French hens into various alcoholic beverages.
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Which One Is Today's Woman?
By Suzy Menkes
International Herald Tribune
MILAN - It was a fashion face-off between heavenly bodies and earthly souls. On one side Gianni Versace's supermodels - heads and bosoms high, necklines and hems swooping low - striding out in dresses that slithered across the curves. In the other, Giorgio Armani's women - eyes down, discreet steps forward - enveloped in jackets over cumuli of fabric from neck to ankles.
Who was the winner in this clash of wills, styles and philosophy as Armani and Versace closed the Milan spring/summer shows?
Round one - for presentation - went to Versace for dramatic lighting, superb staging with a kaleidoscopic backcloth of slides, and a beautifully paced show - even if the content was just a dazzling re-mix of few ideas.
Round two - for imagination - to Armani, whose shadow play of fabrics textured like dried grass, dark Indian prints, pale subtle colors and quirky East-meets-West styles expressed a fashion poetry.
Both designers had distinct and delicious color palettes: Versace's bright but not brash, with pure white, lilac or primrose, and Proven<*_>c-cedille<*/>al-style prints that were a fresh departure from his familiar style. Armani opened the show with shades of his signature beige as subtly differentiated as beach pebbles. His prints had gone native but with great subtlety, mixing dark Indian paisleys with the palest Mogul patterns in blossom pink and almond green.
The two shows were so strong, yet so different, that the result has to be declared a tie. You take the water or the wine; the veil or the Wonder-Bra; or maybe both.
"It's for the same woman in different moods - and between Versace and Armani, Milan has ended on a high note," said Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman.
"They are very different designers," said Kalman Ruttenstein of Bloomingdale's. "The Armani woman is subtle, quiet, understated. The Versace woman likes to be noted and is fun in spirit."
The two shows ran back to back with Versace first, causing Liz Tilberis, editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, to change in her limo from a studded black leather suit into a white Armani pantsuit. Other off-runway entertainments included Versace's seven-year-old niece Allegra demanding a front-row seat, and at the Armani show, the film stars Claudia Cardinale and Ornella Muti sitting bust to bust.
Versace's show was spectacular - even though it was based on just two silhouettes: bell-bottom pants updated from the 1970s by making them cling in stretch fabric to the hips and swing out at the calf; and simple mid-calf dresses with uplifting bodices, so that bosoms balanced like two scoops of ice-cream. Variations on the themes included frilled layers of pattern and silk shirts knotted to reveal the ubiquitous bared midriff.
IF you believe that life's a beach, Versace had great clothes, from the opening white dresses - shown with long, loose, crimped hair and bare feet - to the exuberant mixed-print layers of gypsy skirts. The show had little you could wear for work - barely a serious jacket or simple pantsuit - but it was a fine statement. The show was a mite pretentious, as music switched from rock to Panis Angelicus (from the Catholic Mass) and the slides showed historic paintings, regional costumes, details of fabrics or scenes of Versace's beloved Miami Beach.
"Fashion is for joy and for fun. And I know how to play with rock and with grand opera," announced an ebullient Versace, receiving backstage accolades.
Armani took his ovation in navy sweater and blue jeans in front of models sitting in Tahitian dresses against a Gauguin backcloth. Inspirations from far-flung places was the theme of the show, which was quirkily beautiful, even spiritual, in its use of fabrics, motifs and silhouettes from other cultures.
The day clothes had not really changed: pantsuits in putty, stone and beige; straight mannish jackets still with a square - too square - shoulder line; the colors quiet as a whisper. The novelty was in the layering of skirt or tunic over pajama or even harem pants, which seemed too identifiably ethnic, especially when heads too were covered.
Armani has never really been at home with skirts and insisted too much on these, yet the designer seemed to be suggesting something profound: that women can be graceful and feminine, even when completely covered up. It made a nice change from the silicone implants bouncing through the Milan week.
Armani's gentle message came over best in the beautiful evening clothes - slim, straight dresses, maybe in lace, perhaps pleated, or under a beaded vest, or in Balinese prints, or with crusts of embroidery topping soufflé-light fabrics. It was a show with a soul.
"Why not mix Eastern and Western dress - the world is small, and we need to find a new femininity that is modern," said Armani.
Neither Versace's jet-stream escapism nor Armani's submissive femininity seem the whole answer for modern women. But it was an exhilarating end to a dull Milan fashion week that saved its sweetest plums for the bitter end.
"If Paris is first next time, Armani and Versace had better follow on its heels, because we buyers aren't going to sit around for a week in Milan waiting for the big guns to go off," said Ruttenstein, referring to the changing calendar of international fashion for next season. Those dates will be announced on Oct.19.
The fashion stories out of Milan were the fluid mid-calf dress, a strong revival for knits, and a continuing focus on Beatles and hippie inspirations, as well as on corsetry and transparency. Often simple, luxurious clothes that are Italy's strength were concealed under swags of love beads.
"When we get to the showroom, most of the nonsense has disappeared - the runway is entertainment," said Joan Kaner, fashion director of Neiman-Marcus. Andrea Jung, the store's executive vice president, said they had done "terrific business" with Missoni, Dolce&Gabbana, Krizia and Ferré.
The fashion crowd now moves on to weekend showings in London, which has to decide how to hold its place on the calendar.
THE London fashion week, which opened Friday, contains 15 runway shows, backed up by an exhibition, the London Designer Show, at the Duke of York's barracks in the King's Road Chelsea.
England remains a seedbed of ideas, many of which are only absorbed into mainstream fashion after several seasons. For example, the back-to-the-Beatles looks dominating the Milan shows were first seen on London's streets and run-ways five years ago, although few of the small London designers have been able to make them into commercial money-spinners.
The London season will close Monday with the British Fashion Awards.
Derek Walcott: History's Nostalgia
By James Atlas
New York Times Service
NEW YORK - In a time when poetry has reveled in its freedom, deploying unmetered, unrhymed lines across the page, the formal properties of Derek Walcott's work are instantly visible to the eye.
To open his 'Collected Poems' is to find oneself in the presence of a writer for whom English poetry is no oppressive burden, to be cast off like the colonial past of Walcott's native St. Lucia, but a vibrant tradition, to be plundered and recast in his own contemporary idiom.
Couplets and quatrains unfurl with a stately regularity, suffused with echoes of Shakespeare and Keats, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden.
"Art is History's nostalgia," Walcott writes in 'Omeros,' an epic-length modern 'Odyssey' composed in terza rima.
In his work, the voice of his English precursors resonates, animated by his own people's voice, a rich Creole patois mimed in 'The Schooner Flight': "I go draw and knot every line as tight/ as ropes in this rigging, in simple speech..."
The son of a schoolteacher who died when Walcott was a year old, the poet was raised in a bookish atmosphere. "Our house had a wire-meshed library of great books," he recalled in a memoir of his youth, "principally a uniform edition of Dickens and Walter Scott and Sabatini."
His teachers recited Swinburne by heart, inculcating in him the notion that poetry was "living speech." A quatrain spoken by one of his characters could serve as an ironic autobiography:
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation
Clearly, Walcott is the latter - a nation polyglot in the extreme. "With equal right," as Joseph Brodsky, his friend and fellow Nobel laureate, has noted, "Walcott could have said that he has in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Baudelaire, Valéry, Apollinaire."
In part, his genius is his versatility - his recourse to what Brodsky calls "a genetic Babel." Yet however international Walcott's style, his language is quintessentially English.
More than any poet of his generation, he has absorbed our poetic canon - absorbed and internalized it. Walcott, says the Irish poet Seamus Heany, "possesses English more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves."
At times, he can sound derivative. "We swore to make drink/ and art our finishing school," he writes in the cadence of Yeats; "A white church spire whistles into space/ like a swordfish" borrows shamelessly from Robert Lowell.
In his earlier work, especially, Walcott's apprenticeship to his English masters has a slavish feel to it; the elaborate, knotted rhetoric is too high-pitched, inflated for rhetoric effect, as in these willed and ponderous lines from 'The Fortunate Traveler':
The heart of darkness is not Africa
The heart of darkness is the core of fire
In the white center of the holocaust.
But at his best - and there is little dross in Walcott's oeuvre - he achieves a sustained eloquence, an exhilarating amplitude; he's "a man immersed in words," the poet James Dickey has written, "not afraid of them, but excited and confirmed by what he can cause them to do."
IN awarding Derek Walcott the Nobel Prize, the Swedish academy singled out his "historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." Multicultural in the demographic and political sense: Walcott is black, his homeland a Caribbean island remote from the dominant 'white' culture, he is a poet for whom exile - both geographic and personal - has been the informing fact of his life.
But his work vindicates T.S. Eliot's account of the way in which a poetic tradition evolves through the modification of works of art "by the new (the really new) work of art among them."
In Derek Walcott, we can discern the history of what is most enduring in our tradition, invigorated, as it has always been, by the voice of our most recent immigrants. Invigorated and made new.
Popular Culture
A Festival With Some Strings Attached
GLENN COLLINS
WHEN 17 PUPPET companies take over the Joseph Papp Public Theater starting Sept. 7, it could mark a giant step toward increasing American awareness of puppetry as adult theater. Despite its long tradition and popularity in much of the rest of the world, this ancient art form has never been taken quite seriously enough in the United States.
Both Jim Henson and Joseph Papp had dreamed together of providing a show-case for sophisticated puppetry. And though Mr. Papp died last year, and Mr. Henson the year before, the idea survives in the International Festival of Puppet Theater that will feature eight foreign and nine American companies. This dizzyingly comprehensive two-week gathering, through Sept. 20, is the first public festival of adult puppet theater ever produced in New York.
Mr. Henson's hope, said his daughter Cheryl Henson, executive producer of the festival, was that the event "would build new audiences for puppetry." It is being presented by the Jim Henson Foundation, with the New York Shakespeare Festival acting as host.
"My life was changed forever by the first Bread and Puppet show I saw many years ago - I think it was in the basement of the Washington Square Church," said JoAnne Akalaitis, the Shakespeare Festival's executive director. "My life was similarly changed when I first saw Jim Henson's Muppets."
Puppetry's roots can be traced to religious ceremonies in the ninth century B.C.
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The Persecution of Milken
BY L. GORDON CROVITZ
In the mid-1980s, a group from Drexel Burnham Lambert met with the editorial-page staff of The Wall Street Journal. They urged us to stop using the term junk bonds and instead to use the less colorful formulation "high-yield bonds." In either guise, these bonds brought capital to smaller firms and fueled sometimes needed shake-ups of corporate suites by funding takeovers, but the Drexel folks feared a political backlash.
Ridiculous, some of us thought. How could a financial instrument be moral or immoral, good or evil? A bond by any other name would still be judged by its performance in the market. Ironically, Michael Milken, who was busy in his Beverly Hills office that day, would within a few years be undone by just such naivete.
Milken was prosecuted and sentenced as the symbol of a decade, so it's not surprising that a cultural study yields the clearest picture of him to date. Jesse Kornbluth's 'Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken' (William Morrow, 384 pages, $23) captures how an over-zealous prosecution helped transform the go-go, greedy '80s into the no-go, vengeful '90s.
The title refers to the letters Drexel once sent to investors saying it was highly confident that a transaction would succeed. Funds flowed to the start-up Turner Broadcastings and MCIs, which created more than 18 million new jobs in a decade when the Fortune 500 lost workers.
Mr. Kornbluth, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, recalls how "The Bonfire of the Vanities" era on Wall Street "was deeply offensive to those who regarded themselves as cultural arbiters." It never mattered to them that Milken actually lived a simple, if workaholic, life. "To stop Milken is to stop takeovers fueled by junk bonds," Mr. Kornbluth writes, and "to put most of what is politely called New York's 'Nouvelle Society' in jail. It is to make real the fondest dream of the American Establishment - Congressman John Dingell, the Fortune 500, the Business Roundtable, and some of Drexel's battered rivals. It is to roll back the 1980s."
Mr. Kornbluth describes how inside trader Ivan Boesky conned prosecutors into giving him a light punishment by claiming serious crimes by Milken. "In all that time, with all their subpoena power and RICO threats, they never got beyond Ivan Boesky - and Boesky never pointed out pre-announcement trades that netted Milken a quick $20 million, or foreign bank accounts, or bags of cash, or code names in diaries," Mr. Kornbluth writes. Milken was no inside trader, and junk bonds are no daisy chain.
It didn't matter. Federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. Kornbluth jabs, was "more ambitious than Madonna" and "hit the ground talking." He twisted the RICO statute into a rubber hose and held Milken's brother hostage to a plea.
Mr. Kornbluth spent 400 hours interviewing Milken. He did not find a card-board cutout of greed, but a financial genius who had to admit to his probation officer that "I had a hard time not taking care of people." Even when it was irrelevant to his business, even when it tumbled him into a gray area of securities law.
In a jail-house interview, Milken told Mr. Kornbluth that the media were partly to blame. "All those years," he said, "I thought the marketplace or the customer was the final judge. I was wrong. In the short run, it's the media. And in the media, nothing means anything unless it's negative." Mr. Kornbluth found one-sided coverage based on leaks from prosecutors and cites bond journalist James Grant's claim that the Journal was "the useful idiot" of the prosecution. Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, responds that "Journal policy precludes any discussion of sourcing, but that statement is sheer nonsense."
Milken didn't make things any easier for himself. As Mr. Kornbluth also found, the private Milken "never wanted to meet the press." When charges were published, they were made against a void. Indeed, Milken only recently began speaking to journalists on the record.
Still, things have changed since Milken's plea. In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission simply fined 98 brokerage firms and banks for their Milkenlike technical reporting violations.
Boesky testified in just one case, against arbitrager John Mulheren. The federal appeals court in New York reversed the conviction by saying that "no rational trier of fact" could have bought Boesky's story. Trader Boyd Jeffries, who testified against James Sherwin of GAF Corp., had his Boesky-inspired conviction reversed by this appeals court, which also overturned Giuliani /RICO convictions against securities firm Princeton /Newport and Edwin Meese's friend Robert Wallach.
Everyone, it seems, got his day in court - except those like Milken, whose plea bargain meant his case never got to an appeals court. At least Judge Kimba Wood recently reduced Milken's longer-than-Boesky prison stay.
For all of Mr. Kornbluth's cultural observations, the book is not yet written that closely tracks Milken's persecution with the credit crunch and recession. As for Milken's legacy, last year funds made up of junk bonds earned 40%, and in the first half of this year were ahead 12%. It's too late, but with those kind of returns, let's call them high-yield bonds.
Intellectuals Under Pressure
BY LEE LESCAZE
China's intellectuals have suffered, agonized and worried through more than 40 years of communism. Each time they have gathered their courage and raised their heads, Beijing has lopped them off. Given their cruel history, it isn't surprising that China's intellectuals are a cautious, mostly unheroic group. Perry Link lived among them during one of their years of living optimistically (comparatively) - the year preceding the Beijing protests and killings of May and June 1989. His engrossing 'Evening Chats in Beijing' (Norton, 448 pages, $24.95) is his snapshot of that time.
Like many things Chinese, Mr. Link's book presents a paradox. It highlights the futility of intellectuals' efforts to promote the improvement of China, but also provides abundant evidence of the bottled-up potential that will lift China from its doldrums once the old system is smashed or withers away.
Most of all, 'Evening Chats in Beijing' makes a reader hope that the day comes soon when the Chinese enjoy individual freedom and this book therefore seems an absurd and unreal relic, a report from a vanished Kafka kingdom.
Albert Camus described an intellectual as "someone whose mind watches itself." In totalitarian China, the state apparatus joins in the watching, putting intellectuals under enormous pressure. As Mr. Link, who teaches Chinese literature at Princeton University, shows, this prressure is partly self-induced, thanks to Chinese intellectuals' inbred caution and their historical sympathy for the state.
They have been too willing for their own good to be what Stalin called "screws" in the state structure. What's more, they too often share the regime's fear of chaos. They may hate the Communist Party, but they are scared of the void that might open if it were to disappear.
National pride helps blind them. Intellectuals are proud of being Chinese and cannot imagine China as anything but a nation of special importance in the world - despite their treatment at Chinese government hands.
Mr. Link admires these hollow men more than most readers will. One of the bravest, Liu Binyan, who now lives in exile, once described the typical intellectual as the human equivalent of a town hit by a neutron bomb. "In the end he looks normal, can still see and analyze, and can pronounce regular sentences. He can fit in, and function, but is devastated inside."
The pressure on intellectuals is so intense that it seems to affect their health. According to one Chinese survey reported by Mr. Link, they die at an average age of 58.5, some 10 years before the population at large.
Mr. Link's great affection for the intellectuals doesn't prevent him from seeing their limitations. Few have the courage of physicist Fang Lizhi, who is a friend of Mr. Link, or of journalist Dai Qing. Most are remarkably willing to let someone else take the risks of challenging the state on even small matters. While many feel that their struggle needs martyrs, they think someone else should volunteer for the role.
This might be labeled despicable, but not by Mr. Link. He keeps his criticisms gentle, and self-deprecatingly includes himself among those spectators at the China drama who sometimes fail to perceive the moral ambiguities in their role. He does, however, seem moved close to anger by the Chinese student, wearing an Adidas jogging outfit and Walkman, whom he met on the campus of the University of Virginia. The student felt personally let down that Mr. Fang had sought to save himself by taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time of the 1989 killings. He should have sought martyrdom, the student said. "When he went into the embassy, he was not the Fang Lizhi I was rooting for."
With fans like that, Mr. Fang hardly needs enemies.
The major problem with Mr. Link's book, as with most journalism from China, is the author's need to protect the identity of his sources. It is hard to bring people to life on the page when their real names cannot be used and their life stories are necessarily somewhat veiled. The result, of course, is too many phrases like "many say" and "others think."
Still, the depth and breadth of Mr. Link's contacts and reading in Chinese enable him to keep his pages livelier than most accounts from Beijing.
And, he tells an important story. The Chinese state increasingly resembles the swordsman in the old joke. "Missed!" he declares. "Just try shaking your head," his rival responds.
In the south and on the coast, an economic boom is under way and the central government's authority grows weaker daily. Cities that have missed out so far are desperate to latch onto the bandwagon. In Beijing, the gerontocracy hangs on. The Communist leadership re-prints Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai dash-board ornaments in an attempt to draw strength from the party's glory days.
Mr. Link takes his title from Deng Tuo, a brave man who dared to criticize Mao's policies in a similarly titled book. As always with China's intellectuals, bravery has dubious consequences. Mr. Deng was hounded to commit suicide in 1966 and his criticism is now seen as one of the wounds that inspired Mao to launch his mad Cultural Revolution - a disaster for intellectuals and a nightmare for all China.
Film: He's Afraid to Take the Plunge
BY JULIE SALAMON
'Honeymoon in Vegas' is being pitched as a "straightforward" Andrew Bergman movie. That must refer to the fact that it has an obvious beginning and end. But the middle is delightfully Bergmanesque - which in the case of Andrew, not Ingmar, means odd and very funny.
Mr. Bergman, a writer and director, may be best known for "The Freshman," the Mafia spoof in which Marlon Brando does a wicked imitation of himself as Don Corleone. This time the pop culture icon providing the running gag is Elvis. Maybe it's too obvious, using Elvis and his music as the tacky, sentimental emblem of a romantic comedy set in Las Vegas. But Mr. Bergman approaches Elvis the way he approaches everything: like no one else.
This shaggy dog story begins with a nasty mother (Anne Bancroft) on a hospital bed, extracting from her son (Nicolas Cage) a deathbed promise that he'll never marry. She departs this earth with a gleeful grin, leaving behind a man who can't say yes. But he's been dating Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker), an adorable schoolteacher, for years. He decides the only way he can marry her is to take her to Las Vegas and get it over with fast.
One thing leads to another, and it will all make you laugh a lot: There's the hotshot gambler (James Caan) still mourning his wife, who suntanned herself to an early grave. He sees her face in Betsy's. There's a Hawaiian odyssey that includes the hilarious sight of Peter Boyle playing an island chief who loves Broadway musicals, especially 'South Pacific.'
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Ozzy Osbourne graces fans with buckets of water, hits
By Brenda Herrmann
Come and worship at the temple of the mighty Ozzy.
That could have been the theme of Ozzy Osbourne's Sunday night show at The World Music Theatre because that's what everyone did.
In many ways Ozzy's outdoor act was similar to the one he brought to the Aragon Ballroom last November, basically a greatest-hits package enthusiastically dished out by Oz, guitarist Zakk Wylde, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Randy Castillo.
Opening with 'Paranoid,' Ozzy was looking and sounding good and, as usual, had drenched himself - and much of the crowd - with bucket after bucket of water before the first four songs were finished.
From 'Paranoid,' it was into the new, a quintessential metal anthem called 'I Don't Want to Change the World,' then back to the old: 'Mr. Crowley,' 'I Don't Know' and again, the new, 'Road to Nowhere,' creating a constant shuffle of old favorites and the strongest material from last year's 'No More Tears' album.
Those close to the stage didn't need the video screens Ozzy had packed - watching Ozzy, with his wide, robotic eyes and tiny steps, was mesmerizing enough.
When he left the stage, however, any momentum died quickly. Wylde's dull, self-indulgent solos were barely tolerable and, the band just didn't seem to get it together, leaving only Oz to carry the act.
And he did, right out into the audience, urging the crowd to stampede forward for 'Good-bye to Romance.' In the end, security gave up trying to stop the fans - two guys even managed to get onstage with Oz - and, here, with everyone packed in about five to a seat, was when the show peaked, with everyone singing the ballad and swaying along.
Special guests Faster Pussycat were better than expected, taking the crowd over almost from the beginning. They were beautiful to look at - all five with matching jet-black hair and glammy costumes - but it was the way they campaigned for the audience's attention that won everyone over. If singer Taime Down was on the left, guitarists Brent Muscat and Greg Steele were manning the right, always keeping the stage alive.
Opening act Ugly Kid Joe wasn't so likeable. The cocky novelty band seemed to expect worship but did nothing to deserve it.
Grant Park season ends on a Latin American note
By Ted Shen
With a few exceptions, serious music by Latin American composers is relegated to the fringe of the mainstream repertoire both here and in Europe. Yet, as the Grant Park Festival season closer last Saturday night proved, it's high time to redress the neglect.
All five works on the survey program, conducted by Mexican-born Enrique Diemecke, are noteworthy, if only for their varying success in reconciling indigenous folk strains with European styles. The Grand Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1915), by the self-taught Brazilian nationalist Villa-Lobos, is surprisingly steeped in the swooning gestures of late 19th Century romanticism. Loosely knit, roughhewn, and strongly Schumannesque, this concerto proffers a number of flashy passages for the soloist. Celloist Carter Brey, energetically backed up by the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, handled them with assurance and verve.
'Barren Land,' a 1949 tone poem by Mexican modernist Jose Pablo Moncayo, is baldly Ravelian in its long-breathed plangent lyricism except for an interlude of sashaying Mexican dance. The orchestra's performance had a voluptuous feel. In contrast, Ginestera's Dances from his 1943 Ballet, 'Estancia,' are outgoing and ebullient - sort of 'Rodeo' on the pampas. The orchestra played them with an immodest amount of gusto.
Silvestre Revueltas' 'Redes' (Nets), a concert suite of his 1935 score for an agitprop movie about the travails of Mexican fishermen, is decidedly 20th Century in its outlook. At times atonal, this folksy and picturesque music is also boldly dramatic. As performed by the Grant Parkers, its poignant moments did not have quite the same intensity as the festive ones.
The evening's most original work belonged to Carlos Chavez, the dean of Mexican music. His one-movement 'Sinfonia India', commissioned by CBS in 1936, deftly incorporates Mexican Indian tribal melodies. Piquant rhythms, exotic modalities and a battalion of unusual percussion instruments contribute to the highly distinctive character of this music.
Woodstock festival offers gems of a teenage Mozart
By Ted Shen
The Woodstock Mozart Festival, given every August in the town's landmark opera house, is capable of surprises. Organized by the Juilliard- and European-trained maestro Charles Zachary Bornstein, it can put on a terrific show especially when it delves into the Mozartean arcana.
Featured in last weekend's season finale were a pair of choral works from the composer's teen years. Seldom-performed and known mostly to cognoscenti, both show a budding genius gleefully at work, experimenting with musical layout and injecting earthly drama into liturgical materials. The 'Orphanage' Mass, in fact, qualifies as a minor masterpiece.
Mozart was barely 13 when he finished this commission (K. 139) in 1768 for an orphanage church in Vienna. Already a sophisticated craftsman and gifted melodist, he turned the cantata-mass into a daring showcase of imaginative, sometimes floridly operatic touches. Unusual for the time was the inclusion of doleful trombones and hammering trumpets that imitate the sound of nails being driven into Christ on the cross. Loosely guided by the dictates of the nascent classical style - though not forsaking Baroque polyphony altogether - this grand-scaled work traverses through moods that alternate between the somber and the ecstatic.
The performance by the festival's resident orchestra and the James Chorale Friday night - in collaboration for the first time - was sensitive yet bracing and exciting. It conveyed the music's essential warmth and devoutness. The intimate setting and the small orchestral and choral forces also added a feel of authenticity. Bornstein, an intense-looking conductor with a Stokowskian hauteur, coaxed graceful playing from the strings. The quartet of soloists - all chorale veterans - sang cleanly and at times rapturously. They were, in order of impressiveness, tenor John Concepcion, soprano Joan Strom, alto Krista Depenthal, bass Matthew Greenberg. The chorus, prepared by James Rogner, paid careful attention to phrasing.
The other piece was the 'Litaniae Lauretanae,' written when Mozart was 17 and feeling stifled in provincial Salzburg. No doubt churned out quickly for a church service, this litany nonetheless is high-quality music, eloquent and lively. The performance was shapely and even affecting, highlighted by ardent soprano and tenor singing.
Formula overdose
2 Fox sitcoms faithfully follow the recipes
By Rick Kogan
TV critic
Two new shows, formulaic in extremis, hit Fox's Thursday night lineup with barely a chance - though one is pretty good - of denting the ratings. First up is 'Martin' (7:30 p.m., Fox-Ch. 32), a showcase for the talents of Martin Lawrence, a highly energetic comic whom some may recall from his work in the 'House Party' films or from HBO's 'Def Comedy Jam' series.
If you remember his work in the latter venture, you might not be able to imagine him toning down his scatological sensibilities to a level acceptable to the censors in prime time.
But he has and, in so doing, has been robbed of some of what makes him an original and aggressively contemporary comic. But he's still winning, as the host of a talk radio show at the fictional WZUP in Detroit. (Amazingly, another comedy based at another fictional Detroit radio station, NBC's 'Rhythm & Blues,' will go head to head with 'Martin' later this season.)
He's a bully - insulting, misogynistic - behind the mike but rather more demure in the presence of his marketing executive girlfriend Gina (Tisha Campbell), who has the ability to turn him into a pussycat.
The show - for all of its topical references to such matters as Sister Souljah - owes much to the sensitivities of 'Seinfeld' but also to such gruff-guy-with-a-heart-of-mush pioneers as 'The Honeymooners.'
The two stars make a lively pair of romantic sparring partners, and many of the supporting cast members are snappy in look and dialogue. Most of them - and this might be forgiven in a premiere - are shrill with their lines, as if performing in a club rather than in front of cameras.
But perhaps the oddest thing about this sitcom is that Lawrence, in one of the most unusual bits of casting in television history, also plays the parts of his own mother and of his rambunctious next-door neighbor.
On the surface, this might seem a novel twist, but in the premiere it's merely weird in a show that otherwise has entertaining possibilities.
'The Heights' (8 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32) is the sort of neighborhood that seems to exist only in movies and on television: a lower-class area spruced up with loud graffiti and filled with young people who look as if they've just stepped out of a Gap ad.
It is there that a group of these young people gather nightly in some sort of loft space to play rock 'n' roll. They called their band, in a dangerously accurate example of their creativity, the Heights.
Naturally, this series is from the youth-drenched pens of producer Aaron Spelling's factory. And, the characters are a handsome, lithe and pearly-toothed bunch.
There's J.T. (Shawn Thompson), the band's long-maned lead singer, who chases any skirt in his vicinity and works days as a mechanic. There's Stan (Alex Desert), the dreadlocked bassist who works days in his father's pool hall; Hope (Charlotte Ross), a guitarist from more monied circumstances than the others (I think she goes to law school); Dizzy (Ken Garito), the drummer who works days as a plumber; Rita (Cheryl Pollak), a saxophonist who works days as a truck dispatcher; Lenny (Zachary Throne), the drummer who is obsessed, ridiculously, with taping street sounds to mix with the music.
A new person joins this band in the premiere. Alex (James Walter) is something of a renaissance man; one of the busiest young manmen on the tube, working, as best as I could figure, about 37 hours a day as a waiter in a coffee house and as a grocery clerk; and the shyest guy in prime time.
He writes a poem to Rita and later not only sets it to song but also grabs a guitar and proves himself a talented singer-songwriter.
The budding relationship between Alex and Rita is contrasted to the longstanding one between Dizzy and Jodie (Tasia Valenza), a nurse and the daughter of Dizzy's plumbing contractor boss. And she's pregnant!
Both storylines are told in simple (and simple-minded) form.
Rita and Alex exchange longing looks; Dizzy and Jodie squabble because he's afraid to commit to marriage.
Social issues, too, are reduced to comic-book levels: a schoolyard pal asks Stan why he's hanging with white people, to which Stan angrily replies, "It's not a color thing. It's a human being thing."
And this show is meant to be a music thing. That's its highly touted novelty hook - an original song each week given a music video treatment. The problem with this is that in asking musicians to act and actors to be musicians, one is likely to get a bunch of mediocrities.
I know it's tough to judge a band on one song, but the show's initial original tune is a tired track called 'How Do You Talk to an Angel?' It's not likely to make anyone forget 'Last Train to Clarksville,' another original song from a similar and vastly more entertaining TV show called 'The Monkees.'
2 mystery novels: 1 suspenseful, 1 insipid
The Principal Cause of Death
By Mark Richard Zubro
St. Martin's, 182 pages, $17.95
Death Benefits
By Michael Kahn
Button, 308 pages, $19
Reviewed By Bill Mahin
A writer and critic
'The Principal Cause of Death' is the fourth volume in Mark Zubro's series of 'Tom and Scott' mysteries. Here, Tom, a high school teacher, is the chief suspect in the murder of the school's principal.
Bypassing the plodding police, he and his friend Scott begin investigating Tom's fellow faculty members - and a nasty bunch of incompetents, thieves, student-seducers and drunks they turn out to be.
In one scene - almost as unlikely as one in which they beat and torture one of Tom's vilest students - the two uncover a cache of drugs in the home of the delinquent's parents and then summon the police, who, without benefit of a warrant, charge onto the premises, make arrests and seize the drugs.
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Recreating a forgotten showbiz past
Alma
By Gordon Burn
Houghton Mifflin, 210 pages, $19.95
Reviewed by Bill Maxwell
A critic who writes for the Irish Times
In 'Alma,' first-novelist Gordon Burn proves himself to be among the best of the current re-inventors of the past. Recreating a whole era in show business, one that has been almost forgotten because it was wedged in between the end of World War II and the arrival of the Beatles, Burn gives us a rich and hilarious narrative and a sharp satire on the fatuity of fame, the amorality of much of the modern imagemaker's glitz and the devastation that celebrity can wreak on the private lives of individuals.
'Alma' is the fictional autobiography of Alma Cogan, a British pop singer of the '50s. In her time she was Queen of the London Paladium and much of the music circuit and could hold her own against American 'invaders,' as they called people like Doris Day, Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Nat King Cole.
In those days, television was still such a newfangled idea that when the newsreader came on, mothers would warn their sprawling daughters to pull down their skirts as he might be looking at them. Nowadays, muses Alma, looking back on her life, when you cease to appear on television, you are dead.
Living alone with her pet dog, in a country cottage surrounded by woods and silence, Alma finds it odd that she ever had to invent strategies to ward off the clinging fans. Sitting on the London Underground, she sees her 54-year-old face staring back at her from the depth of a dirt-dappled window, looking a touch reptilian and leathery perhaps, but still with "nothing uplifted, tucked up, sliced off or surgically repositioned."
Much of the thrill of the big time, Alma feels, came from anticipation. Few evenings lived up to the taxi ride through the London dusk that began them. The contrast between the blank, dim gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity outside (plus a few drinks), never failed to produce the perfect balance between excitement and boredom.
Alma's appetite for the social whirl even surprised herself. When she wasn't preparing for drinks, a first night, a private view, a record launch, a supper, she was picking herself up from the night before. The formula was sleep, ice cream and plenty of thick brown tea.
She loved chewing the fat with the hacks and stars of the day: "Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of the shallowness, the fatuity the whatever you want to call it, the truth was that I got a kick out of the mingling with faces from the shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper."
But for all her pseudo-sophistication, Alma remained a sexual innocent. As for drugs, when she came across some musicians soaking gauze from inhalers for the hit of benezedrine it gave them and they told her it was a new kind of tea, she believed them.
Much of her success was due to the tenacity of her Rumanian Jewish immigrant parents, who conceived of her as an all-singing, all-dancing showtime spectacular, the natural successor to Shirley Temple. By the time she was 2 years of age, she was being coached in voice and tap. Back home, after every lesson she had to stand and give a demonstration while her father urged her on: "Don't stop 'til I tell you. I want my shillings worth."
By the time she was 10 she could walk into a cinema and tell which studio made the movie by just looking at the print - MGM's lion, Paramount's snowcapped mountain, RKO's radio beacon and Columbia's diaphanous Miss Liberty.
Their modest home in London became a kind of Lincoln Tunnel, as one American called it, where one met all the passing show traffic. Everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment and more was there. And when they were all settled and sozzled, Alma's mother would take out her banjo and give them her rendition of 'When It Is Night Time in Italy, It Is Wednesday Over Here' or 'If I Had My Life To Live Over Again, I'd Live Over a Delicatessen.'
Never invest in material goods, she told her daughter. The only thing worth hoarding was jewelry, which, when everything else gets taken away from you, you still have something left to sell. Little wonder that Burn has Noel Coward noting in his diary: "Was hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman who is always at Alma Cogan's by and large charming parties in Kensington, claiming to be her mother."
But when the time came, as it must for all celebrities, and Alma was no longer the star she had been, she had plenty of favors to call in. Indeed she owed to a friend of a friend the house she now occupied for most of the time.
Perhaps the saddest episode in this story is when Alma goes off to the Tate Gallery in search of a famous portrait done of her when she was in her prime. Whatever else time may have wrought, she feels, this will remain the same. Unknown to the attendants, who have long forgotten even her name, she finds that her picture is no longer on show and has been confined to the vaults. And when she checks her name in the reference index, the card reads, "Cogan-Alma. See H - has beens, whatever happened to. . ."
In a final twist of invention, which I leave to the reader to discover, Burn links the name of Alma with the notorious Moors child murderer Myra Hindley and her accomplice Ian Brady. Burn doesn't spare us the incongruity and obscenity of the comparison. To the modern publicity-conscious world they too were icons of their time. After all they made the news, didn't they? And while they may not have been persons, they certainly were personalities.
Civic Liberalism's debut
Mickey Kaus calls for an end to welfare and a fair deal for all who work
The End of Equality
By Mickey Kaus
New Republic/Basic Books, 293 pages, $25
Reviewed by George Scialabba
Recipient of a citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critic's Circle
William F. Buckley once remarked in exasperation that he would not read another book about liberalism until his grandmother wrote one. I don't know whether she has, but if not, Buckley really ought to make an exception for 'The End of Equality' by Mickey Kaus. Many details of Kaus' argument will arouse opposition or skepticism from liberals, conservatives, or both. But in its overall vision and thrust, it is an original, powerful book, capable of permanently altering the terms of American political debate.
It is obvious that economic inequality has increased in the United States in the last 10 or 15 years. Most disputes about the subject concern either how much or why. 'The End of Equality' asks a different question: Why does it matter? It does matter, of course, to Kaus as much as anyone; but not, either to him or (he claims) most of the rest of us for the reasons often assumed.
The equality most Americans value, says Kaus, is not equality of income but civic equality: equal dignity and respect for all who do their part - that is, work. People who accept their obligation to society, who work, are entitled to self-esteem and material security, at any rate in a prosperous democracy like ours. Equal dignity and respect mean such people's right to at least adequate medical care, legal help, education for their children and the other necessities of a good life, and even to some of its amenities: safe and pleasant public spaces, public transportation, clean air.
These things need not be distributed exactly equally, or even distributed at all. But if some people can afford the best of all these goods, while many others who are working or have worked hard or are willing to work can barely afford a decent minimum of them or cannot afford them at all - this violates most Americans' sense of fairness.
As Kaus points out, that sentiment does not amount to an ideological opposition to capitalism nor even to a populist antipathy toward the rich. If through luck, talent or exceptionally hard work, someone strikes it rich and wants to buy a yacht, take exotic vacations, retire at 40, most of us will gladly (or grudgingly) tip our hat. But that well-off Americans should live on safe streets while less affluent but equally hardworking Americans are afraid to go out after dark; should be able to afford crowns for their teeth or nursing care for their parents or stimulating schools for their kids while a lot of equally hardworking people can't: this doesn't sit right.
In short, a democracy can allow rich and poor, but not first-class citizens and second-class citizens. Such at least, Kaus claims, is most contemporary Americans' understanding of democracy. (He bases his argument on polling data as well as on a persuasive reading of American political history.)
I think Kaus is right. And he's right, too, to perceive not merely the negative side of this, the widespread popular disapproval of unfair hardship, but the positive side as well, the civic and psychological healthiness of mixing the classes, of having institutions where rich and poor stand in line together, go to meetings together, sit and root together in the bleachers or the grandstands. This is what endures, and deserves to endure, from the culture of smalltown America.
The vision of civic equality as earned dignity ought to guide liberal strategy. Instead, according to Kaus, liberals have in recent decades usually settled for straightforward income redistribution: taxes and transfers. A variety of other redistributive policies are currently on offer from Democrats: worker re-training; 'flexible,' or technologically de-centralized, production; protectionism; profit-sharing; the promotion of unionization. Kaus takes on each of these schemes, arguing that none of them can really do much to halt the recent sharp increase in income inequality, which is rooted in the transformation of the American economy away from mass production and toward symbol-manipulation, away from unionized blue- and white-collar workers and toward a meritocratic managerial-professional elite.
Instead of a futile and unpopular 'Money Liberalism,' Kaus advocates what he calls "Civic Liberalism," which would "use the public sphere to incubate and spread an egalitarian culture" of common interests, sentiments and experiences.
There are half a dozen innovations or reforms, some of them familiar, that could widen the sphere of social equality. For one: a return to conscription, combined with a year of national service for all who are not drafted. For another: campaign reform, public financing and free radio and television time for candidates.
An American scholar's insider report on China
Evening Chats in Beijing:
Probing China's Predicament
By Perry Link
Norton, 448 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Harrison Salisbury
A specialist in Soviet and Chinese affairs whose most recent book is 'The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng'
No one who experienced the tragedy of Tiananmen emerged unscathed, certainly not Perry Link, an American scholar who was in the forefront of it all. Although he insists that 'Evening Chats in Beijing' is "not a Tiananmen book" it is, in fact, the quintessential Tiananmen book, and that is why it is important.
A soft-spoken American specialist in Chinese literature, Link portrays himself as an accidental player in the Tiananmen events. If this is so, he was precisely the right man in the right place at the right time. Link knew the language, had spent time in China previously and for months had practically lived with the intellectuals who were to take part in the affair, interviewing them in depth about their attitudes toward the regime and its problems.
Long before Tiananmen, Link was in possession of clues that suggested to him that a basic confrontation was at hand. And he himself became a participant in Tiananmen through his friendship with Fang Lizhi, the physicist and dissident who became something of a folk hero during the tumultuous affair.
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Bella Vista: Fashion Statement from Food to Decor
By Pat Bruno
Restaurant Critic
Bella Vista had to be a labor of love for Dan and Linda Bacin. The Bacins, who own the Bacino's Pizzeria chain, broke out of their pizza-only concept a few years ago when they opened Bacino's Pizzeria/Trattoria, a many-seats Italian restaurant in Naperville.
The instant success of that restaurant, which featured a broad range of upscale Italian dishes, seems to have been the springboard for the newly opened Bella Vista on West Belmont.
Bella Vista is really something. The restaurant is housed in a building that began as a bank in 1929, and got wracked, ravaged and nearly ruined after the bank moved out. Some sharp-eyed developers talked Bacin into opening a restaurant in the building. Then it began: What started out as a labor of love became a love for labor. It seems that with one thing or another, the process of turning this old bank space into a restaurant went on and on. A number of restaurants around town opened and closed in the time it took Bella Vista to open.
Restaurant as art
The end result is spectacular. If you take a right turn just inside the revolving door, you'll end up in the bar area, which is separated from a small dining area by a wall of wines. In one corner are two rustic, strikingly beautiful, copper-clad, wood-burning ovens that are used for pizza and certain pasta dishes.
The main dining room, with its decorative beaux-arts motif, is composed of a series of levels - five, it seems - that starts with an inlaid marble floor and ends way up there, 30 feet or more, with open balcony seating and small dining rooms that feature hand-painted, fresco-like artworks with a Sistine Chapel feel. In fact, the whole restaurant is one big piece of art; everywhere you look there's some type of on-the-wall original art. It must have cost a small fortune to decorate this restaurant.
Is it all too much? In its intrinsic beauty, Bella Vista becomes somewhat of an anomaly on this part of Belmont Avenue, where, to put it politely, businesses that are a dime a dozen are bought and sold for a nickel - over and over again. Then there is the competitive situation. In the two square blocks around Bella Vista, there are a lot of restaurants, and a lot of them are Italian, and a lot of them - an awful lot - serve pizza.
So Bella Vista, which means 'beautiful view' (the name has to have come from what is seen inside the restaurant, because there isn't much of a vista outside) has its work cut out. But Bacin is known as a 'slugger' in the restaurant business; he's not afraid to mix it up with the competition to get his share of the pasta and pizza pie.
Contemporary Italian
Bella Vista serves, as the front of the menu points out, "contemporary Italian cuisine." This is food that doesn't tweak the old Italian mustache; it completely shaves it off. Calamari gets grilled and served with beans, garlic and tomatoes. A salad of endive, watercress, peppered pecans and Gorgonzola makes quite a fashion statement, one that would make iceberg lettuce freeze with envy.
Pasta dishes are built with sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, wild mushrooms, arugula, grilled vegetables and other ingredients that create tiers of flavor. The lasagna was served in an unabashedly urbane, multicolored, multilayered arrangement that bore little resemblance to lasagna as we know it, other than possibly the shape. And the only red sauce I could find on the menu was called a "spicy sun-dried tomato sauce."
Pizzas swivel down the runway of fashion and carry the 'gourmet' label. They come topped with grilled or roasted vegetables, smoked chicken and white beans, peppered shrimp and goat cheese, roasted onions and smoked mozzarella.
A similar pattern
Entrees follow a similar pattern, boasting names that if they weren't in Italian would defy provenance. Maiale allo spiedo, for example, becomes spit-roasted loin of pork served with garlic whipped potatoes, mixed peppers and buttered escarole. Tonno con capellini is grilled tuna with roasted onions, marinated tomatoes and angel-hair pasta. Every part of that dish would be at home on the menu of a nouvelle cuisine restaurant or a French restaurant.
But how does the food stack up against the dazzling decor and the tight but well-balanced menu (roughly six choices listed under each course)? Sometimes it stacks neatly, and sometimes it tumbles. An appetizer of grilled wild mushrooms redolent with rosemary and lavished with shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese was delicious.
But each of the three gourmet pizzas sampled left me only partially satisfied. The toppings were great, but the crusts weren't. Pizza baked in a woodburning oven should look and taste like it came out of a woodburning oven; these didn't. The crust was too thin, and it had no character, no marks from the wood fire, no good chew. But some of the toppings could not have been better. They included crisp and thin grilled asparagus, roasted onions and marinated tomatoes; pesto, tomatoes, pine nuts and fresh mozzarella-vegetables, and goat cheese. The combinations were right on the flavor button and thoroughly enjoyable.
A pasta dish of corkscrew-shaped pasta (cavatappi) in a Parmesan-rich Alfredo sauce with swirls of fresh spinach and pounded thin slices of breast of chicken was a delicious piece of pasta work in every respect. But a spit-roasted herb chicken dish was woefully short on flavor. The chicken was really bland, and the promised herbs were too little and too tame. I could have made a meal, however, on the delicious creamy wild mushroom polenta that was buried under the chicken.
At lunch, a grilled tuna sandwich was a delicious arrangement in which the fillet of fresh tuna, perfectly cooked to a tasty medium-rare, was laid between thin slices of grilled Italian bread and flanked by slices of fresh tomato, thick rings of roasted red onion and a powerfully good roasted red pepper mayonnaise. It was a sandwich not only of substance but also good taste.
Then there was the lasagna. This was a case where I would have enjoyed an un-lasagna, in which a few layers of the pasta were replaced by more of the delicious grilled vegetables. All this lasagna needed to be outstanding was some rearranging.
Desserts, et al.
Desserts were the most consistent of all. A warm apple tart with caramel and macadamia nuts was most pleasing. Another delicious arrangement was the warm chocolate cake, a round, soft, gooey-good cake ringed by small scoops of milk chocolate and white chocolate gelato and raspberry sorbet.
I hate to admit that tiramisu, which means "lift me up" but has been letting me down, is boring me, but it is. I think it's time someone started tinkering with the basic ingredients (ladyfingers and mascarpone cheese being the most important) and came up with something a little different (Bella Vista works a creme Anglaise into the picture).
The wine list, which features Italian and California wines, is extensive and runs from cheap to expensive. Wines by the glass are just plain expensive. And while I'm at it, I'd like to note that $2.75 is too much money for espresso. Most of the fine dining places in town charge less than that. And charging that much makes it less likely that people will order it, so nobody wins.
Mitchell Our Best Writer?
Up in the Old Hotel
And other stories.
By Joseph Mitchell.
Pantheon. $25.
By Stephen Becker
Back in the 1940s and 1950s young writers used to swap stories about established writers and sooner or later someone would say, "Of course, Joe Mitchell is the best writer in America," always the casual "Joe Mitchell," as if one had seen him recently in New York or was in desultory correspondence with him. None of us aspirants actually knew Mitchell, but we delivered the verdict with awful authority. He was (and remains) a legendary figure, publishing rarely. We kids may very well have been right: He may indeed have been (and still be) the best writer in America.
Up in the Old Hotel is Mitchell's collected work, and it comprises his four published volumes, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (a classic that should stand in every American home), Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret, plus several stories that have never been reprinted. "Stories," yes, but they live on the border; they are true stories and high art - reportage made so vivid, so real, that it comes out like fiction of the highest order ("a reporter only in the sense that Defoe was a reporter," wrote one critic).
His titles alone are a kind of literature. One story is called "Hit on the Head with a Cow." Another is "The Mohawks in High Steel," borrowed by Edmund Wilson to lead off his own Apologies to the Iroquois, and "The Same as Monkey Glands," and "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County," and "I Blame it All on Mamma." He can take a group of men or women ('The Gypsy Women') and bring them to life like an old Dutch painter; he can take a place, or a murky region ('The Bottom of the Harbor,' 'Obituary of a Gin Mill,' or the Fulton Street Fish Market), and ease us into it until we feel we have known it all our lives.
And how does he work his magic, this "obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake"? In a prose so simple, so honest, so monolithic that not a word is wasted or affected or vain. Mitchell is to "current American writing" what fine whiskey aged in contented oaken barrels is to soda pop. His accounts share essential qualities with the Authorized Version of the Bible: the prose is direct and solid and dignified, and as a result stately, whatever his subject.
Consider the cats at McSorley's: "He owned as many as 18 at once and they had the run of the saloon. He fed them on bull livers put through a sausage grinder and they became enormous. When it came time to feed them, he would leave the bar, no matter how brisk business was, and bang on the bottom of a tin pan; the fat cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the saloon." Ever wonder what makes good writing? "Bang Bottom Fat Cats Loping Like Leopards" - that's rhythm, that's music, and Mitchell does it all the time. He may not even know that he does it. He is so gifted a natural writer (and so shaped, we must think, by the Authorized Version) that he cannot write badly. He may be the only writer in America of whom that can be said.
Mitchell is in his early 80s now, and has lived the century's history. He is a Carolina man, and while observing the Klan's solemn foofaraw decades ago he "spent so many nights hiding in the weed patch that I failed my final examinations in algebra, the history of North Carolina, English composition, and French, and was not promoted, which I did not mind, as I had already spent two years in the ninth grade and felt at home there."
Any gap in his formal education is irrelevant and obsolete. He is perfectly at home whether telling Block Island stories or quoting Joe Gould quoting William Blake. He will tell you what sea urchins are and how to dress and eat them, not to mention diamondback terrapins. Or true old-fashioned traditional New York steak dinners, before they were corrupted by Manhattan cocktails and modern manners. (His zest for food is contagious; after a couple of these pieces we feel famished. He may have gone hungry as a boy.) But he will also be brilliant about Calypso music or a gifted child or the deaf club.
Indeed, if you read these stories at random, one or two a night, you soon realize that you are assembling a mosaic of American life.
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A Matter of Survival
October, Eight O'Clock
by Norman Manea,
translated by Cornelia Golna, Anselm Hollo, Mara Soceanu Vamos, Max Bleyleben, and Marguerite Dorian and Elliott B. Urdang.
Grove Weidenfeld, 216 pp., $18.95
Louis Begley
Late one Friday: a little boy waits by the window in an unnamed, desolate place. A phantom, "a shadow, withered and gloomy," appears out of the "smoky steppes." It is the boy's mother walking hurriedly, stumbling, bent under a sack heavy with potatoes, beans, prunes, and other scraps of food she earns knitting in houses of peasants whose language she does not understand. The father's work - we are not told what it is - pays only a quarter of a loaf of bread a day. If it weren't for the mother - believing "that we would survive if we held fast to anything that might save us" - they would have "faded very rapidly, right at the beginning." Only this time, in addition to the food which she lays out as always on the floor in six piles, one for each day of the week to come, she has brought in her sack something miraculous. It is a sweater of many colors, like Joseph's coat, knitted of yarn ends scavenged in those alien huts. The sweater is bulky. Avidly, the boy imagines its warmth. The colors sparkle,
as if the magician who would save us wanted to demonstrate to us what he could do. The night enveloped us in smoke, cold, and darkness; we heard nothing but explosions, screams, the barks of the guards, crows, and frogs. We had long ago forgotten such glitter.
Who can this object be for? The mother, to keep her from freezing as she trudges across the steppes? The boy? No, he thinks it must be for the father, "he deserved it more than anybody else, since he had lost all hope long ago." But in fact the sweater is for Mara, the only occupant of the hut the boy names. That is because "she had ended up among us by mistake.... The little girl had nothing to do with the curse on us; she was innocent.... Caught up in the catastrophe, mixed up with us and taken away, she had been brought as far as this." So they "loved her excessively," thinking that "she must return alive at all costs."
So begins 'The Sweater,' the first in the important and beautiful collection of stories by Norman Manea entitled October, Eight O'Clock. From the known facts of Mr. Manea's life, one may infer that the nameless place is a concentration camp, somewhere in Transnistria, a land across the border which then divided Romania from Ukraine; the time is World War II; and the little boy, his family, and the other prisoners in the camp (other than "innocent" Mara, soon to die of typhus) are Romanian Jews deported by the Nazis. But none of these words - Romania, Nazi, German, Jew, the War, typhus - are used, except that once some other boys call the narrator a "kike."
Years pass. One does not know how many. A later story is called 'The Partition.' The boy narrator - who had been one of those children covered with scabies, "with oversized skulls... compressed, stunted, as if an instrument of torture had shrunk them all" - has survived. He is now a middle-aged man, perhaps a trifle paunchy, reclusive, perpetually attired in shabby jeans and turtleneck sweaters which, to his janitor, looks imported. He lives in "an adolescent's mess in an old man's room." The building is also old, well built, with large apartments for rich people. But "they" - we take them to be the Communist authorities - have divided it with "partitions thin as cigarette paper, reallocated living space, redid everything." The janitor watches his tenants' every move:
thick-set, punctual, hygienic. Hairy, swarthy. The eyes of a makeshift expert. A conversationalist by profession.... Always attentive, he notes, makes out, identifies your shopping bag, packages, voice, clothes, who you're with. The rhythm of your steps, any hesitation, the least trace of bad humor, everything is recorded. Such an important building, such different people, in short the community demands its own laws: to know everyone, ward off conflict, to inform correctly, make judicious decisions, have one's eye on everything.
The nameless narrator watches and listens too. His neighbors
wake up, hurry, leave, rush around like greyhounds; flee from the rat race; their eyes empty, they scatter in the streets toward shops, trams, the bus. Lines for cheese, medication, flashlights, buttons, TV sets. A line here, another there: books, light bulbs, pad-locks, shoes, eyeglasses, and so on until nightfall. Twilight eases their exhaustion. Up the staircase of standardized buildings, concrete boxes, the leftover hours pass lazily: armchair, TV, gas heater, ironing, the nightly sarcophagus.
He leaves the city for a resort - an August beach crowded with the recumbent bodies of the vacationing elite of the regime, the paraphernalia of third world chic scattered around them, the sea bringing in "offal, grease, pitchballs, foul-smelling wrack, fruit rinds, rags, empty cans." As yet, he doesn't know how to swim. One step too far into the surf, and he comes close to drowning.
An attenuated affair with a woman who has accompanied him comes to an end. This is in a story called 'The Turning Point.' In a later story, 'Seascape with Birds,' he returns to the same shore in a different season. It seems to him that
The staggering, exhausted bodies should have been brought here, to the deserted edge of the sea, and stretched out on the cold moist autumn sand....
If only the trains carrying them reached here, the few survivors could have descended the high, dusty cliff to the jagged shore. It would have been better had they been forced to watch, for hours on end, the fluid violet horizon, the silky tremor of spring. Transfixed for days, weeks, an entire year, before the same scenery. Had they experienced this feeling of pointlessness, endlessness, they might not have chased after time so greedily....
The boy, the boy at least would have deserved the cold, moist winds, the blaze of mirrors, summer. He should have been brought here long ago, thought the man overcome by indolence and sleep. For years on end, I would have known only the light and the happy sobs of the water, I could have understood why nature means nothing to me...
Thrice and four times blessed were they who perished under the walls of Troy. Between these dreadful parentheses - the sweater and the beach - Mr. Manea evokes with powerful and yet delicate brush strokes, as though in water colors, the nightmare of survival. In 'We Might Have Been Four,' one senses that the war has possibly ended, but not the hunger. The family is still in a "hostile village." They steal a chicken, kill it, pluck its feathers, boil and fry it, gorge "under the spell of the meat's fragrance almost to the point of oblivion." It is just before dawn when they return through the forest: the mother and father, the boy, and Finlanda, the boy's young cousin. The girl wears a dress in which "she seemed to float, to be beyond anyone's reach." She has made it of material the father had offered to the mother and the mother refused: she had grown too thin with the war, it would not have looked good on her. Now the boy sees that
the order in which we had come had broken down. Finlanda had moved far off, ever more absent. Not too far behind her, he [the father] too was moving off, as if caught in the leaves and in the russet light of her flowing hair.
I watched them leave everything behind. I wanted to shout after them, I wanted to hate them, but I liked them, they always joked with me...
Whereas the mother, to whom they owe their survival, now "had no patience, she was always sour, anxious." The theme of betrayal - or is it the stirring of a scandalous spring, an obscene reawakening of senses - returns in the story called 'Proust's Tea.' The boy and the mother are in a railroad waiting room monstrously packed with old people and children. The repatriation trains have been segregated, so that men and young women were dispatched somewhere separately. Although nurses in white uniforms pass through the crowd, distributing tea and biscuits, the rescued cannot understand that they have in fact been saved. The mother
couldn't stop thinking about what might be happening on the train that never arrived. She couldn't have been allowed on board, she knew all too well that she looked like an old woman, no one would have believed that she was not yet thirty. But then she would have had no reason to want to be on the train for men and young women. Surely she too had seen how they had clung to each other without shame - my father and my cousin - the moment they left the lineup.
Eventually, such things are passed over. "Normal times" return. Families survive, "go everywhere they were invited, as if to make up for lost time and to reassure themselves that they had come back alive, that they could start over again with renewed strength." Once again, they live in middle-class apartments. They have maids; like in the old days, the maid sleeps in the basement kitchen. At night, she may receive visits of one soldier or another; one night this family's maid receives instead the now adolescent narrator:
Here are my feverish hands, the curls, the uncovered wetness, open to all promises, summer green darkened in the curled hair, phosphorescent with bacteria. I bite into the heart of her shoulder.
Young boys learn to answer questions such as "Did they beat you?" Driven by their parents and relatives, or by their own anguish, all at once they write poems, pass examinations, excel in mathematics; they are awarded prizes at schools they had never before attended. The narrator is such a boy. He "had made up the lost classes; devoured textbooks, even those others found dull; he swallowed everything; always hungry, concentrated, impelled by his own thirst."
But, at a certain moment, even that may not be enough. The boy's identity must be defined - for grownups, the issue may not arise, their identities had been formed and, however tattered, can be reassumed. Such a moment is examined in 'The Instructor.' The father and the mother arrange for the boy to be taught Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Mr. Manea does not name either the language or the ceremony; the teacher - an old man dressed humbly in black like a petty functionary or a shopkeeper - says to the boy:
You're about to turn thirteen, to become a man. That's why I've been called. The ceremony is not complicated. The language is old, beautiful. The greatest book of all was written in it. That is why the language has survived to this day.
It is as though the parents tried to attach the limb that has been severed:
suddenly he was seeing them from a great distance. They seemed childish, ridiculous. They did not even believe in the ceremony for which they were preparing him. It was just the need for yet another sign that all was normal. Nothing else but the rush to accumulate proof, to have relatives and neighbors and former friends confirm that, yes, everything was in order that life had reaccepted them, that it was just like before, that they were the same as before.
The narrator does not rebel for long. His parents hold a trump card, the ability to control his movements. In addition to the Torah, he is poring over the Communist Manifesto. What he reads there, he believes and wants to believe. That is his road to an identity and a "normal" new life. A selection is about to be made for a great honor: attendance at a summer camp for Soviet Pioneer Scouts, the elect among secular believers.
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Santa Maria and Spaceships
Philip Glass's Columbus opera sails into the Met
KATRINE AMES
During an early rehearsal of Philip Glass's 'The Voyage' at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, one orchestra member asked conductor Bruce Ferden how long the first act would run. "Forty-five minutes," the meastro replied. "Oh," said the musician. "So if we played it without repeats it would last five?"
Commissioned for the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World, 'The Voyage' sailed into the Met right on schedule last week, exactly 500 years after the famous landing. Unfortunately, it was also about a decade too late: minimalism crested years ago. Though much of 'The Voyage' is lovely, especially its lush orchestral passages, and though Glass is using a wider harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary now, he's riding the same old wave. Still, 'The Voyage' is a hit. All six performances are sold out, in part because Glass has a legion of downtown followers. And there is the faint but real possibility, particularly after the success last season of John Corigliano's 'The Ghosts of Versailles,' that some Met subscribers are willing to give new operas a chance.
Conservative operagoers will not suffer. 'The Voyage' is scored for acoustic instruments- no computer clicks or electronic beeps here. But there's too little that surprises: Glass's famous arpeggios abound, and the chromaticism is pretty but predictable. (Someone has already renamed the piece "Recycled Glass.") It makes considerable demands on the performers, and too few on the audience. The concept was the composer's: not to tell the story of Columbus, who gets very little stage time, but to explore the notion of exploration, of space, of time, of the mind. It's an intriguing idea and a neat way to sidestep much of the Columbus controversy. But, hampered by a muddled libretto by playwright David Henry Hwang ('M. Butterfly'), an overblown production and his own failure to shape character, Glass doesn't pull it off.
The opera begins with a touching prologue, as a scientist (modeled on Stephen Hawking) hovers above the stage in a wheelchair, ruminating: "The voyage lies where/The vision lies." He summons up a planet-filled sky, and flies away. After that, the vision falters: the action moves from the late ice age, when four intergalactic travelers crash to earth in their spaceship, to 1492, as a hallucinating Columbus nears land. The last act, set in 2092, takes an abrupt tonal shift. Frantic and hilarious, it features twin archeologists (imagine Hans and Franz as Margaret Mead) who have unearthed crystals left behind by the ice-age astronauts. Finally, in an epilogue, the dead Queen Isabella tries to seduce the dying Columbus. Amid the mess are some fine performances, particularly Patricia Schuman as the spaceship Commander and Timothy Noble as Columbus. There are some great moments, as when the Commander tangos with earthlings who wear bird headdresses- like 'West Side Story' with feathers. But too often, my mind took a little voyage of its own.
The Rise From Rice to Riches
A 10-hour TV series tracks Asia's economic miracle
JOSHUA HAMMER
Five years in the making, 'The Pacific Century,' a 10-part documentary now appearing on the public television net-work PBS, is a history lesson that goes down easy. Produced by Alex Gibney, a filmmaker whose critically acclaimed 'Battle for Eastern Airlines' on PBS chronicled the rancorous 1989 machinists' strike, this series covers a vastly larger chunk of time. Over 10 hours, it traces East Asia's transition from dependence on America to political and economic vibrancy, concentrating on Japan but also touching on China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Inevitably, the series, which will appear in a number of Asian and European countries in the coming months, is flawed by tedious passages, omissions and eat-your-spinach commentary from those inescapable talking heads. But for every dull spot, it comes alive with newsreels and pop-culture artifacts - from the appalling American 1910 film "comedy," 'That Chink at Golden Gulch,' which shows cowboys gleefully murdering a pigtailed coolie, to early Sony promotional films.
'The Pacific Century' is most riveting when it weaves Asia's past with its present. One of the best episodes, 'The Two Coasts of China,' places the xenophobia of today's Communists in the context of China's ancient hostility toward the outside world. Gibney's camera crew traveled to Mongolia and got scenes of native filmmakers re-creating Genghis Khan's invasion of China, complete with hundreds of soldier-extras riding horseback across the steppes. To capture the era of the Opium War (when the British navy overwhelmed the Chinese to protect its contraband trade), he serves up details about "Miami Vice"-style smuggling trips, Indian opium factories and entrepreneurs such as Warren Delano, Franklin D. Roosevelt's grandfather. Framing the old conflicts are modern images of capitalist Hong Kong - as threatening to today's Communist regime as the British "barbarians" were to the Manchus.
Gibney does a terrific job exploring Japan's history, showing how it grafted Western-style colonialism, culture and democracy to its own society. Beginning with the rise of the Emperor Meiji, he devotes four episodes to the country's 130-year evolution from a nation of samurai to soldiers to salarymen. It's jolting to realize that the Mitsubishi Corp. once ran Battleship Island, a 19th-century Alcatraz where coal miners lived packed into wretched "octopus dens" and faced execution if they tried to escape. Particularly touching are scenes from the occupation, in which Japan aped all things American: a patronizing American newsreel shows "a Jap jazz band for Joe and Mrs. Joe" and a Japanese Elvis attempts to sing "(You Ain't Nothin' But a) Hound Dog." But footage of strikes and anti-American riots in 1960 explodes the common misconception that Japan's transformation to economic superpower was smooth. In one moment from 1960 captured on videotape, a right-wing assassin rushes across a stage and thrusts a samurai sword into a socialist leader. It's a chilling image of the violent, medieval forces still seething in the Japanese psyche.
Striking themes: Once it gets past Japan, however, 'The Pacific Century' loses focus. (Gibney's original plan was to make a documentary just on Japan, but the Annenberg/CPB Project, which chipped in $2.5 million of the $4.5 million budget, wanted him to tackle the whole Pacific Rim.) South Korea's rapid modernization and pro-democracy uprisings are vividly portrayed, but his treatment of the Chinese Revolution is cursory and disorganized, and much of the material on Taiwan and Singapore is just plain dull. And while Peter Coyote's fine, understated narration lends resonance, your eyes may glaze over when the documentary falls back on a battery of droning academics.
A documentary this sprawling is also bound to be flawed by omissions. It doesn't touch Thailand's boom or Cambodia's tragedy, skirts the Vietnam War and neglects Deng Xiaoping. A segment on the Philippines begs for more scenes from Cory Aquino's 1986 revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos; an episode about Indonesian leader Sukarno (described by a comrade as "a combination of George Washington and Clark Gable") inexplicably says nothing about the thousands of leftists murdered in the 1965 military coup - one of the darkest chapters of Asian history. And it could use more about the underside of the Japanese miracle - the stock-market scandals, the bursting of the real-estate bubble. But what's striking are themes and, above all, images: a shabby crowd at a Tokyo fashion show in 1960, poised between memories of abject poverty and dreams of prosperity. And in a tacky video from the People's Republic, a young woman sings: "Hurry up 1997/ Then I can go to Hong Kong/ Come soon 1997/ I want to have a wild time." Moments like that one poignantly capture the yearnings of a region still new to affluence and democracy.
Playing with Paradox
Director of the moment: Canada's Robert Lepage
SCOTT SULLIVAN in Paris
A plain white sheet: behind it, the spectral outline of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis rolls up its sleeve and ties off a vein in its forearm. Looming stage left, a giant hypodermic syringe aims itself at the inside of the jazzman-junkie's elbow, strikes - and ejaculates a jet of liquid across the sheet. Blackout.
Few stage directors would dare mount such a scene. Fewer still could bring it off. But for Robert Lepage, a 35-year-old French Canadian who is captivating audiences across Europe, the Miles Davis sketch is all in an evening's work. All his productions abound in wit, surprises and unlikely combinations. When he stages Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' he has the Capulets speak English, the Montagues Canadian French. When he presents a murder mystery situated in Quebec, the action takes place before the Berlin wall. In Lepage's 'Coriolanus,' the playing area consists of a 6-by-16-foot window; when the hero rises to address his countrymen, his head vanishes from view. In several productions, the hero flies overhead on wires.
A few critics tax Lepage with superficiality. But the vast majority see him as the brightest new star in the Western theatrical firmament. Not since the early 1970s - when the American renegade Bob Wilson first mesmerized European theatergoers with his slow-motion stage magic - has a director made more waves. Already this season Lepage has presented five plays at the prestigious Autumn Festival in Paris. This week he is directing 'Needles and Opium' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Last summer he created a dazzling 'Midsummer Night's Dream' at London's National Theatre. He works in Frankfurt and Munich this winter, then returns to his Thé<*_>a-circ<*/>tre Rep<*_>e-grave<*/>re in Quebec. Already, European critics are classing Lepage with the great theatrical innovators of the late 20th century: Wilson, Peter Brook, Peter Stein and Patrice Chéreau.
He is a somewhat unlikely candidate for such adulation. A painstaking minimalist who uses small casts and deliberately limited stage spaces, Lepage implicitly rejects the lavishness of most postmodernist productions. More than that, he sees himself as an intensely local phenomenon. He is a Québécois patriot, wedded to the archaic (sometimes even incomprehensible) French of the province. But Lepage has turned his apparent limitations into real-life assets. He crowds his tiny stages with psychological and physical action. And he studs his texts with brash cultural allusions - from Leonardo da Vinci to Jean-Paul Sartre to the East German secret police - which he treats with the infective enthusiasm of a provincial who has just come up to town.
"Modern theater people never stop talking about communication," says Lepage. "They've forgotten that the main point is communion." To knit his audiences into theatrical congregations, he uses every trick in the book - from cinematic subtitles to flashbacks to full frontal nudity - plus some he has invented himself. "Audiences today have learned everything from television," Lepage points out. "Because of the TV and even the VCR, I can permit myself all kinds of gimmicks that were off-limits ten years ago." There is a certain slightly unfinished quality about some of Lepage's work. But he defends even that quality on interesting theoretical grounds. "If the images are too perfect," he argues, "you forget you are at the theater. You might as well be sitting at the movies with your girlfriend."
Nobody who attends a Lepage performance will confuse it with a movie. "Polygraph," one of the plays he presented in Paris this fall, follows (and pokes fun at) the conventions of the B-movie thriller: the sinister detective in a snap-brim hat, the unconventional femme fatale, the tense meetings on subway platforms. But Lepage transforms this familiar material, chops it up into quick, punchy episodes, sows his trail with false clues, blends the central plot with themes from Shakespeare ('Hamlet,' mostly). In the end, the raw material is transmuted into a challenging puzzle about human guilt, responsibility and punishment. The murderer is never identified.
Lepage is a searcher, a ransacker of European culture, which, he points out, his native Canada so acutely lacks. Two of his plays - 'Vinci' and 'Needles and Opium' - are renderings of his own experiences as a provincial on the Old Continent. He searches out the hotel room where Jean-Paul Sartre once lived and wrote.</doc></docx>
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Theology and the Physical Sciences
Until early modern times the relations between theology and science were as harmonious as between theology and philosophy. Indeed, no sharp line of demarcation existed between philosophy and the natural sciences. As we have seen in the last chapter, systematic theology has retained, even to the present day, very close links with philosophy. The relations between theology and science have, however, been strained by a number of crises such as the Galileo affair in the early seventeenth century and the controversies about human evolution in the mid-nineteenth century. In our own century battles have continued to rage between fundamentalist Christians and scientists, as the Scopes 'monkey trial' of 1925 and the court cases about 'creation science' in the early 1980s bear witness. These conflicts direct our attention to the question of systematic theology's relation to the physical sciences.
Blondel on Faith and Science
Vatican I, without speaking directly of the physical sciences, laid down some general principles in its teaching on faith and reason. It affirmed that the two types of cognition can never be at odds and that they mutually support each other. Reason can assist faith by enabling it to construct apologetic arguments and theological systems. Faith assists reason by extending reason's sphere into the realm of supernatural mysteries and by delivering reason from errors, thanks to the surer light of revelation. Within its own proper sphere, the council declared, scientific reason enjoys a proper autonomy. Deriving from God, "the lord of the sciences," reason can, with the help of grace, lead people to God.
A generation after Vatican I, the French philosopher Maurice Blondel attempted to apply the teaching of the council to the academic situation of his own day. In the last two parts of a four-part article on faith, first published in 1906, he took up the linkage between faith and science. The relationship can be variously conceived, he said, in correspondence with different conceptions of science. According to the classical concept of science, taken over by Thomas Aquinas from the ancient Greeks, the concepts and theories of science are controlled by their objects and are intended to reproduce the structures of external reality. In that case science could directly confirm, or directly collide with, philosophy and faith.
According to a second view, held by some of Blondel's contemporaries such as Pierre Duhem, science was a system of symbols or notations devised for the purpose of accomplishing certain practical tasks. Science in that case would make no metaphysical claims. The only criterion would be its fruitfulness. In that case science and faith could coexist in mutual indifference.
Blondel was dissatisfied with both theories. The first, demanding concordism, failed to give science its proper autonomy. The second theory, by divorcing science from the real, would eliminate the possibility of any interaction between science and faith. In Blondel's estimation, science was autonomous to the extent that it was concerned with formal coherence, logical force, and inner consistency. But insofar as science aims to serve the needs of human life, it must insert itself into the real order. Even though scientific discovery does not have directly metaphysical significance, it does refer to the real order. Its notations are not merely arbitrary or conventional. It yields an authentic, though limited, grasp of truth. Moral and religious thinkers must take account of certitudes acquired through science: for example, that the firmament is not a solid vault; that there are antipodes.
According to Vatican I, Blondel notes, science and faith must cooperate, even while following their distinct methods. Conflict can arise, as the council stated, either from a misunderstanding of faith or from false conclusions of reason. Faith gives rise to confusion when it is falsely reduced to exterior formulations or when people look for literal agreement with scientific statements, overlooking the different modes of discourse. Science can be responsible for conflicts when it usurps the competence of faith.
A measure of friction between science and faith, said Blondel, is inevitable. Such friction can lead to advances. When science operates rightly in its own proper sphere, its findings can help believers over-come their unconscious narrowness. By adjusting to the progress of geology, archaeology, and other sciences, faith gains in solidity. For the same God, as Vatican I declared, is the lord of science and of theology. God never contradicts himself.
Vatican II, in its Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, extended the teaching of Vatican I along lines that Blondel would have welcomed. After affirming with Vatican I that the sciences have legitimate autonomy within their proper spheres of competence (GS 60), the Pastoral Constitution went on to admonish theologians to cooperate with experts in the various sciences and to propose the Church's teaching on God, humanity, and the world in ways that take advantage of recent scientific advances (GS 62).
Message of John Paul II
John Paul II, even before becoming pope, had a keen interest in the sciences; as pope he has maintained close relationships with leading scientists through instrumentalities such as the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. In 1983, at the 350th anniversary of the publication of Galileo's Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences, John Paul II remarked that the Church's experience during and after the Galileo affair "has led to a more mature attitude and a more accurate grasp of the authority proper to her." He added: "It is only through humble and assiduous study that she learns to dissociate the essentials of faith from the scientific systems of a given age, especially when a culturally influenced reading of the Bible seemed to be linked to an obligatory cosmogony." Already in 1979 the pope had established a commission to make a careful examination of the Galileo question. A member of the commission has interpreted the condemnations of 1616 and 1633 as having merely disciplinary, rather than doctrinal, force.
A new phase in the development of the Catholic understanding of the relationship between religion and science was inaugurated by the Vatican-sponsored study week held at Castelgandolfo on September 21-26, 1987, to mark the 300th anniversary of the publication of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis principia mathematica. In a message of June 1, 1988, reflecting on this conference, Pope John Paul II presented a very open, confident, and encouraging assessment of the relations between religion and science. Ernan McMullin, an expert in the field, calls this message "without a doubt the most important and most specific papal statement on the relations between religion and science in recent times." Without preempting the prerogatives of working theologians, philosophers, and scientists to make their own applications, the Holy Father proposes a program that appears to be feasible, valuable, and even necessary for the good of all concerned.
The general position taken by John Paul II may be indicated by reference to the standard typology of the relationships between religion and the sciences: conflict, separation, fusion, dialogue, and the like.
Very clearly the pope rejects the position of conflict, in which it would be necessary to choose either science or religion to the exclusion of the other. This rejection can take either of two forms. One form is a 'scientism' such as that of Thomas Henry Huxley, who asserted in a sermon in 1866: "There is but one kind of knowledge, and but one method of acquiring it," namely, science. By the universal application of scientific method, positivists believed, it would be possible to dispel the dark clouds of dogma and inaugurate a bright new era of free assent to universally acknowledged truth. This triumphalist variety of scientism is not yet dead. The periodical Free Inquiry, for example, promotes science and reason as opposed to faith and religion. The 'scientistic' program tends to reduce quality to quantity and to emphasize the technological aspects of life. But it also makes room for a certain mystical exaltation of science, to the point where it becomes a pseudoreligion, involving what the pope in his message calls an "unconscious theology" (M 14). Jacques Monod and Carl Sagan are sometimes cited, though not by the pope, as examples of scientists who tend to extrapolate beyond the proper limits of their own discipline.
On the other hand, the pope no less firmly rejects the alternative possibility - the religionism of those who oppose science in the name of faith. In this framework theology becomes, as the pope warns, a pseudoscience (M 14). This may be judged to have occurred in the case of the 'creation science' taught by some American fundamentalists. The 'creationist' position, as Langdon Gilkey and others have shown, is in fact antiscientific. According to the sounder view, held by the pope in his message, faith cannot do the work of science, nor can the Bible function as a textbook of astronomy or biology.
The second major position that the pope rejects may be called separationism. Some thoughtful Christians solve the problem by relegating religion and science to separate spheres. This kind of separation has become almost axiomatic in Protestant theology since Immanuel Kant, who confined the competence of theoretical reason to the order of phenomena and regarded religious beliefs as deliverances of practical reason. Not only liberal theologians, such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, but neo-orthodox thinkers such as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Tillich accepted this division into two spheres. In an extreme reaction against the excesses of Galileo's judges Tillich writes:
Knowledge of revelation cannot interfere with ordinary knowledge. Likewise, ordinary knowledge cannot interfere with knowledge of revelation. There is no scientific theory which is more favorable to the truth of revelation than any other theory. It is disastrous for theology if theologians prefer one scientific view to others on theological grounds. And it was humiliating for theology when theologians were afraid of new theories for religious reasons, trying to resist them as long as possible, and finally giving in when resistance had become impossible. This ill-conceived resistance of theologians from the time of Galileo to the time of Darwin was one of the causes of the split between religion and secular culture in the past centuries.
McMullin, in a recent article, notes that
at the height of the 'creation-science' dispute in the U.S. some years ago, the National Academy of Sciences issued a declaration maintaining that religion and science are, in principle, entirely separate domains, one pertaining to faith and the other to reason, and hence of no possible relevance to one another. The new papal message takes issue with this convenient and popular way of avoiding the risks of conflict.
In our own day philosophers and theologians influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein frequently assert, as does Richard Braithwaite, that religious language is not intended to communicate cognitive truth but to recommend a way of life and to evoke a set of attitudes. In a somewhat similar vein, George Lindbeck maintains that doctrinal statements are "communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action." In all these theories the dogmas of the Church, even though they may seem to describe objective realities, are reinterpreted as symbolic expressions either describing the inner experience of the speaker or regulating the conduct of the worshiping community.
Some philosophers of science regard science as directly informative about the real order. But others, as we have noted in our discussion of Blondel, hold that science has a purely pragmatic aim, and thus that it cannot deny any claims of revealed religion about objective reality. Thus they rule out the possibility of conflict from the side of science.
Peace between religion and science is achieved in these systems, but only at the price of depriving religion or science of its capacity to say anything true about the world of ordinary experience. Wisely in my judgment, John Paul II takes a position akin to that of Blondel. He refuses to settle for a world divided into two cultures, literary and scientific, as described by C.P. Snow in his classic essay. Interaction, according to the pope, is necessary for the proper functioning of both religion and science.</doc><doc register="religion" n="02">
CHAPTER FIVE
RECONSTRUCTING CHRISTIAN NARRATIVE ETHICS
ETHICAL PARADOX AFTER AUSCHWITZ
Despite the case I have made for the influence of Luther's two-kingdom ethic on the formation of the demonic double among the Nazi doctors, I would argue that the failure of Christian ethics during the Shoah can be thought of as a failure to maintain its two-kingdom ethic. Although Christianity began as a holy community, a separated community embodying an anthropological ethic of being in but not of the world, from the time of Constantine its ethic largely collapsed into a cosmological ethic of sacred cosmic order. Luther's Reformation theology, which significantly shaped the ethos of Germany, attempted to reinstitute a two-kingdom ethic. Opting for a paradoxical relation between the church and the world, he separated the realms of the sacred and the secular, which he believed had been dangerously fused together in the medieval hierarchical order of Christendom. The way in which he separated the two realms of church and state, however, permitted the paradoxical relation between them to collapse once again into a cosmological ethic and prepared the way for the eventual formation of the Deutsch Christian gospel of the Aryan Jesus.
The collapse of Luther's two-kingdom ethic is primarily the result of his privatization of religious experience. As the secularization of public order expanded during the Renaissance and Reformation, the public dimension of religious experience contracted. For Luther, the language of religion is the language of the inner person, and the language of the secular public order (of politics, science, etc.) belongs to the outer person. Because the kingdom of God is restricted to the inner and the kingdom of this world to the outer, the relation between the two ethical orders is rendered complementary rather than dialectical. The essential element of dialectical tension between the two ethical orders is eliminated. As a result the two kingdoms fit together too comfortably. The ethical tension between the cosmological and anthropological orders collapses into a sacral ethic of unquestioning obedience. The result is a pseudo-two-kingdom ethic.
Luther's instincts were right in attempting to recover a two-kingdom ethic, but his own version failed to alter substantially the Constantinian model of church-state relations. After Auschwitz, Luther's paradoxical two-kingdom ethic must undergo a fundamental revision. What is at stake here is more than restructuring Protestant ethics. As I suggested in the introduction, a two-realm or two-kingdom ethic is an essential feature of every anthropological tradition (e.g., Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Socratic) and essential to the critique of culture. Therefore, understanding what went wrong with two-kingdom ethics in the Christian tradition can point the way to a viable reconstruction that is of value to all holy communities.
Jacques Ellul offers a reconstruction of two-kingdom ethics which directly addresses the weakness of Luther's ethic. Ellul, a sociologist as well as a theologian in the Barthian tradition, has written over forty books on the social and ethical aspects of our technological civilization. As a sociologist, Ellul took on the task of identifying, analyzing, and articulating the "cosmological ethic" of our technological civilization. But as a theologian, Ellul then responded to that ethic by developing his own desacralizing "anthropological ethic." Like Richard Rubenstein and Arthur Cohen, Ellul sees the cold and calculating technobureaucratic structure of modern civilization as demonic and dehumanizing. The technicist ideal of efficiency subverts all other values, for once a society has opted for the most efficient solution in every area of human activity (his definition of a technicist society), human beings must conform to technical requirements, no matter how dehumanizing, for less efficient solutions simply cannot compete. Ellul's sociological work seems to suggest that human existence is determined by and conformed to technical and social forces, but that remains true only within the horizon of a cosmological ethic. Within the horizon of an anthropological ethic of transcendence, individuals may yet find it possible to exercise the freedom to call society into question and initiate a social transformation - one that brings the Is under the judgment of the Ought. This possibility occurs, Ellul insists, not when a cosmological ethic is replaced by an anthropological ethic but, as Eric Voegelin would agree, when one embraces both in a paradoxical relationship.
This paradox is expressed in Ellul's contrast of the sacred and the holy, which parallels Voegelin's distinction between cosmological and anthropological ethics (distinctions that I have adopted as foundational for my own work). Ellul departs from ordinary usage here by treating the terms sacred and holy as antonyms rather than as synonyms. The sacred performs the sociological function of integration and legitimation. Its positive function is to create a sense of order within which human life can be carried on. But its demonic propensity is to create an absolute or "closed" order (in which Is = Ought) that prevents the continuing transformation of self and society. Without such a self-transcending openness to the future, life ceases to be either human or free.
Thus for human life to be creative, Ellul argues, the claims of the social order to be sacred and unalterable must be relativized by that which is its opposite - the holy. The holy is that which is Wholly Other than society. Where the sacred demands integration and closure, the holy (as the Hebrew word qadosh indicates) demands separation and openness to transformation. A consciousness of the holy creates a feeling of tension and separateness between self and society. That tension prevents the social order from becoming absolute because it prevents the total integration of the self into society. This, in turn, forces the institutional structures of society to remain fluid and open to further development.
The paradox of freedom is that it is always an act of revolt against a limit. But the real limit, for Ellul, is a "combination of what is actually impassable and the inviolably sacred." Our sense of sacral awe makes us accept the limits of a given social order as absolute and also makes us seek to conform to these limits. Only our consciousness of the holy can enable us to desacralize and rehabilitate the sacred so as to open a social order to further development in the name of the infinite. The possibility of ethical freedom depends on the possibility of having a hope in something radically other than our technological civilization and its promises of fulfillment. For the hopes promoted by the mass media of our civilization serve only to integrate us into the collective social order as a sacred status quo. By contrast, a radically other hope would individuate persons, set them apart from the collectivizing influences of mass media, and give them the critical autonomy that belongs to an anthropological ethic.
Ellul's designation for this unique hope is "apocalyptic hope." When he speaks of apocalypse, however, he is not speaking of it in the literal and popular sense. On the contrary, "hope ... can be situated only in an apocalyptic line of thought, not that there is hope because one has an apocalyptic concept of history, but rather, that there is apocalypse because one lives in hope." Hope is apocalyptic not because it expresses a literal expectation of the end of the world but because the hope expressed in the book of Revelation breaks radically with the present order of things in order to inaugurate a new creation. An apocalyptic hope is a hope in the one who is both Wholly Other and the end (telos) of all things. Every person who is moved to embrace such a hope participates in the transcending freedom of God and inserts that freedom into society as a limit on its claims to absoluteness. Such a hope ruptures one's psychological dependence on 'this (technological) world' and permits one to break free and engage in acts that violate the sacral status of efficient technique, the ideological or mythological hopes of consumerism, and the political illusions that dominate our technical civilization.
When Ellul speaks about this kind of hope, he takes Judaism to be the model and argues that Christians must also learn to live a diaspora style of existence as a holy community. "Israel is a people centered entirely on hope, living by that alone .... As the one hoping people of the world, it is Israel which provides us with the model for this age ... an example of the incognito [i.e., its hidden presence as a holy community within the larger society]. In this age ... I think that Christians ... should take that as a model." Indeed, "if history is looked at closely, and without the usual Christian prejudice, it turns out to have been forged at least as much by the Jewish incognito as by Christian activism." "There is only one political endeavor on which world history now depends; that is the union of the Church and Israel. ... These two communities ... must join forces so that, in effect, this Word of God might finally be written. ... It would be written in counterpoint to the technological history of these times." Ellul is speaking not of an institutional merger but of a conversion of the church to share the same hope so as to support Israel "in its long march through the same night and toward the same Kingdom." The Christian community is the wild olive branch that has been grafted onto the cultivated olive tree of Judaism precisely to share in this hope.
Ellul's importance for post-Shoah Christian theology and ethics is linked to the fact that he is one of those rare Christian theologians who takes the Jewish experience of faith seriously in its own right. The essence of apocalyptic hope is embodied, for Ellul, in the Jewish tradition of chutzpah or wrestling with God. In an age of God's silence and abandonment, hope assaults God and wrestles with God. Prayer, which Ellul calls "the ultimate act of hope," is the "demand that God not keep silence. ... [It is] a striving with God, of whom one makes demands, whom one importunes, whom one attacks constantly, whose silence and absence one would penetrate at all costs. It is a combat to oblige God to respond, to reveal himself anew." It is motivated by a "commitment on behalf of man [that] is decisively bound to the commitment with God," from which "all further radicalism, of behavior, of style of life and of action" comes.
For Ellul, a Christian ethic emerges out of this shared paradoxical hope against hope. The only force that is a match for the integrating power of the fascination and hope inspired by the sacred is an apocalyptic hope inspired by the holy. Herein lies the ethical power of the dualistic symbolism of anthropological ethics. Only one whose hope is not in this world would even dare to contravene the present sacred order. Every act of inefficiency in the name of human dignity, every act of intelligent compromise in a world of politically absolute positions, is an audacious act that serves to delegitimate the present order and introduce new possibilities of ethical freedom.
Apocalyptic hope gives birth to an ethic of holiness, that is, of separation from the world. But unlike the sectarian, Ellul is not speaking of physical separation but of psychological and spiritual separation - that is, a change of hopes, from the claims for hope and meaning mediated by mass media to a hope in the Wholly Other. It is "separation ... only for the sake of mission. The break has to come first, but it implies rediscovery of the world, society, and one's neighbor in a new type of relationship."
Ellul's intellectual roots are in the work of the twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth and the nineteenth-century philosopher S<*_>o-slash<*/>ren Kierkegaard. But his fundamental stance on Christian ethics goes back even further, to the theologies of the Reformation and especially to Martin Luther's two-kingdom ethic. According to H.R. Niebuhr, Christians have historically responded to the problem of the two kingdoms in one of five different ways. At one extreme, Christians have preached a 'Christ against culture.' This is the sectarian option that sees the world as totally evil and seeks to withdraw from the larger culture into its own separate world.</doc><doc register="religion" n="03">
Toward a Postliberal Religious Education
BY OWEN F. CUMMINGS
Cummings argues the need for a postliberal religious education that immerses the learner in Christian culture.
There is a considerable degree of division and confusion in Catholic circles about the nature, role, and function of religious education. At the international level, for example, there is the debate surrounding the proposed Catechism for the Universal Church. At a national level, in England, there is a degree of interdiocesan controversy over the recent religions syllabus for high school, Weaving the Web. Questions are asked: Is it too experiential? Is there enough Christian doctrine in it? Is the method too phenomenological? Something of this unease lay behind the contributions of Padraic O'Hare and Francis D. Kelly in The Living Light in 1984.
The purpose of this essay is to address that unease through a critical application of George Lindbeck's The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. This book has given rise to wide-ranging analysis and criticism since its publication, and has been described by Walter Kasper as the "... most noteworthy advance on the level of systematic theology" on discussions of foundational theology, and by David Ford as "a proposed 'paradigm shift' for conceiving the nature of religion, doctrine, and theology."
What Is Postliberal Theology?
The term 'postliberal' is ambiguous. It seems to connote conservatism in the pejorative sense of the word, insularity, and even fundamentalism. Nothing could be further from Lindbeck's intention and position. Described by David Tracy as "... the major theological contributor to genuine ecumenical dialogue among the major confessions," the core of Lindbeck's postliberalism is best outlined in his own words:
The four centuries of modernity are coming to an end. the The individualistic foundationalism rationalism, always wavering between skeptical relativism and totalitarian absolutism, is being replaced ... by an understanding of knowledge and belief as socially and linguistically constituted. Ideologies rooted in Enlightenment rationalism are collapsing.
The liberalism to which Lindbeck is opposed is "individualistic foundational rationalism," the child of the Enlightenment. 'Postliberalism' is probably best understood as a heuristic term, representing a more nuanced approach to knowledge and belief as socially rather than individually rooted.
While Lindbeck has coined the term 'postliberal theology,' and is its best known representative, it is a way of doing theology that is shared by others, for example, the late Hans Frei, David Kelsey, Ronald Theimann, and Brevard Childs, all having some connection with Yale. At the same time, it is not a school in the usual sense of that word. These theologians (and others) share a methodological family resemblance in refusing to allow the modern, 'enlightened' secular world as such to determine the agenda for theology or for the church. To plot a more detailed profile of postliberal theology, the best way to proceed is to attend to Lindbeck's own categories for theology as presented in The Nature of Doctrine.
Models of Doctrine
Lindbeck describes three types or theories of doctrine: cognitivist-propositional, experiential-expressivist, and cultural-linguistic. One of the most articulate commentators on postliberal theology, William Placher, advocates a somewhat simpler nomenclature. Placher speaks of the cognitive model, the revisionist model (= experiential-expressive), and the postliberal model (= cultural-linguistic). For the sake of simplicity I shall rely for the most part on Placher's terminology.
The cognitive model of doctrine insists that doctrines make truth claims about objective states of affairs. There is little or no historical awareness or perspective for the doctrinal cognitivist: "For a propositionalist, if a doctrine is once true, it is always true, and if it is once false, it is always false." The lack of informed historical perspective often has the effect of making doctrine extrinsic to the believing community, impedes a sensitive perception of the evolution of doctrine, and is ecumenically sterile.
The revisionist model of doctrine posits that doctrines express experiences and attitudes of the believing subject. They are noninformative symbols of inner feelings, attitudes, existential orientations. Theologians from Schleiermacher through Rahner and Lonergan to David Tracy exemplify this approach, according to Lindbeck. This approach sits ill with the cognitive approach because it underplays the objective status of doctrines. There is a common assumption among revisionists that we have experience and then search for a suitable language in which to express the meaning of the experience. Christian doctrines are the expression of the prelinguistic experience of Christian people. Presumably, for revisionists, the same would hold true of Buddhist doctrines or Muslim doctrines.
Lindbeck articulates a third model of doctrine, the postliberal or cultural-linguistic model, which he judges to be the most appropriate. In this model, doctrines specify rules for Christian speech and action. Taking his cue from the philosophy of language of the latter Wittgenstein, Lindbeck insists that language does not express an experience that precedes it. On the contrary, language makes experience possible. Doctrines, whatever else they may be, are language. And so, Walter Kasper can comment that "dogmas or theological doctrines do not have an expressive meaning, but primarily a regulative and performative meaning." This regulative character of doctrine insists that the primary function of church doctrines "is their use ... as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude, and action." Whereas in the revisionist or experiential model the movement is from internal experience to external expression; in the postliberal model it is the reverse. We "internalize through stories, symbols, rituals, behavior, and many other influences, the 'language' through which we experience reality."
Some Criticisms of Lindbeck
Lindbeck's work has met with criticism, the clearest sign that he is being taken seriously by the "public of the academy," to use a prominent revisionist phrase! Kasper has made the point that labeling Lindbeck as neo-orthodox or neo-conservative advances nothing: "Such strategies of labeling and dismissing contribute nothing ... to true understanding and to progress in constructive discussion of the issues that we are, after all, faced with." Kasper's point is well taken, but, of course, it applies with equal force to Lindbeck's labeling of others.
Perhaps the major criticism of Lindbeck has to do with the a priori difficulty of representing the irreducible particularity and complexity of anyone's thought in clear-cut categories such as cognitivist-propositionalism or experiential-expressivism. Commentators of different theological persuasions have lodged versions of this critique. Colman O'Neill, a Thomist, believes that any Thomist "will have a basic sympathy for the cultural-linguistic analysis." At the same time, O'Neill is doubtful whether "any theory of religion or doctrine exists, at least within Christianity, which corresponds to the description given of cognitivism ...." A propositionalist account of faith and doctrine is sometimes considered a major characteristic of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. This may be true of some of the manualists, but even there caution is required because of Catholicism's heightened emphasis on symbolism, not least in sacramental theology.
At the other end of the theological spectrum, the position of revisionism, David Tracy considers that thinkers in the tradition have moved on in at least the last fifteen years to an explicitly hermeneutical position, providing a more nuanced view of experience and language than Lindbeck allows for. Tracy notes that in the text of The Nature of Doctrine, for example, that Hans-Georg Gadamer is not mentioned at all and that Paul Ricouer is referred to only once, and yet the more significant revisionists have engaged the thought of such hermeneutical thinkers and have moved on from earlier views. Tracy himself is the best example of this shift, and his Plurality and Ambiguity securely establishes him as a hermeneutical theologian.
Kasper contrasts Tracy and Lindbeck in the following way:
The real difference between Tracy's and Lindbeck's view ... does not lie so much in the inversion of the internal and the external word, of experience and language. It lies rather in the fact that, for the sake of universal intelligibility, hermeneutical and political theology interpret the texts within a modern, largely secular horizon of understanding, while Lindbeck trusts their performative power, that is, their self-evidence and internal plausibility.
Tracy trusts the texts of the Christian tradition to mediate meaning to contemporary people. Lindbeck trusts the performative power of these texts in the Church to proclaim a clear message. Both trust the texts. Therefore, the relationship between at least these two representatives of revisionism and postliberalism does not seem to be polarized in an absolute sense.
Some may wonder whether Lindbeck's postliberal theology does justice to the truth claims of Christian doctrine. Wittgensteinian philosophy has led to a certain relativism with respect to questions of religious truth. A stress on the 'use' of statements rather than on their 'meaning' may allow that Christian doctrines have a use without conceding that they have a cognitive meaning, that is, that they describe or give information about the real world. Would this be a consequence of Lindbeck's use of Wittgenstein in postliberal theology? I think not.
Truth and Action
Lindbeck distinguishes "intrasystematic" truth from ontological truth. Intrasystematic truth is the truth of coherence; ontological truth is correspondence to reality. Christian doctrines are intrasystematically true when they cohere with the total relevant context, include the correlative forms of life. They are ontologically true, that is, they correspond to reality, when they intend and enable a conformity of the self to God. Or, one might say, Christian doctrines are ontologically true when they are performed:
... a religious utterance ... acquires the propositional truth of ontological correspondence only in so far as it is a performance, an act or deed, which helps create that correspondence.
The only way to assert a Christian doctrine as ontologically true "is to do something about it, i.e., to commit oneself to a way of life ..."
This is no sophisticated version of doctrinal reductionism. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that there can be no neutral judgment in matters of religious truth. To profess belief in the Trinity is not in the first place to make an objective theistic statement; it is to commit oneself to living life and to understanding reality in the light of the Trinity. Finally, not only Lindbeck, but Frei, Kelsey, Thiemann, and other postliberal thinkers are theologically committed to the absolute priority of God. This Barthian emphasis stands as a corrective, if such be needed, to the methodological influences of Wittgenstein.
Immersion in Tradition
As far as I am aware, no postliberal theologian as such has turned toward articulating a postliberal religious education. There are ad hoc remarks here and there, but a profile of postliberal religious education as such has yet to emerge. A passage from E.D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy -and, indeed, a paradigmatic expression of his entire project of cultural literacy -provides a point of entry for seeing some of the implications of postliberal theology for religious education:
Believing that a few direct experiences would suffice to develop the skills that children require, Dewey assumed that early education need not be tied to specific content. He mistook a half-truth for the whole. He placed too much faith in children's ability to learn general skills from a few typical experiences, and too hastily rejected "the piling up of information." Only by piling up specific community-based information can children learn to participate in complex co-operative activities with other members of their community.
Whether it is exclusively or even principally to be associated with Dewey, there can be little doubt that a close engagement with many contemporary educational texts and philosophies reveals a deep-rooted skepticism about the "piling up of information."
Society at large is frequently being told that knowledge is exploding so fast that it is more important to teach a student how to learn, to gain knowledge, than to teach them 'facts' as such. The theologian/religious educator will see here the helpful and truthful traditional distinction between fides qua and fides quae. An emphasis on one at the expense of the other makes a nonsense of fides. It is epistemologically impossible, in fact, it is something of a performative contradiction, to divorce the one from the other. Or, in a word, people do not simply learn; they learn something.
One result of this rampant skepticism is a widespread illiteracy with regard to the humanities.
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INTERIOR MONOLOGUE AS A NARRATIVE DEVICE IN THE PARABLES OF LUKE
PHILIP SELLEW
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455
Six of the parables told by Jesus in the Gospel of Luke use a narrative device that is otherwise rarely if ever employed in the gospel tradition. When faced with a moment of decision, usually in a moral crisis, the central characters in each of these little stories address themselves through the use of the literary technique of 'interior monologue.' The Rich Farmer, the Unfaithful Servant, the Prodigal Son, the Crafty Steward, the Unjust Judge, and the Owner of the Vineyard all think out their plans and strategies in private moments that are nonetheless simultaneously displayed for other characters in Luke's story to see and hear. The motivations and personal viewpoints of these actors in the parables are laid bare to give the reader direct access to their unspoken thoughts. The use of this device grants privileged insight into the human dilemma in a fashion not ordinarily available.
I. Interior Monologue in Narrative
Luke has characters in Jesus' parables voice their inner thoughts as a way to dramatize their private interior debate. The 'soul' disputes with itself, but its arguments are broadcast through Jesus' special insight. The true feelings and inner workings of the characters within these stories are made transparent, not only to the reader but to Luke's other characters as well, who act as the parables' audience within the larger story. This and similar techniques of self-address had long been employed in Greek mimetic or dramatic literature, especially in epic poetry, tragedy, and the Hellenistic novels, as well as in some of the biblical tradition, as a means for an author to paint more vivid and poignant portraits. But the use of such a device in writings of a more historical, philosophical, or rhetorical flavor is rare. When a Thucydides or a Xenophon (or the Luke of the NT Acts) composes a public speech by an individual character, this is very different in intent and effect from presenting the private thoughts of a Pericles or a Paul, even when we realize that the speeches are the creation of the historian rather than of the presumptive orator.
When a narrator renders his or her characters' thoughts and decision-making processes so directly, the reader or dramatic audience is able to grasp their self-understanding and moral dilemmas with increased psychological depth and empathy. Awareness of this technique and its effects is not just a modern event. The distinction between a distanced or 'plain' narration (translitGwapl<*_>e-macron<*/> diégesistranslitG/) and imitative narration (translitGm<*_>i-acute<*/>mesis), where the narrator speaks in the person of a character, was already a matter of interest for Plato. The philosopher was primarily concerned with the moral effects of imitation of unworthy persons, emotions, or forms of behavior. His chief example was Homeric epic. Heroes in the Iliad will at times speak inner monologues to express their deepest emotions, especially fear. The Homeric characters are pictured as "disputing with their hearts" (translitGvall<*_>a-grave<*/> t<*_>i-acute<*/>e moi ta<*_>u-tilde<*/>ta f<*_>i-acute<*/>los dieléxato thum<*_>o-acute<*/>stranslitG/), a phrase that has its echo in some of Luke's portrayals. Achilles, a man of wrath rather than of fear, will question in his heart about his unburied friend Patroclus (Il. 22.385). The interior monologues of the Iliad show how the heroes struggle from unworthy emotions to worthy actions.
Hellenistic epic and romance preferred to reserve the interior monologue for desperate lovers at moments of crisis. All of our known examples are from women. Medea in Apollonius's Argonautica attempts to resolve her dilemma of torn loyalties between her lover, Jason, and her father, King Aeetes, in a lengthy interior monologue (3.772-801). There is a similar scene in Vergil's Aeneid: when Dido is confronted with conflicting demands, she considers her difficulties in interior monologue before ultimately choosing suicide as her only escape (4.534-52). Ovid and the novelists Xenophon of Ephesus and Longus use the same technique.
Narrative in the Hebrew Bible is typically more laconic (or 'reticent') and more hesitant to provide direct access to its characters' thoughts, but self-address is sometimes used in interesting ways. The deteriorating relationship between David and Saul as portrayed in 1 Samuel 18, for example, and especially their negotiations about Saul's daughters Merab and Michal, is described for the most part using the techniques of distanced, external narration (techniques that will be discussed below). The exception is when the narrator begins to use the device of the interior self-address to expose the deceitful thoughts and strategies of King Saul (18:17b, 21a). Saul expects that David will fall in battle against the Philistines while displaying his valor for his prospective royal father-in-law. The reader is told precisely what is so crucially left unsaid to the other characters in the story.
Though this focus on the inner workings of an unheroic character will also find echoes in Luke's parables, the technique for the most part remains alien to gospel narration. Luke is the exception, and indeed only a partial exception: his Jesus will occasionally employ the device of inner speech when one of his characters is at a point of crisis or decision, but these are only very brief 'conversations,' running but a sentence or two in length, like Saul's in 1 Samuel 18, unlike the often very lengthy soliloquies or inner debates of classical mimetic literature. Luke's descriptive narrative is broken only briefly, within a few parables, a break made possible perhaps by the parables' more dramatic or fictive mode of presentation as contrasted with their surrounding, more matter-of-fact narration.
One of the few writers to take much notice of the use of this literary convention in Luke's parables has been John R. Donahue: "For Luke, the human condition is a stage on which appear memorable characters.... Luke invites us into this world by frequent use of soliloquy ... where we are made privy to the inner musings of the characters. Luke eschews allegory and expresses realistic sympathy for the dilemmas of ordinary human existence." This is very well put, but I cannot agree with how Donahue then continues: "His memorable characters offer paradigms of discipleship for ordinary Christian existence." This may well be true for some of the parables in Luke, but is generally not the case for those in which interior monologue is employed, including those classically labeled 'example stories.' What great difficulties the leading characters of precisely these stories have long posed for those seeking exemplary Christian heroes -including the gospel writer! None of the personalities whose thoughts are described is particularly commendable; indeed they tend to embody anything but noble characteristics. The self-satisfied, amoral, or even immoral individuals who star in these portrayals, who are looking out for their own interests above all, sometimes encounter unexpected divine intervention or retribution (the Farmer, perhaps also the Owner of the Vineyard), but more often they seem able to use their craftiness or amoral reasoning to escape punishment (the Prodigal, the Steward, and the Judge).
II. Techniques of Characterization in Descriptive Narration
The Gospel of Luke, together with its companion literature both within and outside of the New Testament, has ordinarily only two means of letting its readers learn of its characters' thoughts, intentions, or motivations. (1) The characters can speak their minds aloud or act in a decisive manner that will itself clarify their feelings and intent; or else (2) the narrator can inform the reader of the characters' moods or motivations through third-person description. These are the techniques commonly employed by the ancient historians and biographers, practitioners of the literary art of translitGdiégesis, the ancient term for 'narrative description' (Luke 1:1). The intentions and opinions of characters in third-person narration are made clear only externally.
Contemporary literary analysis speaks of variations in depth of characterization in narrative texts, ranging from the two-dimensional cardboard figures found in stock folk tales to the fully realized psychological portraiture expected in the modern novel. "Characterization in the Gospels tends toward the 'flat' and 'static' end of the spectrum." Third-person description tells us about a character; first-person speech or thought shows us a character's inner life. Accordingly, as we read Luke's story of Jesus, the narrator will frequently provide a general statement about individuals who "wonder," "ponder," or become "amazed" or "astonished," but the specific content or wording of those thoughts or emotions is revealed only by having the characters utter them aloud or take some illustrative action. In contemporary terms, Luke tells us about his characters.
Luke's use of this common narrative technique can be briefly illustrated by surveying the infancy stories. In the opening scene of the Gospel, we learn of Zechariah's terror at the appearance of the angel through the narrator's description (1:12). The people's wonder outside the Temple is related in similar fashion (1:21-22). Elizabeth's understanding of her conception at an old age is expressed through her voiced opinion (1:25), even though the narrator does not mention any other character to whom she might be speaking. Her voicing of a statement out loud is the customary way in which the Gospel writers can allow a character to express internal judgments. Mary's perplexity at Gabriel's announcement is expressed indirectly by the narrator (1:29) and then voiced aloud through the question she puts to the angel (1:34). In the later scene of the naming of Zechariah's and Elizabeth's son, the wonder of those who heard the temporarily mute father now speak is expressed not as thought but as speech: "All who heard them pondered them and said, 'What then will this child become?'" (1:66).
In chapter 2, we learn by means of the narrator's descriptions of the shepherds' fright before the angels (2:9), the amazement of Jesus' parents at their report (2:18) and at the prophecy of Simeon (2:33), and the wonder of the crowds listening to the adolescent Jesus in dialogue with the teachers at the Temple (2:47). Other thoughts are expressed through direct speech. We learn of his parents' worry at losing track of their son Jesus in Jerusalem from Mary's words of consternation in 2:48. And twice in this section we read of Mary "keeping and pondering" events in her heart (2:19, 51b), but tellingly the specific content of her thoughts is neither described by the narrator nor voiced by the character. The narrator knows that Mary is thinking, and probably what she is thinking too; but we are left in the dark.
III. Lucan Parables That Employ Interior Monologue
The external descriptive technique just described is employed throughout the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles and needs no further discussion here. I shall now turn instead to the more interesting topic of how and why at a few specific moments the Lucan narrator has Jesus the Parabolist move beyond third-person narration to employ the more direct mimetic device of giving voice to his characters' inner debates. Our understanding and appreciation of Luke's literary artistry can be deepened by doing some comparative and historical analysis. Luke did not invent the device of self-address, of course, but a few comparisons will show that this author has at places emphasized or elaborated his characters' internal monologues to good effect. Our ability to see Luke's technique at work will be enhanced by starting with a parable that is also attested in an independent source. The other three full examples are known to us only from this Gospel.
The Foolish Farmer (Luke 12:16-20)
In Luke 12 we encounter our first example of how a character in one of Luke's parables thinks out his strategy of action when faced with a dilemma: the story of the rich farmer who foolishly expects to be able to live to store and enjoy his wealth. Luke includes the parable in the context of a discussion about proper attitudes toward possessions, daily sustenance, indeed toward threats of bodily harm or even death. After an exchange with "someone from the crowd," in which Jesus refuses to act as mediator in a dispute over inheritance (12:13-15), he addresses the parable "to them," meaning either his "friends" the disciples (present for the remarks about fear in 12:4-7 and then in 12:22-31 for the words on anxiety), or the crowd, or both.
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Love, Religion, and Sexual Revolution
Stephen G. Post / Case Western Reserve Medical School
Philip Rieff comments that, "in the classical Christian culture of commitment, one renunciatory mode of control referred to the sexual opportunism of individuals." While we should avoid prejudice against the human body per se, I contend that the modern cultural assumption that happiness is achieved as a matter of course through liberation from sexual control has proved unfounded. Moreover, as Max Scheler wrote, the relaxation of restraint can hinder the realization of sacred values and lead to a culture that "envisages man the external phenomenon, his sensual well-being. And increasingly it envisages this well-being in isolation from the objective hierarchy of real and spiritual goods."
Since Scheler's four modalities of value underlie the present analysis, I shall state them at the outset. According to his schema, pleasure values pertain to the individual seeking what is physically agreeable; welfare values to the promotion of health and social well-being; spiritual values to justice and truth; and sacred values to holiness, or love for God. In a holy person, sacred values occupy the highest level. The fundamental problem of human existence is the inversion of the correct ordo amoris within the person, so that the objective order of values toward which human beings are ontologically structured is violated. In short, "Loving can be characterized as correct or false only because a man's actual inclinations and acts of love can be in harmony with or oppose the rank-ordering of what is worthy of love." Scheler argues that "God and only God can be the apex of the graduated pyramid of the realm of that which is worthy of love, at once the source and the goal of the whole."
Modernity, Scheler contends, not only suffers from a disorder of values, but has deliberately chosen the inverse of the proper value hierarchy. This note of deliberate inversion goes beyond the less severe charge that most persons "will acknowledge no hierarchy of values" and "will live for the moment in a chaos of pure sensation." Granted that sexual restraint and the culture of control can be unduly morbid and dualistic, it is not mere frivolity that the likes of Saint Paul and Augustine, as well as the Buddha and Socrates, all asserted that unrestrained sexual desires can intoxicate the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual values and interests. Walter Lippmann puts the point simply: "Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychologists excitedly rediscovered: that there is a very intimate connection between the sexual life and the religious life." Around sexual desire, he continues, the churches have "built up a ritual, to dominate it lest they be dominated by it."
In this article, I propose a broadly applicable theological-ethical argument in favor of sexual restraint as an aspect of the human good, though my immediate focus lies within Christian ethics. As my aims are constructive rather than expository, I do not intend a full-scale interpretation of the thinkers referred to, including Kierkegaard and Tolstoy. My intention is to elaborate a criticism of the assumption that sexual desires are "so quintessentially, immediately, and irresistibly natural that it is as futile to deny, suppress, or sublimate them as it would be the contractions of the heart muscle." The argument moves from an appraisal of sexual control as viewed by modern culture and recent religious ethics to a recovery of the sexual interpretation of the Fall narrative.
Our culture can be described as manifesting a mass flight from beneficial sexual restraint. Although such flight is not new, its ubiquity in modernity may be. While Saint Paul proclaimed the human body as the temple of God, the flight from sexual restraint proclaims it as sportive. Sexual intimacy, which manifests a rich and beautiful significance when sought within the proper hierarchy of values, is debased by a culture gone awry.
FLIGHT FROM SEXUAL RESTRAINT: A CULTURAL APPRAISAL
Traditions of sexual discipline and control indicate a widespread understanding that sexual desire can impede spiritual values. The Pauline notion of a conflict between the law of one's members and the pursuit of sacred values is veridical, as common experience attests. Bodily desires can easily muscle aside spiritual ones.
In addition to the tension between unrestraint and the realization of sacred values, sexual desire often reduces its objects to mere means. Kant commented at length on how morally problematic the "appetite for another human being" can be and added that "there is no way in which a human being can be made an object of indulgence for another except through sexual impulse." It is a simple fact, Kant contends, that through sexual appetite one human being often plunges another into "the depths of misery," casting him or her aside "as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry." The analogy is powerful and fitting.
Beyond the de-emphasis on spiritual values and the exploitation of the sexually oppressed, the modern sexual revolution is responsible for increased disease, as psychiatrist Willard Gaylin describes:
While the final score is not yet in, the results so far of this so-called 'sexual revolution' are less than reassuring. The Freudian view of human behavior laid the positive groundwork for the liberation of the sexual aspirations of women from both an oppressive personal sense of guilt and the shame and humiliation of social stigmatization. But the only empirical results of that illegitimate offspring of Freudian philosophy, the sexual revolution, seem to be the spread of two sexually transmitted diseases, genital herpes and AIDS; an extraordinary rise in the incidence of cancer of the cervix; and a disastrous epidemic of teenage pregnancies.
The extent to which Freud was responsible for the revolution may be exaggerated, but the prevalence of the diseases on Gaylin's list is beyond doubt.
A final result of the sexual revolution is emotional despair and a sense of meaninglessness. Psychiatrist and theologian Paul R. Fleischman writes that if sexual repression dominated the psychological landscape in Freud's Vienna, the current problem is quite the reverse: "Among the hurt and pained in need of help, who may suffer from broken marriages, fluctuating or fallen self-esteem, obsessive constrictions, panicky attachments to parents, bewildering isolation, uncontrolled rages, and haunting depressions, the common denominator is an inability to transcend themselves with care and delight, to reach over and touch another heart." Fleischman's patients report that they suffer emotionally because they have assumed that genuine love requires sexual intimacy. They then pursue such relations, even when inappropriate, and suffer the consequences. Their experience may be summed up thus: "The binding together, the touch of person to person, is sought concretely, rather than spiritually, and dyadically rather than communally. The substitution of sexuality for religious life constitutes one of the most prominent and pervasive elements of cultural pathology that a psychotherapist encounters." Many people seek to touch physically for the sake of sexual intimacy alone, failing to see physical touch as at all expressive of a deeper spiritual meaning. They make sexual intimacy rather than spiritual values the center of their lives.
The toll of unrestraint on physical and emotional well-being has already been lamented. C. S. Lewis, for one, writing in the early 1950s, warned against the loss of any serious moral caution regarding sexual intimacy: "Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour. Now this association is a lie." It is a lie, wrote Lewis, because sexual indulgence without commitment and steadfast love has always been associated with disease, deception, jealousies, and emotional pain. Lewis claimed that our society has lost sight of definitions of love that do not place sexual intimacy at their center, that it has illusory expectations of this intimacy, and the result is oppressive. He rejected the practice of sexual union when it is isolated "from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union." He complained against the "contemporary propaganda for lust" that makes it appear perverse to resist sexual union out of respect for a lasting and total union.
Criticism of unrestraint is neither irrational nor peculiar to Christian thought, for as Michel Foucault has emphasized, this suspicion was in place in Greco-Roman culture by the second century A.D. and was intertwined with Christian belief. Foucault writes, "A whole corpus of moral reflection on sexual activity and its pleasures seems to mark, in the first centuries of our era, a certain strengthening of austerity themes. Physicians worry about the effects of sexual practice, unhesitatingly recommend abstention, and declare a preference for virginity over the use of pleasure. Philosophers condemn any sexual relation that might take place outside marriage and prescribe a strict fidelity between spouses, admitting no exceptions." Numerous thinkers, including Plutarch, virtually all the Stoics, and the Physicians, also articulated a growing skepticism of unrestrained sexual activity and its consequences for the individual and for society.
Pride, the desire to dominate others, self-assertion, and egocentrism - all radically inconsistent with love - animate the sexual preoccupations that destroy love. Our culture of flight from restraint disguises these grim realities in order to reject sacred values, though it does not seem to recognize that voluntary restraint is not exclusively a religious practice. Religion may function as a motive for restraint, but it need not be the sole or even principle justification of it.
The aim of restraint, as Kierkegaard argued, is the affirmation of good rather than the prohibition of evil. The task is to bring sexuality "under the qualification of the spirit (here lies all the moral problems of the erotic)." The sexual revolution rejects all such qualification; its roots lie partially in nineteenth-century materialism and a view of the psychic life of human beings as the manifestation of processes in the physical organism. Eros, this materialism claimed, always aims at genital pleasure, the model of all human happiness; in the process, Plato's "heavenly eros" lost its classical ground. Historians John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman have shown that by the mid-1910s assumptions were commonplace that the sexual instinct demands constant expression, that restraint is harmful, and that gratification is a more worthy ideal than self-control. Thus, "the shift from a philosophy of continence to one that encouraged indulgence was but one aspect of a larger reorientation that was investing sexuality with a profoundly new importance." Sin was redefined as not expressing libido, and all restraint was construed as negative and repressive. The possibility of arguing for sexual restraint without diminishing the glory of sexual eros was not contemplated.
To be seriously religious, one must constantly ask the question, 'What is the source of happiness?' When one has determined that the true human good rests in God, one must demand much of oneself to achieve that good. Augustine was right to acknowledge God as the ultimate source of lasting happiness. He would agree with Freud that human beings show by their behavior that they strive after happiness that gives purpose to their lives. Augustine and Freud would disagree, of course, about the source of that happiness. Augustine believed we should seek our happiness in God: "For our good, about which philosophers have so keenly contended, is nothing else than to be united to God." Freud, by contrast, held that sexual love affords human beings the central experience of happiness, that it constitutes the "prototype of all happiness," and is the "central point" of life. A materialistic philosophy of the self, conjoined with atheism and the 'pleasure principle,' made sexual intimacy the highest good of Freudian theory. Augustinian thought, which established the Christian view of the self as ontologically structured toward God, the Highest Good, lost its cultural force. But if 're-ligio' or 're-binding' of human beings to God constitutes the essential path of the restoration of right order (ordo amoris) in our lives, then the assumption that sex is the highest good must be rejected.
Licentious sexual expression is ultimately the mainfestation of a meta-physical problem, that is, materialism, which presumes that there is no transcendent reality and no transcendent dimension in our being.</doc><doc register="religion" n="06">
A Prayer That Availeth Much
Jeremiah 20:7-13
Psalm 10:12-18.
Hebrews 12:1-2,12-17.
Walter Brueggemann
THESE SEVEN verses from Psalm 10 plunge us into the midst of the prayer of a "poor person," who speaks for "the oppressed," "the helpless," "the orphan" and "the meek" - perhaps all the same person or the same class of persons. The prayer sounds the faith cadences of the marginated who are without hope in the normal arrangements of social power.
According to the partisan rhetoric of this poor petitioner, the "wicked" who are greedy and powerful have already had their say. The petitioner imagines the wicked being arrogant, autonomous and untamed in their use of exploitative power. Their arrogant autonomy denies and disregards God and abuses the poor. That is, "without God, everything is possible" against the neighbor. In this view of "the wicked," there is only "I" and "them," and "I" will surely prevail over "them." There are only two parties to social reality, and there is never any doubt who will prevail in such a simple scheme.
In verse 12, however, the poor person does not accept this two-party scheme, and everything depends upon the petitioner's courage to resist it. Indeed, if he or she accepted the definition of social reality given by the wicked, there would be no prayer and no Psalm. The very act of uttering verses 12-18 is itself a courageous and subversive way of redefining social reality. The prayer of the poor person insists that there are three players in social relations, not two. In addition to the abusive wicked and the oppressed poor, there is Yahweh, a joker in the deck who destabilizes and reorders the relation between the other two parties. The immediate problem, however, is that the third party has been absent, silent, indifferent and dormant. The poor person hopes to arouse and mobilize Yahweh, to alter drastically the relation of the other two.
The beginning of the prayer in verse 12 is daring and abrupt; the God of the Exodus is summoned, the one who is characteristically evoked by the cries of the wretched, by those who have no hope in the world. Every time it is sounded this Psalm-prayer reconvenes the drama of the Exodus in which the God of liberation is mobilized by and for the oppressed against the oppressor. This glorious name is matched by the enormous imperative: "Rise up" - to power, sovereignty, vitality. The term is and Easter word, echoed in Christian talk of resurrection, in which God's power for new life overcomes all the pretensions of death. The very sovereignty of God is evoked by the daring courage of the poor and weak who utter the name that will reshape social reality.
In the verses that follow, the speaker maintains initiative over against God. It is as though the speaker must line out in great detail for Yahweh exactly who Yahweh is and what Yahweh does. On the one hand, God is reminded of a characteristic past: "You have helped the orphan." On the other hand, God is summoned to a characteristic future: "You will do justice to the orphan and the oppressed." Both God's past and God's future are marked by this 'preferential option,' for that is who Yahweh is. Without this petition and its pressure, however, that 'option' might have been neglected, the dismissal of God by the powerful might have prevailed. The past and the future of transformation are focused on a present moment of "trouble and grief," wherein the wicked must be harshly overcome, so that the poor and meek may prosper.
SUCH IS the innocent, simple prayer of this petition. In its innocence and simplicity, however, the prayer is an act of enormous daring and resolve. The prayer refuses to accept the way the world seems to be and is said to be. An act of evangelical imagination, it refuses to let visible power drive out the trusted reality of God.
But who could pray that way against assured social reality? Many of us are 'children of Feuerbach,' who have come to accept that such primitive 'God-talk' is empty talk. Indeed, it has been suggested recently that such prayers are in fact only theater, designed to be 'overheard' by the powerful. An address to God is only a rhetorical device. Such assumptions about prayer follow from our intellectual sophistication that is in turn a function of our economic affluence. In a hospital room of the affluent, prayer is more likely a matter of casual indifference. For the unsophisticated (poor), such prayer is a matter of life and death. For the latter, everything hangs upon this daring redefinition of reality that refuses to accept apparent power relations.
Those of us who are more affluent and more sophisticated talk sometimes of "solidarity with the poor." This prayer suggests to me that there will be no serious solidarity with the poor until there is liturgical solidarity, until we are able to move through and under our intellectual sophistication and imagine that such a prayer is real speech, addressed to a real listener who is summoned as a live third force in social reality. Of such prayer, Harold Fisch has written:
The Psalms are not monologues but insistently and at all times dialogue poems ... The Psalms are not exercises in existential philosophy ... The 'Thou' answers the plea of the 'I' and that answer signals a change in the opening situation. The Psalms are in this sense dynamic, they involve action, purpose.
And Karl Barth asserts that God "is not deaf, he listens; more than that he acts. He does not act in the same way whether we pray or not. Prayer exerts an influence upon God's actions, even upon his existence. This is what the word 'answer' means."
We do not choose such prayer; we are drawn toward it when we finally notice that our usual pattern of prayer and powerlessness is killing, and when, in the exercise of our passion, we dare to anticipate a decisive agent. In such prayer we join the company of hopers and resisters who, like Jeremiah, rage (Jer. 20:7-10), trust (vv.11-12) and finally praise (v.13). Such prayer may indeed be the end of drooping hands, weak knees and lame joints (Heb. 12:12-13).
A Choice Amid Doxologies
Joel 2:22-30
Psalm 107:1
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31
Walter Brueggemann
THE READING in 1 Timothy asserts a stringent either-or about gospel faith. It is, however, an either-or that seems to mix categories badly. The premise of verse seven is that we bring nothing, we possess nothing, we depart with nothing; it is all a gift and therefore we should not seek contentment in our things. The tempting, rejected choice is wanting to be rich, which plunges one into "ruin and destruction" and pierces "with many pains."
Whatever the original crisis and context of this text, we have no difficulty hearing it amid our consumerism and preoccupation with commodities. We have no trouble noticing the poignancy of the text in a society that is more and more affluent for some (while others drop out), in a church where old luxuries become urgent necessities, where church conversations are desperately about budgets, salaries and benefits, where 'media Christians' embarrass the rest of us while our world of deprivation groans.
We have no trouble with the text touching us in heavy ways. This old text, however, is as powerless as we feel we are in an economy where our feeble efforts at an alternative are outflanked by the pressures, demands and desires in which we are full and often willing participants. The writer thinks the problem is not terribly complex. The alternative to "wanting to be rich" is a series of unadorned imperatives: "Shun all this, pursue [and then follows a catalog of covenantal acts and attitudes], fight for faith, take hold of the eternal life you have already confessed, keep the commandments."
The alternative to the destructive service of mammon is an act of disciplined will whereby the gospel-confessed are fully disengaged from the temptation. The writer dares to imagine and confess that while believers may be timid imitators of a covetous society, they have in fact started from a different premise. The apples of economic greed are countered by the oranges of a clear theological intentionality. That odd choice, which has always vexed the church, is now staring us in the face. The church has recently given much attention to issues of sexuality, but the writer of 1 Timothy knows that the key issues of life and faith are fought in the economic realm. We face the same old deal and same old choice about God, mammon and anxiety.
So far only didacticism. So far only a kind of unbothered, oversimplified Pelagianism. The options are not new to us, and we wonder if the text offers anything more than good advice and urgent imperative. Then in verses 15 and 16 the writer breaks out of a tight, instructional either-or into a lyrical doxology about "the only sovereign, the king of kings and Lord of lords" - immortal, unapproachable. The doxology is geared to an eschatological hope, with a high, extravagant affirmation of God, who, when inserted into the either-or of love of money or fighting the good fight, makes a decisive difference.
I don't want to focus on an eschatological claim, however, nor on the decisive difference made by God's sovereignty (albeit in male imagery), for I find such cognitive, substantive affirmations are less than decisive in this difficult struggle against commodity. I suggest rather that it is the bodily act of doxology, the sheer lyrical, unembarrassed yielding of an unguarded self to a prerational claim that matters most in taking the 'or' of faith rather than the 'either' of love of money. The very concrete, physical act of doxology is a social, personal, public ceding of self over to realities that the world will not honor and that I, in my fearful calculation, strident morality and settled creedalism, often find silly and trivial.
Think what it requires to utter a genuine doxology. This ceding over of self in an irrational act of singing praise I also find, sometimes, to be silly and trivial, because I don't want to commit an overt, nonrational act and I don't want to lose control of self, or give up the reasonableness of my calculated economics or my rather sure morality. But if I cannot yield even in this lyrical act, it is likely that I will always choose the love of money over a good confession. I am increasingly convinced that for myself and my church, it is only a doxological mode of discourse that will break the power of commodity - even as I know that doxology is also readily co-opted to become a commercial jingle for commoditization.
Daniel Hardy and K.L. Ford argue in Praising and Knowing God that praise is difficult in a technological society. Indeed, the more affluent and less generous a church is, the more muted its congregation's praise, because the very act of praise is itself an act of relinquishment. We end up with only paid soloists to render our praise for us, to whom we listen with respect and appreciation, but without foot-tapping, hand-clapping, bodily movement or bodily relinquishment. Maybe "white men can't jump," and maybe rich people (or those of us who wish we were) cannot sing praise with any abandonment of self, body or money.
The doxology acknowledges a character other than those of us who can be trusted. Psalm 107 recites the specificity of the "Lord of Lords" in whom Israel invests mightily. The Joel reading is a promissory (I do not say eschatological) assertion inviting gladness and joy for the God who has given rain, who will "act wondrously," and who will eventually "pour out my spirit" - give the power of God's own self to the world. Measured rationally and economically, doxology is a feeble, futile gesture. Whenever the church has had missional vitality, however, it has chosen the irrationality of doxology over the rationality of commodity.</doc><doc register="religion" n="07">
Summary
Understanding conversion was a hermeneutic project in the twelfth century as it is in our own day. One purpose of this work has been to recover the broad outlines of that project as it was grasped in that distant era. I have regained part, at least, of what was read into St. Jerome's sentence "Christians are made, not born" (ep. 107,1). From beginning to end the hermeneutic project was a task in metaphorical analysis. In the languages of philosophy and theology, 'conversion' was a metaphor taken over from arts and crafts, especially from those employed in transforming raw materials into works of art or achieving some such alteration of metals as occurs in the production of bronze.
I found that those engaged in spiritual conversion employed a parable of Jesus to describe their task as recovering a treasure buried in another's field. The Apostle Paul provided an alternate metaphor when he wrote: "Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (1Cor. 13:12). Paul added what was taken to be a crucial gloss on this text when he wrote that each person must think according to the measure of faith dealt out by God (Rom. 12:3). Thus, spiritual enlightenment depended upon grace, not on human traditions, laws, or actions. And inegalitarian grace, bestowed in arbitrary proportions by God's hidden judgment, established serried ranks of greater and lesser lights. In fact, Paul's metaphor, expanded with this gloss, epitomized the entire hermeneutic project.
What conclusions can be proposed? Three seem obvious. Perhaps too self-evident is that the word conversion is not a reliable tool of analysis. Far from being (so to speak) clinically sterile, it comes laden with connotations rooted in Christian history that transmit their coloration on contact to materials under investigation. There is reason to assume that the word has no equivalent in major languages outside Europe. The question is certainly worth considering whether applying the word conversion can impose Western conceptions on non-Western experiences and ideas.
Further, what is called 'conversion' is defined by contexts of time and place. Consequently, it is important to determine what is called conversion, by whom it is so called, and the language used to analyze it.
I have discovered that ideas about conversion in twelfth-century Europe had two senses. In the first, conversion was obvious. It occurred within the confines of human nature, expressed by the ideas and words and shaped by the capacities and institutions that grew out of human nature. Sociologists, anthropologists, and historians recognize this kind of conversion, as manifested, for example, in acceptance of Christianity and submission to the Church or in a change of affiliation or discipline within the ecclesiastical order. However, these inquiries have established that eleventh- and twelfth-century writers recognized this variety as conversion only in a formal sense.
For them, authentic conversion was not formal but supernatural and empathetic. The heart turned not to Christianity or Church but to Christ; by mystic union, it turned into Christ. Indeed, it was turned by grace, rather than by any logical deductions or emotional discoveries of its own. Indemonstrable and mysterious, this mystic turning of the heart into something else was not bound to formal, institutional obedience, nor could its outcome, hidden in God's foreknowledge, be predicted. To the contrary, reversing human expectations, it frequently proved subversive of formal obedience and customs.
Thus, a second outcome of the work at hand has been to define these twinned but entirely separable ideas of conversion and, moreover, to identify them as historical artifacts, souvenirs of the ascetic wing of a military, literary, and ascetic male aristocracy in western Europe.
The implications of insisting that the hermeneutics of conversion is a historical artifact are wide, but they are quite the same as some disclosed by the historical criticism of the Bible and the 'quest for the historical Jesus.' They can only entail asking whether the objects of faith, too, were historical fictions. This is my third conclusion.
Polemical experience with philosophical skepticism and the critical demands of Christianity itself prompted the Church Fathers to anticipate this query when they glorified in the great improbabilities: that God revealed the truth needed by all to an obscure and despised people in a remote corner of the world; that God became man and submitted to death; that God long withheld revealing the way of salvation, leaving whole nations to live and die in their sins; and that, condemned by lying witnesses and wicked priests and executed by a cowardly ruler and ignorant soldiers, the crucified God would bring about universal redemption through the crime of those who mocked and slew him. Given the first two conclusions, I should stress that the Fathers addressed such doubts not on the level of what could be demonstrated by natural logic but on the indemonstrable grounds of supernatural revelation and grace.
Let me recapitulate how this point was reached. I first distinguished the phenomenon (what was called 'conversion'), the name ('conversion'), and the process by which the phenomenon came to be called by the name. What began in esthetics, the realm of inexpressible feeling and intuition, was transposed into that of poetics, the realm of representation. It has been important to realize that conversion is a metaphor-word and, as such, a historical artifact. Thus, whatever may be said about the experience of conversion, the word conversion and the vernaculars used to define and express its meanings were by no means universal. I assumed that like other works of art, the name 'conversion' contained elements of the process by which it was made and that they could be unpacked by analyzing the artifact.
As a technical word in the language of manufacture, conversion denoted a variety of processes. Correspondingly, as a metaphor, it contained not one meaning but a large repertory of them, each with its own history and paradigm of change. The experience of the word in the world left its marks, especially during persecutions suffered by the early Church. One result of persecution was that for the survival of the institutional Church, devices were invented that enabled believers who succumbed to temptation, even to the point of denying their faith, to return to the fold and that in time permitted the cycle of confession, lapse, penitence, and reconciliation to be repeated throughout life. Monasticism was the great institutional form of conversion as a penitential way of life. Thus, in the repertory of paradigms, those became dominant that represented conversion as a process of transformation, full of perplexities and dangers, rather than a sudden, decisive peripety. However, they were supplemented and melded, in a highly eclectic way, with other patterns.
I have not argued that understanding the metaphor-word conversion was, or is, a matter of playing with words, or entirely a rhetorical exercise. Yet it seems inescapably true that access to that understanding comes through texts, which are written, historical documents, and that the ideas informing those texts are set forth in words and syntax that are likewise bound by time and place. I had to ask at the beginning whether Olav Tryggvessön's words to Sigrid the Strong-minded - "Why should I wed you, you heathen bitch?" - and his sharp blow to her face were really part of the confrontation between Christianity and paganism in tenth-century Scandinavia or a reconstruction tailored to suit expectations in a thirteenth-century Christian society.
It seems indisputable, moreover, that the language in the text, and the thoughts in the language, and the perceptions in the thoughts are also creatures of time and place and, consequently, that they have antecedents, possibly also consequences, that, being historical, are not universal.
This emphasis has had one further effect. To speak of language as historical evidence is to ask whose language it was. By whom, for whom, with whom did it signify, especially in concealed, metaphorical senses? The vernaculars of conversion were used in discourse. I have found correlations between the ways in which they were used and the identities of those who controlled discourse and its rituals and who, as a result, received, interpreted, enacted, and conveyed tradition. Hermeneutic circles are made by social circles.
I have also been acutely aware that all of these qualifications apply to me, seeking to understand how others understood conversion and thus working within a two-tiered hermeneutic structure that from some perspectives of hermeneutic circularity may resemble a gallery of mirrors.
Another object of these investigations has been to recover guiding ideas. Here the real point of departure was the proposition, inherited in different forms from Hebraic and Hellenic traditions, that human nature was made for happiness but lived in misery: What was called conversion was a way to survive and escape the wretchedness of this world and achieve happiness. And yet 'conversion' stood at the juncture of imperative and impossibility. Thus, understanding conversion was not susceptible to direct, logical demonstration; true to the nature of metaphors, it required poetic imagination - that is, fiction, built up by a strategy of criticism. Universal myths (including that of the noble origins of a people, its exile through catastrophe, and eventual return to a land of milk and honey) were brought to bear. Faith was accepted as a mode of knowledge, by no means opposed to reason. But among the varieties of faith - such as intellectual assent, common sense, and trust - only one was adequate to empathetic conversion. 'Believing in' through love produced the union of believer with the object of belief and therefore the transcendence of the believer's self and circumstances. This was, specifically, the kind of faith granted by God according to measure. In its poetics empathetic conversion was of the heart, not the mind. Emotions were dominant; mind served heart, each according to its own measure of faith.
Because it was understood as a gradual process of formation, rather than as an instant, irreversible event, what was called conversion entailed pathology. Fear of error and apostasy among professed believers demanded relentless, life-long vigilance, for since carnal desires could not be plucked out by the roots, one could only repeatedly shave off the wicked deeds that kept growing out from them.
Institutionalizing conversion in monastic order had two effects on understanding. The first was to establish ritualized methods of spiritual discipline (such as reading and prayer), each of which hinged on kinesthetic pain. The second enlarged the sphere of ambivalence created by the mysterious and ungovernable proportionalities of faith. For, devoted to imitation of Christ crucified, monastic discipline focused understanding on ironies.
Overarching all the ironies that I have examined were those of theodicy. Empathetic conversion was an essay on the existence, power, and goodness of God. If there were a God, how could there be evil? If there were no God, how could there be good? Why were those who served and obeyed God in purity of heart afflicted with temptation and physical pain, while the manifestly evil, the hypocrite, and the unbeliever prospered? Why did virtuosos in ascetic disciplines and eminent theologians experience spiritual aridity and dejection? One key to these queries was the ironic distance between appearance accessible to human minds and divine reality, as in that between Christ the victim on the Cross and Christ the universal Ruler and Judge. Not far behind came the ironic distance between Christ, as perfect archetype, and the human soul as his flawed image. Thus, understanding the metaphor-word conversion presupposed the inversion of values that the Apostle Paul had constructed in his theology of the Cross: what was to the world pain was to believers pleasure; the world's ignorance was God's wisdom; its degradation, his honor; its servitude, his freedom; its weakness, his power; its death, his life. Irony became the dominant trope for understanding conversion and its subversive effects.
Reflections on conscience underscored this irony. For, given the hiddenness and incommunicability of conscience, the spiritual condition of the soul was hidden even to the soul itself. The soul's capacity for self-deception meant that the great need of conscience was for purity, which could only be proportionate, and not for certitude, which could at least pretend to be absolute.
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William M. Bodiford
ZEN IN THE ART OF FUNERALS: RITUAL SALVATION IN JAPANESE BUDDHISM
Funeral rituals, even ones with an artistic aura, rarely appear in descriptions of Zen art or Zen practice. Although little commented on, the art of Buddhist funerals in Japan is very Zen. In order to understand the Zen of Japanese funerals, first one must leave behind preconceptions based on religiously inspired images of what Zen should be and, instead, examine how Zen functions as a religion in Japanese society. One of the most important social roles of Zen, as in other religions, is to guide the living through the experience of death. Buddhist scholars, who should know better, not uncommonly disparage funerals as mere ritualism peripheral to fundamental Zen insights. Yet for lay people suffering the loss of a loved one few occasions are charged with more emotional power and religious meaning. Zen funerals, furthermore, like their counterparts in medieval European Christianity, historically constituted one of the more significant regular meeting points between the closed religious world located within monastic institutions and the larger secular community they served. The exploration of Zen funerals thus can aid our understanding of how the religious worldview of monks attained expression in the world actually lived by lay people as well as how monastic institutions, by giving new meaning to the process of death, were able to claim privileged social and economic roles among the living. This article presents a brief overview of the historical development of key elements of Zen funerals in the S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> Zen tradition to show how Zen monks manipulated the symbols of Zen enlightenment to provide spiritual solace to the living and religious salvation to the dead. An examination of these practices will demonstrate the limitations of the usual academic answers to the question, What is Zen?
Most descriptions of Zen fall into two camps, sometimes placed in opposition, which could be called (in the words of Alan Watts) "beat Zen" and "square Zen." The first refers to the widespread belief in an intrinsic spiritual link between Zen and artistic endeavors. This view, now commonly associated with Watts himself and D. T. Suzuki, asserts that Zen represents the sublime achievement in personal, artistic self-expression. The association between Zen and artistic skill has become such a cliché that most books published today with the word 'Zen' in their titles actually concern topics unrelated to Buddhism or religion. In contrast to this popular image, Buddhist scholars have stressed the earnest character of Zen as it appears in its traditional Buddhist setting: the Zen monastery. Instead of artistic pursuits, Zen monasteries house a tightly disciplined community of monks engaged wholeheartedly in re-creating an ancient life-style based on the legacy of the Buddhist patriarchs. Typically, the day's activities begin at four o'clock in the morning with the first of four daily periods of Zen meditation (zazen). During these meditation periods the monks sit cross-legged, lined up together in the meditation hall for about two hours of silent contemplation. When the monks are not engaged in communal meditation, they occupy themselves with an endless variety of religious rituals and monastic chores. Not a single idle minute is tolerated. These monastic monks have no time for art. They single-mindedly pursue the soteriological goal of Zen enlightenment. According to the scholars who direct our attention to this monastic pursuit, the essence of Zen lies in a life of meditation and enlightenment.
Yet these two descriptions of Zen Buddhism share a key similarity. Critics of Zen would assert that both types - the artistic Zen as well as the Zen in the monastery - constitute self-centered, basically selfish pursuits. This might well be the reason for some of the popularity of Zen in America. Whether focused on artistic self-expression or focused on the realization of self-enlightenment, both images of Zen seem designed to appeal to traditional American sentiments of rugged self-reliance, individualism, and freedom. This special Zen self-reliance, however, can be obtained only by years of effort and strict training, either in meditation or in art. Aspiring Zen artists and Zen monks both set forth on a rigorous quest for a transcendental, superhuman experience - an experience of insight or enlightenment - that will guide their art and their religion.
To many observers, this superhuman experience appears beyond the grasp of the average person. Anyone who has attempted either Zen art, such as the Tea Ceremony, or even a single session of Zen meditation knows how difficult it can be. Few people can take the necessary time away from families and jobs to devote years to harsh training in the pursuit of a narrow, personal goal. Zen advocates typically assert that to know Zen one must experience it directly. Yet if one cannot thus personally pursue the path of Zen, then what spiritual benefits can Zen offer? Indeed, however appealing some descriptions of the attainments of the accomplished Zen masters might seem, for many would-be converts Zen practice is too impractical. This very criticism of Zen, in fact, was common in medieval Japan. The famous Buddhist saint My<*_>o-stroke<*/>e (1173-1232, a.k.a. K<*_>o-stroke<*/>ben), for example, expressed great interest in Zen and became an accomplished meditator. Yet My<*_>o-stroke<*/>e wrote that the Zen school had nothing to offer laymen.
This exclusivity is especially associated with the style of Zen taught by D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen (1200-53), the founder of the Japanese S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> tradition. D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen stands out for his uncompromising insistence on strict, monastic Zen. Although he lived at a time of religious ferment when many popular religious movements in Japan competed for new converts, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen did not attract a large following. Instead he devoted his energies to the cultivation of a few dedicated monks. He founded only a single, small, isolated monastery in the rural mountains of northeastern Japan. There he taught that single-minded sitting in Zen meditation embodies the essence of Buddhist enlightenment. According to D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen, this enlightenment must be realized in meditation and expressed in accordance to strict ritual forms. D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen wrote detailed commentaries on the monastic codes, in which he described how every action, from cooking to use of the toilet, must be performed as an expression of living enlightenment. In his more extreme writings D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen even went so far as to assert that people living outside the monastery cannot attain enlightenment. The severity of this assertion is clear when we remember that in a Buddhist context enlightenment implies salvation. In this instance, therefore, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen denied that laymen and laywomen could attain salvation.
Contrary to the descriptions summarized above, neither the artistic approach to Zen nor the monastic approach accurately depicts the Zen Buddhism found in Japan. This is not to say that Zen-inspired artists do not exist or that Zen monasteries do not train monks in meditation. Zen artists and Zen monks can be found in limited numbers. But at the vast majority of Zen temples - and there are about twenty thousand Zen temples versus only seventy-two monasteries - no one practices art, no one meditates, and no one actively pursues the experience of enlightenment. The popular image of Zen known in the West and the image promoted by scholars both fail to reflect this reality. Neither tells us what religious functions truly occur at Zen temples. Surveys of Zen priests reveal that most monks stop practicing meditation as soon as they leave the monasteries at which they receive their basic training. Once monks return to their local village temple, lay-oriented ceremonies, especially funeral services, occupy their energies to the total exclusion of either Zen art or Zen meditation. Statistics published by the S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> school state that about 77 percent of S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> laymen would visit their temples only for reasons connected with funerals and death. A mere 7 percent would do so for what they termed spiritual reasons. Less than 2 percent would go to a Zen priest at a time of personal trouble or crisis.
These statistics, of course, are not at all unusual in modern Japanese Buddhism. For various historical reasons funeral rituals have come to represent the main source of financial income at most Buddhist temples in Japan, not just those affiliated with one of the Zen schools. Yet most people would judge the preponderance of funeral services at Zen temples simply as evidence showing the decline of 'real Zen' in modern Japan. In this view, the Zen temples still exist, but the practice of Zen has all but disappeared. Presumably some distinction can be made between 'Zen in itself' and the so-called non-Zen practices commonly found within the Zen school.
This distinction, however, is not clear-cut. Historically, Zen monks first popularized the widespread practice of Buddhist funerals in Japan. Prior to the emergence of independent Zen sects in Japan, only the wealthy nobility sought to supplement traditional Japanese funeral rites with special Buddhist services. The majority of Japanese people, in contrast, generally lacked access to the Buddhist clergy and economic prosperity required for elaborate Buddhist funeral rites. It was Zen monks who first introduced and popularized affordable funeral rites that appealed to the religious sentiments of the common people. These Zen rites came to define the standard funeral format that was emulated by most other Japanese Buddhist schools. In other words, Buddhist funerals are not external to traditional Zen practice. The image of Zen as a religion of artistic insight and enlightenment is incomplete. In Japan, Zen monks always have used their powers of insight and enlightenment to serve the more immediate worldly needs of their patrons. The realm of Zen enlightenment extended beyond the monastery walls into the homes of laymen.
ZEN FUNERALS
To find the origin of Zen funerals, one must look first to the Chinese monastic codes followed by Japanese Zen monks. As mentioned earlier, D<*_>o-stroke<*/>gen (the founder of the Japanese S<*_>o-stroke<*/>t<*_>o-stroke<*/> tradition) had stressed the spiritual importance of monastic regulations because they codify ritually meaningful expressions of enlightened activity. The activities described in these codes include funeral rites. Buddhist funeral rites were developed by Chinese Buddhists relatively late, in order to adapt Buddhism to traditional Chinese sensibilities. The first detailed account of Chinese Buddhist funeral rites is found in an eleventh-century Chinese Buddhist encyclopedia. It contains twenty-six entries on funeral rituals, most of which are explained by means of quotations from the Confucian classics, such as the Book of Rites (Liji), the Book of Documents (Shujing), and the Book of Odes (Shijing). In fact, all the funeral ceremonies referred to by this encyclopedia, except cremation and the chanting of Buddhist scriptures, parallel earlier non-Buddhist Chinese rites. This same pattern is found in the earliest Zen monastic code, the Chanyuan quinggui compiled in 1103. The description of the funeral for a Zen abbot in this text prescribes a sequence of ceremonies modeled on the traditional Chinese Confucian rites for deceased parents, with the abbot seen as the symbolic parent of his disciples. On the abbot's death, his direct disciples would wear robes of mourning and retire from their normal duties, while the other monks in the monastery would be assigned the functions of praising the abbot's accomplishments and of consoling his disciples. The deceased abbot's corpse would be washed, shaved, dressed in new robes, and placed inside a round coffin in an upright, seated position, as if engaged in meditation.
The subsequent funeral ceremonies then would take several days. A special altar would be prepared on which to display a portrait of the abbot as well as his prized possessions - his sleeping mat, fly whisk, staff, meditation mat, razor, robes, and so forth. The altar and coffin would be decorated with flowers. Decorative banners would be placed on both sides of the coffin. Other banners that proclaim Buddhist doctrines, such as a verse on impermanence, would adorn the room. The abbot's final words or death poem would also be prominently displayed. The hall containing the altar would be lined with white curtains, while additional lanterns, incense burners, white flowers, and daily offerings would be set out. On the day of the actual burial or cremation, an elaborate procession consisting of resident monks, lay patrons, and local government officials would carry not just the coffin, but also the altar, the abbot's portrait, and the special banners to the grave site.</doc><doc register="religion" n="09">
The Christian Right in the United States
MATTHEW C. MOEN
In the late 1970s, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians in the United States began organizing to contend in the political arena. They did so out of a concern that traditional American values were waning, and out of a conviction that a secularized government was partly to blame. Reverend Pat Robertson spoke for many conservative Christians at the time: "We used to think that if we stayed home and prayed it would be enough. Well, we are fed up. We think it is time to put God back in government." Toward that end, millions of evangelicals and fundamentalists joined a number of organizations that collectively were labeled the Christian Right. Throughout the 1980s, the Christian Right earnestly challenged both governmental policies and secular principles.
This chapter documents the transformation of the Christian Right during the 1980s, as it proffered a challenge to the state, and focuses specifically on changes in the Christian Right's organizational structure, political strategy, and rhetoric. Elite leaders consciously drove changes in these areas in an attempt to maximize their political influence.
Threaded through the chapter is the argument that the Christian Right's leaders grew more politically sophisticated over time. Many of the movement's early leaders gained political experience and savvy, and some of the less capable people were replaced by those more politically astute. Joseph Conn of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State focused on the latter point in an interview: "Over time, the old guard of the movement has mostly disappeared from the scene. Those early people were strongly motivated by fundamentalist religion, but were not particularly sophisticated in politics .... They gradually dropped out or were moved to the sidelines, leaving the political arena to the somewhat less narrowly sectarian, but more sophisticated people." Not surprisingly, Christian Right leaders agreed with the notion of increased sophistication. Gary Jarmin of the American Freedom Coalition flatly asserted that "the sophistication in the Christian Right has clearly increased." Although self serving, Jarmin's statement was also true, which becomes apparent as the sophistication theme is re-visited.
Before proceeding further, though, one caveat should be added: the improved political skills manifested in the leadership did not automatically result in a more powerful movement. In fact, evidence suggests that the Christian Right was a less formidable force at the end of the 1980s than it was at the beginning. Simply put, the movement was better led by the end of the decade, not necessarily a more influential political factor.
This inquiry into changes in the Christian Right is warranted on two counts. First, scholars have failed to examine its changes very thoroughly or systematically. They have focused on the Christian Right's influence in politics through studies of its political action committees, electoral clout, and lobbying activities. With the exception of Lienesch's article, which applies theories of social movements to the Christian Right, there has been virtually no focus on the other side of the causal equation: how has political activism shaped and influenced the Christian Right? It is an equally pertinent and important question.
Second, the inquiry into changes is timely, in the wake of a decade of activity, Rev. Pat Robertson's unsuccessful bid for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination, and the termination of the Moral Majority. The Robertson candidacy and the closure of the Moral Majority, in particular, were substantive and symbolic benchmarks for the Christian Right; before a second full decade of activism is well underway, it is worth pausing to consider the changes that transpired in the first full decade.
Organizational Structure
The Christian Right's structure changed considerably in the 1980s. Ten easily identified national organizations were located in the nation's capital and were active during the decade. Those organizations, along with their major leader(s) and their lifespan, are listed in Table 4.1.
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An overview of those organizations, and a discussion of the multitude of groups, follows.
The National Christian Action Coalition (NCAC) was launched by Robert Billings, a fundamentalist educator from Indiana. In the late 1970s, he spearheaded opposition to Internal Revenue Service regulations aimed at revoking the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory schools. The NCAC was designed to be the 'eyes and ears' of the conservative Christian school network, informing schools of bureaucratic regulations that would affect their operations. Billings bequeathed the NCAC to his son Bill, after the former accepted a position in the 1980 Reagan campaign. Bill subsequently enlarged the NCAC's role by producing materials that taught conservative Christians how to participate effectively in politics, testifying on Capitol Hill for tuition tax credits for private schools, and compiling indexes on the conservatism of members of Congress. All of that activity did not prevent the NCAC from being overshadowed, though, by a budding Moral Majority.
Bill Billings acknowledged that "they [Moral Majority] went up front and we kind of went into the background." By 1985, the position of the NCAC was untenable, and it was terminated.
The Religious Roundtable was formed in 1979 by Ed McAteer, a fundamentalist layperson with deep roots in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). He used the roundtable as a forum for training previously apolitical ministers in the art of politics, hoping that they would foment opposition to Carter's 1980 reelection bid. Prior to the election, the roundtable conducted training sessions for an estimated twenty thousand ministers. It also organized the National Affairs Briefing, a forum for Reagan to solicit the support of conservative Christian elites. The Religious Roundtable was disbanded after the 1980 election, other than to serve as a platform for McAteer's political pronouncements. Its headquarters was moved from Washington, D.C. , to McAteer's hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. The roundtable is still in existence, but for all practical purposes it is nothing more than a letterhead organization.
Christian Voice was started by Rev. Robert Grant as a California-based, anti-gay rights organization. It received early publicity from Rev. Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and from its 'moral report cards' on members of Congress. The report cards caught the attention of the national media, partly because they distilled the Christian Right's agenda and partly because they came out so skewed. For example, a Catholic priest in Congress at the time received a zero 'moral approval rating,' in part because he supported the creation of the Education Department and opposed a balanced-budget amendment. Christian Voice consisted of a lobbying arm, headed by Gary Jarmin; a tax-exempt educational wing, responsible for disseminating information about political candidates; and a political action committee, called the 'Moral Government Fund.' During Reagan's first term, the lobbying arm was active on behalf of antiabortion and school-prayer legislation, while the tax-exempt wing continued churning out report cards on members of Congress. Near the end of that period, however, the organization's activity waned. A 1984 interviewee noted that the "Christian Voice is largely a letterhead organization these days. They still send out their mailings to raise money, but they do not do much else."
As Reagan's second term opened, Christian Voice's brain trust restructured its operation and channeled its resources away from Capitol Hill, toward the grass roots. It continued to distribute updated report cards, but it effectively suspended its lobbying operation. The moribundity of Christian Voice was evident in June 1989. The organization shared a suite in the Heritage Foundation building with a consulting firm, and the literature was a year old. Gary Jarmin confirmed the dormancy of Christian Voice in an interview, noting that it would only "serve as a door opener to churches" in the future. It was no longer the vehicle outside the church for Christian Voice's leadership. That task was assumed by the American Freedom Coalition (AFC).
According to Jarmin, "Following the 1986 election, Christian Voice had a poll conducted nationwide. We filtered out a group that was conservative, religious, and registered to vote. About 9% of that group was black. We asked them extensive questions about issues and politics." Rev. Robert Grant and Jarmin used that information in 1987 to launch the AFC, which they envisioned as a grass-roots organization. In November 1988, it held its first annual board of governors meeting; today, its leaders are trying to erect 'precinct councils' across the United States.
Another organization with connections to Christian Voice was the American Coalition for Traditional Values (ACTV). It was headed by the Reverend Tim LaHaye, a one-time executive officer in the Moral Majority and a member of the executive board of the Christian Voice. ACTV was constructed to register voters for Reagan in 1984, much like the roundtable did in 1980. The quid pro quo for LaHaye's work was an administration promise to appoint religious conservatives to administration positions. According to a 1984 interviewee with intimate knowledge of the organization,
ACTV began after some discussions among many of the leading television evangelists across the country about the need to set up an organization that would register Christian voters. Of the thirty-two individuals who consented to their involvement in setting up an organization, ten actually contributed their mailing lists. On the basis of those mailing lists, a phone bank was set up that contacted 110,000 evangelical and fundamentalist churches.
ACTV's leaders sought to register two million religious conservatives. Following Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, ACTV was gradually wound down by Rev. Tim LaHaye, and then terminated in December 1986.
In the same year that LaHaye accepted the vice-presidency of the Moral Majority (1979), his wife, Beverly, created Concerned Women for America (CWA). According to Laurie Tryfiates, CWA's field director, "CWA started as a response to the stereotype of women brought by the [feminist] National Organization of Women. It really began as a handful of women brought together in neighborhood meetings. ... From there, the organization mushroomed." For six years CWA was head-quartered in San Diego, and then in 1985 it moved to Washington, D.C., "in order to have a greater impact preserving, protecting, and promoting traditional and Judeo-Christian values." It since has lobbied Congress, organized at the grass roots, and marshaled test cases in the courts. Its annual convention was visited by President Reagan in 1987; its current literature contains words from President Bush. Hertzke reports that its membership may exceed the combined total of the three largest feminist groups in America.
The Moral Majority was the most salient and perhaps the most successful Christian Right organization in the 1980s. Initially, it consisted of four divisions: the lobbying and direct-mail operation, called the Moral Majority; the litigation arm, called the Moral Majority Legal Defense Fund; the tax-exempt education division, known as the Moral Majority Foundation; and the political action committee, known as the Moral Majority PAC. Of those divisions, the Moral Majority proper was easily the most important. According to Roy Jones, its legislative director in the mid-1980s, Moral Majority had 250,000 members its first year; that figure doubled the next year, quadrupled the following year, and again doubled, so that Moral Majority had 4,000,000 members by 1983 -a figure within the calculations of one scholar. In 1986, Moral Majority was collapsed into the Liberty Federation, ostensibly to facilitate attention to international issues. In reality, its merger with another organization was recognition of the fact that it carried "high negatives" in public opinion polls. Gary Bauer offered an explanation: "The Moral Majority was one of the first groups of what has come to be called the Christian Right. Since it was one of the first groups, it suffered accordingly as people opposed to its agenda attacked it. ... [Falwell] took the lead to sound the alarm. Having done so, he was the focus of considerable attack. To put it simply, Falwell became damaged goods." Michael Schwartz, of the Free Congress Foundation, echoed that thought, in saying that Falwell was a "lightning rod" for criticism and "humble and intelligent enough" to retreat from politics once he was no longer in a position to advance the Christian Right's agenda. Moral Majority persisted for several more years under new leadership, until Falwell officially nixed it in June 1989.
The Liberty Federation had a vaguely defined purpose and a tenuous existence, attracting very limited attention in 1986 when it engulfed Moral Majority, and virtually none thereafter.
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'SYNCRETISTIC RELIGIOSITY':
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS TAUTOLOGY
Jeffrey Carlson
PRECIS
This article develops the thesis that religious identity is always/already a selective reconstruction from among many possibilities - one undeniably relative but utterly necessary product of a process of 'encampment,' a creative synthesis in which we dwell and from which we venture forth. From this perspective, even for those in 'mainstream' traditions, 'syncretistic religiosity' is tautological. The thesis will be developed through an analysis of correlational Christian theology and will begin to explore some of the implications of construing religious identity in terms of a 'syncretic self.' What happens when the pool of possibilities from which one draws in comprising one's 'list' of 'what matters most' is extended beyond prior boundaries, even when such boundaries have impressive names such as 'scripture' and 'tradition'? When religious identity is inevitably syncretic, what happens to boundaries between 'the religions'? Finally, might a recognition of the syncretic self become one contribution toward ethical reflection in this age of 'man-made mass death'?
I. On Correlational Theology
Correlational theologians have argued that the task of theology requires explicit attention to two major concerns, usually named something like 'the Christian message' and 'the contemporary situation.' According to Paul Tillich, one of the leading modern Christian representatives of this approach, theology must satisfy two basic needs: "the statement of the truth of the Christian message and the interpretation of this truth for every new generation." It is thus concerned with both the "eternal foundation and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received." Similarly, Karl Rahner stated that his Foundations of Christian Faith was written to allow his readers "to reach a renewed understanding of [the Christian] message" and to "try as far as possible to situate Christianity within the intellectual horizon of people today."
This would seem to be such a felicitous method, relating message with situation, reading the signs of the time in the light of the gospel, perhaps even, in the words of Rudolf Bultmann, "[making] clear the call of the Word of God." However, as Augustine discovered when he probed the meaning of that so-simple reality of 'time,' theologians, when they face up to plurality, may find themselves admitting that they know well enough what Christian theology is, provided no one asks them to explain. Let us ask.
Schubert Ogden has written that "to be assessed as adequate, a theological statement must meet the two criteria of appropriateness and credibility ... in the given situation." His point is that since theology must both represent the Christian message and relate it to the present situation, it seems eminently helpful to require explicitly that one's own theological formulations be 'appropriate' to that message and 'credible' in that situation.
'Appropriateness' means a fidelity to the Christian 'message.' This would seem simple enough, but then, like Augustine, we are asked to explain. What is that message, and what is the nature of our fidelity to it? Two clusters of questions are raised: First, what precisely is the 'referent' of the theological criterion of appropriateness? To what must adequate theological formulations be appropriate? To which model or image of Jesus developed through the centuries (and there have been so many!) should one attend, and why? This first question is clearly related to a second and even more basic issue concerning one's religious identity: Why am I 'a Christian' in the first place? Whence comes my religious identity? What are the implications of my answers?
II. Locating the Referent of Appropriateness
Ogden has argued that the norm or referent of theological appropriateness is what he called "the earliest apostolic witness to Jesus Christ." Where does one find this earliest witness, according to Ogden? In the findings of this century's "new quest" for the historical Jesus. Precisely what the new-questers are able to detect, he maintained, is the earliest stratum of Christian witness - the very norm of theological appropriateness. Arguing that the true canon is not the New Testament per se, Odgen wrote that the "real, indeed crucial, theological importance of the so-called new quest of the historical Jesus" lies in its "identification and interpretation of the Jesus-kerygma of the earliest church," which is "'the canon within the canon' to which all theological assertions must be appropriate." The new quest, it seems, is the 'good luck' of Christian theology!
Another correlational theologian, David Tracy, has construed 'appropriateness' rather differently than Odgen has. Tracy has written that the theologian must "take into account all the classic christological images, symbols, doctrines, witnesses and actions of the entire tradition." All the images. The entire tradition. For Tracy, it seems, one ought not to detect and isolate an essential and singular kernel from among all that plurality of witness but, rather, attempt to encounter something of its richness, power, and vitality. One would be led, according to Tracy, to "an abandonment of a search for 'a canon within the canon' in favor of the full diversity of the New Testament witness." To concentrate only on the 'Jesus-kerygma' as, in Tracy's estimation, "the expression 'canon within the canon' seems to suggest," actually "... risks losing the enriching diversity of the whole scriptural (and, in principle, postscriptural) witness and thereby risks losing the full reality of 'tradition' for the contemporary theological horizon."
Tracy is certainly more open to what he would call "inner Christian plurality" than Odgen is. However, in affirming and even celebrating the diversity of "the whole scriptural ... and ... postscriptural" witness, Tracy passed over a point I wish to accentuate: A decision was inevitable and has, in fact, been made, overtly or covertly, consciously or not. It was and is a decision to select from among the many. Even the whole of the Bible is still but a part. The canon, so diverse, is nevertheless still a circumscribed reality, one among the many other would-be witnesses to God or to Jesus. It is one product, achieved centuries ago, of an ongoing process of selective reconstruction, of daring to name a reality, to locate a religious identity in these texts (and, indeed, in these particular manuscript versions). It is an act of 'encampment.'
III. Plurality and Religious Identity
Think about it. If one is Christian, in which 'Jesus' does one believe? Does not one select, as well as inherit others' selections, from among many possible interpretations? What, for instance, were the last words of Jesus before his death? How does the Jesus in whom a Christian believes meet his end? With serene confidence that he is in the hands of his Father ("Father, into your hands I commend my spirit")? This is indeed the Jesus of Luke, but not the Jesus of Matthew or Mark, for whom Jesus cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Then he dies, abandoned.
Such different images! Are these plural 'portraits' and diverse 'memories' a weakness or a strength? Why not simply have one Gospel, one that 'got the story straight'? Or, is there in fact a 'surplus and excess of meaning' generated by every 'classic'? Perhaps Odgen's quest for the 'singular' is itself inappropriate. Perhaps the 'real' Christ is precisely the evoker of a plurality of witnesses.
One can ask questions about the canonical Gospels. Was Jesus born in a manger? Yes, but only in Luke. Were there wise men following a star? Yes, but only in Matthew. John and Mark tell nothing whatsoever of Jesus' birth. Peter the 'rock of the church'? Pilate washing his hands? Guards at Jesus' tomb? Yes, but only in Matthew. Only there, as well, are the onlookers, interpreted by much of subsequent Christian tradition to be 'the Jews,' made to cry out, at Jesus' trial, "His blood be on us and on our children!" When Christians select items from among the many images of Jesus and elements of his story, I hope they will exclude that one, as well as other blatantly violent texts that discriminate on the basis of gender, class, or ethnicity. This raises the question of criteria once more but here in terms of ethics. A nuanced argument for ethical criteria is beyond the scope of this essay. For the moment, it can simply be suggested that decisions should be guided by a hope for creation rather than destruction, liberation rather than oppression, conversation rather than deprivation of speech.
I am not calling for the abandonment of the New Testament canon, still less for a single, fixed canon within the canon. Instead, I am calling for an honest recognition of what the canon exemplifies: the need to risk a reconstruction, to wager a creative act in which, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, "The many become one, and are increased by one," which involves "... the advance from disjunction to conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction. The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the 'many' which it finds, and also it is one among the disjunctive 'many' which it leaves." Reality, here understood, is a veritable flood of images and possibilities, but some of it 'sticks' to us; some of it matters. Our identities are shaped by what has stuck. We simply cannot attend to all of it. Who knows what we do not perceive, on this side of absolute elsewhere, where only some of the many become one in us?
We are narrow in perspective, partial in grasp. To be 'Christian' is to be this particular assemblage of diverse elements, brought together out of freedom and amid a certain destiny, an array of influencing factors we cannot control completely. Our religious identities are shaped by the 'list' of 'ultimate' things, drawn from many pools with many names, some 'non-Christian' and even 'secular.' We are this syncretic amalgam, this selective reconstruction of elements.
Thus, an act of reconstruction, of encampment, is an articulation of one's religious 'identity,' and it is, I believe, an utterly necessary activity. As Mircea Eliade saw so clearly, humans need to be somewhere, to have a symbolic dwelling, a spiritual center, a true home. But, as he also knew, and as the Oglala Sioux Black Elk reportedly observed, "anywhere is the center of the world." We need to know both of these 'two truths' about our religious identities: concerning the particular and the universal, the relative and the absolute.
So why am I in this particular place? Why this center, these texts, that Jesus, that creed? Why, indeed? Not because assent is mandated from any external authority but because certain persons, places, texts, events, even objects, so disclose that which is deemed 'really real' that those affected cannot but wish to dwell there. Hierophanies (Eliade), classics (Tracy), historical mediations of transcendentality (Rahner) - these exist. They touch us in ways that range, in Tracy's words, "all the way from a radical identification with the claim to truth ... to some tentative, even hesitant, resonance with its otherness." Given that range, the specificity of one's own response to a particular 'classic,' coupled with one's own current and specific 'list' of classics, constitutes one's present religious identity.
What moves you? Which persons, places, texts, events, objects, constitute the truth that is true for you? That matter for you? So much of life is superficial. What speaks to you from the depths? When you think of your 'list' of deep things, from whence do you draw its items, and would you presume to circumscribe the boundaries within which deep items might be found? How, in all seriousness, would you dare do that? If the truth be told, would your list of 'what matters most' contain only items that have been stamped with ecclesiastical approval? If the truth be told, does not your real list include items that have not been so stamped, and does not your real list omit items that have been so stamped? Is not the stamping process itself always/already another reconstruction, another selection from among the many, another example of encampment?
Kierkegaard wrote: "Frequently, when one is most convinced that he understands himself, he is assaulted by the uneasy feeling that he has really only learned someone else's life by rote."</doc><doc register="religion" n="11">
2. Sexual Ethics in the Roman Catholic Tradition
The Roman Catholic tradition in sexual ethics and sexual understanding has had a long history and has exerted a great influence on people and their attitudes both within and outside the Roman Catholic church down to the present day. At the present time, however, the Catholic tradition and teaching are being questioned not only by non-Catholics but also by many Catholics themselves.
The general outlines of the official Catholic teaching on sexuality are well known. Genital sexuality can be fully expressed only within the context of an indissoluble and permanent marriage of male and female and every sexual act must be open to procreation and expressive of love union. The natural law theory that supports such an understanding results in an absolute prohibition of artificial contraception, artificial insemination even with the husband's seed, divorce, masturbation, homosexual genital relations, and all premarital and extramarital sexual relationships. Virginity and celibacy are looked upon as higher states of life than marriage. Women are not allowed to be priests or to exercise full jurisdiction within the church.
Dissatisfaction with official Catholic sexual teaching came to a boil when Pope Paul VI in his encyclical Humanae Vitae of 1968 condemned the use of artificial contraception for Catholic spouses. Before late 1963, no Catholic theologian had ever publicly disagreed with the Catholic teaching that banned artificial contraception. But events in the church (especially Vatican Council II, 1962-1965) and in the world at large very quickly created a climate in which many Catholic married couples and theologians called openly for change in the official teaching. Nevertheless, after much consultation and hesitation, Pope Paul VI in 1968 reiterated the condemnation. His encyclical occasioned widespread public theological dissent from the papal teaching.
Many Catholic couples disagreed with the teaching in practice. According to the statistics of the National Opinion Research Center in 1963, 45 percent of American Catholics approved of the use of artificial contraception for married couples, whereas in 1974, 83 percent of American Catholics approved. Archbishop John Quinn of San Francisco, at the 1980 synod of bishops in Rome, gave the statistics that 76.5 percent of American Catholic married women of childbearing age use some form of contraception and 94 percent of these women were employing means that had been condemned by the pope. Andrew Greely concluded that the issuing of Humanae Vitae "seems to have been the occasion for massive apostasy and for a notable decline in religious devotion and belief"; he attributes the great decline in Catholic practice in the United States during the decade 1963-1973 to the teaching of this encyclical.
Dissatisfaction with official Catholic teaching on sexual meaning and morality has been raised both in theory and in practice with regard to masturbation, divorce, and homosexuality. And many Catholic women have become disenchanted with the Catholic church because of its attitudes and practices concerning the role of women in the church, whose patriarchal reality is quite evident. Abortion has recently become a very heated topic in Catholic circles; one important aspect of the discussion centers on law and public policy, but the moral issue of abortion has also been raised. Although most Catholic theologians and ethicists remain in general continuity with the traditional Catholic teaching on abortion, some have strongly objected to this teaching.
And so a widespread dissatisfaction with hierarchical Catholic sexual teaching exists within Roman Catholicism today. In general, I share that dissatisfaction, but my position does not involve accepting the impersonal, individualistic, and relativistic understanding of sexuality that is too often proposed in our society today. The purpose of my study is not to deal with all of the specific issues mentioned above or with any one of them in particular or in depth. This chapter will try, rather, to explain the negative elements in the Catholic tradition that have influenced the existing teaching, and I shall then appeal to other, positive aspects of the tradition that help formulate what I would judge to be a more adequate sexual ethic and teaching.
Negative Elements in the Roman Catholic Tradition
This section will briefly discuss five aspects of the Roman Catholic tradition in sexual ethics which in my judgment have had a negative effect on the church's official teaching - negative dualisms in the tradition, patriarchal approaches, over-riding legal considerations, authoritarian interventions by the teaching office, and the natural law method justification.
Negative Dualisms
The Catholic tradition in sexuality has suffered from negative philosophical and theological dualisms. Platonic and Neo-platonic philosophy, which helped to shape the thought of the early church, looked upon matter and corporeality in general and sexuality in particular as inferior to spirit and soul. Theological dualisms often associated the bodily and especially the sexual with evil and sin. A habit of thought in the early church these dualisms influenced the first stage of sexual teaching in the West. Such spiritualistic tendencies, however, have always been present in the church. Many contemporary Catholic dualistic attitudes about sexuality and about all aspects of spirituality have been influenced by the rigoristic Jansenism that reached its zenith in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but Jansenism's influence has continued especially on a popular level.
Blaming Augustine for most of the negativity about sexuality in western Christendom is a commonplace. Before him, however, Ambrose and Jerome were even more censorious. Ambrose's thinking emphasized a series of antitheses that should not be mixed - Christian and pagan; Catholic and heretic; church and world; soul and body. Ambrose was a person of action and so his dualism viewed the body as a perilous mudslick on which the firm tread of the soul's resolve might slip and tumble at any time. Through conversion and baptism the Christian was caught up in Christ whose sexless birth and unstained body mediated between the fallen state of the human body and its glorious transformation in the future. According to Ambrose Christ's body was unscarred by the double taint of sexual origin and sexual desires or impulses. In such a context, virginity was truly the ideal. For Christian married people to avoid adultery and to abstain from intercourse at certain liturgical times and under certain conditions (e.g., menstruation, lactation) was not enough; the couple must also strive to minimize the ever-present possibility of unchastity connected with all sexual pleasure itself. Peter Brown, whose analysis I follow closely here, points out the important relationship of the sexual understanding to the social context of the time. The church itself, like Mary the perpetual virgin and like other virgins, is to keep herself undefiled from the saeculum (world) around her. The sexual and the social were closely related for Ambrose.
Jerome stands out as the authority most fearful of sexuality in the early Christian West. His castigation of Jovinian for having placed married couples on the same plane as virgins contains some of his most vituperative language on sexuality. Even first marriages were regrettable, if pardonable, capitulations to the flesh; second marriages led one step away from the brothel. Jerome also left us the unfortunate legacy of understanding St. Paul's concept of the flesh as equivalent with sexuality. The spirit-flesh dualism was thus understood as the struggle against sexuality by Jerome, the most militant of the writers of the early church in his emphasis on female virginity, clerical celibacy, and the temptations and dangers of sexuality.
According to Peter Brown, Augustine avoided somewhat the antitheses and dichotomies of Ambrose and Jerome. For Augustine, marriage and intercourse, on the one hand, and human authority and human society, on the other, were not to be equated with sin, for they existed even in paradise. Martyrdom, not virginity, was the pinnacle of the Christian life. Augustine understood the fall of our first parents as a matter of obedience and the will. Before the fall, Adam's and Eve's sexuality was in perfect accord and harmony with the divine will. Uncontrollable sexual urges, like death itself, came about through the fall. Augustine contrasted to Eve Mary, the exemplar of perfect obedience rather than the defender of a sacred inner space against the pollution of the world.
The fall brought about in all of the children of Adam and Eve concupiscence of the flesh, which originated in a lasting distortion of the soul. As a result of their active disobedience, Adam and Eve were estranged from God and from each other and from their own conscious selves. Concupiscence affected everything and embraced more than sexual feelings, but uncontrolled sexual feelings (based on the text of Genesis that Adam's and Eve's eyes were opened and they knew they were naked) illustrated the fact that the body could no longer be controlled by the will. The sharp ecstasy of orgasm was an abiding sign of the limits of the human will because of original sin; had there been no fall, intercourse would have taken place at the command of the will solely for the purpose of procreation, not pleasure. As shown in the disobedience of the genital organs to reason and the will, concupiscence was the punishment of original sin that all the descendants of Adam and Eve would carry with them until their death.
Augustine formulated his very influential teaching on marriage in the light of this understanding, and he built on what had already been developing in the early Christian church. In turn, early Christian teaching on sexuality borrowed heavily from Greek stoic philosophy's belief in the laws of nature and duty, and saw itself as a response to other ethical positions that were based in gnosticism, such as the claim that marriage was evil, or that sexual intercourse had such a high value that it must be freed from the burden of procreation. In the face of these more extreme positions, the early church came to the conclusion that sexuality had to be reserved for marriage and used only for the purpose of procreation, which was nature's intention. The motive for sexual intercourse in marriage had to be procreation and could not be anything other, especially pleasure.
Augustine developed his teaching on marriage in the light of his own experience and on the basis of his differences with the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. For Augustine intercourse can be without sin only in the context of marriage, and marital intercourse is sinless only if it is motivated by the desire of conceiving a child and if no consent is given to any pleasure other than that coming from the anticipation of conceiving a child. The realistic Augustine recognized that not even a devout Christian could consistently confine her or his motive for intercourse only to procreation. Thus venial sin is usually associated with sexual relations even within marriage.
Our purpose here is not to summarize the whole historical tradition or even Augustine's total position. However, we should note that Augustine's description of the three goods of marriage - proles (offspring), fides (fidelity), and sacramentum (the permanence of marriage) - became very influential in the Catholic tradition; further, they could excuse sexual expression within marriage. Augustine found two additional meanings in marriage that were taken over by a later tradition and were part of Catholic canon law until very recently - the mutual help or support of the spouses and what was called the remedy of concupiscence. Marriage allows an outlet for passion that protects a person from fornication and adultery. For spouses, even sexual relations simply to satisfy libido constitutes only a venial sin, which thus helps partners in the struggle against concupiscence.
The early church's teaching on sexuality was influenced by several different dualisms, all of which downplayed the corporeal and bodily aspects of sexuality and the pleasure connected with sexual expression. The impact of this early development on subsequent Catholic tradition and teaching cannot be denied. Until the Second Vatican Council, Catholic teaching proposed that procreation and the education of offspring were the primary ends of marriage. The secondary ends of marriage are the mutual help of the spouses and the remedy of concupiscence basically as they were discussed by Augustine. In the 1930 encyclical, Casti Connubii, Pope Pius XI also recognized the secondary end of conjugal love and gave more importance to personalist values of marriage.
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WHICH THEISMS FACE AN EVIDENTIAL PROBLEM OF EVIL?
Terry Christlieb
Many philosophers simply assume that evil is evidence against a generic form of theism. Others have tried to offer an argument to show that this is so. I will argue in Part I that the most promising attempt to develop an argument of that sort fails. It will become apparent that generic theism is just too generic to permit anyone to show that known evils provide evidence against it.
Given the above results I will then in Part II examine the question of whether some other kind of evidential argument might still be possible. Perhaps an evidential argument from evil could be developed against a properly elaborated theism, that is, one more precise and detailed in its claims relevant to the relation of God to evil. But I will argue that it is doubtful that such can be shown against the really important forms of elaborated theism, namely those forms to which actual theistic religions are committed. I will point out a number of grave obstacles to the development of an argument of that sort. The conclusion will be that there is no adequate basis for the common assumption that evil is evidence against theistic religions.
I
For purposes of explaining and illustrating my position it will be useful to examine a particular presentation of the evidential argument against generic theism. I believe that the best development of an argument of this sort is William L. Rowe's so I will begin by briefly explaining his argument. I will then show why his argument in particular and this kind of argument in general cannot succeed.
Rowe's Fawn
Rowe has produced a series of articles in which he attempts to formulate and defend an 'empirical' argument from evil. The argument is aimed at what we might call 'generic' theism. The generic theist believes that a unique, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent being exists and created the universe in which we find ourselves. We will refer to that being as 'God.'
The evils on which Rowe's argument focuses are, roughly, cases of intense suffering which have no readily apparent 'point' or 'purpose.' We may believe that we see why God has allowed some evils, but Rowe wants to call attention to cases for which the purpose is not known.
As an example Rowe constructs the case of a badly burned fawn. The evil of interest is the suffering that the fawn undergoes over a period of several days before it dies. A number of features of the case are included in order to block efforts to specify a purpose for this suffering. At the same time, the goal is to choose a kind of incident which happens, perhaps even on a regular basis, on our planet.
The fawn's burns result from a forest fire started by lightning. Hence the suffering is not the result of a free decision of any created being, but instead has natural causes. Thus, one cannot appeal to the free will defense with respect to the origin of the suffering. Second, the suffering transpires without any creaturely moral agent - or perhaps without any other creature at all - knowing of it. Hence no one's character is developed by the suffering, no one has an opportunity to do a good act in response to the suffering, and no one learns about evil from the suffering. Neither will the fawn profit from the suffering. For the fawn will never recover, so it cannot have improved itself by, say, having learned to flee at the first hint of smoke. And fawns presumably do not repent of sins, so the evil could not have been allowed in order to give the fawn a chance of doing that.
Rowe says of the fawn case:
So far as we can see, the fawn's intense suffering is pointless. For there does not appear to be any greater good such that the prevention of the fawn's suffering would require either the loss of that good or the occurrence of an evil equally bad or worse. Nor does there seem to be any equally bad or worse evil so connected to the fawn's suffering that it would have had to occur had the fawn's suffering been prevented.
Later, in 'Evil and Theodicy,' Rowe adds another case for consideration. The new case is an actual case of the sort one finds with disturbing frequency in the news, a case in which a child was tortured and then killed. The new case provides an alternative for those unimpressed by the fawn case. The argument does not stand or fall on the fawn case (or the other one). Instead, those cases are offered to help the reader to focus on the kind of case that he ought to think about, those cases of evil for which, try as he may, the reader cannot find a purpose. The reader can choose his own particular example. As Rowe says in 'The Empirical Argument from Evil,' the point is that there exists intense suffering in vast quantities for which we can see no purpose at all, let alone any purpose obtainable by omnipotence without that suffering.
It seems clear that Rowe is developing the case in the way that it must be developed if it is to succeed. If there is evidence from evil against theism then surely those cases of evil which we have thought through carefully and yet have found unexplainable must be part of that evidence. Focusing on those cases bypasses debate about whether the theist may know the purpose of the evil. The theist is challenged to begin with the difficult case, the one for which she agrees that the purpose of the evil is unknown. So we can agree with Rowe's claim that his is the strongest sort of evidential argument, the sort that has the best chance of success. If these cases of evil are not evidence against theism, then none are.
Here is a summary of Rowe's argument. Let 'E' be used to refer to a case of evil for which no purpose is known. The fawn or the child torture case might be it, or, if the reader knows of a case Ofofevil for which the purpose is even less apparent than for the ones mentioned, let 'E' stand for that case. Let 'J' be used to refer to whatever property a particular good state of affairs would have just in case obtaining that good would (morally) justify an omnipotent, omniscient being in permitting E. Let me also note that here and elsewhere 'good' or 'goods' should be understood as good token(s) rather than type(s) unless otherwise specified. Then,
1. We have evidence that all the good states of affairs we know of lack J
2. So, we have evidence that every good state of affairs lacks J.
3. E is a case of a kind found in our world.
4. Therefore, we have evidence that evils exist which God would not permit to exist.
5. Therefore, we have evidence that God does not exist.
The claim is that evil with a certain characteristic - namely the conjunction of the characteristics of the case supplied for E - is actual and constitutes evidence that God does not exist. Rowe does not specify how much evidence there is. Let us assume, at least initially, that only the weakest claim is in view, so that the argument is only intendeded to show us some evidence that God does not exist.
Now clearly there are instances of intense suffering in our world. So far theist and atheist are agreed. But we must still exercise some caution in our description of such cases in order to avoid question begging. We cannot describe such cases as cases of 'pointless evil' or 'apparently pointless evil,' for that is certainly not how the cases have seemed to the theist. The theist, at least before hearing Rowe's argument or one like it, has been thinking of the cases (if at all) as cases which do have a purpose or at least as cases of evil which have a purpose of which humans are unaware.
So if there is to be common ground there must first be an acceptable description of the case, a sufficiently 'clinical' description of, say, the fawn or the child, the injuries, the physical pain, the psychological pain, any pain caused to others, etc. At a minimum the description must not be in terms of the actual purposefulness or purposelessness of the evil. Consistent with this requirement Rowe has focused our attention on the descriptions of the fawn and the child, descriptions which seem sufficiently 'neutral' in the way indicated.
The Failure of Rowe's Argument
Can the theist show that the cases mentioned are not evidence against God's existence? Let us decide by examining the kinds of responses that the theist might offer. For convenience I will follow Rowe's division of the possible responses into three groups.
Option 1 - Outweigh the Evidence
First, the theist might simply acknowledge that the argument does provide some evidence against the claim that God exists, but then resist the claim that God does not exist by piling up other evidence in favor of God's existence. This other evidence would be such that it 'outweighs' the evidence from evil.
Obviously, if the theist takes this option she has accepted the weak claim that evil is some evidence against God's existence, and so has accepted the soundness of Rowe's argument as we initially read it. In 'The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism' Rowe also suggested that this is the theist's best response to the evidential problem. But even if she did not possess favorable evidence the theist would not be without an adequate response to the evidential problem of evil, as we shall see. So having noted that this response is one of the theist's options we now set it aside, since an investigation of everything which might be thought of as evidence for or against God's existence is beyond the scope of this article.
Option 2 - Show that the Reasoning Is Unacceptable
The second sort of response is to try to show that somehow the reasoning goes wrong, that there is an unsupported premise or an illegitimate inference. In Rowe's opinion this response is a failure, but it seems to me that he has overlooked some considerations which show his assessment to be unwarrantedly pessimistic.
Before explaining these considerations I want to introduce a proposition to which Rowe might appeal for support of premise 1. Although this approach to supporting premise 1 has not appeared in Rowe's published works to date, he did utilize it as means of defending premise 1 in recent correspondence. I will call this proposition premise 'L.'
L. All the goods we know of and which are such that we can tell whether they have J, lack J.
Here Rowe countenances the possibility that we may not be able to tell whether some known goods have J or not. But L also tells us that whenever we can tell, we always find that they lack J. This offers a reason, he suggests, for accepting 1. So, besides taking account of what Rowe offers in support of 1 in his published works, we will also consider this strategy of deriving 1 from a general principle like L.
We are now prepared to evaluate Option 2 in detail, beginning with premise L. What does Rowe offer in support of the claim that of all the goods we know of, either they clearly lack J or we cannot tell whether they have J or not? Rowe explains that a good that we 'know of' is roughly a good that we conceive of and which we recognize as being intrinsically good. Goods we don't know of are ones that "include states that are enormously complex, so complex as to tax our powers of comprehension," or states that contain "simple properties we have never thought of ... whose presence ... might render that state a great intrinsic good."</doc><doc register="religion" n="13">
Chapter 11
An Update on Neopagan Witchcraft in America
Aidan A. Kelly
The Neopagan movement in America and other English-speaking nations parallels the New Age movement in some ways, differs sharply from it in others, and overlaps it in some minor ways. Comparing and contrasting these two movements, which are roughly the same size, will help clarify the nature of the New Age movement as such.
The Neopagan Witchcraft movement in America is a new religion that, like almost all new religions, claims to be an old religion. It does, as one might expect, emphasize the reality and learnability of magic (or at least parapsychology) as one of its central concepts; but in almost every other way it is a surprise to anyone who comes from the study of 'witchcraft' in some other context. I have demonstrated from the available evidence, which is copious, that the religion actually began in September 1939 on the south coast of England, as an attempt to reconstruct the medieval Witchcraft religion described by Margaret Murray. The founding members included a retired British civil servant, Gerald Brosseau Gardner; a locally prominent homeowner and socialite, Dorothy Clutterbuck Fordham; probably Dolores North, later known for her regular column in a British occult magazine similar to Fate; the occult novelist Louis Wilkinson; and probably others in the occult circles of London and southern England.
Gardner took over leadership of the group, perhaps by default, around the end of World War II, and began developing it in a direction that would better meet his own sexual needs. At this point the religion began to take on characteristics typical of many libertarian movements of the past, especially a focus on sexuality as sacramental, which it has retained ever since. (In fairness to all I must stress, however, that this emphasis on sexuality remains theoretical and inspirational, not something expressed in practice.)
Gardner began writing and publishing in the late 1940s and 1950s, and his books have been primary documents of the movement ever since. After Doreen Valiente was initiated in 1953, she threw her excellent writing skills into the service of the movement and produced the text of the Book of Shadows (in practice, the liturgical manual) that is essentially the one now used by the movement throughout the world. She has described her contributions modestly but accurately in her recent The Rebirth of Witchcraft. During this period, the Craft began to assimilate the White Goddess theology of Robert Graves, who revived many theories about a matriarchal period in European prehistory, theories that had long ago been discarded by scholars as inadequate to deal with the known facts.
The Craft continued to grow steadily in England. Gardner initiated a great many new priestesses from 1957 until his death in 1964, and these carried on the Craft enthusiastically. Raymond Buckland, after a long correspondence with Gardner, was initiated in 1963 in Perth, Scotland, by Monique Wilson (Lady Olwen), from whom much of the Craft in America descends, since Buckland brought the Craft back to the USA and, with his wife Rosemary as High Priestess, founded the New York coven in Bayside, Long Island. Almost all the 'official' Gardnerians in America are descendants of that coven.
However, these 'official' Gardnerians are now a very small fraction of the whole movement, largely because they operate according to a fairly strict interpretation of the rules that were gradually established by the New York coven in its steadily expanding text of the Book of Shadows. Most American Witches, being spiritually akin to anarchists, libertarians, and other proponents of radical theories, regard the Gardnerian concept of 'orthodox Witchcraft' as an oxymoron and practice the Craft much more flexibly, using whatever they like from the Gardnerian repertoire and creating whatever else they need from whatever looks useful in past or present religions. Many of these claim to descend from some other 'tradition' of Witchcraft independent of Gardner, but such claims are almost entirely historically specious. The rare exceptions are the few individuals, such as Victor Anderson (from whom Starhawk derived most of her information), who had practiced a pre-Gardnerian, folk-magic type of Witchcraft, but that was so different from Gardnerianism, in both practice and theology, that they can be considered to be the same religion only by a great stretch of the imagination.
Since the late 1960s, enough information on the theory and praxis of Gardnerian-style Witchcraft has been available in books that any small group who wanted to could train themselves as a coven. Those who did so could be, and were, recognized as members of the same religion when they later met other Witches; and more and more covens began this way as more and more books becausebecame available in the 1970s and 1980s. We have now reached a stage where an attempt to diagram the proliferation of Craft covens and traditions resembles a jungle.
The Neopagan and New Age movements share so many characteristics that one might expect their members to feel a certain amount of kinship, but in fact they do not. Both, for example, are extremely interested in developing personal psychic abilities as much as possible. However, New Agers eschew the terms 'magic' and 'witchcraft.' New Age bookstores almost never have sections labeled 'Magic' or 'Witchcraft.' Instead, books on magic are shelved with works on spiritual disciplines, such as Yoga; and books on Neopagan Witchcraft are shelved with books on 'Women's Studies.'
Second, many typical New Age assumptions about religion are generally rejected by Neopagans. Many New Agers assume, for example, that all religions are ultimately the same; that spirituality is best learned by sitting at the feet of a master teacher or guru, preferably from one of the Eastern religions; and that a new world teacher or messiah will appear to usher in the New Age. Neopagans, in contrast, like the Craft specifically because it is so different from the Puritanical, world-hating Christianity that continues to be prominent in American culture. Most Neopagans believe in karma and reincarnation; but they reject the dualism of the Eastern traditions, and consider the guarantee of rebirth to be the reward for their spiritual practices. They generally believe that they are practicing an ancient folk religion, whether as a survival or a revival; and, being focused on the pagan religions of the past, they are not particularly interested in a New Age in the future.
They also generally believe that many religions are radically and irreconcilably different from each other; that the 'reformed' religions (especially the monotheistic ones) established by Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the Buddha, and similar figures were NOT an improvement over the folk religions that they replaced; and that if there were a single worldwide religion in the future, it might very well repress human freedom even more than the Roman Catholic Church did in Europe during the 'Burning Times.' Hence, Neopagans are not at all receptive to teachers and teachings from the monotheistic religions nor to any from the East, with the possible exception of Hinduism, which is seen (whether accurately or not) as an 'unreformed' polytheism similar to that of the Greco-Roman world; Neopagans tend to be especially interested in Tantric traditions, since these can easily be seen as a type of magic parallel to that developed in hethe Western occult tradition.
Neopagans also generally tend to be extremely antiauthoritarian (whatever the reasons in personal backgrounds might be), and so are not at all inclined to accept the personal authority of any guru. The authoritarian structure of the official Gardnerian Witches in America might then seem to be anomalous, but it alone is a reason why there are at least ten times as many Gardnerian-imitating Witches as official Gardnerians in the Neopagan movement.
Neopagan Witches also operate with an ethic that forbids them to accept money for initiating anyone or for training anyone in the essential practices of the Craft as a religion. Neopagan festivals have grown into national gatherings, often of several thousand people, during the last decade, but they have remained quite inexpensive, since no one is attempting to make profit from them. As a result of this ethic, Neopagans look upon the 'Psychic Fairs' and 'New Age Expos' with open contempt and tend to consider most New Age gurus to be money-hungry frauds who are exploiting the public by charging exorbitant fees for spiritual practices that can be learned for free within a Neopagan coven. This attitude does not, of course, encourage New Agers to look kindly upon Neopagans.
There are, nevertheless, a minority among the Neopagan Witches who consider themselves to be members of the New Age movement as well. This minority tends to consist of the Witches who understand fairly clearly not only that the Gardnerian Witchcraft movement is a new religion, but also that this newness makes it the potential equal of every other religion in the world, since every religion begins as a new religion at some time and place. If the Craft is a new religion, then it can be understood as contributing to the spiritual growth in the modern world that is leading up to the New Age, whenever and however that might begin.
For scholars, the Craft is even more difficult to study than most new religions are because of its custom of 'secrecy' (actually, privacy): there are no central registries for covens, and many covens still do not let their existence be known to anyone except their own members. Nevertheless, by dint of diligence and ingenuity, one can get a fairly reliable assessment of the nature and size of the movement. For the sake of manageability, I take as my starting point the data presented by Margot Adler in the second edition of her Drawing Down the Moon, which is the only competent journalistic investigation of the movement to date.
Size of the Movement
How large is the Neopagan movement now? We can estimate its size by four independent methods.
First, because almost all members of the movement are avid readers (see later discussion), we can estimate the movement's size from the sales of certain key books. For example, extrapolating from the sales of the Llewellyn reprint of Israel Regardie's The Golden Dawn, Gordon Melton arrived at a figure of 40,000 serious adherents (essentially, members of covens) in the early 1980s. Similarly, Adler's Drawing Down the Moon and Starhawk's The Spiral Dance had each sold about 50,000 copies by the end of 1985.
Second, we can extrapolate from festival attendance. Even limiting the category of festivals to those that last two days or more (in contrast to local Sabbats - the 'traditional' Witch gatherings on the solstices, equinoxes, and Celtic cross-quarter days - which tend to be one-day affairs), there were 44 such annual festivals in 1986, and are closer to 100 now. Attendance can differ widely, but all reports estimate average attendance at between 100 and 200. Adler reports that the responses to her 1985 questionnaire showed that less than 10 percent of American Witches attend festivals at all. Harvest magazine learned from a survey of several hundred of its readers in 1986 that, of the readers who attended festivals: they attended an average of two festivals a year; a third of them belonged to covens; a third were solitary Witches; and a third were Neopagans, but not Witches (i.e., did not consider themselves to be initiated or 'ordained'). We can therefore carry out some rough calculations, as follows: Total annual attendance at festivals: 5,000 to 20,000; divided by average attendance of two festivals: 2,500 to 10,000; only a third are members of covens: 833 to 3,333.
Only 10 percent of all Witches go to festivals, but covens probably average ten members; so the number of covens would also range from 833 to 3,333, and the number of individuals who consider themselves to be Witches would range from 8,330 to 33,330, plus perhaps another 10 percent for the solitaries, giving roughly 9,000 to 36,000.
Around each coven there tends to be a circle of other people who are somewhat less involved: friends who come to Sabbats, students in study groups, and other noninitiates who are following Neopaganism as their primary spiritual path.
</doc><doc register="religion" n="14">
Inquisitors into Missionaries:
The Holy Office in Cuenca, 1547-1600
Since 1510 the Spanish Inquisition had been a court in search of a mission. The institution's original purpose, to punish Judaizers, had run its course, and fewer cases of judaizing came to its attention every year. Luther's split from the church in 1520 gave the Inquisition a new focus, the destruction of Protestant ideas. Even this, however, proved to be an elusive goal, as there were virtually no Lutherans in Spain during the 1520s. The inquisitors settled for discrediting the numerous followers of Erasmus and his ideas, which were perceived as having inspired Luther, destroying the tiny cells of mystics known as alumbrados, and going after the moriscos. These campaigns were quickly executed, and once again, after 1532 the Inquisition's level of activity fell. In fact, the tribunals, which relied primarily on court fines to pay their expenses, were perpetually in a state of financial crisis. Given what was to follow, the appointment in 1547 of Fernando de Valdés as inquisitor-general might almost be viewed as an act of divine providence.
The Asturian Fernando de Valdés's long career in the church began in 1517, when he entered the household of Cardinal Cisneros. Although unlike his patron in that he bore a lifelong animadversion to Erasmian ideas, Valdés shared with Cisneros his passion for administrative reform. He is an excellent example of the skilled administrator turned inquisitor. Prior to his appointment as inquisitor-general, Valdés had been in succession bishop of Oviedo, bishop of Sig<*_>u-umlaut<*/>enza, and archbishop of Seville. His episcopacies were characterized by the zealous administration of church affairs that was to become one of the hallmarks of the Catholic Reformation.
Valdés brought to the Holy Office his administrative genius and an obsessive fear of Protestantism. He was convinced that it was just a matter of time before Protestant ideas infiltrated Spain. Accordingly, he quietly prepared for that crisis by completely overhauling the middle-aged, bankrupt institution. Nothing was left untouched - not court procedure, finances, personnel, nor administration. Two areas in which Valdés's influence was critical were visitations and nonsalaried officials such as the familiars and commissioners. Together, the visitation and the comisario gave the Inquisition its major advantages over other courts in the sixteenth century.
The visitation was a means of taking the court to the people, announcing its intentions, and swiftly bringing the accused to justice. Since 1517, inquisitors had been under orders to go on circuit in their districts four times each year, but the record suggests that this order had been ignored. Valdés changed the requirement to four months of visitations each year by one of the tribunal's two inquisitors. The Inquisition of Cuenca at least partially fulfilled Valdés's orders. In the eleven-year period 1565-75, which encompasses the final years of Valdés's generalship and those of Espinosa and Quiroga, inquisitors from Cuenca visited some part of their district at least once a year, if not more frequently. The officials made a point of covering the entire large district by visiting Sig<*_>u-umlaut<*/>enza one year, La Mancha the next, the city of Cuenca another, and so on.
The use of nonsalaried officials, the familiars and comisarios, complemented the visitations. Through such auxiliary officials, the Inquisition's presence could be extended year-round into the countryside. Familiars were Old Christian laymen who performed certain duties in exchange for privileges such as the right to bear arms and exemption from royal taxation and justice. They were supposed to denounce religious crimes, carry messages, escort prisoners, and in other ways assist the inquisitors with their work.
Familiars had existed long before Valdés became inquisitor-general, but at the time of his appointment they were gaining rapidly in numbers and in notoriety for their freewheeling ways. To be an effective aid to the Inquisition, and not an embarrassment to it, the office had to be rehabilitated. Valdés issued two important circulars in 1553 and 1555 that initiated the process of reforming the familiars by setting new standards of behavior and limits on the number of officials each tribunal could commission. In 1552 the conquense inquisitors began to keep records of all the familiars and other persons who held commissions from the Holy Office. If the tribunal followed the Suprema's guidelines as set forth above, at any given time in the sixteenth century the bishopric of Cuenca supported a network of about two hundred familiars.
The familiars' sinister image calls for a clarification of the real function of this official. The Inquisition never intended the familiars to serve as an omnipresent 'secret police,' an image of them that still persists in the popular imagination. Since their identity was not secret, they hardly could 'spy' on anyone. They could not even report the rumors that circulated about their neighbors because the tribunal would not accept hearsay as evidence. Familiars rarely appeared as witnesses in the hundreds of trials that the inquisitors prosecuted. In reality, the inquisitors of Cuenca used familiars to create an inexpensive network of officials who, when needed, could be trusted to carry out the Inquisition's confidential errands in the countryside. Modest as this function seems to the twentieth-century observer, it was a disturbing innovation to a population that rarely saw any representatives of the authorities who ruled them.
The lesser-known comisarios were quite different in nature from the familiars, and far more crucial to the success of the Inquisition's activities. While familiars merely ran errands, comisarios served as representatives of the inquisitors themselves. The comisario was a local priest who was empowered to publish the Inquisition's edicts, take denunciations and depositions, and ratify witnesses. When there seemed to be a probable case against an offender in his parish, it was the comisario who sent a denunciation, together with supporting testimony, to the inquisitors in Cuenca. Like the familiar, the comisario served without pay, apparently for the prestige and privileges of his post.
In Cuenca, the comisario's influence was greatly enhanced by the fact that the position was often awarded to village curas. The Inquisition relied on curas primarily because the comisario's legal duties required a high degree of education, which was not found in many priests other than curas. Nonetheless, there were added benefits to preferring parish priests over other well-educated priests for the position of comisario. The cura could draw upon his hired lieutenant priests and his other contacts in the area to aid him in gathering information about offenders. By using the cura, the Inquisition effectively latched onto an existing network of secular priests to extend its own presence outside the city of Cuenca.
The first comisario in Cuenca was one Dr. Gonzalo L<*_>o-acute<*/>pez, a theologian who was appointed in 1559 to serve in his parish of Tebar. The conquense inquisitors appointed comisarios at a steady rate, one to a town, until by 1600 sixty to sixty-five localities in the district could be expected to support the official. As in the case of the familiars, the comisarios were appointed only in the more important and more distant towns of the district. As the comisarios grew in number, the Inquisition came to rely on them to take over the legwork of the tribunal. Indeed, with responsible comisarios, the inquisitors had no need to visit their district on a regular basis. As a result, the traditional visita became less common in the seventeenth century.
Valdés's institutional reforms worked in Cuenca. Beginning in the 1550s, the increased number of visitations and of local officials led to far more trial activity than usual. The tribunal's annual case load rose from a pre-Vald<*/>e-acute<*/>sian average of about thirty trials to nearly sixty. In fact, the networks functioned so well that in 1568 the tribunal had to work overtime to keep up with its docket. More trials, however, was not Valdés's sole objective. In keeping with the inquisitor-general's policies, the kinds of offenses tried by the conquense Inquisition changed as well.
Valdés attempted to head off the spread of Protestant ideas by controlling the flow of possibly dangerous information into Spain and restricting access to the Scriptures in the vernacular. Late in 1551 the tribunal in Cuenca received Valdés's announcement that the Inquisition would publish a catalog of prohibited books, the famous Index, which was based on a list prepared by the University of Louvain. Cuenca was ordered to cooperate in collecting all Bibles, missals, and diurnals in the Spanish language, in addition to specific books mentioned by title. In the summer of 1552 the inquisitors wrote that they had found some diurnals and asked for further instructions concerning book collection. Censorship became more organized in the 1560s, when the Suprema began to send out notices to Cuenca of new works as they were added to the Index. Occasionally, the inquisitors inspected the district's bookshops for prohibited works. They also enlisted the booksellers' aid to control the circulation of broadsheets, primers, and playing cards, popular literature that sometimes contained scandalous or heretical material. Once, someone turned in some playing cards he had picked up from some sailors in Alicante, showing the pope with a woman. On another occasion, a French print warning against prostitution was mistaken for an ecce homo and was cause for argument and scandal in a local shop.
In addition to heretical literature, inquisitors in Cuenca were on the lookout for heretics themselves. Trials for heresy were a direct consequence of the growing fear of the spread of Protestant ideas to Cuenca from abroad or other parts of Spain. Foreigners, primarily French, Flemings, and Italians, passing through or residing in Cuenca suddenly were liable to face the tribunal on charges of 'Lutheranism.' Inquisitors inspecting the countryside uncovered conquenses who read prohibited books or spoke ill of the church, its officials, and its doctrine. These were difficult years for priests and friars, who discovered that their colleagues and parishioners were scrutinizing their casual statements or poorly written sermons for echoes of Protestant thought.
The Inquisition classified most suspicious statements as cases of either palabras escandalosas (scandalous words) or proposiciones (propositions), the latter usually being the more serious of the two charges. While there was enormous variety in the statements heard by the Inquisition, most fell within certain patterns. Some were popular sayings about religion that openly contradicted the church's dogma. Others, especially comments about specific practices of the church, may have been inspired by Christian humanism or Protestantism. Still others were simply incredulous or crudely speculative remarks.
Very common among the popular sayings were "In this world you won't see me have a bad time, because in the next one I won't suffer," and "There's nothing more [to life] than being born, living, and dying" (today's "Life's a bitch and then you die"). The sixteenth-century cases heard in Cuenca, rather than being defiant challenges to Catholic doctrine, seem to have been said in the context of justifying reckless living. Other people liked to say, "Each man is saved according to his own religion," a provocative statement that grew out of Spain's still multi-religious society but contradicted the church's teaching that there was no salvation outside the Christian faith.
Over the years, the inquisitors in Cuenca tried several cases reminiscent of Christian humanist or Protestant thought. Every year, someone would voice the opinion that masses and offerings for the souls in purgatory obtained no advantages for the dead. The eighty-year-old farmer Mart<*_>i-acute<*/>n Garc<*_>i-acute<*/>a turned himself in for saying that "the things people do here so that the dead will go to glory don't do any good." On more than one occasion, the tribunal encountered the sentiment that processions to shrines, because of their merrymaking, did less good than pious prayer at home, or similarly, that praying to a "stick of wood" was less efficacious than directing one's prayers to the saint in heaven. Others found some aspects of Christian dogma hard to believe, particularly the doctrine of the virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead. Twenty-one-year-old Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a de Cardenas, the daughter of a shepherd in Villanueva de Alcardete, in 1568 maintained that "God did it to Our Lady like her father [did] to her mother" and "persisted in believing that God had known Our Lady carnally."</doc><doc register="religion" n="15">
Four
Jewish Ethnography and the Question of the Book
Beyond the valorization of native knowledge, beyond even the lesson that anthropology, too, is a cultural system, there is more to be articulated about the relation between the cultural practice of anthropology and the cultures that anthropologists practice on. The comparison of the treatment of certain themes in anthropology with those by people in cultural settings widely removed from the origins of modern anthropology is one way to investigate this relation (Borofsky 1987). My approach here is rather different. I attempt a critique of certain unspoken fundamentals in professional anthropology through references to the Jewish textual tradition - a tradition that is intimately related to the Christian textual tradition out of which ethnography more immediately arises - and to the situation of Jews who have lived in or near the centers of world power within which anthropology has been produced. This Jewish tradition has resurfaced, albeit greatly transformed, within postmodern theory. Making explicit its critical potential vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis the assumptions of ethnographic practice might, therefore, help to de-mystify and invigorate the contemporary practice of anthropology by revealing a particular manifestation of the link between knowledge and power. It should also help to explain why Jews have until quite recently been marginal as subjects of ethnographic study.
I will launch the essay with a fragmentary discussion of Stephen Tyler's book The Unspeakable. Tyler himself is adept at the postmodern techniques of close, multiple, and playful reading, and therefore I do no violence by relying on strong readings of selected brief fragments from his work. The book is first of all relevant as an ambitious account of textuality and orality in anthropology. Tyler's understandings of the written and the spoken are unselfconscioulsy grounded in the Christian tradition, thus enabling me to show more clearly what happens when we bring the Jewish voice in. Furthermore, Tyler articulates a nexus between orality and textuality on one hand, and time and space on the other, that is extremely relevant to my concerns. He writes:
It is a commonplace though many-named fact that there are two modes of integration, one a metaphor of space, the other a metaphor of time. The former is a static image of simultaneously coordinated parts, an objectlike structure, while the latter is a dynamic sequential relation of parts. Since Plato, at least, these modes of integration have been correlated with different modes of discourse, the sequential with narration and the simultaneous with argument or exposition. Plato's distinction between rhetoric and dialectic reflects this correlation, for dialectic in discriminating genera and species creates a taxonomy, a static and spatial image of reason which the syllogism merely recapitulates. In modern discourse analysis we have a similar contrast between the sequential and temporal formalisms of Propp and the simultaneous and spatial formalisms of Lévi-Strauss. Significantly, both Plato and Lévi-Strauss subordinate sequence to simultaneity. The indices of time - sequence, cause, consequence, and result are dominated by images of space - inclusion, exclusion, hyponymy, and the syllogism. (1987:80)
It is hard for me to know what Tyler would say about this passage. Is he iterating a truth or unveiling a misconception? The former interpretation can gain support from linking his term commonplace to his prefatory plea in favor of a repressed "commonsense world" (xi: emphasis mine) and from his binary assignment of time to Propp, space to Lévi-Strauss (and to Derrida; see p.42). The latter reading, on the other hand, can also draw support from his antispatialist dissection of Derrida, for if the fact he is referring to is commonplace, presumably he would find something in it that needs to be demystified.
My general concern here is with the sentence fragment "fact that there are two modes of integration." These two modes do not exist simply; they are constructed and naturalized, and I want to see them as such. I will begin, then, by discussing a spatializing discourse to which I am hostile but whose beneficent intent I am making some modest effort to comprehend - that of academic area studies. I will end by discussing a temporalizing discourse to which I am drawn, but whose mystifying silences need to be made audible - a reading of the Jewish Bible that privileges textual identity to the virtual exclusion of the necessary dimension of everyday life and collective identification.
My specifiable interests here are threefold. The first is my academic future as a Jewish anthropologist and an anthropologist of Judaism; I articulate this viewpoint in order to create a choice beyond what seem to be the existing options either of representing myself as being a specialist in an 'area' that is not recognized as such and that indeed is properly not an area, or of abandoning my professional relation to a particular group of people in favor of a focus on 'pure theory.' The second concern is the general status of Jewish ideas in elite intellectual discourse; they should be neither ignored nor patronized. The third is the well-being of the Israeli Jewish and Palestinian Arab peoples. A critical approach toward the spatial and temporal grounds of ethnic identity is highly relevant to a better understanding of the construction of those two nations and of the conflict between them.
The index to Tyler's book confirms the gap between these concerns and the current theoretical/critical discourse in anthropology. There are no references there to Jews, Hebrew, Israel, or midrash, that genre of rabbinic interpretive literature that works largely by interweaving fragments of the biblical text and that has recently attracted considerable scholarly attention (see D. Boyarin 1990; Hartman and Budick 1986; Handelman 1982). The Kabbalah is mentioned in the text (p.180), but it is not indexed, nor is the Zoroastrianism to which it is coupled. The one reference in the index to "Bible (postmodern ethnography and)" directs us to Tyler's statement that
the hermeneutic process is not restricted to the reader's relationship to the text, but includes as well the interpretive practices of the parties to the originating dialogue. In this respect, the model of postmodern ethnography is not the newspaper but that original ethnography - the Bible (cf. Kelber 1983). (ibid.: 204)
The book Tyler refers to - Werner H. Kelber's The Oral and the Written Gospel - is a painstaking and insightful account of the transition from oral traditions to written texts in the Christian accounts of Jesus' sayings and life (see also Kelber 1989). But the Gospels are not what I usually have in mind when I think of the Bible, and it is not obvious that the same relation between orality and textuality obtains in the canonical Jewish books and in the Gospel. That Tyler himself identifies 'Bible' and 'Gospel' is further suggested by his Pauline paraphrase "the letter of ethnography killeth" (1987:99). It is easy to understand why this phrase is a powerful one for Tyler, since the ethnographic situation in which the oral dialogic of fieldwork is transformed into a monologic ethnography is so often roughly concomitant with the actual disappearance, the 'death,' of indigenous oral cultures. And yet we need to beware of this antigraphic prejudice, which Tyler shares with Paul: "If the apostle's thought is perceived as a theology of language, affirmation of the oral power of words and aversion to written objectification lie at its core" (Kelber 1983:184). Kelber does indeed say that "an oral language deconstructed by textuality undergoes a kind of death" (ibid.:185). But he has also taken care not to evaluate the former as superior to the latter (16), does not believe in an evolutionary progression from one to the other (184), and cautions against the very search for origins (xv). The Bible I will be writing about here in its relation - critical or potential, but not original - to ethnography is other than the Gospel and, in fundamental ways, that which the Gospel constructs as its Other.
Note that Tyler is doubly validating the Gospel-Bible, both as the original of ethnography tout court and as the proper model for post-modern ethnography. Tyler's Bible is both the way ethnography was 'originally' done and the way ethnography should be done. The indexing of the Gospel as Bible and as model postmodern ethnography, along with the absence of any Jewish references, suggest that for Tyler the relevant textual-interpretive sources of ethnography are generally Christian. The intimate link between missionary accounts and early ethnographic reports certainly reinforces this suggestion. On the other hand, there is the natural objection that so many modern pioneers in cultural anthropology (Mauss, Boas, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss) were Jews. The issue, of course, is more one of social motivations and implicit frameworks of understanding than of the overt ethnic or religious affiliation of any particular scholar. Two observations can be made about the apparent contradiction between the Jewish personal origins of these pioneers and the Christian hermeneutic origins of anthropology as a whole.
First, all these Jewish scholars stand, as 'assimilating' Jews, in an apologetic relation to the modern nation-state that is curiously analogous to the relation of the early Christians to the Roman Empire. Jews in post-Enlightenment Western Europe felt obliged to prove their loyalty to the new nation-states, and many of the secular scholars among them (Durkheim perhaps most notably here) did so by helping to elaborate the legitimating ground of liberal state structures. The record of the church fathers' relations with imperial Rome demonstrates a similar concern for compatibility between Christian loyalty and loyalty to empire and a corresponding dissociation from the particularist and rebellious Jews (Greer 1986:121-22). The analogy is even more poignantly ironic when we consider that these secularist, modern, Western European Jewish scholars were, like the early Christians, "free to exploit the universalist aims of the religion from which they had sprung" (ibid.).
Secondly, identifying ethnography as profoundly (not essentially) Christian does not mean that its history is unrelated to Judaism. In fact, as I will discuss more fully later on, a major source of ethnography's logic of Othering is the early Christian encounter with Judaism. What came to be normative, orthodox Christianity did not simply reject the Hebrew Scripture in the way the Gnostics did. Instead Christian hermeneutics were largely bent toward "the transformation of the Hebrew Scriptures so that they may become a witness to Christ" (ibid.:111), a task made infinitely more difficult by most Jews' rejection of that "witness" (120). Here - as in the case of Marx's essays on the Jewish question or Lenin's confrontation with the Jewish Workers' Bund in 1903 - the Jews stand as the test case for universalizing theory, which fails to deal adequately with a stubbornly distinctive group. But equally interesting, we are talking about a process of Othering that is simultaneously inter-'ethnic' and intertextual. Thus in a historical and not only metaphorical sense, the history of Othering is a history of reading; a crucial early moment in ethnography is the hermeneutic, intertextual encounter between the Christian Bible and the Jewish Torah.
I am hardly an authority on Christianity, although I am doubtless shaped by its cultural heritage more thoroughly than I could possibly be aware. Indeed it is impossible to imagine ourselves without the superethnic, individualized universalism elaborated in Christianity. Here, however, I am attempting to identify some of the mystifications inevitably entailed by the institutionalization of that universalizing thrust. One mystification perhaps linked to the early Christian ideal of a community whose members are linked not by history but primarily by faith is the idea of an abstract, undefined, yet nevertheless universally human common sense. Here Tyler, for instance, becomes wonderfully polyvalent. On one hand he generally valorizes common sense as one in a series of repressed, presumably liberating values, decrying "the triumph of logic over rhetoric, of representation over communication, of science over common sense, of the visual over the verbal" (1987:170). Immediately afterward, however, he historicizes common sense, and undoes his own claims for its universal value: "These visual arts ... are ... historical emergents within a structure of common sense, and being thus relative to a cultural tradition cannot function as universals capable of constituting a fusion of all cultural horizons into a single integrated whole" (ibid.).</doc><doc register="religion" n="16">
Bishops Meet at Notre Dame
By THOMAS J. REESE
BEFORE THE U.S. bishops even met for their spring meeting at the University of Notre Dame, storm clouds gathered over the university. The storm was both literal and figurative. Many bishops got stranded in Chicago and Detroit on the way to the meeting as high winds, rain and tornado warnings closed one airport after another.
Another storm raged over the decision of Notre Dame to award its Laetare Medal to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.). Although arguably the most academically qualified member of Congress and a supporter of social justice programs, Senator Moynihan was criticized by the bishops' conference president, Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, for espousing "the position that people should have the right to kill their unborn children."
Cardinal John J. O'Connor of New York and other bishops felt so strongly about the issue that they refused to set foot on the campus. Although he met with the bishops' pro-life committee in a hotel in South Bend, the Cardinal boycotted the spring meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (N.C.C.B.). Of the 286 voting members of the conference, about 200 attended the meeting. How many refused to come because of the Moynihan flap is uncertain, since attendance at the spring meetings is always less than at the November meetings of the bishops.
Controversy continued to plague the bishops as they gathered in South Bend. Even before approving the agenda, Archbishop William J. Levada of Portland, Ore., moved to conduct the discussion of the pastoral letter on women's concerns in closed session. Archbishop Levada and Bishop Alfred C. Hughes of Boston, both members of the committee drafting the pastoral, argued that the bishops could be more honest and free talking behind closed doors. They were supported by Cardinal Bernard F. Law of Boston but opposed by Archbishop John R. Roach of St. Paul, Bishop Raymond A. Lucker of New Ulm, Minn., as well as Bishop Joseph L. Imesch of Joliet, Ill., who chairs the drafting committee. The bishops voted to keep the discussion in the open.
Bishop Imesch had come to Notre Dame fearing the worst for his pastoral and that was exactly what he got. The draft letter was attacked from the right and the left. Auxiliary Bishop John R. Sheets, S.J., of Fort Wayne-South Bend, said that the document should include a condemnation of any radical feminist theology that threatens church unity by rejecting traditional Christology because Jesus was male, by seeing the church as a patriarchal institution that suppresses the feminine dimension and by refusing to participate in Eucharists celebrated by male priests.
Bishop Elden F. Curtiss of Helena, Mont., agreed with Bishop Sheets. He noted that the letter says sexism is a sin; it should also say radical feminism is a sin.
During the debate it became clear that the drafting committee itself is so divided that Archbishop Levada and Bishop Hughes prepared a minority report. Although the report was not made public, Bishop Hughes's criticisms of the draft were telling. He called for strengthening and expanding the Christian anthropology of the first chapter. Although he did not go into detail, this probably means reflecting more closely the Pope's theology of the human person, especially his views on the complementarity of the sexes.
Second, Bishop Hughes wanted the letter to analyze modern views of the individual, family and freedom rooted in Enlightenment. Finally, he wanted a more positive presentation of the church and the church's position opposing the ordination of women.
THE PASTORAL LETTER was also attacked from the other side. Bishop Lucker argued that the process was more important than the letter and recommended dropping the document while continuing the dialogue with women. He noted that the bishops have a difficult time applying their teaching about the equality of women to the daily life of the church and that the draft has lots of suggestions for society but not for the church.
Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, O.S.B., of Milwaukee also called for dropping the letter because it does not have anything to say beyond what has already been said in papal and Vatican documents. He said it is not up to the standards of other conference letters and that it would be embarrassing to put it out in its present form. Furthermore, it would neither heal the wounds suffered by women nor bring people together.
Archbishop Roach spoke for the middle, who hope that the letter can be saved and approved after the normal amending process in November. "We need the document to focus the dialogue," he argued. "This document will be helpful for discussion on the local level."
Cardinal Jospeh L. Bernadin of Chicago also supported pursuing the document through the normal conference process. "It would be a serious mistake to walk away from the letter after all the work that was done, including the consultations," he said. He acknowledged that ordination is the neuralgic issue. The bishops would have to enrich the section dealing with ordination and explain the church's teaching. But to attempt to say the last word on Christian anthropology and feminism would in effect kill the letter, he said.
IN ORDER to give the drafting committee some direction, Archbishop Pilarczyk held a straw vote to see if the bishops wanted to use the current draft as a basis for debate and amendments in November. The committee had told the bishops that, after almost nine years of work, they were finished and would not attempt another draft. A standing vote indicated that a majority of the bishops wanted to go forward with the letter. But the vote also showed that the letter was in serious trouble: Fewer than two-thirds of the bishops wanted to go forward, and it will take a two-thirds vote to pass the letter.
The results of the vote were further muddied since some bishops thought that the committee could revise the text in light of the discussion. Others hoped the letter could be issued by the committee rather than by the full conference and thus have weaker authority.
"I don't see how it is possible to satisfy the concerns expressed by the bishops," said Bishop Imesch. "We will try, but that would be a miracle."
Bishops who support the ordination of women believe that they only have about 30 votes in the conference. Revisions in the letter will most likely reflect the views of those opposed to the ordination of women and to feminist theology.
While the bishops debated the draft, groups favoring the ordination of women and of married men released the results of a Gallup poll showing that U.S. Catholics favor both. Sixty-seven percent agree that "it would be a good thing if women were allowed to be ordained as priests," up from 47 percent in 1985 and 29 percent in 1974. An even higher percentage (75 percent) support a married priesthood. Since younger Catholics support these positions more strongly than older Catholics do, future polls will probably show a continued trend toward even greater support for the ordination of women and for married priests.
The poll showed disagreement with the bishops on other issues. Eighty-seven percent say couples should make their own decisions on birth control, and 75 percent think divorced and remarried Catholics without annulments should be able to receive Communion. Two-thirds of the Catholics also disagree with the bishops' opposition to capital punishment, showing that the sample was not limited to liberal Catholics. Despite disagreements with the Pope on these issues, 84 percent of the U.S. Catholics think John Paul II is "doing a good job leading the church."
The bishops also received reports on proselytism and evangelization. Proselytism is the attempt to recruit people away from another church through undue pressure and promises of material rewards. The bishops are especially concerned about the loss of Hispanics through proselytism.
The bishops will consider a statement on evangelization at their November meeting. The three goals of evangelization, according to the draft, are to increase enthusiasm for the faith among Catholics, to invite all people to hear the message of the faith and to foster Gospel values in American culture.
THERE ARE 15 million inactive Catholics and 80 million unchurched in the United States who will be the focus of the evangelization effort. Many bishops said that Catholic parishes need to be more hospitable to new-comers and strangers. A number of bishops indicated that Renew, a parish renewal program begun in Newark, N.J., is the best instrument of evangelization in the American church.
Another report by Bishop Edward I. Hughes of Metuchen, N.J., described preparations to receive and implement The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which will be approved by the Pope on June 25. Bishop Hughes chairs a conference subcommittee to develop a favorable climate for the reception of the catechism. An ad hoc committee of the conference severely criticized the first draft of the catechism, which was then called Catechism of the Universal Church (see AM. 3/3/90). The bishops are now being asked to embrace enthusiastically a revised catechism they have not yet seen. The English translation of the catechism is expected in January.
One surprise at the meeting came from Archbishop Agostino Cacciavillan, the Pope's representative to the United States, who said that the Vatican is concerned about the Christology and Trinitarian theology expressed in the new translation of the sacramentary being developed by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy (I.C.E.L.). While he did not explain the concerns, one member of the bishops' liturgy committee felt that I.C.E.L. was going too far in trying to avoid using traditional Trinitarian language in referring to the Father and Son. He felt that if the draft came to the conference as it stood, "there would be a blood bath on the floor." There may be some hope for the I.C.E.L. sacramentary, however, since without much controversy the bishops did approve a new translation of the lectionary that uses inclusive language in dealing with the non-divine. This revised lectionary took eight years of consultation and work with bishops and scholars.
The bishops also met in executive session behind closed doors. Cardinal James A. Hickey of Washington, D.C., reported that he had gotten the Pope to approve a second conference of religious women in the United States to represent those who believe that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (L.C.W.R.) is too liberal. The L.C.W.R. has been under attack by conservative nuns whom some bishops consider more loyal to papal teaching. Also, Archbishop Pilarczyk indicated that there may be some Vatican movement on the issue of altar girls but warned against raising false hopes.
But the major topic of the executive session was sexual abuse of children by priests. The bishops heard from a panel of experts and bishops. In a statement at the conclusion of the meeting, Archbishop Pilarczyk, as N.C.C.B. president, addressed the problem with more directness and candor than had ever been heard on the national level. He called sexual abuse of a child "reprehensible conduct directed at a most vulnerable member of our society." He noted that research indicates that one out of every four girls and one out of every 10 boys is sexually abused before they reach their 18th birthday.
"Sexual abuse is caused by a disorder (in some cases, an addiction) for which treatment is essential," he said. "Sometimes the therapy may be successful; sometimes it is not." He refused to rule out the possibility of a priest returning to ministry after treatment, but "We realize we must seek sound medical advice as we make responsible pastoral judgments," he said. "The protection of the child is and will continue to be our first concern."
He admitted that mistakes had been made in the past when people treated sexual abuse as a moral fault for which repentance and a change of scene, so it was thought, would result in a change of behavior. "Far more aggressive steps are needed to protect the innocent, treat the perpetrator, and safeguard our children.
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Fruit for eternity
A testimony of God's sustaining love
by Stephanie Smedley
At some point in a Christian's life, he or she may face what I term 'the Judas Issue': How far are you willing to go for Christ? What will purchase your betrayal?
It may come through disappointment or a situation so shattering that the cost of following Jesus is sharply held in focus. I have faced such a challenge; I have lost a child.
Christopher Ryan, my second son with silvery-blue eyes and white-gold hair, departed this earth. He was perfect in form, beautiful to see, cuddly, sweet, and good. He called me "Amma," and I loved him - and love him still. He lived with us for seven months, then returned to the one who gave him life, a sweet and precious memory.
"You're a pastor's wife. You've walked with the Lord for years and witnessed countless miracles. Why would God, if he's so good, let this happen?" Such reactions, along with judgments of "not enough faith" or "having concealed sin" came from those who looked on, unable to perceive God's objectives in my life.
But throughout the ordeal, I never doubted God's goodness or God's love. God's purposes are higher than mine, more lasting, more enduring. I recognize God's right to do as God wills. As Job so widely said, "Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?" (Job 2:10, NAS).
I had to face the questions, What will be the price of my denial? Do I love God because God blesses? Do I serve the Lord for some reward? Will I remain loyal through difficulty or hardship?
This present life is full of trials. God entrusted my family with a massive test, one that has buckled others. The good news is that though we were shaken severely, God's stalwart love sustained us. God's grace truly is sufficient.
I relate to the sword piercing the soul as spoken of in Luke 2:35. I understand the physical ache, the yearning to hold and possess, the missing and horrible emptiness. I have faced the declaration that death is final.
But death is not final for the Christian. It is only the exchange of that which is frail for that which is indestructible. Yes, the pain of separation is great; there isn't a day I don't think of Chris. But I have this reassuring hope: I will see him again.
The power of Christ's grace brought me through what I could never endure on my own. I am not bitter, nor am I resentful. In fact, I am humbled to think Christ trusted me with such a test. I love my Lord.
At the time of Christopher's death, God spoke to our hearts: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit" (John 12:24).
Life on earth is brief, just a blip on history's graph. I pray that we people of God will shift our focus from what is temporary to that which never ends. May we spend our lives with this goal in mind: to bear fruit for eternity.
What our children see
Suggestions for setting a good example
by Deborah Christensen
Linda sat propped up in bed reading her Bible. She enjoyed these moments to herself. The children were sleeping. She had read a Bible story to them and prayed with them before putting them to bed. The house was quiet. This was the first chance she had to spend quiet time with the Lord.
"What are you doing, Mommy?"
Linda looked up to see five-year-old Diane peeking into the room. She smiled and motioned for Diane to come in. "I'm having my devotions."
"Devotions? What's that?"
"That's reading the Bible to learn about Jesus, then praying to him - just as we do before you go to bed." Linda read aloud the passage she had been studying.
"I learned some songs about the Bible in Sunday school," Diane said. "Do you want to hear them?"
"Sure."
Diane started singing 'The B-I-B-L-E' and 'Zacchaeus.' Linda joined in. When they finished, Linda kissed Diane good night and sent her back to bed.
Have you noticed how children see everything we do, even when we don't know they are watching? Whether we like it or not, we set an example every day. What we do sticks with them. We decide if we set a good or bad example. How can we ensure that it is a good example? Following are a few suggestions that might help.
Weave your spiritual life into daily living. Read Bible stories to your children at bedtime, go to church, and pray before meals. But don't stop there. Allow the children to see you growing in your own spiritual journey.
In First We Have Coffee, Margaret Jensen talks about her mother's complete dependence on God. Every day she went to her room by herself and prayed on her knees. The children knew not to disturb her because she was talking to God, and it was a special time. She didn't hide it from them. They also watched miracles happen because of her faithfulness.
Deuteronomy 6:6-9 instructs us to teach the Lord's commands to our children in all circumstances. Our children learn about our values by watching us.
Be consistent. It's not a matter of 'do what I say, not what I do.' If what we say and what we do are different, we send confusing messages to our children.
Discipline is essential. Standards set in the home, however, apply to all family members, including parents. We are not above the rules. Pretending we are puts a wedge in our relationship with our children. They see the discrepancies between our actions and our words.
Children imitate us. When they see us doing something, even if we have told them not to, they feel they have permission to do it. Or they stop respecting us. They will probably sneak around behind our backs.
Recognize and acknowledge failures. We are not perfect. Our children already know that. They see every mistake we make. Admitting our mistakes and failures opens the lines of communication. It also lets our children know that failure is not the end of the world. It may teach them how to be open about their mistakes. Many people believe this undermines our authority. In fact, the opposite occurs.
Get involved in ministry as a family. Serve God together. Find something you can all do as a family. Let your children see you reaching outward to other people.
After church every Sunday, Bill and his father drove out to the local mental health facility. His father conducted services for the mentally handicapped patients. Bill watched as his father spent time with each person and treated her or him with dignity, showing love to each.
That image impressed Bill for the rest of his life. He cites his father's example as the catalyst that sent him into ministry. Bill now pastors a large congregation in the midwest. His church focuses on reaching people for Christ - no matter who they are. His theme is 'You matter to God.'
"Train up a child in the way he should go" (Prov. 22:6) means more than discipline or just talking about it. It means living it.
Putting back the thanks
Ten suggestions for a more thankful Thanksgiving
by Kathleen Buehler and Jennifer Veldman
Much has been said about the commercialization of Christmas that takes away from the real meaning of advent. But what about Thanksgiving? Has Thanksgiving become just a day to stuff ourselves with food and lie around watching parades and football games?
You may feel the need to put back into the holiday some of the gratitude to God that is the reason for the day. Following are some ideas that may spark your own new Thanksgiving traditions.
1. Weeks or days ahead of Thanksgiving, brainstorm as a family those persons who have meant a great deal to your family. Buy or make thank-you cards or write notes to send to these persons, expressing your gratitude to them. On Thanksgiving Day, make them part of your prayer time.
2. You could 'add' to your family. Invite persons who do not have a place to go on Thanksgiving to your celebration and include them in your holiday tradition. If there is a college near you, remember that some students may not be able to go home for the holiday, especially if they live far away, and may be spending the day alone.
3. Learn portions of the psalms that speak of Thanksgiving and praise. Recite these together on that special day.
4. Rewrite portions of Psalm 136 to fit the blessings of your family. Read your version as a litany on Thanksgiving Day.
5. Allow children, perhaps directed by an adult, to practice and present a skit or puppet show for the adults expressing the meaning of Thanksgiving or family togetherness.
6. At each person's place at the table, put a piece of paper with that person's name at the top. As the meal is being prepared, ask the various family members and guests to write on each of the other papers one characteristic or action that they appreciate about the person whose name is at the top. Then as persons gather at the table for dinner, each will find a list of reasons why he or she is appreciated.
7. Before digging into the dinner, spend a few moments looking back over the last year. Let each one express one person or event that has been a blessing.
8. As part of your prayer/worship time before you begin your meal, hold hands around the table and sing a familiar hymn or chorus of thanksgiving to God.
9. If someone at your Thanksgiving celebration is not a Christian, a specific testimony about what God has done in your life and how you are thankful to God may be a good way to share your faith.
10. If there is a shut-in or nursing home resident that you know, arrange to pack up a portion of your dinner to bring Thanksgiving to that individual after you have finished your meal.
Ministers of constant prayer
An unequaled opportunity for outreach
by John Eyberg
Even as the old are getting older, they are being joined in quantity by an aging, younger group. With a dramatic decline in birthrate, aging of the general population has skyrocketed. At the beginning of this century, an estimated one of every twenty-five persons was sixty-five or older; during the past decade the ratio was one in nine; and thirty years into the next century it is projected to be one in five - twenty percent of America's total population.
The graying of our country has ignited a national debate focused on building an economy that will sustain the aging population. What has yet to be ignited is a level of interest within the church community in what to do about an aging constituency. Mostly, the church has been satisfied with programs designed to entertain the elderly and with nursing home visitation. The result is an underutilized resource and a burial ground of unused talent.
Responsible stewardship is to be a hallmark of the church. To the church, God has entrusted gifts of great value, and God's expectation is for their return to him 'with interest' (Matt. 25:27). A church that violates that trust by burying talents embodied in aging vessels may one day hear, "You wicked and slothful servant!" (v.26).
As we grow older, we learn that aging is built into the system and happens at the same pace for everyone. Of course, we enter the human race at different times; therefore, we do not cross the finish line together.
Generation gaps can be the result, but an atmosphere of freedom can help fill the gaps. In the concluding chapter of her life, Hannah Whitall Smith wrote, "Advice we who are older may give, and the fruits of our experience, but we must be perfectly content to have our advice rejected by the younger generation, and our experience ignored ....</doc></docx>
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Friendly Competition
These five runners prove that competition and camaraderie can go hand in hand.
By Elizabeth Kaufmann
Going for a run is one of the simplest ways to feel your body move - all you need is a good pair of shoes and a safe place to go. For the women profiled here, that feeling is enhanced by the camaraderie and competition of an all-women's race. The high spirits generated by women running with women and the collective letting-go of old fears and inhibitions keep women such as these returning to their favorite races year after year. Often, they surprise themselves - and others - with their accomplishments, be it a personal record or simply a newfound self-confidence.
Tufts 10K for Women
Lyn Licciardello
When Lyn Licciardello, 43, first ran the race now called the Tufts 10K for Women 15 years ago, her two daughters were "tiny little things." Then they grew, and when the elder one, Amy, turned 15 in 1989, mother and daughter stood together at the start of the Tufts 10K.
"Of all the running I've done, that race was a highlight," says Licciardello, a part-time nurse form North Andover, Massachusetts. "I love the feeling I get at the starting line, of all those women who are healthy and doing some activity together. It's just a joyous occasion. And I loved being able to have my daughter share that with me."
They didn't run together for long, however. "She beat me by a lot," laughs Licciardello. "She placed fourth in her age group. It topped off the day."
While her daughters excel as runners - North Andover High School freshman Crissy is a cross-country league all-star, and Amy runs cross-country at Quinnipiac College in Hamden, Connecticut - Lyn considers herself a regular person who runs to stay healthy and admits to having won a few age-group trophies.
She generally prefers mixed races and runs with her husband, Tom, but Tufts is the one exception, and she has run it every year. Big and prestigious, the race is nonetheless accessible, providing a forum for all levels of runners to hobnob with world-class athletes. One is local heroine Lynn Jennings, who won the first race when she was 17 and has recaptured the title several times since.
The course, too, has a distinctly local flavor, starting and ending at Boston Commons, with upwards of 4,000 women squeezing through the city's narrow streets. "One of the neat things about this race is that it turns back on itself several times so you can see the frontrunners coming," Licciardello says. "It's so electric because you're rooting for the winners at the same time you get to participate."
There's a feeling of camaraderie, too, that women don't get from a lot of things. "When I was in high school, we were told we weren't capable of running any distance," she says. "We covered a mile and a half in the gym, but they told us we had to walk part of it. A lot of women my age are afraid to run in events. But when they hear that just women are going to do this, and it's a real big thing and it's acceptable and they give you a long-sleeved shirt, they say, 'Maybe I can try that, and if there are that many women, then surely I won't come in last.' A lot of women run just this one race. That's why it's so great. It gets them out of a shell."
Nike Women's Race 8K
Henley Gibble
It's fitting that Nike asked Henley Gibble, 48, to serve as race director for the Nike Women's Race 8K in Washington, DC. She's as legendary to women's running as the shoe company is to the sport.
Gibble's love affair with running began in 1975, when she started running but couldn't find many kindred spirits. That changed in 1976, when she founded one of the first women's running clubs in the country, the Washington RunHers Unlimited Club. "We decided on purple for royalty and green for new beginnings, but there was no clothing made for women then - we had to wear men's polyester purple shorts and lime-green shirts," she recalls. "Everyone laughed at the hideous purple and green RunHers women coming, but they didn't laugh for long, because we started winning all the competitions. There was no one to run against us." Other clubs took note, and women's memberships blossomed, which was exactly what Gibble had hoped for.
Running transformed her, and over the years, she watched lots of other women build confidence as they got involved. Her activism continued, ranging from lobbying for the inclusion of a woman's marathon in the 1984 Olympics to improving police patrols of DC-area running trails and publishing a regular bulletin to keep women runners informed of recent attacks. She was the first woman president of the Road Runners Club of America, from 1986 to 1990, and is currently the club's first paid executive director. In 1989, Nike asked her to direct the women's 8K.
"The idea was to have a superb, high-quality event on a flat, fast course and build a reputation that this was a course not only for the elite woman runner who could set records, but also for the ordinary person out there," she says. A lot of money has gone into supporting the grass roots runner, says Gibble, including clinics the day before led by the elite athletes. Elite athletes are attracted to the race because it's fast and competitive, with good prize money - a total of $25,500 in 1991.
A dedicated runner herself with a marathon PR of 3:08, Gibble puts in 45 miles a week for personal fitness, running four to nine miles a day. "It's very much a part of my life, just like brushing my teeth," she says. She gets as much pleasure, however, from watching everybody else, and the 1991 Nike 8K was particularly moving. "We could see that Lynn [Jennings] was really close to breaking the world record, and when she got about 200 yards from the finish, she realized she could do it," she says. "Here's this woman who had just gone all out for the whole race, but she put on the afterburners and sped down the road. Everybody burst into tears when she crossed the finish line. She had done it."
Columbine Classic 5K
Juanita Keeler
Seven years ago, Juanita Keeler, 48, was flying an ultralight aircraft when she made a bad landing in an Illinois corn field. The accident broke her back and paralyzed her from the hips down. Eight months later, her husband of 21 years left. They had no children, and she was completely on her own.
She began to pick up the pieces of her life and moved to Denver. "I'd been doing a lot of experimentation: who I am, what I want to do, where I want to go in life," she says. Before the accident, she hated running. But as she searched for her real self, she decided to try racing. In 1988 she entered the Zoo Fun Run 10K to see if she could do the distance. "There was one other wheelchair entrant and he had a racing chair. I think it took me three times longer," she laughs. "I'd done absolutely no training, but I decided I liked it and would eventually get a racing chair. What blew me away was the camaraderie and encouragement that people gave me along the way."
In 1990 she bought the racing chair and entered every 5 - and 10K she could fit in. One was the all-women's Columbine Classic 5K, held each year in Denver's Washington Park. Started in 1978 by the Colorado Columbines running club, the event raises money for the Safe-House for Battered Women in Denver. With 4,373 finishers in 1991, the race raised $20,000 for the shelter. "It was a very neat experience being with all women and seeing the men and staffers and friends on the side cheering," says Keeler. "And what I really liked was the idea of women helping women."
In her brief racing career, she has already branched out into longer events, including the Midnight Sun Wheelchair Marathon, a nine-day, 367-mile extravaganza from Fairbanks to Anchorage, Alaska. The racers are timed as they cover a predetermined distance each day; camp moves each night, with motor homes provided for a maximum of 15 competitors. Keeler entered the race in 1991, the lone woman in a field of 12 men. Keeler, who says she had trained very little, finished the event, only the second woman in a manual chair to do so in the race's eight-year history.
Wheeling has become a soul-saving outlet for her. "I think when you're first injured you're a victim, and you have to get past that victim mentality," she says. "I wouldn't do things because I didn't want people to see me struggle. I finally came to the realization that if they didn't like it, they could look the other way. I was going to do what was good for me. So I race, and if I look funny, so what?"
Alaska Women's Run 10K
Marcie Trent
Marcie Trent, 74, started running when she was 50. She and her husband homesteaded on 160 acres in Anchorage in 1946 and raised five children there. Seventeen years later, her husband and eldest son were killed in a plane crash. After being widowed four years, she married Bill, a runner. She encouraged him to try the Fairbanks Marathon, and when he raved about the experience, she decided to walk it with him the following year. She ran a mile a day for six months, walked the marathon and almost finished within the runners' allotted time.
The next year, training just two miles a day, Trent ran the marathon. "That really got me excited," she says.
Trent was 60 for the premiere of the Alaska Women's Run 10K in Anchorage in 1978. She had already run the Boston Marathon at the age of 57, the oldest woman to do so at the time, finishing in 3:27:45. She proceeded to win the 60-and-older division of the Alaska run for 10 straight years. Then, even though she was racing against 60-year-olds (the race doesn't have a 70-and-older division), she placed in the top five until 1991. She holds national age group records for a one-hour run, half marathon and marathon.
In '91 the Alaska race attracted competitors from 25 states, plus one from Canada and one from Thailand. "It's just about the best-organized race in Alaska," she says. "The staff works on it 11 months a year, and it has grown from 257 people in 1978 to 3,095 this year. It's on a beautifully wooded bike trail that goes through the heart of Anchorage."
No prize money is offered, but it's nonetheless competitive. "Alaska women don't come in first any more," says Trent, "but that's OK. The majority of the women are there for the fellowship, and that's what makes it so outstanding."
Two years ago, Trent began suffering injuries, breaking both wrists and crushing some ribs. Her heigt shrank by three inches, and she was diagnosed with osteoporosis. "I've had to slow down," she says. Fortunately, her doctors haven't discouraged her from running. "Oh, no way," she says. "Exercise is supposed to be the best thing. If I can just keep going every day, I'll keep my bones strong. The only thing is, I don't run on pavement, and I don't bounce down hills like I used to."
She likes to train on trails with "people half my age," including two sons, one of whom runs at her pace. And she's always accompanied by D.O.G., her black lab whose mileage she tracks along with hers. "He's logged 25,000 miles in nine years," she says proudly.
Still, he's got 37,000 to go before catching up to her.
Susan G. Komen
Race for the Cure 5K
Becky McClenny-Stull
Becky McClenny-Stull, 35, has a personal reason for running in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 5K each year in Dallas, which donates the proceeds to breast cancer prevention and research.
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GROWING ROSES ORGANICALLY
IT'S EASIER THAN YOU THINK!
Many beauties are so disease-resistant all you need are their names, but we'll tell you how to get gorgeous flowers from the other kind, too!
By CATHERINE YRONWODE
Although cultivated roses are descended from hardy, vigorous wild brambles, many gardeners believe that they are tender, spindly little things that cannot be grown without a regular program of toxic spraying. "I love roses," one often hears, "but I just can't raise them organically!"
It's true that roses do fall victim to disease, especially to fungus attacks which damage their leaves, but it's also true that you don't have to spray them. At least not as much as you probably think, if you do some homework before you plant and select varieties with natural immunity to disease. And when you do spray, there are a number of safe, organic products that will prevent those diseases without kicking a hole in your garden's ecosystem.
This two-pronged approach - selecting disease-resistant varieties and handling diseases that do show up with environmentally friendly methods - will change your attitude toward roses forever. Once you see how easy organic cultivation can be, you'll wonder why you ever tried to grow roses any other way.
Let's start with disease resistance. Roses, like other plants, carry genes that may protect them from - or subject them to - a variety of diseases. Unfortunately, continued breeder emphasis on the look and color of the flowers alone has resulted in the loss of natural rose attributes such as drought tolerance, disease resistance and frost hardiness from many of today's most popular varieties.
BLACKSPOT
A look at one of the worst diseases of roses demonstrates how breeding for flower type has hurt plant health.
Blackspot (Diplocarpon rosae) is a fungus that causes black patches with fringed margins to form on the plant's leaves. It spreads by spores which develop rapidly when they land on wet foliage. Infected leaves soon turn yellow and fall to the ground, where they serve as launching pads for the next generation of spores.
Blackspot occurs throughout the United States. It is not a severe problem in warm areas with low summer rainfall, but in some climates, it can kill roses. Plants defoliated by blackspot try to grow new leaves as soon as possible. Undeveloped leaf-buds, which would have overwintered safely in dormancy, are forced into fall growth, leaving them insufficient time to harden off before winter. This results in frost-damage, dieback or even death.
Good cultivation practices (removing all fallen leaves and watering at ground level so the foliage stays dry) will help control blackspot. You should also consider planting one of the many blackspot-resistant varieties on the market. It may also help to understand how the disease came to be such a problem in the first place. Here's the story:
The wild Iranian rose, Rosa foetida, is a thorny, five-petaled yellow shrublet with a very limited habitat range. Unlike most wild roses, which tolerate all sorts of weather, temperature and soil conditions, this species demands dry heat, full sun and sandy soil. Because it evolved in a climate where the water-dependent blackspot fungus did not thrive, Rosa foetida never had to develop resistance or tolerance to this common disease.
"So what ?" you ask. "I wasn't interested in growing it anyway."
Ah, but it is this species that has cursed many modern roses with both fungicide-dependency and the heightened threat of winterkill.
Domesticated hybrid roses originated in the gardens of ancient Rome and China. From pre-history until the end of the 19th century, almost every hybrid rose in the world had been bred in a temperate, moist climate from species that were either resistant to blackspot or tolerated it without complete defoliation.
These 'heritage roses' - classified into family groups such as alba, china, damask, gallica, polyantha, banksia, hybrid musk, wichuraiana, hybrid perpetual and rugosa - were limited in color mostly to scarlet, pink or white. The search for a vivid yellow rose brought a double form of Rosa foetida named PERSIANA into the hands of gifted French breeder Joseph Pernet-Ducher. In 1893, he finally accomplished the difficult cross between PERSIANA and a hybrid perpetual rose. This mating eventually produced a fabulous golden-orange seedling called SOLEIL D'OR, the ancestor of most modern hybrid teas and floribundas whose flowers are yellow, orange or fiery-red. But these new colors came at a terrible price: susceptibility to blackspot.
Imagine for a moment now that instead of roses, we were discussing tomatoes. Would you rush right down to the nursery and buy plants known to be susceptible to verticillium or fusarium wilt if those fungal diseases were common in your area? Of course not - you'd ask for disease-resistant varieties. You know that prevention of disease is half the organic battle, and that selection of resistant varieties is the simplest way to sidestep the battle entirely.
Well, that's the way to sidestep the battle of blackspot on roses: grow varieties that are not descended from Rosa foetida! In practice, this means growing heritage roses, varieties that were popular before the introduction of Rosa foetida genes made blackspot a household word among rosarians. These 'old roses' (and many new ones unrelated to Rosa foetida) are numerous. All you need to know is what to ask for. Among the heritage roses you will find virtually every type of plant, including huge, spring-flowering shrubs, magnificent climbers, charming dwarf bushes and Arctic-hardy hedges. Yes, most blackspot-resistant roses are white, pink or scarlet - but what they lack in color range they more than make up for in trouble-free growing.
POWDERY MILDEW
Before you send away for those blackspot-resistant heritage roses, do yourself a favor and cross varieties known to be susceptible to powdery mildew (Sphaerotheca pannosa rosae) off your buying list. This fungus grows on the surface of the foliage, covers the plant with white felt-like spores, causes leaves to curl up and turn purple, and makes flower buds die without opening.
Ugly as it is, powdery mildew does not kill plants, and many roses in many classes are resistant to it. In general, only wichuraianas, chinas, and polyanthas, plus a few red and dark-pink hybrid teas, are significantly susceptible to this disease and even they can be helped. Powdery mildew spreads fastest among drought-stressed plants when evenings are cool and the air is humid and still - conditions common in California and the Southwest, especially if you give your roses a nice sprinkler bath when you come home from work. To deny this fungus a foothold, space plants far enough apart to ensure good air circulation, mulch them with compost to prevent drought-stressing, and irrigate at ground level in the morning or afternoon to discourage humid conditions at dusk.
RUST
If you live on the West Coast, where rose rust fungus (Phragmidium disciflorum) is a serious problem, avoid varieties known to be susceptible to it. Rust covers entire plants with tiny spores that resemble bright-orange curry powder. Like blackspot, it causes defoliation severe enough to weaken plants and hasten their demise. Luckily, the number of varieties resistant to rust is great, and when a rose is resistant to rust, it is almost completely immune (unlike blackspot, for which 'resistance' often means simply 'tolerance').
ANTHRACNOSE
Anthracnose (Sphaceloma rosarum) fungus causes circular white dots with reddish margins to form on the leaves. It mostly attacks climbing roses with glossy foliage, but it's not deadly. Its range extends along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and from the Gulf Coast up into Arkansas. In my experience, varieties resistant to blackspot seem to be resistant to anthracnose as well. It is more common on varieties that get powdery mildew.
DOWNY MILDEW
Entirely different from powdery mildew, Peronospora sparsa is a serious problem only on greenhouse and exhibition roses. Characterized by yellowish blotches on the topsides of leaves and grayish 'down' on the undersides, it can lead to complete defoliation. Downy mildew requires continuous high humidity and low air circulation for its growth, so it is not often found on outdoor plants. Most varieties resistant to blackspot and powdery mildew are also resistant to downy mildew.
COMBATING FUNGAL DISEASE
Planting fungus-resistant heritage rose varieties is the biggest step you can take toward disease-free organic rose-growing. But if the bright colors of modern hybrid teas and floribundas tempt you, or if you've already planted such roses and now want to wean them from toxic sprays, don't despair. It's easy to treat even these 'tender' plants the safe, organic way.
Start with regular cultural cleanliness: Pick up and burn - do not compost! - infected leaves. Always water roses at their bases, never on their leaves. Interplant blackspot-susceptible varieties with those that do not develop the disease; this will cut down the speed with which water-splashed spores can travel through your garden. Avoid heavy doses of nitrogen; the resulting lush, sappy growth readily falls prey to blackspot, rust and especially powdery mildew. Mulch with compost; this has been shown to help prevent disease in almost all plants, including roses.
As a last resort, spray - but not with toxics. For powdery mildew, try a solution of baking soda (3 tablespoons per gallon of water), an old-time remedy that works well when applied at the first sign of infection. Here in Northern California, sulfur dust, wettable sulfur in solution (2 heaping tablespoons per gallon of water) or Safer's Garden Fungicide spray (a sulfur-based product) applied once or twice per season will keep blackspot, powdery mildew and other fungus diseases down to acceptable levels on all but the most susceptible plants. In other areas, you need to spray more often.
(Don't use sulfur when the temperature is above 85<*_>degree<*/> F; the foliage may burn.)
And don't waste baking soda or sulfur on your resistant varieties - a truly fungus-resistant rose will be able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with an infected one and never lose a leaf to illness.
THE FUNGUS-FREE LIST
If reading about those rose diseases scared you a bit, now's the time to relax. A list that included every fungus-resistant rose would fill a book. I grow about 350 varieties myself, spray only once a year (with sulfur) and have little trouble with disease. There are hundreds of widely available old-fashioned varieties - even whole classes of varieties - that are as disease-resistant as a rose can be.
Some may perform better than others in areas with different climates, so check the catalog descriptions carefully. When you order, tell the supplier that you want to choose varieties that can be grown organically in your area, and ask if your choices are suitable. Here are some of my favorites:
HYBRID MUSKS: This class of highly fungus-resistant shrub and semi-climbing roses derives from complex crosses between Rosa moschata ('musk rose'), R. multiflora ('many-flowered rose'), and various cultivated roses. Developed primarily between 1900 and 1930, hybrid musks bear their flowers in large clusters and bloom repeatedly throughout the summer. They are the most shade-tolerant of roses. They should not be pruned except to eliminate crossing or weak branches. BELINDA and BALLERINA are similar in name and form; BELINDA bears large, erect trusses of single, light-pink flowers on a 7-foot shrub, while BALLERINA has clusters of bright-pink flowers with white eyes on a 5-foot shrub. PAX and PROSPERITY both bear clusters of white semi-double flowers on 7-foot shrubs.
BUFF BEAUTY may be the finest hybrid musk. It forms a 7-foot shrub with clusters of full, biscuit-colored blossoms that fade to white in the sun; its fragrance is more like a pineapple-banana fruit smoothie than a traditional 'rose' scent.
HYBRID RUGOSAS:This class of shrub roses derives from the wild Asian seaside species R. rugosa ('wrinkly rose'). The tough and distinctly wrinkled rugosa leaves foil most fungal attacks except rust, and rugosas have the additional benefits of being salt and drought tolerant and exceptionally frost hardy. Although they naturally form large bushes, they can be kept within bounds by light pruning. The best known varieties are F.J. GROOTEN-DORST (clusters of dark-pink double flowers that are serrated like carnations), PINK GROOTENDORST (exactly like F.J., but medium pink), FIMBRIATA (like a white GROOTENDORST), and HANSA (a striking purple semi-double).
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ESCAPE FROM WAKE ISLAND
BY JOHN ELOTT WITH WILLIAM W. MOSS
The short, squat soldier with khaki leggings kicked through the rubble of the bomb-shattered building. A gleam of metal caught his eye and he stooped over for a closer look. Picking up the soiled white cap, he stared at the gold insignia attached just above the still glossy visor. Since he could not read the inscription, he assumed it belonged to one of the American defenders who had surrendered the island to him and his comrades a few days earlier. He tore it from the cloth brow and stuffed it in his pocket. It would make a nice souvenir. What the Japanese soldier did not know was that the former owner of the hat almost became one of his prisoners. Wake Island. December 8, 1941. It was the worst of times. But 36 of the island's occupants had a way out. All they had to do was get an overloaded, bullet-riddled airplane into the air and across an ocean now dominated by the Japanese Navy.
The Vought-Sikorsky Vindicator banked sharply over the bow of the USS Lexington as the aircraft carrier knifed sleekly through the blue Pacific 1,000ft (300m) below. Now parallel to the ship, the silver dive bomber continued on a reverse course until it was abeam of the carrier's stern. Attempting to maintain a 30-second interval between himself and the preceding aircraft, the pilot pulled the airplane once more to the left, rolling out of his turn a half-mile (0.8km) behind the carrier and a scant 100ft (30m) above the water. Speed was critical - no more than 5-10kt (9-18km/h) above the stall. A slight drift to port prompted an immediate reaction from the Landing Signal Officer (LSO), and the pilot corrected his alignment. With the aircraft now solidly in the 'slot', the LSO signaled the pilot to cut his power. The airplane flashed across the stern of the ship and settled heavily on the deck, an arresting cable deftly snaring its tail hook and bringing it to an abrupt halt. Ensign William W. Moss had successfully completed his 103rd carrier landing.
As a glider pilot, Bill Moss was already well-versed in the fundamentals of flight when he entered the US Navy in November 1935. After winning his wings at Pensacola a year later, Moss joined the 'Flying Panther' Dive Bomber Squadron and eventually served on all three carriers assigned to the Pacific Fleet. But today's landing would also be his last. His tour of duty was up, and when the fleet returned to San Diego he would bid his shipmates farewell and head for Brownsville, Texas. Newly hired by Pan American Airways, he would report for duty in December 1939.
Following training and indoctrination, Moss was deemed qualified to occupy the right-hand seat in Pan American's Douglas DC-2s and new DC-3s, and began flying down through México to Central America and the West Indies. Later he would be based in Trinidad and then re-assigned once again to Brownsville.
In spring 1941, Bill Moss was transferred to Pan American's Pacific Division based at Treasure Island, San Francisco Bay. He was in the big leagues now, treading where such legendary figures as Edwin C. Musick, R. O. D. 'Rod' Sullivan, and Fred Noonan had made aviation history on board the China Clipper in 1935. The culmination of years of planning and preparation, the inaugural flight to Manila on November 22, 1935, also represented the fulfillment of a dream for Pan American founder, Juan T. Trippe. Using his 'stepping stones across the Pacific', Trippe had demonstrated that flying to the Orient, if not practical, was at least possible.
Two more Martin 130 flying boats, the Hawaii Clipper and the Philippine Clipper, soon joined their more famous sistership, and by the end of 1935, weekly service to Manila had been established. Although no passengers would be carried until the following year, Pan American's Pacific Division was in business. The endeavor proved to be a risky venture, however, and, after four years of operations, the Pacific routes had yet to make any money for Trippe. Undaunted, he commissioned the Boeing company in Seattle, Washington, to build an even bigger airplane and, in early 1939, the first of 12 Boeing 314 flying boats was delivered to a Pan American ferry crew waiting at Astoria, Oregon. Even then, there was a way around Washington's state sales tax. The truly colossal Boeings were a welcome addition to the Pacific fleet, now reduced to two airplanes following the loss of the Hawaii Clipper between Guam and Manila in July 1938.
Following his arrival at Treasure Island, Moss was immediately assigned to one of the big Boeings as, in his words, "Fifth Officer in Charge of Mail Sacks." But new responsibilities came quickly and by the end of 1941, Moss was functioning alternately as navigator and relief pilot.
Because crews and equipment were cross-utilized, Bill Moss was not surprised to find himself assigned to the Philippine Clipper for a trans-Pacific crossing in December 1941. But it came about mainly as a result of happenstance. A first attempt by a different crew had been thwarted by strong winds and forced to return to San Francisco. To abort, even when half-way across, was not uncommon. The 2,400mi (3,850km) leg between San Francisco and Hawaii was the longest non-stop segment flown by any airline in the world. Theoretically, the Martin 130 had that kind of range. But since ground speed seldom matched airspeed, distance could not always be measured by time aloft. Endurance was, in itself, no guarantee of a timely arrival in Hawaii.
Glenn Martin's engineers had built a remarkable airplane. Still, the Model 130 was based on technology developed in the preceding decade and only 30 years removed from mankind's first powered flight. It was improvements in other fields that made it possible for its crews to successfully complete the flight to Hawaii more often than not. Modern meteorology now bore little resemblance to the fanciful prognostications contained in the Old Farmers Almanac. New scientific techniques permitted forecasters to predict the weather with exceptional accuracy. In fact, Pan American meteorologists provided pilots with a variety of tracks to select from so that they could take advantage of the most favorable winds.
Then there were the new radio direction finders, the brainchild of Trippe's electronics wizard, Hugo Leuteritz. Although celestial navigation and dead reckoning were still in use, Leuteritz developed a system that would require neither clear skies or guesswork. Utilizing a modified version of the British-designed Adcock Direction Finder, base stations could take precise bearings on a flight while it was still hundreds of miles away, as well as providing close-in assistance when the aircraft was on approach. While not infallible, it would play a vital role in navigating the vast reaches of the Pacific. Without it, scheduled air service to the Pacific probably would not have been possible. But Trippe had remained apprehensive about the reliability of the apparatus, and did not approve its use until the eve of the first survey flight to Hawaii in April 1935.
Even with his modern equipment, Trippe still had a problem. The nemesis, it seems, was fuel. Although the Martin 130 could carry just over 4,000USg (15,000l) of gasoline, that represented almost half of its maximum gross weight. As a result, the traffic department and flight operations were seldom in agreement on the ration of fuel versus payload. Traffic complained that for every gallon of gasoline that was carried, 6lb (2.7kg) of payload had to be left behind on the loading dock. Operations contended that is where those pounds would end up anyway if the airplane had to turn back. Obviously, a compromise was always struck.
OFF TO HAWAII
At 1545, Flight 1551 once again eased away from the float at Treasure Island. It was December 3, 1941, and with the Philippine Clipper now under the command of Capt John Hamilton, a second attempt would be made to get across to Hawaii. Under full throttle, the big flying boat lifted slowly from the waters of San Francisco Bay and a few minutes later made its traditional pass over the Golden Gate Bridge. Ahead of them lay 2,400mi (3,850km) of open sea and a minimum of 18 hours flying.
At 500ft (150m), Capt Hamilton called for 'rated power', and then 'climb power' when the altimeter indicated 1,000ft (300m). All engine functions, including propeller pitch and synchronization, were now handled by Flight Engineer Ed Barnett up in the cabanecabine, a small, cramped enclosure located just forward of the wing root. In the right-hand pilot's seat, First Officer William Moss kept an eye on cylinder head temperatures which were always a concern on take-off. While the cowl flaps would vent much of the engine's heat, the drag that they created placed some constraints on their use.
Immediately behind Moss, Flight Radio Officer Don McKay was preparing to send his first radio report. Company regulations required all flights to communicate with a base station every 15 minutes, even though such contacts might consist of nothing more than an exchange of abbreviated 'Q' signals. For example, 'QTP' meant 'I have left port' (outbound), or 'I have entered port' (inbound); 'QWC' informed the circuit that the operator was momentarily away from his station answering nature's call. A 'short' report every 30 minutes provided base stations with the flight's position, altitude and fuel quantity. Hourly, a 'long' report included detailed weather information and ground speed 'made good' during the previous 60 minutes. Although the airplanes were equipped with a radio-telephone for short-range communication, all other traffic was transmitted by short-wave radio using international Morse Code.
In the cockpit behind the pilots, Navigator John Hrutky began calculating their position even before the Marin Headlands were out of sight. He would use the bearing provided by the San Francisco DF as long as the signal remained stable. Later, if there were no cloud cover, he would confirm his plots by thrusting an octant through an open hatch at the rear of the aircraft to get a fix from the stars.
Capt Hamilton leveled off at 5,000ft (1,500m). At a leisurely 300ft (91m) per minute, the climb-out had taken almost 15 minutes. Flight Engineer Barnett refined the fuel mixtures and began monitoring his fuel flow meters. How fast they were using their fuel was more important than how much. Fuel remaining would become meaningful only after he had determined how long it would last.
Now configured for maximum fuel economy, the aircraft began flying itself as Capt Hamilton engaged the Sperry Automatic Pilot. The instrument would keep the plane in reasonably level flight, but would require frequent monitoring and adjustment to hold the aircraft at a constant altitude and on the heading specified by the navigator.
Back in the passenger cabin, Steward Charlie Relyea scanned the passenger list again, looking for familiar names. Normally, there would have been a sprinkling of celebrities - movie stars, diplomats, industrialists. But since the war began in Europe, most seats now were occupied by men in uniform. He began preparations for an elaborate six-course dinner which would include appetizers, fruit salad, soup, a hot entree and dessert. And, even on the flying boats, there was a choice of coffee, tea or milk.
Darkness came quickly and within an hour and a half after leaving San Francisco, the stars were the only visible external point of reference. Periodically, Third Officer Elwood Leep relieved his fellow crew members, a function Bill Moss had performed maymany times and which he had relinquished without regret. It was a thankless job, although essential training for a pilot who someday hoped to earn the coveted title 'Master of Ocean Flying Boats'.
At the equi-time point, Flight Engineer Barnett calculated their fuel quantity based on their rate of consumption since leaving San Francisco. It compared favorably with the gauges and should be sufficient to get them the rest of the way across. Navigator Hrutky concurred. Clear skies had permitted him to obtain star sights during most of the flight, and with bearings now being provided by the Pearl City DF, he felt confident about their position.
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CD PORTABLES:
THE BEETHOVEN TEST
Ken Pohlmann takes five of the newest, smallest CD players through their paces in the city of Beethoven.
THE Viennese customs inspector was not amused. He looked bored when I pulled out the Kenwood. He smiled when I produced the Denon. He frowned when the Technics and JVC hit the counter. Then his eyebrows danced when the Sony joined the pile. What was this American up to? Smuggling portable compact disc players into Austria?
I quickly explained to him that I was conducting an important test for STEREO REVIEW, that although many reviewers test portable players while sitting in front of their word processors or perhaps while walking their dogs, I was attempting something a good deal more significant. I explained that I was bringing five of the best CD portables to Vienna to challenge them with her demanding resident: Ludwig van Beethoven. I would study them in his old haunts, pound them the way he pounded his pianos, and listen to them with his music. It would be the ultimate cultural, physical, and sonic test. The inspector pondered all that, perhaps considered calling airport security, then waved me through.
Denon DCP-150 on Probusgasse 6
I boarded the bus to the City Air Terminal at Landstrasse, and half an hour later I caught the U4 subway line to Heiligenstadt. Beethoven moved eighty times during his thirty-five-year stay in Vienna. He was constantly in flux because of landlords nagging him about money or noise, but most of all because of his own restless, temperamental nature. The house on Probusgasse 6 probably stood etched in his memory, however, because it was there, despairing over his encroaching deafness and continuing poverty, that he poured out his pessimistic emotions in the Heiligenstadt Testament. Sitting in the courtyard of the house where Beethoven lived and suffered in the summer of 1802, and wrote the Second Symphony, I reached into my knapsack, pulled out the first player, the Denon DCP-150, and loaded in a disc of the Second Symphony.
The DCP-150 is the bulkiest among the five portables I tested, but it offers several unique features, such as a built-in remote-control receiver. The top surface contains a button to mechanically release the clamshell lid and buttons for forward and reverse track skipping (fast search in forward or reverse when held down), play/pause, and stop. The front of the chassis sports a versatile Mode button that sequences through eight modes of operation: track repeat, disc repeat, random track playback, disc repeat with random tracks, track programming (up to thirty-two tracks), disc repeat with programmed tracks, random playback of program tracks, and disc repeat with random programmed tracks. A Set button changes the time display from elapsed time in the track to remaining time in the track to total remaining time. Volume control is handled with a rotary potentiometer.
The liquid-crystal display shows track numbers and timings and has indicators for battery strength, track programming, random playback, and other functions. A shortcoming: The display is unlighted even when the unit is powered via AC. Nestled beside the display is the sensor window for the integral remote-control receiver. The chassis itself is finished with a suede-like material that has a nice feel and helps you keep a secure grip on the player.
The right side of the DCP-150 has a headphone jack and a three-way slider for tone control: flat, bass boost, or bass and treble boost. Another three-way switch selects normal playback, a hold function that disables transport controls, or a resume function that returns the laser pickup to where it was when the unit was last switched off. Around back is a 6-volt DC input jack.
The left side of the chassis contains jacks for analog and digital audio output. The coaxial digital output employs a mono mini-jack connector (an adaptor cable would be required to change it to a standard phono-jack connector). Optical digital outputs are more common on home CD players, but many portables have started using this kind of coaxial output. Underneath the chassis are not one but two battery compartments, each holding a rechargeable battery, and they can be used singly for 2 hours of playing time or together for 4 hours.
The wireless remote control has twenty-five buttons. There are buttons to control the transport, select operating modes (such as random track playback), adjust the volume, and switch the power on, along with an eleven-key key numeric keypad. When you use the remote, the display changes accordingly; for example, the timing display changes to show a numeric volume setting.
THE DCP-150 employs an eight-times-oversampling digital filter with dual 18-bit digital-to-analog (D/A) converters. The converters are made by Analog Devices and are the same ones found in some expensive home CD players. The DCP-150's power supply senses whether battery or AC power is being used. When you're using batteries, the maximum output level is reduced to conserve power. (A high output is needed to maximize signal-to-noise ratio in the output to a home system, when you would be using AC power, but it's not needed to drive headphones directly in portable use with batteries.)
The DCP-150 comes with a soft vinyl-and-fabric carrying case, a stereo connecting cable, and an AC adaptor/charger. One rechargeable battery is supplied, and more are available as optional accessories. A stand-alone recharger is also available.
I liked the Denon player's human engineering (ergonomics). All the transport buttons are grouped together on top, and when they're pressed they respond with a nice tactile click. The Mode button nicely consolidates the functions of many different buttons- it is a simple matter to sequence through them to find the one you want. I also liked the textured case, which is practical and pleasant to hold.
Although the DCP-150's metal construction makes it quite heavy (at 24 ounces it's almost twice as heavy as the next heaviest player in our test group, the Sony), it imparts a solidity that is aesthetically more pleasing than the lightness of plastic; and it also makes the player more immune to damage from accidental drops. The label on the top of the player calls it a 'Precision Audio Component,' and that's not an exaggeration.
Best of all was the solidity of the sound quality. As I listened to the Second Symphony, gazing into the window where Beethoven must have gazed out, I felt that the DCP-150 was delivering everything that Beethoven intended us to hear. Who knows, if he had owned a DCP-150, perhaps that summer of 1802 might have been a happier one for him.
JVC XL-P90 On Hauptstrasse 92
From Heiligenstadt it is only a short uphill walk to the D<*_>o-umlaut<*/>bling district and the house on Hauptstrasse 92 where Beethoven lived in 1803. It was a charming house in Beethoven's time, owned by a vinegar maker, and set in a row of small houses; a narrow meadow separated it into two parts. He worked on his Third Symphony while living there, and I put a compact disc of it into the JVC XL-P90, the smallest of the players I tested. It measures a mere 5/8 inch thick, with an overall size approximately equal to two stacked jewel boxes.
There are eight buttons on the top cover. One pops the clamshell lid, one starts and pauses playback, and one stops playback, turns off the player, and clears the track memory. A Memory button is used to program sequences of up to twenty tracks, a Random/Intro button selects either random track playback or plays the first 15 seconds of each track, a repeat button repeats either a track or an entire disc, and a pair of forward/backward buttons provide either track skipping or two-speed audible fast search. The front of the chassis contains a thumbwheel for volume control. The display on top shows track numbers and timings and has indicators for low battery, repeat, random playback, and so on. The display is lighted when the unit is powered through its AC adaptor.
THE right side of the chassis has connectors for audio line output, DC power input, and headphone output. There is also a three-way slide switch for flat response and two levels of bass boost, which affects only the headphone output. The left side has connectors for a coaxial digital output (using a minijack) and for JVC's proprietary Compu Link-1 remote-control system. There is also a slide switch to turn the resume-playback function on and off or select both resume-playback and a hold function. There are no user controls on the back of the unit, but there is a screw mount and two mounting pins for attaching an external battery pack. A battery compartment on the chassis's underside holds two flat rechargeable batteries, providing about 1 1/2 hours of playback time.
The clamping spindle has three spring-loaded plastic tabs to secure the disc, and these undoubtedly provide a firmer grasp and greater impact immunity than the usual loading system. The output section contains a pair of 1-bit D/A converters.
Although I left most of the accessories at home in Miami, several come with the XL-P90: a DC adaptor for powering the player from a car's cigarette lighter, an audio adaptor for playing it through a car's cassette deck, two rechargeable batteries, an AC battery charger/adaptor, a stereo audio cable, an external AA battery case, a soft vinyl carrying case, and a pair of earphones. Optional accessories include a wireless remote control and a 'home audio station unit,' a docking chassis that contains a wireless remote receiver, a battery recharger, and phono-jack outputs and other input, output, and power connector.
As I boarded the U4 subway for the quick ride back to Schottenring, I examined the XL-P9. It is a handsome player with robust yet lightweight metal construction. The quality of its manufacture is apparent, but its small size presents some problems. In particular, the buttons are quite tiny. Often-used buttons such as forward and backward track skip are difficult to push without pressing nearby buttons as well. That makes the player awkward to use, particularly when you are on the move. The sound quality was good but somehow did not particularly impress me. Still, if small size is your paramount concern, the JVC is about as small as a CD player will ever get.
Sony D-515 Discman On M<*_>o-umlaut<*/>lkerbastei 8
At Schottenring, I switched to the U2 subway and took a quick ride to Schottentor. The apartment building I was looking for, on M<*_>o-umlaut<*/>lkerbastei street, was only a block away from the subway station. Beethoven returned to the apartment at M<*_>o-umlaut<*/>lkerbastei 8 again and again, and he occupied it for longer periods than any of his other residences. While living there he worked on the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, Fidelio, the Violin Concerto, and a host of other compositions. I loaded the D-515 Discman as I walked through a low corridor and climbed the hundred steps to his fourth-story apartment.
From a styling standpoint, the D-515 is a radical departure from earlier Sony CD portables. Gone are the squared corners and silver edge trim, replaced by rounded contours and a hand grip. In short, the D-515 looks like no other Sony CD player and, indeed, seems to represent an entirely fresh approach to the design of portable CD players. The sides and bottom are made of a rubbery plastic that provides a firm, no-slip grip; this is enhanced by a contoured hand grip across the back of the case. The top of the case is shiny metal, with a striking finish.
There are six buttons on top of the player. The Play Mode button sequences through four modes: Intro mode, which plays the beginning of each track on a disc; 1 mode, which repeats one track; Shuffle mode, which plays all tracks in random order; and RMS mode, which is used to program up to twenty-two tracks. The repeat/enter button is used to repeat a whole disc, and in the RMS mode the same button is used in conjunction with the forward and backward track-skip buttons to select and program tracks.
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Presidential pups
In Part II, the author looks at the White House dogs from the Harding administration on
By Terry Sue Shank
Whether the creator planned it so, or environment and human companionship have made it so, men may learn richly through the love and fidelity of a brave and devoted dog. Such loyalty might easily add luster to a crown of immortality."
When Ohio newspaper editor Warren Gamaliel Harding wrote those words in The Marion Daily Star on March 11, 1913, as part of his impassioned editorial condemning the cruel poisoning of Hub, a neighbor's beloved Boston Terrier, he had no way of knowing he would one day become America's 29th president. It is not at all surprising, then, that he lavished so much affection upon the first gift he received after moving into the White House - a small Airedale puppy.
As a rule, Harding didn't have any special favorites among the dogs in his life; he appreciated each one as an individual with its won distinctive personality. But when Caswell Laddie Boy arrived on the scene, a gift from an old friend, Marshall Sheppey of Toledo, OH, it soon became clear that the precocious pup, with his beguiling bright eyes, cocked head and intelligent face, was the undisputed No. 1 presidential pet.
Within a few short weeks, Harding's energetic, extroverted Airedale was a national celebrity. Laddie Boy, who took his White House responsibilities seriously, had his own valet and a busy social calendar and was even known to sit in on important Cabinet meetings in his own special chair.
In 1921, when the Hardings decided to resume the traditional White House Easter egg roll, which had been discontinued during World War I, it was Laddie Boy who was there to greet the children and amuse himself and the happy crowd by frolicking about the lawn retrieving colored eggs. And on May 11 of that same year, when the Humane Education Society held a Be Kind to Animals parade, it was first dog Laddie Boy, seated with dignity atop his own float, who led the procession through the streets of Washington, D.C.
Laddie Boy became so well-known, both nationally and internationally, that on July 17, 1921, the editorial section of the Washington Star printed a mock interview with the famous pet that ran for nearly an entire page and included two editorial cartoons. In that tongue-in-cheek article, Laddie Boy gave his opinions on some of the most prominent issues of his day. He commented on the flock of sheep President Wilson had allowed to graze on the White House lawn during World War I, spoke out against a ban on Mexican hairless dogs and advocated an eight-hour day for America's watch dog population. The eloquent Airedale talked about Prohibition and discussed his view of such notables as Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein and the entire Harding Cabinet.
When President Harding died suddenly on August 2, 1923, during a tour of the western U.S., Laddie Boy mourned with the nation. The next day the Associated Press carried the following news item: "There was one member of the White House household today who couldn't quite comprehend the air of sadness which overhung the executive mansion. It was Laddie Boy, President Harding's Airedale friend and companion. Coming to the White House a raw-boned, callow pup, Laddie Boy has, in two years, grown to the estate of dignity and wholesome respect for his official surroundings."
Immediately after Harding's death, the Boston Newsboys' Association began a campaign to commission a statue of Laddie Boy to be presented to Florence Harding in honor of her late husband, the newspaperman who had become president. Every newsboy in America was asked to donate one penny of his paper route money. Those pennies were then melted down and sculpted into a life-size statue of the famous dog by artist Bashka Paeff. Laddie Boy posed for at least 15 sittings.
Sadly, Florence died before the newsboys' gift could be presented to her. That statue of Laddie Boy is today on display in the Smithsonian Museum of American History of Washington, D.C. It bears the simple inscription "Cast From Newsboys' Pennies, In Memory Of Their Friend, Warren Gamaliel Harding."
Upon Harding's unexpected death, his vice president, Calvin Coolidge, was sworn in as the 30th president of the U.S. The White House became the new home for Calvin and Grace Coolidge, their two teen-age sons, dozens of birds, two cats, a racoon named Rebecca and "an abundance of dogs."
Included among the Coolidges' canine collection were the Chows Timmy and Blackberry; Peter Pan, a Wire Fox Terrier; a fun-loving Shetland Sheepdog named Calamity Jane; and Ruby Rough, an affectionate brown Collie. And despite the fact that the Coolidges also owned Airedale Paul Pry, half-brother to Harding's devoted Laddie Boy, the presidential couple were probably most closely identified with their two beautiful white Collies. Grace Coolidge had dubbed the elegant pair Rob Roy (after a Highland outlaw in a novel by Sir Walter Scott) and Prudence Prim (for her sweet, feminine nature).
Prudence Prim was especially attached to Grace. The ladylike Collie accompanied the first lady almost everywhere, and even slept by her bed at night. At tea time, proper Prudy moved politely from guest to guest in a most mannerly way. And when Grace made Prudence a straw bonnet trimmed with ferns and green satin ribbons, the fashionable Collie became a hit at White House garden parties. (A fine pastel on velvet portrait of Grace Coolidge and Prudence Prim, painted by G. Jacoby in 1925, is now on exhibit in the visitors' center at Calvin Coolidge's birthplace in Plymouth, VT.)
Rob Roy belonged to Calvin Coolidge, or perhaps it was vice versa. The handsome dog, whose only bad habit was chasing cars, slept in his master's room, attended press conferences, and often lay at the president's feet as he entertained world leaders and talked politics. Occasionally guests expressed the opinion that Coolidge paid more attention to Rob Roy than he did to them.
Even though Prudence Prim was Grace's dog, the first lady's official White House portrait was painted with Rob Roy at her side. When Howard Chandler Christy arrived at the executive mansion to paint the portrait, he requested that Grace wear a red gown as contrast against the blue sky and snowy white Collie. Calvin objected; he wanted his wife to wear a white brocade satin gown which he especially liked. "If it's contrast you want," he told her solemnly, "why not wear white and paint the dog red?" The president's veto was overridden. Christy's portrait of Rob Roy and Grace (wearing her red dress) now graces a wall in the White House China Room.
Of Rob Roy's death in September 1928, Calvin Coolidge later wrote:"He was a stately gentleman of great courage and fidelity. He loved to bark from the second-story windows and around the south grounds. Nights he remained in my room and afternoons went with me to the office. His especial delight was to ride with me in the boats when I went fishing. So although I know he would bark for joy as the grim boatman ferried him across the dark waters of the Styx, yet his going left me lonely in the hither shore."
There was at least one political animal who would have preferred that his master had never been elected to the highest office in the land. King Tut, Herbert Hoover's Belgian Sheepdog, never did adjust to life in the White House. Ironically, it was Tut who had indirectly helped Hoover win the presidential nomination of the Republican party.
Although Hoover was in reality a warm, good-hearted individual, on the surface he often gave the impression of being an emotionless, machinelike politician, interested only in statistics, reports and fact-finding surveys. That cold public image almost lost Hoover his party's nomination.
One day a Hoover campaign worker ran across a photograph of the politician and his loyal shepherd. The informal pose showed a smiling Herbert Hoover affectionately holding King Tut by the forepaws. Immediately, the shrewd party official had thousands of copies of the photo printed. The snapshot, which was published in newspapers and magazines all across the country and blown up into life-size campaign posters, became a valuable tool in the drive to soften and humanize Herbert Hoover's public image. Autographed copies of the photo were mailed out to thousands of political admirers.
Once Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover had settled into the White House, King Tut appointed himself official presidential protector. Although the president's faithful pet had never been trained as an attack dog, he seemed quite confident that he could do a much better job guarding the first family than any of the dozens of Secret Service agents who swarmed over his master's new home. In good weather or bad, Tut could be seen patrolling the tall iron fences and repeatedly checking and rechecking each and every White House gate and door.
At first, the White House staff considered Tut's zealous behavior rather amusing, even admirable. But gradually it became all too clear that the situation was serious. King Tut appeared nervous and overwrought. He rarely ate or slept, and had begun terrorizing White House visitors and workers. It wasn't funny anymore. The president's obsessive protector was dangerous.
For a brief time King Tut was muzzled, but that seemed only to aggravate the situation. Finally, because there was no longer any way to control the dog, he was sent back to the Hoovers' former residence on S Street. Without his beloved master and mistress to protect, poor Tut pined away and soon was dead.
Several other canines - some with enviable pedigrees and long lists of dog show awards - were also in residence at the White House during the Hoover administration. There was Patrick, a huge Wolfhound; Big Ben and Sonny, friendly Fox Terriers; and a handsome Collie named Glen. Their canine assortment also included Eaglehurst Gilette, a stunning setter, and Lou Henry Hoover's two special favorites, Pat, an easygoing German Shepherd, and Weegie, a playful Elkhound from the Hemson Kennels of Ski, Norway.
In March 1990, Mildred Hall Campbell, who was Lou Henry Hoover's personal secretary more than 60 years ago, sent me a photocopy of the Hoovers' official 1932 White House Christmas card. On the left leaf of that card was a picture of a smiling President Hoover on horseback. On the right was a lovely photograph of the first lady and her favorite dogs. The handwritten greeting read, "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from Herbert Hoover and from Lou Henry Hoover and Weegie and Pat."
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated for the first time in 1933, his favorite dog was a black-and-tan German Shepherd named Major. The presidential pet, who had been trained as a police dog, had one particularly disconcerting habit that terrified White House guests and tried the president's patience. The dog would walk up to a visitor, take the startled person's wrist firmly between his jaws and study his face carefully. Not until he had determined the person was a friend (often as much as half a minute later) would Major finally release his so-called fake bite and allow the frightened guest to enter.
Unfortunately, the bites Major took out of Sen. Hattie Caraway's leg and the trousers of British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald were not fake. When the irritable dog eventually sank his teeth into the hand of a passing citizen, who had reached through the fence to pat him on the head, that was it. Another presidential police dog was banished from the White House.
The Roosevelts had other difficult dogs. For some unknown reason Meggie, Eleanor Roosevelt's Scottish Terrier, liked to sleep in ash-filled fire-places. She did not, however, appreciate the necessary baths that followed. Like Major, Meggie was a habitual biter. When the first lady's belligerent little Scottie bit the nose of The New York Times' Washington reporter Bess Furnam, and soon afterward bit both Sistie and Buzzie Dall, the Roosevelts' grandchildren, the dog was given to Dr. David E. Buckingham, the White House veterinarian.
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RACING TACTICS
Strategies for handicap racing
John Yeigh suggests some moves that will help keep you at the top of the fleet
Although handicap racing is a far-from-perfect format, it is popular - and fun. It's not the same as one-design racing, but you can use the differences between these formats to improve your position in your fleet.
First, you should honestly assess your boat's potential relative to other boats. Although most handicaps are generally correct, your 'Cruiser 35' will probably never beat the 'Slowtub 65' on a heavy-air reach, and it won't take a 'Rocket 27' in light-air round-the-buoys-racing. Each boat performs differently in different conditions, and in some types of weather your boat may perform better relative to other boats than it does in others. Even the multiple ratings of the International Measurement System (IMS) can't entirely compensate for all the differences in boats.
Second, my observation is that the fastest rated boats in a class split do tend to win unless the rating band is very narrow - less than 30 seconds per mile between the top and the bottom. I have observed Performance Handicap Racing Fleet (PHRF) and IMS boats finishing in the front of the pack (first to third) when they are rated fastest in a class split. These same boats typically finish farther back (fourth to sixth) when they are not the fastest rated in another class split. If your boat is rated among the slowest in your class, you might consider making a rating adjustment, such as reducing sail area or shortening the spinnacker pole, to move down to the top of the next class.
Unfortunately, handicaps do not account for either the benefits of sailing in clear air or the adverse effects of sailing in a dying wind. A fast boat can break away after the start, while slower boats have to sail in bad air. To have any chance, slower boats must always sail in clear air, and the time separation between boats can increase significantly if the wind drops.
When you are racing, keep in mind that the separation between corrected-time finishes is typically a minute or more. Don't be tempted to risk a 30- to 60-second setback for the potential gain of just a few seconds.
Also understand that boat speed alone doesn't win races, although it can keep you in the top one-third. Properly dealing with wind shifts and current is usually what wins races. Most sailing areas do have favored ways to go, so you should spend more time understanding what those features are and perhaps less time working on small improvements in boat speed.
Similarly, crew maneuvers never win a race, but they can lose one. Good execution is much more important than speed. For example, a crew that takes two additional boatlengths to set the spinnacker loses only about 2 seconds. A fouled spinnacker set loses far more time.
Starting
When you are starting a race, conventional dinghy tactics say you should determine the favored end of the line and start there. However, I believe a good keelboat start for handicap racing is in the middle of the line, clear of other boats, moving at full speed, and sailing in clear air. With a long or a heavily favored line, you should position yourself toward the favored side of the middle. Even if one end of the line is favored by 4 boat-lengths, if you stay in the middle you will be behind the leading boat at the weather end by only 8 seconds or so if you are sailing at 5 knots (see table), but you still will be ahead of most other boats.
Beating
After the start you have only 4 reasons to tack: (1) You are sailing in bad air; (2) you have good reason to believe the other tack is favored; (3) you need to cover; or (4) you are near the layline. Unlike a dinghy, a keel-boat loses a lot of time tacking, at least 8 seconds even with a perfect tack. A tack is also an opportunity to lose time with a poor sheet release or override. Here are some of the worst reasons to tack: "The crew has been inactive," "Maybe we'll do better on the other tack," and my favorite, "I don't know, but what do you say we tack?"
Be very cautious about tacking on a header if you are sailing in an oscillating wind. For a keelboat, a wind shift of less than 7 degrees is probably not enough to warrant a tack. The wind often shifts back within 30 to 60 seconds, so much of the shift's benefit is going to be lost during the tack. I have seen boats make 20 tacks to chase lifts, only to fall behind the boats that haven't tacked.
Unless you are going to a larger genoa, try to avoid making headsail changes on an upwind leg. The change loses time, and here again there is the possibility of a foul-up. Because a headsail change is often made to protect sailcloth from increasing wind speeds, you might want to reconsider having new genoas made with superlight cloth. The benefit that is gained in light winds may be offset by the time that is lost making the headsail change.
When you approach a weather mark, undershoot your initial layline-approach tacking angle by 5 to 10 degrees, because you might get a lift <figure/>. If you are sailing with higher-rated boats, you may have to abandon this safety margin, sail on to get clear air, and go to windward of the parade of faster boats to the layline. Bigger boats usually can outpoint you, and they have large wind shadows.
On your final tack to the mark, it usually doesn't hurt to overstand by a couple of boat lengths. This costs only 8 seconds at 5 knots, compared with the potential time loss from pinching, shooting up to the mark, tacking twice ('four-putting'), or gybing around in front of the mark and going behind incoming starboard-tackers. This time loss can be significant compared with the same maneuver in a dinghy, where you might not lose any places.
Reaching
On a reach your options are to sail high of the course to the next mark, sail low of the mark, or sail on the rhumb line. If you are in clear air, sailing the rhumb but going high in the lulls and low in the puffs is almost always the best strategy. If you are sailing with boats rated within 20 seconds per mile of yours, you will probably have to sail high enough that they cannot pass and hope you don't have to sail too low later.
If faster boats are close behind you, it usually pays to dive low immediately after the rounding and build up some leeward separation. Let them sail by you clear to windward without a luffing duel. This strategy also works well when you have 4 to 5 boatlengths of separation between boats that are rated evenly. Going low keeps you from sailing too high early and keeps you inside at the reach mark.
Whatever else you do at the leeward mark, never get caught on the outside of another boat going around the mark. This guarantees you'll have bad air and will have to tack immediately.
If you are outside another boat, give up a few seconds and do an early spinnacker takedown. Then fall in behind the inside boat and make a good rounding, staying wide on the near side and close on the far side. If you do this correctly, you should have relatively clear air upwind <figure/>. The only exception to this strategy is if boats are right behind you. Leave some cushion and count on a slow rounding as the front boat turns sharply.
Your strategy for all remaining windward legs should be similar to that on the first windward leg. If you are in the lead pack, cover as many boats as you can. A loose cover is usually best; it ensures against a time-losing tacking duel and helps herd the fleet astern, because those boats tend to follow the leaders. If you are ahead on corrected time but are physically astern of faster-rated boats, cover them by following in clear air.
If you are among the leaders on a downwind leg, again cover loosely by sailing the favored gybe, position yourself between your competitors and the mark, and always keep your air clean. Let all boats rated 20 seconds per mile faster than you go by, and sail as low as your boat's polars allow. Know your boat's downwind gybe angles and never just follow other boats. Their gybe angles could be quite different from yours.
If you are behind on the last down-wind run, consider a gybe away from the fleet. After all, what do you have to lose? The best way to get back into the money is to hit a favored shift.
If you are on the last beat to the finish and you are ahead, always use a loose cover. If you are in the upper middle of the fleet, you might try to pick off a couple more boats. If you are behind, think about taking a flyer out to the layline. Remember, keelboats make up time slowly, and that's the only way you can score a big recovery.
When you are approaching the finish, you should switch to dinghy tactics and closely cover the boats that rate near you. You don't want one of them to get on the inside of a lift on the last shift. As you come up to the line, don't forget to shoot up into the wind to gain a few seconds.
In handicap racing you are racing the clock as well as individual competitors. Don't become obsessed with individual boats when you're out on the course. Keep the clock and these conservative strategies in mind, and you may begin to get consistent finishes near the top of your fleet.
RIGGING
Low-stretch halyards
Chris Kulczycki uncoils the tale on which material to use for your halyards. Who needs that nasty wire?
Strong, low-stretch halyards for mainsails and jibs are important to a boat's performance. A halyard that stretches will allow the sail's luff to scallop or deform, resulting in reduced pointing ability and speed. Until recently, wire halyards were used on most boats because only wire was able to resist stretching adequately. Today, modern low-stretch cordage opens up the option of rope halyards (Photo 1). Whether you are replacing existing halyards or setting up a new boat, it's wise to consider the advantages of various types of wire and rope, and it's important to check and maintain those halyards regularly after they are installed.
Wire halyards
Stainless-steel wire halyards have long been popular because wire has low stretch and is relatively inexpensive. Wire's high strength allows small-diameter halyards to be used, lessening windage on external portions of halyards. But wire can be hard on hands and equipment, and it wears out fairly quickly. The reel-type winches still used on older boats with all-wire halyards occasionally slip or release accidentally - something to consider when going aloft on a halyard. A reel-type winch allows the sail to be raised only by turning the handle, a slow process. For these reasons all-wire halyards are rarely used today.
With the development of practical techniques, it became easier to splice a braided rope tail onto a wire halyard <figure/>. Rope tails make wire halyards easier to handle and allow a conventional open winch to be used. With the addition of mechanical stoppers, one winch can be used for several halyards.
The splice joining wire to rope seems to worry many sailors. If properly made, wire-to-rope splices are extremely strong, and though they are more difficult to make than a rope splice, anyone with a bit of patience can make one.
Normally, 7*19 steel wire (made of seven strands of 19 wires each) is used for halyards.
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Tips'n tales from the cab
A mainline engineer's experience filling in on a branch line
BY VERNON HART
BRANCHLINE railroading seems like an ideal theme for a layout with unique character. An imaginary cab ride down a little streak of rust may provide some insights into what I mean. Let's begin with some background information.
FILLING IN FOR THE 'OLD MAN'
The scene is backwoods south Missouri in the early 1970s. The 'Old Man,' as the regular engineer is known, is on vacation. As the youngest promoted engineer on the division, I'm assigned to fill the vacancy and work his job with the regular crew. (Seniority means everything on the railroad and any undesirable outlying jobs are always foisted upon those with the least seniority.) At the time, I had four or five years of 'mainline' experience, but not nearly enough to feel comfortable reporting for work with the old man's legendary crew.
Arriving at Willow Springs, the little town that served as the home terminal for the branch line, I began to investigate this 'legend' for myself. In the cold gray light of dawn, I walked toward the old side-door caboose near the station. This ancient 'woody' was the private domain of the 'Ranger', an old conductor notorious for his low opinion of enginemen like me!
Looking in the open side door, I was amazed by what I saw. An ornate antique barber's chair was mounted in front of the door! A polished brass spittoon sat nearby, while spotless cooking utensils lined the shelves near the old wood stove. A stainless-steel lavatory sink completed the 'kitchen' corner, and an oversize sofa occupied most of the other wall!
Judging from the refinements, I suspect the caboose was officially 'lost,' with all records of it gone in a fire years ago. No wonder I had never seen the old woody turn up for servicing in Springfield!
WORKING THE 'TURN'
On Sundays, the Frisco ran an extra job called the 'Turn' to clear the Springfield yard of cars destined for various on-line industries as well as cars for the branch line. Sunday was the layover day for our locals, so the Turn usually set out around 20 cars at Mountain Grove and 30 or so at Willow Springs, and delivered an engine and caboose for the branch.
It usually continued on to West Plains with the remaining 20 cars. After 'peddling' all the 'shorts,' or local cars, the Turn returned to Springfield, picking up cars that had been set out the day before by assorted trains with tonnage problems (insufficient power to pull the hills).
My thoughts returned to the job at hand, and I eased away from the caboose unnoticed and headed for the tie-up track to inspect my locomotive. The old Geep looked okay with good oil and water levels ... the governor oil was sufficient, however a can of Havoline nearby told me that it probably leaked. The engine's brake rigging seemed okay ... shoes thin ... sandboxes full ... ice needed for the cooler, along with drinking water.
Climbing down, I headed for the depot to fetch supplies. The station agent greeted me and nodded toward the crap game going on a few feet away.
"This here is Joe Bob and Lou," he announced. He nodded toward an adjoining room, "The Ranger is in there."
The agent continued, "Can't get no time on the main 'til they run two north. Gotta switch the shorts in Two and Three West before we can switch the town, or make up yer train. Boogers covered up the north end last night, when 234 had to reduce tonnage here. Then a pup conductor set out Marvin's junk on the south end this morning."
Marvin was the roadmaster responsible for track maintenance in the area. He had a habit of storing his assorted tool cars, tie flats, ballast cars, air dumps, and machines at Willow Springs instead of in town. Even so, any knowledgeable conductor would not have blocked our revenue cars when he set his stuff out in the small yard.
MEETING THE RANGER
Obviously, the agent was preparing me for a long day. I walked into the next room to meet the Ranger. To my surprise, he had no black cape and his fangs appeared normal. The Ranger was a husky man of about 60. Time was being kind to him, as his graying hair complemented his tanned, healthy appearance.
"Glad to meet you, Mr. Hart. We've heard good things about you."
Like so many things in life, this dreaded confrontation had been totally disarming. The railroad 'grapevine' was, and still is, incredible. If you were judged a good engineer early on, the reputation would stick unless you really fouled up. The same held true if your first impressions were negative. You were branded 'bad' for life.
A harsh crucible? Yes. However, full-size railroading is a dangerous profession. Railroaders all know that the best way to stay alive is to be careful and determine, by any possible means, the degree of trust that can be placed in a co-worker. The less-than-fair rumor mill is heavily used for this purpose.
The Ranger continued, "We have time on the controlled siding. Joe Bob will line ya outa the stub, 'n I'll have Lou hand ya up supplies when ya come by the depot. We ken pull the empties outa the mill 'n be ready to set 'em up as quick as we get time on the main."
I knew exactly what he had in mind. The Ranger's crew members were all ranchers on the side, so they made sure the feed mills got priority service. They would dig the feed cars out of the shorts, along with any cars that belonged in our train, and spot them at the mill.
Once the mill was taken care of, the Ranger made the decisions regarding which cars would go in our train. Since the branchline job seldom had enough power to get all the tonnage over the hills, he chose the most needed cars and we built our train accordingly, finishing things off with his personal caboose.
Once we were under way, the main-line locals were stuck with switching the rest of the yard, delivering cars around town, and sorting out the road-master's equipment.
Next month, I'll pick up the story with a trip up the branch to show you what rural railroading is really like.
COMPUTERS in MODEL RAILROADING
CONDUCTED BY BOB FINK; P.E.
THE RESPONSE to our introduction to Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) tools has prompted me to dig deeper and extend the coverage this time. Also, Don Mitchell will share his pick of the 2-D CAD packages.
THE LAYOUT DESIGN CYCLE
You might call this column CAD re-visited. Back in September we talked about CAD and some of its model rail-road applications. Since then, a number of readers have responded, telling me about their systems and the best choice of software for their needs. I spent some time last winter analyzing CAD packages in the practical range for layout design.
I studied the phases involved in the layout design sequence. Figure 1 shows what everyone goes through if they intend to build a believable model rail-road. With this in mind I looked at various commercial programs offering the best value for each phase of the design sequence, and here's what I found.
GETTING STARTED
The first and probably most difficult phase of layout design for most folks seems to be putting workable ideas on paper. Whether you're setting out to model a section of a real railroad or to free-lance a realistic track plan, that first phase can be frustrating. If there were only a way to quickly condense the important elements of, say, a real freight yard, sketch it, and test it for practical operation, you'd be on your way. Surprisingly there is!
Design Your Own Railroad is produced and marketed by Abracadata, some of whose earlier 'Just for Fun' offerings have been reviewed here. The depth of useful features in this new one is astounding. The IBM version I worked with is extremely well written. See fig.2.<O_>figure<O/>
Learning time, the biggest drawback to most high-end stuff, is minimal with Design Your Own Railroad. In an evening you'll find yourself connecting scale track elements and testing car and train placement. I found that I could quickly set up a yard lead arrangement, add scale turnouts that actually throw, populate the tracks with cars of the length I use, and switch them with a locomotive. Potential operational or space problems will show up before terminals and sidings have been added to the overall scheme.
The program goes well beyond a practical layout design aid and lets you fill in room constraints or sketch in scenery and structure arrangements.
The pull-down menus, ease of movement in the drawing, and component editing allow you to turn out many workable ideas in a lot less time. There's even a menu to develop way-bills and shipments with a revenue accounting system to play out the financial end of railroad operations.
FROM CONCEPTS TO DESIGN
Getting all the working areas (yards, service facilities, sidings, etc.) to fit as realistically as possible in a limited space is the next hurdle in designing an operating layout, and should start long before the sawdust flies. Most of us building layouts let this phase just 'happen.' You can luck out sometimes, but here again your computer can keep you out of trouble.
The key to a workable track plan for realistic operation is that the trains move reliably from place to place. With portions of the layout constructed at different elevations, we have some of the same grade problems as the prototype. Vertical separations and the grades connecting elements of the track plan are extremely important yet often difficult to visualize.
A program that lets you see vertical separations and grades is CadRail. The newest version, 3.0, should be out by the time you read this.
To a layout designer CadRail's most important features are establishing distances along the track (stationing) and automatic elevation calculations for grades. The new version provides a profile view to help you 'see' how vertical separations are taking shape.
In CadRail I found all the features of track placement needed to complete my design. The manual is well written, and the program is easy to learn. The Grid and Snap features are especially useful in track layout. A library of HO scale yard ladders, curves, and sample layouts is another asset.
CadRail is a practical layout design program that keeps getting better as more and more railroaders use it and offer their feedback.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
There's always going to be a final phase of seeing the completed scale plan set in its surroundings. A lot of us shirk on this one too and let the trackwork determine where the bench-work should go.
With a full-featured drafting program you're able to draw benchwork on one layer, overlay track on another, and lock in your overall room constraints on a third. Finding a moderately priced program that will do this is possible. Most of the track plans Don Mitchell designed for MODEL RAILROADER and his Kalmbach book, Walkaround Model Railroad Track Plans, were done with a CAD program called EasyCAD 2. Be sure to check out Don's review in the sidebar for details.<O_>sidebar<O/>
AND THE WINNER IS ...
I haven't tried to stack one program against another here. These are the best three for the money that I've seen so far, and they match up just right to layout design objectives. Of course, you don't need all three. It depends on where you're starting and how deeply you want to become involved. I'd like to hear your findings on this useful application of computers in model railroading.
Trains ... ... of thought
Commentary by Tony Koester
GOT A LETTER the other day from a fellow who asked about an article on the HO scale Allegheny Midland's Wheeling Division.
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THE 10 FASTEST 'STREET' CARS IN AMERICA
By Joe Pettitt
Yikes! We had a lot of motors up against the rev limiter in hot rod land while looking for the 10 'fastest' street cars in America. (Yeah, we know drag cars are properly referred to as quickest, but 'the fastest street cars' sounded better.) It seems everybody we talked to had the baddest, the most brutal street car ever conceived by a rodder. And, of course, we heard rumors and tales that a friend of a friend had the quickest car in the world, but he only raced for money and didn't want anyone to know how fast it really is. So it goes.
Hey, maybe those rumors are true, but we're not interested in ghost stories, we're interested in the fastest street cars in America. And as far as we can tell, we have 10 of the baddest street cars that ever prowled the pavement on either side of Woodward Avenue or the prime meridian for that matter.
These cars are bad-to-the-bone, low 9-second and high 8-second street-style cars. As long as these cars can cruise on the street without overheating or draining the battery, have lights and turn signals, and some semblance of an interior, they qualify as street cars in this loose sense of the term. That puts this group of cars on the ragged edge of being called a street car and the owners/drivers on the ragged edge of sanity with a loose grip on reality. These cars are pure adrenaline, fun, and the essence of hot rodding.
You may notice that most of the cars in this section are big-block Camaros. We didn't plan it that way, it's just that Camaros are relatively lightweight cars in which a big-inch motor fits nicely. And you simply can't beat the combination of big inches and low weight for a fast street car. In addition, we didn't run across any Mopars and only found a few Fords. We know you elephant motor heads and shotgun rodders are out there, but you're just too well hidden. So if you have a faster Ford or a meaner Mopar, come out of the closet and let us know, pronto.
One more thing: There are only winners in this group. All of the cars here are exceptionally quick, but they have not competed on the same track, on the same day, under the same conditions, so any performance comparisons would be pure speculation. However, this may change in September, because we will decide by means of a competition which is the fastest street car in America. Until then, here are the 10 fastest street cars that we know of.
ROD SABOURY, '57 Corvette, 8.62/156 MPH
As of this June, this is the quickest time Rod Saboury has posted with his 2500-pound '57 Vette on a set of Goodyear slicks. And he did it through the mufflers with a single four-barrel carburetor without nitrous! And don't be fooled, he does cruise this bad boy on the street. In fact, he drives it to the track, swaps tires, and runs - now that is bad!
The combination that hurls this 'Vette to such performance-heights is 532 inches of a Garrett Racing Engine-prepared, cast-iron Bow-Tie block with a Competition Cams .730-inch lift roller cam that is topped with Brodix aluminum heads and a Dart intake. A Barry Grant 1150-cfm Dominator mixes the fuel before a Jesel belt drive distributor and MSD-7AL team up to thelight the fire. Saboury says the Moroso dry-sump system is worth 15 horse-power, and the Turbo Start 16-volt battery makes a hotter spark for a noticeable performance gain. A custom set of 2 1/4-inch headers route into 4-inch inlet/outlet Flowmaster mufflers. The engine is backed by an ATI full-competition Powerglide with a 5500-rpm stall converter and 4.56 gears in a Mark Williams Pro Stock-style Ford 9-inch rearend. Saboury tunes the hook with a Koni coil-over double-adjustable-shocked four-link rear suspension and a Lamb strut front suspension.
DANNY SCOTT, '68 CAMARO, 8.61/158 MPH
Danny Scott's Camaro has to be the most beautiful of these bad boy machines. This impeccably prepared Camaro is all steel and has a full interior with functional side widowswindows and all the glass is just that - glass. No Plexiglas for Mr. Scott.
Here's the combination: a 540ci Sam Gianino-massaged Bow-Tie block stuffed with Venolia pistons and Childs&Albert rods on an offset ground crank capped with Gianino-tweaked Chevy C-port aluminum heads. A Crane Solid Roller cam (.780-inch lift) calls the tune to the Danny Scott-modified Holley 1150 carb on a Team G manifold, and 3-step headers (2 1/4-, 2 3/8-, 2 1/2-inch diameter) dump into modified Flowmaster mufflers. (The mufflers only lose Scott a few tenths!) To develop the levels of torque needed to rocket 3300 pounds of Camaro into the mid-8s, Danny relies on a CompuCar 'Blaster' 600hp nitrous system. The engine is backed by a four-speed Lenco transmission that puts the spin on a 4.88-geared Dana with Mark Williams 44-spline axles and spool. Scott fabricated the ladder bar suspension himself to the obvious satisfaction of the Goodyear slicks.
KEN ANDERSON, '78 MALIBU, 8.81/155 MPH
Ken Anderson's brutal machine turned its best time so far on 30x18-15 M&H street tires with a 3.70 gear in the Ford 9-inch rearend. Anderson and his dad are thinking of steppin' up to a 4.11 gear and the new 33x18-15 M&H tires. The change in the combo looks quicker on paper, and we'll let you know if it works out.
Meanwhile, Anderson's Malibu weighs in at 3050 pounds fueled without the driver and is powered by a 588ci, tall-deck Bow-Tie block with Brodix heads, a Dart manifold, and a Barry Grant-modified 1050 Holley Dominator carb. The fuel system is a combination of a CNC pump and regulators which feed both the carburetor and the Top Gun two-nozzle port-injection nitrous system. The engine is exhausted through a custom set of 2 3/8-inch headers through cavernous 4-inch in/out Flowmaster mufflers. The engine is backed by a Carl Rossler-built, ATI 5000-rpm stall-converted Powerglide. The rear suspension is a four-link system that hooks hard as indicated by its sub 9-second e.t.'s.
SCOTT SHAFIROFF, '67 'VETTE, 8.62/160 MPH
Scott Shafiroff is known for building awesome Pro Mod mountain motors. Shafiroff's reputation, combined with the German owner's desire to have the fastest street car in Germany, resulted in a Shafiroff Racing (516/293-2220) extravaganza. It seems there is a lively cruise scene in Germany, considering there are no speed limits on some sections of the autobahn. We don't have to spell it out for you, do we? Even though it will be exported to Germany, the 'Vette was built in America so it qualifies for this section.
Not only did Shafiroff build the engine, but he managed the construction of the entire car. It has a full interior, roll-up windows, a dash, a radio, a stock X-frame, and all the comforts of home. Out front is a 10:1, 604ci aluminum Donovan big-block stuffed with Total Seal rings, steel rods, a Shafiroff-spec'd street roller cam, and topped with Dart Big Chief heads. He also race-prepped the cast-aluminium intake and topped it off with a pair of tweaked Dominator carbs. Healthy doses of NOS-regulated and Shafiroff-tuned nitrous increase the naturally aspirated 930 hp to an astounding 1280 hp! Backing the engine is an FB Transmission-built TH400. The force from the engine is managed by a four-link coil-over suspension and 4.56 gear rearend.
Shafiroff says the most difficult part of this exercise is making the engine streetable. This engine idles at 750 rpm and is designed to perform under the varying conditions of a street driver. According to Shafiroff, building a race engine is easy by comparison.
MAX CARTER, '66 NOVA, 8.454/157 MPH
Max Carter presently appears to be the man to beat on the street car scene. He made some changes and has run a 5.24/133 mph 1/8-mile e.t. which, in theory, is in the low eights. Though some say his 2900-pound (fueled with driver) '66 Nova isn't a street car, Carter believes otherwise, and he's willing to meet you at the burger stand and go for a cruise to prove it. It has all the accessories of a street car, and it isn't a 2200-pound round-tube-chassis car. The most serious chassis work consists of extended mild-steel square tubing up to the front clip. Plus he runs a basic ladder bar rear suspension with separate spring and shock mounts instead of the trick coil-over shock system you see on sophisticated Pro Street machines cruising the fairgrounds.
Carter's Nova does it with torque: 557 inches of Crane roller-cammed Bow-Tie block capped by aluminum Bow-Tie heads with a Sonny Leonard-modified Holley Pro Dominator intake, twin Barry Grant 1150 carburetors, and custom headers which make up the basic combination for a killer nitrous engine. Carter has recently changed to a Compucar two-stage nitrous system. He leaves the fogger system on and then hits the 430hp-rated spray bar when the nose begins to settle. The Strange axles and spool in the 4.88-geared 12-bolt rearend deliver the torque to the 32x14.5-15 Goodyear slicks.
JOE YATOOMA/KURT URBAN, '69 CAMARO, 8.85/157 MPH
When Kurt Urban isn't busy running his Mr. Muffler shop in Detroit, Michigan, he's working on Joe Yatooma's Camaro. It's basically a hobby which, with a little help from the Ramchargers speed shop and a new coat of paint from Jeff Hall at Bloomfield Collision, is funded by Yatooma and Urban's pocketbooks. The same goes for most of the racers in this story.
And like the rest, they have built a max-boogie street car. The basic combination goes like this: a Bow-Tie block, BRC crank, Carillo rods, and Venolia pistons. This combo produces 13:1 compression mixed in with a Crane roller cam and D-port Chevy aluminum heads. Then fuel is added through a single Dominator carb atop a 'Bird man'-massaged Dart intake, and the exhaust passes through 2 1/4-inch Hooker headers and 5-inch in/out Flowmaster mufflers. Then they rearranged the components of an NOS Fogger system to a direct port design. The power is pumped through a Coan TH400 and 10-inch 4500-rpm stall converter, and it runs to a 4.56 rear gear and 32x14-15 Goodyear slicks. Now put it on a race track, point it, and pull the trigger.
HONORABLE MENTION
DON WALSH/D&D PERFORMANCE, '90 MUSTANG GT, 9.48/142 MPH
Don Walsh's Mustang is quicker than a 306ci small-block has a right to run! The block is an M-6010-A4 SVO block with a machined M-6301-B4 SVO crankshaft, Bill Miller aluminum rods, and JE pistons. The heads are SVO M-6049-C3 Yates-type aluminum goodies that were ported but not welded at Roush Racing. A Crane mechanical roller signals the SVO M-9424-B303 single-plane intake and Holley 830-cfm carb. Prototype SVO M9430-Y302 headers by Watson Engineering exhaust the gases that are fired by an SVO M-12199-C301 wiring harness with an M-12390-C bronze gear distributor and an M-12199C301 module, M-12029-A302 coil, and M12071-A301 harness. A single-stage NOS Cheater nitrous system is used to enhance torque.
A D&D Performance-massaged C6 automatic delivers the torque to a D&D Performance 9-inch rearend with 4.30 gear. The car is suspended by a combination of Global West McCastor kit bushings and rear tubular lower control arms, Koni shocks, Lakewood traction bars, and Watson Engineering subframe connectors. Cragar Drag Stars and Goodyear Front Runners and 26x10-15 M&H Racemasters hook the car into the nines!
RICK DYER, '69 CAMARO, 9.02/153 MPH
If Rick Dyer's Camaro looks similar in execution to Danny Scott's '67 Camaro, there's a reason. These two cars are part of the C.A.R.S. race team. Dyer's Camaro is essentially the same combination as Scott's since Scott built both cars. The only difference that we can discern (aside from year and color) is that Dyer's car weighs a massive 3666 pounds compared to Scott's slightly more sveltsvelte 3300 pounds. Dyer's e.t. is slightly slower than Scott's, primarily, according to Dyer, "because I like to put the wheels in the air. If I kept the wheels lower to the ground, I'd be running in the high eights, too!"
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SHOW JUMPING SURE AIN'T WHAT SHE USED TO BE
U.S. show jumping appears to be flourishing economically, but four years of fighting over USET policies has left the participants worried and divided about the future.
John Strassburger
Bill Steinkraus, writing in the 1991 international review book L'Anne Hippique, has developed an apt metaphor to describe the evolution of show jumping. He compares show jumping to the heroine of a romantic novel:
"She is born and brought up in the country, where her early life is dedicated to hunting. While still young, she marries a dashing cavalry officer and passes many happy years with him. Then, suddenly, he is ordered off to war. He barely survives and returns briefly, only to die of his wounds.
"Our heroine tries to return to her old lifestyle but cannot, for she has no funds with which to support it. At this point, some old acquaintances come to her aid, though they are from the world of business and she has always been quite cool to them in the past. Some offer temporary assistance, but others prove staunchly loyal; her life goes on and even prospers.
"Still, she worries, for she knows that her business friends must receive something in return to justify their expenditures. She is given funds to help entertain their guests and clients, but she realizes that an adverse business climate would make such activities very marginal for them. Thus her happiness is tempered by anxiety, and this is where she stands today."
Steinkraus' metaphor is even more poignant for the United States than for the rest of the world.
Eight years ago the U.S. show jumping team was on top of the world. At the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Joe Fargis, Conrad Homfeld, Leslie Burr and Melanie Smith did something no U.S. team ever had before -they won.
That golden moment was the apex of a tremendous skein of victories -eight wins at the FEI Volvo World Cup final in nine years and the gold medal at the 1986 World Championships with an almost completely different team.
These victories were the legacy of Bertalan de Nemethy, who from 1955 to 1980 coached the U.S. Equestrian Team and produced many of our finest horsemen and horses -Bill Steinkraus, Frank Chapot, George Morris, Kathy Kusner, Fargis, Homfeld, Smith, Robert Ridland, Michael Matz and Bernie Traurig, as well as Snowbound, San Lucas, Untouchable, Nautical, Sloopy, Ksar d'Esprit, Sandsablaze and Southside.
De Nemethy, now retired in Florida, was the most influential person in the shift from the military era to the current major civilian industry. De Nemethy was recruited to fill in the void created when the U.S. Army disbanded its cavalry and its cavalry schools following World War II.
"We got a very precious foundation from Bert," said Steinkraus. "Bert had, in effect, a mini-cavalry school."
For over 25 years de Nemethy personally selected riders and horses and brought them first to Tryon, N.C., and then Gladstone, N.J., for months or years of training. He planned their careers and took them for seasoning to shows in the United States and Europe. With their fluid and classical style, his riders quickly earned worldwide respect and have passed on their horsemanship to countless students, many of whom have also become trainers. His proteges have become course designers and administrators in both the USET and American Horse Shows Association.
De Nemethy's teams competed in 144 Nations Cups, winning 71. They also took part in seven Olympic Games, winning the team silver in 1960 and '72. Steinkraus became the first U.S. rider to win the individual gold in 1968. Four years later Neal Shapiro earned the individual bronze.
But since 1987, success has come far less frequently. The 1988 Olympic team claimed the silver with a determined second round and Greg Best and Gem Twist claimed the individual silver. But two years later nearly the same team could only finish a lackluster fourth in the World Championships.
U.S. riders haven't won the World Cup Final since Katharine Burdsall on The Natural in 1987. The only top placings since then have been third through seventh at Tampa in 1989. In 1990 and '91 no one made the top six.
Even worse, the team went 22 months without a Nations Cup victory -from Washington (D.C.) on Nov. 1, 1989, to Lanaken (Belgium) on Sept. 22, 1991. In between, there were such embarassing moments as finishing last at Spruce Meadows (Canada) in 1990 and '91.
Certainly the challenges to the selection procedure by Peter Leone before the 1988 Olympics and Debbie Dolan before the 1990 World Championships distracted the team's efforts in those years by pitting riders against each other.
Leone's grievance, filed with the U.S. Olympic Committee and turned down by an arbitrator, was a legal right granted to him under the Amateur Sports Act of 1978. And he wasn't the only athlete to file a grievance that year. Event rider Kerry Millikin lost her grievance a month earlier. Athletes from many other sports filed similar grievances, ensuring a legal pre-Olympics.
But Dolan bypassed the USOC grievance procedure and sued the USET, president Finn Caspersen, Steinkraus, and the individual members of the Selection Committee after she was named to the team and then removed because the Executive Committee felt there had been a conflict of interest in the decision. She even attempted to get an injunction to prevent the team from competing. The case was dismissed by one judge last February but is currently under appeal.
Responds Dolan, "I keep hearing that we're not doing well because of me. We're not doing well because we all have to try harder," she said. "To blame all our problems on one thing is a real cop-out. Just like our economy, it runs in cycles."
Nevertheless, Frank Chapot, one of show jumping's most forceful individuals, has been seriously affected by the deterioration of the system that nurtured him and that he promoted. As a veteran of six Olympics and chef d'equipe for the last three, Chapot has been the driving spirit behind U.S. show jumping for more than three decades. Although he was previously outspoken and sometimes even contentious, Chapot declined to be interviewed because of the lawsuits.
"I feel badly because I think our biggest asset has been Frank Chapot as our coach," said rider Chris Kappler. "He has always been absolutely 100 percent on our side, backing us always, even when things went wrong. I think he's lost his spirit with all this controversy, and there's no one better for the job."
The Root of All Evil
Today's show jumping game is far different from 20 or even 10 years ago. The reason is money -prize money now totaling over $3.8 million annually, major corporate sponsorship of events and individuals, and wealthy riders and owners who frequently spend six figures (sometimes even seven figures) to buy the best horses and then expect to make international teams because of it.
But the United States doesn't operate in a vacuum. European show jumping has just as much money. Corporate sponsors like Optiebeurs and Herderson put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to support teams of several riders, and auto manufacturers like Volvo and Mercedes sponsor events and give away cars to the winner.
Although show jumping's prize money doesn't yet approach golf or tennis, it's more than enough to induce Americans and Europeans to fly their horses around the world in pursuit of big paydays.
Not surprisingly, the riders almost universally embrace prize money. "In the positive way there is more participation. It's more interesting to the sponsors and owners and riders. There's more of a reward monetarily," said Joe Fargis.
Still, "I think when money was less involved 20 years ago it was probably more pure." he mused. "Now the sport has become a big business, and when things become big business, they change."
"I think itsit helps the sport," said David Raposa. "It's so expensive to show, and if an owner has invested a lot of money in a horse, he'd like to see some return. It's made the sport more appealing to owners."
"It's fabulous. I just wish more of it would come to the West Coast," said Susie Hutchinson.
They all point out that although income is high, expenses are even higher. In addition to entry and stabling fees, the cost of keeping horses is higher on the road.
"Prize money is still way behind the cost of buying and maintaining grand prix horses, and there hasn't been enough increase in prize money," said Bernie Traurig, expressing the complaint of most West Coast riders.
Traurig has a valid point. From 1987 to 1991, total grand prix purses have risen from $2,755,000 to $3,805,000, a 38.1 percent jump. The number of events has increased from 87 to 100, and the average purse per event has risen from $31,666 to $38,050, a 20.1 percent increase.
In that same period, though, the American Grandprix Association, the sport's most demanding, lucrative, and best marketed league, has remained nearly static. Total prize money peaked at $1,535,000 in 1988, and its average prize money per event was the same in 1991 as in 1989. In 1990 a record 16 events offered prize money of $50,000 or more; in 1991 that fell to 14. Only one of those events was in Arizona in 1991; none were in California.
The increase in total prize money has been fueled mostly by the independent events, plus the development in 1991 of the National Grand Prix League.
Since 1987, the AGA's share of total U.S. prize money has dropped steadily from 49.7 percent to 38.8 percent. Still, its year-end standings and championships remain the most sought-after titles.
The increasing diversity of prizes has forced riders to become better managers. Today they have to carefully plan their horses' schedules, putting them in events they can win just like race horse trainers.
Twenty-five years ago, the first big show of the year was at Devon (Pa.) and shows would lead more or less sequentially up to the fall indoor shows. Or you could go to Europe. Now the Florida, California and Arizona circuits start in January and the last major show is Toronto in mid-November.
"That's what puts the pressure on -the shows are all year long," said Melanie Smith-Taylor, now retired from show jumping and raising horses in Germantown, Tenn.
"The responsibility lies on the shoulders of the rider/trainer. It depends on your priorities -do you want to go to the Olympics or win the horse of the year? They really have to manage their horses or have someone help them, that's the key now," she continued.
"Your goals determine the strategy," said Hutchison. "If the horse is an investment, if the owners want to sell for a profit within a period of time, you need to give the horse exposure. If your goal is the Olympics, you manage toward that goal differently."
Even with good management, the never-ending circuit means riders spend less time training their top horses and developing their young horses. It's hard to keep a consistent training program when you're constantly cruising down the highway to a new show.
In a 1987 interview, Bert de Nemethy stated emphatically that riders weren't doing their homework and that it would catch up with them. "Many riders are far from the level they should be. They are doing nothing else but competing and jumping. They need training, they need ironing out, and they have to be criticized. Flat work is not being done," he said.
Steinkraus agrees. "You can look at horses today with outstanding careers who have a lot of holes in them, and many riders never finish their technical foundations," he said.
Why Doesn't The Team Win More?
U.S. show jumping does have many strengths. About a dozen knowledgeable and innovative course designers create challenges equal to or better than any in the world. The United States has at least a dozen of the world's most experienced and proficient riders, and at least half a dozen horses as good as any in the world (with the possible exception of Milton and Big Ben).
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The Mercury Makes ELK Move
IF YOU'RE A SKIER, PRAY FOR SNOW. BUT IF YOU'RE AFTER WAPITI, MAKE YOUR REQUEST FOR COLD.
BY SAM CURTIS
ELK HUNTING SEASON ALONG THE Continental Divide is a time of changes. Opening day may arrive as balmy as a summer breeze, and as you walk draws and ridges looking for fresh elk sign, you may find songbirds still not hinting of heading south.
But the season evolves, and one day you awake to a hard wind that blows all the way to dusk. Snow starts to fall during the night and continues throughout the next day, and somewhere in the condensed darkness of the following night the stars snap on and cold settles in like stones.
Stepping into a day on which the temperature has tumbled to the basement fine-tunes my elk hunting skills faster than anything else I know. Three of the five elk I've shot over the last five years were taken when the temperature was in the teens or below. I'd go so far as to say that I got those elk because of the cold.
Elk do things when the temperature drops below 20 degrees that they don't do when it's warmer. Perhaps even more than snow, cold weather prompts elk to move to lower elevations. Frigid temperatures also affect what side of a ridge elk bed down on, what type of cover they seek, and how and when they feed and move.
The hunter who is aware of the influence of cold weather on elk behavior stands a better-than-average chance to finding elk when the temperature drops into the teens or even below zero.
Traditional hunting lore has it that snow is the prime catalyst in getting elk to move from their high summer range down to where they are easier to hunt. Snow certainly has its effects, but research on elk movement indicates that they can easily walk through snow that's 1 1/2 feet deep before the going gets rough, and a big bull may be unhampered by up to 2 or even 3 feet of snow, depending on its consistency.
But let it get cold in the high country and things begin to happen. The open alpine meadows and the sparse timberline forests provide no protection from the effects of radiant cooling at night, and body heat just dissipates out into the clear, unobstructed skies. In these conditions, elk start to head lower in search of thicker forest cover and elevations less exposed to the influence of wind and its additional chilling effects. Even in the absence of snow, severe cold may spur elk onto fall migration routes. Cold and snow provide a double whammy that brings elk into even closer reach.
So, the first real cold snap - when temperatures hit the low teens - is a time to look for elk along traditional migration corridors. Those fall storms that come in for a day or two and are immediately followed by a sudden and deep drop in temperature under clear skies provide ideal elk hunting conditions. but get out there on the migrational travel lanes even if the cold is not preceded by snow.
As the elk descend from the high country in the face of really cold weather, they'll be looking for several things to satisfy their needs. They'll want to find a source of nutritious food to fire their heat-producing body furnaces, since calories equal BTUs as much for elk as they do for humans. And once elk have found a good source of food, they'll want to conserve the body heat it produces by finding a place to hide and bed that will minimize heat loss.
But cold-weather feeding sites and cold-weather bedding sites are not always close together. And since low temperatures prompt elk to feed more in order to stay warm, the animals will be going back and forth between feeding and bedding sites more frequently than usual. This increased movement makes them more visible to hunters.
The best bedding sites under cold-weather conditions are found in conifer forests that have thick canopies. These can usually be found on north slopes, where optimum shade and moisture produce tense timber stands.
In these forests, the umbrella formed by the trees' branches holds in a certain amount of heat, preventing it from radiating quickly into the atmosphere. Clouds can have the same effect, but when it gets really cold the skies are usually very clear.
Setting out on the last day of elk season some years ago, I moved under stars that glittered so sharply I could almost feel their edges. I left behind a house with frozen water pipes and a wife who agreed that they could remain that way, as I had only one more chance to put elk steaks on the table for the winter.
My toes and fingers ached even though I walked quickly up a Forest Service fire break that had been cut through thick timber years before. The break seemed my best bet for covering ground through otherwise tough terrain. As I walked, I peered under the tight cover of fir branches looking for bedded elk.
As I approached the crest of the north slope and the end of the fire break, I slowed my pace to a real still-hunting crawl. At the end of the tunnel the fire break made through the trees, I could see that the sun had just begun to hit the south slope on the opposite side of the ridge. I was standing, letting my eyes readjust to the darkness beneath the trees, when I heard the sound and noticed the legs.
The elk had given a grunt of exertion when it got up from its bed, and suddenly it was standing there like a present.
More than likely, it was the clear, cold skies that gave the bull to me. I later concluded from his tracks that the elk had spent much of the previous frigid day feeding and basking in the sun on the open south slope less than 100 yards from his bed. Then, he'd entered the timber on the fire break and stepped into a dense knot of conifers to stay as warm as possible for the night. I suspect he, too, had seen the morning sun hit the south slope and was getting up to seek its warmth.
Except for the happenstance of my presence, that elk had found an ideal situation, given the cold weather. The thick timber needed for a warm bedding site and the open slopes needed for grass - an elk's favorite food - were very close together at this spot.
In fact, any east-west ridgeline will provide both a north and south aspect whithin very close proximity to one another. These are ideal places to hunt when it is cold. In the face of light hunting pressure, elk feed and sun in the open during the day and head for the relative warmth of thick timber only after the sun goes down. This is just the reverse of what they usually do, and knowing this gives an elk hunter a distinct advantage.
It's sometimes difficult, however, for elk to find a place that offers ideal bedding and feeding conditions as well as light hunting pressure. So, elk need additional bedding and feeding sites.
When cold weather is combined with snow cover, elk will use the insulative qualities of snow to keep themselves warm. It seems ironic, but where snow cover is patchy, remaining, for instance, only in shaded draws or in drifts on windward bits of terrain, elk will actually seek it out for a bedding spot during cold-weather conditions. For this reason, snow pockets are well worth checking, particularly at daybreak.
Deep snow, on the other hand, produces 'tree wells' around the bases of lone, large conifers. Low, hanging branches keep snow from piling up under the tree while snow depths around the periphery may accumulate to the height of the lowest limbs. The 'well' produced beneath the tree offers almost complete protection from wind, and the mass of the tree trunk itself retains enough heat to attract elk in cold weather.
In some areas of the Northern Rockies, elk have actually been observed competing for such prime bedding sites in extremely cold weather. So it's worth scouting for big, live conifers that can produce such tree wells.
As for feeding grounds, elk may want to stay very close to cover when hunting pressure is great. This is when secluded natural openings surrounded by timber become cold-weather gathering points for hungry elk. They can feed on the grasses in such spots but never be more than a few dozen yards from cover.
Where you aren't immediately aware of the lay of the land, a 7.5-minute series topographic map will show you where such natural openings exist. And don't overlook small clearcuts as possible cold-weather feeding grounds.
ON THE OTHER EXTREME, ELK may feed in the wide-open spaces on cold days. During cold snaps, elk may move a mile or more out of the timber onto completely open terrain where the openness itself provides some security. A herd of elk feeding in open country is difficult to sneak up on because your presence can usually be detected by at least one elk, who will then warn the others of dangers. If you find a concentration of elk in the open during the day, it's best to locate where they have been coming out of the timber and wait for them there.
The typical cold-weather elk behavior I've been describing can be curtailed by two accompanying weather conditions that occasionally occur when the temperature drops.
Wind has a real effect on elk when it is cold. They will do almost anything to avoid it, and they'll usually forsake food in favor of finding a calm pocket in the surrounding terrain. Look for these pockets when it's cold and windy, and you'll probably fill your elk tag.
Temperature inversions are less frequent but also worthy of note. Occasionally, weather conditions will force a wedge of warm air up over a wedge of cold air, trapping the cold air close to the ground. The temperature difference between these layers of air can be dramatic, as much as 20 degrees, so this phenomenon really can influence elk whereabouts. Coming down out of the timber toward lower, open feeding grounds, elk may run into the trapped cold air, turn around, and go back uphill where it is warmer.
Perhaps the most important thing to remember about hunting elk in the cold is that elk behaviour at this time consists of a delicate balancing act. Elk have to move and eat to keep warm, on one hand, but they have to stay still to conserve energy on the other. Your awareness of how they perform this balancing act is the key to successful elk hunting in the cold.
HUNTING
Where Others Cannot Go
WHEN THE WHOLE WORLD USES FEET AND WHEELS TO GET WHERE THE DEER ARE, THE WISE MAN PICKS UP A PADDLE.
BY JEROME B. ROBINSON
ALONG THE BANK OF EVERY BROOK, river, lake, and swamp in the wild lands of North America there is a game trail. That should tell you something about where big-game animals are often found. The edges of waterways are natural territorial boundaries as well as common travel routes. In deer country in late autumn these trails are always heavily marked by bucks; trees where bucks have rubbed their antlers and ground scrapes where they have left sign are exceptionally abundant along the edges of waterways.
For many years I have concentrated my deer hunting efforts close to water. Sometimes we travel a long distance by water to reach a remote area; on other trips we use a boat only to get to the other side of a stream or lake in order to get away from roads. Crossing water is the best way I know to get beyond other hunters and find a territory where the deer are moving according to their natural inclinations instead of being pushed around by people.
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Spécialités de la Maison
NEW YORK
LORA, ROSA MEXICANO, GIRASOLE
BY ANDY BIRSH
Lora Zarubin looked for about five years for the right place in New York City to open a restaurant. The various store-fronts and other spaces she considered were either too large, too unattractive, in need of too much renovation for her budget, or simply rented for too much money. In the meantime she continued to run her rather bravely named catering firm, Good Food, which provided good food for social gatherings and had a busy sideline in laying on the edibles for leading photographers at their studios.
Even for someone undeterred by putting out a great effort, catering is arduous work, and Ms. Zarubin left the business in 1989, after ten years. While still holding out the dream of a restaurant in Manhattan, she decamped for Paris, where she busied herself designing a friend's apartment and cooking informally. Later she took a trip to India. Soon the pace of events quickened. Through contacts in New York, she learned that Sally and John Darr, the proprietors of La Tulipe in Greenwich Village, sought to retire, and she realized that the opportunity this presented was almost too good to be true.
La Tulipe was started by the Darrs in 1979 after Mrs. Darr's departure from the food department of this magazine and Mr. Darr's departure from school administration. As her own restaurant would later be for Ms. Zarubin, La Tulipe was a long cherished dream of the Darrs, and it soon became one of the best-loved small places to eat in the city. Set on the ground floor of a restored town house (the Darrs resided above), La Tulipe faced the world from the back of a postage stamp-size garden. The little front room was furnished with a zinc-clad Parisian-style bar, rattan café chairs, and tables with marble tops. The food served in the more formal dining room beyond was home-style French. Garlicky roasted chicken, snapper steamed in parchment, and tarte Tatin fueled their initial success.
To customers familiar with La Tulipe, LORA, Ms. Zarubin's restaurant (which she owns in partnership with a businessman named Donald Evans), might seem more like a well-tended inheritance than an enterprise started from scratch. The garden and the etched-glass front door are still there from La Tulipe, and so is the bar with its furniture. Ms. Zarubin's alterations have included the installation of the framed,beveled mirrors that line the dining room as well as a change in the color of the walls (from plum to off-white). She is a photograph collector, and the bar now holds a mini-retrospective of the work of William Claxton, whose crisp black-and-white portraits of jazz greats in performance (Billie Holiday, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Chet Baker, and Ray Charles are among those pictured) not only create an undeniably hip atmosphere but also recall Greenwich Village's proud musical heritage. A colorful counterpoint is provided by a signed print of Annie Leibovitz's famous portrait of Ella Fitzgerald in a tailored red suit. Mr. Claxton and Ms. Leibovitz are members of the chef's very extensive network of friends.
Ms. Zarubin also converted the parlor level above, where the Darrs lived, to a handsome private dining room and an office, but perhaps her most significant addition was made in the kitchen: a state-of-the-art wood-burning grill from California. Although most of her main courses are cooked over the glowing hardwood charcoal, her style is deft and subtle, and she does not serve dish after dish covered in black stripes. Indeed Ms. Zarubin can run a grill as skilfully as many of her French counterparts can handle their sauté pans.
The components of her grilled dishes change a bit all the time, but the constants are her sources of fine meats. Her friendship with the author Orville Schell and his ranching partner Bill Niman has enabled her to be the exclusive outlet in New York City for the extraordinary beef raised on their Niman-Schell Ranch north of San Francisco. These steers feed only on un-adulterated grains, and Niman-Schell also supplies Lora with legs of lamb from nearby McCormack Ranch and pork from Wildwood Ranch, which are like-minded in their feed practices. I have found all three meats to be unusually fine-flavored and tender, especially Niman-Schell's aged rib-eye steak, which Ms. Zarubin has lately served with French fried potatoes, glazed turnips, and some lightly dressed water-cress (the chef generally likes some cold greenery on the plate).
For those not inclined toward meats, chances are good that a generously cut fillet of salmon, quite possibly from the Pacific, will arrive at the table perfectly moist and flavorful, accompanied perhaps by basmati rice, salsa verde, and curly chicory salad. This being New York, a chicken-fancying town, Lora has offered a grilled version with mashed potatoes and mixed greens as well as a chicken fricassee with Yukon Gold potatoes and turnips. There are usually a few other non-grilled items, such as changing versions of risotto or pasta, and it is hard to imagine that demand will drop - in season - for her crab cakes served with mesclun and a rémulade blended with roasted yellow bell peppers.
All of these main courses come generously portioned, so it is well that starters at Lora are modest affairs. Parma ham with rosemary oil and grilled bread will not make too great a dent in the appetite, nor will any of an array of salads. The most interesting way to begin is perhaps with an antipasto that includes, among other things, grilled sweet red onions, house-cured black olives, more of the Parma ham, and bruschetta topped with tomato salad. The plate can easily be shared.
Ms. Zarubin stocks wines for the restaurant's cellar herself, and she tastes potential entries with an eye for how well they will complement her cooking. Sumptuous indeed is Peter Michael Chardonnay 'Mon Plaisir' '89 from Sonoma. This sells for $42, but satisfaction is also to be found, for $24, with Olivier Leflaive's white Bourgogne 'Les Sétilles' '88. Among reds, the chef favors Domaine Tempier's Bandol 'La Migoua' '87 from the South of France, for $43, but she also expresses a fondness for Saint-Amour Trenel '88, for $22, and hopes some of her customers will venture so far as to try the Sancerre Rosé '89 from Ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau du Maimbray Roblin ($28) with some of her grilled dishes. The wine is made from Pinot Noir and is among the few vins rosés thought to improve with some aging.
Along with the grill, Ms. Zarubin purchased a high-quality European ice-cream maker. She tries new flavors often, but I hope that her maple walnut comes back some time; it has to be the last word on that subject. Just as simple and satisfying, in my experience, are vanilla ice cream with chocolate-dipped almonds and a cr<*_>e-grave<*/>me br<*_>u-circ<*/>lée with a nip of ginger. Chocolate pavé (a 'paving stone') will gratify serious chocolate fans, but the less committed should look elsewhere. The restaurant appends to its dessert list a roster of exceedingly rare dessert wines and digestifs by the glass, such as aged Calvados from L. Dupont, Muscat grappa from Oregon, and cask-aged plantation rum from Martinique. How do all these disparate elements of a meal at Lora manage to fit together? They are all enthusiasms of the chef-owner, and her enthusiasm is infectious.
First courses at Lora range from $7 to $10.50. Main courses are $17 to $26, and desserts are from $5 to $8. Dinner is served nightly, except on Sundays and major holidays, from 6:30 until 11 (with an extension to 11:30 on Fridays and Saturdays). A short fixed-price menu is available at $25 for those who wish to be seated between 6 and 6:30, early enough for an off-Broadway show at 8. New York's foremost jazz club, the Village Vanguard, at 178 Seventh Avenue South, is minutes away by foot, but the music doesn't start there until after 9:30.
ROSA MEXICANO
On the whole, Mexican restaurants in New York City have a rather dubious reputation. Probably because the resident Mexican population of this city is low, there are few customers of Mexican origin demanding fine-quality cooking, and, as a result, the plentiful Tex-Mex joints in town cater primarily to customers looking for a cheap, spicy foil for beer and Margaritas. Josefina Howard, the co-owner, chef, and guiding spirit of Rosa Mexicano, has been aware of these local circumstances ever since she opened for business about eight years ago. As fair warning to anyone who might sit down at a table in Rosa Mexicano entertaining thoughts of, say, a Taco Combination Platter and a pitcher of watery lager, Mrs. Howard's menu bluntly states, "Because Rosa Mexicano presents classic Mexican cuisine, some of the popular Americanized dishes often associated with Mexican food are not included on our menu."
It shouldn't come as a surprise that her approach rubs some stubborn people the wrong way, whereas other customers count their dinners at Rosa Mexicano among their favorites in New York. Indeed a lack of familiarity with the classic cuisine should not be considered a barrier to full-throttled enjoyment. Mrs. Howard herself is not Mexican: she is Spanish by upbringing - although born in Cuba - and was married to an American. Her passion for Mexican food developed during her twenty-eight years' residence in that country, and she learned to cook from her friends and the people who staffed their kitchens. It amuses her to observe that her East Side restaurant has scrupulously preserved "the Mexican upper middle-class home cooking of the fifties."
Her efforts at maintaining this style pay off night after night. She herself is on hand most of the time, and her staff is unusually kind, loyal to the boss, and patiently ready to explain the dishes on the menu and the day's specialities. The surroundings have a simple charm (Mrs. Howard began as an interior designer) and feature walls and ceilings in shades of pink along with plenty of glazed and unglazed tiles. The bar, the grill, and the tortilla-making department adjoin along one side of the front room, and a splendid display of plants and flowers occupies the center of the side dining room, which is also the area in which smoking is forbidden.
What Mrs. Howard is most eager to teach her patrons is that the Mexican cuisine she loves embraces a bountiful range of the best fresh ingredients. A happily familiar way to begin the meal is with guacamole, but a guacamole with a difference, for Mrs. Howard's version is made to order on a trolley that parks alongside the table. A waiter starts with whole, perfectly ripened California avocados, halves them, scores their flesh, scoops the flesh into a traditional Mexican basalt mortar, or molcajete, and gently stirs in chopped seeded tomatoes, diced onions, and a finely minced mixture of coriander and jalape<*_>n-tilde<*/>os. The fieriness of the mixture is up to the customer. However hot one likes it, the naturally sweet freshness of the avocados shines through.
A fine match for Margaritas - made with superior Tequila - are the elements that constitute Mrs. Howard's array of cold seafood (the elements may be ordered separately or all together). Seviches, made from small scallops and from filleted fish, arrive authentically citric and permeated by green chilies. Lightly marinated oysters are served chilled on oyster shells with strips of pickled green chili; and superb lump crab meat salpic<*_>o-acute<*/>n is quickly sautéed with coriander, celery, and just a hint of chilies before it, too, is chilled and served. The truly brave can show off their sturdy palates with 'xalape<*_>n-tilde<*/>os rellenos': pickled roasted chilies with a sardine filling. These push the edge of my tolerance for peppery heat, but I hanker for them nonetheless.
Also to be approached with some caution are the house's special Margaritas, in which freshly extracted pomegranate juice is added to the customary mixture. For reasons I wish I could explain, they appear to drive their drinkers a little loco. Seemingly gentler in their effects are the Mexican beers that Mrs. Howard stocks, including a very dark entry, Negra Modello, which pleasingly underscores the superbly sauced main courses.
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Two top pros take different views through the AF SLR
By Dan Richards
AUTOFOCUS? YOU BET!
(If you have a fear of heights, some of Peter B. Kaplan's photos may give you vertigo. Known for spectacular views of the New York City skyline and Statue of Liberty, this 30-year veteran's work includes corporate, wildlife, advertising, and fashion work, and images in many major publications.)
Don't talk to Peter B. Kaplan about trap focus or tracking focus speed or wide-area autofocusing fields. He's sold on autofocus and views it as just another speedy convenience on modern cameras, like autoexposure and motor drives. With it, proper focus becomes one less thing to worry about.
The camera can now focus better and faster than human eyes can, Kaplan says, so why not go with the flow?
"Let's face it: I started wearing glasses seven years ago - which I hated - but with autofocus, wham, I know it's in focus," he says. "But even if I were in my 20s and had perfect vision, I'd use autofocus - what a wonderful, quick way of focusing!"
Kaplan made the move to autofocus in 1989, with Nikon's introduction of the F4S, now his photographic tool of choice. It was not, however, love at first focus, by any means.
"As with any new tool, you first look at it and say, who needs this?" he explains. "In the beginning it used to drive me nuts. But I think that it takes a good year to learn a piece of new equipment. It's a great tool once you learn it - but I still don't go anywhere without the instruction book."
'Learn' and 'know' are two very common words in Kaplan's vocabulary. To him, you're not going to like autofocus if you don't know how to use it, and you're not going to know how to use it if you don't take the time and trouble to learn it. "I would like to say that behind every lightmeter there's a photographer. If you don't know how to use your meter, you won't get the right exposure. If you focus on something in the background because your little autofocusing mark was there, you'll get an out-of-focus picture."
Kaplan makes liberal use of the F4S's independent autofocus-lock button, picking out what he feels is the area of critical focus and then turning his attention to composition and exposure. He autofocuses via the shutter release as well, with action subjects.
Whether the subject is moving or static, Kaplan says that autofocusing increases the certainty of getting a sharp photo. For the photo of the baby polar bear, he notes, the animal was moving around quickly and, in this particular instance, surfaced suddenly and couldn't be prefocused. "Look, I'm sure it's possible that I could have focused as fast - maybe. Then again, I don't know," he says. "You just have more certainty with autofocus."
Kaplan agrees the advantages of autofocus may not seem so clear in static situations - for example, shooting the skyline from the top of the Brooklyn Bridge with the camera on a tripod. "But then there was a truck going across the Manhattan Bridge, and the sun was just coming up. I just locked the auto-focus onto the truck, hit the shutter - and I knew it was in focus. Before, you would take a photo and it would be slightly out of focus. It would be off by just a smidgen, but on a 20 x 30 or 40 x 60 blowup, you're going to see it."
Complaints? He has a few.
Kaplan has a gripe or two about autofocus, to be sure, the major one being hunting (which he calls 'whining,' from the noise the AF motors make). "Yes, it can drive you nuts, as when you're shooting in a foggy situation and it goes wheee wheee and searches. But you switch it over to manual and focus manually. There are advantages and disadvantages to everything."
Also annoying, he notes, is the situation in which the camera balks because you're slightly too close. "It looks like it's in focus, but it isn't, and it won't fire. But that doesn't happen that often."
Kaplan says he understands resistance to autofocus or, for that matter, any new camera technology. "We all get used to old systems. When I first came out of college, I had a handheld meter and a manual camera - that was the system. I got a Nikon Photomic head, but I still used the hand meter because I was a 'professional' and professionals didn't use built-in meters."
But learn to use them he did.
Kaplan's advice? Don't worry about scratching your expensive camera. "That's the main difference between the real pro and what I call the amateur pro - people who buy a tool and don't work the hell out of it. Treat it like tool, not like a jewel, and it will work for you."
AUTOFOCUS? NAH!
(Somewhere along the line you have probably seen a Joel Gordon image. A professional for over 20 years, his work spans advertising, corporate, studio, reportage, and publications, in both color and black-and-white. With his wife, Elaine Abrams, he now runs his own stock agency.)
Joel Gordon has one autofocus lens, but he doesn't own an autofocus camera, unless you count the Olympus Infinity Stylus he uses as a snapshot camera. He has used loaner Nikon F4S's on a number of occasions, but for his 35mm workhorses, he's stayed with F2's and F3's and a battery of manual-focus lenses from 16mm to 500mm.
"The verdict is not in as far as I'm concerned," he says. "I'm not against autofocus; I just don't think autofocus is the boon it's been promoted to be."
And what in the world is Gordon doing with a 180mm f/2.8 AF-Nikkor? Manually focusing it, of course. "It's lighter than the old 180," he says.
One of Gordon's major complaints is a common one, and one heard from autofocus fans as well, such as Gordon's friend, Peter B. Kaplan: hunting. "The autofocus would sometimes go in and out - hunt - and that was very annoying," he says.
Gordon understands all the arguments for autofocus and, in some instances, agrees with them - a bit. "Of course, I think it has its usefulness, for example when covering a news-oriented event where things are happening fast," he says.
Continues Gordon, "The other argument for autofocus is that as you get older (which I am), and as your eyes begin to fail (which photographers discover happening sooner or later), autofocus is a great help. I do wear glasses, and I can understand that."
But Gordon says conditions under which manual focusing is difficult can be difficult for autofocus as well. He adds, "From my experience, I wasn't sure autofocus was always as sharp as manual. You still make mistakes. With the F4s, you had to focus right in the center of the frame. I don't always focus right in the center of the frame or where the autofocusing marks are. The focusing was sometimes off - a lot of times it was on, very good - but it was off more times than I really wanted." And while he has high praise for many of the F4S's features, he says the weight of the camera is a major drawback.
Gordon readily admits that much of his work doesn't necessarily call for an autofocus camera. "I have a little more time. The speed element isn't crucial to me. It allows me to make a determination of my point of focus and my point of view. I like to make that determination and not have a camera make it for me."
Perhaps typical of Gordon's approach is his shot of the road painting in Arizona. He tried vertical and horizontal compositions, than had his wife sit near the top to add a human element. He composed with the drawing going into the bottom of the frame and, from experience, focused on a certain line of the drawing to get hyperfocal depth. He then used depth-of-field preview to check what aperture he could get away with and still handhold with 50-speed film.
Equipment isn't all
This brings us to the crux of Gordon's argument: that it's the cook, not the cookware, that's primary.
"I've seen demonstrations of auto-focus cameras by three major manufacturers. But what made them was the person behind the camera. Someone still has to pick up the camera, view, and compose - that's the key."
But can't you do that with an auto-focus camera just as well?
"I think that autofocus is a useful tool. I'm just saying for what I'm doing most of the time it's not a primary need. I'm not a purist. But I'm a working professional, and the equipment has to produce for me. I can't afford to have equipment sit in my safe gathering dust - this is my livelihood."
Gordon further argues that sophisticated automation, paradoxically, may be fine for the expert but not for the beginner. "A photographer should first learn on a manual camera to learn the principles of photography, and learn to print. Then go to autofocus and automatic cameras. Otherwise, you're just not learning."
Will Gordon eventually switch? "I'm not saying I'm never going to use an autofocus camera because I probably will at some point, and I'll continue to do testing," he answers.
"But I'll probably still keep my F2's as long as there are parts for them."
flash on camera!
How to live with the light source you love to hate
By Robert Salgado
On-camera flash, by far the most widely used artificial-light source on the planet, is also the most despised. On the plus side of the ledger is convenience. Sliding a flash unit into your SLR's hot shoe or popping up its built-in flash eliminates the need for dangling connector cords, brackets, or other paraphernalia. You needn't even acquire the small degree of digital dexterity required to aim an off-camera flash with one hand while holding the camera and pressing the shutter release with the other.
With most recent built-in flashes and state-of-the-art shoe-mount autoflashes, you also get such benefits as automatic, through-the-lens (TTL) exposure control and auto fill-in flash. And today's light, compact, powerful shoe-mounters often provide such amenities as fractional power settings, multiple autoflash ranges, zoom heads that tilt and swivel, and second-curtain synch.
Despite all this admittedly wonderful stuff, on-camera flash still has a bad reputation among many serious photographers, because so many flash-on-camera pictures are afflicted with the notorious 'flash look' - an unappealing combination of pasty white faces, two-dimensional figures, murky backgrounds, and harsh shadows.
The good news is that you needn't resign yourself to any of this. By implementing the simple, straightforward techniques described herein, you'll be able to retain all the conveniences of on-camera flash while achieving pleasant, natural-looking lighting that enhances your subjects without overpowering them.
One of the main problems with on-camera flash is that it's so often used as the sole source of illumination when it doesn't have to be. Indeed, many auto-flash systems encourage this by automatically setting the camera to the top flash-synch speed (typically 1/125 sec), then suggesting or selecting a moderate aperture. This means that any ambient light falling on the subject may have little effect on the exposure, leading to dark backgrounds and flatly lit faces. These negative effects are compounded by shooting straight on, which can add unflattering shadows. As our before-and-after examples illustrate, using a slower shutter speed and/or selecting the fill-flash mode can soften these effects considerably.
The goal is to achieve a pleasant balance between the existing light and the flash illumination. You can also soften the effects by bouncing the light from your shoe-mount flash off a ceiling or wall, and as you can see in the example on pages 34 and 36, even with direct flash it's usually possible to alter your shooting angle to get the shadow to fall behind the subject rather than to one side.
Automatic, balanced fill flash is unquestionably the greatest thing that's happened to on-camera flash since the era of flashbulb.
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Banana Split: Can Beautiful St. Lucia replace its threatened export with mass tourism and stay beautiful?
By Nick Taylor and Barbara Nevins
IT SEEMS LIKE A PLACE WHERE NOTHING could ever go wrong, but while we were there something did. The winds and seas had shifted, and bays that under usual conditions are protected were being pounded by heavy swells. Thatch beach huts had been swept from their concrete foundations and lay scattered across the sand and water. Nearby bays had been spared, and the normal round of water sports - sailboarding, water skiing - continued unabated. But the warning was not lost. Never take a tropical paradise for granted.
We were vacationing with Richie, our 12-year-old, on St. Lucia, the Windward Island that lies between Martinique and St. Vincent. It is tempting to call it 'undiscovered,' but that would be misleading: European travelers know it well enough. Only to Americans is it less familiar. Still, for now the atmosphere is unspoiled. Perhaps not for long, St. Lucia is the sort of Caribbean retreat one dreams about.
Already, the sirens of duty-free are luring the cruise ships. The local government is stoking the engines of that juggernaut it calls Development. It is considering the matter of casinos, too, and that is not good news.
It used to be that St. Lucia meant bananas. In a way, it still does. Driving the scenic 27 miles from Hewanorra International Airport to Castries, you hug the rough Atlantic coast, curve up around the fishing village of Dennery, and then turn inland into a lush tropical forest. And bananas are everywhere: bananas still ripening, bananas bagged in blue plastic to repel insects. The plants line the roadsides, flourishing across the wide hills and valleys.
Thanks to bananas, St. Lucia has stayed off the beaten tourist path for a long time. But later this year, when the European Economic Community merges into a single market, this independent member of the British Commonwealth may lose its favored trading status with Great Britain, and the price of its all-important banana exports could drop by as much as 30 percent. No wonder the government is promoting tourism. John G.M. Compton, the prime minister, spoke wisely at the ground-breaking ceremony for a new, multimillion-dollar port: "We are late in this tourism race. We must therefore offer better value if we are to catch up. Trying to make a 'quick killing' will be self-defeating and is the surest recipe for failure. 'Quality, price, and service' must be our watchword."
It remains to be seen whether St. Lucia will learn from the mistakes made by other island nations. In the meantime, it survives as a relic of the old Caribbean - charming, somnolent, slightly inconvenient. Exploring the island is not easy; the roads are in poor shape and the services by no means abundant. But the locals are friendly, and the scenery is spectacular. The twin volcanic peaks known as Les Pitons (Gros, 2,619 feet, and Petit, 2,461 feet) rival the most dramatic sites of Hawaii. If you sit on the left side of the plane, you will see them as you fly in to Hewanorra, a onetime military airfield, which lies on the arid flatlands to the south. The resorts are where the scenery is, to the north.
Our discovery of St. Lucia began on that 45-minute drive. In a typical St. Lucian arrangement, the taxi driver, Henry, had brought along his son, Jerome. Jerome and Richie hit it off right away, and Jerome, with a little prompting, began initiating Richie into dub, the islanders' breathless expositional talking music - part rap, part reggae, turned up to double speed. While this was going on, Henry pulled over at the edge of a towering cliff.
"Please," he said, with old island courtesy, "look at the view." The fishing village below, lashed by the foaming sea, might have been a spot on Portugal's breathtaking Algarve coast. Then came those banana groves, where people on foot and on bicycles were heading home from work and children stared and giggled at the sight of visitors. We were still a novelty.
Dropping us at our hotel, Henry suggested we attend that evening's street festival in the village of Gros Islet, near the northern tip of the island. They have one of these every Friday night, he told us, "a real Caribbean party." The locals' name for it is 'jump up,' and though visitors are welcome it's not staged for the tourists.
The streets of Gros Islet were crowded with St. Lucians and the rest of us, many brought by hotel buses. In the balmy night air, vendors hawked barbecued chicken and beer from their own front porches. Funky bars (one proudly displaying its license to purvey 'intoxicated liquors') had tables set up right in the street. A booming sound system transformed the main intersection into a dance floor. The locals and the tourists moved easily together, like neighbors at a block party. About 11:30 there was a brownout all over town. As the lights flickered and went dim, the stars and the waxing moon came out in full glory against the wispy clouds. The music continued, more softly now and even more magical.
St. Lucia, with a population of about 150,000, welcomed just over 250,600 visitors in 1990, bringing in revenues of $154.8 million. The government is looking for slow, steady growth - in the range of 4 to 6 percent annually - over the next several years. Conservative as these projections are, many islanders are concerned about the changes they see ahead. Most St. Lucians are Catholic, which reflects the strong French presence in the island's convoluted history, and the majority are thought to oppose the idea of casinos. But even if no casino is ever built, the islanders are having to adjust to sharing their corner of paradise.
One morning we went walking out along the water by the luxurious resort Cunard Hotel La Toc. At the end of the beach we encountered a man in dreadlocks named Peterson Joseph, carving birds from coconut husks. He told us that St. Lucian men often transpose their first and last names; he didn't know why. We enjoyed the chat, and he sold us a bird. A generation ago, such free-lance craftsmen had few customers for their wares.
Lisa Sampson, who spends her days promoting the beautiful rental condos of Windjammer Landing, talks wistfully of her childhood years of growing up on Labrelotte Bay. The buildings that now line the beach had not yet been built, and Sampson well recalls playing in the crystal-clear surf when there was not another soul for miles around. The water still sparkles, and all the island beaches are still open to anyone, but solitude may be a thing of the past.
Behind such memories, though, lies a turbulent, often violent, history. The first human beings to discover St. Lucia were the Arawaks, members of a South American tribe who settled the island before A.D. 300. Then came the Caribs - cannibals, some sources claim - who killed the Arawaks off. Columbus may or may not have weighed anchor on St. Lucy's Day (December 13) in 1502; local tradition says he did. A hundred years later, some Englishmen washed ashore and came to grief at the hands of the Caribs; in 1660 the French persuaded the Caribs to enter into a treaty, gaining control of the island. But not for long. For the next century and a half, the French and the English made intermittent war over the island. In 1814 hostilities ceased, with the British in charge.
The stakes were high: the fine natural harbor and a succession of lucrative crops - sugarcane, coconuts, cotton, and, finally, the famous bananas - harvested in the early days by slaves imported from western Africa, the ancestors of most of the population today. Before the opening of the Panama Canal, Castries was an important coaling stop for steamships; keeping pace with the technology of the times, the city now attracts ships with its large, modern facilities for storing oil. With the weekly influx of cruise ships and freighters and frequent sightings of the Geestbay, the slender banana boat that carries St. Lucia's crop to England, the port harbor bustles much as it did in the 19th century. Architecturally, though, only a fanciful fa<*_>c-cedille<*/>ade here and there recalls the grand colonial style. The town has suffered many fires, and the prevailing building style is drably modern.
What lingers and indeed flourishes on St. Lucia is the speech of the long-departed French. Though English is the official language, what you hear in the marketplace and on the streets is mainly French patois. And French place-names dot the map everywhere, from towns like Micoud, Vieux Fort, and Soufri<*_>e-grave<*/>re to landmarks like Les Pitons and Pointe Seraphine and coves like Anse la Raye.
One day we rented an open jeep and set off along the fast, smooth coast road toward Soufri<*_>e-grave<*/>re, near the medicinal sulfur springs. As we turned into Marigot Bay, we were suddenly joined by a young fellow named Robert, who asked for a ride even as he was leaping onto our bumper. As our self-appointed guide, he stuck with us all the way to Anse la Raye, at which point we let him know we preferred to continue on our own.
Beyond Anse la Raye the road deteriorates and the signs of poverty multiply. We saw ramshackle houses, rusting vehicles, people washing laundry in the mountain streams. They waved us off when Richie aimed his camera, and we wished we hadn't imposed. Two more young men accosted us, trying to commandeer rides or sell us trinkets. Some travelers we met reported running into holdups on the back roads, but although some of the attentions we received were not wanted, we never felt that we were in actual danger. Still, if we had it to do over again, we would rent a closed car.
Switchback curves and potholes turned the 28-mile drive into a two-hour ordeal. Poor Richie had the worst of it, levitating above the backseat as we bounced along. One of his homework assignments from school was to ask St. Lucians what one thing they would change on their island. Most of them instantly replied that they would fix the roads. We felt much the same.
A far better way to get to the area near Soufri<*_>e-grave<*/>re is by speedboat, as we discovered later in the week. In just 40 painless minutes, a fast, outboard-powered launch from Castries Harbor whisked us to Anse Chastanet, an exquisite small resort, where we went snorkeling amid the coral, feeding bread to swarming fish in all the colors of the rainbow.
And just a few coves away, beyond Soufri<*_>e-grave<*/>re, are the breathtaking Pitons.
The two peaks are the remains of a volcanic fault that geologists in their wisdom classify as inactive but not dormant. Its subterranean simmerings are responsible for what is billed as the world's 'only drive-in volcano': a moonscape of bubbling, belching sulfur springs that feed a steaming river of dark water. Actually, the road to the springs is closed now; you park at a nearby gate, buy you a ticket for $1, and see the sights in the company of a guide.
Five miles away, similar springs feed Diamond Falls, which changes color eerily from yellow to black to gray to green several times a day and spills over the cliffs. Louis XVI had baths constructed here for the benefit of his French soldiers, and for $2 you can test the curative effects of the waters. (They are said to work wonders on a hangover.) The surrounding mountains rise to a dramatic 3,000-plus feet, trapping the clouds that nourish a luxuriant rain forest, the habitat of the brilliantly plumed St. Lucia green parrot and many other rare species.
Reconnoitering by car and boat, we found other signs of efforts to protect the island's endangered species and sites. Pigeon Island National Park, on a 44-acre island near the northern tip of St. Lucia, once a pirates' hideout, is now connected to the main island by a causeway.
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Fifty years ago, if my mother had put a plate of vegetables with no meat in front of my father for dinner, he would have thought she was demented or that we had suffered some financial disaster he didn't know about. Actually, my husband would have thought the same thing a few dozen years back. Those were the meat and potato years: bacon for breakfast, cold meat for lunch, and a roast for dinner.
When I was growing up in a small foothill town in Southern California, it seemed as if there were only about five or six fresh vegetables in our grocery store: carrots, string beans, cabbage, lettuce, and corn, and maybe one or two others. Vegetables certainly played second fiddle in my mother's cooking. I know we had string beans because I can remember stringing them. And I know we had carrots, but always raw, because my mother had read in some government pamphlet that they were better for us that way. My Irish father considered corn-on-the-cob to be cattle fodder, so our table never saw an ear of corn. He said almost every other vegetable was rabbit food.
Times have changed. The produce departments in supermarkets are huge, and we have a vast variety of vegetables. Cooks from around the world have introduced us to tomatillos, gingerroot, chile peppers, bok choy, and cilantro, to name a few plant foods new to most of us, and our cooking is far more interesting because of them.
All the recipes in this chapter are main supper dishes, and all of them are vegetable dishes except for a few pasta and rice recipes. Many of them have been collected over the years from friends and strangers eager to share a favorite vegetable dish. Green Chile Pie (see page 135) came from a county fair winner long ago. Linda Sue's Tomato Stew (see page 138) came from a photographer who doesn't cook except once in a while when she's homesick for this dish from her childhood. And Frieda and Elinor's Onion Pie (see page 133) came from the Swiss Alps by way of an Idaho housewife.
Southern Green Beans
(four servings)
For the last few years most of us have been following the recommended way of cooking green beans until just tender, because we believed that long cooking destroyed flavor and vitamins. But Southern Green Beans with potatoes and a hint of bacon have a fullness of flavor and depth of character that crunchy beans don't have. Serve with warm cornbread.
3 or 4 slices smoky-style bacon, diced
1 pound green snap beans, washed, ends trimmed, and cut into 1-inch lengths
Salt and pepper to taste
1 cup water
2 scallions, sliced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
Heat a Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed pot with a lid. Add the bacon, and cook over medium-low heat until lightly brown, about 5 minutes. Add the green beans, salt and pepper, and water. Cover and cook for about 10 minutes over medium-low heat. Add the scallions and potatoes, stir to mix, cover, and cook for 30 minutes more. Check once or twice to make sure the liquid hasn't all evaporated. Serve hot.
FARMERS' MARKET
A visit to the farmers' market can be as inspiring and as uplifting as a trip to Yosemite. If you've never eaten fruit that has been tree ripened, or cooked vegetables at their peak of maturity, you can't imagine what you've been missing. Going to the farmers' market, walking from stand to stand, and talking to friendly people is a very pleasant experience.
Supermarkets, with their vast array of foods, are fascinating and indispensable, but a farmers' market, with fewer foods to buy, all of them fresh and sold by their growers, is so much more personal. There's an appreciation at my supper table when the dishes have been made from the produce of farmers I know.
Often you'll find people exchanging recipes at the market and that can be rewarding. I usually return home each week with some cooking tip or a fresh herb to cook a new way with a favorite vegetable. Some of the recipes I collected at the farmers' market are Wirtabel's Melon Chutney (see page 178), Green Peppers and Cheese (see page 113), and New Red Potatoes with Rosemary (see page 116).
Red Beans and White Rice
(six servings)
Beans and rice are oddly delicious together. You may approach this Creole dish with low expectations, but once you've tried it, you'll see why it's a beloved staple in the South. The nutritionists keep telling us to put more legumes and grains in our diets, and I can't think of a better way to do that than serving red beans alongside white rice.
2 cups (about 1 pound) dried red beans, soaked overnight (see page 18)
1 carrot, peeled and diced
1 large onion, chopped
1/4 cup chopped celery with leaves
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons Tabasco sauce
1 pound salt pork, diced
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cups steamed long-grain white rice (see page 55)
Drain and rinse the beans, return them to the pot, and add the carrot, onion, celery, bay leaf, Tabasco sauce, and salt pork. Add enough water to cover, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer for about 2 hours, or until the beans are tender. Some of the beans should be mushy. Add more water if necessary, or mash some beans to thicken. Salt and pepper to taste, being careful not to over-salt. Serve the beans in the same bowl with the rice, side by side.
Boston Baked Beans
(four servings)
I don't think Bostonians bake their beans overnight in the ashes of their fireplaces anymore, but Boston baked beans still need to be long cooked to have that rich, mellow flavor that only long, slow cooking creates. Once you have quickly assembled the dish and put the beans in the oven, they don't need you, except to check up hourly to see if more liquid is needed. This dish can be made on a Sunday and reheated. Serve with Piccalilli (see page 177) and Coleslaw (see page 187).
2 cups Great Northern beans, or small dried white beans, soaked overnight (see page 18)
2 teaspoons dry mustard
3 tablespoons dark brown sugar
3 tablespoons molasses
1/4 pound salt pork, cut into 1/2-inch cubes, leaving the bottom attached to the rind
Preheat the oven to 325<*_>degree<*/>F.
Drain the beans, cover with fresh water, and cook until tender, about 1 hour. Drain, reserving the liquid. Stir together the mustard, brown sugar, molasses, and 2 cups of the reserved liquid. Put the salt pork in a 2-quart bean pot or casserole, add the beans, and then add the molasses mixture. Stir to blend. Cover and bake for 5 to 6 hours. They are done when soft. Check every hour or so to make sure the beans don't dry out. Add more of the reserved liquid, or water, as needed to keep the beans moist. Taste and correct seasonings. Serve hot.
Bean Stew with Raw Onions
(four servings)
Adding fresh raw onions to this dish just before you serve it boosts the taste and texture. Make this bean stew and taste it before and after you add the chopped raw onion: you will be surprised by the difference.
1 1/4 cups dried red or pinto beans, soaked overnight (see page 18)
6 slices bacon
8 cups water
1 large onion, chopped (1 cup)
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 cup chopped parsley
1/3 cup yellow cornmeal
1/8 to 1/4 medium head cabbage, chopped (2 cups)
1 1/2 teaspoons ground sage
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
2 medium onions, chopped (1 1/2 cups)
Drain the beans. Put aside 1 slice of bacon and dice the rest. In a large (5-quart) soup pot, put the beans, diced bacon, and water. Bring to a boil and cook over low heat for 30 minutes.
In a frying pan, cook the remaining bacon slice until crisp. Remove from the pan, crumble, and set aside. Add the 1 cup chopped onion, celery, and parsley to the bacon drippings. Sauté the vegetables over medium heat until soft, about 5 minutes.
Add the cornmeal to the beans and bacon in the soup pot, and stir to mix. Add the sautéed vegetables, cabbage, sage, and salt, and stir. Cover and cook for 30 more minutes. Just before serving, stir in the 1 1/2 cups chopped onions or sprinkle the onions on top of individual servings with the crumbled bacon. Serve hot.
Green Peppers and Cheese
(four servings)
One Saturday at the farmers' market I was buying some Anaheim chiles and the woman next to me asked me if I had ever made Peppers and Cheese. "It's so simple," she said. "Do try it!" I did, and she was right.
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 Anaheim or California chile peppers, split, seeded, and deveined
6 ounces Monterey Jack, fontina, or Gouda cheese, sliced
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons corn oil
8 tortillas (corn, flour, or whole wheat)
Fresh cilantro
Heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Put in the peppers, open and skin sides down, and flatten them with a spatula as they cook. Cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until the skins are blistered and browned. Put 1 slice of cheese and 2 tablespoons of onion in each pepper. Fold the pepper over the cheese and cook over low heat 1 minute, then remove from the heat. Warm the tortillas by putting two at a time in a steamer over boiling water. Leave only for a few seconds. Remove and keep warm in a covered dish. Put a filled pepper and a few sprigs or cilantro into each warm tortilla and fold the tortilla in half. Serve hot.
Filled Green Peppers
(four servings)
In the summertime, all the ingredients for this dish will be at the farmers' market. The quality of the tomatoes is important, and for a short time in the summer they will be perfect: sweet, acidic, firm, juicy, and bright red. This is a very practical dish: the filled bell pepper halves are easy to pick up and eat cold on a picnic, yet they are just as good served hot on a plate. Serve a sharp, creamy cheese, green onions, and whole wheat bagels on the side.
4 green bell peppers, halved lengthwise, seeded, and deveined
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 medium tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1 small eggplant, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano; or 1 1/2 teaspoons dried crumbled oregano
Salt to taste
Generous amount of pepper
Fresh basil leaves, for garnish
Preheat the oven to 350<*_>degree<*/>F. Film a 9 x 13-inch Pyrex baking dish with olive oil.
Put the peppers into a pot of salted, boiling water; place a plate in the pot on top of the peppers to keep them under the water; and parboil for 4 minutes. Remove and set aside.
Film a sauté pan with the olive oil and heat. Add the garlic and onion and cook over medium heat for a minute or two, just to soften. Add the tomatoes, eggplant, oregano, salt, and pepper. Stir to mix and blend thoroughly. Taste for salt and correct if necessary. Cover the pan and cook over medium-low heat for 10 minutes, stirring once or twice. Uncover and cook another 3 minutes, stirring often. Remove from heat.
Put the pepper halves in the prepared baking dish. Using a slotted spoon, fill the halves with the tomato/eggplant mixture. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove and serve hot or cold, with whole, fresh basil leaves on top.
Baked Green Peppers with Anchovies, Rice, and Dill
(four servings)
Unless you know you love anchovies, this dish may not be for you. The pepper halves are filled with the brazen flavors of olives, garlic, lemon, dill, and salty fish.
4 green bell peppers, cut in half lengthwise, stemmed, seeded, and deveined
2-ounce can anchovy fillets, packed in oil
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Bazaar Bonanza
Twice a year the 24 members of The Ladies Aid Society of the First Reformed Church of Pella, Iowa, hold bazaars to help the church with expensive improvements. Recently they raised $10,000 to help with the cost of installing an elevator in the church. They sold crocheted afghans, pieced quilts, knitted slippers, woven rag rugs ... and hundreds of homemade pies and pressed chicken sandwiches.
Agnes Mathes is on the Ways and Means Committee; Rose Duven is this year's chairman. According to Agnes, the woven rag rugs are their best sellers. Two members do the weaving, but all get involved during 'Sewing Days' in tearing the fabric strips for the weavers (denim strips with blue warp is the favorite). The ladies also like to piece quilts for dolls, although Agnes tells us that some customers buy them for their dogs which is okay with her. Her most popular bazaar contributions are knitted slippers and bed socks.
We know that there are thousands of these bazaars in communities across the country, and we salute all the stitchers who donate their time and talents!
And we know that there are a lot of craft fairs where enterprising crafters secure space and retail their creations for profit. We think it is a great way to bring attention to the special quality of handmade items!
In this issue of McCall's Needlework and Crafts, tucked among our collection of patterns, you'll find over 40 projects specially selected to be bazaar best sellers!
A SMILE & A TOUCH OF HUMOR
We'd like to introduce you to a new member of our family. She's a wife and mother, has a sense of humor and a cat, and best of all she loves to knit, sew, crochet, paint. She's always busy creating something like someone you know. Her name is Maggie McCall and she's today's 'crafty' woman!
You'll find Maggie turning up on our pages every now and then - just for a smile.
Fall Colors, Textures and Styles
There is something for everyone in this season's fashion forecast:
Plaids and patchwork are very popular. Blues, purples, violets, denim, and tweeds are highlighted with embroidery details and textures.
Big, bold outerwear in buffalo plaids, blanket patterning and Americana motifs will be musts for your wardrobe. Look for toggles, frog closures and hoods in desert tones, and fall colors.
Ribs are everywhere. You'll find them in knitwear, both in body hugging and loose fitting styles. Mohair, bouclés, soft merino wools, and tweeds in subtle colors dominate the fashion scene.
Browns and grays are important this fall. Bright colors retain their popularity in activewear. Look for faux jewels, fake furs, and metallics. We've been paying close attention to these trends and have selected sweaters and accessories for our coming issues to fit these styles!
MR. AND MRS. SANTA BELLS
shown on page 45
SIZE: Each, 2 3/4".
MATERIALS
Plum Fun Wood Products 2 3/4" wood bells with rings, two. DecoArt Americana acrylic paints: flesh tone, gooseberry (medium rose), brandy wine (burgundy), slate gray, white wash, black, and leaf green. Deco-Art Snow-Tex white textured paint and extender. Paintbrushes: No. 2 round and old, small brush. Krylon spray varnish. Fine-tip permanent black marker. Fine sandpaper. Toothpicks.
BELLS
PREPARATION: Sand bells lightly. Basecoat the Santa bell with two coats of brandy wine and the Mrs. Santa bell with two coats of gooseberry; let dry.
Refer to <figure/> and use a pencil to lightly draw grid lines and pattern outlines on each bell. Continue hat, hair and clothing pattern lines around the back of the bell.
PAINTING: Basecoat faces with flesh tone. Mix a small amount of extender with gooseberry, dip finger in mixture, and pat on each face for cheeks; let dry.
Santa: Basecoat the hat with two coats of gooseberry. Refer to the photo and paint the berries on the hat with brandy wine and the leaves with leaf green.
Using an old brush, dab Snow-Tex on bell ring to make the hat tassel; clear ring hole with a toothpick. Applying small amounts of Snow-Tex at a time, carefully fill in beard, then moustache using the paintbrush and the nose using a toothpick. Let dry overnight. Paint over all Snow-Tex areas except nose with slate gray and let dry. Paint over gray with white wash, letting areas of gray show through for shading.
Paint the nose with flesh and blush the tip with thinned gooseberry. Paint eyes using the wood end of the paintbrush. Using white wash, paint the eyebrows, hair on forehead, and add highlight dots to the nose, cheeks, eyes, and berries.
Mrs. Santa: Applying two coats of each color, basecoat the collar with brandy wine and the apron with white wash.
Using an old brush, dab Snow-Tex over bell ring and hair; clear ring hole with toothpick. Apply Snow-Tex to nose with a toothpick. Let dry overnight. Paint over hair with slate gray and let dry. Paint over gray with white wash, letting areas of gray show through for shading.
Paint the berries on the hair with brandy wine and the leaves with leaf green.
Paint the mouth with gooseberry and the nose with flesh, blushing the tip with thinned gooseberry. Paint eyes using the wood end of the paintbrush. Using white wash, paint the eyebrows and collar buttons, and add highlight dots to the mouth, cheeks, nose, eyes, and berries.
Finishing: Use the fine-tip permanent marking pen to ink outlines and pattern details; let dry.
Spray lightly with varnish.
PERFORATED PAPER HOLIDAY EARRINGS
shown on pages 44-45
SIZE: Approximately 1"-1 1/2" high x 1" wide.
MATERIALS
For all: Perforated paper, twelve 2" squares each white for stitching and gold for backing. DMC six-strand embroidery floss, one 8-meter skein each color listed in Color Key. Kreinik Fine #8 Braid, one 10-m. (11-yd.) spool gold #002HL. Six pairs of earwires or French ear clips, silver.
EARRINGS
Draw intersecting lines across each chart to mark the center. Measure across paper and mark its center. Matching centers of paper and chart, cross-stitch each design twice on white perforated paper squares. Use the stab-stitching method and three strands floss or one strand braid.
Assembly: Using craft knife, cut out each motif one square beyond last row of stitching, leaving extra squares in tight corners. Layer gold squares and white shapes wrong sides facing. Use three strands floss or one strand braid to backstitch front and back together following backstitching lines. Backstitch jack-o-lanterns and snowmen with black, ornaments with gold braid, hearts with dark mauve, shamrocks with dark emerald green, and Easter eggs with dark violet. Weave thread ends between the two layers. Attach jewelry findings to top or back as desired.
Through The Editor's Eyes
What do you want to be when you grow up? Some of us as youngsters changed our minds daily, while others seemed to be predestined to follow a path from the beginning. Little did I know that my lifelong love affair with crafts would lead me to become the new editor of McCall's Needlework and Crafts. Raised by a seamstress and a jack-of-all-trades, and instructed in the needlearts by nuns in primary school, I developed a love for all forms of creative crafts from early childhood. Some of you may recognize my name from my years of freelance work with many publications and from my knitting books. "What is your favorite craft?", you ask. Although I have been concentrating primarily on knitting, crochet and cross-stitch for sanity's sake, I also love to quilt, sew, stencil, do woodworking and stained glass, needlepoint and crewel - well, basically all sorts of crafts. And therefore, like many of you, I am interested in a magazine which provides me with projects of quality, style and variety.
As the editor at McCall's Needlework and Crafts, I select patterns from other established, as well as new, designers with the right style and appeal for you, the readers. Having been on the 'other side of the fence' as a designer, I know how patterns should be written, which materials are best suited, and what types of projects are of interest. In order for a design to be selected, several criteria must be met, and the following questions must be answered:
How does a design concept meet our standards?: Quality, where all details have been attended to, where colors, materials, and styles have been carefully selected for your inspiration.
How do we keep you coming back for more, issue after issue?: Originality, always searching for new techniques, new stitch combinations, new products, while keeping abreast of the trends and your interests.
How do we meet the need of several crafters with different interests?: Variety, a medley of projects, carefully balancing knitting, crocheting, cross-stitch, and quilting, along with a dash of some other interesting crafts (see page 78 for fabric painting!).
I know you invest more than your time and talents in your projects. The patterns featured will always reflect a detailed attention to our standards, and only those good enough to be of interest to you will find their way into the pages of McCall's Needlework and Crafts. After all, the most important person here at McCall's is you, the reader.
A Chat With The Cover Girl
By Annemarie Lawson
Take note of the model gracing this issue's cover. Nicole Bobek, at the age of fourteen, is one of the top ten female skaters in the United States! In 1991, Nicole placed first in both the Vienna Cup and Olympic Festival, and placed eighth in the National Senior Competition. She is currently a member of the United States Figure Skating Association and is competing to be named to the USA Olympic Team. I met Nicole after her appearance along with other National Competitors asat the RockefellarRockefeller Center ice rink in New York City.
Nicole has been an athlete from infancy. Her mother took Nicole to swimming lessons and gymnastic classes before she was one year old. She started skating at three and showed so much promise that her parents relocated to Colorado Springs from Chicago so that Nicole could attend the Olympic Training Center.
Nicole has a daily routine in which every minute counts. Her schedule includes five periods of high school classes, four hours of rigorous form training, an academic session with her private tutor, then back to the ice for skating practice.
Like many teens, Nicole relaxes by calling friends, shopping, and reading. She also manages to find time to be creative. "Recently I've beaded a lot of necklaces and earrings," she told us. "Before that I was decorating jeans and tee-shirts with rhinestones and fabric paint." Nicole is also proud of her stained glass. She learned the technique from her Grandpa George. What's her favorite motif? "Ice skates, of course!"
On the fashion front, Nicole can usually be seen in sweaters. "I prefer a close fit and shorter length for practicing," she explained. "You need to see the movement of the body in competition. Ribbed knits and turtlenecks are great because it's so cold on the ice!" Stripes and checks are her favored designs, along with plaids. Nicole is also an avid hat collector.
The next National Competition is in early January 1992. The winner will compete in the winter '92 Olympics in France. We'll be watching for you, Nicole!
April showers bring May flowers ... as we share with you some of our own colorful projects. A flower basket quilt to brighten your bedroom, mother/daughter sweater sets to prance in on these sunny spring days, a delicately stitched baby birth announcement for that special newborn, plus some rabbits and Easter eggs for the holiday season ... lots more wonderful springtime ideas to inspire the creative person in you!
PAINTED BABY QUILT
shown on page 78
SIZE: 32" x 44".
MATERIALS
Broadcloth 44" wide: yellow, 1 1/2 yards (includes backing); white, 3/4 yard; royal blue, 1/2 yard. Duncan Scribbles Matchables matte fabric paint, one 1-oz. (30-ml) bottle each: lemon yellow, bright blue, bright yellow, apricot, bright orange, light pink, lipstick pink, light turquoise, deep turquoise, and bright red.
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AVIATION
30 SECONDS OVER TOKYO
50th anniversary of the most famous air raid in history
BY WILLIAM GARVEY
It's hard to imagine now, but not all that long ago the United States was left bleeding and humiliated by an attacker who, confident he'd paralyzed his victim, went on to grab everything within reach. It was January 1942, and what had been the engines of the country's pride and power in the Pacific, its Asiatic fleet, was a collection of sunken hulls and twisted superstructures leaking fuel oil and sailors' blood into Pearl Harbor's once-azure water.
In the month that had passed since the Day of Infamy put the U. S. Navy out of action, the Japanese forces rampaged across the Pacific. Every day the news got worse. We needed a victory bad.
Almost from the moment he learned of the unprovoked surprise attack on the Hawaiian Islands, President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded that his military leaders strike back. Specifically, he wanted American airplanes to bomb the Japanese home islands - to put it right in their face. And he wanted those bombs to fall soon.
The problem was that there was no apparent way to comply. There were no bombers based anywhere near striking distance of Japan, and moving one of the Navy's precious carriers close enough to conduct such a mission with naval aircraft would make it vulnerable to overwhelming retaliation.
But then an unlikely 4-striper came up with an audacious idea. Capt. Francis Low, a submariner, suggested a strike with long-range Army bombers launched from a Navy flat-top operating well away from the Japanese coast. The idea caught fire in Washington - theoretically it would work. And the best man to put the theory into flight was the balding, middle-aged lieutenant colonel right down the hall.
Years before the outbreak of war, James H. Doolittle had already secured his place in the Hall of Aviation Immortals. A 'daredevil' pilot who actually calculated all risks very carefully - he held a Ph. D. in aeronautical science from MIT - Doolittle had set transcontinental speed records, won a brace of races, performed the first outside loop and conducted the first 'blind' flight on instruments. As the war clouds gathered, he returned to active duty and was stationed in Washington, D.C., when the carrier-borne bomber idea was broached. Doolittle was told to help find the right bomber.
The rough criteria for the aircraft: It had to be able to operate from an exceedingly confined space and take off in less than 500 ft. while hauling a ton of bombs and enough fuel to fly 2000 miles. Only one airplane in the inventory fit the bill: the new North American B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. And it would require modifications. Doolittle requested and got the nod to honcho what was officially the 'Special Project,' and things started happening very quickly.
Two dozen B-25s were fitted with specially designed rubber tanks inserted in the bomb bay and above. Also, some aircraft were fitted with automatic cameras. Meanwhile, crews assigned to the 17th Bombardment Group - among the most experienced B-25 airmen in the service - were told that volunteers were needed for an important, dangerous mission. They all wanted in. Those chosen were sent to Eglin Field in Florida for special training. Richard Cole, one of the copilots selected, remembers the speculation that went on every night about the upcoming mission. They all knew it would involve flying off a carrier. After all, a Navy instructor had been assigned to them for that task. But why and where?
It was during this phase of training for short-field takeoffs that Cole's pilot became ill and had to drop out. To prevent theirs from becoming one of the project's reserve aircraft, the crew appealed to the operations officer. He replied, "The old man's coming in this afternoon. He'll fly with you and if everything goes right, you've got yourself a pilot."
Cole says he and his three other crewmen were ecstatic for the chance to stay in the mission, "but we had no idea who the old man was." On March 3, they and the rest of the men gathered at Eglin found out.
"My name's Doolittle," the one-time collegiate fighter told the assembly. "I've been put in charge of the project that you men have volunteered for. It's a tough one, and it will be the most dangerous thing any of you have ever done." He told them of the importance and urgency of training that lay ahead, but withheld the name of their destination. Secrecy, he explained, was of critical importance.
As the pilots refined their short-field takeoff technique, modifications proceeded on the aircraft. Doolittle ordered the bottom gun turret removed (the mission would be so low-level the only enemy planes below them would be sitting on the ground) and replaced with a 60-gallon fuel tank. De-icing boots were installed, as well as anti-ice for the props. Liaison radios were removed and phony twin .50s (they were broomsticks painted black, actually) were installed in the tail to make enemy fighters think twice about attacking from the rear.
The B-25s were normally equipped with the super-secret, high-altitude Norden bombsight, which lost its effectiveness below 4000ft. Since bomb release on this mission was planned for 1500 ft., the Norden sight was replaced with a rudimentary sighting device composed of two pieces of aluminum that Eglin technicians fashioned specifically for the mission. Whereas the Norden cost more than $10,000, the value of the Eglin sight was estimated at 20 cents. Each.
Although Doolittle was in charge, he had not yet been assigned to lead the actual strike, something he was burning to do. So with crew training well underway, he flew to Washington and put the request directly to Gen. Henry 'Hap' Arnold, chief of staff for the Army Air Forces.
Then 45, Doolittle was thought to be too old for combat and, besides, he was too valuable an aide. Arnold had no intention of granting the request. But Doolittle persisted until the general reluctantly agreed - with the stipulation that Doolittle must also get the okay from Gen. Millard Harmon, Arnold's chief of staff.
Doolittle smelled a rat. Exiting Arnold's office he raced down the hall to Harmon's desk and told the surprised general that Arnold said he could lead the raid if Harmon agreed. "Sure, Jim," he responded. "Whatever is all right with Hap is all right with me." Doolittle left. Just outside the office he heard Harmon's intercom come to life and then heard Harmon say, "But Hap, I just gave him my permission." The quick-footed colonel then high-tailed it back to Florida and waited for Arnold to yank his chain. But he never did.
On April 2, the carrier Hornet steamed out of San Francisco Bay with 16 Mitchell bombers tied down on its deck. Still, only a handful of men knew their true purpose and destination. That afternoon as the Hornet sped west into the open Pacific, the ship's loudspeaker suddenly blared the stupendous news: "This force is bound for Tokyo."
Richard Cole remembers the moment, "Cheers went up everywhere. Everyone was happy." America was punching back.
The plan of action called for the Hornet and the seven cruisers and destroyers accompanying it to rendezvous with Adm. William F. Halsey's 8-ship group in mid-Pacific, forming Task Force 16. The armada would then steam to within 400 miles of Tokyo, launch Doolittle's raiders and run full-speed back home. After dropping 32,000 pounds of ordnance on Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, the bombers were to continue west to airfields located in sections of mainland China still un-occupied by the Japanese. They were to land, refuel and fly farther inland to Chungking and await further orders. The bombing was to occur at night, and landings were to take place at dawn. Total flight distance was approximately 2000 miles.
It didn't quite work out that way. On the morning of April 18, Navy lookouts spotted a Japanese fishing boat which they soon realized was really a radio-equipped sentry. Even though they were still more than 200 miles short of their intended launch point, Halsey knew the whole task force was in jeopardy of attack. He flashed a signal to the Hornet: "Launch planes. To Col. Doolittle and gallant command, good luck and God bless you."
Suddenly the Hornet's Klaxons sounded and loudspeakers shouted, "Army pilots, man your planes!" Eighty pilots, bombardiers, navigators and gunners scrambled topside. Richard Cole and his crew were on deck in a flash. "I wanted to make sure I was there before him [Doolittle]," he says. Tiedowns were ripped down and chocks pulled as the Hornet turned directly into a howling wind. The weather was foul with rain squalls, low clouds and 30-ft. seas.
After confirming that his bombs were armed, Doolittle climbed aboard. His was the lead plane, of course. He brought his two Wright R-2600s to life, checked the instruments and eyed the flagman on the deck ahead. At 31,000 pounds, his plane was 2000 pounds over its maximum. He had only 460 ft. of runway, and he had never flown off a carrier before. None of his men had either.
Checklist complete, Doolittle gave a thumbs-up to the flagman, who signaled back to advance throttles. Then, just as the fore-deck began moving up from a swell, the signal officer knelt and pointed his checkered flag at the bow. Go! Doolittle released the brakes. Its big props screaming, the B-25 began to lumber forward. Every eye on the ship moved with it. As the aircraft passed the Hornet's island, Doolittle hauled back on the yoke and the nose wheel came up. Moments later the mains broke free. He was airborne with 100 ft. to spare. The rest of the Mitchells followed, with the last one airborne at 9:20 am, exactly 1 hour after Doolittle.
Inbound to Japan, the bombers stayed low, about 200 to 300 ft. above sea level, and slow, under 200 mph, to conserve fuel. Several spotted enemy planes, but apparently they were undetected because none were attacked. Doolittle and Cole were the first to make land-fall, which they estimated was 80 miles north of Tokyo. Doolittle banked toward the capital city. Cole remembers it being a sunny, hazy day with low clouds.
Reaching the outskirts of Tokyo, Doolittle climbed to 1200 ft., lined up on his target (an industrial area) and opened the bomb-bay doors. There were no heroic shouts, no stirring words - Doolittle was a by-the-numbers guy - when at 12:30 pm, four 500-pound incendiary bombs fell from his airplane and rained fire and destruction right in the middle of Tokyo, the emperor's home town. Other raiders soon joined in, dropping their incendiaries and iron bombs on oil refineries, steelworks, docks, factories, an electrical powerplant and tank farms. The Japanese were caught completely off guard and had no chance to mount a true defense against these raiders who suddenly seemed to be everywhere, having come without warning from nowhere.
Once an aircraft had dropped its four bombs, it immediately descended back to treetop level to avoid ground fire and detection from above. While there happened to be enemy aircraft over Tokyo at the time and anti-aircraft fire was sometimes dense, every one of the B-25s escaped serious damage and made it safely to the China Sea. And as a bonus, they picked up a 25-mph tail wind.
At this point, however, the raiders' luck began to run out. As they approached the Chinese coast, the weather turned stormy. By nightfall, their tanks were running dry, they were on solid instruments and searching desperately for the homing beacons of their destination airfields. They had no way of knowing there were no beacons. Thanks to a combination of American caution, blunder and plain bad luck, the Chinese didn't know about the raid.
And so, after 13 hours aloft, out of fuel and with no safe way down, 11 of the pilots told their crews to abandon ship and hope for the best. Joe Manske, the engineer-gunner on the No. 5 aircraft, remembers that jump as "terrifying, the worst experience I've ever had in my life."
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Do-it-Yourself Playhouse
Thrill your kids with this two-weekend project.
By Ken Collier
As the handyman in my family, I must confess that there are a lot of jobs I'm not crazy about: the drain that needs unclogging, the squeaky floor that I've struggled with for months, the perennial battle of the bulging gutters. You've probably got your own list. Satisfying though these jobs can be when you finish them, no one - not even the most hard-core among us - would call them fun.
But here's one that's different, a project that's pure delight - the icing on the handyman cake. The work is easy, and absolutely nothing beats the feeling you'll get from watching kids having a blast in the playhouse you've made.
I designed this playhouse with the busy parent (like me!) in mind, so it can be built as quickly as possible. Two beginners could put it together in a couple of weekends, including the painting, and an experienced do-it-yourselfer could build it alone in about the same time. It's a no-worry type of project, too, with few chances to screw up, and without much need for precision - a perfect project for beginning or seasoned do-it-yourselfers alike.
SKILLS (AND $$) YOU NEED TO BUILD IT
"No experience required" could be the motto for this playhouse. You need to be able to use a circular saw and a jigsaw to build it, but the cuts are simple enough (and the project forgiving enough) that even if you've never picked up one of those tools before, you could learn while you work. If you are just starting out, you could read 'Need Help Cutting Plywood?' (Feb. '90, p. 31) and 'Using Your Circular Saw Like a Pro' ('Using Tools,' June '89, p. 20).
Besides a jigsaw and a circular saw, you'll need an electric drill with a Phillips head bit for driving screws, a chalk line, level, carpenter's square (the big one that's about 2 ft. long) and a stepladder. A power sander is helpful but not essential.
This is a great opportunity to get kids involved in the building, too, especially during the assembly of the walls - the nails are small, accuracy isn't particularly important, and you're working flat on the ground. And what kid wouldn't want to help paint? Otherwise, if you have another adult to lend an occasional hand, you'll do fine working alone.
The materials for our playhouse cost $350. You may be able to knock about $50 off by using plywood with the grooves farther apart, but it won't look quite as realistic.
SAVE WORK BY CUTTING MANY PARTS AT THE SAME TIME
Get out your saw, don your safety glasses, and dive right in by cutting the parts of the playhouse to size (Photo 1). When you're cutting the treated lumber, wear a mask so you don't breathe in the dust. You can cut all the parts A through L now, but wait until later to cut M and the remaining pieces.
To save time and prevent mistakes, cut the lumber to length on top of sawhorses, where you can cut several pieces at once ('gang cutting,' carpenters call it). This is especially useful in cutting the floor boards (E). Mark the angled ends of part C with a protractor (even your child's school model is fine), or use an angle-cutting guide for your circular saw.
The plywood is easier to cut on the ground (Photo 1), using a piece or two of lumber to raise it up. Use a chalk line to mark the cutting lines. Cut straight, but don't worry if the edge isn't perfect; every cut edge will be hidden in the finished playhouse. You'll notice that the edges of the plywood aren't square; they have a little lip on them so one sheet fits into the adjacent one. For this project, don't worry about that joint; just cut the plywood as shown in <figure/>A and everything will fit.
THERE'S NO FOUNDATION, BUT YOU DO NEED A LEVEL SITE
A playhouse doesn't have to last forever, so forget about concrete blocks, mortar and a complicated foundation - build your playhouse right on the ground.
You need a fairly level spot, about 6ft. on a side. Use one of your boards (like part D) and a level to check the slope, and dig and pack the soil to level it out. Your spot doesn't have to be perfect; it's easy to slip a few scraps of treated wood under the corners of the finished house to get it level (Photo 5).
ASSEMBLE THE FRONT AND BACK TO MAKE PREFAB PANELS
Now the fun begins - nailing parts together. The first step is to assemble the front and back walls, one at a time. Lay out on the ground the three 2x4s (A and B) that support the end wall. Place the plywood parts G and H on top of the 2x4s, and make sure that the edges of the plywood fit together. Then nail the plywood to the 2x4s, measuring in from the edge to find the location of part B, which is not centered (Photo 2). If you have trouble hitting part B with the nails, here's a tip: Snap a chalk line across the face of the plywood to mark where the middle of the 2x4 is, then nail on the line. When you're done nailing, screw part C on from the inside of the wall (Photo 3).
After you've completed one wall, lay out the other one carefully to avoid a very easy, and absolutely maddening mistake - making both walls the same. They need to be mirror images, a front and a back, rather than identical. So measure for part B from the left on one wall and the right on the other; otherwise the house won't go together right. I can't even count the number of times I've made this little blunder.
ATTACH THE SIDES TO MAKE A LITTLE THREE-SIDED BOX
Whistle for your helper or your Cub Scout assistants, because now's the time to raise up the front and back walls and connect them (Photo 4). Prop one wall up on your level spot and screw the floor joists on (D), making sure they're square to the wall. Then screw the other wall to the joists, then nail on the plywood for one side (parts J and K). Nail on part K on the other side, but leave off the larger piece of plywood (J) on that side, so you can get inside the house to work. (Remember, there's no door yet!)
This is a good time to put blocks or shims under the corners of the house to get it plumb and level (Photo 5), because it's only going to get heavier from now on.
A SOLID FLOOR TO TAKE THE TRAFFIC
The floor on this house is built sturdily, like a miniature deck. The first step is to attach the two small support blocks (N). If you have trouble with them splitting, use a smaller nail or drill pilot holes and screw them on.
Lay the full-length floor boards on top of the joists, then measure and cut the shorter ones that fit around the upright 2x4s of the walls. When all the floor boards fit well, nail them on (Photo 6).
A ROOF THAT'S MORE LIKE A BOAT
Now for the roof, and a weird roof it is - no shingles, no tar paper, and no rafters. It's actually built more like an upside-down boat, with ribs (part M) and a hull of thin plywood strips (L). But it works, it's fast, and it's perfect for a playhouse.
Begin by nailing on the 'ribs' (M). Hold the board in position, mark the board for length, cut it, and nail it in place (Photo 7). This is easiest to do with a helper, but if your helper's off playing, hold the other end of the board with the 'bent-nail' trick (see 'Working Alone,' Jan. '92, p. 62).
Now attach the lowest strip of plywood, lining it up so it overhangs part C by an inch, and nailing only at the ends. When you lay the next sheet on top of it, line up the upper edge of that sheet with a rib (M), and then nail through both pieces of plywood where they overlap. Be sure the nails go into a rib. Snapping a chalk line across the plywood will help you know where to nail.
The ends of the plywood pieces may not line up perfectly, but that's something you can fix. Just snap a chalk line and trim the pieces with your jigsaw. While you've got the ladder out, run some acrylic caulk into the joint where the plywood pieces meet at the very top (the 'ridge') of the roof, just to help keep the rain out.
THE DOOR AND WINDOWS ARE SIMPLY HOLES CUT IN THE WALLS
Take a step back now, get a cup of coffee, and admire your work for a few minutes. You don't want to rush into this next step - cutting the openings for doors and windows.
Start with the door. From the inside of the playhouse, drive a nail through the plywood at the corners of the door opening, flush with the floor and the 2x4 uprights. From the outside, wrap your chalk line around the protruding nails to mark where the door opening is to be cut. Pull the nails, drill a 1/4-in. hole at each nail hole, and saw out the door opening with your jigsaw and a fine-tooth blade (Photo 9). Clean up the edges with a rasp or sander.
Once the door is cut, nail on the last piece of plywood (J). Cutting the windows is easy; simply mark the openings in pencil on the outside, and cut them out. We made three windows: one in front and one on each side.
ADD SOME PIZAZZ: GINGERBREAD TRIM
Carpentry is like life - sometimes you need to follow a strict plan and sometimes you need to go with the flow. Adding trim to your playhouse is a time for the latter. Rather than slavishly following a cutting list, you'll get better results if you hold each piece of trim in place, mark it, and cut it to fit. If you miss the mark and cut a piece too short, either use it somewhere else (I always cut the longest pieces first whenever possible), or fill the gap later with caulk.
Start with the vertical 1x4 corner boards (P) on the sides of the house. Then do the front corner boards, then the horizontal boards and the vertical piece around the door (Photo 10). Build the little caps for the tops of the window opening, nailing part U onto part T, then cut the other window trim. With a jigsaw and drill, cut the decorative roof trim (V), give it a test fit, then sand it smooth.
Tack all the trim pieces in place with just a couple of nails and don't drive the nails all the way in, because you'll want to remove all the trim for painting. It sounds crazy, I know, but it's a heck of a lot easier than painting the trim once it's on the playhouse.
Don't worry if there isn't a 2x4 to nail into in some places; screw the trim on from the inside wherever necessary.
FINISHING TOUCHES: PAINTING
I know you're probably dying to start painting now, but try to hold your horses for a minute. You should round off, using a rasp and sandpaper, any sharp edges and corners that kids might hurt themselves on. Pay particular attention to the roof corners and the edges around the windows and doors. Furthermore, treated wood is often somewhat damp, so give it a few days of good drying weather before you paint.
Now you can paint (hooray!). Remove all the trim and paint it separately. Paint the roof before the sides, so you won't drip (or bump into) the wet paint. A roller with an extension handle will make those flat surfaces go quickly.
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THE PRESS AND THE PENTAGON: OLD BATTLES, NEW SKIRMISHES
By Loren B. Thompson
IN THE AFTERMATH of the recent Middle East war, many journalists complained that government-imposed restrictions on their activities had prevented adequate coverage of the conflict. While this view appears to have little support within the government or among the public, it nonetheless renews a controversy that has persisted throughout most of U.S. history about the proper role of journalists in wartime. Historical antecedents help us understand the current debate and the absence of a perfect solution to the dilemma of war coverage. The Desert Storm experience demonstrates that friction between the military and the media in wartime is probably inevitable.
Early Antecedents
The Framers of our constitution probably gave little thought to how an unfettered press might operate in wartime. The experience of the American Revolution provided little basis for believing that if the press acted as an "expeditious messenger of intelligence" (to quote The Federalist No. 84), this could compromise important national objectives. News of the battles at Lexington and Concord in 1775 was not reported in the New York and Philadelphia papers until a week afterward, and some southern papers printed accounts more than a month later. The prevailing means of gathering and disseminating news largely precluded the transmission of information that could be of tactical use to British commanders.
By providing the press with expansive freedom in the Constitution, the Framers created a potential for the dilemma that would confront the republic in all its future conflicts. Because success in battle depends on deceiving and confusing an adversary, on throwing him off guard and achieving surprise, the military imperative to maintain secrecy and the journalistic imperative to convey truth will always be in tension.
The need to reconcile these contending goals did not become apparent until the Civil War. During the early nineteenth century, the advent of railroad and telegraph networks greatly accelerated the pace at which news could be transmitted. Meanwhile, the emergence of rival daily newspapers in most large cities fostered a competitive spirit that placed a premium on publishing the news as quickly as possible. As long as the nation was at peace, these developments posed no challenge to the preservation of democracy. Once the Civil War began in 1861, though, all that changed.
The North alone sent 500 journalists to cover the war, and they generated a constant flow of information about military engagements, troop movements, and the like. Some of this information was useful to the enemy. Robert E. Lee regularly read northern papers to gain insight into Union war plans. Generals Grant and Sherman were so upset by the propensity of reporters to disclose their plans that both considered resigning.
At the front, many journalists engaged in questionable practices. Sources were bribed. Accounts of battles were fabricated. News was slanted to curry favor with commanding generals or support papers' editorial preferences. A few generals, such as Halleck and Sherman, were so offended by the behavior of correspondents that they treated them as little better than spies. Other Union commanders, such as Grant, Rosecrans, and Sheridan, picked favorites whom they accorded preferential treatment. General McClellan openly cultivated reporters in the hope of advancing his presidential ambitions.
The Lincoln administration failed to establish consistent policies for war coverage. Some members of the administration favored draconian restrictions: Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, for example, banned reporters from the front, arrested editors, and closed papers for violating censorship rules. On one occasion, he even ordered that a reporter from the New York Tribune be shot for refusing to hand over a dispatch. (He wasn't.) But other members of the administration favored a more lenient approach, arguing that the support of the press was essential to the war effort. In the absence of a clear policy defining what could and could not be reported, journalists were never sure whether their dispatches would be transmitted over the federally controlled telegraph lines. Some military censors were quite lax in their interpretation of what constituted sensitive information, while others suppressed dispatches that contained even a hint of criticism of the course of battle.
Despite capricious censorship, suspicious commanders who tried to exclude journalists from the front, and the costs of reporting a multifront war, journalists showed great enterprise and courage in reporting the war. As a result, the volume of timely war coverage available to the average citizen was without precedent. The Civil War thus established a new standard for wartime journalism that would influence the reporting of all future conflicts.
The Twentieth Century
The issues concerning war coverage that came to the fore during the Civil War have reappeared in twentieth-century conflicts. What is the proper role of a journalist in wartime? What obligation does the government have to support that role? What limits should there be on the government's right to censor dispatches from the front? How should censorship be administered? What sanctions should be imposed on journalists who violate the rules? A quick review shows how these questions were answered differently at different times.
In the aftermath of the brief Spanish-American War (in which press/military relations were generally friendly), the United States faced a nationalist insurgency in the newly annexed Philippine Islands. The U.S. military imposed strict censorship on all dispatches and proceeded to wage a brutal counterinsurgency campaign. When reporters complained that censorship was being used to conceal the true nature of the campaign, the U.S. Army commander in the Philippines accused them of "conspiracy against the government" and threatened court-martial proceedings, arguing that critical reporting in the U.S. press was undercutting their efforts and hurting morale.
These exchanges led to a deterioration in relations between the military and the press that had an impact on how reporters were treated in 1917 when the United States entered World War I. Many soldiers who had been junior officers during the Filipino insurrection held senior commands, and they were determined that the press would not again be allowed to undermine a war effort. Heavy censorship was imposed on all correspondents accredited to the American Expeditionary Force in Europe, and the Army initially tried to limit the number of journalists to a mere 31 reporters. This restriction was gradually eroded by visits of hundreds of nonaccredited correspondents to the front, but no loosening of censorship occurred: military censors were so severe that they even deleted items from expense accounts. Unlike British and French journalists, though, U.S. correspondents at the front did not have to be accompanied by military escorts. As long as they submitted their dispatches for censorship, they were free to come and go as they wished and could even follow troops into combat.
Similar practices prevailed in World War II, but a significant change occurred in the attitude of both journalists and soldiers concerning war coverage. Confronted with a global struggle, the Roosevelt administration sought to enlist journalists in the war effort. The vast majority of journalists accepted this role, and as a result it was possible to carry out censorship on a voluntary basis. The need to win was so widely accepted that few of the 2,600 correspondents accredited by the Navy and War Departments to cover the conflict had any desire to circumvent review of their copy.
The vast scale of World War II was matched by the journalistic effort to cover it. Newspaper and wire reporters were joined at the front by representatives of radio, newsreels, and mass-circulation newsweeklies. The need to manage hordes of journalists in battle zones led to an important innovation: the media pool. By selecting a small number of reporters to represent all correspondents in a theater of operation, it was possible to cover major events such as the Normandy landings without impeding the campaign. Media pools facilitated war coverage, although they reduced the opportunities for individual scoops since pool reports were given to all accredited correspondents.
The sense of shared purpose that permeated military/media relations during World War II dissipated rapidly in the Korean War. U.S. involvement in this conflict was controversial, and there was much debate about how the war should be prosecuted. The U.S. commander in Korea, General Douglas MacArthur, initially employed a voluntary system of censorship such as that used in World War II, but after numerous disagreements between officers and journalists, both sides agreed that a more formal approach was needed. The system put in place resulted in two or three copy reviews at various command levels. Dispatches were often delayed or excessively censored. The resentments this engendered were exacerbated by a belief among military officers that negative reporting was hurting the war effort. Thus, even after censorship procedures were simplified, enmity between soldiers and journalists persisted.
The Korean conflict was a preview of what was to occur in Vietnam a generation later. Like Korea, Vietnam was a limited war that provoked much opposition at home. Unlike Korea, the enemy in Vietnam seldom revealed itself, battle lines were ill-defined, and most engagements occurred between small units in the jungle. This made the war difficult to prosecute and difficult to report. In the early years, the Kennedy administration sought to conceal the extent of U.S. involvement from the press and the public. President Johnson reversed this policy in the course of escalating the U.S. presence, attempting as Roosevelt had in World War II to enlist the media in the drive for victory. Despite skepticism about the war by some reporters in Vietnam, most media organizations supported the war, at least initially.
However, as the war dragged on, coverage became increasingly critical, culminating in a firestorm of negative reporting during the 1968 Tet Offensive. Although it was a major defeat for the Viet Cong, the Johnson administration's optimistic assessments before the offensive had led many observers to believe that the communists were incapable of mounting such an ambitious effort. The resulting 'credibility gap' drove Johnson from office and led to a virtual collapse in military/media relations.
In addition to the character of the war itself, coverage of Vietnam was different from that of previous conflicts in two important respects. One was the presence of television, which imparted an immediacy and realism to war reporting that had never been seen before. Analysts are divided as to what impact this had on the public, but many military officers believe to this day that graphic war footage on nightly newscasts severely undermined support for the war. A second distinctive feature was the unusual latitude journalists had in reporting the war. Under a system of voluntary restraint worked out by Barry Zorthian, the senior press officer at the U.S. mission in Saigon, reporters were free to roam the country unescorted and report whatever they saw as long as they did not disclose militarily sensitive information. As a method of preserving secrecy, the system worked very well, but it allowed correspondents to present extremely negative assessments of U.S. military performance, and many did.
The recriminations surrounding the U.S. defeat in Vietnam set the mood for subsequent military/media relations. This became evident during the 1983 invasion of Grenada, a relatively minor military operation that nonetheless provoked widespread complaints about interference with war coverage. Journalists attempting to reach the island were excluded until two days after the invasion had begun, and then only small groups under military escort were allowed in for three more days. Reporters already on the island were prevented from filing stories. The restrictions on coverage were not lifted fully until after fighting had ceased. Pentagon officials claimed these steps were necessary to ensure the success of the operation and to protect the lives of both soldiers and reporters, but some journalists alleged the restrictions were also used to conceal deficiencies in military performance.
In the wake of Grenada, the Defense Department convened a panel headed by Major General Winant Sidle to consider how military/media relations could be better conducted in future conflicts. The panel recommended that public affairs preparations should be included in the planning for future military operations and should stress the principle of voluntary compliance with security guidelines.</doc><doc register="skill and hobbies" n="19">
Pretty and Practical
Porches
BY SANDRA S. SORIA
Sure, a couple of rusty lawn chairs and a cement slab will do- but why not turn your warm-weather sitting spot into an especially beckoning retreat. To do it, simply take comfort cues from the inside of your home. This potpourri of porches will show you how.
By swapping a bank of storm windows for a checkerboard of glass, the Fleischmans turned their underused porch near Boston into a three-season temptation. As a bonus return on the investment, the porch looks as good from the street as it does from the wicker. For porch appeal:
Do a background check. Don't need a wall of glass? Consider small decorating strokes that make a big impact. Here, glossy white paint showcases aged pieces. The Fleischmans used durable deck paint on the floor, then personalized it with stenciled blooms.
Furnish with flair. Not just for has-been furniture, this porch is stocked with a fine bureau, hooked rug, napping sofa, and paint-revived wicker - all the comforts of inside the home.
Once their back stoop started to crumble, this Boston-area family decided the time was right to expand the off-the-kitchen steps into a nostalgic time-out spot. A 12x15-foot lineup of planks lays the platform for easy living, while the classic balustrade adds architechtural punch. To power up your patio:
Do the white thing. Again, white paint sets a sparkling stage that show-cases the open-air players, from great greenery to star seating.
Pump up some iron. As sophisticated as a tuxedo, a new coat of black paint and pinstriped cushioning prepares 30-year-old garden furniture for another round of gaiety. Don't have old pieces to recycle? Consider investing in never-say-die classic iron.
Shelly and Janet Rosenberg wanted to relax in a porchlike setting year-round, so they enclosed a bit of their New Jersey backyard with an inviting greenhouse addition. Light-filtering solar shades create a crisp canopy that can roll up to reveal the sky. To give any light-filled space relaxing porch appeal:
Stay neutral. Calming hues don't upstage the outdoors; they let the eye glide by. Invite in the view with shades or blinds that are there when you need them, vanish when you don't.
Rely on natural beauty. Wicker instantly evokes a casual, outdoor mood. Fill in with sun-baked accents: a worn rug, an airy birdhouse, and, of course, fresh fruit and flowers.
When a shingled addition turned the back of their St. Louis home into an L, the Engelbreits found an ideal niche for an old-fashioned galley porch. The 20x12-foot getaway is only steps away from the kitchen, making it an ever-beckoning spot for alfresco dining or after-work relaxing. To give a new porch vintage flair:
Cozy with color. Deep, rich colors, such as this dark green wood floor and black wicker, foster intimacy. Brights and whites leaven the deep hues.
Toss it on; mix it up. Set off against the black-painted wicker, a bright fabric medley gives the sense that this porch has evolved over time. Common colors link the varied fabrics.
Look back. Simple pleasures - a swinging hammock and vintage birdhouse - instantly evoke times gone by.
OUTDOOR LIVING Family Style
"Our backyard is an extension of our house. We eat, play, and work here. It's a family garden."
Grown-up pleasures and childhood delights blend harmoniously in Nancy and Doug Abbey's spacious San Francisco backyard. Granting warm-weather wishes of every member of the family, their yard sets a dramatic summertime stage for hours of wholesome gardening, fun, and relaxation.
The stylish living that Nancy and Doug enjoy indoors doesn't stop at their back door, even though they share their yard with a couple of young adventurers, 2-year-old Katherine and her 4-year-old brother, Robert. Luxurious landscaping for them, however, requires a design that's "both pretty and practical," says Nancy.
To keep the dogs from running through the rose beds and the kids from tossing balls into the hors d'oeuvres, the Abbeys' backyard is divided into special sections: a lawn for croquet and tumbling, a brick patio for entertaining, a formal vegetable garden, and a play area. Separated by perennial borders to discourage shortcutting, these areas are defined by grade changes in the sloping property.
The slope initially posed the most vexing challenge. "All we had was a scrubby lawn and a sloping bank," says Nancy. "The elm tree obstructed the view from the house and shaded everything."
Wanting to preserve some, but not all, of their shade, the Abbeys saved the elm, but pruned it so that the tree now acts as a lacy canopy above the patio and lets sunshine into the yard in the winter. "I envision a tree house in it one of these days," says Nancy.
Opening up the back of their yard to sunlight allows the family to grow vegetables. The garden is a fun learning ground for Katherine and Robert, but the play area is their favorite place to spend afternoons. Complete with a playhouse and sandbox, the play area is close enough to the patio for supervision, yet far enough away so that the children feel as if they're in their own little world.
Whether they're chasing butterflies or plucking blooms, sitting in the shade or gliding down the slide, all in the Abbey family now have their own private outdoor world to retreat to.
SQUEEZING A SPA INTO A TINY YARD
A side-yard terrace, featuring a deck, spa, privacy screen, and storage area gives this Portland, Oregon, home a much-needed focal point for outdoor living. Because their backyard abuts a busy street, the owners located their family retreat in a narrow, but quieter, space between the drive-way and the side entry of their house.
Before the remodeling, the side yard was exposed to neighbors. "This tiny yard had a lot of problems," says landscape architect John Herbst. "We needed to design a private space that was shielded from street noise where the owners could entertain friends and have room left over to store all their outdoor equipment."
A new storage shed, built to conceal the driveway from the house, forms one wall of the new courtyard. Privacy screening, with glass inserts at one corner, closes the gap between the shed and the house, offering views of the yard.
A jog in the screen creates a small alcove for the spa, which is sunken into a raised deck and connected to the house with a narrow boardwalk. "When we designed this backyard, we had to employ as many space-saving ideas as possible," says John. "For example, we built a deep ledge on the back side of the spa so the spa cover could be stored out of the way when the spa was in use."
Framed with brick pavers for colorful accents, exposed aggregate squares form a durable and attractive patio surface. "We didn't want a boring, all-aggregate patio, so we added a geometric pattern of brick pavers for color and interest," says John.
Old-fashioned Comforts
By Jane Austin McKeon
In the good old summertime, Marilyn Cornell enjoys the simple luxuries of her San Diego backyard. Marylin's old-fashioned oasis suits her vintage house and offers open-air pleasures that are both affordable and fun.
Timeworn was the best word to describe the home Marylin purchased several years ago. She renovated the 100-year-old house, then began sprucing up the long-neglected 50x50-foot back-yard. "The weeds were waist-high," she recalls. A chain-link fence and a small concrete stoop off the back door were the only outdoor 'improvements' the previous owners had made.
To preserve the architectural integrity of the house, Marilyn hired a professional landscape designer to suggest some appropriate changes for her yard. Her one stipulation: New structures must blend with the old. "Rather than add a conventional deck" says Marilyn, "I decided an old-fashioned veranda would blend better with the style of the house."
A curving brick patio carries the porch's traditional appeal into the yard. "To offset the squared-off angles of the veranda, I wanted the rest of the yard to flow," says Marilyn. The slightly sunken terrace takes advantage of a natural dip in the property, dramatized by low brick walls that double as seating for large backyard gatherings.
Sweeping flower borders, left open for Marilyn to plant as she pleases, outline the walkway to the patio. "None of the beds contains permanent plantings," she says, "because I have to adapt to changing local restrictions on watering."
Summer is filled with the enduring and endearing heirloom blooms of cosmos, petunia, salvia, lavender, lobelia, chrysanthemum, marigold, rose, and shasta daisy. "I prefer the dependable, old-time varieties so I can have cut flowers year-round," says Marilyn.
A natural offshoot of her love for gardening is the trellised potting area, built at one end of the renovated carriage house. The original structure, enhanced by fresh paint and bougainvillea vines, now stands as a focal point of the backyard.
The pastel pinks and purples that predominate in Marilyn's garden reappear as color themes throughout her outdoor decorating. Painted furniture and cheerful cushions add simple, yet elegant, finishing touches. "I live in my backyard on weekends," says Marilyn. "I know of no better place than my own veranda to sit and watch a sunset."
A Splash Of The Southwest
A sunbathed southwestern-style courtyard offers Leslie Ayers the laid-back lifestyle she enjoys. Not even the subdued traffic sounds from the other side of the wall can disturb the peace she's created in back of her St. Louis rowhouse.
An 8-foot-high privacy wall running along the length of Leslie's narrow 75x30-foot property inspired the design of her courtyard. "I wanted a soft, contemporary look with a southwestern feeling," she says. "But I also wanted to maintain the character of the old house."
Leslie saved the wall, preserving some of the traditional styling of her turn-of-the-century neighborhood, but she added a few flourishes of her own. "I kept the original brick facade on the street side and the brick trim on top," she says. For the inside, however, she chose stucco and repeated it in the new wall, built on the opposite side of the yard.
The garage at the back of the lot also sports a stucco facelift. Embellishments, such as shutters and a trellis, give the structure the look of a guest-house. "I enjoy making things look like something different from what they are," says Leslie.
A long, narrow swimming pool eats up a good portion (about 12x25 feet) of the pocket-size property, yet fits beautifully as a part of the yard's new design. "I think most swimming pools are boring," says Leslie. "To make this pool go with the court-yard feeling, I painted the bottom black so it blends in like a natural pond."
Interlocking concrete pavers surround the pool. "Having lived and worked in Florida and California, I grew to love the Mexican tile used in so many of the homes there," says Leslie. The clay tone of the pavers is "wonderful because it looks cool in the summertime and warm in the winter."
Designed to look casual, not perfectly manicured, plantings are chosen for their year-round interest and ease of care. As a result, the landscaping is very manageable. "I just weed the beds now and then," Leslie says.
Leslie's laid-back philosophy about her back-yard allows her to spend what limited leisure time she has entertaining in it. Gathering friends together for summer cookouts is one of her favorite pleasures, especially now that her courtyard contributes a southwestern flavor.
The Romance of a Log Home
BY TOM JACKSON
Forest fresh and built to last, this hand-hewn American tradition can put you back in touch with nature and satisfy your deepest yearning for peace and quiet. Join us for a walk in the woods and discover why this American classic never did - and never will - go out of style.
Here is a home worth listening to. Inside it's breathtakingly quiet. The massive log walls not only shrug off rain, hail, sleet, and snow, but they muffle almost any sound. Tranquility surrounds you the moment you walk through the door.
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CHAPTER ONE
The technique
The woodworking technique used to make all of the projects explained in this book has many advantages. Not only are the time and equipment requirements minimal in comparison to traditional methods of furniture building, but large table saws and band saws are not used, so very little floor space is necessary.
What You Don't Have to Do
You don't have to have years of woodworking experience to complete a quality piece of furniture using this method. One easy-to-master technique is used for all the projects in the book, large and small. Advanced woodworking techniques, such as making French dovetail joints or compound cuts, are not required either.
You also don't have to interpret measured drawings filled with confusing dimension lines and hidden lines. The plans provided are straightforward, and chapter 2 gives you detailed instructions on how to enlarge them from the book's page.
After enlarging the pattern to full size, you merely trace around the shapes to transfer the design to the wood. With the smaller projects, you will start 'shaping' the wood almost immediately, as these projects do not involve stepped laminations. Even with the other furniture projects, though, very little measuring is necessary. You will need to make a mortise-and-tenon joint for the rockers, but all that involves is cutting four mortises (slots) and four tenons (tongues). Most of the joint is 'hidden,' so a large tolerance is incorporated into the design.
You don't have to be an artist to sculpt the contours for the projects. There is, however, a degree of 'eye work' required when removing wood to create a natural flow of grain line and tapers. With traditional forms of woodworking, the machinery or cutter controls the amount of wood removed from the stock material. During the shaping stages for the projects in this book, the amount of wood removed is controlled by you, the woodworker. Consequently, no two pieces are exactly alike.
This technique is a combination of woodworking and sculpture, but don't let that intimidate you if you can't draw - I can't, either. Rounding and tapering the various sections is actually easy and fun. You start with an original block of material that can be very boring to look at - much like working with clay. When you see the globs of glue and stepped laminations of wood before shaping, you will find it hard to believe they could ever be transformed into a beautiful rocker, lamp, or table. Once the project is completed, however, you'll find it even harder to believe how easy it was to create a unique piece.
Designing new projects is easy because you can make any piece of furniture using this technique. Matching sets of three pieces or a whole roomful are possible. I've often thought it would be fun to customize the interior of a van with this style of woodworking. It also would be easy to transfer the techniques learned for constructing wall panels, shelving, closets, and cabinets.
Where to Work
I made my first rocker while living in a small apartment. I did the gluing and finishing work on a tiny kitchen floor, and the dusty work with portable electric tools outside of the apartment. An extension cord, which ran through my bedroom window, was my source of power.
Any location with a 120-volt outlet and a small area to keep materials dry and warm is sufficient for the construction of even the largest project (the adult rocking chair). You can use a small, portable generator if permanent electrical service is not available, but be sure to use some type of Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter (GFCI) with your power tools, especially if they will be used near water or outside. Some types of GFCIs are installed merely by plugging them into the existing outlet, and they are not very expensive. However, always consult a certified electrician before installing any electrical safety devices and for a general safety check of the existing service.
Tools
All the projects are made with portable electric tools and hand tools. You only need a few for each project, and these are listed in the tools and materials lists for each chapter.
A variety of power tools are used to cut, shape, and sand, and many of these are pictured in the following photo.
Generally, the more you spend on any one tool, the faster you will be able to complete your project and the longer that tool will last, but don't worry if you don't have an extensive selection of power tools. Quality projects are possible using very inexpensive tools.
As a struggling student working on my first rocker, I purchased the least expensive tools to get the job done. For cutting, I used a light-duty saber saw. I could not afford clamps, so for gluing during the lamination and assembly operations, I used piled cinder blocks for the needed pressure. I also used common-purpose rope, twisted very tight with a stick, to apply pressure. I was able to shape around the tight curves with a 14-inch half-round wood rasp, a woodworking file, and some old-fashioned 'elbow grease.'
Renting all the tools you will need is something to consider if you plan to make a limited amount of projects. One weekend I rented a heavy-duty right-angle grinder to shape the larger surfaces. I used a 7-inch rubber backing pad with a #16 hard-backed sanding disk with a grinder. It was well worth the $20 for the time I saved.
For sanding, I purchased an inexpensive orbital sander and an electrical hand drill to use with sanding drums of various sizes. I also used a soft disc pad with adhesive-backed sanding discs.
As I began to make furniture to sell, I upgraded my equipment and woodworking techniques. For cutting I switched to a better-quality saber saw and to using a router in conjunction with a Masonite template. The router is equipped with a 1/4-inch carbide straight cutter and a template guide. Shaping is much faster now with the use of a lightweight high-speed right-angle minigrinder, equipped with a 4 1/2-inch rubber backing pad and an aluminum-oxide-fiber sanding disc. For shaping the tight areas, I use a die grinder equipped with a 1/2-inch rotary rasp. For sanding curved areas, I use a pneumatic sander connected to a hand drill.
For cutting the wood there are a few alternatives. Tools I have used are routers, saber saws, and lightweight, benchtop band saws. The portable band saws are very handy for cutting the small projects and small sections of the furniture. The router or saber saw is used in the early stages of operation. Both tools are comparable in terms of cutting speed, but a top-of-the-line saber saw will cut faster than an inexpensive router, and vice versa.
Use Table 1-1 as a quick reference for the power tool options. Making sturdy and functional furniture without a huge initial investment in tools is one of the advantages of this type of woodworking.
Materials
A wide variety of materials are suitable and fun to work with. For the smaller projects, such as the lamps or model boats, you can use any of your favorite woods. I usually use butternut, cherry, walnut and pine for these projects. I like the natural color of these woods, and they are easily shaped with an electric grinder.
For the furniture, plywood is the best type of wood to use. Indian birch plywood or even construction-grade plywood will work, but I recommend solid-core plywood, 5/8-inch thick, with 12 layers of hardwood. The many layers add strength, and they look like a natural grain pattern in the finished piece. This type of plywood is commonly used for concrete forms in the construction industry, Formica desktops, and sports equipment.
In addition to the strength in this plywood, any voids in it are filled with wooden boat patches during manufacturing. This permits you to sculpt without exposing large holes or loose knots.
All of the matching furniture pictured in this book is made with birch plywood, which is imported from the Baltic region and sold under different trade names. I have used plywood made of alternating layers of birch and fir, which was easy to sculpt. However, plywood made with all birch is easier to finish and more durable, and a natural, more consistent color is easier to achieve. This type of plywood is readily available and less expensive in the large port areas, but you should be able to purchase it through your local lumberyard.
I've purchased plywood from large wholesalers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. The sheet sizes I've always used are 4 by 5 or 5 by 5 feet. (It doesn't matter which direction the grain is running.) I have had no problem buying small quantities of plywood from the large wholesale distributors, and some even offer a credit plan. The yellow pages of your phone book will help you locate lumberyards in your area that carry or can order the lumber you need for your project.
Enlarging the Plans
The plans, which are found with each project, can be enlarged in several ways. For the smaller projects, you can use a photocopier that has enlarging capabilities. Another method, which works well with the larger plans, is to use a transparency of the plans on an overhead projector to project an enlarged view directly onto the template material. The third alternative is to enlarge the plans with grid paper.
This method requires patience, but you can achieve an accurate set of patterns using it. I used this method to reduce my adult-size rocking chair plans down to the dimensions for the child's rocker. Most art supply stores sell large sheets of grid paper with 1-inch squares, but it is also easy to draw your own.
The following sequence shows how to make a grid pattern to enlarge the plans for the child's rocker. Use the same procedure for all the plans (one square =1 inch in all the patterns).
Step 1.
Use a ruler and a pencil to measure and mark dots 1 inch apart along the four edges of a 24-x-24-inch piece of paper. The dots must be congruent so the vertical and horizontal lines you draw in the next step are perpendicular.
Step 2.
Use a straightedge to connect the dots to create a grid pattern with 1-inch squares. The corners of each square must be 90 degrees.
Step 3.
Draw in only one square at a time. Copy the shapes from the book. Use the sides and corners of each square as a guide.
Step 4.
Continue one square at a time until entire drawing is complete.
Step 5.
Use scissors to cut out the pattern so you can make the project or a template. Trace around the pattern on the recommended types of material. Use a saber saw to cut out the project or the Masonite template.
Making a Styrofoam Model
You can use 3/4-inch styrofoam to make a model of the projects offered in this book or to create original shapes for projects. Here I am making a styrofoam model of the floor lamp project.
Step 1.
Trace around the template or pattern with a felt marker on the styrofoam.
Step 2.
Cut out the styrofoam sections with a saber saw.
Step 3.
Hold the various sections of styrofoam together with toothpicks or small amounts of epoxy, then shape with a right-angle grinder.
Step 4.
Take the model apart and use the various styrofoam sections as a guide to determine the actual size and shape of each plywood lamination of the project.
Cutting Using a Template
When cutting with the router, you will use a 1/4-inch-thick Masonite template of the exact shape of the project. With the aid of an inexpensive template guide, the router follows the edge of the Masonite template to cut out the various sections. Masonite tempered on one side, which most lumberyards stock in 4-x-8-foot sheets, is the material I recommend for templates. Your router base will slide easily, and this material is easily repaired with epoxy if you accidentally damage the surfaces with the router cutter.
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Even though fish are uppermost in their minds, residents gladly share island secrets with those who have the savvy to visit between Labor Day and Columbus Day, when the weather's mild and the water's warm (you can usually swim until the end of September). Shops and restaurants remain open despite the decreased crowds. The only disadvantage to an autumn visit is that many historic houses are shuttered.
Most trips to the Vineyard start at the island's eastern end, where the three main towns are located. In the southeastern corner is blue-blooded Edgartown, with a yacht-filled harbor; sea captains' houses, handsome behind rose-tangled fences; and shops, restaurants and inns. On a warm October night, nothing is more peaceful than sitting on the Charlotte Inn's veranda watching a full moon snagged in the branches of an elm and listening to the sounds of the off-season: a trickling fountain, a chorus of crickets and the infrequent hum of tires on darkened streets.
Nearby, across a channel (navigated by a four-car ferry), lies Chappaquiddick, an island or a peninsula, depending on the vagaries of barrier beaches. Much of its shoreline is protected in wildlife refuges, the lonely haunts of seabirds.
Oak Bluffs, northwest of Edgartown, is home to the Camp Meeting Grounds, one of the country's most distinctive neighborhoods. Methodists founded the town in the 1830s as a religious getaway. Members who wanted to stay after the meetings built small cottages, attempting to outdo one another in design, until every cottage was turreted, gabled and draped with scrollwork. The effect is a Hansel and Gretel village, without cars or other modern intrusions.
Vineyard Haven (officially called Tisbury), across an inlet from Oak Bluffs, is an active port circled by boatyards and other maritime enterprises. Away from the harbor area, the town gathers interest with well-preserved 19th-century clapboard houses (especially along William Street), restaurants and stores on Main Street and noble trees throughout.
My favorite part of the Vineyard, though, is up-island, as the western two thirds of Martha's realm is known. Here, the sea gives way to a landscape of rolling hills, oak and pine woods, farms, and fields where horses graze beyond stone walls.
It's peaceful to cycle or drive along lightly traveled up-island byways. On North Road in Chilmark, oaks canopy the highway as you pass large estates. Even getting lost on these back roads has its compensations. Searching for the Long Point Wildlife Refuge in West Tisbury, I took the wrong dirt road and dead-ended beside Long Cove just in time to see a great blue heron flap past. When I finally found the refuge, I had it to myself. On foot, I followed a boardwalk through the dunes to a beach of pure white sand and lay there under a cloudless October sky, contemplating the rolling surf and the glittering sea.
An up-island visit usually culminates in the Gay Head Cliffs, a mile-long multicolored clay rampart. Summer's carnival atmosphere is replaced in autumn by a windswept solitude. You can wander by the lighthouse atop grassy headlands, or along the beach at the base of the cliffs. In the distance, behind the rounded humps of the Elizabeth Islands, lies the rest of America. Maybe it's just the autumn light, but the mainland looks far, far away.
COAST TO COAST
Martha's Vineyard is 260 miles northeast of New York and 75 miles south of Boston. To get there, you can fly from New York or Boston, or take a ferry from one of several points on the Massachusetts coast. The Steamship Authority (telephone 508-540-2022) has year-round service from Woods Hole on Cape Cod ($9 round-trip for adults and $72 for their cars). The passenger ferry Island Queen (508-548-4800; $9) runs out of Falmouth through mid-October. Ferries also leave from Hyannis (508-778-2600; $21) and New Bedford (508-997-1688; $17). If you want to rent a car on the island, you'll find agencies at the airport and near the ferry landings in Oak Bluffs and Vineyard Haven.
For more information, contact the Martha's Vineyard Chamber of Commerce (Beach Rd., Vineyard Haven, MA 02568; 508-693-0085).
MARTHA AU NATUREL
In the off-season, chances are excellent that you'll be communing with nature all on your own at the more than 50 conservation areas open to the public. Hurricane Bob, the big blow of August 1991, trashed some properties, most notably the Mytoi Japanese gardens on Chappaquiddick and the Cedar Tree Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in West Tisbury. In other protected areas, toppled trees and trunks broken off like celery stalks bear witness to the power of wind. The Martha's Vineyard Land Bank Commission map locating conservation properties is available at the Dukes County Historical Society (see below).
The most popular refuge is the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary (Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Rd.; 627-4850), 350 acres of woodland and wetland on a spit of land jutting into Sengekontacket Pond. There are extensive interpretive facilities, including wildlife exhibits and aquariums at the headquarters, with naturalists on hand to answer questions. Four trails wind through the sanctuary, which is frequented by owls, ospreys and other waterfowl.
Most of the Vineyard's renowned beaches are open only to town residents. Hotel guests, however, get local beach privileges. In addition, there are plenty of superb public sands.
The warm, calm waters facing Nantucket Sound make three-mile-long Joseph Sylvia State Beach, between Edgartown and Oak Bluffs, popular for families with young children. Two to three-foot swells breaking close to shore attract body surfers to Katama Beach, south of Edgartown, but the undertow can be dangerous. Land Bank Long Beach and Moshup Beach are set spectacularly at the base of the Gay Head Cliffs.
Cycling is a popular way of getting around the island, especially the relatively flat eastern section. Bicycle paths parallel roads between Vineyard Haven, Oak Bluffs and Edgartown (my favorite stretch is along Sengekontacket Pond, lined with wild roses). Mopeds are also available, but avoid those noisy bikes if you don't want to offend half the residents.
It's surprising how much farmland the island's conservation groups have preserved, given the constant threat of overdevelopment. At historic Katama Farm (Katama Road; 627-9272), now owned by Edgartown's conservation trust, you can watch cows being milked at 5 A.M. and 5 P.M. and take free wagon rides on Sunday. Martha's Vineyard Riding Center (off Edgartown-West Tisbury Rd., West Tisbury; 693-3770) offers horseback rides through woodlands around Watcha Pond and along Katama Beach. You can also book trail rides at Misty Meadows Farm (Old Country Rd., West Tisbury; 693-1870) and Iron Hill Stables (Edgartown-Vineyard Haven Rd., Edgartown; 693-0786).
The Vineyard has some of the finest saltwater fishing in the country. Surf casters haul in bluefish, bonitos and false albacore, while trolling fishermen land swordfish, tuna and white marlins. Charters leave from Oak Bluffs and Edgartown. For a $30 entry fee, you can chase prizes totaling $100,000 in the Striped Bass & Bluefish Derby (September 9 - October 10; 627-8342).
A dozen outfits schedule cruises from Vineyard Haven - home port to more wooden sailboats than anywhere else in the Northeast - and other Vineyard towns. For a memorable outing, board the Shenandoah (693-1699), a 108-foot square-rigged topsail schooner.
PAINTED PONIES
'Life's a Beach,' the T-shirts say. But the Vineyard, with its intriguing history and active cultural life, has a number of diversions that don't require sun block.
My favorite exhibit at the Dukes County Historical Society (Cooke St., Edgartown; 627-4441) is a row of stoppered bottles containing 'deodorized viscous sperm oil' and other grades of the maritime petroleum that made New England the 19th-century equivalent of Saudi Arabia. Scrimshawed sperm whale teeth the size of daggers are also impressive.
The Vineyard Playhouse (10 Church St., Vineyard Haven; 693-6450) runs its season through September 5. This fall the Vineyard's only professional troupe of actors will present off-season shows on the main stage of its theater (a converted 1833 Methodist church) and downstairs at the smaller Cabaret Theater.
The painted ponies go round and round to wheezing calliope music, as they've done for more than a century, at the Flying Horses Carousel (Circuit Ave., Oak Bluffs; 693-9481). This indoor merry-go-round, an 1876 Coney Island model moved here in 1884, may be America's oldest (one in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, also claims the title).
The Vineyard was so named because English explorer John Brereton extolled the island's "incredible stores of vines" in 1602. (His partner, Bartholomew Gosnold, added Martha to the name in honor of his daughter.) Chicama Vineyards (Stoney Hill Rd., off State Rd., West Tisbury; 693-0309) sustains this legacy by producing Chardonnay, white Zinfandel, Cape Cod white and other wines from vinifera grapes. The harvest usually lasts from mid-September to mid-October, so if you visit Chicama then, chances are you'll see the winery in full operation. Tours and tastings are conducted 11-5 Monday to Saturday, 1-5 Sunday.
ISLAND FINDS
When it comes to shopping, Martha's Vineyard isn't exactly Hong Kong. But if you know where to look you'll find some unusual items - sometimes at off-season prices - tucked in amid the T-shirts that say 'I Survived Hurricane Bob.'
Whalers spent most of their shipboard leisure time engraving whalebone and whale teeth with intricate designs. Tom DeMont, a scrimshander, sells contemporary examples of this American folk art at Edgartown Scrimshaw (Upper Main St.; 627-9439). All items are made from legally obtained ivory. Sperm whale teeth decorated with nautical scenes cost $2,000; bookmarks made from old piano keys, $20.
Even if you don't feel an overwhelming urge to decorate your mantel with a brass binnacle ($685) or spy on your neighbors with a sea captain's telescope ($425), it's still fun to browse through the nautical-minded Edgartown Art Gallery (S. Summer St.; 627-5991) in the Charlotte Inn.
Two Edgartown shops share a shingled house built in 1703. A Gift of Love (N. Water St.; 627-5922) specializes in housewares and furnishings. The adjacent Island Made cooperative displays local arts and crafts, including the twill-weave market baskets ($91) of Susan Shea and the wildly colorful ceramics ($400 for a nine-inch vase) of Washington Ledesma.
The Bunch of Grapes Bookstore (68 Main St., Vineyard Haven; 693-2291), which has a wonderful wooden sign hanging above its door, stocks the island's most extensive collection of local and regional titles. Crispin's Landing (corner of Main and Union, Vineyard Haven) is a building shared by a number of craft shops; look for islander Joan LeLacheur's wampum bracelets ($150-$300) at Sioux Eagle Designs (693-6537).
Janet Messineo of Island Taxidermy & Wildlife Art Studio (the name makes a great acronym for a taxidermist) is one of the few people in the East who does skin mounts of saltwater fish. You can bring in your own catch if it's less than 100 pounds ($12 an inch) or buy a ready-mounted fish ($100 and up). Messineo also makes minnow accessories with rhinestone eyes ($18-$25). The studio is in Vineyard Haven; call 693-3360 for an appointment.
A TASTE OF THE VINEYARD
It may be the Vineyard, but don't expect to buy vino, or any other alcohol, on most of the island. Oak Bluffs and Edgartown are wet; the other towns are dry, although restaurants there allow you to BYOB:
The top breakfast spot is the Black Dog Tavern (Beach St. Extension; 693-9223; $10 for two), a shingled wharfside tavern in Vineyard Haven. Get a table overlooking the harbor and be sure to try some pastries form the Black Dog's own bakery.
Edgartown's best lunch spot, the unpretentious Savoir Fare (14 Church St.; 627-9864; $25 without drinks), looks summery even in fall, thanks to white furniture, light-blue tablecloths and big picture windows. The delicious special I tried consisted of cold seared tuna, green beans, potato slices, onion, olives and tomato, sprinkled with vinaigrette and chives.
For fish-and-chips, fried clams and chowder, visit the Wharf Pub (Lower Main St., Edgartown; 627-9967; $25), a lively hangout with a pressed-tin ceiling and dark wood paneling. To start, have an appetizer of Sword Bites (chunks of deep-fried swordfish).
Edgartown has several elegant restaurants. L'Etoile (S. Summer St.; 627-5187; $52 prix fixe per person), the Charlotte Inn's dining room, has a soothing conservatory setting; its mullioned windows reflect and multiply the light of antique lamps.</doc><doc register="skill and hobbies" n="22">
Robert Shaw
Musician of the Year 1992
By Scott Cantrell
To anyone who's seen Robert Shaw in front of a chorus, it will come as no surprise that the man alternately browbeating and cajoling his charges started out as a preacher. That was nearly 60 years ago, and Shaw has long since given up any such career goal. But his single-minded dedication to making the world a better place hasn't changed one whit.
Nor has his preacher's gift for spell-binding an audience. Violinist William Preucil, who during several seasons as concertmaster of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra worked closely with Shaw, describes him as "a teacher and inspirational speaker. To hear him speak about music - about anything - is hypnotizing and mystifying and moving. I could sit and listen to him talk all day."
You might say that Shaw stayed in the sanctuary, but his medium of choice became neither sermon nor sacrament but choral singing. And if there's any one man responsible for professionalizing the life of the choral director, it's Robert Shaw. The Collegiate Chorale, which he founded in 1941 and conducted for 13 years, was widely recognized as setting a new standard in American choral performances, and it brought Shaw to the admiring attentions of Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, Serge Koussevitzky, and William Schuman. Still more standards were set by the Robert Shaw Chorale, a professional chamber choir that toured and recorded extensively from 1948 until 1967.
But Shaw proved to be much more than 'just' a choral conductor. After guest gigs with Toscanini's NBC Symphony Orchestra and Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra, he went on to become one of Szell's assistant conductors with the Cleveland Orchestra.
Then, in 1967, he astonished plenty of podium-watchers by becoming music director of the Atlanta Symphony, then a part-time outfit of barely 60 players. By the end of his 21-year tenure it was no secret that Shaw's orchestra was well into the major leagues, and by common consent his Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus was second to none.
That Shaw, now 75 and going strong, should be named Musical America's Musician of the Year should raise nary an eyebrow. Neither was it a surprise that Washington's John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts named Shaw one of seven 1991 recipients of its Kennedy Center Honors. As early as 1943, he was cited by the National Association of Composers and Conductors as "America's greatest choral conductor." Shaw proves that a prophet needn't be without honor in his own land.
Nor is he a prophet to rest on his own laurels. Although he gave up the Atlanta Symphony's music directorship in 1988, he remains the orchestra's director of choral activities; as much director emeritus, he still conducts four weeks of concerts each season, and he will continue to record with the orchestra and chorus. He's also immersed in a new summer course for choral conductors in France, and he maintains a busy schedule of guest-conducting dates, not to mention courses and Master Classes for singers and choral conductors. So much for Shaw's 'retirement.'
Shaw's messianic zeal - and his gift for making better folk of his charges - came naturally. Born April 30, 1916, in Red Bluff, California, he was the son and grandson of preachers. Entering Pomona College in 1934, he studied English literature, philosophy, and religion; he figured he'd end up teaching philosophy or religion in a university. But he also got involved in the college's glee club, and when the director took a year-long leave of absence, Shaw was tapped to fill in.
It was during that year, in the spring of 1937, that the Pomona College campus was used for the filming of the motion picture Varsity Show. Appearing in the film were Fred Waring and The Pennsylvanians, a chorus well known for its radio broadcasts. While on campus Waring heard the glee club, and he was sufficiently impressed to offer its young director a job.
By now, Shaw was thinking of becoming a minister, and declined. A year later - being short of money and having second thoughts about the ministry - he wrote to Waring and asked to observe his work. Waring replied by inviting Shaw to come to New York and form a new glee club for a series of radio broadcasts. Suddenly, at age 22, virtually untrained in music, Shaw was working in New York as a professional choral conductor.
Shaw picked up a wide range of professional experience during his years with Waring, in radio, films, and theater. But he yearned to work with more serious literature, so in the fall of 1941, in collaboration with Gordon Berger, he founded his own choral group; some 185 singers were selected from 500 volunteers. The group, which was to rehearse at Dr. Norman Vincent Peale's Marble Collegiate Church, was dubbed the Collegiate Chorale. When the church's consistory requested that the chorus be trimmed to 100 members, and that its Roman Catholics, Jews, and blacks be removed, Shaw and company moved elsewhere, but the name stayed.
One of the singers present at the Collegiate Chorale's first rehearsal was contralto Florence Kopleff. "He was a bundle of energy," she recalls of her first impression, "and very charismatic - likeable, knowledgeable and very infectious with his enthusiasm."
Reviewing one of the Collegiate Chorale's first performances, critic Henry Simon observed that "Robert Shaw conducted in a violent and unconventional manner," but he "made it at once apparent that here is a new, major chorus." At about the same time, composer William Schuman was sufficiently impressed to ask Shaw and his chorus to participate in a concert of his music. But Schuman recognized that the young conductor needed some coaching, so he was sent off for lessons with George Szell, who was then teaching at the Mannes School. Shaw subsequently applied for, and got, a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used for a year of concentrated study with Julius Herford, a German emigrant who later would direct the doctoral program in conducting at Indiana University.
The Collegiate Chorale's reputation grew quickly, and in September 1945, Shaw's charges were hired to sing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with Toscanini. When the fearsome conductor showed up for his first rehearsal with the Chorale, far from throwing one of his infamous tantrums, he pronounced himself delighted. To NBC's Samuel Chotzinoff he declared, "I have at last found the maestro I have been looking for."
This was to be the first of many collaborations, and within a year, Toscanini invited Shaw to conduct the NBC Symphony in a challenging all-orchestral program: Beethoven's Second Symphony, William Schuman's Fifth, and Peter Mennin's Festival Overture. That same year, Shaw spent the first of three summers at Tanglewood, teaching classes in choral conducting and preparing choruses for Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts. In the fall, William Schuman hired him as the Juilliard School's new director of choral music.
In 1948, Shaw formed the select professional chorus that would carry his name for 20 years, touring 47 states and 29 countries and recording extensively. Both the Robert Shaw Chorale and the Collegiate Chorale performed regularly with chamber orchestras, and on the side Shaw continued to hone his conducting skills in sessions with Julius Herford; in 1950, he worked with Pierre Monteux and Arthur Rodzinsky.
Then, in 1953, he was offered the position of music director of the San Diego Symphony. His five-year tenure there included a major expansion of the orchestra's season - and it gave Shaw a concentrated workshop in which to learn orchestral repertory and rehearsal techniques. With the press of these responsibilities, he gave up direction of the Collegiate Chorale in 1954; a year later, he was given the Columbia University's Ditson Conductor's Award, honoring his contribution of "a new vitality to choral music in the United States."
In 1956 came a big surprise: George Szell invited Shaw to become an associate conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, to develop a symphony chorus and conduct some of the orchestral concerts. With more than 80 concerts to lead during his first season, Shaw got another baptism by fire. But, for 11 years, he had what he dubbed "the hottest orchestral property in the U.S. to learn on," and for a mentor, he had one of history's most formidable orchestral technicians.
What Shaw learned from Szell was the importance of meticulous editing of orchestra musicians' parts - that and the cultivation of a kind of chamber-music mentality within a symphony orchestra. "Szell developed the first symphony-sized chamber orchestra in the world," Shaw says. "He prepared their parts, and he made them listen." From watching Toscanini he had also learned "the severest sort of concentration on the music during performance, and economy of choreographic movement."
For all his growing orchestral experience, though, Shaw continued to be thought of mainly as a choral conductor. So it was quite the talk of the orchestral world when, in February 1966, he was named music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The ASO had been formed as recently as 1945, originally as youth orchestra. Under the guidance of Henry Sopkin it had gone professional - and adult - but it remained a part-time outfit. By the middle 1960s, with a Ford Foundation grant forthcoming and a new arts center about to be built, the orchestra's board figured it was time to take a major step forward.
Like a whirlwind, Shaw arrived in Atlanta in August 1967. In his first season, the orchestra was enlarged to 87 musicians, the season was expanded to 30 weeks, and salaries were raised. The following season, for the first time, the orchestra became a full-time occupation for its musicians, with rehearsals during the day. Shaw lost no time in creating the 60-voice Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chamber Chorus, and three years later he formed the 200-voice Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus. In October 1968, the orchestra moved into the new 1,762-seat Symphony Hall, in what was subsequently named the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center.
With appearances in Washington, D.C., and New York in May 1976, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra began to attract national attention. The orchestra and chorus participated in President Carter's Inaugural Concert at the Kennedy Center in January 1977, and a year later, with Telarc, it made the first-ever digitally-mastered commercial recording, of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite and selections from Borodin's Prince Igor. Since then, the orchestra has made more than 30 recordings with Shaw, many with the ASO Chorus; still more discs are planned. The most recent release, on Telarc, is of the Mahler Eighth Symphony.
During the years with his New York-based choruses, Shaw made a point of championing contemporary music; for the Collegiate Chorale, he had commissioned Paul Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed. And he continued to give his attention to new music in Atlanta, to the chagrin of some patrons. In the middle of his fifth season, the orchestra's board decided it was too much and asked for Shaw's resignation. It was duly tendered, without recrimination, but the community rose up in protest. The board rethought its position, and soon Shaw was negotiating a new contract. The orchestra went on to commission new works by composers such as Karel Husa, Henry Brant, Donald Erb, Ned Rorem, John Harbison, Alvin Singleton, William Schuman, Stephen Paulus, and Leonard Bernstein, and to win repeated ASCAP awards for adventuresome programming.
"What is important is that music for 'thinking' be encouraged and supported and promoted as industriously as music for 'forgetting,'" says Shaw of the contemporary-music issue. "If there is ever to be a flowering of American 'serious' music, it must be sought and promoted by audiences as well as musicians. But the musicians must lead the way."
Having taken the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus on its first European tour in May and June of 1988, Shaw retired as the orchestra's music director. He was weary of the administrative duties, and he reasoned that "the orchestra and its audience deserve some variety." And, at age 72, he wanted to spend more time with his wife, Caroline, and son, Thomas. Yoel Levi was named his successor.</doc> <doc register="skill and hobbies" n="23">
CAPTURING LIGHT IN PASTELS
BY BRAD FAEGRE
Pastel is an expressive, spontaneous medium that combines the best qualities of drawing and painting. The color and direction of each stroke contribute both to the mood of the painting and to its visual excitement.
I enjoy working in pastel because it is an expressive, spontaneous medium that combines the two activities I like to do most: drawing and painting. As a drawing tool, a pastel stick can be used to define the shapes of objects with lines; as a painting tool, pastel can be blended to create tonal areas. As my ideas take shape, I can work both ways on the same surface.
Light is my most valuable instrument for expressing feelings; it can be used dramatically, to capture those moments when stormy skies open up momentarily and brilliant sunlight bathes a meadow, or quietly, to express, through rich contrasts of muted colors, the melancholy of late evening, when the land gets dark and mysterious.
When painting, I keep in mind a valuable piece of advice I received from my college English professor. "When you write," he said, "speak to an audience of one. Imagine that you're talking to your best friend. If you do this, you'll be more likely to speak honestly and without affectation." Although he was referring to writing, his advice definitely applies to painting as well. In the beginning stages of a picture, I imagine myself communicating with my closest friend and determine what feeling I'm hoping to express; then I try to picture the completed artwork. I call this stage 'the daydream.' Success depends on knowing when the daydream and the painting become one.
Ideas simmer in my imagination for a long time before they clearly present themselves. Once I have a specific idea in mind, I begin composing the painting, searching the subject for darks and lights and then placing them on the paper surface. I sketch lightly at first, making my preliminary marks with colors of medium value. With a landscape, for example, I often start by sketching the negative shape of the sky, which helps me define objects above the horizon such as mountains, trees, and buildings; with a still life, I begin by drawing the lighter values of the objects. At this stage, mistakes in the position or proportion of shapes can easily be altered.
Since I'm able to draw with pastel, I think about the structure of the picture while I'm working, making decisions as the composition evolves. I spend time on the drawing because I enjoy it, but I also believe that it is of great importance - if a painting doesn't start with a good drawing, it's not going to be good when it's finished. I find when teaching workshops that people tend to jump into painting before working out the bugs through drawing, and their problems become apparent as they continue working. Although it can take months for me to see the paintings clearly in my mind, an average-size painting usually takes about four or five days to complete. I have tried a variety of acid-free boards and papers and have experimented with a wide range of rough and smooth surfaces. In most situations, I prefer a smooth surface because it allows me to make strong, expressive strokes that might seem defused and weak on rougher surfaces. Canson-Talens, Arches, and Strathmore make drawing papers in a variety of colors, and my favorites are dark colors, bright colors, and black. The color of the paper surface acts like an under-painting; I allow the color to peek through from between the strokes of pastel to create interest and enhance the mood of the picture.
Working on black paper has become something of a trademark for me. I developed my technique for working on a black support in a manner directly opposite what I do in watercolor, where I leave the white paper alone in areas that I want to remain light. Conversely, when working on a dark surface in pastel, I let the paper show through for my darkest values. Black paper creates a dramatic contrast with the colors of the pastel, and I find it also accentuates the quality and direction of my strokes. My decision to experiment with black paper was purely pragmatic: I was annoyed by the fact that colored pastels become contaminated when placed over black pastel, even when a fixative has been applied to the first layer. Using black paper eliminated this problem (and consequently some of my need for fixatives).
Through teaching workshops, I've become familiar with many of the pastels being manufactured today. There are several kinds that I like, but I most prefer soft pastels in large sticks, particularly those made by Sennelier and Rembrandt. The soft, even consistency of these sticks makes them very responsive to the subtle pressures of my hand. For example, if I lightly drag a soft pastel stick across a painting surface, I can make marks of subtle delicacy. If I press hard, I can lay the pigment down in opaque, buttery cascades.
Five years ago, when I purchased my first set of pastels, I was concerned that the thicker soft pastel sticks would be clumsy and make it difficult for me to render detail. As a result, I chose hard pastels because they came in narrower sticks. Fortunately, I discovered the expressive advantages of soft pastels when I won a complete Rembrandt set in a competition. In addition to being very responsive to the pressure of my hand, large sticks of soft pastel increase the variety and expressiveness of the marks I can make. By breaking a stick, taking a segment of it, and dragging it on its side, I can achieve very broad marks; marks of medium width can be made with the end of the stick as it wears down; and fine lines and details can be made with a sharp edge, if one exists (if not, I just break the stick to create one).
In the past, what frustrated me the most about pastels were the large deficiencies that exist in the range of very dark colors. As a result, I was often forced to use black in areas of deep shadow, where it can be both uninteresting and overpowering. Fortunately, I learned that Sennelier manufactures a generous five hundred fifty-two shades of pastel, and included within their darkest shades are warm and cool blues, reds, browns, greens, and purples that provide desirable alternatives to black. I always keep dozens of Sennelier colors on hand to satisfy my need for dark colors.
The quality of the pastel strokes is of primary importance to me. I've learned a lot about strokes from examining the works of some of the artists and illustrators I admire the most, among them Claes Oldenburg and Charles Dana Gibson. I appreciate the graphic nature of their drawing and, by looking closely at their work, I've learned valuable lessons regarding the descriptive and expressive potential of line and color.
Once I put a mark down, I make an effort not to draw on top of it - to let the stroke of pastel stand clearly and concisely rather than changing or blurring it. I have no set formula for selecting color or determining the direction of my strokes. I feel my way through the painting, with one decision leading to the next. Regardless of whatever decisions I make, though, I always draw with the pastel stick. Since individual strokes are so important to me, I'm unwilling to smudge pastel, whether it is with my fingers, stomps, tissues, or any other implement. My purpose is to leave an exciting network of lines, both delicate and bold, placed either side by side or one on top of the other in multiple directions. These lines describe form, create visual interest, and express my feelings about a subject.
As a result, I'm often asked how I blend colors or soften the edges of objects. The answer is simple: I blend colors by layering them while reducing my hand pressure and changing the direction of the lines. However, I avoid crosshatching lines at ninety degrees, which looks too mechanical; I feel that lines that cross obliquely are far more interesting. Also, I find there are so many colors available that I don't really need to do any blending - the pastel colors on the market are more lively and interesting to me than blended tones - which is one of the reasons why my palette is made of more than two hundred colors.
Color is very significant to me because I don't always portray the colors of my subjects as they really are. Although I want the pictures to seem realistic, I also want them to communicate my feelings. If I want the painting to be melancholy, for example, I use cool tones; if I want to express joy, I use warm hues.
No matter how lightly I spray fixative on pastel, I find that it darkens values and deadens color intensity, so I use it sparingly. However, I sometimes use it in limited ways to intentionally darken areas that appear too light or too intense. I also rely on fixative when a painting surface becomes so saturated with pastel that marks become increasingly difficult to make; a little bit of fixative sprayed on the area will create a more cooperative bed on which to lay new color.
Daniel Ludwig
BY SAM KIRBY
By pursuing his own artistic vision, this Rhode Island artist creates lush, expressive works that have fostered successful sales, gallery exhibitions, and his reputation as a serious painter.
IN A WORLD SATURATED WITH COUNTLESS images and many styles of painting, how does an artist make even the simplest decisions about what to paint? For Daniel Ludwig, the answer is easy. "Honesty," he says, "is the key to good painting." Artistic honesty allows a painter to disregard the distractions and criticisms of the outside world and find his or her own direction.
In Ludwig's case, that direction is clear. Whether in his figurative paintings, for which his wife, the painter Anne Leone, often serves as inspiration, or in his painterly landscapes exploring classical themes, Ludwig's work reveals his fascination with color, mood, and the painted surface.
Propped against a wall in Ludwig's studio, a recent addition to his home in Newport, Rhode Island, are a number of his large canvases, glittering with the bright colors of fresh oil paint. One canvas depicts three women bathing in an arcadian pond. Several others comprise a series in which men wrestle in wild, natural environments, their struggle carried out against crashing waves or the thick growth of a jungle. In another work, a woman stands alone in a grove of trees - the atmosphere is reflective, melancholy. The woman could be a mythical goddess or a marvelous statue, but her identity is unimportant. Ludwig's figures often look hauntingly familiar, and, indeed, they are akin to the allegorical figures painted by the Old Masters. The vibrant colors and loose brushwork, however, are the products of Ludwig's hands.
Ludwig considers his paintings to be classical in origin, many of them dealing with traditional themes that incorporate myths, literary narratives, and images from famous works of art. Nevertheless, his ideas for paintings are not generated exclusively from these sources or even from real-life scenes but from his dreams and imagination. Although trained as a classical realist painter, Ludwig firmly believes that he would be lost without his imagination. "Even when I was young and pouring over pictures in art books, I didn't think of paintings as simply depictions of real life," he explains. "I believed that art didn't come from life but from the imagination of the artist. When a painting begins to reveal its meaning or identity to the artist, there are no obstacles, no external pressures. There is nothing holding the artist back."
Sitting in the bright sunlight streaming through the large windows of his studio, the thirty-two-year-old artist talks about the great masters' consistent approach to making art.</doc><doc register="skill and hobbies" n="24">
THE PLEASURE OF THEIR COMPANY:
JEWELS IN THE DANISH CROWN
LONG CELEBRATED FOR ITS MALE DANCERS, THE ROYAL DANISH BALLET BOASTS WOMEN WHO ARE RAVISHING IN THEIR OWN RIGHT. AUDIENCES IN WASHINGTON, D.C., AND COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA, WILL HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE THEM DANCE BOURNONVILLE IN JUNE.
BY MARILYN HUNT
Let's hear it for Danish women. Historically, although Lucile Grahn, Toni Lander, and a few other women have made brilliant international reputations, the men of the Royal Danish Ballet have garnered the lion's share of the limelight. After all, the ballets of the great nineteenth-century choreographer August Bournonville present male dancers exuberantly free from eclipse behind their partners' skirts. But close observers of the Royal Danish Ballet have known all along that its women are special, too, that in the Royal Theatre a remarkable succession of dancer-actresses has flourished, with a pedigree springing from Bournonville's light, breezily easy-looking - and secretly daunting - distaff choreography. An essence of these women is suggested in a pose unique to Bournonville heroines' mime - a tendu <*_>a-grave<*/> la seconde with the working foot resting on the floor in a relaxed demi-pointe: The openness of the body to the audience and its down-to-earthness-within-convention tell us these are real people.
Currently a group of young women is surging forward in the company, bursting into major roles. Spectators have increasingly seen them competing and guesting on foreign stages; but audiences for the American tour in June, like those that attended the big Bournonville festival in Copenhagen last March, will have the good fortune to see them in context-jewels in specially designed settings.
The Royal Danish Ballet's artistic director, Frank Andersen, is as proud of his fresh, talented women as he is of his men. Rose Gad, Silja Schandorff, Henriette Muus, Petrusjka Broholm, and Christina Olsson take their places in the company along with such established principals as Heidi Ryom, Lis Jeppesen, and Mette-Ida Kirk, and other rising dancers such as American Caroline Cavallo (newly named soloist) and English dancer Claire Still.
The company's women are particular beneficiaries of two recent, long-awaited developments that have finally been settled with the Danish government. One was the creation of a soloist rank, where traditionally there had been only two categories - principal and corps. Most of those promoted to the new intermediate rank so far are women, who in the past have suffered the schizophrenia of dancing, say, Giselle one night and a corps wili the next, as well as all the skepticism of foreign audiences toward corps members' dancing leads.
The other development was the lowering of the retirement age from forty-eight to forty. While many invaluable older character dancers will, of course, be retained, some senior dancers will give way to expanded ranks of young women, making productions of Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty feasible.
The company's dancers traditionally haven't taken separate bows. They've grown up together from as early as six or eight years of age, receiving their ballet and academic training in the same Royal Theatre where they now dance - in some of the very ballets that they appeared in as children. Gad, Schandorff, Muus, Broholm, and Olsson, who were in more or less the same class in school and are now twenty-three to twenty-six years old, were apprentices around the time that Andersen took over as director in 1985, and they were just becoming visible during the company's last visit to the United States, in 1988. The wonder - but one typical of the company - is that they have different and distinctive personalities and qualities.
Their independent, forthright air, with a hint of sexuality, keeps Bournonville's heroines evolving with the times - in the company's new production of A Folk Tale, for example. But these dancers are versatile and don't want to be "put in a box"; participating in the breadth of the company's repertoire is important to them. Self-aware and self-critical, they are conscious of their individual evolutions.
Made a principal after her creation of the passionate and vulnerable title role in Flemming Flindt's Caroline Mathilde last year, Rose Gad has a sort of golden glow and a natural romantic lyricism, from the smooth roll through the foot to the breadth and curl of long, liquid arms. She learned the Sylphide from the late Hans Brenaa and first danced the role at eighteen. Giselle and the heroines of Bournonville's Lay of Thrym and A Folk Tale followed. Gad feels that her strong points are style and a belief in the ballet's stories, whereas, she says, "I don't have a body built for pure classical technique. But I'm really trying to work on it." Nevertheless, she makes a real ballerina in her performances of George Balanchine's Theme and Variations and Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux. She has recently danced the latter at Paris Opéra Ballet galas, partnered by POB's Manuel Legris.
The year after Gad received the women's Erik Bruhn Prize in Toronto, Silja Schandorff made it two Danish women in a row by winning in 1989. (She has since returned to dance with the National Ballet of Canada as part of an exchange arrangement between the two companies.) This January she was named a principal. Possessed of a magisterial, long, lithe body, high extension, perfectly arched feet, and large, luminous eyes, she gobbles up the works of Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, loving their energy and musicality. She has also benefitted a great deal, she says, from working with Ib Andersen and Anna Laerkesen in new ballets. Recently Schandorff has taken on narrative parts: Myrtha in Giselle, roles in The Lay of Thrym, and the lead in A Folk Tale. Sailing, airy and joyous, she proves that, contrary to tradition, a tall dancer can give a lot to Bournonville.
Henriette Muus shared an award for best couple with Alexander K<*_>o-slash<*/>lpin at the 1986 Jackson competition, where their pas de deux from The Flower Festival in Genzano was a favorite. Muus continues to shine in that Bournonville showpiece. Her compact build and her effervescence and mischievous wit onstage make her a natural for Bournonville - the heroines of Abdallah and The Kermesse in Bruges, for example - and for Coppélia, to which she brings a particular joie de vivre. She is funny and touching as John Neumeier's slapstick, spectacled Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ballet is not easy for her physically, she says. But she is a quick learner, and in a character she looks very secure, playing with balance, phrasing, and attack and shading her moods. Her dancing rises to a passionate commitment, too (as Olga in John Cranko'sOnegin, for example). She is interested in different kinds of roles, such as the Sylphide, and she scored a success as Juliet recently with Australian Ballet.
Temperament and liveliness characterize Petrusjka Broholm's dancing. Bournonville style comes readily to her; her imagination lights up the role of Teresina in Napoli. Noticed favorably at the New York International Ballet Competition when she was nineteen, she has an eagerness for dancing and extending herself that took her to the Berlin Ballet for half of last season. Working on Flemming Flindt's The Lesson, she says, taught her the courage to push effects rather than playing safe. She dances Coppélia, Olga in Onegin, and Robbins's Afternoon of a Faun. Broholm says she wants to "get to the point that every movement has expression and connection, so it is really music, and I can make a whole melody."
Christina Olsson has always had a strong, expansive technique and a big jump suggesting strength. The powerhouse 'Vortex' solo in Alvin Ailey'sThe River was an early role. (Schandorff did the sinuous 'Meander.') Olsson loves Balanchine and has done the Russian girl in Serenade, the Agon solo, and Polyhymnia in Apollo. A change of pace has been Lar Lubovitch's jazzy Rhapsody in Blue. She used to focus too exclusively on virtuosity, she says, and is now working on movement quality and a more fluid port de bras. "I still have a tendency that when I get nervous my legs take over because they're so strong," she says, but she is interested in "expressing something with my dance, because that's what makes it all beautiful." Olsson's new softness and lyricism are visible as Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Irma in Bournonville's Abdallah.
How do these five women feel about being in this company, with its Bournonville tradition? Do they feel at any disadvantage, compared to the men, in terms of training or repertoire?
They say they do not feel overshadowed. They point out that women are as necessary to Bournonville's ballets as men are. Gad volunteers that "it's great that Danish male dancers are so famous," and she likes "the way you dance with each other or to each other, instead of having the males behind all the time." Muus says she loves Bournonville even though it "is very hard, and the women's steps are sometimes men's, [such as] beating steps." "It's harder than it looks," Schandorff points out, "so it gives you a lot of strength."
Olsson says she became aware, though, when she studied at New York City Ballet's affiliated School of American Ballet, that, while Danish training gives women more jumps ("males' jumps, heavy jumps"), Balanchine training gives more pointe work. She also notes that, compared with Balanchine, Bournonville doesn't provide the women in the corps with much to do - a common complaint in the company. On that account, she feels it's especially important for the company to have a big mixed repertoire.
The women like the musicality and expressiveness of Bournonville choreography. Muus finds the steps harmonious, "and you can play with them"; the emphasis on the use of the whole body and the de-emphasis of athletic feats are a relief. Bournonville class for her is "like a breath in the midst of all this tension about being placed."
Olsson gives working on Bournonville (in particular, soloist roles in Abdallah) the credit for changing her focus from virtuosity to movement quality. "Bournonville is really good for me, my quality and heart," she says. "It's hard on the calves, and there might be quick little steps, but it's always supposed to look easy - soft and gentle." She also likes the jumps and the breadth of the steps, using the whole stage.
For Schandorff, Bournonville has been very much a matter of rapprochement: "I feel that the things that I was good at, I couldn't show in Bournonville. They would always advise me not to raise my leg so high. When you are a kid, sometimes you can be a little bit 'smart' and say, 'No, I don't like that.' I think a lot of kids felt that. But later I realized that less can be more. So it is nothing to do with how high the leg is, but the way it is. It's really a lovely way of dancing and a wonderful tradition."
The dramatic legacy of Bournonville has given the dancers an unusual degree of imaginative involvement. They often speak of forgetting themselves onstage and becoming the person they are playing. Although, as Muus points out, the women characters are often "young and inexperienced," still they are "very different from story to story," and a supernatural character such as the Sylphide is a special challenge. Gad finds that Bournonville helps one learn how to create a role - and to do it in a way that looks natural rather than 'acted'.
In Napoli - one of the ballets scheduled for the U.S. tour - Broholm believes that the role of Teresina has the responsibility of holding the three acts together. She has thought through her approach with her own details: "The dancing is not very difficult, but it really has to be quality. In the first act, Teresina is happy, she's free. She's me! In the second act [in which Teresina comes under the spell of the sea god Golfo], it's exciting because you have to express that you're almost dancing in water, like a water plant. When Teresina does port de bras, it's like reaching toward the surface. </doc><doc register="skill and hobbies" n="25">
Installing and Troubleshooting Car-Audio Systems
These valuable hints and techniques can help you install a car-stereo system like a pro.
BY WAYNE R. GIPSON, CET
Like most worthwhile endeavors, installing your own car-stereo system is much easier if a few professional methods are utilized. Furthermore, armed with the right knowledge, installing a car stereo can also be a rewarding experience. To help you 'roll your own' set up, this article will provide insights into practical installation and troubleshooting techniques. This article will also help you determine if a particular system or vehicle might demand professional installation, and will provide 'red flags' that might help the installer avoid damage to the vehicle or stereo.
It should be mentioned that the procedures set forth here are not to be interpreted as applying to every installation scenario. The reader is expected to use his or her own judgment in applying these ideas to their own situation. Always read and follow the instructions supplied with your stereo system. If questions arise, consult the dealer from whom the equipment was purchased.
Sizing-Up the Job. Many problems arise when trying to fit a car stereo into a vehicle that cannot accommodate the system's size or dimensions. Some stereo systems are simply too large to be mounted into the dash of a smaller vehicle, and speakers that are too large for the cavity of the interior of the car can be damaged in use. To avoid these problems, take advantage of the literature that your dealer can provide that will list dimensions of the different head units and speakers that you are considering. Be sure to take advantage of all the good advice that a knowledgeable dealer might offer. If you buy your equipment from such a dealer, he will be glad to evaluate your vehicle. After all, it is much easier, and more profitable, for him to to satisfy your needs at the onset, rather than have to take back merchandise that cannot be made to fit. By the same reasoning, be wary of a salesman who pushes a particular stereo before he even knows what type of car or truck you own.
The first step in deciding on the right stereo is to draw a diagram of your vehicle on a piece of graph paper, similar to that shown in <figure/>. Take time to visualize what you want your system to look and sound like before you buy it. Once features have been settled on, price must be considered. At this point, before shopping seriously, consider the list shown in Table 1 to determine if there are any accessories that must be included in your price.
<O_>figure<O/>
Having a firm grasp on wanted features and price, examine the dash area of the vehicle. Most older domestic cars have a 'two-shaft' radio (one shaft for the volume control and one for tuning.) If, when the radio is pulled, and there is a small rectangular center cavity with shaft holes on either side, you are limited to a shaft type radio. If there remains just a large rectangular cavity, then you can install either a shaft-type radio or a DIN type radio, depending on the mounting bracket you buy.
Speaking of mounting brackets, several car-stereo accessory manufacturers market a wide range of plastic faceplates and mounting brackets custom designed for your vehicle type. These accessories can make your installation look very sharp and professional. Some can accommodate with a DIN-mount stereo and an equalizer in the cavity used by the original radio. Generic mounting units are also available, and they are usually much cheaper than the ones marketed by the car-stereo manufacturers. However, to take advantage of special mounting arrangements like the radio/equalizer mounting mentioned above, the manufacturer's mounting units must generally be used.
When examining installation literature put out by the manufacturers, be wary if the guide states 'professional installation recommended' or warns you that the system is incompatible with your vehicle. Take their advice, and do not attempt to install such a model in your car. Always remember the manufacturer is eager to sell equipment. If they gave-up trying to fit the unit into your model of vehicle, you stand a very slim chance of proving them wrong.
If your vehicle has a 24-volt electrical system or a 'positive ground' (meaning the positive post of the battery is connected to the chassis, or frame, of the vehicle), do not attempt installation yourself. Take your vehicle to a professional installer. Damage to the stereo and vehicle will surely result from improper installation in such a situation.
If you own a newer vehicle, seek advice before replacing a factory- installed/original-equipment stereo unit. Some new vehicles have sophisticated wiring and control schemes that are designed specifically for that car maker's factory-installed stereos, and careless or incorrect removal of the radio might cause damage to the vehicle's electrical system.
Getting to It. One tip that will save you a great deal of time is to test the system outside of the vehicle before installation. That gives you a chance to rehearse the installation before the fact. It is very discouraging to put the vehicle back together, button everything up, and turn on the unit only to learn that it is an 'out of box' failure. Those instances, happily, are few and far between, but it is good practice to do a bench test; if the unit is bad, it is much easier to return a like-new unit versus one whose chassis has been scarred and fingerprinted during the installation process. If you'd like, the retailer that sold the unit may bench test it for you.
Before starting to remove the old stereo or installing the new unit, disconnect the negative battery cable from it'sits terminal. That prevents the battery from running down while the doors, trunks, and hood are open, and also prevents injury to you should you accidentally short the wiring.
Carefully examine the original radio to learn how it comes out of the vehicle. If it is a shaft-mount unit, generally there are nuts affixing the control shafts to the dash, and then there will be a back brace that holds the rear of the radio tight to the car's frame. Basic mechanic's tools are sufficient to accomplish the removal; use deep sockets to loosen the front nuts. On some vehicles, the radio is mounted from the front, and generally the bolts that fasten the radio to the console can be easily taken out, although a few utilize reverse-headed bolts that require a special tool available from an auto-parts store or from the dealer to be removed.
Once the radio is unfastened, carefully detach the wiring from the radio. Some of the connectors can be incredibly hard to remove, but generally they will detach without much trouble if time is taken to examine the fasteners and find any 'hidden' snaps or brackets used to keep the cables in place. Never cut any of these connectors off. As we'll discuss shortly, these connectors might be able to attach to an aftermarket harness interface, or if the original radio was to be replaced, perhaps when the vehicle is to be traded, they would be handy if left in place. When those connectors are disconnected from the radio, pay attention to where the power cables are. These must be taped up so they do not touch anything or short together.
Follow the car-stereo manufacturer's instructions to physically install your new unit. One installation step many inexperienced installers overlook is to secure the back strapping (shown in <figure/>. In order to ensure a trouble-free installation, the stereo must be secured with that strap. The pressure on the front shafts and nose piece of the stereo is relieved by the back strap, keeping problems like broken printed-circuit boards and bound mechanisms to a minimum. The metal back strap also provides a common ground for the system. To help avoid noise and engine interference problems (which we'll explain later), a good ground point is essential.
Generally, it is best to avoid hooking up a stereo to any of the wiring harnesses that are provided by the vehicle manufacturer unless an aftermarket 'breakout' harness is used to plug into the original harness. Such breakout units will clearly label wiring that can be used in installing the new stereo. If no such harness is available, run your own cabling directly to the speakers, power source, etc. It is dangerous to take for granted that a wire emerging from the vehicle's wiring harness reading +12 volts will be correct for hooking up to your stereo. The voltage might be coming from an electronic control point to the clock or tuner memory, and drawing current sufficient to power your stereo will damage the source. You might consider using the cable that powered the original radio, but the size of the wire could be insufficient to feed the new system, particularly if amplifiers or other peripherals are installed. The wire might overheat, and burn up the vehicle's wiring harness, or it might be connected to a fuse that will blow when the system is cranked up, disabling other equipment in the vehicle.
One tip to help you get the connectors you may need for your radio would be to bring the literature supplied with your new equipment to the dealer. That way he can 'see' what you want, rather than trying to figure out what to sell you from a verbal description.
<O_>figure<O/>
Antennas and Accessories. Most units today have one power wire to power the amplifier section and control functions, and another to provide a continuous voltage to retain selected stations in memory and to power the clock function. The main power wire allows the radio to be turned on and off with the ignition switch. Sometimes the second wire, if deprived of 12 volts, will prevent the radio from working. This wire must be connected to a source that provides 12 volts on a continuous basis.
If you have an electric antenna in your existing system, provisions must be made to provide power to the antenna. Generally, when 12 volts is applied to the antenna's power-lead, the antenna extends, and when the 12 volts is removed, the antenna retracts. There are a few variations, so consult the dealer if in doubt. The antenna power lead can often be determined by examining the original radio. Sometimes, a wire legend is stamped on the radio with the abbreviation 'ANT' denoting the antenna wire, or one of the wires might have a tape affixed to it labeled as an antenna lead. Most car stereos have a 12-volt outlet wire that is used to supply voltage to the antenna when the radio is powered up.
Keep all connecting cables as short as possible between the radio (or head unit) and any add-on components, such as an amplifier or equalizer. If a long run is necessary (perhaps because the amplifier is mounted in the trunk), then use quality interconnect cable to minimize interference. Be sure to follow the manufacturer's instructions regarding size of power cables for the amplifier. Most of the time, you can connect amplifiers and head units of different manufacturers together, but be sure to find out if special interconnections are required. Once again, your equipment's documentation will help the dealer determine how and what accessories are required to complete the installation. When mounting amplifiers and other items, such as crossovers, really beautiful bases can be made for these accessories by using finished plywood. A plywood base is great for mounting a system's amplifiers and crossovers behind the seat in a pickup, or in the trunk of a car.
Speaker Tips. Data on selecting correct speaker sizes can be had in the same manuals that the manufacturers publish for their head unit recommendations. The speakers must seal the opening they project sound through. You must not let air escape around the speaker mounting from the front of the cone back to the rear. Such leakage will diminish sound quality and power.
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TRAINING AND DEVELOPMENT
PSE&G's center shapes distribution apprentices; reaches out to customers
By Nancy G. Sooy
Since its inauguration in 1989, Public Service Electric & Gas Co's (PSE&G) unique Edison Training & Development Center has successfully 'graduated' distribution-systems apprentices in programs covering everything from overhead construction to substation operations.
Hands on. Fashioned from a renovated warehouse on 15 acres of land in Edison, NJ, the center's main building is a 90,000 ft<sp_>2<sp/> facility designed to provide quality technical-skills training for the utility's distribution systems department.
It succeeds at this by: (1) establishing specific performance objectives for each 'job family' and developing employee skills to meet those objectives; (2) reinforcing the basic skills training provided at the training and development center with hands-on field experience; and (3) constant feedback on employee performance through instructor mentoring.
Employee-designed. Inside, the training and development center is a multi-functional structure with dual-purpose rooms equipped for both training and emergency uses. PSE&G called on employees to help design the center. A team consisting of employees from the distribution systems engineering and construction departments, along with training instructors and outside architects, designed the shops and laboratories based upon the job-related functions of each room.
Outdoors. Outside, training facilities include a four-acre site for overhead and underground distribution construction, maintenance, operations, mobile equipment, a commercial driving track, and other special training programs.
Back inside the center, there are executive conference rooms, an auditorium that can accommodate up to 125 people, and a full complement of core facilities, including a library, audio-visual equipment, host telephones and computers, food service areas, and an administrative area providing telephone, reproduction, and fax equipment. However, the most frequently used components of the building are the 37 skills training laboratories and meeting rooms.
Old days. Skills training at PSE&G was a lot simpler 30 years ago, when distribution-systems employees relied primarily upon on-the-job training. However, with the introduction of highly sophisticated overhead and underground distribution systems, complicated and expensive construction tools and text instruments, along with complex service restoration procedures, the company recognized a need for structured training programs.
Trailers. The first formalized T&D apprentice training program at PSE&G began in 1967. It left employee skills training to be done at each of the six division headquarters. Fifteen years later, in 1982, training became centralized at a facility consisting of temporary trailers on grounds adjacent to the current site of the new training and development center.
Focused. Since its opening in 1989, the new center has trained thousands of employees in courses that focus on personal safety and development of technical expertise in equipment and systems used in the field. Apprentice programs are offered to service dispatchers, linemen, underground technicians, equipment operators, substation mechanics, substation operators, relay technicians, meter technicians, automotive mechanics, engineering technicians, and clerks.
Mentoring. These training programs also extend beyond distribution systems to include other company business units, Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland Interconnection (PJM) pool dispatchers, and employees of primary customers and governmental agencies.
An important element recently added to the center's apprentice lineman program is 'mentoring.' The mentoring program was developed to increase communications and rapport among instructors, trainees, and field supervisors. Because of the limited amount of time for trainee development, this triad insures that the time devoted to field experience is meaningful, diversified, and productive.
When apprentices attend formal training for the first time, they are assigned an instructor who becomes their mentor and visits them when they go out into the field for hands-on experience. Mentors consult with local supervisors, crew chiefs, and trainees, who keep record books on their work assignments. Mentors detemine the trainees' progress and evaluate their training assignments. They use the field visits to detemine what the trainee needs to enhance performance skills.
"I think mentoring has gone a long way to improve the learning curve with PSE&G trainees," says Jesse Brown, manager of the Edison center. "Mentoring helps to insure that the employee's on-the-job work is truly supplementing training."
Upgrades. Training at the center is not just for apprentices. Throughout employee careers, there are many other occasions when they can use the training center for follow up, technical updates, and developmental and other enhancement courses. The same holds true for the center's 24 instructors, who are also given technical and instructional enhancement on a continual basis. Most of them have prior field experience and teach multiple disciplines. A few days a year, the center is shut down to update technical and instructional skills.
Upfront. Constant feedback is encouraged as a part of the center's continuous improvement cycle. "Our teaching method stresses the difference between education and training," explains Thomas Devine, senior training supervisor at the facility. "Education is the gaining of knowledge for its own sake, but training is gaining knowledge with a specific, well-defined performance goal in mind," he explains. "When students walk into our classrooms, the course objectives are given to them right up front. We make a direct connection between what they're learning and the job they'll be doing when they return to the field."
Double duty. Devine notes that the training workshops were designed to include equipment that could simulate actual field situations. "One of our capabilities here is that if an emergency situation arises in the distribution systems department, our training props become available to act as operating equipment," he says. "For example, if a breaker or feeder row fails, we can take out the equipment that's here and send it to wherever it's needed to get the customer back in service. We have actually done this. Eventually, the failed piece of equipment comes back to the center and we can learn from it."
Emergencies. In fact, the carefully designed, dual-purpose training center's rooms are pre-wired with emergency telephone lines and computer connections in the event an emergency arises. There are also fixed cellular phone and radio systems in place to communicate beyond the normal telephone grid. The following emergency functions are supported:
System operations alternative emergency command center - This is a room that can be activated in less than half an hour for load dispatching for the entire state should the emergency systems operations center in PSE&G's Newark (NJ) headquarters be unable to function;
Distribution systems department's alternative storm/emergency command center - This room can be used by distribution systems in the event a major outage prevents all six divisions of PSE&G from manning the Newark emergency storm center;
Computer mainframe emergency command center - This room houses the computer backup for the entire company;
Board of regulatory commissioners (BRC) emergency information center - This area consists of two rooms where information can be easily relayed to the state's office of emergency management in the event of a storm or calamity affecting statewide utility services. It can also be used to provide assistance to the state Dept of Environmental Protection and Energy during times of energy-supply emergencies involving the curtailment or disruption of electricity services.
Clerk program. Although the center is designed to put great emphasis on training field employees for actual work conditions, inside personnel, such as clerks and engineering technicians, are not overlooked. The apprentice-clerk program consists of three phases that focus on administration, payroll/records, and classification storeroom.
Technicians. Meanwhile, for engineering technicians, an apprentice engineering technician program covers drafting, inquiry, new business, overhead, underground, and planning, with additional courses - such as fundamentals of electricity, dc and ac, and the fundamentals of electric distribution. Management personnel are also included in the skills training and development process. Courses such as front-line leadership, positive discipline, and supervisory technical orientation are offered. Other courses at the center are designed for the general employee population. Some of these are customer relations training, root-cause analysis, PCB and oil-spill procedures, hazardous-waste cleanup, and communications.
Leadership and licenses. A recent program addition is a leadership-development course given to union employees who are operating-department group leaders, to provide practical experience in identifying and applying leadership techniques. The course is designed to improve group safety, communications, operating effectiveness, and customer relations.
Another service provided is commercial driver's-license certification, not only for distribution-systems personnel but for production and transmission-systems employees as well. To date, the center has certified approximately 3000 employees.
Outdoors. Though it belongs to PSE&G, the utility is not the center's only customer. Government agencies, state employees, and other utilities often request its use to supply skills training, such as cable splicing and electrical safety. In addition, the center has also provided 'beyond-the-meter' training to PJM system operators, the US Coast Guard, and other companies, including PSE&G's primary customers. And in 1991, approximately 4000 people attended electrical safety demonstrations given to emergency squads, fire departments, schools, and community organizations.
Balloons. One popular safety show is a 'high-voltage demonstrator,' a large simulator that uses actual equipment and live electric current to demonstrate the dangers of contact with downed wires. The demonstration shows how objects such as fire hoses, trees, kites, and even mylar balloons can create havoc with high-voltage equipment.
Another way the training center reaches out to customers is through its electrotechnology demonstration facility where product testing and demonstrations inform industrial customers of new process technologies - such as ultraviolet curing and infrared drying. These new processes help customers remain competitive by improving product quality and increasing productivity and energy efficiency.
What's in the training rooms?
An important feature of the training and development center is the ability of the skills-training laboratories to simulate actual field situations. Some of these rooms and their features include:
Meter training room. This room is equipped with electro mechanical system work stations to provide polyphase hands-on training experience for the fundamental electrical courses presented. This room contains examples of meter and service equipment found in the field. Each installation is connected with proper secondary service voltage to enable employees to train under field conditions.
Electronics training room. This room is equipped with preparatory electricity and electronics training aids and a selection of the instruments used in the field. The laboratory has been designed and furnished to accommodate basic electricity, electronic microprocessor, and fiber optic training required for various job classifications.
System protection training room. Standard switching and substation equipment has been installed, including relay racks, cable trays and carrier and transfer trip equipment. Personnel learn through operation of actual equipment under simulated field conditions.
Primary line training room. Poles have been installed in this shop to permit all-weather, indoor training in primary line construction and maintenance. Line personnel are taught safe work practices and procedures over hard surface areas.
Cable splicing and network training room. Work stations have been constructed to provide hands-on instruction in cable splicing. Network protection equipment has been installed and is energized to simulate field conditions for training.
Substation mechanics training room. 4-kV, 13-kV, and 26-kV circuit breakers and switching equipment have been installed with control circuit wiring. Here, personnel are instructed in maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair of these devices.
Miscellaneous mechanics training room. This dual-purpose room has been designed for the instruction of miscellaneous mechanics and for the construction of simulators and mock-ups for the training center. It is equipped with stationary and portable power tools.
Computer training rooms. The computer rooms are functional installations for training apprentice clerks, service dispatchers, and other employees. The IBM PS-2 computers are connected via local area network to the company mainframe system. This allows personnel to learn the customer inquiry system, materials management system, and other computer programs and courses under job conditions.
Secondary line training room. An energized, overhead, secondary distribution system has been installed in this shop and feeds a variety of service installations found in the field. Secondary service construction, maintenance, troubleshooting and repair are taught through practical hands-on exercises. Simulators to teach transformer connections are also located in this shop.
Automotive training room. This room has been constructed with work bays and equipment necessary to provide training in mechanical as well as the latest electronic areas of automotive maintenance, troubleshooting, and repair.
The CAMS TowneTown room. CAMS means, 'customer and marketing services.' This room contains a meter-reading town consisting of eight streets housing 110 electric meters. The various meters and meter installations are dispersed in 55 building modules.
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SEEDS OF OPPORTUNITY
Central Brazil is ready for new fields of soybeans. In Londrina, U.S. farmers nurture a precious crop.
BY JENNIFER ERICKSON
BUSINESS EDITOR
Certain things about Brazilian agriculture - small and out-dated equipment, an abundance of poor farm workers - won't impress you. But the result - healthy fields of sugar cane, coffee, wheat, corn and soybeans - will.
Another thing that will impress you is the potential for growth.
"Brazilian agriculture is like a huge engine idling, waiting for a good world market," says Harvey Kluvers of Litchville, North Dakota.
"I always knew they were a big competitor, but until you drive by mile after mile of those waving soybeans, you really don't know how big," says Doug Emerson, a farmer from Kenyon, Minnesota.
Doug and Harvey, and 15 other Midwesterners, looked first-hand at Brazilian farming in February as part of a farmers' work crusade with the Fellowship of Christian Farmers (FCFI) and Men For Missions International (MFMI).
The group, led by MFMI's Brazil director Jay Edwards, helped with the construction of Shalom Community Church in Londrina, Paran<*_>a-acute<*/> . They also toured farms, a co-op and the country's National Soybean Research Center.
Land of opportunity
Edwards, who grew up in Brazil, went to college in the U.S. and farmed his grandfather's Indiana farm for eight years before returning to the mission field. He has travelled throughout Brazil exploring agricultural opportunities. His view: "I'm convinced that as far as agriculture goes, there's no place in the world with more opportunity than central Brazil [see map]."
Soybeans are at the center of that opportunity, with lands as flat as Kansas and as fertile as Indiana lying in wait on Brazil's central plains. Much like pioneer expansion into the U.S. Corn Belt, Brazilian entrepreneurs are clearing land (it's 1,000 miles south of the rainforest) to plant soybeans and graze cattle.
"If all the land was developed, there would be at least 203 million hectares (about 515 million acres) of cropland in Brazil," says Luiz César Guedes, an economist with EMBRAPA's (Brazilian Organization for Agriculture and Animal Science Research) National Soybean Research Center near Londrina.
One major stumbling block to expansion in this region is transportation. For example, Guedes says it costs $51/ton to truck soybeans to the port from the west-central state of Mato Grosso, compared to $16/ton from field to port in the south.
Mato Grosso is home of the world's largest soybean farmer, Olacyr de Morais, who is working to build a railroad into the region to cut transportation costs. In April, Brazil's National Bank for Economic and Social Development approved $250 million in financing for the 1,000-mile railroad.
Financing anything in Brazil - a rail-road, a farm or a new church - is a challenge. Inflation, which has recently slowed to about 20% /month, has been anything but manageable.
"It's not easy to plan and get going with this crazy economy here," says Ricardo Gomes de Araujo, who has farmed 4,350 acres near Londrina for 15 years.
Visiting Ricardo and other Brazilian farmers gave the FCFI group an impression that farmers everywhere face similar problems - insects, drought and prices.
Along with visiting Brazilian farms, the group of U.S. farm men and women worked with members of Londrina's Shalom Community Church to pour cement for the foundations of a new church building. In the midst of the work, they poured new breath into the foundations of their personal lives.
"It's so good the way God puts it together. The people who end up here are the people who needed to be here, not only with their hands, but spiritually," says Dale Larrance, a farmer and veteran MFMI work team member.
Dale has ventured to Brazil 16 times (as well as Colombia and Belize) with MFMI from his Ridge Farm, Illinois, farm where he sells Cargill seed. "I went down there to tear up the world," he says. "All I did was help myself."
"We enjoyed working with fellow Christians, both the Brazilians and the Americans," says Harold Vahl, a farmer from Edgerton, Minnesota. "The reception we got was excellent because of the fellowship we have in Christ and you don't have that on a normal farm tour."
"Brazil is tremendously impressive both agriculturally and spiritually," Edwards says. "Senior missionaries who have been there for 35 years say they have never seen a time when Brazilians are more hungry for the Gospel than now."
The 1993 FCFI/MFMI Brazil farmers' crusade will return to the Shalom Church or another church building site. The group will also tour local farms, a co-op and the research center. Dates are January 7-21, 1993. Price is $1,725/person from Miami. Group is limited to 20. Men and women are welcome.
Brazilian farm show draws 20,000
When an idea brews with Ricardo Gomes de Araujo, it's reality.
This innovative Brazilian farmer planned and dreamed for four years to host a successful farm show on his family's 4,350 acre farm last April. The show, which drew more than 20,000 visitors to his farm, was modeled after the Farm Progress show which is held each fall in the United States.
His 'Expo Dynamica' included machinery, tillage and harvesting demonstrations, along with displays from farm suppliers. Ricardo hopes his farm show will continue to grow.
Araujo also coordinates a group of farmers who share production and cost information, striving for efficiency. "We try to exchange knowledge and technology," he says. "We try to have farmers with the same conditions and crops work together, but what's more important is that they have the same mindset."
"What is important for us is not each crop, but the whole system. Considering the cost of production and other things, we try to make the whole system work."
STRIP A FIELD CLEAN
The English-made header that strips just the grain heads from cereals stalks is earning the respect of U.S. growers
BY HARRIS BARNES
Following the 1991 harvest, wheat growers are claiming that a combine header that strips grain heads from plants is the biggest breakthrough since the self-propelled combine.
And farmers who no-till soybeans behind small grain are crediting this stripper header for giving them faster and better stands and weed control, resulting in higher soybean yields per acre.
"By any standard the stripper header made a combine and a half out of my John Deere 9950. In a single day we harvested a 105-acre field of 65-bushel wheat," says Raymond Armistead, who farms with sons Kevin, Joel and Eric near Adairville, Kentucky.
Plucks heads from stalks
The revolutionary 18-foot-wide header, built by Shelbourne Reynolds Engineering in Great Britain, literally plucks small grain and grass heads from their stalks, leaving the straw behind.
Because only a fraction of the crop's straw is ingested by the harvester, the header allows combines to run at nearly twice the speed across fields.
The innovation was originally created by England's Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC). The English engineers report the header works well in cereal grain, grass seed, navy beans, dry peas, flax and rice. However, it is doubtful whether the stripper header will work in soybeans because of high shatter losses and the header's inability to reach low enough to pluck low-growing pods.
As it is now designed, the stripper header also can't harvest corn, grain sorghum or sunflowers. Non-grass-type crops present a problem for the header as these crops don't provide enough of a 'wall of straw' for it to work against.
The header's teeth work against such a wall to prevent seeds from being thrown forward. Researchers have also found that the heads of some wheat varieties explode on contact with the plastic teeth.
The header, which comes in 16-, 18- and 20-foot widths, fits most any combine feeder house. The average price for an 18-foot header is $28,000.
For more information call 800/482-1959 if you are located in the Midwest, 703/254-1441 in the East, 501/697-2226 in the South, 509/529-9837 in the West and 916/458-4923 in California.
The Shelbourne Reynolds header got its first taste of U.S. wheat harvest in 1990, but has operated in English fields for several years. Sales of the stripper header have skyrocketed in the Mid-South wheat belt and southern rice-growing areas since it was introduced.
For example, Big Rivers Agri Supply of Owensboro, Kentucky, sold 56 stripper headers last year. "I predict the number of these headers running in our area to double in 1992," says Ronnie Rutherford of that firm.
Last years was the first year the Armisteads used the stripper header. "With one of these headers the grower must think ahead and think big, for there is a lot of fast hauling from the field to the elevator," adds Raymond Armistead.
He says from what they experienced last year with the stripper header, he is convinced that they can harvest as good a quality of small grain as ever before. "And we did it 1 1/2 times faster than a conventional combine. By setting the combine properly we got 'rave reviews' from our elevator manager."
Charles Wagenaar of Adams, Oregon, managed a total of four stripper header combines last year, running them in wheat, barley, tall fescue and blue grass. "We were impressed with the doubling of speed of the Case IH 1680 on flat ground, compared to combines using conventional cutter bars," says Wagenaar, who is field foreman for B.L. Davis Ranches Inc. "With the two Case IH 1670s used on hillsides, we were able to cover the ground at about 1 1/2 times faster than conventional harvesters."
Works well on hillsides
Wagenaar admits to being concerned about running the stripper header in the steep hillsides of eastern Oregon. Safety to the operator and combine are more of a concern than speed in this case. "But no real problem using the stripper header surfaced. We did brace the drive shaft to keep it in place. We also placed a counter-weight on the downhill side of the rotor to keep it level as we changed positions."
The wheat they harvested, mostly the bearded Stevens variety, is very abrasive to the header's plastic fingers and metal wear plates. "As such, we had to change the plastic fingers after the four combines had cut over half of our 7,000 acres of wheat. This wheat was averaging 75 bu. per acre. Worn fingers don't strip as well in thin (60 bu.) wheat as they do in our best 80-85-bu. crops," Wagenaar adds.
"Our one stripper header, mounted on a Deere 7720, did the work of two combines," says Marion Dilday of circle Grove Farms near Belhaven, North Carolina. "This meant savings on labor, fuel and machine wear and tear."
Dilday used the header on 1,000 acres of 60-80-bu. wheat and barley without noticing damage to the seed. "If anything, our seed was better than before as we didn't run so much volume through the combine," he adds. "Where the header really shines is in high-yielding small grains. A wheat grower with an average of 35 bu. per acre would best stay with a conventional header in the wider 24-30-foot header size."
Rice growers are also pleased with the header's abilities. "From what we saw, the header would help both in rice and small grains," says Robert Seidenstricker of DeValls Bluff, Arkansa.
Seidenstricker harvested his rice with two John Deere 7720 combines, one with a conventional header, the other with a stripper header. His father operated the conventional reel-type header in low spots and along the edges of fields. "It wasn't long before we found that the stripper header could run even in lodged rice, so we sent Dad home," he says.
Shelbourne Reynolds has already made improvements to their header since it was first introduced to the U.S. market.
"We are using gear boxes to replace chains and belts in the header," explains Keith Shelbourne of Shelbourne Reynolds. "With at least a year of experience, our dealer servicemen should be able to handle any problems," he adds.
Stripper shines in double-cropping
The stripper header is fast finding favor among farmers who no-till soybeans behind small grains in a double-crop program.
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SANITATION
HOW TO COMMIT BIOCIDE
In the strictest sense, sanitation means getting bacteria where they live. But that requires a greater awareness of plant conditions, training practices and QA plans.
LETICIA MANCINI
TECHNICAL EDITOR
"Sanitation tools aren't new," said Bob Richardson, manager of inspection services for General Mills to an audience of sanitarians at last October's DFISA show, "You know what to do with foam cleaners and the like. However, we as an industry haven't figured out how to put it all together."
Richardson was describing problems with executing sanitation at food plants. Every plant has some type of program; every plant thinks they're doing it right. But still there are quality and contamination problems. The thousands of recalls of diverse food products for Listeria, Salmonella and Staph contamination every year are proof of that.
The technology to combat bacterial contamination is there (and is always improving), but without a greater understanding of microorganisms, it is ineffective. However, food companies are not without hope. Problems can be solved fairly simply by taking a good hard look around the plant.
Listeria hysteria
Now for the bad news: many types of bacteria can attach firmly to all types of food processing surfaces, including rubber, stainless steel and Teflon. Without proper attention, gooey biofilms can form, spelling disaster in the form of contaminated product.
According to Diversey Wyandotte Corporation's International Biocide Laboratory (Wyandotte, MI), 5 to 10 percent of foodborne poisoning out-breaks are caused by improperly cleaned food processing equipment. One organism that strikes fear in the heart of many is Listeria monocytogenes, because it is so pervasive. Listeria poisoning, or listeriosis, is almost always severe, and sometimes fatal.
This organism has the ability to withstand heat, acidic conditions and high salt concentrations. But its most frightening aspect is that it can thrive at temperatures as low as 0<*_>degree<*/>C and can survive temperatures as high as 82<*_>degree<*/>C, which indicates it can withstand some cooking processes.
Still, proper cleaning cannot be emphasized enough in the control of Listeria. If biofilms are destroyed completely with cleaners, there will be no contamination. However, if surfaces are not completely cleaned, sanitizing them won't help. Researchers at Campbell Soup have documented that Listeria is resistant to a number of sanitizing chemicals on a variety of surfaces. In the case of Listeria, the old saying "You can't sanitize a dirty surface" has never been more true.
"Listeria has taught us that some previously sound principles are not so," commented Dr. Don Zink, Quality Assurance and Product Safety manager at Nestle USA, to the same DFISA audience. Zink explained that Listeria is present in all plants, thriving in drains, warehouses and standing water. More attention must be placed on environmental control, he said, especially on preventing cross contamination.
Spotting trouble
"Be innovative and persistent when looking for sources of contamination," said Zink. For instance, segregating raw ingredients and processing areas, and limiting human and forklift traffic between them, can improve matters. Free movement of employees can be monitored by using different colored uniforms. And keep forklifts clean and separate. "What good are sanitizing dips for workboots when they will be placed on dirty forklifts?" he said.
The FDA also calls for the segregation of brushes for food contact and non-contact surfaces. Here, Sparta Brush's (Sparta, WI) new Tri-Zone color coded brushes can help. In the Tri-Zone program, red brushes are used for raw food areas, white for processing areas, and yellow for general custodial use. A fourth brush, black, is used for floor drains, a favorite hiding place for Listeria.
Even routine maintenance cannot be ignored. All rubber gaskets should be replaced once a month, before cracks appear that harbor bacteria.
But a little detective work can be a sanitarian's most important weapon in the battle against Listeria, says L.B. Guzzo, technical manager at Oakite Products (Berkeley Heights, NJ). He relates this anecdote: "I worked with a dairy that had a continuing Listeria problem. They were constantly pouring chlorine down the drain. Their swab tests continued to come up negative, but product would still be contaminated. Finally, we discovered that the problem was due to a mechanic using a filthy grease gun to fix all the clean machines, and touching everything." That practice came to an immediate stop.
According to Guzzo, chlorinated foamers are most effective against Listeria. Oakite markets FiChlor Foam HD, a high-foaming heavy duty chlorinated foam for cleaning stainless steel surfaces, and FiSan ACF for aluminum surfaces.
Mal Sorgenfri, vp of R&D at Alex Fergusson (Frazer, PA) suggests using quat-based sanitizers to follow. The company markets a unique product, the Power Block, to be placed in drains after cleaning. It is quat-based, but it is a solid, so that when water flows over it, a small portion dissolves to keep Listeria under control.
And there is a new type of sanitizer from Klenzade (St. Paul, MN) made from peroxyacetic acid. Oxonia Active was developed for CIP sanitizing and provides killing activity in water temperatures as low as 40<*_>degree<*/>F. The product is also biodegradable under normal waste treatment.
Improving training
But using the right product doesn't do much good if it is used incorrectly. Half of all sanitation costs are labor, but sanitation workers are probably a food plant's most neglected resource. They are extremely important when it comes to controlling contamination.
"Somebody has to supervise how cleaning procedures are taught," commented Dick Bakka, director of technical services at Klenzade. "All too often you have Joe Blow teaching some other guy how to clean equipment. The new guy picks up all of Joe's bad habits." Bakka advocates getting cleaning procedures written down, including what chemicals to use and in what concentrations, and keeping them in a bound notebook in a central location. Supervisors should retrain workers, if needed, and supervise the training of new workers.
Klenzade has recognized the importance of properly trained workers in the development of their QUASAR program. The program, an acronym for Quality, Assurance, Answers and Results, details what chemicals a plant might need, and how to use them. Special care is taken so the worker is not overexposed to chemicals. An important part of the QUASAR program is Quorum, a full line of chemicals that utilizes colors rather than names on its labels. The product labels are also bilingual, which makes training easier and less variable.
Sometimes the sanitation supervisor is in need of training. Here, Dennis Bogart of Diversey Wyandotte takes a hard line: "Most sanitarians are not educated well enough in food and spoilage microbiology. There is a tremendous amount of myth about how to get rid of bacteria." Diversey publishes a manual, TACT WINS, that can be used to train supervisors about the fundamentals of cleaning. The manual outlines the principles of time, action, chemical concentration, temperature, water, individual employees, nature of soil and surface to be cleaned (tact wins) and their cumulative effects on bacteria.
Getting crews to understand the principles of microbiology is a different matter. Experts advise sending sanitation workers into the plant, armed with petri dishes, to conduct swabbing tests. "When they do the testing and incubating themselves, sanitation workers gain a greater appreciation of organisms and what they can do," noted Nestle's Don Zink. One food safety manager likes to take a blacklight into the plant to show crews the fluorescing bacteria they missed during cleaning. All surveyed said that training was the weakest part of sanitation programs, but when employees are approached with respect, they show a greater commitment to learning.
Good QA sampling
The third important part of sanitation is developing an adequate microbiological sampling and testing plan. Are you doing the right tests? Are they still critical? If QA reports negative results or low counts, but quality problems continue, the current testing programs must be overhauled.
Rather than step up testing of product, increase environmental testing in the plant. This way, the absence or presence of pathogens can be determined as well as the location of microbial growth pockets. For instance, floor drains, which are always wet, should be sampled and tested. If pathogens are found, tests of the entire 'watershed' are warranted. Also, metal-to-metal surfaces, cracks and crevices, undersides of mats and insulation on pipes should be monitored to confirm that they are not growth pockets. Do not overlook standing water, peeling paint, compressed air lines, wooden-handled tools or equipment repaired with tape.
When sampling, it is important to use good aseptic technique. There are several different methods of sponge sampling, depending on whether the surface to be sampled is wet or dry. If you are unsure of how to sample correctly, independent testing labs can explain the correct technique.
Prior to testing, equipment should be dismantled to expose nooks which may harbor bacteria. As an indication of how effective a cleaning and sanitizing program is, samples from equipment can be collected after cleaning, and compared to samples taken before cleaning.
Silliker Labs in Chicago Heights, IL recommends testing environmental samples first for aerobic plate count or coliforms. Not only are the tests useful for ferreting out microbial growth, they reveal sites that could support pathogenic organisms. These tests can be done at relatively little cost, compared to pathogen testing.
If it sounds like environmental testing can be as complex as a military battleplan, it is. But when sources of contamination are found, then systematically eliminated, proper cleaning by properly trained workers is all that is needed to keep bacteria under control.
AMEXICANADA
ITS IMPACT ON FOOD
The prospect of 360 million consumers in a borderless market spurs 'rationalization,' investment and exports.
CHARLES E. MORRIS
MIDWEST EDITOR
American business isn't waiting for ratification of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) linking the U.S., Canada, and Mexico into a common market of 360 million consumers.
According to a new study entitled A North American Common Market?, published in April by Cleveland Consulting Associates (Cleveland, OH), no less than 87 percent of the 190 U.S. executives (representing 170 companies) responding say their companies are already doing business in Mexico. Eighty-four percent expect ratification of a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Mexico; and 76 percent believe the U.S. should pursue free-trade negotiations with other Central and South American nations.
The CCA study also demolishes the perception that U.S. manufacturers see Mexico mainly as a source of cheap labor, and free trade as an opportunity to cut the cost of goods sold in the U.S. Eighty-five percent of the respondents cite access to a new market of 81 million consumers as the greatest benefit of free trade with Mexico, while only 13 percent list operating efficiencies as their top priority.
Most respondents recognize, however, that major benefits depend on 'rationalizing' their North American operations -that is, consolidating or expanding manufacturing and distribution where necessary to eliminate duplication and optimize efficiency.
Food outlook
Of the 170 companies covered in the CCA survey, 58 are food-processing firms; 38 of these are Fortune 500 members. Fifty-one operate in Canada; 49 currently do business in Mexico.
Since implementation of the U.S./ Canada FTA, eight have increased ownership of Canadian subsidiaries, seven have entered new licensing agreements, five have executed mergers or acquisitions, and seven have entered new joint ventures. To further boost efficiency in serving combined U.S./Canadian markets, 28 see opportunities to rationalize manufacturing plants, 41 to expand or rationalize distribution systems, and 15 for sourcing raw materials or components.
If an FTA with Mexico is approved by Congress, 31 would consider establishing new distribution systems in Mexico, 37 would set-up new sales functions, 22 would startup manufacturing plants, and 18 would source new materials and components. Nine say they would eliminate or reduce similar activities in the U.S. or Canada, 38 say they would not.
If the proposed NAFTA is implemented to create a North American Common Market, 31 see opportunities to rationalize manufacturing, 44 would expand or rationalize distribution, 26 see new sources for raw materials or components.
Major stimulus for the burgeoning interest of American manufacturers in a NAFTA embracing Mexico: The unprecedented economic reforms instituted since the 1986 admission of Mexico to GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs & Trade) and the 1988 election of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
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Pacific Bell
The offices of the firm's ISG Group in a warehouse made habitable and pleasant by Brown Baldwin Associates
MONICA GERAN
PHOTOGRAPHY: JANE LIDZ
At Pacific Bell's Information Service Group (ISG), what could have been a riches-to-rags tale did, in the hands of Brown Baldwin Associates, lead to a happy ending. For the ISG staff had been ensconced in so-called 'Class A' premises: the SOM-designed PacBell headquarters building in San Ramon, set in a park and providing all sorts of coveted amenities close at hand. Then growing pains forced relocation to larger space. And while the selected site, a nearby warehouse latterly converted for office use, had ostensibly been modernized to serve present-day needs, it actually required much remedial work to prevent the transferred group's experiencing a demoralizing letdown. This is where the designers took over, succeeding decisively in transforming a second-best setup into eminently desirable accommodations.
Not that the metamorphosis was easy. As Pamela Baldwin, president/principal designer in charge, tells it, structural problems as found were formidable indeed. For example: old walls had been pierced at 6-ft. intervals and fronted with a new window skin, leaving 4-ft. aisles between remaining sections and the built-out perimeter; column placements were erratic, a memento of past conjoinment of two buildings; and the facility lacked means for accommodating needed mechanical/electrical systems - this for a work dependent entirely on hook-ups to computerized equipment. (One of PacBell's entrepreneurial groups, ISG specializes in development of electronic communications.) Although Brown Baldwin had gone through a fast-track design charette and had prepared a costing/allowance plan, subsequent leasing negotiations, theoretically resolved by arbitration in the client firm's favor, derailed all best laid schemes. The five months' move-in schedule had to be aborted. Deficiencies remained.
The problems demanding curative attention afflicted both levels of the 70,000-sq.-ft. warehouse (another 50,000 sq.ft. are reserved for expansion). On the lower floor, on-grade concrete slab - no basement, of course - had to be saw-cut to accept electrical and telephone conduits. One flight up, more conduits were run through existing waffle pans, creating an unconventional duct system. As for ceilings, the ground floor's overhead reach would have been reduced to 8-ft.-3-in. if wiring/plumbing et al had been concealed under dropped planes; and this, in turn, would have resulted in a claustrophobic cave-like look ruled out as unacceptable by Ms. Baldwin. Accordingly she installed pendant lights while whiting out the exposed ductwork, making the volume seem high and bright. The upper level's sloping roof was slightly less depressive (in both senses of the word), but even so, high-up conduits also were left without cover-up camouflage. Then to assure efficiency and flexibility, extensive testing was conducted to gauge fit and feasibility of furnishing options. Systems furniture producers, Ms. Baldwin asides, tend to ignore the 'creep' syndrome; it just won't do, she explains, to quote width or length which, in actuality, might measure one inch less or more.
When finally able to implement the interiors program space allocations were devised so that no-one has a private enclosed office. That applies to all ranks, not excluding the top man in charge. But there are lots of open and glass-screened conference rooms, the latter designed with inward-angled entryways, grouped in blocks to engender a sense of territorial identity and to fit the prevailing concept of 'neighborhood' setting. A winding 'main street,' wider than typical corridors and distinguished by different lighting and flooring, is the main thoroughfare on each level; side aisles are strictly secondary to the broad rush-hour traffic routes. Paving of the main artery is of vinyl/marble-chip tiles, the composite substance said to give much better wear than all-plastic surfacing. Elsewhere floors are covered with carpet squares, cut on the bias to define make-believe thresholds running parallel to slanted conference entries. The basic color scheme is white, with strong staccato accents supplied by vertical signage panels painted bright red, yellow or green. Red overhead bars, actually inverted aluminum channels staggered to repeat contours of 'streets' below, and patterned carpet inserts at 'thresholds' similarly are in line with Ms. Baldwin's observation that chromatic impact is confined to signpost devices, which, for orientation purposes, are meant to stand out and be seen. Her wrap-up comment about the ISG group's verdict: "They love the new spaces."
The budget is described as tight. Completing the design team were Julie Young, project manager, with Katie Parr and Lenore Levinson.
King & Spalding
The law firm's Atlanta offices designed by Gensler and Associates Architects/Houston and New York
MONICA GERAN
PHOTOGRAPHY: JAIME ARDILES-ARCE
King & Spalding, reportedly one of the country's oldest and largest national law firms, had for many years been headquartered in a late-19th-century building in downtown Atlanta. As the company grew, ancillary space was taken in a '50s structure. But this horizontal kind of expansion, fragmenting as it did the staff's work, soon proved to be counterproductive. Needed instead was a long-term growth-plan, allowing for internal flexibility and inherent stability while also taking into account financial givens.
As often happens at large firms embarked on relocation, K&S turned to a major real estate advisor, in this case Cushman Realty Corporation. Joint talks led to the selection of several leading design firms, a list subsequently narrowed down to a few serious candidates. Gensler and Associates Architects, represented by the firm's Houston and New York offices and collectively selected as one of the finalists, did very well indeed in its initial presentation; but the final decision was left pending. Then for the next go-around, president Arthur Gensler brought in his big gun: Margo Grant, a managing principal of the New York office and a veteran with enviable reputation in law office design. Her experience, proposals and, most likely, her very presence, won the day - and the commission. Under the leadership of Ms. Grant and Jackson Greene, principals in charge/New York and Houston respectively, the combined teams undertook the 273,000-sp.-ft.-gross (250,000 rentable) King & Spalding project.
This still left the question of suitable site. To gauge opinions on preferred location as well as other wants, Margo Grant interviewed each of the client firm's lawyers and many support people, quizzing, it is estimated, about 100 staffers in all. Some wanted to remain in the downtown business sector, others preferred to venture farther uptown. Yet neither zone offered the kind of large building appropriate for long-term commitment. K&S, accordingly, turned to a developer who, it was felt, could meet the criteria set by Gensler and Cushman. Gerald D. Hines Interests and building managers Cousins Properties were tapped, and the de facto multi-partnership chose and screened a handful of architects. The building assignment went to John Burgee Architects with Philip Johnson as design consultant, and the venue became downtown Peachtree Street next to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, now interconnected to provide two-way access.
K&S occupies the eleven topmost floors of the new 50-story structure; nine are devoted to law practice per se, and the twin peak flights, linked by added stairs, to a mixed-use conference center, reception and dining rooms. The main library is on the 41st level. Below the K&S block, about 150,000 sq.ft. on six floors are reserved for future expansion. Space planning is basically the same for all tiers, though internally, as Ms. Grant notes, some differences apply. Among constants are: elevator lobbies with marble floors that repeat the stone used in elevator cabs, the latter application said to be something of a trademark in Gerald Hines buildings; raised mahogany panel doors at enclosed offices (though endangered woods are, it is said, to be avoided henceforth); unusually wide corridors, allowing two people to walk side by side (with arms swinging or gesticulating freely, one may suppose); and sizing standards in office occupancy. Partners are assigned 240 to 300 sq.ft. (often convertible into two associates' spaces, or otherwise flexible to allow for variations within and from floor to floor); 150 sq.ft. go to associates, 100 sq.ft. to paralegals, and 94 sq.ft. to secretaries. The last-named, in an interesting side note, could have been accommodated at work stations in open layouts, but firmly spoke up for cubicles, having become used to a measure of privacy in previous quarters. Two more factors pertaining to corporate practices, or what Ms. Grant calls "cultural" traits, affect the staff structure. One, the 40:20 ratio of partners vs. associates may seem lopsided in relation to other big law-firms; but here, in marked contrast, the second-in-command has a much better chance of promotion to the next step up. And two, instead of scattering support staff like so many left-overs, they share central facilities on one (40th) floor.
Describing the interiors approach generally, the design principal relates that K&S asked for some degree of tradition without, however, the obvious design clichés supposedly denoting kinship to olde English men's clubs. Since quite a few of the client firm's existing possessions, particularly fine antique furniture and Oriental rugs, were to be brought along, some important ingredients for traditional flavoring already were extant. As to the finer points of interior design planning and implementation, Margo Grant defers to senior designer Cricket Purdy. ("She can do what I would never dare ... Her eye discerns [and she applies] subtleties in colors and materials, often very complicated and time-consuming" are among her encomia.)
Ms. Purdy, accordingly, takes it from there. Her job began in earnest when stacking, i.e., floor-by-floor space allocations, had been determined. Following client discussions about the advisability of installing a reception area on each level - the verdict was affirmative - she developed the program of transposing the green, black or salmon marble treatment of Hines's elevator cabs forward into the lobbies. There, stone flooring is pale beige accentuated with 'feature strip' inserts in one of the three cap colors; elevator surrounds also are of marble. Progressing into walkways, one sees stronger colors used for carpets and painted walls, frequently coordinated with furniture as well. In all there are five different palettes applied to public areas on the nine practice floors. Within work spaces, secretarial-to-assistant ranks are given Knoll systems furniture and snowflake-pattern carpeting. Partners, on the other hand, have free rein to choose whatever they wish. This, one gathers from one of Margo Grant's earlier comments, at first caused a bit of consternation among the designers, who feared that - as indeed happened - results would be unpredictable (not her word). But allowing the legal brass to treat their spaces as expressions of personal individuality is, she says, another example of the firm's "unique culture" that makes K&S special, to her and, one may assume, her client's clients.
The two top floors having been left in their raw state when the Gensler team took over, the designers were able to specify architectural detailing as well as built elements such as the conjunctive stairs. Designed in the proverbial grand and stately manner, with treads and rails of fumed oak, the connector unit rises under a dome ceiling toward an inside Palladian window, this too created by the design group. Although there is no natural light influx through the dome, its paint colors, seemingly changing from pale periwinkle to deep lavender as warm cathode lighting is turned off or on, the area assumes the airiness of an outdoor setting. The topflight terrace was to have been ringed with a parapet, but Gensler's preference for a graceful ballustradebalustrade, open to city views, prevailed. On lower floors, lighting is said to be fairly simple, with lots of down-beam fixtures plus pendants to highlight artworks contained in niches.
Jackson Greene, principal in charge from the Houston office, confirms the obvious: that close and consistent collaboration with the New York contingent gave invaluable continuity to the project. Singling out project architect P. Tara Wasmuth for special plaudits, he notes that she was a key figure in the joint design development, spending a great deal of time on site as coordinator and administrator of construction documents. "The main success of the job," he concludes, "comes from knowing that the client is extremely pleased and proud of the results. Their exceptionally good maintenance reflects this, too." Adding, "And I hope to work with them when they go into expansion."
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Showbiz for Beginners
What it takes to break into America's most exclusive industry
By Jon Murnick and Estelle Vaughns
Every boy and girl dreams of becoming a movie star. By the time most reach college, however, that dream has faded to a distant memory, and they are content to remain observers of the entertainment world. But a select few stand fast in their conviction that there is a place for them on the screen, behind the camera, or in the executive suite. Many of these students will indeed go on to find fulfilling jobs in the entertainment industry, but not without hurdling a daunting series of initial obstacles.
As most everyone in entertainment testifies, the most difficult challenge of a Hollywood career presents itself at the outset: getting a foot in the door. This could probably be said of most industries, but it is particularly true of the entertainment business, where there are so many talented people struggling for any given position that a relationship of friendship and trust can be the distinguishing factor in selecting between applicants for upper-level positions. Richard Lindheim began his career in the business by landing an entry level position in a network research department. He now serves as Vice President of Programming Strategy for the MCA Television Group. Reflecting on his years in the industry, he observes that "the hardest task was simply to get a job in the industry; it's much easier to move around once you're in the industry than it is to go from the outside to the inside, [even if you start out as] a clerk, or a gopher to some producer."
Jane Read Martin started as Jane Curtain's secretary on Saturday Night Live, but worked her way up to assisting Woody Allen, and is now an associate producer for The Joan Rivers Show. She agrees that the key is to start at the bottom and work your way to the top, but advises against one particular inroad. "Never offer to intern. If you're good, you should get paid," she says. While interning can be a good way to gain experience while in college, it is a bad way to start your career.
Once inside, the hottest opportunities are jobs in marketing or at an agency. Many of today's network and studio heads began their careers in one of these two specialties. Research and legal affairs departments have also produced a fair number of the industry's leaders.
One's outlook for success can also depend on the type of work he wishes to do. Lindheim suggests that getting a job in a creative area is "really easy." He adds, "The entrance into being creative is to write. If you can write, then you will progress very rapidly. There is a great demand for writers, and a good writer quickly moves into developing and creating his or her own show."
Conversely, positions for executives and directors are in much shorter supply now, due the recession.
Actress Melissa Clayton, who appeared in the television shows The Wonder Years and The Hogan Family, offers insight into the performing side of the entertainment industry. "The biggest obstacle is becoming a member of the Screen Actors' Guild (SAG). Without an SAG card, directors are usually not interested in you." Yet, paradoxically, the prerequisite for Guild membership is performing in at least one professional shoot. Clayton suggests acting in a commercial to get a card.
An added obstacle for the budding actor or actress is finding an agent. While there are many agencies to choose from, the better ones will represent only established talents.
Whatever career one is seeking in the entertainment business, emotional stamina is a necessity. Despite over thirty years of Hollywood experience and previous production successes such as Jaws, The Sting, and Cocoon, when Richard Zanuck tried to obtain studio backing for Driving Miss Daisy, he had to contend with consistent skepticism and rejection. Only his persistence and willingness to shoulder some of the financial risk of the project himself allowed it to get off the ground and go on to become an Academy Award winner with over to thousand percent domestic return on capital. Zanuck advises, "You've got to look yourself in the mirror and say, 'Am I the kind of person that is prepared for tremendous rejection?' because that's what happens. Your ideas are shot down right and left, and doors are closed in your face. I don't care who you are. That shouldn't deter you if you honestly feel you have a talent for the business, but you should realize what's in store."
Both Clayton and Lindheim also stress persistance. Says Lindheim, "While it has never been easy to get into the entertainment business, the opportunities are going to be there for those who persevere long enough."
Buy These Jeans.
Bugle Boy's new Color Denim commercials mix flash and honesty.
By Andrew Stern
Striking scenes fill the television screen. Scantily-clad women. Provocative poses. The commercial you are watching could be for almost anything, now that selling with images rather than information has become an accepted form of advertising. And it is no secret what kind of images sell: sex, sex, sex.
In this new campaign for Bugle Boy jeans, however, an innovative ad company called DDB Needham Worldwide has taken the trend one step further, and in effect turned the concept on its head. They have made a sensation in the advertising world by showing the commercials for what they really are, and honestly and clearly explaining their intentions behind them.
The Bugle Boy Color Denim commercials, which were released in November, feature outlandishly sexy flashes of beautiful women choreographed to rock music with video-like cinematography. A string of subtitles runs along the bottom of the screen, frankly explaining the 'motives' of the campaign. [see box at right<O_>box<O/>].
The premise of the commercials is a conspiracy between the advertising company and the (male) viewers. If this is the kind of thing you want to see, they explain, support the ads by buying Bugle Boy Color Denim jeans. Then Bugle Boy will let them keep running the ads. There is absolutely no mention of the merits of the jeans, or any implication that you should buy them on such a basis. You are apparently asked to do so simply because you like the ads themselves.
The irony is that these ads too are just another form of image, and their real influence lies in linking that image with their product. In this respect, they are very similar to the image-based advertisements that preceded them. It is their frankness in admitting that image sells, however, that breaks the conventions of the industry.
It is also unheard of to run an advertisement in which the advertising agency plays a visible role. Most commercials lead people to believe that they were made by the company featured as a direct communication to viewers. DDB Needham, however, admits its role as an intermediary, and would even have viewers believe that Bugle Boy is somewhat uninformed as to what they are doing in the company's name. This sort of tongue-in-cheek mockery of convention is as refreshing as it is creative. In a world of packaged honesty, it is nice to see some honest packaging.
Balancing Act
College athletes, coaches, and league officials comment on the challenges of competing in both the classroom and the international arena.
By Andrew O'Brien
Is there still a place for the student athlete in today's intensely competitive arena of international amateur athletics? As college rivalries continue to command a growing share of the national spotlight, university coaches and administrators are placing increased importance on managing successful athletic programs. The result has been that varsity sports at many Division I schools now demand such great commitment from athletes that they can no longer realistically be considered 'extracurricular' activities.
Regrettably, the intensified pressures of interscholastic competition also have led to a number of academic violations and recruiting scandals, tarnishing the reputation of college athletics. Moreover, many schools have gradually evolved into split communities, with the general student body on one side and the student athletes on the other, each group with its own dorms, dining halls, and even classes.
In order to integrate student athletes back into the campus mainstream and remove the stain of scandal from the fabric of collegiate sports, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) has reformed its standards governing the conduct of all university athletic programs. Beginning with the 1991-92 school year, the new regulations limit the maximum mandatory practice time which a coach is allowed to schedule to twenty hours per week. Over the next few years, athletic dorms will be eliminated and training table meals will be cut to just one per day. The NCAA has also recently toughened the academic eligibility requirements for freshmen participating in athletics by increasing the minimum permissible grade point average for thirteen core high school courses to 2.5 and demanding that each student have achieved a combined SAT score of 700 or above on at least one occasion. Exceptions are allowed, however, since students with lower GPA's can compete if their SAT scores are correspondingly higher.
What effect will these measures have on college athletes and sports programs? Reactions from coaches have been uncertain. "We did need some guidelines," acknowledges Francis Allen, the men's gymnastics coach at the University of Nebraska. "Some schools would practice for six or seven hours a day. But what [the NCAA] gave us is not very good." All of the senior swimmers who competed under coach Peter Daland at the University of Southern California during the 1990-91 season graduated, and sixty percent are now attending graduate school. Daland therefore feels that "for some sports, like swimming, the regulations were not necessary. We can achieve the same results without a lot of this legislation." Prospective Olympic swimmer Chris Smith, currently a sophomore at Montgomery College in Maryland, expressed a similar perspective: "It's not hard to balance classes and swimming if you're responsible and plan ahead."
Critics have also levelled a number of more specific charges against the new rules. Some feel that a greater proportion of minorities will lose eligibility than their non-minority counterparts, because the former tend to perform less effectively on the SAT. Richard Schultz, head of the NCAA President's Commission, disagrees. "Research indicates that these new standards...would only reduce the number of minorities participating in intercollegiate athletics...by about one percent." Schultz also took issue with the charge that the new standards would prevent young athletes from disadvantaged high schools from attending good colleges. "The four year institutions [which make up] the NCAA are not the only avenue of access for young people. There are prep schools, there are junior colleges, and the regulations have been changed so there's access."
Most students and coaches agree that the standards set are minimal, especially since the GPA/SAT requirements have been placed on a sliding scale and are no longer absolute. "From what we have heard," added NCAA Director of Communications Jim Marciani, "the 2.0 [minimum GPA previously in effect] was not very much a factor in determining whether someone was going to be eligible or not, so I don't expect the 2.5 [minimum GPA] to have much more of an impact." Allen asserted his position more bluntly: "People who can't meet these requirements just don't belong in Division I, whether they're black, green, or purple."
Restrictions on mandatory practices have raised another question as well: will college athletes training for the upcoming Barcelona Olympics be able to prepare effectively? Daland believes that they will. In fact, he feels that the NCAA rulings will not affect American Olympic performance at all, because if dedicated athletes encounter training conflicts, they will "just drop out of college." The decisions of former Stanford swimmer Janet Evans and other Olympic prospects to leave school in order to pursue more rigorous training programs seem to substantiate Daland's arguments.
Others disagree with his assessment, however. "I believe [that students who leave have] other motives for quitting college," commented Marciani.
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SUPER JOE
BLUE JAYS SLUGGER JOE CARTER IS A BIG-TIME RUN PRODUCER WITH A BIG HEART
BY RICK WEINBERG
He probably gave the money away, probably to one of his sisters. They were always asking him for dough anyway - and he'd always give it to them. Sure, no problem, he'd say; it's yours.
The money was for his father's birthday present. Joe Carter was 11. He earned his money washing windshields while standing on a bucket, 'managing' the soda machine and working the cash register at his dad's service station on 6th and Robinson in downtown Oklahoma City. He wasn't sure what to buy his dad. Maybe a necktie. Dad needed one for his Sunday suit. Maybe fishing hooks. "Dad loves to fish," Joe Carter says.
But he gave the money away. Handed it right over. He couldn't say no.
"I remember him saying he couldn't buy me anything because he didn't have money," Joe Carter Sr. was saying. "Then he says, 'But, Dad, I'm pitching tonight, and I'm dedicating the game to you.'"
That night, pitching for his midget team, the Falcons, Joe Carter pitched a no-hitter and struck out 21.
Happy birthday, Dad.
Joe Carter, the all-star left fielder for the Toronto Blue Jays and the major leagues' No. 1 RBI man over the last six seasons, is still giving money away. Just not as often.
"I pulled him aside one day and told him, 'Joe, this ain't good,'" says Joe Carter's mother, Athelene. "You've got to stop giving so much money away 'cause people aren't gonna learn to be responsible for themselves. They ain't gonna learn to stand by themselves."
So Joe had to learn how to say no - and, at times, it tore him apart inside. With six sisters and four brothers always calling, always asking for help to pay the rent or electric bill, it was hard for Joe to say no. It went against his nature, his character - and he had the dough anyway. Oh, he'd go on a binge here or there. Couldn't help himself. Like right before the holidays, when he took his 40 nephews and nieces down to Toys 'R Us and bought them bikes, games, athletic equipment, video games. Total bill: only around $5,000.
That's Joe.
"Joe and me were at one of those ATM machines a few years back," says Joe's brother Fred, a former minor-leaguer with the Yankees, Indians and Angels. "There was this older woman standing behind Joe. Ragged woman. Had just one shoe. Well, Joe gets $100 out of the machine and, suddenly, the machine stops - it ran out of money. Joe turns around, looks at the woman, looks at her car full of kids and gives her the money."
That's Joe.
"Joe Carter is one of the nicest, most genuine and sincere people you could ever meet," says Padres superstar Tony Gwynn, who's a lot like Carter himself. "He'd do anything for anybody. Anything. Has a heart of gold.
"Couple of years ago, at spring training, all the guys who weren't gonna make the club, the minor-leaguers, well, Joe took 'em all to dinner, gave them all kinds of advice, batting gloves, shoes, and I'm sitting there thinking, 'Man, here's this veteran, this superstar, taking time to take these guys out, treat them like major-leaguers.' And I'm saying, 'Man, I wish there was someone like him around when I was a rookie.'"
Joe Carter used to hand over his pocketful of coins to his sister, Caroline, for lunch money down at Millwood High. Every school day. He was 13. She was 15. "We'd wait for my sister to come by the room before starting classes," Joe says. "It became a ritual. There'd be a knock at the door. 'There's Joe's sister,' and we'd start class. A ritual."
Joe Carter was always telling his folks how tired he was of seeing them lugging themselves to work every morning. So, a few years back, after signing one of his first million-dollar contracts, he told his folks they were retiring, to pick a date, and that would be it. No more work. Permanent vacation. He had purchased an annuity that would pay them $3,000 a month for the next 20 years. He didn't just do it for his folks; he did it for his wife's too.
"I asked him one day, 'Joe, are we worthy of this?'" Joe Carter Sr. says. "So Joe turns to me and says, 'Dad, you drove a rig six days a week, and on the seventh, you'd wash, grease and change the oil on it for $140 - and send the check to me when I was at Wichita [State]. Yeah, Dad, you're worth it.'"
That's Joe. Kind. Generous. Warm.
One day, Carter's mom receives this phone call from a gal whose friend had an ill son. Cystic Fibrosis. The boy didn't have long to live, they said. He was a big baseball fan, and his favorite player was Joe Carter. So Athelene calls her son at his home in Leawood, Kansas, some 400 miles away, and tells him about the phone call. Next morning, Joe's in town, loaded with gifts, eating lunch with the boy.
The boy, Dylan Williams, is alive today.
"Hey, don't go portraying me as being perfect," Joe Carter says. "There's nothing perfect about Joe Carter. Nothing at all."
He says he's got faults, shortcomings. "I'm selfish," he says, leaning forward on the couch in the entertainment room of his 6,100-square-foot home, just a short lob from the homes of George Brett and Bret Saberhagen. "I've taken things for granted. When you play pro sports, when you reach a certain level, everything centers around you. When that happens, it's not Diana Carter anymore; it's Joe Carter's wife. It's not Kia or Ebony Carter anymore; it's Joe Carter's daughters. I got so caught up in the game, I forgot about how I affected the people around me. My wife, my kids, they lost part of their identity because of me."
The voice is a dark velour. Smooth. Joe Williams smooth. He chooses his words carefully, after reflection, and between clauses mixes in a smile that's Indian summer warm. Joe Carter's cool. The voice croons. Welcome; what can I do for you?
But some misconstrue Carter's calm as a sign of weakness, of softness - and how can you play tough, hard-nosed ball and be such a softy? Being so goodhearted, so kind, perhaps it adversely affects Carter's game. Maybe he's not intense enough. Maybe he actually can tolerate losing - and, heaven knows, he knows about that, having played on six sub-.500 teams in eight seasons.
"When Joe first came to Cleveland, I platooned him with Mel Hall," says former Indians manager Pat Corrales, now a Braves coach. "I remember how disappointed he was when he wasn't in the lineup. He'd be edgy during games, especially by the fifth or sixth inning. He was always ready, always holding a bat. When he anticipated me calling on him to hit, I could see his knuckles get tight around the bat; he'd be squeezing it that hard. If that's the sign of a guy who's soft or a guy who accepts losing... sorry, I don't buy it."
Says former Padres manager and GM Jack McKeon, who engineered the blockbuster trade that delivered Carter to San Diego for the 1990 season, but whose firing led to Carter being dealt to Toronto by his successor, Joe McIlvaine: "All you need to do is look into Joe's eyes to see his intensity. That tells the story. The guy's tough. The guy's intense. Believe me."
Some things take convincing. When you see Carter standing at the plate, bottom of the ninth, tie game, runner at third base, and he's smiling, what are you supposed to think?
"I'll tell ya, I took a lot of heat in Cleveland for that," says Carter, who played for the Indians from 1984 to 1989. "They could not relate to my smile, my easygoing approach. I've never taken this game so seriously where I don't have fun.
"Tell you this much: When that pitch is coming, I'm as serious as anyone. You'll never see me smiling when that pitch is coming. Never. I'm able to go from one concentration level to the next in a split second. I have the ability to focus in a snap."
Joe Carter's one of those guys who's able to separate his personal life from the game, the type who has to. The game is overwhelming; it can drive you batty in seven out of 10 times at bat. Baseball consumes Carter, but not to where it controls his moods. Sure, losing bothers him; it just doesn't prompt him to rip up the clubhouse or go home and kick the kids.
"I've heard the stories about how the old guys played the game," he says. "When they got beat, they'd get mad, go to a bar, get drunk, throw up, come back the next day, play and be mad as hell. That's not me. That's not how Joe Carter does things. If someone's looking for that, they're looking at the wrong person.
"You have to deal with defeat sometime in your life, somehow. Fact is you're gonna lose sometimes. You have to learn how to cope with it. If you don't, you'll go crazy."
There have been times when he's wanted to scream in frustration, kick a garbage can in the runway, throw his glove against the dugout wall. But he refrains from throwing tantrums. What kind of an example would that be?
"Joe didn't bust up any chairs," says Corrales, "but I know he wanted to a few times."
Joe Carter's will to win is so powerful, so passionate, that he became adept at picking up little signs which alter games, turning possible defeat into victory. "One game," says Gwynn, "he comes up to me after scoring in the first inning and says, 'This guy's tipping his pitches. Watch his index finger [on the glove hand]. When he bends it, fastball. When it's straight, breaking ball.' Sure enough, that's what he was doing. By the second inning, we knocked him out of the game.
"Another time, we come in from the field, and Joe says, 'They're stealing Benny's [catcher Benito Santiago] signs. The [runner] at second is telling the hitter what's coming with body signs. His right arm is out when Benny calls a fastball; his right leg is out on a curve.' Sure enough, next inning, they get a runner on second, and I see him doing all these crazy things. We had Benny change his signs."
Joe Carter's desire to win won't allow him to take a day off, something he hasn't done since 1988. He's played in every game, all 162 of 'em, the last three seasons. Among active players, he's baseball's No. 2 iron man, trailing only Cal Ripken Jr. in consecutive games played. When Carter injured an ankle in Game 3 of last year's AL Championship Series, he refused to leave. He could barely swing with any power, but there he was, playing on heart, on courage.
"In this day and age, when guys fake injuries and don't put forth the effort necessary to help their club win, well, I can't accept that," he says. "Fans pay $20 to see you play. I can't disappoint them. I won't disappoint them. If I don't play, the fan who pays that money isn't getting his money's worth, and I just won't allow that to happen."
That's Joe.
Joe Carter's trademark, his 'obsession,' is spelled out on the Kansas license plate of his red Jeep Cherokee: JC RBIS.
As in Joe Carter, Runs Batted In.
Perfect.
"Appropriate," he says with a wink.
He's knocked in 100 or more RBI in five of the last six years - and the only time he didn't, he knocked in 98. His RBI total of 653 since 1986 is No. 1 in the majors. More than Jose Canseco. More than Ripken.
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PLCs GET THE OPEN LOOK
JOHN R. GYORKI
Staff Editor
Open systems used to be a buzz word that was seldom heard outside the computer industry. But not anymore. An open architecture, where machines from numerous vendors can talk to each other, is becoming as important on the factory floor as in offices. Makers of programmable logic controllers (PLCs) say their customers increasingly ask for open architecture, both in new systems and in upgrades.
An increased reliance on electronic networks is what's driving the trend. Manufacturers now need PLCs that send information not only back to centralized mainframes, but also to other controllers on the production line. The result is that more data is being shuttled back and forth between PLCs, as well as up and down the manufacturing hierarchy.
Customers are also demanding large-scale improvements in control software. As systems grow and machine throughput increases, ladder logic becomes increasingly cumbersome - it struggles handling critical control loops and multiple tasks. Moreover, PLC users are becoming more sophisticated about the control techniques they use in manufacturing. This means that PLCs need faster response and more computational abilities. To squeeze high performance out of PLCs, manufacturers are providing software enhancements that include higher level or alternative languages such as C, Basic, and assembler.
Open systems
"Everyone is moving in the direction of CIM and integration," says Ron Ellis, PLC product marketing manager, Omron Inc., Schamburg, Ill. The push toward automation puts a high priority on capturing considerable information for management analysis and on sophisticated operator interfaces. The need is for fast and reliable networks.
Coprocessing functions, such as numeric and graphic operations, must be handled by the PLC hardware, not the ladder logic. Then hardware and software bridges must be built between PLCs and system host computers. Some PLC vendors offer a VME standard platform as a solution because it can support a high-speed local-area network (LAN) running at up to 2M baud on the factory floor. But there is a problem. Many users are unwilling to adapt the VMEbus because some VME manufacturers deviate from what is not a rigid standard to begin with. Then, when interface problems arise, it's difficult to fix and impossible to blame any one VME product. Users often make-do with impromptu fixes that let modules work together. PLC vendors view such solutions as too shaky and are reluctant to sanction their use on proprietary PLC backplanes.
Perhaps most important for automation is software. In recent years, much effort has gone into software for sophisticated operator interfaces. Many vendors have generated some elegant operator panels using new PLC programming tools and graphical user interface cards.
Process controls and machine tools increasingly use simulation and emulation software for display purposes. Displays that give operators a view of valves operating, vats filling, and tool bits cutting depend on such software to update screens accurately and fast. And as applications become more complex, some PLC vendors believe computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools will help automate a large portion of the software development and maintenance programs.
Communications
There is no one standard for LANs. However, some types of networks are more widely used than others. For example, the top and lower three levels of the Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP) are frequently found in factories, but they have yet to be recognized as standards.
The original goal of MAP was to provide major PLC suppliers with a standard that would replace or work in addition to their proprietary communication protocols. Users could then mix and match control devices based on their cost, features, and performance. Unfortunately, MAP turned out to be an elusive goal. Suppliers could not get together on essential elements to make it work, such as physical connections, link/physical layers, protocol stack, and application protocol. Consequently, only parts of MAP have been adapted and it is not a universally recognized standard.
PLCs aren't the only pieces of automation gear sporting communication facilities. Machine and process controllers of all sorts now come equipped with a communications link. One common application is in motion controllers. Here, the minor loops that control machine motion also feed information and data to supervisory computers for diagnostics. The information provides management with a preview of possible impending failures, tool wear, and data for statistical process control (SPC).
Communication links are showing up not only between PLCs, but even between the PLC and its input/output terminals. The reason is that there are economic benefits to putting I/O terminals closer to sensors and actuators. For one, the wires connecting sensors and actuators to the I/O block are shorter. Less-expensive twisted pair or coaxial cable then connects the remote I/O block to the CPU. The resulting system costs less to build, assemble, and install.
Another benefit to PLC vendors and OEMs alike is that only one I/O product need be manufactured for the entire PLC line. In the past, vendors had to design different I/O modules for every rack or other form factor in the product line. But now, boxes the size of a pack of cigarettes reside remotely, serve as I/O terminal blocks, and communicate with any level PLC.
Software
PLCs initially were designed to replace relay racks. Thus, early on, they were packaged to look like relay boxes to make them nonthreatening for electricians. For the same reason, they were programmed using relay ladder logic and designed to operate sequentially to emulate relays.
Today, computers are becoming ever less intimidating, and the original justification for using ladder logic is rapidly evaporating. There is a trend for more sophisticated users to take advantage of the PLC's computer power by migrating to higher level languages such as C and Basic.
ELIMINATING SPAGHETTI I/O
All PLC vendors are rethinking their I/O concepts. One reason is that even small differences in I/O can have an impact on PLC sales. So vendors are paying attention to their I/O offerings. This has brought, among other things, more I/O for low-to-middle range PLCs. Because first cost is a major issue in these recessionary times, users are turning to smaller PLCs but need the I/O of large-scale PLCs.
One approach, designed to meet such needs comes from GE Fanuc, which developed a low-cost interface module and an architecture for a low end PLC that handles distributed I/O. An input module doubles the density of the Series 90-30 PLC to 320 I/O points in a 10-slot rack. The modules handle a wide variety of sensors and actuators by providing <*_>plus-minus<*/>24-Vdc logic, 5-V TTL logic, and <*_>plus-minus<*/>12-V logic in various I/O configurations.
Siemens also sees a need for distributed I/O. Says Uwe Frank, marketing manager, Siemens Industrial Automation, "I/O selection from a customer perspective should be unlimited. Expect to see I/O and sensors coming from different vendors that will work from the same communications bus and is available in numerous form factors."
Compact NEMA-4 I/O will complement recently announced NEMA-12 remote I/O on Fieldbus. Siemens' entry is its model ET200K, a fully sealed and mountable module directly connected to Fieldbus. The Siemens distributed I/O network, Sinec L2DP/ET200, has a throughput speed of 1 to 10 msec. Sinec is a subset of the Siemens Fieldbus network. Over 150 international companies make products compatible with the standard.
Allen-Bradley, the biggest player in the U.S. market, states that its most important improvement recently has been in distributed I/O. For example, Allen-Bradley recently introduced a model 1791 I/O block. The new I/O blocks contain a variety of functions to handle special applications, such as motion control, plus analog and ac signals as well as traditional dc.
Although distributed I/O was used in the past, a remote point consisted of several modules, a power supply, and a rack. Now, it is enclosed in a block no bigger than a brick allowing it to be located closer to sensors and actuators. Also, Allen-Bradley expanded its 16-point module to 128. But industry's focus still appears to be on blocks under 20 points for more distributed capability.
WHAT OPEN SYSTEMS REALLY MEAN
Some PLC users buy only from one source because doing so gives them a sense of security. But others, who have the skills and the technology, mix and match gear from various vendors to get a more customized system. "One way of customizing systems," says Martyn Jones, marketing manager, Modicon Inc., North Andover, Mass., "is to interconnect different PLCs and automation devices through a software program and a network. But automation equipment vendors must sit down together and hash out protocols and specifications to ensure that their netwoks mesh right down to communication chip levels." Modicon had such discussions with more than 40 companies. The result was a partnership program and a series of products called Modconnect that provides them with a widely compatible, reliable network.
Another approach to open systems between computers and PLCs is through circuit boards that plug into standard computer backplanes and match with a variety of LANs. Examples include boards for the IBM-AT, PS-2 microchannel, and VME computers.
Allen-Bradley Co., Milwaukee, Wis., is also a leading proponent of open systems. Mark Moriarty, commercial marketing supervisor, says that Allen-Bradley must make certain the people who come into the protocol understand networking requirements in detail. Opening up the system to other vendors also opens up some liability because it lets customers introduce errors when modifying processor bits and bytes. "But despite some danger, opening systems gives users the capability to make changes and develop new solutions faster than purchasing and installing new gear," adds Moriarty.
Says Robert Soré, Mitsubishi Electronics America Inc., Mt. Prospect, Ill., "We choose to keep the bus proprietary, but tie into networks such as MAP and Ethernet because we don't offer a VMEbus-type product. But in a sense, we open our system by exchanging communication specifications with other PLC vendors so the network that evolves is error free." The advantage of retaining a proprietary system is having control over interrupts and internal information that can be accessed by outside PLCs and computers. A proprietary system is more robust, fast, focused, and dedicated to the problem at hand than an open one. Furthermore, a disadvantage of a VME-type open chassis is that there are many component suppliers in the market with product variations to the standard that makes it difficult to pinpoint a problem when one comes up.
LINKING PLCS TO COMPUTERS
Computers are being used increasingly in programmable controller applications to provide graphic interfaces, networking, mass storage, or to run off-the-shelf application software. But combining computers and PLCs through an RS-232 communications path is limiting. The link is relatively slow and susceptible to noise interference. "To get around the problem, some companies have integrated PLCs and computers within a single box with parallel communication paths," says Paul Virgo, director of marketing, Pro-Log Corp., Monterey, Calif. The computer performs the computations and data manipulation, while freeing the PLC to handle I/O scanning and improve response time.
Two different approaches have been used to integrate computers and PLCs. For one, some PLC makers provide an optional computer module that plugs into its own PLC that uses a proprietary bus. But, says Virgo, at this level, no vendor has a PLC rack that is so standard that it can accept plug-in modules from other vendors.
The second approach is an open architecture. Siemens and Modicon, for example, make a PLC on a card that plugs into a computer passive backplane, such as an IBM-AT bus, and provides connectivity to a variety of networks. These open systems conform to a set of standards with many companies providing hardware and software compatible products. But industrial computer companies have been slow to make such PLC modules for the computer industry, perhaps because they lack familiarity with the PLC controls world.
Pro-Log Inc., however, is one of the few firms that does provide a combined computer and a series of programmable controllers that interface with a wide variety of networks. It employs a 486-based processor for DOS and Windows applications along with a ladder logic processor with scan times less than 1 msec.
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Where's the bubble? - A turning point for gas?
Mark E. Teel, Engineering Editor
The 1992 edition of Natural Gas Trends, a joint study by Arthur Andersen and Cambridge Energy Research Associates, says the first signs of a upturn in the natural gas sector are showing up. This has been expected and predicted for sometime by many of us in the industry. A turning point has in fact probably been reached, but conflicting pressures will still contribute to market uncertainty.
"Demand growth has been the most important factor in tightening the market balance, with consumption having risen nearly 20% over the past five years," said Everett Gibbs, Arthur Andersen's managing director for natural gas industry services and Thomas Robinson, CERA's director for North American natural gas, study authors. They added that "At the same time, questions have emerged about future supply availability as a result of retrenchment in the upstream U.S. gas industry, where the top 40 reserve holders replaced less than 72% of production last year."
Tightening supply and demand, and regulatory changes are producing significant effects, according to the study, including:
Gas price will be more volatile and less predictable on seasonal patterns
Competitive restructuring and realignment among producers, pipelines, marketers and distribution companies driven by FERC Order 636 and a tightening market will benefit merchants who can provide flexible, reliable supply.
According to Gibbs and Robinson, "The industry as a whole has clearly entered a new cycle that includes increased consumption, growing supply constraints, new competitive pressure and for some producers, a return to profitability."
Supply. Upstream financial constrains and more cautious 'just-in-time' strategies by producers have led to a sharp decline in gas development activity. This may lead to near-term declines in natural gas reserves and productive capacity. Longer term, the North American resource base remains abundant as evident by ongoing discoveries in important gas regions, including the Gulf of Mexico Flexture trend, Mobile Bay and British Columbia.
Demand. Low prices and markets like non-electric power generation have resulted in gas demand rising to over 19 Tcf. The bright side of recent depressed wellhead prices is that usage has remained high in spite of the recession and markets in power generation, commercial cooling, vehicles and Mexico remain to be served.
New transmission capacity. Alleviation of bottlenecks, new capacity, improved access to major basins and increased Canadian exports has further integrated the North American market and shifted the focus of transmission companies to managing under-utilized pipeline capacity.
Storage and futures. Traditional seasonal price patterns are being redefined by increased working-gas storage volumes and growing prominence of the futures market. As markets continue to tighten, the role of storage in buffering price shocks will become increasingly important.
FERC Order 636. The most sweeping regulatory changes since 1985, this order creates two commodities, natural gas and transmission capacity. It reduces customers' need to use interruptible transportation, places greater cost pressures and risk on distribution companies and end-users, and creates new opportunities for gas merchants. This offers strategic opportunities for gas marketers, brokers, producers and other middlemen to provide new, re-bundled services.
Rig activity. Gas exploration and development rig activity dropped to 250 rigs during March 1992, but is now increasing as the year-end deadline for tax-incentive drilling approaches. Gas demand is projected to increase, no one we've heard of foresees a decrease in usage, neither onshore or offshore rig activity is expected to increase significantly in the near future, and recent gas development activity simply is not enough to replace production or reserves.
Reserves. U.S. proved reserves in the lower 48 increased slightly to 160 Tcf from 1989 to 1990. Total natural gas production has increased to almost 17 Tcf, which helped keep the reserves-to-production ratio (R/P) flat at 9.5 years.
Reserve replacement by the top 40 reserve-holding companies declined in 1991. For 1990, they replaced 105% of production by reserve additions exclusive of net acquisitions. By the end of 1991, this fell to 72% of production. The decline is indicative of persistent low prices. Many producers have chosen to delay or cancel E&P gas projects and shift emphasis to oil or international developments until prices recover.
For 1990, average replacement rate by the top 20 reserve-holding companies rose to 108% of production and the second 20 had a replacement rate of 95%, excluding net acquisitions. During 1991 average replacement rates fell to 69 and 85%, respectively.
Bottomhole assemblies: Getting back to basics
Thomas R. Wright, Jr., Editor
Operators all over the world are engineering their own crooked holes and drillstring failures, according to drilling consultant, Roy L. Dudman of Houston, by ignoring what's been known for years about drillstrings and bottomhole assemblies (BHAs). The basics are that steel does not accumulate fatigue unless overworked, and that the correct packed hole assembly will drill a straight, useable hole, free of doglegs, keyseats, offsets and spiraling.
Dudman feels that drilling a crooked hole is inexcusable and recommends using a packed hole assembly consisting of three zones of stabilization provided by large-diameter, short drill collars and a 30-ft, large-OD collar. Multiple stabilizers/reamers are used in Zone 1 (see accompanying drawing), depending upon a formation's crooked hole tendency and abrasiveness. When any other type of BHA is used, Dudman says a directional drilling expert should be employed.
Stabilizers above a packed hole or packed pendulum assembly only prevent differential sticking and drill collar wear. Large-OD collars with a bending strength ratio greater than 2.5:1 are the best tool for controlling hole deviation, minimizing connection failure and providing useable weight on bit (WOB). Large, stiff collars centralized directly above the bit tend to overpower the crooked hole tendencies of the formation. Weight, stiffness and stabilizer clearance determine the ability of a packed hole assembly to control deviation.
Small, limber collars increase a packed hole assembly's tendency to deviate and reduce the restoring force of a pendulum assembly. Small collars also contribute to drill collar whirl between the bit and the first stabilizer, and between stabilizers. The smaller the collars and the longer the length between points of centralization, the greater the effect of buckling and high rpm. Collar whirl and vibration resulting from high-stress-level drillstrings and a poorly designed BHA increases the accumulation of fatigue and the rapid destruction of drillstring components.
Low-stress-level drillstrings designed for 12 1/4-in. and larger holes have experienced no reported failures during the past five years. Low-stress-level pin-up drillstrings for smaller hole sizes have been used in over 300 near-vertical, extended-reach and horizontal hole sections to depths exceeding 24,000 ft without connection or tube failure. The larger-than-normal sizes provided by these drillstrings increase weight and stiffness to control deviation, increase torsional/tensile strength to minimize failures and increase bore size to reduce pressure loss.
Campaign Against Adulterators To Go On
We must admit to some surprise when we ran across the above headline in Progress, a monthly publication of Pakistan Petroleum Ltd. But we won't admit to the vision that came to mind until we read further. Alas, it seems the story was about certain petroleum products dealers who were either "watering down" or otherwise altering fuels to reap extra profits.
Speaking of headlines, here's one we wish we had thought of: "Half of the City Council (insert U.S. Congress, if you like) Are Crooks." It seems that the local paper, under threat of a libel suit, decided to capitulate and ran the following headline in the next issue: "Half of the City Council Aren't Crooks." (We thank our friends at The Montana Oil Journal for this item.)
The MOJ also ran this jewel in a recent issue: Said an irate roughneck to the Casper waitress, "This chicken is only half cooked. Take it back to the cook and tell him where he can shove it."
Replied the bored waitress, "Sorry sir, but there are three T-bones and a Bell Pepper in front of you."
E&P success hinges on good data management
J.V. (Jack) Cowan, Contributing Editor
Success of E&P operations is directly dependent on availability of quality data needed for analysis processes. Organizations that systematize data management procedures benefit most by being able to readily integrate E&P data into powerful computer applications.
We often hear the 80/20 rule applied to computer analyses, "80% of a professional's time is needed for gathering and pre-processing data leaving only 20% for the analysis phase." Conoco reported at the recent SPE Petroleum Computer Conference that proper data management can halve data collection and preparation time therein doubling the time available for analysis. This requires identifying, organizing and cataloging available data items into a computer database.
A Conoco data management task force found that over 10 million technical data items (seismic and well data, internal studies, reports and published works) were in current use throughout the company. They discovered that 90% of data, accumulated over 30 plus years, were in hard copy form, stacked in boxes, bins and cabinets in record rooms and warehouses, and significant efforts were needed to organize and reshelve materials as the catalog database was built.
Conoco estimates the total value of technical data, based on replacement costs, to be $2.8 billion. They have spent about $5.5 million in cataloguing 2 million data items with $20 to $25 million expenditure required to catalog all 10 million items. Per item cataloging costs, which includes organizing and reshelving, ranged from $1 for seismic, well logs, maps and externally published works to $4 for internally generated reports and studies.
Texaco Latin America/West Africa (Coral Gables, Fla.) began a data management project in 1989 to satisfy needs for an exploration database of graphic design files (maps, cross sections, digitized electric logs, montages, etc.) and a hard copy filing system. No method existed at that time for sharing computer files or data inventories among offices in the U.S., West Africa and Latin America.
Other problems with their data management included misfiling, tracking checked out data, inventory of off-site storage in Houston and New Orleans warehouses, knowing what data is available, readily integrating data into computer applications, etc. To resolve these problems, they worked with Data General Corp. (Atlanta, Ga.) and developed TEXDIS (Total Exploration and Data Inventory System).
With a fully populated database, TEXDIS enables explorationists to rapidly review, graphically and textually, all hard-copy data available for any area of interest. Clicking upon screen objects (wells, seismic lines, etc.) retrieves a list of all related documents (logs, reports, seismic sections, etc.) or digital data in the system. These data can be processed via ported applications programs (gridding, contouring, multi-dimensional analyses of seismic horizon data, fault analyses, drilling analyses, production test analyses, etc.). TEXDIS also links to external proprietary and commercial databases.
TEXDIS has been used by Texaco LA/WA in many international exploration projects. Networked workstation versions of this open system can be distributed to international field offices and tied to remote database servers.
The system provides for updating associated databases to keep them current. The Librarian segment uses bar-code scanners to support filing, check-in, check-out, and document tracking features. Optical disk libraries store images (documents, logs, maps, etc.). Based on experience, Texaco LA/WA estimates it cost one-quarter to one-half percent of the acquisition expense of a data item to process and load it into TEXDIS.
The TEXDIS software package consists of the TEXDIS shell, available from Data General and is priced from $25,000 for a 5 user system to $55,000 for a 30 user system. VORTEXT GIS and spatial data management software from Aangstrom Precision Corp., Mt. Pleasant, Michigan is priced from $100,000 for 5 users to $405,000 for 30 users and ORACLE database software used for textual data management lists from $50,000 to $90,000. The rest of the TEXDIS hardware/software platform uses a UNIX workstation/server such as DG's AViiON, OSF/MOTIF and X-WINDOWS GUI's plus TCP/IP for networking.
Other items needed to make the system fully functional include textual and raster scanners (color or black and white), bar-coding devices and digitizing/plotting equipment. TEXDIS provides transparent system interfaces for these devices.
Impressive benefits come to those using solid data management techniques that provide rapid integration of data into computer analysis applications and insure all data relevant to a project are fully exploited.
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Fountains: Sweet Music
by Lee Steedle
Potters who are looking for compelling items to pull customers toward their displays might well consider fountains designed for indoor or garden use. By attracting attention with sound and motion, fountains go a long way toward selling themselves in showrooms or display booths. Plus, they command prices considerably higher than any but the most artistic pots.
Unlike commissioned fountains, which may require protracted negotiations with architects and owners, or need special plumbing and wiring, small fountains are assembled with off-the-shelf-pumps and tubing, and their profitability makes them attractive to galleries, retail craft stores and up-scale garden supply stores. Fountains considered 'small' are those customers can carry out of a salesroom, then easily reassemble themselves.
There is real satisfaction in creating a fountain that functions as you'd hoped - lively water, bright sounds, no spills. Chinese and Japanese garden designers discovered long ago that the aesthetics of running water are greatly enhanced when it flows into a rock hollow, magnifying the sound. This same resonance can be created with a ceramic or stone base that closely confines the water at the place where it has fallen.
For indoor fountains, there are just a few 'musts': they must be vitreous to ensure water impermeability; they must not spray or splash beyond their rims; and they must be of reasonably compact design.
To be sold successfully, indoor fountains also have a few 'shoulds': water flow should be pleasingly visible and emit musical, tumbling sounds; water capacity should be fairly limited; pump operation should be inaudible; and design should harmonize well with intended surroundings.
Design constraints for outdoor fountains are fewer in number, once the location of an electrical source has been resolved. A wall-mounted fountain is often the simplest design, requiring only a ceramic fountainhead and a lower base connected by unobtrusive plastic or copper tubing. Yet a wall setting also presents considerable opportunity for creativity. The fountain back, often of handmade tiles, can include multiple water outlets, splash pockets, lights and sculptured relief. As long as too much splashing and water loss are avoided, a certain amount of misting is actually desirable in garden fountains, because water-loving plants such as mosses and ferns thrive in a moist setting, and their greenery suggests coolness and refreshment. Care must be taken, however, to protect the pump's inlet from clogging with the leaves, grass clippings and wind-blown dirt that inevitably settle into the basin of any garden fountain. And, when installed in cold climates, outdoor fountain pumps should be readily accessible for easy end-of-season disassembly, to avoid ice damaging their seals.
Although endless variety in ceramic fountain designs is possible, their mechanical parts are usually quite similar. These include a recirculating pump, plastic or copper tubing, clamps to tighten them securely together, and an adjustable clamp with which to regulate the water flow.
Small-capacitiy, submersible pumps are permanently sealed against water leakage; they are available in capacities ranging from about 80 to 680 gallons per hour (gph). A pump's gph capacity rating can be misleading, however, because this varies in actuality with the height to which water must be lifted. A 120-gph capacity at a height of 1 foot, quickly drops to 70 gph at 3 feet, for example. The smallest sizes generally provide adequate flow for most fountains.
Major pump manufacturers include Beckett Company, Dallas; Little Giant Pump Company, Oklahoma City; and Dayton Electric Manufacturing Company, Chicago. Their units are available nationally through distributors and hardware stores, farm and garden supply retailers.
Fortunately for fountain designers, these pumps are small enough in size to be easily concealed somewhere within a fountain's lower water chamber. One of the most popular models measures only 3 1/2x2 1/2x2 3/4 inches and, if purchased singly, costs less than $40, with quantity discounts available.
Craftspeople make fountains for a wide variety of reasons. In the beginning, some designs will probably be failures, whose fate will be to end in shards, or to sit in dark, ignominious disgrace beneath workbenches as reproachful reminders of ideas badly conceived. However well-intended their design, their common failings are unexpected mistings, splashing and tuneless sounds resembling open faucets or running toilets. Design mis-adventures like these seem an inevitable part of the process of developing trouble-free fountains.
Among the most successful fountain makers on a production scale is Robert Compton, a Bristol, Vermont, potter, who now concentrates chiefly on fountains. He works out of an old dairy barn on the farmstead he shares with his wife Christine, a weaver, who is also his business partner. They make and market a half-dozen basic fountain designs in a wide range of sizes, for both garden and indoor use. The median retail price is about $1600.
Although most Compton fountains are hand thrown and altered, a winch and 40-foot overhead I-beam, which runs nearly the length of the work area, help to reduce the labor involved in handling massive molds for slip-cast designs. The majority of these are vertical, multitier units, made of a dense, grogged clay fired to Cone 10, usually glazed.
Optional features for their indoor models are circular and half-moon 'Moisture Guards,' which are pie slice-shaped tiles with upward curving outer lips that assemble snugly around the fountain bases. These guards eliminate the problem of misting, and enable owners to place their fountains on carpets and wooden floors.
A knowledgeable marketer as well as a craftsman, Compton maintains computerized customer records and prospect lists, and promotes with a 12-page, full-color catalog. He sells through galleries nationally, as well as from the shop, but tries to limit sales to galleries he knows will replenish evaporated water regularly and will maintain cleanliness when fountains are run continuously.
Compton says: "To be well displayed, fountains need visual room. The galleries that do best understand that fountains add liveliness, energy, movement and sound to their showrooms, and space them accordingly."
Katherine Pearson of Cherry Brook Potters, Canton Center, Connecticut, has concentrated on fountains resembling naturally rounded stones. In 1978, she "started to fool around with an idea of stones and waterfall. It took about three years to design and figure out the engineering, then in 1983 I put a copyright on them and started to market them."
Her basic self-contained fountain has water tumbling gently and musically over about ten stones within an upper basin, after which the water quietly disappears into a lower basin and recirculates. To further the motif, she provides each unit with additional ceramic stones to be placed outside the fountain to give the assemblage a sense of the outdoors.
Pearson's white porcelain fountains are cast in large molds, dried slowly, then sanded to create a stonelike surface. They are then fired to Cone 6 in an electric kiln, after which their interiors are given a Cone 6 to 10 clear glaze, and fired to Cone 7.
Her stoneware fountains start as slabs of well-grogged clay that are 'persuaded' into two halves of heavy plaster molds. The halves are joined, and allowed to stand overnight. After removal, much hand work is required to smooth the exterior and finalize the form.
Following a Cone 06 bisque firing, the interior is coated with an Albany slip glaze, and the exterior is sprayed with iron oxide and manganese stain. These fountains are then reduction fired to Cone 9 in a gas kiln, which renders natural coloration ranging from black/brown to a rich black, and allows the clay to display its inherent stonelike quality.
Pearson's self-contained waterfall fountains, which rely as much on their pleasant sounds as on their visual appeal, are quite small. Most are between 12 and 19 inches long, and some are just 7 1/2 inches high. They retail from $430 $630 at craft galleries and shops nationwide.
While fountains can be great fun to design, quite profitable to sell and attention-getters for ceramics displays, it is vitally important to have trouble-free designs. Customer complaints about misting, pump noise or water clogging can prove an unwanted problem for gallery owners, and an expense for the fountain maker.
Rober Compton summarizes the aesthetic requirements very well when he says: "A fountain is not like an open faucet. Just making a piece that water runs through is not making a fountain. While the pleasing sight is important, you must also have the musical sounds of tumbling water. For this reason, we have discarded many more fountain designs than we have marketed."
Individual fountain makers develop their own solutions to design limitations. But I'll conclude with a few solutions that have worked well for me: Vibration suppression can generally be achieved by placing a 1/4-inch Styrofoam pad beneath the pump, and by gluing felt cushions under the lower bowl. Larger wall fountains may be made from sequentially-mounted elements that catch the falling water then pass it down. And resonance enhancement can result from building a ceramic baffle into a fountain's lower bowl to tightly confine the area into which the water tumbles.
Politically Correct Pots
by Brad Sondahl
Is pottery political? Musician Frank Zappa once said that everything you wear is your uniform. Stretching the analogy, if your pottery is apolitical, perhaps this merely reflects your personal politics. Has pottery been political? I think about the ruckus caused by Judy Chicago's 'Dinner Party,' and know that it has. Is pottery subject to the current trend of political correctness? Ponder lightly and read on.
Since everything else in life is subject to standards of political correctness, from grocery bags to dorm room doors, let's consider whether pottery meets today's high standards of behavior. When I began 'doing' pottery in the early '70s, there was no question that it was the right thing to do. After all, at about that time Ceramics Monthly began printing in full color. If that's not evidence of a mass movement, I don't know what is. Pottery was then clearly a direct counterpoint to the prevalent military-industrial complex that afflicted the psyche of our country. To avoid contracting that disease, I would retire to a kick wheel and think peaceful thoughts.
I knew back in college that pottery was more politically correct than the other arts, because it didn't require any models sitting around naked. This, and the 'elite'-ist tendencies of art, convinced me that art was politically incorrect, and prompted my final art production, a happening called 'Art as a Bourgeois Sham.' In the current language of - ists and - isms for every occasion, this clearly labels me an 'art'-ist (despite and because of my attempts to disavow it) and a non-'nude'-ist (as I am obviously a prudist).
Getting back to my historical critique, I moved into a chicken coop and tepee with another potter, and learned how to live righteously, scraping along with scrap clay, used kilns and a big garden. Living close to the earth was synonymous with making pottery then, especially since the pottery studio had a dirt floor. This was the good life, although Minnesota winters are justly famous for wearing down good-lifers. We lasted several years before moving on to other possibilities.
By the eighties, the age of greed took its toll among the ranks of potters who wanted to have some semblance of financial security in addition to their good life and political correctness. Teaching became an attractive second career option, and the ones who remained in the ranks split between those emphasizing production and those capitalizing on artistic quality and uniqueness. At the same time, living close to the earth was beginning to suggest silicosis from long-term occupational exposure. Meanwhile, glaze leachates implied potential government regulation and skittish consumers, while leftover glaze chemicals and pottery wastes became not so environmentally correct (and even glossy pottery magazines posed a problem for recyclers).
In the light of all these environmental considerations (which potters have tended to know about, but chosen to continue anyway), suddenly the politically correct choice lies in the route of less consumption, since materials processing and usage both denote (to some degree) environmental degradation. Even the earthy wood or salt kilns, and reduction firing in general, represent greater environmental degradation than sane-but-bland electric kilns.
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Double the size, quadruple the fun
After the Hillsborough, California, family grew from two to six, they commissioned a remodeling to make their Tudor house not only twice as big but newly, thrillingly modern
BY JODY THOMPSON-KENNEDY
FROM THE STREET, ONLY A hint of color - the rosy wall - tells passersby that something unusual may lie within. Otherwise, the Tudor Revival house fits politely into the prosperous, tree-lined northern California enclave. But step through the gate in that wall and you are in for a most agreeable culture shock. Inside is the kind of contemporary space, light, architectural color and interplay of forms that are rarely, if ever, found behind such a polite facade.
Until two years ago, the house had looked the same for fifty years - conventionally gabled and dormered, with dark, confining rooms and not enough of them. During a decade of ownership, the couple (he is a San Francisco physician) had four children and needed space for them to live and work and play, and they also felt a need for the kind of private retreat all parents come to long for.
Enter House+House, the San Francisco-based firm that would make the transformation. Avid fans of modern architecture and collectors of architect-designed furniture, the owners had seen a house designed by Steven and Cathi House, a husband-and-wife architectural team, and immediately called on the pair to view their very unmodern Tudor. "The house had very little going for it other than its original U-shaped plan encompassing a lawn," recalls Steven. But the clients had mentioned that they liked courtyards.
Over a period of eighteen months, House+House more than doubled the size of the house by adding a living-dining wing to completely surround the lawn. A new interior corridor - "the kids use it like an indoor track," says their mother - links the downstairs rooms to each other and the courtyard. An upstairs master suite includes a huge bathroom that is as big as the bedroom and comes complete with a cylindrical, neon-lit shower nook that can hold the whole clan.
One of the homeowners' major directives to the architects was to make the kitchen the 'command center' of the house. This is where the action is morning and night and where guests like to congregate. "It had to be more than just large - it had to be efficient and functional. The owner wanted more than one person to be able to cook at one time," Cathi House says. Designed like a city, with a hub, cabinets that look like a skyline, and an easy, circular traffic pattern, the kitchen features polished black granite work counters that can also seat up to eight. There are two dishwashers, a professional stove and a second pint-sized refrigerator just for the kids.
The kitchen links the breakfast 'nook' (actually a tall, dramatic half-round space lined with windows) with a new family area (not shown) underneath the master suite, but its function as a people magnet continues to amaze the owners. Although there are now over 5,000 square feet in the house plus 1,300 in the courtyard, at a recent party about fifty people preferred to be in the kitchen-family space.
Although the newness of the massive remodeling is beginning to wear off after a year, the couple report that the excitement has not.
Designed with TLC
ln Washington, D.C., a handful of decorators use color, wit and imagination to create a haven for youngsters with AlDS
BY LISA DePAULO
IT ALL STARTED WITH A WOMAN who rang the bell and identified herself only as Albina. "We didn't know who she was," says Joan McCarley, cofounder of Washington's 'Grandma's House,' the first home in the country for children with AIDS. "But you should always entertain strangers as though they were angels."
This one was. She reappeared one day with $325,000. Cash. And asked Joan McCarley to please buy another house for the children. "We never dreamed she was a countess," says McCarley.
Albina, the countess du Boisrouvray, had an only son who died at the age of 24 in a helicopter crash. Since then she has sold off $50 million worth of jewels to finance 'living memorials' to him all over the world. Her gift to Washington, the Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>ois-Xavier Bagnoud House (named after him), came complete with a blank check to cover the operating costs, including staff salaries, "forever," says McCarley.
"It was pretty inspiring," says Joseph Paul Davis, a Washington decorator who was volunteering at one of the four existing Grandma's Houses when the mystery countess delivered her gift. It moved him to do something grand.
He corralled fourteen of his colleagues, and each of them selected a room in the new FXE House (a DIFFA project), planned for children from deprived backgrounds who are five to ten years old and infected with the HIV virus. The decorators were to design the kind of environment "that to a sick child who lay in bed," says Joan McCarley "would be inspiring."
Trish Cavallaro and Jonathan Mclntyre took the entrance foyer, dipped their hands in paint and left handprints over every inch of wall. The pattern leads all the way up to the second-floor bedrooms. In the living room, Mary Drysdale stenciled birds, stars and swirls on lemon-colored walls. Larger-than-life crayons lean against the tiled fireplace, and a kitschy pair of dinosaurs stand at each end of the mantel. But most amusing is Drysdale's play table with chairs - painted to resemble a sky and four clouds.
Amy Cornell was asked to do a dining room that would accommodate big family meals. She started with a Niermann Weeks table and sideboard. But the whimsy of the room is their chandelier - an iron fixture dripping with strands of crystal 'hard candies.'
Nothing was left untouched - from the back porch with its 'designer recycling bins' to the kitchen floor, tiled like an argyle sock.
But in the bedrooms the decorators really let loose. One room is an ocean with waves up near the ceiling. Another room is a circus, its ceiling like the inside of a tent, in carnival blues and yellows. And farther down the hall it's a jungle in the room by designer Gary Lovejoy and painter Kay Jones. You can't miss the elephant with teal-striped tusks on the wall behind the twin beds. A steel 'vine' crawls around a window, and a stuffed monkey crawls on it, waiting to be hugged.
Golden-oldie reproductions
Copies of rare antiques are now antiques too
BY MITCHELL OWENS
AS TIME PASSES, WE SEE THE reproductions of one period becoming the antiques of the next. Ancient Roman sculptures are usually copies of Greek originals, after all. Today, as choice antiques become scarcer and more expensive, canny designers and connoisseurs are seeking out furniture made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that replicates an earlier style. Collecting and using these old copies is popular today for three good reasons: fine craftsmanship, availability and sensible prices.
The head of Sotheby's 19th-century furniture department, Elaine Whitmire, sells many older reproductions, though she prefers to call them "copies after the original." Semantic niceties aside, a turn-of-the-century copy can be as beautifully crafted as a 300-year-old original - and just as convincing. There is an additional attraction: the United States Customs Service defines an antique as any object certified to be more than 100 years old, so many of these older copies have now been around long enough to qualify for that duty-free status. If they were ever dismissed as fakes or as secondhand, they are now prized objects.
Rod Kreitzer, president of Baker Furniture in Grand Rapids, Michigan, not only presides over a company that has manufactured fine reproductions for American homes for generations, but he also collects the older variety for the company's museum, a few of whose pieces were made by Baker in the first half of this century. These older reproductions also serve as research material for the company's craftsmen. But Kreitzer notes a critical difference between earlier reproductions and those made today. Although the construction and carving of today's copies continue to involve a great deal of specialized handwork, their usual high-luster finish, which some decorators and potential purchasers object to, is the result of labor saving and a public demand for indestructibility.
"For a good part of this century, new furniture was still given a traditional hand-padded shellac finish," Kreitzer explains. "This darkens and becomes even more luminous as it ages." But hand-padding, which builds a finish slowly, layer by layer, is costly and is also easily marred in casual daily use. Soon after the Second World War the hand-padded shellac finish was abandoned by the industry for a quick-drying, spray-on nitrocellulose lacquer. The result was a glassy, uniform finish that remains the industry standard.
"Today's average customer wants a high luster," says Baker's Kreitzer, and he cites consumer polls and strong sales figures to prove it. Yet he feels a lingering nostalgia for the days of the shellac finish. "If you want real character," he says, "the human hand is vital."
Custom applications that approximate the low-luster glow of hand-rubbed shellac have been available in several degrees of sheen for some years, and some people cut the shine of modern reproduction by rubbing it down or refinishing the piece entirely. Other seekers of reproductions who object to a sprayed-on finish look for the older kind.
The instigator of the first important reproduction-furniture boom was a woman of beauty, taste and style. She was Eugenie Montijo de Guzman, empress of France. In the 1850s, stung by gossip about her non-royal birth and saddled with a number of half-empty palaces in dire need of redecoration, the Scottish-Spanish bride of Napoleon III chose to emulate the sophistication of the ancien régime. She took Marie Antoinette rather than Josephine as her role model. Overnight the new Louis Seize-lmpératrice style took hold in Parisian salons as the Bonaparte courtiers followed the redheaded empress's example and began filling their homes with precise copies of regal Louis XVI French antiques. At a time when first Empire opulence was the norm, Eugenie's neoclassical elegance was a breath of fresh air that would make its way to England and America by the 1890s.
The finest cabinetmakers of this period (among them Ferdinand Barbedienne, Guillaume Grohé and Louis-Auguste-Alfred Beurdeley in France, Edwards & Roberts in England, and Julius von Zwiener in Germany) were sticklers for authenticity. In fact, their creations were so cunningly accurate that they continue to fool the experts. At the Victoria & Albert Museum, for example, a Louis XVI satinwood occasional table was discovered not so long ago to be a circa 1860 copy by the London cabinetmaker Donald Ross. The curators decided that the table was just too beautiful to put into storage; instead, they moved it into a place of honor as an example of a fine Victorian reproduction.
High-caliber reproductions don't come cheaply, but they are infinitely more affordable than the real thing. "Beurdeley is my personal favorite," says Sotheby's Elaine Whitmire. "He copied eighteenth-century pieces to perfection. Now an exquisite museum-quality console by Weisweiller, one of the greatest eighteenth-century ébénistes, will cost $500,000, but you can find an equally fine Beurdeley modeled after it for around $200,000."
Matthew Sturtevant, head of furniture at Christie's East, prefers the more aggressively rococo work of Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>ois Linke, a Czech-born Frenchman who was active from 1882 to 1935. Arguably the finest cabinetmaker of his generation, Linke was so adept a copier that in the book 19th Century European Furniture, historian Christopher Payne writes: "The mind boggles at what Linke would have been able to achieve had he been working for the Court of Versailles over 150 years earlier." Linke's astonishing creations, however, still bring less than they should on the open market (good news for the shopper). For example, a swaggering Linke bureau plat sold last September at New York's William Doyle Galleries for $29,000 - a bargain when compared with the catalogue estimate of $40,000 to $60,000.
Impressive bargains can also be found in furniture made in the next important reproduction era, which lasted from about 1890 to the beginning of the First World War.
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CRAZY FOR YOU
This new musical, based loosely on the 1930 Girl Crazy, features the timeless songs of George and Ira Gershwin
by Sheryl Flatow
IN 1934 George Gershwin went on a 28-city concert tour of America, which included a stop in Cincinnati. Following a performance in that city he wound up at a party in the home of a local musician where, characteristically, he entertained at the piano. Among those who heard him play his Second Piano Prelude and various songs was Roger Horchow, six-year-old son of the host and hostess. For young Horchow the melody lingered on.
He became a serious collector of the composer's work, and as he got older, he made a promise to himself that he would one day produce a musical on Broadway featuring a Gershwin score. So it's fair to say that a chance encounter more than a half-century ago was the impetus for Crazy for You, a new musical comedy featuring the timeless songs of George and Ira Gershwin.
Crazy for You, a show in which you go in humming the tunes, stars Harry Groener (Oklahoma!, Cats) and Jodi Benson (voice of the title character in the movie The Little Mermaid). It is written by Ken Ludwig (Lend Me a Tenor), directed by Mike Ockrent (Me and My Girl) and choreographed by Susan Stroman (And the World Goes 'Round - The Songs of Kander & Ebb) and was inspired, very loosely, by the 1930 Gershwin musical Girl Crazy. That show is fondly remembered today for its captivating score, an ingenue named Ginger Rogers (who introduced 'But Not for Me' and 'Embraceable You') and the debut of a dynamo named Ethel Merman, whose stardom was assured when she held a note for 16 bars during 'I Got Rhythm' to the delight of a delirious audience.
"Originally we thought we were going to do a revised version of Girl Crazy," says Ken Ludwig. "But we read the book, and it was terrible. It was made up of skits and had all these stereotypes. So we threw the book out completely."
All that is left from Girl Crazy are four great songs (the fourth is 'Bidin' My Time'), a relatively unknown song ('Could You Use Me?') and the germ of an idea: An Easterner goes to a little Western town.
Playwright Ken Ludwig and director Mike Ockrent worked closely in constructing the new story line, which they then adapted as they went through the Gershwin catalogue in search of the right song for the right moment. Then Ludwig wrote the book, which rises and falls largely on the ability of its leading man to deliver a tour de force performance. The role requires impeccable comic timing, effortless dancing and an abundance of charm.
"Harry Groener was exactly what we were looking for," says Ockrent. "I realized it when I saw him in the Pasadena Playhouse, where he was doing Cole Porter's You Never Know. Then he came and auditioned for us. The process of auditioning is waiting for the moment when that person walks into the room, and you know that's it. That's what happened with Harry and also with Jodi Benson."
Ludwig describes the feel of the show as "Me and My Girl meets Lend Me a Tenor." Crazy for You is filled with snappy one-liners, old jokes, sight gags, pratfalls and the inspired fun and giddiness of both those shows. The notion of mistaken identity, so crucial to Lend Me a Tenor, is also intrinsic to the plot of Crazy for You. "I love the idea of mistaken identity and confusion, the kind of muscular comedy that springs off the stage," says Ludwig. "It is so rooted in the English, American and French history of high comedy, and it's the tradition that I want to work in. It makes me want to be in the theatre. I'm sure I will return to that idea in a lot of my plays, although not in the same way. The other thing I've come back to is the nebbishy guy flowering, and that's a theme I expect I'll always write about. Renewal is something I care about, and this show is about renewal."
This is not to suggest that Ludwig and Ockrent have simply reworked their hit shows and wrapped them into one neat, recycled package. Crazy for You is anchored in the black-and-white 1930's musicals made by Warner Brothers, MGM and RKO, reinventing them from a 1990's perspective. It calls to mind Ruby Keeler dancing on a taxi in 42nd Street, Mickey and Judy putting on a show, and Busby Berkeley routines. The musical also features a Ziegfeld-like impresario (Bruce Adler) and the inevitable chorus girls. Adding to the fun is some subtle-but-pointed humor aimed at a few well-known contemporary musicals.
Mostly, though, Crazy for You harkens back to the incandescent movies of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Boys meets girl and falls instantly in love with her, girl falls in love with boy after dancing with him, boy unwittingly makes a mess of things and loses girl, boy and girl dance off happily together.
"I was very much trying to capture a Fred-and-Ginger style in the show," says Ludwig. "Their movies influenced me as much as anything else. When the script is published, the first time that our leads dance together my stage directions will probably say: 'They take off like Fred and Ginger.'"
If the plot and the tone of the show seem to particularly suggest Shall We Dance, the only Astaire-Rogers movie written by the Gershwins, Ockrent says it is not a coincidence.
"For me the key number in our show is 'Shall We Dance?' It's the big romantic dance number in act one, the one in which our leads fall in love."
The songs, which are the raison d'etre for the show, bind the musical together. The Gershwin estate gave the production access to its entire library, and a score was compiled that consists of mostly standards, with a few lesser-known songs (and one totally unknown) added to the mixture. Included are several numbers that were introduced by Astaire, such as 'They Can't Take That Away from Me' and 'Slap That Bass' (from Shall We Dance) and 'Nice Work If You Can Get It,' 'I Can't Be Bothered Now' and 'Things Are Looking Up' (from A Damsel in Distress).
One of the most crucial decisions in the evolution of the show was to determine the sound that best suited the material: Was a thirties sound appropriate, or should something different be attempted? (Girl Crazy, orchestrated by Robert Russel Bennett, was known for its swing sound, and its pit musicians included Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Dorsey and Gene Krupa.)
"We decided we didn't want to do it as a 1930's museum piece," says music director Paul Gemignani. "That's boring. Instead we kept the period in mind, used what we know about orchestra writing today, added a love of Gershwin and put it together. It's a 1990's impression of a thirties sound."
William Brohn, the show's orchestrator, says, "We had to take into account the fact that audiences really expect more opulence from an orchestra today. But we didn't want to create a glitzy sound. The music is too great to distort like that. The orchestrations are really a reflection of the whole musical: the way the thirties look to our eyes and ears."
Brohn also incorporates bits of Gershwin melodies not used in the show: Listen closely, for instance, to 'Someone to Watch Over Me,' and you'll hear a few bars from the Concerto in F at the beginning and end of the song. "Bill's done a very creative job with the orchestrations," Gemignani notes, "because it's very difficult to take music we all know and make it into something that is inventive and fresh."
If the music is the heart of Crazy for You, then the piano is its soul. It has often been said of Gershwin that he was happiest when entertaining at the keyboard. He was a remarkable pianist, whose dazzling improvisations were a source of wonder. "Robert Russell Bennett once told me that Gershwin was possessed when he was at the piano," says Brohn. "Russell believed in spirits and said he really thought that Gershwin became another being at the piano. So for me the piano represents the spirit of Gershwin. I used it with that in mind, as if his ghost just peeked out of the orchestra pit, nodded and smiled."
That's somehow fitting for a show set in motion all those years ago in Cincinnati, when George Gershwin worked his magic at a piano and cast a spell over a listener who remains bewitched by his music. Everyone involved in Crazy for You is eager to spread that enchantment.
JUMPIN' JORDAN
by Sheridan Morley
The story of Five Guys Named Moe is essentially the story of one guy named Louis Jordan and another named Clarke Peters. Let's start with Mr. Peters. A New York actor long a resident in Britain, he grew up in an apartment 14 floors above the intersection of 155th Street and Amsterdam in the very heart of Harlem:
"Cats like Louis Jordan were already coming to the end of their careers by then, the early 1950's. Even though they were the main influence for a lot of what came after them, they were being pushed to the back of the shelf by the rock and pop people.
"But radio was all we had for entertainment at that time, and those songs of his stayed in the dust of my memories - songs like 'Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens' and 'Saturday Night Fish Fry' and 'What's the Use of Getting Sober When You're Going to Get Drunk Again?' Every time I heard those songs I felt better, and I thought maybe they could have that effect on other people."
Peters left New York to study mime in Europe and came to London via Paris, where he tried to establish his own band. But his enthusiasm for Jordan met with blank stares from most of the British: "They thought he was the guy who starred in Gigi, maybe. His jazz just never seemed to have crossed the Atlantic."
So Peters carved out a distinguished non-jazz career in Britain. He was the first black actor to play Nathan Detroit when Guys and Dolls moved to the West End. He also played in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and was a notable Othello at Greenwich. But all this time he kept thinking about the music of Louis Jordan, wondering if there was some way to bring it back to audiences:
"I always wanted this to be a stage piece, but not being a producer I had no real idea of how to go about it. I spent what little money I had buying up the rights from Jordan's estate in America, but I couldn't get any London producer to come in with me, so we finished up doing the show as a midnight cabaret at the National Theatre just for one night."
After that Peters, now in his early forties, spent three or four years trying to get Five Guys together. He had almost given up hope when the manager of a little theatre out in London's East End came up with the offer of a low-budget staging at the end of 1990:
"That's where the miracle happened: After we'd been playing about a week, Cameron Mackintosh came in one night to see us, and by intermission he'd bought the transfer rights to the West End, where the show has been playing for a year now to standing-room-only every single night."
At this point Mackintosh himself takes up the story:
"I'd known about this show for years because Clarke had mentioned it to me when he was first starting to work on the tryouts, but at that time I wasn't particularly interested in doing any show where I couldn't meet and work with the actual writer, so I turned it down.</doc></docx>
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Unearthing Dracula
Tall, dark, and campy, vampires have long held sway over our most sinister impulses. Here Herb Ritts photographs the stars on the set of Francis Ford Coppola's new baroque Dracula, and Mary Gaitskill dissects the power of this age-old gooey nightmare
He approaches slowly, with the grace and cold authority of an expert seducer. His body is shrouded in black, and his eyes have the paralyzing fascination of death. His victim, a frail beauty reduced to incoherent high-pitched gasps of fright, waits in a state of alertness and horror, yet she is swooning - her head thrown back, her throat exposed in electrifying receptivity. There is a pregnant moment, as if an unarticulated longing is about to come to fruition. Then, sinking his fangs into her neck, he penetrates and devours her.
Really, it's too corny, not to mention too sexist, for sophisticated people like you and me. But sexist corn notwithstanding, there it is: the vampire myth persists with the tenacity of a spider, continually reemerging in varying guises that range from the dire to the erotic to the goofy and back again. Be it Bela Lugosi standing mute and icy in the graveyard or Elvira camping it up between ads for the greatest hits of the seventies, the vampire lurks at a complex intersection of human dilemma; his myth is a great dark jewel that reveals another facet with each turn. And he is about to walk again in Francis Ford Coppola's version of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, Dracula, a sumptuous retelling of the old, old story.
This story is a bloody Kabuki comic about our fear of and ambivalence toward our own nature, and the fragmentation that results. It is a metaphor for maddeningly common human behavior; we have all known (and been) psychic 'vampires,' people who, because of their inability to internally 'get a life,' do all kinds of things to feel more complete - like social climbing, marrying for money, or augmenting hollow self-esteem by attacking someone else's, to name a few. Today's pervasive celebrity worship is a kind of mutual vampirism, in which the adoring masses and the celebrity get their identity and power from each other, and thus never fully become themselves. Almost all vampire movies, even the silliest, deal with this stuff, playfully or intensely. Judging from the screenplay for Bram Stoker's Dracula, written by James V. Hart (author of Hook), Coppola is going for the intense.
One of literature's first vampires appears in Coleridge's weird, unfinished narrative poem, Christabel, published in 1816. Camille Paglia, in an astute, erudite, and totally horny essay, describes Coleridge's lesbian vampire Geraldine as nature's own psycho slut from hell, "the chthonian mother who eats her children." She's not the only one. In the old movies, vampires hang out with swarms of insects, spiders, maggots, rats, and bats - the deep-down ugly part of nature, lower-order group-minded creatures that remind us of our connection with the part of life that scares us: the brainless, monstrously gooey primeval, the death-dealing predator, the heartless cycle of aging, illness, death. In a word, the irrational, which is mirrored in our emotions, and which typically overrides our brains.
Cannily, Jim Hart included a scene from Stoker's original novel that most other screen Draculas have omitted. In it, the virtuous hero (Keanu Reeves! The ideal swooning beauty!) is swarmed and bitten by Dracula's three 'brides' in a lush haunted bedchamber, a realm of the undifferentiated primordial at which religion and society shake their pale fingers in vain. These 'mothers' literally do eat the young -Dracula feeds the brides by tossing them a live baby. Winona Ryder, who stars as the film's heroine, Mina, says she was grossed out by the scene: "These women are played by beautiful models and it should be sexy... but they're horrible, like insects or spiders." Exactly. At one point the film reveals Dracula lying in his coffin as if it's a womb, covered with placentalike slime, a perfect image of the conflation of life and death and all that...stuff they entail.
We may fear the deep-down ugly, but it is part of who we are; in trying to deny it, we divide ourselves and the world into opposing factions. That on which we shut the door will come knocking in some truly skanky forms, and we will always let it in, because 'it' is us. Harold Bloom has referred to Coleridge's heroine Christabel as "a half-willing victim." No kidding. As Coleridge describes her, she is Virtue on two legs. This type of purity is compelling but unlivable. Since the lady Christabel, the feminine ideal of her day, is not allowed to even imagine the ugly, cruel, predatory slut within, she will secretly long for it and be sensually transfixed when it appears in the form of another person - especially another woman. The passivity of this kind of 'victim' is deceptive, for it is not mere inertia or failure of will. It is a convoluted attempt to imbibe the power of the aggressor; it is unacknowledged power, fierce and resolute in its own way. It would be better if such 'victims' felt free to experience their own power more directly, in an ambience of mutual respect and honor - but unfortunately, a lot of people don't know how to do that.
The female victims in the old vampire movies definitely don't. Idealized expressions of ultrarefined femininity, they are weak, flighty, Blanche du Boisesque. The dark, powerful vampire may be nasty, but he represents an earthy solidity and strength that have the potential to make them complete. And vice versa. In F.W. Murnau's beautiful, silent 1922 Nosferatu, the vampire can be destroyed only if a pure woman keeps him by her side until daylight. The film ends with the heroine sacrificing herself to the vampire to save the populace. It's as if the vampire, despite his toothy might, is stuck in a purgatory; only when purity is made freely available to him can he finally cut out.
This Sturm und Drang is sexy, but it's not just about sex. Whenever the full potential is thwarted, rage, possession, and devouring rear their ugly heads. One of the most pathetic victims in vampire lore is Stoker's hapless solicitor, Renfield, as portrayed by Dwight Frye in the famous 1931 Tod Browning Dracula. (In the Coppola film, he's played by Tom Waits, in a less central but equally intense role.) Frye's Renfield is a friendly, dapper, optimistic businessman who arrives at the vampire's castle with a natty walking stick and a natty smile. "Oh, the fire," he exclaims, seizing on the only homey aspect of the vampire's gruesome castle; "it's so cheerful!" It is both comic and painful to watch this upbeat fellow become Dracula's morbidly degraded slave, on his hands and knees eating insects. Comic because there is a grim appropriateness in this silly, effete person being forced to eat the earthiness that his ultracivilized persona implicitly denies. Dracula's sadistic power is brutal but so, in a sense, is Renfield's idiotic optimism and refinement. Consciously or not, Renfield has coldly excised the guts from his insipid world, a world in which the power and veracity of the extreme are not allowed to exist. The extreme has returned in the form of Dracula, and boy, is he pissed.
These days, in movies and in the culture at large, it seems as if everybody's eager to sling extremities and guts all over the place, as if Dracula could be just another crank on the subway. But the guts so garishly and routinely displayed are artificial; while we seem to have acknowledged our extreme aspects, our discomfort is actually as acute as ever.
Modern vampires no longer represent biological dread; instead, they seem a defiance of biology, reversing the symbolic meaning of the grotty old monster. Agelessly beautiful, sexy, and glamorous, they are far more dynamic than the dumpy mortals upon whom they prey. Anne Rice's novels are filled with empathy for them. They do bad stuff but they can't help it; they're lonely and full of angst. In the old vampire story, the underlying frisson is the victim's unspoken ambivalence and longing. In the current version it's the anguish and longing of the vampire, who is, after all, a parasite totally dependent on his/her weak prey. Today's vampires symbolize the tyranny of the imagination and the mind as estranged from the heart and the body. In the 1983 film The Hunger, a chic lesbian (Catherine Deneuve) imprisons her victims not in an earthy crypt but in an airy town house; instead of swarming rats and bugs she is surrounded by flocks of white birds. In The Lost Boys (1987), a gang of beautiful boy vampires terrorizes a fantastical amusement park while, on the sound track, a seraphic boys choir sings "thou shalt not grow," and the camera pans up to a sky of preternaturally brilliant blue. High style, soaring movement, ethereal height, unadulterated beauty, perpetual adolescence, limitless power, and pleasure: these vampires inhabit a realm utterly removed from the icky, crawly, ugly forces of nature, free of relentless evolutionary flux.
But this realm is arid, sterile, and, ahem, bloodless. The vampires must feed, compulsively, endlessly. They can only borrow life, they can never truly have it. As Dracula laments in Coppola's film: "I am nothing." Although the vampire bites and bites, he remains 'the undead' who cannot live.
In the trashy but perceptive Vampire's Kiss (1989), Nicolas Cage is a cruel, internally dessicated womanizer cut off from his own emotionality - the kind of guy who, despite his compulsive sex life, would fear a deep sexual experience. After a hallucinatory one-night stand, he becomes convinced he is turning into a vampire and before long is eating bugs, tearing at the flesh of birds, and pursuing people while wearing plastic fangs. He becomes increasingly sadistic to a female employee and finally rapes her. The joke of the movie is that while Cage is not physically a vampire, psychically he is and always has been. In a pivotal scene he claws at a mirror, moaning, "Oh, Christ, where am I?" having become invisible to himself. Geraldine, Dracula, Nosferatu, and the rest may have great power, but there is a terrible emptiness at its center, and Vampire's Kiss - the product of a modern sensibility in an age pervaded by expressions of disconnected, empty power - recognizes that dead-on. It is appropriate that Cage becomes a rapist, for rape is another vampiric act. A rapist longs to have whatever the female and the feminine represent to him, and is driven to attack. Yet since he violates and damages what he craves, he puts it even further out of reach, creating an endless cycle of mutual torment not unlike the vampire's.
Among the many vampires walking among us today, perhaps the most horrifying is not psychic but physical. AIDS divides the body and causes it to attack itself with a method we still have no understanding of and little defense against. In a sense, it is like a horrible and horribly unfair mirror of our divided and warring psychic selves - only in this case the horror is impossible to ignore (although as a society, we have been trying hard to do just that).
Screenwriter Hart was very aware of this metaphoric connection; his brother, who died of AIDS, had remarked to him that it is "a vampire's disease," a comment that seems to have haunted Hart. Indeed, Winona Ryder, who brought the script to Coppola's attention, responded to it initially because she had just lost a close friend to AIDS and thus found the script eerily resonant.
The script is juicy and operatic (possibly campy, depending on how it's played), a combination of the old and modern vampire modes. (The 1979 version starring super-sexy Frank Langella only hinted at this.) Dracula (Gary Oldman) is both a snarling beastie with hairy palms and the 'most handsome man on the street.' And his victims are scarcely the 'pure' creatures of the past; they too are conflicted and angsty.
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DOES JAPAN PLAY FAIR?
While official protectionism is largely gone, Americans still battle cartels, old-boy networks, and outright corruption. The U.S. must keep the pressure on.
by Edmund Faltermayer
DOES JAPAN tilt its economic playing field against the rest of the world? The question is crucial, for despite years of pressure to open the world's No. 2 economy to foreign goods and investment, Japan has amassed an unheard-of trade surplus now soaring above $100 billion a year. If Japan's policies and business culture really do deny foreign companies a fighting chance, what can be done to set the balance right? Unless it is corrected, governments around the world, including the U.S. President elected in November, are sure to feel rising protectionist demands.
This article examines specific markets and business practices that shed light on Japan's openness. Sizing up a country's business terrain is relative. Difficult or easy compared with what? In making the assessment, FORTUNE judged access to markets in Japan in relation to hardships Japanese companies face in the U.S.
Overall, is the playing field level? In a word, no. "The Japanese market is not as closed as Americans think," says Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, "but not as open as the Japanese think." The long answer is more complicated, however - and more encouraging. Japan has changed greatly since the mid-Eighties. In many markets today's tilt is less steep than it was, and an official, orchestrated policy of thwarting the gaijin (foreigner) is mostly gone. Americans with high-quality goods and services can make a dent in Japan. Because of remaining governmental roadblocks and a business culture that can be extraordinarily inhospitable to outsiders, however, U.S. companies still have to work harder than Japanese companies in the U.S. And sometimes the Americans need diplomatic pressure to help laissez faire along, particularly when they are trying to penetrate industries dominated by entrenched oligopolies.
For those willing to take lots of bruises and stay in the game, Japan has compensations. The customers the Yank wins are often more loyal than those back home. Makoto Kuroda, managing director of Mitsubishi Corp., tells an American visitor: "Your market is easy to enter, but it's also easy to be kicked out. In Japan, once in, your people may stay much longer." Depending on the industry, the Americans may also reap outsize profits. Says William Wheeler, who heads Asia-Pacific operations for FMC Corp.: "The margins here are some of the highest in the world."
Many Japanese insist that their country's barriers have fallen and that Americans have little to grouse about. "In terms of formal government policies," asserts Noboru Hatakeyama, vice minister for international affairs at the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), "Japan is much more open" than the U.S. Japan has cut average tariffs on manufactured goods below America's (2.1% vs. 5%). The country may also be one of the few in history to subsidize imports. For the past three years, Japanese companies that substantially boost imports of a wide array of manufactured goods can get a 5% tax credit on the increase.
Japan has some gripes about the U.S. too. In semiconductors, for instance, Washington has resorted to managed trade with quotas, demanding that Japan buy 20% of the chips it uses from foreign companies. The U.S. has also leaned on Japan to curb exports of such items as cars and machine tools, forcing a shift of production to American transplants. Light pickup trucks from Japan face an unusually high tariff of 25%. And let's not ignore recent protectionist outbursts, as when opportunistic politicians in Los Angeles canceled a subway car contract with Sumitomo in favor of Morrison Knudsen.
For Japanese executives running businesses in the U.S., life is no Zen garden. They must often contend with a poorly educated, ill-trained labor force. The U.S. used to be ranked among the lowest-risk countries in which to do business, says Tachi Kiuchi, CEO of Mitsubishi Electronics America, a sales subsidiary of Mitsubishi Electric. But because of "all the lawsuits," he says, "the U.S. is no longer in the top five."
Still, for all America's blemishes, one giant fact stands out: Gaining entry is like falling out of bed compared with what a foreign company confronts in Japan. Though formal barriers there are mostly gone, a forest of others remains. Many impede any newcomer to a particular market, Japanese or foreign, and in that sense foreigners are getting what trade negotiators call national treatment. But because Americans find conditions harder in Japan than vice versa, they are handicapped in redressing the trade imbalance.
Topping the list of adverse conditions, according to U.S. companies surveyed in 1991 by the A.T. Kearney consulting firm, is "the high cost of doing business." The rise in the yen against the dollar since the mid-Eighties has made a bad situation worse. Kearney itself pays $160 a square foot for its Tokyo office, nearly five times what equivalent space would command in New York City. Assuming that an American company lands orders, survival in the early years can resemble life in a piranha tank. Unless the product is unique and can't be readily duplicated, says Kearney vice president William Best, "you'll have competition faster than you can believe."
Americans who bend your ear about the perils aren't all crybabies, for the Japanese themselves acknowledge that their country is a rough go. Listen to Seiichi Takikawa, the jovial president of Canon Sales, a marketing and importing offshoot of the Japanese camera and copier company. He says that in the Seventies, when he built up Canon's operation in the U.S. - "where it's a much simpler task" - it took only six years to lift sales tenfold. Returning to Japan, Takikawa needed 15 years to achieve similar growth. Reason: a smaller market, fiercer competition, and a government that, he says, "has a habit of sticking its nose into everything it sees." And Takikawa was born into the culture. For an American, he says, success in Japan requires "two to three times as much as energy."
Daunting as this sounds, it was worse when Japan practiced flagrant protectionism. Edmund Reilly, president of Digital Equipment's Japanese subsidiary, recalls that when he first went to Japan for his company in 1970, the government was nurturing a home-grown computer industry and "the odds really were stacked against us." Overt discrimination against foreign products is now limited, though Japan still keeps out rice. The ban flies in the face of the free-market principles: The home-grown variety costs seven times as much as imported rice would.
These days, when the Japanese government makes life difficult for foreigners, it's mainly through regulatory moves that rarely get headlines. Etak, a California company now part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., was the first to begin electronic mapping of Japanese cities in 1987, hoping to enable ambulance services and others to find addresses on computer screens. But a year later the government decided that Etak needed a license. By the time it came through, the company's head start was gone and a Japanese competitor had moved in.
This is but one example. Says Clyde Prestowitz Jr., president of the Economic Strategy Instate, a Washington research group: "The procedures that you go through are typically not transparent." He means they are neither open nor based on criteria known to all who are affected. In that atmosphere, American executives say, Japanese who have good entree with bureaucrats can delay the entry of competitors. The effects are sufficiently serious that Japan, in the latest round of talks with the U.S. under the so-called Structural Impediments Initiative, has agreed to reform its regulatory practices.
What really leaves many foreign companies out in the cold is the business culture. The word keiretsu suggests giant industrial groups linked by cross-ownership, such as Mitsubishi or Sumitomo. But the term can apply to longstanding business relationships without financial ties. When Sony developed its videocassette recorder in the early Seventies, Chairman Morita relates, it needed a new, high-quality recording tape. At the time, a major U.S. chemical company passed up Sony's invitation to supply the tape because it was reluctant to invest new production equipment. Sony enlisted two Japanese companies that, Morita says, "invested money at their own risk." To this day Sony holds no equity stake in these suppliers, he adds, "but once they invest money and make a good product, that situation is a keiretsu, and we feel some kind of obligation."
Outsiders sometimes fail to understand why they can't instantly displace such suppliers by underselling them. As Morita explains: "An American company says, 'Our product is good, our price is good, why don't you buy?' But with an industrial product that needs continuous improvement, you need a long-term relationship." The U.S. company that originally declined Morita's invitation now has some of the business, but less than it might have had.
Productive relationships are the good side of keiretsu, which America has begun to emulate. But all too often, keiretsu exclude new players or give preferential treatment to members. Says Reilly of Digital Equipment, who is also president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan: "Keiretsu links, bidding cartels, and the old-boy network still present us with formidable obstacles that Japanese corporations do not face in the U.S. market."
Obstacles or no, more and more companies find they must be in Japan. Applied Materials, a Silicon Valley company with sales of $644 million a year, is one of the few flourishing American manufacturers of chipmaking equipment. One reason: It gets valuable customer feedback from Japan, which accounts for 35% of its revenues. Tetsuo Iwasaki, CEO of Applied Materials Japan, explains how the company benefits from working closely with Japan's semi-conductor industry, the world's largest. Japan excels in manufacturing DRAM memory chips, he notes, which require finer circuitry than the microprocessors in which the U.S. has the leading position. Says Iwasaki: "In production, DRAMs are the technology driver."
The examination that follows concentrates on markets where Americans have a strong competitive edge or a chance to improve the trade numbers dramatically - if only the playing fields were level. One notable theme that emerges: It's relatively easy to sell to Japanese consumers as opposed to the purchasing agents of big companies. We also assess Japanese fairness in two important areas that cut across many businesses - direct investment and patent production.
CONSUMER ITEMS. The Apple computers jumping off Tokyo store shelves and BMWs tooling down the elevated express-ways dispel the notion that Japanese citizens shun all foreign products. When it comes to marketing, says Tokyo consultant George Fields, "American companies have an advantage in anything related to youth and lifestyle." Fields, the son of an Australian father and a Japanese mother, spent time in each country in his youth. He notes that Japan's No. 1 soft drink is Coca-Cola, the No. 1 fast-food chain is McDonald's, the No. 1 theme park Disneyland, and the list goes on.
Many of the successful products are made in Japan rather than exported from the U.S., but the earnings help America's balance of payments. The main difficulty in marketing consumer goods is penetrating the convoluted distribution system. Kodak's entry in the mid-Eighties shows the unexpected routes a company might have to take: It used a mail-order company to sell film and a dry-cleaning chain as a collection point for developing.
Distribution is an impediment for the supreme consumer item: the automobile. When Japanese carmakers entered the U.S., they were able to sell through existing American dealers, who have long been allowed to offer more than one make. Japanese automakers own much of the sales network in Japan, and dual dealerships are rare. Bowing to pressure from Washington, Japanese carmakers are starting to offer a few American models. But the only real answer may be a direct stake in a distribution network. BMW carved out a respectable niche in Japan's market after it bought an ailing chain of showrooms in 1981 and expanded it. Ford, the most aggressive of Detroit's Big Three in Japan, has just raised its ownership in the Autorama sales chain from 34% to 36,5%, making it an equal partner with Mazda.
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AN INTRODUCTION TO ASTROLOGY
Part 2: What the Chart Means.
A popular astrologer shares knowledge of her science in a way that is easy to understand. In the first part of this article (FATE, February 1992) she wrote about the history of astrology. Now learn about astrology from a practical point of view.
By Linda Chamlee Black

COMPILING A CHART
If you were out in a boat at sea and wanted to find your location, you'd look through a device called a sextant until you found a star you could identify. Through another part of the instrument you'd locate the horizon.
A sextant is made so that you can determine the angle between the horizon, a star and the point where you're located. By doing this with two different stars, you get two different angles. Then, by looking up the positions of the stars for that time in books called ephemerides (ephemeris in the singular) and performing a few mathematical computations, you can determine where you are at that exact moment.
An astrologer does the same thing - only backwards. We first find the exact time and place of birth. Then we look in books that give us the planets' positions, perform a little math and figure out where things were in the sky at that birth time. Initially astrologers had to physically see where the planets were located in order to draw up a chart, although they've used mathematically compiled tables of locations for quite some time. Now computers can do the same work with less error in a matter of minutes or even seconds.
The circle of the zodiac, or astrological chart, represents the heavens with the Earth being the spot in the middle. The point due west (at the left of the chart) is actually the sign on the eastern horizon. To understand this better, imagine that you're standing on the Earth - the dot where all the lines intersect.
The Ascendant (the sign on the eastern horizon at birth) is at least as important as the positions of the Sun and Moon in reading a chart. It also determines where to place the other lines which cut the circle into 12 pie pieces. These are the houses, each with a sign on the cusp (dividing line between two houses). Thus, the signs overlap the houses on a chart.
Each house represents a certain area of life. Although each is actually much more complex, they basically break down as follows:
1) Ego, self-analysis
2) Money and land
3) Education and siblings
4) Home and family
5) Love affairs and adolescents
6) Service to others
7) Partnerships and beauty
8) Life, death, secrets and other people's money
9) Travel, philosophy and publications
10) Career, area of greatest success
11) Friends and creative solutions
12) Spirituality, faith and institutions
Each house (pie piece) is ruled (dominated) by the sign on its left edge. That means, for example, if you have Scorpio on the cusp of the second house you'll probably gain through inheritance or have some other secret and plentiful source of income.
Sometimes the same sign rules two houses and another sign doesn't get an edge at all (if it is completely within one house and not crossing a cusp). This happens more often when the birth takes place farther north or south on the globe.
SIGNS, PLANETS AND HOUSES
The sign ruling each house also influences the planets that are in that house. Each planet has its own characteristics which are modified by the sign it's in, the house it's in and its mathematical relationship (angle or aspect) to the other planets. (Editor's note: the word planet means 'traveler.' Even though it has long been recognized that the Sun and Moon are not planets in the modern, scientific sense, from our earthly point of view they still appear to travel through the sky. Hence, astrologers may refer to them as planets.)
<O_>diagram<O/>
This diagram shows the houses, Medium Coeli and Ascendant. The Ascendant is marked by the heart-shaped wedge pointing to the left. This is the sign that is on the eastern horizon for the moment that the chart is drawn. It is determined by the time and location being charted.
The top of the chart, the Medium Coeli or Midheaven, is the point directly overhead at the time for which the chart is cast. This defines the separation between the ninth and tenth houses, both indicators of success. The ninth implies that success will come through good fortune while the tenth usually means that it's going to take some hard work.
In this illustration the pie pieces, called the houses, are numbered. The sequence goes from the left in a counter-clockwise direction.
The cusps are the divisions between houses. These are established by the latitude and longitude as well as the exact time being charted. Signs are given to each cusp just as they are to the first cusp, the Ascendant.
The Earth is located in the center, where all of the lines intersect.
Here is an example: Assume that Mars is in Scorpio and in your second house. Scorpio is on the cusp of the second house. In this example Mars is squared (at about a 90<*_>degree<*/> angle to Mars) to the planet Jupiter which is in the sign of Leo. According to Western astrology, Mars represents aggression, Jupiter luck, Leo fair play and Scorpio other people's money and secrets. The squared relationship means that there is a block (or lesson to be learned) represented by the planets, signs and houses at each end of the angle.
Interpreting an entire chart - as opposed to just one small, isolated part of a chart - is called synthesis. In the example described above we would say that a person born with the above example in his or her chart would have a strong urge to grab other people's money, but it will be blocked by their own sense of decency and fair play. Or the person will find a game to play that allows you to win other people's money in an honorable, although private, manner.
THE ASPECTS
The aspects, or the angles between the different planets, are very important. A difference of 30<*_>degree<*/>, called a semi-sextile, is supposed to be mildly beneficial. A sextile or 60<*_>degree<*/> angle is very beneficial. A semi-square, found when planets are at 45<*_>degree<*/> is upsetting while a square at 90<*_>degree<*/> is a difficulty or barrier. Planets at 180<*_>degree<*/> are opposed, but can actually be attractive (their effects enhance one another).
THE MOST IMPORTANT PARTS OF A CHART
The three equally dominant parts of any chart are the positions of the Sun, the Moon, and the Ascendant and the signs that are on their cusps. People who were born when the Sun was within five degrees of the next sign should consider both, with the coming sign slightly stronger. When the Sun is divided this way the influence of the Moon and Ascendant signs are considered to be even more important.
The sign at the top of the chart, the Midheaven (also known as the Medium Coeli or MC), is considered by some to be very important too. That area of the chart is supposed to indicate the individual's career and greatest success.
The ascending sign changes completely every two hours. The Moon takes two to three days to get through a sign and the Sun stays in one sign for almost a month. You can see, then, why it's so important to know the exact time of birth - the Ascendant changes one degree for every four minutes of time and its position also determines the positions of the Houses all the way around the chart. Charts figures for 8:00 AM and 8:00 PM on the same day and in the same location are completely different.
ASTRAL TWINS
Since all the planets are continually moving (at different rates), the same configuration won't repeat for at least 26,000 years (the length of time needed for the precession of the equinoxes to complete one cycle. See the previous article in last month's issue of FATE for details). You can have an astral twin - somebody who has the same chart as you. This can result from differences in birth locations. However, having an astral twin is even more uncommon than having a fraternal twin. Incidentally, fraternal twins aren't always astral twins.
As you can see, the time is very important when setting up a chart. Things can change considerably in only a few minutes. Dramatic changes will usually occur in an hour or two. If you have your chart done and find that it doesn't sound like you, don't assume that astrology is wrong. Check the time of birth. Then check the exact latitude and longitude. The reading of your accurate natal chart will leave you feeling that you have been described with uncomfortable precision.
PREDICTIONS
To make predictions with astrology, the astrologer compares where the planets are now to the natal chart (birth chart of the subject). A progression of the natal chart (where each day in the ephemeris equals a year in the person's life, starting at birth) is also used. For example, if you're 30 years old your progressed chart is for 30 days from your actual birth. This implies that the person goes through phases in life. If the Sun has progressed from Aries into Taurus, for example, the person will be much less spontaneous and more interested in financial security than when he or she was younger.
The position of each of the planets and the Moon is also progressed. For example, the Moon changes signs through this method approximately every two to three years. Since the Moon sign is an indicator of love and romance, this would suggest that people have a tendency to change their romantic preferences every couple of years. Consequently, a stable relationship has to be based on something more than whether a couple agrees on everything, or even whether they like each other at all. Both of those conditions would be in a constant state of flux, even if the two people were born with the Moon in the same sign.
Finally, the astrologer making the predictions compares the natal chart of the person involved, the progressed chart and a chart of where everything in the sky is today, or for the date in question for the prediction.
As you can see, this can get very complicated! For example, if you want to know the best time to make an investment you should compare your natal chart, your progressed chart and the chart of the time of incorporation of the business in which you want to invest and its progressed chart. Then you'd look for a day in the future when strong growth was indicated, such as one with the Moon in Scorpio. You'd have to compare everything else on that day to all of the other charts, though, in order to make sure you weren't going to have favorable indications in one area and unfavorable ones in another. You don't want to pick a date when the business does fine - by growing strongly with your money - but leaves you behind in the dust.
COMPLICATIONS, COMPLICATIONS...
As you see, this is a complicated game. When Jupiter, as it is in the sky, now transits (crosses) the position of Jupiter in your natal chart, things will be very favorable for you. Money will come your way. This would be a good time to buy a lottery ticket.
When Saturn transits your natal Saturn (called a Saturn return) you get a test. That's when you find out how well you've learned the lessons life has dished out to you up to that point. If you've been an open-minded and diligent scholar and have learned from your mistakes, your Saturn return marks the beginning of your period of greatest success. If you've continually avoided facing up to your problems, however, you're in for a very rough time. You may have the feeling you're repeating the same painful thing that happened before.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="04">That's not done with antiemetic drugs, they explain, because only 30 percent of postoperative patients become nauseous, and they worry about side effects, such as excessive sleepiness from a drug. With ginger, they found no side effects.
Then there's garlic. In January of this year, we told you about exciting research from Europe, where doctors found that doses of garlic powder appear to have a marked beneficial effect on cholesterol and blood pressure. Garlic research is proceeding in the United States, as well.
One area of interest is cancer prevention. At the UCLA School of Medicine, researchers added aged garlic extract to test tubes containing cancer cells from humans and mice. A week later, they saw that the cells' growth had been inhibited. The growth of healthy cells was not affected (Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research, March 1991).
At Pennsylvania State University, rats were fed garlic and also subjected to a chemical known to turn normal mammary cells cancerous. "In some studies," says the head of the nutrition department, John Milner, Ph.D., "we observed a 70 percent reduction in the number of tumors." Dr. Milner's best theory is that garlic inhibits cancer-causing chemicals from binding to DNA, the part of a cell that carries hereditary information.
In any event, Dr. Milner says, "this marked reduction places new emphasis on the importance of this condiment in our diet."
Speaking of diet, there's always the question of how to eat garlic. Some researchers advise eating your garlic raw, but now evidence suggests this isn't the only way.
Mahendra K. Jain, Ph.D., professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Delaware, says his work with Rafael Apitz, M.D., suggesting an antithrombosis role for garlic, leads him to prefer cooked garlic. Cooking promotes the formation of compounds that, in the lab, thin blood.
Robert I-San Lin, Ph.D., who served as chairman of the 1990 First World Congress of Garlic, says his two favorite forms are cooked and aged. He told us "aging garlic in vinegar or wine can drastically reduce the pungency and odor problem of raw garlic, while boiling makes garlic sweet." Sautéing garlic does not always eliminate the pungency, and frying it can stink up your house.
The experts we talked to say that no one should treat a serious illness with garlic, but most are big believers in adding some to your diet as a possible helper in warding off problems a lot worse than garlic breath.
REVERSE DIABETES
A 12-step, recommended-daily-action plan that can help you drive the disease into retreat
DON'T BE SO DEFENSIVE. RECENT RESEARCH suggests that most people with diabetes would do well to assume an offensive position. That is, to commit to an aggressive daily-action plan designed not just to manage the disease and keep it from getting worse but to actually shift the disease process into reverse. Imagine requiring less medication to control your blood-sugar swings - or perhaps weaning yourself off medication altogether - while preventing the often crippling and deadly complications of diabetes. In fact, not only is this possible but, for people with non-insulin-dependent diabetes (also known as type-II diabetes), the results can be phenomenal. In a recent study, 701 people with type-II diabetes - all enrollees at the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, California - were asked to follow a challenging diet-and-exercise regimen. They ate a diet high in complex carbohydrates and fiber and very low in protein and fat. (The therapeutic diet consisted of about 10 percent of calories from fat compared with the typical American diet of 40 percent fat.) They also walked about 45 minutes each day and participated in a 40-to-50-minute exercise class five times a week.
At the outset, 207 of them were taking oral drugs to control their blood-sugar levels. Another 214, who had more advanced cases of diabetes, were on insulin injections. The rest were not on medication of any kind.
After three weeks on the aggressive program, however, 70 percent of the group on oral agents were able to discontinue their medication. Even those whose disease had progressed to the point where they required insulin benefited; 36 percent of them were able to go completely medication-free. Many in the study were also able to at least reduce their medication requirements.
In people with type-I diabetes, the pancreas produces no insulin at all. Type-I diabetics are dependent on insulin, usually from self-administered injections (although some are turning to new insulin pumps that are surgically implanted under their skin) to keep blood-sugar levels normal.
EARLY CATCH, BETTER RESULTS
The implications are clear. An aggressive diet-and-exercise program can have a major impact on the course of diabetes. And the earlier in the disease process you start making these lifestyle changes, the greater the potential benefits. "We know that genetic factors predispose certain people to diabetes. But all of the data suggest that lifestyle factors, particularly diet and exercise, can determine whether those genetic factors actually manifest in the disease," says James Barnard, Ph.D., professor of physiological science at the University of California at Los Angeles, one author of the study.
"By committing yourself to certain lifestyle changes, you may be able to reduce your need for medication - and possibly get off and stay off diabetes drugs for the rest of your life," he continues. "Plus, you may be able to avoid any complications."
The Pritikin-program participants saw all three of their heart-disease risk factors - total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides - drop dramatically. This is significant because diabetes can double, triple, even quadruple your risk for heart disease. In fact, it's the number-one cause of death among diabetics.
"Even type-I diabetics, who must rely on insulin injections, may benefit from a lifestyle approach such as the one described above," Dr. Barnard says. There's a chance that they can reduce the amount of insulin they need to keep their blood-sugar levels stable - and that may mean fewer daily injections. And they may also reduce their risk of heart disease and other complications.
TAKING CONTROL
The trouble is, some people with diabetes believe they can simply adjust their medications to compensate for dietary indiscretions. That's their idea of being in control. In fact, says Marie Gelato, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of endocrinology at SUNY Health Science Center at Stony Brook, "medications are an adjunct to - not a replacement for - a good diet and exercise program." Real control of diabetes comes from the ability to redirect the course of the disease through a proactive diet-and-exercise plan coupled with intelligent self-care.
But before you do anything, talk with your doctor. With his or her guidance, you can decide which of our 12 recommended daily actions might best help you achieve your health goals.
OUR RECOMMENDED DAILY ACTIONS
1. Monitor your blood-sugar levels throughout the day. "It's absolutely imprudent to adjust your diet, exercise schedule or medication simply on the basis of the way you feel," says James Pichert, Ph.D., associate professor of education in medicine at the diabetes research and training center at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
You can eliminate the guesswork about your diet by using do-it-yourself, at-home blood-glucose meters that analyze a sample of your blood (from a pricked finger).
A once-a-day blood-sugar test, scheduled at the same time every day, is the absolute minimum. Your doctor may also advise you to check your blood sugar after meals, and before and after exercise, too.
Be sure to log the results of each test in a special book (available from your doctor or at most drugstores). That allows you and your doctor to analyze the highs and lows and adjust your diet, exercise and medication accordingly, if necessary.
2. Keep a careful eye on the fat grams you consume. The American Diabetes Association recommends that you limit fat intake to under 30 percent of calories to redirect the course of the disease and prevent complications.
For one thing, fat calories contribute more to excess body weight than calories from any other source. And excess weight contributes to the development of type-II diabetes. Overweight is no small contributor, either. In early stages of type-II diabetes (characterized by a malfunction of the body's insulin-receptor cells), the loss of excess body weight is sometimes sufficient to reverse the degenerative diabetic process and restore function to the receptor cells.
A number of studies also have suggested that overweight diabetics are more likely to have associated risk factors, including high blood pressure, high triglycerides and high cholesterol. These factors, in turn, can lead to complications like heart disease and kidney damage.
In addition, dietary fat (especially saturated fat) with its artery-clogging, heart-sabotaging abilities, puts an extra burden on people with diabetes, who are already at higher risk for heart disease.
3. Aim for 40 grams of fiber from complex-carbohydrate foods. Fiber-rich complex carbohydrates break down into glucose more gradually and are slowly absorbed into the bloodstream. So they don't hit your bloodstream all at once, like simple sugars, preventing a postmeal blood-sugar surge. Combined with exercise, they're also a great way to slim down, which is a definite goal for many type-II diabetics.
Among the best sources of complex carbohydrates are starchy foods, like whole-grain breads, pasta and rice, or foods high in water-soluble fiber, like legumes, oats and barley. Studies indicate that these foods are especially slow-digesting. Water-soluble fiber turns into a gel when it hits your digestive system, increasing the time it takes for the sugar in food to be absorbed by your body.
4. Take a 45-minute exercise break every day, dividing your time between aerobic conditioning and resistance training. "Make exercise just as important and routine as brushing your teeth. Do it every day," Dr. Barnard says. Combined with a low-fat diet, there's no more powerful way to strengthen your resistance to diabetes. Prevention recently reported on a study of 5,990 men showing that, for every 500 calories burned per week (the equivalent of walking just 5 miles), the risk of developing type-II diabetes dropped 6 percent.
But the big returns were for the men who had at least one risk factor for the disease, like a family history of diabetes or excess body weight. Men in that high-risk group who burned 2,000 calories or more a week had 41 percent less risk compared with men who burned only 500 calories a week. That's about 45 minutes of brisk walking or stationary cycling.
What's more, recent research suggests that resistance training may help control blood-sugar levels even in type-I diabetics. Muscles apparently take up glucose greedily. And there's some evidence that when you build muscle, the muscle's insulin receptors on the cells, which store glucose, may grow in number, and this may enhance glucose utilization by the cells. That means you now have more room to store glucose. With less glucose in circulation, it's possible that insulin requirements may be reduced.
One note of caution: Check with your doctor before beginning any exercise program. And, if your program includes weight training, have your eyes checked regularly. Resistance training may cause surges in blood pressure, which could affect pressure in the eyes.
5. Consider supplementing your diet. A number of studies suggest that diabetics tend to run low on certain vitamins and minerals, particularly vitamins C and E. That's significant because there's increasing evidence that these antioxidant vitamins may protect diabetics from common complications, such as heart disease and kidney, eye and nerve damage.
"Because diabetics are prone to vascular disease, they may need to increase their intake of vitamin C," says Ishwarial Jialal, M.D., assistant professor of internal medicine and clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Based on findings including his own, he believes diabetics should be sure to get 120 milligrams of vitamin C a day - twice the Recommended Dietary Allowance. "That won't cause any side effects, and it could be beneficial," he says.
Vitamin E may also prevent a process called protein glycosylation (gleye-caw-sil-A-shun). In a diabetic, this process may be involved in damaging proteins circulating in the blood.
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Is There A Conspiracy To Keep Blacks Off Juries?
Recent cases have led many to believe that the American justice system is still far from its color-blind ideal
By Charles Whitaker
FOR the vast majority of Black Americans - and many sympathetic White Americans - the acquittal of the four White police officers charged with the brutal beating of motorist Rodney King cast in sharp relief the racist leanings of the nation's judicial system, particularly the process by which jurors are selected.
While most of us were taught in grammar school civics classes that the selection of a fair and impartial jury is the backbone of American jurisprudence, the King case - and other splashy court-room dramas that have recently held the nation's rapt attention - confirmed for many the feeling that the law is applied quite differently when either the defendant or the plaintiff/victim is Black.
Though the Supreme Court has attempted to address the issue of race-based jury selection, most recently in a June ruling that extended the ban on such practices to defense attorneys, some continue to find ways around the law.
Legal maneuverings in the King case, for example, helped the odds of seating an all-White jury. The trial was moved from ethnically diverse Los Angeles County (10.5 percent Black), where the beating occurred, to overwhelming White Simi Valley in Ventura County (only 2 percent Black).
In the court of public opinion, the change of venue and other high profile examples of under-representation or complete lack of representation of Blacks on juries have the distinct smell of pure racism.
"In the King case, in particular, the racial overtones are just shameful," says Miami attorney H.P. Smith, who has conducted seminars and workshops in the art and philosophy of jury selection for the National Bar Association. "In terms of jury selection, Blacks are clearly losing ground when it comes to being allowed to sit as the factual judges of innocence or guilt. We are at a point when justice is still peeping from under the blindfold that she is supposed to be wearing, and unfortunately what she is seeing is a system that still shuts the door of opportunity for Blacks to be involved in this great experiment called a trial by jury."
In barbershops and at lunch counters, the indignation is expressed in more blunt terms. Many speculate about the existence of a national conspiracy to keep Blacks out of the jury box, particularly in racially tinged cases.
Specifically, many courtroom watchers have expressed alarm at the scant number of Blacks selected for such highly visible cases as the Mike Tyson rape trial (in which there were only two Black jurors) and the trial of mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer (one Black juror).
While most attorneys and legal scholars are loath to subscribe to conspiracy theories, they uniformly maintain that a degree of racism continues to taint the jury selection process even in light of recent Supreme Court rulings that prohibit the dismissal of prospective jurors based on race.
"Prejudice is so pervasive in our society, you really don't need to look for a conspiracy," says Sharon McPhail, immediate past president of the National Bar Association, in explaining the persistence of race-based jury selection. "Any system that depends upon the behavior of human beings is going to be somewhat affected by the prejudices and biases of those human beings. Frankly, I don't know that you could design a process that would pull out the prejudices of the people selecting the jury."
Currently, the process works like this: A random and, in theory, ethnically representative pool of prospective jurors - culled in most jurisdictions from voter registration rolls - is impaneled and interviewed by opposing counselors. During the interview process, known as voir dire, the opposing attorneys attempt to root out persons with biases, fears or hostilities that would prevent a prospective juror from reaching a fair and impartial decision based on the facts presented at trial. Each side is allowed a specified number (depending upon the jurisdiction) of peremptory challenges.
What has traditionally happened in many criminal and personal injury cases, however, is that prosecutors and attorneys for deep-pocket defendants have sought, as a matter of course, to eliminate prospective Black jurors under the racist assumption that Blacks are, by nature, soft on criminals and quick to 'punish' large firms.
"For whatever reason, there is this perception that Black jurors will give away the farm or somewhat are more sympathetic to criminals," says McPhail. "And so you have these challenges based on unacceptable reasons such as race and gender."
Yet in a 1986 ruling (Batson v. Kentucky), the U.S. Supreme Court declared the use of race stereotypes in jury selection for criminal cases unconstitutional and held that prosecutors may be required to explain their objection to prospective jurors.
In 1991, the Court's ruling in Edmonton v. Leeville Concrete Co. extended its condemnation of race-based challenges to include civil suits as well. Then in June, the Court ruled in Georgia v. McCollum that defense attorneys also could not use race as a basis for peremptory challenges.
Since the advent of Batson and its legal progeny, many attorneys say they have, in the main, detected something of a change in the air. "Before Batson, I could walk into any courtroom in South Georgia and have a panel of 42 prospective jurors and maybe half a dozen Black males and females, and I'd know that the prosecutor, without thinking, would strike most of them from the pool," says Atlanta attorney Tony Axam, a member of the faculties of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and the National College of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "That was both the philosophy and the practice of some sitting prosecutors and their young assistants who were trying cases. Batson has changed that."
Not everyone agrees that the changes have been all that significant, however.
"We still have the problem of prosecutors using peremptory challenges to strike Black jurors without a legitimate explanation," says Julius Chambers, executive counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. "I don't know how widespread this is, but we've seen enough instances of this occurring to say that we should all be concerned about improprieties in the way juries are constituted."
Among the most common reasons used by prosecutors to exclude prospective Black jurors is the reasoning that a would-be juror and the defendant live in close proximity, making the juror less-than-impartial, prosecutors say. It is a line of reasoning that attorneys say defies all logic. "Who is going to be more concerned about crime in a given area that someone who's from the same neighborhood," says H.P. Smith. "If the person is guilty, I would want him prosecuted and off the streets where I live. If he's innocent, I'd want to see the right person found, so the reasoning just doesn't make sense."
That reasoning, particularly in light of the spate of high-profile trials, has also raised the ire of some Black Americans and heightened sensitivity to the jury selection process. But observers of the fury say Black Americans must do more than get angry; they must seize this opportunity to apply more pressure to keep the system honest.
"Batson is the vehicle the Supreme Court devised for ensuring fairness, but you have to give it bite," says Jackson, Miss., attorney Dennis Sweet, a lecturer at the Introductory Trial Advocacy Program at Harvard University and a member of the Jackson Board of Bar Commissioners. "Judges have to take a closer look at these challenges and make prosecutors and other attorneys give real reasons for excluding Blacks. Once you start getting the same explanations over and over and you start seeing a pattern of exclusion, then judges have to invoke Batson and deny these strikes."
Clearly, the racial tensions that continue to smolder in the wake of the Los Angeles riots have, for the moment, had some affect on judicial behavior. A Florida judge, for example, recently shifted the highly publicized trial of a Hispanic Miami police officer charged with the shooting death of a Black motorcyclist from Orlando to Tallahassee which has a Black population closer in number to that of Miami's.
Still, attorney'sattorneys say, the real key to courtroom fairness, however, is the seating of more Black judges. "You've got to believe that Black judges would be less likely to accept the legal mumbo jumbo that lawyers are likely to give," says H.P. Smith.
Similarly, many attorneys advocate changing the way jury pools are selected. Rather than selecting potential jurors from voter registration rolls or property tax rolls, some suggest impaneling jurors from driver's license rolls, a register that more accurately reflects the makeup of a community.
And Black Americans must understand the significance of jury selection and must be willing to serve. "We have to impress upon the Black community how very important jury service is," says Dennis Sweet. "You have to have people registering to vote and getting involved. The issue here is participation and fairness. Having Black people on juries brings cultural sensitivity into the jury room that can be very useful. When you have a jury that is representative, a decision can be reached that's fair to everybody involved."
Why HYPERTENSION Strikes Twice As Many Blacks As Whites
Racism and urban pressures may cause hypertension disparity between Blacks and Whites
By Karima A. Haynes
LIKE a predator silently stalking its prey, hypertension, or high blood pressure, strikes African-Americans at alarmingly higher rates than it does Whites, prompting medical researchers to look at environmental factors like racism, stress and diet as causes for the disparity.
For reasons that are hotly debated in medical circles, hypertension, according to the American Heart Assn., strikes twice as many Blacks as Whites. African-Americans also suffer from chronic hypertension nearly five to seven times more often than Whites. And interestingly, Black Americans have much higher rates of high blood pressure than Blacks in Africa, leading researchers to believe that the stress of living in America's inner cities plays a major role in triggering high blood pressure in Blacks with a genetic predisposition to the condition.
The number of Blacks between the ages of 45 and 64 years with chronic hypertension is 366.9 per 1,000 compared to 204.2 per 1,000 among Whites in the same age group, according to a 1990 study by the National Center for Health Statistics. Some medical experts blame the hypertension disparity on the condition being passed on from generation to generation. Others say African-Americans are disproportionately exposed to urban pressures and racism. And still others surmise that it is a combination of both factors.
A strong case has been made that racism itself is a major cause of hypertension among Black Americans. "There are many environmental factors associated with high blood pressure," says Dr. Robert F. Murray Jr., director of the division of medical genetics at the Howard University College of Medicine. "Because of the racism that exists in our society, people of darker pigment are discriminated against more than those who are fairer. Darker-skinned people undergo more streets because they feel powerless over their condition, particularly people in the inner city."
Dr. Clarence E. Grim of Charles R. Drew University of Medicine in Los Angeles theorizes that Black Americans are more susceptible to high blood pressure because of a sensitivity to salt inherited from some African slaves. The theory is that many slaves died on the passage from West Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean due to diarrhea and salt loss. Those slaves who carried genes that helped them to retain water and salt survived the journey and subsequently passed the genes on to their descendants.
If the theory holds true, Grim asserts, some 75 percent of the cases of hyper-tension among Blacks could be eliminated by reducing salt intake. "The exciting thing is that we could start wiping out this disease in the Black community by changing dietary salt intake and by prescribing diuretics (drugs that reduce salt and fluid retention)," Grim points out.
Still, there is a third school of thought that says both environment and heredity cause hypertension in Blacks.
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HALF A MOUNTAIN...
The Matterhorn challenges our travel editor
By Charles N. Barnard.
I met Perrig in Switzerland more than two years ago. It was he who tempted me to think I might climb a certain mountain. (Which led to this adventure.) Perrig is not a climber himself; he is a former ski instructor, now a government official. But anyone living in Zermatt thinks inevitably of mountains. And of climbing them.
"We are surrounded here by the greatest concentration of 4,000-meter mountains in Europe," he said. "Twenty-nine." One had only to look out any window in town to see a great array of snow-frosted peaks - including the Matterhorn - standing guard above and around the valley of Zermatt. All had been conquered by climbers long ago, of course; mountaineers have been coming to this picturesque Alpine village for much more than a century. "All the same," said my enthusiastic friend, "to climb a 4,000-meter mountain - any one of them, even today - is a kind of achievement...."
My mind was doing funny, irresponsible things as Perrig talked. I could hear what he was saying, but I was communing with myself at the same time. Let's see. Four thousand meters? That's 13,200 feet. That isn't impossible. You were higher than that in Peru. You're in pretty good shape. You've even started lying about your age because you discovered you can get away with it. So why not think about a climb, you old coot? It might boost your morale.
"... Some of the fourthousanders are more difficult than others, of course," Perrig was saying and I heard myself answering, Of course, in an unfazed, age-39 tone. "You could try, for example, the Breithorn. It is 4,160 meters, but if you are quite fit, it should be no problem. I can introduce you to a guide who has taken clients up the Matterhorn more than 200 times. You couldn't be in better hands."
My imagination was racing. An aphorism came flashing back You don't stop playing because you get old. But you could get old if you stop playing. (Admittedly this bit of wisdom was meant to apply to romance, but why not mountain-climbing too?)
"Well, think about it," Perrig said, shaking hands as we parted. "If you ever want to give Breithorn a try, let me know." Give Breithorn a try, give Breithorn a try.... Hmmm. Time passed, as they say in stories, but this visit to Switzerland - this idea - refused to fade. Not because I believe Perrig really cares if I climb Breithorn or not - or even remembers our conversation. Not (forfend) because I think I have something to prove at this age - but there it is, the shimmering, inextinguishable thought: I must climb a 4,000-meter mountain and have done with it. What's the big fear? What would it take? A little extra conditioning. Then a day or so and it will be over. For life.
August, 1991
Dear Amandé Perrig:
Great news! I will be coming back to Zermatt next month to do a magazine story. Will be arriving via Glacier Express from St. Moritz about the 15th. Do you remember the talk we had about doing a bit of mountaineering? I think you said September would be an ideal month. Can you set something up for me with that veteran guide you said you knew?
Oh, yes. In case you don't remember. The mountain we were talking about is Breithorn ...
I pack thermal underwear, sun goggles, sturdy gloves, a wool hat, lip balm, sweaters, hiking boots. And my clipping file - all the stories I have been saving about climbing in the Swiss Alps: "FOUR DIE ON MATTERHORN" ... "OLDEST MOUNTAIN GUIDE IS 88" ... THE CHALLENGE OF THE PEAKS." Also a great calendar photo of climbers near the summit of Breithorn, and a copy of Edward Whymper's classic Ascent of the Matterhorn, the story of the first successful climb to the summit of the famed mountain in 1865. Good reading for tonight on the plane.
I am early at the Swissair lounge. I find a cup of coffee, some sweet Swiss biscuits and a guide book I have not seen before - all about 'Alpinismo ... Bergsteigen ... Mountaineering.' It says most Zermatt climbs take two days. ("First day, ascent to the hut. Second day, climb in view.") It warns that good physical condition and equipment are indispensable. It cautions that fourthousanders should not be climbed without a guide. In a list of "classical high-Alpine climbs" I find my mountain: "Breithorn, ice-climbing, 4,164 meters, 45-degree pitch."
Well, I think, if I'm not ready now, it's too late to back out. The plane leaves in 15 minutes.
One cannot fly into Zermatt; there is no airport. Nor can one arrive by tour bus or drive into the town itself in any motor vehicle. Only the narrow-gauge trains of a private railroad arrive here after a spectacular journey through vertiginous gorges and mountain passes.
A gathering of small battery-powered carts and horse-drawn coaches meet each arriving train to pick up guests. The chauffeurs have the names of the leading hotels embroidered in gold on their caps: Mont Cervin, Schweizerhof, Monte Rosa, Alphubel. I signal my man, he rushes to relieve me of my luggage and off we drive, swiftly and electric-motor-silent, up half-mile Bahnhofstrasse, the main street.
If every weathered timber and stone of Zermatt - every Alpine meadow and herd of black-and-white cows - had been assembled by a theatrical set designer to represent the most idyllic of Swiss mountain villages, the result would be - well, Zermatt. The Sound of Music! Heidi-town! Geraniums tumbling from chalet balconies! Small, quaint hotels! Sidewalk cafés! The sweet scents of bratwurst steaming and pastries baking! The sound of cowbells echoing down from the hills. Skiers in brilliant colors striding back into town after a day on the slopes. Climbers in knickerbockers, ropes coiled unaffectedly over one shoulder, ice axes in hand. I take in the whole scene once again with affection.
To be a guest in a small Swiss hotel is to be a member of the family. Inn-keeping is as much a proprietary Swiss occupation as watch-, chocolate- or cheesemaking. Swiss hoteliers founded a profession in the remote valleys of this mountainous country more than a century ago. Now the Swiss manage great hotels in every corner of the world. In Zermatt, a guest is still greeted as one who has just survived an arduous and perhaps risky journey and deserves the best of care: a bed smothered in down comforters; a small, cozy lounge for a schnapps before dinner; a roaring log fire; a dining room where you will have your own table for as long as you stay. And a waitress who addresses you by name (but has the good manners not to announce her own). And, yes, your very own napkin ring.
Zermatt is a small town in both population (about 3,500) and style. I do not have to go looking for Perrig. A few minutes after dropping my bags at the hotel, I meet him by chance on the main street. "So! You have come for the Breithorn!" he exclaims, as if not more than two weeks, rather than two years, had passed. In this environment, under the shadow of the Matterhorn, I suddenly feel a little like an imposter. Well, yes, I say, perhaps. "No perhaps!" Perrig shouts. "We are waiting for you! Breithorn is waiting for you! We meet with Biener at five!"
Emil Biener is the guide who has climbed the Matterhorn more than 200 times. The three of us gather in a small restaurant. Three glasses of sherry, a toast to success, and then it all becomes very businesslike - the essential first discussion of "ze program." A few days will be allowed, to become accustomed to the altitude and to recover from jet lag. Perrig and Biener agree on some moderate mountain hiking for me.
I am conscious of Veteran Guide giving Greenhorn Client a preliminary checkout: "How old is this American, how fit, what temperament? He says he is here to climb Breithorn, but does he seem like someone I would take up a mountain, any mountain? We shall see."
First meeting is a time for the client to make a preliminary appraisal of the guide, too. Frankly, I am in awe of anyone who has climbed the Matterhorn once, to say nothing of 200 times. (I later learn even that figure is not extraordinary within the fraternity of approximately 50 Zermatt mountain guides.) Biener is a small, intense man with sharp blue eyes, thin gray hair and a leathery face. He is about my age and very explicit. "Tomorrow we walk," he says. "And I must see your boots."
From this moment and for the next few days, Emil Biener runs my life and manipulates my emotions.
It is raining this first morning and the day does not look promising for mountain hikes, but Guide Emil shows up at my hotel precisely on time. He examines my boots with displeasure. Too soft, he says, but they will do for now. I am wearing a favorite jacket that kept me warm even in Antarctica. Anxious to please, I point out to my new father-figure that my jacket is waterproof. "Nozzing iss vaterprooof!" Emil declares with a snort. I am put off balance already; I am doing everything wrong.
The floor of the valley at Zermatt is at about 1,620 meters. (One meter is three-feet-plus.) We give ourselves a 700-meter jump on today's itinerary by taking a fast ride on a funicular railroad tunneled through the mountains to a station named Sunnegga at 2,300 meters. When we emerge into daylight, the weather has improved slightly.
When we begin to walk, Emil leads the way along a stony trail through a treeless landscape. We are headed for a crossing of the Findelgletscher; we follow the moraine left behind by the retreating glacier over the past few centuries. It is like scrambling along the rim of a crater.
The sky remains overcast and there are occasional spits of rain. Emil stops now and then to survey the weather in all directions with binoculars. Once he points in the direction of the partially obscured Matterhorn and announces, "It is snowing at H<*_>o-umlaut<*/>rnlih<*_>u-umlaut<*/>tte." I take this to be a remark full of portent, if only I understood what.
Soon the glacial icefield begins to be visible several hundred feet below on our right. We begin a diagonal traverse down the inner slope of the moraine, stumbling through a boulder field. There is no trail here, only gravelly spaces between big rocks, rocks that move underfoot, and rocks that rumble.
(This is no piece of cake, I am thinking. I really must stop lying about my age - especially to myself.)
When we reach the edge of the ice, the cold breath of the glacier feels like the entrance to a frigid cave. Up close, Findelgletscher is a little frightening - a huge, craggy mass that makes groaning, growling sounds. Emil probes ahead with his ice axe: There is a crevasse. He dislodges some big rocks and they tumble into the void. After a pause, the stuff makes a big, muffled splash below; it's like having dropped several cement blocks into a deep well. Once we know where the crevasse is, we proceed.
Now the rain begins in earnest and Emil says we must wait. We find shelter under the overhang of a boulder about the size of a small house. A gurgling river of glacial melt rushes by. We pull up some flat stones and sit. A foggy vapor rolls off the glacier.
"What is H<*_>o-umlaut<*/>rnlih<*_>u-umlaut<*/>tte?" I ask while we wait. Emil says it is the first climbers' hut on the way up the Matterhorn; it's also the last. "At three-two," he says. That means 3,200 meters - more than 10,000 feet.
The rain lets up after 20 minutes and Emil says it is time to put on crampons, the steel-toothed footgear that make it possible to walk or climb on ice.
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Waste vs. waste
David Scott
Three new products made from waste materials promise low-cost, speedy cleanups for oil spills.
At the University of Texas in Austin, two chemical engineering professors have invented tiny glass beads, manufactured from fly ash, that float on oil and stick to it. The hollow microbeads, about the thickness of a human hair, are partially coated with titanium dioxide - a nontoxic white pigment used in paint.
The coating acts as a semiconductor: struck by sunlight, it provides the energy needed to oxidize oil. The oxidized oil then dissolves in the ocean, where it can be quickly consumed by naturally occurring bacteria. Adam Heller, one of the inventors, estimates that a ton of beads could dissolve about 35 tons of oil per week.
The oil-soaked beads, unlike thin layers of oil, can be ignited for even faster cleanups. The end product resembles white sand and is harmless, says Heller.
A British farmer has devised another simple and inexpensive means of countering oil spills. Ten years ago, Kenneth Frogbrook discovered he could use straw to clean seabirds soaked with oil. From this chance discovery, he invented Frogmat. "It's a ribbon of compacted straw that is stapled between two skins of nylon mesh," he explains.
To hasten cleanup after an oil spill, mobile Frogmat factories could be rushed to the scene of the accident. With funding from the British government's Marine Pollution Control Unit, Frogbrook has already designed and built several trailer-mounted machines that chop baled straw, use a belt conveyor to feed the straw between mesh coverings, and shape the straw into mats that are three inches thick and four feet wide.
"This ribbon is churned out continuously at the rate of 11 yards per minute, or nine miles a day. It can be coiled in 330-foot lengths weighing 560 pounds," says Frogbrook, "then unrolled along the beach or on the water, where the straw floats even when fully saturated." Used mats can be rolled up to squeeze out the oil, and then they can be incinerated.
A comparable American system uses a sawdust to soak up oil - an idea borrowed form saloon owners who sprinkle sawdust on floors to absorb spilled beer. Heat-treatment of ordinary sawdust alters its porous structure so it absorbs oil but repels water. The concept was developed by Thomas B. Reed, a research professor at the Colorado School of Mines.
Called Sea Sweep, the treated sawdust is spread on the water from a boat or aircraft. It can float indefinitely, storing 80 percent of its own volume in oil while congealing into clumps. The oily dust is recovered by a scoop or boom, or swept to a collection point for removal by suction or mechanical means. Sea Sweep can be processed to extract most of the crude, then burned as an industrial fuel.
Laser watchdog
P.J. Skerrett
Barry Commoner's fourth law of ecology - there's no such thing as a free lunch - definitely applies to burning solid waste instead of burying it in overburdened landfills. Incineration may solve disposal problems and generate electricity to boot, but it can also create toxic emissions. Currently, emissions monitoring is a time-consuming process that at best "gives you a good snapshot of what happened a couple of weeks ago when you took the samples," explains Terill Cool, a physics professor at Cornell University who is developing a laser system that can spit out results in less than two hours.
The Cornell monitor uses a laser to excite incinerator gases, but only after a sample of smokestack gases has been flash-cooled to less than - 380<*_>degree<*/>F in a vacuum flask. The detector searches for approximately two dozen chemicals that always form along with dioxins and other suspected carcinogens, but in higher concentrations.
An even faster sensor designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) detects and tracks compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PACs) from the instant they form deep in an incinerator's flame. The technique, called laser-induced fluorescence, targets PACs because "they are the real villains in emissions," says J<*_>a-acute<*/>nos Beér, a professor of chemical engineering. Not only are PACs carcinogenic, but their presence indicates that hard-to-detect dioxins are being produced as the stack gases cool.
Through a tiny pie-shaped slit in MIT's huge test incinerator, sparkling blue light from an argon-ion laser slices into the roaring orange flame. Any PACs hit by the laser absorb some of its energy, then release it at characteristic wavelengths. A detector outside the incinerator filters out background radiation from the 2,200<*_>degree<*/>F flame and picks up the distinctive PAC 'signatures'.
Under real operating conditions, a surge of these hardy compounds could be destroyed by releasing a blast of oxygen or hydrogen peroxide, says Beér. Or the incinerator gases could be diverted through special scrubbers.
An industrial-scale prototype is now under construction at a municipal power plant in D<*_>u-umlaut<*/>sseldorf, Germany. Beér expects the laser detector system to cost around $100,000.
The Great (imported) Lakes
Mark D. Uehling
Beloved though they are, the Great Lakes have become great aquariums: holding ponds for species introduced by humans. In a report prepared for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, a team led by Edward L. Mills of the Cornell University Biological Field Station has identified 136 species from Europe, the Pacific, and elsewhere that thrive in the world's largest expanse of fresh water.
Some species were released accidentally by ships dumping ballast water; others were introduced deliberately to provide good fishing. "Probably most of the biomass in the Great Lake is exotic," says Mills. "It's a very artificial system now."
Alewives, for example, decimated native yellow perch and reproduced so well that they washed ashore by the millions in the 1960s. Today the same fish are struggling to survive - and fed at public expense because they are the prey of choice for salmon, another immigrant. New-comers themselves, the finicky salmon may not have had enough time to evolve a taste for indigenous species, Mills speculates.
For the moment, the most despised import is the amazingly fecund zebra mussel, each of which generates 30,000 eggs a year. The small, clamlike pests are clogging intake valves at power plants throughout the region. Their removal could cost $2 billion annually. Unable to keep up by scraping off clumps of the mollusks, some utilities treat nearby water with chlorine to kill the creatures. But a company specializing in naval research seems to have found a more environmentally sound approach. Sonalysts, Inc. in Waterford, Conn., discovered that ultra-sound waves shatter the mussels at a larval stage.
Less notorious exotic species will have severe biological ramifications in the Great Lakes too. A tall aquatic weed, purple loosestrife, is edging out native cattails and marsh grasses. Inedible to migrating birds, loosestrife is already impervious to herbicides and expanding its range. And the ruffe, a fish that flourishes at a variety of temperatures, is well established in Lake Superior, where it is disrupting what is left of the natural ecological balance. The ruffe is too spiny to be a tempting meal for predators.
Biosphere J
Dennis Normile
First there was Biosphere - Earth. Then there was Biosphere II - a small replica of Earth ['Inside Biosphere II,' Nov. '90]. And soon there will be Biosphere J - the unofficial name of a research project being planned by Japan's Science and Technology Agency.
The project's purpose is to determine how radioactive elements move through an ecosystem. Agency official Toshinori Kanno emphasizes that there are no current plans to use radioactive material at Biosphere J. The aim is to understand the food chain more clearly and how elements move through it by studying closed systems. Researchers may then infer how radioactive material could move through a larger ecosystem. That understanding eventually could lead to better safety measures at nuclear power plants.
Kanno says the agency is not ruling out the possibility of using trace amounts of radioactive elements in the future. Japan is still committed to nuclear power, although the public is increasingly uneasy about it.
Unlike Biosphere II, which is a one-of-a-kind environment, Biosphere J will probably contain two nearly identical closed systems. One will serve as the experimental system while the other will be a control system. The agency would like to be able to manipulate the concentrations of atmospheric gases and other environmental conditions to observe the response.
Enclosed within Biosphere J will be a variety of small animals, microorganisms, and plants. It is likely that humans will also be enclosed for extended periods. Preliminary designs call for sealed areas of up to 1,200 square yards. Biosphere J is expected to cost approximately $30 million and is targeted for completion in 1995.
Third World wonder tree
Robert Langreth
This tree sounds too good to be true: Its twigs prevent tooth decay, its oil is a strong contraceptive, its seeds produce a safe pesticide, and it is so hardy that it grows even in drought-stricken parts of the Third World.
But the tree really exists, and it's called the neem. Indians have recognized the neem's value for centuries, but only recently have scientists begun to confirm the folklore about the tropical evergreen, a relative of mahagony. Now "even the most cautious of researchers are saying that the neem deserves to be called a wonder tree," reports Noel Vietmeyer, the director of a National Research Council study on the neem.
In India, where the tree originated, it is used for so many curative purposes that some call it "the village pharmacy," the report says. Investigations show that chemicals from the tree may kill athlete's foot-type fungi, block ringworms, and prevent the spread of a crippling tropical parasite. Brushing one's teeth with neem twigs seems to deter gum disease, although scientists aren't sure why. And natural pesticides can be extracted from the neem's seeds (see 'HNF,' this issue).
Research on animals and humans indicates that neem oil is a potent spermicide, according to the National Research Council. Such a contraceptive offers several advantages for developing nations: Neem oil is cheap, nontoxic and easy to extract.
Yet another use for the neem tree is in reforestation. "Planting neem on a large scale might ... improve the declining ecosystems of many areas considered fairly hopeless," the report says. The neem provides firewood and shade and prevents erosion.
Strategic offense initiative
M.D.U.
Scientists have adapted high-energy weapons, originally designed for Strategic Defense Initiative research, to zap hazardous stews bubbling up at hundreds of industrial and military installations where water is contaminated by solvents and organic chemicals. The scientists are fighting waste with million-volt electron beams and high-intensity X-rays.
"We call this an equal opportunity destroyer - it attacks a broad spectrum of wastes," says Louis Rosocha, a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. His electron beam annihilates trichloroethylene, carbon tetrachloride, phenols, and vinyl chlorides.
In California, physicist Stephan Matthews has achieved similar results with X-rays at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His machines can deliver radiation several hundred times more intense than that used by doctors and dentists. Unlike electron beams, the X-rays can penetrate steel drums used to store toxic chemicals.
Both beams shatter the chemical bonds in water. The resulting molecular shrapnel then reacts with contaminants to form more benign chemical debris. "We're hardening the water, basically," Matthews says, because the main byproducts are harmless salts.
Though others physicists laid the groundwork for such research with experiments using radioactive cobalt, today's beam machines are safe when turned off. And neither produces any sludge that must be treated or stored.
In Miami one electron beam is already operating on a large scale. It targets contaminated water cascading over a short ledge at a rate of 120 gallons per minute. Bombarding the waterfall, the beam can obliterate 99 percent of the most common solvents found at Superfund sites.
The only residues are minute levels of formaldehyde and formic acid. "We found the concentrations are a hundred times lower than those in a common cola and a recent Beaujolais," explains Bill Cooper of Florida International University. "I wouldn't drink this water, but I would have no hesitation about using it for irrigation or releasing it into the environment.
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The Children
I am five. The July sun shines on my shoulders. I am wearing a dress I have never seen before, one I don't remember putting on. The door opens and a little girl runs to me, her face delighted. I have never seen her before. I am completely terrified and try to hide behind my astonished and irritated mother.
"But she's your best friend!" my mother says, and tells me that I played at the girl's house just yesterday. I don't remember. When my mother tells me her name, I've never heard it before.
Other children arrive. I remember some of them, but from long ago. They're older now. They've grown. Some have lost their teeth.
I pretend that everything is all right.
At night I lie awake as I have for years, listening. I hear footsteps coming down the hall. I hold my breath. I watch the edge of the door to my bedroom. I watch for the hand that will push it open. If it is my mother's hand or my father's, I am all right. For now. If it is the hand of the woman who lives with us and sticks things into me, I move out of my body. I disappear into a painting on the wall, into my alarm clock with its rocking Gene Autry figure, into imaginary landscapes. Usually I come back when the woman leaves. But not always.
I am eight. I have spoken French from the time I was three. I attended a French kindergarten, and now the Lycée Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>ais. I have just spent the summer in France. My French is fluent when we leave Nice. Four days later, after my return to the woman who hurts me, I can no longer understand or speak a single word of French. Sitting at my gouged wooden desk, my classmates sniggering around me, I feel terrified and ashamed, certain that whatever is wrong is my fault.
She told me she would cut out my tongue. She told me I would forget. I remember how tall she was, how she wore her hair pulled back with wisps breaking loose at the temples. I knew then that I would never forget.
I am 40. There are things I have always remembered, things I have forgotten, things that exist in shadows only, that slip away when I try to think about them. I can't remember all that she did that sent me 'away.' Nor do I know what I was doing while I was 'away.' I only know that these episodes began with periods of abuse so frightening, painful, and humiliating that I left my body and parts of my mind.
I rarely talk about what happened to me. I have never discussed the details with my parents, my husband, or anyone else. Whenever I think of telling, she returns in my dreams.
I dream that I am a child and she chases me with a sharp knife, catches me, and gouges out my eyes. I dream that I have to protect little children at night, even though I am alone and a child myself. I tuck in the other children and get into my bed. Her arm reaches for me and pulls me down. I dream that I run for help, enter a phone booth, hear a dial tone. When I reach up I see the phone has been torn from the wall. I dream of animals skinned alive while I scream.
Sometimes when I sleep I stop breathing and can't make myself start until I wake gasping, my fingers blue.
Incest can happen to anyone: to rich and to poor; to whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Jews, Christians, and Buddhists. It happens to girls and to boys, to the gifted and to the disabled. It happens to children whose parents neglect them, and those - like me - whose parents love and care for them.
What exactly is incest? The definition that I use in this article is: any sexual abuse of a child by a relative or other person in a position of trust and authority over the child. It is the violation of the child where he or she lives - literally and metaphorically. A child molested by a stranger can run home for help and comfort. A victim of incest cannot.
Versions of this definition are widely used outside the courtroom by therapists and researchers. In court, incest definitions vary from state to state. In many states, the law requires that for incest to have taken place, vaginal penetration must be proved. So if a father rapes his child anally or orally he may be guilty of child sexual abuse but may not, legally, be guilty of incest.
I believe that if incest is to be understood and fought effectively, it is imperative that the definition commonly held among therapists and researchers - the definition I have given here - be generally accepted by the courts and public. I am not alone in this belief. As therapist E. Sue Bloom, for one, writes in Secret Survivors: Uncovering Incest and Its Aftereffects in Women: "If we are to understand incest, we must look not at the blood bond, but at the emotional bond between the victim and the perpetrator. ... The important criterion is whether there is a real relationship in the experience of the child."
"The crucial psychosocial dynamic is the familial relationship between the incest participants," adds Suzanne M. Sgroi, M.D., director of the Saint Joseph College's Institute for Child Sexual Abuse Intervention in West Hartford, Connecticut, writing in the Handbook of Clinical Intervention in Child Sexual Abuse. "The presence or absence of a blood relationship between incest participants is of far less significance than the kinship roles they occupy."
Incest happens between father and daughter, father and son, mother and daughter, mother and son. It also happens between stepparents and stepchildren, between grandparents and grandchildren, between aunts and uncles and their nieces and nephews. It can also happen by proxy, when live-in help abuses or a parent's lover is the abuser; though there is no blood or legal relationship, the child is betrayed and violated within the context of family.
No one knows how many incest victims there are. No definite random studies on incest involving a cross section of respondents have been undertaken. No accurate collection systems for gathering information exist. The statistics change depending on a number of variables: the population surveyed, the bias of the researcher, the sensitivity of the questions, and the definition of incest used. This is an area "where each question becomes a dispute and every answer an insult," writes Roland Summit, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California, in his introduction to Sexual Abuse of Young Children. "The expert in child sexual abuse today may be an ignoramus tomorrow."
As recently as the early '70s, experts in the psychiatric community stated that there were only 1 to 5 cases of incest per one million people. When I began work on this article, I thought that maybe one person in a hundred was an incest victim. How wrong I was. Sometimes called 'rape by extortion,' incest is about betrayal of trust, and it accounts for most child sexual abuse by far. To be specific: In 1977, Diana E.H. Russell, Ph.D., professor emeritus at Mills College in Oakland, California, and author of The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women and Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Workplace Harassment, questioned 930 San Francisco women and found that 38 percent had been sexually abused by the time they had reached the age of 18. She further found that of those women who were victims, 89 percent were abused by relatives or family acquaintances. Using Russell's figures as my guide - they are widely cited by other authorities in the field and have been duplicated in other studies - the estimate of the incidence of incest that I came up with is one in three; which is to say that incest happens to about one person in three before the age of 18.
Incestuous acts range from voyeurism and exhibitionism to masturbation, to rape and sodomy, to bestiality, to ritualized torture in cults. Incest may or may not include penetration, may or may not be violent. It may happen only once or continue for decades. It usually exists in secret, but not always.
Kim Shaffir was four and a half years old when her divorced mother remarried. Her stepfather, John Hairsine, showed Kim pornographic photographs and read aloud to her from pornographic novels. He took Polaroids of himself and Kim's mother having sex and showed Kim the pictures. He arranged for her to watch him and her mother having intercourse; he told her when they would be doing it and left the door open. Hairsine kept Kim quiet with the threat that if she told anyone, her mother would send her away.
From exhibitionism and voyeurism, Hairsine moved on to fondling. He made Kim perform oral sex on him. Then he forced her to have anal sex. As he had photographed himself with her mother, he now photographed himself with Kim.
When Kim was 13 her mother discovered the blurred backings of the Polaroid pictures of her husband and Kim. She broke the camera as a symbolic statement. "We're going to put it all behind us," she announced. But she was wrong.
Hairsine made peepholes throughout their Maryland house so he could spy on Kim. He drilled through the bathroom door. Kim repeatedly stuffed the hole with soap and toilet paper, which he would remove and she would replace. For three years she tried to avoid showering when her mother was out of the house.
Every morning, under the guise of waking her for school, Hairsine entered her room and masturbated in her presence. Kim, now 30 and living in Washington, D.C., says, "That's how I'd wake up, to him coming into a dish towel as he stood by my bed."
One reason for the imprecise nature of the incest statistics is that when children try to tell, they aren't believed. Another is that many victims don't recognize certain behaviors as abusive. My parents would never have let anyone abuse me - if they had known. They didn't know because I didn't know to tell them.
Small children understand very little about sex. Even kids who use 'dirty' words often don't understand what those words mean. And as little as they know about normal sex, they know less about deviant sex. They simply trust that whatever happens to them at the hands of those who take care of them is supposed to happen. Children know that adults have absolute power over them, and even in the face of the most awful abuse, they will obey.
The victim who does tell is almost always asked: Why didn't you tell sooner? The answers are:
I didn't know anything was wrong.
I didn't know it was illegal.
I didn't know who to tell.
I did tell and no one believed me.
I was ashamed.
I was scared.
The abuser keeps the incest secret through threats:
If you tell, I will kill you.
If you tell, you'll be sent away.
If you tell, I'll kill your little sister.
If you tell, I'll molest your little brother.
If you tell, I'll kill your dog.
If you tell, it will kill your mother.
If you tell, no one will believe you.
If you tell, then you will go to the insane asylum.
If you tell, I'll go to jail and you'll starve.
If you tell, they'll give you to someone who will really hurt you.
If you tell, you'll go to hell.
If you tell, I won't love you anymore.
Many abusers make good on their threats, but most don't need to. "Small creatures deal with overwhelming threat by freezing, pretending to be asleep, and playing possum," says Dr. Roland Summit, the Harbor-UCLA Medical Center psychiatrist who, in a paper titled 'The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome,' sets forth a widely accepted explanation of how children behave when molested.
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NO WOMAN'S LAND
80 PERCENT OF THE WORLD'S REFUGEES ARE WOMEN AND CHILDREN. HOW DO WE MAKE THEM VISIBLE? AND HOW DO WE CHANGE BAND-AID RESPONSES INTO REAL SOLUTIONS?
by Marcia Ann Gillespie
IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE STANDING ON a mountaintop, looking out on a vast plain where as many as 20 million people stand, bodies touching. As far as your eye can see, there are people, their numbers more than the combined populations of Los Angeles and New York City. An estimated 20 million who have one thing in common: they are all known as refugees. Now add the 23 million displaced within their homelands. Homeless: Liberians fleeing civil war and tribal persecutions, Cambodians who fled the killing fields. Haitian and Vietnamese boat people running from hunger, running for freedom. Muslims (and some Christians) forced out of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Serbs calling for 'ethnic cleansing.' Palestinians in limbo for more than 40 years. Somalis, Ethiopians, and Sudanese driven out by war and drought. Afghans, from a country that became a political pawn now warring against itself. Among this vast sprawl of humanity are people belonging to ethnic and tribal groups few in the industrialized world have ever heard of: the Hmong, the Karen, the Mon, the Saharawi, the Afar, the Tutsi. People from countries many of us might be hard-pressed to locate on a map: Rwanda, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Eritrea.
According to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is a "person who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or political opinion, or belonging to a particular social group, is outside the country of his [sic] nationality." Developed in response to the upheavals of World War II, that definition fails to define all the circumstances that conspire to create refugees: political gamesmanship, civil wars, tribal conflicts, patriarchal 'customs,' homophobic persecution, repression, oppression, drought, famine, acts of genocide, economics, a knock at midnight ...
Bad enough that the definition fails to account for many of the key reasons people must flee their homes; worse that the Western nations that drafted the convention refused to incorporate the universal right to asylum. As a result, politics plays a key role in the decision-making process. For example, people fleeing Communist regimes during the Cold War were almost automatically welcomed by the West, particularly the United States - which remains disinclined to grant asylum to those fleeing repressive regimes it supports.
While the West has reserved the right to pick and choose what individuals and groups would legally be allowed to cross or remain within its borders, the Organization of African Unity, an organization representing some of the world's poorest nations, adopted a convention in 1969 expanding the definition of refugees and the reasons why they flee. Yet the United Kingdom and the United States during the last 25 years have blatantly pursued policies directed at keeping refugees out. Now Germany, once noted for its open-door policy, has adopted a similar drawbridge approach. Facing the task of rebuilding the East, its economy no longer booming, Germany has moved to bar refugees and deport those deemed illegal immigrants. Violence and hate campaigns directed toward immigrants and refugees continue to rise in France, Germany, and the U.K., and in the U.S., 'America firsters' cry for walls, electrified fences, and shoot-to-kill polices to close off the southern border.
Yet the number of refugees continues to soar. And more than 80 percent of them are women and children. Now you see them, now you don't. Here, a Somalian woman, eyes numbed by grief and fear and hunger. There, a Cambodian woman, walking cautiously down a Los Angeles street with a white cane. She has witnessed loved ones murdered before her eyes; in a form of self-protection, her mind no longer allows her eyes to see. Rarely do these women ever seem to speak for themselves, especially the vast majority who live in the world's refugee camps. Those who do, tell terrifying stories about the situations that forced them to flee, about the journey of flight itself.
"I first saw the Nicaraguan woman coming across the lawn from the south security post. She walked quickly, at a shopkeeper's purposeful pace. Her skirt, which was still wet at the hem from crossing the river, was too long and her low-heeled pumps were stretched out of shape by the journey, gapped at the instep ....
"In the security of white uniforms and the smell of antiseptics, [she] told of her experience on the other side of the border, of the men who had violated her, of how she had wept and bled and wandered for a month, alone at first, then working here and there while the physical wounds healed and the shame receded and she made herself ready to try again to cross the river ....
"The nurse's aide ... said that there are places in Mexico on the way to the border where every woman who passes through is raped." (Excerpted from 'Latinos: Biography of a People,' by Earl Shorris; W.W. Norton, 1992.)
When individuals, families, or groups are targeted, women's bodies become the battleground. Women are routinely tortured and maimed, and rape is often used as a primary terror tactic. At one Bosnian refugee center, 40 Muslim women told a New York Newsday reporter that they had been attacked by Serb forces who were under orders to rape them. Females of all ages are preyed upon by guards at borders and at refugee camps, armed men in and out of uniform, officials, pirates, male refugees.
All too often the volatile conditions that create refugees occur in some of the world's poorest places. Neighboring countries are often ill-equipped to provide for the large numbers of people pouring across their borders. Some are unable or unwilling to absorb them, or remain hostile to their presence. But the world's wealthy nations are even less hospitable these days. In Geneva in 1989, 60 countries gathered to design the Comprehensive Plan of Action. Taking their lead from British policy, the assembled nations decided that some people were 'economic' rather than genuine refugees - and as such could, in effect, be forcibly returned if voluntary repatriation failed. Adapted specifically to aid Singapore, Thailand, and Hong Kong (which wanted to reverse the tide of Vietnamese refugees), this very calculated closed-door policy has since been used by other nations. But the United States took it one step further, when it moved to intercept and return boatloads of Haitian refugees, unilaterally deciding - without benefit of hearings - that all fleeing Haitians were automatically 'economic refugees.'
If the door to asylum is closing in the industrialized world to those classified as 'economic refugees,' it has never truly opened to women fleeing gender persecution or those who break social taboos, or refuse to honor certain 'cultural traditions.' Women's well-founded fears of sexual abuse, of rape, and their knowledge that these are frequent methods of gender-directed 'repression' are not normally considered just grounds for asylum. Take the case of Catalina Mejia. Accused of being a guerrilla in El Salvador, she was raped by a soldier; twice more during an 18-month period she was stopped at military checkpoints and accused of being a guerrilla. But her application for political asylum in the United States was denied by a judge who concluded that her being raped was not an act of persecution. Last year, France's Commission for Appeals of Refugees became the first in modern history to acknowledge 'female circumcision' as a form of persecution under the Geneva Conventions (which offer protection from 'torture' only if it is administered by the state). But no asylum was given to Aminata Diop (see Ms., January/February 1992), the woman who filed the appeal. Diop, a Malian, was denied because she'd failed to seek help form the very same authorities in her own country who, by not outlawing it, effectively sanction female mutilation.
Refugee camps are usually situated by the host country in bleak, sparsely populated areas close to the border. The prison-like settings of many camps serve as a constant reminder that the people being housed are unwanted. Some camps are enclosed compounds surrounded by barbed wire fencing, with armed guards at the perimeters. Unrelated families, traditional enemies, unprotected women and children, are forced to share sleeping areas. The newer the camp, the harsher the conditions. Sanitation facilities are often minimal; the stench from latrines and open refuse trenches pollutes the air. The circumstances that forced people to flee and the rigors of the journey itself often result in refugees arriving at these camps severely debilitated. Many arrive in advanced stages of starvation, as was the case this summer when Somalian and Sudanese refugee children were literally dying while waiting in food lines in camps in northern Kenya.
More than half of the world's refugees are totally dependent on relief agencies for the basic necessities. The remoteness of campsites, the numbers of refugees and their rate of flight, turmoil in the surrounding region, money, internal and external politics - are all factors in the relief efforts. If refugees are lucky, what they receive provides enough for bare subsistence. And in today's world the largess of major donor countries has diminished. Private funding of relief work relies heavily on the compassion of the general public in the wealthy nations. Donor fatigue is increasing in part because of economic fears at home, as well as in reaction to the waves of appeals. Adding to the problem is the spotlight effect that happens when media attention is diverted from one refugee crisis to another. As funding shrinks, agencies are hard-pressed to provide even minimal supplies. One study this year indicated that the nutritional value of refugee rations is less than what dogs are fed in the industrialized world. Is it any wonder that the principal cause of death in refugee camps is malnutrition?
Even when food is available, women and children are often malnourished. Given that food in these situations is a source of power and control, it should come as no surprise to learn that usually men are the ones consulted on food distribution. Women, who traditionally do the cooking and are most aware of their families' nutritional needs, are rarely consulted, much less put in charge. If by tradition women and children are expected to eat after the men do, and the supply is inadequate, they go without. It is not uncommon to find women being forced to submit to sexual demands in exchange for food.
The health problems women and children routinely experience in the 'developing world' are magnified here. Children are affected by outbreaks of scurvy and pellagra. Anemic pregnant women are at high risk of hemorrhaging during childbirth, and their infants often have low birth weights and suffer from a host of deficiencies. Sometimes babies just fail to thrive. And because women and children are usually the water carriers, they are particularly vulnerable to waterborne diseases, such as cholera and dysentery.
But because women's health needs are addressed mainly in the context of pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering, other problems often go undetected or ignored. It is not uncommon for sexually transmitted diseases, precancerous and cancerous conditions, infections, genital mutilations, and other traumas to go undetected. AIDS education and testing, as well as rape counseling, are virtually nonexistent in many refugee settings. Family planning services and birth control are often unavailable, as are female health providers.
The most effective health programs focus on preventive medicine and build a strong base of community programs. For example, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees in the Near East has created programs that specifically address maternal and child health care, provide immunization and supplementary feeding, and family planning programs, as well as health education and improved sanitation. Key to UNRWA's success has been the emphasis on the needs of women and children, and its involvement in empowering communities, and women specifically, to speak, plan, and act in their own behalf.
According to 'World Refugee Survey,' a study of 111 Central American refugee women conducted by the International Catholic Child Bureau in Washington, D.C., found "85 percent to have been the victims of at least one traumatic event in their home country, and the average woman to have experienced 3.3 events.
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CHEATING FATE
At death's door, some people mysteriously take a turn for the better. What does the body know that medicine can't explain?
BY STEPHEN S. HALL
STANLEY GERBACICH staggered into the Veterans Administration Medical Center in West Haven, Connecticut, one day in January 1967, desperately ill with a raging fever of about 104 degrees. He was a quiet, balding man of 52 years, a jewelry repairman, married with one child, and, as he would soon learn, dying of a terrible disease.
His West Haven doctors poked him and prodded him and ran all the usual tests. They quickly discovered that his blood count was perilously low, and when they slipped a needle into his pelvic bone, they found that the body's blood-making apparatus, the marrow, was overrun with rogue cancer cells known as blasts. The attending physician on the case was Rose Papac, and as she reviewed all the test results, everything added up to a diagnosis of a quick and deadly cancer of the blood known as acute myelomonocytic leukemia. Papac, trained as a hematologist and oncologist, knew only too well that Stanley Gerbacich's chances of survival were nil.
"Without response to treatment, three months was the median survival rate," Papac recalled recently, sitting in her office at the Yale University School of Medicine, where she is a professor of oncology. "With a complete response to treatment, the prognosis would be about one year."
Papac decided to try to buy Gerbacich a little time with chemotherapy. So the following day, the West Haven doctors started him on two drugs considered the treatment of choice in those days, 6-mercaptopurine and prednisone - now known to be, at best, minimally effective in slowing the disease.
The orders were for 50 milligrams 'q.i.d.' (meaning quarter in die, or four times a day), and no one was terribly surprised when Gerbacich's condition failed to improve the following week. Indeed, his disease was progressing exactly as predicted - rapidly and lethally. But then there occurred a serendipitous (and perhaps even irrelevant) turn of events.
"When a new intern took over the case ten days later, he read the treatment orders as 'q.d.,' or once a day, instead of four times a day," says Papac, recalling how, his doctors unaware, Gerbacich ended up with one-fourth the recommended dose. "But then his blood counts came up to normal, and he was less anemic, and we became aware that he was getting better." Over the next two weeks, his fever broke and color returned to his face. The most startling transformation, however, could be glimpsed only with a microscope: All those abnormal cells choking Stanley Gerbacich's bone marrow had simply vanished. "A once-in-a-lifetime experience," Papac says, remembering the sight.
Two months later, having received a quarter of the normal dose of an almost useless medication for an incurable disease, Stanley Gerbacich walked out of the VA hospital and embarked on the second part of his life. "He has never relapsed," Papac says. Twenty-five years later, Stanley Gerbacich is alive and well and still exchanging Christmas cards with Rose Papac every year.
Such rare and improbable medical reversals go by the name of spontaneous regression or spontaneous remission. They are medical flukes, unpredictable and inexplicable, bright isolated shafts of sunlight cutting across the grim, gray statistical tables of survival rates. To many doctors, they are distracting and bothersome aberrations; says one prominent oncologist, "I think you'd have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than of having a spontaneous remission of cancer." To others, they are "whispers of nature," infrequent but tantalizing clues about the ways the human body can rally itself to fend off mortal disease. If only we had the ears to discern these whispers, goes the argument, we might discover revolutionary new approaches to medical treatment and healing.
But at this juncture in the popular re-telling of cases, the plot typically takes one of two turns, both of them dead ends. Many physicians simply dismiss the original diagnosis as flawed; it wasn't a case of spontaneous remission, they conclude, the doctors just blew the diagnosis. In the other direction lie the "cancer quacks," as Rose Papac calls them, those who precipitately attribute these miraculous cures to herbal remedies or vitamin therapy or, all too often, a superhumanly 'positive' mental attitude displayed by the patient. To talk seriously about spontaneous regression, Papac says, is to walk "a thin line between doubt and quackery." Which is precisely what Papac did when she gave a Grand Rounds talk on the subject at the Yale School of Medicine a couple of years ago.
Asked to prepare the talk in 1989, in part to refute some of the more preposterous claims, Papac sorted through three decades of her clinical practice and realized she had encountered at least eight, and possibly ten, cases of spontaneous remission. The most remarkable, in her opinion, was the story of Stanley Gerbacich. His case not only embodied all the medical mystery that bedevils spontaneous remission, it gives little comfort to either the medical profession's reflexive skepticism or the charlatans' facile explanations.
"Lots of people doubted it and said, 'You must have misdiagnosed the case in the first place,'" Papac recalls with a smile. "But when they saw our evidence, they agreed that the diagnosis of leukemia was correct."
And how would Papac characterize Gerbacich's attitude? Was he upbeat? Was he combative and feisty? Did he, in the words of best-selling mind-body guru Bernie Siegel, see his disease not "as a sentence but a new beginning?"
"I wouldn't rank his attitude as the most positive of any we've seen," she says after a pause, choosing her words carefully. "He was a very frightened person, very fearful. He was paralyzed by the thought that death was imminent."
MISS X, as she was called in the literature, suffered no less dire a prognosis than Stanley Gerbacich. A woman of 31, she lived in Baltimore, and her medical problems began, she believed, following a tumble off a bicycle. She visited her physician, complaining of a lump and pain in her right breast. Several weeks later, the cancer-ridden breast as well as the nearby lymph nodes were removed by surgeons at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Miss X remained healthy for approximately one year. Then her condition began to deteriorate.
She started to lose vision in her right eye, a problem caused by a second tumor apparently spread by the original. She lost more and more weight. A lump developed in the other breast, and then a new tumor poked up like a bony outgrowth from her sternum. Bedridden with pain, barely able to breathe, Miss X had little to look forward to beyond her six daily grains of morphine.
"I saw her twice, and in May her condition seemed really desperate," her physician later recalled. "I left for England shortly afterwards, and, of course, did not expect to find her alive on my return." But during the summer and fall of 1899, Miss X steadily improved. The pains subsided, the awkward tumor rising out of her breastbone just as mysteriously melted away, and by October of 1900, Miss X had recovered enough to drive the one and a half miles to the train station to meet her very surprised physician. "She had improved," Sir William Osler observed, "in every way."
Just as Osler has been credited with ushering in the modern era of American medicine, his account of Miss X is among the first 20th century descriptions of what in fact is a very ancient phenomenon. As he noted in a 1901 article, these cases are "among the most remarkable which we witness in the practice of medicine, and illustrate the uncertainty of prognosis, and the truth of the statement that no condition, however desperate, is quite hopeless." Spontaneous remissions have occurred - "without any obvious reason," in Osler's perplexed, faintly protestant phrase - for centuries.
One of the earliest recorded anecdotes dates back 700 years, to a time when a reformed politician and anti-papist in central Italy named Peregrine Laziosi became a Servite monk and priest, traveled far and wide doing good works, and ultimately developed a debilitating and unsightly cancer on his foot. Facing amputation of his foot, the monk prayed during the night before the operation and dreamed that the tumor disappeared. He awoke to find it gone and lived to the age of 80, dying in 1345. His miraculous recovery earned him canonization as St. Peregrine, and he became known as the patron saint of those with cancer and malignant diseases. William Boyd, a prominent Canadian pathologist, later suggested that cancerous masses that similarly regress without adequate explanation be called 'St. Peregrine's Tumors.'
But by what mysterious mechanism does spontaneous remission occur? As Boyd would write in the 1950s, "A moment's thought is sufficient to convince us that in biology, as in other fields of science, nothing is really spontaneous, for every event must have a cause." But the cause, the biology of spontaneous regression, eludes researchers. Without it, spontaneous remission might just as well be called St. Peregrine's Curse.
AMONG THOSE who have tried to solve the puzzle were two surgeons at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago, Tilden Everson and Warren Cole. In the mid-1950s, Everson and Cole began a landmark analysis of reports of spontaneous remission of cancer, which they defined as "a partial or complete disappearance of a malignant tumor in the absence of treatment that ordinarily is considered capable of producing regression." The two surgeons excluded lymphomas and leukemias (cancers of the immune system and blood), as well as the skin cancers known as squamous cell carcinomas, because all three forms of cancer vary greatly in growth rates. Even so, Everson and Cole compiled a total of 176 instances of spontaneous remission of cancer and published the results in a famous 1966 monograph.
One of the most remarkable cases was that of a 30-year-old woman diagnosed with malignant melanoma, a particularly aggressive form of skin cancer that nonetheless seems associated with instances of spontaneous remission. When doctors attempted to remove a grape-sized nodule from the woman's shoulder, it ruptured and had to be taken out in pieces, with the likelihood that some malignant material escaped removal. Even so, not only did the wound heal, but all metastatic spread of her cancer disappeared. Four years later, a 28-year-old male melanoma patient was purposely given a transfusion of this woman's blood. Although the man suffered from widely disseminated cancer in his head, thigh, buttocks, and armpit lymph nodes, within six weeks all the metastatic tumors disappeared.
Like Osler and everyone since him, Everson and Cole were at a loss to explain how these mysterious events occurred. They did note that such cases have always been marked by intriguing, ambiguous, and often contradictory factors that hint at biological mechanisms, not miracles. Cole, a former president of both the American Cancer Society and the American College of Surgeons whose every phrase and sentence betrayed a reluctance to speculate, believed that regression most likely occurs because the patient somehow marshals a heightened immunologic response to malignancy.
For instance, the disappearance of tumors has often been accompanied by a concurrent bacterial or viral infection and fever, a link that prompted William Coley, a surgeon at Memorial Hospital in New York around the turn of the century, to experimentally induce bacterial infections in cancer patients; those experiments continue to this day, with mixed results. In the early experiments, vaccines that were made up of killed bacteria, which became known as 'Coley's toxins,' caused some tumors to shrink or disappear. Suspecting that the vaccines triggered some natural anticancer agent, researchers sought and ultimately discovered tumor necrosis factor. Isolated in the early 1970s, the powerful tumor-killing molecule is produced as part of the body's immune and inflammatory response, and is now being tested against cancer.
In many other cases, tumors seem to melt away following biopsy procedures or similar surgical insult, possibly by prompting a local immune response.
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SPECIAL HEALTH REPORT By Carl Sherman
Is It Just a Mood or Real Depression?
Barbara L., age 30, remembers the suffocating feeling that descended on her as she struggled through her second year of college. Plagued by a sense of utter worthlessness, she was convinced that if she were gone, no one would miss her - no one at all. "Someone might be standing right in front of me, saying, 'I do care about you. I do love you,' but the words couldn't reach me." Desperate and in unbearable emotional pain, she attempted suicide with a handful of pills.
For Millie G., 34, the downward spiral began with the end of a relationship. Then her plans to buy a co-op fell through. She started waking up at 4 A.M. with a terrible sense of doom. She became 'abrasive' with everyone, lost friends and began to fear for her job. "I was constantly crying in front of my staff. I couldn't concentrate. Every memo I wrote was filled with mistakes."
Diana T. was 50 years old when her world caved in on her. Her two sons were in college, and after an absence of 20 years she had returned to teaching, a job she loved. Yet she felt constantly oppressed by "a physical feeling, a sinking sensation in my body that I couldn't stand. I stopped eating," she recalls. "I couldn't sleep. I cried all the time." Nothing - reading, watching TV - could distract her or give her the least bit of pleasure. She thought about suicide. "I didn't have the guts to do it. I hoped I would just die a natural death."
What these women have in common is depression. Not just a blue mood, but an illness potentially more disabling than arthritis or heart disease - an illness that in its severest form drives 15 percent of its victims to commit suicide. (For a list of symptoms, see 'Are You Depressed?' at right.) Five percent of Americans suffer the mental and physical torments of depression - and almost two out of three of them are women.
Unfortunately, an estimated two-thirds of depressed people never seek treatment, according to Robert Hirschfeld, M.D., chairman of the department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Because of the fear and stigma that still surround mental illness, and the hopeless, helpless feeling that "nothing can be done," a lot of people end up suffering alone.
What's worse, just half of those who do see doctors are accurately diagnosed and adequately treated. People may seek help for the fatigue and other physical symptoms - backaches, headaches, stomach problems - that accompany depression, but they stop short of talking about their feelings. The hurried doctor never hears about the sleeplessness, the sadness, the oppressive thoughts. The family physician or internist - the doctor most likely to see depression - all too frequently misses the diagnosis, according to Kenneth B. Wells, M.D., of Rand, a nonprofit research group in Santa Monica, California; in prepaid health plans (like HMO's), depression was spotted only 42 percent of the time. "Patients have to take an active role," urges Dr. Hirschfeld. "If you say, 'I think I may be depressed,' you're more likely to get the attention you need."
When should you suspect that you might be suffering from depression? Blue moods come and go. It's natural to feel down if you lose your job or to grieve when a loved one dies. But clinical depression is another story. It's a mental and physical illness that can disrupt sleep and appetite, inflict physical pain and distort thoughts into a continuous night of helpless despair. 'Business as usual' becomes impossible: Work, friendships and family life suffer.
"I was devastated when my mother died," Diana T. remembers. "But that was different. I had the same 'I can't stand it' feeling, but it wasn't constant, and it gradually went away."
Diagnosing Depression
Doctors have come to recognize several basic types of depression. According to Darrel Regier, M.D., director of the division of clinical research at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Washington, D.C., nearly 6 percent of the population has suffered episodes of major depressive illness. The primary symptoms are sadness, anxiety or emptiness; hopelessness or pessimism; feelings of worthlessness, helplessness or guilt; restlessness or irritability; a loss of interest in activities; trouble sleeping; changes in appetite or weight; fatigue and thoughts of death or suicide. Bouts of depression often recur.
About 1 out of 100 Americans has had episodes of bipolar, or manic-depressive, illness, characterized by periods of high energy and excitement - manic states - that may alternate with depression.
But depression isn't always disabling. "In its mildest form, people say: 'I'm well fed, I'm well clothed ... and yet why do I feel so awful?'" says Jay Amsterdam, M.D., the director of the depression research unit at the University of Pennsylvania. The same symptoms are there - and these often include sleeplessness and a change in appetite - but in weaker form.
A chronic kind of depression, dysthymia, is less daunting than a major episode but persists for years. Its victims may spend decades or a lifetime under a cloud, struggling constantly with low energy and poor self-esteem. They get through life, but with little joy. People affected by dysthymia can hold a job - they're typically overconscientious employees - but a lack of drive causes them to be permanent underachievers, says James Kocsis, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center. Many don't date and never marry, or end up trapped in bad marriages, without the energy to fix the relationship or get out.
No one knows for sure what causes depression, but it is now recognized as both biochemical and psychological in nature. On the biochemical level, suggests Karl Rickels, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, it reflects an imbalance among the neurotransmitters - chemicals that regulate and harmonize activity throughout the brain. In particular, the chemical serotonin appears to be in short supply. The biochemical predisposition to depression can be inherited; if a parent has suffered from it, your chances rise fourfold.
Depression can attack without apparent reason, but some episodes appear to be triggered by emotional turmoil or high-stress periods at home or work. In both men and women, "It may be that there's an interaction," says Ellen McGrath, Ph.D., chair of the American Psychological Association's National Task Force on Women and Depression. "For someone who is biologically vulnerable, enough accumulated stress may throw brain biochemistry out of balance."
Increasingly, experts believe that women may unintentionally accelerate depression by focusing on their emotions, and may also deepen it by sharing it with a sympathetic friend. According to Bonnie Strickland, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, it's good to unburden your feelings, but sitting around and rehashing the sense of inadequacy and self-blame that come with depression won't make you feel any better. What can help, though, is taking action. If 'talking it out' spurs you to make positive moves to develop new job skills or start an exercise program, for example, it can be worth it, Dr. McGrath says.
Of course, depression is nothing you can snap yourself out of; it requires treatment. Fortunately, says Dr. Hirschfeld, "we now have a whole range of medications and psychotherapies that have made a huge difference." With today's arsenal, an estimated 85 to 90 percent of people with depression - no matter how severe - can be treated successfully.
Treatment Alternatives
How can depression be most effectively treated - with therapy or drugs or a combination of both? Interestingly, a recent National Institute of Mental Health study showed that for relatively mild depression, two short-term forms of therapy work as well as medication. Cognitive behavior therapy teaches patients how negative thinking habits promote and maintain depression, and helps people replace them with other patterns that generate positive feelings. Interpersonal psychotherapy helps to explore relationships, resolve conflicts and teach the skills that will strengthen bonds.
For more severe depression, drug treatment has been found to be more effective than psychotherapy, according to Dr. Amsterdam. Many psychiatrists believe that antidepressants should be used whenever a patient's symptoms (such as eating and sleeping problems, fatigue and physical pain) suggest a true biochemical depression.
Drugs also work well for chronic depression, which was once considered too deeply rooted in the personality to change. In a recent study of people who had remained chronically depressed despite years of psychotherapy, nearly two-thirds got better with an antidepressant. Some stayed well even after the drugs were discontinued, Dr. Kocsis says.
Nowadays doctors have a bagful of antidepressants to choose from. The oldest ones, the tricyclics, include Tofranil, Elavil and Sinequan, and generally are the most effective. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI's), such as Parnate and Nardil, are frequently prescribed when tricyclics don't help. Lithium works against both the manic and depressive episodes of bipolar disorder.
All drugs have their drawbacks, however. The side effects of tricyclics - which may include dry mouth, sleepiness, dizziness, constipation and weight gain - are difficult for some to tolerate. MAOI's require strict diet control: Patients must avoid long lists of foods, including cheese, wine, bananas and chocolate, that can cause a dangerous interaction. "These older antidepressants act on a number of brain chemicals at once, and may cause sweeping physical effects - many unpleasant - throughout the body," Dr. Rickels says.
One new drug, fluoxetine (trade name: Prozac), appears to represent a real advance because it only boosts serotonin. Scientists believe that low levels of this neurotransmitter are primarily responsible for depression. Prozac has fewer side effects than previous therapies, although a few have been reported. Recently, after investigating sporadic reports of Prozac-related violence and suicide attempts, an advisory committee of the Food and Drug Administration concluded that there is no evidence that the drug is riskier than other antidepressants. But like all powerful drugs, the committee stressed, it must be used with care.
Solid improvement usually takes two to four weeks, and is often not dramatic. "I don't do somersaults all day, but I can handle things better," says Millie G., who has been taking Prozac for several months. "I'm not always fighting back tears." Before, every day seemed like "climbing a mountain without a foothold." With the antidepressant, "I feel safer," she says.
With thorough treatment - which usually means continuing on medication for several months after symptoms are alleviated - depression often disappears completely. But it may recur - two, five or ten years later. If you're prone to recurrent attacks, you may need to stay on a low 'maintenance' dose of antidepressants for protection.
Even the newest drugs don't work for all patients. If symptoms remain dangerously severe despite treatment - the risk of suicide is high, for example - doctors may consider electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), inducing brain seizures with electricity, which (for reasons that no one truly understands) is often effective against depression where medication fails, according to Dr. Rickels. Despite its frightening image, today's ECT is far safer than in the past: Smaller doses of electricity are used, anesthetics and muscle relaxants eliminate discomfort, and the only serious side effect - memory loss - is almost always temporary.
If you suspect you suffer from depression, start by talking to your doctor. Now that easy-to-use medications are available, the condition can often be treated by a family doctor or internist. Before embarking on a treatment program, though, a physician will probably want to rule out medical problems (certain thyroid conditions, for example) that can cause similar symptoms.
If you get no response from your doctor or see little improvement after you've been treated for a month or so, it may be time to call in a specialist. When consulting a mental-health professional, bear in mind that psychiatrists, who are medical doctors, are licensed to prescribe drugs, whereas psychologists, social workers and other psychotherapists are not. A particularly difficult case of depression may require the advanced skills of a psycho-pharmacologist, a super-specialist trained to use drug combinations that may succeed where standard treatments fail.
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ETHICS
A Matter of Survival
By Rushworth M. Kidder
Our ethical responsibilities are increasing as we wield ever more powerful technologies. But ethical standards have suffered in an age of tolerance.
Several years ago, I was - as far as I can tell - the first Western journalist to visit the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I was taken there on a tour in the company of several engineers called in after the April 1986 explosion to clean it up. I learned that, on the night of the accident, two electrical engineers were "playing around" with reactor #4 in what the Soviets later described as an unauthorized experiment. The two engineers wanted to see how long a turbine would freewheel if they took the power off it. That meant shutting down reactor #4.
To do so, they had to override six separate computer-driven alarm systems. The first system came on and said, "Stop, go no further, terribly dangerous." And they shut off the alarm rather than the experiment, and went on to the next level. They even padlocked valves in the open position so that they would not shut automatically and stop the experiment. Think for a minute about who these people were. In the context of the Soviet Union, jobs like those at Chernobyl were plum jobs. They went to the 4.0 averages, the 800 SATs, the Phi Beta Kappas of the Soviet Union. These men were not dumb. Then what was missing? What they lacked, apparently, was the sense of responsibility, the moral understanding, the sense of conscience, the understanding of ethics - however you want to put it - that somehow would have prevented them from going forward.
Before you can override a computer-alarm system, you have first got to engage some kind of an ethical override in your own consciousness. You've first got to block out that little voice that says, "Don't do this, it's dangerous!" Somehow, the two engineers at Chernobyl were capable of turning aside and shutting down that voice. And that shutdown is not a question of technology. It's a matter of ethics.
Technology and Ethics
Think back to the nineteenth century. What do you suppose we could have put two people in front of, saying "Do whatever you want, in as unethical a way as you wish," that could have produced the damage caused by Chernobyl? Suppose we loaded up the biggest ship of the nineteenth century and put a drunken captain in charge, so he could run it aground in Prince William Sound; could it possibly do the kind of damage the Exxon Valdez did? Where do you find in the nineteenth century a financial structure as big and as complicated and as powerful as today's savings-and-loan business in the United States that would have allowed a group of unethical bankers to produce the damage the current S&L crisis has produced?
And we're still only in the twentieth century. Shift your thinking forward into the early years of the twenty-first century and ask yourself about the kinds of ethical questions that will arise there. Perhaps the biggest and most complex arise from the Human Genome Project - not because it will be a big medical issue, but because it will be a big employment issue.
Suppose your genetic 'book' can be read. It tells me, your potential employer, that at such-and-such an age you are liable to develop this-or-that problem, and I am going to have to foot the bill for the problem. So what is my interest in hiring you as compared with somebody whose book is a bit cleaner? How does society cope with such an issue? We have no record at all as a society of willingly choosing not to know what is knowable. So it is inconceivable that we will choose not to know our employees' genomes. This will be one of the largest privacy questions that we will face in the twenty-first century, and it's essentially a question of ethics.
The point here is simply that our technology has leveraged our ethics in ways that we never saw in the past. Why is that? Isn't it largely because we spend tremendous amounts of effort in our educational system teaching about the nature of technology - and virtually no time at all talking about the moral, ethical consequences of that technology?
Yet, for all of our advanced systems and for all of our artificial intelligence, the decision-making stream continues to focus ever more pointedly, as it always has, on the thinking of one or two or half a dozen individuals sitting at the apex of that technology. That hasn't changed. What has changed is only the capacity to do terrific damage because of that decision making.
Fortunately, those structures can change - because the values system underlying the social systems can change. Futurist Earl Joseph suggests that, "as we gain new knowledge, values can be improved. Therefore, on the average, the deeper we penetrate the future, the better our values and ethics should become."
Recapturing a Sense Of Standards
In the nineteenth century, one of the highest goals of Western nations was a sense of standards. We took our standards out into the rest of the world, colonized other regions, and imposed those standards. Were we tolerant of what we found there? Not at all. If the people whom we were trying to 'civilize' didn't want to get 'civilized,' we went out and 'civilized' them anyway! At the end of a gun, or however we had to do it, but we civilized them. Why? To bring them up to our standards.
By the 1960s, this attitude had shifted 180 degrees. Tolerance was what mattered most. As long as somebody said, "Yes, this is what I stand for, this is what I want to do," one was expected to be wholly tolerant of any conceivable value structure.
The job of the twenty-first century is not to forget the terrific progress we've made toward tolerance, because it has been invaluable in creating and incorporating a pluralistic society. At the same time, however, we must begin within that context to recapture a sense of the standards that in many cases appears to have been lost.
One of the places this lack of standards shows up is in the U.S. education system. Let me cite a few statistics. These are not statistics that tell you how awful it is that the United States somehow can't compete with the Japanese and the Germans on math and literature. These speak to the ethical sense of American students. Sixty-five percent of high-school students admit that they would cheat to pass an important exam. A similar percentage are ready to inflate their expense accounts when they enter the corporate world, or lie to achieve a business objective.
Remember, these are not merely students we're talking about. They are, in fact, Western culture's middle managers in 2015 and its CEOs in 2030. These are the people who are going to administer your pension plans.
A recent Louis Harris poll for the Girl Scouts asked 5,000 American students where they would look to find the greatest authority in matters of truth. Where would they turn for that sense of authority? The answers that came back are very interesting. At the bottom are the media and the sciences. A few percentage points higher come parents and religion. Can you guess what the bulk of those students say is the greatest authority in matters of truth? "Me." The student himself or herself. These students tell us that there is no source of authority beyond their own experience. "I have not seen anyone out there that I can trust," they're saying. "I've got to go by my gut instinct. I've got to do whatever feels right, whatever turns me on, whatever is situational, relative, negotiable." That reply speaks volumes about the ethical standards that we are now seeing.
Tracking Value Shifts
Fortunately, as the century closes, this entire subject of ethics is becoming a very serious concern for an awful lot of people. That's why the Institute for Global Ethics was recently founded. It aims to track value shifts as we move into the next century.
The first issue of Insights on Global Ethics, our monthly newsletter, leads with a story from Mexico, looking at the Mexican public's changing attitude toward corruption. Mexico is no longer the business-as-usual, corruption-as-usual place we've all assumed it to be. There seems to be a groundswell of public opinion saying, "We can't live this way. We must change." Future issues will look at things like the question of marriage versus cohabitation in Sweden, the work ethic in Japan, and values education in Ukraine.
Of course, we could wait until the twenty-first century, and then we could read the results of these ethical changes in the economic and social data. Or we can get at them now and begin to track the values shifts that are already occurring. Why is that important? Because any meaningful social and political and economic change is preceded by a change in values. If we want to devote our energies to looking into the changes that are most going to dictate the future, we must look at the questions of ethics in the twenty-first century.
One thing seems clear: We will not survive the twenty-first century with the twentieth century's ethics. The dangers are simply too great - and the ethical barometer is simply too low.
Business in the 21st Century
By Edith Weiner
Businesses must master the 'forgetting curve' to cope with new challenges such as environmentalism and an emerging 'cyberpunk' society.
Some years ago, I saw a marvelous cartoon depicting an alien spaceship that had been observing life on Earth. The alien scouts reported the following conclusions: Earth is inhabited by metallic creatures called cars, and each car owns at least one two-legged slave who cares for it. Each morning, the slave goes outside its home and wakes up the car. The car is taken for its nourishment to what is called a gas station, and then it goes to its social club to be with other cars. The club is called a parking lot. Meanwhile, the slave goes to work to earn money to take care of the car. At the end of the slave's work day, the car bids farewell to its friends at the parking lot and the slave takes it back to its home. On days when the slave is not making money for the car, it washes the car, or takes it for a drive and shows it a lot of different places.
This cartoon cleverly points out that, viewed by new eyes, alien eyes, the world can be interpreted in very different ways. Businesses that hope to thrive in the next decade and beyond must seek out new perspectives. Too many enterprises are currently based on outdated interpretations of the world, its inhabitants, its social structures, and the ways that markets behave.
Pretend for a moment that we are aliens - that we are not loaded down with the baggage of memory, of experience, of preconceived ideas about what is and what should be.
Suppose we were to invent the financial-services sector today, from scratch. This sector includes life insurance, disability insurance, pensions, and savings and investment vehicles. What do we see with our new eyes? We observe the huge numbers of working women, and particularly single or divorced working mothers, and we see the enormous numbers of women who outlive men in their very old years. We also see many more women taking care of disabled men than men taking care of disabled women. Thus, we conclude that the primary market for all forms of financial services should be women, and we start from there. The reality is, however, that the modern financial-services business grew up over the course of 200 years and evolved with a male-oriented market; only in the past 20 years has it begun to recognize women as a serious market.
Mastering the Forgetting Curve
Let's look at retailing.
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Vaccination programs, procedures for producing top quality pullets
The purposes and methods of vaccination programs for pullets are explained along with blood test results for evaluations.
By George D. Boggan, V.M.D.
Vaccinations of poultry flocks are carried out with the intention to prevent serious disease outbreaks. Properly administered, vaccinations help the chicken's immune system to produce antibodies that greatly reduce or eliminate the chances of disease. A proper vaccination is a relatively harmless and inexpensive method of disease control and prevention. Vaccinations also go a long way toward eliminating the spread of more virulent forms of disease.
How vaccinations work
The mechanisms of action for most viral vaccines depends on the normal immune system of the chicken. The goal of vaccination is to fool the bird's immune system into believing that there has been an actual viral exposure to a disease-causing virus. This process is achieved by vaccinating with extremely mild 'avirulent' strains of the virus or by using a virus which has been inactivated (killed). In both situations, the bird's body recognizes the virus, or antigen, and starts producing the appropriate antibodies to fight off the infection.
Antibody continues to be produced until the vaccine virus has been completely inactivated or overwhelmed. The result of this stimulation is the production of a reserve pool of anti-bodies that is capable of immediate response in the event of re-exposure to the same virus or the disease-causing agent in this case.
With time, however, antibody levels will naturally decline so it is necessary to restimulate or boost the immune system with subsequent vaccinations. The goal of maintaining the high antibody levels (titers) is to allow a very quick immune response in the event of a field exposure and subsequently resist infection.
Inactivated or killed vaccines stimulate immunity even though the killed virus cannot multiply. Since the killed virus is unable to reproduce itself, a large amount of it must be present along with an adjuvant (usually an oil emulsion). After administration of the killed vaccine, some of the rival antigen causes an initial immune response. The adjuvant then releases the remainder of the antigen over a long period of time to allow the immune response to continue.
It should be noted that killed vaccines normally require a 'priming' or prior administration of a live vaccine for the disease you are vaccinating against.
Vaccination factors
It is important to remember that vaccination is only one aspect of disease prevention and should be used in conjunction with optimal biosecurity, sanitation and good management and husbandry practices. Care should also be exercised to avoid introducing live vaccine viruses to areas where a particular disease problem is not known to occur. Likewise, indiscriminate use of antibiotics and drugs should be avoided. Vaccination schedules and disease control programs should always be designed under the direction of a qualified poultry veterinarian familiar with the disease problems in your area.
Your vaccination program must protect your flocks from diseases that are common to your area. In many cases, these diseases would include Marek's, IBD, Newcastle, bronchitis, and AE. However, this situation varies between localities. For this reason, blanket recommendations for vaccination programs are ill advised and impractical.
There are several basics on which to build your vaccination programs. You must know the immune status or serology of the parent stock from which your birds were hatched. This is an especially important point in regards to IBD as we shall see later in this discussion.
Timing of vaccinations is also very important. We must view vaccination as a stress on the flock. Thus, the stress of vaccination should not be combined with other stresses such as beak trimming or moving. We should also realize that in some cases parental immunity may not dissipate until two to four weeks after hatching. If vaccines (especially attenuated ones) are given while strong parental immunity is still present the effectiveness of the vaccination will be significantly reduced. In fact, it may not even give the desired effect.
Also, the age at which a flock is exposed to a certain disease can be a determining factor. For example, chicks could be exposed to fowl pox as soon as they arrive at the brooder house, making a pox vaccination at the hatchery necessary.
As with many products, it is important to always follow label directions when using vaccines. Never try to 'stretch' or dilute the vaccine. You should always strive to use one dose of vaccine per bird. Anything less can be considered as 'penny wise and pound foolish.' Finally, always vaccinate an entire house on the same day.
Once vaccination has been completed, destroy and discard all empty vaccine bottles, caps, and unused vaccine. These materials should never be left where there is a danger of chickens or people coming in contact with them.
Vaccination records
Detailed record keeping plays an important part in a sound vaccination program.
Vaccination records should include:
1. The disease the flock was vaccinated for.
2. Method of administration (i.e., water, spray, wing web, intraocular, injection, etc.).
3. Quantity of doses used and the number of birds vaccinated.
4. Serial number and expiration date of the lot of vaccine used. (Never use any vaccine beyond its expiration date as its potency will be impaired and it may not produce the desired effect.)
5. Where the vaccine was purchased.
6. Date and time of vaccination.
7. The age of the flock.
8. The flock's strain and/or breed.
9. Farm and house numbers.
10. Names of the people who performed the vaccination.
11. Any reactions to the vaccination that have been observed.
All of this information will be especially useful in troubleshooting any health problems that may arise.
Emphasis on IBD
A key to the effectiveness of your vaccination program is the successful control of IBD or Gumboro disease. An outbreak of IBD will severely damage the immune system of susceptible chicks. As a consequence, IBD infected chicks won't respond properly to vaccinations for other diseases. Egg producers should be especially mindful of controlling IBD as this disease is generally more serious in layers than it is in broilers. The point to keep in mind above all is that prevention of IBD is a must, because attempting to treat it will prove futile.
There are several steps to producing immunity to IBD. The process of achieving immunity in the offspring actually begins with the parent flock. To protect their offspring, the breeders should be vaccinated at approximately 18 weeks of age with a killed oil emulsion vaccine. When such a vaccination is properly administered to the breeder flock, it will produce a high level of antibodies. This then provides for the passive transfer of maternal antibodies to the chick. These maternal antibodies are essential to the prevention of early IBD infections. Chicks from well immunized breeders may resist these early infections for two to four weeks.
Even with the presence of maternal antibodies, this is just one step in establishing an IBD resistant flock. It is also important to provide good sanitation in the brooder house as a means of reducing the level of IBD infection.
As the chick's maternal antibodies begin to decline, we must address the question of IBD vaccination for our young flock. The vaccine to be used must be strong enough to overcome any residual maternal antibodies, so a more attenuated vaccine may not be effective. Therefore, it is important to wait until the point is reached where the vaccine can overcome the maternal antibodies. In most cases, this will occur at about three weeks of age. After the dissipation of the maternal antibodies, vaccination with a live virus IBD vaccine by way of drinking water or the intraocular route is the best method of developing immunity in young chicks.
Marek's disease
For purposes of this discussion, let's assume that the Marek's disease vaccination has been executed properly at the hatchery. However, even when chicks have been vaccinated properly for Marek's, the possibility of an out-break still exists.
The trick to preventing Marek's out-breaks is to avoid early exposure of the chicks to the Marek's virus. The first step is to clean and disinfect the brooder house before the chicks arrive. It is especially important to ensure that all dust and dander be removed as the Marek's virus can survive for years in this material. Single age brooding and strict biosecurity at the brooder farm or complex will aid greatly in preventing Marek's problems. Generally, careful sanitation and management in the early stages of the flock's life will reduce the chances of a Marek's infection.
Water vaccination
Water vaccination involves live virus vaccines, is fast and cost effective, but may be the least reliable form. The major points to successful water vaccination are proper distribution of the vaccine and preventing the inactivation of the virus in the vaccine.
To avoid inactivation of the virus, store the vaccine containers in a refrigerator at 45 degrees F (7 degrees C) until ready to use. Vaccine containers shouldn't be exposed to heat or left in the direct rays of the sun. Knowing the status of your water quality in respect to hardness, pH, organic matter, heavy metals, and chlorine content is also important. Powdered milk added to the vaccine solution will act as a buffer against the materials that may reduce the potency of the vaccine. Once the vaccine has been prepared, it should be given to the flock within one hour. All drinking vessels should be clean before the vaccine solution is added.
Spray vaccination
Application by spray has replaced water vaccination in some instances. Spray vaccination can be more effective than water application provided it is executed correctly.
The spray vaccine should be placed in a clean container that is used only for vaccine application. The container should not be used for other applications such as spraying pesticides. In addition, the vaccine container should never thebe cleaned with a sanitizer or possible damage to the vaccine may result. Be sure to use a spray that produces the particle or droplet size recommended for the particular vaccine.
Close up the house for 20 to 30 minutes during and after a spray vaccination to prevent the mist from escaping before it can be inhaled by the birds. Of course, in very hot weather, the duration of this closing will have to be lessened.
Before mixing the vaccine, plan one dose per bird and use approximately 120-130 cc's of distilled water per 1,000 doses of vaccine. It is important that distilled water be used to avoid impairing the potency of the vaccine. Spray the mist just above the birds' heads and be sure to cover the entire house. For best results, precede a spray vaccination by about three weeks with a water vaccination for the same disease.
Intraocular and intranasal
These two vaccination applications can be very effective. However, these are very time and labor intensive and experienced crews are required for best results. The same precautions that apply to other vaccination methods should be followed. Some intraocular vaccines are supplied with their own diluent and this is what should be used when preparing these vaccines.
Each bird must be handled and no bird should be released until it is certain that it has received its dose of vaccine. This can be confirmed when the drop of vaccine disappears into the bird's eye or into the nostril, as the case may be.
Wing web vaccination
Wing web vaccination is used mainly for fowl pox but can be used for avian encephalomyelitis (AE) (in combination with fowl or pigeon pox), reovirus or live fowl cholera vaccines.
Always use the applicator needles that come with the vaccine package. These applicators will have been sized properly by the vaccine manufacturer for the job intended. Ensure that the applicator needles remain clean. Avoid letting the applicators contact dirty surfaces or contamination may result. To prevent contamination of mixture, don't dip the applicator handle or other foreign objects into the vaccine.
Never allow pox vaccines to touch the eyes, mouth or feathers of the birds as this may result in a case of wet pox.
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The Burial Society
By Daniel E. Troy
IT IS a truism that we moderns are uncomfortable dealing with death - and especially uncomfortable dealing with dead bodies. Troubled by the very idea of our own mortality, we try to avoid its reminders, among which an actual dead person is certainly the most powerful. So it is no wonder that among modern Jews, knowledge of, and interest in, the hevra kedisha (literally, holy society) - the group of lay volunteers who prepare a Jewish body for burial - has declined over time, or that membership in such a society, although considered by Jewish religious law to be among the most laudable of activities, is now often thought to be exclusively the province of the black-garbed ultra-Orthodox.
This is unfortunate, because Jewish law relating to the newly dead has much to teach us, as I myself have learned from experience. Ever since my best and oldest childhood friend died suddenly eight years ago, my interest had been piqued by the hevra kedisha. Until I married, however, my inclination to join such a group was dampened by my general squeamishness concerning medical matters, as well as by my uncertainty about the level of religious observance required for membership. (Although I attend an Orthodox synagogue, keep kosher, and observe the Sabbath, I do not adhere to every jot and tittle of Jewish law.)
My wife's family, however, holds membership in the hevra in high regard. Her maternal grandfather participated in one in Germany, and her maternal grandmother was a member in Kansas City. (Men are allowed to attend only to dead men. Women technically are permitted to prepare both men and women for burial but, as a practical matter, women attend to women exclusively.) This heritage provided the impetus I needed, and thus one day I found myself volunteering on what I told myself was purely a trial basis. The rabbi assured me that one need not be a tzaddik - an especially righteous person - to join, only a committed Jew willing to do his best.
This tolerant approach may reflect the relatively late development of the shevra kedisha as an organized institution. The earliest mention is in the Talmud, which reports that Rav Hamnuna (ca. 290-320 C.E), arriving in a city where someone had recently died, observed the inhabitants going about their business. Irate, he threatened to excommunicate them for violating the injection that burial of the dead takes precedence over all else. But then, upon hearing that burial societies existed in the town, Rav Hamnuna concluded that ordinary citizens were indeed permitted to continue work. Rav Hamnuna's ruling made the establishment of a hevra kedisha a top priority in most European communities. When Jews came to the United States, this was among the first institutions they established.
In Washington, where I live, many synagogues have their own hevra, contacted when a member of the community dies. Thus, a few weeks after my conversation with the rabbi, I was called upon to assist in my first tahara, or purification. When I arrived at the funeral parlor, I was told that the sixtyish man we were to prepare for burial weighed over 350 pounds, and had died of 'chronic obesity.' I guiltily squelched an adolescent urge to grin, and was doubly chastened as I watched Ben, our team leader, a physician in his early thirties, call around asking for a few more volunteers to help us deal with the difficulties created by the weight of the met (dead person). His tone in discussing the met was intensely respectful, and this set the stage for what I was to learn was the paramount directive in this experience: to show reverence for the person who has departed.
Judaism has always considered burying deceased loved ones to be a mitzvah, a religious duty and good deed, of supreme importance. Traditionally this view is based on Abraham's actions upon the death of his wife Sarah, when he turned to the neighboring sons of Heth and said, "A stranger and a sojourner am I with you; give me the possession of a burying place with you, that I may bury my dead from before me." This verse, the rabbis held, placed the responsibility for internment first on the family, and from there on the community as a whole. By the period of the Second Temple (ca. 465 BCE.-70 C.E.), according to the testimony of Josephus, to "let anyone lie unburied" was considered inhumane under Jewish law.
Jews try to bury their dead immediately, as befits a people whose origins were in the desert, where bodies decompose rapidly. The rabbinic teaching is that, unless necessary for the honor of the dead, "no corpse is to remain unburied overnight." Today, in most cases, a Jew is buried within a day after having died. This custom allows the family to begin coming to terms with the loss as soon as possible. Anyone who has experienced the death of a loved one knows that the time before burial is essentially a period of 'limbo' (in Jewish tradition this condition is called aninut), and that only after the funeral can a family proceed with the difficult task of mourning.
AS WE walked to the room in the basement of the funeral parlor where we were to perform the tahara, we passed the shomer, or watcher, a man who stays with the recently deceased at all times. There are both practical and religious explanations for the constant presence of a shomer - as there are, incidentally, for most of the hevra's ancient procedures. Practically, the shomer was originally needed to ward off mice and other animals that might inflict indignities on the corpse. He also may have helped guard against thieves who trafficked in dead bodies.
Today, when such considerations are less pressing, the shomer continues to serve a vital function. In the interval right after death and before burial, the deceased is especially vulnerable, having not yet reached a permanent 'resting place' either in body or, so far as we know, in soul. (I well recall that when my friend died, his mother begged me to ensure that he was "not alone"; she did not want any further harm to befall his mortal remains.) The hevra has thus traditionally served to reassure the family that their loved one is being protected and cared for, a function reinforced by the custom of having the shomer be a respected and, presumably, well-known member of the community.
But this concern about the 'address' of the newly dead is not solely for the sake of the surviving family. (Nor is it exclusively Jewish, as we can see in the proliferation of lawsuits against funeral parlors which confuse or switch bodies.) Judaism's regard for the body itself lies behind the determination to ensure that it, in its wholeness, be accorded a place after death. This is but one of the many reasons why Jewish law prohibits cremation. Aside from manifesting a disregard for God's handiwork, incinerating a body leaves it without any definable, knowable location in the world.
Although I was aware of some of these Jewish laws and customs concerning the body, I had never seen a dead person before. I was therefore quite fearful as I followed Ben and the four other members of our team down to the purification room in the funeral room. The room in which the tahara took place was in the basement, immediately adjacent to the embalming room. It was stark and relatively small, with two sinks, a cabinet, a drain in the middle of the floor, and a steel table that tilted for drainage purposes. Ben noticed my trepidation and reassured me: nothing was expected of a beginner other than to watch. I was free to do only what I felt comfortable doing and to leave any time I wanted. Ben warned us that smoking, eating, drinking, unnecessary talking and praying near the body were all forbidden. Nothing was to distract us from the primary task at hand - preparing the met for eternal rest.
We entered the room, and there was the met, covered in a sheet, lying on a table. Ben explained the fundamental rules. As much of the body as possible is to be kept covered at all times, even while being washed. It is particularly important that the face and the genitals be shielded. At no time is it permitted to place the body face down. It is absolutely forbidden to pass anything over the body - a sign of profound disrespect, and a violation of the 'personal space' of the met; if we had to give an item to someone on the other side of the table, we were to walk around and hand it to him.
The prohibition against passing objects over the met affirms the humanity of the person whose body is lying before us; it seeks to ensure that the members of the hevra continue to accord a dead person the respect normally given to those still alive. This consideration is by no means peculiar to Jews: for essentially the same reasons, people visiting a cemetery are reluctant to step directly on the spot where someone is buried. But in Jewish tradition the space above a met is reserved for him not only in the immediate vicinity but all the way "up to the heavens," so that his path to the divine will not be impeded. This suggests that we should respect a dead person even more than we do a living one, precisely because, in death, the met is thought to come face to face with his Maker and Judge.
After Ben's explanation of the procedures, we began by reciting the hamol ('forgiveness') prayer, which asks God to take mercy on the met, pardon his transgressions, and allow him to rest with our fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as well as the other righteous of Israel. Jewish prayers often characterize God as the reviver of the dead (in the time of the messiah); unusually, the hamol prayer adds that it is God Who causes the living to die.
Stealing glances during the prayer, I was surprised to observe that the met had a large tatoo. Since Jews are expressly forbidden by the Torah to tatoo their bodies, it seemed that this man had been far removed from Judaism in his life. And the distance became even more palpable when I heard his name - Yehudah ben (son of) Herman. In other words, Yehudah's family did not even know his father's Hebrew name. Yet here he was, tatoo and all, being prepared for burial just as his ancestors had been for millennia. The stark contrast between Yehudah's apparently irreligious life and his choice to be buried in the ancient Jewish manner, in a shroud and in a closed, plain pine box, moved and confused me.
BEN assigned me the simple task of filling buckets with lukewarm water. The requirement that the water be set at the temperature at which most people feel comfortable taking a bath seemed yet another reminder that the met should be treated as sensitively as possible. Ben explained that the goal in a tahara is to replicate the immersion of the body in a mikvah (ritual bath). There are, again, at least two reasons for this ceremony. The first is ritual: to remove symbolically any impurity which the met might have brought upon himself during his lifetime. Humans can assist in eliminating this type of pollution, because it has arisen at the hand of man - i.e., the deceased. (The inherent impurity that comes from being a dead body, however, can be removed only by God.) The other reason is related to the vulnerability of the newly dead and the role of the shomer. Death completes the cycle of life. Practically the first experience of a baby is being washed and wrapped in swaddling clothes. It is fitting that this experience be mirrored in death.
Performing the tahara is uncomplicated. First, the entire body is fully washed, from head to toe, with water poured from a ladle back-handed, to indicate the sadness of the situation and that things are not 'normal.'
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IN THE WORLD OF OLD-BOY POLITICS, THIS WOMAN CALLS THE SHOTS
THE MATALIN FACTOR
BUSH'S SECRET WEAPON
In college, the girls would have called her a 'smart chick'; in politics, the boys would say she's 'a guy's kind of girl'; in a tough election year, she's exactly the person George Bush needs on his side.
"There's a little to-do about all this woman stuff," concedes Mary Matalin, aware that her role as national political director for the Bush campaign makes her not only the top woman on the president's re-election team but also a 'peg' for the media. She is, in fact, a rare species in politics: a woman who knows how a familiar story will get played out; a behind-the-scenes force who comes quickly to the point. "It doesn't matter if you're a Martian," she says of her position, "as long as you perform."
Matalin is sitting in her Washington office, in a swivel chair, wearing a dark-green wool dress; the phone rings constantly; her assistant Lisa Greenspan, reports on developments in the South; her return-call list gets longer; and George Bush, Jr., is arriving in an hour. Matalin calls, "Hey, Lisa? Does Junior have a phone in his office?" Junior is one of Matalin's closest allies - and his father's familiar troubleshooter. "I only talk to Junior 17 times a day," she says wryly, "but this is his first foray into town. We're so bunked-in over here, there's not even a cubbyhole for him."
To listen to Matalin is to hear the voice of someone who came out of the Midwest, who is happier in jeans than a dress, and who, by some instinctive apprehension of the rudiments of old-boy politics, figured out how to move within the system, rather than oppose it solely on the assumption that power might be a white male thing, and so, beyond her reach. That she might hit the glass ceiling does not seem to have occurred to her.
"For as long as I've worked, which is since age 11, I've never liked the notion of anything coming to someone because of gender. It's degrading to the recipient," says Matalin, who is 38. "I don't come to the table with 'the woman's point of view.' I come from a blue-collar family on the south side of Chicago. And nobody at the table comes from what I thought Republicans were."
Indeed, in Matalin, the men in the Bush campaign may have found their secret weapon: a woman whose candor deflects stereotypes of nerdy Republicans; whose gut instincts for politics are so close to the surface that she reacts decisively; and whose opinions, style, and wit amount to a breath of fresh air in a hot-winded horse race. "She has," says Tony Snow, a White House speech writer, "a great b.s. meter."
In early March, it's on full alert. Greenspan sticks her head in the door, bringing primary news from one of the southern states. Matalin frowns. "I need somebody in headquarters who has two brain cells to rub together." She reaches for a Marlboro Light.
Since New Hampshire, the media has dogged the Bush camp with criticism that its organization and ads have produced lackluster primary results. "Today, for instance, I'm trying to explain that 13,000 out of 199,000 Republicans voted for an uncommitted slate of delegates," says Matalin on the morning after the South Dakota primary. "This isn't a lackluster performance. We have more than 200 delegates; Buchanan has nine. Next week it's winner-take-all in four of the eight states," she says, referring to Super Tuesday. "What are we doing here? We're counting delegates."
It the media sees it differently, Matalin understands, having weathered the 1988 campaign, when she organized the GOP's state-by state 'ground war' of voter turnout - and having been the subject herself of stories about her romance with James Carville, a consultant to Governor Bill Clinton. Political reporters, she says, "always pick out their Bruce Babbitt. They've already picked out Clinton. They can always fall back on blind sources, as in 'sources close to the president said.' They could be talking to Millie the dog. So we know what kind of environment we're in. But it's frustrating because I know the mechanics, and I know we're winning."
It's the mechanics - the nuts and bolts of campaigning - that define her interest in politics. "What I have is the ability to keep a lot of plates spinning," she explains. That's a neat way of saying that when a campaign director in Michigan has a problem or when Junior needs a solid opinion, they call Matalin. "Politics always operates on the squeaky hinge theory," she admits. "Whoever gets to me first gets the job done."
But if there's one thing she learned from her mentor, the late Lee Atwater - campaign manager for Bush '88 - it is to spread the power around to her staff. "I don't want to hear about a problem unless there's blood on the floor," she says. "And we've all worked together long enough to know the difference between blood and a hang nail."
Maybe what Matalin brings to the Bush camp is levity. She grew up first near Chicago's 93rd and Commercial, later in suburban Burnham; her mother was a Democrat in the Kennedy-Roosevelt tradition and her father, the son of Yugoslavian immigrants, was a "sort of anarchist-libertarian" who worked his way up to superintendent at U.S. Steel - Matalin herself worked there during school breaks. " I understand the language of real people," she says. "If you read The New York Times or The Washington Post every day, you get sucked into the rhetoric of economics. But real people don't talk about capital gains. They want to know what it means if they sell their houses."
Distrustful of big government, Matalin says it was her family's work ethic that attracted her to the GOP. "Not to be corny, but I believe in the notion of individual responsibility," she says. And so, in 1980, while in graduate school, she took her first crack at politics in the Illinois Senate race, working for Republican David E. O'Neal. O'Neal lost but Matalin met the first of several mentors, Maxene Fernstrom, then O'Neal's campaign manager. "She is a great woman and a killer at politics," says Matalin. It was Fernstrom, now a small business consultant, who got Matalin a job in Washington at the Republican National Committee (RNC). Two years later Matalin was made executive assistant to Rich Bond, then deputy chairman of the RNC. "I liked the cut of her jib," observes Bond, now RNC chairman. "Mary can be charming. Mary can be tough." Or, as Tony Snow says, "She is at her best when things are going fast and you need quick decisions."
Perhaps no event defines Matalin's career better than the 1988 Michigan caucuses, when Bush nearly lost to Pat Robertson. "She stayed in Lansing for months," says Governor John Engler. "She was the link between Michigan and Washington." Michigan was also the unlikely beginning of her deep friendship with Atwater - unlikely because Bond and Atwater did not see eye-to-eye, and Matalin was Bond's deputy. "But Michigan turned into such a Beirut, Lee had to talk to me," she recalls. "We just clicked."
In listening to Matalin, one develops a sense of how politics works; that it isn't strictly about numbers and delegates but loyalty, raillery - and something close to passion. In Atwater, Matalin found her opposite and her mirror image. "He was this wacky, iconoclastic guy," she says. "He loved music and books... " She pauses. "I have never met, and never will, a person who can crystalize human nature in a phrase like he could."
In Carville, another flamboyant Southerner, Matalin found someone who spoke her language. Unfortunately, their bipartisan romance - now on hold - provoked intense curiosity in the press. Several articles suggested Matalin's involvement with Carville posed a liability to the Bush campaign. "It's demeaning that the authors of these stories professed to be writing them because they thought I was getting pressured [into cooling the relationship], which was untrue," says Matalin hotly. "Yet they all cast me as a victimized female. And on a personal level, it's nobody's damn business."
In any event, she now has other things to worry about, not the least of which is getting Bush re-elected. But if Matalins' days extend into nights, if her pulse quickens on caffeine and conflict, she has also begun to ponder what to do after the campaign. "I've only thought this: that it's time to think about it," she says. "About things I might have considered sooner, like having kids and finding a real man." She dismisses the notion that her job is preparing her for a new role in government. "I know a lot of people and I've got a gut. What does that prepare me for?" she asks. "To have to wear panty-hose every day, put on a dress, and set my hair..." She laughs. "That kind of structure is too unproductive for me. My all-time favorite position was my first field job, when I could sit at home in jeans, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and just work the phone." Somehow, she is not entirely believable. "Mary," says Fernstrom, "is prepared for anything."
PICASSO'S STILL CENTER
DOMESTIC PLEASURES FROM THE GREAT MASTER. A MAJOR EXHIBITION REVEALS THE PAINTER'S MANY MOODS.
The cabbie driving me into Cleveland on a dank February afternoon asked what I was in town for, and I said a show at the Cleveland Museum of Art of Pablo Picasso's still lifes ('Picasso & Things,' now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through August and to open at the Grand Palais in Paris in September). "I gotta see them!" the cabbie said. "Those are what he did before he went crazy, right?"
Everybody in the world knows Picasso, though some might get his myth cross-wired with Vincent Van Gogh's and construe 'still life' as a type of art that is precariously levelheaded. I relayed the remark to Jean Sutherland Boggs, the exhibition's main curator and the author of its majestic catalog. "I hope you told him Picasso was always crazy," she said, smiling. Yet another cabbie during my three freezing days in Cleveland, which I spent attending an international symposium convened for the occasion, declared that he, too, would make a point of seeing the show. Why? "Picasso is part of history," he explained solemnly as we drove through falling snow.
Picasso! Right up there with the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower as a monument and must-see. Picasso, the 20th century's other mascot genius, with Albert Einstein. Picasso, "that great and proprietary Spaniard" - as art historian Robert Rosenblum termed him in his lecture - who could seem to consume most of modern art's oxygen, leaving other artists gasping. Picasso, the Zeus-like lady-killer whose love life retrospectively remains as exciting to gossip about as that of any current Hollywood roué. Picasso, the academic industry summoning busy scholars to freezing Ohio.
John Richardson was on hand. Friend of the artist and singular scholar-raconteur, fresh from the triumph of the first volume of his projected four-volume biography, A Life of Picasso (Random House). Richardson begged off giving a lecture, but his presence lent some stardust to the proceedings. Eager professors queried him about volume two. It is roughly half done, Richardson said wearily, plainly daunted by the life sentence this mammoth work has become for him.
In the symposium, one professor related Picasso's Surrealist period to academic theorists' latest fashion, the apocalyptic sex and death thematics of Georges Bataille, the late French author of Literature and Evil. It was heavy sledding, as was another scholar's strenuous attempt to impute radical political content to the self-absorbed anarchism of Picasso in the years leading to cubism. Academe is academe, equal to muffling the liveliest material. In context, flamboyant philosopher Lydia Gasman's ecstatic speculations were refreshing.
Curator Boggs told a suddenly captivated audience that Picasso loved to watch professional wrestling on television.
The legacy of Picasso is so intimidatingly grand that many of us enjoy making light of him when not subjecting him to high-handed analysis - but then we are back looking at his work and the game is up.
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Coming Back To Religion:
What It Can Add to Your Life
BY DAN WAKEFIELD
I joined church the week I turned 50, after studiously avoiding any connection with organized religion since my sophomore year at Columbia University. I had been one of those intense collegiate atheists, a proud 'convert' to existential angst, Freudian salvation through psychoanalysis, and Hemingway's brand of macho courage (aided by booze) in the face of despair. But all those systems that saw me through youth and early middle age seemed to collapse in a midlife crisis of physical, professional and emotional strain.
In the course of one year, both my parents died, my relationship with a woman I had loved for seven years came to an end, I left the television work I had been doing in Los Angeles, moved out of my home and found myself broke for the first time in my life. Faced with a top-10 list of life's greatest stresses, I found myself muttering the 23rd Psalm: "He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul..." Those words spoke more to my condition as I neared my own half-century mark than anything by Hemingway, Freud or Sartre.
When I look back at the past decade, one of the most fulfilling times of my life thus far, I cannot imagine it without the richness that has flowed from my return to church. Many of us who, in youth, drifted away from our spiritual roots - whether Christian, Jewish or any other faith of our forebears - have found the homecoming especially rewarding. Most people are comforted by the framework of the faith in which they were raised; hymns, prayers or chants return with reassuring familiarity. Those who plug into some new and different system of shared spiritual values also may find that they can add a powerful new dimension to their mature years.
My first intimations of mortality arose in my doctor's office, where I was advised to lose weight and cut down on drinking to slow a racing pulse. This light brush with reality brought me face to face with the big questions I hadn't thought about since college philosophy classes and late-night bull sessions: What does it all mean? What am I here for?
Although serious adult religious questing doesn't provide any pat answers, it offers a context, a lens through which to look at the mystery of the universe and our own infinitesimal part in it. I began to view the stories and poetry of the Bible - like the psalm I instinctively turned to in time of crisis - as a legacy that has been passed down through thousands of years, speaking in language that still addresses the deepest issues of the heart and soul.
Looking anew at the oldest questions of existence can be an invigorating and surprising experience. Religious concepts that once seemed naive or irrelevant to the latest fashion in social behavior may, with the hard-won wisdom of a half-century of experience, suddenly strike one as remarkably helpful.
As I started to study familiar and unfamiliar psalms, I found that these ancient cries of anguish, triumph, love and loss echoed my own experience, helping to heal my unresolved pain. Lines from the 139th Psalm made me feel that even in direst despair, a guiding force was with me; that God is as much in the pain as in the joy of life and is with us in the dark as well as the bright times: "Wither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? ... The darkness and the light are both alike to thee." As I reflected on the most turbulent years of my life, that psalm calmed my memory, bringing peace and closure.
My search grew deeper on a weekend retreat, when other parishioners and I contemplated those dark nights of the soul. A man my age who had also returned to church after a midlife crisis wrote in one of our exercises: "I celebrate the darkness in which I grope." He wondered if perhaps it is only in the darkness that "we discover our true selves, because we are too distracted in the light." His insight broadened my own perspective, and I felt a camaraderie greater than "man to man," of humans in a common quest for spiritual meaning.
Prayer and contemplation in maturity can bring a sense of harmony and connection with the natural world. After a class in 'spiritual direction,' I followed what seemed a simple, child-like exercise: sitting down to look at a tree for 20 minutes, considering why God created such a thing. I felt I actually saw the tree for the first time, not as mere background to my own personal soap opera but as an intricate, miraculous creation. Returning to the same spot, I mediated on grass, trees, flowers, insects, birds - the whole amazing web of life around me - and experienced a deep and satisfying sense of belonging to nature.
Prayer often leads to action, in community service that is not just perfunctory volunteerism but a vibrant opportunity to live one's faith. When a friend in church remembered that I used to make chili for small neighborhood gatherings, she asked me to prepare it for 40 people at a congregation supper. ("All you have to do is quadruple the recipe," she assured me.) The day I shed onion tears and chopped tomatoes in the kitchen of the parish house, a special sense of community permeated my flesh and bones as well as my heart and mind.
When I went with other church members to serve dinner at a local homeless shelter, I was humbled by the realization that the people who held out their plates were the same as me - it was only a trick of fate that put me that night on the other side of the table. Performing this small service, I viewed the dispensing and sharing of food with those who needed it as a true expression of communion.
My belated spiritual journey has not consisted of lightning flashes and thunderous voices from above but of the gradual, quiet 'turning' that comes with small steps. Accustomed to looking at success in terms of bigness and high book sales, I was disappointed when I turned up one rainy night for Bible study and found only our seminarian and one other parishioner present. Then the words came to mind, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." I smiled and relaxed, enjoying an aura of warmth and light, made more precious by the wind and rain outside. I was learning a serenity far removed from the racing-pulse days of my late midlife crisis.
I've found that the real fruits of the spirit tend to multiply as the receiver passes them on. After taking a class in religious autobiography, I designed a similar workshop that I now lead at adult-education centers and churches across the country. In so doing, I am learning the stories of other people revitalized by their own spiritual quests.
In a Seattle workshop, for example, Helen Stout wrote on the eve of her 79th birthday, "My paintings grow smaller, my dance steps slower, my words more and faster, my thoughts and dreams richer."
Dennis Dahill, who worked for a bank in Boston, described feeling impatient at first when he went on a spiritual retreat and was asked to recollect how God had worked in and through his life. He eventually began to see patterns, and "by the second night, as I lay on my bed, a great comfort and peace came over me. I hadn't gone to sleep that easily in months." Reflection and spiritual guidance had led him to affirmation and appreciation.
When I went back to church I was delighted to see people I knew, neighbors and friendly acquaintances who I hadn't realized followed any religious belief or practice. They weren't proselytizers and so hadn't mentioned their involvement to me (someone who had expressed no interest or even had showed hostility toward religion). Now, whether I was among old or new friends, I felt an unspoken bond with men and women I joined in prayer. We gathered to worship (or simply to seek) God, to tune in to some force greater than our own egos. The word 'amen' not only signified the end of a prayer but also sealed a mutual understanding among those who uttered it, a common acknowledgment of our own frailty and our desire to look beyond ourselves for guidance and sustenance.
Tolstoy turned to religious in his later years: After becoming the greatest novelist in Russia, he was left with the feeling "So what?" The rewards of a lifetime's work did not fill his spiritual yearning, the human hunger for that elusive something more, other, beyond. That interior gap, often covered over in the rush and clamor of the middle years, becomes achingly apparent when the bustle of career and family raising is over. Reflection suddenly becomes unavoidable.
Thirst is what I felt when I finally sought the religious experience I'd avoided for so many years. This was slaked by Sunday worship services, classes, discussions and Bible study offered at the parish house during the week. "I'm as eager to come to these programs as I would have been twenty years ago if you were throwing a series of free martini parties!" I wrote in a note of thanks to the minister. (People like myself who once drank to excess find that engaging in a spiritual search helps satisfy a need we may have once blotted out with booze.)
An editor friend who heard I'd gone back to church once told me, with the unconscious condescension that men in their 30s sometimes display for people past 50, "I can see why someone of your age would get interested in religion." But he didn't see at all. He thought I was preparing for death and hoping to get in good with God.
What I really sought and found through religion was not a comfortable accommodation with death but a larger vision of life, a fuller participation in it. Rather than lulling us with some misty notion of the hereafter, religion can give us a greater engagement with the challenges of living.
In the ripeness of age, the spirit can bloom.
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Gray is beautiful ...
BY LINDA BURNHAM
What is gray hair, anyway? As drab a prospect as the paint job on a battleship? Not at all. The mix of white with your original color is as individual and provocative as ever, so long as you avoid those gray clichés and style it with expression.
MODERNIZING YOUR HAIRCUT
Women and their hairstylists used to equate gray hair with short hair. They also opted for permanents to control 'frizziness' or to 'fluff up' baby-fine hair. The sad result was that too many women looked too much alike, and most looked older than their years.
But as more women choose to show their graying hair, new attitudes toward style and cut have emerged. For example, not everyone's hair texture changes, and even when it does, the newfound body or silkiness can allow for new hairstyles.
For frizziness, stylist Carmine Minardi advises "the least layering possible." He adds, "A lot of women past sixty believe that their hair should be brushed upward, but exposing the hairline, ears and nape of the neck is not always the best thing to do." Minardi likes to see gray hair chin length or longer, depending on your height: Women taller than 5 feet 5 inches look good with hair an inch past the shoulder, cut bluntly and set into waves for special occasions, he believes.
Another nontraditional suggestion is bangs. "They bring focus to the eyes, which only get more interesting with age," says Minardi. "Just be sure the bangs are soft and wispy, and long enough to be brushed to one side. The mistake with bangs is cutting them too short, <*_>a-grave<*/> la Mamie Eisenhower, or too straight, like Prince Valiant."
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TRAVELER'S JOURNAL
Carpe Your Diem In Harvard Square
Here's a visitor's guide to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where seldom is heard a politically incorrect word, and the zeitgeist is not cloudy all day.
by Patricia Harris and David Lyon
LIKE PUBLIC Television, Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a cross-roads of high culture and counterculture. Situated in the upper lefthand corner of the American imagination near Greenwich Village and the Land of Oz, it's easy to find. Just make a left at every fork in the road. Or take the Red Line to Harvard Square.
When most people speak of Cambridge, Harvard Square is what they mean. The 40-acre tract adjacent to the brick-and-ivy halls of Harvard College is the urban counterpart of a tropical rainforest - an ecosystem of unparalleled diversity. Every esoteric life-form - and life-style - flourishes here. The sidewalks bustle with a peculiar mix of patrician and plebeian, professor and panhandler. The scene is American Fellini played out on a human-scale stage.
But the Square is more than mere milieu. It's a habit of mind that out-siders, frankly, find a little askew. This is where cult movies begin, where restaurants refer to serving staff as 'waitrons,' where volunteers seek petition signatures for fifth-party candidates, where light poles are papered with lecture announcements such as 'Deconstruction: Has It Fallen Apart?' Street singers out-number boomboxes and people don't fight - they challenge each other to chess duels. Eccentric as the city may seem, it's open to converts - or even to day-trippers sampling the local zeitgeist. The guiding ethic is that anything worth doing is worth overdoing. Here's how to experience the quintessential Cambridge:
HOOF IT
A DIORAMA OF THE Square in 1936 at Harvard's Widener Library depicts a traffic jam; some of those cars still haven't budged. Pedestrians own the streets, but first-time visitors should cross against the walk light or dance through the traffic at midblock only in the company of an experienced local.
The Square was built for walkers, and if the crusading conservationists of the Harvard Square Defense Fund prevail, it will always be so. Says president Gladys 'Pebble' Gifford, "Pedestrian life makes Harvard Square tick." The fund fights for small-scale buildings, open patches of greenery, and "sidewalk treatments" that encourage people to "gather and interact." The architectural canyons of down-town Boston are Gifford's worst nightmare: "If you don't have sunlight, people stay away."
The information booth at the mouth of the subway supplies maps and tickets for walking tours.
IGNORE HISTORY
IN CAMBIDGE WHAT'S past is prologue. Sure, George Washington slept here - when he took command of the Continental Army and forced the British to evacuate Boston. He worshiped at Christ Church, the modest Episcopal structure across from the Cambridge Common. His headquarters was a confiscated Tory house, later owned by the Good Gray Poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The Longfellow House (105 Brattle St.; $2 per person; 617-876-4491) offers an out-standing interpretive tour.
Harvard, too, has its Byzantine history (free guided tours depart from Holyoke Center). Cambridge was the birthplace of the player piano, and the first phone call over a distance was made between Cambridge and Boston. But that was then, and this is now. Carpe diem.
HIT THE BOOKS
THE 100,000 Discounted titles at WordsWorth Books (30 Brattle St.) constitute a bibliophile's paradise with a checkout line - and WordsWorth is only one of six large, full-service book-stores in the Square. Given that dedication to the life of the mind is de rigueur, as many as 17 other specialty book dealers also thrive - often tucked away on side streets or upper levels.
At the Grolier Poetry Book Shop (6 Plympton St.), Louisa Solano wedges 15,000 titles into a store the size of a front parlor. Around the corner, Herb Hillman of Pangloss (65 Mount Auburn St.) has supplied Cambridge academics with used and out-of-print books since 1957. "Sooner or later every scholar in the world worth his salt" comes to the Square, Hillman says. Science fiction, horror, and fantasy are specialties at Pandemonium (8 JFK St.), where Tyler Stewart subdivides the shelves because "You know, some people are into werewolves and others like vampires." Schoenhof's Foreign Books (76-A Mount Auburn St.) services more worldly aliens with reading materials in 160 languages.
CONNECT WITH THE WORLD
THE NEWS OF THE planet spills into the Out of Town News kiosk in the center of Harvard Square: newspapers from 150 foreign countries, nearly 200 from around North America. Out of Town is the spot for Pravda and Mexican Vogue. The diminished Iron Curtain has meant a flood of Eastern European journals too.
LINGER OVER A CAFFE
THE UNASSUMING Coffee Connection in the Garage mall between JFK and Dunster streets may serve the best cup of coffee, but the true Cambridge caffeine scene is Eurostyle: Café Pamplona (12 Bow St.), Caffe Paradiso (1 Eliot Sq.), Patisserie Fran<*_>c-cedile<*/>aise (54 JFK St.), Café Fiorella (50 Church St.), and the Algiers Coffee House and Blacksmith House Bakery and Café (40 and 56 Brattle St., respectively). At press time, those in the know were choosing caffe latte and espresso over cappuccino.
The Blacksmith House takes its name from Longfellow's 'under-the-spreading-chestnut-tree' poem, but the pastry is pure Viennese. Au Bon Pain (Holyoke Plaza) is the closest thing to golden arches permitted by the Square's restrictive zoning. The out-door scene varies from a bustle of local 'types' to a sometimes-abrasive tableau of hustlers and punk pretenders. For $2, chessmaster Murray Turnbull will play anyone who can muster enough concentration amid the commotion.
CHOW DOWN OR DINE FINE
Harvard Square eateries outnumber bookstores four to one and exhibit the multinational range of Out of Town News. Some, like the Wursthaus (4 JFK St.; 617-491-7110), are Cambridge institutions. For a moderate meal, try the specialty pizzas at Bertucci's (21 Brattle St.; 617-864-4748) or the excellent burgers from the Casablanca and Harvest Bar menus.
Tablecloth dining is a better choice. College parents treat their offspring to continental cuisine at Peacock (5 Craigie Circle; 617-661-4073), while hungry poets favor the hearty Iberian fare of Iru<*_>n-tilde<*/>a (56 JFK, rear; 617-868-5633).
The top dining rooms - Upstairs at the Pudding (10 Holyoke St.; 617-864-1933) and Rarities (at the Charles Hotel; 617-864-1200, x1214) - are worth a splurge. Both are inventive proponents of New American cuisine. Rarities is elegant and modern, Upstairs at the Pudding often has a homey fire. The Pudding permits early diners to assemble a light meal of appetizer, dessert, and glass of wine.
CHOOSE SIDES IN THE ICE CREAM WAR
HE OPENED HIS FIRST store in neighboring blue-collar Somerville almost 20 years ago, but Steve Herrell remains the guru of homemade-style ice cream. His name is separated in the Square because he sold his company (Steve's, 31 Church St.) and got out of the business for a few years, only to rejoin the industry under his surname (Herrell's, 15 Dunster St.). Try both. Cantabrigians debate ice cream the way Burgundians discuss wine.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS is central to Cambridge's identity, although Republican governor William Weld does reside near Brattle Street. The city has one of the toughest smoking regulations anywhere (if in doubt, don't light up) and requires bars and restaurants to furnish condom machines in all rest rooms to slow the spread of AIDS.
The city has a paid Peace Officer and offers sanctuary to political refugees. Although visitors can't vote on the numerous local referenda, they can sign petitions to support political, social, environmental, or animal rights. Just look for the earnest people with clipboards.
PUT A BUCK IN THE HAT
CAMBRIDGE IS "ONE OF the five best cities in the world for street performers," says Stephen Baird, political puppeteer, musician, and founder/director of the international Street Artist Guild - a task he calls "organizing anarchists." The street scene really catches fire on warm summer nights, but some stalwart entertainers ply their trade in colder seasons as well. Singing in the Square is such a venerable tradition that in 1990, the city council passed a resolution honoring street performers - and an ordinance limiting their volume to 80 decibels.
The best spots are staked out early by performers from around the globe, ranging from a Haitian tenor performing Piaf to an Ecuadoran troupe with panpipes and armadillo-shell mandolins. Tracy Chapman, Joan Baez, and Bonnie Raitt are all alleged to have started their careers here. Among the more colorful characters is Brother Blue, an erstwhile doctor of education who is the Official Storyteller of Cambridge and Boston.
HAVE A SERIOUS NIGHT OUT
STREET SINGERS Sometimes come in from the cold to play Passim (47 Palmer St.; 617-492-7679), a relic of the 1960s folk revival and a top stop on the current acoustic music circuit. Old-timers may recollect hearing an unknown Bob Dylan here, but take it with a grain of sea salt.
Other evening entertainment leans toward the highbrow. The American Repertory Theater (64 Brattle St.; 617-547-8300) is an avant-garde theater of international repute. Love it or hate it - but argue passionately. Regattabar in the Charles Hotel (1 Bennett St.; 617-661-5000/846-1200) is one of the top jazz rooms in the Northeast, booking both classic club acts and up-and-coming artists. The music, like ART's plays, requires focused attention. Film buffs can analyze the stylistic flourishes of bygone directors at the Brattle Theater (40 Brattle St.; 617-876-6837). Once a performing stage for Hollywood and Broadway blacklistees, the Brattle is a fine repertory film house and serves real butter on the popcorn. The Bogart revival began here.
SEE AND BE SEEN
THE BAR AT Casablanca (below the Brattle Theater; 617-876-0999) features murals of the movie scenes and is the place to spot local celebs. Play the Cambridge version of naming the faces on the Sgt. Pepper album jacket - the best-selling lawyer, the detective novelist, the not-quite-famous actor, the Nobel laureate. Look for the literati a few doors down at the Harvest Bar (44 Brattle St.; 617-492-1119).
SAMPLE THE TREASURES
HARVARD'S MUSEUMS are as varied as the university's scholarship, and not even Cantabrigians try to see them all at once. The glass flowers at the Museum of Comparative Biology (26 Oxford St.; 617-495-2248) are perennial favorites of visiting great-aunts. These botanical teaching models represent the zenith of the glassblower's art. Recent makeovers have thrust two other museums into the spotlight. The Hall of the American Indian in the Peabody Museum (down-stairs from the flowers) has been renovated along politically correct, post-Dances with Wolves lines.
The Busch-Reisinger Museum's striking German Expressionist artworks have a new home in Werner Otto Hall, which is grafted onto Harvard's main art museum, the Fogg (32 Quincy St.; 617-495-9400). Enter from above the Fogg's ever-impressive Italian Renaissance courtyard. The Sackler Museum (485 Broadway; 617-495-9400) houses Harvard's Classical and Asian art. It's isolated across Broadway from the Fogg because Cambridge neighborhood groups blocked construction of a connecting bridge. One ticket gains entry to all the natural history museums, another to the art museums. All are free on Saturday mornings; the natural history museums from 9:00 to 11:00; art from 10:00 to noon.
BED DOWN IN STYLE
GENERATIONS OF Parents visiting their Harvard and Radcliffe progeny have favored the Sheraton Commander (16 Garden St.; 617-547-4800). But the overstuffed New England comforts of the Commander gained a sleek and modern competitor in 1985 - the Charles Hotel (1 Bennett St.; 617-864-1200). Last October saw the debut of the Inn at Harvard (1201 Massachusetts Ave.; 617-491-2222), a small inn with rooms ringing an airy central atrium. Windows in 25 of the rooms look down Mass. Ave. to the Square. With the room key comes a venerable Harvard privilege: Masquerade in rumpled tweeds and dine across the street at the Harvard Faculty Club.
THE LONGEST-RUNNING STORY IN BOSTON
This month, at the age of 84, Johnny Kelley will run in the Boston Marathon for the 61st time.
by Todd Balf
I WAS AFRAID OF THIS. I LOOK at Johnny Kelley, in pink togs and candy-cane tights, and he beams the charged look of a boy. It isn't at all hard to imagine the Irish youngster from Watertown whose mother always said he'd rather run than eat.
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FILM, RECEPTION, AND CULTURAL STUDIES
By Janet Staiger
ON THE AGENDA for understanding film or television as culture is addressing the question of how spectators and social audiences comprehend, respond to, and interpret cultural texts and events. As has been pointed out in reception aesthetics or reader-response theorizing (prevalent in literary studies), textual analysis is all fine and good but people are not always versed in the subtleties of unraveling ironies, finding latent pre-oedipal narrative structures, or deconstructing fallacious binary oppositions which structure propositions. People do not always read cultural texts the way scholars do; audiences are not ideal readers. But for understanding society and the effects of popular culture, knowing how people read culture can be extremely important.
One approach to considering how people actually read texts has been the work of the British Cultural Studies scholars. As I shall suggest, I find the ideas of these individuals extremely valuable. However, I also will argue that certain of their assumptions have inhibited the breadth of observations they might make. Instead, I think that a revised historical materialist approach to reception research can provide richer information, and perhaps some answers, to understanding how people think and feel when they confront cultural productions. Such an approach has at least the following features: (1) Immanent meaning in a text is denied. (2) 'Free readers' do not exist. (3) Contexts of social formations and constructed identities of the self in relation to historical conditions explain the interpretive strategies and affective responses of readers. In this model, interpretations need to be related to specific historical conditions rather than essentialized (e.g., labeled conservative or progressive). (4) The means for analyzing these interpretative strategies exist in post-structuralist, feminist, and ideological analysis.
Although much variance exists among the people associated with British cultural studies research, in general these writers emphasize that interpretations and uses of texts connect to ideologies and cultural, social, and political power. Theories of communication and cultural discourses are numerous. Some scholars assume communication is neutral - the transmittal of messages which may or may not hold ideological content (often called the 'transportation' model). Such a position is expressed in one strand of communication theory deriving from the work of Paul Lazersfeld, Kurt Lewin, Harold Lasswell, Carl Hovland, and Wilbur Schramm. This model also occurs when formalist aesthetics separates form and content.
Other scholars of communication and culture such as James Carey take the position that communication is a social or cultural ritual, "a sharing, participation, association, fellowship." Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch extend and revise that notion by conceptualizing commercial broadcast television as a "cultural forum" which provides individuals not merely information but also a process for "understanding who and what we are."
Yet other theorists such as Lev Vygotsky and V. N. Volosinov assume that communication is a tool. Like other means of production, communication is produced by and for its users: communication transforms reality for the benefit of human beings. But as with other means of production, not everyone has equal access to technology; thus, communication can function as a tool of domination. Signs and their signifieds are not neutral but sites of power. Representations are developed in social circumstances and bear the ideological marks of the class or group that controls meanings. This obviously has tremendous leverage in organizing social existence for people. Thus, as Volosinov writes: the sign "becomes an arena of the class struggle." Controlling representations and meanings is as much a part of the fight for equity as any political battle.
This notion of communication as a tool does not imply a functionalist theory of society, assuming a drift toward equilibrium within a social formation. Instead it posits a Marxist thesis that social orders are structured in contradictions and overdetermination. Nor, however, does this model assume conspiratorial repression by the dominant class; indeed, communication systems may function so well for the dominant class that hegemony often exists. Yet as advocates of this understanding of language caution: the very 'common sense' or 'naturalness' of discourses of meanings is a strong indicator of power at work. It is this theory of communication and cultural discourses which I shall consider to be held by those individuals working in British cultural studies. In this essay, then, I shall be arguing against the positivism of some of their cultural studies research and for a contextual approach to understanding reception. While I believe that the British cultural studies scholars offer important gains in considering how audiences interpret cultural products, we need to recognize that history creates the audiences as well as the texts and both texts and readers need to be investigated in context.
British cultural studies is a particular version of Marxism developed through debates, mainly in Britain, from the mid-1950s. Several histories exist, detailing a sequence of theoretical problematics from orthodox Marxism through culturalist Marxism (including the work of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) and structuralist Marxism (particularly Louis Althusser) to what Richard Johnson calls "ideological-cultural" Marxism - a label that never stuck. This problematic is, though, a combination of aspects of cultural and structural Marxism as proposed by scholars at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. People associated with the Centre's work include Johnson, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and John Hartley. I shall also discuss the work of Charlotte Brundson, David Morley, and John Fiske as having connections to these views. As is common among scholars, much disagreement exists within the propositions forwarded by the various people. However, several general tenets have gained considerable following, and while many members of the original group now work apart, the standard phrase British cultural studies continues to describe the common aspects of the work. I would underline that other Marxist theories of cultures and their study also exist as well as non-Marxist cultural studies.
Generally, British cultural studies accept the advances of structuralist Marxism as most notably proposed in Louis Althusser's essay, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (and in other similar ways by other Marxists). Base and superstructure are theorized as distinct concepts, with elements of the superstructure having potential effect but also "relative autonomy" from other determinants. In capitalism (and perhaps other modes of production), the economic aspects of a social formation "in the last instance" are causal, but economic structures are not sufficient to explain many specific features of a social formation. For one thing, development is uneven. Because the economic base (the mode of production) is contradictory, superstructural features display that history moves through class struggle. Althusser splits the superstructural features into two groups. Repressive state apparatuses (RSAs) include the government, armies, police, courts, prisons. RSAs function primarily on behalf of the dominant class and often through violence or repression; they are public and generally overdetermined in an effort to repress change disadvantageous to the dominant class. Ideological state apparatuses (ISAs) are all sorts of other institutions and groups such as religions, educational systems, families, political parties, and communication and cultural media. ISAs are plural and function primarily by ideology. Consequently, contradictions and overdeterminations proliferate among the competing discourses, with all classes struggling through the ISAs. Ideology is defined relationally and materially: it "represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (162). Ideology exists in the RSAs and ISAs; it exists in practices. The structured relations invite or "interpellate" an individual to take up a position as a "subject" in that imaginary relationship: positions of occupation, social status, gender - whatever constructed but imaginary sense of the self that is useful for the reproduction of the mode of production and the maintenance of the dominant class. This imaginary subject position has, however, very real consequences for individuals.
Interpellation is a tricky notion, often defined as "hailing" the individual, calling out for the individual to recognize him or herself as being the subject who belongs in a role. For example, reverently singing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' is taking up the ideological position of the nationality of being a United States citizen. The song has interpellated, hailed its subject to position him or herself into that constructed and, hence, imaginary identity. Such an interpellation, however, may produce an extremely contradictory condition for an individual who is, of course, the site at which multiple subject positions may concurrently exist. While one might accept the position of being a citizen of the United States, one might also resist the policies of the government in power. Interpellation as it is more closely examined becomes a theoretical description of an activity or process which is complicated by the difference between thinking of a coherent theoretical notion such as a subject position but recognizing that in reality people are not so neatly 'taken up' by ideological discourse.
This much of structuralist Marxism is relatively uncontested by British cultural studies. Where disagreement develops is whether the human individual has volition or a consciousness that is other than 'false.' This is significant for Marxists' calls for political action and change; the idea of struggle implies a need for conscious actions on the part of people, and the issues of force and consent are significant. Part of the dispute with structuralist Marxism over this point derives from Althusser's use of Lacanian psychoanalysis to describe interpellation. British cultural studies scholars argue that Lacan presents a trans-historical and universal theory of the development of the subject; furthermore, that in Althusser's model, the psychoanalytical unconscious (rather than economics) becomes the primary determinant developing individuals. Such a model is unacceptable to these writers because to them the model becomes ahistorical and change impossible to explain.
I believe, however, that at least some Freudian-based psychologies can offer social and historical models of psychic development. I also do not think Althusser's model conflicts with a historical reading of Freudian theories. For one thing, in Althusser, ISAs such as family relations are as ISAs structured in contradiction; their ideologies have some (uneven) relationship to the in-the-last-instance determinant of the mode production. Family structures are social, historical, and contradictory ideological sites, and some writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman have made strong arguments connecting family structures such as patriarchy to economic situations such as capitalism. Thus, I do not agree that Althusser's use of Freudian psychology necessarily produces a trans-historical, universal, or totally determined subject. I would also emphasize that Freudian psychology never suggested that the unconscious constituted all of the subject; in fact, in Freud's theoretical framework the ego is often in conflict with the id (or the superego) because of social and public contradictions. A somewhat more sympathetic reading of Freud is not at odds with concerns in Marxism that historical events indicate the need to represent an individual as also having conscious intentions, understandings, and volition. Freudian psychologies just remind readers that the consciousness is not all of what people as human organisms are and that heterogeneity and conflict are part of people's psychological dynamics. Freudianism is a historical theory of the individual as individual and social being. In this matter, the issue of Lacan is less clear, but while Althusser's original proposition employs Lacanian language, I am not at all sure that Althusser's model requires that language for it to work.
In summary, the rejection of psychoanalytic theory by British cultural studies may also reject a viable contribution to the understanding of the subject and an explanation of some types of affect and pleasure. In fact, some members of the group are now considering the possibilities of Freudian psychologies, particularly in relation to narration and subjectivity.
At any rate, while temporarily eliminating psychoanalytical theory, British cultural studies theorists paid particular attention to Althusser's use of Gramsci's concept of hegemony to account for the reproduction of ideologies without repeating the universally automatic response they perceive existing in the interpellation thesis. Thus, British cultural studies attempts to synthesize Althusser and Gramsci. People are not tabula rasa but exist in contradictory experiences so that while ideological hegemony often exist, opposition or at least deviation from the dominant does too. This can happen, they argue, because the base is contradictory and class continues to be the most significant determinant of human action.
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The Politics of Performance: From Theater Licensing to Movie Censorship in Turn-of-the-Century New York
DANIEL CZITROM
Mount Holyoke College
THE MOVIES WERE BORN IN THE CITY. WHILE HISTORIANS OF EARLY film have begun to pay more attention to special issues such as technology, patent wars, industrial practice, and the movie's aesthetic debt to earlier forms of cultural expression, there has been little analysis of the specifically urban world that made motion pictures the most popular form of commercial entertainment by World War I. The political, legal, and economic wrangles surrounding the nascent movie business in New York City established the template for the ownership and control of the mature industry, as well as the basic pattern for film censorship. In the first center of movie production and exhibition during the early part of the century, the especially knotty issues involving the licensing and censoring of movies -who could show them and what could they show -were fiercely contested. These battles over the regulation of representation need to be understood against the historical backdrop of urban cultural politics.
Movies reinforced and reconfigured a set of controversies that, since the mid-nineteenth century, had been fought out largely over the licensing and regulation of theatrical space. These issues included the alleged dangers commercial entertainments posed to children, disputes over Sunday blue laws, the licensing authority of the police department, and the connections between plebeian culture and the underworld. The process that determined which entertainments were licensed and which were licentious had always been fundamentally political and volatile. The continual controversies over commercial enterprises loosely described as 'theatrical' involved complicated relations among entrepreneurs, the licensing authority of the state, the police power, and neighbourhood audiences.
By 1908, the movie business faced a crisis of exhibition: the older traditions of theater licensing proved inadequate for regulating the emergent new medium. Progressive reformers, movie exhibitors, and movie producers sought to split movies off from such live urban entertainments as vaudeville, burlesque, and concert saloons. Progressive social service agencies and activists embraced movies as an alternative to older entertainment traditions closely allied with machine politics and the urban vice economy. Movie entrepreneurs cultivated the new alliance with reformers as a way to shed the stigma of the street, attract a middle class patronage, and increase their profits. For their part, reformers saw that alliance as a way to achieve what John Collier, general secretary of the National Board of Censorship, called "the redemption of leisure." New York's movie wars -fought over theaters and screens, in the courts and the streets -illuminate a crucial transformation: the supplanting of locally based, municipally licensed cheap theater by the nationally organized, industrial oligopoly that came to dominate our popular culture.
The whole question of what, precisely, constituted a theatrical performance had remained ambiguous ever since the New York State Legislature passed the first comprehensive licensing act in 1839. That act, a response to intense lobbying by the Society for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents (SRJD), had rested on the strongly held belief in a direct, causal relationship between the theater and delinquent or criminal behavior. It required any "theater, circus, or building, garden or grounds, for exhibiting theatrical or equestrian performances" in New York City to obtain a license from the mayor, with all collected fees to be forwarded to the SRJD. The law also set a penalty of $500 for every violation, and it authorized the society, as an agent of the state, to sue and collect on those penalties. During the Civil War the city experienced a boom in 'concert saloons,' and the explosive issue of separating prostitution and alcohol from entertainment spaces led the state legislature in 1862 to pass a new act to "Regulate Places of Public Amusement." Its key features banned alcoholic beverages on the premises of a performance and made illegal the employment of females to wait on spectators.
Over the next four decades, two kinds of regulation coexisted in the highly profitable yet unstable world of New York popular amusements. One was an internal supervision within the entertainment business itself, led by the trade press and certain entrepreneurs who sought to expand their audience by distancing their attractions from associations with alcohol and prostitution. The most influential figure in this process was Tony Pastor, often called the father of American vaudeville. Although Pastor gained his first notoriety during the concert saloon boom of the early 1860s, he soon moved to create a 'high class variety' by freeing the entertainment from its earlier associations. By 1881 he had become the leading variety theater manager in the city, as he moved into his Fourteenth Street Theater located on the ground floor of the new Tammany Hall. Pastor embodied the urge toward respectability and wider commercial success, and his theater is rightly viewed as the prototype for the mainstream vaudeville that dominated the American popular stage from the 1880s until the rise of radio. He regulated his theater with an eye toward increasing profit, making special efforts to attract a female clientele.
Yet there were hundreds of other entertainment entrepreneurs who did not follow this path, retaining their ties to the concert saloon traditions and struggling to survive within the competitive world of New York amusements. An uneasy alliance of the police department, the mayor's office, private moral reform societies, and neighbourhood groups performed a continuous cultural surveillance on entertainment spaces that included dime museums, concert saloons, and vaudeville and burlesque houses. Success or failure in obtaining and keeping a license from the mayor's office proved a key not only to staying in business, but also for moving into a more profitable realm in the continuum of amusement respectability. To thrive, an entrepreneur had to negotiate a treacherous terrain that included autocratic police captains, ever-vigilant moral reformers, outraged clerics, and organized neighborhood citizens. No one, finally, could say with any certainty what constituted a theater, or what the difference was between a theater and a concert hall. Indeed many entrepreneurs sought both theater and concert licenses since the city charter authorized the police department to permit the sale of liquor in concert halls.
An 1875 'List of Theaters, Halls, Concert Rooms' counted fifty-seven licensed places for that year, a figure that remained basically constant for the next two decades. These were about evenly divided between places presenting straight drama, opera, music concerts, and circuses and the newer concert saloons and variety theaters. They were clustered mainly in three entertainment districts: the Bowery and the Lower East Side; Fourteenth Street and Union Square; and 'the Tenderloin,' roughly from Twenty-third to Fourty-second Streets, between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. By this time several newer private groups, such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and the Society for the Prevention of Crime, had joined the SRJD in making active interventions in the licensing process.
Consider, for example, the Belvidere Variety Theater at 23 Bowery, licensed by the city since at least 1875. Its owner, John Schroeder, probably opened it first as a saloon room, adding a small stage with rough scenery facing tables and chairs. Upon orders of the local police captain in early 1879, Schroeder erected a seven-foot high wooden partition to separate the bar room from the stage area, thus technically complying with the law requiring separation of theatrical performance from the serving of alcohol. In April 1879, two agents from the recently formed Society for the Suppression of Vice (SSV), founded by Anthony Comstock, visited the Belvidere and filed depositions with the mayor's office, protesting against a renewal of license. One described the scene at the Belvidere as follows:
At the tables were seated about twelve girls and women with a number of men, engaged in drinking and conversation .... On entering the saloon deponent seated himself near the door and was soon approached by one of the women and asked what [he] would have to drink and if she could drink with him. Seating herself at the table the drinks, lager beer and lemonade, were brought by a waiter. While drinking the woman asked deponent to go with her to one of the rooms on the side of the stage. Deponent consented and going to the room was again asked to treat which he did. In the course of the conversation which followed the woman urged deponent to take her into one of the rooms up stairs, which was more private and had better accommodations, and where they could have a bottle of wine together and would only cost three dollars. Upon deponent's remarking that it cost pretty high and whether anything else was given for the money, the woman replied that they would have a good time, that she would give him a nice diddle, pulled up her dress, showed her leg above the knee, made use of every persuasion and said she would get one dollar of the money and the other two dollars would go to the proprietor -the whole of which offers the deponent declined.
In response, Schroeder vigorously denied the "false, malicious, and untrue" statements in the SSV depositions, claiming that "such practices are not permitted on the premises." He defended the arrangements in his place, stressing the makeshift wall separating bar room from theater as "similar to the front partitions used at Miner's theater, Volks Garden, and theaters of like character on the Bowery." He admitted that "the greater portion of the upper part of the building is let out weekly to male lodgers and the balance thereof to transient lodgers of the same sex." Schroeder also submitted a supporting petition from eight neighboring businessmen. These clothing merchants, hatters, and picture framers all affirmed that the Belvidere was not disorderly, "nor is it a source of disturbance or annoyance to us during the day or night or in our Judgment the cause of annoyance or grievance to the travelling public." Like so many other places on the Bowery, in Union Square, and in the Tenderloin, the Belvidere continued to operate for years, a protean urban space defined and redefined by various elements of the metropolis. It qualified as a legitimate entertainment enterprise as long as owner John Schroeder coughed up regular tribute to the local police captain. He maintained the Belvidere as a legal and moderately successful business, catering to local working people and tourists, and providing employment for musicians and other variety performers. At least some of the women found there earned money by hustling drinks from customers and splitting the money with Schroeder. Whether or not they received a wage is unclear. Some of them may have also engaged in casual prostitution with customers looking for that. But as both police and private investigators found, one had to agree to move through a series of coded encounters first: letting a woman sit with you, treating her, moving to a side room, treating again, allowing her onto your lap, moving upstairs to a private room. Even there, the real profit resulted from using sex to sell liquor rather than the reverse. For the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Belvidere was a low "dive," frequented only by thieves and prostitutes. It was "disorderly" precisely because it blurred the boundaries between respectable and unrespectable social behavior.
During its infancy, roughly from 1896 to 1906, the motion picture established itself largely within venues more respectable than the Belvidere. Movies became the single most popular act in American vaudeville, the latest in a long line of visual novelty acts -'living picture' tableaux, lantern slides, shadowography -that could be fit neatly into an established format organized around discrete, unrelated 'turns'. Vaudeville managers aggressively promoted brief travelogues, 'local actualities', news films, and the occasional comedy or drama to gain an edge over their competitors. Hundreds of vaudeville theaters across the country provided the most important market for the fledgling, mostly undercapitalised movie makers.
Beginning around 1905 the rapid growth of nickelodeon theaters, devoted exclusively to exhibiting motion pictures, created the industry's first great boom.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="20">Others, most of them, embraced the new trends and tried to make the best of it in white-collar jobs, with more education, in newer homes with larger yards out in the suburbs. But both groups had a passion for the polka and wanted to hold on to that. It could not be done individually. There were ample signs that a fresh approach had to be found. Take the case of the missing young people as an example. Those actively involved in keeping the polka alive are always measuring their success not only by how many people come out to a dance but also by whether the youth participate. The falling off of polka interest among the young is always pointed out as a sign that the polka is in trouble. "We noticed that the youngsters did not go for polka music," said Schafer. "Rock-and-roll was their thing. When we were young, polka dancing was the big thing. We just had a ball going to the dances and picnics. There was nothing better. So, we've got to do something; we've got to get these kids interested."
It was a matter of realism. The IPA would promote the polka in a constantly developing ethnic situation. Using a form that exists throughout Polonia, the ever present not-for-profit organization and club, the founders of the IPA moved to institutionalize fan and industry cooperation because the polka and what kept it alive had begun to decline, and individual promoters could not turn this situation around.
The seriousness and intensity with which the IPA pushed both the convention and the polka business over the next decade are reflected in the dense 84-page 1976 Souvenir Program of the IPA Convention and Festival. Roughly the first third of the booklet is devoted to the program of the festival, the schedule of events, biographies and pictures of Hall of Fame and annual Polka Music Award winners, and pictures of bands appearing in the festival, followed by lists of their sponsors, both commercial and fraternal. The rest comprises advertisements from businesses that support the polka and in turn are supported by the fans. The souvenir program is obviously another fund raiser. It advertises polka bands, the famous ballrooms of the northern Midwest, the equally legendary bars of the industrial heartland, the record companies unknown to anyone but polka lovers, and a list of 247 contributing 'Well Wishers.' But it also boosts commitment to the polka field as a whole. An introduction to this field for budding enthusiasts, it exudes solidarity and is full of information about the small-scale economics (promotions, advertising, sponsorship), status competition, and polka commitments on which the entire polka world depends. It is a Who's Who of the polka world, referred to by fans throughout the year.
The program is especially informative in presenting the organization. All the officers and directors of the IPA are represented by individual photographs and their places of residence given. Brief histories of the IPA and of the Polka Music Hall of Fame are presented by Leon Kozicki, first president of the IPA, acting chairman of the board of trustees of the Hall of Fame, and generally acknowledged leading light of the IPA from its very beginning. Listed also are all inductees since the Hall of Fame's inception in 1968, and deceased members of the association (under the title 'Lest We Forget'). This concern to explain to the public what the IPA is and how it came about, and to celebrate its own members and the work they do, suggests a self-reflective and highly motivated organization. It is the first Polonian volunteer organization focusing on the polka to make a serious bid for a central place in the life of the ethnic community.
Here is a summary of purposes as it appears in the language of the charter and is reproduced in the souvenir program: The IPA is "an educational and social organization for the preservation, promulgation, and advancement of polka music"; its goals are "to promote, maintain, and advance public interest in polka entertainment; to advance the mutual interests and encourage greater cooperation among its members who are engaged in polka entertainment; and to encourage and pursue the study of polka music, dancing and traditional folklore." Through popular vote of its delegates, the IPA also accepted "the challenge of responsibility" to establish a professional academy and selection procedure and to raise funds for the Polka Music Hall of Fame in order "to bestow proper honor and recognition to performers, Djs, and others who have rendered years of faithful service to the polka entertainment industry."
Without quite saying it, the program defines the IPA as a professional association, a badge of pride and legitimacy. The role of the polka musician in the Polish-American community is governed largely by community rather than by professional standards, and this relationship of tension and balance between the specialized network of musicians, promoters, disc jockeys, bar owners, and the ethnic community is reflected in the variety of terms used to describe the polka complex: polka industry, polka field, polka world, polka lover, polka people, polka entertainment, polka power. Each term emphasizes a different aspect of the complex, and each one remains unsatisfactory if taken alone. Some terms echo populism; others point to professionalism and specialization - it is the mix that is essential to the IPA. The fans are included right next to the musicians: "engaged in polka entertainment" is an identification broad enough to include the entire polka-loving community and reflects the balance between 'professionalism' and 'community' that keeps the polka alive.
Although musicians may be called 'artists' from time to time and composers of popular new polkas are recognized as such, the IPA does not generally glorify polka music as 'art' and polka musicians as 'artists' or 'composers.' There is no fetishizing of 'music' and 'art,' only a pragmatic concern for the health of polka music. The recognition that the polka needs serious study, however, responds to the realities of the situation and is a message of self-affirmation to bruised polka identities. The IPA seems to be saying, "Chopin is fine, but our polkas are worthy of serious study and honored preservation too." This affirmation is aimed not only at the non-polka, non-ethnic community but also at that image-conscious and 'gatekeeping' section of the Polish-American community which, until quite recently, has not wanted to acknowledge the polka people's existence at all.
The Polka Music Hall of Fame is part of the IPA's struggle against the belittlement of polka music from both outside and inside the ethnic community. The Hall of Fame is an appropriate mark of seriousness and success, not only to those who make unconscious or conscious comparisons with the acceptance, popularity, and unassailability of baseball and country music but also to the vast majority of Polonians who tend to recognize virtue in an organization only when they see it materialize in a building, a landmark of substance. In this desire to put the polka on the map, the two themes of ethnic pride and class pride are interwoven.
A long-standing member of the IPA emphasizes this point:
<O_>interview<O/>
Museums and halls of fame, like other visible institutions, are respected in Polonia, U.S.A. But respect never comes unadulterated. By the time an organization is doing something clearly enough to command respect, it has also crystallized an opposition that is eloquent on the subject of its demerits. The Polish-American's deep sense that nothing gets done without many people pulling together, without organization, cooperation, communal work, and appropriate institutions, is threatened by enduring rifts in the community. On the one hand Am-Poles claim to love freedom and democracy so much that they cannot compromise on such important issues; on the other, they say they 'cannot agree on anything.' What Helena Znaniecki Lopata calls 'status competition' is taken for granted. 'Jealousy' is the word for it, and it is the most prevalent explanation for unresolved disputes between people who are not divided by substantial conflicts of interest. 'Jealousy,' assumed to motivate any criticism, is deprecated when it seems to be the main motivating force in a person's behavior. In fact, however, in a community where status competition and having a pleasant time in a companionable group are such prevalent motivations for social activity, both jealousy and good common sense unite behind the following crucial questions: What's the leadership in it for? What's happening to the money? Is this a democratic, open (noncliquish) organization with legitimate procedures? Are the leaders active? Are they doing something for the community?
These are perennial questions through which every old and new organization is scrutinized in Polonia. The standards of selflessness, scrupulous handling of money, and legitimate procedures are extremely high. While leniency in these matters may be possible toward an individual member, strict skepticism fuels the examination of anyone who presumes to act in an official capacity.
Since polka activity is expected to pay for itself, those who assume organizational positions are usually adept at handling the economy that sustains the polka. Such talented individuals are admired yet scrutinized. The fans are practical and accept as a matter of course that in helping the music survive, polka professionals are also working for their own futures; they point to this interdependence as an intelligent compromise between private and public welfare. Greed, however, is an ever present threat. Concern for monetary profit only is completely out of place within a polka ideal that demands cheerful service to the public. Sharp gossip is constantly used to limit excessive profit seeking.
While the IPA cannot avoid the skepticism that readily accompanies financial success, it has managed to put its best foot forward. Most of its functions are benefits for the Polka Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The IPA makes contributions to charitable organizations such as the March of Dimes. Through a calendar of such affairs the IPA ensures adequately paid work and good publicity for the polka businesses of its members (bands, halls, bars, caterers, and so on). Such moderate compensation, however, falls within the limits of what the practical polka public consider reasonable. And there is nothing like donating money to the community to allay suspicions of personal gain. Furthermore, the IPA is run completely by volunteer labor, and the IPA Bulletin maintains a high standard of open information about finances and meetings. Nonetheless, there are jokes. Elections are greeted by a jovial response: "Fixed - do it again!" Most of the time, these jokes are good-humored - people poking fun at themselves and exorcizing the ever present suspicion and danger of crookedness - but may include a pointed challenge to the legitimacy, the fairness of selection: "How come your cousin won, Stan?" This is why the broad membership in the academy of electors for the Annual Polka Music Awards and the professionalism of the consulting firm that tabulates the votes represent a solid base from which the legitimacy of the IPA decisions can be defended.
Although the association's purpose and activities are remarkably coherent, there is one gnawing inconsistency in its stated goal. The IPA proclaims itself international, yet in many important ways it has always been a Polish-American organization. Some fans see this contradiction as an indication of bad faith in the very nature of the organization, but most ignore it or interpret it as a pious wish that for practical reasons has not yet been fulfilled. The feeling in polkaland is always 'the more, the merrier,' and everyone within the polka world is aware that the polka is a true international phenomenon.
Like other active members of the IPA, Chet Schafer accepts this dual nature of the association as a pragmatic reality, the way things have actually worked out. The IPA came to life out of the experience of the polka people in Chicago's Polonia; hence, it is not only a Polish organization in its membership, its leadership, and the cultural ideals it embodies but, more specifically, a Chicago Polonian organization. Nevertheless, as Schafer puts it, irrespective of the original and present membership, "the idea is to unite all the ethnic groups interested in preserving the polka."
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="21">When the many greenhouse gases are introduced into the free atmosphere, they begin to combine with one another, thereby producing another set of complicated interactions with the radiation balance of the system. Scientists recognize that a full representation of each gas is needed to properly account for the radiative effects of the many trace gases. But in an attempt to simplify this complex situation, the equivalent CO2 values remain in wide use by climatologists working with the greenhouse effect.
Equivalent CO2 levels were approximately 290 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution; by 1900, the equivalent CO2 had risen to about 310 ppm. Although the estimates in the scientific literature vary (e.g., Tricot and Berger, 1987; Sch<*_>o-umlaut<*/>nwiese and Runge, 1991), the best estimate of equivalent CO2 for 1990 is over 430 ppm - since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have increased the equivalent CO2 by approximately 50 percent (Houghton et al., 1990). And over the past 100 years, we have seen the equivalent CO2 levels increase by 40 percent. Given the pattern of the past 100 years, we can expect to reach the 600 ppm equivalent CO2 value (often used as the value for a doubling of CO2) between 2035 and 2040.
The concept of equivalent CO2 is a critical component to much of this book. Most of the predictions associated with the 'popular vision' are for a time when we have doubled CO2 (or equivalent CO2). Yet, as can be seen in Figure 10, we have already gone halfway to an equivalent CO2 doubling, and in the past 100 years, we have witnessed a 40 percent increase in this value. We are lucky that over the same 100-year period, relatively good records have been kept regarding the climate of the earth. If large, catastrophic changes in climate are going to occur for a doubling of equivalent CO2, we should expect to see some of these changes being revealed for a 40-50 percent increase in the equivalent CO2. Understanding how our climate responded to the observed increase in equivalent CO2 will certainly provide insight into how the climate will ultimately respond to a doubling of CO2.
3
THE NUMERICAL MODELS OF GLOBAL CLIMATE
It is widely recognized that the atmospheric concentrations of the various anthropogenic greenhouse gases are increasing and that they will continue to increase into the next century. As we saw earlier, the doubling of equivalent CO2 (actually, when we reach 600 ppm) will likely occur near the year 2040; obviously, any number of social, technological, political, and economic unknowns can alter the exact time. However, most scientists agree that some time in the middle of the next century, the earth's atmosphere will reach the 600 ppm level for equivalent carbon dioxide.
For a long time, climatologists have attempted to determine what the climate of the earth would be like in a world of doubled CO2. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many scientists were conducting research on the radiative and absorptive properties of gases in the atmosphere. Following in this trend, Svante Arrhenius presented a paper to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1895 that showed a doubling of CO2 would lead to a rise in global temperature of about 6.0<*_>degree<*/>C (10.8<*_>degree<*/>F); the paper was later published by the Philosophical Magazine (Arrhenius, 1896). By the 1930s, G. S. Callendar, of London's Imperial College of Science, had calculated the amount of CO2 humans had emitted into the atmosphere. Callendar (1938) concluded that the observed rate of CO2 increase could lead to a 1.1<*_>degree<*/>C (2.0<*_>degree<*/>F) warming per century. Several decades later, Johns Hopkins University scientist Gilbert Plass (1956) determined that a doubling of CO2 would force the planetary temperature to rise by 3.6<*_>degree<*/>C (6.5<*_>degree<*/>F). By the early 1960s, M<*_>o-umlaut<*/>ller (1963) was developing very simplistic models of the atmosphere; his research led to an estimate of a 1.5<*_>degree<*/>C (2.7<*_>degree<*/>F) rise in temperature for a 300 ppm rise in atmospheric CO2. The calculations were becoming increasingly intricate and complex by the end of the 1960s; the modern numerical models of global climate were becoming an important part of the CO2 research. Nonetheless, the early 'pioneering' work by Arrhenius, Callendar, Plass, and M<*_>o-umlaut<*/>ller led them to conclusions that are remarkably consistent with the predictions of some of the most complex climate models.
WHAT ARE NUMERICAL CLIMATE MODELS?
Models are idealized representations of reality, and in the context of numerical global climate models, they are mathematical, theoretical, deductive, and deterministic representations of the climate. The goal of the numerical modelers is to generate models that are based on the physics governing the mass, momentum, and energy flows and exchanges in the atmospheric system. For example, in Chapter 1 an equation was given for calculating the effective temperature of the earth. In a very simplistic form, that equation could be considered a numerical model of climate. The equation was obviously mathematical, it can be derived from relatively simple theory, and its derivation was deductive. We started with the theory, then built the equation, as opposed to measuring the solar constants and various effective temperatures of the planets and moons and then finding an equation that matched our observations. The effective temperature equation is also deterministic - the most basic forcing functions of global temperature are explicitly represented in the model. If we were to calculate the effective temperature for the various planets and moons of the solar system, and then compare the estimated effective temperature with the actual mean temperatures of these bodies, we would be close in many cases and quite in error in other cases. Nonetheless, we would still have a numerical model capable of simulating, with some limited degree of accuracy, the mean global temperature of bodies in the solar system.
The effective temperature 'model,' which is clearly at the lower end of the spectrum of model complexity, is an example of a zero-dimensional model (Schneider and Dickinson, 1974; Fraedrick, 1978). It is called zero-dimensional because it does not resolve any of the latitudinal, longitudinal, or vertical patterns in the climate system. Given the extreme limitations in using such a zero-dimensional model, one may conclude that the only useful climate models must be three-dimensional. However, a number of one-dimensional models have proved useful in CO2-climate research.
Imagine a vertical line running from the surface of the earth straight out to the very top of the atmosphere. At many points along the line, we could specify various physically based equations that could simulate the transfer of solar energy, the transfer of infrared energy from the earth and atmosphere, the vertical movement of air via convective processes, and even some basic cloud physics (e.g., Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; Manabe, 1983). The influence of various gases could be carefully specified in such a radiative-convective model, and as the concentrations of these gases are altered, the effects on energy transfers, temperatures, convection, and clouds could be determined. Such a one-dimensional model is surprisingly well suited to the greenhouse problem, and although its one-dimensional character would seem very limiting, these models have been used successfully in green-house research (e.g., Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; Schneider, 1975; Watts, 1980).
Another type of popular one-dimensional model resolves latitudinal differences in climate as opposed to the vertical structure of the atmosphere. Sellers (1969) and Budyko (1969) independently developed two of the most widely used one-dimensional energy balance models that have been applied to the greenhouse question. However, these models are largely used in classroom exercises, and have not continued to be utilized in many recent greenhouse experiments. Two-dimensional models (e.g., Sellers, 1973) combining a vertical coordinate with latitude or including only longitude and latitude are uncommon, and have not played a significant role in the greenhouse research.
Within the hierarchy of models (Schneider and Dickinson, 1974; Gal-Chen and Schneider, 1976), the three-dimensional models are clearly at the top, and these three-dimensional models are central to the greenhouse debate. These models attempt to resolve the latitudinal, longitudinal, and vertical components of the earth-atmosphere system. To visualize how many of these models operate, think about a grid of points over the earth's surface. Although the models vary in terms of spatial resolution, a grid of approximately 500 km by 500 km (300 by 300 miles) is common. Even at the rather sparse spatial resolution of the 500-km squares, one should realize that several thousand of these squares are needed to cover the globe. Because the three-dimensional models contain a vertical component, these several thousand squares defined at the surface have layers of boxes above. Most of the modern three-dimensional models have approximately ten vertical layers, and therefore, the earth-atmosphere system is represented by over 20,000 boxes.
An intricate and complex set of equations is solved for each grid point or box to determine time and space changes in mass, energy, and momentum. The equations are written to carefully simulate changes in atmospheric pressure, fluxes of incoming solar energy, outgoing infrared radiant energy, thermal patterns, wind vectors, moisture levels, precipitation, clouds, ice and snow, and on and on. If there is not enough complexity already, the models should simulate oceanic circulations and allow a coupling between the oceans and the atmosphere. Because many of the three-dimensional models are based fundamentally upon the equations governing the wind patterns of the planet, these three-dimensional models are often referred to as general circulation models or GCMs.
All modelers are confronted with finding a balance between the physical representation of the climate elements and speed of computation (in fact, to maximize computational efficiency, some 'spectral' models do not have grids and boxes, but rather produce all calculations for a series of harmonic waves). Ideally, modelers seek to represent all of the processes with theoretically based equations generated from the underlying physics. However, this goal is compromised at times to allow the computer program making up the model to run more quickly.
Many processes operating within the earth-atmosphere system can be represented with more simplified equations that are based on observed statistical relations. These simplified equations may have great accuracy in representing some process in the atmosphere, but they are not equations that reflect the physics of the process. These 'fast physics' relations are referred to as parameterizations. They keep the computation time down, but the parameterizations reduce the scientific purity of the model. Many parameterizations used in the earlier models are fortunately being replaced by more explicit and physically based equations in the latest generation of climate models. Convective processes, heat flow in the soil, sea ice processes, and the structure of the cloud deck are examples of recent improvements in the models. However, sub-grid-scale phenomena, such as thunderstorms operating at a scale less than the 500 km grid spacing, continue to be parameterized in the models.
Imagine that the computer program is written and ready for a climate simulation. The surface conditions, including basic geography and topography, are specified along with starting conditions in the atmosphere; obviously, detailed information about the sun and the orbit of the earth can be specified in the model. The equations that make up the model are written in a form that allows the change in surface and atmospheric conditions to be calculated for a given change in time (time steps near 30 minutes are common). The models are started or initialized with the surface and atmospheric conditions, and all equations are solved for the change in the atmospheric and surface components over one time-step interval. This produces a new set of conditions, and the model equations are once again solved for another time step. After several years of simulated time in the model, the calculations stabilize, and outputs can be generated for a large number of simulated surface and atmospheric conditions (Meehl, 1984).
These models represent enormously complex computer programs that are tremendous achievements in computing, applied mathematics, and atmospheric physics. Many of the best minds in climatology have been used to construct these models, which require the power of the world's biggest and fastest computers. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the climate models were typically constructed by just one or two investigators (e.g., Sellers, 1969; Budyko, 1969; Manabe and Wetherald, 1975).
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="22">
Writing 'True' Crime: Getting Forensic Facts F23 1 </doc><doc register="popular lore" n="23">
Our Disappearing Common CultureRight F23 2
THE FORBIDDEN TOPIC
by Steven Scarborough
F23 3
Some conservatives don't want to know about the link between
THE STORY READS LIKE THIS: Mitch Sharp, the skillful detective, F23 4 multiculturalism and immigrationsolves the 'Casino Slasher Case' by tracing cloth fibers and a drop F23 5
Lawrence Auster
of saliva found at the murder scene to the stealthy criminal. F23 6
ACROSS the country, America's mainstream identity is being
What's wrong with the facts in this scenario? This simply can't F23 7 dismantled in the name of 'inclusion.' Half of last summer's New be done. The evidence is scien-tifically dubious. When is a F23 8 York City Shakespeare Festival was given over to Spanish and case plausible, and when does it stretch reality? A writer can know F23 9 Portuguese translations of Shakespeare. Christmas has been replaced only by examining the type of forensic evidence necessary for the F23 10 in many schools by a non-denominational Winterfest or by the new events of the story and then by doing the appropriate research. F23 11 African-American holiday Kwanza, while schools in areas with large
Fingerprints F23 12 Hispanic populations celebrate Cinco de Mayo. The exemplary figures
Fingerprints are the most conclusive form of forensic evidence; F23 13 of American history have been excised from school textbooks, they are the only type of evidence that does not require F23 14 replaced by obscure minorities and women. Despite massive additions corroborative proof. Though the probability of finding that elusive F23 15 of material on non-Western societies, school texts are still being fingerprint or that single strand of hair is low, it can be woven F23 16 stridently attacked as 'Eurocentric,' and much more radical changes into your story if you include the proper background. Fingerprint F23 17 are in the works.pro-cessing of a toenail and an eyeball of a murder victim F23 18
Yet even as the multiculturalist revolution rolls through the in The Red Dragon is not only technically correct, but it F23 19 land, there is still profound disagreement about its meaning, its also lends a gritty credence to Thomas Harris' novel. F23 20 aims, and most of all its origins. Mainstream media and
Fingerprints command the most attention in court, and they F23 21 educationalists describe the diversity movement as, in part, an should get equal billing in our crime story. In a city of about F23 22 effort to be more inclusive of America's historic minorities; in 300,000, finger-prints lead to the identification, arrest, F23 23 its larger dimensions, however, they see it as a response to the or con-viction of nearly one person every day. F23 24 prodigious changes that are occurring in America's ethnic
While fingerprints are readily retrieved from glass, shiny F23 25 composition. America is rapidly becoming multi-racial and metal, and paper, they are difficult to recover from fabric, F23 26 white-minority, and, these observers say, our national identity is textured objects, or fin-ished furniture. Surface to F23 27 changing in response. If that is true - and it is stated or implied surface, the methods to recovery differ, so the writer should know F23 28 in almost every news story on the subject - then it is also true the proper processes for recovering incriminating fingerprints. It F23 29 that the massive Third World immigration is itself the ultimate will make a story both interesting and accurate. F23 30 driving force behind multiculturalism.
In <tf>Presumed Innocent, Scott Turow gives us an F23 31
Virtually alone in resisting these assumptions is the impressive account of the questioning of a fingerprint witness in F23 32 conservative establishment, particularly the neoconservatives. court. His only lapse is in describing blue fingerprints developed F23 33 Liberals, who support both unrestricted immigration and on glass with ninhydrin powder. Ninhydrin, a liquid chemical F23 34 multiculturalism, do not hesitate to point out a causal link brushed on paper, produces a purplish fingerprint. The common F23 35 between the two; indeed, they appeal to the inevitability of graphite powder method is used on slick surfaces such as glass. F23 36 continued Third World immigration as an unanswerable argument for
A dramatic punch to your story might be to recover prints from F23 37 multiculturalism. Traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan, who one of your victims, and it can be done. Iodine fumes are blown F23 38 with equal consistency oppose both multiculturalism and Third over the body with a small glass tube and a silver plate is pressed F23 39 World immigration, also have no difficulty in seeing the causal against the skin to lift the print. However, at this time prints F23 40 connection. Neoconservatives, by contrast, have dissociated these can be recovered only within two hours from a live person and F23 41 two issues, leading the fight against multiculturalism while within about twelve hours from a deceased one. F23 42 passionately clinging to the ideal of unrestricted immigration.
Is your antagonist trying to incriminate some-one else? F23 43 Their pro-immigration stand, based on a conviction of both its Maybe he has considered forging a fingerprint? Forget it, his F23 44 economic necessity and its political morality, compels them to attempts are sure to be futile. It is nearly impossible to recreate F23 45 ignore - or ritually dismiss - the mounting evidence that the an ac-curate die of someone's fingerprint. A cast can be F23 46 sea-change in America's ethnic identity is fueling the made, provided he has a willing or dead hand to cast. Yet, even the F23 47 cultural-diversity movement. To keep immigration from coming under resulting print will be reversed or backward if transferred to an F23 48 attack, they are forced to hunt for alternative explanations for object. F23 49 multiculturalism.
A fingerprint expert cannot testify to how long a fingerprint F23 50
This approach was brought into focus last summer in articles by will last on an object. General rules suggest that a fingerprint F23 51 Irving Kristol in the Wall Street Journal, by Nathan will last days, not weeks, outside in the weather; weeks but not F23 52 Glazer in The New Republic, and by Midge Decter in months in a residence; and a month would not be long for a F23 53 Commentary. Despite wide differences on the effects of fingerprint left on a mirror, especially if en-cased in a F23 54 multiculturalism (Kristol thinks it's a threat to the West equal to drawer or a safe. Fingerprints have been chemically recovered years F23 55 Nazism and Stalinism; Glazer thinks it's no big deal), they reached later on the pages of a book. F23 56 startlingly similar conclusions about its causes.
When tracing someone from latent fingerprints, the investigator F23 57
Multiculturalism, they argued, has essentially nothing to do must have the suspect's name and fingerprint record on a file to F23 58 with America's increasing ethnic diversity; at bottom, it is a make a positive match. Lawrence Block captures the essence of F23 59 desperate, misguided attempt to overcome black educational fingerprints in The Burglar Who Painted Like Mondrian:F23 60 deficiencies - an effort that radicals have opportunistically
<quote>... you can't really run a check on a single print F23 61 seized upon to advance their separatist and anti-West agenda. unless you've already got a suspect. You need a whole set of F23 62 "Did these black students and their problems not exist, we prints, which we wouldn't have, even if whoever it was left prints, F23 63 would hear little of multiculturalism," Irving Kristol which they probably didn't. And they'd have to have been F23 64 declared. Assimilation, he believes, is proceeding apace: fingerprinted anyway for a check to reveal them .... F23 65 "Most Hispanics are behaving very much like the Italians of
Historically, fingerprints have been filed using a ten-print F23 66 yesteryear; most Orientals, like the Jews of yesteryear." classification system; without recover-ing latent F23 67 Nathan Glazer agreed: "[I]t is not the new immigration that fingerprints of all ten fingers, a per-son could not be F23 68 is driving the multicultural demands."identified. In the 1980s, the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint F23 69
Down with Eurocentrism
Identification System) computer was introduced, enabling F23 70
IRONICALLY, on the same day Irving Kristol was denying that jurisdictions with access to the computer to link a single latent F23 71 Hispanics are pushing for multiculturalism, the New York fingerprint to a suspect previously fingerprinted. Writers should F23 72 Times ran this typical item: "Buoyed by a growing remember the AFIS computers cost over a million dollars, and your F23 73 population and by a greater presence on local school boards, quaint Ver-mont village will not have one. The F23 74 Hispanic Americans have begun pressing text-book publishers well-connected fictional investigator should know someone F23 75 and state education officials to include more about Hispanic at a large agency or the FBI for a record check. F23 76 contributions in the curriculums of public schools," as
Body fluids
F23 77 well as to correct 'stereotypes' - a familiar code for the
Fingerprints may be the most positive form of identification, F23 78 elimination of Eurocentrism.but what if your perpetrator does not leave any? In the absence of F23 79
A spate of letters to the Wall Street Journal fingerprints, body fluids are a common type of evidence found at a F23 80 protesting Kristol's view offered a revealing glimpse into crime scene. If an intact sample of adequate size is recovered, F23 81 mainstream opinion on the subject. The chief factor in body fluids can be analyzed to ob-tain a DNA genetic F23 82 multiculturalism, wrote Martha Farnsworth Riche of the Population profile that can be compared with the suspect's or examined for F23 83 Reference Bureau, is that "racially and ethnically, blood type. F23 84 America's school-age population is increasingly unlike its
Blood, semen, and saliva are all excellent media for F23 85 past generations. ... This ensures that the school-age population determining a DNA match. DNA (deox-yribonucleic acid) is F23 86 will become even less a product of what we call 'Western the blueprint of a person's genetic makeup and is absolutely unique F23 87 civilization' in the future." Multiculturalism, said for each individual. Contrary to common belief, hair will not F23 88 another correspondent, "is not an attempt to address the reveal a person's DNA pattern. Have your victim yank out a clump of F23 89 social problems of African-Americans. Latin Americans and hair with the skin cells to make a DNA match. F23 90 Asian-Americans have been equally involved." From the
The equipment necessary to analyze DNA is highly specialized F23 91 cultural Left, Gregory K. Tanaka said that as a result of the and costly. Again, if your story is set in a quaint village, it may F23 92 increasing proportion of non-whites in America, "it is not be feasible to run a DNA check. It also may take months to get F23 93 becoming clear that our Western 'common' culture no longer works. results from one of the few laboratories that do DNA analysis. This F23 94 What Mr. Kristol overlooks is that this decline of Westernism need not be a negative; think of the desperation, the agony, of F23 95 leaves us no surviving basis for social order."waiting for results while your killer still stalks. F23 96
While it might be tempting to dismiss these views as
Body fluids can be analyzed by the local crime lab to help your F23 97 multiculturalist propaganda, the clincher is that Nathan Glazer detective. An important factor associated with body fluids, F23 98 himself, after at first denying that the increase of non-European including blood types, is secretor status. A secretor puts out, F23 99 groups is propelling multiculturalism, turned around and admitted i.e., secretes, his AB0 blood types into peripheral body fluids F23 100 it: "I do not see how school systems with a majority of such as semen, perspiration, etc. It is possible for your fictional F23 101 black and Latino students, with black or Latino serial rapist to avoid any link to his body fluids by being one of F23 102 leadership at the top ... can stand firmly against the the 15 per cent that are non-secretors. F23 103 multiculturalist thrust ... demographic and political
What does blood type tell the investigator? Normally a blood F23 104 pressures change the history that is to be taught." type places a person in a broad por-tion of the general F23 105 (Italics added.) It was in this same article that Glazer, to the population. A community might have 45 per cent of its members with F23 106 great consternation of his neoconservative allies, announced his 0 blood, 20 per cent with A blood, and so on. Therefore, if F23 107 reluctant support for Thomas Sobol's radical curriculum reforms in standard AB0 typing is done, the results are of little value F23 108 New York state. That Glazer subscribed to the because of the large population with that blood type. F23 109 demographics-multiculturalism link in the very act of surrendering
Additional blood grouping techniques, specifically enzyme and F23 110 to the new curriculum supports my point that once multiculturalism protein analyses, enable the forensic chemist to assign a suspect F23 111 is accepted, the key role of immigration and ethnic diversity in to a nar-rower population. Your fictional crime lab should F23 112 driving multiculturalism loses its stigma and can be freely not give your detective a match on blood from the crime scene. They F23 113 acknowledged.can limit only the number of people in your town that have that F23 114
To this, conservatives reply that Glazer is not admitting a type of enzyme blood groups. F23 115 forbidden truth but is simply adopting the multiculturalists'
The special equipment needed for thorough blood group analysis F23 116 fallacious 'demographic inevitability' argument. In The New is costly, and it is probable that numerous crimes go unsolved F23 117 Criterion, Heather McDonald agrees that demographic changes because suf-ficient testing is either too expensive or F23 118 are "fueling" multiculturalism, but criticizes Glazer for neglected. F23 119 "[mistaking] the actual for the inevitable." In
Other evidence
F23 120 other words, neoconservatives will concede that multiculturalism
Hair can be of forensic value. Strands found at the scene of F23 121 has been adopted because of our society's increasing diversity; the crime can be compared to a suspect's for similarities in color, F23 122 but, they insist, this was not 'logical.' Since immigration is only shape, and tex-ture, but it is difficult to determine race F23 123 the 'actual' cause and not the 'logical' cause, we should leave or even sex. An author can write that some of the suspects were F23 124 immigration alone.eliminated because analysis concluded that their hair was not F23 125
One can't help being reminded of the people who say that the similar or consistent with the hair found at the crime scene. F23 126 failures of Marxism do not prove its theoretical unsoundness.
Footwear prints, recovered photographically, fall into the F23 127 Just as one cannot persuade a devoted Marxist that Marxism must class category. Except for the excep-tional case, F23 128 lead to tyranny and poverty, one cannot logically demonstrate to an shoeprints can only be said to be made by the same type of shoe. F23 129 open-borders conservative that precipitately changing an Footwear, or any class type evidence (hair, fiber, AB0 blood type) F23 130 historically European-majority country into a multi-racial, by itself would normally not be enough to convict your suspect in a F23 131 white minority country must result in a breakdown of the common court of law. F23 132 culture. Nevertheless, whether logical or not, that is what is
Handwriting cases rarely get into court. A handwriting expert F23 133 happening.renders an opinion after ex-amining several varying F23 134
Here neoconservatives fall back on the familiar argument that factors, such as letter height ratio and slant. If the writing is F23 135 it is only the ethnic activists, not the great bulk of the similar, then degrees of match probability are reported. F23 136 immigrant groups, who are pushing for multiculturalism, a case
Criminals usually disguise their writing. It is unlikely that a F23 137 advanced most recently by Linda Chavez in Out of the kidnappers's ransom note, written in block letters, will lead to F23 138 Barrio. But as Tamar Jacoby has pointed out, Miss Chavez's own the identity of your brutish villain. Words in blood dribbled on a F23 139 evidence suggests quite the opposite conclusion: that Hispanics of wall may provide a strong clue and add color to your story but they F23 140 all classes are eagerly embracing the call to cultural separatism. will not enable a handwriting ex-aminer to point to your F23 141 According to one study cited by Miss Chavez, a large and rising murderer. F23 142 percentage of Hispanics describe themselves as 'Hispanic
Striations on a bullet are unique, much like the ridges of a F23 143 first/American second' - a preference made clear by the Hispanic fingerprint. Therefore, a bullet can be traced to a gun using the F23 144 majority in San José, California, who angrily scratches or lands and grooves imprinted on it by the barrel of a F23 145 protested, as a 'symbol of conquest,' a statue commemorating the gun. Unfortunately, if the barrel is damaged or changed, or if the F23 146 raising of the American flag in California during the Mexican bullet is mangled, the examina-tion will be inconclusive. F23 147 War.Careful scrutiny is necessary before including a firearms match in F23 148
But even if it were true that most of the new ethnics didn't your murder mystery. F23 149 'want' multiculturalism, it is undeniable that their swelling
Thomas Harris was very skillful in weaving his forensic F23 150 numbers empower the group-rights movement by adding to its research throughout his novel. FBI Agent Will Graham explores the F23 151 clientele. Scott McConnell has pointed out in the New York gamut of forensic evidence from fingerprints to blood typing to F23 152 Post that as soon as minority immigrants arrive in this bite marks. The Red Dragon could be used as a F23 153 country, they become grist for the affirmative-action mill, foren-sic model for crime writers. F23 154 eligible for an elaborate web of preferences. To imagine that we
The increasing sophistication of today's readers is a two-edged F23 155 can turn back the multiculturalist and group-rights ideology by sword: Readers are no longer satisfied with, 'He was the only one F23 156 persuasion alone, while continuing the large-scale immigration that tall enough who had a motive.' A Writer trying to add more realism F23 157 feeds that ideology, is like pouring liquor down a man's throat to a story need not shy away from scien-tific evidence, but F23 158 while 'advising' him to stay sober.he must check his forensic facts for accuracy. Credibility is the F23 159
Apart from ideology, it is important to understand that massive key to a successful crime novel. Just as a character's action may F23 160 deculturation is occurring as a direct result of the demographic lead the reader to say, 'He wouldn't do that,' an F23 161 changes themselves. Commenting on the impact of the huge Hispanic er-roneous forensic fact can turn off the reader. Do your F23 162 presence in California, an Hispanic academic tells the New research well, and readers will be clamoring for your next F23 163 York Times: "What is threatened here is intellectual authentic crime story. F23 164 life, the arts, museums, symphonies. How can you talk about
Writing A Publishable Health Article F23 165 preserving open space and establishing museums with a large
by JOAN LIPPERT F23 166 undereducated underclass?" The program director of the
"Your very lack of expertise in the health field makes F23 167 Brooklyn Academy of Music speaks matter-of-factly about the you ideal as a health writer."
F23 168 inevitable displacement of Western music as the Academy gears its
IF ONLY YOU WERE A doctor, researcher, dietitian, or other F23 169 programs to the cultural interests and traditions of Brooklyn's health professional - you would be truly qualified to write about F23 170 intensely heterogeneous, Third World population.health, right? F23 171
Another consequence of this profound population shift is an
If you're none of these, you have a delightful surprise coming: F23 172 intensification of white guilt. Since in our emerging multi-racial Your very lack of expertise in the health field makes you ideal as F23 173 society any all-white grouping is increasingly seen as a health writer. You wonder about the same things your readers F23 174 non-representative (and presumptively 'racist'), the same wonder about, and you express the answers in simple words the F23 175 assumption gets insensibly projected onto the past. The resulting reader can understand. Consider well-known health writer Jane F23 176 loss of sympathetic interest in Western historical figures, lore, Brody. She is not a doctor, nor does she have a doctorate in any F23 177 and achievements creates a ready audience for the multiculturalist medical subject: she's just a journalist like you and me, a very F23 178 rewriting of history. When we can no longer employ traditional thorough reporter who knows how to translate the esoterica of F23 179 reference points such as 'our Western heritage' because a critical medicine into language that Aunt Enid in Hicksville can understand. F23 180 number of us are no longer from the West; when we cannot speak of She is a professional writer who thinks of her audience first. It's F23 181 'our Founding Fathers' because the expression is considered qualities like these that can endear you to editors. F23 182 racially exclusive; when more and more minorities complain that
What besides a sense of your audience will you need to write F23 183 they can't identify with American history because they about health? With an objective and intense interest in the way the F23 184 "don't see people who look like themselves" in that body works, a good medical dictionary, and the pointers that F23 185 history, then the only practical way to preserve a simulacrum of follow, you can probably find an opening in the F23 186 common identity is to redefine America as a centerless, health-writing field. F23 187 multicultural society.
Start small. If you have not written about health F23 188
Multiculturalism, in sum, is far more than a radical ideology before, consider a short news item as your first project. F23 189 or misconceived educational reform; it is a mainstream Fortunately, proposing one health news item or even a group of them F23 190 phenomenon, a systematic dismantling of America's unitary national does not have to mean a big investment of your item or the time of F23 191 identity in response to unprecedented ethnic and racial a busy doctor. You can write a few sentences about a medical F23 192 transformation. Admittedly, immigration reform aimed at stabilizing advance - enough to get a go-ahead from an editor - simply F23 193 the country's ethnic composition is no panacea; the debunking of from reading a health journal, an abstract (article F23 194 multiculturalism must also continue. But if immigration is not cut sum-mary or preview), press release or speech. Once you F23 195 back, the multiculturalist thrust will be simply unstoppable.have a go-ahead from an editor for the sub-ject you F23 196
What explains the conservatives' refusal to face the propose, you can go after the interview. (Many doctors will not F23 197 demographic dimensions of multiculturalism? Martha Farnsworth Riche take the time to speak with you until you have an actual F23 198 believes the reason is psychological: "The older white assignment, and many editors prefer a short query to an unsolicited F23 199 academics are facing a shift in power. They're denying that reality submission.) Magazines typically pay little for news items, and F23 200 by saying, in effect, that minorities 'should' assimilate; they newspapers even less, but it is a good place for a novice to F23 201 don't want to face the fact that their world is start. F23 202 disappearing." More to the point, they are evading the
Another way to break into the health-writing field is with a F23 203 uncomfortable necessity of dealing with the racially charged personal experience piece: how you lost the weight, climbed the F23 204 immigration issue.mountain, figured out what was ailing you, for example. A number of F23 205
Indeed, the conservatives' greatest reason for not allowing a magazines publish first-person articles. On the down side, you will F23 206 fundamental debate on immigration is their understandable fear of probably need good photog-raphy to illustrate your story, F23 207 opening up a forum for racist attitudes. But as last year's and most of us do not have a leica loaded with slide film as a F23 208 election in Louisiana suggests, the establishment's refusal to take constant companion. F23 209 seriously Middle America's legitimate concerns about cultural F23 210 displacement only makes it more likely that those concerns will be F23 211 taken up by extremists. If opposition to racism is not to become a F23 212 destructive ideological crusade, then racism must be defined in this world. Understood in a non-utopian sense, racial justice means that the majority in a country treats minorities fairly and equally; it does not mean that the majority is required to turn itself into a minority. If it does mean the latter, then nation-states, in effect, have no right to preserve their own existence, let alone to control their borders.
The immigration restrictions of the early 1920s, discriminatory though they plainly were (and against the group to which this writer belongs), reduced ethnic hatreds, greatly eased the assimilation of white ethnics, and kept America a culturally unified nation through the mid twentieth century. The falloff in cheap immigrant labor also encouraged capital-intensive investment and spurred the great middle-class economic expansion of the 1920s. It is ironic, therefore, that our open-borders advocates constantly appeal to the turn-of-the-century immigration as a model for us to follow today, since one of the key reasons the earlier immigration turned out, in retrospect, to be such a remarkable success was that it was halted. The same caveat applies even more strongly to our present, uncontrolled influx from the Third World.</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="24">
IN BIKINI LAGOON LIFE THRIVES IN A NUCLEAR GRAVEYARD
Text by JOHN L. ELIOT
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SENIOR WRITER
Photographs by BILL CURTSINGER
Blasted to the bottom like a steel guinea pig, the U.S. submarine Pilotfish was among 21 vessels sunk during two atomic tests at the end of World War II. This nuclear ghost fleet belongs to the people of Bikini, still marooned far from their radioactive Pacific island. Could these longtime symbols of destruction become a marine park to attract sport divers and aid the Bikinians?
As if worshiping a higher power, sailors drill on the flight deck of the U.S. carrier Saidor (opposite) for a momentous test: code name, Able. Later that day, July 1, 1946, a B-29 would drop an experimental weapon over a fleet of ships moored amid the tranquil waters of Bikini Lagoon. These support personnel practice protecting their eyes from the ungodly incandescence to be created by an explosion equal to 20,000 tons of TNT.
Less than a year earlier, the first wartime atom bombs had laid waste Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, military analysts wanted to know, what would happen to a navy attacked by this seemingly irresistible force? So a massive exercise called Operation Crossroads brought some 42,000 men, 242 ships, and 10,000 instruments to Bikini. There two nuclear blasts were unleashed, the first of 23 such tests performed at Bikini through 1953. The first, Able, was detonated in midair. Three weeks later a second test, Baker, was touched off underwater.
To permit the dawn of the nuclear age there, a painful sacrifice had been made earlier by the 167 Bikinians who lived on that tropical atoll. A devout and trusting people, they agreed to give up their home for a project that they were told was for the good of mankind. Thus began their woeful saga as nuclear nomads repeatedly relocated to other Pacific islands, where they have found only unhappiness.
With the Bikinians removed, the military assembled more than 90 vessels, including landing craft, as targets. Many of the ships, among them a few Japanese and German war prizes, had fought crucial battles in the just ended war, and a few had served in the previous one.
The five battleships included Arkansas, a World War I veteran. In 1944 she supported the Allied invasion of Normandy, as did Nevada, heavily damaged at Pearl Harbour but raised and repaired to fight again. Nagato, the Japanese battleship that coordinated the Pearl Harbour attack, was berthed at Bikini out of vengeance. A dozen destroyers and eight submarines with Pacific battle scars from Midway to Guadalcanal were added.
Of four cruisers, Germany's <tf|_>Prinz Eugen had sortied with the famed battleships Bismarck and Scharnhorst - both sunk in the Atlantic theater - before being surrendered to the U.S. But the sentimental star was Saratoga, completed in 1927, one of the first U.S. carriers. She survived Able but was doomed by Baker. Its bomb hangs suspended 90 feet under a landing ship (below) between Saratoga, background, and Arkansas, both nearly in final position.
BIKINI LAGOON
In the path of a staggering force that would blow her 800 yards away atop a 43-foot wave, Saratoga sits at the edge of the Baker blast a half second after detonation.
Seven and a half hours later "she died like a queen - proudly," eulogized a New York Times correspondent. Six other large ships were also lost, including the battleships Arkansas and Nagato and submarines Pilotfish and Apogon. Some were sunk by the two million tons of water and sediment that was hurled more than a mile upward, then fell to batter the ships.
Yet the bombs' most insidious danger was revealed in the ships that remained afloat or were salvaged: They seethed with radiation. Bewildered men improvised decontamination efforts against an invisible enemy. Permitted aboard some ships for only minutes, sailors washed, scrubbed, foamed, and painted 'hot' steel, with little effect. "In the end the Navy ... is going to feel a lot like Br'er Rabbit when he got mixed up with the Tar Baby," physician David Bradley, a Crossroads veteran, observed at the time.
Of 12 large vessels sunk by Able and Baker, most lie within a thousand yards of the blasts (above). Just as radiation exiled the Bikinians, it also caused a confused exodus of the surviving ships. After initial decontamination efforts failed, most were towed 200 miles to Kwajalein Atoll - where the Prinz Eugen foundered - for further countermeasures. When those didn't work, many of the derelicts were sunk in target practice off Kwajalein, Hawaii, and the U.S. West Coast.
SARATOGA
She had survived two torpedoes and five kamikazes and had served in bloody Pacific campaigns at Wake Island, Guadalcanal, and Iwo Jima, but Saratoga could not survive nuclear fission. In 1945, before the Bikini tests, the beloved carrier took part in Operation Magic Carpet (left), ferrying 29,204 veterans home from the Pacific.
Nearly 50 years later Saratoga's massive bow dwarfs the U.S. National Park Service divers who invited me along. Their team, the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit (SCRU), spent several weeks drawing the ships in great detail and evaluating their park potential. Saratoga would be the centerpiece.
The world's only aircraft carrier accessible to divers, the ship's depth ranges from 50 feet at the top of its island - the tallest structure, which includes the bridge - to 180 feet on the lagoon's bottom. In between lie fascinating relics such as a Navy Helldriver aircraft (left) and 500-pound bombs (below) 130 feet deep on the hangar deck.
Although much ammunition is live, both Navy experts and SCRU team leader Dan Lenihan feel that the risk to divers is minimal - "unless they attack the ordnance with a hammer," says Lenihan. And there is essentially no danger from radiation in the water, according to William L. Robinson, a scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
Some of the atomic violence is shocking. Saratoga's starboard side, which faced the Baker blast, is dented six feet deep in places. The gargantuan funnel, as tall as a four-story building, collapsed and spewed sections writhing with internal pipes. Even more amazing is the aft half of the flight deck. It is no longer flat. Through it runs a canyon 200 feet long, 70 feet wide, and 12 to 20 feet deep, probably created by seawater and sediment hurtling back down from the sky. Said my diving partner, naval historian Jim Delgado, "It's like Godzilla stomped on the flight deck."
NAGATO
Dreaded warlord of the Pacific, Nagato (left) was the only Japanese battleship still afloat when the war ended - nine others had been sunk. "In less than four years, this great war machine fell from glory to oblivion," wrote naval historian Masanori Ito. After Japan bowed in 1945, U.S. forces symbolically captured Nagato in Tokyo Bay to mark the final surrender of the Imperial Japanese Navy. She was taken to Bikini - her death sentence.
In 1941 Nagato served as flagship for Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, who planned and directed the attack on Pearl Harbour aboard the battleship from distant Japanese waters. Pacing her bridge on December 7, Yamamoto heard one pilot's electrifying radio transmission - to ra, to ra, to ra! - surprise achieved.
Nagato, the first battleship armed with 16-inch guns (below), may have played an additional role at Pearl Harbor. Some of Yamamoto's carrier-launched aircraft were equipped with Nagato's 16-inch shells, specially modified to be dropped as bombs- and some historians believe that one of them sank the battleship Arizona.
If so, then the Baker bomb repayed Nagato. Upside down on the bottom, she raises one of her four screws as if in capitulation.
A frenzy of gray reef and other sharks feed near photographer Bill Curtsinger's boat. Such dizzying numbers of predators suggest that, despite man's worst efforts at annihilation, marine life has returned to normal.
It was not so after the tests. "Our first netful of sand ... proved to be so radioactive that in a panic I had the whole catch thrown overboard," wrote Crossroads physician David Bradley in his best-seller, No Place to Hide. "Small reef fish feed on coral ... predatory fish eat more and more of the smaller fish who are sick with the disease of radioactivity."
Within weeks most radiation had dissipated from the lagoon. But in the topsoil of Bikini Island, the fallout remains, especially a dangerous substance called cesium 137. Little of it actually came from the Cross-roads bombs. They were nuclear popguns compared with Bravo, a 1954 hydrogen explosion 750 times stronger, set off on the lagoon's northwest side. A wind shift rained fallout on Bikini, including cesium. Its levels remain too high for the Bikinians to return permanently, because it is absorbed by the coconuts and pandanus they grow for food. However, a test using potassium compounds to block cesium uptake by plants on the island has been successful.
Could a marine park of warships draw recreational divers to Bikini? Not all the diving would be deep - shallow reefs laden with giant clams and coral (left) beckon even snorkelers. In recommending the concept, Dan Lenihan of SCRU says, "We hope that the Bikinians someday can take the source of their problems - the ships - and make them a source of income."
The Bikinians have expressed some interest, but their main concern is to escape Kili, the island 500 miles to the southeast where they were relocated in 1948. Many, like Joji Laijo (right), visit Bikini to work at its field station, operated by the Department of Energy. But there has long been a cloud over these people, and they have heard many conflicting stories from many different experts. Last November they declared their intent to have all 1.3 million cubic yards of radioactive topsoil scraped from Bikini, somehow disposed of, and somehow replaced.
Liabilities and logistics may well dim that plan, but not their desire to return. Visiting his father's grave on Bikini, Kilon Bauno, an aged iroij lablab, or paramount chief, said "I don't want anyone to stay on Kili. If we hear this island is safe to live on, we will swim from Kili to the big boats to take us back."
RUSSIA'S LAKE BAIKAL
The World's Great Lake
Crown jewel of Russia's natural inheritance, Baikal is the world's oldest and deepest lake - an environmental battleground and a godsend in hard times.
By DON BELT
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SENIOR STAFF
SERGEI VASILIEV, captain of the Albatross, still wonders if he would have found the courage to speak his mind that fateful July in 1954. But not once during their mysterious two-week cruise around Lake Baikal did the government official ask his opinion of their plan - and to volunteer one would have been unthinkable. Barely a year had passed since Stalin's death, and the dictator's lifeless hand still lay heavy on the land.
All this came up one afternoon as Vasiliev, a slight and gentle-spoken man widely known as the greatest of the Lake Baikal ship captains, was reminiscing about his career on Albatross, a scientific-research ship. In the middle of a long, hair-raising story about a great storm south of the Ushkani Islands, his memory turned a corner, taking his narrative into deeper and more troubling waters than he had intended.
"I remember too clearly for my own good," he said sadly, shaking his head.
And he began to explain. He knew little about those officials at first - only that they were "very serious, very powerful men," who had arranged to use his vessel for their first look at Lake Baikal. They were, of course, well informed about the great lake in south-central Siberia. All Soviet schoolchildren were taught that Baikal is special: It is the most ancient lake on earth and the deepest, measuring 1,637 meters from top to bottom, more than a mile. It holds one-fifth of the planet's fresh water and 80 percent of the former Soviet Union's - more water than all of North America's Great Lakes combined. In school these men traced the lake's elegant shape, like a sliver of moon, and learned to call it the Pearl of Siberia or the Sacred Sea, as Russians have for generations.</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="25">
Women and Literacy: Promises and Constraints
By Nelly P. Stromquist
ABSTRACT: In almost every country, illiteracy rates are higher among women than among men. This gender disparity can be explained in terms of (1) the sexual division of labor that assigns women many domestic tasks, especially, among poor and rural families, time-consuming chores, and (2) men's control of women's sexuality, which creates both physical and psychological constraints in women's lives. Research has identified various benefits of literacy for women, such as better maternal behaviors regarding child health and child rearing, and effective family planning. Although women could use literacy to increase their access to new knowledge, most literacy programs do not encourage this because their curricula are still designed along sexually stereotyped lines that emphasize women's roles as mothers and household managers. This article argues that these messages do not convey emancipatory knowledge and may solidify values and attitudes that cause women to accept current gender relations rather than to question them.
ILLITERACY is generally considered to be a major impediment to the understanding of one's world and to the securing of a good place in it. The role of literacy as a prerequisite for the acquisition of other skills and the development of more rational attitudes is universally accepted. In today's rapidly advancing technological society, the written word has become the dominant mode of complex communication; those without the ability to read and write will be condemned to the lowest roles in society.
And yet illiteracy is far from being eliminated throughout the world. It is estimated that in less than 10 years from now, the world will have 1 billion illiterates, 98 percent of whom will be in developing regions.
Illiteracy is far from being a mere technical problem, that is, the inability to decode and encode the written word. It is linked to contextual factors in which social-class distinctions, linguistic affiliations, general levels of socioeconomic development, and marginalization of certain groups play important and mutually supportive roles.
While there is diversity in the causes operating in any given country, a persistent phenomenon observed in most societies is that women constitute the majority of illiterates. Moreover, the numbers of illiterate women have been increasing not only in absolute but also in relative terms: according to data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), they represented 63 percent of the illiterates in 1983, up from 58 percent in 1960. Two of every three adult women in Africa and one of every two in Asia are illiterate. In the African and Asian areas there is a literacy gap of 21 percentage points in favor of men (Table 1), a gap that clearly spells out economic and social inequality for many women.
UNDERSTANDING THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMEN
Observers of literacy programs note that neither adult literacy studies nor 'women in development' studies have focused on women's literacy. From a theoretical perspective, the conditions of women's illiteracy can be easily explained in the context of women's overall inferior status in society. For a variety of historical and technological reasons, industrialization brought with it a division of social life into public and private spheres. Soon, a patriarchal ideology that defined women as inferiors and subordinate to men developed in most countries. This ideology was promptly codified in the laws of the emerging nation-states through regulations affecting institutions such as the family, work, landownership, and voting rights. Although these institutions have undergone modification over time, the two essential mechanisms for the persistence of patriarchal ideologies - the sexual division of labor and the control of women's sexuality by men - continue in effect. Although these forces are substantially modified by class position, the country's level of technological development, and cultural beliefs, the influence of gender is strong and remarkably stable across societies.
The sexual division of labor
According to statistics of the International Labor Organization, women account for two-thirds of the working hours in the world. Poor women in rural areas perform heavy and arduous tasks daily to ensure family subsistence. In Africa, women provide 60 to 80 percent of the labor in food production and a considerable contribution to cash agricultural production. In Asia and Latin America, men contribute a greater share than in Africa to agricultural work, but the domestic burden of women remains considerable. Given the demands of rural domestic life in many developing countries - which includes walking long distances to obtain water and wood for fuel, growing subsistence crops and processing foods that require a considerable investment of physical energy and time, and facing pregnancy and related illnesses with a minimum of medical technologies - women and girls in rural areas face a daily existence that is indisputably more demanding than that experienced by men. Social beliefs that women should take care of children and home lead poor social groups to consider education - even literacy - an element less crucial than others to the everyday survival of the family.
Control of women's sexuality
In addition to the sexual division of labor that places poor women in inescapable domestic servitude, men's control of women's sexuality places additional constraints on women's lives. This sexuality control, which operates mainly in Asian and Latin American countries, is manifested in strict supervision of women's movement outside the home and of the friendships they develop with members of the opposite sex. In many societies, it is also manifested by the withdrawal of daughters from school as soon as they reach puberty for fear that the young girls may lose their virginity.
A more serious manifestation of the control of women's sexuality is wife beating, which creates among women an attitude of conflict avoidance, which in turn produces a reluctance to engage in any action that might trigger the husband's attack. That this may have a bearing on decisions such as attendance in literacy classes has been documented through life-history methods. The existence of intensive domestic work coupled with conflictual family dynamics renders literacy an unattainable dream for a large number of women and merely a dream for some of their children - particularly their daughters, who early in life tend to be assigned the same domestic and subsistence roles that their mothers perform.
Control of women's sexuality affects their participation in literacy programs because often the places available for classes are considered unsuitable in terms of safety and accessibility for women. Reports from India indicate that obstacles imposed by family members, particularly husbands and in-laws, prevent women from participating in literacy programs. The experience of a recent national literacy campaign in Ecuador detected similar effects.
These two fundamental causes, the sexual division of labor and the control by men of women's sexuality, are socially constructed realities. They exist by virtue of social understandings rather than because they are the only ways in which societies can exist. In traditional societies and, to a surprising degree, even in modern nations, women are defined primarily as mothers and wives rather than as autonomous citizens or workers. Women attain legitimacy when they marry and form families. Subsequent legitimacy is gained when they produce children, especially sons.
Patriachal ideologies are generally supported by religiocultural norms, even though within a given religion variations may be found as a result of historical differences that have led to different interpretations of sacred texts. Islam and Hinduism tend to be more gender restrictive than either Christianity or Buddhism regarding social norms. In India, for instance, the traditional laws of Manu make women noneligible for all scholastic activities. The three countries in West Asia with the lowest rates of female literacy and the highest gender gap in literacy are Muslim: Yemen, Syria, and Afghanistan. Confucianism, a cohesive set of moral precepts, is also highly oppressive of women, and its legacy is still evident in rural areas of today's socialist China.
WOMEN AND LITERACY
Not only is illiteracy higher among women than men, but it is higher in less industrialized and in agrarian societies than in urban societies. One explanation for the low levels of literacy among women in nonindustrial societies is that in these societies the maternal roles do not require high levels of education. Literacy indeed may not be necessary if the main reproductive and productive tasks that women carry out - having babies, raising children, managing a low-budget household, growing subsistence crops - can be learned through informal, oral-tradition methods. In all countries, illiteracy rates are higher in rural than in urban areas. UNESCO data for 15 Latin American countries show that rural areas have greater levels of illiteracy than urban areas regardless of sex, although women have a slightly greater disadvantage compared to men - a 27.5 percent illiteracy gap exists between urban and rural women compared to a 25.4 percent gap between urban and rural men. It is striking, however, to observe that the gender gap in rural areas is almost double that in urban areas - 12.0 versus 6.3 percentage points. The disadvantage of rural women is most likely due to the sexual division of labor that places upon them major burdens for domestic work, subsistence production, and various family responsibilities.
With the expansion of schooling, poor families today are more inclined than former generations to allow their daughters to be educated. Girls' enrollment rates in primary school are gradually reaching parity with those of boys in many developing countries. Yet the early withdrawal of girls from school, as happens in many African and Asian countries, does not allow the retention of literacy skills. Three or four years of schooling characterized by numerous absences do not amount to much education for the girls; thus a significant loss of literacy skills follows. As adults, their limited physical mobility, their contacts mostly with women of their own community - who tend to be illiterates like them - and their own socialization into accepting the norm that women do not need as much education as do men create a strong mind-set among women that further prevents them from seeking basic literacy skills.
BENEFITS OF LITERACY FOR WOMEN
Do women benefit from access to literacy? There have been relatively few studies measuring the impact of literacy per se - as opposed to levels of schooling - and even fewer studies focusing on literacy while controlling for other, confounding variables.
We have substantial evidence about the positive effect of education on a number of individual and maternal outcomes, but such studies are based mainly on examinations of the impact of years of schooling. Nonetheless, it could be inferred that literacy - a critical component of formal education - also offers the same benefits. Several findings support this inference. First, mother's schooling has been found to have a monotonically negative relationship with infant and child mortality rates and fertility rates. This suggests that every amount of additional schooling - of which literacy represents the first step - makes a difference. Second, because education makes a difference even in places where the quality of education is low, the effects of schooling are probably less due to the curriculum or the instructional program than to "something very general about schooling." This general factor could be literacy since most schooling experiences at least provide literacy skills. Third, if we conceptualize adult literacy as the precursor to the establishment of literate practices - that is, regular access to the printed word - then the effects of literacy should be akin to those of the number of years of schooling.
In numerous countries, education is so strongly associated with reduced fertility and decreased infant and child mortality that it is accepted now as a causal factor. Some of the critical mechanisms that account for the literacy-fertility relationship have been found to be knowledge of and access to birth control and increased husband-wife communication. Not surprisingly, the level of education of women has an effect on fertility that is three times stronger than that of men. Regardless of social class, the more educated a woman is, the fewer children she will have; this effect seems to be stronger in urban than in rural areas. Education seems to have more positive effects when the society in which people live is also literate; Cochrane's review of data for 23 countries found that the inverse relation between education and fertility was strongest in societies where the aggregate literacy was at least 40 percent.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="26">
'The Jell-O Syndrome': Investigating Popular Culture/Foodways
SARAH E. NEWTON
Research in American foodways can lead one into sometimes strange and exotic byways, and the subject of this paper - the folklore and cultural meanings of the popular gelatin food product Jell-O - is one of them. Questions of cultural dynamics as well as many kinds of lore - from children's folklore to personal narratives to food contamination stories to jokes and folk performance - are evoked by the amazingly versatile Jell-O. Thus study of the folklore of Jell-O as it intersects popular culture can give insight into this food's cultural presence and meaning for the American folk. Further, the case of Jell-O suggests a possible model for the investigation of that intersection of folklore and culture via the vector of popular commercial American foods.
Certainly little work, aside from nutritional studies, has been done on popular foods. In the case of Jell-O, this "national" food, this "princess in the fairy tale ... as good as it is beautiful" (Today ... What salad n.p.) has attracted virtually no serious notice from folklorists, social historians, anthropologists, cultural commentators, or even home economists. Although Jones, Giuliano & Krell (1981) give a brief nod to the ordinary Oreo cookie in their ground-breaking Foodways and Eating Habits, the much more dynamic and interesting Jell-O is ignored. Other important foodways studies continue this oversight. For instance, Jell-O plays no role in Brown and Mussel's (1984) study of ethnic and regional foodways; nor have Humphrey and Humphrey (1989) yet studied the significance of Jell-O as an important symbolic and social factor in small group festive gatherings (such as potlucks and birthdays). And reference to Jell-O does not appear, as far as this writer can determine, in Charles Camp's American Foodways: What, When, Why and How We Eat in America (1989). Indeed, if Jell-O is not the what, when, why and how of America, what is?
Jell-O is in many ways the ideal subject for seeing some of the rich connections between folklore and popular culture. For one reason, Jell-O is perhaps the one commercial food in America that has not only crossed all regional and ethnic lines but continues to ignore them. Certainly enough documentation exists to argue convincingly that Jell-O holds place as perhaps America's one 'national' commercial food. A survey of compiled cookbooks (fund-raising cookbooks) from across the nation and both north and south supplies proof of Jell-O's national citizenship. Across America Jell-O is a major ingredient in innumerable salads and desserts (so much so that to most American cooks the folk/vernacular term and spelling 'Jello' or 'jello' has come to be synonymous with the generic term 'gelatin'). Thus the sheer number of recipes is unequivocal evidence of immense popularity nationwide. For example, in Recipes for Making Your Honeymoon Last (1987), a compiled cookbook published by the National Bridal Service, 33% of the salad recipes use Jell-O; in The Stan Hywet Cook Book (n.d. Akron, Ohio) 20 of 37 salads, or 54%, cite Jell-O as an ingredient. Other evidence abounds. In 1989, Grand Rapids, Michigan, was declared America's Jell-O Capital for consuming 82% more Jell-O than the average American marketing area (that was 25.5 servings per household per year versus the average of 13.5 servings) (Viets 1989:50). And over the years, the test kitchens of General Foods have "developed no fewer than 1,733 ways to prepare Jell-O" (Kleiman 1989:C 1). It would seem that America has pretty much an insatiable appetite for the salad/dessert that jiggles.
Thus a second reason for using Jell-O to study the connections between folklore and popular culture is that virtually every American has had some experience with the "ubiquitous Jello" (Ireland 1981:108). Some Jell-O recipe is very often an essential ingredient in our national festive life, both public and private. Jell-O dishes, from a simple sheet of lime Jell-O with bananas to towering, layered, whipped-creamed creations, have signaled to countless Americans times of gathering or celebration - funerals, potlucks, family re-unions, church suppers, baby and wedding showers, Christmas and Thanksgiving. It is no accident that Garrison Keillor stars a Jell-O dessert (cherry Jell-O with mandarin oranges and tiny marshmallows) in the Lake Wobegon story of Mrs. Lena Johnson and 'Bruno the Fishing Dog,' at the baptism of Bob and Marlette Johnson's little girl Lindsey (of which more later). To many of us, Jell-O is America - or certainly at least the Mid-West, which to food marketing executives may amount to the same thing.
That people have a strong emotional bond with this otherwise commercial and corporate product has not escaped the notice of Jell-O's manufacturer, Kraft General Foods. In the 1970s, General Foods' advertising agency, Young & Rubicam, interviewed consumers and discovered, not surprisingly, that "Jell-O's appeal lay in its emotional connotations rather than its cost or versatility." As the president of Young & Rubicam U.S.A. stated, "There's a lot of affection for Jell-O. It's the name. It's Jack Benny (a longtime Jell-O advertiser). It's your mother serving it." And of course it is also fun, as the subsequent Young & Rubicam campaign emphasized: ads showed "large, middle-class families gathered together for either a reunion or an anniversary. To the beat of spunky background music, the whole clan - from toddlers to grandparents - downs endless, multi-hued mounds of Jell-O. 'We're not going to have dessert,' exclaims one jovial character. 'We're going to have fun!'" (Wallach 1981:206)
The original 'target consumer' for Jell-O was the American housewife who was assured that this product would please her family (be both tasty and 'fun'), make her somehow a better wife and mother, and allow her to exercise kitchen creativity. Certainly Jell-O's invention is tied with wholesomeness, purity, and domesticity. Although gelatin had been used by housewives for years, Jell-O's origin is usually put at 1897 in the LeRoy, New York, kitchen of Pearl B. Wait and his wife May. May, so the story goes, complained that the old-fashioned sheets of gelatin were difficult to use. Couldn't they be powdered? Pearl B., a cough syrup inventor, took the problem in hand: May named it Jell-O; they sold out to a neighboring entrepreneur for $450.00 and the rest is history (Whitman and Schmidt 1966:13; Kato 1989:B 6). By the turn of the century, Jell-O was on its way to being a million-dollar business and a way for women to show creativity in the kitchen, nurturance of the family, and a clever if innocent sophistication. A 1933 Jell-O cookbook titled "What Mrs. Dewey did with the NEW JELL-O!" begins with Mrs. Dewey simply amazed at the rapid setting up of the pretty Jell-O dessert she, good mother that she is, made for little Nancy (this was because the 'new' Jell-O could be dissolved in warm rather than boiling water). The little book ends with the recipes for "Mrs. Dewey's smartest salads!" and a color illustration of well dressed and coiffed ladies - Mrs. Dewey and her friends - sitting at a luncheon table and facing shiny molded lime green salads. Obviously Mrs. Dewey, in addition to being the ideal mother, is quite the "smart" up-to-date lady, and Jell-O is the culmination of sophisticated elegance. All of these points were important messages to American women.
Informants today confirm the importance of Jell-O as the one-time culinary centerpiece of woman's creativity. Says one, "When I was a young woman, it [molded Jell-O] really was the most sophisticated thing you could do. There wasn't anything as elegant. It was the center of the table." And over the years dozens of the well-known Jell-O cookbooks, most often titled the Joys of Jell-O, have helped women create such dishes as 'Under-the-Sea Salad,' 'Ring-Around-the-Tuna,' and 'Broken Window Glass Cake' - just three of those 1,733 recipes - to the awe and perhaps astonishment of their families. Housewives can play, too.
In contrast to this past, Young & Rubicam's 1990 advertising campaign for Jell-O targeted children directly. Young & Rubicam developed a new animated character, a cartoon hero named Agent LL-O (that's double L-O) who, with his canine sidekick Wobbly, champions the rights of kids to eat Jell-O, particularly when their dessert has been made off with by bullies or jealous sisters (Dale 1990:7). This advertising raises the eating of Jell-O to drama. Jell-O, the food of Democracy, is added to the Bill of Rights, at least of children. Enemies of Jell-O and Jell-O-eating kids are to be frustrated by a hero modeled on James Bond's 007. American television carries the message that eating Jell-O is not only fun but patriotic, and advertisers are well aware of the power of television to affect our tastes as well as beliefs. As one informant says in a parody of commercial rhetoric, "Wiggily, jiggily, cool and fruity, television tells us everything about Jello. Just ask Bill [Cosby]" (Stevenson 1990).
Since Jell-O, then, connects folklore and popular culture, any number of these interstices could lead to insights about the food behavior of Americans vis <*_>a-grave<*/> vis this undeniably national food. What follows here is a brief survey of some of those connections and some hints of the cultural and folkloric implications. Although I have segregated my data into categories, the alert reader will see that, like Jell-O itself, the categorical boundaries are sometimes shifting and permeable.
Children's Folklore
As Mechling, Sutton-Smith and others have convincingly shown, children form a significant folk group within which important cultural data is communicated face to face. Children share jokes, techniques of forbidden play, and other traditional rules or beliefs that allow them to come together as group. Playing with food - by learning the 'rules' for eating Oreo cookies or spaghetti or Jell-O - quickly becomes part of a child's repertoire of play behavior. Although this food play is not approved of in most households, often adults and children have a tacit understanding about Jell-O: Jell-O for dessert is license to play. How children both learn and practice play techniques with food is most generally from one another. Comments from a survey of college students emphasize the shared joy of Jell-O play. As one informant says, "Jell-O is neat because it's like looking through colored glasses. You can see the bottom of the bowl but it's a different color. It's also fun to see how much you can shake a plate of it without it losing its shape." Many informants described shared techniques for eating it. One informant recollected, it was "fun to squish Jell-O between your teeth," and another says, "I used to swish it around in my mouth to liquify it and then swallow it. It drove my mother crazy." Children also learn what does not work as play, as in this case: "My friend Laurie once tried to stick it [Jell-O] up her nose but found it was impossible (in jellied form)" (Stevenson 1990). Every child or adult interviewed shared similar traditional 'forbidden' techniques for playing with and eating Jell-O and indicated that often they had learned the practices from brothers or sisters or other children.
Personal memories and recollections have also had an important role in persuading people to see Jell-O as a traditional food. Virtually every child and grown-up to whom one mentions Jell-O has some nostalgic if sometimes sheepish childhood memories of the food product. This by a female college junior is typical:
Jello is one of my fondest childhood memories .... When I see or think of jello, I remember back to my pre-school days. I saw on TV the other day a commercial with Bill Cosby and some kids, eating Jello that were [sic] in different shapes, like stars and fish. I said, 'Wow, I want to get some.' I love jello (Stevenson 1990).
These recollections often trigger descriptions of traditional family customs, such as these: "My grandma used to make it for me when I was sick, with Cool Whip on top," or "When I would get sick when I was little, my mother would mix up some red jello and put it in the freezer. She didn't let it congeal - she gave it to me in a glass with one of those funky loopy straws to drink it with.
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Imagery, Reality, and Policy Principles
At the end of the 1980s, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported that over half (56 percent) of government farm program payments went to farmers with net profits in excess of $100,000 (Duncan 1989). Even more striking, a report issued by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture stated that in 1988, some 18 percent of the farms of the nation (the larger farms producing program crops) received approximately 90 percent of direct government payments; another 18 percent of the farms (smaller farms producing program crops) received only 10 percent of direct government payments; and some 64 percent of the farms of the nation received no government payments at all (USDA 1990). This highly skewed system of commodity and income price support is one of the least understood mechanisms of public policy in the U.S.government. It has existed for years, continuing to reward those farmers (and nonfarm landowners) the most who bought or inherited large tracts of farmland, and who agree to produce those crops for which the government pays large subsidies through the commodity price and income support programs
Sadly, the American public is largely unaware of how different farming is from the imagery of the past. A great gap exists between these images and the reality of farm activity today. In this chapter, we discuss five images that mask the reality of how the commodity programs really operate.
Imagery
The New Yorker magazine several years ago depicted an East Coast perspective on the continental United States. The great middle of the country was essentially a blank. It began somewhere after the Hudson River, with Iowa vaguely centered between the foreground of Manhattan and the distant point of Los Angeles. The myopia depicted was at once accurate and self-congratulatory. A similar cartoon soon appeared on the West Coast, showing the same view, but with Los Angeles in the fore-ground.
The concentration of population, media influence, and popular culture on the East and West Coasts creates a sort of informational dumbbell, in which what goes on in between appears in narrower and less accurate terms in many journalistic and media accounts. Scholarly studies have confirmed the existence of this bias. John Borchert, the distinguished geographer, reports that the upper Midwest "is a blank on the mental maps of most Americans" (Borchert 1987). The major metropolitan area of Minneapolis-St. Paul becomes "a vague, inexplicable anomaly amid the wastelands, glaciers, and boondocks." This lack of awareness about America between the coasts has a stifling effect on treatments of farming and farm policy, giving rise to a variety of false images about how it really operates.
The first image is that there exists an undifferentiated land mass of red barns and tall corn or golden wheat growing in flat, featureless landscapes collectively described as 'farm states.' While some areas conform to type (making them favorite visuals for the occasional nightly news story on farm policy), the reality is strikingly different. Obviously, the great middle is a highly diverse landscape. In addition to the flat, fertile soils of Iowa and Illinois, which are the prototypical agricultural landscapes, there is also great diversity, from the rolling hills and woodlands of southwest Wisconsin or the Ohio Valley to the wet, humid semi-tropics of the Mississippi delta; from the arid High Plains of Kansas and Nebraska to the uncropped grazing lands of the mountainous West. In this vast land area a wide range of crops and livestock are grown and raised, although it is less diverse, as we shall see, than in the past.
Each state's agriculture is sufficiently different that very broad generalizations are needed to sustain any picture of a 'typical' farm state. Perhaps more importantly, the economies of the great middle of America, while heavily dependent on agriculture, are less so today than ever before. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported in 1987, for example, that fewer than 12 percent of rural families received the majority of their income from farming (Drabenstott, Henry, and Gibson 1987). In the upper Midwest, a pattern of regional service centers has emerged, focused on medium-sized cities such as Rochester, Minnesota; Iowa City, Iowa; or Billings, Montana. Although farming itself serves as a diminishing source of employment, agricultural processing, finance and services are substantial employers, including international companies headquartered in 'farm states' like Hormel, International Multifoods, Pillsbury, and General Mills.
The first image, then, is that commodity programs are the product of general farm state interests, with benefits that are widely distributed to the residents of this undifferentiated land mass. In reality, the interests (and politics) of farm programs break down along lines of specific commodities and regions, each with its own features and peculiarities. Farmers are a distinct minority in every 'farm state,' and in every congressional district in these states. The most 'agricultural' congressional district in the country, Minnesota's second, has only 25 percent of its population engaged in full-time farming. Reliance on agriculture has increasingly come to mean part-time reliance, with other employment in processing or service sectors. It is a particular irony of the midwestern 'farm state' illusion that California is the biggest farm state of all, with net farm income of $6.0 billion in 1989, compared with $2.4 billion for Iowa, $2.1 billion for Nebraska, and $1.1 billion for Kansas (USDA/ERS 1991a).
To understand agricultural policy, therefore, it is not enough to understand 'typical' farm state interests. The student of policy must grasp an intricate web of specific commodity and geographic interests, and a complex historical evolution of farm programs. Faced with this complexity, it is easy to see why the urbane President Kennedy is reported to have said to his newly designated secretary of agriculture, Orville Freeman, "I don't want to hear about agriculture from anyone but you .... Come to think of it, I don't want to hear very much about it from you either."
A second image characteristic of many treatments is what might be called the picture of a 'Little House on the Prairie.' This soft-focus view of rural life, while conceivably part of a romantic past, is not of the present. Laura Ingalls Wilder's own life history, on which the recent television series was based, suggests that her rootless frontier experiences in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the territories was anything but bucolic. The image of a 'family farm' associated with the little house is reinforced by a democratic conception of a majority of farmers providing a stable basis for an agrarian republic. This Jeffersonian idealism, despite its powerful hold on the political traditions of our nation, began a long decline in its actual relevance to American political life as early as Jefferson's own time, when the Hamiltonian conception of a manufacturing-based economy began to take hold.
Today, the majority of families who farm are incorporated as businesses and file farm income form F-1040 with the IRS. A large share of the profits in this business, including government commodity payments, go to a small percentage of those categorized as 'farmers.' As we shall see, the commodity programs tend to aggravate this skewed distribution of benefits. Those farmers who do live on relatively smaller farms, because of the way these government programs are structured, receive the least in payments. Earl Butz, President Nixon's secretary of agriculture, was famous for his proclamation that to survive, farmers had to 'get big or get out.' Yet it is the commodity programs, as well as market forces, that have rewarded the bigger land owners. Their reward is not just for efficiency, but because they own more acres. This contributes, as we shall document, to the cannibalization of the small by the big. This reality is a far cry from the Jeffersonian ideal, or the symbolism of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The third image, related to the first two, is that farmers in general are 'stewards of the land,' and that agriculture is an environmentally benign and naturally healthy activity. In reality, agriculture is increasingly dependent on chemical and mechanical inputs that, when left uncontrolled, have contributed in major ways to environmental pollution of lakes, streams, and groundwater. As more and more farmers have left the land, the fewer, bigger farmers that remain increasingly rely on larger and larger machinery to till their soil and chemicals to maintain its fertility and protect it from weeds and pests. Commodity programs have rewarded the specialized cultivation of crops that are particularly prone to erosion, and encouraged heavy use of fertilizer and chemicals to keep yields high so that larger government payments can be garnered. Heavy equipment, long hours, and steady exposure to hazardous materials also make modern agriculture one of the riskiest businesses in America, with accidents and occupational mortality and morbidity rates among the highest of any major occupational category. Some of the most dangerous features of modern agriculture, we shall argue, are aggravated and encouraged by commodity programs that reward behavior which is inconsistent not only with the health and safety of farmers, but with the health of the larger consuming population that eats what these farmers produce.
The fourth image is that American agriculture remains a domestic industry, for which domestic policies, such as the five-year farm bill, are most important. In reality, American agriculture in the postwar period has emerged as the quintessential export industry, highly dependent on foreign markets and international market forces over which domestic commodity and economic policies have comparatively little influence. Far from being isolated between two coasts, the great middle of America depends upon, and looks to, global markets for its survival and livelihood. Part of what New Yorkers and Los Angeleno's miss when they look west or east is that vast quantities of American agricultural exports are moving south to New Orleans on Mississippi barges, or north through the Port of Duluth and Great Lakes, to destinations all over the world. Nearly half of many fields of corn, wheat, and soybeans in the Midwest are destined for these markets. Farm incomes and assets of Iowa and Nebraska farmers depend, daily, on the quoted prices in Rotterdam. The modern farmer is thus increasingly a global trader, with an increasingly sophisticated grasp of international commerce, logistics, and transport. A major trading firm located in Minneapolis and serving this market is estimated to be the largest privately held company in the world.
The fifth and final image is that the number of farmers leaving the land is so great, and the remaining survivors so beleaguered by debt, crop failure, and hardship that farmers amount to an endangered species. In this view, no expense is too great to preserve and protect them from the hostile march of corporate takeovers. They must be preserved by farm programs so that the other images cited above can also be maintained. The reality is that farm programs have actually hurried the exodus of farmers from the land, by encouraging large farmers to buy up their smaller neighbors. In records kept of farmland purchases in Minnesota going back to 1910, the distinguished economist Philip M. Raup has observed a consistent and steady pattern of farm enlargement, not of corporate takeovers from outside, but of neighbors buying out neighbors. During the period 1981-88, 89 percent of all farmland purchases in Minnesota were made by buyers living within 50 miles and 74 percent within 10 miles of the land they purchased. In the same period, 75 percent of all purchases were to expand existing farms, and only 12 percent were bought by investors (Schwab and Raup 1989).
It is true that millions of farmers have left the land, and those remaining constitute only about 1.5 percent of the American electorate. But those that remain are hardly poor. And farm programs, as currently structured, do almost nothing to help those who are the poorest and most disadvantaged.
Related to this endangered species image of American farmers, is the fear on the part of many urban consumers that their food supply may in some way be impaired. The idea is often expressed: 'If farmers keep going out-of-business who will produce our food?'</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="28">
Sleeping with Ghosts: Myth and Public Policy in Connecticut, 1634-1991
By Christopher Collier

Statement of the Case
Central to the image of New England - in the eyes not only of New Englanders themselves but of Americans generally, perhaps of all the world - is the independent town. The "township," proclaimed Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835, "seems to come directly from the hand of God" and "forms the common center of interests and affections of the [New England] citizens." After describing the constitutionally limited sphere of town activity, the French observer then went on to express the central myth: "I believe that not a man is to be found who would acknowledge that the state has any right to interfere in their town affairs." But in Massachusetts and Connecticut the colony/state government constantly regulated town affairs and had since the 1630s. The constitutional and legal history of the relations between periphery and center, village and commonwealth, was always one of agent and principal. Thus in 1864 the Connecticut Supreme Court declared that town powers "instead of being inherent or reversed, have been delegated and controlled by the supreme legislative power of the state from its earliest organization."
This split between constitutional reality and popular perception is as alive today as it was when Tocqueville wrote in 1835. But today myth and reality collide with increasing regularity and greater public confusion, as modern life permits no islands and all social problems cross town boundaries. Matters of waste disposal land use and zoning, mass transportation, segregated housing and schools, and environmental protection, to name a few, routinely create inter-town conflicts that call for state intervention. And every time a town discovers anew the limits of its range of independent activity, some one is sure to protest state intrusion.
In our generation the myth frequently extends beyond popular impression to breathe life into the actions of municipal officials and their deputies at the bar who prepare briefs asserting the inherent authority of towns to perform - or refuse to perform - this or that public function. That lawyers on the state's side are still required to demonstrate that towns in Connecticut not only have no inherent powers today but never have had them reveals a good deal about the power of ideological tradition.
Over and over again state and national courts have driven what they hoped was the final stake through the specter of the myth of New England town autonomy. But specters do not die, especially when riven with stakes. So popular perception and legal determination travel often parallel but frequently colliding paths into the twenty-first century.
Even those individuals who recognize the juridical 'truth' often have hearts committed to the idea of town autonomy. This prevailing dichotomy - it is more than mere ambivalence - was nicely summed up by a delegate to the abortive Connecticut Constitutional Convention of 1902. "Connecticut towns are not independent units," he admitted. "The modern historian has proved that to his satisfaction, and the Supreme Court has announced such to be the law. But, sir, 'As a man thinketh, in his heart so is he.'... I suppose we must admit we are not little states in ourselves. But the towns believed that they were... and to this day we ourselves feel that the towns are miniature commonwealths."
From their interception in 1634, the Connecticut towns were continuously subject to superior government, but before the twentieth century most citizens were so remote from the seat of colony and state government that few had any concrete relations with it. And for a couple of generations in the ante-bellum era, the General Assembly was so apt to let towns go their own ways that intrusion from the legislature came as a surprise to the insular farmer. When the state supreme court spoke on the issue over the course of the nineteenth century, Connecticut citizens heard and understood but did not absorb its judgments. Thus conflicting views of towns' rights continue to endure side by side, one serving the constitutional needs of a modern state, the other serving the emotional needs of a conservative and provincial society, and both serving the needs of politicians who, like necrophiliacs, lie down with the ghost to give body to public policy.
The Historical Evidence
There is today a universal consensus among academic historians that Massachusetts towns were the creation of the General Court in the first years of settlement after 1630. The initial settlement of Connecticut between 1634 and 1636 was carried out under the umbrella of the Massachusetts government and under the same institutional assumptions. The three River Towns were treated as a collectivity; Connecticut was a settlement of people, not towns.
Before 1639, when the Fundamental Orders codified the governmental structure of the colony, Connecticut passed through three organizational stages: six months under the administration of William Westwood, a constable appointed by the Massachusetts government; a year under the Massachusetts Bay Commission; and nearly two years under the Connecticut General Court, nominally under Massachusetts jurisdiction but de facto unregulated. During this entire period, the settlements on the river were treated as a single unit; the towns at no time exercised any authority independent of the colony government.
The adoption of the Fundamental Orders in 1639 did not alter but only made explicit the towns' relationship to the General Court. The towns were to serve as administrative units for the election and jurisdiction of constables and the election of deputies to the General Court. The orders proclaimed that the General Courts shall be "the supreme power of the Commonwealth, and only they shall have power to make lawes or repeal them, to graunt levyes, to admitt of Freemen, to dispose of lands undisposed of, to severall Townes or prsonspersons... and also may deale in any other matter that concerns the good of this common welth."
In 1662 a royal charter legitimated the government established by the Fundamental Orders. The charter mentions towns only as electoral districts for the General Court and vests all governmental authority in the "Governour and Company of the English Collony of Connecticut in New England" to "Make, Ordaine and Establish All manner of wholesome and reasonable Lawes Statutes, Ordinances, Directions and Instructions."
During the colonial period the General Court delegated most local administration to the towns and concerned itself largely with regulating relations among the towns as well as with other colonies and the imperial government. It interfered in local affairs only when town activities had wider ramifications. Though it intruded into town affairs quite often in the Revolutionary and federal eras, the state relaxed that practice in the early nineteenth century, when there was no longer a need for the statewide coordination required to free and establish the nation. Towns settled into rustic isolation and the General Assembly adopted a laissez-faire attitude. Only when towns took actions that had no legal basis or when their activities impinged on state policy or administration did the General Assembly intrude to maintain order or administrative coherence.
The constitution of 1818 did not in any way alter the functions of towns or their relationship to the state. Towns figure in that document, as they did in the Fundamental Orders and Charter of 1662, only as electoral districts and the demographic basis for representation in the General Assembly. The first revision of the statutes under the Constitution of 1818, that of 1821 by Zephaniah Swift, the state's leading jurist acting at the behest of the General Assembly, included the great body of law allowing and obligating the towns to perform numerous acts of local administration. But, as always, these acts were privileges and duties, not rights.
Though the General Assembly, the lower house of which was made up of representatives from the towns, was lax in its oversight of town responsibilities and often legitimated deviations from the law, the courts acted otherwise. In the federal era and the early nineteenth century, courts compelled the assembly to enact legislation authorizing activities in which the towns had been engaged for generations. For instance, in 1796, the state supreme court insisted that the General Assembly authorize the towns to establish ordinances regulating wandering livestock, though such local by-laws had been in effect for a century and a half by then. Judges' opinions laid down the policy that only the state had rights of eminent domain; it could order selectmen to lay out local highways and require towns to tax themselves to indemnify owners for land seized even over the protests of the selectmen and the town. Selectmen, declared the court, were agents of the state, not of the towns. Furthermore, town and city charters were no different from private incorporations and must be strictly interpreted.
The Myth Rises and Is (Temporarily) Defeated
As the courts began to restrict the authority of town meetings and town officials, the proponents of town autonomy - the folk version - rose to defend what they thought was the legitimate tradition. Out of the experience of two or three generations of parents and grandparents, who pursued the simple life in Connecticut's isolated antebellum towns, grew the defenders' perception that their towns were at least semi-autonomous. From among these defenders would soon arise Connecticut's new mythmakers.
The popular offensive against the historical bulwark of state supremacy, buttressed after 1818 by an awakening judiciary, began in 1855. In that year Gideon Hollister, himself a lawyer and politician, sent to press the first solid history of Connecticut to be published since the 1790s. Hollister described towns as "recognized and independent municipalities. They are the primary centres of power, older than the Constitution [i.e., the Fundamental Orders] - the makers and builders of the state." Hollister continued: the towns "have given up to the State a part of their corporate powers, as they received them from the free planters, that they may have a safer guarantee for the keeping of the rest. Whatever they have not given up, they hold in absolute right."
Hollister's confederation theory of Connecticut's origins was developed in an era dominated nationally by the debate over states' rights. Though Hollister's assertions had no basis in historical fact, they provided what looked like grist for the brief of a young lawyer, Charles B. Andrews, hired by the town of Harwinton to defend it against charges of illegal activity. Webster v. Harwinton grew out of the town practice, common throughout the North during the Civil War, of offering bonuses to local sons who enlisted or were drafted into the Union army. Taxpayers in several towns challenged the right of their town meetings to tax for this purpose. Andrews's fundamental theory was "That as in a democratic government ultimate sovereignty resides with the people, the simplest municipal organization, viz., the towns, being the most purely democratic and voluntary, possess all power with which they have not expressly parted."
The judicial mill ground Andrews's hulks and spit them out. The court, dominated by Republicans in the midst of a war fought at least in part against confederation theories, could not accept Andrews's logic. The provision relating to towns in the Fundamental Orders, wrote Chief Justice Thomas Butler for the court,
was both a grant and a limitation of vital power, and was intended to embrace towns thereafter created (as they were in fact) by law, and is utterly inconsistent with the idea of a reserved sovereignty, or of any absolute right in the towns, and constituted the towns corporations, and the continuance of it has continued them so; ...and thus their powers, instead of being inherent or reserved, have been delegated and controlled by the supreme legislative power of the state from its earliest organization.
This, then, is the defining statement of town powers in the constitutional system of Connecticut. No court majority has contested it since its articulation in 1864.
In the decades after Webster, voters at town meetings must have been surprised to learn that they had no inherent power to tax but must receive state permission for each kind of tax they chose to levy. And they must tax whether they chose to or not in order to fulfill local obligations imposed by the state.
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Lexical Lasagna and Semantic Stew
BY RON GLOWEN
Like the person who was surprised to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life, I've discovered that I'm a technologist with the appropriate skills to perform my particular craft. No, it has nothing to do with changing spark plugs or fathoming the cosmic implications of differential gears; nor do I require the intervention of any Neo-Luddites to rid me of my afflictions. Rather, the nature of my talent was revealed to me in the course of my - ahem - professional activities of research and writing. Technology derives from the Greek techne (an art or pertaining to art) and logos (word or discourse); therefore technology means to write or talk about art, or perhaps to write or talk artfully. Skill means "discernment, knowledge, reason." Craft means "device, artifice or expedient." Art in its original Latin means "to fit" or "to join"; in Greek it means "to arrange." (All definitions in this case come from the Oxford Universal Dictionary.)
Needless to say, that's not how we define or use these terms today, particularly in a colloquial sense. My idle pursuit of word origins, which resulted in the discovery of the true meaning of technology (Eureka!), was not without some purpose, because I now have a new word to lay on you, if you haven't heard it already.
Craftart. If ever there was a word that defines itself, this is it. Two root words expediently joined, or as we say in Greek, 'arranged.' I cannot, nor do I want to, claim authorship of this neologism, however. It was extracted from the title of a conference I attended recently, the First National Symposium on Criticism in the Craftarts held at New York University. Certainly there have been other conferences on criticism and the crafts (I recall the 1985 Oakland gathering Art/Culture/Future sponsored by the American Craft Council). But maybe with a new term for the designation of the former crafts (or medium-based art, which incidentally means "an intervening substance"), a whole new light might be shed on this musty subject.
It was not to be. In fact, the panel of critics and editors who convened for the purpose of Getting Our Terms Straight: The Language of Criticism completely missed the mark. The only solid proposal was put forth on another panel by sculptor Winifred Lutz, who urged the replacement of 'craft' with 'work' (taking her cue from a book by Russell Pye, with the word "Workmanship" in the title). Etymologically speaking, this put us on firmer ground - work means "something that is done" - but the desire here for substitution in hopes of erasing the old 'art and craft' dichotomy is just as prone to the language problems of existing colloquial usage. In fact, Harold Rosenberg published an essay entitled 'Art and Work' in 1965, an expanded version of a talk he gave at the First World Congress of Craftsmen in 1964 (so much for staking a claim to being first!), which addressed the very same issue.
In his essay, Rosenberg made the prescient remark that "art criticism seems to be much slower than art itself in casting off the spell that identifies the artist with making and the maker." To most makers, and the audience at NYU was filled with those who regard 'making' as a high calling [make: a matched fit; to do or act], this statement amounts to heresy. From all indications, what is desired is the reversal of the present state of affairs; quoting again from Rosenberg, "... art goes against its past as a making of things and takes on the characteristics of action," by which he meant "... the primitive motive of art as magic and celebration." Action, in Rosenberg's lexicon, meant self-development; and he concluded his essay by declaring that "... self-development shall [ideally] be the motive of all work," and when that prevails "... the distinction between the arts and other human enterprises will become meaningless."
While there are 'art workers' who oppose the identity of 'artist' on the basis of ideological, social or cultural difference, virtually all of the 'crafters,' 'craft workers' or 'craftartists' that I've encountered seek the meaningful distinction of being called an 'artist.' Perhaps in the future, the crafters will become the artists, and artists will become ... something else. How strange that this hierarchical separation, still enforced in some quarters, was cooked up from the semantic stew that has given us an inverted lexical lasagna in which one thing originally meant its opposite. Unfortunately, I have not offered much clarity to the matter. But I am going to start calling myself a 'technologist' rather than an 'art writer' so that I can apply for grants from 'industry' (industria: diligence, skill, a crafty expedient).
The Last Romantic: Part II
BY FRED MARTIN
Scheherazade said, "come back tonight ..." and disappeared in the middle of a sentence during my early morning reverie at the National Council of Art Administrators last November in Minneapolis, disappeared with "You [Romantics like me] are all as far from a worthwhile work ... as you were a hundred and fifty years before. ..." I knew that Scheherazade never finished anything and always reappeared when night came. So, when night did fall in that gloomy Minneapolis hotel room, I was not surprised when Scheherazade reappeared and went right on as if nothing had happened:
As it had been for the post-Impressionists, the Cézannes, Gauguins and van Goghs, certain of the first generation Abstract Expressionist artists were taken up by perceptive dealers and sold to a 1950s version of the same audience that had bought Cézanne during the early twentieth century. And, as Cézanne et al. were followed by the Picassos and Matisses, so the Abstract Expressionists were followed by the Warhols, the Stellas, the Olitzkis and the Rauschenbergs. And also, as it had been ever since the early nineteenth century, these mid-to later-twentieth century artists worked for the 'cultural elite,' the art world of a couple thousand influential 'tastemakers,' while all of the other image-makers in society worked for everyone else, the 250 million people who constituted society as a whole.
The fine artist worked for the art world; the popular artist worked for the people. The fine artists' work reached its audience through the art dealer and museum curator; the work of the popular artist reached its audience through the recording company and the radio station, the film studio and the movie theater or television set. And as time passed, the work of visual fine art, largely static and more cult object of social status than guiding vision of human life, gave way in power and influence to popular art, which was vital, engaged all the senses, moved in time and, like television and the movies, brighter than life, or like recordings, louder and with no wrong notes.
That is why [Scheherazade said] you fine artists have come at the end of the twentieth century to the question of your place and the place of your work in a world that is evolving today and tomorrow. As the art world has continued to evolve in its own isolation from the major needs of the society in which you exist, you speak more and more only to one another, in a dialogue ever more distant from the great issues of human life, ever more representative of those issues only as they may exist in the individual experience of you artists yourselves, for yourselves, to yourselves.
When the Romantics began in the early nineteenth century, they were leisured aristocrats who had lost their role in society. You are the same. You are only Romantics, two hundred years too late. "And, dear boy," Scheherazade concluded, "that is the end of your story. You are worthless. The world has no use for you nor any place for your works. Get lost."
Months passed after those last words from the woman who had after all finished my story, and she had gone off to amuse a sultan before I could strangle her with her veil, stab at her heart. Then one day recently I saw a headline in a local tabloid: THE PROSECUTION OF THE LYRIC POET. I think Scheherazade was the Prosecutor: "Brought before the bar of justice, accused by a society in chaos of the crime of self-indulgence when the services of every person are needed to promote the general welfare and pursue the common good, the Lyric Poet was questioned by the Prosecution:
Q. What is your service?
A. My service is speaking.
Q. Why were you chosen?
A. Because I have the talent.
Q. For whom do you speak?
A. I speak for the mute.
Q. What do you say?
A. Because I am a child, I speak for the vulnerable, the frightened, the abused. I speak for the children who dream and those who played the fairy stories of long ago, who play Barbie and Ken and GI Joe and Transformer today ...
Because I am an outcast, I speak for the rejected, the sinners, the publicans, the whores; I speak for the poor and the homeless because I am that ...
Because I am male, I speak for men the words they cannot say: the caring their machismo hides, the raging phallicism their fear of homosexuality hides, the fear of age their youth disguises, the fear of failure each knows but never admits ...
Because I am female, I speak for women the rage at their impotence and servitude, their repression for three hundred centuries; I speak for their care for children and a love so deep that it can nurture or smother, sustain or kill ...
Because I am man/woman-woman/man, I speak all hungers of the flesh for the other that is itself, I speak all lusts that are the statements of despair ...
Because I am of color, I speak all rage against the whites where I project the power over my weakness; because I am white, I speak all fear of the energy and sensuality which I project upon the dark ...
Because I am all, multivalent, every-faced, all age and all life ... desert and mountain, breaking surf and clouds of every kind, you hear me in the surging of the shore, and in hands cupped hollow to your ears ...
And because the child, the out-cast, the man, the woman, the gay and lesbian, the dark and light, the desert even and the mountain, sea and sky, because they are all in you, Mr. Prosecutor, I speak for you ...
Today and yesterday, tomorrow and in all days to come, I speak what you cannot say; I say the world you live but cannot make - until beyond the dust of now, when other times other worlds, other languages other lives, your need forever remains and my service forever is called.
The Prosecution rested; the Lyric Poet had given a defense; the Judge passed sentence:
"To the Lyric Poet: Yes, show your work, speak your poem, make your gift however, whenever you can. But also, return to your origin to help those who begin as you once did, help children learn to sing in the free chorus of the world. Show at the local art festival and be proud when your work hangs on the walls of lovers' bedrooms; teach at the local school and be proud when second graders paint their first world. The Romantic Artist is dead, long live the Lyric Poet."
Blame It on Columbus
Beyond 1992 at the Berkeley Art Center
BY BRUNO FAZZOLARI
During the course of this year just about every sector of the art and media worlds will perform a ritual homage and analysis of the Columbus Quincentennial. That such institutions as Newsweek have raised doubts about the heroic stature of Columbus indicates more about the current cultural climate than about Columbus himself, however. To take an example from Beyond 1992, currently at the Berkeley Art Center, the image of Columbus readily calls forth the man and his entire colonial legacy, but it is unlikely that the man himself would recognize his own likeness, for the portrait we know was produced long after his death.
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Delegation of educational authority, then, is a product of specialization, but it is equally a function of the extrinsicality of an important purpose of the major. The success of a department that regards itself as preparing students for practice or further study is measured by the relevant success of its students, a fact that has an effect on its decisions. One such external influence on the major is informal and often subjective, consisting as it does of the sum total of departmental beliefs about how success is achieved out there in the world, with the evidence fragmentary and anecdotal. The upshot tends to be the principle, when in doubt, include, since the failure of even a small number of students to reach their goal is vastly more obvious than the harm of a one-sided education for a much larger number.
The aim of a second influence is more precise and steady. Often, graduate departments, professional schools, employers, and - especially for professional majors - accrediting and licensing agencies are quite explicit in their demands, to the point of specifying courses. Entrance requirements or preferences, personnel officers' guidelines to school placement officers, or conditions for accreditation all leave their mark on the curricula of majors. The prerogatives of expertise and the demands of external agencies thus tend to crowd out the determination of majors by faculties of particular institutions. And because these forces also suppress attention to potentially intrinsic pedagogic values of the major, a closer look at the relationship between the stage that prepares and those it prepares for is important.
For many students, of course, the undergraduate major is followed by related advanced study or by employment that calls for the knowledge and skills acquired. Undoubtedly, this orderly sequence occurs more consistently in job-related undergraduate professional programs, such as engineering, nursing, or education, than for arts and sciences majors, though there will be differences among the latter. That the major prepares is not fiction. Insofar as undergraduate education in America can be regarded as a bridge from variability of talent and schooling to postbaccalaureate education and professional employment (where relatively uniform professionwide standards prevail), majors are the main girders of that bridge.
Accordingly, it is quite appropriate for undergraduate institutions to look outside for guidance in the design of certain of their programs. But for educational institutions with pedagogic goals of their own, some modes of looking are more fitting than others. Even the few broad principles to be suggested here, however, will call for different policies in different professions and fields.
One must distinguish, to begin with, between students making their entrance into that next stage and functioning within it once inside. To the ears of a faculty, the keepers of portals have by far the most audible voices: campus recruiters, personnel officers, deans of admission, licensing agencies. And while these representatives speak for their institutions, they nevertheless bring to their tasks special perspectives of their own. The success of company recruiters and personnel officers, for example, is measured primarily by the degree of satisfaction of the first supervisors of the new employees, whether or not this forecasts a longer-run flourishing of the employee. Admissions officers, given their task of dealing with large numbers of applicants, tend toward the use of indicators that permit decisions to be made efficiently - that is, relatively rapidly, and without too much 'subjective' discretion by the decision makers.
Since the accomplishments of students who do not get through the door will not then be further tested, the preparing faculty must, of course, pay heed to such entrance requirements. But, as educators, they must also look beyond that portal to the functioning of their students over a longer career. Just as we expect a law school to prepare students for a career in the law (and not just for the bar exam), so the faculty in charge of an undergraduate program must base its curricular decisions on an understanding of a longer and deeper trajectory. Bluntly put, faculties must make the educational decisions, not recruiters and admission officers.
A bureaucratic point that has considerable pedagogic consequences corroborates this fundamental principle. For the sake of convenience, requirements are often stated in the language of courses. Required: one semester of calculus; one year of accounting; one course in design; a year of organic chemistry; and so on. But what is actually needed on the job or in advanced study is never a course but certain substantive knowledge and certain broad or specific skills, expected to be acquired in those courses.
No doubt they usually are, and no doubt much more is, as well. Courses are packages, with the selection of contents a function of the structure of the field, of habit, history, and convenience. It remains open as to whether, when a course is specified, what is substantively needed includes all that is required. Where a discipline's internal organization does not dictate the package's components, it can easily happen that a broader educational decision is made for the sake of a narrower admissions need. When a conventional course is required for the sake of a certain ability or quality of mind, an educational decision might suggest a quite different road toward that goal.
This theme - that the faculty responsible for a major must translate external demands into decisions of its own - becomes central when the issue of the major as preparation is placed in the broadest perspective. We are moving in realms in which much more is to be learned in preparation for the next stage than there is time for. As a result, on-the-job training and continuing education within the workplace have become very big business, indeed. Such activities range from informal (but time-consuming) on-the-job training, to instruction in company-specific practices, to technical courses and workshops that closely resemble those of the academy, to instruction that is indistinguishable from that provided in colleges and universities, right up to degree-granting corporate institutions. In short, everywhere the growth of knowledge has been such that students must embark on that next stage before being fully prepared for it.
At best, the undergraduate major can only do part of the job of preparing, even if it had no other goals; the faculty cannot avoid selecting what is to be included and what will be left to be learned later. Three broad principles should govern such choices; the fact that they are virtually self-evident most certainly does not assure that they are observed. First, where learning one thing builds on the prior knowledge of something else, that dependency dictates an order of learning. Because this simple logic has immediate pedagogic consequences, it is in general, though by no means always, adhered to. But since the adverse consequences of violating either of the other two principles do not become manifest until long after the undergraduate years, an equivalent simpleminded logic does not have analogous coercive force.
Institutional setting may make a big difference as to how adequately some material is taught or whether it can be taught at all. Some teaching should take place in colleges and universities, asserts this second principle, because it can only be taught there or can be taught much better there than elsewhere. Other knowledge or skills are more readily acquired in the environment of the postbaccalaureate stage. Where needed as part of preparation, the first of such subjects should be included in the major, in place of subjects that might be acquired elsewhere, while one ought to omit those in the second category, even in the face of pressures from students who want to get there faster.
A recent study of professional education analyzes the notion of professional competence into six components, to take a single example. One, called "contextual competence," "signifies an understanding of the broad social, economic, and cultural setting in which the profession is practiced." Since it is unlikely that all six components can be adequately acquired in the course of an undergraduate professional program, it makes sense to include material that takes advantage of the availability, at an institution of higher education, of such departments as economics, sociology, anthropology, say, not to mention broad library holdings. On the other hand, and for a number of reasons, if the intention is indeed to focus history and the social sciences on the profession being studied, such "contextual competence" is much more difficult to acquire 'on the job.' Suitability of place, absolutely or comparatively, suggests that "contextual competence" be given some priority in the design of a major.
On the other side, the point has been made with some force that schools will never succeed in educating teachers in such a way that they are good teachers when they start teaching. Programs that aim at preparing teachers should therefore teach how to learn to teach and leave the job of actually becoming good teachers to the years of beginning practice. Wherever such an observation is taken seriously, important curricular decisions follow.
Finally, there is the power of time. Some things not learned early are later learned with much greater difficulty at best. The "interpersonal communication competence" called for in that study on professional education is surely best acquired when young. For reasons rooted in psychological, if not biological truths about human development, the cost of postponement can be high. Other studies are best engaged in earlier rather than later for economic or sociological reasons. For what one is free to explore at an earlier stage may later be precluded by increasing pressure to specialize and by economic constraints. Options open in youth that might, in principle, be recaptured later tend, in practice, to remain out of reach.
That these truths have long been known is no assurance that they are incorporated in educational programs. They are, however, of particular relevance to the design of majors, insofar as they are intended to provide an adequate preparation for stages beyond the undergraduate years.
THE PEDAGOGICAL PURPOSES OF THE MAJOR
We have been concerned up to now with the educational effectiveness of the major as preparation for specific future stages, without attending to the educational function of the undergraduate major for those who do not take that road. While there is a paucity of statistical evidence on the careers of students after college, it is widely known that for many of them, the major is not at all followed by related advanced study or employment.
First, quite a few undergraduate majors simply do not prepare for some designated next step. Often this is obvious to students and faculty alike, but at times both groups, especially students, suffer from misapprehensions. Many interdisciplinary majors have no graduate counterparts, nor are there specific jobs for someone who has completed a program in ancient civilizations, say. But, more insidiously, some professional-sounding majors are wrongly believed to qualify the graduate for a position in that profession. Many bachelors in journalism, for example, will be disappointed not to be hired as reporters; the fact that some undergraduate economics majors like to call themselves economists does not make it so when they are on the lookout for jobs. This perspective on the major not only raises questions about effective communication with students but about the very ethos of the major as preparation.
Second, for at least two reasons, numerous students who intend to use the major as a road to relevant advanced study or employment never get there. Even where a program prepares, many individual students simply do not do well enough to make it. In some areas, the standards for success are so high that the number who fail to reach the next stage is large. Think of the biology majors who are not admitted into a medical school or a Ph.D. program! On the other hand, a program can be well designed to prepare students for a career, and they might complete it admirably but may find that the number of openings in the world of work is so small that there is no room for them. At different times, this disproportion has held for every profession for which undergraduates prepare: education, engineering, music, library science, pharmacy, and social work, to give a few prominent examples.
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There can be no natural explanation for the origin of this cancer-fighting wonder other than past heavy losses of juveniles to cancer.
Because it was activated only after healthy cells were converted into the deadly cancer state, the increasingly efficient immune system enabled many species to weaken, or even abandon, first line defenses. The animals were still, from the gene's view, disposable vehicles, and every act of somatic cell creation in a developing animal was still a threat to the germ line. But the 'fail safe' nature of immune systems liberated the gene pools. Released from the restrictions imposed by risk-aversive cancer defenses, many of these emboldened invaders of the sun-drenched land surfaces could do what would be unthinkable with only a single line of defenses:
Increase the length of prereproductive life.
Lengthen total life spans. The aging process was attenuated.
Invest more cells in each organism. Giant animals - dinosaurs at an earlier time, humans now - came to dominate life on earth.
Externalize soft tissue as the need for noncellular external hard coverings were reduced or eliminated.
Because of that externalization of tissue, develop greater flexibility and mobility.
Eliminate, in some species, body hair, a noncellular covering with proven cancer-defense properties. (I say more about hair later in the chapter.)
Reduce skin pigmentation in many humans and in a few species of domestic animals - some pigs and some rabbits have white-pink skin.
In many species, spend entire days in direct sunlight.
In most immunologically-equipped lineages the animals increased in size. That is because immune systems not only permitted larger animals, they encouraged them. With an effective immune defense in place additional cells actually protect against cancer.
But if fewer cells were cancer defensive in insects, how could more cells be cancer defensive in vertebrates? To understand this apparent paradox, consider two vertebrates with cells of similar size. One is a mouse whose liver is no larger than the eraser at the end of a pencil. The other is a whale, and it's liver is the size of a small automobile. If cancer were to start in one liver cell in each animal and proliferate at the same rate of speed, which animal would be the first to die? Obviously, the mouse would go first. Because of its smaller size, the mouse's liver would stop functioning before the whale's. And the whale's immune system, with more time to organize a counterattack against the killer cells, would have a better chance of winning its fight against the killer cells and might save the animal.
(In his 'Phylogeny and Oncogeny' Clyde J. Dawe pointed out that although whales have many more cells at risk than mice and might be expected to have higher lethal cancer rates they in fact have far lower rates. He speculated that certain physical characteristics of whales [he mentions higher levels of fatty tissue] might explain the whale's lower death rate. He seems not to have considered time-to-kill versus time-to-react as a factor.)
The terrestrial vertebrates include among their number the only large animals that regularly expose themselves to intense sunlight. Vertebrates are also the only animals known to have cancer specific immune systems. And they have yet another unique characteristic: they are the only animals that sleep.
Sleep is a major evolutionary mystery. Land vertebrates spend one-third of their lives in an unconscious state, utterly defenseless against attack by predators. Natural selection would have worked against the selection of this defenseless state unless it offered other life-or-death benefits. My theory looks at all the facts and asserts that sleep's primary function is to defend against cancer.
To begin my case, consider that the greatest risk of cancer initiation occurs during mitosis. That delicate process of passing genetic material from one mother cell to two daughter cells is, in organisms with oncogenes, nothing less than death-defying. It is also an incredibly frequent occurrence in large animals. Cells divide ten quadrillion times during a human lifetime. That's 350 thousand million cell divisions every twenty-four hours! If just one of those divisions went awry, the mishap could kill the organism. And any cell divisions that misfired in juveniles would imperil the lineage.
Significantly, these highly dangerous acts occur in vertebrates during sleep. Human skin cells, for example, divide mostly between the hours of midnight and 4 AM. The connection with sunlight is obvious. Cells divide at night in animals that are active during daylight and during the day in most nocturnal animals. Bats and mice sleep during the day, but they sleep, and their cells divide (itsit's been observed and measured in mice) in places sheltered from sunlight; bats sleep in caves and mice in burrows.
Using the 'cause of death' rule, the universality of sleep in land vertebrates (all mammals, birds and reptiles sleep) leads to the question, what killed animals that did not sleep? The facts - mitosis during sleep, sunlight avoidance while sleeping - point to cancer.
Another set of facts that supports this idea is the age-related sleep pattern in our own species. Humans sleep most during infancy - newborns sleep 18 or more hours a day - when new cell production, and the risk of cancer initiation, is at its highest level. After infancy sleep decreases steadily with age, but with one significant exception. Adolescents sleep more than pre-adolescents. Again, there is a correlation with growth and increased cell division: rates of increase in height and weight during adolescence are second only to infancy. Cancer experience also correlates. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to cancer related to growth. Leg bones grow rapidly during adolescence and cancer in those bones almost exclusively occurs in teenagers.
Another medical fact pointing toward sleep's function as a cancer defense: the increase in sleep following severe trauma. Persons recovering from major surgery or other trauma - when cells division increases to repair damaged tissue - sleep more than normal.
There is still more evidence. The pituitary gland secretes growth hormone when we sleep. According to Yasuro Takahashi, "...the highest peak of [growth hormone] concentrations in a 24-hour period always occurs during ...sleep."
How does sleep enhance cancer-free cell division? I don't know. This is a black box proposal. I suspect, however, that the state of unconsciousness was selected to enforce physical inactivity and that inactivity provides an internal somatic environment conducive to the successful division of cells.
I have said that insects shield their larvae from solar radiation as a cancer defense. The terrestrial vertebrates also protect their embryos from radiation, but they didn't put them under rocks.
Most vertebrate fish embryos were not protected by their parents. They reproduced with external fertilization and external gestation; many fertilized eggs develop in open water. But when some of the fishes' descendants migrated to land they moved toward greater embryo protection. This is evident in the earliest land animals, the amphibians. Although some amphibians use the fish system of external fertilization and external gestation, other use internal fertilization followed by external gestation. And a few species use both internal fertilization and internal gestation.
In the next big evolutionary step, the emergency of true terrestrials, the reptiles and birds, fertilization became internal and all embryos were protected in hard-shelled eggs, some of which were buried by the parents.
Embryo protection was further intensified in mammals. Both fertilization and gestation are internal.
That progression from exposed fertilization and exposed gestation to shielded fertilization and shielded gestation implies unrelenting selection pressure. Such long term trends in many lineages are best explained, again applying Occam's Razor, by a single selection mechanism working throughout the long transformation period, rather than by a melange of assumptions.
Increased protection of embryos occurred in lineages that underwent great transformation and my theory says transformation itself could not occur without lots of juvenile cancer, including embryo cancer. The intensification of cancer selection pressure as the animals moved away from the protection of the sea would also explain the change to internal fertilization and internal gestation.
As my theory would predict, no comparable intensification of protection of very young offspring occurred when plants moved from marine to terrestrial habitats.
Despite the fact that many mammals have discarded heavy external protection against sunlight, all land vertebrates continue to shield mitotic cells from natural radiation.
Blood cells in humans and other vertebrates, which divide more rapidly than other cells, divide inside large bones. As X-ray images demonstrate, bone tissue protects against radiation.
In four-legged animals, the soft organs, which are made up mainly of dividing cells, are protected from exposure to sunlight by layers of cells that do not divide; muscles and, to a lesser extent, nerve cells.
The observation that pre-mitotic cells are routinely shielded by cells that do not divide suggests that cancer selection explains one of the great mysteries of recent evolution, the origin of the human brain.
Paleontologists have established, with the 1974 discovery in Ethiopia of the hominid fossil 'Lucy,' that our ancestors first became bipedal about 3.5 million years ago. They stood up before they acquired their large brains. The big brains - they more than doubled in size from Lucy's - did not appear until about 2 million years ago. That sudden appearance - and in evolution 1.5 million years is a short time - is a puzzle. So quickly did the new brain appear that biologist Anthony Smith estimates that it grew at an average rate of 90,000 cells in each generation!
All previous ideas about that sudden origin revolve around the supposed survival value of human intelligence. They ignore several powerful signs pointing to cancer selection.
The locale where our ancestors were living when the big brains first appeared is highly significant. It was in the Rift Valley, which runs from North to South, dividing central Africa in half. West of the valley the land is covered with heavy foliage; it's mostly deep, dark jungle. To the east it's savanna; open land bombarded by fierce tropical sunlight. The valley itself, where Lucy lived, is now one of the hottest places on earth. It is risky to assume that current climatic conditions obtained millions of years in the past, but I make no such assumption. According to a 1984 article in The New York Times, specialists are convinced that humans appeared when the area changed from shady forest to sun-drenched savanna.
Suddenly spending entire days with the blazing African sun beating down on the top of their heads (thanks to their recent adaptation of bipedalism), early humans suffered losses from brain cancer. But - and this is essential - most brain tumors do not start in functioning brain cells, not in neurons. They start in glial cells, dividing non-nerve cells that circulate inside the cranial vault. Neurons are postmitotic; they never divide, not once the brain has been constructed. And brain construction is completed in early childhood.
If glial-cell cancer killed many human children, selection would have favoured the placement of additional neurons on the top of the mammalian brain we inherited from Lucy and our other protohuman ancestors. Those additional nondividing cells, placed between the dividing cells and that harsh African sun, would have blocked the carcinogenic solar radiation.
Certain observations support this idea:
Cancer is the second leading cause of death among American children. And the second leading site of lethal cancer in children is brain cancer; it accounted for 14% of childhood cancer deaths in a recent year. (The leading cause of death is accidents and leukemia is the most common cancer.)
Children have thick hair only on the top of their heads. Humans lost their thick body hair, and biologists are convinced that they shed it to survive in the heat of the African plain. But most of our body heat escapes through our heads. (It's why most people wear hats in cold weather.) If we got rid of body hair to keep cool in the African heat, its retention by juveniles (remember, their welfare was essential to lineage survival) in the one place where it would most interfere with body-cooling suggests that something else was also involved. I think childrens' hair protected them against sunlight-caused brain cancer.
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The argument could legitimately be made that virtually all coverage of national government is primarily the drama surrounding the president - from the story of the initial policy proposal through the Congress's handling of the issue to the president's subsequent reaction to Congress. It may even extend to the role of interest groups, the states and localities, the federal bureaucracy, and the Supreme Court. Energy programs, budget cuts, anti-inflation plans all receive elongated coverage if they emanate from the White House and are considered top priorities of the president.
Not only does the president get a lot of press coverage, but most of it is favorable, or at worst neutral. Although the number of unfavorable stories has increased since the late 1960s and early 1970s (Vietnam and Watergate) the president still receives more favorable than unfavorable press.
MANAGING THE NEWS
The president's media coverage is generally positive primarily because of White House efforts to manage the news. The White House usually does not need to solicit the press's attention (although it cannot take such attention for granted), but the president's staff does try to affect the content that is transmitted. A vital and time-consuming job of the president and his senior advisors is the shaping of news coverage to the president's advantage.
Former White House Communications Director David Gergen aptly describes this preoccupation:
We had a rule in the Nixon [presidency] that before any public event was put on his schedule, you had to know what the headline out of that event was going to be, what the picture was going to be, and what the lead paragraph would be.
Image-Making
The White House works to create an image of the president which supports the president's policy objectives and creates a reservoir of political capital (that is, popular support), for the president in his battles with Congress and others. This imagemaking is especially crucial in the first year of a new administration when the new president seeks to translate an electoral mandate into congressional and public support for the administration's proposals. The president not only can be more successful in accomplishing policy objectives, but he also can draw an image of himself which will form the first strong impression in the public mind. Fortuitously, the press also concentrates on the personality of the new president in this first year. (See Table 8.1.) Since such information is new, it is considered newsworthy. The White House, aware of this emphasis, seeks to take advantage of it through imagemaking. According to Grossman and Kumar, the image created generally encompasses the president's personal characteristics, leadership ability, and policy.
The President Is Human. The White House attempts to 'humanize' the president, particularly in the first year of a new administration. Reporters are quick to pick up on such stories, since they appeal to a natural human interest in an important personality and his family.
Typically, the White House portrays the president as one who is close to the concerns of the citizenry, whether that be through an emphasis on Jimmy Carter's small-town roots, his experiences as a farmer and small businessman, and his preference for staying in voters' homes during campaign trips, or on George Bush's predilection for pork rinds, backyard barbecues, and playing horseshoes. The public flap over Nancy Reagan's designer dresses was the other side of this coin. The press is vital in communicating this image to the public: the president as common man.
The First Family. The president's family is used to demonstrate his compassion as well as a model home life. The First Lady's involvement in noncontroversial causes such as Barbara Bush's work on adult illiteracy aid the president's image as a concerned individual. In the case of Barbara Bush, her matronly figure and grey hair has reinforced an image as a typical woman, particularly by comparison with Nancy Reagan, who was petite and dressed in fashionable designer clothes. Children, particularly younger children, can soften the public image of the president. Even animals, when presidential offspring are adults, can serve a similar role, as evidenced by the attention to Millie, the Bush's pregnant spaniel who was featured on the cover of Life magazine.
Emphasis on family can backfire, however, given inappropriate context or behavior. Jimmy Carter's mention during the 1980 presidential debate that he had discussed nuclear arms policy with his 13-year-old daughter Amy was met with derision, since it implied he received policy advice from his teenage daughter, and Carter's brother Billy became involved in an embarrassing scandal over his role as a lobbyist for Libya. Ronald Reagan's children undercut both his 'family man' image and his positions on moral issues; son Ron appeared on Saturday Night Live in his underwear, and daughter Patti wrote a derogatory novel based on her relationship with her father.
Leadership. Our expectations for the presidency today demand presidential leadership, or at least the appearance of such. In fact, the president is severely hampered by the Constitution, by statute, and by the resistance of the Congress in his decision-making role. Hence, the White House concentrates on projecting an image of leadership in order to gain public and congressional support. Grossman and Kumar identify several components of the image as a leader.
Military Decisiveness. The president must appear militarily decisive. Early in his presidency, George Bush's use of the military in Panama and the Middle East successfully reinforced this image. However, Jimmy Carter's failed attempt to rescue the Iran hostages and the Reagan administration's inability to oust Panamanian leader Noriega in 1988 contributed to a perception of military impotence.
Control of Subordinates. The president also is expected to demonstrate leadership by firing disruptive subordinates. The continued presence of a subordinate who challenges the president or politically damages him is viewed as a sign of weakness. President Reagan's firing of the air traffic controllers in 1981 projected a strong, decisive image, but his later refusal to remove his embattled chief of staff Donald Regan in 1986-1987 conveyed the opposite impression.
Intellectual Ability. The president is expected to show leadership through his command of the issues and his overall intellectual ability. Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Carter projected images of highly knowledgeable experts on complex matters, although their expertise usually was demonstrated in controlled settings. Ronald Reagan lacked this intellectual or technical ability, but successfully lowered expectations of presidential expertise by drawing the analogy of a corporate chairman of the board rather than a hands-on manager. George Bush, however, has restored the practice of showing leadership through intellectual command of the issues.
World Leader. Finally, Grossman and Kumar argue that the president must show leadership through his role as a world figure. Presidents have often turned to foreign policy - and particularly to foreign travels - to boost sagging popularity at home. Richard Nixon's visit to the Soviet Union and later to the Middle East in the midst of Watergate and the Camp David Summit arranged by Jimmy Carter to bring together the leaders of Israel and Egypt in 1978 are two examples.
Foreign travel can also backfire. Gerald Ford's tumble down an airplane stairway on a trip to Austria reinforced an already-established image of incompetence, and Ronald Reagan's failure to achieve an arms agreement with the Soviet Union at the Iceland Summit in 1986 initially attracted critical stories from the press, which the White House sought to manage by sending a phalanx of top officials to the major news organizations. Even that trip finally confirmed the image-building value of foreign travel as Reagan's public approval rating jumped eleven points.
Foreign travel generally reaps benefits for presidential image. A study of fifteen presidential trips abroad between 1953 and 1978 found overwhelmingly favorable news coverage.
Activity. Another component of image-making is the illusion of activity. As the president moves about with speeches, ceremonies, travel, he leaves in his wake a plethora of news stories. Such reporting sustains the image of an active president, even when such activity may be more symbolic than real.
Moreover, all of these stories serve to direct the attention of the press toward favorable presidential news and away from investigative reporting.
Policy. The tactics to improve the president's image with the press and the public are designed primarily to lay the groundwork for congressional and public support of the president's policy objectives.
The president himself specifically presses his policy agenda through the news media. Presidents use speeches to various audiences to push policy initiatives. These include the State of the Union addresses, televised 'fireside chats,' and speeches to the numerous groups offering him invitations to speak. The selection of the audience is done with the press coverage in mind. The setting for the speeches is fitted with the particular policy objective in order to provide the backdrop and visual reinforcement of the verbal message. For example, in 1988, Ronald Reagan used a visit to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy to press for formation of a bipartisan executive-legislative commission on drug interdiction.
Press Access
As Reagan's presidency emphasized, one recurring point of contention between the press and the White House has been access to the president. While nearly all members of Congress, including the leadership, are readily available for questioning, the president has sometimes maintained an aloofness from the press.
Historically, the White House has gone to great lengths to encourage reporters and offer access. Presidents have provided office space within the walls of the White House for the press's operations, and those facilities have gradually improved. Ironically, Richard Nixon moved the press even closer to the Oval Office by covering over the swimming pool and moving the press into the West Wing. In addition to office space, the White House arranges for press access to the president as he travels.
But press access nevertheless is controlled by the administration. The press is kept in a confined environment at the White House, and reporters are prohibited from wandering at will. Formal access to senior officials is granted at the administration's descretion, and presidents have discouraged, although usually unsuccessfully, unauthorized contacts between staff and the press.
Access is extended when it serves the administration's purposes and denied when it does not. Favored reporters and columnists are granted private interviews with the president and exclusive stories, for example, while others who are viewed as unfriendly are denied such access.
According to Reagan press secretary Larry Speakes, favorites during the Reagan years, for example, included columnists James J. Kilpatrick and George Will, Hugh Sidey of Time, Bill Plante and Gary Schuster of CBS. But other reporters were accorded different treatment. For example, during the Reagan presidency, reporters for the Washington Times were shunned by the White House Press Office for printing stories about Nancy Reagan's dislike for Larry Speakes.
Speaking for the President
Managing the news about the presidency means controlling the statements emanating from the White House. Such control eludes presidents since not all who speak about the president, or even those who speak for him, are saying what he would want said. Presidential spokespersons include the president himself, and also a wide array of persons ranging from the press secretary to a lowly White House staff member.
According to Colin Seymour-Ure, there are six types of spokespersons who are differentiated on the basis of their regularity in meeting with the press, their authorization to speak to the press, and their specialization as public relations professionals.
Presidential press secretaries, authorized specialists, meet with the press routinely. The press secretary speaks formally for the president in daily (and sometimes more often) briefings with the press. Some of the most effective press secretaries have been individuals who have had close personal relationships with the president, such as Jody Powell to Jimmy Carter and Bill Moyers to Lyndon Johnson. However, other secretaries have included government public relations professionals such as Larry Speakes (Reagan presidency) and Marlin Fitzwater (Reagan and Bush), and former White House reporters such as Jerry Terhorst and Ron Nessen in the Ford presidency.
Although the press secretary is the spokesperson usually most visible to the press and the public, presidential assistants such as the White House Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, assistants, deputy assistants, and special assistants to the president also meet with the press routinely, though usually for background purposes.
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The populists also had attacked big business. But they had concentrated on providing more economic leverage for small farmers and other members of the 'toiling masses' in the marketplace. The progressive Republicans emphasized the threat to democratic institutions posed by unchecked business power. In 1897 the Wisconsin Progressive Republicans, led by LaFollette, issued a platform of eleven planks, eight of which were primarily political or governmental, including promises to "nominate candidates by Australian ballot at a primary election"; to "enact and enforce laws to punish bribery in every form by the lobby"; to "prohibit the acceptance by public officials of railroad passes" (a standard means through which the railroads won favor with state legislators); and to "enact and enforce laws making character and competency the requisite for service in our penal and charitable institutions." Of the three planks that were primarily economic, two dealt with foreign trade, calling, ambiguously, for both "reciprocity" and "protection for the products of the factory and the farm"; the third forthrightly endorsed conservative Republican monetary policy: "Sound money, a dollar's worth of dollar."
Progressives at the state level fought against patronage-based state machines, whose coffers were filled by unreported contributions from corporations. Like the municipal reformers, many of the state progressives came to feel that organized parties were impediments to democratic government.
The anti-party measures instituted by Hiram Johnson in California to help break the power of the Southern Pacific Railroad epitomized the remedies to which many state progressives were drawn. In the early years of the twentieth century the Southern Pacific controlled both California party organizations and "secretly fostered new factions to keep the old ones in check." The railroad's money, according to Abe Rueff, Republican boss of San Francisco, "was the power behind almost every political throne and behind almost every insurgent revolt." The Southern Pacific's Political Bureau maintained "a railroad political manager in every county in the state. This manager might be a Republican boss in a Republican county, or a Democratic boss in a Democratic county; in important or doubtful counties he was merely the railroad boss, with whom both Republican and Democratic bosses had to deal." The state was usually competitive in national elections, but in Sacramento, the state capital, the Southern Pacific was king.
In 1910, Hiram Johnson (whose father was a Republican state legislator and a stalwart defender of the railroad) entered the Republican primary for governor. Running on the slogan Kick the Southern Pacific out of politics, he won a sweeping victory. Johnson received some support in the primary from urban liberals in the San Francisco Bay area, but his strongest backing came from socially conservative middle-class Protestants in southern California, particularly Los Angeles and Orange counties, apparently attracted in part by his identification with puritanical moral reform. In the general election, Johnson again swept the south but was closely contested by his Democratic opponent in the north.
As governor, Johnson persuaded the legislature to establish a public utility commission which subjected the Southern Pacific and other railroads to fairly strict regulation. Johnson's main legislative effort, however, was devoted to enacting a far-reaching program of electoral and party reform, including the introduction of the referendum, initiative, and recall, which he claimed would assure popular control of government. The parties were reduced to little more than shells. Johnson also secured passage of a cross-filing law, which permitted candidates for state and congressional offices to enter primaries of both parties without naming their own party on the ballot. The cross-filing law not only helped wreck California parties but contributed to the development of an almost totally candidate-oriented brand of state electoral politics.
The 'New Nationalism.' America's quick victory in the Spanish-American War of 1898 produced a wave of enthusiastic support for an expanded role for the United States in world affairs. Theodore Roosevelt, who had been assistant secretary of the navy when the war began, and others drew on the expansionist doctrines of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who called for an enlarged navy and the acquisition of bases and colonies all over the globe, particularly in Latin America and on the Pacific rim. "God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration," Republican Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana declaimed in 1900. "No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns .... And of all our race He has marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man ...."
Aggressive pursuit of America's national interest abroad was to be accompanied by rededication to 'national purpose' at home. "The promise of American life," Herbert Croly wrote in 1909, "is to be fulfilled not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial." American capitalism was to be brought more into the service of national destiny. "The true friend of property, the true conservative," Roosevelt said in a widely acclaimed speech he called 'The New Nationalism' in 1910, "is he who insists that the creature of man's making shall be the servant and not the master of the man who made it. The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they themselves have called into being."
Many businessmen were alarmed by the degree of government regulation of the economy that Roosevelt's program seemed to envision. But some leaders of the business community, as Gabriel Kolko and other historians have shown, welcomed the new nationalism, in both its international and domestic aspects, with open arms. The Republican ideology had never required complete nonintervention by government in the economy. The protective tariff, which most Republicans supported, was after all a massive intrusion by government into the 'natural' operation of the market. And Republicans carried on the Hamiltonian and Whig traditions, calling for federally financed internal improvements to promote economic growth.
By the first decade of the twentieth century some American businessmen with broad horizons, particularly among Wall Street financiers, had concluded that unrestrained competition was undercutting maximization of profits. Private efforts to control competition were coming unstuck, and in any case such efforts might now be subject to prosecution under the Sherman Anti-trust Act, which had been enacted in 1890. The financial panics of 1903 and 1907 persuaded growing numbers of businessmen that the federal government should take a hand in stabilizing and rationalizing markets. Observing the effects of cutthroat price competition in the steel industry, Andrew Carnegie commented in 1908: "It always comes back to me that Government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem." Carnegie was in many ways an exceptional businessman, and his view cannot be taken as representative. But his opinion was echoed by so hardbitten an entrepreneur as Judge Elbert Gary, chief executive of U.S. Steel, who in 1911 told a congressional committee: "I believe we must come to enforced publicity and governmental control ... even as to prices."
Gabriel Kolko has identified George Perkins, partner in the Morgan bank and close adviser to Roosevelt, as the principal pointman in bringing a portion of the business elite into the progressive movement. "Federal regulation is feasible," Perkins told an audience of businessmen in 1909, "and if we unite and work for it now we may be able to secure it; whereas, if we continue our fight against it much longer, the incoming tide may sweep the question along to either government ownership or socialism."
The sources feeding progressivism pursued differing, in some cases incompatible, social goals. But they had in common certain assumptions and themes: government should play an active role in promoting the public good; political life is best seen as a moral struggle between good and evil; public confidence requires honest elections and effective government; the existing party system is a major barrier to political reform; and government should serve the public interest rather than advancing particular interests to the exclusion of others or acting chiefly as broker between competing special interests. All these themes came together in the pronouncements and personality of the charismatic leader who became the progressive movement's virtual embodiment: Theodore Roosevelt.
THE ROOSEVELT FACTOR
Through most of his career, except during his third-party campaign for the presidency in 1912, Roosevelt described himself as a "conservative." Looking back in 1916 on his leadership of the progressive movement, he claimed that his approach had represented "not wild radicalism ... [but] the highest and wisest form of conservatism."
Roosevelt was drawn to politics as a young man in the early 1880s by ambition and an itch for public service - and perhaps by a desire to settle scores with machine bosses like Tom Platt whom he held responsible for his father's humiliation in the fight over the New York collectorship in 1877. He began attending meetings of his local Republican organization in midtown Manhattan, which he found manned by "cheap lawyers, saloon keepers, and horsecar conductors ...." Asked by friends in the social elite why he was associating with such dreadful people, he replied "that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did - and that I intended to be one oftheof the governing class; and if they proved too hard-bit for me I supposed I would have to quit, but that I certainly would not quit until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble."
Though a reformer from the start, Roosevelt resolved to operate within the structure of the Republican party. His fellow delegates to his first Republican national convention, in 1884, he observed, included "some scoundrels, but for the most part good, ordinary men, who do not do very much thinking, who are pretty honest themselves, but who are callous to any but very flagrant wrongdoing in others, unless it is brought home to them forcibly." Under pressure to join the mugwumps who were deserting Blaine to vote for Cleveland in 1884, he denounced the bolters as suffering "from a species of moral myopia, complicated by intellectual strabismus." He took over leadership of the municipal reform movement in New York but had nothing but scorn for 'ultra independents' who refused to work within the limits set by political reality. "The Goo-Goo and Mugwump idiots," he said, "are quite as potent forces for evil as the most corrupt politicians." In his dislike for economic and social radicals he at times exhibited an almost Tory sensibility: he once declined to be introduced to the radical Governor John Altgeld of Illinois because he thought he might some day have to "meet him at the head of troops."
Returning from the Spanish-American War in the fall of 1898 a highly publicized hero, Roosevelt, obeying his sense of what was practical, went to Tom Platt's 'Sunday School' - the sessions the boss held in New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel to confer party endorsements and other political favors. Following his own sense of what was practical, Platt backed Roosevelt for the governorship. This alliance of convenience proved unhappy. Before becoming governor, Roosevelt had viewed reform as a matter of throwing out corrupt politicians and installing leaders motivated by dedication to public service. "We were still accustomed," he later recalled, "to talking of the 'machine' as if it were something merely political, with which business had nothing to do." But experience in Albany convinced him that support from big business was "the most important element" in Platt's "strength." Roosevelt concluded that the political system was permeated by the influence of irresponsible corporate wealth. He set out to break the power that the alliance of big business and machine politicians exercised over the state legislature. Unlike LaFollette and Hiram Johnson, however, he sought not to dismantle the parties but to make the Republican party the instrument of reform.
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After premium hikes, owners become 'insurance literate' and more safety-conscious
Company execs learn the hard way the importance of safety programs and insurance claims management.
Safety is on everybody's mind as 1992 gets into full swing. With the economy the way it is, it's especially important to reduce insurance costs.
David Frank says that between 1986 and 1988 his company's insurance premiums doubled each year after a series of uncharacteristic workmen's compensation, auto, property and liability claims.
He says it was then that he realized the close relationship between insurance premiums and accident history.
Frank, president of David J. Frank Landscape Contracting, Germantown, Wisc., says the company's first concern was safety.
"We began an active safety and loss program," recalls Frank. Apparently, Frank's efforts are paying off, as the company recently had 120 days of no lost-time accidents, and good records in property as well.
He estimates the company saved $100,000 in claims and premium charges in 1991.
Like Frank, David Minor, president of Minor's of Ft. Worth, Texas, says it only took one incident to convince him of the need for better claims management and accident reduction at his 150-person company.
"We were hit with a $17,000 surcharge in workmen's comp," remembers Minor. "The comp rate had not been promulgated: we had gotten a base rate, but we had not received a 'modifier.'"
Minor became a self-admittted 'student of insurance,' and learned all he could about reducing workmen's comp premiums.
Both men enacted extensive safety programs to be followed by all employees. Frank's program is divided into workmen's comp, workplace safety, property safety and auto safety.
Safety is also influenced by proper selection and training of employees, and safety procedures are reviewed weekly.
Other plan elements at Minor's:
<*_>checkmark<*/>a 'get-back-to-work-soon' program;
<*_>checkmark<*/>self-insurance on closed-end or first-aid-type claims;
<*_>checkmark<*/>safety contests;
<*_>checkmark<*/>better claims management; and
<*_>checkmark<*/>adoption of safety standards established by the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA).
Minor's company became "obsessed with safety," and as a result saved "tons of money."
Under Minor's safety program, foremen receive a $35 per month safety bonus based on accident-free periods. Safety-related meetings are held every two weeks. Every new employee has to read and sign-off on the safety program.
A safety manual for claims management geared for safety 'officers' describes how to respond to a wide variety of accidents.
And instead of raises for returning assistants, recent incentive safety bonuses were based on good safety records.
Frank awards 10 cents per hour for crew leaders who have accident-free periods between April 1 and November 30.
Brian Janek, an agent with the Van Gelder Co. of Denver, Colo., knows what saves companies money:
Find an agent and company with proven landscape industry experience. Otherwise, uncovered claims, pollution liability or worker comp problems will be overlooked.
Initiate a loss control program.
Initiate a safety program; use financial statements and driving records to prove insurability.
If your state allows you to use deductibles for workmen's comp or general liability, do it. The less the prior record inhibits renewal, the better.
"It's gotten to the point where you're at the mercy of the insurance company," says Minor, and a company must 'sell itself' to an insurer.
According to Minor, his company's stellar safety program earned a workmen's comp policy, when, as he says, no landscapers in Texas were getting them.
"Involve yourself in the insurance process," advises Minor. "If you let somebody else do it, you're doing yourself a disservice."
Don Brown, a loss-control specialist with the CNA Insurance Co., thinks company owners are doing very little to address medical cost containment, reduce litigation or manage claims.
"Those are the two areas that make availability of coverage at affordable prices the critical problem today," says Brown. "Once the claim is filed, business owners tend to leave it up to a third party to manage the claim. The bottom line is, these folks are managing your business. Take charge as the owner. Work out a relationship with insurance professionals and physicians.
"Basically, you've got to provide the finest medical attention to an injured worker as you can. If not, they will go to an attorney and you lose control of that claim and costs will multiply."
He suggests:
Developing 'modified work' to bring injured workers back as soon as possible, doing alternative part-time work until they are back in top form, and
Filing accident reports within 24 hours, to keep costs down.
Minor's concern for the injured worker includes having a mid-level manager drive him to the hospital, the pharmacy and home if necessary.
"If they are standing, and can walk, we want them in the office the next day," insists Minor. "We don't want them home watching TV commercials from personal injury attorneys."
Brown thinks that concern must include genuine concern for the family.
Mulch: perfect for beauty in landscapes
Beware how mulch you use! Experts says it's not hard to actually over-mulch around trees and shrubs.
<*_>Black-square<*/>Mulch is an integral part of most award-winning landscapes - not merely for its practicality, but also for its appearance. In combination with the trees and shrubs around which it's used, mulch provides another way for designers to break up large areas in the landscape.
"Mulching started out as being purely practical," notes Al Rickert, owner of Wholesale Landscape Supply in Bradenton, Fla.. "It's now become a part of the aesthetics."
The term 'mulch' is defined by Dr. Donald Rakow of Cornell University as "any ground treatment that differs from the substrate (soil beneath), either physically or biologically." Many different types are available (see Table 1).
Rakow says wood chips are the most-often-used mulch. "They can serve a valuable role in the landscape if used properly," he notes.
The phrase "if used properly" is key.
"Piling too much organic mulch can rot the base of the tree and kill it," says Bonnie Lee Appleton of the Virginia Tech Cooperative Extension Service. "Back off! In most cases, we see no reason to exceed two to three inches. If you need more, put a well around the tree base, keeping the mulch away from the tree.
"The finer the particles of organic material you use, the less you should use," she continues. "Weeds have a field day if you're using mulch over fabrics or polypropylene because it acts as a substrate."
Rickert says the types of mulch available to landscapers and golf course superintendents vary according to region.
"Cypress mulch is very popular from Kansas east because of favorable shipping rates. It dominates the market in the Midwest," he notes. "Pine bark is the old standby in the South, Southeast and Central Atlantic. Pine straw is more regionalized in the Southeast, but that's changing."
Though mulches have numerous benefits (see Table 2), there are disadvantages.
"Most mulches also make a wonderful winter home for mice," says Dr. Bill Fountain of the University of Kentucky. "And when warm spring weather arrives, they awaken with the hunger of a 16-year-old male. The closest food source is often the trunks of young trees."
Fountain says that raking the mulch away from the trunk for six to eight inches will discourage feeding by mice without reducing the mulch's benefits. "Hardware cloth around the trunk is also a very effective barrier to mice and rabbits," he notes.
Barefoot's stature as 'national' company grows with acquisitions
Management team headed by Pat Norton sees continued expansion of Worthington, Ohio-based company through development of franchises, 'branchises' and buy-outs.
Convinced the lawn care business no longer offers any entrepreneurial excitement? Shhh ... don't let Patrick Norton know it.
He still thinks - silly him - that there's opportunity to grow a lawn care company. A really big company. A national company.
"I think that good operators - and we don't think we're the only good operators - will continue to prosper and grow," says Norton.
"There are a lot of markets still out there in the development stages. I think that portends well for the industry."
Say what?
What does Norton know? After all, Barefoot Grass Lawn Service, which he's helping to grow, has, since 1979, only spread from central Ohio into and across the Mideast and Midwest. Barefoot is now also represented on both coasts as well as in Florida, Colorado and Texas. Company revenues increased from about $2 million in 1979 to about $52 million in fiscal year 1991.
Reasons why the public is, seemingly, so eager to accept Barefoot services include: its clean yellow and green vans (Barefoot's main competition uses larger, tanker-type trucks), its well-trained technicians, it's customized, predominantly dry application program.
Just as significantly, Barefoot is adept in targeting its considerable direct mail and in-house telemarketing efforts to homes in neighborhoods that are able and willing to pay a premium price for the delivery of granular fertilizer and control products.
It's this attention to detail that's characterized the Barefoot management team which has been headed by Norton since the mid-1980s.
Briefly: Pat Norton joined Barefoot in 1979 as its director of finance and administration. In 1981 he, and other top company managers, bought Barefoot from Toro. Norton became company president in 1986. In 1989 the Chicago-based investment firm Golder, Thoma & Cressey bought a majority share of the privately-held company. This past October Barefoot went public.
Barefoot Grass is now the third largest lawn care company in the United States, and still growing at an annual double-digit rate.
Norton says it's attracting new customers for each location. "We are still growing in Columbus, Ohio," says Norton. "If that's not the most competitive lawn care market in the United States, it's certainly one of the most competitive."
But mostly it's growing because of the proliferation of its market-targeted franchise and 'branchise' operations - and, most recently, its acquisition efforts. (A 'branchise' is a Barefoot franchise which is owned by a separate corporation but nonetheless managed by Barefoot through a management agreement.)
Barefoot is definitely in a buying mood. Says Norton, "we would have growth without acquisition, but to maintain the level of growth we want, we have to look at acquisitions."
On January 3, Barefoot bought lawn care operations in Cleveland, Wooster, Akron and Canton - former properties of Lawnmark which generated 1991.
To make that deal work, Barefoot Grass also bought its Canton franchise. Otherwise the company would have found itself competing against one of its own franchise operations.
"The ideal acquisition for us is going to be in a market where we already have a presence so that when we add revenues, we can do it profitably," says Norton, "where we already have existing facilities, where we're making money, where we can add revenues without adding too much overhead."
In separate transactions in 1991, Barefoot purchased its 'branchise' in Newark, N.J., (for about $1 million), and will likely purchase 'branchises' in Fort Lauderdale, Long Island, Harrisburg, Pa., and Boston by the end of 1992. This past year also saw the opening of 'branchise' operations in Portland and Norfolk, Va., and the opening of franchises in Topeka, Kans., and Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
For the past several years about 88 percent of the company's net service revenues have come from standard lawn care services, and 12 percent from add-on services such as tree & shrub care, lawn aeration, liming and seeding.
10 easy steps in gaining a friend and supporter in the legislature
These suggestions from two experienced lobbyists can guide you to a successful meeting with your lawmaker.
Here's a recipe for meeting with and seeking the cooperation of your elected representative.
It's a step-by-step recipe built from the comments of Ed Graves and Norm Goldenberg. The two men advised lawn professionals who had gathered in Washington D.C. prior to meetings with their U.S. Senators and Representatives. More than 100 lawn professionals participated in these 'Day on the Hill' events Feb. 23-24.
Graves is a senior consultant with Capitoline International Group, an issues management firm headquartered in Washington D.C. He's been lobbying on Capitol Hill the past eight years. Capitoline is employed the green industry to present its case in the Capital.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="35">When mounds were built or hillsides terraced, people were following the directives of spirits familiar with the best uses of those terrains.
Members of these bands and tribes tended wild foods such as plants, trees, vines, and berries. Every year, they burned over large sections of land to encourage fresh growth and unobstructed passage. Some tended seafoods and shores, building huge traps to impound live fish during low tides. Others gave their attention to herds of animals like mammoths and bison. In the North, people cared for a variety of animals who lived apart, such as moose. Humans and animals kept track of each other and lived off their kills. Both died, but with mutual respect.
In time, the specialized tending of plants developed into a more intensive tilling of the soil. New species were fostered, encouraged by the human hand. The spirits of particular species appeared in visions and in stories to explain what people needed to do. Sunflowers, amaranth, sunroot, and various local seeds began the process of specialization, while corn, beans, squash, manioc, and potatoes brought it to fruition.
All of these interactions were recorded in stories, each of them making clear that underneath the outer forms of these species there was an essential human form with arms, legs, and hands. This common, underlying humanity provided the basis for a system of beliefs shared across the diverse regions of the Americas.
Starting with the hunting and harvesting pattern of the migrants from Asia, a variety of adaptations were developed by Native Americans as they made the continent their own.
These 'cultural areas' have come to be defined in terms of their staple foods, housing styles, family arrangements, and, particularly, organizing rituals.
For Tenders, these regions, from north to south, are the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, California, and Intermontane.
Initially the last haven of the big game hunting tradition, interacting with enormous herds of bison, the Plains added farming as people settled in sheltered river valleys. With the reintroduction of the horse into the Americas by Spanish explorers, the Plains again emphasized hunting as it became populated by tribes from many other regions who came to live with the bison herds.
For the Tillers, the Southwest and East relied on farming, located at the frontiers of Mexican empires and religious movements. The economies of the valley of Mexico were fueled by trade goods and foodstuffs from the far-flung reaches of the Americas.
As an introduction to North America, each of these culture areas will be considered in turn to provide a context for appreciating the variety of stories throughout the continent.
ARCTIC
While much of the Arctic year consists of cold, white winters, there are a few months of long days and wet terrain. Almost unique on the earth, its Inuit (Eskimo) inhabitants stretch along a coastal zone and share a similar appearance, language, culture, and environment. This is not often the case because looks, language, and locale do not often coincide.
Tundra is the predominant landform, covered with ice fields all winter long. With little vegetation, hunting was the basis for life. Living on the land are musk-ox, caribou, fox, bear, and wolf, along with hare, marmots, and lemmings. Birds include ptarmigan, owl, plover, and seagull. Coastal rivers abound with fish, while the ocean has seals, whales, walrus, and sea lions.
Among the strongest Inuit taboos is the prohibition on mixing food from the sea with that from the land. Seal meat must be served separately from caribou. Winter houses were made of sod, stone, and timbers, while camping used tents and igloos.
Men and women had separate but equal responsibilities. Only married couples could survive. Men did the hunting, while women processed and cooked the food that fed the family. Men used kayaks, while the umiaks that moved families and household gear were associated with women. In Alaska, villages also had a separate men's house.
Usually, a house was occupied by a married couple and their children, together with a grandparent or other stray relative. A superb hunter or shaman might have more than one wife, but this was rare. Every house had a men's and a women's domain. Usually, the hard floor, used as a work surface, and the cold outer storage compartment belonged to men, while the fur-covered sleeping platform where the family spent the day and slept at night belonged to the women. The wife was especially equated with the soapstone lamp that lit and warmed the house, using oil rendered from animals killed by her husband.
During seasons of plenty, families might gather together to form kindreds or 'bands,' but these lasted only a few days until provision ran low. Leaders emerged only long enough to coordinate a particular task, such as net fishing or caribou hunting, and then submerged back into the crowd. While respected at all times, these men only led during situations when everyone needed to work together.
Community sentiments were expressed through a series of formal arrangements confirmed by the brief exchange of wives, good-natured insults, trade goods, names, and hunting partnerships. People conformed to public expectations through the application of subtle pressures expressed by means of ridicule, songs, and snide remarks. If there was no improvement, slugging contests might be tried, to be followed by ostracism, which was tantamount to death, or, in the worst of antisocial behavior, sanctioned murder.
Shamans were individuals, often men but sometimes women, who had special relationships with the supernatural. Often, certain families produced effective shamans generation after generation. Shamans cured both the illness of a person and the social ills of the community.
In the most dramatic of all cures, a shaman mystically journeyed to the ocean bottom to comb tangles out of the hair of Sedna, the woman in charge of all the animals. Taboo violations, abuse of animals, and ill-will by humans caused these tangles, and the shaman undertook to soothe Sedna so she would send the animals back to the hunters. He could only apply the comb to Sedna after someone had confessed to the breaches that caused these problems. With this personal confession came absolution for the entire community.
The major public ritual came at midwinter when people gathered to feast on stored and frozen foods, engage in games, and learn from their stories. In Alaskan men's houses, elaborate mask enactments were held.
SUBARCTIC
Evergreens such as pine, spruce, hemlock, and fir dominate the forests that cover this huge area. Along broad streams where moose thrive are willow, tamarack, birch, alder, and poplar. Other inhabitants are wolf, lynx, wolverine, bear, and caribou, along with the snowshoe rabbit, martin, and great horned owl. In high alpine meadows lives the pika, a rabbit relative who sun dries and stores grass twigs for winter feeding.
Regional staples include caribou, along with salmon in the west, wild rice in the Great Lakes, and moose and deer in the east.
Married couples formed the basic unit of every community. Men engaged in hunting, trapping, and tool making. Women did the cleaning and storing of fish and game, tended the household, and raised the children. Fishing provided an opportunity for men and women to work together, otherwise the genders worked apart. Families generally lived together under the influence of a parent or older sibling. Leadership depended on the task at hand, but the pool of respected elders who might serve as leader consisted of those individuals known for their hunting success, good character, sensible decisions, spirit allies, and generosity. Individuals communicated with their spirit partners via dreams, which provided help or warnings about upcoming activities. In all situations, elders led by example, never by command.
When trading posts and the fur trade came to the north, larger groupings into bands and tribes were encouraged. People along the same drainage often cooperated so that some could hunt for food while others trapped furs. It was difficult to do both and survive.
Only shamans had a recognized position in the community. He or she healed the sick, prayed for successful hunts, and directed puberty ceremonies for girls on the verge of womanhood. The health, number, and stability of their own families served as testimony for their abilities.
Tribes often traced the origin of the world to an Earth Diver. Among the Beaver or Dunne-za tribe, Muskrat retrieved the dirt that became the earth, while Swan had the more prophetic role of establishing the cultural rules and social conventions. Among his greatest contributions was stealing fire for humans. Throughout the western section, the Give Away was the communal ceremony, much like the Potlatch of the Northwest Coast. Families celebrated their own prestige and gained honor by being generous to others.
Among Great Lake tribes, the Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Lodge had the most distinctive rituals in the region. Emphasizing a belief in rebirth, initiates were symbolically killed and revived in order to achieve membership. After physical death, members were inducted into a ghost lodge.
In the west, the Shaking Tent provided a means for special shamans to hold a seance in which members of the audience outside the conical tent could ask questions and receive a reply from visiting spirits, particularly Turtle and Owl. As each spirit entered the tent, it shook violently, even though no one could make it budge before the start of the ritual.
NORTHWEST COAST
Rain and mountains characterize this region, thickly covered by evergreen forests and drained by many waterways. Red cedar was a particular gift of the Creator, providing the straight-grained planks that became the sides of houses, and the logs that were used to form molded canoes, bentwood boxes, and tools of local tribes. Travel was by water because the dense undergrowth of thickets and brambles made land routes few and far between, except along riverbanks.
Salmon was the staple, gathered by men and women during huge runs during the spring and summer months. Candlefish in the north and acorns in the south augmented the diet. Food grew in abundance and variety, taken by means of an elaborate technology. Men were concerned with animals and fish, while women devoted considerable time to plant foods, from the fresh greens of spring to the berries and nuts of autumn.
Winter towns included a row of big plank houses facing the beach, each house inhabited by related families. In the north, kinship was traced through women of various clans; in the central zone, it was traced through both parents, while in the south, the father's side was given more emphasis. Northern towns were also divided into halves, variously Orca and Raven or Eagle and Raven, which included different clans.
A 'house' was the dwelling place of three ranks of people. At the rear of the house, beside its sacred treasures of masks, costumes, and carvings, lived the nobles who owned the house. The eldest man was the leader of the household, but his wife (in the middle) or sister (in the north) provided links among the members. Along the sides were families of commoners who attached themselves to the house as kin or workers. Beside the door were slaves, taken in war or the children of such captives, whose lives belonged to their owner, along with all their labor.
Families kept their own fires along the sides of the house where they lived. In the middle, however, was a large hearth used to cook meals for the noble owners or for guests attending a celebration.
Houses owned stories, sacred histories, naming the people, places, and resources claimed by ancestors. Some of these house histories can be related to regional patterns in existence for over two thousand years. These involved the location of fishing, berrying, seaweeding, and hunting sites claimed by a specific house. Most stories in the Northwest, therefore, are owned and copyrighted by households. Only a few are phrased in such general terms that they were widely known and used to teach a moral.
The major event throughout this region was the Potlatch, an elaborate feast when a noble family dramatized their clan crests and treasures (via songs, dances, masks, effigies, and natural rarities) inside of a house filled with invited guests.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="36">
Ginsberg also claims jazz as an important model for his work and that of his contemporaries: "The whole point of modern poetry, dance, improvisation, performance, prose even, music, was the element of improvisation and spontaneity and open form, or even a fixed form improvisation on that form, like say you have a blues chorus and you have spontaneous improvisations, so in 'Howl' or 'Kaddish' or any of the poems that have a listeny style, 'who did this, who did that, who did this,' you start out striking a note, 'who,' and then you improvise, and that's the basic form of the list poem or, in anaphora, when you return to the margins in the same phrase, 'Or ever the golden bowl be broken or the silver cord be loosed or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,' as in the Bible or as in some of Walt Whitman's catalogues or in Christopher Smart's 'Rejoice in the Lamb' poem or the surrealist example of André Breton's free union, 'my wife with the platypus's egg, my wife with the eyes of this, my wife with that and that ...'
"It [jazz] was a model for the dadaists and it was a model for the surrealists and it was a model for Kerouac and a model for me and a model for almost everybody, in the sense that it was partly a model and partly a parallel experiment in free form. The development of poetics, as well as jazz and painting, seems to be chronologically parallel, which is to say you have fixed form, which then evolves toward more free form where you get loose from this specific repeated rhythm and improvise the rhythms even, where you don't have a fixed rhythm, as in bebop the drum became more of a soloist in it too. So you find that in painting, the early de Koonings have a motif or a theme, the woman or something like that, but it gets more and more open, less dependent on the theme, and in poetry, where you have less and less dependence on the original motifs and more and more John Ashberyesque improvisational free form flowing without even a subject matter, though I always kept a subject matter like the old funky blues myself. It was partly a parallel development within each discipline: painting, poetry, music. There were innovators who opened up the thing after Einstein, so to speak - you know, relative measure, as Williams said - which is in a sense something that happened with bebop: not the fixed measure but a relative measure. It was both inter-influential and parallel, also integrating."
If jazz opened up Ginsberg to "the awakening of Afric slave sensibility, of black sensibility, black funk as distinct from white, clean Doris Day ethic, and mind funk instead of well-combed, academic, button-down poetry," some jazz musicians, as Cruz comments, were also "interested in learning about all of it." Many, however, were not. After all, there were still plenty of clubs in black neighborhoods until the mid-sixties, and for lots of jazzmen, a job downtown - at Café Bohemia, the Village Vanguard, the Five Spot, or wherever - was just another gig. When I asked Walter Bishop, Jr., about his take on the lower Manhattan avant-garde twenty-five years ago, he replied that at the time he'd "had blinkers on," that for him it had been "bebop or bust" - in other words, that he'd had no artistic interests outside jazz.
Others, however, like Jackie McLean, were intensely curious about the worlds around them. McLean found his way into painting and (to a lesser degree) literature through his "friendship with guys who were doing this, for instance Harvey Cropper, who was the first painter that I knew. He was the one that introduced me to Bart<*_>o-acute<*/>k, to a lot of painters, the style of Cézanne. He introduced me to Hieronymus Bosch and that opened another world. That was the painter that had the greatest influence on me, Bosch, because my world was so horrible at that time that I could understand his paintings. I could look at the horror in some of his paintings and feel it when I was sick [from lack of narcotics], and then when I met Bob Thompson in 'sixty-one and we became very close, I learned a great deal about painting from Bob, being around him and talking about music and painting and what not. And of course Leroi Jones was around in those days, and we were all hanging in the Village together during that time."
McLean's period (1959-1963) with the Living Theatre also widened his interests. During these years he evolved from a promising journeyman bebopper, described by Steve Lacy in The Jazz Review in 1959 as having "the most rhythmic vitality and, so far, the least discipline" of major saxophonists, into the brilliant experimentalists we hear on records from the early sixties like Let Freedom Ring and Evolution. The intensity of McLean's experience in the Living Theatre comes through in his reminiscences about the troupe: "I thought they were great people. I thought they were people who were looking far into the future, for a better way. You had to love them to be with them, because the Living Theatre was like a big commune. Mostly everybody lived together, ate together, and were together working out each person's problems. I didn't live with them because I had my wife and kids, but I was part of it because certainly I lived with them when we left New York, when we went to Europe.
"It was weird because the day that we left, there was a big snowstorm in Manhattan and all the transportation was stopped. It was the biggest snowstorm I ever saw. The night before there was no snow. I wake up the next day, we're supposed to leave for Europe, and the phone rings. The guy says 'Jackie, this is Hacker.' So I said 'Yeah, I know. We're not going. We can't get there,' so he says 'No. An ambulance is coming to get you. We had to hire ambulances to pick everybody up.' I said 'Jesus Christ, man,' and I was so strung out, so sick, so my wife walked me to the hallway and we stood there with my bags and my horn and my children and this ambulance came and I went downstairs and put my bags in the ambulance and two arms came out and helped me in. We went and picked up the next guy and went to where the ship was, the Queen Elizabeth, and the whole cast was coming in in ambulances, a sick group coming in ambulances, but when I say 'sick,' I mean sick in terms of having a better understanding of what life is supposed to be about. They were very hip people, Judith and Julian and the whole crowd. They were humanists. They were all into every aspect of art and their idea of theater was brand-new in terms of how they wanted to present it."
Bohemianism, of course, is not all purity and innocence. Ever since the concept was invented, it has also meant pleasure, doing what feels good, and rebellion, surreptitious or open, against constraints of all sorts. Another aspect of jazz's attraction for Village types was its renegade connotations. Again in Emilio Cruz's words: "Jazz became the heretic art form. What we call 'gutbucket' has not to do so much with the guts or the bucket but it has to do with heresy. So what is unique in modern culture is the heretic form. Everything that is created, in truth, outside of the sciences which deal directly with a mechanistic culture, comes out of heresy, so that Allen Ginsberg was involved in a kind of heresy. Charlie Parker was also involved in a kind of heresy. There is the idea of violation, and that violation would attract those people that were searching for that heretic tradition."
At on extreme, such heresy and will to violation leads artists to flirt with or embrace the most perilous vices. While jazz was the banner of a kind of fresh and Edenic newness in the arts, it was also a path into the lower depths, as implied by Sukenick's comment on underground rebels of the 1950s: "Where are you in the mid-fifties? Are you fighting your way up the heart-burning ladder of career, or have you finally decided there's no place to go but down? Burned out into a dead-end underground. Into the shadow world emblemized above all by Bebop. Digging Bop is one of the main ways subterraneans can express their cultural radicalism."
Jazz's "shadow world" was the kingdom of the hipster, a stereotype partly mythical and partly based on reality, but far more cynical than the flower-child, love-and-peace 'hippies' of the late 1960s. A furtive, jive-talking sociopath, the hipster was supposedly alert only to his own whims and his craving for intense experiences. In 'The White Negro' (1957), which remains an intriguing and annoying essay, Norman Mailer wrote that "the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knifelike entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation - that postwar generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the twenties, the depression, and the war."
Mailer's piece drew heavy criticism from those in the jazz world who read it. They faulted it for presenting a series of caricatures. So it does - not necessarily much of a defect in an essay whose tone is so exaggerated and polemical anyway - but many of them fit, at least partly, the jazz scene at that time.
What Mailer perhaps did not emphasize enough was the centrality of drugs and particularly heroin among hipsters. As Leonard Feather noted in 'Jazz in American Society' (published as a foreword to his Encyclopedia of Jazz, 1960): "A serious effect of the use of drugs, quite apart from the medical, is its creation of a sub-society in which all the users are 'hip' and the rest of the world is 'square.'" "Hip talk" itself was partly a necessary camouflage for discussions of drugs, what Mailer called "the cunning of their language, the abstract ambiguous alternatives in which from the danger of their oppression they learned to speak ('Well now, man, like I'm looking for a cat to turn me on ....')."
The mysterious, hedonistic yet cooled-out universe of junkies in pursuit of what Balzac called "quiet, inner enjoyment," and their profound alienation from society as a whole - an alienation often compounded by race - were perceived as deeply attractive by some bohemians. Even as fire-breathing a revolutionary as Amiri Baraka, who has often railed against drugs, surrenders to their sinister glamour when describing (in The Autobiography of Leroi Jones) his use of heroin with painter Bob Thompson in the early sixties - this despite the fact that Thompson's very promising career was cut short by an overdose: "I walked all the way back to Avenue C, not to see Lucia, but to find a friend of mine, Bob Thompson, a black painter. Bob lived in a huge loft on Clinton Street. He was there with a couple of bohemians, getting high, shooting heroin. I didn't know he used it, but he was sending one of the bohemians out to cop. I dropped some money in the mitt and meanwhile used some of Bob's 'smack' and we took off together, down, down, and right here! Bob and I were a number after that."
There can be no doubt that heroin use was widespread among jazz musicians. As Leonard Feather pointed out in 'Jazz in American Society': "Of the 23 individuals listed as winners in a recent Down Beat poll, at least nine were known narcotics users, five of them with a record of arrest and conviction.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="37">Thus, while citizens are busy pursuing their private desires, the sovereign is doubly a natural person. He acts as himself, as well as for others, and he acts without a framework of constraints.
The legal tradition of artificial persons is guided by a certain gestalt, the linked figures of master and slave or servant, respectively models of power and powerlessness. But how can such a model apply to modern relations between fully competent and equal humans, professionals and their clients, government and the citizens? How does it harmonize with our moral tradition? The moral difficulties of the slave-and-master relation are plain enough, but the interpretation of these difficulties in modern descendents of that relation is not similarly clear. They need to be ferreted out and addressed.
TWO
Who Is Responsible?
In virtue of my membership in some larger whole or wholes, how can I reasonably be expected to take responsibility for what these bodies do in circumstances where I could have no conceivable influence on their actions?
W. H. Walsh, 'Pride, Shame, and Responsibility'
IN THEIR VARIOUS forms, artificial persons make decisions that commit other people. At the same time, the power to speak and act for another makes responsiblity problematic, for common sense wants to ask who really did what was done, who is responsible. The answer is difficult to find.
I
Lawyers provide a clear case of the difficulty, and from both within and without the legal profession is the focus of much moral criticism. The reason is this: a lawyer's position requires him to act, but to act not as himself or for his own purposes and sometimes not on his own judgement. The cause he pleads - even eloquently and passionately - and may appear to endorse is not his, and his expressions of indignation and sympathy, his praise of his client and expressions of scorn for the opposing client are also not personally his. Thus, to the problems that apply to other artificial persons is added a large component of dissembling.
It is clear why responsibility for actions that a lawyer undertakes for a client should be ambiguous. It is not the client who does what is done, but the lawyer. However, since the lawyer acts on behalf of and in the name of his client, the action isn't strictly his either. The responsibility must then be the client's; he is the one who brings suit, who wins or loses, and who may pay the judgment or even go to jail. We go back and forth - the lawyer acts for the client, not himself; the client is detached but stands to benefit or suffer.
A lawyer's immunity from criticism is defended in this way by one writer:
We must distinguish between what lawyers do and what clients do through their lawyers .... The content of a lawyer's action, focused by intentions solely on the legal lever-pulling, may be entirely unproblematic, morally speaking, although what the client seeks to do through the actions of the lawyer may well be morally problematic. And ... since all that one must take responsibility for are one's own actions and their (intended) consequences, there is no bad faith in refusing to face aspects of professional activity that are not properly attributable to one's own agency.
On this account the lawyer simply performs suitable legal moves; she isn't responsible for the ends that guide them. She serves as an instrument of someone else, and her standards are those of competent lawyers - of knowing how to use legal rules and practices for a client's advantage. She files papers, prepares forms, sends letters to appropriate officers; she gives persuasive argument in or out of court and in general displays the knowledge and skills she is trained in. At the conclusion she is paid.
But then the question arises: what difference is there between a lawyer and a county clerk whose job is to fill out forms, say, or a bookkeeper who balances books, or a pharmacist who fills a prescription? The clerk may assist in a dispossession, the books may contain evidence of mismanagement, the prescription may cause harm. Like lawyers, they do as they are trained and fill their positions; but unlike lawyers, they don't suffer moral criticism. If they aren't responsible for the consequences they bring about in their work, why should lawyers be?
Indeed, according to the American Bar Association code, a lawyer is not culpable in her pursuit of a client's interests so long as no law is violated. She is no more responsible for her client's purposes than a pharmacist is for a physician's diagnosis. One hesitates to accept this argument, because lawyers generally know quite well what is behind the actions they are involved in; they are unlike most clerks and pharmacists, who may not be privy to the whole purpose and plan, who see only their detached contributions. Thus the lawyer's defense would be strenghtened if it had the additional stipulation that she doesn't know what the likely effects of her actions will be. Then her excuse would fairly resemble that of clerks, accountants, and pharmacists: we only do what we are told. A lawyer would say, "I had no idea why I was bringing this suit or what would happen as a result." Or if she were incompetent or deceived by her client, we would sympathize with her: "Poor person, she was used" - without her understanding or consent.
However, the lawyer's nonaccountability can't depend on ignorance or incompetence; lawyers take pride in knowing how they can be most helpful, claim to know better than clients how to achieve their ends, and are pleased to lend their talents and skills to be maximally helpful. Single-mindedness in helping the client is a professional virtue, the English jurist Lord Brougham writes: "an advocate, in the discharge of his duty, knows but one person in all the world and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, among them, to himself, is his first and only duty."
II
Moral questions about the legal profession - and their answers - are often cast in terms of roles. Thus Richard Wasserstrom, himself a lawyer, is concerned with how an action done in a professional role can be "morally different from what it would have been if the role were not in the picture." "Appeal to the ... role becomes a central part of the reasoning about the right thing to do"; this is shown by the way certain roles justify partiality. Thus a parent should be partial to the interests of her child, simply because she is a parent; the general should be more concerned about his own troops than the enemy's; and "it is thought to be ... permissible and probably obligatory, once the lawyer has entered into the role of ... lawyer for some client, ... to do any number of things that otherwise might very well be morally criticizable." But this power of roles makes Wasserstrom uneasy: "the problem ... is that behavior that is potentially criticizable on moral grounds is blocked from such criticism by an appeal to the existence to the actor's role .... Appeal to the ... role seems to distort, limit, or make irrelevant what might otherwise be morally relevant."
Appealing to roles is attractive, Wasserstrom thinks, "because roles provide a degree of moral simplification that makes it much easier to determine what one ought to do .... Psychologically, roles give a great power and security because they make moral life much simpler, less complex, and less vexing than it would be without them." The demands of a role answer questions - which might otherwise be difficult - about what to do in given circumstances.
If one views the moral hazards of a professional in a framework of roles, it is understandable why those hazards are often addressed in terms of professional codes of ethics. The assumption is that if the code is tightened and the professional community made more aware, ethical problems can be corrected without altering the overall shape of the profession. Of course, by suggesting that any moral problem can be answered by adjustments in role requirements, this approach works against radical change, against a deeper examination of what morality means. The shape of the profession is allowed to remain intact. Col. Anthony Hartle says of the military, for example, that "examining professional ethics in terms of role differentiation seems to be a reasonable way to reveal the moral structure within which military professionals work." He finds nothing problematic about the idea of a code that "consists of a set of rules and standards governing the conduct of members of a professional group." The military code determines what they should do as members of the military.
Concerned with the gravity of many military decisions, Gen. Maxwell Taylor noted the absence of an explicit ethical code for the military and proposed that each officer should work one out on his own. He might begin with the idea that "an ideal officer is one who can be relied upon to carry out all assigned tasks and missions and, in doing so, get the most from his available resources with minimum loss and waste." Such an ideal person "would be deeply convinced of the importance of the military profession and its role, ... [and] view himself as a descendant of the warrior, who, in company with the king, the priest, and the judge," has helped civilization survive. In the end Taylor believes that professional requirements must condition the moral ones and not the reverse.
This is, of course, the central issue. Richard de George argues the other side, promoting the preeminence of moral understanding. The point of an ethical code is to raise the profession's standard above what is normally demanded: "Any profession ... is appropriately given respect and autonomy only if it lives up to a higher moral code than is applicable to all." In particular this applies to the military, because "society places in [its hands] a monopoly on the use of the major instruments of force." Society's trust is consequently "enormous, and the corresponding burden on those who assume the trust and have custody of the monopoly of force is likewise enormous," he argues. But in view of that trust, there should be a commitment to peacefulness and a cultivation of restraint in the use of that force. This brings out the potential for conflict between a code and the basic military duties to obey and respect authority, duties of one piece in a large organizational machine.
A professional code, then, is a way of capturing the sum of duties of someone in that profession. But the question of where morality fits in remains. Gerald Postema wonders "whether, given the need for ... a [professional] code, it is possible to preserve one's sense of responsibility" when professional responsibilities are detached from ordinary moral ones. His answer is no: "I contend that a sense of responsibility and sound practical judgment depend not only on the quality of one's professional training, but also on one's ability to draw on the resources of a broader moral experience ... [which] in turn, requires that one seek to achieve a fully integrated moral personality." Unless a person integrates his professional and nonprofessional life, he cannot fully satisfy his professional role, cannot be a good lawyer, Postema argues. This means that a code's claim to morally simplify a person's life is spurious.
Using the code as a guide or formula for making moral decisions may be simplifying, when as Wasserstrom says, roles and their obligations are substituted for decisions that demand the balancing of competing moral claims, a balancing that may be complex and difficult. Role obligations and role moralities may thus contribute to simplicity in decision making if they exclude ordinary moral considerations - but in that case they add to the moral obscurity and complexity of whatever is done. The question is whether we should grant them this power to exclude.
III
Emile Durkheim argues, in support of role-defined moralities, that they are inevitable and morally beneficial. He uses the term 'role' broadly.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="38">This, in itself, is a radical departure for winegrowing - more so even than for wheat, corn, or cattle.
The difference with winegrowing is that it is a long-term venture. Expensive to establish, vineyards traditionally are not easily tinkered with. Given the expense, grape growers traditionally have been unsympathetic to change. This is especially so with fine wine vineyards, as their tradition is more than simply monetary. With fine wine, the challenge is to push grapevines to their limits: How cool or warm before it's too cool or warm? How dry before it's too dry? How extreme a soil type? All this is characterized as 'stress.'
Until California's fine wine ambition, stress was achieved largely from naturally occurring conditions. In Europe, grapevines were planted in a nonmethodical fashion along a wave-length of locations, as if tuning a radio until you lock onto the strongest signal. The 'signal' is not just flavor. It also includes grape yields, disease resistance, winter hardiness, summer heat, drought resistance, and soil suitability. Hindsight makes the process seem deliberate, but much of it was haphazard. Over the centuries, the tradition congealed into articles of hard faith.
This approach was challenged when California bulk wine-growing began anew immediately upon Repeal in 1933. What became the transforming vision of California winegrowing - agriculture shaped by the machine - arrived through the agency of California's preeminent agricultural college, the University of California at Davis. Located in a small farming town about twenty miles east of Sacramento, the state capital, UC Davis expanded on the efforts of the state's first college of agriculture, established in 1868 at UC Berkeley. There, a viticulture and enology department was created in 1880. Only in the late 1930s did the program gradually drift from the Berkeley campus to Davis, where the wine and grape-growing program is known as the School of Viticulture and Enology.
This new vision of winegrowing was itself an outgrowth of a larger social and academic movement. Agricultural colleges everywhere were locked in a battle with farmers. Professors at agricultural colleges were dedicated to applying to agriculture the same principles of 'systemization' that were the idée fixe of America from the 1870s to the 1920s. The idea of systemization was applied to virtually all business and social endeavors. Farming was no exception. "These systematic agriculturists ... assumed that farming was composed of numerous discrete operations and that success was the consequence of rationally conceived and pursued methods."
The shock troops of this systemization movement were agricultural colleges. They, in turn, were subsidized by those businesses with an interest in the benefits to be reaped by large-scale farming performed with mechanical reliability and predictability. As Marcus and Segal point out, "The bestowal of collegial sanction often led others to adopt the practices, which tended to standardize farm operations. Application of systematic farming techniques only sometimes increased farm profits and reduced drudgery, but its partisans always identified themselves as progressive." When bulk winegrowing returned to California's vast, flat, irrigated Central Valley, the systemization of American agriculture and the dominance of agricultural colleges were already in place. Of all the major crops in America, wine grapes were one of the last to be addressed.
For their part, agricultural college professors had a point, nowhere more so than with winegrowing. Precisely because of its ancient heritage, winegrowing practice in Europe changed grudgingly, if at all. Although it was exclusively Europeans who first established that yeasts caused fermentation (Louis Pasteur in 1859); that bacteria in the presence of oxygen caused wine to turn to vinegar (Louis Pasteur in 1866); and that enzymes were the agency by which the fermentation was achieved (Eduard and Hans Buchner in 1897), European wine-growing practices were mostly unmoved by the revelations.
In this, America had its one advantage. Because of Prohibition, no ingrained tradition presented resistance. The UC Davis enology and viticulture professors could fashion a new 'scientific' vision of how and where grapes should be grown and, even more importantly, how wine should be made. Their influence was assured not only because of the ignorance caused by the wholesale collapse of winegrowing during the thirteen years of Prohibition, but also because by then the authority of agricultural colleges was unchallenged.
The absence of a fine wine ambition was a benefit to UC Davis. Otherwise, the pull of European tradition would have weakened the sway of the college professors. (Which is precisely what occurred in the 1980s). Where such as Leland Stanford looked automatically - and longingly - to Europe, those concerned with bulk wines felt no such pull. Their interest was proper farm management in order to extract the highest yields and the healthiest vines. Stress, so called, was not the issue, as the finer gradations of quality that emerge from it are of no concern to bulk wine production.
Just how basic winegrowing in California was after Prohibition is revealed by the enormous influence of the notion of 'heat summations' or 'degree-days,' a vision of the land propounded by UC Davis. The idea of degree-days for crops is not new. But its application to grapevines, although discussed in Europe as far back as 1872, was largely academic. By then Europe was covered in vines and mired tradition.
The degree-day concept is straightforward. With grapevines, growth proceeds only when the temperature achieves 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Every degree above that is counted as one degree-day. When these degree days are totaled over the several-monthseveral-months span between the beginning of vine growth and the harvest of ripe grapes, the total is called temperature summation. At a glance, one can establish the coolness or warmth of a site or district.
Building on the work of Frederic T. Bioletti, the influential director of the UC Berkeley wine science program, viticulturist A. J. Winkler embarked upon a statewide investigation of temperature summations in the 1920s. Subsequently, his student and later distinguished colleague Maynard A. Amerine, in collaboration with Winkler, categorized these heat summations in brackets labeled Regions I (the coolest) through V (the hottest). To this day, California winegrowers still talk about their vinyards as being "high Region I" or "low Region II." This simple but useful scale was made more graphic, literally, by a map of the entire state showing various pools of temperature, each categorized as Region I through V. It was first published in 1944.
For the first time, vineyards could be established not by unthinking tradition or gut instinct, but by scientific methodology. It was rational; it was systematic. And it provided a basis upon which to proceed to revitalize an industry. Above all, it became the basis of an American vision of winegrowing: qualitative; methodical; verifiable. For bulk winegrowing, this vision was sufficient. That the university never subsequently offered a methodology of greater nuance speaks volumes: The bulk winegrowers who funded its research had no need for one.
For the fine wine ambition, degree-days are crude. They measure only heat and that only in the aggregate. What if a site is hot in the morning but cooled rapidly by fogs or winds in the afternoon? Numerically, the site may be considered warm or cool, depending upon the degree-day total for the growing season. But it tells us little about how the grapevine reacts to the swings in temperature. Or about sunlight intensity. Or about the effects of wind, rain, humidity, or night temperatures on the grapevine. The insight extends only to how well and regularly a grape variety is likely to ripen its grapes properly. What the ripe grape delivers in terms of the flavor shadings that distinguish fine wine from ordinary is another matter entirely.
It should be noted that vineyard plantings in California, to this day, are not entirely rational, despite the veracity of the degree-day vision, however limited. Rationality has to compete with the marketplace. With Chardonnay, the most lucrative grape variety, the competition is almost one-sided. As late as 1988, there still were 2,164 acres of Chardonnay planted in grossly too warm Regions IV and V, according to the California Agricultural Statistics Service. More telling yet is that 10,380 acres are planted in Region III sites, which is warm for Chardonnay. The lure of Chardonnay in the market-place clearly is too enticing to be resisted. Nevertheless, the influence of degree-day vision is strongly felt. Three quarters of California's Chardonnay vineyards are planted in areas classed as Region I (3,077 acres) or Region II (26,249 acres).
The surprisingly small acreage of Region I sites is revealing: What California considers as cool is relative - and limited. Region I is 2,500 degree-days or fewer. Burgundy's C<*_>o-circ<*/>te d'Or registers 2,120 degree-days, which would put it just barely above a hypothetical Region 0. (Each climate region is delineated by five hundred degree-days.)
That the UC Davis scale effectively begins at 2,500 degree-days tells us not only how warm are many of California's traditional vineyard areas, but also the limitation of the vision that places so much emphasis on climatic zones. Precisely because grapes do not ripen regularly or easily in cool sites, to identify such sites was to legitimize them. This was not possible, as those sites can never achieve the machine regularity fundamental to scientific winegrowing.
This commitment to machine regularity is further evidenced by the vast labor of Harold P. Olmo, a UC Davis professor with a Ph.D. in genetics who for decades specialized in creating new wine-grape hybrids. Nearly all of his twenty-five hybrid varieties were invented to deliver decent acidity and flavors while baking in hot Region V climates. By 1989 only two Olmo-created high-yielding hybrid varieties occupied significant acreage in the San Joaquin Valley: Ruby Cabernet (7,037 acres) and Rubired (7,030 acres). Nearly all of the others have fallen into disuse, partly because of a decline in bulk wine consumption and partly because of an embrace of traditional 'classic' varieties such as Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.
For the machine in the mind, it is a far better thing to add acidity to a 'flabby' wine grown in a too-warm location - or to laboriously 'design' a new grape variety - than to plant a grape variety in place where it might not ripen fully every vintage. More than economics is at work here. Equally powerful is a determined interventionism. The offense of European winegrowing was its passivity. The machine in the mind offers a more muscular approach.
A special contempt is reserved by the machine in the mind for the influence of soil on wine. The importance of soil for fine wine has been so abundantly demonstrated by the wines themselves in Europe, most convincingly in France, that it would seem evident that soil plays a significant role. One need only taste a great Meursault or Chablis to be convinced. But soil, more than even climate itself, cannot easily be altered. The only practical intervention is of the most superficial sort, such as fertilizer or topsoil. (Even here, the machine in the mind is tempting. Randall Graham of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz decided that Burgundy's limestone-rich soil was indispensable for growing Pinot Noir. So he 'planted' the soil of his vineyard with ten tons of limestone per acre.)
Reproducible 'scientific' verification of the role of soil is unavailable: Soil is far more ambiguous than neatly quantified temperature summations. That its role cannot be pinpointed, let alone measured, wrenches the machine in the mind. The degree of discomfort, even scorn, is displayed by Maynard A. Amerine and Philip M. Wagner in their chapter 'The Vine and Its Environments,' in The University of California/Sotheby Book of California Wine (1984):
Many popular commentators and almost all vineyard owners attribute some magical property to vineyard soils. As indicated in the preceding sections, there are differences between regions and localized areas (exposures, valley floor versus hillsides, and so forth). Some of these differences are due to variations in temperature, some perhaps also to moisture (and thus related to soil temperature), soil microorganisms, and vineyard and ecological practices. How many of the differences are due purely to soil factors has not, to our satisfaction, been scientifically determined.
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<p>Private Life and Public Scandal: The 'New Moralism' Then and Now
To their credit, most Americans have not been willing to cut the public world entirely loose from moral or ethical surveillance or to evaluative public figures on their feelings or motivations instead of on their behavior. But when people abandon hope of judging public figures by stringent political ethics, periodic personal exposés become the main weapon for controlling their ambitions and actions. In the 188Os and 189Os, the removal of moral intensity from public relations and its concentration on private ones made family relations a tempting target for public disclosure. As public standards and political vocabulary faded, debate by scandal and exposé became the rule.
The preacher Henry Ward Beecher was one of the first to discover the threat that hangs over those who encourage a concentration of public debate on private values. To demonstrate Beecher's hypocrisy in denouncing her 'free love' movement, social reformer Victoria Woodhull leaked to the newspapers his alleged affair with one of his parishioners; the resultant scandal was at least as widely debated as the Jim Bakker affair in the 1980s and the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991. American politics has been wracked by periodic scandals and moral crusades for 200 years, but they were especially virulent in the late nineteenth century, when private morals were first elevated above public virtues in mainstream ideology. Their reemergence in the last decade has similar origins, following the decline of 1960s and early 1970s social and political debate.
lt is in this context that we must place America's 'New Moralism.' Recently, we have seen a series of celebrated scandals over issues that were once considered part of private life. Public figures have been dethroned by revelations about their personal relationships; private nonentities have become public figures by making such revelations. Politicians who courted our votes by touting their home lives rather than their ides now complain that their families are being invaded by the press, even though their campaign managers regularly leak information to the press about their opponents' personal lives. The confusion has reached the point that some enterprising 'sinners' have been offered to reform their private lives in return for public office: The late Senator John Tower promised to quit drinking if confirmed as Secretary of Defense; William Bennett declared he would stop smoking if given a chance to run the nation's health agency. Perhaps Gary Hart's campaign staff should have hinted that if he was put in the Oval Office, he could be kept out of a lot of bedrooms.
There has been much debate over how to evaluate the new scrutiny of public figures' personal lives. Does it represent a break-down of the double standard that once allowed the wealthy in general and men in particular to run roughshod over the lives of others, exploiting and discarding women with impunity? Does it signal a growing concern about the public consequences of private acts, a more stringent insistence on ethical behavior? Or have we become, as political analyst Harrison Rainie charges, a "culture of hackers," breaking into people's personal lives and reprogramming their reputations? Is this a new McCarthyism, resting on pillory by innuendo? Are the women who recount their sexual misuse in the popular press exposing male hypocrisy, or are they a new kind of gold digger? Are we forging new definitions of public accountability or destroying important distinctions between people's private peccadilloes and their public contributions?
Speaking as a historian, l would have to answer "all of the above." On the one hand, we should beware of romaticizing older divisions between public and private life. Too often, Enlightenment thinkers established 'civilized' limits to public debates by defining social inequities as subordinate private matters. Early republican politics, for example, rested on the neat assumption that extermination of Native Americans and enslavement of blacks were prepolitical issues, almost domestic matters. Southerners declared that it was as "impertinent" to criticize slavery as to tell a white man how to treat his wife and children. Native Americans were often referred to as children protected by the 'Great White Father' in Washington. Women's claims for justice were dismissed as family spats.
Some of the 'private' scandals we see today represent a challenge to such inequities. Power, money, and sex are bound up in our society in very unsavory ways. To leave these connections unexamined is to ignore the hidden mechanisms reproducing injustice in a nominally democratic society. Isn't it important to know how a public figure uses power at home, how likely his or her judgment is to be warped by personal appetites? Should the compulsive, cold-blooded womanizing of President Kennedy really have gone unreported, especially since some of it apparently linked him to prominent figures in organized crime? Is it totally irrelevant that the Reagans apparently did not find it as easy to "just say no" as their public policies assumed it would be for the poor?
Clearly, many private issues have a political component, while public issues spill over into private life. That is what makes it so problematic, as l will show in chapter 6, to make hard-and-fast generalizations about privacy and state intervention. Private family relations take place against a background of rules set by public authorities; public inequities of gender, race, or class get transferred into private relations; and family norms affect the ability of individuals to exercise public rights. There is, for example, much more public tolerance of violence within the family than there is of violence among strangers - and this toleration can deprave women or children of their civil rights, or even of life itself.
Too often, however, the scrutiny of private life threatens to swamp all other issues. Precisely because sex and power are bound so tightly in American society, which is a<tf>social problem, almost all public figures are vulnerable to at least the appearance of sexual impropriety, so that the personal attacks become frighteningly arbitrary. Distinctions fade between appearance and reality, between single transgressions and patterns of deceit. The lines between victim and perpetrator also blur. When Jessica Hahn and Donna Rice pose for men's magazines or for skintight jeans ads and women institute million-dollar paternity suits over one-night stands, it obscures the legitimate reasons for exposing cases of male sexual coercion or irresponsibility: Most sexually abused women have such low self-esteem that they cannot promote themselves so assiduously; most unwed mothers get no support payments from the fathers of their children.
Preoccupation with personal morality and sex reveals above all that, like our predecessors in the first Gilded Age, we lack a clear set of public ethics and political standards of behavior. We focus on private vices because we cannot agree on the definition of a public vice. The confirmation hearings for John Tower generated far more discussion about his drinking and womanizing than about his attitudes toward peace and war or his apparent conflicts of interest in the military-industrial complex. In the Oliver North case, his evasion of constitutional checks and balances was totally overshadowed by the suspicion that one of his improper expenditures was for silk stockings for his secretary, Fawn Hall. When committee members discovered he had only bought tights for his daughter, they were almost completely routed. In the Clarence Thomas hearings, the real debate came over Anita Hill's testimony, not over his qualifications, his oath that he had never discussedRoe v. Wade, or his misrepresentation of his sister's welfare experience.
ln one sense, then, the new moralism about sex and family represents the bankruptcy of our political life. Public policy failures take second place to family irregularities; a political issue such as the status of women is reduced to courtroom brawls over palimony; rampant social ills such as childhood poverty receive far less attention than tales about prominent men who videotape young girls in sex acts.
The answer to the new moralism, however, is not the old hypocrisy. In the 186Os and again in the 196Os, people suggested alternative definitions of the public good that included the personal issues facing women, minorities, working people, and the poor. Toward the end of each period, though, the old narrow definition of the public splintered, but no new political institutions, values, or processes were developed to reconnect its fragments. Instead, dominant opinion ceased to claim that any overarching standards for public life could be agreed on. Questions of morality were displaced onto the private sphere.
The conflation of public morality with private values leads to inevitable oscillations between a repressive, divisive moralism and, in reaction, an extreme, even perverse, 'tolerance' of all private behavior, whatever its social consequences. Most of us, unhappy with either extreme, grasp our family values even more tightly, as the one anchor that can protect us from being swept away by the tides of repression and permissiveness. But an anchor does not work in the open ocean. The same factors that erode public life and political standards tend, in the long run, to set personal life and family values adrift. While the antisocial tendencies of Gilded Age privatism were not immediately apparent within the family circle, the collapse of public life in that period paved the way for many recurrent strains in twentieth-century families.
The Fragility of the Private Family
Without the ballast provided by the public sphere, the family began its long slide toward subjectivism, feeding the very individualism that family morality was supposed to counter. It is not that the spread of individualism threatens to destroy the traditional privacy and intensity of family life, as is sometimes claimed; as we have seen, familial privacy and intensity were in many wayscreated by the spread of individualism. But it is certainly true that individualism constantly undermines the very family life that it originally fostered.
When obligation and reciprocity were banished from public life and confined to the nuclear family, their continued existence became very problematic, especially once the same-sex networks and community associations that formerly diffused the tensions of family life began to disintegrate. The effective adult, at work and in public, is independent, individualistic, rational, and calculative. The effective family member, by contrast, shares, cooperates, sacrifices, and acts nonrationally. The character traits that keep families together are associated in all other arenas of life with immaturity and nonrationality; family interdependence is now the only thing that stands in the way of 'self-actualization.' At the same time, the family becomes over-burdened with social expectations as well as psychological and moral ones. Ifthe family would just do its job, we wouldn't need welfare, school reform, or prisons. And if my family would just do its job, l would be perfectly happy. The obvious next step, of course, is that if l amnot perfectly happy, it's my family's fault.
Figuring out whether a family is doing its job, however, becomes progressively more difficult when external moral and political reference points for judging the quality of love or parenting disappear. "The world of intimate feeling," remarks Richard Sennett, "loses any boundaries" - and therefore loses any core. Where is the center of infinity? As education professor Joseph Featherstone argues:"A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely."
The triumph of private family values discourages us from meeting our emotional needs through mutual aid associations, political and social action groups, or other forms of public life that used to be as important in people's identity as love or family. So we must rely on love. If we fail to attain love, or even if we do attain it and still feel incomplete, we blame our parents for not having helped us outgrow such neediness - as though it is only 'the child within' who could be needy. We may postpone confronting the shallowness of our inner life by finding one special person to love us or for us to love, yet when the love disappears, and our needs, inevitably, do not, we feel betrayed. We seek revenge, or at least contractual relief, demanding public compensation for the failure of private life to meet our social needs.
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INTRODUCTION
The Black Knights of Baseball
Before Jackie Robinson hit his first crisp line-drive single into the closely cut green grass in the outfield of Brooklyn's Ebbets Field in April of 1947, the game of baseball was black and white. No black ballplayer had ever played in the American or National Leagues in the game that had become the national pastime. Baseball was a game as segregated as movie theaters in the north, bus depots in the midwest, restaurants in the west, and rest rooms in the south.
Blacks couldn't play baseball in the major leagues before 1947, but they played the game nonetheless. They played it on sandlots, in city parks, at fairgrounds, and in mill yards. They played on factory teams and in summer leagues. They played in South Carolina and they played in New York. They played in Santo Domingo and Mexico City. The very best of them played in the Negro National League, the Negro American League, and the Eastern Colored League, the 'major leagues' of black America.
The teams of the Negro National, Negro American, and Eastern Colored Leagues played the same dazzling baseball as the teams of the white major leagues, with enormously talented stars who were just as good - giants of the game, now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Ray Dandridge, Monte Irvin, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Pop Lloyd, Martin Dihigo, and Oscar Charleston. Their teams had wonderful names like the Monarchs, Grays, Eagles, Royal Giants, Crawfords, Barons, and Buckeyes. They played their games against each other in major-league ballparks and with major-league hustle. Then they piled into beat-up old buses with peeling paint, poor ventilation, uncomfortable seats, and bad engines, and barnstormed all over America to play some more. The Negro League stars took on both lower-level black professional teams and white semipro teams, playing clubs in the United States, South America, Central America, and Canada. Some even went to Japan and played all comers there. They also challenged and played white major-league teams like the Philadelphia Phillies, the Detroit Tigers, and all-star teams led by the likes of Dizzy Dean, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig. And often they beat them.
The Negro League stars never gained the fame and glory of the white ballplayers in those years from the late nineteenth century until 1947, when the color line and Jim Crow laws kept them out of the white major leagues. None of them made the cover of Life, did ads for Wheaties, or rode in parades with governors. They didn't for one reason and one reason only: they were black.
During the glory days of the Negro Leagues, from 1920 to 1946, America was two countries - one white and one black - and they didn't mesh. The two nations had been stumbling, politically, socially, and culturally, toward a single America since the Civil War had freed the slaves more than fifty years before. But they weren't there yet.
Nothing symbolized the inability of the white and black countries to merge more than major-league baseball. American baseball was never just a game, it was the passion of the nation, and as long as it was segregated the entire nation would be. Generations of black ballplayers tried to end that segregation, but after knocking at the major-league doors and being ignored, they played baseball where they could.
They were the forgotten men, at least by white culture. Mainstream white newspapers ignored them, refusing to cover their games and often referring to them as 'coloreds' to denigrate them, so black newspapers covered them with glory. White sports magazines ignored them, too, so black sports magazines were started and the Negro League stars graced their covers. Black teams couldn't play in the white World Series, so in 1924 they started the black World Series. Likewise, since they weren't invited to the white All-Star Game, in 1933 they started their own.
It never mattered what was written about the Negro League stars, because everybody knew who they were and how very good they were. More than 46,000 fans, black and white, filled Yankee Stadium in 1946 to see Satchel Paige duel Bob Feller in a black-versus-white all-star game. One of the Negro League East-West All-Star Games in Chicago's Comiskey Park drew 51,000 fans. White factory workers and store merchants all over the United States could chip in a dollar or two so that the local white semipro team in some little hamlet could bring in the legendary Pittsburgh Crawfords for a Sunday afternoon game to see how the locals would fare against these heralded black stars. Home-run-bashing catcher Josh Gibson, 'the Black Babe Ruth,' was mobbed by autograph-seeking kids, black and white, wherever he went.
The white major-league stars themselves played against them over the years more than four hundred times in the off-season and respected their skills. Back in 1910, the Detroit Tigers toured Cuba, playing against a Cuban team that included Home Run Johnson, imported with others from a black team in Brooklyn. Johnson out-hit the Tigers' Ty Cobb on the tour, .500 to .371. In 1915, three weeks after the Philadelphia Phillies won the National League pennant, the black Lincoln Giants beat them, 1-0. In 1934 Satchel Paige's All-Stars beat the Dizzy Dean All-Stars four times in a six-game series. Dean himself told everyone that Satchel Paige was the greatest pitcher in the country.
Some of the players who began their careers in the Negro Leagues moved into the majors when the color line was broken in 1947 and became instant all-stars. In addition to Hall-of-Famer Jackie Robinson, they included Hank Aaron (who broke Ruth's career home-run record) Monte Irvin, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby, Ernie Banks, Roy Campanella, Joe Black, and a skinny kid from Birmingham, Alabama, named Willie Mays. They and the Negro Leaguers before them paved the way for all the other blacks and Latinos who played the game in the 1960s and 1970s and who play the game today. All those men who put up with sixty years of segregation and bigotry opened the door for Doc Gooden, Cecil Fielder, Rickey Henderson, Frank Thomas, Reggie Jackson, Kirby Puckett, Kevin Mitchell, Barry Bonds, Terry Pendleton, Tony Gwynn, and Daryll Strawberry.
They were folk heroes who for a century were forbidden to play what was a white man's game. But most were never bitter about it, then or now. "That's just the way it was," shrugged the Philadelphia Stars' Gene Benson. He and his colleagues never filed a lawsuit, demonstrated, called a press conference, or wrote letters to their congressmen: America during those years wouldn't have heard. Instead they played baseball, and on the most extraordinary level.
Paige, Gibson, Bell, Robinson, and hundreds of others traveled from city to city, town to town, county fair to county fair, to play the game they loved for millions of people who loved it too. They played in front of white people and black people, brown people, Japanese, Chinese, rich, poor, educated, and illiterate. They were the black knights of baseball, heroes who kept jousting against racism, and, after all those generations, finally won, making baseball at long last the national pastime for a whole nation.
CHAPTER ONE
Diamonds in the Rough
Long straight lines of large square tents were stretched out as far as the eye could see, thousands of them, a city of white tents. It was a between-battles camp of the Union Army in Virginia during the hot summer of 1864, and soldiers were walking slowly to the end of the tents toward a large grassy field. There, hundreds of black and white soldiers and three generals on horseback were watching two of the camp's baseball teams battle each other. The diamond consisted of a hastily hewn square with large boards for bases and a batter's box roughed out with rifle butts. The day was bright and peaceful - no rumbling of deadly cannon in the distance, no fatal clatter of rifle shots, no terrifiying yells of Confederate troops. Nothing but the sound of a bat hitting a ball and the roar of a weary and battle-hardened crowd cheering at a baseball game under the gentle Virginia sun.
Despite the racism and segregation that came to be associated with baseball in America, ironically it was during the Civil War, fought in part to free blacks from slavery, that blacks were first introduced to baseball. Over 180,000 freed slaves fought for the north in the war, and the two chief forms of recreation in army camps during these years were boxing and baseball. Those who held their health in high esteem played baseball, so like everyone else in Union Army camps, black soldiers watched and played endless baseball games. It was a long and bitter war, and it was also a boring war. For every day of death and destruction on the battlefield there were ten days of boredom in camp. To pass the time, everybody played baseball.
The game grew to such popularity that large army camps had their own baseball leagues. On Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, a permanent Union Army camp was home to a total of 50,000 soldiers, camp followers, and freed slaves living on the ten-mile-long island. By 1862 the camp had become as large as a major American city and had its own theater, two daily newspapers, and a baseball league that was so popular its championship game drew 40,000 people.
The sport of baseball boomed all over the country after the Civil War as soldiers who had played or watched it during the conflict brought the game home to their cities and small towns. Since most of the troops came from larger cities, the sport flourished there. Most of the black Americans who fled slave plantations wound up in large cities, too, where there were jobs for unskilled laborers. Blacks formed teams in different cities and by 1867 New York teams were traveling to Philadelphia to play black teams there.
The number of black teams grew in the 1870s and 1880s, usually in large cities where northern blacks lived. Freed slaves, looking for economic and cultural support from other blacks, moved to those cities, just as many black soliders who served in the war together moved to black neighborhoods in northern cities. These growing black population centers soon had their own cultural networks, with black churches, black theaters, and black newspapers. Black baseball was a natural extension. The players came from the community, which also provided the fan base, particularly in big cities.
Numerous all-black teams banded together in informal inter- and intracity all-black leagues and carved out a rich niche in American sports history. Players came from all walks of life, neighborhoods, and jobs. Many competed on all-black factory teams, a handful played on integrated teams, and some teams played schedules against all-black, all-white, and integrated teams. The teams were so successful that by 1887 a professional minor league, the League of Colored Base Ball Clubs, was founded with teams in Cincinnati (the Browns), Washington, D.C. (the Capital Citys), Louisville (the Fall Citys), Pittsburgh (the Keystones), Baltimore (the Lord Baltimores), Boston (the Resolutes), Philadelphia (the Pythians), and New York (the Gorhams).
Smaller semipro black teams consisting of freedmen had been playing throughout northern cities since 1858, but in the 1870s they became extremely active and organized. A top team from one city would often travel to play a top team from another, and the game was usually preceded by a parade in the black community, with children racing along the streets to get a look at their very own athletic heroes.
The identification of blacks with their baseball teams was strong, so strong that by 1906 cartoonists in black weekly newspapers were putting caricatured black politicians in baseball uniforms and on the diamond to poke fun at them.
Games were well-attended by snappily dressed black men and women who saw baseball as a weekend entertainment like theater and music. Black ballplayers were revered and many were given the better jobs at factories where owners were looking for a mill hand who could hit .300.
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INTRODUCTION
A collection of forty-five bicycle trips in Northwestern Oregon, principally in the Willamette Valley from the Portland area south to Eugene, this book includes routes from 12 to 178 miles in length. Mostly loops, the routes are designed to bicycle in a few hours. Also included are a few tours in the Columbia Gorge area, one along the Oregon Coast, and some linear trips. Four rides in the book are for multiday journeys. These are the Oregon Coaster, Mount Hood Loop, Three-Ferry Figure Eight, and Scaponia.
Strike out along the county and rural roads, bicycle lanes, or secondary highways of Oregon. Pedal into rolling hills, flatlands, or deep gorges. The people and life-styles are as varied as the terrain and weather patterns. The history stems from hardy pioneers who sought a better life in the West. Visit parks, old soda fountains, festivals, country stores, historic buildings, lakes, and covered bridges decorating foothills, farmland, forests, side valleys, small towns, and ethnic settlements. Your miles of pedaling will enhance physical fitness and your appreciation of Oregon. We wish you all the enjoyment we have found pedaling the beautiful, bountiful backroads of Northwest Oregon.
The Trip Descriptions
Each ride in the book includes a capsule summary. Use the summary to match rides to your abilities and interests, paying particular attention to both visual and narrative information provided.
Elevation and distance graphs illustrate the route's altitude profile, but don't be put off by a route that first appears too long or hilly. Almost every route has shortcuts or shorter options. Tailor the ride's length and difficulty to your needs by reviewing the accompanying text, mileage logs, and map sketches. Some options are described in the text and logs, and others may be readily apparent in the sketch maps.
Starting and en route times are estimated and should not be considered rigid. Based on averages for the novice cyclist, these assume a fairly slow pace with frequent stops at points of interest. Strong riders or seasoned racers may complete the routes in half the estimated times.
Starting times are recommended to permit riders to complete the routes by mid- to late afternoon. Consider, however, the advantages of starting very early in the morning. Traffic is almost nonexistant, permitting the cool morning air to be enjoyed in solitude, and leaving the hot afternoon riding to the late risers. Cyclists who can stand the initial agony of crawling out of the bed at dawn will find their efforts rewarded. In winter, the opposite advice may be better: Wait for the day to warm up a bit, then choose a short ride that will end well before the chilly late afternoon.
Each route also includes a map and a mileage log. In theory, either one should be sufficient for a selected route. In practice, both the map and the mileage log should be followed, particularly in unfamiliar territory or on routes with frequent turns or numerous intersections.
Mileage logs in this book describe the routes in tenths of a mile. Used in tandem, maps and logs provide adequate information for following the exact route. These can be followed with a cyclometer (bicycle computer), but don't expect an exact match to distances printed in the book. Bicycle computers vary, partly because of differences in wheel and tire sizes.
A watch and a compass are two other pieces of optional equipment that can assist in following a mileage log. With experience, most riders develop a feel for how fast they are riding and, using a watch, can estimate distances traveled with a surprising degree of accuracy. In this book, maps have a scale of miles and a north arrow, while mileage logs frequently mention compass directions. When in doubt about intersections where road signs are missing, twisted, or otherwise confusing, check both the log and the map. Then consult a compass, if necessary.
The mileage logs describe each of the loop trips in a particular direction, i.e., clockwise or counterclockwise. Any route may be ridden in the opposite direction, but some that pass through cities and towns may require slight modification when one-way streets are encountered.
The mileage logs usually mention bike lanes or paths, when available along the routes. These are recommended in the interest of safety. Throughout the book, a bike route on the shoulder of a road, whether designated by a painted line or protected by small cement dividers, is referred to as a bike lane. A paved path separate from the roadway is referred to as a bike path.
Accurate road and street names often are difficult to determine. Especially in rural areas, many roads are unmarked, or are signed with names different from those on local maps. Although Oregon Department of Transportation maps purport to show the correct official name for every road in the state, those may not appear on street signs. In this book, the road and street names usually are the ones on local signs. Be cautious, however. Signs can be missing, altered, or, through the efforts of local pranksters, twisted ninety degrees. Where signs conflict with available maps, or where more than one name appears on different signs, the mileage log shows alternate names in parentheses. Maps show the most commonly used names. To avoid losing the route, consult both the map and the mileage log.
A turn onto a gravel road is a signal that you are probably off-route. Few of these rides involve gravel roads, and the ones that do are marked clearly on both the map and the mileage log.
To take shortcuts or side trips away from the itineraries described here, consult the map. It shows whether nearby roads are paved or gravel. On recommended variations, the roads have been inspected. In other cases, the pavement status is based in part on information derived from Oregon Department of Transportation maps, which are generally accurate.
Also keep in mind that roads and intersections are changing constantly as highway departments fiddle with the landscape. Don't be surprised to find roads realigned, intersections rearranged, or new highways built. A close eye on the map and the mileage log should make most changes readily apparent and wrong turns avoidable. The others will make for interesting stories.
Facilities available along the routes are described for rider enjoyment. Stores, and sometimes restaurants, are mentioned when they appear in rural locations, but no attempt is made to list their hours. Carrying food is always a good idea when cycling.
Public parks are mentioned whenever they appear along the routes or within striking distance. Nearly all have rest rooms, if only outhouses, but many of those facilities are open solely during summer months. Drinking water and camping facilities are mentioned in the mileage logs, but again, water often is disconnected and campgrounds closed in the off-season. Carry a water bottle and refill it at every opportunity.
Choosing a Bicycle
Almost any bike can be used to ride the routes described here. It doesn't have to be fancy or expensive. A forty-pound balloon-tired bike will get you to your destination just as surely as a twenty-pound racing bicycle, but it may take a bit longer. If you've got an old bike gathering dust in the garage, get it out, dust it off, make sure it is safe to ride, and start pedaling. You eventually may want to graduate to a better bike, but don't stay home for want of it now.
When it's time for a new or upgraded bicycle, here is a tip: Concentrate on lightness and the frame. A good, light bike really isn't as fragile as it may appear. Extra weight is mostly located in nonfunctional places. Once you have a good frame, you can vary components to suit your riding style and needs.
When considering bike lightness, the frame is a good example. Most stress is at the joints where frame tubes come together. On expensive 'double-butted' frames, the tube wall's thickness is greatest at each end, where strength is needed, and narrower in the midsection, where the stress is much less. Significant weight is thus saved without loss of strength.
Bicycle choices are abundant in today's marketplace. Before selecting a bike, consider your riding style, the length and type of trips, and the need to carry gear. Road frames are designed for touring, racing, or a combination of the two. Hybrid bicycles primarily meet the demands of commuters and mountain cycles are designed for off-pavement use.
Touring frames are more stretched out and flexible than their racing counterparts, and thus produce a smoother ride. Extremely responsive, a stiff racing frame would be less comfortable on long rides and unable to carry much gear. Sport-touring frames absorb some of the road shock of a racing frame without sacrificing the benefits of responsiveness, and can be equipped with panniers (saddlebags). Mountain bikes can be ridden on pavement, but their weight and bigger tires require more effort than touring and racing frames.
Bicycle frames are graduated to fit different-size bodies. Measured in inches or centimeters from the spindle (the axle on which the pedals rotate) to the point where the seat post enters the frame, most frames are sized between 18 and 25 inches.
To determine if a particular frame fits, straddle the bike, standing between the handlebars and the seat. If the bike fits, you should be able to lift the front wheel an inch or two off the floor. Frames may also be measured by standing in a wide, equidistant stance over the top tube. Clearance between you and the top tube should be 1 to 2 inches on a road bike, but as much as 4 inches on a mountain bike. (Some say 3 inches is ideal.) This extra mountain-bike clearance allows for more responsiveness and for sitting behind the saddle to hold down the back wheel on steep descents.
Frame and wheel sizes should not be confused. While frame sizes vary, nearly all road or hybrid bicycles with gearing use 27-inch-diameter wheels, or their slightly smaller metric equivalent, 700-millimeter wheels. Mountain bikes and some youth or inexpensive adult bikes use 26-inch wheels.
Bicycle fitting is not complete with selection of the correct frame size. Competent advice from someone who can examine the bike and the rider at the same time is advised.
Saddle height on all bikes is generally adjusted by balancing on the bike. With the ball of the foot on a pedal, the leg should bend slightly when the pedal is at its lowest position.
Handlebars can also be adjusted, and should generally be slightly lower than the saddle. Long- or short-armed riders might also consider changing the length of horizontal extension of the handlebar stem. This change requires a new stem, but helps avoid undue strain on the neck or hands.
After properly fitting the frame to the rider, examine the bike. Rims, handlebars, pedals, cranks, and front sprockets on a heavy, inexpensive bike will all be steel. A light bike uses aluminum (actually aluminum alloy) for these parts. Frames also can be constructed from either steel or aluminum alloy. On a light bike, parts commonly made of steel, with the exception of the frame, are the axles, spokes, parts of the saddle, and a few others. If you can't tell the difference between aluminum and steel, carry a small magnet when shopping for a bike.
Remember, the finest, lightest components can't make up for a heavy frame and vice versa. Nevertheless, don't focus so much on weight that you lose track of components and how they work together. Components on most bikes can be exchanged for lighter or higher-quality parts. If your budget limits your choice of bikes, buy the best frame - the bicycle's heart and soul. Components can be added or switched as your finances and technology advancements in the industry allow, watching for compatibility with existing equipment.
A key component is the crankset. This consists of front chainrings (sprockets), cranks (the arms on which the pedals are mounted), and bearings that attach to the bottom bracket of the frame.
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Maxine Waters, on the other hand, has a style that grew out of being the fifth of 12 children. "We were not taught diplomacy as much as how to fend for ourselves," Waters recalls, before modifying slightly: "To defend ourselves is really what it was. You had to make sure you shared in the opportunity, be it dinner or something going on in the family or the neighborhood." Undaunted by the unflattering adjectives she has attracted, Waters recognizes that the woman she is evolved naturally from the girl she was in St. Louis: "I didn't know [what I was doing] was 'assertive' behavior. I didn't know that was 'aggressive' behavior. I didn't know women weren't supposed to act like that."
Bill Boyarsky, a columnist on the Los Angeles Times, called Maxine Waters "the conscience" of the current Speaker of the California Assembly and, accordingly, rued the day that Waters was elected to Congress. "She'll just chew you out if she thinks you're wrong," Boyarsky says: "I know, because she's done it to me." To be the conscience of any Speaker is a hefty job, but when the Speaker is Willie Brown - a man so brilliant and irreverent that he dominates every conversation, and so quick on the draw that virtually every politician in California is wary of him - the job becomes very nearly herculean.
Waters laughs at the notion that she kept Willie Brown in line, but she doesn't take exception to Boyarsky's description of her style. "I have not attempted to be liked by my male colleagues or to pamper them," she says, "I have not tried to be male enough for them to like me. I simply am what I am; I care about what I care about. I'm me! So I've had fights and I've had good moments." People work best together when they respect each other, Waters insists, and since she tries to be fair, she expects fairness in return. When she doesn't get it "I let 'em know. I'm not going to practice disguising my feelings. I'm not socialized in being subtle: I just say it!"
Unlike Willie Brown, Thomas S. Foley, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, is a decorous, understated man. The Congress's rituals derive from the 18th century, and its rhetorical traditions run to the baroque. Foley's legislative assistant, Melinda Lucke, was therefore startled, but not surprised, when the new member from Los Angeles, whose reputation had preceded her, walked saucily into his office and said, "I need one hot minute with the Speaker!"
"This place is so steeped in custom and tradition that [the members] don't really do the work people expect them to do," Waters says with exasperation. As a freshman member on a Veterans' Affairs subcommittee, Waters was told that the chairman, G.V. 'Sonny' Montgomery from the Mississippi Delta, did not look kindly on amendments to his legislation. Congresswoman Waters was not impressed. "They said 'That's the way he operates.' I said, 'These people are elected to serve, and if they've got something to offer, they should be allowed to offer it.'" She had something to offer - an amendment that would allow veterans to hire private legal counsel and have their attorneys' fees paid by the government - and when the pro forma call for amendments came, she offered hers. "This is not a good time for people who purport to support their government to oppose helping veterans return to their jobs," Waters observes cannily, and after some modest finagling, she got a unanimous vote in support of her amendment. "I respect custom and tradition that gets the job done," Waters insists, but "if it thwarts the process or throws up obstacles to your being able to represent your district, I'm not going to go along with it."
Younger political women are more likely to have had female models and teachers in the ways of politics - many of them the women of that key transitional generation. Among those whom Ann Richards has mentored, Lena Guerrero has already become something of a star in her own right. She was Richards's political director in her campaign for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and Richards's initial act as governor-elect was to appoint Guerrero to the Texas Railroad Commission.
Since Guerrero is a full generation younger than the other women we interviewed, she could be expected to have had a somewhat different experience, and indeed, like so many Texan women her age, she was inspired by Barbara Jordan. Guerrero was 13 when Jordan struck her imagination, along with the nation's, during the televised Watergate impeachment hearings. "I thought 'that is exactly what I want to do.'" Guerrero remembers: "I read everything that anybody wrote about that woman. I cut out newspaper articles. I wanted to be a member of Congress, and I never thought what that meant for an Hispanic woman. After all, she [Jordan] was black!"
In 1976, while Jordan gave her keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, Guerrero "watched her like I was delivering it. Most people don't remember that she co-keynoted it with John Glenn. He was so boring - she was the keynote. 'What's new? What's different?' [Jordan intoned:] 'Barbara Jordan is keynoting this Convention!' It was so great!"
Guerrero credits the Sisters of Mercy who ran the school she attended with her strong belief in conscience, which is at the root of her pro-choice position on abortion - an irony the nuns might not appreciate. "I was educated by nuns," Guerrero recalls, who "were extremely independent, bright, conscientious, demanding women. They taught me to think. They taught me that someday I was going to be judged for my actions - not somebody else's." And she learned her basic leadership skills in the Catholic Church: in the late 1960s, when boys still monopolized virtually all the helping roles in the Church, she was actually an altar girl. "My church was two blocks from my house," Guerrero remembers, "and I did a lot of helping around the back and during the service. But I also led in the choir. Mexican boys don't sing in the choir! They grow up to be famous singers, but they don't sing in the choir!"
Nonetheless, Guerrero's first explicitly political mentoring came from a man, Gus Garcia, the first Hispanic to be president of the Austin school board and a principal plaintiff in the suit that finally broke down Texas school segregation for Mexican American children. When Guerrero was a student at the University of Texas at Austin, Garcia took her aside and told her "something extremely visionary." His generation of Hispanic leaders in Austin, he told her, had "spent the better part of the last 15 years in a movement that has taught us basically where the hinges on the door are. We've popped the damn thing open. Now they invite us to the table. Your generation of leadership - men and women - is going to be required to know parliamentary procedure, to know how to read budgets, and to eat your lunch at the negotiating table." When you find a door that's closed, he insisted, "you call me, because we'll knock that sucker right down! We know how to do that. But that's not your job. Your job is to be substantively good!" Garcia made her focus on what she might do, according to Guerrero, and it was at his prompting that she mastered Robert's Rules of Order.
Will women in politics do things differently from men? The question is tantalizing - even haunting - but for the moment we have no sure answer. In a world in which almost all the rules have changed, and the information is as yet sparse, we can make only tentative generalizations.
We do know that women will not all take the same stands, even on war. Although the first woman elected to Congress, Jeannette Rankin, is the only member ever to vote twice against taking America to war - she voted against our entering both the First and the Second World Wars, and lost her seat in Congress each time as a result - women have always swelled the numbers of wartime patriots. When asked to name her toughest decision, Nancy Kassebaum first inclined to name her vote to give President Bush the authority to take the United States into war in the Persian Gulf. But then she corrected herself: that decision, ultimately, was not hard because she thought it the only possible, since the country "had to do it." Although Kassebaum speculates that her office got 75 calls opposing the use of force in the Gulf for every one that supported it, she believed the president's policy was the only way to stop Saddam Hussein. "You have to weigh the calls you get with the larger constituency out there that you don't hear from," Kassebaum says, "and then you have to use your own judgment."
Maxine Waters agrees with Kassebaum on the process: neither takes polls or lets them influence her vote. On the issue, however, she disagrees fundamentally with the senator. A woman who considers war "an obsolete means of resolving conflict," Waters was one of the Persian Gulf War's most unrelenting opponents. Although she was only a neophyte member of Congress and emotions were volatile, no one tried to influence her to mute or modify her stand: "People know I have strongly held positions." When asked whether she thought her vote expressed the will of her district, she replies, "I don't legislate that way. I try to let people know who I am all the time, so they will understand where I'm coming from on issues. I don't pull very many surprises. I think the people voted for me because they kinda liked where I was coming from."
Waters will keep on opposing policies like those that led to the Persian Gulf War - even though they gave President Bush the highest poll ratings of any president in history. In the aftermath of the war, as the Kurds were fleeing toward the Turkish and Iranian borders, she insisted that "we should not only provide humanitarian aid, we should be absolutely honest with the American people about what we're doing there. They need to know that this administration is supporting Saddam Hussein's staying in office."
If women disagree on fundamental issues, there is nonetheless some evidence that they do approach public office differently from the way men do. Mayor Kathryn Whitmire of Houston, Texas has suggested, for starters, that women are usually ready to try new things: since each was once the new kid on the block, innovation does not set them to trembling. Whitmire herself demonstrated a positive relish for breaking precedent when she appointed Lee Brown to be Houston's chief of police - the first white mayor to appoint a black to that office. Long after Brown had left Houston to head New York City's police department, Whitmire remembered one letter to the editor at the time he first came that said, Well, it could have been worse: she could have appointed a woman. And indeed, in 1990, Houston's chief of police was the first in the country to need maternity uniforms for herself.
Although Senator Nancy Kassebaum does not expect women's burgeoning political presence to change policy significantly because she suspects they are not "that different" from men, she agrees with the common perception that women bring "a certain perspective and sensitivity" to bear. Kassebaum herself, for instance, will not play "political hardball" - a game at which "some of my colleagues are masters." She recognizes that refusing to play that game can put her at a disadvantage, but feels that it is simply "against my nature." Convinced that women can be firm in their resolve without resorting to trickery, Kassebaum associates political hardball with "innuendo, vindictiveness ... threats," and a willingness "to use everything that's out there in order to get your own way."
In Texas, on the other hand, political hardball is a synonym for politics. In his Pulitzer-prizewinning The Making of the President 1960, Theodore White described that state's political tradition as among the most "squalid, corrupt, and despicable" in the nation.
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Costume drama
Adventures served to satiate the public lust for violence, but historical dramas appealed to different desires. Again we see the divergence between elite and mass opinion. Critics heartily despised the costume dramas and attacked them vigorously, but audiences made their views known at the box-office - and films like The Palace and the Fortress (Aleksandr Ivanovskii, 1924), Stepan Khalturin (Ivanovskii, 1925), and The Wings of a Serf (Iurii Tarich, 1926) were demonstrable commercial successes. For the purpose of this chapter, however, I have selected the two historical films which were the 'most' of everything - most popular, most expensive, and most controversial: The Decembrists (Ivanovskii, 1927) and The Poet and the Tsar (Vladimir Gardin and Evgenii Cherviakov, 1927).
Complaints about the "bourgeoisification" of revolutionary history had been levelled against the historical films since The Palace and the Fortress, a film which set the tone for the costume drama by using the revolutionary epoch as a vehicle for exploring the lives and loves of the gentry. It enjoyed the distinction of attracting Politburo member Grigorii Zinovev's ire for its excessive emotionality. The critical controversy over the bourgeois cooption of the past reached a crescendo with the appearance of The Wings of a Serf, quite an atypical Soviet historical picture set during the reign of Ivan IV. This film, which was reported to do well abroad although its audience reception at home is uncertain, was charged with being "counterrevolutionary" in a scandal manufactured by opponents of its producer, Sovkino.
Perhaps unaware of the gathering storm, Aleksandr Ivanovskii and historian Pavel Shchegolev had spent nearly two years preparing their blockbuster, <tf>The Decembrists. (Shchegolev, a well-known specialist on the populist movement, served as scenarist on all three of Ivanovskii's historical films - as well as others, like The Ninth of January.) The Decembrists was probably the costliest picture produced in the USSR in the silent period. Two sources confirm that it came in at 340,000 rubles, while another claimed that its colossal expense had led to the bankruptcy of the Sevzapkino studio, which then became the Leningrad Sovkino studio. To a certain extent The Decembrists does support the old saying that there are virtues in economy. Costing nearly twice as much as its predecessor, Stepan Khalturin (an overlong dramatization of one of the unsuccessful plots to assassinate Alexander II led by the People's Will), it was twice as flawed.
Ivanovskii and Shchegolev made little pretense at recreating the Decembrist uprising of 1825, focusing almost exclusively on the love affair between the Decembrist Ivan Annenkov (Boris Tamarin) and Pauline Geueble (V. Annenkova). Social commentary was minimal (though the Decembrists did not seem particularly admirable - and Grand Duke Konstantin and his Polish wife certainly were not). Ivanovskii paid loving attention instead to details of costume and set, emphasizing glamour, heavy-handed irony, and coy brutality. Despite the participation of a bona fide historian as scenarist, the uprising appears to be no more than a badly staged afterthought.
There was no chance that the Soviet critics, with their stiletto pens and critical acumen, would miss this oppotuntiy. The most scathing review appeared in Cinema unsigned, a practice which became more common as cultural politics become more uncivilized. In it The Decembrists was charged with being a film designed to appeal to the superficiality of the:
continental public ... but for people raised on contemporary cinema, this cine-opera with its agonizingly long and theatrical montage elicits only unpleasant memories of the 'psychological' fairy-tales of the time of Ermolev and Drankov.
In other words, The Decembrists was an 'export' film constructed on the principles of the pre-revloutionary cinema, an accurate assessment. Vladimir Nedobrovo was equally harsh, accusing Ivanovskii of using his material "expoitatively, extravagantly, stupidly"; Vladimir Korolevich called for an end to pictures about "St. Petersburg"; Arsen charged it with historical inaccuracy. Pravda's Boris Gusman concurred that it was "literary-theatrical" but predicted it would be a big hit for that very reason. Gusman's prediction was borne out in the Troianovskii-Egiazarov survey where it was listed as fourth among the ten most popular pictures. And yet it was asserted in 1929 in Soviet Screen that the film had recouped only 64 percent of its production costs. Given The Decembrists' apparent popularity, which would have translated into paid attendance of well over 1 million at ticket prices ranging from 0.60 to 1.50 rubles, this seems unlikely.
The Poet and the Tsar had the misfortune to appear the same year as The Decembrists ,but after it, at precisely the moment when the backlash against "bourgeois" cinema was gathering force. It also did not help that the picture's cavalier tratment of Pushkin attracted the ire of the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii, a formidable force in Soviet cultural circles and an outspoken critic of Sovkino and its politics. Indeed, The Poet and the Tsar became his personal cause in 1927, and he used it as an example of everything that he perceived to be wrong with Soviet cinema. At the ODSK-Komsomol-Komsomolskaia Pravda conference in October 1927 which laid the polemical groundwork for the Party Conference on Cinema Affairs the following spring, Maiakovskii said with a flourish: "Take the film The Poet and the Tsar. You may like the picture ... but if you think about it, what rubbish, what an outrage this picture is."
Perhaps The Poet and the Tsar is not worth "thinking about" (certainly its appeal was not intellectual), but it is not an "outrage." Vladimir Gardin and actor Evgenii Cherviakov collaborated on the screenplay and co-directed, and Cherviakov starred as Pushkin. Cherviakov looked a fine Pushkin, but unfortunately the screenplay, which centers on the last year of Pushkin's life, is as uncinematic as it is melodramatic. The narrative focuses on Pushkin's unhappy marriage to his unworhty wife (I. Volodko), and Gardin and Cherviakov gave full credence to the old story that Nicholas I (K. Karenin) engineered Pushkin's duel with the nefarious d'Anth<*_>e-grave<*/>s (Boris Tamarin). When Cherviakov's Pushkin is not glowering disapprovingly at various social gatherings, he is wandering about "reading" poems, letters, and so on (and on). Gardin lived up to his reputation as one of the leading directors in both the pre-revolutionary and Soviet cinemas in the well-staged duel scene, but then ruined the dramatic tension by having poor Pushkin linger on forever.
Maiakovskii was not alone in his scathing denunciation of the film, although a fairly judicious review appeared in Cinema in which P. Neznamov concentrated on formal attributes, criticizing the static tempo and other technical weaknesses. More typical of the tenor of the reviews was the solemn setpiece in Soviet Screen, where Pushkin scholars were assembled to rail against The Poet and the Tsar's "completely false" protrayal of Pushkin. Adrian Piotrovskii labelled The Poet and the Tsar a film which epitomizes the "petty-bourgeois belief" that history translates into "poeticalness" and "beauty."
This beauty had a high price - at 200,000 rubles not only was the movie four times more expensive than the typical Soviet film, but it had overrun its budget by nearly 25 percent. The Poet and the Tsar was therefore not just part of a "front" of reactionary pictures, but also touted as proof of the existence of a "commercial deviation" in cinema which involved Sovkino as well as Mezhrapbom. The public, however, did not share these jaundiced opinions of the picture, and it was apparently a commercial success.
The Poet and the Tsar marked the turning-point in the development of the Soviet costume drama. The final major historical dramas of the silent period appeared in 1928 - Iurii Tarich's The Captain's Daughter (about the Pugachev Rebellion) and Konstantin Eggert's The Ice House (concerning the scandalous reign of Anna Ivanovna) - but their swift demise was a foregone conclusion. After the Party Conference on Cinema Affairs, the film press focused on promoting "economical," "contemporary," and "ideological" works. Historical pictures certainly could not be contemporary, and their ideological content was superficial at best. Because of the costumes and sets needed to recreate the past "accurately," it was highly unlikely that a "good" historical picture could ever be made as economically as a film about Soviet life. Consequently, only sixteen costume dramas were made in the five-year period from 1929 to 1934 (and none in 1935), accounting for a mere 3 percent of total production.
What the historical film could do better than any other popular genre (because of the constraints of the censorship) was give Soviet audiences a way to enjoy "high life" vicariously - beautiful clothes, lavish homes, plentiful food, leisure time. Despite the romanticization of the Soviet twenties, life during the NEP was not particularly easy; while a few lived well (notable NEPmen and apparatchiki), most did not. The costume drama, therefore, served much the same function in Soviet society in the twenties as did those movies about millionaires that were so popular in the US during the Great Depression of the thirties.
Melodrama
The costume dramas had many melodramatic elements, but the melodrama without any historical window-dressing had a distinctive set of problems and imperatives. Adrian Piotrovskii wrote that while melodrama in and of itself was not intrinsically anti-Soviet, most Soviet makers of melodramas had revealed themselves "slaves to bourgeois art" in their focus on the inner workings of private life. If Piotrovskii were correct, then the best-known "slave to bourgeois art" had to be the Commissar of Enlightenment, Anatolii Lunacharskii, for the melodrama in early Soviet cinema is inextricably linked to his name.
Lunacharskii co-authored the screenplays for The Bear's Wedding and two other infamous variations on melodrama - Poison and The Salamander. Until 1928, Lunacharskii managed to rationalize his involvement with these films and avoid undue criticism, but his role was not a passive one. According to Georgii Grebner's contract with Lunacharskii for The Salamander, Lunacharskii wrote a librettto which Grebner then translated into a shooting script. Lunacharskii also stipulated in this contract that his wife, Natalia Rozenel, be given the female lead - at a time when directors were being fired for nepotism.
The Bear's Wedding (co-directed by veteran filmmaker Vladimir Gardin and by its star, Konstantin Eggert, 1926) was easily the most sensational Soviet film of the twenties. Critics found very little good in it, but it enjoyed an enormous following and was the number two title in Troianovskii and Egiazarov's 'top ten' chart. Its popularity with mass audiences was confirmed in numerous other sources, one viewer writing to Cinema that it was a "colossal victory on the cinema front." It was apparently successful abroad as well, and from 1926 on, "bears' wedding" becomes a synonym for the so-called 'export' films.
Why did Soviet audiences find this screen adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's variation of the vampire story so appealing? It is not up to the standards of filmmaking which earned Soviet silent cinema its international reputation. But it is certainly one of the most defiantly apolitical productions of the period, and its emphasis on perversion places it squarely in the pre-revolutionary tradition. Co-director Eggert played the deranged Count Shemet, cursed to have seizures which transform him into a bear on the prowl. The count falls in love with an innocent, awkward young girl (the very popular Vera Malinovskaia, in a part which provides a little comic relief, at least at first). The wedding of the doomed pair is followed by an uncontrolled, sexually charged celebration which becomes more sinister as the night progresses. Tension mounts. The film climaxes in a frightening and gruesome scene in which Count Shemet, besotted by passion and madness, savagely mutilates his bride in their wedding-bed. When he comes to his senses, the count is overcome with anguish, but he attempts to flee the vengeful mob of villagers all the same. Eventually he is murdered by his sister-in-law, and his castle is torched.
The Bear's Wedding had the usual ingredients of popular entertainment - love, sex, violence, action, horror - but in baroque excess. The film is so extreme that this synopsis makes it sound like a parody of melodrama, but it was not. Eggert managed to make the improbable believable in his protrayal of Count Shemet, and he and Gardin pulled this cinematic pastiche off with style.
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Five
Cultural Illiteracy
At first glance, E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy seemed as unlikely a bestseller as The Closing of the American Mind. Originally a lecture given before the Modern Language Association, it was published as an essay in the American Scholar in 1983. "I received a letter from Robert Payton, president of the Exxon Education Foundation," Hirsch wrote in the introduction to his book, "encouraging me to start acting on my perceptions rather than just writing them down."
Spurred on by an Exxon grant, Hirsch began to compile his now-famous list of the 'items' that, if known and mastered, would enable this and future generations of students to attain cultural literacy. In 1987 he published his book, which instantly made the bestseller list; for forty weeks it was second only to Bloom's. The paperback has sold 600,000 copies. Hirsch, a professor of English at the University of Virginia and a scholar of eighteenth-century literature, has become the latest representative of that new American type, the academic celebrity.
What is cultural literacy? The answer is simply put in the subtitle of Hirsch's book: What Every American Needs to Know. By 'culture' Hirsch doesn't mean 'high culture,' but 'basic information,' the names and events that enable us to decipher the world. In order to function in society, to work and to communicate, he argues, people need to possess a certain number of facts about their own history. The key events in our past, the key phrases in our literature, are in themselves a kind of language, a code that educated people decipher in their daily lives without even knowing it. Hirsch reminisces about his father, an old-fashioned businessman who used to quote Shakespeare in his correspondence and often used the phrase "There is a tide" - shorthand for "There is a tide in the affairs of men / Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune" from Julius Caesar - to illustrate how one knows intuitively when to buy or sell. "To persuade somebody that your recommendation is wise and well founded, you have to give lots of reasons and cite known examples and authorities," wrote Hirsch. "My father accomplished that and more in four words, which made quoting Shakespeare as effective as any efficiency consultant could wish."
For Allan Bloom, the decline of educational standards can be traced to the decline of philosophy (a word he uses to mean the humanities in general); to ignore the classics is ultimately to weaken the very foundations of our society. Hirsch is more pragmatic. For him, the purpose of education isn't to produce a handful of Greek scholars who can preserve the great intellectual traditions of the West, as Bloom would have it, but to prepare us for the complex social transactions of everyday life. It's not a nation of English professors that Hirsch aspires to create, but a nation in which ordinary people are literate enough to negotiate effectively in the world. "High stakes," he writes, are involved in the curriculum debate:
... breaking the cycle of illiteracy for deprived children; raising the living standard of families who have been illiterate; making our country more competitive in international markets; achieving greater social justice; enabling all citizens to participate in the political process; bringing us closer to the Ciceronian ideal of universal public discourse - in short, achieving fundamental goals of the founders at the birth of the republic.
There's nothing abstract about this imperative. Behind Hirsch's high-minded rhetoric is a pretty straightforward message: You can't expect people to grasp the basic principles of democracy unless they know what those principles are. And you can't expect them to function effectively in the world unless they're literate.
Hirsch's book was notably even-tempered and unpolemical; he sounded like a guy who was trying to help. And he had actually done something. He had gone around speaking before state boards of education; he had founded a Cultural Literacy Foundation, publishing a newsletter and circulating to schools around the country a provisional list of what students at every grade level ought to know; he had produced a Dictionary of Cultural Literacy and a six-volume textbook (still in the works) designed to teach the rudiments of American history, the major works of English and American literature, and the natural sciences. But in academic circles, Cultural Literacy kindled almost as much fury as The Closing of the American Mind. At a conference on 'Liberal Arts Education in the Late Twentieth Century' held at Duke University in 1988, Barbara Herrnstein Smith rose and delivered a vitriolic diatribe, 'Cult-Lit: Hirsch, Literacy, and the 'National Culture,'' that enumerated in harsh language the magnitude of Hirsch's sins. What did he mean by shared culture? Smith wanted to know. There was no such thing, and any efforts to define one represented, in Smith's words, "context-specific, pragmatically adjusted negotiations of (and through) difference." Hirsch was trying to homogenize and oppress minorities by making them conform to his idea of culture. Nor did Smith have a whole lot of sympathy for Hirsch's idealized vision of what our nation is all about. "Wild applause; fireworks; music," she noted with heavy sarcasm after quoting his invocation to the "fundamental goals" of the Founding Fathers: "America the Beautiful; all together, now: Calvin Coolidge, Gunga Din, Peter Pan, spontaneous combustion. Hurrah for America and the national culture! Hurrah!"
Okay, so there are flaws in Hirsch's argument: his definition of a 'literate national culture' is vague; his list of 'What Every American Needs to Know' is biased. But his basic indictment - that we're in the midst of a crisis with long-range social consequences - seems to me beyond dispute. Americans know less than ever. In a 1988 survey of high school students' scientific achievement level prepared by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, the United States ranked third-to-last out of fifteen developed nations; in a 1970 survey, the U.S. had ranked seventh. It's not that other nations have improved in terms of education; we have deteriorated. U.S. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores have declined precipitously over the last decade: from 1972 to 1984, 56 percent fewer students scored over 600 and 73 percent fewer scored over 650. A 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education stated, "For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents."
Hirsch's book is full of frightening statistics: Two-thirds of seventeen-year-olds weren't aware that the Civil War occurred between 1850 and 1900. Nearly half couldn't identify Stalin; nearly one-fourth couldn't identify Churchill. When Hirsch's son, a high school Latin teacher, asked his class to name an epic poem by Homer, one student volunteered "The Alamo?" Another, informed that Latin was no longer spoken, asked, "What do they speak in Latin America?" At a conference of college deans, Hirsch reported in the New York Review of Books, he was regaled with "a chorus of anecdotes" about the decline in literacy among entering freshmen: "To these administrators, the debate over Stanford University's required courses seemed interesting but less than momentous when compared with the problem of preparing students to particiapte intelligently in any university-level curriculum."
It's just as much a problem in the Ivy League as anywhere else. Jerry Doolittle, an English instructor at Harvard, designed a quiz for his freshmen students to determine their level of literacy. They were given twenty statements and asked to fill in the blanks. Among the sample questions were the following:
I think that I shall never see a poem <*_>blank<*/> (four words)
Quoth the raven, <*_>blank<*/> (one word)
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread and <*_>blank<*/> (one word)
The average score was seven out of twenty - a figure somewhat inflated, Doolittle confessed, by two statements that everyone in the class completed correctly:
"Winston tastes good, like a <*_>blank<*/>" (two words) and "This Bud's for <*_>blank<*/>" (one word). And this was Harvard!
According to Richard Marius, director of Harvard's Expository Writing Program, arriving freshmen are so woefully deficient in the basic skills of reading and writing that a remedial course is required just to get them to the point where their peers would have been a generation ago. "This generation does not read," Marius laments in Teaching Literature: What Is Needed Now. They're unfamiliar with the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton; they don't even know the Gettysburg Address: "They are strangers not only to those points of reference that might help them navigate the literary sea, but also to the underlying cadences that have governed the development of written English. They cannot write because they have not read and they cannot hear."
The poet and essayist Katha Pollitt offers telling corroborative evidence. In her modern poetry seminar at Barnard, Pollitt reports, none of her students had even a bare familiarity with any poems published more than a decade ago. "Robert Lowell was as far outside their frame of reference as Alexander Pope." They didn't see how a knowledge of earlier poetry was necessary to their work; in fact, they found the work of earlier poets discouraging, for it showed up their own deficiencies. A new way to deal with the potentially smothering effects of one's precursors: Don't have any.
One could argue that our indifference to literature - and to literacy - is a function of our distracted culture, but a contributing factor, I suspect, is the virtual abolition of requirements that so many colleges embraced in the late sixties and seventies (a development that quickly replicated itself in public secondary schools). It's all very well to talk of the character-building sustenance that books provide, but most people don't read unless they're compelled to; and higher education was designed to serve that purpose. School once was, "and might frankly be," Pollitt reminds us, "the place where one read the books that are a little off-putting, that have gone a little cold, that you might overlook because they do not address, in reader-friendly contemporary fashion, the issues most immediately at stake in modern life but that, with a little study, turn out to have a great deal to say."
In the 1980s, a reaction set in to the laissez-faire education that characterized my college days, and a number of colleges moved to reinstate some semblance of a core. (Some had never abandoned it: the Great Books course instituted at Columbia after World War I survives in recognizable form to this day.) At Harvard, where the general education program - created to provide students with "the common knowledge and the common values on which a free society depends" - had fallen into disrepair, a core curriculum was once again proposed, and a task force was convened to consider the matter. It found in favor of establishing such a curriculum, but weaseled out of actually trying to impose one. What it came up with was a set of courses divided into ten categories - Social Analysis, Moral Reasoning, Foreign Cultures, Literature and Arts, and so on. But the Core's architects, eager to avoid the charge of ethno- or Eurocentricism, threw in a potpourri of courses from other disciplines and fields: 'Building the Shogun's Realm: The Unification of Japan (1560-1650)'; 'Caribbean Societies: Socioeconomic Change and Cultural Adaptations'; 'Individual, Community, and Nation in Japan.' Since you only have to choose one course from each area, it's possible to graduate, notes Caleb Nelson in a strongly argued condemnation of 'Harvard's Hollow 'Core,'' without ever having read any nineteenth-century British novels; without having read Virgil, Milton, or Dostoyevsky; without having taken a course on the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or the American Civil War. One section leader editorialized in the Crimson: "Most Harvard students taking Core courses are no more likely to have read and seriously understood the philosophical, political, or cultural foundations of their own United States than if they selected thirty-two random courses from the catalogue."
But that was never the Core's intent. "There are simply too many facts, too many theories, too many subjects, too many specializations to permit arranging all knowledge into an acceptable hierarchy," reasoned its founders.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="45">When coupled with computers, synthesizers make the exploration, composition, and performance of electronic music an inexpensive art medium.
A technology called the musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) interconnects electronic music instruments and computers. When coupled with a sequencer - software that can capture, edit, and play back music - complex electronic arrangements are made possible through a wide variety of editing options. Just as a word processor can replace a writer's typewriter or pencil and paper, sequencer software can replace a composer's pencil and paper score.
In live performances, such as rock concerts, live and recorded sound are often indistinguishable, thanks to the use of computerized backing tracks. Promoters defend the use of preprogrammed music, arguing that fans want to see a perfect reenactment of an MTV video or a recording. However, some legislators believe the practice is deceptive and propose legislation that would require promoters to inform ticket buyers in advance whether preprogrammed music will be used in a live performance.
DESIGN AUTOMATION
Designers in professions such as clothing, publications, architecture, and industrial products use electronic drawing boards extensively to help automate the mechanics of creativity. Borrowing from the techniques of computer-aided design that were pioneered in the manufacturing disciplines, a variety of designers are using computer software to increase productivity and help speed up the design process.
Architects, for example, used to design buildings manually. The design process began when an architect drew a rough sketch, which is the high-level design of what the building is supposed to look like, and how it interfaces with the surrounding environment. Then, a scale model was hand built, critiqued, and modified. After client approval, blueprints and specifications were created for the contractor.
Today's architects use computer-aided design methods extensively. In much the same way that power tools increase the productivity of the carpenter, CAD increases the productivity of the architect. In addition to automating the drawing process, CAD enables the architect to build computer models of the building, rotate the design to view the building from various angles, allow the client to take a simulated walkthrough of the building, simulate its heating and cooling sub-system performance under various climatic conditions, and create blueprints and specifications for the building.
Clothes designers in large corporations such as Esprit, Levi Strauss, and Benetton use CAD to design patterns, colors, and clothing shapes. In addition, designs, patterns, and colors can be archived in databases. The designer can call up a previously designed pattern, for example, modify it slightly, and feed the design to automated machinery that cuts patterns out of fabric.
COMPUTERS IN GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, AND LAW
Professionals in government, military, and law have become some of the most sophisticated users of information systems. They quickly learn the importance of intelligent information gathering and manipulation and, as a result, information systems are the lifeblood of these professions.
GOVERNMENT
Federal, state, and local government professionals, as well as their adversaries (e.g., lobbying groups such as the National Rifle Association and the Sierra Club), are concerned with developing public policy, enforcing laws, and protecting the well being of citizens.
Politicians rely heavily on their constituent databases and lobbying groups on their membership databases to track peoples' profiles, contribution histories, topics of concern, and levels of experience with specific issues. In their effort to sway public policy, for example, special interest groups can extract specific members' names and addresses and send out letters to inform them of pending legislation.
In recent years, the public has become more aware of the damage being done to the environment as a result of society's actions. This is, of course, a broad and complex set of problems that defies simple solutions. But one technology called geographical information system (GIS) is lending a helping hand.
Geographical information system data include digitized maps and images of distributions of statistical data such as populations of humans, plants, and animals. Geographical databases can help planners set up displays of watershed areas, soil and water districts, property lines, school and tax districts, and zoning boundaries. For example, if planners need to know how new development will affect a watershed area, they can view the watershed area and zoning boundaries simultaneously, in order to make more informed decisions about the impact of the development on the environment.
Other GIS applications include viewing population and school district boundaries simultaneously to redraw district lines and plan school bus routes. Fire departments can study patterns of streets and traffic flows along them at various hours of the day and plan the fastest route to a fire.
Government agencies, such as police departments, sheriff's offices, emergency medical services, and fire departments, leverage technology with computer-aided dispatch, communications, record keeping, and jail-management functions.
And technology is beginning to find its way into the legislative branch. Recently, the Michigan State Senate installed a legislative information system that puts a personal computer at every senator's desk. Using computers, the lawmakers can review and vote on bills and, during slack periods, write letters and communicate with their offices via electronic mail.
MILITARY
Ever since the late 1950s, the U.S. military has used computers for defense. The nation's first air-defense system, a network of computers linked to radar stations, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment, or SAGE, pioneered the use of real-time interactive graphics. (See Appendix A under 1950, 'Whirlwind.') Today, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) performs a similar defense function by guarding the United States against missile attack.
On the drawing boards is the Strategic Defense Initiative or SDI, a computer-controlled system that will use satellites to detect and lasers to destroy enemy missiles. SDI is very controversial, because it will be so complex and will rely so heavily on unproven, untested hardware and software. Critics, for example, point out the possibility of a false alarm, thus triggering a U.S. attack or even a nuclear war.
On a smaller scale, weapon systems, such as those found in submarines, tanks, and aircraft, use sophisticated technology for navigation, tracking, and control. The person using such systems has at his or her disposal graphic representations of landscapes with grids marking optimal paths to targets. Eye-tracking devices help aim the weapons at the target at which the person is looking.
One of the most impressive military computer applications involves training pilots with flight simulators. A simulation is a computerized representation of a real-world event or series of actions. Although flight simulators also help train civilian pilots, the most sophisticated versions can be found in the military.
A pilot, seated in a replica of a cockpit, views realistic simulated images displayed on the cockpit windows. As the pilot flies the simulator, the view changes immediately in response to altitude, speed, and position. Realistic special effects such as fog, airplane malfunctions, or enemy attack can be added to the simulation. Such realism is made possible by drawing on an immense visual database that contains data digitized from scale models, photographs, and topological maps. Special-purpose computers generate and display images in real time, in order to create the illusion of motion.
Although the cost of military flight simulators is enormous, a simulation costs less than its real-world counterpart. By having pilots practice with simulators rather than real airplanes, the military avoids the risk of losing an expensive plane and worse, losing an irreplaceable life - that of the pilot. And, of course, without simulators, training astronauts for a space shuttle mission would probably be out of the question.
What does the military do to prevent the details of its newest Stealth bomber from being leaked to the KGB? Preventing compromises in national security and defense depends on limiting access by unauthorized people. Photographs, signatures, and fingerprints have been used for identification purposes long before the advent of computers. But the problem of verifying a person's identity has led to an interesting high-technology solution.
Biometric devices are instruments that perform mathematical analysis of biological characteristics. An individual's speech, handwriting, fingerprints, or even eye retina features can serve as a unique patterns for identification purposes. Biometric identification systems that can digitize, store, and compare these patterns can be used to verify a person's identity.
Biometric identification systems are still in the experimental stage, but when they become reliable enough, they are expected to provide a more accurate means of verifying peoples' identity at classified and secret locations throughout the military and government.
LAW
Today's law firms are characterized by the need to manage, process, and interpret large and complex amounts of information. Legal documents, such as briefs, transcripts, notes, laws, codes, and rules are increasingly available in electronic versions. Court reporters, for example, routinely make their transcripts available as text files than can be directly input to a word processor.
A wealth of historical legal data are available in the form of on-line databases. Law firms can subscribe to Westlaw and Lexis, firms that specialize in publishing precedents, decisions, administrative rulings, trade regulations, and laws governing securities and taxes. In addition, some information providers are starting to offer similar information on CD ROM databases.
Another type of database software that is particularly useful for attorneys and paralegal professionals is called full-text retrieval software. It allows text to be indexed, edited, annotated, linked, and searched for in an electronic document. In a trial, for example, attorneys may need to review, track, and cross-reference the testimony of witnesses. Through use of full-text retrieval software, the transcripts for the trial can be indexed, annotated, and searched to verify the consistency of a witness's testimony right in the courtroom.
During the courtroom portions of trials, attorneys use desktop presentations to illustrate complex ideas to the jury in cases such as patent infringement or medical injury.
COMPUTERS IN EDUCATION
The potential of new computers and new software developments in education is highly intriguing and compelling. Computers are one of the newest and most versatile tools of the teaching trade. Computer and communication technology are making possible imaginative approaches to teaching traditional subjects and are motivating teachers and students to try new ways of information gathering and learning.
LEARNING
The oldest instructional application of computers is computer-assisted instruction (CAI), which provides instruction and drill-and-practice in basic computation and language skills. The basic philosophy of CAI involves a direct link between student and software and the transfer of basic instructional decisions from teacher to curriculum developer.
By using CAI, information is presented on the computer's display, students are asked to respond, and their responses are evaluated. If the student is correct, he or she moves on; if incorrect, similar problems are given until the correct response is elicited.
Advocates of CAI argue that students who have not mastered basic skills can benefit from drill and practice and that the computer helps to motivate students and frees the teacher to provide individual instruction. Critics of CAI argue that drill-and-practice tasks can be done just as easily without computers, using, for example, flash cards or some other form of drill. Hundreds of studies have been conducted to determine the effectiveness of CAI, and while the results concerning the effects of CAI are generally favorable, the research conducted provides little insight into how, what, and why students learn when they use CAI.
In response to such criticism, educators have developed intelligent CAI programs in which students interact with the computer rather than respond to it in a predefined manner. Intelligent CAI can generate and solve problems, store and retrieve data, diagnose students' misconceptions, select appropriate teaching strategies, and carry on dialogs with students. Most of these programs incorporate simulations and games that allows students to try out their evolving models of knowledge in a particular area.
ELECTRONIC BOOKS
New software tools and new ideas for user interfaces make possible the presentation of materials that are manipulable in several different ways. One such example is the electronic book, in which the reader manipulates computer technology instead of printed pages.
For example, Sony Corporation of Japan uses a palm-sized CD player for reading books recorded on 3-inch compact disks. Each disk can store approximately 100,000 pages of text, the equivalent of 300 paperback books.
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What that required was for the United States and its allies to "maintain sufficient flexible military capabilities, and firmness of policy, to convince the Communist rulers that the U.S. and its allies have the means to ensure that aggression will not pay and the will to use military force if the situation requires." The West should, however, forgo "actions which would generally be regarded as provocative," and "be prepared, if hostilities occur, to meet them, where feasible, in a manner and on a scale which will not inevitably broaden them into total nuclear war." These cautions were necessary "to assure the support of our allies against aggression and to avoid risks which do not promise commensurate strategic or political gains." The distance separating the architect of 'massive retaliation' from what would later come to be known as the doctrine of 'flexible response' was, it seems, less than one might have thought.
The basic policy the United States had followed through the end of 1954, Dulles admitted, had been "pretty good," even if "it hasn't got us into war." Not getting into a war, after all, was no bad thing. The positions the United States had taken with regard to the German question, Indochina, and the Chinese offshore islands could hardly be described as 'craven': "it would be difficult to argue that our policies are not strong, firm, and indicative of a willingness to run risks. But our policy was none the less one which fell short of actually provoking war."
That policy had assumed, though, continued American nuclear superiority. The great difficulty Dulles saw on the horizon was "the forthcoming achievement of atomic plenty and a nuclear balance of power between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R." It was not at all clear how the United States could prevent the Russians from achieving that 'nuclear balance' without going to war with them. More active policies in such areas as Indochina or China, of the kind the Joint Chiefs of Staff had advocated, would not solve that problem.
Dulles expanded on this argument at a National Security Council meeting later in December, 1954. He could not help but have some sympathy for the Joint Chiefs' call for "greater dynamism" in American policies toward the Russians and the Chinese Communists; he himself had campaigned on just this point in 1952. "However, experience indicated that it was not easy to go very much beyond the point that this Administration had reached in translating a dynamic policy into courses of action, and in any case we had been more dynamic than our predecessors." Preventive war was "of course" ruled out. Strong and forceful efforts to change the character of the Soviet system, or to overthrow communist regimes in Eastern Europe and China, or to detach those countries from the Soviet bloc "would involve the United States in general war." Even if the United States could somehow break up Soviet control over Eastern Europe and China, "this in itself would not actually touch the heart of the problem: Soviet atomic plenty." And although these more aggressive policies, if successful, "might result in the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, they would almost certainly cause the disintegration of the free world bloc, ... for our allies would never go along with such courses of action as these."
In the end, Dulles concluded, the only real solution for the problem of expanding Soviet nuclear capabilities might be nuclear abolition. It was true, he admitted, that if the United States should agree to eliminate nuclear weapons alone, "we would be depriving ourselves of those weapons in which the U. S. was ahead and would not be taking action in the area of Soviet superiority, the conventional armaments field." It was unlikely that the means would ever be developed to monitor conventional force disarmament. But "it could be argued that atomic weapons are the only ones by which the U. S. can be virtually destroyed through a sudden attack, and if this danger of destruction should be removed by eliminating nuclear weapons this would help the U. S. by enabling retention intact of our industrial power which has acted both as a deterrent against total war and as a principal means of winning a war."
A year later, almost on the eve of the famous Life magazine interview with James Shepley in which he had extolled the virtues of going to the brink of war as a means of preserving peace, Dulles discussed the future of nuclear deterrence with a recuperating Eisenhower - the President had suffered his heart attack three months earlier - in the White House. As Dulles himself recorded the conversation: "I said that I had come to the conclusion that our whole international security structure was in jeopardy. The basic thesis was local defensive strength with the backing up of United States atomic striking power. However, that striking power was apt to be immobilized by moral repugnance. If this happened, the whole structure could readily collapse."
Dulles went on to say that he had come to believe "that atomic power was too vast a power to be left for the military use of any one country." Its use, he thought, should be "internationalized for security purposes." The United States might well consider calling together the forty-two nations with which it had security treaties, placing before them a proposal for an international group that would decide "when and how to use atomic weapons for defense - always reserving of course the right of the United States, in the event that it was directly attacked, to use whatever means it had." If and when the Soviet Union was prepared to forego the right of veto, the group might then transfer this responsibility to the United Nations Security Council, "so as to universalize the capacity of atomic thermonuclear weapons to deter aggression." Eisenhower's response, somewhat neutrally, was that the idea was "an interesting one."
Encouraged by the President to develop his ideas, the Secretary of State prepared a long memorandum early in 1956, in which he noted that Soviet nuclear capabilities might well grow, within a few years, to the point at which they could "at a single stroke, virtually obliterate our industrial power and ... simultaneously gravely impair our capacity to retaliate." That retaliatory capacity would then lose its deterrent effect, and "the United States might become endangered as never before." Indeed, the psychological loss of superiority might well precede its actual loss, because "it would be generally assumed that the use of our nuclear power is so restricted by constitutional and democratic processes and moral restraints that we would never be able to use it first; and conditions could be such that only the first use would have great significance. ... Repugnance to the use of nuclear weapons could grow to a point which would depreciate our value as an ally, undermine confidence in our 'collective defense' concepts, and make questionable the reliability of our allies and the availability to SAC of our foreign bases."
All of this only reflected the fact that "there is throughout the world a growing, and not unreasonable, fear that nuclear weapons are expanding at such a pace as to endanger human life on this planet. ... The peoples of the world cry out for statesmanship that will find a way to assure that this new force shall serve humanity, not destroy it." This responsibility very largely fell to the United States, but meeting it would require more than the "Atoms for Peace' or 'Open Skies' proposals that had already been put forward. If the nation failed to meet that responsibility, "our moral leadership in the world could be stolen from us by those whose creed denies moral principles."
The ultimate solution, Dulles suggested, would be to vest a veto-less United Nations Security Council with control "of sufficient atomic weapons, and means of delivery, as to overbalance any atomic or other weapons as might be surreptitiously retained by any nation." Prior to this, the United States might seek commitments from nations possessing nuclear capabilities to use them only in accordance with recommendations from the General Assembly. Regional groups, too - NATO would be the model - could be set up "to study and plan the means whereby nuclear weapons could most effectively be used to deter armed attack and to preserve peace in each region." The critical task would be to get the United States away from its "present vulnerable position [of having] virtually the sole responsibility in the free world with respect to the use of nuclear weapons, ... a responsibility which is not governed by any clearly enunciated principles reflecting 'decent respect for the opinions of mankind'."
Although nothing came of Dulles's sweeping proposals, he continued throughout the rest of his term as Secretary of State to reiterate with Eisenhower the concerns he had articulated. For example, in December, 1956, in the immediate wake of the Suez and Hungarian crises, Dulles warned that in his view "a 'showdown' with Russia would not have more than one chance in three of working, and two chances out of three of making global war inevitable." But the Russians too would have difficulty translating nuclear strength into political advantage. In November, 1957, in connection with a discussion of Strategic Air Command vulnerabilities, Dulles dismissed the possibility of a Soviet surprise attack as "remote" on the grounds that "such an attack without provocation involving casualties of perhaps one hundred million would be so abhorrent to all who survived in any part of the world that [he] did not think that even the Soviet rulers would dare to accept the consequences."
In April, 1958, Dulles again raised with Eisenhower "the question of our national strategic concept." The difficulty was that "this too much invoked massive nuclear attack in the event of any clash anywhere of U.S. with Soviet forces." There were, Dulles argued, "increasing possibilities of effective defense through tactical nuclear weapons and other means short of wholesale obliteration of the Soviet Union, and ... these should be developed more rapidly." It was a vicious circle: "so long as the strategic concept contemplated this, our arsenal of weapons had to be adapted primarily to that purpose and so long as our arsenal of weapons was adequate only for that kind of a response, we were compelled to rely on that kind of a response." It was, of course, the case that "our deterrent power might be somewhat weakened if it were known that we contemplated anything less than 'massive retaliation' and therefore the matter had to be handled with the greatest care."
What this new evidence suggests, then, is that the traditional view of Dulles as an uncritical enthusiast for strategies based solely on nuclear deterrence is profoundly wrong; that, indeed, the Secretary of State himself anticipated many of the criticisms advocates of 'flexible response' would later make of such strategies; and that he even contemplated, as a long-range goal and on both geopolitical and moral grounds, the abolition of nuclear weapons altogether.
International Communism
A second area where the documents suggest we need to revise our thinking about John Foster Dulles has to do with his understanding of international communism. In his first televised address as Secretary of State only a week after the Eisenhower administration took office, Dulles had dramatically unveiled a map showing the "vast area" stretching from Central Europe to Kamchatka and including China, "which the Russian Communists completely dominate." In the few years since the end of World War II, the number of people under their rule had expanded from 200 to 800 million, "and they're hard at work to get control of other parts of the world." The strategy was one of "encirclement": "Soviet communists" would seek to avoid all-out war but would work "to get control of the different areas around them and around us, so they will keep growing in strength and we will be more and more cut off and isolated. And they have been making very great progress."
At first glance, the tone and content of this speech appear to fit the widely held view of Dulles as an ideological literalist, convinced - as were many other people at the time - that adherence to the doctrines of Marx and Lenin automatically meant subservience to Moscow.
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There were further adverse effects of the mergers and acquisitions mania. These included the socially sterile rewards received by those who traded with inside information on the offers to be made for a specific stock. And there were the losses, in some instances perhaps salutary, of those who were attracted by the prospect of high return and who bought the securities, principally the high-risk, high-interest junk bonds, that financed the operations and that went eventually to discount or default as the full consequences of the aberration became evident. From these losses there was further effect on productive investment and, at least marginally, on consumer spending and the functioning of the economy as a whole. With all else, in the oldest tradition of economic life, the mentally vulnerable, those at one time more obtrusively denoted as fools, were separated, as so often before, from their money.
Yet all was wholly plausible, given the corporate structure and the approved profit-maximizing motivation of the system. All, to repeat, was under the benign cloak of laissez faire and the market.
Legislative or executive action to limit or minimize the destruction - for example, holding hearings to require the approval on economic grounds of the regulatory agency for any large-scale substitution of debt for equity - went all but unmentioned. And such mention would have been met, in any case, with rejection verging on indignation and ridicule. The free enterprise system fully embraces the right to inflict limitless damage on itself.
The mergers and acquisitions mania was, without doubt, the most striking exercise in self-destruction of the culture of contentment. There have, however, been two other highly visible manifestations of this deeply inborn tendency.
The first of these was the real estate speculation of the 1980s, centering on commercial office space in the cities, but extending out to expensive dwellings, in particular condominiums, in the suburbs and resort areas and going on to architecturally questionable skyscrapers in New York City and admittedly hideous gambling casinos in Atlantic City.
As ever, the admiration for the imagination, initiative and entrepreneurship here displayed was extreme. Of those receiving the most self- and public adulation, the premier figure was Donald Trump, briefly and by his own effort and admission the most prestigious economic figure of the time.
The admiration extended to, and into, the nation's biggest banks. Here the loans were large and potentially dangerous, and so, in the nature and logic of modern banking, they were handled with the least care and discretion. The security of the small borrower is traditionally examined with relentless attention; the claims of the large borrower go to the top, where, because of the enormous amounts involved, there is an assumption of especially acute intelligence. The man or woman who borrows $10,000 or $50,000 is seen as a person of average intelligence to be dealt with accordingly. The one who borrows a million or a hundred million is endowed with a presumption of financial genius that provides considerable protection from any unduly vigorous scrutiny. This individual deals with the very senior officers of the bank or financial institution; the prestige of high bureaucratic position means that any lesser officer will be reluctant, perhaps fearing personal career damage, to challenge the ultimate decision. In plausible consequence, the worst errors in banking are regularly made in the largest amount by the highest officials. So it was in the great real estate boom of the age of contentment.
Here the self-destructive nature of the system, if more diffused than in the case of the mergers, acquisitions and leveraged buyouts mania, was greater in eventual economic impact. Excessive acreages of unused buildings, commercial and residential, were created. The need for such construction, given the space demands of the modern business bureaucracy, was believed to be without limit. In later consequence, the solvency of numerous banks, including that of some of the nation's largest and most prestigious institutions, was either fatally impaired or placed in doubt. The lending of both those that failed or were endangered and others was subject, by fear and example, to curtailment. The construction industry was severely constrained and its workers left unemployed. A general recession ensued. Any early warning as to what was happening would have been exceptionally ill received, seen as yet another invasion of the benign rule of laissez faire and a specific interference with the market.
However, in keeping with the exceptions to this rule, there could be eventual salvation in a government bailout of the banks. Insurance of bank deposits - a far from slight contribution to contentment - was permissible, as well as the assurance that were a bank large enough, it would not be allowed to fail. A preventive role by government was not allowed; eventual government rescue was highly acceptable.
Ranking with the real estate and banking aberration was the best publicized of the exercises in financial devastation: the collapse of the savings and loan associations, or, in common parlance, the S&L scandal. This, which was allowed to develop in the 1980s, had emerged by the end of that decade as the largest and costliest venture in public misfeasance, malfeasance and larceny of all time.
Again the basic principle was impressively evident and pursued: laissez faire combined with faith in the benignity of market enterprise. The short-run view took precedence over the more distant consequences. And there was an infinitely vast and obligatory public intervention as those consequences became known.
Starting well back in the last century, the savings and loan associations, under various names, played a small, worthy and largely anonymous role in the American economy. Attracting for deposit the savings of the local community, they then made these available in the form of home loans to the immediately adjacent citizenry. There was strict regulation by federal and state governments as to the interest they could pay and charge and the purpose for which they could make loans. Home ownership being a well-established social good, the S&Ls were eventually given public encouragement and support in the form of a modest government guarantee of their depositors' funds.
Then, with the age and culture of contentment, there came the new overriding commitment to laissez faire and the market and the resulting movement toward general deregulation. The commercial banks, once released from regulation, greatly increased the interest rates there available to depositors, which meant that if the similarly deregulated S&Ls were to compete, they would need to pay higher rates to their depositors. Sadly, however, these payments would have to be met by the low rates then in place on a large and passive inventory of earlier mortgage loans. The highly improvident solution was to accord the S&Ls freedom to set rates of interest on the insured deposits and then to go beyond home loans to the widest range of other investments, or what were imaginatively so designated. Also, faithful to principle, government action in the interest of contentment was not curtailed. Instead, the once modest insurance of deposits by the federal government was raised to $100,000 on each S&L account. The selective view of the role of the state was never more evident.
The foregoing changes were variously enacted or instituted mainly in the early 1980s. They set the stage for what was by far the most feckless and felonious disposition of what, essentially, were public funds in the nation's history, perhaps in any modern nation's history. Deposits guaranteed by the federal government and thus having behind them the full faith and credit of the government were brokered across the country to find the highest rate of return. Such interest was, normally, offered by the institutions most given to irresponsible or larcenous employment of the funds involved. Efforts at correction or restraint, palpably small, were deliberately restricted as being inconsistent with the broad commitment to deregulation. Those still subject to the skeletal and ineffective regulation took their case, not without success, to the Congress. Funds from the publicly guaranteed deposits were thus recycled back to support congressional races in an innovative, if perverse, step toward the public financing of electoral campaigns.
In the latter years of the 1980s, the whole S&L experience came explosively to an end in the first and, in many respects, most dramatic exposure of the public principles implicit in the age of contentment. The prospective cost, perhaps $2,000 for each American citizen were it equally assessed, was regarded as impressive. Less impressive, perhaps, was the understanding of what underlay the debacle. Here, first of all, was the general commitment to laissez faire, the specific commitment to the market, which had led to the deregulation. But here too was the highly selective character of that commitment. As far as the culture of contentment was concerned, responsibility to find a solution for the shortfall remained firmly with the state. The depositors, large and small - the comfortable rentier community - were at risk; thus the necessity for the continuing role of the government. The whole S&L scandal was, to repeat, one of the clearest displays of the controlling principles of contentment, and certainly it was the most immediately costly.
The Bureaucratic Syndrome
Thought for many is hard work, which is why it often commands high pay. It also, alas, is compulsively delegated.
NO ONE should be in doubt: one of the inescapable features of life in the late twentieth century is the great, complicated and multilayered organization. With all else, it is the source of much present-day innovation. The latter is no longer the distinctive product of one acutely inspired brain, although this source of invention is still celebrated; normally it is the result of the cooperative effort of diversely competent specialists, each making his or her uniquely qualified contribution to the common goal. As economic and public operations become more complex, it is necessary to unite varying skills, different experience, different education, resulting specialization and different degrees of intelligence, or, at a minimum, its confident outward expression.Out of this need for both number and diversity of talents comes the need for supervision, coordination and command. This, in turn, and depending on the size and complexity of the job at hand, can involve numerous levels of authority, or what is so described. Further, since the requisite knowledge and intelligence derive in large measure from those whose contributions are brought together and coordinated, so in no slight measure does the power in the organization. The modern corporation or public agency has an internal intelligence and authority of its own; these are to some extent independent of, or superior to, those of the persons who are seen, and who see themselves, as in command. The latter point should not go unremarked. The power attributed to the cabinet secretary recently arrived in office with no previous experience in his or her now-assigned task or to the corporate chief executive officer now rewarded for an orderly and disciplined performance in the ranks is subject to an exaggeration to which those so celebrated happily and even diligently contribute.
Not surprisingly, the culture of the great organization is enormously influenced by the pursuit of contentment. This is evident in two important ways, both proceeding from the discomforts associated with original or dissenting thought. Also involved is a deeply ingrained, much invoked distinction between private organization and public organization - between the great private bureaucracy and its large public counterpart. In the culture of contentment the former is perceived as efficient and dynamic, while the latter is thought to be mentally moribund, seriously incompetent and, on frequent occasion, offensively arrogant.
In any large organization there must, first of all, be a well-developed sense of common purpose. This is informally, and sometimes formally, articulated in the large modern firm as company policy; in the public organization it is called official or departmental policy. "We are committed this year to big, if somewhat less fuel-efficient cars; that is what the American customer wants." "The Communist threat may no longer exist, but our policy still calls for a strong defense."
Individual contentment, all are aware, is powerfully served by acceptance of this formally stated or commonly assumed purpose.
</doc><doc register="popular lore" n="48">To now permit the patenting of animals subjected to genetic alteration, principally by means of genetic engineering, could have several adverse consequences. From a scientific perspective, these include the following concerns.
1. No regulation. The floodgates will be opened wide once genetic engineering research on animals is patent protected, because biotech companies will have the protection they need to secure a monopoly over new 'intellectual property' (i.e., genetically engineered animals). This will mean a dramatic increase in animal experimentation for agricultural, biomedical, and other industrial purposes, which cannot be effectively regulated. The outcome of many genetic experiments cannot be predicted in relation to the animals' health and welfare or in relation to the long-term social, economic, and environmental impact. In many instances animals will be abnormal at birth, and generations will suffer until techniques are perfected and accidents prevented.
2. Monopoly. Patenting could result in monopoly of genetic stock and predominance of certain genetic lines of animals over others, with an ultimate loss of genetic diversity within species. This could have a significant impact on agriculture as well as adverse social, economic, and ecological consequences. And if farm animals are patented, will farmers have to pay a user fee for offspring and crossbreeds, and how would this be enforced?
Lynn McAnelly, a technology analyst with the Texas Department of Agriculture, Austin, sent out over 1,700 letters to livestock producers in Texas, asking them whether patenting animals would increase or decrease their costs. Of about 500 responses, 96 percent predicted that costs would go up. The consensus was that only patent holders and large agribusinesses would benefit. It was also felt that animal patenting would provide increased opportunity for large corporations and syndicates to gain control of the industry and that any cost advantages of patented animals would wind up in the pockets of big agribusiness. As a result of the survey, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower asked the Texas congressional delegation in Washington to support a patent-moratorium bill.
3. Effect on wildlife. Patenting would also cloud the ownership of wild animals. In the United States, wildlife is held by governments, both state and federal, as a common public trust. If a deer is altered genetically, can it be patented? Will people be disenfranchised of ownership of their wild animals? America's wildlife is far too precious to get caught or lost in a discussion about patenting and ownership. The American people own wildlife, to the extent that anyone does, and patenting would mean a very real threat to such ownership.
The biomedical industry will play upon public fear to block all attempts to prohibit the patenting of animals. It will tell us that the march of modern medicine will stop dead in its tracks without patent protection. The fact remains that medical advances have been made in the past without the patenting of genetic engineering techniques and of animal models. And we should recognize that patenting in this area could actually inhibit medical progress since, for proprietary reasons, research findings of privately funded laboratories and university research institutions would not be shared. There would also be considerable unnecessary and costly duplication of research, because the patenting of animal models would encourage a competitive, rather than a collaborative, research atmosphere, to the ultimate detriment of the public's best interests.
Patent Ethics
From an ethical perspective, the patenting of animals reflects a cultural attitude toward other living creatures that is contrary to the concept of the sanctity of being and the recognition of the interconnectedness of all life. The patenting of life reveals a dominionistic and materialistic attitude toward living beings that denies any recognition of their inherent nature.
Left unopposed, the patenting of animals will mean the public endorsement of the wholesale exploitation of the animal kingdom for purely human ends. Since humans are also animals, then logically there should be no legal constraints on the patenting of techniques to genetically alter human beings for the benefit of society. But there are ethical constraints (as well as the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the ownership of one person by another) that protect the sanctity and dignity of human life. To permit the patenting of animals will effectively eliminate ethical constraints on genetically altering other animals, and eventually humans, for the purported benefit of society. Such a utilitarian attitude toward life is a reflection of the ethical blindness of the times.
Supporters of animal patenting have argued that if the patenting of animals is prohibited, companies engaged in the genetic engineering of animals will fall back on trade secrecy to protect their investments in research and development. The Trade Secrecy Act, they reason, would make it difficult for those concerned about animal welfare to know what had been done to genetically engineered animals. If patenting were approved, all details would be available to the public in the patent application. In reality, however, public access to such information would be of little help in protecting animals' rights and welfare. With or without the patenting of animals, the genetic engineering of animals is being done. And by the time a patent application is filed, all the research on the animals has already been completed. Thus rigorous ethical guidelines concerning the welfare of animals subjected to genetic engineering are needed before the onset of new research projects. Knowing what has happened to them after a patent has been granted is of little avail.
It should also be remembered that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office does not, as a rule, consider the ethical, moral, and social consequences of patent applications. The essentially amoral and objective role of this governmental agency is dramatically illustrated by the granting of patent number 4,666,425 to attorney and engineer Chet Fleming for his 'discorporation' life-support system. This system, which Mr. Fleming has never actually used, is designed to keep the isolated head of an animal alive. This patent application was apparently filed to provoke greater concern for the future of new technologies and for their moral, ethical, and social consequences, which Mr. Fleming requested the Patent Office to consider in his application. But apparently, it did not. The office granted him a patent without further question.
The primary reason for the patenting of genetically engineered animals is to protect private interests, and opposition to animal patenting is clearly a threat to the biotechnology industry. Animal patenting is an issue quite distinct from genetic engineering per se. It is an issue that is linked with private interests and monopoly on the one hand, and the public endorsement of animals as patentable commodities and inventions on the other. As such, the patenting of animals is an ethical issue, supported primarily by economic concerns and an attitude toward nonhuman creatures that is contrary to the mainstream cultural traditions of reverence for life and respect for animals and the natural world. Patent protection will do nothing to protect the rights and welfare of animals and will serve to further undermine those cultural traditions that opponents of animal patenting value so highly.
Chronology of Animal Patenting
On 7 April, 1987, the U.S. Patent Office interpreted patent law to allow for future patents on animals changed or altered through genetic engineering or similar techniques. Relying on the Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303 (1980), which held that microorganisms could be patented, the Patent Office determined that such genetically altered animals were nonnaturally occurring 'manufactures' and 'compositions of matter' and thus could be included under section 101 of the Patent Act as patentable subject matter.
The Supreme Court decision made no mention of animals, and Congress has never approved the patenting of living things except for certain specified plants in legislation passed in 1930 and in 1970.
On 17 April, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Foundation on Economic Trends, and a coalition of animal-welfare organizations representing five million people petitioned the Patent Office to rescind its controversial decision. The coalition included 11 national farm groups, 24 religious leaders, 21 animal-welfare organizations, and 8 environmental and public interest groups. It was concerned about long-term ethical, animal-suffering, environmental, economic, and governmental consequences of the patenting of animals.
In 1987, the Senate passed a Hatfield (R-Ore.) amendment to the continuing resolution, which would have temporarily blocked patenting. But the amendment was dropped in conference when Commissioner Donald Quigg stated that the Patent Office would not be able to act on animal patent applications before the end of the fiscal year on 30 September 1987. Patent Office officials later stated that they might be able to issue patents as soon as 1 April 1988.
Chairman Robert Kastenmeier (D-Wis.) of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice held a series of four hearings on the issue. No further action was taken. John Hoyt, president of the HSUS, testified on 11 June, 1987, stating that patenting is "inappropriate, violates the basic ethical precepts of civilized society and unleashes the potential for uncontrollable and unjustified animal suffering."
On 5 August 1987, Rep. Charlie Rose (D-N.C.) introduced H.R. 3119 to impose a moratorium on the patenting of animals so that the potential adverse implications of such patenting could be carefully studied. The HSUS and others wrote to Rose pledging to conduct studies during the moratorium period. On 29 February, 1988, Sen. Mark Hatfield introduced a moratorium bill, S. 2111, in the Senate.
On 13 April 1988, the U.S. Patent Office issued the first patent on a genetically engineered animal. Harvard University researchers had developed the 'oncomouse,' a genetically engineered, cancer-prone mouse. Funding for this research came from DuPont Chemical Co., one of the world's major producers of carcinogenic chemicals.
Rep. Kastenmeier drafted legislation to make patent-user exemptions for family farmers and scientists in order to quell some of the increasing public opposition. Meanwhile, steps were taken in Europe by the European Economic Community to change existing laws that prohibited the patenting of selectively bred plant and animal varieties so that all genetically engineered life forms might be patented.
On 13 July 1988, under pressure from the State Department of Commerce, which insisted that a moratorium on animal patenting would harm U.S. industrial competitiveness, Rep. Kastenmeier's subcommittee voted 8 to 6 against Rep. Rose's moratorium. This established the United States as the first nation to officially endorse the patenting of all life forms subjected to genetic engineering.
On 2 August 1988, the House Judiciary Committee approved Rep. Kastenmeier's legislation on animal patenting, which would have exempted farmers from paying royalties on the offspring of patented transgenic animals. According to opponents in the biotech industry this would have removed many economic incentives for developing genetically engineered animals. Supporters of the exemption saw it as vital to the survival of family farms. (It never became law, most likely as a result of pressure from the inner circle that is now the Council on Competitiveness.)
Since the patenting of the oncomouse in the United States there have been no further animal patents awarded.
Some 145 animal patent applications are now awaiting approval at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Approximately 80 percent of these have medical utility, and the remainder involve agricultural animals.
A new bill was introduced in the Senate (S. 1291) by Sen. Hatfield on 13 June, 1991 to impose a five-year moratorium on the granting of patents on invertebrate and vertebrate animals, including those that have been genetically engineered. I supported this bill with the following statement published in the Congressional Record on that day (pp. 7818-7819).
In order for society to reap the full benefits of advances in genetic engineering biotechnology, the social, economic, environmental, and ethical ramifications and consequences of such advances need to be fully assessed. Considering the rapid pace of developments in this field, which will be spurred on by the granting of patents on genetically altered animals, a 5-year moratorium on the granting of such patents is a wise and necessary decision. A moratorium will enable Congress to fully assess, consider, and respond to the economic, environmental, and ethical issues raised by the patenting of such animals and in the process, establish the United States as the world leader in the safe, appropriate, and ethical applications of genetic engineering biotechnology for the benefit of society and for generations to come.</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684416" filename="FROWN_G.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="belles-lettres" n="01">
Love and/or War
By W. D. Snodgrass
WHAT was our teacher crying for - unashamedly, in front of us all? What should she care if we finally were in the war? Nobody thought fighting would come to this country, much less this town. If it lasted, we might have to go to it; she never would. We were used to war talk: year after year, our home radios had talked about plebiscites, treaties, battles, countries fallen - other peoples' war. We had heard the voices of Mussolini and Hitler. That morning, we'd all been herded into the school auditorium where a huge radio console had been rolled out to carry the voice of Franklin Delano Roosevelt saying that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour. Could she be crying for us?
Year by year, while I finished school and started college, that war became a little less of a rumor, more a living presence. We had blackouts, rationing, newsreels, patriotic songs on the radio. The war, like love, was on every public tongue; we were expected to have strong feelings - but what feelings? Men I knew got drafted; a neighbor who'd played in Uncle Stew's tennis club died in a training accident. A boy who had bullied me in the high school band dropped out of school to join the Marines; he was killed. I did not admit, even to myself, a feeling that this proved the world's, even God's, justice.
Our band director's name was Adolphe - Adolphe J. Pletincks, a drill-master worthy of SS sergeantry, who wore, moreover, a tiny mustache not unlike Hitler's. He, though, was Italian and wore it to look like a nobler despot, Toscanini. Unceasingly he exhorted us that, because of "our boys overseas," we must march better, play better, win more competitions. To botch a maneuver during the football half time would "let them down." Absurdly, this worked; we took every prize in the area.
I once knew a man who, during World War II in the Soviet Union, had served a sentence in Siberia - the best years of his life, since 'free' men were in the army. The time I served in the tiny hyper-Christian college a block from my home could have been as delightful if I'd had sense or nerve. We were strictly forbidden to smoke, drink, or dance, but a kindlier tolerance was turned toward couples who slipped off nightly to the 'Big Rock' or the woods behind the practice football field. I wrote a column in the campus paper, helped write a musical comedy, acted in plays and skits, was student conductor of the chorus. The older girls, who would normally have scorned freshmen, sought us out, praised our performances, took us to necking parties.
So love and war, or sex and war, arrived in tandem; at times they seemed equally daunting. When, at earlier parties, our high-school gang had played spin-the-bottle or post office, I abstained - though I had a heavy crush on one of the girls, a frill, willowy blonde (aptly named Willa), outside whose house I paced longingly late at night, whistling sad songs. Still earlier, I had taken another girl, as pretty but less fashionable, to a barn party. I think she liked me; in time she became a dancer, shared my love of music, and proved superbly sexual with one of my friends. Alas, while other couples kept disappearing into the hay mow, I not only failed to vanish with, I vanished from her, seeking noisier sports among the boys. Later, at school functions, I seldom danced with girls, getting instead into athletic jitterbug contests with other guys - much as young Hungarians and Romanians display for their girls rather than dance with them.
By the time I finished high school, though, the drives grew stronger, even if my nerves did not. The few times I'd tried to kiss a girl, I had shivered so heavily that I had to plea a sudden chill and hurry home. Once into college, I did manage to try a little petting with the older girls, though even then I was known to deliver to a partner impromptu sermonettes on the subject of French kissing.
Meantime, I'd been attracted to a girl in my freshman class, a minister's daughter whose name recalled the heroine of a then-scandalous novel. She agreed, after our first movie or pizza, to drive out somewhere and park; I tried not to betray that I had no idea where one could. As soon as I kissed her she began to moan and tremble, fumbling at my clothes. I backed out of our woodland cranny in such panic that I stuck the car in a ditch - embarrassing, but at least a crisis I could manage.
Another night, we went to lie in the tall grass behind the practice field; again I fled. My sermonettes could not even calm her enough so that passion might shake her less than fear shook me. One day, when she'd quite justly escaped to her room at the girls' dorm, I got the nerve to follow upstairs, risking expulsion. I dared climb or enter little else. Already weary, no doubt, of her father's sermons on love and sex, she had no need of mine and soon moved on to a college air cadet.
Still, the draft loomed larger, closer. I felt unable to face that war without someone to be in love with, someone to come back to - a feeling shared, oddly enough, by most young men. And I soon met another girl who fit, more or less, the romantic ideal of the moment: slender, blonde, and rather timid both sexually and personally. We started dating and quickly decided we were in the grip of a great passion. We did feel something powerful, wanted to call it love and to believe, since it would surely last forever, that one could mitigate one's death, or build a life around it.
Getting drafted must be much like what a frog feels, being taken into a larger organization - say, a heron. Instantly, you are one in a line of naked men, examined, poked at, numbered, rushed from place to place, questioned, insulted, shouted at, given indecipherable but inexorable commands. Then, strange clothes are hurled at you and you emerge, as from a new, more fearful birth trauma, into an area of barracks and asphalt-covered, phlegm-splattered drill yards. I have no way to convey how utterly you become nobody, vulnerable, almost transparent. Instantly, no world revolves around you, and there is no way to make one seem to do so again.
In school I had been one of the best students and also the class clown - a role self-deprecating enough to make me more or less acceptable to tougher, less studious classmates. In the Navy, nothing I did, said, or could think up was funny. Music was no help; after boot camp I kept a few scores with me, but how many sailors care about Palestrina? Actually, a man two bunks away did care, but he'd been second organist at St. Patrick's in New York and found my learning less than impressive. I joined the Bluejackets' Choir at each of several bases hoping to find a berth as music specialist, but found, instead, others better prepared, more experienced. I had no idea how to relate to the men around me or how to give what had seemed the fact of my existence any hint of significance.
Randall Jarrell ends a fine little poem, 'Mail Call,' by saying "the soldier simply wishes for his name," which, if called, will bring him a letter and prove the person he once was, possible - possibly even recoverable. The surest proof came in love letters. Mail call was the best, or worst, moment of each day; you approached carefully any man whose name had not been called. Only a 'Dear John' letter was worse - we felt, mawkishly no doubt, that with no one to come back to, a man was less likely to come back. As if wanting something more intensely could make it more likely to happen!
Evenings, when the others read, played cards, went to the canteen, I stayed in the barracks to write my family or my girl. I was determined to write her every night; once or twice, I refused to leave the base on liberty lest I miss a day. My friends - eventually I had some - were aghast. Though I had little to say beyond the tritest lovers' formulae from movies or the radio, my letters grew longer and longer. I cultivated enormous handwriting to eat up more space on the page, making it all seem weightier, bulkier.
No doubt I hoped - in vain - to coerce more and longer answers, more impassioned declarations. How else could I impress my less romantic, less sublimated mates? My best friend at several successive camps, known as 'J.C.,' got letters from his girl signed, "Again, Johnny! Again!" Chastity had to go far to match that! J.C.'s cynical cockiness often shocked me. When an older platoon member and former lay preacher, Charles Birdey, returned from liberty full of self-praise for his weekend spent comforting his impoverished grandmother, J.C. shouted across the barracks, "Hey, Birdey, did you get in her pants?"
I was shocked, too, when friends whose wives' or girl-friends' fidelity was so crucial to them felt no constancy incumbent on themselves. Of course, we demand more of the other's morals, especially of those we love, than of our own; then, too, men were expected to be sexually freer. And the fact of facing possible death or injury made many feel driven to, and justified in, sexual inconstancies. To me, all premarital sex was immoral; if I did not dare have sex with my own girl-friend, I could scarcely imagine it with anyone else. That seemed as preposterous to my friends as their attitudes seemed scandalous to me.
Still, some of my notions were changing. Home for ten days' leave after boot camp, I became more urgent and the love-play more intense. If she had been willing, I wonder what I'd have done. She wasn't. And partly because of that - what might now seem a strong deterrent - we got engaged.
At the same time I found myself, to my surprise, darkly resentful against my parents, as if they had somehow caused the war. It might have made some sense to feel our lifestyle had been one, at least, of the war's cause. Or that my upbringing had left me woefully ill-equipped for the world I faced. What I did feel was the spoiled child's sense that the parents, the gods of his tiny cosmos, were to blame for all trials or dangers. My feelings about God - the one in church - were as yet unchanged.
And another attitude changed: I was finding that, in real need or trouble, help seldom came from the appointed or promised channels. In boot camp my greatest fear had been of the swimming lessons; I could swim a little but had always dreaded the water. Those 'lessons' consisted of ordering a shivering clump of thirty or forty naked men to jump into the pool at once - then, arms thrashing, bodies thumping and jostling, strike out for the far end. As the last lesson, we had to step off a high wooden tower, falling feet first into the pool. In the chow hall, the night before that test, I went to pieces, hysterical.
A boy my own age - vulgar, irreverent, a loudmouth I'd never willingly have spoken to - took me in hand. "You come right beside me," he said. "We'll go off together; it's a snap." When we'd climbed the platform atop the tower, he stepped out, whooping, comically kicking and flailing; then I, too, stepped into the air. Falling for what seemed hours, I heard a small, regretful voice I've heard again several times when I thought my life about to end in a car crash or a fall, saying with stupid sincerity: "Oh. I wish I was back up there." Then I was in the water, splashing toward the edge.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="02">
Whither Europe?
By RICHARD N. COOPER
Europe of 1992 has arrived, almost. In 1985 the member nations of the European Community launched an ambitious program to eliminate intracommunity border delays for economic transactions, so that intra-European trade would become like trade within the United States. While tariffs and most quantitative restrictions had been eliminated as long ago as 1968, a truck carrying commercial goods still had to stop for an average of eighty minutes at intracommunity borders in the late 1980s. This delay results from the need both to ascertain whether the truck's goods violate the importing country's health or safety or environmental regulations and to complete the paperwork associated with adjusting for the different indirect tax rates prevalent among European countries, rebatable on exports and leviable on imports.
Border stops are to be eliminated by the end of 1992. By February 1992 all of the 282 directives required to achieve this result had been submitted by the European Commission, the community's executive arm, to the European Council of Ministers, its decision-making body. Of these, 194 had been adopted by the Council of Ministers, and thus formally became the law of the European Community, although in practice most required implementing legislation by national parliaments, and that process was much delayed.
Whatever happens in detail, however, the European Community will unquestionably have entered a new phase, completing the common market begun in 1958. Business firms have already anticipated the new arrangements; in the past few years there has been a spate of cross-border mergers, acquisitions, and weaker forms of association among firms to take advantage of the new possibilities and intensified competition, for example, with respect to government procurement. Cross-border investments within Europe formerly were mainly by non-European, and especially American, firms; now they also involve many European firms.
Ironically, Europe may not achieve the full benefits of 'Europe without borders' in the near future. These were estimated in 1988 at 4.5 percent of Europe's gross domestic product (GDP), to be achieved over the six years following 1992, roughly 0.7 percent a year, a significant addition to a region's growth rate. The reason for the delay is the European Council agreement in December 1991 at Maastricht to introduce a European Monetary Union (EMU) by 1999 and the conditions attendant to that aim.
A Europe without (commercial) borders will represent the attainment of one of the objectives laid down in the Spaak Report of 1955, whose adoption led to the Treaty of Rome in 1957, achieving a true common market among the (originally six, now twelve) members of the European Community. What was not agreed in the mid-1950s, but was foremost in the minds of some European statesmen, was the eventual creation of a United States of Europe, politically linking all member countries. (A minor achievement of the period pointing in this direction is that the Treaty of Rome, like a constitution but unlike most treaties, contains no provisions for withdrawal from or dismantling of the European Community.) That objective remains alive and controversial thirty-five years later.
Europe is once again at a crossroads, usually formulated as facing a strategic choice between 'widening' the community or 'deepening' it. Those who would deepen it want to extend the scope of the community to encompass a unified currency, a common foreign policy, and a common defense, leading eventually to a confederation or even a federation of European states, although that ultimate objective is rarely discussed explicitly. Many Europeans are not prepared to contemplate a federation yet, but they are willing to continue, gradually, down a path that may eventually lead to federation. Other Europeans see no reason for further change from existing arrangements, although that view, too, is rarely voiced explicitly, not being respectable in informed circles. Still other Europeans believe the community should be widened by taking in additional countries that are ready to join. Austria, Finland, Sweden, Cyprus, Malta, and Turkey have officially applied for membership, and others, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland, have indicated their likely desire to apply in the future. The three Baltic states may not be far behind. The Swiss and Norwegian publics are debating the issue seriously. Under the Treaty of Rome, anyEuropean country can aspire to membership.
Political considerations reinforce the economic arguments for enlargement in the case of the three central European countries, and eventually also possibly for the Baltic states. The European Community is made up exclusively of democratic countries, a political if not a formal condition for membership. Some argue that membership in the community will in practice rule out a reversion to authoritarian government. This consideration played a role in the admission of Greece, Portugal, and Spain during the 1980s.
Although widening and deepening are not logically incompatible, in reality there is considerable tension between them, even though in the end they may actually reinforce each other. The admission of new members creates substantial problems of adjustment both for existing members and especially for new members, who may call for financial assistance and special transitional arrangements lasting for many years. The all-important details of entry preoccupy officials, diverting their attention from other tasks. Some prospective members would have great difficulty adhering comfortably to a common currency, thus either delaying that route to deepening or leading to two classes of membership. Close cooperation in foreign or defense policy is difficult enough among existing members, all of which (except Ireland) have much experience with both through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Admission of countries with traditions of neutrality would probably impede progress on those fronts.
New membership would also greatly complicate theprocess of decision-making within the European Community, and extensive widening would certainly require major revisions in the voting provisions of the European Council (which still requires unanimity on matters of tax, environment, and labor policies, and a heavy majority on other issues), and would probably lead to greater authority gravitating toward the Commission, thereby increasing the so- called democratic gap within the community, since the Commission is not politically responsible to electorates or, except very indirectly, to national governments. A natural solution to these problems would be to enlarge the powers of the directly elected European Parliament, a step toward deepening.
During the 1960s the members concentrated on completing the customs union and the common agricultural policy - a process of deepening. French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed additional members, notably Britain. During the 1970s Britain, Denmark, and Ireland joined the community, a process of widening. In the early and mid-1980s three additional members joined, and in the late 1980s the community passed the Single European Act, which embraced the objective of Europe-92 and streamlined the decision-making process - some widening and some deepening for the decade as a whole. In recent years the emphasis has been on deepening. Europe-92 in particular required joint decisions on thousands of details concerning regulation and taxation that are at the heart of domestic policy-making in every country.
What comes next? Extensive consultation on extra-European foreign policy questions has taken place for several years, but no one is yet prepared to embark on joint foreign policy-making on all issues. Sharp disagreements over how to handle a disintegrating Yugoslavia simply dramatized the difficulty.
That leaves money and defense. European defense for the past forty years has been closely associated through NATO with the Unites States and Canada and two nonmember nations on Europe's important flanks, Norway and Turkey. Although NATO needs to redefine its role in light of the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, many Europeans do not yet want to abandon NATO, at least until it becomes clear how the dust settles. Former Soviet republics still have nuclear weapons capable of devastating Europe. Moreover, Russia will no doubt emerge with a powerful military capability and with intentions toward Europe that cannot now be foreseen. Thus a European-only defense policy is not widely desired. No method has yet been found to forge a common European defense policy that still permits close cooporation with NATO, and many Europeans fear opening that particular route because NATO, precarious since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact, might unravel at the American end.
By elimination, that leaves monetary cooperation, which indeed has been on the European agenda since the late 1960s. The meeting at Maastricht took a major step toward the European Monetary Union, while advancing very little on the directly political front. The details of the EMU were agreed, and the timing and conditions of its introduction outlined. Specifically, some time after 1996 but no later than 1999, exchange rates of the participating countries (which may but need not be the same as members of the European Community) will be irrevocably fixed, a common currency in all but name. Such an arrangement requires a common monetary policy, and much of the Maastricht agreement is devoted to spelling out the institutional structure for determining that monetary policy and the powers and responsibilities of the institutions to be established.
Monetary policy under the EMU will be determined by a Eurofed, modeled in part on the Federal Open Market Committee of the U.S. Federal Reserve System. It is a council to consist of governors of the participating national central banks, who will vote as Europeans without government instruction, augmented by six individuals appointed for eight-year terms by the European Council, also to serve as Europeans rather than as national representatives. This body would determine the rate of monetary expansion in the EMU, and thus also short-term interest rates, with the primary but not exclusive objective of maintaining price stability.
The Eurofed would be obliged to report to the public but would act independently of governments. Governments would have no direct access to the money-creating powers of the EMU, and because national central banks would cease to create national money, governments would have to go to the capital market to finance any budget deficits, as governments in the United States do. These arrangements would mark a dramatic change from present arrangements.
A decision is to be made before 1997 whether to go ahead with the EMU in 1997, and if so with what membership. Four presumptive conditions for membership were established at Maastricht: (1) a country should have a rate of inflation that does not exceed by 1.5 percentage points the rate of inflation of the three community countries with the lowest rates of inflation; (2) government borrowing to cover deficits should not exceed 3 percent of GDP, and outstanding government debt should not exceed 60 percent of GDP, or at least should have declined substantially; (3) a country's currency should not have been devalued for at least two years; and (4) a country's long-term interest rates should not exceed by 2 percentage points the long-term interest rates of the three countries with the lowest rates of inflation.
These are stiff conditions. At the end if 1991 only France and Luxembourg among the twelve member countries could meet them. During the remainder of the 1990s countries that do not want to be left out of the EMU will strive to attain them, on the grounds that adequate striving may in the end be sufficient for admission. (The numerical target on outstanding debt, in particular, will be virtually impossible for several countries to meet without repudiation - notably Belgium, Greece, Ireland, and Italy.) The process of attempting to reduce inflation (which has come down substantially in many European countries during the past five years) and budget deficits will result in deflationary pressure being exerted by fiscal and monetary policy in the coming years. Moreover, it is widely recognized that currencies within Europe are out of line in 1992, and in particular that the German mark should be appreciated against several other currencies. The Maastricht agreement does not prevent currency realignments before the EMU. But under existing arrangements currency realignments involve a collective decision, and in their efforts to establish their anti-inflation credentials, most European countries will strive to avoid currency evaluation, as they have done since early 1987. A corollary is that monetary and fiscal policies will have to be relatively tight also to protect the balance of payments of these countries.
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CANDICE BERGEN: SWEET SUCCESS
The nice girl who grew up with a piece of wood for a brother may not fit the character of Murphy Brown precisely but close enough to know that she is 'home at last.'
By Maynard Good Stoddard
What is a nice girl like Candice Bergen doing in the acerbic character of Murphy Brown, a 42-year-old television journalist who is single and pregnant and refuses to marry the father, her ex-husband?
An obvious answer is that she's enjoying the success of this popular CBS series, which has survived its fourth season in the sudden-death jungle of TV sitcoms. A look behind the scenes, however, reveals Candice Bergen as a most un-Murphy-like person who is happily married and loves living quietly.
The daughter of famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, Candice grew up in the Hollywood limelight contending not only with fame, but also with a unique sibling rivalry - her wooden 'brother,' Charlie McCarthy, got more attention than she did.
"Candy never knew a day without Charlie, which was a bizarre relationship for a little girl," Candice's mother, Frances Bergen, says. "How do you explain why this piece of wood was as important as a live, little girl? She was photographed with Charlie in her cradle when she was an infant."
In her teen years, Bergen rebelled. She went through some pretty colorful phases beginning at age 14 when her parents sent her to a school in Switzerland. They later yanked her out upon learning that she had bleached her hair and was majoring in Bloody Marys. "When Candy was 15, I was ready to give her away," Frances says. At 17 Candice enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but spent so much time modeling that she flunked out.
Today, her mother can laugh when asked if Candy and Murphy are one and the same person. "They are not entirely different at all," she says. "That's one reason Candy is having so much fun doing the series." Bergen herself confesses it's the kind of "flat-out comedy I've been wanting to do in the movies for years and didn't get a chance to do.
"My father kept pushing me toward comedy," she says. "He would have loved this kind of show."
At 24 Bergen was referred to as the most beautiful woman on the screen. Her romances included affairs with a Brazilian radical and an Austrian count, a date with Henry Kissinger, and a more serious involvement with record producer Terry Melcher, son of Doris Day.
The real thing finally came along, however, after photographer Mary Allen Mark suggested that Candice and Louis Malle, known for directing Atlantic City and My Dinner with André might be a perfect match. He was 14 years her senior, divorced with two children, and Bergen at first looked the other way. But ten years later, in the summer of 1980, she and Malle married. Currently their home is Malle's 18th century chateau in Lagagnac, France, as well as a duplex in Paris and an apartment in New York. But nine months of the year Bergen resides in Los Angeles - home of her mother and brother - where 'Murphy Brown' is filmed.
Bergen is proud of her role as devoted stepmother to Malle's children - Cuote, 17, and Justine, 14 - and mother to Chloe, their 6-year-old daughter. When not on the set, Bergen is at home with Chloe playing games or watching 'Sesame Street.' Of course, on Monday nights they settle down to watch - what else - 'Murphy Brown.'
The 'Murphy Brown' role was not presented to Bergen on the proverbial silver platter; she lobbied hard to become this outspoken broadcast celebrity - said to look like Diane Sawyer and behave like Mike Wallace. After the first three years home with Chloe, Bergen decided she was not comfortable away from her work. And when she read the pilot script, she was hooked. Although not one of creator Diane English's original choices for the part, she arranged a dinner with English and emerged with the role. And two Emmys now prove that her talent has at last come home.
Although her father would have liked the show, complete with things like a whoopee cushion and 'kick me' sign on someone's back - how would he, and perhaps millions of faithful 'Murphy Brown' fans, embrace the character of a pregnant single woman who refuses to marry the baby's father? "Candice and I both went through a very long period in our early lives when we were just good girls," English says. "And this character has helped us to get to another level. We are not afraid for everyone not to like us, either."
A hard and fast rule among compositors is to 'follow the copy if it goes out the window.' An actor also follows the script even though it may occasionally conflict with his or her moral principles, trusting in the writer's judgement to present an entertaining version of real life that will reach the audience.
Script-writer English and actress Bergen agreed that having Murphy come down with a case of pregnancy while single was worth the risk. They felt the situation to be topical, pointing out the publicity given the babies of TV personalities such as Katie Couric, Deborah Norville, and Meredith Viera. And hadn't Connie Chung taken leave to try to get pregnant? All of this Candice Bergen leaves on the set when she comes home to play with her daughter, read, and spend a quiet evening with her husband. "I can't think of anything greater than that," she says.
Declared to be the least pretentious of Hollywood's celebrities, Candice Bergen is perhaps quietest when "giving something back."
"When I see people losing their families, their homes - even farmers - I have to find a way to do something more," she says. She is now working with the Starlight Foundation, involved in granting wishes to dying children. Her best friends all say that she cares very deeply. So exactly what is Candice Bergen doing in the role of Murphy Brown? She's having fun, speaking out, cashing in, bettering the lives of those around her, and finding joy in the work that makes life complete.
TIME TO PREVENT OSTEOPOROSIS
The best defense against bone loss is a good offense, so start by understanding these six principles of calcium absorption.
By Kenneth H. Cooper, M.D., M.P.H.
There's no question that calcium is absolutely necessary in building and maintaining a good, solid bone mass - or what I call 'tough bones.' Unfortunately, however, the average person consumes far less than needed in his or her daily diet.
Calcium by itself - especially in the form of certain supplements - won't necessarily help you develop the tough bones you need to fight osteoporosis. But in general, if you consume your calcium wisely, you'll most likely strengthen your defenses against bone loss. The following principles will help you get the calcium you need.
Principle 1. Each day's menus should contain 1,000 to 1,500 mg of calcium.
The U.S. Recommended Daily Allowance for calcium is 800 mg. But I prefer to go with the higher 1,000-to-1,500 range, which has been endorsed by the National Institutes of Health, as well as by my consultant Dr. Charles Pak and other osteoporosis experts.
The reason for choosing the higher amount is that it's important to be certain that you reach at least a 'zero calcium balance' in your body. That is, you should be retaining at least as much calcium as you're losing. If you're consuming only the average amounts of 450 to 550 mg a day that many Americans take in, you're in danger of losing bone mass. Furthermore, you are putting yourself at greater risk for osteoporosis.
In addition, recent studies have shown that under some circumstances, increasing your calcium consumption may lower your risk of hypertension. For example, one study of pregnant women suggested that high blood pressure was associated with low calcium intake. Also, nationwide surveys and clinical studies have indicated that as a group, those who have high blood pressure take in less calcium than do those who have normal blood pressure. Specifically, one study revealed that people who consume fewer than 300 mg of calcium daily have a two to three times greater risk of developing hypertension than do those consuming 1,500 mg a day.
Of course, hypertension is a complex disease, and there's no one solution to it for everybody. But the general trend of scientific investigation points toward a definite link between low calcium intake and the risk of high blood pressure.
Principle 2. It's best to take your calcium on an empty stomach.
Admittedly, there is some disagreement on this point. One group of researchers feels that calcium supplements - and, by implication, calcium contained in foods - should be taken with meals because they're absorbed better that way. This contention is based on the fact that certain foods, such as meats, will stimulate secretions such as hydrochloric acid, and thereby enhance the solubility of calcium salts. In this way, more calcium supposedly is absorbed into the system and becomes available for use in bone formation.
A second group, which includes Dr. Charles Pak, takes the opposite position. They feel that calcium is best consumed on an empty stomach because some other foods may interfere with its absorption. For example, the oxalates or organic salts in foods such as spinach may tie up the calcium so that it never gets into the bloodstream. A similar process may occur with certain types of fiber, which 'bind' the calcium and cause it to be excreted from the body before it can get to the bones. Also, these scientists fear that taking calcium with other foods may interfere with the body's absorption of certain minerals such as phosphate and iron. Remember: Phosphate, as well as calcium, is needed for hardening!
On balance, I believe that the arguments of this second group are the strongest. Obviously, however, for you to get the necessary amounts of calcium, often you must consume your calcium at mealtimes as well.
Principle 3. Divide your calcium consumption into at least two separate 'doses' each day.
It's a well-established fact that the more you can spread out your calcium intake over the day, the more likely it is that you'll absorb maximum amounts. Most people who take supplements find that it's most convenient to take a tablet or other form of calcium before breakfast and a second one at bedtime.
On the other hand, if you're including your calcium as snacks in the middle of the day or as part of your regular meals, you can spread it out into even more 'doses.' That approach will promote even better absorption by your body.
Principle 4. Limit the sodium in your diet - especially if you're a post-menopausal woman.
In general, it's best to limit your salt intake for your overall good health. But there's a particular reason for you to pay attention to this principle if you're a woman who has gone through menopause: You'll put yourself at greater risk for lower calcium absorption and the development of osteoporosis if you consume too much sodium.
Principle 5. Calcium from different sources is absorbed by the body with varying degrees of efficiency.
In other words, calcium may be more 'bioavailable' from one source than from another. In general calcium in certain supplements tends to be better absorbed or more bioavailable than in others.
The calcium contained in milk - calcium phosphate - isn't as well absorbed when it's given as a pure salt. It's much better absorbed in the form of milk. Furthermore, skim milk seems to be better than whole milk, probably because the fats in whole milk interfere with the absorption of calcium.
Spinach contains a great deal of calcium, but has very low bioavailabilty - only about 3 percent of its calcium gets absorbed into the body. This is because the oxalates or organic salts in spinach operate in the intestines to prevent absorption of calcium.
Other common calcium-containing foods include yogurt, canned sardines and salmon (eaten with bones still present), canned or fresh oysters, collard greens, dandelion greens, turnips, mustard greens, broccoli, and kale.
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A LOADED QUESTION
What is it about Americans and guns?
By Leonard Kriegel
I have fired a gun only once in my life, hardly experience enough to qualify one as an expert on firearms. As limited as my exposure to guns has been, however, my failure to broaden that experience had nothing at all to do with moral disapproval or with the kind of righteous indignation that views an eight-year old boy playing cops and robbers with a cap pistol as a preview of the life of a serial killer. None of us can speak with surety about alternative lives, but had circumstances been different I suspect I not only would have hunted but very probably would have enjoyed it. I might even have gone in for target shooting, a 'sport' increasingly popular in New York City, where I live (like bowling, it is practised indoors in alleys). To be truthful, I have my doubts that target shooting would really have appealed to me. But in a country in which grown men feel passionately about a game as visibly ludicrous as golf, anything is possible.
The single shot I fired didn't leave me with a traumatic hatred of or distaste for guns. Quite the opposite. I liked not only the sense of incipient skill firing that shot gave me but also the knowledge that a true marksman, like a good hitter in baseball, had to practice - and practice with a real gun. Boys on the cusp of adolescence are not usually disciplined, but they do pay attention to the demands of skill. Because I immediately recognized how difficult it would be for me to practice marksmanship, I was brought face to face with the fact that my career as a hunter was over even before it had started.
Like my aborted prospects as a major league ballplayer, my short but happy life as a hunter could be laid at the metaphorical feet of the polio virus which left me crippled at the age of eleven. Yet the one thing that continues to amaze me as I look back to that gray February afternoon when I discovered the temptation of being shooter and hunter is that I did not shoot one or the other of the two most visible targets - myself or my friend Jackie, the boy who owned the .22.
Each of us managed to fire one shot that afternoon. And when we returned to the ward in which we lived along with twenty other crippled boys between the ages of nine and thirteen, we regaled our peers with a story unashamedly embellished in the telling. As the afternoon chill faded and the narrow winter light in which we had hunted drifted toward darkness, Jackie managed to hide the .22 from ward nurses and doctors on the prowl. What neither of us attempted to hide from the other boys was our brief baptism in the world of guns.
Like me, Jackie was a Bronx boy, as ignorant about guns as I was. Both of us had been taken down with polio in the summer of '44. We had each lost the use of our legs. We were currently in wheelchairs. And we had each already spent a year and a half in the aptly named New York State Reconstruction Home, a state hospital for long-term physical rehabilitation. Neither of us had ever fired anything more lethal than a Daisy air rifle, popularly known as a BB gun - and even that, in my case at least, had been fired under adult supervision. But Jackie and I were also American claimants, our imaginations molded as much by Hollywood westerns as by New York streets. At twelve, I was a true Jeffersonian who looked upon the ownership of a six-shooter as every American's 'natural' right.
To this day I don't know how Jackie got hold of that .22. He refused to tell me. And I still don't know how he got rid of it after our wheelchair hunt in the woods. For months afterward I would try to get him to promise that he and I would go hunting again, but, as if our afternoon hunt had enabled him to come to terms with his own illusions about the future (something that would take me many more years), Jackie simply shook his head and said, "That's over." I begged, wheedled, cajoled, threatened. Jackie remained obdurate. A single shot for a single hunt. It would have to be sufficient.
I never did find out whether or not I hit the raccoon. On the ride back to the ward, Jackie claimed I had. After he fired his shot, he dropped his wheelchair and slid backward on his rump to the abandoned water pipe off the side of the dirt road into which the raccoon had leaped at the slashing crack of the .22. His hand came down on something red - a blood-stain, he excitedly suggested, as he lifted himself into his wheelchair and we turned to push ourselves back to the ward. It looked like a rust stain to me, but I didn't protest. I was quite willing to take whatever credit I could. That was around an hour after the two of us, fresh from lunch, had pushed our wheelchairs across the hospital grounds, turning west at the old road that cut through the woods and led to another state home, this one ministering to the retarded. The .22, which lay on Jackie's lap, had bounced and jostled as we maneuvered our wheelchairs across that rutted road in search of an animal - any animal would do - to shoot. The early February sky hung above us like a charcoal drawing, striations of gray slate shadings feeding our nervous expectation.
It was Jackie who first spotted the raccoon. Excited, he handed the .22 to me, a gesture spurred, I then thought, by friendship. Now I wonder whether his generosity wasn't simply self-protection. Until that moment, the .22 lying across Jackie's dead legs had been an abstraction, as much an imitation gun as the 'weapons' boys in New York City construed out of the wood frames and wood slats of fruit and vegetable crates, nails, and rubber bands - cutting up pieces of discarded linoleum and stiff cardboard to use as ammunition. I remember the feel of the .22 across my own lifeless legs, the weight of it surprisingly light, as I stared at the raccoon who eyed us curiously from in front of the broken pipe. Then I picked up the gun, aimed, and squeezed the trigger, startled not so much by the noise nor by the slight pull, but by the fact that I had actually fired at something. The sound of the shot was crisp and clean. I felt as if I had done something significant.
Jackie took the gun from me. "Okay," he said eagerly. "My turn now." The raccoon was nowhere in sight, but he aimed in the direction of the water pipe into which it had disappeared and squeezed the trigger. I heard the crack again, a freedom of music now, perhaps because we two boys had suddenly been bound to each other and had escaped, for this single winter afternoon moment, the necessary but mundane courage which dominates the everyday lives of crippled children. "Okay," I heard him cry out happily, "we're goddamn killers now."
A formidable enough hail and farewell to shooting. And certainly better than being shot at. God knows what happened to that raccoon. Probably nothing; but for me, firing that single shot was both the beginning and the end of my life as a marksman. The raccoon may have been wounded, as Jackie claimed. Perhaps it had crawled away, bleeding, to die somewhere in the woods. I doubt it. And certainly I hope I didn't hit it, although in February 1946, six months before I returned to the city and to life among the 'normals,' I would have taken its death as a symbolic triumph. For that was a time I needed any triumph I could find, no matter how minor. Back then it seemed natural to begin an uncertain future with a kill - even if one sensed, as I did, that my career as a hunter was already over. The future was hinting at certain demands it would make. And I was just beginning to bend into myself, to protect my inner man from being crushed by the knowledge of all I would never be able to do. Hunting would be just another deferred dream.
But guns were not a dream. Guns were real, definitive, stamped on the imagination by their functional beauty. A gun was not a phallic symbol; a gun didn't offer me revenge on polio; a gun would not bring to life dead legs or endow deferred dreams with substance. I am as willing as the next man to quarantine reality within psychology. But if a rose is no more than a rose, then tell me why a gun can't simply be a gun? Guns are not monuments to fear and aspiration any more than flowers are.
I was already fascinated by the way guns looked. I was even more fascinated by what they did and by what made people use then. Six months after the end of the Second World War, boys in our ward were still engrossed by the way talking about guns entangled us in the dense underbrush of the national psyche. And no one in that ward was more immersed in weaponry than I. On the verge of adolescence, forced to seek and find adventure in my own imagination, I was captivated by guns.
It was a fascination that would never altogether die. A few weeks ago I found myself nostalgically drifting through the arms and armor galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Years ago I had often taken my young sons there. A good part of my pleasure now derived from memories pinned to the leisurely innocence of those earlier visits. As I wandered among those rich cabinets displaying ornate pistols and rifles whose carved wood stocks were embossed with gold and silver and ivory and brass, I was struck by how incredibly lovely many of these weapons were. It was almost impossible to conceive of them as serving the function they had been designed to serve. These were not machines designed to kill and maim. Created with an eye to beauty, their sense of decorative purpose was as singular as a well-designed eighteenth-century silver drinking cup. These guns in their solid display cases evoked a sense of the disciplined craftsmanship to which a man might dedicate his life.
Flintlocks, wheel locks, a magnificent pair of ivory pistols owned by Catherine the Great - all of them as beckoning to the touch of fingers, had they not been securely locked behind glass doors, as one of those small nineteenth-century engraved cameos that seem to force time itself to surrender its pleasures. I gazed longingly at a seventeenth-century wheel lock carbine, coveting it the way I might covet a drinking cup by Cellini or a small bronze horse and rider by Bologna. Its beautifully carved wooden stock had been inlaid with ivory, brass, silver, and mother-of-pearl, its pride of artisanship embossed with the name of its creator, Caspar Sp<*_>a-umlaut<*/>t. I smiled with pleasure. Then I wandered through the galleries until I found myself in front of a case displaying eighteenth-century American flintlock rifles, all expressing the democratic spirit one finds in Louis Sullivan's buildings or Whitman's poetry or New York City playgrounds built by the WPA during the Great Depression. Their polished woods were balanced by ornately carved stag-antler powder horns, which hung like Christmas decorations beneath them. To the right was another display case devoted to long-barreled Colt revolvers; beyond that, a splendidly engraved 1894 Winchester rifle and a series of Smith & Wesson revolvers, all of them decorated by Tiffany.
And yet they were weapons, designed ultimately to do what weapons have always done - destroy. Only in those childlike posters of the 1970s did flower stems grow out of the barrel of a gun.
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A Moral Conscience
Hans Burkhardt at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts
BY MICHAEL ZAKIAN
Hans Burkhardt's Desert Storm II is a new installation of paintings first shown at Jack Rutberg Fine Arts in autumn 1991. He began this series the day after Iraq invaded Kuwait and continued it through various stages of American involvement in the Gulf, but it is nonspecific in its indictment of war. It does not take sides but condemns the rational greed and irrational hate that still brings countries together in bloody conflict.
At the heart of these paintings lies Burkhardt's deep ties to Abstract Expressionism. Born in 1904, the same year as Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, he worked with them in New York during the 1930s. After moving to Los Angeles in 1937 he painted in relative isolation, producing painterly abstractions that paralleled developments in New York in the forties and fifties. Never a natural abstract painter, Burkhardt always worked best when guided by a specific subject. In the Gulf War he found a passionate, emotionally charged theme well suited to his creative personality.
The compositions utilize one basic image - the American flag - sometimes accompanied by a cross or crucifix. The symbols of the Great Society and the Great Religion are drained of their proud aura, reduced to empty ciphers that underscore how shallow these institutions have become. The red stripes of the flag have been changed to black. Originally symbolizing the blood of American patriots, they now speak of nothing but despair for the human condition in general.
In many of the flags, the field of stars, symbols of our lofty aspirations, are represented by burlap. This cheap, coarse cloth, used primarily for sacks, reminds us that our values and principles have been cheapened. Some of the burlap is rotted and stained red, like the shrouds used to wrap the dead, and the harsh, scabby surfaces of these works look like burnt and mangled flesh.
The series could be criticized as too literal and repetitious. Social critique centered around the flag has become cliché. But for Burkhardt, it gives tangible form to his feelings of outrage, and one cannot ignore comparisons with other works on the subject. Alfredo Jaar's recent Gulf War installation, for instance, surprised viewers with graphic photographs of war dead placed unexpectedly within a pleasing, minimal setting. In a typically postmodern fashion, these fragments of human sentiment were heightened by presentation through an impersonal medium. Burkhardt, on the other hand, gives you a full dose of sentiment, unembarrassed and unconcerned about correctness of expression. He acts not simply as a social critic but as a moral conscience.
In Catch-22, the protagonist Yossarian watched as a wounded friend's entrails spilled out onto the floor. He concluded that his friend was telling him, "Man was Matter.... Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn." Burkhardt has the same message. His Desert Storm paintings, in which the flag appears broken and burnt, declare that all peoples and nations are as mortal as any one of us.
Impossible Labors
Bernie Lubell at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
BY JOHN RAPKO
Bernie Lubell's current installation, The Archaeology of Intention, presents art as the by-product of an impossible labor of self-understanding. Working with an overgrown urban lot next to the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Lubell has installed a faintly comic array of wooden machines which apparently were used to dig the scattered holes and trenches visible from the sidewalk. Tall poles, topped with identifying letters or the logical operators 'and,' 'or,' and 'not,' seem to indicated points of interest. In the front of the lot, a large wooden grid in the form of an archaeologist's diagram correlates shards and artifacts with particular strata. The overall effect is of an archaeological dig in progress; besides the title, however, Lubell indicates in two other ways that the dig is ultimately for the self and sources of action. The use of logical operators suggests that the signs are not just for identification but also indicate objects of inquiry: the sources of reason and language. Likewise, Lubell has put what looks like a painter's palette at the lowest level and two simple grids at the highest level of his archaeological diagram, thereby suggesting that the grid presents its own prehistory as an artist's tool. Yet the sense of incompleteness reigns. No order is apparent: arrows linking artifacts in lines of influence glide over the gaps in the grid. The effort of self-knowledge yields a grab bag of quaint machines and uncertain charts.
Like the conceptual artist Charles Gute, who recently worked with this site, Lubell draws upon the sense of an empty urban lot as a transitional place, one abandoned only momentarily. Gute turned the lot into a construction zone, transforming it into a barely noticeable and evanescent monument to its own demise, a work which threatened to disappear into its future. By contrast, Lubell wants to highlight the inevitable incompleteness of one's knowledge of one's past. The site itself has been both cleared and built upon; Lubell both excavates and constructs. What first appears as the urban rhythm of construction and demolition figures in art as two inseparable aspects of a necessarily endless process of understanding. In order to excavate self-knowledge, the artist must create the tools for the job. Yet in creating the tools he thereby changes who he is. What the archaeology of intention reveals is the transformation of self-discovery into self-creation, which in turn requires a new attempt at discovery.
Lubell clarifies this difficult sense of aesthetic self-discovery as an open-ended spiral through the title's allusion to Michael Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. In that book, Foucault laid out his 'archaeological' method of historical research into the human sciences. In Foucault's equally difficult sense, archaeology does not search for origins but instead describes the "question of the already-said at the level of its existence"; like Lubell's machines and artifacts, Foucault's material "already-said" is the ultimate object of inquiry, and not some immaterial intention or disembodied principle. And again, like Lubell's art, what Foucault's inquiry reveals is "this dispersion that we are and make."
Lubell marks his distance from Foucault, though, in the shift from 'knowledge' to 'intention.' The distance of the archaeologist of knowledge's gaze from its objects allows a certain serenity which is impossible for Lubell. Because it searches for the sources of its own agency, Lubell's work is caught up in his own inquiry, like a painter painting herself painting herself. Perhaps the ultimate dilemma Lubell presents is of one digging to find where to dig.
A Perfection of Form
Ruth Duckworth at Dorothy Weiss Gallery
BY TERRI COHN
Consider a single perfect vessel form. Not a traditional vessel, but one delicately manipulated to include carefully incised edges, an exquisitely crafted oblong porcelain 'blade' that rests in its symmetrical crenulations, and exceedingly subtle variations in its pale, pearlescent glaze. Cool, minimal, meditative, the flawlessness of the vessel elevates it to a Zen garden-like focal point; an object of contemplation. Such is the potential experience of the work of Ruth Duckworth, at Dorothy Weiss Gallery.
When considered singularly, the detached elegance and quiet beauty of a Duckworth porcelain cup or bowl is compelling. The minimalist aesthetic embodied in her alabaster geometric forms, honed to an almost translucent perfection, inspires admiration and even awe: how did she do it? But, the problem with perfection is that it must remain separate and unique in order to retain its status; a gallery full of these subtly hued, slightly varied, untitled forms begins to neutralize itself. It becomes difficult to see the tree for the forest of them.
There are pieces that stand out. Duckworth's tall, cylindrical untitled cup with two blades has a regal presence. Interest is created by the incised edge of its foreground blade and the sculptural dynamic it creates in relation to its unmanipulated posterior twin. In another slender, untitled cup with blade, she has used a thin band of multi-hued glaze around the cylinder, echoed on the lower half of the blade, to allude quietly to landscape.
More dynamic and individualistic are the artist's abstract sculptures and wall maquettes. Although somewhat too closely allied with Barbara Hepworth's forms, the two standing constructions here have an impressive, lyrical fluidity. The ingenious assemblage of their carefully balanced free-form planes, fastened at one convergence with a porcelain pin, creates close visual and structural affinities with wood sculpture. Her most unique and 'contemporary' sculpture is part of a maquette of unrelated 'bandaged' shapes - an arc, a foot, a cornucopia - all with a verdigris surface glaze reminiscent of oxidized copper. The presence of the artist's hand in these pieces, as well as their more earthy surfaces, is like an open window in this hothouse of precious forms.
The competing sensibilities of Duckworth's diverse aesthetics raises existential questions pertinent to recent art: where is the validity of a perfectly crafted vessel form? While technical mastery remains admirable and Duckworth's handiwork is consummate, in the context of the current art world, her formalist focus and serial explorations seem anachronistic and redundant. Now that Duckworth has achieved a pinnacle of perfection with her more traditional works, this writer's hope is for her to pursue the more evocative, conceptual path suggested by her maquettes and freestanding sculptures, which perhaps will lead her to new definitions of consummate expression.
Facing Reality
Knowledge: Aspects of Conceptual Art at the Santa Monica Museum of Art
BY SUVAN GEER
There are times when nothing is more fascinating to me than to observe the workings of the human mind. I am drawn to art which toys with ideas and twists meaning. It's mesmerizing, this drive we have to order and reorder - imbedding or releasing a different rational with every turn. There are times when this kind of self-examination of the human capacity to think seems the most involving kind of art-making around. But in the wake of the fury that shook Los Angeles - as the fires cool and neighborhoods reel - now is not one of those times. After driving past gun-toting National Guardsmen on my way to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, I found it hard not to ask myself what the coolly intellectual conceptual art of the Knowledge show could possibly have to do with this reality. Perhaps the social upheaval has precipitated something of a forced reality check amounting to a crisis of faith in the importance of art - for me, and for other artists with whom I've spoken recently.
Still, co-curators Phyllis Plous and Frances Colpitt have put together a small but incisively well-defined exhibition that explores the growth of Conceptual Art's semiotic base. At any other moment it would be easy to wax enthusiastic over the work of these eighteen artists (slightly reduced for this venue) and the delightfully clear writing that accompanies such an intellectually stringent and historically coded exhibition. Together they make a strong argument for the powerful influence of Conceptual Art on postmodern considerations of cultural context, and the energy it has lent the politics of decentered pluralism. Alongside the current turmoil, however, much of the work (particularly the older pieces) seemed outrageously hermetic, taking great pains in the making of small and esoteric points. Standing before Thomas Locher's Cibachrome door of arbitrarily assigned numbers, I felt a little like a music critic listening for the nuances of Nero's fiddle amid Rome's cooling ashes.
Ironically, some of the latest work of the eighties and nineties seemed to share my distress. For a while I debated whether art in general couldn't be summed up adroitly by the title and washy vacuousness of Stephen Prina's Exquisite Corpse panels. I found a timely poignancy in Louise Lawler's photograph of a match-book that asked Why Pictures Now? and Clegg & Gutmann's incessant cataloging of information studiously detached from literature, culture and ultimately all connections to peoples' lives. After all, what is the profit of self-examination if the process leaves out the real world?
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EL SALVADOR'S JESUIT MURDERS
Justice Is Still Undone
MARTHA DOGGETT
The peace settlement for El Salvador, signed in New York City on New Year's Day, sidesteps the question of amnesty, leaving the contentious matter to a multiparty peace commission and ultimately to the Legislative Assembly. With the details of an amnesty still to be worked out, concerns persist that the Salvadoran government might attempt to pardon those convicted of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter. In a much-criticized verdict last September, a jury found a colonel and a lieutenant guilty of the killings.
Following the verdict, el caso Jesuita seemed to be settling into the judicial limbo that characterizes so many human rights crimes in El Salvador. Then U.S. Congressman Joe Moakley resurrected the case. Last November 18, Moakley, a street-smart South Boston politico who heads a special Congressional task force on the case, released a six-page statement outlining information he had received from confidential sources. Moakley charged that top Salvadoran officers decided to kill the Jesuits and the women at a meeting on the afternoon of November 15, 1989; that night the murders were committed. He reported that those who attended the meeting at the Military Academy were Gen. René Emilio Ponce, then army Chief of Staff and now Defense Minister; Orlando Zepeda (then a colonel, now a general), Deputy Minister of Defense; Col. Francisco Elena Fuentes, commander of the infamous First Brigade; and Gen. Juan Rafael Bustillo, long rumored to be a collaborator with the Central Intelligence Agency. As Air Force chief, Bustillo allowed Ilopango airfield to be used as a transfer point for Nicaraguan contra supply flights. Entrusted with carrying out the plan was the director of the Military Academy, Col. Guillermo Alfredo Benavides.
Moakley said the idea to kill the Jesuits came from Bustillo, who abruptly and unexpectedly resigned his command just six weeks after the crime. The general now divides his time between San Salvador and his home in Miami, and is said to have set his sights on El Salvador's Casa Presidencial.
According to Moakley's statement, the reactions of the other officers at the meeting "ranged from support to reluctant acceptance to silence." Moakley also charged that Colonel Benavides, who was convicted on eight counts of murder last September, told officers at the academy on the murder night that he had "received the green light" to move against the Jesuits, just meters down the highway at the Central American University. The army's enmity for the Jesuits was nothing new. Fr. Ignacio Ellacur<*_>i-acute<*/>a, the brilliant Basque theologian and philosopher who was probably the killers' primary target, had narrowly escaped a military plot on his life in 1980.
Moakley's revelation of the afternoon meeting is one of several accounts of gatherings of top officers in the hours preceding the crime. Other versions place the meeting at Joint Command headquarters, where many officers had virtually taken up residence during the most threatening urban guerilla offensive of the decade-long civil war. A May 1, 1990, communiqué issued by young army officers said two meetings at which the murders were plotted had been held on the afternoon of November 15, 1989, in the office of General Zepeda. The junior officers also gave credibility to the views of Col. Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez, a retired field commander who is now an influential member of the ruling ARENA party. Ochoa told 60 Minutes in April 1990 that "Benavides obeyed; it wasn't his decision."
El Salvador's senior military officials reacted predictably to Moakley's allegations, declaring their innocence, demanding proof and decrying 'politicization' of the case. General Bustillo called Moakley a closet leftist and "a politician without scruples or professional ethics who respects neither individuals nor institutions."
First Brigade commander Elena Fuentes, whose troops have one of the army's worst human rights records, said Moakley has a notoriously close relationship to the F.M.L.N., "to the point that there is a suspicious coincidence between the declarations of the terrorist leader Joaqu<*_>i-acute<*/>n Villalobos and the honorable Mr. Moakley." (On the afternoon of the assassination, First Brigade sound trucks drove around San Salvador triumphantly announcing, "Ellacur<*_>i-acute<*/>a and Mart<*_>i-acute<*/>n-Bar<*_>o-acute<*/> [a Jesuit psychologist who was among those murdered] have fallen. We are going to continue killing communists!" Bustillo and Elena Fuentes (who was reassigned in mid-January) said they were considering a slander suit against Moakley. For his part, General Ponce, sweating profusely and visibly shaken, held a press conference last November 19 with General Zepeda. They released an army communiqué saying "It is totally illogical that persons who supposedly were inside the Military Academy on the afternoon of November 15 who are said to have verified that the meeting took place but who did not participate in the meeting could have knowledge of what the meeting was about and what was decided during the meeting." The wording is curious, especially in light of an exchange between General Ponce and a journalist at the press conference:
Q: You also deny that [the meeting] took place at the Military Academy?
A: I deny it categorically because I was not at the Military Academy. I was here at my command post at Joint Command headquarters.
Who came and went from the Military Academy is difficult to establish with any certainty at this point because high-ranking officers ordered that the logbooks kept by sentries at the main gate be burned in late December 1989. Having destroyed the evidence, those named by Moakley are confident that he cannot produce the smoking gun they demand.
Even the government of President Alfredo Cristiani felt compelled to defend the army, placing a paid advertisement in the Salvadoran press. Without naming Moakley, the government criticized "persons or groups" who have the "evident goal of manipulating politically and attacking personalities of the Armed Forces and the institution itself. This has been done with absolute irresponsibility, with no foundation and based on purely partisan speculation."
Congressman Moakley's charges provoked new complaints about foreign intervention into the case. This theme was part of the defense's appeal to the jury at the trial of nine soldiers last September. Attorneys for the defense harped on foreign imperialism, telling the jury that the trial was being held only to please "los cheles," as Salvadorans refer to light-skinned people. "He who pays the mariachis chooses the tune," one defense attorney said repeatedly.
A defense attorney said that "today we will show that we have no yoke around our necks by acquitting these men." Another defense attorney told the jury, "We are going to work as Salvadorans and not capitulate to foreign pressure."
At no time did the defense attempt to paint an alternative scenario for what happened on the campus of Central American University the night of the murders. The crime itself was hardly touched on by the defense. Members of the jury heard no oral testimony or cross-examination, and for security reasons were blocked from seeing the defendants. After five hours of deliberation, they delivered their verdict. Five enlisted men and two lieutenants, all of whom had initially confessed their roles in the murders to the police, were acquitted. Colonel Benavides, who, according to the military's version of events, ordered the killings, was convicted on all eight counts of murder. His deputy at the Military Academy, Lieut. Yusshy René Mendoza Vallecillos, was convicted solely of the murder of 15-year-old Celina Mariceth Ramos.
The verdict, which stunned defense and prosecution alike, defied logic. No witnesses suggested that Benavides ever went to the murder site; Lieutenant Mendoza, by all accounts, did not fire his weapon. There is no more reason to link Mendoza to the killing of Celina Ramos than to any other murder. Celina died embracing her mother, Julia Ramos, the Jesuits' cook, with whom she shared a sofabed that night, so whoever killed Celina also killed her mother. Argentine attorney Eduardo Luis Duhalde, who observed the trial for the American Association of Jurists, called Mendoza's conviction "totally incomprehensible factually and legally."
The jury's decision provoked speculation that it might have believed that the soldiers who originally confessed to committing the murders did so on the orders of their superiors and should not be held accountable, even though such a finding was in contravention of both Salvadoran law and the Nuremberg principles.
The illogical verdict inevitably led to speculation about jury tampering. A European law professor who observed the trial at his government's request said the most "credible hypothesis" concerning the verdict was that someone "influenced [the jury] in one form or another...to predetermine its decision. It is not easy to imagine that a [Salvadoran jury] would spontaneously come up with such a solution....The verdict fulfills all the conditions of a political decision."
In a Washington Post Op-Ed article last October, Moakley said he could not "rule out the possiblity that the military interfered with the outcome of the trial. The verdict is too inconsistent to be rationally explained and fuels suspicions that the jury may have been manipulated." In November, on the second anniversary of the killings, Central American University issued a statement saying that the jury's "strange" conclusions "leads us to consider that the verdict - like the entire judicial process - was the product of 'a deal.'" The communiqué continued, "This verdict was not the product of a judicial system which works, but something darker, more political, and not ruled by established institutional procedures."
"It was fixed," a retired Salvadoran politician told me in early December. "As an attorney I can tell you that it was fixed. It was a solution that was designed to do the least damage."
The verdict did have a certain utility from the military's point of view. The two convicted officers had been holding desk jobs at the Military Academy, without combat troops under them. Convicting them was less apt to stir up discontent among younger officers. The tandona, the clique that dominates the military today, knew it had to sacrifice something to keep the aid dollars flowing from Washington. Colonel Benavides, one of their own, who had already been kept under house arrest for nearly two years, surely understood that loyalty to his peers required that he serve as scapegoat for the grossest miscalculation the Salvadoran Armed Forces has ever made.
That the convictions did not touch the powerful Atlacatl Battalion, the U.S.-created and trained elite unit that carried out the murders, is noteworthy. Atlacatl Lieut. José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, whose excellent English and extensive U.S. training made him a close collaborator of U.S. advisers, can presumably salvage his once-promising military career. Espinoza is said to have threatened to 'talk' had he been convicted. The peace treaty calls for a vast reduction in the size of the army, and the elite battalions are to be gradually disbanded. Yet the treaty leaves open the question of whether current members of the Atlacatl and other battalions are to be reassigned or discharged, and convictions of skilled commandos would no doubt have been a blow to the morale of the Atlacatl fighters, whose unit will not be demobilized until September.
Judge Ricardo Zamora still has not sentenced the two officers, nor has he ruled on charges related to terrorism and the cover-up, which were not heard by the jury. Defense attorneys, who repeatedly tried to have the case transferred out of Zamora's court in 1990, have asked the judge to recuse himself, citing the fact that he once taught law at Central American University. In a country where conflict of interest is seldom an issue, attempts to raise it at this late date have only provoked angry impatience from the appeals court, which has twice rejected the recusal petition.
Whether Congressman Moakley's statement will trigger an investigation by Salvadoran authorities into who acutally ordered the assassination depends largely on the State Department. Spokesman Richard Boucher's description of Moakley's charges as "accusations but not direct evidence" is consistent with State's pattern of sitting back and waiting for somebody else to come up with incontrovertible proof.
Central American Jesuits, meanwhile, asked the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly to form an investigative commission, as provided for by the Constitution, to examine the question of who ordered the murders and when.
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TAKE A LITTLE DEADLY NIGHTSHADE AND YOU'LL FEEL BETTER
BY JAMES GORMAN
MY FRIEND THE MEDICAL SOCIOLOGIST WAS the one who shocked me. I had not been that surprised when some anthroposophical friends and others with interests in so-called alternative medicines had touted the virtues of homeopathy. But when my friend, Joan L., who works in the health-care industry - the high-tech, mainstream, regular-medicine health-care industry - told me that not only had she used homeopathic remedies for her allergies and colds, but also had given her daughter homeopathic medicine for a sore throat (It worked! Overnight!), I was shaken.
This was a woman with whom I had shared long hypochondriacal conversations about heart disease, brain tumors and food poisoning, all based on the best available scientific evidence. Yet here she was advocating a system of medicine - based on treatment with very dilute doses of natural materials, which in larger quantities would cause the same symptoms that ail you - that is inexplicable by modern science. "But it works," she said, and cited a paper in The British Journal of Medicine (we often trade citations in conversation).
Further investigation revealed that almost everyone I knew either had used a homeopathic remedy or knew someone who did. Drugstores that a few years ago were carrying only mainstream products like Nyquil and Sudafed were displaying homeopathic lines in their windows. And not in amber bottles, but in small, colorful cardboard containers with the pills comfortably ensconced in blister packs. There was Quiétude - 'the homeopathic insomnia remedy in a white box with blue and pink pastel borders.' And Alpha CF, for colds and flu, in an icy-blue package with a snowflake design.
I was not the only one to notice that homeopathy was in vogue and visually more attractive than ever. A newspaper article about an up-and-coming bicoastal style monger named Andre Balazs noted that a feature planned for the ultra-chic Manhattan hotel he's building is a homeopathic pharmacy. If it does well, Balazs envisions a chain.
This would obviously please the homeopathic pharmaceutical companies, which are already undergoing a renaissance. Old companies are reviving, and new companies are getting into the field, which in the late 1970's and early 1980's made a miraculous recovery from near death. According to the Food and Drug Administration, sales of some homeopathic drug companies increased 1,000 percent. Growth has continued apace ever since, with the American market for homeopathic drugs now estimated at $100 million.
Europe's two biggest homeopathic pharmaceutical companies have moved into the United States, each acquiring a struggling old American firm. Boiron L.H.F., of France, a publicly held company, bought Borneman & Sons of Philadelphia in 1983. In 1987 the privately owned Dr. Willmar Schwabe GmbH & Company, of Germany, purchased Boericke & Tafel, another Philadelphia company, founded in 1825, and in 1990 moved it into a new, state-of-the-art production facility in Santa Rosa, Calif. Both companies report that gross sales have increased by more than 20 percent a year, a claim matched by Standard Homeopathic Company, an old-line California firm.
New to the homeopathic market is Nature's Way Products Inc., a manufacturer of food supplements, which describes itself as "America's Natural Health Care Company." The full-page magazine advertisements trumpeting its new line of homeopathic medicines assure consumers that they "work a lot like vaccines" and are easy to use. "If my back hurts, I get the remedy labeled for injury and back-ache, and there's one for arthritis, PMS, colds or whatever. It's simple." So simple, in fact, that there is a remedy labeled simply 'Allergy.'
Imagine - medicines that have no side effects, so safe that a child could swallow an entire bottle of pills, yet able to cure pesky ailments like fatigue, insomnia and allergy that have baffled modern medicine. How could such medicines be produced? What went into them? What was my friend Joan getting into?
Boericke & Tafel's brand-new headquarters seemed the best place to look on the new face of homeopathy, so I flew to San Francisco and then drove north to Santa Rosa. The plant was spanking clean, just the way you want a pharmaceutical plant to be. In the laboratorylike production rooms, everyone (including me) wore white coats, surgical masks and gloves and disposable caps. The workers also put on special white shoes, which they wore only while in these areas. Visitors and all other personnel were given covers for theirs. (The last time I had seen people dressed this way was at my son's birth.) In one area a tablet-making machine was busy making tablets. In another, the tincture storage room, there were scores of amber bottles on stainless-steel racks, all very pharmaceutical. But there was no amoxycillin or Prozac, no Xanax or AZT. Instead there were tinctures of Rhus radicans (poison ivy), Berberis vulgaris (barberry) and Calcarea silicata (silicate of lime). In another area, Calendula officinalis (marigold) was macerating in what seemed to be large stainless-steel stockpots.
Next we entered the 'single remedy room,' where medicines were actually being produced. First the technician weighted out a gram's worth of drops from one bottle of Natrum muriaticum 25X. Otherwise known as sodium chloride or table salt, the Natrum muriaticum had been diluted 25 times at a ratio of 1 to 10, leaving 1 part salt to 10 to the 25th power parts of alcohol and water (10 followed by 25 zeros, a number so high that the name used to describe it is a 'googol'). After each dilution the solution was shaken 10 times by hand and banged against a rubber pad, a process known in homeopathy as 'succussion.' In homeopathy this process of diluting, shaking and banging is known as 'potentizing.' In homeopathic speak the solution was at 25X potency.
To this already ethereal solution the technician added more liquid to dilute it 1 to 10 once again. She then succussed the solution by shaking it 10 times by hand (up and down) and banging it against a rubber pad on each down stroke. The solution was now Natrum muriaticum 26X. She repeated the same procedure again to produce a 27X solution. The final steps (done later) would be to repeat the dilution and succussion process three more times to achieve Natrum muriaticum 30X. Then drops of this solution of 1 part salt to 10 to the 30th power parts liquid would be added to sugar tablets, resulting in a product reputedly useful for allergy, anemia, cardiovascular problems and grieving states.
As I watched this process I heard within me the whimper of offended reason. By all known laws of physics and chemistry, the initial preparation had been diluted so many times that it was highly unlikely that a measurable trace of salt remained, not a molecule. And this was before the five succeeding dilutions, and the final dosing of the sugar pellets. What was being created, it seemed, was not a drug, but the idea of a drug, what an artist friend of mine calls "conceptual medicine." I thought, Welcome to homeopathy.
FEW PEOPLE WHO BUY the new over-the-counter homeopathic remedies realize that homeopathy is not herbal or Chinese medicine. It is not naturopathy, osteopathy or acupuncture, not bodywork, shiatsu or chiropractic. Homeopathy was developed by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), and began to flourish in Europe, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. According to the National Center for Homeopathy, a promotional organization with 6,500 members, 32 percent of family physicians in France and 20 percent in Germany prescribe homeopathic medicines, while in Great Britain 42 percent sometimes refer patients to homeopaths. In France, where the best-selling flu remedy, Oscillococcinum, is homeopathic, the national health-care system covers homeopathic prescriptions from traditional physicians.
Homeopathy's popularity surged in this country after the Civil War, then faded early in this century. In this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'The Social Transformation of American Medicine,' Paul Starr says homeopaths "won a share in the legal privileges of the profession." He wrote: "Only afterward did they lose their popularity. When homeopathic and eclectic doctors were shunned and denounced by the regular profession, they thrived." Opinions differ as to its demise. Homeopaths say it was squeezed out by the American Medical Association, while others hold that its popularity waned because regular medicine worked better. In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic medical schools here; in 1918 there were 6, and now there are none, which makes homeopathy's revival all the more remarkable.
One reason for homeopathy's new-found popularity is its focus on the individual. Homeopathic physicians traditionally spend considerable time finding a unique cure for each person. This is in direct and appealing contrast to the medical assembly lines many patients find themselves going through nowadays. A visit to a homeopathic physician should involve not only the traditional physical exam (blood pressure, blood tests and so on) and the standard medical history, but also at least an hourlong consultation with very thorough questions about the patient's complaints and general health.
Even in the realm of self-help, the same attitude prevails. Boericke & Tafel's 'Family Guide to Self-Medication' has something of the appeal of a book of medical horoscopes. Deadly nightshade, for instance, is recommended for colds and flu, but look under the 'Comments' column: "Patient is overly excited and sensitive." Wild rosemary is good for a range of ills, including "rheumatism that starts in the feet," "black eyes" and "chronic bronchitis." It is particularly "suitable for pale, delicate persons who always feel cold and chilly." Naturally I went looking for what remedy would be good for me. There was no doubt: Nux vomica, otherwise known as poison nut, a plant from which strychnine can be extracted. "Preeminent for many conditions of modern life. Typical patient is thin, active, nervous, lives a sedentary life with much mental strain." Well, I used to be thin.
IN DESCRIBING THE early practitioners, Paul Starr says, "Hahnemann and his followers saw disease fundamentally as a matter of the spirit; what occurred inside the body did not follow physical laws." Today the emphasis is on the principles of medicine Hahnemann developed. Perhaps the most well known of these is the 'law of similars', or 'like cures like,' which holds that the same substance that in large doses causes the symptoms that plague you, in small doses will cure you. To prove this Hahnemann used cinchona, which was already a known treatment for malaria. Hoping to induce the symptomatic chills and fever of malaria, he took large doses of cinchona, which produced the desired results. Using that as evidence for the rule, he conducted other experimental 'provings' of different substances to identify other potential cures. He then instructed his followers to use the drug or treatment that 'in effect' matched the patient's symptoms.
Furthermore, Hahnemann said, and modern homeopaths have agreed, that the smaller the dose, the stronger the remedy, but only if the preparation is vigorously shaken after each dilution, the theory being that dilution plus succussion somehow 'potentizes' a remedy. A dilution of 1 part in 10 is 1X, 1 part in 100 is 1C. At roughly 12C or 24X, which is to say 1 part in 10 to the 24th, conventional chemistry holds that there is no measurable amount of the original substance left. But homeopaths do not stop at 24X; some go up to 1,000 or 50,000. The highest dilutions of homeopathic medicines - despite having the least amount of the active ingredient, or ingredients - are supposed to be the most potent and are commonly used for mental or emotional problems. Conversely, lower dilutions, like 1X or 6X, which characterize most over-the-counter medicines, contain much higher amounts of the active ingredient, but are considered less potent.
Most prepackaged remedies are for aches, pains, allergies and colds, but some promise more. Boericke & Tafel, for instance, markets something called Alfalco. An alfalfa tonic that comes in a four-ounce-bottle, it is recommended for temporary relief of tension, anxiety, sleeplessness, mental and physical fatigue, abnormal appetite and fatigue following illness. Alfalco has nine homeopathic ingredients, including cinchona 2X, sodium phosphate 6X and formic acid 3X, and one ingredient in a nonhomeopathic dose, alcohol.
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Where Honor Is Due:
Frederick Douglass as Representative Black Man
WILSON J. MOSES
FREDERICK DOUGLASS may or may not have been the greatest African American abolitionist and orator of the 19th Century, but he was certainly the most accomplished master of self-projection. His autobiographical writings demonstrate the genius with which he seized and manipulated mainstream American symbols and values. By appropriating the Euro-American myth of the self-made man, Douglass guaranteed that his struggle would be canonized, not only within an African American tradition, but within the traditions of the mainstream as well. He manipulated the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon manhood as skillfully as did any of his white contemporaries, including such master manipulators as Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Phineas T. Barnum. I mention Douglass along with these wily exemplars of American showmanship, not because I want to drag out embarrassing cliches about making heroes more human, but in order to address the truly monumental nature of Douglass's accomplishments. Douglass, like Lincoln, Emerson, and Barnum, was abundantly endowed with the spiderish craft and foxlike cunning that are often marks of self-made men.
Douglass, like his bluff contemporary Walt Whitman, made his living by the art of self-celebration, a skill that has always figured in the strategies of American literary figures. He sang his song of himself, through four main versions of his autobiography, creating himself as a mythic figure and racial icon. The result is that even scholars and historians who may be relatively unfamiliar with other black American personalities of the 19th Century are acquainted with the major events of Douglass's life, or at least with his version of them. He was born into slavery in 1818, escaped to the North in 1838 and, with amazing rapidity, by 1840 was well on the way to establishing himself as the principal black abolitionist in the United States. Among his other accomplishments, Douglass served as a newspaper editor, Civil War recruiter, president of the Freedman's Bank, minister to Haiti, recorder of deeds, and Marshall of the District of Columbia. In the final analysis, he was a man of great dignity, principle, and courage, but he was also a showman, and he made his living mainly by cultivating the myth of Frederick Douglass.
When he attempted to function as a businessman or politician, he sometimes waded in beyond his depth, and thus he was embarrassed by the failure of the Freedman's Bank, shortly after he assumed its presidency. His tenure as minister to Haiti was troubled from the beginning. As he made preparations to assume the post, he found that he could not get first-class accommodations by railroad or steamboat going south. Special arrangements were made for him to travel on a U.S. naval vessel, the Kearsarge, which moved some to comment that not every black American found it possible so to avoid the indignities of Jim Crow travel. Douglass was constantly pressured by the State Department and the American business community to deal with the Haitians in an imperious and insulting manner. This, to his credit, he would not do. Black people everywhere identified passionately with Haiti, the world's first sovereign black republic, and Douglass could not allow himself to be seen as a puppet for American racist expansionism. As part of his duties, he attempted to negotiate for a military base at M<*_>o-circ<*/>le St. Nicholas, but his respect for Haitian sovereignty led to his being accused of incompetency by those whose interests he refused to slavishly serve. When his efforts were unsuccessful, whites rebuked him as an inept representative of American interests.
But even Douglass's setbacks were somehow transmuted into victories by the alchemy of a brilliant personality and the fact that black America has always had a desperate need for heroes. Nonetheless, it must be admitted that many aspects of Douglass's life and writings are controversial. No serious historian can ignore the problem of self-serving selectivity that lies behind the veil of homely modesty that he assumes in his autobiographical writings. The task of every biographer of Frederick Douglass has been to fill in some of the discreet omissions in Douglass's skillful work of self-promotion. Historians and literary scholars are increasingly aware of the craft with which Douglass manipulated audiences and readers, and they have recently provided us with considerable information that Douglass did not see fit to reveal. Many of these matters were discussed in the first full-length biography of Douglass, published by Benjamin Quarles in 1948. More recent biographers have built on Quarles's work, giving us a portrait that is admirable and believable; nonetheless, in far too many instances, Douglass has been allowed to dictate the terms of his own biography.
Because even the best biographies of Douglass have been appendices to his own brilliant autobiographical writings, the point is often forgotten that Douglass was not a gigantic abnormality in black American history, but in many ways a typical black American man of the class and region he represented. In typical American fashion, Douglass sought in his writings to demonstrate his individuality, along with his individualism. The very self-reliance and independence that he stressed in his autobiographies represented conformity to the American type of the self-made man. Thus, Douglass was, to use Emerson's phrase, a representative man. Much of the present-day biographical and literary treatment of Douglass makes him appear to be exceptional. For his own part, Douglass at times stressed the Emersonian dictum that the great man is often great because he is representative, not because he is exceptional. Self-reliance, for him as for Emerson, often existed in the paradox of blending one's ego into larger 'transcendental' forces, of believing that what is true of one's self is true of others. Douglass's concept of self-reliance, like Emerson's, was grounded in the principle of universality rather than difference. Douglass was, as I hope to show presently, not only a representative man, but a representative black man.
On the other hand, there were ways in which he was not representative. Douglass seemed, at times, to be less attuned to the cultural sentiments of black Americans and to their political struggles than were some other black men among his contemporaries. Among black-power advocates, he is celebrated as a prophet of self-determination. They celebrate his founding of The North Star, an independent newspaper, and it is with relish that they recall his rallying cry "We must be our own representatives!" But Douglass could change positions dramatically on black-power-related issues. He did at times champion black institutions, and then on other occasions he denounced them as self-segregating. Douglass's ideology was thoroughly inconsistent, usually opportunistic, and always self-serving. I suspect that if Douglass were alive today, he would be as uncontrollable as ever, and that his often shifting ideology would be now, as it was then, often unacceptable to liberals and conservatives alike.
Douglass represented a class of free black males who were literate in English, influenced by Christianity, and afflicted with a sometimes unconscious Anglophilism. Mary Helen Washington and Valerie Smith remind us that he was obsessed with attempts to emulate and compete with white males in terms of the values of assertive masculinity. Nonetheless, the recent interpretation by James McFeely depicts Douglass in ways specifically adapted to liberal ideologies of the 1980s. A case in point is Douglass's relationship to the women's movement. He did indeed commendably support women's suffrage, but this support was at times less than lukewarm. Douglass gave black male suffrage a much higher priority than white female suffrage, even when his feminist friends became exasperated with him. While on the one hand he got along well with white liberal women, and even married one of them, he was not afraid to confront them when he felt their interests to be in conflict with his as a black male.
Today there is endless discussion of Douglass's private life and his friendships with women, both black and white, for we now know much more about his personal affairs than did his earlier biographers. Douglass had a commanding personality; he was strikingly handsome and stood over six feet tall; he was athletic and he possessed an intense sexual attractiveness. I believe that a great deal of what he accomplished was a result of his magnetic virility. As Mary Helen Washington has observed, he largely owed his escape from slavery to a black woman, Anna Murray, who became his first wife. One historian has speculated, probably accurately, that Anna was pregnant with their first child, Rosetta, before the couple left the South. It is impossible not to be curious about the early sexual development of Douglass, who later portrayed himself as a puritanical feminist, an image that was so useful to him in his dealing with his New England abolitionist contemporaries. Was it really possible for a heterosexual black male to grow up in a slave society without being affected by the earthly values of plantation sexuality? Douglass's autobiography is silent on such matters, unlike that of his 18th-Century predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, who admits to sexual adventurism during youth.
In recent years, black feminists have become increasingly critical of Douglass's treatment of his first wife. Anna Douglass was a dutiful helpmate to her husband; she was a hard worker and a thrifty housewife. A portion of Douglass's financial success has been attributed to her able administration of his domestic finances, but she was not up to the management of a newspaper and she apparently never learned to read. Furthermore, it does not seem that she provided Douglass with much in the way of intellectual companionship; for this, he often went outside his home. The women were usually white, and his friendship in later years with the young journalist Ida B. Wells is the best-known intellectual friendship he is known to have developed with a black woman. It is interesting to note in this regard that Wells frequently separated herself ideologically from other black women leaders. That uncompromising militancy that earned her the hostility of the leadership of the National Association of Colored Women apparently endeared her to Douglass, while isolating her from the likes of Mary Church Terrell and Margaret Murray Washington. Ida B. Wells was, significantly, one of the few black women who did not resent his second marriage at the age of sixty-six (after Anna's death) to Helen Pitts, a forty-six-year-old white woman.
Douglass's ambivalent feelings toward Sojourner Truth are seldom discussed. Sojourner was a dynamic black woman abolitionist who once caused him public annoyance by responding to his declamations with the question, "Frederick, is God dead?" This was a matter of some embarrassment, since Douglass was more than once plagued by charges of irreligiosity. Sojourner Truth, on the other hand, was closely associated with the strident religiosity of the day and was much more closely related to proletarian evangelical Christianity than was the transcendental Douglass, with his increasing pretensions to gentility. Late in life, Douglass dealt with Truth rather ungenerously, when he compared her speaking style to the ungainly dialect of a minstrel show, implying that her language was "grotesque" and only quoted in order to belittle and degrade black people generally.
Douglass's relationships with white women generated controversy as early as 1849, when he paraded down Broadway in New York with the two Englishwomen, Julia and Eliza Griffiths - one on each arm. Julia eventually moved in with the Douglass family to assist with the operation of The North Star, and within a year she had brought it from the brink of ruin to a sound financial footing. Rumor was rife in the abolitionist community that the relationship between Douglass and Miss Griffiths had led to difficulties in the Douglass household. Apparently the relationship was purely a matter of business and political sympathy. Douglass's relationship with Ottilla Assing, a German reformer, is still the subject of speculation. William McFeely is convinced that the friendship did indeed have a sexual dimension, although he cannot document his contention. It has, however, long been known that Assing left Douglass a substantial inheritance after her suicide in 1884. McFeely implies that the suicide was a result of hearing the news of Douglass's second marriage to Helen Pitts.</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="09">
SHARON ACHINSTEIN
Plagues and Publication: Ballads and the Representation of Disease in the English Renaissance
The scope of devastation by bubonic plague in early modern Europe is hard for us to imagine today, even as some call AIDS a modern plague. The Black Death haunted Western Europe from its first great appearance in 1348 for over four hundred years. The initial catastrophe of plague in England in 1348-9 swept away one third of the population, at a minimum. Though this first outbreak was the most severe, the epidemic continued to threaten English society over the next four hundred years. Plague deaths were part of daily life in early modern England, with repeated outbreaks of the disease in almost every year between 1348 and 1665, not just in the landmark years of plague - 1603, 1625 and 1665. It is no wonder that the plague was a subject of much thought and writing, and that it even became a trope in English literature.
It may seem incongruous to write about the plague and ballads together, but the unlikely fact is that these two subjects were linked in the moral discourse of the period. Renaissance notions of contagion and transmission linked plagues and ballads; the evil in plagues and ballads was thought to disseminate in similar ways. Ballads, like the plague, were perceived to exert evil effects both morally and physically. William Prynne's now-famous criticism of the theatre inveighs against ballads, his language consistent with plague discourse: "Such songs, such poems as these [are] abundantly condemned, as filthy and unchristian defilements, which contaminate the souls, effeminate the minds, deprave the manners, of those that hear or sing them, exciting, enticing them to lust; to whoredom, adultery, prophaneness, wantonness, scurrility, luxury, drunkenness, excess; alienating their minds from God." Like the plague, the ballads were "filthy" and had their effects through "contamination"; their corruption worked on the spirit as well as on the body.
Ballad-sellers, and not just the corrupting ballads themselves, were frequently attacked as conveyors of plague. The 1636 Plague Orders, issued by the Royal College of Physicians in London, required not only that London citizens take specific health precautions and that those who were infected be submitted to quarantine and surveillance within their homes - the usual responses to plague epidemic - but also that "loose persons and idle assemblies" be regulated, that no "wandering beggar be suffered in the streets of this City." Along with restrictions on plays, bear-baitings and other games, the order specifically prohibited the singing of ballads. The offenders were to be severely punished. Since the ballad trade in the seventeenth century depended upon chapmen and wandering peddlers, who were often considered beggars, such orders effectively eliminated the sale of ballads during times of plague.
The case of the restrictions on ballads in the first half of the seventeenth century opens up new possibilities for understanding responses to plague and to the printing economy in early modern England. The association of plagues with ballads is an example of how disease was beginning to be perceived as a material phenomenon - and not solely as a providential one. The discourse on ballads presents this dual explanation of disease inhabiting the minds of seventeenth-century medical practitioners, lay and clerical.
Furthermore, the material explanation of disease by London health authorities was accompanied by a social commentary that articulated anxieties about urban disorder, poverty and vagrancy. As medical explanations offered a substantially modified view of the natural order of things in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English society was also coping with the social upheavals of an urbanizing society. The analogy between disease and popular literature was used by civic authorities, in London especially, to control and suppress certain social groups that threatened civic order, and the association of plagues with ballads illustrates how rhetoric functioned by the use of this powerful analogy to control the popular force of printing. This essay is a chiastic attempt to consider the play between moral and material explanations in the medical discourse of Renaissance England, on the one hand, and, on the other, the articulation of fears about urban disorder as a function of a literary genre, ballads. Put simply, why were ballads blamed for England's literal and figurative ills?
1
Social and cultural norms always shape the ways disease is represented, interpreted, and treated, since ways of perceiving disease are historically constructed. This is as true for the AlDS epidemic today as it was for the plague of the early seventeenth century. Writing about AIDS in the 1980s, Douglas Crimp pursues the idea that disease does not exist apart from the "practices that conceptualize it, represent it, and respond to it .... We know AIDS only in and through those practices." Crimp is quick to add: "This notion does not contest the existence of viruses, antibodies, infections, or transmission routes. Least of all does it contest the reality of illness, suffering and death. What it does contest is the notion that there is an underlying reality of AIDS, upon which are constructed the representations - or the nature, or the politics of AIDS." There is of course a political interest in de-constructing myths of AlDS today at a time when AlDS is still treated not just as any health issue, but one charged with anxiety about alternate sexualities. Awareness of the politics of medical perception only sharpens the call for a cultural analysis of this, and other, diseases.
The aim here is not to dismiss studies in the history of medicine which concern the history of the plague, but to encourage a dialogical and discursive approach to that history, one which seeks to enliven the study of historical representations by invoking the contemporary cultural meanings against which those representations were posited. Historians of medicine might gain by looking into the associations between the plague and certain forms of literature, so as to see the ideas about transmission as a moral and as a physical matter, and those concerned with early printed literature might better understand how medical and philosophical discourses give us guides for interpreting the position of that literature in society. We need to expand the kinds of contexts and preconditions we might use to inform our studies of literary representations, as well as to encourage historians of ideas and of society to look to literature as a way to understand the diversity of cultural response that is offered by the archive.
What was the language of the plague in early modern England? Dating from its first appearances, the plague was coded by Christian theology, and instances of plague were likened to Biblical examples of divine punishment. As early as the sixteenth century, houses where infected people were found were marked with a red cross on the door as part of civic programs for monitoring and containing the illness. This red cross and its accompanying slogan, "Lord have mercy upon us," drew symbolic power from the Bible, and the use of the Biblical trope of marked doors coded the plague as divinely sent. City health officials used the Biblical story of the Passover, where the Angel of Death passed over the marked houses of the Israelites in Egypt (Exodus 12:13), with an inversion: they marked doors of those infected with the plague, as if to say the Angel of Death would visit there. These marks were, like the Passover tokens of blood, red. The sign and slogan reinforced theories that the infection had a divine source, that God had sent the plague to punish sin. By alluding to the Bible in this way, the English added their own history to a long series of divine punishments for sin.
Yet the health officials' placement of these marks upon the doors of contaminated households also promoted materialist explanations of the disease. The doors were marked so that other citizens would stay away; and in these acts of quarantine and segregation, city officials practiced a theory of disease closer to our modern treatments of infection and contagion. Their use of the Biblical trope accompanied reforms in sanitation and hygiene which promoted a radically different explanation of disease, one that was rooted in physiology, not in theology. If God sent the plague to punish those sinners who were spiritually unclean, then only spiritual reform would work; or could human physical hygiene contribute to disease conditions? This conflict in explanatory models was a source of debate between English civil and ecclesiastical authorities between 1590 and 1640. As Renaissance theorists of contagion, such as Fracastero (De Contagione [1546]), turned to physical causes to explain the transmission of disease, so civic authorities sought to control the spread of plague by material measures - quarantine, isolation of the sick, and hygienic reform. The very idea of a program for public health required that diseases be considered to be within the realm of human prevention.
This essay concerns ideas about the plague roughly between the years 1597 and 1630 in England, during which time there were significant outbreaks which destroyed between ten and thirty percent of the population of communities in a single year. The clash between Renaissance health authorities and the Church in their analyses of disease, and thus the ideological clash between providential and material understandings of the world, is evident in the representation of the plague and in its link to the attack on ballads.
2
Renaissance notions of contagion blurred the distinction between moral and physiological causes of disease. Thomas Lodge, a self-proclaimed "Doctor in Physicke," explained what contagion was in his A Treatise of the Plague (London, 1603). A contagion was: "An evil quality in a body, communicated unto another by touch, engendering one and the same disposition in him to whom it is communicated. So as he that is first of all attainted or ravished with such a quality, is called contagious and infected" (B2v). In Lodge's account, contagion was a process of "communication," but one with both physical and moral properties: it was an "evil quality" which performed an action from outside, a "ravishment" upon its victims. The plague made both men and women passive victims of a pollution. Yet the moral factor, the "evil quality," was transmissible via physical contact, touch. It had some material properties, which careful civic regulation might inhibit. Lodge's dedication of his tract to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Sheriffs of London, the city's chief public health authorities, offered a 'scientific' approach to the pestilence, calling for practical responses to the disease, including street cleaning and fumigation.
Mary Douglas's analysis of the idea of pollution is helpful here. In her account, ideas of uncleanness and pollution reveal a society's concerns with the "relation of order to disorder." She writes: "Dirt ... is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements." The Renaissance conception of plague as a kind of pollution, an "evil quality," required that the stricken society do moral penance. That moral penance took diverse and ritualized forms: municipal cleanliness; the exclusion of unruly elements of society, beggers, the poor and vagrants; as well as suppression of some forms of popular literature. These measures reveal the multivalent understanding of pollution. For the municipal authorities, the evils of the city ranged from the physical aspects of dirt to the spiritual ideas of uncleanness, idleness, or unruliness.
For early seventeenth-century medical practitioners, purging was to be accomplished on the social, not only on the individual, level. One author presented this theory by speaking in the voice of a disconsolate London: "I hope it [the plague] will purge my body from bad humours, as vicious persons. Nay, I know it hath already of abundance." In a cruel conclusion, London concedes, "God hath swept my house, so desire to garnish it with virtue, and furnish it with graces." London in particular, and cities in general, were made to shoulder both the moral and physical burden of especially high mortality rates in times of plague.
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Richard L. Trumka
ON BECOMING A MOVEMENT
Rethinking Labor's Strategy
Not long ago I was told about a debate raging among the top political organizers of one of the larger AFL-CIO affiliates, a union that traditionally sent sizable delegations to the Democratic National Convention and is easily capable of doing the same again. But now the question it was facing wasn't whether the union had the resources to get its members on delegate slates. Instead, the question was whether it was even worth the time and expense. "Every four years we dump who knows how much money into sending people to the Democratic convention," one of the union's seasoned political organizers observed, "but the only thing we ever seem to get out of it is the right to say, 'Look how many people we had there.'"
Though long characterized - even by some of its friends - as slow to accept change, labor is engaged in an almost unprecedented reexamination of its political strategies. And for good reason. For unions representing manufacturing workers, 1991 may be remembered as the year when many of labor's 'best friends' in Congress abandoned the cause of protecting American jobs to put negotiation of a U.S.-Mexico Free Trade Agreement on a fast track. In the public sector, state and local government employees have seen scores of Democratic officials - some whose very careers were financed through union campaigns - respond to budget shortfalls by scapegoating government workers rather than by challenging low corporate tax rates.
Ironically this is occurring at a time when organized labor is raising and contributing more money than ever before - one published estimate even says that eleven of the wealthiest union PACs (Political Action Committees) contributed between $2 million and $5 million each over the last ten years. However, despite this, our influence in Congress and in the state capitals continues to decline. Even on questions where Democratic support might have once been a given - banning the 'permanent replacements' of striking workers, for example - union lobbyists often find legislators they had endorsed nearly as intractable as those they'd opposed.
Today we long for the 'good old days' when Democrats took their leadership from veteran New Dealers and when the image of Bobby Kennedy marching shoulder to shoulder with Cesar Chavez convinced us that the coalition forged by John L. Lewis and Franklin D. Roosevelt had become a permanent fixture in American life. But on the eve of the 1992 campaign the Democratic party of the Humphreys and Kennedys - a party that could champion farm workers in Delano or sanitation workers in Memphis - is the stuff of 1960s nostalgia.
Today, organized labor faces an indifference bordering on contempt from a new generation of Democrats who grew up as children of the very middle class that young CIO organizers made possible a few decades before. Though their parents may have lived in the shadow of the Great Depression, these Democrats grew up in a time of relative prosperity. While touched by the struggle for civil rights, they were more deeply moved by the threat of the draft and a faraway war.
To many of this generation of Democrats, the labor movement was less a vehicle for economic security - let alone social justice - than it was Lyndon Johnson's silent partner. Just as surely as the Great Society died somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam, the possibility for igniting trade union passions among America's young was lost as images of prowar hardhats charging antiwar marchers filled television screens. Somewhat to the left on questions of civil liberties, defense, and the environment, but far closer to corporate America when it comes to economic policy, they are cultural liberals who offer a politics vaguely reminiscent of 1980 presidential candidate John Anderson.
For much of organized labor, rethinking the relationship between America's unions and these Democrats has meant adopting tough criteria for withholding unions support from politicians who refuse to back our agenda. At a time when many local Democratic party 'organizations' are barely able to mobilize a roomful of volunteers to mail out a list of endorsed candidates, the threat of withholding access to labor campaign dollars, union-operated phone banks, and other campaign services is hardly without its implications. However, while the radical right believes labor's political campaign dollars are vital to the survival of the Democratic party, fewer of those on the receiving end behave as if this were true. And for good reason. Last year alone labor's PAC contributions to U.S. House candidates totaled nearly $35 million, but those dollars become chump change compared to the $58 million dished out by corporate PACs and the additional $44 million from trade association and professional PACs. When the average U.S. Senate incumbent must raise $20,000 each week to wage a credible reelection bid, few candidates can be expected to turn their backs on corporate interests. Raising the political price for our support might be enough to corral wayward Democrats under a system where campaign expenditures were sharply limited, but not when corporate interests stand ready to replace the dollars we withhold. We could literally bankrupt the entire labor movement and still be unable to match the dollars available to corporate America.
Faced with the seemingly hopeless task of reviving the Democratic party's commitment to working people, a growing though still small number of union activists are calling for the creation of a labor party. Pointing to the successes of Canada's New Democrats, supporters say that America's 'old Democrats' can also be elbowed aside in favor of candidates who will stand up for our issues. Advocates for this approach make a compelling case, but there's another strategy that incorporates much of the vision of labor-party supporters. It's an approach the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) and a growing number of unions are putting to work today: it's called running our own as Democrats and, when necessary, as independents. That was the lesson UMWA members learned a couple of years ago when, in the midst of the union's strike at the Pittston Coal Group, union activists decided to take on Don McGlothin, Sr., heir to one of southwest Virginia's most distinguished political families and a twenty-year incumbent in the state's House of Delegates. But McGlothin, like many Democrats, was more than content to gamble that his incumbency and poor Republican organization would allow him to avoid the region's most controversial issue: Pittston's drive to deprive coal-mining families of their health benefits.
We launched a campaign for Jackie Stump - a coal miner and UMWA International Executive Board member. Though Stump's write-in campaign, begun a bare three weeks before the election, could have been one more doomed protest candidacy, it became something very different. Backed with the resources of the UMWA, Stump's campaign produced sophisticated television and radio spots hitting hard on the 'populist' themes of protecting workers rights and family health care. Meanwhile, rank-and-file union activists mounted an aggressive door-to-door canvassing drive and organized the same phone bank operations unions traditionally place at the disposal of Democratic candidates. The result was that Stump easily defeated McGlothin by a greater than two-to-one majority.
Stump's campaign demonstrated that labor can successfully employ the same techniques as any other campaign organization. It was a lesson reinforced last year by the election of UMWA members to state legislatures in Alabama, West Virginia, and Illinois, and by the remarkable gubernatorial campaign of Paul Hubbert, a leader of Alabama's largest teacher's union, who came within a hairbreadth of unseating Republican incumbent Guy Hunt.
But the experience of labor's candidates tells us something else, too. It's that our message - a hard-edged economic populism considered 'too strong' by most social liberals - can succeed among low- and middle-income white voters. Polling conducted by Garin-Hart Strategic Research in the wake of David Duke's chillingly strong 1990 Louisiana U.S. Senate race underscores why. According to the survey of 612 white Louisiana voters, racial issues consistently were of less concern to Duke supporters than their sense that government had abandoned them. By a 56 percent to 28 percent margin, pollsters found Duke supporters who are open to voting Democratic blame the wealthy and big business over minorities and welfare recipients for the squeeze on middle-class families. "As a matter of sheer political arithmetic," the pollsters conclude, "these results suggest there is substantially more advantage for Democrats in championing the middle-class interests than in seeking to capture the anti-welfare, anti-minority message from David Duke."
It should be little surprise that of the arguments used against Duke in the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial contest it was the threat of additional job loss that appears to have moved middle-class white voters to support Democrat Edwin Edwards. Ironically, the economic hardship that many of Duke's white middle-class backers finally led many to vote for Edwards.
However, the best example of the power of economic populism - and organized labor's role in advancing it - may be in the election of Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania to the U.S. Senate. Though today it's accepted as a given that Wofford successfully campaigned on a platform that could have been written at the convention of any U.S. industrial union, even more significant was the fact that long before Richard Thornburgh even entered the Senate race, Pennsylvania unions dug in their heels behind Harris Wofford and his populism when many party professionals advocated a far more cautious approach and, in some cases, even another candidate.
With its insistence that labor be more than loyal foot soldiers for party officials, the Wofford campaign stands as a rarity: an effort that successfully spoke to the problems affecting workers and accepted leadership from workers' unions. Living up to the challenge of making campaigns like Wofford's more than the exception to the rule involves making significant changes in how we view ourselves and labor's mission.
On paper the labor movement seems ideally suited to lead a populist insurgency in the Democratic party, but the reality is far less encouraging. On too many occasions organized labor, unable to reach any kind of consensus, comes down decisively on both sides of an issue. Though Connecticut labor leaders successfully pressed legislators to launch a state income tax, more than 45,000 residents denounced it at a rally financed in part by a key local of one of the state's largest private-sector unions. Similar conflicts occur routinely whenever teachers and construction unions battle over property tax abatements for local building projects or when a privatization proposal that would cost jobs for one union could just as easily create them for another. Though it obviously contradicts some of the AFL-CIO-bashing in vogue among organized labor's well-intentioned critics, the confusion that sometimes characterizes our political strategy isn't due to the AFL-CIO exercising too much authority as much as it is the result of the fact that, as a federation, it has too little.
Many union leaders have responded to our declining membership not by exploring our movement's ability to adapt and change but by invoking the image of a pendulum that's bound to come back our way. The chief challenge we face is to define ourselves as more than servicing institutions that negotiate contracts by becoming organizations that speak to a broader range of worker concerns, both on and off the job. Walter Reuther was prophetic when, in 1967, he observed that "a new concept of unionization" needed to take shape in the wake of the farm worker organizing campaigns in California. Calling the approach "community unionism," Reuther suggested that "properly nurtured and motivated, it can spread across the face of the nation, changing the social character of the inner city structure, providing the poor with their own self-sufficient economic organization."
Examples of this new kind of unionism remain few and far between, but its success may offer new hope for labor's resurgence. In the UMWA, it's meant helping to establish Miners For Democracy (MFD) as part of the union's Powder River Basin organizing drive in Wyoming. Through MFD, nonunion miners have an opportunity to join with the UMWA as associate members where they have both access to the union's resources and a vehicle to make their voices heard in local politics.
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And yet, the major problem for a reading of the Holocaust comes not from this but from the problem of 'reading' itself. In their time, Adorno and Horkheimer could still appeal to absolutist notions such as truth, falsehood, and goodness. Having taken note of the problem of language, they could still brush it aside and reach out for the metaphysics of truth and justice. Thus, for example: "When language becomes apologetic it is already corrupted, and it can neither be neutral nor practical in its essence. Can you not show the good side of things and announce the principle of love instead of endless bitterness? There is only one expression for the truth: the thought which denies injustice." With the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, however, it has become increasingly difficult to set aside the question of language and still conduct philosophically acceptable discussions. A postmodern philosopher like Lyotard would go to the extent of even denying the existence of an overriding metaconcept such as language; instead, what we have, according to him, is only a set of phrases, genres, and modes of linkage between phrases and genres. What or who does one appeal to in matters of dispute when there is no authority to appeal to? What tribunal can we trust when the tribunal itself cannot be 'neutral' and therefore impartial? Of course, it is not the case that no authority exists really; rather, the case is that the dispute arises specifically because authority really exists and the dispute is with that existing or emerging authority. In the absence of a metalanguage, how does one read the Holocaust?
The Holocaust is something that makes people speechless, and so it already prefigures the postmodernist dilemma of language in search of meaning. What then is the Holocaust? A signifier so vast and enormous that filling it with any conceivable meaning is simply futile or outright unjust? Or, is it in itself a signified for which we have not yet found a language, an interpretant? Or, leaving aside the linguistic paradigm for a moment, shall we say that it is an 'event' in the sense in which the Jewish theologian A.J. Heschel uses the term - something that cannot be analyzed and therefore cannot be rationalized in terms of analytic philosophy? The 'unspeakable' ties one in a double bind: it calls for speech and at the same time mocks it. Although it is true that the Holocaust archive is stupendously vast, all attempts at verbalizing the 'event' have always fallen short of its emotional storage. Right from the beginning, there have been varying reactions to the Holocaust from writers - ranging from silence to aggressive speech acts. Adorno said that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric. A group of German writers, among the Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Martin Walser, and Peter Hamm, decided to stop writing poems, prose, or plays. There could be several reasons for this vow of silence. Adorno argues that the transfiguration of the event from the plane of reality to that of art alleviates some of its horror by rendering it an object of aesthetics. For others like Ezrahi, all art fails before the Holocaust because "there is no analogue in human experience." "The imagination," says Ezrahi, "loses credibility and resources where reality exceeds even the darkest Fantasies of the human mind: even realism flounders before such reality." According to Stephen Spender, the inability of the Western literature to come to terms with the Holocaust arises primarily from its preoccupation with the fate of the solitary sacrificial victim, Oedipus, Christ, or Lear; it does not yet know how to deal with disaster of such a scale.
There are others who have reacted differently. The Polish poet Tadeusz Rozewicz said that after the Holocaust he fashioned his poems "out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery." Paul Celan, a Rumanian-born poet who writes in German but spent the war years in a camp in his native land, pitched all his hopes in one thing: language. In spite of everything, language continued to live "through a dreadful silence, survive through a thousand nights of death-dealing speech. It went on living and gave birth to no words to describe what had happened; but it survived and came to light again, 'enriched by it all.'" Elie Wiesel, who began as a Yiddish writer but now writes in French, has devoted an entire novel called The Oath to one survivor's struggle against the vow of silence: "Words have been our weapon, our shield, the tale our lifeboat." Even Adorno's dictum of "no poetry after Auschwitz" is not to be taken literally. Adorno himself quotes the reply of Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a prominent German poet and critic, who said that surrender to silence would mean surrender to cynicism, surrender to the very forces that created Auschwitz in the first place. George Steiner's advocacy of silence after the Holocaust stems from his extreme agony and anger at what he describes as the falsification of language. For him, the violence done to the Jews during the Third Reich is inseparable from the violence done to the German language. In making sense of what is apparently senseless, the destruction of nearly six million Jews by the Nazis, will language offer itself as the only available archaeological arena?
Kren and Rappoport point out in their excellently written book The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior that, faced with the phenomenon of the Holocaust, we generally perceive two types of reactions. One is to say that the Holocaust is unique "but normal after all." According to this reaction, the Holocaust is one among the several such 'aberrations' of human behavior in history, and as such, albeit its enormity, is only comparable with the slaughter of the Albigensian heretics, the Turkish decimation of the Armenians, the British use of concentration camps during the Boer War, and so on. The killing of the Jews, supported by historical evidence of anti-Semitism, thus becomes "an ugly but familiar fact of historical life." The second reaction, coming mainly from the survivors of the death camps, is one of mysticism. According to this, the Holocaust and the experiences associated with it are beyond intelligent comprehension and "impossible to communicate." Both these reactions, argue Kren and Rappoport, make the historian's task simple: the unique-but-normal-after-all view obviates all challenges to critical inquiry and "historians may conduct business as usual, gathering facts and examining how they may be articulated as explanations for specific actions." On the other hand, if the Nazi genocide program is seen in terms of mystical revelations, "then it will appear to be manifestly beyond critical study." Kren and Rappoport take this as an explanation for why the essential human questions get lost in all discussions on the Holocaust. The situation thus constitutes a complex problem - a problematic - rather than a simple question like 'What does the Holocaust mean?'
Take as an example the word 'holocaust' itself. In common parlance it means great destruction or devastation. Although the definitized and capitalized Holocaust (the Holocaust) does partake of this meaning, it has come to be specifically associated with the Nazi genocide of Jews during the Second World War. Jews themselves have chosen it and are generally impatient with anyone who would settle for ordinary words like 'killing' to refer to the event. What is most striking in the word 'holocaust' is its etymological association: it derives from the Greek holokauston (or holokautoma) which was the Septuagint's translation for the Hebrew olah, literally 'what is brought up,' and can be rendered into English as 'an offering made by fire unto the Lord,' 'burnt offering,' or 'whole burnt offering.' Commenting on this etymological aspect, Dawidowicz says: "The implication is unmistakable: once again in their history the Jews are victims, sacrifices." If this implication is to be accepted, it can be accepted only in its ironical sense, however, since, as Ezrahi points out, the nomenclature adopted by the Jewish world "does not carry the same affirmative theological overtones, but rather, signifies the enormity of the rift in Jewish history and culture brought about by the destruction of the European Jewish community." Further, the uniquely Jewish reference of the word Holocaust has, over the years, given way to a more general sense: today it is being used with respect to any large-scale killing or uprooting of populations. Fidel Castro has even gone to the extent of using it to refer to Israel's treatment of Palestinians.
In understanding the Holocaust, then, we are faced with certain contradictions: to treat is as a unique or unrepeatable phenomenon is to set at naught all its significance for humanity; to treat it as a historical aberration is to trivialize tragedy. The ultimate meaning of the Holocaust is to be sought in the possibility of its repetition in forms and contexts yet unknown and unforeseen.
The Great Interdiction
The Holocaust created a world of its own, a linguistic world, factually as well as metaphorically. To David Rousset we owe the notion l'universe concentrationnaire, 'the concentrationary universe,' which Ezrahi describes as "a self-contained world which both generated its own vocabulary and invested common language with new, sinister meanings." Kapo, Appel and Einsatztruppen were not just words but constituted the vocabulary of the new language. An otherwise harmless word like 'selection' now assumes the terrifying meaning of choosing inmates for death, forced labor, or such other purposes. The worst example of euphemism was of course the phrase 'the Final Solution,' which actually referred to the annihilation of Jews from Europe and, if possible, from the face of the earth itself. What baffles the mind is the syllogistic nature of the argument: once the Jews were recognized as a 'question' or a 'problem', the problem needed a 'solution'. And what could be simpler than a permanent one, namely, the 'Final Solution'? As if to mimic this gradual but 'necessary' end, the Final Solution occurred not in the beginning years of Nazi Germany but sometime in the middle of the Second World War. First, there was the stripping of Jews of all their civil rights, followed by massive forced immigration. Then the immigration was stopped by law and the Final Solution was hatched. More specific was the euphemistic term 'bath' (or 'showerbath') which referred to death by gas in the gas chamber. The grammatical possibilities of the German language were fully exploited in what came to be known as the 'Nazi-Deutsch.' For example, the Nazi adjective for an area whose Jewish inhabitants were either deported, killed, or sent to death camps was Judenfrei (or Judenrein), which became a commonplace word. It was as if the very currency of the word made the condition it envisaged necessary and legitimate!
Euphemism, metaphor, and reality have a complex relationship. Euphemisms, generally drawn from metaphoric imagination, transfigure reality in strange ways. For the perpetrator of the crime, a work like 'bath,' a metaphor for death, has the effect of toning down the severity of his action on behalf of his own conscience. Elaine Scarry says in her book The Body in Pain that torturers all over the world take recourse to such 'softening' metaphors largely drawn from cultural spheres. In the case of the Holocaust, this side of the language was buttressed by another: the dehumanization of Jews. This was achieved by initiating a vicious circularity of thinking: the Jews were described in terms of animals, insects, sickness, madness, dirt, lust, and, in fact, in terms of everything evil. They were projected as a great danger to the purity of the Aryan race. In turn, Jews 'became' a danger because they were not human beings and so deserved to be eliminated. One official Nazi historian described the gas ovens used in the death camps to destroy Jews as anus mundi 'the anus of the world.' The Jews deserve to be eliminated because they are not human beings and so the logic eats its own tail. In Scarry's analysis, such a use of language amounts to what she calls a 'double negation': the users of the language refuse to break the circularity because they have an interest in its maintenance inasmuch as it throws a protective shield around them against the charge of active participation.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="12">In this dream, More does not see himself in the image of the aspiring courtier, trained in the Inns of Court for a career as a royal servant and adviser. The desire projected here, given free play in the utopian field wherein all things are possible, is one in which More can momentarily find a place for himself and his longing for the monastic life (symbolized by the Franciscan frock). This dream marks the autonomizing appeal Utopia had for More in its glorifying of the private individual. More's assurance to Erasmus that his fanciful rise from his "lowly estate to this soaring pinnacle" will not threaten their friendship indicates that his concerns about entering Henry's court and compromising his humanist principles are also scripted into this psychodrama. This vision suggests that elements of the historical More are incorporated in the text, that Raphael embodies impulses in More contradictory to the Morus persona.
What might make one a king in fiction would not necessarily serve to advance one in the more practical world of court politics. The limits to self-fashioning in fiction and imagination were indeed boundless, not so the limitations place upon self-fashioning in the very real and dangerous world presided over by Henry VIII. Even on its own terms, however, the created world of Utopia reflects the historically contingent circumstances surrounding its composition.
Those critics who see rifts between the created world of Utopia and the life More led fail to recognize that More's text is a more faithful mirror of his life and England's historical circumstances than a superficial investigation reveals. In seeking to situate Utopia in the discursive space between the concept and history, Marin asks a series of provocative questions: "To what reality or to what absent term does it ['utopia'] finally refer? What figure - fraught with incoherencies of its own -traverses it? What discursive conclusion opens up as soon as the thesis of historical truth, from whose posture it speaks, is lacking?" (xxi). In posing Morus against Raphael, the historical figure against the mythic figuration, More has hedged his bet. I use the term 'hedged' advisedly, for it is the figure of enclosure - "fraught with incoherencies of its own" - that traverses the text as a constant equation in the self-fashioning transaction. It mediates the conversion of values between the private and the public, between opposing class identities.
The bet that More is hedging is that involving his own self-fashioning, and its broadest values are those represented by the opposing figures of Morus and Raphael. The self-fashioning that must be worked out between the opposing terms of Morus and Raphael points towards class conflict, a conflict between an expropriating class and an expropriated class in which More represents the very middle class that was being defined in this conflict. Morus, the representative of the expropriators of land, and Raphael, representative of the dispossessed, cause this topographical discourse to be extended into the narrative structure of the text as their two voices bring the historical notions of improvement and impoverishment into that text.
If we reexamine the myth of Utopia's founding, for example, we find that in his conquering of the Abraxians, King Utopus acts out of a myth whose plot is very much grounded in a history vexed with the problems as well as the opportunities of enclosure. The 'incoherencies' of enclosure expose Eutopos as Outopos in demonstrating just how closely the created world of Utopia is linked to historical contingencies. The 'problem' that the text of Utopia seeks to solve is that of enclosure, particularly the large-scale pastoral enclosure occurring in More's day. Lying along a fault line that represents a break in historical continuity occasioned by the irreconcilable programs of large-scale enclosers, small-scale improvers, and subsistence-level farmers, Utopia must mediate the class conflicts that arise from shifts in agrarian values. The myth of Utopia's founding is not at all divorced from the problems of English history; in fact, the king's conquering of the Abraxians is simply the telling and enactment of that history over again, its characters disguised in myth.
The improver, Utopus, is not merely conducting a raid upon a fictional people; he is, in essence, raiding history, for his conquering of the Abraxians allows him to redefine and reshape English history for his own ends. This reworking of history begins with a forcible expropriation of people from their land. While we are not told specifically whether that part of the conquered Utopians who resist are killed or expelled, this initial expropriation of Abraxa sets an obvious precedent and model for the Utopians' spillover colonization of lands outside their territory. In these seizures of territory, those who refuse to be ordered by the Utopians' laws are driven "out of those bounds which they [the Utopians] have limited and defined for themselves" (<&_>beginning quotation marks missing<&/>Reneuntes ipsorum legibus uiuere, propellunt his finibus quos sibi ipsi describunt" [Campbell, 91]; note the initial surveying that has occurred before eviction, a surveying not unlike that preparatory to the evictions of historical enclosure). Like their historical counterparts, the enclosers, the Utopians justify their expropriation of others' lands by arguing their ability to improve them by a fuller utilization than that practiced by the natives. These vanquished people, their rights of landholding extinguished, are the fictional counterparts of England's squatter population evicted by enclosure. Those who do comply join with their conquerors in enclosing the peninsula of Utopia as an island. They, along with the conquering Utopians, become the class of improvers, their historical counterparts.
The plot of Book II thus offers a careful reenactment of English history in this conquering and evicting of one part of the Abraxians. This is the overt content of Book I, the historical injustice perpetrated against a displaced class. As the problem of Book I, it gets little play here, for the myth of Book II must work toward finding an intermediate term between the displaced yeomanry and the large-scale encloser. To insist too strongly upon the historical identity of any of the players in this mystic reenactment would undermine the myth of improvement so dear to Raphael. Obliquely, the text addresses the problems of vagrancy and idleness by enclosing the wastes of the 'New World.' As a means of implementing and expanding social control in More's England, enclosures of the unenclosed wastes were advocated, for these wastes were commonly characterized as "nurseries of beggars." Enclosed lands were reputed to breed a more prosperous, better quality citizenry; they also yielded a higher parliamentary subsidy. Those who block Utopus's 'improvement' are evicted, the counterparts of the historically dispossessed (and their voicelessness in Raphael's account of Utopia's founding corresponds to the voicelessness of their counterparts in history). If we consider the problem of history beyond the confines of Book I, we shall find that this glossing over the evicted Abraxians allows Book II to redefine history not as a conflict between the expropriated and the large-scale encloser but as a collusion between the small-scale improver and the large-scale encloser.
This collusion, constituting the myth of Book II, is essential if the text is to recapture the historical value of improvement for itself. As Rodney Hilton indicates, within the peasantry a split was developing as this peasantry began to separate into "elements with differing economic interests." Unlike the "poor and middling peasants" involved in subsistence farming, a wealthier class of entrepreneurial peasants had accumulated both movable and landed property and were increasingly the beneficiaries of any new economic ordering (the improvements which could be had through enclosure, for example). These were what Hilton labels the "upper stratum of the peasantry, benefiting from the crisis in the seigneurial economy" (127). With the impetus of the textile industry, these peasants would play an important role in constituting the class of capitalist farmers that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (127). Hilton closely links the growth of this class, which struck against all forms of seigneurial control, with the emergence of capitalism.
Historically within the English 'tribe,' a widening separation was occurring between the upper- and lower-strata peasantry, a division very much rooted in the political and economic shifts that occurred in sixteenth-century England. The 'wolves' - large-scale enclosers - not only expropriated the land of the poorer peasantry - the sheep - but they have also disrupted the orderly historical shift being brought on by the small-scale enclosers. The plans of the large-scale encloser and the small-scale improver are merged in Book II, as the remaining Abraxians are subsumed into one common identity with their conquerors, both henceforward known as Utopians. This merger runs counter to history, for Hilton has shown that the programs of these two groups ran directly counter to one another. In this respect, Utopus raids history twice over, for he both expropriates one element of the peasant class while co-opting the program of another. Most important, this conquering and transformation of the 'compliant' element of the Abraxians allow Utopus to wrest the historical value of improvement from the program of the small-scale enclosers and to reinvest it in the large-scale enclosing of Utopia.
Utopus and, by association, Raphael rework historical situations and identities in a fashion that does not bear close scrutiny; indeed, the myth of Utopia is undermined when one converts the values expressed in Book II into those more historically oriented ones of Book I. The myth of Utopia's founding by enclosure risks being exposed if it is not disguised. The expropriation of the Abraxians is thus muted, displaced, and 'alienated' in the example of Utopus's conquering of foreign lands. The historical expulsion of peasants from private land by members of the yeomanry and nobility might not seem to equate to the conquest of an alien territory and the expulsion of some part of its people by a king; however, the digging out of the land link, transforming the mythic Abraxian peninsula into a figuration of the English island, reminds us that there is a strong sense of the familiar in the alien. It also marks Book II as a prophetic text in a sense quite contrary to Kautsky's celebration of Utopia as a precursor to socialism. The text's transfer of the enclosing function from the levels of yeomanry and nobility to that of the state predicts the link between large-scale Acts of Enclosure and the growth of the modern state.
The charge of duplicity that Marius brings against More is offset and answered by the double text of Utopia, for Book I provides many keys for reading and deciphering the myth offered in Book II. Indeed, unwound from the historical materials of More's own embassy is another embassy, uniting history and myth, that brings Raphael forth. Raphael argues on behalf of the dispossessed yeoman who appeared many times before More in Chancery court; Hythloday sets forth - this time quite pointedly and eloquently - the rights of the expropriated. As Richard Sylvester points out in "Si Hythlodeao Credimus," Hythloday is "both uprooted himself and an uprooter of others. His most urgent pleas for reform bristle with metaphors of deracination and eradication." In service to the interests of royalty and the wool merchants, More is suddenly confronted in the Netherlands with the very spokesperson for those less powerful, competing interests: the dispossessed yeomanry. Contrary to Marius's and Marin's assertions, Thomas More provides a text entirely contingent to history and to his personal circumstances at the time of its composition. Utopia exemplifies Jean Howard's dictum that literary texts do not constitute "monologic, organically unified wholes" but "sites where many voices of culture and many systems of intelligibility interact." Raphael's curious - and untenable - position as a spokesperson for the expropriated and a representative of Utopus, a large-scale encloser, bears witness to the text's rootedness in the history it allegorizes. Morus himself, representing a collusion between monarchy and merchants in an embassy that sought to improve trade equally advantageous to both, offers yet another voice in the text's encoding of dissonant cultural interactions.
The historical contingency of Utopia, a text that uses enclosure both as a theme and as a principle of its own organization, provides a better sense of place for More in his text.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="13">He said that it was his lack of a formal education that kept him from setting down on paper his recollections of the Revolution. It was widely rumored that his aides composed his best letters as commander-in-chief. If so, it is not surprising that he was diffident in company. Some even called it 'shyness,' but whatever the source, this reticence was certainly not the usual characteristic of a great man. "His modesty is astonishing, particularly to a Frenchman," noted Brissot de Warville. "He speaks of the American War as if he had not been its leader." This modesty only added to his gravity and severity. "Most people say and do too much," one friend recalled. "Washington ... never fell into this common error."
III
Yet it was in the political world that Washington made his most theatrical gesture, his most moral mark, and there the results were monumental. The greatest act of his life, the one that made him famous, was his resignation as commander-in-chief of the American forces. This act, together with his 1783 circular letter to the states in which he promised to retire from public life, was his 'legacy' to his countrymen. No American leader has ever left a more important legacy.
Following the signing of the peace treaty and British recognition of American independence, Washington stunned the world when he surrendered his sword to the Congress on Dec. 23, 1783 and retired to his farm at Mount Vernon. This was a highly symbolic act, a very self-conscious and unconditional withdrawal from the world of politics. Here was the commander in chief of the victorious army putting down his sword and promising not to take "any share in public business hereafter." Washington even resigned from his local vestry in Virginia in order to make his separation from the political world complete.
His retirement from power had a profound effect everywhere in the Western world. It was extraordinary, it was unprecedented in modern times - a victorious general surrendering his arms and returning to his farm. Cromwell, William of Orange, Marlborough - all had sought political rewards commensurate with their military achievements. Though it was widely thought that Washington could have become king or dictator, he wanted nothing of the kind. He was sincere in his desire for all the soldiers "to return to our Private Stations in the bosom of a free, peaceful and happy Country," and everyone recognized his sincerity. It filled them with awe. Washington's retirement, said the painter John Trumbull writing from London in 1784, "excites the astonishment and admiration of this part of the world. 'Tis a Conduct so novel, so unconceivable to People, who, far from giving us powers they possess, are willing to convulse the empire to acquire more." King George III supposedly predicted that if Washington retired from public life and returned to his farm, "he will be the greatest man in the world."
Washington was not na<*_>i-trema<*/>ve. He was well aware of the effect his resignation would have. He was trying to live up to the age's image of a classical disinterested patriot who devotes his life to his country, and he knew at once that he had acquired instant fame as a modern Cincinnatus. His reputation in the 1780's as a great classical hero was international, and it was virtually unrivaled. Franklin was his only competitor, but Franklin's greatness still lay in his being a scientist, not a man of public affairs. Washington was a living embodiment of all that classical republican virtue the age was eagerly striving to recover.
Despite his outward modesty, Washington realized he was an extraordinary man, and he was not ashamed of it. He lived in an era where distinctions of rank and talent were not only accepted but celebrated. He took for granted the differences between himself and more ordinary men. And when he could not take those differences for granted he cultivated them. He used his natural reticence to reinforce the image of a stern and forbidding classical hero. His aloofness was notorious, and he worked at it. When the painter Gilbert Stuart had uncharacteristic difficulty in putting Washington at ease during a sitting for a portrait, Stuart in exasperation finally pleaded, "Now sir, you must let me forget that you are General Washington and that I am Stuart, the painter." Washington's reply chilled the air: "Mr. Stuart need never feel the need of forgetting who he is or who General Washington is." No wonder the portraits look stiff.
Washington had earned his reputation, his 'character,' as a moral hero, and he did not want to dissipate it. He spent the rest of his life guarding and protecting his reputation, and worrying about it. He believed Franklin made a mistake going back into public life in Pennsylvania in the 1780's. Such involvement in politics, he thought, could only endanger Franklin's already achieved international standing. In modern eyes Washington's concern for his reputation is embarrassing; it seems obsessive and egotistical. But his contemporaries understood. All gentlemen tried scrupulously to guard their reputations, which is what they meant by their honor. Honor was the esteem in which they were held, and they prized it. To have honor across space and time was to have fame, and fame, "the ruling passion of the noblest minds," was what the Founding Fathers were after, Washington above all. And he got it, sooner and in greater degree than any other of his contemporaries. And naturally, having achieved what his fellow Revolutionaries still anxiously sought, he was reluctant to risk it.
Many of his actions after 1783 can be understood only in terms of this deep concern for his reputation as a virtuous leader. He was constantly on guard and very sensitive to any criticism. Jefferson said no one was more sensitive. He judged all his actions by what people might think of them. This sometimes makes him seem silly to modern minds, but not to those of the 18th century. In that very suspicious age where people were acutely 'jealous' of what great men were up to, Washington thought it important that people understand his motives. The reality was not enough; he had to appear virtuous. He was obsessed that he not seem base, mean, avaricious, or unduly ambitious. No one, said Jefferson, worked harder than Washington in keeping "motives of interest or consanguinity, of friendship or hatred" from influencing him. He had a lifelong preoccupation with his reputation for 'disinterestedness' and how best to use that reputation for the good of his country. This preoccupation explains the seemingly odd fastidiousness and the caution of his behavior in the 1780's.
One of the most revealing incidents occurred in the winter of 1784-85. Washington was led into temptation, and it was agony. The Virginia General Assembly presented him with 150 shares in the James River and Potomac canal companies in recognition of his services to the state and the cause of canal-building. What should he do? He did not feel he could accept the shares. Acceptance might be "considered in the same light as a pension" and might compromise his reputation for virtue. Yet he believed passionately in what the canal companies were doing and had long dreamed of making a fortune from such canals. Moreover, he did not want to show "disrespect" to the Assembly or to appear "ostentatiously disinterested" by refusing this gift.
Few decisions in Washington's career caused more distress than this one. He wrote to everyone he knew - to Jefferson, to Governor Patrick Henry, to William Grayson, to Benjamin Harrison, to George William Fairfax, to Nathanael Greene, even to Lafayette - seeking "the best information and advice" on the disposition of the shares. "How would this matter be viewed by the eyes of the world?" he asked. Would not his reputation for virtue be harmed? Would not accepting the shares "deprive me of the principal thing which is laudable in my conduct?"
The situation is humorous today, but it was not to Washington. He suffered real anguish. Jefferson eventually found the key to Washington's anxieties and told him that declining to accept the shares would only add to his reputation for disinterestedness. So Washington gave them away to the college that eventually became Washington and Lee.
Washington suffered even more anguish over the decision to attend the Philadelphia Convention in 1787. Many believed that his presence was absolutely necessary for the effectiveness of the Convention, but the situation was tricky. He wrote to friends imploring them to tell him "confidentially what the public expectation is on this head, that is, whether I will or ought to be there?" How would his presence be seen, how would his motives be viewed? If he attended, would he be thought to have violated his pledge to withdraw from public life? But, if he did not attend, would his staying away be thought to be a "dereliction to Republicanism?" Should he squander his reputation on something that might not work?
What if the Convention should fail? The delegates would have to return home, he said, "chagrined at their ill success and disappointment. This would be a disagreeable circumstance for any one of them to be in; but more particularly so, for a person in my situation." Even James Madison had second thoughts about the possibility of misusing such a precious asset as Washington's reputation. What finally convinced Washington to attend the Convention was the fear that people might think he wanted the federal government to fail so that he could manage a military takeover. So in the end he decided, as Madison put it, "to forsake the honorable retreat to which he had retired, and risk the reputation he had so deservedly acquired." No action could be more virtuous. "Secure as he was in his fame," wrote Henry Knox with some awe, "he has again committed it to the mercy of events. Nothing but the critical situation of his country would have induced him to so hazardous a conduct."
IV
When the Convention met, Washington was at once elected its president. His presence and his leadership undoubtedly gave the Convention and the proposed Constitution a prestige that they otherwise could not have had. His backing of the Constitution was essential to its eventual ratification. "Be assured," James Monroe told Jefferson, "his influence carried this government." Washington, once committed to the Constitution, worked hard for its acceptance. He wrote letters to friends and let his enthusiasm for the new federal government be known. Once he had identified himself publicly with the new Constitution he became very anxious to have it accepted. Its ratification was a kind of ratification of himself.
After the Constitution was established, Washington still thought he could retire to the domestic tranquillity of Mount Vernon. But everyone else expected that he would become president of the new national government. He was already identified with the country. People said he was denied children in his private life so he could be the father of his country. He had to be the president. Indeed, the Convention had made the new chief executive so strong, so kinglike, precisely because the delegates expected Washington to be the first president.
Once again this widespread expectation aroused all his old anxieties about his reputation for disinterestedness and the proper role for a former military leader. Had he not promised the country that he would permanently retire from public life? How could he then now assume the presidency without being "chargeable with levity and inconsistency; if not with rashness and ambition?" His protests were sincere. He had so much to lose, yet he did not want to appear "too solicitous for my reputation."
Washington's apparent egotism and his excessive coyness, his extreme reluctance to get involved in public affairs and endanger his reputation, have not usually been well received by historians. Douglas Southall Freeman, his great biographer, thought that Washington in the late 1780's was "too zealously attentive to his prestige, his reputation and his popularity - too much the self-conscious national hero and too little the daring patriot."
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="14">
Babette's Feast: Feasting with Lutherans
BY MARY ELIZABETH PODLES
At the time she wrote 'Babette's Feast,' Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) was in the latest stages of the syphilis she had contracted from her husband, and knew herself to be near death. Her digestive system had been destroyed by the disease, and, in intense pain and unable to eat, she dictated her story as she literally starved to death. Yet still she could write 'Babette,' a parable of a sumptuous superfluity of food and of the sacrifices an artist makes to give of herself and her art. Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast (Babbette's Gastebud, 1987), an expansion of the story into film, partakes of the same artistry. Numerous critics compare the visual effects of Axel's film to painting in an attempt to capsulize its force and flavor. Typical are Tom O'Brien's observations in Commonweal: the Lutheran minister resembles "a dour portrait of John Calvin," his daughters are called "pre-Raphaelite-looking," and the cool bluish tone of Axel's color scheme "looks as if Vermeer had painted it." Frédéric Strauss in Cahiers du Cinema refers to the film's "atmosph<*_>e-grave<*/>re pointilliste." Babette's Feast clearly suggests even to those who are not art historians a debt to painting. Indeed, the film recapitulates the main currents of Scandinavian painting, a recapitulation that is part of Gabriel Axel's synthesis of the deepest themes of Danish culture - folk, European, and Lutheran.
For a director to allude to painting in a film is not a new development. First, paintings are often 'quoted' in film for the sake of the power of the image borrowed. Whether the audience recognizes the image is almost irrelevant. Its form and composition carry their own force. But further, film, a younger child in the family of the visual arts, sometimes seeks to validate its own worth by using the techniques of its more respected elder siblings. Just as painters of the Renaissance self-consciously held themselves up for comparison to the art of the antique, so filmmakers frequently make reference to the older, comparable art of painting, hoping or assuming that an intelligent audience will see the superior advantages of the newer idiom. Thus the tableaux vivants of Carnival in Flanders (Jaques Feyder, 1935), while not the point of the film, add to the general drollery, tickle the knowledgeable viewer's appreciation of seventeenth-century painting, and make valid, if mocking, points of comparison concerning composition, framing, and their impact on narrative in the two media, film and painting. A Sunday in the Country (Bernard Travernier, 1984) pulls joke after in-joke on us, as the elderly painter-hero ruminates on his failure of courage in not pursuing the avant-garde avenues of nineteenth-century painting, while his life is shown as a series of visions of contemporary painting come alive. Frame after frame of Monet, Degas, Carri<*_>e-grave<*/>re, Van Gogh parade across the screen, to the delight of art historians in the audience. There is little in the way of plot to impede their enjoyment.
Babette's Feast continues this film tradition by referring to nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting to evoke and explain the complexity of Danish culture, to which the film is a conscious homage. Recent scholarship, notably Kirk Varnedoe's Northern Lights (1988) and the Kunstmuseum D<*_>u-umlaut<*/>sseldorf's Im Lichte des Nordens (1986), is working towards the establishment of a corpus and definition of nineteenth-century Scandinavian painting both as a facet of cosmopolitan European culture and as an indigenous phenomenon born of the distinctive and evocative Nordic light.
Babette's Feast is a sophisticated European film with a decided flavor of Denmark and a deceptive simplicity, an amalgam like the paintings it imitates. The evocation of Scandinavian painting throughout the film is more than a nod to art historians and more than a validation of the artistic importance of the film medium. It helps Axel to explore his own culture as an expression of the deepest levels of artistic and human yearnings. Axel invokes not only painting but also literature, music, humor, and Lutheran theology to make his statement about life, art, and the nature of grace.
Gabriel Axel's literacy connection is the most obvious. Babette's Feast closely follows Isak Dinesen's slight short story of the same name. The plot is simple. A Lutheran minister with two beautiful daughters has gathered a small, intensely pietist flock around him in a fishing village. Norre Vosseberg in Jutland in the film. A young army officer, in trouble for his loose living, is sent to rusticate with an elderly aunt. He visits the pietist community, to which his aunt is devoted, for prayer and proximity to the elder daughter Martine. He leaves her, however, without ever articulating his feelings, tells her only that he has realized that "in this world there are things which are impossible," and determines to cut a brilliant figure in the military and the world.
Subsequently, a French opera singer, Achille Papin, sunk in a profound Danish melancholy during a visit to the village, hears Philippa, the other daughter, singing in her father's congregation. Recognizing the quality of her voice, he gives her singing lessons and promises to make her a prima donna. Though she is attracted to the splendid, erotic world he represents (together they sing Mozart's 'Seduction Duet'), she rejects the proffered career - and him.
Years pass. The dean has died; his daughters head the dwindling community in prayer and ministry to the poor. Babette, a Frenchwoman and friend of Papin, is cast up into the village, fleeing from the violence of the Commune. The sisters, though they have little enough to spare, take her in and give her a position as a cook. Soon they find her indispensable: they, on whom she depended, have become dependent on her.
More years pass. Babette, whose sole remaining contact with France has been a lottery subscription, wins the grand prize of Fr. 10,000. All are saddened by the prospect of her leaving. She asks whether she may cook a real French meal for the community to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the founding dean. The sisters view such a wordly feast with trepidation, but, considering it to be Babette's last request before her departure, they consent. Privately, the brethren agree never to mention, not even to notice or taste the food as they eat.
The dinner convenes, and course after course of beautiful, sumptuous food and wine appears. Babette is a cook of consummate artistry. Under the influence of her art, old bitternesses and recriminations between the brethren are reconciled, old sorrows healed and loves restored, and all made whole again in a transcendent feast. Afterwards, the sisters express their thanks to Babette and their sorrow that she will soon be leaving them. She reveals that she will in fact not return to France, for she has spent all her winnings to provide the feast.
The film varies from Dinesen's story by omitting any reference to Babette as a petroleuse, an incendiary participant in the Communard up-rising. In the story, the sisters' suspicion of her role in the revolutionary violence increases Babette's depth and mystery. Furthermore, it adds a level of irony to Lowenhielm's climactic dinner speech, in which he recalls the sumptuous meal he had eaten with Gallifet, the general from whom Babette was fleeing, and a further level still when Babette lets it be known that she was indeed the cook of that legendary meal, and that, cruel and oppressive as Gallifet was, she grieves for him as one of the few who understood and appreciated her art. This change the film makes in the original story is an improvement, because, it distances Babette's story from the political and particular and gives it a greater universality by focusing it on the relation of art and grace in Babette's story.
Dinesen's story was originally written in English to reach a wider European audience. Axel translates it back into Danish (as Dinesen often did herself), for Danish is a more suitable language for so Danish a story. Dinesen set her story in Norway; Axel moves it back to Denmark. Dinesen's Norwegian setting may have been meant to distance the story a little from her immediate Danish audience, to give it a slight added flavor of the quaint; otherwise it is so distinctively Danish in its understatement, its irony, humor, and in the constructs of Lutheranism that shape its structure, that it is again an improvement to return it to a Danish setting in the film.
Just as Dinesen's writing is a mix of the cosmopolitan and the specifically Danish, so too are the Scandinavian paintings with which we began this essay, and which are, to an informed eye, so strikingly evoked by the visual imagery of Babette's Feast. For example, the close cultural and political ties between Germany and Denmark produced a close resemblance between German Romantic painting and Danish art of the late years of the century. Some of the most compelling images of Babette's Feast are pure German Romanticism: an isolated figure stands against a panoramic background, a solitary individual in the face of cosmic natural forces. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveller Looking over a Sea of Fog is a close parallel: it portrays a single figure seen from behind, atop a mountain spur looking down and outward over a rocky, mist-covered landscape; his face is averted, his response to the mysterious panorama concealed. The young Lowenhielm riding over the dunes, Achilles Papin sitting on the headlands, Babette gathering herbs in the meadow: each is framed as the elevated Romantic soul (the lover, the musician, the artist-cook) and, within the framework of the story, each one is alone, an outcast of one kind or another, thrown up into the village by apparent chance, there to find connections "in the hidden regions of the heart."
From the isolated figure in the landscape to the solitary figure in the domestic interior is a short step, and there the film reflects another theme of nineteenth-century Danish painting, the Realist study of the single, absorbed, unsentimentalized figure, often a peasant or a woman, painted in a subtle and limited range of color. Painters like the Danish Anna Ancher drew ultimately on the paintings of seventeenth-century Holland and Flanders to create their own versions of the genre painting, and to pay homage to the dignity and authentic quality of the simple rustic life they portrayed. Ancher's painting Lars Gaihede Carving a Stick, for instance, shows a real person known to the artist immersed in his work, oblivious to the artist for whom he sits. In Babette's Feast, the three scenes of the pauper with the soup bowl pay their own homage to Danish art, and at the same time comment with understated Danish humor on Axel's central themes. He is as rough-hewn as Ancher's model, and as absorbed in his food as Lars Gaihede is in carving his stick. First he receives soup from the minister's daughters, who have renounced love and art for good works, then from Babette, who transforms food into grace, and again from the sisters, who have come to recognize what life without Babette would be: his silent "Phooey," when he gets his ale bread soup instead of the French cooking to which he has become accustomed, speaks volumes. The recipient of the community's charity, with all its limitations, and of Babette's grace, he is both an exponent of and a humorous, unsentimental commentator on the unfolding themes of the film. At the same time, he represents in the film just what Varnedoe finds in Scandinavian genre paintings, a "rural folk ... as surviving examples of a primordial national soul."
Scenes of the sisters with their sewing and of Babette in her kitchen create a high-culture counterpart to these rustic genre 'paintings' within the film, and make reference to another strain of Scandinavian painting. Artists like Harriet Backer made a speciality of the single female figure engaged in some mundane task (sewing, for example) in a simple interior often bathed in transforming light effects (lamplight, sunlight diffused from a window in another room).
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I am led to ask these questions about television's male viewers for a number of reasons which arise, for me at least, in a much earlier interpretive context - namely, whenever I encounter the scene very near the end of Dark Victory when Judith has begun to go blind. I am mystified, not sure of my knowledge or what I am supposed to see, yet quite 'moved.' That distanciation I am supposed to have, as a male confronted with melodrama, seems to fail me because of the ways in which I am implicated. Let me be explicit: Judith has revealed the fact of her impending blindness to her dearest female friend Anne but hides it from her husband, Frederick, because he has had important news about presenting his research in New York City. She does not want to keep him from going. Frederick, however, has suddenly become oblivious to Judith's condition and does not 'see' her current condition, whereas he had been solicitous and observant (as both doctor and husband) before. Why does this scene arouse my anger toward the marginalization of the doctor? How can he not recognize what Judith is concealing from him? Is he merely insensitive, or does he not have access to Judith's state of mind because she has concealed it (from him but not from me)? Is it that our optical point of view and its consequent knowledge is something we can share only with Judith and not with Frederick? Yet, why in what Frederick does not see and does not do, do I suffer the pain of visible and embodied recognition?
Why might this scene, however, appeal to spectators of both sexes, after so many years have passed? Of course, as Steve Neale recently argued about melodrama and tears, it has to do with the coincidence of character and spectator knowledge as well as with a sense of spectator powerlessness. That is, my knowledge is not restricted or withheld by the film, my point of view is always more complete than the diegetic character, and my sense of powerlessness comes about because of the delay in understanding and awareness. It is always too late in melodrama. Amidst this powerless feeling, there is, nonetheless, the power of the Dark Victory scene to be found in the 'feeling' that, one suspects for both male and female spectator, is quite contradictory and unpleasurable. When we move from the cinematic to the televisual, 'feelings,' intimate detail, and intense emotion in small but familiar spaces are the ways television resolves everything that is contradictory - consumer culture, gender and class relations - especially in what is recognized as 'melodramatic.' As more and more televisual genres become mixed modes of realism and melodrama, as fantasy and desire invade so-called gender-specific genres, and as television melodrama reveals more and more the strains of contradictory bourgeois culture, the interpretive moment becomes more complex.
Cinematic criticism of melodrama has not recovered enough from its Sirkian moment, apparently, to recognize that television has moved beyond simplistic notions of two textually defined audiences: the female one that is implicated in, identifies with, and weeps at melodrama, and the male one that sees through female involvement and distances itself from melodrama. Cinematic 'bachelor machines' regulate issues of knowledge and surveillance as they, and we male spectators, bind and constrain women. But those familiar assumptions are very prejudicial to, and presumptive about, males in the audience.
For example, one assumption in most cinematic theory is that the 'eyes' that see are exclusively male. The male 'gaze' at the female in melodrama is a concept which is usually ahistorical while being essential. But in Dark Victory, we see that the male and female characters do not see, and we know that they do not. We also know that Judith and Frederick see each other differently. I am quite sure, for example, that I will never be able to recognize (not just 'see') why Judith makes the choice she does. To assume that that lack of insight results only, or essentially, or ideologically, from the fact of my gender essentiallizes gender, excludes my experience, and assumes, I think, too much about gender, and too little about me. All males do not see the same things about that scene, feel the same way about those characters, when they are husband and wife, or act upon that sight and that knowledge in the same ways.
What part, then, might that scene from Dark Victory play in an explanation of how males view television melodrama? Thomas Elsaesser's recent review of Mary Ann Doane's book The Desire to Desire raises precisely these points. It is assumed that men did not, do not, like the melodramatic in any cultural form identified as 'feminine.' How, then, can men take pleasure in and acknowledge a desire for the melodramatic? Men, after all, have an historical complicity with (compounded by an institutional predilection for) the more rigid and fixated forms, Elsaesser says, of "imaginary investment" represented by the "object choices" of the so-called 'male' genres. How to explain this paradox? How, further, to discover any patriarchal consent for such a preference?
Might men view women's films, and melodrama generally, out of a desire to "see" the woman's desire "thematized" as Elsaesser suggests (p. 114), but also to see new forms of public desire worked out in admittedly non-utopian representations of heterosexual and family relations? Popular culture is not, Andrew Ross argues, "an expression of mass complicity with the status quo, but rather a medium in which ideological consent is either won or lost." But if the male viewer becomes "captivated" (Elsaesser's term; Neale's would be "moved" which has an older, Longinian sense to it), and he loses his sense of distance from the domestic melodrama, he is no longer ruled visually by the voyeuristic. Then desire for the male spectator is 'desire deferred,' which sounds very much like the sort of 'desire' that television's imaginative regime requires to function. Elsaesser notes that "'the desire to desire' is in fact a kind of double negative, and grants the female spectator, or for that matter any spectator caught up in the signifying process of the woman's film, a special sort of intensity, a radicalism of desire: it is not desire denied, but desire doubled" (p. 114). By positioning this notion of 'desire' outside of the ahistorical, class-less psychopathology of Elsaesser's theoretical formulation, we can escape from the narrow text-constructed aspects of his argument.
What draws men to melodrama, to the male in melodrama, and to male melodrama are issues larger than what draws men to the woman's films. While male desire might take the form of (misogynist or malevolent) curiosity, it might also take other forms, some of which Elsaesser recognizes. e.g., woman's film satisfies the males' "desire to see the woman's desire" (p. 114), which is very close to pornography; the melodramatic disposition recognizes (and misrecognizes) the sado-masochistic scenarios of desire; the melodramatic in both so-called 'male' genres and 'female' genres involves that push-me-pull-you of distance and captivation, the pleasure of the unpleasurable, the basic paradox of popular culture. Additionally, we might note a willing desire to see and to recognize, to know and to understand, that which is otherwise forbidden because of the power of patriarchy to repair and mend itself even when under tremendous siege, as it appears to have been in the United States since at least the Vietnam War.
Male desire to 'see' woman's desire may, also, emerge from areas of male sexuality that are by no means universal: that is, that some males actually fear and distrust women, starting with their mothers, as Dorothy Dinnerstein argues. Some males simply cannot distinguish between sex and love. Some males dislike the messiness of sex itself. Beneath the macho and bravado of male bonding might lurk not just a primal misogyny but a horrified awareness. There may, furthermore, be a blending of male desires evoked by viewing and recognizing the more traditional implications and identifications of melodrama as well as those desires evoked by male-genres that have always contained melodramatic elements presenting more suitable male desires: the fantasy of male achievement, the concern for manliness and the anti-feminine, masculine pride and ethos, and masculine nostalgia for its youth.
THE COMPLICITY OF THE MALE VIEWER
The project of this essay is to interrogate these aspects of masculine desire through an investigation of the relationship of male viewers to particular types of television programming because, following Tania Modleski's suggestion, I want to "complicate the question of male sexuality, and so move beyond the notion that masculinity is always about achieving a phallic identity." Perhaps, by deemphasizing the current psychopathology of gender-genre relations and emphasizing a textual-social dialectical epistemology, we can approach Elsaesser's more "heretical" (his term) definition of the television viewer as lacking lack and desire because s/he is already "part consumer, part social subject" (p. 115). For Elsaesser, this hybrid spectator is not positioned in a cinematic field of vision but in a "multiplicity of voices and modes of address" providing "intelligibility and interpretation, social preconstruction rather than textual construction and imaginary coherence" (p. 115). Clearly, Elsaesser's notion of the television viewer is undesirably 'social' and commodified rather than 'textual,' having or possessing a different subjectivity from that of the cinematic spectator.
But textually constructed male spectators and historically constructed male social subjects are tied to an anterior idea of my [our] self-nominated and self-identified complicity(ies) with a social representation of myself as 'male audience' for and within television. It follows that any 'male spectator' that I discuss here will have to be capable of dealing with conflicting cultural messages, with contradictory subject positions within 'masculinity,' and with competitive cultural interpellations. Since I've nominated myself for complicity with televisual texts, and with the rest of my 'world,' I must have some social history as 'audience' formed (some might say 'bought') as the audience of television programs addressed, I presume, to me as well as to others both like and unlike me (in gendered and other terms).
Stephen Heath says that as individual human subjects "we live our heterogeneity," but we also "live our positionings in the [gendered] social field." We have to assume (be complicit with) both sects of operations. Men are carriers of the patriarchal mode, of masculinity, and the masculine point of view. They can, also, sometimes engage in a practice of deconstruction. Within deconstructive practice, this would amount to the recognition of "provisional and intractable starting points" in the investigation of one's own masculine positioning in the social field. Such an investigation amounts to the disclosure of complicities, where the "critic-as-subject is her[him]self complicit with the objects of her [his] critique," emphasizing history and the "ethico-political as the 'trace' of that complicity."
This structure of complicity includes not just the disclosure of the subject as subjected, but genre complicity, textual complicity, viewing complicity, and commodity complicity. This complicity between social text and its viewer takes many, familiar forms: the way in which we are complicit in the concepts of modes of address and ideological problematic used by David Morley and John Fiske, the way in which we think the relationship of viewer interdiscourse and television's heterogeneity of discourse (Ien Ang), the way in which we think about ideologies contending with one another for our consent (in, among other places, Bill Nichols' essay 'Ideological and Marxist Criticism'), or the way in which television works to construct a complicity with the viewer around the construction of the ideal family (in John Ellis and Jane Feuer). None of these discursively constructed complicities assumes a complete reciprocity in terms of encoder/decoder understanding, nor a complete disjuncture either. Whenever, then, we discuss the means by which genre is currently thought, or the nature of audience complicity with star discourses, we are, implicitly, investigating the complicity of texts-viewers encounters. Even in commodity theory, we recognize that the audience, which is sold by networks to advertisers, is also a commodity for itself, involving kinds of cognitive and emotional work that is sold.
Complicity, then, involves processes of consent, sometimes collusion, but never bad faith or guilt.
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William Olsen
Lyric Detachment: Two New Books of Poetry
Jorie Graham, Region of Unlikeness. New York: Ecco, 1991.
Chase Twichell. Perdido. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1991.
As artists, poets should naturally want to distance themselves from what they regard as mere fashion - which is to say that fashion influences those who would shed it almost as deeply as those who would cling to it. At present it seems fashionable to deride the personal in poetry. We have approached a juncture where contemporary American poetry is collectively congratulating itself for having escaped the malignant confines of a personal poetry, especially as practiced by the so-called confessional poets - currently, our most widely spanning and therefore most meaningless pejorative. A poetry of self-confrontation is seen to be a product, if not the cause, of the excesses of a narcissistic culture. Further, a strictly personal poetry is seen to be aesthetically incorrect: if the Marxists are right and our consumer society created an ethos of the self out of a need for ever more selfish consumers, then any poetry dealing with the personal only strengthens the stranglehold our greed has on us. Our newest truism is that a less private, more public poetry is less apt to be given to narcissism, sentimentalism, self-promoting, etc. A more public poetry will lead us away from all of these things. In the meantime the introspective had better watch their step.
No doubt genuine change in the arts occurs slowly, maybe too slowly for those of us mired in the present moment to comprehend. That so many voices are clamoring against the personal suggests, among other things, how strong a pull the personal still has on poetry. And arguably, of the various kinds of discourse, poetry is actually blessed, not cursed, with a small (the sophists would say elite) audience; for if poetry has one custodial function in our culture right now, it may be to preserve the potential for genuine community that eludes more massive forms of communication. You can't talk back to a TV, a poet-friend once said to me. True, you can't talk back to a poem either. But when you listen to a poem or read a poem, you listen as part of a small group or you read by yourself and not as an indistinguishable member of a tyrannical majority. The individual called the poet depends on the fact that other individuals called readers are out there. However, even in our most revolutionary poetry, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, what we have (arguably) instead of a public poetry is a poetry that could not possibly be more subjective, a poetry that chooses the most private of all aesthetic paths, absolute stylism.
What really has changed in American poetry in the last thirty years or so is not so easy to talk about. It may have less to do with poetry eschewing the subjective than with its tiring of postured ways of behaving subjectively in poems and its rejecting specious alchemical formulas for the private life. In reading new books by Jorie Graham and Chase Twichell, it becomes clear to me that the dynamics between poetry and personality have changed somewhat. Both poets use post-modernist strategies of artistic self-consciousness - like David Letterman knocking on the camera lens to see if anyone at home is really at home - but they do so only out of the hyper-earnest desire to be more honest about poetry's status as artifice. Though both poets aspire to a more public role for the poetry, by and large they are still cartographers of the interior. Their poetry is characteristic of one current branch of mainstream poetry, a poetry of lyric detachment.
These poets view human experience less as dramatic participants or as agonized soliloquists and more as detached observers. It is poetry's very capacity to distance us from experience that attracts - and frustrates - these poets and paradoxically impassions them with responsibility. There is a suprapersonal, yet pained restraint in their treatment of the qualms of the inner life and the unpredictabilities of a deterministic world. On the one hand, detachment becomes a necessary evil. On the other hand, as the essential flipside of involvement, it actually facilitates worldly engagement. For Chase Twichell, 'music'-poetry - becomes a protective agent, or "a chord, like the membrane, broken only once, that keeps the world away." More than her first two books, Perdido admits moments of devastating personal revelation, but only because a dispassionate overtone makes these moments possible. Jorie Graham adheres to a camera-like point of view so as to tease herself and her reader into sympathy for a living world abandoned to lifeless analysis. Graham has at once a great distrust for language and an equal fascination with its powers of abstraction. In Region of Unlikeness language is almost personified into an interrogator of experience and a perpetrator of our omnicidal history.
Chase Twichell aspires to a poetry of lyric detachment because the world of her poetry is too cruel for any other response. Her goal is imaginative sympathy, but for her such sympathy is conceivable only after scrupulous investigation of the darker motives alive and brooding somewhere just behind craft. The speaker in Perdido seems to report her discoveries from behind a plexiglass surface of memory. Her strategies are mock-inductive: however quirky and ungrounded and unscientific her conclusions are, she arrives at those conclusions only after compiling the requisite perceptual data, descriptions that shimmer in the phenomenological no-man's land between the subjective and the objective. Her imagery, usually pleasing enough in itself, is never just flashy: it urges the speaker toward statement, personal disclosure, and intimations of vulnerability. Unlike so much bad magazine verse that bulldozes piles of observant description as proof of a sometimes missing intelligence, Twichell is just as engaged by speculation as by observation. In good keeping with post-Heisenberg metaphysics, she constantly makes the point that speculation alters our methods of observation and transforms and even mutates whatever it is we observe. Her first-person speaker is ideational: a speculative witness that consistently laments her abstraction from the physical world. Yet in her own words, the disclosures are "unrepentant."
Oddly, the exploration of consciousness Twichell's poetry documents is something like a descent into an underworld, a Darwinian, subterranean world plainly visible to the powers of intellection if somewhere just beyond full comprehension. The one domain of her poetry encompasses the twin zones of memory and desire, and her journey therein open out into pre-human worlds teeming with creaturely presences. From a biological perspective, these poems assert a continuity of being among the lower and higher life forms. From a psychological perspective, her poetry aims to achieve self-realization only upon something akin to regression, some slippage into the depths of the psyche, that murky place where all at once the libido takes hold and consciousness begins. Yet Twichell is never guilty of species-ism, and I'm guessing she would hesitate to accept Roethke's idea of a poem as "in a sense ... a kind of struggle out of the slime." If anything, the pre-human realms of Perdido comprise a world of sometimes remarkably clear actualities, a world neither more nor less than our world of brutal intelligences. In Spanish, perdido means 'lost,' 'strayed,' 'ruined,' 'mislaid.' In these poems 'Perdido' is the name both of the Alabaman river that empties into the Gulf and of some seemingly pre-lapsarian city of light. Between the subhuman and human realms there are endless border crossings.
So far all I have done is to scratch the surface of a world view. Consider how rich the opening poem 'Why All Good Music Is Sad,' is, how hypnotically its rhythms unfold, how much the poem is about the pull of its own musical seduction, how the cadences hover between free verse and metered verse, how the images hover between loveliness and venom; and how, more than the poem's candid statements, even more than the rich mystique of its conceit that produces the final equation between fish and speaker, the rhythms themselves embody the unending struggles between body and spirit, desire and memory, insentience and sentience:<O_>poem<O/>
However metaphorical this poem is, it never cloys into allegory. From the strangely icy and matter-of-fact first line that provides the poem's personal frame, we move through flashing schools of fish and the undulating lacy fans to the poem's crux, the sight of a fish impaled on a spear, "abandoned to its one desire." It is not death that the fish seems to be suffering so much as bodily isolation. The paradox is that desire, normally a vehicle for escaping isolation, is the cause of isolation. At this ironic "apex of its fear" Perdido filters from the world above to the "half-lit world" below, until words subhuman and human, preverbal and verbal, presexual and sexual, unfold the same problems, are prone to the same violence. Twichell captures whatever it is about human apperception that makes it easier to lounge on the surface and enjoy the freakshow below. Yet at the same time her speaker's observation grows out of such dark instincts as can only be appeased - if that - when they are comprehended. The ending is fairly easy to anticipate (that the sea has been a metaphor for the bed hardly surprises us), yet this unsurprising closure, or the sorrowful ease of it, strikes a common nerve with the stunned awareness that the speaker is unfathomably alone, yet ever just able to say so.
It is characteristic of Twichell's poems to flatten out their own worst foreboding news. If Twichell means to be moving away from an art which is no more than "cold solace," her poems now reach new emotional depths as a result of the dramatic distancing of the speaker from her experience - this because deep feeling shows up most clearly against a backdrop of reserve. The problems these poems occasionally run into have to do with one of Twichell's strong suits as a poet, metaphor-making. Sometimes she seems too willing to reduce unstated psychic dilemmas into fairly formulaic images, worldly and pathetic and terrible for being put so flatly, yet still reductive. In a poem ironically titled 'A Whole Year of Love' (it turns out that a whole year of love doesn't amount to a can of minnows!), we get a glib equation like this: "just as a whole year of love, for example,/ might shrink to a stack of pale-colored,/ just laundered shirts. An image." Here Twichell's usually hard-won flatness of voice lapses to mere posturing, and tonal effect becomes a shortcut to substance. These poems also sometimes go wrong when they provide pat emblems of their own emotional inaccessibility, as at the end of 'Window in the Shape of a Diamond':<O_>poem<O/>
This gesture of unsaying the sublime, meant to be sublime in itself, does not produce much more than mute pathos. Thus the poem speaks no more accurately of the poet's inner life than it does of the world outside the window.
But the truth is that Perdido gains emotional and intellectual ground because of its willingness to overreach. It may have been more difficult to tell the good poems from the weak poems in Twichell's first two promising collections, Northern Spy and The Odds. Perdido is a stronger collection. It has Twichell's penchant for images as smart as they are dazzling, but it also allows her imagination more auditory depths. Though this isn't true for the poetry of every poet, Twichell's poetry has gained in passion and meaning as her syntax has relaxed and as her ear has joined her eye in writing the poem. I quoted 'Why All Good Music Is Sad' because it best illustrates the vision of Perdido. I can't leave unmentioned other equally strong poems like 'Dream of the Interior,' 'The Shades of Grand Central,' 'One Physics,' 'Useless Islands,' 'Revenges,' and the remarkable closing poem, 'The Stolen Emblem.' In this tour de force poem Twichell has made the dream of her interior ours, its language our language. She does so by playing endless riffs on the book's by-now recognizable discovery that our perceptions cloud the world, but with twists that take the poem beyond the common bounds of pop-quantum physics:<O_>poem<O/>
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Michael Dorris
Beyond Cliché, Beyond Politics:
Multiculturalism and the Fact of America
HALF a millennium ago, my Modoc paternal ancestors lived near the lava flats of northern California. They went about their lives - hunting, fishing, falling in love, mourning their dead - completely unaware of an Atlantic Ocean, much less of any human beings on the other side of it. Meanwhile, Irish peasants - my mother's people - toiled in the rocky fields of the western county of Roscommon, spoke Gaelic, and worried when the next attack from the sea might come. Unschooled in geography, they possessed little notion of Spain, much less the possibility of a New World. Somewhere in the tree of my particular lineage were also French farmers, Swiss shepherds, German professors, Coeur d'Alene salmon fishermen - all innocent of the complications of contact, oblivious of each other's priorities and concerns, insular, ethnocentric, proud ... and unfathomable to a contemporary person.
These were men and women whose world was infinitely smaller, arguably easier, but ultimately less interesting than our own. When the lines of their consciousnesses inadvertently collided - well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - they were at least as confused as they were enlightened, as terrified by newness as they were fascinated by it. No doubt they mistrusted the strange, yearned for the security of the 'old days,' often wished each other gone. But there were also among them people who dared to look beyond the boundaries of their own birthplaces, who not only accepted but embraced the possibilities of difference, who joined together to forge something new.
This was not, in most cases, a matter of choice but rather a practical, creative, and available necessity. Our dynamic American landscape of fabulously interwoven ethnicities has struggled for generations to devise a workable definition of itself - a challenge and debate at the heart of the quincentennial anniversary of Christopher Columbus' first voyage to this hemisphere. The task has consistently proven to be neither simple nor uncontroversial. 'Multiculturalism,' though the only catchall that accurately reflects this nation's history of free-for-all migration and slippery assimilation, has become almost a cliché in political discourse - a bow to each federally recognized ethnic population, a dutiful list of its accomplishments and contributions to the modern world. As a concept, multiculturalism is amorphism without the sharp edges that traditionally mark boundaries, and it rarely pleases anyone.
Among the Native American people I know and respect, there are many who are angry at the attention lavished on the 1992 continental birthday party. These individuals are the embittered descendants of tribes whose lands were stolen, whose populations were decimated, whose religions were outlawed and held in contempt, whose books were burned, whose skin color was reviled. They have ample reason to profess an aversion to Columbus and all he stands for. Mythologizing and glorifying - or denigrating - a complicated past does no justice to anyone. It over-simplifies, and it buries hard facts and sad realities. It absolves without any confession of guilt, and it does not heal.
There are, among my non-Indian friends, those who resent any cloud cast over the international orgy of self-aggrandizement, and who blissfully dismiss as 'revisionary' every history save that of the conquerors. "To the victors belong the spoils," they crow. But they are wrong - wrong as the extollers of Manifest Destiny were in the last century, wrong as those who would remake the world in the image of a single culture or society or faith - and they must be challenged. Our diversity, as a species, has always been our salvation. Why do we struggle so to deny and suppress it?<*_>star<*/>
Who, after all, were those societies that greeted Europeans five, four, three hundred years ago? What were their motives, their important elements, their contrasts with the Old World norms that attempted to dominate and destroy them?
Imagine the scene: it is an autumn day in the late fifteenth century. On a beach with rose-colored sand, somewhere in the Caribbean, two groups of people are about to meet for the first time. The world will never again be the same.
Emerging from a small landing boat are a group of men exhausted from a long and frightening ocean voyage. They didn't trust where they were going and now they don't know where they've arrived - but it doesn't look at all like the India described by Marco Polo. They come from Spain and Portugal and Genoa, are Christian and Jewish. The more superstitious and uneducated among them feared that, by sailing west across the Atlantic, they would fall off the edge of the planet.
The men seek treasure and adventure, fame and glory, but the people who greet them seem quite poor. They are not dressed in fine brocade encrusted with precious jewels, as one would expect of subjects of the great Khan. They are, in fact, not dressed at all, except for a few woven skirts and dabs of paint. Are they demons? Are they dangerous? Do they know where the gold is hidden?
Watching the boat draw near are a cluster of men, women, and children. They speak a dialect of the Arawak language and are delighted to receive new guests, especially ones who aren't painted white - signifying death. Strangers arrive often, anxious to barter parrot feathers or new foods or useful objects made of stone or shell. These particular visitors look rather strange, it's true: their bodies are covered with odd materials, not at all suited for the warm climate, and they communicate with each other in a tongue as indecipherable as Carib or Nahuatl.
Up close there are more surprises. There are no women in the group, and some of the hosts speculate on why this may be the case. Have their clan mothers expelled these men, banished them to wander alone and orphaned? Has their tribe suffered some disaster? And another thing: they have the strong odor of people who have not had their daily bath. Are they from some simple and rude society that doesn't know how to comport itself?
But all this notwithstanding, guests are guests and should be treated with hospitality. They must be offered food and shelter, must be entertained with stories and music, before the serious business of trade begins.<*_>star<*/>
The earth was much larger than Christopher Columbus imagined, and its human population was far more diverse. The land mass he encountered on his transatlantic voyages was thoroughly inhabited by more than one hundred million people, from the frigid steppes of Patagonia at the furthest extremity of South America to the dark arboreal forests of Newfoundland. In the inhospitable Arctic, Inuits foraged for much of the year in small nuclear or extended family groups, assembling only sporadically to carry on the necessary business of marriage, remembrance, or collective action, and only when the availability of food was at its peak. In the lush and verdant jungles of Yucat<*_>a-grave<*/>n and Guatemala, Mayas had invented agriculture, writing, and an accurate calendar fifteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, and they had gone on to become populous in complex, class-oriented societies supported by a nutritionally balanced diet based on maize, squashes, and beans. In the Andes of north-western South America, early Quechuas domesticated the potato, engineered an intricate system of roads and bridges, formed a nation in which the state owned all property except houses and movable household goods, and collected taxes in labor.
The Western Hemisphere was home to literally hundreds of cultures whose people spoke a multiplicity of languages and dialects derived from at least ten mutually exclusive linguistic families. Many societies had well-developed traditions of science and medicine - some forty percent of the modern world's pharmacopeia were utilized in America before 1492 - and literature, visual art, and philosophy flourished in a variety of contexts. Yet beyond a shared geography, there were few common denominators; due to the haphazard and long process by which in-migrating peoples had distributed themselves throughout the continents, the Western Hemisphere thrived as a living laboratory of disparate life-styles, linguistic variety, and cultural pluralism.
The Karok in California were no more likely to share mores with the Anishinabe of Wisconsin or the Yanomamo of Venezuela than they were with groups in Polynesia or Persia. Every type of social organization existed: theocracies among the Natchez, matrilineal clan descent among the Delaware, incipient forms of representative government among the Iroquois, chiefdoms among the Arawak, confederacies among the Huron, loosely knit bands among the peoples of the Amazon. The Zunis maintained stable towns and the Toltecs dwelled in cosmopolitan cities. Vast trading networks linked the so-called Mound Builders of central North America with the tribes living along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, as well as with peoples on the North Atlantic seaboard.
Obviously, no single group was directly aware of more than a fraction of the other extant societies - and there was no conception of an overarching group identity. 'We' was the family, the community, the tribe, and 'they' were everyone else, known and unknown. The fact of cultural diversity, however, was manifest. Within a day's walk of virtually every indigenous population could be found at least one and probably more than one unrelated community whose inhabitants, relative to the visitor, spoke a totally foreign and incomprehensible language, adhered to a unique cosmology, dressed in unusual clothing, ate exotic foods, and had a dissimilar political organization with peculiar variations on age and gender roles.
Native persons in most regions of precontact America could and undoubtedly did believe that they belonged to the smartest, most tasteful, most accomplished, and most handsome human constellation in the universe, but clearly they knew that their particular culture was not the only one. Variety, in whichever way it was construed and explained, was inescapably the human norm.
It is little wonder, therefore, that for Europeans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, America proved to be much more than a single new world: it was an unimagined universe. The sheer heterogeneity of Western Hemisphere societies challenged every cherished medieval assumption about the uniform and orderly nature of human origin and destiny. It was as if the cultural hodgepodge of America revealed a whole new set of potential operating rules - or, even more disconcerting, served as an ego-threatening intimation that there were no dependable rules at all. Imagine the shock! To have believed for a thousand years that everything and everybody of consequence was known and neatly categorized, and then suddenly to open a window and learn that, all along, one had been dwelling in a small house with no perspective on the teeming and chaotic city that surrounded one's accustomed neighborhood - with no map or dictionary provided. How did Cain and Abel fit into this new, complicated schema? Which Old Testament patriarch begat the Lakota or the Chibcha? How did the Comanche get from the Tower of Babel to Oklahoma?
The contrasts between the Old World and the Americas were staggering. With only a few minor exceptions, virtually all Europeans spoke languages that sprang from a single linguistic family. Moreover, in the larger perspective, Europe's vaunted religious and philosophical divisions were basically variations on a concordant theme. Everyone from the Baltic to the Balkans and on west to the British Isles professed belief in the same male divinity, and - except for European Jewry - worshiped His Son as well.
As side effects of this theological unity, Latin became a lingua franca for intellectuals from all sectors, and the Mosaic code formed the basis for practically every ethical or legal philosophy. The broad assumption of male dominance reigned uncontested, from individual marriage contracts to the leadership hierarchy of emergent nation-states. And the Bible - especially the Book of Genesis - was regarded as a literally true and factually accurate accounting of origin itself.
Significantly, in the Adam and Eve story creation is intentional: a personalized, antropomorphic, male divinity formed a man in His image and then threw in a woman, made out of a nonessential rib, for man's company and pleasure. God's word was law, and the only token competition came from a fallen angel, also of His manufacture.
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THE POLITICS OF RACE
THE MEANING OF EQUALITY
SEYMOUR MARTIN LIPSET
No achievement of 20th-century American politics surpasses the creation of an enduring national consensus on civil rights. This consensus was forged during the past quarter century by a civil-rights movement that compelled Americans finally to confront the wide gap between their treatment of blacks and the egalitarian values of their own cherished national creed.
In recent years, however, the leaders of the civil-rights movement have shifted the focus from the pursuit of equal opportunity to the pursuit of substantive equality through policies of preferential treatment. This has brought matters to a difficult pass, because most Americans, including many blacks, have not shifted with the leaders of the movement. The reason is not hard to find. While the civil-rights movement of the 1960s asked Americans to live up to a single un-assailable ideal, today it sets up a conflict between two core American values: egalitarianism and individualism.
Affirmative action was born in 1965 in the spirit of the first civil-rights revolution. Soon thereafter it was transformed into a system of racial preferences, and today affirmative action is rapidly polarizing the politics of race in America. The editorial and op-ed pages bristle with affirmative action polemics and analyses. In the 1990 contest for the governorship of California, Republican Pete Wilson focused on the 'quota' issue in defeating Diane Feinstein. In the same year, Senator Jesse Helms won reelection in North Carolina with the help of the quota issue, and in Louisiana ex-Klansman David Duke exploited it to gain a majority of white votes while losing his bid for a Senate seat. His failed campaign for the governorship last fall became a national drama. When Congress began its 1991 session, the first bill introduced by the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives was a civil-rights bill described by its opponents as 'quota' legislation. Even after a version of that bill became law in November, controversy over its meaning and import continued. ...
In many ways, of course, the United States has never been a perfect meritocracy. In the job market and other fields, people tend to favor relatives, friends, and members of their own ethnic, religious, communal, or cultural groups. And universities, though meritocratic and universalistic in their explicit values, have always favored the children of alumni and faculty, not to mention athletes, in their admissions policies. They also award special scholarships and fellowships limited to applicants from particular regional, gender, ethnic, or religious backgrounds - though some of these practices are now outlawed. To a large extent, blacks have been excluded from these networks of privilege.
Women and most other minorities have required only genuine equality of opportunity, not special help, in order to make a place for themselves in American society. Indeed, the Jews, the 'Confucian' Asians, and the East Indians have done better on average than old-stock white Americans with similar skills and education. Roughly 40 percent of Mexican-Americans hold white-collar or other high-level positions today, even though most of them were not born in the United States. In any case, immigrants generally have no claim on American society. Whatever handicaps they have - inadequate education, lack of skills, inexperience with the ways of the cities - are not the fault of American society.
Blacks clearly do have a claim on this society. As I wrote in 1963 in The First New Nation: "Perhaps the most important fact to recognize about the current situation of the American Negro is that equality is not enough to assure his movement into the larger society." The question is, what will?
One of the more novel proposals is advanced by Brandeis University's Lawrence Fuchs in The American Kaleidoscope (1990). He argues for a system of preferential treatment in employment that varies according to the type of job. Fuchs points out that in many, if not most, occupations employers chiefly require competence, not superior performance. Seniority rights, legislation outlawing compulsory retirement ages, and tenure for school teachers are all justified by the assumption that general competence is a sufficient qualification for employment. Thus, Fuchs contends, efforts to increase the number of minority workers among the less-skilled - "fire fighters, machinists, computer operators, and candidates for dental school" - can reasonably include numerical goals, permitting "race to be counted as one of many factors. ..." in filling jobs. But he argues that fields in which high achievement matters a great deal - scholarship, medicine, sports, airline pilots, and management - should not be subject to quotas and special preference policies, apart from special recruitment and training efforts.
Whatever the merits of Fuchs' distinction, people who work in these less-exalted fields do not accept such disparaging estimates of their worth. Poll after poll finds that white workers see no reason that meritocratic standards and universalistic rules should not apply to them. In fact, more support (or at least acceptance) of special preferences is found among elite whites, who begin with much more economic and status security.
Mass opinion remains invariably opposed to preferential treatment for deprived groups. The Gallup Organization repeated the same question five times between 1977 and 1989:
Some people say that to make up for past discrimination, women and minorities should be given preferential treatment in getting jobs and places in college. Others say that ability, as determined by test scores, should be in the main consideration. Which point of view comes close to how you feel on the subject?
In each survey, 10 or 11 percent said that minorities should be given preferential treatment, while 81, 83, or 84 percent replied that ability should be the determining factor. When the 1989 answers were broken down by the respondents' race, blacks were only somewhat more supportive of preferential treatment than whites (14 percent to 7 percent); a majority of the blacks (56 percent) favored "ability, as determined in test scores." Women, it should be noted, had the same response as men; 10 percent supported preferential treatment, and 85 percent ability.
Gallup, working for the Times Mirror Corporation, presented the issue somewhat differently in 1987 and 1990: "We should make every effort to improve the position of blacks and other minorities even if it means giving them preferential treatment." This formulation was supported more strongly. Twenty-four percent agreed in both years, while 71 to 72 percent disagreed. Blacks were more favorable than whites by 32 to 18 percent, but again it is notable that over two-thirds of the blacks rejected preferential treatment. And while over four-fifth of the Republicans surveyed were against preferences, so were two-thirds of the Democrats. A relatively high proportion of those who identified themselves as "strong liberals," 43 percent, endorse preferential treatment, but they constituted only 10 percent of the total sample.
Last spring, a Newsweek-Gallup poll posed the issue in terms of persons of equal qualifications: "Do you believe that because of past discrimination against black people, qualified blacks should receive preference over equally qualified whites in such matters as getting into college or getting jobs?" Only 19 percent of whites responded positively, 72 percent said no. But preferences secured a plurality of 48 percent among blacks, with 42 percent opposed.
Preferential treatment does somewhat better when it is justified as making up for specific past discrimination, when ability is not posed as an alternative, and when it is limited to blacks and applies only to employers that have actually discriminated. The New York Times national poll asked in May and December of 1990: "Do you believe that where there has been job dis-crimination against blacks in the past, preference in hiring or promotion should be given to blacks today?" Both times, roughly one-third of those polled said yes. But small majorities, 51-52 percent, rejected preferential treatment even under these conditions.
By June 1991, during the debate on the new civil-rights bill that Republicans attacked as quota legislation, support for preferences dropped to 24 percent, while opposition rose to 61 percent. One month later, a poll of blacks taken by USA Today to test their reaction to Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court found that they rejected quotas. They were asked, "Thomas has said that racial hiring quotas and other race-conscious legal measures damage blacks' efforts to advance. He emphasizes self-help instead. Agree or disagree?" More blacks agreed with Thomas, 47 percent, than disagreed, 39 percent, while 14 percent replied "don't know."
Both whites and blacks, however, will support a policy described as "affirmative action" if it explicitly does not involve quotas, as an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found in July 1990. Two-thirds of whites (66 percent) and 84 percent of blacks responded favorably to the question: "All in all, do you favor or oppose affirmative action programs in business for blacks, provided there are no rigid quotas?"
A LEADER-FOLLOWER SPLIT
Americans make a critical distinction between compensatory action and preferential treatment. To return to Lyndon Johnson's image of the shackled runner, they are willing to do more than remove the chains. They will go along with special training programs and financial assistance, enabling the previously shackled to catch up with those who are ahead because of earlier unfair advantages. But they draw the line at predetermining the results of the competition.
In some measure, the distinction between 'compensatory action' and 'preferential treatment' parallels the distinction drawn between 'equality of opportunity' and 'equality of results.' Compensatory action is probably seen as a way to enhance equality of opportunity. Because blacks have been discriminated against in the past, it is fair to give them special consideration so that they will have a better chance in the future. Preferential treatment, on the other hand, probably sounds to most whites like an effort to predetermine the outcome of the competitive process.
The heaviest support for preferential treatment seems to come from the liberal intelligentsia, the well-educated, the five to six percent of the population who have gone to graduate schools, plus those who have majored in the liberal arts in college. Support is also strong among the political elite, particularly Democrats but including many Republicans (though not many prominent officeholders). The Democrats in Congress increasingly support these policies, a change which may flow from the fact that the proportion of Democratic members who can be classified as liberal on the basis of their voting record has increased steadily since the 1960s.
Democratic leaders are increasingly out of step with public opinion, and it is hurting them. The Republicans, their creation of quotas long forgotten, now vigorously emphasize meritocratic standards. Democrats are faced with a dilemma: how to respond to pressure from civil-rights groups and the intelligentsia on the one hand, and on the other, how to prevent the party's identification with quotas from alienating its traditional base of support among whites in the working class and the South. Lyndon Johnson anticipated the problem in 1965, when he said in private White House discussions about civil rights, "We have to press for them as a matter of right, but we also have to recognize that by doing so we will destroy the Democratic Party."
This is precisely what is happening. A New York Times-CBS News poll conducted in mid-year 1991 found that 56 percent of Americans said the Democratic Party "cares more about the needs and problems of blacks," while only 15 percent believed the Republicans do. More significant may be the finding that, when asked the same question about "the needs and problems of whites," 45 percent answered that the GOP cares more, only 19 percent said the Democrats do, and 14 percent said both parties care equally about both races.
Affirmative action is widely seen as reverse discrimination. Many less-affluent whites believe that the number of jobs available for them had declined as a result of preferences for blacks. Two studies undertaken in 1985 and 1987 by Stanley Greenberg of the Analysis Group for the Michigan Democratic Party indicate that negative reaction to affirmative action has played a major role in the defection of white male blue-collar voters from the party.
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RICHARD LIND
The Aesthetic Essence of Art
Anyone familiar with the parallel evolution of aesthetics and Western art knows how new art-forms, in a kind of punctuated equilibrium, have regularly dislodged each new art theory. In a strategy designed to avoid any new embarrassments, some contemporary writers have sought to define 'art' in terms of a complex relationship within the so-called 'artworld' between artists, their products and the traditional community for whom those products are made. One of these writers, Arthur Danto, has plausibly argued that all art makes some sort of 'statement' interpretable only by artworld participants familiar with an appropriate art theory. Nothing can be an artwork until an artworld theory emerges by which it can be understood.
There are good reasons to believe that 'making a statement,' in the broadest possible sense, is a necessary condition of art. But it is not sufficient. Phenomenological analysis tends to show that an artwork must be aesthetic as well as meaningful. Without this further specification, what the artist has to say could not be distinguished from many nonartistic forms of communication. Indeed, for anything to be art, its meaning must subserve the aesthetic function of the artwork, in a role I shall call 'significance.' Our counter thesis, then, will be that the concepts of 'art' and 'artwork' must be defined in terms of the creation of significant aesthetic objects.
I
Danto doesn't offer a readily accessible formulation of his definition of 'art,' but it is possible to piece one together from his various pronouncements. At the heart of his theory is a concern about the basic difference between such everyday objects as clusters of real Brillo boxes and putative artworks like Warhol's Brillo Boxes, the respective physical features of which are virtually identical. If they are alike in every physical detail, yet one is art and the other not, something must make for the distinction. Danto points out that, of the two, only Brillo Boxes is subject to 'interpretation' by an artistic community, the 'artworld.'
Consider, he says, a pair of hypothetical neckties painted all-over blue, respectively, by Cézanne and Picasso. Only Picasso's would have qualified as art:
For one thing, there would have been no room in the artworld of Cézanne's time for a painted necktie. Not everything can be an artwork at every time: the artworld must be ready for it. ... But Picasso's artworld was ready to receive, at Picasso's hand, a necktie: for he had made a chimpanzee out of a toy, a bull out of a bicycle seat ...: so why not a tie out of a tie?
On the basis of such observations Danto seems to offer a set of necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for 'art': a) the use of some object b) to make an original statement c) interpretable within an artworld context. Conditions a) and b) are suggested in the explanation of Picasso's tie as art: "Picasso used the necktie to make a statement." Danto points out that the statement must be original since a fake does not qualify as art. Condition c) is an explicit part of Danto's conditions:
The moment something is considered an artwork, it becomes subject to an interpretation. It owes its existence as an artwork to this, and when its claim to art is defeated, it loses its interpretation and becomes a mere thing.
To see something as art demands nothing less than this, an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art.
Danto is often accused of failing to specify what makes a community an artworld community. But in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace he tells us that by means of artistic theory the artist enables us "to see his way of seeing the world." For instance, within the tradition of art as self-commentary, Warhol's Brillo Boxes, can be interpreted as propounding "a brash metaphor: the brillo-box-as-work-of-art." Danto can thus claim that the artworld is a community of individuals prepared to see the world as the artist does through his statement.
Though this sketch may not do Danto full justice, it at least enables us to see the beauty of his main thesis that the function of art is to convey meanings decipherable by an appropriate artworld audience. The idea that anything requires an interpretive understanding before it can be experienced as a work of art seems the only plausible explanation for the fact that what counts as art in one age would not have counted as art in an earlier one. We might question Danto's claim that if Cézanne had painted his tie blue it would not have been art; had he actually produced one, we should now say it always had been art - unappreciated art. But a principle has still been demonstrated: if such an artifact did not even have the potential to be interpreted by any artworld community, it would never be deemed 'art.' The potential for 'interpretation' therefore has to be an integral part of anything's being an artwork.
But Danto's subsidiary thesis, that the statement of the artist consists of enabling us to see the artist's 'way of seeing the world,' makes his artworld-interpretation condition too narrow. This condition implies that art must always be about something in the world. George Dickie has challenged this 'aboutness' requirement:
Consider a design which consists of a number of interpenetrating triangular-shaped areas and entitled #23. Is it about triangles? About art? Nothing in the painting or its title gives one any reason to think that it is about anything at all in any ordinary sense of 'about.'
Nonobjective art is by definition about nothing at all. And obvious examples of music - Schoenberg's serial pieces for instance - qualify as art, even though they fail to 'say' anything about the world. So Danto's 'aboutness' thesis leaves out a significant segment of what the artworld embraces as art.
II
That art makes statements is justifiable, however, so long as we view 'making statements' metaphorically - as a way of communicating meanings that are understood by an audience. I am using the word 'meanings' in the broad phenomenological sense to signify whatever is brought to mind in accordance with the principle of association. Distant thunder thus 'means' an impending rainstorm in the same general sense that the word 'dog' means a certain species of four-legged animal: both are signs that regularly remind us of something. Words have conventional meanings, being based on agreed-upon associations, but there are other sorts of conventional meanings as well. Clearly, art is able to communicate a wide variety of nonverbal meanings that become intersubjectively 'interpretable' in virtue of the shared associations of a knowledgeable art community. Such meanings are 'interpreted' by those familiar with the particular style, school, or tradition of the work.
Danto regards artworld meanings as limited to whatever is specified by particular art theories. In doing so, he seems to have overlooked one basic meaning that appears to be universal, present even where the work is nonobjective. That meaning is authorship, by which we recognize that what has been presented to us is the product of a certain special activity on the part of its creator.
After all, nothing is identified as an artwork if it does not cause us to associate with it the idea that it was specifically created by someone to be appreciated in the appropriate way. For instance, the very fact that Dickie's counter example has a title ('#23') is a sufficient clue to its artistic intentions. Lacking any such sign, an absent-minded doodle of a similar set of intersecting triangles would not be considered an artwork. Unframed, untitled, unsigned, and unexhibited, enterprises like whistling while you work, free-associating in your diary, or absentmindedly torturing tinfoil into quirky figures lack only the standard signs of authorship to qualify as art. Art is always at least about itself; it conveys by certain mutually understood clues the idea that it is the sort of thing created for a specific kind of appreciation by a certain kind of audience. The fact that authorship is at least one conventional meaning required of all art would seem to render Danto's thesis, that art makes statements interpretable by an artworld community, a viable definitional condition, so long as we construe 'making statements' as conveying inter-subjective meanings in the broadest possible sense.
III
By itself, however, our modification of Danto's condition is now too broad to catch only 'artworks' in its net. Without any specification as to what makes any community an artworld community, our requirement would seem to include any kind of artifact that conveys meanings interpretable by a community - for instance, the products of journalism, history, science, and philosophy. If 'art' does have a set of sufficient conditions, we need to find at least one more ingredient. I shall contend that the key condition that Danto's theory lacks - and even eschews - is the requirement that the main function of art is to produce aesthetic objects. The idea that art must be aesthetic is not exactly new; its most prominent proponent was Monroe Beardsley. But the difficulty with this particular condition has always been to give a proper account of what makes anything aesthetic.
I propose to spell out the aesthetic requirement of art by means of an analysis of 'aesthetic object' worked out in earlier essays. The theory was proposed as a corrective to the once-popular thesis that an object becomes aesthetic simply if one addresses it with a certain 'aesthetic attitude.' The attitude theory fails to distinguish taking an interest in something (giving it a 'chance' to be interesting) from finding it interesting (being interested by or attracted to it). The described attitude does only the former; it is a special way of taking an interest in the appearance of things. The problem is that such an attitude is not always rewarded: 'I am paying full attention to x and x is not aesthetic,' is clearly not self-contradictory.
It would seem that only when something holds our interest in a certain way do we want to call it 'aesthetic.' My thesis, then, is that to be aesthetic something must be attractive to attention in a spectrum of ways one might variously describe as 'intriguing,' 'fascinating,' 'beautiful' or 'gorgeous,' depending on the degree and kind of perceptual interest taken. The term no longer refers merely to the beautiful. Even objects we would ordinarily regard as 'ugly' - withered old hags, for instance - can count as 'aesthetic' if they grab and hold our attention in a certain way. I shall try to demonstrate that all aesthetic objects are necessarily interesting, but in a way that distinguishes them from other interesting objects.
Are aesthetic objects necessarily interesting? If we single out any natural, manufactured or artistic item as aesthetic, intuitively it is only after having contemplated it. No other use seems relevant. But why, out of all the phenomena continuously swimming through experience, should we contemplate just these items? Clearly it is only because they somehow reward that contemplation by 'holding' our attention and motivating us to continue to engage in their contemplation. Indeed, it seems a contradiction to say a sunset or piece of driftwood is aesthetic but totally uninteresting. True, someone could consistently say, "I'm bored with beautiful sunsets." But consider what such a statement actually means: the sunset remains interesting to the eye ('beautiful') but the speaker is no longer interested in that sort of experience.
The fact that we speak of being aesthetic as a matter of degree supports our claim. It is lexically and syntactically correct to say that one work is 'more aesthetic' than another, or that a particular arrangement is 'not very aesthetic.' We could not mean simply that we are deliberately paying more attention to one than the other; intense scrutiny is often disappointed by admittedly unaesthetic objects. Intuitively, we see that the more an item spontaneously elicits discrimination the more aesthetic we say it is. Being contemplatively interesting thus seems the only possible reason to bother to call anything 'aesthetic.'
IV
So there are good reasons for claiming that all aesthetic objects are interesting.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="20">By and large, this work has suggested that although scientifically demonstrated routes of HIV transmission (through intimate sexual contact, sharing needles, and blood transfusions) are well understood by the public, there is nonetheless a persistent belief among substantial portions of the public that AIDS can also be transmitted through a variety of casual routes (e.g., by working alongside HIV-infected persons, shaking hands, being sneezed on, etc.). Recently, for example, the National Center for Health Statistics estimated from their September 1990 National Health Interview Survey that 24 percent of the public thinks it is "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that someone would contract AIDS from eating in a restaurant where the cook has the AIDS virus, while 19 percent believes it is "very" or "somewhat likely" that they would contract AIDS from using public toilets (Adams and Hardy 1991).
These findings are of concern to public health policy officials for at least two important reasons. First, basic knowledge about HIV and how it is transmitted is an essential precursor to reasonable and safe personal health practices, which are necessary for preventing further spread of AIDS. Second - and more to the point of the present research - levels of public knowledge have considerable consequences for the structuring of public policy health debates and the long-term social outcomes for the AIDS epidemic. Public support or opposition will undoubtedly help determine the eventual success or failure of various health policies. And some research has already found that beliefs in the casual transmission of HIV are indeed predictive of increased levels of public support for certain restrictive and even discriminatory policies aimed at infected persons (Sniderman et al. 1987). Given that public health officials currently desire policies that are not heavily restrictive of HIV-infected persons (e.g., the President's Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic [Watkins 1988]) such findings certainly deserve attention.
Correct information - or misinformation - about the ways in which AIDS is contracted is certainly not the only factor underlying public opinion on AIDS-related issues. Long-standing public attitudes, in particular, attitudes toward the clearly defined social groups that have so far been most affected by AIDS, will also presumably play a large role. Some evidence bearing on this issue has also been uncovered: recent work has suggested that antihomosexual or homophobic attitudes may directly affect public policy preferences (Ostrow and Traugott 1988; Sniderman et al. 1987) and perhaps interfere with receptivity to publicized information about AIDS transmission (Stipp and Kerr 1989).
Previous research, then, although limited, has identified at least two variables that appear to be important predictors of public opinion concerning AIDS-related health policies: levels of misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS and levels of antigay sentiment. But if these variables are to be dealt with effectively in the formulation of public health policy, and in the planning and implementation of health information campaigns, a better understanding of their origins is needed. What factors, in other words, contribute to AIDS knowledge and to antigay attitudes?
It seems reasonable to postulate that exposure to mass media messages about AIDS is the principal determinant of levels of AIDS knowledge, since the mass media have, to date, been the principal conduits for public information about the disease. The American public, at least, seems to credit the mass media as being a principal source of AIDS information (Singer, Rogers, and Corcoran 1987). Exposure to media messages is not, however, in and of itself sufficient to produce changes in knowledge - and certainly not changes in attitude or opinion. Decades of research on communication and attitude change have demonstrated that media audiences may, due to a variety of psychological factors, selectively attend to messages, distort or alter their meaning, and thus 'resist' them (see, e.g., McGuire 1981). Recently Stipp and Kerr (1989) have argued that negative attitudes toward homosexuals can interfere with the acceptance of information from the mass media about AIDS.
Against this backdrop of limited prior research and findings, then, we propose the following set of propositions concerning the determinants of public opinion on AIDS-related policies:
1. The misunderstanding that AIDS can be easily contracted through casual contact with HIV-infected persons is a primary contributor to higher levels of support for more restrictive public policies aimed at people with AIDS.
2. Principal factors contributing to misunderstanding about AIDS transmission include (a) limited exposure to mass media messages about AIDS, (b) restricted ability to comprehend information that is received, and (c) attitudinal resistance to mass media messages due to various long-standing values and predispositions.
3. Consequently, variables that affect exposure and comprehension (e.g., socioeconomic background, age, education) or that may engender resistance to AIDS information (namely, elevated feelings of threat or fear, religious and moral beliefs, and attitudes toward sexual behavior) are thus expected to be principal predictors of misunderstanding.
4. Principal predictors of support for restrictive public policies toward people with AIDS are expected to include - in addition to misunderstanding about casual transmission - general attitudes toward individual freedoms and civil rights and political liberalism/conservatism and negative attitudes toward affected groups (e.g., toward homosexuals).
These four propositions are necessarily general, given the somewhat underdeveloped state of research in this area. Although the research literature on public opinion concerning AIDS is steadily expanding, it remains in relatively short supply. Furthermore, studies to date suffer from several important limitations. First, much of the research drawn from nationally representative surveys has been confined to aggregate-level data analysis, most of it descriptive or limited to bivariate cross-tabulations (e.g., Blake and Arkin 1988; Singer, Rogers, and Corcoran 1987). More recent efforts to extend this important work by pursuing multivariate analyses (e.g., Singer 1989) have still relied primarily upon demographic analyses. Meanwhile, more in-depth studies of determinants of knowledge, attitudes, or opinions using multivariate techniques at the individual level of analysis have generally been confined to regional rather than national surveys (e.g., Ostrow and Traugott 1988; Sniderman et al. 1987) or have investigated only a very small subset of variables (e.g., Stipp and Kerr 1989).
Unfortunately, then, we still lack a systematic understanding of even the most basic demographic and attitudinal determinants of public levels of knowledge about AIDS, or the ways in which AIDS knowledge and longer-standing attitudinal and social-structural variables operate together in shaping public opinions on potential AIDS policies. The present research aims at addressing these problems, by taking advantage of two extant survey data sets to pursue systematic, individual-level analyses of these issues. In line with the proportions outlined above, we propose and test a theoretical model of the relationships between a variety of social-structural background variables, knowledge of HIV transmission, attitudes toward homosexuals, and support for restrictive policies aimed at HIV-infected persons.
Method
Data used in the present study were taken from two Los Angeles Times polls, conducted in December 1985 and July 1987, which focused on AIDS. Both surveys involved telephone interviews with national samples of men and women age 18 and older (N =2,308 in 1985; N =2,095 in 1987). Responses were weighted to take account of household size, times at home, and variations in the sample relating to geographic region, age, gender, employment, race, and education. Telephone numbers for the samples were generated by computer randomly within strata to insure that both listed and unlisted households were included. Five standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSAs), which together account for nearly half of the AIDS cases in the United States, were oversampled (Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Miami, and Newark, NJ). Data from the national sample and the oversampled SMSAs were weighted in the analyses according to the probability of selection.
MEASURES
Knowledge of AIDS transmission. The present study focuses on misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS rather than correct information about ways in which AIDS can be contracted. By 1985, when the first of the two Los Angeles Times polls was conducted, well over 90 percent of the general population already understood that AIDS could be transmitted through intimate sexual contact, the sharing of hypodermic needles, and blood transfusions. But the incorrect impression that AIDS can also be transmitted through a variety of far more casual forms of contact with infected persons clearly persisted.
Four questions included in the 1985 survey were used to assess respondents' level of misinformation concerning AIDS transmission: people were asked whether they thought someone could contract AIDS in four different ways: (1) from eating food that had been handled by a person with AIDS (19 percent replied "yes"); (2) from a toilet seat (24 percent "yes"); (3) from trying on clothes in a department store (14 percent "yes"); and (4) from handling money (10 percent "yes"). The four questions were recoded to take the values 0 = no, and 1 = yes or not sure. The exact wording of each question, including item means and standard deviations, are presented in table A1.
Only two of these questions were repeated on the 1987 survey (see table A2). In the 2 years intervening between the surveys, levels of misinformation about the transmissibility of AIDS declined only slightly. A sizable number of respondents still believed that AIDS could be contracted through food (14 percent indicated they thought so) or from a toiled (20 percent said "yes").
Attitudes toward homosexuals. Four questions included in the 1985 survey were used to measure attitudes toward homosexuals. These questions asked respondents (1) whether they thought that homosexuals have too little or too much political power (8 percent said "too little," 39 percent said "about right," and 34 percent said "too much"); (2) whether their views about homosexuality were liberal or conservative (29 percent were "very" or "somewhat" liberal toward homosexuality, 44 percent were "very" or "somewhat" conservative); (3) to what degree they considered sexual relations between adults of the same sex to be wrong (73 percent felt it that it was "always" or "almost always" wrong); and (4) what their personal attitude was toward homosexuality (50 percent were personally opposed to homosexual relations). Responses to all four questions were recoded such that 1 = the response most supportive of homosexuals and 5 = the least supportive response. Again, the exact wording of each question and descriptive statistics are provided in table A1.
Only two of these four questions were repeated in the 1987 survey, and responses to these questions were overall quite similar to the data from the earlier survey. When asked their overall views of homosexuality, 23 percent said they were "very" or "somewhat" liberal, while 42 percent said they were "very" or "somewhat" conservative. On the matter of gay political power, 13 percent of 1987 respondents felt that homosexuals had "too little" power, 32 percent said that gay political clout was "about right", and 34 percent indicated that homosexuals had "too much" political power. Once again the items were recoded to a 1-5 interval (see table A2).
Opinions concerning restriction of HIV-infected people. The 1985 survey also carried three questions that assessed the level of support for policies aimed at restricting people with AIDS as a means of combating the disease. These restrictions included: (1) requiring persons exposed to AIDS to carry identification (ID) cards (48 percent in favor, 43 percent opposed, 9 percent not sure); (2) quarantining AIDS patients (51 percent in favor, 40 percent opposed, 9 percent not sure); and even (3) tattooing people exposed to AIDS (15 percent in favor, 78 percent opposed, 6 percent not sure). The three items were coded with values 1 = opposed, 2 = not sure, and 3 = in favor (wording and descriptive statistics for each item can be found in table A1).
It is surprising that such sizable minority within the general population - here estimated at about 15 percent - would support a measure as extreme as tattooing persons with AIDS. Yet support for such restrictions, as with the aforementioned persistance of AIDS misinformation and antigay sentiment, apparently remained constant or increased slightly from 1985 to 1987. The two restriction measure repeated in 1987 produced a pattern of response similar to that found 2 years earlier. On the matter of quarantining AIDS patients, 52 percent favored such a measure, while 41 percent opposed it and 7 percent were unsure.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="21">Strachey and Woolf knew those roles well, and Freud, it is rather surprising, seems to have known them well too. At any rate each of them became busy combating Victorian ways of enacting, serving those roles.
In introducing Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey writes of the genre: "With us, the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing has been relegated to the journeymen of letters." He then damns the journeymen for their "ill-digested masses of matter, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric [and] their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design." He goes on to summarize and complain about his four biographies in his own terse, ironic, thoroughly selective manner. He might well have come out and talked of journeymen biographers as Victorians straightway, and named names, for, as a dedicated anti-Victorian near the end of World War I, he was writing deliberately to annoy historians as well as biographers of the Victorian establishment, knowing that they would think him an enemy to scholarship, thoroughness, objectivity, and, as if incidentally, the values of Victorianism itself.
The journeymen's arguments against him may now be construed roughly like this. The agnostic polemicist Strachey chose Cardinal Manning as a subject because Manning seemed a representative worldly politician of religion, a clergyman whose wheeling and dealing reflected darkly on both the Romans he espoused and the Anglicans he abandoned. Strachey, a pacifist, chose General (Chinese) Gordon as a representative chauvinist of the Victorian imperialist war machine. The liberal Strachey chose Thomas Arnold as an instance of the pompous piety running the English anti-Semitic, law-and-order, school-tie education system. The Freudian Strachey chose Florence Nightingale because the legend about her as a "saintly, self-sacrificing woman," a "delicate maiden," seemed a representative piece of hypocrisy (about females generally) to be found in Victorian households. In short Bloomsbury Strachey had - for such critics - an inflexible, four-victim agenda for misrepresenting the whole culture. He did not just use his subjects: he abused them.
In defense of Strachey I would say that the book stands up well after seventy-five years. Its poorly documented scholarship (no notes - and only a brief bibliography for each life) has not to my knowledge been found to be seriously defective scholarship, and its agenda is more complicated and even considerate than critics allow. It remains a model for any group biographer, and it is as group biography that it asks to be considered. With his four interestingly diverse upper-class individuals he was able to construct at least the scaffolding of the larger entity behind and around them, and do so while minding his p's and q's as a biographer, not as a sociologist.
Of course there was less sociology in the air in 1918, and he was English; but even then there were scholars, such as Edmund Gosse, alarmed and up in arms about the new scientism. Thus Gosse defined biography - for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1910) - in such a prescriptive way as to exclude "broad views" entirely. He declared "the true conception of biography" to be that of "the faithful portrait of a soul [note the singular] in its adventures through life," with those adventures being "sharply defined by two definite events, birth and death." Strachey was no social scientist, but he came at biography as an art that had a necessary social-historical dimension.
My second revolutionary, Sigmund Freud, was an alien among Victorians, but he needs to be looked at as a vital contributor to Bloomsbury thought - for a time he even had Leonard Woolf as his publisher - about biography. But was he a biographer at all? He kept saying no, and his disclaimer is implicit in his title: Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood. Yet that work as well as his even briefer comments about Michelangelo and Shakespeare, had the broadest of views lurking inside, as this quotation from chapter 6 of the Leonardo reveals:
Biographers are fixated on their heroes in a quite special way. In many cases they have chosen their hero as the subject of their studies because - for reasons of their personal emotional life - they have felt a special affection to the task of idealization, aimed at enrolling the great man among the class of their infantile models - at reviving in him, perhaps, the child's idea of the father. To gratify this wish they obliterate the individual features of their subject's physiognomy; they smooth over the traces of his life's struggles with internal and external resistances, and they tolerate in him no vestige of human weakness or imperfection. They thus present us with what is in fact a cold, strange, ideal figure, instead of a human being to whom we might feel ourselves distantly related. That they should do this is regrettable, for they thereby sacrifice truth to an illusion.
Freud's contribution to the biographical revolution was of course that of the psychoanalyst, as Strachey's was that of the social historian, and Woolf's that of the novelist and satirist. Each set up shop as if in an appropriate building on a university campus (Freud in absentia), and all proceeded to use biography as a serviceable adjunct-genre for their professional activities. But their activities were never just created for their professions. To revise Frost's lines:
They couldn't be called ungentle,
But neither were they departmental.
Now we return to Orlando. In Woolf's diary at the time of her dream of revolution she wrote that she had had the first glimmerings of Orlando after finishing To The Lighthouse, a novel with her own hero-villain father at its center, Leslie Stephen, a biographer who was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had just agreed to do several reviews and was gloomy at the prospect. She was feeling empty. She was wondering if she shouldn't do something "wild and satirical," and she concocted a fuzzy plot with two women wandering about Constantinople (Vita had recently returned from a long tour of the Middle East with her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson). She was also being reflectively critical of her own prose, and of Vita's. More important, she had been visiting, with Vita, the great Sackville country house Knole:
Vita took me over the 4 acres of buildings, which she loves: too little conscious beauty for my taste: smallish rooms looking onto buildings: no views: yet one or two things remain: Vita stalking in her Turkish dress, attended by small boys, down the gallery, wafting them on like some tall sailing ship - a sort of covey of noble English life. ... How do you see that I asked Vita. She said she saw it as something that had gone on for hundreds of years. ... All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate; not dumb and forgotten; but a crowd of people stood behind, not dead at all; not remarkable; fair faced, long limbed, affable; & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. After tea, looking for letters of Dryden's to show me, she tumbled out a (17th century) love letter with a lock of soft gold tinted hair which I held in my hand for a moment. One had a sense of links fished up into the light which are usually submerged.
(January 23, 1927)
So Orlando begins to take shape, wild and satirical but also, in a Woolfian way, historical. Saturated with Knole's history. And scented biographically with Vita, Vita, Vita. Centuries of Vita. Plus of course father Stephen.
Nothing gelled for several months. Virginia Woolf took a holiday on the continent with her husband, Leonard, progressing no further with the wildness except to think "it" might be "fun to write." Coming back home, she found Vita in her life again for having won a literary prize (for a poem). The prize and the poem managed to depress them both, and Woolf wrote snobbishly: "[At the ceremony] I felt there was not one full grown mind among us. In truth it was the thick dull middle class of letters that met; not the aristocracy. Vita cried at night."
Shades of Strachey's 'journeymen' thesis (she had admired Eminent Victorians greatly, almost ten years before). Then suddenly, after a seemingly idle, society-ridden summer, Orlando comes clear: she finds herself "writing at great speed, engulfed." It is indeed to be a biography of Vita, but three hundred years' worth, with Vita as both male and female (she switches sex in the eighteenth century), and activated, enlivened right back to the Elizabethans by her Knole lineage, an individual rendered as a national composite. Don't forget that the DNB is also, in its way, a national composite. So Vita would arrive, after the centuries, at the present: age thirty-six in 1927. The result would be a formally (and biologically) revolutionary group biography - the group being the English upper class - but it would still be about Vita Sackville-West, the living, singular Vita known intimately to Woolf.
Would this be a serious undertaking? As with all satire it could only be partly serious. And as with all human biography - there are other kinds - of the living, it had to be moderate in its mockery. Vita was going to read it (and did, though not until it actually appeared) so Woolf could chide her for her minor frailties, especially as a young romantic with instant changes of mood; but she could not sneer at her, scorn her. Her biographical aim with Vita had to be in the old tradition of commemorative biography.
Therefore her serious satirical aim had to be elsewhere, at her surrounding cast in the various centuries, at the sycophants and hypocritical literary critics and male belittlers of females, at the faithless, the arrogant, the ruthless, the stupid. And at biography itself, as practiced by journeymen.
Orlando is full of potshots at all these, with the aim often straight at father Stephen, though a much better target might have been his journeyman successor on the DNB, Sidney Lee, for whom she expressed contempt in a review written at about the time of Orlando. Clearly it is with these potshots that Orlando emerges as what she announced it to be, originally, in the title - Orlando: A Biography. At least it emerges as a kind, though an odd kind, of biography, and certainly as a book about biography, not just about a somewhat fictionalized Vita. In the potshots is the revolution, and it failed. The work was instantly rejected as biography by critics even as they praised the book, rejected by the simple device of denying that it was biography at all. Most of them called it a novel (and Woolf's own publisher came to call it a novel), and one reader - who is quoted on the current paperback edition - called it a lover letter.
Father Stephen would presumably have denied it as biography also, though his views were more complicated than the satirical strain in Orlando would allow. At heart he was a company man, a professional scrivener in biography's long tradition of establishment service. Victorian England was an extremely large establishment requiring professional, businesslike, and conventional values; and obviously it needed a dictionary of national biography to consolidate and regularize those values, edited by someone who would not oppose them. Father Stephen didn't. His daughter Virginia Woolf, sitting in nearby Bloomsbury and spiritually allied to Strachey and Freud, did.
Several lessons in biography, with attendant questions, hover about this small, triadic revolution, especially when it is viewed from another country decades later. The ambiguity in Strachey's long-term success appears oddly as a lesson against group biography from contemporary departments of history, though that lesson is undercut by many postmodern (I think the word is applicable here) group biographies of and by women - a point to which I'll return. The lesson is reinforced, however, by a curious recent counterrevolutionary move by historians (whom I would label scientific historians) against the greatest group biographer of classical times, Plutarch. In the latest Penguin paperbacks of his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans the lives of the Grecians are separated from the lives of the Romans by being placed in separate volumes, and the comparisons he conducted of each pair following the scheme of parallel biographies are simply omitted.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="22">
Superseding Historic Injustice
Jeremy Waldron
I. INJUSTICE AND HISTORY
The history of white settlers' dealings with the aboriginal peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and North America is largely a history of injustice. People, or whole peoples, were attacked, defrauded, and expropriated; their lands were stolen and their lives were ruined. What are we to do about these injustices? We know what we should think about them: they are to be studied and condemned, remembered and lamented. But morality is a practical matter, and judgments of 'just' and 'unjust' like all moral judgments have implications for action. To say that a future act open to us now would be unjust is to commit ourselves to avoiding it. But what of past injustice? What is the practical importance now of a judgment that injustice occurred in the past?
In the first instance the question is one of metaethics. Moral judgments are prescriptive in their illocutionary force; they purport to guide choices. But since the only choices we can guide are choices in front of us, judgments about the past must look beyond the particular events that are their ostensible subject matter. The best explanation of this relies on universalizability. When I make a moral judgment about an event E, I do so not in terms of the irreducible particularity of E but on the basis of some feature of E that other events might share. In saying, for example, "E was unjust," I am saying, "There is something about E and the circumstances in which it is performed, such that any act of that kind performed in such circumstances would be unjust." I am not so much prescribing the avoidance of E itself (a prescription that makes no sense if E is in the past), but prescribing the avoidance of E-type events. If E involved breaking a promise, or taking advantage of someone's credulity, then our condemnation of it commits us to a similar condemnation of breaches of faith or exploitation in the present. Though E occurred 150 years ago, to condemn it is to express a determination now that in the choices we face, we will avoid actions of this kind.
The point of doing this is not that we learn new and better standards for our lives from the judgments we make about the past. Unless we had those standards already, we would not make those judgments. But our moral understanding of the past is often a way of bringing to imaginative life the full implications of principles to which we are already in theory committed. To be disposed to act morally, it is not enough to be equipped with a list of appropriate principles. One also needs a sense of the type of situation in which these things may suddenly be at stake, the temptations that might lead one to betray them, and the circumstances and entanglements that make otherwise virtuous people start acting viciously. That is what history provides: a lesson about what it is like for people just like us - human, all too human - to face real moral danger.
Beyond that, there is an importance to the historical recollection of injustice that has to do with identity and contingency. It is a well-known characteristic of great injustice that those who suffer it go to their deaths with the conviction that these things must not be forgotten. It is easy to misread that as vain desire for vindication, a futile threat of infamy upon the perpetrators of an atrocity. But perhaps the determination to remember is bound up with the desire to sustain a specific character as a person or community against a background of infinite possibility. That this happened rather than that - that people were massacred (though they need not have been), that lands were taken (though they might have been bought fairly), that promises were broken (though they might have been kept) - the historic record has a fragility that consists, for large part, in the sheer contingency of what happened in the past. What happened might have been otherwise, and, just because of that, it is not something one can reason back to if what actually took place has been forgotten or concealed.
Each person establishes a sense of herself in terms of her ability to identify the subject or agency of her present thinking with that of certain acts and events that took place in the past, and in terms or her ability to hold fast to a distinction between memory so understood and wishes, fantasies, or various other ideas of things that might have happened but did not. But remembrance in this sense is equally important to communities - families, tribes, nations, parties - that is, to human entities that exist often for much longer than individual men and women. To neglect the historical record is to do violence to this identity and thus to the community that it sustains. And since communities help generate a deeper sense of identity for the individuals they comprise, neglecting or expunging the historical record is a way of undermining and insulting individuals as well.
When we are told to let bygones be bygones, we need to bear in mind also that the forgetfulness being urged on us is seldom the blank slate of historical oblivion. Thinking quickly fills up the vacuum with plausible tales of self-satisfaction, on the one side, and self-deprecation on the other. Those who as a matter of fact benefited from their ancestors' injustice will persuade themselves readily enough that their good fortune is due to the virtue of their race, while the descendants of their victims may too easily accept the story that they and their kind were always good for nothing. In the face of all this, only the deliberate enterprise of recollection (the enterprise we call 'history'), coupled with the most determined sense that there is a difference between what happened and what we would like to think happened, can sustain the moral and cultural reality of self and community.
The topic of this article is reparation. But before I embark on my main discussion, I want to mention the role that payment of money (or the return of lands or artifacts) may play in the embodiment of communal remembrance. Quite apart from any attempt genuinely to compensate victims or offset their losses, reparations may symbolize a society's undertaking not to forget or deny that a particular injustice took place, and to respect and help sustain a dignified sense of identity-in-memory for the people affected. A prominent recent example of this is the payment of token sums of compensation by the American government to the survivors of Japanese-American families uprooted, interned, and concentrated in 1942. The point of these payments was not to make up for the loss of home, business, opportunity, and standing in the community which these people suffered at the hands of their fellow citizens, nor was it to make up for the discomfort and degradation of their internment. If that were the aim, much more would be necessary. The point was to mark - with something that counts in the United States - a clear public recognition that this injustice did happen, that it was the American people and their government that inflicted it, and that these people were among its victims. The payments give an earnest of good faith and sincerity to that acknowledgment. Like the gift I buy for someone I have stood up, the payment is a method of putting oneself out, or going out of one's way, to apologize. It is no objection to this that the payments are purely symbolic. Since identity is bound up with symbolism, a symbolic gesture may be as important to people as any material compensation.
II. THE COUNTERFACTUAL APPROACH TO REPARATION
I turn now to the view that a judgment about past injustice generates a demand for full and not merely symbolic reparation - a demand not just for remembrance but for substantial transfers of land, wealth, and resources in an effort actually to rectify past wrongs. I want to examine the difficulties that these demands give rise to, particularly when they conflict with other claims that may be made in the name of justice on the land, wealth, and resources in question.
It may seem as though the demand is hopeless from the start. What is it to correct an injustice? How can we reverse the past? If we are talking about injustice that took place several generations ago, surely there is nothing we can do now to heal the lives of the actual victims, to make them less miserable or to reduce their suffering. The only experiences we can affect are those of people living now and those who will live in the future.
But though these are obvious truths, we may miss something if we repeat them too often. To stand on the premise that the past cannot be changed is to ignore the fact that people and communities live whole lives, not just series of momentary events, and that an injustice may blight, not just hurt, such a life. Individuals make plans and they see themselves as living partly for the sake of their posterity; they build not only for themselves but for future generations. Whole communities may subsist for periods much longer than individual lifetimes. How they fare at a given stage and what they can offer in the way of culture, aspiration, and morale may depend very much on the present effect of events that took place several generations ealierearlier. Thus, part of the moral significance of a past event has to do with the difference it makes to the present.
But then there is a sense in which we can affect the moral significance of past action. Even if we cannot alter the action itself we may be able to interfere with the normal course of its consequences. The present surely looks different now from the way the present would look if a given injustice of the past had not occurred. Why not therefore change the present so that it looks more like the present that would have obtained in the absence of the injustice? Why not make it now as though the injustice had not happened, for all that its occurrence in the past is immutable and undeniable?
This is the approach taken by Robert Nozick in his account of the role played by a principle of rectification in a theory of historic entitlement:
This principle uses historical information about previous situations and injustices done in them (as defined by the first two principles of justice [namely, justice in acquisition and justice in transfer] and rights against interference), and information about the actual course of events that flowed from these injustices, until the present, and it yields a description (or descriptions) of holdings in the society. The principle of rectification presumably will make use of its best estimate of subjunctive information about what would have occurred (or a probability distribution over what might have occurred, using the expected value) if the injustice had not taken place. If the actual description of holdings turns out to be one of the descriptions yielded by the principle, then one of the descriptions yielded must be realized.
The trouble with this approach is the difficulty we have in saying what would have happened if some event (which did occur) had not taken place. To a certain extent we can appeal to causal laws or, more crudely, the normal course of events. We take a description of the actual world, with its history and natural laws intact, up until the problematic event of injustice (which we shall call event 'E'). In the actual course of events, what followed E (events F, G, and H) is simply what results from applying natural laws to E as an initial condition. For example, if E was your seizure of the only water hole in the desert just as I was about to slake my thirst, then F - the event that follows E - would be what happens normally when one person is deprived of water and another is not: you live and I die.
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The Culture of Cruelty
BY RUTH CONNIFF
Not long ago I was on a morning radio show talking about welfare, when an irate caller from Milwaukee got on the line and introduced himself as "that most hated and reviled creature, the American tax-payer." He went on to vent his spleen, complaining about freeloading welfare mothers living high on the hog while he goes to work each day. "A whiff of starvation is what they need," he said.
I was chilled by the hatred in his voice, thinking about the mothers I know on welfare, imagining what it would be like for them to hear this.
One young woman I've met, Karetha Mims, recently moved to Wisconsin, fleeing the projects in Chicago after her little boy saw a seven-year-old playmate shot in the head. Mims is doing her best to make a better life for her son, a shy third-grader named Jermain. She volunteers at his elementary school, and worries about how he will fit in. The Mimses have received a cold welcome in Wisconsin, where the governor warns citizens that welfare families spilling across the border from Illinois will erode the tax base and ruin the "quality of life."
Of course, even in Wisconsin, life on welfare is no free ride. The average family of three receives about $500 a month in Aid to Families with Dependent Children - barely enough to pay the rent. Such figures are widely known. So is the fact that each state spends a small amount - about 3.4 per cent of our taxes, or a national total of $22.9 billion annually - on welfare. In contrast, we have now spent $87 billion - about $1,000 per taxpaying family - to bail out bank presidents at failed savings-and-loans.
But neither the enraged taxpayer nor my host on the radio program wanted to hear these dry facts. "What ever happened to the work ethic in this country?" the host demanded. "What about the immigrants who came over and worked their way up?"
I had the feeling I was losing my grasp on the conversation. I could see my host getting impatient, and the more I said the more I failed to answer her central question: What's wrong with those people on welfare?
The people on welfare whom I know have nothing wrong with them. They live in bad neighborhoods; they can't find safe, affordable child care; often, they are caught in an endless cycle of unemployment and low-wage work - quitting their jobs when a child gets sick, losing medical insurance when they go back to their minimum-wage jobs. They don't have enough money to cover such emergencies as dental work or car repairs. In short, they are poor. They are struggling hard just to make it, in the face of extreme hardship and in an increasingly hostile environment.
Meanwhile, rhetoric about lazy welfare bums is taking the country by storm. Policy experts keep coming up with new theories on the 'culture of poverty' and its nameless perpetrators, members of a socially and morally deformed 'underclass.' "Street hustlers, welfare families, drug addicts, and former mental patients," political scientist Lawrence Mead calls them.
"It's simply stupid to pretend the underclass is not mainly black," adds Mickey Kaus in his much-acclaimed new book The End of Equality. Kaus and fellow pundit Christopher Jencks, who wrote his own book this year - Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass - are two of the most recent riders on the underclass bandwagon. But the essence of their work is uncomfortably familiar. Both writers start by asking the question: What's wrong with the underclass?, and both proceed to talk about the depravity of poor black people, devoting large though inconclusive sections to such ideas as genetic inferiority and "Heredity, Inequality, and Crime."
Kaus paints a lurid picture of young black men who sneer at the idea of working for the minimum wage, which he says they deride as "chump change." (It's not clear where Kaus gets this information, since he doesn't cite any interviews with actual poor blacks.)
Why don't poor black people just get jobs and join the mainstream of society? Kaus asks rhetorically. While many African-Americans have moved up to the middle class, he writes, the important question is "what enabled some of them, a lower-class remnant, to stay behind in the ghetto? And what then allowed them to survive in the absence of legitimate sources of income?"
The answer, of course, is welfare. Kaus compares black people's attachment to poverty with a junkie's addiction to a drug. Welfare is the "enabling" force that indulges ghetto residents' propensity for living in squalor. When they stopped working hard and learned they could collect welfare while living in the ghetto, Kaus theorizes, poor black people's values eroded and they became a blight on society.
Kaus's solution to the "underclass problem," then, relies largely on such motivational initiatives as instilling a work ethic in lazy black youth through hard labor and "military-style discipline." Likewise, he proposes cutting benefits to mothers who have more than one child, creating an example for their neighbors, who, he says, would "think twice" before becoming pregnant.
To his credit, J. Anthony Lukas, the writer who reviewed The End of Equality for The New York Times, noted near the end of his essay that Kaus had forgotten to talk to anyone on welfare in the course of writing his book. But Lukas detected no prejudice in Kaus's prescriptions for an overhaul of the underclass, and he found a touching note of "compassion" in Kaus's assurance that under his plan, "no one would starve."
What I want to know is how Kaus came to be considered even remotely qualified to analyze the psychology and motivations of poor black mothers and their sons. Kaus's whole program rests on a faith in his own ability to do exactly that: to surmise what ghetto residents are thinking and why they behave the way they do.
Kaus and Jencks show little interest in learning about the real lives or day-to-day difficulties of people who are poor. Rather, in the grand tradition of underclass theory, they invent hypothetical characters with demeaning little names.
"Phyllis may not be very smart," writes Jencks, in a revised version of underclass theorist Charles Murray's famous 'Harold and Phyllis' scenario. "But if she chooses AFDC over Harold, surely that is because she expects the choice to improve the quality of her family life. ..." Furthermore, says Jencks, "If Phyllis does not work, many - including Sharon - will feel that Phyllis should be substantially worse off, so that there will be no ambiguity about Sharon's virtue being rewarded."
On the strength of the projected feelings of the fictitious Sharon, Jencks goes on to recommend a welfare system in which single mothers don't get too much money.
Incredibly, this sort of work then gets translated into concrete public policy.
Under the Family Support Act, states are now running a number of experiments designed to tinker with the motivations and attitudes of poor people - despite data that demonstrate such tinkering will have no positive effect. There is no evidence, for example, to back up one of the popular notions Kaus subscribes to - that "most" poor women would stop having babies if benefits were cut. Women who live in states with higher benefits do not have more babies. They do not have fewer babies in Alabama or Mississippi (or Bangladesh, for that matter), where benefits are shockingly low. Yet Wisconsin, California, and New Jersey are now cutting AFDC payments to women who have more than one child. Likewise, theories about the underclass have inspired initiatives to teach poor people job skills and "self-esteem" - despite the fact that in many of the areas where the training is done, no jobs are available.
The results of these policies are often disastrous for the poor. As more and more states treat poverty as an attitude problem, legislatures justify slashing the safety net and cutting back social programs that help poor people survive. The situation is particularly dire for the 'extra' children of women on welfare, who are punished just for being born.
But in Kaus's estimation, the suffering of children is nothing next to the social benefits he thinks will accrue from causing pain to their mothers. "If we want to end the underclass, remember, the issue is not so much whether working or getting two years of cash will best help Betsy Smith, teenage high-school dropout, acquire the skills to get a good private sector job after she's become a single mother. It is whether the prospect of having to work will deter Betsy Smith from having an out-of-wedlock child in the first place. ... The way to make the true costs of bearing a child out of wedlock clear is to let them be felt when they are incurred - namely, at the child's birth."
The callousness and immorality of such thinking, I believe, are part of a pathology that is spreading throughout our society. We might call it a "culture of cruelty.
Such theorists as Kaus and Jencks build the rational foundation beneath our national contempt for the poor. They lend legitimacy to the racist and misogynist stereotypes so popular with conservative politicians and disgruntled taxpayers who feel an economic crunch and are looking for someone to blame. Understanding the roots of the culture of cruelty, and trying to determine how, through the adoption of decent social values, we might overcome it, would be far more useful than any number of volumes of speculation by upper-class white experts on the attitudes and pathologies of the "underclass."
Underclass theory as promoted by Kaus and Jencks has four main characteristics:
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is extremely punitive, appealing to a desire to put poor black people, especially women, in their place.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is based on prejudice rather than fact, full of stereotypical characters and flippant, unsupported assertions about their motivations and psychology.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>It is inconsistent in its treatment of rich and poor. While poor people need sternness and "military-style discipline," to use Kaus's words, the rich are coddled and protected. This third characteristic is particularly important, since treating the "underclass" as alien and inhuman permits the prescription of draconian belt-tightening that one would never impose on one's own family or friends.
<*_>paragraph-sign<*/>Finally, there is the persistent, faulty logic involved in claims that we can "end the cycle of poverty" by refusing aid to an entire generation of children. These children are thus punished for their mothers' sins in producing them, and, if such programs persist, they will soon have no hope of getting out from under the weight of belonging to a despised lower caste.
In his book Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol describes visiting a wealthy public school, where he talks to some students who argue that giving equal funding to the schools in poorer districts wouldn't make a difference. Poor children "still would lack the motivation," they say, and "would probably fail in any case because of other problems." Racial integration would cause too many problems in their own school, they say. "How could it be of benefit to us?"
"There is a degree of unreality about the whole exchange," Kozol writes. "The children are lucid and their language is well chosen and their arguments well made, but there is a sense that they are dealing with an issue that does not feel very vivid, and that nothing that we say about it to each other really matters since it's 'just a theoretical discussion.' To a certain degree, the skillfulness and cleverness that they display seem to derive precisely from this sense of unreality. Questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity or conscience. A few of the students do break through the note of unreality, but, when they do, they cease to be so agile in their use of words and speak more awkwardly. Ethical challenges seem to threaten their effectiveness. There is the sense that they were skating over ice and that the issues we addressed were safely frozen underneath.
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Edinburgh and the Idea of a Festival
Robert L. King
THE PUBLICITY GENERATED BY Tango at the End of Winter at the Edinburgh Festival last summer centered around the director, Yukio Ninagawa, and the lead actor, Alan Rickman. Ninagawa's reputation in the West for visual and visceral appeals was earned first at Edinburgh; Tango was his first English language production. Rickman interrupted a movie career on the rise for a chance to work under Ninagawa in a play set in a run-down cinema and featuring a film actor of his own age, one locked in a world of illusions, his chosen retreat from a Japanese society that banishes male actors from the stage before they reach their forties. Neither man speaks the other's language; Ninagawa reached the English company through an interpreter and screened actors mostly for their facial expressiveness. In the understandable excitement over this collaboration, the playwright, Kunio Shimizu, and the adapter of his text, Peter Barnes (The Ruling Class and Red Noses) were relatively unnoticed. Their text derives from the now dominant forces in the creative tradition of modern drama, notably a self-consciousness that monitors and corrects any tendencies that would seduce an audience into accepting dramatic illusion as a value in itself. In Tango, Shimizu borrows directly from the action of Pirandello's Henry IV, a play that resolutely breaks down boundaries between theatrical and ordinary reality. Like Henry, Sei lives an imaginary life: he calls his wife his sister, hears a telephone that does not ring, sees a peacock that "nobody else sees" and "plays to an imaginary audience." Like Henry's visitors, Sei's wife, Gin, tries to shock him out of his escapist state; her forged letter to Mizuo, an actress who may have been his lover, brings her to the theatre where she enters as a kind of apparition in white.
Her entrance displays Shimizu's inventive use of the dramatic tradition. Shigeo, Sei's brother and projectionist if the theatre had any films, is explaining his fondness for heroines in Hollywood Westerns. He recites 'the fixed unchanging pattern' and pushes up an imaginary Stetson with one finger as the 'baddies' would. He rounds off his summary of the pattern with "as if in a dream there in the entrance stands a woman in white." The stage direction repeats this line: Mizuo appears "upstage centre ... a woman dressed in white." She appears on cue and as if on cue but surprises Shigeo, the story-teller; through the actress/performer, Mizuo appears as 'herself' and as the heroine in Sigeo'sShigeo's imagined scene. In this moment, Shimizu complicates the question of theatrical illusion behind the simplicity of the Western stereotype and the clarity of the pure white costume. Such complicated simplicity - its significance obscured beneath striking details of performance - lies at the heart of the theatricality which gives Tango at the End of Winter its artistic life.
Turning lights on the audience has long since lost any element of surprise, but the opening of Tango works a disorienting variation on the device. The powerful light from a projectionist's booth is aimed out at the audience from deep and high on the stage; images of student riots appear as if on a screen before us, and the violent scene is brought to an end when Sei mounts toward the projector and relieves our pained squinting with his covering hand. When lights come up on the stage, we are facing the steep rows of the seats of the cinema; Sei and cardboard cut-outs occupy them. Gin comes forward to address the audience directly, explaining that Sei had left the stage three years before to "shut himself away" in this place. These opening minutes contain other major components of Tango's art. Besides the lighting and the striking dramatic images that can occupy the entire stage, the author plays variations on techniques of audience involvement. He 'mirrors' the audience in the theatre with a cardboard one on stage; it is fully visible in a sharply raked but naturalistic cinema auditorium. Shimizu's subtle text presents a Sei who has escaped from live theatre to watch the fixed art of film, but images of political turmoil and involvement introduce him as spectator in a stage without films or living customers.
In another paradox, Sei re-enacts his final curtain speech several times, but near the play's end he confuses it with "lines from a bad play I did twenty years ago." Shigeo works up a Chaplin scene for his aunt (who would raze the cinema for a supermarket) only to undercut it and his own apparent emotional commitment: "Actually, I don't really like Chaplin. Too sentimental for me." Similarly, Sei dismisses as "drivel" his earlier advice to Mizuo to "have an all-consuming love affair" if she "wanted to be a good actress." "Drivel" ironically comments on Sei himself, however, for he acted out a part even in his desire for Mizuo. Despite its great potential for personal fulfillment, acting has never truly liberated Sei. It allows him a measure of third-person objectivity when he speaks of his past ("He was an actor ... He always made sure to choose the right setting"), but it traps him in the artistic moment, fusing a present that demands he be young with a living past that imposes former roles on him. Among his persistent memories is an association of tango music with one of his more principled stage speeches. The stylized movements and familiar rhythms of the dance have a formal kinship with Sei's self-awareness as an actor: practiced but assertive, sensual but directed. Late in the play, Sei dances the tango with Mizuo and, having returned her to her husband, sinks into his wife's arms, but in the next scene "ten minutes later," he kills Mizuo when she questions his imaginative power, his actor's improvisational skill, to transform a seat cushion into a peacock representing his youth. As he strangles her, she is Desdemona; he calls her lifeless body Mizuo. At this crucial point, Tango once again recalls Pirandello:
REN: You maniac! You've killed her!
SEI: No ... no ... keep calm ... It was only a play.
To Western audiences accustomed to the spare theatricality of much modern theatre, Tango has been far more than a play. Its fully furnished stage, its music and movement, and its range of lighting strategies engage our senses and perhaps lull our intellects. As he continues, Sei's long speech is filled with snatches of earlier ones; finally he succumbs to the strains of a tango that he dances with an imaginary partner. The stairs of the cinema set provide a full view of Alan Rickman rapt in his performance; he is stabbed by the avenging husband and, while still dancing, collapses. The boundaries of time and of the set, our focal point for theatrical reality, are destroyed. An upper portion of the rear wall breaks away to reveal cherry blossoms which mix with paper snow and blow over the stage. Richly colored peacock patterns cover the side walls of the set; the music stops at Sei's death, and the lights go down. The audience, in the natural course of theatrical things, sees a culmination in the partial loss of set, in the end of music and light, in the transforming peacock colors and in the death of Sei. We applaud. But Shimizu and Ninagawa are not through with us. The lights come up on Gin; she is wearing a coat, ready to move on. She tells us that the cinema will be "pulled down in May as planned" and asks us to agree that it is a "beautiful and sad" place. The stage audience re-enters in slow, dance-like movements; they applaud as at the end of a film. We applaud - this time for 'real.' The double ending of the play is not designed to trick the audience into sudden awareness of its naivete; rather, Tango assumes our intelligence and good will. We truly participate in the experience with all those responsible for the production's success, director, cast, playwright and fellow members of the audience.
George Tabori's Wiseman & Copperface, sub-titled A Jewish Western, seemed the ideal play for an international festival; it won a best play award in Vienna where its author is an artistic director. Tabori's career gives him overwhelming moral and aesthetic authority for writing on political subjects. He lost his father and other family members at Auschwitz, was blacklisted here in the McCarthy years, directed a revisionist Merchant of Venice at Stockbridge and has confronted the Holocaust and MyLai massacre in his plays. A person of such experience - and my list is severely condensed - could well claim to be his own arbiter of taste in approaching the great questions of our time. And, since a reasonable person can read twentieth-century history as farce, Tabori can hardly be faulted for combining farcical elements with weighty subjects in a fiction. In his latest effort, Weisman and his daughter, Ruth, have their car stolen as they drive from New York to Los Angeles with an urn holding the ashes of Weisman's wife. They are mugged by The Hunter, who wears mirror sunglasses, drinks Budweiser from a can and smokes Marlboros. This sort of push-button symbolism runs through the play - Woodstock, McCarthy, John Wayne - until everything is on the same indiscriminate level. Perhaps on the continent, Tabori's audience was flattered by such references, but Wounded Knee, never mind the Holocaust itself, is reduced by the other stark cultural signs to the level of a catalogue listing. Ruth is retarded; her father fails in an attempt to drown her, but the flawed ritual results in a kind of rebirth. She plays scorekeeper in a verbal tennis match between her father and Copperface, their Indian savior. In an unconsciously ironic critique of his entire method, Tabori has the two men lob words like "Dachau" at each other in a competition over which race has suffered more. Surely our politics have debased language, but wrenching painful words out of historical contexts to use them as markers in a game contributes to the lowering without enlightening us. At the end, Ruth and the Indian have exchanged cultural identities, she with an Indian name and he, a Jewish one. They walk erect, to a new life; they turn away from her dead father, his body covered with an Indian blanket and her mother's ashes encircled with Indian rocks. This clumsy allegory did not succeed with the audience the night I saw it. If someone does stage it here, conservative columnists will be delighted to have a broad target for attacks on their version of the politically correct.
To create a trilogy around the Guy Burgess spy story, The Performance Theatre Company sandwiched a new play, A Secret Country by Anthony Peters, between two established ones, Julian Mitchell's Another Country and Alan Bennett's brief An Englishman Abroad. About twenty people attended the world premiere of the Peters play in Edinburgh at a venue that had once been a church. About the only remaining religious property, the pulpit, was used resourcefully for direct address to the audience. A Grand Inquisitor begins and ends the play with statements that the events are real but that the stage places with their abstracted props have not been the places that Burgess, Maclean and Philby actually inhabited. The play is, in other words, framed by notices of its deliberate artificiality and includes many others, among them the curtain line before the interval ("What a way to end an act"), references like "Russian stereotype," and paper 'snow' thrown from the pulpit. These deliberate dramatic procedures ideally complement the proudly duplicitous lives of its homosexual heroes. As acted by Paul Aves, the Burgess character revels in a theatricality which makes sexual and political identities one. At one point Burgess tells his Russian contact, Aleksei, that he himself can never be sure which mask he is wearing. This willed self-deception, made entirely credible by Aves, makes the performance intriguing where an emphasis on the intrigue of the factual espionage would have resulted in a predictable melodrama.
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Do We Have a Judeo-Christian Heritage?
Vern L. Bullough
Recently Irving Kristol, a prominent Jewish author and editor of Commentary, editorialized that the United States was a Christian nation and that Jews should recognize this and work within that framework. Similarly, Richard John Neuhaus, a Protestant theological convert to Catholicism, has claimed that atheists cannot make good citizens in a Christian country like the United States. Both statements represent a new onslaught on secular humanism and mark a shift in attacks from right-wing fringe fundamentalists. Key to all the attacks is the belief that our "common" Judeo-Christian tradition is threatened by modern secularism.
Both the fringe groups and the neo-fundamentalists share a kind of deconstructionist belief that history is what we say it is, and they ignore everything that seems to be contrary to their own beliefs. They create a history that they want to believe in order to establish a new faith as a basis to attack anyone with whom they disagree. All ills of the modern world are blamed on secularism, and a past that never existed is looked back to for answers. In the true sense of the word these people are not really conservatives, or neo-conservatives as they prefer to call themselves, but radicals intent on establishing a new mythology under the banner of conservatism.
Though there is undoubtedly a Western tradition loosely called the Judeo-Christian tradition during the twentieth century, it has never been restricted to such. Many of our assumptions are based upon those of the pagan Greeks and Romans. In turn their beliefs were influenced by astrological, mathematical, and other discoveries of the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and others. We all are a product of our past, and in some areas this past was Christianized in the Middle Ages, but mostly it was not. We have twelve months of the year because the Romans did, and the months still bear Roman names. We have seven days of the week not because of the Bible, but because the ancients believed there were seven heavenly spheres circling the earth: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Part of the names of our days still keep this belief alive, while others are named after German gods in which we no longer believe.
With only a thin veneer of Christianity, we still manage to celebrate and observe ancient festivals such as the Winter Solstice, which we call Christmas, or the coming of spring, which we call Easter. About the only thing Christian about Christmas is the name, since all other aspects, from Christmas trees to cr<*_>e-grave<*/>ches, are pre-Christian customs. Easter, the spring celebration, is named after a German goddess, and traditions ranging from the basket of eggs to the bunny have nothing at all to do with Christianity.
We believe a circle has 360 degrees because the ancient residents of Mesopotamia said so, although we have abandoned 12 as a base number and replaced it by 10. We got 0 and our decimal system from the Muslims, who took it from India. Much of our Hebrew scriptures are based on beliefs common in the Babylonia, while the Christian scriptures themselves picked up not only from Judaism but from Zoroastrianism, from the religion of Isis and Osiris, and from the pagan Greek philosophical tradition. Stoicism and neo-Platonism both exerted tremendous influence upon the Church fathers, as did other aspects of Greek and Roman belief patterns. Augustine, probably the most influential of the early Christian thinkers, was a Manichean before he converted to Christianity, bringing over with him many of the ideas that came from that offshoot of the Persian Zoroastrianism, as well as the Stoic and neo-Platonic views he had learned in school. Later, in the Middle Ages, as the Islamic version of Aristotle reached Christian Western Europe, Aristotle became more a part of the Christian tradition. In popular texts his scholastic movement is sometimes called the Aristotelianization of Christianity.
Monasticism, which was so much a part of the Western Christian tradition, seemed to have been influenced by Buddhism, and a series of Chinese discoveries from paper-making to silk manufacturing to gun powder eventually made their way west, changing the nature of Western culture. The list could go on, but the point to emphasize is that our Western tradition is a mixture of what has gone before with a thin veneer of Christianity overlaid on it. Just how thin the veneer is, is emphasized by the diversity of the 'Christian' religions. From the very beginning there were hundreds of interpretations, and the Emperor Constantine, after formally incorporating Christianity into the Roman pantheon of religions, found he had to call a council to decide what it was. Though officially the Council of Nicaea established a version of trinitarian Christianity, most Christians never formally adopted it, and Constantine himself later refused to accept it. Hundreds of 'heresies' developed, and many of them still survive today in various parts of the world. In the West, Catholicism for a time was dominant, but only for a brief period, as it was soon challenged by a number of different interpretations. Two of these interpretations, Calvinism and Angelicanism, were particularly influential in establishing colonies in the United States, but dissenters such as the Society of Friends and the Baptists did the same, as did traditional Catholics.
When our Founding Fathers were hunting for a basis for their new country, they did not turn to the Christian church for examples but to ancient Rome and Greece. They named one of their legislative bodies after the Roman senate, and were influenced by the Greek leagues to come up with a second house. Even our law is based upon Roman law, although it was more modified than continental law by the influence of English common law. Undoubtedly our Founding Fathers were religious, but a good many of them were influenced by the deism of the day, and they certainly were determined to avoid the rampant sectarianism of the time. Many of our early leaders were Unitarians who denied the divinity of Jesus. Agnostics and freethinkers from Thomas Paine to Robert Ingersoll also played significant roles in the development of the United States.
In recent years we have had a growing variety of non-Western traditions, from Sikhism to Hinduism to Islam to Buddhism, gain and establish strongholds in the United States. We have spawned or tolerated new religions such as Bahaism and a variety of Hare Krishna not usually found in India. We even have followers of L. Ron Hubbard. Many traditional churches deny that the Mormons are Christians, although in recent years the Mormons have tended to emphasize a more Christian aspect of their tradition. Judaism has also made a strong impact in the United States if only because it stood outside the Christian belief system.
Even our Christianity as such is radically different from the Christianity of the past. Capitalism would have been condemned by the medieval Church, and it was by modern popes. Usury and interest-taking was regarded as a sin until the fourteenth century. The early Church was pacifistic, and early Christians refused military service, a far cry from the militant Christianity of the Crusades or of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for that matter. In spite of the example of the two Marys in Christian stories, women were given short shrift by Christian churches, and their attempts to speak out and better their position have traditionally been opposed. Christianity was interpreted to condone slavery. In fact many religious conservative radical movements such as the Southern Baptists are fueled by Bible-believing literalist Christians determined to keep women and minorities in their place. Many of them also oppose all of the theories behind modern science.
This is not to deny that Christianity (as have other religions) often expressed high ideals and helped motivate large numbers of people to aspire to look outside themselves and to help others, but so have all kinds of non-believing traditions, going back at least to Stoicism. Undoubtedly, also, people who called themselves Christians have been a majority in the United States for much of its history, but the various sects and denominations could not agree among themselves (nor should they) about what that meant, and often those in disagreement have been extremely intolerant of others who believed differently.
In short, we have an eclectic tradition in the United States, one that generally has been tolerant and nondogmatic. Christians of various stripes are part of this, as are humanists and agnostics, but this does not make the United States a Christian nation or even a Judeo-Christian one. We are a mixed accumulation of our past, and it is the Christian dogmatists, not the secularists, who are the major threat to our pluralistic democratic tradition.
The Vatican's Alliance with Reagan
Tom Flynn
We note with concern recent media allegations that former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II formed a secret alliance to help topple communist rule in Poland. If true, the stories help to explain certain elements of the Solidarity saga that always seemed incredibly fortuitous. But they also mark a papal return to geopolitics on a scale unmatched in more than a century. And they raise serious questions about church-state separation: How can a secular democracy order its relations with an entity that is both a sovereign foreign power and a religious community? And what is implied when the Vatican makes United States compliance with its moral program a quid pro quo to secure the church's political cooperation?
Writing in Time, Carl Bernstein reported that Reagan and the pope forged a secret alliance to preserve Solidarity, whose leaders had gone underground in Poland after General Wolciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on December 13, 1981. They acted swiftly: United States' sanctions were imposed upon Poland and the then U.S.S.R. Top-security intelligence data was funnelled to the pope on the authority of Reagan and then-CIA Director William Casey. If the United States enjoyed superior military intelligence, the Vatican had more timely, better-quality intelligence regarding social and political matters as the crisis unfolded. On at least one occasion in 1984, Reagan relaxed certain sanctions against Poland when Archbishop (now Cardinal) Pio Laghi flew to the western White House to warn that the pope felt the sanctions had grown counterproductive. At other times, Philadelphia's John Cardinal Krol is said to have served as a papal intermediary to Reagan.
Within Poland, American spies and Catholic priests worked hand in hand to distribute millions of dollars worth of fax machines, video recorders, two-way radios, mimeographs, cash, and more - all the accoutrements of a propaganda 'war from below' against a repressive communist regime. We read that Casey himself coordinated efforts to build the remnants of the Socialist International within Poland into a force like the Christian Democratic parties in many Western European countries.
All of this reflected a vision that Reagan and the pope shared: a vision that the post-World War II division of Europe, ceding Eastern Europe to the Soviets, could be overturned. In the fifteenth century, the Borgia pope Alexander VI had imposed a similar partition, dividing the known world between Spain and Portugal. With little less audacity a twentieth-century pope joined forces with the president of United States to dissolve the partition of Yalta. "This," said Reagan national security adviser Richard Allen without a trace of irony, "was one of the greatest secret alliances of all time."
But the alliance was not without its cost to the United States. Secularists cannot help but be concerned at the spectacle of an American spymaster laying clandestine foundations for a "Christian Democratic" anything in a foreign land. Equally dubious, in our view, was the Administration decision to grant the Vatican full diplomatic recognition as a sovereign state. Perhaps most disturbing was the quid pro quo on birth control policy that Rome is said to have exacted from Washington as the price of alliance. William Wilson, Reagan's first ambassador to the Vatican, told Time that the Vatican demanded an outright ban on the use of American funds for the promotion of birth control or abortion, whether by foreign countries or international health organizations.
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ALFRED KAZIN
Howards End Revisited
Howards End appeared in 1910, a date that explains an idealism important to our understanding of the book. It was E.M. Forster's fourth novel. He had written in rapid succession Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), and A Room with a View (1908). Howards End was the last novel he was to publish for fourteen years. The next, A Passage to India (1924), was certainly worth waiting for, but it is not as serene and hopeful as Howards End. The 'Great War,' the most influential event of the twentieth century and the onset of all our political woe, had intervened between Forster's two major novels and certainly darkened the second. The reality of British imperialism, bringing the threat of racial politics to Forster's belief in personal relationships as the supreme good, was something unsuspected in Howards End.
In 1910 Forster was thirty-one. In the next sixty years he was to publish only one novel more. Maurice, a novel about homosexual love that had been circulating privately for years, was published soon after Forster's death in 1970. All these dates and gaps in Forster's record as a novelist have their significance. He was a wonderfully supple and intelligent writer for whom the outside world was a hindrance and even a threat to his identification of himself and his art with 'relationships.' Everyone knows that he wrote in Two Cheers for Democracy, "I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." But what - as happened so often in World War Two - if my friend betrayed me for an ideology he considered his only 'country'?
So the date of Howards End has a certain poignancy now. The most famous idea in it is "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die." No one with the slightest sense of twentieth-century history can read that in the 1990s without thinking (not for the first time) how far we have traveled, in liberal, generous, above all religious instinct, from 1910. Howards End is a shapely and beautiful novel, extremely well thought out. One has to read it now as a fable about England at the highest point of its hopes in 1910, while at its center rises up before us, as always, England's eternal Chinese wall of class distinctions, class war, class hatred - a world in which people stink in each other's nostrils because of their social origins or pretensions: in which a poor young man, who has lost his job and is in the depths of despair because of his home life, encounters hostility because he walks down Regent Street without a hat. But Howards End resolves this war between the English, tries to lift away this winding-sheet of snobberies and taboos, in the only way it has ever been resolved - in a beautiful theory of love between persons. This extends just as far as love ever extends. Meanwhile social rage keeps howling outside the bedroom.
Howards End is a novel of ideas, not brute facts; in many respects it is an old kind of novel, playful in the eighteenth-century sense, full of tenderness toward favorite characters in the Dickens style, inventive in every structural touch but not a modernist work. A modernist work - Ulysses will always be the grand, cold monument - is one that supplants and subsumes the subject entirely in favor of the author as performer and total original. This is hardly the case in Howards End. Forster cares; he cares so much about the state of England and the possibility of deliverance that what occupies him most in working out the book is a dream of a strife-torn modern England returning to the myth of its ancient beginnings as a rural, self-dependent society. It is typical of an undefeatable tenderness (almost softness) in Forster's makeup that the book ends in a vision of perfect peace right at the old house in Hertfordshire, Howards End, that is the great symbol throughout the book of stability in ancestral, unconscious wisdom. Even in 1910 this was absurd - hardly an answer to the class war. But fairy tales thrive on being of another world.
The class war is hardly an English prerogative, but the English have been so good at picturing it that it is no wonder they cannot do without it. Where but in England would that quirky refugee Karl Marx have found so perfect a ground, a text, for his belief in the long-established war between the classes? As I write, I notice in a review by Sir Frank Kermode of Sir V.S. Pritchett's Collected Stories, that Pritchett once had a conversation with H.G. Wells "in which they considered the question of whether lower-class characters could ever be treated in other than comic terms." It is noteworthy that Kermode finds it entirely natural to write of "lower-class characters" and "suburban little people." These are phrases that seem comic to an American - not because America is less divided than England but because, torn apart as it is by race, fear, and hatred, its gods are equality and social mobility.
How different the case in England. Dickens, though he lent pathos and occasionally even dignity (if not heroism) to his lower-class characters, certainly delighted in 'treating' them in comic terms just as much as Shakespeare did. It is hard to think of any first-class English novelist before Thomas Hardy who identifies so much with the 'lowly' and who gave characters at the bottom like Jude and Tess so much love and respect.
George Orwell in 1937: "Whichever way you turn, this curse of class differences confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather is it not so much like a wall of stone as the plate glass pane of an aquarium." This American was for some months near the end of World War II in close contact with 'other ranks' in the British army. Even when lecturing at Cambridge after the war, he came to see how the college servants lived, as well as the incomparable beauty of the public surface. These experiences gave glimpses of a side of life in England that explained the rancor and frustration of postwar English writing - but also its violent humor. As Edmund Wilson said, the English Revolution was made in America.
I hasten to add - and Howards End is in many respects specifically about England - that as a subject single and entire of itself, blissful to the literary imagination, England -
This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea
awakens an honest glow in its writers. America is too vast, heterogeneous, and spiritually mixed up to appear before its writers as a believable single image. F. Scott Fitzgerald in his notebooks: "France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter - it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart."
America certainly has been harder to utter - except in the most grandiose and boastful terms. By contrast, here is Forster in Chapter Nineteen of Howards End. The Schlegel sisters' German cousin is with them on a tour of the countryside, and because one of the signal points of this novel is that the characters are all representative - the English of conflicting attitudes and cultures, the Germans of different sides of Germany - Forster here 'interrupts' himself to speak with felt emotion about England, his England, everyone's England, summed up as "our island":
If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit, a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our island would roll together under his feet ...How many villages appear in this view! How many castles! How many churches, vanished or triumphant! How many ships, railways, and roads! What incredible variety of men working beneath that lucent sky to what final end! The reason fails, like a wave on the Swanage beach; the imagination swells, spreads, and deepens, until it becomes geographic and encircles England.
A few pages on, he inserts into a scene of conflict between the Schlegel sisters on the incredible thought (to Helen) that Margaret could even consider marrying the overbearing businessman Henry Wilcox:
England was alive, throbbing through all her estuaries, crying for joy through the mouths of her gulls, and the north wind, with contrary emotion, blew stronger against her rising seas. What did it mean? For what end are her fair complexities, her changes of soil, her sinuous coast? Does she belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or those who had added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing in a ship of souls, with all the brave world's fleet accompanying her towards eternity?
Earlier, Forster had written of "our race," and later he was to write of his countrymen and women as "comrades." So the attentive reader comes to see that behind the rivalry and final, ironic conjunction of Schlegels and Wilcoxes (meaning Margaret and her defeated husband Henry Wilcox) is Forster's yearning hope (as of 1910) that this grievously class-proud, class-protecting, class-embittered society may yet come to think of some deeper, more ancient 'comradeship' as one of its distinguishing marks. Where Forster's belief in "personal relationships" was founded on Bloomsbury and the Principia Ethica (1903) of its Cambridge sage G.E. Moore, Forster's invocation of 'comradeship' no doubt owes much to Edward Carpenter, a strong defender of homosexuality who was one of the first English disciples of Walt Whitman.
But 'comradeship' aside for the moment, English literature's advantage over American literature, so it appeared to the American critic who helped to make Forster famous in America, Lionel Trilling, is that the class war, class distinctions of every kind, social rivalries of the most minute (and even nastiest) kind, are great for literature. As conflict seems to be the first rule in life, so conflict taken seriously enough, without sentimental hopes of easy deliverance, is comedy, is tragedy, is dialogue, is history, is FORCE. Only an Englishman would have opened Chapter Six of Howards End with:
We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk.
The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it.
This would have enraged the California novelist and pioneer socialist, Jack London, who in 1902 went down into the "horror" of London's poor to write The People of the Abyss, a powerful document not likely to interest anyone in England but the Salvation Army. Because Howards End is rooted not even in Fabian socialism but in the dream of "personal relationships," one of the felt tensions in the book is the fear of war between England and Germany. The Schlegels' father (now dead) was a German idealist who fought for Prussia before it took Germany over, and in disgust left for England and married an Englishwoman.
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Barry Maxwell
Whitman: Acceptance, Appropriation, Investment
In a half-line from 'To Thee Old Cause,' one of the inscriptions to the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's formulation of the relation between his poem and the American Civil War is prima facie a direct and untroubled statement of identity: "my book and the war are one." On the whole, 'To Thee Old Cause' sets out a relationship between "my book," the war ("all war," in fact), and the "peerless, passionate, good cause" the short poem apostrophizes. In one of his characteristic parenthetical hushes, Whitman speaks to the combatants, saying that the unitary war he has set forth in the first stanza - "all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee" - is "(A war O soldiers not for itself alone, /Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.)"
Far, far more what? Wars? Or something less readily given in this immediate context? Like much of Whitman's poetry, the 1881 inscription functions as pseudo-clarification. The mode of ringing declamation and orbic utterance can easily carry the auditor beyond such small, troublesome words as 'one' ("my book and the war are one") and 'for' ("really fought, for thee"). Like a Brechtian drinking song, the Whitmanic statement goes down easily, but is barbed, gentle reader. 'One' is complicated, through a characteristic Whitmanic punning method which I shall discuss, by the aural shadow of 'won'; 'for' is innocuous only until we ask what precisely it means here. Beyond these cruces, the word 'cause' itself looms up problematic. Exemplified, but undefined, it stands as the sign of a cultural motive shared by the poem and its readers. The word would goad us, though, to specify our methods for assigning meaning to it.
Altogether, the affective situation is something like what the jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk told an audience they might undergo when he simultaneously played the melodies of 'Sentimental Journey' and Dvorak's 'New World Symphony': "It's like makin' one part of your mind say, 'Oo-blah-dee,' and makin' the other part of your mind say, 'What does he mean?'" Partaking of both the sentimental journey and new world symphony modes, Whitman's work, not wholly without the Master's collusion, has a long history of befogged reception on the 'oo-blah-dee' level; our concern now might rather be with what he means. But if interpretive precision is difficult here, it may be because Whitman and his readers are in close quarters with a paradox of the sort James Baldwin characterized when he spoke of a writer finding "that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the next." Precisely conundrum, a riddle to which the answer is a pun, turns out to be a valuable heuristic notion in Whitman's case. In the following, I want to point to some of the implications for Whitman's work of the riddle of war and book-making, and of the uneasy light the pun one/won admits to a dark nexus ("All of those athletes had to die young so that we might have this magnificent poem?"). In doing so, I hope that my debt to Kenneth Burke's labyrinthine address to these matters will be recognized and received critically, but in any case here stands acknowledged. I have not so much stood on Burke's shoulders to look at Whitman, though, as tried to attend to what each man has to say about, as a Burkean title has it, "The Nature of Art Under Capitalism." In addition, the specifically capitalist character of Whitman's production will be discussed in the light of certain of the German literary theorist Robert Weimann's extensions of Marx's thought.
"My book and the war are one"; my book and the war are won: Whitman's puns, rare as they are, follow the pattern of compounding the initial, orthographically determined meaning rather than exploiting, for ironic, humorous, or critical motives, a semantic disjunction between manifest and latent meanings. When the poet presents to us, for example, his profession of the self-revealing nature of his work, titling it "Here the Frailest Leaves of Me," coupled to the presentative adverb 'here' is the urgent injunctive verb 'hear.' Of course 'leaves' itself carries several meanings, as has been frequently pointed out. Homophony works additively in this poetry, not dissonantly. In the one/won play, we confront an assertion not only of an identity, but also of a consubstantial achievement and indeed victory. That Whitman's is in one sense not a true statement, given the pre-war editions of Leaves of Grass, is not the issue here. I am asking rather about the power that the war had to change Whitman's sense of what he had made.
In seeking to understand the textual-historical relationship Whitman is propounding, we may recur to Robert Weimann's term Aneignung. Weimann has demonstrated on several occasions and in relation to diverse literatures the specific usefulness of this concept, which may - with qualification - be translated as 'appropriation.' For the sake of clarity, we ought to give a moment here to a terminological summary.
One way of apprehending Aneignung is to see it as a critique of Foucault's 'What is an Author?' In that essay, discourses are held to be only "objects of appropriation," a function of which Weimann concedes the importance. However, Weimann further insists that discourses are also "subjekte of appropriation, that is ... historical agencies of knowledge, pleasure, energy and power" (433). Linking discourse-as-object to the property status of an author's works (in other words, to their exchange value), Weimann then argues that the use value of one's cultural work (as labor) derives from and depends upon "literary production as an appropriating agency" (433). The basic move of Aneignung, making things one's own, is also making one's own things. We should bear in mind, though, that in the German, the term has "the advantage of not necessarily involving an ideologically preconceived idea of (private) ownership or (physical) property; instead it allows for acquisitive behavior as well as for non-acquisitive acts of intellectual energy and assimilation"(433).
The crucial historical shift in the situation of Aneignung as a representational method is from a state first of the relative paucity of material that an author in a pre-modern society can make his or her own, because intellectual production is largely conceived of there as a communal activity carried out under "previously inscribed authority" (434), to one of a burdensome plentitude of material that the breakdown of "presupposed relations" (Marx) offers - or imposes - through dynamic contradictions to a newly-constituted world of individuals. In the later situation, the representational function of verbal art is, obviously, problematized, but it is also, at the same moment, fixed on by bourgeois culture as the necessary healing agency. As Weimann says:
What representational art presupposes and what it thrives on is more than anything else the loss, the undoing of the plenitude of that property in which the self and the social are mutually engaged and in which their engagement is unquestionably given and taken for granted (436; emphasis added).
One further aspect of Aneignung must be mentioned, because without noting it we are hard put to understand Whitman's aesthetic and poetic appropriation of the war as anything other than heroizing and apologetic. The necessary companion gesture of Aneignung is, according to Weimann, a putting-apart from oneself, an expropriation in its etymological sense. "The process of making other things one's own becomes inseparable from making other things (and persons) alien, so that the act of appropriation must be seen always to involve not only self-projection and assimilation but also alienation through expropriation"(434). The taking-to and the putting-apart from one's self and one's poetry are forms of work that so mutually imply one another that, in fact, Weimann subsumes performance of the latter under the term for the former.
If we provisionally concede that the primary task of Whitman's writing is appropriation, particularly so in relation to the Civil War, that concession need not pledge us to a simplistic view of Whitman's work as an endorsement of the war, or of war in general. An analogy may help here. Does a thief endorse, through the act of theft, the ethical status of the goods he or she steals? Do the processes of materials acquisition, production, distribution, and 'legal' exchange that account for the presence of such goods gain from the act of theft a concurring voice or stamp of approval? Is the thief's a symbolic action that encourages submission to and cooperation with the manifold circumstances, historical and political and economic, that placed the goods within reach? Does the thief's act certify the quality of the thing stolen? Does theft undermine or does it shore up dominant cultural forms (again, Marx's "presupposed relations")? As Jean Genet and others have pointed out, theft in a bourgeois society poses more interesting questions about the thief and the thing stolen than it does about the victim of the theft. If stealing is an act with dimensions both acquisitive and non-acquisitive, and an act of appropriation with attendant motives of expropriation, it may be compared with Whitman's poetic acts in that both make yes or no answers to the questions I have just posed dangerously naive.
Aneignung, then, names what Walter Benjamin would call the "decisive gestus" of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, specifically with respect to the status of the war in the poem, and the poem in the war. Benjamin has in fact provided us with a meditation on war and the enrichment or depletion of symbolic reserves, and we might note that without using the term Aneignung, he here instances the clearest kind of thinking on the subject. The apposite passage, which deserves quotation in full, not only problematizes juridical concepts of 'winning' and 'losing' wars, but also prods us to think of making war and multiplying cultural capital as intimately, even causally related. It is this latter point, as I have suggested, that is crucially at issue in Whitman's work.
What does it mean to win or lose a war? How striking the double meaning is in both words! The first, manifest meaning, certainly refers to the outcome of the war, but the second meaning - which creates that peculiar hollow space, the sounding board in these words - refers to the totality of the war and suggests how the war's outcome also alters the enduring significance it holds for us. This meaning says, so to speak, the winner keeps the war in hand, it leaves the hands of the loser; it says, the winner conquers the war for himself, makes it his own property, the loser no longer possesses it and must live without it. And he must live not only without the war per se but without every one of its slightest ups and downs, every subtlest one of its chess moves, every one of its remotest actions. To win or lose a war reaches so deeply, if we follow the language, into the fabric of our existence that our whole lives become that much richer or poorer in symbols, images and sources.
In Whitman's poetry, we study a victor's disposition of what the war gained for him and for his culture. That Whitman himself could consider this 'disposition' in its fiduciary sense is made clear by an undatable fragment with a most comprehensive title:
My Own Poems
Aye, merchant, thou hast drawn a haughty draft
Upon the centuries yet to come
Yet hitherto unborn - the Americas of the future:
The trick is ...Will they pay?
I think we can see this promissory relation to the future of the United States as determined - in fact, overdetermined - by the victory of the Union. Without that victory, Whitman may well have found himself in the situation of Benjamin's German veterans of the First World War: "grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience."
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AMY THOMPSON MCCANDLESS
College of Charleston
The Higher Education of Black Women in the Contemporary South
THE COLLEGIATE EXPERIENCE OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN women in the contemporary South can be understood only in the context of regional history. Educational statistics and surveys of Southerners reveal the persistence of racial, regional, and gender differences in student attitudes and behaviors. Southern black women's choices of academic fields and educational institutions, their relationships with their professors and classmates, and their goals and achievements inside and outside the academy continue to be shaped by conceptions of gender and race derived from the ideology of the antebellum plantation. Because slave-holders believed that the education of blacks would foment rebellion, free persons of color had to leave the region to attend college. The end of slavery created new educational opportunities for black youth, but there was considerable debate among educators about the nature and purpose of black higher education. Few thought that blacks and whites should be educated together, and many wanted blacks to receive an industrial rather than a liberal education.
For African-American women, antebellum gender stereotypes compounded postbellum racial biases. Many of the personality traits ascribed to black women in the early twentieth century originated in the complex relationships of the nineteenth-century plantation. Black women - like black men - were considered docile, indolent, and ignorant. Like white women, they were supposed to sublimate their needs and wants to those of men. Like white women and black men, they were expected to serve their lord and master. Unlike white women, black women did not receive the protection of the pedestal; instead they were blamed for the sexual liaisons of the slave quarters. The consequence of such antebellum stereotyping was a denigration of black women's intellectual and moral faculties.
The academic offerings provided black women in the postbellum South reflected these gender and racial prejudices. Black women were given a 'moral' and 'vocational' education designed to develop 'virtuous women' who would as mothers and teachers 'uplift' the race. Although this racial and gender stereotyping limited the educational opportunities and professional horizons of black women, it also inspired them to become teachers and social workers. As historian Jeanne Noble concluded in her study of 'The Higher Education of Black Women in the Twentieth Century,' black women students consistently exhibited a greater "sense of mission" and a greater concern for the well-being of society than either black men or white women.
In the last two decades, gender, racial, and regional differences in higher education seem to have lessened considerably. Today, Southern women, black and white, earn more associate, bachelor's, and master's degrees than do men, the proportion of women in the college population having increased significantly since 1960. (In 1959 Southern women comprised only 38.0 percent of the college/university population in the region; in 1987, 54 percent. Only two public military schools, Virginia Military Institute and The Citadel, and a handful of private colleges in the region do not grant women undergraduate degrees.) Black women now outnumber black men in all but first professional degree programs. Today also no woman can be barred from admission to a Southern college or university because of her race. Whereas African-American women at the beginning of the twentieth-century were limited by law to all-black institutions, over two-thirds of black women currently attending college are enrolled in previously all-white institutions. On a regional level, educational opportunity grants and guaranteed student loan programs have made it possible for more Southerners to attend college, and standards at Southern institutions of higher education have equalled and, in some instances, surpassed those at institutions in other parts of the nation.
Few black women were provided a liberal arts education at the public expense at the beginning of the twentieth century; only in recent years have Southern states assumed a greater share of fiscal responsibility for the higher education of blacks and women. In 1968, 28.0 percent of all Southern women were enrolled in private institutions; in 1987, 17.1 percent. The percentages for white and black women were almost identical. Although black Southerners today are slightly less likely to matriculate at public institutions than white Southerners (82.3 percent versus 84.0 percent), they are still more likely to attend public colleges and universities than youth in the United States as a whole (82.3 percent and 77.0 percent respectively).
Southern higher education, like Southern culture, has retained many unique characteristics, however, and these continue to affect the educational experiences of black women in the region. The South still spends less on education than the nation as a whole. Even though 16.0 percent of state taxes in the South in 1986 went to finance higher education as opposed to 13.4 percent in the country as a whole, the region lags behind in per capita expenditure on higher education ($135 in the South compared to $140 in the United States). Because the economic pie remains smaller in the South - per capita personal income is only 89.0 percent of the national average - Southerners must spend proportionately more on higher education to close the gap.
The educational attainment of Southern adults also trails that of other Americans. A 1991 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau revealed that the Southeast has the lowest proportion of high school and college graduates of any area of the country. Robert Cominsky, director of the Census Bureau's education branch, attributed the low Southern rankings to the region's historic inability or unwillingness to invest in education.
Educational issues continue to be intricately interwoven with matters of race. Desegregation has not resulted in racial integration; most institutions of higher education in the South are nominally integrated. Minority students remain under represented in the collegiate population at large and at major public and private institutions in the region.
Enrollments in South Carolina's colleges and universities are indicative of enrollment patterns throughout the South. Although African-Americans comprise 18.5 percent of students in all South Carolina institutions of higher education, they represent only 12.1 percent of the students at the University of South Carolina and only 6.2 percent at Clemson University. South Carolina State College, on the other hand, is 92.3 percent black. Discrepancies at four-year private institutions in the state are even greater. Bob Jones University has no black students, while Morris College has only one white student. The editors of the Chronicle of Higher Education note significantly that South Carolina's educators "are still struggling with ways to improve the college-going rate of black citizens, which substantially trails that of whites. The issue is viewed as crucial to the state's economic health in the future because about one-third of the South Carolina population is black."
Historically black colleges remain an important component of the Southern educational scene. All but two of the historically black institutions are located in the South, and they enroll over eighty-eight percent of the students who attend black colleges. The graduation rates of black Southerners are consistently higher at black institutions. Although approximately sixty-six percent of African-Americans in the region attend predominantly white institutions, fifty-one percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded to Southern blacks are from predominantly or historically black institutions.
A 1992 report for Black Issues in Higher Education found that "black colleges are still producing and carrying a disproportionate share of the load" of educating black students. The twelve schools in the nation which awarded the largest number of bachelor's degrees to African-American students in 1988-89 were all historically black, Southern colleges. Howard University in Washington, D.C., led the list with 744 graduates, followed by Southern University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in Louisiana with 575, Hampton University in Virginia with 539, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University with 509, and Jackson State University in Mississippi with 463.
Gender restraints continue to circumscribe the academic horizons of white and black women alike. Faculty often take the comments and concerns of women students less seriously than those of men. Men are still more likely than women to hold campus leadership positions, to dominate classroom discussions, and to major in mathematics and science at coeducational institutions. Women have fewer opportunities to work as lab or field assistants or as interns. Social activities continue to reinforce traditional gender roles and to separate students along racial and sexual lines.
Southern women, as women elsewhere in the nation, choose institutions with programs which they consider appropriate for their sex. Technical and military colleges and public universities with strong engineering programs attract far fewer women than men. Fewer than a quarter of the students at Florida Institute of Technology and Georgia Institute of Technology, for instance, are women. Men also outnumber women at technically oriented state universities such as Auburn, Clemson, Louisiana Tech, Mississippi State, North Carolina State, Oklahoma, Tennessee Tech, Texas A & M, Arkansas, and Virginia Polytechnic Institute.
Gender stereotypes also influence women's choices of majors. Business is the most common major among students at coeducational institutions in the South, but women dominate in traditional 'female' fields such as education, health care, and home economics. Although the number of women in such 'male' fields as engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences has increased significantly in the last decade, most black women prefer concentrations in the humanities and the social sciences.
Higher education in the South is still perceived as 'different' by many Americans. Guides to the nation's colleges and universities, such as that written by Edward B. Fiske of the New York Times, characterize institutions in the region as "distinctly Southern" or "steeped in Southern traditionalism" but have no category of 'distinctly Northern' or reference to 'Northern traditionalism.'
The connotation of 'Southern' in such educational commentaries is even more revealing. Fiske describes Davidson College as "a top-notch regional college for Southern WASPs ... [It] is distinctly Southern and socially traditional." He thinks that Duke University's unique blend of North and South explains how the institution "can be laid-back and high-powered at the same time." Georgia Tech, he notes, "isn't your typical laid-back Southern State U." On the other hand, he claims that the University of Virginia's "Southern, slightly aristocratic ambiance gives it a homey charm, but also a streak of anti-intellectualism and apathy." He finds students at Wofford College "conventional South Carolina types with conventional aspirations," while students at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, "can take on the best of any Yankee student body." For Fiske - and other educational commentators like him - most Southern students and most Southern colleges are narrowly provincial, academically inferior, and politically and socially conservative.
Many of the students Fiske interviewed for his guide also employed regional terminology in describing their institutions, albeit more positively. One student who labeled the University of Arkansas "truly a Southern school" referred to the fact that "People smile and speak to other people whether they know them or not." Students at Furman University perceived their classmates as "an enlarged, close Southern family." To these individuals, 'Southern' meant a student body which was friendly, a faculty which was approachable, and a campus that was hospitable.
African-American students and traditionally black colleges are noticeably absent from descriptions of typically 'Southern' schools in Fiske's guide, even though all but two of the historically black institutions are South of the Mason-Dixon Line. Promotional materials from predominantly black colleges use many of the same 'Southern' descriptors as predominantly white colleges in the region, proudly pointing to the "warm, friendly atmosphere" of their campuses.
The Southern woman student still tends to be characterized as white and rich. Images of the 'lady' remain strong: Fiske notes that Randolph-Macon Woman's College always has "enough Southern prep school graduates to give the college what some call a 'Southern-bellish' tone." He describes the "typical" Hollins College student as "white, traditional, Southern, preppie." Southern women at Duke, according to Fiske, are "very conscious of clothes and looks," while "relations between the sexes are still somewhat formal."
Other remnants of the 'Old South' are even less attractive. Beauty contests and other activities which treat women students as sex objects have not disappeared from the Southern college scene. The 'Miss T.U. Pageant' at Tulane University in New Orleans, for example, asks contestants to provide their bust, waist, and hip measurements and to appear in swimsuit and evening gown competitions.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="29">Discussions of David Lynch's films or those of Brian de Palma, for example, often depend on intricate aesthetic descriptions of the way each director foregrounds the devices and strategems of representation. The films themselves eerily mirror representations that are much too familiar from their regular occurrence in far less experimental films and life, generally depending on violence against women. But there is a presumption that pointing out constructedness by repeating the constructions at an ironic remove is somehow enough. The response to criticism of that irony, however, is that representation, like gender, is constructed. Strangely, once we've all stopped believing in the biological truth of gender, its effects in terms of constructing the site of knowledge production are presumed to have gone away. It is here that a curious 'blurring,' a strange effacement of the theorist's subject-position, links back up with Bourdieu's description of the main characteristics of the aesthetic disposition, its "privilege of indifference" to legitimacy (95).
Adrienne Kennedy disrupts this legitimacy by her insistence on the female specificity of birth, but in order to situate her play, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, in relation to a cultural refusal of female specificity, I first want to make a provisional horizontal comparison among several cultural discourses where that specificity is, at the moment, being refused, as we find ourselves in a continuation of what Susan Jeffords calls "the remasculinization of America." This comparison might help foreground a broad structural feature that still constrains the poststructuralist study of differences. The elements of these discourses include: 1) the fact that on cable tv, there is a channel called the Family Channel, where the shows one can watch on weekends are those old 'family' standbys: 'Bonanza,' 'Wagon Train,' 'The Rifleman,' 'Gunsmoke,' and the 'Big Valley.' The most striking thing about the Family Channel is that these families, for the most part, have been cleaned up of women. These are basically families made up of white men who are busy taming the West - cleaning it up in the interests of the middle-class white, Christian, decent Body; 2) the fact that the Gulf War, the supposed origin of a New World Order planned and executed by men, was billed as the Mother of all Wars, and the spectacular celebration of it, the Mother of all parades; and 3) the way deconstructive or Foucauldian arguments show how the constructedness of masculine identity is destabilized by a reliance on a form of femininity that generally does not require women, a structure which in many ways appropriates femininity for its own project.
I will return to the first two of these issues later, but it seems especially important to address feminism's allies in poststructuralism in order to make more obvious some of the dangers of overlooking the specificity of the female body. There seems to be a troubling risk of remasculinization in an increasingly overt but paradoxically invisible reliance on the specificity of the masculine body. As one example, the latest star on the poststructuralist horizon, Slavoj <*_>Z-hacek<*/>i<*_>z-hacek<*/>ek, offers as his figurative model of interpretation a 'phallus' experience in which the radical exteriority of the body is figured by a phallus, the transcendental signifier with its "pulsation between 'all' and 'nothing'..." To explain the paradox of interpretation, <*_>Z-hacek<*/>i<*_>z-hacek<*/>ek gives two examples. One has to do with the impossibility of control. That is, he says, referring to Saint Augustine, "Someone with a strong enough will can starve to death in the middle of a room full of delicious food, but if a naked virgin passes his way, the erection of his phallus is in no way dependent on the strength of his will ..." And to show the opposite side of this riddle, he tells this joke: "What is the lightest object on earth? - The phallus, because it is the only one that can be elevated by mere thought." There is here a striking instance of theoretical amnesia. No longer is any attempt made to distinguish between organ and figuration, even though, in the earlier days of Lacanian theory, much ink was spilled attempting to do just that, to show that men really don't have 'it' either. Now it looks like they do. This overtly masculine figuration whose partiality founds the oxymoronic irony of poststructuralism (the point of coincidence between omnipotence and total impotence) serves, as did the earlier aesthetic model, as a universal model for interpretation and guarantees an indifference to legitimacy. But its partiality can be foregrounded by looking at the figuration of birth, for it is in and around discussions of birth and the maternal body, those places where the label of essentialism is most often pinned, that the most intense resistance to female specificity can be found.
Though this study of Kennedy and birth will depend, in part, on a revisionary reading of psychoanalysis, Wayne Koestenbaum warns in Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration that the origins of psychoanalysis, the discourse within which the paradoxical invisible but obvious relationship between phallus and penis gets organized, circle around an appropriation of femininity, and in particular, of birth by men: "[B]y collaborating with Breuer, Freud sought to fuse male bonding and scientific labor, and to appropriate the power of female reproduction" by way of a woman's hysterical birth-giving, that of Anna O., or Bertha Pappenheim, who was to become a feminist activist. In that collaboration, argues Koestenbaum, the fantasized, or hysterical childbirth experienced by Anna O. and interpreted by Freud "loses texture as a woman's experience, and becomes, within the history of psychoanalysis, a possession prized by a chain of male mentors and their disciples." Thus Anna O.'s uterus figuratively becomes and anus, as Freud "erases the maternal and feminine origin of his science at the same moment he stresses it." Anna O. is thus passed on as "male property, a representation of male intercourse" and of the "pleasure-giving, child-delivering hole in men."
The abstraction and circulation of metaphors of birth here organizes a crucial intersection between symbolicity and bodies, and it is in the textualization and appropriations of birth where aesthetics and politics meet. "For," says Julia Kristeva, "where life and discourse come together, that is where the destiny of subjectivity is caught up in the claims of civilization. Today the pill and the Pope know that indeed." The risks for feminism of talking about birth may, at this historical moment, have to be taken, in order to dissect the masculinist appropriations of birth which accompany what is too often unambiguously called femininity.
These 'femininities,' like these 'births,' are still to be disentangled.
The Political Economy of Spectacle: Hiding the Mess from View
Life and discourse, or the density of subjectivity caught up in the claims of civilization, are at the moment intensely focused on race and the intimate control of women's sexuality. Adrienne Kennedy commented almost twenty years ago on these intersections in A Movie Star in Black and White, first performed at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1976, directed by Joseph Chaikin. Like the plays of Lorraine Hansberry, it long ago raised the kinds of questions about middle-class African Americans that Spike Lee's movies are only now addressing twenty years later. Kennedy was raised in a middle-class family in Cleveland at a time when the schools were racially and ethnically mixed; she encountered a more overt and damaging racism when she went to Ohio State University, then dropped out. Her parents were prominent members of the African-American community; their friends were civic workers, teachers, social workers, doctors, and lawyers active in the NAACP and the Urban League. But the questions she raises, unlike Lee's, come from the perspective of a woman who must deal not only with racism but with pregnancy, miscarriage, and the experience of being an intellectual whose academic husband was able to do the things her pregnancies prevented her from doing. A feminist in a period of masculinist Black nationalism, she was also a postmodern experimentalist in a period of realistic political drama and a woman writing very specifically about the consequences of the physicality of blackness and the bleeding, pregnant female body when theoretical discourse could not account for those differences; it still cannot. In this play, what is available is, on the other hand, bloody miscarriage and the complete responsibility for pregnancy and blood on the part of the woman, even if she is a middle-class, African-American intellectual who possesses some measure of cultural capital; and, on the other hand, brain-damaged, military-related paralysis for her brother in a white supremacist cultural logic.
The play stages the way photography and film insist on constructing a Family, within a site organized and coded by public culture within what might now be described as the mode of information. That is, as Ian Angus and Sut Jhally argue, we are currently within a third stage of capitalist formation in which the economic and the cultural are indistinguishable, the result of two earlier stages: 1) class culture, from the beginning of industrial capitalist society in the seventeenth century, divided into high culture and popular culture; 2) from the turn of the century to the 1960s, mass culture, with homogeneous cultural products for mass consumption; and 3) since the 1960s mass-mediated culture of the mode of information, accompanying "the explosion of electronic media, the shift from print literacy to images, and the penetration of the commodity from throughout all cultural production." In this latest period of postmodernity, they argue, the construction of social identity is centered on a politics of images which produces "staged differences," differences that are overlaid on the homogenized culture produced in the earlier cultural formation. These "staged differences" are, in some measure, differences without much difference as their real inequalities lie hidden behind a screen of consumer goods. It is the implications of these differences without much difference, the way they show up in discourses which would ostensibly seem to be quite different, that need to be considered.
Within this mode of information, spectacle determines possibilities for representation and performs the move of abstraction away from materiality, where, as Guy Debord argues:
the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible [itself] ... The spectacle consists in taking up all that existed in human activity [in order to] possess it in a congealed state as things which have become the exclusive value by their formulation in negative of lived value ... [Here] we recognize our old enemy, the commodity, who knows so well how to seem at first glance something trivial and obvious, while on the contrary it is so complex and so full of metaphysical subtleties.
As political economy circles back around to postmodern possibilities of representation, we find that this abstract spectacle, with its differences without much difference that unite the economic and the cultural to produce what Frederic Jameson calls the "omnipresence of culture," increasingly rests on a global opposition between an active, masculinized North, and a feminized South, whose resource often is the cheap labor of non-white, female workers. The majority of female workers who work to produce the chips for the mode of information are young women who must retire by the time they are twenty-five, after their eyesight has been ruined by the close work. They leave the work force, according to what Jennifer Wicke calls the employers' "beneficient fiction" that they will marry, a fiction which provides a justification for using them up and discarding them.
The mode of information makes possible a new elite, not of manufacturers or those who invest in production as much as those who invest in and work with information, what Robert Reich calls symbolic analysts: management consultants, lawyers, software and design engineers, research scientists, corporate executives, financial advisers, advertising executives, television and movie producers -and academics, poststructuralist critics as well as nuclear physicists or professors of finance. Within this cultural formation, the mode of information's symbolic common denominator is its feminized debris.
Interrupting the Sanitized Spectacle/Disgusting Bodies

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The Idea of Teleology
Ernst Mayr
1. Philosophical Background
Perhaps no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking. In one form or another it was the prevailing world view prior to Darwin. (Indeed it is one of the relatively few world views seriously considered by western man.) Appropriately, the discussion of teleology occupies considerable space (10-14%) in several recent philosophies of biology. Such a finalistic world view had many roots. It is reflected by the millenarian beliefs of many Christians, by the enthusiasm for progress promoted by the Enlightenment, by transformationist evolutionism, and by everybody's hope for a better future. However, such a finalistic world view was only one of several widely adopted Weltanschauungen.
Grossly simplifying a far more complex picture, one can perhaps distinguish, in the period prior to Darwin, three ways of looking at the world:
1. A recently created and constant world. This was the orthodox Christian dogma, which, however, by 1859 had largely lost its credibility, at least among philosophers and scientists.
2. An eternal and either constant or cycling world, exhibiting no constant direction or goal. Everything in such a world, as asserted by Democritus and his followers, is due to chance or necessity, with chance by far the more important factor. There is no room for teleology in this world view, everything being due to chance or causal mechanisms. It allows for change, but such change is not directional; it is not an evolution. This view gained some support during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, but remained very much a minority view until the nineteenth century. A rather pronounced polarization developed from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, between the strict mechanists, who explained everything purely in terms of movements and forces and who denied any validity whatsoever of the use of teleological language; and their opponents - deists, natural theologians, and vitalists - who all believed in teleology to a lesser or greater extent.
3. The third view of the world was that of a world of long duration (or being eternal) but with a tendency toward improvement or perfection. Such a view existed in many religions, it was widespread in the beliefs of primitive people (e.g., the Valhalla of the old Germans), and it was represented in Christianity by ideas of a millennium or resurrection. During the rise of deism, after the Scientific Revolution and during the era of Enlightenment, there was a widespread belief in the development of ever greater perfection in the world through the exercise of God's laws. There was a trust in an intrinsic tendency of Nature toward progress or an ultimate goal. Such beliefs were shared even by those who did not believe in the hand of God but who nevertheless believed in a progressive tendency of the world toward ever-greater perfection.
Although Christianity was its major source of support, teleological thinking gained increasing strength also in philosophy, from its beginning with the Greeks and Cicero up to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The concept of the Scala Naturae, the scale of perfection, reflected a belief in upward or forward progression in the arrangement of natural objects. Few were the philosophers who did not express a belief in progress and improvement. It also fitted quite well with Lamarck's transformationist theory of evolution, and it is probably correct to say that most Lamarckians were also teleologists. The concept of progress was particularly strong in the philosophies of Leibniz, Herder, their followers and of course among the French philosophesphilosophers of the Enlightenment.
What struck T.H. Huxley "most forcibly on his first perusal of the Origin of Species was the conviction that teleology, as commonly understood, had received its deathblow at Mr. Darwin's hands." However, Huxley's prophecy did not come true. Perhaps the most popular among the anti-Darwinian evolutionary theories was that of orthogenesis, which postulated that evolutionary trends, even nonadaptive ones, were due to an intrinsic drive. Even though the arguments of the orthogenesists were effectively refuted by Weismann, orthogenesis continued to be highly popular not only in Germany but also in France, the United States, and Russia. The reason was that even though Darwin's demonstration of the non-constancy of species and of the common descent of all organisms made the acceptance of evolution inevitable, natural selection, the mechanism proposed by Darwin, was so unpalatable to his opponents that they grasped at any other conceivable mechanism as an anti-Darwinian strategy. One of these was orthogenesis, a strictly finalistic principle, which did not really collapse until the Evolutionary Synthesis. Simpson, Rensch, and J. Huxley, in particular, showed that perfect orthogenetic series as claimed by the orthogenesists, simply did not exist when the fossil record was studied more carefully, that allometric growth could explain certain seemingly excessive structures, and finally, that the assertion of deleteriousness of certain characters, supposedly due to some orthogenetic force, was not valid. These authors showed, furthermore, that there was no genetic mechanism that could account for orthogenesis.
Both friends and opponents of Darwin occasionally classified him as a teleologist. It is true that this is what he was early in his career, but he gave up teleology soon after he had adopted natural selection as the mechanism of evolutionary change. Whether this was as late as the 1850s, as claimed by some authors, or already in the early 1840s, as indicated by the researches of R. Eisert, is unimportant. There is certainly no support for teleology in the Origin of Species, even though, particularly in his later years and in correspondence, Darwin was sometimes somewhat careless in his language. I have previously presented a rather full history of the rise and fall of teleology in evolutionary biology, particularly in Darwin's writings.
All endeavors to find evidence for a mechanism that would explain a general finalism in nature were unsuccessful or, where it occurs in organisms, it was explained strictly casually (see below). As a result, by the time of the Evolutionary Synthesis of the 1940s, no competent biologist was left who still believed in any final causation of evolution or of the world as a whole.
Final causes, however, are far more plausible and pleasing to a layperson than the haphazard and opportunistic process of natural selection. For this reason, a belief in final causes had a far greater hold outside of biology than within. Almost all philosophers, for instance, who wrote on evolutionary change in the one hundred years after 1859, were confirmed finalists. All three philosophers closest to Darwin - Whewell, Herschel, and Mill - believed in final causes. The German philosopher E. von Hartmann was a strong defender of finalism, stimulating Weismann to a spirited reply. In France, Bergson postulated a metaphysical force, élan vital, which, even though Bergson disclaimed its finalistic nature, could not have been anything else, considering its effects. There is room for a good history of finalism in the post-Darwinian philosophy, although Collingwood has made a beginning. Whitehead, Polanyi, and many lesser philosophers, were also finalistic.
Refutation of a finalistic interpretation of evolution or of nature as a whole, however, did not eliminate teleology as a problem of philosophy. For the Cartesians any invoking of teleological processes was utterly unthinkable. Coming from mathematics and physics, they had nothing in their conceptual repertory that would permit them to distinguish between seemingly end-directed processes in inorganic nature, and seemingly goal-directed processes in living nature. They feared, as shown particularly clearly by Nagel, that making such a distinction would open the door to metaphysical, nonempirical considerations. All their arguments, based on the study of inanimate objects, ignored the common view, derived from Aristotle and strongly confirmed by Kant, that truly goal-directed and seemingly purposive processes occur only in living nature. Yet the (physicalist) philosophers ignored the study of living nature and the findings of the biologists. Instead they used teleology in order to exercise their logical prowess. Why this was so has been explained by Ruse: "What draws philosophers toward teleology is that one has to know, or at least it is generally thought that one has to know, absolutely no biology at all! ... philosophers want no empirical factors deflecting them in their neo-Scholastic pursuits." The irony of this jibe against his fellow philosophers is that, having said this, Ruse himself promptly ignored the literature on teleology written by biologists and concentrated on reviewing the books of three philosophers known for their neglect of biology. Yet Ruse is not alone. One paper or book after the other dealing with teleology continues to be published in the philosophical literature in which the author attempts to solve the problem of teleology with the sharpest weapons of logic, while utterly ignoring the diversity of the phenomena to which the word teleology has been attached, and of course ignoring the literature in which biologists have pointed this out.
Some of the difficulties of the philosophers are due to their misinterpretation of the writings of the great philosophers of the past. Aristotle, for instance, has often been recorded as a finalist, and cosmic teleology had been called an Aristotelian view. Grene is entirely correct when pointing out that Aristotle's telos has nothing to do with purpose "either Man's or God's. It was the Judaeo-Christian God who (with the help of neo-Platonism) imposed the dominance of a cosmic teleology upon Aristotelian nature. Such sweeping purpose is the very opposite of Aristotelian [philosophy]." Modern Aristotle specialists (Balme, Gotthelf, Lennox, and Nussbaum) are unanimous in showing that Aristotle's seeming teleology deals with problems of ontogeny and adaptation in living organisms, where his views are remarkably modern. Kant was a strict mechanist as far as the inanimate universe is concerned, but provisionally adopted teleology for certain phenomena of living nature, which (in the 1790s) were inexplicable owing to the primitive condition of contemporary biology. It would be absurd, however, to use Kant's tentative comments two hundred years later as evidence for the validity of finalism.
The reasons for the unsatisfactory state of teleology analyses in the philosophical literature are now evident. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that the treatment of the problems of teleology in this literature shows how not to do the philosophy of science. For at least fifty years a considerable number of philosophers have written on teleology basing their analyses on the methods of logic and physicalism, "known to be the best" or at least the only reliable methods for such analyses. These philosophers have ignored the findings of the biologists, even though teleology concerns mostly or entirely the world of life.
They ignored that the word function refers to two very different sets of phenomena; and that the concept of program gives a new complexion to the problem of goal-directedness; they confounded the distinction between proximate and evolutionary causations, and between static (adapted) systems and goal-directed activities. Even though there is an enormous philosophical literature on the problems of teleology, those recent books and papers are quite useless which still treat teleology as a unitary phenomenon. No author who had not tried to articulate the differences between the significance of cosmic teleology, adaptedness, programmed goal-directedness, and deterministic natural laws, has made any worthwhile contribution to the solution of the problems of teleology.
The principal endeavor of the traditional philosopher was to eliminate teleological language from all descriptions and analyses. They objected to such sentences as "the turtle swims to the shore in order to lay her eggs," or "the wood thrush migrates to warmer climates in order to escape the winter." To be sure, questions that begin with "what?" and "how?" are sufficient for explanation in the physical sciences. However, since 1859 no explanation in the biological sciences has been complete until a third kind of question was asked and answered: "why?" It is the evolutionary causation and its explanation that is asked for in this question. Anyone who eliminates evolutionary "why?" questions, closes the door on a large area of biological research. It is therefore important for the evolutionary biologist to demonstrate that "why?" questions do not introduce a meta-physical element into the analysis, and that there is no conflict between causal and teleological analysis, provided it is precisely specified what is meant by 'teleological.'
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CHAPTER 3
Schoolmaster: Manchester, Guernsey, and Elgin
Saintsbury spent March 2, 1868, visiting his fiancee, Emily King, at Southampton. He came back to Oxford to find the offer of a teaching appointment in the upper forms of the Manchester Grammar School, then headed by Frederick William Walker. He left Oxford the next day for this his first six months' experience of teaching and his first acquaintance with Manchester, a history of which he was to write two decades later. He found lodgings somewhat out of the city and a few days later joined the Manchester Athenaeum where, as the ticket (made out erroneously to a "Mr. Santzburg") promised, one could "'advance and instruct in knowledge' ... read the papers, smoke, play billiards, and ... lunch lightly." At this time, the school's quarters were so severely crammed as to make some such refuge necessary. There were no Common Rooms and "the very classes were held in soon-to-be-pulled-down tenement houses."
The spring saw Saintsbury settled into teaching while planning and preparing for his marriage, which took place on June 2d - presumably at Southampton. By the summer solstice, the couple had set up housekeeping in the rooms "somewhat out of the centre" where he had already settled. His account book tells of moving and household expenses and of a silk dress and a chain and cross for Emily. With characteristic reticence, Saintsbury tells us nothing more of the wedding or about his bride or those early days of marriage.
In Manchester, the young scholar was trying his hand at school-mastering where he was soon to feel a glimmer of the distaste that made him later confess, "I never liked schoolmastering." Yet he must have felt the challenge of the new situation, in a good school where English and the classical languages were his lot. He had begun in debt and on a low salary with "neither time nor means to invest in the gifts of Bacchus." But he and Emily were in love and eager for marriage. There was leisure for each other and for reading, and for Saintsbury's favorite physical pastime - solitary walking and exploring the countryside. A map of Lancashire was one of the first of his purchases. Here, he first saw some of Rossetti's writing while he continued his interest in French literature.
A cryptic credit entry in Saintsbury's accounts for July 26, 1868 - "Cub (M.G.) 12.12" - suggests that he made his first contact with the Manchester Guardian in his early months in Manchester. Though C.P. Scott was not editor until 1872, Saintsbury mentions only that, in 1877, Scott gave him his "valuable apprenticeship to journalism" and "much hospitality to boot." Scott, who had been a contemporary of his at Oxford, was a good friend of the Creightons and was frequently their guest in the 1870s. The Guardian obituary of Saintsbury assumed the earlier date, but since Guardian records for those years have vanished, the mystery remains.
Of the city itself as he knew it at firsthand, Saintsbury says little except in the brief popular history of it he wrote in 1887. Written for the series Historic Towns, edited by E.A. Freeman and William Hunt, it was published independently. Saintsbury tried to view the city's history from a less provincial vantage point than earlier writers had done. It is no local glorification, but the Academy reviewer thought it vindicated the City from the "gross caricature" it suffered in Dickens's Hard Times. Its origins and its four centuries of "barren history" are given with a touch of irony, but the rise of the cotton trade gets a straightforward account. Saintsbury warns the reader against the "element of the fantastic" in Disrael's Sybil, but finds "the reality and power of his drawing" superior to that of Mrs. Gaskell in Mary Barton. He recalls walks in the city's "sober streets" but inexplicably omits mention of the Grammar School and the Guardian, the two institutions he worked for and of which the city could be most rightly proud. Members of the Manchester School of Economics he saw as "totally cramped by education and inherited sympathies." He later recalled the city as "the foggiest and rainiest of all our industrial hells, except Sheffield ... a half Rembrandt, half Caillot picture." He had found it sociable, and he enjoyed the Rossettis, Turners, and Coxes in the museum. The book was the honest, competent product of the discipline journalism gave its author, and no more.
Whatever those few crowded months in Manchester offered the newlyweds, by September, 1868, the Saintsburys were settled in Guernsey where he was to serve as senior classical master at Elizabeth College for six years. This "Charmed Isle," one of the "Isles Fortunées," he knew from his 1867 tour. The islanders, he tells us, "included an unusually large proportion of persons of fair income, ancestral houses, and gentle blood; hospitality was abundant and the means of exercising it excellent. Liquor was cheap and "... for a miniature and manageable assemblage of amenities I do not think you can easily beat Guernsey." So he saw his life:
... teaching the classics and other things to decently bred youth for hours at which even a trade union leader could hardly grumble; enjoying the bounties of King Bacchus and my Lady Venus ... walking, whisting, waltzing; reading immense quantities of French and other literature; writing my first reviews for the Academy ... 'regarding the ocean' like my august neighbor and fellow incola M. Victor Hugo - in short, possessing almost all desirable possessions save one - to wit, money. And it was rather a comfort not to have that lest one should be in hopeless danger of Nemesis again.
Given this happy capsule memoir, the picture can be filled out. Paul Stapfer, the French master at Elizabeth College during Saintsbury's first years (1866-68), in his Victor Hugo <*_>a-grave<*/> Guernsey defines the society - from a French vantage point - as four very distinct classes, "les sixty, les forty, les twenty, et les ... rien du tout." The first of these, the nobility and the gentry, the officers of Fort George, and the "hauts fonctionnaires," admitted to their number the college masters who were Oxford to Cambridge men and foreigners of distinction. No class, Stapfer notes with amusement, acknowledged acquaintance with those below it, though even the lowest found someone to look down upon. For the college masters, acceptance afforded a pleasant social life at the top level, including that of the barracks, which Saintsbury recalled as "distinctly good" - perhaps because, to him, it seemed "college life over again" with some gambling (shillling whist and shilling loo), "plenty of fun and good fellowship." Guernsey, somewhat a world apart during the period of great social and political changes in England following on the Second Reform Bill, gave a detachment that Saintsbury, in later years, regarded as both good and bad: "The looker-on sees the drift of the game more clearly, but he appreciates the motives and aims of those who take part in its less fully than the players."
Saintsbury did not have the good luck to know Guernsey's most distinguished resident of this period, Victor Hugo, though on one occasion he "saw him plain" at a shop in French-speaking Saint Pierre when that eminent self-exile ejaculated to a shopkeeper who spoke French as well as he did, "Ah, Monsieur, je vien chercher des books, des vieux books." Saintsbury's great admiration for the poet Hugo, which had come earlier and was permanent, he shared with Stapfer for whom Hugo was always first among French writers. Stapfer took many walks with Hugo. During the few months that his career on Guernsey overlapped that of Saintsbury, this strong bond and their talk about things French must have given fresh impetus to the young Englishman's already developed French literary interest. He was reading "more French than any other literature and more novels than anything else in French." By the end of the 1860s he was accustomed to read for style in French as in other languages, though he never spoke French to his own satisfaction.
Stapfer, a good French scholar who was also interested in English literature, had taken his post to learn English, to be near Hugo, and to devote most of his time to his own writing. He was later professor at Grenoble and Bordeaux. At Guernsey, he relieved the boredom of teaching French grammar by producing Hernani with his older students in January, 1868, and by offering a series of outside literary lectures for young ladies. Although these met with minimal success, Saintsbury followed Stapfer's lead and the recommendation of John Oates, the headmaster, and in succeeding years at Guernsey was kept very busy (he notes eleven hours' work in one day) "with outside lectures and private coaching, not to mention reviewing." Saintsbury's lectures to a Young Ladies' Educational Association were on history and logic. Some time also had to be given by a confessed nonathlete to assisting with the college sports program.
Elizabeth College, founded in 1563, had been rechartered and reopened in 1824. Its course of study stipulated "Latin and Greek in all classes ... and English Classics in all classes ... to include history (general and scriptural), rhetoric, elocution and the belles lettres. All other subjects optional ...." The absence of science is shocking to a modern reader.
The Reverend John Oates, who had been vice principal for eight years, became principal in 1868. A scholar of Lincoln College and an intimate friend of Mark Pattison, Oates was genial and very hospitable. Saintsbury noted his "unscholarly indolence of temper, Pattisonian flour made up into dough with milk instead of gall, its yeast unsoured by any religious conversion and soft instead of hard baked." Oates presided over a relaxed and casual world, "une anarchie aimable, celle de l'age d'or ... un beau désordre et une confusion pleine de vie," according to Stapfer. Some of the confusion was due to thin walls through which the noises of all classes mingled as one, a confusion enhanced by the boys' trick of releasing live crabs into the classrooms, thus producing a merry chase and a resultant caning. Despite such disorder, the school's work was of a quality that won it three scholarships in 1870, on of these at Oxford. The student group then numbered more than a hundred.
Stapfer remarks in some surprise that these boys, unlike French boys, made a "progres en sagesse"; their growth in wisdom and "la raison" corresponded to their development from children into responsible young men. He deplores the use of the cane as peculiarly English - acceptable to parents and largely a matter of indifference to the victims. Saintsbury, less responsive to growing boys and more inured to the practice, says of his local military exemption (for which he paid 12s. 6d.): "One could not serve that State by caning small boys and loading and firing guns with blank cartridges at the same time."
Appointed on the recommendation of a native of Guernsey, Dr. McGrath, then Fellow and later President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Saintsbury found his teaching experience there more agreeable than that later at Elgin. Always strongly in favor of the discipline of classical languages, he once offered his own scheme for that ideal "State Education in Humane Letters" which Arnold sighed for: "... the classical languages, elementary mathematics, history and geography taught in the older fashion, and modern languages within reason, but all thoroughly drummed and rubbed in from the formal point of view."
As senior classical master, Saintsbury had his first opportunity to develop methods and see results. The fruit of these he presented to the Classical Association of Scotland in 1905. Giving high praise to his own Kings College School training, he specified that schoolboys should memorize large quantities of classical poetry, translate classical verse into English verse, and translate English and indeed all modern languages into Latin or Greek as well. That all such language teaching should be thoroughly 'literary' was his main theme - with a placing of the authors in the history of their own literature, and with literary comparisons. Elsewhere he cites specific methods, comparisons most specifically.
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Men Do, Women Are
The characteristics Gaskell designates as especially male or female are for her not necessarily embodied in a man or a woman. There is a prima facie connection between a person's sex and gender -and I use this latter term, although it is strictly a term in grammar, simply because it serves to distinguish between psychological and physical sex and has recently gained some currency -but the connection is not invariable or insoluble in Gaskell. It can be loosened. It often is. In many of her characters, therefore, sex and gender are dissociated, and we have to examine the circumstances in the individual instance before we can be sure who is which. The point, however, is not androgyny. Male and female are, for Gaskell, entirely different from one another. In her stereotypical way, Gaskell always assigns her characters, of whatever sex they are, characteristics that belong to one or to the other gender. And her distinctions are not limited by any means to people alone. Places, feelings, ideas, conditions, and a good many other things also have genders in her fiction. To an extent this is not unusual. Most societies, making divisions between what men and women do, distinguish their activities also, and many of Gaskell's associations are those common in her day. Courage, for example, is male. Charity, however, is female. Men have the right to express their feelings; women, by implication, do not (4:253).
Most of the metaphors Gaskell uses have genders in a similar manner. The demon is unequivocally male. Made of the passions she denied in creating 'Mrs. Gaskell,' the demon is 'Mrs. Gaskell's' antithesis. As she is the ideal woman, the demon is the unideal man. It is significant that Gaskell -clustering metaphors, as she does -thinks of France, the land of passion and in consequence of the demon, always as a male domain just as she thinks of England as female. It is common in her fiction for male characters to be French and for female to be English. The narrator's parents in 'My French Master' are divided in this way. In 'the Grey Woman,' there is again a man who, being daemonic, is French and a woman who is German, Germany being another country that is for Gaskell female like England.
The most important distinction for Gaskell between the female and the male is to be found in her description, in The Life of Charlotte Bront<*_>e-umlaut<*/>, of the different lots awaiting Branwell and the Bront<*_>e-umlaut<*/> girls. "There are always," Gaskell writes, "peculiar trials in the life of an only boy in a family of girls. He is expected to act a part in life; to do, while they are only to be" (LCB, p. 153). Gaskell had used these very words, also italicized, years earlier, in her conclusion to 'The Moorland Cottage,' in which she had eulogized Mrs. Buxton, a woman who would be, she wrote, remembered as one "who could do but little during her lifetime; who was doomed only to 'stand and wait'; who was meekly content to be gentle, holy, patient, and undefiled" (2:383). Men do, women are.
'The Moorland Cottage' develops this notion further when Mrs. Buxton attempts, being herself ideally feminine, to teach Maggie to become heroic in a female way. Maggie, like most of Gaskell's girls, begins with daemonic characteristics. She wants to play a heroic part, but she envisions herself in the role of someone who acts like Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc was, of course, a woman, but not to Gaskell a female type. Mrs. Buxton tries, instead, to teach Maggie what she calls 'noiseless' heroism by reminding her of women who have gone "through life quietly, with holy purposes in their hearts, to which they gave up pleasure and ease, in a soft, still succession of resolute days" (2:296). "Mrs. Gaskell suggests that Maggie, nagged and mistreated by her mother, "showed no little heroism" herself "in bearing meekly what she did every day" (2:296). A woman, thus, it is implied here, should not seek to act heroically. She must teach herself to endure, to invest her heroism in being.
Even a man, if he is female, must learn to realize his heroism, not in doing, but in being. This is the lesson Gaskell seeks to teach in her story 'The Sexton's Hero,' a tale she published in Howitt's Journal in September of 1847. The story concerns a man named Dawson who, being extremely religious, refuses to fight for the woman he loves when he is challenged by the sexton. The woman marries the sexton instead, and Dawson is branded a coward by everyone. He proves, however, he is not when, at the cost of his own life, he saves the sexton and his wife, who are about to drown in a flood. Leaping into the water, of course, Dawson is engaged in doing, but this is not his heroic moment. It is the moment only in which the sexton suddenly comes to realize that what was really heroic in Dawson was his initial refusal to fight and, even more, his quiet endurance of the contempt in which he was held all those years he was thought a coward. Having been feminized by religion, Dawson must for Gaskell become heroic in a female way. The sexton who, on Dawson's death, acquires his copy of the Bible and is converted to its ways, is feminized himself in turn. It is to preach this female heroism that he writes the story, in fact.
Nowhere in all of Gaskell's fiction is the idea that women are embodied as fully as in Cranford, a work that began as a single short story entitled 'The Last Generation in England' and appearing in Sartain's Union Magazine in July of 1849, but that, growing by installments published irregularly in Household Words between December of 1851 and May of 1853, reached the length of a short novel. The work is unusual in many ways, not in the pattern it reveals, but in the forms the patterns take. Generally, Gaskell does not, for instance, physically isolate what she sees as the male and female worlds. Most of her settings mix the two. But in Cranford she creates a place that is entirely female. There is, as well, a male place in the neighboring town of Drumble, but neither she nor we go there. We only hear of it now and then. To the extent that events in Drumble have an effect on events in Cranford, Drumble is important in the narrative. It is important too as a guide to the genders Gaskell assigns to a variety of doings, since she considers exclusively male all the activities of Drumble. Drumble is a large manufacturing town, concerned with business and with money, both of which are here defined as exclusively male domains. We know that money in Gaskell's mind is associated with love. Here we learn that men and women have different relationships to the image. Women need love. Men have it to give. And since the possession of love is male, so is the possession of money. The Cranford ladies know nothing of money. They never mention it, in fact (2:3). They know nothing of business either. The "most earnest and serious business" for the ladies of Cranford are card games, of which they are, in fact, very fond (2:80). Whenever a woman attempts to deal with money or business in Cranford, she fails. Thus, the heroine, Miss Matty, loses her money because her sister, rejecting advice from a Drumble businessman, invested their inheritance herself. Inevitably, the bank she chose for their investment goes bankrupt.
The man whose advice Miss Matty's sister would not take is the narrator's father. Gaskell must have begun the story not intending to make the narrator more than a formal figure through whom she would be able to tell her tale. At the beginning she is peripheral, mostly a witness to the events and only minimally a participant. She does not even acquire a name until we are halfway through the book, at which time she is called Mary Smith (2:164). But, as she kept on adding installments, Gaskell must have come to see her as an individual character. Little by little she gains a voice, then an actual personality, and eventually even a history. And it is obvious, as she develops, that Gaskell projects in Mary Smith her recollection of herself when she was about eighteen. The focus is on the usual details. Her mother is dead, her father is living, as Gaskell's was when she was eighteen. And her manner, which is kindly, gentle, funny, charming, sweet, yet incisive, shrewd, and impish, is exactly Gaskell's own.
Mary is a Drumble resident. Every so often, however, she feels the need to get away to Cranford. And this is the very need that drives Gaskell herself to write the tale. Since Drumble is male, it is the place in which, for Gaskell, the demon lives. There, she must always face confrontation, an endless struggle against her self. Therefore, like Mary Smith, she needs every so often to escape. She needs to get away from her demon to a completely female world, a world that does not threaten, that is, the composure of 'Mrs. Gaskell.' Gaskell created such a world for herself in her actual life. As Haldane has rightly pointed out, within her large circle of friends there was a very special group -Eliza Fox, the Winkworth sisters, Parthenope Nightingale, Mary Mohl, and a number of others as well -that consisted wholly of women. A similar circle exists in Cranford, some of the characters being modeled perhaps on people she knew in Manchester, others undoubtedly recreated out of the elderly ladies of Knutsford.
The town itself, whatever the source of the individual characters, is, as a fictional setting, a metaphor for the female place in the mind. That is why it is literally female. As Mary observes in her opening sentence, "In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses above a certain rent are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble" (2:1). Nothing seems less Amazonian than the little old ladies of Cranford, but Gaskell knows what she wants to say. The ladies of Cranford are Amazonian, not because they are large or powerful, but because they have banished men, because they have exiled the male principle.
The making of this female place is the central point of the story. If the incremental installments have a unifying theme, it is the freeing of Miss Matty, who embodies the female spirit, from the domination of men. Miss Matty is Gaskell's ideal woman. She has a fairly limited intellect. "'I never,'" she says, "'feel as if my mind was what people call very strong'" (2:151). But she has "patience," "humility," "sweetness" (2:158). She is the stuff of which, in Gaskell, is made the angel in the house. Her sister, Deborah, a different type, to whom I shall return in a moment, had dreamed as a girl of marrying an archdeacon so that she could write his charges, but Matty had had a different wish. "'I was never ambitious,'" she says, "'nor could I have written charges, but I thought I could manage a house (my mother used to call me her right hand), and I was always so fond of little children'" (2:128-29). In time she does in fact become -although she does not ever marry -an angel to those who live in her house: her servant, her servant's husband, and their child. And, like Ruth, she even extends her role as an angel to the community.
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SIX
For a World "Minute and vast and clear"
ELIZABETH BISHOP'S work demands that we look at how representation of the people and places of her life were part of her intense concern with representation itself: with drawing correspondences between word and experience, with the curious thingness of language, and with the question of accurate likeness-taking. Bishop's pragmatism, her gifts as an anatomist of appearance and sensation, as well as her treatment of her life as subject, should be firmly linked to the characterization of her work by Jarrell and others as a pursuit of the exact and the descriptive. Such a pursuit led Bishop to a special relation to the visual arts, manifested first as an intense curiosity about surrealism, and then, that interest fading, as an enduring concern with paintings and art objects as paradigmatic of her own relation to poetry.
Quite apart from any role that any single painter can be said to have played in her poetry, her connection to picture-making was direct, intense, and prolonged; she was both a maker and collector of pictures and objects throughout the whole of her life. We can catch glimpses of this involvement through her letters, from the frottages in the manner of Max Ernst that she reports sending to Marianne Moore, to the comic descriptions of herself as a painter in competition with her Brazilian cook, on down to the older self that made a box in homage to Joseph Cornell. Various examples of her painting also survive in possession of her heirs, and as covers for her books. Interviews early and late also stress the pleasure she took in finding and acquiring pieces of folk art. Miss Bishop in the world of her hand-worked birdcages, heirloom paintings, antique Bahian gilt mirrors, and beside the carved wood of large ship's figurehead, was clearly a find for those who believe in the extension of the mental through the material and visible.
The poems are full of movement. Still, there are moments, when through the art of her description, the poems themselves function almost as objects. Set firmly in their spaces, with very few poems attempting to use flashback or sharp breaks in time, they unroll across the unified surface of a map, follow the trajectory of a storm, or curve around a seashore, their canvas of expression unfolding with a strong directional sense, across a landscape or the surface of an object or animal from top to bottom by means of long, steady tracking shots. Bishop relies on enumeration, on stationing her redbud beside her dogwood, her deer beside a fence, or on counting and turning over her successive tropical leaves; she paints with color, indicates size and scale, illumination, and shadow, and depends on a strongly developed sense of the tactile. All of her observations appear in a logical and usually unbroken traverse of the poem's field. While the speakers of poems form 'The Man-Moth' on through to 'In the Waiting Room' may pause in vertigo, their dizzying homelessness is always at variance with the relatively stable spatial envelope of the poem.
Why this should be so seems a consequence of Bishop's determination to build substance from within the perpetually elusive and insubstantial sign. The ultimate realist, she aims to load and counterweight the always unsatisfactory immateriality of the poem and its inevitably symbolic nature with a vigorous spread of the sensory and immediate: with the goods of observation. Like the painter she occasionally became, Bishop as poet dealt with the problem of illusionism created by the act of reading common to both poetry and painting. The page is a way station, a port. Reading, one wants to fall through the print on the paper, to penetrate its light scrim, behind whose features through some peculiar method of evocation are suddenly located an interior body state, which is literally neither here nor there, but in some spaceless energy of mind, created by mind, off page. Bishop's fascination with objects, with the visual look and feel of existence, again and again calls up this questionable relation between internal and external, between depth and surface authenticity.
A poet generally compelled by mutability, by changing weathers, dissolving landscapes, and flooding memory, her skills are most often revealed in the difficult marriage of physically dimensionless language to a shifting, dimensional world. Like the Man-Moth seeking the moon in Bishop's poem of the same name, writing is a broad investigation of surface to which the poet is helplessly but quite heroically committed:<O_>poem<O/>
The Man-Moth fails, but the black scrolls of the poet are the record of his partial success. As Bishop saw it in 'Objects & Apparitions,' her translation of Octavio Paz's tribute to Joseph Cornell, both language and object meet in a glancing state of equality in their reflection of the enduring inner world:<O_>poem<O/>
Symbol-making, for Bishop, was always both verbal and pictorial.
The firm connection to the visual arts engages more than a single question of influence, a question, for instance, of how she may have dealt at the outset of her career with the surrealist Max Ernst or later with the box-maker Joseph Cornell. Rather, we need to ask first how Bishop treated vision itself. In her work, against what her sharp eyes see, she holds in disturbing and provocative tension what the body feels and what the mind knows and remembers. Two interrelated concerns, the problematic shifts between external and internal realities, and the problem of illusionism, of the relevance of representations of space in the largely nonspatial, nonphysical medium of the lyric poem, haunt her. In her strange man-moths, pulsating weeds, and in the feral activity of her maps, lighthouses, monuments, snails, sandpipers, and paper balloons, she makes stubbornly visible the elusive and strange richness in much of what we blindly label the ordinary and the plainly domestic. In that estrangement of the familiar she invites comparison with the surrealists.
In 'Elizabeth Bishop's Surrealist Inheritance,' Richard Mullen offered the first, and to date most extensive, treatment of Bishop and the visual arts. Mullen focuses at least as much on Bishop's divergence from surrealist practice as on her apparent submissions to its directives. The most important difference he identifies as Bishop's focus on objects; for Breton and other surrealists, "there were no objects, only subjects. They had no interest in the natural world per se." For Bishop, says Mullen, the "strangeness of our subjective selves, the queer struggle between conscious and unconscious, is projected outward into a world where the 'thingness of things' dominates."
In persuasive detail Mullen shows how Bishop shared with the surrealists a conviction about the importance of the disjunctive relations between our sleeping and waking minds, and a copious use of techniques of dissociation and displacement in description. Inversions and enlargements of scale, sudden and surprising shifts in point of view through personification, and an always subtle, but pervasive emphasis on dreamscape, mark her work from first to last. "I use dream material whenever I am lucky enough to have any," she wrote to Anne Stevenson in March 1963.
Mullen demonstrates at length how two poems drew directly and substantially from surrealist sources. In his correspondence with Bishop, she acknowledged, if a little dismissively, her wide reading of surrealist poetry and prose, including Francis Ponge. In comparing her prose poem, 'Giant Snail' with Ponge's 'Snails' from Le Parti Pris des Choses, Mullen flags some striking parallels in language and imagery between the two texts. Of her acquaintance with surrealist graphic art, Bishop writes: "I didn't know any of the surrealist writers or painters - I just met 2 or 3 painters, that's all." Mullen points out that she owned an early edition of Max Ernst's Histoire Naturelle; Bishop also acknowledges that the technique of frottage that Ernst illustrates therein produced her poem, 'The Monument.'
In the process of frottage, or rubbing, which Ernst described as an "optical excitant of somnolent vision," the artist placed paper across wood or other surfaces and objects, and then rubbed away at the paper with blacklead. The subsequent drawing produced the "optical excitant," or object of meditation, which produced further drawings: "the drawings thus obtained steadily lose, thanks to a series of suggestions and transmutations occurring to one spontaneously - the character of the material being studied - wood - and assume the aspect of unbelievably clear images of a nature probably able to reveal the first cause of the obsession or to produce a simulacrum thereof." Ernst invented frottage after a revery into the hours of childhood, when he remembered staring at an imitation mahogany panel across from his bed at naptime.
Bishop, who may have been sympathetically drawn not only by the technique but by the childhood source of it, was soon manufacturing frottages at a great rate, and as she wrote to Marianne Moore rather mockingly, "I can turn them out by the dozen now and shall send you one." But her poem 'The Monument' offers more direct evidence of this new pastime. Like Ernst's frottages, Bishop's verbal exercise uses its wooden sea-surface as springboard into a meditation on the strange space of art's reality, both within and without, penetrable and impenetrable, curiously living and dead, material and immaterial. The poem describes an allegorized object standing in for the artist's relation to the world:<O_>poem<O/>
In the play of its altering pronouns, moving freely between singular and plural, and in working out the drama of its dialectal voices, the poem exploits the work of art's peek-a-boo vantages vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis perceiver, perceived, and the idea of perception itself. Past her twenties, Bishop never did anything quite so programmatically allegorical again.
Mullen puts his finger decisively on the growing causes for Bishop's dissatisfaction with surrealism. There are generally four reasons: first, the surrealist lack of interest in the natural object; second, the surrealist privileging of the realm of the unconscious over the conscious (Bishop records them as fluctuating in dominance but equal in importance); third, their emphasis on the revolutionary impact of disintegrating orders of perception (Bishop concerned herself with a balanced dialectic between associative and dissociative powers of perception); and fourth, the surrealist lack of faith in conventional language and logic.
But we ought not overlook the generally youthful character of Bishop's experiments with surrealism. While her preoccupation with oneiric imagery only deepened throughout a working life in poetry, her eventual resistance to surrealist practice came openly to the surface in several ways. In 1946, in a letter to Ferris Greenslet, her editor at Houghton Mifflin, she rushes in to avert a public association with Max Ernst by way of jacket copy. In some obvious distress she writes: "In the letter that Marianne Moore wrote for me she commented on some likeness to the painter Max Ernst. Although many years ago I once admired one of Ernst's albums I believe that Miss Moore is mistaken about his ever having been an influence, and since I have disliked all of his painting intensely and am not a surrealist I think it would be misleading to mention my name in connection with his."
By the early 1960s, after acknowledging Ernst's role in the composition of 'The Monument,' Bishop was still busy trying to stamp out all talk of influence. In January 1964 she writes to Anne Stevenson: "You mention Ernst again. Oh dear - I wish I'd never mentioned him at all, because I think he's a dreadful painter." But her general antagonism was already visible in unpublished notebooks of the thirties and forties. In one jotting she writes: "Semi-surrealist poetry terrifies me because of the sense of irresponsibility & [indecipherable] [wild?] danger it gives of the mind being 'broken down' - I want to produce the opposite effect." Somewhat later, in notes about her reading of an episode from Crevecoeur, she says, under the heading of 'Tact & Embarrassment': "Why in 'Letters From an American Farmer' does it embarrass one when he speaks of the wasp on the child's eyelid, etc.? The whole story of the wasp-nest is fantastic, surrealistic, we'd say now. Is surrealism just a new method of dealing bold-facedly with what is embarrassing?
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CHAPTER 5
Pathfinding
It must have been in the spring of 1920. The end of the First World War had thrown Germany's youth into great turmoil. The reins of power had fallen from the hands of a deeply disillusioned older generation, and the younger one drew together in larger and smaller groups in an attempt to blaze new paths, or at least to discover a new star to steer by."
With these opening words Heisenberg set the stage for his 1969 reminiscences, Der Teil und das Ganze (English title: Physics and Beyond). He began not with childhood or adolescence but with the period that most profoundly influenced him as both scientist and citizen - the chaotic years immediately following World War I. And he focused neither on family nor on formal education but rather on his participation in the postwar German youth movement, the experience that most directly affected the formation of his adult values.
The first chapter of Physics and Beyond refers to Werner's diverse, often difficult and confusing experiences during the early postwar years. Between neo-Socratic dialogues on the nature of atoms, Heisenberg discusses his assistance in suppressing the Bavarian soviet republic, his remembered reading of Plato, and his study of textbook atoms. He also recalls debates with his comrades about the lost war, the meaning of social order, the search for order within their own lives, and their developing notions of nature and homeland. One theme emerges clearly from this rather muddled account: the desire for order in all aspects of thought and life. Heisenberg and his friends longed to regain a sense of purpose and belonging - and they found it with each other in the youth movement.
For Heisenberg himself, there were added benefits. The youth movement became a vehicle for his adolescent rebellion, adventurous impulses, and budding leadership qualities. It spurred his intellectual independence, taught him how his primary interests - science and music - could transcend the chaos of daily life, and gave him close and secure friendships with his comrades, with whom he formed valuable lifelong relationships.
As Heisenberg wrote in the opening lines of Physics and Beyond, the postwar youth movement grew out of a profound sense of crisis that engendered a spirit of rebellion among bourgeois German youth after the collapse of the old order at the close of the world war. But the roots of rebellion reached back into the prewar decades. Young people increasingly detested the charades of bourgeois propriety and nationalistic sabre rattling and felt no desire to pattern their lives on them. By the same token, middle-class society throughout Europe provided little place at that time for adolescence, the crucial transition from childhood to adult roles. Bourgeois youth, like the children seen in Renaissance paintings, were expected to behave like miniature adults, to prepare for their adult careers and future station in life, and to accept without question the values and ideals handed to them.
The rapid urbanization of Germany at the end of the nineteenth century brought with it the problem of what to do with young people in large cities. Where could they come together outside school? Where could they find the adventure, romance, and excitement of youth? Before the war, some urban youngsters literally headed for the hills, seeking to rediscover basic values in the romance of nature, music, dance, and Germanic ritual. Groups like the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel (Migratory Birds) and the Freideutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) embodied the spirit of prewar youthful rebellion in northern Germany, but neither survived the war intact. Of the 11,000 members of the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel, 7000 perished in the war; the Freideutsche Jugend fragmented into factions.
For those too young to fight, the state provided youth organizations, paramilitary training, and agricultural assistance work. Youngsters were aggressively indoctrinated with nationalistic values to prepare them for the task their elders set them: to fight and die in a brutal war. Those not battling at the front struggled at home with bitter cold, desperate privations, and near starvation. How carefree can a teenager be when he grows so weak from hunger that he falls off his bicycle into a ditch?
The sudden, humiliating defeat of Germany, the loss of friends and relatives, the collapse of the old regime, the political chaos that ensued, and the forced democratization of their schools traumatized middle-class youngsters, leaving them angry and mistrustful. "A gaping hole opened up for us young people," recalls Wolfgang R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del, one of Heisenberg's comrades. Their response: "We're going to make something for ourselves instead, without an organization from above."
The situation was particularly acute for bourgeois Bavarian youngsters, many of whom belonged to the only existing youth organization, the gymnasium's Military Preparedness Association. Few had any use for the North German, 'Prussian' youth groups, including the tradition-minded Boy Scouts. The Boy Scouts had originated in England and had spread to Germany in 1909, where they were called Pfadfinder (Pathfinders). Like their English counterparts, German Pathfinders were paramilitary and puritanical, but unlike the English Scouts they focused less on international ideals and more on preparing their young members to fit into existing German adult social structure. Two years after the First Munich Pathfinder Troop was founded in 1909, it joined the state-supported Military Preparedness Association.
At war's end, the adult-led Preparedness Association lost any raison d'<*_>e-circ<*/>tre, and Pathfinder units began dropping out. In January 1919, a Pathfinder troop in Regensburg rebelled against the 'decadent' adult values that, in their view, had failed to preserve the monarchy. At the same time, they rejected socialist attempts to dilute the cultural elite by democratizing their schools. The Regensburg troop quit the state's Preparedness Association and pushed for a renewal of all German Pathfinders, and ultimately society itself, through the ideals of the Wanderv<*_>o-umlaut<*/>gel - a genuine Jugendbewegung (youth movement) that would replace adult Jugendpflege (youth care).
On Easter Sunday 1919, at the height of the soviet republic's power, the equally traumatized Munich troop followed Regensburg's example. A month later, during Hoffman's socialist restoration, the Preparedness Association changed its name to the more youthful-sounding Jungbayernbund (Young Bavaria League), and in the last months of the school year, during the bloody mopping-up operations in Munich, a group of Preparedness boys at the Max-Gymnasium debated their future.
Wolfgang (Wolfi) R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del, then 13 years old, had belonged only briefly to the Max-Gymnasium's Preparedness unit before it changed its name and some of its activities. Under intense pressure from their elders to support the socialist restoration, he and his friends now resisted 'youth care' under any name. Wolfi, his older brother Eberhard, and several other boys from their Preparedness unit gathered one day during recess at the old fountain in the courtyard of the Max-Gymnasium. They agreed to reject adult youth care but still wanted the guidance of an elder. They decided to seek an older boy of suitable character to replace teachers and adults as their leader. At Wolfi's suggestion they turned to a well-respected older group leader in the Young Bavaria League - Werner Heisenberg.
Werner satisfied every prerequisite: he was an older student, disillusioned with youth care, well liked and well regarded at the school for his mathematical and musical talents, and endowed with intellectual self-confidence, good looks, and leadership qualities. He was also known as "a very great friend of nature," familiar with the mountains and countryside - a perfect choice. Werner, then 17, in the eighth gymnasium grade, and just finishing his military duties following the suppression of the soviet republic, readily accepted the boys' invitation. By the summer of 1919 he was guiding Wolfi and eight or nine of Wolfi's friends into the postwar world.
Gruppe Heisenberg, as it was known, belonged at first to the Regensburg reform movement within the Young Bavaria League, then became independent in 1921. It remained closely associated with the independent Regensburg faction and officially rejoined it in 1922. According to Gottfried Simmerding, one of Wolfi R<*_>u-umlaut<*/>del's classmates who joined Gruppe Heisenberg in the fall of 1919, the group was then part of Troop B18 of the Young Bavaria League, then headed by Dr. Kemmer, the gymnasium's former Preparedness commander and one of Werner's former teachers. The troop consisted at the time of six or seven groups led by Hans Schlenk, Heisenberg's friend in grade 9B and a war veteran who later became a well-known actor. Most of the troop members had previously served in the agricultural assistance service and in Major Pfl<*_>u-umlaut<*/>gel's schoolboy unit during the suppression of the soviet republic.
Besides Werner, the group leaders in Troop B18 included Heisenberg's comrades Kurt Pfl<*_>u-umlaut<*/>gel and Werner Marwede. Marwede's younger brother Heini (Heinrich) helped found Gruppe Heisenberg. Werner's group met regularly with the other boys in Troop B18 in several basement rooms provided by the Max-Gymnasium; after breaking with the Young Bavaria League, they met in the Heisenberg home.
Just days after the formation of Gruppe Heisenberg, the Regensburg reformers, led by Franz Ludwig Habbel, a wounded war veteran, and Ludwig Voggenreiter, a publisher's son, called a meeting of all Pathfinder leaders interested in reform. Held on the weekend of August 1-3, 1919, the meeting took place in a medieval castle, Schloss Prunn, in the Altm<*_>u-umlaut<*/>hl River valley near Regensburg. Group leader Heisenberg was still in the throes of his own postwar and postsoviet confusion when he encountered a young man his age on Leopoldstrasse near the university who, as he recalled it, told him of the Schloss Prunn meeting in the passionate words of an inspired youth: "'All of us intend to be there, and we want you to come. Everyone should come. We want to find out for ourselves what sort of future we should build.' His voice had the kind of edge I had not heard before. So I decided to go to Schloss Prunn, and Kurt wanted to join me."
On Friday, August 1, young Werner, with his knapsack and a guitar, took the train with Kurt to Kelheim at the end of the Altm<*_>u-umlaut<*/>hl Valley. There they joined a stream of boys hiking the remaining several kilometers to the castle. The valley and castle made an ideal romantic setting for the adolescent adventure. The narrow valley, a prehistoric Danube River bed, is lined by steep cliffs and jutting rocks. The castle, still in existence, perches precariously at the top of one of the cliffs, and above it lies a large wood where the boys pitched their tents.
About 250 Pathfinders found their way from all over Germany and from Vienna, Austria, to the meeting. Gathered in their castle in the sky, the boys were alone at last to debate the questions of the day that concerned them most: Had the German soldiers fallen in vain, now that the war was lost? How should young people respond to the new political situation? How should they interpret Boy Scout ideals of internationalism, self-sacrifice, and tradition? But the crucial questions were those of any reform movement: How was the movement to define itself, and how was it to address the decadent mass society in which it existed? The answers were vital to Werner, who had hoped to discover his own order at the castle - a philosophical, social, even personal harmony. "I myself was much too unsure," he recalled, "to join in the debates, but I listened to them and thought about the concept of order myself."
Incredibly, their discussions were recorded and a transcript later published in Der Weisse Ritter (The White Knight), the periodical of reform-movement leaders. The meeting was intended to be of lasting significance. The transcript and related writings vividly display the German youth rebellion - indeed, the rebellion of German society at large - against the modernity of urban, industrial 'civilization' and the bitter sense of loss of common purpose, of meaningful traditions, of well-grounded values with the passing of a seemingly simpler age. According to the transcript, the young men agreed that their society had declined into lifeless mechanism, capitalistic greed, urban anonymity, and personal hypocrisy. Young people had to cut the chains of material and moral decadence. A year earlier, Regensburg reformer Franz Ludwig Habbel had declared: "The first demand of our conviction is for truth and uprightness.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="35">
CHAPTER 5
Boston
LOOKING BACK over his own literary apprenticeship, Robert Lowell dated a turning point from the day in the spring of 1937 when he drove into the "frail agrarian mailbox post" of Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon's house in Tennessee. "I had crashed the civilization of the South," was the droll, supercilious way he put it two decades later. He got out of his car to disguise the damage to the rickety post and was promptly welcomed by the southern literary elite as a valuable rebel from New England: a renegade from the Lowell clan was a real coup for the Fugitives. The mythic status they conferred upon him - "I too was part of a legend. I was Northern, disembodied, a Platonist, a Puritan, an abolitionist" - gave him one of the literary themes that dominated his early writing and underlay all his work.
Jean Stafford's own story of arrival was a nightmarishly distorted echo. A year and a half later, home from Kenyon on Christmas vacation in 1938, Lowell smashed his parents' car, with Stafford in the passenger seat, into a wall in a dead-end Cambridge street. She was rushed to the hospital with "massive head injuries," as a friend described it, "everything fractured, skull, nose, jaw, everything." The damage would never be entirely disguised, and Stafford was soon made to feel she had 'crashed' the civilization of Boston - rudely, not heroically. Lowell's parents adopted an attitude of chilling detachment from the unpedigreed interloper. Yet for Stafford the collision took on symbolic dimensions that helped give her the themes around which her emerging style matured. Inspiration did not come immediately; her head needed mending, and the symbols required time to take shape. In fact, Stafford had another unsuccessful novel to go before she found the frame and images, and the distance, to sustain a narrative.
The disastrous car ride with Lowell, a notoriously bad driver who had probably been drinking that evening, was the climax of the high drama that had begun two months earlier when Stafford escaped from Iowa in the middle of the night. Soon after she finally surfaced in Cambridge in November, she had confessed to Hightower the cause of her delay in arriving - the rendevousrendezvous with Lowell in Cleveland. Having rearranged his life and rented more spacious rooms to welcome Stafford, Hightower understandably felt betrayed. But he trusted her claim that she was afraid of Cal, and made clear that he was still ready to try living with her.
Lowell certainly was far from the low-key suitor she was used to from her years with Hightower. Cal's romantic history before Stafford had consisted of a swift, fierce, finally aborted campaign two years earlier to marry a twenty-four-year-old Boston debutante, Anne Dick, an unlikely match opposed by his parents - which had only spurred Lowell on. His father had been the victim of his violent zeal on that occasion: protesting his parents' meddling disapproval, Cal appeared on their doorstep and knocked his father down in the front hallway while his mother watched.
Stafford had a taste of Lowell's wild determination during a visit from him in Cambridge over Thanksgiving when, she wrote to her friend Mock, "he got savage and I got scared." The issue was marriage, she said, which he insisted on and she resisted. "A friend of his, a young man from Harvard College," she went on, "told me in a private interview that Mr. L. wanted me more than anything else in his life and that I wd. never be free of him, that he will continue to track me down as long as I live, a very pleasant thought. It makes me perfectly sick because he is an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet."
How much of the account reflected her typical dramatizing is hard to say, but she was evidently unnerved. Hightower's apartment was not a workable haven, and she soon told him that she had better move out to Concord to be safe. Stafford clearly wanted distance from Hightower too, or at least couldn't manage in the flesh the intimacy she had described in her letters from Iowa. "The full articulation of passionate love" didn't happen with the fevered eagerness she had conjured in words; living together faltered from the start, when Stafford told Hightower she was frigid. Whatever she meant by it, and whether or not it was true, he understood the message. It was one more stunning reversal, but the friendship didn't collapse.
They continued to see each other after she moved to Concord, and Hightower planned a modest Christmas celebration. But on December 21 he received an urgent message to call Mount Auburn Hospital. He found Stafford swaddled in bandages and, learning of the accident, discovered that she hadn't kept Lowell at a safe distance after all. A loyal bedside visitor for several weeks, Hightower finally sent a letter announcing the end of their relationship, to which Stafford replied with an atypically unadorned indictment of herself: "I will say nothing, only this: I love you, but my selfishness is so all consuming that I can't help hurting you." Two weeks alter, she adorned it somewhat: "I want children, I want a house. I want to be a faithful woman. I want those things more than I want my present life of a writer, but I shall have none because my fear will make me unfaithful and desire cannot now be hoped for, it is too late and I have been too much revolted." It was an echo of her declarations of frigidity and of the journal entry about her profound loneliness that she had sent him over the summer: here too she viewed herself tragically, as both victim and victimizer, maintaining that her "life of a writer" was no compensation for the emotional commitment and sexual fulfillment that eluded her.
Once Hightower had retreated, Stafford had few other places to turn during a very painful convalescence. Neither Lowell nor the Atlantic Monthly Press - the other Boston attractions that had drawn her - proved a source of much support. Lowell was not even at hand. He returned to Kenyon for the spring term of his junior year, leaving Blair Clark, a friend from his prep school days at St. Mark's, to help Stafford deal with the lawsuit it had been agreed she would file against Lowell to pay for her hospitalization. Clark was also supposed to protect her from Lowell's parents, which was a full-time job, if the rumors that reached Cal in Ohio about the Lowell's bullying conduct toward her were to be believed. "About Boston," Lowell chided his parents in the summer, "I gather many people think you have behaved shabbily about Jean's accident. Such opinion is not my concern yet I cannot feel the action of my family has in all cases been ethicilly [sic] ideal."
Stafford hadn't managed to establish a literary life in Boston that offered much relief or gratification either, though she had been busy making herself known at the Atlantic Monthly Press from the moment she arrived. Her Neville manuscript, based on her Stephens experience, earned her praise from the editors there, whose report judged that "she can handle the English language as a skilled carpenter handles a chisel - with ease, deftness, accuracy, and rhythm," but they indicated that she would have to rework it completely before they would consider a contract. In fact, Edward Weeks, the editor in chief, went so far as to suggest a rough outline for a fundamental overhaul of her "ironic, heartless story of a small college community" in a memo to another editor:
It seems to me that if the girl can link together the three points of interest now visible in her work (1) Gretchen's affection for her German professor father and her revolt form the ranch (2) college life with its stimulus and dissatisfaction (3) and her experiences in Germany where presumably she finds that there are worse things than the life she has run away from in the United States, she would have a good book. I should presume that if parts 2 and 3 were bound together with a love story, the book would have a rising interest which it at present seems to lack.
Stafford was prepared to be a docile, and speedy, student. Eight days later, on December 9, Archie Ogden sent her a check for two hundred and fifty dollars as an option on the book and said they looked forward to a "sizable portion" of the manuscript six months later, on June 1, 1939.
The guidance Stafford received didn't sound very promising. What Weeks had extracted from Stafford's ungainly Neville undertaking - a jumbled gallery of satiric portraits hung on a plot line too arbitrary and ludicrous to be compelling - was a broad (and banal) outline of her autobiography. That was exactly what she had been trying to bury beneath the more objective enterprise of a larger social satire, at the advice of the readers of her first solipsistic venture, Which No Vicissitude. Not that Weeks had any reason to know the creative history of this fledgling writer, but even by his own standards, which were apparently mainly commercial, his advice was dubious. After all, he and his staff had just told her that the college theme was rather narrow and overdone, and a year earlier she had sent sections of her Germany diary to the Atlantic Monthly at the suggestion of Howard Mumford Jones, only to meet the objection that "there is too much about Germany on the market at present."
The prospects for the book looked even less promising two weeks later, when Stafford found herself in the hospital, with a crushed nose, a broken cheekbone, and a skull fractured in several places. Ogden urged her to give "no further thought to that novel of yours until relaxation has taken every last kink out of your cranium," but relaxation didn't seem to be what Stafford wanted - and it certainly wasn't what she got. After spending roughly a month in the hospital, she had to return twice in the spring for harrowing surgery on her nose. Her convalesence convalescence was extremely uncomfortable (along with nose troubles and difficulty breathing, she was plagued by headaches). And it was lonely, though she didn't go straight back to her Concord room. She was welcomed first by the Ogdens, with whom she had become friendly; then an acquaintance put her in touch with a wealthy Milton, Massachusetts, family, who took her in. Still, she felt bereft of close companions and was apparently finding solace in solitary drinking. By the summer, she admitted, however jokingly, to some concern: "I have taken the veil and at the moment do not think I will become alchoholic [sic]," she wrote to Hightower.
Meanwhile, the negotiations with Lowell, not to speak of those with his parents, were far from smooth. Once again, Stafford's relationship with a man was radically unstable. His pursuit apparently continued to be unnervingly intense; he tracked her down at a friend's apartment near dawn during a visit she made to New York that spring. She in turn continued to be thoroughly unpredictable, now eager to see him, now ready to denounce him. After welcoming Lowell's company in New York, she anticipated his return to Boston for Easter vacation with trepidation. It seems that another trip to New York, during which she had seen Ford Madox Ford and his wife, had revived her fears. In a note to the Ogdens, she reported only half facetiously that the Fords, "convinced that Cal Lowell is really pathological and capable of murder, told me such horrible things about him that I am thinking of pressing Stitch [Evarts, her lawyer] into service to get out an injunction against him. He is due to arrive next week. I may have to find a hiding place." but she didn't, and when he arrived Lowell seemed "completely metamorphosed," she said later. They enjoyed a genteel time visiting his elegant relatives, and by the time Lowell returned to Kenyon to finish the spring term, they were engaged, though Stafford kept the betrothal a secret.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="36">
MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY
On Trial with Ernest
THROUGHOUT THE MID-1930s, Archibald MacLeish continued to produce quantities of copy for the columns of Fortune. As a result of his eminence and his sympathy with the New Deal, he covered the government beat in Washington, turning out stories on inflation, taxation, the NRA (National Recovery Act), and social security. But he was also dispatched on special assignment to destinations far more distant than Washington, D.C. He did farming stories in Iowa and Montana, and he journeyed to three different continents - Europe, Asia, and South America - for Luce's magazine. Despite these frequent trips, during this period MacLeish solidified his family relationships and reached new, and sometimes bitter, levels of understanding about his friendships.
On a trip to England and France in the spring of 1933, he combined his journalistic duties for Fortune with a voyage around the Mediterranean on the Murphys' new hundred-foot schooner, Weatherbird. In England he was doing research for a story on Harry Selfridge, the American-born "merchant prince of Oxford Street." One Sunday he saw much of the English isle when "young bucko Selfridge" hoisted him into the sky in the rumble seat of his Puss Moth for a morning trip to Cambridge, a teatime visit in the west counties, and back to London for the evening. "Imagine any other country calling a [flying] machine a Puss Moth," he wrote Hemingway. He escaped to Paris on the day before Good Friday, accompanied by a mob of English tourists munching on buns "so as not to have to eat that horrible French food." Aboard the Weatherbird there wasn't much to do, but the company and the food were fine, and he and Ada came back rested.
No sooner had they returned to the States than a wire arrived from Hemingway, who was outraged by Max Eastman's New Republic review of his book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. "Bull in the Afternoon," the review was called, and that was bad enough. What most troubled Hemingway, though, were Eastman's slurs against his manhood. Hemingway wore "false hair" on his literary chest, Eastman wrote. "It is of course a commonplace that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man," he added. Delighted to serve as his friend's paladin, Archie immediately wrote Bruce Bliven, editor of the New Republic, objecting to the scurrilous remarks. In fact it was "a commonplace" among "the young sensitives" who envied Hemingway his accomplishment to impugn his masculinity, MacLeish pointed out. His letter set out to correct this slander. He had thrice seen Hemingway in danger, Archie wrote, "once at sea, once in the mountains and once on a Spanish street." He had also seen others in similar positions during the war. But no one had ever impressed him "as strongly as has Mr. Hemingway with his complete confidence in his own courage, nor has any other man more completely justified that confidence in the event." As for the issue of virility, he could only refer Mr. Eastman to the birth records of Paris and Kansas City.
Bliven declined to print the letter. Instead he showed it to Eastman, who wrote Archie in return that he had intended nothing of the sort, please believe him. Nor would Bliven publish a three-sentence counter-attack from Hemingway himself. He was "through with politeness in letters," a frustrated Archie wrote John Bishop. "Hereafter I am going to hit where and when I can and take whatever they have to send back." At the same time, he assured Hemingway that no one but Ada knew of Ernest's cable and no one ever would as far as he was concerned. Besides, he would have written to object to Eastman's foul, filthy article without Hemingway's wire. There the matter rested until, four years later, Hemingway and Eastman met unexpectedly in Max Perkin's office at Scribners and engaged in a brief, inconsequential wrestling match.
Although his attempt at championing Ernest's cause hadn't worked out, Hemingway was moved to remember Archie's kindness to him over the years: coming out to Billings to visit him after he'd broken his arm, for example, and keeping his "god damned head working" during the Paris winter of 1926-27, when he was leaving Hadley for Pauline. Winner Take Nothing, his next book of stories, published in October, was dedicated to "A. MacLeish." The ambiguity was deliberate. When Archie thanked him for the dedication, Ernest said, "What makes you think you're A. MacLeish?" By not spelling it out, Hemingway managed to acknowledge a debt to Ada as well as to Archie.
Besides inviting a response to the Eastman 'false hair' review, Ernest asked another favor of Archie in the summer of 1933. Jane Mason, the beautiful and sexually adventurous young wife of Grant Mason, Pan Am's man in Havana, landed in Doctors Hospital, New York, and Ernest - who was almost certainly her lover - asked MacLeish to visit her there. Jane's hospitalization was a consequence of not one but two accidents. In the first of these, she drove her Packard down a forty-foot embankment to avoid an oncoming bus. A few days later, she jumped off the second-story balcony of her home in Cuba and broke her back. Her husband chose to regard this as a grandstand play for sympathy, and shipped her off alone for recuperation and psychiatric treatment in New York. Hemingway, who regarded Grant Mason as "Husbandus Americanus Yalemaniensus Twirpi Ciego," was more sympathetic to Jane's plight. She had had the bad luck to marry the wrong husband, he wrote Archie, and it was "no fun to break your bloody back at 25." At the same time, characteristically, Ernest could be cruel about her situation. He'd tried to write a story, he said, that began, "Every spring Mrs. M. wanted to marry someone else but in the spring of 1933 she broke her back." She had done herself this injury, it was widely thought in Havana, out of her despairing love for Ernest. How much of this Archie knew is unclear, but he had already visited Jane in the hospital at Ernest's request once before, when she came to New York for a minor operation in May 1932. So he of course went to see her again in 1933, and this time stayed long enough to become friends. Or at least they were on good enough terms so that when they met in London two years later, she tried to arrange a private interview for Archie, who was writing a Fortune article on King George V, with the Prince of Wales. She was by this time something of a celebrated international beauty, one who had just been on safari in Africa "with 14 men" and in England was bidden to dine with the prince (who would before long give up his claim to the throne by marrying another previously wed American woman).
Apparently, when she got back to Cuba from these adventures, Jane told Hemingway that his friend MacLeish had made a pass at her, though she had only "sisterly feelings" toward him. Those were the only kind of feelings she was invited to have, Archie wrote Ernest early in 1936. Her remark had "a damned unpleasant connotation," and Archie "resented the hell out of it." Jane Mason, he said by way of summing up, "was the only person that I can think of offhand who does what she does, and the only one who has done what is to date the most considerable injury anyone has done me: the effective destruction of one of the few human relationships I ever gave a deep damn about." Hemingway was now disillusioned about Jane also. "As for your sisterhood pal she is a bitch say i and am documented," he replied. It seems clear that Jane Mason's physical attractions and fickle ways helped to break down the Hemingway-MacLeish friendship.
This relationship followed a pattern in the 1930s. Ernest would eagerly encourage Archie to join him at Key West. Usually Archie could not take the time, and when he did, he wished he hadn't. This was the case during their Dry Tortugas journey in 1932, and again in May 1934. On the latter occasion they were fishing on the Gulf Stream, and MacLeish hooked a sailfish. Hemingway had warned him in advance to give the sailfish plenty of slack, since striking too soon might jerk the bait out of his jaws. But Archie, seasick in the rough weather and excited at the sight of the sailfish leaping, could not resist the temptation to strike. According to Arnold Samuelson, a young would-be writer who went along on that trip, Ernest shouted a series of commands to accompany this episode. "Don't strike until I tell you. There! He hit it! Slack to him! Slack to him!!! Shit! Why the hell didn't you slack to him?" Once again, as during the episode of the fire in 1932, Archie had not lived up to Ernest's expectations under the pressure of action. In the aftermath of this visit, Hemingway wrote Waldo Peirce that from this point on he was only going to like the people he liked, not the bastards who liked him.
Archie went away stung by Ernest's criticism, yet soon was prepared, "sullen resentful Scot" though he was, to forget the insult and resume the friendship. In July 1934 he wrote Ernest that he'd been asked to do an article on him by Henry Seidel Canby at the Saturday Review. Go ahead, Ernest wrote back. "If you don't he will get somebody that no likum dog." But stick to the work and lay off his person, Hemingway advised. He wasn't interested in reading about his family or his religion, his war experiences or his high school sports career. In the end MacLeish decided not to do the article. "I knew Ernest well enough to know that anything I wrote about him would be wrong." The aborted connection with the Saturday Review proved to be fortunate, however. In June 1935 the magazine was considering an article on Hemingway by the psychiatrist who had treated Jane Mason. MacLeish heard about this, got hold of a copy, found it to be "just shit," and persuaded the editors not to run it. Alerting Hemingway to these events, Archie added that he hoped Ernest wouldn't think he'd been "interfering again," as in the New Republic fiasco. By now Hemingway was again urging MacLeish to join him on the Gulf Stream, this time at Bimini, where beautiful women, exotic food and drink, and gigantic fish awaited him. Then he inserted a jocular dig at Archie's recent contacts with the left. "Shit Mac you must come down and get to know the individual as well as the Masses and the Classes."
In the course of their friendship, Hemingway repeatedly found MacLeish unworthy in one way or another, and lashed out at him as a consequence. Wounded by these outbursts, Archie was still inclined to forgive them, especially since Ernest himself usually felt contrite before long. But it was an uncomfortable role Archie was asked to play - that of a man seven years Hemingway's senior constantly in the dock as the younger man passed judgment - and eventually he declined the part. Another complication was that the two were forever engaged in a competitive contest of one sort or another, physical or mental or artistic. On one of Ernest's visits to New York, Bob and Adele Lovett took him and Archie to the recently opened Radio City Music Hall. Before the show, Ernest pulled up his shirt, displayed his stomach muscles, and dared Archie to punch him in the stomach. Archie did so, not terribly hard. Then MacLeish said, "Well, that's not so good. Look at my stomach," which was always very flat and hard. There they were, two of the prominent American writers of the century, competitively displaying their abdominal musculature in the lobby of Radio City Music Hall.
Adele Lovett's interest in literature led her to a close friendship with yet another American writer.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="37">Morrison may well have struck her as the ultimate catch. Writers of the sixties outdid themselves attempting to capture his sensuality. Biographers noted that in black leather he "looked like a naked body dipped in India ink." Journalists referred to him as a "surf-born Dionysus" and a "hippie Adonis." Rock critic Lillian Roxon wrote adulatingly, "The Doors are unendurable pleasure prolonged." Richard Goldstein lionized him as "a sexual shaman" and a "street punk gone to heaven and reincarnated as a choir boy."
Describing a typical Jim Morrison sexual encounter - this one at the Alta Cienega Motel in West Hollywood - his biographers Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman revealed that he first elicited the girl's life story and then "butt-fucked" her. If Morrison got as far as Janis's life story that night in her bedroom, he learned that they had much in common. Jim wanted to be a writer, and Janis, too, intended to write a book, according to Sam. They were both avid readers and both had been Venice, California, beatniks because of On the Road. Both read Nietzsche, Ferlinghetti, McClure, and Corso, and if Janis wasn't an expert on Plutarch, Baudelaire, and Norman O. Brown that Jim was, she could readily discuss Gurdjieff, Wilfried Owen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, not to mention The Sensuous Woman.
Jim and Janis remained cloistered in her room for hours, while Sam, Dave Richards, and Pam waited just outside the door. Says Dave, "Finally, I said to Pam, 'You know, if you're waiting for him to come out of there, he's probably not going to be out of there until tomorrow. He's not coming out.'
"'Oh, yes he will!' she said.
"She was pretty young. 'No,' I said. 'He's not coming out.' Sam and I had ulterior motives, anyway. Finally, she got really mad, and she said, 'Call a cab.' I called a cab and later, as I was walking her down to the street, I opened the door of the cab for her and she got in and Sam went in right past me, pulled the door shut, and the cab went off with both of them in it. I told Sam later, 'You son of a bitch!' He said, 'You got to be quick.' Sam slithered right in there. Sam had this myth in his mind about the equipment men: 'Goddamn, you guys get all the women because you always get to town first.' Since he was a star and making more money than us, he'd invested the oppressed workers with great sexual prowess. That's what was in his head."
Sam confirms Dave's account, saying, "Yes, it's true. The equipment men arrive first at a gig and get all the girls. At last, with Pam, I could challenge the typical proletarian myth about the potency of the working class."
Sometime after Janis's night with Morrison, she told her friend Henry Carr, "I don't like Jim Morrison. He was okay in bed, but when we got up the next morning, he asked for a shot of sloe gin." By Janis's standards, sloe gin was a sissy drink.
Pamela Courson, though hurt when Jim slept around, went along with the Lizard King's peccadillos. Given her choice, Pam would have preferred a 'more traditional' relationship. She was living with Jim at this time at 1812 Rothdell Trail in LA's Laurel Canyon and they were already playing the dangerous games that would eventually kill them both, drugging, scaring each other with spiders and black magic, getting high on acid, and driving down Mulholland with their eyes closed.
Around the time that Jim was sleeping with Janis, Pamela got even by making it with handsome young actors such as John Phillip Law and Tom Baker. Later, Tom Baker fell in with Andy Warhol's crowd in New York and starred in I, a Man, one of Warhol's pornographic epics. Ironically, when Pam broke off with Baker and went back to Morrison, the two men became close friends and drinking buddies, and Baker became one of Janis's lovers. He lived at the Casa Real near the Chateau Marmont with two other young men, and the three of them became known as "the boys who fuck famous women."
Baker, who'd appeared nude in the Warhol film, told Morrison he was nothing but a "prick tease" and challenged him to "let it all hand out" at a rock concert. Eventually, Morrison did exactly that, in Miami, and the resultant legal complications drove him to a nervous breakdown. Baker perhaps also goaded Janis to some of the extremes, including exposure, that came to typify her later concerts.
One day in late June, shortly after Monterey Pop, Janis was scheduled to sing in Golden Gate Park as part of the summer solstice be-in. It was a perfect San Francisco day, mild and sunny, and she decided to take her dog George out walking before the concert. Janis and Sunshine were very close at this time, so she picked up Sunshine and 'sashayed' through Haight-Ashbury, stopping at a liquor store to buy some Ripple. They ran into Freewheelin' Frank and he joined them on their stroll to the park.
At the end of Haight, they crossed Stanyan and entered the cavernous, shadowy park. At Hippie Hill, they came out into the sunshine again and then headed on into the deeper recesses of the park. Janis and Big Brother performed that day from the back of a flatbed truck, and Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead also played, using equipment that had been borrowed from Monterey Pop. Nimble as a panther, Jimi Hendrix scrambled up on the back of Big Brother's sound truck and started snapping pictures with his Instamatic camera. As Janis sang from the flatbed, someone leaned over the edge of the platform and passed out marijaunamarijuana joints to everybody present.
At these great 1960s celebrations of life and love, she was as close as she'd ever be to perfect happiness. After the performance, she was too elated to go home and spent the rest of the day loitering in front of a big 1940s car, smoking a fat cigar and taking swigs of booze straight from the bottle. The next day, she was exhausted, confused, and drinking more than ever. Her friends feared the excitement of her career breakthrough at Monterey would prove to be more than she could handle. When Peggy offered her the use of her house in Stinson Beach, Janis left for a few days' rest.
She went barhopping around Marin County the first day of her vacation and well into the evening. Coming home drunk that night, she nearly crashed her car through the front gate. The next day, she was sunbathing nude on the deck when Peggy arrived unexpectedly. Undressing, Peggy joined her, and soon they were massaging each other's breasts with suntan oil. Janis commented on the stupendous proportions of Peggy's breasts, revealing an insecurity about the size of her own. She very likely found the reassurance she needed in the passionate love they made that day in the open air, completely indifferent to gawking neighbors. Kim somehow learned of their escapade and, on the following weekend, she confronted Peggy, asking her point-blank whether she was sleeping with Janis. Peggy admitted she was.
Although Kim denies being jealous, she says that she assaulted Peggy, breaking her nose. "Peggy and I used to fight like cats and dogs," she says. "I took the aerial off the Shelby on Van Ness Street one time and ran after her with it, beating on her car. She made me mad many times. I put my fist through many windows. I threw stereo stuff out of second-story apartment windows."
"Was it over her running around with Janis?" I ask.
"No, no. I was never jealous of Janis. I was tired of Peggy's obsessive ways, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I was strung out and we had everything together and I didn't know any other life or business. We had our home, our business, our dogs, our people, everything.
"We were out at Stinson one night, and I guess we didn't have enough dope, or she wouldn't have been on the rag. We had a little bit, but she started nagging one afternoon." Tired of fighting with Peggy, Kim tried to make peace by keeping the conversation positive and pleasant. She was determined that nothing Peggy said would "push her buttons" and make her react. Peggy "ranted and raved, picked, and bitched for fourteen hours," Kim says, but Kim maintained total silence, refraining even from facial expressions. They fell asleep for a while and when they woke up, Kim said it was time to return to the city. On the way back in the Porsche, they took the winding, narrow road over Mt. Tamalpais. Kim admits, "I'm not a slow driver," and when they got to a curve and Peggy told her to slow down, Kim "Just kind of snapped."
"I had my right hand on the wheel," she recalls, "and I reached over with my left and went Thunk! Pow! right into her cheek and it broke her nose. She was so mad. I didn't say anything. I drove her directly fifteen minutes from there to the Marin General Hospital and waited for her, and she was still ranting and raving to the doctor. She was just on a trip, but she really had a case now because she had to wear this great big X on her face, a big adhesive white X right across her nose up to her forehead and down her cheek, and if she didn't look a sight!
Peggy took revenge by carrying on her affair with Janis more brazenly than ever. Lying to Kim, Peggy would tell her she was going on a buying trip for the boutique, but she and Janis would meet at a hotel or Janis's apartment. They made love so feverishly that they forgot to take breaks for meals or sleep and became dizzy. Some of these sessions took place in dirty hotel rooms they rented for as little as ten dollars a night.
Peggy stated in her book that when she and Kim made love, the experience was somehow more definite - akin to a man-woman relationship. With Janis, it was more like the secret lesbian garden that Joan Baez described, something only two women could know. Though there was more physical attraction with Kim, Janis was just as essential in Peggy's emotional life.
Though Janis put considerable pressure on Peggy to leave Kim and move in with her, Peggy declined, fearing that she'd become another sycophant in Janis's entourage.
One result of Janis's growing national fame was the reversal of the Fillmore auditorium's long-standing policy against her. Suddenly, after Monterey Pop, she was welcome in Bill Graham's legendary rock palace. As a rule, Chet Helms discovered the talent and Bill Graham exploited it, or, as Janis herself put it, Graham sucked up to anyone who'd "made it." Her relationship with Graham, a hotheaded ego-maniac, had always been tempestuous. From the start, Graham had resented her association with Chet, his archrival at the Avalon Ballroom. Chet and Bill had started out together, producing dances at the Fillmore on alternate weekends. The partnership flourished, giving San Francisco good live entertainment for the first time since the fifties heyday of the jazz and folk clubs.
Graham had never heard of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, who were playing to empty clubs in Southern California when Chet and his partner, John Carpenter, discovered them. They had to fight with Bill to get Butterfield into the Fillmore, finally issuing an ultimatum: "It's our show. Let us do it." Chet and John then got on the phone to everyone they knew and hounded them into coming to the Fillmore that weekend. Butterfield was a smashing success, playing to some 7,500 people. When Graham saw the record crowd, he woke up early the next morning and called Albert Grossman in New York, buying all the potential bookings for the next two years for the Butterfield Blues Band in California and paying Albert a large lump sum.
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GSTAAD: LATE JANUARY 1927
It was the year of the avalanches in the Arlberg and Voralberg, but not at Gstaad where the slopes were more gentle and the clientele more genteel. At Gstaad, Count Rupert and Princess Estelle could enjoy the curling matches or cheer the slalom racers. At Schruns there were no Counts or Princesses that year or before, no tea dances, no horse shows on ice. In previous winters Schruns was never news in the Paris papers. Now the reports were about nameless Englishmen, dying under tons of loose snow. "The features of the victims are not distorted and therefore it is supposed that they were soon suffocated without pain." No one was suffocating at Gstaad except from being overly polite to strangers.
First at the Alpine with Archie and Ada, now at the Hotel Rossli with Pauline and Jinny, he was trying to make it work as it did before. In winter they always went to the mountains, skiing by day and reading books at night under goose-down comforters. In the mountains of 1922, '25, and '26 he did not need to shave, and his hair was long, almost down to his unstarched collar. This year his hair was trimmed; his winter beard reduced to a stylish mustache. In newly tailored trousers with a white sweater that matched Pauline's, he looked lean and handsome among the winter trade. The hundred days of erratic meals and insomniac nights had trimmed his weight and deepened his eye sockets. No longer did he have that "fat, married look" he once wrote about. In all the pictures he is smiling broadly, sometimes with Pauline, sometimes with Jinny. They are all smiling.
During the separation, he was frequently with Jinny at her Paris apartment or in a night café where no one knew them or dining with close friends who did. It was Jinny who sent Pauline his telegrams in French, and Jinny who interpreted Pauline's replies. Younger than Pauline, Jinny was attractive without being beautiful, quick-witted, sensitive in her observations, and drawn by preference to women. Ernest, for whom lesbians were a dark attraction, felt comfortable with Jinny's presence and appreciated her wry humor. Living with two women and sleeping with one was like old times in the mountains. At the same time, less than 300 kilometers away in the snows of Savoie, Hadley was sharing Paul Mowrer with his wife, Winifred. Her New Year's greetings enclosed an ancient, uncashed five-dollar check sent by Ernest's parents at Bumby's birth, which Hadley discovered in the back of her trust account book. Now that the divorce mill was grinding out their severance, Hadley in her letters was once again his Cat, his Catherine, who did not let him forget their once shared life.
But Gstaad was not Schruns, and the old life was disappearing quickly. Ernest and Pauline were no longer conspirators hiding their passion. Now they were merely two lovers with a sister on their way to a marriage as soon as his divorce was final. It was also clear that Pauline was a good deal more organized and less dependent than Hadley on Ernest's lead. Whereas Ernest tended towards tactics, Pauline relied on strategy. He was at his best in an emergency, quick to read the situation and respond; she was better at anticipating the crisis and at long-range planning. With no way to know it in advance, Ernest Hemingway had found, among all the available women in Paris, not the prettiest nor the richest, but the one best suited to his situation. With his career about to burgeon, he no longer needed a devoted Hadley leaning heavily upon his lead. What he needed now was a wife to help manage his career, a woman who could make decisions and take care of herself; a woman like Pauline Pfeiffer, who was already thinking about where they would live in Paris and how they would get married. At twenty-seven, Hemingway was about to wed a woman with an adequate trust fund and access to more money when needed, an independent, older woman who, after living eleven years on her own, was willing to quit her career to be his wife.
Pauline, better schooled than Hadley and a more critical reader, was to become a silent partner in Hemingway's literary career, the possibilities for which were multiplying daily. He had three stories soon to appear in Scribner's Magazine and what was quickly becoming a best-selling novel in the bookstores. The publicity generated by The Sun Also Rises was bringing him new offers with almost every mail delivery. There were foreign rights to be negotiated and translators to be selected. James Joyce recommended Hemingway to his German publishers and two French firms were also interested. Eugéne Jolas wanted him to do an essay on Gertrude Stein for the first issue of Transition, and Ezra was still harassing him to revise 'An Alpine Idyll' for Exile. The New Yorker accepted his humorous 'How I Broke With John Wilkes Booth,' and wanted more material. Even Vanity Fair, after turning down one of his early stories, was now asking for his work. Sure that Hemingway would "get so rich in a year or two that you will look like Henry Mencken," the magazine wanted to help him reach that pinnacle if he would only send them two or three stories about anything "except abortion and allied subjects." Hemingway wrote his next three stories about alcoholism, homosexuality, and abortion.
In New York, sales of The Sun Also Rises were exceeding Scribner's expectations for a first novel and making Max Perkins look very good around the office. Already he was asking Hemingway about his next book of stories, a book that Pound strongly advised against. "You will do no such GOD DAMND thing. You will publish ANOTHER NOVEL next, and after, and NOT UNTIL THAT you will make them pub. sht. stories. Wotter yer think yer are, a bloomink DILLYtanty?" Whatever currency Ezra's advice once held for Hemingway it had lost through distance and lack of perspective. Having marked and remarked on almost every writer in Hemingway's generation, Ezra was growing gradually out of touch in fascist Italy. Hemingway, who grew up respecting middle-American hard-earned money and who never in his life intended to be poor, was trying to perfect a style that satisfied both his artistry and the general public.
He still enjoyed Ezra's strange letters filled with curious diction, but he no longer took his literary advice seriously or made any concessions to Pound's new magazine. The more Ezra advised him on the revision of 'An Alpine Idyll,' the more Hemingway tried to sell it unrevised to another American magazine. In late January, he instructed Max Perkins to send the much-traveled story to Alfred Kreymbourg for his American Caravan. When Ezra asked for a story that would not sell in America, Hemingway, who could have given him the much-rejected 'Fifty Grand,' put him off, for Ezra was his past, not his future. Pound thought that 'Alpine Idyll' was wasted on Caravan, "but yr manipulation of the external woild is so much superior to mine, that I hezzytate to comment," he added. "I trust yr contract dont include turning over proceeds of ALL best sellers to your late consort."
Hadley, who was back in Paris tending to their divorce, was about to become a modestly affluent woman from The Sun Also Rises, which by the end of January was in its fourth printing, having sold almost eleven thousand copies. "It's perfectly great...how that book of yours is going," Hadley told him, "and yours truly is prostrate with joy at the prospect of such grand riches. Paul says he will let me know at what moment to invest, which will not be the present sez he." In Hadley's world, Ernest had clearly been replaced by Paul Mowrer, which relieved some of Pauline's guilt while secretly galling him. He was now dependent upon Pauline's money, while his own earned royalties would be invested by the man who was apparently in love with his not yet ex-wife.
But, as Hadley made clear to Ernest, future royalties were not going to pay for their present divorce. Upon her return from Savoie with the Mowrers, she wrote Ernest that her lawyer, Burkhardt, wanted the rest of his fee up front before the first stage of the divorce was reached. Because the wife's lawyer should not receive money directly from her husband, Hadley asked Ernest to send the check to her to make the payment. She enclosed triplicate copies of official papers for Hemingway to sign and return, which he promptly did, enclosing a draft on his Paris account for 5,100 francs. On 27 January, Hadley received her official judgment for divorce giving her custody of Bumby. The final decree, having still several final steps to go through in the French court system, would not come until sometime in March.
Hadley enclosed several Christmas cards that had arrived for them as a couple, and plenty of mail was being forwarded by Hemingway's Paris bank. Some came from almost forgotten friends like Frances Coates in Oak Park, who found the novel heart-breaking. Lincoln Steffen's wife, Ella Winter, wrote that after reading The Sun Also Rises she now understood what Gertrude Stein was trying to say in Composition as Explanation. "You must have worked like hell at it, and when one reads it, one feels you just stuck it down between putting on your pants and your coat." Even John Dos Passos was having second thoughts about his negative review of the novel. "I've sworn off book reviewing," he joked. "It's a dirty habit....the funny thing about The Sun Also is that in sections it isn't shitty. It's only in conjuncto that it begins to smell. Of course it's perfectly conceivable that it's really a swell book and that we're all of us balmy." The part that galled Dos most was Hemingway's "rotten" tendency to use his friends full-face in his fiction. "Writers," he said, "are per se damn lousy bourgeois parasitic upperclass shits and not to be written about unless they are your enemies." And out of the blue came a letter from Sinclair Lewis, then the hottest literary property in America. The Sun Also Rises, Lewis wrote, "was one of the best books I have ever read, and I want to have the privilege of sending my great congratulations about it. I know of no other youngster...who has a more superb chance to dominate Anglo-American letters. Jesus you done a good book!" In February, Lewis hoped to meet Ernest in Paris.
Guy Hickok, his old drinking and journalist buddy, wrote from Paris that The Sun Also Rises was "a swell book.... Quite a feat to make drunks' talk sound as good to undrunk readers as this does." "I hear," he said in his next letter, "there are one or two guys looking for you with gats [guns]." Hickok and two men Hemingway did not know had been out to dinner with Hadley, whose "maternal duties" began to prey upon her late in the evening. "I got all four of us into my two place Henriette and we trembled off down the rue de Fleurus while Hadley, perched away up near the roof on a couple of laps, sang little French songs which she said the 'boys' brought back, but which I know were nicer than anybody in the A.E.F. ever learned." Hemingway read it slowly, and knew exactly which songs they were and when she had sung them to him. He did not blame Guy for feeling upset about their divorce. "Somebody looking for a degree," Guy said, "ought to trace the influence of whooping cough in history."
Not all the incoming mail was quite so friendly. In Paris, Chard Powers Smith, a sometime acquaintance of Hemingway's during his 1923 Café du D<*_>o-circ<*/>me period, had finally read In Our Time, in which parts of 'Mr. and Mrs. Elliot' bore an uncanny resemblance to parts of his own marriage to Olive MacDonald.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="39">We respect the people who want to honor us and certainly we respect the causes they support. If we were younger, had more time, and were trying to make our way in the world, we would go out more frequently and even joyously. I will let Cronkite speak for us. I told him I was about to sail on an extended trip around South America to gather material for a book and was afraid I was going to be pestered. "I know just how you feel, Jim," Cronkite said. "Four years ago I took that trip and was scared to death I'd be pestered by everyone on board, but Cunard officials assured me: 'We're accustomed to having passengers sail with us who want to be left alone. We know how to protect your privacy.' On the third night after our departure from Miami, Betsy and I were sitting in a corner of the nearly empty bar, and I suddenly asked: 'Betsy! When are they going to start pestering me?'" In that cri de coeur he spoke for all of us.
VI
Politics
MY INTRODUCTION to politics was so shameful that I bore the scars for decades, but from it I learned a lesson of brotherhood that would dominate my adult life. In the autumn of 1917, when I was ten and in the grip of wartime hysteria focused against Germany and the Kaiser, I took a pair of old shoes to the elderly cobbler who had his shop a few doors from our home on North Main Street. This area had always been called Germany because many of the original settlers there had come from that country and their descendants still spoke that language at home rather than English. My shoemaker, of course, was German.
When I handed him my shoes I saw to my astonishment something I had not noticed before. On his wall, behind his lasts and knee-held anvils hung a large chromolithograph of the Kaiser. As as I stared at it over the old man's shoulder the glare from the hooded eyes was so menacing, the set of the jaw so cruel, that I was speechless, and fled the shop. I had seen the enemy about whom the orators ranted and he was lurking in my backyard.
Hurrying home, I brooded over the menace I had seen, and that night my worst fears were intensified, for our family went to the park before the courthouse where a fine-looking young officer from some British regiment spoke eloquently about the horrors of fighting the Boche in Flanders and striving, with American aid, to keep the Kaiser out of Paris.
I did not sleep much that night, which I spent struggling against the Kaiser, dodging his submarines and holding him back in the trenches lest he storm Paris. I left my bed the next morning in such a blaze of patriotic fervor that I marched to the cobbler's, slammed my way into his workshop, and, ripping the traitorous portrait from the wall, carried it out into the street and tore it to bits before a small crowd that had gathered.
I heard for the first time the heady sound of applause, and there were admiring cries: "He's a little hero, that one!" At the height of the celebration I looked past my applauding neighbors to the doorway of the cobbler's shop, where the old man who had so often befriended me looked on in confusion and dismay.
Someone in the crowd reported my patriotic deed to the local newspaper, and I believe that the first time my name appeared in print was as the local hero, ten years old, who had struck a blow for the cause of the Allies and against the tyranny of the Hun. But the praise I received was dampened by the look I had seen on the old man's face as the poor cobbler watched his little world being torn apart by a child.
I was inducted into local politics in a manner almost as dramatic. Our elegant rural county of Bucks, tucked in between Philadelphia and New York, and one of the few counties in the nation known widely by name, was staunchly Republican and was ruled by a benevolent tyrant named Joe Grundy. He owned a profitable manufacturing plant at the lower end of the county and had but one ambition, to keep Bucks County totally Republican and the nation safely in the hands of the G.O.P. In later years he became president of the National Association of Manufacturers and a United States senator, and he fused the two positions so completely that no observer could discern whether he was acting as a senator or as a manufacturer.
He used to come up from his bastion in Bristol in a chauffeured car wearing high-buttoned shoes and a grim smile to dictate the governing of Doylestown, our county seat. He owned the local newspaper, the Intelligencer, and controlled its policies with an inflexible conservatism which ensured that not even a whisper of liberalism or pro-labor sentiment or salaciousness raise its ugly head. One issue of his paper has gone down in history as a notable example of his arch-Republicanism, for on the morning after a crucial national election in 1940 the front page consisted of a banner headline proclaiming that Bucks County had once more voted Republican, while in an obscure bottom right box appeared a small notice to the effect that some Democrat had won the presidency. Joe Grundy played hardball and was so able that he kept our town and county completely under his control.
I first became aware of his power in the fall of 1916, when I was nine years old and he was laboring desperately to keep Pennsylvania in the Republican column in the great presidential fight between the flabby Democratic incumbent, Woodrow Wilson, and the stalwart Republican challenger, Charles Evans Hughes. My family, obedient as always to the urgings of Joe Grundy, was ardently Republican on the solid grounds voiced by my mother: "You can see that with that dignified beard Mr. Hughes looks like a president." (In the next election she would tell me: "James, you can see that Warren Harding with that handsome face and reserved manner looks like a president" but in the election after that she made no comment about her man Coolidge.)
The election was hard fought and Grundy marshaled his forces with wonderful skill so that on Tuesday night after heated balloting we were overjoyed to hear that Hughes had won and, following orders from Mr. Grundy's local henchmen, we traipsed into the middle of town to cheer an impoverished Republican victory parade, and I went to bed that night satisfied that with Charles Evan Hughes in charge of the nation as a whole and Joe Grundy in command locally, the republic was on an even keel.
Of course, by midmorning on Wednesday we learned that a disgracefully wrong vote in California had delivered the presidency back into the hands of that pitiful man, Woodrow Wilson, and black despair settled over Bucks County. But the entire affair culminated for me on Friday night in a distasteful way, because a ragtag handful of Democrats gathered from various unsavory corners of the county convened in our town for a victory parade, and as my mother and I stood in the shadows in the alley beside the Intelligencer office, she delivered her contemptuous summary of the Democrats, a phrase that still rings in my ears: "Look at them, James, not a Buick in the lot."
My next incursion into politics was in the presidential election of 1928. I was then in college, and was so distressed by the virulent anti-Catholicism of the period that in a public rally attended by townspeople, I gave extemporaneously a rousing defense of freedom of religion. After the meeting the community's leading Republican, Frank Scheibley, was so impressed by my speech and its manner of delivery that he collared me, offered me a job, and later wanted to adopt me as his son. I was thus at an early age co-opted.
In rapid order, as I shall explain in more detail later, I was invited to sample socialism, fascism and communism, and learned a great deal about each. But I was not impressed with any of them and remained essentially one of Joe Grundy's boys, although the Great Depression did cause me to wonder why, if he and his buddies were so everlastingly smart, they had allowed this financial disaster to happen not only to me but also to themselves. But I remained a Republican.
At a critical point in my life I moved to Colorado, which was one of the best things I ever did, for the grand spaciousness of that setting and the freedom of political expression that was not only allowed but encouraged converted me from being a somewhat hidebound Eastern conservative into a free spirit. Colorado was an unusual state in that its voters rarely, and never in my time, awarded all three of its top political positions -governor and two senators -to the same party; the citizens preferred to have the power split among various factions, which meant that the political life there was wildly different from what I had known in Bucks County, where Joe Grundy told us how to vote and we obeyed. In Colorado a man or woman could be a member of any party or any faction within a party and still enjoy a serious chance of being elected to high office. In Pennsylvania I had learned to respect politics; in Colorado I learned to love it.
But most important was something there that helped me develop an intellectual strength I had not had before. There was in the town an informal but most congenial small restaurant named after the widow who ran it, a Mrs. Angell, and there in 1936 a group of like-minded men, two-thirds Republican, one-third Democrat, but all imbued with a love of argument and exploration of ideas, met twice a month for protracted debate on whatever problem was hottest at the moment. We had two clergymen -one liberal, one conservative -an admirable lawyer who had pleaded major cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, two scientists, one of the cantankerous leaders of the Colorado Senate, a wonderful school administrator, a fiery newspaper editor and a healthy scattering of businessmen, mostly on the conservative side. Because I had access to a gelatin duplicating pad, I was designated executive secretary in charge of finding speakers and convening the meetings. We paid, I remember, fifty-five cents a meeting in depression currency, and that covered a free meal for the invited guest. The meetings became so precious to all of us that we would go far out of our way to attend. Discussion was rigorous, informed and relevant, with ideas from the nation's frontier whipping about in grand style.
I think that any young person in his or her thirties who wants to build both character and a grasp of social reality would be well advised to either form or join a club like our Angell's, where hard ideas are discussed by hardheaded members, where ideas that the general public is not yet ready to embrace are dissected, and where decisions are hammered out for the welfare of the community. Sensible men have participated in such discussions from the beginning of time: in the wineshops of antiquity, the baths of ancient Rome, the coffeeshops of England, and town meetings of New England, the Friday-night meeting of the kibbutzim in Israel, the informal clubs of California and Texas and Vermont. Thoughtful people seek these meetings because they need them, and had I not stumbled into mine in Colorado I would have been a lesser man.
One summer a fiery evangelist, Harvey Springer, came into town and pitched his big tent near the college where I taught. There in nightly sessions of the most compelling nature, with frenzied speeches, haunting choral music and wild-eyed young women screaming while coming down the aisles to be saved, Reverend Springer launched a virulent attack on the two clergymen in our group and on me as a disruptive, liberal, atheistic professor.
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ONE
THE IVESES OF DANBURY
April 27, 1854, was one of the great days in the history of Danbury, Connecticut. On that day a monument was dedicated to a hero of the Revolution, General David Wooster, long beloved by the town that had been the scene of his finest hours and of his death seventy-five years earlier. In its account of the event, the Danbury Times aptly called it "The Monumental Celebration."
The citizens of Danbury met the day with a sense of solemnity mixed with restlessness and optimism, for the occasion was not only patriotic and historical but funereal as well. The recently completed Wooster Cemetery, where the monument to the fallen champion had been erected near his grave, was already a showplace of the town; however, if some of the five thousand or so Danbury residents were pondering whether this would be their own final resting place, there seemed little evidence of such melancholy. The town was secure and growing, and the future seemed as bright as the Thursday morning sunshine. The turnout was far greater than that for the militia training days of a decade earlier or even the Fourth of July festivals. The newly completed Danbury and Norwalk Railroad made it possible for people to travel to the celebration from every part of the state. The train pulling into the depot at the north end of Main Street brought many dignitaries: the governor and former governor of Connecticut, several generals, the editors of the state's leading newspapers (the Palladium and Gazette of Hartford), and the noted poet Mrs. Lydia Sigourney (1791-1865), who distinguished the occasion with a commemorative poem. It was estimated that the swell of people who attended the event had effectively doubled the population of Danbury. It would long be remembered in the town as one of the finest and most important spectacles of the century.
Danbury, of course, made its own contribution to the color and dignity of the occasion. The growing American appetite for local organizations of every variety was in evidence throughout. The exercises of the day were organized and conducted principally by the masonic fraternity. Its exotic ritual commingled curiously with the patriotic fervor of the other participants, the simple Protestant ceremonial of the Congregational Church, where some of the speeches were heard, and the obligatory military exercises and parades. It was American eclecticism at its most vivid, yet on a scale appropriate to the small town.
It was a day for oratory and music. Danbury provided its own indoor variety of music in the Congregational Church, where following the procession and dedication of the monument those who were fortunate enough to find a place could hear an inspiring oration. However, the resources for outdoor band music were not yet developed on a scale for such an occasion and had to be bolstered by visiting groups.
The procession was dominated by officials and members of the numerous Danbury fraternal organizations. There were also, of course, clergymen, whose function was to anchor the occasion within a long New England tradition of linking the secular with the sacred and to remind the participants that there was, after all, a God. The handful of Revolutionary soldiers who attended, now in their seventies, were accorded an honorary position, marching immediately behind the highest officials. Pacing the parade were military organizations from every part of the state - the Hartford Light Guards, the New Haven Blues, and the German Rifle Company of Bridgeport - and from New York, with five marching bands interspersed among them. The new immigrants from Europe were also well represented, for the most part in the form of church and fraternal groups. The firemen of Danbury, including many Irish, marched along with those of Bridgeport and Norwalk. Danbury Fire Company Number 2 had thrown an ornate arch of evergreens and flowers across White Street in front of their engine house, under which the procession passed on its way to the cemetery. The rich regalia of the Odd Fellows competed with that of the Masons and the military while contrasting with the modest garb of the Sons of Temperance. In democracy made manifest, no group visible in town was omitted and even unaffiliated individuals could form ranks at the end of the parade to march with the "Citizens of Danbury, the Citizens of Fairfield County and Citizens of this and other States who desire to join in the Procession."
The lengthy procession assembled at Wooster House, an inn in the north part of Main Street, and wound through the town to Wooster Cemetery, where a thirty-foot platform had been erected. Following a prayer, Masonic ritual prevailed as the "chief stone" of the monument was laid by the Grand Master and the Master Architect under the honorary direction of Governor Pond. Before the sealing of the stone, a box was enclosed within the monument to preserve certain articles for future generations. These included copies of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, and the Connecticut state constitution, American gold and silver coins, Continental bills, and a daguerreotype of General Wooster. Copies of the day's editions of the New York Tribune, Herald, and Times were included as well as of the Danbury Times.
Looking toward the future, the people of Danbury still keenly felt the past and revered it. At the same time, they hoped that future generations would come to respect them and their efforts of this day. The Revolutionary War had generated a musical legacy consisting largely of patriotic tunes, some of which were played on this day by the bands of the grand procession. But the Revolution had also produced heroes who had by now become an important part of American life. The unquestioned leader in national popularity was George Washington, but first in the hearts of his Danbury countrymen was General David Wooster, whose historical presence was nearly palpable to the boys and girls of Danbury in the first half of the century. The final object inserted into the memorial stone was the bullet that had been the cause of Wooster's death.
General David Wooster, a Yale graduate and a distinguished soldier, was sixty-eight when he was summoned to Danbury in April, 1777. The preceding year, the village had had the misfortune of being designated a depository for Continental army supplies. Inevitably, it was attacked, sacked, and burned, but Wooster and his troops drove the British out. Wooster pursued them to nearby Ridgefield, where he was mortally wounded on April 27, 1779. In the late morning, as Wooster led the attack on the retreating British, he drew heavy fire. Rallying his troops, who were frightened by the grapeshot whistling through the air, Wooster turned in his saddle shouting, "Come on, my boys! Never mind such random shots!" At that moment, a musket ball, said to have been fired by a Tory, struck him obliquely in the back, splintering his spine and lodging in his stomach. He was brought back by carriage to Danbury, where he lay for several days in a House on South Street before he died. This house, at the foot of Main Street, was only a short distance from the point where the memorial procession began.
After the chief stone was laid at Wooster Cemetery, the procession continued to the Congregational church for the oration, a lengthy eulogy delivered by the Honorable Brother Henry C. Deming. Those who failed to participate in the church program, whether by choice or circumstance (it was quite crowded), might have found some solace at the Wooster House: on the green in front of the inn, a sumptuous banquet had been spread for all who wished to partake.
A prominent participant in Danbury's great day was George White Ives (1798-1862), father of George Edward Ives (1845-1894) and grandfather of Charles Edwin Ives (1874-1954). This occasion would not have been possible - at least not in this grand manner - were it not for Ives and several others of his generation who were developing, indeed transforming, the town. For these few and their families - Ives, Tweedy, White, Hoyt - public spirit and private benefit appeared to be inextricably entwined. Even in civic endeavors such as the advancement of the railroad line or the introduction of gas lighting, where motives of private profit might seem to predominate, there could be no question as to their salutary effect on the growth of Danbury in the 1850s. Other projects, like the organization and development of Wooster Cemetery, of which George White Ives was treasurer, were more traditionally in the line of community welfare. Romanticizing economics, this small cohort of contemporaries and neighbors saw themselves as a second wave of pioneers. The first wave, a group of eight men, had made their way from Norwalk along a Paquioque Indian path in 1684 and founded Danbury. Returning shortly thereafter with their families, they formed the rudiments of a settlement - homes, farms, a meeting place, a blacksmith's. The homesteads of the 'original eight' occupied little more than a few hundred yards along Main Street (the old Indian trail) starting at what would become South Street and extending north.
A century and a half later, a new thrust was taking place, this time economic, not geographic. On the one hand, it reflected the times, the post-Jackson era of laissez-faire business expansion; on the other, Danbury's very survival depended on it. Although Danbury was a small town in the days of George White and George Edward Ives - and even, to a lesser degree, during Charles Ives's boyhood - it could not remain static. For industry had come to Danbury and committed it to progress, like it or not. A small inland town could not survive otherwise, and there was no going back. Despite the amenities of small-town life, the changes that would at length transform it were taking place even in its heyday. As was the case in smaller communities, it was a handful of men who spearheaded change. Occasionally they made fortunes and great names for themselves, but more often the result was a degree of 'being comfortable' and a respected name in town.
Ives had been such a name in Danbury since the days of Isaac Ives, George White Ives's father, who came to the town in the 1790s. His sojourn there was characteristic in some ways of many ambitious New Englanders of the time: the striving, the economic fits and starts, the ultimate success, and the comfortable establishment of self and family in tranquil retirement. Typical too were the social and family networks in which all this took place and the resultant family tradition. Isaac was the strong, singular root of the Danbury Iveses. Born in 1764, he was an adolescent at the time of the Revolution. He went to Yale College, the first of the Iveses to be associated with Yale, studied law there, and received the degree of bachelor of arts. According to one account, he came to Danbury via Morristown, New Jersey, where he may have tried his hand at teaching. Another suggests that he had rather limited success practicing law in Litchfield before moving to Danbury.
Perhaps his best fortune there was to board with a member of an already prominent family, the Benedicts, who not only could claim both heroes and villains in the recently fought Revolutionary War but could trace their own Danbury origins to the original eight of 1685. Isaac married their daughter, whose death within two years climaxed a series of misfortunes: by then Isaac had failed in several business ventures. Left with a daughter, Jerusha, and again unsuccessful (this time in the tanning business), Isaac married again. His second wife was Sarah Amelia White, of another well-known Danbury family. Their son, George White Ives, was born in New York City in 1798.
Pressed by the need to support a growing family, Isaac attempted to set up business in New York, this time as a wholesale grocer in Pearl Street. The job eventually required travel to New England and the South. On one such trip Isaac wrote to Amelia, "How unpleasant, indeed how painful, to be absent and to not know conditions."
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6
The Coming of Age
Pym's struggle with cancer in 1971 made her realize that she was growing older and needed to reassess her prospects for the future. Needless to say, forging a novel out of illness and the threat of approaching death was not easy. To do so involved an emotional as well as literary effort, and her plot mirrors the painful steps of her journey. The central theme of Quartet in Autumn is retirement, which is viewed quite differently by retirees and observers. In the novel, observers would like to believe that stopping work represents a liberation, but retirees, like Letty, experience it as an abandonment. As the novel progresses, however, Letty discovers that the truth lies somewhere in between. Although never fully confident, at the end, she believes that she has a future.
Letty's experiences test three current theories about retirement: abandonment, liberation, and what sociologists call "diachronic solidarity." The last one is based on the idea that each generation in turn will help their predecessors, the underlying principle of social security legislation. Letty, however, has no one to rely on, and developing trust in herself is no easy matter. Along the way, she suffers, and even more important, Marcia, her coworker in the office, dies. Marcia's death represents Pym's recognition of the dangers of aging.
Ultimately, the novel becomes a coherent and controlled elegy to the city and to office life, but before Pym began taking notes for it, her thoughts were sorely troubled. She saw death and decay everywhere she turned, partly because such signs existed to be observed. For example, for some time she had been aware of declining membership in the Anglican church. Although she skirted that problem in An Academic Question, as early as September 19, 1969, she wrote Philip Larkin that she would write about these matters in her next novel (VPE, 251). In 1970, when Pym's I.A.I. office was rearranged, she wondered if all the attendant unpleasant emotions might contribute to the plot.
But at that point, she had no time to begin anything new. Also she was preoccupied with the possibility of radically altering her characteristic style. Realizing that gothic novels were immensely popular, on August 31, 1970, she considered writing an update of Jane Eyre, which might express the protagonist's sense of being an outsider (VPE, 258-59). (Four years later, after the second hospitalization for a stroke, Pym started a romantic novel about a young woman recuperating from illness and unrequited love but quickly abandoned the effort.) As it turned out, Quartet in Autumn is neither gothic nor romantic. Ironically, all Pym's attempts to alter her style merely led her back to her old habit of vicarious observations of the lives of others, and to her life-long preoccupation with spinsters. When completed, the novel provided a new synthesis of all the ideas and themes that had enthralled her for a long time.
Meanwhile the mastectomy made Pym feel completely alone in the world for the first time in her life. On May 1, 1971, she wrote Robert Smith that even her sister, Hilary, was out of the country when she was hospitalized (VPE, 261). Although many friends rallied around, the event forced Pym to accept her inner solitude. Then the plight of lonely spinsters, companions, and governesses ceased to be the subject of anxious fantasy but an important new literary topic.
The bleak observations found in Quartet in Autumn are not surprising when one considers the problems that Pym faced. The threat of cancer was the most important. But that discovery was reinforced by signs of aging among her friends and acquaintances. The years brought news of the deaths of many old friends and raised the specter of a lonely demise. Pym was well aware that reading obituary notices of her friends heralded her own mortality, whereas in youth she had assumed that seeing death notices of friends would make the old feel triumphant. November 15, 1970, about six months before the surgery, Robert Smith wrote that his friend Joan Wales, of the furniture depository episode, had been found in a diabetic coma. Although she survived, in a later literary notebook entry on December 8, 1972, Pym started wondering if a solitary character could die of starvation in her novel (VPE, 272). In 1977 Richard Roberts recognized that Marcia was very like Joan Wales. In that letter he wrote that Wales was dying, but later reported her to be alive.
Not only was the health of some of Pym's contemporaries beginning to deteriorate, but London was as well. Between 1970 and 1972, several places that were part of Pym's private landscape closed or were torn down. July 3, 1970, the Kardomah was shut where Hazel Holt and she had shared so many companionable lunches (VPE, 256). Pym wrote Philip Larkin on November 7, 1971, that St. Lawrence's, her church home, had become a victim of redundancy (VPE, 266). The disappearance of personal landmarks aroused mixed feelings. Pym was inclined to mourn their loss, but her sharp eyes also recorded the ensuing conflict, which she felt would make good material for her novel. February 4, 1972, she wrote gloomily in the notebook that Gamage's, a store she patronized, was about to close, and her old haunts near her office were being torn down, "Oh unimaginable horror!" March 6, a month later, she noted "change and decay," while predicting that old buildings would be supplanted by characterless replacements (VPE, 266). Even her office building was to be eliminated.
In fact, the period of Pym's discontent was quite short. Although her notebook complaints sound similar to E.M. Forster's in Howards End, her grief for lost places did not last long. By March 20, 1972, she had found new places to eat and the impending office move had enriched her ideas for a novel (VPE, 267). At the same time she became increasingly preoccupied by a much greater problem, that of her own approaching retirement.
Pym had resisted the idea of retirement for many years. Even before completing An Unsuitable Attachment, on February 6, 1961, Robert Smith had urged her to leave her job. After the novel's failure, September 4, 1964, Richard Roberts encouraged her to work part time and devote herself to her novels. On March 8, 1965, Smith reiterated his plea. Pym appreciated the concern of both men, but her job represented independence to her, and she was loath to give it up. After all, it had taken her years to become truly independent. Moreover, like many women, her meager salary made her feel insecure about her earning power. Throughout most of their lives, Hilary Walton's larger salary had provided most of their financial resources. For all these reasons, Pym wanted to continue to work, and never did entirely give up her connections with the I.A.I. She finished her last index for them in October 1979, three months before her death.
Thus in 1971, when breast cancer made retirement an obvious step, she was still fearful. Hilary Walton, who was more independent by nature, decided the time had come to mover to the country, an idea the two sisters had long planned. Pym agreed in principle, but when Mrs. Walton sold their London house, she wrote Philip Larkin on May 29, 1972, that she planned to work for another year (VPE, 268). Of course, the decision to remain at the I.A.I. meant that she had to find a room to rent in someone else's house, a necessity that aroused the same feelings she had described years before in Something to Remember.
The irony did not escape Pym's notice. In the same letter to Larkin, Pym facetiously suggested that she might advertise herself in the Church Times, as the ideal renter, nonsmoking, genteel, and quiet (VPE, 268). The humor covered up real distress at her unaccustomed situation. Traveling to Finstock on weekends was exhausting for her, even a year after her surgery. On July 6, 1972, she reported feeling very ill and alone. As it happened, things worked out much better than she had feared. By October 24 of that year, Pym had written Larkin that she was lodging comfortably in a house where she had kitchen privileges. She declared that the office move had created "great staff dramas," which she considered to be "fruitful novel material" (VPE, 271). Pym's new rental provided another opportunity to collect material for her novel. Her status was that of a paying guest. She paid rent for the room but referred to her landlady as "my hostess" (VPE, 270-71). Although her situation was pleasant, Pym was quite aware that such arrangements could be most ambiguous socially. She understood exactly what a woman in Letty's position would feel, having shared Letty's anxiety about finding a room and her social discomfort in adjusting (QA, 77).
Charles Burkhart has commented on the prevalence of death in the published version of Quartet in Autumn. Death plays an even larger role in the manuscripts. For several years Pym thought of her female characters as victims and imagined that one of them would die. Marcia's death seems to have been planned by the end of 1972, and at two points in the manuscripts Pym contemplated having Letty die. Hints that she desires to give up the struggle appeared in Pym's notebook as early as November 5, 1972 (VPE, 272).
Making a decision to move had always been much harder for Pym than for Hilary Walton. At every stage in life, the writer invested a great deal of herself in her immediate environment and often appropriated her surroundings for the landscape of her novels. As a result, she felt more intensely rooted than did her more practical sister. For a time, even the idea of leaving London for the country seemed a kind of death. February 4, 1972, Pym recorded in her notebook that "now that the possibility of being 'buried' in the country looms," she was trying to absorb as many impressions as possible. At the same time she observed regretfully that London no longer provided the necessary stability she craved (VPE, 266). Indeed, for a time the divided venue merely gave her two places in which to notice signs of death and decay. When she walked in London, December 8, 1972, Pym worried about the plight of street people (VPE, 272). When the previous July she had walked in the country or nearby towns, she had lamented that she alone seemed to find the dead animals (VPE, 269-70). Even a pleasant stroll in old haunts of Oxford on November 5, 1972, elicited the observation that Addison's Walk seemed "a good place to lie down waiting for death covered in leaves by the still streams" (VPE, 272).
On the whole, however, Pym was aware that her sister's decision was sensible, and she wanted to cooperate as much as possible. Instead of grumbling, she used her notebooks to confront her worries at some remove. Also she could justify the entries to herself on the grounds that they provided material for her novel. Indeed, most of these thoughts were attributed to Letty. They also captured Pym's melancholy mood as she approached her sixtieth birthday. March 13, 1973, she wrote Philip that sixty was "the age." Of course, the feeling of obsolescence that Pym noted was not altogether personal. In the same letter she added that the I.A.I. might have already outlived its function. On the other hand she mused, its decay could make "a rich subject for fiction" provided that one brought to it "a novelist's cruelly dispassionate eye, as I fear I sometimes can" (VPE, 273).
Through this period Pym observed that breast cancer had made her feel powerless. In the first draft of Quartet in Autumn she commented that when she saw eccentric people, they reminded her of herself or of long-ago friends. She did not attempt to review her own past to discover why she felt so vulnerable. According to Robert Butler, a psychiatrist who specializes in treating older patients, many elders begin reviewing their lives at just such moments.
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ONE
F<*_>U-umlaut<*/>RTH
Coming of Age
in Nazi Germany, 1923-38
"The point of departure is order, which alone can produce freedom." - METTERNICH
THE KISSINGERS OF BAVARIA
Among the Jews of Rodelsee, a small Bavarian village near W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg, Abraham Kissinger was known for his piety and profound religious knowledge. Because he was successful as a merchant, he was able to honor the Sabbath by closing before sunset on Fridays. But he feared that his four sons might not have that luxury if they, too, went into trade. So he decreed that they should all become teachers, as his own father had been, and thus always be able to keep the Sabbath.
And so it was that Joseph, Maier, Simon, and David Kissinger each went forth from Rodelsee and founded distinguished Jewish schools in the nearby German villages. Of their children, at least five, including David's eldest son, Louis, would also become teachers. And years later, at a famous college in a faraway country, so would Louis's elder son, a studious and introverted young man who, until his family fled to America, was known as Heinz.
The Jews of Bavaria had suffered recurring onslaughts of repression since they first settled in the region in the tenth century. As merchants and moneylenders, they were protected in many Bavarian towns because of the contribution they made to the economy, only to find themselves brutally banished when the mood of princes and populace changed. They were expelled from upper Bavaria in 1276, beginning a wave of oppression that culminated with the persecutions following the Black Death in 1349. By the sixteenth century, few significant Jewish communities remained in the region.
Jews began returning to Bavaria, mainly from Austria, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Some were bankers brought in to help finance the War of Spanish Succession; others came as traders and cattle dealers. Despite occasional outbreaks of anti-Semitism, they gradually regained a secure place in Bavarian society, or so it seemed. A series of laws between 1804 and 1813, during Napoleon's reign, allowed Jews to attend state schools, join the militia, and enjoy full citizenship. In addition, they were accorded the right to be known by family surnames.
The first member of the family to take the name Kissinger was Abraham's father, Meyer, who was born in Kleinebstadt in 1767. As a young man, Meyer went to live in the resort town of Bad Kissingen, a popular spa north of W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg. At the time, Kissingen was home to approximately 180 Jews out of a population of just over 1,000. Later he moved to Rodelsee, where Meyer of Kissingen legally adopted the name Meyer Kissinger in 1817. Abraham was born the following year.
Abraham was the only one of Meyer's ten offspring to survive childhood. He lived until he was eighty-one and became the patriarch of a family that included the four sons who followed his wishes and became teachers, four daughters, and thirty-two grandchildren. Although they were all Orthodox Jews they were a solidly middle-class German family, one that felt deep loyalty to a nation that treated them well.
David Kissinger, the youngest of Abraham's sons, was born in Rodelsee in 1860 and moved to Ermershausen where he founded a small school and served as the cantor in the local synagogue. Later, he taught in the Jewish seminary in W<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rzburg. Always somberly dressed, he was referred to by friends as the "Sunday Kissinger," to distinguish him from his brother Simon, a more casual dresser, who was known as the "weekday Kissinger."
David and his wife, Linchen, known as Lina, were sophisticated and well read, the type of Germans who would give their first son, born in 1887, a French name, Louis. Louis was the only one of their seven children to take up teaching, but unlike his father, he decided to do so in secular rather than religious schools. After studying at Heidelberg University, he enrolled in the teachers' academy in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth, a town on the outskirts of Nuremberg.
Because Germany needed teachers, Louis was exempted from service during World War I. He took a job at the Heckmannschule, a bourgeois private school. Directed by gentiles, but with half of its students Jews, it typified the extent of Jewish assimilation in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth, a city with a history of religious tolerance.
F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had flourished in the fourteenth century, when Jews were denied entry into Nuremberg and settled instead in the riverbank village just outside the walls of the fortified city. Traders, craftsmen, and metalworkers, they turned F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth into a vibrant commercial center and one of Bavaria's few undisrupted seats of Jewish culture. By 1860, F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had a population of 14,000, about half Jewish.
During the industrial revolution, many of the Jewish business-men built textile and toy factories. The most prosperous formed a Jewish aristocracy, led by such families as the Nathans and the Frankels. Their large sandstone villas overlooked the town, and they endowed a wide array of philanthropies, including an orphanage, hospital, school, and orchestra. The town's seven synagogues were crowded around a large square, which was dominated by that of the most liberal congregation, patronized - at least on the High Holy days - by the more socially prominent Jews.
Louis Kissinger, who joined the most Orthodox of the town's synagogues, the Neuschul, was not part of the world of the Frankels and Nathans. But teaching was a proud and honorable calling in Germany, and Herr Kissinger was a proud and honorable member of the German middle class. In his politics, he was a conservative who liked the kaiser and yearned for him after his abdication. Despite his religious faith, Zionism held no appeal for him; he was a German, patriotic and loyal.
When the kaiser's government shut down most private schools, the Heckmannshule was dissolved. But Louis was able to find a new job as a 'Studienrat' - a combination of schoolmaster, teacher, and counselor - in the state-run system. First, he worked at a girl's junior high school. Then, he taught geography and accounting at a secondary school, the M<*_>a-umlaut<*/>dchenlyzeum, which soon merged with a trade school, the Handelsschule.
Louis Kissinger took great pride in his status as a Studienrat, an eminent position in German society. Years later, after he had lost his job at the hands of another German government and fled his home-land, he would write to old acquaintances, signing himself, in his neat handwriting, "studienrat ausser dienst," retired schoolmaster. He was strict but popular. "Goldilocks," the girls called him, sometimes to his face, and also "Kissus," which amused him even more. He had a slight paunch, a faint mustache, a prominent jaw, and a deferential manner. "He was a typical German schoolteacher," according to Jerry Bechhofer, a family friend from F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth and later New York City. "He was professonial and stern, but wouldn't hurt a fly."
When Louis first came to the M<*_>a-umlaut<*/>dchenlyzeum, the school's headmaster told him about a girl named Paula Stern who had graduated the previous year. The headmaster knew how to entice the sober new teacher: he showed him Paula's grades. There were enough A's to kindle Louis's interest. But those marks were a bit misleading. Instead of having the same scholarly demeanor as Louis, Paula was sharp, witty, earthy, and practical. It was a fine pairing: Louis was the wise and somewhat aloof teacher, Paula the energetic and sensible decision-maker.
The Sterns lived in Leutershausen, a village thirty miles east of Nuremberg. Paula's great-grandfather had gone into the cattle trade in the early nineteenth century. Her grandfather, named Bernhardt, and her father, named Falk, built the business into a healthy enterprise.
Falk Stern, a prominent figure among both the Jewish and gentile communities in the area, was far more assimilated than the Kissingers were. His imposing stone house, with its large courtyard and carefully tended garden, was in the center of the village. Yet he remained a simple man: he went to bed every evening shortly after nine P.M. and took little interest in politics or scholarly subjects. His first wife, Beppi Behr, also from a cattle-dealing family, died young. They had one child, Paula, born in 1901. Though her father remarried, Paula remained his only child.
When Paula was sent to F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth for school, she stayed with her aunt, Berta Fleischmann, wife of one of the town's kosher butchers. Berta helped encourage the match with Louis Kissinger, even though he was thirty-five and Paula only twenty-one. The Sterns also approved. When the couple married in 1922, the Sterns bestowed upon them a dowry large enough to buy a five-room, second-floor corner apartment in a gabled sandstone building on Mathildenstrasse, a cobbled street in a Jewish neighborhood of F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth. Nine months later, on May 27, 1923, their first child was born there.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger. His first name was chosen because it appealed to Paula. His middle name was, like that of his father's brother Arno, a Germanicized updating of Abraham. From his father, Heinz inherited the nickname Kissus. When he moved to America fifteen years later, he would become known as Henry.
YOUNG HEINZ
By the time Heinz Kissinger was born, the Jewish population of F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had shrunk to three thousand. A new period of repression was under way: in reaction to the emasculation Germany suffered in World War I, a nationalism arose that celebrated the purity of the Teutonic, Aryan roots of German culture. Jews were increasingly treated as aliens. Among other things, they were barred from attending public gatherings - including league soccer matches.
Nonetheless, Heinz became an ardent fan of the Kleeblatt Eleven, the F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth team that had last won the German championships in 1914. He refused to stay away from their games, even though his parents ordered him to obey the law. He would sneak off to the stadium, sometimes with his younger brother, Walter, or a friend, and pretend not to be Jewish. "All we risked was a beating," he later recalled.
That was not an uncommon occurrence. On one occasion, he and Walter were caught at a match and roughed up by a gang of kids. Unwilling to tell their parents, they confided in their family maid, who cleaned them up without revealing their secret.
Kissinger's love of soccer surpassed his ability to play it, though not his enthusiasm for trying. In an unsettled world, it was his favorite outlet. "He was one of the smallest and skinniest in our group," said Paul Stiefel, a friend from F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth who later immigrated to Chicago. What Kissinger lacked in strength he made up in finesse. One year he was even captain of his class team, selected more for his leadership ability than his agility.
The Jews in F<*_>u-umlaut<*/>rth had their own sports club. "My father once played for the city team," said Henry Gitterman, a classmate of Kissinger's. "When the Jews were thrown off, they formed their own teams at a Jewish sports club." The field was merely a plot of dirt with goalposts, and the gym was an old warehouse with a corrugated roof. But it served as a haven from roving Nazi youth gangs and an increasingly threatening world.
Young Kissinger could be very competitive. In the cobblestone yard behind their house, he would play games of one-on-one soccer with John Heiman, a cousin who boarded with his family for five years. "When it was time to go in," Heiman recalled, "if he was ahead, we could go. But if he was losing, I'd have to keep playing until he had a chance to catch up."
Kissinger was better at Völkerball, a simple pickup game, usually played with five on a side, in which the object was to hit members of the opposite team with a ball. Kissinger liked being the player who stood behind the enemy lines to catch the balls that his teammates threw. "It was one of the few games I was good at," he would later say.
It was as a student rather than as an athlete that Kissinger excelled.
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Seeking Mother, Marrying Daddy:Summer
Wharton's ultimate paternal interventionist is, of course, the Levantine Palmato who had coopted his daughter's sensual nature so effectively as to eliminate future competitors. If we use Wolff's date, 1919-20, for the incestuous fragment, Palmato's precursor among Wharton's published works is Lawyer Royall, the adoptive father of Charity Royall in Summer (1917), who not only displaces his daughter's lover but succeeds in marrying her as well. Unlike the enraptured Beatrice, this daughter tries to resist the incestuous pull, to put emotional and physical distance between herself and her father, but finds herself caught in his almost ubiquitous web. Fighting to break away but unable to formulate a realistic strategy, she becomes entrapped by her very act of separation - taking a lover and becoming pregnant. Needing to be cared for in this condition and wanting a home for her baby, she submits to marriage with her father. This joyless union represents the final defeat in her struggle for autonomy.
Charity had been informally adopted in childhood by Lawyer Royall and his wife. Following his wife's death, the lonely and somewhat seedy Royall reared the child alone. She grew up haunted by her shadowy, indeed shady, origins. She knows that she had been born of an unknown woman on The Mountain, a place thought to be inhabited by primitive folk of savage and promiscuous habits. According to Royall's story, the girl had been offered to him by her father, a man whom Royall had helped convict of manslaughter. Charity believes herself to be the child "of a drunken convict and a mother who wasn't 'half human,' and was glad to have her go" (73). Although she was taught to be grateful to Lawyer Royall for bringing her down from the mountain and saving her from her shameful origins, she hates their constrained life in North Dormer. Seen through the eyes of this sensuous but untutored and restless adolescent, North Dormer is a trap, a place she must flee if she is to have a full life.
As Charity blossoms into lusty adolescence, neighbors who sense a potential problem in her living alone with her bachelor father urge him to send her away to school. First Royall and then Charity decline this option even though the girl feels hemmed in by the physical and cultural limitations of the town. Charity especially resents her aging surrogate father, who had propositioned her when she was seventeen (Wharton's age at her debut) and subsequently asked to marry her. She fights off her feelings of affinity to him by cultivating disgust, but her insults and rebuffs fail to destroy his possessive love for her. Wishing to earn money so she can escape from him and from North Dormer, the scarcely literate Charity maneuvers to get herself a job as town librarian.
In the library she finds love in the form of a handsome young stranger, an architect named Lucius Harney. He represents the outer world of which this valley-bred girl has had only rare glimpses - a world of grace, manners, and culture. In the sensuous summer of her young life, Charity's love quickly flowers into passion, which Wharton renders in fiery language. Very quickly, Charity becomes pregnant, but her social inferiority makes marriage to Lucius unlikely. In her heedless and inarticulate relationship to vital forces, Charity is reminiscent of Sophy Viner, who also seizes love without asking the price or the consequences.
Lawyer Royall sniffs out the growing passion between Charity and Lucius Harney even before they themselves recognize it. Despite his fondness for Lucius, Royall is determined to intercept this love. At a high point of entrancement, when Lucius and Charity have just witnessed a thrilling display of Fourth of July fireworks in Nettleton and hope to slip home undetected, they are spotted by Lawyer Royall, drunk and disheveled in the company of a prostitute.
He stood staring at them, and trying to master the senile quiver of his lips; then he drew himself up with the tremulous majesty of drunkenness, and stretched out his arm.
'You whore - you damn - bare-headed whore, you!' he enunciated slowly.
Such sexual insults are designed to alienate Charity's genteel young lover, so that he will not want to marry her. They also serve to establish the girl's connections to the whole realm of primitive lusts lurking behind this father-daughter relationship. Royall's appearance in the company of a prostitute suggests that he may have had a similar connection to Charity's mother, that Charity may be his daughter, and that he regards the child of such a union as innately corrupted and therefore fair game.
Throughout the novel, Lawyer Royall's image falls between the lovers - in doorways, at moments of embrace - always he is aware of her sexual activities and contaminates them. He looms over thresholds and outside windows, haunting the girl with his unceasing vigilance. Hoping to evade this surveillance, the lovers meet secretly at a deserted cabin outside of town. There Charity is sensuously watching a fiery sunset over The Mountain and anticipating the arrival of Lucius, when she becomes "aware that a shadow had flitted across the glory-flooded room. ... The door opened, and [in] Mr. Royall walked." He declares that he has come to prevent Charity from getting into trouble, or to help her evoke a marriage proposal from Lucius, but he concludes the episode by saying in front of Lucius that Charity is a promiscuous "woman of the town" just like her mother. "I went to save her from the kind of life her mother was leading - but I'd better have left her in the kennel she came from" (203-4).<*_>three-black-diamonds<*/>
The action of Summer takes place within a symbolic moralized landscape. Charity is poised between the Mountain, a primitive realm of unbounded impulse (though scarcely a gratifying place), and the Town, the rigidly proper and fully encircled village of North Dormer. Charity's only knowledge of the normal world is through brief visits to the nearby town of Nettleton, a place where there are shops, circuses, even an abortionist. Had Charity been capable of escaping to Nettleton she could have moved outside the realm of extreme choices and found alternatives to both her claustrophobic world of inexorable laws and the primitive, promiscuous world of unrule. Lying outside the symbolic landscape, Nettleton represents a more flexible sort of human life, in which compromises and accommodations are possible. Like other Wharton protagonists such as Lily Bart and Newland Archer, Charity Royall seems caught between lawlessness and rigid superego demands, unable to move into the middle world of accommodation.
When we map the affective lines of force within this dream-like novel, we find all the major characters radiating out from the central figure of Charity. Her motherless state calls forth the nurturant father Lawyer Royall, along with his incestuous impulses. Her libido, overstimulated by having her father entirely to herself, seems to have generated The Mountain, a place of origin that would explain or justify her sense of innate pollution. Believing herself born of a degenerate mother into the morally unbounded world of The Mountain, she quite naturally accepts her instinctual nature and feels free to satisfy it. But having also been reared in prudish North Dormer, she can be persuaded that such actions are whorish.
Brought up under the Law, she is too ethical to choose abortion to solve her pregnancy crisis or to use the pregnancy to coerce Lucius into marriage. Like Sophy Viner, she is faithful to her love and refuses to corrupt it by pragmatic considerations. Torn between such polarities as the unbounded and the overly circumscribed, Charity cannot make a worldly adjustment to her situation, such as moving out of North Dormer and working to support her child. She drifts into a very bizarre solution indeed.
Charity had often felt a strange affinity to Royall, "as if she had his blood in her veins" (118). Thus Wharton deliberately inserts a hint that the adopted father may have been the biological one. By introducing this ambiguity, she fudges the incest issue, allowing readers to entertain the more piquant possibility of real incest while neutralizing it through the technicality of adoption. But either way the story is incestuous; an adoptive father is perceived as a father psychologically.
Charity's hostility toward Royall recalls Lily's toward Rosedale, a way of fending off dangerous desires. Furthermore, the author draws another line of affinity, one connecting the formerly gifted lawyer to his daughter's cultured lover, so that Lucius seems to represent Royall's spiritual son or his youthful self, the potential that has been thwarted by life in North Dormer. The relationships among characters in Summer are unrealistically close, all spawned by the same central imagination, which seems to have been an incestuous one.
Longing for her unknown mother begins with Charity's sexual maturation. When she first discovers her love for Lucius, she begins to yearn for her mother, no matter how disreputable this woman may turn out to be. When she finds herself pregnant and abandoned by Lucius, she fights her way through storm and weariness up to The Mountain to find her. She arrives just moments after her mother's death on a borrowed bed in a wretched hovel heated by a borrowed stove, covered in a borrowed coat. That night she sees her mother buried without even a coffin. The longed-for mother, when found, was dead, disreputable, a revolting sight - of no possible help to any daughter, much less to a pregnant one. Nonetheless, Charity had to touch the maternal base before assuming motherhood herself.
With the mother dead and Lucius engaged to someone else and unaware of her pregnancy, Charity is without resources or support. She is alone in a dangerous place, cold and hungry. Knowing all this, Royall follows her to The Mountain in a carriage, protects her from the cold, and secures food for her. He behaves tenderly enough but immediately lures her into marriage. In her shocked and vulnerable state she lacks the strength to resist him. Submitting passively, this once-fiery girl is set up to fulfill the oedipal fantasy of bringing her father a child, the child born of her youthful passion, so that her child's step-parent will be her own adoptive father. With grim fatality she surrenders for the sake of security her youth, her passion, her hopes for a fuller life. The morning after the wedding, she realizes what she has sacrificed; "for an instant the old impulse of flight swept through her; but it was only the lift of a broken wing" (280).
Social Conformity as Refuge: The Age of Innocence
Like The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence is a novel of sexual inhibition that has long been read as a novel of manners. It was published in 1920, about a decade after the Fullerton affair. In it Wharton depicts a New York society of inflexible rules and rituals, an inhibitor of the instinctive life, yet a source of civilizing decencies. Like a good operatic overture, the opening scene introduces the novel's motifs, which emanate from the central question of the ambivalence of love, memorably proclaimed by Marguerite's aria, 'M'ama ... non m'ama ... M'ama.' Within Newland Archer's range of vision at this moment are representatives of his entire world - completely conventional people like the Wellands, the power networks of cousinship, social arbiters, successful challengers of the rules, arrivistes, spotless maidens, men frankly enjoying the double standard, and, above all, indicators of imminent change. The scene plunges us into a critical moment in old New York society, which was cresting just before its downward turn, a moment that is also the turning point of Archer's life.
Archer, about to end a comfortable bachelorhood in which he had never questioned the values of his class, contemplates his artfully innocent fiancée and his erotic hopes for a marriage that will miraculously reconcile "fire and ice." Almost simultaneously he receives his first impression of wider possibilities as embodied in the europeanized person of Ellen Olenska.
All this wonderfully compact exposition falls within the realm of Edith Wharton's recognized gift for social observation and satire.
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Epilogue: Science and Subjectivity
My 'story' of Virginia Woolf's manic-depressive illness ends here, but its implications do not. Her most profound insight into her disorder - that the unity of consciousness is a tidy fiction with which to build our "comfortable cocoons" of consistent identity - continues to challenge how we write histories of the mind, because it has been reinforced by recent advances in neuroscience. This intersection between literary and scientific inquiries may eventually lead us to a new model of the human psyche, one that integrates the valuable insights of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, mind and brain, Freud and Woolf. Indeed, some convergence of the 'hard' and 'soft' sciences must be an inevitable step if psychoanalysis is to survive through the next century. And it would be a fitting sequel to a neurobiography of Virginia Woolf (certainly more rewarding than lingering over her suicide), for she left us a legacy that extends beyond her personal tragedy. She can be more than a Freudian lesson on how not to cope with trauma. She stands at the crossroads where art, science, biography, and biology meet.
Woolf's "ensemble psyche" in The Waves lives on in Michael S. Gazzaniga's theory of the brain's "modular-type organization." Gazzaniga's famous experiments with split-brain patients have led him to conclude that the human brain is organized into "relatively independent functioning units that work in parallel. The mind is not an indivisible whole, operating in a single way to solve all problems," but a confederation. Most of these modules, which are capable of their own actions, moods, and responses, remembering events and storing affective reactions to those events, operate in nonverbal ways apart from the conscious verbal self and so are unavailable for introspection. A sudden impulse to act, a shift in emotion or mood, may arise in one module. The 'ego' of the dominant hemisphere will then evaluate that impulse and mediate it (a hallucinating patient may even 'hear' this module's intent as a 'voice'). If one part functions in isolation and displaces the ego's program to integrate other, counterbalancing modules, the resulting 'impulsive' behavior can be catastrophic and/or psychotic.
Gazzaniga's modules are not necessarily "unconscious" in the Freudian sense (although some probably are); most are "co-conscious but nonverbal." We are unaware of our multiple selves because our brain has a special program in the dominant hemisphere that Gazzaniga calls the "interpreter", a Bernard-like spokesperson who instantly makes inferences and constructs a theory, or narrative, to explain why a behavior or thought or emotion has occurred. But too often the left hemisphere strives for subjective consistency (like old Professor Sopwith twining "chaos" into a neat thread) at the expense of right hemisphere sensitivity to inconsistent data; consequently, ignored modules may act independently. Perhaps, then, manic-depressive mood shifts produce misbehaviors and chaotic self structure because they impair the usually seamless integration of these modules. They certainly heightened Woolf's sense of the mind's innate program to fight chaos with narrative order as opposed to its potential for perceptual plasticity, out of which she created a 'modern' view of subjectivity. In this sense, postmodern science has finally caught up with her.
What can biology offer psychoanalytic theory besides blank opposition? Intriguing possibilities. In Chapter 8 I spoke of how each hemisphere mediates perceptions and thinking differently, contributing various styles and insights that successful interhemispheric processing integrates, and how events in the nondominant (usually right) hemisphere often go unnoticed or unacknowledged by the dominant (usually left) hemisphere, which presumes that it is the only seat of authority and knowledge. Inadequate integration may thus constitute a functional 'invisible deficit.' I borrow this term from neurology, where it is used to describe the inability of a patient to be aware that, due to brain injury, he is lacking a prominent feature of consciousness. If, for instance, certain visual areas of the right hemisphere are damaged by a stroke, patients will not see or attend to any object situated on their left, and they will be unaware that they are so blinded. When asked to draw the face of a clock, they will accurately recreate only the right side, with numbers 12 through 6 dutifully noted, but 7 through 11 will be missing. Oliver Sacks reports on a patient, Mrs. S., who had suffered a massive stroke in her right cerebral hemisphere and lost her ability to perceive objects on her left: when served dinner, she ate only from the right half of the plate; when applying lipstick, she covered only the right side of her mouth. She could not look left, or turn left, so she learned to turn right, in a circle, until she found what she was looking for. The object on the left (indeed, the direction 'left') did not exist unless her 'right looking' left hemisphere perceived it. Another patient's right-hemisphere stroke damage extended into visual imagination and memory: when asked to imagine himself walking through his town square, Dr. P. listed only those buildings that would have appeared on his right side, none on his left. When asked to imagine himself walking in the opposite direction, he listed only the previously missing buildings, those that would have appeared on his right, which he had failed to remember moments before. His subjective world was exclusively right-handed.
The nervous system is arranged to build a spatial map of the body and its environment. Disturbances within the system can have profound effects on the individual's sense of what constitutes his body and his mind - in effect, his identity. If a stroke impairs afferent and motor neurons, the patient may become unaware that he has an arm or leg; when it is pointed out to him, he will report that he "feels" or "believes" that it belongs to someone else, not him. One of Sack's patients threw himself out of his hospital bed trying to rid himself of what looked like someone else's leg, "a severed human leg,a horrible thing" that he could only assume a prankster had surreptitiously attached to his body. He called it a "counterfeit" because it did not feel "real" - at least, not really his. When asked to locate his own left leg, the patient became pale and claimed that it had "disappeared." His identity no longer included a left leg.
Dr. P., Mrs. S., and the young man without a leg all suffer from a psychic dissociation because of their neurological deficit. They do not know about the dead limb or the blind or numb side; indeed, they do not desire to know. It is as if the circuits that mediate particular perceptions also generate or process the specific desire to perceive them, what a Freudian would call an object-cathexis. They literally do not know what they are missing, that they are missing it, or that they might have wanted not to miss it. The desire has disappeared along with the cognitive capacity. The implications of the 'invisible deficit' present psychoanalytic theorists with intriguing challenges. Is the origin of desire limited (like Freud's id) to certain areas of the mind, or is it spread across all neural networks? In what ways are desire and cognition the same thing differently perceived? Will it be possible to chart a "map of desire" in the same way we now map areas of the brain that handle sensory data from the arms or legs? Can interhemispheric integration be affected by a functional invisible deficit, a structural dissociation that does not involve a physical injury or the censorship of forbidden content responsive to introspection and psychoanalytic insight? In what way do we all suffer from invisible deficits? Brain damage is apparent to us because we compare the patient's disability to our abilities, but even we who enjoy intact brains cannot perceive or desire to perceive that we are missing something lying beyond what our brain structure allows us to think about.
In other words, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's linguistic model may not be the only way to describe the limitations of thought. Future interdisciplinary research may shift the burden of postmodern psychoanalysis from a Saussurean linguistic base of self-referential signs and signifiers to a neurological one. For cognitive science and neuroscience also suggest that we do not perceive, interpret, or 'know' reality referentially but, rather, in terms of thousands of feedback loops supporting internal theoretical models that occur on both conscious and unconscious levels, and that operate binomially, amassing and organizing differentiated units (hot/cold, rough/soft, love/hate). Just as postmodern psychoanalytic theory depicts the underpinnings of thought as a chain of signifiers whose meaning exists only in relation of each other, epitomized by opposition of polar opposites, so too neural circuitry and brain structure seem to be arranged to deal with sensory information and behavior by opposing pathways - paired hemispheres, modular processing (discrete areas of the brain handling specialized tasks which must be sorted out at higher levels of functioning), feedback circuits, paired/opposed neurotransmitter systems, the splitting off of linguistic skills from visual skills.
The import of brain research throws up a kind of Lacanian bar between the left and the right hemisphere, making self-insight, or even self-awareness, a matter of interpretation, a guess or approximation based on inadequate data fed from one hemisphere to the other. The dominant hemisphere, a specialist in linguistic signifiers, may be barred from direct knowledge of the nondominant hemisphere, the signified, where a separate self - equally developed and reality-oriented - processes many important perceptions and feelings. Perhaps the Other we most struggle to know (or whose mute gaze haunts our every look) is not the unconscious part of one self but another conscious self, co-existing in our shared body, mute and unavailable to language, yet responsible for processing the visual and emotional cues which the dominant hemisphere may misunderstand, for mistranslations are inevitable between two minds that do not speak the same language.
Can inadequate interhemispheric relations be the physical basis for Lacan's observation that patients' utterances and writers' texts undercut their own ostensible meaning? Does the right hemisphere make itself known by surreptitiously sliding signifiers through metonymy (a useful procedure for a hemisphere good at recognizing widely scattered details and individual words but not at generating sustained, intentional sentences of its own) and metaphor (the right hemisphere is skilled at nonlinear modes of association and converging multiple determinants rather than at forming a causal or logical chain)? What would emerge, then, is not a composed structure of meaningful elements but Lacan's discomposed discourse in which elements are substituted and recombined, leaving seemingly mute traces or absences to litter our left-hemisphere-dominated narratives. If that is the case, then the robust left hemisphere, unaware that it is speaking the unrecognized and unrecognizable 'truth' of the repressed right hemisphere, might also be one source of the Imaginary Subject created in the misreading of the infantile mirror-stage, and the Subject would be a misreading not only of the Other who is its mother but of the Other who is its hemispheric psychic partner, against which it has defined itself. Doubled selves, one of whom is a mute voyeur gazing upon the other, may create the uncanny duality of all Lacanian looking (every recognition at once a finding and a failure to find, every gaze a being gazed at), in which we are perpetually caught. Does transference originate here in the relationship between these two selves, with the right hemisphere playing the Lacanian dummy, the smoothly mirroring and mute Other (like Tansley, Lily Briscoe's whipping boy), who reveals nothing but what we project upon him? Is the left hemisphere thus burdened, defeated, and frustrated by its own mastery, its too-successful subordination of the right hemisphere, because silencing Otherness only increases the power of its haunting and inscrutable gaze? If the Lacanian unconscious includes this other thinking, witnessing, and responding self, then the old phrase about being "of two minds" will someday seem ironically profound and profoundly inadequate. Biological science now offers psychoanalytic and literary scholars promising evidence that a brain/mind integration will have enormously important theoretical implications - if we open ourselves up to them.
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Top Soviet Spy
Until 1950 Owen Lattimore was a typically inner-directed, iconoclastic scholar. The constraints on his independence were self-chosen and only mildly inhibiting. No organizational bureaucracy stifled his creative thought, neither the Institute of Pacific Relations, nor John Hopkins, nor even the Chinese Nationalist government. He said what he thought, and it was often unconventional.
In 1950 all this changed. He found his life taken charge of by lawyers, his privacy invaded by reporters and government sleuths, and his formerly freewheeling discourse forced to conform to the end of proving that he was not a tool of the Kremlin. For five and a half years the inquisition ran his life. The Lattimore story became a part of America's anti-Communist pathology.
The year began happily enough when President Truman announced disengagement form the struggle in China on January 5. The White Paper had exacerbated Republican dissatisfaction with China policy; Asia-first senators were pressing for a commitment to the remnant Nationalist regime on Taiwan. Truman wanted to put a stop to this talk. Disregarding the advice of his staff and of Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson (but agreeing with Secretary of State Dean Acheson), Truman read a statement at his morning press conference January 5: the United States had no predatory designs on Taiwan and would not establish military bases there, nor would it interfere in the Chinese civil war.
Lattimore was pleased. He knew that American policy in Asia had to be built on the reality of nationalism and that continued support of a discredited regime could only increase Asian resentment at American meddling.
A week later, in Acheson's famous 'defense perimeter' speech, the administration clarified its Asian policy further. Military authorities, including MacArthur, had drawn a defense line in the Pacific that included Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines, but excluded Taiwan and Korea. This defense line had been reported in the world's press; the Russians already knew well what American plans were. Acheson merely restated them on January 12 in a speech to the National Press Club; but in the heightened tension of 1950 his speech attracted a great deal of attention.
Lattimore also approved of the defense perimeter. He thought South Korea was a loser under Syngman Rhee, who was as out of touch with his people as Chiang had been. He believed, as did the Department of State and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that South Korea was not a viable government and could not defend itself against a Soviet-supported attack from the north. And, like official Washington, he felt that American defense dollars were better spent elsewhere.
Republican pique at Truman's hands-off stance toward China was intense. The China bloc in Congress, egged on by General Chennault, William Bullitt, the right-wing press, and Chiang's various representatives in the United States, began a long and powerful campaign to support Chiang for an effort to retake the mainland. This campaign was reinforced on January 21, when Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury.
The Hiss case had been dragged through the courts all during 1949. A first trial, ending in July with a hung jury, was followed by a second. In both trials Whittaker Chambers was the crucial witness against Hiss. The second jury believed Chambers; and the conspiracy theories of Alfred Kohlberg, up to then generally ignored, received powerful reinforcement. There were traitors in the government conspiring to promote Soviet plans for world conquest. Hiss had been at Yalta, where China was "sold down the river." Hiss had been the assistant to Stanley Hornbeck, head of the Far Eastern desk at the State Department. Hiss had been general secretary of the United Nations Founding Conference at San Francisco. Now it was proved to the satisfaction of a jury that Hiss had been a Communist, working all along to deliver China into the hands of the enemy.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the Hiss conviction to the developing witch-hunt. If this pillar of the foreign policy establishment could be a traitor, treason could be anywhere. Worse still, Secretary Acheson, who presided over the whole conspiratorial apparatus, refused now to disown Hiss. At a press conference January 25 Acheson was asked if he had any comment on the Hiss case. He refused to discuss legal aspects of the case but said friends of Hiss had to make a personal decision. His own decision had been made: "I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss." The standards that impelled him to this position "were stated on the Mount of Olives and if you are interested in seeing them you will find them in the 25th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew beginning with verse 34." Congress, according to Acheson, flew into a tantrum. However motivated Acheson was by Christian charity, his words served as gasoline to the fires of Asia-first resentment.
All writers on the McCarthy years acknowledge that the Hiss verdict convinced a vast constituency that treason in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt was widespread. It also showed that ex-Communists such as Whittaker Chambers were perceived as credible, and it demonstrated that politicians pursuing subversives could achieve national status, as Nixon did. All of these outcomes were salient for Owen Lattimore.
The tempo of traumatic events early in 1950 continued unabated. It was front-page news for every paper in the country when President Truman announced on January 30 that the United States would develop a hydrogen bomb. And on February 3 Klaus Fuchs, who had worked on the American atomic bomb project during the war but was now in England, confessed that he had passed atomic information to the Russians. Three days later the Republican National Committee announced 'Liberty against Socialism' as the major issue of the 1950 congressional elections. The party statement declared: "We advocate a strong policy against the spread of communism or fascism at home and abroad, and we insist that America's efforts toward this end be directed by those who have no sympathy either with communism or fascism." No one realized, that early in the campaign, how many thousands of people would be charged with sympathy for communism.
Lattimore's attention to these events was distracted by a request from the United Nations that he head a technical assistance mission to Afghanistan, exploring the kinds of economic aid appropriate for that country. The timing of this request was awkward. His lecture schedule in 1949 had kept him away from Baltimore more than normal, he had just returned from a three-week trip to India, and the Johns Hopkins Mongol project needed his attention. On the positive side, he strongly supported the UN, and Afghanistan was a part of the Sino-Soviet border he had never visited.
The Afghan mission would require that he be gone the month of March on an exploratory trip and then for the period from June to September to negotiate final agreements with the Afghan government. This was a big chunk of time. He was uneasy about accepting this assignment and wrote John W. Gardner of the Carnegie Corporation, which supplied the major funding for his Mongol project, that he would not go if Carnegie thought he would be slighting the Mongols. Gardner replied that he thought the Mongol project well enough organized that it could safely be left in the hands of Lattimore's associates while he went to Afghanistan. Lattimore therefore accepted and prepared for this new venture. He was to leave March 6.
There was another project to be attended to before he left. The rapid advances of the Chinese Communists into Tibet suggested that that area would be under their control in a year or two. Lattimore believed this overthrow would mean loss to the scholarly world, perhaps permanently, of the priceless manuscripts in Tibetan monasteries. Lattimore talked about prospects for rescuing these manuscripts with Dr. Arthur Hummel of the Library of Congress. Hummel, an orientalist, was convinced that Lattimore was right and suggested that the matter be put to Luther Evans, the Librarian. Lattimore wrote Evans on February 26, 1950: "As country after country comes under communist control it is cut off from the scholarship of the world, as well as from other contacts. There usually follows a scramble in which a few refugee scholars are brought to the United States or other countries and a few books, manuscripts, and other materials are salvaged. Such salvage is, however, just that - unplanned salvage. Tibet is clearly doomed to come under control of the Chinese Communists. There is, however, time for a planned salvage operation...a wealth of material never yet worked on by Western scholars could be brought out during the next few months."
Lattimore then described to Evans the major sources of manuscripts and what might be found; recommended that the Dilowa Hutukhtu be used to negotiate with Tibetan authorities; explained how Indian cooperation could be obtained; and urged prompt action before the curtain was rung down on Tibet. It was a prescient effort. Perhaps, had the United States not contracted inquisition fever, Luther Evans and the Library of Congress might have acquired the treasure trove of Lama Buddhist lore later destroyed in Mao's Cultural Revolution. As it happened, doctrinal purity took precedence over any kind of scholarship, especially esoteric orientalia.
While Lattimore was wrestling with a decision on Afghanistan, the FBI was wrestling with the problem of keeping up with Lattimore. Lacking a wiretap, the Baltimore office had trouble knowing where and when he was traveling. His home in Ruxton was like the farm in Bethel, Vermont: poor cover for spies. As SAC McFarlin complained to Hoover on February 16, "The peculiar location of the Lattimore home eliminates any possibility of successful physical surveillance without the aid of a technical surveillance."
The Baltimore office had other troubles. McFarlin was worried about the local vigilantes. After the American Legion put Lattimore on its black-list, ultrarightists in Baltimore began their own 'investigations'. Two of them were serious threats to the bureau.
One of the vigilantes was a woman whose name the FBI will not divulge. She had been to the Baltimore FBI office several times, alerting them to Lattimore's subversive influence on impressionable Hopkins students and protesting his alleged role in formulating American China policy. McFarlin told headquarters in his February 16 letter that there was "the ever-present possibility that she will present the matter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities or other persons placed in high political positions in Washington, D.C., in which event there might be undesirable repercussions on the Bureau."
Subsequent serials in the Lattimore file show that the bureau had trouble deciding how to handle the female informant. The matter was serious enough to wind up in the hands of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd. Writing to Hoover on February 17, Ladd recommended that the woman not be contacted again; her charges against Lattimore were trivial. But Hoover reversed Ladd; he did not want HUAC to get potentially important information from an informant directly. His embarrassment at Nixon's getting information from Chambers still rankled. Baltimore was therefore instructed to contact the woman, make sure that she had no new information, and convince her that the bureau was on top of the case. Baltimore found nothing new, and the woman apparently did not go to HUAC.
A more serious private crusade against Lattimore was conducted by Kenneth Hammer, Maryland American Legion commander and chair of its Americanism Commission. According to Daniel H. Burkhardt, who was closely associated with Hammer as adjutant of the Maryland department of the Legion, Hammer was an attorney-investigator who had learned the trade as a military intelligence agent during the war. Burkhardt thought Hammer brilliant; the bureau thought him dangerous. Hammer's activities included efforts to get the Baltimore police to tap Lattimore's telephone, amateur surveillance of Lattimore and the Mongols, and frequent calls to SAC McFarlin. The bureau wanted none of this freelancing. Headquarters Security Division dispatched Lee Pennington, a midlevel bureau official, to dampen Hammer's vendetta against Lattimore.
Pennington and McFarlin called on Hammer at Baltimore headquarters of the Legion February 23, 1950.
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SEVEN
Beyond Hitchcock
I have explored how reputations emerge and change in the art world of film using Hitchcock and the thriller genre to illuminate the process. In this, the final chapter, I will assess the broader significance of the reputational patterns reported in the book. Using the method of controlled comparison (see Smelser 1976), I will extend the discussion beyond Hitchcock and the thriller case to other film directors whose reputations have also fluctuated dramatically over the years. As described by sociologist Neil Smelser, the technique of controlled comparison is an analytical strategy in which the selection of additional 'case histories' is guided by the logic of experimental design. "[P]otential sources of variation are converted into parameters by selecting cases that resemble one another in significant respects. The resemblances can then be regarded as 'ruled out' as explanatory factors, and explanations based on other variables can be generated within the framework provided by the resemblances"(Smelser 1976, 215). By comparing the reputational careers of directors who resemble one another in significant ways, I can both further check on the reasonableness of my interpretation of Hitchcock's reputational trajectory and gain further insight into the process of reputation building.
The sixties and early seventies marked a watershed for Hitchcock as well as for other directors of his generation. It was during the early sixties that Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>ois Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Robin Wood, and other auteur critics actively sought to elevate Hitchcock's stature as a serious artist. While their efforts eventually succeeded, the transformation of his reputation from 'master of suspense' to serious auteur proceeded slowly. The campaign to improve Hitchcock's reputation was part of a general movement to promote directors who fit the new criteria for filmmaking. In advancing their views, the auteur critics constructed a new pantheon of directors wherein certain directors were singled out for special praise while the rest were demoted or ignored (see Sarris 1986a; cf. Wollen 1969, 166-67).
For the old-guard intellectual critics (e.g., Bosley Crowther [1967], Dwight Macdonald [1969], Arthur Knight [1957], Hollis Alpert [1962a], and Richard Griffith [1950]), the major dividing line for directors was American versus European or, more precisely, Hollywood directors versus the Europeans they favored - Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean Renoir, and others. Among the relatively few American directors singled out as significant by the critical establishment were John Huston, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and Fred Zinnemann (see, e.g., Alpert 1962a, 130; Knight 1957, 188-88; and Griffith 1950). "In January 1956," reports film historian Robert Ray, "Newsweek offered a mid-decade appraisal of the American popular film occasioned by John Huston's about-to-be-released Moby Dick. Including Huston, the article named 'the top five directors in the industry' as William Wyler, George Stevens, Fred Zinnemann, and Billy Wilder" (Ray 1985, 141-42).
The young American auteurists of the sixties, as we have seen, countered the established pantheon with one of their own choosing, reflecting their belief that there were directors such as Hitchcock, Hawks, Ford, Lang, and Welles who, despite having worked within the old Hollywood studio system, had somehow managed to maintain in their work a personal vision not entirely limited by space and time. On the other hand, Huston, Wyler, Stevens, Zinnemann, and Wilder were all dismissed as second- or third-rate by the auteurists, and, as Ray has pointed out, "all but Stevens [were] eventually included in American auteurist Andrew Sarris's most damning category, 'Less Than Meets the Eye'" (1985, 142). In contrast to these directors, Hitchcock was an ideal showcase for the American practitioners of auteur theory. Not only did his work span forty years, it also traversed two continents - Europe and North America. As we have seen, according to the critical establishment circa 1955, Hitchcock's British films were superior to those he made in Hollywood. To many veteran critics, Hitchcock had sold out to Hollywood - selling his artistic soul for the commercial dollar. By contrast, the auteur critics, believing that they could demonstrate that his Hollywood films actually surpassed those he made in England, saw Hitchcock's career as a perfect vehicle for illustrating their conviction that great cinematic art could flourish within the Hollywood studio system.
In spite of support from the auteur critics and Hitchcock's own massive efforts at self-promotion, the campaign to elevate his artistic reputation required over ten years to achieve success. The evidence reported in this book strongly indicates that it was the prevalence through much of the fifties and sixties of a critical discourse favoring 'realism' over the artificiality of Hollywood genre films that was principally responsible for delaying his reception as an artist. In addition, I would suggest that Hitchcock's deeply entrenched celebrity status as master of suspense also worked against him. That is, the very success of Hitchcock's self-promotional activities during the fifties may have actually hurt the later campaign initiated by the French auteur critics to enhance his reputation. Perhaps, had Hitchcock not cultivated a public reputation and not been perceived by critics as a master of self-promotion - in other words, had he maintained a relatively low profile - his reputation as an important artist probably would have advanced more quickly. As a check on this interpretation, I turn to the filmmaking career of Howard Hawks.
Virtually unknown outside the film industry before 1960, Hawks came to be regarded by the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of Hollywood's greatest directors. In fact, my strong impression is that by the late 1960s, the critical consensus on Hawks' stature as a significant artist even surpassed Hitchcock's (see, for example, the clippings file on Howard Hawks and the reviews of what proved to be his last film, Rio Lobo [1971], MOMA). Today, while critics might still debate the elements of Hawks' artistry, few would question applying the artistic label to his work. Why did Hawks' reputation advance more smoothly and quickly than Hitchcock's during the early sixties? Before answering this, I will establish the extent to which Hawks' filmmaking career is comparable to Hitchcock's.
Like Hitchcock's, Howard Hawks' career spanned over forty years. One of Hollywood's most successful directors, he had worked, unlike Hitchcock, in a variety of popular genres - gangster films such as Scarface, crime stories such as The Big Sleep, comedies such as Bringing up Baby, musicals such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and westerns such as Rio Bravo. Like Hitchcock, Hawks presented himself publicly as a popular director, never as a serious or significant artist. However, unlike Hitchcock, Hawks maintained a low profile through most of his career; rarely did he publicly discuss his views on filmmaking. Indeed, before 1960, no one had asked him to do so. Nor did he have the audience recognition that Hitchcock had enjoyed throughout his career. For established critics, Hawks went practically unnoticed. Rarely did they mention his name when reviewing one of his films. As Sarris put it in 1962, "Howard Hawks is the least known and least appreciated giant in the American cinema" (Sarris 1962b, 20).
Many of the early French, English, and American auteur critics who embraced the view of Hitchcock as a serious artist also crusaded on behalf of Hawks. The French auteurs who sponsored both directors came to be known as the 'Hitchcock-Hawksiens.' Jacques Rivette wrote a ground-breaking essay on Hawks for Cahiers du Cinéma which appeared in 1953. Three years later Cahiers du Cinéma published an extended interview with Hawks conducted by Truffaut, Rivette, and Jacques Becker. While Hawks' films were frequently reviewed and discussed in French newspapers and periodicals from the early 1950s on, it was not until the early sixties that American critics started to write seriously about his work. In the summer of 1962, roughly a year before Bogdanovich organized the Hitchcock retrospective for the Museum of Modern Art, he put together a similar one on behalf of Hawks for which he also prepared a monograph consisting of an introductory essay and a lengthy interview touching on many on Hawks' films. Later that summer, Andrew Sarris published a two-part essay on Hawks for the British film journal Films and Filming. At the end of the year, another British journal, Movie, devoted an entire issue to Hawks with articles by several critics including Robin Wood and V.F. Perkins. And in early 1963, Cahiers du Cinéma put out a special issue on Hawks which included abridged versions of Rivette's original essay and Bogdanovich's monograph along with essays by other critics. Robin Wood also published a book-length study of Hawks in 1968 (see also Poague 1982 and McBride 1972).
Much of the early scholarship on Hawks resembled the critical scholarship on Hitchcock's work during the sixties. Champions of Hawks raised the question: why was Hawks invisible to the public and why did he receive so little attention from the media? As Gerald Mast pointed out, Hawks had a tremendous reputation within the film industry, enjoying great freedom from the power of the individual studios (and he worked for all the major ones). Says Mast, "no other Hollywood director - not Ford, not Capra, not Hitchcock, not Lubitsch (the directors with whom Hawks liked to be compared) - enjoyed greater freedom from the power of an individual Fox, Paramount, or MGM than Hawks" (1982, 116).
While honoring Hawks with favorable contracts, the film industry withheld from him any artistic awards, at least until late in his career. Hawks was not even listed on Who's Who until 1971. Why was a film-maker who today is acknowledged as one of the great masters of the cinema so neglected throughout most of his career? One reason, according to the Hawksians, was that he worked in so-called minor genres such as adventure films, gangster films, private-eye melodramas, westerns, musicals, and screwball comedies, "the sort of things," said Sarris, that "Hollywood has done best and honored least" (Sarris 1962b, 20). While it may have been true that Hawks had made possibly the best film in each of the genres he had worked in, wasn't it also true that these films were simply vehicles for entertaining audiences rather than for edifying them as serious art might? (See plate 36.)
As Wood, Sarris, and other auteristsauteurists have pointed out, earlier film critics tended to view art and entertainment as distinct and unbridgeable provinces, analogous to those assigned to high art and popular culture. Rejecting this critical bias, Wood argued in the introduction to his book on Hawks that "A work is 'entertaining' in so far as we spontaneously enjoy it and 'art' in so far as it makes intellectual and emotional demands on us" (Wood 1986, 7). Applying this distinction between entertainment and art to music, Wood argues that many of Mozart's works, for example, a number of his divertimenti and serenades, " were composed for social gatherings at which the listeners wandered about and conversed during the music: 'art' or 'entertainment'?" (1968, 7). When Mozart's operas were first performed, most notably The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, audiences were entertained right from the beginning. Arias became popular hits of the day. Turning to Elizabethan theater, Wood maintains that Shakespeare enjoyed the same kind of rapport with audiences that Mozart enjoyed. According to Wood, the works of both Shakespeare and Mozart represent "conservative" as distinct from "revolutionary" art. Revolutionary art, such as works by Joyce and Beckett, says Wood, "deliberately breaks with the immediate past, inventing entirely new forms and new methods of expression," while conservative art "develops out of the immediate past, using forms and language already evolved" (1968, 8). For Wood, Hollywood genre films belong to this latter category and Hitchcock and Hawks are two notable examples of genre filmmakers. While Hitchcock concentrated on thriller films, Hawks worked in a variety of genres. Though not originating any of them, Hawks did produce, says Wood, "probably the best work within each genre he ... tackled" (1968, 12). Hawks, like Hitchcock, in Wood's view, lacked the excruciating self-consciousness of most modern artists. Two years earlier, in Hitchcock's Films, Wood had made much the same point about both directors, "It seems clear that the relationship of a Hitchcock or a Hawks to his art is much more like Shakespeare's than is that of a Bergman or an Antonioni; the sense of communication on many levels precludes the self-consciousness of the artist that besets the arts today and fosters true artistic impersonality" (Wood [1965] 1977, 32).
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Soon after Sara and Charles Eldredge moved to Brighton, Charles's parents moved there also. Hezekiah Eldredge had begun buying property in Brighton in 1833 and by 1838 had acquired a number of parcels of land. In 1839, he, like his son, was no longer listed in the Boston City Directory. As in Ruth Hall, the old couple moved to a house in the country to be near their son and his wife.
In Ruth Hall the life of Ruth and Harry in their home in the country before the death of their daughter is idyllic except for only one factor: the interfering in-laws. In real life, however, there was another blight upon the young couple's happy existence: the unsuccessful financial dealings of Charles Eldredge. In the novel this is a subtext that does not surface until Harry's death, when Ruth finds herself penniless. And it seems that in real life, too, Sara Eldredge was not aware of the true state of her family's financial affairs until her husband's death. In her marriage, as was the accepted custom in her class and period, money was the man's business; women signed papers if necessary, but left decisions to their husbands and fathers. In fact, the handling of money was thought to be so abhorrent for women that professional women were often paid by checks made out to their husband or father rather than to themselves. A consequence of this convention was that a man was often in a position to invest his own and his wife's money without the knowledge or consent of his wife, and in many cases, to invest it unwisely to the extent of losing it.
Six months after Sara and Charles bought the house in Brighton, Charles obtained a mortgage from a Richard Fay for $4,000. Sarah P. Eldredge signed the agreement to repay the money in five years at six percent interest. Three months later Charles Eldredge obtained an additional mortgage of $3,000 from the Merchants' Bank to be repaid in one year. This agreement was also signed by Sarah P. Eldredge. One wonders why Eldredge needed the money so soon after the purchase of the house. Had he borrowed the money privately to pay for the house, from his father perhaps? Or did he need the money for additional expenses? Another possibility is that he wanted the money to make other investments. His father was continuing to make real estate investments in Brighton, and Charles may have felt this was a good way to make money. On October 10, 1840, Charles purchased approximately twelve acres of land which adjoined his own land. He paid $750 initially, but over the period of the next year he paid an additional $1,000 to six other claimants - which suggests that Charles, who must not have had the title searched adequately to determine that it was clear before making the purchase, was not as careful or astute in his investments as he should have been. Within eight months of the initial purchase, he had sold his land to his father in two parcels for a total of $2,250. That this may have been a transaction necessitated by Charles's lack of funds is suggested by the fact that in August 1841 the Merchants' Bank assigned the $3,000 mortgage on his home (which was to have been paid by July 1840) to his father, Hezekiah Eldredge. The other mortgage, for $4,000, was still outstanding.
At the same time that Sara and Charles were living their blissful - though financially shaky - existence at Swissdale, Charles became involved in another real estate transaction that intensified his financial need. In April 1839 Joseph Jenkins, the father of Sara's brother-in-law Joseph Jenkins, Jr., who was married to her sister Mary, had begun building a large brick structure on property on Tremont Street in Boston, which was to become the Boston Fine Arts Museum. Jenkins ran out of money and credit, and, unable to pay the owner of the land, Elizabeth Deblois, he was threatened with the loss of his investment. After Jenkins had made a number of unsuccessful attempts to obtain the money, he approached Charles Eldredge, who agreed that he would raise the money to purchase the property and complete the edifice.
On August 25, 1840, Eldredge purchased the property from Elizabeth Deblois, paying her almost $6,000 and agreeing to pay her the balance of approximately $15,000 within a year. Sarah P. Eldredge signed her name to the documents. On February 12, 1841, Eldredge paid $1,000 for a triangular piece of property adjoining the larger property. The construction of the building continued, and in April 1841 he took out two $10,000 loans and over the period of the next few years borrowed money from various sources to pay for the property and the construction costs. In the spring of 1841, when the building was completed, Eldredge offered to sell the property to Joseph Jenkins for what it had cost him, retaining a small profit for himself: the agreed-upon profit was $3,500. When Jenkins was unable to raise the money by September 1, 1841, the date agreed upon, Eldredge, for whom the liability had become much greater than Jenkins had originally led him to believe it would, advertised the property for public sale. Jenkins took out an injunction to prevent the sale.
On March 1, 1842, Eldredge, pressed by his creditors and under pressure from the officials at the Merchants' Bank where his involvement with Jenkins's speculation was causing his business reputation to suffer, sold the now-completed museum and surrounding property to David Kimball, treasurer of the Corporation of the New England Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts, for $55,000. Of that sum over $40,000 were in outstanding mortgages in Eldredge's name; the purchaser signed an agreement that he would pay the mortgages and other debts and then pay Charles Eldredge $10,000. Jenkins, crying fraud, filed a bill preventing the sale of the property and brought Eldredge and Kimball to court, maintaining that Eldredge was only acting as his trustee and had no right to sell the property. Eldredge claimed that he was in fact the owner of the property and denied that he had ever been simply a trustee. He said that he originally took over the property with the hope that he could help Jenkins's family, particularly his wife's sister, Mary Jenkins, and that he also sought to make a small profit for himself. But he maintained that it had always been his intention to give any surplus money to Jenkins and his family, not because of any prior agreement but at his own discretion.
The court case lasted from 1842 to 1846, and Justice Joseph Story found in favor of Jenkins and against the defendants, Eldredge and Kimball, concluding that it was not reasonable to suppose that Jenkins would ever have agreed to sign over the property to Eldredge unless it was clear that Eldredge was acting only as his trustee. Eldredge petitioned for a rehearing, maintaining that at the time of the agreement Jenkins's right of ownership had already expired. Eldredge cited contradictory evidence given by Jenkins's witnesses at the Master's hearing regarding the date at which the original agreement was reached, and pointed to evidence that proved that those witnesses, including his brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, Jr., who had died in November of 1843, had made false statements about the date. Eldredge's petition was denied. The judge ruled that since the testimony before the Master was without a special order of the court, it could not be admitted, and he also said he did not wish to malign a dead man (Jenkins, Jr.).
In his petition Eldredge claimed that the decision was unfair and based on perjured evidence and that he would "suffer ruinous loss both of property and reputation." The decision was allowed to stand. Eldredge was ordered to pay court costs and to repay, with interest, all the money he had received from Kimball for rents in addition to the purchase money. In addition, he had contracted other debts and had maintained in his petition that he was in danger of bankruptcy and that the sum he had been awarded would not cover all of his debts and payments. When he died four months later, he was insolvent, leaving Sara an impoverished widow with two children.
What must have been the effect of this long litigation and financial night-mare for Sara and Charles Eldredge? For one thing, family relationships must have been strained. Eldredge had entered into the business originally, he said, because he wanted to help Jenkins's family, particularly his wife's sister. He had come to the aid of Jenkins, Sr., when Jenkins was threatened with foreclosure, and he had assumed a debt of $2,000 that Jenkins, Jr., could not repay. He had taken over the Fine Arts building to help Jenkins when no one else would do so, and he had ultimately gotten into a financial muddle because of it, assuming more than $50,000 dollars in debts and jeopardizing his financial reputation and his position at the Merchants' Bank. Yet Jenkins had done everything to force him to retain the building when he could not do so without declaring bankruptcy, and Jenkins, Jr., he believed, had lied about him in court in order to strengthen his father's claim to the property. Eldredge in his petition claimed that Jenkins was guilty of "unjust and ungrateful conduct." What was the relationship between Sara and her sister Mary while their husbands were involved in this financial name-calling? In later years Sara and Mary and their children were on friendly terms, but for many years the relationship between the two families must have been uncomfortable at the very least.
What of the rest of the Willis family? Did they take sides? One wonders if the family's attitude toward Sara after her first husband died and then toward her when she left her second husband resulted in part from the strain caused by Charles Eldredge's feud with Jenkins. When Eldredge died and left his wife with debts, Nathaniel Willis blamed him, telling the young widow that she wouldn't be in such dire straits if her husband had been a better businessman.
It was unkind and insensitive of her father to criticize Eldredge to his grieving widow, but the evidence suggests that Nathaniel Willis - who, according to his son, was himself a careful businessman - was right. Eldredge took on the museum property when all other speculators regarded it as a very poor risk: Jenkins had approached a number of other businessmen, and they all, upon "mature consideration," had refused to become involved. As the Master of Chancery said in his report, "The nature and hazard of the under-taking were such that the said Eldridge [sic] was the only person in the City of Boston who, with reasonable probability of being successful in the under-taking, could be induced by the Complainant [Jenkins] to render the services required." Eldredge may have been somewhat naive, or perhaps too eager to help his in-laws - or he may have mistakenly thought the venture would provide an easy profit for himself. Whatever his motivations, they were ill-guided, and, as he commented in his petition to the court in 1845, he never would have undertaken the speculation had he "foreseen the difficulties and embarrassments" that it would involve.
What did Sara Eldredge think of the way in which her husband had conducted his affairs? She apparently never criticized him to her relatives, and she seems to have loved and supported him through all of the long ordeal. Although Ruth Hall was merciless in its criticism of Fern's father-in-law, brother, brother-in-law, and the newspaper editors who had exploited her, there is no suggestion of criticism of her first husband in her positive portrayal of Harry Hall, who was based on Eldredge, the beloved husband who died in financial ruin, leaving his wife and children without resources. When Hall dies, the author tells us that his hands are folded "over as noble a heart as ever lay cold and still" (RH,58).
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By the time I got home that summer, I hadn't had my period in about six months. In a rare moment of sanity, I decided it might be a good idea to find out why. Of course, it never occurred to me that it could have something to do with the fact that I looked like a skeleton with my skin stretched over the bones.
"I think maybe I need to go for a checkup," I told my mother.
"Why? What's wrong?"
"Well, I - uh - haven't gotten my period for a long time."
I read the thoughts that raced through her mind. Or rather, one thought - pregnancy. I was still a virgin, but I knew she probably doubted that.
"For how long?" she asked.
"Six months." Which ended the pregnancy concern, because nothing could have been growing in my emaciated body for six months.
There was something unusual about that summer - my mother and I had this nice sort of easiness between us. At the time, I thought it was because I had removed myself as a threat, at least in the realm of sexual rivalry, by starving and drugging myself into a completely unsexual-looking person. I'd starved away my breasts, my hips; from the back, I could have been a boy. But I think there was something else going on in this warm summer air that seemed to hang over my mother and me - no storms, no hard winds, just the lull of smiles and kind words. I think that because I was rail-thin, I no longer stirred up memories of a time when my mother was unhappy with her own appearance. The year before, when she called me fat, her anger wasn't aimed at only me. Memories came back up for her, old insecurities. Anger was her first response to this unwelcome tide.
By that summer, I was thin as she was, and perhaps that was easier for her to take.
But I think there was something else, too. In our use of pills, we had converged. Even though we chose opposite drugs, even though we didn't admit to addiction, we shared a common secret.
One evening, I was watching television with my mother. We were in Pacific Palisades and my father was in Sacramento. The news program we were watching had a segment about withdrawal from Valium. It showed someone having convulsions and seizures. If you didn't know, you'd think you were watching someone in the throes of an epileptic seizure. I turned to my mother and said, "You should pay attention to this." She glanced at me and didn't answer. Of course, I should have paid attention, too, but neither of us thought we had a problem. Even if the program had shown someone withdrawing from diet pills - zombie-like, disoriented, desperately depressed - I wouldn't have seen it - not with any clarity of vision.
I noticed that Miltown hadn't been entirely discarded. We flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Sacramento a few times that summer. On one plane trip, my mother shook two Miltown into her hand and asked the stewardess for a glass of water.
"Do you have a headache?" the stewardess asked, thinking they were aspirin.
"Yes," my mother lied.
I thought about the pills hidden in my suitcase in an empty shampoo bottle, and wished they were white and could be mistaken for aspirin.
On another plane trip, my mother complained of indigestion, so she pulled out two Miltown.
"That helps indigestion?" I asked.
"Yes."
To determine why I hadn't had my period in so long, my mother said she was going to make an appointment for me with her doctor, since I didn't really have one of my own. But it was said matter-of-factly, with no hint of judgment or suspicion.
She drove me to the doctor for an examination. I remember lying on the table, my feet in the stirrups, thinking, "Oh God, all these years I've been riding horses ...what if the stories are right? What if riding horses can break things and make it look like you're not a virgin?"
But the doctor completed his examination, turned to my mother, who had stayed in the room, and said, "Well, everything seems to be fine." We all knew what that meant.
The next day, mysteriously, I started my period.
<*_>three-bullets<*/>
We flew up to Sacramento, planning to stay there for the remainder of the summer, but as soon as we arrived at the leased house which had become the official governor's mansion, we were told that Robert Taylor had died. It wasn't wholly unexpected; his body was ravaged by lung cancer from years of smoking, and he'd been hospitalized for months. We turned around and flew back to Los Angeles.
I remember that week like a dream - Ursula Taylor's face transformed by grief, my mother trying to comfort her, unable to hold back her own tears, my father's eulogy for a man who had been one of his best friends. I remember Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor's first wife, so shaken by sobs she had to sit down in the entryway and gather her strength. I remember the confusion of children who didn't quite know how to fit death into their lives. We moved through the hours with bewildered faces and questions we didn't dare ask because we knew no one had the answers.
A few days after the service, we flew back to Sacramento. My father came home from the Capitol every day at around five, but he didn't seem part of those months. What I recall most clearly of that summer is spending time with my mother, sunbathing, sitting by the pool, exchanging books, laughing. Emotionally and physically, my mother and I have been at war for a very long time, but spiritually, we've understood each other in ways that we wouldn't admit, even to ourselves. Both of us have used drugs, anger, and defensiveness as a buffer against pain. And both of us have been capable of truces, of reaching out to one another for periods of time until some event, some source of pain, would again wrench us apart. That summer was one of our rare cease-fires.
When I went back to school that fall, I'd put on a little weight. I still looked like I'd been in a prison camp, but I looked as if some kindly guard had been giving me extra rations.
When my grandparents picked me up at the airport, my grandmother was the one who finally noticed my weight loss.
"You must have to run around in the shower just to get wet," she said.
But my grandfather didn't seem to notice, which was a bit unusual because his surgeon's eye generally recorded everything.
The first night back at school, after dinner, I helped clear the dishes from my table and on my way through the kitchen I noticed a new addition. A young man in his twenties, lean, with sandy hair and blue eyes, looked up from the stove where he was cooking; he smiled at me. I dropped a plate and had a vision of the rest of the year as one long obsession, which turned out to be pretty accurate.
A couple of months later, I had an opportunity to put myself right in his path. I and four other girls were crowded into the bathroom one night, smoking with the shower on hot so the steam would mask the smoke, and the window open so both the steam and the smoke would pour out. We also had a can of Right Guard in case a teacher came by.
A teacher did come. I had just left the bathroom, so according to what she saw, I was innocent. But I was guilty and more important, I wanted to be found guilty because punishment would mean working off 'hours' in the kitchen. So, the next day, I turned myself in, confessed, and got exactly what I wanted: one hundred hours of kitchen duty.
Because I knew the school would notify my parents about my crime, I decided to write my father myself and tell him that I had turned myself in (although I omitted my ulterior motive). It was also part of my continuing effort to get my father's attention.
He wrote back and told me that turning myself in was the right thing to do, but that punishment was necessary because I'd broken the rules. He then went on to describe how important honesty was, how there would be chaos and anarchy in society if dishonesty were tolerated. He said that I would undoubtedly be disturbed if I felt that he wasn't honest in his job as governor, and if the news reported that he had broken the laws and lied.
My father and I exchanged very few letters; they always had to do with a specific subject, never casual news or inconsequential updates. One subject I was informed of, through letters, about this same time, was the sale of our ranch. The ranch was the sweetest memory of my childhood and I was heartbroken to see it go. I was made to feel a bit better, though, by the fact that my father had sold it to Twentieth Century-Fox, which owned a large piece of land next door and promised not to develop the property.
My mother's letters came more often and just gave me news of our dog, descriptions of the weather, and assorted bulletins. It was through one of her letters that I learned that Ron, who was then going to school in Sacramento, had been beaten up by three boys because he was "the governor's son" and rode to school in a state car.
I wasn't sure that the car really was the reason, but I didn't argue. These were volatile times. There was a war in Vietnam, a war in everyone's living room - right there on television. And there was a war on college campuses, like Berkeley; my father wasn't holding back on his rhetoric. He said that if Berkeley students wanted a bloodbath, they'd have one. I'm sure that not everyone at Ron's Sacramento school came from a Republican family, and that more than a few people were opposed to my father's disdain for anti-war protesters. Much later, Ron told me about the incident and said the boys were saying things like "warmonger" as they were punching his face and giving him a black eye.
I was definitely far from the fray, being out in the middle of the Arizona desert. My political feelings were still fairly undeveloped. I fantasized about being in Haight-Ashbury, plaiting flowers in my hair, or at Berkeley, protesting the war. Instead, I was sneaking poetry books into geometry class, riding horses, and getting up at five every morning to work off 'hours' in the kitchen.
Chapter 13
Diet pills came in handy on my new schedule. The night watchman would rap on the window to wake me up at five so I could start working in the kitchen at five-thirty. The kitchen man's name was Don and it didn't take long before we were making out on the stairway in back of the kitchen, in the walk-in freezer, the trash can area, and eventually his room. The room part got a little tricky; I had to get a nurse's excuse to get out of the evening study hall. The I would sneak across campus. That's where I finally got careless.
It was probably starting to look suspicious that I was coming down with illnesses at night, but would be racing between classes the next day and galloping around on my horse in the afternoons. One night, when the nurse decided to check on me in my room, I wasn't there. I was in Don's room, and it was the night I'd decided that we'd taken foreplay about as far as we could. I wanted to lose my virginity. I thought: "I'm sixteen, I'm old enough."
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="49">In recent years there had been little opportunity for games or the competitions that the Shawnees so much enjoyed and very quickly all the males of the village fell into the spirit of it and encouraged Tecumseh to participate, which he finally, with some reluctance, agreed to do. The competition was to be a three-day deer hunt, using only bow and arrows, with each hunter dressing, skinning, and hanging his take at the close of each day, the meat to be picked up by the women after the hunt and brought back to the village for a feast and for curing into jerky. Word of the projected hunting competition spread and soon men from other villages were coming to take part in it and a sense of happy excitement filled them all at the prospect of at last having a good hunt where they needn't fear running afoul of hostile whites.
At the end of the three-day hunt, the men brought in the proofs of their skill - the hides of the animals they had killed. Many of the warriors brought in three or four skins apiece and a fair number had killed five or six. Perhaps a dozen had taken ten each and three men had each downed twelve. Tecumseh returned pulling a makeshift sledge of bark behind him, on which were tied the hides of the deer he had killed - a total of thirty of them.
It was the custom at the feast following the hunt for each man to tell of his own experiences and there was much laughter and admiration as one after another they told their tales. When it came to be Tecumseh's turn, a respectful silence fell over them all and they clung to his every word. Unlike the boastful way in which those who had preceded him told of their exploits, Tecumseh spoke softly, simply and with an appealing eloquence that captured his audience completely and left them marveling at his oratorical abilities as much as over his hunting skill. Once again the news of the great prowess of Tecumseh filtered throughout the Indian nations. And a glow of pride and expectation filled Lowawluwaysica. One day, he was sure, the time would come for his older brother to take up the reins of leadership and when that time came, he was certain to have many followers. And, thought his one-eyed brother, at his right hand would be Lowawluwaysica.
However, despite the therapeutic benefit of the hunting competition and the pleasure in the accolades that followed, Tecumseh remained depressed and pessimistic about what lay ahead for all the Indians.
[May 1, 1795 - Friday]
If there lingered any trace of hope among the Indians with Tecumseh or elsewhere that the British would finally rise and thrust the Americans out of the Northwest, it was dashed when word swept through the tribes of the new treaty of peace with the United States that the American special envoy, John Jay, had negotiated with the British in London. That treaty had been signed last November 19, and though it covered many aspects of international trade and other matters, the provision that struck home with the Northwestern Indians most directly dealt with the strong British posts at Mackinac, Detroit, and Niagara.
The grave nebulosity in the Treaty of Paris over eleven years ago that had enabled the British to so disruptively retain their hold on these vital western posts in American territory had finally been resolved by the astute Mr. Jay. By the new terms to which the British had agreed, all British posts anywhere in the territory of the United States would be evacuated by the first day of June next year. At councils held with the Indians in the Detroit area, assurances were quickly given by the British that this did not mean they were actually leaving. In point of fact, they said, they were only moving across the Detroit River to Canada where, at Amherstburg, hardly fifteen miles from Detroit, they were building a very large fort, much bigger and better than the Detroit fort, and calling it Fort Malden. From here, they promised, they would continue to provide the Indians with the gifts and annuities and supplies they were accustomed to receiving. The explanations and plans did little to instill any rejuvenation of confidence in the Indians for the British.
In the Deer Creek Village, Lowawluwaysica, utilizing the Indian medicine training he had been receiving from the old Shawnee medicine man, Penegashega - Change of Feathers - now carried with him wherever he went a pouch filled with herbs, bits of bone, symbolic and mystical objects, and other paraphernalia and passed himself off as the village doctor. He had even learned a number of the healing chants from old Penegashega and used them now in treating those afflicted with illness. In the majority of cases the patients got better, though they no doubt would have done the same without any treatment. For payment of his services, the one-eyed youngest brother of Tecumseh most often, when it was available, would take liquor in lieu of anything else. As always, in everything he did, Lowawluwaysica constantly looked for short-cuts to success. Most often he did not find them and relied then on his inherent weasellike craftiness to carry him through and remaining, as in the majority of his undertakings, abysmally average and taking refuge in his close blood relationship to Tecumseh. Where Tecumseh declined to boast very much of his own accomplishments, Lowawluwaysica would boast all the louder on his behalf and there was certainly much to boast about.
At twenty-seven Tecumseh was a most formidable warrior, an unparalleled hunter and tracker, a remarkable tactician and logician, a gifted linguist in English as well as in a number of Indian dialects, and most definitely an accomplished leader of men. He continued to be temperate, never again having tasted alcohol in any form following his pledge to Chicsika eleven years earlier. He had become even more strongly handsome with the character lines that time and experience had etched on his features and he remained, in most circumstances, very gentle and good-natured. The only avenue in which he seemed to do less than excel was in his choice of a mate.
Shortly after the Deer Creek Village was established, an attractive, slender and strong young woman of twenty-three summers decided that Tecumseh needed a wife. Named Mohnetohse, she was the daughter of one of the older Peckuwe warriors among them. With her naturally aggressive way she impinged herself upon his life and it came as a surprise to no one when she and Tecumseh were soon married. As a married woman, however, her character changed considerably - or, more likely, revealed its true nature - and she became domineering, accusatory, berative, and demanding, constantly railing at Tecumseh and finding fault in all he did. Were it not that she was pregnant, no one in the village had any doubt he would have sent her away long before now.
News had come to the Deer Creek Village over the past few months that General Wayne, still quartered at Fort Greenville, was continually being visited by chiefs declaring for peace. Most disheartening was the fact that two such chiefs were Blue Jacket and Michikiniqua, who visited with Wayne before the winter was quite over. After that visit, Wayne had magnanimously sent word to the displaced Shawnees under Catahecassa, as well as to other Indians, that if they wished to do so, they could resettle, at least temporarily, at their old village sites, provided they remained peaceful and quiet. As a result, Catahecassa had returned to the site of Wapakoneta and had reestablished the principal village of the Shawnees there, reinstituting the name Wapakoneta. Blue Jacket's Town had also been reestablished when the war chief returned there, and Wapatomica was being rebuilt with a good msi-kah-mi-qui, but the nearby ruins of Mackachack, McKee's Town, and others remained uninhabited. Numerous other small new villages of both Shawnee and Miami Indians similarly were springing up again in the valleys of the Maumee, Auglaize, Blanchard, Ottawa, and little Auglaize. Another surprise came with news that Michikiniqua, accepting the commanding general's invitation, had reestablished a moderate-sized village at the Kekionga site quite close to Fort Wayne. Also, though Chief Five Medals of the St. Joseph River Potawatomies had made an armistice with Wayne and had agreed to attend the Greenville council, the Milwackie and Illinois River Potawatomies under young Siggenauk and Chaubenee were following Tecumseh's lead and not committing themselves to anything.
[September 22, 1795 - Tuesday]
That the war chief of the Shawnees should specifically pay a visit to Tecumseh at his Deer Creek Village and spend long hours explaining to him all details of the Greenville Treaty, so recently concluded, was a real honor. It underlined the level of prestige Tecumseh now had among the Indians even though he was himself, in the eyes of Shawnee chiefs, still merely a warrior.
Blue Jacket had arrived this morning with a contingent of chiefs and warriors that included Chiuxca, Chaubenee, Spemica Lawba, and a bright, seventeen-year-old half-breed Potowatomi named Sauganash, whom the English called Billy Caldwell.
Tecumseh had been overjoyed to see his old friends once again, warmly shaking hands with Blue Jacket and Chiuxca, embracing his nephew, Spemica Lawba, enfolding his huge friend Chaubenee in a great bear hug, and cordially greeting young Sauganash. The latter gazed at him with something almost akin to reverence and it was clear that he was as smitten by Tecumseh in this first meeting as Chaubenee had been those years ago.
Laden with pots and dishes heaped with good food, Wasegoboah and Tecumapese had joined them, along with Kumskaka and Lowawluwaysica, and all had eaten heartily at Tecumseh's table, smoked their pipes and spent the first hour or so in pleasant reminiscences and in the sharing or news of less than monumental significance, saving the most important matter of discussion - the Greenville Treaty - for last.
Because he was a stranger in their midst and more than a little over-awed at being included in this august company at the insistence of Chaubenee, Sauganash was invited to speak first and tell them something of his background. A sinewy but well-built young man of erect posture and animated expression, he was embarrassed at first but quickly warmed to the matter and spoke swiftly, succinctly, and very intelligently. His father, he said, was an Irishman who was a great admirer of both Blue Jacket and Tecumseh and was the officer who had brought the fifty-three Canadians from Detroit who, dressed and painted as Indians, had fought under Blue Jacket at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.
As he continued with his narration, it was apparent to everyone present that Sauganash was an extremely nimble-minded and accomplished young man with a keen memory, a well-developed sense of humor and considerable education. He had been born in Canada in 1778 just across the river from Detroit and at an early age had been presented by his father to the Jesuits in Detroit to be educated. Possessed of a pronounced flair for languages, he spoke English and French fluently and could read and write in both languages equally well. In addition to his own native Potawatomi, he spoke seven other Indian languages and many dialects within those languages. He was skilled in mathematics and geography and had begun learning cartography when he left the Jesuits to be on his own, not in full accord with the Catholic beliefs of his mentors, which were so in variance with his tribal religious beliefs. His Potawatomi name was Tequitoh - Straight Tree - but practically everyone addressed or referred to him by his nickname, Sauganash - The Englishman. From Chaubenee he had heard a great deal about Blue Jacket and Tecumseh and both, along with Chaubenee, had more or less become his personal heroes.
They welcomed him with genuine warmth to their inner circle, if such it could be called, and then went on to other matters. Spemica Lawba was next to speak and the twenty-year-old proudly announced that he had just gotten married.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="50">
8
PURLOINING GERMANY'S ATOMIC SECRETS
The early twentieth century was a revolutionary epoch for physics. And no nation dominated scientific advance in this field as did Germany. For there it was, in 1900, that Max Planck laid the groundwork for all of modern physics by formulating his quantum theory of energy transfer. It was there, too, that Albert Einstein was born and first schooled, and where, at the height of his international fame, he returned, at Planck's urging, to assume a prestigious post at the University of Berlin. And it was the scientifically progressive Weimar Republic that spawned, or nurtured, most of the century's most illustrious physicists: Max von Laue, who devised a way of measuring X-ray wave lengths; Wolfgang Pauli, 'father' of the neutrino; Werner Heisenberg, formulator of the 'uncertainty principle'; Max Born; Lise Meitner; Edward Teller; and, as a graduate student, J. Robert Oppenheimer. With its peerless Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (boasting 15 Nobel prize winners), Prussian Academy of Sciences, and illustrious university, Berlin occupied center stage in German physics.
To these elite scientific bastions Erwin Respondek enjoyed a privileged access. Through a variety of personal connections, he was able to keep abreast of German experimental progress - knowledge shared with few persons outside the scientific community. After 1939, this knowledge would extend to war-related projects. Those would include research relating to an atomic bomb. From Respondek, the Americans would receive news about German progress in the race to produce the most devastating explosive device the world had ever seen.
Respondek's oldest and principal scientific tie was to Max Planck. His brother, Georg, was one of the few students selected to study and earn a Ph.D. under the bald-headed, reserved classical physicist at the University of Berlin. He introduced Erwin as a young schoolboy to the famous scientist and his family. When Respondek was working for the Finance Ministry immediately after the First World War, he lived for nearly two years in Planck's spacious Grunewald villa. He also served as a surrogate son during a time of tragic personal loss for Planck. (One of the physicist's sons was also named Erwin.) Their friendship would endure until Planck's death in 1947. Through the world-famous physicist, Respondek came to know other eminent German scientists, including Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg, who were deeply involved in atomic research. But it was from Planck himself that he first heard about German advances in this area.
Hermann Muckermann was a second valuable source. From his years at the Kaiser Wilhelm Society prior to 1933, the onetime Jesuit knew numerous scientists all over Germany. Many of these colleagues he may well have introduced to Respondek before the Nazis came to power. Now semiretired, Muckermann participated in the resistance activities of Respondek's circle. (Once the Gestapo nearly caught him with some highly sensitive papers. Muckermann had received a list of the persons slated to take over ministerial posts after a successful coup against Hitler. That same day secret police came calling at his home in Frohnau. Luckily, Muckermann's Scotch terrier began barking at the approaching Gestapo agents, and his housekeeper was able to toss the papers into the furnace just in the nick of time.)
But Respondek's most valuable confederate in purloining German atomic secrets was Herbert (Rainer) M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller, one of his few close friends. To this day M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller remains a mysterious, shadowy figure. Little is known about his life and career, other than that he was born, a Protestant, on August 29, 1907, studied law at the University of Berlin, and then married and established a home in Charlottenburg. He was an easy-going, quiet, intelligent man with a love for literature and music and something of a romantic temperament. He was also crafty and duplicitous, a person who could easily blur his loyalties, both personal and political. (During the war he and Charlotte Respondek carried on an affair, more or less under their spouses' noses. Many years later his secretary would remember M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller as a person who could easily have worked "for both sides.") In June 1934, at the age of twenty-six, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller joined the Institute for Foreign and International Civil Law, a center for legal research affiliated with the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. Subsequently, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller served as temporary director of this institute while advising the central administration on legal matters. He published papers on such topics as German administration of justice in the context of international civil law and reform of guarantor law in Switzerland. In his administrative role M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller was well positioned to stay in touch with scientific progress in many fields, including atomic physics. After 1938 he also took advantage of his Kaiser Wilhelm Society posts to shield politically suspect scientists from attacks and dismissal. In addition, M<*_>u-umlaut<*/>ller endeavored to erect obstacles for those German scientists working on an atomic bomb, while he passed on details about their research to Erwin Respondek.
On top of these sources, Respondek could count on his long-standing professional ties to such scientist-industrialists as Carl Duisberg, Hermann B<*_>u-umlaut<*/>cher, Wilhelm Kalle, and Carl Bosch for privileged information concerning German weaponry. And as was noted earlier, his anti-Nazi son-in-law, Friedrich Hoffmann, was fully informed about German experiments involving poison gas.
Earlier Respondek had made use of these ties to prepare for Sam Woods a synopsis of scientific work inside the Reich, which touched upon ongoing experiments in nuclear fission. But there was one sensational piece of news he kept from his American friends. It concerned two of the largest and most powerful industrial firms in the world - one German, the other American - and their secret pact to exchange scientific findings. It was an agreement that would stay in force until the final months of the war and remain concealed long thereafter.
The Delaware-based chemical giant Du Pont had long sought a co-operative arrangement with German companies. As early as 1919 Du Pont executives had broached such a proposal on dyestuffs with Carl Bosch, the inventor of synthetic ammonia, future founder of IG Farben, and then chairman of the board of Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik. But the wily Bosch, who saw little advantage in sharing German expertise with the Americans, rebuffed this bid. Undaunted, Du Pont persisted in its attempts to acquire German technical know-how after IG Farben was created in 1925. The following year, in Hamburg, Du Pont officials signed a secret "gentlemen's agreement" with two Farben subsidiaries, Dynamit Aktien Gesellschaft and K<*_>o-umlaut<*/>ln Rottweiler - both major explosives manufacturers - granting each party a first option on new processes and products, such as black powder and safety and powder fuses.
Although unable to achieve the same kind of comprehensive cartel arrangement it had already signed with the British Imperial Chemical company, Du Pont did invest some $3 million in the German armaments industry in the 1920s, thereby gaining a large lead over its U.S. competitors. In 1929, quite possibly as the result of a hush-hush Mediterranean cruise its top executives took with counterparts from IG Farben and Imperial Chemical, Du Pont signed another pact with the German conglomerate. In 1933, with Hitler now in power, officers of the American company went so far as to agree to sell the Germans "military propellants and military explosives" - in clear violation of both the Versailles Treaty and the peace treaty between the United States and Germany. This happened despite a warning from a Du Pont executive in Germany that it was "common knowledge" that IG Farben was bankrolling the Nazis. Lammot Du Pont, the company's president, wisely scrapped this agreement before it was formally signed, even though he continued to hope he could circumvent these legal restrictions.
Reports of Du Pont's secret cartel pacts with IG Farben and other European firms were aired at the Senate's munitions hearings in 1934. A solemn and dignified parade of Du Pont family executives - Lammot, Felix, Pierre, and Irénée - flatly denied the existence of any such arrangements until documents were introduced in evidence that described a cartel pact on explosives with Imperial and several German firms. These embarrassing revelations notwithstanding, Du Pont cultivated further ties with IG Farben during the Nazi years, making available licenses in acrylates and nitrogenous products, and then, in 1938, giving the German chemical manufacturer important processes necessary for the manufacture of buna rubber - an important, newly developed synthetic substance for making tires. These exchanges of strategically important industrial know-how continued even though they violated U.S. neutrality laws and even though President Roosevelt was warned about them by his ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd. Despite the outbreak of war, Du Pont went on negotiating trade agreements with Farben until 1941, when its board finally voted to sell its stock in the German firm and "suspend" patent exchanges until "the present emergency has passed."
But it was soon revealed that IG Farben had kept a toehold in the lucrative U.S. market through its 90 percent ownership of the New York-based firm General Aniline and Film Corporation. This "dummy" front controlled $11.5 million of assets in American firms, including Du Pont. This news caused quite a stir in the press and in Washington and led to both seizure of General Aniline's assets, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, and to a 1943 indictment of Du Pont, along with two other American companies, for engaging in a worldwide conspiracy to control strategically important metals. (Du Pont was eventually convicted.) The Delaware firm was brought back into court in January 1944 charged as a co-conspirator in cartel agreements governing explosives. (All told, 15 separate legal actions were brought against Du Pont for its cartel ties. The company lost eight cases and was fined a total of $323,000, out of a possible $4 million.)
According to Respondek, it was in this context that Du Pont's best-concealed pact with IG Farben was forged. At some point shortly before Hitler came to power, the leadership of Du Pont worked out an agreement with their peers at IG Farben whereby the two firms would regularly exchange the results of experiments conducted in their laboratories "so that in this regard no secrets would exist between the United States and Germany." In Germany this pact was known only to Carl Duisberg, chairman of IG's Aufsichtsrat; Carl Bosch, then chairman of the board; Geheimrat Hermann Schmitz, Bosch's chief financial advisor and the person who set up Farben's 'camouflaged' control of companies in the United States and elsewhere; Dr. Wilhelm Kalle; three or four other top IG directors; and the trusted financial advisor who had helped draw up the agreement, Erwin Respondek.
The outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the United States in December 1941 did not affect this pact. As Respondek explained after the war, IG Farben "supplied Du Pont with information, in the greatest detail, before the war and during the German-American conflict up until January/February 1945, by means of a secure route through Basel."(In all likelihood the Basel connection was IG Chemie, a Farben 'cloak' for its worldwide interests, established in Switzerland in 1929 and headed by Hermann Schmitz.) The highly confidential papers IG Farben sent to Du Pont - and received from it - were kept "locked in a special safe, to which no one in the company had access other than three or four special directors."
This purported industrial alliance raises some disturbing questions about German knowledge of U.S. military secrets. For Du Pont and IG Farben were heavily involved in extremely sensitive war-related research and development. During the First World War, a German chemist by the name of Walter Heldt had perfected a poison gas known as Zyklon B for use as a delousing agent. Production of this gas was now in the hands of the Deutsche Gesellschaft f<*_>u-umlaut<*/>r Schaedlungsbekaempfung (DEGESCH, or the German Society for Pest Control), which was 42.5 percent controlled by IG Farben. When the Nazis began to carry out their 'Final Solution' by setting up gas chambers in 1942, it was to DEGESCH they turned for the deadly Zyklon B.
For this, Farben executives were indicted by a Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. Ultimately they were exonerated on the grounds that it was impossible to prove the German directors had known how the gas was being used.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="51">I was shocked to hear Louis Kronenberger, who wrote for The Nation, say angrily that she was a charlatan. "Kronenberger is a fop," declared Farrell, without pronouncing on Gertrude Stein.
John and I read Malraux's Man's Fate, in English, without noticing that it had a Trotskyite slant on the Chinese revolution. We read Céline (I never liked him), and one Sunday afternoon the two of us read The Communist Manifesto aloud - I thought it was very well written. On another Sunday we went to a debate on Freud and/or Marx - surely a Communist affair. More hazily I remember another debate, on the execution of the 'White Guards' in Leningrad in 1935; this may have been a Socialist initiative, for the discussion was rancorous. Actually, that mass execution was a foreshadowing of the first Moscow trials in the summer of 1936, which ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev.
The eternal fellow traveler Corliss Lamont, son of a J. P. Morgan partner, persistently tried to seduce me when John was working or away. This pawky freckled swain sought to suborn me by invitations to dance at the new Rainbow Room, at Ben Marden's Riviera on the Palisades, and at a place in the West 50s that featured a naked girl in a bottle. But, as we danced, while I reminded him that I was married, he tried to gain his end by reasoned argument: "You wouldn't want to have just one picture, would you?" Fifty years later, he was taking my friend Elizabeth Hardwick to the Rainbow Room, still up to his old tricks. "Transitory phenomena," he said of the Moscow trials.
Besides going to the Savoy Ballroom on Friday nights, John and I had black friends, who used to come to our apartment, nervously ushered by us past the elevator boys: Nella Larsen, the novelist (Passing), Dorothy Peterson, the actress (she played in the Negro Macbeth), and her brother, who was a doctor. They were high up in the black bourgeoisie. Nella Larsen told stories that always contained the sentence "And there I was, in the fullest of full evening dress." She lived downtown, near Irving Place. The Petersons had a house in Brooklyn - we liked them, not simply because they were black, and were proud of the friendship. We also liked Governor Floyd Olson, Farmer-Labor, of Minnesota; Selden had taken us to a nightclub with him. Then he died rather young of cancer of the stomach. Probably I would have approved of his working with the Communists in his home state in 1936. In Washington, where we went with a play of John's, we saw Congressman Tom Amlie, of Wisconsin, the secretary of the bloc of Progressives in the House; he got us visitors' passes to the House and had drinks with us in our hotel room, where he told us that his committees were "Patents, Coins, and Public Buildings - that's bottoms in committees." A sad, nice man, who, unlike Olson, could not agree to working with Communist factions.
For The Nation, I was reviewing a number of biographies, which taught me some history - I had not taken any at Vassar. From Hilaire Belloc's life of Charles I, I learned that inflation, which entailed a shrinking of the royal revenues in terms of buying power, was the cause of the martyred king's fall. Of all the books I reviewed I was most enthusiastic about I Claudius; the sequel, Claudius the God, I liked somewhat less. Another enthusiasm was Vincent Sheean's Personal History, which gave me my line on Borodin and the Communist failure in China. I was greatly excited by a historical novel, Summer Will Show, by Sylvia Townsend Warner, which ended with the heroine sitting down in revolutionary Paris to read The Communist Manifesto. "Book Bites Mary," Joe Krutch quipped in a telegram on receipt of my copy from Reno. Writing that review was the closest I came to a conversion to Communism (as indeed may have been the case of the author, for whom the book seems to have been a mutant in a career whose norm was one of wild, apolitical fancifulness - Lolly Willowes, Mr. Fortune's Maggot).
As is clear from Krutch's telegram, the Warner book reversed my ordinary practice with fiction. Usually I was rough. Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Stark Young's So Red the Rose, Marching, Marching by Clara Weatherwax, February Hill by Victoria Lincoln - I laid about me right and left. My standards were high - higher for fiction than for biography, which could justify itself by instructiveness - as my still Latinate style seemed to attest, nay, to vaunt. I am embarrassed to recall (textually) a concluding sentence that spoke of the lack, in current fiction, "of bitter aloes and Attic salt." Oh, dear. At least I was forthright and fearless, and I was gaining a certain renown for it; I think I can say that I was truly hated by a cosy columnist in Herald Tribune Books who signed herself "IMP" and doted on the books I attacked.
It was this reputation, evidently, that led Charles Angoff of The American Mercury, a disciple of Mencken, to invite me to lunch one day. It was a business lunch; he was working as a consultant to liven up The Nation, and he had an idea for me: to take on the entire critical establishment in a five- or six-part series, to be called 'Our Critics.' Would I want to try it? Obviously I would. The state of reviewing in the United States was a scandal, far worse than today. Book-review pages, daily and Sunday, and periodicals like The Saturday Review of Literature (edited then by Henry Seidel Canby) were open adjuncts of the best-seller lists, book clubs, and advertisements of the publishing industry. Among the dailies and big weeklies, the one exception was the young John Chamberlain, in the daily New York Times, but he rarely reviewed fiction, and I doubt that he reviewed every day. Moreover, his tenure was brief.
Margaret Marshall, Joe Krutch's assistant, had come to lunch, too. We talked excitedly for a couple of hours and before we separated it was agreed that I would take on the job. Later, there were second thoughts. Freda Kirchwey, who was running the paper under Villard, decided that I was too young to be entrusted with a series of such importance; knowing what I know of her, I suppose she was afraid of me, that is, of what I might write. So a compromise was worked out: Margaret Marshall would be assigned to work on the articles with me. We would divide the research equally; then she would write half the articles, and I would write half. For instance, she would do The New York Times Book Review, under J. Donald Adams, while I would do New Masses, under Granville Hicks. There would be five articles; the first, or introductory one, we would write together. For all five articles, both our names would be on the cover.
We had fun in the New York Public Library reading-room, doing our research in back issues of magazines and newspapers and using lined cards to copy out quotations, some of them unbelievable. Peggy Marshall came from a Mormon family in Utah or Montana; she was about ten years older than I, around thirty-three, and was divorced from her husband; they had one little girl, whose custody they shared. Peggy, I soon discovered, did not have much energy; she was having an affair with a labor writer named Ben Stolberg, and both of them would lie on a sofa or daybed in her living-room, too tired to do anything, apparently too tired to go to bed and make love. Nor can I remember her ever cooking a meal.
Neither was very attractive; she was blond, grayish-eyed, and dumpy, with a sharp turned-up nose, and Stolberg was blond, blue-eyed, and fat and talked, snorting, through his nose, with a German accent. I don't know what view Stolberg took of himself, but Peggy, to my horror, saw herself as seductive. Once, when we were talking of Ben and whether he wanted to marry her, I saw her look in the mirror with a little smile and toss of her head; "Of course I know I'm kinda pretty," she said.
Not long after this, on a weekend when we were starting to do the first piece, we decided to work on it in the Nation office, dividing it in two. I typed my part and waited for her to do hers, so that we could turn our copy in and leave. But she could not get it written; on the sheet of paper she finally showed me, there were a few half-finished sentences. She was giggling and making a sort of whimpering sound. This was the first writer's block I had witnessed, if that is what it was. At length I took her notes and the sheet of paper from her and sat down and wrote what I thought she wanted to say. She thanked me a bit weepily, and I assured her it was O.K. I guessed that she was having a nervous breakdown, from the tension of the divorce, which was quite recent, and living with Judy, the little girl. Stolberg was probably no help.
That was how it was, for five weeks, except that soon she stopped trying and just let me write the pieces, using her notes and mine. She did manage to do half of one - the one on The New York Times Book Review - and made no further effort, though we talked about what would be in the articles and perhaps she suggested small changes of wording. I told Johnsrud of course but nobody else. When the pieces started coming out, the only other person to know that Peggy was not really the co-author was Freda Kirchwey. Peggy had had to tell her something to account for the fact that she was asking for more money for me, but I never knew what Freda knew exactly. They did pay me more money, and after the first week our names, at Peggy's prompting, were reversed on the cover and in the headings: my name now came first.
John did not approve of any of this. He thought I should make Peggy take her name off the whole series; he did not trust her, he said. One could not trust a woman who was as weak as that. They were buying my silence, he said. It all chimed in with things that had happened to his father when he was principal of that Minnesota high school. I said I could not demand full credit because I was sorry for Peggy. I felt sure that she had not told Freda everything. If the truth came out, when our names were already on the articles, Freda might feel she was too compromised to keep her job. That I was not getting complete credit for work I had done was less important than the fact that Peggy was on her own, with Judy, and barely able to perform. I cannot tell even now whether those were my true feelings. I was sorry for her certainly, but not very sorry, possibly because of that self-satisfied smile and "Of course I know I'm kinda pretty." Self-deception always chilled me. But I was the stronger, and she was the weaker, so I could not expose her. John said I would see how she repaid my generosity. I am not sure it was really generosity, but about re-payment he was right, as the reader will see. She has been dead for years now; there is no reason for me to keep silent. And yet I feel guilty, like somebody repeating a slander, as I write this down.
The series on the critics was an immense succ<*_>e-grave<*/>s de scandale. It was time someone did it. Peggy and I, our names now linked together for what looked like eternity, were a cynosure. Seeing her respond to the compliments that came to both of us at the parties we were invited to, I was annoyed, I found. I felt that she was preening.
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10
Cézanne Country
1924-1928
HARTLEY'S STAY in the United States in 1924 was only three months long, hardly enough for him to settle down. He visited relatives in Cleveland, made arrangements about the paintings he had shipped back from Berlin, and completed two informal essays that he submitted to Vanity Fair. The magazine's editor, Frank Crowninshield, rejected one, about the French Riviera, but accepted the other, 'The Greatest Show on Earth: An Appreciation of the Circus from One of Its Grown-Up Admirers.' In mid-June Hartley sailed for England, where he went immediately to London after landing at Plymouth. He delighted in the life-style of Britain - its leisurely pace, its manners, and its dress. He was, in fact, thoroughly pleased to be back in Europe.
After spending several weeks in London he crossed the Channel to Rotterdam and from there visited The Hague, where he was impressed by a large collection of van Goghs and several fine post-impressionist works by van Rysselberghe, Signac, and Seurat, especially the latter's large canvas of a music hall, Le Chahut. Hartley next traveled south to Antwerp, where he met a sailor friend stationed aboard the battleship New York. The two of them visited Brussels, and then Hartley continued on to Paris, arriving near the end of July and at once encountering "the entire world so it seemed - Duchamp - Varese - Man Ray - Leo Stein - and many less conspicuous play-mates." Instead of settling down to paint right away, he took the time to journey out of Paris to visit such places as Rouen and Chartres - "such grace dignity-power-repose-splendour-and simply not to believe - the glass," he remarked about the cathedral at Chartres. And he spent some time looking about Paris as well, getting a sense of it as never before.
He expected to move to the South of France during the autumn, but Paris life was too stimulating, and he was offered exhibition opportunities, so that it would be the following July before he would actually take up residence in Vence. Meanwhile he enjoyed the city, its cafés, and the splendid variety of people with whom he could be close or not so close, as he chose. Hartley recalled the character Fougita, a Japanese artist who was the most flamboyant foreigner among the "terrace life" - except perhaps for "the debonair pink and white Bosshard, who might be superficially called the Swiss Modigliani, since he then painted thin female nudes usually lying down with a faint lyrical mountain landscape in the distance of the same hue as his own skin." Hartley saw something of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, who was close to her then, and of Ernest Hemingway and Edna Saint Vincent Millay at the Rotonde, one of the 'literary' cafés. At the Café Royal he chatted with an English group, among whom were Augustus John, sporting an earring or two, Wyndham Lewis, and Jacob Epstein, and more than once he drank with James Joyce at the Café des Deux Magots. And though he had little use for surrealism, he enjoyed the company of André Breton, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and "the irrepressible Tristan Tzara."
But it was not only the café life that diverted him from traveling south; more important, he believed, was the chance to exhibit in Paris with several other Americans. The artists George Biddle and John Storrs approached him during the summer about exhibiting at a new gallery, the Briant-Robert, in November. Hartley agreed, and on that basis Biddle offered him his studio for most of August. Within three weeks Hartley had fifteen canvases that were either finished or prepared, of which six - five landscapes and one still life - would go into the show, whose opening was delayed until January 1925. So Hartley remained in Paris, using Biddle's studio daily while thriving on the city's busy life, of which he felt very much a part.
Two days after the show of American painting opened, he sat in the Café de l'Univers, across form the Comédie Fran<*_>c-cedille<*/>aise, and wrote Stieglitz a long letter about the exhibition and about French art in general. In a good mood because of the show and because he was to meet some American friends and see the Comédie, he discussed the exhibition, which was interesting "in the novelty of its precedent - it being the first time the French have actually invited Americans to show." He was critical of the other artists selected, who were "quite hopeless in view of what might have been accomplished," but felt that it had gone as well as it could under the circumstances. Jules Pascin, whose inclusion was "a bit far-fetched as there is nothing whatsoever American in his sensations and methods of expression," was represented by three paintings of nudes, which had an Oriental flair about them. Paul Burlin's suffered from not being "passionately endowed" and lacked an "undying conviction." His work and that of George Biddle and John Storrs seemed to him the most essentially American.
His was being called the best, he claimed, and he cited the critic in the European edition of the Chicago Tribune, who had written that "for sheer, sincere modernism...the prize at the exhibit is carried off by Marsden Hartley, whose vigorous, sweeping strokes - devoted to the depicting of abstract ideas - have almost terrifying power, though sometimes reminding one rather more of a bad dream than a picture." His six paintings had the best wall, and they drew responses such as "apocalyptic - inevitable - unquestionable personal." He described the paintings as being an almost monochromatic "black white umber or venetian red and green - the first time in my life I've ever done what I've always aspired to - a black & white painting." Of the four of this sort, two were "large rearrangements of the Maine landscapes of former years." He called them an "attempt to attain true dramatic scale in subject with a sculptural method of treatment."
John Storrs had complimented Hartley's ability as a sculptor, which pleased him because in fashioning these paintings he had had in mind "the Courbet sense of truth and reality - and the Maillol sense of form and sensibility." Hartley's concept was interesting, but few would judge these somber paintings among his better works. Most intriguing about them, perhaps, is the fact that Hartley, as content as ever he could be with his life, chose that moment to confront Maine, translating the rolling curves and expanses of his New Mexico reminiscences into dark - even nightmarish - form and a near absence of color. As he approached his fiftieth year, a milestone he did not take lightly, he was in some ways beginning to come to terms with his birthplace, though the process would take a decade more to complete.
While most of the viewers at the show's 'vernissage' were American, several French artists also appeared, among them Chagall and Mondzain, whose opinion Hartley did not hear, and Fauconnier, a cubist, who declared that Hartley's paintings showed a "fine temperament but 'confused orchestration,'" a term Hartley chose to dismiss. He did not feel overwhelmed by the French and thought the new interest in American art promising. He had been invited to exhibit in another show in May, this one to include artists such as Elizabeth Nourse, Alexander Harrison, Mary Cassatt, and Frederick Carl Frieseke, among others. Although he was slightly scornful of the group and eventually decided not to show with them, at that point he wanted to and as a result planned to remain in Paris at least until May. He had been given an atelier all to himself near Montmartre and knew he ought to take advantage of it.
Whatever the importance of the projected exhibition in May, the time generally was a propitious one for art. There were numerous small shows displaying the major artists, though none of them, in Hartley's opinion, was doing striking new work: "Utrillo - Chagall, Pascin...Utrillo attractive in its way - Chagall most distressing to me - a kind of expression of altogether bad judgement in painting - Pascin well - it's Pascin better but no deeper." Paul Rosenberg's gallery was having a show of the 'great' moderns, in which Matisse was "tamed to propriety," Braque was "quietly returning to the figure," and Picasso had "nobly returned to cubism." At the Grand Maison de Blanc - "Shades of John Wanamaker," Hartley scoffed, referring to the mass-market quality of that exhibition - Utrillo, Vlaminck, and a subdued Morgan Russell were on display, while elsewhere was a retrospective of the Section d'Or group of 1912-13, so "caviar" then and "so sort of calm rice pudding now." The fauves, Hartley thought, domesticated themselves by repeating their work; now they were "painting flat patterns," but these were inane. French art, in other words, had lost its momentum.
Unfortunately, Hartley's work would not seem to many to be the sort of dramatic innovation he had hoped it would. His paintings did not draw great attention in France, and in a show of seven American artists organized by Stieglitz at the Anderson Galleries in New York, his twenty-five canvases were received lukewarmly. Although his friends praised the works, the critics were less than enthusiastic. One wrote of Hartley's New Mexico reminiscences that many of them had little color and a "great deal of pose." The paintings that failed might collectively have been called "Studies in Liver," he declared, but half a dozen worked, and this made up for the rest. Deogh Fulton, the critic, was more taken by the paintings of Arthur Dove and John Marin. Georgia O'Keeffe, who was never fond of Hartley's work for long - she had been able to live with one of his early Maine landscapes for only three or four days - and always ambivalent in her feelings toward him, wrote to the critic Henry McBride that she had found his review of the show amusing and was going to send a copy of it to Hartley so that he might see what McBride thought of American painters living abroad. Describing Hartley's work as "old world, old souled, and awfully fatigued," McBride sounded a criticism that he would continue until after Hartley returned to America in 1930.
But in 1925 Hartley was not ready to be discouraged; Europe still seemed to hold promise. In addition, for the moment he felt reasonably secure financially, due to an arrangement that had come about through a visit with Louise Bryant the previous fall in Paris. He had known and liked Bryant since his summer in Provincetown, in 1916. Jack Reed, her first husband, had died in Russia after World War I, and she was now married to the wealthy American diplomat William Bullitt. They were living in the ornate home of Elinor Glyn, a British novelist, in Boulogne-sur-Seine, near Paris, where Hartley went to see them. During the course of their time together Bullitt asked him about his financial situation. Hartley explained his wish for a steady income over the next years, and Bullitt told him of William V. Griffin, a friend who he believed might be interested in arranging a regular income for Hartley. The result was an agreement whereby Griffin and three friends would pay Hartley $2,000 per year in exchange for ten paintings, the agreement to last four years. In November 1924 Hartley received his first check, for $500. Although he would come to feel burdened by the need to produce ten paintings on others' terms, in early 1925 he was happy with the arrangement.
A siege of carbuncles during the spring lessened the pleasure of Paris for Hartley. They required daily dressings for three weeks, as well as serum injections, and even though he was later able to work comfortably at the Bullitts' in Boulogne-sur-Seine, he yearned to move to the South of France. In July he traveled to Cannes, where he remained for five weeks, sunning himself and enjoying the relative quiet after Paris. He was convinced that he needed a home, warmth, and isolation for his well-being, and the small town of Vence, in the hills behind Nice, seemed an ideal place for him to settle for the next few years.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="53">O'Neill had his effort to save the boy go wild, for it triggers the sacrifice of the girl and the boy's suicide. O'Neill knew that his father's own effort to save him had brought on the sacrifice of Kathleen and his own suicide attempt. By working it all out in the play, he came out with an understanding of what his father had actually meant for him. Dynamo as produced carried O'Neill from his unconscious images of his father as Pan-Dionysus, the male life principle, to a firm conscious identification and alliance with him. Although O'Neill cut it all from the published play, he kept the alliance itself, and he showed it at once in response to the attacks of the critics. He told Robert Sisk of the "doleful tenderness" with which people broke the reviews to him, and declared, "Me that was born on Times Square and not in Greenwich Village, and that have heard dramatic critics called sons of bitches - and, speaking in general, believed it - ever since I was old enough to recognize the Count of Monte Cristo's voice!"
He was still hacking away at Dynamo right through the galleys, and he told Liveright, "Am sorry to say I have again cut and revised hell out of it but now, finally, I really feel 'Dynamo' is cleared of its rubbish, simple and direct - and a damned good play." But all that work to make the critics understand a psychology unfamiliar to them was naturally in vain. When the book appeared on October 5, 1929, no one understood it any better. By this time he himself was doubtful, and he told Joseph Wood Krutch, "I like it better now, but not enough. I wish I'd never written it - really - and yet I feel it has its justified place in my work development. A puzzle." For a while, he talked of writing a third Dynamo for the definitive edition of his works. But for him there was no going back. He gave up this "crippled child of the storm and stress period," and only long afterward did he question whether its debacle might have been undeserved. In 1941 he wanted to convince the Guild that his early play Anna Christie was a bad choice for revival. It was written, he said, around characters and a "situation." He would not compare it with his best plays, he said, but with one of his flops - Dynamo. Maybe it stepped on its own feet dramatically - and he was not sure even of that, for 1929 criticism had been ready to attack any play that mentioned God - but Dynamo had been, he thought, "about characters plus life." And life - seen through no glory of gods or heroes - was what he had gone on with in the superlative play that followed Dynamo.
7
MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA
"Life is growth - or a joke one plays on oneself!" O'Neill decided. Dynamo had been a step back. He felt it wronged his love for Carlotta, and he told her that his next play would "make the world see how much you have done for me." He had battled the forces of hatred and death within himself, and he wanted a theme to fit that struggle. When he found and plunged into it, he exulted to Saxe Commins: "It's the sort of thing I needed to come to me - one that will call for everything I can give it - a glorious opportunity to grow and surpass everything I've ever done before!" He did not know whether he had the "stuff" to do it, but he did know "I'd rather fail at the Big Stuff and remain a success in my own spiritual eyes, than go on repeating, or simply equalling, work I've done before." It would be "the biggest and hardest I have ever tackled."
The first idea had come to him in the spring of 1926, when he thought of "a modern psychological drama using one of the old legend plots of Greek tragedy" - the Electra, or the Medea. The Electra story would set him in direct rivalry with the great Greek dramatists, for Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides had all treated it. He would make it a real trilogy, like theirs, with three plays treating the same characters. Through it he could achieve - what he had always striven to arrive at - a sense, like the Greek sense, "of the Force behind" life, whatever one called it, "Fate, God, our biological past creating our present." It was to be "primarily drama of hidden life forces."
On his voyage to China this play of hidden forces took life, and so the sea washes through it from beginning to end. His fated family became shipbuilders and shipowners, and he had them long for liberation by sea, just as he had felt on the Charles Racine that he could "at last be free, on the open sea, with the trade wind" in his hair. The sea chanty 'Shenandoah' sounds throughout his play, for he thought that it "more than any other holds in it the brooding rhythm of the sea." Although he set the play in the family house, haunted by the family past, he put one act aboard the Flying Trades and very deliberately placed it at the "center of whole work" to emphasize "sea background of family and symbolic motive of sea as means of escape and release." In this act the two lovers, Adam and Christine, plot in vain to escape by sea after the chanty 'Shenandoah' ("Way - ay, I'm bound away") has reached an ironic crescendo of longing.
The sea and O'Neill's recall of the white sails of the Charles Racine determined his choice of time: He wanted to make this play American, and so he needed an American war to match the Trojan War from which the Greek hero Agamemnon had triumphantly returned to be murdered by his wife and her lover. O'Neill thought World War I was too close; his audiences would not see beyond its surface to the real drama of hidden forces, and he was sure that the American Revolution would also blind them with its "romantic grammar-school-history associations." The "only possibility" was the fratricidal Civil War, which fit a "drama of murderous family love and hate" and provided a detached "mask" for the timeless struggle beneath. It allowed him to make the ships of his play Clippers and to use his old thrill at white sails and his old longing to reach China on his voyage out of Boston to Argentina, for the Clippers had all been bound for China by way of Argentina in the tea trade. He made a China voyage the heart of this play, which began to grow in him on the "Arabian Sea en route for China" and on the "China Sea."
He set his investigation of family fate where his own family's fate had worked itself out, in the small New England "seaport, shipbuilding town" of New London. He actually called it "N.L." in his notes. New England, with its "Puritan conviction of man born to sin and punishment," was the "best possible dramatically for Greek plot of crime and retribution," he thought, and he could reexamine his own guilts through all five members of his New England family. He called his Agamemnon 'Ezra Mannon,' and 'Mannon,' suggestive of 'Man,' became the name of his tragic family, whose struggle would reveal the larger struggle of life-and-death forces within the soul of man.
O'Neill hoped the play would have a "strange quality of unreal reality." He wanted to show that the surfaces of life - which are taken for reality - are meaningless and that the great realities, the "hidden life forces" beneath the surface, are so overwhelming when perceived, as to seem unreal. (He who sees Pan, dies.) So he built his penetration through surfaces into the three plays of his trilogy. Each one has the curtain rise to reveal a painted backdrop of the Mannon house as it looks to the townspeople from the street, set in a splendor of orchards and gardens behind a white picket fence. Then this obviously artificial surface lifts to bring the audience directly before the reality of the house and all the embattled forces within the family. O'Neill had seen at once that he could make his house "Greek temple front type that was rage" at the time and that it was "absolutely justifiable, not forced Greek similarity." He remembered the Greek Revival houses of his boyhood New London, but he took care to buy Howard Major's Domestic Architecture of the Early American Republic: The Greek Revival, in which he found just the severe tomblike house he wanted for Ezra Mannon's father, Abe, to have built as a "temple of Hate and Death" after expelling his brother David from the family, supposedly in outraged morality but actually in jealous revenge. O'Neill took for it Marshall House at Rodsman's Neck, New York, with its cold stone base, its pagan portico with six tall columns, its central doorway with a "squared transom and sidelights flanked by intermediate columns," and its arrangement of windows - only he changed its eight steps to four in mercy to the actors and added the shutters he needed for his final catastrophe. This house, like the house in Desire Under the Elms, was to participate in the drama. The family is torn between pagan joy in life, and Puritan condemnation of pleasure as sin, and their conflict appears in the facade of the house, where the pagan temple portico is stuck on "like an incongruous white mask" over the "sombre gray ugliness" of its stone walls. In the first play 'Homecoming,' all the windows of this outraged house reflect the sun "in a resentful glare," and as the murder is planned the inside of the house is stained with the crimson of the setting sun. Whether the columns are bathed in sunlight, haunted moonlight, or bloody sunset, they throw their shadows in black bars against the wall, suggesting the imprisonment of the fated family.
Each of the three plays moves from the embattled exterior of the house to its haunted interior, dominated by the family past in the portraits of the dead Puritan Mannons. Most of the indoor scenes take place at night, and in "the flickering candlelight" the eyes of the portraits take on "an intense bitter life." They glare so "accusingly" at the Electra character after all her crimes, that she justifies herself to them as if they were living judges. O'Neill knew that this haunted interior came out of his deepest self, "whom the past always haunts so persistently." As soon as he had written these plays and had returned to America, he went to New London with Carlotta to "revisit Pequet Ave. old time haunts," and right after that visit he got "Idea play - house-with-the-masked-dead and two living intruding strangers," so much had his own family past in the house at 325 Pequot Avenue haunted him when he designed the haunted interior of the Mannon house.
He even dared to give the same penetration through surfaces, the same sense of "unreal reality" to his characters. Each of the plays begins with a group of townspeople, looking upon the Mannons in a prying, gossiping way as the New Londoners of O'Neill's youth had once looked upon the O'Neills. O'Neill gave them purely "exterior characterization," each with a few emphatic mannerisms. He also made the two fiancés of the tragic young Mannons "almost characterless" - embodiments of simplicity, goodness and health. All these external people set off the entirely "inner" characterization of the fated Mannons. He wanted to avoid for the Mannons, "as far as possible and consistent with living people, the easy superficial characterization of individual mannerisms." Because they speak directly out of the passions engendered in the family past, O'Neill found that any experiments with asides or stylized soliloquies - and he tried both in the course of rewritings - only got "in the way of the play's drive."
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Two-Headed Janus
REHEARSALS and out-of-town tryouts were over and in 1594, when this curtain goes up, Shakespeare stood before his public fully fledged. Though only thirty that year, he thought his days past the best. Sonnets, mostly youthful work, picture him 'as I am now,' crushed by time's hand or 'beated and chopped' with age. For this precocious old man, the world-weariness has its share of literary posing. But his people on the average lived shorter lives than we do and 'hagggish age' stole on them early.
London when he lived there was a pesthouse, Stratford too. Country air carried death, like the air they breathed in cities. Sanitation mocked itself and his contemporaries sickened from typhus, dysentery, and bubonic plague. His brothers and sisters, seven in all, dropped off one by one, only Joan surviving past middle age. He himself died at fifty-two. Poverty waited at the lane's end, especially in the nineties, a time of worsening inflation. Some of his acquaintance, like Tom Nashe, went to debtors' prison and came out to die in straits. Many didn't have enough to eat or what they ate wasn't good for them. The Irish of their day, they were often 'cup-shotten.' If tradition has it right, a drinking bout finished off Shakespeare. Politics, a subtler scourge, afflicted high and low. One of his fellow playwrights, Thomas Kyd, felt the scourge. A caution to the rest, he fell foul of the thought police. Loyalty today was disloyalty tomorrow and the up-and-down wore them 'out of act' or strength.
But 'old,' meaning decrepit, also means the real thing, veritable Shakespeare. Romeo, an 'old' murderer, is practiced in killing, and Shakespeare at thirty, old or expert in craft, towered over the others, satellites to his pole star. Naturally, he made a target for envious gossip. Robert Greene, a jealous rival, seeking to account for Shakespeare's ascendancy, compared him to the provident ant. Greene himself was a grasshopper, fiddling the summer out, but his reading, though partial, includes a piece of truth. Shakespeare, his poet's eye 'in a fine frenzy rolling,' had a cold eye when this was wanted.
As success stories go, his seems unlikely. Late in the 1580s he had come up from Stratford, penniless and anonymous. He left behind a wife who had snared him at eighteen, also three children, doubtful assets. The Shakespeare family's fortunes had to be entered on the debit side too. John Shakespeare saw to that. Once Stratford's bailiff, he was well along on the road to the poorhouse. Shakespeare's father liked to litigate and hoped something would turn up. His mother, one of the Ardens, an ancient name in Warwickshire, had her name to console her. For Shakespeare, starting out, the auspices weren't good. But this through-and-through professional showed them how the career belongs to the talents and by 1592 had ten plays to his credit. Some brought in record returns.
Like a scenario for one of these plays, Shakespeare's story has its checks and reversals. Plague broke out in London in 1592, closing the theaters, his livelihood, for almost two years. Actors like Will Kempe, the time's famous comic, and Edward Alleyn, its great tragedian, fled the city, going on tour. If Shakespeare went with them, his travels were abridged. Plague destroyed some acting companies, Pembroke's Men among them, and likely young Shakespeare belonged to this fellowship. "As for my Lord Pembroke's," Henslowe the theater manager wrote Alleyn, his son-in-law, "they are all at home and have been this five or six weeks, for they cannot save their charges [expenses] with travel...and were fain to pawn their apparel." Evidently the playbooks went the way of the apparel and certain plays of Shakespeare's, once the property of Pembroke's Men, turn up later in the repertory of a rival company.
But Fortune had better things in mind for this playwright. When plague slackened in the spring of 1594, London's theaters reopened, the companies returned, and Shakespeare got back in harness. Though Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, dominated his theater world, other companies competed for popular favor. Shakespeare the apprentice didn't mind which one he wrote for. In June, Strange's Men performed two plays of his at Newington Butts, south of the Thames. Before the year was out, the company lost its patron but found a new one, Lord Hunsdon, High Chamberlain of England. In 1594 Shakespeare entered Hunsdon's service. He remained with this company for the rest of his career.
Pleasing the multitude, he pleased the cognoscenti too. His first attempt at comedy, farce mixed with other things and perfection of its kind, enlivened the Christmas revels in 1594 at the largest of the Inns of Court, London's law schools. This same December he received a higher accolade, performance before the Queen in her palace at Greenwich. By then pirate publishers had snapped up three of his plays, an index of their growing appeal. The first was Titus Andronicus, dismaying to Bardolaters but a rousing success with the crowd.
A snobbish view held that plays were insubstantial pageants, here today, gone tomorrow. Shakespeare may have concurred (the best in that kind were shadows). But poetry appealed to the ages. "I have built a monument more lasting than bronze," said Horace, one of his teachers. The pupil hoped to emulate the teacher and by 1594 his skill as a poet was widely acclaimed. Not long after, a contemporary hailed him as the modern Catullus. His two famous poems of the early 1590s, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, established his credentials as a serious writer, also helping feather his nest. Each carried a dedication to Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, a young notability at Court. He was Shakespeare's patron, perhaps for some years the 'master-mistress' of his passion. A patron was expected to reward the poets who flattered him and likely Southampton did this. One way or another, young Shakespeare built a stake.
In 1594 he 'staked down,' as in their card game of primero. Formerly a hireling in theater, he bought a partnership in his business enterprise, the Chamberlain's Men. A 'composition' or deed in return for his bond entitled him to share in the company's proceeds. The 'sharer' was an actor too, known for kingly roles and old man's roles. It takes a special kind of young actor to play old men successfully, and Shakespeare's facility says something of the man he was.
With all this, he found time to write plays. For roughly twenty years, he served his company as its 'ordinary poet,' i.e., principal writer, turning out the wares others brought to market. "Make it new," his fellows said, their eye on the box office. That he did, supplying whatever was called for: "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical," etc. Polonius, reciting these different genres or kinds, meant to distinguish one from another. But Shakespeare wasn't simon pure and most of his plays make a hodgepodge.
Like the 'singing men' or clerks who rejoiced the hearts of English in the older time, he absorbed himself in his function. Some of his fellows, previewing modern times, lived lives of notoriety, not he. Peele, a hellion, became the subject of a popular jest book. Lodge, before respectability overtook him, made a freebooting voyage to the New World. Jonson was 'rare' Ben, toper and bullyboy. Shakespeare, self-effacing, kept his head down. On this side, he looks backward to his medieval forebears, most of them names in the catalog, little more. If you want to make their acquaintance you must listen to their music, true for Shakespeare too.
Medieval men, deferring to the ancients, called themselves dwarfs who stood on the shoulders of giants. That way, they saw further. This giant of modern times stood on the shoulders of the proximate past. His first tutors who were also his competitors did him good service, notably Lyly and the 'University Wits,' Marlowe, trailed by others. Anonymous playwrights in the generation before him gave him sketches for his Jew of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and Oberon, king of the fairies. A quick study, he outpaced all his teachers. But if he was sui generis, the greatest maker in 'the tide of times,' he was also his time's product. For him the past is prologue when the sinews of his art were developed. This past that intimates the future is young Shakespeare's story. It ends in 1594.
The competition had scattered, another way of explaining Shakespeare's early preeminence. Lyly, his first master, once all the rage for 'Euphuistic' comedy, fell silent in the nineties except for begging letters. Greene, his envenomed rival, died in 1592, detractors said of a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. Kyd went soon after, like Greene still in his thirties. Marlowe, the greatest of Shakespeare's early contemporaries, caught an assassin's dagger in 1593. He was twenty-nine.
Shakespeare, learning his trade from these playwrights, didn't forget them. In the miraculous years to come, he paid tribute to Kyd in Hamlet and Lodge in As You Like It, imitations with a difference. Toward the end of his career, writing The Winter's Tale, he reached back in memory to Greene. He never stopped learning, from others, not least from himself. But by 1594 his apprenticeship was over, and this year he struck out on his own.
MOVING into the city proper from lower-class Shoreditch, he took lodgings in St. Helen's parish, Bishopsgate, on the northern perimeter of London Wall. Playdays, he walked out along Shoreditch High Street to the Theater and Curtain. These first public playhouses, erected in the 1570s, stood in open fields outside the city. Each day they changed their bill of fare, and providing a new one kept Shakespeare busy. He left no calling cards in Bishopsgate but remembered this early residence in plays.
Not the only entertainer in his neighborhood, he shared the spotlight with famous Ned Alleyn. Two years Shakespeare's junior, Alleyn grew up in St. Botolph's parish on the bank of London Ditch. Nashe called him the modern Roscius, after a celebrated Roman actor. But he had no rivals, ancient or modern. "Others speak," Jonson said in a poetical tribute, "only thou dost act." Among his star roles was that of Barrabas in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, a great triumph of the typecaster's art. This play stimulated Shakespeare when he saw it at the Rose on Bankside. Later, though, writing The Merchant of Venice, he found it wouldn't do as a model. The energy, unexampled in Marlowe, seemed amazing, but typecasting was never for him.
When plague closed the theaters, Alleyn's company disbanded, some members quitting London for a Continental tour. Alleyn, joining Strange's company, went into the provinces. As in our modern despotic states, he needed permission to do this. Bureaucracy, a storehouse of paper, has its uses, and the warrant licensing his travels names the actors who went with him, all, subsequently, Shakespeare's fellows in the Chamberlain's Men.
Barnstorming in the country, Alleyn wrote letters home, making it easy for posterity to track him. The letters, thick with life, show an amiable man and affectionate husband. Plague is on his mind, and he wants his Joan to throw water "before your door" every night "and have in your windows good store of rue and herb of grace." But his "Mouse" doesn't write him. "Send me of your domestical matters," he tells her, "as how your distilled water proves, or this, or that, or anything what you will. And Jug, I pray you, let my orange-tawny stockings of woolen be dyed a very good black against I come home to wear in the winter." Reproachfully, he notes no word of his garden. His wife ought to remember "that all that bed which was parsley in the month of September, you sow it with spinach, for then is the time." Later Henslowe wrote Alleyn that the spinach bed was sown.
Shakespeare posted no letters in plague time. He had his poems to write or perhaps his Anne couldn't read.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="55">Unable to afford a farm or factory of his own until the experiment had proved successful, David began by leasing an acre or so of rich alluvial soil and planting a small crop of sugar beets. Maria wrote Louisa Loring that they would often get up before dawn and go out together to weed the rows of beet plants when "all the world, except the birds, are asleep."
For a time the beauty of the scenery and the prospect, however distant, of eventually having a place of their own filled Maria with a sense of domestic contentment. She told Louisa that she had "more of a home feeling than I have had since we left Cottage Place." She even found the stern Calvinism of their landlord, Enos Clark, and the "quiet religious refinement" of his family reassuring. She and David had rented a pew in the Unitarian Church where the pastor, Mr. Stearns, was both a good preacher and a member of the Northampton Anti-Slavery Society.
The first weeks passed pleasantly enough. David went out to his field several times a day to weed and Maria often accompanied him. The remainder of her time she devoted to keeping David's clothes in order (she was making him a frock coat) and promoting the antislavery cause. At first, the Childs were warmly welcomed by the citizenry of the town, most of whom were of old Yankee stock. Northampton's reputation as one of the most beautiful spots in New England had attracted a number of retired business and professional people who contributed to its refined and cultivated tone. Maria was amused by the ease with which she befriended these gentlefolk. "Once more," she wrote Louisa, "I have it in my power to be the favorite of the class denominated first."
One Northampton woman who seemed "the very embodiment of aristocracy" was Anne Lyman, the wife of the sheriff of Hampshire County. The Lymans occupied the adjoining pew in the Unitarian Church, and Maria felt instantly drawn to this learned woman who, like herself, was outspoken and firm in her convictions and with whom she could indulge the "poetical" side of her nature. Anne Lyman's opinions on most subjects ran strictly counter to Maria's. Nonetheless, the two spent many happy hours together. "I like her notwithstanding her distorted view of men and things," wrote Maria somewhat patronizingly of her new friend. "If she can manage to like me, anti-slavery, rights-of-woman, and all, it must be because she respects the daring freedom of speech which she practices." Maria hoped to convert both Anne Lyman and her husband to abolitionism. She never succeeded, but the two women remained firm friends. Years later Maria described their relationship to Anne's daughter, Susan Lesley: "Both of us were as direct and energetic as a loco-motive under high pressure of steam; and, coming full tilt from opposite directions, we sometimes ran against each other with a clash. But no bones were ever broken. We laughed and shook hands after such encounters, and indulged in a little playful raillery at each others' impetuosity."
Underneath all their high-spirited disputatiousness these two friends understood one another. Aristocratic as Anne Lyman was, Maria remembered with delight the "lofty disdain" with which she rebuffed any sign of social pretension. She recalled particularly Anne's account of a visit she once paid to a very wealthy family whose members were "exceedingly careful of their dignity." During the course of her visit, Anne was informed that "a friendship of questionable gentility" had formed between one of the relatives of this family and Maria Child. "Mrs. Child is an abolitionist, you know," the rich folk informed their guest, "and she does not belong to the circle of our visitors." At this Anne Lyman exploded: "Visit you indeed! I should like to have you try to get her here! Send a carriage and six horses, and see if you can get her here!"
Although the Childs had been led to believe that Northampton was a stronghold of antislavery, they soon observed that all but a few reputed sympathizers kept it wonderfully to themselves. Maria reported back to her Boston friends that Christian orthodoxy " has clothed most of the community in her straitlaced garments." If the Childs witnessed plenty of praying and preaching and concern with saving souls, they could discern little of what they considered true charity among the townspeople. After living in Northampton for two months they were only willing to claim two people as "real abolitionists."
Northampton's conservatism on the slavery question was buttressed by the arrival each summer of a number of prominent Southern families. The Childs' closest neighbor, for example, was Thomas Napier, a former slave auctioneer from Charleston, South Carolina. Maria and David quickly discovered that despite his shameful profession, Napier was a respected member of the Northampton community. Like their landlord, Enos Clark, Napier was a deacon of the Congregational Church. He also taught Sunday school, informing the children under his charge that God had officially consigned the blacks to perpetual slavery.
Disagreeable as it was to live so near someone who had made his living "trafficking in human beings," even more irritating to David and Maria were the pious posturings of this man who called himself a Christian. It happened that the south wall of Napier's house rose only a few feet from the Childs' single window, and on warm summer evenings the sound of the man's prayers carried easily into their room. David did his best to drown out the offensive noise by singing and playing his accordion.
Anne Lyman asked Maria soon after her arrival in Northampton if she had made the acquaintance of her Southern neighbor. When Maria observed that a slave auctioneer and an abolitionist were not "likely to find much pleasure in each other's society," Anne Lyman accused her of being as bigoted as Napier himself. Maria responded by insisting that it was one thing for Mrs. Lyman to disagree with the tactics of the abolitionists and quite another for Mr. Napier to promote his slave-trading as a God-given good. There was a difference, she insisted, "between errors of opinion and sins in actual practice."
If Maria found it hard to tolerate the "fiery irascible" Mr. Napier, she had better luck befriending some of the other Southerners in town. Challenged by the opportunity to try her argumentative skills on genuine slaveholders, she willingly sought them out and, with what she described as a careful mixture of "candour and courtesy," spent many hours in hotel lobbies and private parlors discussing the issue of slavery. At first Maria was encouraged by the Southerners' friendliness and hoped her powers of persuasion would convince them of the sinfulness of the "peculiar institution" and of the need to regard Negroes as fellow human beings. But she quickly discovered her job would not be an easy one: "By education and habit they have so long thought and spoken of the colored man as a mere article of property, that it is impossible for them to recognize him as a man, and reason concerning him as a brother, on equal terms with the rest of the human family. If, by great effort, you make them acknowledge the brotherhood of the human race, as a sacred and eternal principle, - in ten minutes, their arguments, assertions and proposed schemes, all show that they have returned to the old habit of regarding the slave as a 'chattel personal.'"
Relations between Maria Child and Northampton's Southern visitors cooled visibly when it became clear that she and David not only opposed slavery in theory but were actively pursuing its extinction. Thomas Napier was particularly annoyed by their proselytizing and countered with missionary tactics of his own. Thus in July when his sister from South Carolina arrived for a visit accompanied by her slave Rosa, he urged Rosa to befriend Mrs. Child and show this Yankee woman how well slavery agreed with her. The colored woman passed frequently under Maria's window, looking sleek and contented. When engaged in conversation she would "boast of her happy slavery" and laugh at Maria's efforts to persuade her to take her freedom. Maria, refusing to be taken in by such subterfuges, sent Rosa's mistress a long letter decrying the evils of slavery and comparing the happiness of slaves "to that of well-fed pigs" and their destiny to dogs who were sold to one buyer while their puppies went to another. Accompanying the letter were several antislavery tracts.
If Maria hoped this barrage of antislavery literature would convince Rosa's mistress of the error of her ways she was sadly mistaken. Within two hours the letter was angrily returned, followed shortly by an indignant Rosa. The Napiers had informed their slave that their abolitionist neighbor had called her a pig and her children puppies. Maria quickly set matters straight by reading Rosa a copy of the letter, and, encouraged by this Yankee woman's sympathetic manner, Rosa was soon disclosing her life's story. Although she'd been promised her freedom by a previous owner, the document granting it had been lost. Maria, who feared that once back in the South Rosa would lose all chance of obtaining her freedom, tried to persuade the woman to remain in Northampton. But Rosa could not bear the thought of living apart from her children and other close relatives and friends, and in the end she returned home with her mistress. Maria's failure to coax Rosa into remaining in the North was a source of delight to Mr. Napier and his family, who boasted that for all of Mrs. Child's efforts to persuade Rosa to take her freedom she had preferred to stay with her beloved mistress. Here was positive proof that slavery was a benevolent institution after all.
More discouraging than the intransigence of Southerners was the behavior of Northampton's Yankee natives, who showed more concern with not offending those in their midst who were pro-slavery than in combating Northern prejudice against Negroes. The owner of the Mansion House, a favorite resort for Southern travelers, became very annoyed with Maria when she asked a colored man staying in the hotel if he were free. "I dislike slavery as much as you do," the hotel keeper assured her, "but then I get my living by slave-holders." Maria also discovered that Margaret Dwight, the principal of the Gothic Seminary for Young Ladies, five or six of whose pupils were Southerners, was strongly prejudiced against the abolitionists. By the end of her first year in Northampton Maria was even upbraiding the tenants in her own boardinghouse for their "narrow and bigoted spirit."
Most disheartening of all was the attitude of the clergy, whom Maria accused of valuing the peace of the church more than moral principle and sectarian doctrines more than the brotherhood of man. She reported to her abolitionist friends in Boston that Mr. Mitchell, the pastor of the Congregational Church, would not permit antislavery lectures in his meetinghouse for fear of driving Mr. Napier out of town. From her observation post next door she watched as almost every day baskets of fruits and vegetables were carried from Napier's garden to Mr. Mitchell's rectory and dismissed this neighborly generosity as "part of the price for which the Judas betrays his master."
During the first year in Northampton both Childs were active in the organized antislavery efforts of Hampshire County. In addition to the tedious and often unpleasant ordeal of obtaining signatures to congressional petitions, they also faithfully attended antislavery meetings. Once, having traveled twenty miles to Greenfield for a Franklin County antislavery convention, Maria found the atmosphere considerably chillier than Northampton's. As she seated herself among the delegates she was at first unaware that her presence was causing any uneasiness, and she ignored the implicit hostility in the announcement that all the gentlemen present were welcome to join the convention. Then she overheard one man whisper to another, while gesturing in her direction, "I hope she doesn't come to introduce Boston notions . ...I trust she is not going to advocate women's rights!"
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="56">
Definition of Feminist Art or Feminist Definition of Art
Selma Kraft
My title is more than a play on words: it states a distinction critical in determining how to bring about overdue recognition of women's art. A feminist definition of art is better suited to this goal than a definition of feminist art.
The call for a feminist definition of art arose in the context of explaining the problem of undervaluing past and present women artists on the basis of the male bias of traditional criteria used to attribute artistic value. This approach does not apologize for the art of women, explaining away their 'lack of greatness' in inequitable social conditions. Instead, it locates the problem of women's exclusion from serious recognition as artists not in their art but in the very definition of art. According to this view, the problem does not reside in the art women have created; it lies in the conditions of viewing visual works as art in the Western tradition.
A successful feminist definition of art would replace the traditional definition of art. Philosophers, however, have increasingly questioned whether it is possible to locate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for calling something art, i.e., for defining art. More than thirty years ago Morris Weitz established the framework for this questioning when he stated: "'Art,' itself is an open concept .... The very expansive, adventurous character of art, its ever-present changes and novel creations, makes it logically impossible to ensure any set of defining properties." Because of this, "If we actually look and see what it is that we call 'art,' we will find no common properties - only strands of similarities." Since that time a new way of defining art, George Dickie's institutional theory of art, has become widely accepted. In 1974 he wrote: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is (1) an artifact; (2) a set of the aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)."
The kind of definition Weitz found impossible is a normative definition - one which provides a criterion, or criteria, for aesthetic judgment. As Weitz puts it, any evaluation of the statement, "'This is a work of art' implies 'This has P', where 'P' is some chosen art-making property." Without the belief that not only is such a definition possible but is, indeed, in use and biased against the art of women, there would be no need to seek a feminist definition of art.
The kind of definition that Dickie provides, however, is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It provides no standard for including or excluding anything as art. It states a fact upon which there is widespread agreement, i.e., that the determination of art is a social process. It is the social process that needs change, not the definition.
Despite Weitz's objections to the contrary, art historians, museum curators, gallery owners, critics, and collectors use a criterion that is agreed upon for making value judgments about art every day, a criterion not the subject of argument or discussion but simply assumed: stylistic originality is the definitive characteristic of art. Visual works that do not meet this standard are taken to be craft, 'motel art,' commercial art, or anything considered to be less than art.
Stylistic originality is not a quality found in any work per se. Looking at a Roy Lichtenstein comic strip painting and a newspaper comic strip frame, or an all-over painting by Lee Krasner and another by Jackson Pollock, one could not tell by any perceptible qualities which one or ones are formally innovative. The determination of stylistic originality can only be made by knowing something about the background of a work, which is the historical circumstances of its creation. One must know to what tradition it belongs and how it is connected in time to the elements of that tradition. No amount of looking, even of sensitive looking, could reveal whether Lichtenstein's or the newspaper's comic strip frame, Krasner's or Pollock's painting, were more stylistically original or even stylistically original at all. Without knowing the circumstances of the creation of, say, two identical-looking Brillo boxes, it would not be possible to differentiate between one that is a mere object found in a grocery store and a work of art by Andy Warhol. Stylistic originality is, then, an attribute added to a work of art from other information, not one derived from it.
A paradigmatic assumption of stylistic originality as the definitive characteristic of art is made by H. W. Janson in his immensely influential art history textbook: "Originality, then, is what distinguishes art from craft. We may say, therefore, that it is the yardstick of artistic greatness or importance." It is clear that what Janson means by originality is innovation in style, not meaning. For example, when he evaluates the Nike of Samothrace as "the greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture," he speaks of the formal element of space: "There is an active relationship - indeed an interdependence - between the statue and the space that envelops it, such as we have never seen before."
It is this assumption that is implicitly agreed upon by art critics. The particular aesthetic characteristics they refer to in evaluating art (e.g., powerful, deliberate, complicated, motionless, authoritative, intense, beautiful, seductive, potent, eerie, visionary, gorgeous, severe, forceful, perishable, vulnerable, ghostlike) may be seen as positive, negative, or neutral attributes by different critics or even by the same critics regarding different works. Depending on context, any of these words can be and are used with different evaluative meanings. A work of art may be interpreted, for example, as overly complicated or interestingly complicated; as flashily gorgeous or sublimely gorgeous; as fancifully perishable or incompetently perishable; as boringly motionless or breathtakingly motionless. The attribute of stylistic originality, however, is always positive and that of stylistic derivativeness is always negative.
This distinction is true even in our postmodern era, when stylistic originality seems threatened to suffer the fate of other earlier valued attributes of art, that of being outmoded. Artists currently are doing blatant copies of earlier artists' works or unabashedly replicating their styles. These kinds of gestures, however, are considered to be manifestations of originality by virtue of their turning away from the originality of modernism. For example, the reviewers of a recent show by Mark Tansey in a New York gallery remark that what Tansey is involved with is "rejection of formalist strategies". Thus the fact that his "figures are redolent of Eakins in their academic realism, the space and dramatic lighting borrowed from the Baroque," does not diminish their appreciation of his art, because "Originality is everywhere denied."
Tansey, in other words, is not unoriginal; he is stylistically original in denying formalistic originality. This denial is, of course, not to be found in the work itself. It is attributed to the work, on the basis of the place of the work in the tradition of formalist art. When compared to formalism, the stylistic characteristics of academic realism and Baroque art are formal innovations. Therefore, this artist is worthy of having his work shown in a prestigious New York gallery and of being reviewed in Artnews.
So pervasive is the acceptance of stylistic originality as the defining characteristic of art that even feminist art historians use this criterion of artistic value. In evaluating the work of Lavinia Fontana, Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin remark: "Her major handicap ... is being one of the last representatives of a conservative maniera ... Thus her work has an old-fashioned air that is unfortunately not redeemed by either a novel personal interpretation of maneria or by a consistently high level of quality." The clear implication here is that a novel personal ointerpretation of style, whatever the deficiencies of her art, would have been sufficient to redeem Fontana's artistic reputation. In another book compiling past women artists, Wendy Slatkin states that the artists she includes are not "women artists of mere competence", and the first criterion for inclusion she lists is "technical or formal innovations".
Among aestheticians, too, there are those who have explicitly taken the position that originality is a necessary condition for something to be called art, or as Arthur Danto puts it, "an analytical requirement of being a work of art." David Goldblatt deduces from this belief that an artist repeating his own style is guilty of self-plagiarism, i.e., ceases to count as an artist. What is even more revealing about the deep belief of the connection between art and originality, however, is the implicit assumption that originality is a sufficient condition for art. Some aestheticians interested in defining art, such as Weitz, Dickie, and Danto, do not start with definitive characteristics of art which can account for works that are original. Instead, they start with the notion of originality and try to find definitions that can include a wide variety of original works. Instead of using prevailing conceptions or their own definitions of art to question the artistic legitimacy or value of such works as the most famous example of all, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, they use such works as unquestioned examples of art that their definitions must meet. Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, Claes Oldenburg's filled-in hole-in-the-ground, Chris Burden's locking himself in a footlocker for seven days - what common quality do these disparate items have in common that makes it necessary to account for them in any definition of art, before any definition of art is forthcoming, other than their novelty in how they are done?
Counterexamples to stylistic originality as art's assumed central defining feature are to be found in artistic traditions outside Western art. When looked at from within these cultures, as opposed to looking with Western aesthetic expectations, the aesthetics of African, Chinese, and American Indian art, to name some examples, do not require originality. This is not to say that these cultures don't require creativity or individualized expression for their art, simply that stylistic innovation is not assumed to be a sufficient or necessary condition for art, or even held in high esteem at all. Of course, the artworks produced by these cultures are generally excluded from consideration by traditional Western aesthetics.
The exclusion of women from the canon of Western art also stems from this assumption. In historical terms the visual works women have made have not met this requirement. Although those women artists who have been valued most highly in Western culture have been creative and highly personal in their individual expressions, they made no significant stylistic innovations. Artemisia Gentileschi worked in the style created by Caravaggio; Mary Cassatt's style was derived from the Impressionism developed by Claude Monet et al.; Georgia O'Keeffe's style was influenced by that of Arthur Dove. The fact that no woman artist has been recognized for having made a stylistic breakthrough in and of itself does not mean, however, that the very notion of stylistic originality is inherently exclusionary toward the art of women.
A closer look at the radical innovativeness involved in achieving significant stylistic originality indicates that it has not been a goal for women artists. To replace intentionally an accepted style with one significantly different requires a certain antagonism to what exists, aggressiveness in overthrowing it, and a willingness to take risks in destroying what stands in the way. While men in Western culture have been socialized to these qualities, women have been taught to be accepting, docile, and passive. This is not to imply in any way that these differences are biological in origin or inevitable for the future, In the past, however, women have stressed the need to connect to the past and to accept life as it is given to them. No male artist has been known to have said, "I try to see through the eyes of many others," or, "[My art] is the thread of my connections which makes the world intelligible to me." No woman artist has been known to have talked about art as "a difficult feat of bravado," or "the love of danger," or to have said, "I feel no tradition ... I'm disconnected."
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="57">What is less clear is whether the rise of conservative evangelical movements has reached its modern-day peak. Are these movements destined to decline and lose power as the West proceeds to the Third Millennia? Perhaps an understanding of the ties between evangelical Protestantism and school Policy in the American past may illuminate these issues.
The connection between various Protestant groups and education and schooling has been an intimate one throughout the course of American history. Public schools as we recognize them today were unknown before the American Revolution, yet the ties between religion and education were strong. The Puritans of New England, like other Protestant groups in the colonies, emphasized the importance of literacy and especially reading, largely though not exclusively for religious purposes. Reading the Bible, in addition to the catechetical instruction provided by oneÕs parents and minister, promoted a more godly life and hopefully led one along the path to personal salvation. The town schools of eighteenth-century Massachusetts and the district schools of the hinterland often used the Bible as a basic reading text and taught the principles of Protestantism through successive editions of the ubiquitous New England Primer ÒIn AdamÕs Fall, We Sinned All,Ó many children quickly learned as schools reinforced the lessons of parents and ministers.
But even in the colonial period, no consensus existed over the propriety of a particular brand of religion in education. Quakers, Catholics, Puritan - and many other groups, including atheists - brought enough diversity to public discussions to preclude any easy agreement on important educational matters. Puritan Boston, for example, saw the emergence of a strong commercial class in the late seventeenth century that often eschewed orthodox Calvinist values in their lives. Secular public reading and writing schools for boys, for example, were founded in towns such as Boston that challenged the monopoly of older Latin grammar schools, as middle class families pressed for more attention to more practical, somewhat less religious, education. Private schools for boys and even some girls whose parents could pay for the tuition opened in response to this secular demand. Navigation, penmanship, foreign languages, and dancing were available for whatever prices the market might bear.
Thus, there was more to education than Puritan ministers even in historic Boston might have desired. By the early eighteenth century, religious leaders there lamented the ÔdeclineÕ in the spirituality of the people, reflected in the presence of more luxury goods, finer homes, and often more secular instruction than seemed common in the previous century. A strong Protestant tone informed the Anglo-American world of colonial America, and prayer, Bible reading, and the like shaped the consciousness of generations of settlers and their children. Controversy was nevertheless always present, elders generally thought the new generation somewhat insolent, and the preservation of sound religious influence upon educational practice problematic. The so-called Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s spread across the land as a testimony to the perception among many that the place of religion in life had to be restored and redefined.
The success of the American Revolution did not necessarily produce a completely harmonious educational and religious state. The commercial middle classes that helped to finance the American Revolution hardly turned their backs on profits after the victory at Yorktown. The values of Yankee traders threatened still further the pieties of religion and the power of local ministers; the expansion of the country westward opened new avenues to material and not necessarily spiritual gain; and the popularity of the ideas of the Enlightenment hardly seemed propitious to the faithful. The skepticism of a Voltaire, the scientific views of a Jefferson, the radicalism of a Paine, and the continued power of secularism in life led to a decline in church membership and attendance. The stage was set for another Great Awakening.
By the early 1800s, evangelical awakenings emerged that had lasting effects on American culture and education. It is not an exaggeration to say that evangelical movements became part of the mainstream of American Protestantism. The rise of faith in human reason, progress, and the perfectibility of humanity proved attractive to groups such as the Unitarians, but overall more familiar and conservative themes received greater public recognition among older and newly expanding groups such as the Methodists and Baptists. To many evangelical Protestants, the terror of the French Revolution sufficiently countered the assumptions of the Enlightenment about humanityÕs inherent nature. Evangelicals were unable to prevent the gradual, formal separation of church and state - the established Congregational Church of Massachusetts was the last to fall in 1833 - yet they still left a visible, and quite controversial, imprint of basic American institutions such as the emerging public schools.
Protestant ministers - best remembered for their camp meetings and urban revivals - played a seminal role in the establishment of Sunday schools and the creation of public schools in nineteenth-century America. All of their actions were controversial and their successes obvious though incomplete. Like previous religious activists, however, they were an essential part of all dialogues about the fate of American education. Religious denominations had always been interested in the formal and informal instruction of children and youth. What was new in the early 1800s was the growing interdenominational Protestant support for common, public school systems. The success of interdenominational Protestant groups such as the American Bible Society (1816) and the American Sunday School Union (1824) heralded the coming of even greater things by mid-century.
In startingly rapid fashion, most Protestant groups after the 1830s began to promote the establishment of common, state-controlled public schools. Early in the 1800s, many philanthropic Protestant reformers had banded together to build free charity schools in major urban areas to educate the children of the unchurched poor. Within a few decades, however, as Catholic immigration increased and the revival movements intensified, a broad-based Protestant effort to build state-sponsored schools triumphed. The majoritarian Protestants saw the public schools as a bulwark of mainstream values, a defender of a common faith against infidels, atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Jews, and others. Historian Timothy Smith has succinctly written: "An evangelical consensus of faith and ethics had come to so dominate the national culture, that a majority of Protestants were now willing to entrust the state with the task of educating children, confident that education would be 'religious' still. The sects identified their common beliefs with those of the nation, their mission with America's mission."
Anti-Catholicism served as a unifying belief among most Protestant denominations throughout the 1800s. The links between Protestant leadership and school policies in the early years were numerous. For example, the earliest state school superintendents were often ordained Protestant ministers. Countless teachers were devout 'Christians,' meaning Protestants who had had a religious conversion. Many single women served as teachers beginning in the nineteenth century, often recruited by religious organizations hoping to save the West for God, or to convert manumitted slaves. Many of these teachers often saw their role in essentially religious terms. More due to custom rather than legislation, teachers often began school days with a non-denominational Protestant prayer and a reading (often without comment) from the King James version of the Bible. Anti-Romanism ran riot.
The successful linkage of Protestant values with the new public school system could be seen in the teaching staff, curriculum, and attitude of ministers toward the enhanced role of the state in the educational sphere. Wrongly assuming that Protestants would long remain dominant, these reformers could not foresee that the state might become more secular and ultimately might infect schools with irreligious beliefs. Most Protestant groups - except for some Lutherans, Seventh Day Adventists, and some small denominations - supported the state system and thus lacked strong systems of denominational schools to counter this possible development. And, as the nineteenth century progressed, the Industrial Revolution added even higher levels of materialism to the American scene, adding further possibilities that secular, worldly values would undermine the power of religion and shape basic social institutions.
Besides Protestant holdouts from the broadly Protestant state system of schools that emerged, Catholics, Jews, non-believers, and other dissenters often attacked the development of public education. Opponents supported education and schooling but often denounced the state systems of instruction that emerged. Catholics slowly built a competing system of parochial schools after their efforts to share the tax fund were defeated in the 1840s. They condemned the public school texts that disparaged the culture of immigrants and Catholics and that openly ridiculed the papacy. That all 'Christians' were Protestants struck Catholics and others as ludicrous, just as it would to many citizens in the next century. But the allegiance of evangelical Protestants to the public schools remained powerful, and the easy equation of Protestantism, Americanism, and public schooling was understandable given the power of majorities to define reality.
The early twentieth century witnessed a continual struggle by evangelical Protestants to control the destiny of American education. As prescient observers sometimes predicted, the belief that the state would remain tightly bound with Protestant values was an overly optimistic one. That is, secularism and materialism were strongly nourished by the intensification of marketplace values in the late nineteenth century, and the religious complexion of the country grew as millions of immigrants, especially Catholics and to a lesser extent Jews, came to America in the new century. Protestants still were dominant on school boards, in much of the teaching force, and especially prominent in shaping school policy in small towns and villages across the country. But professional administrators in the growing schools, especially in cities, while usually Protestant, increasingly supplanted the ministers so influential in state government and local school control in the nineteenth century. Like an echo from the past, Protestant ministers and lay activists condemned the decline of school and society.
Efforts were continually made, of course, to guarantee that a set of homogeneous, pan-Protestant values still dominated schools serving an increasingly heterogeneous people. But the Scopes Trial, which discredited fundamentalist ideas among many citizens, undermined Darwin's theory of evolution about as successfully as Prohibition ended the drinking of bourbon. Yet the fight over evolution was part of a larger crisis facing the faithful. Evangelical and fundamentalist Christians even before the 1920s well understood that a creeping secularism grew larger in the wake of America's emergence as an industrial and world power. Evangelist Billy Sunday attacked the rise of vocational education programs in the schools in the early 1900s, since he realized that material gain was increasingly becoming an important motive behind the expansion of schools in general and the high schools in particular. Despite these complaints against what were seen as dangerous features of modern education, destined to obscure the moral mission of the schools, vocational programs became common and often flourished. How to prepare for the world of work came to define for many the goals of public schools.
Evangelical Protestants won the battle in Tennessee in the 1920s over the teaching of evolution in the schools, since the U.S. Supreme Court did not reverse bans against the teaching of evolution until 1968. Early in the century, prayers in schools were increasingly mandated by law to ensure compliance with the older Protestant faith. But these individual victories did not constitute any ultimate winning of the war. The early twentieth century witnessed a continual movement of mainstream Protestant churches toward liberalism. Some Protestant ministers who advocated the social gospel even became prominent Christian Socialists, calling for various forms of public ownership of the means of production. Such liberalizing tendencies reflected changes within Protestantism itself as certain leaders confronted the challenges of immigration, urban and industrial growth, and the problems of poverty in metropolitan areas.
Evangelical Protestants countered all this by leading impressive revivals, passing legislation requiring prayers in the schools, and fighting atheists and evolutionists wherever they found them. The essential beliefs of anti-modernist sentiment surfaced between 1910 and 1915 in a remarkable set of writings called The Fundamentals, whose sixty-four contributors reemphasized the basic evangelical creed: the divinity of Christ, the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible, human depravity, and the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="58">
A Confucian Boyhood in Gratitude County
JUNE 15, 1981. "Were it not for war and revolution, I would have never strayed from my home in the North China plain. I am a native son of Gratitude County [Xian Xian], in Hebei province, you know. Our hometown of Xiaoduokou was located about a hundred miles from China's imperial capital. Even with all the upheavals of the revolution, I have managed to spend most of my life in the two cities closest to my childhood home: Beijing and Tianjin. Only nine years out of my ninety did I spend away from these cities, and then only because of the war against Japan. Those years were the most difficult ones for me."
The burdened voice of the old man testifies to the truth of his words. Yet he is one of the most cosmopolitan intellectuals of his generation. Why this melancholia about his native place now?
"Yes, yes, I have lived in other cities, too. Paris, Berlin, then Shanghai and Guangzhou. But whenever I had a choice, I stayed close to Beijing. Not out of nationalism, mind you, but out of old cultural habit. This is hardest to shake. Even when I quarreled most intensely with China's traditional values, I liked to stay close to its historical terrain."
He catches traces of disbelief in my eyes and goes on: "You probably think it odd, this attachment of mine to native place. It certainly cost me a great deal, especially during the political turmoil of 1948-49 when I refused to leave Beijing to go to Hong Kong....But the pull of my origins has been great....I have always been interested in the history of Gratitude County and its most famous native son, Ji Yun, a Qing dynasty scholar. I have collected as many of his poems and essays as I could, you know. In my library, even now, I have a nearly complete collection of works by this fellow provincial of mine."
The name of Ji Yun keeps coming up in our conversation. Here sits Zhang Shenfu - a cultural rebel, a modern scholar interested in mathematical logic and dialectical materialism. Yet he has spent months, "indeed years," he says, correcting me, finding and collecting the works of Ji Yun. What lies behind Zhang's attachment to this eighteenth-century Confucian? Compensation for his own injured pride?
Zhang Shenfu himself did not become a famous native son of Gratitude County. His family's intellectual genealogy stretched no further than his grandfather, a wealthy peasant who had saved enough to hire Confucian tutors for his sons. Zhang Shenfu's uncle, his father's older brother, had been the first family member to take the imperial examination. Zhang Shenfu's father, Zhang Lian, was the second.
But the more we talk about Ji Yun, the more he grows in stature in Zhang's eyes. And in my own. In Ji Yun, it appears, Zhang has found a kindred spirit. In the years when Zhang Shenfu had difficulty balancing internal convictions and outer obligations Ji Yun provided him with some precedent, some way out of the thickets of a cultural tradition obsessed by politics.
Before I leave today, I ask to borrow one of Zhang's books by Ji Yun. From the introduction I learn that Ji Yun first attracted national attention in 1747, when he came in first at the provincial-level examination. Within a few years Ji rose to the top of the central bureaucracy, so high in fact that he became exposed to charges of bribery and favoritism. Whatever the basis of these charges, Ji Yun never contested them. Instead, he accepted exile to the farthest north-western corner of the imperial realm. On his way to and from Urumchi, Ji wrote the collection of poems that Zhang Shenfu quotes to me today. Then he adds, "Whenever I was cast out from the center of political revolution, Ji Yun's poems gained new meaning for me."
Zhang Shenfu's parting words as he hands me the volume of poetry at the door make his attachment to this eighteenth-century Confucian clearer. "Ji Yun, too, had to learn how to walk the public tightrope. But he was more successful than I. He came back from exile to become an important official. He managed to thread his path between politics and scholarship more gracefully than I did. He was a close friend of the philosopher, Dai Zhen. Together they took on many battles against the moralists who pretended to be the true heirs of Confucian tradition....For us twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals, the battle was not so clear, nor so easily won. We could no longer claim to be the true heirs of Confucianism. Though at times I was tempted to try."
JUNE 16, 1981. I try to bring our conversation back to Zhang Shenfu's childhood. I want to learn more about his father and his uncle, not just Ji Yun. But Zhang Shenfu's parental world stays opaque. Though his account is clothed in formalities, I sense pain buried beneath the genealogical recitation: "My eldest uncle had taken and passed the zhuren examinations at the provincial level. This opened the path for my father, Zhang Lian. He passed the highest examination for the jinshi [the metropolitan degree] in 1906. The next year, my father was sent on an official visit to Japan to oversee the educational progress of government students there. He returned convinced of the practical value of a modern education. So my father promptly enrolled me in a modern style primary school in Beijing."
I am not ready to jump over the first thirteen years of Zhang's life, and I ask more about what happened at home in Gratitude County, before the new schooling in Beijing.
"Before that? Well, before that I had a thoroughly Confucian upbringing, I suppose. My father was the overseer of my education, but he left the details to the family tutor. My father, I remember, was very strict with me. Here, take a look at these old photographs. They were taken right after my father passed the jinshi examination."
Two small portraits are laid out on the table - the father and the son, a stiff, thoroughly Confucian pair. Zhang Lian, wearing his official robes and cap, looks out with a severe gaze and sports the long mustache of a military official. In fact, as Zhang Shenfu tells me, most of his father's assignments for the Qing dynasty revolved around the military. In 1906 Zhang Lian began to serve as tutor at the Manchu military academy. During the next five years, the men who became Zhang Lian's closest associates were military officials: "Foremost among these was Feng Guozhang, the Chinese general who took over the Manchu Nobles' College in 1906. My father and Feng Guozhang remained close throughout the upheaval of the 1911 revolution. Zhang Lian went on to share a brief moment of glory when Feng came close to suppressing anti-dynastic rebels in the late fall of 1911."
The other little portrait shows Zhang Shenfu at thirteen. The boy's face is as severe as that of the father. The child's gaze projects the kind of seriousness expected of the eldest son of an official who just passed the jinshi examination. Dressed in a silk gown with fur collar, the boy wears his little scholar's cap with awkward dignity over protruding ears. His eyes are unflinching, as if he has just won a battle against an inner foe.
"Were you afraid of your father?" I ask softly. I may be transgressing on protected domain, but the portrait of the fierce father coupled with the overserious boy edges me on. Zhang Shenfu stops in mid-sentence. He had been rambling on about the open-air market that took place in his native village every four days or so. He interrupts the story of how his great-grandfather started this village after running into trouble with his own clan just a few miles away. He looks at me with pained eyes:
"I was six or so when my father beat my head into the kang - you know, the kind of North China stove that also serves as bed and oven for village families....He came into the room in which I was supposed to be memorizing my daily lessons and caught me playing idly with the pages of a classical dictionary. This was a big book, a huge compendium of classical learning that served as a reference work for officials. For my father, this was a sacred text. For me, a boy, it was a toy. Without warning, my father smashed my head into the kang. Blood pumped from the wound a long time. To this day you can see the scar on my forehead."
I lean closer to look for some visible sign of the wound. There is none. But the withdrawn look of the old man in front of me lets me know that the little boy inside is still smarting from the father's violence. The silence between us stretches on longer than usual. Then Zhang Shenfu goes on to assimilate this momentary recollection into the broader picture that he is painting for me. "You see how early I exhibited my pleasure in playing with books. I always liked books, but I didn't like to study."
Zhang leans back and tries to let a smile wash away the gloom hanging over the memory of his father's beating. "By the time I was fourteen, playtime was over. I was sent to Beijing to study under my uncle's supervision. I went there alone, in a small, horse-drawn cart." Zhang's voice trails off, leaving me no way now to return to the subject of his childhood pain. Clearly he has locked most of it in a place words cannot reach. He wants to go on to talk about himself as an easygoing (buzaihu) man.
Toward the end of this afternoon's conversation, however, one more trauma slips through the net of selective remembrance. We are talking about other members of his family. Zhang starts listing his various siblings, adding a few more to the two younger brothers, Zhang Dainian and Zhang Congnian, whom he had mentioned before (and whom I have met). A couple of sisters now enter Zhang's world, "uneducated, as all women were at the time." Then, another cloudy look: "My youngest brother drowned when he was five years old. He was much younger than I was. Still, his death shook my deeply."
Again, the conversation moves on. Another subject, another time. A brief gaze of pain and loss lingers in spite of Zhang's chatty voice. I realize that I have seen the same look come over Zhang's face whenever he speaks about the death of his Paris-born son in 1924. At such times, part of Zhang slows down to countenance old aches. But the conscious, rational, storytelling voice moves on. His losses, unlike the 'mistakes' that thread through his marriages and political life, do not hold Zhang Shenfu's interest for long.
Although he allowed the pain of the kang beating and the loss of his brother's drowning to enter our conversations, Zhang Shenfu really wants to tell me about something else today. He finally comes around to his mother, that vague character whose first name he can never quite recall. He always refers to her by the family name, Zhao Zhang. Though illiterate herself, this daughter of a renowned scholar-official brought considerable prestige to the recently educated Zhang household.
The story of Zhao Zhang takes up a bit more time than usual, mostly because her son Zhang Shenfu is counting his blessings. "My mother," he recalls, "was only twenty-two when I was born. Because she was so young and healthy, I benefited both within and outside of the womb. She continued to bear children every three years or so. None of them was as strong or as healthy as I."
This boast does not quite fit the picture of Zhang Shenfu's younger brothers, with whom I shared a table at the birthday celebration last week. Zhang Congnian, the physicist from Shandon, is a tall, vigorous man of seventy-five.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="59">You shouldn't go to sleep on the job, you must be able to move with some alacrity when necessary, you must not get too bored standing around in the hot sun and, most important, though no one said anything about it, you must be able to get along with the other members of the survey crew.
At the Highway Department just off Don Gaspar Street in the state capitol building, I started by asking questions about where to go to apply for a job. After the usual false leads, I was directed to the appropriate desk. An Anglo male in a white shirt recorded my name, address, age, education, and answers to questions concerning my experience and why I wanted a job with the Highway Department. Then he looked up at me, bobbed his head, and said, "That will be all. Check back with us when school is out and we will see what we can do." I thanked him and said goodbye. I was now a certified job applicant with the New Mexico State Highway Department. The pay was ample and you were paid for your own keep. The workweek was five days with the weekend off but you might be almost anywhere in the state, up to two hundred miles from Santa Fe. It sounded fine to me. Not too stimulating, but then given my age and experience, what did I expect? The main thing was the job - a real job and real pay. Driving home to tell the Bakoses I mentally reviewed what I would say to Dad and how glad I was to be able to relieve him of the load of my upkeep, even if it was for only three months.
In person and by pen (people weren't used to telephoning long distance then, except in emergencies, and even then they were more apt to send telegrams) Dad had showered me with laments of poverty and how pressed he was with having to support us children and what a difference it would make if he didn't have the expense of our upkeep.
By then I had begun to realize that my father was inconsistent in his drives and motivations and was pulled in at least two opposite directions. I had to take into account his own need to control and to keep me dependent, counterbalanced by his deep-seated penuriousness which took the form of a fantasy in which he was rid of all responsibilities, especially those inescapable ones associated with raising a family. I think there were times when he simply felt sorry for himself because Mother had left him. The result, regardless of motives (conscious or unconscious), was to emphasize that I was a burden. Proving that I could work and be on my own for a while was therefore important to me.
There was also the question of how to deal with Theresa. My strategy, developed from past experiences, was to shut myself off and to involve her in my life only when absolutely necessary. This was one of those times, since I had to tell her about the job. As I entered the house, she came out of the kitchen and placed herself in the doorway between the kitchen and living room with her hand on the frame, effectively barring the entrance to the kitchen and the room where I kept my things. I had wanted a little more time but since she wanted to know where I had been, I had to tell her. As my story unfolded she expressed more and more dissatisfaction. But why? Wasn't she delighted that I had taken the initiative and applied for a summer job? Apparently not. I couldn't remember Theresa ever complimenting me on anything so there was no way of judging where I stood with her at any given moment.
In the two years I spent with the Bakoses I was unable to detect, at any time, even a modicum of enthusiasm from Theresa about me. So I was not surprised when her reaction to the news of my summer job plans was far less than enthusiastic. Her negative response didn't bother me too much, as there had been little tendency on her part to interfere in the past. Nevertheless, the unexpected chill in the air and a hint of distress at the thought that I might actually get the job should have told me something.
Sure enough, the next week I received a letter from Dad saying that he didn't approve of what I was doing, adding in very uncharacteristic terms that I would be associating with rough construction types and that after all I was young and didn't know the score and could be led astray by associating with unsavory characters. Just how this was to be accomplished was not specified. I realized I had never heard Dad, under any circumstances, use arguments of that type before. His letter sounded more like something originating from an overly protective woman than a man. At that time, I had neither the insight nor the inclination to devote time to psyching out my parents (it would have been a full-time job), so I said nothing. I did not reply to his letter. From past experience I knew it would be useless to try.
I don't remember whether the news came from Dad or Theresa, but I was told I had been enrolled in Cyril Kay Scott's art class. I didn't know Cyril personally but I knew that he was part of the Santa Fe scene. I had seen clutches of art students with their easels - they all seemed to be women - wearing cotton dresses and straw sun hats, hunched over, dabbing paint from a watercolor box, painfully constructing washed-out versions of adobe houses with hollyhocks along sun-drenched walls. And there I was, freshly imprinted with a cowboy's image of what a man should be. A superabundance of energy and restlessness made me unsuited to sitting around on a canvas stool all day surrounded by middle-class women. I was dismayed, but then I hadn't been consulted and, never having been able to resort to the open rebellion of some of my more normal peers, it never crossed my mind that there were other options.
So how did I end up in Cyril's class instead of working as a rodmanroadman? It seemed that Theresa had done some quick calculating and had seen that she stood to lose the money my father was giving her for board and room (and a maid who seldom appeared). She had to have some way of keeping me at home and not in the field where I would be paid a per diem. She wrote - or possibly even telegraphed - my father, giving reasons why he should squelch my plans to work and at the same time suggesting the great advantages of having me enrolled in Cyril's class. I am not certain of the details but there were enough of her tracks and they were easy to follow. It was one of the many times in my life when things worked out for the better, but for the wrong reasons.
Cyril Kay Scott was a smallish, energetic man with grayinggreying sparse hair, a goatee, and small potbelly. If he had been an authoritarian, take-charge type he would have placed himself differently in the studio than he did. A take-charge type sets up rows of chairs and then puts himself at the head of the class facing the students. Instead, Cyril placed himself in the northeast corner of the room so he could refer to his notes and keep an eye on things. The rest of us scattered ourselves and our easels in a double semicircle catty-corner to the main axis of the room. As a silent tribute to the master, I don't think that there was anyone closer to him than twelve feet. Cyril's voice was clear and relaxed and carried with it the right amount of reassuring authority, the kind that knows but doesn't have to tell you so.
Since his son Creighton (Jig) and I were the same age, we grew to be good friends over the years. As a result I learned a good deal more about Cyril than I might otherwise have known. An Englishman, he did not speak with the upper-class public-school accent which was so characteristic of the other Englishmen I had known, nor do I remember his having any noticeable class or ethnic dialect. He had started professional life as an engineer and later switched to medicine. Clearly as a young man he had been searching for something, because he gave up medicine and received training as a psychoanalyst (it was rumored that he had been analyzed by Freud), which, in the 1920s, was an unusual thing to do.
The analysis, I assume, and a restless spirit deflected his interests from medicine to art. Paris at the beginning of the century was roiling with change and Cyril was the type who would have been in the middle of it. He told us he had studied with one or two of the better-known Impressionists, and since the names didn't mean much to me then I didn't pay much attention to which ones. From his art it would have been impossible to tell, because his painting was unlike that of any Impressionist I can think of. At the time of our art class Cyril had just moved to Santa Fe, bringing his two wives with him, one of whom was Jig's mother. This ménage <*_>a-grave<*/> trois occupied an old adobe house on upper Canyon Road just below the reservoir.
My mother had always painted, as had her sister Blanche (a nervous wisp of a woman married to a sculptor). Heinz Warneke, my stepfather, was a sculptor of some note. Josef Bakos painted, as did everyone else on the Camino del Monte Sol: Will Shuster, Willard Nash, William P. Henderson, Andrew Dasburg, Fremont Ellis, Datus Meyers, and others, so that the activity of painting was not new to me. Even the paint-covered studio floors were part of the familiar scene. It had just never entered my head that I might be doing it. I already knew I had no talent and couldn't draw, though I could make the very fine-grained stippled renderings of bones and protozoa like those in biology textbooks.
Our class was held in an ideal studio, an unused chapel on lower San Francisco Street. The only adaptation in the shift from chapel to studio was to replace the north wall with a large, clear glass window so there was plenty of light. The chapel was suffused with an aura of the particular comfort associated with pleasant, totally absorbing work. Years later I was to work there for Martha Field, Catherine Gay, and Ann Webster, who were sculpting and needed someone who could do their casting for them and pose for figure studies from time to time. Prior to Cyril's time, my mother had taken classes in that same chapel from B. J .O. Nordfeldt, a Norwegian painter who had studied with and was deeply influenced by Cézanne. It seemed that everyone who had anything to do with the art scene in Santa Fe had held classes or studied or worked in that studio. I don't know exactly when the chapel was demolished, but when I tried to find it in the 1950s it was gone, replaced by a cheap imitation adobe structure, and with it a very real part of Santa Fe's past had vanished. It was far from a public landmark, but there are places that don't need public recognition because their memorial is in the hearts of people.
With a minimum of fuss Cyril taught us the vocabulary and the grammar on which the Impressionists' system of painting was based: the isolates, sets, and patterns, an analytic method and classification system that I was to explain thirty years later in my first book, The Silent Language.
Cyril's method was to lecture from a voluminous set of notes in the morning and to allow the afternoon for painting.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="60">Although he wanted to see parts of the 'Kaddish' narrative compressed even further, Ferlinghetti offered a favorable response. "It's right, will be great huge book," he said.
Even with a new book going to press, Allen had a large supply of leftover poems on his hands. He had yet to include 'Siesta in Xbalba' or 'The Green Automobile' in a poetry collection, and he still had poems dating back to his San Francisco/Berkeley days, as well as from his post-Howl, pre-Europe period, that he wanted to collect. 'Aether' still required work, plus it was too long for inclusion in Kaddish. In short, he had enough poetry for another volume at least as long as the one about to be published. That, Allen decided, would be his next City Lights collection.
In addition, his friend Ted Wilentz was interested in publishing Empty Mirror as a part of his Corinth Press. Wilentz had recently published The Beat Scene, an anthology of Beat writings accompanied by the photographs of Fred McDarrah, and in the near future his list of authors would expand to include Jack Kerouac, Diane Di Prima, LeRoi Jones, and others. Allen, who had wanted to publish Empty Mirror for the better part of a decade, and who already had an introduction for the volume written by William Carlos Williams, could not have been happier with this turn of events and he went right to work on assembling the collection.
Thus went one of the most active periods in Ginsberg's publishing history, finding him putting the finishing touches on two volumes of poetry (Kaddish and Empty Mirror) and beginning the assembly of a third (Reality Sandwiches). These works, along with the recordings of his poetry and a movie, assured him of a name and reputation that superseded anything the critics could say about the Beat Generation's being a temporary fad or social movement making a few poets rich. Allen's star continued to rise.
2
Jack Kerouac, however, was in a period of personal and professional decline, stemming more from the toll public life had exacted upon him than from his own creative inability.
Kerouac was a mess, a punch-drunk fighter who had spent the best of his healthy years in training, only to suffer later by taking on too many opponents in too few years. His lifestyle had been knocked about in public, his literary ideals punished. By nature, he was more inclined to internalize his problems than to counterpunch, and by late 1960, it was obvious to those who knew him that Jack was in serious trouble.
From an artistic perspective, it should not have been a bad year. Tristessa, Kerouac's novel about his love affair with a Mexican prostitute, had been published as a paperback original, and LeRoi Jones had published The Scripture of the Golden Eternity at his Totem Press, Lonesome Traveler, a collection of Kerouac's travel essays, was scheduled to be published in late fall, and Ferlinghetti had purchased Book of Dreams for City Lights. Most writers would have been thrilled to see four books in publication within a year's time, but Kerouac, who could be as tough on himself as his harshest critic, was not about to gauge his literary success solely by the number of volumes published or money earned. None of these books was as good as - or offered the exuberance and impact of - an On the Road or Dr. Sax or Visions of Cody, and Kerouac knew it. He was looking to publish another big book - one that would be properly published and distributed, extensively reviewed, and widely accepted by readers.
He could no longer anticipate the response to his books. Two of his finest works, Dr. Sax and Mexico City Blues, had been published a year earlier, in 1959, as was Maggie Cassidy, his novel about his great teenage love affair. To Jack's horror, the books had been largely panned (or ignored) by critics, as if in backlash to his 'sudden' success. To make matters worse, a Hollywood film version of The Subterraneans, starring George Peppard and Leslie Caron, had been released; the film was a slick, embarrassing contrast to the free-spirited Pull My Daisy and threatened to immortalize Kerouac as a caricature of himself.
Depressed, Jack drank until he became bloated and red-faced. His health began to fail. In an effort to get him away from his problems and back to creative work, Lawrence Ferlinghetti offered Jack the use of his Bixby Canyon cabin. With Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso all out of the country, Jack was feeling isolated anyway, so some time alone in Ferlinghetti's Big Sur cabin could not hurt.
Or so he thought. Jack arrived in California in late July, but with the exception of the composition of a Joycean poem written about the sounds of the ocean, his trip was a disaster. Never one to sit by himself for too great a period of time, he was driven to the brink of a nervous breakdown during his stay in Bixby Canyon. The first few weeks went well, with Jack reading and writing and communing with nature on his long walks through the rough, wooded terrain. After a while, however, onsetting boredom and his need for a drink drove him back to the city, and by the time he made his way back to San Francisco, walking a good percentage of the way because he, the author of On the Road, could no longer get drivers to pick him up, Jack was ready for a full-scale bender. Although he had such friends as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch to look after him, he was too far gone to do anything but sink into alcoholic depression. Even a brief reunion with Neal and Carolyn Cassady failed to bolster his spirits. His return to the cabin was followed by bouts of the d.t.'s, loneliness, and more drunken sessions with whoever stopped by to visit. His depression disarmed his sensibility, leading him to paranoid distrust of his friends. He had a brief fling with a girlfriend of Neal Cassady's, but he was in no condition to pursue it. By the time Jack's stay was winding down in early September, Ferlinghetti was so concerned about Kerouac's mental well-being that he suggested he consider checking into a sanatorium.
It was Jack's last big road trip. Still, for all his problems, Kerouac was far too gifted to let the experience lie fallow. He would turn it into Big Sur, the stunning book about mental decline that became one of his finest - and most underrated - novels. Big Sur would be compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, and while Kerouac would have shuddered at the thought, he and Fitzgerald had more in common than anyone might have predicted. Both were romantics whose most enduring novels were about controversial, if not antiheroic, characters; both were depicted by the media as spokespersons for their respective generations. Both were tormented about the relationship between money and art, and both suffered through severe bouts of alcoholism and depression.
There was another similarity that Kerouac's friends probably suspected, though they were helpless to do anything about it and would never have dared to mention it out loud: Like Fitzgerald, Kerouac was pushing himself headlong toward an early death. His star was burning out.
3
Hearing of Kerouac's problems, Allen sent Jack a flip, newsy letter intended both to cheer him up and goad him into some kind of action. The three-page letter was a masterwork of its kind, a nonstop stream-of-consciousness rap in which Allen gave the details of the composition of 'Kaddish' and included a sizable excerpt; spoke of his conclusions from his yage experiments ("realized I AM the emptiness that's movie-projecting Kali monster on my mindscreen, projecting mindscreen even. So not scared anymore. But I still can't stop the appearance of the fucking mindscreen, I mean I can't quiet my organism to total silence. I'll have to study yoga or something, finally..."); reported the comings and goings and mental conditions of mutual friends; and hinted at plans for the future. He was still interested in Cuba in the aftermath of its revolution, he told Jack, and if he could make the arrangements, he hoped to travel there to see firsthand what was going on in that country.
Jack replied with a sober letter that announced he was living a quieter life now; he was back in Northport, staying away from liquor, losing weight, and spending his hours reading a recently purchased vintage twenty-nine-volume edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He downplayed his problems at Big Sur, preferring instead to remember the good times and his composition of 'Sea.' He had begun a new novel, he mentioned to Allen, but it had been a false start. As for Ginsberg's talk about Cuban politics, Kerouac was hearing not one thing: "What Logia Jesus said about astonishment of paradise seems to me much more on the right tracks of world peace and joy than all the recent communist and general political hysteria rioting and false screamings."
It was a presidential election year, and Allen was as interested in politics as ever. In his opinion, the position of the United States as a major player in international politics was absolutely critical to any hope of world peace, and he was particularly interested in the country's relationship with Cuba. Castro's takeover had rekindled U.S. preoccupation with communism as the destroyer of freedom, but Allen continued to believe that Castro, even if a dictator, was far less involved in "hysterical mind control" than the United States. As if to prove his point, he made an effort to meet Castro when the Cuban leader visited the United Nations in September, and at a press conference afterward, Allen caused a stir when he asked Cuban delegates about their country's attitudes about marijuana. Neither Cuba nor the United States was prepared to accept Allen's theory that marijuana was prohibited because national leaders believed it invited its users to think clearly and rebel against oppression.
As impertinent as Ginsberg's question might have seemed, it represented his strong belief that the world - and the United States in particular - needed a radical change of consciousness to avoid self-destruction. Throughout that fall, Allen raged about politics in his journal, filling its pages with manifestos condemning the United States, the FBI, the CIA, academic institutions, international politics, middle-class life, critics, and the news media:
<O_>poem<O/>
Although he conceded that most of his political poems were angry ravings unworthy of publication - and, in fact, none of the poems from this period was ever pulled from his journals and published separately, though some were presented at readings - Allen fully intended to write a grand-scale political poem. He had seen enough of the world to feel that he could hold the United States publicly accountable, directly or indirectly, for many of its miseries:
<O_>poem<O/>
Allen had little reason to be optimistic. He liked neither of the presidential candidates. He saw Kennedy as just another pretty face and Nixon as a continuation of the odious practices instituted during the Eisenhower administration. For all her paranoid ravings about the government, Naomi Ginsberg had been judged to be insane, but now, in light of what he was witnessing, Allen wondered whether she might have been more prophetic than she was given credit for. What was he to think when he saw J. Edgar Hoover get up at the Republican National Convention and proclaim that "communists, beatniks, and eggheads" were America's greatest enemies; or when he read that Eisenhower had been given a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover, with dirty passages underlined, only to agree with the postmaster general that something had to be done about such smut? Were these indicators of the 'fall' Whitman had prophesied?
Ginsberg seethed while he watched the Nixon-Kennedy debates - the first time in history that U.S. presidential candidates had debated on television. As far as Allen could tell, Nixon was playing up to the national paranoia about communism, but both Kennedy and Nixon seemed ready to take action against Cuba.
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Self-Disclosure in Men's Friendships
Variations Associated with Intimate Relations
HELEN M. REID
GARY ALAN FINE
What does a man want - to talk about? How much will he reveal of himself? Does it make a difference if he is talking to a woman or a man? To a spouse, an intimate other, or a platonic friend? Does it matter if he is married, single with an intimate other, or single and unattached?
We explore these issues by studying platonic cross-gender friendships. Surprisingly, perhaps, there is little research on this topic, and this project, small and provisional though it is, sheds light on an important area of male friendships. In order to understand the dynamics of platonic friendships, we interviewed 32 white middle-class adults between the ages of 25 and 50 years, living in a large metropolitan area in the Midwest. Subjects were recruited through a random telephone survey and were interviewed during the spring of 1983. The interviews elicited data on topics discussed between male and female associates; additional data on self-disclosure were collected using a modified version of Jourard's (1971b) Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (SDQ). The focus of this chapter is on the responses by 16 heterosexual men about their friends, lovers, and spouses.
Self-Disclosure and Friendship
Self-disclosure has been defined by Derlega and Grzelak (1979, p. 152) as including "any information exchange that refers to the self, including personal states, dispositions, events in the past, and plans for the future." Interest in self-disclosure has burgeoned in the past two decades with the publication of volumes on this topic. Notable among these are Sidney Jourard's The Transparent Self (1971a) and Self-Disclosure (1971b), which generated interest by social psychologists, sociologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists (e.g., Chelune, 1979; Derlega & Berg, 1987). Jourard's (1971a) classic interpretation of the "lethal aspects of the male role" in which men suffer physically, psychically, and socially for their reticence was a launching pad for much research on disclosure throughout the seventies and eighties. Friendship as a topic of study has also produced considerable research, and the behavior of men in friendships is increasingly under scrutiny as researchers examine the implications of social support and interpersonal behavior for health and well-being.
Aspects other than an individual's physical or psychic health have captured the interest of sociologists and social psychologists. Among the major findings of interest to scholars in these areas are gender differences with respect to friendship and self-disclosure in same-gender and cross-gender dyads. Gender-role norms have been cited as mediating factors in self-disclosure (Hill & Stull, 1987). Other factors affecting friendship maintenance or disclosure within friendships are related to location within social structures. These factors include social class, occupation, mobility, stages in the life circle, and marital status (Allan, 1989; Booth & Hess, 1974; Fischer & Oliker, 1983; Hacker, 1981; Pogrebin, 1987). Opportunities and normative constraints vary with structural factors, affecting the availability and depth of friendships.
After reviewing some of the literature on gender effects in self-disclosure, we will focus on the structure of interpersonal relations surrounding friendship dyads, in particular the effect of intimate relationships on the level of self-disclosure in friendships. Finally, interview data will be discussed in an effort to elucidate the variations observed among men in their disclosure with friends.
Disclosures Within Same-Sex and Cross-Sex Friendships
Women are generally credited with more expressive and intimate disclosures than are men and spend time talking with same-gender friends rather than doing activities with them, the preferred mode of interaction for males (Aukett, Ritchie, & Mill, 1988; Crawford, 1977; Rubin, 1985; Sherrod, 1987; Wright, 1982). The tendency of women to trust a same-gender friend with sensitive personal information is frequently compared with the tendency men exhibit toward discussion of issues external to themselves, such as sports or politics (Aries & Johnson, 1983; Davidson & Duberman, 1982; Haas & Sherman, 1982). Men's reliance upon each other for companionship (Sherrod, 1987) is consistent with the conceptual framework of Wright (1982), who claims that male friendship, alleged to be superior to female friendship (Tiger, 1970), is not so much 'better' as it is qualitatively different. Wright (p.8) contrasts the characteristic "side by side" nature of male friendships with the "face-to-face" relationships found between women, highlighting socialization and gender role themes: Men exhibit instrumentality, activity-centeredness, and task orientation, whereas women emphasize personalism and interpersonal sensitivity oriented to the socioemotional aspects of the friendship.
Men reportedly disclose more intimate and personal information to their female associates than they disclose to other males (Auckett et al., 1988; Komarovsky, 1974), and derive therapeutic benefits from cross-gender friendships ; for women, these benefits were found within same-gender friendships (Auckett et al., 1988). Hacker (1981) finds no gender effect in same-gender disclosures, but men confide more in their female friends than women confide in their male friends. When marital status is introduced, conflicting results emerge. While married men and women reported more confiding behavior with same-gender friends, Booth and Hess (1974) found single people, regardless of gender, more likely to disclose to members of the opposite gender.
A comprehensive review of gender effects in self-disclosure can be found in Hill and Stull (1987). Contradictions across studies are noted that highlight the lack of definitive results for the association between gender and self-disclosure.
We suggest two ways to improve consistency of results. First, the level of intimacy within a cross-gender relationship should be controlled. It is necessary to distinguish disclosure within a sexually intimate cross-gender relationship from disclosure within a cross-gender friendship in which there is no sexual contact. We expect the level of disclosure within a cross-gender relationship to increase with sexual intimacy within that relationship. Second, the presence or absence of an intimate relationship external to the friendship dyad must also be controlled. Accessibility to a spouse or lover may serve disclosure needs; at the same time, normative pressures to limit disclosure outside the intimate relationship are expected to surface.
Relational Considerations for Self-Disclosure
The balance of this chapter highlights the two relational dimensions that are of primary importance in self-disclosure and talk between friends: relation of subject and target, and relations of the subject with significant others outside the friendship. Early studies by Jourard and Lasakow (1958) and Komarovsky (1974) analyze cross-gender disclosure patterns, but fail to adequately distinguish these dimensions.
Jourard and Lasakow found no overall differences between married and single subjects in disclosure to opposite gender associates. We find it problematic that the spouse and opposite-gender friend were not distinguished from one another but were "treated as equivalent target-persons" (Jourard & Lasakow, p. 96). Identifying a spouse with whom a subject is expected to share intimate feelings would seem to be critical.
Komarovsky's study was conducted with a male-only subject pool. Unfortunately, Komarovsky did not distinguish between the platonic female friend and the lover/girlfriend; they were lumped together as opposite-gender targets. She found that the female target receives higher levels of disclosures than the male friend, mother, father, sister, or brother - especially in sensitive aspects of self such as the personality and body dimensions of Jourard's SDQ. But this finding is based on a pooled average, rather than separate scores for lovers and platonic female friends.
We must distinguish between an intimate other and a platonic target to address the claim that men disclose at lower levels to other men than they do to women. If it can be shown that levels of self-disclosure to different targets vary by the intimacy of relations, we may infer that earlier failures to adequately identify these dimensions produced results erroneously ascribed to gender.
Aside from the relationship between the subject and the target of self-disclosure, intimate others in the relational domain of the subject must also be taken into account when reporting self-disclosure results. Jourard and Lasakow found that married subjects, while not differing in their overall disclosure to the opposite gender, differ from single subjects in that their disclosure becomes more concentrated toward the (opposite gender) spouse, to the relative exclusion of parents, siblings, and same-gender friends. This relational dimension is as important to distinguish as is the relation to the target. Whether a subject is married or intimately involved affects his or her level of disclosure to friends. Komarovsky (p. 679) hints at a possible correlation between the relational status of her male subjects and their disclosures to male and female friends: "In the sensitive area of Personality...for only 17 men was the closest friend a male. Of the latter 17 men, 12 were virgins." Komarovsky's subjects confide in other men when they are not in intimate sexual relationships with women. Rubin (1985) came to a similar conclusion regarding the few men she interviewed who reported intimacy (as opposed to her distinction with "bonding") in male friendships: Most of them were neither married nor living with a woman. We pursue this line of inquiry with our sample.
Self-Disclosure Questionnaire Results
The Self-Disclosure Questionnaire (SDQ) has been used by social scientists to explore, analyze or depict aspects of social interaction. We modified the scale and compared mean disclosure scores within each of the following aspects of self: personal opinions and views, tastes and interests, work, money, personality, and body and health. The discussion that follows is based upon trends observed in preliminary data analyses. The limited size and lack of diversity of the sample, however, preclude reliance on the tabulation of statistical tests. We acknowledge the small size of the sample and present these data as a provocative basis for further research.
Relational dimensions that served as independent variables were target of disclosure (cross-sex platonic friend, best friend of the same sex, and spouse or lover) and intimate relations of the subject. We distinguished between married men (n=8), single men in intimate relationships (n=4), and unattached single men (n=4). We refer to this variable as relational status.
Target of Disclosure
In comparisons across targets, a male friend and a platonic female friend receive equivalent levels of disclosures, but a platonic female friend is the recipient of far less disclosure than a spouse or intimate other, in all six aspects of self. In comparisons between disclosure to a male friend and to a spouse or lover, a divergent trend for married men and single men begins to emerge. A wife receives more disclosure than a male friend, but the presence of a lover does not eclipse male-to-male disclosure to the same extent. Single men in intimate relationships appear not to differ in disclosures to their lover and their male friend in the areas of work, money, views, and tastes. However, in the sensitive areas of personality and body, the lover is the recipient of greater disclosure.
The level at which men reveal themselves to their associates seems to depend upon whether they are engaged in an intimate relationship, and to what degree they are committed to that relationship. The most significant trend is the attenuating effect that marriage has on disclosure to persons outside the marital relation, including other men. An emerging pattern of variation among men in differing categories of intimate relationship appears in disclosures to a male friend. Married men seem to disclose the least, while unattached single men disclose the most to their male friends in the areas of views, money, and personality. This trend is repeated in disclosure to the platonic female friend in the areas of views, personality, and body. Single men, regardless of relational status, appear to maintain some same-sex friendships in which they share relatively more of themselves than do married men. Unattached men exhibit the highest levels of disclosure to friends of both sexes, and appear to utilize other men as targets of disclosure to a greater extent than do men in intimate relations.
Variability among men in their disclosure patterns indicates that gender by itself cannot explain differential levels of disclosure. Knowledge of a man's intimate relations provides insight to disclosure patterns. To some extent, our findings address the fact that men may be predisposed to reveal themselves differentially, depending on the definition of the situation. Preliminary analysis of mean disclosure scores on the SDQ suggests answers about what the differences might be; we turn to the interview results to examine why they are so.
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5
Climbing (and Learning) the Ropes
I began studying for the sergeant's exam a year and a half before I had to.
According to departmental regulations, an officer needed four years on the force before he or she could attempt to move up a rung to sergeant. Because I had joined LAPD mid-year, and because they only gave the exam every two years, I couldn't take the test until my sixth anniversary. The wait seemed interminable. By then I had decided I would climb the LAPD ladder as fast as I could. Not that I had committed to a life as a police officer; I was always open to opportunities from the outside. But as long as I was carrying a badge, I wanted it to be the highest-ranking badge I could manage.
This, I knew, would present problems. By nature of my relationship with Parker, I was branded the fair-haired boy, someone who had a direct pipeline to the chief. I didn't. I would never pick up the phone and call him; I mean, I wouldn't do that. And he wouldn't have respected me if I had. But this was the rap. As a result, I always had trouble with officers holding me at arm's length. Each time I had a new assignment, I would have to break down this impression of me, and let the others know I was a regular guy, that I didn't have anything special going for me, that I worked hard and was a damn good police officer.
Knowing that I would be held suspect at every promotional step, I set out to move up the chain of command in a way that would leave no doubts. To be promoted to each new rank - sergeant, lieutenant, captain, inspector (now known as commander), and deputy chief - you must take a written exam, which accounts for 60 percent of your score, and an oral exam for the other 40 percent. To avoid the favoritism label, I knew that I could not be promoted on the basis of an outstanding oral score alone. I needed to do well on both.
So I worked my butt off. I sat in my bedroom for hours every night and studied for the better part of a year and a half. When I took vacation time, I studied ten hours a day. On the bus to work, I read. Having had courses in teaching, I understood the learning process, how you use every one of your faculties. At dinner I would talk a blue streak, lecturing my wife and two daughters, aged four and five, on forgery and its famous cases while they all just sat there and looked at me. I talked to the people at work. "Say, did you know...?"
This helped me put what I read into my own words, and it became a pattern for my promotions: read and talk. As the time neared for the sergeant's exam, I became more determined than ever. It was important to finish as high on the list as possible, because promotions were awarded only when a vacancy occurred, and then according to position on the list. If they hadn't dipped down to your number within two years, you had to take the test again. No way I was going to do that.
The written portion of the sergeant's exam was a grueling all-day test, 180 questions in the morning, 120 more in the afternoon. But it was the oral that I dreaded. And there was no clear-cut way to prepare for that.
Several weeks after I had taken the written exam, I was summoned to an interview room on the second floor at City Hall. Who would be awaiting me, I didn't know. Because two hundred officers were taking the sergeant's test, they had assigned three panels to handle the load, each panel consisting of one inspector and two captains. We knew who these officers were, but not to which panel we would be assigned. One of the inspectors had the reputation of being an impossibly tough grader. If you were Jesus Christ, the rumor went, he'd give you a 90.
Just my luck, I thought, I'd get the panel with that guy. Sure enough, I did. There he was, seated behind a long table, flanked by the two captains. I gulped and sat down.
The purpose of the oral is to judge a candidate's ability to express himself or herself. It's also designed to make the candidate as uncomfortable as possible to see how he or she handles it. I was expected to start out with an opening statement. For several minutes I told them how I'd prepared myself to be a sergeant - what books I'd read and issues I'd studied, what experience I had that would make me a good sergeant, and why I believed I would make a fine supervisor.
On the table in front of me I noticed a quarter. It had been put there, I knew through the grapevine, to see what I would do with my hands. I ignored the coin and kept my hands in my lap.
For the next half hour they fired questions at me, trying to put me on the defensive. If this situation came up, one captain would say, what would you do?
Answer.
But suppose ...
Answer.
Really? But what if ...
This went on until they had backed you into a corner - or tried to.
When they finally finished, they asked me to make a closing statement. You were supposed to tell them, I knew, what a mature, stable person you were, always in control, a shining model for those you would supervise, capable of giving sound advice, and so on.
"Oh, I am all those things," I cockily assured them - reciting my husbandhood, fatherhood, high arrest accord, exquisite manners and courtesy to scumbags of all kinds - "and more." I left the room, grateful that the tough inspector hadn't shredded me alive, and waited anxiously for the results to be posted.
My hard work paid off. I finished with the highest written score of anyone and the highest score overall. My name appeared number one on the list.
After that, I came out first on every exam I took all the way up to chief, not through favoritism or because I was smarter, but because nobody worked harder at preparing for exams than I did.
There would be no way, I vowed, anyone could ever say I moved up because I was Bill Parker's boy.
Overnight, I transmogrified from an order-taker to an order-giver. This took some getting used to. Police officers who had been friends since the Academy looked at me a little differently. Some spoke to me not at all. Even though I was twenty-nine, I still lacked the kind of judgment that arrives only with age and experience. Therein lies one of the most significant problems in any police department. Generally, officers younger than twenty-seven or twenty-eight have the desire, energy, and enthusiasm to do the job, but not the maturity. As a boss, I still wanted to jump on my horse and go every time a call came in.
A sergeant is like a coach. You spark enthusiasm among your officers and make sure they know and abide by the rules. If they're deficient in some skill, you must train them. In addition to the reports you seem always to be writing up, you spend a good deal of your time in the field, in uniform, driving alone, supervising the officers assigned to you. I was one of three sergeants operating out of Central Division nightwatch and among the things I supervised were the drunk wagons and foot beats. I also oversaw two or three F cars, or felony cars.
Detectives would alert us to felons operating in our territory. Because detectives carry such a huge workload, and because many of their days are spent testifying in court, they would ask us to locate the felon and bring him in for questioning. I would tell the officers in the F cars which felons to track down. If they needed advice or guidance, they would contact me over the car radio. I was also there to provide backup. If a call went out about a robbery in progress, a sergeant was expected to arrive on the heels of the patrol officers to make sure the situation was handled properly. I, in turn, reported to the watch commander, who was a lieutenant. Sometimes I would fill in for him.
Once a month this particular lieutenant delivered a talk on ethics. It was an important ritual for him, and frankly, his lectures always impressed me. He was a tough taskmaster and a real stickler for regulations.
One evening, when I was still trying to make a good impression, I went to change into my uniform. I opened my locker and found, to my dismay, that my hat was missing. Baffled, I looked around. And there was my hat in the wastepaper basket.
When I saw this lieutenant later, I said, "The funniest thing happened - did you see anybody go into the sergeant's locker room?"
"No."
"Well somebody went into my locker and dumped my hat in the wastepaper basket."
"That was me."
"You're kidding.", I said.
"One thing you better learn, Gates. My sergeants don't have frayed hats. Get a new one."
Chastened, I bought a new hat. Soon after, we were both on morning watch, and around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. this lieutenant invited me to join him for 'lunch.'
I drove. He directed me to a warehouse area on the east side of town. At this hour it was deserted. "I thought we were going to eat," I said.
"We are. Turn left."
We pulled up in front of a warehouse and he jumped out of the car and banged on a sliding metal door. A man peeked out, opened the door, and motioned us inside. It turned out to be the warehouse for Thrifty Drug Stores.
Somewhat confused, I followed them to a cavernous refrigerator. In those days, Thrifty had soda fountains and lunch counters in its drugstores, and inside this refrigerator hung great big hunks of cheese and slabs of lunch meats. I stood there wondering as I watched my lieutenant pull out bread and cheese as if he owned the place.
"Hey, come one, Gates. Make yourself a sandwich."
And I'm thinking, But this is crazy. Here is a guy who lectures on ethics once a month, and he comes to a warehouse to get a damn sandwich?
I fixed something to eat and didn't say anything. But after that, whenever he said, "Let's get lunch," I'd say, "No. I've got something to do." I just couldn't get over this stickler for ethics who was blinded by those big baloney sandwiches he'd gorge himself on.
What to accept and what not to is a universal problem all police officers must face. Free meals always present a dilemma. People like to make jokes about cops and free meals. They especially make jokes about cops and free doughnuts. They say, "You need a cop? Call the local doughnut shop."
And there's a certain amount of truth in that. Often the owner of an establishment is quite willing to provide the police with a doughnut, a cup of coffee, or a meal, just to have officers present. This may make good business sense for the owner, but it creates a disturbing problem for a police administrator. How do you make it clear that your officers are not on the take?
To categorically outlaw all gratuities under all circumstances isn't feasible or fair. At Christmas a little old lady goes up to an officer who has walked a beat for years and hands him a pair of socks she has knitted. You can't have that officer say, "Sorry, ma'am. I can't accept a gratuity." We're not that cold. Often, it becomes a judgment call.
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If we move from Italy to Germany, we find that the story of the kind and unkind girls moves in the same key. The Grimms' 'Mother Holle' tells of a widow who has a dutiful and beautiful stepdaughter and an ugly, lazy biological daughter. In addition to doing "all the housework," the stepdaughter also has to spin until her fingers bleed. One day, she leans over into a well to rinse her bloodied reel and lets it fall into the water. Prodded by her stepmother to jump in after it, she descends into the well and awakens in a beautiful meadow. There she must carry out one household chore after another. An apple tree full of ripe fruit asks to be shaken, and the heroine not only shakes the tree, but gathers up the apples and puts them in a pile. Finally, the girl arrives at a small cottage, where an old woman tells her: "Stay with me, and if you do all the housework properly, everything will turn out well for you." In the end, the heroine is showered with gold as a reward for her industrious domesticity; her lazy counterpart gets a bath of pitch that sticks to her for the rest of her life.
A British version of the tale is also driven as much by the opposition between hard-working/lazy and dutiful/disobedient as by the contrast kind/unkind. Here one girl's unloading of an oven, milking of a cow, and shaking of a tree pay off, for the oven, cow, and tree all help her out when she flees the house of a witch, taking with her a sack of money. Her sister, in too much of a hurry to acquire the rest of the witch's wealth to do any work, is chased away and returns home empty-handed. In a Russian tale, the kindness of the heroine secures the assistance of animals, who discharge the task assigned by the bony legged Baba Yaga. The heroine returns home in triumph and inspires her stepsister to serve Baba Yaga. But this selfish girl never accomplishes the tasks set forth, for instead of sharing her food with animals, she scolds them and hits them with a rolling pin. Baba Yaga is enraged by the girl's failure to do the chores: she breaks her into pieces and sends the bones home in a basket.
Like many other versions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls,' 'Baba Yaga' probably served as a cautionary tale for girls, who were often sent away from home at an early stage to go into service at other households. Like Baba Yaga and her folkloric cousins, the mistress of a household was a fearsome, threatening presence, yet also the one person empowered to reward a girl, if not as generously as Mother Holle or Baba Yaga. The lesson about the rewards to be reaped from hard work, humility, modesty, and kindness while in the service of an all-powerful female figure was surely pertinent, if not always valid, for the many girls whose household apprenticeships formed the basis for their livelihoods.
Much as the tale variants described thus far all emphasize the redemptive power of hard work, there are many versions of the story that celebrate a good character. When the heroine of Perrault's 'The Fairies' gives a drink of water to a fairy masquerading as a thirsty old woman, the fairy tells her: "You are so pretty and so polite that I am determined to bestow a gift upon you." Each time the girl speaks, a flower or precious stone falls from her mouth. Her sister, "ill-mannered," "disagreeable," and "arrogant" hopes to win the same prize, but for her "lack of courtesy," a snake or toad drops out of her mouth whenever she speaks. The heroine of the Italian 'Water in the Basket' also does not toil for her salvation, but displays an unerring sense of tact and extraordinary modesty. When an old woman asks her to inspect her back to get rid of what is biting her, the girl kills vermin "by the hundreds." To avoid embarrassment, she tells the old woman that her back was covered with pearls and diamonds. Later, faced with the choice of a silk gown or a cotton dress as reward, she offers evidence of her unassuming nature by asking for the cotton dress. Her callous stepsister expresses disgust at the sight of the fleas on the crone's back, chooses a silk gown as her reward, and ends up with a donkey's tail on her forehead. Whether a tale exalts the value of hard work or praises any of a host of virtues ranging from kindness to politesse, it imparts specific lessons by instituting a system of rewards for one type of behavior and punishments for another.
Not all renditions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls' as explicitly didactic as the ones cited here. If we look at the various versions of the story available to the Grimms, we find that they chose to anthologize the one that had a pedagogical agenda. One version of the story, recorded in the Grimms' annotations, tells of two girls - one beautiful, the other ugly. The beautiful one falls into a well and lands in the same lush meadow described in 'Mother Holle." But rather than discharging various chores assigned to her, she is the one who gives the orders and who engineers a happy ending for herself. She tells a tree to shake itself; she directs a calf to bend down; and she asks an oven to bake her a roll. Later she comes across a house made of pancakes, louses the old womenwoman who lives in it, and flees with a dress of gold when the old woman falls asleep. Her unattractive companion duplicates her every deed, but finds herself wearing a dress covered with dirt when the old woman catches up with her. In this story it does not help to be kind, modest, hardworking, or polite. Beauty, bossiness, and deceit are rewarded; ugliness is punished.
It is easy to understand why the Grimms, who openly acknowledged the educational value of their collection, favored a story that commended the virtues of hard work over a tale that credited beauty with winning all the prizes. The story of the girl who is rewarded because of her looks rather than her good conduct simply could not be harnessed into service for indoctrinating children with the right values. It is more difficult, however, to reconcile the Grimms' striving for folkloric authenticity with their choice of 'Mother Holle' over other tales. The oldest tales, and hence those probably most faithful to folk traditions, tend to reward those endowed by nature with desirable qualities rather than those who cultivate specific virtues.
Beauty proves to be a great advantage in fairy tales, but - oddly enough - it also helps to be a stepchild or a child abused by one parent or another. Ludwig Bechstein's 'Garden in the Well' mounts the contrasting fates of two boys - one a stepson, the other the biological child of the tale's villain. Both boys fall into wells and find themselves in beautiful gardens with flowers and trees. The stepson gets fruit and gold when he orders apple trees to shake themselves; the other boy gets sour apples with worms and has pitch poured over him, even though his conduct conforms to the letter of his brother's behavior. The fate of the stepson, who lives happily ever after with his father, contrasts sharply with that of his brother. That boy's mother scolds him and beats him when he returns, then tries to remove the layer of pitch covering his body by putting him in the oven. But when she forgets to take the boy out, she finds that he has "suffocated and burned to death." There is nothing in this boy's character or looks that warrants such a punishment; he has merely had the misfortune of being born to the wrong woman.
Early versions of 'The Kind and Unkind Girls' (Bechstein's tale is one of a very small number featuring boys) tend to take a fatalistic view of the world - some children are privileged, others deprived. Basile enunciated this outlook on life through one of his narrators, who tells of a mother with three daughters, "two of whom were so unlucky that everything they did turned out badly, all of their plans went awry and all their hopes came to nothing." The third is lucky, "even in her mother's womb" and "all the elements combined to endow her with the best of all things." Good fortune was seen as a basic fact of life, and fairy tales show us again and again how those favored by fortune do well no matter how flawed their character and regardless of the odds against them. The attempt of a parent to overturn this 'natural' order of things by favoring one child over another always backfires. And no matter how the children conduct themselves, the one privileged by nature and deprived by a parent always wins out in the end.
All of this changed as fairy tales reached print and came to be placed in the service of acculturation and education. Storybooks emphasized the way in which toil leads to salvation. Kindness and good manners can also do the trick, as in Perrault's 'Fairies' where these qualities bring the heroine pearls and diamonds. It is noteworthy that even as reward-and-punishment tales celebrate kindness and compassion, they are notoriously uncharitable when it comes to fixing the fate of their unkind protagonists. In one such tale, a girl sits in a room waiting for a sack of gold to come flying in (as it had for her sister), when a little gray man whisks into the room and "lops her head off her body." That punishment must have gone a long way toward discouraging the cruelty to animals practiced by the unkind sister. Another story is even more graphic in illustrating the consequences of a girl's failure to share her porridge with a little old man: "When the girl finished eating, the little man took her, tore her into a thousand pieces, and hung them up in the trees." We are treated not only to a description of her punishment, but also to the mother's reaction to the sight of her daughter: "When she got to the place where the pieces of her daughter were hanging, she thought that her daughter must have hung her wash there. But imagine her shock and horror when she got closer and saw what had happened. She fainted dead away, and I have no idea whether she ever got back home again." The scene is so extreme in its grisly detail that it begins to shift into the mode of surreal comedy rather than grim horror. Still, there is something odd about the way in which reward-and-punishment tales advocate kindness toward animals and strangers in a context that champions violent retaliatory punishments for members of the hero's immediate family. This incongruity forms the basis for the suspicion that reward-and-punishment tales began as retaliatory stories (based on sibling rivalry) and became, only later in their development, didactic tales.
There are other serious inconsistencies in the messages sent by these tales. Consider, for example, the way in which rewards for kind heroines nearly always come in the form of gold and precious stones. One girl is showered with gold; another gets a sack of gold; a third receives gowns and jewelry. With their notoriously frank drive toward gold, jewels, and wealth, fairy-tale plots begin to resemble blueprints for enterprising young capitalists rather than for self-sacrificing do-gooders. Yet the tales repeatedly emphasize and enshrine the importance of indifference to wealth and worldly goods: The heroine who chooses the cotton dress over the silk one is rewarded; the one who elects to leave by the gate of pitch rather that the gate of gold is showered with coins; the girl who chooses to eat with the cats and the dogs rather than with her prosperous host wins in the end.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="64">However, we cannot deny that, as a marketing ploy, the memoirs worked. They sold the novel. A number of eighteenth-century readers, in fact, felt it to be the only interesting thing in the book; they did not question its presence in Peregrine's history so much as its propriety in general. What has been for us a structural irregularity seemed to the first readers of the novel a violation of manners. Lady Luxborough wrote to William Shenstone: "The thing which makes the book sell, is the History of Lady V - , which is introduced (in the last volume, I think) much to her Ladyship's dishonour; but published by her own order, from her own Memoirs, given to the author for that purpose; and by the approbation of her own Lord. What was ever equal to this fact, and how can one account for it?" How indeed, we have continued to wonder, but less in regard to Lady V - than to the author of Peregrine Pickle. And yet, I would suggest, the answer is the same for both Smollett and the lady. It has to do with celebrity, the comic carnival of notoriety.
As we have seen, Sterne's approach to celebrity was to don the masks of Tristram and of Yorick in antic celebration of the parody of identity fame necessarily involves. Smollett courts it more cautiously, shifting the locus of authority and defining celebrity as a fusion of consciousnesses upon a single entity, that entity being largely defined by all the conflicting attitudes - stories and character assessments - that make up the moment of attention. Yet for Smollett this fusion is a violent one, a wrenching of consensus from disparity, and while consensus may be the basis of social cohesion, the fact that it emerges from the clash of competing individualities documents its momentary nature. Celebrity is a kind of caricature - a violently reductive image - and it is fitting that this novel, which so exploits the famous and the infamous, should also be centrally concerned with the art of satiric reduction.
The eighteenth century itself tended to regard caricature with a disparaging eye. Novelists and critics alike reserved the word for literary or artistic portraits that departed from nature - certainly not a practice to be condoned, though occasionally, in an otherwise rich and 'natural' landscape, one to be tolerated. Caricature was popular during the eighteenth century, but it was regarded as a satiric tool, as it is still used, and no one argued for its elevated status on aesthetic grounds. Yet caricature is not simply a low form of portraiture. Strictly speaking, it is not a form of portraiture at all but an overdetermined response to cultural uncertainty. In its distortion it is violent and tendentious. It wrenches a partial truth from a landscape of doubt, and, in doing so, it both honors and derides the means by which it communicates, the satiric victim whose image is distorted not so much for his sake as for the sake of the community to which he belongs.
Ernst Kris has said that "whenever caricature develops to any great extent as a form of artistic expression, ... we are invariably able to discover the use of effigy magic at some point in its development" (179-80). In fact, the roots of caricature in such magic, he says, account for our hurt at seeing our gestures or features exaggerated in imitation. In other words, part of us still responds to the imitation as magical substitution, and we are wounded by the symbolic disfigurement. Residual response to effigy magic may also account for our more positive reactions to some forms of image distortion (such as celebrity roasts and the New York Review of Books's caricatures); for, as Sir James Frazer notes, although effigies in primitive cultures often represented pain, illness, and evil, they offered the possibility of not only harm but also salvation. Effigies used for the "beneficent spirit of vegetation" were burned or buried as sacrificial victims to ensure a bountiful harvest (755). According to Frazer, the same idea lies behind the use of effigies during a time of illness. Many communities afflicted by illness constructed effigies in hopes that the demons of death and sickness would mistake them for or good-naturedly take them in the place of the people they represented (569-71). Again, the idea is beneficence; therefore, the effigy is honored, not despised. Image magic, from which caricature developed, retains the notion of the communally honorific and beneficent, and caricature itself, which often provokes the sympathetic, rather than the derisive, smile, many times reflects tribute in the act of critical distortion.
Caricature can be seen as the art of sudden compromise that grows out of the momentary awareness of conflict. As a satiric act, it is aimed less toward the exclusion of the victim than toward the inclusion of others in a shared value or system of values. Smollett's own use of the exaggerated image suggests as much. Peregrine Pickle's portrayal of Garrick serves as an example. Presented secondhand, through the observations of one of Peregrine's acquaintances in the College of Authors, the description nevertheless bears the stamp of Smollett's own resentment: "I cannot approve of his refinements in the mystery of dying hard; his fall, and the circumstances of his death, ... being, in my opinion, a lively representation of a tinker oppressed with gin, who staggers against a post, tumbles into the kennel, while his hammer and saucepan drop from his hands, makes diverse convulsive efforts to rise, and finding himself unable to get up, with many intervening hiccups, addresses himself to the surrounding mob" (651). On the surface, this passage does not suggest either compromise or the honoring of the satiric victim as the locus of communal accord. Certainly, Smollett's intention was to humble Garrick, not to raise him. The ridiculous comparison to a drunk tinker distorts the image of the actor with regard to both his outward appearance and his skill of interpretation. It is true, Peregrine tepidly comes to the actor's defense, objecting mainly to the use of a grotesque figure (the drunk tinker) to describe an already grotesque figure (Garrick), but it is not therein that compromise and honor lie. They lie, instead, in the shared reverence for the moment of death and, more particularly, in the belief that such a moment should be artistically represented with appropriate decorum and restraint.
Of course, 'decorum' and 'restraint' are words that hardly describe Smollett's own style. In fact, the moment of death is treated as grotesquely by Hatchway as it ever could have been by Garrick or any actor. The difference is that, in the Garrick episode, we are expected to step outside the fiction, to agree with or to take exception to the opinions of the speakers with reference to our own experience, our own awareness of the celebrated Garrick style. Hatchway's similarly grotesque language we understand within the fictional construct - a part of his linguistic habit that adds poignancy to the event described. The values are not set but episodic, occasional, momentary, and circumstantial. If we follow the logic of the fiction, what we learn is to accommodate ourselves to the exigencies of the moment, to laugh at something that in another circumstance, at a different time, might have moved us to tears.
Smollett's surrogate spokesmen in this novel, like Smollett himself, are all masters of the tendentious art of caricature. Hatchway, Peregrine, and Cadwallader Crabtree forge stability from the momentary and in doing so bring a temporary (or, we might say, a temporal) order to a chaotic (or, we might again say, temporal) world. Hatchway and Crabtree are mentors to Peregrine, whom Smollett describes in an early chapter as having "a certain oddity of disposition for which he had been remarkable even from his cradle" (51-52), a satirical impulse that vents itself primarily against his uncle and his aunt, the commodore and the former Mrs. Grizzle, his wife. Interestingly, although Trunnion is usually Peregrine's preferred target, the old sailor maintains for his nephew an affection that increases as the boy begins to manifest his peculiar talents. With Hatchway as tutor, Peregrine performs such satirical exploits as stepping on his uncle's gouty toe, picking his pocket, calling him names, tweaking his nose, and emptying a snuff box into his ale - all of which Trunnion tolerates, and most of which he enjoys. The society of the garrison is cemented by a recognition - indeed, a celebration - of individual foibles, which are pointed out, not for the purpose of correction, but for the purpose of connection. While Hatchway and Peregrine do undermine Trunnion's dignity, they also yield to his authority. In fact, their art of satirical caricature, aimed as it is at the authoritative presence of Trunnion, anatomizes even as it establishes the community of values by which the initial chapters of the novel are defined.
In the beginning, through the tutelage of Hatchway, we and Peregrine learn to laugh at superstition (the captain's fear of lawyers and ghosts), at personal eccentricity (the captain's house built and maintained as a ship), at bodily functions or misfunctions (the captain's gout, his wife's false pregnancy), and at secret vices (Mrs. Trunnion's fondness for brandy); but through it all we are encouraged to maintain a kind of sympathy for the satiric victim. The community is small, intimate, and bound together by recognition of individual limitations and by mutual respect for one another in spite of these limitations. In a sense, the moment of caricature, the narrative moment, is again revealed to be the eternal present, repeated and ritualistic, cyclical and perennial. But as Peregrine moves from the intimate community of family into the impersonal world, we find caricature and narrative called upon to play a different role in a skeptical and disjunctive society.
It is Cadwallader Crabtree, not Hatchway, who is Peregrine's chosen mentor. Both caricaturists are important to Peregrine and, like all satirists, they share certain techniques of exposure and exaggeration. When they finally meet, however, there is conflict, and Peregrine must choose between them. Their differences arise from the context in which the caricaturists function. Hatchway works in a closed, personal environment: his targets are those whom he knows well, and his satire is directed upward, designed to celebrate the infirmity of those with authority over him, an act that is completely creditable in psychological terms. Crabtree, on the other hand, works in an impersonal environment peopled with such recognizable types as the would-be wit, the fickle coquet, and the cowardly braggart: he targets acquaintances whom he does not know well, and his caricature exposes the reality beneath the appearance, not in a celebratory fashion, but in an accusatory one. He adopts a mask to strip others of their disguises in protection of himself and (later) Peregrine. For Crabtree, caricature is an act of alienation that confirms the inimical nature of the world in which he lives. It does support communal standards, but they are standards that must be articulated because constant violation is wearing them away. The caricaturist again usurps authority, but it is not an authority of 'position' in a well-structured, stable social system; rather, it is an urban authority born of the confusion and corruption of social relationship in the modern world.
Crabtree's satire belongs to the destabilized modern world, which must reestablish the terms of its authoritative structures and which cannot depend upon the bonds of affection to hold society together. This kind of world is ephemeral, with success today being followed by failure tomorrow - reality exists only in the current moment. In this context, caricature exposes the lack of stability, the threat of extinction by insignificance, the possibility, even probability, of change so drastic as to change identity altogether.
What fuses in the figure of Crabtree is the cultural expression of this destabilization, and his significant features include his participation in all kinds of underground identities, his antisocial, misanthropic personality, and his status as 'keeper of the narrative.' In the chapter in which we meet him, all of these qualities are emphasized.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="65">She follows the plot of heterosexual romance, the only plot in which culture allows her a leading role. Her very helplessness becomes the means through which she achieves acknowledgment, whether loving or punitive. As Karen Horney argues in 'The Overvaluation of Love: A Study of a Common Present-Day Feminine Type,' "The function of this masochistic attitude is therefore a neurotically distorted means of attaining a heterosexual goal, which these patients believe they cannot reach in any other way" (Feminine Psychology 211). Furthermore, the apparently abject masochist seeks vicarious gratification of the active drives through her idealized other. Her self-sacrificing ethics are potentially her entrée to a larger world. Benjamin's comment on masochistic women's goals is to the point here: "in ideal love, as in other forms of masochism, acts of self-abnegation are in fact meant to secure access to the glory and power of the other" (117).
In Sigmund Freud's discussion of how women and men exalt the other, strangely different mechanisms seem to be at work. According to his reasoning, women introject prized qualities of men - attributes that can be theirs no more than can the penis. When men overvalue women, however, they project their own strengths. In both instances, then, the construct of the male ego assumes plenitude and power, while that of the female marks inadequacy. In his lecture 'The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,' for example, Freud notes, via common opinion, that women are particularly influenced by their object choices, who represent the capacities they themselves have lost or never had. "It is said that the influencing of the ego by the sexual object occurs particularly often with women and is characteristic of femininity ....If one has lost an object or has been obliged to give it up, one often compensates oneself by identifying oneself with it and by setting it up once more in one's ego, so that here object-choice regresses, as it were, to identification" (63). Although libido is diverted from the ego to the object, it is restored to the woman through the narcissistic mirror, Freud argues. In presenting this process as "characteristic of femininity," Freud again naturalizes psychic processes to buttress gender differentiation. The process he describes basically leaves women in a permanently melancholic position, but it is themselves they mourn.
According to Freud, though, overvaluation occurs mostly in men; one can only assume as a corollary that the value women attach to male objects or subjects is true currency. For example, in the early Studies on Hysteria, Freud is startled by his own "blindness." "I was afflicted by that blindness of the seeing eye which is so astonishing in the attitude of mothers to their daughters, husbands to their wives and rulers to their favourites" (117n). Here, and in fact throughout much of Freud's work, overvaluation is a mistake the dominant make about the subordinated. The reverse possibility - that the subordinated may ascribe strengths to the dominant that the latter don't have, or may even define the dominant through their fealty - is hardly considered as a possibility, particularly within a heterosexual frame.
To a feminist reader, Freud's definition of overvaluation in 'Sexual Aberrations' seems to describe culture's inscription of masculine authority if the passage is read using 'she' as universal pronoun. "The subject becomes, as it were, intellectually infatuated (that is, his powers of judgement are weakened) by the mental achievements and perfections of the sexual object and he submits to the latter's judgement with credulity. Thus the credulity of love becomes an important, if not the most fundamental, source of authority" (150). The pattern of behavior Freud outlines is precisely that found in every naive Gothic protagonist who suspends her own judgments in deference to her beloved's authority. Astonishingly, the overvaluation Freud describes is the man's of the woman - a fatuous adoration most extensively set forth through the famous whore/madonna splitting of 'Contributions to the Psychology of Love.'
The asymmetrical valuation of the other sex that Freud posits is crucial to how society and Gothic fiction represent and regulate 'normal' adult heterosexual relationships. A woman must 'look up to' her man: unless she is carefully trained to do so, patriarchy falters. Every girl, and every Gothic heroine, learns that it is only in the mirror of his regard that she exists, only in the plenitude of his subjectivity that she is whole. Her assignment of subjectivity to and overvaluation of the other is, however, an analytic and cultural con game in which she's asked to believe that she's a winner. An economic metaphor best describes the transaction. A worker is told her labor has wage-value, the amount she is paid. The labor also generates the surplus value we call profit, which is reaped by others. The woman in conservative analytic and Gothic fictions is such a laborer emotionally. Love is her wage; the surplus value of her nurturing and self-abnegation funds the autonomy of the idealized other. She, like the wage-laborer, does not recognize the product as her own and remains alienated from the power so 'naturally' appropriated by others. In order to maintain this system of subordination, it is imperative that girls learn proper passivity. My argument, then, is that women's devaluation enables and maintains men's overvaluation, a transaction shielded behind Freud's emphasis upon the overvalued woman.
Freud's analysis of object choice for girls and boys highlights the key significance of active and passive choice. Like a docile job applicant, the girl must be ready to accept any offer without pointing to her own qualifications; her getting a job is luck, not merit. All power resides in the employer/lover, and unions, which suggest another locus of power, are an abomination. She must choose to identify with that which is not like herself.
The small boy, according to Freud, has two choices: to love his mother (anaclitic object choice) or himself. Although choosing the former primes the boy for adult heterosexuality, it also leads him to overvalue his adult mate, as he once did the woman who cared for him. The small girl also has two choices: to love her mother (or the person who cares for her) or to love herself. Both sexes can have elements of both choices in love (and an individual of either sex can make predominantly anaclitic or narcissistic object choices).
The girl clearly has a problem or, to put it more accurately, Western culture has a major problem whose symptom is the girl. Her narcissism, so often discussed pejoratively, is nonetheless the adolescent girl's consolation prize for passivity. "This is unfavourable to the development of a true object-choice with its accompanying overvaluation. Women, especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed upon them in their choice of object" ('On Narcissism' 88-89). The passage's struggle with logic, seen in the unreconciled conjunction of "unfavourable' and compensatory narcissism, points to the impasse in which culture places the girl. If, however, she aspires to "true object-choice" rather than narcissism and makes a fully anaclitic choice, she will choose another woman or a man who has her mother's attributes. Ergo, as a woman seeking a woman's qualities, she will have made a narcissistic object choice. Furthermore, if she thinks she can choose and somehow evade "social restrictions," she strays too far into activity.
Thus, the eighteen year old in 'The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman' is masculine in her assumption of the role of courtly lover to older women. Her "acuteness of comprehension and her lucid objectivity" (154) are the first tip-offs, followed by clues indicating "that she must formerly have had strong exhibitionist and scopophilic tendencies" (169). Of "greater importance," however, is her behavior toward the beloved. "She displayed the humility and the sublime overvaluation of the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, the renunciation of all narcissistic satisfaction, and the preference for being the lover rather than the beloved" (154). She is the exception that proves the rule: 'real' heterosexual women love narcissistically and so in "feminine" ways. Freud is careful to distinguish the sex of one's object choice from one's own attitude of masculinity or femininity; finally, though, the least plausible combination is for a woman to love a man in the "sublime" masculine mode ('Psychogenesis' 170).
For Freud, overvaluation is, in the end, an almost exclusively male phenomenon in love, a sentimental overestimation of the mother by the boy that carries over to his eventual mate. "The significance of the factor of sexual overvaluation can be best studied in men, for their erotic life alone has become accessible to research. That of women - partly owing to the stunting effect of civilized conditions and partly owing to their conventional secretiveness and insincerity - is still veiled in an impenetrable obscurity" ('Sexual Aberrations' 151). Freud's own wishful suppositions create some of that obscurity. Adult women, secretive and insincere, never quite love men enough - certainly not as much as the idealized, adoring mother of his own narcissistic stage, the mother who, at least in the son's nostalgic reconstruction, finds her own apotheosis in his perfection. "In typical cases women fail to exhibit any sexual overvaluation towards men; but they scarcely ever fail to do so towards their own children" ('Sexual Aberrations' 151n [added 1920]). The value women attach to men is left in the realm of the real: it is what men are actually worth. And women's worth, devalued so ruinously and early, can only be measured as collateral to men's. Women's worth is generated through the men to whom they are attached, just as we are to understand that poor governesses "become somebody" through the love of wealthy men.
The overvaluation of men that Freud implicitly accepts as real value and, finally, a "natural" determinant of the order of things is itself a cultural construct, as Horney so cogently argues in 'The Overvaluation of Love.' Here, as elsewhere, my interest is not in the analysis of male motives or of the often self-evident benefits that accrue to the male through this structuration. Instead, my concern is what it means to be a woman who must define herself through such a system. The boy's possession of great wealth during the anal stage becomes rarefied into his great value as an adult. The girl, reduced to a beggar during the first major commodities exchange, must find her own adult value through what an other is willing to dower her with.
By signing over subjectivity to another (whether or not the endorsement is coerced), she achieves some vicarious satisfaction of her own active drives, which are directed both to the outside world and herself. Forbidden from exercising the 'mastery' of sadism and the will to knowledge that epistemophilia and scopophilia provide, she ekes out what pleasures she can from the reversal of these instincts. She lives out the catch-22 Foucault calls the "cycle of prohibition": "Renounce yourself or suffer the penalty of being suppressed; do not appear if you do not want to disappear. Your existence will be maintained only at the cost of your nullification" (History 84). She values the knowledge and power she cannot hold and invests them in an other. Like the nameless protagonist of du Maurier's Rebecca and numerous others, she enviously watches the idealized other, whose unfettered existence is so unlike her own, and forlornly hopes that a magical look or word from him will make her 'somebody.'
Repression and Sublimation
The masochistic woman's active drives, inhibited and channeled in an exclusive course early on, continue to express the raw, unreformed aggression of the anal stage, augmented by her own rage. Repressed, these drives remain gargantuan, according to "Repression." "This deceptive strength of instinct is the result of an uninhibited development in phantasy and of the damming-up consequent on frustrated satisfaction" (149). She defends against this formidable instinctual energy. Sadly and inevitably, she abets the system that forbade instinctual expression in the first place: the energy she must expend just to maintain repression is not free for use elsewhere, she uses it to monitor herself (thus freeing others for alternate forms of surveillance), and she employs it actively only in preparing another generation of girls for divesture.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="66">Just as Error ceases to overwhelm Redcross as soon as he grasps and sees it, so Spenser manifests the covert logic of the episode -pastoral -only when that logic has been relegated to a comparison with the scene it originally constituted, when pastoral, that is, can be visualized in and as a single stanza. Yet, if the stanza does in some sense retrospectively clarify the episode, the battle it depicts between a gentle shepherd and some gnats nevertheless disrupts our sense not only of the other fight's ferocity but of its stakes -now the human seems the offender. For the sweet eventide, the sunset, the hasty supper, and the marred soft song all evoke an elegiac spirit to which the shepherd stands opposed: he is high on a hill, his star is ascendant, he takes Phoebus's place. When we discover that John Dixon glosses the stanza by referring it to Matthew 4.8, a stage in Christ's temptation -"The devil showeth him all the delights of the world to entice," Dixon says, "but can not deceive" (First Commentary, 3) -the tonality of this truly Spenserian stanza comes to seem so mixed and peculiar as to warrant longer inspection.
Though it is difficult to see how the details of the stanza might coalesce into the allusion Dixon finds there, the temptation on the mount, the culmination (in Matthew) of Christ's own wandering, has a certain dramatic propriety in relation to the Error allegory. A passage from More's translation of the Life of Pico (1510) automatically connects the two struggles: "Remember how cursed our old enemy is: which offereth us the kingdoms of this world, that he might bereave us the kingdom of heaven, how false the fleshly pleasures: which therefore embrace us, that they might strangle us" (Works 1:17). To such temptation Christ responded, "Avoid Satan" (Matthew 4.10); Petrarch atop Mont Ventoux found himself remonstrated by Augustine's lament that men go abroad to wonder at nature and yet leave themselves behind; but what in the shepherd's action recalls either Christ's repudiation or Petrarch's turning inward? Only, perhaps, his brushing gnats away, whose foremost iconographic association, ephemerality, does fit the contemptus theme: in the part of his contemptus litany immediately before the passage I quoted, Pico reminds his nephew that "the death lieth at hand. Remember that all the time of our life is but a moment, and yet less than a moment." The gnats also iconographically embody, and therefore distance and reduce, similarly worldly attributes of Error such as heresy, lechery, and even wandering, and so suggest the possibility of at least a kind of Cynic contemptus in the stanza, the philosophy of Erasmus's Folly:
If one (as Menippus did) looking out of the moon, beheld from thence the innumerable tumults, and businesses of mortal men, he should think verily he saw a many of flies, or gnats, brawling, fighting, beguiling, robbing, playing, living wantonly, born, bred up, decaying, and dying: So that it is scant believable, what commotions, and what Tragedies, are stirred up, by so little, and so short lived a vermin as this man is. (Praise, K3V)
Yet, while such pagan contemptus may find its counterpart in the bathetic side of the shepherd's battle, the "noyance" from which "he no where can rest," the same features of the scene that weaken the suggestive connection between it and Christian virtue baffle this allegory also. Though high on a hill, the shepherd views neither gnatlike men nor worldly kingdoms but his flock; the gnats themselves, if comically miniaturized glories of the world below, are nevertheless atop the hill also; and their tender wings and murmurings generate a pathos that counters any repudiation of them. In sum, what blocks these allegorical readings, what keeps the stanza, for all its contemptus yearnings, earthbound, is the 'lowly' character and setting Spenser and Redcross set out to leave behind them -the pastoral.
It looks misguided for a poet who announced his turn from pastoral and then proceeded to figure pre-epical modes as potentially deadly now to regret the loss of pastoral worldliness; but this final reduction, dislocation, and clarification of pastoral into a simile, the facing off of pastoral with its erroneous image, seems for Spenser to justify such nostalgia. The stanza's elegiac tone bespeaks more than the coming end of the episode itself. In the previous simile the characterization of father Nilus as old anticipated a turning back of the clock here also, the introduction of another old character: the gentle shepherd with his clownish hands recalls the clownish young men both Redcross and Spenser had been until only recently. Surrounding the shepherd, circumscribing this old identity, the gnats refigure the collapse of Redcross into Error and therefore also the spectatorial distance granted Una and then Redcross himself. Indeed, they turn the discarded pastoral in upon itself, for their "tender wings" invoke E. K.'s company of pastoral poets, whose prior flights on "tender wings" Spenser in The Shepheardes Calender set out "every where" to emulate. The bizarre Circean reduction of these poets to insects looks less surprising in the context of Virgilian poetics, which takes for granted that a poet should proportion his choice of subject to himself: if he is a fledgling, then his subject should be diminutive also, like the Culex Spenser translated as Virgils Gnat. In representing pastoral poets as one of these small subjects -as gnats - the simile literally collapses an already metaphorically collapsible relation, and so substitutes the shepherd surrounded by gnats, and the gnats themselves, as a diffracted image of the strangulation Redcross just suffered. What the pathos of the stanza would seem to register, then, is Spenser's desire to hang onto a scene that he believes liberates both Redcross and himself by staging their erroneous past and so differentiating them from its constraint.
The thwarted contemptus of the stanza indicates how pastoral can go so far as to be divided against itself, as in The Shepheardes Calender, and yet fall short of transcendence. The simile begins hopefully. The Error episode introduced a pastoral-like grove, we recall, as a shelter from heavenly wrath, from the hideous storm; pastoral's far more typical reason for shelter is only the heat of the sun, and, in the simile, with the sun sinking in the west, the shepherd escapes even that slight inconvenience. Yet, though free now to leave the shade for a lofty hilltop vision of his world, the shepherd still labors under the pressure of a temporal "tempest" (FQ 1.1.7, 8), even when, or rather because, heavenly power seems to absent itself from the world. The vision comes only at this "hasty" moment, only when day is nearly done; the shepherd can contemn his world only, that is, when it is being eclipsed. And in favor of what would he despise it? The only other world to desire, heaven, the sun, is what's becoming absent; and if the shepherd's flock represents the paltry, fleeting vanities he might despise, appropriately metamorphosed into gnats, they, like a new grove, still encumber him, because until the death all shepherds ought to long for ('November,' 182-92), he has no other place but his diminished world in which to live.
Redcross and Spenser, on the other hand, have only to discard pastoral in order to enact their own little apocalypse, sacrificing one kind of worldliness in order to save another. When Redcross severs Error's human head from her animal body, he explodes pastoral's strangling proportionment of human to natural, of self to place; with Error's head the trees of her grove (metonymically) fall as well, no longer required for shade but for the kind of use to which, say, the first tree mentioned, "the sayling Pine" (FQ 1.1.8), should he put. The death of Error even provides a final "sight" (26) of collapse: combining in themselves the shepherd's two cares, both the hungry sheep and the gnats "striving to infixe," Error's "scattred brood" have "flocked" (25) about their unhumanized mother and now "devoure" (26) her. As Error's blood and then her children's overstuffed bowels gush forth (24, 26), a constraint or implosion once more turns outside, to the spectatorial freedom of Redcross simply watching his foes defeat themselves, or of "his Ladie seeing all" now approaching "from farre" (27). The microcosm that dies enemy to God -"cursed" Error and her "unkindly Impes of heaven accurst" (16, 26) -opens a worldly space, the "long way" Redcross travels, in which he can have "God to frend" (28) as well, as roominess subject only to the "happy starre" Redcross was "borne under" (27), distant in both space and time.
ERROR AS TRIFLING
Error appears to represent a mistake, however, that not just Spenser but England as a whole had recently escaped, a delusive ideal more clearly embodied in the second monster Redcross meets, though Archimago at first protests himself only a "silly old man," who, because he "lives in hidden cell, / Bidding his beades all day for his trespas," knows nothing of "worldly trouble" (FQ 1.1.30). In his youth Erasmus, of all people, spoke of monastic life in De Contemptu Mundi (1521, trans. 1532?) as a pastoral retreat, a covert to fend off the hideous storms of worldly existence: "Who (but he that is stark blind) seeth not that it is far more surer, more pleasant, and more commodious to journey through the pleasant green meadows without dread, than among so many images of death to be turned and went with perpetual vexation and trouble" (13r-v). Adapting passages from Virgil's Eclogues, Erasmus celebrates the monastery "like to Paradise of pleasure," where, among "orchards and greaves," "within these dens," "groweth the pople tree, to shadow us from showers" (13v-14r). In Renaissance English versions of the Old Testament, however, "groves" figure as the idolatrous shrines that God repeatedly commands the Jews to cut down" (e.g., Exodus 34.13); and Greene lauds the day England's "woodman" Henry VIII wounded the "Monster" Antichrist by demolishing its monastic hiding places: "flying to the text, whatsoever my father hath not planted, shall be rooted up by the roots, he suppressed their Abbeys, pulled down their sumptuous buildings, & scarce left one stone upon another" (Works 5:251). The shattering of such pleasances "seeldom inward sound" (FQ 1.1.9) produced what many Protestants must have considered liberating catalogues of the rottenness and insubstantiality, the "pelting trash" (e.g., Derricke, Image of Irelande, 22), at their core: supposedly "holy relics" disgorged into the light as "stinking boots, mucky combs, ragged rochets, rotten girdles, pilled purses, great bullocks' horns, locks of hair, and filthy rags, gobbets of wood, under the name of parcels of the holy cross, and such pelfry beyond estimation."
Spenser establishes the relation between the Catholic worldliness and the pastoral ideal of proportion, and then reduces this subverted ideal to a literal trifle, first of all in The Shepheardes Calender's tale of the fox and the kid. According to E. K.'s commentary on "Maye," the eclogue in which the tale appears, the interlocutors Piers and Palinode represent "two forms of pastors or Ministers, or the protestant and the Catholic." Piers wants to explain to the papist Palinode, "a worldes childe" (73), why Protestants would be foolish to make friends with papists, and so tells him a fable. The kid's mother leaves him at home for a while, warning him to keep his door locked. The "false Foxe" then comes to the kid's door disguised "as a poor pedler ... / Bearing a trusse of tryfles at hys backe, / As Bells, and babes [i.e., dolls], and glasses in hys packe" (236, 238-40); "by such trifles," says E. K., "are noted, the relics and rags of popish superstition, which put no small religion in Bells: and Babies .s. Idols: and glasses .s. Paxes, and such like trumperies." Pretending to be sick and lame, the fox lures the kid to unlock his door by presenting him a glass -the kid "was so enamored with the newell, / That nought he deemed deare for the jewell" (276-77).
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="67">Then the following year, Collier had included McNickle in the delegation to the Inter-American Indian Institute in P<*_>a-acute<*/>tzcuaro, Mexico. By 1942, when the Heads suggested his transfer to Sells, Collier was relying heavily on McNickle's presence in the Washington office as McCaskill's assistant. But McNickle had, on occasion, expressed an interest in field work, and he could be useful in Arizona, as well. Collier apparently gave him the choice.
The seminar in Santa Fe that McNickle attended after leaving Sells was primarily a training session for those BIA teachers, nurses, soil conservation experts, clerks, and administrators who had volunteered as researchers for the personality study. Many of them were initially skeptical about the value of what they would be doing. Laura Thompson and the project's advisors, however, had worked through the pilot study on the Papago Reservation and were able to define the goals and techniques to be applied in the field. The volunteers learned the theories behind the various tests they would be using, which were the most sophisticated yet developed for analyzing personality development, and they had a chance to perfect their interviewing techniques by practicing on each other. Incredible as it seems, many of the volunteers had had little personal interaction with the people whose affairs they administered. They had never been inside an Indian home, where much of the testing was to be done, or attended an Indian ceremony. The initial prospect of having the intimate contact required by the testing procedures was frightening to many, but as the volunteers familiarized themselves with the techniques to be used, they became increasingly enthusiastic about the possibility of genuine community involvement.
W. Lloyd Warner, who read the evaluations submitted by participants when the seminar was over, reported to Collier that all the volunteers were enthusiastic, and some were "positively lyrical." "It became clear that what had happened was that a lot of these people had been stirred emotionally by gaining insight into their own lives and feeling somehow or other they had got a new grip on the kind of life they wanted.
McNickle, too, was caught up in the excitement of the seminar, and he returned to Washington to write an article entitled 'Toward Understanding' for Indians at Work about what had happened in Santa Fe. "There is always the chance," he began apologetically, "that one will speak or write with a naive enthusiasm about what one has felt and seen and lived through.... Nevertheless, there are occasions when one must make the effort to speak deeply and truly. The Seminar held at Santa Fe from May 17 to June 5 ...has been such an occasion, a time of profound experiences." Then he explained the purpose of the personality study itself. It was an attempt first, he said, to learn how human personality was formed, and then to gather data that would make Indian administration more effective.
Even that data, however, would be a by-product. In his summary he reflected some of Collier's mystical perception of human potential. "The research, in actuality, is projected on the assumption that there are in human personality certain primal, earth-old powers which, if understood and developed and used, can make for that mastery of the soul which men have longed for but have lacked the skill to achieve." He wrote as if he were talking about a religious experience, one not unlike Myron Begay's "passion in the desert" that he had described in his review of La Farge's Enemy Gods. He was obviously one of those who had been moved by the seminar experience. If he stayed in the nation's capital, he would have an opportunity to observe the full spectrum of the research and help evaluate its results. He decided to stay in Washington.
From his Chicago vantage point, Collier was able to maintain even closer contact with the University of Chicago and the personality study. The field work for the project was completed within the year, as expected. The University of Chicago then sponsored two seminars, in March and June, to begin the preliminary analysis of the data that was to be incorporated into the various tribal monographs. McNickle attended both sessions, then once again in Indians at Work he described the next phase of the project. He explained how the tribal monographs, written on each of the five tribes included in the study, were to be followed by a major publication dealing with the application of the research to problems of Indian education and administration. Such application, he reminded his readers, was the ultimate goal of the project.
The contract between the BIA and the University of Chicago for the first phase of the study expired in late 1944 and for a variety of reasons it was not renewed. Instead, the BIA negotiated a new contract with the Society for Applied Anthropology to complete the second phase of the study. The SAA appointed a Committee on Administrative Research, which included John Provinse as chairman; Paul Fejos, director of the Viking Fund (later the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research); Alexander Leighton; Edward Spicer; and D'Arcy McNickle, to complete the work. Laura Thompson stayed on as project coordinator. At D'Arcy's suggestion, his wife Roma served as publications editor and was also a member of the committee. The Viking Fund agreed to contribute six thousand dollars toward the completion of the project.
At that point the first of the tribal monographs, The Hopi Way by Laura Thompson and Alice Joseph, was ready for publication, while the others were in various stages of preparation. Collier, who by then was thinking seriously of resigning, became increasingly impatient with the inevitable delays in making the other studies available. Since the project was his legacy, he wanted the final analysis and policy recommendations printed and in the hands of Bureau personnel before he left office.
Despite the committee's impressive roster, however, the impetus for completing the project spent itself with Collier's resignation. John Provinse, in writing to Laura Thompson about the committee's final report in 1947, admitted that the research had not been implemented anywhere "except in the attitudes of a few individuals who have taken time to read the reports." Nevertheless, as the historian Lawrence Kelly has since pointed out, Collier's insistence on using the insights of the social sciences to develop administrative policies was catching on, and other government activities became the beneficiaries of his foresight during the war.
Although McNickle's specific contribution to the personality study remains difficult to assess, his unique position probably made him the most knowledgeable person in Washington on all aspects of the project. He and Roma spent much of 1944 and 1945 preparing the various manuscripts, and despite cutbacks in funding that followed the end of the war, all of the tribal monographs were eventually published. Only one volume of the second phase of the study was completed, however. That was Laura Thompson's Culture in Crisis, which was published in 1950. Meanwhile, the Committee on Administrative Research had disbanded. Although D'Arcy's and Roma's names appear in the acknowledgments, McNickle's labor on behalf of another publication perhaps provides a better indication of the nature of his involvement.
Before their involvement with the Indian Bureau projects, Dorothea and Alexander Leighton had prepared a manuscript, based on their pre-war studies of Navajo healing practices, that described the problem of crossing cultural barriers in health education. They had shown the text to Edna Gerkin, a health education supervisor for the Bureau in Colorado, and Gerkin in turn had recommended it to Collier. She was obviously impressed with the Leightons' work, much of which was concerned with how to make modern information concerning health and hygiene relevant to the still-isolated and uneducated Navajos. A book such as the Leightons had written, she told Collier, would provide invaluable assistance for all Indian service workers in the health field, not just those on the Navajo Reservation, and she urged him to assist in its publication.
After reading the manuscript Collier agreed with Gerkin's assessment. As he would write in the book's foreword, the authors' study was the product of people who had, without being inhibited by cultural preconceptions, "moved into the center of the Navajo's world view." As a result, their discoveries and generalizations about the problems of cross-cultural health education had far-reaching implications not only for the Indian service but for colonial administrations wherever they happened to be. He wanted the book published, and he assigned to McNickle the task of preparing the manuscript.
McNickle was involved with the Leightons' book for over a year, and without his assistance it probably would not have been published. His editorial skill helped him identify and correct some of the problems of its internal organization, and he offered to rewrite the chapter on administration. The Leightons were more than happy to have him do so. His attention extended even to the end papers, which replicated a map prepared by the Bureau's Navajo Human Dependency Survey of the 1930s. He edited Collier's foreword as well. Unfortunately, commercial publishers who examined the manuscript thought that it lacked general interest and were reluctant to publish it. McNickle therefore decided to try various university presses, and when Duman Malone at Harvard expressed interest, he was delighted. He forwarded Malone's letter to Alexander Leighton, who was still at Poston, with a brief comment: "Attached is a copy of a letter from Dumas Malone which should be cheering, in case everything else at the moment is going to pot."
The letter from Malone was indeed cheering, but it was far from a contract. Harvard Press wanted a definite commitment from the Bureau as to how many copies it would buy, and McNickle patiently acted as go-between while Collier tried to avoid giving a specific answer. The negotiations with Harvard took months, but McNickle's efforts finally paid off. When The Navajo Door: An Introduction to Navajo Life was published, Collier was pleased with every aspect of the book, from its content to its cover. He wrote to the publishers, "The 'Door' is a most beautiful piece of book-making throughout. The cover is perfect. I believe that this book ought to have a really good market if it can be brought to people's attention, and I shall do what I can to help." McNickle's work on The Navajo Door was patient, detailed, and effective, but, typically, he received little credit except for a line in the author's acknowledgments.
Despite the lack of specific information about McNickle's contribution to the personality study, there is little doubt that his work on that project, as well as on The Navajo Door, played a major role in his education as an applied anthropologist. Although he never studied the subject formally, research on the project and subsequent work with the Committee on Administrative Research provided a unique opportunity for him to learn from those scholars who were most committed to work among American Indians. Parallel to those efforts, his various activities with the Indian Bureau had required intimate contact with individuals and tribes who were trying to make new adjustments to the modern world. His job offered a superb opportunity for his own field work. Although he never lost his self-consciousness about not having earned a college degree, those who were familiar with his background knew that a piece of paper could add nothing to his already profound and growing knowledge of social and cultural anthropology.
The war years, especially from April 1942 through December 1943, were inevitably hectic, and were made more so by the Bureau's involvement with the War Relocation Authority. Milton Eisenhower, who had worked out the initial cooperative agreements with Ickes and Collier, had soon found that he had no stomach for the heart-wrenching job of dispossessing and relocating more than a hundred thousand people. By June 1942, just three months after his appointment, he became ill from the stress and he asked President Roosevelt to reassign him. As his successor he suggested Dillon Myer, a self-assured midwesterner who had been employed by the Soil Conservation Service since 1933.
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="68">Mitterrand also prepared his audience for future change by insisting that his government would pursue just social, economic, and fiscal reforms and would combat what he called "the wall of money" that had prevented reform in the past. The president also asked the French to mobilize themselves against unemployment and inflation. Yet Mitterrand did have something to say to private employers. He told them that as a result of the nationalizations, the economy would simply be a "little more mixed" than before and that a large majority of production would still remain in private hands. Mitterrand even told the business community that the government would exempt industrial profits from the wealth tax if employers spent the saved amount on investments to create jobs. The president's Gaullist-like image at this first press conference and his strong emphasis on future reforms served him well as a politician seeking some links with the past and at the same time trying to legitimize the reforms that the Socialist government intended to carry out. All in all, his initial meeting with the press attempted to ensure that the state of grace would continue.
Also attempting to maintain support for his government as economic indicators revealed the pitiful state of the economy, Mitterrand traveled to Gascony and Aquitaine where he gave a speech at Figeac that surprised many. In this small town in the southwestern part of France, after the press office at the Elysée announced that the president would be making an important speech there, Mitterrand declared, "What I have called socialism is not my Bible." He tried to give the impression that he was not simply a Socialist president but the president of the entire nation. "It is my duty to express the wishes of the entire nation," he said. "How firmly I hold to that pluralism! And how I want France to remain profoundly diverse and different, without being divided." In this speech Mitterrand also indicated that his government would be more sympathetic to the demands of French business. From this time forward, the word 'socialism' all but disappeared from the president's public discourse.
A few days after the Figeac speech, the Council of Ministers, with Mitterrand presiding, adopted a nationalization plan. The government divided the targeted companies into four groups. First, the Dassault aircraft company, maker of the Mirage fighter-bomber, and the arms production division of Matra, a large diversified electronics firm, were scheduled to fall under state control. The Socialist government agreed that the production and sale of weapons should not be controlled by private industry. The second group included two large steel producers, Usinor and Sacilor, which were already heavily indebted to the state. The third group included five large industrial concerns - CGE (electrical equipment), Péchiney-Ugine-Kuhlmann (an important chemical company), Rhone-Poulenc (a textile-chemical firm), Saint-Gobain (a diversified industrial group), and Thomson (a huge electronics company). The fourth group comprised Honeywell Bull (a French-U.S. computer company), ITT's French interests, and Roussel-Uclaf (a chemical and pharmaceutical firm). In addition to these industries, the government planned to nationalize a number of banks and holding institutions to maximize the state's control over credit and investment.
The nationalization plan divided the government. The nationalized industries were theoretically to be used as 'motors' for reindustrialization, research, and development, but this motor would be controlled by state technocrats. What provoked disagreement in government circles was not the 'motor' role of the nationalized sector, but the extent of the takeover within each industrial group. Finance Minister Delors and Minister of Planning Rocard, for instance, argued that the government only needed to take over 51 percent of the targeted industries to gain control; this would save the government billions of francs that could be spent elsewhere. Other ministers, such as Chev<*_>e-grave<*/>nement, argued that the government had a mandate to fully nationalize the targeted industries and that problems would emerge within the ranks of the industries if they were not completely nationalized. The nationalization plan set off the first real debate between two Socialist factions that the president would have to listen to: the 'minimalists' like Delors, Rocard, Minister of Foreign Trade Michel Jobert, and Minister of Industry Pierre Dreyfus, and the 'maximalists' comprising some Mitterrandists, Chev<*_>e-grave<*/>nement and his supporters, and the four Communist ministers. Mitterrand himself arbitrated this debate and decided that the targeted industries would be nationalized 100 percent. After a passionate session in the National Assembly where numerous amendments were offered, the deputies approved Mitterrand's version of the nationalization plan. The president's desire to nationalize 100 percent of the nine industrial groups was based mainly on his attempt to keep the pledge made in the Common Program and ensure left-wing unity within his government, especially from the Communist side. With this decision, which would cost at least 44 billion francs, the maximalists won a key battle with their adversaries, but they eventually lost the war over control of French economic policy.
In late September the government approved a spending program that reflected the maximalist position. Drawn up by Fabius, who was in charge of the budget, and negotiated with the Elysée staff, the new budget included a 23 percent increase in public spending, now set at 135 billion francs. The projected deficit for the 1982 budget was expected to be about $16.7 billion, a postwar record for a French government. The government hoped partially to offset the deficit with a new wealth tax under consideration and the abolition of special tax privileges. Although Delors initially refused to countersign the 1982 budget as minister of the economy, the expansionist budget of Fabius was adopted, a budget that reflected many of the dreams and illusions of the Socialists at the outset of their experiment with power.
With pressure still heavy on the franc, Mitterrand decided it was now time to devalue. While he flatly rejected devaluation immediately after taking office because of the political damage that might be incurred, in early October he had little choice. On October 4, after Delors had consulted with the Germans, the government announced that the members of the European Monetary System (EMS) had agreed that the franc would be devalued 3 percent while the mark would be raised in value by 5.5 percent. This meant that the franc fell in value 8.5 percent vis-<*_>a-grave<*/>-vis France's major trading partner. The day after the devaluation, Delors announced a price freeze on basic products and said he would discuss with the unions the necessity to moderate pay increases. The 14 percent inflation and a higher rate projected for 1982 worried the minister of the economy. The devaluation and Delors's October 5 actions were too little and too late.
On October 12 and 13 Mitterrand visited an area in eastern France hard hit by unemployment, Lorraine. Between May 1979 and May 1981 this region alone had lost 30,000 jobs in the steel industry. Mitterrand hoped that this official visit would allow him to explain the government's economic and social policy as outlined in his September press conference and to stymie any opposition effort to capture a foothold in this area. In the May 10 presidential elections 51.6 percent of the voters in Lorraine had voted for Mitterrand, but only one of the four departments in Lorraine had given Mitterrand a majority of votes. In the June legislative elections the Left had captured thirteen of twenty-five seats in this region. In terms of political calculus, Mitterrand knew that Lorraine was a key area of concern for the Socialist government.
During his visit to Lorraine the president was accompanied by several members of his government: Delors, Defferre, Bérégovoy, André Henry (minister of leisure), and Jean Auroux (minister of labor). The president and his entourage visited all four departments in Lorraine where they talked with mayors, heads of companies, union leaders, and workers. Among other themes, Mitterrand told the citizens of Lorraine that a powerful popular movement was galvanizing national unity around his government and that the nationalization program would permit the "structural reforms necessary to reverse the decline in Lorraine." He also said that he hoped Lorraine would become a symbol of "hope" and not a "symbol of political setback." This tour was followed in the coming months by a solo trip by Prime Minister Mauroy to various areas of France to explain further the government's economic and social policies. Like Mitterrand, Mauroy wanted to sensitize French citizens to the difficult problems of unemployment, the "priority of priorities" for the new government, at least during its first year.
The dreams and illusions of the new Socialist government were clearly revealed in the October 14 meeting of the Council of Ministers where this body adopted what it termed an 'Intermediate Plan' for 1982-83. According to this plan, the government's first objective was to stabilize unemployment and then to reduce it by creating 400,000 to 500,000 new jobs a year beginning in 1983. It also said that the government wanted to create conditions for economic growth (3 percent projected for 1982-83) and investment, to improve productive capacity, restore social solidarity, and establish an effective dialogue with various social groups. Like other leftist governments in the past, such as Blum's Popular Front in 1936 or Harold Wilson's government in Britain after 1964, Mitterrand and the Socialists forgot how quickly inflation erodes confidence in a newly elected progressive government.
These campaigns in the provinces by the president and his prime minister were followed by the Socialist congress at Valence between October 23 and 25, a meeting dominated by radical rhetoric echoing 1789. After the 1981 victory, Mitterrand's strength within the PS jumped from about 47 percent of the party's membership to approximately 51.1 percent, while Rocard's support fell from 21 percent to 15 percent. Fearing a further reduction of his strength in the euphoria of 1981, Rocard did not present a countermotion at the Valence congress, despite Jospin's effort to encourage Rocard to draw up a set of counteraims for the party. The motion presented at Valence called on the government to work toward "a complete break with capitalism." With debate in the government brewing over a new wealth tax and with some bankers, notably at Paribas (Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas), resisting a government takeover, some PS members sensed a clash with the 'wall of money' that Mitterrand had referred to earlier. One PS delegate at Valence, Paul Quil<*_>e-grave<*/>s, even resorted to quoting Robespierre by declaring, "It is not only necessary to say that heads are going to fall, but it is necessary to say which ones." Another delegate said now that the banks had been nationalized, it was "necessary to nationalize the bankers." The prime minister himself, referring specifically to the resistance of some banks, stated, "The government will not yield to any intimidation."
In essence, the Valence congress was a victory celebration for the PS, especially for the more radical representatives. In a message to the delegates, Mitterrand attempted to moderate the rhetoric by telling his confreres, "We have a long period ahead of us [and] it is necessary to know how to manage it." One right-wing Parisian newspaper dubbed the Valence meeting 'La terreur tranquille' (the calm terror). Valence may have been a victory celebration for the Socialists, but the extreme rhetoric contributed to mobilizing right-wing opinion.
In November, Mitterrand's economic dreams and illusions began to confront a harsh reality, not from the right wing, but from his own finance minister. In a TV broadcast on November 29 Delors called for a "pause in the reforms." Just as startling to Mitterrand and others in government, Delors stated: "The responsibility of the Socialist government is to create a climate more favorable to business." Delors also said that he did not believe that there was a 'conspiracy' on the part of big business to subvert Socialist reforms. Delors's pronouncement attracted considerable attention in the French and international press and got the attention of Prime Minister Mauroy, who proceeded to discount it, because Delors's statements contradicted official government policy. Traveling in the provinces at the time, Mauroy told the press that the government would continue its reforms "without accelerating or slowing down."
</doc><doc register="belles-lettres" n="69">
The struggle for the bottom rung
BLACKS VS. BROWNS
BY JACK MILES
Behind the Los Angeles riot lay a grim economic competition between Latinos and African-Americans, which is intensifying and which poses a stern challenge to U.S. domestic and foreign policy, as well as to sentimental cultural attitudes about immigration
DURING THE 1980S, ACCORDING TO CENSUS figures released last May 11, the United States admitted 8.6 million immigrants. In the context of U.S. immigration history this is a staggering number - more than in any decade since 1900-1910. Worldwide, half the decade's emigrants had made the United States their destination. Of them, 11 percent - more than three quarters of a million - further specified their choice as Los Angeles. By the end of the decade 40 percent of all Angelenos were foreign-born; 49.9 percent spoke a language other than English at home; 35.3 percent spoke Spanish. This is the city where, two weeks before those figures were released, the most violent urban riot in American history broke out: fifty-one people were killed, and property worth $750 million or more was lost.
Though the occasion for the riot was the acquittal of four white policemen on charges of assaulting a black traffic offender, Latinos as well as African-Americans rioted. Why? What was Rodney King to Latinos? Did a race riot, once begun, degenerate - or progress - into a bread riot? Was it a vast crime spree, as devoid of political content as the looting that followed the 1977 blackout in New York City? Of those arrested afterward - of whom more than half were Latino - 40 percent already had criminal records. Was the riot a defeat of the police? If it was a hybrid of all these, was it, finally, an aberration from which, by hard work, America's second-largest city could recover? Or was it the annunciation of a new and permanent state of affairs?
I work at the Los Angeles Times, writing a column for that newspaper's book supplement and unsigned editorials three or four times a week for its editorial page. On the day after the first night of the riot, one of my colleagues said to me, as we left to hunt for a still-open restaurant, "When the barbarians sacked Rome in 410, the Romans thought it was the end of civilization. You smile - but what followed was the Dark Ages." Think of what follows here as the voice of a worried Roman - in front of a television set, watching the Goths at their sack.
Meeting Latino Los Angeles
I CAME TO LOS ANGELES IN 1978, TO WORK AS AN editor in the branch office of the University of California Press at UCLA. The first home I owned here was a house trailer in Malibu. In 1981 a Santa Ana - one of the notorious local windstorms - ripped off the carport attached to the trailer and did some further damage to the roof. My wife and I had some insurance, but not enough. To help me complete my do-it-yourself repairs, I hired two Mexican boys from the pool of laborers who gathered daily near a shopping center just off the Pacific Coast Highway. One of the two, Ricky Rodr<*_>i-acute<*/>guez (not his real name), just fifteen years old when we met him, would become almost literally a member of our family.
One Sunday afternoon, after Ricky had been working with me part-time for several weeks, a Coast Highway landslide cut Malibu in half, and we invited Ricky to stay overnight. The buses weren't running. His alternatives, both illegal, were sleeping on the beach and sleeping in some neglected patch of brush along the road. He accepted the invitation and on the morrow brought my wife and me a breakfast in bed consisting of fried eggs and peanut butter sandwiches. In the sudden, unforeseen intimacy of the moment, a kind of conversation began different from any we had yet had. We began to learn something about his family.
Ricky, his mother, two sisters, and a brother were living in City Terrace Park, a neighborhood in East Los Angeles, as the permanent houseguests of another sister, her husband, and their two small children: nine people in a two-bedroom cottage. Ricky's brother-in-law, at the time the only American citizen in the family, was a cook whose generous employer had bought him this cottage. (Later, Juan José - called Juanjo for short - would open his own burrito shop.) Ricky invited me to visit his family, and I did so. I had never been in the barrio before.
Ricky continued working for us over several months. Relations remained friendly, and he eventually asked if we would adopt him, purely for legal reasons: to make him a citizen. His mother and I visited a sympathetic Chicano immigration lawyer, but Mexico's laws protecting its children made the move legally complicated. I did agree, however, to tutor Ricky through his remaining two years of high school - and here we return to the riot as an event in a mecca for immigrants.
As a taxpayer, I was surprised - not that I wasn't happy for our young friend - to discover that his status as an illegal immigrant was no bar to his attending high school at state expense. He did have to show a birth certificate; but, interestingly, his mother, a short, stout, indomitably cheerful woman who had crossed the border as a single mother with four children, of whom the youngest was a toddler at the time, had brought birth certificates with her. She had had education on her mind from the start, and a Guadalajara certificate was certificate enough for Wilson High School, which received money from the state on a per capita basis and would have lost money had illegal immigrants been denied admission.
Another surprise came in Ricky's senior year, when he asked if I would accompany him to the Department of Motor Vehicles and permit him to take a driving test in my car. (My presence and signature may have been required in some other capacity as well; I can no longer quite remember.) I knew by then that illegal immigrants commonly drove the streets and freeways of Los Angeles without any kind of driver's license. Ricky wanted a license mainly because it provided an identification card and a degree of cover for someone seeking work. He took and passed the test in the Lincoln Heights DMV office not far from downtown Los Angeles.
But here again I was surprised that no proof of legal residency was requested for the receipt of a California driver's license. On the Coast Highway, I had witnessed hair-raising 'sweeps' by Immigration and Naturalization Service agents on the very corner where I had hired Ricky. Such cases farther south, at an INS checkpoint on Interstate 5, north of San Diego, led with grim frequency to traffic deaths. Why did the INS not simply come to the DMV office in Lincoln Heights and arrest applicants? As we waited in line to deliver Ricky's completed written test, we overheard the clerk administering the same test orally - in Spanish - to a short older man with a coppery Amerindian face. He would have fallen one answer short of the passing grade had she not given him a broad hint.
The DMV office had as foreign a feel to it as the correo in Mexico City. One heard almost no English at all. Ricky took his test not long after Election Day that year. The contrast between the two populations - the one in the polling station, the other at the DMV - was overwhelming. The DMV office seemed to be a part of the American administration of some foreign - or indigenous but subject - population.
A Latino Riot?
BACK TO THE RIOT: WAS THERE A POLITICAL motive for the Latino rioting? There is a radical fringe of Chicano activists with a political agenda for the land they call Aztl<*_>a-acute<*/>n: northwest Mexico and the southwest United States. They claim, not without reason, that Chicano farm workers now sweat on land stolen from their ancestors. But Ricky and his family take a different view. I learned in passing that as an eighth-grader Ricky had donned a feather headdress and a loincloth and danced in a 'folkloric' group organized by one of his teachers, but the Aztecs meant no more to him than the Illinois did to me as a Boy Scout in Chicago. Ricky's older brother, Victor, once asked me in puzzlement why Americans gave Spanish names to their houses and boats. Why not English names? A rich and interesting question, perhaps, but not one that betrayed a political agenda.
We learned later that in fact many if not most of the Latino rioters were either Central Americans or very recent Mexican immigrants, and that what the riot might have been to us Anglos, it was also, to some considerable extent, to the established Mexican-American political leadership. They, too, were wondering about a huge, strange, possibly angry, Spanish-speaking population in their midst. Who were these people, and what did they want? If they had no political agenda, if they were common criminals, well, that, too - given their growing numbers and the demonstrated inadequacy of the police - was news, wasn't it? The population of South Central Los Angeles had doubled since 1965. For every black in the area there was now at least one Latino. That had to make a difference. But what kind of difference?
In the weeks following the riot, Latino leaders from East Los Angeles were concerned that the sudden spot-light on South Central Los Angeles would rob them of scarce government funds. They were on guard against the possibility that South Central Los Angeles would be rewarded for its violence and East Los Angeles punished for its good behavior. "Just because we didn't erupt in East L.A., does that translate into us being ignored or missing out on the funds that are funneling into the communities?" asked Geraldine Zapata, the executive director of the Plaza Community Center. But the more immediate challenge to Mexican East Los Angeles was coming to terms with Central American South Central Los Angeles.
The Watts II Paradigm: Blacks vs. Whites
THE MAINSTREAM INTERPRETATION HAD little to say about either Mexicans or Central Americans. It took the riot to be Watts II, a repetition of the 1965 black riot, touched off by the verdict in the King case but growing out of the deeper frustrations of the black population over rising unemployment, institutionalized police brutality, and eroded public assistance. That interpretation was surely right as far as it went. Those who mentally bracketed the riot between the videotaped beatings of King by a gang of white policemen and of Reginald Denny, a white trucker, by a gang of black rioters were not altogether wrong to do so.
And this interpretation was reinforced during the weeks following the riot by the competing rhetoric of black rappers on the one hand and the police on the other. On June 26, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates's last day on the job, Amnesty International released a report, 'Police Brutality in Los Angeles,' claiming that the department used its Taser guns and turned loose its dogs on suspects who were not resisting arrest or had already been taken into custody. LAPD brutality, the report claimed, "has even amounted to torture." Gates replied by denouncing the organization as "a bunch of knucklehead liberals" who "attack everything that is good in the country ... and good in the world."
Earlier, Sergeant Stacey C. Koon, the commanding officer in the King beating, had discussed his unpublished memoir, 'The Ides of March,' with reporters, apparently in an attempt to sell it. The manuscript includes the following description of Koon's treatment of a Latino said to be under the influence of the drug PCP (the same was said, wrongly, of Rodney King):
My boot came from the area of lower California and connected with the suspect's scrotum about lower Missouri. My boot stopped about Ohio, but the suspect's testicles continued into upper Maine. The suspect was literally lifted off the ground.
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The Trouble with
Adam Smith
THOMAS K. McCRAW
THE BATTLE between Adam Smith and Karl Marx is over. By a late-round technical knockout, Smith and capitalism have won. But now a second championship fight is under way, a contest between different kinds of capitalism. In one corner stands a relatively laissez-faire consumer variety represented by the United States. In the other corner is a more nationalistic, producer-oriented capitalism epitomized by Germany, Japan, and the 'Little Dragons' of East Asia (Korea and Taiwan).
The theoretical split that underlies this competition is best exemplified by Adam Smith on the one hand, and on the other by the two great prophets of activist national developmental policy. These are the American Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) and the German Friedrich List (1789-1846). So far, in the realms of ideology and academic theory, Smith is ahead on points. But there is reason to believe he will fade in the middle and late rounds, and in this essay I want to explain why. I will do this not through an extended comparison of Smith with Hamilton and List, but by looking mostly at Smith alone - at his intellectual strengths and weaknesses, his preferred units of analysis, and especially his hostile attitude towards organizations.
I
Ever since its publication in 1776, The Wealth of Nations has been regarded as the most influential book on economics ever written. Ronald Coase, the 1991 Nobel laureate in economics, called it "a work that one contemplates with awe. In keenness of analysis and in its range it surpasses any other book on economics. Its preeminence is, however, disturbing. What have we been doing in the last 200? years?" Joseph Schumpeter, though no particular admirer of Adam Smith, described it as "the most successful not only of all books on economics but, with the possible exception of Darwin's Origin of Species, of all scientific books that have appeared to this day."
The influence of The Wealth of Nations has always been high, but of course higher at some moments than others. When it was first published, it received a fair amount of attention but did not have a sensational success. In the first two or three decades after publication, its powerful messages about free trade and minimal government seeped slowly into the consciousness and everyday vocabularies of British and American citizens. Soon its translation into French, German, Spanish, and other languages spread Smith's influence to Europe and Latin America. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, its message penetrated Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian circles.
Every fifty years since 1776, as the economist R. D. Collison Black has noted, The Wealth of Nations has been memorialized in formal ceremony. In 1826, the author had been dead for only thirty-six years and had not yet attained the status of sainthood. Accordingly, David Ricardo and others of that generation threw reverence to the winds and criticized some of Smith's technical errors. On the other hand, both they and numerous politicians had long since embraced Smith's system of "natural liberty" and its free-trade implications. By 1846, the Corn Laws had been repealed and the era of free trade and international British economic hegemony had begun.
Thirty years later, in the centennial celebrations of 1876, the policy side of Adam Smith, as distinct from the analytical, received even greater emphasis in both Britain and America. Having witnessed Britain's rise to unmatched prosperity under its free-trade regime, celebrants were ready to proclaim Smith the prophet of political economy. Economic theory, however, was now in turmoil. The classical system was being challenged by Marx and the socialists and also by Léon Walras and the marginalists. By the late nineteenth century it had come under relentless attack by popular critics of industrialism - writers such as Carlyle and Dickens in Britain, Victor Hugo in France, Henry George and Henry Demarest Lloyd in America. Adam Smith's laissez-faire system seemed linked to an ominous polarization of wealth and to the horrifying industrial squalor that plagued European cities.
By the 150th anniversary of The Wealth of Nations in 1926, enlightened capitalism and the emerging welfare state had eliminated some of the squalor, though little of the maldistribution of wealth. On the theory side, the neoclassical reconstruction was nearly complete, and the economies of Alfred Marshall ruled the academy alongside marginalism, to which it was tied. Yet doubts about Adam Smith had again become rife. For a world trying to recover from the Great War, the merits of free trade and laissez-faire were far from self-evident. Perhaps in consequence, 1926 was the least joyous, though most intellectually interesting, of all the anniversaries.
Fifty years later, in 1976, conditions had become uniquely propitious for celebration of Smithian policy as well as theory. With the triumph of capitalism over its rivals finally in sight, with deregulation and privatization on the lips of economists and politicians all over the world, and with American bicentennial hoopla at full throttle, Adam Smith had reached the highest pedestal. The Chicago economist Milton Friedman had just won the Nobel Prize. His colleague George J. Stigler, an equally ardent Smithian, was about to win one of his own. The Wealth of Nations had become more fashionable than at any other time in its history. Inexpensive paperback editions proliferated. A huge project to edit and republish all of Smith's works was under way, sponsored by the University of Glasgow and Oxford University Press. By 1981, the young Washington commandos of the Reagan Revolution were sporting neckties decorated with Smith's profile. (Their identification of The Wealth of Nations with Reaganite principles had a certain logic, but they should also have known that Smith despised conspicuous consumption and favoritism toward the wealthy.) By 1989, with the collapse of socialist regimes in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, Smith reigned as intellectual king of the economic hill.
II
In person, Adam Smith seemed the unlikeliest of guides to the practical world. He was, hands down, the most absentminded economist in the history of the discipline. Once he put bread and butter into boiling water and complained that he had never tasted a worse cup of tea. Bumbling and ungainly, he was forever talking to himself, sometimes in a loud voice. "His absence of mind was amazing," wrote Walter Bagehot. "On one occasion, having to sign his own name to an official document, he produced not his own signature, but an elaborate imitation of the signature of the person who signed before him; on another, a sentinel on duty having saluted him in military fashion" [doing the 'Present Arms' movement with his rifle], Smith "astounded and offended the man by acknowledging it with a copy - a very clumsy copy no doubt - of the same gestures."
Altogether, he represented an easy target for future critics. Schumpeter liked to ridicule Smith's "sheltered and uneventful life" as "a professor born and bred." He noted with relish that Smith's understanding of human nature was circumscribed by the fact "that no woman, excepting his mother, ever played a role in his existence: in this as in other respects the glamours and passions of life were just literature to him." This comment reveals less about Smith than about Schumpeter, the self-styled world's leading economist and greatest lover; and it is not quite accurate. Smith did lead the quiet life of a scholar, but his cousin Jane Douglas kept house for him over many years, and during a sojourn to France in the 1760s he made lasting friendships with several women who presided over Paris salons.
Smith (1723-1790) was born and raised in Kirkcaldy, a town of about fifteen hundred on the North Sea side of Scotland, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh. His father, several other relatives, and eventually he himself were employed by the Scottish civil service, an ironic circumstance given his future reputation as an anti-government man. As a child, he was delicate and dreamy, subject, as his biographer John Rae puts it, to "those fits of absence and that habit of speaking to himself which he carried all through his life." Kidnapped by gypsies at the age of three, he was returned to his mother in short order. "He would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy," Rae avers. As an adult, Smith once went out for a nocturnal stroll wearing his dressing gown and, deep in thought, walked all the way to Dunfermline, fifteen miles west of Kirkcaldy.
After a local elementary education, Smith entered the University of Glasgow at the age of fourteen. In his three years there, he earned an M.A. and became excited by the philosophic teachings of Francis Hutcheson, the likely source of Smith's powerful economic ideas about the division of labor. He then spent six years at Oxford on a scholarship, one of a tiny number of Scots among the total of one hundred students enrolled at Balliol college. Little is known of his years at Oxford except that, judging from the evidence of his later writings, he detested it. He found no new Hutchesons to inspire him, and he came to regard the English university system as generally corrupt and inferior to that of Scotland.
Smith returned to his mother's home in Kirkcaldy in 1746. Now twenty-three years old, still studious and unprepossessing, he felt no attraction to either the ministry or the law. For a couple of years he did nothing, at least nothing that was recorded. Then came a sudden opportunity. He was invited by some prominent men of Edinburgh to give a series of public lectures on rhetoric, belles lettres, and jurisprudence. In his presentations that followed, he proved such an able scholar and speaker that in 1751 he was elected to the chair of logic at the University of Glasgow. Later in that same year he moved up to the more prestigious chair of moral philosophy, once held by his own teacher, the 'never to be forgotten' Hutcheson.
Smith remained at Glasgow for twelve years, lecturing and writing. In 1759, at the age of thirty-six, he brought out the first of his two great books. This was The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which soon made him moderately famous in Britain and throughout Europe. Six English editions were published during his lifetime. Three French and two German translations appeared before the end of the eighteenth century.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a long, engaging treatise on human nature and ethical systems. Written in the 'plain style' Smith cultivated, it flows so easily that one suspects it originated as a series of oral presentations to undergraduates. "It is rather painting than writing," waxed Edmund Burke in his review. The book combines in approximately equal parts what today would be taught in departments of ethics, psychology, and sociology. The unit of analysis is the individual. The theme is the evolution of moral structures and the mixture of motivations that govern human behavior. There is much criticism of the pursuit of wealth and of undue admiration for "the rich and powerful," which Smith finds "the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments." The analytical emphasis is on "sympathy" (what we would call empathy), "self-love" (self-interest), and the "impartial spectator" (one's conscience, reinforced by a desire to be well regarded by others and to deserve their high regard). The opening sentence of the book suggests both its concentration on human nature and its appealing tone: "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it." The book is much less preoccupied with "the invisible hand" of beneficent market forces than is The Wealth of Nations, which appeared seventeen years later.
Among contemporary admirers of The Theory of Moral Sentiments was the English statesman Charles Townshend, stepfather of the young Duke of Buccleuch. Townshend had visited Glasgow not long after reading the book. (The ever-distracted Smith, conducting him on a visit to a local tannery, fell into a vat of evil-smelling liquid and had to excuse himself.)
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JOSEPH EPSTEIN
First Person Singular
The best time to write one's autobiography, surely, is on one's deathbed. Leaving aside the technical problem of getting the job done - all those interruptions from medicos, clergymen, florists, relatives - just before death, assuming one isn't squirming in pain, is likely to provide one's best shot at understanding one's own life, if not, granted, life itself. Writing one's autobiography at the very close of one's life would also give the story a nice rounded-off quality - a sense, as Dr. Kermode has it, of an ending. Before the end, after all, one is likely to have too much to defend and too much to hide, likely to be too worried about tact and about the tactics of one's own little career. But there, on one's deathbed, one can at last say - the hope is, with easeful breath - oh, screw it, let 'er rip, I shall tell the truth at last.
Until that time, though, truth about one's self and one's relationships with the people close to one is not usually freely expressed. Freud said that biographical truth was unavailable. Henry James thought that biography tended to flatten out life and make it thinner than in reality it is. And this, recall, is biography they were talking about. As for autobiography, Orwell, whose specialty was never that of putting things gently, said that "autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats."
Yet, theoretically, writing autobiography ought not to be so horrendously difficult. The autobiographer, as Leslie Stephen long ago pointed out, has "ex officiotwo qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work. He is writing about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which he is the highest authority." Autobiography, according to Stephen, also allows one to give way to "an irresistible longing for confidential expansion," which was that very superior late Victorian's elegantly euphemistic way of referring to the pleasure of spilling the beans. True, not everyone has the same quantity of beans to spill, and then, too, not all beans are equally delectable. Yet the urge at some point to spill them doubtless resides in most of us. All this being so, one would think there would be a great deal of first-class autobiography around.
There isn't. Nor has there ever been. The problem of lying by way of moral self-aggrandizement that Orwell alluded to plays a role here. The knowledge that one has been a miserable failure, and probably a creep into the bargain, is not easily made public and this is part of the problem. (All autobiographies, it has been noted, tend to grow dull at exactly the point where the autobiographer has achieved success.) Withholding evidence is a more serious part of the problem. But even this might be surmounted, or so one might think, if one didn't often withhold evidence even from oneself. Dostoyevsky, that perpetual drag on optimism, put the matter with damnable perfection when he wrote:
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even himself, and every man has a number of such things in his mind.
As if this weren't troublesome enough, one recognizes that the cards dealt one in life present further obstacles on the Damascene road to truth. The cards I have in mind are called parents (face cards, those), one's sex (low clubs), social class (diamonds), religion, nationality, toss in geography within one's nationality (hearts all). Add to this the distinct prospect of getting one's own story confused with other people's stories, a prospect perhaps greater than at any other time in the past, since there appears to be a vast quantity of such stories afloat just now. By other people's stories I mean the competing stories put forth by psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, you name it, many of which are there to be adopted by the pliant-minded as their very own. Every psychoanalysand is, after all, merely a prone autobiographer, with the main themes of his story having already been foretold by that dogmatic, cigar-smoking gentleman from Vienna. Fresh stories of this generic kind are put into play with fair regularity. A psychiatrist of my acquaintance tells me that nowadays, owing to the publicity that child-abuse stories have received on television and in the press, a large number of patients under psychiatric care are combing their pasts searching for child abuse in their own lives. Surprise, surprise, with only a little stretch of the imagination, a little twist of personal history, not a few find it.
The cards one is dealt in life have a way of occluding, channelling, shaping the facts of one's life to the point where it is not always certain they can any longer be called facts. The potential motives for writing autobiography - ranging from the need for vengeance, to setting down for the record what a winsome fellow one is, to being a writer with nothing else in mind to write at the present time - are as great as those for going on with life itself. Alas, despite one's belief in objective truth, one has to allow the distinct possibility that there may be no autobiographical truth but only a handful of splendid autobiographies.
Odd, but very few of these really splendid autobiographies have been written by novelists, poets, and playwrights. Saint Augustine, Cellini, Rousseau, Gibbon, Franklin, Mill, Alexander Herzen, Henry Adams, the men - and there have thus far been almost no women - who wrote the monumental autobiographical works were none of them primarily imaginative literary artists. Henry James, that consummate artist, botched his two volumes of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of A Son and Brother - botched them insofar as they have no real standing as discrete works of art, but are of interest chiefly as Jamesian curiosities. How strange that Henry James, surely the greatest master of introspection the world has known, should fail at autobiography, which, at its best, is primarily the art of introspection.
Perhaps there is something about autobiography that discomfits literary artists. Literary artists, it has been said, use up their autobiographical experience, in more or less transmuted form, in their poems and plays, stories and novels. But the truth is that, in the use of experience, artists have been great recyclers long before the term recycling was invented. Why not run the same material through once more this time non-fictionally or non-poetically, in one's autobiography? Many a literary artist has tried, but not generally with impressive results. Vladimir Nabokov's lovely autobiography, Speak, Memory, seems to me a notable exception, though it is a work driven by a deep nostalgic yearning for a lost country. But so overwhelmingly is this the case that one is inclined to think that perhaps autobiography and pure art are if not antithetical then less than compatible, and the better the artist the poorer the autobiographer he is likely to prove. To cite only two fairly recent examples, Anthony Powell, whose novels can be so greatly pleasing, wrote four volumes of autobiography that, for dullness, could bring sleep to an insomnia ward. Evelyn Waugh, who hadn't an uninteresting sentence in him, wrote, in A Little Learning, a single, most disappointing volume of autobiography.
My own two-cent theory holds that artists don't finally believe in autobiography; deep down they don't hold with it, as an earlier generation used to say, as a sufficiently worthy vessel of truth-telling. They don't hold with it principally because they sense, if they do not absolutely know, that there is a higher truth than that offered by the pedestrian but necessary factuality demanded by autobiography. Or, as Goethe wrote in Fiction and Truth: "A fact of our experience is of value not insofar as it is true, but insofar as it has something to signify." Only in arts do all facts signify.
Not all but a fair part of the pleasure of reading autobiography is in catching the autobiographer out in suspicious reticences, self-serving misperceptions, cover-ups, and, of course, delightfully clever deceptions. What's he hiding, what's he withholding, why doesn't he talk about his first wife, who's he kidding leaving out his children, odd he never mentions money - such are the questions that roam randomly through the mind of your normally licentious reader of autobiography. An intelligent person reads autobiography for two things: for the facts and for the lies, knowing that the lies are often more interesting than the facts. From the other side, that of the writer, if you make yourself look good in your autobiography, you seem a hypocrite; own up to being a swine, you will have no difficulty finding people who will readily enough believe you. Not a game at which it is easy to win, autobiography.
This is not to say that the appetite for reading autobiography isn't very strong. Certainly it is with me, so much so that autobiography is the only kind of book I should rather read than write. (I have myself long ago decided never to write an autobiography, preferring to spend my own autobiography, in nickels and dimes, in essays, memoirs, and anecdotes.) The appetite for autobiography reaches quite across the brows, from high to appallingly low. Hence the vast sums laid out by publishers for the life stories - "self-biographies," Isaac D'Israeli called them - of such men and women far on the other side of the literary divide as Norman Schwartzkopf and Magic Johnson, Katharine Hepburn and the Mayflower Madame. Which reminds me that a friend of mine, who works on celebrity autobiographies, was simultaneously writing the autobiographies of Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House, and the Mayflower Madame, speaker of a house of another kind. I worried for him throughout these projects, fearful that he might mix up his galleys.
I have just read six autobiographies - one of these of two volumes, together running to more than 850 pages. Three of these are by Englishmen, three by very different sorts of Americans. One of the latter is a woman and two among them are Southerners and set in the South, which, one sometimes feels, is another country unto itself. I have the feeling that none of my six autobiographers would at all wish to spend much time in the company of any of the others. As a reader, I can say that all have stepped into my little confessional, and, having now heard them out, I don't know what penance ought to be assigned to them. A wise guy might say that it was I who served the penance, having to read all these pages filled with disdain, chagrin, outrage, and petty vengeance. Still, reading autobiography, while it does not increase one's hope for the race, does lend vast amusement in watching it all pass in review from the rail.
What also emerges - though perhaps my selection of autobiographies has an oddly skewed bias in this direction - is that one is never too old to express resentment against one's parents. Not many kind words for parents here; very few parents in these books come off at all handsomely; grandparents, too, take a few good shots. It's almost as if their authors all subscribed to Philip Larkin's view in 'This Be The Verse,' a version of which perrhaps needs to be rewritten for parents:
You tick them off, your son and daughter.
You may not mean to, but you do.
In old age and even death, except from them no quarter,
Nothing but resentment, and all aimed just at you.
National differences might be the best place to begin. Auberon Waugh offers an interesting throw-away sentence in his autobiography, Will This Do?, which seems to me nicely to distinguish the differences between English and American autobiography in our day.
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Michael Mandelbaum
COUP DE GRACE:
THE END OF THE SOVIET UNION
On August 24, 1991, three days after the collapse of an attempted coup by a group of high Soviet officials in Moscow, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev killed himself in his Kremlin office. Mikhail Gorbachev's special adviser on military affairs left a suicide note: "Everything I have worked for is being destroyed."
Akhromeyev had devoted his life to three institutions: the Soviet army, in whose service he had been wounded at Leningrad in 1941 and through whose ranks he had risen to the position of chief of the General Staff (1984-88); the Communist Party, which he had joined at 20 and on whose Central Committee he had served since 1983; and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself, officially founded a year before his birth in 1923. In the wake of the failed coup all three were disintegrating.
The armed forces were divided and disgraced. Entire units had refused to take part in the coup. A number of the troops sent to besiege the Russian parliament building - where a crowd that ultimately numbered 100,000 had gathered to defend the Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and his government - defected to Yeltsin's side. After the coup had failed Defense Minister Dimitri Yazov and his deputy, Valentin Varennikov, were arrested. Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the newly appointed minister, announced that 80 percent of the army's officers would be replaced because they were politically suspect.
The Communist Party was shattered. As jubilant crowds cheered, statues of communist heroes were pulled down all over Moscow. Gorbachev, shortly after his return from his ordeal in the Crimea, resigned as leader of the party, dissolved the Central Committee, ordered an end to party activity in the military, the security apparatus and the government, and told local party organizations that they would have to fend for themselves.
The union of 15 republics was itself dissolving. In Moscow people began to wave the blue, white and red flag of prerevolutionary Russia. The republics scrambled to declare their independence, the Ukrainian parliament voting for full independence by 321 to 1. For 75 years the vast stretch of Eurasia that was the Soviet Union had been tightly, often brutally controlled from Moscow, which had come to be known as "the center."The president of Armenia, Levon Ter-Petrossian, declared that "the center has committed suicide."
II
The coup might have been expected to succeed. The ranks of the eight-man junta that on August 19 announced it was assuming power, proclaiming a state of emergency, banning demonstrations, closing newspapers and outlawing political parties, included the leaders of the most powerful institutions of the Soviet Union: the government, the security apparatus and the military-industrial complex. Yet they failed completely. Two minor episodes during the three dramatic days of August 19-21 exemplify the reasons for their failure.
On August 20 Yelsin dispatched his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, to Paris to prepare a government-in-exile should that become necessary. The junta learned of the trip and sent word to Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport to detain Kozyrev. He succeeded in leaving, however, because the order to stop him went to the airport's VIP lounge while Kozyrev simply stood in the departure lines with ordinary passengers. It apparently did not occur to the plotters that a high official would fail to take advantage to the privileges available to him.
In short, the men who launched the coup were incompetent. They did not send troops and tanks in to the streets of Moscow until a full six hours after declaring the state of emergency. They neglected to seize Yeltsin immediately, thus making it possible for him to become the focal point of resistance. They failed to cut the Russian parliament's communications with the rest of the world.
It was, to use a phrase familiar under the old regime, "no accident" that the coup-plotters bungled so badly. The people at the top of the communist system were not the best and the brightest of the society they governed. That system did not encourage or reward initiative, imagination or decisiveness. It valued, instead, dull conformity and slavish obedience to authority. Several members of the junta were later reported to have spent most of the 72 hours of the coup drunk.
The other exemplary episode took place on Monday afternoon, August 19, the first day of the coup. The junta called a press conference. Gennadi Yanaev, the vice president who had assumed Gorbachev's duties because, he said, the president was "ill," made a statement and fielded questions. One journalist asked whether he had sought "any suggestion or any advice through General Pinochet." The question evoked laughter. It was meant to be sarcastic and belittling by associating the coup-plotters with the conservative Chilean dictator who had overthrown Marxist President Salvador Allende in 1974 and had thus been routinely reviled by Soviet propaganda.
The event, the question and the response were all telling. When Lenin seized power in Petrograd in November 1917 he did not feel it necessary to call a press conference to explain and justify what he had done. Nor were his successors in the habit of entertaining questions from the press. And when they did offer their thoughts in public, no one had ever dared to mock them. In Stalin's day failing to applaud the leader vigorously enough was cause for being sent to prison - or worse.
Since Stalin's day, however, things had changed. The Soviet Union in which Yanaev was attempting to seize power was a very different country from the one that Lenin and Stalin, indeed that Khrushchev and even Brezhnev had ruled. So different was it, in fact, that each of the three great institutions to which Marshal Akhromeyev had devoted his life was already in an advanced state of decay by August 19.
Well before it balked at the junta's orders the army had been severely battered. In 1988 it had withdrawn from Afghanistan after nine years and 15,000 deaths without having pacified the country. The next year the revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia ended the Cold War, depriving the Soviet armed forces of what had been, for four decades, their central mission. Troops stationed in those countries had to leave; many had no homes to which to return.
Draft evasion became rampant, especially outside Russia. The army was divided politically by rank, age, region, and ethnic group. Junior officers began criticizing their superiors; several were elected to all-union and republican parliaments, where they expressed dissenting views on military questions. The political leadership committed itself to substantial reductions in military spending, and proposals were floated to abolish conscription and rely instead on volunteers to fill the army's ranks.
In all, the military suffered from a severe loss of status. In the Brezhnev era, in particular, official propaganda had glorified the mighty Soviet army as the stalwart defender of socialism. By 1991 it was despised outside Russia as an agent of imperial oppression and had come to be seen in the Russian heartland as a self-serving bureaucracy whose endless appetite for resources was bankrupting the country.
The Communist Party was similarly reeling from blows to its privileged standing before Gorbachev effectively closed it down. It was subject for the first time in six decades to open criticism, which turned into an avalanche of denunciation. Far from being the champion of the toiling masses and the vanguard of the just society, as it had always portrayed itself, the party came to be seen as a criminal conspiracy dedicated to preserving its own position. The elections of 1989 and 1990 to the national and republican supreme soviets humiliated the party, as people voted in droves against communist officeholders even when there was no opposing candidate.
Members deserted the party in enormous numbers. By one estimate four million people, fully 20 percent of the membership, had quit the party in the year immediately preceding the coup. In some places the local party apparatus simply disintegrated. Gorbachev renounced the long-standing and fundamental communist claim to a monopoly of power, and the month before the coup he pushed through a party charter that virtually abandoned the formerly sacred precepts of Marxism-Leninism. After his election as Russian president, Yeltsin ordered party cells in workplaces throughout Russia dissolved, challenging the basis of the communist grip on the everyday lives of the people of the Soviet Union.
As for the union itself, it was well on the way to becoming a hollow shell even before the republics began to declare independence in the coup's wake. The republican elections had brought to power governments determined not simply to take orders from Moscow, as had been the rule in Soviet politics for decades. Each of the 15 republics had proclaimed itself "sovereign," meaning that its own laws took precedence over those of the center. Ukraine, the second most important of them after Russia, was moving to recruit its own armed forces and issue its own currency.
On the eve of the coup nine republics were preparing to sign a new union treaty, which would have deprived Moscow of virtually all economic power and left the republics with the right both to challenge any powers the center retained and to secede if they were dissatisfied with the new arrangements. The prospect of this new union treaty probably triggered the coup attempt, for it would have eliminated most of the functions of precisely those organizations that the plotters headed. The coup was a last-ditch attempt to preserve their own power. But that power had already been severely eroded. As the political scientist William Taubman put it at the time: "The coup occurred because of all the changes that have taken place, and it failed because of all the changes that have taken place." The coup-plotters struck to restore the old order; the result of their failure was to put it out of its misery. What began as a coup d'état to preserve it turned out to be the coup de grace for the Soviet Union.
III
How did all this come about? How did it happen that a mighty imperial state, troubled but stable only a few years before, had come to the brink of collapse in 1991? Who and what were responsible?
The chief architect of the Soviet collapse was Mikhail Gorbachev himself. During the coup, as a prisoner of the junta in his Crimean villa, he was the object of a struggle between the partisans of the old order and the champions of liberal values. But it was Gorbachev who had, in the period between his coming to power in 1985 and the fateful days of August 1991, created the conditions that had touched off this struggle.
The Soviet leader had created them unintentionally. His aim had been to strengthen the political and economic systems that he inherited, to strip away their Stalinist accretions and make the Soviet Union a modern dynamic state. Instead he had fatally weakened it. Intending to reform Soviet communism he had, rather, destroyed it. The three major policies that he had launched to fashion a more efficient and humane form of socialism - glasnost, democratization and perestroika - had in the end subverted, discredited and all but done away with the network of political and economic institutions that his Communist Party had constructed in Russia and surrounding countries since 1917.
The policy of glasnost relaxed bureaucratic controls on information, broadened the parameters of permitted discussion and thereby enabled the people of the Soviet Union to say more, hear more and learn more about their past and present. Gorbachev's purpose had been to enlist the intelligentsia in his campaign to revitalize the country and to generate popular pressure on the party apparatus, which had resisted the changes he was trying to make. He plainly wanted to encourage criticism of his predecessor, Leonid Brezhnev, and to resume the campaign against Stalin that Khrushchev had launched but that Brezhnev had ended.
Glasnost, however, did not stop there. The sainted Lenin, and even Gorbachev himself, came in for critical attention. Gorbachev wanted to foster a reassessment of some selected features of Soviet life.
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Schlegel's sense of the poetic voice or presence of the poet, as that which "hover[s] at midpoint between" the portrayer and the portrayed, positions this voice on a vertical axis, running down between poet and poem, both between these two terms, and also hovering above them; between and above. For Olson, however, between the 'I' of the phrase, 'I have this sense,' and the 'I' who is one with his 'skin,' there is not, or for him ought not be, any difference: there is only a singular, compact identity. If there is transcendence for Olson, it would not be a mere disembodied voice hovering above and/or between bodies, as for Schlegel, but the entire embodied individual, hovering in space. Such a theme, as R.W.B. Lewis shows in The American Adam, is hardly foreign to American writers.
Olson's line is of course susceptible to a reading in which the voice of the poet hovers just at that midpoint between the 'I' (the portrayer) and the 'I am one/ with my skin' (the portrayed). That midpoint, not above or below, but somehow right between, is a non-transcendent place. This reading would put the poetic voice in the place of that difference which ought to make no difference, that space which is not supposed to be a space, and must be denied as a significant space if identity is to be achieved. Olson might endorse a transcendent voice which presides from above as it yokes the portrayer and portrayed together, but he would no doubt resist the notion of a voice 'between,' for it would threaten to undo the identity which that same voice nonetheless seems to desire.
Olson is one of the great readers of Melville. He seems to have had an uncanny relation with the author: at times, in reading Call Me Ishmael, one is not sure whose voice is being heard. Olson's sense of being at one with his skin has many echoes in Melville's works, which begins to complicate the very self-identity being asserted. The Melville who wrote of self-identity in terms of being at one with one's skin was a young Melville; not the Melville who wrote Pierre, or anything after. Even before Pierre, when Melville was writing his fifth novel, White-Jacket (1849-50), the possibility of being at one with one's skin was being both posed and explicitly put into question. The narrator-protagonist of this novel is named White Jacket because of a white jacket he so continuously wore that it seemed to become his second skin. Towards the end of the novel he finally divests himself of this jacket, saying I "ripped my jacket straight up and down [with a knife], as if I were ripping open myself. With a violent struggle I then burst out of it, and was free" (404).
White Jacket does not, however, liberate himself from a mere jacket, for a strong analogy holds between clothing and language as exterior forms of material signifiers. Melville apparently had not read Carlyle's Sartor Resartus when he wrote White-Jacket, but he didn't need to have read it; the analogy Carlyle suggested between language and clothing, in his philosophy of clothes, had currency then as now (see Barthes's The Fashion System). Melville clearly thought of language by drawing on an analogy between language and clothing. In White-Jacket, such an analogy is quite explicitly thematized. How, then, are we to read that moment when White Jacket strips himself of his white jacket? Does he strip himself from language itself, or does he remove a level of false signifiers which then allows the true signifier, the true voice, now unencumbered by a material signifier, to be revealed?
On the one hand, Melville had, as did his age, a na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve sense of the relation he felt ought to exist between language and being. He believed and desired that language ought, somehow, to be co-extensive with self. As Emerson said, expression or language is the other half of man, and the link between those halves is unproblematic. Those links became problematic for Melville, however, and the strategies he developed to deal with the problems arising from this na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve sense of language are themselves far from na<*_>i-umlaut<*/>ve. To examine Melville's sense of the identity which he felt ought to have held between language and self is to examine Melville's struggle with his flesh - his materiality - and his desire to be at one with, identical to, his skin.
I
Some nine years after Melville's death, Peter Toft, an otherwise little-known American artist, published an account of his friendship with Melville which developed during the author's later years. Of particular interest is what Toft tells us of Melville's attitude towards his writings, an attitude no doubt determined by Toft's apparently insistent questioning. Toft writes that Melville "seemed to hold his work in small esteem, and discouraged my attempts to discuss them. 'You know,' he would say, 'more about them than I do. I have forgotten them.' He would give me no information about the old whaling tradition of the fiendish White-Whale ('Moby Dick') ... and [he] was almost offended when I inquired so curiously about his falling from the maintopgallant yard of the frigate - ('White Jacket') ... " (Leyda 799).
For Toft, the value of literature lay in its relation to truth. He doesn't hesitate to identify the 'true' identity of a character like White Jacket: he was obviously Melville himself. If one assumes that Melville's struggle with language turned precisely on questions of and the desire for identity, then Melville's irritation with Toft's questions becomes understandable. If Melville defers, perhaps ironically, perhaps bitterly, to such a reader, suggesting that that reader must always already know more than the author, it is because the problem of the very possibility of knowing remained for Melville a complex issue.
Toft's explanation of why Melville was "almost offended" when he "so curiously" asked him about his fall from the yardarm, as told in White-Jacket, was that Melville "was abnormal, as most geniuses are, and had to be handled with care" (Leyda 799). That answer is hardly satisfactory, as Howard Vincent shows in his book, The Tailoring of Melville's 'White-Jacket.' According to Vincent, who retells Toft's story, Melville's irritation in this instance was due to the fact that Melville had lied, and Toft's inquiries had touched precisely upon those lies he had told. Not only had Melville not fallen from any maintopgallant mast, but he had not even made it up; rather, he had stolen the entire episode of the fall from someone else's text, that of the sailor Nathaniel Ames, as given in his personal narrative entitled A Mariner's Sketches (1831) (Vincent 202). An apparently shocked Vincent writes:
So open, so barefaced is the character of Melville's theft that one must wonder whether he did not feel a twinge of guilt. Perhaps he did, but it can be argued that he erased that guilt by strategic placement of his borrowed passages, so giving each a new and different significance. (Vincent 219)
One wonders whether Vincent himself felt a "twinge of guilt" about his delight in having discovered the father naked, although he mainly succeeds in exposing himself. It is not surprising that Vincent's attempt to cover for the Melville whom he exposed does little credit to Melville's abilities as a writer: "[Melville] erased that guilt by the strategic placement of his borrowed passages" (219). Moreover, Vincent's efforts to salvage Melville from his devious theft are misplaced. According to the passage above, Melville redeems his literary theft through a "strategic placement of ... [the] borrowed passages" from Ames's text, which gives "each a new and different significance." Yet Vincent's own painstaking labor - setting side by side passages from Ames's text and Melville's - shows Melville's relation to Ames's text never was one of "strategic placement of ... borrowed passages," to give "each" borrowed passage, each stolen piece, a new significance. Vincent implies that Melville lifted intact entire pieces, chunks, or chains of signifiers from Ames's text, placed them in his own, and simply arranged their order. This is not the case. One cannot find any evidence of what we could call plagiarism. At the level of the signifier, there is no immediate similarity between Melville's text and that of Ames. Without a repetition at the level of the signifier, one can no longer talk in any strict sense of borrowing, nor of Melville's mode of writing as "strategic placement" of "borrowed" passages.
If we assume for the moment that there was a case of literary theft, even if not word-for-word, and if we likewise assume that the theft was as obvious, open, and barefaced as Vincent claims, the question that forces itself upon us is that if the theft is so apparent and so easy to trace, in what sense was it really a theft? Vincent doesn't refer to Benito Cereno which repeats, almost entirely, the text of another author, Amasa Delano, who is never explicitly acknowledged as author, yet whose name, along with others from the original text, Melville retains in his text. Much rides on this 'almost.' What becomes significant in such a case are the differences that are introduced in the near-repetition - differences which, because they are and can be marked as different only on the surface, as signifiers, come to be ignored in the haste to identify an essence, beyond the mere surface. Vincent reads at the level of content, finding the only slightly differing surface signifiers of each text. This mode of reading finally rewrites that surface level, for mere surface differences of the signifier are differences which make no difference. A difference remains, however, which can potentially disturb not only the notion of theft, but likewise the ideas that make the claim of theft possible: the belief in and protection of private property. The proper, truth as interior essence, 'original' artistic creation - these beliefs stand behind and make possible Toft's curious questions and Vincent's exposures, both of which depend on the structure of and desire for identity. Ultimately the question of a theft from Ames's work is itself irrelevant, while the questions inadvertently raised by the accusation - those of repetition, the problem of ownership given repetition, or the very possibility of identity - remain at the heart of the matter.
2
Critics generally agree that the description of the fall of the sailor White Jacket from the topmost spar of the mast is, as Alfred Kazin writes "the most famous single scene" in the book (ix). Its fame has persisted in spite of the claims that the scene was lifted. This single scene, however, is divided into two moments: a kind of prelude which describes the complications which lead up to and set the scene for - but do not cause White Jacket's fall, and then a description of White Jacket's plummet into the ocean and his subsequent rise to the surface. Kazin, Vincent, and other critics make no explicit reference to this first moment, which I have called the prelude; they focus exclusively on the second moment, that of the actual fall, when they refer to this scene. As a result, this prelude seems to have a curious history of going unread. This passage goes as follows:
Having reeved the line through all the inferior blocks, I went out with it to the end of weather-top-gallant-yard-arm, and was in the act of leaning over and passing it through the suspended jewel-block there, when the ship gave a plunge in the sudden swells of the calm sea, and pitching me still further over the yard, threw the heavy skirts of my jacket right over my head, completely muffling me. Somehow I thought it was the sail that had flapped, and, under that impression, threw up my hands to drag it from my head, relying upon the sail itself to support me meanwhile. Just then the ship gave another sudden jerk, and, head foremost, I pitched from the yard. (402)
Vincent's claim of plagiarism is irrelevant to this passage since Ames's text contains nothing resembling this description of what makes the fall possible, either at the level of the signified or signifier.
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MALCOLM LITTLE UNDERSTOOD hunger. In many ways it defined his childhood. Certainly it taught him lessons he would never forget, and years later Malcolm X would be lecturing his assistant minister Benjamin Karim on hunger as the most basic of human drives.
Not only did Malcolm in his boyhood suffer the pangs of physical hunger for want of food; he also sharply experienced hunger for affection, acceptance, guidance, encouragement. The Littles lived meagerly, and more and more the economic hardships of the Depression drained Louise Little's emotional and spiritual reserves. She became despondent, withdrew from harsh realities. By 1937 the Little family was rapidly deteriorating. Malcolm had begun stealing. He was twelve when he found himself in the first of what would be numerous foster homes. In January 1939, following a severe nervous breakdown, Malcolm's mother was declared legally insane and committed to the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo. Still, Malcolm himself clung to his diminished pride and his ambitions, continually battered though they were. As he relates in the Autobiography, one day he confided to his favorite eighth grade teacher that he wanted to be a lawyer, only to be told that "that's no realistic goal for a nigger" - even though Malcolm at the time was ranked near the top of his otherwise white class. That day marked a turning point for Malcolm, then thirteen. Within months he would be exploring the street life of Boston.
More than miles separated the childhood experience of Malcolm Little in the bleak northern suburbs of Lansing from that of Benjamin Karim in rural Suffolk, Virginia. Suffolk lies about eighty miles south of Richmond, and when Benjamin Karim was growing up in the 1930s, it was that small you could see from one end of the town to the other in an easy glance. By then Suffolk was feeling the economic pinch of the Great Depression, but still trade continued at the general store where townswomen bartered fresh eggs or homegrown poultry for provisions. In the barbershop men gathered for easy gossip or talked idly of the weather, crops, hard times. Kids kicked up the dust in quiet streets or played in the shade of fruit-bearing trees, or they helped to weed the vegetable patches planted in the backyards of small clapboard houses.
In one of those houses, on July 14, 1932, a midwife delivered the first, and only, child of young Mary Goodman in her mother Sarah's bed. The child was baptized Benjamin and given his mother's family name. (Not until 1978 did he take the Muslim name Karim.) In private Mary called him Dickie-boy, a term of affection that would survive nearly twenty years, as would the inviolable bond forged by Mary with her son in his early childhood. It was a "good childhood," as Benjamin Karim remembers it, and he describes the small-town boy who grew up in the meager thirties as being "absolutely content." He recalls the simplicity of daily life then, and the sense of community that prompted people to help their neighbors and enabled them to rely on friends. And no matter how much his family may have wanted for material goods or a dollar's pleasures, they never wanted for food.
Everybody had gardens, Benjamin Karim remembers. We would grow corn and beans and onions and radishes, whatever, and in the summer the fruit trees would bury us in pears and apples. We'd pick wild berries, too. Then the women would put the fruit up in jars. They'd have big pots bubbling on the stove, all the fruit smelling as sweet as the season, and while they were cooking, we boys would be out back chopping wood to feed the stove. For days we'd keep the fire going, until we'd have hundreds of jars of fruit preserves and other home-canned goods - vegetables and sauces and relishes - stored out in the pantry. So in the wintertime nobody would have to worry about going hungry. We also had pigs, three of four of them, and we raised chickens, so we always had fresh eggs.
We didn't really need a lot of money. If we ran out of flour or sugar, say, we would gather up a few eggs and take them to Mr. Nichols's general store. Two or three eggs might bring us enough pennies to buy a pound of flour or as much of sugar, and that's a nice taste of sugar. One of our chickens, dressed, would get us both the flour and the sugar and maybe some rice or potatoes as well as a nickel soda for me. We bartered like that quite a bit. Or we borrowed. Neighbors helped each other out with a scoop of flour or cup of milk; what we had we shared. We've lost communal values like that, like we've lost our fruit trees and farming land to real-estate developers. You'd have to search hard to find the Suffolk I knew as a child.
Suffolk was divided by railroad tracks. White people lived on one side of the tracks and on the other lived the blacks. For a time we lived right by the railroad tracks. Day and night the trains would be running past my grandmother's house, where we lived, but they really didn't bother us; they just told us what time it was. On either side of the railroad tracks lay a drainage ditch, and sometimes some of us black kids would cross the near ditch and the railroad tracks and then the ditch opposite, or else the white kids would cross from their side - they'd be the poor white kids, the ones who lived near the tracks - and we'd play together. We'd play childhood street games or run wild in the woods. We had fun, and I don't remember a single fight ever between us, not when we were little kids.
My grandmother worked for a family in the poor white neighborhood. In fact she ran their house. She told everybody what to do and what not to, including the man of the house - he owned a service station that was losing more money than it was making - and everybody in that household listened. She commanded a ton of respect, so much so that when she died in 1952, not a member of that family missed the funeral. Often I would visit the house with my grandmother. The service station owner had a son about my age and sometimes we would play together the whole day. If we'd get ourselves into any sort of trouble, my grandmother would give both of us alike her what-for. Also, if she'd give the two of us some chore, like it or not, he'd do it, although he might first look to his father for some signal that he could disobey - same way that I would do to mine - but his father would just look away. I enjoyed those days we spent together in his house. Then we reached the age when black kids and white kids no longer associated with each other. Society, it seemed, forbade it; it was something that happened before you actually realized it, something you felt. Only when you got older did you know why.
Of course, once we started school we never saw white kids day to day. That our schools were segregated never entered our minds. Nor did it bother us. It seemed natural, normal; the white kids went to their school and we went to ours. They were corn and we were rutabagas. I first went to school at Easter Graded in the black community of Saratoga. The large, white frame building housed four classrooms, two on either side of the principal's office, and it was heated by a big potbelly stove. When the weather turned cold, each morning two or three of the older kids - the school went up to the fifth grade - would get up early and trudge off to Easter Graded to build a fire in that big potbelly stove; it was their chore. To have the heat jumping in that big iron belly by nine, you'd have to get up as early as five o'clock in the cold and dark, but you took your turn, you shared the chore. Lessons like that never caused me any harm.
When the school term ended, I would sometimes spend the whole summer, often into harvest time, out in Windsor, Virginia, with my Aunt Martha and her sixteen children. They worked as sharecroppers on a white man's farm. Like many freed plantation slaves before them, they had no choice but to hire themselves out as tenant farmers to white landowners in order to survive after the federal government reneged on its promise to provide each black family with forty acres and a mule. For what did the freed blacks know but working the land? For their white masters they had seeded the earth and tended the crops and harvested the peanuts, tobacco, and corn, the indigo, hemp, alfalfa, and cotton. So sharecropping had become the norm in the South. When I was seven, though, I wasn't so much seeing injustices as I was enjoying the company of my cousins. We had our fun, of course, but I liked working with them, too, out in the open fields under a summer's sky. I especially remember the sky. In rural Virginia in the thirties and forties the only light we had at night came from the moon and the stars and out on the farm the night sky seemed to lie so close to the earth that I'd think you could just reach right up and with your fingers rake the firmament.
In town I lived with my mother and grandmother. My father lived just down the street. Although he and my mother deeply respected each other always, they never actually married, as my mother felt he was too old for her. He was maybe twenty-six when I was born; my mother was sixteen. All her life she lived with my grandmother, Sarah, except for one year, when I was eight or nine, that she spent in New York. She stayed with a cousin there - in the early forties, the war years, it seemed that everybody down in Suffolk had a cousin or some relative in New York - but after one year she came back. She had worked in a factory packing gefilte fish. Cooped up for long hours in a stifling gefilte fish factory where the workers were not even allowed to speak to one another, my mother, a young woman with a free spirit from a small southern town of friendly, outgoing people who'd think nothing of hollering their greetings from one side of the street to the other, found the conditions unbearable. One thing she said I'll never forget. She was talking to my grandmother, and she told her that for so long as she lived she would never ever again work for a white man.
And she never again did. My mother was strong; she inspired me. She went to Apex Beauty School to learn how to treat and style black woman's hair. She bought chemistry books, which she studied diligently, and she began making her own hair creams and beauty aids. I used to watch her at her work in the kitchen with oils and powders and scents and gelatin. I'd watch her as she'd combine her mysterious ingredients, worry them, and it seemed to me magic the way they would begin to congeal, become viscous and then thick, like Vaseline. Her beauty treatments made her famous among black women in the county. Even today you could go to the south of Virginia and ask any of the older women there about Mary Goodman, and they would tell you that woman could do some hair.
Like my mother, I, too, went to New York for a year. In 1947. I was fourteen then, and I had started feeling that I'd outgrown Suffolk. Night and day I dreamed of living in New York with my uncle.
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ALICIA OSTRIKER
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
And they said one to another, Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now therefore, and let us slay him, and cast him into some pit, and we will say, Some evil beast has devoured him; and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Genesis 37.19-20
All dreams are dependent on the interpretation given to them.
Midrash Rabbah
Take me, take me, I am coming down to you. Yes, all our arms are outstretched, we almost have you, just a little farther. Come on, our brother. A trail of bubbles above me, I pull myself hand over hand - weeds thicker than a father's arms, rooted somewhere in the invisible silted floor, offer themselves swaying. I gather strength and kick straight downward. Am I there yet. Are you enclosing me. Yes, it is so enjoyable here, heated, bowel-like, golden, shimmering, green.
When you arrive and join us we will begin our journey, we are all going to be rich, we are only waiting for you.
Our first fathers are alive in dream-time. There they are naked. There they are, naked. We can almost touch them. We ourselves can feel our identity with their bodies, which are their real selves. They are most fundamentally biological beings, family men, those who produce the next generation, the next link. They bless, but they have to beget before they can bless: their paternity is their deepest existence.
God creates. The patriarchs beget. (Although Toledot, begetting, in Genesis 4.2, obliquely almost suggests that God generates the cosmos through a sexual act.)
We can feel this. We remember their movements and gestures, their journeyings, the fine comedy of their family relations, living each other's lives, dying each other's deaths, as performances we ourselves have performed. Almost no separation yet. I practically was or am all these men and women, who are or were me. The presence of El Shaddai, the Breasted One, the Mountain, brings them forward, makes them large, making the borders between them, and between them and me, traversible, and preventing the intellectual distinction between life/dream, or myth/reality, or here/there, or conscious/subconscious, or yes/no from crystallizing. They fill up all the space, like the large, eyes-breathing classical drawings of Picasso.
Among the dream patriarchs nothing is yet repressed, everything is deep yet transparent, like a sea in motion, its tides and currents, and the way it rises up against the cliffs at its shoreline, reaches over boulders, rushes into caves, embraces the rock's least indentations. These patriarchs in their rising-up are always already falling and yet heaving forward again. Theirs are the ceaseless human rhythms, which we recognize as such only when we have already lost them.
With Joseph and his brothers, reality has imperceptibly changed. Without a break in the narrative, something has been broken. The sign of this is the "coat of many colors" to which a mysteriously romantic quality is attached. Why has this "coat of many colors" reiterated itself through a thousand puzzle interpretations yet remained a puzzle, like a bright square of embroidery appearing at a congress of international bankers? It is the dream-garment, materializing in consciousness at the very moment when 'reality' and 'dream' part company. Like all such signs it faces two ways. A sign of loss - parallel to the garments God makes for Adam and Eve, or the covering with which his two cautious sons cover the drunken Noah, or the hairy glove Jacob wears to defraud his father - yet at the same time a sign of love and a sign of luxury, "so light and delicate," say the rabbis, "it could be crushed and concealed in the closed palm of one hand." Rich colors for a spoiled son, his father's favorite.
We are approaching civilization as we know it. That is to say, recognizable family life as we know it. Joseph is the penultimate son born to a formerly barren wife in the book of Genesis. God has removed (asuf) my reproach, says beautiful Rachel, and may God add (yosef) another son to me. Joseph is the darling, a pretty boy, "fair of form and fair to look at." Those same words having been used to describe Rachel. Joseph is Rachel, somehow, his father's pet: the rabbis say he painted his eyes and walked with mincing step. Showing off the coat of many colors which old Jacob made him. Twirling, hugging himself. A young Hebrew Narcissus. No wonder his brothers hate him. No wonder they catch him in the field, strip him of his little coat and throw him into the pit, and sell him into Egypt, and rip the coat and dip it in goat's blood: exhibit A to show the father - do you recognize this coat, Dad? A torn veil, a bloody show, a lost innocence.
Joseph dreams - what? Ten sheaves will bow down to one sheaf. The sun and moon and eleven stars also bow to him. He runs to tell the brothers; no wonder they want to get rid of him, the intolerable brat, the A student - nobody has a problem interpreting dreams like this. Later when Potiphar's wife tries to seduce him he is the exemplary servant of his master, purer than the pure, so that she is enraged and rips his garment off. Claims he tried to rape her, that familiar tale of the insulted woman who fails to understand the purity of the pretty young man. Another veil gone, another false deflowering.
Now Joseph the tease goes to prison. But he comes out again. Potiphar likes him and puts him in charge, the jailor likes him and puts him in charge. Pretty young man makes good, pleases the bosses, gets the job, God makes his hand prosper in all things and he is also unfailingly respectful to his superiors .... No doubt with all sincerity, unlike the tale of the rabbi who insisted on saying the Sabbath prayer for the ruler with great ardor, explaining that one should always wish long life to the czar, since the next one was sure to be worse ...
Finally Pharaoh likes him very well and puts him in charge of the kingdom.
So the outsider/insider Joseph becomes Prime Minister, and not for the last time. He obtains this position of power and influence despite his background, and over the protests of certain well-placed gentlemen who argue that if you let one of them in you'll be drowned in a sea of them before you turn around. An accurate assessment, as it eventuates; but the truth is that Joseph has efficiency and integrity in his favor. Nobody catches him with his hand in the till. Moreover, consider his impressive capacity for assimilation: he has excellent manners, dresses well if a bit austerely, marries his old employer's daughter (Potiphar's daughter! so much for Potiphar's wife, that old she-bear). You would never take him for one of ... well, you know what I'm talking about ... if it were not for the slight accent, which many of the ladies in any case consider superlatively charming. Above all is his brilliance in an area people really care about. Dreams. What does my dream mean? What does my life mean? What will happen next? Oh, you'll be promoted. Oh, you'll be hanged. Oh, your kingdom will have seven fat years followed by seven years of famine so it would be a good idea for you to put someone competent in charge of the granaries. Who do you suppose that should be. No, don't thank me, thank the Holy One who lets me know these things, explains Joseph modestly.
Finally the day arrives for which we have all been waiting. Joseph's brothers come down to Egypt during the famine. They are here to buy grain. Everyone at home is on the verge of starvation. The officials send them with all the other petitioners to make their request of the Prime Minister, sitting in all his magisterial robes. Do they recognize this Prime Minister? No. Does he recognize them? What do you think. Does he tease them? What do you think. Torment them? What do you think. Heap grain on them, feast them, refuse to take their money, accuse them of theft, refuse to release them unless they bring their youngest brother Benjamin to court - while the old father at home laments that if he loses Benjamin, Rachel's only other son, it will bring down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave - and when Joseph sees the boy Benjamin does he hide himself in an antechamber to weep? What do you think. In the end he reveals himself, and joyously restores the family unity. And morally as well as materially generous? The brothers are feeling guilty, and understandably anxious about Joseph's possible future behavior. So Joseph reassures them: you thought you were doing me harm, but you see it was all God's plan. By this time the family is greatly expanded, so full of begats that "all the souls that came out of the loins of Jacob were seventy souls," not to mention wives and servants, all of whom will now live happily ever after.
I have a family, you have a family. Some of our brothers are princes, some not so princely. And the children? They're well, they're in good health, they graduated college already, they're getting married? To have children is a blessing, sometimes not such a blessing. Vey iz mir, God willing, we should all be so lucky as Jacob, such a good son he had, such a smart boychik.
Nonetheless the coat of many colors materializes at the moment of loss. A symbol of something else. A symbol of symbolism. The material object evoking the maternal subject: matter for pride and arrogance on the part of the innocent showoff child, matter for the mutter on the part of his jealous brothers, patchwork of Israel's sensuous love for Rachel-Joseph, fabric for another kind of story, a new velvet moment.
Good-bye, good-bye to the family; when one adaptable brother can leave the backwoods - but we do not know they are the backwoods until he leaves, we thought 'home' was the world - for the big city, where he will become rich and powerful. Where his family will become his pathetic dependents and he their magnanimous protector. Does the mysterious bond of the family fail? No, but we see now that it might fail, it is susceptible to failure, the advent of the individual such as Joseph destroys the powerful biological balance of the mythic family. In the successions of brothers, Cain and Abel are bonded forever, Abraham and Lot are balanced, Isaac and Ishmael are balanced, Jacob and Esau are balanced - although one in each pair is the chosen link in God's chain, the brothers remain inhabitants of a shared world. But in the generation of Joseph and his brothers the filial bond becomes a matter of human choice. The brothers choose to reject it. Joseph chooses to restore it.
(Please feel free to use my limousine, boys. I'll send my tailor over in the morning. Charge it on my card. Listen, here's the key to the liquor cabinet. Just don't worry about a thing - you'll be looked after, your children also. What can be more precious to a man than his family. He unbends, he chokes back the tears, he embraces them. At the moment of intimacy he weeps unreservedly.)
The biological family belongs to dream-time and myth-space. The brothers, acting on personal resentment, break the magic circle. Joseph is ejected out of dream-time into the practical world of a complex society. A class structure. A wealthy household, keeping the books and overseeing the estate, sexual novelty surrounding him (which he rejects, but it must be educational), jail, the pharaonic court, political maneuvering, imperial economic policy. Clean as a whistle, pure as a lily, smelling like a desert rose, Joseph rises like a cork - from foreign slave to headman in three easy lessons. Nothing succeeds like success. But the secret of his success is that Joseph brings with him a piece of dream-time.
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<doc register="miscellaneous" n="01">Some reporters had difficulty distinguishing in their records between parts that should have been included in 'road vehicles and parts' or 'other transport equipment' and parts that should have been included in other categories. BEA reviewed reports with large trade values and, after discussions with reporters, revised those with incorrect reporting. However, reports with low values were not reviewed, and in some cases, reporters may have erroneously included both types of parts in 'road vehicles and parts' or 'other transport equipment.' Thus, these two categories may be overstated, and other categories, particularly machinery, may be understated.
Total U.S. trade associated with U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates consists of (1) trade between U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates, (2) trade between other U.S. persons and foreign affiliates, and (3) trade between U.S. parents and unaffiliated foreigners. Data on trade between U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates were collected on the BE-10A and BE-10B(LF) and (SF) forms; on the BE-10A form, total trade of a given U.S. parent with all of its foreign affiliates combined was reported, while on the BE-10B(LF) and (SF) forms, trade of the U.S. parent with only the individual foreign affiliate covered by that form was reported. In principle, the sum of a U.S. parent's trade with each of its individual foreign affiliates, as reported on the BE-10B forms for those affiliates, should equal the parent's total trade with all of its affiliates combined, as reported on the parent's BE-10A form. In fact, however, the sum of the data from the affiliates' BE-10B forms may not equal the total reported on their parent's BE-10A form, because of differences in timing and valuation and because the parent's BE-10A form may include data for affiliates that are exempt from being reported on the BE-10B forms.
In this publication, the data on trade between parents and affiliates used in computing total U.S. trade associated with U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates are derived from the affiliates' BE-10B forms rather than from the U.S. parents' BE-10A forms. (However, the data derived from the parents' BE-10A forms are shown as an addendum.) Data on trade between other U.S. persons and foreign affiliates are also derived from the affiliates' BE-10B forms. However, data on trade between U.S. parents and unaffiliated foreigners are from the parents' BE-10A forms.
In this publication, BEA is showing, for the first time, separate data on U.S. parent trade with foreign parent groups (FPG's). A U.S. parent has an FPG if the U.S. parent is, in turn, owned 10 percent or more by a foreign person. For a given U.S. parent, the FPG consists of (1) the foreign parent of the U.S. parent, (2) any foreign person, proceeding up the ownership chain, that owns more than 50 percent of the person below it, and (3) any foreign person, proceeding down the ownership chain(s) of each of these members, that is owned more than 50 percent by the person above it.
Direct Investment Position and Balance of Payments Data
Direct investment position and balance of payments data cover U.S. parents' positions in, and transactions with, their foreign affiliates; in contrast, the direct investment financial and operating data, discussed earlier, cover the overall activities of the parents and affiliates themselves. For foreign affiliates, the data include positions in, and transactions with, them by all persons, not just their U.S. parents. The U.S. direct investment position abroad is equal to U.S. parents' equity in, and net outstanding loans to, their foreign affiliates; foreign affiliates' total assets, in contrast, are equal to the sum of (1) total owners' equity in affiliates held by both U.S. parents and all other persons and (2) total liabilities owed by affiliates to both U.S. parents and all other persons. For example, suppose that an affiliate is owned 80 percent by its U.S. parent and that the affiliate has total owners' equity of $50 million and total liabilities of $100 million (including $20 million owed to the parent). In this case, the affiliate's total assets would be $150 million (total owners' equity of $50 million plus total liabilities of $100 million), and the parents' position in the affiliate would be $60 million (80 percent of the $50 million of owners' equity plus the $20 million of intercompany debt).
In the benchmark survey, data for the position and balance of payments items were reported in part III of the BE-10B(LF) or (SF) (or the BE-10B BANK) forms. The balance of payments items consist of transactions between parents and their affiliates and of transactions between parents and other persons that change the parents' equity in their affiliates. The major items that appear in the U.S. balance of payments accounts for U.S. direct investment abroad are these:
Direct investment capital outflows,
Direct investment income,
Direct investment royalties and license fees, and
Other direct investment services.
It should be noted that there are two types of adjustments made to the balance of payments data presented here before the data are entered into the U.S. international accounts. First, as noted earlier, two of these items - income and capital outflows - are not entered into the international accounts at the reported book values until they are adjusted to reflect current-period prices.
Second, as discussed in the section on fiscal year reporting, the direct investment position and balance of payments data collected in the 1989 benchmark survey and shown in this publication are on a fiscal year basis, whereas the data in the U.S. balance of payments accounts and in BEA's annual series on the direct investment position are on a calendar year basis. Before being incorporated into the balance of payments accounts and the series on the position, the data from the 1989 benchmark survey will be adjusted to a calendar year basis. These adjusted data for 1989 will also be extrapolated forward to derive universe estimates for subsequent calendar years, based on sample data collected in BEA's quarterly surveys for those years. The adjusted 1989 data and the extrapolated estimates for calendar years 1990-92 are scheduled for publication in the June and August 1993 issues of the Survey of Current Business. As noted earlier, BEA also plans to revise its balance of payments and direct investment position data for 1983-88 to incorporate information from the 1989 benchmark survey.
The balance of payments data included here differ from data from the 1982 benchmark survey because of methodological and definitional changes introduced in June 1992 to make BEA's data more consistent with the international standards recommended in the forthcoming fifth edition of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Balance of Payments Manual and in the United Nations System of National Accounts. These changes include (1) the presentation of receipts and payments of income, royalties and license fees, and other private services before deduction of withholding taxes and (2) the removal of capital gains and losses from direct investment income. These and other changes are explained in the sections that follow.
U.S. direct investment position abroad
As noted earlier, the U.S. direct investment position abroad is equal to U.S. parents' equity in, and net outstanding loans to, their foreign affiliates. The position may be viewed as the U.S. parents' contribution to the total assets of their foreign affiliates or as financing provided by U.S. parents to their affiliates in the form of either equity or debt. The data are derived from the foreign affiliates' books at yearend.
The direct investment position estimates published here are at book value and are not adjusted to current value. Thus, they largely reflect prices at the time of investment rather than prices of the current period. Because historical cost is the basis used for valuation in company accounting records in the United States, it is the only basis on which companies can report data in BEA's direct investment surveys. It is also the only basis on which detailed estimates of the position are available by country, by industry, and by account. (Elsewhere, however, BEA does provide aggregate estimates of the position valued in current-period prices.) For simplicity, all subsequent references to the position are to the position on a historical-cost (book-value) basis, unless otherwise stated.
U.S. parents' equity in incorporated foreign affiliates consists of the U.S. parents' holdings of capital stock in, and other capital contributions to, their affiliates and U.S. parents' equity in the retained earnings of their affiliates. Capital stock comprises all stock of affiliates, whether common or preferred, voting or nonvoting. Other capital contributions by U.S. parents, also referred to as the 'U.S. parents' equity in additional paid-in capital,' consists of capital, invested or contributed, that is not included in capital stock, such as amounts paid for stock in excess of its par or stated value, capitalizations of intercompany accounts (conversions of debt to equity) that do not result in the issuance of capital stock, and donations. U.S. parents' equity in retained earnings is the U.S. parents' shares of the undistributed earnings of their incorporated foreign affiliates.
For most unincorporated affiliates, U.S. parents' were able to provide a breakdown of owners' equity by type. Thus, in tables showing U.S. parents' equity in affiliates by type, the parents' equity in both incorporated and unincorporated affiliates are shown together. For those unincorporated affiliates for which no breakdown of owners' equity by type was available, all of the parents' equity in the affiliates was included in capital stock (which includes additional paid-in capital and capital contributions) rather than in retained earnings, because these affiliates usually remit all of their earnings to the U.S. parent. The U.S. parents' share in total owners' equity (not broken down by type) is shown separately for incorporated and unincorporated affiliates in addenda to the direct investment position tables.
The U.S. parents' net outstanding loans to their foreign affiliates, shown in the tables as the affiliates' net intercompany debt to U.S. parents, consist of trade accounts and trade notes payable, other current liabilities, and long-term debt owed by the affiliates to their U.S. parents, net of similar items due to the affiliates from their U.S. parents.
Intercompany accounts include the value of all capital leases and of operating leases of more than 1 year between U.S. parents and their foreign affiliates. (Only long-term operating leases are included in intercompany accounts to conform to U.S. data on merchandise trade, which also exclude shipments under leases for periods of 1 year or less.) The value of property so leased to a foreign affiliate by its U.S. parent is included in affiliates' payables, and the net book value of property so leased by a foreign affiliate to its U.S. parent is included in affiliates' receivables. Capital leases recognize that title to the leased property will usually be transferred to the lessee at the termination of the lease - similar to an installment sale. Operating leases have a term significantly shorter than the expected useful life of the tangible property being leased, and there is usually an expectation that the leased property will be returned to the lessor at the termination of the lease. For capital leases, the net book value of the leased property is calculated according to GAAP. Under GAAP, the lessee records either the present value of the future lease payments or the fair market value, whichever is lower; the lessor records the sum of all future lease receipts. For operating leases of more than 1 year, the value is the original cost of the leased property less accumulated depreciation.
For bank affiliates, the direct investment position is defined to include only their parents' permanent debt and equity investment in them; similarly, the direct investment flows that enter the U.S. balance of payments accounts for these affiliates include only transactions related to such permanent investment. All other transactions and positions - mainly claims and liabilities arising from the parents' and affiliates' normal banking business - are excluded from the direct investment accounts because they are included with other banking claims and liabilities in the portfolio investment accounts. The definition of permanent investment may vary somewhat from bank to bank. Examples of such investment are funds from parents that are used to establish or acquire the affiliates or that finance the affiliates' purchases of property, plant, and equipment.
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CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
Members of the Kentucky General Assembly were not surprised when the 101st U.S. Congress, in its closing days, placed stringent new controls on the burning of coal by electric utilities. Proposals to control acid deposition, commonly referred to as acid rain, were introduced in Congress as early as 1981. From 1982 until 1990, interim committees of the Kentucky General Assembly studied congressional proposals to control acid rain and communicated regularly with the state's congressional delegation on the issue. Recognizing that Congressional action was close at hand, the 1990 General Assembly enacted Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 on March 29, 1990. Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 directed an interim legislative committee, the Energy Task Force, to study the potential impacts of federal acid rain legislation in Kentucky's economy and to develop a strategy for addressing those impacts.
On November 15, 1990, the President of the United States signed into law S.1630, the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, Public Law 101-5491. Title IV of the Act contains the acid rain legislation.
Acid rain forms when fossil fuel combustion from electric power plants, industrial boilers, and motor vehicles release pollutants, primarily sulfur dioxide (SO<sb_>2<sb/>) and nitrogen oxides (NO<sb_>x<sb/>), into the atmosphere. Reacting with the SO<sb_>2<sb/> moisture in the atmosphere, and NO<sb_>x<sb/> emissions are converted into sulfuric and nitric acids, respectively. The acidic materials, which may be carried long distances by wind, are released back into the atmosphere or are deposited on the ground in the form of rain, fog, snow, gas, or dry particles. Acid rain, in certain concentrations and under certain conditions, can damage forests, lakes, streams, aquatic life, buildings, and monuments, and cause human respiratory problems.
According to a national inventory completed in 1985, electric utilities were responsible for 69% of SO<sb_>2<sb/> emissions in the United States, with most of those emissions created by coal combustion. The transportation sector was identified as the largest source catetgorycategory for NO<sb_>x<sb/> emissions, 43% of the total. Electric utilities were responsible for 32% of NO<sb_>x<sb/> emissions. Fairly early in the process, proposals to tackle the acid rain issue narrowed to one source: fossil-fueled electric power plants.
Although the Clean Air Act, prior to the 1990 Amendments, did no specifically address acid rain formations, it did require certain controls on SO<sb_>2<sb/> and NO<sb_>x<sb/> for industrial power facilities, as well as electric utility power plants. However, as the phenomenon of acid rain was recognized and concern over the effects of acid rain grew in the 1980's, controls in the existing law were viewed as inadequate and support for increased controls grew, leading to the inclusion of Title IV acid rain provisions in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.
The acid rain issue provoked much argument among the states and between the U.S. and Canada. Canada and the northeastern states initiated the congressional acid rain battle, claiming that their forested areas and lakes were suffering from the long-range transport of acid rain originating in the midwest.
Once it became clear that acid rain legislation would target emissions from coal-burning electric utilities, the congressional proposals pitted states with high-sulfur coal reserves against states with low-sulfur coal reserves. The mid-western states of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, which have high-sulfur coal, favored proposals to require installation of pollution control equipment on all existing coal-fired utility units. States with low-sulfur coal, such as Wyoming and Montana, pushed for proposals to give affected utilities more options for reducing sulfur emissions, including switching to their low-sulfur coal. States with utilities targeted for the largest SO<sb_>2<sb/> reductions, again, primarily midwestern states, argued for cost-sharing provisions where all electric consumers, nationwide, would be subject to a tax to be used to subsidize the cost of the acid rain controls. The regional battles still continue, months after the signing of the Clean Air Act Amendments, as the rules for implementation are being developed.
Kentucky, as one of the nation's largest coal-producing states, with large reserves of high-sulfur coal in the west and low-to-medium sulfur coal in the east, was in a particularly difficult position during congressional deliberations. Proposals which favored one of the state's coalfields were not always favorable to the other coalfield.
The state was one of the early supporters of clean coal technology development, contributing over $10 million for construction of the atmospheric fluidized bed combustion project at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Shawnee plant near Paducah. And much support did exist within the state and the General Assembly for the position that Congress should not act on the issue without sound scientific knowledge of the benefits and costs of new acid rain control. To gain this knowledge the federal government embarked in 1980 on one of the largest research projects of its kind ever undertaken, the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP). The project took over ten years and $600 million to complete and involved the efforts of over 1000 scientists in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.
Ironically, the fiscal assessment by the NAPAP project was not available to either the Senate or House of Representatives as each chamber passed their initial version of the Clean Air Act Amendments. A draft of the report surfaced just a month prior to final action by a conference committee but had little effect on the legislative process. The final NAPAP report raises serious questions as to whether the costs of the new acid rain controls outweigh the benefits NAPAP was able to identify.
The final bill gives utilities flexibility in making SO<sb_>2<sb/> and NO<sb_>x<sb/> reductions. Pollution control equipment is not mandated and no cost-sharing provisions are included.
Task Force Activity
Soon after the President signed the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, hereafter referred to as the CAAAs, the Interim Energy Task Force began its work on Senate Concurrent Resolution 73. In November 1990, a subcommittee of the Energy Task Force met with researchers at the University of Kentucky's Center for Applied Energy Research and reviewed the center's current coal research. Also that same month the Energy Task Force received its first briefing on the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 from state officials in the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Cabinet and the Governor's Office for Coal and Energy Policy.
In January 1991, when the General Assembly reorganized several House and Senate committees, the Energy Task Force's jurisdiction was broadened to include tourism and the name was changed to the Tourism Development and Energy Task Force. Because of the 1991 Extraordinary Session of the General Assembly, the new task force did not meet during the first three months of 1991. At its April meeting, the Tourism Development and Energy Task Force established the Subcommittee on Energy and assigned the subcommittee the task of completing the Senate Concurrent Resolution 73 study on acid rain legislation.
The subcommittee devoted most of the remainder of the interim to the study, hearing testimony from coal producers and coal miners, from electric utilities in the state, and from various state agencies which will be involved in implementation of the acid rain legislation. On November 12, 1991, the Tourism Development and Energy Task Force completed its work on SCR 73, with the receipt of the subcommittee's report and adoption of recommendations.
Review of Chapters
This report is the final product by the Tourism Development and Energy Task Force on Senate Concurrent Resolution 73. Chapter II describes the federal acid rain legislation, including an SO<sb_>2<sb/> emissions trading system, and discusses the various compliance options available to affected utilities. Chapter III presents coal mining trends in this state, as well as factors which affect national coal markets. Chapter IV is an analysis, based on a computer model simulation, of the effects of the federal legislation on the state's economy. Chapter V presents all issues identified by the various participants of the study process, and the final chapter presents the task force's findings and recommendations.
Future Review
As the Tourism Development and Energy Task Force worked on this issue, through its subcommittee, it quickly became apparent that the task force's work is preliminary. Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 - as well as the entire act - is a very complicated piece of legislation, a product of much political compromise. The emissions trading system is experimental; there is uncertainty as to how or indeed whether the experiment will work. Congress left many of the implementation details up to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has not yet worked out many of those details. Utilities are now formulating compliance plans without the final rules; the task force completed its work under similar uncertainties. As recommended by the task force, the General Assembly, through its interim committee system, will need to continue to monitor implementation of Title IV of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.
CHAPTER II
CLEAN AIR AMENDMENTS OF 1990: ACID RAIN PROVISIONS
When President Bush signed S.1630 into law on November 15, 1990, a major overhaul of the nation's air pollution law was set into motion. The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (CAAAs) are the first amendments to the Clean Air Act since 1977 and the first major environmental law of the 1990s. The amendments will require as many as 175 regulations. The CAAAs, which include 11 titles, tighten air standards to control acid rain, urban air pollution, and toxic air pollution. The legislation sets out a new permitting program, strengthens enforcement efforts, and mandates additional clean air research. This chapter summarizes the acid rain provisions of the CAAAs and explores the various ways affected entities may comply.
Title IV, the acid rain title, mandates that by the year 2000, utilities' overall SO<sb_>2<sb/> emissions will be ten million tons less than they were in 1980. Nitrogen oxide emissions are to be two million tons less than they were in 1980. Reductions of SO<sb_>2<sb/> and NO<sb_>x<sb/> will be accomplished in two phases. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will administer the first phase; states with approved permit programs will administer the second phase. Whereas there will be no fees for permits in the first phase, there will be a permit emission fee in Phase II, which, in most states, will run $25.00 per ton of emissions. All affected units are required to install continuous emission monitors to record the levels of SO<sb_>2<sb/> and NO<sb_>x<sb/> emitted at specific time intervals.
Utility generating units larger than 25 megawatts will, at some point, become an affected source. Cogeneration facilities, facilitites that produce both electricity and process heat from the same source, are exempt if they produce less than one-third of their electric output for use by a utility.
Sulfur Dioxide Reductions
Title IV's SO<sb_>2<sb/> reduction provisions represent a radical departure form federal emissions control programs of the past. A permanent annual sulfur emissions cap for electric utility plants is set at 8.95 million tons for the year 2000 and each year thereafter. This represents approximately a 50% reduction in SO<sb_>2<sb/> emissions. No absolute caps on sulfur emissions are to be set for individual utilities. Instead the sulfur reductions will be accomplished through a market-based emissions allowance trading system. The underlying goal of the SO<sb_>2<sb/> provisions is to allow each utility flexibility to choose the most cost-effective way to make SO<sb_>2<sb/> reductions.
Affected units are to be given set allowances to emit SO<sb_>2<sb/>. One allowance will permit an affected source to emit one ton of SO<sb_>2<sb/> during or after a specified calendar year. The allowances can be traded within the utility's own system, banked for future use, or sold on the open market. Utilities which exceed their emissions allowance and do not obtain any additional allowances to cover their deficit will be fined $2000 per excess ton and will be required to offset the excess tons the following year. However, regardless of the number of allowances an affected source may hold, previously existing SO<sb_>2<sb/> air quality standards must still be met. For example, units which come under the New Source Performance Standard of 1977 will not be permitted to exceed their current SO<sb_>2<sb/> emission rate of 1.2 pounds per million Btus.
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Although we are here to discuss the subject matter in a broad nature, I want you to know that I support H.R. 1502, which is the Violence Against Women Act.
I have a special interest in the provisions relating to domestic violence and, in fact, offered an amendment to the crime bill that incorporated part of Mrs. Boxer's bill last session. As a former prosecutor, I know firsthand how difficult it is for women to come forward in domestic violence cases.
I am sad to report that today a battered woman stands a better chance in the courts if her assailant is a stranger. The undeniable fact is that if the husband or partner is the assailant her complaint is often dismissed as a domestic squabble or a private matter between husband and wife. Until very recently, battery almost never resulted in arrest.
Why is it that battered women who eventually kill their husbands in self-defense receive on an average double the sentence that men who murder their wives receive. I believe we in Congress have a responsibility to recognize domestic violence for what it is; and that is, it is a crime. Those guilty of domestic violence crimes must be held accountable for their actions and punished under the law.
We must work to change the perception that domestic violence is a family matter. We can begin by passing laws that will give our Nation's police officers, judges, and prosecutors the tools necessary to treat these types of offenses in the same way as any other crime. In addition, victims of domestic violence who are often terrified to come forward need assurances and, indeed, should be guaranteed that the system will help them and not work against them.
Sadly, Mr. Chairman, the problem of violence against women goes well beyond the disturbing trends in domestic violence. In today's violent culture, it seems as though every woman has reason to fear. In fact, the Department of Justice's calculations that three out of four American women could expect to be victims of at least one violent crime in their lifetime is, as astounding as it is, unacceptable. Also unacceptable is the FBI statistic indicating that rapes have increased four times as fast as the general crime rate during the past decade, and Mrs. Boxer's bill suggests proposals in those areas as well.
I look forward to hearing the testimony this morning and thank you again, Mr. Chairman, for scheduling this hearing.
Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. Sangmeister.
Mr. Gekas.
Mr. GEKAS. I thank the Chair, and I too welcome Senator Biden and Congresswoman Boxer and Congresswoman Morella to this hearing.
For a long time, I had been laboring under the false impression that we had made great strides in the arena of victimization of women. In my own State and elsewhere, even in the Federal establishment, we began to develop recognition of groups that would be honing in on these various individual problems, like rape crisis, and other domestic violence entities that really had a firsthand, hands-on knowledge of the series of problems that we are encountering in this field, and I was feeling rather smug about it until this last couple of years when the headlines began to scream all over the country with a renewed, shall we say, outbreak of visible incidents involving the victimization of women. So when Senator Dole and Congresswoman Molinari and I got together to do our version of a women victims' rights bill, I was eager to renew my own interest in this field and in preventing such victimizations.
We have shield laws, we have increased penalties, we have even the inclusion of rape-murder in the death penalty provisions pending, so we are continuously cognizant of the problem. But, a sweeping change in the attitudes of our citizens and in our law enforcement, and in those of us who have the responsibility of crafting new laws, still remains with us. That is why I am eager to proceed with listening to our colleagues and in hearing hard testimony for our consideration.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. Gekas.
Congressman Washington.
Mr. WASHINGTON. Thank you for recognizing me, Mr. Chairman. I don't have a prepared statement, but I would like to say that I have always felt that leadership was defined by, or at least the qualities of leadership were essentially defined by those who had the courage to step forward and to recognize a problem and do what was right. I am therefore not at all surprised that Senator Biden and Congresswomen Boxer and Morella, all of whom I respect and admire very much, have taken the leadership on this issue. So I look forward to hearing their testimony, and I am happy to be an original cosponsor of H.R. 1502, and I hope that we can find a way to make all the provisions that are required in order to beef up our law to make all our citizens understand that there is no difference between violence committed against women and violence committed against others. In fact, if there were to be a distinction, I think we would look on it with more abhorrence than violence committed against men, but that would sound chauvinistic on the other end.
At any rate, I look forward to hearing all the testimony. I have had the opportunity to read over the testimony of the witnesses last evening, a lot of which brought tears to my eyes. I want to hear it again, and I want us to move forward on this legislation. I want us to get it on the floor and get it passed and over to the President's desk as soon as possible.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. Washington.
Mr. Ramstad.
Mr. RAMSTAD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I, too, thank you for holding this important hearing today. As we all know, far too many women in our neighborhoods are battered, far too many women on our college campuses are raped, and I might add to Mr. Sensenbrenner's comment that the most recent national study corroborates the University of Minnesota study, which was a local study done in my State, that, in fact, one of four college women during her 4-year college career is the victim of either attempted rape or an actual rape, a full-fledged sexual assault, and, as we all know, far too many women are denied justice.
On top of all that, we know that these crimes are vastly underreported. The same study I just cited shows that, once again, fewer than 10 percent of all sexual assaults in this country are reported.
In Minnesota alone, with a population of just over 4 million people, further research indicates there may be over 400,000 battered women, yet 41 of our 87 counties do not have battered women's programs. In some counties, a battered woman's nearest option for emergency safety is over 100 miles away. In the Twin Cities metropolitan area, part of which I represent, more than two-thirds of women seeking safe shelter from domestic violence are turned away due to lack of space.
Clearly, Mr. Chairman, the Federal Government must step in to buttress State efforts to prevent violence against women, to prosecute their attackers, and to provide victims shelter and much needed treatment.
Mr. Chairman, I am particularly pleased today that we will receive testimony from Jenny Katzoff, who was the victim of sexual assault as a 1st-year college student and whose allegations of rape were grossly mishandled by a number of different college officials. As Jenny knows, we tried but just weren't able to get her out to Minnesota to testify at a recent field hearing that Congresswoman Molinari, Congresswoman Penny, and I conducted last September on the issue of campus sexual assault. Thus, I am very pleased that we will be able to hear from her today.
I am also grateful that Senator Biden and our distinguished colleagues, Congresswomen Boxer and Morella, are here today. Senator Biden and I introduced the Campus Sexual Assault Victims Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 2363 and S. 1287, last year. This legislation, which now has 165 cosponsors in the House, complements the Violence Against Women Act which I was proud to cosponsor.
H.R. 2363, the campus sexual assault victims bill, would protect campus rape victims by requiring university and college officials to make victims aware of their legal rights and assist them in bringing allegations of sexual assault before the criminal justice system. Our bill also protects victims who choose to go through campus disciplinary proceedings. But the choice should be with the victim.
Jenny's tragic story shows exactly why we must enact both the Violence Against Women Act and the Campus Sexual Assault Victims' Bill of Rights Act. Senator Biden and Congresswomen Boxer and Morella obviously recognize this as they are sponsors of both, Senator Biden being the principal sponsor of both of these bills in the Senate, and Congresswomen Boxer and Morella are cosponsors. We must work to prevent rape as well as ensure that rape survivors are not traumatized a second time because justice is denied them.
Mr. Chairman, I think this will be one of the most important hearings that we will hold this year, and I thank you again for your leadership in this area.
Mr. SCHUMER. Thank you, Mr. Ramstad.
Now let us go on to our first panel. If the witnesses don't mind, I would like to ask Connie Morella maybe to join us because she not only has her legislation but she is the second sponsor of the bill after Congresswoman Boxer for the Violence Against Women Act.
So, Connie, you are welcome to join us and maybe say a few words after Joe and Barbara.
As our first panel of witnesses today, I am pleased to welcome two - three now - very distinguished Members of Congress: Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, Representative Barbara Boxer from the Sixth District of California, and Representative Connie Morella from the Eighth District of Maryland.
Senator Biden and Representative Boxer and Representative Morella have been leaders in combating violence against women. Senator Biden introduced the Violence Against Women Act, S. 15, which was reported favorably by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representatives Boxer and Morella have introduced the Violence Against Women Act, H.R. 1502, here in the House. All three have been real leaders on this issue, being the beacon for not only the Congress but for the country in helping us all recognize not only how serious the problem is but how hidden it has been for so long.
I want to thank all of you for coming, commend you for your efforts, and turn over the floor to you.
Senator Biden, again, it is an honor for you to be here, and you may proceed. We are doing it in alphabetical order. It is not because you are a Senator or a man.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH BIDEN, A SENATOR IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF DELAWARE
Mr. BIDEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much. Let me begin by thanking my colleagues on my left and right for their leadership. Quite frankly, it is not only their leadership in drafting and pushing this legislation, but also their standing that has given this legislation the kind of credibility that it otherwise might not have had. The mere fact that my friend, Barbara Boxer, immediately indicated an interest in perfecting this legislation and introducing it gave it a legitimacy - and I mean this sincerely - that I was not capable of giving it by the mere fact of drafting parts of it on the Senate side. I want to thank both my colleagues for their work.
As you know, Mr. Chairman - you and I have worked together on a lot of crime issues - I try not to beat around the bush. I am not going to take your time by going through each part of this legislation - it has a number of titles.
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Chapter III
ASSESSMENT OF HIGHWAY NEEDS
The Task Force to Study Highway Needs held public hearings in all twelve highway districts. These hearings assisted the Task Force in identifying projects being proposed by the Department of Highways' personnel and the local elected officials of the district.
The intent of the Task Force was to identify those corridors which would have the greatest impact on a region. The Task Force defines corridor as a major route through Kentucky or a route which connects a rural area to its regional center or another corridor. While the Task Force recognizes the needs for storage lanes, local connector roads, curve realignments and other types of local improvement projects, priority was given to establishing a system of roads which would allow each region better access to larger markets of the area. The state's philosophy of road building, the Task Force believes, should continue to emphasize connecting the rural areas to the urban markets.
The finding of the Task Force is that the 1990-1996 highway construction proposal is the best starting point for the future of road building in Kentucky and these identified needs should be addressed prior to the introduction of other needs.
The information obtained through the hearing process, coupled with an examination of the highway accessibility of every county in Kentucky, allowed the Task Force to develop its strategic highway corridor system. The highway corridor system includes the existing limited access system, key US routes, and other corridors which need upgrading to four lanes.
The following discussion is the strategic corridor system identified by the Task Force to Study Highway Needs. The first segment is a list of highways which currently provide adequate access to the Commonwealth. Following that list is a discussion of highways which the Task Force identified as needing improvement in order to provide access to all regions of the Commonwealth.
Adequate Corridors
The following routes have been determined to provide adequate accessibility, with the exception of minor reconstruction and improvements which will maintain the functional integrity of the existing system. For example, several interstate routes need additional lanes and these improvements are critical to the highway network. In addition, many of the proposed corridors will connect to the routes presented in this section.
East to West Corridors
Interstate 64
Mountain Parkway from I-64 to Campton
Bluegrass Parkway
Western Kentucky Parkway
Cumberland Parkway
Interstate24
Audubon Parkway
North to South Corridors
Interstate 75
Interstate 65
Green River Parkway
Pennyrile Parkway
Purchase Parkway
Interstate 71
Circumferential Corridors
Interstate 264
Interstate 265
Interstate 275
KY 922, KY 4, US 25
The Task Force is defining an adequate corridor as an existing facility of four or more lanes. Despite this categorization, some of these corridors will need reconstruction in order to maintain their functional value. The improvements for those purposes are estimated by the Department of Highways to be $2,230,400,000.
Corridors Needing Development
The routes which follow are projects for which the Task Force is recommending improvement. The Task Force recommends that each route be designed as a four-lane facility; however, it realizes that initial reconstruction as quality two-lane routes may be a desirable goal.
The discussion of each route will provide the rationale for project inclusion, points of interest along each route and a cost estimate provided by the Department of Highways.
U.S. 23
U.S. 23 is the major north to south corridor in eastern Kentucky. It enters the state at South Shore, Kentucky and exits at Jenkins, Kentucky. Its route intersects with major east to west corridors including I-64, KY 114 (connects to Mountain Parkway), KY 80, and U.S. 119. This corridor is the major route in eastern Kentucky and serves to connect the region with the larger markets in all directions.
Completion of the segments of U.S. 23, as authorized by the 1990 road bond issue projects, was emphasized at public hearings in Districts 9 and 12. The entire length of this route will be four-lane upon completion. Points of interest along this route include: Paintsville Lake State Park, Jenny Wiley State Resort Park, Fishtrap Lake, and Dewey Lake.
This route will complete U.S. 23 as a four-lane facility from monies allocated by the 1990 bond issue and federal highway development funds. For that reason, no cost estimate is included.
U.S. 25E
U.S. 25E connects with I-75 at Corbin and extends southeast to Middlesboro and into Tennessee. Points of interest along this route include: Pine Mountain State Resort Park, Kentucky Ridge State Forest, and Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.
Two segments of U.S. 25E are currently under construction. A section south of Barbourville to Pineville is being funded by the 1990 bond issue. A second project is the Cumberland Gap tunnel project just south of Pineville. Upon completion of this project, U.S. 25E will be a four-lane facility. For that reason no cost estimate is included.
U.S. 127
U.S. 127 is a north to south corridor entering the state at Newport and extending south to Static, at the Kentucky line, and on into Tennessee. The current bond issue will provide major reconstruction along this route. In addition, U.S. 127 will provide access to I-64, the Bluegrass Parkway and the Cumberland Parkway. Points of interest along this route include: Buckley Hills Wildlife Sanctuary, Old Harrod State Park, Isaac Shelby State Historic Shrine, Constitution Square, Herrington Lake, Lake Cumberland, and Dale Hollow Lake.
The 1990 bond issue included several sections of U.S. 127 for improvements. The six-year road plan included $105,977,000 in projects for the U.S. 127 corridor. In addition, $79,000,000 was cited in long range needs for U.S. 127.
US 119
US 119 enters Kentucky at South Williamson and traverses the southeast border of Kentucky, intersecting US 25E at Pineville. The route joins US 23 at Pikeville; therefore, the segment from Dorton to Jenkins is incorporated into the current bond issue, as is a section of US 119 over Pine Mountain to Letcher County.
The improvements of US 119 can be divided into two distinct sections: the section between South Williamson and Pikeville and the section between Pineville and Jenkins. The section between South Williamson and Pikeville was identified by the local officials at the District 12 hearing as a major need. The two-lane section traverses two mountains and its narrow curvy nature makes it hazardous. Improvement to the section would also extend a multi-lane road into a previously isolated area of Pike County, allowing easier access to I-77 in West Virginia, opening the area to eastern markets.
US 119 from Pineville to Jenkins crosses Letcher, Harlan, and Bell Counties. These counties have been established as being at least 25 miles away from an existing continuous four-lane highway. This project was also identified at the District 11 public hearing as a major corridor need for the region. The counties which will directly benefit from this improvement have the following unemployment and per capita income figures:
<O_>table<O/>
Development of US 119 would give this region an east to west route which would provide greater access to the US 23 corridor in Eastern Kentucky, and the US 25E corridor, which accesses Interstate 75. These connections would provide access to major markets in the northeast and southeast. A segment of this route was placed in the 1990 road bond issue. The estimated cost of the remaining portion of the project is $782,780,000.
US 460
The section of US 460 from Pikeville to the Kentucky-Virginia line is identified as a corridor which needs development. Improvement to this corridor was mentioned at the public hearing in District 12. The justification provided was improving tourist access to Fishtrap Lake and the Breaks Interstate Park.
A construction project in this area would also improve access to an isolated area of Pike County. The county has an unemployment rate in excess of 9% and a per capita income of approximately $10,000, which is about $3,000 less than the statewide average.
US 460 would connect at Grundy, Virginia, and eventually would access Interstate 77 at Princeton, West Virginia, to the east. The west connection at Pikeville would connect US 23, which is a major north-south corridor in the Eastern United States. US 23 connects with Interstate 64 in northern Kentucky, and the nearest interstate connection to the south is Interstate 77. The estimated cost of this project is $150,000,000.
The Mountain Parkway and KY 114
The segment of this corridor needing improvement is from Campton to Prestonsburg. The parkway's four-lane section currently stops at Campton and continues as a two-lane route from Salyersville to Prestonsburg, with truck climbing lanes to Salyersville, where it connects with KY 114. KY 114 is a two-lane route which connects with US 23. The counties directly benefiting from this project are Wolfe, Magoffin, and Floyd.
The extension of the Mountain Parkway was cited as a need at the public hearings in Districts 10 and 12. A concern mentioned at these hearings was that the completion of US 23 would allow easier access to out-of-state markets by the populace in this area. The parkway has long provided Eastern Kentucky a connection to Lexington as a retail center, but the lack of improvement to this route could change the habits of consumers, especially with the completion of improvements on US 23. Magoffin and Floyd Counties are both at least 25 miles from an existing four-lane facility. An improved east to west feeder in this area would connect north/south corridors at both ends. The west connection is Interstate 64 at Winchester, just 16 miles from the Interstate 75 junction. The east connection is US 23, which has been mentioned previously.
Wolfe, Magoffin and Floyd Counties have unemployment rates between 9% and 15% and per capita income ranging from $7,000 to $9,500. Both Wolfe and Magoffin counties have unemployment rates about twice the statewide average. State Parks along this route include Natural Bridge State Resort Park and Red River Gorge. The estimated cost of this project is $350,000,000.
KY 15
KY 15 traverses Wolfe, Breathitt, Perry, and Letcher Counties. Improvement to this corridor would provide easier access in these counties to the Mountain Parkway and US 119 south of Whitesburg.
This improvement was cited as a need in the public hearing in District 10 and, as a corridor, need by the Economic Development Cabinet. Breathitt, Perry and Letcher Counties are all at least 25 miles from a continuous four-lane highway. The unemployment rate is approximately 9% in each county and the per capita income is about $9,000.
Breathitt County is one of the counties previously identified as a county with only Kentucky routes. Buckhorn Late State Resort Park is located along this corridor. The estimated cost of this project is $473,700,000.
KY 7
KY 7 was identified as having potential regional significance at the public hearing in District 9. This route is a north to south corridor which crosses one of the most economically depressed areaareas in Kentucky. The proposed improvement would connect KY 7 to Interstate 64 in Carter County and the Mountain Parkway at Salyersville. The counties receiving direct benefit from this corridor improvement are Carter, Elliott, Morgan, and Magoffin. Grayson Lake State Park lies along this corridor.
Morgan and Magoffin Counties are 25 miles from a continuous four-lane highway and the major route in Elliott County is KY 7. The following economic data reveal problems associated with this area.
<O_>table&caption<O/>
KY 11
KY 11 was identified as a need at the District 10 meeting. This route is a north to south corridor which connects at the Slade exit on the Mountain Parkway and runs south to just east of Manchester on the Daniel Boone Parkway. This corridor has been upgraded from Slade to Beattyville. Counties receiving direct benefit from improvement to the remaining segment of KY 11 include Lee, Owsley, and Clay.
Lee and Owsley Counties are areas which have been previously identified as having only Kentucky routes. Owsley and Clay Counties are both outside of the 25-mile criterion. These counties can also be identified as depressed areas by the following data:
<O_>table&caption<O/>
US 421
US 421 is a major highway in the network of interstate connectors.
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Second, financial factors could also have a bearing on a decision about whether to appropriate. In particular, a concern that an uncured default on a bond issued by one authority might cause financial markets to increase the costs of issuance or lower the rating assigned to subsequent bonds of other state debt authorities could lead the General Assembly to appropriate funds to cure the default. Finally, even in the absence of any legal and financial consequences of a default, political factors could be such that legislators have little choice but to appropriate funds.
Thus, the purpose of the research is to identify the likely legal, financial and political consequences of a default of the various state debt authorities. Because the research issues are complex and because little prior research addresses the issues, five distinct research methods were utilized.
Legal Research
First, legal research was conducted by an LRC staff attorney to determine whether current law contains any provision that could be used to require the General Assembly to appropriate funds in the event of a default by any of the state debt authorities. The results of the legal research are presented in Chapter II.
Case Studies
The second approach was to conduct case studies of past defaults of bonds issued by state debt authorities in other states. Since the late 1970's, the Bond Investor's Association (BIA) has tracked defaults of corporate and municipal bonds. At the request of LRC staff, BIA searched their on-line database for the years 1980-1990 and identified 71 defaults of bonds issued by state debt authorities, in twenty states. Staff conducted a telephone interview with the ranking legislative staff (or a designee) having knowledge of state debt management issues in each of those states. The interview questionnaire (Appendix A) was intended to elicit information regarding the legal, financial and political consequences of each default for the state legislature, and to identify any actions the legislature considered in response to the default. These case studies are presented in Chapter III.
Expert Opinions
The third piece of the research utilized a technique known as the 'Adelphi technique,' whereby a small number of experts in a particular field are asked their opinions concerning the issues under study. To this end, a random sample of listings was drawn from the Bond Buyer's Municipal Marketplace and a survey questionnaire was sent to each selected listing. The survey instrument (Appendix B) contained open-ended questions concerning what financial consequences the respondents perceived from the 71 actual defaults identified in the BIA search. They were also asked for opinions regarding expected consequences from a hypothetical default of any of the active Kentucky state debt authorities. A summary of the survey responses is presented in Chapter IV and copies of the complete responses are contained in Appendix C.
Periodical Search
A fourth research activity was a search of newspaper and periodical indexes for articles relating to defaults of state debt authorities. There were two aspects to this research. First, a search was conducted for articles and editorials pertaining to the particular defaults examined in the case studies. The purpose here was to see if the press had extensively covered the default and had, perhaps as a reflection of public opinion, called for state action to cure the default. The results of the search pertaining to the existing defaults are reported in the summary of each case study.
A second search of indexes focused on the more general topic of municipal bond defaults. Specific attention was given to identifying recent articles in the national financial press which discussed issues pertinent to market expectations about municipal defaults. In particular, staff reviewed all 1990 and 1991 issues of MuniWeek, a national news weekly devoted to the municipal bond market, to identify relevant articles. Articles obtained in the second search are discussed in Chapter IV.
Statistical Analysis
Staff believed that concerns about possible financial consequences of a default would be a major factor in any legislative decision to appropriate funds. However, the previously outlined research relied on individual perceptions of market responses to a default, rather than on actual assessments of market responses. Therefore, the final piece of the research represents an attempt to determine whether the defaults identified in the case studies had a statistically significant effect on the cost of subsequent issues of state debt authorities. Staff obtained data on bonds issued from 1980-1989 by the debt authorities of all 50 states, for either public projects or industrial development projects. Variables were incorporated to control for the effect of other factors, such as project type, the condition of the state's economy, the amount of state debt-outstanding and the general level of interest rates in the economy. A regression analysis was conducted to assess the amount of variation in interest costs which could be attributed to the existence of a prior state default. A full description of the statistical research and a discussion of the results are presented in Chapter V.
Chapter VI presents a summary assessment of the various research pieces. The chapter also includes staff recommendations regarding changes the General Assembly may want to consider in its oversight of the Commonwealth's state debt-issuing authorities.
Current Oversight of State Debt Authorities
Like most states, Kentucky has long issued bonds to pay for major capital projects. Similar to a mortgage, a bond is a promise to pay principal and interest in the future in return for money borrowed to fund a project for current use. In a mortgage loan, the house stands as collateral for the loan. If the borrower fails to repay the loan as promised, the lender is allowed to take possession of the house.
However, in the case of state borrowing, it would be difficult for bondholders to take possession of a road or the state capitol building. So rather than pledging the project as collateral for the bonds, traditional practice has been for states to pledge the 'full faith and credit' of the state for bond retirement. Bonds which pledge the full faith and credit of a government issuer are called general obligation bonds. With such bonds, if the government fails to make the regularly scheduled debt service payments, bondholders may go to court and force the government to do whatever is necessary, including raise taxes, to make the promised principal and interest payments. A special or limited obligation bond is one that pledges only certain tax or other receipts as collateral for the bond. An example is the pledging of the receipts of a motor fuels tax to retire a bond used to build a highway. State bonds have usually been issued with a repayment schedule (or term) of 20-40 years. A bond is said to mature when the final scheduled debt service payment is made and the state's obligation to bondholders is discharged. The key point to note about general or special obligation bonds is that if, at any time before the maturity date, the state does not make its regularly scheduled debt service payment (or defaults on the bond), bondholders may have the court enforce the obligation and require the state to raise taxes to make debt service payments.
Sections 49 and 50 of the Kentucky Constitution stipulate that, before the state can issue debt in excess of $500,000, the issuance must be approved by the majority of voters in a referendum election. This requirement applies to all state general and limited obligation bonds, which are issued by the State Treasurer. Kentucky issued its last bond subject to referendum vote in 1966.
Section 157 of the Constitution prevents units of local government from issuing any debt without prior approval of two-thirds of those voting in a referendum election. Section 158 limits total indebtedness of local governments to various percentages of the value of taxable property. Section 159 limits local debt to a term of no more than 40 years. The last Kentucky local government general obligation bond was issued in 1982.
Revenue bonds pledge only the particular revenues generated by a project as collateral on the bonds issued to fund the project. The traditional use of revenue bonds is for the provision of government services which generate fees, such as utilities. Revenue bonds issued for fee-supported government services are often called special revenue bonds, to differentiate them from revenue bonds issued for private purposes. Government issuance of private-purpose revenue bonds arose primarily because the interest earnings on bonds issued by state and local governments (called municipal bonds) are exempt from federal taxes and, usually, from the taxes of the state in which the bonds are issued. This means that lenders will charge a lower rate of interest for the tax-free bonds than they do for a bond which carries taxable interest earnings. State and local governments are able to provide an interest subsidy to local firms or individuals by issuing a tax-free municipal bond and loaning the proceeds to the firm or individuals. The loan repayments of the firm (or individuals) to the issuing government are the only collateral pledged by the government to secure the bonds. Such revenue bonds are also known as pass-through or conduit bonds because the issuing government merely acts as a go-between for the private borrower and the lenders. Because of the limited collateral offered for revenue bonds, they carry a higher interest cost than general obligation bonds issued by the same government. However, even that higher cost is usually lower than the interest cost a private borrower could obtain on a bond with taxable interest earnings.
Since 1966, the proceeds of state revenue bonds have also been used to fund all of the various types of public projects which had previously been funded through the use of general obligation bonds. The usual practice is as follows. The state creates an independent debt-issuing authority, which is defined to be a municipal corporation of the state, so it can issue tax-exempt bonds, but which is not defined to be a part of state government, so it is not subject to the Constitutional restrictions on debt issuance. The authority issues a revenue bond and uses the proceeds to fund a public project desired by the state. The authority then leases the project to the state for an amount equal to that necessary to fund debt service payments. When the bond is retired, ownership of the project is transferred to the state. The biennial lease payments of the state to the authority are the only 'revenue' pledged to secure the bonds. These bonds are called lease rental bonds.
Even though lease rental bonds are issued for public purpose projects and are supported by appropriations of the General Assembly, the Kentucky Supreme Court has held that they do not represent a debt of the Commonwealth and are not, therefore, subject to the Constitutional restrictions. This is because the General Assembly is not required to renew a lease with the independent authority beyond the current biennium. Since future General Assemblies are in no way legally obligated to make the lease payments, the lease agreement does not constitute state debt. (See Chapter II for a more thorough discussion of these legal issues.)
The Commonwealth currently has seventeen independent entities with outstanding state revenue debt, including the eight state universities. The entities are listed in Figure 2. Figure 3 displays various characteristics of the state debt entities.
Although the Supreme Court makes no legal distinction between appropriation-supported revenue bonds and non-appropriation-supported revenue bonds, state officials have made a clear distinction in oversight of the two kinds of state debt. According to staff of the Office of Financial Management and Economic Analysis (OFMEA), except in two special cases, the State Property and Buildings Commission and the Kentucky Turnpike Authority issue all state appropriation-supported debt. Both authorities issue only appropriation-supported debt. As one special case, state universities issue consolidated education bonds and housing and dining bonds, which are supported by appropriations from restricted agency funds derived from university receipts. In the second special case, the Kentucky Infrastructure Authority (KIA) issues appropriation-supported bonds for the following programs:
Fund A: Federally Assisted Wastewater Revolving Loan Fund
Fund B: Infrastructure Revolving Loan Fund
Fund B1: Kentucky Drinking Water Grant Fund
Fund B2: Kentucky Drinking Water Loan Fund
Fund E: Solid Waste Revolving Loan Fund
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="06">Because such research depends on costly and specialized equipment, funding for ships and associated sampling tools is a limiting factor (NSB, 1989).
The importance of marine biodiversity is almost as vast as the oceans themselves. Much of the Earth's human population depends on the oceans, especially marine coastal systems, for food. In the developing nations, more than half of the population obtains at least 40 percent of its animal protein from fish (WRI, 1986). Some 9,000 species of fish are currently exploited for food, although only 22 are harvested in significant quantities on a global scale (WRI, 1987). Approximately 80 percent of the marine species of commercial importance occur within 200 miles of a coast. Marine flora and fauna are also extensively used in the production of antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, food additives and processing agents, and a variety of manufactured goods.
Above and beyond these commodity values, marine organisms are critical determinants of the structure and function of the global ecosystem. Marine phytoplankton, for example, are the foundation of marine food chains and play an important role in atmospheric dynamics. The interactions among marine biota, the Earth's geochemical cycles, and global climate change are just coming to light, and even our most advanced computer models have been able to offer only the roughest approximations of the feedback mechanisms involved in the maintenance of biospheric conditions. The study of marine biodiversity is thus critical to understanding environmental dynamics on the global, as well as on local and regional, scales.
Interest in the conservation of marine biodiversity is a relatively recent phenomenon. The immensity that makes oceans such a challenge to study has also made it possible to believe that anthropogenic disturbances would remain limited in their environmental impact. Compared to terrestrial environments, oceans provide relatively stable, extensive, open, well-buffered habitats for the organisms that inhabit them. Nonetheless, the threats to marine diversity are much the same as on land: habitat destruction (especially in coastal, estuarine, wetland, and coral reef systems); pollution (including suspended sediments, nutrients, and toxics); overexploitation of harvestable species (including fish, shellfish, turtles, and mammalian species); and the specter of global climate change with all its attendant marine impacts (Soulé, 1991; Thorne-Miller and Cantena, 1991).
Although the biota of oceans has been protected from many of these impacts by the extent of the medium itself, environmental stresses can be expected to place the same pressures on marine systems that they are placing on terrestrial systems. So little is known about marine biota that rates of extinction are difficult to estimate. Ray (1988), however, suggests that the degradation of coastal zones is occurring as rapidly as tropical forest destruction, and recent findings indicate that coral reefs may be among those communities most seriously imperiled by human activities (Salvat, 1987; Guzman, 1991). As in terrestrial systems, inventories and ecological studies are needed for all oceans, with special emphasis on those habitats most immediately threatened.
This brief review does not reflect the full status of scientific knowledge with regard to specific taxa, geographic areas, ecosystems, or habitats, and only touches on genetic-level diversity and the vitally important relationship between ecosystem dynamics and diversity. As we seek the means to slow or reverse the losses, we will have to secure increased support for established scientific efforts in systematics and resource management, and for relatively new scientific endeavors in such integrative, applied fields as sustainable agriculture, conservation biology, and restoration ecology. We face an unprecedented situation that demands new combinations of the basic and applied sciences, the expertise of specialists and the vision of generalists, conceptual clarity as well as concrete experience. The science of biological diversity and its conservation demands not only more knowledge but new kinds of knowledge, and new ways of synthesizing what we know.
IMPLICATIONS FOR DEVELOPMENT AGENCIES
Biological diversity reaches its highest levels, and faces its greatest risks, in the developing nations of the world, primarily because of intensive resource exploitation and the extensive alteration of habitats. This is due in part, however, to international markets, development policies, and lending practices that transfer financial resources from developing countries to industrial countries and undermine the capacity of developing countries to sustainably manage their resources.
Rapid population growth, extreme and persistent poverty, social inequity, institutional breakdown, and perverse policy incentives have brought unstable economic conditions to many developing nations. In response, many of these countries have had to adopt short-term development agendas and exploitative resource management practices aimed at increasing foreign exchange earnings from their undiversified economies. Trade in elephant ivory (mostly illegal) and tropical timber (legal) provides obvious examples that have important consequences for the maintenance of biodiversity, but other less publicized practices - overgrazing of ranges, expansion of cash crop agriculture, intensified shifting cultivation - also lead directly to the demise of species and habitats.
As a result of these interrelated social, economic, and environmental trends, many developing countries have begun to question the sustainability of current resource management practices and look for more promising alternatives. The policies and funding practices of international development agencies, if directed toward wise, long-term commitments of assistance, can aid in this by affording developing countries greater economic stability and hence greater national capacity to preserve biological diversity. In the past, development agencies have funded infrastructural development activities, agricultural expansion programs, dams, and other large-scale projects that have contributed directly to the loss of biological diversity, while doing little to ease the indirect causes of resource decline (NSB, 1989). A new vision is necessary at all levels of the development community - one that recognizes the inextricably connected fate of human communities and the biotic community, of development and conservation.
Biological diversity is, in the most literal sense, the basis of sustainable development and resource management. By conserving biodiversity, we retain not only plants and animals, soils and waters, but the foundations of sustainable societies and the availability of options for future generations. Fuelwood gathering, to cite just one example, is a significant contributing factor behind the rising rates of deforestation in many parts of the tropics. A billion and half people in developing countries depend on firewood as their major fuel source. In many areas, expanding demand and declining local supplies have led to excessive harvest rates, and acute fuelwood shortages, and subsequent decline in soil and water resources. Developing renewable, cost-effective alternative energy sources, sustainable agroforestry systems, and more productive sources of firewood, charcoal, and timber will require greater attention to potentially useful species and genetic resources (NRC, 1991a).
Biodiversity, in short, must come to be seen as an inherently important aspect of every nation's heritage and as a productive, sustainable resource upon which we all depend for our present and future welfare. The conservation of biological diversity is not merely an obscure, hitherto neglected area of endeavor whose importance has only now been discovered; rather, it is a fundamental concern that has been absent in short-term development planning, at the risk of long-term social and economic well-being.
Responding to Research Needs
In both the developing and the developed nations, immediate action needs to be taken to protect biodiversity. At the same time, there is a continuing need for research on biodiversity that improves our knowledge base and our management capacities, and leads to the development of new ways for people to live with, and not at the expense of, their biological resources.
It is unlikely that poor countries will be able to support major biodiversity research enterprises, however important, in the near future. If global environmental and scientific objectives are to be served, more effective means for north-south transfers of funding must be found, and more productive mechanisms for scientific collaboration must be invented (NSB, 1989). The international development agencies are essential in this regard. Other organizations are unlikely or unable to provide the necessary funds. In the long run, this assistance will allow developing nations to move toward greater independence by strengthening in-country research institutions. As their research capacity increases, so too will their ability to chart their own course of sustainable development.
As they seek to meet these growing research needs, development agencies will themselves have to undertake institutional changes. Research on biological diversity is necessarily broad based and multidisciplinary, and the administration of research within the agencies must reflect this. Overlapping areas of biology, including ecology, sustainable agriculture, and conservation biology, are critically important in addressing the needs of developing countries and must be given greater support. More support must also be given to research that integrates economics, the social sciences, and biodiversity conservation. Above all, research must be carried out largely by people in and of the countries involved.
Long-term institutional commitment is necessary. Support for these changes must be incorporated wherever possible into the human resource development programs of technical assistance agencies. All personnel should be given training in biodiversity science and policy. More personnel with the requisite background knowledge must be brought into the agencies on a permanent basis and given adequate specific training, as well as opportunities to remain up to date on research in their fields. Although development and science agencies can play a leading role in promoting these efforts, their work must involve agencies, institutions, and organizations that have not traditionally taken part in conservation activities. Finally, development agencies must have a 'built-in' capacity to review outcomes, monitor practices, and recommend adjustments in policies that affect the status of biological diversity.
Several development agency research programs have begun to reflect these needs. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for example, provides funds for innovative research on biodiversity under its Program of Scientific and Technical Cooperation (PSTC) and its Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM) Collaborative Research Support Program. Support for this kind of research should be expanded and strengthened. Agencies will need to find creative ways to sustain funding for these endeavors over many years, even indefinitely. National biological inventories, for example, could well be funded by pooling the resources of all international assistance agencies functioning within a given country.
The research agenda outlined in the remainder of this report is intended to assist development agencies in their efforts to respond to these research needs. Research cannot, in and of itself, conserve biodiversity in developing nations any more than it can in the developed nations. What research can do, however, is provide the people and the leaders of these nations with information that may help them to improve their lives, while securing the biological legacy on which their livelihood depends.
Biological Aspects Of Conservation
In the past, national and international development agencies have seldom relied on - or called for - basic information on biological diversity. This can no longer be the case. Many development projects include a significant natural resource component and thus require sober analysis of their environmental impacts. More broadly, international agencies and resource and planning ministries in developing countries need information about biological diversity to formulate development plans and specific projects that are both successful and sustainable.
Pertinent information on biological diversity in most developing countries is too sparse or scattered to be of practical use. Often it is unavailable altogether. A good deal of 'gray' literature exists - unpublished reports, files in government archives, studies of limited distribution. The most important of these should be analyzed and made more accessible. In general, however, the required information can be gathered and disseminated only through systematic efforts to strengthen the entire research process.
Development agencies need to know which kinds of research are of greatest relevance as they assist client governments and develop the rationale to secure funding for this research. A large and growing body of literature describes conservation strategies appropriate to different species, ecosystems, and regions in developing countries. This includes journals such as Biotropica, Biological Conservation, and Conservation Biology. Recent agendas, involving a range of basic and applied research needs, can be found in Research Priorities in Conservation Biology (Soulé and Kohm, 1989); From Genes to Ecosystems: A Research Agenda For Biodiversity (Solbrig, 1991); and The Sustainable Biosphere Initiative: An Ecological Research Agenda (ESA, 1991). Subsequent chapters of this report focus on the socioeconomic and cultural aspects of biodiversity research in developing countries.
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Mission Statement
The mission of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is to provide its service area with adequate and reliable supplies of high-quality water to meet present and future needs in an environmentally and economically responsible way.
Foreword
Incorporated in 1928, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provides a supplemental water supply for Southern California's coastal plain. Municipal and industrial demands account for approximately 92 percent of the water supplied by Metropolitan with the remaining 8 percent being used for agricultural purposes and the prevention of seawater intrusion into coastal groundwater basins. Metropolitan currently supplies more than half of the water used within its service area, and is expected to deliver nearly all of the anticipated increase in future demand.
Metropolitan's service area encompasses 5,200 square miles, consisting of 27 member agencies, composed of 14 individual cities, 12 municipal water districts, and a county water authority. This area extends for about 200 miles along the Pacific Ocean, from Oxnard to the Mexican border, and inland in some places for about 70 miles into six counties: San Diego, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura. The distribution system utilizes 775 miles of pipeline, five filtration plants, eight reservoirs, numerous regulating structures, 350 service connections, and includes 14 hydroelectric power recovery plants. Metropolitan's member agencies (or their subagencies) subsequently deliver the water to homes, industries, and agricultural users.
Water for Southern California is supplied by the State Water Project, operated by the California Department of Water Resources, and by the Colorado River Aqueduct, built and operated by Metropolitan. Water from the State Water Project is transported from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta through the central valley via the Governor Edmund G. Brown California Aqueduct to Southern California. It is introduced into Metropolitan's distribution system through State Water Project's West Branch from Castaic Lake in the Santa Clarita Valley, and through the State Water Project's East Branch from Silverwood Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains. East Branch water flows through several points into the distribution system: the Rialto Pipeline below Devil Canyon Power Plant, the Box Springs Feeder Junction Structure, the Perris Bypass Pipeline, or directly from Lake Perris.
The Colorado Aqueduct spans 242 miles of desert terrain and mountain ranges between its Lake Havasu intake and its terminal reservoir, Lake Mathews, near Riverside. Five pumping plants lift the Colorado River Water a total of 1,617 feet, taking it over several mountain ranges and into Metropolitan's service area. Whitsett Intake Pumping Plant on the western shore of Lake Havasu lifts water 291 feet to Gene Wash Reservoir located two miles inland. Gene Pumping Plant raises the water an additional 303 feet to Copper Basin Reservoir, the aqueduct's major flow control point. The water then flows by gravity approximately 63 miles to the Iron Mountain Pumping Plant where it is elevated 144 feet through the Iron Mountains. After flowing another 45 miles, the water reaches Eagle Mountain Pumping Plant where it is lifted 438 feet. Following a 16-mile gravity flow, the water arrives at the Julian Hinds Pumping Plant. This final lift of 441 feet brings the water to an elevation of 1,807 feet, adequate for flow by gravity the remaining 116 miles to Lake Mathews. Completed in 1941, the Colorado River Aqueduct was designed to accommodate an eight-pump flow of 1,605 cubic feet per second (cfs), but will convey flows 15 percent higher due to the massive pump rehabilitation project which was designed to ensure dependable delivery of Metropolitan's allocation of 487,000 acre-feet, as well as more than 800,000 acre-feet of surplus Colorado River water, when available.
The Colorado River Aqueduct Pump Rehabilitation Project resulted from a 1985 evaluation of the pumping units which had been installed as part of the original Colorado River Aqueduct construction. The evaluation revealed that the pumping units were nearing the end of their useful life and needed to be rehabilitated. The rehabilitation project started in 1988; work was divided into phases and completion is scheduled for 1993. This project is distinct from normal operating requirements and maintenance schedules.
Organization
Office of General Manager
The General Manager's Department has the responsibility for planning, directing, and managing Metropolitan's overall operations. For fiscal year 1991-92 the objectives were:
To make the most efficient use of Metropolitan's existing facilities.
To expand Metropolitan's water distribution system capacity.
To continue the program of upgrading existing facilities to maintain reliability and enhance service capability.
To pursue opportunities to increase dependable water supplies.
To encourage conservation and formulate programs to reduce demands on Metropolitan's system.
To intensify programs to meet regulations in the areas of drinking water, wastewater, air quality, hazardous materials, and waste.
To continue automation of Metropolitan's activities (purchasing, accounting, maintenance, project management) to increase staff efficiency and effectiveness.
To enhance Metropolitan's employee development and Equal Employment Opportunity programs.
To continue legislative monitoring at both the State and Federal level.
Legal Department
Metropolitan's legal staff represents Metropolitan, its Board of Directors, officers, and occasionally employees, in litigation and administrative proceedings. The staff provides the Board of Directors and Metropolitan's officers with legal advice and written opinions, and reviews contracts and other documents. Additionally, staff members follow litigation and administrative proceedings to which Metropolitan is not a party, but whose outcome could affect Metropolitan or the resources on which it depends. By closely monitoring State legislative proposals, staff recommends positions Metropolitan should take, if any.
Internal Audit
Metropolitan's Audit Department performs internal auditing activities consisting of financial, compliance, and computer audits, as well as miscellaneous reviews or special audits. The Auditor reports directly to the Board of Directors through its Special Audit Committee. He works closely with Metropolitan's staff, but is independent of general management.
Internal audit assignments are usually selected by the Auditor and are occasionally requested by Metropolitan's Board of Directors or management. Proposed Audit Department work activities are reflected in the Audit Work Plan submitted to all directors through the Special Audit Committee at the beginning of each fiscal year. The Audit Work Plan is modified as necessary throughout the year based on actual experience, new priorities, or other circumstances. The Auditor also prepares a written activity report each month for the Board of Directors information.
Detailed audit testing is preceded by appropriate planning and coordination with management or staff. When significant audit assignments are completed, all directors receive the report to the Special Audit Committee, with copies provided to management. In accordance with internal auditing standards, the typical audit report outlines the objectives and scope of the work performed, the audit findings noted, and any recommendations for corrections or improvements which the Auditor feels are warranted under the circumstances. In addition to internal audit assignments, the Auditor and his staff provide substantial assistance to Metropolitan's external auditors in conducting quarterly financial audits and the year-end audit required by the California Government Code and Metropolitan bond covenants.
Preface
Fiscal year 1991-92 opened with a gloomy water supply picture for Southern California as it faced a sixth year of drought. On September 30, the end of a water year, storage in the State's major reservoirs was only 58 percent of average, the lowest level since 1977's severe drought. Sacramento river runoff, a major source for the State Water Project and usual provider of about half of the water Metropolitan delivers, was only 46 percent of normal. Colorado River basin supplies, which usually provide the other half of the water Metropolitan delivers, were only slightly better, ranging from 63 to 75 percent of normal. To cope with dwindling supplies and increasing demands, Metropolitan provided input to proposed plans for better management of Federal and State water supplies; moved forward with its plans to construct Southern California's largest reservoir; and accelerated its efforts to encourage water management and conservation, and to construct new and rehabilitate existing facilities for greater efficiency.
As the Federal government considered reforms to the operation of the federal Central Valley Project, Metropolitan's board of Directors adopted a series of provisions to be pursued for inclusion in any Central Valley Project reform legislation. The general principles to be promoted involved water transfers; fish and wildlife improvements, including water metering and changes in water pricing; appropriate Federal actions to pursue needed facilities; and other provisions consistent with Metropolitan's mission to provide "adequate and reliable supplies of high quality water to meet present and future needs in an environmentally and economically responsible way". At the State level, providing input to Governor Pete Wilson's Water Policy Task Force, Metropolitan urged that the State formulate a balanced water policy, stressing the need for developing significant new supplies through a combination of improved facilities and water transfers.
Innovative was the key word for many of Metropolitan's programs during the fiscal year. With approval of a landmark pact, forged by the State's major urban water suppliers and environmental organizations, Metropolitan helped set an industry standard for urban water conservation practices throughout California. Detailing 16 specific conservation measures, also known as 'best management practices', the agreement helps assure a more dependable water supply by providing justifiable water savings. To secure additional water supplies, Metropolitan's Board of Directors adopted a far-reaching policy statement regarding the future development of voluntary water transfers, primarily from agricultural water users. Transfer activities would be accomplished through conservation, conjunctive use, water management programs and selective land fallowing, and would be designed to avoid contributing to or creating long-term groundwater overdraft conditions. The activities appropriately address potential third-party impacts in a manner that protects and enhances the state's environmental resources. An historic two-year experimental program will demonstrate the potential of fallowing California farmland near the Colorado River and making the saved water available to urban Southern California. The program's agreement marked the first time urban and agricultural water interests and Colorado River water rights holders have joined forces in a land-fallowing program.
Locally, Metropolitan launched an inventive pilot program that combines the goals of water conservation with community action. The program in East Los Angeles will create new jobs for community members who will be trained to install ultra-low-flush toilets in local residences and who will also receive instruction in sales and personal development.
Domenigoni Valley was selected as the site for an 800,000-acre-foot reservoir, the largest in Southern California - completion of which will nearly double Southern California's water storage capacity. The proposed 4,410-acre lake is critical to long-range planning, prudent water management practices, and assurance that an adequate supply of water will be available. It will also provide the Hemet and San Jacinto areas with increased tourism, a stronger economy, and one of the largest and most pristine public recreation areas in California.
Reservoir construction will be accomplished in an environmentally sensitive manner through creation of one of the first multi-species preservation and mitigation banking areas in the nation. Joining lands purchased in the Santa Rosa Plateau and lands already maintained as a reserve by the Nature Conservancy, dedication of the 3,000-acre Shipley Reserve brought the multi-species habitat to nearly 16,000 contiguous acres.
Metropolitan's concern for the environment extended to actively joining efforts to alleviate air pollution in the Los Angeles area by acquiring ten clean-burning, methanol-fueled automobiles and including a program of preventing and containing chemical spill hazards as part of a major capital improvement program. The chemical containment program essentially will eliminate the risk of accidental chemical contamination at Metropolitan's filtration, pumping and hydroelectric power plants, reservoirs and maintenance areas where chemicals are stored and handled.
Anticipating rigid new drinking water quality standards under the Safe Drinking Water Act, Metropolitan began testing a new treatment process at its Oxidation Demonstration Project on the grounds of the F.E. Weymouth Filtration Plant. The demonstration facility allows Metropolitan to test the performance of ozone and PEROXONE (a combination of hydrogen peroxide an ozone) at a scale that closely resembles actual use. Until the plants' completion, Metropolitan had studied ozone and PEROXONE use in small-scale treatment tests to reduce disinfection by-product levels, eliminate disease-causing water-borne microorganisms, and control undesirable taste and odor.
Hoping to make desalination a more viable option for supplementing existing water supplies, Metropolitan's Board of Directors authorized the first planning and development phase of a seawater desalination demonstration project which will include construction of a 2,000 gallon-per-day test unit at a coastal power plant site.
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Terrorism: Efforts Toward International Solutions
A. Peter Burleigh, Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism
Address before the 1992 Worldwide Anti-terrorism Conference, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, June 23, 1992
I appreciate the opportunity to address this important conference. I'd like to describe some recent noteworthy developments in our efforts to counter the threat of international terrorism.
Despite the extraordinary and positive changes in the world in the last 2 years and despite an evolving international consensus to oppose terrorism, the problem is still very much with us. In fact, last year there was a sharp increase in the number of international terrorist incidents, although the number of deaths and injuries declined. The increase reflected the large number of generally small-scale incidents that occurred during the Gulf war. There were no terrorist spectaculars resulting in large loss of life in 1991. However, in 1992, we have seen the most spectacular terrorist attack in 3 years: the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires. This brutal bombing killed about 2 dozen people and left 200 injured.
Although the number of international terrorist incidents seems to be on a downward trend so far this year, the number of deaths and injuries has increased. There have also been a number of serious attacks by domestic terrorist groups in Spain, Peru, Turkey, and other countries.
It is shocking to note that almost all of the American citizens who died in terrorist attacks during the past 2 years had some connection to the US military - either on active duty or under contract to the Defense Department. They died in Panama, the Philippines, El Salvador, Turkey, and Greece. Two weeks ago, one US serviceman was killed by gunfire and a second soldier wounded in an ambush in Panama in advance of the President's visit.
The Gulf War
One of the most important developments of the last year was the success of the coalition and the international community in trumping Saddam Hussein's terrorist 'ace in the hole.' I think it is clear that Saddam Hussein believed terrorism would be a strategic weapon in deterring the coalition and undermining support for the effort to liberate Kuwait. Iraq trained terrorists and Iraqi intelligence operatives and dispersed them to locations around the world in preparation for the 'mother of all battles.' In the months following the invasion of Kuwait, and especially during Operation Desert Storm, Saddam Hussein called publicly and repeatedly for terrorist attacks against coalition targets. But these attacks for the most part did not materialize.
As many of you here know well, it was no accident that there were no major successful terrorist attacks. It was the result of unprecedented and largely unheralded cooperation among security and law enforcement services around the world - including Europe, Eastern Europe, and the Arab world - that stifled the Iraqi terrorist threat. This cooperation involved the sharing of intelligence information, expulsion of Iraqi diplomats and agents, preemptive arrests, and enhanced security countermeasures. Those attacks that did take place were largely sporadic and uncoordinated acts of indigenous groups acting in sympathy with Saddam Hussein or exploiting the Gulf war as a pretext to commit terrorism.
While we can be proud of our successes, we must remember that the Iraqi terrorist threat, while currently suppressed, is likely to re-emerge if international sanctions are loosened and Iraq is allowed to rebuild its diplomatic and intelligence operations.
End to East Bloc Support
Another new element has been the astonishing changes that have occurred in the former Soviet Union and former Soviet bloc. We note with great interest the recent reports from Moscow of documents containing evidence that the former Soviet Government supported groups that engaged in terrorism against Western interests. It is too early to discuss broad conclusions about the extent of the former Soviet Union's responsibility for international terrorism, but these fragmentary reports are disturbing.
The demise of the communist governments has obviously deprived terrorist groups of material support, sanctuary, and safehaven from which to operate, arms, financing, and front companies and other infrastructure. Also important, it deprived them of the Leninist ethos of all-justifying revolutionary violence. In some circles, this had lent appeal and an aura of respectability to leftwing terrorist groups.
At the same time, the disintegrations of the Soviet Union and now Yugoslavia has unleashed long-contained ethnic, religious, and territorial rivalries. While these, regrettably, have claimed a great number of lives and caused widespread suffering, they do not appear to have spilled over into international terrorist incidents. Nevertheless, it is a sobering reminder, today, that Sarajevo, site of one of the most momentous terrorist incidents in history, is again the scene of bloodshed.
State-Supported Terrorism
While Iraq was unable to incite a terrorist offensive against the coalition, and despite welcome changes in the former communist bloc, there remain states that have been and remain willing to employ terrorism as an instrument of state policy.
As many of you know, the United States maintains a list of countries that support terrorism. There are six countries on that list: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria.
Iraq, today, is in a state of enforced quiescence. Libya, as I will discuss in greater detail shortly, is under great pressure to comply with the UN resolutions requiring it to hand over suspects in the Pan Am [Flight] 103 bombing, cooperate with French authorities' investigation into the bombing of UTA Flight 772, and cease its support for terrorism. Libya continues to provide support and facilities for a number of terrorist groups, including the Abu Nidal Organization [ANO], the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and the Palestine Liberation Front.
Iran, regrettably, continues to sponsor terrorism in an effort to intimidate governments and individuals around the world. An Iranian-sponsored group, Islamic Jihad, has claimed responsibility for the bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, and it produced videotaped footage of the embassy taken prior to the bombing in order to authenticate its claim.
Iran continues to assassinate dissidents abroad. Four Iranian agents are under arrest for the murder of former Iranian Premier Minister Shapur Bakhtiar in Paris last year.
Iran has also refused to rescind the fatwa, or religious decree, calling for the murder of author Salman Rushdie because of his book, The Satanic Verses. This seems a particularly perverse and Orwellian fromform of terrorism - international thought crime, bearing a sentence of death. In addition, attacks on translators of Rushdie's books in Italy and Japan are believed to be linked to their work.
Iran also continues to provide material and financial assistance to terrorist groups throughout the world. Last year, Iran finally helped arrange for the freeing of Western hostages held in Lebanon. The last two, both German citizens, were freed last week. We have recognized Iran's role in this, and it was an important step. As the President said, it has removed an enormous obstacle to a more normal relationship with Iran. Serious problems remain, however.
Hezbollah elements in Lebanon that are fighting Israeli troops are continuously resupplied by the Government of Iran by flights to Damascus. Syria then permits these supplies to travel overland by truck.
Islamic Jihad also claimed responsibility for an attack in Ankara, Turkey, that killed the Israeli Embassy's top security officer. This attack followed by a few days a handgrenade attack in front of the Neve Shalom Synagogue in Istanbul for which Hezbollah is suspected.
Tehran must recognize that only by abandoning state sponsorship of terrorism can it expect to re-enter the international community. The Iranians are not acting as if they have understood this basic message. We need to work with other states to drive it home in every way possible.
Syria is not known to have sponsored any international terrorist attacks outside Lebanon since 1987, and most of the groups it supports have been relatively quiet since Syria joined the allied coalition in the war with Iraq. However, Syria continues to provide support and safehaven to a number of groups that engage in international terrorism, and, for that reason, it remains on the US Government list of state sponsors.
A number of terrorist attacks, particularly against Israel, have been attributed to groups based in Syria and in Syrian-controlled areas of Lebanon. Groups enjoying Syrian support and sanctuary include Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the ANO. Two non-Arab groups that receive Syrian support - the PKK and Dev Sol - are very active in Turkey. The PKK, or Kurdish Workers' Party, has kidnapped Western hostages, including Americans. The virulently anti-US group Dev Sol murdered two DOD [Department of Defense]-associated Americans in Turkey last year. Another non-Arab group supported by Syria is the Japanese Red Army, which has attacked the US military. It is responsible for the 1988 car bombing of a USO [United Services Organization] club in Naples that killed an American servicewoman and injured four US servicemen.
Syrian efforts over the past few years to reign in terrorists under its control represent a half step. It has yet to sever its relationships with these groups and shut down their training camps.
Other Trends
I'd like to also touch briefly on two other issues. One is what you might call the growing 'reach' of terrorists today. During the Gulf war, Iraqi agents attempted unsuccessful attacks in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, far from the traditional areas of operation in the Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires is the latest, tragic example of what may be a new strategy of seeking targets in traditionally low-threat areas of the world, where security may be less vigilant and local security forces may have little experience with the international terrorist threat.
I would also like to mention the threat of narco-terrorism. This is not a new problem. In recent years, we have seen the emergence both of narcotics traffickers who employ terrorism against the state, and particularly its judicial system, to further their own criminal goals. Many of you will recall the terrible violence that struck Colombia in 1989, including the bombing of a civilian airliner and the assassinations of judges, journalists, police officials, and politicians.
We have also seen more political insurgent and terrorist groups - for example, the Shining Path in Peru - turn to narcotics trafficking as an easy way to generate more income to support their terrorist and military activities.
We must continue to closely monitor this phenomenon, especially as terrorist groups feel the effects of the cutoff in funding from the former East bloc countries and reduced assistance from Cuba. In Latin America and the Middle East especially, there are many areas that are both major and traditional narcotics production areas and operating areas for terrorist groups.
US Policy
I would like to turn now to the US counter-terrorism policy. Our policy is based on three tenets:
No concessions to terrorists;
Pressure on states to cease support for terrorism; and
Cooperation with other governments to impose the rule of law on terrorists. This involves practical measures to help us identify, apprehend, and prosecute terrorists.
I believe that over the past year this policy has produced some significant successes in our fight against terrorism.
No Deals. The United States maintains a policy of refusing to make concessions to terrorists. This means that we will not pay ransom, release convicted terrorists, or pressure other countries to give in to terrorist demands. No group should believe that it can blackmail the United States. There will be no rewards for terrorism.
This aspect of our policy was damaged by the Iran-contra affair, but we saw it succeed in the unconditional release, last year, of all the remaining US hostages in Lebanon. As President Bush stated last week in the wake of the release of the two remaining German hostages from captivity, the 'no deals' policy, which had encountered some rough water along the way, has been vindicated by results. We are very well aware of the terrible, wrenching pressure that terrorists can bring to bear, especially on humane, democratic governments that value the lives of their citizens. But we believe this policy is the only correct one.
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By Mr. BIDEN (for himself and Mr. DeConcini):
S. 618. A bill to control and reduce violent crime; to the Committee on the Judiciary.
VIOLENT CRIME CONTROL ACT OF 1991
Mr. BIDEN. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the Violent Crime Control Act of 1991, the most comprehensive anticrime initiative I have ever proposed. It is my belief that this legislation would make tremendous strides toward restoring safety and sanity to our Nation's dangerous streets.
America needs a crime bill and it can have one in 100 days. But it must be a crime bill that is tougher than the one the President proposed yesterday, in at least two important respects:
First, it must ban the killer assault weapons used by drug-dealers and terrorists.
Second, it must do more to add new police officers to the front lines of the war on crime.
If anyone doubts that such action is needed, I urge them to take a look at a report that the Judiciary Committee majority staff is releasing today.
This report, entitled 'Fighting Crime in America: An Agenda for the 1990's,' contains new data that illustrates how horrible the crime problem has become.
Among the report's findings:
The year 1990 set a national record for murders, a national record for rapes, a national record for assaults. Last year's increase in murder and rape was the largest 1-year jump in more than a decade. And every American - every American - is four times more likely to be victimized by a violent crime today than he or she was in 1960. The fact is this: more Americans were killed on our streets over the past 8 weeks than were killed by enemy soldiers during Operation Desert Storm.
Yet if the report we are releasing today contains some depressing, stark facts, it also contains some rather simple - but important - solutions for meeting this crisis.
And these solutions form the core of the legislation I am proposing today: a bill, I am proud to say, that was endorsed last month by my colleagues in the Senate Democratic Conference.
Before I discuss our bill, I want to say a few things about the President's 100 days.
I have little doubt that Congress can pass a crime bill in 100 days. In fact, we could have passed a crime bill last year had the special interests in the gun lobby not worked to stall, delay, and ultimately kill the bill because of its ban on deadly assault weapons.
Simply put: If the President would join the Congress in banning the murderous weapons that are killing police officers, children and countless of innocent bystanders, we could easily pass a crime bill within the next 100 days.
The report we are releasing today makes clear what America must do to end its rapidly rising crime rates:
First, we must get the people who commit crimes out of the community, and we must punish them severely for their actions;
Second, we must stop people from committing crimes before they happen; and
Third, we must get the deadly weapons off the streets.
On the first of these goals, our bill has little difference from the President. We disagree not in what the President proposes - but what he opposes - not in what he includes but in what he excludes.
Like the President's bill, our bill:
Imposes the death penalty for the largest number of offenses in U.S. history - indeed, our bill covers even more capital offenses than does the President's.
It extends the death penalty for drug killers, terrorists, and the murderers of law enforcement officers.
It shortens the appeals process for capital offenders.
And, it increases penalties for criminals who commit gun offenses.
We have no disagreement with the President over whether we must punish criminals severely. On this point, both proposals are in agreement. Our differences with the President start with the second goal, the question of whether more must be done to prevent crimes in the first place.
Here, we think that much more must be done - not just to punish criminals - but also to make our streets safer from mayhem in the first place.
On this point, the findings of our new staff report are worth noting. It shows:
In 1950, America had three police officers per violent crime. Yet today, the ratio is just the reverse - three violent crimes per officer.
After 18 months of the administration's war on drugs, the number of police officers on our streets today is only 1 percent higher than it was when the President's effort was launched.
And the administration's 1992 budget actually proposes a cut in Federal aid sent to local law enforcement agencies.
Our streets are unsafe because our police forces are undermanned and overwhelmed. They can never be safe again until we reverse this imbalance.
That's why our bill, unlike the President's, includes funding for thousands of new police officers, FBI agents, DEA agents, and other law enforcement officers. We don't want to just punish murderers, we want to prevent murders.
And it's why our bill includes three new initiatives that the President's plan ignores: a comprehensive new program to combat juvenile gangs; more help for rural areas that are suffering rising crime rates, and emergency aid to the places hardest hit by drugs.
And it is why we are pushing an important initiative called the Violence Against Women Act, which would tackle the escalating problems of rape, domestic violence, and sexual assault.
The Violence Against Women Act, along with Senator DeConcini's motorcycle gang bill are further aspects of our anticrime agenda that are not adequately addressed by the President's plan.
Finally, and again, unlike the President's bill, our bill addresses a third goal of any substantial crime legislation; getting killer assault weapons off the streets.
Our bill includes the so-called DeConcini amendment, a measure adopted by the Senate last year to ban the manufacture and sale of 14 deadly assault weapons.
These guns are the weapons of choice for drug dealers and international terrorists. They have no legitimate purpose and they must be controlled before they kill any more of our law-abiding citizens.
Unfortunately, the President's bill is silent in this respect. Instead of controlling assault weapons, the President proposes to increase the penalties on those who use such guns to commit crimes.
Mr. President, I say this in response: We agree that gun criminals should face stiffer punishments, but we also think that we should get the most deadly weapons off the streets before they are used to kill or maim anyone else.
In sum: The President wants to punish crime - and so do we - but we also want to do more to prevent crime, and make our cities and towns safer for all Americans.
Can the Congress meet the challenge to pass a crime bill in 100 days? I am convinced that if the President works with us, this ambitious goal can be achieved.
But for this goal to be a meaningful one, the crime bill we pass must be a meaningful one. Our goal should not be to pass just any crime bill within 100 days, but rather, to enact a comprehensive, valuable piece of crime-fighting legislation in that period.
To achieve that end, the President must help us in two ways: First, he must prevent his allies in the gun lobby from blocking this bill, and indeed, he should join us in coming up with an agreeable proposal to limit these weapons; and second, he must work with us putting aside the rhetoric of partisanship on crime to reach an accord on a hill that we can all support.
None of us here in Congress or at the White House, Republican or Democrat - can afford to wait any longer to start to tackle this crisis.
Hopefully, if we all work together, we can make progress to combat death and violent aggression on this home front as swiftly and decisively as we achieved this same end in the gulf.
I urge my colleagues to review our new majority staff report and join me in supporting the Violent Crime Control Act.
I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my bill, along with a side-by-side comparison of it to the President's bill, and some summary materials, be printed in the Record.
Mr. President, I rise today to introduce a voluminous piece of legislation, but I think an important one - I hope my colleagues see it that way - the Violent Crime Control Act of 1991. This is the most comprehensive anticrime initiative I have ever introduced in the 18 years I have been here, and it is my belief that this legislation would make tremendous strides toward restoring safety and sanity to our Nation's streets and neighborhoods.
Mr. President, before I say my little piece here, let me point out that the President announced yesterday that violent crime is going to be his No. 1 domestic initiative. I hope that doesn't mean we are going to back off on the fight against drugs. The President laid out a crime bill, a crime bill all of which we passed last year here in the Senate. It ultimately failed because of a Presidential threat of a veto because we in the Senate included a provision eliminating 14 assault-style weapons - the so-called DeConcini bill.
Mr. President, I want to say at the outset about the death penalty that I do not think many of us in here - I know the Senator from Florida, because he knows so much about this area and has worked so hard in it so long when he was a Governor and since he has been here - disagree. Few of us disagree - at least I do not, nor does the Senator from Florida - on reinstating the death penalty.
Our bill last year provided for the death penalty. And the bill this year provides for a dealthdeath penalty - total of 44 offenses for which you can receive death as the penalty. That is more than what the President is proposing.
There is also a proposal the President has to change the habeas corpus law. The Senator, as an attorney and former attorney general, knows full well what that means. It means that there are people who have been put on death row, and who are filing frivolous and successive petitions that are taking up the courts' time and everyone's time.
But we can change habeas corpus tomorrow, and it will have no effect on the crime rate; zero. Those folks on death row are not shooting people. Yet, if you listen to some of my colleagues talk, they will tell you: "If we get the death penalty and we get a change in the habeas corpus, well, we will change the world. Our streets will be safer."
Now, I support the death penalty. I am going to try to pass it again through this legislation. We passed it here in the Senate, and passed it in the House, and we are going to pass it again. That is not a big problem.
But with the Federal death penalty, Mr. President, if you add up all the potential people who will be put to death and convicted for all the crimes we include, you are not talking about more than a dozen folks a year. Heck, there are far more murders right here in the city of Washington. We are not talking about a lot of people.
The point I wanted to make is this: It is not what the President has proposed in his legislation that I oppose; it is what he does not propose. We will change the habeas corpus law to provide for only one appeal, one bite out of the apple. We have some disagreement among ourselves and with the President over the nuances. We will settle that. And we will pass a death penalty.
As I said, I spoke to a group of attorneys general this morning - and you spoke to them just prior to my speaking to them, Mr. President - Republicans and Democrats alike.
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="10">Women have the right to be informed of the risks, potential ramifications, and benefits related to urine screening toxicology.
Recommendation #32
The Michigan Department of Social Services and the Michigan Department of Public Health should review the Child Protective Services policies regarding child abuse and neglect in relation to substance use among parent(s). Policies should be revised where indicated to foster family preservation as the goal of all programs, that is to keep families together with appropriate support services where possible.
Recommendation #33
Prosecutors should include in their policies the referral of substance-using pregnant women into substance abuse treatment programs and prenatal care. The Department of Public Health should enlist the assistance of advocacy groups and private organizations to support local prosecutors in the development and implementation of policies on the non-punitive approach to pregnant, substance-using women and their referral into substance abuse and prenatal care. The statement submitted to the Task Force by Wayne County Prosecutor John O'Hair in support of the non-prosecution of substance-using pregnant women should be accepted as a stellar example for local prosecutors.
Recommendation #34
Widely publicize written policies of treatment and education as an alternative to criminal prosecution for substance-using pregnant women.
Recommendation #35
Increase public information targeting the male role and responsibility in reducing fetal exposure to alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs and in promoting positive pregnancy outcomes.
Recommendation #36
All state legislation, regulations and programs should consider the culturally relevant lifestyle issues of substance-using women.
Recommendation #37
All state legislation and regulations should support smoke-free treatment environments, i.e., Clean Air Act. The Michigan Department of Public Health should develop a protocol for smoking cessation that may be used with pregnant women. Substance abuse treatment facilities should offer smoke-free environments.
Health Services
The use of ATOD (alcohol, tobacco and other drugs) during pregnancy can have detrimental effects both non-specific and highly specific on perinatal outcome. Non-specific effects include fetal growth retardation, resulting in low birth weight infants and infants with small head circumference. Specific effects include facial, skeletal and organ system abnormalities. Women using drugs during pregnancy are also at increased risk for preterm labor and abruptio placenta thereby placing an already compromised fetus at increased risk. The number of mothers who are HIV infected from sharing needles and practicing unsafe sex is increasing at an alarming rate.
Definitive information does not exist about the long-term effects of drug use during pregnancy. Researchers have reported that some infants who were prenatally exposed to cocaine have suffered from stroke or hemorrhage in the areas of the brain responsible for intellectual capabilities; and there is a substantial body of information available which describes the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco use on the developing fetus. In-utero exposure to alcohol, tobacco and other drugs is associated with an increased rate among newborns of (1) low birthweight, with small for gestational age length and head circumference, (2) central nervous system damage that may delay or impair neurobehavorial development, (3) mild to severe withdrawal effects, and (4) certain congenital physical malformations. Researchers have also stated that follow-up studies of these children indicate that the vast majority of them reach developmentally appropriate milestones by 36 months.
Prenatal care can help or at least ameliorate many of the problems and costs associated with the births of prenatally-exposed infants. Through three basic components of prenatal care: (1) early and continued risk assessment, (2) health promotion, and (3) health/medical and psychosocial interventions and follow-up, the chances of an unhealthy infant are greatly reduced. Comprehensive residential and intensive outpatient substance abuse treatment that includes prenatal and other health services for women, such as gynecological, HIV counseling and testing, etc. is the best approach to helping women to stop using drugs during pregnancy and providing the developing infant with the best chance of being born healthy.
In addition to prenatal care, the earliest opportunity for intervention is the provision of reproductive health services. Reproductive health services should be made available to all substance-using women of childbearing age in Michigan. These services would include teaching abstinence and family planning as well as providing pre- and post-conceptional counseling. In addition it is widely accepted and documented by pregnancy and sexually-transmitted disease (STD) data that adolescents are negatively impacted by early sexual activity and that the most reliable method of preventing pregnancy and STDs is abstinence. Abstinence-based strategies, therefore, should receive adequate funding.
Recommendation #38
Reproductive health services should be made a Basic Health Service (teaching abstinence, family planning methods, pre- and post-conceptional counseling.) Abortion counseling is not included.
Recommendation #39
Develop protocols for use and dissemination of reproductive health services information to substance-using women to be used by all appropriate programs.
Recommendation #40
Increase statewide access to health care for substance-using pregnant women through provision of education, training and incentives to providers to serve this population.
Administrative Recommendations
Education and Training
A recurring theme in discussing substance abuse treatment is the importance of well-trained and committed professionals to lead substance abuse programs and to provide direct care. Unfortunately, more often than not, drug treatment services, as well as other services which should be linked with them, are frequently staffed by inadequately trained individuals who are poorly paid and given little on-going support. It is often the least skilled and trained individuals who are given the tasks of managing the state's most serious problems in health and human services.
It is imperative that persons caring for substance-using women and pregnant women clearly understand and address all aspects of the complex psychosocial, medical, gender, legal and ethical issues involved, so that the best possible care and positive outcomes can be provided for the woman, her infant and family.
Recommendation #41
State funding should be made available to sponsor on-going training to professionals who provide care to substance-using women. Training should include information on assessment, culturally-relevant lifestyle issues and the influence/impact drug usage may have on women (e.g., issues of sexuality and hormonal surge). State funding should be made available to substance abuse programs to assist with planning, implementation and evaluation.
Recommendation #42
Curricula for physicians, nurses and social workers and others concerned with maternal and child health issues should include gender specific issues including behavioral manifestations of exposures to environmental stress, and sexual abuse and stress. Topics should include post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression, incest, rape, co-dependency, drug use, child abuse, and domestic violence.
Evaluation
Research and evaluation is needed on the results for various approaches of treating alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use among parents and families, and especially among pregnant women and women with young children. This requires, among other things, greater clarity among goals of treatment and careful definition of the markers of success.
In Michigan, few resources have been devoted to evaluating programs for substance-using women. There is little qualitative or quantitative data to support the objectives of the state's programs. What works? How can we replicate? What should be replicated? How can we prevent, treat and address the myriad of problems associated with and the impact of perinatal substance use on women, their children and families in our state?
Many experts believe that the most cost-effective approach is a comprehensive continuum of care model program that includes specially trained staff; provision of physical, social, medical, educational, childcare, and vocational services; and the involvement of the family in therapy. The conclusion is that more programs tailored to meet the unique requirements of women are needed. More research is also needed regarding treatment effectiveness, as well as the etiology of alcohol and drug abuse. To this end, the government (federal, state and local) must play a major role in funding longitudinal and multi-site studies.
Recommendation #43
The Michigan Department of Public Health should develop guidelines for cost-effectiveness, process and outcome-based evaluations of women- and family-specific substance abuse treatment and prevention programs. The guidelines should be reviewed and endorsed by appropriate state, local and educational institutions.
Recommendation #44
Guidelines and training should be made available to assure that program evaluators understand the need for culture and gender specific program designs and service delivery methods.
Recommendation #45
The Michigan Department of Public Health should disseminate information about effective alcohol and other drug treatment programs for women.
<O_>Exhibit<O/>
Early Childhood Development
Introduction
Charge to the Committee
The Early Childhood Development Committee of the Governor's Task Force on Drug-Exposed Infants originally described its task as "the careful consideration of, and the formulation of recommendations for the population of children between the ages of 0 and six years who have been prenatally exposed to drugs, or exposed to drugs in the environment." This approach, however, posed at least one major problem to committee members: many, and probably most, prenatally drug-exposed infants will not be detected using current screening mechanisms. Correspondingly, many children who were not prenatally drug-exposed are in need of services. Therefore, the committee expanded its charge to include all infants in need of intervention, with special emphasis placed on the identification of and intervention with those infants known to have been prenatally drug-exposed.
Statement of the Problem
The issue addressed by the Governor's Task Force on Drug-Exposed Infants is the syndrome of problems sustained by infants as a consequence of maternal drug use during pregnancy. The Governor's Office has charged this Task Force with the responsibility of generating recommendations which will prevent and ameliorate these problems, as well as to recommend effective interventions for those children sustaining developmental disabilities as a consequence of such exposure.
A difficult problem the Early Childhood Development Committee had to confront was the reality that - short of intensive and unrealistically expensive (and often intrusive) screening techniques - many drug-exposed newborns will go undetected. A 1989 study indicates that hospitals assessing every pregnant woman and newborn infant through rigorous detection procedures had an incidence rate of drug-exposed infants three to five times greater than hospitals utilizing more customary, less rigorous screening techniques. (Chasnoff, 1989)
Further, it became clear that there may be many drug-exposed infants who for one reason or another may not have sustained any early detectable negative consequences. Factors which may have a bearing on detectable infant health problems attributable to prenatal drug exposure include amount and duration of exposure, drug/s of choice, nutrition, access to health care systems, prenatal care and overall maternal health. A review of the literature indicated abundant reports on the occurrence of developmental delays and/or disabilities in this population. Ramer, et al, revealed significantly smaller-sized fetuses in mothers known to be heroin-addicted (1975), even when controlling for prenatal care and nutrition. Babies born to methadone addicts were found to have normal birthweights, but greater postnatal weight loss due to hyperactivity and sleep disturbances (Householder, 1982). Neonatal drug withdrawal symptoms were noted in neonates of heroin- and methadone-addicted mothers, with symptoms mainly involving the central nervous and gastrointestinal systems. Such symptoms included irritability, increased muscle tone, shrill crying, inability to sleep, and hyperactive deep tendon reflexes. "Uncoordinated and ineffective sucking and swallowing reflexes, non-nutritive sucking, vomiting, diarrhea and progressive weight loss were also noticed." (Dinges, 1980).
Infants born to opiate addicts were found to be "highly energetic, talkative, and easily distracted, with brief attention spans" (Hutchings, 1982). Disturbances also included immature object manipulation; and cognitive, speech, and perceptual difficulties. The frustrating nature of these difficulties to the drug-addicted mother and other family members may also place the infant at high risk for child abuse (Bauman et al, 1986).
Bauman and Levine (1986) found that children of methadone-maintained mothers had a higher incidence of adverse behavior such as yelling, whining, teasing, and physical abuse of other children as compared with children of non-addicted mothers, which they postulate may contribute to impairment. The same study found that both the mothers and the children had lower intelligence quotient scores when compared to children and their non-addicted mothers; and that children of addicted mothers had a lower ability to learn and to adapt to new situations. However, they found no significant differences in the gross motor skills of these two populations of children.
Mayes, Granger, et. al. (1992), warn about the potential dangers of arriving at premature conclusions about the severity and universality of cocaine effects, which they caution "are in themselves potentially harmful to children."
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="11">This is unfortunate, given that such expenditures often have very high rates of return. For instance, the expected return to efficient nonwage O&M in the irrigation sector in Indonesia in the mid-1980s is estimated at 117 percent in Java and 90 percent off Java. A Bank report found that in the transport sector, specific road improvements have an estimated return of 13 rupiahs for each rupiah spent. These high economic returns often justify a higher priority for expansion of maintenance expenditures than for outlays for new construction in a number of countries. Unfortunately, increases in nonwage O&M do not yield the political dividends that new and visible capital investments do. Nor do declines in their allocations have the same political costs as a retrenchment in civil service employment, erosion of real salaries, or elimination of subsidies. This expenditure category has thus been cut along with capital investment, but unlike capital investments, its starting point was unsatisfactorily low to begin with (Heller 1977 and 1982).
While countries exhibit pervasive difficulties in this area, there are a few instances of progress. In Ghana, spending on nonwage goods and services more than tripled in real terms from 1984 to 1989. Much of this increase has focused on health, education, and agriculture, with allocations guided by newly established government norms. The Bank actively facilitated this process, through advice, technical assistance, and associated conditionality in adjustment loans. In several cases - Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, for example - the Bank has encouraged the adoption of nonwage O&M strategies for such sectors as roads, education, health, and agriculture. In Indonesia, road maintenance was a problem for several years, but nonwage O&M spending has recently been increased to more adequate levels.
Most cases are less positive. In a set of country briefs on adjustment lending countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bank staff cited inadequate nonwage O&M as a key problem in the allocation of public expenditures in seventeen of nineteen countries. Several countries (Benin, Togo) had falling levels and shares of nonwage O&M (SPA Working Group 1991). Some countries have experienced a collapse of effective service delivery - schools without teaching materials, health clinics without drugs and supplies, and rehabilitated roads once again becoming impassable because of the absence of subsequent maintenance. Inadequate nonwage O&M expenditure has also brought about an alarming deterioration of infrastructure assets, imposing high economic costs for road transport. Country reports are replete with evidence on declining allocations for nonwage O&M, the worsening wage-nonwage balance, and the undesirable implications for the efficiency of government infrastructure and services (box 3.4).
The Bank's attention to nonwage O&M issues in adjustment lending is relatively recent. Conditions on nonwage O&M feature in only 8 percent of adjustment loans during 1979-85, increasing to 14 percent in 1986-88 and then leaping to about one-third in 1989-90. Greater emphasis has been placed on the adequacy on nonwage O&M allocations in key sectors. Examples include allocating sufficient funds for routine road maintenance for 1989-91 in Chad (Transport Sector Loan 1989); making adequate nonwage O&M budget allocations for irrigation, transport, and power in Nepal (1989); and increasing allocations on nonwage expenditures for road maintenance, agriculture, education, and health in Cameroon (1989-92). But even more emphasis needs to be placed on the adequacy of nonwage O&M for critical economic and social sector programs. Conditionality can constitute a good mechanism for bridging the deviation between economic benefits and political indifference in this area.
Subsidies and other current tansfers. Subsidies and other current transfers include all unrequited, nonrepayable government payments for current purposes. For fifteen intensive adjustment lending countries (data were incomplete for Bolivia), average spending under this category fell from 6.4 percent of GDP in the first half of the 1980s to 5.7 percent in the second half. All countries in this group except Pakistan registered a decline. As a share of total expenditure net of interest payments, average expenditure on subsidies and other current transfers fell from 31.9 percent in the first half of the adjustment decade to 28.8 percent in the second half. In four countries in the sample (Korea, Pakistan, Thailand, and Uruguay), the budgetary share increased in the second half of the 1980s.
Bank involvement has focused on subsidies for key commodities and on transfers to public enterprises. Many adjustment loans have included conditions to cut subsidies - almost half the loans during 1979-85 and only slightly less than that in recent years. Many conditions have focused on reducing or eliminating subsidies on agricultural commodities and inputs, principally fertilizers. Examples include eliminating subsidies for rice, wheat flour, and fertilizers in Sri Lanka (Economic Reconstruction Credit, 1990), reducing fertilizer subsidies by 15 percent in Ghana (SALII, 1989), and reducing the ratio of budgetary subsidies to GDP during 1990-91 in Mozambique (Economic Recovery Program, 1989). Further work in this area needs to distinguish between types of subsidies (generalized or targeted, production or consumption) and alternative reforms supported by the Bank (such as elimination or better targeting). For instance, in Venezuela's SAL and Jamaica's Social Sector Development Project, sharp reductions in general subsidies in the context of the adjustment program were accompanied by targeted interventions to protect the poor.
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Changes in the functional composition of spending
Expenditure shifts, in tandem with cuts, are critical for improving economic performance and the quality of life. For instance, rechanneling resources from nonproductive uses to social sectors can enhance human capital for sustainable and equitable growth and shield the poor during fiscal adjustment. For twenty-four developing countries, Hicks (1991) analyzed expenditure reductions during 1970-84 and concluded that governments facing tough expenditure choices preserve present welfare and security interests at the expense of longer-term capital investment and thus long-term economic growth. Hicks found that during this period social sectors and defense were relatively protected (elasticities of these expenditures relative to total expenditure were less than one), while economic infrastructure spending bore a larger burden of the fiscal adjustments. The evidence for social and economic infrastructure during adjustment is broadly consistent with these findings (table 3.3). In addition, government expenditure on industry and mining fell during adjustment in intensive adjustment lending countries, suggesting a desirable reduction of the role of the state in areas where the private sector has a comparative advantage.
Economic infrastructure spending. Both intensive adjustment lending and non-adjustment lending countries cut the share in GDP of expenditure on transport and communication (a proxy for economic infrastructure spending) during the 1980s. A comparison of pre- and postadjustment trends in each country shows that economic infrastructure spending declined in eleven intensive adjustment lending countries and increased in four. On average, spending declined by 25 percentage points during the postadjustment period. There is also evidence that in both the intensive adjustment lending and the non-adjustment lending groups, the budgetary share fell. The intensive adjustment lending countries, however, cut spending less, on average, than the non-adjustment lending countries.
Although economic infrastructure expenditures in general have a high proportion of capital expenditures, the fall in economic infrastructure spending also reflects the decline in the materials, supplies, and maintenance part of the nonwage O&M budget. This decline has led to a deterioration of economic infrastructure in many countries, most notably roads (see section on nonwage operations and maintenance above).
Social sector spending. Some critics of Bank- and Fund-supported adjustment programs, including UNICEF, argue that these programs have imposed fiscal austerity that has compressed government spending on social services, particularly health and education (Cornia, Jolly, and Stewart 1987). A breakdown of government spending by function does not support this hypothesis (table 3.3). There is no perceptible change in the ratio of central government expenditure on education and health to GDP in both intensive adjustment lending and non-adjustment lending countries from the first half of the 1980s to the second half. But there is evidence that the share of health and education in total public expenditures increased slightly. The share of these expenditures in government expenditure net of interest payments for the 16 intensive adjustment lending countries increased marginally - from 23.5 percent in the first half of the 1980s to 25.1 percent in the second half. During the same period, the non-adjustment lending countries increased the share of health and education in total expenditures net of interest from 20.4 to 22.8 percent. Social expenditures include more than health and education, but we focus on these two categories because they are the most commonly important.
Real per capita social spending also indicates the social impact of adjustment lending. This measure gives an indication of the real level of social services that countries provide. Real social sector spending per capita on education and health by central governments increased in the late 1980s in over 60 percent of intensive adjustment lending countries but in only 42 percent of non-adjustment lending countries. Among the low-income intensive adjustment lending countries in the sample, real per capita spending on education and health increased in Ghana, Kenya, and Pakistan and declined in Bolivia and Malawi in the postadjustment period. Moreover, the average increase in intensive adjustment lending countries was greater than that in non-adjustment lending countries in the sample (table 3.4).
Interpretation of the aggregate evidence requires caution, however. The indicators of social spending presented in tables 3.3 and 3.4 do not support the hypothesis that government expenditures in health and education subsectors declined under Bank-supported adjustment programs. Beyond this, any meaningful assertion about the social cost of adjustment or the effect of stabilization programs on the poor requires a more detailed examination of primary-level expenditures and efficiency (better delivery, targeting, and cost recovery) in the social sectors. Expenditures on primary and secondary education and on preventive health usually have high returns and are central to increasing the productivity and welfare of the poor. The problem is that cross-country data on social sector expenditures generally are not sufficiently disaggregated to address these questions.
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An examination of individual country experiences suggests that even though social sector expenditures may have been protected, complacency is unwarranted. A few countries (for example, Chile, Ghana, and Indonesia) have increased the relative share of aggregate social sector expenditures as well as expenditures on basic social services. In Ghana, the share of aggregate social sector expenditures as well as that of primary education increased - as a percentage of GDP and of total expenditures - in real terms during the adjustment. A range of social indicators improved during the adjustment period. In Indonesia, when expenditures were being reduced between 1982 and 1987, expenditure shares of poverty-related sectors - social sectors, agriculture, and transfers to local governments for basic social services - were increasing and large-scale capital investments in industry and mining were deferred. In Chile, while the real level and shares of education and health expenditures dropped, the private sector expanded its role at the tertiary level. In addition, there were increased allocations for primary education and improved targeting in primary health care and nutrition programs, which permitted continued progress in social indicators. Chile was thus able to protect targeted and poverty-oriented expenditures despite fiscal austerity.
In some intensive adjustment lending countries, however, there have been cutbacks in the levels and shares of social sector expenditures during periods of austerity. Even when total social expenditures have been protected, important intrasectoral imbalances remained or got worse. Resources were concentrated at tertiary levels, while allocations for basic social services declined, despite poor social indicators. There were shortages of critical complementary inputs, such as basic drugs, textbooks, and supplies, while overstaffing continued (for instance, the experience of Brazil - box 3.5). Similar problems can be seen in many other intensive adjustment lending countries (box 3.6).
On balance, restructuring social expenditures in favor of primary education and health services and safety nets offers substantial scope both for mitigating the costs of adjustment for the poor and for improving their human capital and earning potential in the long run. But such restructuring usually requires sustained political will to reduce the allocation of social expenditures for such items as universities and city hospitals that benefit principally better-off segments of society.
The role of the Bank's adjustment lending in restructuring public expenditures to enhance efficiency and reduce poverty has been limited, but it has received more attention in recent years in the context of a renewed emphasis on poverty alleviation.
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="12">
(3) National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993
Partial text of Public Law 102-190 [H.R. 2100], 105 Stat. 1290, approved December 5, 1991
AN ACT To authorize appropriations for fiscal years 1992 and 1993 for military activities of the Department of Defense, for military construction, and for defense activities of the Department of Energy, to prescribe personnel strengths for such fiscal years for the Armed Forces, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the 'National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993'.
TITLE X - GENERAL PROVISIONS
PART G - MISCELLANEOUS MATTERS
SEC. 1095. IRAQ AND THE REQUIREMENTS OF SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION 687.
(a) FINDING. - The Congress finds that the Government of Iraq continues to violate United Nations Security Council Resolution 687, which required Iraq to submit within 15 days of its adoption on April 3, 1991, a declaration of the locations, amounts, and types of all weapons of mass destruction and to "unconditionally accept the destruction, removal or rendering harmless" of chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometers and the removal of nuclear weapons-usable material.
(b) SENSE OF CONGRESS. - It is the sense of the Congress that -
(1) Iraq's noncompliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region;
(2) the President should consult closely with the partners of the United States in the Desert Storm coalition and with the members of the United Nations Security Council in order to present a united front of opposition to Iraq's continuing noncompliance with Security Council Resolution 687; and
(3) the Congress supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of Security Council Resolution 687 as being consistent with the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1).
RESOLUTION 688
(a) FINDING. - The Congress finds that the Government of Iraq, through its ongoing suppression of the political opposition, including Kurds and Shias, continues to violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 which demanded that Iraq "ensure that the human and political rights of all Iraqi citizens are respected".
(b) SENSE OF CONGRESS. - It is the sense of the Congress that -
(1) Iraq's noncompliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 constitutes a continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of the Persian Gulf region;
(2) the President should consult closely with the partners of the United States in the Desert Storm coalition and with the members of the United Nations Security Council in order to present a united front of opposition to Iraq's continuing non-compliance with Security Council Resolution 688; and
(3) the Congress supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 688 consistent with all relevant United Nations Security Council Resolutions and the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1).
(4) Persian Gulf Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991
Partial text of Public Law 102-25 [S. 725], 105 Stat. 75, approved April 6, 1991; as amended by Public Law 102-190 [National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1992 and 1993; 105 Stat. 1508], 105 Stat. 1290, approved December 5, 1991; and Public Law 102-484 [National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1993; H.R. 5006], 106 Stat. 2315, approved October 23, 1992
AN ACT Entitled the 'Persian Gulf Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991'.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
This Act may be cited as the 'Persian Gulf Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991'.
SEC. 2. TABLE OF CONTENTS<*_>three-stars<*/>

SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS
For the purposes of this Act:
(1) The term 'Operation Desert Storm' means operations of United States Armed Forces conducted as a consequence of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq (including operations known as Operation Desert Shield, Operation Desert Storm, and Operation Provide Comfort).
(2) The term 'incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm' means costs referred to in section 251(b)(2)(D)(ii) of the Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act of 1985 (2 U.S.C. 901(b)(2)(D)(ii)).
(3) The term 'Persian Gulf conflict' means the period beginning on August 2, 1990, and ending thereafter on the date prescribed by Presidential proclamation or by law.
(4) The term 'congressional defense committees' has the meaning given that term in section 3 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991 (Public Law 101-510; 104 Stat. 1498).
SEC. 4. CONSTRUCTION WITH PUBLIC LAW 101-510.
Any authorization of appropriations, or authorization of the transfer of authorizations of appropriations, made by this Act is in addition to the authorization of appropriations, or the authority to make transfers, provided in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991 (Public Law 101-510).
TITLE I - AUTHORIZATION OF FISCAL YEAR 1991 SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR OPERATION DESERT STORM
SEC. 101. FUNDS IN THE DEFENSE COOPERATION ACCOUNT
(a) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATION. - During fiscal years 1991, 1992, and 1993, there is authorized to be appropriated to the Department of Defense current and future balances in the Defense Cooperation Account established under section 2608 of title 10, United States Code.
(b) USE OF FUNDS. - Amounts appropriated pursuant to subsection (a) shall be available only for -
(1) transfer by the Secretary of Defense to fiscal years 1991, 1992, and 1993 appropriation accounts of the Department of Defense or Coast Guard for incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm; and
(2) replenishment of the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund created under section 102.
SEC. 102. PERSIAN GULF REGIONAL DEFENSE FUND
(a) ESTABLISHMENT OF ACCOUNT. - There is established in the Treasury of the United States a working capital account for the Department of Defense to be known as the 'Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund'.
(b) AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS. - During fiscal years 1991 and 1992, there is authorized to be appropriated to the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund the sum of $15,000,000,000.
(c) USE OF FUNDS. - Funds appropriated pursuant to subsection (b) shall be available only for transfer by the Secretary of Defense to fiscal years 1991, 1992, and 1993 appropriation accounts of the Department of Defense or Coast Guard for the incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm. Such funds may be used for that purpose only to the extent that funds are not available in the Defense Cooperation Account for transfer for such incremental costs.
(d) REPLENISHMENT OF ACCOUNT. - Amounts transferred from the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund shall be replenished from funds available in the Defense Cooperation Account to the extent that funds are available in the Defense Cooperation Account. Whenever the balance in the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund is less than the amount appropriated to that account pursuant to this section, the Secretary shall transfer from the Defense Cooperation Account such funds as become available to the account to replenish the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund before making any transfer of such funds under sections 101 and 102.
(e) REVERSION OF BALANCE UPON TERMINATION OF ACCOUNT. - Any balance in the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund at the time of the termination of the account shall revert to the general fund of the Treasury.
SEC. 103. ADDITIONAL TRANSFER AUTHORITY
The amount of the transfer authority provided in section 1401 of Public Law 101-510 is hereby increased by the amount of such transfers as the Secretary of Defense makes pursuant to law (other than Public Law 101-511) to make adjustments among amounts provided in titles I and II of Public Law 101-511 due to incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm.
SEC. 104. ADMINISTRATION OF TRANSFERS
A transfer made under the authority of section 101 or 102 increases by the amount of the transfer the amount authorized for the account to which the transfer is made.
SEC. 105. NOTICE TO CONGRESS OF TRANSFERS
(a) NOTICE-AND-WAIT. - A transfer may not be made under section 101 or 102 until the seventh day after the congressional defense committees receive a report with respect to that transfer under subsection (b).
(b) CONTENT OF REPORT. - A report under subsection (a) shall include the following:
(1) A certification by the Secretary of Defense that the amount or amounts proposed to be transferred will be used only for incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm.
(2) A statement of each account to which the transfer is proposed to be made and the amount proposed to be transferred to such account.
(3) A description of the programs, projects, and activities for which funds proposed to be transferred are proposed to be used.
(4) In the case of a transfer from the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund established under section 102, an explanation of the reasons why funds are not available in the Defense Cooperation Account for such transfer.
SEC. 106. MONTHLY REPORTS ON TRANSFERS
Not later than seven days after the end of each month in fiscal years 1991, 1992, and 1993, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the congressional defense committees and the Comptroller General of the United States a detailed report on the cumulative total amount of the transfers made under the authority of this title through the end of that month.
TITLE II - WAIVER OF PERSONNEL CEILINGS AFFECTED BY OPERATION DESERT STORM
SEC. 203. AUTHORIZATION FROM DEFENSE COOPERATION ACCOUNT
(a) AUTHORIZATION. - In addition to authorizations under section 101, there is hereby authorized to be appropriated from the Defense Cooperation Account such sums as may be necessary for increases in military personnel costs for fiscal years 1991 through 1995 resulting from the exercise of the authorities provided in section 201. Such increases in costs are incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm.
(b) USE OF FUNDS. - Funds appropriated to the Persian Gulf Regional Defense Fund pursuant to section 102(b) may be used for the purposes described in subsection (a) to the extent provided in section 102(c).
(c) REPORTING. - Funds obligated for the purposes described in subsection (a) shall be included in the reports required by section 106.
SEC. 204. CONFORMING REPEAL
Section 1117 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1991 (Public Law 101-510; 104 Stat. 1637) is repealed.
TITLE IV - REPORTS ON FOREIGN CONTRIBUTIONS AND THE COSTS OF OPERATION DESERT STORM
SEC. 401. REPORTS ON UNITED STATES COSTS IN THE PERSIAN GULF CONFLICT AND FOREIGN CONTRIBUTIONS TO OFFSET SUCH COSTS
(a) REPORTS REQUIRED. - The Director of the Office of Management and Budget shall prepare, in accordance with this section, periodic reports on the incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm and on the amounts of contributions made to the United States by foreign countries to offset those costs. The Director shall prepare the reports in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, and other appropriate Government officials.
(b) COSTS OF OPERATION DESERT STORM. -
(1) PERIOD COSTS AND CUMULATIVE COSTS. - Each report prepared under subsection (a) shall specify -
(A) the incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm that were incurred during the period covered by the report; and
(B) the cumulative total of such costs, by fiscal year, from August 1, 1990, to the end of the period covered by the report.
(2) NONRECURRING COSTS AND COSTS OFFSET. - In specifying the incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm that were incurred during the period covered by a report and the total of such costs, the Director shall separately identify those costs that -
(A) are nonrecurring costs;
(B) are offset by in-kind contributions; or
(C) are offset (or proposed to be offset) by the realignment, reprogramming, or transfer of funds appropriated for activities unrelated to the Persian Gulf conflict.
(c) SPECIFIC COST AREAS. - Each report prepared under subsection (a) on the incremental costs associated with Operation Desert Storm shall specify an allocation of the total amount of such costs among the military departments, the Defense Agencies of the Department of Defense, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, by category, including the following categories:
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"(1) IN GENERAL. - If the taxpayer's principal residence or any of its contents is compulsorily or involuntarily converted as a result of a Presidentially declared disaster -
"(A) TREATMENT OF INSURANCE PROCEEDS. -
"(i) EXCLUSION FOR UNSCHEDULED PERSONAL PROPERTY. - No gain shall be recognized by reason of the receipt of any insurance proceeds for personal property which was part of such contents and which was not scheduled property for purposes of such insurance.
"(ii) OTHER PROCEEDS TREATED AS COMMON FUND. - In the case of any insurance proceeds (not described in clause (1)) for such residence or contents -
"(I) such proceeds shall be treated as received for the conversion of a single item of property, and
"(II) any property which is similar or related in service or use to the residence so converted (or contents thereof) shall be treated for purposes of subsection (a)(2) as property similar or related in service or use to such single item of property.
"(B) EXTENSION OF REPLACEMENT PERIOD. - Subsection (a)(2)(B) shall be applied with respect to any property so converted by substituting "4 years" for "2 years".
"(2) PRESIDENTIALLY DECLARED DISASTER. - For purposes of this subsection, the term 'Presidentially declared disaster' means any disaster which, with respect to the area in which the residence is located, resulted in a subsequent determination by the President that such area warrants assistance by the Federal Government under the Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act.
"(3) PRINCIPAL RESIDENCE. - For purposes of this subsection, the term 'principal residence' has the same meaning as when used in section 1034, except that no ownership requirement shall be imposed."
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. - The amendment made by subsection (a) shall apply to property compulsorily or involuntarily converted as a result of disasters for which the determination referred to in section 1033(h)(2) of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 (as added by this section) is made on or after September 1, 1991, and to taxable years ending on or after such date.
By Mr. AKAKA:
S.3124. A bill to amend the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act and the Farm Credit Act of 1971 to establish a program to aid beginning farmers and ranchers, to improve the operation of the Farmers Home Administration, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry.
FARMING OPPORTUNITY ACT
Mr. AKAKA. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Farming Opportunity Act, a bill to target credit assistance to those who need it most - beginning farmers.
Anyone familiar with farming should be alarmed by the dramatic decline in the number of farmers and the advancing age of our farm population. Last month the Census Bureau announced that the average age of our farmers continues to grow older and that farm population has once again declined.
The average farmer is 52 years of age, compared to an average of 33 years for nonfarmers. Today, there are twice as many farmers over the age of 60 as there are below the age of 35. As our aging farm population retires, we must ask ourselves: Where will the next generation of farmers come from?
Clearly we are not doing enough to attract rural youth to farming. All too often, young people with farm backgrounds don't follow in their parents' footsteps. Often this occurs at their parents' urging. Farming simply has too many barriers to remain attractive to young people.
Gone are the days when, if you had land, labor, and a little cash, you could make a go at farming. Modern farms are capital intensive businesses. Ask struggling young farmers about the greatest challenge they face, and the near-universal response you will hear is "access to credit."
The Federal Government simply has not done enough to help beginning farmers establish themselves or remain in business. In part, this is because the Farmers Home Administration has forsaken its central mission of extending credit to beginning farmers until their operations can become viable. The legislation I introduce today is a companion measure to H.R. 2401, introduced by Representative PENNY, and is designed to redirect the lending priorities of the Farmers Home Administration.
Under this bill, a new FmHA loan program would be established to assist persons interested in pursuing farming, ranching and aquaculture as their primary occupation. It specifically targets the beginning farmer - individuals who have not previously operated a farm or have operated farms for less thenthan 5 years.
To relieve assistance under the Farming Opportunity Act, an applicant must agree to participate in loan assessment, borrower training and financial management programs under the Department of Agriculture. An applicant must be able to demonstrate that after 10 years the farming operation will be viable without further FmHA loans. Finally, the measure creates a special downpayment loan program so that these farmers can achieve the dream of owning their own farm.
Nowhere would such a program have greater benefit thatthan in Hawaii. Due to a number of recent developments, we have an abundance of idle farmland and a growing rural labor pool.
Last Friday, the big island's second largest sugar plantation, Mauna Kea Agribusiness, announced that it would cease farming sugarcane. Beginning in November, nearly 9,000 acres of caneland will be converted to other agricultural uses.
One-third of the land producing sugarcane 20 years ago is no longer being cultivated today. By the time that Mauna Kea's sugar operations have come to an end, Hawaii's cane acreage will have declined by 85,000 acres. If past experience is a guide, only 12 percent will be planted in other crops.
There is an ample supply of good farmland in Hawaii. In addition to the changes planned by Mauna Kea Sugar, there is evidence that additional farm acreage may be available soon. As a means of raising capital in order to reduce its debt, the big island's Hamakua Sugar Co. has announced plans to sell nearly 2,000 acres at Laupahoehoe. The land will be subdivided into small agricultural lots and offered for sale to current and former Hamakua employees, and to nearby residents.
In another development, the 9,600-acre Mauna Kea Ranch was recently subjected to a foreclosure sale. While the new landowner has not announced its intentions about the use of this property, ranching or agriculture appears to be the only conceivable land use. Further reductions in Hawaii's sugar acreage remain a possibility, as the Hawaiian sugar industry gets caught in a squeeze between static or declining sugar prices and higher production costs.
Rising unemployment, especially on the neighbor islands, means that there is a labor pool capable of becoming the next generation of Hawaii's farmers. On the big island, unemployment is 3.1 percent above the statewide average. Molokai is 4.3 percent above the State average, while Maui's unemployment is 1.3 percent above the State as a whole.
The neighbor island economy has been hard hit by a downturn isin sugar and tourism. The Farming Opportunity Act can offer a shot in the arm for our lagging economy. Many sugar workers have spent their lives in agriculture, and I want to ensure that they can continue to find employment in farming.
Agriculture has always been the economic backbone of rural Hawaii. The decline of sugar means that we must turn to other crops if we are to preserve the economic health of the neighbor islands. The best way to achieve this transition is to promote new ventures in diversified agriculture by targeting credit assistance to beginning farmers.
There is no magic answer to the problems that precipitated Mauna Kea's decline. But I am committed to finding solutions that will maintain a strong and healthy economy in rural Hawaii.
Fortunately, Hawaii has an abundance of good agricultural land as well as ambitious young people capable of farming successfully. What is lacking is a credit program specifically designed for the needs of beginning farmers. Through the Farming Opportunity Act, we can establish a new generation of farmers who will produce diversified crops that are in demand in mainland and overseas markets.
Mr President, I ask unanimous consent that a copy of the bill be printed in the RECORD at the conclusion of my statement.
There being no objection, the bill was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
S. 3124
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION. 1. SHORT TITLE; TABLE OF CONTENTS.
(a) SHORT TITLE. - This Act may be cited as the 'Farming Opportunity Act of 1992'.
(b) TABLE OF CONTENTS. - The table of contents of this Act is as follows.
Sec. 1. Short title; short title.
Sec. 2. Limitation on aggregate indebtedness.
Sec. 3. Federal-State beginning farmer partnership.
Sec. 4. Beginning farmer and rancher program.
Sec. 5. Graduation of borrowers with operating loans or guarantees to private commercial credit.
Sec. 6. Time period within which county committees are required to meet to consider applications for farm ownership and operating loans and guarantees and beginning farmer plans.
Sec. 7. Period for certification of eligibility for loans.
Sec. 8. Processing of applications for farm operating loans.
Sec. 9. Simplified application for guaranteed loans of $50,000 or less.
Sec. 10. Graduation of seasoned direct loan borrowers to the loan guarantee program.
Sec. 11. Debt service margin requirements.
Sec. 12. Targeting of loans to members of groups whose members have been subjected to gender prejudice.
Sec. 13. Recordkeeping of loan success rates by gender.
Sec. 14. Effective date.
SEC. 2. LIMITATION ON AGGREGATE INDEBTEDNESS.
The first sentence of section 305 of the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act (7 U.S.C. 1925) is amended by striking "and 310D" and inserting "310D, and 310E".
SEC. 3. FEDERAL-STATE BEGINNING FARMER PARTNERSHIP.
(a)
COORDINATION OF ASSISTANCE FOR ELIGIBLE BEGINNING FARMERS AND RANCHERS. - Section 309 of the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act (7 U.S.C. 1929) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:
"(i)(1) Within 60 days after any State expresses to the Secretary, in writing, a desire to coordinate the provision of financial assistance to eligible beginning farmers and ranchers in the state, the Secretary and the State shall conclude a joint memorandum of understanding that shall govern how the Secretary and the State are to coordinate the assistance.
"(2) The memorandum of understanding shall provide that if a State beginning farmer program makes a commitment to provide an eligible beginning farmer or rancher (as defined in section 310E(e)) with financing to establish or maintain a viable farming or ranching operation, the Secretary shall, subject to applicable law, normal loan approval criteria, and the availability of funds, provide that farmer or rancher with -
"(A) a downpayment loan under section 310(E);
"(B) a guarantee of the financing provided by the State program; or
"(C) such a loan and such a guarantee.
"(3) The Secretary may not charge any person any fee with respect to the provision of any guarantee under this subsection.
"(4) As used in paragraph (1), the term 'State beginning farmer program' means any program that is -
"(A) carried out by, or under contract with, a State; and
"(B) designed to assist persons in obtaining the financial assistance necessary to enter agriculture and establish viable farming or ranching operations.".
(b) ADVISORY COMMITTEE. -
(1) ESTABLISHMENT; PURPOSE. - Within 18 months after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Agriculture shall establish an advisory committee, to be known as the 'Advisory Committee on Beginning Farmers and Ranchers', which shall provide advice to the Secretary on -
(A) the development of the program of coordinated assistance to eligible beginning farmers and ranchers under section 300(1) of the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act (as added by subsection (a) of this section);
(B) ways to maximize the number of new farming and ranching opportunities created through the program;
(C) ways to encourage States to participate in the program,
(D) the administration of the program; and
(E) other methods of creating new farming or ranching opportunities.
(2) MEMBERSHIP. - The Secretary shall appoint the members of the Advisory Committee which shall include representatives from the following:
(A) The Farmers Home Administration.
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2. CHARACTERISTICS OF POVERTY IN AFRICA
2.1. Definition and Causes of African Poverty
2.1.1. What Is Poverty?
Poverty is the state of deprivation of fundamental human needs and expectations. Among these are the desire for sufficient food and water, adequate shelter, good health, long life, knowledge, and the capacity to provide materially for oneself and one's family through productive endeavor. Poverty is, thus, far more than lack of income, although that is how it is typically measured. It is rather the absence of basic human progress, without which the concept of social and economic development becomes a mockery.
Poverty may be defined relatively and absolutely. Relative poverty refers to comparative measures of deprivation between groups within one country or cross-nationally. Absolute poverty attempts to define a minimum standard of material acquisition below which one is poor anywhere in the world. The absolute poverty line is normally that income required to secure a basic nutritional intake (2,250 calories per day) and other necessities (Lipton, 1988). The World Bank has estimated this consumption-based poverty line to lie between $275 and $370 per person per year, according to country context (World Bank, 1990a).
The absolute poverty line in each country should be estimated by calculating the cost of a basket of essential goods and adjusting it to reflect real purchasing power with respect to other countries. The number of poor households in a country can then be expressed as a proportion of total population. This headcount index, however, fails to indicate the degree to which the poor fall below the poverty line. The poverty gap measures the income necessary to bring the poor up to the poverty line. Nevertheless, both the headcount and the poverty gap calculation fail to indicate the distribution of inequality among the poor.
Poverty lines adjusted for purchasing power are thus gross measures of the number of poor in a country. Country-specific poverty lines can only be a start in understanding the characteristics and composition of poverty, with more detailed analysis necessary for targeting programmes of poverty reduction.
2.1.2. The Nature of African Poverty
Africa is among the poorest regions of the world, and the number of poor is increasing rapidly. The number of persons with less than $370 income per year increased by about two-thirds between 1970 and 1985 and is expected to increase from 180 million in 1985 (47 percent of the population) to 265 million by the year 2000.
If current trends continue, the African poor, constituting 16 percent of the world's destitute in 1985, will comprise 30 percent of the total by the year 2000 (Lele and Adu-Nyako, 1991). Other estimates of African poverty are worse and probably reflect an unrealistically high absolute poverty level. The ILO, for example, estimates that the number of absolute poor in Africa had already reached 270 million by 1985, about half the total population; by 1995 this number is expected to reach nearly 400 million (UNDP, 1990).
Poverty in Africa is still primarily a rural phenomenon, despite the increasing presence of slums around rapidly growing cities. Reflecting the generally dismal conditions of rural life, urbanization has been rapidly increasing throughout Africa and has been growing faster than in other regions of the world. From an urban population of 14 percent in 1965, the towns and cities of Africa expanded to 28 percent of the total population in 1985 and continued to grow at over 6 percent per year throughout the 1980s. Migration to cities has tended to be primarily a male phenomenon, leading to heightened impoverishment of rural areas and rapidly growing number of female-headed rural families, especially in Southern and Eastern Africa.
Although varying from country to country, the overall population growth rate for Africa is about 3.1 percent a year, while per capita agricultural production has declined for more than a decade. In some countries, population doubled between 1965 and 1987. During the same period real GNP per capita declined from $400 to §330 (excluding Nigeria).
From 1970 to 1985, agricultural production rose on average only 1.4 percent per year, half the population growth rate. In spite of rising food imports, malnutrition has become endemic in many countries.
Malnutrition and low income contribute strongly to the short life expectancy of Africans, currently about 54 years compared to 62 for all developing countries. The child mortality rate of 196 per 1,000 is second only to India (200) among the regions of the world. Primary school enrollments are the lowest in the world, averaging 56 percent, and are strongly linked to high infant and child mortality and morbidity rates.
The lack of reliable data makes detailed accounting of the poor impossible at present. Few countries can do more than estimate the number of absolute poor and their location. However, for countries with good data, the pattern of severely worsening poverty in Africa holds across the continent (World Bank, 1990a). In Tanzania, real rural living standards fell at an average annual rate of 2.5 percent between 1969 and 1983. Real urban wages declined by 65 percent during the same period, and real private consumption per person has dropped 43 percent since 1973. In Nigeria, consumption fell by 7 percent a year during the early 1980s and living standards were lower in the mid-1980s than in the 1950s. In Ghana, nearly 60 percent of the population in 1985 lived on less than $370 per year, while in Botswana this figure was almost 50 percent, in spite of a near 9 percent a year economic growth rate since 1965. In contrast, Morocco counted only 34 percent of its population below the poverty line in 1984, down from 43 percent in 1970 (World Bank, 1990a).
2.1.3. Causes of African Poverty
The origins of widespread poverty in Africa are rooted in the economic dislocation and political balkanization brought on by European colonialism. Since the end of colonialism, the following factors have limited African progress in achieving broad-based economic development, and have resulted in stagnant growth and declining per capita incomes (Dumont and Mottin, 1980):
Persistence in following inappropriate development models based on an emphasis on capital-intensive, industrial sector investment at the expense of labor-intensive agricultural-led growth. This has resulted in neglect of rural areas in favor of urban zones, and a massive rural-to-urban exodus;
Overemphasis on public sector interventions in economic activities more efficiently performed by the private sector. Not only has this hindered private sector development, but it has also retarded development of public capacity to work effectively in areas that are appropriate for government intervention (such as the legal system, education, health, and agricultural research);
Failure to recognize the informal sector as a legitimate engine of economic growth. Although several governments have become more enlightened in recent years, many are still more concerned with policing informal sector participants than in seeking strategies for assisting them to improve the performance of their enterprises;
Over-reliance on projects, donors, and foreign assistance that has resulted in too many poorly conceived and supervised projects, bloated recurrent costs, and inconsistent development strategies as governments depend more on outsiders than their own citizens to make crucial public policy and investment decisions;
Neglect of subsistence food crops through lack of research and extension of appropriate production and processing technologies;
Unfavorable trends in the terms of trade as many African agricultural and mineral exports have declined in price at the same time that import costs have risen, most notably for oil; and
Insufficient concern with environmental degradation as population growth combined with expansion of areas cleared for agriculture and fuelwood gathering have imperiled sustainable development.
Historical poverty in Africa has been perpetuated in recent years by slow economic growth coupled with rapid population increases. African GDP growth slowed during the 1980s to 0.3 percent during the period 1980-1986 and even declined by 1.1 percent in 1987. Since 1988 growth rates have turned positive again but remain modest.
Much of the stagnation in economic growth revolved around the inability of agriculture to outperform population increase, itself primarily a reflection of low productivity and poor national policies. Exports, which could have spurred real growth, were hindered in most countries by overvalued exchange rates, lack of price incentives to producers, and export taxes. Poor governmental agriculture policies, in fact, seem to have been as important in promoting agricultural decline in Africa as the general reversal of commodity terms of trade during the 1970s and their stagnation in the 1980s. This trend has been compounded by competition from Asian and Latin American countries, whose share of agricultural exports has expanded rapidly in the last decade.
Slow growth of export-oriented agriculture has been accompanied by a similar stagnation of smallholder food crop production and productivity since the 1960s. This neglect of smallholder agricultural development has operated in favor of import-substituting industrialization. Although some countries were successful in promoting exports for national growth (for example, C<*_>o-circ<*/>te d'Ivoire, Cameroon, and Kenya), most were not. In general, exploitation of natural forest or mineral resources and capital-intensive, protected infant industries created pockets of prosperity, yet bypassed the bulk of the population.
In retrospect, it appears that African countries would have been far more successful at reducing poverty and stimulating economic growth had they focused on attaining an appropriate policy environment and stimulating investment in smallholder agriculture and health and education, while developing carefully their comparative advantage in higher-value export crops. A broad-based, small-farm approach could have stimulated family savings and on-farm investment leading to increased food crop productivity and diversification into specialized export crops. This could have produced in many countries an economic transformation to postsubsistence agriculture, while at the same time guaranteeing increased food self-reliance.
Social services and infrastructure investment spurred by the apparent commodity export boom of the early 1970s, was replaced by the mid-1980s by enormous debt service obligations and macroeconomic adjustment programmes. This debt burden has increased significantly since the mid-1970s; by 1987, debt outstanding was nearly $129 billion, up from only $20 billion in 1975. By 1986, debt service represented about 45 percent of African export earnings, effectively stifling much potential for renewed economic growth.
In many countries, salaries now constitute an unacceptably high share of government expenditures (70-85 percent), while essential investment has dwindled to less than replacement levels. Social indicators in many countries of Africa have stagnated or even declined (except for immunization rates in some countries) during the 1980s, and subsidized services remain untargeted on the poor and tend to be disproportionately captured by the wealthier classes. Primary education, sanitation and potable water services, and basic health care have not been provided by African governments at levels sufficient to match population growth, because of the crowding-out effect of salary expenditures for oversized parastatal and government bureaucracies, urban social services and infrastructure, and more recently debt service obligations.
2.2. Who Are the Poor?
Comparatively speaking, most African populations are poor by world standards. Moreover, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) distinguishes various categories of poor: the chronic poor at the margin of society, constantly suffering from deprivation; the borderline poor, who are occasionally poor during the year because of employment insecurity; and the newly poor, victims of budgetary austerity under structural adjustment (UNDP, 1990). These distinctions are important in the targeting of poverty reduction actions within the context of an overall poverty reduction strategy for the African Development Bank.
The concern here is to identify the absolute poor, that is that portion of the population in various countries with income per person too low to afford 2,250 calories per day or basic nutritional needs (Lipton, 1988). Although varying substantially from country to country, a generally accepted per capita income level for assuring nutritional adequacy is about $370 - adjusted for purchasing power parity. This line is, of course, arbitrary and represents a proxy indicator for serious material deprivation.
The identification of an even lower level of poverty based on an annual income of $275 per capita defines the extremely poor, or 'ultra-poor.' Both levels define poverty in absolute terms compared to relative income levels based on country income or consumption deciles or quintiles.
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1. INTRODUCTION
The United States Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management (OCRWM) has prepared this draft Strategy for parties with an interest in spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste transportation activities. The purpose of the Strategy is to inform the public what steps DOE will take to ultimately develop an implementation plan to provide funding and technical assistance to States and Indian Tribes as required by Section 180(c) of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, as amended (NWPA). A schedule of when the steps will take place is included.
1.1 Purpose
The NWPA directs DOE to dispose of the spent nuclear fuel generated by commercial nuclear power facilities and high-level radioactive waste from defense facilities. OCRWM was established to carry out this mission. OCRWM is developing a transportation system to support shipping of spent nuclear fuel to a Monitored Retrievable Storage (MRS) facility, and spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste to a final disposal repository.
A 1987 amendment to the NWPA added Section 180(c) which states that DOE:
...shall provide technical assistance and funds to States for training for public safety officials of appropriate units of local government and Indian Tribes through whose jurisdiction the Secretary [of Energy] plans to transport spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste .... Training shall cover procedures required for safe routine transportation of these materials, as well as procedures for dealing with emergency response situations.
Passage of Section 180(c) committed OCRWM to provide funding for training and technical assistance for public safety officials. OCRWM stated it will use a phased approach to deliver the assistance. In the 1991 Draft Mission Plan Amendment, OCRWM committed to define workable mechanisms for administering technical assistance. Assistance will initially be for shipments to an MRS, if an MRS site has been identified. OCRWM will begin providing training assistance between 1993 and 1995 to jurisdictions along the initial corridors from the utilities to an MRS; and make adjustments and support retraining as needed, after 1995.
This draft strategy represents a five-step process to meet the requirements of Section 180(c). The steps are: (1) continue current efforts with the interested groups to identify and discuss funding and technical assistance issues; (2) develop a Policy Options Paper to identify possible Section 180(c) implementation processes; (3) issue a policy statement identifying the option selected; (4) issue a plan detailing the implementation process; and (5) initiate funding for 'training assistance.' For brevity, the term 'training assistance' is used to mean 'technical assistance and funds to States for training for public safety officials of appropriate units of local government and Indian Tribes through whose jurisdiction the Secretary [of Energy] plans to transport spent nuclear fuel or high-level radioactive waste.'
A notice of the availability of this draft for review by Federal agencies, States, Indian Tribes, and interested parties will be published in the Federal Register. The comments received will be fully considered and will be reflected, where appropriate, in the final strategy. All comments will be catalogued and their disposition explained in writing.
1.2 Scope
This document presents the five-step process for OCRWM to develop an implementation plan to meet the requirements of Section 180(c). The introductory section includes information on the purpose of the Strategy; the legal requirements of the NWPA with respect to technical assistance and funding to train transportation corridor and host governments for safe routine transportation and emergency response, and the relevant sections of the Hazardous Materials Transportation Uniform Safety Act of 1990 (HMTUSA); planning principles that address or incorporate recommendations repeated most often by interested parties; and a proposed schedule.
The subsequent section, Issue Identification as an Interactive Process, describes the methods and means OCRWM has employed to ensure that all interested and potentially affected parties can have an appropriate predecisional role in the development of Section 180(c) policy. The three remaining sections delineate the steps to provide training assistance.
Accompanying the Strategy are lists of definitions and acronyms in common usage throughout the document, and general references.
1.3 Legal Requirements
The NWPA contains provisions regarding technical assistance and funding for training relating to transportation for both host and corridor jurisdictions. Assistance provisions mandated by Section 180(c) apply to corridor States and Indian Tribes through whose jurisdictions spent fuel and high-level waste are transported to an MRS or repository. For corridor Indian Tribes thoughthrough whose jurisdictions DOE will transport spent nuclear fuel and high-level waste, DOE will provide direct funding to Indian Tribes as sovereign Nations.
For a State or Indian Tribe that will host a repository, Section 116(c) provides for financial assistance to the State, and Section 118(b) insures financial assistance to an Indian Tribe, to participate in "activities required by Sections 116 and 117 or authorized by written agreement entered into pursuant to subsection 117(c)." Section 117(c) of the NWPA states that OCRWM will work with a State [or Indian Tribe] where a repository is being constructed and with "the units of general local government in the vicinity of the repository site, in resolving the offsite concerns ... arising from accidents, necessary road upgrading and access to the site, ongoing emergency preparedness and emergency response, monitoring of transportation of high-level radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel..." under written agreement.
For a State or Indian Tribe who will host an MRS facility, Section 149 of the NWPA extends the same "provisions of Section 116(c) or 118(b) with respect to grants, technical assistance, and other financial assistance...to the state, to affected Indian Tribes and to affected units of local government...in the same manner as for a repository."
Section 403(d)(1) and (2) of the NWPA provides that training assistance for an MRS or repository host State or Indian Tribe would be through an agreement submitted by the Nuclear Waste Negotiator to Congress "...and shall contain such provisions as are necessary to preserve any right to participation or compensation of such State, unit of local government, or Indian Tribe under Sections 116(c), 117, and 118(b)."
If DOE is unable to reach any agreement with the repository or MRS host State or Indian Tribe under these sections, DOE shall develop a policy to provide training assistance for emergency response and safe routine transportation for a host State or Indian Tribe within the scope of Section 180(c) training assistance.
The recently passed HMTUSA amended the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act of 1974. HMTUSA has emergency response and Federal inspection provisions that have potential implications for the technical assistance and funding required by Section 180(c).
Section 17 of HMTUSA authorizes Federal funding for: 1) planning grants to States to develop emergency response plans; 2) training grants to States and Indian Tribes for training official personnel in hazardous materials emergency response; 3) curriculum development by a Federal committee to develop a list of courses, recommend courses of study and minimum hours of instruction, and develop appropriate emergency response training and planning for non-Federal Government and Tribal employees under other Federal grant programs; and 4) monitoring and technical assistance through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, in coordination with four other agencies including DOE, for non-Federal Government and Tribal emergency response training and planning. HMTUSA also requires that Federal departments, agencies, and instrumentalities coordinate to minimize duplication of effort and expense in all emergency response and preparedness training programs.
Section 16 of HMTUSA directs the Secretary of Transportation (DOT) to employ 30 additional hazardous materials inspectors, including 10 of whom are to focus on promoting safety in the transportation of radioactive materials.
In order to ensure cooperation between DOT and DOE in implementing both Section 180(c) and the relevant sections of HMTUSA, DOE is represented on the HMTUSA Interagency Coordination Group (ICG), and will coordinate with the ICG through the DOE State, Tribal, and Local Working Group on Transportation Emergency Preparedness.
1.4 Planning Principles
In carrying out the requirements to provide technical assistance and funds for training, OCRWM is committed to an open dialogue with all interested parties. Interested parties have repeatedly requested that OCRWM include the following in its implementation of Section 180(c). OCRWM is committed to fulfilling these requests.
OCRWM will strive to develop a program with enough flexibility to accommodate the wide variety of State, Tribal, and local assistance needs.
OCRWM training assistance will be integrated into current established Federal, State, and Tribal training assistance structures.
OCRWM will integrate its Section 180(c) planning with current DOT HMTUSA planning functions and rulemakings, where possible.
OCRWM will seek input from the diverse and broadly representative sources using a cooperative approach.
OCRWM recognizes that diverse interested groups can make contributions to the decision-making process. OCRWM will seek input in particular from representatives of transportation corridor jurisdictions who will be directly impacted by NWPA shipments.
1.5 Schedule
A proposed schedule for OCRWM to provide training assistance for public officials is shown in Figure 1. The Section 180(c) strategy will be flexible enough to accommodate changes in OCRWM program schedule. Opportunities for ample interaction and predecisional input from interested parties and the public have been factored into the schedule. Current planning assumes that OCRWM will accept spent fuel for shipping to an MRS in 1998. Prior to 1994, OCRWM should be able to predict whether an MRS will be available to receive shipments, and thus plan for training to begin. Training assistance will depend on the location of an MRS facility and the spent fuel acceptance schedule.
2. ISSUE IDENTIFICATION: AN INTERACTIVE PROCESS
Section 180(c) training assistance is of particular interest to the State, Tribal, and local governments. OCRWM has utilized a cooperative approach to identify, discuss, and resolve planning issues to provide a viable training assistance program strategy.
2.1 Activities to Date
After the enactment of the NWPA in 1982, OCRWM initiated a dialogue with interested parties to identify and resolve issues related to OCRWM shipment planning. Interested parties included Federal, State, and Tribal governments; the nuclear power utilities; the transportation industry; special interest groups; the media; and the public. OCRWM was able to use these interactions to identify issues and formalize a resolution process. OCRWM published its Transportation Institutional Plan (TIP) in 1986. The TIP identified emergency response, inspection, and enforcement issues, and provided a foundation for issue discussion and resolution processes that proved instrumental to developing this Strategy document.
The process to evaluate and resolve issues comprises continued identification, coordination, research, and resolution of issues using a combination of DOE policies and studies, work with regional and national groups of States, Indian Tribes and technical organizations, and interactions with interested parties.
With the passage of Section 180(c) in 1987, the commitments OCRWM had initiated regarding emergency response, inspection, and enforcement, became mandates. OCRWM began planning to provide training assistance, and resolve issues discussed in the TIP. As stated above, issues regarding emergency response, inspection, enforcement, and the implementation of Section 180(c) were identified through a variety of program activities with interested parties. These issues as stated in the TIP and discussed at TCG meetings include OCRWM's need to:
Define roles and responsibilities
Define potential emergency situations
Define the appropriate emergency actions to be taken by the first responders
Develop a set of inspection criteria
Develop a system for inspections
Determine training needs by assessing existing training programs
Determine the definition of assistance
Determine eligibility for assistance
Assess potential funding and assistance mechanisms
Explore the desirability of a training certification or standards process
Determine an approach to the timing of training assistance
Additional issues may be identified through the resolution process and through interactions with interested parties.
2.2 Issue Resolution Mechanisms
OCRWM and the interested parties are working together to develop an efficient plan to provide training assistance to States, Indian Tribes, and local governments. Some of the mechanisms that currently provide forums for communication, issue identification and resolution, and policy development include: OCRWM cooperative agreements with national, regional, and technical groups; the Transportation Coordination Group (TCG); the HMTUSA Interagency Coordination Group; the Federal Radiological Preparedness Coordinating Committee; and the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.
Working groups are a significant communication mechanism. An informal working group met following a TCG meeting in July 1989, to discuss a rough outline of this strategy document.
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="16">It is equally clear that a State might temper such an 'any county' rule to the extent a reasonable assessment of defendants' interests so justified.
Here, Montana has decided that the any-county rule should give way to a single-county rule where a defendant resides in Montana, arguably on the reasonable ground that a defendant should not be subjected to a plaintiff's tactical advantage of forcing a trial far from the defendant's residence. At the same time, Montana has weighed the interest of a defendant who does not reside in Montana differently, arguably on the equally reasonable ground that for most nonresident defendants the inconvenience will be great whether they have to defend in, say, Billings or Havre. See Power Manufacturing Co. v. Saunders, 274 U.S. 490, 498 (1927) (Holmes, J., dissenting). Montana could thus have decided that a nonresident defendant's interest in convenience is too slight to outweigh the plaintiff's interest in suing in the forum of his choice.
Burlington does not, indeed, seriously contend that such a decision is constitutionally flawed as applied to individual nonresident defendants. Nor does it argue that such a rule is unconstitutional even when applied to corporate defendants without a fixed place of business in Montana. Burlington does claim, however, that the rule is unconstitutional as applied to a corporate defendant like Burlington that not only has its home office in some other State or country, but also has a place of business in Montana that would qualify as its 'principal place of business' if it were a Montana corporation.
Burlington's claim fails. Montana could reasonably have determined that a corporate defendant's home office is generally of greater significance to the corporation's convenience in litigation than its other offices, that foreign corporations are unlikely to have their principal offices in Montana, and that Montana's domestic corporations will probably keep headquarters within the State. We cannot say, at least not on this record, that any of these assumptions is irrational. Cf. G. D. Searle & Co. v. Cohn, 455 U.S. 404, 410 (1982); Metropolitan Casualty Ins. Co. v. Brownell, 294 U.S. 580, 585 (1935). And upon them Montana may have premised the policy judgment, which we find constitutionally unimpeachable, that only the convenience to a corporate defendant of litigating in the county containing its home office is sufficiently significant to outweigh a plaintiff's interest in suing in the county of his choice.
Of course Montana's venue rules would have implemented that policy judgment with greater precision if they had turned on the location of a corporate defendant's principal place of business, not on its State of incorporation. But this is hardly enough to make the rules fail rational-basis review, for "rational distinctions may be made with substantially less than mathematical exactitude." New Orleans v. Dukes, 427 U.S. 297, 303 (1976); see Hughes v. Alexandria Scrap Corp., 426 U.S. 794, 814 (1976); Lindsley v. Natural Carbonic Gas Co., 220 U.S. 61, 78 (1911). Montana may reasonably have thought that the location of a corporate defendant's principal place of business would not be as readily verifiable as its State of incorporation, that a rule hinging on the former would invite wasteful sideshows of venue litigation, and that obviating the sideshows would be worth the loss in precision. These possibilities, of course, put Burlington a far cry away from the point of discharging its burden of showing that the underinclusiveness and overinclusiveness of Montana's venue rules is so great that the rules can no longer be said rationally to implement Montana's policy judgment. See, e.g., Brownell, supra, at 584. Besides, Burlington, having headquarters elsewhere, would not benefit even from a scheme based on domicile, and is therefore in no position to complain of Montana's using State of incorporation as a surrogate for domicile. See Roberts & Schaefer Co. v. Emmerson, 271 U.S. 50, 53-55 (1926); cf. United States v. Raines, 362 U.S. 17, 21 (1960).
Burlington is left with the argument that Power Manufacturing Co. v. Saunders, supra, controls this case. But it does not. In Saunders, we considered Arkansas' venue rules, which restricted suit against a domestic corporation to those counties where it maintained a place of business, 274 U.S., at 491-492, but exposed foreign corporations to suit in any county, id. at 492. We held that the distinction lacked a rational basis and therefore deprived foreign corporate defendants of the equal protection of the laws. Id., at 494. The statutory provision challenged in Saunders, however, applied only to foreign corporations authorized to do business in Arkansas, ibid., so that most of the corporations subject to its any-county rule probably had a place of business in Arkansas. In contrast, most of the corporations subject to Montana's any-county rule probably do not have their principal place of business in Montana. Thus, Arkansas' special rule for foreign corporations was tailored with significantly less precision than Montana's, and, on the assumption that Saunders is still good law, see American Motorists Ins. Co. v. Starnes, 425 U.S. 637, 645, n. 6 (1976), its holding does not invalidate Montana's venue rules.
In sum, Montana's venue rules can be understood as rationally furthering a legitimate state interest. The judgment of the Supreme Court of Montana is accordingly
Affirmed.
UNITED STATES v. ALVAREZ-MACHAIN
CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT
No. 91-712. Argued April 1, 1992 -Decided June 15, 1992
Respondent, a citizen and resident of Mexico, was forcibly kidnaped from his home and flown by private plane to Texas, where he was arrested for his participation in the kidnaping and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent and the agent's pilot. After concluding that DEA agents were responsible for the abduction, the District Court dismissed the indictment on the ground that it violated the Extradition Treaty between the United States and Mexico (Extradition Treaty or Treaty), and ordered respondent's repatriation. The Court of Appeals affirmed. Based on one of its prior decisions, the court found that, since the United States had authorized the abduction and since the Mexican Government had protested the Treaty violation, jurisdiction was improper.
Held: The fact of respondent's forcible abduction does not prohibit his trial in a United States court for violations of this country's criminal laws. Pp. 659-670.
(a) A defendant may not be prosecuted in violation of the terms of an extradition treaty. United States v. Rauscher, 119 U.S. 407. However, when a treaty has not been invoked, a court may properly exercise jurisdiction even though the defendant's presence is procured by means of a forcible abduction. Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436. Thus, if the Extradition Treaty does not prohibit respondent's abduction, the rule of Ker applies and jurisdiction was proper. Pp. 659-662.
(b) Neither the Treaty's language nor the history of negotiations and practice under it supports the proposition that it prohibits abductions outside of its terms. The Treaty says nothing about either country refraining from forcibly abducting people from the other's territory or the consequences if an abduction occurs. In addition, although the Mexican Government was made aware of the Ker doctrine as early as 1906, and language to curtail Ker was drafted as early as 1935, the Treaty's current version contains no such clause. Pp. 663-666.
(c) General principles of international law provide no basis for interpreting the Treaty to include an implied term prohibiting international abductions. It would go beyond established precedent and practice to draw such an inference form the treaty based on respondent's argument that abductions are so clearly prohibited in international law that there was no reason to include the prohibition in the Treaty itself. It was the practice of nations with regard to extradition treaties that formed the basis for this Court's decision in Rauscher, supra, to imply a term in the extradition treaty between the United States and England. Respondent's argument, however, would require a much larger inferential leap with only the most general of international law principles to support it. While respondent may be correct that his abduction was 'shocking' and in violation of general international law principles, the decision whether he should be returned to Mexico, as a matter outside the Treaty, is a matter for the Executive Branch. Pp. 666-670.
946 F. 2d 1466, reversed and remanded.
REHNQUIST, C.J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which WHITE; SCALIA; KENNEDY; SOUTER, and THOMAS, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which BLACKMUN and O'CONNOR, JJ., joined, post, p. 670.
Solicitor General Starr argued the cause for the United States. With him on the briefs were Assistant Attorney General Mueller, Deputy Solicitor General Bryson, Michael R. Dreeben, and Kathleen A. Felton.
Paul L. Hoffman argued the cause for respondent. With him on the brief were Ralph G. Steinhardt, Robin S. Toma, Mark D. Rosenbaum, John A. Powell, Steven R. Shapiro, Kate Martin, and Robert Steinberg.
CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST delivered the opinion of the Court.
The issue in this case is whether a criminal defendant, abducted to the United States from a nation with which it has an extradition treaty, thereby acquires a defense to the jurisdiction of this country's courts. We hold that he does not, and that he may be tried in federal district court for violations of the criminal law of the United States.
Respondent, Humberto Alvarez-Machain, is a citizen and resident of Mexico. He was indicted for participating in the kidnap and murder of United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) special agent Enrique Camarena-Salazar and a Mexican pilot working with Camarena, Alfredo Zavala-Avelar. The DEA believes that respondent, a medical doctor, participated in the murder by prolonging Agent Camarena's life so that others could further torture and interrogate him. On April 2, 190, respondent was forcibly kidnaped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, to be flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas, where he was arrested by DEA officials. The District Court concluded that DEA agents were responsible for respondent's abduction, although they were not personally involved in it. United States v. Caro-Quintero, 745 F. Supp. 599, 602-604, 609 (CD Cal. 1990).
Respondent moved to dismiss the indictment, claiming that his abduction constituted outrageous governmental conduct, and that the District Court lacked jurisdiction to try him because he was abducted in violation of the extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico. Extradition Treaty, May 4, 1978, [1979] United States-United Mexican States, 31 U.S.T. 5059, T.I.A.S. No. 9656 (Extradition Treaty or Treaty). The District Court rejected the outrageous governmental conduct claim, but held that it lacked jurisdiction to try respondent because his abduction violated the Extradition Treaty. The District Court discharged respondent and ordered that he be repatriated to Mexico. 745 F. Supp., at 614.
The Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the indictment and the repatriation of respondent, relying on its decision in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 939 F. 2d 1341 (CA9 1991), cert. pending, No. 91-670. 946 F. 2d 1466 (1991). In Verdugo, the Court of Appeals held that the forcible abduction of a Mexican national with the authorization or participation of the United States violated the Extradition Treaty between the United States and Mexico. Although the Treaty does not expressly prohibit such abductions, the Court of Appeals held that the 'purpose' of the Treaty was violated by a forcible abduction, 939 F. 2d, at 1350, which, along with a formal protest by the offended nation, would give a defendant the right to invoke the Treaty violation to defeat jurisdiction of the District Court to try him. The Court of Appeals further held that the proper remedy for such a violation would be dismissal of the indictment and repatriation of the defendant to Mexico.
In the instant case, the Court of Appeals affirmed the District Court's finding that the United States had authorized the abduction of respondent, and that letters from the Mexican Government to the United States Government served as an official protest of the Treaty violation. Therefore, the Court of Appeals ordered that the indictment against respondent be dismissed and that respondent be repatriated to Mexico. 946 F. 2d, at 1467. We granted certiorari, 502 U.S. 1024 (1992), and now reverse.
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="17">The fact of respondent's forcible abduction does not therefore prohibit his trial in a court in the United States for violations of the criminal laws of the United States.
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is therefore reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
So ordered.
JUSTICE STEVENS, with whom JUSTICE BLACKMUN and JUSTICE O'CONNOR join, dissenting.
The Court correctly observes that this case raises a question of first impression. See ante, at 659. The case is unique for several reasons. It does not involve an ordinary abduction by a private kidnaper, or bounty hunter, as in Ker v. Illinois, 119 U.S. 436 (1886); nor does it involve the apprehension of an American fugitive who committed a crime in one State and sought asylum in another, as in Frisbie v. Collins, 342 U.S. 519 (1952). Rather, it involves this country's abduction of another country's citizen; it also involves a violation of the territorial integrity of that other country, with which this country has signed an extradition treaty.
A Mexican citizen was kidnaped in Mexico and charged with a crime committed in Mexico; his offense allegedly violated both Mexican and American law. Mexico has formally demanded on at least two separate occasions that he be returned to Mexico and has represented that he will be prosecuted and, if convicted, punished for his offense. It is clear that Mexico's demand must be honored if this official abduction violated the 1978 Extradition Treaty between the United States and Mexico. In my opinion, a fair reading of the treaty in light of our decision in United States v. Rauscher, 119 U.S. 407 (1886), and applicable principles of international law, leads inexorably to the conclusion that the District Court, United States v. Caro-Quintero, 745 F. Supp. 599 (CD Cal. 1990), and the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 946 F. 2d 1466 (1991) (per curiam), correctly construed that instrument.
I
The extradition treaty with Mexico is a comprehensive document containing 23 articles and an appendix listing the extraditable offenses covered by the agreement. The parties announced their purpose in the preamble: The two governments desire "to cooperate more closely in the fight against crime and, to this end, to mutually render better assistance in matters of extradition." From the preamble, through the description of the parties' obligations with respect to offenses committed within as well as beyond the territory of a requesting party, the delineation of the procedures and evidentiary requirements for extradition, the special provisions for political offenses and capital punishment, and other details, the Treaty appears to have been designed to cover the entire subject of extradition. Thus, Article 22, entitled 'Scope of Application,' states that the "Treaty shall apply to offenses specified in Article 2 committed before and after this Treaty enters into force," and Article 2 directs that "[e]xtradition shall take place, subject to this Treaty, for willful acts which fall within any of [the extraditable offenses listed in] the clauses of the Appendix." Moreover, as noted by the Court, ante, at 663, Article 9 expressly provides that neither contracting party is bound to deliver up its own nationals, although it may do so in its discretion, but if it does not do so, it "shall submit the case to its competent authorities for purposes of prosecution."
Petitioner's claim that the Treaty is not exclusive, but permits forcible governmental kidnaping, would transform these, and other, provisions into little more than verbiage. For example, provisions requiring "sufficient" evidence to grant extradition (Art. 3), withholding extradition for political or military offenses (Art. 5), withholding extradition when the person sought has already been tried (Art. 6), withholding extradition when the statute of limitations for the crime has lapsed (Art. 7), and granting the requested State discretion to refuse to extradite an individual who would face the death penalty in the requesting country (Art. 8), would serve little purpose if the requesting country could simply kidnap the person. As the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recognized in a related case, "[e]ach of these provisions would be utterly frustrated if a kidnapping were held to be a permissible course of governmental conduct." United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 939 F. 2d 1341, 1349 (1991). In addition, all of these provisions "only make sense if they are understood as requiring each treaty signatory to comply with those procedures whenever it wishes to obtain jurisdiction over an individual who is located in another treaty nation." Id., at 1351.
It is true, as the Court notes, that there is no express promise by either party to refrain from forcible abductions in the territory of the other nation. See ante, at 664, 665-666. Relying on that omission, the Court, in effect, concludes that the Treaty merely creates an optional method of obtaining jurisdiction over alleged offenders, and that the parties silently reserved the right to resort to self-help whenever they deem force more expeditious than legal process. If the United States, for example, thought it more expedient to torture or simply to execute a person rather than to attempt extradition, these options would be equally available because they, too, were not explicitly prohibited by the Treaty. That, however, is a highly improbable interpretation of a consensual agreement, which on its face appears to have been intended to set forth comprehensive and exclusive rules concerning the subject of extradition. In my opinion, "the manifest scope and object of the treaty itself," Rauscher, 119 U.S., at 422, plainly imply a mutual undertaking to respect the territorial integrity of the other contracting party. That opinion is confirmed by a consideration of the "legal context" in which the Treaty was negotiated. Cannon v. University of Chicago, 441 U.S. 677, 699 (1979).
II
In Rauscher, the Court construed an extradition treaty that was far less comprehensive than the 1978 Treaty with Mexico. The 1842 treaty with Great Britain determined the boundary between the United States and Canada, provided for the suppression of the African slave trade, and also contained one paragraph authorizing the extradition of fugitives "in certain cases." 8 Stat. 576. In Article X, each nation agreed to "deliver up to justice all persons" properly charged with any one of seven specific crimes, including murder. 119 U.S., at 421. After Rauscher had been extradited for murder, he was charged with the lesser offense of inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on a member of the crew of a vessel on the high seas. Although the treaty did not purport to place any limit on the jurisdiction of the demanding State after acquiring custody of the fugitive, this Court held that he could not be tried for any offense other than murder. Thus, the treaty constituted the exclusive means by which the United States could obtain jurisdiction over a defendant within the territorial jurisdiction of Great Britain.
The Court noted that the treaty included several specific provisions, such as the crimes for which one could be extradited, the process by which the extradition was to be carried out, and even the evidence that was to be produced, and concluded that "the fair purpose of the treaty is, that the person shall be delivered up to be tried for that offence and for no other." Id., at 423. The Court reasoned that it did not make sense for the treaty to provide such specifics only to have the person "pas[s] into the hands of the country which charges him with the offence, free from all the positive requirements and just implications of the treaty under which the transfer of his person takes place." Id., at 421. To interpret the treaty in a contrary way would mean that a country could request extradition of a person for one of the seven crimes covered by the treaty, and then try the person for another crime, such as a political crime, which was clearly not covered by the treaty; this result, the Court concluded, was clearly contrary to the intent of the parties and the purpose of the treaty.
Rejecting an argument that the sole purpose of Article X was to provide a procedure for the transfer of an individual from the jurisdiction of one sovereign to another, the Court stated:
No such view of solemn public treaties between the great nations of the earth can be sustained by a tribunal called upon to give judicial construction to them.
The opposite view has been attempted to be maintained in this country upon the ground that there is no express limitation in the treaty of the right of the country in which the offence was committed to try the person for the crime alone for which he was extradited, and that once being within the jurisdiction of that country, no matter by what contrivance or fraud or by what pretence of establishing a charge provided for by the extradition treaty he may have been brought within the jurisdiction, he is, when here, liable to be tried for any offence against the laws as though arrested here originally. This proposition of the absence of express restriction in the treaty of the right to try him for other offences than that for which he was extradited, is met by the manifest scope and object of the treaty itself. Id., at 422.
Thus, the Extradition Treaty, as understood in the context of cases that have addressed similar issues, suffices to protect the defendant from prosecution despite the absence of any express language in the Treaty itself purporting to limit this Nation's power to prosecute a defendant over whom it had lawfully acquired jurisdiction.
Although the Court's conclusion in Rauscher was supported by a number of judicial precedents, the holdings in these cases were not nearly as uniform as the consensus of international opinion that condemns one nation's violation of the territorial integrity of a friendly neighbor. It is shocking that a party to an extradition treaty might believe that it has secretly reserved the right to make seizures of citizens in the other party's territory. Justice Story found it shocking enough that the United States would attempt to justify an American seizure of a foreign vessel in a Spanish port:
But, even supposing, for a moment, that our laws had required an entry of The Apollon, in her transit, does it follow that the power to arrest her was meant to be given, after she had passed into the exclusive territory of a foreign nation? We think not. It would be monstrous to suppose that our revenue officers were authorized to enter into foreign ports and territories, for the purpose of seizing vessels which had offended against our laws. It cannot be presumed that congress would voluntarily justify such a clear violation of the laws of nations. The Apollon, 9 Wheat. 362, 370-371 (1824) (emphasis added).
The law of nations, as understood by Justice Story in 1824, has not changed. Thus, a leading treatise explains:
A State must not perform acts of sovereignty in the territory of another State.
It is ... a breach of International Law for a State to send its agents to the territory of another State to apprehend persons accused of having committed a crime. Apart from other satisfaction, the first duty of the offending State is to hand over the person in question to the State in whose territory he was apprehended. 1 Oppenheim's International Law 295, and n. 1 (H. Lauterpacht 8th ed. 1955).
Commenting on the precise issue raised by this case, the chief reporter for the American Law Institute's Restatement of Foreign Relations used language reminiscent of Justice Story's characterization of an official seizure in a foreign jurisdiction as "monstrous":
When done without consent of the foreign government, abducting a person from a foreign country is a gross violation of international law and gross disrespect for a norm high in the opinion of mankind. It is a blatant violation of the territorial integrity of another state; it eviscerates the extradition system (established by a comprehensive network of treaties involving virtually all states).
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="18">
Topics of Discussion for President's Trip to Europe
Secretary Baker
Opening statement at news conference, the White House, Washington, DC, July 1, 1992
Ladies and gentlemen, let me quickly outline some of the specific topics that the President will be looking to discuss on his visits to Warsaw, Munich, and Helsinki.
In Warsaw, the President will attend the repatriation of the remains of Poland's pre-communist Prime Minister, Paderewski; a symbolic return to an independent Poland. The President will reaffirm America's strong support for democracy and economic freedom in Poland and in Central and Eastern Europe, as a whole. He will want to discuss the reform process with President Walesa and explore some new ways that Poland and the international community can work together to advance these courageous reforms. He will then be in a position to share these ideas with his G-7 [Group of Seven industrialized nations] colleagues.
From Warsaw, the President will travel to Munich, of course, for the G-7 summit. We hope that this summit will send a pro-growth message that will reinforce the recoveries already underway in several G-7 economies, including our own.
The President's meeting with [Japanese] Prime Minister Miyazawa, today, allows us to exchange perspectives on the topic of growth a few days in advance.
The President will also use the opportunity of the Munich meeting to determine what further actions may be necessary to cope with the humanitarian tragedy in Sarajevo. Our view is that we should work with our friends and allies, particularly in the UN Security Council, to see that relief supplies are delivered.
At Munich, the leaders of the G-7 will also be meeting with [Russian] President Yeltsin as a signal of their strong support for Russia's bold reforms.
Building on the Washington summit, President Bush will want to continue his dialogue with President Yeltsin on further developing our political partnership. He will also want to hear an update on the state of Russia's reform program, and he will discuss how we can work together to move forward with assistance from the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, and bilateral assistance.
Finally, as an important item on their collective agenda, the G-7 leaders will discuss with President Yeltsin the steps we can take to improve the safety of Soviet-designed nuclear reactors throughout Eurasia.
The final stop on the trip will be Helsinki, where the President will be attending the summit meeting of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe -CSCE. In 1975, the first Helsinki summit - Helsinki I - launched the CSCE and promoted the values and the process that helped transform the shape of Europe and end the Cold War.
If Helsinki I helped usher in the final act of a divided Europe, Helsinki II must help set the stage for a democratic Eurasia by equipping CSCE to address more effectively the momentous opportunities and challenges that we face today.
In particular, CSCE is considering developing enhanced capacities for conflict prevention and crisis management through such steps as annual human rights meetings and a CSCE peace-keeping role that would draw on the capacities of organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the North Atlantic Cooperation Council, and the Western European Union.
In addition, in Helsinki, we will lay the foundation for a stable new European security order by encouraging the quick entry into force of the CFE [Conventional Armed Forces in Europe] Treaty.
US Policy Toward UNESCO
John R. Bolton, Assistant Secretary for International Organization Affairs
Statement before the Subcommittees on International Operations and on Human Rights and International Organizations of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Subcommittee on Environment of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, Washington, DC, June 25, 1992
I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss our policy toward UNESCO [UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization]. It is particularly timely to do so in the context of the recently completed GAO [General Accounting Office] report on the organization's management, administrative, budgetary, and personnel practices.
It has been 7 1/2 years since the United States withdrew from UNESCO because of the organization's excessive politicization, poor management, and runaway budgets. Since then, we have been working with our allies, with the Secretariat, and with Director General Mayor to promote reform. We have maintained a presence at UNESCO through our Observer Mission, have attended every meeting of the organization's governing bodies, and have made voluntary contributions of approximately $2 million per year in support of selected activities in which we continue to participate.
We are, consequently, pleased to note that the GAO report concludes that initial progress has been made in implementing management reforms. We have reviewed the report and find it a useful assessment of UNESCO's management practices. The report states that it is too soon to judge the effectiveness of some reforms. Knute Hammarskjold and Peter Wilenski, authors of a 1989 study on UNESCO's management, said much the same thing last January in a follow-up report on the implementation of their recommendations: "Extensive progress in reform has been made on a broad front but has not yet taken root...."
The GAO report states that UNESCO has not solved long-standing problems with consultants and program evaluation. It makes 12 formal recommendations that address policies for decentralization of activities and resources, program evaluation, procedures for the use and control of supplementary staff, budget techniques, and payroll controls. These recommendations and the other suggestions made throughout the text provide helpful guidelines and a benchmark for further progress.
As we noted in the State Department comments included as an appendix to the report, each of the recommendations is consistent with goals sought by the Department of State for several years. In this regard, we believe that our policy of insistence on real change at UNESCO - before any consideration of re-entry into the organization - has been a significant factor in motivating its member states, governing bodies, and the Secretariat, itself, to achieve the progress noted in the report.
In contrast to this progress, there are other areas of UNESCO policy which still deeply concern us. Particularly troubling was a UNESCO mission to Iraq in February, reportedly undertaken in cooperation with the UNDP [UN Development Program], to assess the situation of education. While sympathetic to humanitarian initiatives that meet essential medical and nutritional needs, we are not inclined to stretch "essential civilian needs" discussed in UN Security Council Resolution 687 to repairing or replacing school buildings. Last August, the UN Sanctions Committee informed UNESCO that it was unable to reach agreement on the appropriateness of such a mission, and UNESCO wisely canceled its plans to send an assessment team to Iraq.
In September, the UNESCO Executive Board deferred, sine die, consideration of any discussion of the situation of the educational and cultural institutions in Iraq. In November, our Mission to the United Nations informed the UNESCO representative that we were not sympathetic to another UNESCO initiative to send a mission to Iraq to assess the status of schools and cultural sites. Nonetheless, a UNESCO/UNDP team spent 2 weeks in Iraq during the month of February. In a March 3 letter to Director General Mayor, the Kuwaiti Permanent Delegate to UNESCO expressed his surprise that UNESCO would undertake such a mission in the light of the board decision and the UN sanctions regime. The Director General responded that the mission was undertaken in consultation with the UN Interagency Humanitarian Program and did not contravene Resolution 687. The officer-in-charge of the Office of the Executive Delegate for Humanitarian Assistance indicated that the Director General did not consult his office prior to making a decision to send a mission to Iraq. We believe the action was ill-advised, potentially detrimental to the sanctions regime, and inconsistent with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Executive Board decision to postpone consideration of the status of Iraqi educational institutions.
Turning once more to the GAO report, we believe that particular attention should be given to the recommendation on better application of the rules on the use of supplementary staff and fee contracts to control the contract authorization procedure more effectively and make it more transparent and uniform. This is of considerable import in that supplementary staff costs and fee contracts amounted to nearly $70 million during the 1990-91 biennium. GAO found considerable gaps and inconsistencies in data on supplementary staff. This raised doubts "about whether UNESCO uses too many supplementary staff or validly employs them." We endorse the Hammarskjold-Wilenski recommendations that call for the introduction of a consistent and fair promotion system based on merit, a better career development system, and equal opportunity for women.
The report underscores the need for significantly better program evaluation. We concur and believe considerable improvement in this area is needed if further program concentration is to be achieved, as recommended in the report. Impact evaluations are particularly wanting, both in number and in quality. GAO notes that UNESCO has conducted only 16 impact evaluations since 1986, covering only 8% of its activities, and that the appropriate methodologies, in some instances, were not employed even for this limited selection. Moreover, while guidelines exist for impact evaluation, there is no overall plan to ensure that a reasonable and representative selection of programs will be evaluated.
Regarding decentralization, there is reason for concern at the report's observation that 73% of UNESCO's total staff of 2,697 persons is located in Paris and that the ratio of headquarters to field staff has not varied since 1984. The report notes that a higher proportion of funds are expended in the field than would be expected by the distribution of staff; 44% of the 1990-91 regular and extra-budgetary budgets was expended in the field. This, however, is the same percentage as in 1988. Clearly, it is time for the organization to develop the systematic approach to decentralization mandated by the Executive Board at its November 1991 session.
In conclusion, we concur with the GAO report's view that initial progress has been made in implementing management reforms at UNESCO. Based on the report's conclusions and the observations of the Hammarskjold/ Wilenski report of last January, however, we believe that much remains to be done and that what has been accomplished needs to settle in and be institutionalized. We will have more to say on this in the report on UNESCO that Congress has asked us to submit later this summer. Finally, we will continue to implement fully our current policy and work with UNESCO's governing bodies, other governments, and the Director General to effect further reform along the lines recommended in the GAO report. At present, we do not believe the changes adopted warrant opening the question of whether to rejoin the organization, at an expenditure of approximately $55 million per year.
US Policy Toward Iraq and the Role of the CCC Program, 1989-90
Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Deputy Secretary of State
Statement before the House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, Washington, DC, May 21, 1992
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I plan this morning to do my best to set the record straight on the US Government's policy toward Iraq during the latter half of the 1980s and in 1990 and to place in context the role of the Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) program. I intend to make clear that the Administration followed a prudent policy toward Iraq at the time - including the management of the CCC program - even though we, and other governments, were ultimately unable to restrain Saddam Hussein.
In explaining US policy, I also plan to address many of the factual and legal misstatements currently being put forth by members of this committee. Quite frankly, the selective disclosure, out of context, of classified documents has led -knowingly or otherwise - to distortions of the record, half truths, and outright falsehoods, all combined into spurious conspiracy theories and charges of a 'coverup.' For those interested in the truth, let me make the following 10 points:
First, neither the Agriculture Department's investigation of the Commodity Credit Corporation program, nor the US Attorney's investigation of BNL [Banca Nazionale del Lavoro]-Atlanta has, to date, established diversion to third countries of commodities sold to Iraq or Iraqi misuse of the CCC program to purchase military weapons.
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Combating Drug Money-Laundering

The Problem
In 1990, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an ad hoc organization of 26 countries that have significant financial centers, estimated worldwide proceeds from the production, trafficking, and consumption of illicit drugs at more than $300 billion.
The Response
In recent years, it became clear that campaigns against money-laundering are an important tool to destabilize drug-trafficking organizations.
In 1988, nearly 100 governments approved the UN Convention Against Trafficking in Illicit Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which requires signatories to criminalize money-laundering and remove bank secrecy barriers that inhibit criminal investigations. The 1989 economic summit, held in Paris, established the FATF to develop recommendations for action.
In 1990, the FATF endorsed 40 countermeasures, which it recommended to governments throughout the world, calling for:
The criminalization of money-laundering;
Removal of legislative barriers to investigations;
Reporting suspicious transactions;
Regulating non-bank as well as banking institutions; and
Rendering assistance to other governments on financial investigations.
FATF recommends that each of the 26 participating governments adopt and implement legislation to enforce these countermeasures. They further recommend that, through an outreach program already involving governments in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, participating governments seek concurring legislation among all possible governments whose financial systems are considered vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers.
To bolster this effort, the 26 FATF members have agreed to mutual evaluation, in which teams comprised of experts from other member countries will assess each government on progress. This commitment to examination, in addition to submitting annual self-evaluations, has given the FATF greater political credibility. The organization has established a secretariat through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.
The European Community (EC) adopted a policy directive to guide its 12 members in the implementation of the UN convention, going beyond the convention in some key aspects - notably the requirement for mandatory reporting by banks of suspicious transactions. The EC is one of two regional members of FATF and works closely with that body. A new convention, drafted by the Council of Europe, addresses the critical issue of cooperation on asset forfeiture, which is essential given the multiplicity of financial transactions that today's traffickers are initiating through professional money managers across the globe.
The Future
Money-launderers are using increasingly complex schemes to avoid detection, such as employing a wide variety of monetary instruments, non-bank financial institutions, and corporate shells for placing money. The United States and other financial center countries have changed strategies to counter these innovations.
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The United States supports Colombian Government efforts to target money managers. Raids on the Cali cocaine organization, for example, resulted in the arrests of six leading managers and seizures of millions in assets. These raids also yielded 300,000 documents, which provide important new insights into how and where money is laundered. The United States plans similar cooperation with other governments in South America and Asia, the results of which should force traffickers to increasingly expose their assets by constant movements that should result in more seizures and arrests.
In 1992, FATF is focusing on non-bank institutions, while also targeting corporate criminal liability and strengthening asset forfeiture and seizure provisions.
The Caribbean Group is expected to adopt more than 60 measures unique to its region, and governments in Latin America and the Caribbean are expected to take the first steps to implement model legislation recommended by the Organization of American States. Similar efforts will begin in other regions.
Controlling Chemicals Used in Drug Trafficking
Chemicals are necessary for the production of cocaine, heroin, and synthetic drugs. In order to curb drug production, the United States is working to deny traffickers access to these chemicals.
The extensive and competitive international commerce in chemicals, however, complicates the design and adoption of effective regulations to prevent diversion. Such regulations must control the entire chain of a chemical transaction, from chemical manufacturers through intermediaries to ultimate users, while not unduly burdening legitimate commerce. They must be adopted by all major chemical manufacturing and trading countries, in addition to drug producing countries, to prevent traffickers from switching to unregulated sources of supply.
The 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances outlines procedures for controlling 12 of the most important drug-related chemicals. The United States, other Western Hemisphere countries, and the European Community (EC) have been leaders in adopting laws and regulations incorporating them.
The 1988 US Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act placed 20 chemicals under government control. In 1990, the Organization of American States (OAS) adopted 'Model Regulations to Control Precursor Chemicals and Chemical Substances, Machines and Materials' which are forming the basis for chemical control regulations in many OAS countries. They call for the regulation of 36 chemicals. The EC has adopted community-wide chemical control regulations based on the 1988 UN convention to control chemical trade with non-EC countries.
Nevertheless, chemicals essential to the production of illicit drugs are getting through for two basic reasons: the absence of universal, uniform regulations; and the inability of many countries to effectively implement their chemical control laws because they do not have the regulatory infrastructure and trained personnel to do so.
We are attacking the problem on two fronts. Experience demonstrates that the most effective chemical control action is that taken by the exporting country prior to the exportation of regulated chemicals. The United States chairs the G-7 Chemical Action Task Force (CATF) which includes 26 other major chemical manufacturing countries, drug manufacturing countries, and concerned international organizations; the CATF has developed comprehensive recommendations for chemical control, building on procedures in the 1988 UN convention.
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The extensive discussion in five meetings during 1990-91 on these recommendations demonstrated to the CATF members that chemical control is not only desirable but feasible and provided uniform procedures to be incorporated in a chemical control regime. The recommendations include five basic chemical control procedures to be adopted at the national level to prevent diversion and the addition of 10 chemicals to the 12 in the 1988 UN convention.
These multilateral initiatives are being supplemented by US Government bilateral initiatives targeted at the major cocaine producing countries. We have chemical control agreements with Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Peru to facilitate the exchange of information to determine the legitimacy of chemical sales between our countries. The United States is funding chemical control training through the UN Drug Control Program and the OAS for the chemical and drug producing countries of Latin America. In 1991, national training workshops were conducted in Bogota, Mexico City, Quito, and Santiago. The US Drug Enforcement Administration conducts much of the training.
The model regulatory regimes and chemical control training are providing the foundation for enhanced international cooperation between enforcement agencies of major chemical and drug producing countries. Our chemical control objective is to extend adoption of compatible chemical control regimes through the CATF to those countries that do not have them, while enforcement agencies work to improve cooperation within existing regulatory frameworks. The ultimate objective is to make diversion control a standard part of any transaction involving a drug-related chemical.
Coca Production And the Environment

The Problem
Cocaine production causes serious - often irreparable - damage, since coca is grown and processed in some of the world's most fragile ecological zones. Coca farmers and the so-called chemists who process the raw product for export irreversibly damage jungle forests, soils, and waterways. The populations of the primary Andean coca regions in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia - largely migrants who have come specifically to grow coca - have almost no regard for the 'eyebrow of the jungle' region where the tributaries of the Amazon begin.
Although the US drug war seeks mainly to halt the devastation caused by drugs to citizens and communities, the United States also wants to stop environmental destruction. American drug users help finance the environmental degradation, and the increasing number of drug users in Europe, in neighboring Latin American countries that serve as narcotics pipelines, and in the producer countries themselves add to the market.
Coca growers and processors damage the environment in three ways:
Deforestation. Deforestation increases erosion and soil runoff, depletes soil nutrients, and decreases biological diversity. As heavy rains erode the thin topsoil of the fields, growers often must abandon their parcels to prepare new plots. Traffickers also destroy jungle forests to build landing strips and laboratories. A smoky haze covers much of the Huallaga Valley throughout August and September as farmers slash and burn forests to create new fields for coca production; much of the coca-producing land is cut out of nature preserves and national forests.
Scientists in Peru report the irretrievable loss of plant and animal species due to clearance of large areas of the country's most biologically diverse region. Besides the 171,000 hectares of coca cultivated in Bolivia and Peru, producers of illicit drugs have deforested as much as 1 million hectares of fragile jungle forest lands in the Amazon region.
Use of Herbicides, Pesticides, and Fertilizers in Coca Growing. Seeking to maximize their incomes and largely ignorant about chemicals, coca growers dump great quantities of strong pesticides, weedkillers, and fertilizers on their crops. Peruvian environmentalists estimate that coca growers use 1.5 million liters of paraquat each year in the Upper Huallaga Valley alone. These chemicals saturate the soil and contaminate waterways, poisoning the water system and destroying the species that depend upon it. Although the extent of damage is still unknown, Latin American environmentalists believe that the contamination is spreading into adjacent ecological zones.
Toxic Chemicals From Cocaine Processing. Cocaine processing laboratories disposing of huge amounts of toxic chemicals into nearby streams and rivers have killed several fish species in Peru. Scientists estimate that pollution in Peru's Amazon feeder rivers from Peruvian processing included, in 1 year, the discharge of:
57 million liters of kerosene - the equivalent of one supertanker;
22 million liters of sulfuric acid;
16,000 metric tons of lime;
3,000 metric tons of carbide;
6 million liters of acetone;
6 million liters of toluene; and
10,000 tons of toilet paper.
US Strategy
Successful drug control strategies must weigh environmental as well as social and economic effects. Since manual eradication of coca bushes is very difficult, dangerous work and because of environmental concerns about chemical eradication, the United States - in consultation with Andean nations - is pursuing a three-fold strategy.
1. In Peru and Colombia - limit forced eradication to coca seedbeds to reduce the spread of cultivation, while working with local authorities and grower organizations to promote voluntary eradication. (Some forced eradication of mature coca plants continues in Bolivia, primarily in public areas such as national parks.)
2. Support alternative economic opportunities, crop substitution, and other programs to provide growers with another way to earn a living and escape from dependence on criminal organizations.
3. Attack the trafficker organizations by intercepting their aircraft, seizing their assets, destroying their drug production facilities, and reducing their supplies of chemical inputs to stem their earnings.
Bolivia
US-Bolivian Relations
Traditionally, the United States and Bolivia have enjoyed good, friendly relations. Our goals in Bolivia are similar to those that the current government has set for itself: to strengthen democracy, institutionalize economic reforms, and eliminate narcotics trafficking. The United States has a longstanding aid relationship with Bolivia. Between 1945 and 1991, US economic assistance totaled more than $1.6 billion.
Bolivia is an active participant in regional organizations such as the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Rio Group. The country has a good human rights record and has created a legal framework to encourage foreign private investment. The United States has modest trade with Bolivia and is negotiating a bilateral investment treaty.
Since taking office in August 1989, President Jaime Paz Zamora has met twice with President Bush. Vice President Quayle visited the Bolivian capital, La Paz, in the fall of 1989.
Political Conditions
Bolivia is close to completing a decade of democratic government. Since 1982, it has had two peaceful democratic transitions. The Administration of President Paz Zamora is now in its third year of its 4-year term. He has been a moderate, pragmatic president.
</doc><doc register="miscellaneous" n="20">The specific question raised by corporate integration is whether the current distinction in the treatment of corporate equity investments by tax-exempt entities (which bear the corporate, but not the shareholder level tax) versus corporate debt investments (which bear neither corporate nor debtholder level tax) should be retained or decreased. An integration system best fulfills its goals if it provides uniform treatment of debt and equity investments by tax-exempt investors. Equating the tax treatment of debt and equity will require either an increase or decrease in the taxes on corporate capital supplied by tax-exempt investors or the introduction of a separate tax on investment income of these investors. As Section 6.D discusses, such a tax could be designed to maintain the current level of tax on income from corporate capital supplied by tax-exempt investors while equalizing the treatment of debt and equity.
6.B DISTORTIONS UNDER CURRENT LAW
Current law encourages tax-exempt investors, like taxable investors, to invest in debt rather than equity. Only two types of income from capital supplied to corporations by tax-exempt entities are actually tax-exempt. Interest paid by corporations is both deductible by the corporate payor and exempt from tax in the hands of the tax-exempt recipient. Corporate preference income distributed to tax-exempt shareholders also is exempt from tax at both the corporate and the shareholder level. Non-preference income is taxed at the corporate level, but is not taxed at the shareholder level whether it is received by the exempt investor as capital gains from the sale of shares or as dividends from distributions. Thus, under current law, corporate income paid to tax-exempt investors in the form of interest is not taxed at either the corporate or investor level, while non-preference income retained or distributed to tax-exempt shareholders is subject to tax at the corporate level.
Current law does not, however, encourage tax-exempt investors to invest in equity of noncorporate rather than corporate businesses, because, in both cases, the income is subject to one level of tax. While corporate income (other than preference income) allocable to tax-exempt shareholders is subject to tax at the corporate level, the noncorporate unrelated business income of tax-exempt investors generally is subject to UBIT. For tax-exempt investors who invest in equity, current law generally also does not affect their preferences for distributed or retained earnings. Because corporate income (other than preference income) is subject to current corporate level tax and both distributed and retained earnings are exempt from tax at the shareholder level, a tax-exempt shareholder has no tax incentive to prefer distributed earnings over retained earnings.
6.C NEUTRALITY UNDER AN INTEGRATED TAX SYSTEM
Because of the asymmetric treatment of debt and equity investments by tax-exempt entities under current law, an integrated system can achieve neutrality between debt and equity investments for tax-exempt investors only by either decreasing the tax burden on equity income or increasing the tax burden on interest. A straightforward decrease in the tax burden on equity investments might be accomplished by removing the corporate level tax on earnings distributed as dividends to tax-exempt investors. A deduction for corporate dividends, for example, would achieve this result. The contrary approach might subject interest income on corporate debt earned by tax-exempt investors to one level of tax (at either the corporate or the investor level).
The first approach, taxing neither dividends nor interest paid to tax-exempt investors, would lose substantial amounts of tax revenue relative to current law. Extending the benefits of integration to tax-exempt investors would add costs of approximately $29 billion annually under distribution-related integration and approximately $42 billion annually under shareholder allocation. This revenue loss would increase the costs of integration and would require offsetting increases in other taxes or in tax rates, which might create or increase other distortions. This approach also would distort the choice between corporate and noncorporate investment for tax-exempt investors if UBIT remained in place for noncorporate investment. If corporate dividends were tax-exempt at both the corporate and investor level, while earnings from businesses conducted directly or in partnership form were subject to UBIT, a tax-exempt investor would always prefer corporate dividends. Indeed, anti-abuse rules might be required to preclude tax-exempt organizations from avoiding UBIT altogether simply by incorporating their unrelated businesses.
The second approach, taxing both interest and dividends at a single rate, would reduce the current advantage of tax-exempt investors relative to taxable investors. Tax-exempt investors would no longer enjoy an after-tax return on a given corporate equity or debt investment higher than that available to taxable investors. The principal advantage of this approach is that it would equate the treatment of debt and equity while maintaining the neutrality between corporate and noncorporate equity for tax-exempt investors.
6.D GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS
This Report recommends that a level of taxation at least equal to the current taxation of corporate equity income allocated to investments by the tax-exempt sector be retained under integration. The dividend exclusion prototype, described in Chapter 2, essentially continues present law treatment of tax-exempt investors under an integrated tax system, so fully-taxed corporate profits would continue to bear one level of tax and preference income would not be taxed at either the corporate or shareholder level. A similar result can be accomplished under an imputation credit system of integration, but a dividend deduction system would eliminate the current corporate level tax on distributed earnings on equity capital supplied by tax-exempt investors. Under the shareholder allocation prototype described in Chapter 3, taxes are collected at the corporate level on corporate income allocable to investment by tax-exempt shareholders and no refund is provided to nontaxable shareholders.
Maintaining one level of tax on equity investments by tax-exempt entities would promote one of the primary goals of integration: achieving tax neutrality for all investors between corporate and noncorporate investments. This choice is consistent with a move to integration for taxable shareholders, because choosing to reduce the double tax burden on corporate income distributed to taxable investors does not necessarily dictate a commensurate reduction in the tax burden on tax-exempt investors. Finally, continuing to tax equity investments by the tax-exempt sector avoids the revenue loss that would result if such investments were completely tax-exempt. Increasing other tax rates to compensate for such a revenue loss would entail other inefficiencies.
Some countries that have adopted integration have chosen to tax separately corporate and other income allocable to tax-exempt investors. For example, in moving to an integrated corporate tax, Australia and New Zealand imposed a tax on the income of pension funds, thus reducing the number of tax-exempt investors. In both countries, the remaining tax-exempt investor base, such as charities, is small. Australia imposed a 15 percent tax on investment income earned by pension funds and made available the full 39 percent imputation credit from dividends as a nonrefundable offset. Australia did not project collecting more than a token amount of tax from this tax on investment income: it devised the mechanism to remove distortions between investing in domestic corporations (which pay Australian tax) and investing in foreign corporations (which generally do not). The new Australian system also removes distortions between investing in equity and investing in debt. New Zealand went further and repealed entirely the tax exemption of pension funds; they now function basically as taxable savings accounts. Under the U.K. distribution-related integration system, the corporate level tax is not completely eliminated, with the consequence that income distributed to tax-exempt shareholders bears some tax burden.
This Report also encourages an effort to achieve uniform tax treatment of corporate debt and equity investments by tax-exempt investors. Because of the important role played by the tax-exempt sector in the capital markets, failing to create neutrality for debt and equity investments by the tax-exempt sector would limit the extent to which integration could achieve tax neutrality between the two kinds of investments. This is achieved under CBIT by treating tax-exempt shareholders and debtholders generally like other suppliers of corporate capital, with tax imposed at the corporate level.
One potential alternative approach would tax all corporate and noncorporate income allocable to investment by the tax-exempt sector at a rate lower than the rate applicable to taxable investors. Such a tax on the investment income, including dividends and interest income, received by tax-exempt entities could be set to achieve overall revenues equivalent to those currently borne by corporate capital supplied by the tax-exempt sector. Under the imputation credit prototype discussed in Chapter 11, for example, imputation credits for corporate taxes paid would be allowed to tax-exempt shareholders. To the extent that the credit rate exceeds the tax rate on investment income, the excess credits could be used to offset tax on interest or other investment income. In addition to the substantial advantage of equating the tax treatment of debt and equity held by such investors, such an approach would allow tax-exempt investors to use shareholder level credits for corporate taxes paid to the same extent as taxable shareholders. By doing so, this approach would limit both portfolio shifts and other tax planning techniques that might otherwise be induced by efforts to distinguish among taxable and tax-exempt investors in integrating the corporate income tax. A revenue neutral rate for such a system would be in the range of 6 to 8 percent depending on the prototype. This would approximate the current law corporate tax burden on investments by tax-exempt shareholders.
CHAPTER 7:
TREATMENT OF FOREIGN INCOME AND SHAREHOLDERS
7.A INTRODUCTION
International issues are important in designing an integrated tax system because there is substantial investment by U.S. persons in foreign countries (outbound investment) and investment by foreign persons in the United States (inbound investment). At the end of 1990, private U.S. investors owned direct investments abroad with a market value of $714 billion, and $910 billion in foreign portfolio investment, while private foreign investors owned $530 billion in direct investment in the United States and $1.34 trillion in U.S. portfolio investment. U.S. investors received a total of $54.4 billion income from their direct investments abroad in 1990, and $65.7 billion of income from their foreign portfolio investments, while foreign investors received $1.8 billion from their direct investments in the United States in 1990 and $78.5 billion from their U.S. portfolio investments.
The income from transnational investments may be taxed by both the country in which the investment is made (the host or source country) and the country of residence of the investor (the residence country). The United States uses two primary instruments for mitigating the potential problem of double taxation: the foreign tax credit and bilateral income tax treaties entered into between the United States and about 40 other countries.
Taxation of foreign investment by U.S. investors. The United States taxes the worldwide income of its residents. The U.S. tax on income earned by U.S. corporations or individuals through foreign corporations is generally deferred until such income is repatriated through dividend or interest payments to U.S. shareholders or creditors.
The United States allows taxpayers to claim a foreign tax credit for qualifying foreign income taxes paid (the direct foreign tax credit). Current law also allows corporate taxpayers that receive dividends (or include Subpart F income) from at least 10-percent owned foreign subsidiaries to claim a foreign tax credit for a ratable portion of the qualifying foreign taxes paid by the subsidiary on the income from which the dividends are paid (the indirect foreign tax credit). The portion of the foreign taxes which taxpayers may claim as an indirect credit is proportional to the fraction of the earnings of the foreign subsidiary distributed or deemed distributed. The dividend income for U.S. tax purposes is grossed up by the amount of the direct and indirect credits claimed. The indirect foreign tax credit, like the dividends received deduction available domestically, prevents multiple taxation of corporate profits at the corporate level.
The Code limits the maximum foreign tax credit to prevent the foreign tax credit from offsetting taxes on domestic source income. Separate limitations apply to several different kinds of foreign source income (baskets) in order to restrict the use of foreign tax credits from high-taxed foreign source income against low-taxed foreign source income.
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Radio Address to the Nation on Domestic Reforms
March 28, 1992
Good morning:
Many have called the 20th century the American Century. The question before us today is about the next century, looking just a few years ahead.
Let me tell you a story that will help shape that century, a story you probably haven't heard about. It's about a battle between those who want to change things and those who want to protect the status quo. And in this battle those who support change are telling those who want to stand pat: lead, follow, or get out of the way.
Wednesday, those words were heard loud and clear. I'm talking about how the Democratic Congress couldn't muster a two-thirds majority; incredibly, couldn't even get a majority to override my veto of the liberals' latest tax increase. This story you haven't heard about is also unheard of. Only twice before in the last 60 years has the House failed to muster a simple majority to override a veto.
Congressional liberals suffered this defeat for a simple reason: Americans measure progress in people helped, not dollars spent. And that's why I'm going to continue the fight to keep a lid on Federal spending. It's also why I ask Senator McCain of Arizona and Congressman Harris Fawell of Illinois to formally introduce legislation to endorse the 68 rescissions I announced last week to cut nearly $4 billion in waste from a bloated Federal Budget.
Unlike liberal Democrats, given our big deficit, I don't think the Federal Government can afford to fund prickly pear research or study asparagus yield declines. Those who reject these pork barrel projects will stand with me and the American taxpayer. Those who support them will have to explain in November why the public interest has been denied.
If enough members demand it, Congress must vote on each of these bills, yes or no, up or down. I'm going to work with those who want the Congress to be accountable and fight those who will try to block our initiatives through parliamentary gimmicks. I know that Government is too big and spends too much. And now let's see where Congress stands. Stay tuned, keep listening. We'll find out who really wants to cut spending and who just wants to keep the pork.
In a world more driven by economic competition than ever before, the challenge I am referring to is crucial to our future. I mean reform of the American Government. During the last decade, one institution after another has looked within itself, decided on improvements, and acted to fix its problems and reflect its principles. Our task now is to bring that process of reform to the United States Government. All of us know Government's problem, too often it is not accountable, not effective, not efficient. It's not even compassionate. Only by changing it can we protect America's general interest against selfish, special interests.
My rescissions will help knock out one part of the special interest problem at work in Congress today, but the changes I want are even bigger. I want to end the PAC contributions which are corrupting our system. I want to place term limits on Congress, and I want to lead the American people in making changes that will make the 21st century another American Century.
One challenge is to make our people educated, literate, and motivated to keep learning. And that's why I'm trying to reform our education system from top to bottom.
Our people must have a sense of well-being about their health and that of their children and families. My health care reform plan will guarantee them access to the finest health care system in the world and make that care affordable.
And next, help me return our civil justice system to its original purpose: dispense justice with civility. Eighteen million lawsuits a year are choking us, costing individuals and businesses billions, a tremendous drag on our morale as well as our economy.
And in the next century, as we look at the likely economic competition as well as the likely opportunities, they will be beyond our borders. That means we must open up more foreign markets to sell our goods and our services and to sustain and create jobs for our people.
Reform of Government, education, health care, our legal system, opening markets abroad: addressing these issues is fundamental to America's future. Already America has changed the world. Today I'm asking you to help me change America. If Congress won't change, we'll have to change the Congress. The battle has been joined, and it's your future that we're fighting for.
Thank you for your support. And may God bless the United States of America.
Note: This address was recorded at 10:30 a.m. on March 27 in the Oval Office at the White House for broadcast after 9 a.m. on March 28.
Remarks to State Attorneys General
March 30, 1992
Well, may I salute Ken Eikenberry and Jeff Amestoy and all the State attorney generals, and salute also - whoops, there he is down there - our own Bill Barr, who I think is doing an outstanding job. And I know he's working closely with everybody in this room.
Bill has his forces moving out on several fronts, from tort reform to relief of prison overcrowding. We've also started what we call the Weed and Seed initiative, our plan to get the roots, rip them out of the inner-city violence, and then plant seeds of hope with more educational opportunity, with more job training, with a new approach to health care. And then we are going to keep hammering away on the need for enterprise zones. This plan joins Federal, State, and local forces to go after and to take back our hardest-hit neighborhoods. They're crucial missions, and I am determined to see them achieved and let nothing stand in the way.
The efforts of the Justice Department help shape the kind of legacy that we leave for future generations. And our children must inherit a society that is safe, is sane and just. And I've also spoken of other meaningful legacies like jobs and a world at peace and certainly, strong families. The American heritage which I describe is one where children can sit on their porch without the fear of getting caught in an ugly crossfire, where decent people don't have to hide behind locked doors while gangs roam the streets, where the message is clear: when it comes to the law, if you're going to take liberties, you're going to lose your own, you're going to pay.
We cannot pass this legacy onto our children tomorrow unless we start going after tough crime legislation today. And for 3 years running, we have called on the Congress to pass a tough crime bill. We've pushed hard. Many of you have been at our side in trying to get something done. I want a bill that won't tie the hands of the honest cops in trying to get their jobs done, one that shows less sympathy for the criminals and certainly more for the victims of crime. And most of all, I want to get a crime bill that I can sign.
But law and order mean more than just safe streets and bigger prisons. Reforming the system also means going after public corruption in our cities and our States, the rot that eats away at our institutions and at our trust. Over the past 3 years, this administration has moved aggressively to hunt down corruption and stop it dead in its tracks.
For the record, in '89 and '90 alone the Department secured over 2,200 convictions, 2,200 in public corruption cases. Judges, legislators, and law enforcement officials, part-time crooks, full-time fakes: Nobody is immune. And this kind of crime does society real harm because these swindlers aren't satisfied merely with making crime pay; they stick the taxpayer with the tab. And millions and millions of hard-earned tax dollars are disappearing from public treasuries every single year and showing up in corruption's back pocket. And this is money that could be building roads or balancing budgets. I am preaching to the choir on this subject because you all are out there on the cutting edge, on the front line all the time, trying to do something about the problem.
But the problem is greater than a few individuals who stopped caring. The problem is a system that has stopped working. And the old bureaucratic system of big Government has ground to a halt. And it's not accountable; it is not effective; and it is not efficient. It's not even compassionate. And the chronic problems we see today are sad proof that the old approaches are producing new failures.
So in this election year, it's understandable, I'm sure, that we hear a lot of talk about change. You all have been fighting for change; I think I have. And yes, the time has come for change, far-reaching, fundamental reform. That's the kind of change that his country needs in the fighting-crime field. Not just in fighting crime, incidentally, and not just in Government but all across the board.
And that's why I've - proposing school choice reform - just finished almost an hour meeting with our Secretary of Education on that one. So the choices about education can be made from the kitchen table, not from the halls of bureaucracy. Where it's been tried, it has been effective in improving the schools that are not chosen as well as those that are.
And I've proposed a health care reform to improve access for those who need it the most. Legal reform, we need your help on. We've got good proposals up there on Capitol Hill. Our legal reform is shaped so that Americans can start solving their problems face to face instead of lawyer to lawyer. I'm amazed at the number, the great increase in lawsuits that is really putting a damper on so many aspects in our society.
The kind of change that I'm describing is hard. It has its enemies, and the battle lines have been drawn: the allies of change versus the defenders of the status quo. So, I want to make it very clear which side I'm on; I know which side many of you are on.
So, let the cynics say that this is only a fight for the next election. We know it's a battle for the next generation. And I'm very glad you all are here. And what we'll do is go over here, and I'd love to have suggestions from you as to how we might be doing our job better down here. And of course, I'd be glad to take questions and if they're technical, I'll kick them off to perhaps the most able Attorney General a guy could hope to have with him.
Thank you all very much.
Note: The President spoke at 10:36 a.m. in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. In his remarks, he referred to Kenneth O. Eikenberry, attorney general of Washington, and Jeffrey L. Amestoy, attorney general of Vermont.
Exchange With Reporters Prior to a Meeting With President George Vassiliou of Cyprus
March 30, 1992
Cyprus
Q. President Vassiliou, are you going to ask the United States to pressure Mr. Denktash to make some progress?
President Vassiliou. Well, I am grateful to the President for his support for a solution of the Cyprus problem, and I'm sure that the fact that he's meeting here, with him in an election campaign period, is the best proof of his interest. And I'm grateful.
President Bush. I am interested, and I just hope we can help. Our Ambassador's been wonderful and tried, a special Ambassador, but now he's going on to greater pursuits. But we can't let him get too far away because he's very interested in all of that. No, but we'll talk about it, and I think your visit up there in New York probably is very important. I hope the new Secretary-General is energized.
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PART ONE
GENERAL PART
Chapter One
Objectives
Article 101: Establishment of the Free Trade Area
The Parties to this Agreement, consistent with Article XXIV of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, hereby establish a free trade area.
Article 102: Objectives
1. The objectives of this Agreement, as elaborated more specifically through its principles and rules, including national treatment, most-favored-nation treatment and transparency, are to:
(a) eliminate barriers to trade in, and facilitate the cross-border movement of, goods and services between the territories of the Parties;
(b) promote conditions of fair competition in the free trade area;
(c) increase substantially investment opportunities in the territories of the Parties;
(d) provide adequate and effective protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in each Party's territory;
(e) create effective procedures for the implementation and application of this Agreement, for its joint administration and for the resolution of disputes; and
(f) establish a framework for further trilateral, regional and multilateral cooperation to expand and enhance the benefits of this Agreement.
2. The Parties shall interpret and apply the provisions of this Agreement in the light of its objectives set out in paragraph 1 and in accordance with applicable rules of international law.
Article 103: Relation to Other Agreements
1. The Parties affirm their existing rights and obligations with respect to each other under the General Agreement of Tariffs and Trade and other agreements to which such Parties are party.
2. In the event of any inconsistency between this Agreement and such other agreements, this Agreement shall prevail to the extent of the inconsistency, except as otherwise provided in this Agreement.
Article 104: Relation to Environmental and Conservation Agreements
1. In the event of any inconsistency between this Agreement and the specific trade obligations set out in:
(a) the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, done at Washington, March 3, 1973, as amended June 22, 1979,
(b) the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, done at Montreal, September 16, 1987, as amended June 29, 1990,
(c) the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal, done at Basel, March 22, 1989, on its entry into force for Canada, Mexico and the United States, or
(d) the agreements set out in Annex 104.1,
such obligations shall prevail to the extent of the inconsistency, provided that where a Party has a choice among equally effective and reasonably available means of complying with such obligations, the Party chooses the alternative that is the least inconsistent with the other provisions of this Agreement.
2. The Parties may agree in writing to modify Annex 104.1 to include any amendment to an agreement referred to in paragraph 1, and any other environmental or conservation agreement.
Article 105: Extent of Obligations
The Parties shall ensure that all necessary measures are taken in order to give effect to the provisions of this Agreement, including their observance, except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, by state and provincial governments.
Annex 104.1
Bilateral and Other Environmental and Conservation Agreements
1. The Agreement Between the Government of Canada and the Government of the United States of America Concerning the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Waste, signed at Ottawa, October 28, 1986.
2. The Agreement Between the United States of America and the United Mexican States on Cooperation for the Protection and Improvement of the Environment in the Border Area, signed at La Paz, Baja California Sur, August 14, 1983.
Chapter Two
General Definitions

Article 201: Definitions of General Application
1. For purposes of this Agreement, unless otherwise specified:
Commission means the Free Trade Commission established under Article 2001(1) (The Free Trade Commission);
Customs Valuation Code means the Agreement on Implementation of Article VII of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, including its interpretative notes;
days means calendar days, including weekends and holidays;
enterprise means any entity constituted or organized under applicable law, whether or not for profit, and whether privately-owned or governmentally-owned, including any corporation, trust, partnership, sole proprietorship, joint venture or other association;
enterprise of a Party means an enterprise constituted or organized under the law of a Party;
existing means in effect on the date of entry into force of this Agreement;
Generally Accepted Accounting Principles means the recognized consensus or substantial authoritative support in the territory of a Party with respect to the recording of revenues, expenses, costs, assets and liabilities, disclosure of information and preparation of financial statements. These standards may be broad guidelines of general application as well as detailed standards, practices and procedures;
goods of a Party means domestic products as these are understood in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or such goods as the Parties may agree, and includes originating goods of that Party;
Harmonized System (HS) means the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System, and its legal notes, as adopted and implemented by the Parties in their respective tariff laws;
measure includes any law, regulation, procedure, requirement or practice;
national means a natural person who is a citizen or permanent resident of a Party and any other natural person referred to in Annex 201.1;
originating means qualifying under the rules of origin set out in Chapter Four (Rules of Origin);
person means a natural person or an enterprise;
person of a Party means a national, or an enterprise of a Party;
Secretariat means the Secretariat established under Article 2002(1) (The Secretariat);
state enterprise means an enterprise that is owned, or controlled through ownership interests, by a Party; and
territory means for a Party the territory of that Party as set out in Annex 201.1.
2. For purposes of this Agreement, unless otherwise specified, a reference to a state or province includes local governments of that state or province.
Annex 201.1
Country-Specific Definitions
For purposes of this Agreement, unless otherwise specified:
national also includes:
(a) with respect to Mexico, a national or a citizen according to Articles 30 and 34, respectively, of the Mexican Constitution; and
(b) with respect to the United States, "national of the United States" as defined in the existing provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act;
territory means:
(a) with respect to Canada, the territory to which its customs laws apply, including any areas beyond the territorial seas of Canada within which, in accordance with international law and its domestic law, Canada may exercise rights with respect to the seabed and subsoil and their natural resources;
(b) with respect to Mexico,
(i) the states of the Federation and the Federal District,
(ii) the islands, including the reefs and keys, in adjacent seas,
(iii) the islands of Guadalupe and Revillagigedo situated in the Pacific Ocean,
(iv) the continental shelf and the submarine shelf of such islands, keys and reefs,
(v) the waters of the territorial seas, in accordance with international law, and its interior maritime waters,
(vi) the space located above the national territory, in accordance with international law, and
(vii) any areas beyond the territorial seas of Mexico within which, in accordance with international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and its domestic law, Mexico may exercise rights with respect to the seabed and subsoil and their natural resources; and
(c) with respect to the United States,
(i) the customs territory of the United States, which includes the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico,
(ii) the foreign trade zones located in the United States and Puerto Rico, and
(iii) any areas beyond the territorial seas of the United States within which, in accordance with international law and its domestic law, the United States may exercise rights with respect to the seabed and subsoil and their natural resources.
PART TWO
TRADE IN GOODS
Chapter Three
National Treatment and Market Access for Goods
Article 300: Scope and Coverage
This Chapter applies to trade in goods of a Party, including:
(a) goods covered by Annex 300-A (Trade and Investment in the Automotive Sector),
(b) goods covered by Annex 300-B (Textile and Apparel Goods), and
(c) goods covered by another Chapter in this Part,
except as provided in such Annex or Chapter.
Section A - National Treatment

Article 301: National Treatment
1. Each Party shall accord national treatment to the goods of another Party in accordance with Article III of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), including its interpretative notes, and to this end Article III of the GATT and its interpretative notes, or any equivalent provision of a successor agreement to which all Parties are party, are incorporated into and made part of this Agreement.
2. The provisions of paragraph 1 regarding national treatment shall mean, with respect to a state or province, treatment no less favorable than the most favorable treatment accorded by such state or province to any like, directly competitive or substitutable goods, as the case may be, of the Party of which it forms a part.
3. Paragraphs 1 and 2 do not apply to the measures set out in Annex 301.3.
Section B - Tariffs

Article 302: Tariff Elimination
1. Except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, no Party may increase any existing customs duty, or adopt any customs duty, on an originating good.
2. Except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, each Party shall progressively eliminate its customs duties on originating goods in accordance with its Schedule to Annex 302.2.
3. On the request of any Party, the Parties shall consult to consider accelerating the elimination of customs duties set out in their Schedules. An agreement between two or more Parties to accelerate the elimination of a customs duty on a good shall supersede any duty rate or staging category determined pursuant to their Schedules for such good when approved by each such Party in accordance with its applicable legal procedures.
4. Each Party may adopt or maintain import measures to allocate in-quota imports made pursuant to a tariff rate quota set out in Annex 302.2, provided that such measures do not have trade restrictive effects on imports additional to those caused by the imposition of the tariff rate quota.
5. On written request of any Party, a Party applying or intending to apply measures pursuant to paragraph 4 shall consult to review the administration of those measures.
Article 303: Restriction on Drawback and Duty Deferral Programs
1. Except as otherwise provided in this Article, no Party may refund the amount of customs duties paid, or waive or reduce the amount of customs duties owed, on a good imported into its territory, on condition that the good is:
(a) subsequently exported to the territory of another Party,
(b) used as a material in the production of another good that is subsequently exported to the territory of another Party, or
(c) substituted by an identical or similar good used as a material in the production of another good that is subsequently exported to the territory of another Party,
in an amount that exceeds the lesser of the total amount of customs duties paid or owed on the good on importation into its territory and the total amount of customs duties paid to another Party on the good that has been subsequently exported to the territory of that other Party.
2. No Party may, on condition of export, refund, waive or reduce:
(a) an antidumping or countervailing duty that is applied pursuant to a Party's domestic law and that is not applied inconsistently with Chapter Nineteen (Review and Dispute Settlement in Antidumping and Countervailing Duty Matters);
(b) a premium offered or collected on an imported good arising out of any tendering system in respect of the administration of quantitative import restrictions, tariff rate quotas or tariff preference levels;
(c) a fee applied pursuant to section 22 of the U.S. Agricultural Adjustment Act, subject to Chapter Seven (Agriculture and Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures); or
(d) customs duties paid or owed on a good imported into its territory and substituted by an identical or similar good that is subsequently exported to the territory of another Party.
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DEVELOPMENTS IN FEDERAL-STATE RELATIONS, 1990-91
By John Kincaid
The continuing federal fiscal crisis and the developing fiscal crisis in state and local governments dominated intergovernmental relations in 1990 and 1991 as the nation entered its deepest recession since the early 1980s. On Jan. 1, 1991, The Washington Post headlined a story, "Big Fiscal Woes Await Governors in Northeast." As problems spread to more states, the Post headlined an April story, "Recession, Soaring Medicaid Costs Put the Squeeze on State Budgets." By June 30, 1991 a Post headline read, "Facing Year of Living Penuriously, States Slash Costs, Beef Up Taxes."
Overall, state expenditures were $533.7 billion in fiscal 1991, up 8.8 percent from the previous year. However, the average general-fund balance for the 50 states at the end of fiscal 1991 was 1.5 percent, the smallest since fiscal 1983 (Howard 1991, 18). At the same time, about 34 states raised taxes. The total increase was in the range of $14.4 billion to $16.2 billion - the largest ever one-year increase (Gold 1991, 623-626).
The results of these developments, wrote New York Times columnist Russell Baker on July 9, 1991, are "predictable: Hordes of governors, mayors and county supervisors will be voted out of business in 1992. At the same time, the usual 95 to 98 percent of Congress and President Bush will enjoy re-election."
By the end of the year, though, George Bush, who seemed unbeatable after the American victory in the Gulf War in February 1991, was in trouble with voters because of the recession. Bush's plunge in the polls was counterbalanced only by continued public disdain for the Congress, a mood exacerbated in 1991 by the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy before the Senate Judiciary Committee and by revelations of bounced checks at the House bank and unpaid bills at the House restaurant.
The disarray in Washington increased the fiscal and policy problems facing state and local officials. These officials generally attributed their problems to: the deepening recession; increasing demands and costs for social welfare; increasing federal mandates and conditions of aid, especially in Medicaid; reductions in federal aid; and adverse federal court decisions. Some critics charged, though, that states were reaping the consequences of profligate spending during the growth years of 1984-1989 (Moore 1991). State spending had increased by more than 100 percent during the 1980s - above the rates of inflation and the increase in federal spending.
States also experienced pressures form the rising costs of: health care, due partly to inflation, mandates, and long-term care costs; education, due partly to reform efforts, teachers' lobbying and rising enrollments; and corrections, due in part to federal court orders, the drug war and mandatory sentencing policies. At the same time, states were widely criticized in the media for trying to balance their budgets on the backs of the poor, and by other observers for slowing economic recovery by raising taxes and cutting spending.
Hence, for many state and local officials, 1991 ended on a sour intergovernmental note. The mood was reflected in a commentary by the executive director of the National Governors' Association, who wrote that recovery from the 1991-1992 recession "will not resemble the 1980s, when state revenues grew an average of 9 percent a year throughout the decade and plenty of money was available for new programs. Instead, the 1990s will be a period of scarcity and adjustment." He added, "State government will no longer have the fiscal capacity to assume additional responsibilities from the federal and local governments. Efforts to shift responsibilities to states will meet increased resistance" (Scheppach 1991, 1-2).
Public opinion
The possible effects of these developments on public attitudes toward the states were reflected in a 1991 national opinion poll commissioned by the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (ACIR). The proportion of respondents saying that states spend their tax dollars the most wisely of all governments in the federal system dropped from 20 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 1991. Those picking local government declined slightly, from 36 percent to 35 percent, while respondents selecting the federal government, actually increased slightly from 11 percent to 12 percent. More dramatically, the percentage of Americans volunteering that none of the three governments spends their tax dollars wisely jumped from 19 percent to 27 percent.
The proportion of respondents saying they get the "most of their money" from state government declined from 23 percent in 1989 to 22 percent in 1991. However, the percentage dropped from 33 to 26 for the federal government while increasing from 29 percent to 31 percent for local governments.
The proportion of poll respondents who picked the state income tax as "the worst tax" increased from 10 percent in 1989 to 12 percent in 1991. Those picking the state sales tax as the worst increased from 18 percent to 19 percent, while those selecting the federal income tax declined from 27 percent to 26 percent, and the local property tax, from 32 percent to 30 percent.
Even so, when asked how well their state and the federal government cooperate, 7 percent said "very well" and 43 percent said "fairly well." When asked the same of their state and local government, 9 percent said "very well" and 50 percent said "fairly well." Overall, these respondents seemed more up-beat about federal-state cooperation than many activists in the intergovernmental community, despite the fact that public discontent with state governments appeared to have risen with the downturn in the economy. The most negative public views of state governments, and of federal-state and state-local cooperation, were found in the Northeast (ACIR 1991).
Public Pressure for Term Limits
Another indicator of public discontent with state government, as well as the U.S. Congress, was the term limitation movement. Although a term-limit measure failed on the 1991 Washington state ballot, such measures already had been approved in California, Colorado and Oklahoma in 1990, and were advocated in about 35 other states. In response, the National Conference of State Legislatures began a public education campaign to improve public perceptions of state legislatures.
While the wisdom of term limits is certainly debatable, attempts to limit the terms of members of Congress raise constitutional questions. Many observers believe the states cannot unilaterally limit the number of terms served by their Congressional members. After all, the framers of the U.S. Constitution rejected a term limit, and the term limit imposed on presidents required a constitutional amendment.
Yet, the situation with the Congress is different. Each member represents one state or substate jurisdiction. No one state or group of states could unilaterally limit presidential terms; but the voters of each state, as a sovereign entity, are arguably free to limit the number of terms served by their representatives in Congress, just as they can limit the number of terms served by any of their other elected officials. Although the U.S. Constitution contains no term limit, neither does it explicitly prohibit a state from setting a limit for its representatives. The Constitution specifies only the length of terms to be served by Senate and House members.
Federal Turnovers v. State Turn-ups
For most state officials during this period, term limits were of less immediate concern than fiscal limits. States continued to press the federal government for fiscal and economic relief and for federal assumption of certain fiscal responsibilities, such as long-term care under Medicaid. Some conflict also developed among states, especially over the bailout of the savings and loan industry. Officials in the Northeast and Midwest argued the bailout is shifting funds from their coffers to states such as Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Alaska, Kansas and Louisiana - all net gainers of bailout monies.
In contrast to state emphases on fiscal 'turn-ups' and an economic turnaround, President Bush proposed in his 1991 State of the Union address to 'turn over' to the states $15 billion to $20 billion of grant programs in a fully funded, consolidated block grant, with essentially level funding guaranteed through fiscal 1996. Bush listed 11 examples of what could be turned over, and said these programs were subject to 1,028 pages of regulation in the Federal Register, requiring about 4.2 million hours of paperwork per year. The programs included four in education; EPA sewage construction grants; three in health and human services; two in housing and urban development; and the Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Program.
The proposal generally was well received by governors and state legislators, but not by mayors and members of Congress. House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt suggested, instead, that the federal government increase by 2 percent the taxes on some corporate income to fund state education programs. To qualify for these bonus funds, states would be required to show that all children entering first grade were recipients of prenatal and well-baby care, nutrition screening, immunizations and early childhood education. The proposal received little attention.
City officials opposed Bush's proposal, primarily because the examples included programs of direct interest to them, especially the Community Development Block Grant, certain public housing funds, low-income energy assistance and impact aid for local schools. Robert M. Isaac, president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said that states cannot be trusted with block grant monies. He argued, for example, that under the Drug Abuse Act of 1986, states disburse funds that are too late and too little for local governments.
Both the National Governors' Association and National Conference of State Legislatures developed alternative proposals to present to the White House in April 1991. Missouri Gov. John Ashcroft, then vice-chairman of the National Governors' Association, emphasized the flexibility afforded by block grants. "A prime example of the lack of flexibility in Missouri," he said, "is that social service caseworkers must document by 15-minute intervals the time spent for individual Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and food stamp cases" (National Governors' Association 1991, 3). Both proposals allayed the major concerns of local officials by excluding programs of vital interest to them (McDowell 1991, 8-11). The National Governors' Association proposed to consolidate 42 categorical programs and six loan and loan-guarantee programs into a $15.2 billion block grant having eight functional components. The National Conference of State Legislatures proposed to consolidate about 85 categorical grants into 12 block grants falling into five categories and funded at $21.2 billion.
Virtually nothing was heard about the turnover until December 1991, when President Bush informed the National League of Cities that he would announce a new turnover in his 1992 State of the Union address. Bush proposed a consolidated block grant consisting of 25 programs in: education (12 programs); environmental protection (EPA's sewage construction program); health and human services (Maternal and Child Health Block Grant, Social Services Block Grant, and state administrative expenses for Medicaid, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Food Stamps); justice (drug control and juvenile justice); and four other programs (job training for the homeless, Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service cost share, community service employment for older Americans, and the National and Community Services Act). The proposed budget outlay was $14.6 billion for fiscal 1993, projected to $15.7 billion in fiscal 1997. The 1992 proposal did reflect some of the modifications that had been suggested by the National Governors' Association and National Conference of State Legislatures, and dropped most of the programs that had drawn the strongest objections from local governments.
The President said in the budget proposal that his goal was "to move power and decision-making authority closer to the people and allow state and local governments greater flexibility to manage programs more efficiently and effectively. The proposed block grant encourages the natural innovative powers of state and local governments as laboratories of change." The proposal contained a hold-harmless provision, transitional arrangements and requirements for intended use reports and audits to ensure that states spend the money for the intended purposes. State officials appeared to be cautiously optimistic about the plan, though they expressed concern about the prospects for passage and the fact that "it mixes and matches entitlements and discretionary programs" (Perlman 1992, 23).
In light of the recession and the upcoming presidential election, Bush's overall $1.52 trillion fiscal 1993 budget proposal drew mixed reviews.
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Fuels Used in Farming
You may be eligible to claim a credit or refund of excise taxes included in the price of fuel used on a farm for farming purposes, if you are the owner, tenant, or operator of a farm. You may claim only a credit for gasoline and special motor fuel used on a farm for farming purposes. You may claim either a credit or refund for diesel fuel and aviation fuel used on a farm for farming purposes.
A farm includes livestock (including feed yards for fattening cattle), dairy, fish, poultry, fruit, fur-bearing animals, truck farms, orchards, plantations, ranches, nurseries, ranges, and structures such as greenhouses or horticultural commodities. A fish farm is an area where fish are grown or raised - not merely caught or harvested. The farm must be operated for profit and located in any of the 50 States or the District of Columbia.
Farming purposes. Fuel is used on a farm for farming purposes if it is used:
1) To cultivate the soil, or to raise or harvest any agricultural or horticultural commodity.
2) To raise, shear, feed, care for, train or manage livestock, bees, poultry, fur-bearing animals, or wildlife.
3) To operate, manage, conserve, improve, or maintain your farm, tools, or equipment.
4) To handle, dry, pack, grade, or store any raw agricultural or horticultural commodity (as provided below).
5) To plant, cultivate, care for, or cut trees, or to prepare (other than the sawing into lumber, the chipping or other milling) trees for market, but only if the planting, etc., is incidental to your farming operations (as provided below).
Fuel is used on a farm for farming purposes when it is used by you to handle, dry, pack, grade, or store a raw commodity, but only if you produced more than one-half of the commodity which was so treated during the tax year. Commodity refers to a single raw product. For example, apples would be one commodity, and peaches another. The more than one-half test applies separately to each commodity.
Fuel used in incidental tree operations on your farm may not be included in a claim unless the operations are minor in nature when compared to the total farming operations.
Fuel used on a farm for farming purposes includes fuel used by you as the owner, tenant, or operator, and fuel used by a neighbor or a custom operator who performs services for you to cultivate the soil, raise or harvest any agricultural or horticultural commodity, or to raise, shear, feed, care for, train or manage livestock, bees, poultry, fur-bearing animals, or wildlife.
If you have a neighbor, custom operator, or any other person perform any other services for you on your farm, no one can claim the credit for fuel used on a farm for farming purposes for these services.
If there is doubt whether fuel was purchased by the owner, the tenant, or the operator of a farm, determine who actually bore the cost of the fuel. For example, if the owner of a farm and the tenant share the cost of the fuel 50-50, then each can claim a credit for the tax on one-half of the fuel used. Also, if you sell fuel to a neighbor who uses it on a farm for farming purposes, your neighbor (not you) can claim the credit on the fuel you sold, because your neighbor bore the cost of the fuel.
Cropdusting. The use of fuel in the aerial or other application of fertilizers, pesticides, or other substances is a use of fuel on a farm for farming purposes. You as the owner, tenant, or operator, may claim the credit or refund. If you do not file a claim, you may waive your right to the claim, and then the claim can be made by the applicator. The applicator is treated as having used the fuel on a farm for farming purposes.
Waiver. To waive your right to the credit or refund, you must:
1) Execute in writing an irrevocable statement that you knowingly give up your right to the credit or refund.
2) Identify clearly the time period that the waiver covers. The effective period of your waiver cannot extend beyond the last day of your tax year.
3) Sign the waiver before the applicator files his or her claim. Once signed, the waiver cannot be revoked. You may authorize an agent, such as a cooperative, to sign the waiver for you.
4) Keep a copy of the waiver for your records and give a copy of the signed waiver to the applicator. Do not send this waiver to the Internal Revenue Service, unless requested to do so.
The waiver may be a separate document or it may appear on an invoice or another document from the applicator. If the waiver appears on an invoice or other document, it must be printed in a section clearly set off from all other material, and it must be printed in type sufficiently large to put you on notice that you are waiving your right to the credit or refund. In addition, if the waiver appears as part of an invoice or other document, it must be written separately from any other item that requires your signature.
Sign a separate waiver for each tax year or part of a tax year in which the fuel was used. If any part of the waiver period extends beyond the end of the applicator's tax year, the applicator must wait until the next tax year to claim the credit or refund for that part.
Fuel not used for farming. Fuel is not used for farming purposes when used:
Off the farm, such as on the highway or in non-commercial aviation, even though the fuel is used in transporting livestock, feed, crops, or equipment;
For personal use, such as mowing the lawn;
In processing, packaging, freezing, or canning operations; or
In the processing of crude gum into gum spirits of turpentine or gum resin, or in the processing of maple sap into maple syrup or maple sugar.
Fuels Used in Commercial Fishing Boats
You may be eligible to claim a credit or refund of excise tax included in the price of fuel if you use the fuel in a boat used in the fisheries or whaling business.
Boats used in fishing include only watercraft used in taking, catching, processing, or transporting fish, shellfish, or other aquatic life for commercial purposes, such as selling or processing the catch, on a specific trip basis. Both fresh and salt water fisheries are included. Commercial fishing boats do not include watercraft used on a specific trip for both sport fishing and commercial fishing. For example, a boat is not engaged in commercial fishing if on the same trip it is used for marlin sport fishing and for catching tuna. Fuel used in aircraft to locate fish is not fuel used in commercial fishing.
Fuels Used in Off-Highway Business Use
You may be eligible to claim a credit or refund of excise tax included in the price of fuel if you used the fuel in an off-highway business use.
Off-highway business use is any use of fuel in a trade or business or in any income-producing activity. The use must not be in a highway vehicle registered for use on public highways unless the vehicle is owned by the United States. If a vehicle owned by the United States is registered for highway use, but is not actually used on a public highway during the period for which the claim is made, its use is still an off-highway business use. Off-highway business use does not include any use in a motorboat.
Highway vehicle includes any self-propelled vehicle designed to carry a load over public highways, whether or not also designed to perform other functions.
It does not matter if the vehicle is designed to perform a highway transportation function for only a particular type of load, such as passengers, furnishings, and personal effects (as in a house, office, or utility trailer), or a special kind of cargo, goods, supplies, or materials. It does not matter if machinery or equipment is specially designed (and permanently mounted) to perform some off-highway task unrelated to highway transportation except to the extent discussed in the next paragraph. Examples of vehicles that are designed to carry a load over public highways are passenger automobiles, motorcycles, buses, highway-type trucks, and truck tractors.
Vehicles not considered highway vehicles. Generally, the following kinds of vehicles are not considered highway vehicles:
1) Specially designed mobile machinery for nontransportation functions. A self-propelled vehicle is not a highway vehicle if it consists of a chassis that-
Has permanently mounted to it machinery or equipment used to perform certain operations (construction, manufacturing, drilling, mining, timbering, processing, farming, or similar operations) if the operation of the machinery or equipment is unrelated to transportation on or off the public highways.
Has been specially designed to serve only as a mobile carriage and mount for the machinery or equipment, whether or not the machinery or equipment is in operation, and
Could not be used, because of its special design, as part of a vehicle designed to carry any other load without substantial structural modification.
2) Vehicles designed for off-highway transportation. A self-propelled vehicle is not a highway vehicle if-
The vehicle is designed primarily to carry a specific kind of load other than over the public highway for certain operations (construction, manufacturing, mining, processing, farming, drilling, timbering, or similar operations), and
The vehicle's use of carrying this load over public highways is substantially limited or impaired because of its design. To determine if the vehicle is substantially limited or impaired, you may take into account whether the vehicle may travel at regular highway speeds, requires a special permit for highway use, or is overweight, overheight, or overwidth for regular highway use.
A public highway includes any road in the United States that is no a private roadway. This includes federal, state, county, and city roads and streets.
Registered. A vehicle is considered registered when it is registered or required to be registered for highway use under the law of any state, the District of Columbia, or any foreign country in which it is operated or situated.
Any highway vehicle operated under a dealer's tag, license, or permit is considered registered. A highway vehicle is not considered registered solely because there has been issued a special permit for operation of the vehicle at particular times and under specified conditions.
Fuels used in power take-offs. You are not allowed a credit or refund for fuel used in the motor of a highway vehicle that operates special equipment by means of a power take-off or power transfer. It does not matter if the special equipment is mounted on the vehicle. For example, there is no credit or refund on gasoline used to operate the mixing unit on a concrete-mixer truck when the mixing unit is operated by a power take-off from the motor of the vehicle. Similarly, fuel used in the motor of a registered fuel-oil delivery truck to operate the pump on the truck for discharging the fuel into the customer's storage tank does not qualify for a credit or refund of tax.
If your registered highway vehicle is equipped with a separate motor to operate the special equipment, such as a refrigeration unit, pump, generator, or mixing unit, the fuel you use in the separate motor qualifies. When fuel is drawn from the same tank that supplies fuel for propelling the vehicle, you must figure the quantity used in the separate motor operating the special equipment. Your reasonable estimate of the amount of fuel used will be accepted for a credit or a refund. The figure must be based, however, on operating experience and supported by your records. Devices to measure the number of miles the vehicle has traveled, such as hubometers, may be used to figure the number of gallons of fuel used to propel the vehicle. Add to this amount the fuel consumed while idling or warming up the motor preparatory to propelling the vehicle.
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Taking Stock: Community Development 25 Years Later
New York, N.Y. - Twenty-five years after the civil rights movement and the war on poverty spawned a resurgence of community efforts to combat poverty, representatives from seven of the country's oldest community development corporations met at the Ford Foundation to survey the road they had traveled.
The first order of business was defining just what a community development corporation is. Rocky Mitchell, president of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation in Brooklyn, N.Y., said the person best qualified to offer a definition in his organization was the switchboard operator. "A couple of months ago," said Mitchell, "someone from the community called Restoration to report that the house next door to them was on fire. I think that's an indication of how we're perceived by a lot of people in the community."
Mitchell's organization may not put out fires but, over the last 25 years, it has performed enough services to be routinely described as "the city hall of Bedford-Stuyvesant." Everyone agreed that since their organizations were defined primarily by the needs of the communities they served, there was no 'cookie-cutter' definition to their work, but 'city hall' seemed to fit admirably well.
The two-day conference, held in early November, marked the first time the seven groups - known as 'mature' CDCs - had sat down together around the same table. It was convened by the Foundation's Urban Poverty program so that the organizations' leaders could reflect on their shared experience and define the main issues confronting them in the 1990s. Participating organizations were: the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation (BSRC); the Mexican American Unity Council (MAUC), from San Antonio; Mississippi Action for Community Education (MACE), from Jackson; the Spanish-Speaking Unity Council (SSUC), from Oakland, Calif.; Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC), from Los Angeles; New Community Corporation (NCC), from Newark, N.J.; and Chicanos Por La Causa (CPLC), from Phoenix, Ariz.
All of the groups were organized in the 1960s, when the issues of poverty and discrimination first burst onto the national agenda. There was a clear need then for organizations that could combine the technical and professional skills of a government agency with the street wisdom, motivation, and local pride found in many community-based groups.
Such CDCs were part of a generation of neighborhood organizations that played a pivotal role in the rebirth of urban neighborhoods. Emphasizing self-determination and self-help, they accepted as their mission the improvement of all aspects of a community's life - physical, economic, and social.
Over the years the CDCs represented at the conference had all demonstrated the ability to manage large amounts of public and private funds, often with great ingenuity, developing programs that included job training, youth counseling, care for the elderly, health services, housing rehabilitation, and commercial and industrial development. In addition, the early CDCs served as the training grounds for many local leaders.
In spite of all they had accomplished, all of the groups reported that their work had to be seen as a "holding action." Without substantial public and private reinvestment, it was felt that no single organization could reverse a continuing pattern of decline in many of the nation's poor neighborhoods.
Moreover, during the 1980s they all had to learn to survive in an era of drastically diminished support. Larry Farmer, the president of Mississipi's MACE, articulated a feeling shared by most of the other CDC leaders when he said, "All of us have been living one step ahead of the sheriff for the last 10 years or so."
In his remarks to the conference, Ford Foundation President Franklin Thomas, who had been BSRC's first president, serving for ten years, recalled how tough it had been to get these organizations going in the mid to late 1960s. "Some of these cities were burning," he said, "and we were all scrambling to try to show something tangible that would give people a basis for hope and give young people a sense of connection and empowerment."
He called for wider recognition of the challenges the groups faced in meeting capital and other needs, including leadership development and staff development. He took particular note of the devastating impact that the shift in national policy during the 1980s had on these groups. "At the same time," said Thomas, "the vision embodied in the early CDCs is one that the entire community development movement has to return to. For a development strategy to be worthy of the name, it has to simultaneously pursue work on housing, business growth, job training, education, and art, culture, and recreation - because those are all the elements necessary for a healthy community and a healthy society." He cited what he saw as a "real need to connect this first generation of CDCs with the newer ones in a way that strengthens the whole."
All the conference participants agreed that there hadn't been enough recognition of how hard it was to carry out that vision. Reflecting on their difficulties, SSUC's executive director, Arabella Martinez, said, "Over the last decade there's been a serious erosion of the social safety net. There's less of a will to do something about the problems of poverty. It's a less caring society."
"A lot of the time," said Martinez, who was an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services during the Carter Administration, "we're taking on development risks in areas long since abandoned by business and industry." Speaking from her own experience, she said, "If it hadn't been for the Spanish-Speaking Unity Council, the Fruitvale section of Oakland would look the way the South Bronx did 10 years ago."
Yet, given the shortage of funding, many of the CDCs formed over the past 10 to 15 years have had to restrict their activities to housing development. "They've done important work adding to the stock of low-income housing," said Martinez. "But it's a narrower vision of community development."
At least in part because the mature CDCs remain the most complete expression of the philosophy of community development, Monsignor William Linder of Newark's New Community said he believed that it was in everybody's interests that they continue to grow.
Describing them as one of the most important sources of expertise in the debate on poverty issues, from teenage motherhood to homelessness, he observed that the mature CDCs "can tie policy to the real world of people in a way that few other organizations can."
Speaking around a table where there were decidedly more people with gray hair than not, he added, "There's no way for a movement to progress if it doesn't have a sense of its own history. We need a lot of the gray-haired people who have lived that history to continue to play a role in the community development movement."
MACE's president, Larry Farmer, said that what he thought distinguished the work of the groups attending the conference from more recent efforts in poor communities was that many of the newer ones seemed "more committed to helping people live better in poverty rather than helping them get out of poverty."
He also said that community groups "had to try to empower from all directions. Not just through economic development, but through the people becoming leaders" - something that MACE has stressed since its beginnings.
Said SSUC's Martinez, "Don't measure my success solely on the dollars and cents at the bottom of my balance sheet. Measure me also on the number of people who got their first real chance while working in a CDC. Leadership is just like anything else - it's learned. And it's learned on the job. I would never have been an assistant secretary in Washington if it hadn't been for the experience I got at the Unity Council."
Most felt that their organizations had to become better at formalizing leadership training. CPLC's Pete Garcia recalled that when he first started to move beyond the world of South Phoenix's barrio, he was "still trying to figure out which one of these whoms and forths and wherefores you used first. You don't just take someone who grew up in a housing project, the way I did, and expect that he or she will be able to make their way through the corridors of power without some formal training. If you're going to make a leader, you're going to have to provide training, travel, internships, and a variety of other things."
One step that Garcia's organization has taken is to forge close ties with Hispanic students in the nearby universities. "We recruit interns through student associations," he said. "And even if we can't offer them jobs after they graduate, we try to keep in contact with them."
But many at the conference said that the crisis atmosphere brought on by the withdrawal of federal support made leadership development - in their organizations and in the larger community - a luxury they couldn't afford.
"We need real institutional support," said Martinez, "the kind of support that ballets, symphonies, and museums, and national organizations like the American Red Cross get. None of us are coming close to that kind of backing. We have a harder job to do with fewer resources."
"One of the problems," she added, "is that we're working with people who aren't terribly attractive to a lot of funders. Many have been drug dealers, or they're ex-addicts or welfare mothers. And they're black and Hispanic."
There's a double standard," said NCC board member Mary Smith. "Funders will tell you, 'Oh, the work you're doing is wonderful!' But then they'll tell you that they don't give grants for that kind of work. They'll give it to an institution they perceive as safe, like a college or a hospital."
Monsignor Linder cited as an example a university not far from Newark's New Community. By midway in a yearlong $100 million fund-raising drive it had already reached its goal. "New Community touches a lot more people's lives than that university," he said. "We're providing services that are every bit as important and a lot more challenging to deliver. But somehow we're not perceived as playing anywhere near as important a role."
CPLC's Garcia thinks wider recognition of that role is absolutely essential. "With all the hard times we've had," he said, "we've come of age as a group. We're an institution now. And the powers-that-be should start taking notice."
"We have track records," said WLCAC's Ted Watkins. "We've established our credibility. But government and the private sector still haven't realized sufficiently that what we're doing is in their best interests, too."
To overcome those perceptions, all agreed that they had to get much better at telling their story.
"When it comes to inner-city communities," said Watkins, "there's a lot more attention given to drive-by shootings, crack dealers, and drug busts than to the work of CDCs. But trying to get the attention of the media takes time - time that none of us can afford right now."
Just as important, said Garcia, was "getting more involved in the debate over public policy, so that instead of us having to follow the money, the money starts to follow us." He added that this was also an area where an organization's commitment to developing leaders in the community could be crucial. "If you've done that work," he said, "then a lot of the local political leaders may not only be your friends, they may be part of your organization's family." He cited as an example a recently elected U.S. congressman from the Phoenix area who was a longstanding member of CPLC's board. "CPLC identified the development of leadership as a primary objective 20 years ago," said Garcia. "We've succeeded at the local level, at the state level, and now, we're proud to say, at the national level."
According to Mary Smith of NCC, one way her organization has dealt with this issue was by having a strong community action group that worked hard to let elected officials know what they thought was best for their community.
She recalled an encounter she had 15 years earlier that brought home the importance of organizing.
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FROM THE DEPUTY CHAIRMAN
"To fulfill its educational mission, achieve an orderly continuation of free society, and provide models of excellence to the American people, the Federal Government must transmit the achievement and values of civilization from the past via the present to the future ..."
National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, as amended through November 5, 1990
Civilization is a fragile thing. As the legislation that authorizes the Endowment makes clear, history and literature and philosophy do not by themselves speak to generations, present and upcoming. There are necessary agents of transmission - teachers, scholars, students, books, exhibitions, films - and there is necessary support from American citizens. The National Endowment for the Humanities, as an agency of the federal government, does its part by translating American taxpayer monies into programs that serve the present and the future.
One universally acknowledged achievement of civilization is being recognized through the NEH Initiative on the Emergence of Democracy announced in 1992. It is a special invitation for projects that study democracy in its beginnings 2500 years ago and its subsequent emergence in different parts of the world. The initiative is particularly timely in that American scholars are just gaining access to archives held close in Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet republics, but the emergence of democracy is of enduring interest to a nation that seeks to provide for the future orderly continuation of free society. The Endowment has supported several initiatives over the years, mostly in response to historically significant commemorations, such as the Bicentennial of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Columbian Quincentennary. Although for none of these initiatives were there dedicated funds, they have served to enrich the pool of applications and raise even higher the quality of NEH's many awards.
The merit of the thousands of applications is determined by a process that encourages open debate and brings a multitude of perspectives to bear. It is a procedure that respects intellectual property and personal privacy while conducting public business. It is a three-way tug-and-pull: first, an individual applicant's or panelist's reasonable expectation of confidentiality; second, the citizen's right, therefore the press's right, to know how federal funds are being spent; and finally, a federal agency's responsibility to carry out statutorily mandated programs as effectively and fairly as possible.
When NEH peer reviewers are asked for advice, they have the reasonable expectation that their advice will be treated confidentially. Likewise, when applicants submit proposals, they have a reasonable expectation that the details of their proposals will be held in confidence until the decision to fund or not to fund is made. Once federal funds are obligated for a project, then the description of that project is public information, for the public has a right to know how federal funds are being spent.
Meetings at NEH to discuss specific proposals are closed to the public. When panelists and when National Council members meet in Washington to discuss individual applications, they are reminded that their discussions as well as the details within applications are confidential. Not only does the Endowment reason that it has a responsibility to protect the privacy of those people who do not receive federal funds, but it also understands that it must safeguard the ideas in the applications.
Closed review, however, is more than an issue of the right to privacy. It is an issue of fair and impartial evaluation. The Endowment argues that it cannot carry out its statutorily mandated programs without assuring that applications will be fairly and judiciously considered. Since its inception NEH has depended on the good will of knowledgeable people who have submitted assessments in complete confidence. They have given honest opinions freely; they have determined merit in an atmosphere of disinterested remove.
Their work has resulted in a wide-ranging array of Endowment-supported projects, from a film on Lyndon Baines Johnson to a comprehensive dictionary of classical Latin. In the course of its twenty-seven years, the Endowment has spent $2.65 billion enabling 47,000 projects. In terms of the total federal budget, the sums are small; in terms of total funding for humanities in the United States, however, NEH annually provides more financial support than the 846 largest private foundations do collectively.
One way in which the Endowment has made its funds go farther than they would under ordinary circumstances is through alliances with other federal agencies and with major private funders. Currently an interagency agreement has enabled NEH to participate with the National Science Foundation and the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education in the Department of Education. The three agencies are pooling resources to encourage programs that improve the quality of undergraduate curricula. Another agreement with the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress will support public lecture-discussion programs in science and the humanities. A large gift from the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund has given sabbatical opportunities to almost 200 outstanding elementary and secondary teachers over the four years the program has been in place.
NEH is able to play as an equal partner with much larger enterprises for several reasons, but none as important as its reputation over the years for being a well-run agency with a highly competent professional staff. On the administrative side of the agency, for example, in the auditing office and grants office, are knowledgeable, collegial professionals who serve as stewards of taxpayer funds. And on the program side of the agency are dedicated, intelligent officials who daily encourage and inform potential applicants, and who, most importantly, assure fair and impartial review.
It is the widely acknowledged integrity of its merit review process that has given the Endowment the reputation of being primus inter pares in the community of grant-making agencies. It is through these means - merit review, a superlative staff, initiatives that emphasize the contribution of humanities to the national interest - that the National Endowment for the Humanities strives to enable projects that transmit the accomplishments and values of civilization.
HOW THE ENDOWMENT WORKS
In order "to develop and promote a broadly conceived national policy of support for the humanities," the National Endowment for the Humanities was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent grant-making agency of the federal government. The Endowment supports scholarly research, education, and public programs in the humanities. Under the act that established the Endowment, the term humanities includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following disciplines: history; philosophy; languages; linguistics; literature; archaeology; jurisprudence; the history, theory, and criticism of the arts; ethics; comparative religion; and those aspects of the social sciences that employ historical or philosophical approaches.
Programs.
This report lists federal funds obligated for grants made in fiscal year 1992 through the Endowment's six divisions - Education Programs, Fellowships and Seminars, Preservation and Access, Public Programs, Research Programs, and State Programs - and one office - the Office of Challenge Grants. Grant listings are preceded by a brief introduction describing the nature and purposes of the programs administered by each division. The grants themselves are listed in alphabetical order under each grant-making program. Except for the Travel to Collections program, grants for less than $1,000 are not listed.
Public Information.
Information about Endowment programs and activities can be found in a variety of publications produced by the Office of Publications and Public Affairs. The Endowment's bimonthly magazine Humanities features articles by nationally known scholars and writers on current humanities topics, a listing of recent grants by discipline, a calendar of grant application deadlines, a guide section for those who are thinking of applying for an NEH grant, and essays about noteworthy NEH supported projects.
Matching Funds.
To stimulate private support for the humanities, the Endowment uses federal funds to match funds donated from private sources. To date, NEH matching grants have helped generate almost §123 billion in gift funds - more than $953 million of which has been generated through the Challenge Grants program. Matching under the Challenge Grants program is required in a ratio of three to one for first-time awards or four to one for second-time awards. Matching under other programs is on a one-for-one basis.
In addition to federal matching funds, the Endowment stimulates private-sector support of specific projects by requiring grantees in most programs to commit their own funds for a portion of the costs of a project. In many cases, this amounts to 50 percent of total project costs.
Grants.
Except in the case of challenge grants and most grants made by the Division of State Programs, awards made by NEH are for specific projects in the humanities. To apply, an individual or organization submits a proposal for a project to one of the Endowment's funding categories. A final decision can normally be expected about six months after the application deadline.
Each application is assessed by knowledgeable persons outside the Endowment who are asked for their judgments about the quality of the proposed project. About 1,200 scholars and professionals in the humanities serve on approximately 250 panels throughout the course of a year. The judgment of panelists is often supplemented by individual reviews solicited from specialists who have extensive knowledge of the specific subject area dealt with in the application.
The advice of the panels and outside reviewers is assembled by the staff of the Endowment, who may comment on matters of fact or on significant issues that would otherwise be missing from the evaluation. These materials are then presented to the National Council on the Humanities, a board of twenty-six citizens nominated by the President of the United States and confirmed by the Senate. The National Council meets four times each year to advise the Chairman of the Endowment. The Chairman, who is appointed for a four year term by the President with the consent of the Senate, takes into account the advice provided by this review process and, by law, makes the final decision about funding.
In fiscal year 1992, more than 9,100 applications were reviewed, of which about 1,900 were approved.
DIVISION OF EDUCATION PROGRAMS
In 1992 the Division of Education Programs began to award grants for undergraduate curricula that illuminate connections among the various disciplines of science and the humanities. This interagency effort, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation and the Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, will continue into 1993 and 1994. By means of one such grant, Southwest Texas State University of San Marcos, Texas, will call on faculty from a wide range of fields whose common interest is the study of the Southwest through the perspectives of history, culture, and the natural sciences to develop courses for a new Southwestern studies minor. Another grant will enable Skidmore College to plan a series of multidisciplinary capstone courses which will enrich general education courses. The Division's Higher Education in the Humanities program emphasizes not only general education and core curricula but also deepening the humanities education of future teachers. At Southwest Texas State University a seminar of thirteen humanities faculty members and four secondary school teachers will refine foundation courses for a new program leading to a graduate certificate in the humanities for secondary school teachers. The courses are to focus on 'The Quest for Order and Happiness: The Individual, the State, and the Ethical Life'; readings will range from Seneca's 'Letter from a Stoic' through Diderot's Rameau's Nephew to Morrison's Beloved. To strengthen curricula for undergraduates preparing to become history and social studies teachers, the American Political Science Association will offer a summer institute on constitutional history, principles, and law for campus-based teams of humanities and education faculty members.
Both of the division's comprehensive programs support residential summer institutes for intensive study of significant topics and texts in the humanities. 'The Nature of Meaning,' sponsored by Rutgers University under a grant from the Higher Education program, will focus on the fundamental question, now widely disputed in the humanities, of whether meaning is verifiable among individuals. Intended for faculty members in literary theory, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and cognitive studies, as well as those who teach philosophy, the institute will feature many leading contributors to the current debate.
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Hershey
A Report on the Company's Environmental Policies and Practices
The Council on Economic Priorities Corporate Environmental Data Clearinghouse
December 1992
HERSHEY FOODS CORPORATION
I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report documents the company's environmental impact. Among the key aspects are the following:
PERFORMANCE VS. INDUSTRY
CEP looks at six indicators to provide comparative industry-wide analysis. Taken together, these indicators by no means reflect the sum total of a company's environmental performance. CEP compares Hershey to its competitors in the Food Industry.
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Hershey reported the release of just over 90,000 pounds of toxic chemicals in 1989, up from 78,000 pounds in 1988. In terms of aggregate releases, the company's reported release of toxic chemicals was better than average among other companies in the food industry.
When adjusted for sales, Hershey's toxic releases were better than average for the food industry in 1988 and 1989. Hershey Soup reported the release of 0.04 pounds of toxic chemicals for every $1,000 in sales in 1989 and 0.03 in 1988.
Hershey Foods paid nearly $12,000 in OSHA violations during the past five years for 56 violations. This dollar amount was lower than nearly all its major competitors.
The environmental soundness of Hershey's PAC contributions was only about average in general, but much better than that of its competitors. Hershey scored 50 out of 100 on CEP's Greendex.
As of July 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had not identified Hershey Foods as a 'potentially responsible party' (PRP) at any Superfund site. This tied them with 4 other companies in the food industry.
Hershey had 4 facility-quarters out of compliance with air permits in 1991. (A facility-quarter is a facility that is out of compliance with its air permit during one calendar quarter.) This was about average for the food industry.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
Though Hershey has not set goals to reduce the use or emission of carbon dioxide and methane, they have done so for nitrogen oxide and CFCs. Hershey states that its sulfur dioxide emissions have been reduced significantly, through an energy policy which uses cleaner burning natural gas as its primary fuel. And in Hershey's new chocolate facility the company has installed new technology in the boilers that reduces nitrogen oxide emissions.
In terms of solid waste management, the company participates in waste exchanges when possible and reprocess waste for sale as usable product. The company's edible products are reprocessed into animal feed and other wastes are reprocessed for use as mushroom and garden mulch.
The company now has a policy that whenever possible it purchases office paper with recycled content and it replaces photocopiers with new ones which can use recycled paper. Many of its photocopiers and laser printers also use refurbished cartridges.
Hershey's new chocolate facility is attempting to conserve water in the manufacturing process by using water recovered from the evaporation of milk in various non-food contact operations. The company estimated that this program will save approximately 100,000 gallons of water per day.
REGULATORY, LEGAL AND POLITICAL ISSUES
Though the company did not state its position on the proposed GATT Resolution (H.Con.Res. 246), they did state that they support "harmonization" of food safety standards and have a company representative in the U.S. delegation to the Codex Alimentarius Commission.
PRODUCTS AND TECHNOLOGIES
Hershey does plans to conduct biotechnology research on plants, but would not identify the projects and items under consideration, stating this was confidential information.
DISCLOSURE AND POLICY
Hershey responded to CEP's environmental questionnaire. The company also provided comments on a draft copy of CEDC's environmental profile.
Hershey does not support the labelling of foods for pesticides, waxes or shellacs, bioengineered genes, or irradiation, because the company believes "that foods complying with US safety standards do not require warnings on labels."
II. COMPANY OVERVIEW
Hershey Foods Corporation produces a broad line of chocolate confectionery, pasta and other food products. At the end of 1991, the company employed 14,000 people full-time and 1,300 people part-time and Richard A. Zimmerman is the Chairman and CEO.
In 1991, Hershey had nearly $3 billion in sales revenues, a 7% increase from 1990. Net income rose 2% in 1991 to $220 million. According to Fortune, it was the 160th largest company in the United States, and the 17th largest in the food industry in terms of 1991 revenues.
III. STRUCTURE AND POLICY
INDUSTRIES AND SUBSIDIARIES
Hershey Foods Corporation manufactures, distributes and sells consumer food products, which include various chocolates, confectionery, pasta and other food products. The corporation includes the following: Hershey Chocolate U.S.A.; Hershey Canada Inc.; Hershey Refrigerated Products; Hershey International and Hershey Pasta Group.
Hershey Chocolate U.S.A.
This division of Hershey Foods, along with Hershey Canada Inc., manufactures and sells chocolate and confectionery products under approximately fifty-five brand names. Hershey Chocolate U.S.A's main brand names are Hershey's, Reese's, Y&S, Luden's and Peter Paul.
Hershey Canada Inc.
In addition to Hershey, Reese and Y&S, the main brand names of this division include Moirs, Lowney, Glosette, Life Savers, Oh Henry! and Planters.
Hershey Refrigerated Products
This division of Hershey Foods manufactures and sells refrigerated puddings in the U.S.<
p_>Hershey International
In Germany and Mexico, the company manufactures chocolate and confectionery products under the brand names Gubor and Hershey's respectively. This division also exports products manufactured by other divisions and is involved in various international joint ventures.
Hershey Pasta Group
Hershey Pasta Group manufactures and sells pasta under eight brand names, which include San Giorgio, Skinner, Delmonico, P&R, Light 'N Fluffy, American Beauty, Perfection and Ronzoni.
Importation of Foods
The company imports ingredients directly as well as through brokers. Currently, Hershey receives cocoa beans from seven countries.
Hershey explained that they do not grow cocoa beans themselves, but import them from West African, South American and Far Eastern equatorial regions.
FACILITIES AND TERRITORIES
Domestic and Canada
Hershey Chocolate U.S.A. operates 10 manufacturing facilities, six of these are plants of Hershey Pasta Group and the rest are two Confectionery Products plants in Hershey, Pennsylvania, one Confectionery Products plant in Oakdale, California and one in Stuarts Draft, Virginia. Hershey Canada Inc. operates manufacturing facilities in Smith Falls and Hamilton, Ontario; Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; and Montreal, Quebec. They also have a Confectionery Products plant in Smith Falls, Ontario. In addition to the plants listed above, Hershey owns properties for manufacturing pasta products.
CONTACT PEOPLE
Dr. Catherine St. Hilaire
Director
Regular Affairs
(717)-534-5060
John C. Long
Director of Consumer and Public Relations
(717)-534-7641
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
Company's environmental policy
Hershey established an environmental taskforce in 1990 with the purpose of updating the company's Environmental Compliance Policy. The company's 'environmental philosophy' reads as follows: "We believe that Hershey Foods Corporation has an obligation to protect and preserve the environment for ouselves, our children and for future generations. We will continue to conduct our business activities in a manner which does not adversely affect the environment and which protects the health and safety of our employees, our consumers and the communities in which we operate."
Hershey's environmental compliance program is based on the following: The company stated that they keep management informed of all issues and circumstances relating to compliance; that its facilities are provided with individuals who have technical expertise in resolving environmental problems; that independent environmental assessments are made by the company; and that any permitting of non-compliance will result in disciplinary acton.
Agriculture policy
When importing ingredients, Hershey stated that they test all lots of cocoa beans to ensure they comply with U.S. regulations on pesticides.
Hershey's formal environmental policy does not deal specifically with integrated pest management (IPM), organic certification, or soil conservation. However, the company does endorse and encourage IPM and soil conservation in its supplier documents and position on pesticide use.
The company does not support the labelling of foods for pesticides, waxes or shellacs, bioengineered genes, or irradiation because the company believes "that foods complying with US safety standards do not require warnings on labels."
Food irradiation
Hershey Foods' policy on food irradiation seems to have fluctuated in the past few years. In 1990, it was reported that Hershey supports food irradiation in policy and the Better World Investment Guide in 1991, stated that up until the late 1980s Hershey belonged to the Coalition for Food Irradiation, a pro-food irradiation lobby. In November of 1991 the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR) had a dialogue with the company regarding its policy on food irradiation. At the time, Hershey was targeted as a company that possibly supports food irradiation and ICCR initiated a shareholder resolution against the company. Though ICCR was not able to follow up on the issue, Hershey stated to CEP that "With respect to food irradiation, it is not currently used by our corporation or any of our operating divisions. Neither do we currently purchase or use irradiated foods or ingredients or sell foods that have been exposed to radiation." However, Laurie Williams, educational coordinator for Food and Water, an anti-food irradiation group, stated that as of now Hershey has not submitted a statement to them on food irradiation.
IV. ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
RELEASES
While releases of methyl bromide (bromomethane), a potent carcinogen, decreased slightly from 1988 to 1989, Hershey's total reported toxic releases increased substantially. This was mostly dodue to the release of over 27,000 pounds of phosphoric acid into the sewer system at its Oakdale, CA facility.
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Toxic Releases Reduction
Hershey does not participate in the EPA's Industrial Toxics Project (33/50 program). The initiative aims to reduce by one-third by 1992 and by one-half by 1995 the release of 17 target chemicals from 600 industrial companies. Hershey stated that of the 17 chemicals targeted by the EPA, they use only "small amounts in laboratory-related methods." The company then explained that when appropriate, they are looking to eliminate the use of these chemicals through alternative methods.
Though Hershey has not set goals to reduce the use or emission of carbon dioxide and methane, they have done so for nitrogen oxides and CFCs, though the targets were not divulged to CEP. Hershey also stated that its sulfur dioxide (SO<sb_>2<sb/>) emissions have been reduced significantly. The company explained that this was achieved through its energy policy, which uses clean burning natural gas as its primary fuel. They further explained, that in Hershey's new chocolate facility the company has installed new technology in the boilers that reduces nitrogen oxide emissions.
In 1988, Hershey's plant in Hershey, Pennsylvania emitted 40,591 pounds of methyl bromide. According to the Toxic Chemical Release Inventory of the 1986 Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, this chemical is one of many which is considered as "acutely toxic, possible carcinogenic, or capable of having a significant adverse effect on the environment."
WASTE MANAGEMENT
Company Policy
Hershey stated that their company does have a program for reducing wastes generated in manufacturing and it is implemented in the following ways: reducing or eliminating the use of hazardous/toxic materials by switching to non-hazardous/non-toxic materials; reusing or recycling materials; production design/engineering changes; recycling of non-spec or substandard product and establishing office paper recycling.
Hazardous Waste Management
In their 1991 Environmental Brochure, Hershey stated that they do not handle many materials that are hazardous or toxic, but that some amount of chemicals are used in their laboratories and manufacturing plants. For disposal of these materials, Hershey stated that they are moved by licensed transporters who deliver it to waste treatment or disposal facilities. They also stated that they are committed to minimizing the use of hazardous and toxic materials.
Hershey stated that their company does produce chemical, nuclear, and biological wastes from laboratory work which require special disposal procedures.
Hershey stated the amount of hazardous waste (as defined under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act or RCRA - see APPENDIX J) they produced for each year between 1987 and 1991 was less than 20,000 pounds. Hershey did no onsite recycling, incinerating, treating or landfilling of the hazardous waste produced last year. In terms of offsite efforts, however, the company did recycle 95% of the hazardous waste generated and incinerated 5%.
Solid Waste Management
In their 1991 Environmental Brochure, Hershey stated that they "agree" with the following waste reduction and disposal techniques (in order of preference) adopted by the EPA: source reduction; recycling (including composting of yard waste); waste-to-energy conversion; and landfilling.
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Faculty Research Leave (Sabbatical Leave)
APPLICATION DEADLINE: None
Faculty members spend their sabbatical leave, typically 9-12 months, at the Laboratory. Over 120 appointments have been made since the program's inception in 1980.
The Faculty Research Leave Program is intended to provide mutual benefits to the faculty members and the Laboratory. In addition to bringing about fruitful research activity, it should give Argonne scientists and engineers and visiting faculty opportunities to develop a strengthened rapport and deepened appreciation of mutual needs and interests pertaining to research development and to catalyze the formation of continuing research partnerships and collaborations.
Interactions of faculty with students in the research programs is strongly encouraged. This can take the form of research collaboration as well as more conventional interactions such as seminars and teaching. Also, when funding is available, faculty can involve qualified student(s) from their home campus in their Argonne research program.
Appointments will normally be for an academic or a calendar year, extendable, if mutually agreed upon by the faculty member, the home institution and Argonne. To be eligible for the appointment, a faculty member must be in receipt of a sabbatical-leave award (or other appropriate award) from his/her university, have the approval of the appropriate university administrator to accept the Argonne appointment, and have demonstrated accomplishment in an area of research and/or development relevant to research at Argonne.
During his/her Faculty Research Leave appointment, the faculty member will remain on the payroll and under the fringe benefits of the university. Typically, Argonne will reimburse the university for 50% of salary and fringe benefits for the academic-year (9 months) and full salary and fringe benefits for the summer period (3 months). In addition, the Laboratory may, by direct payment to the faculty member, negotiate reimbursement for certain travel, moving, and housing expenses.
Argonne desires that the expression of interest in Faculty Research Leave participation by an individual faculty member, along with university endorsement of such participation, be transmitted to the Faculty Program Leader, Argonne Division of Educational Programs. Initial expressions of interest should include a curriculum vitae, a publication list, and a brief statement of the research interests of the faculty member. There should also be an indication by the responsible university official that the faculty member is eligible to receive a sabbatical or other appropriate award.
GRADUATE STUDENT PROGRAMS
Laboratory-Graduate Participantship Appointments
Laboratory-Graduate Participantship (Lab-Grad) appointments are available for qualified graduate students at U.S. universities who wish to carry out their thesis research at Argonne National Laboratory under the co-sponsorship of an Argonne staff member and a faculty member. The university sets the academic standards and awards the degree. In practice, the participation by the faculty member varies from full partnership in the research to general supervision. The Argonne staff sponsor undertakes to keep the faculty sponsor informed about the student's progress and he/she attends the thesis defense.
Research may be conducted in the basic physical and life sciences, mathematics, computer science, and engineering as well as in a variety of applied areas relating to conservation, environment, fission and fusion energy, and other energy technologies.
Lab-Grad appointments are for a one-year term with annual renewals being contingent upon satisfactory performance by the appointee. Appointments usually commence when the student begins full-time thesis research at Argonne after having completed all other academic requirements. In certain cases students may be awarded support for pre-thesis studies on campus, provided that they intend to carry out their thesis research at Argonne.
Support of a Lab-Grad appointee consists of a stipend, tuition payment up to $3,500 per year, and certain travel expenses. In addition, the student's faculty sponsor may receive payment for limited travel expenses.
An application for a Lab-Grad appointment may be submitted at any time during the year and an appointment may commence at any time. A completed application should be submitted at least one month prior to any proposed starting date but earlier application submission is advantageous because the availability of Lab-Grad appointments is limited by funding constraints.
Mutual interest in an area of research by the student and the Argonne staff sponsor is essential for the successful arrangement of a Lab-Grad appointment. To help the parties gauge their mutual interest, a limited number of temporary appointments are available for qualified graduate students so that they may work with an Argonne staff member and become familiar with his/her research program. These temporary appointments have a tenure of three months and support consists of a per diem payment to help defray the cost of living away from home, plus travel expenses.
Thesis-Parts Appointments
Thesis-Parts Appointments support qualified graduate students who wish to visit Argonne for periods from a few days to a few months, so that they may utilize special Laboratory facilities or capabilities during the course of their thesis research. Support consists of a per diem amount to help defray the cost of living away from home, plus transportation. Application is best made through an Argonne staff person or research Division appropriate to the proposed activity.
Guest Graduate Appointments
Guest Graduate Appointments are available for qualified graduate students who show that access to Argonne National Laboratory will be beneficial to their thesis research and to Argonne programs. A Guest Graduate is given a gate pass, usually for one year, and the student may visit Argonne whenever appropriate. A Guest Graduate receives no stipend or payment of any kind from the Laboratory.
For application materials and further information about any of these graduate student programs, or for assistance in identifying an appropriate Argonne staff member, write or call:
Graduate Student Program Office
Division of Educational Programs
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, Illinois 60439-4845
(708) 972-3371
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAMS
The student research programs at Argonne are educational experiences designed to provide participants with the opportunity to study and carry out research at the frontiers of their fields of interest. Participation in the program takes the form of an individual collaboration with an Argonne staff member in some part of an ongoing project of interest to the student participant.
Three programs exist at Argonne in which college/university students may obtain research experience. These are the Summer Research Participation (SRP) Program, the Science and Engineering Research Semester (SERS), and the Graduate Student Thesis Research Program. While specific details for SRP and SERS are given below, a student will generally spend the first week of his/her Argonne experience with an Argonne staff member devising a research strategy. For the next few weeks the supervisor will provide considerable program assistance and guidance. Subsequently, the student will be expected to perform relatively independently and complete the project on his/her own initiative. Each student is required to submit a mid-term progress report and a final research report.
To be eligible for SRP or SERS, a student must:
<*_>star<*/> have a grade point average of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale, and
<*_>star<*/> be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident alien.
Selection for any program is based upon a student's academic record, statement of interests, and his/her faculty member recommendations.
Summer Research Participation Program
APPLICATION DEADLINE: February 3, 1992
The Program:
The Summer Research Participation Program extends for an eleven-week period which begins in early June and runs through mid-August. In addition to their research activities, participants are expected to attend a series of seminars and tours dealing with current topics in science and engineering.
Normally, participants in the summer program must have completed their sophomore year and not more than their first year of graduate study. While students must generally have matriculated status, science or engineering graduates who have been out of college for no more than one year will also be considered for the program.
Financial Assistance:
During the appointment period, participants receive a stipend of $200/week and complimentary housing or a housing allowance. All housing arrangements for single students are handled by Argonne's Division of Educational Programs. Transportation expenses are reimbursed for one round-trip between the Laboratory and the participant's home or university for round-trip distances greater than 100 miles. If travel is via personal auto, reimbursement is at a rate of 25.5 cents per mile, with the total not to exceed coach-class airfare.
Application Procedure:
An application packet can be obtained by writing or calling:
Student Research Programs
Division of Educational Programs
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne, Illinois 60439-4845
(708) 972-4579
Once completed, the application form should be returned to the above address. The Student Evaluation Forms found in the application packet should be given to faculty members with whom the applicant has had frequent contact. The faculty member should mail the evaluation form directly to the Division of Educational Programs. These forms must be returned to complete your application file.
Science and Engineering Research Semester
APPLICATION DEADLINES: 1992 Fall Program - March 15, 1992
1993 Spring Program - October 20, 1992
The Program:
As part of a recent, nationwide Department of Energy initiative, the Science and Engineering Research Semester offers challenging opportunities for students selected nationally for participation in energy-related research during the academic year. The program enhances the historic collaboration between the university community and the national laboratories and strengthens the quality of science, mathematics, and engineering research and education.
The core of the academic-year SERS Program is the student research experience. As such, the student is expected to devote at least 35 hours per week to research on a specific project under the mentorship of an Argonne staff scientist. In addition to a mid-term and final report, each student will also be required to present a brief seminar at Argonne on his/her research project.
In addition to the research experience, courses which should accommodate the needs and interests of a majority of the student participants will be available. Information on the specific courses to be offered during a particular term can be obtained by writing to the Division of Educational Programs or by calling the Argonne SERS coordinator at (708) 972-4579.
Should a student require a special course not offered as part of the regular program, he/she will be allowed to substitute a course offered by a regional university. In this case, arrangements MUST be made by the student well in advance of his/her stay at Argonne. Students whose special needs are not covered by any of the above options may arrange with their home campus faculty for independent study to be conducted at Argonne under the supervision of one of the Argonne staff.
In addition to the above activities, Argonne has integrated into its program a number of special features and activities. During the Fall term, SERS participants have the opportunity to attend the Argonne Graduate School Fair in Science and Engineering. At this Fair, students have the chance to talk, one-on-one, with faculty representatives from some of the finest graduate schools in the U.S. On October 5, 1991, we will have over 135 departments represented, including: Princeton, Yale, The University of Chicago, Georgia Tech, to name a few. In the Spring, a number of the program's students are selected for an expense-paid trip to make a presentation on their Argonne research at the annual undergraduate conference sponsored by the National Council on Undergraduate Research. Last year, 18 Argonne students attended the Conference held at the California Institute of Technology. In addition to the above special activities, many cultural and scientific resources exist in the greater Chicago area. Trips to the Aquarium, Planetarium, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Science and Industry, etc., are also available.
Academic Credit:
Students are encouraged to seek academic credit from their home institutions for their SERS experience. Recommended credit is 12-16 semester hours or the equivalent; Interdisciplinary Seminar, 1 credit; Advanced Course, 3 credits; Research, 8-12 credits. The exact number of credits a student receives must be determined by the student in consultation with the student's departmental chairperson or advisor. DEP is willing to provide whatever assistance it can in helping a student arrange for academic credit.
Periods of Appointment:
Appointments are usually for either the Fall or Spring Semester. For those students on other types of academic schedules (quarter, tri-mester, etc.), adjustments of the beginning and ending dates are usually possible.
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P&G in Saudi Arabia:
Tapping a Wealth of Talents
BACK IN JANUARY 1991, THINGS looked pretty bleak to Ali Abdo. A welder at P&G's MIC-Dammam detergent plant in Saudi Arabia, he and his family had fled to Yemen, their home country. Yemen's support of Iraq during the Persian Gulf crisis prompted an exodus of Yemenis from Saudi-Arabia.
Beyond providing air tickets for the family, there was little anyone at MIC-Dammam could do for Abdo. In Yemen, he fretted about his future. Would the Saudi government allow him to return? Would he still have his job?
With the Gulf War's end and after three months of waiting, Abdo and his family were allowed to return to Saudi-Arabia. He was elated to find his old job waiting for him at the Dammam plant.
Today, reflecting on events, Abdo is clear on one point: MIC-Dammam stood by him. "I've heard a lot about the Company's principles," he says, "but the war put them to the test ... and they worked."
The Company's Saudi Arabian joint venture companies are P&G to the core, especially concerning principles and employees. Dealing with everything from war to labor shortages, the joint ventures reach across many borders to attract the best people for building a fast-growing, profitable business. Saudi Arabian market shares for diapers, detergents and shampoos are the highest in the world. [See sidebar on the next page.]
P&G's three Saudi joint ventures - Modern Products Company-Jeddah, Modern Industries Company-Dammam, Modern Industries Company-Jeddah- employ about 1,000 people from 31 nations.
This wide diversity is a necessity, since competition for the best-educated and trained Saudis is sharp. "Until the oil boom of the early '70s, the number of Saudi college graduates was very small," says Anand Prasad. A citizen of India, Prasad is personnel manager for P&G's Saudi businesses.
The kingdom moved quickly to establish universities and trade schools, but for now, the number of college and technical school graduates is well below the country's needs. Since the potential recruits are also attracted to government-sponsored corporations such as state oil companies, luring graduates to a consumer products company is a further challenge.
STAFFING CHALLENGES
The joint ventures' personnel goal is for Saudi nationals to make up at least half the workforce within a few years. Progress is steady: three years ago, only 15 percent of P&G's Saudi Arabian workforce were Saudi nationals; today, nearly 27 percent of employees are.
As the joint ventures' corporate recruiting manager, Haitham Alhudhaif creates ways to increase awareness of P&G and its global business on Saudi campuses. To capture the interest of the brightest students, the joint ventures hold marketing seminars at Saudi Arabia's two primary universities, King Fahd University and King Abdul Aziz University.
Students are responding. Wlid Hajj, a brand assistant on Head & Shoulders, was a marketing major at King Fahd University in Dhahran when he attended a marketing seminar sponsored by the joint ventures. Impressed, he chose MIC-Jeddah because "it has a quality of work I couldn't get anywhere else."
Amr Kandil, Pampers line manager, is a three-year veteran of MPC-Jeddah. A Saudi and a graduate of Riyadh University, he joined MPC because "it's an opportunity to learn and work with a worldwide company."
He sees himself as part of Saudi Arabia's drive to diversify its economy from total reliance on oil. "We [Saudis] need exposure to other working methods," he says, "and P&G is building a strong organization here."
While more Saudis are joining the business, the labor and skill shortage means that reliance on expatriate managers and technicians will continue for the near future. After Saudis, the largest nationality groups are from Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Jordan, India and Pakistan.
ONLY THE BEST
"We recruit only the best," explains Personnel Manager Prasad, "to get the best mix of strengths and creative skills from different societies and nations."
On a language and cultural level, close co-operation between the dozens of nationalities is relatively easy. The majority of employees come from Arab countries, speak the same language (Arabic) and follow the same faith (Islam).
Employees work and live in a nation in which Islam serves as religious <tp|>and civil law: Employment is limited to males. Each work site has a prayer room facing Mecca. During the holy month of Ramadan, work shifts are shortened to six hours to accommodate the fasting required of Moslems.
Cultural and religious similarities are helpful, but hiring the best and creating an environment focused on business results are even more important. Consider the MPC-Jeddah plant, which produces Pampers, Luvs and Always. In 1991 it won Product Supply's Process Reliability Award for having the highest reliability rate of any P&G paper plant in the world. Backed with a combination of great quality at low cost, Pampers captured a commanding share of the Arabian Peninsula diaper market.
The foundation of success like this is meticulous attention to hiring the right people. The Company is "very selective", agrees Abdel Moneim Bashir, a Sudanese who works in Paper Product Development. "The Company wants wide-minded people."
To enable people to focus on "doing the best work possible," says Obied Khojah "there's one system, balanced and fair" for everyone. It's common for other companies to have one pay scale for Saudis and another for foreign workers. Not so with P&G's joint ventures, according to Khojah, a Saudi and MIC-Jeddah plant personnel manager. Saudis and non-Saudis alike have the same opportunities for advancement.
"LIKE ONE HAND"
Dedicated by King Faisal in 1965, the MIC-Jeddah plant is famous throughout Saudi Arabia as the Tide plant. Once the sole structure on this stretch of the Mecca road, Jeddah's booming growth has engulfed the plant site and placed it in the midst of a busy neighborhood.
Abdul-Mugni Qasim, a supervisor in the plant's Raw Materials section, describes a 'rare' bond of trust between MIC and its workers. He knows, for example, that many companies in the Middle East depend upon contracted labor and "are quick to fire a person for someone cheaper."
This is unheard of at the Jeddah plant. Qasim himself is a expatriate, a citizen of Yemen whose family has lived in Jeddah for nearly three decades. He has worked for MIC-Jeddah for most of his work life and now supervises a team of eight that includes six nationalities. Nearly 30 years ago, he was part of the construction crew that built the plant.
Differences in nationality are of no consequence to him. On the contrary, he sees his group as an extended family. "If someone's wife has a baby, or a relative dies, I live it with them."
Abdul-Qadir Basher, a Pampers line technician from Sudan, has a succinct metaphor to describe how MPC-Jeddah's 18 nationalities cooperate: "We work like one hand," with the "goal of getting fine products with good quality."
Lest one get the impression of a workplace utopia, frictions due to nationality occasionally arise. "There are differences" of cultural styles among Arabs, says Adnan Ossailan, a Saudi who works in Quality Control at MPC-Jeddah, which can sometimes lead to resentments. The goal is to address problems before they grow, explains Mohammad Al-Ghamdi, plant personnel manager.
MAXIMUM EFFORT
With Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the MIC-Dammam plant's personnel challenges took on a whole new dimension. "People were worried," recalls Fahad Abdul-Karim, personnel manager for the detergent plant. "No one knew what would happen." Kuwait is only a few hours away by car. Helicopters and jets from a nearby Saudi airbase filled the skies. Tanks and military trucks clogged the streets.
In January, with war imminent, the decision was made to evacuate employees and their families to Jeddah and Mecca. Buses were impossible to find, making caravans of private cars necessary. Fuel, maps, tools and first-aid kits were gathered for the nearly 1,600-kilometer drive across the desert.
One hundred apartments awaited the evacuees in the west. After settling in, "we got people working" in the Jeddah plants and headquarters, says Abdul-Karim. A group of 40 employees, mostly Saudis with roots in the Dhahran region, volunteered to continue working at the plant.
Among them was Abdullah Abu-Saed, a mechanic. Dammam is his family's home, and "I felt it was my duty to stay behind in order not to shut down the plant." He and his colleagues kept a security watch to handle damage in case the plant was hit by one of the Scud missiles that passed over nightly. By the last stages of the brief war, the group managed to begin limited production at the plant.
"As Saudis," says Abu-Saed, "we served our country too, because this is a Saudi company."
By April, Saudi Arabia's Eastern Provinces were back to a semblance of normality, and the Dammam-MIC employees evacuated to Jeddah returned to work. No time was lost in reestablishing shipments to newly liberated Kuwait. Truckloads of Ariel and Tide headed for Kuwait as soon as the roads were reopened. Because of this quick action, P&G brand shares in Kuwait are today higher than pre-war levels.
As the chaos and uncertainty created by the war dissipated, MIC-Dammam could evaluate its evacuation as a job well done. "We were one of the few - if not the only - companies that really took care of its people" in providing transportation and living facilities, says Marwan Haddad, Synthetic Detergents Operations manager.
If there's any question about P&G principles providing a competitive edge in Saudi Arabia, Bader Al-Din Hossain, a Customer Services coordinator at MIC-Dammam, has an answer. "The Company has proven it values us very much. Now I want to give the maximum."
Mastery In Action
"Given the current competitive environment, unless we continually upgrade our skills and competencies, we'll become obsolete both as individuals and as a Company," says Keith Lawrence, Industrial Relations Division, who is working on the long-term worldwide vision of work systems in Product Supply. There has been a growing concern among management for the past several years that Procter & Gamble is not building the organization as deep as it could, and is losing some of its technical mastery.
Technical mastery is profound knowledge and skill used to improve business results. It is a continual improvement process necessary to remain competitive.
The gradual eroding of these technical skills is a result of several factors which tended to encourage the development of generalists at P&G, more than specialists. But the trend is changing.
At the November annual meetings, Chairman and Chief Executive Ed Artzt outlined six key strategies for P&G's future growth. One is organizational development, or said another way, building the capacity of people to keep pace with rapid business growth.
There are many examples of building, developing and recognizing organizational capability, from Advertising to R&D to Finance and beyond. All have a common purpose - to help build individuals' technical mastery and, in turn, to support the key corporate strategy of building the organization.
PRODUCT SUPPLY
Product Supply is one of the leaders in developing and recognizing technical mastery. In fact, the function even celebrates technical excellence with the coveted Worldwide Technology Achievement Awards.
Gary Simpson, Product Supply manager-Laundry & Cleaning Products, sees technical mastery as more than just expert individual knowledge. It also includes systems mastery.
"Think of it as creating a gourmet meal," says Simpson. "It takes an expert chef to first create a new entree. But he or she can only make one at a time. Now, if the chef writes down the recipe, thus creating a system to follow, others can then be taught to be technical masters of that entree. The result is many more entrees being made from one expert's knowledge."
This expert/master thinking applies directly to Product Supply's strategies. "By creating technical masters, we're enhancing the total organization's ability to execute key strategic work," says Simpson. Strategy development involves picking the critical few things which will make a significant difference in building the business. Technical mastery allows us to do those right things right - or execute all strategies with excellence. In Product Supply, this includes everything from sourcing raw materials, to how the plants are run, to improving delivery of 'perfect orders,' to getting quickly to market with the new consumer benefits.
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ADMISSION CRITERIA
Jacksonville University seeks students with potential to contribute to and benefit from the institution's programs. Admission decisions are based on:
1. The secondary school academic record, including course selection, honors or AP classes, grade point average, and class rank (where available).
2. SAT or ACT test results.
3. Extracurricular involvement, leadership record, and evidence of special talents or abilities.
4. The applicant's writing sample or essay.
5. Interviews, when possible.
To be considered for admission, students must satisfactorily complete, or be in the process of completing, a satisfactory college preparatory program. Recommended minimum preparation should include 18 academic units, including:
1. 4 units of English
2. 3 units of Mathematics
3. 2 units of Natural Sciences
4. 2 units of Foreign Languages
5. 2 units of Social Sciences
A minimum GPA of 2.5 and class rank in the top half of the graduating class is recommended.
PROVISIONAL ADMISSION
Students whose records do not meet the criteria for admission but who show potential to be successful in college, e.g., low SAT scores but a good high school record, or vice versa, may be admitted to a summer session on a provisional basis. Decisions on students admitted on a provisional basis may be made by the University Admissions Committee. These students will enroll in the appropriate English course, as determined by a placement examination, and other three-credit course and a one-credit course or a four-credit course, for a total of seven (7) credits. A grade of 'C' or better must be earned in each course for the student to continue beyond the summer session. Students who meet the requirements of the provisional admission will be admitted to Jacksonville University as degree candidates. A limit of 30 students annually is placed on the number of students to be enrolled provisionally.
ADMISSION NOTIFICATION
REGULAR DECISION PLAN. Consideration of the application will follow receipt of all materials, and applicants will be notified on a rolling bases as soon as possible after January 1 of the current academic year of the decision of the Admissions Office.
EARLY DECISION PLAN. Students who declare Jacksonville University their first choice college by November 15 and have all credentials to Jacksonville University by December 1 will be notified of University action on applications by December 25. Replies from accepted applicants and deposits will be due by January 15. The Early Decision Plan of Jacksonville University is intended to serve those students with exceptional high school records, rank in class, grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, and special potential to contribute to and benefit from Jacksonville University.
EARLY ADMISSION
A gifted student of unusual maturity whose high school record shows excellent academic performance through the junior year in a college preparatory program, and whose scores on a standardized aptitude test are high may submit his application for admission to the University for enrollment after the junior year in high school. The candidate should have the support of his or her parents in writing submitted with the application. A strong recommendation from the high school is expected, and the candidate must come to the campus for a personal interview with the Director of Admissions.
DUAL ENROLLMENT
The dual enrollment program is designed primarily for high school seniors who along with their guidance counselors feel that their academic program would be enriched by college-level courses. The normal freshman application for admission to Jacksonville University is required with the indication that the student is applying for dual enrollment. The following supporting data must be submitted with the application:
1. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) of the College Board (PSAT may be submitted) or the American College Test (ACT).
2. High school transcript.
3. Guidance Counselor's recommendation including a statement in support of allowing the student to attend both high school and college at the same time.
TRANSFERS APPLICATION PROCESS
Transfer applicants must submit:
1. Completed application.
2. $25.00 application fee (non-refundable).
3. Official transcripts of colleges and universities attended, sent by the Registrar of each institution.
4. High school transcripts if transferring less than 15 semester hours of college credit.
5. Statement from Dean of Students (or other appropriate official) at the last college attended full time, attesting to the candidates character and general fitness to continue university work.
6. Catalog of the institution from which the candidate transfers, if requested.
7. Medical information/immunization after admission (see below).
Art students must submit a portfolio.
Music, Theatre Arts, and Dance students must audition.
TRANSFERS ADMISSION REQUIREMENTS
A student who wishes to transfer to Jacksonville University must:
1. Have completed a semester of academic work at an accredited college or university at the time of entry, and not be concurrently enrolled in high school.
2. Be in good standing and eligible to continue or be readmitted at the last institution attended, unless all work has been completed or the student has graduated from that institution.
Jacksonville University encourages transfer applications from students with cumulative grade point averages of 2.5 or higher but will give full consideration to students with averages from 2.0 - 2.5.
Jacksonville University honors academic suspensions of the last institution, and credit will not be awarded for work taken during the suspension period.
It is the responsibility of the candidate to provide the Director of Admissions at Jacksonville University with official transcripts of work completed from all colleges attended. Concealment of previous attendance at a college or university is cause for cancellation of admission and registration.
TRANSFER OF CREDITS
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Students who have a bachelor's or higher degree must have an official transcript on file in the Registrar' Office which shows the degree(s) earned. Such students need not submit transcripts of subsequent course work taken elsewhere unless they are degree candidates at this University. Degree candidates must have copies of all transcripts on file.
A student who terminates enrollment at Jacksonville University while in a probationary or suspended status and who subsequently completes course work at another institution prior to being readmitted does so at the student's own risk. Such course work will be used in determining whether or not to readmit the student. If the decision is made to readmit the student, appropriate transfer credits will be awarded at the time of readmission. In the case of a suspended student, transfer credit will not be awarded for course work completed during the period of suspension from Jacksonville University.
ENROLLMENT DEPOSIT
Upon notification of acceptance, all new non-boarding students are required to pay a $100 tuition deposit. This is a non-refundable deposit.</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684418" filename="FROWN_J.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="learned" n="01">
Cosmology, Clustering and Superclustering
William C. Saslaw
On large scales, the probability that galaxies occupy a given size volume of space is not random, like the toss of a coin, but is related to the presence of nearby galaxies. Positions of galaxies depend on one another. Details of this dependence may provide important clues to the origin and evolution of the universe. Modern systematic searches for these clues started in the 1930s with Edwin P. Hubble's galaxy counts, accelerated in the 1950s with the development of new statistical techniques, and surged in the 1970s and 1980s as computers became powerful enough to handle large amounts of data and calculate complex simulations of clustering physics.
There are two main descriptions of galaxy clustering. The first is essentially pictorial, derived by searching the sky for filaments, voids, and overdense regions. Galaxies in projected high-density regions having similar redshift distances are likely to form a physically related cluster. If such a cluster has been bound gravitationally for a large fraction of the present Hubble time, it evolves fairly independently of its surrounding galaxies. Occasionally several contiguous large clusters form a supercluster. This may result partly from the initial positioning of clusters and partly from their subsequent motions.
Most galaxies are not in large physically bound clusters. They are, however, clustered in a more general statistical sense. Rather than examining individual clusters, this second description looks for statistical departures from a Poisson distribution (which is the uniform random spatial distribution of objects whose positions are entirely independent of one another, i.e., totally uncorrelated). In a Poisson distribution there will be some regions where galaxies are strongly clustered just by chance, and other regions which are unusually empty, also by chance. The observed numbers and statistics of such regions may then be compared with those expected from various theories.
STATISTICAL MEASURES OF CLUSTERING
The most useful and informative statistics can be measured objectively from observations and related analytically to physical processes of clustering and computer experiments. Low-order correlation functions are one example. The two-point correlation function <*_>xi<*/>(r) in its simplest form for a homogeneous isotropic system is defined by
<O_>formula<O/>
Here n(r)dr is the average number of galaxies between radial distance r and r+dr from any given galaxy. The overall average number density of galaxies in the entire system, or over a very large volume of the universe, is <*_>unch<*/>. For a random Poisson distribution, <*_>xi<*/>(r)=0; so n(r) is determined just by <*_>unch<*/> and geometry. Therefore <*_>xi<*/>(r) helps measure departures from the Poisson state. Higher-order correlation functions use the relative positions of three or more galaxies for a more refined description that, unfortunately, is harder to measure observationally. The first accurate observations of <*_>xi<*/>(r) for galaxies, made by H. Totsuji and T. Kihara in 1969, gave a power law of the form <O_>formula<O/> on scales <O_>formula<O/> (for a Hubble constant of 50 km s<sp_>-1<sp/> Mpc<sp_>-1<sp/>). Large clusters of galaxies are observed to have a similar two-point correlation function if each cluster is represented by a single point, but this result is much more uncertain. On small scales <*_>xi<*/>(r)>>1, so the observed clustering is highly nonlinear; that is, correlations dominate for r <*_>unch<*/>10 Mpc.
Another observed simple objective clustering statistic is the distribution function f(N). This is the probability for finding N galaxies in a volume of size V, or projected onto the sky in an area of size A. If the distribution is statistically homogeneous then it will not depend significantly on the shape of the volumes or areas, provided they are sufficiently large and numerous to give a fair average sample. Recent analyses of the area counts of galaxies show that they have a distribution of the form
<O_>formula<O/>
where <*_>unch<*/>=<*_>unch<*/>V is the average number in a volume V for an average number density <*_>unch<*/>. The quantity b is a measure of clustering and is related to gravitational correlations. The observed value of b is 0.70<*_>unch<*/>0.05 for galaxies whose separations are typically 1-10 Mpc. For large clusters with separations of <*_>approximate-sign<*/>10-50 Mpc, b=0.3<*_>unch<*/>0.1. For a sample of faint radio sources with separations <*_>unch<*/>50 Mpc, b=0.0, which is a random Poisson distribution. The f(N) distribution for N=0 gives the probability that a region is a void with no galaxies at all.
Other statistics applied to galaxy clustering include minimal spanning trees (the shortest line connecting all the galaxies in a sample), topological patterns formed by contour maps of regions with the same density, and multifractal analyses (a single fractal dimension does not adequately describe galaxy clustering), which are related to how the average number density of galaxies around a given galaxy changes with distance from the galaxy. These other statistics also yield valuable information. Unlike <*_>xi<*/>(r) and f(N), however, they have not yet been related generally to an underlying dynamical theory. Some specialized computer experiments have examined their behavior.
THEORIES OF CLUSTERING
To understand the observed statistics we need to know the initial conditions for clustering as well as a physical theory for its subsequent evolution. Initial conditions may indicate properties of the early universe before galaxies formed and perhaps even close to the Big Bang. Some possibilities are that galaxy clustering started from a random Poisson distribution, or from a state with local clustering or from large-scale coherent structures. No clear observational evidence for any particular initial state has been found. On small scales the clustering processes themselves tend to destroy this evidence, while on large scales it is difficult to detect.
Different types and distributions of dark matter may also be important for forming galaxies and clusters. For example, massive neutrinos, other weakly interacting massive particles, cosmic strings, quark nuggets, or other currently speculative objects of various high-energy theories may influence galaxy clustering if they exist in sufficient quantity.
All known forms of matter gravitate and gravitation promotes clustering. Therefore, astronomers have developed analytical theories and examined many computer simulations to describe the gravitational clustering of galaxies. Results for different models are then compared with <*_>xi <*/>(r) and f(N). The models generally differ in their initial conditions, the role of dark matter, and the time available for clustering.
Computer simulations calculate the gravitational orbits of many thousands of particles, each one representing a galaxy, in the background of the expanding universe and any dark matter present. The orbits are found either by integrating the thousands of equations of motion - each with thousands of terms - directly, or by averaging the gravitational forces in different ways to simplify the problem. Averaging sacrifices detailed information in order to include a larger number of galaxies.
Computer models which start with strong structure on scales of tens of megaparsecs frequently do not agree with the observed correlation and distribution functions. Those that do, often agree only for a short span of their evolution. On the other hand, models with fairly homogeneous initial distributions, such as an uncorrelated Poisson state, evolve gravitationally to agree reasonably well with the observations and remain in agreement as they continue to evolve. In other words, they relax into the observed state and remain there rather than just pass through it. This may make them more aesthetically pleasing, although it does not guarantee they are correct. For example, some models in which galaxies have formed and clustered very recently may conflict with the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Gravitational theory predicted the observed form of f(N) given earlier for relaxed statistically homogeneous clustering of point masses in a slowly expanding universe. The value of b is essentially the ratio of gravitational correlation energy (representing departures from a uniform Poisson distribution) to the kinetic energy of galaxies' peculiar velocities (representing departures from the Hubble flow). Computer experiments such as the example in <figure/> show that this relaxed state is a very good description for universes which start with no or little large-scale correlation, have <O_>formula<O/>, and have expanded by more than several times their initial radius. As differences with these conditions become greater, agreement with the observed f(N) decreases. These conditions also lead to two-point correlation functions in reasonable agreement with the observations provided, for example, that clustering started at redshift z<*_>approximate-sign<*/>8 in <*_>OMEGA<*/><sb_>0<sb/>=1 models and z<*_>approximate-sign<*/>30 in <*_>OMEGA<*/><sb_>0<sb/>=0.1 models. Therefore, gravitational clustering starting from fairly simple initial conditions seems likely to account for the objective statistical evidence now available. These include large underdense regions and filamentary structures, some of which could have formed just by chance concentration of independently clustering regions or their boundaries. When more subtle statistics are developed further and related to dynamical evolution, perhaps they will reveal clear evidence for other processes such as primordial explosions, or large-scale initial structures.
Cosmology, Cosmic Strings
Neil Turok
One of the most active areas of current research in physics and astronomy is the search for a theory of the formation of structure in the universe.
Historically, this is a result of the success of two different theories and the attempt to combine them. In astronomy, the Hot Big Bang model of the universe has three big successes. It successfully explains the expansion of the universe, the relic microwave background radiation, and the abundances of the light elements today. The weakness of the standard Hot Big Bang model is that it says nothing about how structure in the universe (galaxies and cluster of galaxies) could have originated.
In high-energy physics, the idea that the underlying theory of particles and their interactions has a high degree of symmetry which is broken at low energies forms the basis of the Weinberg-Salam model of the electroweak interactions. Over the last decade many predictions of this model have been confirmed, the discovery of the W and Z particles being the most dramatic. Based on the idea of symmetry breaking, theories which unify all the forces except gravity (grand unified theories), and theories including gravity (superstring theories) have been developed. Unfortunately, at present there are many different theories, and few ways of testing them.
One idea, which emerged from particle physics in the early 1980s, was that the same process which broke the symmetry between the particles and forces might break the spatial symmetry of the universe, producing the structure we see today. This is physically a very reasonable idea. In fact, similar processes happen in everyday substances. Most liquids are quite homogeneous and isotropic, which is not surprising, because there is nothing in the description of atoms and their interactions that singles out a particular direction or place in space as different from any other. Cool the liquid, however, and it freezes. The crystal structure of the solid picks a particular direction; but in different regions different directions are chosen. The result is that (unless the process happens very slowly) the solid is formed full of defects where there is a mismatch between neighboring crystalline regions.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Cosmic strings are very similar to these defects. They are predicted to occur by some grand unified theories and superstring theories. In the very early universe, at high temperature the fields in these theories are random, just as the atoms of a liquid. The density is quite uniform. As the universe cools below a certain temperature, some of the fields 'freeze.' As they do so, defects are formed, just as in solids.
In different theories, the defects may be at points, along lines, or in sheets. Cosmic strings are the linelike defects: They have special properties which make them well suited to forming structure later in the universe. For topological reasons they cannot have ends; they must form closed loops or continue on forever. The only way to change the length of a string is if it crosses itself and reconnects the other way <figure/>, chopping off a loop. This means that if one starts with some strings which wander right across the universe, there is no way to get rid of them completely. At best one can progressively chop more and more of the long string off into loops, and the loops can then radiate away (see <figure/>. Thus some of the strings formed at very early times (around 10<sp_>-34<sp/> s after the Big Bang in most models predicting strings) survive right up to today.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="02"> We have attempted to make these bibliographies as complete and comprehensive as possible. The intensity and broadening compilations cover the published literature form November 1983 through June 1990, and they include several earlier references overlooked in the previous compilations. The pressure-induced line shift compilation includes all references published through June 1990 that were available to us. We have also added a number of more recent references as they came to our attention in the course of preparing the present bibliography.
II. INTENSITIES
Detailed discussions of intensity parameters, units, and measurement techniques have been given in Refs. [1-2] and will not be repeated here. However, in order to properly interpret the values given in Tables II and III and in the individual references, we must discuss the difference between the vibrational band intensity, S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/>, and the integrated band intensity S<sb_>Band<sb/>. S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> is related to the squared vibrational transition moment by
<O_>formula<O/>
where h is Planck's constant, c is the speed of light, <*_>nu<*/><sb_>0<sb/> is the wavenumber of the band center, N is the total number of molecules of the absorbing gas per cubic centimeter per atmosphere, Q<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> is the vibrational partition function, and <O_>formula<O/> is the vibrational transition moment. S<sb_>Band<sb/> is defined as the summation of individual line intensities S<sp_>B<sp/><sb_>A<sb/> for all possible rotational transitions within the vibrational band; that is,
<O_>formula<O/>
where R<sp_>B<sp/><sb_>A<sb/> is the rotational factor, given by
<O_>formula<O/>
where S'<sb_>AB<sb/> is the dimensionless quantity called the line strength by Herzberg [3], E<sb_>A<sb/> is the energy of the lower state A, k is Boltzmann's constant, T is the gas temperature in degrees Kelvin, <*_>nu<*/><sb_>AB<sb/> is the wavenumber of the transition from lower state A to upper state B, and Q<sb_>r<sb/> is the rotational partition function. In Eqs. (1-3) we are using the approximation <O_>formula<O/>, where Q is the total internal partition sum; this approximation is valid except at very high temperatures.
The F-factor in Eq. (2) accounts for the effects of centrifugal distortion, Fermi- and Coriolis-type interactions, and other perturbations. For a rigid rotor, the F-factor would be 1, and S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> and S<sb_>Band<sb/> would be equal (assuming all possible rotational transitions are included in the summation). However, if the F-factor is significantly different from 1 for most of the rotational transitions, as the case for many CO<sb_>2<sb/> bands, S<sb_>Band<sb/> is usually larger than S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/>. S<sb_>Band <sb/> values determined from the summation of individual line-intensity measurements using high-resolution techniques are more appropriate for comparison to low-resolution band intensity measurements (e.g., [4]). Therefore, where a given reference reports both S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> and S<sb_>Band<sb/> values, (e.g., [5]) we have chosen to include only the S<sb_>Band<sb/> values in Table 2. Unless the reported intensity is designated as S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> or S<sb_>Band<sb/> in the footnotes to the table, the reader should obtain more detailed information from the original reference.
Table I gives the various units in which band intensities have been reported in our literature survey, along with the multiplicative factors used to convert these units to our standard units (cm<sp_>-2<sp/> atm<sp_>-1<sp/> at 300K) for comparison purposes. However, because these multiplicative factors do not account for the temperature dependence of the partition functions or the exponential factors shown in Eq. (3), the converted values may not represent the true band intensity at 300K, particularly for transitions whose lower state is not the ground state. Goldman, Dang-Nhu and Bouanich [6] give an excellent brief discussion of the temperature dependence of line intensities.
Several of the references reporting intensity measurements of bands of CHCl<sb_>3<sb/>, CDCl<sb_>3<sb/>, CHCl<sb_>2<sb/>F, CHClF<sb_>2<sb/>, CHD<sb_>2<sb/>F, CHF<sb_>3<sb/>, and CDF<sb_>3<sb/> give the results not as S<sb_><*_>nu<*/><sb/> or S<sb_>Band<sb/> as defined in Eqs. (1-3), but as a quantity denoted as G. This G is identical to the <*_>GAMMA<*/> originally defined by Golike et al. [7] and is usually reported in units of (length)<sp_>2<sp/> mole<sp_>-1<sp/> or (length)<sp_>2<sp/> molecule<sp_>-1<sp/>. As previously stated in [2], G (or <*_>GAMMA<*/>) may be related to S<sb_>Band<sb/> approximately by S<sb_>Band<sb/> = G<*_>nu<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, where <*_>nu<*/><sb_>0<sb/> is the wavenumber of the observed band center.
To compare measurements by investigators in different laboratories and apply their results to atmospheric or astrophysical measurements, we must also understand the corrections applied for the isotopic composition of the measured gas samples. Unfortunately, in many papers, the isotopic composition is not specified, and the interpretation of 'natural abundance' is left to the reader. Johns [8] discussed in detail the difference between the 'natural abundance' of <sp_>13<sp/>C in atmospheric CO<sb_>2<sb/> and that in commercially supplied CO<sb_>2<sb/>. In our conversion of reported intensities to a consistent set of units, we have attempted to rescale each intensity value to represent the band intensity for a 100% pure sample of a single isotope. Where no specific isotopic abundance information has been given in the original reference, we have used the 1986 HITRAN abundances [9].
III. COLLISION BROADENING
For most of the range of pressures typically encountered in the terrestrial and planetary atmospheres, infrared vibration-rotation lines have predominantly the Lorentz, or collision-broadened line shape, in which the width of the line is linearly dependent on the gas pressure (for a fixed temperature). At very low gas pressures, the line shapes follow the Doppler profile, where the line width depends only on the temperature, mass of the molecule, and wavenumber of the transition. In the intermediate range where the Doppler and Lorentz profiles both contribute significantly, the line shape is most often modeled by the Voigt profile, which is the convolution of these two profiles. Detailed expressions for these three line profiles have been given in [2] and will not be repeated here. The dependence of the collision-broadened halfwidth on pressure and temperature is usually expressed as
<O_>formula<O/>
where b<sb_>L<sb/>(p,T) is the collision-broadened halfwidth of the line at measured pressure p and temperature T, b<sp_>0<sp/><sb_>L<sb/>(T<sb_>0<sb/>) is the collision-broadened halfwidth of the line at the reference pressure (usually 1 atm) and temperature T<sb_>0<sb/> (usually 296 K). According to the classical theory, the exponent n should have the value 0.5; however, many of the experimental results cited in Table IV of the present compilation and in [2], show quite different values for n. The experimentally determined values of this exponent appear to vary according to the absorbing and perturbing gases and the vibrational and rotational quantum numbers.
In recent years measurements of Lorentz broadening coefficients and their temperature dependence have become more numerous. There have been more measurements of individual line widths within a band, and very few studies reporting simply an average broadening coefficient (or n value) for an entire band. Recognizing that temperatures in the terrestrial upper atmosphere and in planetary atmospheres are quite different from ambient values in the laboratory, several investigators have pursued measurements of collision-broadened gas-phase spectra at low temperatures down to about 150K. Other investigators, driven by requirements to measure the spectra of combustion exhaust gases in situ, have recorded laboratory collision-broadened spectra at high temperatures.
Another are of increased interest has been the examination of line shapes that depart from the usual three forms (Lorentz, Doppler, Voigt) most commonly used to model laboratory, atmospheric, planetary, or astronomical spectra. Collisional narrowing is observed for spectral lines whose Lorentz halfwidth b<sb_>L<sb/> is very small. The Galatry line shape [10] is usually used to model the profiles of absorption lines affected by collisional narrowing in addition to Doppler and Lorentz broadening. Other phenomena that have been examined extensively include non-Lorentzian profiles in the far wings of very strong absorption lines (particularly for H<sb_>2<sb/>O and CO<sb_>2<sb/>) and line mixing (also called line coupling) in regions of very closely spaced lines such as Q-branches. References for laboratory studies of collisional narrowing, far-wing line shapes, and line mixing have also been included in Table IV.
IV. PRESSURE-INDUCED LINE SHIFTS
Shifts in the positions of vibration-rotation lines due to collisions with other gases have become a concern for certain types of infrared measurements. Since ambient pressures in the terrestrial and planetary atmospheres range from several Torr to several atmospheres, pressure-induced line shifts must be considered in spectroscopic studies of these atmospheres. Knowledge of line shifts is also important for certain transitions of CO<sb_>2<sb/>, CH<sb_>4<sb/>, and other gases that are used for stabilization of laser frequencies.
Prior to the mid-1980s, very few measurements of pressure-induced line shifts appeared in the literature; most of these were for diatomic molecules such as CO, HBr, HCl, HF, H<sb_>2<sb/>, and HD. More recent studies have provided extensive information on shifts in transitions of larger molecules, including CO<sb_>2<sb/>, H<sb_>2<sb/>O, N<sb_>2<sb/>O, O<sb_>3<sb/>, NH<sb_>3<sb/>, and CH<sb_>4<sb/>. However, some of these studies report measurements of shifts for only a small number of lines within a band.
Theoretical prediction of pressure-induced line shifts has been successful only for selected types of molecules such as polar diatomic molecules [11, 12]. Adequate models for pressure-induced shifts in bands of other molecules of interest for atmospheric studies, such as O<sb_>3<sb/> or CH<sb_>4<sb/>, have not yet appeared. Only a very few measurements of pressure-induced line shifts at temperatures far above or below room temperature have been reported, and the form of the temperature dependence of the shifts is not certain. A number of investigators, including Grossmann and Browell [13, 14], have modeled pressure-induced line shifts at low temperatures using a relation similar to that used for the Lorentz halfwidths:
<O_>formula<O/>
where <*_>delta<*/>(T) is the shift coefficient (in cm<sp_>-1<sp/>/atm) at the measured temperature T, <*_>delta<*/>(T<sb_>0<sb/>) is the shift coefficient at the reference temperature T<sb_>0<sb/>, and the exponent n' is empirically determined. However, the above expression is not valid in cases where the line shift changes sign with temperature. Other investigators, such as Houdeau and Boulet [15], have developed more rigorous theoretical models to account for the temperature dependence of both halfwidths and shifts.
V. EXPLANATION OF TABLES AND TABLE REFERENCES
The tables continue in the format of Refs. [1-2] with one exception. For carbon dioxide and its isotopic variants, we have adopted the vibrational band notation of Rothhman and Young [16], which is also used in the HITRAN and GEISA spectroscopic line parameters compilations [9, 17]. This notation is widely used by numerous investigators. Briefly, each vibrational level of CO<sb_>2<sb/> is designated by an integer whose five digits correspond to the sequence <O_>formula<O/>, where <*_>nu<*/><sb_>1<sb/>, <*_>nu<*/><sb_>2<sb/>, and <*_>nu<*/><sb_>3<sb/> are the vibrational quantum numbers, l is the degeneracy index of the <*_>nu<*/><sb_>2<sb/> vibrational mode, and r indicates the level's ranking in a Fermi resonance polyad. Thus, the ground state is designated by 00001, the <*_>nu<*/><sp_>1<sp/><sb_>2<sb/> level by 01101, the <*_>nu<*/><sb_>1<sb/> level by 10001, and the 2<*_>nu<*/><sp_>0<sp/><sb_>2<sb/> level by 10002. For each transition the level designations are given with the upper level first. For example, the <sp_>12<sp/>C<sp_>16<sp/>O<sb_>2<sb/> laser transition at 961 cm<sp_>-1<sp/>, designated <*_>nu<*/><sb_>3<sb/>-<*_>nu<*/><sb_>1<sb/> in the previous compilations, is indicated as 00011-10001 in the present work, and the <O_>formula<O/> laser transition at 1064 cm<sp_>-1<sp/> is indicated as 00011-10002.
The literature values and references for intensities of vibration-rotation transitions are given in Tables II and III. All of these values are for electric dipole allowed transitions measured in the gas phase with a few exceptions. These include the 'forbidden' 03301-00001 band of <sp_>12<sp/>C<sp_>16<sp/>O<sb_>2<sb/> at 2003 cm<sp_>-1<sp/>, liquid-phase measurements of several N<sb_>2<sb/>O bands that were published along with gas-phase measurements, and quadrupole and electrically-induced dipole vibration-rotation transitions of H<sb_>2<sb/> and N<sb_>2<sb/>. Purely rotational and electronic transitions are not included in the compilation.
As in the previous compilations, Table II contains the data for molecules with 2,3,4, and 5 atoms. The molecular data are sorted first by number of atoms, then by molecular formula in alphabetical order, then by isotopic form in order of increasing molecular weight. If the isotopic forms are not individually spectified, the reader should assume that the data refer to the most abundant isotope of the molecule. The first page of Table II serves as an index to the succeeding pages of the table. The bands for each molecule are presented in order of increasing wave number, with the assignments and band centers (in cm<sp_>-1<sp/>) given in the first column of the table. In the second column, headed Reference Value, are listed the integrated band intensity values as reported in the original references. Any unusual features of the reported measurements are indicated by footnotes in the relevant sections of the table.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="03">If this is indeed the case the data in <figure/> may be skewed upward as r/R decreases, since they could still reflect, in part, the highly aligning nature of the converging extensional flow at the tube entrance.
At the highest shear rate studied in this work, 1270 s<sp_>-1<sp/>, a value of 0.66 was found for S<sb_>11<sb/>, indicating essentially perfect fiber alignment (S<sb_>11<sb/> = 2/3).
A priori predictions may be obtained using Eqs. (3)-(8) together with the parameters given in Table III. That shown for S<sb_>11<sb/> in <figure/> is seen to portray the data quite well within their experimental uncertainty, and this was equally true at the other conditions studied. This is the most gratifying aspect of the analysis: the ability to make at least approximate predictions of fiber orientation using only the measured apparent viscosity function.
(2) The parameter S<sb_>12<sb/>, as noted earlier, is a measure of the skewness of the orientations about the flow direction. Intuitively one would expect that, for fibers aligned in a shearing flow, this parameter should be very close to zero, and all 14 sets of experimental data, including that shown in <figure/>, bear this out. The theoretical prediction is thus simply incorrect.
(3) The components S<sb_>22<sb/> and S<sb_>33<sb/> are smaller than S<sb_>11<sb/>, as expected, and are consequently of lesser interest. The theoretical predictions are seen to be of the same general magnitude as the data but the agreement is not at all exact. Again, both data and theory show very little change with shear rate.
In conclusion, while further evaluation of the theory will be needed before fiber orientations can be predicted with confidence the orientation parameter of greatest interest, S<sb_>11<sb/>, and its variation with shear rate, appear to be predicted well. Further, very low levels of shearing rate appear to be sufficient for substantial fiber alignment in these concentrated systems.
Flow behavior and morphology of extruded polymers
Die swell and melt fracture are ordinary phenomena which occur during the extrusion of unfilled polymers from dies of any geometry. Die swell generally increases with extrusion rate, and melt fracture occurs at a shear stress near 0.1 MPa, as reported by Ramamurthy (1986) and others. For extrusion form a tube, die swell changes the diameter of the extruded filament and melt fracture may produce surface matteness as well as both longitudinal and radial ripples. Neither die swell nor melt fracture, however, significantly changes the shape of a cross section of the extruded filament from the circular shape induced by the die, except at very high stress levels well beyond those at which incipient irregularities are formed.
The extrusion of fiber-filled polyethylenes and polypropylenes from a circular die involves reduced die swell (as compared to the unfilled polymers) and the occurrence of gross surface irregularities not related to the phenomenon of melt fracture. The photographs in Figs. 6 and 7 illustrate the surface irregularities which occur during the extrusion of polypropylene containing 10 and 40 wt % glass fibers. These polymers were extruded at 230<*_>degree<*/>C from a 0.05 in. i.d. by 2 in. long capillary at the apparent shear rates shown in the figures. Similar morphologies were observed for the fiber-filled polyethylenes.
The photographs in Figs. 6 and 7 show that extraordinary surface irregularities and longitudinal variations in the diameters of the filaments occurred at the lowest extrusion rates. Numerous fibers protruded from the surface of the filament giving them a fuzzy appearance, and the orientations of the protruding fibers seemed to be random. As extrusion rates increased, the surface irregularities faded and the diameters of the filaments became much more uniform. The measured shear stresses for the filaments in Figs. 6 and 7 obtained at 4.6 and 115 s <sp_>-1<sp/> were well below the melt fracture stress of 0.1 MPa, and the shear stresses at 1272 s<sp_>-1<sp/> were only slightly above the critical value. Melt fracture, therefore, did not seem to be a contributing factor in the observed surface irregularities, nor was any indication of sudden changes in surface irregularity observed at the critical stress of 0.1 MPa.
<O_>figures&captures<O/>
Wu (1979), Crowson et al. (1980), and Knuttson and White (1981) have reported similar surface morphologies for fiber-filled polymer melts. Knuttson and White reported that the surface of fiber-reinforced polycarbonate extrudates was significantly rougher under all conditions than that of the unfilled polymer, but the smoothness of the extrudates increased with extrusion rate. They attributed the increased smoothness to increased fiber orientation in the direction of flow, although we have noted only modest changes for our materials. Crowson et al. observed a similar improvement in smoothness with increased extrusion rate, and they found that shear flow produced a decrease in fiber alignment parallel to the flow direction. Wu in his study of glass fiber-filled poly(ethylene terephthalate), observed three distinct regimes of extrudate surface morphology: a smooth surface at low shear rates, irregular surface at medium shear rates, and a somewhat smoother extrudate at high rates. Wu suggested that the observed morphologies arose from normal stress effects and rotation of fibers in the velocity field. Thus we see that a comprehensive and consistent understanding of physical concepts leading to such extrudate morphologies has not been developed.
Cross sections of the extruded glass fiber-filled polypropylenes are shown in Figs. 8 and 9 for fiber loadings of 10 and 40 wt %, respectively. The cross sections in these figures are digitized representations obtained from photomicrographs. The sections are perpendicular to the axis of the filaments, and the shear rates correspond to those in Figs. 6 and 7. The points in Figs. 8 and 9 represent the locations of individual, well-aligned fibers. The most striking observation to be made from Figs. 8 and 9 is that the shapes of the cross sections are extremely distorted at low shear rates and become largely circular at high rates.
<O_>figures&captures<O/>
The same shear rate dependence of morphology was observed for suspensions extruded from capillaries with lengths of 1, 2, and 3 in. The distortion disappeared, however, when the materials were extruded through an orifice. Cross sections of extrudates of the 10 wt % suspension in polypropylene obtained from the orifice are shown in <figure/>0. The orifice had the same diameter (0.05 in.) as the capillaries for which surface irregularities were observed, and it retained the 90<*_>degree<*/> convergence at the entrance. For the orifice cross sections in <figure/>0, there appears to be slight reversal in the distortion of the cross-sectional shape; i.e., the shape is quite circular and smooth at the lowest rate and becomes more jagged at the highest rate.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Factors affecting surface morphology
A number of factors were considered for the development of a plausible mechanism for the observed surface morphologies. As pointed out in the previous section, melt fracture did not appear to play a role since the shear stresses at which distortion occurred were too low. Other factors considered by Becraft (1988) were die swell, thermal connection of the polymer, surface effects between the polymer and metal, flexing of fibers near the surface of the extruded filaments, expansion of gas bubbles in the material, regions of local fiber alignment, stress variations resulting from fiber concentration inhomogeneities, and velocity profile rearrangements at the tube exit. The more interesting and pertinent of these considerations are as follows.
Die swell
Die swell was significantly reduced in the fiber-filled polymers and it was unlikely that the large distortions observed in the extrudates resulted from swelling of the polymer. Die swell increased with extrusion rate even for the filled polymers. Therefore, if swelling were the relevant mechanism, extrudate distortion should have increased with shear rate, not decreased as observed.
Fiber flexing at the surface of extrudates
The glass fibers in the polyethylenes and polypropylenes are somewhat flexible, and the flexibility increases with temperature. This creates the opportunity, with a large enough fiber flexural modulus, for misaligned or bent fibers near the surface of the extruded polymers to 'spring out' while the material is still in a molten state. During this straightening process the fiber may entrain polymer and conceivably cause the nonuniformities observed in the cross sections. The photograph in <figure/>1 illustrates entrainment of polymer by a fiber protruding from the surface. This photograph was taken at the surface of a distorted extrudate using polarized light and a magnification of 90x. An envelope of polymer surrounds the protruding fiber and a surface irregularity has been created by the entrained polymer. Protruding fibers in all of the samples showed similar entrainment of polymer.
To pursue this possible origin of the surface morphology the dynamics of flow from the tube was observed using a Panasonic VHS camcorder (model PV200). In the recorded images at low shear rates, fibers were visibly springing out from the surface of the extrudates immediately after the material emerged from the capillary. All fiber motion appeared to be complete within one or two diameters of the tube exit. It was not possible, however, to determine from the flow visualization whether the springing out of fibers was a consequence of long fiber flexibility or of rotation of rigid fibers. A random side-to-side motion of the exiting filaments was also evident, and was produced by forces originating at or prior to the tube exit. At higher shear rates, the frequency of the side-to-side motion increased dramatically, and the movement resembled that of a vibrating string although with no obvious periodicity.
Fiber flexing and 'spring back' of bent fibers implies the occurrence of bent fibers within the polymer melt during flow into and through the tube. No such bent fibers were ever found in any of these extrudates, possibly because cooling of the emerging extrudate in the air was slower than the rate of springback of the fibers. To check, the extrudates were also extruded into a cold glycol-water bath held within one diameter of the capillary exit (a closer positioning was not possible). Although perfect quenching could not be achieved significant differences between quenched and unquenched extrudates could be found. The quenched extrudates had only much shorter fibers protruding from the surface, and examination of quenched sections under polarized light revealed numerous bent fibers within the frozen polymer. Clearly, then, fiber flexing contributes to the observed extrudate irregularities.
Fiber concentration inhomogeneities
Evidence of local variations in fiber concentration appears in the cross section of Figs. 8 -10. Close examination of these cross sections reveals that there are regions that seem to be completely free of fibers, and other regions which have high densities of fibers. Such variations in fiber concentration may cause point-to-point variations in viscosity and a variable deformation rate profile across the diameter of the molten polymer as it flows. The effects would be greatest at low deformation rates when the local viscosity variations due to differences in fiber concentration (Figs.2 - 4) are greatest; at increasing shear rates the viscosity differences diminish and a smoother extrudate would appear, in attractive agreement with that observation. Radial fiber migrations were reported for poly(ethylene terephthalate)-glass systems by Wu (1979) but, in the present work on polypropylene-glass fiber systems careful measurements revealed no such large-scale changes. However, local concentration fluctuations were indeed of large magnitude: in the 10 wt % material the volume fractions of fibers varied between 0 and 0.15 and, for the 40 wt % system, between 0.09 and 0.35. Using the data of Kitano et al. (1981) to estimate the local viscosity variations tenfold changes are computed. To determine more definitively the probable effects of large viscosity variations on extrudate morphology, an experiment was conducted using a 50/50 wt % blend of high density polyethylene and polypropylene. The viscosities of these two immiscible polymers varied by nearly an order of magnitude at low deformation rates and a temperature of 180 <*_>degree<*/>C. The blend was prepared by chopping extruded strands of the individual polymers into fragments 1 mm or less in length and mechanically mixing an equal mass of each of the solid fragments. The blend was extruded through a 2 in. long capillary with an L/D of 40, and cross sections of the extrudates were examined for distortion.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="04">We also derive, for the case of random sphere percolation, an exact Smoluchowski equation describing the scaling behavior of the mean cluster densities. In Sec. III we focus on the function n<sb_>c<sb/>(k), which gives the mean number of clusters, per unit volume, containing exactly k particles. We obtain an exact differential equation for this quantity and discuss its solution. We also give an efficient general numerical method for solving this equation and, thus, for obtaining cluster-size distributions. In Sec. IV we extend these methods to clustering in ionic systems. In Sec. V, we show how to calculate the mean volume of a cluster as a function of cluster size. To do this, we first extend earlier research by Fanti et al. [20] to give a recipe for calculating the mean volume of a cluster. We then use the ghost-field method developed in previous sections to obtain the full distribution of mean cluster volumes. Section VI gives our conclusions. In the Appendix, we give a closed set of Ornstein-Zernike equations that are satisfied by the asymmetric (ghost-field-dependent) connectedness functions. We discuss the difficulties in obtaining the mean-spherical approximation (MSA) for this system. Finally, we discuss the relationship between this system of equations and similar systems encountered in other random media problems, including correlations of a liquid in porous media and structure of the gel phase in a percolating medium.
II. GENERATING FUNCTION FORMALISM FOR CLUSTER STATISTICS
In this section we show that including a color field, or ghost field, in a continuum percolation model allows one to develop generating functions for the basic quantities describing such a model. We develop these generating functions using the continuum-Potts-model formalism already applied to percolation without a ghost field. Certain basic relations between these generating functions are also developed. In particular, we show that the virial theorem for percolation models provides an exact equation of Smoluchowski type describing the growth and coalescence of clusters as the density is increased.
The one-state limit of the continuum Potts model [21-23] gives a very general correlated, continuum percolation model. We have previously [12] discussed in detail this relationship, which is the continuum generalization of the mapping originally developed for lattice percolation by Fortuin and Kastelyn [14]. Here we add a ghost field to the Hamiltonian in order to develop the basic quantities describing this model as generating functions. The ghost field [16, 18] is an artificial external field of constant magnitude that acts on particles in all but one species (we choose species 1 for definiteness). Since the correspondence between Potts-model quantities and percolation quantities has been developed in detail previously, we do not repeat this work here. We rather focus on the additional structure created by including the ghost field in the CPM.
The asymmetric CPM is a generalization of the Widom-Rowlinson model [24]; it describes a mixture of s different species which can undergo phase separation at sufficiently low temperatures. In the one-state limit, this phase-separation transition becomes a percolation transition. This mapping exhibits continuum percolation as an analytic continuation of a many-body system of a standard type, and allows the methods of liquid-state physics to be applied to it. The Hamiltonian of this system is
<O_>formula<O/>.
The first term is a repulsive interaction [we will take <*_>nu<*/>(x)>0] acting only between particles of different species (we use the symbol <*_>sigma<*/><sb_>i<sb/> to denote the species of particle i). The second term is a species-independent potential acting between each pair of particles. In the one-species limit, the thermodynamic quantities describing this model become the basic quantities describing a very general model of clustering and percolation in the continuum. This model consists of particles with interparticle correlations induced by the potential <*_>phi<*/>(x) and bonds connecting each pair of particles with a separation-dependent bond probability p<sb_>b<sb/>(x) given by
<O_>formula<O/>.
The last term in (2.1) is a ghost field which acts equally on particles of all species except those in one distinguished species (we choose species 1 for definiteness; henceforth we will use subscripts i and j to denote species other than 1). This term can be absorbed into the fugacities characterizing different species; if particles of species 1 have activity z<sb_>1<sb/>, then particles of species i have activity
<O_>formula<O/>,
with H=<*_>beta<*/>h, <*_>beta<*/>=1/kT the inverse temperature and h the ghost field from (2.1). If particles in species 1 are present with density <*_>rho<*/><sb_>1<sb/>, those in every other species have density <*_>rho<*/><sb_>i<sb/>, a nontrivial function of the fugacities z<sb_>1<sb/>,z<sb_>i<sb/>. The one-state limits of these quantities are
<O_>formula<O/>,
where <*_>unch<*/> is the percolation density, while
<O_>formula<O/>,
where n<sb_>c<sb/>(K) is the density, or number per unit volume, of clusters containing exactly k particles. The quantity <*_>unch<*/><sb_>i<sb/>(H) is a generating function for the cluster densities n<sb_>c<sb/>(k). Furthermore, if the field H were pure imaginary, we could recover the individual cluster densities from the function <*_>unch<*/><sb_>i<sb/>(H) by performing an inverse Fourier transform. The convergence of the series (2.5) for purely imaginary values of H follows from the exponential decay, as a function of cluster size k, of the {n<sb_>c<sb/>(k)}. We will make this program explicit in Sec. III. Here, we will assume that inversions [25] of this kind are in fact possible and focus on presenting formal results. That is, we will give the other basic generating functions provided by the CPM mapping and state the results of performing the inverse transform just described. Note that, according to (2.5), setting H to zero gives<O_>formula<O/> [we treat here only the regime below the percolation transition, and thus all particles are contained in finite clusters; see, however, the discussion below Eq. (A18) in the Appendix].
The other low-order moments of the generating function are also given by basic CPM quantities. The one-state limit of the pressure is
<O_>formula<O/>.
We can also define the H-dependent version of the mean cluster size,
<O_>formula<O/>.
We give an integral equation satisfied by this function below. The one-species limits of the distribution functions are also generating functions for useful quantities, as we now show. As before, we will use subscripts i and j to denote two different species other than species 1, which we have distinguished by applying a ghost field. In the one-species limit s<*_>arrow<*/>1, the CPM distribution functions give connectedness and blocking functions, denoted g<sb_>c<sb/>(x,H) and g<sb_>b<sb/>(x,H), respectively, according to
<O_>formulae<O/>.
The zero-field limits of these functions, which we write simply as g<sb_>b<sb/>(x) and g<sb_>c<sb/>(x), respectively, have a direct physical interpretation: The connectedness function g<sb_>c<sb/>(x) is the probability density associated with finding two particles with separation x both in the same cluster. Similarly, the blocking function g<sb_>b<sb/>(x) is the probability density associated with finding two particles with separation x but in different clusters. These two functions are related by
<O_>formula<O/>,
with g<sb_>t<sb/>(x) the thermal correlation function associated with the potential interaction <*_>phi<*/>(x). For the nonzero H field, the H-dependent CPM distribution functions, in the s<*_>arrow<*/>1 limit, give generating functions for blocking and connectedness distribution functions restricted to clusters of specified size, which we denote <O_>formula<O/>, <O_>formula<O/>, according to
<O_>formulae<O/>.
Here <O_>formula<O/> is the probability density associated with finding two particles separated by a distance x, but in different clusters, one of size m, one of size n. Also, <O_>formula<O/> is the probability density associated with finding two particles separated by distance x and both in the same m-particle cluster. An explicit system of Ornstein-Zernike equations obeyed by the correlation functions of an asymmetric CPM is presented in the Appendix. Our strategy is to solve these equations in the s<*_>arrow<*/>1 limit, and use their solutions, as indicated in (2.11) and (2.12) to recover the H-dependent connectedness functions. The function g<sb_>ij<sb/> is itself useful as a generating function. It is valuable as an intermediate quantity because it obeys the relation <O_>formula<O/>. It is also important because it obeys the Ornstein-Zernike equation
<O_>formula<O/>.
Here the symbol <*_>unch<*/> denotes a convolution. A basic equation relating the above generating functions is the virial theorem for the CPM, and its s<*_>arrow<*/>1 limit, the virial theorem for percolation. This theorem has been developed [12] for the general correlated percolation model defined below Eq. (2.1). However, for simplicity, we discuss here only the case of random sphere percolation, in which randomly located particles are directly connected if and only if they are closer together than a fixed distance a. The virial theorem for the zero-field case of this model is
<O_>formula<O/>.
For the model of sphere percolation, n<sb_>c<sb/> depends only on the dimensionless variable <O_>formula<O/>. Thus we can rewrite
<O_>formula<O/>.
This equation can be given a direct physical interpretation by identifying the particle diameter a with the time variable in a particular growth process. Specifically, we imagine randomly distributed particles with zero diameter at time t=0, with their diameters growing at a constant rate so as to remain proportional to the time. As the particles grow, they overlap, and form successively larger clusters. Now we focus on a specific particle at the moment when its diameter has just grown to size a. The quantity <O_>formula<O/> gives the density of particles that are in different clusters from the particle in question, and are about to become directly connected to it. The factor 4<*_>pi<*/>a<sp_>2<sp/> gives the total surface area on which this can happen, while the factor of 1/2 prevents double counting. Such coalescence events are precisely the ones that decrease the total number of clusters.
We can extend this result to show that the cluster densities {n<sb_>c<sb/>(k)} for random continuum percolation obey an exact equation of Smoluchowski type. To see this, we write down the virial theorem for our asymmetric Potts model, analytically continue the ghost field H to purely imaginary values, and then perform an inverse Fourier transform. It is convenient to express the result in terms of reaction rates describing the fusion and breakup of clusters. To do this, we define an H-dependent blocking function g<sb_>b<sb/>(x,H) in terms of the function <*_>rho<*/><sb_>b<sb/>(x,H) already defined:
<O_>formula<O/>.
This function, evaluated at contact, is a generating function for reaction rates according to
<O_>formula<O/>.
In terms of these quantities, we can write the following equation of Smoluchowski type for the cluster densities:
<O_>formula<O_>.
We pause to note the connection between this equation and the form of Smoluchowski equation which is furnished by a mean-field treatment. If we replace the function g<sb_>b<sb/>(x,H) on the right-hand side (RHS) of Eq. (2.16) by the function g<sb_>b<sb/>(x), i.e., if we ignore the H dependence of this function, the summations over the subscripts m and n in the terms on the RHS of Eq. (2.18) will be eliminated. If we set m=0 and n=0 in these terms, a mean-field Smoluchowski equation results. The probabilistic interpretation of such an equation is immediate: The first term on the RHS gives the rate at which pairs of smaller clusters coalesce to give k clusters. The second term on the RHS gives the rate at which k clusters are removed by fusing into larger clusters. Equation (2.18) thus has the form of a generalized Smoluchowski equation [26]; we emphasize that this equation is exact. Here the contact values of blocking functions play the role of rate constants. These contact values can be derived for random sphere percolation by using an asymmetric version of the scaled-particle theory for percolation [13]. In the general case a variety of integral equation methods have been developed for calculating these quantities, as we discuss in Sec. III and also in the Appendix.
III. GENERAL ALGORITHM FOR CLUSTER-SIZE DISTRIBUTIONS
In this section we discuss the cluster-size distribution in a very general correlated continuum percolation model. We first use the formalism of Sec. II to develop a differential equation for the quantity <O_>formula<O/>, which, as we have shown, is the generating function for the cluster densities n<sb_>c<sb/>(k). The RHS of this differential equation involves the volume integral of the H-dependent connectedness function <*_>rho<*/><sb_>c<sb/>(x,H). Numerical solution of this equation is computationally demanding; we discuss efficient methods for solving this equation.
The analog, for percolation, of the compressibility theorem is the theorem giving the mean cluster size as an integral over the two-point connectedness function. The probabilistic argument that gives this theorem has a form specific to k clusters which we now describe.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="05">Thus, each finger is related by a rotation of 3 x 32<*_>degree<*/> and a translation of about 10 A<*_>circlet<*/> (3 x 3.3 A<*_>circlet<*/>) along the DNA axis. Unlike the recognition helix of the helix-turn-helix motif, the <*_>alpha<*/> helix in the zinc finger is tipped at an angle away from the major groove. The <*_>beta<*/> sheet is on the back of the helix away from the base pairs and is shifted towards one side of the major groove. The two strands of the <*_>beta<*/> sheet have different roles. The first <*_>beta<*/> strand does not make contact with the DNA, whereas the second <*_>beta<*/> strand is in contact with the sugar phosphate backbone along one strand of DNA.
The zinc finger peptide makes 11 hydrogen bonds with the bases in the major groove. Six amino acid side chains interact with the base pairs, two from each zinc finger. However, five of the six residues that are binding to the nucleic acids are arginine residues. One of these arginines immediately precedes the <*_>alpha<*/> helix in each of the three fingers, and it also includes the residues from either the second, the third, or the sixth residues in the <*_>alpha<*/> helix. All of these form hydrogen bonds with the G-rich strand of the consensus binding site. Figure 7 shows the interactions of the various arginine residues and one histidine residue from the three fingers. It can be seen that five of the six interactions are those postulated at an earlier time in an analysis of protein-nucleic acid recognition <figure/>.
Each zinc finger interacts with a subset of three bases. All of them interact with the first base in the subset. However, two of them interact with the third base of the subset and one with the second base. The detailed interactions are listed in Table II and are also shown in <figure/>. Some of the arginine residues binding to guanine are also stabilized by aspartic acids that occur as the second residue in the <*_>alpha<*/> helices. It is likely that this side-chain interaction helps to stabilize the binding of the arginine to the guanine residue, although it is not found in all of the fingers. The recognition system is relatively simple. The residue immediately preceding the <*_>alpha<*/> helix contacts the third base on the primary strand of the substrate at the 5' end. The third residue on the <*_>alpha<*/> helix can contact the second base on the primary strand, and the sixth residue can contact the first base. In this structure, each zinc finger came in contact with only two bases of each three-base subset. It is not known whether it would be possible to have other zinc fingers in which all three bases are recognized.
The DNA is essentially in the form of a B-type helix with small distortions. There are small changes in base-pair twist going from one site to the next, although the overall conformation is similar to normal B-DNA. Each of the three fingers binds in a similar orientation and has similar contacts with the three base pairs of the DNA. In a formal sense, the relationship of one zinc finger to the next is in the form of a translational rotation or a screw operation that tracks the inside of the major groove of the double helix.
Even though the zinc finger uses the <*_>alpha<*/> helix for recognition, it has several unique features that differentiate it from the helix-turn-helix interactions. First, of all, the zinc finger complex is formed out of modular units that can be repeated a large number of times. This entails the possibility of recognizing very long stretches of DNA by simply having a larger number of zinc fingers. As mentioned, some proteins have very large numbers of zinc fingers and may actually use this. The second characteristic is that the contacts seem to be largely with one strand only of DNA, in this particular case with the purine-rich or guanine-rich strand. The recognition depends largely on interaction with the bases, and there are fewer hydrogen bonds with the DNA backbone than are seen in the other structures.
Even though studies of other protein-DNA complexes appear not to have a recognition code, the zinc finger complex appears to have a recognition code which is largely based on the arginine-guanine contacts, at least for the Zif complex. It remains to be seen whether these types of contacts will be found more specifically when the structures of more zinc fingers have been done. Solution of this structure will make it possible to synthesize new zinc finger binding domains with different nucleotide binding specificities. Thus, it will be possible to explore the full gamut of interactions found in this widely used recognition motif in eukaryotic systems.
THE GLUCOCORTICOID RECEPTOR ALSO CONTAINS ZINC IONS
The glucocorticoid receptor has the property of binding a hormone, such as estrogen or another steroid, and is then translocated from the cytoplasm to the nucleus, where it binds to specific DNA sequences, called glucocorticoid response elements (GREs). The binding affects transcription of the genes. A large number of these exist; they include receptors for steroid hormones, retinoids, vitamin D, thyroid hormones, and others. Members of this superfamily have a common amino acid sequence organization with discrete domains that are used for binding DNA as well as zinc. All of these nuclear receptors are characterized by a pattern containing eight cystenes and, in the glucocorticoid receptor, these cystenes coordinate two zinc ions in a tetrahedral manner. The structure of the glucocorticoid receptor bound to DNA has been determined recently by Luisi et al. (1991). Unlike the typical zinc fingers, the glucocorticoid receptor forms a distinct globular binding domain and does not occur in a long series of modular units, as is often found in the typical zinc finger DNA binding.
The structure of the glucocorticoid receptor bound to DNA reveals that the receptor dimerizes onto a DNA molecule that contains two repeats of the glucocorticoid response element sequence, each with the major groove facing in the same direction. Each of the proteins forms a compact globular structure in which the two zinc ions serve to nucleate the formation of a conformation in which an <*_>alpha<*/> helix is positioned in the major groove of B-DNA and thereby has sequence-specific binding. The glucocorticoid receptor conformation may be looked upon as a conformation similar in some respects to the helix-turn-helix conformation, except that zinc ions are used in maintaining the stable fold of the protein rather than the helix interactions found in the helix-turn-helix system. A number of interactions are found between the glucocorticoid receptor and the DNA. However, three of them are interactions with bases that are important for determining sequence specificity. One of the most important of these is an arginine 466 that binds to guanine 4 using the system of arginine-guanine interactions, which has been described above using two hydrogen bonds. Another hydrophobic interaction involves valine 462 interacting with the methyl group of thymine 5 while a lysine 461 forms a single hydrogen bond to N7 of guanine 7 as well as to a water molecule, which in turn binds to O6 of guanine and O4 of thymine in an adjacent base pair. If arginine 466 is replaced by lysine or glycine, the protein no longer functions in vivo. Arginine 466 and lysine 461 are absolutely conserved in the superfamily of nuclear receptors; their targeted bases, guanine 4 and guanine 7, also occur consistently in all the known sequences of the hormone response elements (Luisi et al., 1991).
The major difference between the zinc-containing glucocorticoid response element and the traditional zinc finger is the fact that the latter conformation is stabilized individually by an extensive hydrophobic core as well as by the zinc ion. Furthermore, it assumes this conformation independent of the presence or absence of DNA. In contrast, experiments with the glucocorticoid receptor show that it only condenses as a dimer in the presence of the DNA. The dimerization is stabilized both by the DNA as well as by contacts between the protein.
The arginine-guanine interaction, which played so predominant a part in five of the six interactions seen in the three modules of the traditional zinc finger structure, also plays a role in interactions with the glucocorticoid response element. However, in this case, only one of the three interactions that are sequence-determining involves the arginine-guanine interaction.
ECO RI ENDONUCLEASE BINDING TO DNA
Restriction endonucleases are very important tools in molecular biology since they cleave DNA molecules at specific sequences. One of the widely used enzymes was obtained from E. coli and is called Eco RI endonuclease. It cleaves DNA at a specific double-stranded sequence (d(GAATTC)). Eco RI contains 276 amino acids, and it has been crystallized with a fragment of DNA containing 13 base pairs. The solved structure revealed a complex interaction between a globular protein and a DNA double helix (McClarin et al., 1986; Kim et al., 1986). The DNA recognition motif consists of a parallel bundle of four <*_>alpha<*/> helices penetrating the major groove of the DNA. There, amino acids at the end of the <*_>alpha<*/> helix interact with the bases in the major groove. Although <*_>alpha<*/> helices are employed, this motif differs from the interaction seen both in the helix-turn-helix proteins and the zinc fingers. In this case, a cluster of very long <*_>alpha<*/>-helical segments interact with the DNA at their ends. In addition, a segment of extended polypeptide chain runs along the major groove of the DNA roughly parallel to the DNA backbone. This is anchored at one end by one of the recognition helices, and it has several contacts with bases. Among the interactions that are described is one involving arginine 200 binding to guanine in a manner similar to that described in <figure/>.
We do not know whether this structure is likely to be a general structure for the recognition of DNA by restriction endonucleases. However, one of the interesting projects arising from solution of this protein-DNA complex is the possibility of modifying side chains to alter recognition modes so that one might be able to make restriction enzymes with altered cleavage specificities using the Eco RI framework for carrying this out. Further work will be necessary before we know whether this is a general recognition motif for other enzymes as well. However, it is important to emphasize that the mode of interaction is quite distinct from that seen in any other protein-nucleic acid cocrystal.
<*_>beta<*/> SHEET DNA BINDING PROTEINS
The methionine repressor controls its own gene as well as structural genes for enzymes involved in the synthesis of methionine. It is a protein with 104 amino acids and forms stable dimers in solution. The structure had been determined by Phillips and colleagues, and it consists of two highly intertwined monomers that form a two-stranded antiparallel <*_>beta<*/> sheet with one strand coming from each monomer (Rafferty et al., 1989). This <*_>beta<*/> sheet forms a protrusion on the surface of the molecule. A similar structure has been deduced for the Arc repressor based on NMR studies (Kaptain et al., 1985). Phillips has also solved the structure of the Met repressor bound to a synthetic DNA fragment containing 18 base pairs (S. Phillips, personal communication). The structure of the Met dimer is not changed greatly by binding to the DNA, which is largely in the B conformation. The two-stranded <*_>beta<*/> sheet of the repressor is found in the major groove of the DNA with side chains from the <*_>beta<*/> strands interacting with base pairs within the operator sequences. These interactions are the base sequence-specific interactions. The DNA itself is somewhat kinked in the center of the operator sequence. That has the effect of narrowing the major groove slightly so that it can form closer bonding to the side chains of the <*_>beta<*/> sheet.
The two-stranded <*_>beta<*/> sheet is thus another DNA binding motif which, unlike the others mentioned above, does not use an <*_>alpha<*/> helix for recognition but rather an extended polypeptide chain.
The listing of protein structural motifs that are involved in recognizing DNA sequences (Table I) is necessarily incomplete.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="06">
II. EXPERIMENT
The molecular beam time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOFMS) used in this study is identical to that in Paper I, to which the reader is referred. A given C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/> neutral cluster size is selected for photoionization using resonance enhancement through the S<sb_>0<sb/>-S<sb_>1<sb/> transitions of the C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> chromophore in the cluster. Resonant two-photon ionization scans utilize the unfocused, doubled output of an excimer-pumped dye laser. Typical peak UV laser powers are 3x10<sp_>5<sp/> W/cm<sp_>2<sp/>. Laser power studies indicate that the observed product ions result from two-photon processes. Relative product yields are determined from scans over the resonant features of the reactant complex while simultaneously monitoring ion signals from all relevant product mass channels using a 100 MHz digital oscilloscope.
III. RESULTS
In Paper I, we reported on the spectroscopy of neutral C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/> clusters. In that case, attention was focused on R2PI spectra taken monitoring unreactive ion mass channels [C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/>]<sp_>+<sp/>. Figures 1-3 present a series of scans over the same 6<sp_>1<sp/><sb_>0<sb/> region including scans monitoring mass channels which arise from intracluster ion-molecule chemistry. As is readily apparent from these spectra, resonant two-photon ionized C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/> clusters with n<*_>unch<*/>3 [Eq. (1)] react by dissociative electron transfer (DET) to form (CH<sb_>3<sb/>HO)<sb_>n<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> [Eq. (3)], while those with n<*_>unch<*/>4 also undergo dissociative proton transfer (DPT) to form H<sp_>+<sp/>(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/> ions [Eq. (4)]. This intracluster ion chemistry is completely absent from the resonantly photoionized C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(H<sb_>2<sb/>O)<sb_>n<sb/> clusters and from C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/> with n<*_>unch<*/>2 [<figure/>(b)]. In all cases, the ion chemistry occurs in competition with fragmentation of the cluster [Eq. (2)] via loss of one (or sometimes two) methanol molecules.
<O_>formulae<O/>
The dissociative electron transfer channel to form [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/><sp_>+<sp/>] is quite unexpected since only protonated methanol cluster ions are observed in either electron bombardment or photoionized pure methanol clusters. While the resolution of our reflectron TOFMS is easily capable of distinguishing protonated from unprotonated clusters (<O_>formula<O/>), we have as an additional check carried out resonant two-photon ionization (R2PI) scans using CH<sb_>3<sb/>OD which confirm that the major product is [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OD)<sb_>n<sb/><sp_>+<sp/>] and not [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OD)<sb_>n<sb/>D]<sp_>+<sp/> or [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OD)<sb_>n<sb/>H]<sp_>+<sp/>.
Figures 4 and 5 present the relative product yields for the observed fragmentation, DET, and DPT channels following resonant ionization through the 6<sp_>1<sp/><sb_>0<sb/> and <O_>formula<O/> transitions of the 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, and 1:5 clusters. These yields are obtained by integrating the peak intensities of the 6<sp_>1<sp/><sb_>0<sb/> or <O_>formula<O/> ion signals in the relevant product channels in order to avoid nonresonant contributions from the signal. The measurements at <O_>formula<O/> increase the maximum internal energy in the cluster ion (determined by the photon energy) by 5.2 kcal/mol from those using the 6<sp_>1<sp/><sb_>0<sb/> transition as the intermediate state.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
IV. DISCUSSION
One factor which plays a major role in determining the presence and efficiency of a given product channel is the energetic threshold for the channel relative to the internal energy of the photoionized reactant cluster. In photoionization, a distribution of ion internal energies is produced which reflect both direct ionization and autoionization processes in the cluster. In the free C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> molecule, R2PI through the 6<sp_>1<sp/><sb_>0<sb/> transition reaches 8 kcal/mol above the ionization threshold. In that case, the largely <*_>DELTA<*/><*_>nu<*/>=0 Franck-Condon factors between the S<sb_>1<sb/> state of the neutral and the ground states of the ion result in the electron taking away most of the excess energy as kinetic energy.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
In clusters, on the other hand, the nature and strength of the intermolecular forces change significantly upon ionization, often leading to very different lowest-energy structures for the neutral and ionic clusters. This is particularly true for the present clusters containing polar methanol molecules as solvent, where the good Franck-Condon factors between the S<sb_>1<sb/> state and the ion are to regions of the ionic potential energy surface far above the adiabatic ionization threshold for the cluster. As we saw in Paper I, the efficient fragmentation of the photoionized clusters is one result of the high ion internal energies produced. Here, since the same photoionization process also initiates the intracluster ion chemistry, we expect to form a distribution of reactant cluster ion internal energies which favors ion internal energies near the maximum allowed by the photon energy.
Figures 6-8 present energy level diagrams reflecting our best estimates of the energies of fragmentation, DET, and DPT product thresholds relative to the maximum ion energies produced by photoionization. Experimentally observed product channels are highlighted by placing them in boxes. In the figures, the zero of the energy level scales is taken to be the energy of the <O_>formula<O/> asymptote. Table I collects the heats of formation of the relevant species. The thermochemistry of the protonated methanol clusters is known with good accuracy by virtue of several studies of these clusters. The neutral cluster binding energies are not known from experiment. We estimate them using the calculations of Paper I after approximate correction for zero point energy effects.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
An upper bound for the energy of the DET channel [Eq. (3)] on our relative scale is determined by the threshold for reaction (5)
<O_>formula<O/>
whose thermochemistry is determined by well-known heats of formation for all species. If the CH<sb_>3<sb/>O radical is formed instead of CH<sb_>2<sb/>OH, the upper bound for DET would be 10 kcal/mol higher. We assume that the observation of [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>n<sb/>]<sp_>+<sp/> ions in the present experiment arises because there is an energetic barrier to breakup of this ion to <O_>formula<O/>. The shaded region in the diagrams place some reasonable bounds on the height of such a barrier (0-10 kcal/mol) and thus loosely brackets the threshold for DET.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
A. The 1:2 cluster
As <figure/> indicates, the only observed product channel in one-color R2PI of the 1:2 cluster is fragmentation via loss of a single CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH to form <O_>formula<O/>. Fragmentation is 86% <*_>unch<*/> 5% efficient using the 6<sp_>1<sp/> level of the S<sb_>1<sb/>state as the intermediate state and 80% <*_>unch<*/> 10% efficient at 0<sp_>0<sp/>, despite our use of laser powers for which three-photon contributions to the ion signals are negligible. The small change in the percentage of fragmentation accompanying the 3 kcal/mol increase in the two-photon energy confirms the notion that most of the cluster ions have an internal energy near the two-photon energy in <figure/>, well in excess of the <O_>formula<O/> dissociation asymptote in both the O<sp_>0<sp/> and 6<sp_>1<sp/> scans. Loss of CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH from the ionic cluster occurs on a time scale fast compared to movement of the cluster ion in the ion source (t<1<*_>mu<*/>s), since no asymmetry is observed in the arrival time profile of the parent or fragment. Fragmentation occurs almost exclusively by loss of a methanol monomer rather than a methanol dimer, despite the fact that the latter channel should be accessible to many of the clusters. This favoring of evaporative loss of monomer units has been a trademark of cluster fragmentation in many types of clusters.
<O_>figures&captions<O/>
The lack of ion-molecule chemistry in the <O_>formula<O/> cluster appears to be a direct consequence of energetic constraints. Dissociative electron transfer, which is the dominating reaction channel in higher clusters, is predicted to be endothermic in R2PI through 6<sp_>1<sp/> <figure/>. This is the case because the ionization potential of CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH is some 37 kcal/mol above that for C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> (Table I), so that even with the stabilization of CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH<sp_>+<sp/> provided by a second methanol molecule, formation of [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>2<sb/>]<sp_>+<sp/> is still endothermic. Similarly, the high proton affinity of C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>5<sb/> (which clearly precludes proton transfer of C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> to CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH) is nearly thermoneutral for transfer to (CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>2<sb/> (see Table I and <figure/>. Hence it is not surprising that no reaction products beside fragmentations are observed in the 1:2 clusters.
B. The 1:3 cluster
The <O_>formula<O/> cluster ion is the smallest sized 1:n cluster to undergo intrascluster ion-molecule chemistry. The appearance of [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>3<sb/>)]<sp_>+<sp/> (i.e., mass 96) is consistent with the energy level diagram of <figure/> which shows that the asymptote for DET is now well below the maximum ion internal energy produced in R2PI. Nevertheless, DET is still only a minor channel (6%) which competes only poorly with fragmentation via loss of CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH (94%).
1. The formation of [(CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH)<sb_>3<sb/>]<sp_>+<sp/>
The formation of a reaction product at mass 96 is notable for being exclusively the unprotonated methanol cluster ion. As mentioned earlier, when pure methanol clusters are either electron bombardment or photoionized, only protonated cluster ions are observed due to exothermic ion-molecule reactions of the type
<O_>formulae<O/>
The bimolecular analogs of these reactions
<O_>formula<O/>
are exothermic by 24 and 14 kcal/mol, respectively. Both these facts suggest that the initially unprotonated cluster ions would be inherently unstable with respect to loss of CH<sb_>2<sb/>OH or CH<sb_>3<sb/>O. However, in recent experiments by Vaidyanathan et al., electron bombardment ionization of Ar/CH<sb_>3<sb/>OH heteroclusters has successfully produced significant quantities of unprotonated <O_>formula<O/> ions via intracluster Penning ionization involving high-lying states of the argon neutrals. The present study offers a second example of the formation of unprotonated methanol cluster ions, this time mediated by C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>. The attachment of the methanol clusters to a C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> chromophore offers an extremely gentle means of producing unprotonated M<sb_>n<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> clusters by photoionizing the cluster with only 9.60 eV energy via the C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> chromophore. In the case of the 1:3 cluster, the unprotonated M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> products can be formed completely free from interference from protonated clusters. This mechanism thus provides a route producing the novel M<sb_>n<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> cluster ions for subsequent spectroscopic and mass spectrometric study.
The formation of the DET product M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> (M = methanol) provides supporting evidence for the neutral C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/>-M<sb_>3<sb/> cluster possessing a structure composed of hydrogen-bonded methanols all attached to the same side of the benzene ring (Paper I). It seems unlikely that DET to form M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> would occur from an initial geometry in which methanol molecules are on both sides of the benzene ring rather than as an aggregate on the same side.
The structure of the mass 96 ion is not determined in the present work. However, it seems likely that the M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> cluster exists either as <O_>formula<O/> or as <O_>formula<O/> in which proton transfer within the methanol cluster has occurred with cluster energy insufficient to allow its breakup to form the protonated M<sb_>2<sb/>H<sp_>+<sp/> ion. Loss of the C<sb_>6<sb/>H<sb_>6<sb/> molecule form the cluster provides the means by which the M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> ion is stabilized below its M<sb_>2<sb/>H + CH<sb_>2<sb/>OH/CH<sb_>3<sb/>O dissociation asymptote.
The only energetically allowed channel which competes successfully with DET is fragmentation to form <O_>formula<O/>, which dominates the product distribution (94%). No parent 1:3 cluster ions are observed in our experiment. Thus the observed processes are the following:
<O_>formulae<O/>
One could imagine two limiting cases for the competition between DET and fragmentation. In one limit, the energy dependence of the rate constants is either small enough or similar enough in the two channels that the observed product distribution directly reflects the relative magnitudes of the rate constants for fragmentation and DET; i.e., the product yields are kinetically controlled. In this case, the rate of fragmentation would provide and 'internal clock' for the DET reaction if it could be determined by other means.
In the second limit, the observed product distribution will reflect energetic constraints rather than kinetics. This would occur if k<sb_>frag<sb/>(E) is much greater then k<sb_>DET<sb/>(E) for energies where fragmentation can occur. Then all cluster ions with internal energies above the fragmentation threshold would undergo fragmentation, while the remaining, lower energy cluster ions would react via DET. More complete control over the ion internal energies produced or detected (e.g., via photoelectron-photoion coincidence measurements) will be required before the energy dependences of the reaction rates can be determined unambiguously.
2. Reactions which are not observed
The formation of unprotonated M<sb_>3<sb/><sp_>+<sp/> ions is unusual in a second respect - it occurs to the exclusion of several other energetically open channels, most notably those involving dissociative proton transfer [Eq. (4)]. Careful searches for the DPT products <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>, or the CH<sb_>2<sb/>OH loss channel to produce <O_>formula<O/> place upper bounds on these channels at less than 1% of the 1:2 fragment channel <figure/>, nearly ten times less than the observed yield of DET products.
Again, energetics could play a significant role in suppressing the proton transfer channels if the rate constants for the product channels were sensitively dependent on their exothermicity.
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Let's briefly examine what this might do. If the acceleration is a, the change in the potential energy is <O_>formula<O/> and the total kinetic energy gained is <O_>formula<O/>. Here the rate of growth is<*_>tau<*/><sp_>-1<sp/> and <*_>delta<*/>z is the displacement. Then the growth time scale is given by
<O_>formula<O/>
where k<*_>approximate-sign<*/>z<sp_>-1<sp/> is the wave number for the disturbance (assuming that the wavelength is of order z). The instability is guaranteed if the density gradient is in the opposite direction to the local acceleration. Now by noting that any acceleration is locally equivalent to gravitation (this is after all the basis of general relativity), we can replace a by <*_>DELTA<*/>P, the pressure jump across the shock front at the wind-wind interface. We could also use g<sb_>eff<sb/>, the effective gravity including radiation pressure. Let's concentrate on the first choice. Across a shock, which moves with a speed v<sb_><*_>SIGMA<*/><sb/> into the surrounding gas, the pressure is given by
<O_>formula<O/>
For a perfect gas this is larger on the postshocked side and the pressure jump is <O_>formula<O/>. The interface is unstable to the formation of knots and blobs. As we have already discussed, as these rise, they tend to show induced vorticity and develop the characteristically mushroom-shaped structures so familarfamiliar from both violent explosions (like nuclear blasts) and simulations of supernova envelopes. This same condition will certainly prevail during the formation of planetary nebulae, and the wind-wind collision should generate stringy and bloblike structures because of this instability. If optically thick, they will shadow the material in the slow wind, and the result is that low ionization regions should be mixed into the H II region. One expectation is that in any of the blastlike expansions, be they Wolf-Rayet winds, planetary nebulae, or supernova remnants, it should be possible to see the effects of the wind collision preserved in these structures.
8.7 Accretion Disks in Astrophysics

8.7.1 Some Observational Motivations
We have invoked binary systems frequently in this chapter, and it is therefore appropriate to end it with a discussion of a most interesting confluence of rotation and viscosity, namely accretion disks around massive objects. But first, before launching into an extended exposé of the properties of the disks themselves, let's examine the conditions under which rotating accretion flows may arise.
For many binaries, especially ones of long period, this is precisely what is observed. The more evolved star really is the more massive. In the case of Algol (<*_>beta<*/> Persei), an extremely well-studied star and the first discovered eclipsing binary, just the opposite is observed. Algol consists of a G giant and a B main sequence star. The mass ratio is <*_>approximate-sign<*/>3, but in favor of the main sequence B star. The orbital period is short, less than 3 days. the light curve data and modeling the equilibrium shapes of the stars show that the red subgiant completely fills its Roche surface. This is the limiting surface for tidal interaction, given approximately by
<O_>formula<O/>
where a is the semimajor axis given by Kepler's law <O_>formula<O/> for circular orbits, q is the mass ratio, and M is the total mass of the system. The reason for the peculiar mass of the red giant is that it has been significantly altered by mass loss from the binary system and by mass transfer onto the main sequence star. The fact that this is still going on, in both this and related semidetached systems (the term comes from the fact that only one of the stars is in contact with the critical surface), means that accretion flows onto the companion have played a role in the orbital dynamics and that this has fed back into the stellar evolution through the alteration of the mass and boundary conditions on the stars. The observation, for a number of these stars, of emission lines which are formed in a Keplerian disk surrounding one of the components adds fuel to the argument, although in Algol it does not appear that an extensive accretion disk is observed.
8.7.2 Flow through the Inner Lagrangian Point
First, a binary system, that is, a close system, is one that is not spherically symmetric. The presence of the companion star, as well as the rotation of the mass-losing star due to spin-orbit coupling, produces immediate departures from sphericity. To see what happens to the mass transfer at the inner Lagrangian point, also called L<sb_>1<sb/>, we need to consider the flow of material in a potential that switches sign at some point in the flow (see <figure/>.4).
Let's look back at the spherical case for a moment. The mass loss is driven by the combined effect of pressure gradient and retardation due to gravity. At some point, where the outward driving becomes strong enough relative to gravity, the material coasts at the sound speed and then accelerates as the gravitational acceleration continues to fall off. In other words, the reason the effective gravity vanishes is that at some point, g is balanced by <*_>unch<*/>p. But what about other possible cases? We've already seen that if g is balanced by <*_>unch<*/>p<sb_>rad<sb/>, or at some point g(1 - <*_>GAMMA<*/>) vanishes, then the material becomes supersonic and a strong wind. Both of these depend on the presence of a pressure gradient to do the job of producing a sign change in the acceleration. The alternative is to say that the gravity itself reverses sign, something impossible for a single star but normal for a close binary. Put differently, imagine that the potential is taken to be
<O_>formula<O/>
in the vicinity of the L<sb_>1<sb/> point. The problem can be rendered one dimensional if we assume that we look at the flow only in the vicinity of the Lagrangian point and that the system is not so rapidly rotating that the Coriolis deviation of the flow is large compared with rectilinear flow. This means that <*_>OMEGA<*/><u', where the prime denotes the spatial derivative of the velocity.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The fact that the equation of motion can be written as
<O_>formula<O/>
means that we can apply the same condition that we had in the spherical Parker wind solution. Take a look at the flow through a small region around the L<sb_>1<sb/> point. The equipotentials on either side of L<sb_>1<sb/>, along the line of centers, give a local critical point to the flow. This is because there is a local maximum in the gravitational field. Perpendicular to the line of centers the gradient has a local minimum. (See <figure/>.5.) The L<sb_>1<sb/> point is a saddle point in the gravitational potential; the gravitational acceleration changes sing on crossing this point. For the case of one-dimensional flow, this has the same effect as the changing gravitational acceleration relative to the pressure gradient. The critical condition for stream formation is similar to the Parker solution; that is, u = a<sb_>s<sb/> at L<sb_>1<sb/>. Thereafter, as the gravitational field increases toward the secondary, the flow accelerates. As material is forced through this point, it has the same effect as the passage through the g<sb_>eff<sb/> = 0 point in a spherical wind. The pressure gradient does not vanish, so the material is accelerated and the sound speed is reached, after which the flow is ballistic toward the secondary. Stream formation is important because it transfers material with high specific angular momentum toward the accreting star. Once in the vicinity of the companion, the matter forms an accretion disk, the details of which we shall now discuss.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
8.7.3 Some Consequences of Mass Transfer
The observation of tidal distortion leads immediately to important hydrodynamic consequences. The existence of the Roche surface in general, and the limiting radius in particular, is the result of the three-body problem. The inner Lagrangian point, L<sb_>1<sb/>, is the point along the line of centers at which the effective gravitational acceleration vanishes. However, since the pressure does not vanish even though the gravitational acceleration does, matter will be forced to exit through this region and begin to flow to the other star. In effect, we have set up the de Laval nozzle problem from Chapter 1. The variation in the effective gravity acts like the nozzle (although without many material walls) to accelerate the flow through the sonic point and eventually to hypersonic speeds. The matter carries some net angular momentum because the L<sb_>1<sb/> point is generally not at the center of mass, and therefore the deviation of the flow and its acceleration toward the companion produce an accretion disk.
The stream must eventually rid itself of this excess angular momentum before it can accrete onto the companion even for direct impact. Several mechanisms are available, probably all of which operate somewhere in the universe. One is turbulent viscosity. That is the one we shall mainly deal with here. Another is magnetic breaking. If the material forms a disk that becomes Kelvin-Helmholtz unstable at the boundary of a stellar magnetosphere, blobs may be formed that accrete onto the companion. The process is certainly not well understood but can be simulated for neutron star accretion and is well established as a scenario. For direct impact, the stream may submerge and pump angular momentum into a deeply generated boundary layer.
The final mechanism is spiral shocks. Since the matter falls into the disk with excess angular momentum and drives spiral waves in the disk, these may form stable circulating structures that serve to deviate the flow onto the companion and dissipate energy and momentum. (See <figure/>.6.) Presently, however, the details of the accretion process are the most schematic parts of accretion disk theory. This is a pity, because these details contain virtually all of the essential physics.
If the mass-accreting star is a compact object, like a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, the disks reach temperatures considerably higher than for main sequence stars. The simple reason is that the gravitational well around the accreting object is very deep and the energy source for the dynamics is consequently greater. Any dissipative processes fed by the global circulation will therefore find a very large reservoir of energy which can be tapped, and the resulting emission of radiation can take place in the ultraviolet or even the x-ray. It was the latter wavelength region, observed with satellites like Uhuru and Einstein, that first signaled the presence of accretion disks around neutron stars like Hercules X-1 = HZ Her and black holes like Cygnus X-1 = HD 226868. The added discovery that the optical counterparts of these and other galactic x-ray sources are spectroscopic binaries and the observation of optical emission lines which tracked the compact star clinch the argument for accretion powering the radiation.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The observation of strong emission lines arising in a very compact region in the cores of active galaxies like quasars and Seyferts also indicates that accretion can occur on a scale of extremely massive but otherwise 'single' collapsed objects. These galaxies have emission line widths indicative of velocities of order 1000 to 10<sp_>4<sp/> km s<sp_>-1<sp/> coming from a region less than 1 pc across. The temperature of the regions, indicated by the presence of extremely high radiation rates for x-rays, argues that accretion flow around a black hole is the likely source of the observed luminosity.
In light of these observations, and because the range of physics required for an understanding of such flows touches on virtually all aspects of astrophysical hydrodynamics, we will discuss accretion disk theory at some length.
8.7.4 Heating the Disks: Dissipation and Viscous Torques
We first take up the question of the effect of the generation of energy by the shearing within the disk due to its differential rotation. Recall that the viscous energy dissipation rate is given by
<O_>formula<O/>
where T<sb_>ij<sb/> is the stress tensor and <*_>sigma<*/><sb_>ij<sb/> is the shear. The shear for an axi-symmetric system is given by <O_>formula<O/>. The negative sign in the second term comes from <O_>formula<O/>. In light of the previous discussion, the disk is Keplerian, and since the angular frequency is given by <O_>formula<O/>, the shear is <O_>formula<O/>. Since the shear varies with radius for such a disk, so does the rate of energy generation.
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Global Warming and Potential Changes in Host-Parasite and Disease-Vector Relationships
ANDREW DOBSON AND ROBIN CARPER
I. INTRODUCTION
Parasitology has always been a discipline in which purely academic studies of the evolution of parasites and their life cycles have progressed as a necessary complement to the study of the pathology and control of the major tropical diseases of humans and their livestock. Indeed, the most striking feature of parasitology is the diversity of parasites in the warm tropical regions of the world and the frightening levels of debilitation and misery they cause. Determining how long-term climatic changes will affect the distributions of different parasites and pathogens at first seems a daunting task that almost defies quantification. Nevertheless, as parasitologists have always been concerned with the influence of climatological effects on different parasite species, it is possible to begin to speculate on the ways that global warming might affect the distributions of some specific tropical diseases. Similarly, the study of parasite population dynamics has developed within a solid theoretical framework (Anderson and May 1979, May and Anderson 1979). This permits the development of quantitative speculation in more general studies concerned with how parasite-host interactions may respond to perturbation.
This chapter addresses both general questions about the response of parasite-host systems to long-term climatic changes and the specific response of one particular pathogen, Trypanosoma, to the changes in climate predicted for the next hundred years.
A. Macroparasites and Microparasites
Current estimates suggest that parasitism of one form or another may be the most common life-history strategy in at least three of the five major phylogenetic kingdoms (May 1988, Toft 1986). The enormous array of pathogens that infect humans and other animals may be conveniently divided on epidemiological grounds into microparasites and macroparasites (Anderson and May 1979, May and Anderson 1979). The former include the viruses, bacteria, and fungi and are characterized by their ability to reproduce directly within individual hosts, their small size and relatively short duration of infection, and the production of an immune response in infected and recovered individuals. Mathematical models examining the dynamics of microparasites divide the host population into susceptible, infected, and recovered classes. In contrast, the macroparasites (the parasitic helminths and arthropods) do not multiply directly within an infected individual but instead produce infective stages that usually pass out of the host before transmission to another host. Macroparasites tend to produce a limited immune response in infected hosts; they are relatively long-lived and usually visible to the naked eye. Mathematical models of the population dynamics of macroparasites have to consider the statistical distribution of parasites within the host population.
B. Direct and Indirect Life Cycles
A second division of parasite life histories distinguishes between those species with monoxenic life cycles and those with heteroxenic life cycles. The former produce infective stages that can directly infect another susceptible definitive host individual. Heteroxenic species utilize a number of intermediate hosts or vectors in their transmission between definitive hosts. The evolution of complex heteroxenic life cycles permits parasite species to colonize hosts from a wide range of ephemeral and permanent environments, while also permitting them to exploit host populations at lower population densities than would be possible with simple direct transmission (Anderson 1988, Dobson 1988, Mackiewicz 1988, Shoop 1988). However, heteroxenic life cycles essentially confine the parasite to areas where the distribution of all the hosts in the life cycle overlap. Shifts in the distribution of these host species due to climatic changes, will therefore be important in determining the areas where parasites may persist and areas where parasites may be able to colonize new hosts.
C. Aquatic and Terrestrial Hosts
Climatic changes are likely to have different effects on aquatic and terrestrial environments (chapter 24). The heteroxenic life cycles of some parasite species often allow them to utilize hosts sequentially from either type of habitat. It is thus important to determine the different responses of the terrestrial and aquatic stages of a parasite's life cycle to climatic change. That, along with an examination of other parasite responses to climatic change, demands a quantitative framework within which to discuss parasite life-history strategies.
II. PARASITE LIFE-HISTORY STRATEGIES
The complexities of parasite host population dynamics may be reduced by the derivation of expressions that describe the most important epidemiological features of a parasite's life cycle (Anderson and May 1979, May and Anderson 1979, Dobson 1988). Three parameters are important in describing the dynamics of a pathogen: the rate it will spread in a population, the threshold number of hosts required for the parasite to establish, and the mean levels of infection for the parasite in the host population.
Basic reproductive rate of a parasite, Ro: The basic reproductive rate, Ro, of a microparasite may be formally defined as the number of new infections that a solitary infected individual is able to produce in a population of susceptible hosts (Anderson and May 1979). In contrast, Ro for a macroparasite is defined as the number of daughters that are established in a host population following the introduction of a solitary fertilized female worm. In both cases the resultant expression for Ro usually consists of a term for the rates of parasite transmission divided by an expression for the rate of mortality of the parasite in each stage in the life cycle (Dobson 1989). Increases in host population size or rates of transmission tend to increase Ro, and increases in parasite virulence or other sources of parasite mortality tend to reduce the spread of the pathogen through the population.
Threshold for establishment, H<sb_>T<sb/>: The threshold for establishment of a parasite, H<sb_>T<sb/>, is the minimum number of hosts required to sustain an infection of the pathogen. An expression for H<sb_>T<sb/>, may be obtained by rearranging the expression for Ro to find the population density at which Ro equals unity. This may be done for both micro- and macroparasites with either simple or complex life cycles. The resultant expressions suggest that changes in the parameters that tend to increase Ro tend to reduce H<sb_>T<sb/>, and vice versa. Although many virulent species require large populations to sustain themselvlesthemselves, reductions in the mortality rate of transmission stages may allow parasites to compensate for increased virulence and maintain infections in populations previously too small to sustain them.
Mean prevalence and burden at equilibrium: It is also possible to derive expressions for the levels of prevalence (proportion of the hosts infected) and incidence (mean parasite burden) of parasites in the host populations. In general, parameters that tend to increase Ro also tend to give increases in the proportion of hosts infected by a microparasite and increases in the mean levels of abundance of any particular macroparasite (Anderson and May 1979, May and Anderson 1979, Dobson 1988). Most important, increases in the size of the host population usually lead to increases in the prevalence and incidence of the parasite population (fig. 16.1).
These expressions, which characterize the most important features of a parasite's interaction with its host at the population level, can be used to ascertain how parasites with different life cycles will respond to long-term climatic changes. This may best be undertaken by determining which stages of the life cycles are most susceptible to climatic variation and by quantifying the response of those stages to climatic change.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
III. EFFECT OF TEMPERATURE ON PARASITE TRANSMISSION RATES
The physiology of adult parasites is intimately linked with the physiology of their hosts. Providing the hosts can withstand environmental changes, it seems unlikely that the within-host component of the parasite life cycle will be significantly affected. However, any form of increased stress on the host may lead to increase in rates of parasite-induced host mortality (Esch et al. 1975). In the absence of data from the specific experimental studies that could throw considerable light on these relationships, this study will concentrate on the effect of changes in meteorological factors on the free-living infective stages of different groups of parasites.
A. Parasites with Aquatic Transmission Stages
Several detailed laboratory studies have examined the effect of temperature on the transmission success of parasites with aquatic infective stages. The parasitic trematodes are probably the most important class of parasites to utilize an aquatic stage for at least part of their life cycle. The data presented in figure 16.2 are for an echinostome species that is a parasite of ducks. Increased temperature leads to increased mortality of the larval infective stages of the parasite. It also leads to increased infectivity of the larval stage. The interaction between larval infectivity and survival means that net transmission efficiency peaks at some intermediate temperature but remains relatively efficient over a broad range of values (16<*_>degree<*/>-36<*_>degree<*/>C for Echinostoma liei cercariae; fig. 16.2). These synergistic interactions between the different physiological processes determining survival and infectivity allow the aquatic parasites to infect hosts at a relatively constant rate over the entire spectrum of water temperatures that they are likely to experience in their natural habitats (Evans 1985).
B. Poikilothermic Hosts
The effect of temperature on the developmental rate of parasites in both aquatic and terrestrial hosts has been examined for several of the major parasites of humans in the tropics. In contrast to the effect on transmission efficiency, increases in temperature usually lead to reduced development times for parasites that utilize poikilothermic hosts (fig. 16.3). As with many physiological processes, a 10<*_>degree<*/> increase in temperature seems to lead to a halving of the developmental time. This may allow parasite populations to build up rapidly following increases in temperature.
C. Parasite Populations in Thermal Cooling Streams
The expressions for Ro and H<sb_>T<sb/>, derived in the first part of this chapter, suggest that increases in transmission efficiency and reductions in development time induced by temperature changes allow parasites to establish in smaller populations and grow at more rapid rates. This is observed to some extent in a pair of long-term studies that compare the parasite burdens of mosquito fish (Gambuis affinis) populations in artificially heated and control sections of the Savannah River in South Carolina. The data for the trematode Ornithodiplostomum ptychocheilus show significant differences between heated and ambient sites during the earlier period of the study when temperature differences were most pronounced. Infection by the parasites starts several months earlier each year in the thermally altered sites (fig. 16.4). However, infection rates decline in the summer in the artificially heated sites when populations of hosts decline in response to high water temperatures (Camp et al. 1982). This effect may be compounded by the movement of the waterfowl that act as definitive hosts for the parasite. These birds tend to prefer the warmer water in winter and cooler water in the summer. Similar but less clearly defined patterns are observed in the data for Diplostomum scheuringi from the same site (Aho et al. 1982).
These studies illustrate the important role of host population density in the response of a parasite's transmission rate to thermal stress, while also demonstrating the ability of parasites to capitalize on improved opportunities for transmission and to establish whenever opportunities arise. Obviously the data are open to several interpretations, but they do emphasize the importance of long-term experiments in determining the possible effects of global warming on the distribution of parasites.
D. Terrestrial Hosts
The survival rates of the infective stages of the parasites of most terrestrial species tend to decrease with increasing temperature (fig. 16.5a). Although little evidence is available to determine how the infectivity of these larvae is affected by temperature, rates of larval development tend to increase with increasing temperatures (fig.16.5b). These two processes again interact synergistically - as an increase in temperature depresses survival, development speeds up - allowing the parasite to establish at a broad range of environmental temperatures. In contrast to parasites that utilize aquatic hosts, parasites of terrestrial hosts have transmission stages that are susceptible to reduced humidity, and these stages are highly susceptible to desiccation (Wallace 1961). To compensate for reduced opportunities for transmission during periods of severely adverse climate, parasites of terrestrial hosts have evolved adaptations such as hypobiosis, the ability to remain in a state of arrested development within the relatively protected environment provided by their hosts until such time as transmission through the external environment proves more effective.
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EXTRACELLULAR SIGNAL-REGULATED KINASES IN T CELLS
Anti-CD3 and 4<*_>beta<*/>-Phorbol 12-Myristate 13-Acetate-Induced Phosphorylation and Activation
CHARLES E. WHITEHURST, TERI G. BOULTON, MELANIE H. COBB, AND THOMAS D. GEPPERT
Extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERK) 1 and 2 are growth factor- and cytokine-sensitive serine/threonine kinases that are known to phosphorylate microtubule-associated protein 2 and myelin basic protein. The current studies examined whether ERK1 and/or ERK2 was present in T cells and whether they were phoshorylated and activated as a consequence of T cell activation. The data demonstrated that both ERK1 and ERK2 were present in Jurkat cells and peripheral blood T cells. In T cells, ERK2 was more prevalent than ERK1. The concentrations of ERK1 and ERK2 were not altered by stimulating the cells for 16 h with immobilized anti-CD3 mAb or anti-CD3 mAb and phorbol myristate acetate. mAb to CD3 and phorbol myristate acetate stimulated an increase in ERK1 and ERK2 MBP kinase activity. Anti-CD3 mAb triggered an increase their phosphate content which was detectable at 2 min but reached a maximum at 5 min. A portion of the increase in phosphate was caused by an increase in phosphotyrosine. We also examined the rate of ERK2 degradation. ERK2 was stable for up to 36 h, and its degradation was unaffected by the activation state of the cells. The data demonstrate that ERK1 and ERK2 are part of an anti-CD3 mAb-stimulated signal transduction cascade that is downstream of protein kinase C and, therefore, suggest that these kinases play an important role in T cell activation.
T cell activation is triggered by an interaction between the TCR and a complex formed by the antigenic peptide and a class I or II MHC molecule. The recognition of Ag by the TCR leads to a variety of early biochemical changes (1-4). Among the earliest occurring within seconds of engagement of the TCR, is the phosphorylation of a variety of substrates on tyrosine residues (5). The kinase or kinases responsible for these first phosphorylation events have not been identified, although a member of the src family of tyrosine kinase, fyn, appears to be physically associated with the CD3 complex (6). The subsequent steps in the cascade of reactions have not been well characterized. Temporally, activation of tyrosine phosphorylation precedes activation of phospholipase C (PLC) (5). Further, inhibitors of tyrosine kinases block the activation of PLC, demonstrating that tyrosine phosphorylation is necessary even for the stimulation of PLC (5, 7). As in other systems, PLC releases two products, inositol phosphates, that elevate intracellular calcium, and diacylglycerol, that activates and translocates protein kinase C (PKC) to the membrane, where it is in proximity to membrane substrates (2-4, 8, 9). In addition to these events triggered by engagement of the TCR complex, cross-linking CD4 or CD8 molecules on T cells leads to the activation of a tyrosine kinase, p56<sp_>1ck<sp/>, or the src family (10, 11). Based on burgeoning evidence from studies of T cell activation and by analogy to other receptor signaling systems, it is believed that these early biochemical phenomena result in the activation of additional cascades of protein kinases which are responsible for the subsequent cellular events. In other systems, the vast majority of these subsequent phosphorylations occur on serine and threonine residues.
Of the data suggesting that other kinases are stimulated in T cells, the most convincing is for a MAP2 kinase activity that is increased by cross-linking the TCR complex (12-14) or by the phorbol ester, PMA (13). The stimulation of this serine/threonine kinase activity by a mAb to the TCR complex is diminished but not eliminated by an inhibitor of PKC (H7) or by prior depletion of PKC (13). Cross-linking CD4 on T cells stimulates the tyrosine phosphorylation of a 43-kDa protein that co-migrates with a protein with MAP2 kinase-like activity (12, 14). Cross-linking CD3 together with CD4 results in a greater increase in MAP2 kinase activity than cross-linking CD3 alone (14). This combination of stimuli also delivers a more effective activation signal than cross-linking the TCR complex alone (15-17), indicating a correlation between MAP2 kinase activity and T cell activation. Taken together these findings suggest that MAP2 kinase plays an important role in T cell activation.
Recently, cDNA have been cloned and sequenced from human, rat, mouse, and Xenopus libraries which encode two proteins with insulin and nerve growth factor-sensitive MAP2/MBP kinase activity (18-23). These two proteins are 90% identical within their catalytic domains and have been named extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) 1 and 2 because of the wide variety of extra-cellular signals which stimulate their activity (13, 14, 18, 20, 24-32). Moreover, they are highly conserved across species (19). The activation of these two serine/threonine kinases is correlated with increases in the phosphorylation of their tyrosine and threonine residues (20). Phosphatases specific for either tyrosine (CD45) or serine/threonine (2a) residues partially inactivate ERK1 and ERK2 (25), indicating that full activation of these kinases requires both tyrosine and serine/threonine phosphorylation.
The current studies were carried out, therefore, to determine whether ERK1 and/or ERK2 is present in T cells and to determine whether they are phosphorylated and/or activated as a consequence of activation. We found that both ERK1 and ERK2 are present in Jurkat cells and peripheral blood T cells and that ERK2 is more abundant. The concentration of both ERKs was not altered by stimulating the cells for 16 h with immobilized anti-CD3 mAb or anti-CD3 and PMA. Both anti-CD3 and PMA stimulated the phosphorylation of ERK1 and ERK2 in Jurkat cells and induced an increase in ERK1 and ERK2 MBP kinase activity. The data suggest that ERK1 and ERK2 may play an important role in T cell activation. Moreover, the size, kinetics of activation, and substrate specificity of ERK1 and ERK2 are similar to properties of kinases with anti-CD3-inducible MAP2 kinase-like activity noted in previous reports. Thus, the studies strongly support the hypothesis that ERK1 and ERK2 are the kinases responsible for this activity.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Reagents, mAb, and mitogens. PMA (Sigma Chemical Co., St. Louis, MO) and phorbol 12,13-dibutyrate (PDB; Sigma) were dissolved in ethanol and added to the cultures at a final concentration of 10 ng/ml for PMA and 20 ng/ml for phorbol 12,13-dibutyrate, and 0.1% ethanol. The mAb used were OKT3 and 64.1 (American Type Culture Collection, Rockville, MD), IgG2a mAb directed at the CD3 molecular complex on mature T cells; TS1/18, an IgG1 mAb directed at the <*_>beta<*/>-chain of CD18; and P1.17, an IgG2a mAb or irrelevant specificity. All mAb were purified over a column of Sepharose 4B coupled with staphylococcal protein A and used at final concentrations as indicated in the figure legends. PHA (Wellcome Reagents Division, Burroughs Wellcome Co., Research Triangle Park, NC) was used at a final concentration of 0.5 <*_>mu<*/>g/ml. Orthophosphate (H<sb_>3<sb/>PO<sb_>4<sb/>; 285Ci/mg P) and <sp_>35<sp/>S-labeled amino acids (Tran<sp_>35<sp/>S-label; >1000 Ci/mmol) were purchased from ICN Biomedicals, Inc., Costa Mesa, CA.
Cell preparation. PBMC were obtained from healthy adult volunteers by centrifugation of heparin-treated venous blood over sodium diatrizoate/Ficoll gradients (Isolymph; Gallard Schlesinger Chemical Manufacturing Corp., Carle Place, NY). Cells were washed once in HBSS and twice in saline before further processing. T cells were prepared from PBMC by isolating the cells forming rosettes with neuraminidase-treated SRBC and passing them over a nylon wool column to deplete B cells and macrophages. Jurkat cells, a malignant T cell line, were generously provided by Dr. Arthur Weiss (33).
Antipeptide antisera. Antisera raised to peptides at the carboxyl terminus (837; IFQETARFQPGAPEAP) and subdomain XI (691; KRITVEEALAHPYLEQYYDPTDE) of rat ERK1 had characteristics described previously (25). Antiserum A249 was raised to a peptide at the carboxyl terminus of rat ERK2 (ELIFEETARFQPGYRS) using the same methodologies described previously (25). The sequences of human ERK1 and ERK2 are identical to the rat sequences in the region of the peptides used to derive 691 and A249 (19). The sequence of the carboxyl terminus of human ERK1 differs slightly from that of rat ERK1 (IFQETARFQPGVLEAP).
Preparation of cell lysates and immunoblotting. After T cells or Jurkat cells were treated with the various stimuli as indicated in the figure legends the cells were homogenized or sonicated in homogenization buffer (20 mM Tris, pH 7.5, 20 mM p-nitrophenyl phosphate, 1 mM EGTA, 50 mM NaF, 50 <*_>mu<*/>M sodium vanadate, 3 <*_>mu<*/>g/ml aprotinin, 1 mM leupeptin, 1 mM PMSF, and 10 mM iodoacetamide), the lysates clarified by centrifugation, and the soluble protein concentrations were determined using the bicinchoninic acid/Cu<sp_>2+<sp/> reagent (Micro BCA kit; Pierce Chemical Co., Rockford, IL). Equivalent amounts of protein/lane were analyzed by electrophoresis on 10 to 14% SDS-polyacrylamide gels, transferred to nitrocellulose or Immobilon-P (Millipore), and immunoblotted with a mAb to phospho-tyrosine (hybridoma 4G10; Upstate Biotechnology Ind., Lake Placid, NY) or antiserum 691 or A249. Reactive proteins were visualized with goat anti-rabbit or mouse IgG (Cappel) conjugated to horseradish peroxidase and 4-chloro-1-napthol, or with chemiluminescent procedure per manufacturers' specifications (Amersham Corp., Arlington Heights, IL). For chemiluminescent detection, the films were preflashed before exposure.
Radiolabeling of Jurkat cells and immunoprecipitations. Jurkat cells (40 x 10<sp_>6<sp/> cells/ml) were preincubated in phosphate-free RPMI 1640 containing 1% BSA for 50 to 60 min at 37<*_>degree<*/>C, [<sp_>32<sp/>P]orthophosphate was added (1.0 mCi/ml), and the cells were incubated an additional 50 to 60 min at 37<*_>degree<*/>C. After washing twice in ice-cold 0.9% NaCl, the cells were resuspended in RPMI 1640, stimulated as described in the figure legends, pelleted, and lysed. For immunoprecipitation with A249, the cells were lysed in homogenization buffer containing 1% NP-40 and 2 mM MgCl<sb_>2<sb/>, pH 8.0, for 10 min at 4<*_>degree<*/>C. Insoluble debris was removed by centrifugation. For immunoprecipitation with 837 the proteins were denatured either by boiling the lysates in SDS (0.2%) or by lysing the cells directly in 1% SDS. With the latter technique the lysate was later diluted so that the concentration of SDS was <0.2% for immunoprecipitation. For immunoprecipitations, the antisera were either added directly to the supernatants (10 <*_>mu<*/>l/sample), incubated for at least 1 h at 4<*_>degree<*/>C, and then precipitated with SPA-agarose (30 <*_>mu<*/>l of packed SPA-agarose/sample) for at least 1 hour at 4<*_>degree<*/>C, or alternatively, saturating amounts of the antisera were preabsorbed to SPA-agarose, and this complex was added to the lysates (30 <*_>mu<*/>l of packed preabsorbed SPA-agarose/sample and incubated in the same manner. The results of using these two methods were comparable. The immunoprecipitates were washed four times in homogenization buffer containing 1% NP-40, 0.1% SDS, and 150 mM NaCl, boiled in gel loading buffer containing <*_>beta<*/>-ME, and analyzed by SDS-PAGE and autoradiograhy. To correlate the molecular weights of the proteins immunoprecipitated by anti-serum 837 with those detected by antiserum 691 on an immunoblot, 837 immunoprecipitates or a whole cell lysate were electrophoresed on each side of a molecular weight standard on an SDS-PAGE gel. The gel was then sliced in half down the middle of the lane containing molecular weight standards, and the half of the gel containing the 837 immunoprecipitates was dried and used for autoradiography. The proteins on the other half of the gel were transferred to a polyvinylidene difluoride membrane for immunoblotting with antiserum 691. Exposures from the autoradiograph and immunoblot were then aligned using the molecular weight markers. Sequential immunoprecipitations were performed by immunoprecipitating with A249 as described earlier, boiling the immunoprecipitate in 1% SDS, and then diluting the supernatant to 0.2% SDS using 1% NP-40 homogenization buffer. 837 immunoprecipitates were then performed as described above.
Chromatography. Jurkat cells (200 x 10<sp_>6<sp/> cells/group) were stimulated for 5 min as indicated in the figure legends, pelleted, and then resuspended in 1 ml of homogenization buffer at 4<*_>degree<*/>C (20 mM Tris, pH 7.5, 1 mM EGTA, 50 mM NaF, 20 mM p-nitrophenyl phosphate, 1 mM sodium vanadate, 1 mM PMSF). The cells were sonicated with two 10-s bursts using a Vibracell (model ASI; Sonics and Materials Inc., Danbury, CT) and the cellular debris pelleted by centrifugation for 10 min at 15,000 x g. The supernatants were stored at -80<*_>degree<*/>C. For chromatography, the sonicates were thawed on ice, diluted with 3 vol. of water, and loaded onto a Mono Q HR5/5 column equilibrated with buffer A (50 mM <*_>beta<*/>glycerophosphate, pH 7.3, 1 mM EGTA, 0.1 mM sodium orthovanadate, and 0.1 <*_>mu<*/>M pepstatin).
</doc><doc register="learned" n="10">Such trade-offs would make genetic load and the cost of natural selection greater than they would be with functional independence.
Wallace (1987, 1989; Reeve et al. 1988) recently renewed his effort to lay the problem to rest with arguments and evidence that the traditional genetic-load argument, such as mine above, is based on faulty logic and a misunderstanding of the dynamics of viability selection during the culling of an age cohort. He emphasizes that much culling must take place in every population because of the universal Malthusian factor of over-production of offspring. He envisions a world in which an individual dying as a result of some genetic deficiency is thereby making room for a better endowed individual. If one does not die the other one would. Given that populations do remain finite, the argument fits the facts. Yet the conceptual problem remains, especially in low-fecundity species like our own, because the genetic-load arithmetic makes us expect far more culling than is actually found, and far more than the population could bear.
Wallace's (1987) illustrative model of cohort culling is the competition between seedlings in an experimental tray (e.g. Schmidt and Ehrhardt 1990). The space available will permit only a limited plant biomass to develop, and this will be produced by the small number of successful contenders. The great majority will do very little growing and gradually die out. The possibly small fraction that survives to maturity will be enormously variable in size and fitness. This result seems to be unaffected by levels of genetic load in the seeds used. If a thousand viable seeds are sown in one tray and a thousand with 90% lethal genotypes in another, the two trays may produce about the same number of ultimate survivors, total biomass, and phenotypic fitness variation.
I would suggest another kind of experiment as more relevant to the problem Haldane had in mind. Sow only 100 of the viable seeds in the first tray and 100 with a high incidence of genetic load in the other, and also in each tray sow 900 seeds of competing species. I would expect the 100 viables to win much more representation in their tray than the ten viables and 90 lethals in the other, and this result would be a closer parallel to what usually takes place in the culling of a plant cohort in nature. For most animals, Wallace's experimental model is even less realistic. Only sessile invertebrates meet intense and inescapable competition from near neighbors. Wallace's seedling experiment would be broadly applicable to animal populations only with competition for social status, West Eberhard's (1983) social selection, of which sexual selection would be a special case. Social status is a resource that can seldom be appropriated by a member of a different species.
The central problem with Wallace's model, which he calls soft selection, is that it implies unrealistically strong density dependence with an age cohort. Most populations in nature are extremely sparse. The tendency for field ecologists to study organisms that are abundant enough to study may greatly bias our impressions. Populations in nature are seldom dense enough to cause any obvious resource depression (Tilman 1982). The most convincing examples of resource depression result from exploitation by many species, such as the reduction of marine invertebrate biomass on mudflats from concerted onslaughts of many species of migratory bird (Schneider 1978). Even the extraordinarily dense populations commonly studied by field ecologists, e.g. by Andrewartha and Birch (1954), usually show numerical changes that look like random fluctuation and seldom give clear evidence of density effects in short-term studies. Individual survival must be mainly a matter of chance, partly a matter of many kinds of adaptive performance, and only to a minor degree affected by density-dependent competition with conspecifics.
Near neighbors, sessile or motile, will often be of different species in diverse natural communities, and the death of one individual will often allow the survival of a member of a competing species. In such situations we most clearly confront the challenge of genetic load in relation to population survival, the problem that worried Haldane. If too large a dose of its population's genetic load causes one individual to die, it is likely to mean that the abundance of that species will be reduced by one. A reduced genetic load would make it more likely for the population to survive in competition with other species. Every (1-s) that enters into a fitness calculation means a finite deficiency in some sort of adaptive performance. Any such deficiency implies not only adverse selection within a population, but also a decreased representation of the population in the community. Dudash's (1990) experiments nicely confirm this expectation. Fitness differences between her inbred and outbred seedlings were much greater in the field than in greenhouse monoculture. The expectation is that the natural populations that are still available for study should be those that have extremely low levels of genetic load, and this is not what is found.
Wallace (1989) claims that Haldane and others have been needlessly worried about a mere "computational artifact." They arbitrarily assign a fitness of 1 to a favored genotype and of 1-s to an unfavored competitor. If instead we used 1+s and 1 we would not calculate such low fitness values for so many multi-locus genotypes. This is true, but the change is merely cosmetic. We would still get the same variation in fitness and be faced with the same problem of how fit the average individual can possibly be. Also, the traditional notation is more realistic. A rare favorable mutation may be said to have a fitness of 1+s, but this implies a deficiency in the ancestral gene pool. If a mutation can improve some character by some fraction s, that character must have been suboptimal. How could the ancestral population have survived with suboptimal genotypes at a large number of loci if there were competing populations with a lower genetic load?
I think the time has come for renewed discussion and experimental attack on Haldane's dilemma.
10.2 Paradoxes of sexuality
Sexual reproduction by its existence and in many special aspects is a complex of puzzles on which many books have been written (e.g. Bradbury and Andersson 1987; Stearns 1987; Michod and Levin 1988). The main theoretical challenge is in the cost of meiosis, but this is a matter already getting attention from able investigators. I can do no better than refer readers to Maynard Smith (1984b), Eberhard (1985), Felsenstein (1985a), Bierzychudek (1989), Hamilton et al. (1990), Parts II and III of Stearns (1987) and Chapters 4-9 in Michod and Levin (1988). Another major challenge is in resolving the data of life-history diversity in the frequency and the developmental and ecological correlates of sexual phases. The problem here is not so much logical as logistic. The diversity is overwhelming in relation to the time and money that a few thousand interested biologists can devote to it.
Of the many recombination-related difficulties that I could discuss I will echo Maynard Smith (1988a) and choose the one that best serves as a kind of text-book illustration of an evolutionary anomaly, the absence of sexual reproduction throughout the rotifer order Bdelloidea. This is anomalous because it clearly violates the principle of Muller's ratchet, which seems a logically tight line of reasoning from well established premises (but see Gabriel (1989)). Muller (1964) was the first to recognize that an asexual lineage "incorporates a kind of ratchet mechanism, such that it can never get to contain, in any of its lines, a load of mutation smaller than that already existing in its at present least loaded lines." It can acquire a higher load of mutation simply by the occurrence of a new one in a least loaded line. So exclusively asexual reproduction leads inevitably to a degeneration of the genome, in the sense of its being ever more ruled by chemical stability, and ever less informative as to what has succeeded in the past. This must always lead to rapid extinction on an evolutionary time scale. For a recent quantitative study of Muller's ratchet, see G. Bell (1988).
Muller's ratchet explains the phylogenetic distribution of asexual species in most major types of eukaryotes. There is a fair number of exclusively clonal species, but never any entirely clonal genera or higher categories. Asexual species arise from time to time, but Muller's ratchet must lead them to extinction long before they can produce any appreciable taxonomic diversification. The loss of sexuality seems to be a classic example of an evolutionary step that is opposed by clade selection (Van Valen 1975). Unfortunately the general rule of conformity to expectations of Muller's ratchet has some exceptions. The whole rotifer order Bdelloidea (Meglitch (1967) calls them a class), with its several families and many genera and species, is composed entirely of parthenogenetic females (Pennak 1978). There are also a few other noteworthy violators of the theory, such as the freshwater gastrotrich order Chaetonotoidea (Meglitch 1967; Pennak 1978).
Another difficulty that surely deserves more attention is the scarcity of adaptively flexible sex determination (for a comprehensive review, see Bull, (1983)). Sex determination in most animals is genetic and is fixed at conception. Only a few have sex determination as a facultative response to information perceived during development. A neatly understandable example (Conover and Heins 1987) is provided by a fish, the Atlantic silverside, which spawns every spring in shallow waters along the Atlantic coast of the United States and Canada. Eggs spawned early in the season become females; those later on become males. Temperature provides the cue, so that development below a certain threshold causes female development, warmer water male development. This mechanism gives females a longer growing season and larger size for the following spring's spawning. The close relationship between size and fecundity in fishes makes large size more important to female fitness than to male.
This environmental sex determination is adaptive in a way that extend the size-advantage model used to explain the occurrence of protandry vs. protogyny among sequential hermaphrodites (Ghiselin 1969; Warner 1975). The silverside is almost entirely semelparous, and this would rule out sequential hermaphroditism as a viable life history. As predicted (Conover and Heins 1987), the temperature threshold that determines sex varies as expected of combined optimizing and frequency-dependent selection. It is lower in northern, higher in southern parts of the range, so that the sexes are nearly equally abundant all along the coast. Experiments by Conover and Van Voorhees (1990) show that the threshold can be changed by selection in the laboratory.
Besides the greater dependence of reproductive success on size in females than in males in most animals, it is possible to think of many other ways in which it may be more adaptive for an individual in a given situation to be male or female, and to identify cues that would predict the situation during development. A clear example would be the stochastically varying sex ratios of many social groups. In a pond in which most of the frogs happen to be of sex A, it would pay a tadpole to develop into a member of sex B. It would also pay a parent to bias sex determination away from whatever is the majority in previously produced young (Taylor and Sauer 1980). This would avoid what might be called Baptista's Burden. Having Bianca instead of a son after having had Katharina was something of a challenge to his fitness. Yet despite the advantage that can be envisioned in alternating sons and daughters, each sex determination is a largely independent event in most animal populations (Williams 1979; Huck et al. 1990).
Facultative sex determination would only be expected in groups in which useful cues can be perceived prior to any major developmental commitment to maleness or femaleness, requirements discussed in detail by Bull (1983), Charnov and Bull (1977), and Korpelainen (1990). These conditions must surely obtain in many diploid insect populations. Why is adaptive sex determination, such as that found in the silverside, not widespread in many groups of insects?
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The argument for conversation is strongest when functional tests, such as gene replacement or in vitro complementation, can be applied. Most often, though, we must rely on sequence comparisons. But do these sequence comparisons monitor adaptive evolution, or do they monitor genetic drift? In the case of p34 there is extensive sequence identity throughout the molecule between yeast and humans, which diverged more than a billion years ago. In the case of the conserved regulators of p34, cyclin, cdc25, and weel, the identity is limited to a small portion of the molecules and there is extensive divergence in other domains. Yet in the case of cdc25, for example, despite the large sequence divergence, the human molecule will complement yeast mutants (Sadhu et al. 1990) and in the case of weel, frog can also complement yeast (Booher and Kirschner, unpublished).In an in vitro system, sea urchin cyclin, despite its large divergence in most of the molecule from the frog cyclin, will complement a deficiency of frog cyclin. These results suggest that functional divergence of these important regulating genes has been minimal, while sequence divergence has been extensive. Since cdc25, weel, and the p34 kinase fully complement deletions of these genes in species that diverged more than a billion years ago, we can conclude that no important yeast functions are missing in the human protein. The reciprocal experiment is not possible in humans but may soon be possible in mouse (Thomas and Capecchi 1990). Therefore, while these sequences have apparently drifted extensively, they do not appear to have evolved functionally very much.
With the help of genetic tests, the list of highly conserved cellular functions has continued to grow. In some cases phylogenetic barriers have emerged, but for many systems they are minor and easily overcome. For example, the <*_>beta<*/>-adrenergic receptor that normally responds to catecholamines in heart muscle will not function in yeast to replace a related receptor that responds to mating pheromones. However, addition of one more element to the signaling system, the mammalian G<*_>alpha<*/> protein, will allow the yeast cell to respond to catecholamines and undergo the mating response (King et al. 1991). The obvious conservation of DNA structure has been matched by the conservation of histones, transcription factors, splicing enzymes, ribonucleoprotein complexes, and nuclear pores. The well-known conservation of the protein synthesis machinery has been extended to protein secretion, including components of the endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi. The major cytoskeletal proteins such as tubulin and actin have been conserved and serve similar functions in many organisms, as do the metabolic enzymes. The signaling and regulating molecules such as ras and hormone receptors, the regulating kinases such as protein kinase A, protein kinase C, S6 kinase - all have been found in every eukariotyc cell. There have been, of course, new inventions, expansion and specialization of each repertoire, but, as we shall see, many of the new demands of specialized cell types have come about by usurpation of existing components. Viewed as a computer, we would have to say that the basic hardware is similar in all eukaryotic cells; if anything has changed, it is the software.
Software Changes in the Cell Cycle
Though the proteins that regulate the cell cycle may be nearly identical in all organisms, the strategy for regulating the cell cycle is not. In the frog egg the accumulation of cyclin to a threshold initiates mitosis, and this process is independent of any transcriptional control (Murray and Kirschner)1989b). In the Drosophila embryo after cellularization, cyclin accumulation is also required for mitosis, but it is not the regulator. In this case control of the mitotic process is under control of the mitotic activator cdc25, and its expression is under transcriptional control (Edgar and O'Farrell 1990). Recent studies of cyclins specific to the G1/S transition in yeast have shown that their accumulation is under transcriptional control, but also may be under posttranslational control (Wittenberg et al. 1990; I. Herskowitz, pers. comm.). In cleaving frog eggs and sea urchin eggs, cyclin accumulation is completely unregulated. However, in the case of the G1/S cyclin in yeast, the accumulation is tied to the whole pathway of the mating pheromone response as well as to other less well understood pathways involving cell size and nutrition.
In the few well-studied cases of cell cycle control we can see both conservation and divergence. The major components are highly conserved and most are functionally interchangeable. The basic reaction pathway involving cyclins, p34 kinase, and other kinases and phosphatases is also identical. Yet the rate limiting steps and their linkage to other processes are different in different cells. This has enabled the cell cycle control mechanisms to respond transcriptionally to spatial signals, to be linked to extracellular cues, to be coupled to various homeostatic mechanisms, or to operate nearly autonomously during the rapid cleavages in the early embryo. As with modern computers, the architecture of the machine allows for many software applications. One might even say that computer hardware has evolved to allow for greater software flexibility. As we shall see, much the same can be said for cellular mechanisms.
Divergent Pathways of Photoreception
The cephalopod eye and the vertebrate eye are exquisite examples of convergent evolution. The anatomy suggests that the origins are totally independent. The vertebrate eye develops as an outgrowth of the brain; the cephalopod and insect eye develops as a peripheral ectodermal structure that grows into the brain (Young 1974). The topology of the nerves and photoreceptors is reversed. In the vertebrate eye, light passes through the nerves to the photoreceptor; in the cephalopod eye, light impinges directly on the photoreceptors. Is this anatomical convergence reflected in a totally separate origin of the biochemistry of photoreception?
The key event in photoreception, the photoisomerization of retinal-dehyde, has been widely used. In prokaryotes, where it is part of the proton pump, and in eukaryotes, where it is used as a photoreceptor, retinaldehyde, which is chemically the same in all systems, is bound to an integral membrane protein called opsin, whose polypeptide chain spans the plasma membrane seven times. There is no sequence homology between the prokaryotic opsins and the eukaryotic opsins, though overall structural similarities in the positions of the amino and carboxyl ends and the number of transmembrance helices suggest that at one time these proteins could have had a common origin (Henderson and Schertler 1990).
In eukaryotes, whether cephalopods or mammals, opsin is a 7-membrane spanning protein, and all such proteins are receptors that are thought to couple to intracellular GTP binding proteins called G-proteins. This widespread family of membrane protein receptors includes the receptors for the mating pheromones in yeast, the cAMP receptor in slime molds, and the serotonin and <*_>beta<*/>-adrenergic receptor in mammals (King et al. 1991). The receptors catalyze the exchange of GTP for GDP on the heterotrimeric G protein. Binding of GTP causes dissociation of the trimeric G protein into G<*_>alpha<*/> and G<*_>beta<*/>G<*_>gamma<*/>; these subunits interact with other cellular enzymes and regulate their functions. The invertebrate opsins, which are 7-membrane spanning integral membrane proteins, have clear sequence similarity to the vertebrate opsins (Yokoyama and Yokoyama 1989). In the central region of the molecule there is also a very strong similarity on the nucleic acid level, and throughout the molecule there is extensive similarity with a few insertions or deletions. There is no question that rhodopsin, the primary unit of photoreception, has evolved from a common precursor.
The vertebrate opsins are known to couple to a heterotrimeric G protein called transducin, which in its GTP form activates directly a cGMP phosphodiesterase. In the vertebrate photoreceptor, increased levels of cGMP open a Na<sb_>+<sb/> channel leading to increased neurotransmitter release. Therefore, the action of light causes a drop in cGMP and an inhibition of transmitter release that inactivates an inhibitory neuron, which ultimately leads to elevated electrical activity in the brain (Stryer 1988). The vertebrate photoreception system also has a means of adaptation that desensitizes the receptor after stimulation. It involves the binding of a small protein, called <*_>beta<*/>-arrestin, to the cytoplasmic domain of the receptor after a period of activation (Bennett and Sitaramayya 1988).
In invertebrates, although the initial coupling of opsin to signal transmission are similar, the complete pathway is designed differently. Drosophila is known to contain G-proteins (Guillen et al. 1990), and the structure of invertebrate opsin strongly suggests that the receptor couples to G-proteins; the exact G-protein that couples to Drosophila rhodopsin is not known. Like vertebrates, Drosophila contains a <*_>beta<*/>-arrestin molecule that is highly conserved, suggesting that Drosophila rhodopsin contains the same desensitization system as mammals (Smith et al. 1990). However, the next part of the pathway seems divergent. G proteins are known to couple to several second messenger systems, and the best evidence suggests that G protein in invertebrates (Drosophila and the horseshoe crab, Limulus) couples to a different second messenger system from that affecting cGMP phosphodiesterase (Suss et al. 1989; J.Brown, pers. comm.). Genetic approaches can be useful in delineating this second messenger pathway. Recently, Drosophila mutants have been obtained that have morphologically normal cells that do not respond to light. The gene that is defective in one of these mutants has been cloned and shown to have strong similarity phospholipase C, an enzyme involved in cell signaling (Bloomquist et al. 1988). There is evidence that Ca<sp_>++<sp/> release, mediated by inositol triphosphate, occurs during light stimulation, which suggests that in the invertebrate photoreceptors the G protein linked to opsins may activate phospholipase C and signal either Ca <sp_>++<sp/> pathways via inositol triphosphate or protein kinase C via diacylglycerol. It is also possible that the unknown G protein signals some other second messenger pathway. Downstream of this signaling system there is an increase (as opposed to the decrease in vertebrate photoreceptors) in a nonselective cation channel leading to a depolarization and secretion. Thus the invertebrate system uses the same visual pigment, an evolutionarily related receptor, a very similar desensitization system; but most likely it couples this receptor to a different G-protein-mediated system to produce the opposite electrophysiological result from the one that occurs in vertebrates. In the end the brain still gets the signal.
The lessons of the comparative physiology of vertebrate and invertebrate photoreceptors is that the basic components have been highly conserved but their linkage has developed differently. The basic input of photons is the same; the output hyperpolarization or depolarization of the photoreceptor cell is completely different. In between there has been a high degree of conservation: retinaldehyde, 7-membrane spanning receptors, G proteins, <*_>beta<*/>-arrestin, phospholipase C, nonselective cation channels; but the circuitry is different. The evolutionary invention was not in the types of proteins but in software for linking signaling and responding pathways together.
New Components and Their Evolutionary Value
Not all the remodeling of the eukaryotic cell is the equivalent of rearranging the furniture. There are, of course, new genes whose expression facilitated rapid evolutionary change. In the computer analogy these are the hardware improvements, which often provide new capacities for software innovations. As we shall see, some of these new genes may have persisted underutilized for extended periods of time, until the appropriate software mechanisms were developed to make use of them. In most cases the origins of these genes is traceable to more primitive structures that were stitched together by gene duplication and exon shuffling, but in some cases there is little clue as to their origins. It seems likely that some of these specific genes are crucial for major branches of macroevolution. Although one can tabulate many genes that would qualify as a "great moment in evolution", I will discuss only two structures dependent on new genes that are important for the major radiations within the vertebrates: myelin and feathers.
The biophysical features of nerve conduction explained by cable theory show that the rate and efficiency of nerve conduction increase with the diameter of the nerve fiber and with the decrease in the capacitance of the plasma membrane. To process complex information or to respond quickly to a predator or to capture food, rapid nerve conduction is obviously advantageous.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="12">Of those animals which had positive isolations from the oviducts, 68.8% had isolations from both oviducts.
Since a relatively high inoculating dose of chlamydiae was used to infect the guinea pigs, we wanted to determine if ascending infection into the uterus and oviducts would develop with lower numbers of organisms. Thus, a dose-response experiment was performed in which animals were inoculated with 10<sp_>4<sp/>-10<sp_>8<sp/> IFU of GPIC (Table 1). When animals were sacrificed on days 7 or 9, no dose-related differences were found in the number of animals acquiring infection in the oviducts.
Histopathologic Analysis of Endometrium
After it was established that ascending infection was a common occurrence in the genital tract, we examined the various endometria and oviducts for pathologic changes associated with infection. The histopathology of the exo-and endocervix has been previously described. The data presented is from a pool of animals killed at various times after infection and is based on the total number of a given specimen examined, rather than the total number of animals, i.e., two uterine horns and two oviducts per animal. The percentage of total endometrial tissues with specific pathologic changes is presented in Figure 2. Only 1 in 12 animals showed inflammation by day 3. Acute inflammation was the most prevalent finding at all time points from day 7-12, peaking at day 9. Peak infiltrates with lymphocytes and plasma cells were also seen at day 9 although the percentage of animals showing these findings was less than those showing acute inflammation. Fibrosis of endometrial stroma was virtually unseen. The percentage of animals displaying an inflammatory response decreased by day 12, and with the exception of a single animal on day 20 (not shown), no histopathology was identified in the endometrium after day 12 even including specimes examined on days 30 and 75-85. Of interest is the observation that on day 7, only 43.6% of the uterine horns were positive for pathology whereas 63.8% were isolation positive. Similarly, on day 9, 57.7% were positive for pathology with 66.7% positive for isolation.
<O_>caption&table<O/>
To further characterize the pathologic findings, we semiquantified the morphologic findings in endometria showing abnormalities (Figure 3). Animals were included if any pathologic parameter was positive. The predominant pathologic finding was acute inflammation particularly on days 7 and 9. Polymorphonuclear leukocytes infiltrated the glandular surface epithelium, filled the endometrial gland lumens, and were scattered throughout the superficial stroma. Chronic inflammation was also present at all timepoints, but in lesser quantity. The lymphocytes were arranged in loose aggregates in the superficial stroma with occasional transformed lymphocytes identified (Figure 4). Plasma cell infiltrates were seen from days 5 through 12 but always in smaller numbers than either polymorphonuclear leukocytes or lymphocytes. Plasma cells were scattered throughout the endometrial stroma in a patchy distribution.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
In 12 uninfected control animals, an occasional solitary lymphocyte aggregate was seen in either the uterine fundus or horns. Infrequently, one or two endometrial glands contained a few scattered polymorphonuclear leukocytes. There were no plasma cells, fibrosis, or erosions identifed in any control animal. Thus, the pathology described earlier in infected animals was obviously a result of the infection and not associated with a normal resident endometrial response.
Histopathologic Analysis of Oviduct and Mesosalpinx
Figure 5 illustrates the percentage of mesosalpingeal tissue and oviducts that showed infiltrates of polymorpho-nuclear leukocytes, lymphocytes or plasma cells and/or fibrosis. Because many animals had only unilateral pathology, the data is presented based on the total number of tissues examined. The number of specimens in either the mesosalpinx or oviduct that had pathologic changes was low at 7 days after infection, when the isolation of organisms from the same specimens was maximum. Nevertheless, by 9 days after infection, the number of samples with pathologic changes had doubled although this number was never as great as the total number of specimens from which chlamydiae were isolated. Thus, some tissues were isolation positive but did not have detectable pathology.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Early in the infection (days 5-12), acute and chronic inflammatory responses as well as plasma cell infiltration were common in both the mesosalpinx and oviducts. By day 30, the acute inflammatory and plasma cell responses had markedly diminished in both tissues; however, lymphocytic infiltrates and fibrosis were still evident in the mesosalpinx. Pathologic changes in the oviducts at day 30 and beyond were minimal. The reactions in the mesosalpinx continued to decrease, but 21% of the tissues still had obvious fibrosis 75-85 days after infection, and 19% had ongoing chronic inflammation.
Semiquantification of the morphologic findings in the specimens showing abnormalities is presented in Figure 6. The early stage of the infection was characterized by an acute inflammatory reaction in both the mesosalpinx and oviducts (Figure 7). Chronic inflammation was also present early but did not reach its peak level until day 12 in the mesosalpinx as did plasma cell infiltration (Figure 8). The appearance of plasma cells corresponded to the development of antibody that normally is detectable about day 10. The development of fibrosis was primarily restricted to the mesosalpinx and was maximum at day 12 although it persisted and was still obvious as late as 75-85 days after infection. Tubal dilatation (hydrosalpinx) was apparent in 12% of the observed oviducts in the 75-85 day period, and in some cases, was marked with tubal diameters as great as 1 cm.
<O_>figures&captions<O/>
Oviduct and mesosalpingeal tissues were also stained with guinea pig anti-GPIC antibodies followed by peroxidase-labeled rabbit anti-guinea pig IgG to visualize and localize chlamydial antigen. Chlamydial antigen and inclusion bodies were commonly detected in the 7-12 day period in the epithelial cells of the oviduct (Figure 9).
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Oviducts from uninfected animals were also examined to determine whether any inflammatory infiltrates were normally present. No acute or chronic inflammation was identified in any of 12 control animals nor were any plasma cells, fibrosis, or erosions found.
Discussion
In this study, we describe a model for chlamydial genital infection in which ascending infection to the endometrium and oviducts routinely occurs as a result of vaginal inoculation of the chlamydial agent. Other than the primate, which is limited in usefulness by expense, the guinea pig:GPIC model represents the only animal model in which ascending infection from a vaginal inoculation, analogous to the human situation, can be commonly demonstrated, even though GPIC is a member of the C. psittaci, it has been found to elicit ocular and genital infections remarkably paralleling the corresponding human disease. GPIC primarily infects superficial epithelial cells of the cervix and epithelial cells of the male urethra, but most significantly, the infection can be transmitted sexually in guinea pigs. Moreover, newborns of infected mothers acquire a conjunctival infection by passage through the birth canal and can develop a pneumonia typical of chlamydial pneumonia of the newborn when inoculated intranasally. Hormonal effects on chlamydial infection can and have been effectively studied in the guinea pig, since of all the rodents, the reproductive system of the female guinea pig most closely resembles the human with regard to their long estrous cycle (17 days), spontaneous ovulation, and actively secreting corpus luteum. Immunologically, guinea pigs develop both cell-mediated and humoral immune responses to GPIC. Analogous to humans, guinea pigs also produce significant antibody responses to the major outer membrane protein (39 kDa), the chlamydial GroEL (57 kDa), the Omp2protein (60 kDa), and lipopoly-saccharide of GPIC. Also comparable to humans is the short immunity to reinfection that occurs, with animals becoming susceptible to reinfection as early as 2 months after the resolution of a primary infection.
<O_>caption&figure<O/>
Previously, we have only noted the develoment of upper tract disease when animals have been manipulated either by treatment with cyclophosphamide or estradiol. However, in those studies, the early timepoints of the infection were not carefully evaluated or studied in a large number of animals. In the current investigation, we analyzed the tissues early after infection and found that in a high percentage of guinea pigs, chlamydiae can be isolated form the oviducts within 1 week of vaginal inoculation. The presence of organisms in the oviducts is limited in duration, with disappearance from the oviducts concomitant with the resolution of cervical infection and the development of both cell-mediated immunity and serum and secretion antibodies.
<O_>caption&figure<O/>
The ascending nature of the infection is confirmed by the fact that no chlamydiae could be isolated from the oviducts on day 3 and only a few on day 5 despite the presence of organisms in the cervix of virtually all animals. Isolation from the uterus paralleled that of the oviducts although animals became positive earlier in the uterus. Thus, several days were required for the organisms to reach both the endometrium and the oviducts. However, it is significant that organisms could be recovered from the endometrium and oviducts of almost 80% of the guinea pigs assessed at day 7. Moreover, the appearance of the bacteria in the oviducts by day 7 also represents a remarkably rapid ascending infection for a non-motile, slowly growing organism. If one estrapolates these data to the human situation, they suggest that a much higher number of women develop upper tract infection than previously believed and that this may occur quickly after infection. As stated earlier, Jones et al have reported evidence in support of these data in cases of chlamydial infections in women.
However, it is interesting that not all animals that acquire tubal infection go on to develop tubal pathology. Although 78% of the animals had tubal infection on day 7, only 45% were found to have pathologic changes in the oviducts on day 9, the time at which maximum pathology was noted. Swenson et al using the direct injection model with MoPn also observed that not all injected animals developed salpingitis. A similar phenomenon was also noted in our study with regard to isolation and pathologic changes in the endometrium. Significantly, it has been recently reported that chlamydiae could also be isolated from the fallopian tubes of women without laparoscopic evidence for salpingitis. These data would suggest that, in some cases, the immune response may be sufficiently rapid in producing those effector functions that can resolve the infection. Antibody can be detected in genital secretions of guinea pigs as early as 10 days after infection, and we have found even earlier appearance of antibody on some occasions. Cell-mediated immunity, which is also required for resolution of a chlamydial genital infection, can also be present as early as 10 days.
An alternative explanation for the variation in incidence of pathology is that other physiologic factors may be affecting their development. We have previously reported that when guinea pigs are treated with estradiol in either pharmacologic or physiologic doses, a markedly enhanced infection is noted in the cervix with a significantly increased number of animals developing hydro-salpinx. Moreover, the infection is prolonged when compared with untreated controls. Sweet et al have also noted that the onset of acute salpingitis in women occurred significantly more often within 7 days following the beginning of menses than at other times in their menstrual cycle. In addition, it has been well-described that treatment with oral contraceptives does increase the number of individuals from whom chlamydiae can be isolated. Although hormonal changes are not the only possible factor in the variance seen in tubal pathology, they certainly may have some role based on available data. Since this model resembles humans in that not all individuals develop overt salpingitis, it will be useful to investigate those endogenous or exogenous factors that alter the incidence of salpingitis. An important point, however, is that a high number of individuals do have organisms in the oviducts, and the development of overt salpingitis may be dependent on factors that prevent elimination of the bacteria from the oviducts or mediate the development of pathologic changes. Furthermore, the presence of organisms in the oviducts may not necessarily mandate the production of disease with harsh sequelae.
Finally, it was found that the pathologic changes occurring as a result of chlamydial genital infection in the guinea pig with the GPIC agent were remarkably parallel to that in human chlamydial endometritis and salpingitis.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="13">
Between Bone Tissue-Type Comparison
The second step in the tissue-type comparison was to analyze interbone variation using the bone sites selected as least and most variable - the midshaft femur and vertebral body, respectively. Waldron (1989) reported that between bones of the same skeleton, elemental levels can vary by as much as a factor of two. Elaborating upon the method employed by Tanaka et al. (1981) to compare vertebra to other bones, the Nubian and modern samples were compared for the degree of dissimilarity between cortical and cancellous tissues using a modification of the two-sample Student's t-test (Greene, 1973). Greene first developed this modified t-test as a method for comparing hominoid species for differences in the degree of sexual dimorphism expressed in the dentition. the method was further revised by Greene (1989) for comparisons "between populations and comparisons between generations within populations" (p.121). This modification was used in the present investigation as follows:
<O_>formula<O/>
where subscript: 1=Nubian midshaft femur
2=Nubian vertebral body
3=Modern midshaft femur
4=Modern vertebral body
Table 17 lists the results of these comparisons. Barium, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, manganese, and zinc show significant (p<0.05) tissue-type differences between Nubian and modern samples. Of these, barium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and zinc are more variable in the Nubians than the moderns. Conversely, copper and potassium are more variable in the modern samples.
<O_>caption&table<O/>
The more variable elements in the Nubian bone may indicate enrichment from the soil. Except for zinc, each is found at higher concentrations in the soil than in the bone. The reduced variability of copper and potassium in the Nubian bone (compared to the moderns) may indicate depletion of these elements into the soil.
Summary of Element Selection
Seven tests were employed to identify five measures of diagenesis among the elements - 1) range overlap between the modern and Nubian samples; 2) variability among the elements using CV; 3) antagonistic/synergistic interactions between the elements using multi-element correlations; 4) analysis of bone contamination from elements in the soil; and 5) variation between tissue-types to assess enrichment/depletion of elements in bone. Based on these measures, elements were divided into those minimally, moderately and highly affected by diagenesis.
Nubian means for the midshaft femur and for all sites combined were overlayed on the modern distributions for each element. Only one element fell outside the modern range - boron. Manganese and iron varied for the combined site mean, but the Nubian femur mean was within the modern distribution.
Coefficients of variation were metrically ranked for the Nubians and moderns across all sites combined and for the midshaft femur alone. In all four rankings, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, and strontium were the least variable 100% of the time. Vanadium was among the six least variable 87% of the time. The three most variable elements across all four rankings were boron, manganese, and zinc.
When elements were ranked across all bone sites ordinally, again calcium, phosphorus, sodium, magnesium, and strontium were the least variable for both the Nubian and modern samples. Boron and manganese were the most variable.
All of the multi-element correlations noted for the Nubians could be explained using the modern matrix or the literature, except for zinc/phosphorus. The modern and Nubian patterns matched for calcium/phosphorus, nickel/vanadium, potassium/sodium, and boron/lead. The Nubians agreed with the literature for those elements believed to be diagenetic - copper, iron, and manganese. The strong strontium/barium and sodium/magnesium correlations were also expected based on published studies (Buikstra et al., 1989).
Comparison of the Nubian bones to associated soil values and to the modern sample showed that calcium, phosphorus, strontium, and sodium were not affected by enrichment or depletion from the surrounding soil. Boron, iron, and manganese showed a pattern indicative of enrichment, and potassium of depletion. Barium, copper, magnesium, nickel, lead, and zinc were indeterminate because while Nubian bone levels were below soil values, they were equivalent to the modern samples.
Tissue-type comparisons within and between bones also showed distinct patterns. The within-bone comparison between cortical and cancellous bone showed that elements concentrated in the same tissues for both the femur and humerus. When the percent variation between tissues was compared, calcium, phosphorus, strontium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium were found in highest concentrations in cortical bone. The latter three, significantly so. All other elements concentrated in cancellous bone. According to the literature (Buikstra et al., 1989; Waldron, 1989), elements concentrating in cancellous bone are more likely the result of diagenesis than those in cortical bone.
The between-bone tissue-type comparison showed degree of dissimilarity for the least and most variable bone sites in the Nubian skeleton. Barium, iron, magnesium, manganese, and zinc were more variable among the Nubian bones, possibly indicating enrichment. Copper and potassium, were found to vary less in the Nubians than moderns, indicating potential depletion.
Other than the between bone comparison, for each measure, calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and strontium appeared the least affected by diagenesis. Magnesium also rated high in each test except the soil and between-bone comparisons. Boron and manganese were consistently ranked the most variable. Based on these comparisons, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, strontium, and sodium are considered minimally affected; barium, copper, nickel, vanadium, iron, potassium, and zinc, moderately affected; and, boron and manganese, highly affected.
SUMMARY OF DIAGENESIS EVALUATION
Analysis of the degree of diagenesis was conducted along multiple lines of inquiry. First, the quality of the bone composition was assessed. Then bone sites were compared to determine which were the least affected in the depositional environment. Finally, elements were tested for alteration and grouped into those minimally, moderately, and highly affected by diagenesis.
Bone preservation proved exceptional by all measures except %ash. However, this discrepancy is very likely the result of experimenter error. Of the bone sites, the midshaft femur proved the least altered, based on a rank-ordering of coefficients of variation for both Nubian and modern samples. Among the elements, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, and strontium were judged minimally affected by diagenesis. Boron and manganese were the most affected, and all other elements were moderately altered.
This analysis employed virtually all the conventional methods suggested in the literature for assessing diagenesis (Price, 1989; Buikstra et al., 1989). Several traditional tests were modified in this study, and others were introduced for future use. Whereas diagenesis cannot be measured directly, the present analysis demonstrates a strong circumstantial argument for selection of the least affected bone and elements in the Nubian remains.
CHAPTER 5:
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION II:
BIOCULTURAL RECONSTRUCTION
Numerous biocultural reconstructions of ancient human populations have been conducted utilizing chemical analyses (for reviews of this literature, see Klepinger 1984; Price et al, 1985; Gilbert, 1975; Schoeninger 1979; Sillen and Kavanagh, 1982; Price, 1989; Buikstra et al., 1989). Most promote an interdisciplinary approach to the use of elemental variation.
A principal advantage of the Nubian remains to elemental analysis is the rich biocultural context within which the elemental data can be interpreted. Price et al (1985) and Blakely and Beck (1981) recommended that chemical analyses be conducted in concert with nutritional and paleopathological investigations of ancient remains, the later stating that elemental research is "of little utility when ... findings cannot be corroborated by other sources of information, such as demographic data or pathological diagnoses" (p.422). Martin and Armelagos (1985) concurred, advising that elemental analyses will not realize their full potential "until they are used in conjunction with other techniques such as gross and microscopic analyses. A thorough understanding of nutritional deficiencies and health in prehistory will require an examination of anatomy, pathology, histology, and chemistry in a systematic analysis using multiple indicators" (p.527).
The biocultural analysis of elemental variation at Kulubnarti will proceed along two lines of inquiry. First, a general assessment by age and sex will be conducted. Then given the importance of independent lines of confirmatory evidence noted by the authors quoted above, the second phase of the investigation will focus on previous studies of aging, nutrition, and disease at Kulubnarti. Based on the results of Chapter 4, only the femur will be used in these analyses. Also, given the substantial evidence of their idagenetic alteration, boron and manganese will be excluded from further consideration.
BIOCULTURAL DIMENSIONS AT KULUBNARTI
As previously discussed, the people of the Batn el Hajar lived in villages of perhaps a dozen households dependent on small-scale farming for their livelihood. Agriculture was intensified where possible by simple irrigation systems and retaining walls which protected alluvial soils. Staple crops included sorghum, dates, millet, barley, beans, lentils, peas, and a small amount of wheat. Coprolite analysis also revealed that some fish and crocodile were consumed (Cummings, 1988). In addition, a few cattle, sheep and pigs were kept, but animal protein appears to have been a minor part of the Nubian diet (Carlson et al., 1974; Adams, 1977).
From the standpoint of dietary variation within the Kulubnarti population, the archaeological (Adams, 1977) and biological records (Van Gerven et al., 1981) overwhelmingly support a single interpretation: Kulubnarti was an egalitarian community of household producers and consumers. The few communal activities that existed were limited to production and maintenance of the village saquia (waterwheel) and the irrigation ditches and retaining walls. There is no indication of a political or economic elite with preferential access to critical resources.
BIOCULTURAL RECONSTRUCTIONS UTILIZING ELEMENTAL ANALYSIS
Elemental analyses in the past have been applied to questions of: differential access to food resources related to status (Brown, 1973; Schoeninger, 1979; Lambert et al., 1979; Blakely and Beck, 1981; Hatch and Geidel, 1985), sex (Brown, 1973; Schoeninger, 1979; Lambert et al., 1979; Price et al., 1986); changes in subsistence methods (Lambert et al, 1979; Gilbert, 1975; Jaworoski et al, 1985; Katzenberg, 1984; Price and Kavanagh, 1982; Sillen 1981; Schoeninger 1982); relative contributions of plant versus animal resources (Lambert et al, 1983; Price et al., 1986); contributions of marine versus terrestrial resources (Connor and Slaughter, 1984); patterns of weaning (Sillen and Smith, 1985); and, residence patterns (Ericson, 1985). However, inclusion of many of these parameters in the present investigation was not possible.
For example, the Kulubnarti Nubians were egalitarian, therefore, evidence for preferential access to food resources based on political or economic status was absent. Given that only individuals from the Feudal period were examined, no analysis of diachronic change in subsistence patterns was possible. Also, an examination of marine versus terrestrial resources could not be conducted because the Batn el Hajar is land-locked. Patterns of weaning could not be assessed because only adults were studied. And finally, analysis of residence patterns requires examination of elemental concentrations in the teeth and bone to determine childhood versus adult strontium levels. Teeth were not studied in the present investigation.
Lacking evidence for either political/economic stratification or temporal change, elemental variation related to nutrition and disease at Kulubnarti was analyzed from the demographic perspectives of age and sex. Price (1985) took a similar approach in his analysis of a prehistoric Amerindian population stating that "Late Archaic groups are generally regarded as egalitarian so that dietary differences associated with rank, status or position do not play a major role" (p 450). Outlined below is a review of the literature pertaining to sex and age-related variation in elemental concentrations, followed by the pertinent findings of the present investigation.
Prior to an analysis of elemental variation by age, sex, diet or disease however, it is important to describe features of those elements that most often appear in such reconstructions. These include strontium, barium, magnesium, and zinc.
Strontium
Strontium is an alkaline earth metal with an uneven distribution throughout the lithosphere (Odum, 1951). There are four naturally occurring isotopes and 14 radionuclides. Of the latter, two are the result of nuclear fission, which explains the vast body of knowledge amassed for this element.
Strontium has a similar ionization energy, ionic size, and electron configuration to calcium, and therefore behaves in a similar fashion. Both enter the foodchain at the plant level through soil and water, and the amount found in plants is directly proportional to the concentrations in the local environment. Plants do not discriminate between calcium and strontium in absorption, and therefore have a higher strontium concentration than that found at any other trophic level.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="14">In adults, the small number of patients and their uniformly poor performance status has not allowed clear identification of the high-risk group. However, certain clinical features, as well as immunologic and morphologic features, of adult ALL have been associated with poorer clinical performance.
Clinical Features
Sex, age, initial blast count, initial platelet count, and organ involvement are features that identify high-risk patients. Males do more poorly than females. Patients over 40 years of age have a shorter mean survival time than those below 40. Hepatosplenomegaly and/or lymphadenopathy at presentation has been associated with shorter remission duration, although the presence of isolated splenomegaly may indeed not be a high-risk factor.
The white blood cell count at presentation is clearly most important in predicting remission duration. Blast counts in excess of 100,000 cell/mm<sp_>3<sp/> were a dire prognostic sign in many series. Additionally, statistically significant longer remissions were demonstrated in patients presenting with an initial blast count of 10,000 cells/mm<sp_>3<sp/> or less. Survival is also adversely affected by decreased platelet counts at presentation: survival was significantly worse in patients with presenting platelet counts below 50,000/mm<sp_>3<sp/>. Finally, the presence of central nervous system involvement at the time of diagnosis was associated with a significantly shorter survival.
<O_>table&caption<O/>
Morphologic and Immunologic Subtypes
The L<sb_>3<sb/> B cell ALL has a very poor prognosis in most series. In rank order of increasingly good prognosis, the immunologic subtypes may be listed as follows: B cell ALL, T cell ALL, null cell ALL, and common ALL. Whether these immunologic subtypes are independent prognostic variables or whether they reflect differences in clinical presentation remains unclear at the present time.
Treatment
Chemotherapy with cytotoxic agents remains the cornerstone of the treatment of adult ALL. The present-day approach has been developed as a result of multiple clinical trials in both pediatric and adult patients. The therapy is divided into remission induction (restoration of the normal hematologic state with less than 5% blasts in the bone marrow aspirate), early intensification once remission is obtained, maintanencemaintenance therapy to maintain the leukemia-free state, and central nervous system prophylaxis or treatment.
Induction and Early Intensification
A comparison of various induction regimens is shown in Table 4-5. Initial complete remission rates with vincristine and prednisone in adults with ALL were approximately 40%-50%, and the remissions were of short duration. it was shown in a number of trials that the addition of daunorubicin or doxorubicin to the induction regimen increased the complete remission rate to 70%-80%. The addition of L-asparaginase to the vincristine and prednisone combination yielded similar success.
Cancer and Leukemia Group b (CALGB) showed that the addition of L-asparaginase after induction with vincristine and prednisone resulted in more long-term remissions than the simultaneous administration of the three drugs or than vincristine and prednisone used alone. Lister et al,. using vincristine, prednisone, daunorubicin, and L-asparaginase in combination reported a complete remission rate of 71%.
The concept of early intensification has been sparked by the disappointing duration of remission in the adult population. Gee et al. reported a mean remission duration of 24 months with a program incorporating cytosine arabinoside, 6-thioguanine, L-asparaginase, and carmustine after induction with vincristine, prednisone, and daunorubicin. Trials in the pediatric population by Aur et al. and Muriel-Sackman et al., using cytosine arabinoside, cyclophosphamide, and methotrexate intensification, showed no improvement in remission duration.
It appears safe to conclude that the approach to adult ALL should include intensive induction with vincristine, prednisone, and an anthracycline, with the addition of L-asparaginase soon after. An example of such a regimen is shown in Table 4-6. The role of early and late intensification remains unclear.
<O_>table&caption<O/>
Maintenance
The need for effective maintenance therapy in ALL is evidenced by the high relapse rates in patients in whom a complete marrow remission is obtained. Short remission durations were noted in studies using short intensive induction courses of chemotherapy. Similarly, patients in complete remission who discontinue therapy relapse quickly. The most commonly used maintenance schedule has been methotrexate and 6-mercaptopurine. Attempts to improve maintenance duration with the addition of intermittent vincristine, prednisone, cytosine arabinoside, and cyclophosphamide have not proved successful. Sallan et al. reported improvement in duration of remissions with the addition of doxorubicin to vincristine, methotrexate, 6-mercaptopurine, and prednisone. However, it is too early to know whether this improvement will stand the test of time. As there are so few patients remaining in complete remission, the question of duration of maintenance therapy remains unanswered in adults. In children, it appears that therapy can safely be stopped after 3 years of relapse-free maintenance therapy.
Relapse
Hematologic relapse occurs in 70%-80% of adult patients with ALL in whom a complete remission is obtained. Once in relapse, reinduction with vincristine, prednisone, anthracyclines, L-asparaginase, or cytosine arabinoside is successful in 80% of children and 50%-70% of adults. These remissions are usually short, especially in patients having relapsed during maintenance chemotherapy. New chemotherapeutic agents, such as m-AMSA, VP-16 and VM-26, are being used in refractory ALL with variable success. High-dose therapy with either methotrexate or cytosine arabinoside is also being used.
Central Nervous System Prophylaxis and Treatment
With improvement in the treatment of ALL in children, the incidence of central nervous system involvement by leukemic infiltration became significant, occurring in 50%-60% of patients in hematologic remission. The problem of central nervous system involvement was realized as early as 1965, when Frei et al. of CALGB instituted intrathecal methotrexate in the induction regimen for childhood ALL. This led to a series of trials over the years to examine the question of central nervous system prophylaxis. The St. Jude's group showed a decrease in incidence to less than 10% with the institution of whole-brain irradiation therapy in intrathecal methotrexate. The same group showed similar results using 2400 rads craniospinal irradiation. This group and others have shown that the goal of central nervous system prophylaxis can be achieved with whole-brain irradiation therapy and intrathecal methotrexate, avoiding spinal irradiation, which causes bone marrow suppression and a higher incidence of complications. Attempts to avoid central nervous system disease by incorporating drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier have been ineffective.
The problem of central nervous system leukemia was observed in the adult population as well, with an incidence of at least 40%-50%. Omura et al. showed that 2400 rads whole-brain radiotherapy combined with five doses of intrathecal methotrexate in doses of 10 mg/m<sp_>2<sp/> (15 mg maximum dose) decreased central nervous system incidence from 11/34 in an untreated group to 3/28 in a treated group. Unfortunately, no difference in the duration of hematologic remission nor survival could be seen between the two groups. The L<sb_>2<sb/> protocol series from memorial Hospital, which incorporated intrathecal methotrexate without radiotherapy, had a 66% incidence of central nervous system disease in patients with white counts above 25,000/mm<sp_>3<sp/>. It seems that the combination of whole-brain radiotherapy and intrathecal methotrexate should be advocated at this time. Investigations into intraventricular drug delivery via Ommaya reservoir are currently under way.
In patients with documented central nervous system leukemia, treatment is approached by a combination of radiotherapy and intrathecal methotrexate or cytoxine arabinoside. Clinical presentation of central nervous system leukemia is variable. Cranial nerve palsies are common due to leukemic infiltration of nerve sheaths at presentation. Diagnosis depends on cytologic examination of cytocentrifuge preparations of cerebrospinal fluid. The CNS relapse rates are high in patients in whom intrathecal therapy is discontinued once central nervous system relapse has occurred.
New Approaches to ALL
Despite advances in remission induction rates, the ability to cure ALL with conventional chemotherapy in the majority of adults remains elusive. New approaches have emerged to improve results in these patients.
Bone Marrow Transplantation
Bone marrow transplantation of 22 patients with HLA-compatible donors, aged 4-22 years, in second or subsequent remission, has resulted in long-term survival: 50% remain in remission at 15-35 months after transplant. Only 18% of those transplanted in relapse have survived. Therefore, it appears that transplant of patients in second or subsequent remission is preferable to transplant once disease is refractory. When transplantation was compared with conventional chemotherapy in patients in second or subsequent remission, 11 of 24 of the transplanted group remained disease free at 17-55 months, whereas only 1 child of 21 treated with conventional chemotherapy remained in remission for more than 2 years. Certainly, bone marrow transplantation is not available for all patients. However, if available, one should screen family members for HLA-compatible donors and should consider transplant for patients under 30 years old during second remission or possibly in first remission if they have 'high-risk' disease (i.e., a high white count at presentation, and null, B, or T cell disease).
Serotherapy and Specific Therapy
With the expansion of immunologic techniques and subtyping of ALL, passive serotherapy with anti-CALLA antibodies has been attempted in patients with CALLA-positive ALL. Initial responses have been noted; however, these have been very short lived. The role of immunologic manipulation in the therapy of ALL remains experimental and speculative. Finally, specific selective therapy has been reported with 2-deoxycoformycin, an inhibitor of adenosine deaminase in a patient with T cell ALL.
Outlook
ALL remains a fatal disease in 70%-80% of affected adults. It has been seen that the favorable results in adult ALL have more or less been confined to adolescents and young adults, with the 'older' population faring less well.
The challenges seem clear. The role of both early and late intensification requires further study. Furthermore, more precise designations of poor prognostic signs need to be made in the adult population so that more intensive treatment may be attempted. The immunologic approach to therapy is in its infancy and clearly needs development. It is hoped that these advances will come quickly and improvement in long-term survival will be realized.
Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) was described by Dameshek as "an accumulative disease of immunologically incompetent lymphocytes." This concise definition describes the majority of patients with CLL, who present with physical findings and laboratory data that are consistent with Dameshek's theory. CLL is a disease of older persons: less than 10% of patients present before the age of 50 years. Men are about two times as likely to develop CLL as are women. As in all forms of leukemia, CLL is more common in the white than in the black population.
The diagnosis of CLL is based on the minimal requirement of an absolute and sustained lymphocytosis in the peripheral blood of no less than 15,000 cells/mm<sp_>3<sp/>. The bone marrow is hypercellular and more than 40% of the cells are lymphocytes. The lymphocytes in peripheral blood and marrow are of the small, well-differentiated type (Figure 4-4). Slowly enlarging lymph nodes and gradual enlargement of the liver and spleen due to the accumulation of neoplastic lymphocytes may occur early or late in the course of the disease. The immunologic incompetence of the expanding lymphocyte population expresses itself in hypo-gammaglobulinemia with predisposition to infections, and in the emergence of such autoimmune phenomena as the production of antibodies against host red blood cells.
Biology
Lymphocytes in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia
CLL primarily represents a clonal proliferation of B lymphocytes (Figure 4-2). The malignant cells have immunoglobulin molecules on their surfaces bearing the same idiotype and light chain type. The most common surface immunoglobulins are IgM and IgD. The finding of two heavy chain classes does not preclude the concept of monoclonality, as the IgD and IgM have the same idiotype specificity and presumably reflect a stage of differentiation of normal B lymphocytes. CLL lymphocytes also express the Ia antigen, the receptor for C'3, and the receptor for the Fc portion of immunoglobulin.
Studies of the clonal origin of CLL have used glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) as a marker in patients who are heterozygous at this locus. Skin tissue from these patients manifested both A and B G6PD types. However, as one would predict, the CLL B lymphocytes manifested only one type of G6PD. In contrast to the neoplastic B lymphocytes, the T lymphocytes, granulocytes, erythrocytes, and platelets displayed both enzyme types in proportions similar to those found in skin. These findings indicate that CLL involves only committed B lymphocyte progenitors.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="15">
Molecular Mechanisms of Drug Addiction
Eric J. Nestler
Laboratory of Molecular Psychiatry, Departments of Psychiatry and Pharmacology, Yale University School of Medicine, Connecticut Mental Health Center, New Haven, Connecticut 06508
Drug addiction has afflicted mankind for centuries, yet the mechanisms by which particular drugs lead to addiction, and the genetic factors that make some individuals particularly vulnerable to addiction, have remained elusive. From a clinical perspective, drug abuse continues to exact enormous human and financial costs on society, yet all currently available treatments for drug addiction are notoriously ineffective. The search for a better understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms underlying the addictive actions of drugs of abuse and of the genetic factors that contribute to addiction should be given a high priority, as this should result in crucial advances in our ability to treat and prevent drug addiction.
From the basic neuroscience perspective, study of the neurobiology of drug addiction offers a novel opportunity to establish the biological basis of a complex and clinically relevant behavioral abnormality. Many prominent aspects of drug addiction in people can be clearly reproduced in laboratory animals, in striking contrast to most other forms of neuropsychiatric illness, such as psychotic and affective disorders, animal models for which are much harder to interpret. Advances made in the study of drug addiction should provide important insights into mechanisms underlying some of these other disorders.
Three terms related to drug abuse are used commonly: tolerance, dependence, and addiction. Tolerance represents a reduced effect upon repeated exposure to a drug at a constant dose, or the need for an increased dose to maintain the same effect. Dependence is defined as the need for continued exposure to a drug so as to avoid a withdrawal syndrome (physical and/or psychological disturbances) when the drug is withdrawn. Dependence is considered a priori to result from adaptive changes that develop in body tissues in response to repeated drug exposure. The traditional distinction between physical and psychological dependence is somewhat artificial, since both are mediated by neural mechanisms, possibly even similar neural mechanisms, as will be seen below. Addiction is defined as the compulsive use of a drug despite adverse consequences. In the past, physical dependence was part of the definition of addicton. However, the requirement for physical dependence as a neccessary or sufficient aspect of drug addiction is no longer considered valid. Many drugs with no abuse potential, for example, <*_>beta<*/>-adrenergic antagonists, clonidine, and tricyclic antidepressants, can produce marked physical symptoms on withdrawal. On the other hand, many unquestionably severe abusers of some drugs have little or no physical withdrawal syndrome upon cessation of drug exposure (e.g., most marijuana or cocaine users). Similarly, not all drugs of abuse produce tolerance to all of their effects.
This article reviews the results of recent research efforts that have begun to characterize the neurobiological basis of compulsive drug use. Its major focus is on opiates and cocaine, since the addictive mechanisms underlying the actions of these drugs are the best understood.
Cellular site of drug addiction
The discovery of endogenous opiate receptors in the 1970s raised the possibility that opiate addiction might be mediated by changes in these receptors. However, a decade of research has failed to identify consistent changes in the number of opiate receptors, or changes in their affinity for opiate ligands, under conditions of opiate addiction (Loh and Smith, 1990). Changes in levels of endogenous opioid peptides also do not appear to explain prominent aspects of opiate tolerance and dependence. The discovery that cocaine and other addictive psychostimulants acutely inhibit the reuptake or stimulate the release of monoamines throughout the brain has focused study of their addictive mechanisms on the regulation of monoamine neurotransmitters and their receptors. These studies too have been disappointing because it has been difficult to demonstrate consistent long-term changes in specific neurotransmitter or receptor systems in brain regions thought to underlie psychostimulant addiction (see Clouet et al., 1988; Liebman and Cooper, 1989; Peris et al., 1990).
The failure to account for important aspects of opiate and psychostimulant addictions in terms of regulation of neuro-transmitters and receptors has shifted attention to postreceptor mechanisms. Most types of neurotransmitter receptors present in brain produce most of their physiological responses in target neurons through a complex cascade of intracellular messengers. These intracellular messengers include G-proteins (Simon et al., 1991), which couple the receptors to intracellular effector systems, and the intracellular effector systems themselves, which include second messengers, protein kinases and protein phosphatases, and phosphoproteins (Nestler and Greengard, 1984, 1989). Regulation of these intracellular messenger pathways mediates the effects of the neurotransmitter-receptor systems on diverse aspects of neuronal function, including gene expression. Given that many important aspects of drug addiction develop gradually and progressively in response to continued drug exposure, and can persist for a long time after drug withdrawal, it is likely that the regulation of neuronal gene expression is of particular relevance to addiction.
In recent years, the increasing knowledge of intracellular messenger pathways has provided an experimental framework for studies of the molecular mechanisms underlying drug addiction. These investigations have demonstrated that changes in the activity of G-proteins and the cAMP second messenger and protein phosphorylation pathway mediate important aspects of opiate, and possibly cocaine, addiction in a number of drug-responsive brain regions.
Molecular mechanisms underlying opiate tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal: studies in the locus coeruleus
The locus coeruleus (LC) of the rat has served for many years as a useful model of opiate action. The LC is the largest noradrenergic nucleus in brain, located bilaterally on the floor of the fourth ventricle in the anterior pons. It is particularly suited for biochemical and molecular investigations, as it is a relatively homogeneous brain region that has been extensively characterized anatomically and electrophysiologically.
Pharmacological and behavioral studies have indicated that modulation of LC neuronal firing rates contributes to physical aspects of opiate addiction, namely, physical dependence and withdrawal, in several mammalian species, including primates (see Redmond and Krystal, 1984; Rasmussen et al., 1990). The importance of the LC in mediating opiate addiction is highlighted by a recent study that examined the effects of local injection of an opiate receptor antagonist into various brain regions of opiate-dependent rats (Maldonado et al., 1992). The most severe opiate withdrawal syndrome was produced by antagonist injections into the LC, which, in fact, elicited a withdrawal syndrome even more severe than that seen following intracerebroventricular administration.
Acute opiate action in the LC
The mechanism of acute opiate action in the LC, based on electrophysiological and biochemical studies, is well established and is shown schematically in Figure 1 (top). Acutely, opiates decrease the firing rate of LC neurons via activation of an inward rectifying K<sp_>+<sp/> channel (Aghajanian and Wang, 1987; North et al., 1987) and inhibition of a slowly depolarizing, nonspecific cation channel (Aghajanian and Wang, 1987; M. Alreja and G. K. Aghajanian, unpublished observations). Both actions are mediated via pertussis toxin-sensitive G-proteins (i.e., G<sb_>i<sb/> and/or G<sb_>o<sb/>) (Aghajanian and Wang, 1986; North et al., 1987), and inhibition of the nonspecific cation channel is mediated by reduced neuronal levels of cAMP and activated cAMP-dependent protein kinase (Aghajanian and Wang, 1987; Wang and Aghajanian, 1990; Alreja and Aghajanian, 1991). Opiates acutely inhibit adenylate cyclase activity in the LC (Duman et al., 1988; Beitner et al., 1989), as is the case in many other brain regions (see Childers, 1991), and inhibit cAMP-dependent protein phosphorylation (Guitart and Nestler, 1989). Such regulation of protein phosphorylation presumably mediates the effects of opiates on the nonspecific cation channel through the phosphorylation of the channel itself or some associated protein. Opiate regulation of protein phosphorylation also probably mediates the effects of opiates on many other aspects of LC neuronal function, including some of the initial steps underlying longer-term changes associated with addiction.
Chronic opiate action in the LC
Upon chronic opiate treatment, LC neurons develop tolerance to the acute inhibitory actions of opiates, as neuronal firing rates recover toward pretreatment levels (Aghajanian, 1978; Andrade et al., 1983; Christie et al., 1987). The neurons also become dependent on opiates after chronic exposure, in that abrupt cessation of opiate treatment, for example, by administration of an opiate receptor antagonist, leads to an elevation in LC firing rates manyfold above pretreatment levels (Aghajanian, 1978; Rasmussen et al., 1990).
The tolerance and dependence exhibited by LC neurons during chronic opiate exposure occur in the absence of detectable changes in opiate receptors or opiate-regulated ion channels themselves (see Christie et al., 1987; Loh and Smith, 1990). This raises the possibility that intracellular messenger pathways may be involved. Indeed, over the past several years, it has been demonstrated that chronic administration of opiates leads to a dramatic upregulation of the cAMP system at every major step between receptor and physiological response <figure/>, bottom). Chronic opiate treatment increases levels of G<sb_>i<*_>alpha<*/><sb/> and G<sb_>o<*_>alpha<*/><sb/> (the active subunits of the G-proteins G<sb_>i<sb/> and G<sb_>o<sb/>) (Nestler et al., 1989), adenylate cyclase (Duman et al., 1988), cAMP-dependent protein kinase (Nestler and Tallman, 1988), and a number of MARPPs (morphine- and cAMP-regulated phosphoproteins) (Guitart and Nestler, 1989). Among these MARPPs is tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) (Guitart et al., 1990), the rate-limiting enzyme in the biosynthesis of catecholamines. These various intracellular adaptations to chronic opiate treatment are mediated via persistent activation of opiate receptors: the adaptations are blocked by concomitant treatment of rats with naltrexone, an opiate receptor antagonist, and are not produced by a single morphine injection.
Direct evidence for a functional role of an upregulated cAMP system in opiate addiction in the LC
The upregulated or 'hypertrophied' cAMP system in the LC can be viewed as a compensatory, homeostatic response of LC neurons to the inhibition devolving from chronic opiate treatment <figure/>. According to this view, opiate upregulation of the cAMP system increases the intrinsic excitability of LC neurons and thereby accounts, at least in part, for opiate tolerance, dependence, and withdrawal exhibited by these neurons (Nestler, 1990). In the opiate-tolerant/dependent state, the combined presence of the opiate and the upregulated cAMP system would return LC firing rates toward pretreatment levels, whereas removal of the opiates would leave the upregulated cAMP system unopposed, leading to withdrawal activation of the neurons. This model, which is similar to one proposed previously based on studies of cultured neuroblastoma x glioma cells (Sharma et al., 1975; Collier, 1980), is supported by several lines of evidence.
First, cAMP and agents that elevate cAMP levels excite LC neurons via the activation of cAMP-dependent protein kinase and subsequent activation of the nonspecific cation channel (Wang and Aghajanian, 1990). In fact, the spontaneous firing rate of LC neurons requires an active cAMP system and the opening of the nonspecific cation channel (Alreja and Aghajanian, 1991). Second, the time course by which certain components of the upregulated cAMP system revert to normal levels during naltrexone-precipitated opiate withdrawal parallels the rapid, early phase of the time course of recovery of LC neuronal firing rates and of various behavioral signs during withdrawal (Rasmussen at al., 1990). Third, upon bath application of naltrexone, LC neurons in brain slices obtained from morphine-dependent animals exhibit spontaneous firing rates more than twofold higher compared to LC neurons in slices from normal animals <figure/>A) (Kogan et al., 1992). Earlier studies failed to detect such withdrawal activation of morphine-dependent LC neurons in vitro, possibly due to the poor condition of the brain slices used and the small number and nonrandom samples of neurons examined (Andrade et al., 1983; Christie et al., 1987). Since most major afferents to the LC are severed in the brain slice preparation, the results establish that an increased intrinsic excitability caused by chronic opiate exposure contributes to opiate dependence in these cells. Fourth, LC neurons from morphine-dependent animals show a greater maximal responsiveness to cAMP analogs in vitro <figure/>B) (Kogan et al., 1992). Taken together, these results provide strong evidence to support the view that the opiate-induced upregulation of the cAMP system represents one mechanism by which opiates produce addictive changes in LC neurons.
Molecular mechanisms underlying opiate upregulation of the cAMP system in the LC
One of the central questions raised by these studies concerns the molecular mechanisms by which chronic opiate administration leads to upregulation of the cAMP system in LC neurons.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="16">
Spliced RNA of Woodchuck Hepatitis Virus
C. WALTER OGSTON AND DOLORES G. RAZMAN
Polymerase chain reaction was used to investigate RNA splicing in liver of woodchucks infected with woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV). Two spliced species were detected, and the splice junctions were sequenced. The larger spliced RNA has an intron of 1300 nucleotides, and the smaller spliced sequence shows an additional downstream intron of 1104 nucleotides. We did not detect singly spliced sequences from which the smaller intron alone was removed. Control experiments showed that spliced sequences are present in both RNA and DNA in infected liver, showing that the viral reverse transcriptase can use spliced RNA as template. Spliced sequences were detected also in virion DNA prepared from serum. The upstream intron produces a reading frame that fuses the core to the polymerase polypeptide, while the downstream intron causes an inframe deletion in the polymerase open reading frame. Whereas the splicing patterns in WHV are superficially similar to those reported recently in hepatitis B virus, we detected no obvious homology in the coding capacity of spliced RNAs from these two viruses.
INTRODUCTION
Hepatitis B virus (HBV), the prototype of the hepadnavirus family, causes serious human disease and has a complex and interesting mode of replication. Hepadnaviruses make efficient use of a very small genome by use of overlapping reading frames, each of which may produce several alternative peptides (Ganem and Varmus, 1987), and their genome replication cycle involves reverse transcription of an RNA template (Summers and Mason, 1982. We would like to know how the peculiar features of hepadnavirus replication relate to their natural history and pathogenesis.
The mammalian hepadnaviruses woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) and ground squirrel hepatitis virus (GSHV), which are genetically close to HBV and similar in their pathogenesis, make the best experimental models for our purposes. We have chosen WHV as the object of our studies because infected woodchucks suffer from chronic hepatitis, and the majority of persistently infected woodchucks get hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) that is histologically similar to liver cancer caused by HBV in humans (Popper et al., 1987; Korba et al., 1989).
The manner in which hepadnavirus messenger RNA codes for proteins remains a subject for research. Four genes have been identified in the DNA sequence of the mammalian hepadnaviruses as open reading frames (ORFs) diagrammed in <figure/>. The core (C) ORF gives rise to the major nucleocapsid polypeptide as well as the secreted e antigen, and the surface (S) ORF gives rise to a total of six known glycoprotein species that are incorporated in the envelope of the virion and in related 'empty' 22-nm particles. The large polymerase (P) ORF is inferred from amino acid sequence homology to encode reverse transcriptase. The function of the X ORF in virus replication is not known, although it has been shown to be a transcriptional trans-activator in transfected cells.
The pattern of RNA transcription of the hepadnavirus genome has been reviewed by Ganem and Varmus (1987). Two abundant transcripts of 3.5 and 2.1 kb, respectively, can account for expression of the abundantly expressed C and S ORFs. A minor transcript of 2.4 kb encoding the pre-S1 ORF has been described in HBV-infected chimpanzee liver (Cattaneo et al., 1984; Will et al., 1987), but no corresponding RNA has been detected in WHV or GSHV (Ganem and Varmus, 1987).
The expression of the ORFs P and X remains to be accounted for, since no transcripts have been detected in vivo that include these ORFs at their 5' end. To solve this difficulty three hypotheses may be considered. First, these ORFs may be expressed from abundant mRNA by use of downstream AUG start codons (Kozak, 1986); second, there may be rare mRNAs that have 5' ends immediately upstream of these ORFs; and third, there may be rare spliced transcripts that express these ORFs.
The third hypothesis above is supported by the recent reports of spliced mRNAs in HBV-infected tissues and cells transfected with the HBV genome (Chen et al., 1989; Su et al., 1989; Suzuki et al., 1989, 1990; Wu et al., 1991). These workers have described two introns that encompass the region of overlap between the C and P genes of HBV. We have used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) (Kawasaki, 1990) to look for analogous splicing in WHV, and we now describe two species of spliced mRNA in WHV-infected liver, both of which could encode core-polymerase fusion proteins.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
The animals used in this study were naturally infected woodchucks (Ogston et al., 1989) and woodchucks infected as neonates (RW101, RW103, RW115, and RW116; C. W. Ogston and B. C. Tennant, unpublished). Virus from the serum of naturally infected woodchuck RW003 was used to initiate the infections of RW101 and RW103, and RW013 was the source of the inoculum for RW115 and RW116.
Liver tissue obtained at autopsy was cooled on ice, cut into slices 2-5-mm thick, and frozen in liquid nitrogen. RNA was prepared by homogenization in guanidine thiocyanate followed by cesium chloride centrifugation (Maniatis et al., 1982). Polyadenylated RNA was purified by oligo(dT) cellulose chromatography (Maniatis et al., 1982). The yield of RNA was measured by absorbance at 260 nm.
Complementary DNA was synthesized in a reaction containing 5 <*_>mu<*/>g of RNA, 100 mM Tris, pH 8.3, 7 mM MgCl<sb_>2<sb/>, 40 mM KCl, 1 mM dithiothreitol, and 0.5 <*_>mu<*/>g dT<sb_>12-18<sb/> primers (Collaborative Research), with 8 units of AMV reverse transcriptase (U.S. Biochemical). The reaction was incubated 2 hr at 42<*_>degree<*/>, then stopped by heating to 100<*_>degree<*/> for 3 min. The DNA was precipitated with ethanol, dried, and dissolved in 30 <*_>mu<*/>l of water.
The standard PCR reaction contained 100 mM Tris; pH 8.3 (at 25<*_>degree<*/>); 0.2 <*_>mu<*/>M each of dATP, dCTP, dGTP, and TTP (Pharmacia); primers at 0.08 <*_>mu<*/>M; and 0.6 units of Taq DAN polymerase (Perkin-Elmer Cetus). Amplification was carried out using a Perkin-Elmer Cetus DNA thermal cycler for 30 cycles with denaturation at 94<*_>degree<*/> for 60 sec, annealing at 50<*_>degree<*/> for 2 min, and extension at 72<*_>degree<*/> for 30 or 60 sec. Longer extension times were used in some reactions that were expected to produce amplification products greater than 1000 bp.
To generate single-stranded amplified DNA for sequencing, the amplified DNA fragment of interest was cut from an agarose gel and electroeluted. Asymmetric amplification was carried out using the same pair of primers as in the original amplification, but the concentration of one primer was reduced 32-fold (McCabe, 1990). The product of asymmetric PCR was purified by two rounds of centrifugal dialysis (Centricon 100, Amicon) to remove the primers and other components from the PCR reaction, then concentrated by centrifugal evaporation to a volume of about 7 <*_>mu<*/>l. The asymmetric DNA was sequenced directly using the Sequenase system (U.S. Biochemical) according to the manufacturer's directions. A 'nested' primer internal to the original PCR fragment was used for sequencing whenever possible.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The sequences were analyzed using the Beckman Microgenie software package. Sequence read from the gel was first compared to the published sequence of WHV (Galibert et al., 1982) by dot-matrix comparison. Areas of homology so identified were confirmed and then aligned.
In referring to primer sequences and experimental results, WHV map coordinates are given in nucleotides originating at the EcoRI site, as defined by the data of Galibert et al. (1982). The total length of this sequence is 3308 nt.
RESULTS
PCR can be used to detect spliced sequences in cDNA by employing primers located in different exons spanning one or more introns. Unspliced template then gives rise to an amplification product whose length corresopnds to the distance between the primers on the genomic DNA, whereas amplification of spliced template results in a shorter PCR product. Since short templates are amplified more efficiently than long ones this method is very sensitive even in the presence of excess unspliced template. We chose pairs of primers, shown in <figure/>b, that we expected to span intron(s) analogous to those previously described in HBV.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
When we amplified cDNA from WHV-infected liver using the primers 2110(+) and 575(-), we obtained a product of approximately 560 bp, as shown in <figure/>a, as well as the full-length product of 1773 bp. This indicates that a segment of about 1200 nucleotides has been removed from the template. Likewise, the primers 2110(+) and 1478(-) gave a short product of 1260 bp as well as the full-length product of 2676 bp, indicating removal of about 1400 nucleotides. These two results presumably imply the existence of a single intron, since the inferred sizes of the missing segment agree within the limits of experimental error.
In the reaction using the primers 2110(+) and 1478(-), an additional product of 320 bp was amplified, indicating a template from which a total of 2300 nucleotides are missing from between the priming sites <figure/>a). This will be discussed further below.
To check the specificity of the amplification we carried out PCR using lower concentrations of nucleotide triphoshates. As shown in Figure 2a the short fragments described above were all amplified when the triphosphate concentration was reduced, while the full-length segments became less intense as expected. As a further control for specificity we amplified WHV DNA from the clone pWHV81-2 (Seeger et al., 1987) with both the above primer sets. No short products were obtained from this reaction, although the full-length sequence was amplified (data not shown).
To determine whether these observations are general among separate strains of WHV, we amplified cDNA from a number of experimentally and naturally infected woodchucks (Figure 2b and data not shown). The PCR products were the same size in all cases, although the relative intensity of the fragments varied. We think that this variation is due to complex interactions in the competition between more abundant unspliced template on the one hand, and rarer but shorter spliced template on the other hand. This competition will also be influenced by such factors as the degree of RNA degradation and the efficiency of reverse transcription.
To determine whether these results reflect authentic RNA splicing, the short PCR products were sequenced. We found in preliminary experiments that the best sequence data were obtained when a different 'nested' primer was used for sequencing rather than that used for amplification. This method also ensures that products derived from mispriming will not contribute to the sequence. Accordingly the primers 1961(+) and 314(-) were used to amplify a fragment of about 400 bp derived from the first spliced template described above, and this 400-bp fragment was purified by preparative electrophoresis. Single-stranded DNA was then made by asymmetric reamplification, using the primer 314(-) in excess over 1961(+) (McCabe, 1990), and the single-stranded DNA was sequenced using the 2110(+) primers, with the result shown in <figure/>a.
The sequence obtained in this experiment was aligned to the published sequence of WHV (Galibert et al., 1982) as shown in <figure/>b. This alignment is consistent with an intron of 1300 nucleotides between the donor site GT at bases 2151-2152 to the acceptor AG at 141-142. To confirm the sequence of this splice junction we generated positive-strand DNA template by amplification with 2110(+) in excess over 314(-) and sequenced the minus strand from the primer 314(-). The resulting complementary sequence showed the identical splice junction (data not shown).
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The smaller (320 bp) product of amplification using the primers 2110(+) and 1478(-) <figure/> could result from a doubly spliced mRNA with the 1300 nt intron and one of 1000 nt, or alternatively from a singly spliced mRNA with an intron of about 2300 nt. We first looked for the hypothetical second splice junction by amplifying cDNA with the primers 176(+) and 1478(-), but detected only the 1300-bp product derived from the unspliced sequence (data not shown). We thought that abundant cDNA derived from the 2.1-kb S-gene transcript might be overwhelming a rarer spliced template sequence, so we set out to separate the putative spliced sequence from unspliced S transcript by carrying out PCR in two steps. In the first step we used the primers 1961(+) and 1478(-) to selectively amplify spliced DNA, avoiding the 2.1-kb S transcript whose 5' end is at nt 145 (Moroy et al., 1985).
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CONFUSION IN THE DETERMINATION OF DEATH: DISTINGUISHING PHILOSOPHY FROM PHYSIOLOGY
JEFFREY R. BOTKIN and STEPHEN G. POST
Two decades have now passed since the Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Death. The adoption of whole brain criteria as a new standard of death proceeded quickly, supported by the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and the President's Commission, and has been adopted into legislation in 49 states. One of the final tasks toward the uniform adoption of the whole brain standard is the establishment of criteria for death in young infants. But despite this definitional consensus and its rapid adoption, beliefs about what it means to be dead may vary considerably in our highly pluralistic society.
Within the medical community alone there remains a startling amount of confusion about the determination of death. The redefinition of death has given rise to a distinct tension between the new definition of death based on brain criteria and common perceptions of the nature of death. Physicians, nurses, and others at the bedside may 'know' that a person is dead by established criteria, yet life still may be perceived as long as the heart continues to beat and the skin remains warm to touch. Many clinicians can rattle off criteria for obscure conditions or long differentials for anomalous lab results, yet they cannot offer specific criteria for death. More importantly, it is obvious that many health care professionals, including physicians, simply do not believe patients are dead when their brains alone have ceased to function.
Such confusion in the medical professions was clearly documented by Youngner, et al. This study documented that only 35 percent of physicians or nurses who dealt routinely with critically ill patients could correctly identify the legal and medical criteria for determining death. Further, 58 percent of the respondents did not apply a consistent concept of death when asked to justify their determination of death in hypothetical cases. The wider public is confused as well - a confusion no doubt fostered by news reports of 'brain dead' patients who are kept 'alive' by 'life-support' technology.
We commonly perceive the presence of death when the body is cold and pale, when breathing and heart cease. Little confusion about the presence of death arises in such circumstances. But contemporary technology has fostered confusion by forcing us to recognize the ambiguous nature of the moment of death. We can now restart functions such as breathing or heartbeat when once they would have been irreversibly lost. Certainly someone is not really dead with the cessation of heartbeat if the person can be revived. Yet despite common language about being 'brought back to life,' we like to think of death as a final and irreversible state, so we must now speak in terms of an 'irreversible cessation' of functions. However, what constitutes 'irreversible' will no doubt change with technology. This influence of technology on the moment of death indicates that the determination of this moment cannot be made independently of the cultural environment in which death occurs. Additionally, the contemporary ability to entirely replace cardio-respiratory functions with machines further blurs the boundaries between life and death. It was, of course, this latter technological development that was the primary force behind the adoption of the whole brain standard of death.
The basic argument we wish to make here is that the moment of death is not a specific physiologic event amenable to scientific determination. Rather, it is a moment defined by philosophic concepts - concepts that speak to what it means to be alive. Since such philosophic contentions defy objective proof, the moment of death must be seen as an event fixed by social consensus. Two implications of this realization will be discussed: first, that education for physicians and other medical professionals must address philosophic concepts if confusion about death is to be reduced; and second, that our pluralistic society must address the demand for alternative definitions of death for those who reject the philosophic foundations of the prevailing standard.
First we wish to look critically at the three competing standards of death. By 'standard' we mean a set of criteria for determining death that is based on an underlying philosophic concept. The three standards of death are the traditional heart/lung standard, the whole brain standard, and the higher brain standard. Current law recognizes the combination of the heart/lung or whole brain standards, but for the purposes of clarity, these will be discussed separately. In this discussion we will focus on our common perceptions of death and how these correlate with the philosophic concepts of death that underlie the three standards.
Advocates of the higher brain death standard argue that death occurs when cognitive function irreversibly ceases. Cognition is considered to be the essential element in personal identity, and thus the loss of cognition heralds the death of the individual. Under this standard, death would be an event occurring when the relevant brain activities cease. The philosophic appeal of this approach is that it accurately defines what most of us feel is of primary importance in human life - when all cognitive capacities are lost, we 'might as well be dead' figuratively, and, it is argued, literally. In addition, cognition is embodied in the cerebral hemispheres and so is potentially measurable by technical means (although it is not so at the present time).
From the perspective of many observers, the problem with the higher brain standard is the perception of continued 'life' despite the presence of death so defined. Individuals who have permanently lost all higher brain functions but retain brain stem functions will still breathe spontaneously, remain warm, and may have sleep/wake cycles and spontaneous movement. These patients simply do not look dead by our more intuitive understanding of the term. The conflict and confusion that arises here is due to a distinct and important difference between the death of the individual and the death of the organism. When cognition is irreversibly lost, but other physiologic processes continue, the human individual may be dead, but the human organism is not.
Which is the correct focus for our determination of death - death of the human individual or death of the human organism? There are reasoned arguments for each. One distinct advantage of determining death in terms of the organism is that such a definition could be applied across the spectrum of life. Since death is a term that is relevant to all life forms, it must therefore have some consistent biologic meaning. When we speak of death in other forms of life, we refer to the death of the organism - 'personhood' or cognition do not have any logical correlates in the majority of life forms. We may choose to define death in humans in terms of the loss of a single, key function (like cognition), but this will leave us with the task of defining such key functions for other life forms as well. Is there a single key function in fungi, barnacles, or bacteria on which our recognition of life hinges?
Even in the simplest of life forms, the definition of life has proven remarkably difficult and has been the subject of much debate. Orstan has provided a brief review of the definitions of life offered in Western thought and concludes: "It does not take much effort to realize that these definitions are little more than arbitrary lists of things the living organisms do". Thus, we would suggest that the common perception of death in an organism requires the cessation of a host of functions that comprise the perception of life. It is quite unlikely that any nonhuman life forms would be considered dead as long as there was spontaneous movement, respiration, and the flow of vital fluids.
So while the higher brain standard has the intellectual appeal of specifying the loss of a key function as the moment of transition between life and death, it will remain unconvincing for those whose intuitive or intellectual beliefs require that death signify the death of the human organism. Thus the higher brain standard is not 'wrong,' but if the popular perception of death is grounded in a concept of a living organism, the appeal of the higher brain standard may be limited as a basis for public policy.
The Whole Brain Standard
The current standard for the determination of death reads as follows:
An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.
The second half of the current standard represents the whole brain standard. The key concept for the whole brain standard is the loss of integration of the organism. Clearly some cellular and organ function continues for a period of time after brain or heart and lung functions cease; but the argument is that we do not care about isolated organ or cell function, we care about the integrated function of the organism. When the organism as a coordinated whole has irreversibly ceased to function, the argument goes, the organism is dead.
The brain is the logical locus for this integrative activity. Loss of whole brain activity leads to the loss of consciousness, respiratory arrest, no spontaneous movement, and no interaction with the environment. Without 'life support,' cardiac arrest soon develops and loss of all organ and cellular functions follow. Under this standard, the event of death is determined as the time at which there is irreversible loss of whole brain function.
The whole brain standard has several advantages; it can be measured with reliability, and irreversibility can be assured within reasonable limits. In addition, loss of integration is potentially applicable to other life forms (although it may be less clear how integration is determined in organisms without central nervous systems). Finally, loss of whole brain function produces an individual with many of the qualities we usually associate with death: lack of spontaneous breathing, movement, and response to the environment.
A principal difficulty with this standard is that individuals who lack whole brain function while on life support retain significant attributes of life: their skin may be warm and soft, they have a heartbeat, food continues to be metabolized, and waste products are excreted. Individuals without whole brain function may even gestate fetuses and bear children. It is precisely these attributes that lead many in the public and the medical profession to believe that such individuals are not 'really dead.'
The counterargument is that these life-like attributes of whole brain-dead patients do not count, since they do not reflect any integrated function in the organism, but exist only by technical intervention. This counterargument only makes sense if we can define what we mean by integration. According to Webster, integrate means: (1) "to make or become whole or complete," (2) "to bring (parts) together into a whole." Clearly an individual without brain function is not integrated; however, an individual without function in any major organ is not integrated. Barney Clarke was not intrinsically integrated once the artificial heart was implanted, yet he was obviously alive by virtue of technical support.
Youngner and Bartlett make this argument with a hypothetical case of a man who has had brain stem function surgically destroyed by a diabolical physician. The patient is then hooked to technical support that maintains bodily functions as well as cerebral functions: In essence, this hypothetical patient has been afforded a mechanical brain stem. Youngner and Bartlett note that the patient has "entirely lost the innate and spontaneous ability to integrate essential body systems," yet is obviously alive, at least as long as consciousness remains. It is irrelevant to our perception of life that brain stem functions are performed mechanically.
When an individual has lost all brain function yet is maintained on a ventilator, the heart, bowels, kidneys, and other organ systems may continue to function normally, at least temporarily, and these subsystems work in coordination. The individual without brain function is not wholly integrated, but neither is he or she wholly disintegrated.
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We have thus shown that the Hilbert transform determines a bounded operator from L<sp_>p<sp/> into itself, for p of the form 2n. By the Riesz Interpolation Theorem, it follows then that the Hilbert transform determines a bounded operator from L<sp_>p<sp/> into itself, for <O_>formula<O/>. The proof can now be completed by appealing to Exercise 6.21 for the cases 1<p<2.
EXERCISE 6.24. (a) Show that any constant <O_>formula<O/> will satisfy inequality (6.4). Supposing that f is supported in the interval [-a,a], show that any constant <O_>formula<O/> will satisfy inequality (6.5) if <O_>formula<O/>.
(b) Establish Equation (6.6) by integrating around a large square contour.
(c) Let m be the characteristic function of an open interval (a,b), where <O_>formula<O/>. Prove that the multiplier M, corresponding to m determines a bounded operator on every L<sp_>p<sp/> for 1< p < <*_>infinity<*/>. HINT: Write m as a finite linear combination of translates of - isgn.
(d) Let m be the characteristic function of the set <O_>formula<O/>. Verify that the multiplier M corresponding to m has no bounded extension to any L<sp_>p<sp/> space for p <*_>unch<*/> 2.
CHAPTER VII
AXIOMS FOR A MATHEMATICAL MODEL OF EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE
This chapter is a diversion from the main subject of this book, and it can be skipped without affecting the material that follows. However, we believe that the naive approach taken in this chapter toward the axiomatizing of experimental science serves as a good motivation for the mathematical theory developed in the following four chapters.
We describe here a set of axioms, first introduced by G.W. Mackey, to model experimental investigation of a system in nature. We suppose that we are studying a phenomenon in terms of various observations of it that we might make. We postulate that there exists a nonempty set S of what we shall call the possible states of the system, and we postulate that there is a nonempty set O of what we shall call the possible observables of the system. We give two examples.
(1) Suppose we are investigating a system that consists of a single physical particle in motion on an infinite straight line. Newtonian mechanics (f = ma) tells us that the system is completely determined for all future time by the current position and velocity, i.e., by two real numbers. Hence, the states of this system might well be identified with points in the plane. Two of the (many) possible observables of this system can be described as position and velocity observables. We imagine that there is a device which indicates where the particle is and another device that indicates its velocity. More realistically, we might have many yes/no devices that answer the observational questions: 'Is the particle between a and b?' 'Is the velocity of the particle between c and d?'
Quantum mechanical models of this single particle are different from the Newtonian one. They begin by assuming that the (pure) states of this one-particle system are identifiable with certain square-integrable functions and the observables are identified with certain linear transformations. This model seems quite mysterious to most mathematicians, and Mackey's axioms form one attempt at justifying it.
(2) Next, let us imagine that we are investigating a system in which three electrical circuits are in a black box and are open or closed according to some process of which we are not certain. The states of this system might well be described as all triples of 0's and 1's (0 for open and 1 for closed). Suppose that we have only the following four devices for observing this system. First, we can press a button b<sp_>0<sp/> and determine how many of the three circuits are closed. However, when we press this button, it has the effect of opening all three circuits, so that we have no hope of learning exactly which of the three were closed. (Making the observation actually affects the system.) In addition, we have three other buttons b<sb_>1<sb/>, b<sb_>2<sb/>, b<sb_>3<sb/>, b<sb_>i<sb/>, telling whether circuit i is open or closed. Again, when we press button b<sb_>i<sb/>, all three circuits are opened, so that we have no way of determining if any of the ciricuits other than the ith was closed. This is a simple example in which certain simultaneous observations appear to be impossible, e.g., determining whether circuits 1 and 2 are both closed.
The axioms we introduce are concerned with the concept of interpreting what it means to make a certain observation of the system when the system is in a given state. The result of such an observation should be a real number, with some probability, depending on the state and on the observable.
AXIOM 1. To each state <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S and observable A <*_>EPSILON<*/> O there corresponds a Borel probability measure <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>, A<sb/> on R.
REMARK. The probability measure<*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>, A<sb/> contains the information about the probability that the observation A will result in a certain value, when the system is in the state <*_>alpha<*/>.
EXERCISE 7.1. Write out in words, from probability theory, what the following symbols mean.
(a) <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>,A<sb/>([3,5]) = 0.9.
(b) <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>,A<sb/>({0}) = 1.
AXIOM 2. (a) If A, B are observables for which <O_>formula<O/> for every state <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S, then A = B.
(b) If <*_>alpha<*/>, <*_>beta<*/> are states for which <O_>formula<O/> for every observable A <*_>EPSILON<*/> O, then <*_>alpha<*/> = <*_>beta<*/>.
EXERCISE 7.2. Discuss the intuitive legitimacy of Axiom 2.
AXIOM 3. If <*_>alpha<*/><sb_>1<sb/>, ... <*_>alpha<*/><sb_>n<sb/> are states, and t<sb_>1<sb/>, ... t<sb_>n<sb/> are nonnegative real numbers for which <O_>formula<O/>, then there exists a state <*_>alpha<*/> for which
<O_>formula<O/>
for every observable A. This axiom can be interpreted as asserting that the set S of states is closed under convex combinations. If the <*_>alpha<*/><sb_>i<sb/>'s are not all identical, we call this state <*_>alpha<*/> a mixed state and we write <O_>formula<O/>.
We say that a state <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S is a pure state if it is not a mixture of other states. That is, if <O_>formula<O/>, with each t<sb_>i<sb/> > 0 and <O_>formula<O/>, then <*_>alpha<*/><sb_>i<sb/> = <*_>alpha<*/> for all i.
EXERCISE 7.3. Discuss the intuitive legitimacy of Axiom 3. Think of a physical system, like a beaker of water, for which there are what we can interpret as pure states and mixed states.
AXIOM 4. If A is an observable, and <O_>formula<O/> is a Borel function, then there exists an observable B such that
<O_>formula<O/>
for every state <*_>alpha<*/> and every Borel set <O_>formula<O/>. We denote this observable B by f(A).
EXERCISE 7.4. Discuss the intuitive legitimacy of Axiom 4. Show that, when the system is in the state <*_>alpha<*/> and the observable A results in a value t with probability p, the observable B = f(A) results in the value f(t) with the same probability p.
EXERCISE 7.5. (a) Prove that there exists an observable A such that <O_>formula<O/> for every state <*_>alpha<*/>. That is, A is an observable that is nonnegative with probability 1 independent of the state of the system. HINT: Use <O_>formula<O/> for example.
(b) Given a real number t, show that there exists an observable A such that <O_>formula<O/> for every state <*_>alpha<*/>. That is, A is an observable that equals t with probability 1, independent of the state of the system.
(c) Show that the set of observables is closed under scalar multiplication. That is, if A is an observable and c is a nonzero real number, then there exists an observable B such that
<O_>formula<O/>
We may then write B = cA.
(d) If A and B are observables, does there have to be an observable C that we could think of as the sum A + B?
(e) In what way must we alter the descriptions of the systems in Example 1 and Example 2 in order to incorporate these first four axioms (particularly Axioms 3 and 4)?
DEFINITION. We say that two observables A and B are compatible, pairwise compatible, or simultaneously observable if there exists an observable C and Borel functions f and g such that A = f(C) and B = g(C). A sequence {A<sb_>i<sb/>} is called mutually compatible if there exists an observable C and Borel functions {f<sb_>i<sb/>} such that <O_>formula<O/> for all i.
EXERCISE 7.6. Is there a difference between a sequence {A<sb_>i<sb/>} of observables being pairwise compatible and being mutually compatible? In particular, is it possible that there could exist observables A, B, C, such that A and B are compatible, B and C are compatible, A and C are compatible, and yet A, B, C are not mutually compatible? HINT: Try to modify Example 2.
EXERCISE 7.7. (a) If A, B are observables, what should it mean to say that an observable C is the sum A + B of A and B? Discuss why we do not hypothesize that there always exists such an observable C.
(b) If A and B are compatible, can we prove that there exists an observable C that can be regarded as A + B?
DEFINITION. An observable q is called a question or a yes/no observable if, for each state <*_>alpha<*/>, the measure <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>,q<sb/> is supported on the two numbers 0 and 1. We say that the result of observing q, when the system is in the state <*_>alpha<*/>, is 'yes' with probability <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>,q<sb/>({1}), and it is 'no' with probability <*_>mu<*/><sb_><*_>alpha<*/>,q<sb/>({0}).
THEOREM 7.1. Let A be an observable.
(1) For each Borel subset E in R, the observable <*_>chi<*/><sb_>E<sb/>(A) is a question.
(2) If g is a real-valued Borel function on R, for which g(A) is a question, then there exists a Borel set E such that g(A) = <*_>chi<*/><sb_>E<sb/>(A).
(Note that condition 2 does not assert that g necessarily equals <*_>chi<*/><sb_>E<sb/>.)
PROOF. For each Borel set E, we have
<O_>formula<O/>,
and
<O_>formula<O/>,
which proves that <O_>formula<O/> is supported on the two points 0 and 1 for every <*_>alpha<*/>, whence <*_>chi<*/><sb_>E<sb/>(A) is a question and so part 1 is proved.
Given a g for which q = g(A) is a question, set E = g<sp_>-1<sp/>({1}), and observe that for any <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S we have
<O_>formula<O/>
Since both q and <*_>chi<*/><sb_>E<sb/>(A) are questions, it follows from the preceding paragraph that
<O_>formula<O/>
showing that
<O_>formula<O/>
for every state <*_>alpha<*/>. Then, by Axiom 2, we have that
<O_>formula<O/>
We now define some mathematical structure on the set Q of all questions. This set will form the fundamental ingredient of our model.
DEFINITION. Let Q denote the set of all questions. For each question q <*_>EPSILON<*/> Q, define a real-valued function m<sb_>q<sb/> on the set S of states by
<O_>formula<O/>
If p and q are questions, we say that <O_>formula<O/> if <O_>formula<O/> for all <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S.
If p, q and r are questions, for which <O_>formula<O/>, we say that p and q are summable and that r is the sum of p and q. We then write r = p + q. More generally, if {q<sb_>i<sb/>} is a countable (finite or infinite) set of questions, we say the q<sb_>i<sb/>'s are summable if there exists a question q such that
<O_>formula<O/>
for every <*_>alpha<*/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> S. In such a case, we write <O_>formula<O/>.
Finally, a countable set {q<sb_>i<sb/>} is called mutually summable if every subset of the q<sb_>i<sb/>'s is summable.
REMARK. As mentioned above, the set Q will turn out to be the fundamental ingredient of our model, in the sense that everything else will be described in terms of Q.
THEOREM 7.2.
(1) The set Q is a partially ordered set with respect to the ordering <*_>unch<*/> defined above.
(2) There exists a question q<sb_>1<sb/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> Q, which we shall often simply call 1, for which <O_>formula<O/> for every q <*_>EPSILON<*/> Q. That is, Q has a maximum element q<sb_>1<sb/>.
(3) There exists a question q<sb_>0<sb/> <*_>EPSILON<*/> Q, which we shall often simply call 0, for which <O_>formula<O/> for every q <*_>EPSILON<*/> Q. That is, Q has a minimum element q<sb_>0<sb/>.
(4) For each question q, there exists a question <*_>unch<*/> such that
<O_>formula<O/>
That is, every question has a complementary question.
PROOF. That Q is a partially ordered set is clear.
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Consider the diagram
<O_>formula<O/>
where <*_>pi<*/> is orthogonal projection (with respect to the Hodge inner product), i is the isomorphism
<O_>formula<O/>,
and
<O_>formula<O/>.
Using the Hodge decomposition theorem, it is not hard to see that this diagram commutes, and that <*_>pi<*/> is an isomorphism for <*_>rho<*/> near 1. Hence, for such <*_>rho<*/>, det <*_>nu<*/>) can be identified with the determinant of D'<sb_><*_>rho<*/><sb/>.
The lagrangian <O_>formula<O/> gives rise to a smooth section of <O_>formula<O/> near <*_>rho<*/> = 1. For <O_>formula<O/>, this section coincides with <O/>formula<O/>. For <*_>rho<*/> = 1, it coincides with <O_>formula<O/>. Similar things are true if W<sb_>1<sb/> is replaced by W<sb_>2<sb/> or if 1 is replaced with another representation in P. Thus we have found the desired extensions of det<sp_>1<sp/>(<*_>nu<*/>) and det<sp_>1<sp/>(<*_>eta<*/><sb_>j<sb/>).
As a notational contrivance, let us define, for <O_>formula<O/>,
<O_>formula<O/>
If <O_>formula<O/>, define
<O_>formula<O/>.
So, abusing notation slightly, det<sp_>1<sp/>(<*_>nu<*/>) is a smooth bundle over all of <*_>unch<*/> and det<sp_>1<sp/>(<*_>eta<*/><sb_>j<sb/>) is a smooth section defined over all of <*_>unch<*/><sb_>j<sb/>. This will simplify notation in what follows.
(1.15) Proposition. The first Chern class c<sb_>1<sb/> (det(<*_>nu<*/>)) of det(<*_>nu<*/>) is represented by a multiple <*_>omega<*/> of <*_>omega<*/><sb_>B<sb/>. If <O_>formula<O/> is a symplectic 2-torus corresponding to a 2-dimensional symplectic summand of H<sb_>1<sb/>(F; R), then <O_>formula<O/>.
Proof: Let A be the space of connections on <O_>formula<O/>. The first step is to compute the curvature the universal S<sb_>0<sb/><sp_>1<sp/> bundle <O_>formula<O/> over A x F (cf. [AS]).
Identify A with <O_>formula<O/> via <O_>formula<O/>. Identify T<sb_>A<sb/>A with <O_>formula<O/>. Let <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>. Define the connection 1-form <*_>theta<*/> by
<O_>formula<O/>
The connection <*_>theta<*/> has the property that over the surface {A} x F it restricts to the connection A on <O_>formula<O/>. The curvature of <*_>theta<*/> is <O_>formula<O/>. Thus, for <O_>formula<O/>,
<O_>formula<O/>
Let G<sb_>0<sb/> be the group of smooth maps <O_>formula<O/> such that g(x<sb_>0<sb/>) = 1 for some fixed <O_>formula<O/>. G<sb_>0<sb/> acts freely on U. This action preserves the connection <*_>theta<*/>, and so leads to a connection <*_>theta<*/><sp_>b<sp/> on <O_>formula<O/>. Recall that <*_>unch<*/> can be identified with F/G<sb_>0<sb/>, where <O_>formula<O/> is the space of flat connection on <O_>formula<O/>. Thus <*_>theta<*/><sp_>b<sp/> restricts to a connection on <*_>unch<*/> x F.
The representation <O_>formula<O/> associates to <O_>formula<O/> bundle E over <*_>unch<*/> x F with curvature
<O_>formula<O/>
Hence <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/> is represented by
<O_>formula<O/>
Thus the Chern character of E is represented by
<O_>formula<O/>
E can be thought of as a family of flat <O_>unches<O/> bundles over F parameterized by <*_>unch<*/>. Corresponding to each flat connection A is the operator D<sb_>A<sb/>, defined above, and det(<*_>nu<*/>) can be identified with the determinant of the index bundle of this family.
A flat connection A of <O_>formula<O/> determines a holomorphic structure A' on <O_>formula<O/>, and the index of the family D<sb_>A<sb/> can be identified with the index of the family <O_>formula<O/>. (F is given the complex structure compatible with its metric.) So, by Theorem 5.1 of [AS4] and the Riemann-Roch theorem, c<sb_>1<sb/>(det(<*_>nu<*/>)) is represented by the 2-dimensional part of
<O_>formula<O/>
where <O_>formula<O/> denotes integration along the fibers (i.e. along F) and T(F) is a form representing the Todd genus of F. Since <O_>formula<O/>, where <O_>formula<O/>, this is just
<O_>formula<O/>
Note that, for <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>,
<O_>formula<O/>.
Hence c<sb_>1<sb/>(det(<*_>nu<*/>)) is represented by the 2-form <*_>omega<*/>, where
<O_>formula<O/>
(Here we have identified <O_>formula<O/> with R via <O_>formula<O/>. Let <O_>formula<O/> be a symplectic 2-torus. Then
<O_>formula<O/>
D. Results of Newstead.
In this subsection we use results of Newstead ([N1,N2]) to show that certain diffeomorphisms of representation spaces are homologically trivial.
Let <O_>formula<O/> be a separating simple closed curve. Define
<O_>formula<O/>
Let F<sb_>1<sb/> and F<sb_>2<sb/> be the components of F cut along <*_>gamma<*/>. Define
<O_>formula<O/>
(j = 1,2). Then we can make the identifications
<O_>formula<O/>
(In the first equation, some basing of the free loop <*_>gamma<*/> is assumed.)
Let <O_>formula<O/> be a diffeomorphism such that <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/> is the identity. <*_>tau<*/> induces diffeomorphisms of F (which is the identity on F<sb_>2<sb/>) and <O_>formula<O/>, which will also be denoted <*_>tau<*/>. In the proofs of (3.10) and (3.12), we will need the following lemma.
(1.16) Lemma. <O_>formula<O/> is the identity.
Proof: Note that since [<*_>gamma<*/>] lies in the commutator subgroup of <O_>formula<O/>, <O_>formula<O/> consists entirely of irreducible representations. Hence there is a fibration
<O_>formula<O/>
with fiber <O_>formula<O/>. Since SO(3) is a rational homology 3-sphere, there is a Gysin sequence
<O_>formula<O/>
(All coefficients are in Q. <O_>formula<O/> is the Euler class of the fibration.)
I claim that <O_>formula<O/> is an isomorphism for i = 2 or 3. This is obvious for i = 2, and injectivity is obvious for i = 3. By Proposition 2.6 of [N2]), the natural map
<O_>formula<O/>
is an isomorphism (j = 1,2). Furthermore, <O_>formula<O/> (Theorems 1 and 1' of [N2]). Therefore, by the Künneth formula, the composite
<O_>formula<O/>
is an isomorphism. (The first arrow is induced by the fibration <O_>formula<O/>.) Hence <O_>formula<O/> is onto.
By Theorem 1' of [N2] and the Künneth formula, <O_>formula<O/> is generated by classes of dimensions 2 and 3 for <O_>formula<O/>. I claim that <O_>formula<O/> is generated by classes of dimensions 2 and 3 and <O_>formula<O/>, for <O_>formula<O/>. This is clear for i<*_>unch<*/>3. Suppose it holds for <O_>formula<O/>. Let <O_>formula<O/>. Then there exists <O_>formula<O/> lying in the subring of <O_>formula<O/> generated by classes of dimensions 2 and 3 such that <O_>formula<O/>. Hence
<O_>formula<O/>
where, by inductive assumption, <O_>formula<O/> lies in the subring of <O_>formula<O/> generated by classes of dimensions 2 and 3 and <*_>chi<*/>.
So it suffices to show that <*_>tau<*/>* is the identity on <O_>formulae<O/> and <*_>chi<*/>.
Since <*_>tau<*/> acts on the fibration (1.17) in an orientation preserving fashion, <O_>formula<O/>.
Since <O_>formula<O/> is an isomorphism for i = 2 or 3, it suffices to show that <*_>tau<*/> acts trivially on <O_>formula<O/>. By the Künneth formula and the fact that <*_>tau<*/> act trivially on <O_>formula<O/>, it suffices to show that <*_>tau<*/> acts trivially on <O_>formula<O/> (i = 2,3). This is done in [AM] (Lemma VI.2.1 and VI.2.2).
Let x<sb_>1<sb/>, y<sb_>1<sb/>, ..., x<sb_>k<sb/>, y<sb_>k<sb/> be a symplectic basis of <O_>formula<O/>. This gives rise to identifications
<O_>formulae<O/>
Define <O_>formula<O/> by
<O_>formula<O/>
<O_>formula<O/> descends to a diffeomorphism of <O_>formula<O/>, which will also be denoted by <*_>sigma<*/>. In the proof of (3.59), we will need the following lemma.
(1.18) Lemma. <O_>formula<O/> is the identity.
Proof: The proof of (1.16) can be adapted to this case almost verbatim. It is left to the reader to check that the proofs of Lemmas VI.2.1 and VI.2.2 of [AM] work with <*_>tau<*/> replaced by <*_>sigma<*/>. (This amounts to observing that <O_>formula<O/> is the identity and that <*_>sigma<*/> acts on various sphere bundles in an orientation preserving fashion.)
E. Special Isotopies.
(1.19) Definition. An isotopy <O_>formula<O/> of R is called special if
1. <O_>formula<O/> is transverse to Q<sb_>2<sb/> at <O_>formula<O/> for all t.
2. <O_>formula<O/> for all t.
3. <O_>formula<O/> is symplectic, and hence (in view of 2 above) preserves the fibers of the normal bundle <*_>nu<*/>.
(1.20) Proposition. There exists a special isotopy <O_>formula<O/> of R such that <O_>formula<O/> is transverse to Q<sb_>2<sb/> (i.e. their Zariski tangent spaces are transverse at each point of <O_>formula<O/>).
Proof: Since M is a QHS, Q<sb_>1<sb/> is transverse to Q<sb_>2<sb/> at P and T<sb_>1<sb/> is transverse to T<sb_>2<sb/> in S. Choose a compactly supported isotopy of a tubular neighborhood of S<*_>unch<*/> in R which moves <O_>formula<O/> transverse to <O_>formula<O/> for each <O_>formula<O/> and is symplectic on <O_>formula<O/>. At this stage Q<sb_>1<sb/> is transverse to Q<sb_>2<sb/> in a neighborhood of S, and so we can find a compactly supported isotopy of R<*_>unch<*/> which moves Q<sb_>1<sb/> transverse to Q<sb_>2<sb/>.
F. Orientations.
Orientations will be important in what follows, so in this section we will establish orientation conventions. [Y] will denote the orientation of the space Y. If Y is singular, this means the orientation of the top stratum. If Y is a bundle, it means an orientation of the fibers (not the total space).
First of all, orient the Heegaard surface F so that [F] followed by a normal vector to F pointing into Q<sb_>2<sb/> gives [M]. This fixes an identification of <O_>formula<O/> with R, and so fixes the sign of <*_>omega<*/>.
Complex vector spaces (and almost complex manifolds) have a natural orientation: If a<sb_>1<sb/>, ..., a<sb_>n<sb/> is a basis over C, then a<sb_>1<sb/>, ia<sb_>1<sb/>, ..., a<sb_>n<sb/>, ia<sb_>n<sb/> is an oriented basis over R. Symplectic vector spaces and manifolds are oriented according to a compatible almost complex structure. Thus <*_>omega<*/> determines the orientations [R], [S],[<*_>nu<*/>] and [<*_>xi<*/>]. <*_>eta<*/><sb_>j<sb/> and <*_>unch<*/><sb_>j<sb/>, when lifted to <O_>formula<O/>, have J-complex structures. This determines [<*_>eta<*/><sb_>j<sb/>] and <*_>unch<*/><sb_>j<sb/> (as bundles over <O_>formula<O/>).
Choose orientations of <*_>unch<*/> and <*_>unch<*/> so that
<O_>formula<O/>
at points of <O_>formula<O/>. ([<*_>unch<*/>] is the orientation lifted from [S].)
In general, given a fibering <O_>formula<O/>, we choose orientations so that [E] = [B][Y]. Thus orientations on two of E, B or Y determine an orientation of the third. If G acts on X, there is a fibering <O_>formula<O/> (at least at points where G acts freely, which is enough to determine orientations). We regard spaces of unit vectors (e.g. <*_>unch<*/><sb_>j<sb/>) as quotients of spaces of non-unit vectors (e.g. <*_>theta<*/><sb_>j<sb/>) by R<sp_>+<sp/>, the positive reals. Let [SU(2)], [S<sb_>0<sb/><sp_>1<sp/>] and [R<sp_>+<sp/>] be the standard orientations. The following equations determine orientations of spaces not yet oriented. (There are some cases of over determination, and it is left to the reader to check that these cases are consistent.)
<O_>formulae<O/>
(The third equation requires some comment. <O_>formula<O/> determines an orientation of a double cover of a neighborhood of <O_>formula<O/> in Q<sb_>j<sb/>, which induces an orientation on Q<sb_>j<sb/>.)
All boundaries will be oriented according to the 'inward normal last' convention. (e.g. F is oriented as <*_>delta<*/>W<sb_>2<sb/>.) In particular, this fixes an orientation of <*_>delta<*/>F*. Hence the map
<O_>formula<O/>
is well-defined up to conjugation by elements of SU(2) (which preserves orientation). Note that <O_>formula<O/>. Thus, near regular points of R<sp_>#<sp/>, there is an identification of the normal fiber (in R*<sp_>#<sp/> with su(2), well-defined up to orientation preserving linear maps (i.e. Ad (SU(2))). Choose [R*<sp_>#<sp/>] so that
<O_>formula<O/>
([su(2)] is, of course, the standard orientation of su(2).)
Now we give an orientation convention for intersections of manifolds. Let A and B be oriented properly embedded submanifolds of an oriented manifold Y, intersecting transversely in X. Let <*_>alpha<*/> be the normal bundle of A in Y. Orient <*_>alpha<*/> so that
<O_>formula<O/>
<O_>formula<O/> is the normal bundle of X in B. Orient X so that
<O_>formula&figure<O/>
Note that this orientation convention is compatible with the convention given above for boundaries in the sense that
<O_>formula<O/>
Note also that the induced orientation of X depends on the ordering of A and B.
G. Dehn Twists and Dehn Surgery.
Let <O_>formula<O/> be a smooth function such that f(r) = 0 for r near 1 and f(r) = 2<*_>pi<*/> for r near 2. Let <O_>formula<O/>. Define <O_>formula<O/> by
<O_>formula<O/>
for <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/> (see Figure 1.1). Note that g is the identity near <*_>delta<*/>A and the the isotopy class of g does not depend on the choice of f.
Let <*_>gamma<*/> be a simple closed curve in an oriented surface F. Let <O_>formula<O/> be orientation preserving embedding of A in F which maps the boundary components of A to curves which are isotopic to <*_>gamma<*/>. Define <O_>formula<O/> by
<O_>formula<O/>
The isotopy class of h<sb_><*_>gamma<*/><sb/> does not depend on the choice of <*_>phi<*/>. Any map in the isotopy class of h<sb_><*_>gammma<*/><sb/> is called a left-handed Dehn twist along <*_>gamma<*/>. The inverses of such maps are called right-handed Dehn twists.
Let N be a 3-manifold and let <O_>formula<O/> be a boundary component of N which is diffeomorphic to a torus. Let <O_>formula<O/> be a primitive homology class (that is, one which can be represented by a simple closed curve). Let <O_>formula<O/> be a diffeomorphism which sends <O_>formula<O/> to a curve representing a.
<O_>formula<O/>
is called the Dehn surgery of N along a. Note that N<sb_>a<sb/> does not depend on the sign of a. If N is oriented, we give N<sb_>a<sb/> the orientation induced from <O_>formula<O/>.
If <O_>formula<O/> is a knot in a 3-manifold M, then Dehn surgery on K means Dehn surgery on M\U, where U is an open tubular neighborhood of K.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="20">Let <*_>unch<*/> denote the neighborhood of <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> parameterized by <O_>formula<O/> with <O_>formula<O/>. In this paper, we will be interested in the associated real analytic polar coordinates (Re <*_>unch<*/>, Im <*_>unch<*/>, |t|, arg t): the coordinate function arg t is S<sp_>1<sp/>-valued, but since we will soon lift to a Z-cover and consider the lift of arg t to be R-valued, here we will write arg t <*_>epsilon<*/> [0, 2<*_>pi<*/>).
Next, let <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> denote the Deligne-Mumford compactified moduli space of stable curves and set <O_>formula<O/>. Then <*_>pi<*/> extends to a nonsurjective map <O_>formula<O/> which is a branched cover over its image. Moreover <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> is a differentiable manifold ([BE], [Ea-Ma], [Mas]).
Now the neighborhood <*_>unch<*/> admits a Fenchel-Nielsen parameterization based on uniformizing the surfaces <O_>formula<O/>. On the surface M<sb_>t<sb/>, choose curves <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>1<sb/>, ..., <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>3g-4<sb/> so that M<sb_>t<sb/> <*_>approximate-sign<*/> {<*_>gamma<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>1<sb/>, ..., <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>3g-4<sb/>} is a collection of 3-holed spheres. Let <*_>sigma<*/><sb_><*_>unch<*/>, t<sb/> denote the hyperbolic metric constistent with the conformal structure on the Riemann surface <O_>formula<O/>, and let <O_>formula<O/> denote the <*_>sigma<*/><sb_><*_>unch<*/>, t<sb/>-length of the unique <*_>sigma<*/><sb_><*_>unch<*/>, t<sb/> geodesic representing the free homotopy class [<*_>gamma<*/><sb_>i<sb/>] <*_>epsilon<*/> <*_>pi<*/><sb_>1<sb/>M<sb_>t<sb/>. Let <O_>formula<O/> denote the Fenchel-Nielsen twist angle (see [Ab] for details) of [<*_>gamma<*/><sb_>i<sb/>] of <O_>formula<O/>. Then <O_>formula<O/> provide Fenchel-Nielsen polar co-ordinates for <*_>unch<*/>; here we leave <O_>formula<O/> undefined. Also, <O_>formula<O/> should be thought of as S<sp_>1<sp/>-valued, but it will be notationally convenient to consider <O_>formula<O/>.
The local functions (Re <*_>unch<*/>, Im <*_>unch<*/>, |t|, arg t) and (<*_>unch<*/>, <*_>unch<*/>) each provide real analytic polar coordinates for <*_>unch<*/>, the former system from a conformal geometry point of view, and the latter from a hyperbolic geometry point of view. These two real analytic structures are not equivalent: in this paper, we aim to relate the two structures.
Before we state the main theorems, we need a technical definition of what we mean for a coordinate function to be real analytic in a polar coordinate system. We say that a function defined on a neighborhood of the origin in R<sp_>2<sp/> parametrized by the polar coordinate (r, <*_>theta<*/>) is sector real analytic provided that for any ray from the origin, there is a sector of the neighorhood at the origin containing that ray in which the function has a convergent expansion in the variables r and <*_>theta<*/> in that sector. The definition extends immediately to a product of planes. We prove
THEOREM A. The coordinate functions <O_>formula<O/>, are sector real analytic in (-log |t|)<sp_>-1<sp/>, arg t, and <*_>unch<*/> near t = 0; the coordinate functions <O_>formula<O/>, are also sector real analytic in (-log |t|)<sp_>-1<sp/>, arg t, and <*_>unch<*/>.
From our method, it follows
THEOREM B. The hyperbolic metrics <O_>formula<O/> are sector real analytic in (-log |t|)<sp_>-1<sp/>, arg t, and <*_>unch<*/> near t = 0.
We also conclude
THEOREM C. If (l<sb_>0<sb/>, <*_>unch<*/>, <*_>theta<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, <*_>unch<*/> are Fenchel-Nielsen coordinates for the neighborhood <*_>unch<*/>, then the coordinates |t|, <*_>unch<*/>, arg t are sector real analytic in <O_>formula<O/>, <*_>unch<*/>, <*_>theta<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, and <*_>unch<*/>.
Remarks. (1) Additional notation extends the results to surfaces with multiple nodes.
(2) We would like to place the current work in the context of [Wf] and [Wlpt].
In [Wf], we showed that the hyperbolic metrics <O_>formula<O/> were real analytic in <O_>formulae<O/>, and we provided a somewhat explicit Taylor series. There only the hyperbolic structure of the surfaces M<sb_><*_>unch<*/>, t<sb/> was considered and the proof relied on harmonic maps. We found that the harmonic maps were well suited to the study of the single real analytic polar structure (<*_>unch<*/>, <*_>unch<*/>): the maps were independent of the twist variable <O_>formula<O/>, and so any sector real analytic function of (<*_>unch<*/>, <*_>unch<*/>) was in fact real analytic in a full polar neighborhood. In the present situation, we are interested in comparing the conformal and hyperbolic geometry, and we find that we must use different maps between surfaces; the harmonic maps are unsuitable.
In [Wlpt], we provided the initial expansion for the hyperbolic metrics <O_>formula<O/> in (<*_>unch<*/>, t). The approach was based on the plumbing construction, approximate hyperbolic metrics, and solving the prescribed curvature equation. The method appears not to provide that the hyperbolic metrics are sector real analytic in (log |t|)<sp_>-1<sp/>, arg t, and <*_>unch<*/>. The motivation for the current work was to treat both the real analyticity and the complex parameterization.
2. Maps between surfaces. In this section, we define the map between surfaces that we will use, and we prove a lemma about its relevant properties.
2.1. We work on the augmented Teichmüller space <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> (see [Ab]). Briefly, the Teichmüller space T<sb_>g<sb/> is an infinite cyclic cover of P<sb_>g<sb/> with covering group T(p) generated by isotopy classes of Dehn twist about <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>0<sb/>. Setting <*_>PI<*/> to be the covering map <O_>formula<O/>, consider <O_>formula<O/> where <O_>formula<O/> and let <O_>formula<O/> denote a point in T<sb_>g<sb/> lying over m(<*_>unch<*/>, t). Assign <*_>unch<*/> the coordinates <O_>unch<O/> and lift the coordinate functions on N near m(<*_>unch<*/>, t) to a neighborhood of <*_>unch<*/>. When we continue the functions <*_>unch<*/>, |t|, and arg t on T<sb_>g<sb/>, we see that <*_>unch<*/> and |t| are invariant under the action of the deck group T(p) while if <O_>formula<O/> with <O_>formula<O/>, then the arg t coordinates for <*_>unch<*/><sb_>1<sb/> and <*_>unch<*/><sb_>2<sb/> differ by an integer multiple of 2<*_>pi<*/>.
To obtain <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> we adjoin to T<sb_>g<sb/> classes representing the noded surfaces M<sb_><*_>unch<*/>, 0<sb/> so that the coordinate functions <*_>unch<*/> and |t| are continuous. The projection <O_>formula<O/> extends to a map <O_>formula<O/> infinitely branched over the locus of points t = 0. Let <*_>unch<*/>* be the preimage of <*_>unch<*/> under <*_>unch<*/>; then <*_>unch<*/>* is sometimes called a horocyclic neighborhood in <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/>, and we have provided coordinates (<*_>unch<*/>, |t|, arg t) on <*_>unch<*/>*.
2.2. In this section, we prove
LEMMA 2.2. Fix (<*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, arg t<sb_>0<sb/>) with |t<sb_>0<sb/>| <*_>unch<*/> 0 and let <O_>formula<O/> represent a point in <*_>unch<*/><sb_>g<sb/> with coordinates (<*_>unch<*/>, |t|, arg t) near (<*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, arg t<sb_>0<sb/>). Then there exists maps <O_>formula<O/> so that <O_>formula<O/> is real analytic in <*_>unch<*/>, (-log |t|)<sp_>-1<sp/> and arg t and the radius of convergence of the power series expansion of <O_>formula<O/> about <*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, arg t<sb_>0<sb/> is independent of <*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, t<sb_>0<sb/>.
Remark. Theorem B will follow from Lemma 2.2 by letting |t<sb_>0<sb/>| tend to zero. We are forced to take this approach rather than simply setting |t<sb_>0<sb/>| = 0 initially because we do not know the expansion of <O_>formula<O/> near the node p, and so we lack boundary conditions with which to simultaneously open up the node and uniformize.
In this approach, the size of the sector in which we are guaranteed analyticity in the theorem depends on the radius of convergence given by the lemma.
Proof. We organize our argument into four steps.
1. Constructing the maps. Important to our construction of the map <*_>zeta<*/> will be a decomposition of <O_>formula<O/> into three domains determined by its coordinates. Our original surface M<sb_>0<sb/> admitted a decomposition as
<O_>formula<O/>
where the Beltrami differentials <*_>mu<*/><sb_>i<sb/> were supported on M* and where we now further assume that M<sb_>0<sb/> <*_>approximate-sign<*/> M* is given as <O_>formula<O/>. Now define <O_>formula<O/>; here c is a small number to be determined later. The cylinder C<sb_>|t|<sb/> conformally embeds in <O_>formula<O/> and we will also use the notation C<sb_>|t|<sb/> for the embedded cylinder. Now recall that the map <O_>formula<O/> was conformal on M<sb_>0<sb/> <*_>approximate-sign<*/> M*, and define <O_>formula<O/>; we notice from our constructions that the conformal type of <O_>formula<O/> depends only on <*_>mu<*/>(<*_>unch<*/>), hence only on <*_>unch<*/>. We conclude that <O_>formula<O/> can be decomposed as
<O_>formula<O/>
Note that the middle component, <O_>formula<O/>, is a pair of cylinders whose geometry depends only on |t|; moreover the geometry of these cylinders is bounded independently of |t| for <O_>formula<O/>. We will define the map <*_>zeta<*/> on each domain and then patch the definitions together across the frontiers.
We begin by considering the cylinder C<sb_>|t<sb_>0<sb/>|<sb/>, but before we define the map <*_>zeta<*/> on C<sb_>|t<sb_>0<sb/>|<sb/>, we discuss some of the geometry of a cylinder C<sb_>|t|<sb/>. First, it will be more convenient for us to work with the conformally equivalent domain <O_>formula<O/> where we identify <O_>formula<O/> with <O_>formula<O/>. Second, we notice that A<sb_>|t|<sb/> admits the (noncomplete) hyperbolic metrics <O_>formula<O/>; in this metric the curve <O_>formula<O/> is a geodesic of length <O_>formula<O/>, and the curves <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/> have constant geodesic curvature and are of length <O_>formula<O/>. It is often enough to focus on the subdomain <O_>formula<O/>; the domain <O_>formula<O/> is bounded by the geodesic <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>|t|<sb/> and is antiisometric to the interior of <O_>formula<O/>.
We now define the map <O_>formula<O/> by setting <O_>formula<O/> and then defining u(|t<sb_>0<sb/>|; |t|)(z) and v(|t<sb_>0<sb/>|; |t|)(z) in the coordinates on A<sb_>|t<sb_>o<sb/>|<sb/> by
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
Let <O_>formula<O/> denote the <O_>formula<O/> distance function. Then the map <O_>formula<O/> has the important property that
<O_>formula<O/>
Because u(|t<sb_>0<sb/>|; |t|)(x) is odd about <*_>gamma<*/><sb_>|t|<sb/>, we could also have defined <*_>zeta<*/> to take <O_>formula<O/> onto <O_>formula<O/> and the interior of <O_>formula<O/> onto the interior of <O_>formula<O/>; when we allow |t| to tend to zero, this will be a useful characterization of the map <*_>zeta<*/> between the domains <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>.
Later we will need to know <O_>formula<O/> and the Beltrami differential <O_>formula<O/>. These we compute to be
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
and
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
where <O_>formula<O/>, and <O_>formula<O/>.
It is perhaps easier to note that the first term in the brackets of (2.2) is <O_>formula<O/> and that
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
and
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
The following properties of (2.1), (2.2), and (2.3) will be crucial for our discussion:
(i)<O_>formula<O/>,
(ii)<O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>,
(iii) for <O_>formula<O/> is bounded independently of |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, for |t<sb_>0<sb/>| small,
for |t| > 0, the map <O_>formula<O/> and for |t| = 0, the map <O_>formula<O/> on <O_>formula<O/> (also on the interior of <O_>formula<O/>, with the natural conventions) where here we define <O_>formula<O/> and most importantly of all,
(v) for fixed <O_>formula<O/>, the families <O_>formula<O/>, v(z), and Dv(z) are analytic in <O_>formula<O/> for 0<|t|<<*_>delta<*/> for some <*_>delta<*/> and can be analytically continued to a neighborhood of <O_>formula<O/>.
Next consider the components <O_>formula<O/>, which are conformally a pair of cylinders of bounded geometry; we will assume for convenience that <O_>formula<O/> does not depend on (<*_>unch<*/>, t) and that B<sb_>1<sb/> and B<sb_>2<sb/> are the two connected components. Divide each cylinder B<sb_>i<sb/> into thirds so that <O_>formula<O/>, so that B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>1<sp/> share a frontier with C<sb_>|t|<sb/>, B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>2<sp/> are the middle thirds, and B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>3<sp/> share a frontier with <O_>formula<O/>. Suppose that B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>2<sp/> is parameterized by <O_>formula<O/>; using the anticonformal equivalence of B<sb_>1<sb/> with B<sb_>2<sb/>, we may suppose that {|z| = <*_>beta<*/>} parameterizes the boundary between B<sb_>1<sb/><sp_>2<sp/> and B<sb_>1<sb/><sp_>1<sp/> and also the boundary between B<sb_>2<sb/><sp_>2<sp/> and B<sb_>2<sb/><sp_>3<sp/>. Then we define <O_>formula<O/> to be a pair of twist diffeomorphisms realizing the difference in arguments arg t - arg t<sb_>0<sb/>, i.e. in the coordinated <O_>formula<O/> we define
<O_>formula&caption<O/>
We will later define <*_>zeta<*/> on B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>1<sp/> and B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>3<sp/> to interpolate between the maps on C<sb_>|t|<sb/>, B<sb_>i<sb/><sp_>2<sp/>, and <O_>formula<O/>.
On the remaining subsurface <O_>formula<O/>, define <*_>zeta<*/> to be a quasiconformal map <O_>formula<O/> depending only upon <*_>unch<*/> and <*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/> so that <O_>formula<O/> is the identity and <O_>formula<O/> is analytic in <*_>unch<*/>.
We are left to construct <*_>zeta<*/> on the cylindrical regions <O_>formula<O/>. Here we define <*_>zeta<*/> to interpolate between the maps defined on <O_>formula<O/> so that (i) <*_>zeta<*/> is analytic in (<*_>unch<*/>, |t|, arg t), with a real analytic continuation possible to a neighborhood of (<*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, t = 0), (ii) <*_>zeta<*/>(<*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, arg t<sb_>0<sb/>; <*_>unch<*/><sb_>0<sb/>, |t<sb_>0<sb/>|, arg t<sb_>0<sb/>)(z) = z and (iii) <O_>formula<O/>. Such a family of maps exists because we have defined <*_>zeta<*/> on <O_>formula<O/> to have those properties and to also have derivatives which are uniformly bounded on <O_>formula<O/>. This concludes our construction of the map <O_>formula<O/>.
2. Constructing the grafted metrics. Our next goal is the construction of the hyperbolic metric <O_>formula<O/> on <O_>formula<O/> in such a way that we can analyze its dependence on <*_>unch<*/>, |t|, and arg t. Our approach is to use the method of Wolpert in [Wlpt]: we first construct a family of smooth metrics <O_>formula<O/> on <O_>formula<O/> which are hyperbolic on C<sb_>|t|<sb/> and <O_>formula<O/> but which are generally not hyperbolic on <O_>formula<O/>. We then consider the pullback metric <O_>formula<O/> which will be hyperbolic on <O_>formula<O/> but generally not hyperbolic in <O_>formula<O/>.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="21">
THE SELF-JOININGS OF RANK TWO MIXING TRANSFORMATIONS
DANIEL ULLMAN
(Communicated by R. Daniel Mauldin)
ABSTRACT. The class of rank one mixing transformations has been known for some time to have certain so-called 'exotic' properties. Specifically, any rank one mixing T has only the two trivial factors, and nothing can commute with T but powers of T itself. This much was known to Ornstein in 1969 [3]. In 1983 J. King showed that rank one mixing transformations possess an even stronger property known as minimal self-joinings (MSJ). In this note we investigate how these results can be extended to the case of rank two mixing transformations. In this class, it is possible for there to exist nontrivial factors and commuting transformations: the square of a rank one mixing transformation and certain two point extensions of a rank one mixing transformation are rank two mixing [2]. What we prove is that, other than those two kinds of rank two mixing transformations, this class also has MSJ.
Definitions. Assume throughout that T is a measure-preserving automorphism of a Lebesgue probability space (X, B, <*_>mu<*/>). By a tower for T of height h we mean a set B <*_>unch<*/> B together with its first h translates under T, provided that these translates are disjoint. B is called the base of the tower <O_>formula<O/>, and, for <O_>formula<O/>, T<sp_>i<sp/>B is called a level of the tower. (Notice that according to this terminology, a tower of height h has h +1 levels.)
The well-known Rohklin Lemma asserts that, given any measure-preserving transformation T and any <*_>epsilon<*/>>0, there is a tower M for T with <O_>formula<O/>.
All partitions are presumed to consist of a finite number of measurable sets. If P<sb_>j<sb/> is a sequence of partitions of X, we say P<sb_>j<sb/> generates the <*_>sigma<*/>-algebra B if B is the smallest <*_>sigma<*/>-algebra containing all the P<sb_>j<sb/>.
A measure-preserving transformation T is called rank n or less if there is an infinite sequence of sets of n disjoint towers <O_>formula<O/> such that the partitions P<sb_>j<sb/> of X given by
<O_>formula<O/>
generate the full <*_>sigma<*/>-algebra B. Given such a sequence, the towers with subscript j are called j-towers. Obviously, we call a transformation rank n (exactly) if it is rank n or less but not rank n - 1 or less.
It turns out that the class of rank n or less transformations can be characterized as the family of automorphisms isomorphic to a cutting and stacking transformation of the unit interval with n or fewer towers at each stage. (The n =1 version of this fact was first prove by Baxter [1]; the case of general n is not much harder.) I do not describe the details of such a construction nor refer to cutting and stacking in the sequel. Suffice it to say that this result allows us to assume that the partitions P<sb_>j<sb/> in (1) form a nested sequence, each refining the previous.
A TxT-invariant measure <*_>unch<*/> on the Cartesian product space XxX, which projects to <*_>mu<*/> in both directions, is called a self-joining of T. Any T has certain obvious ergodic self-joinings; namely, product measure <*_>mu<*/>x<*_>mu<*/> and the so-called off-diagonal measures - measures defined on measurable rectangles by <O_>formula<O/> for some integer n. If these are the only ergodic self-joinings, then T is said to have minimal self-joinings (MSJ). This definition is due to D. Rudolph [4].
The commutant of T is the group of measure-preserving transformations that commute with T modulo the (necessarily normal) subgroup of integral powers of T. A factor <*_>sigma<*/>-algebra is a T-invariant sub-<*_>sigma<*/>-algebra of B. B itself and {<*_>phi<*/>, X} are factors of any T and are called trivial. It is not hard to see that MSJ implies that T has trivial commutant and factors. For if S commutes with T and is not a power of T, <O_>formula<O/> defines a new ergodic self-joining, and if F is a nontrivial T-invariant (factor) <*_>sigma<*/>-algebra, then <O_>formula<O/> defines a self-joining not all of whose ergodic components can be product measure or off-diagonal measures.
A map T is mixing (or satisfies the mixing property) if, for all A and B <*_>unch<*/> B, <O_>formula<O/> as n goes to infinity.
THE CLASSIFICATION THEOREM
Theorem. If T is a rank two mixing transformation, then either
(1) T is the square of a rank one mixing transformation,
(2) T is a two point extension of a rank one mixing transformation, or
(3) T has MSJ.
The proof proceeds through a series of lemmas. Throughout, T acts on a space (X, B, <*_>mu<*/>). For each natural number j, X is partitioned into two towers M<sb_>j<sb/>(1) and M<sb_>j<sb/>(2), called j-towers, and a set <O_>formula<O/>. M<sb_>j<sb/> and M<sb_>j<sb/>(2) have bases B<sb_>j<sb/>(1) and B<sb_>j<sb/>(2) and heights h<sb_>j<sb/>(1) and h<sb_>j<sb/>(2), respectively. Levels of j-towers are naturally called j-levels. The partitions P<sb_>j<sb/> of X whose elements are j-levels successively refine each other and generate B. We assume that the real numbers <*_>mu<*/>(M<sb_>j<sb/>(1)) and <*_>mu<*/>(M<sb_>j<sb/>(2)), for j = 1, 2, 3,..., are bounded away from zero, by <*_>gamma<*/>, say. (Otherwise, T is rank one.) Finally, we assume that the base of the j-towers are a union of at least twenty (j+1)-levels; this can be arranged by passing to a subsequence of towers j<sb_>k<sb/>.
We begin with a lemma that guarantees that almost all points in X lie in the middle 98% of their j-tower for at least 3/4 of all j. For 0<<*_>alpha<*/><1/2 and i =1 or 2, let
<O_>formula<O/>
and set
<O_>formula<O/>.
This is the set of points on one of the j-towers that are not too close to the top or bottom.
Lemma 1. Let
<O_>formula<O/>.
Then <*_>mu<*/>S(1/100) =1.
Proof. First notice that x<*_>unch<*/>S(1/99) implies that <O_>formula<O/> for all integers n. Consequently, <O_>formula<O/>, so
<O_>formula<O/>.
To show that <*_>mu<*/>S(1/100) =1, it is enough to show that <*_>mu<*/>s(1/99) >0, since then the left-hand side of (2) is an invariant set of positive measure.
The idea is that the sets D<sb_>j<sb/>(1/99), for j = 1, 2, 3,..., are close to being independent sets. We modify them slightly (to produce independent sets) and then use the law of large numbers.
Find four natural numbers a(1), a(2), b(1), and b(2) such that, if
<O_>formula<O/>,
then
<O_>formula<O/>,
<O_>formula<O/>,
and
<O_>formula<O/>.
Condition (5) says simply that E<sb_>j<sb/> must be a union of j-levels the first of which is a subset of the base of a (j - 1)-tower and the last of which is a subset of the top level of a (j - 1)-tower. That a(1), a(2), b(1), and b(2) can be chosen satisfying (3) and (4) requires that the j-towers be many times higher than the (j - 1)-towers, which is equivalent to the assumption made at the end of the first paragraph after the statement of the theorem.
Let <*_>nu<*/> be the measure <*_>mu<*/> restricted to <O_>formula<O/> and normalized; that is,
<O_>formula<O/>
for <O_>formula<O/>. Then the sets E<sb_>j<sb/> are independent with respect to nu, since no data of the form <O_>formula<O/> or <O_>formula<O/> for k>j give any information about which j-level the point x is on.
Hence the strong law of large numbers tells us that, for <*_>nu<*/>-almost every x,
<O_>formula<O/>.
But <O_>formula<O/> and so <*_>nu<*/>S(1/99) =1. This implies that <*_>nu<*/>S(1/99) >0 and so <*_>nu<*/>S(1/100) =1 as required.<*_>square<*/>
Hereafter, we assume that the property that Lemma 1 ascribes to almost all points in fact holds for all points. We may do this, since the property is invariant.
For any pair <O_>formula<O/>, we set r<sb_>j<sb/> equal to the greatest nonpositive integer i such that either T<sp_>i<sp/>x or T<sp_>i<sp/>y is in <O_>formula<O/>. Similarly, let s<sb_>j<sb/> be the smallest nonnegative integer i such that either T<sp_>i<sp/>x or T<sp_>i<sp/>y is in the top level of a j-tower, that is, in the set <O_>formula<O/>. We say that the interval of integers between r<sb_>j<sb/> and s<sb_>j<sb/> is a frame (the j-frame) for (x, y). Note that, when j is sufficiently large, both x and y are on j-towers, and for such j, the j-frame is shorter than both h<sb_>j<sb/>(1) and h<sb_>j<sb/>(2).
Lemma 2. Suppose <*_>unch<*/> is a self-joining of T, (x, y)<*_>unch<*/>XxX, and x and y are not on the same orbit of T. Suppose also that there is a subsequence J<*_>unch<*/>N of natural numbers j such that (1) x and y lie in the middle 98% of the same j-tower, and (2) for all sets A and B in X that are unions of levels of some tower,
<O_>formula<O/>
as j goes to infinity along the subsequence J. Then <O_>formula<O/>, product measure.
Comment. Condition (2) of the lemma is certainly satisfied if (x, y) is generic for <O_>unch<O/>, which means that for any sets A and B made out of levels of some tower,
<O_>formula<O/>.
Proof. For j<*_>unch<*/>J, let F<sb_>j<sb/> be the phase shift between the j-block in which x sits and the j-block in which y sits. By this I mean that if n(x) and n(y) are the smallest nonnegative integers such that <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>, then <O_>formula<O/>. Since x and y are assumed to be on different orbits of T, <O_>formula<O/>, as j goes to infinity along J.
Let A and B be subsets of X made up of j<sb_>0<sb/>-levels. Fix <*_>epsilon<*/> >0. Because T is mixing, there is an integer N so that
<O_>formula<O/>.
Pick j<*_>unch<*/>J so large that
<O_>formulae<O/>
and
<O_>formula<O/>.
By switching the roles of x and y if necessary, we may assume that <O_>formula<O/>, so that Figure 1 is qualitatively correct.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
We now calculate:
<O_>formula<O/>.
The first equality here comes from (9) and the second holds because <O_>formula<O/> if and only if <O_>formula<O/> and <O_>formula<O/>, when <O_>formula<O/>. If <O_>formula<O/>, let
<O_>formula<O/>,
the set of points on the same j-tower as x, at a height between 0 and s<sb_>j<sb/>-r<sb_>j<sb/>. Now (7) implies that <O_>formula<O/> is made entirely of complete j-levels, hence expression (10) above implies
<O_>formula<O/>.
Since C is at least one hundrethhundredth of M<sb_>j<sb/>(i) (because of condition (1) of the lemma) we see that <*_>mu<*/>C ><*_>gamma<*/>/100. (Remember that <O_>formula<O/>.) Thus,
<O_>formula<O/>,
which, owing to (6) and (8), is <O_>formula<O/>. The outcome of this calculation is that
<O_>formula<O/>,
or
<O_>formula<O/>,
where L is a constant independent of A and B. Since this inequality holds for all A and B made up of j<sb_>0<sb/>-levels, and since j<sb_>0<sb/> is arbitrary,
<O_>formula<O/>.
Finally, since <*_>unch<*/> is TxT-invariant (and normalized), we conclude that <O_>formula<O/> and the lemma is proved.<*_>square<*/>
Lemma 3. Suppose <*_>unch<*/> is an ergodic self-joining of T that is not product or off-diagonal measure. Then for all <*_>epsilon<*/> > 0, there is a natural number N so that j < N implies
<O_>formula<O/>.
Proof. Suppose that there are an <*_>epsilon<*/> > 0 and a sequence of sets <O_>formula<O/> with <O_>formula<O/>, for infinitely many j. Then <O_>formula<O/>, so lim inf<sb_>j<sb/>A<sb_>j<sb/> has a generic point (x, y) for <*_>unch<*/>. If x and y were on the same orbit, then <*_>unch<*/> would be an off-diagonal measure. If x and y were not on the same orbit, then we could infer from <O_>formula<O/> that condition (1) of lemma (2) is satisfied. The genericity of (x, y) gives us condition (2) of that lemma, which would imply that <*_>unch<*/> is product measure. The lemma is proved.<*_>square<*/>
Lemma 4. Suppose that <*_>unch<*/> is an ergodic joining of T that is not product measure. Assume that both (x, y<sb_>1<sb/>) and (x, y<sb_>2<sb/>) are generic for <*_>unch<*/> and that x and y<sb_>i<sb/> are on opposite j-towers for all sufficiently large j, for i = 1 and 2. Then y<sb_>1<sb/> = y<sb_>2<sb/>.
Proof. y<sb_>1<sb/> and y<sb_>2<sb/> are on the same j-tower for all sufficiently large j. Let r<sb_>j<sb/> and s<sb_>j<sb/> be the beginning and the end of the j-frame for (y<sb_>1<sb/>, y<sb_>2<sb/>).
Skip those j for which either y<sb_>1<sb/> or y<sb_>2<sb/> is not in D<sp_>j<sp/>(1/100). Lemma 1 assures us that we are left with infinitely many j. Along the subsequence that remains, we have <O_>formula<O/>.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
There is a natural topology on X associated with the towers M<sb_>j<sb/>(i), and that is the one generated by levels of towers. That is, a set is open (and closed) if it is a countable union of elements of the partitions P<sb_>j<sb/>.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="22">Women between the ages of fifteen and fifty-nine now normally have a job or are looking for one. In Denmark, 75.9 percent of adult women were employed in 1987. Spain had the lowest participation rate in the EC with 37.5 percent of adult women at work (Jackson 1990: 5). Women most commonly work in the service sector. Indeed, 76.4 percent of them find their jobs in that sector (CEC 1989p: 124). Women are also most likely to work in feminized work places. They are bank tellers, nurses, teachers, and cleaners in hotels. They are unlikely to be bank managers, executives in private business, well-paid technicians, or hotel managers. Women who work in industry tend to be concentrated in a few sectors which are less well paid and more labor intensive, such as the clothing and textile industry. The situation in Germany illustrates the fact of segregation. Ninety percent of working women find their jobs in only twelve occupational categories (CEC 1989k: 87). Women also fill a disproportionate number of part-time jobs; for example, they provide 90 percent of the part-time work force in Germany (CEC 1989v: 72). According to the latest report, 28.6 percent of women's employment is part-time (CEC 1989p: 140). Working women in the EC still have not achieved equality in pay or opportunity despite laws requiring equality. Women's pay is probably 31 percent less than men's (Jackson 1990: 50). However, pay scales differ greatly among the member states. What women want and what society expects for women also varies among the member states. For example, a French woman employed in a bank has a much greater chance of reaching a managerial position than does her British counterpart. Also the French woman is much more likely to find a place in a good public nursery for her child than her British counterpart, and both the British and the French woman would expect more social acceptance for their careers than would a female bank employee in Portugal.
NATIONAL POLICIES FOR WOMEN IN THE WORK FORCE
The governments of all of the member states of the EC have laws to protect and assist working women. In addition, the governments have created high-level agencies or even ministries for women's issues. The old paternalistic laws, such as those banning women from night work, have gradually given way to more modern laws on equal treatment. Discrimination is illegal in all countries, but the definition of discrimination varies considerably, as does the quality of enforcement (Landau 1985). A 1983 French law requires employers to make an annual report about their personnel policies for women. The law provides sanctions for transgressions as well as protections for an employee making charges against an employer (France 1984: 487). In general, most governments have been more effective in banning overt discrimination than in devising policies for affirmative action.
Working mothers have more assistance from the law in EC countries than they have in the United States. Every country has a law which provides for maternity leave. Italian women are entitled to twenty weeks of paid leave but British women to only six. In all countries, employers may not fire a regular employee because of pregnancy or refuse to allow a woman to return to work following maternity leave. Parental leave is also beginning to appear in some countries. Most countries have inadequate public provisions for child care, but the French government provides a good system of public child care centers. That system may be a factor in explaining why French women are more likely to remain in the work force during childbearing years than are women in most other EC countries (OECD 1985: 34).
New public policies for women are being devised in response to unemployment and to changes in the work place. Schools are encouraging girls to consider a variety of careers. Training programs are being reformed so that women may participate more easily. A great deal of research is being conducted in order to ascertain what is needed in order to better use women in the work force. The efforts are scattered and sporadic, but governments are increasingly accepting responsibility to assure that women have the preparation needed for modern job opportunities.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF EC POLICIES FOR WOMEN
The right of the EC to formulate a policy for working women derives from the Treaty of Rome. Article 119 establishes the principle of equal pay for men and women. The preamble to the treaty as well as Articles 117 to 122 give the EC a general grant of power for social policy.
The 1970s was the decade when the EC began to address women's issues. It was a period when both the Council of Ministers and the Commission had leaders who were sympathetic to the social concerns of the day. Equality, worker's rights, and social justice were values which found their way onto the political agendas of the countries of Western Europe and onto the agenda of the EC. The Social Action Program of 1974 was the result. The program promised action "to achieve equality between men and women as regards access to employment and vocational training and advancement and as regards working conditions including pay" (CEC 1974b). The statement constituted the first elaboration of the meaning of Article 119 and laid the foundation for the EC to act over a broad range of job rights for women.
The EC quickly started to fulfill its commitment by enacting three directives on equal rights at work. They were the Equal Pay Directive of 1975, the Equal Treatment Directive of 1976, and the Social Security Directive of 1978. The meaning of each directive has been broadened by subsequent rulings of the European Court, but most member states have been remiss in enforcing them. Today the definition of equal pay in the EC means equal pay for work of equal value. Equal treatment now makes illegal all forms of sex discrimination at work including hiring, training, and promotion. Most importantly, it protects women against both direct and indirect discrimination. The directive on social security applies to both national social security systems and special occupational and supplementary schemes. It does not require uniformity among the national programs, and it allows those programs to contain special benefits for women. It protects women against provisions which are discriminatory even when the discrimination is indirect (CEC 1983).
The organization of the Commission was changed in the 1970s in response to the new interest in women's issues. The units added continue to be responsible for EC policies for women. The equal opportunities unit in the Directorate General for Employment, Social Affairs, and Education (DG V) carries on the bulk of the work. A handful of civil servants are responsible for the information gathering, analysis, and consulting necessary for preparing and overseeing policies for working women. DG V is under the direction of the commissioner who holds the portfolio for social affairs. (In 1991, the commissioner responsible for social affairs was Vasso Papandreou. She was the first woman in that position and one of the only two women ever to be a commissioner.) A women's information service operates in the Directorate General for Information, Communication and Culture (DG X). It is responsible for disseminating information about women and publishes a series called Women of Europe. The European Parliament and the Economic and Social Committee have special committees to deal with women's issues. Both institutions have advocated a strong EC policy for women. The Court of Justice has also played a role in developing the EC policy for women through a liberal interpretation of EC law.
The scope and ambition of the EC policy for working women developed in the 1970s is quite remarkable. The policy contains both legal measures to ban discrimination and nonlegal measures to facilitate the social and psychological changes necessary for true equality. Traditional family values intermingle with newer feminist concerns in a broad range of initiatives. For example, the Commission sponsored seminars to encourage bankers to be less sexist in their personnel policies. The Commission studied vocational education in order to ascertain why women remain in feminized work places. The Commission delved into the question of the relationship between family responsibilities and success in the work place. The EC used the Social Fund to provide training for women to enter jobs formerly inaccessible to them. During the formative period of the 1970s, the EC chose an activist approach which surpassed merely formulating measures essential to harmonize national policies which might have inhibited competition in the internal market.
In 1981, the disparate EC activities for women were brought together in the first action program to promote equal opportunities for women. The opening sentence of the document states, "The Community's longstanding commitment to the improvement of the situation of women has established it as a pioneer and innovator in this field" (CEC 1981). The rest of the document does not match the bold opening sentence. Discussion in the document is brief and focuses primarily on the problems working women were facing because of the recession. Member governments were given the primary responsibility of alleviating the problems.
The annex of the document contains sixteen proposals for legal and nonlegal measures to promote equality. In almost every case, the responsibility for action is divided between the EC and the member state. Frequently, the role of the EC is only to study the situation and then consider action; however, six of the proposals fit into the activist mold of the 1970s. They are:
1. An EC law on equal treatment for women in occupational, social security schemes.
2. An EC law on equal treatment for self-employed women and women in agriculture.
3. An EC law on parental leave and leave for family reasons, and on the building of public services and facilities to assist working parents.
4. Possible legislation on pregnancy and motherhood if the Commission considers it necessary.
5. Future legislation on steps needed for action to assist women in achieving equal opportunity.
6. Extension of EC action on vocational education so women can participate in new technological sectors through the Social Fund and the center for vocational training in Berlin.
The dates for the action program, 1982-1985, coincided with the period when the integration appeared stalled and economic problems took precedence. Only the first two proposals listed above became law according to the schedule given in the program (CEC 1984b); however, the other proposals remained on the agenda of the Commission.
A second action program appeared in 1985, when Europessimism was strongest. It was also the year when the EC was deeply involved with two historic documents: the White Paper on Completing the Internal Market and the Single European Act. Seen against that time, the second action program is quite remarkable. Although it contains no major new programs, it is a thoughtful and interesting document. It shows the influence of research conducted in the Commission over the past decade. Emphasis is given to the psychological dimension of discrimination. The writers of the document doubted the efficacy of laws to end discrimination. Ways to change attitudes, and not just attitudes in the work place, were needed. The basis of discrimination is in society and in the family. The sharing of family responsibility is listed as the sine qua non for true equality (CEC 1986b: 5). Many of the proposals in the document reflect this orientation, such as the proposal for a campaign to increase public awareness. Other proposals were a reiteration of some in the first action program, which still await acceptance. Four proposals were to become focal points of controversy. They are:
1. A legal instrument to facilitate action by women against employers who discriminate. The instrument was to be based on the principle of the reversal of the burden of proof.
2. A code of practice on positive actions which should guide employers and member states in order to facilitate providing equal opportunity.
3. A measure to protect working women during pregnancy and motherhood.
4. A directive on parental leave and leave for family reasons.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="23">If any of these changes are substantial, they will affect the relative values of the different ways of institutionalizing property rights. If the result of these changes is that a new property rights scheme can produce greater aggregate benefits than the existing system does, the contracting parties will consider the following cost-benefit calculation: Do these additional benefits exceed the costs of changing the present contract? If the answer is yes, the actors will enter into a new contract institutionalizing new rights (North, 1990: 67). Here we see the third important element of the transaction-costs theory: Institutional change will occur only if the resulting outcome is Pareto superior to the previous institutional arrangement.
Note that at this point we are discussing only the motivations of the actors in the individual exchange. The fact that low-cost rules may be selected by marketlike competition has not yet entered the analysis. North's reliance on transaction-costs minimization reflects the approach of the new institutional economics. In analyzing the contractual arrangements of social organization, the theory proceeds from the "working rule that low-cost organizations tend to supersede high-cost ones" (Eggertsson, 1990: 213-14, emphasis in original). When exceptions to this rule are observed, three factors should be considered.
First, there may be hidden benefits that are not readily apparent. This reduces to a claim that the apparent exception to the working rule is in fact an instance of the more general rule of maximizing benefits. Here a higher-cost institutional rule in fact produces a more beneficial exchange than does a less costly one. Second, the efforts of social actors to create low-cost institutional forms may be constrained by the interests of the state. This latter issue is closely related to issues of intentional design and reform, but it is proposed as an explanation of why the voluntary arrangements being analyzed here can be restricted by some type of formal external constraint. The point relevant to this analysis is the implicit claim that if it were not for external constraints, rational social actors would voluntarily create the least costly forms of organization. This is consistent with the third exception to the minimization-of-costs rule: uncertainty. According to this account, actors may not create the least costly rules because they lack either the capacity or the knowledge to establish them.
This minimization-cost standard is a problematic one. As the arguments in Chapter 2 demonstrate, the claim that the minimization of aggregate transaction costs is the motivation for institutional development and change is inconsistent with individual rationality. The assumption of narrow rationality on which the transaction-costs approach is based implies that strategic actors will prefer more costly rules if these rules give them greater individual benefits than those from less costly ones. Remember that in this case the explanation is not inability or incapacity but, rather, self-interest. The transaction-costs approach does not predict costly rules produced by fully informed, self-interested behavior. Here we return to some of the same explanatory problems we encountered with the theory of social conventions. The standard transaction-costs approach fails to explain either the distributional features of informal social conventions or the redistributive changes in these rules.
I should clarify this criticism in the context of current attempts by Libecap and North, among others, to incorporate distributional considerations. The standard approach has traditionally avoided the question of power asymmetries and instead has focused on the problem of transaction-costs minimization among symmetrically endowed actors (North, 1981). North (1990) acknowledges the importance of asymmetries for explaining distributional differences; Libecap (1989) explicitly addresses the complications introduced by distributional concerns in the effort to contract for socially efficient property rights. These attempts are in the spirit of the sorts of arguments I am making. But what these authors seem to have in mind are efforts at intentionally creating formal property rights. The importance of power asymmetries for explaining the emergence of informal rules governing property rights and economic organization has not been pursued; and this is the basis of my criticism. This failure can be explained by the reliance on competition as the selection mechanism for such decentralized emergence, competition thought to undercut the importance of power in individual exchange.
In regard to institutional change, the dubious relationship between a criterion of Pareto-superior change and strategic rationality has already been well exposed. Not only does the transaction-costs approach predict a Pareto-improving institutional change that might not be accepted by strategic actors (the path-dependent argument), but it also fails to explain either redistributive or Pareto-inferior change. This follows by implication from the combination of a reliance on voluntary agreement and a limitation to Pareto-superior change. If a change entails a loss to some individuals as a cost of establishing new property rights that produce greater aggregate benefits, narrowly rational actors will not voluntarily agree to the change.
The transaction-costs theory of exchange and competition has a way to resolve this weakness: a reconciliation of transaction-costs minimization (and the consequent maximization of aggregate benefits) with the pursuit of individual gain by means of compensation. We can see how the idea of compensation can be used in this way by examining Posner's (1980) interpretation of property rights and economic organization in primitive societies. He argues for an analogy between primitive economic institutions and insurance. That is, he explains the rules structuring economic activity in these primitive societies as a means of distributing risk in the community. The property rights scheme provides rules governing the enjoyment of community resources. Distributional advantages are granted to certain members of the community, and they are explained as the product of an exchange with the less advantaged, an exchange for the protection in the future if the community is struck by hard times. Here Posner reconciles distributional differences with the long-term efficiency of the property rights scheme. This insurance analogy can be seen as a form of compensation: The less advantaged are compensated for the distributional bias in the economic rights scheme by the promise of future insurance protection.
It is easy to reduce this insurance explanation to a mere functionalist assertion without some fairly rigorous empirical evidence. To see this, consider the general logic of compensation. Say that two actors currently share the benefits in the following manner: $60,000 to A and $40,000 to B. Now assume that circumstances change so that an alternative set of property rights allows the actors to produce an additional $25,000 per year but that this alternative scheme produces a new annual distribution: $50,000 to A and $75,000 to B. The logic of the new institutional economics predicts that as long as the aforementioned limitations on change are not applicable, the actors will adopt the new contract. But as long as the mechanism of change is one of voluntary agreement, my argument is that the new rules will not be adopted because they diminish A's benefits. If, however, B agreed to compensate A by giving her a side payment of at least $10,000 per year, then according to some accounts of individual rationality, it would be rational for A to agree to the changes.
Here the logic is plausible, and in the case of the intentional design of formal institutions, compensation is a possibility that must be considered. But the utility of this concept for explaining the spontaneous emergence of informal rights is highly questionable. The empirical requirements necessary to satisfy the theory are substantial, and there must be evidence of compensatory payments between the individuals in the institutional change, payments that are temporally related to these changes and are anticipated before the change. In the case of spontaneous emergence, an additional element must be shown: Either the form of compensation must be a common practice in similar exchanges in a society, or the compensation must be an element of the creation of those contractual rules that are subsequently selected out by the competitive process. Posner's insurance explanation exemplifies the weakness of most accounts of compensatory-like mechanisms: The evidence necessary to justify a compensation explanation is lacking.
Competition. But the transaction-costs approach invokes more than the actors' intentions in an individual exchange to explain the emergence of social institutions. Individual exchanges merely produce a variety of possible institutional forms, but the key selection mechanism is competition. Many explanations of institutional development and change situate the decision to establish social institutions in the context of a market or a marketlike environment. The main influence of the market on the choice of institutional form is in the competitive pressure it supposedly exerts on the institutionalization process. There are two related but conceptually distinct ways that competitive pressure can enter into this analysis.
First, as a dynamic effect, competition can be a selection mechanism that determines the survival of various institutional forms on grounds of survival and reproductive fitness. This is the logic behind Alchian's (1950) model of evolutionary competition, used in most economic analyses of institutional emergence. The existence of a large number of firms seeking profits from a common pool of consumers produces pressure for survival. Over time those firms that employ less efficient techniques lose profits to those that are more efficient. Losing profits eventually translates into extinction. As the competitive process continues, only those firms that use efficient techniques survive. Second, as a static effect, competition can undermine the actors' bargaining power in a particular interaction:
The main curb on a person's bargaining power, and the main pacifying influence on trade in general, is competition. A person has competition if the party he wants to trade with has alternative opportunities of exchange. The people who offer these alternative opportunities to his opposite party are his competitors. Competition restricts a person's bargaining power by making the other less dependent and therefore less keen on striking a bargain with him. (Scitovsky, 1971: 14)
This latter effect enters into a theory of development and change only to the extent that it establishes the environment in which rational actors seek to produce institutions.
The existence of competition raises questions for theories of institutional emergence and change. The dynamic effect forms the basis of the theory of exchange and competition. The relevant question here is whether the competitive pressure is sufficient to select out less efficient institutional rules. The static effect relates mainly to arguments such as the one in the next chapter, that would invoke the asymmetries of power in a society in order to explain institutional emergence. The relevant question there is whether the existence of competition prevents social actors from using asymmetries in power to develop institutions that produce systematic distributional consequences. This static effect is also related to the theory of exchange and competition in that it justifies ignoring power asymmetries in its own analysis. It is important to remember that competition is not an either/or phenomenon; there are degrees of competition and therefore degrees of competitive effect. The best way to answer these questions is to establish the empirical conditions under which competition affects the emergence of social institutions. Because the issues are so closely related, the analysis is best presented by addressing both of these questions. I will clarify a few of the conclusions in my later discussion of bargaining theory.
What are the prerequisites for the existence of competition? Lists of the necessary conditions for marketlike competition are numerous. According to Scitovsky's analysis (1971) of competition, the following conditions are necessary for the existence of competition in social institutions: (1) a large number of competitors in pursuit of a common pool of resources, (2) a set of institutional alternatives differentiated only by their distributional consequences, (3) full information about the availability of alternatives, and (4) low transaction costs. If an explanation of institutional change is to invoke competition as a relevant factor, these conditions must be empirically satisfied.
Discussions of competition in the market are numerous. What I want to do is limit my analysis to those issues unique to the question of competition in regard to social institutions, as this will allow to me to emphasize the difficulties of satisfying these conditions in the institutional case. Central to my argument is the following distinction: Institutions are not goods.
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Why Fewer Women Become Physicians: Explaining the Premed Persistence Gap
Robert Fiorentine and Stephen Cole
Previous research indicates that the answer to the question of why fewer women become physicians lies in the 'premed persistence gap.' Women are no less likely than men to enter undergraduate premed programs, but they are less likely to complete the program and apply to medical school. This article presents data from a study designed to test four plausible explanations of the persistence gap that are consistent with the structural barriers, normative barriers, and cognitive differences theories of gender inequality. The findings do not support the 'perception of discrimination' hypothesis, the 'discouragement' hypothesis, the 'self-derogation' hypothesis, and the 'anticipated role conflict' hypothesis. Rather, the evidence suggests another explanation - the normative alternatives approach, This approach holds that contemporary gender norms offer women fewer disincentives to changing or lowering their high-status career goals when encountering hardship, self-doubt, and the possibility of failure.
INTRODUCTION
This article presents the latest results of a research program designed to understand the contemporary causes of gender inequality in the United States (Cole, 1986; Fiorentine, 1986, 1987, 1988a, 1988b). The specific area of research is medicine, one of the most prestigious and lucrative occupations.
As is true with other prestigious occupations, medicine is characterized by extensive gender inequality. Men make up about two-thirds of medical students and more than 80% of all practicing physicians in the United States (Cole, 1986; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1987; Bickel, 1988). Men are overrepresented in the most prestigious specialties, and they are more likely to hold positions of authority in hospitals and clinics (Lorber, 1984).
Three theoretical approaches have emerged in sociology and social psychology to explain the underrepresentation of women in high-status professional and executive positions. The structural barriers approach holds that differences in occupational achievement are a consequence of sex discrimination that limits the opportunity of women. Because female gender may be a 'discrepant status' that undermines trust and certainty so highly desired by organizational players (Kanter, 1977) or because prejudicial attitudes of employers force women into the less desirable, secondary-sector jobs (cf. Bibb and Form, 1977; Bridges, 1982) or because capitalist production systematically exploits female labor (Hartmann, 1976; Eisenstein, 1979), women may encounter barriers to their mobility.
The normative barriers approach assumes that gender socialization brings young women to view the pursuit of success in a high-status career as a transgression of norms (Angrist and Almquist, 1975; Douvan, 1976). Anticipating social rejection (Horner, 1972), and believing they would be unable to fulfill the role expectations of wife and mother if they were committed to a demanding career (Angrist and Almquist, 1975; O´Leary, 1974), young women place limits on their ambitions, emphasize the primacy of their domestic role, and select normatively appropriate, 'feminine' occupations.
The cognitive differences approach assumes that because cultural stereotypes do not depict women in achievement roles (cf. Weitzman et al., 1972), or because parents and others are less encouraging of female achievement (Hoffman, 1972), women have lower confidence in their ability to perform successfully in a variety of achievement situations (Lenney, 1977; Maccoby and Jacklin, 1974). With lower levels of confidence, women are more likely to attribute their successes to 'external' or 'unstable' causes such as luck or effort, and their failures to 'internal' or 'stable' causes such as low ability or task difficulty (cf. Weiner et al., 1971; Deaux, 1976; Frieze et al., 1982). As successes are discounted while failures are affirmed, women are less likely to enter into, persist with, or perform well in a wide array of achievement tasks.
In earlier research we looked closely at the structural barriers explanation of the underrepresentation of female physicians. Inasmuch as women comprise only about one-third of the students currently admitted to medical school, it could be that medical schools discriminate against female applicants. Medical schools may employ restrictive quotas (Walsh, 1977), they could subject female applicants to more rigorous admissions standards, of they may systematically, if unconsciously, devalue their credentials. But in an analysis of application and admission rates of males and females to all American medical schools (Cole, 1986), it was determined that female applicants have about the same qualifications as male applicants, and they are just as likely to be admitted to medical schools. Women account for one-third of the admittees simply because they constitute one-third of the pool of applicants.
The evidence suggests that medical schools do not overtly discriminate against female applicants. But what happens once they enter medical school? Are women admitted only to be systematically 'cooled out' after they begin their training? The evidence suggests not. Women graduate from medical school at almost the same rate as men (Journal of the American Medical Association, 1984, 1986).
If women are as likely as men to get into and through medical school, then efforts to understand why fewer women become physicians need to focus on gender differences in ambition rather than differences in opportunity. It needs to be determined why fewer women apply to medical school.
Subsequent research has demonstrated that the answer lies in the 'premed persistence gap': An equal ratio of women and men enter undergraduate premed programs, but men are twice as likely to complete the program and apply to medical school (Fiorentine, 1986, 1987). Further, it was determined that the persistence differential cannot be explained entirely by differences in academic performance, even though female premed students earn slightly lower grades in the required premed courses. For while women with a marginally competitive or a noncompetitive academic performance are more likely to relinquish their medical career goals, women with a competitive grade average of 3.50 or higher are no less likely to persist in the program and apply to medical school.
A similar persistence gap exists for male and female high school students who aspire to high-status professional occupations such as doctor, college teacher, scientist, and lawyer. Women with an A average are just as likely as their male counterparts to persist with these career aspirations, but at every lower academic level, males are from one and one-half to two times more likely to maintain their professional aspirations from the sophomore to the senior years (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1983; Fiorentine, 1986). This suggests that the premed persistence gap is explained by general social or cultural processes rather than by factors that are unique to premedical programs.
Although that earlier study demonstrated that sex differences in academic performance account for only a small portion of the premed persistence differential, it was not designed to empirically examine nonperformance explanations of the persistence gap. This article presents data from a second study that tests four plausible explanations that are consistent with the (informal) structural barriers, normative barriers, and cognitive differences theories of gender inequality.
Perception of Discrimination
Even though medical schools do not overtly discriminate against female applicants, this 'objective reality' may not be the subjective perception of many female premed students. It may be that young women erroneously assume medical schools restrict admission to all but the most academically distinguished female students. If so, then those with a highly competitive performance would be about as likely as young men to persist, but those with a less competitive performance would underestimate their chances of admission, and would be less likely to complete the premed program and apply to medical school.
Discouragement
Although there has been a great deal of change in gender expectations over the last several decades, it could be that professors, parents, peers, and lovers continue to treat the medical career goals of young women with more indifference, less encouragement, or even outright hostility. As premed programs are usually competitive, even slight differences in encouragement may lead women with marginally competitive and non-competitive performances to believe the goal of becoming a physician is unattainable or inappropriate. It would not be immediately apparent, however, why women with a competitive performance are either not discouraged by others or do not react to this discouragement by relinquishing their medical career goals. One possibility is that the negative reactions of others are not sufficiently strong to sway the most determined, who eagerly and realistically anticipate success.
Self-Derogation
Consistent with the assumption of expectancy-value and attribution theories (Atkinson, 1964; Weiner, 1986; Weiner et al., 1971), it may be that young women enter the premed program with lower expectancies of success, and attribute a less-than-competitive performance to stable, internal causes (low ability), or to stable, external causes (high task difficulty). If so, then women would be less likely to believe they could turn a marginally competitive or a noncompetitive performance into a competitive one, and consequently, less likely to persist in the premed program.
Anticipated Role Conflict
Finally, it may be that young women initially underestimate the ease of negotiating family demands and a career in medicine. Realizing they are forced to choose between their career goals and their family plans, most relinquish their career goals, while some, particularly those with a competitive academic performance, relinquish their conventional family plans.
METHOD
As in the original investigation, transcripts of all male and female nontransfer premed students entering the State University of New York at Stony Brook as freshmen between 1982 and 1985 were acquired. During four weeks in April 1986, trained interviewers attempted to locate and interview, via telephone, all persisting and defecting students, including those who had withdrawn from the university. Interviews were completed with 302 males and 240 females. Only one male student refused to participate in the survey. Interviews were completed with all persisting and defecting premed students who were currently enrolled at the time of the survey. There was no difference in the distribution of males and females by year in college. Among the males in the sample, 26% were freshmen, 26% sophomores, 25% juniors, and 22% seniors. Among females, 27% were freshmen, 26% sophomores, 25% juniors, and 22% seniors.
As typical in attrition studies, some of the students who were no longer enrolled at Stony Brook could not be located in a national search, and were not interviewed. The sample represents 73% of all males and 60% of all females who began their studies as premed students. Because females were more likely to drop out of the premed program (and not leave a forwarding address or phone number) they were more likely to be in the hard-to-find subsample. Students who were not interviewed had very low GPAs (about a D+ average), but there was no difference between males and females in this group. Inability to locate these students had the following effect on the results: (1) the sample has a higher grade average than the population of all those who began as premed students and (2) the proportion of persisters in the sample is higher than it would be if there were data on all those who began as premeds. This would not, as far as we can tell, have influenced any of the conclusions about gender differences in persistence.
Focused fact-to-fact interviews also were conducted with 23 female and 13 male premed students during the fall 1985 and spring 1986 semesters. Students in the main sample (n = 542) were categorized along lines of persistence, grades, and sex; and then a small number within these broad categories were randomly selected for interviewing.
In order to assess initial expectancies of success prior to entering the premed program, a list of high school students who planned to begin as freshmen in the fall of 1986 and were preregistered for any two of the required premed courses was acquired from the registrar's office (n = 76). Sixty-eight of these students could be located, and interviews were completed during the same four-week period in April with the 62 students who indicated they planned a 'premed' course of study.
Premed persistence was assessed by self-report measures along with actual records of medical school application acquired from the Office of Undergraduate Studies. Respondents were determined to be 'persisters' if they either had applied to medical school (premed students typically apply to medical school during the spring semester of their junior year) or indicated they planned to apply to medical school in the future.
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DESIGN FOR VULNERABILITY: CUES AND REACTIONS TO FEAR OF CRIME
Jack L. Nasar
Ohio State University
Bonnie Fisher
University of Cincinnati
Fear of crime is a critical problem on university campuses. This paper describes cues in the built environment that may affect fear of crime. It develops and tests a theory about the relationship between these cues and fear, and consequent reactions. In our analysis of responses to open-ended questions, we found that fear was heightened by several site-specific cues: poor prospect for the passerby due to inadequate lighting, blocked escape for the passerby, and concealment for the offender. Respondents also reported avoidance, protective, and collective actions in response to their site-specific fears. The results suggest that reductions in fear (and actual crime) on campus may be achieved through the design of micro-level physical features.
Introduction. Fear of criminal victimization threatens the quality of life for many Americans (Gallup Poll, 1989). Almost half of the U.S. population have reported feeling unsafe in areas within a mile of their homes (National Opinion Research Center, 1987). Many citizens have been found to feel unsafe in the neighborhoods where they shop, work, go to school, and seek entertainment (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1984; Fisher, 1991).
Fear of crime is also a significant problem on college campuses, causing faculty, staff, students, and parents to demand safer campuses (Gaines, 1989). Recent court rulings have held universities liable for foreseeable victimizations (Raddatz, 1988), and Congress has passed a law requiring colleges and universities to publicly report their crime statistics (House Report 101-883, Section 201-205, 1990). All of these factors pressure college administrators to address the safety concerns and needs of the university.
To better understand causes of fear of crime, researchers have examined demographics factors. They have found higher levels of fear among socially or physically vulnerable individuals, such as minorities, low-income people, women or the elderly, especially after dark (Box, Hale, and Andrews, 1988; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981; Warr, 1984). Most young urban women, a group prominent on many campuses, have been found to fear certain types of personal crimes, such as rape (Warr, 1985); and when individuals are fearful, they have been found to adopt different crime prevention behaviors (Gates and Rohe, 1987; Lab, 1990).
Researchers have also moved beyond demographics predictors to examine contextual causes. In this regard, we see the occurrence of victimization from two interrelated theoretical levels - one at the macro-level and the other at the micro-level. From the macro-level perspective, researchers have consistently found that neighborhood-level problems, such as 'physical and social disorders' or 'incivilities,' heighten fear of crime (Gates and Rohe, 1987; Skogan and Maxfield, 1981; Wilson and Kelling, 1982). While this macro-level perspective explains broad characteristics of fear, it misses the micro-level cues in the built environment that affect feelings of vulnerability and fear of crime at a specific location. Yet, research has shown that offenders rely on micro-level cues to select a suitable target (cf. Taylor and Gottfredson, 1986). The cues indicate opportunities for committing a crime. A sizable body of research has revealed links between the built environment, crime, and crime prevention at the street or block level (Jacobs, 1961; Jeffery, 1977), or the site level, as in housing projects (Newman, 1972; Merry, 1981) or schools (Hope, 1985).
The role of the physical environment on university campuses has been overlooked. Yet, campuses have high levels of crime and fear of crime, and they often have macro-level conditions that lead to these problems. Routine activity theory explains victimization as a function of the routine activities of victims that place them at risk (Cohen and Felson, 1979). Campuses exhibit all three risk factors: the opportunity for victimization presented by potential targets (students, faculty and staff), a supply of motivated offenders nearby (neighborhoods with poor socio-economic conditions), and poor guardianship (open access and varying levels of security among students).
With knowledge of how micro-level features affect crime and fear of crime, university officials can institute design policies to reduce the risk. They can plan, evaluate or alter campus buildings and micro-level features to promote safety. Compared to students and personnel, physical facilities are relatively permanent. Thus, while educational programs only have short-term value because they must be repeated for new students and personnel, environmental design strategies can produce long-term positive effects on crime and feelings of vulnerability.
How can campuses be designed for safety? Unfortunately, there has been little empirical evidence on the effects of the physical arrangements on crime and fear of crime on campus. Most studies of environmental strategies have concentrated on residential or commercial areas (Kuskmuk and Whittemore, 1981). This paper draws from both the macro- and micro-level perspectives to understand the cues in the outdoor environment to feelings of vulnerability and reactions to that fear. We present a theoretical model of how micro-level site features affect fear of crime and we describe the results of a study aimed at uncovering some of those cues in relation to a campus setting. In particular, we analyzed written responses to open-ended questions in relation to three buildings on a university campus. The results revealed three micro-level cues as important influences on site-specific fear of crime: refuge, escape and prospect (depending on different light levels). Furthermore, we found evidence of changes in behavior in response to the site-specific fears.
Cues and reactions to fear of crime. The built environment may go relatively unnoticed until it creates a substantial problem or pleasure. Nevertheless, the design of the built environment does influence perceptions of safety (Fisher and Nasar, 1992) which in turn may affect psychological well-being, and spatial behaviors (Nasar, 1988; Russell, 1989).
In areas where crime and fear are present, people regularly evaluate their risk of victimization by scanning their immediate environment for cues of danger (Appleton, 1975; Gates and Rohe, 1987; Goffman, 1971; Warr, 1990). Based upon their assessment of the presence or absence of such cues, they adjust their behavior accordingly. In discussing cues for alarm, Goffman (1971) observed,
Individuals seem to recognize that in some environments wariness is particularly important, constant monitoring and scanning must be sustained, and any untoward event calls forth a quick and full reaction.(242)
Individuals do not necessarily notice all signals as cues for alarm. They only attend to those cues in their immediate environment as signals for alarm. According to Goffman,
The individual's surround ... (is) that region around him within which signs for alarm ... can originate ... This is likely to be measured by means of a radius that is only yards long. His body is what he mainly can become immediately concerned about, and it is principally vulnerable ...(253-254).
As we move from place to place, our immediate surroundings continually change, changing the position or distance of different signals of alarm. Consequently, different types of situations give rise to alarm while others do not. For example, Goffman noted,
Walking along the street, the individual's surround follows him; walking around a room, it does not, or does so only in a small degree. Note, the individual is likely to concentrate his scanning for signs for alarm at the moment and place of his entering a bounded area. For often it will be at the doorway that he will have to notice alarming things if he is to notice them in time. (255-256)
When a person's proximate surroundings have a cue for alarm, the person feels vulnerable and reacts. As Goffman puts it,
... when the subject senses that something is up, his attention and concern are mobilized; adaptive behavior occurs if the alarms proves 'real,' but if reassuring information is acquired, the alarm proving false, his concentration will decay quickly. (262)
In contrast, when a cue for alarm is absent, "When the world immediately around the individual portends nothing out of the ordinary," Goffman writes that the person,
will sense that ... he is safe and sound to continue on with that activity at hand with only peripheral attention given to checking up on the stability of the environment.(239)
According to Goffman, then, individuals monitor their environment for signals of danger. When they detect a danger signal, they react accordingly. Otherwise, when appearances are "natural" or normal (23), they go about their routine.
It becomes important, then to identify what cues convey the message of alarm or danger, how such cues provoke fear, and what responses then follow. In discussing the design of vulnerability, Goffman (1971) introduced the concept of 'lurk lines'. These lines demarcate zones that lie beyond or behind the individual's line of sight. These zones have also been called 'blind' spots (Warr, 1990). Lurk lines or blind spots occur in many places - the areas behind an open door, inside an unlocked closet, or around a sharp bend in hallway. You do not necessarily have to walk through a physical obstruction to discover these areas. You can see potential blind spots, in the near distance and anticipate their likely character.
The concept of lurk lines and blind spots conforms with Appleton's (1975) discussion of prospect and refuge. Appleton argued that for evolutionary reasons humans favor places that afford prospect (an open view) and refuge (protection). In Goffman's (1971) and Warr's (1990) terms, humans dislike lurk lines or blind spots. Places with prospect and refuge offer an observation point from which humans can see, react, and if necessary, defend themselves, as well as a protective space to keep them from harm. Appleton (1975) went on to say that humans need not enter an area to determine it's prospect and refuge. They anticipate what those qualities would be if they were to enter the place. For example, observers can look at a clear-cut mountain-top in the distance and anticipate that it would offer them prospect but little refuge should they venture there.
We believe that potential offenders also value places which offer prospect and refuge. As Lorenz's (1964: 181) said, such places offer an advantage to "the hunter and hunted alike - namely to see without being seen." This agrees with views on the role of natural surveillance in reducing crime (cf. Jacobs, 1961, Jeffery, 1977; Newman, 1972); and several studies indicate that robbers favor prospect and refuge. Bank robbers have been found to target banks that have poor visibility of the inside from the outside, and clear views out to escape routes and to see who might enter (Camp, 1968). Tapes of bank robberies show that robbers select banks and follow a path that let them see as much as possible while remaining unseen (Wise, 1983). In a study of 78 tapes of sting operations, Archea (1985) found that robbers operate from locations with prospect ("enough visual access to gain and maintain control") and refuge ("low visual exposure from areas not in direct control") (p. 249). Stoks (1983) found that rape outdoors tend to occur in areas with refuge ("physically confined" spaces) and limited prospect ("barriers") nearby areas of pedestrian movement (p. 334). In sum, the research confirms prospect and refuge as relevant constructs in relation to site-specific opportunities for crime. It was our hypothesis that prospect and refuge would also affect fear of crime among passersby in outdoor settings.
In theory, humans would feel vulnerable passing by places such as alcoves and tall, dense shrubs that afford potential offenders refuge (concealment) and potential victims limited prospect. Offenders would have hiding places, into which passersby could not see in time to escape or avoid an attack. Conversely, where pedestrians have wide and deep prospect onto an area which has no places of refuge for an offender, they would feel safer because they could anticipate and avoid an attack.
Expanding the notion of prospect, we argue that insufficient lighting at night also provokes feelings of vulnerability because it limits prospect. The idea that the night may be scary is not new (Fisher and Nasar, 1992; Warr, 1985). Previous research has found that darkness represents a potent sign of danger, and combined with novelty and uncertainty can produce considerable fear (Warr, 1990). We believe, however, that it is not only darkness per se, but also its effects on prospect that effect site-specific fear of crime.
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Population Decline from Two Epidemics on the Northwest Coast
ROBERT BOYD
Direct contact by Indians of the Northwest Coast culture area with Euro-Americans began very late, in 1774. Therefore, documentation of the contact process is relatively good. It appears that the introduction of Old World diseases was similarly late and coincided with contact. Although Campbell (1989), using archeological data, has made a case for penetration of the Northwest Coast by the hemispheric smallpox epidemic of the 1520s, all other evidence (archeological, historical, Indian oral tradition) for Northwest disease introduction postdates 1774. That evidence is considerable, with nearly the full list of high mortality infectious diseases introduced in rapid fire sequence, with accompanying heavy mortalities strongly suggesting that these diseases were new to the area, or at least present again after a very long absence.
Smallpox epidemics appeared roughly every generation - the first, in the late 1770s following direct contact, over the entire coast, and others in 1801, 1836-1838, 1853, and 1862-1863 in more limited regions (Boyd 1990:137-143). This interesting sequence appears to have been created by the dual factors of introduction from an outside source plus presence of a large enough pool of non-immune susceptibles in the Northwest born since the last epidemic. Evidence for depopulation from the initial outbreaks is limited to descriptions of abandoned villages and native recollections, but high mortalities from the later epidemics are well documented in the Indian censuses and estimates compiled by the Hudson's Bay Company and by early government officials. Besides smallpox, malaria was introduced to and became endemic in a sizable portion of the southern coast, and records indicate considerable population decline concurrent with its introduction. Other 'new' diseases that contributed to Northwest Coast Native American population decline included measles, influenza, dysentery, whooping cough, and (in a different way) tuberculosis and venereal diseases (Boyd 1985, 1990).
This is the situation for the region as a whole. This chapter will discuss the records on population decline associated with two localized outbreaks - on the lower Columbia in the decade following the introduction of malaria in 1830, and in the Queen Charlotte Islands during the years of the last great smallpox epidemic, 1862-1863. The two epidemics appear to qualify as virgin soil or near virgin soil; malaria had not been known in the Northwest prior to 1830, and smallpox had been absent from the Charlottes since the late 1770s. The data on depopulation in these two instances are remarkably good and may provide clues to patterns of depopulation in similar virgin soil situations in other places and at earlier dates in the Americas.
MALARIA ON THE LOWER COLUMBIA, AFTER 1830
The Lower Columbia drainage, here defined as the area from the river mouth to near The Dalles and including the basins of large tributaries such as the Willamette and Cowlitz, was home to several Indian groups. The two largest, Chinookans on the banks of the Columbia and Kalapuyans in the Willamette Valley, are also the most completely documented as far as population decline is concerned; and they are used as the base of discussion here.
In the late 1820s the population of these two peoples approximated 18,580; within a decade it had dropped to 2,433, or 13 percent of the initial number. Detailed discussions of the sources for these numbers have been given elsewhere (Boyd 1985, 1990, 1991a; Boyd and Hajda 1987); suffice it to say that the preepidemic estimates are from Meriweather Lewis and William Clark and the Hudson's Bay Company, and the postepidemic numbers are from the 1841 U.S. Exploring Expedition.
What caused this monumental decline in Lower Columbia populations? The contemporary sources (a large body of data) uniformly ascribe it to the disease called 'fever and ague' by Americans and 'intermittent fever' by the British. Despite some controversy over the identity of this disease (e.g., Cook 1955; Taylor and Hoaglin 1962), epidemiological evidence strongly suggests that it was malaria (Boyd 1975), described most often in later accounts (e.g., Townsend 1839:197; Brackenridge 1931:141, 221; J.R. Dunn 1846) as the tertian form (Plasmodium vivax and P. falciparum). The sources are unanimous in stating that this disease was new to the area, and unknown before 1830 (e.g., McLoughlin 1941:88). This points to a virgin soil situation. Malaria, as has been fully established by research (F. Dunn 1965; Wood 1975), is an Old World disease, which was introduced in sequence to different regions of the Americas, where suitable vectors, mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles, were native (Harrison 1978). Once introduced, it became endemic. In the unbroken tropical and subtropical regions of the Amazon, circum-Caribbean, and Southeast United States this introduction was early and apparently has gone unrecorded (Ashburn 1947:112-123; Friedlander 1969). In the Lower Columbia and adjacent California central valley (Cook 1955) malaria arrived late and was both observed and recorded.
The statistics from the area are unambiguous in documenting a dramatic population decline following the introduction of 'fever and ague.' What remains unclear are the dynamics of this decline. Such high mortalities are not characteristic of endemic malarial regions today, nor of those occasional instances where a combination of factors inflate mortality rates in endemic areas to numbers that merit the term 'epidemic' (Wood 1979:260). It is essential to remember that on the Lower Columbia the outbreak was a virgin soil epidemic, and virgin soil outbreaks of whatever disease are almost by definition unusually virulent (Crosby 1976). This may be part of the answer to the large decline. Three other contributing factors are: the Indian means of dealing with the alternating spells of chills and fever characteristic of the disease, secondary diseases that precipitated mortality, and fertility decline directly or indirectly associated with malaria.
A small, consistent, yet independently written body of sources from the earliest years of the epidemic ascribe the high mortality to inadequate treatment of the disease. During the fever spells, Indians would plunge into cold water; when chills came they retreated to sweat lodges. Sudden death followed. The phenomenon is securely documented; the actual dynamics of death are not (Boyd 1979). Quinine sulfate, the medicine used by Whites, was in short supply in the early 1830s (Allan 1882:79; McLoughlin 1941). Factor two: Modern malaria is a disease of complications; death, when it comes, is usually from a secondary illness superimposed on a weakened malarial constitution (Brown 1983:65). Children, in endemic regions, form the bulk of casualties (Wood 1979:258-259). Though evidence is sparse, deaths listed in the record book of an 1830s Willamette Valley mission school, for instance are ascribed to such secondary diseases (including influenza and tuberculosis) introduced to Indian children chronically ill from malaria (Shepard 1922). It seems likely that much of the mortality in later years may have been due to secondary illnesses.
These two factors, in combination, appear to have contributed to the mortality side of the population equation in the Lower Columbia valley. But it appears that there may have been a decline in fertility as well in this newly malarial population. Post-malaria Chinookan and Kalapuya censuses (Hudson's Bay Company 1838; Spalding 1851; Boyd 1985: chart 26) incorporate information on population structure, specifically age and sex. Censuses of groups within the epidemic focal area show low - below 30 - percentages of children. Elsewhere in the Northwest, among Indian populations counted by the Hudson's Bay Company but not subjected to disease, the percentages are much higher, generally in the 30-40 percent range. In the case of the 1851 counts, mortality from the 1848 measles epidemic (Boyd 1991b) decreased the percentage of children even more. But in 1838 and 1851, two underlying explanations for fertility decline also seem likely. First, in immediate postepidemic years (MacArthur 1961:8), there was a sudden drop in fertility due to disrupted marital units. Second, there was considerable malaria-caused anemia, which, among women of child-bearing age, led to spontaneous abortions and stillbirths (Wood 1979:258).
The approximate 87 percent decline in Lower Columbia Indian populations in the decade following the introduction of malaria therefore appears not to have been a simple process. Inappropriate Indian treatments precipitated deaths in cases where proper treatment would have resulted only in temporary debilitation; secondary ailments moved in and pushed weakened malarial cases on to death, particularly among the very young; and maternal anemia is likely to have caused spontaneous abortions and miscarriages, resulting in a drop in fertility. The decline was regular and cumulatively dramatic: in 1841 an American physician, resident since 1835, estimated that the population of the Willamette Valley Indians diminished by one-quarter annually (Bailey in Wilkes 1926:57), a proportion fully in keeping with before (late 1820s) and after (1841) Kalapuyan population figures.
Socially, after 1841, most Chinookan and Kalapuyan populations were approaching extinction as viable and ethnically distinct entities. Inhabitants of Chinookan winter villages, tied to their local land base, remained in place with minimal regrouping (Dart 1851) until they were reduced to a few survivors or overwhelmed by migrants from more robust populations (Sahaptin or Salishan) from the peripheries of the endemic malaria zone (Tappan 1854). The 1851 Kalapuya census showed that these people likewise remained in their local band territories, with negligible regrouping. The average band size in 1851 was a mere 53 people, and the bands were evenly spread over the entire valley. As on the Columbian, more robust outsiders (Sahaptin Klikitat) had begun to move in, and by 1851 they were equivalent in numbers to the sum total of the Willamette Valley indigenes. The Kalapuyan population nadir was reached in the 1850s, and numbers (in what was a highly mixed population) began to increase again only after enforced concentration on the Grand Ronde Reservation and regular access to Western medicines.
SMALLPOX IN THE QUEEN CHARLOTTE ISLANDS, 1862-1863
The steady population decline of the Lower Columbia Indians following the introduction of malaria was very different in nature from the sudden catastrophic drop of the Haida population of the Queen Charlottes caused by the 1860s smallpox epidemic, even though the percentage losses were comparable.
The 1862-1863 British Columbia smallpox epidemic has been documented (Yarmie 1968; Pethick 1978). Over 20,000 Indians, nearly 60 percent of the pre-epidemic total, died in British Columbia and the Alaska Panhandle (Duff 1964; Boyd 1985, 1990; 142-144). In classic fashion, the disease arrived with an infected individual on a ship from San Francisco. The ship docked at Victoria, and the disease spread rapidly to the crowded Indian encampment on the city's outskirts. Instead of quarantining the Indians, the authorities evicted them, and fleets of Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshina, and Kwakiutl traders sailed back to their homelands, taking the epidemic with them.
On the densely populated (relatively speaking) and isolated Queen Charlotte Islands, the effect was rapid and devastating. A Hudson's Bay census dating from 1839-1842 showed a total of 8,428 Haidas (table 1); there is no evidence that this number changed significantly in the next 20 years. The people were concentrated in several winter villages spread along the coastline in areas of heavy resource concentration (especially halibut, the local staple). Each village was associated with a particular matriclan.
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Census of the Haida taken 1882-1884 (Chittenden 1884; Petroff 1882) show 1,598 survivors, or a population drop of over 80 percent, nearly all of which must on present evidence be assigned to the smallpox epidemic. This exceedingly large loss was due to several factors. First, the strain of smallpox virus in the 1860s epidemic was particularly virulent; second, Haida settlement was (relatively) dense and continuous, facilitating transmission; third, the Queen Charlotte population was particularly vulnerable, as there was no segment with acquired immunity, as was the case with most other British Columbia Indian populations. Whereas Tsimshian, Tlingit, and others had experienced an outbreak 24 years prior, the Haida had not known the disease for more than 90 years (Boyd 1985; Blackman 1981:23; cf. MacDonald 1983:17). It was, in essence, a virgin soil experience for them. A fourth factor was vaccine. While sizable numbers of Tlingit and some Kwakiutl had been vaccinated in the 1830s, and the Metlakatla Tsimshian in 1862, none of the Haida had been vaccinated (Boyd 1985, chapter 4 and appendix).
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The Division of Household Labor
The most obvious predictors of wives' perceptions of fairness might seem likely to be the outcomes related to the quantity of labor, such as the extent of the husband's contribution to household labor and the total amount of labor performed by the wife. Benin and Agostinelli (1988) have shown that women are relatively unaffected by increased household labor participation on the part of husbands unless the labor is specifically spent in those tasks traditionally defined as 'feminine' chores, such as cooking or cleaning. What might explain this pattern? First, the traditional male tasks involve little investment of time relative to the female tasks. Second, male involvement in female tasks is likely to have direct and visible consequences for the wife's workload. Third, since husbands' contributions to such tasks cross traditional gender lines, they will be more salient and more likely to be perceived as involving a special effort by husbands to be 'fair.' We thus expect perceptions of fairness to be affected by husbands' participation in 'female' household tasks, but not by their participation in 'male' or gender neutral tasks. Since our arguments for this effect hinge in part on the reduced need for wives' labor, we also predict a direct effect of wives' total labor on perceptions of fairness.
However, we do not expect even this aspect of husbands' household labor contribution to be related to perceptions of fairness in all families. As Thompson (1991) rightly emphasizes, women's orientations to various household outcomes vary considerably. It is still the case that many families allocate labor market participation exclusively to husbands (for the sample utilized here, about a third of the families have nonemployed wives), with household labor presumably becoming the wife's responsibility. For such families, it is unlikely that husbands' participation in housework would have much impact on perceptions of fairness. Hence, all of our analyses will be carried out separately for families in which the wife is employed and those in which she is not. We expect that the quantity of labor variables will have their clearest impact for families in which the wife is employed.
Qualitative Aspects of Household Labor
Thompson has reasonably argued that quantitative aspects of the division of labor or "the distribution of time and task" do not tap the full range of possibly important outcomes. For example, Oakley (1974) found that wives who were dissatisfied with the division of labor in their home were likely to complain about the monotony and fragmentation of their chores. Dissatisfied wives were also likely to complain about the loneliness of household labor; that is, they expressed concern over the lack of companionship during the performance of household labor. Thus, although the relationship between 'satisfaction' and perceptions of fairness may be complicated, it is reasonable to hypothesize, on the basis of Oakley's findings, that wives' perceptions of the extent to which their household labor is lonely and complicated will be related to their perceptions of the fairness of the division of labor.
Appreciation
Kessler and McCrae (1982) conclude that husbands' willingness to participate in housework is important to wives' in part because it carries a 'symbolic meaning' for wives, such that their work is recognized and appreciated by the husbands. Thompson (1991) also argues that among the most important outcomes of the division of household labor are symbolic outcomes, particularly the significance of caring. We would argue that the 'satisfaction' involved in such a demonstration will be greater when wives perceive that their work is, indeed, appreciated. We expect, therefore, that women who do not perceive their household labor to be appreciated will be more likely to feel that the division of labor is unfair, and that this effect should be evidenced whether or not she is employed.
Ideological Factors
What role might we expect gender ideology to play in women's reactions to division of house-hold labor? A number of authors (e.g., Huber and Spitze, 1983) assume that gender ideologies are an important determinant of the allocation of chores within the home, and we will be able to test this assumption. However, since task allocation certainly takes place through a negotiation process (Atkinson & Huston, 1984), and one that might be somewhat protracted (Hochschild, 1989) there will undoubtedly be a far from perfect relationship between gender ideology and the division of labor. Given the general finding that men, on average, contribute very little to house-hold labor, it is reasonable to assume that there will be some direct relationship between women's gender ideology and their assessment of fairness in the division of labor.
Additionally, however, we would expect ideology to be related to all three of the factors in Thompson's (1991) model. First, husbands' contributions to the division of household labor should be a particularly salient outcome for less traditional wives. Second, less traditional wives should be more inclined to make the cross-gender comparisons that would produce dissatisfaction with husbands' lack of participation. Third, less traditional wives will presumably be less likely to accept the traditional justification for low levels of husbands' contributions to household work. Thus, we would expect an interaction effect involving ideology and husband's contributions, such that women with egalitarian ideologies will react strongly to the extent of their husband's participation, while those with more traditional ideologies will not. And we would expect this effect to be particularly clear for those families in which both partners participate in the paid labor force.
DATA AND VARIABLES
Data for this study are taken from the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households (Sweet, Bumpass, & Call, 1988). The NSFH provides a cross-sectional national sample of 13,017 respondents aged 19 and older. The sample here is limited to 778 married white women for whom data were complete across the variables required here-in. Our smaller sample size results from the restriction of the study to only white, currently married wives for whom data on both attitudinal and household labor measures are complete. The primary limitations on sample size result from the use of only married households (68% of the total sample), women (50% of the total sample), whites (85% of the total sample), and individuals less than 65 years of age (86% of the total sample). The sample was also restricted to include only respondents who reported a weekly household labor performance of 120 hours or less.
Household labor. For each couple, the NSFH includes reports from each partner/spouse regarding their own household labor contributions and those of their partner/spouse. Each partner provides an estimate of the hours spent per week on eight specific household tasks. The tasks are: (a) preparing meals, (b) washing dishes, (c) cleaning house, (d) outdoor tasks, (e) shopping, (f) washing and ironing clothes, (g) paying bills, and (h) auto maintenance. Given the focus of this investigation on wives' reactions to the division of labor, measures of both husbands' and wives' household labor are based on reports from wives.
Two primary aspects of the quantitative division of household labor are of central interest here: how much work is done by husbands and how much by wives. First, with regard to husbands' household labor, our major focus will be on male labor in female-dominated tasks, the number of hours spent by husbands in those chores typically envisioned as 'female' tasks (meal preparation, dishes, cleaning house, and ironing and washing clothes), as measured by wives' estimations. We will also begin our analysis of the effects of male labor on wives' perceptions of fairness with a demonstration that male labor in male-dominated tasks (outdoor tasks and auto maintenance) and male labor in gender neutral tasks (shopping and paying bill) have little to do with perceptions of fairness. Second, total female labor is the total number of hours spent in all household labor per week by wives.
Qualities of household labor. Three measures of wives' assessment of the nature of their household labor were available in the NSFH. Responses were taken from the question: "How would you describe the work you do around the house? Would you say it is: (1) boring-interesting, (2) complicated-simple, (3) lonely-sociable?" Responses were taken on a 7-point scale, with the responses shown above representing the respective end points of each scale.
Appreciation. The extent to which women perceive their household labor to be appreciated is based on the same question used to assess the qualities of household labor. One of the 7-point scales presented in the NSFH was "unappreciated-appreciated."
Gender ideology. An indexed measure of wives' sex-role ideology was created from responses to the following questions: (a) It is much better for everyone if the man earns the main living and the woman takes care of the home and the family, (b) Preschool children are likely to suffer if their mother is employed, (c) Parents should encourage just as much independence in their daughters as in their sons, and (d) In a successful marriage, each partner must have the freedom to do what they want individually. Wives answered each question on the basis of a 5-point scale, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Each item was coded appropriately, with a high score indicating egalitarian sex-role orientations. Coefficient alpha for the scale was .55.
A measure of ideology focused more directly on the division of labor, family-labor ideology, was taken from responses to the question: "If a man and a wife both work full-time, they should share household tasks equally." Here, responses ranged across a 5-point scale, with a higher score indicating egalitarian family-role orientations.
Employment. The employment variable is based on a question regarding number of hours per week spent in the paid labor force. Our first intention was to separate the wives into three groups (employed full time, employed part time, and nonemployed), but for these data less than 10% of the women were employed fewer than 35 hours per week. We decided, therefore, to combine all 'working' women, and the employed group includes all women who report any hours of paid employment.
Perceptions of fairness. Wives' perception of fairness of the division of labor was measured with the following question: "How do you feel about the fairness in your relationship in each of the following areas? (household chores)." Responses were on a 5-point scale, ranging from "very unfair to me" to "very unfair to him." A code of 5 indicates "very unfair to my partner," 4 is "somewhat unfair to my partner," 3 corresponds to a response of "fair," 2 represents "somewhat unfair to me," and 1 is "very unfair to me." Since very few wives responding perceived the division of labor to be unfair to their partner (see below), we will refer to higher scores on this variable as indicating "fairness."
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Among the 496 employed wives in this sample, 61% perceive the division of labor to be fair, 28% "somewhat unfair to me," 6% "very unfair to me," and about 4% as either "somewhat" or "very" unfair to him; the mean is 2.64. Among the 282 nonemployed wives, 71% report a "fair" division of labor, 24% see it as "somewhat unfair to me," 2% as "very unfair to me," and 3% as somewhat or very unfair to him; the mean is 2.76.
RESULTS
Division of Labor
Table 1 presents the mean hours per week spent in household labor, by each spouse, across the eight household chores, as well as their percentage distribution. As shown, wives and husbands perform significantly different total amounts of labor and different types of labor. In those households in which the wife is employed, wives average 31.06 hours per week of total labor, while their husbands average only about 15.28. The disparity between male and female total labor is, of course, even greater within those households in which the wife is nonemployed. Here, wives perform approximately 42.04 hours per week of total labor, while their husbands average 12.23 hours per week. Obviously, the employment status of wives has a significant impact on their total labor in the home; their employment status has a substantially weaker association with husbands' household labor.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="28">Rather than seek integration of the best elements of each model, model-based professional organizations place behavioral scientist-practitioners in a multiple-choice stance in which they are encouraged to affiliate with one model.
Furthermore, many literature reviews, such as those published in Psychological Bulletin and Clinical Psychology Review organize their presentations around separate causal models and evaluate their comparative efficacy. This strategy also places causal models in a competitive stance and fails to acknowledge that behavior disorders may be a function of several classes and levels of causal variables, either concurrently or under different conditions, and that some variables and causal relationships in different causal models may be compatible and equally valid. As Blalock (1964) noted, this leads to "jurisdictional disputes" among proponents of models that are not necessarily incompatible.
Causal models can also be artificially contrasted by focusing on only one parameter of a behavior disorder (e.g., focusing only on the 'occurrence' of depression). This narrow focus is limiting in that it fails to recognize that different parameters of a disorder are affected by different variables. The cognitive model of depression, presented in chapters 1 and 2, provides a good example. An examination of the published longitudinal research might suggest that "beliefs of helplessness" should be minimized as an explanatory concept for the occurrence of depressive symptoms because the evidence that it reliably precedes the onset of depressive episodes is weak. However, if we focus on the magnitude or duration of depressive symptoms, the research is more supportive of a causal role for "learned helplessness" (Barnett & Gotlib, 1988).
'Alternative' causal models are sometimes simply different levels of explanation for the same phenomena. We can base a useful causal model for lamp illumination on either initiating electron flow through a resistor or on the behavior of throwing a light switch. Both can be useful, are not incompatible, and are simply different levels of explanation. Similarly, 'learned helplessness beliefs,', 'neurotransmitter deficits,' and 'social rejection experiences' need not be incompatible causal concepts for depression (Beck & Young, 1985; Boyd & Levis, 1980; Coyne, Kahn, & Gotlib, 1987; Lewinsohn & Hoberman, 1982). They may reflect only different labels, different measurement procedures, and different levels of foci for the same phenomena.
The relative validity or power of causal models may vary across domains or conditions. For example, between-spouse communication difficulties may be an important factor in marital distress, but significantly less so in the context of a supportive extended family. Similarly, the relative importance of diet and life stressors as determinants of hypertension risk may differ between European-Americans and African-Americans, or between younger and older adults. The various models, however, should not be viewed as necessarily competing but as potentially complimentary; elements of each may be necessary to account for causal relationships in different domains.
Unspecified Causal Mechanisms
Because causal inference demands a logical connection between variables, and because causal mechanisms are important in treatment decisions, the mechanisms of action of a causal variable (i.e., how or in what manner the causal variable exerts its influence) must be identified or at least amenable to reasonable hypotheses (Hyland, 1981). For example, we can hypothesize that aerobic conditioning can reduce premenstrual distress (Gannon, 1985), hypertension (Danforth, et al., 1990), depression (Doyne, Chambless, & Beutler, 1983), heart attacks (Dubbert, Rappaport, & Martin, 1987), and obesity (Brownell & Foreyt, 1985). But, as noted in chapter 1, it is important that the mechanisms of these hypothesized causal relationships be identified. 'How does exercise reduce premenstrual distress or hypertension?'
Causal relationships with unspecified mechanisms may have predictive and clinical efficacy. Consider the clinical utility of a reliably identified causal relationship between aerobic conditioning and hypertension, even if the causal mechanism is unknown. However, the utility of any hypothesized causal relationship is limited if the mechanism that underlies that relationship is not articulated. Knowledge of a causal mechanism helps us to identify the 'active components' of a causal relationship, to refine our intervention procedures, and to develop more effective and efficient interventions. Going back to our exercise example, it is useful to know that moderate levels of aerobic exercise can reduce premenstrual distress for some women (Gannon, 1985). However, if we also identify a possible causal mechanism for that relationship (e.g., that aerobic conditioning increases receptor-site sensitivity to endogenous opiates that may be released during premenstrual phases or affects prostaglandin release), we can possibly develop other interventions that operate through the same mechanism.
However, the question of 'how' an hypothesized causal variable affects the target behavior is too infrequently addressed in causal models of behavior disorders. How does childbirth sometimes lead to postpartum depression (Atkinson & Rickel, 1984)? How does a severe threat to self-esteem sometimes lead to paranoid ideation (Haynes, 1986b)? How does sexual abuse of a child sometimes lead to disturbed interpersonal relationships as an adult (Harter, Alexander, & Neimeyer, 1988)? How do self-efficacy beliefs sometimes influence a person's social interactions (Bandura, 1977a)? How does an 'accepting' and 'positive' client-therapist relationship sometimes lead to a reduction in interpersonal anxiety?
In summary, many causal models of behavior disorders have unspecified causal mechanisms. As a result, these models will (1) be less likely to evolve into more powerful models, (2) have a limited impact on our ability to explain behavior, and (3) have limited utility for the development of more effective interventions.
Unacknowledged Domains
As indicated in chapter 2, causal relationships are never unconditional. They have domains (i.e., boundaries or necessary conditions) outside of which the causal relationships are no longer valid. In psychopathology, these domains include population characteristics, internal states, developmental stages, variable values, temporal factors, and environmental contexts. Domains may apply to the types of causal variables related to the behavior disorder as well as the strength and form of causal relationships.
Many causal models of behavior disorders fail to specify their domains adequately. For example a causal model that suggests that self-efficacy beliefs affect the probability of posttreatment relapse (Marlatt, Baer, Donovan, & Kivlahan, 1988) should carefully delimit the social context in which that proposed relationship is applicable. Similarly, hormonal models of gender behavior should specify the environmental conditions in which hormonal factors will influence sexual orientation (Ellis and Ames, 1987). Also, it is important to stipulate the conditions under which stimulus pairings will produce a classically conditioned response (Rescorla, 1988; Papini & Bitterman, 1990), defensiveness and withdrawal will lead to long-term marital distress (Gottman & Krorkoff, 1989), a single exposure to a stimulus will produce a phobic response (McNally, 1987), and social support will mediate the impact of environmental stressors (Alloway & Bebbington, 1987).
Unacknowledged domains can lead to several conceptual and methodological errors. First, a causal relationship may erroneously be presumed to be absent. This can occur when the causal model is tested outside of its domain of operation. Second, domains can provide information about causal mechanisms and an unspecified domain restricts access to this information. For example, long-duration and short-duration stressors may have opposite effects on the immune system. Some studies have suggested a strengthening of the immune system during brief stress and a weakening during protracted stress (Miller, 1983), illustrating a 'chronicity' domain for the effects of the stressors. Examining causal relationships within these chronicity domains may lead to a better understanding of causal mechanisms involved in immune system deficiencies. Therefore, unacknowledged domains restrict the evolution of causal models.
Third, undefined domains for causal relationships can lead to inappropriate clinical applications. If negative outcome expectancies contribute to the maintenance of depression, but not its onset (a behavior disorder parameter domain), cognitive intervention efforts may be more effective if used during depressive episodes to reduce its duration than if used as a prevention strategy between depressive episodes.
Excessively High Level
As noted in chapters 1 and 2, causal models of a behavior disorder can be expressed at different levels. Furthermore, various levels of causal models can be clinically and empirically useful, depending on their intended application. Consider the utility of both political-sociological and biological models of post-traumatic stress disorders of Vietnam veterans. However, there is probably a hyperbolic functional relationship between the level of a causal model and its utility in that excessively low and excessively high levels often have diminished clinical utility for treating and preventing behavior disorders as well as diminished predictive and explanatory utility. However, behavioral scientists-practitioners err more frequently by proposing excessively high-level models.
As pointed out earlier the difficulty with a high-level causal variable is that it includes many lower-level variables. Therefore, higher-level variables and models do not permit distinction among the multiple possible causal variables and paths that they represent. For example, finding that 'marital distress' has a strong causal relationship to a behavior disorder, such as depression or alcoholism, has limited clinical utility because this variable does not identify the specific forms, mechanisms, or parameters responsible for the causal relationship. The active elements in 'marital distress' can include hostile verbal exchanges, physical abuse, sarcastic comments, defensiveness, withdrawal, infrequent presence in the home, feeling unloved, anxiety and emotional arousal, or lack of positive statements to the spouse. Therefore, attributing a behavior disorder to 'marital distress' provides only an array of possible causal variables and paths.
High-level behavior-disorder constructs are also problematic. A causal model for 'anxiety' is insufficiently specified because we do not know if the model applies to physiological, subjective, cognitive, or behavioral components of anxiety or to its onset, magnitude, or duration (Bernstein, Borkovec, & Coles, 1986).
Personality variables have played a prominent role in the behavioral sciences but are particularly vulnerable to the criticism of being dysfunctionally high level. Constructs such as 'locus of control,' 'hardiness,' 'authoritarianism,' 'need for dependency,' 'assertiveness,' 'self-esteem,' 'Type A behavior pattern,' 'emotional adjustment,' 'self-respect,' 'sexuality,' and 'need for achievement,' include so many possible lower-level variables that they are rendered scientifically and clinically debilitated. Personality variables suffer from an added disadvantage as causal variables because they usually imply stability across time and conditions and, therefore, are less useful as explanations of variance in the parameters of behavior disorders (Epstein, 1979, 1980).
Less molar causal variables are also open to this criticism. For example, it has been reliably demonstrated that there is a causal association between 'exercise' and a variety of behavior problems (e.g., response to stressors, hyper-tension). However, at a lower level of analysis, it is apparent that some types of exercise (i.e., weight lifting) can increase blood pressure while others (e.g., jogging) can decrease it; exercise early in the day can facilitate sleep onset while exercise later in the day can inhibit it, and the mediating effects of exercise on responses to psychosocial stressors may be related to the length of time a person has been exercising. Again, the concept of 'exercise' can be suggestive of causal relationships but requires lower-level specification to facilitate the design of intervention programs.
As with other elements of limited causal models, excessively high-level causal variables also promote inferential and measurement errors. Proposing a causal relationship between 'exercise' and response to psychological stressors, without more precisely describing the relationship, increases the chance that it will be measured at the wrong time of day, with the wrong sampling rate, or with the wrong assessment instruments.
Identifying higher-level causal variables can be a useful first step in psycho-pathology research and treatment programs. However, higher-level variables should be viewed as preliminary 'markers' for lower-level and more heuristic causal relationships. Subsequent inquiry can increase the chance of identifying causal variables and paths with greater clinical and empirical utility.
Linearity
Most causal models do not specify the mathematical form of their functional relationships. Consequently, most applications and tests of the models presume that the relationships are linear in form. However, as noted by umerousnumerous scholars and clinicians (e.g., Asher, 1976; Biddle & Marlin, 1987; Bishop, Fienberg, & Holland, 1975; Blalock, 1964; Bridgman, 1931; Grove & Andreasen, 1986, James et al., 1982; Miller, 1983), many functional relationships adhere more closely to parabolic, sine-wave, log, exponential, or other nonlinear forms.
The main drawback to an erroneous presumption that a causal relationship is linear in form is, again, an increased chance of an inferential error - underestimating the strength of a causal relationship. This can happen when statistical techniques based on a presumed linear relationship are applied to date that are nonlinear.
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Conflict Talk:
Sociolinguistic Challenges to Self-Assertion and How Young Girls Meet Them
Amy Sheldon
University of Minnesota
Cultural stereotypes which interpret girls as less forceful or less assertive than boys in pursuing their own agendas, particularly during conflict episodes, are questioned. A theory of double-voice discourse is proposed to characterize a type of conflict talk that has a dual orientation, in which speakers negotiate their own agenda while simultaneously orienting toward the viewpoint of their partner. In double-voice discourse, self-assertion is enmeshed with addressee-oriented mitigation. Examples of such discourse in 3- and 4-year-old middle-class white girls' conflict talk are analyzed. Gender differences in conflict talk are seen to be contextualized variations that reflect differences in the organization of same-sex groups. Girls' use of the pretend frame in negotiating is discussed. Also highlighted is the importance of analyzing children's language in the context of conversational turns in order to develop a fuller interpretation of utterances.
This paper is an investigation of how young girls argue during social play, the kinds of tactics they use to further their own interests in disputes. As Maccoby (1986) pointed out, "we have a clearer picture of what girls' groups do not do than what they do do" (p.271). She called for "a more clearly delineated account of interaction in female social groups" (p. 271). Such an account requires description of the ways in which language creates and maintains social relationships among girls in everyday conversation.
A theory of double-voice discourse (name taken from Bahktin, 1929) is proposed to describe a linguistic style in white, middle-class, preschool girls' social interactions. The term points to a principle of dual orientation that shapes the agenda and style of their conflict talk. One of the speaker's orientations is toward her own agenda, toward the self. It asserts the speaker's own wishes and proposes activities that are in the speaker's interest. The other orientation is toward the other members of the group. As a result, self-assertion is enmeshed in an orientation toward the other. Self-assertion is thus regulated and contextualized by the speaker's relationship-centered orientation.
A theory of double-voice discourse captures the linguistic complexity and creativity with which young girls manage disputes. It also raises questions for traditional beliefs about femininity and masculinity, which treat gender as a polarity or a comparison of opposites. Such traditional views of gender are ill-conceived and inadequate to develop an account of girls' sociolinguistic interaction. Gender and context are confounded (Goodwin, 1980; Sheldon, 1990; Thorne, 1990). We can best see how talk is gendered if we take into consideration the context in which it emerges (e.g., the sex of the speakers and what the speakers are trying to accomplish). Considering children's talk from the perspective of gender has the advantage of raising methodological issues that focus attention on how we study children's language.
First, I will raise concerns about androcentric interpretations in some recent research on gender differences in children's talk. Next, I will describe the theory of double-voice discourse and relate it to children's solidarity-based task orientation. I will then discuss methodological advantages of a qualitative approach to the study of children's discourse and analyze examples of preschool girls' conflict talk to show how double-voice discourse can be read from them. I will conclude with remarks on the study of language and gender.
Gender and conflict. In most parts of American society women's conflict talk is constrained by the expectation that they will be 'nice.' 'Tough' talk, hard bargaining, and 'confrontational' talk is taboo for women. Men, however, have the license to argue in directly demanding ways. They can engage in unmitigated rivalry. Women are criticized if they speak as men do (Campbell, 1988, 1989; Coates, 1987b; Lakoff, 1975; Thorne, Kramarae, & Henley, 1983). Consequently, social talk which is considered ordinary 'assertive' talk for men is likely to be perceived as 'confrontational,' 'bossy' (or worse) when uttered by women. Does the talk of very young girls show evidence of the cultural taboo on tough talk? How do young girls express themselves in assertive ways while they keep to the cultural mandate that they not be 'too assertive'?
It is difficult to describe the full range of girls' and womens'women's talk without echoing stereotypical thinking about feminine and masculine behavior. Our thinking about conflict has an androcentric bias. As a society, we view aggression as the conflict norm. Equating conflict with aggression, however, does not fully capture how girls argue. The dispute management norm for girls is different from that for boys (Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987). Expecting conflict to have an aggressive component can prevent us from even noticing conflict in girls' groups in which a more subdues, yet nonetheless assertive, conflict style is common.
If we reconsider verbal conflict by focusing on feminine conflict styles, there are several interesting consequences. First, we must ask what agency, self-assertion, and power mean for females, because looking at conflict through an androcentric lens hides feminine agentic behavior and obscures the dynamics of feminine power. Second, we see the constructive and facilitative aspects of double-voice conflict, which is attentive to the social cost of self-assertion, in contrast to the constrictive and even destructive aspects of single-voice, baldly aggressive conflict, which is enacted with little regard to social cost. Finally, we gain a much clearer understanding of interaction in female groups.
Some problems with research on gender differences in children's conflict talk. In a review of the literature of gender differences in children's language and language development, Klann-Delius (1981) concluded that this area is in "dire need of being developed." Two recent quantitative studies have observed the way that young children's talk is gendered. Miller, Danaher, and Forbes (1986) studied over 1,000 quarrels by 24 racially and socioeconomically mixed 5- to 7-year-old children. They concluded that "boys are more concerned with and more forceful in pursuing their own agendae, and girls are more concerned with maintaining interpersonal harmony" (p. 543). What led the authors to the interpretation that boys were more "forceful" in trying to get their own way is that their dispute style was more heavy-handed than girls'. Boys used more threats and physical force. By contrast, girls were interpreted as more concerned with maintaining group harmony because they used more conflict-mitigating strategies, such as compromise, evasion, acquiescence, and clarification of intent.
This conclusion by Miller et al. (1986) is influenced by traditional views of gender hierarchy. It implies that girls are not as self-assertive as boys because (a) when measured against the masculine norm for conflict, which is coercive, girls do not use as much verbal brute force to get what they want; and (b) part of girls' agenda is to be empathic, and empathy presumably limits self-assertion. To describe the boys as "more forceful" in pursuing their own agenda is ambiguous as well as politically loaded. It is ambiguous because forceful means both 'effective' as well as "overpowering ... using force." It is political because it implies that girls are not as effective as boys in conflict situations; hence, girls are not good at verbally managing conflict, at furthering their own interests when opposed by someone. It is also a political conclusion because it values and emphasizes a masculine mode of brute force over a feminine mode of conflict mitigation. A different conclusion about feminine conflict style is possible, however; one that values the feminine conflict process and does not interpret it as weakness, as something 'less' than the masculine mode. From such a perspective, mitigation can be understood as functioning to tone down coercion and domination, to bring about adjustment and accord, and to restore group function. Girls and women are skillful at negotiating constructive conflicts. This view permits us to ask what important effects a constructive conflict process has on how girls' groups function.
To say that boys are "more forceful" persuaders, or "more assertive" (Sachs, 1987), overlooks the very important work that mitigation does to further self-assertion in the conflict process and reinforces cultural stereo-types that portray girls and women as submissive, ineffective, and weak. It equates effectiveness in conflicts with aggression. It measures self-assertion and independence too narrowly. To remedy this, I propose that the term coercive be used to describe only the heavy-handed conflict style. This frees the word forceful, meaning effective, to describe girls' (and boys') moderate conflict styles.
In another study of gender differences in children's talk, Leaper (1991) analyzed the conversations of 138 middle to upper-middle class 4- to 9-year-old children in either same- or mixed-sex dyads. Leaper's findings are consistent with those of Miller et al. (1986). Girls used more collaborative speech acts, defined as "direct" and "affiliative" (e.g., invitations to play, constructive offers, mutual affirmations). Boys used more controlling speech acts, defined as "direct" and "distancing" (e.g., insults, orders, refutations, and nonacceptance). Leaper (1991) hypothesizes,
Given that girls have been found to demonstrate more mutual coordination, responsivity, and elaboration in their conversations ... the female pairs were expected to use more affiliative speech acts ... and demonstrate more cooperative exchanges compared to male pairs. In contrast, since boys have been observed to be more demanding and domineering in their interactions than girls, ... male dyads were hypothesized to display more controlling speech acts and more domineering exchanges. (p. 800)
The girls and boys in these two studies actually used both self-assertive and supportive speech. But because there was a significant difference in the comparisons of interest, it is easy to lose sight of the similarities between girls and boys and to be left with the differences, despite the efforts of the authors to stress similarities. To address this problem in the study of conflict talk, disputes can be described, instead, in a way which better captures the complexity of girls' talk, thus revealing the imaginative and elaborate ways in which girls are self-assertive and powerful within the constraint of being relationship oriented.
Conflict is a contest of wills. Feminine conflict, because it requires the overlay of mitigation to avoid jeopardizing interpersonal harmony, asks for more sociolinguistic sensitivity than the more direct masculine conflict style. In fact, Sachs (1987) found that preschool girls have learned already how to assert themselves "with a smile." Camras (1984) studied what she identified as dominant and subordinate middle-class children in pre-school, kindergarten, and second grade. Dominant boys were much less polite than subordinate girls or boys, but they were also much less polite than dominant girls. Camras (1984) interprets these results as showing that dominant girls "are gradually socialized to mask their exercise of power during conflicts with use of polite language" (p. 263).
That girls and women are prescribed to assert themselves in a way that is responsive to others has been noted by Carol Gilligan (1987) and Jean Baker Miller (1986). This means that feminine agency functions in a different way than masculine agency, not that females are less agentic than males. Feminine self-assertion requires responsiveness to others, whereas masculine agency does not necessarily do so. The self-in-relation models of feminine groups proposed by Miller and by Gilligan also predict less hierarchical power relationships in female groups in contrast to the masculine model in which power is a relation of domination over others.
Double-voice discourse. Double-voice discourse is a talk style that is predicted by the self-in-relation model of feminine development (Gilligan, 1987; Miller, 1986). The term double refers to the perspective-taking stance of this style in which the speaker expresses a double orientation or double alignment. The primary orientation is to the self, to one's own agenda. The other orientation is to the members of the group. The orientation to others does not mean that the speaker necessarily acts in an altruistic, accommodating, or even self-sacrificing manner. It means, rather, that the speaker pays attention to the companion's point of view, even while pursuing her own agenda. As a result, the voice of the self is enmeshed with and regulated by the voice of the other.
Double-voice discourse is the norm in groups that are solidarity based. The best example of such groups are girls' (or women's) groups. Their social orientation is more often or more consistently relationship centered.
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Recovery of traumatic memories leads to reintegration of the split and isolated multiples.
There is another aspect to Freud's early belief that the cure of neurosis lies in the remembrance of traumatic experiences. There is no other treatment that so stresses remembering, and there is no religion other than Judaism that makes a religious duty of remembrance of traumatic events. "You shall not forget that your forefathers were slaves in Egypt and you shall teach it to your children and to your children's children" is one of the cardinal commandments of Judaism. The Pass-over Seder is a dramatization of that traumatic event and the redemption from it, so that it will not be forgotten. The Jew must remember that his forefathers were slaves. Freud repudiated Judaism as a religion and consciously was an atheist who followed no religious practices or ceremonies; however, he never repudiated his identity as a Jew or his cultural adherence to Judaism. On the contrary, he was proud of it. I would suggest that the psychoanalytic emphasis on remembering as the essence of the cure was a return of the repressed or perhaps a return of the disavowed that was in part determined by the unconscious part of Freud's identity as a Jew. This, of course, does not affect the theoretical validity or the degree of practical utility of the cure through remembering, nor does it deny the clinical inspiration for the theory. Theories, like all psychological states and products, are, to use another Freudian concept, overdetermined; that is, they have many causes. The source of an idea has nothing to do with its value; to think so is to commit a genetic fallacy. After I wrote this, I came across Yosef Hyman Yerushalmi's brilliant and moving Freud's Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991), in which he expresses a similar understanding of the origin of some of Freud's psychoanalytic theorizing.
Breuer, the third of Freud's spiritual fathers broke with him over the issue of sexuality. Love turned to hate, or, more accurately, the flip side of Freud's ambivalence toward fathers came to the fore, and Freud found it necessary to cross the street when he saw Breuer, his presence being so distasteful to Freud. There followed a period of lonely isolation during which Freud met and fell in love with Wilheim Fleiss, a charismatic Berlin internist to whom he was related by marriage. Freud was neither the first nor the last to be fascinated by Fleiss. Confident, successful, and uncritically admired by many, Fleiss was just what Freud needed. Brilliant, if erratic and eccentric in his ideas, Fleiss was receptive to Freud's otherwise and otherwhere unwelcome theorizing. Fleiss had a mesmerizing charm and was probably more than a little crazy. His theory that all illnesses were caused by nasal disorders, the nose being a sexual organ, has found little scientific support, nor has his belief that all natural phenomena could be accounted for by combinations and permutations of the female (28-day) and male (23-day) cycles. Fliess's pseudoscientific numerology probably owes an unconscious debt to cabalistic number mysticism - altogether, an unlikely consort for the Helmholtzian, scientifically rigorous Freud, but the heart has its reason, and a passionate relationship developed between the two men. Their contact was mostly through their correspondence, occasionally punctuated by congresses, Freud's term for their anxiously anticipated meetings, a term that suggests both grandiosity and sexuality. Reading Freud's side of their correspondence, which is all that has survived (Freud, 1985), we get a sense of intense intellectual excitement: here are two men approaching 40 who sound like adolescents who have just discovered the world of ideas, with all the passion and excitement that goes with that discovery. Of course, Fliess's excitement is an inference from Freud's letters, but it certainly appears to be there. Freud's letters to Fliess are a depiction of life of the educated Jewish middle class of late 19th-century Vienna that have all the vividness and richness of a great novel. Sentences filled with Freud's deep love of children alternate with sarcastic comments on his academic rivals, discussion of current political events, and theoretical 'drafts'. The overall effect is exhilarating. Freud's early theories about neurosis, anxiety, and the role of sexuality are all given trial balloons in the drafts he sent to Fliess. The most extensive of the drafts is Freud's 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895/1950), which he abandoned and never published. It is a brilliant attempt to give a quantitative neurological explanation of psychological states and of psychopathology. It was Freud's last attempt to reduce psychology to physiology. Although he never abandoned the belief that a neurochemical explanation of mental events was possible, he himself turned to purely psychological explanations to account for both normal and pathological events. It is true that his psychological models and accounts retain a physicalistic basis, and much of Freud's theorizing is based on a "hydraulic model" of forces, pressures, flows, and blockages. It is a model based on 19th-century physics. It is also true that his theorizing becomes more and more a theory about meaning, and about relationships, and becomes truly psychological rather than pseudopsychological physics.
During Freud's almost two-decade-long relationship with Fliess, he suffered a "considerable psycho-neurosis" (Jones, 1961, p. 198) himself. Freud's emotional pain drove him to undertake his self-analysis, in which Fliess served as a sort of analyst by mail, and more important, was a transference figure eliciting all of Freud's intense feelings of love and hate for his father. Although it is unlikely that the two men were actually lovers, there is no question that Wilheim Fliess was the great love of Freud's life.
In the course of his self-analysis and his relationship with Fliess, Freud 'discovered' the Oedipus complex and wrote what is usually considered his most important work, Interpretation of Dreams (1900/1953a). In analyzing his dreams, Freud came to see that dreams have the same structure as symptoms. They too are disguised expressions of forbidden wishes. He concluded that all dreams are wish fulfillments. In the course of his self-analysis, he discovered much about himself: about his intense rivalry with and ambivalence toward his father; about his murderous feelings toward his infant brother, Julius; about his drivenness; and about his narcissistic vulnerability.
The dreams reported in Interpretation of Dreams make a unique contribution to the autobiographical literature of the West. They expand the account of self to include a new dimension. The self asleep - at least while dreaming - now becomes an integral part of self. Descartes's questions about distinguishing dreams and waking reality as a vital component of reality testing become irrelevant, and Locke's concern about the continuity of self during sleep is seen in a new light: dream consciousness is just as much consciousness, just as integral to the self, as waking consciousness. The injunction "Know Thyself" changes in meaning as the locus of self shifts to that which is not known, to the unconscious as represented in disguised and distorted forms in the dream. The self is now more unknown and unknowable, apart from undergoing the rigors of analysis, than hitherto believed. Freud's technique of dream analysis is double-edged: on the one hand, it gives us a tool for knowing the self; on the other hand, it reveals a new, unknown territory that must be reclaimed before the self can be either known or integral.
Having gone public in a unique, if partial and selective, way, Freud put an important part, by his lights the most important part, of himself up for scrutiny by any and all; and indeed his dreams have been interpreted and reinterpreted in a bewildering variety of ways, both from within and from without the psychoanalytic movement. One of the most fascinating perspectives on Freud's dreams is that of Carl Schorske (1980), who looks at their political meaning and significance and sees Freud as "regressing" from the political (adult's) to the familial (child's) world, from external reality to internal reality, because of the disintegration of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, its series of defeats in war, and growing dissension, corruption, and decadence; also, increasingly virulent anti-Semitism (Karl Lueger was installed as the anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna just as Interpretation was published) made action in the outer world increasingly futile and hopeless. Freud's dreams do indeed have many political references, and Freud like Plato before him takes the relation between social classes as representative of, or isomorphic to, the relationships of the parts of the psyche. Additionally, Freud's metaphors of self and mind are consistently political, and even sometimes military: defense, resistance, occupation, and drive.
Schorske interprets what Freud calls the manifest dream, the dream as dreamt, which Freud distinguishes from the latent dream , which is where his interest lies. In Freud's theory of the mechanism of dreams (which serves as a paradigm for his theory of mind in the sense of self) the dream thoughts that are forbidden childhood wishes, derivative of drives (instinctual energies) striving for discharge, are "converted" by the dream work into the manifest dream through the mechanisms of displacement, condensation, symbolization, visualization, and secondary revision. The task of dream interpretation is to work backwards from the manifest dream to the latent dream thoughts by listening to the dreamer's association to each dream element. Secondary revision is the mind's reworking of the dream material to give it more apparent sense and continuity than it possesses, that is, to give the dream a better story line. Dreams make use of current materials (the "day residue") but always equally, or more than equally, represent in distorted form the events and desires of childhood. Dreams are always egoistic. The censor imposes the dreamwork on the latent dream thoughts so they do not arouse so much anxiety as to wake the dreamer.
Freud has now moved from psychopathology to a normal psychological phenomenon, dreaming, and found that dreams are compromise formations in just the same way as symptoms. He is now in a position to expound a general psychology, an omni-applicable account of human nature. In the years following the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud went on to apply his paradigm to jokes, art, hallucinations, religion, and culture in general, finding each to have the same basic structure as compromises and disguised wish fulfillments.
In the famous "specimen dream of psychoanalysis", the dream of Irma's injection, Freud for the first time subjects a dream of his own to analysis. In the dream, the dreamer is in a large reception hall receiving guests, including Irma, who is a former patient who is still ill. By the time the dream ends, Irma's continued illness is blamed on at least three other persons, including one who represents Breuer, Freud interprets the dream wish as the desire to be blameless as well as to pay back some old scores. Irma in real life was Emme Eckstein, whom Fliess had operated on for "nasal neurosis" (which was plain madness), an intrusive application of his wild theory to a human being. To make matters worse, he left the packing in, which infected (long before antibiotics) and almost killed the patient, who suffered the torments of the damned and was given psychological interpretation of her difficulties by Freud. Freud told her that her symptoms were a holding onto her illness, which was a manifestation of her negative transference to him. Freud's dream was certainly an attempt to find himself guiltless by projecting blame for Irma's difficulties onto others, but Freud missed the main thrust, the deepest wish, behind the dream: to find Fliess blameless in order to protect his (Freud's) idealized love object from contamination and devaluation. Freud missed the motive power of our need for ideal objects, for perfect lovers with whom we can identify and perhaps merge. Fliess was such an ideal object for him. If Fliess was a transference object, as according to Freud's theory he had to be, then it was his father who was to be protected from the charge of injuring a woman. The childhood wish represented in distorted form in the dream was his wish that Father be perfect and blameless.
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THE TIMING OF AN INTERPRETATION
A Comparative Review of an Aspect of the Theory of Therapeutic Technique
Lawrence Josephs
Interpretation in psychoanalysis is often considered to be as much an art as a science. And perhaps the most intuitive aspect of interpretive work, an aspect that is crucial to therapeutic outcome, is the timing of an interpretation. When do we interpret the transference? When do we interpret resistance? How deeply do we interpret? (And by 'deep' do we mean highly defended-against material, archaic fantasy, or early life historical events?) When would we simply empathize with the phenomenology of conscious self-experience and when should we confront and challenge resistance to discussing anxiety-laden unconscious conflict? By what criteria do we define an interpretation as premature or perhaps as too late? To what degree is the timing of an interpretation dependent on the presence of a prerequisite atmosphere of safety? How do we assess whether early interpretation of latent negative transference will either strengthen or impair the formation of a working alliance? The answers to these questions are partially based on the analyst's evaluation of the particular dynamics of the individual patient, yet to a large degree the answers to such questions derive from the analyst's theory of therapeutic technique. Although timing is in many respects dependent on the analyst's intuitive grasp of a unique analytic moment and is informed by past experience conducting analyses, the analyst's theory of therapeutic technique provides a preconscious sensibility that quietly guides the analyst's intuition as to the proper timing of an interpretation. In other words, intuition is partially derivative of a preconscious theory-derived rationale. It is preconscious in the sense that one's theory of therapeutic technique is not, for the most part, subject to repression, denial, or disavowal but nevertheless operates prereflectively, often without explicit conscious formulation.
For the purpose of this paper interpretation will be defined in the broadest sense as the provision of verbal feedback which aims at increasing the patient's self-understanding. Thus, clarification, empathic reflection, and confrontation will be considered as forms of interpretive activity in addition to the more narrow definition of interpretation that involves linking transference manifestations in the here and now to genetic constellations deriving from the there and then. The timing of an interpretation refers to the sequencing and pacing of one's interpretive activity and as such reflects a pre-conscious interpretive strategy; continually modified as it will be by the vicissitudes of the ongoing therapeutic interaction. The purpose of this paper will be to review, compare, and contrast recommendations concerning the timing of an interpretation that derive from diverse theories of therapeutic technique and offer an integrative overview in the service of resolving some of the disputes under discussion.
FOUNDATIONAL MODELS
The Topographic and Psychodynamic Approaches
The original theory of how to time an interpretation is to be found in Freud's (1911, 1912a, 1912b, 1913, 1914, 1915) seminal papers on technique which were based primarily on his topographic and psychodynamic models, having been written prior to the introduction of the structural model in 1923. Well-known psychoanalytic aphorisms informing the timing of an interpretation derive from these papers, including the principles that one should always work from surface to depth and that one should always interpret resistance before content. In these papers, resistance emerged as the key concept on which the assessment of the proper timing of an interpretation must be based. Resistance to free association was conceived of as a surface phenomenon that blocked access to greater depth. According to Freud (1914), the analyst "contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient's mind, and he employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognizing the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient" (p. 147). Resistance analysis was seen as the primary technique through which the analyst helped the unconscious to become conscious.
Freud discovered in his psychoanalytic work that resistance to the uncovering of unconscious contents was a ubiquitous phenomenon. Patients blocked introspective understanding of unconscious conflicts in inhibiting the flow of free association and they would not accept the analyst's interpretation of unconscious contents, be it forbidden wishes or painful memories, until the analyst had interpreted the resistance to the awareness of such warded-off contents. If one interpreted prematurely (i.e., too deeply) or too late (i.e., too superficially) resistance was exacerbated rather than ameliorated.
Expecially pertinent to the timing of an interpretation was a consideration of the dynamics of the transference. The art of correct timing largely focuses on the problem of overcoming the resistance to free association, and the major form of resistance is invariably to be found in the transference:
Over and over again, when we come near to a pathogenic complex, the portion of that complex which is capable of transference is first pushed forward into consciousness and defended with the greatest obstinacy .... These circumstances tend towards a situation in which finally every conflict has to be fought out in the sphere of transference. (Freud, 1912b, p. 104)
In terms of the relationship of the timing of an interpretation to the nature of the transference, Freud (1913) gave this recommendation:
So long as the patient's communications and ideas run on without any obstruction, the theme of transference should be left untouched. One must wait until the transference, which is the most delicate of all procedures, has become a resistance. (p. 139)
Yet, before transference can be interpreted as a resistance, there is a crucial preparatory phase that must occur if interpretation is to be effective at all:
When are we to begin making our communications to the patient? ... The answer can only be: Not until an effective transference has been established in the patient, a proper rapport with him. It remains the first aim of the treatment to attach him to it and to the person of the doctor. To ensure this, nothing need be done but to give him time. If one exhibits a serious interest in him, carefully clears away the resistances that crop up at the beginning and avoids making certain mistakes, he will of himself form such an attachment. (Freud, 1913, p. 139)
Part of what makes for an effective interpretation is not only the correct content of the interpretation but the nature of the transference at the time the interpretation is made: "The patient, however, only makes use of the instruction in so far as he is induced to do so by the transference; and it is for this reason that our first communication should be withheld until a strong transference has been established" (Freud, 1913, p. 144).
The Structural Viewpoint
Freud discovered that resistance analysis was no easy task. Although resistance is closer to the surface than the wishful impulses and painful memories whose expression resistance serves to inhibit, resistance itself is nevertheless a deeply unconscious phenomenon for which there is no ready access to awareness. In other words, there is always resistance to the awareness of resistance. In the structural model, resistance was traced to the unconscious defensive activities of the ego:
There can be no question but that this resistance emanates from his ego .... We have come upon something in the ego itself which is also unconscious, which behaves exactly like the repressed - that is, which produces powerful affects without itself being conscious and which requires special work before it can be made conscious. (Freud, 1923, p. 17)
The technical rule of interpreting resistance before content could be amended to read as a recommendation to analyze ego before id, ego defined as the unconscious mechanisms of defense.
Deviations in Technique
By the end of his career, Freud (1937) began to assess the limitations of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic modality. He had discovered that psychopathology and character structure were massively resistant to change, that patients were massively resistant to the awareness of their resistance to change, that whatever changes did transpire occurred very slowly and only with painstaking working-through of anxiety-laden conflictual issues, and that, even when change occurred, regressive developments could always undo it. Despite this tragic vision of human development Freud believed that his technical recommendations provided the optimum conditions for a 'talking cure.' Naturally, succeeding generations of analysts would attempt to improve results with technical innovations given the modest therapeutic expectations that Freud suggested.
If Freud's technical recommendations are treated as a baseline, it becomes apparent that technical innovations have deviated in basically two directions. On the one side, the central idea has been that classical technique is too conservative in addressing anxiety-laden unconscious conflicts and that resistance to the awareness of unconscious processes needs to be addressed more directly, vigorously, and systematically. On the other side, the central idea has been that classical technique has laid excessive emphasis on the analysis of defense, resistance, and latent transference in a context of abstinence, in neglect of establishing a therapeutic relationship and building psychic structure, activities that are seen as preceding and laying down the foundation for meaningful analysis of unconscious conflict. The debate has centered on matters of relative emphasis and priority, with the issues resting on a continuum from conservative to radical approaches. When classical technique has been seen as too conservative, the innovation has been to address latent transference more directly, actively, and systematically. Reich (1933) was one of the first innovators in that regard, chastising his peers for insufficient attention to latent negative transference and suggesting that nonverbal characterological resistances to treatment be consistently interpreted as manifestations of latent negative transference. Klein (1952) shared Reich's focus on systematically interpreting the latent negative transference, but felt that links to archaic unconscious fantasy could be established much more quickly than was the case utilizing classical technique. Searles (1979), Langs (1976), and Gill (1982) also advocated the primacy of interpretation of the latent negative transference, but felt that transference interpretation needed to be linked to the triggering stimuli in the here-and-now therapeutic interaction. The overall innovation in technique in all of the aforementioned suggestings is that unconscious conflict is most quickly brought to the fore through a primary and active interpretation of the latent negative transference. The difference in these approaches resides in whether transference interpretation is most efficaciously linked to character analysis, archaic fantasy, or current interpersonal transactions. The analyst's resistance to employing such innovations is usually traced to his or her fear of the patient's anger in confronting latent negative transference, fear of psychosis in interpreting archaic fantasy, and fear of admitting interpersonal involvement interpreting the here-and-now interaction.
When the critique of the classical approach is for insufficient attention to relationship building, technical recommendations center on interpretive strategies that are thought to facilitate a therapeutic relationship as well as greater emphasis on nonverbal affective attitudes that are thought to facilitate the proper ambience for treatment. Be it the ego psychologist's fostering of a working alliance and an observing ego, the object relations theorist's provision of containment or a holding environment, or the self psychologist's facilitation of a selfobject transference through empathy, the essential idea is the same: A therapeutic climate, which is partially curative in and of itself, must be established before conflict defense analysis can be fruitfully conducted. Verbal interpretation from this perspective tends to focus on the articulation of preconscious processes that are thought to be crucial in ego development and in the establishment of a cohesive sense of self.
Each approach claims to achieve maximal therapeutic benefit and possesses a critique of the inadequacies of other approaches. When the technical approach is seen as unnecessarily avoidant of addressing unconscious conflict and therefore superficial, the treatment is devalued as re-educative supportive psychotherapy that bolsters defenses rather than analyzes them. When the approach is seen as going too deep too quickly, the assumption is that treatment will result in excessive negative therapeutic reaction, intellectualized insight, false self-compliance, and a moralistic maturity ethic. The basic question in regard to interpretation boils down to one of timing: how deep to go how quickly? In working from surface to depth, must painstaking elucidation of the phenomenological surface precede deeper interpretation or is such an approach only working with the manifest content and avoiding a more active, direct, and systematic analysis of latent negative transference?
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Chapter 4
The Frequency of Dirty Word Usage
How frequently are dirty words used in American culture? How often does one person use them throughout the day? Although many people in broadcasting, education, law, and social science make judgments about the frequency of dirty word usage, there are no sound data on which to make those decisions. If one examines the literature on general word frequency, one finds little information on dirty word usage. Entries in standard dictionaries are standard speech. Studies of word frequency tend to be studies of standard word frequency. One can examine colloquial dictionaries or those dedicated to argot, slang, or jargon. These provide no indication of how frequently such terms are used. A few minutes on a busy street corner convinces the listener that Americans use dirty words frequently in public but how frequently? This chapter is about determining the relative frequencies of dirty words in American English using standard empirical techniques. We will look at traditional means of establishing word frequency and some of the problems with establishing how often people swear. The conclusion from the available data is that these words are used relatively frequently.
Why Word Frequency?
For many years those interested in human communication and verbal behavior have known that words are used with different frequencies in communication. The notion of variable frequency has led investigators to study how frequency differences affect a wide variety of language-related activities (reading, creativity, language learning, problem solving, or comprehension). Given that dirty word usage is a behavior that most social scientists have constantly ignored, how can we tell how often dirty words are used? What impact does differential usage have?
One of the early concerns was the role of word frequency in both face-to-face communication and through electronic media like radio, short wave, or encoded channels. It was pointed out by Zipf (1949), for example, that relatively few words were used extremely often in communication and that the higher the frequency of occurrence a word had, the more likely it was to be used in general. Shannon and Weaver (1949) incorporated 'Zipf's Law' into their grand theory of communication, using word frequency to make predictions about the probability of various sayings or messages during communication. These predictions were important to produce efficient and quick communication and to eliminate errors by using predictable words. These findings were applied in military and government communication systems following World War II. However, the grand theory building that dominated psychology in the 1950's has died out and contemporary psychologists now focus on specific issues and problems involving human communication. Interest has shifted to how word frequency influences a specific type of language processing. The frequency question remains present in almost every aspect involving information processing abilities, such as attention, problem solving, pattern recognition, learning, rehabilitation, and memorization. Below are some of the recent applications of word frequency in contemporary investigations to show why the dirty word frequency question has remained unanswered.
Word frequency has been a fairly consistent predictor of response time differences in language processing tasks. High frequency words are processed faster and more easily than words at low frequencies. The result has been called 'the word frequency effect' in whatever process is under investigation. In a lexical decision task, for example, subjects are shown a string of letters and asked to tell whether the string forms a word. One of the best predictors of response time is how frequently the word is used; the higher the frequency, the lower the reaction time.
Word frequency effects have been reported in other language and memory tasks. In an object-naming task, where subjects are asked to name objects as fast as possible, results indicate that word frequency is related to the ease of naming the object. In word legibility tasks, frequent words were found to be as legible as single letters, although infrequent words are less legible than either. In lexical access tasks, word frequency effects the time it takes to decide if a target word has occurred in a sentence. Word frequency effects have been found in many memory tests of recall, recognition, and others (see Jay, 1980a). People who study reading and learning to read know that frequent or familiar words make information processing tasks easier and faster than obscure or low frequency words.
It should be clear that in each of these studies dirty words are never used. What is known about linguistic processes has had little or nothing to do with dirty words. If all science on language stopped now, we would know little about dirty word usage or how dirty word usage relates to more normal language use.
A recent question has been whether word frequency is related to the age of acquisition of a language by children. Carroll and White (1973 a,b) found that frequent words tend to be those that are acquired early in life. Another variable related to acquisition is the number of different meanings that a word has. One point here is that frequent words have more interpretations than low frequency words. So, age of acquisition depends both on meaning and frequency aspects of word usage. It is important to know what children learn early in life when examining patients with brain damage. Lesser (1978, pp 110-112), for example, shows that word frequency is needed to study aphasic (language loss) patients. Patients may use childish or highly frequent language when recovering from brain damage. Some of these aphasics may use only dirty words when recovering because the words were learned early and well, and may be stored in parts of the brain untouched by the trauma.
There should be no doubt that word frequency has an important influence on communication and communication problems. But, have we stopped to ask the question, where did all these frequency data come from in the first place?
The Frequency Estimation Problem: Why There Are No Dirty Words
There are hundreds of millions of speakers of English using tens of thousands of words on thousands of different occasions. To accurately count actual word usage is impossible. Therefore, estimates must be used. Throughout the history of frequency research, the question of proper frequency estimation has received minimal attention, and one wonders whether any of these previous estimates were accurate. While the tasks mentioned above have been conducted with appropriate methods, those interested in taboo language estimation would find them inadequate and inaccurate to estimate taboo language frequency. Future interest in controlling taboo language frequency or offensiveness requires an alternative to traditional methods and reports.
One major problem is the use of inappropriate normative samples of word frequency. Since its publication, psychologists and others interested in language frequency have been using the Thorndike and Lorge (1944) norms to estimate word frequency. However, the count (or others like it) are inadequate for three reasons: (a) the sample is restricted only to written, not oral usage, (b) the written sample is restricted to a limited domain of reading materials (mostly children's and popular adult literature), and (c) it is outdated (language changes with time). Eriksen (1963) has demonstrated quite clearly that the Thorndike-Lorge count is inadequate to estimate oral usage and that it in fact underestimates the frequency of many colloquially used words. Two collections of written word frequency norms were published by Kucera and Francis (1967) and more recently by Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971). These are updated and less restricted than Thorndike-Lorge, but they are still limited to written samples.
The problem with written norms is not that they are inaccurate, but that they are used incorrectly by researchers. The written norms generally are appropriate when applied to tasks involving textual material; that is, reading processes. The written norms are not appropriate for research concerning oral usage, however. Written norms do not apply directly to colloquial, conversational situations such as parent-child interaction, discourse processes, or language influenced by sociolinguistic variables (social or physical setting). The point is that sociolinguistic variables are crucial to understanding dirty word usage. It is context that controls dirty word usage and these factors must be accounted for.
The bottom line on studies of written samples is that one is rarely going to find dirty words used in the sample because they are collected from biased material, even though that material may be appropriate to design children's reading texts, for example.
Counting Oral Frequency: Almost Good Enough
Written and oral speech are two different forms of language. In addition to different rules (e.g., the future perfect does not seem to exist in oral speech) and different distribution of rules they have in common (e.g., the perfect form of the verb appears much more in written speech), written language has the benefit of more polish. Oral speech is marked by hesitations, interruptions, incomplete expressions, is more prone to imprecise or incorrect definitions - all of which can be corrected with a little proofreading in the written form.
Oral speech is also at the mercy of a number of sociolinguistic influences. Spoken language, particularly in its more colloquial form, is more sensitive to the relation between speaker and listener, the degree of social relaxation, and the topic of discussion (see Jay, 1978c). When these variables <{_>flucuatefluctuate, so does the kind of language selected and used in conversation. In light of these contextual constraints, then, the estimation of oral frequency requires looking at oral - not written - samples of language for taboo speech.
Several attempts have been made to examine the frequency of word usage in conversational English (Jay, 1980a). One widely mentioned study is French, Carter, and Koenig's (1930) collection of words and sounds from telephone conversations. This study is cited because it provides information about vowel, consonant, and word frequency data. The study has one major flaw. They omitted some 25% of the data representing utterances such as exclamations, interjections, proper names, titles, letters, numbers, and profanity. In fact profanity was 40% of the material omitted! While the study could give a relatively accurate picture of conversations, it compromised a true picture of dirty word usage. Fairbanks (1944) updated the French et al. study and compared the spoken language samples of college students with diagnosed schizophrenics. More recently, Black, Stratton, Nichols, and Chavez (1985) published a word count based on college student classroom language, as did Berger in 1968.
Several studies concentrate on children's oral language. The need for these data in reading, learning, and comprehension applications should be clear. These data serve the purpose of designing age-appropriate textbooks but do not indicate anything about how children use dirty words or how often. One of the best collections and most current counts is Spoken Words (1984) by Hall, Nagy, and Linn. These investigators report the data as a function of situation and social status of the children's family. However, when speech was recorded in classes or at the dinner table, very few dirty words were spoken. Dirty words are highly context dependent and even young children have learned not to use them most of the time at school or at the dinner table. Thus few of them appear in the corpus. While these norms provide a useful foundation for writing or evaluating children's reading texts, as intended, they give the impression that children do not produce dirty words. Consequently, there is a risk of thinking children are much more naive about matters involving sex and aggression than they are, if the conclusion is based on biased word counts. Cameron (1969) made one of the more natural attempts to collect adult language data as a function of social setting. His sample, though restricted to a few college settings, is useful to indicate how speech changes from relaxed to formal social environments. The major problem with the Cameron norms stems from an inadequate sampling procedure. He asked his 'overhearer' to record by hand "the first three words they heard during the conversation at 15 second intervals" (p 102). Such recording is subject to constraints from attention, perception, or recording bias, especially when overhearers knew he was interested in certain types of words.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="33">The most successful representations make fairly specific assumptions about the way in which the text should be interpreted (e.g., as a story about one of a small number of topics) and about the kinds of questions that might be asked about the text (e.g., questions about actor's intentions). Some work has been done to adapt the natural language understanding techniques to an information retrieval setting, but there is little near-term hope that these techniques could be used to represent large document collections and arbitrary queries [Sparck Jones and Tait, 1984].
Within the information retrieval community, a number of techniques have been developed that can represent the content of documents and information needs. These representations have a much different flavor than NLP representations. They are generally based on simple, very general, features of documents (e.g., words, citations) and represent simple relationships between features (e.g., phrases) and between documents (e.g., two documents cite the same document). The focus here is on simple, but general, representations that can be applied to most texts rather than on specialized techniques which capture more information but are applicable only in narrow contexts. Information retrieval representations also make extensive use of the statistical properties of representations features and attempt to make use of information produced by human analysis (e.g., manual indexing) when available.
Over the last decade there has been considerable interaction between the AI and information retrieval communities; AI techniques have been adapted to an IR setting and the IR focus on 'real' document collections and on thorough experimental evaluation has helped to expand the focus of AI research.
Given the availability of a number of representation techniques that capture some of the meaning of a document or information need, our basic premise is that decisions about which documents match an information need should make use of as many of the representation forms as practical. The remainder of this paper develops a theoretical framework for retrieval that allows multiple representations to be combined.
In the next section, we describe the major types of retrieval models. Section 7.3 presents the motivation for a retrieval model based on inference. In Section 7.4, we review related research on inference and network models. Sections 7.5 and 7.6 describe the basic inference network model and how it is used. Section 7.7 addresses the issue of causality in a network model. The final section discusses recent results and research directions.
7.2 Current Retrieval Models
A retrieval model fixes the details of the representations used for documents and information needs, describes how these are generated from available descriptions, and how they are compared. If the model has a clear theoretical basis we call it a formal retrieval model; if the model makes little or no appeal to an underlying theory we call it ad hoc. We use the terms theory and model here in the mathematical or logical sense in which a theory refers to a set of axioms and inference rules that allow derivation of new theorems. A model is an embodiment of the theory in which we define the set of objects about which assertions can be made and restrict the ways in which classes of objects can interact.
Four retrieval models are particularly important in IR research: the Boolean, cluster-based, probabilistic, and vector-space models. Most of the commercial and prototype IR systems currently available are based on some variation of these models, and some understanding of them is necessary for our discussion of the inference net model in the next sections.
Boolean. Boolean retrieval forms the basis of most major commercial retrieval services, but is generally believed to be difficult to use and has poor recall and precision performance since the model does not rank documents. In the Boolean model we have a finite set of representation concepts or features R = {r<sb_>1<sb/>, ..., r<sb_>k<sb/>} that can be assigned to documents. A document is simply an assignment of representation concepts and this assignment is often represented by a binary-valued vector of length k. The assignment of a representation concept r<sb_>i<sb/> to a document is represented by setting the i<sp_>th<sp/> element of the vector to true. All elements corresponding to features not assigned to a document are set to false.
An information need is described by a Boolean expression in which operands are representation concepts. Any document whose set of representation concepts represents an assignment that satisfies the Boolean expression is deemed to match the information need, all other documents fail to match the information need. This evaluation partitions the set of documents, but provides no information about the relative likelihood that documents within the same partition will match the information need.
Relevance in Boolean retrieval, then, is defined in terms of satisfiability of a first-order logic expression given a set of document representations as axioms. Several attempts have been made to extend the basic Boolean model to provide document ranking.
Cluster-based retrieval. Cluster-based retrieval is based on the Cluster Hypothesis which asserts that similar documents will match the same information needs [van Rijsbergen, 1979]. Rather than comparing representations of individual documents to the representation of the information need, we first form clusters of documents using any of several clustering algorithms and similarity measures. For each cluster, we then create an 'average' or representative document and compare this cluster representative to the information need to determine which clusters best match. We then retrieve the clusters that are most likely to match the information need rather than the individual documents. There are several ways to identify the clusters to be retrieved, particularly when using hierarchical clustering techniques that allow navigation of the cluster hierarchy.
Since many techniques are used to compare the query with the cluster representative, there is no single definition of relevance for cluster-based retrieval. Rather, relevance is partially defined by the model that forms the basis of the comparison. The similarity measures used to define clusters and the method used to create the cluster representatives also play a part in defining relevance since they determine which documents will be judged similar to a cluster representative that matches the information need.
Vector-space retrieval. In the vector-space model, we have a set of representation concepts or features R = r<sb_>1<sb/>,..., r<sb_>k<sb/>}. Documents and queries are represented as vectors of length k in which each element corresponds to a real-valued weight assigned to an element of the representation set. Several techniques have been used to compute these weights, the most common being tf.idf weights which are based on the frequency of a term in a single document (tf) and its frequency in the entire collection (idf). These tf.idf weights are discussed in more detail in [Salton and McGill, 1983].
Documents and queries are compared using any of several similarity functions, the most common function being the cosine of the angle between their representation vectors.
Since several techniques have been used to compute weights for the vector elements, the vector-space model has no single form of document or query representation, although all representations have a common form. Similarly, since several similarity functions have been used, relevance has no single definition.
The vector-space model is historically important since it forms the basis for a large body of retrieval research that can be traced back to the 1960's. The vector-space model has been criticized as an ad hoc model since there is relatively little theoretical justification for many of its variations.
Probabilistic retrieval. Probabilistic retrieval is based on the Probability Ranking Principal which asserts that the best overall retrieval effectiveness will be achieved when documents are ranked in decreasing order of probability of relevance [Robertson, 1977].
There are several different probabilistic formulations which differ mainly in the way in which they estimate the probability of relevance. Using a representative model, a document d<sb_>i<sb/> and an information need f<sb_>j<sb/> are represented as the now familiar vectors of length k in which each element is true if the corresponding representation concept is assigned to the document or query. If we let F represent the set of representations for information needs and D represent the set of document representations, then we can define an event space F x D and our task becomes one of determining which of these document-request pairs would be judged relevant, that is, estimating P(R|d<*_>i<*/>,f<sb_>j<sb/>). We then use Bayes' theorem and a set of independence assumptions about the distribution of representation concepts in the documents and queries to derive a ranking function that computes P(R|d<*_>i<*/>,f<sb_>j<sb/>) in terms of the probabilities that individual representation concepts will be assigned to relevant and non-relevant documents. Different independence assumptions lead to different forms of the model. Given estimates for these two probabilities (say, from a sample of documents judged relevant and from the entire collection), we can compute P(R|d<*_>i<*/>,f<sb_>j<sb/>).
Probabilistic models are in many ways similar to the vector-space model [Bookstein, 1982; Turtle and Croft, 1992]. Both can be considered to be generalizations of the Boolean model in that they can support partial matching using Boolean queries. Probabilistic models, however, provide a sounder theoretical base for the design of IR systems, and have significantly contributed to our understanding of some aspects of IR, such as term weighting, ranking, and relevance feedback.
7.3 Retrieval Based on Inference and Networks
Recent retrieval research has suggested that significant improvements in retrieval performance will require techniques that, in some sense, 'understand' the content of documents and queries [van Rijsbergen, 1986; Croft, 1987] and can be used to infer probable relationships between documents and queries. In this view, information retrieval is an inference or evidential reasoning process in which we estimate the probability that a user's information need, expressed as one or more queries, is met given a document as 'evidence.'
The idea that retrieval is an inference or evidential reasoning process is not new. Cooper's logical relevance [Cooper, 1971] is based on deductive relationships between representations of documents and information needs. Wilson's situational relevance [Wilson, 1973] extends this notion to incorporate inductive or uncertain inference based on the degree to which documents support information needs. The techniques required to support these kinds of inference are similar to those used in expert systems that must reason with uncertain information. A number of competing inference models have been developed for these kinds of expert systems and several of these models can be adapted to the document retrieval task.
In this paper, we describe a retrieval model based on inference networks. This model is intended to
Support the use of multiple document representation schemes. Research has shown that a given query will retrieve different documents when applied to different representations, even when the average retrieval performance achieved with each representation is the same. Katzer, for example, found little overlap in documents retrieved using seven different representations, but found that documents retrieved by multiple representations were likely to be relevant [Katzer et al., 1982]. Similar results have been obtained when comparing term- with cluster-based representations [Croft and Harper, 1979] and term- with citation-based representations [Fox et al., 1988].
Allow results from different queries and query types to be combined. Given a single natural language description of an information need, different searchers will formulate different queries to represent that need and will retrieve different documents, even when average performance is the same for each searcher [McGill et al., 1979; Katzer et al., 1982]. Again, documents retrieved by multiple searchers are more likely to be relevant. A description of an information need can be used to generate several query representations (e.g., probabilistic, Boolean), each using a different query strategy and each capturing different aspects of the information need. These different search strategies are known to retrieve different documents for the same underlying information need [Croft, 1987].
Facilitate flexible matching between the terms or concepts mentioned in queries and those assigned to documents. The poor match between the vocabulary used to express queries and the vocabulary used to represent documents appears to be a major cause of poor recall [Furnas et al., 1987]. Recall can be improved using domain knowledge to match query and representation concepts without significantly degrading precision.
The resulting formal retrieval model integrates several previous models (probabilistic, Boolean, and cluster-based) in a single theoretical framework [Turtle, 1990].
</doc><doc register="learned" n="34">
Manipulating the +/- UG distinction in terms of Coppieters' percentage figures turns out to be something of a vacuous exercise, however, since many of the percentages are based on small numbers of exemplars, thus lowering their face validity. Recall that the percentages for NNS-NS deviance are derived from varying numbers of tokens of each linguistic variable. At one extreme of NNS-NS divergences are the variables Imparfait vs. Passé Composé (39.5% divergence) and <*_>a-acute<*/> vs. de + Infinitive (34.7%), which are exemplified by 5 tokens and 2 tokens, respectively. At the other extreme is the A-over-A variable (14.4%), exemplified by 6 tokens. As numbers of tokens decrease, percentage figures become less valid indices of response patterns. It would be a simple matter, for example, to deflate or inflate the deviance for the <*_>a-acute<*/> vs. de + Infinitive category by changing (or adding, or subtracting) a single well-chosen item. Clark 1973 has demonstrated the dangers of inference from few tokens of a given category: there is no evidence that the findings will generalize beyond the items sampled and apply to the category as a whole.
A contingency in data elicitation further clouds the issue of locus of competence differences. For some 41 of the 107 items, subjects were given a choice between paired forms (e.g. Est-ce que tu {as su/savais} conduire dans la neige? 'Did you {manage/know how} to drive in the snow?'). They were then asked by the experimenter to decide: (1) whether both forms were acceptable; (2) if so, whether a difference in meaning was entailed in the differing forms; (3) if so, "what that difference consisted of in the framework of sentence interpretation" (550). These 41 items were tokens of five linguistic variables: the Imparfait/Passé Composé distinction, il/elle vs. ce, prepositions <*_>a-acute<*/> and de + Infinitive, prenominal vs. postnominal adjectives, and article use. The other elicitation procedure required subjects merely "to provide straightforward well-formedness judgments" (550) for single (unpaired) sentences. This was done for "most of the other 66 sentences" (550), representing four linguistic categories: the Object + Predicate construction, Causatives and Clitics, A-over-A constraint, and the de + Adjective construction. Reviewing the data in Table 1, above, one may discern a striking pattern. For the top five variables - just those variables tested by the first technique - NNS diverged dramatically from the NS (NNS-NS average = 29.2%) and the range of NNS-NS divergence is disparate (19.9% - 39.5%). For those variables tested under the second procedure, on the other hand, the NNS-NS divergence is relatively small (average = 17.3%), with the range clustering tightly (14.4% - 18.9%). Comparing these figures with the deviance figures for the +/- UG distinction (average for putatively - UG items = 27.2%, range = 16.9% - 39.5%; average for putatively + UG items = 17.4%, range = 14.4%-18.9%), one notes that the magnitude and heterogeneity of NNS-NS divergence are somewhat better predicted by the procedural contingency than by Coppieters' version of the +/- UG distinction.
The issue of elicitation procedure has special significance for de + Adjective structure. Coppieters registers his surprise that NNS should diverge so minimally from NS (16.9%) on such a "comparatively obscure" construction (561). It is an ad hoc move to invoke frequency as a predictor of divergence for this structure alone. Left unmentioned is the fact that minimal divergences for this structure are an embarrassment for the +/- UG distinction as a general predictor of NNS-NS differences. As it happens, the de + Adjective construction was tested under the second procedure; for it and the other structures tested in this manner, NNS-NS divergences were small. There is no anomaly to account for if one allows for the possibility that the asymmetry in NNS-NS differences is an artifact of a procedural asymmetry. Coppieters is apparently aware of the procedural asymmetry, but does not attribute differential results to it (553-54).
Though one can only speculate about whether differences in procedure are in fact causally related to differences in results, it is nevertheless easy to see how there might be a relationship. The first procedure involved a three-part, fine-grained decision task in the context of a face-to-face interview with the experimenter. In the second procedure, subjects were asked merely to give nominal statements of well-formedness. In the latter instance, it is unlikely that subtle cues could be communicated by the experimenter to the subjects. However, that likelihood necessarily increases in an elaborated discussion of form, meaning, and interpretation, as was the case in the first procedure. I offer this observation about the relative possibility of experimenter effects as a statement of objective fact about experimental procedure (see Heringer 1970, Labov 1975, Rosenthal 1966), not to dispute Coppieters' assertion that he reinforced all subjects in their judgments and gave no indication when judgments diverged from native norms (552-53). Experimenter effects can be unintentional and unnoticed; measures should be taken to reduce their likelihood.
More to the point, one must consider the nature of the data resulting from the two different elicitation procedures. Recall that the results displayed in <figure/> and the two left columns of Table 1 represent cumulative departures from NS norms, the norms being in the form of nominal statements of acceptability or grammaticality. The second procedure generates just such nominal statements for each item, and departures from these norms are straightforwardly tallied. The first procedure, by contrast, involves direct comparisons of two sentences. In this case, the subjects declare that the sentences are equally acceptable, or that they prefer one sentence over the other. Thus in one procedure judgments of acceptability reflect assessments against some external criterion of acceptability, while in the other procedure the judgments reflect comparisons of one sentence with another. A further difference between the procedures should also be noted. The first procedure, in eliciting three-part answers, generates complex commentaries on subtle interactions of syntax and semantics. Anyone who has ever elicited (or offered) such comments recognizes that they may contain references to imagined contexts, statements reflecting judgments based on degrees of well-formedness, expressions of ambivalence, etc. This type of data may be contrasted with the simple nominal statements ('correct or good'/'incorrect or bad') generated by the second procedure. (Moreover, what is meant by 'good' and 'bad' is not spelled out for participants, creating the possibility of intersubject variability as to the basis of judgment.) In light of multiple differences between the two procedures, one must recognize that their results are inherently dissimilar and therefore not comparable. The two types of data should not be lumped together as if they were identical.
However, Coppieters seems to do just that. The results of the first procedure, in order to be considered relevant input for the NNS-NS comparisons displayed in <figure/> and Table 1, have apparently been converted into nominal data. The details of this conversion operation are not spelled out. How does one establish a unique NS norm, and nominal departures from it, when the task generates a complex response? By what algorithm is a comparison of two related items, with an accompanying three-part, fine-grained discussion, transformed into an independent statement of acceptability for each of the items? These questions speak to the reproducibility of the results, as well as to their validity.
With respect to the more general question of whether there are NNS-NS competence differences, Coppieters' methodology is again problematic. Recall that the differences he attests are derived from comparisons of NS and NNS deviations from a prototypical native norm. The norms represent the majority of NS nominal judgments. For 90 of the 107 items, there was 80% or more agreement in judgment among NS. For the other 17 items, "the majority opinion of NS's" (553) must be understood as any level of agreement above 50%. Clearly, it would have been desirable to establish norms at a high level of NS agreement for all items. Even if this had been the case, one must question the use of nominal data to establish norms. Nominal judgments are insensitive to degrees of grammaticality or acceptability. Chaudron 1983 has argued that scaled judgments of grammaticality (e.g. 1 = totally unacceptable/ungrammatical; 5 = perfectly acceptable/grammatical) are more informative than nominal data, inasmuch as they permit intergroup comparisons (e.g. t-tests and ANOVAs) on the basis of means and variance from means. The psychological validity of scalar grammaticality statements is supported by Barsalou 1987 and others working in category/concept theory. The category of well-formedness is susceptible to gradedness effects in experimental performance, just like other categories such as BIRD (robins and sparrows are judged more birdlike than emus, ostriches, penguins, and apteryxes). Moreover, Chomsky 1986 has argued for relative grammaticality in syntax as a function of the number of barriers crossed in extractions. In sum, there are numerous reasons for preferring scalar responses to nominal statements in determining differences between NS and NNS.
The composition of the subject groups in the Coppieters study presents additional problems. To qualify for participation, nonnative subjects had to perform at a near-native level of speech, as determined by native-speaker friends of the subjects and by the experimenter himself. In addition, by Coppieters' reckoning, all performed orally at a level of 'superior' by ACTFL criteria. (For a description of the ACTFL oral proficiency interview, see ACTFL 1986.) However, both of these screening procedures are imprecise and nondeterministic. Informal near-native ratings cannot assure native-like performance across a variety of linguistic structures. It is quite possible to sound 'native-like' by avoiding production of complex structures which are not fully mastered. It is also possible to sound 'native-like' in restricted contexts, such as bank transactions or philosophy lectures. Indeed, for restricted and practiced contexts, there may be apparent pragmatic mastery, while for other contexts there may be manifest inadequacies. The second screening measure leaves a great deal of latitude for composing the near-native group, inasmuch as the ACTFL category of 'superior' ranges between the 3rd and 5th levels of a 5-point scale. By virtue of these screening procedures, it is quite possible that the near-native group was not particularly proficient. It is not clear that Coppieters satisfies the desideratum of Long 1990 for investigating the general question of competence differences, viz., that at least some subjects sampled be among "the very best" L2 learners.
The biographical profiles of NNS and NS subjects pose further problems. As has been documented by Ross 1979 and others, one may expect differences in grammaticality judgments - even among native speakers - if sociological and educational variables are not controlled. Coppieters' 21 NNS were "highly educated" (551) and included 19 professors or researchers, eleven of whom were professors of linguistics or literature. In contrast, his 20 NS had merely "had some education" (551). Alone, such background differences could account for a good deal of the NNS-NS deviance. That is, failure to control for background differences between the NNS and NS increases the chances that the two groups will not coincide on judgments for "subtle areas" (Long 1990:281) of the grammar, just as NS or NNS with heterogeneous backgrounds would be likely to disagree among themselves.
The risks of heterogeneity are also evident in the native language backgrounds of the NNS. Recall that Coppieters' subjects are from a variety of disparate linguistic backgrounds. In principle, this design feature would allow one to determine whether results generalize beyond speakers of a single native language. However, with only 2 subjects representing Farsi, only 5 subjects representing 'Oriental' languages, and 6 different native languages among the 14 native speakers of Germanic and Romance, one cannot assume validity of results for the individual native language groups, much less generalize across groups.
Because of these shortcomings, and others that will come to light in later sections of this paper, the Coppieters study must be viewed with some skepticism. At the very least, it should be evident that the two main questions of maturational effects in L2A - whether there are competence differences between NNS and NS, and if there are, which linguistic domains are affected - remain open. Further examination of the issues is therefore warranted. As a first step, it is important to determine whether the principal findings of Coppieters can be replicated with methodological modifications and under conditions of tighter procedural control.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="35">The other sources for the Eastern dialect give forms containing [ts] or [<*_>c-hacek<*/>] rather than [ks]. These include Lean and Mulia, the two archaic sources cited by Lehmann (1920:656), who give //lochac//, presumably [lo<*_>c-hacek<*/>ak], and all of the modern sources, e.g., Dennis and Royce (1983:14), who give lots'ak<sp_>h<sp/>. Campbell and Oltrogge (1980:219) reconstruct *lots'ak. The [ks] reported by some sources is likely an erroneous transcription, due to lack of familiarity with ejectives. Moreover, none of the sources contains any word of the form sak or sax that might be what Greenberg considers to be the second member of the form, or anything like ala-k 'glowing' or lak 'glow'. Nor do these forms appear in the notebook. The notebook contains no headword 'glow', and no entry for Jicaque under the headword 'shine', nor has inspection of all of the Jicaque entries yielded any plausible sources for these forms. The only entries under 'sun' are loksak, latsak, and loksaki. It thus appears that there is no evidence whatsoever internal to Jicaque for analyzing laksak into lak-sak. In other words, the comparison is between two words, each containing the sequence lak (if the Jicaque contains a [k] at all), in neither of which there is the slightest evidence for an analysis in which lak is a morpheme. In contrast, Greenberg fails to mention the etymology proposed by Mason (1918:19), namely, that ma<*_>unch<*/>alak is derived from ma<*_>unch<*/>al 'burn, blaze' (cf. ma<*_>unch<*/>ale 'flames'). The weakness in Mason's etymology is that no suffix -ak is known, but, there being evidence for one of the two morphemes, it is nonetheless more plausible than Greenberg's.
246 STONE<sb_>2<sb/>
LIA cites M. i<*_>unch<*/>ak and i<*_>unch<*/>ik 'knife' and asak'a 'flint'. The last is attested but is indicated by Mason (132) to be Antonia<*_>n-tilde<*/>o. Neither of the forms for 'knife' appears in the notebook, which gives M. <*_>c-hacek<*/>a:k, A. <*_>c-hacek<*/>ik<sp_>h<sp/>, <O_>formula<O/>, and <O_>formula<O/>. Nor do they appear in Mason (130), who gives M. <*_>c-hacek<*/>ak, A. <O_>formula<O/>. The form i<*_>unch<*/>ak is cited by Greenberg and Swadesh (1953:219). The forms in LIA as well as the form in Greenberg and Swadesh (1953) appear to derive from Sapir (1917:8), who gives the forms (i)<*_>unch<*/>a:k and (i)<*_>unch<*/>ik. In the footnote to this entry, Sapir cites the form as <*_>unch<*/>ak, suggesting that the forms with the initial i may be typographical errors, with i in place of the articular prefix t, the parentheses intended to segregate it from the stem.
255 THROAT
LIA lists A.p-e:nik'a. The notebook has pe:nik'a:i, which is the form given by Mason (127). The basis for segregating the /p/ is unknown.
4.2. Grammatical evidence. Chapter 5, 'Grammatical Evidence for Amerind,' cites Salinan data in eleven places, sections 6, 13, 16, 19, 45, 74, 80, 84, 88, 90, 100. Of these, the following five call for comment.
In section 19 (p. 288) LIA gives the Miguele<*_>n-tilde<*/>o first-person plural pronoun as ka. The correct form, according to Mason (32) is <O_>formula<O/>.
Section 80 (p. 311) reads in its entirety:
The following etymology represents a past-tense marker in HOKAN: Yuru-mangu<*_>i-acute<*/> iba, Coahuilteco pa-, Tequistlatec -pa, Salinan be, Pomo (hi)ba, Karok -<*_>unch<*/>ipa<*_>approximate-sign<*/>pa- (near past), and Shasta p'- (distant past, habitual past). The marker probably also occurs in Salinan iwa-<*_>unch<*/>, which when suffixed to nouns means 'that which was formerly', e.g. noq<*_>unch<*/> 'head', <O_>formula<O/> 'skull'. The last element, -<*_>unch<*/>, is a common noun formant in Chumash. The agreement in a form *ipa among Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/> in the extreme south, Coahuilteco in the middle, and Karok in the far north is striking.
This passage presents a number of difficulties. First, Salinan be is not a simple past tense morpheme as Greenberg glosses it. Mason (1918:35) glosses be as 'when, definite past time', as in such examples as be:-ya 'when I went'. Sapir (1920:307) suggests that be:ya is really "an indicative e:ya 'I went' subordinated by the demonstrative stem pe, pa 'the, that'." Sapir's view is supported by Mason's statement that "Pure sonant b has been found only in the case of the demonstrative article pe..." (1918:11). If Sapir is right, be is not a tense morpheme at all.
Second, the agreement among the forms is perhaps less striking than Greenberg suggests. Of the eight forms cited, only four (Karok, Pomo, Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/>, Salinan iwa<*_>unch<*/>) have the initial i, as we shall see, the initial i of iwa<*_>unch<*/> is probably not original. Moreover, some of these morphemes are prefixes while others are suffixes. Finally, as discussed below in 5.3, it is unclear whether the Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/> past tense morpheme is the infix -iba- or the suffix -bai.
Third, the discussion of iwa<*_>unch<*/> is seriously flawed. To begin with, this suffix and the examples cited are not Salinan. The suffix iwa<*_>unch<*/> is not mentioned in any source on Salinan that I have consulted, nor are the examples cited as illustrating the use of this suffix (noq<*_>unch<*/> 'head', <O_>formula<O/> 'skull'). Nor do they appear under the headings 'head' and 'skull' for Salinan in Greenberg's Hokan notebook. Indeed, Salinan has no [q] at all.
Rather, the suffix iwa<*_>unch<*/> and the examples of its use are Chumash. noq<*_>unch<*/> and <O_>formula<O/> are among the examples of the use of the suffix iwa<*_>unch<*/> in Barbare<*_>n-tilde<*/>o Chumash given by Beeler (1976:259), one of the sources listed in the notebook. The notebook lists noks under 'head' for Inese<*_>n-tilde<*/>o and Barbare<*_>n-tilde<*/>o Chumash.
Nonetheless, the issue of the cognation of Chumash iwa<*_>unch<*/> with the other forms cited still arises. Two facts militate against Greenberg's analysis. First, the initial i is very likely not original. There are two related suffixes in Chumash, the suffix iwa<*_>unch<*/> which derives nouns meaning 'dead, defunct, former', and the verbal past tense wa<*_>unch<*/>. The nominal suffix is invariant, as is the verbal suffix in Barbare<*_>n-tilde<*/>o (Beeler 1976). In Inese<*_>n-tilde<*/>, however, according to Applegate (1972:102-3), an epenthetic copy of the last vowel of the stem is inserted before the past tense marker when the stem ends in a sonorant. Although the history is not known, it seems very likely that the nominal suffix is historically derived from the verbal past tense, and that the initial i represents a frozen epenthetic vowel.
Second, there is little basis for segmenting out the final <*_>unch<*/>. If iwa<*_>unch<*/> is derived from the verbal suffix wa<*_>unch<*/>, it is unlikely that the final <*_>unch<*/> is a noun-forming suffix. Noun-forming suffix <*_>unch<*/> is not described in any source on Chumash that I have consulted, including the two most detailed grammatical descriptions, Applegate (1972) for Inese<*_>n-tilde<*/>o and Beeler (1976) for Barbare<*_>n-tilde<*/>o. There is a suffix -V<*_>unch<*/> described by both Beeler (1976:258) and Applegate (1972:213) as "resultative," and it is to this suffix that Greenberg refers. The V means that the suffix takes the form of a vowel followed by <*_>unch<*/>. According to Beeler (1976) this vowel is unpredictable, but Applegate (1972:93) gives rules for predicting the vowel. In any case, the derivation envisioned by Greenberg is not clear. If we start from a verbal past tense suffix *ipa, which in Chumash comes to be added to nouns as well as to verbs, it would seem unnecessary to add a resultative suffix, and one has to wonder why the basic past tense suffix would acquire the resultative suffix attached to it in nouns.
In section 84 (p. 311), LIA cites a suffix -<*_>unch<*/>e 'desiderative' for Antonia<*_>n-tilde<*/>o. Mason discusses such a suffix, but with final glottal stop <O_>formula<O/>, on page 49, and although he glosses it 'desiderative', he makes it clear that he is far from confident of this interpretation, a hesitation fully justified by the varied meanings of the examples adduced.
In section 88 (p. 313), LIA refers to a Salinan imperative morpheme -i-. This suffix is not described by Mason in his discussion of the verbal morphology (1918:34-54), nor in Turner (1987), so that it appears to be quite spurious, and given the lack of documentation, one despairs of tracking it down. The key turns out to be Rivet (1942:33), which presents the same equation as in LIA, minus the Karok form, which was evidently added by Greenberg. Rivet cites Sapir (1921:71), in which we find, as entry number 28, the following:
Sal. -i-, imperative suffix with third person pronominal object (e.g. m-alel-i-k ASK HIM!): Yana -'i', imperative suffix.
This constitutes the entire discussion of imperative -i- in the literature. At the very least Greenberg is to be taken to task for using as evidence a morpheme for which the evidence is so skimpy, especially when it does not appear in Mason (1918), the only published grammatical description of the language and the source of Sapir's data.
Whether Sapir's analysis should be accepted is unclear. Salinan has a number of third-person singular objective suffixes, which according to Mason (1918:46-47) take the form -o, -ko, -xo, and -k. The different suffixes are associated with different classes of verb: "... the -p prefix nearly invariably takes the suffix -o or -ko as its third personal objective form while the objective form in -k occurs exclusively with the -k prefix" (Mason 1918:39). That is, the forms in -k are associated with what Mason considered to be the intransitive verbs, later argued by Sapir (1920:307-8; 1921:69-70) to be stative. In his discussion of the imperative, Mason (1918:41) states that : "The imperative takes its third person pronominal object in -ik, never in -o or -ko."
Sapir's reasoning appears to have been that the i of this suffix could be isolated as an imperative since the suffix appears only in imperatives and since other third-person singular objective suffixes contain k. Against this we may consider the fact that imperative i occurs nowhere else and that it is not possible to analyze the third-person singular objective morpheme simply as k; even if we could extract k from ko, we would be left with the forms in o. Moreover, judging from Mason's examples of the use of -ik, namely k-<*_>a-acute<*/>mamp-ik 'take it out!', <*_>a-acute<*/>mes-ik 'shout to him!', and m-alel-ik 'ask him!', it appears that -ik occurs even with active verbs, which according to Mason's generalization do not take the objective prefixes containing k. On balance, it seems that -ik must be treated as a unit, and that Sapir's analysis is overly aggressive.
In section 90 (p. 313) LIA cites k- as the imperative prefix. Actually, according to Mason (1918:41) this prefix appears only in the plural, and not in all cases.
5. Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/>. Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/> forms occur in a total of twenty-six entries in LIA, to wit: H15, H32, H35, H44, H61, H69, H72, H87, H142, H158, H161, A9, A79, A86, A102, A104, A191, A243, A269, G19, G61, G80, G88, G90, G102.
5.1. Segmentation. Morphological analysis is often difficult even in languages for which we have unlimited data; in a case like Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/>, where we have only a tiny corpus containing few related forms, we must proceed with the utmost caution and must expect to remain unsure on many points.
Rivet made a valiant effort at analysis on the basis of the data available to him, using both what little language-internal evidence there was, and what was suggested to him by similar forms in Hokan languages. Many of these proposals are interesting and would be worthy of pursuit if we were convinced of the affiliation of Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/> with Hokan, but until such an affiliation is proved they remain the merest speculation.
The result of the dearth of Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/> data combined with the fecundity of Rivet's etymological imagination is that most of the morphological analyses he proposed rest on hypothetical affiliations with Hokan, and so remain undemonstrated. Rather than exercising caution and utilizing only justifiable analyses, Greenberg simply accepts Rivet's analyses and presents them as if they were clearly justified internal to Yurumangu<*_>i-acute<*/>, as we shall now see in detail.
Rivet (1942:28-29) posits a prefix a-, appearing on both verbs and nouns. Other than the fact that a considerable number of words begin with a, he cites no language-internal evidence for the existence of such a prefix. In many cases he gives no evidence of morphological complexity of any kind. Where he does give evidence, it consists of comparisons with other languages.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="36">
One
Palestine and the
Coming of the Cold War,
January 1947 - March 1947
During the winter of 1947, the future of Palestine became immersed in East-West policy considerations extending far beyond the Eastern Mediterranean. Britain's sudden retreat from empire enabled American Zionists and the U.S. State Department to exploit rising war jitters as they competed with one another in the mass media to create a new conventional wisdom on Palestine. The American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) insisted American involvement in Greece and Turkey should be followed by support for a Jewish state. The State Department's Near East desk argued that policy would only lead to Communist gains throughout the oil-rich region. Both sides attempted to use the American mass media, particularly the New York Times, to win converts to their cause. They competed in describing a vision of reality that would serve as the context for policymaking. The beginning of this struggle to shape conventional wisdom at the outset of the Cold War and the role the mass media played in that conflict is the subject of this chapter.
Americans reading the daily press and listening to the nation's network commentators in the opening days of 1947 had reason to believe that the world was entering an era of peace. Although a state of war still technically existed, President Harry S. Truman on December 31, 1946 declared the hostilities of World War II officially terminated. Emergency laws exercised by the Executive Branch since 1941 were ended. A presidential proclamation pledged the United States would work with other nations in building a world in which justice would replace force.
The New York Times reported that American Secretary of State James F. Byrnes and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov had just completed negotiations in New York that amicably resolved differences on more than forty issues. United Nations Secretary General Trygve Lie indicated in his New Year's message that a "sound foundation" had been laid and he looked to the future with "sober confidence." The chief United States delegate to the United Nations, Warren R. Austin, told a radio audience that he was convinced the United States and the Soviet Union "had come to a better understanding of each other" and that he had "great faith" that a start had been made on the "long road away from war." The nation's foremost radio commentator, Hans V. Kaltenborn of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), caught this spirit of optimism when he told listeners, "the days ahead will confirm mankind's steady march to better things." The United States, Kaltenborn was convinced, had "seized the torch of freedom and held it aloft for others to see and follow."
The New Year's cheer proved short-lived. The British, bankrupted by the war and wracked by labor problems, abruptly announced in February a pullback from their commitments in the Eastern Mediterranean. The collapse of the British economy and the Labour government's sudden fallback from empire jolted New York Times publisher and board chairman Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who remained convinced that the "common good" of the free world required a strong Britain. The prospect of a disintegrating British empire had Times editorial writers fearing the emergence of a world in which the United States stood alone in defense of democratic freedoms everywhere under attack. Kaltenborn shared this sense of sudden foreboding. Gone was the "new age of peace" that seemed to have been dawning only weeks before. The British cabinet's decision to reduce Britain's armed forces by 340.000 men, plus the acute shortages of food, fuel and clothing throughout the United Kingdom, created a "dangerous situation," Kaltenborn believed, in the postwar world.
Britain's pullback from the Eastern Mediterranean exposed misgivings long held by members of the American media and the State Department over the Soviet Union's postwar aims. In the fifteen months that followed, the world was rhetorically split into two hostile camps, one Soviet, the other American, separated by "deep distrust and mutual suspicion." Palestine, a country with a violent history of its own, became absorbed within the East-West war of words when Britain, eager to trim a costly 100,000 man peacekeeping force, announced in late February it was turning the Palestine problem over to the United Nations. It was these events that set the stage for a mass-mediated battle for public opinion at the beginning of the Cold War.
JOURNALISM'S FIRST DRAFT ON HISTORY
The early postwar rhetoric of Kaltenborn and Sulzberger reflects a journalism of self-promotion and self-conscious public service, if not self-abnegation. Each man intended to play a bigger part in policymaking than either was permitted during the war years. Born in Milwaukee, Kaltenborn joined the Fourth Wisconsin Voluntary Infantry to fight in the Spanish-American War. In the two decades that followed he hustled stories for the German language press in Wisconsin before joining the staff of the Milwaukee Journal, and later Herbert F. Gunnison's Brooklin Daily Eagle. On April 4, 1922 Kaltenborn presented a radio address at the Army Signal Corps station in New York City, which years later he billed as "the first editorial opinion over the air." He made news when he climbed Mt. Fuji in 1927 and visited the Soviet Union two years later. In 1932 he covered the Democratic National Convention for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), later interviewed Hitler and Mussolini, reported on the Spanish Civil War and the appeasement at Munich.
Kaltenborn considered himself a "contemporary historian" and saw his fifteen-minute newscasts for NBC during the war as first drafts of history. NBC nourished this image and on October 16, 1941 organized a town meeting in which Kaltenborn answered questions about the war from two hundred of San Francisco's "outstanding citizens." NBC also arranged for a newsreel camaraman to be present. Subsequently, Kaltenborn appeared weekly in newsreels shown across the country. During the first six months of the war, more than one million theatre goers asked for Kaltenborn's views. While he admitted that he "didn't know all the answers," he believed it was his responsibility to "guide public opinion.
Both Kaltenborn and Sulzberger saw the press as a major player in postwar policymaking. Kaltenborn observed that the responsibility to lead opinion belonged to the press as much as to those "who place their hands over the Bible and swear to do their duty in public office." Each made democracy possible by their public service. Sulzberger told the nation's leading editors that how the press handled its "sacred and special mission" might well "determine the destiny of the world." The war had shown too clearly, Sulzberger claimed, that only "an informed democracy" was strong enough to survive in a world where totalitarianism was on the march.
During the war the press had been an agreeable, if at times, reluctant partner in reporting the Roosevelt administration's war news and views. Part of the reason was that the press generally supported the war effort. In April, 1942, Kaltenborn endorsed the idea that total war required a cooperative press in April 1942. "We want freedom of speech and press for patriotic Americans whose one concern is to win the war," he noted. "We want silence from all others." But as the war went on, many in the press wearied in the role of messenger service for the Roosevelt administration. Radio newsmen in May, 1943 went public with a complain that government censors often left "the Japs better informed than Americans." Wire service reporters were convinced a false image of the war was being communicated through the government's determination "to hold back and play down American casualties." The American Society of Newspaper Editors, representing the nation's largest dailies, resented the growth of "pernicious propaganda" disseminated by government bureaucrats. It charged in April, 1944 that news management had confused the American people.
Arthur Krock, the Times veteran Washington correspondent, believed the war and the controversy growing out of government efforts to manage the news would alter the policymaking environment in the immediate postwar period. Krock thought the press would be less likely to accept the administration's call for a non-partisan foreign policy. He wrote that the State Department would be incapable of managing postwar foreign policy without significant participation by the Congress and the American people. Times management shared Krock's conviction. Sulzberger conceived of the Times as an "American institution" called upon to preserve the country's fragile freedoms through vigorous editorial crusading. Charles Merz, the paper's editorial page chief, determined to "stir the American people and the Congress to their responsibilities." Sunday editor Lester Markel saw that responsibility as "educating public opinion" to what diplomat correspondent James Reston described as "the changes and convulsions in the world in which America must operate."
The determination of Times management to participate in postwar policymaking was a significant departure from the days when Adolph S. Ochs seriously considered scrapping the paper's editorial page. The Ohio country boy turned grocer's clerk and druggist's apprentice told an interviewer that he could get a larger circulation by printing a newspaper with all advertisements and no news rather than a paper with all news and no advertisements. His work as an assistant in the composing room of the Knoxville (Tenn.) Tribune and as staff writer and editor of the Chattanooga Times convinced him that "news which told the exact truth so far as possible" also made good economic sense. In 1896 he became publisher and controlling owner of the New York Times, then a struggling enterprise in the era of the yellow press dominated by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Ochs' determination to cultivate an elite, monied readership resulted in a twenty fold increase in Times earnings during the first generation of his stewardship, and it led to the Times' dominance "within its own sphere of usefulness." Ochs reasoned that only one in 100 readers read all the news that Times' editors saw fit to print. But that one "would tell the other ninety-nine" and the Times would get the reputation of being the "complete newspaper."
Sulzberger saw interpretation and leading elite opinion as central to the postwar role of the Times. Sulzberger had been a member of a noteworthy Jewish family that featured philanthropists, scholars and jurists, when he married Ochs' only daughter in 1917, positioning himself as the heir apparent within the Times hierarchy. On Ochs' death in 1935, Sulzberger became publisher, president, and chairman of the board at the Times and wielded his power to pick associates who shared his commitment to a journalism of "public service." Sulzberger saw protecting the nation's freedom from totalitarian intrusions at the center of that service. He warned fellow editors that the press was like the canary miners took down into the shafts with them. "It fell over at the least sign of poisonous gas", Sulzberger pointed out, and this warning gave others a chance to escape. While the Times primarily considered Soviet foreign policy before and during the World War II in terms of that nation's security interests, by the winter of 1947 it was beginning to smell poison gas. "Communists and fellow travelers" represented a threat to the American way of life, Sulzberger told the nation's editors in April, 1947; the publisher who "knowingly employed a communist or any other type of totalitarian" or gave him "any place of influence" in news or editorial departments "threatened the United States itself." The defeat of Nazi Germany did not mean fascism was dead, Times diplomatic correspondent Herbert L. Matthews wrote, expressing this new orthodoxy. Communist authoritarianism was a "Red Fascism."
Sulzberger and the Times were seen as an important target for those within the Truman administration who were pressing for a get tough policy toward the Soviet Union. In December, 1945 Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal told Sulzberger and Brooks Atkinson, the paper's Moscow correspondent, that "the only thing /the Russians) recognize is stark force." Forrestal's case to Sulzberger was that the Russians had "no respect for the normal human weaknesses, such as justice, kindliness and affection." At a cabinet meeting three weeks later Forrestal urged President Truman to call an emergency meeting of Sulzberger and other leading newspapermen, as well Kaltenborn and the nation's leading radio commentators, impressing on them "the seriousness of the present situation."
</doc><doc register="learned" n="37">During these sessions, the PDRY was consistently reported in Sanaa as arguing that the transitional period between the announcement of unity and the holding of national elections should be extended beyond the six months stipulated in the draft constitution. PDRY leaders reportedly feared that six months was not enough time to overcome their regime's poor image in the eyes of the electorate. There was also speculation that both the YAR and PDRY leaders feared that opposition to the draft constitution was growing, so they wanted to accelerate the unification process to deny opponents time to organize.
Predictably, the issue of assigning senior posts in the new government proved difficult. Throughout the government structure, the principle of a 50-50 split of positions, and of assigning northern deputies to southern department heads and vice versa, was maintained. The bargaining sessions were long and at times rancorous as officials jockeyed endlessly to ensure themselves favorable spots in the new hierarchy. Salih and Bidh were named president and vice president, respectively, of the five-man Presidential Council provided for in the draft unity constitution; the PDRY head of state, Haydar Abu Bakr al-Attas, became prime minister of a 39-member cabinet, and PDRY prime minister Said Yasin Numan was installed as speaker of the parliament. The unity agreement said that sufficient time should be allowed for transition to permanent unity and specified a two and one-half year, rather than a six-month, transition period. The constitutional referendum called for at Aden and stipulated in the draft constitution was not mentioned.
The new state was something of a Potemkin facade. The situation was symbolized by the new flags seen around Sanaa, from which it was obvious that the green star of the YAR had simply been removed to leave the unadorned red, white, and black tricolor of the new state. The 'united' ministries tended to be divided into two camps of rival northern and southern officials who were more inclined to keep to themselves than to integrate with their new colleagues. These divisions were particularly sharp in bodies such as the Education Ministry, where northern and southern ideas differed sharply on fundamental substantive issues such as curriculum. As more than one senior official admitted, the complex problems of unifying the PDRY's socialist economy with the free market system of the YAR were at first swept under the rug with the two economies left to function largely as they had done in the past. In the field of defense, the general staffs were successfully integrated into a unified defense ministry, and a few units were moved from south to north and vice versa. Unification at the rank-and-file level, however, was left to take place over a protracted period of time, in order not to sacrifice military efficiency.
The haste with which the two sides came together had its costs in the early months of unity. The low salaries that had been paid to southern officials were at first not raised quickly enough to keep pace with the cost of living, which rose rapidly toward northern levels despite the maintenance of some consumer goods price subsidies. This problem, combined with administrative failure to meet payrolls in Aden, created severe hardship and short-term discontent in the south. Another cause of friction was a hasty attempt to roll back the land reform program under which the PDRY government had distributed agricultural land in the years following independence from Great Britain. The dislocations caused by this effort led to demonstrations in at least one southern province. At the same time, the government was slow to deliver on promises to restore real estate confiscated from businessmen who had fled north from Aden following southern independence. This failure hurt efforts to induce these businessmen to reinvest in the stagnant southern economy.
Despite these difficulties, however, the merger took place without the major disruptions some had predicted, and the small size of demonstrations mounted in Sanaa on 22 May against the union was a fair measure of the weakness of anti-unity sentiment in the country. Officials noted at that time that their strategy was to capitalize on the enthusiasm for unity that existed in 1990 and not allow the formidable practical problems of unification to cause them to miss this major opportunity. In retrospect, and notwithstanding the severe problems the Republic of Yemen has faced in its first two years, their calculation appears sound.
THE POLITICS OF UNIFICATION
There were several reasons why the leaders in Sanaa and Aden were able to overcome a legacy of mutual suspicion and fear created by 22 years of politico-military combat and to unify Yemen in less than six months. The first and foremost was the sea change in the international political climate brought about by the Soviet Union's acceptance of change in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the implications for the Aden regime of Moscow's new attitude toward its friends elsewhere in the world. The southern leadership doubtless felt compelled to alter radically its political course and to strike the best deal possible with Sanaa as quickly as possible.
The other reasons for the success of the unification effort are interrelated. In the 1980s, the consolidation of the authority of the YAR government in tribal areas left Salih, whose personal stake in a successful unity initiative was high, greater room for maneuver in unity negotiations than he had previously enjoyed. Salih's greater maneuverability vis-<*_>a-acute<*/>-vis the tribes grew out of the evolution of the complex Yemeni-Saudi relationship, which was an important element influencing the success of the initiative. To understand the radical transformation in the attitude of the two sides toward one another, the political and economic positions of Aden and Sanaa in November 1989 must be considered.
Aden: Fall 1989, Nowhere to Turn
By the fall of 1989, the regime in Aden had very limited options. The bloodletting of January 1986 was a repudiation of Ali Nasir Muhammad and his effort to seek an opening to the West, seen by many as the key to the PDRY's economic salvation. Also gone from the scene, however, were the most prominent of Ali Nasir Muhammad's hard-line opponents. Although they were eulogized as 'martyred' heroes, the country's new leaders showed little enthusiasm for returning the country to a radical communist course.
PDRY politics following the January events were essentially stagnant. The regime was divided into factions opposed to one another along regional as well as ideological lines, with hard-line North Yemeni members of the former NDF pitted against moderates, many of whom came from Hadhramaut Province. These splits sharply limited the regime's ability to develop a clear policy direction. The only success the new PDRY leadership could claim was the rapprochement with the YAR that produced the joint investment zone, the proliferation of other less significant agreements with Sanaa, and the gradual diminution of the status of Ali Nasir Muhammad and his exiles in the YAR.
In social terms at least, the regime had some reason for self-congratulation. Between 1967 and 1985, illiteracy was reduced from 97 to 59 percent. In the YAR, the illiteracy rate stood at 80 percent in 1985. In achieving this progress, the PDRY relied largely on native, well-motivated teachers whereas the YAR depended heavily on Egyptians. The PDRY could also point with pride to its liberal family law that gave women rights unparalleled in most Islamic countries.
The economy, by contrast, was largely dysfunctional. Land and fisheries reforms had produced declines in agricultural production, and the port of Aden, once one of the busiest in the world, played almost no role in international commerce. Industrial production had declined, and, despite 20 years of socialism, more than 50 percent of the gross national product still came from the private sector, while hard currency remittances from workers abroad accounted for half the government's annual budget.
Nowhere was the bankruptcy of the PDRY's system more apparent than in the petroleum sector. The discovery of oil in the YAR by the US-based Hunt Oil company in 1984 had led to exports of 200,000 barrels of oil a day five years later. A more or less contemporaneous Soviet discovery just across the border in the PDRY had put Aden $500 million in debt with nothing to show for it other than 60 or so mostly non-functioning wells, a pipeline suspected of leaking, an outmoded oil processing complex, and a few barrels of crude oil trucked sporadically to Aden's decrepit refinery. Ali Nasir Muhammad's opening to the West had brought several Western companies into the PDRY, but none had made a discovery.
Against this somber backdrop came the changes in Moscow's policy toward Eastern Europe. The political message that Moscow was unwilling to stand behind the regimes there was complemented by widespread reports in the latter part of 1989 that the Soviet military and economic aid that had been vital to the Aden government's survival was to be drastically reduced. Exactly what the Soviets said to the Aden leaders about aid levels, and when they said it, is not well known. There is little doubt, however, that such cuts were an imminent prospect.
The PDRY leaders' strategy for improving their bleak situation was to move cautiously in the direction of political and economic reform. In the latter part of 1989, the government organized local council elections in which candidates outside the ruling Yemen Socialist Party were allowed to run; a high percentage of non-party members were elected. The government also appeared to reach a tacit understanding with newspaper editors permitting freer journalistic expression. On the economic front, discussions began with the Soviet Union in 1989 aimed at making available to Western companies a substantial portion of the area in Shabwa Province where the Soviets had been looking for oil. The government also adopted a law intended to encourage domestic and foreign private investment and to permit investors to take a percentage of their profits out of the PDRY. Finally, wealthy Saudis of South Yemeni origin, as well as southern businessmen who had moved to the YAR, were invited to make investments in the PDRY economy.
Aden's limited economic liberalization efforts, however, proved a failure. Whatever negotiations there had been with the Soviets about the release of oil acreage seemed to be going nowhere. Soviet exploration in Shabwa largely ceased, and the date for the opening of the pipeline from Shabwa to the coast was continually postponed. Efforts to attract private investment languished as businessmen waited until the fate of the regime became clear.
The response of South Yemenis, like that of investors, made it plain that the regime's political strategy was too little too late. The spring of 1990 saw considerable ferment in the media - in contrast to the silence of the still highly 'disciplined' fourth estate in the YAR - as well as the first stirrings of political demonstrations and strikes. South Yemenis also made clear their strong pro-unity feelings. When President Salih went to Aden in November 1989, he was greeted by crowds calling for unity whose enthusiasm was obviously not staged. At the same time, some of the political parties that had been active in both the YAR and the PDRY in the early 1960s began to resurface in the PDRY. While these parties were insignificant as political forces, their appearance reflected the popular interest in genuine liberalization.
Pressure for unification from South Yemenis continued in the spring of 1990. By then, the leadership in Aden, short of other alternatives, appeared to have reached the conclusion that unification was its best option. In theory, it could have continued to resist pressures for unification, opting instead for more radical political change, for a renewed effort to open the oil fields to Western companies, and for strategms designed to avoid the need both to play second fiddle to the YAR leadership and to share their oil wealth with Sanaa. Their decision against such actions and instead to respond favorably to Salih's unity initiative almost certainly stemmed from a calculation that popular feeling in the PDRY both against them and in favor of unity was too strong to permit them to stay in power.
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10.2 Connections between City Growth and Economic Development
Compared with Third World averages, India did not develop rapidly between 1960 and 1981. Much of the difference can be attributed to far lower total factor productivity growth rates (chap. 7). Indeed, while poor productivity growth can account for only a portion of India's slow city growth experience after 1964 (chap. 6), it can account for a great deal of the poor economic performance overall.
Underlying India's dismal productivity growth performance are structural and intrasectoral distortions. To some degree, these could be reduced by appropriate rural policies (notably, providing insurance incentives to encourage peasant farmers to switch to higher yield but riskier crop mixes: see Singh, 1979) and industry-oriented packages (in particular, by removing location and input pricing distortions created by current policies: see Sekhar, 1983). In the presence of such distortions, traditional policies that are oriented toward capital formation will have only a modest impact, mainly because returns are low. This was the key flaw of the Mahalanobis strategy (chap. 9). Policies that favored urban manufacturing at the expense of rural production ultimately resulted in increasing input and urban food costs, as well as in sharply declining returns to investment.
Many public sector policies needlessly reduce real incomes of the poor as well. Excessive modern sector investment is one such practice. As chapter 9 shows, the Mahalanobis strategy channels investment to the most capital-intensive sectors, thereby minimizing the impact of new investment on labor demand, and hence on unskilled wages. The neglect of agriculture also results in food price hikes, again hurting the poor. Migration restrictions and incomes policies tend to diminish the earnings of most unskilled workers still further.
Furthermore, highly 'prorural' development strategies reduce city growth rates only slightly, largely because urban-rural linkages have become so strong in India. Manufacturing has always been a major user of raw materials, so an augmented supply of those raw materials encourages urban-based manufacturing growth. Because city workers are heavy consumers of foodstuffs, any improvement in food production that lowers food prices also lowers urban wages, thus stimulating city growth. In addition, because Indian agriculture has become increasingly dependent on manufactured intermediates, agricultural output growth stimulates the demand for manufacturing output, creating urban employment. As the Indian economy is relatively closed to trade, all of these urban-rural linkages tend to be stronger than in the SOE in which such linkages spill over into changes in foreign trade volumes. India's poor export performance also implies that the major outlet for increased output must be the domestic market. Thus, if rural demands lag behind, urban output will suffer. Furthermore, the growth of Indian towns and cities appears to have spurred agricultural productivity in nearby areas by generating increased demand and improving the supply of critical intermediate inputs (Dasgupta and Basu, 1985).
In summary, while Indian economic growth may well be greater in the 1990s than it was in the 1960s and 1970s, strong forces limit the extent to which it can be carried by highly unbalanced sectoral productivity advance favoring urban sectors. Development is likely to be most dramatic in the coming decade if urban and rural productivity advance are both enhanced simultaneously.
10.3 Modeling India and Other Developing Countries
Let us turn to a third set of findings coming from the previous chapters and consider what we have learned about computable general equilibrium models. Our general assessment in chapter 3 was the BMW's simulation of a recent portion of Indian economic history provided a surprisingly close fit to reality (even though our vision of that reality was often blurred by imperfect data). In addition, counterfactual simulation with BMW has offered detailed insight into the determinants of city growth. Nevertheless, some of our tales about Indian city growth could have been told without the help of an elaborate CGE model. But this statement can only be made ex post facto: the analyst cannot start by assuming which urbanization and growth forces are most important, which interactions matter most, and which assumptions are most critical.
Although BMW is a complex computer program, it is not a black box. We were surprised at the number of times the model yielded results inconsistent with our economic intuition. But unanticipated results were never accepted (nor hidden) out of deference to the program's inscrutable omniscience. Instead, virtually all results were subjected to scrutiny that enabled us to determine exactly which forces were, and which were not, driving the results. In other words. BMW is not a black box; nor should other CGE models be viewed as black boxes. The model is a tool, not a Ouija board.
Like all models, a CGE can only provide plausible answers to the questions it was designed to address. And like all models, it makes assumptions. The BMW model of India assumes that prices and quantities are, for the most part, determined by the simultaneous clearing of all markets. As such, it is designed to explain medium-term and long-run phenomena. It was not designed to assess short-run responses to shocks, for here disequilibrium rather than equilibrium assumptions seem appropriate. Similarly, BMW has been developed so that we can address questions relating to spatial movements and sectoral growth. But it cannot be expected to provide great insights into policies and shocks impinging on only a very narrow part of the economy.
One of the most valuable contributions of BMW (and something that can in principle be obtained from other CGE models) is a clear understanding of the model's errors. Just as one would examine residuals in econometric work, we devote considerable attention to those episodes and those parts of the economy in which the model did not seem to fit Indian history well. By analyzing the errors, we have been able to identify periods and sectors for which a neoclassical model does poorly and to highlight the need for further research. It turns out that the main errors all have fairly obvious explanations.
One also may ask what can be learned from BMW that could not be learned from a different framework. Relative to other CGEs, the BMW India model richly details government behavior and focuses on infrastructure, capital market fragmentation, and the rural-urban spatial division (as do Kelley and Williamson, 1984). But CGE models do not offer the only means by which to analyze urbanization. It would have been possible to develop a small econometric model of Indian city growth. Such models are obviously useful. Furthermore, they avoid 'one-point estimation' of many parameters, which is inherent in most CGE models. But such models are highly aggregative; they typically contain few explanatory variables and cannot be used to analyze urbanization with the richness offered here. Rather than designating one method as inferior to the other, it makes more sense to regard them as complementary, each with different strengths and weaknesses.
Demographic forecasting offers yet another way to analyze urbanization (see, for example, Rogers, 1984). These models typically have extensive detail with respect to demographic variables; in particular, they usually contain many regions, population groups, migration probabilities, fertility rates, and age- and sex-specific death rates. What they do not have are behavioral specifications or endogenous economic variables. But it is imporper to assert smugly the superiority of economic models: ours, after all, aggregates highly over demographic variables and treats all of them, but not migration, as exogenous.
10.4 Can We Generalize from India?
BMW has been designed to capture critical features of the Indian economy. Our assessment is that it does so rather well, enabling us to draw a large set of conclusions concerning the country's urbanization and growth process. But to what extent can these conclusions be generalized to other countries? The answer hinges on the similarity between India's demo-economic structure and that of other developing countries. Naturally, authors like their findings to be as general as possible. Alas, there are some major obstacles in the way.
A leading obstacle is the greater openness of most developing countries relative to India. In India's semiclosed economy, a sectoral demand boom can fizzle if the costs of traded goods or nontraded inputs are bid up rapidly. In an SOE, traded goods' supply curves are flatter, since traded goods can be imported at a fixed price. Thus, a booming sector is not held back so much by the presence of a stagnant, low-productivity sector in an SOE; indeed, the more unbalanced the productivity advance, the more unbalanced the output growth. But India, with its small, moribund export sector and pervasive import controls, cannot accommodate truly dramatic unbalanced growth quite so easily. In consequence, unbalanced urban-rural sectoral productivity advance, a driving force behind rapid city growth, will have a much more pronounced impact in an SOE than in India.
Two other key features of India's economic structure are its relatively large and developed rural nonagricultural sector and urban manufacturing's dependence on domestically produced raw materials rather than on imported intermediates. The latter feature ensures that rural and urban areas are far more closely integrated than, say, in many African countries. This linkage makes 'runaway city growth' difficult if not impossible and ensures reasonably balanced growth, but it also tends to put the brakes on the overall rate of economic progress. The large rural service sector essentially competes with the urban sectors for released peasant labor, but it can also release labor to agriculture and to the cities, thus reducing competition between them. If Indian agriculture continues to modernize rapidly -and one should not be excessively optimistic here -then the presence of a large rural service sector will provide something of a surplus labor pool that will continue to permit rapid growth of output (but, less happily, continue to depress unskilled wages) both in farming and in the cities.
In short, India has many unique features. Thus, the question remains: Are there any generalizable findings? The most important ones probably center on the role of government. The inegalitarian nature of public sector employment (bidding up skill differentials) and demands (consuming urban goods) is unlikely to be unique to India. So is the need to follow proagricultural policies if large welfare gains for the poor are a target. As a whole, the inefficient government policies outlined above are unlikely to be dramatically different in most other Third World economies. This comment applies most strongly to urban incomes policies and migration restrictions. Furthermore, while IMF-style policies are likely to produce much more growth in SOEs, they are unlikely to be more egalitarian than in India. The distinction between policies that generate large real GDP gains and those that increase living standards of the poor is also generally valid.
The forces driving India's city growth slowdown are to some extent also general, although they operate most strongly in a semiclosed economy. The relative unimportance of rural push factors is probably wide-spread; it was certainly true of nineteenth-century industrial revolutions as well (Williamson, 1990). Similarly, the importance of unbalanced rates of productivity advance, rather than their average level, in driving urbanization is likely to be even stronger in the SOEs, as Kelley and Williamson (1984) have shown. The importance of urban nonmanufacturing sectors and rural nonagricultural sectors in understanding growth and urbanization in India is undoubtedly matched elsewhere as well.
One of the striking findings from our counterfactual simulations was that the misallocation of investment has never been terribly important in India. In a sense, economic inefficiencies are more likely to matter at the firm level: returns to investment are, after all, fairly low everywhere. Since SOEs have more rigidly determined spheres of comparative advantage, sectoral investment choices are probably more important than in India.
In extending the model to other countries -or to India of the 1990s -several modifications need to be considered. In particular, the choice of sectors and the degree of openness must vary from country to country. So, too, must the assumed degree of factor market integration and assumptions concerning domestic restrictions on the tradeability of goods across space. Public sector behavior is also largely country specific. Finally, countries such as India that have experienced significant modernization in portions of their agricultural economies probably should have more than one agricultural sector in a CGE model.
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Building Trades
The building and construction trades have made the most direct gains in using pension funds offensively. Funds from building trades union pensions formed three labor banks in Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. The building trades have also channeled funds into union-built construction. Over eleven projects across the country with varying arrangements and goals have pooled money from regional pension funds. One notable example is the Bricklayers and Laborers Non-Profit Housing Company, Inc. The Bricklayer Union and Laborer Union pension fund buys federally insured certificates of deposit (with small subsidies from participating unions) from the U.S. Trust Bank in Boston, which, in turn, finances construction loans for union-built, low-price housing for South Boston residents.
Other building trade investment projects operate like the Union Labor Life Insurance Company (ULLICO) 'J for Jobs' project, which invests union pension funds in an open-ended trust that invests in union-built construction. The Housing Investment Trust (HIT) has, since 1964, financed union-only housing construction projects with union pension money. In 1987, the AFL-CIO has expanded the HIT scope and established the Building Investment Trust (BIT), which will finance commercial and industrial real estate investments. In May 1988, the Bakery and Confectionery Pension Plan and the Bricklayers National Pension Fund committed $15 million to the BIT; its first project was a $5.8 million hotel complex in Taos, New Mexico. BIT's advantages to pension funds are its relatively low administrative costs and the assurance that union labor will be used in the construction and maintenance of the project.
The Sheet Metal Workers are using their national pension funds in a fashion that could be interpreted as a type of industrial policy. They seek to increase the demand for their members by closing gaps in financial markets and in the surety industry. In order to help contractors in the asbestos removal industry obtain bonds with lower premiums, the union bought a bonding company. The union pension fund already owns a stake in an asbestos removal contractor (U.S. Bureau of National Affairs 1988c). Edward Carlough, President of the Sheet Metal Workers, calls pension funds the labor movement's 'Star Wars Weapon' (U.S. Bureau of National Affairs 1988c). Approximately $500 million has been directed into real estate projects by building trades investment financing foundations (Westerbeck 1985).
The building trades have come closest to systematically challenging the appropriateness of using only the market rate of return in assessing the quality of an investment. Instead, they use a Keynesian multiplier argument and argue that pension funds, unlike other trust funds where all the income comes from financial investments, have two sources of income - employer and employee contributions and investment earnings - and the rates of return from both sources, not just from the more visible financial markets, must be considered. The multiplier argument is primary rhetorical and has not been quantified.
Most of the DOL challenges to building trade investment projects have failed because ERISA's prudent expert rule allows each investment vehicle to be evaluated within the context of the portfolio and the interests of the participants (Leibeg 1980). The unsuccessful 1981 DOL challenge of the Florida Operating Engineers low-interest mortgage program (for plan participants) showed that legal pension-fund investments must have a reasonable rate of return and must serve the needs of the participants (U.S. Bureau of National Affairs 1986a, 1986c). The Reagan administration had sent mixed signals about these union initiatives. The DOL continues to issue warnings about union social investment projects, but then President Reagan, speaking to a building trades meeting in 1982, applauded the unions' efforts in setting an example for local initiatives (Smith 1984). In fact, the building trades' activities have not threatened the traditional control of capital.
Each project has different effects in terms of reallocating capital. Some projects clearly correct a market failure, or barrier, by providing funds to projects that would have otherwise faced a credit problem. The Boston Bricklayer and Laborer project is an example of reallocating capital. Other projects can be viewed as substitutes for organizing new members. The enemy in the building trades is not always perceived as the nonunion worker or the aggressive employer; and in periods of high unemployment the nonunion contractor is not blamed as much as insufficient demand. The building trades have sidestepped organization in favor of using pension-fund monies as a primary way to increase the market share of unionized construction (U.S. Bureau of National Affairs 1985; Freeman 1985).
State and Local Governments
State and local social investing, practiced by public funds in about twelve states, is confined to mortgages or loans to small businesses. The main purpose is to increase employment in the relevant region by filling a capital gap and not by providing loans below 'market rates.' The state of Michigan's project to coordinate investments of private and public funds to provide small business loans and the Pennsylvania MILRITE project are just two examples of the many affirmative investment strategies of governments. These trends can be tracked through the BNA's Pension Reporter, Labor and Investments, and other pension-industry publications.
From a distance, these programs look like models of socially responsible investment because the government, endowed with the duty to maximize social goals, invests. Only some projects reallocate capital to worthy projects that otherwise would have faced a credit shortage. Other projects involve granting some privilege to the private sector and usually do not involve the public sector labor unions. Moreover, I have not found cases where the state and local governments have opted for owner control; they have not operated the projects they finance through pension funds. Another, more political, state and local use of pension plans is represented by the efforts of the late California State Treasurer, Jesse Unruh, who, at the end of 1984, organized the Council of Institutional Investors (CII), which now has representatives from twenty-two state and local pension funds, six multiemployer funds, and one single-employer plan administrator (Pensions and Investment Age 1989). The CII seeks to monitor and influence corporate policies that affect its state and local pension-fund investments, such as green mail, golden parachutes, and poison pills, because these practices threaten dividend income. CII was very vocal in its criticism of GM management's buyout of its largest individual shareholder, H. Ross Perot. Despite GM's assertion that a $720 million price tag on $350 million worth of shares represented a good investment, CII, as well as most of the financial press, cited H. Ross Perot's increasingly shrill criticism of GM management, for example, his public questions, such as, "Why does it take longer to design a GM car than it did to fight World War II?" as a leading motive for the buyout (Kraw 1989). CII forced a meeting with senior members of GM management. A few years later, in January 1990, two CII members, the New York and California state funds, in reportedly uncoordinated efforts wrote to GM asking for a say in the replacement of Roger Smith as GM chief. Most of the CII's tools are public embarrassment, shareholder resolutions, proxy votes, and capital boycotts. CII actions often seek to protect shareholders from entrenched management resisting a takeover. In many cases, labor would be directly opposed to the interests of the shareholders and in agreement with managements' efforts to save the plant from a hostile takeover and possible plant closing.
Under criticism from Edward V. Regan, New York State comptroller and sole trustee of the $44 billion New York State and Local Retirement Fund, Governor Marie Cuomo's Commission on 'The New York State Pension Investment Task Force' recommended that pension funds obtain guarantees from federal agencies to invest in projects to improve the state's infrastructure. Regan argued against the Commission's report and financier Felix Rohatyn's similar suggestions that the federal government was overburdened by guarantees and the first and foremost duty of the fund was to earn the highest return.
This sort of reasoning was further displayed in 1990 when several state and local pension funds threatened to divest themselves of the stock of all Pennsylvania-based companies to protest Pennsylvania's restrictions on hostile takeovers. The pension funds' position is that hostile takeovers bid up the price of the stock and any restriction on hostile bids constrains the potential profit from holding that equity. Lawmakers in Pennsylvania want to halt hostile takeovers in order to stabilize communities and the business environment. What the Pennsylvania pension plans do will reveal how sharp the horns of the dilemma actually are when it comes to defining socially responsible pension-fund strategies.
Churches, Wealthy Individuals, and Endowments
The Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and the Investor Responsibility Research Council are research and advocacy institutes with strong church connections. Their publications provide advice on share-holder rights and strategies. Most of the alternative investments of university endowments have been in South African divestment and clean fund investments. In addition to specific actions and research functions, the financial industry has responded to the concern of churches, unions, endowments, and wealthy individuals who fear their investments are encouraging antisocial activities by the offering of 'clean funds' (Domini and Kinder 1984). Currently, in the U.S., eight mutual funds and three money market funds advertise holdings that are screened according to various criteria. Two Canadian funds, the Summa Fund and the Ethical Growth Fund, and one British fund, The Stewardship Unit Trust, use social screening criteria in selecting investments. Each fund seems specifically tailored to one or more groups. For instance, the PAX World fund does not contain 'sin' stocks, such as holdings in tobacco or liquor companies or defense contractors. The performance of these socially screened funds beats the market average. As a 1986 Wall Street Journal headline noted, "Investors Can Do All Right By Doing Good". So do the brokerage houses and money managers who have developed this market niche.
From the point of view of labor and churches, however, the structure of capital markets limits the effectiveness of the clean fund strategy. Multinationals and conglomerates issue debt and equity. Targeting money into a particular region, or to a particular subsidiary of a conglomerate, is not possible, because capital allocation decisions are made internally. Managers make investment decisions. Unions face the same problems a shareholders if they attempt to transform companies through the ownership of corporate equity. The advantage the labor movement has over most shareholders - its national presence - can either create enormous clout, or unresolvable conflicts of interest among unions. (How successful would the Shell boycott have been if the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union represented Shell employees?)
But, trustees of funds of many corporations and entities with trust funds are asking the same question Harbrecht (1959) and Barber and Rifkin (1978) exhorted labor unions themselves to ask. In the words of a pension attorney, "What is it that says trustees of the American Cancer Society can't say (its pension fund) won't invest in tobacco stocks" (Gerald Feder, quoted in Pensions and Investment Ages 1989).
Corporations
Corporations have discovered in the 1980s that their pension finds can be convenient sources of cash and can serve other corporate needs. A combination of legal, political, and economical factors explains why single-employer pension funds are now used as a corporate financing tool.
The interpretation, and Reagan administration's enforcement of ERISA, all but encouraged corporations to put their funds to innovative and, indeed, alternative uses. To fend off hostile takeovers, or to court 'white knights', a corporation can often obtain DOL permission to direct its employee pension fund to buy the company's stock (as long as it is not 'overpriced'). A corporation can terminate a plan that happens to have more assets than legal liabilities, pay the liabilities, and use the extra cash. The corporation can also manipulate the rate of return the fund is assumed to earn in order to alter the cash contributions required to fund the liability. Raising the assumed rate assumes the fund will earn more and, therefore, require less from the firm.
Between 1980 and 1987 about $9 billion had been recaptured by corporations in defined-benefit pension plan terminations (VanDerhei and Harrington 1989: 189).
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Straight talk from Wall Street
A highly regarded stock analyst points out what's right - and wrong - with bank investor relations
By Thomas K. Brown
What makes an effective investor relations program? The answer depends to an extent on your position. I will provide the perspective of a Wall Street bank stock analyst.
We'll start with the person in charge of investor relations. This person must have a thorough understanding of the company and its financial statements, as well as access to senior management.
He or she must be able to perform the delicate task of providing information to analysts and investors without crossing the line of differential disclosure.
This person cannot be purely a cheerleader, nor a sugar-coater. The goal is to present a fair picture of current conditions.
There is no one spot in the organization from which the head of investor relations should come.
For example, at Wachovia Corp. and Mellon Bank Corp. the heads of investor relations are individuals located in the finance part of the organization. Both are excellent. Bank of America Corp. has one individual whose sole responsibility is investor relations and he is the best in the business. Fleet/Norstar Financial Group operates with a team involving the chief financial officer and two individuals with responsibilities in addition to investor relations. Yet the result is quite effective.
The form may vary, but in all these cases the end result is an effective program.
Unfortunately, in too many companies, including some of the largest banking firms, the head of investor relations is either not knowledgeable about the company and its financials or lacks timely access to senior management. These companies are known for their mishandling of important information, for differential disclosure, and for the dreaded 'surprise' announcement.
Responsive voice. As important as the quality of information disseminated is its timeliness. Institutional analysts and investors are under ever-increasing pressure to gain access to important information and draw investment conclusions.
At First Union Corp. and Wells Fargo & Co., investor relations staffs are briefed about the company's quarterly earnings just before they are released. In this way, several individuals at the company are then able to answer questions from analysts and investors once the earnings release is made public.
At other companies there is only one individual available to answer questions. This inevitably leads to long delays in receiving answers and effectively puts some analysts at a significant competitive disadvantage.
However, because there are more investors and analysts than staffers, at times priorities will have to be made as to who is called first.
Don't just return calls in the order they are received. In my opinion, the top priorities should be large shareholders and those Wall Street analysts who have been particularly visible (both positive and negative) in providing research on the company. This may seem unfair, but it will lead to quickest dissemination of information.
Good, timely disclosure. Analysts are never satisfied with the level of disclosure. So it's only natural that one of the traits that I find in the best investor relations programs is excellent disclosure of timely information.
Recent examples of breakthroughs in the disclosure of important new information include:
A reconciliation of flows in nonperforming assets provided by Valley National Corp., Bank of Boston Corp., and Shawmut National Corp.
First Tennessee National Corp. provides a breakdown of its loan portfolio by risk rating.
Wells Fargo provides excellent disclosure of the cash payments received on nonperforming loans.
The goal of increased disclosure should be to put meat on the bones of the company's required financial statements. The enhanced disclosure of asset quality trends previously described, as well as line-of-business results, are quite helpful in this regard. A better understanding of what is occurring at the company can only help to reduce investor uncertainty. Over time, this will lead to a higher relative stock price valuation.
One of the principal sources of disclosure is the annual report. I believe this is the single most important communication a company makes to its share-holders and potential investors. It should provide the reader with a thorough understanding of the company's products, markets, strategy, and recent financial performance.
Frankly, I am amazed that the investor relations departments at numerous companies do not provide any input into the company's annual report - a mistake.
There are numerous examples of companies that publish outstanding annual reports. Among them are Fleet/Norstar, First Union, Barnett Banks Inc., and Norwest Corp.
Unfortunately, some of the highest-quality companies publish some of the worst annual reports. As long as these companies continue to deliver superior results, this won't be a major problem. But if they stumble, the lack of disclosure will lead to investor uncertainty and a sharply lower relative valuation.
No differential disclosure. It is difficult to be responsive and provide timely disclosure of information without crossing the line and providing differential disclosure to one analysts or investor. The issue can only be managed. It cannot be avoided completely.
However, there are some obvious steps that can be taken to reduce differential disclosure.
For example, don't allow analysts and investors to visit the company after the quarter is over and before earnings are reported. Try as they might, senior management seldom is able to conduct these meetings without providing an important insight into the quarterly results.
In addition, when analysts and investors call after the quarter is over and before the results are announced, the investor relations department should discuss only the results from the first two months of the quarter and make this clear to the caller.
Finally, senior management must spend more time telling employees what constitutes inside information. I am surprised at the number of company executives who know they must not disclose certain information to analysts and professional investors. Yet they will freely discuss such information with friends in social settings.
Leaks of information destroy an investor relations program and raise doubts about management's credibility - and internal controls.
Educate the Street. Effective investor relations isn't simply being responsive to Wall Street's ever-changing desires. Sometimes investor relations programs need to take a stand on issues.
My personal peeve is the widespread use of the reserve-to-nonperforming loan ratio as the sole measure of reserve adequacy. Any good banker knows that this ratio is a poor indicator of reserve adequacy. Yet management let Wall Street adopt this measure over the past few years as its principal tool in reserve adequacy.
Educate the brass. An effective investor relations program must educate the company's senior management, and particularly its chief executive officer, in the workings of Wall Street, for example:
The difference between good companies and good stocks. A good or even great company does not necessarily make a good investment over the short or intermediate term. And those are the time frames of most investors, whether they say so or not.
As of mid-November in 1991, J.P. Morgan had had an outstanding year and it is widely regarded as an excellent company. Yet it has been one of the market's worst-performing bank stocks. Analysts can recognize J.P. Morgan as an outstanding company and yet not recommend its stock - and be helping their clients in the process.
Analysts' varying perspectives. Most Wall Street analysts are not good stock pickers.
Many are really investment bankers hiding out in the research department; others are just good at understanding industry trends. A good investor relations program will explain to senior management the strengths and weaknesses of the analysts who are making public comments or writing reports.
For example, when the analysts at the company's principal investment banking firm write a glowing report about the company, it's up to the investor relations department to remind senior management of the analysts' bias. Or, when an analyst who doesn't know the company well publishes a report that is somewhat off base, the investor relations department should explain this to senior management and then contact the analyst.
Don't let the CEO blow up over negative comments. When a negative report is written or negative comments are made, it is up to the investor relations department to encourage the CEO not to act irrationally by cutting the analyst off from the information flow or by preventing the banking company from doing any business with the analyst's firm.
Such steps are only understandable when careless analysis has damaged the company or if the analyst is deliberately spreading misinformation.
An effective investor relations program can significantly influence how investors view the company, which will impact how the company's earnings stream is capitalized over the long run. Too often, managements judge the effectiveness of their investor relations programs by short-term movements in their stock price - a critical mistake.<*_>square<*/>
ADA compliance is uncharted territory
With just a short time remaining before some provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) take effect, community bankers are generally less concerned about compliance with the law than their counterparts in large metropolitan-area banks.
Nevertheless, they have some real concerns, not the least of which is how to finance structural and other changes that may be required. "From an employment standpoint, we have a second floor without elevator access, which pretty well leaves the handicapped out," notes Gerald Hansen, vice-president and controller of Itasca (Ill.) Bank &Trust Co., with $172 million in assets. "We can make arrangements that will alleviate the problem in terms of interviews, but if someone were qualified to work in that area, we would have to consider the cost of installing an elevator in the building." The law states that "readily achievable" measures to remove physical and communications barriers must be taken, but such language has yet to be tested in the courts, and the expense of installing an elevator probably would not be found readily achievable.
But the problem is not an isolated one. Michael Derr, assistant vice-president, operations, at the $144 million-assets Bank of Glen Burnie (Md.), faces a similar situation at his bank's main office. That facility was built in the early 1950s, notes Derr, with very limited access to the second floor.
The bank has four remote branches as well, "and the bank is surveying those facilities and identifying areas that could be considered barriers," says Derr. Like most banks, accessibility to automated teller machines ranks high on the list of potential trouble spots, but access to night depositories and rest rooms can't be overlooked either, notes Derr. "We'll have to make a judgement as to what is practical," he says.
Derr and dozens of other bankers attended an ABA-sponsored symposium on ADA in late October. Speakers, including those representing various disabled groups, encouraged banks of all sizes to have a committee in place whose task is to formulate a strategy for complying with the law. Such a measure will help persuade a court of law that a bank is attempting to meet the requirements of ADA, if and when litigation occurs.
Disabled neighbors. "We're not anticipating litigation," says Paul Sciacchitano, executive vice-president and cashier of Old Point National Bank, Hampton, Va., which has $263 million in assets. "A lot of disabled people deal with us already, since we're one street away from a Veteran's Administration center," he adds.
A year ago, Sciacchitano's bank surveyed its locations and identified areas where access for the disabled could be improved. Since then, Sciacchitano has become more sensitive to the issue of accessibility for the disabled. He's observed that a local fast-food restaurant, for example, put a wheelchair ramp in a virtually inaccessible location leading to a doorway that is only about 20 inches wide. "And the ramp was placed in the middle of a parking space with no clear access to it," says SciaccitanoSciacchitano. "It was done as an afterthought and showed no real consideration."
Most disconcerting to Sciacchitano and other bankers is the fact that the only real enforcement of the law regarding facility accessibility lies with the Department of Justice. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) will oversee compliance of the law's Title I provisions, which deal with human resources issues.
"Compliance is more subjective than objective," says Sciacchitano, "but the monetary penalties involved are rather objective.
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Motor Carrier Deregulation and Highway Safety: An Empirical Analysis
DONALD L. ALEXANDER
I. Introduction
The passage of the Motor Carrier Reform and Modernization Act of 1980 (MCA 1980) effectively marked the end of rate and entry regulation in the interstate trucking industry, and most economists agree that this legislation has created many important economic benefits during the 1980s. For example, shipping rates fell in real terms, service expanded and improved in quality, and generally resources were used more efficiently. There is increasing concern, however, that deregulation has led firms to reduce safety expenditures in order to remain competitive, and that trucking accidents and fatalities have increased as a consequence [4; 9]. Indeed, Brock Adams (former U.S. Secretary of Transportation) claims that trucking accidents have increased since 1980 for this very reason.
The limited empirical evidence reported in the literature suggests otherwise. Moore [17], for example, shows that accident, fatality, and injury rates have fallen since 1980 despite the rapid increase in the number of truck-miles traveled [13]. His analysis, however, is based on a comparison of rates across time, and does not reveal any of the potential economic or institutional forces that may be affecting the evolution of these data. In a more systematic analysis, Traynor [22] finds that deregulation has reduced accident rates in California, although it may be difficult to extend his results to the national experience as a whole.
This paper has two major objectives. The first is to estimate an empirical model using a pooled, cross section of state data to determine whether the evidence Traynor [22] reports for California holds, in general, for all other states. The second objective is to determine empirically those factors that may be driving the results in Moore [17]. Pooling these data allow us to test for the impact of deregulation on accident, fatality, and injury rates while holding state-specific factors constant; an empirical approach that is not possible at a higher level of aggregation.
The paper is organized in the following manner. In the second section I discuss three possible ways deregulation may have affected accident rates in interstate trucking. The third section presents the empirical model and regression results, and the final section summarizes the major conclusions drawn from this investigation.
II. Motor Carrier Deregulation and Highway Safety
The current theoretical literature provides a framework for discussing the potential link between changes in deregulation and highway safety. I will use this framework to focus on three aspects of deregulation that are likely to affect highway safety in the trucking industry.
Before deregulation, rate bureaus acted as cartels and set shipping rates at supracompetitive levels. Since the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) restricted the entry of new trucking firms, incumbent firms were able to earn economic rents that were shared with organized labor. After deregulation, however, the ICC essentially permitted free entry and naturally there was an influx of new firms. Winston et al. [31], for example, report that the number of truckers with ICC operating authority increased from 18,045 in 1980 to 36,948 in 1986. One implication for highway safety is that trucking accidents may have increased because of the additional traffic congestion. Moreover, if the new entrants were inexperienced in handling trucks on congested highways, it is likely accidents would have increased until the new drivers gained the necessary driving experience.
The implicit assumption underlying this argument is that a driver's behavior towards safety remains unchanged in response to a change in the regulatory environment, which Peltzman [18] has questioned on theoretical grounds. Although deregulation in the trucking industry did not involve a specific change in safety regulation, Peltzman's model provides a useful framework to examine the effect of deregulation on the behavior of owner-operators.
The basic model is that drivers face a choice between driving intensity (e.g., faster speeds, longer hours) and the probability of an accident, which is affected by several economic factors: the price of an accident, income, and a regulatory parameter which we will associate with the driver's promotion of safety. In a cross-section model, it is difficult to argue that interstate drivers respond to differential 'accident prices' across each state. Moreover, it is equally difficult to argue that secular changes in income that Peltzman discusses are at work to the same extent in this analysis since we are using data for a shorter time span. Therefore, I will ignore the first and second factors and focus on the third.
We can think of deregulation shifting the driver's demand for driving intensity in several ways. The widely-held view is that deregulation has led owner-operators to reduce safety expenditures to remain competitive, which raises the probability of an accident for a given level of driving intensity. It is not quite clear, however, why owners would reduce safety expenditures when their discounted future profits depend on providing timely and safe deliveries today.
On the other hand, deregulation may have induced firms, which employ drivers for hire, to increase their safety expenditures. Suppose a trucking firm uses two complementary inputs, labor (L) and safety (S), per truck to deliver a given quantity of goods. We can think of S broadly as the resources the firm uses to maintain some level of safe operation, which may include any investment in safety training for drivers or the purchase of truck-related safety equipment. In competitive markets, the level of safety the firm provides determines the wages the firm must pay to compensate drivers for any relative risks in trucking. If, for example, the firm offers better training or installs more (or better) safety equipment, then wages would be commensurately lower. As wages fell after deregulation, this may have created an incentive for firms to hire more drivers and to provide additional safety to compensate drivers for any apparent risks in trucking. In addition, it is quite possible that firms provided the drivers with greater safety resources (i.e., equipment or training) because the new drivers were relatively inexperienced. The implication is that if firms increased safety expenditures because wages fell, then accidents would have probably fallen as well. Moreover, if the additional expenditures were used to purchase truck-related safety equipment, then fatalities and injuries would have fallen too.
And finally, deregulation may have affected driving intensity directly if drivers were induced to make more deliveries by driving longer hours and at faster speeds. Therefore, it would be important to control for differences in speed limit enforcement and vehicle inspections when attempting to explain differences in accident rates across states.
The above discussion indicates there are reasons to expect that accidents may have increased or decreased as the result of deregulation. The next section discusses the empirical model which attempts to determine the net impact of deregulation, while holding various other factors constant.
III. The Empirical Model and Regression Results
The Empirical Model
The sample consists of a pooled, cross-section of state data for 1977, 1982, and 1987. Since the MCA was passed in 1980, the sample can be partitioned into two periods: 1977 represents a regulation year, whereas 1982 and 1987 represent deregulation years. The variable descriptions and sources are discussed in the appendix.
The dependent variable is the number of accidents per truck-miles traveled per state. The numerator represents accidents that occurred in a particular state, which were reported by truck drivers engaged in interstate transportation. The denominator is an estimate of the truck-miles traveled per state, and includes all trucks that traveled more than 200 miles from their base of operation. To the extent that the denominator includes some intrastate travel, the denominator is likely to overstate the miles logged by interstate truckers. Therefore, the dependent variable is likely to understate the actual accident rate per truck-miles traveled for interstate carriers, and any effect of deregulation that we uncover would be a conservative estimate of the actual impact.
The set of independent variables include factors which have some theoretical or institutional basis for explaining the variation in accidents per truck-miles traveled across states. The first is the number of highway police officers per highway mileage (POLICE). This measure is intended to control for differences in enforcement resources used to detect speed and weight violations. More officers per highway mile should lead to more careful driving and, consequently, less accidents. Thus, we expect a negative sign for this variable.
The second, third, and fourth variables relate to traffic conditions on interstate highways which could arguably affect accident rates across states. These conditions are: the average speed of interstate traffic per state (AVESPEED); the variance of speed on interstate highways; and a density variable (CONGESTION) to proxy the level of road congestion. Lave [14] argues that it is the variance of highway speed that causes accidents and not the mean speed. The intuition is that if all vehicles were traveling at the same speed (i.e., variance is 0), then chances of an accident occurring are almost zero at any mean speed. Recently, Levy and Asch [15] challenge this view and report some evidence which shows that both the mean and variance of highway speed affect accident rates. Since this issue appears to be unresolved, I have included both measures in the model.
AVESPEED is the estimated statewide average highway speed for all vehicles. The variance is calculated as the difference between 'the speed at or below which 95 percent of the vehicles are traveling' (85TH) and the statewide average. In the regression model, one could write the expression as
<O_>formula<O/>.
Lave, however, suggests that the expression be rewritten as
<O_>formula<O/>.
The rationale is that the coefficient for AVESPEED in the second expression reflects the relative effect of both the average and variance of speed (i.e., <*_>beta<*/>-<*_>THETA<*/>). Thus, if the variance has a larger impact than the average (i.e., <*_>beta<*/><<*_>THETA<*/>), then the coefficient on AVESPEED would be negative while the coefficient on 85TH would be positive. This explains why a negative sign for AVESPEED is counter intuitive, since the coefficient measures the relative size of each effect.
CONGESTION is simply the total number of automobile registrations normalized by the estimated highway mileage for each state. This factor is intended to control for differences in road congestion across states, since greater congestion is likely to increase the probability of a collision between two vehicles. Thus, we expect a positive sign for this variable.
I included two additional variables to control for differences in weather conditions across states. The first is the average number of rain days per state (RAINDAYS). I anticipate a positive coefficient for this variable since rain is likely to impair vision and road conditions. The second is the average snowfall (SNOW) per state, and the expected sign for this variable is uncertain. On the one hand, one may argue that more snow leads to more accidents because of slippery roads. On the other hand, more snow might reduce travel if drivers wait until the roads are cleared, which makes a negative sign plausible.
Finally, I included a dummy variable (MCA80) in the model to control for differences attributable to deregulation; 1977 is a regulation year while 1982 and 1987 are deregulation years. Thus, MCA80 equals 1 for 1982 and 1987 and 0 otherwise. It is possible, however, that any empirical difference between the time periods is unrelated to the shift from regulation to deregulation, and I acknowledge this potential interpretation. Nonetheless, any difference that is uncovered in the analysis will be discussed in the context of the existing empirical literature [3; 17].
The Empirical Evidence: Rates per Truck-Miles Traveled
Table 1 reports the estimates from four regression equations, and several interesting findings emerge from these results. First, the MCA80 variable has a negative sign in each of the four equations, but is only significant (using a two-tailed test) at conventional levels in the fatality, injury, and property-damage equations. These results suggest that drivers experience the same accident rate that they did before deregulation, but that the accidents involved fewer fatalities and injuries.
The insignificance of MCA80 in the accident equation presents a puzzle; that is, how and why would deregulation affect the fatality and injury rates, but not the accident rate?
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Part 1. Jurisprudence is Adjudication
a. Critique of legal positivism
Dworkin constructs his legal theory largely in response to legal positivism and utilitarianism. Legal positivism, Dworkin claims, defines law merely as a set of rules or 'social facts,' and allows judges to legislate when rules run out in hard cases. As such, Dworkin argues legal positivism contains two main defects: (1) an inaccurate description of adjudication in American legal practice, and (2) an inadequate theoretical account of law and legal obligation. Utilitarianism, Dworkin claims, enforces the preferences of the majority over the preferences of the minority to improve social welfare. Dworkin considers utilitarianism a deficient political theory because individual rights depend upon the shifting sands of political compromise and majority will. Consequently, Dworkin's legal theory establishes certain individual rights beyond the control of the majority, and links positive law to political theory and thereby to virtue and justice. Dworkin thus rejects, partially at least, both legal positivism and utilitarianism.
Dworkin starts his examination of law with a critique of Hart's version of legal positivism. Hart's positivism has three central tenets: (1) the law of a community consists of special rules identifiable by the manner in which they were adopted, (2) the set of legal rules is exhaustive of the law, and (3) a legal obligation derives only from a legal rule. Hart further divides rules into two types: primary and secondary rules. Primary rules grant rights or impose legal obligations upon members of the community. For example, the criminal law consists of primary rules. Secondary rules stipulate how primary rules are formed and validated. Hart calls a fundamental secondary rule a 'rule of recognition.' The latter is legitimate because it is accepted by the community. In the United States, the rule of recognition is the federal constitution since the legitimacy of any particular law can be traced through a complicated chain of validity back to the federal constitution.
According to Hart, judges decide cases by applying rules of law. When a case is not governed by any existing rule of law, a hard case, the judge decides the case by exercising his discretion. The new rule the judge forms becomes part of the legal order and is valid because, under Hart's system, the judge has power to create a new rule when existing rules do not provide guidance in a particular case, Judges hence "may be said to make 'choices' among possible alternatives or to exercise a 'legislative discretion.' Since most cases involve the simple application of rules, the legislative powers of the judge are limited.
Dworkin charges that Hart's theory of judicial discretion inaccurately describes what judges in the United States do when they decide a hard case. Judges use principles, in addition to rules, to decide cases. Principles differ from rules because principles are abstract, general and flexible. In support of his claim, Dworkin cites Riggs v. Palmer, denying a murderer his inheritance on the ground that "no man shall profit by his own crime," and Henningsen v Bloomfield Motors, Inc., voiding a limitation of warranty provision in a consumer contract principally on the ground that unfair bargains are unenforceable. Because the courts in Riggs and Henningsen invoked principles not rules to decide the case, Dworkin concludes, Hart's theory of judicial discretion fails to describe judicial decision making and therefore is wrong.
The origin of legal principles "lies not in a particular decision of some legislature or court, but in a sense of appropriateness developed in the profession and the public over time. Their continued power depends upon this sense of appropriateness being sustained." When a judge decides a hard case, the judge does not simply create a decision in a vacuum; rather the judge invokes the applicable principles of law and applies them to the case. The judge does not create law and apply it retroactively to the parties; the judge enforces moral and legal rights preexisting the case although not captured by any single rule of law. Principles exist independently of legal institutions enacting rules of law because they are part of the community's moral and political culture.
Dworkin draws two broad conclusions from the putative failure of Hart's theory of discretion to reflect actual judicial practice. First, he claims Hart's theory of law does not identify all laws in the society because it fails to account for the existence of principles that judges commonly use to decide cases. Second, the master rule of recognition, to the extent that it ignores rules, is not a master rule defining all laws. If the master rule were redefined to capture principles, Dworkin maintains, it would become so broad as to be meaningless. Dworkin concludes "if we treat principles as law we must reject the positivists' first tenet, that the law of a community is distinguished from other social standards by some test in the form of a master rule." This raises the possibility, Dworkin contends, that legal obligation rests on constellations of principle, as well as rules of law. More important, the critique of legal positivism provides the primary material for Dworkin to create the rights thesis.
Scholars claim Dworkin reduces positivism to a theory no one actually holds since positivists recognize restraints upon judicial discretion. Sullivan correctly notes that "judicial discretion is more tightly circumscribed than Dworkin's caricature indicates." Though the judge is free to weigh various considerations, "this does not entail that decisions resulting from this process are arbitrary, or that the judge's discretionary power is therefore completely unconstrained." Nevertheless, genuine differences differentiate Dworkin's legal theory from positivism. For positivism "law is fundamentally characterized by the notion of a rule," whereas for Dworkin it is a process of discovering the political morality implicit in positive law. Positivism distinguishes law from morality by identifying a master rule of recognition; Dworkin denies the existence of a master rule of recognition and locates law in the practice of interpretation. While some scholars argue that Dworkin's legal theory merely amends positivism, his theory nevertheless investigates the origin of law beyond the mere fact of its enactment by a legitimately constituted legal institution.
b. The rights thesis
The rights thesis corrects two flaws in the positivist's account of judicial discretion: (1) treating the judge as deputy to the appropriate legislature, and (2) claiming judges decide cases in two stages, first reviewing the law books to locate pertinent rules, and second setting aside the law books when pertinent rules are not found. Dworkin says judges are not and should not be legislators for two reasons. First, judges are not elected and therefore, under democratic theory, are not entitled to make law, and second, the judicial creation of ex post facto legislation punishes the losing party. Dworkin also denies that judges decide cases in two stages as positivism maintains. Rather judges enforce the preexisting rights of parties grounded in legal principles. According to Dworkin, adjudication should be as unoriginal as possible.
Central to the rights thesis is the distinction between arguments of policy and arguments of principle. Arguments of prinicple justify a political decision by showing that the decision respects or secures some individual or group right. Dworkin states the "argument in favor of anti-discrimination statutes, that a minority has a right to equal respect and concern, is an argument of principle." Arguments of policy justify a political decision by showing the decision advances or protects some collective goal of the community as a whole. Dworkin states the "argument in favor of a subsidy for aircraft manufacturers, that the subsidy will protect national defense, is an argument of policy." While Dworkin realizes principles and policies mix, and therefore recognizes the distinction between them is more subtle and complex than his examples suggest, he nevertheless advances the claim that a principle cannot be outweighed by every social policy.
Dworkin rejects arguments of policy as a legitimate basis to decide cases because they fail to recognize the existence of rights and require the judge to legislate. Arguments of policy do not provide a stable vehicle to secure rights since they depend upon variable factors designed to promote the social welfare. If arguments of policy determined rights, the latter would fluctuate according to whatever factor advanced the social welfare at a particular historical moment. The law and economic analysis theory illustrates the problem of basing rights on utility, since the efficient decision may deviate from prior law, and hence frustrate the expectations of the parties. Dworkin claims citizens are entitled to rely on rights and duties flowing from the law, and are entitled to request the court to enforce them. If a plaintiff is entitled to win a lawsuit, Dworkin maintains, the plaintiff always had the right to win and the defendant always had a duty to act. Economic analysis runs afoul of this conception of adjudication because economic analysis defines rights ex post facto on grounds of efficiency.
Dworkin divides rights into four categories; (1) background (2) institutional (3) abstract and (4) concrete. Background rights are rooted in political theory and are not necessarily recognized as rights by legal institutions. For example, a political theory may demand "to each according to his needs, from each according to his ability," although no legal institution in the United States yet recognizes that claim. On the other hand, an institutional right "provides a justification for a decision by some particular and specified political institution" and therefore, unlike certain background rights, has the force of law. An abstract right is "a general political aim" such as "Congress shall enact no law abridging the freedom of speech," while a concrete right gives practical content to its corresponding abstract right. For example, the right of newspapers to publish defense plans classified as secret provided the publication will not create an immediate physical danger to troops is a concrete expression of the abstract right contained in the first amendment.
The rights thesis enforces existing concrete and legal rights of an institutional type. Dworkin draws an analogy between the institution of chess and the institution of law to explain what he means by the institutional character of legal rights. He considers how a chess referee would interpret a rule of chess which provides that "the referee shall declare a game forfeit if one player 'unreasonably' annoys the other in the course of play" when one player smiles continually at his opponent to unnerve him. Since the rule does not define the term 'unreasonably,' Dworkin says, the referee must construct a theory of the game of chess to interpret the rule. The theory of the game of chess is derived from the rules constituting the game.
Dworkin first observes that the chess referee cannot interpret the rule by imposing personal convictions. For example, the chess referee may believe that individuals have a right to equal welfare without regard to intellectual abilities and rely upon this conviction to find that annoying behavior is reasonable so long as it reduces the importance of intellectual ability in deciding who will win the game because chess is a game of intellect. However, "(s)ince chess is an intellectual game, (the chess referee) must apply the forfeiture rule in such a way to protect, rather than jeopardize, the role of intellect in the context." Therefore, the discretion of the referee is fettered by the nature of the game of chess which disqualifies personal convictions of the referee contrary to the game's point.
The chess referee must determine the abstract concept of the game of chess and interpret the rule to implement that concept. The abstract concept of the game of chess is identified by analyzing its institutional rules and by posing a series of questions designed to identify the game's character. Since chess is a game of intellect, Dworkin suggests, the referee may need to construct not only the concept of chess, but also the concept of intellect itself to interpret the rule forbidding annoying behavior. 'Intellect' is the point of the game. While the referee exercises judgment to define the concrete right of the players, the exercise of judgment does not reflect the referee's personal convictions.
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Conceptualizing Anti-Gay Violence
JOSEPH HARRY
This chapter attempts a conceptualization of the motivations and situations surrounding the hate crime of violence against gay males and lesbians. (The term gay will henceforth be used to refer both to gay males and to lesbians. Gay males and lesbians will be used to discriminate between the groups.) Violence is anti-gay when its victims are chosen because they are believed to be homosexual. This definition excludes common crimes committed against gay males or lesbians when the homosexuality of the victim is unknown or irrelevant to the choice of victim. Although some research has been done on the victims of anti-gay violence (Committee on the Judiciary, 1986; Harry, 1982; Miller & Humphreys, 1980), there is little knowledge about the perpetrators. In this chapter, I attempt to enlarge on this scarce data.
MOTIVATIONS FOR ANTI-GAY VIOLENCE
As Berk and his colleagues suggest in Chapter 8, the perpetrators of anti-gay violence are very largely male, in their late teens or early twenties, strangers to the victim(s), in groups, and not engaged in victimization for profit. Anti-gay violence seems to be committed during the peak years of delinquency/criminality (Hindelang, Gottfredson, & Garofalo, 1978). Anti-gay violence may thus be but one element of the general delinquency complex in which correlations are found among most kinds of illegal behaviors. If so, it may require little special explanation beyond those usually offered for delinquency and crime; that is, no special psychological propensities on the part of the offender need be assumed.
Even if, however, the typical anti-gay offender is a generic criminal disengaged from the conventional moral order, some closer examination is required to explain why or when he may engage in a particular type of offense (male pronouns are used throughout to highlight the likelihood that perpetrators are male). Whereas disengaged delinquents are free to commit a variety of illegal activities, such freedom does not mean they will engage in any one particular activity. Motivations and situational circumstances are needed to focus their attention on a particular illegal possibility. Why commit anti-gay violence versus rape or armed robbery or burglary? What is there about beating homosexuals that appeals to offenders?
I suggest that most anti-gay violence arises out of the interactions of male groups in their late adolescence or early twenties. For many persons, the period of adolescence constitutes an extended 'moral holiday' during which bonds to the adult moral order are attenuated by involvement in an adolescent subculture, the principal emphases of which are hedonism and autonomy from adult control. Such adolescents find themselves most at home not in school or in the family but in the company of same-age peers. Such company is unstructured, informal, and largely devoted to recreational pursuits, both legal (e.g., sports) and illegal (e.g., drugs). Although the social groups of the adolescent and immediately postadolescent worlds consist of both same-sex and mixed-sex groups, groups of gay-bashers seem to be almost exclusively male. In a few accounts of gay-bashing incidents, a female consort of the offenders served as appreciative audience. This acknowledged, it remains that the offenders are overwhelmingly male and usually act in groups.
One depiction of such male adolescent groups has been provided by Matza (1964, pp. 49-64) in what he calls the "situation of company." In this situation, adolescents are constantly mutually pressured to prove their commitment to the male gender role. Engaging in a variety of illegal or deviant acts is one way to prove their daring, their maleness, their adulthood. In the rather primitive eyes of the adolescent male, sexual and violent acts are the two main means through which they can prove their male commitment. For example, adolescent males have been found much more likely than females (68% versus 44%) to tell their friends about their first experience with sexual intercourse (Carns, 1973), apparently because reporting such intercourse has status value in the eyes of peers.
Although violence can also validate one's commitment to being a male, it has risks. In the legitimate forms of sports, one can lose. Also, many forms of available sports are supervised by adults and hence do not fit well with the emphases of the adolescent subculture. Most illegal forms of violence, such as fighting, offer the possibilities of losing, being injured, possibly being arrested, and having one's status considerably deflated. Hence, although it is important for the adolescent male to be able to talk a good fight, actually engaging in one is risky business.
The option of gay-bashing offers a nearly ideal solution to the status needs of the immature male. When done in groups, it offers little risk of injury. It provides immediate status rewards in the eyes of one's peers because, unlike verbal reports of sexual conquest, it provides direct and corroborated evidence of one's virility. It offers only minimal likelihood of arrest both because the offenders are rarely known to the victim and because the victim is unlikely to report the incident to the police. Gay-bashing serves to validate one's maleness in the areas of both violence and sexuality. It is a sexual, but not homosexual, act because it reaffirms one's commitment to sexuality exclusively in its heterosexual form. Occasionally, gay-bashing incidents include forcible rape, either oral or anal. Given the context of coercion, however, such technically homosexual acts seem to imply no homosexuality on the part of the offenders. The victim serves, both physically and symbolically, as a vehicle for the sexual status needs of the offenders in the course of recreational violence.
The offenders' choice of victim is made appropriate by the institution of gender. Although young males living in the situation of company and morally adrift may find anti-gay violence appealing, such behavior requires that the laws and norms of civil society be morally neutralized. In cases of gay-bashing, the offender is not simply on a moral holiday, as he may be when committing common property offenses, nor is he simply grabbing excuses out of thin air to justify seriously criminal behavior. He is resorting to an alternative set of norms based upon the institution of gender: that set of norms, imbibed mostly unconsciously from birth, that prescribes our sense of what is 'masculine' and what is 'feminine' in thought, affect, and behavior.
The gender institution often operates as a set of subterranean values justifying illegal conduct when more acceptable justifications (e.g., self-defense) cannot be found within the law. Our dominant institution of gender contributes to the view that male-female rape is justified if the victim behaved in a 'provocative' or 'unladylike' manner. It also allows the perpetuation of wife-beating. Gay-bashing seems similarly to be based on a popularly accepted belief, in this case that the only justifiable forms of sex are those between males and females. In the case of gay-bashing at least, moral neutralization is based upon "denial of the victim" (Sykes & Matza, 1957) and of her or his moral worth as a human being. By viewing the victim as worthy of punishment for having violated gender norms, the offender not only excuses himself from opprobrium but sees himself as rendering gender justice and reaffirming the natural order of gender-appropriate behavior.
The above arguments may seem to predict too much gay-bashing, just as Matza (1964, pp. 25-26) argued that cultural theories of delinquency predict too much delinquency because they imply a continuing commitment by the juvenile to delinquent behaviors. Matza's point was that, if juveniles are so committed to delinquency, they would engage in it almost on a full-time basis. Similarly, if anti-gay violence is an ideal means for the attainment of sexual status by young males and is based on such a basic institution as gender, it would seem that gay-bashing should be a daily occurrence involving significant percentages of both the homosexual and the heterosexual populations. To deal with this issue, we need some idea of the extent of anti-gay violence. Because relevant statistics are few, we divide gay-bashing incidents into three types based on the age of the victim.
First are serious physical assaults and homicides committed against adult lesbians and gay males such as those reported in the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee hearings on Anti-Gay Violence (Committee on the Judiciary, 1986). These reported assaults are clearly the most serious ones and do not include the common, random beatings of homosexuals that occur in the streets, parks, and parking lots of America. Most assaults go unreported either because the victim fears being discredited by family, the law, or employers or because the assault was less serious, although still criminal.
Second are assaults and related harassments of lesbian and gay male adolescents by their peers, such as those that gave rise to the Harvey Milk School in New York City for homosexual adolescents. The existence of such a school implies that mistreatment of homosexual adolescents is pervasive in the adolescent world.
Finally, probably far more common than either of the other forms of assault and harassment are the beatings of effeminate boys, both future homosexuals and heterosexuals (Saghir & Robins, 1973, pp. 18-23) that occur during childhood. These beatings occur because the boys do not confirm to the extremely rigid rules of the male gender role. They also reaffirm the offender's commitment to that role before his peers. Psychologically, they serve the same function as the more serious gay-bashing of adulthood. They differ from the latter in two ways, however. First, they are more accepted in conventional adult norms. Second, they do not suggest as much criminality and probable moral disengagement from the norms of civil society on the offenders' part as does adult gay-bashing. Culturally, however, the childhood and adult incidents are the same. Whether persons who engage in adult gay-bashing have also engaged in childhood 'sissy-bashing' is unknown.
If we view the above three age-based types of incidents as gay-bashings that differ only in the ages of the participants involved, the ideas offered to explain anti-gay violence may not predict too much. Gay-bashing may be endemic during childhood and decline in frequency with age while at the same time it increases in seriousness and leathality. As males approach adulthood, most become more secure in their gender roles, so that proving their gender adequacy becomes less obsessive and gender deviance in others becomes less salient. Hence the motivations for gay-bashing may decline with the advent of an adulthood that is not defined in the stark imagery of the immature male.
THE SITUATIONS OF ANTI-GAY VIOLENCE
The views of gay-bashers are clearly in agreement with those of the large majority of the population who disapprove of homosexuality (see Chapter 5). Reporting date from the General Social Survey (National Opinion Research Center, 1988) in 1987, 82% of the population found homosexuality "always wrong" or "almost always wrong." This percentage has changed little since 1973 and may have increased slightly since the 1970s. For purposes of analysis, we divide this 82% into three categories. Most strongly opposing homosexuality are a small number of activists who go out of their way to find homosexuals to assault. Such strongly motivated persons would typically go to a place where homosexuals are known to gather such as a gay ghetto (Levine, 1980) or to the environs of a gay bar. Somewhat less opposed to homosexuality would be the larger number of opportunists who are not sufficiently motivated to seek out homosexuals to victimize but will assault them as occasions arise. Such situations would typically arise in non-gay-defined settings when persons who are visibly homosexual appear. The remainder of the 82% are those who disapprove of homosexuality but not strongly enough to engage in gay-bashing. This group is theoretically important because it is by far the largest of the three and it consists of those who might normally be expected to serve as guardian citizens in cases of assault (Cohen & Felson, 1979). In the case of common crimes among heterosexual participants, such guardians serve the function of being interveners or of calling the police. In cases of anti-gay violence, however, it is doubtful that many of this large group who disapprove of homosexuality would be willing to actively assist the victim.
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AMERICAN LEGAL THOUGHT AND LEGAL REFORM
A. Introduction
The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, implemented in 1938, and the Federal Rules of Evidence, enacted in 1975, are designed, we are told, to promote the "just, speedy, and inexpensive determination of every action." They are to be "construed to secure fairness in administration, elimination of unjustifiable expense and delay, and promotion of growth and development of the law of evidence to the end that the truth may be ascertained and proceedings justly determined." The stated goals of these transsubstantive rules, then, are that the truth be determined and disputes be justly resolved.
The foundational assumptions underlying the claim that the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence are instruments that permit the discovery of truth and the 'just' resolution of disputes are three related phenomena: first, the general 'optimistic rationalism' pervading most of Western legal and intellectual thought from the Enlightenment; second, the legal 'progressivism' of influential early to mid-20th-century American reformers, who acted as catalysts for both procedural and evidentiary reform; and third, the jurisprudential reaction to American legal realism, which coalesced after World War II into legal process or reasoned elaboration.
The Federal Rules of Procedure and the Federal Rules of Evidence were explicitly presented as means to the goals of 'truth' and 'justice' in part due to this broader Western and narrower American intellectual milieu. These goals were also channeled by a deep public and professional reverence for both Law and the Rule of Law. Finally, the legal profession was dedicated to the beauty and utility of the adversary system, the hallmark of the 'Anglo-American' system of adjudication. These explicit statements were not part of the wellspring of the Federal Rules of Evidence, the American Law Institute's 1942 Model Code of Evidence. Part of the failure of the Model Code of Evidence was due to its apparent disavowal of these goals.
The abiding belief of early 20th-century legal progressive thought was that legal reform could rationally aid in the progress of a legal system toward consensual notions of 'truth' and 'justice'. Legal realism, while having little contemporary impact on the legal profession, shattered a jurisprudential faith in legal progress toward truth and justice. The restructuring of legal progressive thought into reasoned elaboration or legal process after World War II required a fundamentally different justification for a 'rational' and progressive administration of justice. This justification, however, was unacceptable to a legal profession then essentially unaffected by legal realism. While legal academics could not longer faithfully argue that the goal of the trial was truth, nor that the administration of justice was concerned with substantive rather than procedural justice, the legal profession and the public continued to believe in both goals. Invoking the goals of truth and justice to garner public and professional support was necessary to the passage of the Federal Rules of Evidence; the structure of the Federal Rules, because it is based on the Model Code of Evidence, undermines those goals.
B. Optimistic Rationalism
William Twining describes the tenets of 'optimistic rationalism' as a congery of beliefs in truth, reason, and justice under law. Events occur independently of human observation, and past events can be truthfully reconstructed in the present, although "establishing the truth about alleged past events is typically a matter of probabilities or likelihoods falling short of competecomplete certainty." Ascertaining the truth is accomplished by listening to experts explain and interpret relevant data and through the 'common-sense' generalizations of society. In adjudicating disputes, establishing the truth must be based on relevant evidence and justice can be accomplished only if the truth is established on the basis of relevant evidence. Further, justice can be accomplished only if the method of fact finding is 'rational.' Rational decision making means making decisions based on inferences from relevant evidence. Rational decision making based on relevant evidence will thus lead the fact-finder to the truth and to 'correctness' in decision making. The search for truth, then, is at the core of a system of justice. Since, however, decisions about the truth of factual allegations occur in an imperfect, human setting, the concern for justice is not a concern for an idealized justice but a justice under [positive] law, which means that truth will not always be discovered or a correct decision rendered and further means that the goal of 'correctness' may be matched or superseded by other social goals.
The 'Anglo-American' system of adjudication - the adversary system - structures and channels these tenets of optimistic rationalism. Unlike trial by compurgation or trial by ordeal, the adversary system was perceived as a rational system for the discovery of truth and the pursuit of justice. In the adversary system, each participant, with the notable exception of the parties, plays a significant role in fulfilling the requirements of optimistic rationalism. The attorneys for the parties investigate and sift the facts pertinent to their (opposing) cases and offer and object to the introduction of evidence; the judge impartially decides disputed issues of law, including the admissibility of evidence; and the jury, given the conflicting evidence presented by both parties and instructions on the applicable law by the judge, decides the disputed issues of fact and renders a verdict for a party. This system provides checks on abuses by counsel (by the judge), by the judge (by counsel on appeal), and by the jury (through jury instructions, limiting their purview to issues of 'fact' and, in egregious cases, permitting the court to render a judgment notwithstanding the verdict or to inquire into the validity of the verdict), and so limits any departures from rationality.
C. Legal Progressivism and Procedural Reform
The story of the codification of the rules of evidence is further linked to the story of legal progressivism, for the interest in a code of evidence rules is based on the legal progressives' spirit of legal reform. In 1904-5, Wigmore's Treatise was published. This four-volume first edition was an immediate critical and commercial success. Dean Wigmore became the unchallenged authority on the law of evidence in America.
The publication of Wigmore's Treatise was "the most important event in the history of the law of evidence in this century." Wigmore's Treatise was not simply a compendium of cases and a rationalization of inconsistencies in the law of evidence but also a call for reform. If the legal system was to be a rational system for the discovery of truth, as Wigmore believed, the rules of evidence needed to be applied consistently with those goals and to be workable in practice, that is, in trials. Wigmore's ideas for reforming the law of evidence were part of the emergence of legal progressivism, or sociological jurisprudence, led by Roscoe Pound.
In 1906 Pound spoke at the annual meeting of the American Bar Association in St. Paul, Minnesota, about the reasons for public dissatisfaction with the administration of justice in American courts. Among the reasons for public dissatisfaction with the American legal system was contentious procedure, which turned litigation from a search "for truth and justice" into a game or sport "that the parties should fight out ... in their own way without interference." Decrying the sporting theory of justice, Pound cited Wigmore for the proposition that this view inaccurately depicted the adversary system. The sporting theory disfigured the administration of justice and mistakenly led even the "most conscientious" judge to believe that he was "not to search independently for truth and justice" and to assume that "errors in the admission or rejection of evidence are presumed to be prejudicial and hence demand a new trial." This gave the community "a false notion of the purpose and end of law."
Pound's call was for a true "scientific jurisprudence" based on the use of experts to make the legal system more efficient. Making judges 'scientists' would instill in judges an expertise which would create a greater efficiency in the administration of justice. It would also alter the administration of justice by creating an emphasis on substantive justice in the courts. Two years later, Pound fleshed out both these themes in a Columbia Law Review article. The science of law was a means to the end of "reason, uniformity, and certainty." A scientific jurisprudence was a search for full justice, for "solutions that go to the root of the controversies," for equal justice, and for exact justice. Law was scientific in order to eliminate "the personal equation in judicial administration, to preclude corruption and to limit the dangerous possibilities of magisterial ignorance." The scientific administration of justice, however, was not to be confused with a mechanistic jurisprudence, although a degeneration of legal science could lead to stagnation and "petrification" in the legal system.
The antidote to the problem of "petrification" was "a pragmatic, a sociological legal science." "The sociological movement in jurisprudence is a movement for pragmatism as a philosophy of law; for the adjustment of principles and doctrines to the human conditions they are to govern rather than to assumed first principles; for putting the human factor in the central place and relegating logic to its true position as an instrument."
Pound then noted that the law of procedure and evidence suffered "especially from mechanical jurisprudence." An insistence on perceiving procedure and evidence in conceptual terms led judges to view them as ends rather than means, and Pound gave examples of this error. He concluded by suggesting the enactment of "a common-sense and business-like procedure."
The advent at the beginning of the 20th century of sociological jurisprudence, also known as legal progressivism, progressive proceduralism, and progressive-pragmatism, was part of the general progressive movement and specifically part of the intellectual departure from formalism. Pound, the progenitor of sociological jurisprudence, relied, like all good progressives, on the "ideology of bureaucracy" to support his efforts at reforming the legal system. In general, "[p]rogressivism believed in the management of government by experts and advocated the expansion of the executive branch, primarily in the form of administrative regulatory agencies, at the expense of the Congress and the courts." Specifically, formalist jurisprudential theory employed a priori reasoning rather than reasoning based on actual economic and social conditions. The use of disinterested experts in adjudication would make the administration of justice more rational and just. Such reform was a gradual reform, conservative in the sense of taking the best from the American past and molding it to the present. Political and legal progressives, as their name suggests, believed in the evolution of human progress, a gradual but continued movement toward greater enlightenment about the human condition. As advocates for efficiency, expertise, and progress, progressives claimed that their movement was nonideological. All bureaucrats, including judges, if correctly trained and learned as 'scientists,' could act disinterestedly in support of progress. Finally, some legal progressives, including Pound and Wigmore, believed in moral absolutes. While society's values were often inchoate and in flux, there was some consensus about values.
Pound's ideas for legal reform gradually captured the attention of influential academics and 'elite' members of the legal profession. In a 1937 article looking back at the early proposals for legal reform, Wigmore called Pound's 1906 speech "the spark that kindled the white flame of progress." Wigmore noted that on the morning after Pound's speech was given, he met with William Draper Lewis, then of the University of Pennsylvania, and they, along with others, "resolved to do something about it in our own limited spheres." In 1936, a writer discussing the third draft of the proposed Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in the American Bar Association Journal traced the movement for reform of the rules of civil procedure to Pound's 1906 speech.
When Pound spoke to the American Bar Association, he was dean of the University of Nebraska School of Law, a "hitherto obscure Nebraska jurist." Two years later, Wigmore recruited Pound to Northwestern, and shortly after that, he was named Story Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. By 1916, Pound was dean at Harvard, and during his 20-year term he consolidated Harvard's preeminence in legal education. The preeminence of Pound at Harvard and Wigmore at Northwestern eased the transition of the legal academy from formalist to 'progressive-pragmatist' notions of jurisprudence.
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Chapter 5
Rebuilding the American City
There is a potential cycle for change. It begins with the local problem of urban poverty and central-city decay, then moves to local public recognition, which generates a local response. That response is severely constrained and confounded by lack of resources and power. In the best of circumstances - and we will argue the case for this - the conflict between attempts to deal locally with the problems of poverty, on the one hand, and lack of resources, on the other, will lead to coalitions and pressures on Congress, the federal judiciary, the White House, and federal agencies. In the face of these pressures, Congress will pass better federal laws and offer more generous budgets, the executive branch will better regulate the national economy, and industry will develop a more progressive response to competition in the global economy. These changes, in turn, will lead not only to better conditions, such as stronger labor demand, more attention to education, and broad health care coverage, but will also provide the funds municipalities need to become better places in which to work and live.
Changes of this sort will not happen automatically or easily. Even when reforms begin, desirable as they would be, major changes in either markets or policy are unlikely in the short run. Neither is any set of partial reforms likely to 'solve the poverty problem.' Cognizant of these severe limitations, in this chapter we aim to be practical, to search for means by which - at the least - the serious problems of urban poverty will get written prominently into the political agenda.
It is not enough to call for a return to generous, liberal federal policy. Neither our analysis and the recommendations we make nor the excellent and more detailed proposals of others will stimulate governmental generosity. The authors of such proposals have no access to the White House basement, where they might push good legislation through Congress, to remake the country in their (and our) better image. Instead, we believe, better policy to minimize poverty will result only from new political forces, which are most likely to be rooted in the poverty of the central city. We believe, that is, that an urban political strategy is the most practical approach for attacking America's poverty problems.
The time is ripe for this plan. City governments are poor and weak, and although they would like to solve the poverty problem, they are unable. The federal government, so distant from urban poverty, is preoccupied with international economic and political affairs. But as the problems mount, city officials and community-based organizations will increase their pressures and try to form new political coalitions. As these problems threaten national productivity, new solutions will become more attractive to various national groups, such as industrial leaders who fear for their international competitive advantage. If these city-based coalitions can be formed, then inroads can be made to improve federal policies and transfer some real power to the cities, and a cycle of positive feedback can begin.
This argument will proceed, section by section, through this chapter. First, we review the history of federal-local relations in fighting poverty. We begin by pointing out that federal aid has drastically declined. Cities are short of resources and nearly powerless in the face of suburban disparities and economic pressures from big business. The situation has been made worse by the rivalries forced on cities by federal programs and their antineighborhood bias.
In the second section, we provide a selection of proposals for sensible, efficient, and efficacious federal programs to solve the urban poverty crisis. We observe the various options for public policy. The major portion of this section is devoted to a review of proposals for better federal policy. It is well for the reader to recall that the national response to global economic pressures can vary: Japan, France, Germany, Italy, and the Scandinavian countries, for example, have adopted policies considerably different from those adopted in the United States. Even in Great Britain, intercity rivalry is less destructive, because national laws and budgets provide a common base for family and urban services. In particular, countries make political choices among technical options to help guide capitalist development. The United States has chosen, partly by lack of plan, regressive policies that guide choice of technology and work arrangements in counterproductive directions. The country could, however, plan more progressively. Reforms could encourage the educating and strengthening of the workforce, from the bottom up. This would be in contrast to the current practice of dividing and further separating labor, destroying opportunity for those at the bottom.
In the third section of this chapter, we examine the potential for political support to implement governmental programs. We raise a troubling question: from where will political support come for these reforms? We briefly review four possibilities, but feel compelled to judge three of them unlikely. The fourth, which stresses the latent strength of grass-roots politics in cities, leads us to the last section, where we focus on strengthening the urban role in the quest for better policy. There we will turn briefly to the heart of the matter - how we may work collectively inside cities to gather political support to fight poverty.
We examine the possibilities for a renewed and revived municipal politics. We first observe that one way to attack the set of problems treated in this book (poverty, low productivity, social division, and urban decay) is through local, progressive experiments. Their success has been documented in several cities. Chicago, Hartford, and Cleveland are among the examples, along with the more widely discussed but smaller city experiments in Burlington, Santa Monica, and Berkeley. If these experiments were to be multiplied and extended, they could show the way to the needed reconstruction of urban America. The evidence suggests there is room for municipal maneuvering in spite of the dismal prospect of a continued negative federal policy toward global competition, and it also suggests what kinds of programs are most effective.
We are more optimistic, still. When enough local change takes place, and when more experiments arise from the economic demands and political pressure of impoverished ghetto populations of African Americans, Latinos, and recent immigrants, they will provide the stimulus for coalitions to fight for better national policies for raising productivity and improving the U.S. response to global challenges. Once there are better national policies, they will stimulate still better local reforms, and the cycle may reinforce positive change.
Federal Aid, Municipal Expectations, and Antipoverty Programs
We open this section on federal-urban relations with a brief response to conservative pronouncements on the problems of the poor and the central city.
A Note on Neoconservatism
The American city shows a pressing need for more adequate national-level policies. The core of the metropolis is failing. Central cities are falling apart physically, economically, and socially. Whole neighborhoods are decaying, the people in them are suffering, and social disorganization threatens entire cities. Far too many people are poor across the nation, not just in the cities and not only when out of work. Their numbers are not declining, even during what the indicators say are economic good times. A generation has reached adulthood in poverty, and the children of that generation are threatened with worse. The gulf between haves and have-nots in this country has never been greater, and political communication never worse.
Few can doubt that the United States needs a new approach to problems of poverty, nor can they doubt the needs of the central city. It is difficult, therefore, to accept conservatives' arguments that we should leave well enough alone. It is hard to believe their theories that the situation will get better by itself. The evidence of the 1980s casts great doubt that problems of poverty will be resolved or even seriously reduced by benefits trickling down from general prosperity.
The conservative argument has been much popularized, but it is false. Most troublesome for our work at this juncture is a tendency in much contemporary discussion to use rhetoric that at once trivializes systematic causes of poverty and magnifies the problems thought to derive from improper individual behavior. To put this bias in context, we borrow ideas from political economist Albert Hirschman, who has examined the problem of rhetoric in a broader but closely related context.
The rise of the welfare state in the twentieth century, Hirschman asserts, can be seen as the third stage in a protracted zig-zag struggle over centuries for the "development of true economic and social citizenship." The first stage was the back-and-forth struggle for civil rights of speech, thought, religion, and justice. The second stage involved the effort to win political rights by extending the vote; and the third stage was the broader struggle to expand social and economic rights, "recognizing that minimum standards of education, health, economic well-being, and security are basic to the life of a civilized person." Arguments for and against these developments of modern society have used greatly exaggerated rhetoric: progressives extoll the advantages of expanded rights, while conservatives warn of dangers. At each stage there may be progress, followed by proposals that attempt to undo the most recent gains. We are now in a period when 'reactionary rhetoric' is particularly prominent.
Rhetorical and ideological backlashes stem not simply from gloomy estimates of human capacity (as by Edmund Burke on the French revolution or Thomas Malthus on the utility of starvation for checking the growth of the English working class), or from fear by the privileged classes that derives from their being outnumbered by the common people. Support for reaction is also provided by theoretical predispositions of the social sciences, especially the myth of self-regulating economics, which allows free-market enthusiasts to denounce as strongly 'perverse' any effects from progressive interferences with the 'natural' laws of supply and demand. The argument that welfare is the cause of poverty is a prominent example of this sort of reactionary argument, neatly echoing centuries of similar reaction to various stages of progress.
The ideological onslaught of the last twenty years against redistributive policies has been widely justified in terms of national economic policy. Although the most negative and racist accompaniments of this policy have been kept usually out of sight, the agendas of those who abuse the theories of free-market economists and other archconservative social scientists have sometimes been transparent. The theories lend themselves to this abuse, as is suggested by the quantity of 'counterintuitive' reasoning to which we have been subjected. Simulation models are designed to show that "at times programs cause exactly the reverse of desired results," as would be the case, for example, if by providing good housing for the poor the City of Boston would attract impoverished migrants and therefore worsen its average housing conditions. It is claimed that "our efforts to deal with distress themselves increase distress." Conservatives argue that "we tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap."
These expectations of counterintuitive, reversed, and inadvertent consequences of progressive social policy exist more in the flawed reasoning of the right-wing critics than in reality. Although unanticipated consequences do often result from public (and private) actions, it is important to recognize that, as Hirschman points out, "there is actually nothing certain about such perverse effects." It is claimed by conservatives, to take but one example, that minimum-wage legislation dries up jobs for the poor by making labor too expensive. But there is in fact little such evidence, and it could be in theory that a higher legal floor to wages would have precisely the intended salutory influence, that is, higher minimums would have "a positive effect on labor productivity and consequently on employment." As the terms of public debate have shifted so as to frame a more conservative and less compassionate view, reformers have more and more difficulty defending in public perfectly reasonable attempts (such as the legislation of a higher minimum wage) to improve basic conditions for the poor.
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International Evidence on the Historical Properties of Business Cycles
By DAVID K. BACKUS AND PATRICK J. KEHOE
We contrast properties of real quantities with those of price levels and stocks of money for ten countries over the last century. Although the magnitude of output fluctuations has varied across countries and periods, relations among real quantities have been remarkably uniform. Properties of price levels, however, exhibit striking differences between periods. Inflation rates are more persistent after World War II than before, and price-level fluctuations are typically procyclical before World War II and countercyclical afterward. Fluctuations in money are less highly correlated with output in the postwar period but are no more persistent than in earlier periods. (JEL E32, E31)
We study fluctuations in output, prices, and money in ten countries for which at least a century of annual data are available. We also examine the cyclical behavior of components of national output: private consumption expenditures, fixed investment, government purchases of goods and services, and net exports. Our objective is to document some of the salient features of business cycles. We know that in many respects these countries and time periods have been markedly different. The ten countries differ in their institutions, their monetary and fiscal policies, their industrial compositions and structures, and their average aggregate growth rates. The question is whether they share, despite these differences, similar features of business cycles.
We find a great deal of regularity in the cyclical behavior of real quantities. Although the magnitude of output fluctuations varies across countries and over time, relations among variables are remarkably stable. Investment is consistently 2-4 times as variable as output; consumption is about as variable as output; and both investment and consumption are strongly procyclical. The trade balance is generally countercyclical, exhibiting larger deficits during booms than during recessions. The exception to this regularity in quantities is government purchases, which exhibit no systematic cyclical tendency. Patterns of price-level fluctuations, however, have changed markedly. Before World War II, prices were predominantly procyclical; since then, they have been consistently countercyclical. They have also been, in most countries, substantially more persistent since World War II than in earlier periods. We also find for the post-World War II period that fluctuations in the stock of money have been less highly correlated with output. There is no general tendency across countries, however, toward greater persistence of money growth rates.
Our study is an outgrowth of business-cylce research by Robert Lucas (1977), Finn Kydland and Edward Prescott (1990), and others that, in turn, retains some of the flavor of the tradition of Arthur Burns and Wesley Mitchell (1946) at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The goal of this work is, for the most part, to summarize the properties of macroeconomic data without imposing much theoretical structure. The resulting empirical regularities can then serve as a guide to a variety of future theoretical developments. A common theme in this line of research is that the business-cycle phenomenon consists not simply of fluctuations in aggregate output, but also of common patterns of correlation between different aggregate time series. We report properties of international fluctuations in a manner that conforms with some recent work on American business cycles and thus extends this work to a much wider range of countries and time periods. Our motivation is international in another respect: our own research (Backus and Kehoe, 1987; Backus et al., 1992) concerns the dynamics of inernational trade and the relationships among business cycles in different countries. A useful by-product is additional evidence on the question of whether output fluctuations since World War II have been smaller than those prior to World War I. This question has been the subject of active debate in the United States, including papers by Christina Romer (1986, 1989), Steven Sheffrin (1988), and Nathan Blake and Robert J. Gordon (1989). Like Sheffrin's study, ours puts this debate in an international context. We include several countries not studied by Sheffrin, notably Australia, Canada, and Japan, and introduce new data for Sweden.
Our data set covers ten countries with at least a century of annual data on national output: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. For the most part, countries with national income accounts for such a long period are also those with the highest per capita output today. Several others, including India, report partial time series, but we doubt that these series are sufficiently accurate for the study of short-term fluctuations. Estimates of national output in the ten countries vary in quality, but in some cases we think they are superior to the U.S. data.
We begin, in Section I, by describing the data. While data for earlier periods are unquestionably less reliable than modern data, in some countries they appear to be good enough to provide an accurate picture of business cycles prior to World War II. The data for several countries seem to be significantly more accurate than the Kuznets-based estimates for the United States, primarily because raw-data sources are better in these countries. In Section II, we compare output volatility before World War I (the prewar period), after World War II (the postwar period), and between the wars (the interwar period). Until recently, the presumption has been that prewar U.S. output fluctuations were two or three times larger than those of the postwar period. Romer (1989), however, suggests that at least part of this difference is the result of systematic measurement error in prewar GNP that overstates its cyclical variability. Our international data set provides additional evidence on this question.
For the ten countries, we find that interwar fluctuations in real output are uniformly larger than those of the postwar period. With the single exception of Japan, the standard deviations of output fluctuations are from two to four times larger in each of the ten countries. We find, however, no consistent pattern for the prewar-postwar comparison. In six of the ten countries studied by Sheffrin (1988), prewar fluctuations are no more than 60-percent larger than those of the postwar period. However, in the other four (Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the United States) the fluctuations are considerably larger in the prewar period. The U.S. case has been discussed extensively, and it appears that part of the excess volatility of the prewar period can be attributed to measurement error (Romer, 1989). Romer's preferred estimate of prewar volatility is only 30-percent higher than for the postwar period, but Balke and Gordon (1989) argue for a number closer to 100 percent. Sheffrin (1988) considers a similar case for Sweden and concludes that the excess volatility in the prewar era is not primarily the result of measurement error. We find, as do Michael Bergman and Lars Jonung (1989) with different methods, that about half of the excess volatility Sheffrin finds in the prewar period disappears when revised as estimates of prewar output are used. Australia and Canada have the most extreme differences between periods, with output three and two times more volatile, respectively, in the prewar period. The data for both countries are reasonably good, so the greater volatility of measure output probably indicates a change in the variability of real economic activity.
In Section III, we examine the behavior of components of the national product: consumption, gross investment, government spending, and net exports. We find that many of the properties of postwar business cycles in the United States are evident in other countries and periods. Consumption expenditures have been procyclical and have approximately the same standard deviation as output. Investment has also been uniformly procyclical and generally varies, in percentage terms, from two to four times more than output. Government spending has generally been more variable than output, but it has been countercyclical almost as often as procyclical. Net exports have been, for the most part, countercyclical. We also find that correlations between measured output movements in different countries are typically positive and more pronounced in the postwar period than in the prewar period.
In Section IV, we examine movements in price levels and money stocks. Here we find, in contrast to the regularity of real quantities, two significant changes in the cyclical behavior of prices. We find, first, that price changes in most countries have been more persistent in the postwar period than in the prewar period. This finding extends related work by Jeffrey Sachs (1980), Charles Schultze (1986), and John Taylor (1986) on the United States and work by Gordon (1983) on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan, to a larger set of countries. We also find, in the prewar and interwar periods, that output and price-level fluctuations are positively correlated in most of the ten countries. However, in the postwar period, price fluctuations have been consistently countercyclical. We find a slight decline in the correlation of money and output in the postwar period, but no general tendency for greater persistence of money growth rates. We conclude this section with some speculative remarks on potential explanations for the observed changes in price behavior.
I. The Data
We start with a description and evaluation of the data, emphasizing in particular the methods used to construct prewar national income accounts; sources and definitions are described in Appendix A. Although national accounts are based to a large extent on a common framework, sources of raw data differ across countries, especially in the prewar period. Countries with the best source material tend to have the most reliable estimates of national income. The United Kingdom, for example, has had an annual income tax in effect continuously since 1842, while in the United States the federal personal income tax was only made possible in 1913 by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As a result, the United Kingdom has much better data on the income side of the national accounts for the prewar period than the United States. In other countries, the establishment of statistical bureaus to measure production and employment, frequently on an industry basis, makes production-based accounts feasible. In the United States such sources of annual data are extremely limited. For this reason, and because accounting methods have improved in the decades since Simon Kuznets's (1961) work on prewar U.S. GNP, estimates for several of the countries we study are likely to be better than the American data examined by Romer (1989) and Balke and Gordon (1989).
Problems with prewar U.S. data have been well-documented by Kuznets (1961) and Romer (1986, 1989). Kuznets and his coworkers constructed national income accounts for the United States from 1869. The cornerstone of this work, and most later work as well, is William Shaw's (1947) commodity output series: estimates of value added in manufacturing, mining, and farming. Shaw's estimates, and therefore those of national income, were severely constrained in the prewar period by the absence of comprehensive annual data sources. The most informative sources (see Shaw, 1947 part II) were periodic federal censuses, including especially the Census of Manufactures, available every ten years from 1869 to 1899 and every five years from 1899 to 1919. One source of annual data is reports on industry published by eight states. These states accounted for between 10 and 39 percent of total manufacturing in census years, and the reports typically covered only part of each state's manufacturing output (see Shaw, 1947 table II:4). The state reports were supplemented with occasional government reports and industry publications. Kuznets (1961) interpolated further between the census benchmarks of 1869, 1879, and 1889 by using a variety of industry-output indicators (see the notes to tables II:1-5 in Kuznets [1961]), since neither he nor Shaw was able to measure commodity output directly for the 1869-1889 period. Finally, both Shaw and Kuznets estimated nominal value added, which was converted to real terms at a disaggregated level using producer price indexes.
Romer (1989), however, bases her criticism of prewar U.S. data not on the fragmentary source material used to produce estimates of commodity output, but on the method Kuznets (1961) used to extrapolate from commodity output to GNP. Kuznets's problem was to estimate GNP from information on commodity output alone, since direct measures of other components were not consistently available even for census years.
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AFRICAN-AMERICAN SOCIETY AND EDUCATION
Letha A. (Lee) See
The study of social inequality in the United States has properly focussed on the fate of African-Americans. Although other minorities have endured privations based on their language or religion, their identity is in their own hands to some extent: there are no physical barriers to a change of an individual's tongue or faith. This is not so with race. Gender would similarly define identity by nature, but even though women are still treated unequally across almost all racial and ethnic groups, civilized societies increasingly denounce sexual discrimination.
The African-Americans, at twenty-eight million, considerably outnumber the Native Americans (about one million), the Asians, or the mixed race Hispanic community (sixteen million). Their situation still constitutes the 'American problem' that has been identified for generations. It should be clear that the problem is only partly theirs to solve, for the society as a whole must change too, and would benefit immensely from its solution.
On the other hand, there is evidence that a minority of African-Americans have succeeded, despite the inferior opportunities available to most of their members. Of course, without their handicap of widespread victimization, these notables would likely have won achievements which were more substantial, earlier, easier, and achievements might have been recognized over a broader range of ventures.
This chapter deals briefly with four aspects of inequality in society to set the context for a discussion of education: income, housing, criminal justice, and health care. Other data on inequality (such as social class) in the United States are drawn upon where appropriate, but this chapter argues that African-Americans exist as a statistically significant sub-group within most of the other categories of disadvantage found in American society - in fact a statistically larger share of disadvantaged categories than would be expected. In short, race does not explain everything, but if you are black and in the United States, it has a pervasive inhibition on opportunities of every kind. Educational programs of schooling and teacher education are then addressed to see where intervention is most promising. Self-help programs are identified, recognizing the difficulties of securing broad public support.
Background to Inequality for African-Americans
African-Americans came to the United States as slaves in most cases. Although they sometimes came via the British colonies of the Caribbean, most came directly from Africa. Although other peoples were sometimes enslaved and the Africans mixed with various other races, slavery remained the dominant experience of their group (more or less exclusively) until the Civil War. From the time that slave trading was abolished during the 1830s (with legislation from several states reinforced by the effective blockade of slaving by the British navy) the numbers of African-Americans have grown by natural causes rather than by continued migration. Only a few thousand have left the U.S. for other nations such as Liberia or Canada. In short, for over 150 years the United States has been the only home of African-Americans, and for 125 years they have been citizens. But not equal ones.
Deprived of the vote initially, threatened by lynch mobs until the present generation, denied equal access to many public services in both government and private institutions, the African-American is still not able to enjoy equal status. This inequality remains institutionalized although no longer formalized in law. Most of the social functions of American life create separate categories for white and non-white, and black is both the largest and probably the most disadvantaged group among the latter. At the personal level, racism may not be evident, but almost any set of statistics can be broken into categories that reflect the racial exploitation. Of course, current data do not describe a society that is inevitable or desirable. Since the systems they describe are capable of being changed if there is sufficient social and political will, education has an important role in improving the deplorable conditions revealed in studies of other aspects of society: income, housing, health, and crime.
Income
Economic developments for African-Americans in the United States reflect the continuum of possibilities. Blackwell (1985) asserts that "many segments of the black community experienced major economic progress" between the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. U.S. News and World Report (1986) claimed that the majority of African-Americans are prospering and that they had doubled their proportion in the middle class. But these two articles still portray these gains as insignificant in the context of economic inequality. The Reagan period brought appalling reverses in economic equality for the majority of African-Americans. An Urban League report entitled The State of Black America (Swinton 1989) shows per capita income for African-Americans remained steadily at 51 percent of that for whites. The aggregate incomes of both groups continued to grow, but the income gap widened by about $2000. Black family income was only 42 percent that of whites and spelled disaster for large families in the urban setting.
U.S. News and World Report (1986) reported that 1.1 million black males were unemployed in 1985, compared to .5 million in 1970. Half of all black teenagers who had started a job are now unemployed. The explanation offered by the Department of Commerce (1986) is that there are no longer well-paid jobs in manufacturing where unskilled blacks would be employed. In the last fifteen years, of twenty-three million jobs created in the private sector, more than 90 percent were in the service sector.
High unemployment rates among African-Americans are related to the entry of new immigrant groups into the employment force, and to the structural shift from low-skill jobs to jobs requiring technical skills (See 1986). The internationalization of the world's labor force (partly because American businesses are opening factories offshore) points to an increasing need for American youth to have job training and general education. Indirect evidence indicates that investment in public schooling can be partly offset against added costs of long-term unemployment, or can provide a partial solution to the high rate of unemployment among blacks, thereby providing a respectable cost/benefit argument for offering training services.
Black unemployment and poverty are both high, and high relative to the figures for white Americans. The 1986 Census Bureau reports that 33.7 million people (14.4 percent of the U.S. total) are poor. Among African-Americans, the rate is 33.8 percent, for black children 51.1 percent, and for the black elderly 31.7 percent. Blacks are three times as likely as whites to find themselves in poverty. Black families headed by women are twice as likely to be poor. Swinton (1989) contends that not only did African-Americans not share in the recent economic revolution, but the black-white gap is growing. The black poverty rate doubled from 1969 to 1988 (12 percent instead of 6 percent) and unemployed tripled (1.7 million instead of 570,000).
This economic inequality in America reflects upon the marginal participation by African-Americans in the economic community. Not only are there smaller numbers but the nature of the jobs makes workers vulnerable to displacement from automation, technological changes, and shifts to off-shore operations. Unskilled and semi-skilled jobs are disappearing at the rate of 35,000 per week, nearly two million per year. This pressure on the African-American community is curiously functional, for Gans (1974) noted that any social system can ensure that its 'dirty work' is done at low wages if there are no alternatives for part of the work force.
African-Americans are losing ground, giving rise to a nation of the truly disadvantaged. Evidently America is growing into two nations, one black, one white; separate and unequal.
Housing
Blackwell (1985) argued that African-American housing should be judged by the standards created and used by the empowered Americans - the whites. By these standards, African-American housing is grossly overcrowded, substandard, and expensive. It contributes to homelessness even as it provides a limited form of housing.
This situation evolved as a succession of Republican administrations shifted the focus from construction of public housing to permitting private landlords to build or convert rental units for eligible families. These changes were followed by a series of rental subsidies (Bell 1970). To reach provisional agreements with landlords, landlords were allowed to subdivide existing apartments into exceedingly small units, resulting in overcrowding becoming commonplace (Forman 1978).
The population density in public housing was three times as high for African-Americans as for whites. In 1980, black families were larger than those of whites, but their apartments were smaller. The 1986 Census also indicated that a substantially larger number of ancillary indvidualsindividuals resided with black families.
There are not enough housing units for the African-American population, and the existing units cost too much. Today's problems arose from the urban renewal programs of the late 1950s and the 1960s, when the goal was to demolish blighted areas and construct new dwellings, office buildings, and highways. African-Americans were forced from their homes and traditional neighborhoods and the reduced number of available housing units became available for the poor in new ghettos (Gilderbloom 1989). The Reagan administration added to existing problems by massive cuts in domestic spending, including a large reduction in housing aid. Spending for low income housing fell from $32 billion in 1980 to $7 billion in 1988. This national agenda halted construction of low income housing despite residential density being at its highest levels ever, housing problems at their maximum.
Another consequence of these government housing policies is that some African-Americans have no housing at all. It is estimated that less than 2 percent of new housing guaranteed by Federal Housing Authority (FHA) mortgages is available to African-Americans. For non-government housing, the percentage open to black people is even smaller. One-third of the 23 million African-Americans now live below the poverty line (U.S. Bureau of Census 1988). It is highly probable that they live in desolation and squalor, devoting an increasing portion of their income to rent. Waiting lists for public housing swell dramatically, forcing many cities to close off new applicants.
Inequality is evident in the housing shortage, in racial exclusion, and in homelessness. The exclusion of persons from residential areas because of their race, color, creed, or ethnic attachment, despite their needs and ability to pay denies African-Americans a fundamental right. While complete freedom of selection is never achieved, compulsory or manipulated segregation is inherently wrong, damaging both for the immediate victims and for the general public. Housing segregation leads directly to segregation in other areas of life: schools, churches, hospitals, public accommodation, recreation, welfare and civic activities, and the workplace. Although segregation of schools is a violation of the orders of the Supreme Court, many schools of the north and west are segregated not by law but by racial patterns of residence.
Health
Universal health care is hotly debated in the United States. Conservative ideology suggests that those in need must fail in seeking help from their families and from the marketplace before they can depend on the government for medical assistance (Enthoven 1980, Hornbrook 1983). For poor people, seeking medical care from the marketplace drains them of hope and resources (Trevino and Moss 1983). The numbers are substantial: in 1983 the number of people living in poverty in the United States exceeded the entire population of Argentina, Australia, Canada, Sweden or Taiwan - in fact of all but twenty-three nations in the world. African-Americans represent a large number of those in poverty.
In 1969, 19.9 percent of African-Americans sixty-five years of age or more could not work because of ill health. (Only five percent of whites were in the same situation.) Low incomes for African-Americans explain many of these discrepancies, as they have done throughout the century. At the beginning of this century, white men outlived black men by 15.7 years; white women outlived black women by 16.0 years. These gaps have continued to narrow throughout the century, to become respectively 6.8 and 5.3 years. Significant differences are evident in the proportion of each race that lives beyond the age of 65: 74.8 percent of white and 58.1 percent of African males; 85.7 percent of white and 74.9 percent of African-American females (Statistics of the United States 1986).
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Academic Achievement in Mathematics and Science of Students Between Ages 13 and 23: Are There Differences Among Students in the Top One Percent of Mathematical Ability?
Camilla Persson Benbow
Iowa State University
The predictive validity of the Scholastic Aptitude Test-Mathematics subtest (SAT-M) was investigated for 1,996 mathematically gifted (top 1%) 7th and 8th graders. Various academic achievement criteria were assessed over a 10-year span. Individual differences in SAT-M scores obtained in junior high school predicted accomplishments in high school and college. Among students in the top 1% of ability, those with SAT-M scores in the top quarter, in comparison with those in the bottom quarter, achieved at much higher levels through high school, college, and graduate school. Of the 37 variables studied, 34 showed significant differences favoring the high SAT-M group, which were substantial. Some gender differences emerged; these tended to be smaller than the ability group differences; they were not observed in the relationship between mathematical ability and academic achievement. The predictive validity of the SAT-M for high-ability 7th and 8th graders was supported.
"Standardized testing is much in the news. New testing programs, test results, and criticisms of standardized testing all are regular fare in the popular media today" (Haney, 1981, p. 1021). Moreover, "with the possible exception of evolution, no area in the sciences has been as filled with emotional and confusing mixtures of science, politics, and philosophy as the field of mental testing" (Carroll & Horn, 1981, p. 1012). These remarks portray quite well the status of mental testing at the beginning of the 1980s, yet they seem to be equally appropriate for describing mental testing at the beginning of the 1990s. Some might perceive this as a rather recent development. However, concern over standardized testing has been voiced ever since the introduction of the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale and the Army Alpha test (Cronbach, 1975; Haney, 1981).
The concerns over mental testing primarily have been threefold: test bias against certain groups (primarily women and minorities at present, but children from families of low socioeconomic status in earlier decades), the role testing might play in perpetuating social and economic injustice, and the utility of test information (Cleary, Humphreys, Kendrick, & Wesman, 1975; Cole, 1981; Gottfredson & Crouse, 1986; Haney, 1981; Jensen, 1980; Scarr, 1981). The questionable value of test information has been a particularly frequent criticism levied against college admissions tests, such as the College Board Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT; see Linn, 1982b, for a review). This study was conceptualized to address the latter concern, namely, the predictive validity of the SAT for a special population. I assess the value of the SAT, not for high school seniors and the college admissions process, but rather for identifying highly mathematically gifted seventh and eighth graders and making predictions about their achievement over a 10-year period following their SAT-Mathematics assessment. Specifically, I asked whether the SAT-M can detect individual differences in the top 1% of the ability continuum that bear on subsequent academic achievement in mathematics and science.
The use of the SAT to identify intellectually precocious students in Grades 7 and 8 dates to 1972 when Julian Stanley launched the first talent search (Keating & Stanley, 1972). Stanley was interested in students who ranked in the top 1 % in mathematical ability. Because considerable variance in academic ability is found among students in the 99th per-centile and because Stanley was interested in differentiating among such students, out-of-level testing (i.e., using tests designed for older age groups) was required. For that reason among others (see Stanley & Benbow, 1986), Stanley chose the SAT as the instrument with which to screen highly gifted students. Since 1972 more than 1,000,000 seventh and eighth graders have been tested with the SAT, and more than 100,000 such students now take the SAT annually through various talent search programs across the United States. The distribution of scores of such students on the SAT is about the same as found for a random sample of high school students (Benbow, 1988). The scores tend to maintain their ordinal ranking over time, increasing 40 to 50 points per year (Benbow & Stanley, 1982; Brody & Benbow, 1990; Olszewski-Kubilius, 1990). Thus, from a psychometric viewpoint, the use of the SAT with seventh and eighth graders seems justified.
It has not been demonstrated, however, whether use of the SAT with young but academically competent students has utility. Is the SAT a valid tool for assessing individual differences in current development, and can this instrument be used to refine predictions of exceptional academic achievements? As Cronbach (1971) pointed out, "validation is the process of examining the accuracy of a specific prediction or inference made form a test score" (p. 471). In assessing the validity of the SAT for highly gifted 7th and 8th graders, I evaluated whether academic achievement, especially in mathematics/science, during the 10-year period after these students were identified is much higher for those students with exceptionally high SAT Mathematics subtest (SAT-M) scores (top quarter of the top 1%) than for those with comparatively 'low' SAT scores who were nonetheless in the top 1% in ability (i.e., the bottom quarter of the top 1%). I hypothesized that meaningful differences would be detected. Several studies have revealed that individuals with the most potential for high academic achievement in mathematics and science are generally considered to be those students with high ability, particularly, high mathematical ability (Davis, 1965; Green, 1989; Walberg, Strykowski, Rovai, & Hung, 1984; Werts, 1967). Moreover, Kuhn (1962) noted that an overwhelming majority of "scientific revolutions" can be ascribed to the works of mathematically brilliant persons.
Nevertheless, many researchers and educators, most notably Renzulli (1986), have argued that there is a threshold effect for ability. According to this argument, after a certain point, there is a decline in the power of ability to influence academic achievement and other variables, such as motivation and creativity, become increasingly important. The precise location of this threshold for ability has not been determined. However, it is thought to be at some point well below the top percentile for ability. If Renzulli and others of this viewpoint are correct, then there should be no statistically significant differences in mathematics/science achievement between the two high-ability groups. All students in the top 1% should achieve highly, and placement within the top 1% should not affect the results.
The reasoning in the above paragraph assumes that there is only one threshold for ability. Yet there could be a threshold effect for ability within a certain range (e.g., between the 90th and 98th percentiles) but not within the top 1%. That is, differences in ability within the 90th and 98th percentiles may not relate much to subsequent academic achievement in mathematics/science. This view is reasonable given that the possible differences in ability within a range, for example, within the 90th-98th or 80th-89th percentile ranges, are small and not reliable in comparison with the ability differences found within the top 1% when out-of-level testing is used. I do not test this possibility in this study. If, however, one is interested in scientific eminence or productivity, and a threshold effect of ability for this level of achievement, it is within the top percentile of ability that one must focus.
Although my prediction is contrary to Renzulli's position, it should be noted that there are data that support the validity of Renzulli's position. For example, students who were in the top 1% in mathematical ability in the 7th and 8th grades were studied at 23 years of age to identify those factors that affect the ways in which childhood potential or ability is translated into adult achievement (Benbow & Arjmand, 1990). As a group these students had achieved academically at a very high level but not uniformly so. When those students who were classified as high academic achievers in mathematics/science areas (i.e., those who were attending graduate school in mathematics/science or medical school; n=261) were compared with those students in the sample who were classified as low academic achievers in those areas (those who were not attending college or had withdrawn, those who graduated with mathematics/science major but with low grades; n=95), a difference in previous ability between the two groups was found (the ability difference approximated two thirds of a standard deviation on the SAT-M). The canonical correlation (from the discriminant analysis) between (a) 7th-grade/8th-grade SAT-M and (b) high school SAT-M, SAT Verbal subtest (SAT-V), and achievement group membership was .30 for male students and .29 for female students. (Too few cases had 7th-grade/8th-grade SAT-V scores to allow inclusion in the analysis.) Nonetheless, ability exhibited the weakest relationship with academic achievement in mathematics/science as compared with variables in the areas of educational opportunity, family characteristics, and attitudes. Similarly, Sanders, Benbow, and Albright (1991) found that among mathematically talented female students, previous ability on SAT-M was not a primary factor relating to choice of mathematics/science career or to educational aspirations.
Thus, the aforementioned studies indicate that among those students in the top 1%, SAT-M performance was a factor but not the major factor predicting the students' academic success. That is, a bright mind will not make its own way. The educational opportunities provided to gifted children make a difference in the children's development. In the present study, I ask the central question: Do individual differences within the top 1% in ability make a difference in the eventual display of achievement?
In sum, I examine whether use of the SAT in out-of-level testing of highly gifted students yields useful information for the prediction of academic achievement up to 10 years after assessment. That is, is it useful to diagnose level of talent within the top 1%, as is currently being done with well over 100,000 seventh- and eighth-grade students on an annual basis? More succinctly, is there a benefit to knowing where in the top 1% a student's ability lies? It has been popularly assumed that such information is not helpful. In essence, I assess the predictive validity of the SAT for use with gifted 7th and 8th graders.
Method
Subjects
Intellectually talented students were identified by the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), in which the SAT was administered to intellectually able 12- and 13-year-olds in the 1970s and early 1980s (Keating & Stanley, 1972). During that 12-year period, more than 10,000 preadolescents (mostly 7th graders) participated in SMPY 'talent searches.' (Since that time more than 1 million students have taken the SAT through other talent search programs.) About 3,500 of the students in the talent searches were included in the SMPY 50-year longitudinal study. As part of this study, researchers in the SMPY are currently tracking four cohorts of students and studying their development longitudinally.
Students in Cohort 1 comprised the sample in this investigation; they were drawn from the first three talent searches of the SMPY (i.e., those conducted in 1972, 1973, and 1974). In those talent searches, 7th and 8th graders in Maryland were eligible to participate if they had scored in the upper 5% (1972) or the upper 2% (1973, 1974) nationally on any standardized mathematics achievement test. Qualified students took the SAT-M and, in 1973, the SAT-V also. These tests are designed to measure developed mathematical and verbal reasoning ability, respectively, of high school students. However, the SAT is believed to be a more potent measure of reasoning for 7th and 8th graders than for 11th and 12th graders (Minor & Benbow, 1986; Stanley & Benbow, 1986).
A score of at least 390 on the SAT-M or 370 on the SAT-V in the 7th or 8th grade was required for inclusion in Cohort 1 of the longitudinal study. These SAT criteria resulted in the selection of 2,118 of 2,582 students who, as 7th or 8th graders, scored as well as the average high school female; the criteria also provided a wide range of talent to study. SAT scores had been grade adjusted (7th-grade scores had been adjusted upward to be comparable to 8th-grade scores, with the procedure outlined in Angoff, 1971). Mean SAT scores at age 13 were as follows for male students, 556 (SD = 73) on SAT-M and 436 (SD = 85) on SAT-V, and for female students, 519 (SD = 59) on SAT-M and 462 (SD = 88) for SAT-V.
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CULTURE CLASH: A MODEL IN ACTION AMONG HAWAIIAN-AMERICAN CHILDREN
Children of color may begin the schooling process having been socialized in a way which may be in conflict with the expectations of the school; when this occurs, children and teachers may fail due to the cultural incompatibility between the culture of the school and the culture of the child. In this section, efforts to remedy the clash between the culture of the home and the culture of the school among one particular American minority group - Hawaiian-Americans - will be reviewed.
The cultural incompatibility approach has been the basis of considerable work at the Center for Development of Early Education (formerly the Kamehameha Elementary Education Program, KEEP), a privately funded, multidisciplinary, educational research and development program directed at remedying academic underachievement of native Hawaiians. As with many other ethnic minorities in American schools, poor school performance among Hawaiians was at first attributed to a variety of cultural and home deficiencies. This cultural deficit model, implying a superior-inferior dichotomy, is unfounded, unhelpful, and often rightfully labeled racist. All neurologically normal children have already learned a substantial amount of relatively complex material that is specific to their culture by the time they are of school age. Employing a cultural incompatibility model as opposed to a cultural deficit model implies that all children can learn prerequisite skills for any future need, including school readiness, if given the opportunity.
Researchers at Kamehameha schools proposed that a school environment that was compatible with the child's home culture could be developed. This culturally compatible classroom might elicit from children those skills, attitudes, and behaviors that would contribute to the desired learning and help children achieve early school success.
While research findings are numerous and complex, some summary can be attempted here. To begin with, the Hawaiian socialization system teaches children to be contributing members of a family. For instance, even when adolescents work outside the home, rather than spend their hard-earned money strictly on themselves, they often contribute to the overall family resources. the family is not seen as a training ground for independence as is typical in many dominant culture families. Personal independence is not a goal; rather, interdependence is stressed. A collective orientation develops, as opposed to the individual orientation prevalent in middle-class caucasian society. This has implications for motivation and instructional strategies, as well as the reward structure in the classroom. For instance, the Hawaiian child may not be motivated by individual rewards (gold stars, grades) as much as a caucasian counterpart. Nor would a Hawaiian child desire to achieve independence from the group.
The sibling care system, whereby children from a very young age are placed in the care of older siblings, also promotes a high degree of interdependence by giving children early experience caring for younger children and carrying out many meaningful family chores. Adults tend to structure their relationships so they can relate to the sibling group as a whole, not to individuals on a one-to-one basis. As a result, children do not have as much one-to-one verbal interaction with adults. In addition, because Hawaiian children learn from peers from an early age, they are comfortable in the role of teacher as well as in the role of learner.
As a result, conditions in typical classrooms may not be sufficient to elicit and sustain appropriate learning strategies. Sibling care and interdependence may diminish the degree of authority alloted to any one adult. Peer orientation and affiliation, while frowned upon in the typical classroom, has been found to contribute to school success of Hawaiian children. Learning stations which consider this orientation facilitate learning. Reading instruction modeled after the culturally familiar 'talk-story' activity improves reading skill and comprehension. Modification of instructional practice, classroom organization, and motivation management that takes into consideration the culture of the child has been found to make a significant difference in the achievement of Hawaiian children in school.
Figure 5.1 illustrates some aspects of mainstream culture which are congruent with the culture of the school but which may be in significant conflict with the cultural knowledge and attitudes of Hawaiian-American students.
Analysis of the classroom experiences of other minority children confirms the usefulness of the cultural incompatibility hypothesis. The KEEP model, for example, has been applied among the Navajo at Rough Rock. While not directly transferable, there is every indication that culture-specific modification of the program is possible. Efforts such as KEEP should be applauded. Even if not directly transferable to other contexts, the implications and motivations behind such work can be applied, especially where there is a large population of a single minority group in the schools.
SOCIAL CLASS
We have said that differences in school achievement may be attributed to the cultural influences of race, ethnicity, and gender on learning style. Other aspects of human diversity may also be critical in determining school success. Such factors include motivation, aptitude and achievement, self-concept, peer pressure, family, health, teacher expectations, and socioeconomic status. It is to issues of socioeconomic status and its influence on school achievement that we now turn.
Most Americans believe they live in a classless, rather egalitarian society. At the least, American ideology promotes the idea that, through proper attention and diligence (and some luck, which Americans also believe in), an individual may 'rise above' his or her social class. Part of what has been called an 'American religion,' this faith in the reality of upward mobility may account for the relative lack of attention to the concept of social class in the educational and psychological literature in the United States. Certainly it accounts for the difficulty sociology professors encounter in helping young people understand the bases of class differences in this society. Nevertheless, as we all know, there are significant variations in standard of living, status of occupation, and extent of expectations of upward mobility among American citizens.
Social class has been defined in a number of ways. all of which refer to a hierarchical stratification, or 'layering,' of people in social groups, communities, and societies. Assignment to social class categories is one of a number of stratification systems that can be used to distinguish one individual or group from another in such a way as to assign 'worth.' The urge to organize people in layers almost appears to be a culture-general characteristic; indeed, it has been said that whenever more than three people are in a group there will be stratification. While many Americans would identify class membership in terms of income, it is important to understand that money alone does not determine one's social class. Rather, one's social class standing depends on a combination of prestige, power, influence, and income.
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Traditional class markers in the United States thus include family income, prestige of one's father's occupation, prestige of one's neighborhood, the power one has to achieve one's ends in times of conflict, and the level of schooling achieved by the family head. In other cultures, markers of social class may include bloodline and status of the family name, the caste into which one was born, the degree to which one engages in physical labor, and the amount of time which one might devote to scholarly or leisurely activities of one's choosing.
For purposes of analysis, it is often helpful to divide American society into five social classes. At the top there is a very small upper class, or social elite, consisting chiefly of those who have inherited social privilege from others. Second is a larger upper middle class, whose members often are professionals, corporate managers, leading scientists, and the like. This group usually has benefited from extensive higher education, and while family history is not so important, manners, tastes, and patterns of behavior are.
The third (or middle) social class has been called the lower middle class. Members of this group are largely people employed in white-collar occupations earning middle incomes - small business owners, teachers, social workers, nurses, sales and clerical workers, bank tellers, and so forth. This is the largest of the social classes in the United States and encompasses a wide range of occupations and income. Central to the values of the lower middle class are a "desire to belong and be respectable .... [f]riendliness and openness are values and attention is paid to keeping up appearances."
Fourth in the hierarchy of social class is the working class, whose members are largely blue-collar workers (industrial wage earners), or employees in low-paid service occupations. Working-class families often have to struggle with poor job security, limited fringe benefits, longer hours of work, and more dangerous or 'dirtier' work than those in the classes above them. It is not surprising, then, that members of the working class often feel more alienated from the social mainstream.
Finally, fifth in the hierarchy is the lower class - the so-called working poor and those who belong to what has been termed the underclass - a designation that refers to people who have been in poverty for so long that they seem to be unable to take any advantage at all of mobility options and thus lie 'below' the class system. Clearly, poverty is both the chief characteristic and the chief problem of this group. Webb and Sherman point out that this simple fact needs to be underscored:
Being poor means, above all else, lacking money. This statement would be too obvious to mention were it not for the fact that most Americans see poverty in other terms. Middle-class conversations about the poor often depict them as lazy, promiscuous, and criminal. Misconceptions about the poor are so widespread that it is difficult to appreciate fully what life is like at the lowest stratum of society.
Complicating the issues of social class is the fact that in the United States there is a large overlap between lower-middle-class, working-class, and lower-class membership and membership in minority groups. African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans (including the Inuit and native Hawaiians) are the most economically depressed of all groups in the United States. These groups also have the highest school dropout rates. To the extent that social class status depends on income and occupation (and therefore, usually, prestige and power), women and children of all racial, ethnic, and religious groups constitute a large proportion of the lower classes. This is, in part, a consequence of the descent into poverty that characterizes the lives of women who are divorced and their children. At the present time, nearly 25 percent of all American children under 6 years old are members of households trying to exist below the poverty line.
The working poor - those people who do work but in jobs that are minimum wage or slightly above, with no benefits, and hardly any job security - must also struggle to make it in today's society. To reach a middle-class lifestyle, a family of four in 1987 needed an annual income of about $31,000, and inflation will continue to raise this figure. In many cases, to reach this level both husband and wife must work. Only 25 percent of men and women reach this level if only one partner in the marriage earns an income. Thurow states that
although the dominant pattern today is a full-time male worker and a part-time female worker, the pattern is rapidly shifting toward a way of life in which both husband and wife work full time .... As an increasing number of families have two full-time workers, the households that do not will fall farther and farther behind economically.
Brislin comments on the effect this reality has on women and children:
The people left behind in the movement through social class levels include households headed by women, and these reached a staggering 31% of households in 1985. Dependence on one income, combined with the well-known fact of lower salaries earned by women, can result in poverty. Women and children constitute 77% of people living in poverty, and 50% of these poor people live in female-headed households with no husband present.
Those of similar socioeconomic status, at whatever level, also share similar cultural knowledge, attitudes, and values.
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TEACHING SOMEONE TO THINK
The most important concept in educational theory is the concept of thinking. The concept has been clearly understood for many years, thanks to the insights of philosopher-educators like John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead, but it has yet to be grasped in the teaching/learning processes of American schools.
Thinking, says Dewey, is what gives meaning to experience. Through thinking we apprehend a connection in experience that enables us to act intentionally. Thinking is the basis of responsible action, as contrasted with capricious behavior (which accepts things as they happen to fall out) or with routinized behavior (which accepts things as they have always been). Education aims at enhancing the powers of thinking in the broad sense of the acceptance of responsibility for action.
Dewey believes that all thinking is problem-solving. All thinking is instrumental. The starting point of any process of thinking is something going on, something that just as it stands is incomplete, unsatisfactory, or unfulfilled. Its point, its meaning, lies literally in what it is going to be, in how things are going to turn out. To fill one's head with facts about what is going on, says Dewey, is not to think but to function as a registering apparatus. Thinking means considering the bearing of what is going on upon what may be, but is not yet. It is applying what is known about the structure of experience to the task of projecting a plan of action for an unknown that lies beyond experience.
The function of a good teacher, as Stanford Erickson says, is to give voice to knowledge linking the present to the past and the future. Dynamic teaching is not a matter of developing innovative techniques for telling things to students. Dynamic teaching is teaching that engages the student's thinking in the imaginative consideration of learning. The moment of instructional truth, as Erickson says, occurs "when the student grasps the meaning of an important idea." Everything else in schooling is nothing more than preparation for learning.
The fundamental aim of all education is the enhancement of thinking. The cultivation of skill obtained apart from thinking has nothing to do with education; and information detached from thoughtful action is dead (even though it may resemble knowledge) and is a mind-crushing load. Education is the attempt to mobilize the imagination of individuals in the activity of thinking. "The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists," as Dewey declares, "in centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking."
For Dewey, the requirements of a dynamic educational method are (1) that the student has a genuine situation of experience that proposes a problem in which he is interested for its own sake; (2) that this problem should develop within the learning situation as a stimulus to his thought; (3) that he should have access to information bearing on the problem, its causes and its solution; (4) that he should be responsible for coming up with alternative solutions to the problem and for exploring them in an orderly way; and (5) that he should have opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their meaning clear, and to discern for himself their validity.
Human learning, as Dewey always insists, begins with recognition of a situation that calls for some sort of doing. The starting point of learning is a problem. Beginning with a problem posed by experience, the student must then be helped to gain command of data that will help him to deal with the difficulty or the challenge that has been presented. To think effectively one must be able to command information that bears on the problem at hand.
The assimilation of data in relation to an experienced problem or concern generates suppositions, tentative explanations, and interpretations - what Dewey calls ideas. Data are facts; the ideas that spring from them forecast possible results. Thinking is an act of inference that always involves an invasion of the unknown, a leap out beyond what is known. Thinking is an incursion into the novel and demands some measure of inventiveness.
Ideas, as Dewey uses the term in this context, are always generated out of the originality of the thinker. All ordinary thinking is creative. Ideas in Dewey's sense are anticipations of possible solutions to problems, of possible connections between action and desired consequences. Ideas are not the final end of learning; they are intermediate goals, significant only insofar as they guide and organize future experience and action. The testing of an idea, of course, involves not only assessing the adequacy of the data that support it, but also acting upon it and seeing what results.
Dewey's understanding of the relationship between education and thinking is closely akin to Whitehead's celebrated definition of education as "the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge." Whitehead advances a passionate protest against the notion of education as the accumulation of inert ideas, as the transmission of scraps of information accumulated by the learned professions. Education at every stage, he says, must permit each individual student to experience the joy of discovery - must permit each student, that is, to discover that ideas can provide an understanding of the stream of events that is Life and can establish a basis for practical decision. A merely well-informed person is the most useless bore on God's earth. But an education that is merely pedantry is not only useless; it is positively harmful, for a mind loaded with the dead weight of routinized learning is unable to think.
Imagination is the capacity to think about the relevance of learning for life. The "problem of problems" in education, as Whitehead sees it, is the provision of a corps of teachers whose learning is lighted up with imagination. A school must be a place in which the adventure of thought meets the adventure of action. Education is learning for life. And what is needed for life, as Whitehead says, are ideas that provide the basis for determining through foresight what actions are appropriate. Education is "a preparation by which to qualify each immediate moment with relevant ideas and appropriate ideas."
The basic virtue of the university, in Whitehead's view, is the power of imagination. The primary reason for the existence of a university is not to be found in the knowledge that it succeeds in imparting to its students or in the scientific advances achieved through its research. The justification for a university is that it preserves "the connection between knowledge and the zest for life," by uniting the young and the old in "the imaginative consideration of learning."
The imaginative consideration of learning, as Whitehead argues, requires a dialectical combination of freedom and discipline. The rhythm of education involves a series of stages in the growth of educated imagination: (1) the awakening of interest and the general apprehension of a subject in its vaguest details; (2) the acquisition of specific knowledge and mastery of the relevant details through the pursuit of an objective method; (3) the comprehensive ordering of the subject as a whole in the light of all relevant knowledge; (4) the understanding of the general principle for purposes of creative application in novel situations. The aimless acquisition through education of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized, only paralyzes thought. The wisdom that education seeks is the habit of the active utilization of well understood principles.
No area of education has more to gain from attention to the rhythmic law of human development, as Whitehead says, than moral and religious education. The principle of progress in moral and religious growth is from within. The teacher of moral and religious values has an important but limited function. He can elicit an awakening of concern in moral issues by resonance from his own personality and character, and he can create an environment that is conducive to the nurture of a higher wisdom and a firmer purpose. But the ultimate motive power for learning (whether in science, in morality, or in religion) comes from the learner. It is the sense of value, wonder, and reverence, the eagerness to merge one's personality in something beyond itself. Without this sense of value, as Whitehead says, education is a great emptiness and life sinks back into the passivity of its lower types.
EDUCATION AND VALUATION
In the course of all complex human learning, questions of value will inevitably arise. Yet the method by which intelligence addresses problems of values is not fundamentally different from the method by which it addresses questions of fact. Questions of values arise in all thinking, since thinking deals with problems arising out of human concerns and seeks a course of purposive action that will bring about a desired circumstance. Unless it addresses the values-related questions, education, like science itself, is simply irrelevant.
Valuation is a phase of the process of thinking that concerns the formation of strategies for solving problems. Informed thinking about alternative courses of action leads to appraisals of which action is better or worse, more or less serviceable/feasible. Such appraisals require an experimental justification of the same sort as is involved in all scientific generalization. Valuations, in other words, are concerned with what Dewey calls "rules for the use, in and by human activity, of scientific generalizations as means for accomplishing certain desired and intended ends." Moral education depends on a theory of valuation that advances a method of reaching well-founded judgments of value to guide the intelligent conduct of human activities, both personal and social, in the solution of human problems.
An instrumentalist understanding of thinking opens new avenues for the systematic application of disciplinary scholarship in the moral domain. Of course, as Dewey himself granted, it does not immediately resolve all the questions that philosophers and other scholars might wish to raise. Instrumentalism remains debatable as an epistemological or meta-ethical theory. Yet in the context of our struggle for better answers to the problems of life, Dewey's analysis of the way we think identifies an approach to values-related questions that is by no means foreign to the academy. It is, indeed, the method by which all human understanding progresses 'from sounds to things,' from appearances to reality, from illusion to truth.
Thinking is an ongoing process. It is never finished, and its conclusions are never final. Thinking is the search for greater coherence in our expanding experience, but it is always limited by the particular context in which it functions at any given moment. Thinking is always contextual; so, too, is all thinking about ethical issues. Every ethical problem arises in a particular context of experience; and all thinking about ethical issues proceeds by stages as the mind seeks new data and perspectives for forming more coherent and comprehensive understandings. Moral thinking does not deal with ultimate or intrinsic values any more than scientific thinking deals with absolute truth. The only truth to be found in either domain is the increasing coherence of our expanding experience.
A pragmatic program of moral education might well be guided by the assumption of ethical contextualism, which views moral reasoning as always taking place within a specific context of moral decision. All ethical argumentation depends on a set of premises in which at least one ethical premise is included. Contextualism is the claim that in every context of ethical discussion we have available some moral principles that set the problem. If these principles are themselves challenged, we simply move to another context of investigation, where we shall need to identify another principle or set of principles with which to carry on the new moral inquiry.
Ethical contextualism is based on the understanding that there is no working ethical premise that cannot be inferred by a process of logical inference from other ethical premises in combination with factual information. Such a view is analogous to the philosophy of causality, which assumes that there is no cause of a phenomenon that is not itself the effect of some other cause. For ethical contextualism the logic of evaluation is coordinate with the logic of science.
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INTRODUCTION
The Grammar of Argumentation
It is generally regarded as mandatory for a textbook in logic to begin with a definition of logic. With some misgivings I shall attempt to comply with that convention. However I think that more than a simple definition is required. The concept of logic has undergone numerous changes since the Greeks first took up the study in the fourth or fifth century B.C. Since then the term has taken on new meanings which it was not originally intended to carry, without, however, entirely loosing its original sense. The result is that nowadays the word "logic" does not identify a single enterprise so much as a confusing conglomeration of enterprises related primarily by historical accident. By way of introduction, I shall attempt to clarify the concept of logic, and introduce at least some of the basic vocabulary of syllogistic logic:
History of the Concept of Logic
The people who conceived and developed syllogistic logic had quite different views on what they were doing than the people who call themselves logicians today. In taking up the study of syllogistic logic - a form of logic with deep historical roots - it may therefore be advisable to begin by acquiring some sense of how the word 'logic' has changed its meaning over the centuries.
The Greek word '<translitG_>logos<translitG/>' from which the word logic is derived, means (among other things) an 'account', in the sense in which a naughty child might be asked to give an account of his actions. Thus when Plato defines knowledge in the Meno as 'true belief with a <translitG_>logos<translitG/>', he means that a belief can properly be called knowledge only if (a) it is true, and (b) the person holding the belief can give an adequate reason, or an adequate account of why he holds that belief.
Of course any account which is adequate to justify one person's beliefs should also be adequate to convince someone else to adopt the same beliefs. To act rationally or logically means to act in a way that can be understood and justified. Hence, since logic was concerned with the nature of an adequate account, the Greeks understood logic to be concerned with the nature of persuasion, refutation, and inquiry.
But what does it mean to say that an account is 'adequate?' Plato thought that one should distinguish between legitimate persuasion and refutation, such as a genuine philosopher employs when conducting an inquiry into the truth, and illegitimate persuasion and refutation, such as a sophist employs in trying to sway public opinion. Granted that people justify their beliefs and actions by telling a story or giving an account, what sort of account qualifies as a legitimate and proper justification and what sort does not? It was this question which, I believe, logicians originally set out to answer. Hence the original conception of logic seems to have been that logic was supposed to give a legitimate account of the way in which we legitimately account for our beliefs and actions.
Plato, however, offers no criteria for drawing the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate accounts, other than to point out that a legitimate account is easier to remember, since the same line of thought, if it is genuinely rational, can always be reconstructed. The only method which Plato offers for telling the difference between legitimate and illegitimate accounts is self-honest evaluation based upon a commitment to the truth. A person who is being honest with himself, and is genuinely concerned to discover the truth, will simply be able to tell the difference.
The problem with this account (as Plato was well aware) is that it gives us no recourse against someone who stubbornly persists in being irrational. In the Gorgias Socrates falls into a discussion with such a person, and the dialogue degenerates into a shouting match. Socrates accuses Callicles of dishonesty - of being in disagreement even with himself - but without being able to give a better account of logic, he has no way to make the accusation stick. Logic may begin with self-honesty and a commitment to the truth, but it cannot end there.
The earliest surviving essays which attempt a systematic study of logic are a group of lectures by Aristotle. Aristotle did not necessarily intend these lectures to be treated as a single work, nor did he even necessarily regard them all as essays on logic. In fact, they cover a wide range of topics and were written at widely different periods of his life. The Alexandrian editor, Andronicus of Rhodes, nevertheless grouped these lectures together under the title Organon, which means 'organ' or 'tool', and placed them at the beginning of Aristotle's works. The implication is that these essays were not themselves lectures on philosophy, but were rather an explanation of the tools with which philosophers work. As such they should be regarded as preliminary to the study of philosophy. The subjects treated in Aristotle's lectures can be summarized as follows:
(1) In the Categories, a discussion of the various types of terms, the classifications into which terms can be divided, and the distinctive features which terms in each category display.
(2) In the Hermeneia, a discussion of propositions, how they are put together and how they are related to each other.
(3) In the Prior Analytics, a discussion of the formal patterns which arguments may take. It is this work in which syllogistic logic first appears.
(4) In the Posterior Analytics and the Topics, a discussion of the practical application of argumentation and proof to the acquisition of knowledge.
(5) In the Sophistical Refutations, a discussion of common errors (or fallacies) made in argumentation.
Medieval logicians learned their dicipline chiefly by studying Aristotle's Organon, so it is not surprising that they considered logic to include the same subjects covered by Aristotle's Organon. The medieval logicians made some significant changes in the syllogistic logic, gave names to each of the valid argument forms, and put the system into more or less its modern form. They also wrote commentaries on the other books in Aristotle's Organon, especially the Categories.
But it was not entirely clear why logicians, concerned with the question of legitimacy in methods of persuasion and refutation, should take time to examine types of terms. Some conception of logic was needed to give a sense of unity to these diverse matters. The medieval response to this problem was to point out that all the topics in Aristotle's Organon are concerned with 'second intentions'. The word 'intention' may be taken as roughly synonymous with the word 'meaning'. Let us call anything which has an intention or meaning a 'sign'. Words, for example, are signs, since there is some object which any word 'intends', though this object need not actually exist. (The word 'unicorn', for example, has a meaning or intention, since it refers to a type of being, even though the being to which it refers does not actually exist.) However, words are not the only signs. Thoughts are also signs, since thoughts, like words, 'intend' some object, i.e. they have a meaning. (To prove this to yourself, try to imagine what it would be like to have a meaningless thought. Wouldn't that be the same as not having a thought at all?)
According to the medieval logicians, signs could be divided into two groups:
(1) those whose object is a thing or relationship that (if it exists at all) exists in nature. Examples would include 'green', 'tree', 'unicorn', etc. These were called signs of first intention.
(2) those whose object is another sign. Examples would include 'noun', 'verb', 'subject', 'predicate', etc. These were called signs of second intention.
Logic, they thought, was the science which studied signs of the second kind rather than signs of the first kind. Hence logic could be defined as the 'science of second intentions'. By this definition, of course, logic incorporates all of the linguistic sciences, including what we would now call grammar and semantics.
This definition gave a sort of unity to the list of subjects which were thought to fall within the scope of logic, but it also caused some of the subjects to be pushed into the forefront, while others took on a merely peripheral importance. For example, the discussion of types of terms became particularly important, since the purpose of the discussion was not to classify types of things, but rather to classify what we could sensibly say about things. It was, in other words, an attempt to give some order to signs themselves; it was not an attempt to give order to the objects which the signs intended. Hence the categorization of terms fit neatly within the medieval definition of logic. The discussion of sophistical reasoning, which would have been regarded as central to logic according to the Greek conception, still had its place in medieval logic but it no longer occupied a position of overweaning importance.
Thus while the Greeks thought that logic should be primarily concerned with persuasion, refutation, inquiry, and the justification of beliefs, the medieval logicians extended the notion, so that logic was thought to be concerned with the nature of signs in general.
It is important to understand that the notions of 'sign' and 'intention' are very broad. They include, not only words and language, but also thought itself. Because of this, it was easy to make the transition from thinking of logic as primarily concerned with language (especially language used to persuade), to thinking of logic as primarily concerned with thought. The philosophers of the early modern period came to regard logic as concerned with 'the laws of thought', and this frequently meant that they regarded logic as a sort of psychology. Logic was thought to study the operations of the mind, specifically, of course, the operations associated with rationality. Certain operations of the mind were thought to be more fundamental than others; so fundamental, in fact, that it would be contrary to human nature, or outside the scope of human capacity, to reason in any other way. This view of logic was held by philosophers as diverse as Leibniz, Locke, and Kant. Even Hegel, when writing on logic, seems to have in mind a thorough-going analysis of the structures of the conscious mind, though he is careful to make clear that he means any conceivable conscious mind, not simply the human mind. Hence, Hegel does not regard logic as a type of psychology but rather as related to (though not identical with) phenomenology.
During the 19th century a revolution occurred in the methods employed by logicians. George Boole was able to demonstrate that simple mathematical operations, such as multiplication and subtraction, could be made to parallel the familiar laws of logic. This meant that logicians were able to use quasi-mathematical formulas to represent or model patterns of argumentation. This new technique was incredibly powerful, and gave logicians the tools with which they could analyze more and more complex arguments. However, most logicians still considered logic to be, at root, the study of the laws of thought. They simply assumed that these laws could be expressed mathematically. Hence mathematics changed the methodology of logic, but not (at first) its essential subject matter.
However, the notion that there are such things as laws of thought, and that it is the business of logic to study them, began to break down with the advent of non-Euclidean geometry, and with the many other sudden advances in mathematical theory also made during the 19th century. It would be false to claim that the non-Euclidean geometries destroyed the concept of 'laws of thought' by proving that humans could conceptualize on a much grander scale than had previously been supposed. In fact they proved no such thing. Rather, the non-Euclidean geometries proved that even apparently absurd presuppositions could be developed into consistent (and perhaps even useful) systems. Hence discussion among mathematicians concerning what was absurd or inconceivable was supplanted by discussion concerning what could and could not be consistently systematized. Mathematicians could no longer regard mathematics as founded upon a priori truths, or as an attempt to elaborate some particular system of well understood formal relations.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="52">Speaking of the poetic writers of this period, Harold Bloom has argued that they characteristically exhibit a compulsion toward priority in intellectual and artistic creation and a fear of being regarded as derivative. Bloom terms this state of mind "the anxiety of influence." In his study with this same title, Bloom observes that "all quest-romances of the post-Enlightenment, meaning all Romanticisms whatsoever, are quests to re-beget one's own self, to become one's own Great Original." Surprisingly, in this study Bloom repeatedly draws on Kierkegaard's statements about artistic and intellectual creativity to illustrate his own points about the poet's efforts at self-creation, the poet's demand for priority and for freedom from the influence of his precursors.
Although Bloom is entirely unaware of Kierkegaard's relationship to Kant, it is not accidental that he draws on Kierkegaard's preoccupation with originality of authorship in describing this "anxiety of influence." As Kierkegaard reminds us from virtually the first to the last words of his published work, he was always a poet, and a poet writing and thinking in an era when originality - the secure possession of one's own daimon, one's genius - was the mark of greatness. Even a cursory reading of Kierkegaard's Papers tell us how much he was concerned with the singularity of his religious-literary effort. From Either/Or and Fear and Trembling onward the poetic Kierkegaard always remained concerned with his place in literary and intellectual history. Furthermore, as Christoph Schrempf reminds us in his exhaustive biography, Kierkegaard's strong sense of sacrificial destiny - his wish to offer up his life as the vehicle for a unique and redemptive idea - exhibits a turn of mind characteristic of many other 'poetic' writers of this period.
In view of this, we might suppose that Kierkegaard also suffered from "the anxiety of influence," that he, too, sought to cut the ties to his predecessors and, above all, to that predecessor on whose originality and genius his own novel creation so depended. In the course of his discussion, Bloom repeatedly quotes a remark by Kierkegaard that Bloom presents as a virtual synopsis of the poet's effort to creatively appropriate the work of his predecessor: "He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father." If the pattern of borrowing we've seen is indicative, Kant is, in a sense, Kierkegaard's intellectual 'father.' Understood in terms of Bloom's analysis, therefore, Kierkegaard's authorship becomes an impassioned effort to 're-create' Kant's philosophy in a way that makes it fully the product of Kierkegaard's own creative genius. The absence of any tradition of scholarship relating Kierkegaard to Kant and the difficulty many Kierkegaard biographers have had in tracing the lines of his descent show how well Kierkegaard was able to obscure his own intellectual paternity.
This first explanation of Kierkegaard's deliberate effort to erase the lines leading back to Kant assumes a measure of concealment and intellectual ambition. A second explanation moves in a different direction and relates Kierkegaard's handling of Kant to the central intellectual concerns of his authorship and to his ongoing employment of irony as a philosophical tool. Simply stated, it sees Kierkegaard's covert use of Kant as a subtle, necessary, and deserved trick played by Kierkegaard on his arrogant Hegelian foes.
To understand this second effort at explanation, it helps to keep in mind Louis Mackey's point that Kierkegaard faced a daunting task in taking on Hegelianism from an orthodox Christian-religious point of view. The challenge before Kierkegaard, Mackey observes, was to call into question a philosophy that regarded itself as the dialectical fulfillment of human thought and as thus able to comprehend all possible philosophical and religious positions. To accomplish this seemingly impossible task, Kierkegaard chose to avoid philosophical argumentation and to employ the method of Socratic irony, arraying its "infinite negativity" against Hegelian pretensions.
I would deepen Mackey's observations by adding that part of this ironic strategy for Kierkegaard may have involved a decision to employ Kantian philosophy in his struggle against the Hegelians: to use a thinker who had been 'transcended' (aufgehoben) and fully assimilated into the dialectic against the discipline's now reigning giant. Philosophy could thus be turned against its own methodological and substantive pretensions. To prevent this from becoming just another page in this history of philosophical debates, however, and to avoid the Hegelians' premature dismissal of his position, Kierkegaard would have had to conceal Kant's presence in his own reformulated statements of Christianity. In this way Kierkegaard could appropriate and use Kant's brilliant destruction of the tradition of rationalism while ironically exposing the hollowness of the Hegelians' claims to have mastered all preceding thought.
There are hints in Kierkegaard's writings that he was aware of the joke he was playing on the smug but philosophically less-than-well-trained Danish Hegelians. Kierkegaard knew that Martensen and his acolytes, for the very reason that they did not take the past seriously, were often ill-versed in the writings of philosophers whose work they purported to have transcended. In a remark to his brother in 1841 he caustically dismisses possible criticisms of his doctoral dissertation by what he calls "one or another half-educated Hegelian robber." Having endured Martensen's and others' lectures on Kant, and knowing how little the Hegelians really understood Kant's profound ethics and philosophical theology, Kierkegaard may well have enjoyed the one-upmanship involved in surreptitiously turning Kant against his teachers.
I have already mentioned one possible instance of this kind of playfulness on Kierkegaard's part: his handling in the Postscript of the matter of the philosophical pedigree of the idea of the 'leap.' Although Johannes Climacus, the Postscript's pseudonymous author, repeatedly confesses his debt to Lessing for this idea, even giving the title 'Attributable to Lessing' to the section where he discusses the leap, the section itself ends with mention to the fact that Johannes de silentio, author of Fear and Trembling, had previously discussed a similar idea. Climacus adds that he had read Johannes de silentio's book before encountering Lessing's essay, and he closes his discussion with the remark "Whether Johannes de silentio has had his attention called to the leap by reading Lessing, I shall not attempt to say." This comment invites the discerning reader to ask, who, if not Lessing, might be Climacus's/Kierkegaard's primary philosophical source for this idea? Since Fear and Trembling centrally addresses Kant's repudiation of the leap of faith as this was symbolized for both Kant and Kierkegaard by the episode of Genesis 22, there can be little doubt that this remark about influence points toward Kant. Almost as though he were unwilling to totally obscure his debt to Kant, in other words, Kierkegaard gives the informed reader a glimpse into the game he is playing with the Hegelians.
The Fragments offers another sign of this playfulness. On at least six occasions, the author, Johannes Climacus, raises questions of scholarly attribution and openly acknowledges the unoriginality of his ideas and his susceptibility to the charge of plagiarism. In almost all these instances, Climacus is able ironically to defend himself against such accusations because the intellectual property he is appropriating derives from the very public domain of biblical teaching. At the same time, many other elements in this volume are borrowed from Kant, possibly including at least one idea attributed by Climacus to the Bible. The project itself is stimulated, in part, by Kant's position on historical revelation in The Conflict of the Faculties, a work we might suppose relatively few Hegelians had read. Hence, concealed within Climacus's openly confessed plagiarism lies a deeper level of unacknowledged borrowing. Kierkegaard's irony and sense of humor seem to me to be at work here. Openly signalling the derivative quality of this work, he leaves it to the Hegelians to detect his employment of Kant against them, while remaining confident that, despite their vaunted philosophical erudition, the Danish Hegelians will surely fail to see or understand the presence of the philosopher they had 'gone beyond.'
Was it, then, authorial ambition or a only half-veiled playfulness and irony that led Kierkegaard to obscure his debt to Kant? In the complex world of human motives, which Kierkegaard himself so masterfully explored, these two explanations may be less opposed than they appear. Perhaps both motives were at work, a youthful author's passionate quest for originality tempered by conscientious self-disclosure and a willingness to reveal his philosophical legerdemain to those able to appreciate it.
Whatever Kierkegaard's motives, there can be no doubt that Kant played a major role in Kierkegaard's intellectual formation. From the pattern of borrowing we've seen, I am led to conclude that as early as his student years Kierkegaard was deeply intrigued by what he had read in Kant's mature works on religion. This interest shaped the course of his writing and thinking in the period immediately following. We saw that as early as 1835 Kierkegaard expressed the wish that he might find "the idea" to which he could give his life. Over the course of the next five years, reading Kant in preparation for his degree examination, Kierkegaard found this idea. Although his best teachers treated Kantianism as merely a way station en route to Hegel, Kierkegaard perceived that Kant's contributions to religious thought had not even begun to be assimilated. If Kant's ethics were taken seriously - and despite many criticisms, including Hegel's, Kant's ethical writings everywhere commanded respect - then his contentions in the Religion also had to be taken seriously. They had to be viewed neither as the work of a great philosopher in his dotage (the opinion of some philosophers) nor as a wooden and perhaps dangerous effort to translate biblical truth into philosophical terms (the orthodox view). Instead, they had to be seen as a rigorous exposition of ideas that pointed inevitably to their limits and to the requirement that they be transcended by faith. Over the next five years, during the intensely creative period of the major pseudonymous writings, Kierkegaard sought to develop a new form for the communication of these ideas, and he tried to carry Kant's beginning to the thoroughly religious or "faithful" conclusions Kant resisted.
A journal entry for 1836-1837 written at the time Kierkegaard was beginning his formal study of Kant provides an early hint of the importance Kierkegaard attached to Kant's philosophy. Kierkegaard here presents Kant, along with Goethe and Holberg, as belonging to the "royal procession" of thinkers whose work represents a fundamental breakthrough in thought and who, because of this, are resisted by their contemporaries. These thinkers, Kierkegaard suggests, play a decisive a role in conveying the "password which God whispered in Adam's ear, which one generation is supposed to deliver to the next and which shall be demanded of them on judgment day." Since Kierkegaard's own sense of personal mission was very much in formation at this time, it is reasonable to conclude that he regarded himself as a recipient, in his generation, of the "password" uttered by Kant. Remarkably, in an omission characteristic of the whole tradition of Kierkegaard scholarship on this matter, the Hongs fail to include Kierkegaard's mention of Kant in their otherwise meticulous translation of this entry.
Either/Or offers a further hint that carrying on and fulfilling Kant's initiative is an accurate depiction of Kierkegaard's project in the pseudonymous works. In Chapter 3 we saw that the ethical stage of life sketched there by Judge William is broadly Kantian in nature. Kierkegaard himself shows his sympathy for this position when he states that in every way the ethics which Judge William champions "is quite the opposite of the Hegelian." Yet Either/Or also seeks to point to the possibility of a religious stage of existence where the ethical is dialectally transcended and fulfilled. This stage is suggested in the position presented by the unnamed country pastor whose view is developed in the "Ultimatum" of the book, a view that moves toward faith via a recognition of the unavoidability of sin. The ethical must be transcended (but not eliminated), the pastor tells us, because if ethics alone were to shape our destiny, we would all succumb to moral despair.
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Wittgenstein on Understanding
WARREN GOLDFARB
Wittgenstein's treatments in the Philosophical Investigations of the cognitive or intentional mental notions are evidently meant to persuade us that, in some sense, understanding, believing, remembering, thinking, and the like are not particular or definite states or processes; or (if this is to say anything different) that there are no particular states or processes that constitute the understanding, remembering, etc. Such a dark point desperately needs clarification, if it is not to deny the undeniable. For surely we may (and Wittgenstein does) speak of a state of understanding, or of thought-processes; surely when one understands - understands a word, a sentence, or the principle of a series - one is in a particular state, namely, the state of understanding the word, sentence, or principle. Now Wittgenstein sometimes puts the point more specifically, speaking of "a state of a mental apparatus" (<*_>section<*/> 149), or, with respect to understanding, of "a state which is the source of the correct use" (<*_>section<*/> 146), as that which he wishes to deny. But clearly these denials, though they sound somewhat less paradoxical, are equally in need of elaboration.
However Wittgenstein's point is clarified, though, there is an objection that will inevitably be made, an objection claimed to arise from a scientific viewpoint. The objection asks: isn't Wittgenstein here usurping the place of empirical inquiry? Is it not possible that empirical science - neurophysiology, in particular - will find specific states and processes that will fill the bill, as far as understanding, believing, remembering, etc. are concerned? And so, whether or not there are definite states or processes of understanding is something that we will discover. That there are such can certainly be entertained as a scientific, empirical hypothesis, and its consequences discussed. To preclude such an outcome now is just to claim that we shall never obtain certain sorts of results in future neurophysiology. But then Wittgenstein is simply making a bet on the future course of science or else he is engaged in a priori anti-science, denying a priori that certain projects could bring results, and hence they ought not even be investigated empirically.
For brevity I shall call this objection, that Wittgenstein is simply ruling out something that science could discover, the 'scientific objection.' I mean it to be narrowly based on envisaged possibilities of results in neuroscience and thus not to be the charge that Wittgenstein fails to leave room for the discoveries of psychology, or cognitive science, or psycholinguistics, or some as yet unknown science of the mind. The latter charge has been made frequently since the publication of the Investigations, but it is not so much an objection to a specific point of Wittgenstein's as a denial of all of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind. Much in the Investigations is devoted to exposing the conceptual confusions that would be involved in a "science of the mind"; in any case, any such science would presuppose just the picture of mental states or processes and the whole notion of a mental apparatus that Wittgenstein is concerned to undercut. In contrast, the scientific objection as I am imagining it exploits the unarguable status as empirical science of neurophysiology and the independence from psychology of the conceptions of state and process that it employs. Consequently, the objection requires detailed attention to what Wittgenstein is saying or denying about intentional notions, and so can function to elicit clarification of Wittgenstein's dark point about states or processes.
The scientific objection is, it seems to me, a most natural one, and for that reason powerful. And it puts Wittgenstein in a poor (and stereotypical) light: as a philosopher, making ungrounded empirical claims or, worse yet, a philosopher trying a priori to deny the progress of science, like a late Scholastic refusing to grant the coherence of the Copernican conception or an Idealist 'proving' the impossibility of Einsteinian physics. Indeed, the charge that Wittgenstein is ruling out certain empirical possibilities a priori is doubly damaging against a philosopher whose major concern is to fight against a priorism, to demolish pictures of how things must be, to expose "preconceived ideas to which reality must correspond" (<*_>section<*/> 131).
A common view of Wittgenstein takes his response to such an objection to proceed by noting that a physiological state would be 'hidden'; it would not reflect central conceptual features of our notion of understanding (or believing, thinking, etc.). No such state would have conceptual links to correct responses and the other criteria of understanding; but the transparency of those links is essential to our concept of understanding. In short, the point is that no physiological state has the 'grammar' of understanding. Hence, Wittgenstein is taken to urge, understanding cannot be conceptually constituted by any such state.
Although there are passages in the Investigations that suggest this response, to my mind it fails to capture Wittgenstein's thought. The response requires a general and sharp distinction between conceptual and empirical, between criterion and result of investigation. Wittgenstein does not have the resources to make this distinction; in fact, the distinction is of a piece with the a priorism that he wishes to attack (see <*_>section<*/> 79, last paragraph). That is, the response requires a form of essentialism which I do not believe Wittgenstein accepts.
Moreover, the response leaves it open that understanding, although not 'conceptually' constituted by a neural state, might be 'empirically' constituted by one. This underreads Wittgenstein's conclusion. Thus the suggested response does too little. Yet it is not totally off the mark, for Wittgenstein does think that the identification of any state of understanding would have to bear some conceptual burden. His conclusion will be that, in some sense, "nothing is hidden." But this is meant to result from detailed considerations of the notion of understanding, not to be assumed more or less as a premise, as an unargued feature of his methodology.
The notion that Wittgenstein dismisses or ignores questions of 'empirical' identity also reinforces the view of him as simply anti-scientific. Now we do know that Wittgenstein was distrustful of the claims of science and its role in contemporary culture. He makes this quite explicit when he expresses his opposition to "the spirit of the age" in the Foreword to the Philosophical Remarks, and the theme is repeated elsewhere in his work, both early and late. Some have gone on to ascribe to him a hostility to or belittling of projects aimed at scientific explanation, of such proportions as to depict him as simply dogmatic and blinkered. Bernard Williams, for example, complains that Wittgenstein's general practice and teaching serve to "stun, rather than assist, further and more systematic explanation," and offers as illustration a story about Wittgenstein used by Georg Kreisel in 1960 as evidence for Wittgenstein's hostility to legitimate scientific explanation. The story bears repeating. Imagine a child, learning that the earth is round, asking why then people in Australia don't fall off. I suppose one natural response would be to start to explain about gravity. Wittgenstein, instead, would draw a circle with a stick figure atop it, turn it upside down, and say "Now we fall into space."
Now I myself do not find the story emblematic of an attitude against science, or of a desire to 'stun' further explanation. In fact, I think it shows Wittgenstein being highly insightful. For he is examining the source of the child's question, in the concepts with which the child is operating. Given those concepts, an appeal to gravity can do nothing but mislead: the child will take it that the antipodal people are upside down, but they have gravity shoes, or glue, or something similar, that keeps them attached to the surface of the earth; as for us, we are right side up, so the problem does not arise. What Wittgenstein's trick does is precisely to expose the conceptual confusion in the way the child is thinking of up and down (cf. <*_>section<*/> 351). Once the child sees the relativity in the notions of up and down, she may then go on to ask, "Well, why don't all these objects - us, the Australians, and the earth - go careening around independently?" or perhaps, "Then why do objects fall down rather than up?" At that point, explaining gravity might well be in order; the child is now prepared to appreciate it correctly.
The lesson, of course, is general. It is central to Wittgenstein's teaching that the conceptual underpinnings to a felt need for explanation must be scrutinized, for what it is, exactly, that wants explanation may only become clear through such an investigation. This does not make him anti-scientific. It does make him anti-scientistic, against the smug and unexamined assurance that what wants explanation is obvious, and that scientific tools are immediately applicable.
For Wittgenstein, it is characteristic of the notions that figure in philosophical problems - prominently, mental concepts and linguistic concepts like meaning - that a structure is imposed on them, without grounding in the ordinary use of these notions and without being noticed, when they are taken to be amenable to certain explanatory projects. (Much work in the Investigations, on my view, is precisely devoted to getting us to notice, to see that there is a place at the start of philosophizing, where this imposition happens.) Hence, only through clarification of what the legitimate questions are can proper sense be made of the applicability of science. A scientistic viewpoint ignores this need for clarification. As a result, for Wittgenstein scientism is just as misguidedly metaphysical as traditional, more transparently a prioristic, approaches.
I am depicting Wittgenstein as thinking that conceptual work must be done before the question of the applicability of science should be raised. Now it is also true that whatever empirical, scientific results may legitimately be foreseen or hypothesized after that work is done are of little interest to Wittgenstein. He seems to believe that what is really at issue in a philosophical question will be answered, or dissolved, by the conceptual work, and not touched by science. That is, science is simply not of use in dealing with the sorts of problems with which he is concerned. But this broad characterization can be misleading. Wittgenstein is not being dismissive; he is not urging a distinction between questions of the mind vs. questions of the heart. Nor is he saying that in doing science we are talking about different things; he would have had little patience with Eddington's 'two tables' and with Goodman's different worlds (although the latter claim may be thought controversial). Moreover, as I mentioned above, I do not believe that he wishes to rely on a sharp distinction between conceptual and empirical, that is, a Fregean divide between logic and analysis on the one hand and 'mere' psychology and physics on the other. Rather, Wittgenstein operates case-by-case. For each philosophical question we treat, we are to tease out what we are aiming for, or what we think we are aiming for, and then to come to see how our objectives will not be served by a scientific investigation; and we are to recognize how the inclination to look for science for answers elides or ignores so much as to suggest that a philosophical picture is at work.
This point is made in <*_>section<*/> 158, the one explicit appearance in the Investigations of something like the scientific objection. Here he suggests that, although the objection says that the scientific investigation may come out either way, that it is only a scientific hypothesis or conjecture that such-and-such a process or state will be found, at bottom the objector is being moved by an a priori demand that things must turn out a certain way. The claim of a modest empiricism is mere lip service.
With respect to understanding, the point might be phrased thus. Wittgenstein asks us to look in detail at the range of our practices relevant to an ascription of understanding. We find an enormous variety of considerations that can enter, a dependence on context that is impossible to describe accurately by any general rules, a lack of uniformity in mental accompaniments.
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While it is not likely that Greek agriculture often produced more than limited dividends, those who were masters of the rural landscape gained an even greater advantage - they also controlled almost all the population of a polis either directly or indirectly. Accordingly, aristocrats tended to hold on to their land. It has often been argued that an ancestral plot (kleros) could not be alienated outside the family before the fifth century, but a variety of evidence proves otherwise. Hesiod's father migrated from Asia Minor to Boeotia, where he acquired a farm; the poet himself advised his auditors to honor the gods so you may buy another's holding (kleros) and not another yours. Aristotle's assertion that "to part with family estate was one of the things that were 'not done,'", does not prove the inference that it could not be done. Normally, nonetheless, formal sale or transfer of land rights was unlikely in so rurally based a world; political citizenship and economic security rested on an independent connection to land.
Various areas saw their smaller farmers of earlier times reduced to the level of bondsmen or serfs, though true agricultural slavery was uncommon in the Greek world. Usually rural domains were not large in view of the fragmented geographical nature of Greek landscapes; the largest known at Athens, as noted earlier, ran only about 50 hectares, though "in fifth- and fourth-century Athens there were landowners possessing from three to six estates in different partparts of Attica." Those who could be expected to serve as hoplites probably were masters of at least 12 hectares; free farmers after the Solonian reforms would scarcely have been able to cope with more than 4 hectares unless they drew in outside labor at critical points in the agricultural cycle.
How were the larger holdings managed? In modern times nobles relied on stewards, factors, and the like to bear day-to-day responsibilities; this was probably the case also in ancient Greece, though our evidence is very limited. Cimon's liberality to his fellow demesmen was famous, but he was absent from Athens so often on military operations that he must have had a resident aide. For Pericles we do have the comment in Plutarch's life that he arranged his paternal estate so "that it might neither through negligence be wasted or lessened, nor yet, being so full of [public] business as he was, cost him any great trouble or time with taking care of it." Thus he sold "all his yearly products and profits" in a lump and bought in the market for his household needs - obol-pinching and keeping precise records to the discontent of his family. "His manager in all this was a single servant, Evangelos by name." To secure fuller information on the careful management of agricultural resources for economic gain we must come down to Hellenistic Egypt where the financial director for Ptolemy II had an extremely astute manager, Zenon, many of whose detailed records have survived on papyri.
The picture usually drawn of upper-class concentration on landed possessions may as a whole stand, but before we accept it as representing the exclusive interest of the well-to-do further reflection is necessary on the nonagricultural aspects of the economy. For example, Demosthenes, on reaching his majority, brought suit against his guardians for the recovery of his inheritance. The estate he itemized to the jury under two headings is rather surprising: "(1) the active (energa), which included 32 or 33 slave swordmakers, bringing in 3000 drachmas a year; another 20 slaves engaged in the manufacture of furniture, 1200 drachmas annually; and 8000 drachmas on loan at 12%; (2) the inactive: raw materials on hand at his father's death nine years before, worth 15,000 drachmas, the house worth 3000, the furniture and his mother's jewelry, 8000 in cash in a strong-box at home, a maritime loan of 7000 drachmas, and 4700 on deposit in two banks and with a relation." Land proper does not appear at all; Demosthenes was rather, in Bolkestein's summary, "accustomed to make [his fortune] bear interest in many ways" as a capital-investor, living on the interest of his money.
Demosthenes' family was not, indeed, of aristocratic stock, so it may have been willing to extend the employment of its capital more widely in the thriving Athenian industry and trade of the fifth and fourth centuries. How far did the aristocrats do the same, or alternatively shun this area?
Industry may be dismissed briefly. Men of standing were not likely to sully their fingers or break their backs in the physical toil of stonemasons, smiths, potters, and other trades. Even so they did have an important, twofold role: they were the consumers who bought the wares of craftsmen, and they provided to a large degree the capital necessary for the purchase of the slaves who furnished a valuable share of the labor. The swordmakers and furniture fabricators of Demosthenes have already been noted; even more remarkable was the fact that Nicias, of aristocratic stock, owned a thousand slaves, whom he leased out to the entrepreneurs running the state silver mines of Laurium.
Commerce was another matter. Retail trade, such as that in ribbons, could be left to vendors, many of them women, but large-scale activity especially by sea required wider attention. One principal mark of the Aegean world in and after the eighth century was overseas voyaging, an this was without doubt initially in the hands of aristocrats.
Sappho's brother Charaxus, for example, carried wine to Egypt and there fell in love with a courtesan, to Sappho's disgust; Solo also engaged in foreign commerce in order to recoup his father's prodigality. Coleus of Samos, blown off course to Egypt as far as Tartessus whence he gained so much that he had to replace his stone anchors by silver ingots, and the later Sostratus of Aegina, who dedicated a statue in the Greek shrine of Etruscan Pyrgi, very probably were both men of the leading classes inasmuch as they entered Herodotus' pages.
It was, after all, aristocrats who had surplus resources that could be ventured abroad and also were leaders, able to face possible hostile resistances on foreign shores. Contrary to the views of many modern scholars, moreover, both they and the potters described in Hesiod's Works and Days sought earnestly after wealth. Already in the epics Odysseus was taunted as not looking like an athlete, that is, a man of leisure, but "one, who faring to and fro with his benched ship, is a captain of sailors who are merchantmen, one who is mindful of his freight, and has charge of a home-borne cargo, and the gains of his greed." Solon categorized the diverse ways of gaining wealth and concluded that those who are richest "have twice the eagerness that others have"; his contemporary Alcaeus quoted Aristodemus - a Spartan no less - as saying that "wealth makes the man." At first aristocratic seafaring might not have been much distinguished from piracy and coastal raids, but eventually it settled into more ordered communications.
Aristocrats were also the men most interested in the wares that could be acquired in the advance workshops of the Near East - ivory, glass, faience, perfumes, ointments, and spices (many of which had names of Semitic root) - for such luxuries were the backbone of the earliest overseas trade. Greek lands, even including Athens down to the time of Solon, fed themselves, though they did have need for foreign slaves, metals, wool, stone, and other bulk items. Hesiod drank wine of Biblis while relaxing in the heat of summer, and to a remarkable degree men and also women of the upper classes desired wools dyed in Tyrian purple and fine linen. Since textiles do not survive well in archeological contexts this item is often overlooked, but even in modern times the textile trade has been very significant; in the English colonies of North America in the eighteenth century the main import consisted of English, Irish, and German cloth and textiles.
By the later sixth century aristocrats had become more conscious of the duties and limitations of their position and largely yielded long-distance trade to professional shippers, but as they withdrew into the background their interest in this realm did not disappear. The men who scurried about the Aegean and farther afield had to have capital to outfit their ships and finance cargoes. To an extent what we cannot measure they may have done so out of their own resources, but at least occasionally they had to secure a bottomry loan at rates up to 33.33% - Demosthenes' estate, it may be remembered, included such a loan, and in one of his orations a money-lender/banker asserted that without the support of men of his type "no ship, shipper, or sailor can put to sea." And who provided the money of the banker? Undoubtedly the well-to-do of Athens; in imperial Rome as in early modern times the rich supplied funds by the back door to large-scale traders. Nor did aristocrats totally surrender the field; Andocides, who traced his ancestry back to Hermes via Odysseus and Telemachus, actually engaged in maritime commerce throughout the winter in the late fifth century and after his return from exile "continued to think and act like the businessman he had turned himself into". It is unsafe to assume that the word kerdos (profit) totally disappeared from aristocratic lips even after the developed ethos of the class frowned on undue interest in economic activities. Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics judiciously stresses the need for a competence but not a search for gain per se.
Through control of the land and the revenues from investments the well-to-do economically commanded the Greek communities, sometimes almost completely, though at Athens only in major degree, and used every available opportunity to enjoy an elegant, luxurious life. Modern hostility toward elites swiftly rises into view at this point in the common assertion that aristocrats in all ages spend money rather than improving the economic machinery of their world in a bourgeois fashion. Thus early modern aristocracies were reproved as being engaged in "the unjust, unhealthy, brilliant and anti-economic utilisation of any surplus produced in a given society:" An interesting study of men who participated especially in the Thirty Years' War of the seventeenth century after Christ suggests that their wealth was committed to building mansions and to acquiring adornments such as gold necklaces. Only one noted scholar, to my knowledge, finds merit in this type of expenditure. Writing about early modern English aristocrats, G.M. Trevelyan raises the question as to how else the English nobles could have expended their money save by building magnificent houses in a period when stocks, bonds and general loans were unknown and land was not easily bought - but then Trevelyan is nowadays generally dismissed as an elitist.
If a phenomenon recurs frequently in different historical societies, then there must be significant reasons for its presence; and an understanding of those reasons will be more useful than the common expression of indignation or reproof. Braudel, just quoted, also observes that luxury "scarcely changes at all" as a concept accepted both by privileged and unprivileged classes and, as he notes, both Mauss and Sombart emphasized the role of luxury in promoting demands on artists and others in early modern Europe. So too the aristocrats of ancient Greece stimulated the amazing outburst of Hellenic civilization by their patronage of the arts and crafts, as we shall see in the next chapter.
Some modern aristocracies unfortunately have been largely parasitical and have been overthrown in violent revolutions. In Greece the political, social, an economic position of the upper classes was too deeply anchored ever to be seriously threatened; even the Athenian democracy commonly entrusted its leadership to men sprung from aristocratic families of high standing. The upper classes of Athens, however, paid a heavy price both personally and economically. If they were wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor or horses, they had to be prepared to face the dangers inherent in the almost unceasing wars of the fifth and fourth centuries; an inscription of 460 or 459 lists no less than 177 men of one Athenian tribe who died in one year in Cyprus, Egypt, and elsewhere, including two generals (an Athenian tribe might have had in the order of 4000 adult male citizens, but the number who in practice might be drafted is much reduced if one takes into account the men of age and those mentally and physically incompetent).
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More recent events reinforced French insistence that 'the Boche will pay.' Rehabilitating France's ten northeastern départments, which had served as one of the main theaters of the war, required an expensive infusion of capital. France had incurred substantial war debts to her Allies, whereas Britain's debt to the United States was offset in part by France's debt to Britain. American refusal to provide concessional reconstruction loans or to forgive these debts did much to harden the French position, rendering it inevitable that German reparations and Allied war debts would be bound up together.
A reparations bill as large as $200 billion was contemplated at Versailles. Ultimately, the assembled delegates were only able to establish a deadline for the conclusion of discussions: May 1921. Negotiations seemed to stretch on interminably. The Reparation Commission charged with settling the matter could agree only on a principle: that while France and her allies were authorized to press their claims for full damages, actual transfers would be linked to Germany's capacity to pay as gauged by the rate of growth of her exports and her success in obtaining foreign loans.
By linking reparations payments to the condition of the German economy, the Allies diminished the incentive for German policymakers to put their domestic house in order. Hyperinflation was only the most dramatic illustration. Politicians were not encouraged to implement painful programs designed to promote growth by the knowledge that the fruits of their labor would be transfered abroad. The form of the reparations bill hardened German resistance. Including pensions, as insisted on by Britain and the Commonwealth to inflate their share of the total, cast doubt on the French justification for reparations based on the cost of reconstructing devastated regions and reinforced the German belief that the dominant Allied motives were avarice and spite.
An unstable German economy had far-reaching economic and political ramifications. Anything that depressed trade in Germany depressed trade throughout Central Europe. Economic instability in Central Europe intensified fears of a Bolshevik threat from the east, reviving familiar Anglo-French conflicts over spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and undermining the spirit of cooperation developed during the war. Prospects for compromise among the Allies grew increasingly remote.
In the interim, Germany was instructed to begin transfers in kind, mainly coal but also stocks of Reichsbank gold, war matériel, public property in ceded territories and colonies, railway rolling stock, and ships. The coal was essential to a French steel industry handicapped by the destruction of French mines by retreating German armies. These 'interim payments,' justified as a way of defraying occupation costs, were formally distinct from other transfers, although they eventually came to be regarded as the first installment of reparations. Transfers completed prior to May 1921 amounted to 8 billion gold marks (marks of prewar value). This amounted to some 20 percent of German national income in 1921, although it represented only 40 percent of the interim payment specified at Versailles.
It seemed noteworthy that these sizeable interim transfers did not destabilize the German price level or the government budget. They were effected despite continued uncertainty about the size of the reparations bill and despite capital flight from territories scheduled for cession. Since a large part of the interim transfer took the form of public property such as railway rolling stock rather than private-sector production that the government had to pay for by borrowing or taxing, it was relatively easy to mobilize. But insofar as it would be necessary eventually to replace that public property, Germany was mortgaging her future, a fact that could not have reassured outside observers. The presence of Allied troops along the Rhine and the Baltic and the return of domestic political stability following the Kapp Putsch of 1920 have also been invoked to explain the ease of transfer. But troops were no guarantee of compliance, as the Allies would learn in 1923. Only with benefit of hindsight could the failure of the Kapp Putsch be seen as strengthening moderate tendencies within the military. At the time, each of these developments, rather than reassuring domestic and foreign observers, heightened concern over both economic stability and Germany's fragile political equilibrium.
More than the presence of occupation forces or the political climate, the key factor in the interim transfer was Germany's hope that a demonstration of good will would elicit Allied concessions and permit the early extinction of reparations. The Allies had not yet irrevocably committed to their excessive demands. By evincing a willingness to pay on the scale of France's reparations after 1871, Germany might encourage the victors to adopt a more conciliatory stance.
The fiscal implications of the transfer were accommodated by tax reforms guided through the Reichstag by the finance minister, Matthias Erzberger, over the strident opposition of a right wing led by Helfferich. Erzberger's tax package featured an emergency levy and transferred the income tax from the states to the Reich in return for a commitment by the central government to redistribute some of the revenues back to local authorities. The tax increase was essential for maintaining fiscal balance in the face of the interim transfer. German politicians and their constituencies tolerated higher taxes because they anticipated that the revenue would be transferred abroad for only a limited period of time. Rather than provoking capital flight and other forms of evasion, the tax increase was followed by short-term capital inflows in anticipation of possible stabilization of the mark. Since the interim transfer provoked neither capital flight nor currency depreciation, the revenue base of the new income tax was not eroded by inflation.
Following a series of preparatory conferences, the Allies assembled in London in 1921 to set Germany's payment schedule. The U.S. Congress had already indicated its unwillingness to ratify the Versailles Treaty. The American representative to the Reparation Commission was reduced to observer status, limiting his ability to support the British delegation in its opposition to the more extreme demands of France and Italy. Congress's refusal to ratify signalled the resurgence of isolationist tendencies within the United States, which bode ill for those who hoped for war debt cancellation. Given American inflexibility regarding war debts, the prospects for French, Italian, and British compromise on reparations appeared increasingly bleak.
The negotiators at London delivered a reparations bill of 123 billion gold marks, or 31 billion U.S. dollars. This staggering sum was a concession relative to the Reparation Commission's initial recommendation of 225 billion gold marks. Denominating the debt in gold insured that inflation and exchange rate depreciation could not be used to erode its value. Germany was to begin service immediately on 50 billion of the 132 billion total, on which 5 percent interest and 1 percent amortization amounted to 3 billion gold marks (roughly 7 1/2 percent of national income). In addition, she was charged 1 billion marks annually for occupation costs and in settlement of prewar debts (bringing the total to perhaps 10 percent of national income). Payment of the second tranche of 82 billion gold marks was deferred pending an adequate increase in Germany's capacity to pay. These contingencies heightened the uncertainty surrounding the date at which the reparations burden would finally be extinguished. All that was certain was that Germany would be obligated to make substantial transfers over a period of decades.
No issue in twentieth-century economic and political history has been more hotly contested than the realism of this bill. Contemporaries gauged the burden by comparing it to the reparations paid Germany by France following the Franco-Prussian war. France had paid a total of 5 billion francs, roughly one-quarter of French national income in 1872. In comparison, Germany's immediate burden of 50 billion gold marks represented 125 percent of national income in 1921. Including the deferred payments (known as C Bonds) raised the ratio to the 330 percent. At 10 percent of national income, the first year's payments under the London Schedule were very large by prewar standards.
Defenders of the London Schedule observed that Britain had transferred abroad fully 8 percent of national income through foreign lending in 1911-13. This proved, they argued, that the balance-of-payments adjustment mechanism was capable of absorbing a transfer on the requisite scale. But at least some British investment abroad had returned to London as foreign deposits and some in the form of export demands. Together these mechanisms minimized the impact on British industry and on the balance of payments. It was unlikely that either mechanism would operate as powerfully to recycle German reparations.
The politics of the two transfers were even less comparable. Britain had not sacrificed domestic wealth in the amount of the transfer. The British had invested abroad voluntarily with the option of devoting those resources to future consumption. No necessary impact on British living standards resulted. The problem for Germany was how to mobilize for transfer 10 percent of national income and to reduce both present and future consumption without provoking domestic political unrest.
Transforming 10 percent of national income into foreign currency required an external surplus equivalent to 80 percent of 1921-22 exports. One can imagine that strict controls modelled on wartime practice might have succeeded in reducing German imports by 80 percent. But radically curtailing imports was inconsistent with the maintenance of exports given the economy's reliance on inputs from abroad such as copper, cotton, and wool, a dependence that had been heightened by war-time losses of territory and stockpiles. Expanding exports by 80 percent required a further increase in imported inputs, multiplying the gross increase in exports necessary to effect the transfer. And even these calculations left aside the implications of massive import compression for domestic living standards.
Even had Germany somehow been able to provide this astonishing increase in exports, the Allies would have been unwilling to accept it. The problem was not that the incremental exports were so large relative to the British, French, and U.S. economies. The projected transfer amounted, on an annual basis, to perhaps 1 per-cent of their combined national incomes. But German exports would be heavily concentrated in the products of industries already characterized by intense international competition, notably iron, steel, textiles, and coal. The same difficulties would be posed for Allied industries if Germany instead flooded markets with exports. Representatives of these industries were unlikely to accede graciously to a sudden expansion of German exports. Even while complaining that Germany's effort to meet its reparations obligation was inadequate, the Allies raised their import barriers. Keynes, in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, insisted that proponents of reparations specify "in what specific commodities they intend this payment to be made, and in what markets the goods are to be sold." Thomas Lamont of the U.S. delegation to Versailles brought this same point to the attention of the negotiators. The American economist Frank Taussig echoed the warning.
That 1920-21 was a period of recession aggravated both problems: those of Germany's ability to export and the Allies' willingness to import. The Allies would have been happy to accept additional in-kind transfers had they taken the form of raw materials (British reservations about coal notwithstanding). But the German economy could provide these only to a limited extent. Transfers of raw materials disrupted Germany's capacity to export manufactures. Proposals to import German labor for the work of reconstruction were rejected as immoral and politically unpalatable in light of unemployment among demobilized Frenchmen, Belgians, and Italians.
Hence the theoretical question of what change in prices would be needed to clear international markets in the presence of reparations (known as the 'transfer problem') was ultimately beside the point. Keynes's conclusion was that to generate a trade surplus on the order of 80 percent of initial exports, a very considerable decline in the relative price of German goods would be needed to switch foreign demands toward German exports and German demands away from imports. He raised the possibility that, if demands were sufficiently inelastic, a decline in German export prices might reduce the value of German exports at the same time it raised their volume, rendering the transfer impossible at any price.
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Such an assessment accurately condensed the realities of Eire's military situation - as well as its political position at the start of the war. Others, however, noted that buoyant morale in the Irish services outweighed mere physical constraints, that it was guerrilla tactics that carried the day in the War of Independence.
After hostilities broke out, the total strength of Ireland's army would reach only a little over half of the authorized levels. Nineteen thousand men - or two divisions - would be in uniform within days of the Emergency's beginning; this compared to the 136 divisions the Germans fielded in the Battle of France. Nearly every Irish unit was understrength. Of the eight authorized rifle battalions, none was yet organized. The cyclist squadrons - known as the 'Piddling Panzers' - would have posed precious little threat to real panzers. The army had at its disposal two 'serviceable' tanks and 21 armored vehicles, most of the latter of which were already in 1939 antiques - 1920, and earlier, Rolls-Royces. The air force, a branch of the army, was equally toothless, with only 24 craft, of which 10 might be called modern. There was no navy other than a small coast guard unit. Prior to May 1940, no strike force capable of resisting any invader existed. Few commands had reserves. Armaments, ammunition, and vehicles were extremely scarce.
But so quickly did the land war turn into Phony War that the army's General Headquarters announced on September 21 that "the present Emergency does not constitute a war situation and it would not be justified in maintaining its Establishment and that the strength should be reduced." By Christmas, most of the army personnel who could manage the journey had gone home for the holiday. Only an IRA raid on the central army munitions magazine in Dublin's Phoenix Park, in which the raiders escaped with large quantities of arms and ammunition, caused headquarters to order troops back to their duty stations.
During these early months of the war, Irish soldiers weren't even sure of receiving a uniform. That was perhaps as well. With some irony, and undisguised distaste on the other side of the Irish Sea, the soldier of the Twenty-six Counties looked uncannily like his counterpart in the Wehrmacht - most notably so in the same 'iron scuttle' steel helmet both forces wore. It was likely this unfortunate symbolism rather than the uniform's scratchy uncomfortableness that caused the Army Department to scrap it in 1940. In its place came a new uniform little distinguishable from the British pattern, soup-plate helmet and all (the latter being the same style helmet worn by American GIs until replaced in 1942 with the familiar rounded, nearly brimless model).
Not only were the soldiers dressed poorly; they were housed poorly as well. Most of the barracks remained as leftovers from the British regime, with little new military shelter built since. Many derelict country houses had been fixed up to provide minimal standards, and farmboys turned soldiers suddenly found themselves living in once grand but now sadly dilapidated mansions.
Privates earned 14 shillings a week - about one dollar in contemporary terms, but then with strikingly greater purchasing power, of course. The income wasn't entirely discretionary, though. A forced haircut deduction of two pence was taken out of each pay packet, as was six pence for laundry and another tuppence for 'social welfare.' In theory the Irish soldier was fed better than his civilian compatriots - supposedly a daily three-quarters of a pound of 'best home-fed beef,' a quarter pound of fresh vegetables, a 'liberal' quantity of butter, cheese, jam, eggs, sausages, bacon, etc. In fact, his diet consisted of the usual monotonous regime of many armies: oatmeal, brown stew, jam rolls, bread and butter, and tea.
To meet the costs of their new defense requirements, the government forced the Irish taxpayer to pay taxes higher than any ever known. The first increase predated the outbreak of war: in the spring of 1939, the new pounds5.5 million defense appropriation meant jumping the income-tax rate by a half shilling to a shilling on the pound - 5 percent. Along with this income-tax increase came new surtaxes, as well as additional taxes on the richest ratepayers. Two months after Germany attacked Poland, the income tax went up another shilling on the pound, together with higher increments in estate duties and new levies on beer and whiskey. Through the next two years, tax increases on income could rise until the Irish citizen was paying on average 37.5 percent of his income to the government. Though the Twenty-six Counties remained at peace, their government was assessing tax levies as onerous as those of most of the countries at war.
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If the island was not yet threatened by a Wehrmacht held in its traces, it was threatened by the ruthless and bomb-prone activities of the IRA. The Irish Republican Army's raison d'<*_>e-circ<*/>tre was to end British control of Ulster by whatever means necessary, however appalling or murderous. The terrorist organization's position was, simply stated, that "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity." To achieve its goal, the organization maintained a complete, albeit underground, government, a constitution, and some 7,500 mostly youthful members - plus perhaps 15,000 more or less dedicated supporters (the figures are from Time magazine).
What popular support the IRA received in the south during the Emergency was given almost entirely in token of the perceived injustice of the island's partitioned status. As to the organization's relationship with the Dublin government, its policy provided that no terrorist activities would be carried out against Eire, as long as the IRA was free to carry out from southern bases operations against Ulster and that province's British targets. De Valera refused such a concession, understanding full well the danger of British retaliation against Eire.
Some months before the outbreak of war, the IRA had undertaken to traumatize the British people into demanding that their government leave Ulster. The shock was carried to Britain itself in the form of a series of terror bombings. In January 1939, young Irishmen recruited in Britain set off explosions in what were, with war approaching, the kingdom's most vulnerable sites: factories, power stations, and telephone exchanges. At the time, even a few well-placed blows against British defense facilities were enormously crippling to the catch-up effort to match Germany's industry. The campaign reached its moral nadir back home with a bombing of the Irish country hotel where Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's son Francis was spending a hunting holiday, the fortunately ineffectual assault an apparent attempt to sour the personally cordial relationship between Chamberlain and de Valera. Britain endured over a hundred more explosions in July alone, with blast sites including Piccadilly Circus and Madame Tussaud's waxworks. Harried police waded through crowds arresting anyone with a brogue. The IRA's outrages culminated in an act that finally crystallized public opinion and marshaled concrete action against the outlaw organization.
On August 25, a package-laden bicyclist made his way through the crowded streets of Coventry, an ancient and, by 1939, heavily industrialized Midlands city. The rider left his parcel - a pre-fused bomb - at a café in crowded Broadgate, in the center of the city. To hide the device's origins, its makers had assembled it in one place and brought it carefully to another, where the last man in the deadly chain put it in his cycle's carrier basket. Delayed by traffic and worried that the bomb would blow him up along with the innocent bystanders who were its intended victims, the anxious IRA terrorist hurriedly threw his bicycle against the wall on the café and left. The explosion a few moments later blew off the front of the building, along with the windows of the neighboring shops. Ankle-deep debris settled over a wide area. Five people lay dead, including an eighty-one-year-old man and a small boy. Seventy more were injured.
Recognizing the threat this and the earlier outrages represented to an Anglo-Irish accord, the authorities reacted by searching every Irish home in Coventry, jailing hundreds of activists, and ending with the apprehension of three members of the city's IRA unit. Two others were later arrested for complicity in the terror attack. The dragnet resulted in an immediate and sharp decline in IRA terror activities in Britain for the rest of the war. But among Eire's citizenry who deplored the IRA's methods, so deep was the vein of antipathy for Britain that when two of the accused were hanged in Birmingham in February 1940, almost the entire country mourned them, with flags dropping to half staff, theaters closed, and masses offered for the repose of the executed men's souls.
Hitler understandably regarded people who could commit such acts against Britain as his natural allies. In fact, Germany had been trying to cement a relationship with the terrorist organization since at least 1937. The military intelligence agency, the Abwehr, directed by Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, initiated planning in November and December of 1939 to send its agents into Ireland by submarine to establish contacts with the IRA, with German agents instructed to tell prospective recruits among the Irish that Germany strongly desired a united Ireland and that the best course for the IRA would be to join efforts with the Reich in destroying 'England,' the sooner both their goals being fulfilled.
But Hempel warned his superiors in November 1939 that Germany had best not rely too heavily on playing the IRA card. On the fourteenth, he wrote to Berlin that "the I.R.A. is hardly strong enough for action with promise of success or involving appreciable damage to England and is also probably lacking in a leader of any stature." He pointedly cautioned the Foreign Ministry that open cooperation with the IRA would very likely lead the more moderate sections of the Irish republic into blaming the organization for making the country's national interests dependent on Germany, which "in view of the widespread aversion to present-day Germany, especially for religious reasons, could rob the I.R.A. of all chances of future success." Hempel also noted, again, that such a course would give Britain an excuse to intervene militarily in solving its own outstanding problems with Eire.
Because of the IRA's potential to damage Eire's neutrality policy more than any other group in Irish politics, the organization's British atrocities had in June 1939 given de Valera a good excuse to outlaw it. The move enabled him to marshal the resources of the state in chasing down its members and generally branding it a menace to Eire's survival in the Emergency. But by the end of the year, the IRA openly declared its sympathies lay in a GermanyGerman victory in the war, evidently on the amazing deduction that such an outcome would, by Britain's defeat, mean the end of partition. The perhaps more likely possibility that Hitler would occupy Ireland - the whole of the island - apparently didn't occur to the IRA leaders. Though Nazi Germany's most scorching depravities and betrayals lay in the future, its many double crosses up to this point should certainly have put the IRA off any hope that it or the nation for which it purported to fight would be treated with respect by Adolf Hitler.
On December 23, 1939, the organization carried off one of its grandest coups - though one of its last - against the Dublin government. When the IRA stole more than a million rounds of ammunition and cases of guns from the Phoenix Park arsenal, it looked as though the phantom army might turn itself into a real army and attempt a coup d'état, or even try to start another civil war. D<*_>a-acute<*/>il member James M. Dillon warned of the raid: "I believe the ultimate end of the activities of these gentlemen [the IRA] must be assassination. God knows how many of us may be victims!"
The reaction of the government was to arrest every member of the IRA who could be rounded up, sending 5,000 Special Police armed with rifles to seal the frontier with Northern Ireland and hunt down the clandestine terrorists. To further the search-and-destroy operation's success, the government rushed through Parliament a bill suspending the constitutional guarantee against holding suspects for more than forty-eight hours without evidence.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="57">Moreover, in recent years, most of those in pursuit of a truly 'British' past have been in thrall to a series of remarkable articles written by J.G.A. Pocock. In the Journal of Modern History in 1975, and in the American Historical Review for 1982, Pocock argued that British history could only be understood as "the interaction of several peoples and several histories." By this, it is important to note, he meant not only the relations that existed over time among England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland but also the broader connections between these four countries and North America and the rest of Britain's 'white' empire, including Pocock's own native New Zealand. Predictably, though, it has been his insistence on the need for study of the four component parts of the United Kingdom - and not his geographically more wide-ranging manifesto - that has generated the greatest interest among British historians.
Some of the results of this new scholarly fashion have been entirely benevolent. Our collective consciousness has been raised, and we are now much less likely than we were even ten years ago to describe exclusively English events and trends as though they were necessarily synonymous with British developments. We have come to understand with more precision than before that Great Britain is a composite structure forged, as France and Spain were forged, out of different cultures and kingdoms. And by examining how these entities effected each other in the past, we have been able to approach familiar historical events in a different and revealing light. Sir John Seeley remarked as long ago as 1895 that the interaction between Scotland, Ireland, and England was so extensive in the 1640s that he wondered whether the civil war "had really its origins in the necessity of revising their mutual relations." But it is only in the past few years that this insight has been pursued to the full.
These are substantial gains. But while acknowledging them as such, we also need to be aware of the problems and limitations inherent in this approach to the British past. To begin with, some of its practitioners are undoubtedly swayed by current political preoccupations, and this can lead to a certain amount of special pleading. Especially since the 1960s, both the Welsh and the Scottish nationalist movements have increased in size and self-consciousness (as simultaneously has support for an independent Basque country and Catalonia in Spain and for separate Breton and Occitanian nations in France). In addition, one of the consequences of Margaret Thatcher's long premiership, which saw a savage reduction in Tory electoral support in Scotland, and a less dramatic but still significant fall in Tory support in Wales, has been the reemergence of a right-wing Little Englandism. (The Labour party, for reasons that will become clearer later in this essay, remains emphatically British in its electoral base and ideology.) Put crudely, the current political situation has encouraged some English scholars to view the Welsh and the Scots as the Other in a more deliberate fashion than before, and vice versa. If we add to this the fact that Protestant Britons have traditionally viewed the predominantly Catholic Irish as the Other, and have been so viewed in return, it is easy to see why the appeal of a Four Nations view of the United Kingdom can seem so overwhelming quite independent of its scholarly value. Such an approach can reduce Britishness to the interaction of four organic and invariably distinct nations (or three if Ireland is left out of the story). As such, it can sit comfortably not only with Welsh, Scottish, and Irish nationalism but also with a newly assertive English nationalism.
The breakup of Britain, or at the very least the emergence of a federal Britain existing as part of a federal Europe, may well be desirable goals for the 1990s. I am not concerned here with vindicating unionism or to argue for its continuation in the future. But I would argue that the Four Nations approach, if pushed too hard or too exclusively, is an incomplete and anachronistic way to view the British past and, also, a potentially parochial one.
It conceals, if we are not careful, the fact that the four parts of the United Kingdom have been connected in markedly different ways and with sharply varying degrees of success. Most conspicuously, Ireland, as a whole, was only part of the Union between 1800 and 1920. It has always been divided from the British mainland by the sea and since the sixteenth century has been severed from it even more brutally by its strictly limited response to the Protestant Reformation. There is considerable evidence that at grass-roots level the Welsh, the Scottish, and the English saw (and often still see) the Irish as alien in a way that they did not regard each other as alien. None of this means that we should ignore Ireland's many and important political, cultural, and economic links with Britain. But we should recognize that, mainly for religious reasons, the bulk of its population was never swept into a British identity to the degree that proved possible among the Welsh, the Scots, and the English. We also need to recognize that, until the late nineteenth century, at least, the majority of people in all of these countries were never simply and invariably possessed by an overwhelming sense of their own distinctive identity as Englishmen, as Scotsmen, as Welshmen, or even as Irishmen. As in the rest of Europe, intense local and regional loyalties were always there to complicate and compromise.
Even in the early 1800s, for example, and despite the enormous impact of Sir Walter Scott's heroic evocation of the lochs and glens of the North, some Lowland Scots still automatically referred to their Highland neighbors as savages or as aborigines. They regarded them, as they had traditionally done, as impoverished and violent, as members of a different and inferior race, rather than as fellow Scots. Conversely, whereas the word 'sassenach' is now one of the kinder epithets used by all Scots to refer to the English, before 1800 the Gaelic sasunnach (meaning a Saxon) was commonly employed by Highland Scots to refer to Lowlanders in general as well as to the English. Quite logically in ethnic terms, Highlanders could view both Lowland Scots and the English as foreigners. By the same token, the inhabitants of northern England had (and still have) far more in common with their Lowland Scottish neighbors than with the inhabitants of southern England. They read the same books, ate the same kind of food cooked in similar ways, frequently intermarried, and shared similar literacy levels. Much the same could be said of men and women living in Herefordshire and Shropshire with regard to their Welsh neighbors. Here, again, people living close to the border, whether on the Welsh or on the English side, could have more in common with each other than with the rest of their respective countrymen. As Hugh Kearney has demonstrated, with a scrupulous honesty that threatens at times to undermine his own arguments, imposing a strict three- or four-nation model onto these intricate and myriad regional alignments is difficult and distorting. In practice, men and women often had double, triple, or even quadruple loyalties, mentally locating themselves, according to the circumstances, in a village, in a particular landscape, in a region, and in one or even two countries. It was quite possible for an individual to see himself as being, at one and the same time, a citizen of Edinburgh, a Lowlander, a Scot, and a Briton.
The invention of a British national identity after 1700 did not obliterate these other, older loyalties. True, both before and after that date, London was always ready to employ military force, parliamentary legislation and various kinds of indoctrination to limit the autonomy of a few, particularly dangerous regions - the 'pacification' of the Scottish Highlands after 1746 would be an obvious example. But Britishness was never just imposed from the center, nor can it be understood solely or even mainly as the result of an English cultural or economic colonization of the so-called Celtic fringe. The extent of such anglicization has, to begin with, often been exaggerated. Scotland always preserved its own religious, educational, and legal structures and its own sophisticated network of printing presses and cultural centers, while even in the 1880s, some 350 years after the Act of Union between Wales and England, three-quarters of all Welshmen still spoke their own language out of choice. More broadly, though, we need to stop thinking in terms of Britishness as the result of an integration and homogenization of disparate cultures. Of course, a degree of integration did occur, mainly by way of the advance of communications, the proliferation of print, the operation of free trade throughout the island, and a high level of geographical mobility. But what most enabled Great Britain to emerge as an artificial nation, and to be superimposed onto older alignments and loyalties, was a series of massive wars between 1689 and 1815 that allowed its diverse inhabitants to focus on what they had in common, rather than on what divided them, and that forged an overseas empire from which all parts of Britain could secure real as well as psychic profits.
It is this vital and external dimension of British development that is most likely to be obscured by too narrow a concentration on the Four Nations model. The interaction of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England is an important and fascinating theme and is a particularly pertinent one at the end of the twentieth century. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britishness was forged in a much wider context. Britons defined themselves in terms of their common Protestantism as contrasted with the Catholicism of Continental Europe. They defined themselves against France throughout a succession of major wars with that power. And they defined themselves against the global empire won by way of these wars. They defined themselves, in short, not just through an internal and domestic dialogue but in conscious opposition to the Other beyond their shores.
II
The absolute centrality of Protestantism to the British experience in the 1700s and long after is so obvious that it has often been passed over. Historians, always reluctant to be seen to be addressing the obvious, have preferred to concentrate on the more subtle divisions that existed within the Protestant community itself, on the tensions between Anglicans and nonconformists in England and Wales, between Presbyterians and Episcopalians in Scotland, and between the older forms of Dissent and newer versions such as Methodism. These internal rivalries were abundant and serious. But they should not obscure what remained the towering feature in the religious landscape, the gulf between Protestant and Catholic.
Even after the beginning of large-scale Irish immigration, the Catholic community on the British mainland was a small one, and its members were usually able to socialize with their Protestant neighbors, own land, earn a living, and even attend mass openly. Yet in terms of prejudice, none of this mattered very much. Irrespective of their real strength and of how they were treated as individuals, Catholics as a category remained in popular mythology an omnipresent menace. Every November 5 until 1859, worshipers at virtually all Protestant places of worship in England and Wales would be reminded that it had been a Catholic who had tried to blow up James I and Parliament back in 1605. In England, Wales, and Scotland, almanacs, sermons, and popular histories made the point, year after year, that it had been a French Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria, together with her interfering priests, who had led Charles I astray and the whole island into war; that the would-be tyrant James II had been Catholic, just as those responsible for the Saint Bartholomew's massacre in 1572, or the Irish 'massacres' of 1641, or the Great Fire of London in 1666 had been Catholic also. "While Britain continues to be a nation," wrote a Scottish pamphleteer at the end of the eighteenth century, "she ought never to forget."
</doc><doc register="learned" n="58">It could be argued from Hutton's own evidence that many of the problems facing Charles II, especially in his early years, were the result of the legacy of the civil war and of the difficulty at the Restoration of finding a satisfactory settlement that could accommodate the interests of former Royalists, Parliamentarians and ex-Cromwellians, Anglicans and Dissenters alike. Certainly the religious tensions generated by the issue of Dissent and the unsatisfactory Church settlement perpetually bedeviled the government in its dealings with all three realms throughout the reign. However, Hutton sees the year 1673 as marking a crucial turning point in Restoration politics, with the duke of York's public profession of his Roman Catholicism after the passage of the Test Act and his marriage to a Catholic princess ushering in a new period of political instability, centering around the problem of the Catholic succession. The succession issue was to lead to the clash between Whigs and Tories after the revelations of the Popish Plot in 1678, but whereas Hutton is prepared to accept the existence of a "Whig party" (p. 422), he is adamant that "there was no 'Exclusion Crisis' at all" (p. 357), because, he says, the situation never became critical for the government. This argument is somewhat strained, since by Hutton's own account the government faced a series of acute difficulties during the Exclusion period that virtually crippled its ability to govern properly: there were problems in forming and keeping together an effective ministerial team; it was impossible to get anything done through Parliament; Charles was unable to conduct any meaningful foreign policy; and the government faced the opposition of an important section of the nation.
Although we learn a lot from this book about what Charles and his various ministers actually did, we do not get a very clear sense of the nature or essence of royal power at this time. The position of the monarchy is said to have been fundamentally strong, and even to have gained in strength in the last years of Charles's life, but the basis of this strength is never properly analyzed. Rather than placing sole emphasis on the inherent powers of the Crown, I would suggest there was also a crucial ideological dimension to the strength of the monarchy in the first half of the 1680s. After the Exclusion scare, Charles made every effort to cultivate public opinion - through propaganda, public pronouncements, and even royal entries and processions. He portrayed himself as a king committed to the rule of law and the defense of the Church of England against the subversive threat of the Whigs and Nonconformists, thereby attempting to recapture the soft Anglican middle ground that had become alienated from the Crown during the 1670s. The monarchy was stronger in 1684 than in 1679 because more people supported what it was doing; that support was achieved partly as a result of a successful public relations exercise but also partly as a result of a shift in policy by the king himself, with Charles at last fulfilling the role of a Cavalier-Anglican monarch that so many of his subjects wanted him to play. Hutton has all the material at his disposal to discuss such questions; it is disappointing that he decided not to do so in a direct matter. Instead he seems to have seen his task as getting the facts straight for his readers so that they could be in a position to draw their own conclusions from the evidence he has chosen to present.
Two of the other books under review look at individuals whose lives and influence spanned the crucial period between the civil war and the 1680s. Conal Condren focuses on George Lawson - long thought to be significant for his criticism of Hobbes and influence on Locke - and on his tract Politica, which was published first in 1660 and again in 1689. Condren's book operates on a number of levels: in addition to being a work of political philosophy and of the history of ideas, it is also a study in political linguistics, and it has much to say on the use of metaphor and rhetoric and on Lawson's manipulation and subversion of existing political vocabularies. As a result the argument is complex and not easy to summarize. Lawson, a clergyman who worked most of his life in Shropshire, was a supporter of Parliament who not only found it possible to accommodate himself to the changing political and religious regimes of the 1640s and 1650s but could accept the Restoration of monarchy in 1660 and work within the reestablished national Church as well. Although the Politica was in gestation for some time before its publication, Condren shows that its context belongs very much to early 1660; therefore it should not (as has been suggested) be seen as a defense of the Commonwealth or of Cromwell but, rather, as a settlement tract that sought to diffuse the divisiveness of constitutional and religious differences on the eve of the Restoration. Thus Lawson's ideal governmental form allowed for any variation of rule by king, Lords, or Commons, or even a republican elite. Likewise any church form might do in a pinch, so long as it did not lock itself into the rhetoric of divine origin. Condren sees Lawson's arguments as in many ways reflecting Clubmen rhetoric, with loyalty to the community and the country emerging as major themes in his work. As many will know, Lawson made a distinction between real and personal sovereignty, with the former being invested with the people as a community, and the latter being the attribute of a particular governmental form. His precise views on the limits of people's subjection, however, are not easy to unravel (necessarily so, perhaps, given that Lawson's stress was on settlement and subjection), so Condren prefers to offer two competing readings of Lawson's position on resistance (the 'cobweb' and the 'seesaw' hypotheses), which he feels circumscribe the limits of plausibility. Nevertheless, Condren maintains that Lawson essentially had a theory of dissolution rather than resistance per se.
Different aspects of this book will appeal to different types of scholars in varying ways. There is a fascinating section on Lawson's interpretation of the civil war, which he saw as having primarily religious causes - although Condren warns us that the attempt to separate discrete factors (religious, constitutional, economic) is really misguided, given the way contemporaries conceptualized their world. He is skeptical of the impact that Lawson is often thought to have had on Locke. Rather it is John Humfrey, that reluctant Nonconformist, who emerges as the main vehicle for the transmission of Lawsonian ideas between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution. There is also a good discussion of the importance of the Politica in the "Allegiance Controversy," which reminds us how relevant the rhetoric of interregnum religious and political discourse still was to the world of 1689.
Toward the end of his study, Condren offers an intriguing, though all too brief, criticism of the way other scholars have deployed the label 'radical' and its siblings 'moderate' and 'conservative.' None of these, he argues, are particularly helpful to our understanding of either Lawson or his text, since they are anachronistic terms that apply to groups in nineteenth-century politics in a way that would not be acceptable to the world of the seventeenth. This important point has been made many times before, though there is no harm in saying it again, so long as it does not blind us to the fact that the late seventeenth century did have its own concept of 'radical,' even if it was very different from that which came into existence after the French Revolution. A theory of government that placed ultimate sovereignty in the people was, so far as the Tories of the Exclusion period were concerned, a 'radical' theory. As one author alleged, the Whigs did their best to infuse into people's minds the belief "that Power is radically and revokably in them." Thus, according to Whig theory, "they [the People] do not absolutely part with this their so natural Right, but commit onely the Administration of such Power as is radically in them to others. But they retain to themselves much of this Right, as upon the Male-administration of the Power so delegated, they may revoke the Delegation, and take all the Power into their own hands again." Many of the more extreme Whigs, Locke among them, would qualify as espousing a 'radical' theory in this sense of the term; whether Lawson would no doubt partly depends on whether one has a cobweb or seesaw reading of the Politica.
Not all are going to accept the conclusions of this book. Julian Franklin, a leading scholar of Lawson and Locke who comes in for serious criticism from Condren, has already replied in print by identifying what he sees to be a number of errors of interpretation. More worrying, I fear, is the fact that most people will have terrible trouble just understanding what Condren is trying to argue. There is a certain irony in the fact that a student of linguistics should find it so difficult to articulate his views in a clear and comprehensible manner, and on one occasion even be forced to give up words altogether and start writing in mathematical equations (p. 108). This is too bad, since I fear many will be put off by the style and therefore miss the many stimulating and provocative ideas that Condren's book undoubtedly contains.
Jonathan Scott, by contrast, has produced a lively and highly readable account of that great seventeenth-century 'radical,' Algernon Sidney. (The term 'radical' still seems appropriate in this case, even after reading Condren.) Although at times Scott's prose styles is rather rough and even colloquial (contractions and split infinitives abound), he writes with pace, verve, and a degree of wit that ensures his reader remains perpetually enthralled with his argument. The present book, which is the first in a two-part study, concentrates on the years of Sidney's life up until 1677 and contains an analysis of his other major political treatise, the Court Maxims written in 1665. The sequel (which was not available at the time of writing this review) is to be entitled Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683, and will contain a detailed analysis of the more famous Discourses. Not that Scott adheres to the strict chronological limits that the titles of his respective volumes suggest. The main purpose of the first study is to examine what Sidney believed and how he came to hold such beliefs, and this is achieved through a combination of biographical narrative, analysis of his intellectual influences, and exposition of his ideas, which takes us back and forth across the whole of Sidney's lifetime and has much to say about the Discourses as well. This is an admirable book: rich, clever and provocative in its revisionism, and to judge from the glimpses we are offered here, the subsequent volume promises to dust off the old cobwebs and set the seesaw rocking through a powerfully argued reconceptualization of the Exclusion period.
The main thrust of Scott's argument, which explains why a separate volume on the period up to 1677 is necessary, is that Sidney was not an Exclusionist Whig whose ideas were formed in response to the so-called Exclusion Crisis; rather, his attitudes were critically shaped by the age of the English Republic (1649-53 and 1659) and his struggles during the period 1635-77 more generally. Scott shows that the traditional view of Sidney as the great popular and patriot philosopher, who was a reformer and a moderate rather than a radical, has got the man seriously wrong. Not only was he "one of the most passionate and bellicose rebels of his age" (p.3), but he was also far from being "the perfect Englishman," since he spent half of his life outside England, was deeply influenced by Continental ideas and his internationalist perspective, and was engaged among foreign princes and republics in a variety of acts of treason against his own country.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="59">
Walter Benjamin would ultimately admonish the modern intellectual's ambiguous politics, exemplified by this kind of neutralization of race, gender, and class allegiances. Western intellectuals, he observed, did not see themselves as "members of certain professions" but as representatives of a "certain characterological type," a type located somewhere between the classes. Advocating a more activist role for the intellectual, Benjamin called "for the transformation of the forms and instruments of production in the way desired by a progressive intelligentsia - that is, one interested in freeing the means of production and serving the class struggle."
Piper's realignment of the artist/spectator relationship rests on her desire to work beyond such a characterological suspension of the artist's connection to the rest of humanity. This challenge to the forms and instruments of art production resulted both in a withdrawal from the precious art object and a travesty of modernist conceits: the 'apolitical' intellectual, the 'classless' dandy, and the 'objective' fl<*_>a-circ<*/>neur who wanders the streets of Paris observing the heroism of modern life are for Piper the subject of parody and even derision. Take, for example, her Mythic Being. Masquerading in dark glasses, Afro, and pencil mustache, the Mythic Being was Piper's male alter ego. Neither dandy nor fl<*_>a-circ<*/>neur - yet strangely reminiscent of both - the Mythic Being represented himself as tough black street kid who engaged in charged and sometimes hostile encounters with strangers. Piper sent him into white middle- and upper-middle class social contexts - theaters, gallery receptions, museum exhibitions - in order to observe racist patterns of avoidance and aggression. After moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1974 to begin graduate study in philosophy at Harvard University, Piper involved her Mythic Being in such actions as 'cruising' the streets to experience male sexuality, wandering the Cambridge commons, and venting class antagonisms by mugging a male accomplice in public view after a provocative conversation.
If Piper's 'whiteness' allowed her to escape from the cruelest side of racism, the racial and class specificity of her male alter ego left her particularly vulnerable. Gaining a sense of her "own marginality as a nonwhite (but not obviously black) member of society," Piper realized that she was now even more threatening to white society at large. As Homi Bhabha observes, "the black presence ruins the representative narrative of Western personhood: its past tethered to treacherous stereotypes of primitivism and degeneracy will not produce a history of civil progress, a space for the Socius; its present, dismembered and dislocated, will not contain the image of identity that is questioned in the dialectic of mind/body and resolved in the epistemology of 'appearance and reality.' The white man's eyes break up the black man's body and in that act of epistemic violence its own frame of reference is transgressed, its field of vision disturbed."
Ultimately, Mythic Being personifies the mythic black man - the presence who ruins the representative narrative of white America. He is the being for whom miscegenation laws were invented, codes that pretended to 'protect' white women "but left black women the victims of rape by white men and simultaneously granted to these same men the power to terrorize black men as a potential threat to the virtue of white womanhood." The tragic irony of this social equation is that black men's 'power,' though threatening to white society, is most often fictive and allusive; since male power within patriarchy is relative, poorer men, frequently men of color, are most often denied the material and social rewards of their participation in patriarchy. With her Mythic Being, Piper conflated issues of race and gender in order to question problematic feminist constructions that pit white women against white men in a struggle for power. Any understanding of patriarchal relations which examines the power of men over women outside of broader racial and economic issues is, of course, problematic. Arguments that feature patriarchy as the primary determinant of women's oppression fail to see "the inapplicability of such a concept in analyzing the complex of relations obtaining in the Black communities both historically and at present." Such discourses of patriarchal relations, for example, most often ignore the struggle that men and women of color must fight together against the white ruling class. Mythic Being - a black woman in the guise of a black male youth - metaphorically represents this alliance, reminding us that in Western society racism effortlessly crosses the boundaries of gender.
Piper's desire to speak over the oppressive master texts of modernism results in the blasting of another aspect of the artist's mythology - the specter of anonymity. Like Frantz Fanon's existentialist evocation of the 'I' that restores the presence of the marginalized (and his own presence within dominant narratives that would silence a black man's voice), Piper at times speaks through personal or autobiographical narratives. The Big Four-Oh (1988), a self-portrait video installation, juxtaposes a display of materials soaked in her bodily fluids, an open journal, a suit of armor, forty hard balls, and a repeat videotape of Piper with her back to the camera dancing nonstop to soul music. The work, which represents the artist at the time of her fortieth birthday, affirms her complexity and strength, each of its parts serving as a metaphor for an aspect of her existence. This installation would seem to continue the project of the earlier Political Self Portraits (1980) in which Piper superimposed images of her face and body over detailed autobiographical accounts written from the three perspectives that define her marginalization - class, race, and gender. A chronology of the artist's life written by Piper and published in the catalog for her recent retrospective exhibition includes the following note: "This chronology was created solely by Adrian Piper and is presented as part of her artistic work." Rather than narcissistic evocations of the self or acts of romanticized self-expression, autobiography serves a crucial political function in Piper's <*_>oe-ligature<*/>uvre. As part of a broader structure for dismantling oppressive systems, such narratives acknowledge the extent to which marginalized peoples are spoken at and for, the degree to which people of color, women, gay men, and lesbians have been defined and judged by the narrow standards of a dominant culture governed by white heterosexual males. Indeed, who constructs the master narratives of culture? Who are the patrons of academia, the publishers, the financiers of industrial society? Who writes history?
Marginalized peoples, of course, are generally excluded from defining their own role in the narratives of history. Women of color, for example, have been alternately categorized as exotic or 'pathological' or both - universalizing conditions that deny difference as they create stereotypes of passivity or abnormality: "But what does the sameness of the exotic women represent? Female heroism, humor, carnivalesque gesture, triumph, movement ... 'trans-cultural, trans-historical, trans-social' - exotic. Here exoticism marks a universality which systematically negates the very raison d'<*_>e-circ<*/>tre of women's different experiences, strategies and actions." Like the mythologized dandy, these ciphers of universality, exoticism, or sameness mask deeper political motives. As such, autobiographical writing can serve an important therapeutic function for marginalized peoples. The fear and uncenteredness associated with psychic and physical oppression can often be overcome or helped by reconnecting with the personal narratives of the past. Remembering can be part of a cycle of reunion, observes Bell Hooks, "a joining of fragments, 'the bits and pieces of my heart' that the [autobiographical] narrative made whole again." Such speech will always be difficult for the dominant culture to accept. Representational marginalization exempts the exotic 'others' - whether they be women, gays, blacks, or even artists - from serious consideration by the ruling class. To allow such peoples to speak in their own voices is to risk hearing their oppositional speech - discourses that demand rather than passively accept, that scream rather than whisper.
Although Piper's project is directed at a cultural community that is mostly privileged, she reconstructs the ideological role of the artist in a way that directs her audience to join her in the struggle against racism and sexism. Indeed, she is always polite in her address, always conscious of the psychological threshold of complacent viewers who would rather look at 'art' than confront the painful reality of their own racism. "I can't bear the thought of violating the norms of etiquette," Piper has said. "Such norms help me to grease my way ... through a hostile white world." The inherent difficulty of disseminating upsetting information makes this politeness a matter of packaging for Piper; like a good advertising executive, she understands that style is often as important as content in reaching an audience. It is through this "power of passive provocation" that Piper hopes to transform her audience psychologically, by presenting them with "an immediate and unavoidable concrete reality that cuts through the defensive rationalizations by which we insulate ourselves against the facts of our political responsibility. I want viewers of my work to come away from it with the understanding that their reactions to racism are ultimately political choices over which they have control - whether or not they like the work or credit it for this understanding."
To this end, Piper embarked on a series of audience performances in which predominantly white, art world groups were engaged in various consciousness-raising activities. The ground-breaking Funk Lessons, for example, began as a question in Piper's mind: Why are white people indifferent, even hostile, to soul music? "I found that response [to funk music] so often," Piper observes. "It seems to me there was a gap between the purported attitude of openness and receptivity to popular culture that is usually espoused by the art world, according to which anything is adequate subject matter for appropriation and reuse within the context of high culture. And what actually seemed to be the case is that in fact only some things can have that function, and in particular black working-class culture cannot have that function." Having incorporated funk music into earlier politically oriented performances, Piper found that white audiences misunderstood her motives or attacked her use of this music as "cheapening" the serious political content of the performance. Such resistance, Piper suggests, is rooted in several areas: "One problem has to do with the overt sexuality of that music - it talks about fucking, it talks about making love, it talks about bodies, and it's very hard to assimilate that in a way that's not threatening to white upper-middle-class culture. Another problem is that it requires a very highly structured use of one's body in order to respond to it."
Piper decided to 'educate' white audiences about the significant (if not always acknowledged) role played by this music in both dominant and marginal culture. Funk Lessons was structured in an academic format as a participatory performance with Piper as instructor and audience members as students. Piper distributed a bibliography and photocopied handouts that listed some of the 'characteristics' of funk dance and music. She proceeded to discuss certain mainstream presumptions about funk music in an attempt to free her audience from discomforting misconceptions. She then led the group in body isolation exercises, discussed the structure of the music, and practiced dance movements with musical accompaniment. (An extraordinary video version of Funk Lessons centers on a particularly successful performance at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. Piper augments film of the Berkeley evening with voice-over and on-screen commentary and archival footage of influential soul performers [e.g., James Brown, Little Richard, and Aretha Franklin] and the white entertainers [Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, The Talking Heads] who capitalized on the black funk idiom. The video yields a level of meaning somewhat independent of but not unrelated to the performance - that of the mass-media suppression of working-class black culture and its comfortable, and profitable, appropriation by white artists.) Ultimately, Piper did not want to scare or intimidate her audience; rather she constructed a "comfortable and safe" format that encouraged people to explore their apprehensions about the music and their ability to soul dance. Individual audience reactions to Funk Lessons varied from antagonism and resistance to jubilation. Successful performances culminated in a celebratory dance party; failed ones fizzled out in a morass of confusion and resentment.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="60">Lady Elisabeth's disappointment in him was most vocal by the middle of that year. Talbot was undoubtedly affected, at least to some degree, by the general state of affairs in Britain. In 1820, the 'Swing Riots' swept through Wiltshire and other areas of the country. They were the inevitable outcome of the intolerable economic pressures that increasing industrialization was inflicting on agrarian workers. As a result of his compassionate and surprisingly expert management of Lacock, Talbot succeeded in avoiding any local violence. He soon found that in trying to alleviate the condition of the poor, he was out of step with the local farmers. Reform was in the air. Henry Talbot expressed his opinion that representation should be equitable; he stood for Parliament in 1831 as a reformer, but was defeated on this first try. Perhaps his entry into politics was less anomalous than it might at first appear. Talbot's ancestors (and many of his current relatives) had been deeply involved in politics. His cousin Kit, Christopher Rica Mansel Talbot, had entered Parliament in 1830. Lady Elisabeth considered her son's talents wasted in the game of politics, but she would have encouraged him to at least do something, anything, to break out of his ill humor. The passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 increased his constituency, and Henry Talbot was finally elected as a Member from Chippenham. He was to serve only one term.
Talbot's short political career proved unsatisfying but perhaps also convinced him that a life in science was what he wanted. A sure sign that Talbot was getting a grip on his doldrums came with his March 1831 election as a Fellow of the Royal Society. Proposed by his relatives Charles Lemon and William Fox-Strangways, Talbot's election was supported by the testimony of Michael Faraday, Davies Gilbert; George Peacock, Thomas Philipps, and William Whewell (Herschel would have been happy to sign for Talbot as well save for his continuing protest against the Society). Perhaps even this short experience in politics was for the best; Talbot's point of view on the relationship between science and society had been expanded. In 1833, he wrote to the botanist William (later Sir William) Jackson Hooker that "the difficulty which you complain of, of getting any bookseller to publish a scientific work on Botany is not confined to that science." Talbot suggested that there was a societal benefit to be gleaned from support:
Abroad, not only is paper & printing cheaper, but assistance is rendered by the Governments. In my opinion public libraries ought to be established in all our principal Towns at the national expense. A considerable sum should be voted annually for the encouragement of science, which should be in part expended in patronizing literary undertakings of merit. From 20 to 50 copies of such works should be purchased by government & distributed to these provincial libraries, which small at first, would soon become important.
Another sign that Henry Talbot was emerging from melancholy was his December 1832 marriage to Constance Mundy, of Markeaton. The youngest daughter of the MP for Derbyshire, she came from a family possessed of more than the usual artistic interests and was a reasonably accomplished amateur sketcher herself. Constance's cheerful countenance was an important foil to Talbot's occasionally brooding behavior. She was highly supportive of Henry's efforts and proved to be a good moderator for the well-motivated ambitions of Lady Elisabeth. However successful in this, Constance never became the intellectual partner to Henry that Maggie was to John Herschel. The evidence for this is distressingly clear. Since Henry spent much time away from home, his correspondence to and from Constance is voluminous. It is perhaps understandable that she carried on no discourse about her husband's highly-specialized researches. But it is extraordinary that Constance, as an amateur artist herself, never once made any serious assessment of any of Henry's photographs. Constance rarely commented on his subjects and virtually never made suggestions for possible photographs. When Constance was vacationing separately in Wales in 1835, at a time when Henry's interest in his new discovery was at its first peak, she wrote that "I wish you could have taken the outline of the castle & fine elms behind just as I saw them - but I think you told me you could not produce the desired effect by any light except that of the sun." But even this breezy comment was an exception. Her very occasional references to photography after it became public in 1839 indicate that she made some attempts to sensitize paper and make some prints; however, they betray a very superficial understanding of how the process worked. Perhaps Constance Talbot's artistic training exerted some influence on her husband during his picture making, but one is disappointed in efforts to trace hints of such an influence in their correspondence. Constance's understanding of her husband's work, including his photography, was conversational, and her role was to be minimal. It would be an overstatement to call her a photographer.
Completing his article on colored flames in 1826, Talbot had explained to Herschel, that "as I am not acquainted with Dr Brewster perhaps you will have the kindness to transmit it." The relationship between Talbot and Sir David Brewster obviously flourished, for, judging by the surviving correspondence, Brewster and Talbot were in regular contact at least by 1833 and were good friends by 1836. They shared interests in light and perhaps some personality traits as well. Brewster; as influential as he was, struck many as an abrasive personality. He had many admirers but few friends. Talbot was reclusive by nature but the two men hit it off very well. A letter from Constance to Lady Elisabeth written on the occasion of Sir David's visit to Lacock Abbey in August 1836, is particularly revealing of Talbot' character:
You are perfectly right in supposing Sir D. B. to pass his time pleasantly here. He wants nothing beyond the pleasure of conversing with Henry discussing their respective discoveries & various subjects connected with science. I am quite amazed to find that scarcely a momentary pause occurs in their discourse. Henry seems to possess new life - & I feel certain that were he to mix more frequently with his own friends we should never see him droop in the way which now so continually annoys us. I am inclined to think that many of his ailments are nervous - for he certainly does not look ill. I hear from Sir David that he distinguished himself at the Meeting in a conversation on the Improvement of the Telescope. ... When I see the effect produced in Henry by Sir D.B's society I feel most acutely how dull must our ordinary way of life be to a mind like his! - and yet he shuts himself up from choice.
Henry Talbot would never achieve the same levels of fame that Herschel (unwillingly!) reached. His scholarly contributions were generally less influential; much of this stemmed from the fact that he rarely took on the more general questions of the organization and role of science that Herschel approached. Unlike Herschel's minutely detailed and lengthy treatises, Talbot's journal publications tended to be very short. Frequently they reflected scientific concerns common to the day and were just as often as suggestive as they were declarative. Even so, Talbot made two fundamental contributions to science before photography was even announced. These stemmed from a growing awareness in Talbot's time of the interrelationship between forms of energy and matter. Talbot made one very practical contribution that is still in use today. In July 1834, he read a paper to the Royal Society summarizing his experiments on light: "I have lately made this branch of optics a subject of inquiry, and I have found it so rich in beautiful results as entirely to surpass my expectations." In this, Talbot revealed his discovery of the polarizing microscope; his method of placing one polarizer close to the eyepiece and another below the stage is still considered highly effective. It provides an increase in contrast between the subject and the background and is an important tool in the analysis of internal structure. Talbot applied it immediately to studying the structure of crystals.
Whereas the polarizing microscope was a discrete invention of Talbot's, his work in spectral analysis ( the analyzing of the physical makeup of substances through optical means) was more in the nature of fundamental contributions to the beginnings of an important branch of science. As Talbot was to remember in later years:
About the year 1824 or 1825, Dr. Wollaston gave one of his evening parties, to which men of science and amateurs were invited and it was the custom to exhibit scientific novelties, and to make them the subject of conversation.
On the evening in question I brought as my contribution to the meeting some very thin films of glass (such as are shown in glass-houses to visitors by a workman, who blows a portion of melted glass into a large balloon of extreme tenacity, and afterwards crushes the glass to shivers.) Such a film of glass I brought to Dr. Wollaston and his friends, and after showing that in the well-lighted apartment it displayed a uniform appearance without any markings, I removed it into another room, in which I had prepared a spirit lamp, the wick of which had been impregnated with common salt. When viewed by this light, the film of glass appeared covered with broad nearly parallel bands, which were almost black, and might be rudely compared to the skin of a zebra.
Talbot's optical 'zebra skin' in fact provided some of the earliest evidence of the presence of the lines of sodium. These bands had been discovered by Josef von Fraunhofer (the same man who was the cause of Herschel's and Talbot's first meeting). Henry Talbot's first non-mathematical journal article, his 1826 'Experiments on Coloured Flames,' was a foundation stone for spectral analysis. The following year, Herschel incorporated Talbot's findings into his treatise on light. Two types of objects can be analyzed this way. In absorbent subjects (where the effect of incident light is analyzed), important pioneering work was done by Sir David Brewster and others. In the treatment of self-luminous subjects (such as the sun), Talbot and Herschel were the pioneers. Many of their subsequent publications returned to this subject of study.
Henry Talbot, through his substantial family connections and through his own efforts, now exercised a certain amount of political influence. An excellent demonstration of this was his effective support for the establishment of a national botanic garden at Kew. Long known as 'the Royal Vegetable Patch', Kew had declined by 1838 to a most precarious position and was threatened with closure. Talbot's longtime botanical friend, Sir William Jackson Hooker (recently knighted for his botanical contributions), led the fight to establish a national collection. Agreeing that "it would be a pity indeed if Kew Gardens were to be sacrificed to a pitiful & false economy," Talbot persuaded his influential relatives to take up the cause. He met with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, determined that petitions to Parliament from learned societies would have great weight, and proposed to the Council of the Linnean Society that they present a petition to the House of Commons. His idea was accepted unanimously. By May, Talbot could report to Hooker that the Chancellor of the Exchequer "spoke confidently to me last night that something satisfactory would be done about Kew Garden. ..." Although he was leaving town and could be of no further assistance, "I trust that it is put into a right train, & will issue favourably." This support was perhaps Talbot's greatest and most effective contribution to the politics of science. Kew was saved and revitalized that year; in 1841, Hooker became its new director.
When considering the dynamics of the beginnings of photography, to paint Talbot as being junior to Herschel, as is often done, is terribly misleading. No one was like Herschel and only a few even approached his status.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="61">Instead of focusing just on how her sympathy feels, she remains interested in understanding what provokes it, what responses it provokes in others, how it reflects childhood experience. Somewhere along the way, however, she finds that she takes great pleasure in contemplating (if rather coolly) the fact of her feeling sympathy when she does; there is something exactly right about it, she finds, that makes it worth appreciating apart from its mere psychological significance or effect on others: like a dancer's gesture or a poet's turn of phrase, it is, somehow, satisfying to behold. Or perhaps the response itself is nothing special; it becomes interesting only through beholding it as Bullough's aesthete beholds the fog at sea: she neither anxiously interrogates it for clues about her psychological health or her moral worth, nor is she so detached that she is indifferent to it altogether. Instead, she has learned how to contemplate, with appreciation and from the 'proper psychical distance,' the mere fact of it. This, too, counts as an aesthetic meta-response.
No doubt, there is something vaguely troubling about routinely aestheticizing one's feelings. But even more troubling is the habit of aestheticizing feelings that play a central role in our moral lives.
IV
Feagin's failure to note the aesthetic character of some of our meta-responses underlies a further important difference between our views. She thinks such responses are a good thing, from a moral point of view, while I am not convinced they are. I am skeptical in part because the aesthetic and moral points of view often conflict; and when they do, the aesthetic often triumphs, if in unexpected and subtle ways.
The extent and obviousness of the conflict vary, as do the ways we resolve it. Formalist purists go far enough when they proclaim, with Clive Bell, that while content may or may not be harmful to aesthetic experience, always it is irrelevant. Formalists of this sort pay attention only to the look or sound or structure of things; moral concerns, like content, are beside the point. But one can go further. Consider the Futurists, whose sensibility echoes in confused and disturbing ways through contemporary culture. One Futurist goal seems to be to reject morality altogether by aestheticizing (rather than ignoring) just those aspects of a situation which would ordinarily be most appalling:
We will glorify war ... militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchist, the beautiful Ideas which kill .... Art can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice.
Of course, most of us are even less likely to be Futurists than formalist purists. If we would feel uneasy ignoring moral content for the sake of aesthetic satisfaction, we would be outraged at the glorification of immorality, in life or art. But compromises, especially confusing ones, can be struck.
One sort of compromise involves a kind of response that, unlike the formalist's, attends to morally compelling content, but not for the Futurist purpose of rejecting morality. This seems a step in the right direction; paying attention to a work's morally compelling content seems to be an improvement, from a moral point of view, over ignoring it. But, as we have seen, Danto worries that when we confront a work of art, we respond aesthetically even to morally compelling content. And this is wrong, for Danto, because representations of human misery demand moral rather than aesthetic response. Indeed, one might even argue that aestheticizing what we should respond to morally may be worse than ignoring it as the formalist does.
I do not doubt that the sort of response Danto describes sometimes occurs. But just as Bell's formalism fails as a descriptive theory by ignoring audiences' widespread concern with content, Danto's view fails to recognize how fictional portrayals of human misfortune may engage most people's moral responses. Danto seems to imply that even if one writes a play for the sake of making a moral difference, the project is doomed from the start; injustice, as soon as it becomes the subject of the play, is put "at a distance which is exactly wrong from a moral perspective." However, if my analysis is correct, we may, after all, have our moral cake and the aesthetic pleasure of eating it, too: We respond to the injustice morally rather than aesthetically, but then diminish the moral significance of this first-order moral response by aestheticizing it.
Something like this may be going on with Alice Walker's character. That the sight of the black woman is for her a weepy miracle suggests not the austere ecstasy that some formalists talk about, but a pleasure that is born, however inappropriately, of moral sentiments, in particular those of a white liberal woman confronting a poor black woman. Here, though, the character knows it is wrong to treat black people as art, as a means to those weepy but enjoyable sentiments. So the character falls somewhat short of a full-blown aesthetic meta-response: her guilt keeps her from fully enjoying her sensations, let alone from contemplating how fine they are.
V
So what exactly is wrong with aesthetic meta-responses to tragedy? To answer this question, we must look more closely still at what counts as such a meta-response, and we must talk about the moral significance of sympathy itself. We must also consider whether such responses, even if inappropriate in 'real life', are unobjectionable in our experience of fiction. The best way into this labyrinth is through a more thorough look at Feagin's view.
That Feagin doesn't consider the possibility of aesthetic meta-responses may make it easier for her to sing their moral praises. Given the tension between the aesthetic and the moral points of view, it may be easier to exonerate morally, if not celebrate, the pleasures we take in tragedy if we do not understand these pleasures to be aesthetic ones. Indeed, Feagin avoids the traditional notion of the aesthetic altogether. When she talks about aesthetic response and aesthetic pleasure, she is simply using 'aesthetic' as a synonym for 'artistic'; she is not using the language of aesthetic-response theorists. At one point she even implies that differentiating between direct and meta-responses to art may allow us to avoid talk about aesthetic response altogether. Nevertheless, some of what Feagin says about these meta-responses seems to indicate that she has aesthetic ones in mind. This, we shall see, makes it easier to question their moral credentials.
Why does Feagin find meta-response to tragedy praiseworthy? First, she claims that the sympathy we enjoy when we respond to tragedy also underlies our capacity for moral action. But does this establish its special moral status? Here I think we must inquire further into the grounds of our pleasure. One might say, "I am glad I can sympathize; sympathy helps me to be a better person, to care about others, to do what needs to be done. Helping others is important, and sympathy is part of this, if not a means to this end." Insofar as we sincerely give this sort of explanation, our meta-response is a moral rather than an aesthetic one. Furthermore, it seems more natural here to talk about valuing or appreciating one's capacity to be moved by the suffering of others than about taking pleasure in or enjoying the feeling of being moved. The latter sort of language, which suggests that we savor a feeling in abstraction from a larger moral context, as we would the look of a painting or the sound of a symphony, seems to be a paradigmatic case of the sort of quasi-perceptual aesthetic meta-response I discuss above.
To be fair, I should note that Feagin does once use the word 'satisfaction.' But elsewhere her emphasis is different. Consider how she explains the moral difference between taking pleasure in one's reaction to fictional suffering and taking pleasure in one's reaction to the real thing. When we sympathize with merely fictional suffering, Feagin points out, our enjoyment of our reaction does not have the price of other's pain:
In real life, the importance of human compassion is easily overshadowed by the pain of human suffering. It is not possible in real life to respond to the importance of human sympathy as a distinct phenomenon, since that sympathy depends on, one might even say 'feeds on,' human misery. It is not, in life, an unequivocal good. In art, however, one experiences real sympathy without there having been real suffering, and this is why it is appropriate to feel pleasure at our sympathetic responses to a work of art, whereas it is not appropriate to feel pleasure at our sympathetic responses in reality. There the sympathy comes at too great a cost.
This may be true enough. But here, again, the enjoyment of our sympathy seems to be an end in itself, far removed from its moral context - especially any connection to the practical action sympathy often motivates in the real world. Indeed, given that Feagin is talking about the moral significance of our meta-response, it is odd that she doesn't say more here about the connection between sympathy and action, if only to strengthen her case by pointing out that we need not worry about rescuing a fictional victim. On the other hand, if a concern with acting, when we can and as we should, does not somehow figure into our meta-response, how morally significant can it be?
Another sign that Feagin has in mind an aesthetic meta-response is her admission that this pleasurable meta-response would be morally inappropriate in a real situation. But unless she means an aesthetic meta-response, there would be no moral impropriety; after all, if our meta-response reflects only a concern with doing the right thing, there would be nothing wrong in saying, for example, "I'm glad I could sympathize with her; it made her feel less alone," or even "I'm glad that after all I've been through I can still feel for people." We need not regard another's pain as a means to a self-congratulatory, narcissistic end; rather, through our feelings we may come to understand and ease another's pain and, perhaps, become better people. But this means just that not all meta-responses to sympathy are aesthetic ones, and that the moral (as opposed to the aesthetic) significance of sympathy does not rest in its being valued as an end in itself.
Determining the moral status of sympathy is, of course, an old and thorny problem. J.S. Mill complained that some of his contemporaries regarded the sympathies as "necessary evils, required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate." Such a view certainly is too harsh. But surely the moral significance of sympathy emerges as part of a larger moral picture, including a commitment to understanding those with whom one sympathizes and to acting when appropriate. Without such connections, the feeling of being at one with humankind seems, from a moral point of view, neither here nor there. If a world of purely rational Kantian agents, completely dutiful and completely unfeeling, is a grim prospect, a world of sensitive souls so involved in sympathy that they are distracted from or uninterested in understanding and acting on the situation at hand may be even worse.
Indeed, in the nineteenth century, obsession with sympathy drew criticism on just these grounds. Historian Walter Houghton puts it this way: the cult of benevolence, typified by Dickens and Eliot, "took a new direction in the nineteenth century when the misery of the industrial workers became sufficiently apparent to demand redress - and all the more so because it constituted a threat to social order. If one solution proposed [by Carlyle and Arnold] was a more earnest sense of social duty, another lay in quickening the moral sensibility to an acute sympathy for suffering humanity." Such a sensibility, however, may care more for sentiment than for understanding and eliminating the conditions that give rise to it. Houghton sees this tendency culminating in the aestheticism of Walter Pater, for whom morality was "all sympathy," contemplation the end of life, and the job of the artist to disengage our thoughts from life and fix them, "with appropriate emotions, 'on the great and universal passions of men.'"
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Nevinson's Elegy: Paths of Glory
CHARLES E. DOHERTY
Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946) was among the first British artists to witness the horrors of the First World War. A volunteer ambulance driver on the western front, Nevinson observed the suffering and carnage resulting from the new trench warfare in the winter of 1914-15. He returned to the front in 1917 as a member of the British government's official war-artists' program. For the program Nevinson produced a controversial painting, Paths of Glory (fig. 1), that was banned from his one-person show at the Leicester Galleries, London, in March 1918. The exhibition took place at a time during the war when morale seemed at its lowest, and the government supposedly censored the painting because it portrayed dead British soldiers. Since other contemporaneous paintings and photographs of Allied and enemy war dead were shown in London galleries and reproduced in the British press, the reason for the censorship of Nevinson's Paths of Glory demands further investigation.
Nevinson was the son of two eminent figures in British society, the Manchester Guardian war correspondent Henry Woodd Nevison (1856-1914) and the suffragist writer Margaret Wynne Nevinson (1860?-1932). The progressive Nevinson household became involved in Futurist activities during F.T. Marinetti's prewar visits to London. The younger Nevinson joined forces with Marinetti to write the only English Futurist manifesto, 'Vital English Art,' published in the Observer on June 7, 1914. Although stopping short of the warmongering rhetoric of earlier Italian manifestos, the English proclamation, like its Italian counterparts, urged that society be cleansed of her ills, her tired platitudes, and long-worshiped traditions and extolled the virtues of sport, adventure , and the heroic instinct of discovery.
A quest for adventure may have drawn Nevinson to the Friend's Ambulance Service, a group of Quaker volunteers who risked their lives tending the injured and dying in Flanders. Following his arrival in Dunkirk on November 13, 1914, he observed death on a daily basis; on one occasion his ambulance was blown up. His personal experience of the grisly results of aerial bombardment and automatic weaponry proved advantageous in producing early, innovative, modern images of the war.
When the fatigued Nevinson returned to London on January 30, 1915, suffering from rheumatic fever, one newspaper reporter stated that the Futurist artist was a victim of neurasthenia, or shell shock. Nevinson denied the accusation, calling the war "a violent incentive to Futurism" and proclaiming, in a quotation borrowed from Italian Futurist manifestos: "There is no beauty except in strife, no master-piece without aggressiveness." H. W. Nevinson's journal entry of October 25, 1914, however, indicates that his son was interested, even prior to visiting the front, in distancing himself from the Futurist movement.
Following a period of convalescence, Nevinson enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps and served as an orderly in a London military hospital. He was invalided out in late 1915, due to recurring rheumatic fever. During 1915 and 1916, he produced Cubofuturist portrayals of fighting men, exploding shells, and destroyed landscape. One early image, Returning to the Trenches (fig. 2), of 1914?-15, captures the buoyant mood of marching French soldiers, equipped with kits and bayonets. Their feet barely touch the ground as they move in synchronized formation toward the front.
This oil on canvas, along with Nevinson's other representations of marching men, is sometimes associated with Vorticism, the short-lived British abstract-art movement. Although a woodcut version of it, titled On the Way to the Trenches, was reproduced in the second issue of Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist publication Blast, the painted version, in its emphasis on simultaneity, lines of force, and fractured planes of colour, derives its abstract qualities more from Futurism than Vorticism.
Expressing none of the action and vitality of war, his La Patrie (fig. 3) of 1916 anticipates the grim portrayal of war dead in Paths of Glory. Both are among the most moving British paintings of the First World War. Set in the poorly lit wooden shed that served as a casualty clearing station in the Dunkirk railyard, La Patrie depicts row upon row of casualties lying on stretchers on a straw-covered floor. The clearing station was known as 'the Shambles,' and Nevinson later described the blood, stench, typhoid, and agony in which six workers attempted to rescue more than three thousand maimed and dying men.
Despite its portrayal of grimacing faces, bloody bandages, and squalid conditions resembling those of a temporary morgue, La Patrie presented no problem for the British censoring authority. Not only was its exhibition permitted twice in 1916 (in June and September-October), it was praised by critics, reproduced in newspapers, and included in a 1917 volume of Nevinson's war images. One reviewer hailed the artist for his non-flag-waving, non-drum-beating depiction of war, while the influential P. G. Konody stated that "C. R. W. Nevinson stands alone, in England, as the painter of modern war." Thus, an image portraying the pain and suffering of Allied soldiers, which not only implied the possibility of death but questioned the invincibility of the British forces, was sanctioned by the British government in 1917.
Under the direction of the journalist and politician Charles F. G. Masterman and, later, the novelist John Buchan, the government hired artists to produce eyewitness accounts of the war after June 1916. These artists retained ownership of their work, while the Department of Information (known as the Ministry of Information after February 1918) had right of first refusal to purchase and use the art to illustrate propaganda literature. Nevinson, who departed for France and Belgium as an official war artist on July 5, 1917, was the first of the young avant-garde artists to be hired for the innovative program. He toured the British line until mid-August, returned to London, and produced more than seventy-five paintings, drawings, and prints over the following seven months.
The controversy surrounding Paths of Glory began on November 24, 1917, when Masterman asked Alfred Yockney, the former editor of the London Art Journal, who served as an advisor within the Department of Information, to show him two of Nevinson's paintings. One of these Masterman called 'Dead Men.' Five days later, the department's censor, Major A. N. Lee, voiced an objection to the one portraying dead British soldiers. Although it would not yield "military information to the enemy," he wrote to Yockney, its "subject matter raises a point of policy." Given a probable concern for public morale, he deemed it necessary to consult the War Office for their opinion, and refused to permit the work to be released.
The elder Nevinson accompanied his son to the government offices on December 4 for a meeting with Buchan, the director of information. They wished to learn more about Lee's reason for suppressing the work. They learned that two Nevinson paintings, Paths of Glory and an oil titled A Group of Soldiers (fig. 4), were considered hindrances to the war effort. The latter, a painting of four Tommies standing at ease, was suppressed because of its purportedly unflattering representation of British soldiers, who were thought to resemble mannequins or ventiloquists' dummies. On this painting Lee's decision was later overruled by Masterman, who claimed that paintings should only be censored "from a military point of view," rather than an aesthetic one. A Group of Soldiers was approved for exhibition and reproduction on December 13, 1917, and for inclusion in Nevinson's one-person show the following March, but Paths of Glory was not.
The artist did not fare as well with Lee regarding this painting. Although no details of the Nevinsons' meeting with Buchan survive, most likely they were told what Yockney was reporting to Masterman, that "representations of the dead have an ill-effect at home" and that all such paintings were "now rigidly suppressed." The painting was purchased by the government in January 1918, perhaps as a means of acquiring full control over its use and reproduction.
The brown-and-green oil on canvas depicts two dead British soldiers sprawled on a hillside littered with rifles, helmets, and barbed wire. The soldiers appear, compositionally, to recede from the lower left to the upper right of the canvas. Unlike Returning to the Trenches, in which military might is suggested by an infinitely long line of marching men, Paths of Glory portrays the human cost of war, with a recessive line implying an untold number of dead beyond the limits of the canvas. A mood of morbidity and death is heightened through use of an eerie, unnatural light that casts aqua-colored shadows across the dead soldiers and the debris that surrounds them. The small zone of background sky is transected by a skeletal web of posts and barbed wire, and appears only at the very top of the composition, conveying a sense of restriction, rather than liberation.
Scenes of inglorious death in the trenches resembling that in Nevinson's painting were commonplace along the front line that stretched from the North Sea coast of Belgium to Switzerland. Burial in a prepared grave was often an impossibility: bodies were frequently left where they fell, sometimes used as shields for trench reinforcement, as gun supports, or as guideposts. The living became accustomed to the sight of trenches "rotthen with dead," who looked "like ghastly dolls, grotesque and undignified," as the poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon described them. Nevertheless, the British government preferred that the public at home be shielded from knowledge of such images.
Paths of Glory was painted in November and December 1917, during the blackest period of Nevinson's war years, when the government was calling up discharged soldiers and previously reflected men to replenish the drastically depleted ranks at the front. Among those under review were men suffering from neurasthenia and shell shock. Entries in H. W. Nevinson's journals of the winter of 1917-18 provide proof that his son was depressed, extremely fearful of returning to the front, and a patient of the eminent British neurologist Sir Henry Head. The younger Nevinson's depression during these dark days was exacerbated by his desire to succeed in the war-artists' program, which he viewed as his only means of avoiding conscription. He had failed in an earlier attempt to emigrate from Great Britain after Parliament began debating the issue of reexamining discharged soldiers. Therefore, the idea that the Futurist sympathizer and former member of the rebel avant-garde deliberately chose to paint an alarming or potentially controversial work of art for political or personal reasons during these traumatic and difficult months is not consonant with his profound wish to remain in the good graces of government officials at the time. His other official war art, in a more representational and stylistically conservative mode than his 1914-16 innovations, also bears this out.
Nevionson's shift toward a more representational style may have been independent of his commitment to the government-sponsored art program. After the trauma and illness following his service at the front, he appears to have distanced himself from the Futurist rhetoric of 1914-15, regarded by some as having contributed to the war's madness. Moreover, this shift is in keeping with a similar move on the Continent toward more legible and orderly stylistic tendencies during the mid and late teens.
A crowd of dignitaries and luminaries from the military and art worlds, as well as invited members of society, gathered at the Leicester Galleries on March 1 to see Nevinson's exhibition and to hear an opening speech by the newly appointed minister of information, Lord Beaverbrook. Their surprise at and intrigue with one painting in a semidisguised state was recorded in the press: despite its proscription Nevinson had hung Paths of Glory and placed a piece of brown paper diagonally across it, covering the dead soldiers. Upon the paper he had written in bold letters "CENSORED."
The press photographed and reproduced the painting in its altered state (fig. 5). One reviewer concluded: "Probably no picture in the Nevinson show excites more interest and speculation than the one which is partly obscured by the 'censored' label." The issue was raised in the London Mail's column, 'Things We Want to Know,' which asked, "What is hidden by the patch?"
</doc><doc register="learned" n="63">Nonetheless, both ruler and ruled always benefit in some way - intentionally, accidentally, or indirectly - because they share some common task or purpose (Pol 1254a27-28).
That ruling and being ruled are according to nature does not mean that either is easy. What is according to nature appears to be divine insofar as it appears to be in the best state possible; but it is not "sent by the gods," or the same as fortune, because it requires effort on our part (NE 1099b9-24). Indeed, Aristotle observes, "in general, it is difficult to live together and be partners in any human activity" (Pol 1263a15-16). This observation seems to move Aristotle's notion of the household toward Arendt's interpretation - that the household is a place of toil yielding no real satisfaction. According to Aristotle, however, things brought into being through effort - nature's or man's - are the greatest and noblest of all things (NE 1099b22-24). They thus yield much pleasure, for "actions in accordance with virtue are by nature always pleasant" (1099b13-14). Furthermore, the difficulty of living together decreases to the extent that the parties recognize their common aim, a life as complete and self-sufficient as possible (Pol 1280b33-35, 1260b13, 1254a27-28).
THE AIM OF HOUSEHOLD RULE: VIRTUOUS INDIVIDUALS
In that the best household's aim is to instill unqualified moral virtue through some sort of rule, its aim appears to be indistinguishable from that of the best regime. Moreover, the aims of the best household and the best regime are alike in that they both seek to acknowledge the distinctiveness of individual human beings; according to Aristotle, diversity more than sameness gives rise to unity (Pol 1261a29-30, 22-24). Both the household and the city should promote similarity in the sense of virtue, but neither should promote homogeneity (1263b31-32). "Habits" deriving from household activities and "laws" from the regime can together make the city "one and common through education" (1263b36-40) without sacrificing diversity. Nonetheless, as noted earlier, household activities are better suited to individualized instruction and thus to acknowledgment of individuality than is public education. Cities, then, should rely more on households than on laws and public, institutions to maintain diversified excellence. The question is, what should household rule instill to achieve this diversity?
According to Aristotle, instilling moderation and judgment makes human beings virtuous without eradicating any distinctiveness other than a lack of virtue. The man and the woman of the household may exercise both moderation and judgment as well as "show who they really and inexchangeably are" by selecting and remaining with each other, managing the household, and caring for their children. Likewise, children and servants may also acquire and demonstrate moderation, judgment or understanding, and distinctiveness by the ways they conduct themselves and respond to the heads of the household. Indeed, the extent to which members of the household practice moderation and judgment is itself expressive of distinctiveness.
TEACHING MODERATION
All household members must learn to be moderate toward things and each other. The various forms of household rule can teach members moderation by revealing to them the natural ends of their natural desires (Pol 1257b19-34). For example, household management (rule over the material conditions of a household) teaches that specific things must fulfill specific needs and desires: food satiates hunger, a bed satisfies the need for sleep; money itself cannot satisfy such needs. Thus, household management teaches human beings to check their desire for money - itself an unnatural, because unfulfillable, desire. The various household relationships also teach moderation in various ways. Forming a household entails the exercise of moderation in that it requires limiting oneself to one out of many sexual partners and companions. Parenthood teaches both the parents and the children moderation. Since children's reasoning powers are not developed, parents must find the mean between arguments and force which is effective for teaching their children (Pol 1260a13-14, b6-7, 1332b10-11; NE 1179b23-29). It is because children are potentially reasoning and reasonable beings - or "free persons" - that one ought to rule them in "kingly fashion" (Pol 1259a39-b1, 1253b4, 1285b32). And children, who are not inclined to be moderate, must learn to be so if they are to live well (NE 1179b24-34). Finally, as the next chapter shows, ruling slaves teaches both the masters and the slaves moderation.
Aristotle's characterization of the ideal household as requiring the exercise of moderation contrasts with the general contemporary liberal view according to which what goes on in the household is entirely a matter for the (undefined) discretion of household members. Indeed, activities are private according to Aristotle only when the actors heed the limits established by nature.
The moderation learned in the household not only helps to sustain the household but facilitates all human engagement. Moderation is both the result of and fosters seeing what is required for living together. It is thus neither a strictly private nor a strictly public virtue, and so it - not courage - might be said to be in Aristotle's eyes the political virtue par excellence.
TEACHING JUDGMENT
In addition to moderation, the good household teaches judgment (Pol 1253a15-18). Forming a household requires judgment in that it requires choosing a good partner. Raising children involves judgment as something to be taught. Ruling servants involves judgment in trying to compensate for the servants' lack of it. What is pertinent to this inquiry, however, are the ways judgment required by the household differs from that required by the regime. One significant difference involves natural affection; another, the end each aims to realize.
According to Aristotle, the end of the city is justice, which all take to be "some sort of equality" - that is, equal things for equal persons (Pol 1282b14-21). But this definition encompasses both natural justice, the fundamental principle of which is proportionality or desert, and conventional justice, the fundamental principle of which is arithmetical equality (NE 1134a26-28, b18-19). The regime that is "by nature" - realized natural justice - is best (NE 1135a5). But since realizing natural justice in a regime presupposes many deserving human beings and the ability to detect them - that is, requires fortune and virtue to achieve (Pol 1331b21-22, 1277a1-5) - cities should aim first to realize conventional justice.
Should the household also then seek conventional or ordinary justice? In two places, Aristotle says that it should not. "Political justice seems to consist in equality and parity," "but there does not seem to be any justice between a son and his father, or a servant and his master - any more than one can speak of justice between my foot and me, or may hand, and so on for each of my limbs. For a son is, as it were, a part of his father" (MM 1194b23, 5-15). As he explains in the Nicomachean Ethics, "there can be no injustice in the unqualified sense toward what is one's own, and a chattel or a child until it reaches a certain age ... is, as it were, a part of oneself, and no one decides to harm himself. Hence there can be no injustice toward them, and therefore nothing unjust or just in the political sense. ... what is just in households ... is different from what is politically just" (1134b10-17).
By proceeding immediately to discuss natural justice, Aristotle suggests that it characterizes the household. The household appears to be even a paragon of natural justice in that inequalities within it are evident and determine who rules and who is ruled. And, as Arlene W. Saxonhouse explains, "the family, because its differences in eid<*_>unch<*/> are observable, demonstrates a unity in diversity which perhaps becomes impossible in political life. In the polis obvious differences in eid<*_>unch<*/> are absent. ... The family with its definition of differences ... attains a certainty in nature not available to the city." Or, at least, not available to most cities. In other words, it appears that the household, being a model of natural justice, is a kind of model for the best regime. Aristotle would apparently like the natural superiority holding together the (best) household to hold together the (best) city. Indeed, he may insist on the preservation of households (in all regimes) because they have the potential to exemplify perfect unity or justice and by their examples point the city toward a higher justice.
Aiming to realize natural, not conventional, justice, the good household ruler does not treat all members equally or give each a turn at ruling; rather, it is incumbent on this ruler to detect the virtues of each member and treat him or her accordingly, giving guidance or instruction when needed and freedom to make choices when deserved. The household is a compound of "unlike persons" - man, woman, servants, and children - who, moreover, have multiple functions or obligations - as husband and father, wife and household manager, son or daughter and future citizen (Pol 1277a5-8, 1253a4-14). There are thus not only manly virtues, womanly virtues, servile virtues (1277b20-23), and presumably even youthful virtues but also virtues attached to being a husband, father, wife, and child. A household thrives when each member performs his or her function, or upholds his or her obligations, in accordance with the virtues proper to doing so (NE 1098a14-15).
The variety of virtues indicates the variety of judgment in the household. Most notably, the judgment of those ruling differs from that of those being ruled, as becomes clear when we take into account the deliberative capacities of each kind of member and Aristotle's distinctions among intellectual virtues in the Nicomachean Ethics. One acquires prudence by repeatedly putting into effect good judgments about at least one's own affairs, if not the affairs of others (NE 1141b12-21, 29-1142a10). Lacking experience, the young cannot have prudence (1142a15-16). Lacking good judgment, or the ability to detect through deliberation what action to perform, and how and when to perform it, the slavish, who lack the ability to deliberate, cannot have prudence either (NE 1143a29-31, Pol 1260a12). The nonslavish adults of the household, however, having both experience and the ability to deliberate (Pol 1260a10-13), may have prudence. In fact, household management requires that they do (NE 1141b31-32). Nonetheless, the prudence of the man and the woman apparently differ. Although it is the responsibility of both to manage the household, the man should acquire possessions and the woman should oversee their use and consumption (Pol 1277b24-25). It follows that the man should acquire the household servants (Pol 1255b37-39), since they are animate possessions (1253b32), and that the woman should command them, since their function is to assist in the use of other possessions (1252b32-33, 1254a2). Moreover, Aristotle indicates in several ways that the man, at least more than the woman, should guide their children; for example, "the man rules the child" (Pol 1260a10). In addition, Aristotle assigns marital rule to both the husband and the wife; that is, spouses rule each other (Pol 1253b9-10, 1259a39-b1, 4-10). Since the man and the woman each rule over others, at least in part for the good of those others (Pol 1278b32-1279a8), each has complete moral virtue, which Aristotle calls justice and prudence (NE 1130a2-14, 1145a1-2; Pol 1260a17-18, 1277b25-26). But because each rules over different persons, they again exercise prudence differently (Pol 1260a10-12, 20-24, 1277b20-23).
In contrast to the judgment of the free adult members of the household, the judgment of children and servants is lacking. Children have only the potential for judgment and prudence; servants can only follow judgment and comply with prudence (Pol 1260a12-14, 1254b22-23).
Variety of judgment appears naturally in the household; even more, in the good household, those who rule acknowledge it. Good household rulers do not command their spouse, children, and servants in the same way (NE 1134b15-16). By way of presenting the household, then, Aristotle suggests that private judgment differs from the judgment required by most regimes in that it acknowledges differences in kinds of, and aptitude for, virtue among human beings. Moreover, in trying to promote the virtues peculiar to each member, household rulers promote individuality.
In addition to promoting individuality, private differs from public judgment in not having law to aid it (Pol 1282b1-6). Both political and household rulers must employ "knowledge and choice" (Pol 1332a31-32) to bring about, respectively, the city's and the household's excellence.
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Complementation, re-presentation, reworking of strategic elements - all of these are present in the finale. The subset center C is insistently thrust into attention by the wrong-footing opening, and at crucial articulative points the movement also reworks the Neapolitan. In fact, the finale shows remarkable new interpretative roles for C, which connect it closely in pitch or function to F-natural. The second subject of the finale, for example, has a strong Neapolitan element. In the exposition, the second subject (mm. 70-78) is in the key of B minor, so the Neapolitan pitch for that key is C. This means that C, the subset pitch of the first movement and the wrong-footing opening of the finale, now assumes a new role as the Neapolitan of B minor (Ex. 18).
Ingenuity is demonstrated on many fronts: the second subject in E minor - a recapitulatory feature - comes back in the development (m. 216), not in the recapitulation. This placement indicates not so much an exchange of function between development and recapitulation, but the interpolation of a recapitulation element in the development. In a movement where surprise and ingenuity are of the essence, this is one further instance of a technical virtuosity, with Beethoven reordering the elements of sonata and rondo design in an individual solution of dazzling skill. In the E-minor appearance of the second subject, the Neapolitan pitch is F-natural. The second subject is extended by a strongly marked four-measure phrase, dynamically highlighting F major and its dominant C. Since C major is also the Neapolitan of B minor, one could say this passage encapsulates both uses of the Neapolitan, as well as the Neapolitan and its dominant (Ex. 19).
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The most stunning use of the Neapolitan, though, comes in the coda, where it is reintegrated into E minor. Like the hammered-out dominant minor ninth in the first movement, this Neapolitan is the dramatic and structural hinge of the finale. It reworks precisely elements from the scherzo - strong dynamics and sudden dynamic change, wide registral span - but more powerfully. The extreme range of the fortissimo Neapolitan is cut off by a shocking measure's silence, then the V of E minor comes in softly. Silence, as well as the pitch and harmonic elements from the first movement, is another element in this powerful return (Ex. 20). This searing Neapolitan figure and its resolution in E minor fulfills all the functions of the Neapolitans from the beginning of the work - except one. The coda has one last card to play. In the last page of the score, one final reference to the Neapolitan appears as part of an ascending chromatic line in the first violin from E to E'. The movement finishes with three pairs of perfect cadences: the first has F-sharp - G in the upper line, so raising the F-natural to its diatonic F-sharp and resolving it to G; the second has D-sharp - E in the upper line, reversing the E - D-sharp of the opening i-V<sp_>6<sp/> at the beginning of the work; the third pair of cadences falls a fifth, B - E, reversing the space-opening gesture of the first movement. The circle is now closed.
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Drama, conflict, design - these features characterize the works of Beethoven's middle period that fall within the description of 'heroic'. To say that Mozart's elegant gracefulness or Haydn's witty equipage have vanished in the face of a more powerful musical conception sounds like a truism, but truisms are rarely the only truth. The description 'heroic' sits oddly on the shoulders of the Fourth and Pastoral Symphonies, the Piano Sonata in F, op. 54, or the C-major Razoumovsky Quartet, op. 59, no. 3, works smaller in frame , more relaxed and graceful in style than their bigger-boned neighbors. But drama and conflict, the characterizing features of the heroic concept, are central to the Eroica and Fifth Symphonies, the E minor Razoumovsky Quartet, the Waldstein and Appassionata Piano Sonatas.
The Appassionata Sonata
The nature, or rather the status, of conflict is treated differently in the Appassionata Sonata than in the other middle-period works just cited. In the Eroica and the E-minor Razoumovsky Quartet, first-subject elements are lightened and partially transformed in the finale. This reworking in turn affects the formal design of the finale where the underlying framework - respectively variation and sonata rondo - is shaped into a highly individual rescoring of the form. The Waldstein Sonata releases its first-movement intensity in the finale by a wonderfully expansive rondo. Only in the Apassionata is conflict unresolved. Conflict in the first movement is taken up in the finale and replayed in a correspondingly intense mode, but while the first-movement tonal opposition of contrasted keys is resolved, the discourse of conflict is not.
At the beginning of the first movement, two distinct elements are presented: First, the linearization of the tonic-triad F minor is followed directly by the flat supertonic G-flat major, forming the harmonic juncture i-<sp_>b<sp/>II. The second element is the modern C - D-natural - C, which is a variant of the movement's prime mordent, C - D-flat - C. Even more closely than the Eroica or the E-minor Razoumovsky Quartet, the finale of the Appassionata is a direct reworking of first-movement elements in a movement of parallel intensity, rather than a reinterpretative reworking in a lighter vein - an intentional matching of mode and material that underscores the cyclic nature of the work. Not only will first-movement elements, particularly the Neapolitan and the prime mordent, return prominently in the finale, but there will also be close parallels of formal placement and pacing between the two movements.
The developments of the two movements vividly illustrate these parallels. In both instances, conflict is central to the dramatic action of the development, with the Neapolitan its most powerful agent for engendering tension and deflecting tonal direction. In the first-movement development, the Neapolitan pitch, G-flat, appears in the context of B-flat minor at m. 115. By a rising bass motion, V-VI, the Neapolitan is then tonally reinforced in G-flat major. Immediately, it is respelled enharmonically as F-sharp, and for the first time in the movement, it rises to G in the key of C. The cumulative energy of this intensification erupts into sweeping diminished sevenths and climaxes onto hammered fortissimo D-flats - C, the latter segment of the movement's prime mordent, now magnified at its structural dominant. (Compare this emphatic segment with its bleached-bones version at the end of the recapitulation).Prolonged through the sweeping line of diminished sevenths and the structural dominant. G resolves to F only at the recapitulation (Ex. 21))
The central action of the development may be seen, therefore, as the conflict between the chromatic <sp_>b<sp/>II and the diatonic supertonic. If this description is reminiscent of the first movement of the Razoumovsky, op. 59, no. 2, what differentiates the first movement of the Appassionata is the way Beethoven locks the chromatic and diatonic supertonics in conflict, rather than allowing the diatonic supertonic to form a point of relaxation as part of the dominant harmony of F minor, so that conflict between the two supertonics is polarized, but not resolved.
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In the finale development, the Neapolitan G-flat is again at the center of conflict against G-natural. Just as in the first-movement development, G-flat appears in the context of B-flat minor, but here replays the work's other prime element, the mordent, on the Neapolitan pitch in a sharply condensed focus of the two main structural components of the outer movements. (See Exx.Ex. 22, 23.)
<O_>figures&captions<O/>
Striking parallels between the outer movements of the Appassionata demonstrated by matching formal placement of salient harmonic features and the contextual reworking of the Neapolitan. Far beyond general similarities of mood and expressive delineation, these precise parallels make viable the description of the work as cyclic form in which the finale provides a complete variant reworking of the first movement. In variation form, the variation - normatively, in classical style - exhibits the same key planning, phrase structure, harmonic progressions, and large-scale formal sections as the theme, while elaborating texture and changing register, articulation, and dynamics. The variant concept also opens up a larger dimension of formal integration for the sonata as a whole; just as prime first-movement elements are reworked (in the manner of development and variant) in the finale, so the principal elements of the slow movement are elaborated (but without development) in a set of variations. While individual variations in the slow movement are self-contained, the movement overall is not, but the end of the slow movement leads into the finale in a way comparable to the slow-movement link to the finale of the F-major Razoumovsky Quartet (F-minor, op. 57, and F-major, op. 59, no. 1; the closeness of compositional period will make such parallels of compositional procedure understandable). Yet the two transitions are different in the way the two movements are connected: the slow movement of the quartet dissolves out in a swirl of elaborate figuration that fines down onto the trill initiating the finale. At the end of the slow movement of the Appassionata, the opening theme returns, but its resolution is blurred by two hazy diminished sevenths. These same chords, hammered out thirteen times fortissimo at the beginning of the finale, shatter the serene repose and consonance of the variation movement. Dynamic rupture, though, is anchored by pitch continuity. D-flat, the pitch and key center of the slow movement, is carried through to the diminished sevenths and falls to C on the turning sixteenth-note figure which heralds the thematic statement of the finale. This juncture, D-flat - C, forming a hinge between the two movements, takes up, at a larger level, the mordent intersection D-flat - C, which is the structural hinge of the first movement.
Just as with development sections, so the recapitulation and finale coda both re-present and compress strategic elements from the first movement. The coda presents the final clash of the supertonic and wrenches it back into the constraints of F minor.
Some of the techniques discussed here with reference to important works in Beethoven's middle period were not in themselves necessarily new, nor had they originated with him. For example, the favored harmonic shift of unmediated I-ii (although not <sp_>flat<sp/>II) which Beethoven used virtually as his own style characteristic for strongly defined first-movement openings (in the Appasssionata, and the String Quartets, op. 59, no. 2, and op. 95, as examples) had been used by Haydn at the beginning of the first movement and also at the beginning of the second movement - scherzando - of his C-major String Quartet, op. 33, no. 3. Expanded dimensions and contrapuntal enrichment of development can be found in the first movement of Mozart's C-Major String Quintet, K. 515, in the first movements and finales of his G-Minor Symphony, K.550, and Jupiter Symphony, K. 551. What is new in Beethoven's middle period is the consistently expanded formal framework as distinct from individual instances; the versatility and daring with which he rearranges the modules of formal entities, yet retains their underlying coherence and sense of internal logic; and the use of strategic pitches as axial centers around which a movement is built and from which it diverges by contextual reinterpretation into new and surprising key areas to form, frequently, the structural hinge of the movement.
In the middle-period works, Beethoven differentiated the four movements of the quartet and symphony by sharply defined characterization, yet, conversely, drew closer relationships between first movement and finale, binding them by similar or related mood, and even more, by the reinterpretation of prime first-movement elements in the finale. This compositional procedure produces a kind of cyclic form., but one conceptually different from Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy or from later nineteenth-century works lie Liszt's B-minor Sonata. Beethoven's expansion of dimensions, of dynamic and tempo ranges, has as its context the retention of formal design and structural principles. The strong individualization of movements is set against the concern for the organic form of the work overall. Accordingly, large-scale integration of the outer movements depends for its effect on the internal formal autonomy of each movement and its specific delineation of character and material - in the relationship of self-standing parts to a larger whole.
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5
Conclusions
SUE BRIDEHEAD: THE CASE FOR A FEMINIST READING
In his depiction of Sue, Hardy shows remarkable sensitivity to feminist issues. The novel's tragedy turns on marriage, and it is a double tragedy. This view is augmented by looking into the historical context of women's issues.
In discussing Jude in the context of Hardy's fiction as a whole, Patricia Ingham (1989) observes that over the course of his novel writing Hardy's treatment of women increasingly diverges from the traditional misogynist stereotype which had been 'scientifically' justified by Herbert Spencer in his popular The Study of Sociology (1873).
Owing to the far-reaching influence of Darwin, Spencer's discourse was scientific rather than moral. Darwinism, with On the Origin of Species (1859), but more particularly with The Descent of Man (1871), gave momentum to biological determinism as it related to the female nature and role. By appealing to so-called objective laws, and adopting a tone of neutral and dispassionate observation, science sought to establish the biological link between physiology, psychology, and sociology, and to effect the ratification of the status quo - that is, to confirm the old stereotypes, and to reaffirm the disabilities of being a woman. This spurious science replaced the Bible as the underpinning of the double standard of sexual morality. Social critics used concepts of evolution to show that sexual difference was the result of adaptation to the conditions necessary for social survival. Woman's position in society was seen as the natural result of processes designed to strengthen her essential function - maternity. Spencer claimed that women had less power than men for abstract thinking because their vital energies went toward nurturing offspring. As a result, women lagged behind men in the evolutionary process, having smaller brains as well as weaker physiques. As the weaker sex, Spencer argued, women had learned to disguise their feelings, to please and persuade, and to delight in submission. Because Victorian women were not only dependent but ready to cultivate and display that dependence, a husband was their only goal. Although in the Victorian period women were often revered as being morally superior - more devout and devoted to caring for others - some writers were of the opinion that woman's reproductive capacity gave her a far more menacing nature. Havelock Ellis, in Man and Woman (1894), stated that since menstruation is disgusting, women are ashamed of it, and shame makes them deceitful. This tendency toward dishonesty is, he asserted, reinforced by the duties of maternity, and much of the education of the young, which is entrusted to women, consists of skillful lying.
Childbearing, one of the few acceptable activities for women in Victorian society, dominated women's lives. In 1900 a quarter of all married women in England were pregnant. Most deliveries took place at home, where the experience could be nothing but a struggle with poverty, pain, and death. Stillbirths, miscarriages, attempts at abortion, uncaring doctors, and incompetent midwives caused women to fear pregnancy. The infant death rate in 1900 was 163 per thousand, compared to 9.4 per thousand in 1985. In all, 145,000 infants died in 1900. The medical profession did not explain about or provide contraception or abortion. The condom and vaginal sponge were unreliable and in any case unavailable to most people because birth control was relatively costly. Among the working classes there was a flourishing trade in abortion-inducing pills.
Employment for women outside the home was effectively limited to 'women's work' - work that required nimble fingers or no great physical strength, for example, dressmaking, schoolteaching, bar keeping, assisting in a shop, doing office work, or working in domestic service. The telephone, typewriter, and bicycle widened career possibilities for women in the 1890s, but professional opportunities did not exist for women until after the First World War. Therefore the ideal woman was supported by her husband and had no independent legal existence.
The movement to change this state of affairs came to the fore in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a period during which organized labor was pressing for social and political emancipation. Throughout Europe mass socialist and working-class parties were organizing and demanding fundamental changes. A group of middle-class feminists sponsored debates and campaigned for legislation giving women access to the professions, secondary and higher education, the right to own property, and the right to vote. They crusaded against adult prostitution, the flourishing trade in child prostitution, and the protection of 'innocence' that made sexuality furtive and dismal.
By the 1890s the woman question was being widely debated in newspapers, journals, and novels. J.S. Mill had argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that the so-called disabilities of women were maintained in order to make women servants of men who feared the competition of women in the working place, and who could not tolerate living with them as equals. The most popular writer on the woman question, Grant Allen, portrayed marriage as a degrading form of slavery. In his novel, The Woman Who Did (1895), the heroine deliberately has a child with her lover whom she refuses to marry, regarding herself as a moral pioneer doomed to martyrdom.
But the whole weight of social orthodoxy brought to bear on maintaining the stereotype was deeply ingrained in the majority of women as well as men, and the women's movement was not able to reach a consensus on most of the feminist issues raised in the 1880s and 1890s. Some writers argued that promiscuity was the path to self-fulfillment; others asserted that such freedom could only come from celibacy. Another point of contention was childbearing. Was it a woman's most sacred calling? Or was it rather an aspect of her degradation? Could fulfillment come from working in the man's world? Or was the man's world a trap for women?
In spite of much debate on the fundamental place of women in society, many women maintained that there was no escape from their established role. In June 1889 more than one hundred well-known women signed their names to the 'Appeal against Female Suffrage,' which was printed in a leading journal. The appeal stated that women's direct participation in politics "is made impossible either by the disabilities of sex, or by strong formations of custom and habit resting ultimately upon physical difference, against which it is useless to contend." Among those who endorsed the appeal were Beatrice Webb, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mrs. Matthew Arnold, and Mrs. Leslie Stephen; a supplementary list of two thousand names was added two months later.
A woman might decide to escape the life marked out for her by "the inexorable laws of nature" - that is, the controlling and channelling of her sexuality into marriage - by refusing the sexual dimension of a relationship. According to Penny Boumelha, Sue Bridehead elected this option. Boumelha contends that Sue's situation is confused and confusing because Sue is not sure whether she wants love without sex or sex but not marriage. Yet one must not see her as lacking sexual feeling, Boumelha argues; rather, Sue's actions should be seen as her response to the dilemma of how to have love without "the penalty."
According to Boumelha, whether Sue denies her sexuality or risks pregnancy, she is reduced. Boumelha says that the tragedy is not brought on by her frigidity but by motherhood: "It is motherhood - her own humiliation by the respectable wives who hound her and Jude from their work, Little Father Time's taunting by his schoolmates - that convinces her that 'the world and its ways have a certain worth,' and so begins her collapse into 'enslavement to forms'" (Boumelha, 148). Hardy, Boumelha observes, is alone among writers of stature in drawing attention to motherhood's role in confining women within the nuclear family. Sue's sexuality destroys her, whereas Arabella's, by contrast, helps her survive. Both reject their husbands, take up with other men, sublimate their sexuality into religiosity, and eventually return to their husbands. Yet a crucial point that emerges from the ironic paralleling of Arabella's life with Sue's is that Arabella never plays a maternal role. Whereas Arabella is identified with sexuality and fecundity - she barters her sexuality for security, seducing Jude by flinging a pig's penis at him and pretending to hatch an egg between her breasts - Sue assumes the role of mother - to her own children as well as to Arabella's son. Thus, according to Boumelha, Hardy understands that a woman's freedom depends on remaining free of the maternal role.
Ingham (1989) argues that Hardy gradually developed his sensitivity to the woman question over the course of 25 years of novel writing. She traces the emergence of metaphors in which workingmen suffering from self-devaluation are compared to women, demonstrating that Hardy ever more insistently subverts the social ideal that a woman's self-fulfillment is rooted in self-denial. By the time Hardy wrote Jude, the workingman and woman are "two in one," twins who suffer a similar oppression. This affinity in oppression, Ingham says, is highlighted by the emphasis on Jude's and Sue's similarities. Their being cousins on Jude's mother's side, children of a family doomed by a hereditary curse, points up a sameness that is continuously stressed: by the rhyming circumstance of each taking refuge in the other's room, by Sue's actually appearing in Jude's clothes as a kind of double, and most emphatically by Phillotson's view of them as the lovers in Shelley's 'The Revolt of Islam' - transcendent beings, martyred in the cause against tyranny.
Jude comes to see himself and Sue as martyred pioneers. They are yanked "back into pre-determined forms of marriage," Boumelha notes, and this is the tragedy (Boumelha, 150). Conventional notions of sanctity and free will are exploded by the novel: neither the home nor the love relationship is a protected zone, and individual acts and intentions cannot reform society.
Boumelha claims that Hardy understood the crucial importance to women of socialized child care, that it was his expressed reason for supporting female suffrage. In his 1906 letter to the Fawcett Society he states that he hopes suffrage would tend "to break up the present pernicious conventions in respect to manners, customs, religion, illegitimacy, the stereotyped household (that it must be the unit of society), the father of a woman's child (that it is anybody's business but the woman's own), except in cases of disease or insanity" (Letters 3:238). The view that unless the institution of marriage is radically changed, women will continue to be enslaved, is also expressed in the novel. Phillotson tells Gillingham, "And yet, I don't see why the woman and the children should not be the unit without the man" (4:4). When faced with the possibility that Little Father Time may not be his child, Jude makes a statement that gives Hardy's position a sharper focus: "The beggarly question of parentage - what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care" (5:3).
I do not see Jude as a novel primarily about marriage, nor do I think of it as "the Sue story" (Boumelha, 138), as Hardy called it in a letter to Florence Henniker. Yet, Boumelha's and Ingham's arguments offer persuasive interpretations that illuminate Sue's life.
Sue's behavior is confused and confusing, which is to say her behavior indicates her self-control. Marrying Jude would invite oppression, yet loving him without marriage would invite the penalties reserved for sinners. Ambivalent, she appears to be coquettish, half inviting his advances, yet sidestepping them. "[E]picene tenderness," "boyish as a Ganymedes" (2:4) are what the love-sick man sees in her external behavior, but he has no clue about what is at issue. Sue wants to be loved, but she cannot bear to lose her freedom.
SHAME
Hardy's alternation of scenes - one on a comic plane, the other tragic; one lofty, the other low; one affirming, the other repudiating - is the novelist's method for grasping the ambiguous real world.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="66">New York, however, was the magnet that drew artists of all sorts. Space was still cheap in lower Manhattan. America's far-flung universities had little interest in recruiting experimentalists-in-residence, and the one serious exception to this rule, Black Mountain College, folded in the fifties, sending much of its teaching staff and student body to New York as well. Bohemian Manhattan was an intimate, small-scale scene: a band of outsiders easily recognizable by their dress and demeanor. Groups that later would seem diametrically opposed or at least very different - for example, the Beats and the 'New York School' of poetry - rubbed elbows amiably and frequented the same bars and jazz clubs. Being few in number, they were obliged to stick together; in Eisenhower's blandly conformist America, all weirdos were brothers until the opposite was proven. In addition, artists shared an exhilaration born of their recent liberation from Europe. The old American colonial complex - a sense of being on the periphery of things, still strong among the modernists of the 1920s - had been swept away by the triumph of abstract expressionism, by William Carlos Williams's appropriation of American speech as a basis for new poetry, and, of course, by jazz, the American art form par excellence.
Needless to say, not all artists frequented bars and jazz joints, but a remarkable number did. The abstract expressionists - Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and others - were hard drinkers and inveterate hangers-out. One of them, Larry Rivers, was also an accomplished jazz saxophonist and served as a point of intersection between the worlds of painting and jazz. The Beats also spent a lot of time in night spots. For the New York School (Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, and others), a key connection with jazz was Frank O'Hara, whose best-known poem, a poignantly oblique homage to Billie Holiday, is entitled "The Day Lady Died." Judith Malina's and Julian Beck's Living Theatre, with its mixture of raw psychodrama and dreamy pacifism, sponsored poetry readings at its headquarters on 14th Street and featured Jackie McLean and hard-bop pianist Freddie Redd in its production of Jack Gelber's play The Connection.
Almost anyone's account of the era includes both this heady mixture of scenes and the centrality of jazz as an artistic model and jazz clubs as meeting places. Ron Sukenick's Down and In: Life in the Underground, a combined study and memoir covering the period from 1945 through the eighties, describes the clientele and atmosphere at the Five Spot in the late fifties: "If the painting seemed more consciously American after 1950, the uniquely native American art form, jazz, became, through the fifties, more central than ever for underground artist of all kinds. It came together at the Five Spot, a bar on Cooper Square where the brothers Iggie and Joe Termini hosted a basically flophouse clientele until the artist started coming in during the mid-fifties. Painters like Grace Hartigan, Al Leslie; David Smith, de Kooning became habitués. Larry Rivers, the painter, played jazz there, poets read poetry to jazz, and avant-garde film makers even showed their films to jazz. Writers like Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch moved in, and finally the great jazzmen themselves came down to play - Charlie Mingus, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman."
In response to a question about which jazz musicians down-town artists and intellectuals were friendliest with, the painter Emilio Cruz (who also writes poetry and plays jazz drums) gave this description of the scene: "In the case of Jackie McLean, I would think that if he was around the Living Theatre crowd, he was friendly with Judith Malina and Julian Beck and that crowd, and a number of interesting people in that company. Also Cubby Selby; we all called him Cubby. I never knew his real name was Hubert Selby, Jr., until his book [Last Exit to Brooklyn] came out. Paul Blackburn, the poet, who was a good friend of mine, knew a lot of those people. Bob Thompson the painter, Allen Ginsberg at times, Bob Kaufman the poet, some of the Black Mountain poets. Rollins lived downtown and knew a number of artists, though he was very solitary.
"Others who were there not just because it was cool but because they had a deep interest in the music were [Amiri] Baraka and Larry Rivers. [Rivers] was a friend of Zoot Sims, Stan Getz I know he considers himself as serious a saxophone player as he does a painter. During that period I lived on Jeffferson Street, down by the river. Pepper Adams lived in that building underneath me. In fact, he was the only one in the building who had heat. He had a gas heater, so in the winter when he was on the road I was a lot colder than when he was there. Donald Byrd used to come by a lot because they had that band together at that time. Jefferson Street was south of East Broadway, maybe southeast, not that far from where the old Fulton Fish Market was. That's all changed now. I don't even know whether that street exists anymore. Ed Blackwell used to come by that building too.
"That was a period, in my life, when a lot of things were integrated. Jazz was integrated within artists' lives. A lot of people lived in lofts, and oftentimes the musicians might not have lived in lofts themselves, but they would come over there (at least on the Lower East Side) to play, to rehearse a band, so there were a lot of connections because of that. That connection would then extend what a person's capacity was, so that one person might learn more about music, another person might learn more about painting or poetry, and I knew a number of musicians who were interested in learning about all of it. Like I'm friends with Grachan Moncur III. I was his drummer last year at his workshop in New Jersey. He used to come visit my studio all the time. There was a lot of openness between various people. Herbie Lewis, the bass player, he lived around the corner. He was a neighbor of mine, so we spent a lot of time together. Miles ... I know numbers of people from the beat generation who were friends with Miles, like Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Robert Frank the photographer. So there was an integration of lots of the arts. The beat generation spent much of their lives in clubs.
"Now one of the things that it's very important to understand is that there weren't thousands of people involved in the arts in those days, so when you would walk down the street in New York City, you would look at somebody and you would recognize them instantly as an artist, and you would immediately find that you had some kind of rapport, and there's another thing. I can't speak for right now, but there was youth. Youth reaches out. There's one thing that was consistent in all the artists in New York City at that time. They were reaching out for new things, new ways of expressing themselves. They were attempting to discover new values. Those values were not necessarily ones that were supported by the society at large, so there was this that they had in common. Another thing was that there was an attempt to break down racism, and politically there was a sense of hope that America could arrive at a higher moral state. So racism was something that in that world was frowned upon."
What did jazzmean to those experimental artists who took it most seriously? Part of the answer, as Sukenick indicates, has to do with its American qualities, also underlined by Hettie Jones, author of Big Star Fallin' Mama, a study of black female vocalists from Bessie Smith to Aretha Franklin: "I think jazz was the music they [downtown bohemian types] felt closest to, the way someone feels close to music that's part of the zeitgeist. It was American. There's that whole idea that abstract expressionist art was the first truly American art movement; and those people saw themselves as an avant-garde in what they were trying to do. It was a shared feeling that they were all part of a changing American art scene."
Jazz was also influential in its improvisational freedom and structural openness, as Allen Ginsberg indicates in his description of jazz's relationship with his poem 'Howl': "In the dedication of 'Howl' I said 'spontaneous bop prosody.' And the ideal, for Kerouac, and for John Clellon Holmes and for me also, was the legend of Lester Young playing through something like sixty-nine to seventy choruses of 'Lady Be Good,' you know, mounting and mounting and building and building more and more intelligence into the improvisation as chorus after chorus went on ... riding on chorus after chorus and building and building so it was a sort of ecstatic orgasmic expostulation of music. So there was the idea of chorus after chorus building to a climax, which was the notion of part one of 'Howl,' with each verse being like a little saxophone obbligato or a little saxophone chorus, as though what I was doing was combining the long line of Christopher Smart, the eighteenth-century poet, with notions of the repeated jazz or blues chorus, till it comes to a climax, probably in the verse 'ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe.' And then there's a sort of a coda from then on."
Ginsberg also claims jazz as an important model for his work and that of his contemporaries: "The whole point of modern poetry, dance, improvisation, performance, prose even, music, was the element of improvisation and spontaneity and open form, or even a fixed form improvisation on that form, like say you have a blues chorus and you have spontaneous improvisations, so in 'Howl' or 'Kaddish' or any of the poems that have a listeny style, 'who did this, who did that, who did this,' you start out striking a note, 'who,' and then you improvise, and that's the basic form of the list poem or, in anaphora, when you return to the margins in the same phrase, 'Or ever the golden bowl be broken or the silver cord be loosed or the pitcher be broken at the fountain,' as in the Bible or as in some of Walt Whitman's catalogues or in Christopher Smart's 'Rejoice in the Lamb' poem or the surrealist example of André Breton's free union, 'my wife with the platypus's egg, my wife with the eyes of this, my wife with that and that ...'
"It [jazz] was a model for the dadaists and it was a model for the surrealists and it was a model for Kerouac and a model for me and a model for almost everybody, in the sense that it was partly a model and partly a parallel experiment in free form. The development of poetics, as well as jazz and painting, seems to be chronologically parallel, which is to say you have fixed form, which then evolves toward more free form where you get let loose from this specific repeated rhythm and improvise the rhythms even, where you don't have a fixed rhythm, as in bebop the drum became more of a soloist in it too. So you find that in painting, the early de Koonings have a motif or a theme, the woman or something like that, but it gets more and more open, less dependent on the theme, and in poetry, where you have less and less dependence on the original motifs and more and more John Ashberyesque improvisational free form flowing without even a subject matter, though I always kept a subject matter like the old funky blues myself. It was partly a parallel development within each discipline: painting, poetry, music. There were innovators who opened up the thing after Einstein, so to speak - you know, relative measure, as Williams said - which is in a sense something that happened with bebop: not the fixed measure but a relative measure.
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One indication of poetry's place in the current construction of African American critical theory is revealing. In The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., proposes a compelling way of tracing the lines of continuity among major African American texts. With consummate skill, he teaches us to read this literature through the paradigms of vernacular culture as a way of chronicling a common African American struggle for authority and voice. Taking off from Roland Barthes, Gates defines Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God as the first instance in our written tradition of a "speakerly" text - that is, a text "oriented toward imitating one of the numerous forms of oral narration to be found in classical Afro-American vernacular literature" (181). Gates's characteristic reinvention of literary theory, grounded in the language and rituals of African American culture, is insightful, yet this particular moment in his revisionary strategy raises an important concern. By slighting poetry in his newly constructed canon, Gates neglects such "speakerly" nineteenth-century texts as Paul Laurence Dunbar's seminal poem 'An Ante-bellum Sermon' (1895). Elsewhere, Gates has written instructively about Dunbar and African American poetry. His early essay 'Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent' remains crucial to our understanding of the conventions of 'dialect' and vernacular poetry. My point here is simply that his exclusion of poetry from The Signifying Monkey, given the ensuing authority of that work, reenacts what has become a familiar pattern in African American literary history. The effect of such omissions in our most influential readings of African American literature may well serve to lessen the perspective of poetry in current revisions of black critical theory and the African American canon.
In his essay 'Performing Blackness,' Kimberly Benston surmises that it may be the "relative susceptibility" of African American poetry "to discrete analyses [that] resists theoretical efforts that move toward totalization, toward recuperation and ideological closure" (184). He confronts the risks involved in theorizing about the lines of continuity between disparate poetic works only to underscore the necessity of defining the shared themes, literary forms, and rhetorical strategies that constitute a distinctive poetic tradition. In particular, he entreats us to recognize that seemingly discrete, fragmented expression - enacted as a mode of performance - characterizes African American discourse. Black utterance, like other counterdiscourses, masks its own continuity as a way of veiling its challenges to the legitimacy of dominant political institutions and cultural traditions. In theorizing about African American poetry, critics might be guided by what Richard Terdiman describes, in a different context, as the "capacity [of counterdiscourses] to situate: to relativize the authority and stability of a dominant system of utterances which cannot even countenance their existence," as a way of enacting a new realm of subjectivity (15-16). When black writers turn to African American vernacular performance, they call into question the authority of the literary conventions and racial ideologies of the dominant society. Critics should neglect neither the insistence of African American poets on challenging the authority of dominant American institutions nor the individual black poet's struggle for recuperation and wholeness. Their individual texts make up an ongoing tradition of black poetic subjectivity.
While the term performance can be applied variously to a range of cultural and literary phenomena, I use it to designate verbal performance viewed as a cultural event. In revising the boundaries of what has traditionally constituted the folklore text, recent scholars, especially Roger D. Abrahams and Richard Bauman, have reconceptualized the distinctions between textual representations and what Robert Georges calls "complex communicative events" (313). Such scholars often associate the term vernacular with the modern concept of folklore as an intricate interaction between performer and audience that relies on linguistic, paralinguistic, kinesic, and thoroughly contextual codes and conventions. This implied notion of performance has become a model for how to discuss formal literary texts. In written texts that draw on the aesthetics of vernacular performance, the relations of orality and literacy are continuous. The tensions between repetition and improvisation that operate in a verbal performance are translated into competing structures of creation and recollection for literary artists and their audiences.
Construing performance in this way, I argue that Paul Laurence Dunbar's early poem 'An Ante-bellum Sermon' is an instructive example of an African American "preacherly text." The poetic heritage to which this poem belongs stretches back at least to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sermons of African American religious leaders, even as it looks forward to the preacherly performances of James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, and Gwendolyn Brooks. In scaling what Hughes calls the "racial mountain," Dunbar's vernacular performance illustrates the solid ground of African American poetic traditions.
I
For black poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the challenge has been to establish the grounds of their literate and poetic authority without sacrificing the distinctiveness of their experiences in the New World. These poets have often relieved the disruptions resulting from different aspects of themselves by locating their work in a continuum of African American expressive culture. In their search for poetic voice, they have struggled to define their experiences as African Americans through tropes of indigenous and communal subjectivity. Many of them, including Dunbar, Hughes, Hayden, and Brooks, have made vernacular sermonic performance of their heritage a primary site of cultural authority and artistic creativity. The narratives, rhetorical strategies, and rituals of performance of the vernacular sermon have helped shape the recurring aesthetic and ideological tendencies of African American poetry. The relations of preachers and their congregations have provided these poets with a model for what Barbara Bowen has called "untroubled voice": the performance of perfect continuity between artist and audience. By performing these sermons, black poets have mended the divisions in their artistic voices and the contradictory expectations of their various audiences, thereby recovering for themselves and their communities the privileges of vernacular eloquence.
To explicate the cultural status of the vernacular sermon, I begin with the historians of the American slave - including John Blassingame, Eugene Genovese, Lawrence Levine, and Al Raboteau - who have drawn on 'folklore,' interviews, autobiographies, and various other kinds of texts to suggest that slaves were able to survive their oppression by evolving sustaining forms of cultural expression. The early black sermonic performance was one of the rituals that defined for slaves and free African Americans their participation in a unique religious fellowship. According to the available evidence, slave preachers were esteemed as exemplary figures in the black community, whether they preached in church, in the quarters, or in the fields, whether they preached out of the Bible or from the depths of their hearts. While many slaves were required to listen to white preachers, some of whom were well educated and well trained, they clearly preferred to hear black preachers deliver messages from God. As Nancy Williams, and ex-slave from Virginia, put it: "Dat ole white preachin' wasn't nothin'. Ole white preachers used to talk wid dey tongues widdout sayin' nothin' but Jesus told us slaves to talk wid our hearts" (Yetman 13).
The slave preachers did not necessarily derive their cultural authority from their ability to read or their facility in speaking standard English. Often the important issue was whether they could perform sermons that moved their congregations toward freedom. One former slave, Clara Young, told her interviewer that it did not matter that her favorite preacher, Mathew Ewing, was illiterate; what she cared about most in judging his sermons was his style and his message. "He never learned no readin' and writin'," she reminisced, "but he sure knowed his Bible and would hold his hand out and make like he was readin' and preach de purtiest preachin' you ever heard" (Yetman 335). She must have been impressed with his wit in reenacting the gestures of white preachers who read Scripture to their congregations, but not as much as she was stirred by his eloquence. Judging from his vast experience with slave congregations, the white minister Charles C. Jones could say that they were natural judges of a "good sermon," even though such a sermon might corrupt Christian theology and the English language (14-15). While recognizing that the slaves preferred to hear black preachers, he was not willing to admit that these preachers were evolving their own style of address. Jones championed the use of religion among slaves as a means of social control without ever realizing that slaves would use their religion as a way of fighting oppression.
Many black congregations expected their preachers to be vigorous, dramatic, and instructive in language, theme, and gesture. The textual accuracy of their preachers' readings of the Bible may not have been a consideration, but the dynamics of performance were essential. Even if the preachers had to create the biblical references in their sermons, their congregations demanded that they breathe life into those creation. In her Letters from New York, Lydia Maria Child, the well-known abolitionist, describes an especially dramatic sermon that Rev. Julia Pell, a black itinerant preacher, delivered to a Methodist congregation in 1841. Although the regular minister of this church felt compelled to apologize to the congregation for Pell's misquotations of Scripture, her performance must have been remarkable. Even the skeptical Lydia Child admitted that this "dusky priestess of eloquence" made her shout and cry with religious fervor (67). Child offers a rare early description of the rhythmic pacing of a black sermon, noting that Pell "began with great moderation, gradually rising in her tones, until she arrived at the shouting pitch ... [that] she sustained for an incredible time, without taking breath, and with a huskiness of effort." This rhythm of performance, and the physical effort it required, undoubtedly reinforced the effect of the sermon's thematic climax and encouraged the enthusiastic response of the congregation. The section of this climax that Child records can be transcribed as lines of poetry:
Silence in Heaven!
The Lord said to Gabriel,
bid all the angels keep silence.
Go up into the third heavens,
and tell the archangels to hush their golden harps.
Let the sea stop its roaring,
and the earth be still.
What's the matter now?
Why, man has sinned,
and who shall save him?
Let there be silence,
while God makes search for a Messiah.
Go down to the earth;
make haste, Gabriel,
and inquire if any there are worthy;
make haste, Gabriel;
and Gabriel returned and said,
No, not one.
But don't be discouraged.
Don't be discouraged, fellow sinners.
God arose in his majesty,
and he pointed to his own right hand,
and said to Gabriel,
Behold the Lion of the tribe of Judah;
he alone is worthy.
He shall redeem my people. (65)
While the members of the church congregation could not have found this conversation in their Bibles, they would have understood that the invented narrative testified to the possibility of redemption. Although Child cannot record the sound of the sermon, one can discern a pattern of rising and falling intonations and perceive the shrillness of Pell's dynamic "shouting pitch." As the black preachers tell us at the beginning of their sermons, they preach as God's instruments. Here Pell literally creates music with her voice. She provides the congregation with proof that she is one of "God's trombones."
Pell could neither read nor write, Child reports, yet this preacher's 'illiteracy' does not limit her talents as an artist. Without 'book learning,' she nonetheless reads and performs the cultural conventions of the black vernacular sermon. While societies define and use literacy differently, "literacy is always connected with power" (Pattison viii). The sermon quoted above demonstrates that Pell is literate in the rituals of African American culture, and it measures the extent to which she exploits her power as a prophet. Unable to read the Bible, Pell still knows what sermons her congregation needs to hear. Such knowledge is communal. It is shared by preacher and audience.
Knowing the tacit rules of performance, many of the blacks in Pell's audience would have recognized her skill in drawing on the conventions of delivering a vernacular sermon: the conspicuous patterns of repetition; the Old Testament imagery and diction; the allusions to the spirituals; the preacher's freedom to assume the identity of a biblical character; her dwelling on the inadequacies of language in the face of divine revelation; her own version of a biblical character's conversion, narrated through the devices of vernacular storytelling.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="68">These people are observers who contribute to the composite picture of Gary Gilmore, but they also help Mailer achieve the broad social panorama he admires in writers as different as Tolstoy and Dreiser. Indeed, Mailer has chided himself for doing so little with the secondary characters in his previous novels, a 'flaw' he hoped to correct in The Executioner's Song. Here Mailer develops virtually every 'minor' character and permits each to speak in something like his or her own voice, however much the several idioms blend into the flat, colloquial style for which the book is famous. Mailer's defense of his unadorned prose might apply to the minor characters themselves: "one's style is only a tool to use on a dig." Like the style by which we know them, the secondary characters are supposed to contribute to the book's larger formal ends.
One such end is to 'examine' the American reality exposed by the strange saga of Gary Gilmore. Joan Didion sees Mailer as capturing two crucial features of western America. The first is "that emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor." The second is an inability to direct our own lives, a failing so pervasive that all the characters seem to share in "a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death." I believe that Didion's insights are exaggerated, but they do point up suggestive connections between Gilmore and the people who surround him. Bessie Gilmore, Brenda Nicol, Vern Damico, Kathryne Baker and her daughters Nicole and April - all are 'trapped' in their futile efforts to find a life worth living. Indeed, almost every woman in the book first marries at fifteen or sixteen and eventually marries at least three or four times, and the men seem equally caught up in the fatalistic drift Didion notices. Didion does not do justice to the admirable stability of people like Brenda Nicol and Vern Damico, but the wasted lives of those around Gilmore suggest that his own fate is only an exaggerated instance of that moral emptiness Didion hears in the book's western voices.
In this respect as in others, Nicole Baker is the second most important character. Mailer has called her "a bona fide American heroine," but most readers will think she is rather the quintessential American victim. Promiscuous at eleven, institutionalized at thirteen, married at fourteen and again at fifteen, Nicole suffers three broken marriages before she is twenty. "Sex had never been new to Nicole," we are told (143), and it is more than plausible when she runs off with an older man because "she didn't care where she was going" (117-18). Yet Nicole has virtues to match her troubling irresponsibility. As Gilmore sees, she is fearless and fiercely loyal. These are the very qualities that Gilmore counts on when he manipulates her toward a suicide pact. In his many letters from jail, he pleads with Nicole not to make love with other men (350), to give up sex altogether (403-04), and to join him on the other side in death (472). At the end of book 1, he leads her toward a double suicide attempt that epitomizes both his romanticism and his selfishness, even as it climaxes Mailer's portrait of Nicole as an endearing victim. Later Nicole will be denied the 'clean' resolution of death, will emerge from yet another institution to tell Larry Schiller (and Mailer) the story of her love for Gary Gilmore, and will finally drift off to Oregon to new lovers if not a new life. Nicole's story is a familiar one among her family and friends: years of acute aimlessness followed by an utterly hopeless commitment. Surely it is no accident that Nicole comes to love Gilmore most fiercely when he is cut off from her forever. For the Nicoles of the world (and perhaps this means for all of us), there is no consummation except in an imagined future.
The stories of Nicole and the other witnesses point to one of Mailer's most crucial decisions in structuring book 1. Rather than trace Gilmore's grim history from reform school through his term in Marion, Illinois, Mailer chooses to focus on Gilmore's last months in Provo in 1976. The reasons for this no doubt include Mailer's desire to achieve greater dramatic unity and to emphasize Gilmore's 'mystery' instead of the familiar stages of American crime and punishment. But another important reason is to allow Mailer to flesh out the human context in which Gilmore plays his final role or sings his final song, as the title would have it. This context is dominated by the same hateful 'habits' that take more spectacular forms in Gilmore. Yet the human resources displayed in book 1 should not be dismissed quite so easily as Didion's formulation would suggest. Here we get example after example of human folly, western style, but also many instances of what Mailer calls "American virtue," the American's dogged determination to do his or her best in the worst of circumstances. The range of such portraits is really quite extraordinary, from Gilmore's mother, Bessie, to Brenda Nicol, to the Damicos, to the irrepressible Nicole. One of the earliest reviewers called The Executioner's Song "a remarkably compassionate work," and the truth in this judgment should remind us that, like Mailer's portrait of Gilmore, book 1 is structured to highlight the human frailties as well as the abominations of American life.
It might seem that book 2 offers a less sympathetic, more satirical history of Gilmore's last months. The very title of part 1, "In the Reign of Good King Boaz," signals a new kind of irony. Here lawyers and the press are omnipresent and one eighty-two-page section, 'Exclusive Rights,' is devoted to virtually nothing but Larry Schiller's and David Susskind's efforts to corner the Gilmore market, so to speak, by securing exclusive rights to his story. Packs of reporters are everywhere, confirming Mailer's worst fears about press. The many lawyers introduced are often distinguished by one bizarre detail or another, as when Earl Dorius, Utah's assistant attorney general, is excited at the prospect of an execution and proceeds to work himself into a near breakdown to ensure that the state of Utah gets its execution on 17 January 1977 (500), or when Dennis Boaz, Gilmore's second lawyer, supports his client's desire to be executed until it occurs to him that Gary would prefer to live if he could have connubial visits from Nicole (590-91), perhaps in Mexico (611)! Gilmore's final lawyers, Bob Moody and Ron Stanger, are a good deal less eccentric, but they too partake in the grim legal struggle in which the state of Utah pursues its pound of flesh, and the ACLU and other liberal groups fight stubbornly to save a man who does not want to be saved. The ironies here are obvious and may even seem undramatic. In the film version of The Executioner's Song (1982), scenarist Mailer and director Schiller chose to leave out most of the materials of book 2, as if they were less relevant than the more 'immediate' events of book 1.
My own view is that book 2 is at least as interesting as book 1, a remarkable feat when one considers that the protagonist is all but unavailable and the heroine is locked up throughout. Once again Mailer gets great mileage from his so-called minor figures, a few of whom (e.g., Boaz, Schiller, Barry Farrell) are among his most memorable characters. Of real interest for their own sake, they also provide perspective on Gilmore. For example, Gary's brother Mikal is at first reluctant to allow his brother to die and participates in legal actions to prevent it. When he finally talks with Gary, however, Mikal is won over by his brother's seriousness and depth of feeling. As they part, Gary first kisses Mikal, then utters perhaps the most haunting words in this very long book: "See you in the darkness" (840). A cellmate of Gilmore's named Gibbs also effectively testifies on Gary's behalf. A police informer, Gibbs refers to Gilmore as the most courageous convict he has ever been (759). And Gilmore's relatives, especially Vern Damico and Toni Gurney, find themselves moving ever closer to Gilmore as he approaches death. Toni's relationship with Gilmore is especially moving. She first visits him the day before he is to be executed and is overwhelmed by his gentle affection (874-75). Later that day, after her own birthday party, she returns to the party Gilmore has been permitted at the prison and again experiences Gary's new warmth (884-86). Toni is sufficiently moved to try to attend Gary's execution (929). This sequence blends with many other small but affecting moments to verify the change in Gilmore that is sensed by many people during his final weeks.
Mailer uses Barry Farrell and Larry Schiller to temper the more sentimental implications of book 2, but ultimately these veteran journalists also testify to Gilmore's surprising depth. The title of book 2, "Eastern Voices," seems to refer to all those safely established in the social system, whether in the East or the West: lawyers, reporters, producers, assistant attorney generals, and so on. Farrell and Schiller are such voices. Each brings a heavy load of urban skepticism to the Gilmore assignment, hating Salt Lake City, as Farrell does, and believing there is no 'center' to this story, nothing of real human resonance (577). When both men come to see Gilmore in a very different light, Mailer is able to bring his book to a genuine climax.
Farrell is at first confident that nothing sets Gilmore apart but his willingness to die. If Gilmore is not executed, Farrell suggests, he will become indistinguishable from the hundreds of others condemned to die but never executed (611). As he works with Gilmore's responses to hundreds of questions, however, Farrell notices that Gilmore "was now setting out to present the particular view of himself he wanted people to keep" (711). Later Farrell responds profoundly to Gilmore's tapes: "Barry was crying and laughing and felt half triumphant that the man could talk with such clarity" (804). Farrell still believes that Gilmore "had a total contempt for life" (805), but this makes it all the more impressive when Gilmore responds so "humanely" to the massive attention of his last months (805). Farrell is stunned at Gilmore's apparent complexity. In the transcripts Farrell spots "twenty-seven poses," twenty-seven different Gilmores ("racist Gary and Country-and-Western Gary, artist manqué Gary, macho Gary," 806). Farrell begins to pursue the single Gary who presumably stands behind these multiple poses, but he is "seized with depression at how few were the answers" to his inquiry (811). There is an "evil genius" in Gilmore's planning Nicole's suicide, but much else in Gilmore's life suggests sheer ignorance (812); Gilmore's relations with Bessie, his mother, seem a potential key, but the answers to many related questions provide no "hope of a breakthrough" (827; see 844). Continuing to ponder Gilmore's transcripts just before the execution, Farrell turns to yet another possible solution to the Gilmore mystery: Gilmore's fascination with small children. But this 'answer' is also unsatisfactory: "It was too insubstantial. In fact, it was sheer speculation .... beware of understanding the man too quickly!" (855). Beware indeed. Farrell's final comment on Gilmore takes us back to the passage from André Gide ("Please do not understand me too quickly") that Mailer first used as his epigraph to The Deer Park (1955). Farrell's conclusion should caution us against reductive readings, psychological efforts to pluck out Gilmore's mystery. Indeed, Gilmore's complexity should impress us as much as it does Farrell, whose prolonged efforts to understand Gilmore are akin to Mailer's.
Larry Schiller's role is in part like Farrell's. Schiller also looks for the human side to Gilmore, the "sympathetic character" buried inside the cold-blooded killer (629), for Schiller cannot imagine making a successful book or film unless he first makes this discovery.
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1.1 PEX and PEXlib
PEX is the 3D extension to X. It adds over 200 X protocol requests for defining and displaying 3D pictures. PEX provides all the common features found in most modern 3D graphics systems, but provides them in a way that's seamlessly integrated with X.
The PEX graphics model is very unlike the 2D graphics model of basic X. With PEX you can define objects in convenient coordinate systems, rotate and move them with modeling transforms, view them from different angles, and create lit and shaded scenes.
1.1.1 The PEX Protocol
As most X programmers know, the underlying mechanism of X is the X protocol. While most of us think of X as consisting of Xlib, which generates X protocol, and the X server, which interprets X protocol, the essence of X is really the protocol itself. It is what defines X and allows it to be interoperable.
PEX is an extension to the X protocol. Like the X protocol, PEX protocol travels between the client - the application program - and the X server (see Figure 1-1). The server contains the PEX server extension, which receives and interprets the PEX protocol and executes the PEX requests. As always in X, the client and server can be on the same machine or on different machines.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Although PEX is defined as a protocol, it specifies a highly capable graphics system. This system and how you use it is what this book is all about.
1.1.2 PEXlib
Just as applications use Xlib to create and send X protocol, so, too, they use PEXlib to create and send PEX protocol. Xlib and PEXlib act as the application's agent, formatting and sending requests to carry out the application's will. You do not need to know PEX protocol to use PEXlib. You need only to understand the PEX capabilities and PEXlib functions.
Figure 1-1 shows the relationships between an application, Xlib, PEXlib, and the X server. The application sits above Xlib and PEXlib. It calls Xlib for the usual window management tasks, such as making server connections and creating windows, and calls PEXlib to draw 3D images. The X and PEX requests travel to the server intermixed on the same communication channel. The request dispatcher in the server routes the X requests to the server's core, and sends the PEX requests to the PEX extension. If other extensions are being used, then requests for them, too, are intermixed with the X and PEX requests; the server's dispatcher routes them to the correct portion of the server.
In our descriptions of PEX and PEXlib, we'll refer mostly to PEX, because that's really the system that's providing the 3D functionality. We'll use PEXlib only when we mean specifically the PEXlib interface to PEX.
1.1.3 What's In the Name? Only History
PEX is an acronym for 'PHIGS Extension to X.' This implies that the purpose of PEX is to support PHIGS, a popular 3D graphics standard (§1.4). But while PEX does indeed support PHIGS and has had much of its definition taken from PHIGS, PEX goes beyond PHIGS in its functionality. The name, at this point, is merely historical, indicating where PEX had its origins, but not where it is today.
1.1.4 How Do I Know if I Have PEX?
You can determine whether a server has a PEX extension by invoking the xdpyinfo command and searching its output for the string 'X3D-PEX'.
% xdpyinfo | grep X3D-PEX
The R5 sample sever from the M.I.T. X Consortium includes a PEX extension (§1.5).
1.2 PEXlib as a Graphics Library
Putting aside PEXlib's role as an X extension, you can look at it as simply another 3D graphics library, one that meshes smoothly with X. Graphics libraries sit between the application and the display device, manipulating the device in response to application commands. Graphics libraries can be low-level or high-level (see Figure 1-2). Low-level libraries typically provide commands for manipulating pixels, device registers, and other features of the display hardware. High-level libraries deal in abstractions like geometric objects and color. They hide low-level and hardware-dependent details.
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1.2.1 PEXlib Is a High-level Library
PEXlib is a high-level graphics library. It allows a programmer to describe a graphic image in terms of familiar objects and attributes, without having to deal with the details of producing that image in a window. PEXlib lets a user say, Draw a wide red line from this point to that point, without requiring her to figure out which pixels to turn on and how to make them look red. All the details of producing the picture are handled by the PEX server. The user merely specifies the geometry, the location, and some appearance attributes for the objects.
This convenience extends to objects more complex than lines and attributes more subtle than color. Say an application wants a picture of a room full of furniture. PEX lets the user describe where the walls of the room are, the shape, location and color of the furniture, what types of lights are on and their locations, and where the viewer is. It then figures out how the room looks to that viewer - which parts are bright or dim, how the aim of the lights varies the color across the walls and upholstery - and sets the pixels on the screen to the values required by the picture (see Figure 1-3). PEX frees the programmer to compose a picture and not worry about the details of producing it.
PEX provides a set of familiar graphics objects called primitives, each with attributes that control its location, orientation, color, and appearance. You can define simple models or complex scenes with these primitives. Multiple views of the same objects can be displayed. You can even animate a scene by setting it in motion.
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1.2.2 Displaying a Picture
PEX gives you two ways to draw a picture: 1) Pass all the primitives in the scene to PEXlib one by one and have PEX display them immediately. 2) Store the primitives in a graphics database, then tell PEX to display the database. In the first method, commonly called immediate mode, you must send all the primitives to PEX each time you want to change or redisplay the picture; once PEX draws the primitives, it forgets about them. In the second method, called structure mode, you need not re-send the primitives for each redisplay, but merely tell PEX to redisplay the stored data-base. You can selectively edit the database between redisplays, changing only those parts of the picture that should be different in each scene. The primitives and their attributes are stored in the database in containers called structures.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both these methods. Most applications are suited to one or the other. Immediate mode is best for applications that must continuously re-specify the complete images, such as animated simulation programs that display different geometry with each frame. Structure mode is best for programs such as computer-aided design programs that create a graphics model and edit portions of it frequently or view it in different ways.
It's also possible to mix both immediate mode and structure mode. You can store the static or infrequently changed parts of your model in structures, and draw the other parts using immediate mode.
1.2.3 Limitations of PEX
PEX has some limitations. It does not do ray tracing or radiosity. It doesn't compute shadows or follow light as it bounces from one object to another. It does not yet provide texture mapping, so you can't tell it to accurately display your marble table. And motion blur and realistic fog would be tough to do with PEX.
PEX implementations can extend PEX functionality, so some PEX implementations may indeed calculate shadows or perform texture mapping; but they'll do it in an implementation-dependent way that may not be the way it's done in other implementations.
PEX implementations may have other limits. Most restrict the number of light sources you can use (although often to a high number), some don't do depth cueing, and some provide only flat or Gouraud shading. Most PEX implementations do provide the majority of the PEX functionality, however, and offer a powerful, useful, and portable set of graphics capabilities, even though they don't support all PEX features. PEXlib provides functions for determining which features a PEX server extension does support.
1.3 Overview of PEXlib
Table 1-1 shows you what's in PEX. It lists the major PEX features and tells you where in this book we've put their primary description. Examples of using the features are throughout the book. See the Index to find the location of specific examples.
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1.4 The Relationship between PEX and PHIGS
PEX owes much of its origin to PHIGS. PHIGS [14] is a 3D graphics standard sanctioned by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). It's been available since 1988, and is used by many graphics applications. A primary goal of PEX is to support PHIGS in the X environment, although that is not its only goal.
To an application, PHIGS serves much the same purpose as PEXlib, sitting between the application and the server, as shown in Figure 1-4. In the X environment, PHIGS sends PEX protocol to the X server to carry out the PHIGS functions.
With the birth of PEXlib, PHIGS implementations can themselves use PEXlib to format and send the PEX requests.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Most of the PEX requests were designed to support the identical functionality in PHIGS. Consequently, PEXlib and PHIGS use the same graphics primitives and attributes, and share the same model for defining a scene and rendering it. But PEXlib goes beyond PHIGS, providing immediate-mode rendering and better integration with X.
Because the PHIGS standard was defined before X was popular, it has no knowledge of X, specifically, the role of X in controlling the display and input devices and the aim of X to be 'policy free.' PHIGS defines its own ways to control the screen and the available input devices. It defines a central graphics database rather than a distributed one, and makes several of the decisions that a policy-free interface would leave to the application. Therefore it's not well suited as an extension to Xlib. PHIGS can be implemented so that it's well-integrated within X, but parts of it would have to be redefined to serve as an extension to Xlib - a nearly impossible task now that PHIGS is an approved standard and in wide use.
PEX and PEXlib are the results of a fresh start on a 3D interface for X. While accommodating and building on PHIGS, they begin with the assumption that 3D graphics should be an integral part of the window system. PEXlib uses the existing X mechanisms: the communication channel, protocol requests and replies, the X event queue, and error events. It avoids specifying policy, and instead provides the functions needed by the application to execute its own policy. By providing an immediate-mode capability, PEX meets the needs of more graphics applications than PHIGS.
1.5 Where to Get PEX and PEXlib
PEX server extensions are available from most major workstation vendors, as well as the M.I.T. X Consortium. PEXlib, too, is available from these same sources.
The PEX and PEXlib products provided by workstation vendors are usually highly optimized for the vendor's computer and display devices. These implementations typically provide the best possible performance for those devices. Some vendors require you to buy their graphics accelerator hardware to get reasonable or high performance, however.
The X Consortium's PEX implementation is known as the sample implementation, or simply, the PEX-SI. As of late 1992, the PEX-SI does not support some high-level PEX features, such as shading and hidden line and hidden surface removal. It also does not provide the highest possible performance on many display devices. Nevertheless, it's a reliable and useful implementation, and provides a good basis for learning PEX and a good starting point for building more complete implementations.
There is only a C interface for PEXlib. We have not heard of an effort to define a FORTRAN binding or any other interface.
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Enhancing CRP values
By Ted Hawn and Mike Getman
Cooperative, interagency assistance to CRP contract-holders in Montana has resulted in some model acreages from the standpoint of soil erosion control and wildlife habitat development
A model Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) contract. That's how one might describe Lee Berry's land in central Montana. Berry is a landowner with an eye to the future. His 445 acres, enrolled in the CRP in 1988, now provide optimal values for soil erosion control and wildlife habitat.
Seeding the recommended mix of three wheatgrasses, alfalfa, and clover, Berry also planted nearly 24,000 feet of tree rows - more than 4,400 trees. At a county tour held during the fall of 1989, county commissioners, conservation district supervisors, and other local agency personnel saw first-hand what it takes to successfully establish CRP cover. At a stop on the Berry farm, tour delegates were duly impressed when several walked into a seven-foot-high clover and grass field resembling a willow thicket and disappeared from view. With assistance from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), three ponds were constructed and food plots were added. The diversity of habitat has resulted in phenomenal changes in the wild-life species present and their populations.
Opportunities aplenty
The 1985 farm bill's CRP has provided excellent opportunities for the management of natural resources on private land. Federal and state agencies have taken this opportunity to complement and maximize the benefits on CRP acres. Most agencies have tailored their programs to benefit the resource for which they are responsible. The Private Lands Program was created by the FWS to develop wetland habitats in conjunction with CRP with emphasis on improving waterfowl production. Improved nesting habitat on private land should aid continental duck populations, which are at record lows. Grass and legume plantings on highly erodible land provide excellent erosion control and the necessary cover for waterfowl to nest on millions of acres throughout the region.
The scarcity of water is a limiting factor for waterfowl production in Montana. The Private Lands Program emphasizes water development, and projects typically consist of restoring wetlands, repairing dams, or constructing new impoundments. Interested landowners also can receive funding to include certain grass and forb species in their seeding mixtures. This assistance, in conjunction with cost-sharing funds from the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, generally covers most of the cost of obtaining seed for these plantings.
Data collected on first-year water projects in CRP fields confirmed that ducks readily occupy newly created habitat. Waterfowl pair counts showed an average of 2.2 breeding pairs per wetland acre. This is similar to the pair counts during the Prairie Pothole region's highest production levels in the 1950s and 1960s. Production most likely will increase in the future because progeny return to the same area to nest.
Field observations also have shown increased benefits to resident wildlife. An estimated 300 pheasants wintered in a 50-acre CRP field where the diverse seed mixture provided optimal cover and food needs. An ongoing radio telemetry study has shown that white-tailed deer and mule deer have preference for and concentrate in CRP fields. Elk also have been seen using these fields, especially where sweetclover or alfalfa are planted.
More than 150 mule deer wintered in 1988-1989 on Fred Lahr's CRP fields just south of Denton, Montana, in an area where few deer were seen on annual census routes. Biologists for the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks attributed the increased wildlife populations to the excellent diversity of wheatgrasses and alfalfa on Lahr's CRP acres. Soil Conservation Service conservationists have worked closely with Lahr on his 700 CRP acres. They assisted in designing four separate shelter-belt and habitat plantings. In addition, FWS constructed three dams to provide water for wildlife.
Residual vegetation is a key factor in providing suitable nesting cover for waterfowl, upland game birds, and other ground nesting birds. For high quality nesting cover, seed mixtures include rhizomatous grasses that provide more contiguous nesting cover than does the scattered cover associated with bunchgrasses. Grass species with fibrous stalks and leaves that are resistant to flattening from winter winds and snow provide higher quality nesting cover. Forbs, such as alfalfa and clover, provide diversity for nesting cover and are preferred forage for mule deer, white-tailed deer, and elk.
The CRP acres on Pat Burton's Double B Farms also exemplify what can come of extra effort to further program goals. Burton's 1,100 CRP acres are situated in the fragile semiarid area of the rugged Missouri River Breaks and adjoining the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. Drought and grasshoppers plagued his 1987-1988 plantings, causing the seeding on about 620 acres to fail. Another factor also affected seeding establishment. Elk from the adjoining refuge sought out tender seedlings and 150 to 200 head spent part of the winter on the fields.
Working through the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks' Upland Game Enhancement Program, Burton seeded a mixture of three wheatgrasses, clover, and alfalfa. Native upland gamebirds, such as sharp-tailed and sage grouse, should benefit from the improved nesting and protective cover. Also, a number of shallow water developments will be constructed using Private Lands Program funds.
Willing landowners
Landowner attitudes toward this multi-agency approach to enhancing resource management generally have been positive. Landowners favor programs that provide an annual income, improve the equity in their land, and allow them a decisive role in management. Some landowners were hesitant at the outset. But after several projects were successfully completed and the benefits from these programs became obvious, the interest increased to the extent that it now exceeds the financial and manpower capabilities of the several agencies involved in the project.
Maximum accomplishments occur when personnel from agencies with programs to assist landowners coordinate and cooperate with each other. Landowners with specific objectives can be directed to the agency that best serves his or her needs. In many situations, a landowner's objectives can be met and funded cooperatively among agencies in a way that multiple resource benefits can occur.
Everyone gains through these cooperative ventures. Decisions are made at the local level, and the land is treated according to its suitability. Soil erosion is controlled, wildlife habitat is developed, and a healthy working relationship is established between landowners and the government agencies involved.
The pressure is on all people involved in natural resource management to be creative and flexible in managing natural resources. Through these cooperative working relationships and mutually beneficial programs, all of society wins.<*_>square<*/>
Citizens in Mason County, Illinois, have found that by working together they can deal effectively with agricultural-related threats to local drinking water supplies
Local resource planning for water quality improvement
By Dale A. Boyd
THE scene was a local coffee shop in Mason County, Illinois. Farmers were discussing a research study that showed high levels of nitrates and traces of pesticides in the local aquifer that supplies drinking water to most of the county. Nitrates exceeded the drinking water standard in 70 percent of the samples from 10 monitoring wells and in 39 percent of the samples from 14 generally deeper domestic wells. Trace levels of metribuzin; atrazine; and/or simazine, propachlor, and trifluralin were detected in groundwater samples from 10 to 13 monitoring wells located downgradient of corn and soybean fields (3). No trace levels were found in the domestic wells.
The farmers were concerned for two reasons. First, the aquifer was their supply of drinking water. Second, they were worried that if the problem persisted they would be forced to stop using chemicals vital to their farming operations.
The result of that early morning discussion was the Illinois River Sands Water Quality Project, which has been a reality in Mason County, Illinois, since the spring of 1990. The project came about because of a unique grassroots effort organized by local individuals and farm organizations to address existing and future water quality problems. It is an excellent example of local organizers working successfully with state and federal agencies to solve problems within a community.
Nationwide, 74 hydrologic-unit-area water quality projects have received funding. The Mason County project is one of two in Illinois. The activities of a group of concerned citizens and local organizational representatives known as the Water Issues Resource Planning Committee were important factors in the project's selection. Resource planning is a process that encourages individuals in a community to come together to identify and discuss mutual problems and needs and, with the help of federal and state technical advisors, develop a plan of action to address local resource concerns
The backdrop
Mason County soils include large areas of sands, the remnants of a prehistoric river bed. Water in the aquifer is held in pore spaces in a sand layer that ranges from 60 to 200 feet thick, depending upon the location in the county. The water table is high. In most places it is only 3 to 12 feet below the surface. The available, abundant supply of water has resulted in 35,000 acres of specialty crops grown annually (1) and more than 100,000 acres of irrigated fields. Combined with shallow domestic wells, conditions are such that the drinking water supply is quite susceptible to contamination by farm chemicals. According to Hallberg (2), while nonfertilizer uses, such as septic systems or manure disposal, may cause nitrate contamination in specific circumstances, regional increases in nitrate levels in shallow groundwater directly reflect increased use of nitrogen fertilizers, especially in sensitive areas, such as western Mason County.
Some families with small children have had to haul water because of high nitrate concentrations. Excessive nitrates can reduce an infant's ability to carry oxygen in its blood, causing a condition known as methemoglobenemia or 'blue baby' syndrome.
Concerned farmers approached the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) district conservationist in March 1989 to ask what the agency could do to help. SCS representatives took the case to the Mason County Soil and Water Conservation District Board, which formed the Water Issues Resource Planning Committee. That committee's first meeting was held May 24, 1989. Efforts were made to have diverse interests in the community represented. Members included individuals from local and state governmental agencies, local farm organizations, and agribusinesses. This initiative led to the area qualifying for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's water quality hydrologic-unit-area designation.
Committee members realized that, while they understood the nature of the problems in their community, they did not have the technical expertise or the financial resources to arrive at a solution by themselves. They again asked the SCS district conservationist for help. As part of the resource planning process, a technical advisory committee was formed and met for the first time in June 1989. This subcommittee of the Water Issues Resource Planning Committee included technical experts from the University of Illinois; members of local farm organizations; and representatives of federal, state, and county governmental agencies. It provides technical assistance and guidance to the local resource planning committee, which makes decisions based on technical advisory committee findings and reports.
The resource planning committee then met and discussed problems and concerns about the local aquifer. Members decided that their overall objective should be to maintain and enhance the quality of water from the aquifer. They also decided to limit the project area to the western two-thirds of the county, where more than 600 irrigation systems irrigate about 100,000 acres.
The result of this work was a resource plan. The purpose of a resource plan is to document a resource problem in an area and outline alternative solutions that can be used in addressing the problem. In this case, the resource plan was used as the basis to apply for USDA water quality hydrologic-unit-area funds.
The technical advisory committee recommended a number of practices, many related to agricultural production, that could reduce the amount of chemicals reaching the aquifer. After the planning committee chose practices from the alternatives presented, they asked SCS, the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS), and the Cooperative Extension Service (CES) to assist in developing a joint plan of work to maintain and improve the aquifer.
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Submarine Maneuver Control
By William P. Gruner and Henry E. Payne III
Submarine warfare is no longer limited to launching weapons against enemy ships, submarines, and land targets and evading enemy antisubmarine (ASW) attacks. It includes collecting intelligence information on activities near foreign shores and at sea and tracking, intercepting, and escaping from foreign submarines. To meet these challenges, U.S. submarines must be able to maneuver rapidly while engaged in their missions.
The public generally is not aware of the close encounters our submarines experience. Table 1 shows a few examples.
The need for great maneuverability in these deadly games of observe, tag, and evade is evident. To make an effective and safe maneuver in the proximity of other submarines, ships, and mines, a diving officer needs two things - precise control of his own submarine and accurate knowledge of the positions and movements of other vessels and objects. Our existing attack and ASW submarines are hampered by three major shortcomings.
Although capable of speeds in excess of 30 knots, they are unable to make small-radius turns at high speeds safely, because they become unstable.
The normally used four-man, manually operated control system lacks the rapid-response capability for directional control of an unstable submarine.
The captain of a submerged submarine has little knowledge of the precise locations of other submarines and ships in his vicinity. Consequently, he does not know how best to maneuver.
The Stability Problem. A submarine at rest has static stability. When it starts to pitch or roll, moments are generated by buoyancy and weight forces to restore it to the rest position. When propelled, it has dynamic stability if it can be made to follow a predictable path. However, pitch-yaw hydrodynamic coupling (the dreaded snap roll) causes severe stability problems when maneuvering at high speeds. Dynamic stability is a prerequisite for directional control, and directional control is a prerequisite for maneuverability. High maneuverability cannot now be achieved because directional control cannot be maintained when large rudder angles are applied at speeds in excess of 15-20 knots. Once control is lost, the submarine may be lost if the diving officer cannot regain control.
Recognition of this instability problem did not come until very powerful propulsion plants and better stream-lining made high speeds possible. The problem was high-lighted in 1954 when the experimental high-speed, battery-powered submarine USS Albacore (AGSS-569), designed with a sleek body-of-revolution hull, became operational. With a top speed greater than 30 knots, she was equipped with specially designed control surfaces and a fully automated control system that could be operated with from one to four men, with or without selected automation. Instability soon became evident. One commentator noted, "If in a melee situation, a modern high-speed sub pilot tries to turn too sharply at too high a speed, he might find himself in a snap roll, hanging from his seat belt and with a loss of several hundred feet in depth at a markedly slowed speed."
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An early lack of concern about the stability problem probably was because, until the end of World War II, very few of the world's submarines had submerged speeds in excess of ten knots. Manual control of bow and stern planes and helm by separate operators directed by a diving officer was considered adequate at normal speeds of two to six knots. If 'the bubble was lost' while increasing depth, an alert diving officer could soon regain control by backing and blowing tanks.
Later, when nuclear-powered submarines of the Skipjack (SSN-585), Sturgeon (SSN-637), and Los Angeles (SSN-688) classes - all characterized by body-of-revolution hull designs and large sails - became operational, they, too, had stability problems similar to the Albacore's. Their instability is caused by external variable forces acting on their hulls - a result of pressures exerted by the swirling masses of water that are continuously generated by the hull as it turns and drives its way through the ocean. These masses of water, termed vortices, rotate inward toward the center of the hull. The higher the submarine's speed, the more energy is imparted to them, and the greater the pressures acting on the hull.
Figure 1 is a computer simulation of vortices generated by a submarine during the mid-stage of an evasive maneuver at 24 knots with a 30° rudder angle. Note the displacements of the twin vortices as the ship progresses through the water and the effect of the sail on their location. Under the influence of the forces generated, the stern will squat down and the bow pitch up. Meanwhile, the forces will cause the submarine to sink and slow, and it will go into a snap roll unless speed is reduced by backing and the rudder put amidships.
Sample patterns of wind tunnel airflow tests, using a scale model of the Skipjack hull, are shown in Figure 2. The first pattern shows the airflow to be quite smooth when the submarine is on straight course. However, when the model is placed at significant roll and yaw angles as in the second pattern, the strong influence of the sail pulls the upper vortex out of its place along the hull and into the wake of the sail. Comparisons of such patterns at different roll angles, yaw angles, and speeds reveal dramatic variation in the oscillating flow and pressure patterns.
Full-scale submarines experience similar flow conditions when large rudder angles are applied at high speeds. Resulting unbalanced pressures on the sail, for example, can produce forces of millions of pounds, with corresponding moments great enough to rotate a submarine about its roll axis. This results from a submarine's relatively small righting moment (because of its small meta-centric height) about the roll axis.
The Directional Control Problem. When a roll begins under these conditions, a coupling of motions about the roll, pitch, and yaw axes occurs to cause a submarine to veer suddenly and radically in unexpected directions and to change depth and speed. Manual control under such conditions becomes highly difficult, if not impossible.
In discussing directional control of the Albacore, an early commanding officer stated, "It was evident that the Albacore performed significantly better without automated controls programmed by a single operator than she did with a standard four-man team of diving officer, helmsman, bow planesman, and stern planesman." He likened the submarine control problem to that of high-speed aircraft in which "designers turn to higher performance control machines to offset human limitations in sensing and reacting, a lack of uniformity of performance, and limited adaptability to performing multiple requirements simultaneously." He believed future submarines would be "flown" with automatic controls with pilot override.
Limited human capabilities - the human brain and muscular control systems operate too slowly and have other limitations - caused airplane designers to turn to higher-performance-control machines. Pilots are unable to keep pace with rapidly changing situations while faced with multiple tasks during aerial combat, low-level flying, and landing. Further, human systems, if under stress, are likely to err, function inconsistently, and freeze. The repeatability and reliability of modern computer-aided systems have made them the only choice for high-speed airplane maneuvers. For similar reasons, they are the only choice for controlling high-speed submarine maneuvers.
Despite the Albacore's favorable experience with the automatic one-man control system in the mid-1950s, the system was looked upon with suspicion. Although other work was performed to improve the controllability of submarines at high speeds, the basic four-man diving team used in low-speed submarines was applied to nuclear-powered submarines, with limited provision for a one-man control system. To minimize the risk of loss of control, maneuverability is now limited by operational procedures that constrain rudder angles to a very few degrees at speeds above about 15 knots. As another safety measure, the rudder control system prevents the application of large rudder angles at high speeds.
The Approach to Greater Submarine Control
For our submarines to achieve greater maneuverability, they must be modified through the application of current technical knowledge in control systems, hydrodynamics, human engineering, and physics. Much of this knowledge can be borrowed from aircraft and missile engineers, who were faced with stability and control problems as soon as Orville and Wilbur Wright demonstrated a capability for powered flight in 1903.
The well-known author and aeronautical engineer Nevillle Shute described the state of airplane control during World War I, when most airplanes flew at speeds of 60-130 knots. "We knew that a clumsily executed turn might have the effect of putting an aeroplane into a spinning nose-dive (a Parke's Dive, some of us called it, because Lieutenant Parke was one of the very few people who had come out of it alive). In general, a spin, once started, continued to the ground, the machine hitting very violently. And that literally, was all we knew about it."
As airplane speeds increased, it became obvious that manual flight control was no longer acceptable. It was recognized that, "human pilots were incapable of adequately compensating for the rapid changes encountered during tactical engagements, adverse weather conditions, ground-skimming flight, and other maneuvers. To make flight feasible, pilots were provided with assistance in the form of automatic flight-control systems. Such systems now are incorporated in all modern high-performance aircraft, including C-141 and C-5 transports, B-1 and B-2 bombers, and F-4, A-6, F-14, F-15, and F-16 fighters and fighter-bombers.
"Individual systems vary from aircraft to aircraft, but in general provide pitch, roll, and yaw control augmentation, autopilot modes of operation, and altitude hold. The pilot normally enters maneuvering orders by means of stick or control column and rudder pedals. Major elements of the flight-control system include control-force transducers, pressure and temperature sensors, directional gyros, accelerometers, a central air-data computer, and a flight-control computer. The latter interprets transducer input from pilot actions and other data sources, processes data, and sends commands to the various servo-actuators to assure that proper control surface and device responses are made to pilot orders within safe flight limits. Control system reliability is achieved by rigid parts selection; inspection and test at component, subassembly, and system levels; and redundancy in electronic, hydraulic, and power supply elements."
While scientists and engineers were developing systems to control supersonic aircraft, others were developing control systems for intercontinental ballistic missiles, to enable them to deliver payloads accurately and reliably to targets thousands of miles distant. At that time, submarine designers seemed content to modify two-dimensional control systems for submarines operating in a three-dimensional ocean. Since these systems do not provide the degree of maneuverability required, a new control capability must be developed - one similar to aircraft and missile control-system technology.
All bodies in motion - including submarines and air-planes - are subject to the same inviolable laws of physics. These laws govern relationships between mass, force, torque, inertia, and acceleration. One important law states that rotational acceleration about an axis is proportional to the moment applied and inversely proportional to the inertia characteristic (moment of inertia) of the body about that axis. The high energy vortices noted previously and the large sail are the main causes of the upsetting moments that cause U.S. submarines to lose control in high-speed turns. Therefore, special attention must be paid to reducing sail size and its resultant interaction with the hull vortices.
Concept for an Automatic Submarine-Control System
Because of the complexity of submarine dynamic motions, the rapidity with which upsetting moments are generated, the speed with which control forces must be applied, and the inability of humans to exercise manual control, the new control system must employ computer technology. Figure 3 presents a concept for an automatic submarine-control system composed of three major subsystems: an automatic maneuver sub-system, a pressure-sensing subsystem, and an automatic attitude-control sub-system.
The Automatic Maneuver Subsystem. This subsystem performs two major functions. First, it provides the man/machine interface by which the diving officer enters maneuver instructions and receives information. To initiate a maneuver, the diving officer specifies the required maneuver within the framework of an earth-oriented, north-referenced, three-dimensional orthogonal coordinate system. Maneuver instructions may call for a simple turn and a change in depth or for more complex maneuvers to avoid a collision or to reach a distant weapon launch position or a position offset from a moving-target track.
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Retrospective - 1992
Internal operations and relations received primary attention. The pace of labor relations activities provided a breathing spell allowing improvements to be made to the tools for dispatch, for allocations and for labor relations information retrieval. Longer range assessment forecasts were introduced at the request of the Industry, and a complete rewrite of the Tonnage Reporting and Assessment Procedures Manual was begun to provide clearer and more explicit reporting instructions for the Industry.
Labor Relations
Labor relations in the West Coast longshore industry is governed by the Joint Port Labor Relations Committees (JPLRC's), the Coast Labor Relations Committee (CLRC), the Coast Steering Committee (CSC) and the Area Sub-Steering Committees. The CSC and Sub-Steering Committees are made up of PMA member company executives, and the JPLRC's and CLRC are composed of Union representatives and the PMA member company representatives.
The meetings and activities of these Committees handle the day to day administration of the Coast contracts, and their agenda determine the direction and scope of much of PMA labor relations staff activities. The bulk of labor relations activity this past year took place at the level of the JPLRC's.
The Joint Port Labor Relations Committees process routine grievances and administer the agreement provisions locally within the various ports. These committees, composed of local Union and Employer representatives, also maintain registration lists and rosters of casual labor pools, coordinate the travel of manpower to ports with sufficient work opportunity, and facilitate the participation of the work force in the General Safety Training, Skilled Training and Drug/Alcohol Free Work Place programs. Their efforts, with the cooperation of the Union membership, have improved the dispatch of manpower, have resulted in fewer instance of labor shortages on peak work days, and have produced a reduction in the number of on-the-job injuries.
The Coast Labor Relations Committee developed a procedure for complying with the Americans' with Disabilities Act. Additionally, the CLRC handled routine matters such as processing referrals from JPLRC's seeking registration approvals and periodic updating of Low Work Opportunity Port lists and negotiated mileage allowance formulas. The Employers and the Union held preliminary discussions on the topics of computerization and new technology in the longshoring industry and the negotiation of a separate labor agreement covering rail container transfer facilities. The preliminary discussions did not result in follow-up meetings with the Union, and no new understandings were reached on either topic.
Labor policy issues concerning several member companies occupied the attention of the Coast Steering Committee. One issue involved a company's negotiating a separate agreement with the Union in violation of policy, and the agreement was eventually nullified. Two issues concerned payroll practices that created an underpayment of man-hour contributions. Both practices were corrected, and the proper man-hour contributions were collected. The Committee continued its review of new technology issues based on periodic reports and on-site visits by its Clerks' Sub-Committee.
The relatively slow pace of labor relations activity provided PMA staff with the opportunity to improve and develop new work place tools. A five-volume index of alphabetical listings of contract interpretations, arbitrators' decisions and historical references covering the period from 1934 to the present was placed into an electronic database. Labor relations personnel in each of the Area offices can now research these data by subject, date, or arbitrator's name quickly and easily.
The PMA Allocator in each of the four Areas is now using personal computer systems to perform many daily allocation functions. (The PMA Allocator accepts manpower orders from the Employers, prioritizes the orders and transmits the information to the appropriate dispatch hall. This process traditionally includes a voluminous amount of manual record keeping and data retrieval.) These systems are in varying degrees of implementation at year-end, and the goal is for computerized allocation to be fully operational soon.
Several staff members participated in labor relations and arbitration work-shops, computer user seminars, and safety and training conferences, and the four Area Managers visited the ports of Rotterdam, Felixstowe, Tilbury and Bremen/Bremerhaven in October to observe first-hand the technology and terminal operations at these ports. Institutional and structural differences in labor relations and operational procedures were explained by our hosts at ECT/Sea-Land Delta Terminal, the Port of Felixstowe, the Port of Tilbury and Bremer Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft.
Training
A record number of employees, 7,437, completed ILWU-PMA training programs. This represents a 40% increase over the previous year, and 85% of the training was Safety training. A significant number of direct employer representatives were among the trainees, and in several programs, ILWU members and company representatives attended classes together. A list of training programs showing the number of participants by program is shown on page 38.
General Safety Training
The General Safety Training (GST), described in detail in the 1991 Annual Report, targets the entire workforce over a three year period and addresses all legislated training requirements. More than 5,000 individuals have already participated in the GST program. The program underwent planned revisions designed to fine tune the curriculum, to introduce new material and to incorporate new regulatory requirements. Three successful custom videos were added, 'Personal Protective Equipment,' 'Vehicle Safety' and 'Local Area Hazards.' The popularity of this program is in large part due to the videotaped segments depicting the longshore work force engaged in their job functions in West Coast ports.
Alcohol/Drug Free Workplace Training For Supervisors and Employees
In February, the Alcohol and Drug Free Workplace (ADFWP) Training for Supervisors commenced, and more than one thousand employees have completed the training. This program is a logical extension of the nationally recognized Alcohol and Drug Recovery Program (ADRP),and it targets both labor and management supervisory personnel.
Drug and Alcohol Free Work Place Training is also incorporated into the General Safety Training.
Winch Training
A Winch Training Program was begun for members of Locals 13 and 46, and this marked the culmination of negotiations with the Maritime Administration on the use of its USNS Curtiss (T-AVB4) for ship's gear training. The Curtiss, a Ready Reserve Fleet vessel homeported in Port Hueneme, is ideally suited for 'yard and stay,' 'swinging boom' and 'jumbo' hands-on training. Rooms on board provide space for classroom instruction and rigging demonstrations. More than one hundred trainees have completed the new program since September.
Video Production
Videotaped presentations of training materials are rapidly supplanting other traditional teaching aids. Video delivers high quality, standardized, scripted training to the work force. Several new videos were added to our library this year. In addition to the three previously described in General Safety Training and the one in Alcohol/Drug Free Workplace Training, each Area contributed ideas for videos which are in various stages of completion. The Oregon Area completed work on 'Lumber Handling,' a ten minute description of handling packaged lumber. 'Marine Fork lift' is in progress in Washington, and 'Autos' and 'Lashing' are being planned in California.
Accident Prevention
The revisions to the Man-hours and Injury Incidence Rate Reports were completed this year. The new reports provide member companies with both quarterly and year to date injury/illness statistics so that they may more readily assess the progress of their individual safety programs.
The PMA Coast Accident Prevention Awards Program continued to generate considerable interest this year. Emphasis on individual achievement has resulted in increased participation as well as deserved recognition. Awards information and other statistical data for 1992 is contained on page 39.
Several staff changes occurred during the year. Larry Hudson was promoted to Area Supervisor, Oregon Area, replacing Dale Larson upon his retirement. Joe Boettcher joined the Oregon staff as an Assistant. Tony Peredo was promoted to Area Supervisor in the Washington Area, and Fred Gordon joined the staff as his Assistant.
Legal
As in the past, third-party litigation consumed the major portion of PMA legal effort this past year. NLRB charges filed by casuals against the 'permissive rule' are pending in the State of Washington and in Southern California. The Golden consent decree and its progeny required considerable attention in the federal courts in Los Angeles in litigation involving unsuccessful applicants for registration or transfer who attempted to use the decree for their own purposes. Although the Golden decree has generated considerable litigation in its ten years of life, it also has provided a generally consistent and stabilizing forum for the adjudication of issues concerning waterfront employment. PMA counsel and ILWU counsel have worked together to provide an effective defense for the parties to the collective bargaining agreement.
While a federal court action filed by several casuals in Oregon claiming so-called 'contingency list' status was pending, the Coast Arbitrator rendered a decision approving the dissolution of the list in Portland and permitting registration based upon hours of experience in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement. The federal district court in Oregon dismissed the lawsuit in view of the Coast Arbitrator's decision.
After much administrative planning and oversight by the NLRB, the re-registration of longshoremen at Local 18 in Sacramento finally is underway. This should conclude the lengthy and costly litigation and the processing of NLRB ordered deregistration and re-registration.
In what has become known as the 'Fish Case,' a Coast Arbitrator's decision was received this fall involving an issue crucial to the future membership of steamship agents in the PMA. The Coast Arbitrator remanded the case to the Area Arbitrator because of the absence of facts showing that the husbanding agent had control of cargo operations for which it was held responsible. We await anxiously the final outcome of this matter.
For the first time in over a decade, PMA became involved in litigation against a member company. Following a refusal to pay interest penalties on delinquent tonnage assessments, Long Beach Container Terminal, Inc., filed a declaratory relief action in the California Superior Court against PMA and various agents and foreign steamship operators. PMA and other defendants have answered with cross-complaints to require LBCT to pay the interest penalties. Discovery is proceeding.
Early in the year, the NLRB sought and obtained a temporary restraining order and injunction from the federal district court in Los Angeles, barring the ILWU from interfering with PMA members doing business with the Southern Pacific ICTF in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The PMA operations quickly returned to normal after a one-day shutdown, with the exception of the refusal by Local 63 Marine Clerks to perform work voluntarily during the meal hour in a manner consistent with conduct prior to the dispute. After a favorable area arbitrator's award finding Local 63 in violation of the contract, the Coast Committee declared the contract remedies exhausted. PMA, in a rarely necessary proceeding, sought and received confirmation of the award from the federal district court. Local 63 continued to violate the award, and PMA moved for an order to show cause why the union should not be held in contempt. The motion was denied. PMA will continue to monitor compliance with the award for future enforcement. The ILWU has appealed the district court confirmation of award to the Ninth Circuit.
PMA engages the services of local law firms in each of the four port areas on the Coast. These firms continue to serve the organization extremely well. Notwithstanding occasional exceptions, the relationship between PMA counsel and ILWU counsel remains professional and courteous and serves as an aid to the resolution of legal problems in the industry.
Finance and Administration
Building on the successful completion of the coastwise payroll system in 1990, the Information Services (I.S.) Department began the redesign and reprogramming of the Pay Guarantee Plan payroll system to make it consistent in all four Areas. Design is completed, and the new system should be operational in the second quarter. Since the payroll system has been accepting automated input, more than 90% of the payroll hours processed each week are transmitted to PMA electronically.
I.S. staff continued their involvement with several projects related to stream-lining the dispatch process. Significant progress has been made in Los Angeles/Long Beach where the UTR board in the Wilmington Longshore Dispatch Hall was the first to be modernized. In addition, telephone check-in for registered longshoremen should be operational in early 1993.
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SUBSONIC AIRCRAFT PROPULSION/AIRFRAME INTEGRATION
The technology of integrating propulsion systems and airframes involves the ability to assess and control the development of wave drag, induced drag, and profile drag. Advances in CFD over the past decade have contributed greatly to this technology. It is anticipated that ongoing CFD developments will lead to even further refinements.
Two areas remain in which technology improvements are needed. One is the development of wind tunnel test techniques and powered propulsion simulators to better represent installed power effects of the forthcoming generations of very high bypass ratio engines in wind tunnel testing. The other is the need to predict the installed characteristics of thrust reversers, both computationally and with wind tunnel testing techniques. These are areas in which NASA can make important contributions.
AERODYNAMIC CRUISE PERFORMANCE
Although the fundamental physical principles of subsonic and supersonic airflow around aircraft are the same, design approaches to minimizing drag are greatly affected by the cruise speed. This section of the report discusses cruise performance in the two speed ranges separately.
Subsonic Aircraft Cruise Performance
Long-haul subsonic transports are now, and will be for the foreseeable future, the major product of the civilian aviation industry and infrastructure. As noted in Chapter 2, from 1975 to 1995, aerodynamic efficiency will have increased by approximately 10 percent, and if the current rate of improvement is maintained, another 5-10 percent is projected by the year 2020. However, ordinary development or evolution alone will not keep the United States at the forefront in the world market. Although continued evolutionary advances in methods and processes (experimental, theoretical, and computational) are needed to provide continued improvement of aerodynamic design technologies, demonstrated innovative technologies are necessary in the longer term to provide opportunities for significant improvements in performance.
Laminar Flow Control
The flow on most of the surfaces of an aircraft is turbulent. Laminar flow control (LFC), hybrid laminar flow control, and natural laminar flow are promising sources of skin-friction drag reduction on aerodynamic surfaces. Laminar flow nacelles are also being studied by NASA. Laminar/turbulent transition of the airflow next to the aircraft surface is delayed through a combination of pressure gradient tailoring of the wing and control such as suction through the skin. If full-chord laminar flow can be maintained in this fashion, fuel savings of up to 25 percent could be realized.
Transition is extremely sensitive to freestream conditions (e.g., freestream turbulence and acoustics) and surface roughness (e.g., rain and ice crystals, insect debris, surface finish, and fasteners); lack of confidence in these issues has hindered the use of this concept on vehicles. Also, of perhaps greater significance have been the questions of fabrication cost and operational cost and maintainability.
Engineering and optimization tools have outpaced the state of the art in transition prediction theory. Thus, the design of LFC, hybrid laminar flow control, and natural laminar flow systems depends on empirical bases to determine transition. This method is also limited because it cannot account for the effects of surface roughness and freestream disturbances.
Knowledge of transition - so very important to the success of LFC techniques - is, in general, limited to the simplest of geometries. Efforts to better understand the transition flow physics are under way to provide valuable guidance for the surface roughness and freestream disturbance problems.
Only a limited number of flight tests have been flown since the original and successful X-21 program of the 1960s; these are the JetStar (NASA/Langley) and Boeing 757 (NASA/Boeing). In both cases, extensive laminar flow was successfully achieved on the upper surface of the swept wing through the use of suction. Very low suction levels were required, with power penalties of the order of 1 percent. Studies with engine noise indicated no effect. The use of a Krueger nose flap eliminated a potential buildup of insect debris on the leading edge.
The remaining challenges to the implementation of laminar flow technology in large subsonic transport designs include validation of the technology in actual airline service operating environments and exploration of the technical issues associated with making laminar flow operate effectively on the inboard portion of the wings of very large aircraft. Recognizing the challenges, during 1990 NASA and the industry developed a cooperative research plan; however, these efforts have been delayed by overall program constraints. Meanwhile, the Europeans have rapidly advanced their laminar flow efforts. Airbus plans for laminar flow technology validation include extensive large-scale testing, targeting technology validation as early as 1993.
Turbulent Drag Reduction
The most promising technique demonstrated thus far has been passive control by riblets, tiny streamwise grooves on the aircraft surface. This device is useful for surfaces on which laminar flow is very difficult to achieve (e.g., the fuselage). The approach was used successfully on the U.S. entry in an America's Cup Race and then flight-tested on a portion of a business jet, achieving a reduction in local skin-friction drag of 8 percent.
The state of the art in turbulence predictions depends on empirical correlations and models, usually developed for one set of flow conditions or a very simplified model. Here also, efforts at understanding the basic physics of turbulent flow are under way. Prediction and control have been hindered by the lack of reliable, efficient models of turbulence for complex geometries.
Advanced Supercritical Airfoils
Advanced supercritical airfoils, which reduce the shock strength on transonic airfoils, have contributed to drag reduction and have been used on all commercial transport aircraft developed since 1975. Further modifications with reduced moments and weaker shock waves are under study by NASA for use with LFC systems.
Improved understanding of shock/boundary-layer interactions has led to new opportunities to greatly improve airfoil design concepts and procedures.
Wing Design
The improvement of theoretical analysis tools and CFD, coupled with a better understanding of flow physics, has enabled the design of more aerodynamically efficient wings with greater thickness and reduced sweep. This allows a wing weight reduction or higher aspect ratio. Substantial improvements in cruise Mach number and critical Mach number have also been realized. New opportunities exist to significantly improve the design optimization procedures for wings that incorporate laminar flow systems along with advanced high-lift systems.
Winglets
Winglets, or wingtip extensions, which first appeared on business jets, are now used on various versions of commercial transports (e.g., the Boeing 747-400 and MD-11). These effectively increase the aspect ratio of the wing. Advancements in understanding of the 'nonlinear' effects of wing-wake-deflection and roll-up have created opportunities to improve the design optimization procedures for winglets and other wingtip devices for drag reduction. In each of these technology topics, significant opportunities have developed to advance the state of the art; however, constraints in the aeronautics program have limited NASA's ability to support the needed advancements in experimental or computational capabilities and in ground and flight validation of these technologies.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Status of Subsonic Technology
As noted earlier, the past decade has seen large improvements in wing design technology, the successful demonstration of laminar flow control on a Boeing 757, the successful demonstration of riblets on a business jet, the successful demonstration of natural laminar flow on a business jet, and the use of supercritical airfoils and winglets on transports in everyday commercial service.
Advances in computer and quiet-tunnel/instrumentation capabilities have allowed details of the fundamental flow physics of transition and turbulence to be studied. Computational time for these efforts, however, is too long for extensive use in the design process at present.
NASA should play a leading, but not exclusive, role in the development of enabling technologies. There should be a cooperative effort among NASA, industry, and academia to research complicated flow physics with the goal of predicting, modeling, and controlling such flows. Research should combine theory, careful experiments and CFD; duplication of the results by another technique or in another facility, as recommended by the U.S. Transition Study Group, is also desirable. NASA is an appropriate organization to encourage flight testing of enabling technologies and the development of advanced diagnostic instrumentation for nonintrusive testing. NASA is also an appropriate organization to provide high Reynolds number, quiet testing opportunities, as well as the most current computational facilities and techniques.
To implement the above concepts, a better understanding of flow physics is required. Intensified efforts to develop useful, accurate engineering models that can be used for design are particularly necessary. This work, although seemingly basic in nature, must be actively pursued and must include companion theoretical, computational, and experimental efforts conducted under careful, well-documented conditions. A better understanding of flow physics will also afford the opportunity for effective use of flow control. Issues to be addressed should include implementation, reliability, and maintenance of the mechanical systems, as well as implications of the loss of the system in flight. Continuing advances in CFD, as well as high Reynolds number, low-disturbance experimental capabilities, are also needed in support of the evaluation and design of these concepts.
NASA needs the following resources to accomplish the foregoing:
high Reynolds number facilities (simulate flight),
low-disturbance freestream facilities (simulate flight),
full-scale Reynolds number flight research capability,
nonintrusive instrumentation,
faster and bigger computers for flow physics (model development),
more efficient CFD, faster algorithms and grid setups,
companion theory/computation/experiment efforts (validation and guidance), and
NASA/industry/university cooperation on appproximately equal levels. NASA's role in the university training of future engineers through research funding must never be overlooked.
The Europeans are using much of the technology described above - particularly LFC - even though by U.S. standards the technology is often untested or unproven. On an overall technical basis, current European offerings are equal to those of the United States. However, because Europeans are incorporating the technology faster than the United States is, their rate of improvement is significantly greater. In particular, within the BRITE EURAM consortium involving government, industry, and academia in Europe, a highly organized effort has been developed to advance the state of the art for laminar flow engineering design capabilities. Their efforts combine the best talent and facilities in all of Europe to develop and validate transition prediction tools for integration with industry engineering design methods. (BRITE EURAM efforts address all other aeronautical disciplines as well.) Although progress is being made in the United States on understanding boundary-layer transition physics, no similar design-tool-focused effort is being funded here. The problem in this country is not lack of opportunities, but rather the lack of priorities on resources.
Supersonic Aircraft Cruise Performance
U.S. expertise in supersonic aircraft performance stems from the earlier Supersonic Transport (SST) program, the ongoing Phase I High Speed Research Program, and various high-speed fighters. In cruise, the recognized promising technologies for the HSCT are the same as for the subsonic case: hybrid laminar flow control by suction and pressure gradient. Unlike the subsonic speed regime, this technology has not been demonstrated in flight. The benefits of lower drag (as described in subsonics) and thermal requirements associated with laminar flow can be realized in this flight range as well. In addition, technology advances in the fundamental understanding of high Reynolds number effects on leading-edge vortex formation and the ability to eliminate unacceptable characteristics, such as low speed pitch-up, could allow the utilization of highly swept, high-performance wing planforms. This would provide substantial increases in cruise lift-to-drag ratios over the currently favored planform concepts.
Laminar Flow Control
At present, our knowledge of high-speed transition is even less developed than our knowledge of subsonic flows; designs depend on existing theories that are not compatible with design and optimization tools (as described in subsonics). In the supersonic range, however, the effects of freestream conditions (e.g., freestream turbulence and noise) and surface roughness may be more severe than in subsonic flows. Efforts are under way to understand and predict the transition behavior in supersonic flight. The exciting progress that has been made in subsonic laminar flow technology required nearly four decades of concentrated, if not continuous, effort. Although some of the subsonic lessons learned may apply to supersonic laminar flow challenges, it would be overly optimistic to expect supersonic laminar flow technology to mature after a few years of effort.
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Laser/Vision - 100% Inspection Systems
The growth of automation requires that most fastener manufacturers implement methods for providing defect-free material to their customers
The demands for stricter quality control have shifted from a high level AQL (Acceptable Quality Level) to three parts per million or zero defects product levels.
The implementation of sophisticated statistical process control has helped to insure quality of manufacture, but does not address product mix, and foreign material contamination as a result of plating, heat treating, packaging, and other bulk processes.
A growing trend for high-speed sorting and 100% gaging is emerging within industries because of the high levels of automation employed in manufacturing today. The human factor will always be present regardless of the SPC or quality control levels adopted for a particular manufacturer. The same customer that was talking AQL yesterday is demanding zero defects today at a reduced price.
The non-contact laser gaging technology available today has been in place for 20 yrs. Only the appliance, automotive, and aerospace industries have sought to minimize downtime by inspecting key attributes of material used in automatic assembly processes. A task originally performed as incoming inspection by the end user is now demanded of the supplier.
Solving the quality control problems for today's manufacturer requires systems designed with the flexibility for large product ranges, simplicity of setup, and the ability to work in harsh production environments.
Perhaps the most over-looked area regardless of the system chosen is the maintenance and level of personnel to perform that maintenance. The laser sorters utilize a single card to perform all the data processing relating to the inspection tasks. An operator is capable of correcting most all<sic!> problems with this type of inspection equipment.
Once the decision to purchase a system for 100% inspection is made, a part packaging system integrated with the inspection element will eliminate any potential mixing due to the human factor or bulk packaging. Several technologies are offered to assist in solving specific problems of the various industries.
Our Vision Inspection System is an automatic, non-contact, stand-alone inspection and measuring system. The standard version with the appropriate options is capable of simultaneously making both two-dimensional gaging measurements and surface flaw analysis of each field of view (FOV) as well as real-time image enhancements. This system is an easy-to-use, menu-driven system. The menu system is a flexible job setup tool with screen prompts to assure correct entering of parameters. No programming experience is required to learn the systems menu. The menu allows the operator to run the system on a turnkey level. Also, if new tolerance or inspection data are required, they can be inserted through the menu.
The typical system configuration includes an inspection module with the specific application programmed, optics, and camera(s), light source, part detector and associated cabling, mounts, brackets, etc. The camera is aligned to view one specific inspection point in the material handling system. During the actual inspection process, the camera captures an image of each part as it passes this inspection point.
This system utilizes an IBM PC compatible 486 processing platform for maximum throughput. A keypad is used by the operator to select and change inspection parameters as required. The inspection tools used to interpret the image and provide orientation information are adjustable in size and position to provide the flexibility to detect many configurations without changing software.
During the setup procedure, the part detector is aligned to monitor the areas adjacent to the inspection point. During the inspection process, the detector continuously monitors the material handling system. As each part reaches the inspection point the detector sends the 'Part Detect' signal to the vision inspection module. Upon receipt of this signal, the vision inspection module actuates the image capture/analysis process. A strobe light source is used, as is necessary with a moving part, to illuminate the part. A visual image of the part is then captured by the camera.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
A small rectangular element in the camera houses an array of tiny electronic devices called photodiodes or pixels. Their function is to detect the amount of light reflected from the part to the camera. The size of the photodiode array can range from a matrix of 256 pixels to 512 pixels (vertical columns and horizontal rows). Each of the pixels continuously transmits an analog signal to the vision inspection module which assigns a value of either 0 or 1 to the binary image acquired.
The vision inspection module then transfers the binary values to the digital memory. The module can now inject the binary data into a variety of complex mathematical routines. These can perform the following analytical operations on the captured image: linear measurement, flaw analysis, and real-time image enhancement. The information obtained by these operations is then used for accept/reject decisions. These decisions can be sent out via RS-232, through discrete I/O.
The 'Magic Black Box' that inspects every dimension on every part does not exist, quality control personnel must identify and target specific areas for inspection and sorting equipment to be implemented in the most cost effective manner. The bulk handling for plating, heat treat, and packaging will remain the major areas of part contamination due to high volumes and materials handling methods.
Safe and Fast
In the 60's scientists used a laser and a passive corner reflector to measure the distance from the earth to the moon within six inches. Since then the technology transfer program helped put the laser to work for non-aerospace uses. In the past five years the development of low-power, personnel-safe gas lasers contributed substantially to their applications on production and assembly lines. More specifically, gas lasers have been adapted successfully to other tasks including automatic dimensional and surface inspection in quality control.
Lasers are fast, reliable, and non-contact. Properly applied, the automatic laser system can completely eliminate manual inspection and reduce test times by as much as 90%. Inspection speeds can exceed 600 ppm. Studies supporting automation show that human inspectors can miss as many as 20% of defective parts when operator fatigue sets in. In contrast, the use of automatic laser inspection eliminates most of these shortcomings.
Operating Principles
The beam configurations generated by various existing laser-based systems include static spot, circular spot, linear scan, and multiple spot. Because the geometry of the laser beam determines the inspection system capability and its ultimate use, laser systems are classified according to the type of their beam.
In operation, the transmitted laser beam interacts in various ways with the target being inspected. Through this interaction the beam at the receiver input will be encoded by various target parameters such as its dimensions, surface quality, etc. The receiver extracts or decodes this information and uses the resulting data for making decisions in inspection. In particular, consider the several ways that an incident laser beam can be encoded by its target and produce different detected signals at the receiver. It can be any of the following:
Sequentially interrupted - the detected signal is digital. It is either on/off or a go/no-go type. Application is in simple length sorting.
Reflected - this results in an analog detected signal whose amplitude and duration are used in the analysis of the inspected part. This approach is used basically in areas of surface flaw detection.
Shadowed - this produces a digital signal which is used for more accurate dimensional gaging, for example, where the sequentially interrupted method becomes inappropriate.
Transmitted - when detected, this is either a digital or an analog signal and is basically used in applications where the material to be inspected is clear or transparent. Using transmitted signals, parts can be inspected for surface defects, missing operations as well as dimensional accuracy. For example, threaded fasteners can be searched for surface problems, missing internal or external threads, damaged threads, or even mixed sizes of threads. The laser beam is scanned in a vertical plane so that it 'walks' down the threads. At the same time, the horizontal beam determines the location of the part under inspection. The inspection of the peaks and valleys in the thread creates a pulsing return signal that is picked up by the receiver/detector. The signal contains information on the quality and size of the thread.
Manual inspection methods using mechanical gaging still hold their own in accuracy and resolution capabilities. Thus, even though a laser-based inspection system can gage dimensions with an 0.0004" accuracy, this figure can be exceeded by traditional methods. But for industrial applications where this lower gaging tolerance is adequate, laser systems win hands down by virtue of their highest speed. Today, laser inspection systems are used in industries making fasteners, bearings, automotive and aircraft components, glass and pharmaceuticals. Laser inspection functions range from simple dimensional gaging to providing feedback signals for automatic process control.
System Components
The basic non-contact laser inspection system consists of several basic components: a laser used as a target illuminating source (the word laser is an acronym of Light Amplification by Simulated Emission of Radiation); a receiver to sense the optical radiation that carries the required dimensional information; and processing circuitry to extract this information in preparation for further use. This radiation can be reflected, scattered, or shadowed by, or transmitted through the target. Other parts include lenses, mirror, prisms, polarizers, choppers, and filters.
In practice, the gas laser provides high beam brightness, good beam collimation, small beam diameter, and long beam life. These laser qualities are used for very high speed, tight tolerance, and non-contact inspection on a wide range of parts and materials.
Parts made of metals, plastics, glass, rubber, or wood can be inspected by a laser without tool changes usually required with mechanical methods.
Functions Performed
Almost all laser system suppliers provide equipment to perform some combination or all of the following functions:
Gaging - most laser systems are used for gaging length, width, height, diameter of parts, and combinations of these at high speeds. A benefit of 100% part size qualification is uninterrupted production.
Operation Voids - the laser system will inspect parts for missing operations such as threads, slots, and holes. Or it will locate specific indicators to help in aligning parts for assembly operations. A laser system is used in the assembly of an automotive thermostat to first locate a scribe mark on one of the parts. Then using the mark as a reference, to position the part for a subsequent staking operation. The laser is used to define the exact position. This operation runs about 120 parts/hr. The laser 2 ft away positions the scribe mark within 0.001".
Surface Flaw Detection - Laser scanning capability is used to identify surface trend indicators. While tighter tolerances are possible with mechanical inspections, the laser method is much faster and more reliable and it works equally well for metallic or non-metallic surfaces.
Process Control - This function combines gaging, surface detection, and identification to provide an on-line output that can be used as a feedback signal to an automatic control system to provide corrective action. A typical application would be in weld seam inspection to generate axial information to guide the weld track and flux flow.
What of the Future?
The future of laser-based inspection seems bright. In addition to the already mentioned advantages of speed and reliability, these systemsystems are also predicable in terms of pricing. For example, the cost of a laser system can be determined accurately for planning purpose. Thus, hard figures are available to management for comparison to alternate-method costs.
For more information contact the author or Circle 259.
Developments in Self-Locking Fasteners
Some Background
Developed almost 50 yrs ago, the idea of engineering a nylon locking element to solve specific fastening problems, Figure 1, is still going strong today. This is reflected not only in growing domestic use, but in a wide range of applications throughout the world. Global acceptance of the patented process that provides a non-metallic prevailing torque element in both male and female threads has been further strengthened by the introduction and use of new technology that upgrades the performance of the self-locking process.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
For example, a new patented nylon powder dispensing system that produces a patcxh-type locking element with more consistent performance and better reusability features.
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The active double-star architecture has received considerable research attention. As shown in Figure 2.1, the architecture calls for feeder fiber to connect the central office to the RDU, which might serve around 1000 subscribers. By equipping the RDU with switching capability, the RDU electronics direct individually selected channels to each home from the many signals multiplexed on the feeder cable. Multiplexing the signals between the central office and RDU reduces costs relative to the switched-star alternative in which individual channels are switched only at the central office for transmission over separate fiber cables all the way to the home.
The first proposals for an IBN assumed an active double-star architecture due in part to its resemblance to the current DLC system. The telephone industry continues to cite this architecture as a likely approach [Shumate, 1989], and much of the ongoing effort to develop prototype IBN components assume this architecture, although other architectural alternatives are now receiving more serious consideration.
Passive optical networks (PONs) are another class of networks now receiving a large amount of research attention. PON architectures have single fibers emanating from the central office, and these fibers fan out via passive optical splitters similar to a tree-and-branch topology. In this way, PON networks achieve a high degree of shared plant throughout the network. The lowest branch in the distribution tree connects to the individual homes. Figure 2.1 shows an example of a passive double-star architecture in which the RDU now houses an optical power splitter.
The optical power budget determines the number of successive splitting nodes in a PON network. Larger bandwidth signals have smaller power budgets, so broadband services cannot be split as often as narrowband services. This leads to the same problem faced by hybrid networks to provide a mix of narrowband and broadband services. Again, WDM or coherent transmission techniques would have to be employed in the future to increase the bandwidth of the system.
An advantage of PON networks is that they provide a transparent path between the central office and the subscriber. This provides a degree of flexibility because the architecture is dependent upon the power budget and not the transmission format. In addition, the use of passive devices reduces the number of active components throughout the network, thereby decreasing the number of potential faults.
There have been few proposals calling for a bus topology in the subscriber loop. One problem is accessing the information on the bus. If the signal is tapped by bending the fiber and detecting the light that escapes - called a nonintrusive tap - then the system provides very little flexibility for evolution to new services because the taps are optimized to one service bandwidth. Another method is to receive and retransmit the information bus at every node. This doubles the number of optical transmitters and receivers in the field, raising more concerns about the environmental protection, reliability, and maintenance cost of the remote nodes. However, one could consider the passive double-star as a bus topology with a passive splitter as the only node. Configuring the network as a double-star rather than a bus simplifies maintenance by reducing the number of nodes. Also, there is less excess signal loss from a single 1:n splitter than from a succession of taps on a bus, thus allowing more subscribers to be served within the available power budget.
In summary, an all-fiber, active double-star network is still under consideration as a viable option for the subscriber loop. However, the number of competing alternatives is growing. The development of PON and hybrid architectures have served as milestones to shift attention away from the active double-star to a richer variety of options. PON networks take more advantage of the properties of optical transmission, whereas network hybrids offer an interim solution before more fiber can be placed in the network.
Today's Cable Television Networks
Cable operators install a tree-and-branch architecture using coaxial cable to provide distributed video services, as shown in Figure 2.4. The headend receives video signals from local studios, over-the-air broadcasts, or microwave and satellite sources and then combines and retransmits these signals over the trunk cable of the network.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Portions of the signal on the trunk are split off every few hundred meters to feeder cable, where in turn the signal is split to drop cable to directly serve the household. Because these systems use the standard NTSC AM-VSB transmission format, a television set used for over-the-air reception can be connected simply to the cable system through a simple frequency converter box. This makes for low entry and exit costs to cable services.
The high transmission and splitting losses that arise from a coaxial cable tree-and-branch network require the placement of amplifiers throughout the network to boost the signal. Coaxial cable introduces transmission losses of about 1 dB every 30 meters (optical fiber introduces about 0.1 dB every kilometer). This loss and the amplifier gain determine the amplifier spacing. Given a gain of about 20 dB, trunk amplifiers are typically situated about every 600 meters. Signal quality also declines as the number of amplifiers in cascade increases, because noise and distortions accumulate with each amplifier. To maintain signal quality, no more than 30-40 amplifiers are generally placed in cascade. In addition, the series connection of amplifiers limits the reliability of cable service. If one amplifier in the cascade fails, then all subsequent network branches downstream of the failure lose their signal, resulting in a loss of signal over a potentially large area.
The tree-and-branch approach is well suited to the characteristics of distributed video services. Each subscriber receives the same group of video channels, which favors an architecture with a high degree of shared network resources, such as the tree-and-branch topology. The bandwidth of the amplifiers limits the number of channels carried by the system. Improvements in technology have increased amplifier bandwidth from around 200 MHz (30 NTSC channels) to 550 MHz (80 NTSC channels) today. The bandwidth of the coaxial cable is about 1 GHz (150 NTSC channels) and represents the upper bound of capacity on typical cable systems.
Fiber Backbones
The cable industry is also exploring architectures that would incorporate fiber into their networks [Chiddix and Pangrac, 1988]. In assessing fiber alternatives, cable operators enjoy the advantage of already having a broadband connection to the subscriber. Fiber installed in any portion of the cable network can immediately improve broadband services. Consequently, cable industry proposals are exclusively hybrid networks and do not include plans to build something like an all-fiber IBN in the near future.
A common approach for adding fiber into cable television networks is the fiber backbone strategy. The idea is to replace the primary trunk lines of a current coaxial cable system with fiber backbones that extend to within a few hundred feet of the subscriber - the remaining distance to be connected using the existing coaxial cable. The fiber backbone could entirely replace the trunk line, thereby eliminating all the trunk amplifiers, or replace a significant portion of the trunk line, thereby shortening the number of trunk amplifiers in cascade to a small number.
Deployment of fiber backbones reduces the number of trunk amplifiers in cascade between the headend and subscriber. Using fewer amplifiers in cascade improves network reliability and picture quality, increases system capacity, and provideprovides greater network flexibility for offering new broadband services. Network reliability is an important attribute, as frequent loss of television signal resulting from the long amplifier cascades continues to be a common consumer complaint about current cable television services. The increase in system capacity made possible by fiber backbones could enable cable systems to carry HDTV signals over the cable network without having to reduce the number of offered channels.
2.4 MARKET STRUCTURE FOR THE SUBSCRIBER LOOP
The previous sections described a framework characterizing the mechanisms of network evolution, starting with the demand for network-based services. Network planners assess the technology alternatives and select the approach best suited to meet current and future demands. The cost characteristics of the chosen technology indicate the appropriate market structure - the most efficient form of industrial organization of firms for production - for the network-based services. Typically, network-based services exhibit economies of scale in production. However, in a multiproduct environment, natural monopoly requires the dual presence of economies of scale and scope in the production of services.
Public telecommunications networks provide the communications infrastructure vital to the activities of everyday life, and the need to establish policies favoring the development of this infrastructure is therefore clearly linked to the notions of economies of scale and scope. That is, presumably the justification for a public communications network, and regulation of the network in general, stems from strong economies of scale and scope arising in the use of such a resource. Telephone companies propose that IBNs will serve as the future communications infrastructure for society by providing a diverse set of services based upon the strong economies of scope inherent in the services provided by fiber-based networks.
2.4.1 The Importance of Economies of Scope
Without any regulatory barriers, a network operator will offer a new service if that service can be offered at a profit for an incremental cost lower than that of competitors. Economies of scope between new and existing services would lower the incremental cost of the new service. As pointed out earlier, the strength of economies of scope between narrowband and broadband subscriber loop services should ultimately determine the success of IBNs. Whether an IBN will achieve economies of scope depends upon the transmission characteristics of the network services and the technological alternatives to transport these services separately.
Figure 2.5 qualitatively illustrates this point by plotting the hypothetical cost functions for three transmission technologies versus three levels of network-based services. Assume that the hypothetical cost functions represent the costs of building a network using that transmission technology. The cumulative levels of service are narrowband, distributed video, and switched video. The shaded portion of the graph shows the area in which cumulative economies of scope are present; its boundary represents the combined cost of separate networks to provide each service category. Any cost curve passing through the shaded region exhibits economies of scope between the service categories, because the cost of an integrated network is less than the cost of separate networks.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The three technology curves depicted in Figure 2.5 are presented in part to motivate discussion, but also because they are indicative of the actual cost characteristics of the representative technologies [Johnson and Reek, 1990]. The curve for copper technology illustrates that this technology provides the lowest cost alternative for narrowband services, but as the capacity requirements of the services increase to broadband levels, copper wire pairs quickly becomes uneconomic versus alternative technologies and provides no economies of scope for these services. The curve for hybrid networks shows that these systems provide economies of scope between narrowband and distributive video, but economies are lost in upgrades to switched video status. The curve for an all-fiber network suggests that these systems offer no economies of scope between narrowband services and distributed video services (that is, a fiber network carrying these services is more expensive than separate copper and coaxial cable networks), but if switched services are incorporated into the network, then the fiber alternative captures more economies of scope than the other alternatives.
Although somewhat contrived, these curves do succeed in conveying the complexity of the network evolution problem. Different technologies are most efficient for transporting different combinations of services. No simple solution exists that will dominate over the entire range of services. Network planners must plan a network that can deliver an efficient mix of services given a highly uncertain environment regarding future technology developments, market opportunities, and government regulations.
One aspect of the deployment of IBNs that is not considered in the analysis is any potential economies of scope between businesses and residential applications. Businesses may have a much higher demand for broadband applications such as high speed date, electronic publishing, or video imaging services. Strong demand for broadband services by business users located in residential areas could provide sufficient economies of scope to facilitate the introduction of fiber into these areas.
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Chapter IX
The Insulating Refractory Product Line
APPLICATIONS AND APPLICATION CRITERIA
Thermally insulating refractories function by providing stagnant or 'dead' gas space, which is to say they contain large volume fractions of voids. Since it is impossible to build closed-cell structures into high-void-volume ceramics, these materials are all 'open': susceptible to permeation and saturation by hot process liquids and to chemical attack by aggressive gases. It follows that they are not willingly exposed directly to liquids of any kind, nor to condensible vapors, nor to gases of more than minor chemical reactivity.
Ergo, corrosion resistance is downgraded as an index of merit. The prime criterion for material selection is refractoriness and dimensional stability sufficient for the assignment. The first property needed for insulating refractory qualification is accordingly the service temperature limit, which is related to composition, sintering temperature, and void volume.
The composition classes of Table VIII.1 turn out to be more than ample. Virtually all refractories in the insulating product line are oxidic, for the obvious reason that nonoxides are on the whole innately efficient conductors of heat. Relief from the necessity of resisting corrosion by liquids eliminates some of the more expensive oxidic types and their composites.
Insulating refractories are grouped at the bottom of Table VIII.2, under Porosity -now expanded to mean void volume fraction. But Table VIII.2 does not address the microstructures of insulating materials nor the manufacturing methods employed specifically to create them. Some further subclassifications are needed. To put those in perspective, let us first examine where and how insulating refractories are used.
Duplex Linings; Steady-State Usage
There are two reasons for interpolating an insulating layer between a hot working lining and the 'outside.' These are: (a) to cool the back face, e.g., to preserve the mechanical integrity of an enclosing metal shell or for reasons of safety outside a wall or roof; and (b) to reduce the heat flux J through the lining and hence improve process fuel economy. Both motives may apply at the same time, though the second usually predominates.
In the simple case of a plane wall at steady state, where a hot-face temperature T<sb_>h<sb/> is fixed by a given operation, then:
<O_>formula<O/>.
This equation is set up for a working lining 'w' of mean thermal conductivity <*_>unch<*/><sb_>w<sb/> and thickness Z<sb_>w<sb/>, an insulating lining 'i' of (low) mean thermal conductivity <*_>unch<*/><sb_>i<sb/> and thickness Z<sb_>i<sb/>, and metal shell 's' of (high) mean thermal conductivity <*_>unch<*/><sb_>s<sb/> and thickness Z<sb_>s<sb/>. T<sb_>h<sb/> is the (fixed) temperature of the working hot face; T<sb_>i<sb/> is that of the interface between linings 'w' and 'i'; T<sb_>b<sb/> is the refractory back face temperature or that of the interface between lining 'i' and shell 's'; and T<sb_>o<sb/> is that of the outside of the shell. J<sb_>o<sb/> is the heat flux to the 'outside,' existing by virtue of water-cooling or forced or convective air-cooling of the shell.
The equation is solvable, given all k's, once T<sb_>o<sb/> or J<sb_>o<sb/> is fixed. This may be done by applying practical criteria to J<sb_>o<sb/> with a known relation between this T<sb_>o<sb/>, or by arbitrarily limiting T<sb_>o<sb/> itself (e.g., to <*_>approximate-sign<*/>100<*_>degree<*/>C if water cooled, to 40<*_>degree<*/><*_>unch<*/> if exposed to human contact, or to some safe limit for mechanical integrity of the metal). Ordinarily the shell thickness Z<sb_>s<sb/> will be fixed by structural design considerations; and Z<sb_>w<sb/> may be limited by considerations of working lining corrosion or its end-of-life minimum allowable thickness, for example. If a metal shell is absent, delete the third equality and replace T<sb_>b<sb/> by T<sb_>o<sb/>. If an insulating backup refractory is absent, delete the second equality and replace T<sb_>i<sb/> by T<sb_>b<sb/>. If both are absent, delete both of those equalities and replace T<sb_>i<sb/>by T<sb_>o<sb/>. The equation is thus versatile, and comparisons may be made with it among various lining options.
Computer programs for solving this steady-state type of equation are in common use. Depending on their sophistication, provisions may be made for: (a) inserting each k as f(T) instead of estimating a mean; (b) inserting additional functions for interface conductivity or temperature drop, where applicable; and (c) inserting appropriate relations between J<sb_>o<sb/> and T<sb_>o<sb/> for various modes of outside cooling. Comparable equations are suited to cylindrical or spherical geometry.
For hand calculations, reasonable estimates can be made for the independent parameters. Perhaps the only one not self-evident is the connection between J<sb_>o<sb/> and T<sb_>o<sb/> for air cooling. A rough empirical curve for unimpeded convective cooling of vertical exterior surfaces by ambient air at about 77<*_>degree<*/>F or 25<*_>degree<*/>C, used for estimating purposes, is approximated by:
<O_>formula<O/> (J<sb_>o<sb/> in Btu/hr ft<sp_>2<sp/> and T<sb_>o<sb/> in <*_>degree<*/>F);
or, in convenient metric units:
<O_>formula<O/> (J<sb_>o<sb/> in kJ/h<*_>dot<*/>m<sp_>2<sp/> and T<sb_>o<sb/> in <*_>degree<*/>C).
This rough guide applies to a refractory cold face up to some 600<*_>degree<*/>F or 300<*_>degree<*/>C. It should do about as well for the outside of a steel shell.
For a conservative example of what thermal insulation can do, suppose the hot zone of a tunnel kiln, firing pottery, averages 1000<*_>degree<*/>C at the hot face. Assume its working refractory sidewalls and roof are 9" or 22.86 cm thick, exposed to the air outside, constructed of super-duty firebrick whose mean thermal conductivity is 9.5 Btu <*_>dot<*/> in./ft<sp_>2<sp/>hr<*_>degree<*/>F or 490. kJ <*_>dot<*/> cm/m<sp_>2<sp/>hr <*_>degree<*/>C. By entering these quantities into the above equations and solving simultaneously:
J =490 (1000-T<sb_>o<sb/>)/22.86 and <O_>formula<O/>,
one obtains T<sb_>o<sb/> =236<*_>degree<*/>C and the heat loss J =16,380 kJ/m<sp_>2<sp/>hr. Now add only about 2" or 5 cm of lightweight insulation to the outside, using a mean thermal conductivity of about 0.6 Btu <*_>dot<*/> in./ft<sp_>2<sp/> hr<*_degree<*/>F or 30 kJ<*_>dot<*/>cm/m<sp_>2<sp/>hr<*_>degree<*/>C. What will be the new T<sb_>o<sb/> and heat loss? One solves:
<O_>formula<O/>
simultaneous with the above air-cooling equation for J<sb_>o<sb/>, obtaining T<sb_>i<sb/> =804<*_>degree<*/>C, T<sb_>o<sb/> =105<*_>degree<*/>C and the heat loss J =4,190 kJ/m<sp_>2<sp/>hr. The saving in lost heat at steady state is (16,380-4,190)/16,380 or very close to 75%. If the kiln hot zone dimensions are 80 ft. by 10 ft. wide by 12 ft. high (24.4 x 3. x 3.7 meters), the total heat-loss area is about 250 m<sp_>2<sp/> and the saving in lost heat is about 3 million kJ/hour or 73 million kJ per day, or 69 million Btu per day. That is worth about $120,000 a year in 1990 U.S. dollars.
In general, interpolating an insulating refractory layer or increasing its effectiveness: (a) increases T<sb_>i<sb/> and decreases J at a fixed value of T<sb_>o<sb/>; or (b) Increases T<sb_>i<sb/> and decreases Z<sb_>w<sb/> and T<sb_>o<sb/> at a fixed value of J. These effects on T<sb_>i<sb/>, which is the cold-face temperature of the working lining, make that lining increasingly vulnerable to corrosion. Of the two effects on T<sb_>i<sb/> recited here, the first is much the more pronounced. Where corrosion is already economically limiting, in fact, the use of an insulating backup lining may be contra-indicated. Examples are in the O<sb_>2<sb/>-blown steelmaking furnaces and the lower parts of the ironmaking blast furnace.
For the same basic reason, insulation is never placed on the outside of a metal shell to decrease J<sb_>o<sb/> unless the shell temperature is already quite low, and never without proving analytically that the metal will not be heated above its safe limit. These same equations serve also in that proof.
Thermal Conductivity, Void Volume, and Bulk Density
Armed with the above means of computing and a list of qualified insulating refractory materials and their properties, the system designer engages iteratively in an approach to both material selection and the determination of Z<sb_>w<sb/> and Z<sb_>i<sb/>. The thermal conductivity of the insulating layer becomes both a qualifying and a design property; but it is not much used for classification. Suffice it for now that values of k<sb_>i<sb/> can be had from close to those of working refractories to nearly two orders of magnitude lower. This k depends on the void volume fraction, f<sb_>v<sb/>.
The void volume fraction is related to measurable quantities from which two corresponding densities are obtained at room temperature. Every defined solid has a theroretical density, <*_>rho<*/><sb_>th<sb/>, obtainable by x-ray diffraction for crystalline species or by weight and volume measurements for bulk glasses. The latter method is also used for multi-phase materials after their maximum consolidation by, e.g., fusion casting or hot pressing, etc. Sectioning and counting up of pore areas under the microscope can be used to improve this measure theoretical density.
Likewise, each insulating material comprised in part of such a defined solid and in part of void space has a bulk density, <*_>rho<*/><sb_>b<sb/>, obtained by measuring its weight and its 'bulk volume.' Measurement of the bulk volume is not always easy. In concept if not in actual practice, this is obtainable by gently shrink-wrapping or enveloping a weighed quantity of material in an infinitely thin plastic film and then measuring the volume by water displacement in a graduated cylinder or pycnometer.
Though there are standard ASTM procedures for obtaining both of these densities, the above conceptual definition avoids confusion. It is important for present purposes that the 'bulk volume' shall contain all of the void volume within a specimen, including the interstitial packing space in the case of unconsolidated granular materials.
With these two named densities in hand and denoting the void volume fraction by f<sb_>v<sb/>, this quantity is:
<O_>formula<O/>.
But in the classification of insulating refractories, this parameter f<sb_>v<sb/> is rarely stated. Instead, the bulk density is used for classification. Although industry practices vary, it is uncommon in the U.S. for the theoretical density to be reported, or even for the phase composition of the material to be disclosed. On the other hand, the precise computation of k from f<sb_>v<sb/> is all but futile anyway; k is measured empirically vs T and is reported for each commercial and research product. We shall deal with the measurement of k along with its numerical cataloguing in Chapter XI.
Working Configurations; Cyclic Usage
Dramatic improvements in processing economy have also been made by the use of insulating refractories in the working configuration -that is, directly exposed to the process environment. A first requisite is that this environment must consist only of 'clean' (i.e., relatively dust-free) gases. A second is that, since high-void-volume refractories are to a greater or lesser degree friable, the usage must entail correspondingly low mechanical wear. Numerous applications meet these two requisites, however. Some that exemplify cyclic process operation include the walls and roofs of batch driers, ovens, and heat-treatment furnaces, batch or periodic kilns, insulating lids or 'hot tops' for metal casting, the upper portions of a limited number of metallurgical furnaces, some kiln furniture, and much hot-gas ducting. Air, moist air, and clean oxidizing or neutral combustion products are generally acceptable. Redox cycling of the atmosphere disqualifies some insulating refractories, and others may not tolerate the production of soot. Chemicals vaporized from the charge are usually somewhat harmful. These have to be evaluated individually depending on chemical identity, partial pressure or transfer rate, and specific rate of attack on the selected refractory. Dust, likewise, need not always be nil but calls for careful evaluation.
What is the peculiar virtue of low-density refractories in these cyclic situations?
It is intuitive after Chapter IV that the analysis of thermal transients entails use of the thermal diffusivity, <O_>formula<O/>, where c = specific heat in kJ/kg<*_>degree<*/>C or J/g<*_>degree<*/>C and <*_>rho<*/><sb_>b<sb/> = bulk density as defined in the preceding section. Since <*_>rho<*/><sb_>b<sb/> in high-void-volume refractories range from low to very low, the product c<*_>rho<*/><sb_>b<sb/> runs correspondingly low while k does likewise, relative to these properties of dense refractories. Computerized mathematical methods of performance analysis using <*_>delta<*/> are widely practiced, but can not be demonstrated here. Instead, some approximations and manual calculations will be used to illustrate the economic benefits of insulating working linings when the temperature is cycled.
Consider a periodic shuttle kiln, again firing pottery at 1000<*_>degree<*/>C. Each charge of ware plus kiln furniture consumes 20 million kJ in firing, and an additional 20 million kJ goes up the stack if it is not recovered. The entire cycle occupies 22 hours, leaving two hours per day for charging and discharging. The cycle consists of 12 hours heat-up plus 4 hours steady-state at 1000<*_>degree<*/>C, plus 6 hours of slow cooling (burners off).
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Colorfastness to Fulling
Developed in 1954 by AATCC Committee RR22; revised 1957, 1972; editorially revised 1981, 1984, 1986; reaffirmed 1958, 1975, 1978, 1983, 1989; editorially revised and reaffirmed 1988.
1. Purpose and Scope
1.1 This test method is intended for evaluating the colorfastness of dyed wool fabric and yarn to mill fulling.
2. Principle
2.1 Dyed wool test specimens, in contact with the desired undyed textiles of choice and steel balls, are enclosed in an undyed test cloth bag and fulled in a soap solution in a metal container in a Launder-Ometer by procedures varying in temperature of the bath and time.
3. Terminology
3.1colorfastness, n. - the resistance of a material to change in any of its color characteristics, to transfer of its colorant(s) to the adjacent materials, or both, as a result of the exposure of the material to any environment that might be encountered during the processing, testing, storage or use of the material.
3.2 fulling, n. - a textile finishing process in which cloth is subjected to moisture, heat, friction and pressure.
4. Safety Precautions
NOTE: These safety precautions are for information purposes only. The precautions are ancillary to the testing procedures and are not intended to be all inclusive. It is the user's responsibility to use safe and proper techniques in handling materials in this test method. Manufacturers MUST be consulted for specific details such as material safety data sheets and other manufacturer's recommendations. All OSHA standards and rules must also be consulted and followed.
4.1. Good laboratory practices should be followed. Wear safety glasses in all laboratory areas and a single use dust respirator while handling powder dyes.
4.2 All chemicals should be handled with care.
4.3 The dyes listed in this method belong to the following chemical classes:
C.I. 62106: (C.I. Acid Blue 78), anthraquinone
C.I. 42645: (C.I. Acid Blue 15), tri-phenylmethane
C.I. 43830: (C.I. Mordant Blue 1), triphenylmethane
5. Apparatus and Materials
5.1 Launder-Ometer (see 14.1)
5.2 Stainless steel specimen containers 8.9x20.3 cm (3.5x8.0 in.) (see 14.1)
5.3 Stainless stell balls, 6.3 mm (1.25 in.) (see 14.1)
5.4 Soap, neutral granular (Fed. Spec. P-S-566 or ASTM D 496) (see 14.2)
5.5 Sodium carbonate, anhydrous, technical
5.6 Phenolphthalein indicator solution
5.7 Standard dyeings (see 14.3)
5.8 Worsted test cloth with 12 effect floats (see 14.4)
5.9 AATCC Chromatic Transference Scale (see 14.1)
5.10 Gray Scale for Color Change (see 14.2)
6. Test Specimens
6.1 Form a bag by folding together a 2-gram dyed wool test specimen and a 2-gram cutting of the test cloth [approx. 7.6x10.2 cm (3.0x4.0 in.)] with the dyed piece innermost, and stitching two of the open edges. Insert ten 6.3 mm (0.25 in.) stainless steel balls and stitch the remaining open edges. To test dyed yarn, braid the yarn with undyed wool, cotton or other yarn of interest [5.1 cm (2 in.)] and tie the braid at the ends. Enclose the braid and ten 6.3 mm (0.25 in.) stainless steel balls in a test cloth bag formed as above.
7. Test Conditions
<O_>table<O/>
8. Procedure
8.1 Prepare a test solution containing 37.5 grams soap and 15 grams sodium carbonate per liter.
8.2 Place each test bag in a 20.3 cm (8 in.) stainless steel container. Add 100 stainless steel balls and 8 mL of the test solution, and secure the covers. Place the tubes in the Launder-Ometer which has been heated to the desired temperature, and run for the required time (see table above). Remove the tubes, release the covers, empty the contents into a colander, and rinse the test bags in several changes of water at 43C (110F) (until the rinse water is neutral to phenolphthalein). Open the bags, remove the balls and the specimens, and dry the specimens and the test cloth.
9. Evaluation
9.1 Evaluate the specimens by comparing them with the appropriate Standard dyeing which has been subjected to the same fulling procedure. These Standard dyeings represent the minimum fastness requirements for their respective classes for alteration in color and staining of accompanying undyed textiles.
10. Alternate Evaluation Method for Color Change
10.1 Define the effect on the color of the test specimens by reference to the Gray Scale for Color Change.
Class 5 - negligible or no change as shown in Gray Scale Step 5.
Class 4 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 4.
Class 3 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 3.
Class 2 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 2.
Class 1 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 1.
11. Alternate Evaluation Method for Staining
11.1 Staining can be evaluated by means of the AATCC Chromatic Transference Scale or the Gray Scale for Staining (see 14.5).
Class 5 - negligible or no staining.
Class 4 - staining equivalent to Row 4 on the AATCC Scale or Step 4 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
Class 3 - staining equivalent to Row 3 on the AATCC Scale or Step 3 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
Class 2 - staining equivalent to Row 2 on the AATCC Scale or Step 2 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
Class 1 - staining equivalent to Row 1 on the AATCC Scale or Step 1 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
12. Report
12.1 Report the class determined for color change or staining.
12.2 Report evaluation method used (Sections 9, 10 or 11).
12.3 For staining report whether Gray Scale for Staining or AATCC Chromatic Transference Scale was used.
13. Precision and Bias
13.1 Precision and bias have not been established for this test method.
Colorfastness to Bleaching with Chlorine
Developed in 1927 by AATCC Committee RA34; revised 1942, 1947, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1962, 1972; editorially revised 1974, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1991; reaffirmed 1975, 1979; editorially revised and reaffirmed 1985, 1989.
1. Purpose and Scope
1.1 This test method is applicable to cotton and linen textiles and mixtures thereof whether dyed, printed or otherwise colored, which may be subjected to solutions containing up to 0.3 per cent available chlorine.
2. Principle
2.1 A test specimen and cuttings of the appropriate control dyeings are washed in hypochlorite solution under controlled conditions.
3. Terminology
3.1 colorfastness, n. - the resistance of a material to change in any of its color characteristics, to transfer of its colorant(s) to adjacent materials, or both, as a result of the exposure of the material to any environment that might be encountered during the processing, testing, storage or use of the material.
4. Safety Precautions
NOTE: These safety precautions are for information purposes only. The precautions are ancillary to the testing procedures and are not intended to be all inclusive. It is the user's responsibility to use safe and proper techniques in handling materials in this test method. Manufacturers MUST be consulted for specific details such as material safety data sheets and other manufacturer's recommendations. All OSHA standards and rules must also be consulted and followed.
4.1 Good laboratory practices should be followed. Wear safety glasses in all laboratory areas.
4.2 All chemicals should be handled with care.
4.3 Use chemical goggles or face shield, impervious gloves and an impervious apron during preparation of sodium hydroxide solutions. Use in an adequately ventilated laboratory hood.
4.4 An eyewash/safety shower should be located nearby and a self-contained breathing apparatus should be readily available for emergency use.
5. Apparatus and Materials
5.1 Launder-Omeer (see 13.7).
5.2 Flat iron
5.3 Stainless Steel Cylinder, 500 mL 7.5x12.5 cm (3.0x5.0 in.) (see 13.7).
5.4 AATCC Chromatic Transference Scale (see 13.7).
5.5 Gray Scale for Color Change and Gray Scale for Staining (see 13.7).
5.6 Distilled water, pH 6.8-7.2.
5.7 Sodium hypochlorite (4-6 per cent available chlorine, pH 9.8-12.8) (see 13.2).
5.8 Sodium hydroxide
5.9 Sodium carbonate
5.10 Sodium bicarbonate
5.11 Sodium bisulfite
5.12 Sodium arsenite
6. Test Specimens
6.1 One specimen should be used for each of the types of test to be applied (four types are described below) and one specimen should be reserved for comparison with the tested specimens.
6.2 Specimens of not less than 2 or more than 6 grams should be taken. If less than 2 grams are available, make up with dyed controls or boiled-out unbleached cotton.
7. Tests
<O_>table<O/>
8. Procedure
8.1 Solutions of sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) containing 0.01, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 per cent available chlorine are made up and adjusted to a pH of 11.0<*_>unch<*/> 0.2 by means of the proper buffers (see 13.3).
8.2 The test specimen is thoroughly wet out at 25-30C (78-85F) in distilled water, or in event that it has been given a water repellent finish (see 13.4), it is wet out in a 0.5 per cent neutral soap solution at 25-30C (75-85F). The surplus liquor is removed permitting the specimen to retain approximately its dry weight of liquor and in this condition it is then placed in a one-pint glass jar containing 50 times its dry weight of the sodium hypochlorite solution adjusted to the required temperature.
8.3 The tightly capped jar is immediately placed in the Launder-Ometer and the machine run until one full hour has elapsed from the time that the specimen was placed in the jar. The Launder-Ometer is maintained at a temperature of 27 <*_>unch<*/> 3C (80 <*_>unch<*/> 5F) during the test.
8.4 The specimen is removed from the jar and rinsed thoroughly in cold running tap water for 5 minutes, squeezing or agitating at intervals. The surplus water is removed by any convenient means after which the specimen is placed in 50 times its dry weight of a 1.0 per cent sodium bisulfite solution of 27 <*_>unch<*/> 3C (80 <*_>unch<*/> 5F) for 10 minutes with occasional agitation. It is then removed and again rinsed in cold, running tap water for 5 minutes, with occasional squeezing or agitation. After removal of the surplus water by any convenient means, it is pressed dry between white cotton with an iron having a temperature not above 152C (305F).
8.5 If the test is used for arbitration of a dispute, then the test specimen should weigh 4 grams and no tolerances in temperature or pH are permissible.
9. Controls (see 13.5)
9.1 Bleached muslin or light weight cotton cloth covered with -
No.1 4 per cent Vat Violet BN 10 per cent Paste (CI 68700)
No.2 4 per cent Vat Brilliant Violet RK 10 per cent Paste (CI 63365) or their equivalents in any strengths of these dyes.
10. Evaluation Method for Color Change
10.1 The effect on the color of test specimens, by each of the four tests with different concentrations of available chlorine, is evaluated and the colorfastness classified by comparison with the Gray Scale for Color Change (see 13.7)
Class 5 - negligible or no change as shown in Gray Scale Step 5.
Class 4 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 4.
Class 3 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 3.
Class 2 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 2.
Class 1 - a change in color equivalent to Gray Scale Step 1.
10.2 As stated in Section 13.6, it is prudent to include Control No. 2 (see Section 9.1) in the tests being made as a means to establish that the tests have been made satisfactorily.
10.3 When subjected to the four tests and the effect on the color evaluated by comparison with the Gray Scale; Control No.2 should merit the following classification:
<O_>table<O/>
11. Evaluation Method for Staining
11.1 In practical process bleaching with chlorine, no visible staining is permitted; however, if desired in testing, staining may be evaluated and classified by using multifiber test cloth (see 13.7) attached to the best specimens and classifying the staining by comparison with the AATCC Chromatic Transference Scale or the Gray Scale for Staining. The means used should be indicated when reporting the test results (see 13.8).
Class 5 - negligible or no staining.
Class 4 - staining equivalent to Row 4 on the AATCC Chart or Step 4 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
Class 3 - staining equivalent to Row 3 on the AATCC Chart or Step 3 on the Gray Scale for Staining.
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The new detector was a Hammamatsu 928R 'extended red sensitivity' photomultiplier (PMT), pin-for-pin compatible with the previous detector, except for a change in bias voltage. Thus, the new detector was able to make use of the transimpedance amplifier built into the base of the pre-existing detector mount. To accommodate the single fibers used in the temperature monitor system, two ST bulkhead connectors were mounted near the input end of the PMT, angled so that the cones of light emitted by the fibers fell on the first dynode of the PMT. Between the PMT and the ST mounts was an optical path selector consisting of a stepper-motor driven shutter that alternately blocks the path of light coming from the sensor fiber or the 'reference fiber.' In the UV monitor, the position of this selector was verified by two photoelectric sensors; these had to be replaced with magnetic reed switches, since the new PMT proved quite sensitive to the wavelength of operation of the photoelectric sensors.
The grating in the monochromator was replaced with a 930 grooves/mm holographic focusing grating blazed for operation at 750 nm. This grating has an effective dispersion of 8 nm/mm at the output focus of the monochromator. The monochromator itself was actually operated (without an output slit) as a spectrograph, with two single optical fibers held at the output focus by a special mounting system (Figure 2). The fibers were potted with TraCon F-230 epoxy in 27 gauge hypodermic tubing inside 22 gauge tubing and polished, then inserted into a 0.5" inch section of 0.5" diameter aluminum rod having two holes parallel to the rod axis. The rod was held in a 1.375" long section of .625" O.D. tubing that slid into another tube directly attached to the monochromator body. Because of this arrangement, light of two different wavelengths is coupled into the two fibers; the spacing between the holes determined the wavelength separation between the light coupled into the two fibers. A slight adjustment in wavelength could also be accomplished by rotating the cylindrical fiber mount. No difficulty was encountered in precisely tuning the output to the two wavelengths of importance to the temperature monitoring measurement (828 and 856 nm – see Figure 3). Between the monochromator output hole and the fibers was another shutter assembly acting as a wavelength selector that could block either one, or both (to provide dark current readings) of the fibers; this output shutter assembly differs from the one used in the UV monitor.
As a final improvement, a general reduction in dark currents was achieved by making extensive use of baffling material in the interior of the optics module. The custom analog circuit board (incorporating the stepper motor driver, PMT power supply, and programmable preamplifier) developed for the UV absorbance monitor was used without modification.
A commercial 2x2 fused fiber coupler was used to couple light at both wavelengths to the temperature sensor fiber, and to the reference fiber (see Figure 1). The coupler was chosen because of its low temperature sensitivity. To further isolate the coupler from warm-up effects, etc., it was mounted in a separate enclosure attached to the outside of the main optical module housing. During early experiments, considerable 'drift' and sensitivity to fiber bending were observed. These effects appear to have been due to the presence in the sensor fiber and coupler of light carried by 'leaky modes.' In addition, the fiber lengths used in the apparatus are so short that the equilibrium distribution of energy between true guided modes, each of which has different bending loss sensitivity, is never reached under normal transmission conditions. This problem was essentially eliminated by the use of mode stripper/mode mixers spliced to the coupler. The stripper/mixers were composed of three sections: 1 m of 50 <*_>mu<*/>m (core/125<*_>mu<*/>m (cladding) step-index fiber, followed by 1 m of 50/120 graded index fiber, followed by 1 m of 50/125 step index fiber, all wound inside a 3" diameter holder.
<O_>figures&captions<O/>
3.2 Fiber
Since the temperature measurement algorithm employed by the system is based on changes in the intensity of optical absorbance peaks (i.e., since the system must work in a high-loss region of the fiber transmission curve), it is important to maximize the amount of light transmitted by the fiber. To this end, a large-core multimode fiber is preferred over the more common single mode rare-earth doped fibers. The fiber used in this system was a 50<*_>mu<*/>m core/125 <*_>mu<*/>m cladding graded index silica structure with a numerical aperture of 0.24, and an effective index difference <*_>DELTA<*/>n=0.02. The fiber was designed to give optimum performance for spatially averaged temperature measurements over a 12 meter path. Based on a conservative system operating margin of 20 dB total loss, and on the known loss behavior of Nd<sp_>3+<sp/> doped fibers, this means that a Nd<sp_>3+<sp/> concentration of approximately 50 ppm was necessary to achieve the desired performance. This concentration was obtained in a specially prepared MCVD preform by using a carefully controlled heated-ampoule system to deliver Nd<sp_>3+<sp/> during deposition of the core region of the preform, and resulted in losses of 1.19 dB/meter at 828 nm and 1.55 dB/meter at 856 nm. The host glass in the core was silica, containing 17% (wt) Al<sb_>2<sb/>O<sb_>3<sb/> to raise the index of refraction. After collapse, the preform was etched in hot hydrofluoric acid until the desired aspect ratio was achieved. For use in the temperature monitoring system, the fiber was drawn with a standard coating, and a 12 meter length was terminated with ST style connectors.
3.3 Electronic module
The only modification required in the pre-existing (UV monitor) electronics package was the replacement of the high-voltage lamp power supply with a low-voltage, high current supply. Power supplies to drive the stepper motor controller and DC-to-DC converter (PMT power supply) in the optics module, together with hardwired safety interlocks to prevent operation of the system of the failure of cooling gas or opening of the lid of the optics module or of the electronics module, were all left as originally designed. The remote display unit of the UV monitor system was used in the temperature monitoring system to display the calculated average temperature. The main component of the electronics module is a Pro-Log System 2 Model 10 single-board CPU, complete with MS-DOS operating system that was re-programmed for the temperature monitoring application.
3.4 Software
The software used in the distributed average temperature monitoring system is directly descended from software developed for the UV absorbance monitor. At any given time the program can be in any of the fiber different modes: RUN, STANDBY, IDLE, AUTOZERO, or TEST. Switching between modes is controlled by operator interaction or by software detection of certain error conditions. The software for each mode is responsible for determining any condition which should cause that mode to exist. Upon exit from any mode, control is returned to a dispatch routine, which determines what mode to activate next. Figure 4 shows a diagram of the overall software architecture used in the distributed temperature monitor.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
On startup the main program enters an initialization routine which initializes the display, the analog board, and the shutters, turns on the lamp and high voltage to the photomultiplier tube, and waits a specified time for the system to warm up. It also reads some values from a parameter file that can be adjusted under program control.
When the initialization is done, the dispatch routine is entered. This routine reads the digital status lines and the operator switches and decides which mode to activate. When the selected mode is terminated the dispatch routine starts again and selects a new mode based on the same input or on newly generator error codes.
During normal operation the system uses RUN more to continuously make measurements, calculate the temperature, and output the results. STANDBY mode leaves the monitor in an inactive, but ready state. IDLE mode is similar to STANDBY mode, except the high voltage and the lamp are turned off. AUTOZERO mode is used to automatically compute the calibration constant C for the temperature calculation. This is done each time the system turned on, after the normal warm-up period. Recalculation of C will also be necessary when switching the monitor to a new fiber since the coupling efficiencies for the fibers to the optics will be changed. The 'AUTOZERO' calculation is done while holding the fiber at a known temperature. TEST mode is an interactive diagnostic routine which allows the operator to exercise all subsystems of the monitor. The user communicates with TEST mode via a portable terminal to move the shutters, read the photomultiplier, do an A/D-D/A check, calculate the temperature, do an auto zero calculation, change the calibration temperature used in the AUTOZERO routine, or perform other operations.
Embedded in the code for all five modes are routines which continuously check the monitor for various error conditions. Each error is assigned a unique error code which is displayed as a hex digit on the lower display. If unexpectedly high or low PMT readings are encountered, if the detector shutter is out of position, or if the calculated temperature is out of the expected range, only the error code is displayed. If the air flow to the optics module is interrupted, or if the lamp and PMT supply voltages are turned off, the system displays error codes and enters IDLE mode. If the cover of the module is opened, the system goes into STANDBY mode.
3.4.1 Data acquisition
In order to do a temperature calculation, six photocurrents must be measured: the fiber current for both wavelengths, the bypass current for both wavelengths, and the dark current for both the fiber and the bypass. The data acquisition routines must position the shutters to select the appropriate light path and read the output of the photomultiplier tube. A layered software structure has been designed to accomplish these tasks. The lowest layer is the hardware specific routine which reads the analog to digital converter. The highest level routine is the routine which coordinates the measurement of all six different photocurrents.
This highest level routine oversees the collection of all the data for both the temperature determination and the autozero function. Each call to this routine results in all six photocurrents being measured once and the proper value for each being assigned to its associated global variable, where it can be accessed by the calculational routines. To do this, the routine first initializes the integrating amplifier timer, then calls the shutter positioning routine in the proper sequence for each of the six photocurrents, waits for the shutters to come to rest, checks for shutter positioning errors, and finally calls the next lower acquisition routine, to get a value for the photocurrent.
The second highest level data acquisition routine handles the processing functions that are necessary to improve signal quality. Five measurements are made for each photocurrent, sorted by the routine, and the median three are summed for the final result, which is then returned to the highest level routine.
Each of these five measurements are made by a call to the next lower level routine, which uses a TTL I/O board to put an integrating amplifier through one complete charging cycle. The integrating amplifier works by using the output voltage of the photomultiplier base to charge a capacitor for an accurately known time interval, through a fixed resistor and an operational amplifier. The voltage developed across the capacitor is further amplified by a second amplifier stage and presented to the analog to digital converter, where it is read by the lowest level data acquisition routine. To cycle the integrating amplifier and make a measurement, the computer first issues a TTL signal to the JFET switch on the optics module circuit board which, in turn, connects a small resistor across the charging capacitor, causing it to discharge. This switch is then opened and an accurately timed signal is applied to another JFET switch which allows the capacitor to begin charging. At the end of the time interval, this second JFET switch is opened and the voltage is read by the lowest-level routine.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="79">
Seven
Nuclear Safety
Scientific, industrial, and political leaders involved with the peaceful development of nuclear energy understood from the very beginning that safety was essential to the success of the new technology. While sound radiation protection standards were not fully developed at the outset, the importance of isolating workers, the public, and the environment from radioactive materials was recognized. Further, it was clear that the peaceful benefits of nuclear power should be shared among nations, and that technical assistance with the development of civilian nuclear power programs might be used as an incentive to accept international safeguards, thus discouraging the spread of nuclear weapons. It was also known that nuclear energy would have to be economically competitive for any large-scale deployment to occur. However, the early developers of nuclear energy were aware that they could not predict all the problems the budding technology eventually would face.
One of those problems has turned out to be public concern over nuclear energy - a technology that scientists see as safe, nonpolluting, and capable of enriching the lives of people in many areas of the world.
President Eisenhower's 'Atoms for Peace' speech on December 8, 1953, opened the door to domestic and international development of nuclear energy. By that time, a large amount of data was already available from programs on nuclear safety sponsored by the handful of nations with active development programs. The United Nations sponsored its first conference on the "Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy" in Geneva in 1955. No less than 200 (out of a total of 1132) papers on nuclear safety and protection of the environment, and a comparable number of papers on medical uses of radiation, were presented at the conference.
<O_>graph&caption<O/>
Radiation
Any concern over nuclear safety is based on the potential for release of radiation or radioactive materials. The design and operation of nuclear power plants is intended to prevent harmful releases under all circumstances, from normal operation to highly improbable accidents. Nevertheless, radiation is an inevitable by-product of nuclear power as well as a natural component of our environment. The fraction of our annual radiation exposure that comes from the generation of electricity by nuclear power is approximately 0.1%, which is insignificant relative to even the variations in the background of natural radiation.
Radiation and its effects on man continue to be the subjects of study by researchers and review by prestigious scientific panels. The annual average exposure from natural radiation for a typical American was estimated to be about 100 millirem per year until 1987, when it was revised upward to 360 millirem because of a new appreciation for the contribution from naturally occurring radon gas. Of the 360 millirem, 18% comes from man-made radiation, primarily from voluntary exposure associated with medical procedures. Consumer products such as smoke detectors and luminous watch dials contribute about 3% of the exposure. Fallout from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons accounts for less than 0.3%. The natural radioactivity in our own bodies contributes approximately the same amount that we receive from medical x rays. Cosmic radiation, streaming in from outer space, averages 8% of the total.
Individual radiation doses are unevenly distributed, depending on where we live, types of houses and work buildings, types of medical treatment, frequency of high-altitude flights, and other factors. The 0.1% of the average exposure due to the nuclear fuel cycle is received almost entirely by workers in the industry; the rest of the population gets effectively nothing from the generation of nuclear power.
Most data on the adverse health effects of radiation have come from studies of the survivors of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Individuals receiving short-term exposure to radiation on the order of 100 rem (100,000 millirem) are subject to acute illness. Acute exposures of 500 rem are sufficient to kill a substantial fraction of individuals within weeks. But there is controversy in how to extrapolate back by a factor of 1000 or more to the very low dose rates associated with normal living, medical treatment, and occupational exposure. One theory is that the effect is linear, allowing a simple extrapolation to be done. A second theory is that there is a threshold below which there is effectively no damage, or the damage is such that it can be repaired by the body. A small minority holds the view that low radiation doses actually cause proportionately more damage. Regardless of which theory is correct, the radiation emitted from operation of a nuclear plant is far too insignificant to have any impact on public safety.
It might be expected that because there is such a large variation in state-to-state natural radiation exposure, the importance of low radiation doses could be inferred from state-to-state variations in the cancer rate. But the states with the highest radiation exposures happen to have the lowest cancer rates. The risk of cancer from normal radiation exposure is simply insignificant compared to such other causes as smoking, industrial pollution, and life-style.
Reactor Safety
In the United States, the government sponsored aggressive reactor safety experiments prior to the start of commercialization activities. Approximately 900 square miles of isolated desert land in Idaho were selected to be the site for the National Reactor Testing Station. One reason for selection of this remote location was so that any accidental release of radioactive materials from tests to study reactor accidents would not affect the public. Safety testing continued well after the commercial nuclear power era began, often with international partners. Other Western nations recognized the imperative of safe operation of nuclear power plants and conducted independent reactor safety experiments. The safety philosophy that evolved in the former Soviet Union and Eastern European nations was apparently less conservative, but there is a current initiative to 'upgrade' some Soviet-built reactors to Western operating and design standards. Nevertheless, some Soviet-built PWRs such as those in Finland and Hungary have excellent records for operating efficiency.
The early development period in the United States was characterized by a broad-based AEC program that included uranium exploration, enrichment, power reactors, space propulsion, waste management, biology, medicine, and peaceful applications of nuclear explosions. The parallel naval reactors program focused on production of nuclear propulsion systems. Development of safety technology was a key focus of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC's) civilian and naval reactor programs. Radiation-effects biology programs were carried out; fundamental and applied nuclear data were generated; a number of special safety-experiment reactors were built and operated; and several series of major reactor safety experiments were carried out. Fundamental radiation standards for all radiation application were developed.
From the very beginning, reactor designers understood that a nuclear power plant could not explode like a nuclear bomb - the hazard was from the 'ashes' of the chain reaction, i.e., the fission products. Reactor safety was based on containment of any credible release of radioactive material. The concept of 'defense in depth' became standard practice to meet the general nuclear safety objective, which is to protect individuals, society, and the environment by establishing and maintaining in nuclear power plants an effective defense against radiological hazard. First and foremost, defense in depth emphasizes the importance of preventing accidents. However, in the event of an accident, defense in depth emphasizes mitigation of damage and doing everything possible to minimize injuries to workers and the public. This philosophy has continued to evolve over the years into internationally accepted basic safety principles.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
In 1957 the first bounding estimates of the consequences of a large nuclear accident, based on an arbitrarily large release of fission products, were published by the AEC in a landmark report called WASH-740. It was not until 1975, when WASH-1400 (better known as the Reactor Safety Study, or Rasmussen report, after MIT Professor Norman Rasmussen who headed the study) was issued, that a truly quantitative estimate was available for the probability of a major reactor accident in a U.S. nuclear plant. Over the years, the Reactor Saftey Study has been challenged by a number of critics, and new safety issues requiring investigation have arisen, but nothing has happened to change the basic conclusions of the report.
In any type of risk analysis, consequences become more severe as more and more improbable circumstances and events are postulated. For most reactor accidents, WASH-1400 showed that the most probable result would be property damage to the plant, but no deaths or acute illnesses due to radiation exposure of workers or the public.
The worst type of reactor accident is the so-called reactor 'meltdown,' which might be expected to happen once in 20,000 years of reactor operation. The study showed that there would be no detectable deaths in 98 out of 100 reactor meltdowns, over 100 detectable deaths in only 1 out of 500 meltdowns, and 3500 detectable fatalities in only 1 out of 100,000 meltdowns. In addition to deaths immediately attributable to the accident, the cloud of radioactive material released in some cases would expose a large population to small doses of radiation. Using the conservative linear extrapolation model for radiological effects, some small fraction of the population would be expected to develop cancer. The average impact would be 400 fatalities over several decades. For the worst meltdown accident considered, there would be an estimate 45,000 additional cancer deaths in an affected population of ten million people. This corresponds to an increase in the probability of an individual's dying from cancer by about 0.5%, which is significantly less than the state-to-state variation in the normal cancer mortality rate. If there were a reactor meltdown every five days, the effect would be comparable to the estimated 30,000 deaths in the U.S. each year as a result of pollution from burning coal
Antinuclear activists often talk only of the most severe postulated accident, the 1 case in 100,000 meltdown accidents, leaving the impression that all major reactor accidents would result in disaster. Clearly, with fewer than 500 nuclear power plants operating worldwide, there are not going to be 100,000 reactor meltdown accidents, or even 100. The equivalent cannot be said of other energy technologies. There have been incidents such as dam failures and excessive pollution that have caused a large number of fatalities. Perhaps the best known incident happened in 1952, when pollution from coal burning under unusual atmospheric conditions in London caused 3500 fatalities within a few days.
People are subject to all types of risks, which can best be understood in relative terms. For example, a person would have a 20,000 times greater chance of being killed by lightning than by the largest reactor accident described above. If all electricity in the U.S. were generated by nuclear power, it would represent the same risk as a regular smoker indulging in an extra cigarette once every 15 years, as an overweight person putting on an extra 0.012 ounce, or increasing the highway speed limit from 55 to 55.006 miles per hour. For any reactor accident, the probability of occurence is much less than other man-made or natural accidents with similar consequences. The relative risk of nuclear power, to either workers or the public, is simply quite small.
The type of analysis that went into WASH-1400 has continued to be refined. The U.S, Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) now encourages all nuclear utilities to conduct probabilistic risk assessments (PRAs) that are plant-specific. The largest benefit from these expensive and lengthy studies has been the ability to identify the systems or operations that pose the most risk for bringing about an accident. Money for modifications and maintenance can then be effectively directed, resulting in real safety improvements. As a result, today's plants, even older ones, pose less risk than the plant used in the Reactor Safety Study.
Reactor Accidents
There have been two major accidents in nuclear electrical generating stations plus a major accident at a large plutonium-production reactor. There have also been a number of lesser accidents with no off-site consequences, a substantial number of accident 'precursors' - events that could lead to an accident if corrective action were not taken, and a few serious accidents at government-owned nuclear facilities.
</doc><doc register="learned" n="80">Floodlighting had its merits for early warning, but the rotating beam had two enormous advantages: there is a greater concentration of energy, and plan position indicators (PPIs) could be employed. The advantage of PPI display had been appreciated in both Germany and Britain since 1935; but it was only practical at much higher frequencies with a rotating beam system. The time-base of the PPI radiates from the centre of the screen in synchronization with the beam. The target appears as a spot of light in the direction of the echo at a distance from the centre that represents the range of the echo, as in <figure/>1.5. When the immediate priority of an early-warning system was satisfied, efforts in ground radar turned to CHL (chain home low), GCI, and gunlaying systems.
Narrow beams required antenna arrays large in relation to wavelength. At the CH frequencies (and also those used by the German system Freya), vertical antenna arrays, 70 m and more in height, were required to obtain the necessary discrimination - in particular to avoid the swamping of the picture by ground returns. Something quite different was required for ship borne radar, to say nothing of aircraft equipment. An October 1935 statement of the operational requirement for naval radar specified microwave equipment, not only to reduce the size of the ship's antenna, but to avoid the ship's radar becoming a homing beacon for enemy bombers. The technology to home on to microwave transmissions came only a few years later.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
There was nothing new about VHF: the original Hertz oscillator probably transmitted on a wavelength of about 4 metres, had he the means to measure it. In the 1920s it had been thought that ordinary thermionic valves could not operate on centimetric wavelengths, because the transit time of the electrons from cathode to anode was too long. The real, unrecognized, problem was the stability of the transit time. Several exotic microwave transmitting devices appeared, some of them producing a fraction of a watt. In 1936 the 16 cm obstacle detector on the Normandie produced 10 watts. As many kilowatts were sought. One important development was the magnetron, a term used since 1921 to describe a vacuum electron tube (usually a cylindrical diode) in which plate current is controlled by magnetic fields. In the early 1930s Philips of Holland produced a magnetron which gave 80 watts on 13 cm continuous wave. A Philips magnetron was delivered to the German navy in 1933.
The difficulties due to the inability to produce power on centimetric wavelengths, and therefore to discriminate with small antenna arrays, are clearly seen in early British aircraft interception (AI) radar operating on 1.5 metres. The transmitting array was in the nose, two quarter-wavelength antennas on a wing acted as elevation antennas, and a half-wavelength dipole with director on each wing provided the azimuth array. The polar diagram is illustrated in <figure/>1.6, the display in <figure/>1.7. The signal received from the elevation antennas (after amplification) is fed to either side of the vertical display; and, similarly, the signals from the azimuth arrays to either side of the horizontal display. Thus the orientation of the target is indicated by the imbalance of the blip, about 20<*_>degree<*/> below and 30-40<*_>degree<*/> to the left in the illustration. There was no range scale, nor any need for one, because the ground return swamped the screen at all ranges greater than the aircraft height, which it sharply defined.
AI MK IV described above (and installed in RAF Beaufighters in 1940) is interesting also because it created a human requirement in terms of spatial visualization and quick thinking unparalledunparalleled in the history of navigation. As the armament was fixed forward, the object of the navigation was to get on the target's tail. If the target's range is allowed to exceed aircraft height, it is lost. The target's course can be inferred indirectly from the motion of the 'blip' down the time-base and the change in its shape. Assume that the Beaufighter is heading south. If the target is heading east, a sharp turn to the left is required at mximum power before the target gets lost in the ground return. If the target is heading west, the only hope is to throttle right back, drop the undercarriage to increase drag, and turn right, losing the blip temporarily, and hoping to come out of the turn behind the target and not in front of it. There are only a few seconds to decide, and, when the correct decision is taken, the enemy unkindly changes course! Only a few had the knack of it.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
The desperate need for powerful microwave transmitters was met by the invention of the multi-cavity magnetron at Birmingham University by Henry A. Boot and John T. Randall at the beginning of 1940. The university had been given a contract by the Admiralty to research microwave transmission, and work had concentrated on developing a high-power version of the klystron invented at Stanford University, California. Randall and Boot were assigned the less promising task of trying to do something with the magnetron. Apparently they shared the research philosophy of Watson Watt and Wilkins, for in 1976 they were to write: "Fortunately we did not have the time to survey all the published papers on magnetrons or we would have been completely confused by the multiplicity of theories of operation."
The story is related that Randall went back to the original experiments of Hertz and, in his mind, extended the Hertz resonant ring into a cylinder with a slit in it, as in <figure/>1.8. He then saw how this could be developed into the six-cavity figure illustrated. Early in 1940 the laboratory model produced over 1 kw pulse power at a wavelength of about 10 cm. The first production model generated 10 kw, which was soon increased to 100 kw. At the end of the war there was megawatt power at that wavelength, and wavelengths down to 3 cm could be transmitted at less power.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
That was the beginning of microwave radar as we now know it. The Royal Navy seized on the magnetron (and on related work on the klystron to provide a local oscillator for centimetric receivers) to produce the first fully operational centimetric radar in the world. From its formation early in 1941, the Admiralty Signals Establishment made major contributions to coastal and naval radar. Perhaps the improvement in AI is as dramatic an illustration as any of the potency of the multi-cavity magnetron. Ground returns could be put where they belonged, and any of the three displays shown in <figure/>1.9 were at the AI designer's disposal. In <figure/>1.9(a) the display shows the target as the eye sees it, in correct azimuth and elevation, but with no indication of range, since a 2D display cannot show three independent variables. This can be supported by a second display in which range is shown against either azimuth or elevation, as illustrated in Figs. 11.9(b) and 11.9(c).
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
A scarcely less dramatic outcome of the magnetron was terrain-mapping radar, in the form of H<sb_>2<sb/>S and later derivatives. In the early years of the war metric naval radar and ASV (aircraft to surface vessel radar) displayed coastlines, but no metric radar could effectively distinguish the features of terrain. Ten-centimetre H<sb_>2<sb/>S enabled the bomber to identify cities and some topographical features of enemy territory by night or through cloud. Later 3 cm equipment gave even greater detail. Accurate altitude above terrain for precision bombing was also provided.
Shortly after the achievement of Boot and Randall all resistance to Hitler on the continent of Europe ceased. In the opinion of many, not least the US ambassador to Britain, the defeat of Britain by Germany was imminent. Certainly Britain lacked the production resources its situation needed. The USA was not to become (by courtesy of Japan) an ally for another year and a half. Churchill chose this moment to do a curious thing. On 8 July 1940 President Roosevelt received a letter from the British ambassador to Washington offering to disclose all Britain's technical secrets to the American government without reciprocal undertakings from the US; but there was an implied quid pro quo. The letter concluded: "We for our part are probably more anxious to be permitted to employ the full resources of the radio industry in your country with a view to obtaining the greater power possible for the emission of ultra short waves than anything else."
The timing was perfect. Eleven days earlier Roosevelt had created the National Defence Research Council (NDRC), and one of its first acts was to establish a microwave committee. A British mission led by Tizard (Sir Henry at that date) departed on 30 August for Washington bearing, inter alia, the multi-cavity magnetron, described in 1946 by one enthusiastic American scientist as "the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores".
The word 'magnificent' appears infrequently in this book; but the American response was magnificent. In October the Radiation Laboratory was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and eminent American scientists flocked to it. The Laboratory's given priorities, agreed between the Tizard mission and the NDRC, were in order:
1. microwave AI;
2. precision gunlaying radar; and
3. a fixing system requiring no response from the ship or aircraft (see Chapter 12).
In the same month the first contracts were being settled with Bell Laboratories, General Electric, Sperry, Bendix, RCA, and Westinghouse.
In December 1940, for the first time ever, radar was fitted to an American aircraft. It was a 1.5 m pre-magnetron British ASV Mk II (see below), fitted to a US Navy PBY. Only three months later an American-designed and built 10 cm radar employing magnetron technology was flying in a US B18. At that precise date (10 March 1941) the staff of the Radiation Laboratory had already reached 140. In effect, American aircraft overflew pre-magnetron radar. When the US finally became a belligerent in December 1941, its leadership in the field was assured.
No small group of people ever win a major war; but sometimes quite small groups can prevent it being lost. It might be said that the group associated with ASV (aircraft to surface vessel) were in that category. ASV worked on similar principles to AI Mk IV except that only a horizontal display was required and the sea return, unlike the ground return, did not swamp the picture. The equipment did not require the special aptitude and skill required by Mk IV AI, but did require intense concentration. The early unsuccessfulness of the Mk I ASV in anti-U-boat operations has been variously attributed to the equipment itself, poor training or unsuitability of aircrew, and defects of aircraft and weaponry. In the quarter ending with February 1941 96 Allied ships were sunk by U-boats without loss. If that rate had continued, Britain would have quickly lost the war by attrition.
<O_>figure&caption<O/>
Figure 11.10 (based on Figure 6.1 of Bowen 1987) shows the effect of the introduction of ASV Mk II, which had the same 7 kW pulse output as ASV Mk I, but was better engineered and had a longer pulse and a lower PRF. Presumably improvements in aircrew, aircraft, and weaponry also played their part. The rise in Allied shipping losses in early 1942 seen in the figure has been attributed in part to the rich pickings for U-boats in American waters immediately after the USA entered the war, but was also partly due to the German development of ASV detectors and other U-boat counter-measures. The signal received at the target is of course several orders stronger than the echo signal received back at the radar transmitter. The range of receivers designed to give warning of radar surveillance may therefore exceed the range of the radar itself. German equipment to warn submarines of ASV and night bombers of AI became a technology in its own right.
After the introduction in March 1943 of microwave ASV Mk III, an H<sb_>2<sb/>S derivative, the U-boat became an ineffective weapon and the coffin of its crew.</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684419" filename="FROWN_K.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="fiction general" n="01">
Geno called B&B taxi, which took him to the Barrington campus along Route 9 in a rusty blue '84 Chevy. This road had been nothing but a slice of macadam through a cornfield when Geno arrived in Barrington seventeen years ago, but for him it was ruined now. Neon signs had arrived a decade ago, advertising a pizza shop and a bowling alley. Gas stations went up quickly, followed by an A&P, a Super Drug, and a Miracle Mart.
Soon after their wedding, Geno and Susan had moved into a redbrick apartment building two blocks off campus on a leafy elm-shaded street. First the elms died, then a Pizza Hut opened up across the street, and the traffic worsened. Frustrated, they began hunting for a farmhouse outside of town.
Geno loved the remoter parts of Vermont, places where one could imagine the twentieth century had barely begun. The farmhouse he and Susan found, with a long view of Mount Isaac, was perfect. Sitting in an Adirondack chair on the front lawn, one could believe the year was 1911.
The main thing about Vermont, for Geno, was that it wasn't New Jersey. His home state embodied the worst aspects of this catastrophic century. At one time its small towns were full of gingerbreaded wood-frame houses, redbrick Federals, neoclassical granite banks, and shimmering limestone court-houses. These had given way to 'developments' of split-level eyesores with aluminum siding and screened-in patios.
Geno had grown up in the standard prefab with a two-car garage beneath a master bedroom. His father put a basketball hoop over the garage doors when he was eight, making his son instantly popular in the neighborhood. A gang of boys filled the driveway every afternoon in summer, and a running pick-up game continued until Geno's father, who sold wall-to-wall carpeting for a building supply company in Meadow Pond, arrived home at five-thirty sharp for supper.
Mr. Genovese always came home frazzled, and he gulped a double Manhattan to calm his nerves. Mrs. Genovese made sure the boys abandoned the hoop just before her husband's black Buick nosed into the driveway.
An only child, Geno was raised to believe the universe revolved around him, although he'd been conscious of his father's business troubles from an early age. Mr. Genovese began in sales after the war, working first in automotive supplies. He moved, briefly, to a feed supply store. His cousin, Nick Giacometti, hired him at the building supply company in 1957, and Mr. Genovese gravitated to industrial carpeting. He wore a suit to work every day with a starched shirt and a flowery tie, and it meant a great deal to him that he had a 'white collar' job. It upset him that business was never very good.
Mr. Genovese wanted Geno to pursue a career in sales, but his son's academic bent scratched that idea. The scholarship to Dartmouth sealed Geno's fate. From then on, he was never not in school, as student or teacher. And never in New Jersey.
The disturbing thing was that Barrington had come to resemble his hometown more than ever, with condos and tracts of prefab houses spreading like cancer cells on the town's periphery. The village green, with its churches and banks and nineteenth-century storefronts, was - thank God - preserved by tourism. Kitsch had its up side, too. But Geno hadn't quite noticed, until now, how terrifyingly ugly the place was becoming.
The college remained pristine, but its unreality hit Geno hard as the taxi passed through its stone gates. What was he doing here anyway? He must call his father-in-law soon about that loan. If only he could buy, say, twenty thousand dollars of penny stocks in gold mining companies in Peru, his future would be assured. If his calculations were correct, in five years that stock would appreciate tenfold, and he could quit his teaching job, move to the Caribbean, and write poetry till the world turned cold.
Geno walked into Milton House with a heavy heart, trying not to breathe in the smell of institutional floorwax. The corridor was dark.
"Hi, Geno," a voice cried, rather pleasantly.
Geno startled, turning to face Agnes Wild.
"Did I frighten you?"
"You always frighten me."
"I'm glad I ran into you," she said.
"Ditto."
"Really?"
"You really fucked me this time, Agnes."
Agnes looked at him. "You think I put Lizzie up to this, don't you?" She seemed hurt.
"I do."
"Well, I didn't. I had nothing to do with it."
Geno stared at her, uncertain.
"I'd tell you if I did. You know that. Nothing is gained by going behind people's backs."
Geno sighed. She was probably telling the truth. Indeed, he often told Susan that Agnes was too unimaginative to lie. "I assumed you were pissed off about that Virginia Woolf thing."
"I thought that I was more interested in Woolf than you were."
"You are."
"So it was natural that I should want to supervise Lizzie."
"It was." He looked down like a small boy. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have jumped to conclusions."
"I accept your apology. But you've got a lot of work to do with Lizzie Nash."
"And the Committee on Human Relations."
"I don't know what's going to happen there."
"You're the chairperson!"
"The materials you presented are ...well ...hard to digest. We're not legal experts, you know. I don't think we're looking at a legal situation in any case. But there's a point of morality here."
"Ah ...morality. Yes."
Geno went into his office, closed the door, and drew the blinds. He sat back in his desk chair, his feet on the desk, and closed his eyes, feeling a sharp throb in each temple. His head was killing him now. It seemed that his life - his teaching life, his writing life, his family life - had hit its nadir. It was difficult to imagine how he could regain his wife's trust or find a way to relate to the boys that felt solid and real. The idea of divorce appalled him. A marriage was a mystical unit, consecrated by human and divine love. And he was determined to act responsibly and well - and to earn the union he desired - even if it meant uprooting, moving to a new country, burning his house to the ground to begin again, with bricks and mortar. The time had come, he decided, to rebuild.
A knock came to the door, and he shuddered. Not Lizzie Nash, he hoped. Or Agnes.
"Hello?" he called weakly.
"Excuse me?" said Chap Baloo, pushing the door wide. "That you, old boy?"
"Nobody here but us chickens."
Baloo made himself comfortable in the chair by the book-case. "I had a call from Botner this morning," Baloo said. "They apparently don't have a decision on your case. Not yet."
"Fuck them," Geno said.
Baloo shifted uncomfortably, twisting his mouth to one side unconsciously. "That's not a good attitude, Geno," he said.
"Frankly, I don't care anymore."
Baloo said, "I don't mean to frighten you, but they could suspend you for a term. Maybe dock your salary."
"Can they fire me?"
"You've got tenure, but I reckon anything's possible." His Southern accent seemed to thicken. "It's a dark mood this country's in."
"I didn't do anything wrong."
Baloo took a pipe from his jacket pocket, though he didn't intend to light it. Pipes were conversation props for him - a residue of Southern gentility. "I'm sorry if this seems to be ruining your summer," he said.
"My summer is fine."
"I saw Susan at the post office just a while ago. She looked awful."
"She's had a bad year," Geno said. "And I guess I haven't made life easy for her."
"Women," said Baloo. "You know the old saying, 'Can't live with them, can't live without them.'" With this, he winked and left, closing the door behind him.
On the way home in the taxi, Geno thought about Baloo's silly old saw. He'd heard it many times, and it typified a familiar male way of regarding women as a kind of foreign country. As an only child, he hadn't really known a woman close up until quite late in adolescence, unless you counted his mother. Susan was the first woman he'd lived with intimately, and he recalled the strangeness of their first months together. Everything about her intrigued him: her smells, her daily habits, the way she stood in front of the mirror and looked into her own eyes. He could never look into his own eyes so intensely.
Susan was bending over a row of flowers when he arrived. She wore a big straw sombrero and jeans, and even though she must have heard the taxi grinding over the pebbles as it climbed the driveway, she didn't look around.
Geno paid the driver and walked to where she was clawing up weeds, and he stood quietly behind her. "We could use some rain, huh?" he said, at last.
She continued with her claw, piling the granular leaves of dandelions in a clump beside her.
"I guess you're not talking, is that it?"
Susan sighed, rocking back on her thighs. Then she started crying. She put her head in her gloved hands, and her shoulders shook.
He knelt beside her. It was so hard to think of anything to say to someone so obviously in pain. What was worse, he felt responsible for that pain.
"I'm sorry, Susie," he said.
She rose slowly, wiping her eyes on a flannel shirtsleeve.
"I guess I'm out of control these days." He was looking at the ground as he talked. "Sometimes I wish we could just get out of here, you know. Start again somewhere else. I might quit teaching."
"You're broke," she said, laughing through the tears now - like sun tearing through a scrim of rain.
"So what?"
"Like hippies, huh?"
He became excited now as a green floating image - an island - appeared in his mind. He closed his eyes to see it more clearly. It was the Dominican Republic, he was sure.
"We could house-sit in Maine," Susan said.
"Maine?"
"Help on a lobster boat or something."
"How about the Dominican Republic? Maine is too cold," he said. "The D.R. is perfect - never too cold or hot."
Susan studied his face like a math problem, saying nothing.
Geno said, "I'm serious."
"I know you are," she said.
Geno came close to her now, wiping the wetness from her eyes with his thumbs. Then he didn't kiss her exactly. He just stood with his lips pressed to hers, slowly breathing her in - the smell of dirt and sweat, tears and sun. She was earth and air, he thought. She was fire and water.
"I love you," he said. "I like you. And I never hate you."
"I'm glad you never hate me," she said.
She put her head on his shoulder, and he let his fingers cup her gourdlike head, feeling her skull beneath the scalp. And he knew he loved her, loved her.
Chapter 21
Charles had spent five days in the mountains with Yellow Moon, a mud-spattered woman in her midtwenties. She was from Arkansas, with an accent thick as kudzu, though she had most recently lived in Boulder. Her name made sense if you looked at her without preconceptions: the whites of her eyes were indeed yellow, while her head was moonlike; even her scalp - visible beneath her bleached-out hair - glowed with a yellowy tint.
She and Charles pitched a tent in the north field adjacent to Geno and Susan's house, and it was established that they could either use the kitchen to cook for themselves or, if they preferred, eat with the family.
"I'm certainly a cook," Yellow Moon volunteered on the first night, her words like mismatched beads on a string. "I do a rice and beans dish much like the Caribbeans."
Geno wondered how was it possible that Charles, who was so intelligent, could have stuck himself with such a woman.
"The Cubans eat rice and beans, don't they?" Susan asked.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="02">
"Not really. It's more like seeing things as they are. Kind of like the old acid days."
"Well, it gets you rolling in the morning." She stood up abruptly with her purse under her elbow. "Call me," she said, and went out.
Frank felt a little gust and thought, I will. He paid for breakfast and went outside where a parking lot full of cars rested, seemed to await their mission. Wonderful when day had not begun, when only the breakfast waitresses and airline crews were conspicuously there and ready for the rest of the world if it ever woke up. Frank looked off to the silhouettes of the city and the mountains beyond. Odd hours always took him back to the days of weirdness, to the exhilaration of being out of step. He went on contemplating the way the world was reabsorbing him and his friends, terrified people coming to resemble their parents, their dogs, their country, their seatmates, after a pretty good spell of resembling only themselves. This, thought Frank, lacks tragic dimension almost as certainly as podiatry does. But it holds me in a certain ache to imagine I'm actually as much a businessman as my father.
But Frank was apprehensive about going to work. He was, after all, across the hall from Lucy. That hadn't changed. And he was disquieted about seeing her this morning. Despite twenty years of trying to reduce sex to the same status as the handshake, its reduction was unreliable and it frequently had an unwelcome larger significance. Lovemaking still seemed to test the emotional assumptions that led up to it, and in Frank's case he somehow found out that he was never going to be in love with Lucy. It was important to act on this perception before her nose seemed to grow or her mouth to hang open vacantly, her vocabulary to shrink or her feet to slap awkwardly on the linoleum. He was going to have to drum up some drippy conversation about friendship, a deadening policy statement that would reduce everything to awkwardness.
He needn't have worried. She was in the hallway when he arrived. She wrinkled her face at the sight of him, shook her head and disappeared into her office. He went into his own without greeting Eileen, his secretary. He tore down the Eskimo poster with disgust and, briefly, hated himself. A new set of tickets and itinerary lay on his desk. He opened the itinerary. It said, "Hell." Nothing else.
He picked up his phone.
"Eileen."
"Yes, Mr. Copenhaver."
"Good morning."
"Good morning."
"My mind was elsewhere."
"Don't worry about it."
"Thank you. Now, can you get me Lucy across the hall."
The phone rang only once.
"Lucy, Frank."
"Yes."
"Is there something wrong?"
"Is there something wrong..." she said. He knew now, of course, that there was.
"I thought we'd had a nice evening."
"We had, to a point."
"And at what point did you think it went downhill?"
"At the point you called me Gracie."
"I did that, did I?"
"About seven times."
"Sorry."
"I suppose it's not your fault, Frank. But I'm not your old wife."
"Of course not."
He hung the phone up and leaned on his hands. He could have said, "No, you're not my old wife. You're my wife's old friend. Some friend!"
For some reason, he called June up at the dealership. They had to page her on the lot. By the time she came to the phone, he had forgotten why it had seemed so necessary to call her. Nevertheless, he told her what had happened. She listened quietly. He explained as discreetly as he could that he had said one or two inappropriate things during a spell of delightful lovemaking and it had ruined everything. June said,"I can't get into it. When they're doing their job, they can call me John Brown for all I care." Frank thanked her anyway and hung up, then thanked her to himself for this burst of redneck health.
He went down to Lucy's office and sat under the waterfall while Lucy watched him and waited for him to say something.
"Are you still angry?" he said finally.
"No. I never was angry."
"I don't want to lay this on you, but if you weren't angry, you were hurt."
"Then I was angry, but I'm not angry now."
Some hours ago, he thought, she was chewing sheets and going "Oof, oof, oof!" while, evidently, I was going, "Oh, Gracie, oh, Gracie!" Quite a picture. Oh, dear.
Then she smiled and said, "This time, I'm not sending you anywhere." The air had apparently cleared. Frank left her office, thinking, What a nice person.
Frank straightened up his desk and went back out through the reception area. "I'm going to the ranch," he said.
"Can you be reached there?" asked Eileen.
"No, but I'll be back."
Frank drove north out of town, cutting through the subdivisions that lay around the old town center. Frank had a reluctant affection for these suburbs, with their repetitious shapes and lawns and basketball hoops and garages. He appreciated their regularity.
The road wound up through dryland farms of oats and malting barley, golden blankets in the middle of sagebrush country, toward the tall brown of snowy mountains. The city had almost disappeared behind him, yet from the front gate of the home place he could still make it out. A bright serration against the hills.
Frank stopped right in front of the house where his family once lived, a substantial farmhouse with a low, deep porch across the entire front, white with blue shutters and a blue shingled roof. The house sat on a fieldstone cellar with deep-set airyway windows at regular intervals beneath the porch. The house was locked up. In front, the tall hollyhocks his grandmother had taken such care of stood up boldly through the quack grass and competed along the border of the porch with the ocher shafts of henbane. The junipers hadn't been trimmed and streaks of brown penetrated their dark green masses. It was a fine old house that gave Frank the creeps.
He drove slowly past it toward the barn and outbuildings, looking for Boyd Jarrell, his hired man. He had already seen Jarrell's truck from the house, and when he crossed the cattle guard into the equipment compound, he watched Jarrell walk past the granary without looking up at Frank's car. He saw that Jarrell would be in a foul mood, and felt a slight sinking in his stomach. Boyd liked Mike but didn't like Frank. Mike came out here and played rancher with Boyd, building fence on the weekends or irrigating, and in general dignifying Boyd's job by doing an incompetent imitation of it. Frank could never understand why this would ingratiate Mike to Boyd, but he guessed it was a form of tribute.
Frank parked the car and walked toward the granary. Jarrell now crossed the compound going the other way, carrying an irrigating shovel and a length of tow chain over his shoulder.
"Boyd," Frank called, and Jarrell stopped, paused and looked over at Frank. "Have you got a minute?"
"I might."
Frank walked over to him.
"I spoke to Lowry Equipment on Friday," said Frank, "and the loader's fixed on the tractor. So, that's ready to go whenever you need it."
"If that's all it was."
"That's right. But I assume it's okay."
Jarrell looked away and smiled. Frank let it fall silent for a minute.
"I've got a buyer to look at our calves on Monday."
"I hope he can find them."
Frank looked at Jarrell. Jarrell had him by fifty pounds and ten years. But he had put down his mark.
"He'll find them," Frank said. "You'll take him to them. Or you'll get out."
Frank turned to go to his car.
"Fuck you, Copenhaver," he heard Jarrell say, like a concussion or a huge sneeze, and Frank kept walking. He heard Jarrell walk up behind him, and in a moment Frank's hat was slapped off his head. He bent to pick it up, then kept going to his car. Jarrell laughed and went to his truck, parked alongside the barn.
Frank stopped, then turned. He went back to where Jarrell stood. "Why did you do that, Boyd?"
"Because I don't like people telling me what to do."
"Well, Boyd, you should have thought of that."
"Thought of that when, you goddamn sonofabitch? When I let you tell me what to do?"
"When you came to work for us, Boyd. You knew what the deal was. I told you what the deal was. And I might have been the guy to give you your last chance." Jarrell crossed his arms and smiled at a faraway place. "I wouldn't hesitate to fire you right now except for the thought you might go back and beat up your wife like you did last time." Jarrell swung his gaze from the cloudy faraway and stared hard and flat into Frank's face. If it happens it happens, Frank thought. I couldn't live with myself if I shut up now. "Don't look at me, it was in the papers. And you know what? I had the same thought everybody else did: what kind of guy puts a hundred-ten-pound woman in the Deaconess Hospital? What kind of man is that? Good luck on your next job, Boyd."
Frank turned and began to walk toward his car. He hadn't gone many steps before he heard Jarrell behind him again. He kept walking and the steps ceased. He got in his car and drove out of the drive, past the unlucky house, and tried to picture the exact spot where Jarrell stood when he left.
When he got back to the office, he called Mrs. Jarrell and explained that he had had to let Boyd go, that Boyd was a fine man and a fine worker but that the time had come for each of them to get on with their lives in a different way. He had had to tell people before that it was time to get on with their lives. He said this in a conciliatory voice that sounded, after a bit, like that of a radio announcer or an advertisement for a commercial halfway house for disturbed youths. Mrs. Jarrell at least let him finish, then called him every foul name he had ever heard, including a few he was unsure of, like "spastic morphodite." Frank squinted in pain through this barrage and said that, nevertheless, he wished them all the luck in the world. His voice was a croak.
"Eat shit," said Mrs. Jarrell. "I hope you have a stroke."
Pause for thought. Some direct suggestions from Mrs. Jarrell. The same day Hell was suggested as a travel destination -and by a lover of the previous night! He went to see his brother Mike.
Mike was an orthodontist, and Frank had to wait until almost noon in his office, with bucktoothed preteens, reading kids' magazines before Mike had him in. They sat in the dental lab and talked, fat Mike still in his pale green smock, his round red face revealing the constant optimism that came of doing some one small thing in the world, namely pushing young teeth back and keeping them there. Frank looked around at the instruments, at the remarkable order.
"Mike," said Frank, "the ranch is making me crazy."
"You always tell me this when irrigation starts."
"I fired that cocksucker Jarrell."
"I wish you hadn't done that. He's a hard worker."
"I went out there today and he was in one of his cowboy snits."
"You shouldn't have gone out there. You know this happens when irrigation water runs. Everybody becomes an animal."
"I have to go out there. I had the tractor fixed for the filthy shit. He busted it, bent the bucket and blew the hydraulics. But he can't talk to anyone so I got it fixed. I tell him this and it just seems to make him madder.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="03">
There she is. No dancing brothers are in this place, nor any breathless girls waiting for the white bulb to be exchanged for the blue. This is an adult party - what goes on goes on in bright light. The illegal liquor is not secret and the secrets are not forbidden. Pay a dollar or two when you enter and what you say is smarter, funnier, than it would be in your own kitchen. Your wit surfaces over and over like the rush of foam to the rim. The laughter is like pealing bells that don't need a hand to pull on the rope; it just goes on and on until you are weak with it. You can drink the safe gin if you like, or stick to beer, but you don't need either because a touch on the knee, accidental or on purpose, alerts the blood like a shot of pre-Pro bourbon or two fingers pinching your nipple. Your spirit lifts to the ceiling where it floats for a bit looking down with pleasure on the dressed-up nakedness below. You know something wicked is going on in a room with a closed door. But there is enough dazzle and mischief here, where partners cling or exchange at the urging of a heartbreaking vocal.
Dorcas is satisfied, content. Two arms clasp her and she is able to rest her cheek on her own shoulder while her wrists cross behind his neck. It's good they don't need much space to dance in because there isn't any. The room is packed. Men groan their satisfaction; women hum anticipation. The music bends, falls to its knees to embrace them all, encourage them all to live a little, why don't you? since this is the it you've been looking for.
Her partner does not whisper in Dorcas' ear. His promises are already clear in the chin he presses into her hair, the fingertips that stay. She stretches up to encircle his neck. He bends to help her do it. They agree on everything above the waist and below: muscle, tendon, bone joint and marrow cooperate. And if the dancers hesitate, have a moment of doubt, the music will solve and dissolve any question.
Dorcas is happy. Happier than she has ever been anytime. No white strands grow in her partner's mustache. He is up and coming. Hawk-eyed, tireless and a little cruel. He has never given her a present or even thought about it. Sometimes he is where he says he will be; sometimes not. Other women want him - badly - and he has been selective. What they want and the prize it is his to give is his savvy self. What could a pair of silk stockings be compared to him? No contest. Dorcas is lucky. Knows it. And is as happy as she has ever been anytime.
<*_>three-dots<*/>
"He's coming for me. I know he is because I know how flat his eyes went when I told him not to. And how they raced afterward. I didn't say it nicely, although I meant to. I practiced the points; in front of the mirror I went through them one by one: the sneaking around, and his wife and all. I never said anything about our ages or Acton. Nothing about Acton. But he argued with me so I said, Leave me alone. Just leave me alone. Get away from me. You bring me another bottle of cologne I'll drink it and die you don't leave me alone.
"He said, You can't die from cologne.
"I said, You know what I mean.
"He said, You want me to leave my wife?
"I said, No! I want you to leave me. I don't want you inside me. I don't want you beside me. I hate this room. I don't want to be here and don't come looking for me.
"He said, Why?
"I said, Because. Because. Because.
"He said, Because what?
"I said, Because you make me sick.
"Sick? I make you sick?
"Sick of myself and sick of you.
"I didn't mean that part ... about being sick. He didn't. Make me sick, I mean. What I wanted to let him know was that I had this chance to have Acton and I wanted it and I wanted girlfriends to talk to about it. About where we went and what he did. About things. About stuff. What good are secrets if you can't talk to anybody about them? I sort of hinted about Joe and me to Felice and she laughed before she stared at me and then frowned.
"I couldn't tell him all that because I had practiced the other points and got mixed up.
"But he's coming for me. I know it. He's been looking for me all over. Maybe tomorrow he'll find me. Maybe tonight. Way out here; all the way out here.
"When we got off the streetcar, me and Acton and Felice, I thought he was there in the doorway next to the candy store, but it wasn't him. Not yet. I think I see him everywhere. I know he's looking and now I know he's coming.
"He didn't even care what I looked like. I could be anything, do anything - and it pleased him. Something about that made me mad. I don't know.
"Acton, now, he tells me when he doesn't like the way I fix my hair. Then I do it how he likes it. I never wear glasses when he is with me and I changed my laugh for him to one he likes better. I think he does. I know he didn't like it before. And I play with my food now. Joe liked for me to eat it all up and want more. Acton gives me a quiet look when I ask for seconds. He worries about me that way. Joe never did. Joe didn't care what kind of woman I was. He should have. I cared. I wanted to have a personality and with Acton I'm getting one. I have a look now. What pencil-thin eyebrows do for my face is a dream. All my bracelets are just below my elbow. Sometimes I knot my stockings below, not above, my knees. Three straps are across my instep and at home I have shoes with leather cut out to look like lace.
"He is coming for me. Maybe tonight. Maybe here.
"If he does he will look and see how close me and Acton dance. How I rest my head on my arm holding on to him. The hem of my skirt drapes down in back and taps the calves of my legs while we rock back and forth, then side to side. The whole front of us touches. Nothing can get between us we are so close. Lots of girls here want to be doing this with him. I can see them when I open my eyes to look past his neck. I rub my thumbnail over his nape so the girls will know I know they want him. He doesn't like it and turns his head to make me stop touching his neck that way. I stop.
"Joe wouldn't care. I could rub anywhere on him. He let me draw lipstick pictures in places he had to have a mirror to see."
Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It's like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people's blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged. Partners and rivals devastated; new pairings triumphant. The knockout possibilities knock Dorcas out because here - with grown-ups and as in war - people play for keeps.
"He's coming for me. And when he does he will see I'm not his anymore. I'm Acton's and it's Acton I want to please. He expects it. With Joe I pleased myself because he encouraged me to. With Joe I worked the stick of the world, the power in my hand."
<*_>three-dots<*/>
Oh, the room - the music - the people leaning in doorways. Silhouettes kiss behind curtains; playful fingers examine and caress. This is the place where things pop. This is the market where gesture is all: a tongue's lightning lick; a thumbnail grazing the split cheeks of a purple plum. Any thrownaway lover in wet unlaced shoes and a buttoned-up sweater under his coat is a foreigner here. This is not the place for old men; this is the place for romance.
"He's here. Oh, look. God. He's crying. Am I falling? Why am I falling? Acton is holding me up but I am falling anyway. Heads are turning to look where I am falling. It's dark and now it's light. I am lying on a bed. Somebody is wiping sweat from my forehead, but I am cold, so cold. I see mouths moving; they are all saying something to me I can't hear. Way out there at the foot of the bed I see Acton. Blood is on his coat jacket and he is dabbing at it with a white handkerchief. Now a woman takes the coat from his shoulders. He is annoyed by the blood. It's my blood, I guess, and it has stained through his jacket to his shirt. The hostess is shouting. Her party is ruined. Acton looks angry; the woman brings his jacket back and it is not clean the way it was before and the way he likes it.
"I can hear them now.
"'Who? Who did this?'
"I'm tired. Sleepy. I ought to be wide awake because something important is happening.
"'Who did this, girl? Who did this to you?'
"They want me to say his name. Say it in public at last.
"Acton has taken his shirt off. People are blocking the doorway; some stretch behind them to get a better look. The record playing is over. Somebody they have been waiting for is playing the piano. A woman is singing too. The music is faint but I know the words by heart.
"Felice leans close. Her hand holding mine is too tight. I try to say with my mouth to come nearer. Her eyes are bigger than the light fixture on the ceiling. She asks me was it him.
"They need me to say his name so they can go after him. Take away his sample case with Rochelle and Bernadine and Faye inside. I know his name but Mama won't tell. The world rocked from a stick beneath my hand, Felice. There in that room with the ice sign in the window.
"Felice puts her ear on my lips and I scream it to her. I think I am screaming it. I think I am.
"People are leaving.
"Now it's clear. Through the doorway I see the table. On it is a brown wooden bowl, flat, low like a tray, full of spilling with oranges. I want to sleep, but it is clear now. So clear the dark bowl the pile of oranges. Just oranges. Bright. Listen. I don't know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart."
Sweetheart. That's what the weather was called. Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year. And that's when it started. On a day so pure and steady trees preened. Standing in the middle of a concrete slab, scared for their lives, they preened. Silly, yes, but it was that kind of day. I could see Lenox widening itself, and men coming out of their shops to look at it, to stand with their hands under their aprons or stuck in their back pockets and just look around at a street that spread itself wider to hold the day.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="04">
At last I applied for the commission of ensign (deck volunteer general) and became a 'ninety-day wonder' after training for that period of time aboard the U.S.S. Prairie State, moored in the Hudson the upper west bank of Manhattan.
And then my fate took a curious turn. Instead of being sent to sea, I was assigned to Vice Admiral Clarke's staff at 90 Church Street, where I found myself a kind of personal secretary to the old man, running errands, writing letters, accompanying him on social occasions and even handling some of the delicate problems of his rather difficult children. It was no fault of mine that he became so dependent on me that he opposed my transfer to more active duty, and Amanda, delighted to have me home, argued strongly that it was a quite sufficient contribution to the war effort to guard from distracting botherations the high officer who was responsible for the safety of our whole eastern sea frontier. But as I had always concentrated on looking the part of a man of courage, it now surely behooved me not to look the part of his opposite, and I suspected that few of my friends appreciated the stranglehold that my chief had on my naval career and deemed me the willing and complaisant captive of his personal needs. And so I found myself in the position of having actually to throw away the shield that a kind fate seemed to be interposing between me and my old nemesis!
The call for more officers on sea duty was now so urgent that Admiral Clarke was obliged to endorse my application for assignment to the amphibious fleet. I had decided that I might do better on a ship such as an LST, where one had only, so to speak, to follow the leader in a line of transports, than on an attacking destroyer, where any moment of panic might paralyze the brain and endanger the vessel. What I had not counted on was the favoritism of my admiral, who followed my career from his desk in Church Street (as a naval officer he could not resent my desertion) and was instrumental in my being made captain of a landing ship tanks.
Well, it started off well enough. I had nine officers and a hundred men under me, and being reasonable in my expectations of them and polite and friendly in my dealings, I soon found myself popular. We crossed the Atlantic to take part in the invasion of Normandy and had the good luck to unload our troops on one of the less guarded sectors of the beaches. After returning to the Solent three days later and dropping the hook exactly in our assigned position, I wondered whether the murky god of my adolescence had not been appeased at last.
Alas, he was only waiting for a more opportune moment. Some weeks later, ordered to London to take on Canadian troops, we passed at night through the Straits of Dover within range for some hours of the German shore batteries. They opened up on the convoy, and despite the British jamming of their radar, they managed to hit the merchant vessel directly ahead of us.
Now I learned what hell is. My crew, of course, were at their battle stations, and I at mine on the bridge with the officer of the deck, the executive officer, the chief quartermaster and a signalman. The night was black but lit with the flare of gunfire and the blazing wreck of the merchant ship, which we now had to pass and leave astern. I was suddenly absolutely convinced that we were going to be struck. The shell would land directly on the bridge itself. There was no doubt in my mind; it was the simplest and grimmest of facts. I opened my mouth to suggest some kind of evasive maneuver to the exec, whose figure I could just make out in the darkness, but no sound emerged. And then I knew that the horror choking me was simply unbearable. Anything, even death was preferable.
Suddenly I was walking aft. I was leaving the bridge. Leaving my battle station without even transferring the 'conn' to the exec! I think I meant to jump off the ship. At least I can recall leaning over the side on the stern, vaguely aware of the staring white faces of the gun crew of the three-inch fifty close beside me, and peering into the hissing foam of our wake. Did I hope to be picked up by a lifeboat of survivors from the wreck astern? Was I deterred by the apprehension of being sucked into our screws and cut to bits? I am not sure.
All I know is that I remained there, a miserable shivering wretch, until the firing ceased and I returned to the bridge. I mumbled something about an attack of the 'trots.' Nobody said anything.
So there it was. Nemesis. The final blow had fallen at last. Yet in the next days nothing happened. I was treated in the wardroom with the same good manners, and I began to wonder whether it was my imagination that these now veiled an unspoken scorn. I knew that the episode must have been discussed by every man on that vessel. But only in the eyes of the exec, a strange saturnine fellow in whom I fancied I could detect a resemblance to Andy Ritter, did I really believe I could make out a glimmer of contempt, and I suspected him of having felt that for me all along.
At last I realized something about LSTs. The ship's company does not depend on the guts and skill of the commanding officer to anything like the degree it does on vessels of attack. These big naval marine trucks perform their semi-automatic tasks under the orders of a group or flotilla commander, who is apt to be a competent and almost certainly courageous regular navy officer. The skipper of the individual unit is important to his crew largely because of his power to make their lives uncomfortable. If they have the good fortune to have drawn a reasonably easygoing and pleasant captain, how much does it matter if he has a yellow streak? The vessel, anyway, is rarely under direct attack.
So my defection was overlooked if not forgotten. I even dared to draw a breath of something like relief at the idea that the worst was now over. When we returned to the States, after some months of uneventful Channel ferrying, for an overhaul in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I was generous in granting liberty to the crew and entertained the officers on several occasions at night clubs.
I was still afraid, however, that one of the officers might tell Amanda of the horrid incident. The exec had left us to take command of another LST, and I did not believe that any of the friendly junior officers would do so vile a thing consciously, but we drank a good deal at our parties, and I could not be sure what distorted joke might emerge from the lips of a young and intoxicated ensign. I decided at last it would be safer to give her my own version of what had happened.
She listened closely and without interrupting. She did not seem surprised. But also did she not minimize it.
"It could have been a good deal worse," was her first comment. "If the ship had been hit while you were away from the bridge, I suppose you might have been in some sort of official trouble. Anyhow, you're due now for shore duty. And with any luck the war should be over before you go back to sea."
I did not at all like her implication that the episode was apt to be repeated. "But even if I should go back to sea," I protested, "there's no reason to assume I'd have another attack of nerves. I have a funny gut feeling that this was the kind of thing that always was going to happen to me, but now it's happened, it may not come again."
"But why risk it? You're home, my darling, and you're safe, thank God. I'm sure Admiral Clarke will be tickled pink to have you back in your old slot. And he won't let you go again, either. Oh, Ally, don't tempt fate! You've done your bit. Let well enough alone."
But I felt trivialized. There was a distinct discomfort in her minimization of a lifetime's trial. If my ancient inner enemy had been merely something that could be kept at bay by a silly staff job in Church Street, what did the long agony of my resistance amount to?
"I wonder whether I shan't apply for an LST command in the Pacific," I said moodily. "The war there may go on for years."
"You might stop to consider what you owe me and the baby," she said in a sharper tone. But then her expression suddenly changed, and she struck a deeper note. She even stretched out her arms to me. "Oh, my dearest, do you think I don't know?"
"Know what?" I did not rush to her arms. Every part of me was throbbing with alarm.
"Know everything, of course. How could I not, loving you as I do? Don't you see, that's got to be the answer? Oh, my poor suffering sweet, if you could only relax and love and let yourself be loved, how easily things would work themselves out! All your bad dreams would fade away, and you and I would be afraid of nothing in the world."
So there it was, Jonathan. A woman's answer to everything. Open the floodgates and let the damned-up sentiment come thundering out to obliterate all the ugly-bugly things in the big bad universe. And she may have been right, too. That's the sorry part. She may have been offering me my last clear chance. And I, like the ass I was doomed to be, or had doomed myself to be, had to turn away from her appeal. Perhaps I felt that otherwise I should be giving up my soul or my ego or even, silly as it sounds, my manhood. When all she was asking was that I give up the foolish little comedy that I had been making of my life! The absurd little piece that I had been desperately trying to turn into a noble tragedy! But lives that won't bow to a hurricane can bend to a gust of wind. Maybe what I couldn't bear was being called "my poor suffering sweet."
Anyway, I mixed her a cocktail and we changed the subject. That night we made love. The next day brought the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, and we knew that I should not have to go to sea again. I remember my gall in reminding myself, as a way of putting the whole matter behind me, of Gibbon's statement that the courage of a soldier is the cheapest and most common quality of human nature.
3
Alistair and I sat in silence for a minute in my office after he had finished. The room was darkening in the winter twilight. I switched on my desk lamp.
"But you and Amanda had another ten years of happy marriage life after that, did you not?"
"Oh, yes." He spoke in a tone of faint weariness. "She was never a nag. She didn't return to the subject. As you know, we had another daughter." He smiled wryly. "Born nine months after that discussion. We went on as before. Ours was what you might call a temperate union. Only, of course, because I made it that way. She would have been pleased with something a good deal hotter. But she was always a good sport."
"Until now?"
"Well, who could blame her for leaving me now? Hadn't she offered me a way out? Hadn't she given me fair warning?"
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="05">
But the milliseconds distinguished the good from the merely adequate. Time enough for a spin or a half turn, a dip - and there should still be a moment left to smile before hands touched and moved apart again. "They called it 'off-timing' in our parents' day," Clayton had explained at the fraternity dance, "because the Lindy three-step is imposed on a four-four rhythm."
Terry reached out for her again, his body buoyed by the exultant wash of strings, tethered by the beat. Transmutation. He swung her into his arms, and they moved without break into a slow song: saxophones and a hundred strings, blue-cool eunuchs harmonizing It feels so good. She had forgotten how it felt to be touched and found desirable, to want with a will not one's own.
A man and a woman relieved of the weight of speech watched light slide from the windshield, the outside air offering no resistance, the car easing forward with barely a tremor. Earlier this evening, seduction had been verbal - words teased, provoked. Now, immersed in the familiar world of his scent, talk was no longer an issue.
He draped an arm over her shoulder as they walked toward his house, and her arm slipped around his waist. Then his tiny grunt of satisfaction, the key in the lock, the dark vestibule, hands slipping under her blouse, his lips. Her exposed skin chilled, the unexpected heat from his palms. She gasped as he sucked her tongue into him.
Down the hallway she held his hand like a lost waif, neither of them daring to speak. The bedroom door creaked, one dim lamp gave light enough to see that the sheets were blue, a bachelor's detail, marine-blue, a waiting ocean. When he touched her again their bodies merged into one long, yearning curve, and the sea rose up to meet them.
Thirteen
She stirred at the aroma of coffee, the comforting cluck of percolation. It smells so brown, she thought, stretching, then snapped awake as she remembered where she was, the deep blue sheets and (she slowly opened her eyes) the peach-and-white-striped wallpaper. She jumped out of bed, headed for the shower, then decided against it. Instead, she splashed water on her face, rubbed along her teeth with a finger full of Crest, and scooted into her clothes. A quick pick through her Afro, and she walked into the kitchen.
"Up already? And here I was planning to spoil you: breakfast in bed with all the trimmings, down to the rose." Arrayed on the tray were plate and napkin, a glass of orange juice, two pats of butter on a saucer, and a rose the color of coral in a crystal vase. Terry was at the sink pouring milk into a creamer, freshly showered and drenched in some exotic scent, clad in one of those white terry-cloth robes Virginia had seen only in the movies.
"Breakfast is served." He held out her chair and she felt warmth radiating from him as he pushed her gently up to the table, then the moisture of his lips on the back of her neck. "My Lord, I've found an angel," he whispered, and slid into the chair to her right.
She had rarely felt less angelic, unwashed and unflossed, with her rumpled blouse and her hair full of lint. If there was anyone who looked beatific it was this gorgeous man calmly sprinkling pepper over his scrambled eggs.
He looked up, smiling. "I've been thinking, princess. There's got to be more schools around here that have room for a Puppet Lady. You should try to get another gig as soon as this one's finished."
"I do have another 'gig,'" she replied.
"You do? Why didn't you tell me?"
"You never asked."
" Liar."
"Okay. You asked, but I didn't know you well enough yet. I still don't know you well enough - "
"Oh, no," he said, and they both laughed.
"But I'll tell you anyway," she continued. "I'm doing a month at the high school in Oberlin."
He frowned slightly. "Oberlin? Where's that?"
"Fifty miles from here, silly! Near Elyria." Then, to smooth over his ignorance: "It's tiny place. Six thousand people, two or three thousand college students."
"Oh, yeah - that radical hippy college, right? Lots of rich cultural-type families from New York send their kids there."
"Not just rich kids - smart kids. And I don't know what you mean by radical, unless you call being the first college to admit blacks and women radical."
"Whoa, whoa!" He lifted his hands, waving his napkin in mock surrender. "Look, I was out of line. More coffee?"
She nodded.
"Anyway, I shouldn't talk about things I don't know firsthand. Which I'll soon remedy. But I do know I like the idea of you being in the neighborhood." He deposited another kiss, this time on her forehead, and suddenly Virginia felt panic. The prospect of last night repeated over and over during the next month and more - to lean across a dinner table to kiss and exchange stories from the past, all the little intimacies of new lovers - the thought both enraptured and terrified her.
"But I won't be in the neighborhood," she stammered. "Not really."
He looked at her with amusement. Then he tried to convince her to stay at his house for the day - "a lazy Sunday" was how he put it - but Virginia needed breathing space.
"I can't," she said. "I've promised to visit an aunt this afternoon whom I haven't seen since I was nine."
"You won't spend all day with her, will you? Tonight - "
"Listen, Terry, I've got class preparations. I also have to plan my opening sessions for Oberlin. That starts up first thing the week after next, and it's a totally different bag."
"We can plan them together."
She smiled, and leaned over to kiss his chin. "Oh no we can't. If I stay, we'd get zero done, that's for certain."
"Well, lady, since you're calling the shots ... will you call me?" He leaned back, studying her expression. "You know" - she saw him swallow hard - "I'm in this for the distance. I mean it."
No. 118 Furnace. Ruts and crabgrass, acrid air, the horizon smeared with the lurid sediment of pollution. Hugging herself against the chill, Virginia trudged across the street, up the sunken steps, onto the sagging porch. The door of the small house opened, and she was swallowed in that massive bosom, spongy and instantly comforting, redolent with the mingled disclosures of sweet cologne, mothballs and wool warmed on the skin. Then she was bustled in, her coat peeled off and in a flurry of exclamations and questions - "My, my, what a sight for sore eyes you are! Tea or coffee? Water's on, sit down; I'll be with you in a minute" - she found herself alone in the room.
She sat down on the sofa, pale gold brocade kept immaculate by a plastic slipcover that clung to the backs of her thighs; she scooted forward, finally settling for a ladylike perch on the edge of the cushion. The coffee table, maple-veneered and from another decade, carried several month's worth of Ebony and Jet magazines; the pale green wall-to-wall carpet had probably been extolled by the salesclerk as 'sea mist' or 'mint frost' but here, with daylight filtering weakly through heavy yellow drapes, it exuded the melancholia of hospital waiting rooms.
She had the feeling she'd come back to something, like a sleepwalker. The modest yearning this room represented, this acceptance of one's vulnerability toward the exigencies of life - she had denied it and now, through a stroke of good luck or bad, the Arts Council had accepted her application for artist-in-residence and she had reason to return, back to the sulfurous skies and camphorated rooms where she first drew breath. Running and getting nowhere, round and round and faster and faster like Sambo until everything melted down to the antimacassars and hidden peppermints and tasseled pillows, the white leather-bound Bible on a doily and the table in the corner with its phalanx of yellowed family photographs framed and propped up under oval mats. ...
"My, my, will you look at that. The spittin' image."
Aunt Carrie stood in the doorway to the kitchen, teacups in one hand and a plate of cookies in the other. She shook her head slowly as she clucked her tongue. "Same eyes, same long neck and that way of holding yourself like someone attached a string to the top of your head and pulled it tight. Ernest must be proud enough to bust." She set the dishes down.
Virginia smiled. And Grandma Evans said her eyes were like Belle's.
Aunt Carrie was wearing a navy blue straight skirt and matching V-neck sweater stretched so tightly across the prow of her bosom that two ghostly circles of white shone through where her brassiere strained against the weave. It was an unusual outfit for a woman at home; Virginia had expected a muumuu or one of those loose shirtwaist dresses and a dun-colored cardigan with the sleeves pushed midway to elbow and two buttons buttoned at the top - instead, this attempt at sophistication. The effect was startling: from the wrappings of a legal secretary rose a vaguely gourd-shaped, jowled face whose pendulous lower lip revealed a crescent of deep pink mucous membrane whenever she smiled - as she did now, showing a row of uneven and widely spaced teeth. Her large eyes drooped slightly at the corners and seemed constantly on the point of tearing, giving her the appearance of a chocolate-brown beagle.
Virginia realized she had been staring; quickly, she reached for the teapot. Why, she looks just like I thought she would. I remembered her all along.
"Here, let me pour," she offered. "What do you take in yours, Aunt Carrie?"
"The same as you, dear. I don't take much to tea usually - never had occasion to, I guess."
"Oh, I'm sorry! I would have drunk coffee as well."
Aunt Carrie chuckled. "You must have learned that in the university."
"Learned what?"
"Having tea in the middle of the day. Anyway, I ain't so old I can't pick up a new habit. It's good to see you, sugar. Mrs. Evans said you was here, said you was bound to call."
"Aunt Carrie, I want to apologize for not getting in touch with you. I've been so busy..."
"Don't go apologizing to me. I'm not one for apologies, makes me blush. You young people got all that life ahead of you, it's no wonder you're busy. We may talk a lot about you not coming round to see us often as we'd like, but we know how it is."
She took a thin white handkerchief from her waistband and dabbed at her eyelids. There was a pink rose embroidered in one corner. "I remember baby-sitting you and your brother, how you liked to draw. You drew up every piece of paper you could get your hands on. Your dad had to lock his desk." She wrapped he hanky around her right index finger, pulled it straight, then started in again with the left index finger.
"May I ask you something, Aunt Carrie? I don't know if it means anything, really."
"What, dear?"
"Well, you mentioned the old station the other day, and then I dreamed that night - I mean, I had a dream about it - not a very pleasant dream, I'm afraid. But you were in it, and me, and my mother. I don't know if you can help me or not. I've always wondered why we had to move to Arizona in such a hurry. I don't remember anyone being too happy about it."
"Your father got a good job offer - "
"I know. But there has to be something else." She stared at the old woman's hands twisting the handkerchief; sometimes the rose could be seen among the coiled ends of the cotton, a delicate blemish. "One day, not long after Claudia was born, I overheard my parents arguing.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="06">
Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.
I met him eight years ago. I was a graduate student then at Columbia University. It was hot that summer and my nights were often sleepless. I lay awake in my two-room apartment on West 109th Street listening to the city's noises. I would read, write, and smoke into the morning, but on some nights when the heat made me too listless to work, I watched the neighbors from my bed. Through my barred window, across the narrow airshaft, I looked into the apartment opposite mine and saw the two men who lived there wander from one room to another, half dressed in the sultry weather. On a day in July, not long before I met Mr. Morning, one of the men came naked to the window. It was dusk and he stood there for a long time, his body lit from behind by a yellow lamp. I hid in the darkness of my bedroom and he never knew I was there. That was two months after Stephen left me, and I thought of him incessantly, stirring in the humid sheets, never comfortable, never relieved.
During the day, I looked for work. In June I had done research for a medical historian. Five days a week I sat in the reading room at the Academy of Medicine on East 103rd Street, filling up index cards with information about great diseases - bubonic plague, leprosy, influenza, syphilis, tuberculosis - as well as more obscure afflictions that I remember now only because of their names - yaws, milk leg, greensickness, ragsorter's disease, housemaid's knee, and dandy fever. Dr. Rosenberg, an octogenarian who spoke and moved very slowly, paid me six dollars an hour to fill up those index cards, and although I never understood what he did with them, I never asked him, fearing that an explanation might take hours. The job ended when my employer went to Italy. I had always been poor as a student, but Dr. Rosenberg's vacation made me desperate. I hadn't paid the July rent, and I had no money for August. Every day, I went to the bulletin board in Philosophy Hall where jobs were posted, but by the time I called, they had always been taken. Nevertheless, that was how I found Mr. Morning. A small handwritten notice announced the position: "Wanted. Research assistant for project already under way. Student of literature preferred. Herbert B. Morning." A phone number appeared under the name, and I called immediately. Before I could properly introduce myself, a man with a beautiful voice gave me an address on Amsterdam Avenue and told me to come over as soon as possible.
It was hazy that day, but the sun glared and I blinked in the light as I walked through the door of Mr. Morning's tenement building. The elevator was broken, and I remember sweating while I climbed the stairs to the fourth floor. I can still see his intent face in the doorway. He was a very pale man with a large, handsome nose. He breathed loudly as he opened the door and let me into a tiny, stifling room that smelled of a cat. The walls were lined with stuffed bookshelves, and more books were piled in leaning towers all over the room. There were tall stacks of newspapers and magazines as well, and beneath a window whose blinds had been tightly shut was a heap of old clothes or rags. A massive wooden desk stood in the center of the room, and on it were perhaps a dozen boxes of various sizes. Close to the desk was a narrow bed, its rumpled sheets strewn with more books. Mr. Morning seated himself behind the desk, and I sat down in an old folding chair across from him. A narrow ray of light that had escaped through a broken blind fell to the floor between us, and when I looked at it, I saw a haze of dust.
I smoked, contributing to the room's blur, and looked at the skin of his neck; it was moon white. He told me he was happy I had come and then fell silent. Without any apparent reserve, he looked at me, taking in my whole body with his gaze. I don't know if his scrutiny was lecherous or merely curious, but I felt assaulted and turned away from him, and then when he asked me my name, I lied. I did it quickly, without hesitation, inventing a new patronym: Davidsen. I became Iris Davidsen. It was a defensive act, a way of protecting myself from some amorphous danger, but later that false name haunted me; it seemed to move me elsewhere, shifting me off course and strangely altering my whole world for a time. When I think back on it now, I imagine that lie as the beginning of the story, as a kind of door to my uneasiness. Everything else I told him was true - about my parents and sisters in Minnesota, about my studies in nineteenth-century English literature, my past research jobs, even my telephone number. As I talked, he smiled at me, and I thought to myself, It's an intimate smile, as if he has known me for years.
He told me that he was a writer, that he wrote for magazines to earn money. "I write about everything for every taste," he said. "I've written for Field and Stream, House and Garden, True Confessions, True Detective, Reader's Digest. I've written stories, one spy novel, poems, essays, reviews - I even did an art catalog once." He grinned and waved an arm. " 'Stanley Rubin's rhythmical canvases reveal a debt to Mannerism - Pontormo in particular. The long, undulating shapes hint at ... ' " He laughed. "And I rarely publish under the same name."
"Don't you stand behind what you write?"
"I am behind everything I write, Miss Davidsen, usually sitting, sometimes standing. In the eighteenth century, it was common to stand and write - at an escritoire. Thomas Wolfe wrote standing."
"That's not exactly what I meant."
"No, of course it isn't. But you see, Herbert B. Morning couldn't possibly write for True Confessions, but Fern Luce can. It's as simple as that."
"You enjoy hiding behind masks?"
"I revel in it. It gives my life a certain color and danger."
"Isn't danger overstating it a bit?"
"I don't think so. Nothing is beyond me as long as I adopt the correct name for each project. It isn't arbitrary. It requires a gift, a genius, if I may say so myself, for hitting on the alias that will unleash the right man or woman for the job. Dewitt L. Parker wrote that art catalog, for example, and Martin Blane did the spy novel. But there are risks, too. Even the most careful planning can go awry. It's impossible to know for sure who's concealed under the pseudonym I choose."
"I see," I said. "In that case, I should probably ask you who you are now."
"You have the privilege, dear lady, of addressing Herbert B. Morning himself, unencumbered by any other personalities."
"And what does Mr. Morning need a research assistant for?"
"For a kind of biography," he said. "For a project about life's paraphernalia, isits bits and pieces, treasures and refuse. I need someone like you to respond freely to the objects in question. I need an ear and an eye, a scribe and a voice, a Friday for every day of the week, someone who is sharp, sensitive. You see, I'm in the process of prying open the very essence of the inanimate world. You might say that it's an anthropology of the present.
I asked him to be more specific about the job.
"It began three years ago when she died." He paused as if thinking. "A girl - a young woman. I knew her, but not very well. Anyway, after she died, I found myself in possession of a number of her things, just common everyday things. I had them in the apartment, this and that, out and about, objects that were lost, abandoned, speechless, but not dead. That was the crux of it. They weren't dead, not in the usual way we think of objects as lifeless. They seemed charged with a kind of power. At times I almost felt them move with it, and then after several weeks, I noticed that they seemed to lose that vivacity, seemed to retreat into their thingness. So I boxed them."
"You boxed them?" I said.
"I boxed them to keep them untouched by the here and the now. I feel sure that those things carry her imprint - the mark of a warm, living body on the world. And even though I've tried to keep them safe, they're turning cold. I can tell. It's been too long, so my work is urgent. I have to act quickly. I'll pay you sixty dollars per object."
"Per object?" I was sweating in the chair and adjusted my position, pulling my skirt down under my legs, which felt strangely cool to the touch.
"I'll explain everything," he said. He took a small tape recorder from a drawer in his desk and pushed it toward me. "Listen to this first. It will tell you most of what you want to know. While you listen, I'll leave the room." He stood up from his chair and walked to a door. A large yellow cat appeared from behind a box and followed him. "Press play," he commanded, and vanished.
When I reached for the machine, I noticed two words scrawled on a legal pad near it: "woman's hand." The words seemed important, and I remember them as if they were the passwords to an underground life. When I turned on the tape, a woman's voice whispered, "This belonged to the deceased. It is a white sheet for a single bed ... " What followed was a painstaking description of the sheet. It included every tiny discoloration and stain, the texture of the aged cotton, and even the tag from which the words had disappeared in repeated washings. It lasted for perhaps ten minutes; the entire speech was delivered in that peculiar half-voice. The description itself was tedious and yet I listened with anticipation, imagining that the words would soon reveal something other than the sheet. They didn't. When the tape ended, I looked over to the door behind which Mr. Morning had hidden and saw that it was now ajar and half of his face was pressed through the opening. He was lit from behind, and I couldn't see his features clearly, but the pale hair on his head was shining, and again I heard him breathe with difficulty as he walked toward me. He reached out for my hand. Without thinking, I withdrew it.
"You want descriptions of that girl's things, is that it?" I could hear the tightness and formality in my voice. "I don't understand what a recorded description has to do with your project as a whole or why the woman on the tape was whispering."
"The whisper is essential, because the full human voice is too idiosyncratic, too marked with its own history. I'm looking for anonymity so the purity of the object won't be blocked from coming through, from displaying itself in its nakedness. A whisper has no character."
The project seemed odd to the point of madness, but I was drawn to it. Chance had given me this small adventure and I was pleased. I also felt that beneath their eccentricity, Mr. Morning's ideas had a weird kind of logic. His comments about whispering, for example, made sense.
"Why don't you write out the descriptions?" I said. "Then there will be no voice at all to interfere with the anonymity you want." I watched his face closely.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="07">Naanabozho, the first born manidoo, who had become a trickster spirit, was much too eager to hunt and kill what he could find, even the first little birds in their nests. Like a domestic animal he brought what he had killed to show to his mother. She told him never to kill little birds again. Naanabozho did not listen, and he did not stop killing little spirits on the earth. He was a trickster child.
Stone, the last born manidoo, seldom moved from his place on the earth. The birds, flowers, and animals came with his birth. Naanabozho and his other brother were together most of the time, but not with their brother Stone. At night the brothers shared their adventures with Stone because he could not travel.
Naanabozho was bothered that his travels and adventures were limited by his mother to the time it would take him to return to his brother Stone, so he asked his other brother if he could kill Stone.
Naanabozho listened for a time, but his brother was silent. He never answered the question. So, the first born manidoo child on the earth decided to listen to himself and planned to kill his brother Stone. This would be the first and most terrible crime on the earth, the death of the first born stone.
The trickster borrowed an axe from his grandmother and used it to kill his brother Stone but the axe broke in two places. Stone was hard and could not be killed with an axe. Then Naanabozho asked his brother Stone how to kill him.
"I will do whatever you tell me to do to kill you."
"Build a fire," said the manidoo trickster Stone. "Put me in the fire and when my body is red hot then throw cold water on me and watch what will happen to me."
Naanabozho built a huge fire. He threw more wood on the fire as his brother stone instructed him to do from the very heart of the fire, and then the trickster waited until his brother was red hot in the coals.
"Are you hot enough, is it time now?"
"No, not yet," said Stone.
"Wait, wait, more fire, is it time now?"
"Yes, it is the time," said Stone.
"Here comes the cold water then," said Naanabozho as he poured the water on his brother Stone. Stone was red hot and cracked in several places when the cold water touched him, and then he broke into thousands and thousands of pieces and flew in the four directions of the earth. At first it seemed that one of the first manidoo children had died on the earth, that the first stone had come to a wild death in a fire.
Naanabozho believed that he had killed Stone. The distance he could travel would never be limited by his brother. He could travel great distances at night and not bother to return to his brother, but Stone had outwitted his brother the trickster, the one who liked to kill.
Stone had broken into several families and covered the earth in the four directions. Stone families lived everywhere, in the mountains, on the rivers, in the meadows, in the desert. No matter where that trickster traveled he would not be far from his brother and the families of the stone. One break of the stone became a bear in the cities. Stone is in a medicine pouch. Stone is in the mirror.
Stone created the world of nature and the wanaki cards, and taught the tribes how to meditate. He created three sets of seven cards with pictures of animals, birds, insects, and the picture of his brother the trickster on one card in each set.
Naanabozho heard that his picture was on the cards so he buried two of the sets. He was tired and bored so one set of the cards survived. The third set of wanaki cards has been used to teach the tribes to remember stories and to meditate. The players create their own cards, but the seven must picture the bear, beaver, squirrel, crow, flea, praying mantis, and the trickster.
The player arises at dawn, turns one of the seven cards, meditates on the picture, and imagines he has become the animal, bird, or insect on the card for the day. Then stories are told about the picture and the plural pronoun we is used to be sure nature is not separated from humans and the wanaki game.
Stone created a meditation that would never leave him out. He taught that on each day a card is selected the player walks on a familiar trail and gathers fallen leaves, flowers, feathers, and other natural things of the season. Then he meditates on these things and places them in a room or on a table according to where they were found on the trail.
When animals, birds, insects, and living things are seen on the trail a stone is placed to remember the place. In this way, stone is always present where life would be in the wanaki game.
The game goes on for seven days, a new picture and identity at dawn. The last card in the game is the picture of the trickster. The last card leaves the choice of identities to the player, an imaginative picture for the last day of the game. Many players become eagles, and cranes, some become beavers and other water animals, and others become beautiful birds on the last card of the wanaki game.
Stone created a game that remembers him in stories. To end the game his brother would have to end the world, and he would never do that because he would be too bored and lonesome. Stone became a bear in his own trickster meditation. The wanaki game is his war with loneliness and with human separations from the natural world.
BEARS
March 1979
Turn the first card at dawn.
Bears in the wanaki circle, bears in the east.
The bears are with me now on this first turn of the cards. The stones are broken into bears and land in the east. We are the bears of chance, bears turned over on the mountain wind, turned over on the cards. We are bears on that slow burn at dawn, down from the wild treelines to our tribal agonies in the cities.
We are bears in the rain this morning, the picture of the bear and the bear in the mirror. We are more than a word, more than a word beast, we are remembered in stories. We return to the heart in stories, a return to nature in the pictures of the wanaki cards. We are bears on the rise in the cities this morning. The wordies held our name in isolation, even caged us on the page. We are bears not cold separations in the wilderness of dead voices.
We are together at dawn. No other bears are on the same trail around the lake. The caged eagle and the crows hear our stories, but the wordies would think we were strange at this hour, talking out loud to the crows in plural pronouns. Not many wordies would see me as the bear, and that is how bears have survived the hunters and the tourists. They might wonder who is with me, but few would see the real me in our stories.
Someone hears us with the crows at the cage, a fresh wordy in loose clothes, and he reeks of perfume and laundry soap. Even the crows move back, out of his poison scent. How can we remember who the wordies are when they smell the same, as if they came from the same box of soap. Their animals are lost, and no one can hear the stories in their blood.
The laundry boy follows us to the bench near the wisteria. His mouth moves with dead voices. How can he be so young and so dead? How could he kill all the animals and birds in his heart? How can he go on? He has no stories to remember because he asks us about our stories. He must be a trickster who played so hard he killed the animals in his own heart.
Laundry must think we are separated, he must think he understands our loneliness at this hour, but he is so easy to distract with the obvious in the natural world. Had he taken the scent of magnolia we might have heard his voice.
We crisscrossed the street and he was sure to follow that morning, so we turn to the right and circle around, but he continued on our trail. The mongrels were roused by the bear and shied by our shadows. The laundry boy lurched at the words and the mongrels barked him down to the animals in his heart. Too bad, he turned to the darkness not the treeline, and the mongrels sensed that he holds back the light in his own stories. The wordies close their books at the first bark and lose their way without a sentence.
Laundry believes he discovers people on the street, as if he landed as some pioneer of tribal stories, but he got lost in his own wilderness of words. How could he hear our stories? He never had his own stories to remember.
Laundry sees the darkness behind his eyes and waits to discover the last words that might hold back his death. How does he go on without stories? He comes so clean to the cage and dies over words in a dream.
We are seen as circus bears under a clear umbrella. We can jump rope to the crack of a whip and ride a small motorcycle in a tight circle on the sawdust. We are bears with an audience, bears in the word, and we are alone at night in a chemical civilization.
Some wordies laugh at us from their windows on the block. Children reach out at a great distance in their dreams to touch our nose, to hide in our maw, and pull our thick hair high around their thin necks in winter.
There, at that clean pink house with the wild shutters, a thin woman leans over the fence as we pass. We were invited to touch her high breasts, the breasts steam in the cold rain. She was silent and never moved. Would she be worried that we were bears?
Laundry cursed the mongrels, and we were alone under the umbrella. We were alone with our pronouns and stories, and there were distances even in our pictures. We might have been a mourning dove, or an otter on the great river. We are bears this morning, and later the cards might turn us into birds at dawn. We could be cockroaches, and we are tricksters in the end. The cards protect us from the dead voices of the wordies.
Broken windows on a truck.
Beer cans and chicken cartons at the bus stop. Cigarettes buried in the concrete.
Printed flowers on a wet scarf distract us from the trees and flowers behind the building. There, spread like a sacred shield over the wire near the storm sewer, the wet red flowers and leaves on the scarf seem more real than the trumpet vines that decorated the center of the cedar trees across the barrier.
The cedars were moist and gentle in the rain, but the cotton flowers bound a culture that made more sense in the cities. So, we were circus bears with a bright silk scarf. First we smelled it, our nostrils flared over the neck perfume of a hesitant blonde, a teacher at the public school. She left a scent of beer and beans, garlic, chalk, and she takes her place in our memories.
We heard more than stories of trees and flowers, so we hounded the material world on the block. We brushed a fence woven with bamboo, pounded a rock garden, and touched an iron bird over a mailbox, and we laid our paws on houses, window frames, fences, and golden doors.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="08">They were often in harmony, even if for different reasons. You're feeling better, he asked. The Cavaliere had not married a monkey. The carriage rolled on. It began to rain. London expired behind them. The Cavaliere's entourage was wending its way back to his passions - ruling passions. The Cavaliere went on with Candide and valet to El Dorado, Catherine stared down at her own book, the maid's chin dropped to her breast, the panting horses tried to pull ahead of the whip, the servants in the rear coach giggled and tippled, Catherine continued to labor for breath, and soon London was only a road.
2
They had been married, and childless, for sixteen years.
If the Cavaliere, who like so many obsessive collectors was a natural bachelor, married the only child of a wealthy Pembrokeshire squire to finance the political career he embarked on after ten time-serving years in military regalia, it was not a good reason. The House of Commons, four years representing a borough in Sussex in which he never set foot, turned out to offer no more scope for his distinctive talents than the army. A better reason: it had brought him money to buy pictures. He also had something richer than money. Yielding to the necessity of marrying - somewhat against my inclination, he was to tell another impecunious younger son, his nephew, many years later - he had found what he called lasting comfort. On the day of their marriage Catherine locked a bracelet on her wrist containing some of his hair. She loved him abjectly but without self-pity. He developed the improbable but just reputation for being an uxorious husband. Time evaporated, money is always needed, comforts found where they were not expected, and excitement dug up in barren ground.
He can't know what we know about him. For us he is a piece of the past, austerely outlined in powdered wig and long elegant coat and buckled shoes, beaky profile cocked intelligently, looking, observing, firm in his detachment. Does he seem cold? He is simply managing, managing brilliantly. He is absorbed, entertained by what he sees - he has an important, if not front-rank, diplomatic posting abroad - and he keeps himself busy. His is the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive. He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.
He is interested in everything. And he lives in a place that for sheer volume of curiosities - historical, natural, social - could hardly be surpassed. It was bigger than Rome, it was the wealthiest as well as the most populous city on the Italian peninsula and, after Paris, the second largest city on the European continent, it was the capital of natural disaster and it has the most indecorous, plebeian monarch, the best ices, the merriest loafers, the most vapid torpor, and, among the younger aristocrats, the largest number of future Jacobins. Its incomparable bay was home to freakish fish as well as the usual bounty. It had streets paved with blocks of lava, and, some miles away, the gruesomely intact remains, recently rediscovered, of two dead cities. Its opera house, the biggest in Italy, provided a continual ravishment of castrati, another local product of international renown. Its handsome, highly sexed aristocracy gathered in one another's mansions at nightly card parties, misleadingly called conversazioni, which often did not break up until dawn. On the streets life piled up, extruded, overflowed. Certain court celebrations included the building in front of the royal palace of an artificial mountain festooned with meat, game, cakes, and fruit, whose dismantling by the ravenous mob, unleashed by a salvo of cannon, was applauded by the overfed from balconies. During the great famine of the spring of 1764, people went off to the baker's with long knives inside their shirts for the killing and maiming needed to get a small ration of bread.
The Cavaliere arrived to take up his post in November of that year. The expiatory processions of women with crowns of thorns and crosses on their backs had passed and the pillaging mobs disbanded. The grandees and foreign diplomats had retrieved the silver that they had hidden in convents. The court, which had fled north sixteen miles to the colossal, grimly horizontal residence at Caserta. was back in the city's royal palace. The air intoxicated with smells of the sea and coffee and honeysuckle and excrement, animal and human, instead of corpses rotting by the hundreds on the streets. The thirty thousand dead in the plague that followed the famine were buried, too. In the Hospital of the Incurables, the thousands dying of epidemic illness no longer starved to death first, at the rate of sixty or seventy a day. Foreign supplies of corn had brought back the acceptable level of destitution. The poor were again cavorting with tambourines and full-throated songs, but many had kept the long knives inside their shirts which they'd worn to scout for bread and now murdered each other more often for the ordinary, civil reasons. And the emaciated peasants who had converged on the city in the spring were lingering, breeding. Once again the cuccagna would be built, savagely dismantled, devoured. The Cavaliere presented his credentials to the thirteen-year-old King and the regents, rented a spacious three-story mansion commanding a heart-stopping view of the bay and Capri and the quiescent volcano for, in local money, one hundred fifty pounds a year, and began organizing as much employment as possible for his quickened energies.
Living abroad facilitates treating life as a spectacle - it is one of the reasons that people of means move abroad. Where those stunned by the horror of the famine and the brutality and incompetence of the government's response saw unending inertia, lethargy, a hardened lava of ignorance, the Cavaliere saw a flow. The expatriate's dancing city is often the local reformer's or revolutionary's immobilized one, ill-governed, committed to injustice. Different distance, different cities. The Cavaliere had never been as active, as stimulated, as alive mentally. As pleasurably detached. In the churches, in the narrow, steep streets, at the court - so many performances here. Among the bay's eccentric marine life, he noted with delight (no rivalry between art and nature for this intrepid connoisseur) one fish with tiny feet, an evolutionary overachiever who nevertheless hadn't made it out of the water. The sun beat down relentlessly. He trod steaming, spongy ground that was hot beneath his shoes. And bony ground loaded with rifts of treasure.
The obligations of social life of which so many dutifully complain, the maintenance of a great household with some fifty servants, including several musicians, keep his expenses rising. His envoy's salary was hardly adequate for the lavish entertainments required to impose himself on the imagination of people who counted, a necessary part of his job; for the expectations of the painters on whom he bestows patronage; for the price of antiquities and pictures for which he must compete with a host of rival collectors. Of course he is eventually going to sell the best of what he buys - and he does. A gratifying symmetry, that collecting most things requires money but then the things collected themselves turn into more money. Though money was the faintly disreputable, necessary byproduct of his passion, collecting was still a virile occupation: not merely recognizing but bestowing value on things, by including them in one's collection. It stemmed from a lordly sense of himself that Catherine - indeed, all but a very few women - could not have.
His reputation as a connoisseur and man of learning, his affability, the favor he came to enjoy at court, unmatched by any other of the envoys, and made the Cavaliere the city's leading foreign resident. It was to Catherine's credit that she was no courtier, that she was revolted by the antics of the King, a youth of stupefying coarseness, and by his snobbish, fertile, intelligent wife, who wielded most of the power. As it did him credit that he was able to amuse the King. There was no reason for Catherine to accompany him to the food-slinging banquets at the royal palace to which he was convened three or four times a week. He was never bored when with her; but he was also happy to be alone, out for whole days on the bay in his boat harpooning fish, when his head went quiet in the sun, or gazing at, reviewing, itemizing his treasures in his cool study or the storeroom, or looking through the new books on ichthyology or electricity or ancient history that he had ordered from London. One never could know enough, see enough. Much longing there. A feeling he was spared in his marriage, a wholly successful marriage - one in which all needs were satisfied that had been given permission to arise. There was no frustration, at least on his part, therefore no longing, no desire to be together as much as possible.
High-minded where he was cynical, ailing while he was robust, tender when he forgot to be, correct as her table settings for sixty - the amiable, not too plain, harpsichord-playing heiress he had married seemed to him pure wife, as far as he could imagine such a being. He relished the fact that everyone thought her admirable. Conscientiously dependent rather than weak, she was not lacking in self-confidence. Religion animated her; her dismay at his impiety sometimes made her seem commanding. Besides his own person and career, music was the principal interest they had in common. When Leopold Mozart and his prodigy son had visited the city two years ago Catherine had becomingly trembled as she sat down to play for them, and then performed as superbly as ever. At the weekly concerts given in the British envoy's mansion, to which all of local society aspired to be invited, the very people who most loudly talked and ate through every opera during the season fell silent. Catherine tamed them. The Cavaliere was an accomplished cellist and violinist - he had taken lessons from the great Giardini in London when he was twenty - but she was the better musician, he freely allowed. He liked having reasons to admire her. Even more than wanting to be admired, he liked admiring.
Though his imagination was reasonably lascivious, his blood, so he thought, was temperate. In that time men with his privileges were usually corpulent by their third or fourth decade. But the Cavaliere had not lost a jot of his young man's appetite for physical exertion. He worried about Catherine's delicate, unexercised constitution, to the point of sometimes being made uneasy by the ardor with which she welcomed his punctual embraces. There was little sexual between them. He didn't regret not taking a mistress, though - whatever others might make of the oddity. Occasionally, opportunity plumped itself down beside him; the heat rose; and he found himself reaching from moist palm to layered clothes, unhooking, untying, fingering, pushing. But the venture would leave him with no desire to continue; he was drawn to other kinds of acquisition, of possession. That Catherine took no more than a benevolent interest in his collections was just as well, perhaps. It is natural for lovers of music to enjoy collaborating, playing together. Most unnatural to be a co-collector. One wants to possess (and be possessed) alone.
It is my nature to collect, he once told his wife.
"Picture-mad," a friend from his youth called him - one person's nature being another's idea of madness; of immoderate desire.
As a child he collected coins, the automata, then musical instruments. Collecting expresses a free-floating desire that attaches and re-attaches itself - it is a succession of desires. The true collector is in the grip not of what is collected but of collecting. By his early twenties the Cavaliere had already formed and been forced to sell, in order to pay debts, several small collections of paintings.
Upon arriving as envoy he started collecting anew. Within an hour on horseback, Pompeii and Herculaneum were being dug up, stripped, picked over; but everything the ignorant diggers unearthed was supposed to go straight to the storerooms in the nearby royal palace at Portici.
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She kept staring at him.
ÒHow could I have lived under the same roof and not known what was transpiring in that room all these years. Forever transpiring! Wait a minute, come closer, Harlan. I wonÕt bite you, you fool. Let me look at you. Kneel down.Ó
Harlan knelt down. She touched his dark face and straight black hair.
ÒThe face does not tell all, does it? The face is a liar, and your face has lied to me. No, you do not look like one of them.Ó
ÒOne of who,Ó Harlan could not control his anger.
ÒLike the children of Sodom,Ó she muttered. ÒDegenerate, abandoned by God and man. The kingdom of forever damned.Ó
ÒI am going to stay the night, Mrs. Vane,Ó Harlan said, Òwhether you will it or not. I will stay to see you are all right. You will have to allow it for your own good.Ó
ÒI have no good, I have nothing. The photographs have sealed off everything from me, past present future, kingdom come, all gone up in one cataclysm. Had there been a hundred stacked corpses in there it would have been a less gruesome sight.Ó
Her color began to return. She worked the rings on her two hands frantically.
ÒWill you make me some strong coffee,Ó she said in a voice more like that of a great star.
ÒDo you think coffee is right after your medicine?Ó Harlan wondered.
ÒWhen I tell you what it is I want, it is what I want, and it is of course right. So march!Ó
Harlan was gone so long that when he came back she had fallen asleep in his chair. She stirred and opened her eyes. She stared at the cup of hot coffee.
ÒAh well, ah well,Ó she said and received the cup. ÒI feel I have come back from the deepest part of the infernal kingdom. I walked down to hell and here I am sitting drinking coffee prepared by one of the participants in hell rites.Ó
Olga Petrovna raised her coffee cup.
She tasted the brew.
ÒYes, itÕs perfect. You have many talents, all hidden of course from a woman who was only his spouse. How fortunate he was in having solicited your assistance for so long.Ó
Harlan sat down in a small chair nearby. To his shame he burst into tears and sobbed.
ÒAll the tears of the seven seas will not wash away what you are, were, and probably will go on being as you leave these premises.Ó
Harlan wept on. She threw him a huge ornately embroidered linen handkerchief and he dried his eyes.
Abner Blossom was so engulfed in the writing of his new opera, a kind of postlude he later called it to The Kinkajou, that he had perhaps failed to take into account the magnitude of the scandal of Cyril Vane's funeral, and the successive scandals like intermittent explosions in a firecracker factory which came after the disgrace of the funeral.
The maenad of course of all of the tumult and the shouting was Olga Petrovna herself. Everybody said she had gone mad, but the fact was if that were so then she had always been mad, but had not had the right script by which her madness could be so completely expressed. Yet in a deeper sense the photographs and the photographic suite itself long sealed to her inquiring eye and nervous fingers had altered her faculties, disordered her senses, and unleashed in her an energy, a shameless bravado, as she went flinging to the winds of any restraint.
Other aging screen stars remembered perhaps Alla NazimovaÕs estimate of Olga Petrovna. Nazimova, the great Russian actress, once said when Olga had paid her a visit in her dressing room: ÒAlways remember, my dear, that it is the firm hand on the reins and not the untamed fury of the steed that wins the day.Ó
Olga Petrovna might have remembered the great NazimovaÕs words the day she flung all reason and restraint to the winds, but had she placed herself under continuous restraint there would have been no explosions of scandal and obloquy. Cyril Vane would probably have sunk into even greater oblivion than he had achieved before his death.
Scandal is the breath of fame in the United States of America. No one can be perfectly famous unless he has fallen into the glue pot. The press lives on lies, and where truth impedes its progress, truth is easily changed to headlines. The press had had lean years, and the scandal arising from the death of the old photographer-novelist brought the corpse of journalism briefly back to life.
Usually as Abner took his breakfast in his bed, Ezekiel seated himself in a chair that almost impinged on the bed itself, for AbnerÕs deafness required proximity when one spoke to him, and Ezekiel relished booming out the latest newspaper instalments of infamy and vilification. All was of course disseminated by the servant in the interest of decency, decorum and the fitness of what one can impart.
But there was a sudden vigorous insistent ringing of the front doorbell. Ezekiel and his ÔmasterÕ exchanged worried glances.
ÒBest to answer it,Ó Abner finally said, and rose out of the layers of bedclothes, fastened the cord of his pajama bottoms, and threw on a faded Chinese dressing gown.
He could barely make out a long sequence of whisperings, clearing of the throat, grumbling and then nervous guffaws.
A flustered but still regal Ezekiel entered the bedroom.
ÒCount Alexander Ilitch, Sir.Ó
Abner gave Ezekiel a look of disbelief and irritation.
ÒWhat shall I tell him?Ó
ÒWhat have you told him?Ó Abner almost shouted.
ÒThat you are occupied.Ó
ÒGood,Ó Abner seated himself in the little alcove next to the bedroom. "Tell him then I will see him.Ó
Count Alexander Ilitch had passed his best years. His face which had once been superlatively handsome was now careworn and flaccid. His hair on the other hand had retained much of the color and luxuriance of his youth and gave him from a distance a look of a man in his prime.
Count Ilitch always carried a small cane which helped him keep his balance. He had a gunshot wound in his left leg sustained during a duel he had fought near the Volga River, at least according to his own story.
ÒThis is an unexpected pleasure,Ó Abner took the CountÕs hand and pressed it briefly.
ÒI am intruding, dear Mr. Blossom," the Count apologized.
Abner bowed faintly.
ÒMay we speak in private?Ó the visitor stared at Ezekiel.
ÒWe are in private, Count,Ó Abner Blossom assured Ilitch.
Count Ilitch nodded, placed his cane carefully almost lovingly by the side of his chair.
Ezekiel picked the cane up despite a motion of displeasure from Count Ilitch and placed the cane just out of reach of the visitor.
ÒI will be brief and to the point,Ó Count Ilitch spoke now with considerable effort. It was perhaps this effort which brought the blood to his countenance, and all at once cleared his features of the look of age. Abner BlossomÕs mouth opened in a kind of surprise, for Count Ilitch all at once appeared as a relatively young and extremely fetching person. His great mass of yellow hair suddenly came loose and fell indolently about his ears.
ÒBut before I begin,Ó Count Ilitch entreated, all the while trying to brush back his unruly shock of hair, Òwould it be possible for your young servant to fetch us a footstool by chance?Ó He pointed to his injured leg.
Ezekiel brought forth a footstool with an ornate American Indian design and placed the CountÕs rather dainty feet accurately and securely on the stool.
ÒThank you, oh thank you,Ó the Count cried and grasped EzekielÕs hand tightly in gratitude.
Abner now resembled in his mien more than ever that of a presiding judge.
ÒMr. Blossom, you must not write the opera,Ó the Count all at once blurted out.
There was no immediate response from Abner, but Ezekiel paused at the door with an air of surprise, even shock at the sudden utterance of Count Ilitch. Then he hurried out.
ÒMust not! Cannot!Ó the Count repeated.
From the CountÕs voice now Abner recalled that his visitor had once sung in a charming male alto and had given recitals to other titled Russians living in exile.
Ezekiel returned bearing a tray with two large glasses filled with wine.
Count IlitchÕs powerful right hand shook as he accepted the refreshment and he had finally to hold the glass with both hands as he thirstily sipped the wine.
ÒLovely bouquet,Ó the Count sipped again and again appreciatively. Little drops of sweat appeared on his brow and his right cheek. ÒBut allow me to return to our problem, dear Mr. Blossom. An opera based on her husbandÕs life - I refer of course to Madame Olga Petrovna. It would come at the worst possible time for her - Remember, dear Mr. Blossom, may I call you Abner in remembrance of your kindness to me in times past when I was honored by being invited to your sumptuous banquets here at the Enrique ....Ó
Abner Blossom raised his own glass in gracious condescension.
ÒThank you,Ó Count Ilitch whispered. ÒRemember, then, dear Abner,Ó he spluttered a bit and sipped more wine, and raised his nearly empty glass to Ezekiel who immediately filled it to the brim. ÒRemember, then, my gracious host, that I knew Olga Petrovna in our native land, in long ages past. She was then known as Vassila. Yes, Vassila,Ó Count IlitchÕs eyes were a bit moist. ÒWe were the dearest of friends. That is why, dear Abner, I have dared to come here today because I am her friend and compatriot although I was much younger than Vassila of course in our Russian days. I have dared to come, then, partly because of knowing her so long ago and partly because I used to be your honored guest at your banquets.Ó
Count Ilitch now sighed heavily as he used to do when as a male alto he entertained his friends with singing arias from TchasikowskyÕs lesser-known operas.
ÒShe has sent me to you as her interlocutor!Ó For some reason now Count Ilitch rose, but then remembering his wounded calf muscle he sat abruptly down.
ÒVassila, pardon me, I mean Olga Petrovna begs you on bended knee,Ó Count Ilitch concluded his request, and almost feverishly finished his second glass of wine, again filled to overflowing by the attentive Ezekiel.
Gazing over at his employer, for a moment Ezekiel thought that Abner had fallen asleep for his employer had his eyes closed tightly to the added discomfiture of Count Ilitch.
"We once spent an entire long evening together on the Volga," Count Ilitch spoke so low at that moment that Abner Blossom could not possibly have heard him, and had kept in any case his eyes tightly closed.
"I greatly appreciate your taking time from your own pressing affairs to come here, Count Ilitch, all on behalf of our dear friend Olga Petrovna, or as you called her of yore, Vassila .... But see here -" Abner now opened both his eyes widely - "I cannot even acknowledge I have heard such a request on your part or hers."
"Cannot?" Count Ilitch asked in an amazed theatrical tone, and again Abner Blossom imagined he could hear the Count's male alto voice in recital.
"Cannot, will not, never shall countenance such a request, even when it comes from so prepossessing, so winsome, so elegant and manly a gentleman as yourself, Count Ilitch. I have always admired you. I have always wanted to be of service to you now and in the future. But I cannot help you because in the first place there is no such opera in progress."
"No such opera," Count Ilitch asked hopefully.
"None whatsoever. Certainly, dear Count, none based on the life of - you did call her Vassila I believe. No such opera based on Vassila's life or that of her dead and departed spouse exists!"
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Oriental fabrics being fashionable in Europe ever since Napoleon's Egyptian foray, permitted glimpses in the warm candlelight of her plump shoulders' ivory skin and of the powdered embonpoint the décolletage of her high-waisted gown of well-set silks revealed. He bent low, placing his beaver hat, with its own fashionable iridescence, between his boots, his Philadelphia boots, of a thinner black leather than his Lancaster boots, their tops cut diagonally in the hussar style.
"You disclaim, to elicit flattery," his new companion gaily accused him. "You have lost your mountain manners, if ever you had them."
"My dear mother is a woman of some graces, who loved the old poets as well as the Bible, and my father a man of sufficient means to send me to college, though he missed my strong back on his farm. He began on the road to prosperity as the sack-handler in a frontier trading post; in his youth in County Donegal, his own father had deserted him, and when the dust of our Revolution settled he quit his dependency on his dead mother's brother, and sailed." Lest this self-description which he impulsively confided seem boastful, he added, "But the simple Christian virtues remain my standard of success, and when my second term in the Assembly ended three years ago last June, I with great pleasure surrendered all political ambition."
Mary Jenkins loyally protested, "Yet the Judge Franklin case has kept you in the public eye, and there is talk," she explained to her sister, giving their guest the dignity of the third person, "of the Federalists putting up Mr. Buchanan for the national Congress in next year's election. And just the other day he and Mr. Jenkins and James Hopkins were appointed to form a committee to advise our Congressman on the question of slavery in Missouri."
Buchanan hastened to disclaim, "Lancaster is a small city, Miss Hubley, and a few dogs must bark on many street corners."
"I assume you will advise to vote against extending slavery; I think it wicked, wicked, the way those planters want to spread their devilish institution over all of God's terrain!"
Such fire of opinion, the tongue and heart outracing reason, attracted Buchanan, and alarmed him. "We do so advise, Miss Hubley, though in terms less fervently couched than your own. Myself, since the Constitution undeniably sanctions slavery, I see no recourse but accommodation with it pro tempore. A geographical compromise, such as rumor suggests Senator Clay will soon propose, to maintain the balance of power within the Senate, would, I am convinced, allay the sectional competition that has heavily contributed to the present panic of selling and suing. For unless the spirit of compromise and mediation prevail, this young nation may divide in three, New England pulling one way and the South the other, and the states of middling disposition shall be left as ports without a nation to supply their commerce. Disunited, our fair States may become each as trivial as Bavarian princedoms!"
Grace said, theatrically addressing her sister, "Oh, I do adore men, the sensible way they put one thing against another. Myself, Mr. Buchanan, I cannot calmly think on the fate of those poor enslaved darkies, the manner in which not only the men in the fields are abused but the colored ladies also - I cannot, it is a weakness of my nature, I cannot contemplate such wrongs without my heart rising up and yearning to smite those monstrous slavedrivers into the Hades that will be their everlasting abode!"
Buchanan tut-tutted, "Come now, the peculiar institution presents more sides than that. You speak as a soldier's daughter, Miss Hubley, but here in peaceable Pennsylvania we take a less absolute view. The slavedrivers, for one, are themselves driven, by circumstances they did not create. Chattel slavery, though I, too, deplore its abuses, is as old as warfare, and to be preferred to massacre. In some societies, such as that of ancient Greece, the contract between master and slave allowed the latter considerable advantages, and our Southern brethren maintain that without the institution's paternal guidance the negro would perish of his natural sloth and inability. At present, our friends in the South see their share of the national fortune dwindling; much of the urgency would be removed from the territorial question, it is my belief, if new territories - to the south of the South, so to speak - were to be mercifully removed" - he made a nimble snatching gesture, startling both members of his little audience - "from the crumbling dominions of the moribund Spanish crown. Cuba, Texas, Chihuahua, California - all begging to be plucked."
He settled back, pleasantly conscious of the breast-fluttering impression his masculine aggressiveness had made. Now he directed his attention, with a characteristic twist of his head, specifically toward Mrs. Jenkins, who had remained standing, held upright by the strands of hostessly duty. "But I mustn't tarry, delightful though tarrying be," he said. "Inform Mr. Jenkins, if you will, that the Columbia Bridge Company matter took some hopeful turns under my prodding, and if he wishes to be apprised of their nature, and of the distance I estimate we have left to travel, he will find me in my chambers tomorrow all day."
"I will indeed inform him," the excellent wife agreed. "But please, Mr. Buchanan, you shame me by not letting me offer you a beverage, and then a spot of supper. My sister and I were to sit down to a simple meal - salt-pork roast, fried potatoes, dried succotash, and peach-and-raisin pie. It would brighten our dull fare if you could join us, and would keep you out of the taverns for an evening."
"People exaggerate my tavern attendance, even in my unattached days," Buchanan said, in mock rebuke, and with a jerk of his head rested his vision on Miss Hubley's alabaster upper chest, bare of any locket or sign of affection pledged. His attachment to Ann nagged at him awkwardly; he should be speeding from this house and presenting at the Colemans' door live evidence of his safe return from Philadelphia.
"Oh, do stay with us," Grace Hubley chimed. "It would be a kindness even after you are gone, for sisters continually need something to gossip about."
Between folded wings of peacock-shimmery Persian silk, the woman's powdered skin glowed in his imperfect vision, which needed for focus constant small adjustments of his head. "I would be honored to serve as helpless fodder for your sororal interchange," he pronounced, "but there can be no question of imposing my presence for the length of a meal. I will, Mrs. Jenkins," he announced, relaxing into conviviality, "upon your kind urging have tea to keep Miss Hubley company, and a thimbleful of port to keep company with the tea."
When Mrs. Jenkins, to arrange these new provisions, left the room, its glittering glow seemed to intensify; the purring blaze in the fireplace - its mantel in the form of a Grecian temple carved with fluted pillars and classic entablature of which the frieze was decorated with acanthus garlands in bas-relief - added its flickers and flares to the eddying web of candlelight. Cocking her head in unconscious imitation of Buchanan's own, Miss Hubley said prettily, since he had referred to his attached state, "I have heard the most wonderful things concerning Miss Coleman. She is as original as she is beautiful, and her family of an unchallenged prominence."
"The Colemans are seldom challenged, it is true," he said, permitting himself the manner if not the substance of irony in such a serious connection. "Even at the age of seventy-one, the Judge keeps a good grip on his interests, and his grown sons greatly extend his influence."
"Mary tells me all Lancaster thinks you are a knight errant to brave the Coleman castle and carry away the languishing princess." When this apparition laughed, the shadowed space between her breasts changed shape. Her voice formed cushions in the air, into which Buchanan sank gratefully after days of nasal legal prating in an oppressive metropolis.
"She would not languish long, were this particular knight to take a fatal lance."
Grace Hubley thoughtfully pursed her plump, self-pleasing lips. "It makes a woman unsteady, perhaps, to have too many attractions; it prevents in her mind the resigned contentment of a concluded bargain." Here she spoke, less mischievously than usual, from experience, absorbed and foreshadowed: we are told Grace Hubley was a young woman of three negative romances, not including the part she played in the Buchanan-Coleman episode. Thrice engaged to be married, misfortune and a fickleness of temperament ordained her ultimately to spinsterhood.
Buchanan, too, may have suffered from a surfeit of attractiveness. A decade later, he excited the Washington journalist Anne Royall to gush, in the third volume of her Black Book (1828-29), No description that the most talented writer could give, can convey an idea of Mr. Buchanan; he is quite a young man (and a <{_>batchelorbachelor<{/>, ladies) with a stout handsome person; his face is large and fair, his eyes, a soft blue, one of which he often shuts, and has a habit of turning his head to one side. He had been his mother's first son and, with the death of his older sister, Mary, in the year he was born, her eldest child. Five sisters followed, four of them surviving to form playmates and an audience. His capacity for basking in female approval was essentially bottomless, and Ann Coleman's good opinion had to it a certain bottom, reinforced by her family. Grace Hubley, in turn, we are told, possessed a beauty and vivaciousness of disposition that made her the pet adorable of her acquaintance. Her feathery banter was to his vanity, we might conceive, as a deep barrel of sifted flour is to a man's forearm. He stirred her, he took her tinge. The shadows the Colemans cast in his head were dispersed by the light of this social conversation very adroitly guided by the keen objective mind of Miss Hubley. Golden minutes fled by on winged feet. As the embrace of the November evening tightened around them, and the windows of the tall sitting room with its fine provincial furniture gave back only tremulous amber reflections of the lights burning within, and Mary Jenkins absented herself to supervise details of the impending meal, possibly the conversation between these two strangers, the pet adorable and the favorite son, whose ages flanked the turning point of thirty, deepened in intimacy and dared probe the innermost source of consolation and anxiety harbored by Americans of the early nineteenth century, the strenuous maintenance of which so remarkably consumed and yet also supplied their energy - the Christian faith. Struck by her repeated righteous rejection of black slavery in all its forms, indeed scandalized by her airy, quick-tongued condemnation of an institution so extensively and venerably bound up in the nation's laws of property and means of production, he ventured," Miss Hubley, I envy you the clarity of your views. God's design, it is evident, presents no riddles to your vision."
"What riddles there are, Mr. Buchanan, I leave to the Lord to solve." By this hour her own sipping had moved from tea to a brandy cordial in a tulip-shaped glass, and certain rosy warmth and confident languor broadened her gestures, beneath the loosening exotic length of Persian shawl.
He inclined his stout handsome person forward from the delicate lyre-back chair with fluted legs, so that his vision won for its field slightly more of the radiant expanse of Miss Hubley's bosom. "May I ask - " He hesitated. "I ask in all respectfulness, with full solemnity - have you known, then, an inner experience of election, that supports this lovely certainty of yours?"
She adjusted her shawl, to achieve an inch more concealment, then relaxed into self-exposition, saying, "I would not express it in so political a phrase - but for as long as I can remember, I have sensibly felt the closeness of the Lord. He looks over me - He approves of me - He rebukes me - He enjoys me."
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="11">
31
The night of the long knives.
Or one long knife - the guillotine.
If only I had known, as the heroes in mystery novels used to say.
When it was over, I was reminded of Elijah at the gangplank or myself in Beverly Hills in the bookshop buying my portable Melville and hearing that strange woman's prophecy of doom: "Don't go on that journey."
And my naive response, "He's never met anyone like me before. Maybe that will make the difference."
Yep. Sure. The difference being it took a bit more time to prepare the pig's head for the hammer, the razor at the throat, and the hanging on the tender-hook.
Lenin referred to dumbclucks like me as "useful idiots."
Which is to say the image of Chaplin - remember? - crossing a street as a lumber truck passes and drops a warning red flag off the load. Chaplin picks it up and runs after the truck, to warn them they've lost the flag. Instantly, a mob of Bolshevicks Bolsheviks rounds the corner behind him, unseen, as Chaplin stands waving the flag after the truck. Enter the cops. Who promptly seize Chaplin, trample the red flag, and beat the hell out of him before throwing him in the hoosegow. The mob, of course, escapes. So ...
There I am, in Dublin, with a red flag, waving it at John. Or there I am in the Place de la Concorde as the Bastille wagons park and I offer to help folks up the guillotine steps. Only when I reach the top do I realize where I am, panic, and come down in two pieces.
Such is the life of the innocent, or someone who kids himself he is innocent. As someone once said to me: "Let's not be too naive, shall we?"
I wish I had heard and followed that advice on that night in a Chinese restaurant somewhere in the fogs and rains of Dublin.
It was one of those nights when the prophet Elijah did not prevent me - nor did I prevent myself - from drinking too many drinks and spilling too many beans in front of Jake Vickers and his Parisian lady and three or four visitors from new York and Hollywood.
It was one of those nights when it seemed you can't do anything wrong. One of those nights when everything you say is brilliant, honed, sharpened to a razor edge of risibility, when every word you speak sends the house on a roar, when people hold their ribs with laughter, waiting for your next shot across their bows, and shoot you do, and laugh they do, until you are all bathed in a warm love of hilarity and are about to fall on the floor writhing with your own genius, your own incredible humor raised to its highest temperature.
I sat listening to my own tongue wag, aim, and fire, damn well pleased at my own comic genius. Everyone was looking at me and my alcohol-oiled tongue. Even John was breaking down at my wild excursions into amiable insult and caricature. I imagined I had saved up tidbits on everyone at the table, and like those handwriting experts we encounter on occasion in life who read more in our hairlines, eyebrows, ear twitchings, nostril flarings, and teeth barings than are written in our Horatio stars or inked on plain pad with pencil, guessed at the obvious. If we do not give ourselves away in our handwriting or clothes or the percentage of alcohol on our breaths, our breathing does us in or the merest nod or shake of the head as the handwriting expert sniffs our mouthwash, or our genius. So lining up my friends one after another, against the stockade wall, I fired fusillades of wit at their habits, poses, pretensions, lovers, artistic outputs, lapses in taste, failures to arrive on time, errors in observation, and on and on. Most of it, I would hope, gently done with no scars to bandage later. So I drilled holes in masks, poured sulphur in, and lit the fuse. The explosions left darkened faces but no lost digits. At one point Jake cried, "Someone stop him!"
Christ, I wish they had.
For my next victim was John himself.
I paused for breath. Everyone stilled in their explosive roars, watching me with bright fox eyes, urging me to get on with it. John's next. Fix him!
So there I was with my hero, my love, my great good fine wondrous friend, and there I was reaching out suddenly and taking his hands.
"Did you know, John, that I, too, am one of the world's great hypnotists?"
"Is that so, kid?" John laughed.
"Hey!" everyone cried.
"Yep," I said. "Hypnotist. World's greatest. Someone fill my glass."
Jake Vickers poured gin in my glass.
"Go it!" yelled everyone.
"Here goes," I said.
No, someone inside me whispered.
I seized John's wrists. "I am about to hypnotize you. Don't be afraid!"
"You don't scare me, kid," John said.
"I'm going to help you with a problem."
"What's that, kid?"
"Your problem is - " I searched his face, my intuitive mind. "Your problem is, ah."
It came from me. It burst out.
"I am not afraid of flying to London, John. I do not fear. It is you that fears. You're afraid."
"Of what, H.G.?"
"You are afraid of the D<*_>u-acute<*/>n Laoghaire ferry boat that travels over the Irish Sea at night in great waves and dark storms. You are afraid of that, John, and so you say I am afraid of flying, when it is you afraid of seas and boats and storms and long night travels. Yes, John?"
"If you say so, kid," John replied, smiling stonily.
"Do you want me to help you with your problem, John?"
"Help him, help him," said everyone.
"Consider yourself helped. Relax, John. Relax. Take it easy. Sleep, John, are you getting sleepy?" I murmured, I whispered, I announced.
"If you say so, kid," said John, his voice not so amused but half amused, his eyes watchful, his wrists tense under my holding.
"Someone hit him over the head," exclaimed Jake.
"No, no," laughed John. "Let him go. Go on, kid. Put me under."
"Are you under, John?"
"Halfway there, son."
"Go further, John. Repeat after me. It is not H.G. who fears flying."
"It is not H.G. who fears flying - "
"Repeat, it is I, John, who fear the damned black night sea and fog on the ferry from D<*_>u-acute<*/>n Laoghaire to Folkestone!"
"All that, kid, all that. Agreed."
"Are you under, John?"
"I'm sunk, kid."
"When you wake you will remember nothing, except you will no longer fear the sea and will give up flying, John."
"I will remember nothing." John closed his eyes, but I could see his eyeballs twitch behind the lids.
"And like Ahab, you will go to sea with me, two nights from now."
"Nothing like the sea," muttered John.
"At the count of ten you will waken, John, feeling fine, feeling fresh. One, two ... five, six ... ten. Awake!"
John popped his pingpong eyes wide and blinked around at us. "My God," he cried, "that was a good sleep. Where was I? What happened?"
"Cut it out, John!" said Jake.
"John, John," everyone roared. Someone punched me happily in the arm. Someone else rumpled my hair, the hair of the idiot savant.
John ordered drinks all around.
Slugging his back, he mused on the empty glass, and then eyed me, steadily.
"You know, kid, I been thinking - "
"What?"
"Mebbe - "
"Yes?"
"Mebbe I should go on that damned ferryboat with you, ah, two nights from now ... ?"
"John, John!" everyone roared.
"Cut it out," shouted Jake, falling back, splitting his face with laughs.
Cut it out.
My heart, too, while you're at it.
How the rest of the evening went or how it ended, I cannot recall. I seem to remember more drinks, and a sense of overwhelming power that came with everyone, I imagined, loving my outrageous jokes, my skill with words, my alacrity with responses. I was a ballet dancer, comically on balance on the high-wire. I could not fall off. I was a perfection and a delight. I was a Martian love, all beauteous bright.
As usual, John had no cash on him.
Jake Vickers paid the bill for the eight of us. On the way out, in the fog-filled rainy street, Jake cocked his head to one side, closed one eye, and fixed me with the other, snorting with mirth.
"You," he said, "are a maniac!"
That sound you hear is the long whistling slide of the guillotine blade rushing down through the night ...
Toward the nape of my neck.
The next day I wandered around without a head, but no one said. Until five that afternoon. When John unexpectedly came to my room at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.
I don't recall John's sitting down after he came in. He was dressed in a cap and light overcoat, and he paced around the room as we discussed some minor point to be revised before I sailed off for England, two days later.
In the middle of our Ahab/Whale discussion John paused and, almost as an afterthought, said, "Oh, yeah. You'll have to change your plans."
"What plans, John?"
"Oh, all that bullshit about your coming to England on the ferryboat. I need you quicker. Cancel your boat ticket and fly with me to London on Thursday night. It'll only take an hour. You'll love it."
"I can't do that," I said.
"Now, don't be difficult - "
"You don't understand, John. I'm scared to death of airplanes."
"You've told me that, kid, and it's time you got over it."
"Maybe sometime in the future, but, please forgive me, John, I can't fly with you."
"Sounds like you're yellow, kid."
"Yes! I admit it. You've always known that. It's nothing new. I am the damnedest shade of yellow you ever saw."
"Then get over it. Fly! You'll save a whole day at sea."
"God," I moaned, falling back in my chair. "I don't mind being at sea all night The ferry leaves around ten p.m. It doesn't get across to the English port until three of four a.m., an ungodly hour. I won't sleep. I might even be seasick. Then I take the train to London, it gets in Victoria at seven thirty in the morning. By eight fifteen I'll be in my hotel. By eight forty-five I'll have had a quick breakfast and a shave. By nine thirty I'll be at your hotel ready to work. No time lost. I'd be busy on the white whale as soon as you - "
"Well, screw that, son. You're coming on the airplane with me."
"No, no."
"Yes, you are, you cowardly bastard. And if you don't - "
"What, what?"
"You'll have to stay in Dublin!"
"What?" I yelled.
"You won't get your vacation. No final weeks in London."
"After seven months?!"
"That's right! No vacation."
"You can't do that!"
"Yes, I can. And not only that, Lorry, our secretary, she won't get her vacation. She'll be trapped here with you."
"You can't do that to Lorry. She's worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for six months!"
"Her vacation's canceled unless you fly with me."
"Oh, no, John! John, no!"
"Unless you change color, kid. No more yellow."
I was on my feet.
"You'd really do that to her? Because of me?"
"That's the way it is."
"Well, the answer is no."
"What?"
"You heard me. Lorry goes to London. I go to London. And we go any damn way I please, as long as I don't interfere with our writing, my finishing, the script. I'll travel all night, and be on time at your room at Claridge's Friday morning. You can't fight that, argue that, I'll be there. I'm going on the ferry. You can't force me into flying on any goddamn plane."
"What?"
"That's it, John."
"Your final word?"
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="12">
4
I didn't see him again for close to two years. Maria was the only person who knew where he was, and Sachs had made her promise not to tell. Most people would have broken that promise, I think, but Maria had given her word, and no matter how dangerous it was for her to keep it, she refused to open her mouth. I must have run into her half a dozen times in those two years, but even when we talked about Sachs, she never let on that she knew more about his disappearance than I did. Last summer, when I finally learned how much she had been holding back from me, I got so angry that I wanted to kill her. But that was my problem, not Maria's, and I had no right to vent my frustration on her. A promise is a promise, after all, and even though her silence wound up causing a lot of damage, I don't think she was wrong to do what she did. If anyone should have spoken up, it was Sachs. He was the one responsible for what happened, and it was his secret that Maria was protecting. But Sachs said nothing. For two whole years, he kept himself hidden and never said a word.
We knew that he was alive, but as the months passed and no message came from him, not even that was certain anymore. Only bits and pieces remained, a few ghostlike facts. We knew that he had left Vermont, that he had not driven his own car, and that for one horrible minute Fanny had seen him in Brooklyn. Beyond that, everything was conjecture. Since he hadn't called to announce he was coming, we assumed that he had something urgent to tell her, but whatever that thing was, they never got around to talking about it. He just showed up one night out of the blue ("all distraught and crazy in the eyes," as Fanny put it) and burst into the bedroom of their apartment. That led to the awful scene I mentioned earlier. If the room had been dark, it might have been less embarrassing for all of them, but several lights happened to be on, Fanny and Charles were naked on top of the covers, and Ben saw everything. It was clearly the last thing he expected to find. Before Fanny could say a word to him, he had already backed out of the room, stammering that he was sorry, that he hadn't known, that he hadn't meant to disturb her. She scrambled out of bed, but by the time she reached the front hall, the apartment door had banged shut and Sachs was racing down the stairs. She couldn't go outside with nothing on, so she rushed into the living room, opened the window, and called down to him in the street. Sachs stopped for a moment and waved up at her. "My blessings on you both!" he shouted. Then he blew her a kiss, turned in the other direction, and ran off into the night.
Fanny telephoned us immediately after that. She figured he might be on his way to our place next, but her hunch proved wrong. Iris and I sat up half the night waiting for him, but Sachs never appeared. From then on, there were no more signs of his whereabouts. Fanny called the house in Vermont repeatedly, but no one ever answered. That was our last hope, and as the days went by, it seemed less and less likely that Sachs would return there. Panic set in; a contagion of morbid thoughts spread among us. Not knowing what else to do, Fanny rented a car that first weekend and drove up to the house herself. As she reported to me on the phone after she arrived, the evidence was puzzling. The front door had been left unlocked, the car was sitting in its usual place in the yard, and Ben's work was laid out on the desk in the studio: finished manuscript pages stacked in one pile, pens scattered beside it, a half-written page still in the typewriter. In other words, it looked as though he were about to come back any minute. If he had been planning to leave for any length of time, she said, the house would have been closed. The pipes would have been drained, the electricity would have been turned off, the refrigerator would have been emptied. "And he would have taken his manuscript," I added. "Even if he had forgotten everything else, there's no way he would have left without that."
The situation refused to add up. No matter how thoroughly we analyzed it, we were always left with the same conundrum. On the one hand, Sachs's departure had been unexpected. On the other hand, he had left of his own free will. If not for that fleeting encounter with Fanny in New York, we might have suspected foul play, but Sachs had made it down to the city unharmed. A bit frazzled, perhaps, but essentially unharmed. And yet, if nothing had happened to him, why hadn't he returned to Vermont? Why had he left behind his car, his clothes, his work? Iris and I talked it out with Fanny again and again, going over one possibility after another, but we never reached a satisfactory conclusion. There were too many blanks, too many variables, too many things we didn't know. After a month of beating it into the ground, I suggested that Fanny go to the police and report Ben as missing. She resisted the idea, however. She had no claims on him anymore, she said, which meant that she had no right to interfere. After what had happened in the apartment, he was free to do what he liked, and it wasn't up to her to drag him back. Charles (whom we had met by then and who turned out to be quite well off) was willing to hire a private detective at his own expense. "Just so we know that Ben's all right," he said. "It's not a question of dragging him back, it's a question of knowing that he disappeared because he wanted to disappear." Iris and I both thought that Charles's plan was sensible, but Fanny wouldn't allow him to go ahead with it. "He gave us his blessings," she said. "That was the same thing as saying good-bye. I lived with him for twenty years, and I know how he thinks. He doesn't want us to look for him. I've already betrayed him once, and I'm not about to do it again. We have to leave him alone. He'll come back when he's ready to come back, and until then we have to wait. Believe me, it's the only thing to be done. We just have to sit tight and learn to live with it."
Months passed. Then it was a year, and then it was two years, and the enigma remained unsolved. By the time Sachs showed up in Vermont last August, I was long past thinking we would ever find an answer. Iris and Charles both believed that he was dead, but my hopelessness didn't stem from anything as specific as that. I never had a strong feeling about whether Sachs was alive or dead - no sudden intuitions, no bursts of extrasensory knowledge, no mystical experiences - but I was more or less convinced that I would never see him again. I say 'more or less' because I wasn't sure of anything. In the first months after he disappeared, I went through a number of violent and contradictory responses, but these emotions gradually burned themselves out, and in the end terms such as sadness or anger or grief no longer seemed to apply. I had lost contact with him, and his absence felt less and less like a personal matter. Every time I tried to think about him, my imagination failed me. It was as if Sachs had become a hole in the universe. He was no longer just my missing friend, he was a symptom of my ignorance about all things, an emblem of the unknowable itself. This probably sounds vague, but I can't do any better than that. Iris told me that I was turning into a Buddhist, and I suppose that describes my position as accurately as anything else. Fanny was a Christian, Iris said, because she never abandoned her faith in Sachs's eventual return; she and Charles were atheists; and I was a Zen acolyte, a believer in the power of nothing. In all the years she had known me, she said, it was the first time I hadn't expressed an opinion.
Life changed, life went on. We learned, as Fanny had begged us, to live with it. She and Charles were together now, and in spite of ourselves, Iris and I were forced to admit that he was a decent fellow. Mid to late forties, an architect, formerly married, the father of two boys, intelligent, desperately in love with Fanny, beyond reproach. Little by little, we managed to form a friendship with him, and a new reality took hold for all of us. Last spring, when Fanny mentioned that she wasn't planning to go to Vermont for the summer (she just couldn't, she said, and probably never would again), it suddenly occurred to her that perhaps Iris and I would like to use the house. She wanted to give it to us for nothing, but we insisted on paying some kind of rent, and so we worked out an arrangement that would at least cover her costs - a prorated share of the taxes, the maintenance, and so on. That was how I happened to be present when Sachs turned up last summer. He arrived without warning, chugging into the yard one night in a battered blue Chevy, spent the next couple of days here, and then vanished again. In between, he talked his head off. He talked so much, it almost scared me. But that was when I heard his story, and given how determined he was to tell it, I don't think he left anything out.
He went on working, he said. After Iris and I left with Sonia, he went on working for another three or four weeks. Our conversations about Leviathan had apparently been helpful, and he threw himself back into the manuscript that same morning, determined not to leave Vermont until he had finished a draft of the whole book. Everything seemed to go well. He made progress every day, and he felt happy with his monk's life, as happy as he had been in years. Then, early one evening in the middle of September, he decided to go out for a walk. The weather had turned by then, and the air was crisp, infused with the smells of fall. He put on his woolen hunting jacket and tramped up the hill beyond the house, heading north. He figured there was an hour of daylight left, which meant that he could walk for half an hour before he had to turn around and start back. Ordinarily, he would have spent that hour shooting baskets, but the change of seasons was in full swing now, and he wanted to have a look at what was happening in the woods: to see the red and yellow leaves, to watch the slant of the setting sun among the birches and maples, to wander in the glow of the pendant colors. So he set off on his little jaunt, with no more on his mind than what he was going to cook for dinner when he got home.
Once he entered the woods, however, he became distracted. Instead of looking at the leaves and migrating birds, he started thinking about his book. Passages he had written earlier that day came rushing back to him, and before he was conscious of what he was doing, he was already composing new sentences in his head, mapping out the work he wanted to do the next morning.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="13">
HAPPY HOUR
Bernadine was glad to get out of the house. Gloria prayed she wouldn't be bored to death. Savannah was hoping she'd meet somebody worth giving her phone number to, and Robin kept her fingers crossed that she wouldn't run into anybody she'd slept with.
They agreed to meet at Pendleton's around six-thirty. Robin offered to pick up Savannah when she found out her meeting would be over much earlier than expected. This gave her enough time to zip by Oasis to get a nail repaired and stop at home to change into something flashier.
More than anything, Robin wanted an excuse to see Savannah's apartment. Bernadine had bragged about Savannah's artworks and said she had very good taste. Robin wanted to see for herself. She knew her apartment didn't exactly look like it came out of Architectural Digest, but it was colorful. When Robin rang her bell, Savannah came to the door wearing a form-fitting orange dress with a wide white belt and orange sling-back sandals. Her hair was cut close on the sides, and skewered-looking curls stuck straight up on the top. It was different from anything Robin had ever seen on anybody down at Oasis. "Hi," Robin said. "I'm Robin."
"No shit," Savannah said, and gave her a hug. "Come on in," she said. "Have a seat. I'll be ready in ten seconds. As you can see," she said, walking down a hallway, "I haven't had a chance to unpack everything yet, so forgive the place."
"It looks to me like you've done a lot in two days," Robin yelled, and sat down on the couch. She ran her hands over the forest-green cushion. This wasn't cheap leather by any means, she thought. There were six mint-green and peach throw pillows strewn along the back. Stacks of boxes were pushed in corners, but there were sculptures sitting on at least four different pedestals, silk flowers on tables, ceramic vases such as Robin had never seen before: copper-colored; metallic green; blackish-silver; each a different shape, and some with blotches of color that made them look like a map of the world. The movers had obviously broken a few, because some were badly cracked, but Robin didn't want to say anything. Savannah already had pictures up on three walls. Robin didn't particularly care for this kind of art, because half of them didn't look like they were finished. The few she was able to make out - what they were supposed to be - didn't match anything in here.
"I'm ready," Savannah said, and came out of the bathroom.
"Your place is gorgeous," Robin said, standing up. "Is this a one or two bedroom?"
"One. It's not much to see, but come on back if you want to."
"I'm nosey," Robin said, and followed Savannah down the hall.
"This is me," Savannah said, waving her hand like the women on game shows who show contestants what they can win.
A queen-sized platform bed with four oversized stuffed pillows sat in the middle of the room. Behind it was a picture of a nude man and woman. Next to the fireplace was an ice-cream parlor table with a black and rose floral tablecloth; oak chairs with wrought-iron backs, and more unpacked crates and boxes stacked in a corner. One whole wall looked like the millinery section of a department store. At least twenty hats hung on hooks.
"So I guess you're into hats," Robin said.
"I am," Savannah said, and headed toward the living room.
"Well, you should've called. I would've been glad to help you unpack."
"Girl, this stuff was in storage, and everything was all mixed up. I'm having a hard enough time finding things myself, but thanks."
"Some people just have the knack of knowing how to put things together, and some don't. I think you missed your calling. You should've gone into interior decorating."
"Bernadine said your place was pretty nice too. So stop. I wish I could've brought my plants."
"Why couldn't you?"
"They wouldn't let me bring them across the state border. They worry about bugs. It broke my heart. But it's okay. I've got to get some. I can't stand being in here without live plants."
"Well, I've got about three, and they're on their last legs." Robin started rubbing her eyes, because they were itching all of a sudden, and the next thing she knew she was sneezing.
"You're allergic to cats, right?" Savannah asked.
"Yes. Lord," she said. "Where is the little sucker?"
"In the back," she said. "I'm ready."
As Savannah reached for her purse and keys, she looked at Robin, particularly her cleavage, which was extremely prominent in that white top. "You're looking pretty snazzy yourself. If I had legs as long as yours, I'd probably wear miniskirts too. How tall are you?"
"Almost five nine," Robin said, taking a handkerchief from her purse and wiping her eyes. "I wish I had some of your ass," she said, and sneezed again.
"Well, in that case, I'd like to borrow about sixteen ounces of your boobs."
"Then buy you some. How do you think I got these?"
They both laughed, and Robin sneezed again.
"Well, I know one thing. I won't have to worry about you wearing out your welcome."
"You got that right," Robin said. "Now get me the hell outta here."
"What kind of resort is this?" Savannah asked Robin. It seemed as if they had driven through Little Mexico to get here, and the place looked as though it could stand to be remodeled.
"Girl, I don't know. This is my first time here too."
They were standing in the entry, when a black man in his early thirties came over to greet them. He looked pleased and excited to see them. Robin pinched Savannah, as if to say, "He's all yours." Savannah pinched her back, as if to say, "I don't want him, either."
"Thanks for coming," he said. "Is this your first time here, ladies?"
They both shook their heads yes.
"Well, I'm Andre Williams, and me and a few of my partners have formed the Stock Exchange group. We're trying to get some exciting things happening in Phoenix, a place where professional sisters and brothers can network and get to know one another in an informal setting and, you know, dance a little, eat a little, and drink a little."
"Are all of you stockbrokers?" Robin asked.
"No, sister. We just wanted to come up with a catchy, sophisticated name. It's the one we all liked. Do you two ladies have a business card?"
Robin did, but Savannah didn't have hers yet; she hadn't anticipated needing one so soon. The moment this man said "network," Savannah cringed. She hated the whole notion. It was as if black folks couldn't get together and have a good time anymore unless they were in a position to do something for each other. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned fun? There was a little basket for the cards, and Robin tossed hers in. What were they going to do with them? Savannah wondered. "I'll bring mine next time," she said, and peeked around a partition into the adjoining room. There were fifteen or twenty people in it. What a helluva turnout, she thought. It was easy to see that Bernadine and Gloria weren't here yet, so she turned her attention to Robin, who had walked over by the windows, where a woman with long dreadlocks stood behind two tables. One was filled with books by and about black people, the other with various African crafts: silver and brass jewelry, kinte cloths, wooden and soapstone sculpture, handmade cards, T-shirts with Africa on front, as well as little bottles of fragrant oils. There were posters of Nelson and Winnie Mandela, Malcolm X, and Martin, as well as Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan.
Robin had her wallet out and two black bangles already on her wrists. Bernadine had told Savannah that the girl was a die-hard shopaholic and terrible at managing her money. Savannah smiled at the sister selling the merchandise, eyed one of the soapstone sculptures, but kept her distance. She hadn't come here to shop. Besides, she was now on something she'd never been on before: a budget.
"Come on, Robin," Savannah said, and headed for one of the forty or so empty tables. When they sat down, it felt as if they were on display, which Robin didn't seem to mind. She liked getting attention, and it showed. There were ten men sitting at the bar, a few of whom turned around and looked at them, and then turned back toward the bar.
"I thought this thing started at six," Robin said. "That's what Bernadine told me."
"This is your world, I'm just in it," Savanna said.
"I wonder where everybody is. Well, at least the music is good."
'Forever Your Girl' was playing. "I can't stand Paula Abdul," Savannah said. "She can't sing. Jodey Watley can't sing, and if you want to know the truth, Janet Jackson can't sing, either, I'm sick of all three of them." But, she thought, if somebody was to ask her to dance right now, she would. But nobody did.
A waitress came over and took their order. Robin ordered a glass of wine, and Savannah, a margarita. "That must be where you dance," Robin said, pointing to a wide doorway, and within a minute she had walked over to it, peered in, come back, and sat down. "Yep, they've got a DJ in there and everything. There's some tables in there too. And not a soul on the dance floor."
Savannah was staring out the window at the golf course when the waitress brought their drinks. "I'll buy this round," Robin said. "And let's get some of that food over there, girl. It's free, and I haven't eaten.
They weren't stingy with the food, Savannah was thinking as she filled her plate up with fresh fruit salad, tossed green salad, pasta salad, and buffalo wings. Normally, she never ate chicken in public because it always got stuck between her teeth, and plus, she forgot to put her dental floss in her purse. But hell, nobody worth worrying about was in here.
Robin made two trips to the food table and drank her wine in between plates. On the way here, she had told Savannah her life story, which didn't seem to start until she met Russell. She told Savannah all about him. And Michael. And how she wanted to have a baby before it was 'too late.' When she finally mentioned her job as an underwriter and all it entailed, particularly how she sometimes wrote proposals that brought in million-dollar accounts, it sounded to Savannah like the only time Robin used common sense was at work. "It looks good on paper," Robin said, "but I'm still not making any real money, and I'm seriously thinking about looking for another job, at a bigger company. The way things stand now, I'm living from paycheck to paycheck and can't even afford to help pay for a nurse for my daddy. That's pitiful," she said, as if she was talking to herself. "What the hell did I get a degree for?"
The place was starting to fill up, but there was still no sign of Gloria or Bernadine. Now on her second glass of wine, Robin went back to her favorite subject: Russell. She apologized for his philandering. "Could he help it if he was so fine that women flocked to him? If I'd been a little more patient and not pressured him, maybe he would've married me," she said. "But it's not over till it's over."
Savannah didn't say a word. She just sat there listening to the shit and wanted to slap Robin. Knock some sense into her. Savannah agreed with Bernadine: the woman was a little on the dizzy side when it came to men.
Savannah sipped at her second margarita, thinking: This woman is pitiful. Too hard up.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="14">
"At the moment, my true wad could not be farther from shooting. It is work getting the two of you together. I feel that any second I'm going to misstep in telling this. It's very stressful."
"Now listen," she said. "Harvey leaves, slamming the door, so the sign says CLOSED, and I, me, I am left, abandoned right in the middle of things by Harvey, and I'm standing there in the shop with the taciturn and very rich guy Forky, Forky Pigtail, who's holding the necklace that I made in his big knuckly fingers. He sits down on a step stool, he looks down at the necklace, looks up at me. What does he do?"
"He says, 'I really do have to see what it looks like on someone before I know whether it's something I want.' And you look down at your shirt with the green and black stars and you sort of pluck at it and smile and say, 'I'm sorry, I'm not wearing the clothes for that piece. It's really an evening piece, for a low-cut dress.' With your finger you trace the ideal curve of the neckline of the dress. And Fork says, 'Then unbutton your shirt.' Well, what can you do? You unbutton the top three buttons of your shirt. With each button, you feel the fabric shift slightly against your collarbone. Fork stands up, letting the necklace dangle from his left hand, and, to your astonishment, he begins unbuttoning the buttons of his fly. Because of course he's a button-fly kind of guy. He unbuttons three buttons. The two of you are still about ten feet apart. You fold your shirt down, trying to make it follow the line of the dress that you should be wearing to wear the necklace, but looking down at yourself you see that you really need to undo one more button, and you dart a glance at him - has he reached the same conclusion? Oh no, he has! He is shaking his head. He says, 'I think really you'll need to go down one more in order to wear your necklace.' So you unbutton one more button, and he responds by unbuttoning the last button of his fly. He doesn't do anything, he doesn't reach in, you almost couldn't tell that his fly was undone, if it weren't for the fact that you've just seen him undo it. Oh, he is a bold bastard! What is he up to? He takes the necklace in both his hands, by both ends, and he shakes it, indicating for you to walk toward him, which you do. When you are standing close to him, he says, 'I think it'll be easier if you turn around. Then I'll be able to see the clasp.' So you turn around, and you see this necklace, your own handiwork, descend very slowly in front of your face, and you feel the dangly elements just touch your skin and you try to hold your shirt so it doesn't get in the way, but instead of doing the clasp, he lowers the necklace further and lets it accommodate itself to your breasts, and you hear him say, thoughtfully, 'Hmm, no, I really think the shirt has to come off entirely before I can evaluate this necklace.The green and black stars clash with the stones.' So you unbutton the shirt completely and let it fall off your arms. You're wearing a black cotton undershirty thing, with very thin shoulder straps. Very gently he drags your piece of jewelry up again, against you, and then finally he fastens it, holding the ends away from your neck so that his hands hardly touch you. You look down at it. It's hard to tell, but you think it looks kind of beautiful. Your nipples are visible through the black material. He's silent behind you. You say, 'Don't you want to see it now?' But he says, ' Wait, let me just do something.' And you hear a slight scrape of the step stool against the floor, and you hear his shoes on the steps, and then you hear some rustling, and the a very soft rhythmic sound, the sound of the sleeve of his suit jacket making repeated contact with one side of the jacket itself, and, as the speed of the rhythm increases slightly, you hear every once in a while a little sort of plick or click, a wet little sound, and you know exactly what he's doing, and you hear his voice, with a bit of strain in it, say, 'I think I'm ready to see it now.' And you turn, and there he is, on the top step of this little stool, with his cock and both balls pulled out of his pants, and with each pull he makes on his cock you can see the skin pull up slightly on his balls. I mean is this guy for real? And you touch your shoulders with your hands, and you pull the straps of your black undershirt down, and you pull it down around your waist, so your breasts are right there, out, and now you take hold of your breasts, your frans, and you lift them, so that each of the two side stones of your necklace touches a nipple, and by moving your breasts back and forth, you move your nipples, which are hard, back and forth under the two cool dangly stones, and you see him stroking faster and faster, he's starting to get the about-to-come expression, and you smile at him and move a step closer, so your breasts and your silver necklace and your collarbone are ready for him, and then you look straight at him and you say, 'Well, what do you think? Do you like it? As you see, it's really an evening piece.' And the, stroking very fast, he bends his legs slightly and then straightens them and he goes 'Ooh!' and then he comes in a hot mess all over your art."
There was a pause. She said, "Does he buy the necklace or does he just take his fixed fork and go home?"
"I don't know. I assume he takes the paper towel that he'd wrapped his fork in and uses it to wipe you off and wipe off your necklace and then he buys it and gives it to you."
"That's good. He sounds like an honorable sort. A bit precipitate maybe. Um - would you excuse me for a second?"
"Sure."
"I just - my mouth's dry - I want to get some more - "
"Sure," he said.
There was a long pause. She returned.
"It's funny that you cast me as an arts-and-craftsy type," she said.
"Not aggressively arts-and-craftsy. Are you?"
"Well, no. I'm really not, I don't think. Do you have a ponytail?" she asked.
"No."
"Then do you have an old-world smell?"
"I don't think that would be the word for it."
"I wonder what your smell is."
"I've been told I smell like a Conté crayon," he said.
"Hm."
"Or I guess it was that I smelled like what a Conté crayon would smell like if it had a smell."
"Well, that's good to know," she said. "Of course I have no idea what you're talking about. But no, you know what your story reminded me of, when I was in the kitchen just now?"
"What?"
"I was in a museum in Rome with my mother, and we passed a statue that had all these discolorations on it, a nice statue of a woman, and my mother pointed to a sort of mottled area and she shook her head and said, 'You see? It's so realistic that men feel they have to ... ' She didn't explain. And I don't know now if she was serious or not. I was - I guess I was eighteen. I thought, oh, okay, in churches in Italy, men come on the statues of women."
"Yes," he said, "I think I do remember coming on that statue. It's all a blur, though. There were so many statues in those years."
"Do you, as they say, like to travel?" she asked.
"You mean get in a plane and fly somewhere for recreation? No. I've never been to Rome. I spend my vacation money in more important ways."
"Like this call."
"That's right. Now tell me, though, really, when your mother pointed out that statue, was it faintly arousing?"
"I don't think it really was," she said. "It was just interesting, an interesting sexual fact, like something in Ripley's. I'm not, by the way, to get back to your story for a second, I'm not wearing a black undershirt under my shirt."
"What are you wearing under your shirt?"
"A bra."
"What kind of bra?"
"A nothing bra. A normal, white bra bra."
"Oooo!"
"It's shrunk slightly in the wash but it was my last clean one."
"It's always impressive to me that bras have to be washed like other clothes. Does it clip on the front or on the back?"
"The back."
"Shouldn't it come off?"
"I don't think so," she said.
"Oh, I can hear in your voice the sound of you frowning and pulling in your chin to look down at them" Oh boy."
"Hah hah!"
"The idea of women looking down at their own breasts drives me nutso. They do it while they're walking. Some walk with their arms sort of hovering in front of their breasts, or awkwardly crossed in front of them, or they pretend to hold the strap of their pocketbook so their hands are bent in front of them, or they pretend to be adjusting their watch, or their bracelets, and the fact that even fully clothed the helpless obviousness of their breasts is embarrassing to them drives me absolutely nutso."
"They see you staring, with your eyes sproinging springing out of your skull, of course they're embarrassed."
"No, I'm very discreet. And this is only in certain moods, of course. Once I got into an wild state just standing at a bus stop. It was rush hour, and there were all these women driving to work, and they would drive by, and I would get this flash, this briefest of glimpses, of the wide shoulder strap of their safety belt crossing their breasts. That thick, densely woven material, pulling itself tight right between them. That's all I could see, hundreds of times, different colors of dresses, shirts, blouses, over and over, every bra size and Lycra-cotton balance imaginable, like frames of a movie. By the time the bus came, I was literally unsteady, I could barely get the fare in the machine. What's that noise?"
"Nothing. I was just changing the phone to the other ear."
"Oh," he said. "Did you see that thing about the Chinese kid who suffered an episode of spontaneous human combustion?"
"No."
"You really missed something. It was originally in one of the tabloids, I think, but I heard about it on the radio. You know about spontaneous combustion, right?"
"I'm familiar with the general concept."
"All right, well this kid apparently spontaneously human combusted, but the combustion was confined to his genitals. Boom! He was very uncomfortable. But see, I understand perfectly how that could happen. I fear for my own genitals sometimes. I get so fricking horny ... now there's another inadequate word ... so porny, so gorny, so yorny ... I get so yorny that I look down at my cock-and-balls unit, and it's like I could take the whole rigid assembly and start unscrewing it, around and around, and it would come off as one solid thing, like a cotterless crank on a bicycle, and I would hand it over to you to use as a dildo."
"Okay then, hand it over. Although I've never cottoned to dildos particularly. I used one once, to oblige someone, and I got a yeast infection. I think it was called a 'Mighty Mini Brute.' "
"That's a fair description of my ... crank."
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="15">
The urge, she knew, was crazy - a lifetime, or much of one, had passed since she had last touched her mother's living hand. Yet the urge to go back, to escape the years, to be her mother's young child rather than the crabby grandmother of her dead daughter's children, was so sharp that tears came to her eyes. She flung the phone book off the bed and buried her face in the pillow. Hector Scott must not see what she was feeling - it was too crazy, and he'd think it was his fault.
The General did think it was his fault, and he was horrified. What had he done now? Things were getting impossible. He and Aurora were both so sensitized on the subject of sex that the most casual reference to it was likely to send them over the edge. He didn't really know a thing about Aurora's mother's affairs, and even if she had had a lot, so what? That was in New Haven, and a long time ago. Besides, Yale was in New Haven, and people who lived around colleges were always apt to be having affairs. Being at Yale was not like being at the Point. Now he had hurt Aurora's feelings, and they hadn't even had breakfast. If the slightest reference to sex was going to cause her to burst into in tears, he might as well move out - but where would he go to? He had no children - he and Evelyn had kept putting it off, and then Evelyn got too old. Teddy was the only one of Aurora's grandchildren who really liked him, but Teddy was at least half crazy and could barely manage his own life. It was a grim picture he faced, filled with nothing but old soldiers' homes, endless bridge games, and widows who probably wouldn't turn out to be half as interesting as Aurora. And even if they were half as interesting, he loved Aurora, not them. She'd get another boyfriend, she'd never come to visit, and he'd be alone. Perhaps he'd do better just to join the homeless, once he got off his crutches. The papers maintained that most of the homeless were Vietnam veterans, and he had to admit that a good many of the homeless he'd spotted in his drives around Houston looked as if they might be veterans. Well, he was a veteran himself - he could go back to his own and live in a tent in a park when Aurora threw him out.
The grimness of it all reduced the General to a state not far from tears. He had never supposed he would end up in a tent in a park - he had never been very good at erecting tents, for one thing. Most enlisted men could erect tents far more efficiently than he could. It might be that he'd have to pay one of the homeless enlisted men to set up his tent for him. That would be rather a sorry pass for a general to come to, but if that was the best he could do, then so be it.
Aurora felt the General fumbling for her hand and let him hold it, but she didn't immediately remove her face from the pillow. She enjoyed, for a few moments, the ridiculous fantasy that her mother was once more holding her in her arms, as her mother had often done during her childhood. It was a ridiculous fantasy, but at the same time it was deeply comforting, and Aurora clung to it as long as she could before reluctantly raising her face and resuming the taxing life of someone who had miserable grandchildren and a played-out lover.
Looking over at the played-out lover, she noticed that his Adam's apple was quivering, a sign that he was in distress. Hector's Adam's apple quivered only on those occasions when she had vexed him almost to tears. Now it seemed to have happened again, although, as she recalled, he was the one who had accused her and her mother of being loose, an accusation to which she had only made the mildest reply. What could have happened to hurt the man's feelings now?
"Hector, are you getting ready to cry, and if not, why is your Adam's apple behaving that way?" Aurora asked.
"Sorry," the General said. "I guess I just never thought I'd end up in a tent. Old age is full of surprises."
"Life is full of surprises." Aurora said. "They are apt to come at all ages, in my observation. I must say I was quite surprised to look over just now and see your Adam's apple bobbing like an apple in a barrel. What's the matter? All I was doing was looking up psychoanalysts in the phone book. Are you going to begrudge me even that mild pleasure?"
"No, no, you can have all the analysts you want," the General said. It was perfectly obvious that she had had her little fit and was now in a good humor, and yet the fact that she had surprised him in a low mood was as likely as not going to cast her back into a low mood, and this time she would blame him. Sometimes it was so hard to get through a morning, not to mention a day, with Aurora that on the whole he thought it might be easier to be homeless and live in a tent.
"I was just worrying about my tent," the General said, not quite able to detach himself from the grim vision he had just conjured up.
"What tent?" Aurora asked, surveying her nice sunny bedroom. "Have you been dreaming of the Battle of the Somme again? Does this look like a tent we're quarreling in?"
"No, it's a bed, but I've decided to go live in a tent in Herman Park when you finally throw me out," the General said. "For one thing, I won't last long in a tent, and a short end is about the best prospect I have to look forward to now."
Aurora saw to her amazement that the man was genuinely upset, and for no reason - when had she ever said anything about throwing him out?
"A tent in Herman Park would be a damn sight better than one of those stupid old soldiers' homes with no old soldiers in them," the General said, his Adam's apple still aquiver.
"Hector, I'm baffled," Aurora admitted. "You brought up my mother, and the thought of her undid me for a moment. I loved my mother very much and she died much too young. I think I have every right to be undone by her memory, but that's all that happened. I don't have the least desire to dispatch you to a tent in the park and I don't know how you can have conceived such a notion. This convinces me that we had better make an appointment with Dr. Bruckner quickly. You might be beginning to drift off your moorings or something."
The General was both relieved and annoyed: relieved that Aurora was no longer angry, annoyed that she kept slipping into nautical metaphors.
"Aurora, I'm a general, not an admiral," he reminded her, for at least the hundredth time. "Generals do not drift off their moorings. Generals aren't moored. Even admirals aren't moored. Boats are moored."
"Well, touchy, touchy," Aurora said. "Perhaps the word I was seeking was 'mired.' You can hardly deny that we're mired in a rather quarrelsome embrace."
"The hell we are," the General said. "This isn't an embrace. I remember our embraces. I wish I was dead. Then you could embrace anyone you could catch."
"I can anyway," Aurora informed him. "It's obviously not doing me much good, but I've always claimed the right to embrace people at will. That's where this conversation started, remember? You said I was loose, and my mother before me."
The General recalled that he had said something like that. He said it not long before he decided to go live in a tent. Now he couldn't remember why the subject had come up in the first place. They had been talking about Vienna or something and then the quarrel started.
"Well, I suppose I popped off." he admitted. "Did she have affairs or didn't she? Let's get this settled."
"She loved the gardener," Aurora said. "Before he arrived I certainly hope she had a few affairs. What's a girl to do?"
"What do you mean, what's a girl to do?" the General asked. "She was married. Why can't a girl who's married sleep with her husband?"
Aurora was remembering a conversation she had had with her mother once - it was after a concert in Boston. They were walking across the Commons and it was snowing. She could not remember the program, but it seemed to her Brahms had been on it. Her mother confessed to a considerable weakness for Brahms. The evening snow was beautiful, falling on the Commons; the air was wintry and clean. Her mother, Amelia, had evidently been somewhat more stirred by the music than Aurora - just about to marry her beau Rudyard - had realized. Out of the blue her mother made a startling statement.
"I ought to tell you that your father has abandoned my bed," her mother said. "The truth is he abandoned it eleven years ago."
Aurora did not immediately comprehend.
"Why?" she asked. "Isn't it a comfortable bed?"
Her mother who rarely looked happy but even more rarely looked sad - who made it a point of principle never to look sad, in fact - pursed her lips for a moment and gave her daughter a look that was unmistakably sad.
"It's not the bed he finds uncomfortable," she said. "It's the woman in it. It's me he doesn't like."
Aurora did not remember how the conversation ended, though now she wished she could. As soon as she got her memory project really cranked up she meant to go through her vast collection of old engagement books and concert programs and pin down the concert. If she could recover the program, she might be able to recall the end of the conversation. The two things she was sure of were that her mother had used the word "abandoned," and that she had mentioned eleven years.
"My father didn't sleep with her for eleven years, or possibly longer," Aurora said. "My mother lived for six years after she told me that - so it was probably more like seventeen years that he didn't sleep with her. What do you think of that, General?"
"If you're thinking it's some kind of record, forget it," the General said. "I went more than twenty years without sleeping with Evelyn."
"But did you dislike her?" Aurora asked.
"No, not particularly," the General said. "She was a little chirpy, but I didn't exactly dislike her."
"Then what happened?" Aurora asked.
"I really have no idea," the General said. "We just lost the habit, somehow. There came a time when I don't think it would have occurred to either one of us to go near the other sexually. Otherwise we got along pretty well."
"Goodness," Aurora said. "I believe I'll have to think this over, Hector. If nothing else it explains why you were so enthusiastic when we were first getting to know one another. At the time I was quite swept away by your enthusiasm."
"Swept away, my ass," the General said. "It took me a good five years to seduce you. Or to convince you to seduce me, whichever it was that finally happened."
"I remember it as me being swept away," Aurora said. "If you didn't sleep with your wife for more than twenty years, then it's no wonder. I hope we can discuss this matter with Dr. Bruckner at our first session, if that's what you call them. I find it intensely interesting, particularly in light of what I've just been remembering about my mother. I want to hear more about it."
"We just stopped sleeping together, there isn't any more to hear," the General said.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="16">
Twice a week in every week of summer except the last in July and the first in August, their mother shut the front door, the white, eight-panel door that served as backdrop for every Easter, First Holy Communion, Confirmation, and graduation photo in the family album, and with the flimsy screen leaning against her shoulder turned the key in the black lock, gripped the curve of the elaborate wrought-iron handle that had been sculpted to resemble a black vine curled into a question mark, and in what seemed a brief but accurate imitation of a desperate housebreaker, wrung the door on its hinges until, well satisfied, she turned, slipped away from the screen as if she were throwing a cloak from her shoulders, and said, "Let's go."
Down the steps the three children went before her (the screen door behind them easing itself closed with what sounded like three short, sorrowful expirations of breath), the two girls in summer dresses and white sandals, the boy in long khaki pants and a thin white shirt, button-down collar and short sleeves. She herself wore a cotton shirtwaist and short white gloves and heels that clicked against the concrete of the driveway and the sidewalk and sent word across the damp morning lawns that the Daileys (Lucy and the three children) were once again on their way to the city.
The neighborhood at this hour was still and fresh and full of birdsong and the children marked the ten shady blocks to the bus with three landmarks. The first was the ragged hedge of the Lynches' corner lot where lived, in a dirty house made ramshackle by four separate, slapdash additions, ten children, three grandparents, a mother, a father, and a bachelor uncle who was responsible, no doubt, for the shattered brown bottle that lay on the edge of the driveway. The second was a slate path that intersected a neat green lawn, each piece of slate the exact smooth color, either lavendel or gray or pale yellow, of a Necco candy wafer. Third was the steel eight-foot fence at the edge of the paved playground of the school they had all attended until June and would attend again in September, although it appeared to them as they passed it now as something forlorn and defeated, something that the wind might take away - something that could rumble with footsteps and shriek with bells and hold them in its belly for six hours each day only in the wildest, the most terrible, the most unimaginable (and, indeed, not one of the three even imagined it as they passed) of dreams.
At the bus stop, the tall white sign with its odd, flat, perforated pole drew them like magnets. They touched it, towing the pebbles at its base. They jumped up to slap its face. They held it in one hand and leaned out into the road looking for the first glint of sun against the white crown and wide black windshield of the bus that would take them to the avenue.
Their mother smoked a cigarette on the sidewalk behind them, as she did on each of these mornings, her pocketbook hung in the crook of her arm, the white gloves she would pull on as soon as the bus appeared squeezed together in her free hand. The sun at nine-fifteen had already begun to push its heat through the soles of her stockings and beneath the fabric-covered cardboard of her belt. She touched the silver metal of its buckle, breathed in to gain a moment's space between fabric and flesh. Across the street a deli and a bar and a podiatrist's office shared a squat brick building that was shaded by trees. Beyond it a steeple rose - the gray steeple of the Presbyterian church - into a sky that was blue and cloudless. Swinging from the bus-stop sign, the children failed to imagine for their mother, just as they had failed to imagine for the building where they went to school, any other life but the still and predictable one she presented on those mornings, although even as she dropped her cigarette to her side and stepped on the butt with her first step toward them (it was a woman's subtle, sneaky way of finishing a smoke) she was aware of the stunned hopelessness with which she moved. Of time draining itself from the scene in a slow leak.
Briefly terrified, the younger girl took her mother's hand as the bus wheezed toward the curb.
Even the swift, gritty breeze that rushed through the slices of open window seemed at this hour to be losing the freshness of morning - some cool air clung to it, but in patches and tatters, as if the coming heat of the afternoon had already begun to wear through.
The children squinted their eyes against it and shook back their hair. Watching the houses go by, they were grateful that theirs was not one of them to be left, after each stop, in the expelled gray exhaust, and as the bus moved past the cemetery they felt - all unconsciously - the eternal disappointment of the people whose markers lay so near the road. Who saw (because they imagined the dead to be at eye level with the ground, the grass pulled like a blanket up to their noses) the walking living through the black stakes of the iron fence and the filtered refuse of what seemed many summers - ice-cream wrappers, soda cans, cigarette butts, and yellowed athletic socks - that had gathered at its base.
Where the cemetery ended, the stonecutter's yard began, a jumble of unmarked and broken tombstones that parodied the order of the real graves and seemed in its chaos to indicate a backlog of orders, a hectic rate of demand. (Their father's joke, no matter how many times they drove this way: "People are dying to get in there.") Then, at the entrance to the yard, a showroom - it looked for all the world like a car showroom - that displayed behind its tall plate glass huge marble monuments and elaborate crypts and the slithering reflected body of their bus, their own white faces at three windows.
They passed another church, a synagogue, and then a last ramshackle yard where chickens pecked at the dirt in speckled sunlight and what the children understood to be a contraption in which wine was made (although they couldn't say how they knew this) hulked among the vines and the shadows, through which they also glimpsed, passing by, a toothless Italian man named (and they could not say how they knew this, either) Mr. Hootchie-Koo, as he shuffled through the dirt in baggy pants and bedroom slippers.
Now the large suburban trees fell away. There was another church and then on both sides of the road a wide expanse of shadeless parking lot, the backs of stores, traffic. Their mother raised her hand to pull the cord that rang the buzzer and then waited in the aisle for them to go before her toward the front, hand over hand like experienced seamen between the silver edges of the seats. Their first sight as they touched the ground was always the identical Chinese couple in the narrow laundromat, looking up through the glass door from their eternal pile of white and pale blue laundry.
As they stood on the corner the bus they had just deserted, suddenly grown taller and louder and far more dangerous, passed before their noses, spilling its heat on their thin shoes.
When the light changed they crossed. Here the sidewalk was wider, twice as wide as it was where they lived, and they began to catch a whiff, a sense, of their destination, the way some sailors, hundreds of miles out, are said to catch the first scent of land. There was a bar - a saloon was how the children thought of it - with a stuccoed front and a single mysterious brown window, a rounded doorway like the entrance to a cave that breathed a sharp and darkly shining breath upon them, a destillation of night and starlight and Scotch. Two black men passed by. In a dark and narrow candy store that smelled exotically of newsprint and bubble gum they were each allowed to choose one comic book from the wooden rack and their mother gathered these in her gloved hand, placed them, a copy of the Daily News, and a pack of butterscotch Life Savers on the narrow shelf beside the register, and paid with a single bill.
Outside, she redistributed the comics and placed a piece of candy on each tongue, fortifying the children, or so it seemed, for the next half of their journey. She herded them into the shaded entry of a clothing store, another cave formed by two deep windows that paralleled each other and contained, it seemed, a single example of every item sold by the store, most of which was worn by pale mannequins with painted hair and chipped fingers or mere pieces of mannequins: head, torso, foot. The store was closed at this hour and the aisles were lined with piles of thin gray cardboard boxes that sank into one another and overflowed with navy-blue socks or white underpants as if these items had somehow multiplied themselves throughout the night.
When the bus appeared it was as if from the next storefront and they ran across the wide sidewalk to meet it, their mother pausing behind them to step on another cigarette. She offered the driver the four slim transfers while the children picked their way down the aisles. There was not the luxury of empty seats there had been on the first bus and so they squeezed together three to a narrow seat, their mother standing in the aisle beside them, her dress, her substantial thigh and belly underneath blue-and-white cotton, blocking them shielding them, all unaware, from the drunks and the gamblers and the various tardy (and so clearly dissipated) businessmen who rode this bus though never the first because this was the one that both passed the racetrack and crossed the city line.
All unaware, noses in their comics, her three children leaned together in what might have been her shadow, had the light been right, but was in reality merely the length that the warmth of her body and the odor of her talc extended.
At the subway, the very breath of their destination rose to meet them in the constant underground breeze that began to whip the girls' dresses as soon as they descended the first of the long set of dirty stairs. ('No spitting' a sign above their heads read, proving to them that they were entering an exotic and dangerous realm where people might, at any given moment, begin spitting.) The long corridors echoed with their mother's footsteps and roared distantly with the comings and goings of the trains. There were ads along the walls, not as large or as high as billboards but somehow just as compelling, and if it had not been for their mother's sudden haste, for she had begun rushing as soon as they left the bus, they would have lingered to read them more carefully, to study their bold messages and larger-than-life faces and garish cartoons, to absorb more fully what appeared to them to be a vivid, still-life bazaar.
And then bars, prison bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically, a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron bars. Their mother passed another bill through the tiny half-moon aperture in what otherwise seemed a solid box lit green from within and received, in reply to her shouted "Four, please," a sliding handful of tokens and coins.
They were each given their own, given only the time it took to cross the dim expanse from token booth to turnstile to feel between their fingers the three opened spaces in the center of the embossed coin (a tactile memory that would return to them years later when they drew their first peace symbols) before they slipped it into the eternity of the machine and pressed with hands or waist or heart the single wooden paddle that clicked, gave way, and admitted them.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="17">
10
"YOU HAVE an Academy ring," the woman at the stall opposite said to Browne. She was dark and slim, wearing sneakers and jeans. Her booth advertised a patented star-finder for the northern hemisphere.
Browne turned the class ring on his finger.
"Yes. Class of sixty-eight."
It was opening day at the Maritime Exposition at the 42nd Regiment Armory in New York. The crowds were sparse. All day he had been sitting beside a screen on which he himself appeared, extolling the virtues of Altan boats. He was heartily tired of hearing himself.
"My ex-husband graduated from the Academy. His name is Charlie Bloodworth. Ever run into him?"
"Never," Browne said.
"He's at Green Cove Springs now. That's where they make the old ships into razor blades."
"So I've heard," Browne said.
"We lived in Atsugi," she said. "Guam, too."
Looming above them were the hulls of two Altan stock boats. One was the Highlander Forty-five, which from his own experience Browne knew was badly made. The second was the Altan Forty, which he regarded highly. Before sailing south, Browne had actually made a tape on which he praised the Highlander Forty-five. He did not play it. Instead he played his pitch for the Altan Forty. stand-up sign beside the Forty proclaimed it to be the stock version of the boat Matty Hylan would sail around the world. There was a picture of Hylan on the stand-up.
"I like your tape," the slim dark woman said. She was deeply suntanned. "I'm really hung over."
In the stuffy, humming air of the armor, he could not be sure he had heard her correctly.
"Too bad," he said politely.
"Know any cures?"
"No," he said. "I don't drink much."
The woman laughed.
"How about watching my booth?" she asked.
Browne agreed and she walked away, still laughing.
As the afternoon wore on, the crowds became even smaller. The woman did not return to her star-finder booth. Browne had brought along a volume of naval history. That afternoon, he read about Trafalgar, Nelson and Collingwood advancing in separate columns toward the Franco-Spanish fleet, breaking the line.
At some point, he decided to get up and take an aspirin. Well over an hour had passed since the woman at the stall opposite had disappeared. Browne set out in pursuit of a drinking fountain.
Searching for water, he passed through the wing in which the powerboats were displayed. It was much more crowded than the sailing section. There were overweight matrons in yachting caps and couples with matching tattoos. There were cabin cruisers and sleek cigarette boats with gleaming fins. Model interiors blazed with chrome and tiger-striped upholstery. Browne walked through it all feeling light-headed. When he came to the beige curtain that divided the displays from the storage and receiving section, he slipped past it into the gloom.
The storage area was a wilderness of crates and cardboard boxes piled to the forty-foot ceiling. Beyond the crates, on a buffed concrete floor, stood two armored personnel carriers of the New York National Guard. Near them was a drinking fountain.
On his way to the fountain, Browne heard something like a sensual moan from the area behind the crates. Looking more closely, he saw the balding head of a middle-aged man above one rank of boxes. Extending from the boxes along the floor was a woman's foot with a tanned ankle and sneaker. Between one thing and another, Browne formed the impression that a sexual act was taking place. Drinking from the fountain, downing his aspirin, he felt angry and revolted. He avoided the area on his way back.
The woman from the star-finder booth returned fifteen minutes after Browne got back to his own booth. She seemed pleased with herself and he thought somehow it must have been she he had seen sporting among the stacked boxes. The exposition could be a wild scene, the top of the year for certain people. Browne had heard stories about the casual sex but he had never seen any evidence of it before.
A little before six o'clock, Pat Fay, the designer whom Browne had pressed into service at the Staten Island yard, came up and looked at the stand-up ad for the Altan Forty that had Matty Hylan's picture on it.
"You might as well take it down," Fay said.
"Why?" Browne asked. He could see that the designer had been drinking.
Fay handed him a copy of the New York Post, open to page three. The headline over a three-column story inquired, "Where's Matty?"
There was a metal chair handy at a table piled with Altan brochures, so he sat down to read the story. Its substance was that in the face of bankruptcy and mounting scandal, Matty Hylan, bon vivant and captain of commerce, had vanished.
"They might have that race," Fay said. "Matty won't be in it."
"What I'm wondering," Browne said, "is what does this mean to us?"
Fay shrugged and walked away.
Browne stayed seated at the table for a while, trying to ponder the results of Hylan's disappearance. All at once the idea came to him of volunteering to enter the race on his own. If he could not sail the boat Hylan was having made in Finland, he might sail the stock model on the floor in front of him. He was sure it was a good boat. He felt a surge of confidence in his own abilities as a sailor. Immediately he began composing, with a pencil on a sheet of lined yellow paper, a letter to Harry Thorne.
He had finished the letter and pocketed it when he saw the woman who sold star-finders still lounging before her stall. She sat on the ledge of industrial carpeting at the corner of the booth with one leg folded under her. Browne thought she was watching him suggestively.
"Matty's gone," she said. "How about that guy?"
"Off for more congenial climes," Browne said.
"I guess he won't be sailing."
"Too bad," said Browne. He began to gather up his papers. There were very few show-goers about. "It was a good boat."
"If I was Matty," the woman said, "I would have disappeared during the race. I'd vanish at sea."
"Guess he couldn't wait," Browne said.
The dark woman looked at him with a kind of affectionate insolence. He thought she must be on something.
"Or I'd give them something to bellyache about. I'd not sail around the world but say I did. Hole up in Saint Barts and let the other guys sail and cross the finish line first."
"I don't think that's possible anymore," Browne said.
"Matty could do it," the woman said.
Browne told her good evening and went home.
11
NO WORD awaited Strickland in Helsinki. Hylan was not booked into any of the major hotels. Since it was the weekend, he called Joyce Manning at home to leave a message on her machine. No reply was forthcoming. On Sunday, he arranged a meet with a local cinematographer and a sound man. They met a few blocks from Strickland's hotel, in a place called O'Malley's. As an earnest of their seriousness, everyone ordered soda water.
The Finns were called Holger and Pentii. They had recently worked on location in Florida for a Finnish-language TV thriller; they read Variety and were conversant with the picture business. Strickland explained his needs to them; he was charming and hesitant and they were patient with his stammer. Once satisfied with his assistants' bona fides, he became more composed. Everyone relaxed and called out to the Irish girl behind the bar for Harp lager. Her name was Maeve and Holger said she worked for the Marxist-Leninist wing of the IRA.
They spent the rest of the evening talking movies. Pentii was a Russ Meyer fan and his favorite among the master's oeuvre was Faster Pussycat. For Holger, who seemed the more thoughtful of the two, it would always be Heaven's Gate. When they broke up, Strickland told them to meet him in Sariola the next evening. He would drive himself there in the morning for some preliminary conversations with the boatyard management.
After breakfast the following day, Strickland telephoned the yard in Sariola. The man with whom he spoke was very polite but cautious to the point of evasion. It was all very odd. Around mid-morning, he piled his gear into a rented Saab and took off down the autobajn for Sariola.
The town lay deep in scented oak forests along the Gulf of Finland. It was an old place, with a Swedish cathedral, cobbled squares and rambling wooden houses that suggested Chekhovian Russia. The air was clean and dry and the skies overhead as blue as June in California. The dark woods around the town were losing their winter silence but a surprising cold lurked in the groves and shadows.
At his new pastel plastic hotel, Strickland changed into clothes which he hoped seafaring types might find congenial: Topsiders, khaki slacks and a bulky naval sweater. Then he shouldered his camera case and set off on foot for the boatyard. Before he had gone a mile, he was light-headed with the sun and the smell of warm evergreen, his eyes dazzled, his nose and forehead reddening.
At the sign of Lipitsa Ltd., he followed a dirt road off the highway. Bird calls of a mystical complexity seemed to announce his passage. He walked out into the seaside meadow in which the Lipitsa yard stood to find three men waiting for him. Behind them a freshly laminated boat with a sexy curved transom and a shark-fin keel lay up on blocks. Beside it stood a graying, flaxen-haired man with the build of an oak stump and eyes the color of wild grapes.
"I'm Strickland," Strickland told him. "I've come to film."
"Lipitsa," the man said softly. He seemed to hesitate for a moment before extending his hand.
"Is that the boat?" Strickland asked. They looked at the shiny creature in its perch.
Lipitsa nodded.
"I've been trying to find Mr. Hylan," Strickland explained. "He doesn't seem to be available."
The old man's eyes twinkled over his high cheekbones, alight with boreal suspicion.
"I was hoping to ask you about that, sir. Can you come inside?"
Lipitsa's offices were on the second floor of a converted farmhouse, a solemn exercise in wood whose silent varnished spaces held a churchly resonance. There was an oak desk, some ancient photographs that appeared to represent the age of sail, and a long line of model boats in token of the ones he had designed. Strickland took a chair and faced the old man across the stern surface of his desk.
"Tell me what you want to do," Lipitsa said.
Strickland explained that a documentary film had been commissioned by the Hylan Corporation and that he was there to shoot it.
"Do I understand you to mean," old Lipitsa asked him, "that you have been paid?"
"I've been paid a retainer. And I've been given expenses."
"And you have no idea where our Mr. Hylan has gone?"
"Absolutely none," Strickland said. "I didn't know he was missing."
"You saw him when, please?"
Strickland began but had to start over.
"I ... I've never seen him. Now that you mention it."
"Ho," old Lipitsa said gravely. They looked at each other in silence for a moment. "I'm ahead of you," said the Finn. "I saw him in London two months ago. But you have been paid and I have not. So there you are ahead of me."
"What," Strickland asked him, "do you think is going on?"
"Don't think me impolite," Lipitsa said. "But I'm very curious and you are coming from over there. What do you think?"
"Quite honestly," Strickland said, "I have no idea what to think."
Old Lipitsa passed him a copy of the Financial Times. There was a story on the front page which reported growing concern as to the whereabouts of the youthful tycoon in question. The story contained, as rumor, a report that a number of grand juries in the United States had also expressed interest.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="18">
Francesca heard the out-of-tune pickup go by. She lay there in bed, having slept naked for the first time as far back as she could remember. She could imagine Kincaid, hair blowing in the wind curling through the truck window, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a Camel.
She listened as the sound of his wheels faded toward Roseman Bridge. And she began to roll words over in her mind from the Yeats poem: "I went out to the hazel wood, because a fire was in my head ..." Her rendering of it fell somewhere between that of teacher and supplicant.
He parked the truck well back from the bridge so it wouldn't interfere with his compositions. From the small space behind the seat, he took a knee-high pair of rubber boots, sitting on the running board to unlace his leather ones and pull on the others. One knapsack with straps over both shoulders, tripod slung over his left shoulder by its leather strap, the other knapsack in his right hand, he worked his way down the steep bank toward the stream.
The trick would be to put the bridge at an angle for some compositional tension, get a little of the stream at the same time, and miss the graffiti on the walls near the entrance. The telephone wires in the background were a problem, too, but that could be handled through careful framing.
He took out the Nikon loaded with Koda-chrome and screwed it onto the heavy tripod. The camera had the 24-millimeter lens on it, and he replaced that with his favorite 105-millimeter. Gray light in the east now, and he began to experiment with his composition. Move tripod two feet left, readjust legs sticking in muddy ground by the stream. He kept the camera strap wound over his left wrist, a practice he always followed when working around water. He'd seen too many cameras go into the water when tripods tipped over.
Red color coming up, sky brightening. Lower camera six inches, adjust tripod legs. Still not there. A foot more to the left. Adjust legs again. Level camera on tripod head. Set lens to f/8. Estimate depth of field, maximize it via hyperfocal technique. Screw in cable release on shutter button. Sun 40 percent above the horizon, old paint on the bridge turning a warm red, just what he wanted.
Light meter out of left breast pocket. Check it at f/8. One-second exposure, but the Kodachrome would hold well for that extreme. Look through the viewfinder. Fine-tune leveling of camera. He pushed the plunger of the shutter release and waited for a second to pass.
Just as he fired the shutter, something caught his eye. He looked through the viewfinder again. "What the hell is hanging by the entrance to the bridge?" he muttered. "A piece of paper. Wasn't there yesterday."
Tripod steady. Run up the bank with sun coming fast behind him. Paper neatly tacked to bridge. Pull it off, put tack and paper in vest pocket. Back toward the bank, down it, behind the camera. Sun 60 percent up.
Breathing hard from the sprint. Shoot again. Repeat twice for duplicates. No wind, grass still. Shoot three at two seconds and three at one-half second for insurance.
Click lens to f/16 setting. Repeat entire process. Carry tripod and camera to the middle of the stream. Get set up, silt from footsteps moving away behind. Shoot entire sequence again. New roll of Kodachrome. Switch lenses. Lock on the 24-millimeter, jam the 105 into a pocket. Move closer to the bridge, wading upstream. Adjust, level, light check, fire three, and bracket shots for insurance.
Flip the camera to vertical, recompose. Shoot again. Same sequence, methodical. There never was anything clumsy about his movements. All were practiced, all had a reason, the contingencies were covered, efficiently and professionally.
Up the bank, through the bridge, running with the equipment, racing the sun. Now the tough one. Grab second camera with faster film, sling both cameras around neck, climb tree behind bridge. Scrape arm on bark- "Dammit!" - keep climbing. High up now, looking down on the bridge at an angle with the stream catching sunlight.
Use spot meter to isolate bridge roof, then shady side of bridge. Take reading off water. Set camera for compromise. Shoot nine shots, bracketing, camera resting on vest wedged into tree crotch. Switch cameras. Faster film. Shoot a dozen more shots.
Down the tree. Down the bank. Set up tripod, reload Kodachrome, shoot composition similar to the first series only from the opposite side of the stream. Pull third camera out of bag. The old SP, rangefinder camera. Black-and-white work now. Light on bridge changing second by second.
After twenty intense minutes of the kind understood only by soldiers, surgeons, and photographers, Robert Kincaid swung his knapsacks into the truck and headed back down the road he had come along before. It was fifteen minutes to Hogback Bridge northwest of town, and he might just get some shots there if he hurried.
Dust flying, Camel lit, truck bouncing, past the white frame house facing north, past Richard Johnson's mailbox. No sign of her. What did you expect? She's married, doing okay. You're doing okay. Who needs those kinds of complications? Nice evening, nice supper, nice woman. Leave it at that. God, she's lovely, though, and there's something about her. Something. I have trouble taking my eyes away from her.
Francesca was in the barn doing chores when he barreled past her place. Noise from the live-stock cloaked any sound from the road. And Robert Kincaid headed for Hogback Bridge, racing the years, chasing the light.
Things went well at the second bridge. It sat in a valley and still had mist rising around it when he arrived. The 300-millimeter lens gave him a big sun in the upper-left part of his frame, with the rest taking in the winding white rock road toward the bridge and the bridge itself.
Then into his viewfinder came a farmer driving a team of light brown Belgians pulling a wagon along the white road. One of the last of the old-style boys. Kincaid thought, grinning. He knew when the good ones came by and could already see what the final print would look like as he worked. On the vertical shots he left some light sky where a title could go.
When he folded up his tripod at eight thirty-five, he felt good. The morning's work had some keepers. Bucolic, conservative stuff, but nice and solid. The one with the farmer and horses might even be a cover shot; that's why he had left the space at the top of the frame, room for type, for a logo. Editors liked that kind of thoughtful craftsmanship. That's why Robert Kincaid got assignments.
He had shot all or part of seven rolls of film, emptied the three cameras, and reached into the lower-left pocket of his vest to get the other four. "Damn!" The thumbtack pricked his index finger. He had forgotten about dropping it in the pocket when he'd removed the piece of paper from Roseman Bridge. In fact, he had forgotten about the piece of paper. He fished it out, opened it, and read: "If you'd like supper again when 'white moths are on the wing,' come by tonight after you're finished. Anytime is fine."
He couldn't help smiling a little, imagining Francesca Johnson with her note and thumbtack driving through the darkness to the bridge. In five minutes he was back in town. While the Texaco man filled the tank and checked the oil ("Down half a quart"), Kincaid used the pay telephone at the station. The thin phone book was grimy from being thumbed by filling station hands. There were two listings under 'R. Johnson,' but one had a town address.
He dialed the rural number and waited. Francesca was feeding the dog on the back porch when the phone rang in the kitchen. She caught it at the front of the second ring: "Johnson's."
"Hi, this is Robert Kincaid."
Her insides jumped again, just as they had yesterday. A little stab of something that started in her chest and plunged to her stomach.
"Got your note. W. B. Yeats as a messenger and all that. I accept the invitation, but it might be late. The weather's pretty good, so I'm planning on shooting the - let's see, what's it called?- the Cedar Bridge ... this evening. It could be after nine before I'm finished. Then I'll want to clean up a bit. So I might not be there until nine-thirty or ten. Is that all right?"
No, it wasn't all right. She didn't want to wait that long, but she only said. "Oh, sure. Get your work done; that's what's important. I'll fix something that'll be easy to warm up when you get here."
Then he added, "If you want to come along while I'm shooting, that's fine. It won't bother me. I could stop by for you about five-thirty."
Francesca's mind worked the problem. She wanted to go with him. But what if someone saw her? What could she say to Richard if he found out?
Cedar Bridge sat fifty yards upstream from and parallel to the new road and its concrete bridge. She wouldn't be too noticeable. Or would she? In less than two seconds, she decided. "Yes, I'd like that. But I'll drive my pickup and meet you there. What time?"
"About six. I'll see you then. Okay? 'Bye."
He spent the rest of the day at the local newspaper office looking through old editions. It was a pretty town, with a nice courthouse square, and he sat there on a bench in the shade at lunch with a small sack of fruit and some bread, along with a Coke from a cafe across the street.
When he had walked in the cafe and asked for a Coke to take out, it was a little after noon. Like an old Wild West saloon when the regional gun-fighter appeared, the busy conversation had stopped for a moment while they all looked him over. He hated that, felt self-conscious; but it was the standard procedure in small towns. Someone new! Someone different! Who is he? What's he doing here?
"Somebody said he's a photographer. Said they saw him out by Hogback Bridge this morning with all sorts of cameras."
"Sign on his truck says he's from Washington, out west."
"Been over to the newspaper office all morning. Jim says he's looking through the papers for information on the covered bridges."
"Yeah, young Fischer at the Texaco said he stopped in yesterday and asked directions to all the covered bridges."
"What's he wanna know about them for, anyway?"
"And why in the world would anybody wanna take pictures of 'em? They're just all fallin' down in bad shape."
"Sure does have long hair. Looks like one of them Beatle fellows, or what is it they been callin' some of them other people? Hippies, ain't that it?" That brought laughter in the back booth and to the table next to it.
Kincaid got his Coke and left, the eyes still on him as he went out the door. Maybe he'd made a mistake in inviting Francesca, for her sake, not his. If someone saw her at Cedar Bridge, word would hit the cafe next morning at breakfast, relayed by young Fischer at the Texaco station after taking a handoff from the passerby. Probably quicker than that.
He'd learned never to underestimate the tele-communicative flash of trivial news in small towns. Two million children could be dying of hunger in the Sudan, and that wouldn't cause a bump in consciousness,. But Richard Johnson's wife seen with a long-haired stranger - now that was news! News to be passed around, news to be chewed on, news that created a vague carnal lapping in the minds of those who heard it, the only such ripple they'd feel that year.
He finished his lunch and walked over to the public phone on the parking of the courthouse.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="19">
Carmody had lashed a walk from the flying bridge to the scow's rail instead of using the fishing boat's regular walkway lower down. A plank was all it was, not quite a foot wide, no ropes or railings. Billy raised his head from the stretcher enough to get a look. He groaned and cursed. Greer, carrying the lead end, agreed. "Maybe we better think about this ..."
"Psht now, Emil," Carmody called. "Haul your old load right on across. Nothin' to it, nothin' at all."
A loud laugh snorted from the blonde at his side. "How would you know? You haven't hauled your old load acrost it, I noticed." It was a laugh that should have been derisive, but there was no derision in it. It was as sunny and good-natured as her face. Ike judged her to be about fifty, perhaps older - not anywhere near as old as Carmody's seventy-so, but a good decade or two the senior of Alice. Yet there was something about her that was still quite childlike. She had a lopsided tomboy grin that she held wide open in spite of chapped lips and missing teeth, and there was a bratty twinkle in her blue eyes. A twinkle at lot like Carmody's. Their complexions were nearly identical - a wind-buffed and sun-polished pink. They had the same corn-colored eyebrows, the same pug nose. When Ike saw them side by side, grinning at the spectacle of Billy the Squid being carried precariously across the narrow plank, he wondered if they might not be close kin, perhaps even big brother and little sister. That would explain the hip-to-hip familiarity.
"Welcome aboard, laddybucks," Carmody said as they stepped down from the plank. "Stow your kips and secure your wounded. And step lively about if; I'm yearnin' to haul anchor and catch this tide and I really mean yearnin'."
The blonde winked. "What the old donkey really means," she confided, "is we got to hightail out of here before the owner of that powerboat by the pumps yonder comes down and sees the hole we bashed in his bulkhead while we was gassing up. And we have two posses on our tail."
Carmody looked hurt. "He should not've parked the flouncy piece o' fluff so close to the pumps, the stupid gob."
"Close? I wouldn't call that so close. a container barge big as a goddamn football field steamed in between that sailboat and those pumps this morning, didn't ding a thing."
"I was seriously undermanned," Carmody protested.
"You was foolishly overconfident is what you was. Good morning, boys. I'm Willimina Hardesty-" She held out a big pink hand, rough as a reef. "I'm known as Wild Willimina from Waco, but you boys may call me Willi. I'm hired on as chief software officer for this ritzy high-tech tub."
"Haw!" It was Carmody's turn to snort. "Software officer. What do you think, Ike? Would I hire a software officer? Especially a software office names Hard-assy, gnheh-heh-heh ..."
Ike shook the hand and introduced her to his three friends. Archie flushed. Greer kissed her knuckles and said something in French. Billy just grunted into the metal case he had padded with towels for a pillow. Archie started to explain about Mr. Bellisarius' supine condition, but the woman said, oh, they knew all about it - that the gang's daring and spectacular escape on the runaway railcar had been the talk in all the bars hours before Isaak phoned.
"Right!" Carmody added. "All about it. Now put him down and cast us off, we'll swap yarns later." He frowned at the two big net bags Archie was carrying. "What in the hell's all this?"
"One's wine," Archie shrugged.
"I can see that," Carmody said. "A reasonable cargo. but what about the other bag?"
"Books," Archie answered.
"I can bloody see they're books, Culligan. what did you do, enroll in one of those self-improvement courses?"
"They're the Squid's books, Mr Carmody. You know I don't read. Mr Bellisarius made us check them out of the Juneau Community College Library. They're scientific books."
"That's what took you so damn long? Lord love a duck. Well, stash the whole shitteree somewhere out from underfoot if you please ... because, lads and lady, we are about to foam straightaway home. Nels! Flip us free forward - I'm firing this ritzy bitch up!"
They foamed all right, but not straightaway home. To Isaak's surprise, as soon as they were out of sight of Juneau Carmody wheeled the metal prow left, south, back down the Inland Passage exactly the way he'd just come. "Evasive action, to confuse the pursuers," he called from the flying bridge by way of explanation. Then he instructed the woman to key them in a course around Admiralty Island and north up Chatham Strait, which would loop them back to almost the exact spot where they began their so-called evasive action. When Ike mentioned this the old man confided that what he really wanted to do was scope the other side of Admiralty for bears on the beach, maybe pick one off with his new tranque rifle. A half hour later Ike overheard him tell Greer what he really wanted to do was "give this Texas Tootsie a look at An-goon. Three years she's been up here and says she ain't yet seen an authentic Indian village." And a day later, creeping up the strait on auto at no-wake speed, everybody heard him tell the Texas Tootsie herself that what he had in mind was long-lining for some of the legendary sea sturgeon that were supposed to prole the mud off Hoonah. That's when Ike finally figured it out - that what the old dunk actually wanted to do was take just as long as he could getting home.
This was all right with Ike. He had never been in too much of a hurry to deal with Alice in any event, and he had bad feelings about her prodigal son's ambitious return. This was pleasant, cruising leisurely along the calm channel in a deck chair like a tourist on a ten-day special, sipping wine and playing spit in the ocean and scoping the shorelines. Sometimes they put away the cards and trolled off the fantail with spinning rigs and flashers ... they were cruising that slow. Carmody kept the choice catches to eat - the occasional native coho, the rare sockeye with his neon meat - and tossed the hatchies back. Or sold them over the side to the little pirate processors that winked codes from every cove and cranny.
They cruised and played poker and yarned, and Carmody sang. In the evenings, amid the dirty dishes in the galley, he crooned old love songs, like a young swain serenading his lady. Tin Pan Alley tunes, and sixties stuff, even New Age ballads. But as the nights darkened and the bottles emptied, he always got back to the Old World Traditional, and, at last, to his theme song: 'O, the prickle-eye bush ...' It was so ever-present it began to seem to Ike that it had been in his head from the moment he was startled from his peaceful slumber by the cat in Kuinak.
Naturally, at first, Ike had tried to get back into that slumberous peace. It should have been easy enough; the crew was certainly in a slumberous mode. Especially Greer. The chemical uplift Greer had been hoping to find in Billy the Squid's briefcase would not be complete until they rendezvoused with the other half of the stimulant's formula in Kuinak. So Isaak's customarily jacked-up partner spent most of his time below decks in a narrow bunk, zeed out. Archie Culligan was no scoot-head, but he was exhausted by his sojourn in Beulahland; he could usually be found slumped against the water heater in the galley, snoring away. The industrious young Nels Culligan tried to remain at least upright, propped against the rail of the flying bridge, stifling yawns while he awaited orders from the captain. But the captain was no ball of fire himself. Never, in the decade they had worked together, had Ike seen the old fisherman so kicked back and languid.
The cushy new boat was part of it; the software in the Loranav pilot was especially programmed for these coasts, user-easy and voice-activated and in constant contact with sea and sky satellites. A ten-year-old with a coastal chart and a mouse could have commanded the course - "Juneau to Kuinak at fifteen knots" - then gone back to watching his Slitman goggles. It was a superb vessel, built when they were still building boats for high-end diversifishing. It had probably been priced originally at a mil-and-a-half or more, back before the Trident leak. Carmody had picked it up for a fraction of that.
But it was more than the new cruising vessel. The old Cornishman had also picked himself up the perfect cruising companion. Wild Willi from Waco might not have been as cushy and modern as the new boat, but she was just as user-easy. It wasn't hard to understand why Carmody had been dawdling along. This was a long-deserved vacation for the old dunker, with a new playmate. Everybody on board enjoyed her company, except for Billy Bellisarius, who was still brooding too deeply about his recent run-in with Greener to have enjoyed anybody. In the days since Juneau they had found Willi to be a good worker and capable sailor, plus she offered them a whole new library wing of dirty stories and ribald sayings - a southern wing. The trip had been a lot of fun, a lot of drinking and laughing and gambling and eating.
Especially eating. It looked to Ike like Carmody had picked out his ritzy new boat as much on the basis of its galley as on its computer-sensor channel-charting fish-finding features. Maybe more. The old fisherman spent a lot more time around the kitchen dials than the computer dials.
"Fish are best eaten absolutely fresh," Carmody maintained. "I love fresh fish, by God, right in the galley. All these years busting my butt hauling the bastards in? Don't seem like I remember getting to eat one really truly fresh fish supper. I truly feel I have been deprived, by God I do!"
The size of the man's stomach bespoke otherwise; he had an absolutely enormous midsection, round and pink and wrinkle-free as his shaved ball of a head, and as hard. Carmody's girth was the result of a lifetime of hard labor and good appetite, laced liberally with drink and dance whenever possible. The belly he had produced was the accomplishment of nearly three-quarters of a century's dedicated effort; he was famous for it and proud of it. He used it like a sumo wrestler uses his kee, or center. It was his workbench, his fulcrum on the booms, his block and tackle on the ropes. Now, as they hummed along, he had it bellied up against the round cedar table that occupied the center of the galley, leaning on it while he chopped a ten-pound halibut into steaks.
"A fish don't really object to being caught and consumed," Carmdoy was explaining, "long as it happens fresh."
The fish was truly fresh, the glimmer of life had not yet completely left the animal's freakish eyes, and the body was still quivering there on the table, though big slabs of him were already hissing in butter and chopped parsley in the wavepan.
"Fish understand the fishy facks of life. They get et. It's their destiny from the get-go, from the least to the largest, to get et. What a fish objects to is being wasted. 'If you need me, catch me; if you don't, let me be.' Back in the days we really needed whale oil you never heard any whales complaining, did ye? They knew they was greasing the wheels of progress. They didn't commence complaining about it until they found out their oil had become obsolete, progress-wise, and all we wanted them for was food for cats. That's when they organized Greenpeace.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="20">
Rebecca's Theory
I trust water. I know my limitations in water. And I don't press beyond them. My name is Clarissa; I'm twenty-five. Lately, I swim a lot. Swimming toughens the vital organs: lungs and heart. A swallow of air measures every stroke. When I'm underwater, I can't see or hear clearly and can't smell anything. I'm humble. I'm forgiving with others and myself. Maybe I'd have been better off living somewhere like Cuzco, in Peru, when it was the capital of the Inca. Water streamed down from the Andes and flowed in ditches throughout the city. When hot, I'd have knelt under a fountain. A vicu<*_>n-tilde<*/>a would have sipped at a trough near my feet. More often, I think of another place, Atlantis. That is my favorite myth. The island was rich and no doubt lush. But I imagine its splendor after an earthquake sank it.
My grandmother was afraid of the water. She never swam. Her name was Rebecca Lyon, always known to us as Nanny. She was my father's mother and the only grandparent I ever met. I know little about my mother's past. She tells me that she lost both her parents during the Second World War. She is British and her name is Julia.
My father, David, was brought up in Hidden Gorge, a small town in upstate New York. His father ran a nine-hundred-square-foot grocery store called The Lyon Den Mart. The family lived on top. In 1952, my grandfather died of a heart attack. A few months later, Nanny gave my father and his sister enough money to build a supermarket in Puerto Rico. At the time, the island had only small grocery stores, or colmados. Nadia, my father's sister, moved to Puerto Rico shortly after my father did. Today they have several stores on the island and throughout the Caribbean: in Saint John, Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, Tortola and Venezuela. They named the supermarkets Isla.
As our father puts it, my brother, my sister and I are "pampered." We've been given some money. Sometimes we justify our good fortune by feeling guilty. The guilt lets us pretend we're noble. Our father is sometimes noble. A friend of his once said, "Your dad is one of the few honest people left on earth." He appears to find a goodness in almost every man he meets. But he's not always sociable. He likes small islands where there are few people. Maybe that's his way of pretending he has only himself to answer to.
I look like my father. I'm tall and my skin is more olive than white. Like him, I have a high forehead and a dimple on my left cheek when I smile. He tells me I also have his poise. I keep my chin high; I'm never clumsy.
I grew up in a small suburb of Puerto Rico called Santa Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a. Our house had white gates, or rejas, Spanish ceramic roof tiles, white plaster walls and a cupola with a horse weather vane. I was born in 1955 and stayed an only child for four years.
Nanny kept me company. She visited me every week. She drove in from Santurce, where she lived with her housekeeper. Nanny would bounce me high on her knee. She taught me gin rummy. She'd slap down cards. She'd say, I win, over and over. The day I won, she accused me of cheating.
In September 1959, Cora was born. She doesn't look like me. She has blue eyes, like our father's. Otherwise, she looks like our mother. She has her round face and fair skin. She is small-boned.
Michael came a year after Cora. As a baby he had straight blond hair. When it turned dark brown, I remember thinking he looked a lot like my brother. He grew to be six feet. But he doesn't seem big. His legs, his neck, his fingers are all slender and almost graceful.
Nanny's attentions turned to Cora and Michael. So I started to lie. I told my sister and brother stories of what I'd done before they were born. I told them I rode an albino horse in the rain; I cantered for hours. I told them I took a helicopter to a volcano top in Sicily; the volcano had just erupted. I told them stories of what I'd just read as if they were true. I read a lot. My mother had given me reading lessons every morning since I was three. I taught Cora and Michael how to read. I wanted them to look up to me. Nanny taught them how to play cards.
When I was six, my father found me a piano teacher. He was a short man with a red mustache. He used to carry a stack of old music sheets under his arm. He made me copy the music by hand. He used to tell me, "You're the kind of student who can't become too polished. You'll lose your gut feeling for the music." We had a Pianola. When I wasn't playing, my mother pedaled it. We'd all sing to 'Caravan,' 'Stella by Starlight,' 'Making Whoopee.' But the Pianola was eight keys short. My teacher never complained. He said I practiced a lot and that was all he could ask for.
I liked the certainty of notes. They were less ambiguous than words. When I made a mistake, I knew it right away. The fewer mistakes I made, the more Nanny cooed. She began taking me on her lap again. I played with her under me. She made Cora and Michael stand next to me and listen. Nanny said I was a natural musician; I was meant to be a famous pianist. But I never thought of myself as gifted.
The year Nanny turned ninety, she came to visit for a few days. I was eight. My mother took us to the supermarket. Nanny frightened me: she began ranting about tomatoes and lettuces tumbling out of the bins. She said there were rats in the aisles poking their snouts at her toes. My mother had no desire to listen to her. So she drove her to my father's office. She told him to take her home. Then my mother picked up our housekeeper, Rosa, and drove us all to the Japanese gardens, almost an hour away.
The gardens were in a hotel off a San Juan beach. The hotel was always busy with businessmen and tourists. Cubans and Europeans gambled in the casino. They sauntered on the garden paths. Cora and I watched them as if to learn from their motions. My mother called certain women the 'gentry.' They were pearl-skinned and had black hair. Descendants, my mother said, of the conquistadores. One or two such women lived in Santa Mar<*_>i-acute<*/>a. My mother knew them but thought they were too proud.
We entered the garden from the north on a path of stones laid in the grass. The path snaked up a hill. On top of the hill there was a pond with lily pads. A wooden gazebo with a bridge had been built in the middle of the pond. The gazebo was our sanctuary. We had picnics there. Then we threw bread crumbs to the garden birds. Pelicans balanced on one leg; peacocks dragged their tails in the grass; ducks stepped in and out of the pond. The pond streamed over the south side of the hill and turned into a waterfall. Cora, Michael and I used to roll down a dry part of the hill. At the bottom there was an abandoned art gallery, rotting under a mango tree. We used to play around the gallery.
Mom said to Rosa, "What a relief to escape that Rebecca." We were sitting in the gazebo. It was almost five, and we'd been at the gardens since noon.
Rosa was from Peru. She'd been with us since I was three. She'd learned English for Mom. But Michael, Cora and I liked to talk to her in Spanish. Her clothes smelled of garlic. Her skin smelled like pine. She had a flat nose and paper-thin ears. The whites of her eyes had yellow shades in them. She was showing Michael how to whistle with a blade of grass. I was bent over the pond, catching guppies in a paper cup. Cora sat Indian-style next to me. She wore a yellow dress she'd already soiled.
"Rosa, that woman keeps him up all night sometimes," Mom said and lit a cigarette. "She was a wild one. She had her men. Plenty, too. She loves to tell me all about them."
Rosa said, "Do<*_>n-tilde<*/>a Rebecca is a good woman. She doesn't know what she says."
"She knows exactly what she's saying. She told me I should stop trying to have children. Imagine! Now she's begun this raving. Don't underestimate her power, Rosa. That was my mistake. She's a mighty one."
Mom caught me listening and blew me a kiss. She wore her hair short and behind her ears. Her hair is blond-red and her eyes are green; the left one slopes down a little. When angry, she closes both eyes halfway.
She took off her hat and fanned herself with it. Even in the shade Mom felt the heat. She left to call Dad. When she returned, she said, "I told your father we'd be late. I packed sweaters in case it gets chilly."
Cora leaned forward to watch the guppies writhing in the cup. She said, "Do we have to wait until dark? After dark, God comes out."
I giggled. I didn't believe in God. My father made me go to Hebrew school. I skipped lessons. I never liked the quiet of synagogues, the small talk after the services. Passover or Yom Kippur was a chore to me. My mother is Catholic. She has, to all appearances, converted. Yet when frightened or nervous, she crosses herself.
"I have some juice and cookies," Mom said.
"Let's leave before it's dark,"Cora said.
"Have a go at more of those tadpoles."
"Do<*_>n-tilde<*/>a Julia," Rosa said, "Michael hasn't had his nap."
And Mom said, "He'll live."
Cora and I headed for the waterfall at the bottom of the hill. We splattered our ankles in the mango pulp and mud. We looked through a cracked window of the art gallery. I said, "Look at the shadows on the pedestals. Let's go in." We'd never been inside.
Cora didn't want to. I said I'd go in myself and she changed her mind. We crawled through a window. The glass was missing. There were two rooms. The back one had a dirty desk in it. I sat behind the desk and pretended to play Mozart.
"Look at me," I heard Cora shout.
In the other room, she'd climbed onto a pedestal. She was holding her hands up. She looked like a skinny cherub. I climbed onto a larger pedestal and thought there was no way a living thing could look like art.
Mom came to the window and watched us.
When we got home, she said, "You looked so quiet. Just like statues. I couldn't disturb you."
Standing on the pedestal made me feel composed. My mother would tell me she always sees me that way. She believes people like to assess our graces. I believe we ask people to judge us. Sometimes we even insist.
Michael fell asleep during dinner. Rosa carried him to his room. His room was blue, with white floors and a white ceiling. His bed was near the window. He could look out to the top of palm trees and the sky. I liked where his room was: above Mom and Dad's and between Cora's and mine. My room faced the backyard, the pool and the forest that belonged to the church. We had a flamboyan tree. When the tree was flowering, I didn't mind my view.
Nanny ate slowly. She toyed with the lacy collar of her yellow robe. Her face was long and smooth. Her eyes seemed to have clouds in them.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="21">
I am the Grand Inquisitor. My piercing Spanish eyes are wide with righteous indignation beneath my great black hood and cowl. I have the Jew in my grasp, but he refuses to recant. He assaults me with his spurious Hebrew logic. My mind storms at the sacrilege. I must restrain myself from wringing his neck like the chicken he resembles. Instead, I survey my armory of more persuasive implements and consider, with pleasure, which to use on this very special day: the tongs, the thumb screw, the rack, the fire. I sneeze.
This dungeon, my domain, is raw with winter. I can hear the wind rushing through the cracks between the enormous gray stones. Odors of mold and putrefaction are borne along like fish in the sea. Gusts find their way under my cassock, ripple my thighs like a horse's flanks. My arthritic fingers clutch Ecclesiastes to my chest, and I think that the Jew must suffer similar pangs without similar comfort. At least I am accustomed to this spiritual netherworld, while all he knows is his warm thatched cottage, homey with the moist heat and smell of his grandmother's soup. Not soon will he feast on beans and the blood of Christian children. Not soon will he escape the benevolent clutches of the Inquisition. I hold my lantern aloft to examine his fear, but when I sneeze again I drop it and the flame gutters and dies.
Despite the intense cold, I am sweating as I make my way down the darkened corridor. Is it the supernatural illumination that guides me through the pitch labyrinth beneath the castle which is burning me up from within or merely my hatred of the Jew? A fire out of control on a glacial slope, the extremes of temperature wrack and contort me to their whim. Tapping this bone this way and that bone that, they play upon my brittle spine like a musician. We undergo the same tortures, myself and the Jew, but it is a small price to pay for eternal salvation. Each howl of agony that drifts through the walls is bringing some lucky soul closer to God. I envy them. Then I feel it, an awesome winged presence in the corridor with me. A silent, dreadful, magnificent visitation. The Holy Ghost?
From somewhere in the midnight passage comes a voice. "Who are you?"
"Your faithful servant," I reply, and drop to genuflect.
"I see no servant of the God of the Cross," the angry voice intones. "I see only ... a Jew."
A Jew? "No, no, my Lord. Here," I tear at my hood, but where the black crest was is a knitted skullcap. "Here," I rip my shirt to reveal the crucifix ever upon my heart, but in place of the penitential hairshirt is a flannel nightgown, and beneath it a star of David.
What a dream, what a terrible, frightening dream! I am back in my Toledo four-poster bed, Spanish lace hanging from its carved mahogany peaks. My red-cassocked junior brothers surround me, praying. Their voices are sweet, and far away, beneath my chamber, I can make out the restful undertone of the prisoners' cries. My court physician is in attendance, bending over me, peering intently through his gold-rimmed spectacles, attaching a leech to suck the fevered blood from my still pulsing forehead. I try to speak, but I have been too exhausted by my recent ordeal. Even now it is not over, and there is something wrong about these people I think I know so well. They are engaged in a hushed consultation, so I only hear fragments.
"A judgment."
"Raving since he got home."
"... could have happened?"
Gradually their mellifluous Iberian accents become harsher, more guttural. Then their words themselves grow vague, then strange.
"On his way home from cheder."
"Church," I rasp to correct them.
"It was something the blacksmith's son said."
"The blackness. What the blackness said."
But they ignore me, so I scrutinize them. I catch a whiff of something fishy. My God, protect me, the court physician smells of herring! He is an imposter. I try to writhe from his insidious grip, but he and his aides hold me down. Sweat springs to my forehead, floods into my eyes, burns them with salt. I shut them against the pain and sight of the Jew.
It is not enough to banish the vision of treachery. Words come through, in Yiddish. Miraculously, I understand the infidel tongue. I reopen my eyes in wonder at their magic and in order to remember their faces on the day of retribution.
"Who was the last to see him?"
A man dressed as a schoolteacher answers, "The students all left together, but he ran ahead of the others. He often does."
"This wouldn't have happened if he were more friendly."
"So then Zevchik, the blacksmith's son, went up to him. There were words, then a fight."
"That Zevchik is a terror."
"Nonsense," a new voice declares. "When haven't young blacksmiths beat up young Jews? Zevchik is neither better nor worse than any Pole." This speaker's face is different from the others. It is less cared for but more caring. It is sensible, but it is also sensitive, and despite its lowly position on a straight-backed wooden chair in the corner it obviously commands a great deal of respect.
A mournful woman beside the chair sniffs, "He shouldn't fight." Her face is soft, madonnalike, haloed by a checkered handkerchief, but I will not allow myself to be seduced. It smells of soap and the other domestic chores of the faithless Jewish home.
The schoolteacher continues: "They were pulled apart, and he could hardly walk. Already he was crazy. So we brought him here, and he's been like this ever since."
The physician says: "I can find nothing drastically wrong with him. There are bruises but they're minor." He pulls the engorged slug off my forehead and drops it into a glass container, which he seals. "I don't usually advocate leeching, but in this case I thought there might be too much pressure on the brain. It will make him weak and light-headed, neither of which can hurt him more than his delirium."
Delirium, they say! Just because I can see through their pitiful masquerade they are desperate to convince me that I am mad. Endangered, yes, insane, never. I have fallen into the hands of Marranos, false converters, mockers of the sacrosanct baptismal ceremony. Pretending to be good Spaniards, they are merely cowards evading the snares of the Inquisition, secret Jews. I shall tear their disguises from them, strip them bare, flay them, burn them, and consecrate their ashes to the greater glory of Christ. "Jews!" I scream at them.
"Yes," the quiet man in the corner responds.
"Jews! Jews!" There is no worse insult.
"You are a Jew," he says.
"That's a filthy, degenerate lie. I was born to a sainted Christian woman, brought up in the household of the Lord, and have taken my place as the father of his earthly ministry ... I am Torquemada."
Most everyone in the room blanches and starts back in horror. They cannot help but accord the truly righteous a certain esteem. I can see the effect my name has on all of them - except the one in the corner. He seems saddened but not fazed. He says, "Then Torquemada is a Jew."
I spring up and at his neck. My fingers are ten wriggling snakes reaching to sink their fangs through the soft flesh.
He does not move to defend himself. It is the other Jews who subdue me and tie me to the bed.
"A dybbuk," the mystic utters.
"No, a delirium," the rationalist maintains.
"Who," the woman hovering by the man in the corner pleads, "can help?"
First it is the doctor's turn. Besides leeching me he forces me to drink a vile liquid that tastes like tree bark. I feel it knotting my stomach, coursing through, and purging me from within. My pillow is drenched with sweat, but I will not succumb. When he lays hands on me, intruding on my privacy, I must endure the offense. Wrapped as securely as a baby in swaddling clothes, I have only my words. "Do you not see the error of your ways, Jew? How dare you refuse to acknowledge the divinity of the one Lord above?"
As this is a matter for theology, the Rabbi steps in. He is an ugly, cantankerous old goat, a pious criminal. I can smell his beard and rank gabardine coat. I can smell the pungent reek of his faith, like rotting moss caught in a castle wind. "We are the ones who recognize the one Lord," he says. "It is you that divide him into three."
"The Trinity, most hallowed, most ineffable of mysteries. One in three, three in one. You cannot understand."
"Then how can we believe?"
"You claim to understand your Lord, Rabbi? A minor God he must certainly be."
The Rabbi steps warily about this bed that imprisons me, as if afraid that I might break loose. He explains, "No, we do not understand our Lord. His ways are beyond human comprehension. But we do know that he is One."
"As is mine," I tell him. "One in three, three in one. A mystery greater than yours. If there are two great mysteries, must not the greater be attributed to the greater God?"
The Rabbi tugs at his smelly beard, then replies, "Then why not one in five, five in one, one in a million, a million in one, the greater the mystery ...."
I have underestimated him. He has a point. Stalemate. I try another tack. "And the words of Christ on the cross?"
"Moses in the wilderness."
"Saint Paul."
"Elijah."
"Pope Innocent III."
"The Baal Shem Tov."
"We can banter religious authorities all night, Rabbi, but how can you deny the lay opinion of the citizens of the world? How can you deny their choice, which has given the community of Christ to be fruitful and multiply while you shrivel in this Polish backwater? How can you deny history?"
"Truth is not a matter of majority rule. How could we otherwise deny the words of the ancients as to the circulation of the blood, the roundness of the earth. A minority with truth on its side will always prevail, must always deny."
I am exasperated. I cannot contain myself. "Your minority is a rag-ridden, flea-bitten race of whorish, usurious, inbreeding Christ-killers and should be exterminated."
The Rabbi sighs, "No doubt if you have anything to say about it, we shall."
"Yes, I can see such a day, and not so long from now. It will be a splendid day, bathed in light and blood. There, on the white shore of the eternal kingdom, the good people shall be gathered. At sea, aboard a raft as large as an ark, the total remains of international Jewry are tied one to the other. The angels demand an end to the pestilence. I am proud to dip my torch to the scattered bundles of straw, which crackle and smoke until the oils of the wood and the sinews of the flesh catch fire. The flames mount. The last blasphemous prayers to a pagan God are drowned by the hosannas of the righteous Christian multitude as the final glorious auto-da-fé sinks sizzling beneath the waves. Rid forever of the Jewish contagion, it shall be a day of universal thanksgiving and universal belief in the one true God."
They are mute, agape before the power of my vision. Again, it is only the quiet man in the corner who can summon the will to speak to me. He asks, calmly, "Are you a priest or a prophet?"
I could confound the doctor, refute the Rabbi, but this strange man's soft-spoken questions are beyond my ability to scorn. I can see the marks of my hands on his neck. I feel obligated to explain as best I can, and I do so with surprising modesty, in a voice almost like his.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="22">
MAUNDY
A FEW days before Easter, Maggie's father found a man in a sanitary lane, and took him home. All through Badminton, our housing estate, sandy, stony sanitary lanes ran between the houses on Edward Avenue and Henry Street and Elizabeth Crescent. They had been built so that the night-soil men, coming like ghosts after dark, could remove the black rubber buckets without being seen.
Our fathers returned home from the desert war in Egypt and Libya and began battling the bare veldt. Every weekend they wrestled the hard, red earth into gardens. Badminton was a new housing estate, built outside Johannesburg for returning soldiers. Its streets were named after English kings and queens, because we were English South Africans. The boxy new houses, with their corrugated-iron roofs, ran down a slope to a small stream and a copse of giant blue gums. Seven years after the war ended, soldiers who had gone to fight against Germans had turned into gardeners in uniform. My father worked in his Army boots. Gus Trupshaw wore a sailor's blue shirt. Nathan Swirsky put on his leather flying helmet when he took out his motorbike.
Our fathers looked up from their zinnias, mopped their brows, and said, "It's hotter down south than it was up north, make no mistake." They cursed the African heat. They cursed the stubborn shale that had to be broken up with picks, forked over, sieved, spread and sweetened with rich brown earth, delivered by Errol the topsoil man.
They cursed the burglars. My mother said that there were swarms of burglars hiding among the blue gum trees. They ran down the sanitary lanes at night and slipped into the houses like greased lightning. As I lay in bed at night, I saw the sanitary lanes teeming with burglars and night-soil men, coming and going. Nobody talked about the night-soil men. They came and went in our sleep, though in the morning we caught the scent of something we wished to forget.
Nobody talked about Maggie, either. She lived next door and took off all her clothes from time to time and ran around her house. And we all pretended not to notice. She was the fastest ten-year-old on the estate.
My mother was next door in a flash when she saw the man working in Maggie's garden. He wore old khaki shorts. His legs ended in stumps, inches below the shorts, and the stumps were tied up in sacking. He pulled himself everywhere in a red tin wagon, hauling himself along with strong arms. His muscles were huge. The legless man sat upon a paper bag that he had spread in the bottom of his wagon. It read "Buy Your Brand-New Zephyr at Dominion Motors."
"Hell's bells! What could I do? He just followed me home," said Maggie's father. "He tells me his name's Salisbury."
"I don't care if he's the King of Siam," my mother said to my father a little while later. "It's bad enough when that little girl tears about the place in the you-know-what, for all the world and his wife to stare. Now they have a cripple in their garden!"
My father was studying the annual report of the South African Sugar Association. "Figures for 1952 show exports up."
"Some of us cannot lose ourselves in sugar reports," my mother said, "Some of us have to look life in the eye."
"For heaven's sake, Monica," my father said. "The poor sod's lost his legs. I'm sure he doesn't like it any more than you do. But he's still human. Well, more or less."
Then Maggie appeared, running around the side of her house. "Speak of the devil!" my mother said. Maggie was skinny and very brown. Her bare legs flashing, round and round the house she ran. Her dog, a Doberman called Tamburlaine, ran after her, barking loudly.
"Martin," said my mother, "come away from the window. It only encourages her if you stare."
Maggie's father was chasing her with a blanket. He caught up, and threw it over her. Like a big gray butterfly net.
"You'd hardly think this was Easter," said my mother. "I don't know where to put my face."
Salisbury sat in his red wagon, doing some weeding. "What on earth do you think is going through his head?" my mother demanded. "That little girl might be less keen to parade in the altogether if she knew what was going through his head."
"I see that Henry's been planting out beardless irises," said my father. "The beardless iris loves a sunny spot and a good bit of wall."
"Heavens above, where will it all end?" my mother asked. "Our neighbors have a cripple in their garden. Easter is almost on us. There are burglars in the blue gums. Soon the streets will be full of servants. Did you know that they've taken to asking for Easter boxes? First Christmas boxes, now Easter boxes. I suppose they'll be asking for Michaelmas boxes next. Dressed to the nines, some of them. And worse for wear."
I went to bed that night and thought about the burglars down among the blue gums that grew thickly across the road from the big houses in Edward Avenue. All over Badminton our fathers, home from the war, slept with their Army-issue pistols in their sock drawers, ready at any moment to rush naked into the African night, blasting away. The burglars were said to creep up on the houses and cast fishing lines through the burglar bars to hook wallets and handbags from our bedrooms.
We all believed in the burglars. Everyone except for Ruthie Swirsky, the chemist's new wife. But she was English, from Wimbledon. Swirsky had travelled to Europe and brought her home with him. "Burglars with fishing rods," Ruthie Swirsky said to my father just after she moved to the estate. "I've never heard of anything so absurd. Pull the other one, Gordon."
"Pull the other what?" my mother wanted to know later.
"How would I know, Monica?" said my father. "Leg, I suppose."
"Whatever she had in mind, it wasn't a leg," said my mother.
"Whatever she had in mind, it wasn't a leg!" sang my friends Tony, Sally, and Eric, and I as we rolled down the steep, grassy banks in Tony's garden that Eastertime in Badminton.
FOR the rest of the holiday, nothing much seemed likely to happen. The days looming ahead were too hot somehow, even though we were well into autumn. Our fathers worked in their gardens tending to their petunias and phlox and chrysanthemums. They sprayed their rosebushes against black spot, moving in the thick clouds of lime sulfur like refugees from a gas attack in the trenches.
Ernest Langbein had fallen in love with Maggie. Ernest was an altar server at the church of the Resurrection in Cyrildene, and he told Eric that if only Maggie would stop taking off her clothes, their love might be possible. Maggie was not easy to get on with. When she had no clothes on, she wasn't really there. And when she was dressed she was inclined to make savage remarks. I met her in Swirsky's Pharmacy on Maundy Thursday. She wore a blue dress with thick black stockings. Her brown, pixie face was shaded by a big white panama hat, tied beneath her chin with thick elastic. I was wearing shorts. I'd never seen her look so covered up. She looked at my bare feet and said, "You have hammertoes, Martin." It seemed very unfair.
We were standing behind the wall of blue magnesia bottles which Swirsky built across his shop on festive occasions, like Christmas and Easter. We heard Ruthie Swirsky say to Mrs. Raubenheimer of the Jewish Old Age Home across the road, "I'm collecting Maundy money. It's an Easter custom we have in England. The Royal Mint makes its own money, and the Queen gives it to pensioners and suchlike. The deserving poor. In a special purse."
Mrs. Raubenheimer said that those who could afford it could afford it. Swirsky came around the magnesia wall and grinned at us. He crackled in his starched white coat. His mustache was full and yet feathery beneath his nose. Black feathers, it was. "Well, kiddies," he said. "Can I count on you? Pocket money is welcome for Ruthie's Maundy box. What Ruthie wants she usually gets." He rattled a black wooden collection box.
My mother said, "It's appalling. The Swirsky's aren't even Easter people. The Queen of England does not live on an estate infested with burglars. Have you seen the collection box Ruthie Swirsky's using? I happen to know that it belongs to St. John's Ambulance. She simply turned it around so you can't see the badge."
"If you're going to divide the world into those who are and those who are not Easter people." said my father, "you may as well go and join the government. They do it all the time."
"I have no intention," said my mother, "of joining the government."
All the kids gave to Ruthie Swirsky's Maundy-money box. We collected empty soft-drink bottles and got back a penny deposit down at the Greek Tea Room. Swirsky shook the box until our pennies rattled. "Give till it hurts," he said. "Baby needs new booties."
A deputation arrived at the pharmacy. Gus Trupshaw had been elected to speak for the estate. He wore his demob suit and brown Army boots with well-polished toes. He said that everyone objected to the idea of Ruthie's giving away money to the servants. What would they expect next Easter? It might be difficult for an English person to understand. But the cleaners, cooks, and gardenersof Badminton got board and lodging and wages. "They might be poor," Gus Trupshaw explained, "but they're not deserving."
"Are you telling me I may not give my Maundy money to whomsoever I choose?" Ruthie asked, her face white beneath her red hair, "This is outrageous."
"This isn't Wimbledon." said Gus Trupshaw. "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
Swirsky leaned over to us and whispered. "When you're next in Rome, I can recommend the Trevi fountain. But watch out for pickpockets."
Ruthie Swirsky tapped the black collection box with her finger after Gus Trupshaw left. She told Swirsky she was so mad she could spit. She asked him to find Errol the topsoil man. "Tell him I have a job for his wheelbarrow."
Later, it was my mother who spotted Errol wheeling his barrow into the yard next door. "There appears to be some movement at the neighbors'. I think I'll go and lie down," she said.
Errol stopped beside Salisbury with his wheelbarrow. He laid the paper bag from Dominion Motors on the floor of the barrow and lifted Salisbury out of his wagon. Then he set off up Henry Street, wheeling Salisbury, with my friend Sally, her brother Tony, Eric, and me tagging along behind them.
We heard the iron wheels scattering gravel in Henry Street.
"Where are we goings?" Salisbury asked Errol in a deep, growling voice.
"Boss Swirsky's place. Sit still and don't make any trouble." Errol maneuvered the barrow right up to the front door of Swirsky's Pharmacy. Papas, the owner of the Greek Tea Room, and Mr. Benjamin, the Rug Doctor, came out of their shops to stare. A couple of ladies from the Jewish Old Age Home also stopped to watch. Ruthie Swirsky came out of the pharmacy. Nathan was next to her. There was sun on his mustache, and it looked as if it had been dipped in oil. Swirsky carried the collection box. He held it carefully, as if it were a baby, and his face when he looked at Ruthie was soft and loving. A crowd of cleaners, cooks, and gardeners gathered across the road. They looked angry.
"I hear you're a poor man, Salisbury," said Ruthie. "So I've decided to help you."
"Yes, Madam," said Salisbury.
"I hope you're not going to leave him there all day, Mrs. Swirsky," said Mrs. Raubenheimer.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="23">
"Trash like the other trash. Pissako or some other bluffer."
"Who is this Pissako?"
Out of somewhere materialized Reuben Kazarsky, who said, "That's what he calls Picasso."
"What's the difference? They're all fakers," Max Flederbush said. "My wife, may she rest in peace, was the expert, not me."
Kazarsky winked at me and smiled. He had been my friend even back in Poland. He had written a half-dozen Yiddish comedies, but they had all failed. He had published a collection of vignettes, but the critics had torn it to shreds and he had stopped writing. He had come to America in 1939 and later had married a widow 20 years older than he. The widow died and Kazarsky inherited her money. He hung around rich people. He dyed his hair and dressed in corduroy jackets and hand-painted ties. He declared his love to every woman from 15 to 75. Kazarsky was in his 60s, but he looked no more than 50. He let his hair grow long and wore side whiskers. His black eyes reflected the mockery and abnegation of one who has broken with everything and everybody. In the cafeteria on the Lower East Side, he excelled at mimicking writers, rabbis and party leaders. He boasted of his talents as a sponger. Reuben Kazarsky suffered from hypochondria and because he was by nature a sexual philanthropist, he had convinced himself that he was impotent. We were friends, but he had never introduced me to his benefactors. It seemed that Max Flederbush had insisted that Reuben bring us together. He now complained to me:
"Where do you hide yourself? I've asked Reuben again and again to get us together, but according to him, you were always in Europe, in Israel or who knows where. All of a sudden, it comes out that you're in Miami Beach. I'm in such a state that I can't be alone for a minute. The moment I'm alone, I'm overcome by a gloom that's worse than madness. This fine apartment you see here turns suddenly into a funeral parlor. Sometimes I think that the real heroes aren't those who get medals in wartime but the bachelors who live out their years alone."
"Do you have a bathroom in this palace?" I asked.
"More than one, more than two, more than three," Max answered. He took my arm and led me to a bathroom that bedazzled me by its size and elegance. The lid of the toilet seat was transparent, set with semiprecious stones and a two-dollar bill implanted within it. Facing the mirror hung a picture of a little boy urinating in an arc while a little girl looked on admiringly. When I lifted the toilet-seat lid, music began to play. After a while, I stepped out onto the balcony that looked directly out to sea. The rays of the setting sun scampered over the waves. Gulls still hunted for fish. Far off in the distance, on the edge of the horizon, a ship swayed. On the beach, I spotted some animal that from my vantage point, 16 floors high, appeared like a calf or a huge dog. But it couldn't be a dog and what would a calf be doing in Miami Beach? Suddenly, the shape straightened up and turned out to be a woman in a long bathrobe digging for clams in the sand.
After a while, Kazarsky joined me on the balcony. He said, "That's Miami. It wasn't he but his wife who chased after all these trinkets. She was the businesslady and the boss at home. On the other hand, he isn't quite the idle dreamer he pretends to be. He has an uncanny knack for making money. They dealt in everything - buildings, lots stocks, diamonds, and eventually she got involved in art, too. When he said buy, she bought; and when he said sell, she sold. When she showed him a painting, he'd glance at it, spit and say, "It's junk, they'll snatch it out of your hands. Buy!" Whatever they touched turned to money. They flew to Israel, established Yeshivas and donated prizes toward all kinds of endeavors - cultural, religious. Naturally, they wrote it all off in taxes. Their daughter, that pampered brat, was half-crazy. Any complex you can find in Freud, Jung and Adler, she had it. She was born in a DP camp in Germany. Her parents wanted her to marry a chief rabbi or an Israeli prime minister. But she fell in love with a gentile, an archaeology professor with a wife and five children. His wife wouldn't divorce him and she had to be bought off with a quarter-million-dollar settlement and a fantastic alimony besides. Four weeks after the wedding, the professor left to dig for a new Peking man. heHedrank like a fish. It was he who was drunk, not the truck driver. Come, you'll soon see something!"
Kazarsky opened the door to the living room and it was filled with people. In one day, Max Flederbush had managed to arrange a party. Not all the guests could fit into the large living room. Kazarsky and Max Flederbush led me from room to room and the party was going on all over. Within minutes, maybe 200 people had gathered, mostly women. It was a fashion show of jewelry, dresses, pants, caftans, hairdos, shoes, bags, make-up, as well as men's jackets, shirts and ties. Spotlights illuminated every painting. Waiters served drinks. Black and white maids offered trays of hors d'oeuvres.
In all this commotion, I could scarcely hear what was being said to me. The compliments started, the handshakes and the kisses. A stout lady seized me around and pressed me to her enormous bosom. She shouted into my ear, "I read you! I come from the towns you describe. My grandfather came here from Ishishok. He was a wagon driver there and here in America, he went into the freight business. If my parents wanted to say something I wouldn't understand, they spoke Yiddish, and that's how I learned a little of the language."
I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My face was smeared with lipstick. Even as I stood there, trying to wipe it off, I received all kinds of proposals. A cantor offered to set one of my stories to music. A musician demanded I adapt an opera libretto from one of my novels. A president of an adult-education program invited me to speak a year hence at his synagogue. I would be given a plaque. A young man with hair down to his shoulders asked that I recommend a publisher, or at least an agent, to him. He declared, "I must create. This is a physical need with me."
One minute all the rooms were full, the next - all the guests were gone, leaving only Reuben Kazarsky and myself. Just as quickly and efficiently, the help cleaned up the leftover food and half-drunk cocktails, dumped all the ashtrays and replaced all the chairs in their rightful places. I had never before witnessed such perfection. Out of somewhere, Max Flederbush dug out a white tie with gold polka dots and put it on.
He said, "Time for dinner."
"I ate so much I haven't the least appetite," I said.
"You must have dinner with us, I reserved a table at the best restaurant in Miami."
After a while, the three of us, Max Flederbush, Reuben Kazarsky and I, got into the Cadillac and the same chauffeur drove us. Night had fallen and I no longer saw nor tried to determine where I was being taken. We drove for only a few minutes and pulled up in front of a hotel resplendent with lights and uniformed attendants. One opened the car door ceremoniously, a second fawningly opened the glass front door. The lobby of this hotel wasn't merely supercolossal but supersupercolossal - complete to light effects, tropical plants in huge planters, vases, sculptures, a parrot in a cage. We were escorted into a nearly dark hall and greeted by a headwaiter who was expecting us and led us to our reserved table. He bowed and scraped, seemingly overcome with joy that we had arrived safely. Soon, another individual came up. Both men wore tuxedos, patent-leather shoes, bow ties and ruffled shirts. They looked to me like twins. They spoke with foreign accents that I suspected weren't genuine. A lengthy discussion evolved concerning our choice of foods and drinks. When the two heard I was a vegetarian, they looked at each other in chagrin, but only for a second. Soon they assured me they would serve me the best dish a vegetarian had ever tasted. One took our orders and the other wrote them down. Max Flederbush announced in his broken English that he really wasn't hungry, but if something tempting could be dredged up for him, he was prepared to give it a try. He interjected Yiddish expressions, but the two waiters apparently understood him. He gave precise instructions on how to roast his fish and prepare his vegetables. He specified spices and seasonings. Reuben Kazarsky ordered a steak and what I was to get, which in plain English was a fruit salad with cottage cheese.
When the two men finally left, Max Flederbush said, "There were times if you would have told me I'd be sitting in such a place eating such food, I would have considered it a joke. I had one fantasy - one time before I died to get enough dry bread to fill me. Suddenly, I'm a rich man, alas, and people dance attendance on me. Well, but flesh and blood isn't fated to enjoy any rest. The angels in heaven are jealous, Satan is the accuser and the Almighty is easily convinced. He nurses a longtime resentment against us Jews. He still can't forgive the fact that our great-great-grandfathers worshiped the golden calf. Let's have our picture taken."
A man with a camera materialized. "Smile!" he ordered us.
Max Flederbush tried to smile. One eye laughed, the other cried. Reuben Kazarsky began to twinkle. I didn't even make the effort. The photographer said he was going to develop the film and that he'd be back in three quarters of an hour.
Max Flederbush asked, "What was I talking about, eh? Yes. I live in apparent luxury, but a woe upon this luxury. As rich and as elegant as the house is, it's also a Gehenna. I'll tell you something; in a certain sense, it's worse here than in the camps. There, at least, we all hoped. A hundred times a day we comforted ourselves with the fact that the Hitler madness couldn't go on for long. When we heard the sound of an airplane, we thought the invasion had started. We were all young then and our whole lives were before us. Rarely did anyone commit suicide. Here, hundreds of people sit, waiting for death. A week doesn't go by that someone doesn't give up the ghost. They're all rich. The men have accumulated fortunes, turned worlds upside down, maybe swindled to get there. Now they don't know what to do with their money. They're all on diets. There is no one to dress for. Outside of the financial page in the newspaper, they read nothing. As soon as they finish their breakfasts, they start playing cards. Can you play cards forever? They have to, or die from boredom. When they get tired of playing, they start slandering one another. Bitter feuds are waged. Today they elect a president, the next day they try to impeach him. If he decides to move a chair in the lobby, a revolution breaks out. There is one touch of consolation for them - the mail. An hour before the postman is due, the lobby is crowded. They stand with their keys in hand, waiting like for the Messiah. If the postman is late, a hubbub erupts. If one opens his mailbox and it's empty, he starts to grope and burrow inside, trying to create something out of thin air.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="24">
He heard the rabbi strike a match and it flared momentarily, casting shadows of candles and chairs amid the empty chairs in the room.
"Look now in the mirror."
"I'm looking."
"What do you see?"
"Nothing."
"Look with your eyes."
A silver candelabrum, first with three, then five, then seven burning bony candlesticks, appeared like ghostly hands with flaming fingertips in the oval mirror. The heat of it hit Albert in the face and for a moment he was stunned.
But recalling the games of his childhood, he thought, who's kidding who? It's one of those illusion things I remember from when I was a kid. In that case I'm getting the hell out of here. I can stand maybe mystery but not magic tricks or dealing with a rabbinical magician.
The candelabrum had vanished, although not its light, and he now saw the rabbi's somber face in the glass, his gaze addressing him. Albert glanced quickly around to see of anyone was standing at his shoulder, but nobody was. Where the rabbi was hiding at the moment the teacher did not know; but in the lit glass appeared his old man's lined and shrunken face, his sad eyes, compelling, inquisitive, weary, perhaps even frightened, as though they had seen more than they had cared to but were still looking.
What's this, slides or home movies? Albert sought some source of projection but saw no ray of light from wall or ceiling, nor object or image that might be reflected by the mirror.
The rabbi's eyes glowed like sun-filled clouds. A moon rose in the blue sky. The teacher dared not move, afraid to discover he was unable to. He then beheld a shining crown on the rabbi's head.
It had appeared at first like a braided mother-of-pearl turban, then had luminously become - like an intricate star in the night sky - a silver crown, constructed of bars, triangles, half-moons and crescents, spires, turrets, trees, points of spears; as though a wild storm had swept them up from the earth and flung them together in its vortex, twisted into a single glowing interlocked sculpture, a forest of disparate objects.
The sight in the ghostly mirror, a crown of rare beauty - very impressive, Albert thought - lasted no longer than five short seconds, then the reflecting glass by degrees turned dark and empty.
The shades were up. The single bulb in a frosted lily fixture on the ceiling shone harshly in the room. It was night.
The old rabbi sat, exhausted, on the broken sofa.
"So you saw it?"
"I saw something."
"You believe what you saw - the crown?"
"I believe I saw. Anyway, I'll take it."
The rabbi gazed at him blankly.
"I mean I agree to have the crown made," Albert said, having to clear his throat.
"Which size?"
"Which size was the one I saw?"
"Both sizes. This is the same design for both sizes, but there is more silver and also more blessings for the $986 size."
"But didn't you say that the design for my father's crown, because of the special nature of his illness, would have a different style, plus some special blessings?"
The rabbi nodded. "This comes also in two sizes - the $401 and $986."
The teacher hesitated a split second. "Make it the big one," he said decisively.
He had his wallet in his hand and counted out fifteen new bills - nine one hundreds, four twenties, a five, and a single - adding to $986.
Putting on his glasses, the rabbi hastily counted the money, snapping with thumb and forefinger each crisp bill as though to be sure none had stuck together. He folded the stiff paper and thrust the wad into his pants pocket.
"Could I have a receipt?"
"I would like to give you a receipt," said Rabbi Lifschitz earnestly, "but for the crowns there are no receipts. Some things are not a business."
"If money is exchanged, why not?"
"God will not allow. My father did not give receipts and also my grandfather."
"How can I prove I paid you if something goes wrong?"
"You have my word, nothing will go wrong."
"Yes, but suppose something unforeseen did," Albert insisted, "would you return the cash?"
"Here is your cash," said the rabbi, handing the teacher the packet of folded bills.
"Never mind," said Albert hastily. "Could you tell me when the crown will be ready?"
"Tomorrow night before Shabbes, the latest."
"So soon?"
"Your father is dying."
"That's right, but the crown looks like a pretty intricate piece of work to put together out of all those odd pieces."
"We will hurry."
"I wouldn't want you to rush the job in any way that would - let's say - prejudice the potency of the crown, or for that matter, in any way impair the quality of it as I saw it in the mirror - or however I saw it."
Down came the rabbi's eyelid, quickly raised without a sign of self-consciousness. "Mr. Gans, all my crowns are first-class jobs. About this you got nothing to worry about."
They then shook hands. Albert, still assailed by doubts, stepped into the corridor. He felt he did not, in essence, trust the rabbi; and suspected that Rabbi Lifschitz knew it and did not, in essence, trust him.
Rifkele, panting like a cow for a bull, let him out the front door, perfectly.
In the subway, Albert figured he would call it an investment in experience and see what came of it. Education costs money, but how else can you get it? He pictured the crown, as he had seen it, established on the rabbi's head, and then seemed to remember that as he had stared at the man's shifty face in the mirror the thickened lid of his right eye had slowly dropped into a full wink. Did he recall this in truth, or was he seeing in his mind's eye and transposing into the past something that had happened just before he left the house? What does he mean by his wink? - not only is he a fake but he kids you? Uneasy once more, the teacher clearly remembered, when he was staring into the rabbi's fish eyes in the glass, after which they had lit in visionary light, that he had fought a hunger to sleep; and the next thing there's the sight of the old boy, as though on the television screen, wearing this high-hat magic crown.
Albert, rising, cried, "Hypnosis! The bastard magician hypnotized me! He never did produce a silver crown, it's out of my imagination - I've been suckered!"
He was outraged by the knavery, hypocrisy, fat nerve of Rabbi Jonas Lifschitz. The concept of a curative crown, if he had ever for a moment believed in it, crumbled in his brain and all he could think of were 986 blackbirds flying in the sky. As three curious passengers watched, Albert bolted out of the car at the next stop, rushed up the stairs, hurried across the street, then cooled his impatient heels for twenty-two minutes till the next train clattered into the station, and he rode back to the stop near the rabbi's house. Though he banged with both fists on the door, kicked at it, 'rang' the useless bell until his thumb was blistered, the boxlike wooden house, including dilapidated synagogue store, was dark, monumentally starkly still, like a gigantic, slightly tilted tombstone in a vast graveyard; and in the end unable to arouse a soul, the teacher, long past midnight, had to head home.
He awoke next morning cursing the rabbi and his own stupidity for having got involved with a faith healer. This is what happens when a man - even for a minute - surrenders his true beliefs. There are less punishing ways to help the dying. Albert considered calling the cops but had no receipt and did not want to appear that much a fool. He was tempted, for the first time in six years of teaching, to phone in sick; then take a cab to the rabbi's house and demand the return of his cash. The thought agitated him. On the other hand, suppose Rabbi Lifschitz was seriously at work assembling the crown with his helper; on which, let's say, after he had bought the silver and paid the retired jeweler for his work, he made, let's say, a hundred bucks clear profit - not so very much; and there really was a silver crown, and the rabbi sincerely and religiously believed it would reverse the course of his father's illness? Although nervously disturbed by his suspicions, Albert felt he had better not get the police into the act too soon, because the crown wasn't promised - didn't the old gent say - until before the Sabbath, which gave him till sunset tonight.
If he produces the thing by then, I have no case against him even if it's a piece of junk. So I better wait. But what a dope I was to order the $986 job instead of the $401. On that decision alone I lost $585.
After a distracted day's work Albert taxied to the rabbi's house and tried to rouse him, even hallooing at the blank windows facing the street; but either nobody was home or they were both hiding, the rabbi under the broken sofa, Rifkele trying to shove her bulk under a bathtub. Albert decided to wait them out. Soon the old boy would have to leave the house to step into the shul on Friday night. He would speak to him, warn him to come clean. But the sun set; dusk settled on the earth; and though the autumn stars and a sliver of moon gleamed in the sky, the house was dark, shades drawn; and no Rabbi Lifschitz emerged. Lights had gone on in the little shul, candles were lit. It occurred to Albert, with chagrin, that the rabbi might be already worshipping; he might all this time have been in the synagogue.
The teacher entered the long, brightly lit store. On yellow folding chairs scattered around the room sat a dozen men holding worn prayer books, praying. The Rabbi A. Marcus, a middle-aged man with a high voice and a short reddish beard, was dovening at the Ark, his back to the congregation.
As Albert entered and embarrassedly searched from face to face, the congregants stared at him. The old rabbi was not among them. Disappointed, the teacher withdrew.
A man sitting by the door touched his sleeve.
"Stay awhile and read with us."
"Excuse me, I'd like to but I'm looking for a friend."
"Look," said the man, "maybe you'll find him."
Albert waited across the street under a chestnut tree losing its leaves. He waited patiently - till tomorrow if he had to.
Shortly after nine the lights went out in the synagogue and the last of the worshippers left for home. The red-bearded rabbi then emerged with his key in his hand to lock the store door.
"Excuse me, rabbi," said Albert, approaching. "Are you acquainted with Rabbi Jonas Lifschitz, who lives upstairs with his daughter Rifkele - if she is his daughter?"
"He used to come here," said the rabbi with a small smile, "but since he retired he prefers a big synagogue on Mosholu Parkway, a palace."
"Will he be home soon, do you think?"
"Maybe in an hour. It's Shabbat, he must walk."
"Do you - ah - happen to know anything about his work on silver crowns?"
"What kind of silver crowns?"
"To assist the sick, the dying?"
"No," said the rabbi, locking the shul door, pocketing the key, and hurrying away.
The teacher, eating his heart, waited under the chestnut tree till past midnight, all the while urging himself to give up and go home, but unable to unstick the glue of his frustration and rage. Then shortly before 1 A.M. he saw some shadows moving and two people drifting up the shadow-encrusted street. One was the old rabbi, in a new caftan and snappy black Homburg, walking tiredly. Rifkele, in sexy yellow mini, exposing to above the big-bone knees her legs like poles, walked lightly behind him, stopping to strike her ears with her hands.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="25">
JOHANNA KAPLAN
Sickness
In books, radiators hum and sing; in my house, the radiator howls and yelps as if a baby were locked up in it, an angry baby who, though he cries and cries, still does not bring his mother running. Not that she isn't longing to. But there is an older neighbor around or an aunt maybe, and her philosophy is: He's crying? So he'll cry! And the baby in the radiator - how can he know all this? So he sends up a last, raging yowl and I am woken up.
Here, in the brief, early whitish light, the march of neighbors has already begun. For even though it is barely morning of my first day home from school, the news of a sick child has shuttled through the building like steam through the pipes, and my mother's voice rises from the kitchen in bitterness.
"What's a doctor? He sits and sits studying long enough so that finally in one place his bathrobe wears out."
It is not a question now of tissues and aspirins, of swollen glands or a throat that won't swallow. This time it is serious: Lichtblau, the limping Golem with MD on his license plate, has made a housecall. Dragging one heavy foot behind the other, he has announced measles and a high fever, and in a stingy mumble as dull as the one that sends black years to the Irish kids on his new Buick in the street, he has even mentioned the possibility of hospital. But this doesn't worry me because what's a hospital? One, nurses: quick-stepping, white-clad girls whose heads are all blond and faces shiksa-silly. And two, doctors: bald, heavy men, sad-eyed and Jewish, who walk slowly on dragging legs, their bodies wrapped up in old maroon bathrobes, shamefully all worn away in one spot.
What would I do in a place like that? Where would I keep my glass of sweet, lukewarm tea that sits, whenever I am sick, like lightened liquid honey on a folding chair by my bed? Where would I put all my books? Where would I get my neighbor stories? As I lie back against the pillow, my room flies up before me like an airy, pastel balloon. From the window, slats of sunlight sift in, off-spinning ballerina twins to the clumsy elephant slats of the fire escape: the sun is playing a game of potsy on the linoleum. Hopping each time to a different cone of color, the sun has zoned my floor so that it's a country counter of homemade, fruit-flavored ice creams, or else great clean pails of paint from which I can choose new, sweet, custardy colors and order the painter to paint my room.
Outside, other children's feet thump off to school. Some are shouting: they just got to the corner, shoelaces dragging, and now, for spite, the light is changing. And some are crying: people with bad work habits, maybe they forgot their consent slips or their gym suits, and because it's too late now to go back, the crying buttons them into their stormcoats even tighter and their whole bodies knead with what's coming. But I am inside, I am home, and sickness is all pleasure.
"Some tremendous achievement," my mother says, and from the kitchen her voice in anger and sourness closes in on itself till it's black, black as the telephone, a mother jungle - steamy from her tears and sour from her breath. If she listened to me, she'd be completely different, even wear nail polish, but if that's what I'm looking for, she says, what I better do is go out and get myself another mother. As it is, though, the one I have plucks pinfeathers out of a chicken, and because her fingers get clumsy and impatient instead of elegant and neat, the knife point nips them so they bleed a thin, crooked trail that maps out spongy yellow Chickenland: a bridge across the legs, a mountain pass to the wings, and all the way back through to the interior where the tiny stomach and liver lie hiding together, breathing like brothers.
"Some tremendous achievement," she tells Birdie. "To sit and sit and study and study and nowhere in the whole process is there a head that comes into it or a brain that's involved. In medical school the big expense is in bathrobes."
Birdie is puffy-brown and stuffed, the awful splendor of a Florida suntan. Her voice too is bleached - thin and hard from the sun and sandy from cigarettes. With aqua earrings, an orange dress and two orange-painted big toes that pop out from aqua open-toe shoes, Birdie is herself a sunstroke.
"Let's face it, Manya," she tells my mother. "You'll never get satisfaction. A Jewish doctor is a Jewish prince."
A Jewish prince! Joseph Nasi, Joseph the prince ...
The chamber was thick with incense and plush with silken pillows. In the distance a droning voice was chanting the name of Allah, summoning the faithful to prayer. But within the richly adorned room not even a palm frond dared stir, for in the center, seated upon the largest and most sumptuous silken pillow of them all, was the Sultan himself, brocade pantaloons loose about his legs and a gleaming scimitar at his waist. Behind him stood his fierce, mustachioed guards, before him veiled and scented dancing girls. All awaited his pleasure and command. Beneath the imperial turban, however, the Sultan's heavy brow was clouded and his darkened visage bespoke distress. Besides all this, he was very ugly, had a fat, puffy face as if mosquitoes couldn't keep away from him. With a soft rustle of silks, a graceful, veiled maiden appeared before him, bearing a silver tray of sweetmeats. But barely raising one languid hand, the Sultan sent her away. On hot days, sweetmeats probably made him a little nauseous. A richly garbed courtier bowed low before him.
"Sire," he said, "an emissary just arrived from the mighty King of Spain urgently begs that Your Majesty receive him." But bidding him rise, the Sultan merely looked away, saying, "I shall receive no one." A thin, hurrying Vizier flung himself at the Sultan's feet crying, "If it please Your Majesty, a messenger stands at the palace gates with a plea of grave import from Your Majesty's heroic general now engaged with the Infidel in battle far afield." The beetle-browed Sultan sighed.
Suddenly a great clatter was heard from without and finally even the fat, sitting Sultan started getting a little curious.
"What occasions this disturbance?" he demanded of his court.
"It is nothing, Your Majesty," replied a saber-bristling guardsman. "Nothing His Highness need concern himself over. It is merely a Jew."
"A Jew?" cried the Sultan, hastily rising from his cushions as color flooded his features. His eyes were popping, too, and probably by this time there was even a vein twitching somewhere. "A Jew? What Jew?"
"Merely a Jewish doctor who calls himself Joseph."
"Joseph!" The Sultan cried out with great emotion. "All praises to Allah Who has sent him to me this day. Bring Joseph to my presence immediately."
Hustled in between two armor-laden guardsmen was a slight, bearded man of modest dress and bearing and proud, intelligent eyes.
"Sire," he said, stepping forward, carefully lowering his eyes, but not bowing his head or bending his knee, for there was only One to Whom Joseph bowed. A not every other minute either because he certainly wasn't Catholic.
"O Joseph," the Sultan called out in great agitation. "What news do you bring me? What of my son, what of my ships, and what of the terrible apparition of my nightly slumbers?"
"For your son, O great Sire, I have prepared a special salve and now the lad's eye is as bright as ever it was."
"Selim," the Sultan breathed. That was his son's name in Turkish.
"Of your ships, Your Majesty. Though one was lost in a storm at sea, the cargo of all the fleet has been rescued in a foreign port by a friend and member of my faith, one Mannaseh ben Levi. Further, he has sent a message to me with the news of a worm, Your Majesty, who through his own cunning can spin silk. He offers to send to your court as many of such creatures as Your Majesty desires in the shipment with the lost cargo."
"Allah be praised!"
"Of the apparition. It was a warning to Your Majesty of the storm at sea which distressed your ships. Now that the cargo is safe, the dreaded apparition will trouble you no longer."
"O Joseph, physician to my body, my soul, and my coffers. How shall I reward you? What is it that you wish?"
"For myself, Sire, there is nothing I desire. But for my people, I ask that they may always live in peace within your walls, free to pursue their daily lives and to worship, harming no one, according to our age-old laws and beliefs."
"Granted, Joseph. Most swiftly and easily granted. But what of yourself? What do you ask for your own person?"
"Only that which is granted for my people."
"Then, Joseph, if you will not ask, I must bestow unrequested. And I, His Imperial Majesty the Sultan, name you, Joseph, a Prince of my Domain. No longer are you merely Joseph the Jewish doctor. Henceforward you are to be known as Joseph the Prince! Let cymbals sound and gongs strike!" Right in my ear: it is Birdie's Atlantic City charm bracelet sounding and gonging on the Formica table.
"Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here!" she says, smiling at me, her lipsticked lips wide and bright as a sideways orange Popsicle.
Uh-tuh-tuh and look who's here. Yellow kindergarten clowns hop all over my pajamas and red spots climb through my flesh. That's who's here.
"Ketzeleh," says Birdie. "Are you hungry? Do you want some bread and peanut butter?" But I'm not sure what I want; my head is spinning off in a deadman's float all by itself and is strange to the rest of me -luggy limbs and scratchy skin.
"Oh, Manya," Birdie calls to my mother. "Watch how your daughter spreads the peanut butter. I love the way she does it - so perfect and so exact you'd think the knife is a paintbrush. Look how she sits there with that peanut butter like an artist."
"Some artist," my mother says. "She has no hands, she's just like me. She couldn't even tie up a goose, my father used to say about me, and that's what it is - no hands."
In the back of the siddur, in the Song of Songs, it says: What shall we do for our little sister, for she has no breasts? But there is nothing in it about no hands.
"Look how she makes it smooth and how she goes over and over it. By the time she's through, it's a shame to eat it."
But my mother doesn't even bother to turn around because in her opinion peanut butter and nail polish are the exact same thing: both of them made up inside the head of Howdy Doody.
Birdie has nothing against peanut butter, though. Why should she? She chews gum, plays Mah-Jongg, goes to bungalow colonies and eats Chinese food. Altogether she would be a cow but for one thing - cows get the best boys and end up with the best husbands. And this is Birdie's story: she didn't. So far did she miss in this one way that even though she has been divorced for years, she still cries to my mother in the kitchen that when she wakes up in the morning she feels that there is no taste in her, and sometimes when she stands with her shopping cart in the aisle at Daitch's, everything starts to get cold, sour, and far away. Her one son, Salem, is eighteen and goes to pharmacy school in Philadelphia: by a coincidence, an accident, the city where his father lives.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="26">
RADON
BY EDWARD FALCO
In the summer of '88, when my older sister turned 16 and started dating a 34-year-old Amway salesman, my father discovered we had unacceptable levels of radon trapped in our house. That was ten years ago, though it doesn't feel like it. It was a presidential election summer, and in addition to Howard, Julie's new boyfriend, my mother was upset about George Bush's campaign tactics, which she called Nazi-like and un-American. My father was worried that Michael Dukakis might win the election and ruin the economy, and he was also upset because his favorite TV preachers were all in trouble - Oral Roberts said God was going to kill him unless he raised four million dollars soon, Jim Bakker was being revealed as a bisexual, and Jimmy Swaggart had been caught with a prostitute - but most of all my father was going crazy about radon, which he was convinced would give us all cancer, soon. And everyone was worried about AIDS, which I heard one newscaster describe as a plague that could eventually wipe out half the world's population.
Luckily, no one was worried much about me. I was 15, on the baseball, football and basketball teams, an average student, and my two best friends, whom I hung out with constantly, were Mary Dao and Allan Freizman. Mary - a year younger than us and a grade ahead of us - was the smartest girl in the district, and Allan was another all-around athlete, like me. One night that summer my parents were in the living room arguing. They had started out discussing politics and eventually got around, as usual, to radon and Julie's boyfriend. My father wanted to spend four thousand dollars to seal up and ventilate the basement, and my mother wanted him to do something about Howard. "Honey," my father said. "Breathing the radon trapped in this house is equivalent of smoking sixteen packs of cigarettes a day." "Honey," my mother answered. "Your 16-year-old daughter is sleeping with an Amway salesman." Upstairs, in my room, I was searching my closet for a dark jacket. Mary, Allan, and I were meeting at McDonald's. We were casing a house we planned on robbing.
I don't really know which one of us started the whole robbing thing, but that summer was the beginning and end of it. No one in the world would have ever suspected us. No one did. We must have robbed a dozen houses, all told. In the beginning it was a game. There's not a lot to do on Long Island, so we'd walk around, through the developments. Pretty much, we'd wind up in people's yards, where we'd sit and talk and drink beer and smoke grass when we could get it, and we'd keep an eye on the people through their windows. One night Allan brought binoculars, hoping to catch a peek of someone getting undressed. We didn't. It turned out to be an old lady's house where we wound up. We had a couple of joints with us and Allan wanted to go hunting for a better yard, but Mary just wanted to get stoned. So we compromised. We'd get stoned where we were and then go looking for a better yard.
Mary's skin looked like it was always deeply tanned, and she had big eyes and black hair slicked straight back (she claimed she'd rather die than wear bangs) and pulled into two little pony tails that made her look pixieish, along with being so frail. But God, was she smart. She spoke Vietnamese, French, and English, all fluently; and she always had a book in her pocket. Half the time, Allan and I didn't know what she was talking about, and she knew we didn't know and went on anyway. It impressed us, and I think she liked impressing us. Allan and I admired the hell out of Mary, and we were both trying to get her to take off her clothes.
That night in the old lady's yard, Mary was explaining our philosophies to us. "Rick," she said, sitting cross-legged under a tree, slightly above me. She toked on a joint, held the grass in, and then spoke as she exhaled, her voice high and thin. "You're a materialist," she said, pointing at me, the joint between her fingers. "You don't care about what you can't see or feel - or maybe use. But if you can't see it or feel it, man - you don't give a shit about it."
"You mean," I said, "that's like because I'm always saying how I want a hot red Ferrari Testarossa and a big house on the ocean."
Allan took the joint from Mary. He said, "You been watching too much Miami Vice, man."
I must have been stoned, because I remember rolling on the ground laughing at that.
"What about me," he asked Mary. "What am I?"
"You, man - you're a grade A, number one, no-holds-barred nihilist."
"A what-ist?"
"A nihilist. That means you don't believe in shit. Nothing. Nada." Mary picked up the binoculars and looked at the moon.
Allan thought for a moment, then said: "How do you say that again, what I am?"
"A nihilist."
"And what about you," I asked her. "What are you?"
"Me?" She handed Allan the binoculars and took back the joint. "I'm an existentialist."
We both stared at her.
"That's like a nihilist who's into self-delusion. Sort of."
Allan checked out the house with the binoculars. "Hey," he said. "Look at this."
And that's when it started. Allan had seen the old woman take some money out of a bowl and put it in her handbag. A few minutes later, a car pulled up the driveway and a man took her away. I don't remember who said what first, or if anybody even said anything - but we must have all been thinking the same thing, because a few minutes later we kicked in a basement window, climbed up a flight of stairs, and ran out the back door with the money. Later, Mary said it was the most exciting thing she had ever done. The money came to a little over 80 dollars, which we split evenly. That was a couple of months earlier.
The place we were casing - Allan spotted it driving home with his dad. Allan's father's an ex-cop who owns a topless bar on Jericho Turnpike. Or he did then anyway. Now I hear he's retired in Florida. Allan always said he didn't hate his old man because it would take too much energy. He said his father was a stupid drunk who didn't care about anything but screwing the dancers who worked for him. His mother he didn't know. She had left when he was a child. Allan told us that she had moved to Alaska and married a Husky. He said he couldn't blame her for wanting to move up in life.
The house he spotted was only a few blocks from his own. An ambulance had just driven away and a police car was parked at the curb. Allan's dad stopped to talk to the cop, the way he always did, and Allan overheard that the man who lived there was old and three-quarters dead, and kept a loaded gun in every room. At the mention of the guns, Allan said he slunk down in his seat and acted bored while trying to hear every word. The old man used to be important - something about something in World War Two, but Allan didn't get the details. Now he refused to live in a home or with his children. The whole thing was too good to pass up. Guns were easy money in the city: We knew a pawn shop that bought them no questions asked. All we had to do was sit in the old guy's yard and wait for him to leave the house.
I couldn't find the dark jacket I was looking for, so I settled for denim. In the living room, Julie had joined the argument. From the top of the stairs, I could see my father sitting back in his Lazy Boy like a reluctant judge, while my mother stood on one side of the chair and my sister on the other.
"I won't have this!" my mother said, slapping the arm of the chair. "I want you," she said to Julie, "to bring him here tonight. And I want you," she said to my father, "to tell him we'll have him put in jail if this doesn't stop right now." She looked at Julie. "I won't have this," she repeated.
Julie talked to Dad as if they were the only two people in the room. "This is nobody's business but mine," she said calmly. "I'm grown up now. I'll make my own decisions and I don't need any help from anyone."
My father had lain back and crossed his arms over his eyes, as if bracing himself for a crash.
"Dad," Julie said. "Look at me."
He lowered his arms. Julie's hair was bright red and shaved at the temples, short over the top, and long in the back, where it was dyed blond. She wore a gigantic crucifix dangling from her right ear, and a "Jesus is My Friend" T-shirt that was too small on her: it left a few inches of her stomach bare and her breasts struggling for freedom. Her pants, she had slashed with a razor from top to bottom, so from where I stood I could see she was wearing red panties.
My father said, "I realize you're grown up now, Julie -"
My mother sighed.
"But," he continued, "Your mother has a point -"
Julie groaned.
"Why don't we compromise," he said. "Bring him over, just so that we can meet him."
"I don't want to meet him!" my mother screamed. "I want you to shoot the son-of-a-bitch!"
"See!" Julie yelled.
My father jumped up, excited. "You know!" he shouted, quieting them both. "We didn't always used to argue like this, did we?"
I thought to myself: this was extreme, granted, but, actually, yeah - they always argue like that.
"Did we?" my father insisted.
"What?" Julie said.
"What? Radon - that's what!"
My mother covered her face, and Julie turned her back to him. They both sighed.
"Go ahead!" he screamed. "Treat me like I'm mad! I'm telling you, this poison we're breathing is half our problem."
For a moment, everyone was frozen: my mother with her face covered; my sister looking at the wall; my father glaring at both of them. Then his shoulders drooped forward, and he left the room with tears brimming in his eyes. He went out into the yard.
My sister went to her room. As she passed me, she said: "What are your staring at, jerk-off?"
My mother looked up. When she saw me, her face brightened. I've always had that effect on her, even now. She says I'm the best thing in her life. "Rick, honey," she said. "Come here,"
"I'm meeting Mary," I said, on my way down the stairs. My mother loved Mary. When she came to visit, they'd often sit and talk for hours while I wandered in and out, pretending to be interested. My mother never questioned what I was doing, as long as I was doing it with Mary.
By the front door, she put her arm around my shoulder. "Five minutes for your Mom," she said, "I need to talk to somebody sane around here."
We sat down on the front steps, under the dim yellow light. Behind us, the bug-zapper was working overtime: I can still hear the pop and sizzle of bugs getting fried. "Really, Mom," I said. "I've got to go in a minute."
"Did you witness all that?" she asked. "The whole pathetic scene?"
With me, my mother was always dramatic like that - like I'm this pure thing besmirched by a dirty world. "Maybe Dad's got a point about the radon," I said. "Do you know what it is - radon?"
"Yes", she said. "It's wishful thinking."
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="27">
The second thing happened that same week. I was in town late in the afternoon waiting for Dud and Stack to finish some business of theirs, when I looked up and saw my loony brother Bucky across the street. He was standing on the courthouse lawn next to where the steps came down to the sidewalk, holding his hand out, palm up, to one of two men who weren't looking at him. What the men were looking at was a good-sized wooden box on the ground. I could see that Bucky, with his head jerking back and forth, was saying something to the men, or trying to. After a minute I saw one of the men and then the other one reach in their pockets and come out with what had to be coins and put them in Bucky's outstretched hand. After Bucky had the coins settled in his own pocket he leaned down and, almost like he was a magician or something, yanked the top off the box. Both men kind of jumped. They stood staring down into the box, till pretty soon I could tell that one of them was trying to ask Bucky questions. I knew what kind of answers he was getting, the kind that made him give it up after a minute of two. Then all of a sudden Bucky leaned and shut the top down quick. I saw why. A man coming down the walk was just barely a step away from a free look in the box.
I know I stood there for a half hour watching Bucky take in the customers, wondering what it was in the box and what kind of coins he was getting for a look at it. As bad as I wanted to know, I was too ashamed of Bucky to go and see. At least I was till the customers quit coming and I saw the square had about cleared out because it was after quitting time. I crossed the street and climbed up to where Bucky stood by the box. His shirt was even more ragged and dirtier than it was the last time I saw him. He rolled his eyes at me and kind of smiled. "What's in there?" I said.
He held his hand out.
"Your own brother?" I said. "I ain't got any money anyhow."
Bucky blinked and his head jerked. "O-okay." He leaned down and opened the box. I jumped, myself. It was the biggest dang cottonmouth I ever saw in my life. It was as big around as a man's arm and something between black and mud-colored and had a head that looked like it would do for a woodcutter's wedge. "How'd you catch that thing?"
"In m-m-my fish box."
I looked at the ugly thing a minute more. "How much you get for a look?"
His mouth worked, then said, "Du-dime."
"How much you made?"
He patted a bulge on the hip of his overalls. Then he reached in the pocket and took out a handful of coins, some of them quarters, that didn't leave that bulge on his hip much smaller than before. "Damn!" I said. "You going to get rich."
Just then Dud and Stack pulled up to the curb in Dud's old car and sat staring up at Bucky's box. They had to come up for a look, too, which they made Bucky give them for free, and they asked about the same questions I had asked. The thing different was that Dud wanted to know how much Bucky had made in all, and he wouldn't let him alone till Bucky got down and laid all those coins out on the walk to be counted. It came to six dollars and eighty cents, though I reckoned he hadn't made it all in one day.
"Goddamn," Dud said. "It's money in snakes ain't it? You better go catch some more. Start you a snake zoo."
It was that word zoo that got things started. On the way home Stack, after being quiet till we crossed the bridge, said, "What if we started up a zoo? I don't mean just snakes, I mean all kind of wild critters. Maybe we could catch that bear, even. Else her cub. Maybe a bobcat too. And a deer. And sho'ly such as coons and foxes."
"That'd be something, wouldn't it?" I said from the back seat. I was excited. Dud didn't say anything for a minute, just staring at the road in front of him. I knew how Dud liked to be the one to think of a thing and I was beginning to be afraid he was going to say it was a dumb idea. Then I saw him nod. "Ain't one zoo in this whole county," he said. "People likes to look at wild animals. Like that cottonmouth. We could sho catch a bunch of them."
"Rattlers too," I said, leaning over the back of the front seat now. "I killed one down in the hollow Sunday. Could of caught him. And copperheads too."
"We need more than just snakes," Stack said. "That bear's what we really need. And a bobcat."
"Snakes is a good starter, though," Dud said. "Look at Bucky. With one dang snake."
That was how it started off and kept right on after we got in the house and settled down at the supper table. After I watched Coop for a minute or two I was reassured. He didn't say anything at first but I could see him listening, like he was getting interested in spite of himself. Daddy didn't say anything at first either, just went on shoveling the food in, and I was getting uneasy for fear he was going to come in against us. But that was before he got it clear that Bucky was making real money off that snake.
"And he could of got a quarter easy as a dime," Stack said. "He had a bunch of them; folks'd pay more than that. Specially if snakes was just one part of it all."
"We could put a sign up on the road," I said. "Mosses Zoo."
That was the right thing to say because, I could tell, Daddy liked the idea of having his name up there on the road. I watched his jaw slow down and for a space there he didn't take another bite. When his jaw finally stopped all the way he said, "I'm kind of leaning to the notion it just might work. I even knowed a man made money charging to look at his nervous goats. Folks is like that."
Caress and Mabel both looked at him with their mouths open and then at each other. It was easy to see they hated the whole idea, but it didn't matter about them. What did matter was what I could see in Mama's face, in the way her shut lips made a tight straight line. Then they came open. "Where you mean to keep these snakes? In the house?"
"Make a cage for them, o'course," Stack said. "A good tight one."
"What about the bear? And the wildcat?"
"Cages too," Stack said. "Make a log pen for the bear, though."
"I hate a snake," Mabel said, screwing up her face. "What if they get out?"
"They'll come right for you," Stack said.
"When you going to build all these pens?" Mama said to him. "And you with a good job, for a change. You going to quit?"
"I can find the time," Stack said, cutting his eyes away. But I could tell that was what he was aiming to do.
Mama shook her head and drew a long breath. Then she looked up, like up to heaven. "I seen a lot of foolishness in my time, but not nothing like this before. And tobacco to set and corn to plant." She looked down again, looked at Daddy who didn't look back. In fast he had the expression of a man doing some hard thinking. Mama said, "I ain't having one wild animal anywhere close to this house. Put them off in the woods. I ain't going to get caught like poor Mrs. Noah on the ark."
Considering all the work we knew we'd have to do, and Mama so strong against it besides, it's a real wonder the whole business didn't just blow on over. After a couple of days when nobody did anything but talk about it and I saw Mama getting more comfortable-looking all the time, I was afraid it was done for. After all there wasn't a one of us who was much for hard work except Coop, and he didn't get in on the talk like I wished he would. How we did finally get started was another accident, kind of, with Bucky the reason for it this time too. We had stopped by and told him to catch some more snakes for us, but we had about forgot it. Then, on Friday afternoon, he came puffing out of the woods with a box bigger than the other one. It had five grandaddy cottonmouths in it, all knotted up together like big old mud-colored ropes, the ugliest sight you ever saw. He said he had found a whole nest of them where we could catch all we wanted. So we had to do something with those snakes.
Stack started right in that evening after supper. He found enough wire on some banged-up chicken crates, and boards off the old falling-down shed out back. He worked by a lantern on till midnight, with Dud and Coop and I finally falling in to help him. It turned out big enough for a man to walk around in and looked so nice that when Daddy saw it in the morning, with the snakes crawling around in there, he got caught up too.
For the next couple of days, with all the banging and sawing and cussing, that was the noisiest place in the county. We pretty soon ran out of boards and wire and nails and stuff, and Daddy had to go to town and buy everything except for some slab boards he scrounged off Mr. Cutchins at the saw mill. It took more money than Daddy had, but Stack was right there with his last week's paycheck.
By Sunday afternoon we had four big cages finished. With all the odd-shaped slabs on them the last three didn't look as good as the snake cage, but they looked strong. Daddy said they'd hold anything up to the size of a bloodhound, so we could get started catching coons and foxes and such. But what about the bear? I said. Stack had several steel traps big enough for one and we were planning on setting them out that evening down along the creek. What if we caught the bear tonight? Daddy thought for a minute, rolling his lips in and out. "Th'ow ropes around her. Tie her all up and drag her up here. Put her in the mules' stall."
"Ain't got no ceiling," I said."A bear can climb."
"Make one. We got some more slabs. Anyhow we ain't caught her yet."
I had some more questions - Like how would you ever get her out of there? - but I let them go for the time being.
Daddy was always quick to get enthusiastic about a new project to make money, but usually he got over it in a couple of days. Not this time. Every once in a while, when he should have been out in the field with his mules and plow, I'd see him standing there admiring those cages and those cotton-mouth snakes that, for all the moving they did, might just as well have been dead. By the time he got through he'd be standing up straighter than was natural for him, and he'd walk away with a kind of step that made me think of that big old red rooster we had. Pretty soon I could tell what was going on in his head.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="28">
Green Grow the Grasses O
D. R. MacDonald
A suspicion had come down that Kenneth Munro was using dope in the house he rented above the road. "Harboring drugs" was the way Millie Patterson put it.
"I don't think he's that kind," Fiona Cameron said, in whose parlor Mr. Munro was being discussed. She had seen him coming and going, a thirtyish man with dark gray hair nearly to his shoulders. It was the only extravagant thing about him, how the wind would gust it across his eyes. He had left St. Aubin as a tot and returned suddenly now for reasons unclear.
"Drinking's one thing," Millie said. "But this."
"This what?" Fiona said. She was curious about him too, but in a different way. And Kenneth Munro, after all, was not just any outsider. His family was long gone but still remembered.
After some coaxing, Lloyd David, Millie's son, described how Munro's kitchen had been full of the smell the day he'd dropped by to cut the high wild grass out front. "There's no other smell like it," he said.
This expertise got him a hot glance from his mother. Millie missed no opportunity to point up the evils of drugs.
"But Millie," Fiona said, "a smell in his kitchen is hardly criminal."
"Fiona dear, you have no idea." Millie, a nurse for twenty-six years, recalled with horror a young man the Mounties brought into the emergency ward last winter: "In that weather, crawling down the highway in his undershorts, barking like a dog." Lloyd David chuckled, then caught himself. "He was that cold," Millie went on, "he was blue." She paused. "Marijuana." But the word came out of her mouth erotically rounded somehow, lush and foreign.
"But we hardly know Kenneth Munro," Fiona said. She knew he often stood shirtless on his little front porch late in the morning, stretching his limbs. He'd just got up, it was plain to see. He was brown from the sun, though he'd brought the brown with him. Fiona could not imagine him crawling along a highway or barking either. What she could imagine she was not likely to admit. She was from the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides but had lived in Cape Breton all her married life, nearly twenty years. Her eyes were an unusual pale green, peppered with colors you couldn't pin down, and they looked merry even when she was not. no, Millie would not easily let go of this matter. Kenneth Munro. And drugs. They had come to Cape Breton like everywhere else, and of course people saw on TV what drugs out there in the world could do. Marijuana? Just a hair's breadth from heroin, in Millie's eyes, whereas alcohol was as familiar as the weather. hadn't there been a nasty murder over in Sydney where two kids on drags stabbed an old man for his money? That shook everyone, murder being rare among Cape Bretoners, despite a reputation for lesser violence. Fiona glance out the front window: she hadn't seen Munro all day. His bedroom window was flung high and the curtains, green as June grass, whipped in the wind.
"He's got a telescope in the backyard," Lloyd David said.
"What's he up to?" Millie said.
"Well, that's the point." Fiona took a sip of tea. It was cool. "We can't say."
"He seems like a nice fella." Harald, Fiona's husband, had come in from haying and stood stout and perspiring in his overalls. "Fiona's right," he said from the doorway. "Yesterday he was asking me about the bobolinks."
"About the what?" Millie said.
"Birds, Ma. Tweet tweet?"
She glared at her son: she hated his Oakland Raiders T-shirt with the insolent pirate face on the front.
"Well," Fiona said. "He's just over the road. We'll have to find out about him. Harald, won't we?"
"You be the detective, girl."
At a table by the west window of the Sealladh Na Mara Restaurant Kenneth Munro took in the postcard view. Whatever he saw he measured against the descriptions his father had given him years ago. He could see a good portion of goose Cove and the mountain behind it whose profile darkened the water this time of the afternoon, calming the bay. Terns squabbled on a sandy bar. The waitress, whom he fancied and who, he felt, was ready for a move, came up behind him, her slender figure reflected in the glass. In her unflattering uniform- a bland aqua, the hem too long- she seemed all the more pretty. She'd worn her find brown hair unfashionably long down her back when he had seen her walking along the road, but now it was clasped in a bun.
"Ginny, suppose I was to take you to dinner some night soon? In Sydney?"
"Oh, I don't know. You're older than I am, by more than a bit." Ginny had graduated from McGill this summer and was back home, pondering her future. She loved the country she'd grown up but knew she would work in a big city before long.
"I can't deny it," Munro said. "I'm up in years. I expect your parents wouldn't approve."
"No. No, they wouldn't much. And they've always known just about everything I've done around here." She looked over at two elderly women picking daintily at their lobster salads. "There's no need they should keep on knowing."
"I'll get you home early," he said. "Early as you like."
"I suppose we could. I'm thinking we might." She went off to another table and stood with her back to him. Munro drank from his water glass, running the ice around his tongue, and smiled comfortably at the immobile brilliance of the bay, its surface inked in shadow.
That was the kind of light he imagined in his special afternoon, an ambience like that.
They ate in a steakhouse too open and noisy, but after a bottle of wine they talked freely in raised voices, discovering that they might be distantly related through a great-grandmother, and that brought them a few inches closer. Munro told her about his carpentry work in San Francisco, cabinetmaking and remodeling, and how he liked working for gays because they paid him well and were particular. Ginny told him about Montreal and how she always tried to speak French there because she got to know the people. She asked him why he was living alone over there in St. Aubin with hay and woods all around him.
"Only for awhile," Munro said. He took a photograph out of his coat and laid it on the white tablecloth, moving his face closer to hers. "That man there is my father, Ginny. The women I don't know."
"I'd say they like him, eh?"
"Something more than that going on. Look at his face."
"Is he your age there, your dad?"
"About."
"I like your gray hair. It's a bit long. His looks black."
"And very proud of it he was. Vain, even."
"He's dead?"
"He is." Munro tapped the photo. "But not here. Here, he is very much alive." He touched her hand. "Would you come with me to a field like that? Would you be one of those women, for an afternoon?"
Ginny laughed. He looked so serious in the smoldering light of the candle jar. But the people in the photograph, the man and the two women, seemed happy, and she felt quite good herself after three glasses of wine.
"You mean like a picnic?" she said.
On the way back to Rooster Hill Munro pulled off the highway near South Gut so they could take in the bay. Along the mountain ridge the lost sun threw long red embers. In the evening water below them, still as a pond, lay the blackened timbers of an old wharf.
"My father had a picture of that," Munro said. "From back in the twenties when he was a kid. There was a schooner tied up to it. Looked like another century. Here, you want a hit of this?"
He proferred what she thought was a cigarette. She stared at it.
"Am I shocking you?" Munro said.
"I've run across it, and I don't shock easy as all that."
He was afraid he'd blown it with her, but he was in a hurry, and for him puffs of grass were part of almost any pleasure.
"You are a woman," he said.
"At home here, I am still a girl."
"Well, then." He made to stub out the joint but she grabbed his wrist and took it from him, drawing a long hit.
"God help us if the Mounties come by," she said through the smoke. "And you with relatives here."
"Never met any. One afternoon of my own is all I want. With the sun out, and a warm wind coming up the field. And women like those in the photo, at their ease. That's what I came for- to take that back with me."
"Ah, Ginny, you'll be more than that."
They kissed in the car as it idled by her mailbox, once quickly like friends, then again with a long deep taste of something further. After Ginny got out, she kissed the window on the passenger side. The fierce twilight made her reckless. Through the rosy smudge on the glass, Munro watched her walk up the hill to her house, twirling her bag.
Fiona parted the parlor curtains: Kenneth Munro's car was turning slowly up his driveway, its broad taillights reminding her, in the foggy dark, of a spaceship. Wee men would be coming out of it, heading for the scattered houses of St. Aubin. Feasgar math, she'd say, I've been waiting. Fuirich beagan. Certain feelings had no shape in English, and sometimes she whispered them to herself. Harald was not a speaker above the odd phrase, but Gaelic came to her now and then like old voices. Traighean. The sands of Harris, the long shell-sand beaches that even on a dour day opened up white like a stroke of sun, still warm to your bare feet after the wind went cold and the clouds glowered over the gusting sea. Those strange and lovely summers, so distant now- brief, with emotions wild as the weather, days whose light stretched long into evening and you went to bed in a blue dusk.
"Harald," she said, "Is it time for a call on Mr. Munro?" But Harald, pink from haying, had dozed off in his chair. A rerun of Love Boat undulated across the television, the signals bouncing badly off the mountain tonight. Fiona loathed the program. When she turned off the set, Harald woke. He kissed her on the cheek, then wandered upstairs seeking his bed.
So why not go up to Munro's? Yet when she thought of him opening the door, her breath caught. Of course she could phone him first, but that was not the same thing, was it?
Fiona had shared a life with Harald for a long time, here in the country. She'd left Harris for a small farm in Nova Scotia because she loved the man who asked her away, the seaman she'd met in Stornoway where she worked in a woolen shop. Love. An gaol. Yes, she had no reservations about that word, and all it carried, never had. She loved his company, even when he was dull ( and wasn't she the dull one too sometimes, shut into herself, beaten down by a mood?). The two of them together had always seemed enough, and although they liked other people, they never longed for them. Small delights could suffice, if you were close in that way you couldn't explain to anyone else: it was the robin who nested every summer in the lilac bush at the front door, huddled in the delicate branches as they came and went, always aware of her, pleased that she didn't flee, and the families of deer they watched from the big window at the foot of their bed, grazing elegantly one moment and exploding into motion the next, and every day the Great Bras D'Eau, the different suns on its surface, the water shaded and etched by tides, stilled by winter, the crush of drift ice, and the long mountain in autumn, swept with the brilliance of leaves.
</doc><doc register="fiction general" n="29">
Stephen Peters
Babuji
It began, he thought, auspiciously enough. In the plane as they flew over the Indian subcontinent from Bangkok, Richard sat in a window seat watching a pale thundercloud rise level with and a mile off from the airplane. Far below through the mists of the cloud were the starry lights of a city, and as the plane wheeled toward the thunderhead, branches of lightning flashed and filled it from top to bottom like arteries and veins shot through with blue illuminate. The cloud twisted on its axis, larger still, flexed its billows, heaved its hoary chest, wagged an old man's beard at Richard, then its body filled again with the jagged lines of blue light, jolted up straighter, more powerful even that before. He watched for the ten minutes or so it took to approach and then pass the cloud. "What a sight!" he told the Arab man sitting next to him. "Sensational," he said over and over again. The man leaned across Richard to stare out the window and rested his thick paw on Richard's thigh for balance, an alarming, embarrassing feeling that Richard wanted over with. "What a way to start," he said matter of factly and turned away from the window, hoping the man would get off him. "What a sight that was." In half an hour they were on the ground in Bombay. It was three in the morning and pitch black.
The ride from the airport in the dark looked almost like any ride in a taxi from any airport, except that many of the trucks and cabs drove with their lights off, some even on the wrong side of the road, and except that indistinct shapes like giraffes or camels seemed always about to race out in front of the taxi from the shadows. Time to sleep when the creature images start, he thought. It was nothing more than the whimsy of fatigue. He let himself sink back into the vinyl of the passenger's seat and half closed his eyes. They came wide open again and he cringed and sat up straight as his driver, a fat, bald man in his fifties, Richard's own age, started to pass a darkened truck but then seemed happy to simply run parallel to it. "From which country do you come?" the cheerful driver asked.
Richard glanced from the back of the driver's head to the truck they had not completed passing. He felt an empty, cold space in his gut. A pair of headlights approached in the windshield but the driver seemed unconcerned. Richard would have complained at home in Minneapolis or even in New York. Here, though, he would never quite be sure what to do. "I'm from the United States," he said. He noticed that written in English on the side of the truck with no headlights were the words 'Caution! Highly Inflammable Gases!'"That's a rolling Molotov cocktail," he told the driver.
"A very good country, the USA," said the man. "I have many friends USA. Change money?"
But at that instant the oncoming headlights reached them, the talkative driver couldn't decide which way to turn, and the three vehicles tangled themselves into a rolling, spinning collision of screeching tires, breaking glass, shredded blades of slashing aluminum, and fire. Richard was not burnt. His body shot over the driver's seat and through the windshield, landing like a heap of dirty laundry in the dust and rocks at the side of the road. His neck and back were broken, and a long laceration starting at his hairline and staggering across his face and neck, ending in his lower torso, made him look as if someone had turned him half-way inside out. His mouth filled with commingling dust and blood, and for an instant, only for that instant, he felt the sharp air move across the open wound of his face. He smiled as a herd of giraffes, racing monkeys under foot, galloped away across the black wasteland.
After that he stood above his own body wondering what was meant to happen next. "There are no giraffes in India," he said aloud. The burning wreck blocked half the road, and vehicles coming to and leaving the airport picked their ways through this island of fire. Richard watched impassively as the sleepy, morbidly curious passengers stared through smokey windows and continued on. He poked the body at his feet, his own body, with the toe of his tasseled loafers. "No response," he said aloud. "I'm here."
Who would know what to do in that circumstance? His suitcase and shoulder bag sat neatly next to the road, as if waiting for him like a pair of shoes set next to the bed in the morning. He picked them up, found his way past the burning wreck, and began walking into his darkness. No cabs would stop while within sight of the fire, so he had to walk three miles before he caught a ride to his hotel.
Strangely, though, nothing happened immediately after that. He imagined while riding in the second taxi, that, since he was conscious and apparently dead, he would be delivered to some vaguely angelic keeper of souls, escorted through a heavenly customs gate. Instead he arrived at the very hotel he had previously made reservations in. The hotel was a famous one facing the waterfront, all plush and brass and glass and the Sikh doorman sported an elaborate white uniform and a huge red turban. Many of Richard's 'clients' at home - ne'er do wells and welfare mothers, people for whom he no longer felt real compassion - lived in a trailer park that would have fit neatly into that lobby.
The young man at the desk wore a neat blue suit and efficiently checked Richard in and saw to it that Richard's bags were carried to his room. He had a full mustache and a curl of his wavy black hair fell onto his forehead.
"So things just go on," Richard whispered. "Nothing happens. How stupid."
"I beg your pardon, sir?" the clerk asked. When Richard only stared at him, he said. "We don't tip here, sir. There will be a ten percent service charge added to your bill when you leave."
Richard tipped the bell hop when he got to the room anyway. "There will be more when I leave if you take good care of me," he said. The man understood, and Richard felt clever and cocky. Because he kept his budget tight, he could afford only two nights in this place, but he would have good service from the little man while he stayed. How much would he have to tip after just two nights in a place that allowed no tipping? he wondered. It couldn't be much, and anyhow how much was too much in his new state, such as it was?
But something seemed odd, different in how he handled the money. Was it in his elbows? His fingertips? He'd found it difficult to judge where his pockets were when reaching to find the tip for the man. His arms were numb.
Watching his movements carefully, judging with his eye now instead of by feel, he threw the curtains open wide and looked out over not the harbor but a poor side street below. The sun, just coming up, caught the angles and pastels of a building that was either being torn down brick by brick or going up the same way. He couldn't tell, but he thought of a cubist painting as he stood watching the sharp blades of light stab across the surface of yellow bricks. "Tangy," he said aloud and, struck by the oddness of the sensation, tasted the sight on his tongue. "Good grief." A woman in an orange sari squatted next to a cooking fire inside the painting's walls. Did she live there? What difference did it make? He wanted to deny the odd sensations creeping over him.
Apparently you live and you die and nothing changes, he told himself. He had always figured he had done his part for the world, "more than the world probably deserves," he had liked to tell the drab young woman in the desk next to his at the office. "After the final words are written and signed, we are all only really responsible for who and what we are, not for the who and what of other lives. We are, after all, alone." He liked saying that and he said it rather cynically because it shocked and offended her. She was passionate about the social welfare work they did. "The poor will always be with us," he likes adding for good measure. "So no unemployment for us."
After retreating into sleep for a few hours, he rose and shaved. His face was numb. He might have nicked himself and felt nothing. He took a long hot shower. He turned the shower on full blast and stuck his face close up to the nozzle but felt no pain, only a dull pressure, on his face. Then, after drying off, he stopped to examine himself in the mirror for changes. He was a slight man, neither tall nor short, with kinky gray hair increasingly thin in a patch on the back of his head. His features were good, not especially strong, but rather aquiline and, under the weathered grayness of age, his skin still radiated the pink associated with Sunday school and sunlight. He could be positively boyish with a drink in his hand at office social gatherings, and women often wanted to take him home and care for him. His drab young colleague had done just that a time or two, but he felt she'd become dependent and so cut her off. He saw no change in his reflection, no sign of the previous night's trauma except maybe a sourness at the back of the throat that might have still been fatigue. "I see a sourness?"
Still wondering about the jumble of vision and taste, he ventured out onto the street, searching for the tangy building he could see from his room. The same woman in the orange sari squatted next to the same fire stirring the coals. A man, presumably her husband, reclined on a nearby stack of bricks smoking a foul smelling Indian cigarette that looked like a marijuana joint. A second woman sifted dirt through a box with a screen bottom. For one brief moment the air stank of urine and tobacco, sight and smell united.
Apparently there would be no sign today, good or bad, that might explain his condition. He had expected for the world to change the moment he looked again at reality, but that didn't seem to be happening. True, there were these other, odd sensation, the numbness, the sight/taste confusion, but nothing like that was unexpected when you were jet lagged and people had told him India would assault his senses in unexpected ways. He took each step mindful of the sensation the pavement cause his heel, his shin, his knee as he walked through the heat and the crowds of tourists and vendors. He noted the time and date on his wristwatch. Things were almost the same as always. People spoke to him. He was not invisible. His elbows and fingertips had not returned to normal. In fact, his arms from shoulder to fingertips hung loose and unfeeling from his torso, but he could still use them. As if to prove this to himself, he bought a handful of peanuts from a grizzled old-timer stooping under a palm tree on the curb, and he held the peanuts in his hand. They did not fall through his skin; he did not drop them. He had not turned into Casper the Ghost, walking through walls. What could he do but continue with his plans, even when he had no real plans? The peanuts tasted? - rectangular.
He had slept most of the day away, spent one of his 2,500 rupee nights dreaming of giraffe herds cantering aimlessly over an endless savanna.</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684420" filename="FROWN_L.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="fiction mystery" n="01">
Seven
"Now what do we do?" Qwilleran asked his companions. He stood in the middle of a dead man's office in total darkness, listening to the rain driving against the house. The darkness made no difference to the Siamese, but Qwilleran was completely blind. Never had he experienced a blackout so absolute.
"We can't stay here and wait for the power lines to be repaired, that's obvious," he said as he started to feel his way out of the room. He stumbled over a leather lounge chair and bumped the computer station, and when he stepped on a tail, the resulting screech unnerved him. Sliding his feet across the floor cautiously and groping with hands outstretched, he kicked a piece of furniture that proved to be an ottoman. "Dammit, Koko! Why didn't you find this room before I bought one!" he scolded.
Eventually he located the door into the living room, but that large area was even more difficult to navigate. He had not yet learned the floor plan, although he knew it was booby-trapped with clusters of chairs and tables in mid-room. A flash of violet-blue lightning illuminated the scene for half a second, hardly enough time to focus one's eyes, and then it was darker than before. If one could find the wall, Qwilleran thought, it should be possible to follow it around to the archway leading to the foyer. It was a method that Lori Bamba's elderly cat had used after losing his sight. It may have worked well for old Tinkertom, who was only ten inches high and equipped with extra-sensory whiskers, but Qwilleran cracked his knee or bruised his thigh against every chair, chest, and table placed against the wall.
Upon reaching the archway, he knew he had to cross the wide foyer, locate the entrance to the dining room, flounder through it to the kitchen, and then find the emergency candles. A flashlight would have solved the problem, but Qwilleran's was in the glove compartment of his car. He would have had a pocketful of wooden matches if Dr. Melinda Goodwinter had not convinced him to give up his pipe.
"This is absurd," he announced to anyone listening. "We might as well go to bed, if we can find it." The Siamese were abnormally quiet. Groping his way along the foyer wall, he reached the stairs, which he ascended on hands and knees. It seemed the safest course since there were two invisible cats prowling underfoot. Eventually he located his bedroom, pulled off his clothes, bumped his forehead on a bedpost, and crawled between the lace-trimmed sheets.
Lying there in the dark he felt as if he had been in the Potato Mountains for a week, rather than twenty-four hours. At this rate, his three months would be a year and a half, mountain time. By comparison, life in Pickax was slow, uncomplicated, and relaxing. Thinking nostalgically about Moose Country and fondly about Polly Duncan and wistfully about the converted apple barn that he called home, Qwilleran dropped off to sleep.
It was about three in the morning that he became aware of a weight on his chest. He opened his eyes. The bedroom lights were glaring, and both cats were hunched on his chest, staring at him. He chased them into their own room, then shuffled sleepily through the house, turning off lights that had been on when the power failed. Three of them were in Hawkinfield's office, and once more he entered the secret room, wondering what it contained to make secrecy so necessary. Curious about the scrapbook that Koko had discovered, he found it to contain clippings from the Spudsboro Gazette - editorials signed with the initials J.J.H. Qwilleran assumed that Koko had been attracted to the adhesive with which they were mounted, probably rubber cement.
The cat might be addicted to glue, but Qwilleran was addicted to the printed word. At any hour of the day or night he was ready to read. Sitting down under a lamp and propping his feet on the editor's ottoman, he delved into the collection of columns headed 'The Editor Draws a Bead.'
It was an appropriate choice. Hawkinfield took pot shots at Congress, artists, the IRS, the medical profession, drunk drivers, educators, Taters, unions, and the sheriff. The man had an infinite supply of targets. Was he really that sour about everything? Or did he know that inflammatory editorials sold papers? From his editorial throne he railed against Wall Street, welfare programs, Hollywood, insurance companies. He ridiculed environmentalists and advocates of women's rights. Obviously he was a tyrant that many persons would like to assassinate. Even his style was abusive:
"So-called artists and other parasites, holed up in their secret coves on Little Potato and performing God knows what unholy rites, are plotting to sabotage economic growth ... Mountain squatters, uneducated and unwashed, are dragging their bare feet in mud while presuming to tell the civilized world how to approach the twenty-first century..."
The man was a mono-maniac, Qwilleran decided. He stayed with the scrapbook, and another one like it, until dawn. By the time he was ready for sleep, however, the Siamese were ready for breakfast, Yum Yum howling her ear-splitting "N-n-NOW!" Only at mealtimes did she assume her matriarchal role as if she were the official bread-winner, and it was incredible that this dainty little female could utter such piercing shrieks.
"This is Father's Day," Qwilleran rebuked her as he opened a can of boned chicken. "I don't expect a present, but I deserve a little consideration."
Father's Day had more significance at Tiptop than he knew, as he discovered when he went to Potato Cove to pick up the four batwing capes.
The rain had stopped, and feeble rays of sun were glistening on trees and shrubs. When he stood on the veranda with his morning mug of coffee, he discovered that mountain air when freshly washed heightens the senses. He was seeing details he had not noticed the day before: wildflowers everywhere, blue jays in the evergreens, blossoming shrubs all over the mountains. On the way to Potato Cove he saw streams of water gushing from crevices in the roadside cliffs -impromptu waterfalls that made their own rainbows. More than once he stopped the car, backed up, and stared incredulously at the arched spectrum of color.
The rain had converted the Potato Cove road into a ribbon of mud, and Qwilleran drove slowly, swerving to avoid puddles like small ponds. As he passed a certain log cabin he saw the apple peeler on the porch again, rocking contentedly in her high-backed mountain rocker. Today she was wearing her Sunday best, evidently waiting for someone to drive her to church. An ancient straw hat, squashed but perky with flowers, perched flatly on her white hair. What caused Qwilleran to step on the brake was the sight of her entourage: a black cat on her lap, a calico curled at her feet, and a tiger stretched on the top step. Today the shotgun was not in evidence.
Slipping his camera into a pocket, he stepped out of his car and approached her with a friendly wave of the hand. She peered in his direction without responding.
"I beg your pardon, ma'am," he called out in his most engaging voice. "Is this the road to Potato Cove?"
She rocked back and forth a few times before replying. "Seems like y'oughta know," she said with a frown. "I see'd you go by yestiddy. Road on'y goes one place."
"Sorry, but I'm new here, and these mountain roads are confusing." He ventured closer in a shambling, non-threatening way. "You have some nice cats. What are their names?"
"This here one's Blackie. That there's Patches. Over yonder is Tiger." She recited the names in a businesslike way as if he were the census taker.
"I like cats. I have two of them. Would you mind if I take a picture of them?" He held up his small camera for her approval.
She rocked in silence for a while. "Iffen I git one," she finally decided.
"I'll see that you get prints as soon as they're developed." He snapped several pictures of the group in rapid succession. "That does it! ... Thank you ... This is a nice cabin. How long have you lived on Little Potato?
"Born here. Fellers come by all the time pesterin' me to sell. You one o' them fellers? Ain't gonna sell."
"No, I'm just spending my vacation here, enjoying the good mountain air. My name's Jim Qwilleran. What's your name?" Although he was not prone to smile, he had an ingratiating manner composed of genuine interest and a caressing voice that was irresistible.
"Ev'body calls me Grammaw Lumpton, seein' as how I'm a great-grammaw four times."
"Lumpton, you say? It seems there are quite a few Lumptons in the Potatoes," Qwilleran said, enjoying his unintentional pun.
"Oughta be!" the woman said, rocking energetically. "Lumptons been here more'n a hun'erd year - raisin' young-uns, feedin' chickens, sellin' eggs, choppin' wood, growin' taters and nips, runnin' corn whiskey..."
A car pulled into the yard, the driver tooted the horn, and the vigorous old lady stood up, scattering cats, and marched to the car without saying goodbye. Now Qwilleran understood - or thought he understood - the reason for the shotgun on the porch the day before; it was intended to ward off land speculators if they became too persistent, and Grammaw Lumpton probably knew how to use it.
Despite the muddy conditions in Potato Cove, the artists and shopkeepers were opening for business. Chrysalis Beechum met him on the wooden sidewalk in front of her weaving studio. What she was wearing looked handwoven but as drab as before; her attitude had mellowed, however.
"I didn't expect you to drive up here in this mud," she said.
"It was worth it," Qwilleran said, "if only to see the miniature waterfalls making six-inch rainbows. What are the flowers all over the mountain?"
"Mountain laurel," she said. They entered the shop, stepping into the enveloping softness of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling textiles.
"Was this place ever an old schoolhouse?" he asked.
"For many years. My great-grandmother learned the three Rs here. Until twenty years ago the Taters were taught in one-room schools - eight grades in a single room, with one teacher, and sometimes with one textbook. The Spuds got away with murder! ... Here are your capes. I brought six so you'll have a color choice. What are you going to do with them, Mr...."
"Qwilleran. I'm taking them home to friends. Perhaps you could help me choose. One woman is a golden blond; one is a reddish blond; one is graying; and the other is a different color every month."
"You're not married? she asked in her forthright way but without any sign of personal interest.
"Not any more ... and never again! Did you have a power outage last night?"
"Everybody did. There's no discrimination when it comes to power lines. Taters and Spuds, we all black out together."
"Where's your mother today?"
"She doesn't work on Sundays."
With the weaver's help Qwilleran chose violet for Lori, green for Fran, royal blue for Mildred, and taupe for Hixie. He signed traveler's checks while Chrysalis packed the capes in a yarn box.
"I never saw this much money all at once," she said.
When the transaction was concluded, Qwilleran lingered, uncertain whether to broach a painful subject. Abruptly he said, "You didn't tell me that J.J. Hawkinfield was the man your brother was accused of murdering."
"Did you know him?" she asked sharply.
"No, but I'm renting his former home."
She gasped in repugnance. "Tiptop? That's where it happened - a year ago today! They called it the Father's Day murder. Wouldn't you know the press would have to give it a catchy label?"
"Why was your brother accused?"
"It's a long story," she said with an audible sigh.
"I want to hear it, if you don't mind."
"You'd better sit down," she said, kicking the wooden crate across the floor.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="02">
13
I stopped off at Rosie's on the way back to my place. I don't usually hang out in bars, but I was restless and I didn't feel like being alone just then. At Rosie's, I can sit in a back booth and ponder life's circumstances without being stared at, picked up, hit on, or hassled. After the wine at Francesca's, I thought a cup of coffee might be in order. It wasn't really a question of sobering up. The wine at Francesca's was as delicate as violets. The white wine at Rosie's comes in big half-gallon screw-top jugs you can use later to store gasoline and other flammable liquids.
Business was lively. A group of bowlers had come in, a noisy bunch of women who were celebrating their winning of some league tournament. They were parading around the room with a trophy the size of Winged Victory, all noise and whistles and cheers and stomping. Ordinarily Rosie doesn't tolerate rowdies, but their spirits were contagious and she didn't object.
I got myself a mug and filled it from the coffeepot Rosie keeps behind the bar. As I slid into my favorite booth, I spotted Henry coming in. I waved and he took a detour and headed in my direction. One of the bowlers was feeding coins into the jukebox. Music began to thunder through the bar along with cigarette smoke, whoops, and raucous laughter.
Henry slid in across from me and put his head down on his arm. "This is great. Noise, whiskey, smoke, life! I'm so sick of being with that hypochondriac of a brother. He's driving me nuts. I swear to God. His health regimen occupied our entire day. Every hour on the hour, he takes a pill or drinks a glass of water ... flushing his system out. He does yoga to relax. He does calisthenics to wake up. He takes his blood pressure twice a day. He uses little strip tests to check his urine for glucose and protein. He keeps up a running account of all his body functions. Every minor itch and pain. If his stomach gurgles, it's a symptom. If he breaks wind, he issues a bulletin. Like I didn't notice already. The man is the most self-obsessed, tedious, totally boring human being I've ever met and he's only been here one day. I can't believe it. My own brother."
"You want a drink?"
"I don't dare. I couldn't stop. They'd have to check me into detox."
"Has he always been like that?"
Henry nodded bleakly. "I never really saw it till now. Or maybe in his dotage he's become decidedly worse. I remember, as a kid, he had all these accidents. He tumbled out of trees and fell off swings. He broke his arm once. He broke a wrist. He stuck a pencil in his eye and nearly blinded himself. And the cuts. Oh my God, you couldn't let him near a knife. He had all kinds of allergies and weird things going wrong with him. He had a spastic salivary gland ... he really did. Later, he went through a ten-year period when he had all his internal organs taken out. Tonsils and adenoids, appendix, his gallbladder, one kidney, two and a half feet from his upper intestine. The man even managed to rupture his spleen. Out it came. We could have constructed an entire human being out of the parts he gave up."
I glanced up to find Rosie standing at my shoulder, taking in Henry's outburst with a placid expression. "He's having a breakdown?"
"His brother's visiting from Michigan."
"He don' like the guy?"
"The man is driving him nuts. He's a hypochondriac."
She turned to Henry with interest. "What's the matter with him? Is he sick?"
"No, he's not sick. He's neurotic as hell."
"Bring him in. I fix. Nothing to it."
"I don't think you quite understand the magnitude of the problem," I said.
"Is no problem. I can handle it. What's the fellow's name, this brother?"
"His name is William."
Rosie said "William" as she wrote it in her little notebook. "Is done. I fix. Not to worry."
She moved away from the table, her muumuu billowing out around her like a witch's cape.
"Is it my imagination or has her English gotten worse lately?" I asked.
Henry looked up at me with a wan smile.
I gave his hand a maternal pat. "Cheer up. Is done. Not to worry. She'll fix."
I was home by 10:00, but I didn't feel like continuing my cleaning campaign. I took my shoes off and used my dirty socks to do a halfhearted dusting of the spiral staircase as I went up to bed. Works for me, I thought.
I was awakened in the wee hours with a telegram from my subconscious. "Pickup," the message read. Pickup what? My eyes came open and I stared at the skylight above my bed. The loft was very dark. The stars were blocked out by clouds, but the glass dome seemed to glow with light pollution from town. The message had to be related to Tippy's presence at the intersection. I'd been brooding about the subject since David Barney first brought it up. If he was inventing, why attach her name to the story? She might have had a ready explanation for where she was that night. If he was lying about the incident, why take the chance? The repair crew had seen her, too ... well, not really her, but the pickup. Where else had I come across mention of a pickup truck?
I sat up in bed, pushed the covers back, and flipped on the light, wincing at the sudden glare. In lieu of a bathrobe, I pulled on my sweats. Barefoot, I padded down my spiral staircase, turned on the table lamp, and hunted up my briefcase, sorting through the stack of folders I'd brought home from the office. I found the file I was looking for and carried it over to the sofa, where I sat, feet tucked up under me leafing through old photocopies of the Santa Teresa Dispatch. For the third time in two days, I scanned column after column of smudgy print. Nothing for the twenty-fifth. Ah. On the front page of the local news for December 26 was the little article I'd seen about the hit-and-run fatality of an elderly man, who'd wandered away from a convalescent hospital in the neighborhood. He'd been struck by a pickup truck on upper State Street and had died at the scene. The name of the victim was being withheld, pending notification of his next of kin. Unfortunately, I hadn't made copies of the newspapers for the week after that so I couldn't read the follow-up.
I pulled out the telephone book and checked the yellow pages under Convalescent Homes & Hospitals. The sublistings were Homes, Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Rest Homes, and Sanitariums, most of which simply cross-referenced each other. Finally, under Nursing Homes, I found a comprehensive list. There was only one such facility in the vicinity of the accident. I made a note of the address and then turned the lights out and went back up to bed. If I could link that pickup to the one Tippy's father owned, it might go a long way toward explaining why she was reluctant to admit she was out. It would also verify every word David Barney'd said.
In the morning, after my usual three-mile run, a shower, breakfast, and a quick call to the office, I drove out to the South Rockingham neighborhood where the old man had been killed. At the turn of the century, South Rockingham was all ranchland, flat fields planted to beans and walnuts, harvested by itinerant crews who traveled with steam engines, cookhouses, and bedroll wagons. An early photograph shows some thirty hands lined up in front of their cumbersome, clanking machinery. Most of the men are mustachioed and glum, wearing bandannas, long-sleeved shirts, overalls, and felt hats. Staunchly they lean on their pitchforks while a dusty noon sun beats down. The land in such pictures always looks pitiless and flat. There are few trees and the grass, if it grows at all, seems patchy and sparse. Later aerial photos show the streets radiating from a round hub of land, like the spokes of a wagon wheel. Beyond the outermost rim, the squares of young citrus groves are pieced together like a quilt. Now South Rockingham is a middle-class neighborhood of modest custom-built homes, half of which went up before 1940. The balance were constructed during a miniboom in the ten years between 1955 and 1965. Every parcel is dense with vegetation, houses crowded onto every available lot. Still, the area is considered desirable because it's quiet, self-contained, attractive, and well kept.
I located the convalescent hospital, a one-story stucco structure flanked on three sides by parking lots. From the outside, the fifty-bed facility looked plain and clean, probably expensive. I parked at the curb and climbed four concrete steps to the sloping front walk. The grass on either side was in its dormant stage, clipped short, a mottled yellow. An American flag hung limply from a pole near the entrance.
I pushed through a wide door into a comfortably furnished reception area, decorated in the style of one of the better motel chains. Christmas hadn't surfaced yet. The color scheme was pleasant: blues and greens in soothing, noninflammatory shades. There was a couch covered in chintz and four matching upholstered chairs arranged so as to suggest intimate lobby chats. The magazines one the end tables were neatly fanned out in an arc of overlapping titles, Modern Maturity being foremost. There were two ficus trees, which on closer inspection turned out to be artificial. Both might have used a dusting, but at least they weren't subject to whitefly and blight.
At the desk, I asked to see the nursing home director and was directed to the office of a Mr. Hugo, halfway down the corridor to my left. This wing of the building was strictly administrative. There were no patients in evidence, no wheelchairs, gurneys, or medical paraphernalia. The very air was stripped of institutional odors. I explained my business briefly, and after a fife-minute wait Mr. Hugo's personal secretary ushered me into his office. Nursing home directors must have a lot of holes to fill in their appointment books.
Edward Hugo was a black man in his midsixties with a curly mix of gray and white hair and a wide white mustache. His complexion was glossy brown, the color of caramel. The lines in his face suggested an origami paper folded once, then flattened out again. He was conventionally dressed, but something in his manner hinted at obligatory black-tie appearances for local charity events. He shook my hand across his desk and then took his seat again while I took mine. He folded his hands in front of him on the desk. "What can I help you with?"
"I'm trying to learn the name of a former patient of yours, an old gentleman who was killed in a hit-and-run accident six years ago at Christmas."
He nodded. "I know the man you're referring to. Can you explain your interest?"
"I'm trying to verify an alibi in another criminal matter. It would help if I could find out if the driver was ever found."
"I don't believe so. Not to my knowledge, at any rate. To tell you the truth, it's always bothered me. The gentleman's name was Noah McKell. His son, Hartford, lives here in town. I can have Mrs. Rudolph look up his number if you'd like to speak to him."
He went on in this manner, direct, soft-spoken, and matter-of-fact, managing in our ten-minute conversation to give me all the information I needed in a carefully articulated format. According to Mr. Hugo's account of the night in question, Noah McKell had removed his IV, disconnected himself from a catheter, dressed himself in his street clothes, and left his private room by the window.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="03">
The lawsuit was unexpected because for fifty years Louisiana had allowed itself to be devoured and polluted by oil companies and people like Victor Mattiece. It had been a trade-off. The oil business employed many and paid well. The oil and gas taxes collected in Baton Rouge paid the salaries of state employees. The small bayou villages had been turned into boomtowns. The politicians from the governors down took the oil money and played along. All was well, and so what if some of the marshlands suffered.
Green Fund filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Lafayette. A federal judge halted the project pending a trial on all issues.
Mattiece went over the edge. He spent weeks with his lawyers plotting and scheming. He would spare no expense to win. Do whatever it took, he instructed them. Break any rule, violate any ethic, hire any expert, commission any study, cut any throat, spend any amount of money. Just win the damned lawsuit.
Never one to be seen, he assumed an even lower profile. He moved to the Bahamas and operated from an armed fortress at Lyford Cay. He flew to New Orleans once a week to meet with the lawyers, then returned to the island.
Though invisible now, he made certain his political contributions increased. His jackpot was still safe beneath Terrebonne Parish, and he would one day extract it, but one never knows when one will be forced to call in favors.
BY THE TIME the Green Fund lawyers, both of them, had waded in ankle deep, they had identified over thirty separate defendants. Some owned land. Some did exploring. Others laid pipe. Others drilled. The joint ventures and limited partnerships and corporate associations were an impenetrable maze.
The defendants and their legions of high-priced lawyers answered with a vengeance. They filed a thick motion asking the judge to dismiss the lawsuit as frivolous. Denied. They asked him to allow the drilling to continue while they waited on a trial. Denied. They squealed with pain and explained in another heavy motion how much money was already tied up in exploration, drilling, etc. Denied again. They filed motions by the truckload, and when they were all denied and it was evident there would one day be a trial by jury, the oil lawyers dug in and played dirty.
Luckily for Green Fund's lawsuit, the heart of the new oil reserve was near a ring of marshes that had been for years a natural refuge for waterfowl. Ospreys, egrets, pelicans, ducks, cranes, geese, and many others migrated to it. Though Louisiana has not always been kind to its land, it has shown a bit more sympathy for its animals. Since the verdict would one day be rendered by a jury of average and hopefully ordinary people, the Green Fund lawyers played heavy on the birds.
The pelican became the hero. After thirty years of insidious contamination by DDT and other pesticides, the Louisiana brown pelican perched on the brink of extinction. Almost too late, it was classified as an endangered species, and afforded a higher class of protection. Green Fund seized the majestic bird, and enlisted a half-dozen experts from around the country to testify on its behalf.
With a hundred lawyers involved, the lawsuit moved slowly. At times it went nowhere, which suited Green Fund just fine. The rigs were idle.
Seven years after Mattiece first buzzed over Terrebonne Bay in his jet helicopter and followed the swamplands along the route his precious canal would take, the pelican suit went to trial in Lake Charles. It was a bitter trial that lasted ten weeks. Green Fund sought money damages for the havoc already inflicted, and it wanted a permanent injunction against further drilling.
The oil companies brought in a fancy litigator from Houston to talk to the jury. He wore elephant-skin boots and a Stetson, and could talk like a Cajun when necessary. He was stout medicine, especially when compared to the Green Fund lawyers, both of whom had beards and very intense faces.
Green Fund lost the trial, and it was not altogether unexpected. The oil companies spent millions, and it's difficult to whip a bear with a switch. David pulled it off, but the best bet is always on Goliath. The jurors were not impressed with the dire warnings about pollution and the frailness of wetland ecology. Oil meant money, and folks needed jobs.
The judge kept the injunction in place for two reasons. First, he thought Green Fund had proven its point about the pelican, a federally protected species. And it was apparent to all that Green Fund would appeal, so the matter was far from over.
The dust settled for a while, and Mattiece had a small victory. But he knew there would be other days in other courtrooms. He was a man of infinite patience and planning.
THIRTY
THE TAPE RECORDER was in the center of the small table with four empty beer bottles around.
He made notes as he talked. "Who told you about the lawsuit?"
"A guy named John Del Greco. He's a law student at Tulane, a year ahead of me. He clerked last summer for a big firm in Houston, and the firm was on the periphery of the hostilities. He was not close to the trial, but the rumors and gossip were heavy."
"And all the firms were from New Orleans and Houston?"
"Yes, the principal litigation firms. But these companies are from a dozen different cities, so of course they brought their local counsel with them. There were lawyers from Dallas, Chicago, and several other cities. It was a circus."
"What's the status of the lawsuit?"
"From the trial level, it will be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal has not been perfected, but should be in a month or so."
"Where's the Fifth Circuit?"
"New Orleans. About twenty-four months after it arrives there, a three-judge panel will hear and decide. The losing party will undoubtedly request a rehearing by the full panel, and this will take another three or four months. There are enough defects in the verdict to insure either a reversal or a remand."
"What's a remand?"
"The appellate court can do any of three things. Affirm the verdict, reverse the verdict, or find enough error to send the whole thing back for a new trial. If it goes back, it's been remanded. They can also affirm part, reverse part, remand part, sort of scramble things up."
Gray shook his head in frustration as he scribbled away. "Why would anyone want to be a lawyer?"
"I've asked myself that a few times in the past week."
"Any idea what the Fifth Circuit might do?"
"None. They haven't even seen it yet. The plaintiffs are alleging a multitude of procedural sins by the defendants, and given the nature of the conspiracy, a lot of it's probably true. It could be reversed."
"Then what happens?"
"The fun starts. If either side is unhappy with the Fifth Circuit, they can appeal to the Supreme Court."
"Surprise, surprise."
"Each year the Supreme Court receives thousands of appeals, but is very selective about what it takes. Because of the money and pressure and issues involved, this one has a decent chance of being heard."
"From today, how long would it take for the case to be decided by the Supreme Court?"
"Anywhere from three to five years."
"Rosenberg would have died from natural causes."
"Yes, but there could be a Democrat in the White House when he died from natural causes. So take him out now when you can sort of predict his replacement."
"Makes sense."
"Oh, it's beautiful. If you're Victor Mattiece, and you've only got fifty million or so, and you want to be a billionaire, and you don't mind killing a couple of Supremes, then now is the time."
"But what if the Supreme Court refused to hear the case?"
"He's in good shape if the Fifth Circuit affirms the trial verdict. But if it reverses, and the Supreme Court denies cert, he's got problems. My guess is that he would go back to square one, stir up some new litigation, and try it all again. There's too much money involved to lick his wounds and go home. When he took care of Rosenberg and Jensen, one has to assume he committed himself to a cause."
"Where was he during the trial?"
"Completely invisible. Keep in mind, it is not public knowledge that he's the ringleader of the litigation. By the time the trial started, there were thirty-eight corporate defendants. No individuals were named, just corporations. Of the thirty-eight, seven are traded publicly, and he owns no more than twenty percent of any one. These are just small firms traded over the counter. The other thirty-one are privately held, and I couldn't get much information. But I did learn that many of these private companies are owned by each other, and some are even owned by the public corporations. It's almost impenetrable."
"But he's in control."
"Yes. I suspect he owns or controls eighty percent of the project. I checked out four of the private companies, and three are chartered offshore. Two in the Bahamas, and one in the Caymans. Del Greco heard that Mattiece operates from behind offshore banks and companies."
"Do you remember the seven public companies?"
"Most of them. They, of course, were footnoted in the brief, a copy of which I do not have. But I've rewritten most of it in longhand."
"Can I see it?"
"You can have it. But it's lethal."
"I'll read it later. Tell me about the photograph."
"Mattiece is from a small town near Lafayette, and in his younger years was a big money man for politicians in south Louisiana. He was a shadowy type back then, always in the background giving money. He spent big bucks on Democrats locally and Republicans nationally, and over the years he was wined and dined by big shots from Washington. He has never sought publicity, but his kind of money is hard to hide, especially when it's being handed out to politicians. Seven years ago, when the President was the Vice President, he was in New Orleans for a Republican fundraiser. All the heavy hitters were there, including Mattiece. It was ten thousand dollars a plate, so the press tried to get in. Somehow a photographer snapped a picture of Mattiece shaking hands with the VP. The New Orleans paper ran it the next day. It's a wonderful picture. They're grinning at each other like best friends."
"It'll be easy to get."
"I stuck it on the last page of the brief, just for the fun of it. This is fun, isn't it?"
"I'm having a ball."
"Mattiece dropped out of sight a few years ago, and is now believed to live in several places. He's very eccentric. Del Greco said most people believe he's demented."
The recorder beeped, and Gray changed tapes. Darby stood and stretched her long legs. He watched her as he fumbled with the recorder. Two other tapes were already used and marked.
"Are you tired?" he asked.
"I haven't been sleeping well. How many more questions?"
"How much more do you know?"
"We've covered the basics. There are some gaps we can fill in the morning."
Gray turned off the recorder and stood. She was at the window, stretching and yawning. He relaxed on the sofa.
"What happened to the hair?" he asked.
Darby sat in a chair and pulled her feet under her. Red toenails. Her chin rested on her knees. "I left it in a hotel in New Orleans. How did you know about it?"
"I saw a photograph."
"From where?"
"Three photos, actually. Two from the Tulane yearbook, and one from Arizona State."
"Who sent them to you?"
"I have contacts. They were faxed to me, so they weren't that good. But there was this gorgeous hair."
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="04">
13
Josh MacCallum and Amy Carlson sat nervously on the bench outside Hildie Kramer's office. The house was quiet, for the rest of the kids had already headed for their first classes of the day. But during breakfast Hildie had come into the dining room and instructed the two of them to come to her office at the beginning of the first period. Josh and Amy exchanged an apprehensive glance. For his part, Josh was convinced he was in trouble. Deep trouble: Jeff must have told his parents what he had said yesterday afternoon after the funeral, and Mrs. Aldrich must have called Hildie. But what was so wrong with wondering if maybe Adam hadn't really killed himself? And Jeff hadn't been mad at all - in fact, Josh thought, it seemed Jeff had believed him.
Amy, though, thought they'd been summoned by Hildie Kramer for a different reason. "I bet our moms decided to take us out of school," she said. "I bet they talked to Monica's folks, and now they're going to make us go home, too."
Josh had stared speculatively at the empty chair at the next table, which Monica Lowenstein had habitually occupied until this morning. He shook his head. "How come grown-ups always start acting weird? Monica wasn't going to do anything. She thought Adam was really dumb to kill himself. And it can't be that, anyway. If my mom was going to take me home, she'd have done it yesterday. Besides, she told me she'd decided not to. And your mom and dad didn't even come to the funeral, so how could they have talked to Monica's folks?"
Amy made a face at him. "Haven't you ever heard of the telephone?"
"That's dumb," Josh replied. "Monica's folks probably don't even know where your folks live." Amy had made no reply, but instead poked disconsolately at her oatmeal. "Maybe we're really not in any trouble at all," Josh suggested.
"Oh, sure," Amy said, scowling at him. "Did you ever get called to the principal's office when you weren't in trouble?"
For that argument, Josh had no reply at all. The two of them had sunk into a dejected silence for the rest of breakfast. Nor had it helped when the other kids had begun teasing them as they left for their various classes.
"See you later," Brad Hinshaw had called. "If you're still here!" Laughing, he'd shoved his way through the front door into the bright morning sunlight, while Josh and Amy perched on the bench outside Hildie's office, the relative gloom of the large foyer doing nothing to improve their mood.
Finally the door to Hildie's office opened and Hildie herself stepped out to usher them inside. "Well, look at the two of you," she said, smiling at them. "From those long faces, you must have done something I haven't heard about yet!" As Josh and Amy eyed one another nervously, she burst out laughing. "If I'd known you were going to worry yourselves to death, I wouldn't have said a thing at breakfast. I'd have just stopped you on your way to class. Now come on in."
Warily, the two children followed Hildie into her office. For some reason both of them felt vaguely relieved when she didn't close the door. Hildie, noting their response, smiled to herself. Long ago she'd discovered that all the kids got nervous when she called them in for a closed-door conference. It was as if they instinctively knew that a closed door meant some kind of dressing-down. Conversely, she'd also discovered that the simple act of closing the door was enough to strike terror into the heart of the occasional troublemaker.
"I was talking to Dr. Engersol last night," she told them, settling herself into the chair behind her desk as Josh and Amy perched anxiously on the couch. "With Monica leaving school, there are two vacant places in his seminar. He and I both think you two are ideal candidates to take their places."
Josh felt a quick thrill of anticipation, remembering Jeff telling him a week ago about the seminar, but refusing to talk about exactly what they were doing. All he knew was that it involved computers - something he'd loved since the first moment he'd seen one, when he was only five - and that only a few kids in the school were allowed to be in it.
The smartest, most talented kids.
Adam and Jeff Aldrich, and Monica Lowenstein, and a few others.
Jeff. What about his place? Was it possible that he was coming back to school after all? He voiced the question even as it came into his head, and Hildie's smile broadened.
"He's coming back tomorrow," she told him. "Which should make you happy, right? He's your best friend, isn't he?"
"Except for Amy," Josh replied. "Is he still going to be in the seminar?"
"As far as I know."
"But what's it about?" Amy asked. "None of the kids who are in it ever talk about it."
"Well, it's hardly a big secret," Hildie replied. "Basically, it's a class in artificial intelligence."
Josh's eyes widened. "Wow. You mean like in teaching computers how to think?"
"Exactly. And since both of you seem to have remarkable abilities in math, we think you'd fit in very well."
Amy looked uncertain. "I don't really like computers," she said. "All the games are kind of dumb, once you've played them a couple of times. I mean, it's always the same stuff, over and over again."
"And why do you think it's always the same stuff?" Hildie asked.
Amy looked puzzled by the question, but Josh saw the answer instantly.
"Because all a computer does is put things together the way it's told to. It can't figure out anything new, because it can't think like people can."
Amy's brows knit as she concentrated on the idea. "But how could a computer ever think like a person?" she asked.
"That's what the seminar is all about," Hildie explained. "Most of what Dr. Engersol is trying to do is learn how people think. In a way, our brains are like computers, but there's a big difference. Somehow, we manage to put all the data in our heads together and come up with new ideas. Computers can't do that. A lot of people think that if we can figure out just how our brains come up with new ideas, we might be able to design a computer to do it, too. That's what artificial intelligence is all about."
"But what would we be doing?" Amy asked.
Hildie shrugged. "Dr. Engersol will have to explain that to you. But I can promise you, you'll like the seminar. Everyone who's been in it loves it." She smiled ruefully. "Unfortunately, I don't think I understand it enough to know quite why they love it, but they do."
"I don't know," Amy said, fidgeting on the couch. "Do I have to take it? What if I don't want to?"
"Well, I'm sure if you don't want to, Dr. Engersol will understand," Hildie told her. "Of course, you probably won't get to move down to the second floor, but it's entirely up to you."
"The second floor?" Amy asked, her interest suddenly engaged. The rooms on the second floor were much larger than the ones on the third, which had originally been the servants' quarters when the mansion had been built. "Why would we get to move downstairs?"
Hildie smiled as if it should have been obvious. "It has to do with the seminar. All the students in Dr. Engersol's class are issued special computers, and the rooms on the third floor are just too small. And since Adam's room, and Monica's, are empty..." She left the bait hanging. As she'd been certain would happen, both Amy and Josh snatched at it.
"Could we move downstairs today?" Amy asked eagerly. "This morning?"
Hildie chuckled. "You can move right now, if you want to," she told them. "Does that mean you both want to join the seminar?"
The two children agreed eagerly. Hildie took two pieces of paper out of a file folder that was already lying on her desk. "In that case, here are your new schedules. Starting tomorrow, you'll both be going into the new class first period. Amy, you'll be moved into the mathematics class that meets at two, and I've put you into the same one, Josh."
Josh broke into a smile. "Since we're taking another class, does that mean we can stop doing P.E.?" he asked eagerly.
Hildie made a face of exaggerated disapproval. "No, it doesn't mean you can stop doing P.E. But it does mean," she added, as Josh's face fell, "that we'll be making some changes in that, too. So as soon as you leave here, I want you both to go to the gym behind the college field house and see Mr. Iverson. I'll give you a note telling him why you're there, and he'll give you some tests and then help you set up a gym schedule that won't interfere with any of your classes. Okay?"
Both children, slightly dazed by the sudden change in the schedules that had been set up little more than a week ago, nodded silently, and Hildie handed them the note for Joe Iverson, who headed the university's physical education program. Years ago, working closely with George Engersol, Iverson had designed a special regimen for the children in the Academy, emphasizing individual sports over team activities.
"None of the kids we're targeting is going to grow up to be a team player," Engersol had explained even before they'd taken in their first students. "They'll all be unique kids, and most if not all of them will have had nothing but bad experiences with team sports. If they're forced into situations where they have to curtail their intellects in favor of someone else's physical superiority, they'll only resent it, and I don't intend for this Academy to be an unhappy experience for any of them. We'll have a few kids who love baseball and football, but for the most part physical competition just won't mean anything to our kids. So I want you to design a program that will give them the exercise they need, but not bore them. Is it possible?"
Iverson had nodded. "Anything's possible," he'd agreed, and set to work. What he'd come up with was a program emphasizing swimming, which he knew most kids loved to start with, and gymnastics, which, of one was to achieve any sort of proficiency, demanded nearly as much brain power as muscle development. Furthermore, the sports he'd selected for the kids were individual enough that most of them were able to work their P.E. sessions in at their own convenience, merely appearing at the pool or gym when they had time, so long as they put in a minimum of five hours a week.
For Josh and Amy the choice had been easy - an hour a day in the pool was more like playing than anything else.
Now, they left Hildie Kramer's office and headed across the lawn and out the gate, then turned left into the main university campus, on the other side of which were the field house, a smaller gym, the pool, and the football stadium. Amy gazed curiously at Josh.
"How come they have to change our P.E.? Why can't we just keep going swimming every day, like we have been?"
Josh shrugged. "Maybe they have something special for the kids in the seminar."
"But why?" Amy pressed. "What's dumb old P.E. got to do with artificial intelligence?"
"Who cares?" Josh grinned. "We get new rooms and new computers, don't we?"
Amy nodded halfheartedly. The new room was great - she was already looking forward to that. But she didn't really care about the new computer, and the thing with changing her P.E. program seemed stupid. She started to say something else, then changed her mind. After all, Josh didn't know any more about the seminar than she did, and the other kids in it hadn't ever said a word.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="05">
By the time I got down there, the Weasel had his notepad and tape recorder out. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. "Lieutenant Smith," he said. "I wonder if I could talk to you."
"I'm pretty busy," I said.
"Come on," Connor called to me. "Time's a'wasting." He was holding the door open for me.
I started toward Connor. The Weasel fell in step with me. He held a tiny black microphone toward my face. "I'm taping, I hope you don't mind. After the Malcolm case, we have to be extra careful. I wonder if you would comment on racial slurs allegedly made by your associate Detective Graham during last night's Nakamoto investigation?"
"No," I said. I kept walking.
"We've been told he referred to them as 'fucking Japs.'"
"I have no comment," I said.
"He also called them 'little Nips.' Do you think that kind of talk is appropriate to an officer on duty?"
"Sorry. I don't have a comment, Willy."
He held the microphone up to my face as we walked. It was annoying. I wanted to slap it away, but I didn't. "Lieutenant Smith, we're preparing a story on you and we have some questions about the Martinez case. Do you remember that one? It was a couple of years back."
I kept walking. "I'm pretty busy now, Willy," I said.
"The Martinez case resulted in accusations of child abuse brought by Sylvia Morelia, the mother of Maria Martinez. There was an internal affairs investigation. I wondered if you had any comment."
"No comment."
"I've already talked to your partner at that time, Ted Anderson. I wondered if you had any comment on that."
"Sorry. I don't."
"Then you aren't going to respond to these serious allegations against you?"
"The only one I know that's making allegations is you, Willy."
"Actually, that's not entirely accurate," he said, smiling at me. "I'm told the D.A.'s office has started an investigation."
I said nothing. I wondered if it was true.
"Under the circumstances, Lieutenant, do you think the court made a mistake in granting you custody of your young daughter?"
All I said was, "Sorry. No comment, Willy." I tried to sound confident. I was starting to sweat.
Connor said, "Come on, come on. No time." I got into the car. Connor said to Wilhelm, "Son, I'm sorry, but we're busy. Got to go." He slammed the car door. I started the engine. "Let's go," Connor said.
Willy stuck his head in the window. "Do you think that Captain Connor's Japan-bashing represents another example of the department's lack of judgment in racially sensitive cases?"
"See you, Willy." I rolled up the window, and started driving down the hill.
"A little faster wouldn't bother me," Connor said.
"Sure," I said. I stepped on the gas.
In the rearview mirror, I saw the Weasel running for his Mercedes. I took the turn faster, tires squealing. "How did that lowlife know where to find us? He monitoring the radio?"
"We haven't been on the radio," Connor said. "You know I'm careful about the radio. But maybe the patrol car phoned in something when we arrived. Maybe we have a bug in this car. Maybe he just figured we'd turn up here. He's a scumbag. And he's connected to the Japanese. He's their plant at the Times. Usually the Japanese are a little more classy about who they associate with. But I guess he'll do everything they want done. Nice car, huh?"
"I notice it's not Japanese."
"Can't be obvious," Connor said. "He following us?"
"No. I think we lost him. Where are we going now?"
"U.S.C. Sanders has had enough time screwing around by now."
We drove down the street, down the hill, toward the 101 freeway. "By the way," I said. "What was all that about the reading glasses?"
"Just a small point to be verified. No reading glasses were found, right?"
"Right. Just sunglasses."
"That's what I thought," Connor said.
"And Graham says he's leaving town. Today. He's going to Phoenix."
"Uh-huh." He looked at me. "You want to leave town, too?"
"No," I said.
"Okay," Connor said.
I got down the hill and onto the 101 going south. In the old days it would be ten minutes to U.S.C. Now it was more like thirty minutes. Especially now, right at midday. But there weren't any fast times, anymore. Traffic was always bad. The smog was always bad. I drove through haze.
"You think I'm being foolish?" I said. "You think I should pick up my kid and run, too?"
"It's one way to handle it." He sighed. "The Japanese are masters of indirect action. It's their instinctual way to proceed. If someone in Japan is unhappy with you, they never tell you to your face. They tell your friend, your associate, your boss. In such a way that the word gets back. The Japanese have all these ways of indirect communication. That's why they socialize so much, play so much golf, go drinking in karaoke bars. They need these extra channels of communication because they can't come out and say what's on their minds. It's tremendously inefficient, when you think about it. Wasteful of time and energy and money. But since they cannot confront - because confrontation is almost like death, it makes them sweat and panic - they have no other choice. Japan is the land of the end run. They never go up the middle."
"Yeah, but..."
"So behavior that seems sneaky and cowardly to Americans is just standard operating procedure to Japanese. It doesn't mean anything special. They're just letting you know that powerful people are displeased."
"Letting me know? That I could end up in court over my daughter? My relationship with my kid could be ruined? My own reputation could be ruined?"
"Well, yes. Those are normal penalties. The threat of social disgrace is the usual way you're expected to know of displeasure."
Well, I think I know it, now," I said. "I think I get the fucking picture."
"It's not personal," Connor said. "It's just the way they proceed."
"Yeah, right. They're spreading a lie."
"In a sense."
"No, not in a sense. It's a fucking lie."
Connor sighed. "It took me a long time to understand," he said, "that Japanese behavior is based on the values of a farm village. You hear a lot about samurai and feudalism, but deep down, the Japanese are farmers. And if you lived in a farm village and you displeased the other villagers, you were banished. And that meant you died, because no other village would take in a troublemaker. So. Displease the group and you die. That's the way they see it.
"It means the Japanese are exquisitely sensitive to the group. More than anything, they are attuned to getting along with the group. It means not standing out, not taking a chance, not being too individualistic. It also means not necessarily insisting on the truth. The Japanese have very little faith in truth. It strikes them as cold and abstract. It's like a mother whose son is accused of a crime. She doesn't care much about the truth. She cares more about her son. The same with the Japanese. To the Japanese, the important thing is relationships between people. That's the real truth. The factual truth is unimportant."
"Yeah, fine," I said. "But why are they pushing now? What's the difference? This murder is solved, right?"
"No, it's not," Connor said.
"It's not?"
"No. That's why we have all the pressure. Obviously, somebody badly wants it to be over. They want us to give it up."
"If they are squeezing me and squeezing Graham - how come they're not squeezing you?"
"They are," Connor said.
"How?"
"By making me responsible for what happens to you."
"How are they making you responsible? I don't see that."
"I know you don't. But they do. Believe me. They do."
I looked at the line of cars creeping forward, blending into the haze of downtown. We passed electronic billboards for Hitachi (#1 IN COMPUTERS IN AMERICA), for Canon (AMERICA'S COPY LEADER), and Honda (NUMBER ONE RATED CAR IN AMERICA!). Like most of the new Japanese ads, they were bright enough to run in the daytime. The billboards cost thirty thousand dollars a day to rent; most American companies couldn't afford them.
Connor said, "The point is the Japanese know they can make it very uncomfortable. By raising the dust around you, they are telling me, 'handle it.' Because they think I can get this thing done. Finish it off."
"Can you?"
"Sure. You want to finish it off now? Then we can go have a beer, and enjoy some Japanese truth. Or do you want to get to the bottom of why Cheryl Austin was killed?"
"I want to get to the bottom."
"Me, too," Connor said. "So let's do it, k<*_>o-stroke<*/>hai. I think Sanders's lab will have interesting information for us. The tapes are the key, now."
Phillip Sanders was spinning like a top. "The lab is shut down," he said. He threw up his hands in frustration. "And there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing."
Connor said, "When did it happen?"
"An hour ago. Buildings and Grounds came by and told everybody in the lab to leave, and they locked it up. Just like that. There's a big padlock on the front door, now."
I said, "And the reason was?"
"A report that structural weakness in the ceiling has made the basement unsafe and will invalidate the university's insurance if the skating rink comes crashing down on us. Some talk about how student safety comes first. Anyway, they closed the lab, pending an investigation and report by a structural engineer."
"And when will that happen?"
He gestured to the phone. "I'm waiting to hear. Maybe some time next week. Maybe not until next month."
"Next month."
"Yeah. Exactly." Sanders ran his hand through his wild hair. "I went all the way to the dean on this one. But the dean's office doesn't know. It's coming from high up in the university. Up where the board of governors knows rich donors who make contributions in multi-million-dollar chunks. The order came from the highest level." Sanders laughed. "These days, it doesn't leave much mystery."
I said, "Meaning what?"
"You realize Japan is deeply into the structure of American universities, particularly in technical departments. It's happened everywhere. Japanese companies now endow twenty-five professorships at M.I.T., far more than any other nation. Because they know - after all the bullshit stops - that they can't innovate as well as we can. Since they need innovation, they do the obvious thing. They buy it."
"From American universities."
"Sure. Listen, at the University of California at Irvine, there's two floors of a research building that you can't get into unless you have a Japanese passport. They're doing research for Hitachi there. An American university closed to Americans." Sanders swung around, waving his arms. "And around here, if something happens that they don't like, it's just a phone call from somebody to the president of the university, and what can he do? He can't afford to piss the Japanese off. So whatever they want, they get. And if they want the lab closed, it's closed."
I said, "What about the tapes?"
"Everything is locked in there. They made us leave everything."
"Really?"
"They were in a hell of a rush. It was gestapo stuff. Pushing and prodding us to get out. You can't imagine the panic at an American university if it thinks it may lose some funding." He sighed. "I don't know. Maybe Theresa managed to take some tapes with her. You could ask her."
"Where is she?"
"I think she went ice skating."
I frowned. "Ice skating?"
"That's what she said she was going to do. So you could check over there."
And he looked right at Connor. In a particularly meaningful way.
Theresa Asakuma wasn't ice skating. There were thirty little kids in the rink, with a young teacher trying in vain to control them.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="06">
After closing the file drawer and turning off the lamp in the den, Hatch and Lindsey stopped at Regina's room to make sure she was all right, moving quietly to the side of her bed. The hall light, falling through her door, revealed that the girl was sound asleep. The small knuckles of one fisted hand were against her chin. She was breathing evenly through slightly parted lips. If she dreamed, her dreams must have been pleasant.
Hatch felt his heart pinch as he looked at her, for she seemed so desperately young. He found it hard to believe that he had ever been as young as Regina was just then, for youth was innocence. Having been raised under the hateful and oppressive hand of his father, he had surrendered innocence at an early age in return for an intuitive grasp of aberrant psychology that had permitted him to survive in a home where anger and brutal 'discipline' were the rewards for innocent mistakes and misunderstandings. He knew that Regina could not be as tender as she looked, for life had given her reasons of her own to develop thick skin and an armored heart.
Tough as they might be, however, they were both vulnerable, child and man. In fact, at that moment Hatch felt more vulnerable than the girl. If given a choice between her infirmities - the game leg, the twisted and incomplete hand - and whatever damage had been done to some deep region of his brain, he would have opted for her physical impairments without hesitation. After recent experiences, including the inexplicable escalation of his anger into blind rage, Hatch did not feel entirely in control of himself. And from the time he had been a small boy, with the terrifying example of his father to shape his fears, he had feared nothing half as much as being out of control.
I will not fail you, he promised the sleeping child.
He looked at Lindsey, to whom he owned his lives, both of them, before and after dying. Silently he made her the same promise: I will not fail you.
He wondered if they were promises he could keep.
Later, in their own room, with the lights out, as they lay on their separate halves of the bed, Lindsey said, "The rest of the test results should be back to Dr. Nyebern tomorrow."
Hatch had spent most of Saturday at the hospital, giving blood and urine samples, submitting to the prying of X-ray and sonogram machines. At one point he had been hooked up to more electrodes than the creature that Dr. Frankenstein, in those old movies, had energized from kites sent aloft in a lightning storm.
He said, "When I spoke to him today, he told me everything was looking good. I'm sure the rest of the tests will all come in negative, too. Whatever's happening to me, it has nothing to do with any mental or physical damage from the accident or from being ... dead. I'm healthy, I'm okay."
"Oh, God, I hope so."
"I'm just fine."
"Do you really think so?"
"Yes, I really think so, I really do." He wondered how he could lie to her so smoothly. Maybe because the lie was not meant to hurt or harm, merely to soothe her so she could get some sleep.
"I love you," she said.
"I love you, too."
In a couple of minutes - shortly before midnight, according to the digital clock at bedside - she was asleep, snoring softly.
Hatch was unable to sleep, worrying about what he might learn of his future - or lack of it - tomorrow. He suspected that Dr. Nyebern would be gray-faced and grim, bearing somber news of some meaningful shadow detected in one lobe of Hatch's brain or another, a patch of dead cells, lesion, cyst, or tumor. Something deadly. Inoperable. And certain to get worse.
His confidence had been increasing slowly ever since he had gotten past the events of Thursday night and Friday morning, when he had dreamed of the blonde's murder and, later, had actually followed the trail of the killer to the Route 133 off-ramp from the San Diego Freeway. The weekend had been uneventful. The day just past, enlivened and uplifted by Regina's arrival, had been delightful. Then he had seen the newspaper piece about Cooper, and had lost control.
He hadn't told Lindsey about the stranger's reflection that he had seen in the den mirror. This time he was unable to pretend that he might have been sleepwalking, half awake, half dreaming. He had been wide awake, which meant the image in the mirror was an hallucination of one kind or another. A healthy, undamaged brain didn't hallucinate. He hadn't shared that terror with her because he knew, with the receipt of the test results tomorrow, there would be fear enough to go around.
Unable to sleep, he began to think about the newspaper story again, even though he didn't want to chew on it any more. He tried to direct his thoughts away from William Cooper, but he returned to the subject the way he might have obsessively probed at a sore tooth with his tongue. It almost seemed as if he were being forced to think about the truck driver, as if a giant mental magnet was pulling his attention inexorably in that direction. Soon, to his dismay, anger rose in him again. Worse, almost at once, the anger exploded into fury and a hunger for violence so intense that he had to fist his hands at his sides and clench his teeth and struggle to keep from letting loose a primal cry of rage.
From the banks of mailboxes in the breezeway at the main entrance to the garden apartments, Vassago learned that William Cooper was in apartment twenty-eight. He followed the breezeway into the courtyard, which was filled with palms and ficuses and ferns and too many landscape lights to please him, and he climbed an exterior staircase to the covered balcony that served the second-floor units of the two-story complex.
No one was in sight. Palm Court was silent, peaceful.
Though it was a few minutes past midnight, lights were on in the Cooper apartment. Vassago could hear a television turned low.
The window to the right of the door was covered with Levolor blinds. The slats were not tightly closed. Vassago could see a kitchen illuminated only by the low-wattage bulb in the range hood.
To the left of the door a larger window looked onto the balcony and courtyard from the apartment living room. The drapes were not drawn all the way shut. Through the gap, a man could be seen slumped in a big recliner with his feet up in front of the television. His head was tilted to one side, his face toward the window, and he appeared to be asleep. A glass containing an inch of golden liquid stood beside a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel's on a small table next to the recliner. A bag of cheese puffs had been knocked off the table, and some of the bright orange contents had scattered across the bile-green carpet.
Vassago scanned the balcony to the left, right, and on the other side of the courtyard. Still deserted.
He tried to slide open Cooper's living-room window, but it was either corroded or locked. He moved to the right again, toward the kitchen window, but he stopped at the door on the way and, without any real hope, tried it. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, went inside - and locked it behind him.
The man in the recliner, probably Cooper, did not stir as Vassago quietly pulled the drapes all the way shut across the big living-room window. No one else, passing on the balcony, would be able to look inside.
Already assured that the kitchen, dining area, and living room were deserted, Vassago moved catlike through the bathroom and two bedrooms (one without furniture, used primarily for storage) that comprised the rest of the apartment. The man in the recliner was alone.
On the dresser in the bedroom, Vassago spotted a wallet and a ring of keys. In the wallet he found fifty-eight dollars, which he took, and a driver's license in the name of William X. Cooper. The photograph on the license was of the man in the living room, a few years younger and, of course, not in a drunken stupor.
He returned to the living room with the intention of waking Cooper and having an informative little chat with him. Who is Lindsey? Where does she live?
But as he approached the recliner, a current of anger shot through him, too sudden and causeless to be his own, as if he were a human radio that received other people's emotions. And what he was receiving was the same anger that had suddenly struck him while he had been with his collection in the funhouse hardly an hour ago. As before, he opened himself to it, amplified the current with his own singular rage, wondering if he would receive visions, as he had on that previous occasion. But this time, as he stood looking down on William Cooper, the anger flared too abruptly into insensate fury, and he lost control. From the table beside the recliner, he grabbed the Jack Daniel's by the neck of the bottle.
Lying rigid on his bed, hands fisted so tightly that even his blunt fingernails were gouging painfully into his palms, Hatch had the crazy feeling that his mind had been invaded. His flicker of anger had been like opening a door just a hairline crack but wide enough for something on the other side to get a grip and tear it off its hinges. He felt something unnameable storming into him, a force without form or features, defined only by its hatred and rage. Its fury was that of the hurricane, the typhoon, beyond mere human dimensions, and he knew that he was too small a vessel to contain all of the anger that was pumping into him. He felt as if he would explode, shatter as if he were not a man but a crystal figurine.
The half-full bottle of Jack Daniel's whacked the side of the sleeping man's head with such impact that it was almost as loud as a shotgun blast. Whiskey and sharp fragments of glass showered up, rained down, splattered and clinked against the television set, the other furniture, and the walls. The air was filled with the velvety aroma of corn-mash bourbon, but underlying it was the scent of blood, for the gashed and battered side of Cooper's face was bleeding copiously.
The man was no longer merely sleeping. He had been hammered into a deeper level of unconsciousness.
Vassago was left with just the neck of the bottle in his hand. It terminated in three sharp spikes of glass that dripped bourbon and made him think of snake fangs glistening with venom. Shifting his grip, he raised the weapon above his head and brought it down, letting out a fierce hiss of rage, and the glass serpent bit deep into William Cooper's face.
The volcanic wrath that erupted into Hatch was unlike anything he had ever experienced before, far beyond any rage that his father had ever achieved. Indeed, it was nothing he could have generated within himself for the same reason that one could not manufacture sulfuric acid in a paper cauldron: the vessel would be dissolved by the substance it was required to contain. A high-pressure lava flow of anger gushed into him, so hot that he wanted to scream, so white-hot that he had no time to scream. Consciousness was burned away, and he fell into a mercifully dreamless darkness where there was neither anger nor terror.
Vassago realized that he was shouting with wordless, savage glee. After a dozen or twenty blows, the glass weapon had utterly disintegrated. He finally, reluctantly dropped the short fragment of the bottle neck still in his white-knuckled grip.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="07">
100
BRENDON MOODY could not let go of his gut reaction to Karen Grant. The last week of July, as he impatiently waited for the subpoena to be issued by the Chicago court, he wandered around the lobby of the Madison Arms Hotel. It was obvious that Anne Webster had finally retired from the agency. Her desk had been replaced by a handsome cherrywood table, and in general the decor of the agency had become more sophisticated. Moody decided it was time to pay another visit to Karen Grant's ex-partner, this time at her home in Bronxville.
Anne was quick to let Brendon know that she had been deeply offended by Karen's attitude. "She kept after me to move up the sale. The ink wasn't dry on the contract when she told me that it was not necessary for me to come into the office at all, that she would handle everything. Then immediately she replaced my things with new furniture for that boyfriend of hers. When I think of how I used to stick up for her when people made remarks about her, let me tell you, I feel like a fool. Some grieving widow!"
"Mrs. Webster," Moody said, "this is very important. I think there is a chance that Laurie Kenyon is not guilty of Allan Grant's murder. But she'll go to prison next month unless we can prove that someone else did kill him. Will you please go over that evening again, the one you spent at the airport with Karen Grant? Tell me every detail, no matter how unimportant it seems. Start with the drive out."
"We left for the airport at eight o'clock. Karen had been talking to her husband. She was terribly upset. When I asked her what was wrong, she said some hysterical girl had threatened him and he was taking it out on her."
"Taking it out on her? What did she mean by that?"
"I don't know. I'm not a gossip and I don't pry."
If there's anything I'm sure of, it's that, Brendon thought grimly. "Mrs. Webster, what did she mean?"
"Karen had been staying at the New York apartment more and more these last months, ever since she met Edwin Rand. I have the feeling that Allan Grant let her know he was mighty sick of the situation. On the way to the airport, she said something like, I should be straightening this out with Allan, not running a driving service.
"I reminded her that the client was one of our most valuable, and that she had a real aversion to hired cars."
"Then the plane was late."
"Yes. That really upset Karen. But we went to the VIP lounge and had a drink. Then Spartacus came on. It's my-"
"Your favorite movie of all time. Also a very long one. And you do tend to fall asleep. Can you be sure that Karen Grant sat and watched the entire movie?"
"Well, I do know she was checking on the plane and went to make some phone calls."
"Mrs. Webster, her home in Clinton is forty-two miles from the airport. Was there any span of time when you did not see her for somewhere between two to two-and-a-half hours? I mean was it possible that she might have left you and driven to her home?"
"I really didn't think I slept but..." She paused.
"Mrs. Webster, what is it?"
"It's just that when we picked up our client and left the airport, Karen's car was parked in a different spot. It was so crowded when we arrived that we had quite a walk to the terminal, but when we left it was right across from the main door."
Moody sighed. "I wish you had told me this before, Mrs. Webster."
She looked at him, bewildered. "You didn't ask me."
101
IT WAS just like it had been in those months before Lee was locked up in the clinic, Opal thought. In rented cars, she and Bic began to follow her again. Some days they'd be parked across the street and watch Lee hurry from the garage to the clinic entrance, then wait however long it took until she came out again. Bic would spend the time staring at the door, so afraid of missing even one glimpse of her. Beads of perspiration would form on his forehead, his hands would grip the wheel when she reemerged.
"Wonder what she's been talking about today?" he'd ask, fear and anger in his voice. "She's alone in the room with that doctor, Opal. Maybe he's being tempted by her."
Weekdays Lee went to the clinic in the morning. Many afternoons she and Sarah would golf together, usually going to one of the local public courses. Afraid that Sarah would notice the car following them, Bic began to phone around to the starters to inquire about a reservation in the name of Kenyon. If there was one, he and Opal would occasionally drive to that course and try to run into Sarah and Lee in the coffee shop.
He never lingered at the table, just greeted them casually and kept going, but he missed nothing about Lee. Afterwards, he'd emotionally comment about her appearance. "That golf shirt just clings to her tender body... It was all I could do not to reach over and release the clip that was holding back that golden hair."
Because of the 'Church of the Airways' program, they had to be in New York the better part of the weekend. Opal was secretly grateful for that. If they did get a glimpse of Lee and Sarah on Saturday or Sunday, the doctor and the same young man, Gregg Bennett, were always with them. That infuriated Bic.
One mid-August day he called to Opal to join him in Lee's room. The shades were drawn, and he was sitting in the rocker. "I have been praying for guidance and have received my answer," he told her. "Lee always goes to and returns from New York alone. She has a phone in her car. I have been able to get the number of that phone."
Opal cringed as Bic's face contorted and his eyes flashed with that strange compelling light. "Opal," he thundered, "do not think I have not been aware of your jealousy. I forbid you to trouble me with it again. Lee's earthly time is almost over. In the days that are left, you must allow me to fill myself with the sight and sound and scent of that pretty child."
102
THOMASINA PERKINS was thrilled to receive a note from Sarah Kenyon asking her to write a letter on Laurie's behalf to the judge who was going to sentence her.
You remember so clearly how terrified and frightened Laurie was, Sarah wrote, and you're the only person who ever actually saw her with her abductors. We need to make the judge understand the trauma Laurie suffered when she was a small child. Be sure to include the name you thought you heard the woman call the man as they rushed Laurie from the diner. Sarah concluded by writing that a known child abuser by that name had been in the Harrisburg area then and, while of course they couldn't prove it, she intended to suggest the possibility that he was the kidnapper.
Thomasina had told the story of seeing Laurie and calling the police so often that it could practically write itself. Until she got to the sticking point.
That day the woman had not called the man Jim. Thomasina knew that now with absolute certainty. She couldn't give that name to the judge. It would be like lying under oath. It troubled her to know that Sarah had wasted time and money tracking down the wrong person.
Thomasina was losing faith in Reverend Hawkins. She'd written to him a couple of times thanking him for the privilege of being on his show and explaining that, while she would never suggest that God had made a mistake, maybe they should have waited and kept listening to Him. It was just that God had given her the name of the counter boy first. Could they try again?
Reverend Hawkins hadn't bothered to answer her. Oh, she was on his mailing list, that was for sure. For every two dollars she donated, she got a letter asking for more.
Her niece had taped Thomasina's appearance on the 'Church of the Airways' program, and Thomasina loved to watch it. But as her resentment of Reverend Hawkins grew she noticed more and more things about the taped segment. The way his mouth was so close to her ear when she heard the name. The way he didn't even get Laurie's name straight. He had referred to her at one point as Lee.
Thomasina's conscience was clear when she mailed a passionate letter to the judge, describing Laurie's panic and hysteria in lurid terms but without mentioning the name Jim. She sent a copy of the letter and an explanation to Sarah, pointing out the mistake the Reverend Hawkins himself had made by referring to Laurie as Lee.
103
"IT'S GETTING CLOSER," Laurie told Dr. Donnelly matter-of-factly as she kicked off her shoes and settled back on the couch.
"What is, Laurie?"
He expected her to talk about prison, but instead she said, "The knife."
He waited.
It was Kate who spoke to him now. "Doctor, I guess we've both done our best."
"Hey, Kate," he said, "that doesn't sound like you." Was Laurie becoming suicidal? he wondered.
A wry laugh. "Kate sees the handwriting on the wall, Doctor. Got a cigarette?"
"Sure. How's it going, Leona?"
"It's pretty nearly gone. Your golf is getting better."
"Thank you."
"You really like Sarah, don't you?"
"Very much."
"Don't let her be too unhappy, will you?"
"About what?"
Laurie stretched. "I have such a headache," she murmured. "It's as though it isn't just at night anymore. Even yesterday when Sarah and I were on the golf course I could suddenly see the hand that's holding the knife."
"Laurie, the memories are coming closer and closer to the surface. Can't you let them out?"
"I can't let go of the guilt." Was it Laurie or Leona or Kate speaking? For the first time Justin couldn't be sure. "I did such bad things," she said, "disgusting things. Some secret part of me is remembering them."
Justin made a sudden decision. "Come on. We're going to take a walk in the park. Let's sit in the playground for a while and watch the kids."
The swings and slides, the jungle gym and seesaws were filled with young children. They sat on a park bench near the watchful mothers and nannies. The children were laughing, calling to each other, arguing about whose turn it was to be on the swing. Justin spotted a little girl who looked to be about four. She was happily bouncing a ball. Several times the nanny called to the child, "Don't go so far away, Christy." The child, totally absorbed in keeping the ball bouncing, did not seem to hear. Finally the nanny got up, hurried over and firmly caught the ball. "I said, stay in the playground," she scolded. "If you chased that ball in the road, one of those cars would hit you."
"I forgot." The small face looked forlorn and repentant, then, turning and seeing Laurie and Justin watching her, immediately brightened. She ran to them. "Do you like my beautiful sweater?" she asked.
The nanny came up. "Christy, you mustn't bother people." She smiled apologetically. "Christy thinks everything she puts on is beautiful."
"Well, it is," Laurie said. "It's a perfectly beautiful new sweater."
A few minutes later they started back for the clinic. "Suppose," Justin said, "that little girl, very absorbed in what she was doing, wandered too close to the road and someone grabbed her, put her in a car, disappeared with her and abused her. Do you think that years later she should blame herself?"
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="08">
7:45 A.M., THURSDAY
MANHATTAN
Although she hadn't slept much thanks to her late-night call, Laurie made it a point to arrive at work a little early to compensate for having been late the day before. It was only seven forty-five as she mounted the steps to the medical examiner's office.
Going directly to the ID office, she detected a mild electricity in the air. Several of the other associate medical examiners who usually didn't come in until around eight-thirty were already on the job. Kevin Southgate and Arnold Besserman, two of the older examiners, were huddled around the coffeepot in heated debate. Kevin, a liberal, and Arnold, an arch-conservative, never agreed on anything.
"I'm telling you," Arnold was saying when Laurie squeezed through to get herself some coffee, "if we had more police on the streets, this kind of thing wouldn't happen."
"I disagree", Kevin said. "This kind of tragedy-"
"What happened now?" Laurie asked as she stirred her coffee.
"A series of homicides in Queens", Arnold said. "Gunshot wounds to the head from close range."
"Small-caliber bullets?" Laurie asked.
Arnold looked at Kevin. "I don't know about that yet."
"The posts haven't been done yet," Kevin explained.
"Were they pulled out of the river?"
"No"; Arnold said. "These people were asleep in their own homes. Now, if we had more police presence - "
"Come on, Arnold!" Kevin said.
Laurie left the two to their bickering and went over to check the autopsy schedule. Sipping her coffee, she checked at who was on autopsy besides herself and what cases were assigned. After her own name were three cases, including Stuart Morgan. She was pleased. Calvin was sticking by his promise.
Noting that the other two cases were drug overdose/toxicity cases as well, Laurie flipped through the investigator's reports. She was immediately dismayed to see that profiles of the deceased resembled the previous suspicious cases. Randall Thatcher, thirty - three years old, was a lawyer; Valerie Abrams, thirty-three, was a stockbroker.
The day before she'd feared there'd be more cases, but she'd hoped her fears wouldn't materialize. Obviously that wasn't to be the case. Already there were three more. Overnight her modest series had jumped one hundred percent.
Laurie walked through Communications on her way to the medical forensic investigative department. Spotting the police liaison office, she wondered what she should do about the suspected thievery at the Morgan apartment. For the moment she decided to let it go. If she saw Lou she might discuss the matter with him.
Laurie found Cheryl Myers in her tiny windowless office.
"No luck so far on that Duncan Andrews case," Cheryl told her before she could say a word.
"That's not why I stopped by," Laurie said. "I left word last evening with Bart that I wanted to be called if any upscale drug overdose cases came in like Duncan Andrews or Marion Overstreet. I was called last night for one. But this morning I discovered that there were two others that I wasn't called on. Have you any idea why I wasn't called?"
"No," Cherryl said. "Ted was on last night. We'll have to ask him this evening. Was there a problem?"
"Not really," Laurie admitted. "I'm just curious. Actually I probably couldn't have gone to all three scenes. And I will be handling the autopsies. By the way, did you check with the hospital about the Marion Overstereet case?"
"Sure did," Cheryl said. "I spoke with a Dr. Murray and he said that they were just following policy orders from you."
"That's what I figured," Laurie said. "But it was worth a check. Also, I have something else I'd like to ask you to do. Would you see what kind of medical records you can get, particularly surgical, on a woman by the name of Martha Schulman. I'd love to get some x-rays. I believe she lived in Bayside, Queens. I'm not sure of her age. Let's say around forty." Ever since Jordan had told Laurie about his secretary's husband's shady dealings and arrest record, she'd had a bad feeling abort the woman's disappearance, particularly in view of the odd break-in at Jordan's office.
Cheryl wrote the information down on a pad on her desk.
"I'll get right on it."
Next Laurie sought out John DeVries. As she'd feared, he was less than cordial.
"I told you I'd call you," John snapped when Laurie asked about a contaminant. "I've got hundreds of cases besides yours."
"I know you're busy," Laurie said, " but this morning I have three more overdoses like the three I had before. That brings the body count to a total Of six young, affluent, well-educated career people. Something has to be in that cocaine, and we have to find it."
"You're welcome to come up here and run the tests yourself," John said. "But I want you to leave me alone. If you don't I have to speak to Dr. Bingham."
"Why are you acting this way?"
Laurie asked. "I've tried to be nice about this."
"You're being a pain in the neck," John said.
"Fine," Laurie said. "It's wonderful to know we have a nice cooperative atmosphere around here."
Exasperated, Laurie stalked out of the lab, grumbling under her breath. She felt a hand grip her arm and she spun around, ready to slap John DeVries for having the nerve to touch her. But it wasn't John. It was one of his young assistants, Peter Letterman.
"Could I talk to you a moment?" Peter said. He glanced warily over his shoulder.
"Of course," Laurie said.
"Come into my cubbyhole," Peter said. He mentioned for Laurie to follow him. They entered what had originally been designed as a broom closet. There was barely enough room there for a desk, a computer terminal, a file cabinet, and two chairs. Peter closed the door behind them.
Peter was a thin, blond fellow with delicate features. To Laurie he appeared as the quintessential graduate student, with a marked intensity to his eyes and demeanor. Under his white lab coat was an open-necked flannel shirt.
"John is a little hard to get along with," he said.
"That's an understatement," Laurie answered.
"Lots of artists are like that," Peter continued. "And John is an artist of sorts. When it comes to chemistry and toxicology in particular, he's amazing. But I couldn't help overhearing your conversations with him. I think one of the reasons he's giving you a hard time is to make a point with the administration that he needs more funding. He's slowing up a lot of reports, and for the most part it makes little difference. I mean the people are dead. But if your suspicions are right it sounds like we could be in the lifesaving business for a change. So I'd like to help. I'll see what I can do for you even if I have to put in some overtime."
"I'd be grateful, Peter", Laurie said. "And you're right."
Peter smiled self-consciously. "We went to the same school," he said.
"Really?" Laurie said. "Where?"
"Wesleyan," Peter said."I was two years behind you, but we shared a class. Physical chemistry."
"I'm sorry but I don't remember you," Laurie said.
"Well, I was kinda a nerd then. Anyway, I'll let you know what I come up with."
Laurie returned to her office feeling considerably more optimistic about mankind with Peter's generous offer to help. Going through the day's autopsy folders, she came up with only a few questions on two of the cases similar to her question about Marion Overstreet. Just to be thorough she called Cheryl to ask her to check them out.
After changing in her office, Laurie went down to the autopsy room. Vinnie had Stuart Morgan "up" and was well prepared for her arrival. They started work immediately.
The autopsy went smoothly. As they were finishing the internal portion, Cheryl Myers came in holding a mask to her face. Laurie glanced around to make sure Calvin wasn't in sight to complain that Cheryl had not put on scrubs. Happily he wasn't in the room.
"I had some luck with Martha Schulman," she said, waving a set of x-rays. "She'd been treated at Manhattan General because she worked for a doctor on the staff. They had recent chest film which they sent right over. Want me to put it up?"
"Please," Laurie said. She wiped her hands on her apron and followed Cheryl over to the x-ray view box. Cheryl stuck the x-rays in to the holder and stepped to the side.
"They want them back right away," Cheryl explained.
"The tech in x-ray was doing me a favor by letting them out without authorization."
Laurie scanned the x-rays. They were an AP and lateral of the chest taken two years before. The lung fields were clear and normal. the heart silouette looked normal as well. Disappointed, Laurie was about to tell Cheryl to remove the films when she looked at the clavicles, or collarbones. The one on the right hand had s slight angle to it two-thirds along its length, associated with a slight increase in radiopacity. Marsha Schulman had broken her collarbone some time in the past. Though well healed, there had definitely been a fracture.
"Vinnie," Laurie called out. "Get someone to bring the x-ray we took on the headless floater."
"See something?" Cheryl asked.
Laurie pointed out the fracture, explaining to Cheryl why it appeared as it did. Vinnie brought the requested X-ray over to the view box. He snapped the new film up next to Marsha Schulman's.
"Well. look at that!" Laurie cried. She pointed to the fractured clavicle. they were identical o both films. "I think we'r looking at the same person," she said.
"Who is it?" Vinnie asked.
"The name is Marsha Schulman," Laurie said, pulling down the x-rays from the Manhattan General and handing them over to Cheryl. Then she asked Cheryl to check if Marsha Schulman had had a cholecystectomy and a hysterectomy. She told her it was important and asked her to do it immediately.
Pleased with this discovery, Laurie started her second case, Randall Thatcher. As with her first case of the day, there was essentially no pathology. The autopsy went quickly and smoothly. Again Laurie was able to document with reasonable certainty that the cocaine had been taken IV. By the time they were sewing up the body, Cheryl was back in with the news that Marsha Schulman had indeed had both operations in question. In fact, both had been performed at Manhattan General.
Thrilled by this additional confirmation, Laurie finished up and went to her office to dictate the first two cases and to make several calls. First she tried Jordan's office, only to learn that Dr. Scheffield was in surgery.
"Again?" Laurie sighed. She was disappointed not to get him right away.
"He's been ding a lot of transplants lately" Jordan's nurse explained. "He always does quite a bit of surgery, but lately he's been doing even more."
Laurie left word for Jordan to call back when he could. Then she called police headquarters and asked for Lou.
To Laurie's chagrin, Lou was unavailable. Laurie left her number and asked that he return her call when he could.
Somewhat frustrated, Laurie did her dictation, then headed back to the autopsy room for her third and final case of the day. As she waited for the elevator she wondered if Bingham might be willing to change his mind about making some kind of public statement now that there were six cases.
When the elevator doors opened, Laurie literally bumped into Lou. For a moment they looked at each other with embarrassment.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It was my fault," Lou told her. "I wasn't looking where I was going."
"I was the one who wasn't looking," Laurie said.
Then they both laughed at their self-conscious behavior.
"Were you coming to see me?" Laurie asked.
"No," Lou said, "I was looking for the Pope.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="09">
The next morning the President and Mrs. Roosevelt attended services at St. John's Episcopal Church. The sermon was satisfactorily bland and pleased the great majority of the parishioners. The First Lady said a silent prayer for the soul of Christian Asman. She tried to concentrate on the service and not to think of what circumstance had led to the death of the young lawyer.
At the suggestion of Harry Hopkins, he and not the President issued the White House statement on the death of a staff member: "'He was just the finest type of man you could imagine,' said Harry Hopkins, head of WPA and Asman's boss in the Executive Wing. 'I guess the chief regret the President and I have is that we didn't get to know him any better than we did. When a man does his work faithfully and competently, often you don't have much occasion to get personally acquainted with him.'"
The morning papers carried a brief account of Asman's death and printed the statement without comment. The Post, for example, said:
Christian Asman, an attorney on the White House staff, was found dead last night in an alley between G and H streets. Police say Asman died of gunshot wounds. They have no suspect in the shooting.
Asman, a graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law, was an attorney in New York City before joining the staff of the White House approximately a year ago. He was unmarried, and no family has been identified.
Harry Hopkins, by whom Christian Asman was employed, said 'He was just the finest type of man you could imagine ...'
Back in her office on the second floor of the White House, Mrs. Roosevelt turned over a fresh page in her yellow tablet. Even before Stan Szczygiel and Ed Kennelly arrived, she had written a list:
Who might have killed Mr. Asman?
Senator Fisher (unfortunately).
Miss Fisher (very unlikely).
Congressman Metcalf (jealousy?).
Miss Dempsey (but why?).
What is connection with Miss O'Neil?
Who was 'older woman' at Farragut?
Person not yet identified.
Kennelly nodded as he scanned the list. "We have our work cut out for us, hmm? So where do we start?"
"I suggest," said Mrs. Roosevelt, "that we simplify our work by eliminating the unlikely suspects first. It is highly unlikely, it is not, that Miss Fisher killed Mr. Asman. Even so, I suppose we are obliged to clear up any doubt on that score. We must know if Miss Fisher's relationship with Mr. Asman was the cause of the severance of the romantic relationship between her and Congressman Metcalf. If it was, then conceivably Congressman Metcalf resented that and - Well. You see what I mean."
Stan Szczygiel shook his head over the list. "It's that last entry that bothers me most," he said. "'Person not yet identified.' I've begun to think that half the population of Washington might have wanted to kill Christian Asman. After all - we have to face it - he wasn't really a very nice fellow."
"Do you want to read the autopsy report?" Kennelly asked.
"I don't like to read them," said Mrs. Roosevelt. "They are always so -"
"Clinical," said Kennelly.
She could not help but smile.
"Anyway, there are no surprises," said Kennelly. "Asman was killed by two shots from a thirty-eight caliber revolver, fired at close range. One bullet tore open the left side of his heart. The other went through his left lung. At the time of his death he had consumed enough alcohol to put his blood-alcohol level at oh-one-nine percent - which means he was drunk. Good and drunk."
"Did anyone find his coat and hat?" she asked.
"Yes. When everybody left the Hi-Ho Lounge, there was an extra hat and coat."
"'Hi-Ho Lounge.' Oh, dear!"
"Are there any witnesses to Mr. Asman's having been in the Hi-Ho Lounge? Did anyone see him leave?"
"We're checking. The bartender and the waitresses are scattered all over the city, it being Sunday. We'll talk to them tomorrow evening."
"Does it sound to you like a professional killing?" asked Mrs. Roosevelt.
"Well, whoever did it was calm and cool," said Kennelly.
"Sunday ..." she said quietly. "I think you two gentlemen deserve the rest of the day off. I'm afraid there's not much we can do, anyway."
Maybe there wasn't much for them to do the rest of that day. But there was plenty for her.
That afternoon the First Lady attended an outdoor meeting on the Ellipse. It was held outdoors because the people who had come could not afford to rent a hall. They were farmers displaced by the combined tragedies of the Depression and the Dust Bowl. Not many could even afford to come to Washington. Many were there as representatives of friends and neighbors who had collected money to make it possible for them to come - and, even so, some of them had ridden in boxcars or hitchhiked. They had come in mid-winter because this was their slow season, when they could give their time to a visit to the capitol in hope of making the government hear their pleas.
They were there this winter to urge Congress to enact the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Bill, which was designed, they had heard, to make it possible for them to make their living as farmers, the only thing they knew how to do, and get off the relief rolls.
There were only a few hundred of them. They were ragged. Some of them looked malnourished.
Mrs. Roosevelt talked with a girl who said she was eighteen yeas old. She was pregnant. Her bulging belly was not quite covered by a frayed black coat fastened with safety pins in place of missing buttons. She wore a pair of man's high-top shoes, several sizes too big for her. Her dirty hair was stringy, her complexion splotched.
"My dear, should you have come?" the First Lady asked. "In your condition, it might have been better if you had stayed at home."
"Home done come, Ma'am," said the girl.
"I ... I'm sorry. How do you mean your home -?"
"We-uns live in our truck. Me and the ol' man and the baby ...and th' other baby, comin'. Come from West Virginia. Ain' nothin' else to do. Ain' got no land no more. Ain' got no work. Might's well come see if we can argue for some help."
Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was standing beside the First Lady, listening.
"Do you know who we are?" Mrs. Roosevelt asked the girl.
The girl shook her head.
"This is Mr. Wallace, Mr. Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture. And I am Mrs. Roosevelt."
The girl's mouth fell open, and she glanced back and forth between them; but the First Lady remained uncertain that the girl knew who she and Wallace were.
"We are going to do all we can to help you, dear. Everything we can. As quickly as we can."
Mrs. Roosevelt did not make a speech that day. In the damp cold of that February afternoon, she met and talked personally with nearly every one of the farmers and their wives.
On Monday morning the First Lady telephoned the Georgetown home of Senator John Fisher shortly after ten o'clock - when, she had surmised, the senator himself would have left the house for Capitol Hill. As she had anticipated, Joan Fisher answered. Mrs. Roosevelt asked her if she would mind stopping by the White House at her earliest convenience. Joan Fisher said she could be there in an hour. Her tone suggested that she suspected the invitation was actually a summons.
Mrs. Roosevelt spent that hour dictating her column and going through mail. The young woman was prompt and arrived by eleven.
Instinctively, the First Lady was prepared to like Joan Fisher. She was one of those striking blondes who might have been obtrusively spectacular; but she had subdued her appearance in a measured way that suggested she was embarrassed about being so beautiful, but couldn't help it. She had on a black knit wool dress, with skirt at mid-calf length as style dictated. She wore a strand of pearls and a small diamond in a gold setting on her right hand.
Conceding inwardly that her imagination might have escaped discipline, Mrs. Roosevelt thought she saw something more in Joan Fisher: that the young woman was a little cynical and world-weary, as well as discouraged and unhappy.
"I am sorry to have to ask you to come to see me on such an unfortunate occasion, Miss Fisher. I know the death of Mr. Christian Asman must distress you deeply."
Joan Fisher shrugged, as though the death of Asman only added another element to a burdensome life. "He was a friend," she said quietly.
"Miss Fisher," said Mrs. Roosevelt a little more firmly, "I have to ask you some rather personal questions. I have asked you to come here, since I believe it will be easier for you to talk to me than it would be to talk to an investigator from the District Police."
"He was murdered," the young woman said dully.
"More than that, he was a suspect in another murder."
Joan Fisher's eyes widened. "Chris ... My god, who could he have murdered?"
"For the moment, I will not answer that question. What I want to know is, can you think of anyone he might have wanted to kill?"
Joan Fisher shook her head slowly.
"Then, can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill Mr. Asman?"
"My father, of course," she answered. "He threatened to do it."
"I feel I can hardly ask you if you think it's possible your father did it."
"Go ahead and ask me. I'll tell you. It's possible. I don't think he did, but he could have. Chris was killed - what? Eight-thirty or nine o'clock? My father was not at home. Saturday night is his poker night. They don't begin to play until nine. It's possible he shot Chris and went on to his poker game. Not likely, but possible."
"So you yourself were at home Saturday evening?"
"Do you think I killed him?"
"No. But we may as well hear you say you didn't."
"My father's poker night is my mother's bridge night," said Joan Fisher. "Three of her friends were at the house all evening. I serve their drinks and food."
Inwardly Mrs. Roosevelt was relieved: for the young woman, first, but also to have a name off her list of suspects.
"Your father says you were at one time engaged to marry Congressman Metcalf."
"Yes. We broke off the engagement about three months ago."
"I said I have to ask personal questions. Was your relationship with Mr. Asman the reason you and the congressman parted?"
"No, not really. I don't think you could say that."
"Were you seeing Mr. Asman when you were still engaged to Congressman Metcalf?"
Joan Fisher was becoming increasingly disturbed by the questions; whether from outrage over their violation of her privacy or because the questions were about to elicit something she didn't want to tell, Mrs. Roosevelt could not be certain. But the young woman's face had stiffened. Her lips were rigid.
"I began to see Chris when I was still engaged to Vern," she said curtly.
"Mr. Asman seems to have had a singular appeal to young women," said the First Lady. "I have become aware that he dated at least one other in the week before he died."
"Name your one other," Joan Fisher demanded.
"Correct me if I am mistaken," said Mrs. Roosevelt, "but I believe you were with Mr. Asman at the Farragut Bar on Thursday evening. He took you home in a taxi. Then -"
"We were being followed!"
"By the police," said the First Lady. "I told you Mr. Asman was suspected of murder. In any event, he took you home. Then he went to the Gayety Burlesque Theater, where he met a Miss Stormy Skye, a striptease dancer. He took her home, and she spent the night with him."
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="10">"Every effort will be made to keep the matter confidential, Mr. Gillsworth," he said. "What exactly is it?"
Our client drew a deep breath. "About three weeks ago," he began, "a letter arrived at our home addressed to my wife. Plain white envelope, no return address. At the time Lydia was up north visiting cousins in Pawtucket. Fortunately she had left instructions to open her mail and forward to Rhode Island whatever I thought important and might require her immediate attention. I say 'fortunately' because this particular letter was a vicious threat against Lydia's life. It spelled out the manner of her murder in such gruesome and sickening detail that it was obviously the product of a deranged mind."
"Dreadful," my father said.
"Did the letter give any reason for the threat?" I asked.
"Only in vague terms," Gillsworth said. "It said she must die to pay for what she is doing. That was the phrase used: 'for what she is doing.' Complete insanity, of course. Lydia is the most innocent of women. Her conduct is beyond reproach."
"Do you have the letter with you, Mr. Gillsworth?" father asked.
The poet groaned. "I destroyed it," he said. "And the envelope it came in. I hoped it might be a single incident, and I had no wish that Lydia would ever find and read that piece of filth. So I burned it."
Then we sat in silence. Gillsworth had his head averted, and I was able to study him a moment. He was a tall, extremely thin man with a bony face split by a nose that ranked halfway between Cyrano and Jimmy Durante.
He was wearing a short-sleeved leisure suit of black linen. With his mighty beak, scrawny arms, and flapping gestures he looked more bird than bard. I wondered what a young coed had seen in the poet that persuaded her to plight her troth. But it's hopeless to try to imagine what spouses find in each other. It's better to accept Ursi Olson's philosophy. She just shrugs and says, "There's a cover for every pot."
The silence stretched, and when the seigneur didn't ask the question that had to be asked, I did.
"But you've received another letter?" I prompted Gillsworth.
He nodded, and the stare he gave me seemed dazed, as if he could not quite comprehend the inexplicable misfortune that had befallen him and his wife. "Yes," he said in a voice that lacked firmness. "Two days ago. Lydia is home now, and she opened the letter, read it, showed it to me. I thought it even more disgusting and frightening than the first. Again it said that she must die for what she was doing, and it described her murder in horrendous and obscene detail. Obviously the work of a homicidal maniac."
"How did your wife react to the letter?" my father asked gently.
Gillsworth shifted uncomfortably in his wing chair. "First," he said, "I must give you a little background. My wife has always been interested in the occult and in psychic phenomena. She believes in supernatural forces, the existence of spirits, ESP, and that sort of thing." He paused.
I was curious and asked, "Do you also believe in those things, sir?"
He made one of his floppy gestures. "I don't believe and I don't disbelieve. Quite frankly, the supernatural is of minor interest to me. My work is concerned with the conflict between the finite expression of the human psyche and the Ur-reality concealed with it. I call it the Divine Dichotomy."
My father and I nodded thoughtfully. What else could we do?
"To answer your question, Mr. McNally," Gillsworth continued, addressing mein papa, "my wife reacted to the letter with complete serenity. You may find it remarkable - I certainly do - but she has absolutely no fear of death, no matter how painful or horrid its coming. She believes death is but another form of existence, that we pass from one state to another with no loss, no dimination of our powers, but rather with increased wisdom and added strength. This belief - which she holds quite sincerely, I assure you - enables her to face her own death with equanimity. And so that letter failed to frighten her - if that was its purpose. But it frightens me, I can tell you that. I suggested to Lydia that it might be wise if she returned to Rhode Island for an extended visit until this whole matter can be cleared up."
"Yes," father said, "I think that would be prudent."
"She refused," Gillsworth said. "I then suggested both of us take a trip, perhaps go abroad for a long tour. Again she refused. She will not allow the ravings of a lunatic to alter her life. And she is quite insistent that the matter not be referred to the police. She accepts the entire situation with a sangfroid that amazes me. I cannot take it so lightly. I finally won her permission to seek your counsel with the understanding that you will make no unauthorized disclosure of this nasty business to the police or anyone else."
"You may depend on it," my father said gravely.
"Good," the poet said. "Would you care to see the second letter?"
"By all means."
Gillsworth rose and took a white envelope from his outside jacket pocket. He strode across the room and handed it to my father.
"Just a moment, please," I said. "Mr. Gillsworth, I presume only you and your wife have touched the letter since it was received."
"That's correct."
"Father," I said, "I suggest you handle it carefully, perhaps by the corners. The time may come when we might wish to have it dusted for fingerprints."
He nodded and lifted the flap of the opened envelope with the tip of a steel letter opener taken from his desk. He used the same implement to tease out the letter and unfold it on his desktop. He adjusted the green glass shade of his brass student lamp and began to read. I moved behind his shoulder and peered but, without my reading glasses, saw nothing but a blur.
Father finished his perusal and looked up at the man standing before his desk. "You did not exaggerate, Mr. Gillsworth," he said, his voice tight.
"Would you read it aloud, sir?" I asked him. "I'm afraid I left my glasses upstairs."
He read it in unemotional tones that did nothing to lessen the shock of those words. I shall not repeat the letter lest I offend your sensibilities. Suffice to say it was as odious as Gillsworth had said: a naked threat of vicious murder. The letter was triple-distilled hatred.
Father concluded his reading. The client and I returned to our chairs. The three of us, shaken by hearing those despicable words spoken aloud, sat in silence. The pater looked at me, and I knew what he was thinking. But he'd never say it, never dent my ego in the presence of a third person. That's why I loved him, the old badger. So I said it for him.
"Mr. Gillsworth," I said as earnestly as I could, "I must tell you in all honesty that although I appreciate your confidence in me, I am beyond my depth on this. It requires an investigation by the local police, post office inspectors, and possibly the FBI. Sending a threat of physical harm through the mail is a federal offense. The letter should be analyzed by experts: the typewriter used, the paper, psychological profile of the writer, and so forth. It's possible that similar letters have been received by other Palm Beach residents, and yours may provide a vital lead to the person responsible. I urge you to take this to the proper authorities as soon as you can."
My father looked at me approvingly. "I fully concur with Archy's opinion," he said to Gillsworth. "This is a matter for the police."
"No," the poet said stonily. "Impossible. Lydia has expressly forbidden it, and I cannot flout her wishes."
Now my father's glance at me was despairing. I knew he was close to rejecting Gillsworth's appeal for help, even if it meant losing a client.
"Mr. Gillsworth," I said, leaning toward him, "would you be willing to do this: Allow me to meet and talk with your wife. Let me try to convince her how seriously my father and I take this threat. Perhaps I can persuade her that it really would be best to ask the authorities for help."
He stared at me an excessively long time. "Very well," he said finally. "I don't think it will do a damned bit of good, but it's worth a try."
"Archy can be very persuasive," my father said dryly. "May we keep the letter, Mr. Gillsworth?"
The poet nodded and rose to leave. Handshakes all around. My father carefully slid the opened letter into a clean manila file folder and handed it to me. Then he walked Roderick Gillsworth out to his car. I carried the folder up to my cave and flipped on the desk lamp.
I put on my glasses and read the letter. It was just awful stuff. But that wasn't what stunned me. I saw it was on good quality paper, had been written with a word processor, and had an even right-hand margin.
How does that grab you?
3
I went to sleep that evening convinced that the Peaches letter and the Gillsworth letter had been written on the same machine, if not by the same miscreant. But what the snatching of a cranky cat had to do with a murderous threat against a poet's wife, the deponent kneweth not.
I awoke the next morning full of p. and v., eager to devote a day to detecting and sorry I lacked a meerschaum pipe and deerstalker cap. Unfortunately I also awoke an hour late, and by the time I traipsed downstairs my father had left for the office in his Lexus and mother and Ursi had taken the Ford to go provisioning. Jamie Olson was seated in the kitchen, slurping from a mug of black coffee.
We exchanged matutinal greetings, and Jamie - our houseman and Ursi's husband - asked if I wanted a 'solid' breakfast. Jamie is a septuagenarian with a teenager's appetite. His idea of a 'solid' breakfast is four eggs over with home fries, pork sausages, a deck of rye toast, and a quart of black coffee - with maybe a dram of aquavit added for flavor. I settled for a glass of OJ, buttered bagel, and a cup of his coffee - strong enough to numb one's tonsils.
"Jamie," I said, sitting across the table from him, "do you know Leon Medallion, the Willigans' butler?"
"Uh-huh," he said.
Our Swedish-born houseman was so laconic he made Gary Cooper sound like a chatterbox. But Jamie had an encyclopedic knowledge of local scandals - past, present, and those likely to occur. Most of his information came from the corps of Palm Beach servants, who enjoyed trading tidbits of gossip about their employers. It was partial recompense for tedious hours spent shining the master's polo boots or polishing milady's gems.
"You ever hear anything freaky about Leon?" I asked.
"Like he might be inclined to pinch a few pennies from Mrs. Willigan's purse or perhaps take a kickback from their butcher?"
"Nope."
"How about the cook and the maid? Also straight?"
Jamie nodded."I know Harry Willigan strays from the hearth," I said. "Everyone knows that. What about his missus? Does she ever kick over the traces?"
The houseman slowly packed and lighted his pipe, an old discolored briar, the stem wound with adhesive tape. "Mebbe," he said. "I heard some hints."
"Well, if you learn anything definite, pass it along to me, please. Their cat's been swiped."
"I know."
"Have you heard anything about the Gillsworths, the poet and his wife?"
"She's got the money," Jamie said.
"That I know."
"And she's tight. He's on an allowance."
"What about their personal lives?"
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="11">
"Mrs. Williams, I know this is difficult for you, but I'd appreciate it if you answered the question. Was it difficult to remember that the driver's hair was gray?"
"No. I remember that it was gray."
"Didn't you earlier say, 'I think it was gray'?"
"Yes, I think that's what I said."
"You think you said, 'I think it was gray'?"
"Yes."
"Does that mean you're not sure it was gray?"
"No, I'm sure it was gray."
"Then why did you say you only thought it was gray?"
"Because it was a long time ago, and it's hard to remember. My daughter was killed, damn you!"
Oh boy, I thought. There it goes. Right up the chimney.
"Your Honor," Atkins said, getting to his feet, "I ask that the court excuse Mrs. Williams's outburst. But I would like to object at this time to the way the defense is badgering and harassing the witness. By my count, she has repeated some five times that the person she saw driving that car had gray hair. The defense attorney insisting that she repeat the color over and over again isn't going to change the color. She has testified that ..."
"Is this your closing argument, Mr. Atkins?"
"No, Your Honor, I was merely ..."
"Your objection is overruled. I do not believe that Mr. Hope was harassing the witness. Jury will ignore all of Mr. Atkins's comments following his objections. Witness will confine herself to answering the questions and will make no further comments on the merits of the case. Proceed, Mr. Hope."
"Just a few more questions," I said. "Mrs. Williams, when is the first time you saw the defendant, Mary Barton?"
"I saw her on television the day she was arrested."
"I mean in person. When did you first see her in person?"
"Today."
"In this courtroom?"
"Yes."
"Had you ever seen her before today?"
"No."
"Never saw her on your street, did you? Pineview and Logan, isn't that what you said?"
"Pineview. The corner of Logan."
"Never saw her on Pineview Street, did you?"
"No."
"Lurking about? Or walking past the house?"
"No."
"Did you ever see her at the bus stop?"
"No."
"Abbott Avenue and Suncrest Drive, isn't that where you said the bus stop is?"
"Yes."
"Just outside the entrance road to the development."
"Yes."
"You never saw Mary Barton waiting there at the bus stop, did you?"
"No."
"Or walking past it?"
"No."
"Never saw her anywhere in the vicinity of your home, isn't that true?"
"I never saw her."
"Or in the vicinity of Suncrest Acres?"
"I never saw her anywhere near there. But ..."
"Did you ever see her in the vicinity of the Judy Cornier Elementary School?"
"No."
"That's the school your daughter attended, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"And you never saw Mary Barton there, waiting in the area where the children load onto the buses, did you?"
"No."
"Or anywhere in the neighborhood surrounding the school?"
"I never saw her near the school, no."
"Are you familiar with Galin Memorial Park?"
"I know where it is."
"Have you ever been there?"
"Once or twice."
"Ever see Mary Barton in that park?"
"No."
"How about the G&S Supermarket? Do you know it?"
"No."
"Never been there?"
"Never."
"Then you couldn't possibly have seen Mary Barton there, isn't that so?"
"I never saw her there."
"Mrs. Williams ... did your daughter ever mention having been approached by a woman answering the description of Mary Barton?"
"No."
"Did your daughter give you any reason to believe that she was being stalked by a woman answering Mary Barton's description?"
"No, she didn't. But ..."
"Yes, please tell me," I said.
This was a risk. I didn't know what she might say, and a lawyer should never ask a question to which he does not already know the answer. But at the same time, I didn't want the jury to think I was cutting her off. Tell me, I'd said, inviting her to elaborate. But now I was holding my breath.
"I had the feeling someone was watching her."
"Your Honor?" I said.
"I'll allow that," she said, and turned to the jury. "I want to explain to you," she said, "that this is admissible only as to the witness's state of mind and not as to the truth of whether or not someone was actually watching. Go ahead, Mr. Hope."
"I'm sure you worried a great deal about your daughter," I said.
"I did."
"The way any mother would worry about her seven-year-old daughter going off into the world alone."
"Yes."
"But you didn't have any real reason to expect she was in imminent danger, did you?"
"No."
"That is, you didn't actually see anyone who might pose a threat to her."
"No, I just had this feeling."
"Well, feelings aside, you certainly never saw Mary Barton near any of the places your daughter frequented, did you?"
"No."
"Your home ... her school ... the bus stop ...?"
"No."
"In fact, did you ever see Mary Barton anywhere near your daughter?"
"No."
"Thank you, no further questions," I said.
"No further questions," Atkins said.
"Let's adjourn till tomorrow at nine," Rutherford said.
8
The distances troubled Toots most.
"What I don't understand," she told Warren, "is why she would've started her rampage ..."
"Well, if she did it," Warren said.
"Well, we have to believe she didn't do it."
"Amen," Warren said.
"But for the sake of argument, if she did it, why would she've started her rampage ..."
"If you can call it that," Warren said.
"Call it whatever you want to call it, okay? An extended adventure, okay? Why would she've started it so far from home?"
"Why indeed?"
"Take a look at this map," she said.
They were in a diner on the South Tamiami Trail, sitting in the booth closest to the door. All day long, they'd been trying to come up with something on Charlotte Carmody. So far, they had nothing. But nothing looked better over dinner. Warren had ordered a couple of hamburgers and a glass of beer. Toots had ordered turkey breast and Swiss on rye, no mayo, but lots of mustard. She was drinking a glass of milk. The day she'd kicked cocaine, she also stopped drinking anything alcoholic. Substance abuse was substance abuse. That's what she'd learned and that's what she believed.
The diner was decorated with Santa Clauses and red and green bells hanging from red and green tinsel stretched from corner to corner. A sickly-looking, artificial, miniature white Christmas tree was on the corner near the cash register. Nothing down here ever looked Christmasy. Warren wondered why they even bothered. He took a look at the map.
Somerset, where little Jenny Lou Williams had lived before her disappearance, was some ninety-eight miles from Calusa. Toots had marked the town with the numeral 1 in a circle. It was close enough to Eagle Lake to make it an attractive inland location, but its real advantage was its proximity to all the lakes in Osceola County, one of the loveliest areas in all Florida. Moreover, Route 17 was a major north-south artery, providing easy access to other parts of the state.
"The next one was snatched in Alietam," Toots said, and put her finger on the circled numeral 2. "Kimberly Holt. About forty miles outside Calusa."
For the most part, the towns dotting this inland part of the state were featureless and unattractive; even the landscape looked dry and dusty, dotted with scruffy palmettos and cabbage palms, gnarled scrub oaks twisting mossy branches against a brassy sky.
"And finally," Toots said, poking her forefinger at the circled numeral 3, "little Felicity Hammer was grabbed right here in Calusa. Now, it's entirely possible that Mary Barton drove the ninety-some-odd miles for Calusa to Somerset in search of her first victim ..."
"That would've meant almost a two-hundred-mile round trip," Warren said.
"Exactly my point. That's a lot of traveling, Warren."
"It is."
"Mary isn't stupid ..."
"Far from it."
"So why'd she range so far afield? Didn't she realize a stranger in any of the dinky little towns would be noticed? And remarked upon? And remembered later? Do you see my point, Warren? If she planned to bury her victims in her own backyard, why not choose them in Calusa, kill them in Calusa, the way she finally did with Felicity?"
"You're making Matthew's closing argument."
"I'm making the only argument he's got," Toots said, and shook her head. "I'll tell you something, Warren, if we don't come up with something to impeach Carmody when she takes the stand ..."
"I know," Warren said.
"She's the one we really have to worry about. She's the one who saw Mary burying that kid."
"Yeah," Warren said glumly.
Toots was silent for a moment.
Then she said, "You think she's innocent?"
"I hope she is," Warren said.
The voter registration list from which they were working named the residents of 603 Palmetto Court as Bradley Morse and Nettie Morse, presumably his wife. The Morses lived in the same sort of cinder-block and stucco house that Mary lived in. In fact, all of the houses here in Crescent Cove, as the development was called, were of the same inexpensive construction, creating the look of a hastily constructed 1930s shantytown. Actually, the houses had been built in the late fifties, when Calusa was experiencing a boom that would transform it from a sleepy fishing village to a city of fifty-thousand-plus people.
Despite its name, Crescent Cove wasn't on water. If it had been, the homes here would have become treasures to be purchased, bulldozed, and replaced with houses costing half a million bucks or more. In the state of Florida, the only thing more precious than cocaine was water. The Cove in the development's name came from pure whimsy. The Crescent was somewhat architecturally founded in that the layout of the development was in fact semicircular, the outermost rim containing more houses than the innermost, which was called a court because of its comparative coziness. The only mildly interesting house in Crescent Cove belonged to Mary Barton. And the only thing that made it special was the garden in which the dead little girls had been found on a sunny September morn. There were five houses in the semicircle that formed Crescent Court. Lights were burning in all five of them.
They'd started their canvass of Mary's neighborhood on her own block and had worked inward over the past several days until they were now at the development's hub. There weren't many more houses to go, and so far they'd been unable to turn up anything Matthew could use against Charlotte Carmody when the state attorney called her. Given Atkins's chronological approach, they hoped that wouldn't be for some time yet. But if he changed his mind and decided to put her on tomorrow -
"Watching television," Toots said, and nodded toward the house ahead. She'd based her conclusion on the fact that the light showing in one of the front rooms, presumably the living room, had a bluish cast to it. Warren didn't ask her how come she knew the people in there were watching television. He himself knew that if you wanted to fool a burglar into thinking you were home watching the TV, you screwed a blue light into one of your lamps, drew the blinds, and felt at least partially safe when you went out on the town.
This was a Tuesday night, not a big night out in Calusa, though nowadays not too many people were going out to eat, anyway. More often than not, even on Saturday nights, people were staying home. Renting a video, sending out for pizza, that was about all they could afford for an evening's entertainment. In most cities and towns, you didn't go out because you couldn't afford it. In other cities and towns, you didn't go out because you were afraid you'd get killed on the streets. A thousand points of light were shining in living rooms all over America, a real legacy.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="12">
"The local minister, man named Orestes Tillis," Jackie said. "He wants to be a state senator."
"Anyone would," I said. "So Hawk and I are going to clean up Double Deuce and you're going to cover it, and Marge Eagen is going to be able to charge more for commercial time on her show. And Rev Tillis will get elected."
"I know you're being cynical, but I guess, in fact, that's the truth. On the other hand, if you do clean up Double Deuce, it really will be good for the people there. Regardless of Marge Eagen or Orestes Tillis. And whoever killed that child and her baby ..."
"Sure," I said.
"He's just mad," Hawk said, "because he likes to think he's a catcher in the rye."
"I'm disappointed that I didn't figure it out something was up."
"I don't follow this," Jackie said.
"Hawk seemed to be helping people for no good reason. Hawk doesn't do that."
"Except you," Hawk said.
"Except me," I said. "And Susan, and probably Henry Cimoli."
"Who's Susan?" Jackie said.
"She's with me," I said.
"I thought of money, or getting even, or paying some thing off. I never thought of you."
"Me?"
"He's doing it for you."
Jackie looked at Hawk. Her hand still rested quietly on his thigh.
"That why you're doing it, Hawk?" she said.
"Sure," Hawk said.
She smiled at him, as good a smile as I'd seen in a while - except for Susan's - and patted his thigh.
"That's very heartwarming," she said.
Hawk smiled back at her and put one hand on top of her hand as it rested on his thigh.
Good heavens!
CHAPTER 12
As soon as we pulled into the Double Deuce quadrangle the Reverend Tillis and a woman with short gray-streaked hair came out of the building. Tillis had on a dashiki over his suit today. The woman wore faded pink jeans and a Patriots sweatshirt. Hawk got out of the car as they approached. Neither of them looked at me.
"This is Mrs. Brown," Tillis said. "She has a complaint about the Hobarts."
Hawk smiled at her and nodded his head once.
"Go ahead," Tillis said to her.
"They been messing with my boy," the woman said. "He going to school and they take his books away from him and they take his lunch money. I saved out that lunch money and they took it. And one of them push him down and tell him he better get some protection for himself."
The woman put both hands on her hips as she talked and her face was raised at Hawk as if she were expecting him to challenge her and she was ready to fight back.
"Where's your son?" Hawk said.
She shook her head and looked down.
"Boy's afraid to come," Tillis said.
Hawk nodded.
"Which one pushed him down?"
The woman raised her head defiantly. "My boy won't say."
"You know where I can find them?" Hawk said.
"They hanging on the corner, Hobart and McCrory," she said. "That's where they be hassling my boy."
Hawk nodded again. I got out of the car on Hawk's side. Jackie got out the other.
"What you planning on?" Tillis said to Hawk.
"I tell you how to write sermons?" Hawk said.
"I represent these people," Tillis said. "I got a right to ask."
"Sure," Hawk said. "You know Jackie, I guess."
Tillis nodded and put out his hand. "Jackie. Working on that show?"
"Tagging along," she said.
"Figure this is for us?" I said.
"See what we do," Hawk said. "Otherwise no point to it. It ain't exactly the crime of the century."
"Mrs. Brown, I think you and I should allow Hawk to deal with this," Reverend Tillis said, making it sound regretful. Hawk grinned to himself.
There was no one in sight as we walked across the project. Jackie stayed with us. I looked at Hawk. He made no sign. It was warm for April. Nothing moved. The sun shone down. No wind stirred. Jackie took a small tape recorder out of her shoulder bag.
Ahead of us was a loud radio. The sound of it came from a van, parked at the corner. A couple kids were sitting in the van with the doors open. Major leaned against a lamp-post. The big kid that Hawk had nailed last time was standing near him. The others were fanned out around. There were eighteen of them. I didn't see any weapons. The music abruptly shut off. The sound of Jackie's heels was suddenly loud on the hot top.
Major smiled at us as we stopped in front of him. I heard Jackie's tape recorder click on.
"What's you got the wiggle for, Fro?" Major said. "She for backup?"
The kids fanned out around him laughed.
"Which one of you hassled the Brown kid?" Hawk said.
"We all brown kids here, Fro," Major said.
Again laughter from the gang.
Hawk waited. Still no sign of weapons. I was betting on the van. It had a pair of doors on the side that open out. One of them was open maybe six inches. It would come from there. I wasn't wearing a jacket. The gun on my hip was apparent. It didn't matter. They all knew I had one, anyway. Hawk's gun was still out of sight under a black silk windbreaker he wore unzipped. That didn't matter either, they knew he had one to.
"What you going to do, Fro, you find the hobo that hassed him?" Major said.
"One way to find out," Hawk said.
Major turned and grinned at the audience. Then he looked at the big kid next to him.
"John Porter, you do that?"
John Porter said "Ya," which was probably half the things John Porter could say. From his small dark eyes no gleam of intelligence shone.
"There be your man, Fro," Major said. "Lass time you mace him, he say you sucker him. He ain't ready, he say."
Hawk grinned. "That right, John Porter?"
The cork was going to pop. There was no way that it wouldn't. Without moving my head I kept a peripheral fix on the van door.
John Porter said, "Ya."
"You ready now, John Porter?" Hawk said.
John Porter obviously was ready now. His knees were flexed, his shoulders hunched up a little. He had his chin tucked in behind his left shoulder. There was some scar tissue around his right eye. There was the scar along his jawline, and his nose looked as if it had thickened. Maybe boxed a little. Probably a lot of fights in prison.
"Care to even things up for the sucker punch?" Hawk said.
"John Porter say he gon whang yo ass, Fro," Major said. "First chance he get."
The laughter still skittered around the edges of everything Major said. But his voice was tauter now than it had been.
"Right, John Porter?" Major said.
John Porter nodded. His eyes reminded me of the eyes of a Cape buffalo I'd seen once in the San Diego Zoo. He kept his stare on Hawk. It was what the gang kids called mad-dogging. Hawk's grin got wider and friendlier.
"Well, John Porter," Hawk said, friendly as a Bible salesman, "You right 'bout that sucker punch. And being as how you a brother and all, I'll let you sucker me. Go on ahead and lay one upside my head, and that way we start out even, should anything, ah, develop."
John Porter looked at Major.
"Go on, John Porter, do what the man say. Put a charge on his head, Homes."
John Porter was giving this some thought, which was clearly hard for him. Was there some sort of trickery here?
"Come on, John Porter," Major said. "Man, you can't fickle on me now. You tol me you going to crate this Thompson first chance. You tol me that, Homes." In everything Major said there was derision.
John Porter put out a decent overhand left at Hawk, which missed. Hawk didn't seem to do anything, but the punch missed his chin by a quarter of an inch. John Porter had done some boxing. He shuffled in behind the left with a right cross, which also missed by a quarter of an inch. John Porter began to lose form. He lunged and Hawk stepped aside and John Porter had to scramble to keep his balance.
"See, the thing is," Hawk said, "You're in over your head, John Porter. You don't know what you are dealing with here."
John Porter rushed at Hawk this time, and Hawk moved effortlessly out of the way. John Porter was starting to puff. He wasn't quite chasing Hawk yet. He had enough ring savvy left to know that you could get your clock cleaned by a Boy Scout if you started chasing him incautiously. But chasing Hawk cautiously wasn't working. John Porter had been trained, probably in some jailhouse boxing program, in the way to fight with his fists. And it wasn't working. It had probably nearly always worked. He was 6'2" and probably weighed 240, and all of it muscle. He might not have lost a fight since the fourth grade. Maybe never. But he was losing this one and the guy wasn't even fighting. John Porter didn't get it. He stopped, his hands still up, puffing a little, and squinted at Hawk.
"What you doing?" he said.
Major stepped behind John Porter and kicked him in the butt.
"You fry him, John Porter, and you do it now," Major said.
There was no derision in Major's voice.
"He can't," Hawk said, not unkindly.
John Porter made a sudden sweep at Hawk with his right hand and missed. The side door of the van slid an inch and I jumped at it and rammed it shut with my shoulder on someone's hand, someone yelled in pain, something clattered on the street. I kept my back against the door and came up with the Browning and leveled it sort of inclusively at the group. Hawk had a left handful of John Porter's hair. He held John Porter's head down in front of him, and with his right hand, pressed the muzzle of a Sig Sauer automatic into John Porter's left ear. Jackie had dropped flat to the pavement and was trying with her left hand to smooth her skirt down over her backside, while her right hand pushed the tape recorder as far forward toward the action as she could.
Somewhere on the other side of McCrory Street a couple of birds chirped. Inside the truck someone was grunting with pain. I could feel him struggle to get his arm out of the door. A couple of gang members were frozen in midreach toward inside pockets or under jackets.
"Now this time," Hawk was saying, "We all going to walk away from this."
No one moved. Major stood with no expression on his face, as if he were watching an event that didn't interest him.
"Next time some of you will be gone for good," Hawk said. "Spenser, bring him out of the truck."
I kept my eyes on the gang and slid my back off the door. It swung open and a small quick-looking kid no more than fourteen, in a black Adidas sweatsuit, came out clutching his right wrist against him. In the gutter by the curb, below the open door, was an automatic pistol. I picked it up and stuck it in my belt.
"You all walk away from here, now," Hawk said. No one moved.
"Do what I say," Hawk said. There was no anger in his voice. Hawk pursed his lips as he looked at the gang members standing stolidly in place. Behind him Jackie was on her feet again, her tape recorder still running, some sand clinging to the front of her dress.
Hawk smiled suddenly.
"Sure," he said.
He looked at me.
"They won't leave without him," Hawk said.
I nodded.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="13">"So what is it, Lieutenant, you gonna read me my rights?" He began to chuckle deep down in his chest. The chuckle quickly became a cough so violent it worried Koesler.
When the coughing finally stopped, Tully said, "No, Carl ... not yet, anyway. Just some questions. You gonna invite us in?"
Costello did not appear eager to reply. He peered at the group on the porch one by one, studying each unhurriedly as he had studied Tully earlier. Then he got to Koesler. Costello pulled up short. "Hey, you a father? You a Catholic priest?"
For the first time in his life Koesler was reluctant to identify himself. He had no idea what would follow the admission that he was, indeed, a priest. Was the whole family in on the killing of Father Keating? Probably. Did the whole family know that Guido had confessed the murder to him? Probably not.
"Wassamatter," Costello said good-naturedly, "you forget if you're a father or not?"
Koesler reddened. "No ... of course not. Yes, I'm a priest, a Catholic priest. Father Koesler."
"You should watch the company you keep, Father." Costello chuckled again, and again it developed into a coughing spasm. He turned his head slightly to address his grandson standing behind him. "Wassamatter with you, anyway, sonny? You see a father on the porch and you don't invite him in? What are you - a Catholic or what?"
"Sorry, Gampa. I woulda done that, but the father came in this package deal. I didn't think you'd want the heat in here."
"We got better hospitality than that, Sonny." He turned back to the group. "Come on in, fellas ... and good lady. Though I must tell you, Lieutenant, if you hadn't had the father along, you woulda had to have some paper with you to get in. But ..." It was a verbal shrug. "... what the hell; it's a short life."
Tully entered first. But Costello stood back waiting for Koesler to cross the threshold. "You bless my home with your presence, Father.
"Hey," his voice raised only slightly, "Momma: Come see who come to visit us."
As Mangiapane and Moore entered, with Sonny bringing up the rear, from somewhere in the back of the house, probably the kitchen, since she was drying her hands on an apron, came a gray-haired woman. Though she might have been of a certain age, she was still quite attractive; she had held on to her youthful figure remarkably.
"Father," Costello announced, "here is my wife, Vita. Vita, see who this is. It's ... uh ... Father ... uh ..."
"Koesler," the priest supplied. He caught the surprise in her eyes. Evidently this home did not get a lot of priest visitors.
"Welcome, Father," she said. "You bless our home with your presence." She walked quickly to Koesler, took his hand with both of hers, and kissed it. Instinctively he started to pull away, thought better of it, and left his hand in Vita's clasp.
Koesler had almost forgotten that once that had been a time-honored custom. Long ago, when newly ordained priests blessed people, the faithful would kiss the hands that so recently had been anointed with holy oil. Even then, Koesler had felt squeamish about the practice.
Then, also in those early days, sometimes the elderly ailing people would kiss his hands when he brought them Communion.
He wondered about what he had seen and heard just now. Somehow, though he knew it was far too facile, Koesler expected all Italians - as well as Poles, Irish, and Hispanics - to be Catholic. But he never would have expected to be greeted so warmly and with such faith by the Mafia or their family. He was reminded of how comfortable and at home Jesus always seemed to be in the presence of outcasts and those whom society branded as hopeless sinners. He resolved to meditate on this later when he could be alone in prayer.
For the moment, despite the cordial welcome, he had to be on his guard. There was still the secret to protect.
Vita Costello, after a few more words of welcome for Koesler - and an invitation to dinner, which the priest graciously declined - returned to the rear of the house whence emanated appetizing aromas of marinara and meatballs.
Carl Costello led the way into a spacious living room, which looked as if it had been furnished in the twenties and thereafter left untouched. The elderly gentleman moved with deliberation to a chair that appeared to be both comfortable and his. Behind the chair Remo stood almost at attention. He might have been a guardian angel or a sentry.
Koesler and Tully each picked an easy chair; Moore sat on the couch. Mangiapane remained standing behind the couch, mirroring Remo's angel-or-sentry stance.
Costello held up his left hand, with the index and middle fingers extended. For a moment Koesler wondered why the don was giving the peace sign. But Remo quickly lit a cigarette and placed it between the upraised fingers. Koesler now knew the source of Costello's cough.
"Now, gentle lady and gentlemen," Costello began, "in what way can we be of service to you?"
Innocent or guilty of whatever, Carl Costello was cool. He might easily, thought Koesler, have been a conscientious citizen eager to help the police in any possible way.
"Carl," Tully said, "you heard we got a missing priest in Detroit?"
"Bloomfield Hills, I heard, Lieutenant." Costello was almost apologetic.
Tully nodded. "He lives in Bloomfield Hills. He's a Detroit priest."
"It was on the radio and TV, is how I know," Costello said. "I don't get around in those circles too much anymore."
"The last anyone saw of him - that we've talked to - he was heading for Detroit. That was Friday afternoon last. No one's heard from him since."
"Is that so!" Costello said. Impossible to tell whether the expression was sincere or sardonic. "Perhaps he will return soon."
"It's been four days, Carl. That's too long to be missing."
"It is indeed. But there is always hope. Sonny, why don't you drop over by church tonight and have a Mass said for ..." Costello looked to each of his four visitors for assistance.
The long pause proved too much for Koesler. "John Keating," he said, "Father John Keating."
Costello nodded good-naturedly toward the priest. "Thank you, Father.
"Sonny, write that down: Father John Keating - wait: Father, maybe you would say the Mass."
Koesler felt most uncomfortable. If he consented, Costello would offer him money. Which he would refuse. He - most Detroit priests - no longer accepted Mass stipends. Costello would insist; there would be explanations. All very inappropriate.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Costello," Koesler said. "Our parish is booked solid for weeks with Mass intentions. I am praying for him though." All of that was true. However, the prayers were for the repose of Keating's soul.
"I understand, Father," Costello said. He turned his head. "Sonny, go to Holy Family. They can't be so busy. Have the Mass said."
"Right, Gampa." Remo was writing down the name.
"Carl," Tully spoke pointedly, "get serious."
How serious can I get, Costello's gesture implied.
"You know anything about the missing priest?"
"Me! I live in Bloomfield Hills? I should know this priest?"
"He's worked other parishes, some in Detroit, even Little Italy. You could know him from lots of places."
"Anybody could know him from lots of places, Lieutenant. Come on, why me?"
Tully's storied patience was wearing thin. "Carl, guess whose car that is out there that's attracting all that attention?"
Costello leaned forward and craned for a better view of the bustle practically outside his front window. "Well, now, Lieutenant, I learned to add. The kind, you know, where two plus two equals four. I'd guess that since you been asking me all these questions about a missing priest named Father Keating, which I've never seen in my life, and since the car in question is parked almost in front of my house, I would guess that that car belongs to the missing priest, Father Keating." Costello looked at Tully with the wide-eyed innocence of a schoolchild who hopes his answer is the right one. "How'm I doin'?"
"Until we came in your house and started questioning you, you weren't curious about what all those police officers were doing with that car?"
"I seen cops before."
"You didn't see that car before today?"
"I didn't say that."
"You did see the car before today."
"I didn't say that either."
"One of your neighbors has been watching it for four days. That's why he called the cops and reported a suspicious vehicle."
"He done good."
"And you?"
"I mind my own business. There's a law against that?"
"You want us to believe there's no connection between you and that car? That it's just a coincidence that a car owned by a person who's been missing four days ends up practically in front of your house?"
"I don't care what you believe."
The conversation was getting a bit intense. It was Costello who tried to defuse it. With a tone of calm reason, he said, "Look, Lieutenant, what it this? We both know I've been around the block a few times. If I done anything to this priest - and God forbid I did! - I'm gonna have his car parked in front of my house? Like I hang a red flag from the car's antenna? Be reasonable, Lieutenant. Gimmee credit for being more than a dumb school kid!"
"Maybe one of your family left it there."
"And I didn't check into it?"
"You didn't notice the car until today."
"I didn't say that. Besides, Lieutenant, why would I have anything to do with a missing priest?"
"Maybe one of your family had something to do with it. Maybe Guido. Maybe Remo. Sonny here doesn't look too clean."
Remo stiffened. Costello checked him with a gesture.
Yes, yes, yes, Koesler thought. Guido! Go after Guido.
"Look, Lieutenant," Costello said, "nobody here had anything to do with your missing priest. Ain't there supposed to be a motive for this kind of thing? Why would we mess with a priest? Especially a priest from Bloomfield Hills?"
"That's what we want to find out, Carl. Why? Somebody want him iced bad enough to hire a hit? Unpaid bills? Lots of possibilities."
Yes, yes, yes, Koesler thought. Gambling debts. Why isn't this ESP working? It was Guido and it was gambling debts. Can't you hear my thoughts, Lieutenant Tully? Can't you read my mind?
"You been reading too many detective stories, Lieutenant. Whoever put that car there probably had a grudge or something. We didn't have nothin' to do with it."
"You didn't have anything to do with the car. You didn't have anything to do with the priest."
"What I said."
"Then you won't mind if we look around your house, eh, Carl? You got nothin' to hide."
For the first time, Costello's demeanor became deadly serious. "For that, Lieutenant, you gotta have some paper."
Tully rose. Koesler and Moore followed suit. "We'll be back."
The four found themselves out on the sidewalk. Only a few of the gawkers turned to look at them, and those spared only a momentary glance. The police checking out the abandoned car were far more interesting.
"Anyone's rump get hit by that door?" Mangiapane asked.
Moore laughed. "We did get ushered out rather firmly," she agreed.
But Tully was all business. "Manj, stay here. Make sure that we question everybody in every house on this block. Neighboring blocks too. We ought to be able to find somebody who saw something out of place - anything odd. That car didn't just grow there.
"Angie, get a warrant. I want our people to go through every inch of that place. Somebody there is in on this. Maybe not the whole family. But someone.
"I'll take the father home. I want to check with Organized Crime, see what they've got on this family. OC ought to have the latest sheet on Costello. I got a hunch if I let OC know what's going on, they might be able to put some pressure on the family."
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="14">
Her question appealed to the teacher in him. Imagine being here as many years as Elaine had been and not knowing about the Black Museum. Every time he said the phrase, Phil dropped his voice into Orson Welles register, he couldn't help it, but of course Elaine would not have heard that old radio program.
"It's time you saw it. Anything on right now?"
"Your calendar is clear."
"Have someone cover for you."
They took the elevator to the basement and went through a heating tunnel to a building across the street from the courthouse, emerging into the furnace room. The door out of there was not flush with the floor and Elaine had to lift her foot over the sill. Captain Keegan shut the steel door of the furnace room behind them. They now stood in a large, low-ceilinged basement filled with rows and rows of filing cabinets. He took her to the area where recent cases were found and led her down an aisle. In a minute he was unlocking a drawer. Elaine stood close beside him when he pulled it out. It was filled with packages wearing red tags that bore a case number and then an exhibit number.
"We'd need a list to know what each number represents."
Elaine reached into the drawer and began squeezing the packages, but she could not find what was certainly a purse. "I can see the purse so plainly as it lay on the table of exhibits at the trial. You'd think I could detect it through a layer of paper."
"We're not even sure it's here. Didn't you come across that list when you made the report?"
She wasn't sure. Women. Phil wondered if she coveted that purse. Well, there was no way she was going to get it. He should have thought of the list before taking her over here. Or she should have. He pushed the drawer shut and locked it.
"Was Jones her real name, Captain?"
"There'd be a court record if she changed it. When and where. We didn't pursue that. No need to."
"How would we have done that?"
"An APB, then hope. My guess would be Vegas."
Finally Elaine tired of talking of the Wilson murder. Murder, not alleged murder. The woman had been tried, convicted, and sentenced and Phil Keegan didn't give a damn about the appeal. Lawyers would enter an appeal for Judas Iscariot. Appeals were a form of legal harassment of the judicial and jury system.
Back in his office he put the Black Museum key in his desk drawer and went off to have a cup of coffee with Cy Horvath.
"Cy, what was Stacey Wilson's name before she changed it?"
"Jones."
"No. I mean before she changed it to Jones?"
Cy's face was impassive through half a minute's thought. "Did she?"
"Just for the fun of it, find out, will you?"
"Vegas?"
"That would be my guess."
Elaine's question had bugged him, as if there was some stone they had left unturned in investigating the murder of Marvin Wilson. Chief Robertson was still sitting on the report, unsure whether to release it to the press. Phil would give him half a day more, then he would leak it. Stacey Wilson's attorneys were already asking what Chief Robertson had to hide.
12
Cy Horvath felt toward Phil Keegan as a son feels toward his father, which meant that he could see the faults of the man as well as his strengths. Keegan was the best cop Cy knew, but then he was Cy's model, so how could he fail to meet the standard? He was hard-headed, cool-minded, methodical, tenacious. He refused to be deflected by side issues, he kept to the job, he got results.
Usually. Most of the time. It is not in the nature of the job, or of live, to be successful every time. But failure should be explained by factors over which one had no control. Phil Keegan had been a cop a long time and time had taken its toll, no doubt of that. Phil Keegan made mistakes. But Cy Horvath had not imagined he would live long enough to question one of Phil's successes.
The case against Stacey Wilson had been too easy. The pieces fell into place without much effort on their part. Billy Wheaton stuck to his story that Stacey had been in the Lucky Tyke, the McNaughtons reluctantly testified that she had been away from the house during the days in question, a massive life insurance policy taken out on Marvin Wilson in her favor came to light. The nature and occasion of the marriage was public knowledge. Phil was right to say the case was open and shut. He was right, too, that Robertson was an idiot to stonewall when the appeal was filed. Finally the chief released the report Elaine had written up but only when he was told it was already in the hands of the press. The beasts in the press room having been fed, Phil was rightly expecting nothing but praise for a job well done, if any stories appeared. The news had been the unavailability of a report. No one but the defense lawyers had professed any interest in its contents.
When Phil asked about Stacey's name before the legal change, Cy didn't want to tell his boss he had already checked out the Vegas courts. He reported to Phil after an hour.
"Already?"
"The fax," Cy said. And that is how he had communicated with Vegas months ago.
"One, the change was made in Vegas. Here's the newspaper item."
He slid the faxed news story he'd just taken from his desk to Keegan. The captain read it with a scowl. it was far from a perfect transmission.
"It doesn't say what her name was."
"That's right."
"Check the court." He tilted the page toward the window and squinted. "Judge Melbourne."
Cy slid two other items toward Keegan. Melbourne's obit and a form from Vegas saying that the records requested could not be provided.
"Why the hell not?"
"Because they don't have them. They're missing. Maybe they don't keep records like that past a certain date. I don't know. Should I pursue it?"
"Does it matter?"
"I don't see how."
"Neither do I."
"What made you wonder about it."
"Elaine asked."
Cy turned to look at the plumb young woman plinking away at her computer in the outer office.
"What's this date on these transmissions?" Keegan was holding the fax messages an inch from his nose with his glasses pushed up on his forehead.
"When they were sent."
"February?"
"I wondered at the time."
Cy knew Keegan wouldn't chew him out for it but he didn't like it. He shouldn't. But that was the problem with the Stacey Wilson investigation. They took what was offered them without much questioning. Now Keegan had to wonder why Cy months before and Elaine recently had thought of something he hadn't. So what if it meant nothing? You didn't decide that before the fact. That was what he had learned from Captain Keegan.
They had given Billy Wheaton a bit of a hard time when he placed Mrs. Wilson in the boat, nothing like what the defense lawyers did at the trial, but not just taking the word of a known drunk. Poor Billy had gone on such a toot after the trial he had reeled right out of the world.
Stacey Wilson had insisted she was at the farm all the while her husband was out on his fatal boat ride. The McNaughtons who worked at the farm had to testify they could not say she was there.
"You didn't see her?"
"No."
"She didn't ask for any meals to be prepared?"
"No."
"She had no visitors?"
"No."
"Took no phone calls?"
"No."
"Had her bed been slept in?"
"No."
So it had gone at the trial, for both Mr. and Mrs. McNaughton and each question had shot another hole in Stacey's claim to have been at the farm. Why did she say she'd been there when it was so easily disproved? Cy checked the sequence and found that when she made the claim to have been on the farm, Billy Wheaton had not yet come forward. She didn't care whether the story held up, because she didn't think it would matter. If she hadn't been on the boat she could have claimed to be in Las Vegas or on the moon, it wouldn't have mattered as long as she hadn't been placed in the boat with her husband. Cy Horvath could not get rid of the thought that, crazy as her alibi was, it was the lie of a woman innocent of murder, not guilty of it. But if she was not in the boat with Marvin and not in the house, she must have been somewhere and with someone. If not, she'd just say. The only thing that made sense, granting her everything else, was the revealing who that someone was endangered her more than standing trial for murder.
So what would he have done differently if he had been in Keegan's shoes? Talk to Stacey? With her it had been name, rank, and serial number form the start.
Monahan from the prosecutor's office accepted Cy's offer of a drink but when they got across the street to the Pueblo ordered coffee. The bartender looked at him.
"That pot's been brewing since morning."
"Then it ought to be ready."
"What'll you have, Horvath, milk?"
"You got buttermilk?"
"As a matter of fact I do."
"Give me a glass."
The bartender, who could not have remembered it, said it was like Prohibition or something. Nobody drank anymore.
"He should have been with me last night," Monahan said ruefully. "I still can't believe I got through this day. God knows what I did."
"You going to handle our side when the Wilson case comes up?"
"I could handle that one in my sleep. I could have handled it today."
"She's guilty?"
"As charged."
"If she isn't, she sure is dumb."
"Killing her husband is dumb enough."
"No, but think if she really didn't. Just entertain the thought. Geez, we depended on Billy Wheaton. He should have seen two of her if she was in the boat."
Monahan liked that, but laughing made his head ache. The coffee didn't help, but it gave him something to do in a bar that could not bring him further pain.
"Take Billy out of the picture and what do we have? A woman claiming to be where it's easy as pie to show she wasn't."
"Dumb," Monahan agreed.
"She isn't dumb."
Monahan thought about that. "If she's so damned smart why didn't she just enjoy what she had while she had it? He dumps her, it's a golden parachute. She outlives him, she's got it made. Why press matters? Why buy the stupid insurance policy?"
"That's like saying she was at the house."
"Exactly." Monahan paused. "I think."
"Who's she protecting? Or who is a greater threat than life in the slammer?"
"Thank God for Billy Wheaton."
"Yeah. May he rest in peace."
"Amen. Cy, he was the key to our case."
And what would Stacey's story have been if Billy had come forward earlier, before she claimed to have spent those days at the farm? He would have liked to put that question to the lady herself but, one, she wouldn't tell him and, two, he had no excuse to pay her a visit at Joliet.
The booth they sat in gave them a view of the street outside and the courthouse across the street, a convenience for those playing hooky in the Pueblo. As Cy looked across the street, Elaine McCorkle came skipping down the courthouse steps. Cy was struck by the girlishness of her gait and then he saw why. A man awaited her at the foot of the steps. They embraced and then, arms around one another's waists, hips bumping rhythmically, they came across the street.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="15">
How young she had been! She'd worn a full skirt that blew against her slender body, her long black hair free about her shoulders, and John hadn't changed from his waterman's gear, his face as brown as his arms in their rolled-up plain sleeves. They had walked together on hard, wet sand, and hadn't touched each other by so much as a finger. Yet they'd moved close in spirit, and they both knew very well what was happening.
For Alex this had been nothing like her feelings for Rudy Folkes, or for Juan Gabriel. This was her first young love -totally abandoned, without caution or forethought. The acceptance, each of the other, had been complete as they walked together on the sand. Something utterly magical had taken hold of them that evening. Something dangerous.
For her, there had been no choice. It had not been difficult to see one another. They had found delicious, secret places along the Tidewater shores for their lovemaking -never anything as mundane as a room or an ordinary bed. Sometimes it was a field where wildflowers bloomed, or perhaps the russet ground beneath pine trees. And how they had talked, opening their hearts to each other. The stoicism of island men had broken down in John. It seemed that each had understood the other as no one else ever could. That belief, of course, had been their greatest mistake.
Curiously, she had felt no betrayal toward Juan Gabriel. Not then. She knew that nothing could change the special devotion she felt for her husband, but this new love, that she'd never before experienced, had risen in her so strongly that it swept all else away. There'd been no thought of the future, or of who might be hurt. How could this much happiness hurt anyone?
Only one insurmountable problem existed between John and herself. John wanted to marry her and she already was married. Juan Gabriel was an old man -in John's eyes -and he felt she deserved a young man's love. Someone with whom she could build a life, with whom she could have children. Her marriage to Juan Gabriel had brought only one child -a boy who had died as a baby before they had come to this country. There had been no more pregnancies, though they'd tried. What she hadn't understood was the deep island tradition of morality that governed John, even though the part of him that was like his mother could throw off such restrictions for a time.
In some strange way, Alex's relationship with John seemed to exist in another dimension that had nothing to do with her everyday life. In this way she avoided thought, avoided the truth of what was happening, even the truth about herself. John was sure about his life. He wanted to go on with the old ways of the men of his family and be a waterman on Chesapeake Bay out of Tangier Island. He found the dangers and uncertainties of that life to his taste. So, he pleaded with Alex to divorce Juan Gabriel and come to live on the island as his wife. The fact that divorce would never be possible for Juan Gabriel meant nothing to Juan. He had the arrogance of a young man and the rock-hard immovability of all his island-bred ancestors. He could never understand Juan Gabriel's principles, or that Alex Montoro had lived an entire life-time as a ballerina before she even turned twenty-one. Even his mainland upbringing had not touched that fierce, hard core. He was a gentle man, whose hidden, inner fierceness came to frighten her. At first, time spent with John existed on a different plane. An unreal plane, perhaps. Something deep within Alex knew she could never leave Juan Gabriel, never go to live on that tiny, bleak island, burying herself forever. Perhaps she had buried herself in Virginia, but at least she had done so with someone who understood who she had once been, someone who valued her in ways John could never understand. So her refusal wasn't entirely cowardice on her part. An unexpected strength had risen in her -a will strong enough to overcome the emotions she felt in John Gower's arms. Perhaps it was a newly awakened sense of herself, of John, of Juan Gabriel. And she made her choice.
In dark moments, when she was being honest with herself, she knew there had been another reason for her decision not to leave Juan Gabriel. His terrible burst of violence back in Lima was something she could never forget. It was always there at the back of her mind as a warning, and more frightening than the same element in John. Perhaps something in Alex herself had attracted passionate, loving, possessive men, with a depth of violence in their nature.
Juan Gabriel had not been young -even then he was already in his fifties -so it was not the violence of youth that had betrayed him. A hot Spanish anger existed just beneath the surface, ready to explode. When she looked back now she could not be sure that her motive had been one of loyalty to her husband, or fear of what he might do. If she had followed John Gower, they both might be long dead by now. The gun she had seen in Juan Gabriel's safe had been a warning.
After she made her choice, there had been times when she wasn't sure she wanted to go on living. Times when she'd cried herself to sleep because John had married Emily. She was unable to be friends with Emily any longer, and there was loss for her there, too -something Emily, in her innocence, had never understood. Alex could not have endured seeing them together and hearing how happy they were in their marriage, since Emily could turn herself into a proper Tangier wife.
Alex had dealt with pain before, and she dealt with it again, carrying on with her life so that Juan Gabriel was never hurt. The only time she had ever doubted Juan Gabriel's love -so many years later -had been when he had shown her his ebony carving of the black swan. She winced at the memory, and was glad that the carving had been misplaced over the years since his death. She remembered packing it away, but she couldn't remember where. It was just as well, she never wanted to see it again.
Strange that she had loved two men named John -two high-spirited men who could hide their deepest feelings.
When Dolores was born, Juan Gabriel had been exultant with pride, and he had not questioned this sudden miracle. He had wanted this daughter, and from the time she was a baby Dolores had given him an equal love. Sometimes Alex recognized John in Dolores, but Juan Gabriel never suspected, and she could be grateful for that.
John Gower never saw his daughter, nor did she ever tell him it was his child she bore. Nevertheless, with some sixth sense, she felt that he knew. Perhaps, that was why he now wanted to see his granddaughter Susan. Perhaps he had a right to see her? The child of the child of his young love.
To break the spell of her thoughts, Alex reached out to a pad of yellow paper upon which Juan Gabriel had written a few lines. The pad had remained here on his writing table, untouched since he'd left it there. Oddly enough, the lines he'd written were about Tangier Island -only snippets of information. He had never written his novel using the island. Yet he had been picking up the idea again all those years later, shortly before he became ill.
She read the words:
Indians occupied the island before the white man came. Perhaps a thousand years before John Smith sailed into its harbor.
2 1/2 miles long. 1 mile wide. 7 feet above sea level. Fragile, vulnerable to hurricanes.
Residents are of English descent. Elizabethan English can still be heard. The men catch crabs, oysters, fish of various sorts, clams. They are called watermen.
The island has a strange beauty of its own and is peopled with men and women inbred and strong enough to survive all that is asked of them.
Alex stopped reading because Juan Gabriel had started to set down a hint of the island's eerie magic. He'd remembered the sunsets, and he had imagined a storm and written words of tense description. John had belonged to those generations of survivors, as Alex could never have belonged.
She set down the pad, not wanting to be drawn back -unable to help herself.
John! His ruggedly handsome young face was as clear in her mind as though she'd seen him yesterday. There'd been times when she'd forgotten how he looked -but every feature was there now, breaking her heart all over again. To her he would remain always young and strong and passionate. And he would remember her as the girl he had loved so desperately. She had been beautiful then. She had the photographs to prove it. So how could she bear to destroy his memory of her with the reality of old age?
She'd continued to hold Juan Gabriel's pencil in her fingers, and she set it back in the jug, pricking her thumb with the sharp point as she did so. She regarded the lead mark as though it was somehow important -a link between present and past.
There was still a question she didn't know how to answer. What if Susan had a right to know this story, and to meet her grandfather before it was too late? How was she to decide?
It was always, so quickly, too late.
Four
Susan climbed the two flights of stairs to the tower room, finding that the last steps took a special effort. She felt utterly weary, yet wide awake, her thoughts whirling in confusion. What she needed now was to be alone in a quiet space, so that she needn't think at all.
In a little while she would take a hot, soaking bath to help her fall asleep, but for now she wanted only to lie down and rest. Without undressing, she lay full-length on the bed and closed her eyes. At once the faces and incidents of the day began to flash through her mind, and there was no way to dismiss them.
What did she think of her grandmother, now that she had met her? The young pictures of her as a ballet dancer had been fascinating, and Susan wanted to know more about that time. Yet the beautiful young girl in the photographs seemed to have little connection with a woman grown weary and remote from life. How could she hope to feel any affection for a woman so old and austere?
The encounter with Theresa at the foot of the stairs haunted her. Why could she remember nothing of what had happened when her mother died? There had been moments, in the past, when some glimmer of memory had risen, only to escape when she tried to grasp it.
In the end, unwillingly, her thoughts turned to Peter Macklin. The small, adoring child who had loved him still existed in some part of her mind -perhaps more vividly than anything else from the past. She felt unhappy and concerned because of the things Eric Townsend had revealed so carelessly -perhaps maliciously -but she must not get involved. In a few days she would have all the answers she needed and she would be gone. Nothing that existed here in Virginia need ever affect her again.
Deep in her subconscious a faint voice was laughing. It's already too late, it seemed to be saying, and she told it to be quiet.
Lying down wasn't going to work. She couldn't rest while her mind was so active. She threw a sweater over her shoulders and went outside to the small balcony that circled the tower. The sky was dark except for millions of stars. A few clouds covered the moon.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="16">
I took a shower and touched up my shave, then put the TV news on and listened to fifteen minutes of it with my feet up and my eyes closed. Around five-thirty I called Kenan Khoury and told him I'd made some progress, although I didn't have anything specific to report. He wanted to know if there was anything he could do.
"Not just yet," I said. "I'll be going back to Atlantic Avenue tomorrow to see if the picture fills in a little more. When I'm done there I'll come out to your place. Will you be there?"
"Sure," he said. "I got no place to go."
I set the alarm and closed my eyes again, and the clock snatched me out of a dream at half past six. I put on a suit and tie and went over to Elaine's. She poured coffee for me and Perrier for herself, and then we caught a cab uptown to the Asia Society, where they had recently opened an exhibit that centered on the Taj Mahal, and thus tied right in with the course she was taking at Hunter. After we'd walked through the three exhibit rooms and made the appropriate noises we followed the crowd into another room, where we sat in folding chairs and listened to a soloist perform on the sitar. I have no idea whether he was any good or not. I don't know how you could tell, or how he himself would know if his instrument was out of tune.
Afterward there was a wine-and-cheese reception. "This need not detain us long," Elaine murmured, and after a few minutes of smiling and mumbling, we were on the street.
"You loved every minute of it," she said.
"It was all right."
"Oh boy," she said. "The things a man will put himself through in the hope of getting laid."
"Come on," I said. "It wasn't that bad. It's the same music they play at Indian restaurants."
"But there you don't have to listen to it."
"Who listened?"
We want to an Italian restaurant, and over espresso I told her about Kenan Khoury and what had happened to his wife. When I was finished she sat for a moment looking down at the tablecloth in front of her as if there were something written on it. Then she raised her eyes slowly to meet mine. She is a resourceful woman, and a durable one, but just then she looked touchingly vulnerable.
"Dear God," she said.
"The things people do."
"There's just no end, is there? No bottom to it." She took a sip of water. "The cruelty of it, the utter sadism. Why would anyone - well, why ask why."
"I figure it has to be pleasure," I said. "They must have gotten off on it, not just on the killing but on rubbing his nose in it, jerking him around, telling him she'll be in the car, she'll be home when he gets there, then finally letting him find her in pieces in the trunk of the Ford. They wouldn't have to be sadists to kill her. They could see it as safer that way than to leave a witness who could identify them. But there was no practical advantage in twisting the knife the way they did. They went to a lot of trouble dismembering the body. I'm sorry, this is great table talk, isn't it?"
"That's nothing compared to what a great pre-bedtime story it makes."
"Puts you right in the mood, huh?"
"Nothing like it to get the juices flowing. No, really, I don't mind it. I mean I mind, of course I mind, but I'm not squeamish. It's gross, cutting somebody up, but that's really the least of it, isn't it? The real shock is that there's that kind of evil in the world and it can come from out of nowhere and zap you for no good reason at all. That's what's awful, and it's just as bad on an empty stomach as on a full one."
We went back to her apartment and she put on a Cedar Walton solo piano album that we both liked, and we sat together on the couch, not saying much. When the record ended she turned it over, and halfway through Side Two we went into the bedroom and made love with a curious intensity. Afterward neither of us spoke for a long time, until she said, "I'll tell you, kiddo. If we keep on like this, one of these days we're gonna get good at it."
"You think so, huh?"
"It wouldn't surprise me. Matt? Stay over tonight."
I kissed her. "I was planning to."
"Mmmm. Good plan. I don't want to be alone."
Neither did I.
Four
I stayed for breakfast, and by the time I got out to Atlantic Avenue it was almost eleven. I spent five hours there, most of it on the street and in shops but some of it in a branch library and on the phone. A little after four I walked a couple of blocks and caught a bus to Bay Ridge.
When I'd seen him last he'd been rumpled and unshaven, but now Kenan Khoury looked cool and composed in gray garbadine slacks and a muted plaid shirt. I followed him into the kitchen and he told me his brother had gone to work in Manhattan that morning. "Peter said he'd stay here, he didn't care about work, but how many times are we gonna have the same conversation? I made him take the Toyota so he's got that to get back and forth. How about you, Matt? You getting anywhere?"
I said, "Two men about my size took your wife off the street in front of The Arabian Gourmet and hustled her into a dark blue panel truck or van. A similar truck, probably the same one, was tailing her when she left D'Agostino's. The truck had lettering on the doors, white lettering according to one witness. TV Sales & Service, with the company name composed of indeterminate initials. B&L, H&M, different people saw different things. Two people remembered an address in Queens and one specifically recalled it as Long Island City."
"Is there such a firm?"
"The description's vague enough so that there are a dozen or more firms that would fit. A couple of initials, TV repair, a Queen address. I called six or eight outfits and couldn't come up with anybody who runs dark blue trucks or who had a vehicle stolen recently. I didn't expect to."
"Why not?"
"I don't think the truck was stolen. My guess is that they had your house staked out Thursday morning hoping your wife would go out by herself. When she did they followed her. It probably wasn't the first time they tailed her, waiting for an opportunity to make their play. They wouldn't want to steal a truck each time and ride around all day in something that's liable to show up any hour on the hot-car sheet."
"You think it was their truck?"
"Most likely. I think they painted a phony company name and address on the doors, and once they completed the snatch they painted the old name out and a new name in. By now I wouldn't be surprised if the whole body's repainted some color other than blue,"
"What about the license plate?"
"It had probably been switched for the occasion, but it hardly matters because nobody got the plate number. One witness thought the three of them had just knocked over the food market, that they were robbers, but all he wanted to do was get inside the store and make sure everybody was all right. Another man thought something funny was going on and he did take a look at the plate, but all he remembered was that it had a nine in it."
"That's helpful."
"Very. The men were dressed alike, dark pants and matching work shirts, matching blue windbreakers. They looked to be in uniform, and, between that and the commercial vehicle they were driving, they appeared legitimate. I learned years ago that you can walk in almost anywhere if you're carrying a clipboard because it looks as though you're doing your job. They had that edge going for them. Two different people told me they thought they were watching two undercover guys from INS taking an illegal alien off the street. That's one reason nobody interfered, that and the fact that it was over and done with before anyone had time to react."
"Pretty slick," he said.
"The uniform dress did something else, too. It made them invisible, because all people saw was their clothing, and all they remembered was that both of them looked the same. Did I mention that they had caps on, too? The witness described the caps and the jackets, things they put on for the job and got rid of afterward."
"So we don't really have anything."
"That's not really true," I said, "We don't have anything that leads directly to them, but we've got something. We know what they did and how they did it, that they're resourceful, that they planned their approach. How do you figure they picked you?"
He shrugged. "They knew I was a trafficker. That was mentioned. That makes you a good target. They know you've got money and they know you're not going to call the police."
"What else did they know about you?"
"My ethnic background. The one guy, the first one, he called me some names."
"I think you mentioned that."
"Raghead, sand nigger. That's a nice one, huh? Sand nigger. He left out camel jockey, that's one I used to hear from the Italian kids at St. Ignatius. 'Hey, Khoury, ya fuckin' camel jockey!' Only camel ever I saw was on a cigarette pack."
"You think being an Arab made you a target?"
"It never occurred to me. There's a certain amount of prejudice, no question about it, but I'm not usually that conscious of it. Francine's people are Palestinian, did I mention that?"
"Yes."
"They have it tougher. I know Palestinians who say they're Lebanese or Syrian just to avoid hassles. 'Oh, you're Palestinian, you must be a terrorist.' That kind of ignorant remark, and there are people who have bigoted ideas about Arabs in general." He rolled his eyes. "My father, for instance."
"Your father?"
"I wouldn't say he was anti-Arab, but he had this whole theory that we weren't actually Arabs. Our family's Christian, see."
"I wondered what you were doing at St.Ignatius."
"There were times I wondered myself. No, we were Maronite Christians, and according to my old man we were Phoenicians. You ever hear of the Phoenicians?"
"Back in biblical times, weren't they? Traders and explorers, something like that?!"
"You got it. Great sailors, they sailed all around Africa, they colonized Spain, they probably reached Britain. They founded Carthage in North Africa, and there were a lot of Carthaginian coins dug up in England. They were the first people to discover Polaris, that's the North Star, I mean to discover that it was always in the same spot and could be used for navigation. They developed an alphabet that served as the basis for the Greek alphabet." He broke off, slightly embarrassed. "My old man talked about them all the time. I guess some of it must have soaked in."
"It looks like it."
"He wasn't a lunatic on the subject, but he knew a lot about it. That's where my name comes from. The Phoenicians called themselves the Kena'ani, or Canaanites. My name should be pronounced Keh-nahn, but everyone's always said Kee-nan."
"Ken Curry' is the message I got yesterday."
"Yeah, that's typical. I've ordered things on the phone and they turn up addresses to Keane & Curry, it sounds like a couple of Irish lawyers. Anyway, according to my father the Phoenicians were a completely different people from the Arabs. They were the Canaanites, they were already a people at the time of Abraham.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="17">
Again Richie was quickly aware. "Don't speed up. Gradually slow down, drive him nuts. He won't hit you unless you stop without warning."
This took a lot of nerve, for as soon as John began subtly to decelerate, the truckdriver sounded shattering blasts of his horn. The only way to persist in the tactic was to avoid looking in the mirror, grit your teeth, and put your being on automatic pilot. He had once successfully employed the technique as a passenger on a light aircraft in stormy skies. Whether it would have worked again he was not to determine now, for after another mile, by which point he was still going better than forty, the highway became positively spacious, with two full lanes separated by a grassy median strip from the two that went the other way.
His sigh of relief, however, proved premature: the truck stayed directly behind him even when both vehicles had gained the wider road. Furthermore, the deafening sound of the horn had become constant.
When he quickly changed lanes, so did the truck.
"Okay," Richie cried in elation. "We got him now!"
What scared John about this sort of dueling was the irrationality of it. He put the accelerator to the floor. The car responded more vigorously than he had anticipated and sprang out to a substantial lead on the truck. But the driver of the larger vehicle was quick to answer what he took as a challenge. It was unfortunate that, as John could see only now that the highway began an ascent, the powerful tractor had no trailer in tow, which undoubtedly meant that Sharon's little car would be no match for its brute power even when going uphill.
"Christ, why doesn't a cop come along now?" He regretted the need to express fear in Richie's presence. Though he was going flat out, the truck was overtaking him, its windshield reflecting the sun in an impenetrable glare. He still could not see the driver.
"We're in luck," Richie shouted, over the noise of an engine at maximum power. "A cop would only take the bastard's side. Don't worry. We've got him now!"
An empty boast if there ever was one! John had reached the crest of the rise and looked down a long slope of highway on which its weight would give the truck an even greater advantage in speed. Furthermore, several cars were in sight ahead, in each lane, so that he might be trapped behind them in either. To be sure, were they driven by good citizens, perhaps by some effort of them all in concert the truck would be the one so confined or captured. Then, too, car phones and emergency CB sets were commonplace. An observant and law-loving driver might well alert the state police to such conspicuous and illegal slipstreaming.
Yet while entertaining such fantasies, John was aware that no help would be forthcoming. Though accompanied by, and in fact responsible for the well-being of, two other souls (both of them strangers, so that while providing little effective company, they denied him privacy), he stood alone.
But Richie suddenly helped. "Let him get right up against you in the right lane, then suddenly switch to the left. You can maneuver a lot quicker than him. He can't turn that fast at speed without being in danger of losing it. Soon as you get over, slow down some. He'll have to go on by. Once we get behind him, we'll own his ass."
But who wanted it? John looked forward only to seeing the last of the menace. To him the driver was a potential homicide, without a motive: he yearned for no revenge on such a depraved human being. Naturally, if he saw a cop he would report the incident, but that was another thing entirely. As to 'letting' the truck ride his back bumper, it had arrived there once more without his permission and would stay there. What Richie had suggested was better than that.
He gave a warning to his passengers, and Richie heeded it, seizing the handhold above the upper left corner of his door, but Sharon apparently did not, and when he made his abrupt lane-switch, he heard the sound of her body being flung across the backseat by centrifugal force.
Richie's tactic worked! The truck thundered by in the right lane, its rushing bulk and giant brutal wheels even more frightening than its seemingly static and one-dimensional image had been in the mirror. By such a simple device, the thing that could have flattened them was now rendered harmless. Perhaps the madman behind its wheel would roar on to threaten other defenseless motorists. If so, who cared? Quite a natural feeling at this instant. In the next, he would continue to look for a policeman.
Now he was able to ask Sharon, "Are you okay back there?"
She mumbled an affirmative. At such a time there was surely an advantage in being tranquilized.
"Okay," Richie said eagerly. "Now let's nail him."
The truck was already fifty yards ahead, John having diminished his speed so as to fall far behind and thus recede from the immediate memory of the driver, who might just be crazy enough to retain a grudge. Nowadays you were always hearing about people who on the occasion of traffic squabbles produced the guns they carried in their cars for just such a purpose, and shot adversary motorists or even others who were faultless.
"Forget about the bastard," John said. "Good riddance." He was relieved to see Richie accept this with a stoical shrug and fall back into the seat, slumping so low that he could barely see over the dashboard. John had feared that a need for revenge might be the man's dominant emotion. What was his own? He was conscious of a lifetime urge to do right. This put him at a frequent disadvantage, as in the case of the tailgating truck. It was true that he had now escaped from the situation, but it was unfair that he had been in it in the first place. He had given no rational offense. How could one do so by driving in an orderly manner at the speed limit? To behave otherwise would endanger the lives of human beings: that was what had been at issue, not the narrow concerns of traffic law.
Richie grumbled, down in his slump, kicking the firewall. "Those kind of people make me mad: they don't have any respect."
All John wanted to do was get to Hillsdale, and back, without further incident. What Richie said might be true, but nothing could be done about it beyond complaining, and John hated to waste his time in negative lament.
"How big a town is Hillsdale?"
"I don't know."
"Have you lived there long?" John glanced at him. "Do you live there at all?"
Richie grinned. "I said I did, didn't I?"
"Well, that's where I'm taking you."
"Then that's where I'm going." Without emerging from his slump, Richie made a long reach for the knobs of the radio.
"Do you mind?" John asked. "I don't want to hear any music now." He did not quite understand why he had said that. Had he been alone he would have switched on the radio and listened to almost anything but elevator music, though what he preferred were the records popular when he was in the latter years of high school, which to younger people were already far out of date.
"Do you ever enjoy yourself?" It was Richie's sudden question and bore an implication John did not care for.
"I've done some things in my day. I wasn't always married, with little kids. I've been around."
"I'm talking of right now," Richie said. "You interested in some partying? We'll pick up a couple bottles." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "She's got everything else. Maybe go to a motel, do it right."
"Oh, come on," John complained. "Just let that-"
"Think I'm kidding? Should of seen what she had in her purse. That's why she was so worried about the cop back there. Junkie bitch."
John was hit hard by this information. He lacked the spirit to ask Sharon to confirm or deny, but assumed she would have protested had the charge been baseless. He did not even wish to know what sort of drugs were at issue.
"I'm dropping you off in Hillsdale and then going straight home. Since this is the only form of transportation available to me, I'm driving myself home in this car." He had made the latter statement for Sharon's benefit, should she herself be (despite her professed fear of Richie) inclined to acquiesce in the proposal, and looked for her in the mirror, but she was presumable lying on the seat and could not be seen.
"Just an idea," Richie said.
John saw something that brought him back to the moment. A quarter mile ahead, the truck that had tailgated him was parked on the shoulder, which had widened with the broadening of the highway. Instantly chilled, he would have turned and run if he could, but the road was one-way and at this point on the median the simple grass had given way to bushes, so it was not physically possible to perform an illegal U-turn and head back where they had come from - for such he might well have done, in a sudden and unprecedented access of mortal fear.
In another moment, however, he again was in command of himself. The truckdriver was surely not waiting for him, but rather immobilized by mechanical trouble. John was in fact instantly ashamed of himself and grateful that he had said or done nothing that could have revealed his fright to Richie, whom he glanced at now.
Richie, too, had already seen the truck. "Hey, look!"
"I guess he's broken down," John said hopefully.
Richie eyed him. "Maybe we just ought to stop and ask. Maybe he's in real trouble."
John took refuge in a sardonic tone. "I doubt it's life or death." They were not far from the truck now, but he had yet to see the driver.
"Pull in," Richie said abruptly. "You can stay in the car if you want. I'll see what's what."
Insulted by the implied slur on his courage, John accelerated onto the shoulder and then had to brake hard, skidding on the loose dirt and gravel, to stop the car before it collided with the rear of the truck.
He jumped out, in a certain disorder. He disliked hearing the sound his old sneakers, normally quiet, made on the gritty shoulder. Before he reached the truck, the driver's door was hurled open. A burly figure emerged and did not jump but rather descended to the ground with the deliberation of the overweight.
So that his intentions could not be misinterpreted, John quickly said, "Hi. Anything we can help you out with?"
The driver wore a dirty plaid shirt but was clean-shaven and pinkly scrubbed of skin. He spoke in some kind of hick accent. "You mess around with me, and I'll make you cry." He was taller than John and wider, but much of his poundage consisted, visibly, of lard, and he looked to be about forty. He held a metal bar.
John had not been in a fight since childhood, and in fact had not been offered one since then. But now that he was out of the car and actually in this situation, he was not unduly apprehensive. He was a salesman, and knew how to talk to people.
"Hey, I just stopped to see if I could help out." He smiled. "Really. We thought you just might be in some trouble."
"I ain't," said the truckdriver. "You are." He lowered his heavy head, on which the thick hair looked freshly combed.
"Now take it easy," John said, suppressing his annoyance. "I mean it. If your radio's out, I'll be glad to make a call for you at the next phone.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="18">
Mr. Beck looked at Anthony, perhaps with the hope that he would say something in answer to the implied invective, perhaps with the expectation of Anthony's offering some word of comfort or support to his former wife. When Anthony said nothing, Mr. Beck continued quickly.
"You'll need to let me know where and when the services are to be held and where she's to be interred. We've a lovely chapel here if you'd like to use that for the service. And - of course, I know this is difficult for you both - but you need to decide if you want a public viewing."
"A public ...?" At the thought of his daughter being put on display for the curious, Anthony felt the hair bristle on the backs of his hands. "That's not possible. She isn't -"
"I want it." Glyn's nails, Anthony saw, were going completely white with the pressure she was exerting against her palms.
"You don't want that. You haven't seen what she looks like."
"Please don't tell me what I want. I said I'll see her. I'll do so. I want everyone to see her."
Mr. Beck intervened with, "We can do some repairs. With facial putty and makeup, no one will be able to see the full extent of -"
Glyn snapped forward. Like a self-preserving reflex, Mr. Beck flinched. "You aren't listening to me. I want the damage seen. I want the world to know."
Anthony wanted to ask, "And what will you gain?" But he knew the answer. She'd given Elena over to his care, and she wanted the world to see how he'd botched the job. For fifteen years she'd kept their daughter in one of the roughest areas of London and Elena had emerged from the experience with one chipped tooth to mark the only difficulty she'd ever faced, a brawl over the affections on an acne-scarred fifth former who'd spent a lunch hour with her instead of his steady girlfriend. And neither Glyn nor Elena had ever considered that uncapped tooth even a minute lapse in Glyn's ability to protect her daughter. Instead, it was for both of them Elena's badge of honour, her declaration of equality. For the three girls whom she had fought could hear, but they were no match for the splintered crate of new potatoes and the two metal milk baskets which Elena had commandeered for defensive weapons from the nearby greengrocer's when she'd come under attack.
Fifteen years in London, one chipped tooth to show for it. Fifteen months in Cambridge, one barbarous death.
Anthony wouldn't fight her. He said, "Have you a brochure we might look at? Something we can use in order to decide ...?"
Mr. Beck seemed only too willing to cooperate. He said, "Of course," and hastily slid open a drawer of his desk. From this he took a three-ring binder covered in maroon plastic with the words Beck and Sons, Funeral Directors printed in gold letters across the front. He passed this across to them.
Anthony opened it. Plastic covers encased eight-by-ten colour photographs. He began to flip through them, looking without seeing, reading without assimilating. He recognised woods: mahogany and oak. He recognised terms: naturally resistant to corrosion, rubber gasket, crepe lining, asphalt coating, vacuum plate. Faintly, he heard Mr. Beck murmuring about the relative merits of copper or sixteen-gauge steel over oak, about lift and tilt mattresses, about the placement of a hinge. He heard him say:
"These Uniseal caskets are quite the best. The locking mechanism in addition to the gasket seals the top while the continuous weld on the bottom seals that as well. So you've maximum protection to resist the entry of -" He hesitated delicately. The indecision was written plainly on his face. Worms, beetles, moisture, mildew. How best to say it? - "the elements."
The words in the binder slid out of focus. Anthony heard Glyn say, "Have you coffins here?"
"Only a few. People generally make a choice from the brochures. And under the circumstances, please don't feel you must -"
"I'd like to see them."
Mr. Beck's eyes flitted to Anthony. He seemed to be waiting for a protest of some sort. When none was forthcoming, he said, "Certainly. This way," and led them out of the office.
Anthony followed his former wife and the funeral director. He wanted to insist that they make the decision within the safety of Mr. Beck's office where photographs would allow both of them to hold the final reality at bay for just a while longer. But he knew that to call for distance between them and the fact of Elena's burial would be interpreted as further evidence of inadequacy. And hadn't Elena's death already served to illustrate his uselessness as a father, once again underscoring the contention which Glyn had asserted for years: that his sole contribution to their daughter's upbringing had been a single, blind gamete that knew how to swim?
"Here they are." Mr. Beck pushed open a set of heavy oak doors. "I'll leave you alone."
Glyn said, "That won't be necessary."
"But surely you'll want to discuss -"
"No." She moved past him into the showroom. There were no decorations or extraneous furnishings, just a few coffins lined up along the pearl-coloured walls, their lids gaping open upon velvet, satin, and crepe, their bodies standing on waist-high, translucent pedestals.
Anthony forced himself to follow Glyn from one to the next. Each had a discreet price tag, each bore the same declaration about the extent of protection guaranteed by the manufacturer, each had a ruched lining, a matching pillow, and a coverlet folded over the coffin lid. Each had its own name: Neapolitan Blue, Windsor Poplar, Autumn Oak, Venetian Bronze. Each had an individually high-lighted feature, a shell design, a set of barley sugar end posts, or delicate embroidery on the interior of the lid. Forcing himself to move along the display, Anthony tried not to visualise what Elena would look like when she finally lay in one of these coffins with her light hair spread out like silk threads on the pillow.
Glyn halted in front of a simple grey coffin with a plain satin lining. She tapped her fingers against it. As if this gesture bade him to do so, Mr. Beck hurried to join them. His lips were pursed tightly. He was pulling at his chin.
"What is this?" Glyn asked. A small sign on the lid said Nonprotective exterior. Its price tag read pounds200.
"Pressed wood." Mr. Beck made a nervous adjustment to his Pembroke tie and rapidly continued. "This is pressed wood beneath a flannel covering, a satin interior, which is quite nice, of course, but the exterior has no protection at all save for the flannel itself and to be frank if I may, considering our weather, I wouldn't be at all comfortable recommending this particular coffin to you. We keep it for cases where there are difficulties ... Well, difficulties with finances. I can't think you'd want your daughter ..." He let the drifting quality of his voice complete the thought.
Anthony began to say, "Of course," but Glyn interrupted with, "This coffin will do."
For a moment, Anthony did nothing more than stare at his former wife. Then he found the will to say, "You can't think I'll allow her to be buried in this."
She said quite distinctly, "I don't care what you intend to allow. I've not enough money for -"
"I'll pay."
She looked at him for the first time since they'd arrived. "With your wife's money? I think not."
"This has nothing to do with Justine."
Mr. Beck took a step away from them. He straightened out the small price sign on a coffin lid. He said, "I'll leave you to talk."
"There's no need." Glyn opened her large black handbag and began shoving articles this way and that. A set of keys clanked. A compact snapped open. A ballpoint pen slipped out onto the floor. "You'll take a cheque, won't you? It'll have to be drawn on my bank in London. If that's a problem, you can phone for some sort of guarantee. I've been doing business with them for years, so -"
"Glyn. I won't have it.
She swung to face him. Her hip hit the coffin, jarring it on its pedestal. The lid fell shut with a hollow thud. "You won't have what?" she asked. "You have no rights here."
"We're talking about my daughter."
Mr. Beck began to edge towards the door.
"Stay where you are." Angry colour patched Glyn's cheeks. "You walked out on your daughter, Anthony. Let's not forget that. You wanted your career. Let's not forget that. You wanted to chase skirts. Let's not forget that. You got what you wanted. All of it. Every bit. You have no more rights here." Chequebook in hand, she stooped to the floor for the pen. She began to write, using the pressed wood coffin lid as support.
Her hand was shaking. Anthony reached for the cheque<?>-book, saying, "Glyn. Please. For God's sake."
"No," she said. "I'll pay for this. I don't want your money. You can't buy me off."
"I'm not trying to buy you off. I just want Elena -"
"Don't say her name! Don't you say it!"
Mr. Beck said, "Let me leave you," and without acknowledging Glyn's immediate "No!" he hurried from the room.
Glyn continued to write. She clutched the pen like a weapon in her hand. "He said two hundred pounds, didn't he?"
"Don't do this," Anthony said. "Don't make this another battle between us."
"She'll wear that blue dress Mum got her last birthday."
"We can't bury her like a pauper. I won't let you do it. I can't."
Glyn ripped the cheque from the book. She said, "Where'd that man get off to? Here's his money. Let's go." She headed for the door.
Anthony reached for her arm.
She jerked away. "You bastard," she hissed. "Bastard! Who brought her up? Who spent years trying to give her some language? Who helped her with her schoolwork and dried her tears and washed her clothes and sat up with her at night when she was puling and sick? Not you, you bastard. And not your ice queen wife. This is my daughter, Anthony. My daughter. Mine. And I'll bury her exactly as I see fit. Because unlike you, I'm not hot after some big poncey job, so I don't have to give a damn what anyone thinks."
He examined her with sudden, curious dispassion, realising that he saw no evidence of grief. He saw no mother's devotion to her child and nothing that illustrated the magnitude of loss. "This has nothing to do with burying Elena," he said in slow but complete understanding. "You're still dealing with me. I'm not sure you even care much that she's dead."
"How dare you," she whispered.
"Have you even cried, Glyn? Do you feel any grief? Do you feel anything at all beyond the need to use her murder for a bit more revenge? And how can anyone be surprised by that? After all, that's how you used most of her life."
He didn't see the blow coming. She slammed her right hand across his face, knocking his spectacles to the floor.
"You filthy piece of -" She raised her arm to strike again.
He caught her wrist. "You've waited years to do that. I'm only sorry you didn't have the audience you'd have liked." He pushed her away. She fell against the grey coffin. But she was not spent.
She spit out the words: "Don't talk to me of grief. Don't you ever - ever - talk to me of grief."
She turned away from him, flinging her arms over the coffin lid as if she would embrace it. She began to weep.
"I have nothing. She's gone. I can't have her back. I can't find her anywhere. And I can't ... I can never ..." The fingers of one hand curled, pulling at the flannel that covered the coffin. "But you can.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="19">
Chapter 1
ENJOYING A RARE MOMENT of relaxation, Gordon Barclay swiveled in his chair and watched a loaded freighter make its ponderous way across Puget Sound. For most men turning sixty meant winding down, taking fewer risks, planning for oblivion. To Barclay it seemed as if the ride had just begun.
He heard a light rap on the door - Nancy with his letters to sign. He pivoted so he could watch her from the corner of his eye while pretending to scrutinize a document. Her dress was one he hadn't seen before, a pink flowery sort of thing with a lace collar and made of a silky fabric that swung playfully on her narrow hips. She laid the letters on his desk.
"The Wilson interrogatories went out today, and I called and confirmed the trial date on Mastriani. Word Processing says your brief and jury instructions will be done by five."
"I'd sure be up a creek without you, my dear, wouldn't I?" He took the stack of letters from her and quickly scribbled his signature on each one. He hated proofreading and trusted that her typing was accurate.
"How was lunch at Fuller's?" asked Nancy.
"As usual, the restaurant was sublime, the company ridiculous." Barclay lowered his voice. "I trust you'll never tell Walt Wiley at Trans-Pacific Casualty what I really think of him."
"Your biggest client? I'd never dream of it. Did he wear that awful seersucker suit again?"
"No, today's was worse - blue and white houndstooth made of some sort of fabric that looked like spun Styrofoam. He ordered homogenized milk with lunch, made them cook his tournedos of beef well done, and asked the waiter for more bread four times. Oh, before I forget. Would you round up two tickets to the Sonics game for next Wednesday? I discovered that our friend Walt's a basketball fan."
"But I thought you hated basketball."
"I like basketball exactly as much as I like Walt Wiley."
She giggled. "I see. Anything else?"
"Not right now, thanks. Oh, and, uh, about that Friday night you were asking me about? I'll see what I can manage, but I'm not sure yet if Adele's definitely going to be out of town. You know how she is about making decisions." Barclay shrugged.
Nancy frowned, looked as if she wanted to say something, then changed her mind and turned to leave. As Barclay watched her go, a ray of sunlight fell on her hair, bringing out the golden highlights. He remembered what she'd looked like playing tennis, her long brown legs in a short white skirt. She'd practically danced on the court. Despite the difference in their ages he'd beaten her in all three sets.
Once Nancy was out of the room, he slipped on the reading glasses he never wore in public and turned toward his overflowing in-basket. The top item was another memo about the law firm's annual dinner-dance on Saturday night. Now that was something he wished he could get out of. Those damned parties were always boring as hell, and it was going to be on that blasted boat again - impossible to leave early. But he couldn't skip out, not after having made such a fuss about trying to hire Annie MacPherson. She and her partner were supposed to be there to meet the executive committee. No sense in taking chances now after weeks of laying the groundwork. The partners would be voting at the meeting on Wednesday, and it was imperative that they approve this merger. If MacPherson got out of his grasp, his entire plan could go down the toilet.
Barclay's face betrayed no emotion when he saw the next item in his correspondence. Like the other notes he'd received, it was in a sealed envelope, on office stationery, with his name neatly typed in the center. Below it the words EXTREMELY PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL were highlighted in blue.
As he reached for the envelope, Barclay's pulse quickened and he felt his face grow warm. He slashed it open with a letter opener. Inside was a single sheet of paper that looked just like the others. He skimmed it quickly:
TO: GORDON BARCLAY
FROM: AN INTERESTED PARTY
RE: YOUR FUTURE, ASSHOLE
IT'S ME AGAIN, BIG GUY. THE ONE WHO KNOWS EVERYTHING. YOU AIN'T IN PARADISE ANYMORE, TOTO.
ARE YOU GONNA COME CLEAN AND TAKE IT LIKE A MAN, OR AM I GONNA HAVE TO
HUNT
YOU
DOWN?
Barclay shuddered. He didn't need to read the note a second time. He unlocked his personal filing cabinet and shoved the paper and envelope in next to the others. Then, eyes closed, he took several deep breaths, fighting the urge to do something rash.
When he could feel his heart beating normally again, he buzzed Nancy and asked for some tea.
Chapter 2
KNIFELIKE JABS of pain throbbed in Annie's arches and jolted up her calves as she walked across the terminal building to the restroom. The overly bright fluorescent lights in the ladies' lounge gave her freckled skin a bluish cast and turned her red-gold hair the color of kelp. She wondered if it was too late to bolt.
She felt absurd. Even though the invitation said semi-formal, the strapless black dress and the Italian instruments of torture masquerading as shoes were totally out of character for her. She tugged at the top of her dress and prayed it would stay in the right place all evening.
Combing her hair, Annie took several deep breaths and tried to get into the right frame of mind for this party. All week Joel Feinstein, her law partner, had been reminding her how important it was that they make a good impression tonight. After several years of struggling, their two-person partnership was about to self-destruct. It was no one's fault. Sure, Annie felt guilty about having taken a three-month leave of absence, but the real blow had come when Joel's largest client, a local savings and loan, had been bought out by a California bank. They might have squeaked by if their professional liability carrier hadn't picked that moment to double their malpractice insurance premium. What had been a minor blowup at the beginning of the year had, by April, escalated into a financial Chernobyl.
That was when Kemble, Laughton, Mercer, and Duff had called to propose a merger. KLMD was one of the Northwest's largest law firms; it had seemed like a gift from the gods. But mega-law firms didn't merge with small partnerships without first taking a good, hard look. Annie and Joel had been subjected to endless hours of interviews. The books had been pored over, accounts receivable tallied, client names run through the computer to check for conflicts of interest.
Now all that remained was to see if the big fish liked the small fish enough to gobble it up. And Annie MacPherson felt just like a mackerel about to be fed to Moby Dick.
Joel and his wife, Maria, were waiting for Annie outside. The Kemble, Laughton party was being held on the Alki Lady, a vintage ferryboat from the 1920s specially refurbished for such elegant affairs. As soon as all of the guests were aboard, they'd begin a nighttime cruise around Seattle's Elliott Bay.
"Do you realize we're going to be trapped on a boat with over two hundred lawyers with no means of escape?" Annie asked.
"You can always jump," said Joel. "That dress of yours has almost as much fabric as a swimsuit."
"Knock it off, Feinstein, before I tell you what you look like in that monkey suit."
Formally dressed couples ranging in age from their late twenties to their midsixties were heading for the docked boat. Annie was greatly relieved to see that hers wasn't the only strapless dress in the crowd.
"I feel so dowdy all of a sudden," said Maria, looking around at the sequins and plunging necklines. "But what could I do? They don't make sexy evening gowns in my size." Joel's wife stood barely five feet tall and normally weighed about hundred pounds. In her tasteful black maternity dress she bore a striking resemblance to an olive on a toothpick. "And forget what Joel says. I think your dress looks fantastic. I wish I had the guts to wear something like that!"
"So do I," Annie replied.
For a fleeting moment she wondered what David Courtney would think if he could see her right now. For the three months she'd spent on his sailboat in the South Pacific she'd worn nothing but shorts, swimsuits, and a lot of sunscreen, with her biggest decision being what to fix for lunch. But that had all ended when she'd left the boat in February, Annie reminded herself. It no longer mattered what David Courtney thought.
"Now remember, Annie," said Joel nervously, "tonight's our last chance to make this deal work. I don't need to tell you what bankruptcy can do to a lawyer's reputation."
"You already have, Joel. About four times."
"Don't fret so much, honey," said Maria. "You're starting to sound like your mother."
"That world-class worrier? No way. I'm strictly an amateur."
"Practice makes perfect," said Annie.
"You two sure know how to gang up on a guy. Now listen. I'm going to spend my time with the corporate folks, and you've got to try to meet the guy who heads up the insurance defense group, right? What was his name again?"
"Oh, damn. I'm drawing a blank." She caught Joel's anxious glance. "I can do this, I really can."
Joel scowled.
One of the senior partners, a genial man in a plaid cummerbund and matching bow tie, was playing host and ushering the crowd up the stairs to the deck where drinks were being served. HHHe beamed when he saw Annie and Joel, shook their hands, got their names wrong, and assured them he would catch up later to see how they were doing.
"Now don't you be intimidated," he chortled, "we're quite a wild bunch when we get going."
"Oh, I'm sure of that," said Annie.
He thrust out a hip and snapped his fingers. "Party down, as the kids say!"
Annie smiled feebly in response and didn't resist as the surging crowd carried her into the salon. She gave a last look at Joel, easy to spot since he towered a good head above the crowd. He flashed her a thumbs-up and then she was on her own.
A score of waitresses circled the crowd taking drink orders. After Annie ordered a glass of white wine, she took a moment to survey the crowd. Barclay. Gordon Barclay. How could she have forgotten one of the most prominent trial attorneys in the state? If the merger went through, she'd be working in his insurance defense group, and his vote at the upcoming partners' meeting would be crucial. She wasn't quite sure where to start looking for him.
"So the rumors are true after all." The voice behind her sounded vaguely familiar. Annie turned. "Jed Delacourt? What are you doing here?"
"You obviously don't read your alumni newsletter. I work here. It'll be six years next week. Fabulous dress by the way."
"Thanks."
With his fair hair and boyish good looks John Edward Delacourt III looked no older to Annie than he had ten years earlier when they had graduated together from the University of Washington Law School. They hadn't been close friends. Jed, newly arrived from Boston smelling of old money, had had little to do with anyone who wasn't on Law Review, wealthy, or both. Annie had been neither.
"I thought you went to work for the public defender's office after law school?"
"Mm-hmm," he said, grabbing a prawn from a passing tray and popping it into his mouth. He wiped a touch of cocktail sauce from the side of his mouth. "Foolish me, thinking I'd be happier helping the poor than making money for myself. It only took me a few years to wise up. Kemble, Laughton made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="20">
19
Jessie awoke in the mild, milky light of dawn with the perplexing and ominous memory of the woman still filling her mind - the woman with her graying hair pulled back in that tight countrywoman's bun, the woman who had been kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip puddled beside her, the woman who had been looking down through broken boards and smelling that awful bland smell. Jessie hadn't thought of that woman in years, and now, fresh from her dream of 1963 that hadn't been a dream but a recollection, it seemed to her that she had been granted some sort of supernatural vision on that day, a vision that had perhaps been caused by stress and then lost again for the same reason.
But it didn't matter - not that, not what had happened with her father out on the deck, not what had happened later, when she had turned around to see him standing in the bedroom door. All that had happened a long time ago, and as for what was happening right now -
I'm in trouble. I think I'm in very serious trouble.
She lay back against the pillows and looked up at her suspended arms. She felt as dazed and helpless as a poisoned insect in a spider's web, wanting no more than to be asleep again - dreamlessly this time, if possible - with her dead arms and dry throat in another universe.
No such luck.
There was a slow, somnolent buzzing sound somewhere close by. Her first thought was alarm clock. Her second, after two or three minutes of dozing with her eyes open, was smoke detector. That idea caused a brief, groundless burst of hope which brought her a little closer to real waking. She realized that what she was hearing didn't really sound very much like a smoke detector at all. It sounded like ... well ... like ...
It's flies, toots, okay? The no-bullshit voice now sounded tired and wan. You've heard about the Boys of Summer, haven't you? Well, these are the Flies of Autumn, and their version of the World Series is currently being played on Gerald Burlingame, the noted attorney and handcuff-fetishist.
"Jesus, I gotta get up," she said in a croaking, husky voice she barely recognized as her own.
What the hell does that mean? she thought, and it was the answer - Not a goddam thing, thanks very much - that finished the job of bringing her back to full wakefulness. She didn't want to be awake, but she had an idea that she had better accept the fact that she was and do as much with it as she could, while she could.
And you probably better start by waking up your hands and arms. If they will wake up, that is.
She looked at her right arm, then turned her head on the rusty armature of her neck (which was only partially asleep) and looked at her left. Jessie realized with sudden shock that she was looking at them in a completely new way - looking at them as she might have looked at pieces of furniture in a showroom window. They seemed to have no business with Jessie Burlingame at all, and she supposed there was nothing so odd about that, not really; they were, after all, utterly without feeling. Sensation only started a little below her armpits.
She tried to pull herself up and was dismayed to find the mutiny in her arms had gone further than she had suspected. Not only did they refuse to move her; they refused to move themselves. Her brain's order was totally ignored. She looked up at them again, and they no longer looked like furniture to her. Now they looked like pallid cuts of meat hanging from butchers' hooks, and she let out a hoarse cry of fear and anger.
Never mind, though. The arms weren't happening, at least for the time being, and being mad or afraid or both wasn't going to change that a bit. How about the fingers? If she could curl them around the bedposts, then maybe ...
... or maybe not. Her fingers seemed as useless as her arms. After nearly a full minute of effort, Jessie was rewarded only by a single numb twitch from her right thumb.
"Dear God," she said in her grating dust-in-the-cracks voice. There was no anger in it now, only fear.
People died in accidents, of course - she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of "death-clips" on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the back-ground, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn't had the slightest idea they would never eat another cheese-burger, watch another round of Final Jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm was never going to be fulfilled, because you were going to be too busy being dead. Any morning you rolled out of bed might be your last.
It's a lot more than a case of might this morning, Jessie thought. I think now it's a case of probably. The house - our nice quiet lakeside house - may very well be on the news Friday or Saturday night. It'll be Doug Rowe wearing that white trenchcoat of his I hate so much and talking into his microphone and calling it "the house where prominent Portland lawyer Gerald Burlingame and his wife Jessie died." Then he'll send it back to the studio and Bill Green will do the sports, and that isn't being morbid, Jessie; that isn't the Goodwife moaning or Ruth ranting. It's -
But Jessie knew. It was the truth. It was just a silly little accident, the kind of thing you shook your head over when you saw it reported in the paper at breakfast; you said "Listen to this, honey," and read the item to your husband while he ate his grapefruit. Just a silly little accident, only this time it was happening to her. Her mind's constant insistence that it was a mistake was understandable but irrelevant. There was no Complaint Department where she could explain that the handcuffs had been Gerald's idea and so it was only fair that she should be let off. If the mistake was going to be rectified, she would have to be the one to do it.
Jessie cleared her throat, closed her eyes, and spoke to the ceiling. "God? Listen a minute, would You? I need some help here, I really do. I'm in a mess and I'm terrified. Please help me get out of this, okay? I ... um ... I pray in the name of Jesus Christ." She struggled to amplify this prayer and could only come up with something Nora Callighan had taught her, a prayer which now seemed to be on the lips of every self-help huckster and dipshit guru in the world: "God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen."
Nothing changed. She felt no serenity, no courage, most certainly no widsom. She was still only a woman with dead arms and a dead husband, cuffed to the posts of this bed like a cur-dog chained to a ringbolt and left to die unremarked and unlamented in a dusty back yard while his tosspot master serves thirty days in the county clink for driving without a license and under the influence.
"Oh please don't let it hurt," she said in a low, trembling voice. "If I'm going to die, God, please don't let it hurt. I'm such a baby about pain."
Thinking about dying at this point is probably a really bad idea, toots. Ruth's voice paused, then added: On second thought, strike the probably.
Okay, no argument - thinking about dying was a bad idea. So what did that leave?
Living. Ruth and Goodwife Burlingame said it at the same time.
All right, living. Which brought her around full circle to her arms again.
They're asleep because I've been hanging on them all night. I'm still hanging on them. Getting the weight off is step one.
She tried to push herself backward and upward with her feet again, and felt a sudden weight of black panic when they at first also refused to move. She lost herself for a few moments then, and when she came back she was pistoning her legs rapidly up and down, pushing the coverlet, the sheets, and the mattress-pad down to the foot of the bed. She was gasping for breath like a bicycle-racer topping the last steep hill in a marathon race. Her butt, which had also gone to sleep, sang and zipped with wake-up needles.
Fear had gotten her fully awake, but it took the half-assed aerobics which accompanied her panic to kick her heart all the way up into passing gear. At last she began to feel tingles of sensation - bone-deep and as ominous as distant thunder - in her arms.
If nothing else works, toots, keep your mind on those last two or three sips of water. Keep reminding yourself that you're never going to get hold of that glass again unless your hands and arms are in good working order, let alone drink from it.
Jessie continued to push with her feet as the morning brightened. Sweat plastered her hair against her temples and streamed down her cheeks. She was aware - vaguely - that she was deepening her water-debt every moment she persisted in this strenuous activity, but she saw no choice.
Because there is none, toots - none at all.
Toots this and toots that, she thought distractedly. Would you please put a sock in it, you mouthy bitch?
At last her bottom began to slide up toward the head of the bed. Each time it moved, Jessie tensed her stomach muscles and did a mini sit-up. The angle made by her upper and lower body slowly began to approach ninety degrees. Her elbows began to bend, and as the drag of her weight began to leave her arms and shoulders, the tingles racing through her flesh increased. She didn't stop moving her legs when she was finally sitting up but continued to pedal, wanting to keep her heart-rate up.
A drop of stinging sweat ran into her left eye. She flicked it away with an impatient shake of her head and went on pedaling. The tingles continued to increase, darting upward and downward from her elbows, and about five minutes after she'd reached her current slumped position (she looked like a gawky teenager draped over a movie theater seat), the first cramp struck. It felt like a blow from the dull side of a meat-cleaver.
Jessie threw her head back, sending a fine mist of perspiration flying from her head and hair, and shrieked. As she was drawing breath to repeat the cry, the second cramp struck. This one was much worse.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="21">
Wilderness
YES, death stalked the city that night, stalked the city like a great water wolf. The river - sheer, ruffled, gray, brown, black, and khaki - took them into her inhospitable bosom. Why? Why did the river want them, and for what?
All her life Nell had believed that she would have a presentiment if a mishap should befall either of her children. Her bones would tell it. Her bloodstream would tell it. Every hair would stand on end. Often she had half imagined such a thing - indeed, on occasion, went with the delirium of it upon hearing of an accident in this street or that, on a motorway or a leafy lane - and had waited, and the wait had seemed both necessary and ludicrous. She knew the ropes. A policeman or rather two policemen, came and knocked on one's door. She had heard that somewhere. Yet, as the taxi-driver rattled on about an accident, young people, partying, she had no intimation of anything, just felt glad to be going home to sleep. It was a Saturday. Party night. A pleasure boat had collided with a barge on the Thames, and many were drowned or drowning. She felt a flash of dismay, a mockery of the sadness to come.
When a mother sees two policemen at her front door, she knows. She thought it was her younger son, Tristan, was certain that a truck had gone off the road in Turkey, where he and his friends were spending the summer doing relief work. It was Paddy. He was one of the crowd of young people on the pleasure boat and, as he was still missing, they had to inform her. Missing. Missing is not dead. When a mother knows, she does everything to unknow. She goes to her bedroom to dress. She discards the old stockings that she had been wearing in the daytime for a new pair. God knows why. She says that this is not true, this is a false alarm testing her last reservoir of strength. She puts on powder, hurriedly, then returns and, as on any normal occasion, offers brandy or tea. The policemen say it is better for them to get moving, to get back to the scene, since all the force is needed. She sits in a black van with them and slowly and solemnly recites, as her own chant, the words of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane: "O, Father, if it be possible, let this chalice pass from me." Missing is not dead. She says that aloud to the policemen and adds how providential the night is, since it is so still, since there is scarcely a wind. They recognize that undertow of hope and look at each other with eyes in which she believes there are recesses of non-hope. She cannot see their eyes but she can see them fidget. They have already been there; they have already seen people crawling out of the water, senseless, unable to grasp their where-abouts, asking, "What's happened? ... What's happened?" They have heard the screaming, the disbelief, the shouts of crazed, incensed people, and they are not in the business of doling out niceties. She has not seen these things yet. Now she does. Ambulances bursting from the hospital's steps, their lights whirling round and round, but no siren sounding. Ghost machines. Inside, commotion, delirium. People who had been inches from death asking, asking. Everyone asking; voices charging each other across the waiting room. Has Alex been found? "Found." The word both urgent and wan. A girlfriend has lost her boyfriend. She calls his name, shouts it. He does not materialize. She runs, the double glass doors almost swallowing her. A man has lost his wife. He stands, a sodden picture of despair, with a blanket slipping off, saying quietly, "My wife .... My beautiful wife." A younger man weeps for the woman he swam with. Where is she, where is she? He describes how they held hands - tight, tight - until in the end she slipped away from him, eluded his grasp. Was she dead? Was she still struggling?
Nell is sitting quietly, sitting by herself. She is afraid of these people. They pace, then are still, then give reign to some outburst. This night has dislodged their reserves of sanity. Nurses, who go about with forms and thermometers and blankets, are told to piss off. It has the insubstantiality of a dream but it is not a dream. It is a raw, raucous, unashamed confrontation with life or non-life. The names are shouted incessantly. Samantha and Sue and Paul and Jeff. No one says "Paddy", as if no one knew him but her. Outside, the sirens now screech with animal intonations. Inside, coffee, cups of coffee, a voice asking for someone to put another spoon of sugar in, sloshing. Paddy, where are you? She has been told to sit and wait. She will be informed the moment there is news. Rumors bob up the way she imagines, cannot stop herself from imagining, the faces appearing on the water. His face. His alone. A body has been found eight miles upriver at Hammersmith. A woman's. Not a man's. Not him. Should she go to Hammersmith? Did drowned bodies follow one another like shoals of fish? She must go somewhere. Paddy, where are you? She is told again to sit and wait. They know her name and her son's name. It is on a document. Many of the saved are at the hospital. They are weeping, claiming that they do not want to live if their comrades are dead. Their teeth are chattering, they shiver, their features slavered in black mud and ooze.
"Where's my mates? Where's my fucking mates?" a young man shouts as he enters the hospital. His head is gashed, and the blood streaming down his face has black rivulets in it. He is telling everyone how cold it is, how cold and how stupid. She runs from the building and down a narrow footpath to the riverbank, where people are milling and shouting around a posse of police. It is dark and deathlike, everything spectral. The police and the rescue workers are like shadows giving and taking orders, their voices terse. The river is calm but black, a black pit that everyone dreads. Calm, black swishings of water. Looking at it for the first time, looking at it steadily, she thinks it cannot be. He is not in there. He has swum ashore, he is somewhere, he is one of the dazed people in blankets, covered in mud. He is asking someone to telephone her. He is. he is. She hears the tide, its slip-slap against the lifeboats, and she thinks, you have not got him. The chains, however, which go clank-clank, tell a different story - a death knell. And the line comes, how could it not: "A current under sea picked his bones in whispers." A young policeman loses control, says how the hell does he know what one boat was doing crashing into another. Sirens fill the streets and she thinks that if Paddy is still in the water, which she now thinks he must be, those sirens will be a clarion to him, a reminder that everyone is on the alert, everything is being done.
"Oh, Paddy, we are coming to you, we are coming," she says, and, going over to an officer, she asks if there is any way they could light up the water more, give hope to those who were still struggling in it. For some reason he thinks she is a journalist and tells her to shut her trap. She screams back, screams that she is a mother.
"Why isn't the water lit, the way it's lit for a jubilee or a coronation?" she says, and he looks at her with a kind of murderousness and says that those who are still in there have had it by now. She lets out half a cry - a short, unearthly, broken cry. This shadow, this totem of authority, wishes them death. A senior officer tries to calm her, says that they are doing everything they possibly can, that any bodies still in the water will be found. "Found." There is that word again. She asks him if by any chance she can go to the morgue at Southwark in the police van, since others are going. He looks at her with the candor of a man who has to refuse, and says no, that it would be better for her to go back into the hospital and stay put.
IN the hospital, a group of young people is silently weeping, holding one another and rocking back and forth in grief, like children in a play-pen. A boy and two girls. They have lost their mate, their mate. The boy had jumped in the water to search and had to be hauled out. They rock back and forth, like women in labor, giving birth to their grief. Each time they smoke they give Nell a cigarette, too. Some time later one of them, a girl, looks up and screams. A man is coming toward them. She is afraid it is not true. It can't be true. She looks down, she covers her eyes and asks them, Jesus, to look up. It is him. It is Justin. He has been found. Or has he? Is he a spirit? He walks toward them, in his slather of wet clothes, with a strange dazedness. He is holding half a rubber life ring. They get up. They all embrace, four friends, lost for words, unable to speak. They don't believe it. A miracle. Then they do believe it. They cry. They kiss. He cannot speak. He cannot say how he swam ashore. He holds up the bit of black rubber, refuses to let it go. It saved him. It. Then one of them speaks, one of them says that they are going to get out of this hellhole and get in his little banger and drive somewhere and get booze and get fish and chips, and they are going to ring everyone they know and have ever known and give the party of their lives, a party that means welcome home, Justin, welcome home.
Nell shrinks away from them, and they know why. She is still one of the waiting ones. There is nothing to be said. They cannot swap with her. Were she the lucky one she would not swap, either. It is as primal as that.
What she must do is give Paddy strength, send messages to him, urge him, tell him to kick, to kick, not to give in. Her breathing quickens, and it is as if she, too, has dared the water. Then she pauses and says, "Turn over on your back, love, and float." She does this unendingly, because there is one thing that she cannot unknow: some are trapped in the sunken vessel, were caught in a downstairs suite - corpses side by side, or cleaving to furniture. The vessel cannot be brought up till daylight, when the toll will be taken. He is not among them. She is certain of that. He got out - crawled out and swam and is making his way, is holding on to a raft, is on a little bit of beach, waiting to be picked up. He is that seagull he loves to read about, who flew higher than all the other seagulls, up into the lonely altitudes; hearing herself say "seagull," she shrieks, glimpsing the maelstroms ahead.
WAITING. Another day. Parents. Relatives. Police. Waiting at the hospital for names to be called out, now for people to go into the morgue in back and identify their own. Bodies in glass cubicles under sheets - bloated, puffed, disfigured, all prey to the same lunatic fate.
The policeman lifts a sheet, and what she sees is not a face with features but something gray, prehistoric. A purple cowl hides the hair and the body. She does not know if it is a boy or a girl.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="22">
"She thinks it's bullshit," Jimmy told me. "Do you think it's bullshit, kid?"
I knew he was inviting me to contradict my sister; it made me feel like a younger brother instead of an eighth grade girl. I knew that if I agreed with him I might get to come along again. But that wasn't my reason for saying no. At that moment I believed him.
"The kid knows," Jimmy said, and I whispered: The kid. The kid. The kid.
"This danger thing," Jimmy told us, "is only about yourself. It would be criminal to take chances with somebody else's life. I would never go over the speed limit with you ladies in the car." I hunched my shoulders and burrowed into the fragrant back seat. I felt - and I think my sister felt - supremely taken care of.
My parents were often in the city with my father's doctors, occasionally staying over for tests, not returning till the next day. They told my sister to take care of me, though I didn't need taking care of.
Jimmy would drive over when he got through at Babylon Roofing and Siding. He loved his job and sometimes stopped to show us roofs he'd done. His plan was to have his own company and retire to Florida young and get a little house with grapefruit and mango trees in the yard. He said this to my sister. He wanted her to want it, too.
My sister said, "Mangoes in Florida? You're thinking about Puerto Rico."
One night Jimmy parked in front of a furniture store and told us to slouch down and keep our eye on the dark front window. My sister and I were alone for so long I began to get frightened.
A light flickered on inside the store, the flame of Jimmy's lighter, bright enough to see Jimmy smiling and waving, reclining in a lounger.
When Jimmy talked about testing himself, he said he did it sometimes, but I began to wonder if he thought about it always. Just sitting in a diner, waiting for his coffee, he'd take the pointiest knife he could find and dance it between his fingers. I wondered what our role in it was. I wondered if he and my sister were playing a game of chicken: all she had to do was cry "Stop!" and Jimmy would have won. Once he ate a cigarette filter. Once he jumped off a building.
One evening Jimmy drove me and my sister over to his apartment. He lived in a basement apartment of a brick private house. It struck me as extraordinary: people lived in basement apartments. But it wasn't a shock to my sister, who knew where everything was and confidently got two beers from Jimmy's refrigerator.
Jimmy turned on the six o'clock news and the three of us sat on his bed. There was the usual Vietnam report: helicopters, gunfire. A sequence showed American troops filing through the jungle. The camera moved in for a close-up of the soldiers' faces, faces that I recognize now as the faces of frightened boys but that I mistook then for cruel grown men, happy in what they were doing.
My sister said, "Wow. Any one of those suckers could just get blown off that trail." On her face was that combustible mix of sympathy and smoldering anger, and in her voice rage and contempt combined with admiration. I could tell Jimmy was jealous that she looked like that because of the soldiers, and he desperately wanted her to look that way for him. I knew, even if he didn't, that she already had, and that she looked like that if she saw a dog in a parked car, in the heat.
Jimmy had a high draft number but he went down and enlisted. He said he couldn't sit back and let other men do the dying, an argument I secretly thought was crazy and brave and terrific. Mother said it was ridiculous, no one had to die, every kid she counseled wound up with a psychiatric 1-Y. And when Jimmy died she seemed confirmed; he had proved her right.
On the night of the funeral, Mother told us how Jimmy died. The friend who'd accompanied his body home had given a little speech. He said often at night Jimmy sneaked out to where they weren't supposed to be; once a flare went off and they saw him freaking around in the jungle. He said they felt better knowing that crazy Kowalchuk was out there fucking around.
Mother said, "That's what he said at the service, 'Out there fucking around.'"
But I was too hurt to listen, I was feeling so stupid for having imagined that Jimmy's stunts were about my sister and me.
Mother said, "Of course I think it's terrible that the boy got killed. But I have to say I don't hate it that now the two of them can't get married."
After that it was just a matter of time till my sister met the white dog that Jimmy had sent from the other world to take her to Florida.
My sister didn't go to Florida, or anyway not yet. Eventually she recovered - recovered or stopped pretending. Every night after dinner Mother said, "She's eating well. She's improving." Talking to strange dogs in the yard was apparently not a problem. Father's problem was a real problem; my sister's would improve. I knew that Mother felt this way, and once more she was right.
One night Marcy telephoned, Mother called my sister, and my sister came out of her room. She took the phone and told Marcy, "Sure, great. See you. Bye."
"Marcy knows about a party", she said.
Mother said, "Wonderful, dear," though in the past there were always fights about going to parties with Marcy.
We all stayed up till my sister came home, though we all pretended to sleep. My window was over the front door and I watched her on the front step, struggling to unlock the door, holding something bulky, pressed against her belly. At last she disappeared inside. Something hit the floor with a thud. I heard my sister running. There was so much commotion we all felt justified rushing downstairs. Mother helped my father down, they came along rather quickly.
We found my sister in the kitchen. It was quiet and very dark. The refrigerator was open, not for food but for light. Bathed in its glow, my sister was rhythmically stroking a large iguana that stood poised, alert, its head slightly raised, on the butcher block by the stove.
In the equalizing darkness my father saw almost as well as we did."Jesus Christ," he said.
My sister said, "He was a little freaked. You can try turning the light on."
Only then did we notice that the lizard's foot was bandaged. My sister said, "This drunken jerk bit off one of his toes. He got all the guys at the party to bet that he wouldn't do it. I just waded in and took the poor thing and the guy just gave it up. The asshole couldn't have cared very much if he was going to bite its toes off."
"Watch your language," Mother said. "What a cruel thing to do! Is this the kind of teenager you're going to parties with?"
"Animals," my father said. After that there was a silence, during which all of us thought that once my father would have unwrapped the bandage and taken a look at the foot.
"His name's Reynaldo," my sister said.
"Sounds Puerto Rican," said Mother.
Once there would have been a fight about her keeping the iguana, but like some brilliant general, my sister had retreated and recouped and emerged from her bedroom, victorious and in control. At that moment I hated her for always getting her way, for always outlasting everyone and being so weird and dramatic and never letting you know for sure, what was real and what she was faking.
Reynaldo had the run of my sister's room, no one dared open the door. After school she'd lie belly down on her bed, cheek to cheek with Reynaldo. No one asked my sister what she and Reynaldo discussed. And in a way it was lucky that my father couldn't see that.
One night the phone rang. Mother covered the receiver and said, "Thank you, Lord. It's a boy."
It was a boy who had been at the party and seen my sister rescue. Reynaldo. His name was Greg, he was a college student, studying for a business degree.
After he and my sister went out a few times, Mother invited Greg to dinner. I ate roast beef and watched him charm everyone but me. He described my sister grabbing the iguana out of its torturer's hands. He said, "When I saw her do that, I thought, this is someone I want to know better." He and my parents talked about her like some distant mutual friend. I stared hard at my sister, wanting her to miss Jimmy, too, but she was playing with her food, I couldn't tell what she was thinking.
Greg had a widowed mother and two younger sisters; he'd gotten out of the draft by being their sole support. He said he wouldn't go anyway, he'd go to Canada first. No one mentioned Reynaldo, though we could hear him scrabbling jealously around my sister's room.
Reynaldo wasn't invited on their dates and neither, obviously, was I. I knew Greg didn't drive onto the ice or break into furniture stores. He took my sister to Godard movies and told us how much she liked them.
One Saturday my sister and Greg took Reynaldo out for a drive. And when they returned - I waited up - the iguana wasn't with them.
"Where's Reynaldo?" I asked.
"A really nice pet shop," she said. And then for the first time I understood that Jimmy was really dead.
Not long after that my father died. His doctors had made a mistake. It was not a disease of the retina but a tumor of the brain. You'd think they would have known that, checked for that right away, but he was a scientist, they saw themselves and didn't want to know. Before he died he disappeared, one piece at a time. My sister and I slowly turned away so as not to see what was missing.
Greg was very helpful throughout this terrible time. Six months after my father died, Greg and my sister got married. By then he'd graduated and got a marketing job with a potato chip company. Mother and I lived alone in the house - as we'd had, really, for some time. My father and sister had left so gradually that the door hardly swung shut behind them. Father's Buick sat in the garage, as it had since he'd lost his vision, and every time we saw it we thought about all that had happened.
My sister and Greg bought a house nearby; sometimes Mother and I went for dinner. Greg told us about his work and the interesting things he found out. In the Northeast they liked the burnt chips, the lumpy misshapen ones, but down South every chip had to be pale and thin and perfect.
"A racial thing, no doubt," I said but no one seemed to hear, though one of Mother's favorite subjects was race relations down South. I'd thought my sister might laugh or get angry, but she was a different person. A slower, solid, heavier person who was eating a lot of chips.
One afternoon the doorbell rang, and it was Jimmy Kowalchuk. It took me a while to recognize him; he didn't have his beard. For a second - just a second - I was afraid to open the door. He was otherwise unchanged except that he'd got even thinner, and looked even less Polish and even more Puerto Rican. He was wearing army fatigues. I was glad Mother wasn't home.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="23">
When the grisly bundle went rolling down the road, it turned into Texas' tragicomic case of
HELLO DOLLY, GOODBYE DAVID!
by Bill G. Cox
Special Investigator for
OFFICIAL DETECTIVE
The moon rode high and bright over Amarillo, Texas, on the Monday night of August 15, 1988. It was a perfect night for riding around and listening to music. The usual kinds of music filled the airways in this city of 156,000, from country and western to heavy metal to rock 'n' roll to golden oldies to easy listening. On a moonlit night made for love and romantic music, the tunes sent forth by a small radio station on the city's northeast side were the choice of some Amarillo listeners. Easy-listening instrumentals and vocals - nice to kiss by, if you were so inclined.
As it turned out, though, songs such as "Your Cheating Heart" and maybe even the real oldie, "Frankie and Johnny," would have been more fitting for the shocking events that started with a bang at that easy-listening radio station.
Love and hate - such a thin line between them. Sometimes emotions and circumstances combine to blow love all to hell and shove it over to the hate side of that narrow line.
What started in that easy-listening radio station came to public attention with a crashing crescendo on this Monday night when the city streets were bathed in moonlight.
A young woman was parked in front of a residence waiting for a friend to come out when she heard a loud clanking and clattering noise. Glancing behind her, she saw a speeding pickup pulling a wrapped object behind. The cumbersome bundle seemed to be lashed to a conveyance with wheels that jogged and bounced along the street like a large beach ball on tough waters. As the pickup flashed by, the startled woman got the vivid impression that the bouncing bundle was a human body!
Even as she wondered if she were imagining things, the woman's friend appeared at her car, exclaiming, "Did you see what I just saw?"
As the pair drove away from the curb, they saw the same pickup coming back toward them on the street. They only caught a glimpse of a dark figure in the pickup cab, but they noticed that the bundle was now gone from the trailing rig that had carried it.
A block further down the street, the two witnesses saw the blob lying in the middle of the road. They steered gingerly around it and pulled up to a house where lights were on to notify the police department. They had seen enough to confirm in their minds that the wrapped and tied bundle contained a humand body.
The police radio room received the call reporting a body in the street at 10:11 p.m.
A police unit driven by Patrolman Jim Burgess was dispatched to investigate the report. However, the patrol car was given the address from where the reporting call had come, and when Burgess arrived there, he saw nothing that looked like a body in the street.
At the same time, Patrolman Efrin Contreras, only a short distance away, was preparing to drive a prisoner to the city jail. The officer had arrested a woman on a charge of prostitution in an area frequented by hustlers. Strung along East Amarillo Boulevard are cheap motels, strip joints, bars and similar establishments. The area that surrounds the boulevard, which some cops refer to as "The Strip of Sin," really jumps on Saturday nights. On Mondays, the activity is slower, but police still happen on a paid-love transaction in progress even on the quiet nights.
Contreras had grilled and released the potential john, a motorist who the high-heeled lady had solicited on the street. The nervous man, relieved not to be in the clutches of the law, drove away. But a minute later, Contreras was surpised to see the man back again.
"It looks like someone has been hit by a car - there's a body in the middle of the street down there," he yelled, pointing in the direction from which he had come.
With the lady of the night still in tow, the uniformed officer drove to the spot two blocks away. When he got out of the car and looked closer at the trussed bundle, Contreras picked up his radio mike and notified the radio clerk of the discovery.
Patrolman Burgess heard the radio traffic and sped to the nearby location given by his fellow officer. The patrolmen observed what appeared to be a portion of a human arm visible from what looked like white sheets tied with different sizes of rope.
A strong and sickening smell of decomposed flesh was immediately apparent as the patrolmen made a cursory examination. The brief look was enough for Burgess to return to his police car and place a call to the Special Crimes Unit.
The Special Crimes Unit is a crack homicide squad peopled with specially assigned investigators from the Amarillo Police Department and the sheriff's departments of Potter and Randall Counties. Amarillo lies in both counties. The Special Crimes Unit was created to probe murders in Amarillo and the two-county area. Its record of solved crimes and its investigative techniques have inspired other police forces in the South-west to set up similar homicide units.
The Special Crimes roster has an assortment of personalities. Lieutenant Sandy Morris, the unit's assistant coordinator, directs the field investigations. A veteran homicide detective with more then 25 years' experience, he's a crusty individual who has seen the "old school" police procedures of hitting the sidewalks and tapping informants change with new laws and court decisions into the highly skilled forensic police techniques of today. The unit includes younger men and women who have come up through the ranks to their present jobs of investigators and ID and crime technicians.
It's a crew that gets a homicide probe off the ground with the efficiency of a scientific space launch. They felt lucky that the call to duty on this Monday night didn't come in the wee hours of the day, which happens to them all too often.
Accompanied by a detail of regular duty police officers at the crime scene, the Special Crimes Unit force included Lieutenant Jimmy Stevens, the crime scene coordinator who was administrator and overall unit supervisor at the time; Lieutenant Morris and Investigator David Thurman; and Investigator Greg Soltis, an ID and crime scene officer. Aided by one of the uniformed officers, Investigator Soltis took measurements and drew crime scene diagrams in addition to photographing the body and immediate vicinity.
Potter County Justice of the Peace Haven Dysart, acting as coroner, came to the scene to conduct a preliminary inquest.
As the lawmen examined the trussed heap in the street, they saw that the body appeared to be wrapped in curtains or drapes instead of a sheet as first believed. Underneath, they found that a brown plastic garbage sack covered the victim's head, and the feet were inside a black plastic bag. The stench hanging in the air was the result of the advanced decomposition of the body, which appeared to be male. Because of the body's condition, the investigators were uncertain of the dead man's race or how he had been killed. The body had been trussed with two different-sized ropes, the sleuths noted.
Questioning the man and woman who had phoned police after witnessing the hop-and-skip ride of the body behind the pickup, the detectives came up with little information.
The witnesses told officers they thought the pickup had been blue and white in color. They also thought that the driver had been wearing a cap similar to a baseball cap, but they had gotten only a glimpse of the driver.
Officers were assigned to go house to house in the residential area. The neighborhood canvass produced little more than what already had been learned.
Some witnesses who had been on their front porches and were drawn to the speeding pickup and its trailing load by the racket they made also mentioned the blue and white colors. Others who had seen the strange and noisy ensemble thought the pickup might have been another color.
Adding to the confusion, one or two witnesses thought the blue-and-white pickup was not the one that had carried the bizarre bundle, but one that had slowed so its driver could see what was left in the middle of the street after the load had been dislodged from another pickup. One witness contacted by the investigators thought he had seen two persons in the pickup pulling the bundle on wheels.
All of those who had viewed the unusual scene agreed that the pickup had been speeding along Northeast 10th Avenue, going at least 50 mph in a residential area limited to 30 mph. The mysterious driver had obviously been hellbent for somewhere when the towed body was suddenly dislodged by its bumpy, tumultuous ride over the pavement.
The investigators' search for clues along the trail of the fast-moving pickup revealed drag marks and debris at various points that confirmed the last ride of the unidentified body had been a rough one. The corpse had been separated from the pulling vehicle at the intersection of Northeast 10th Avenue and North Arthur Street. This was a short distance from the address to which Officer Burgess had been dispatched before the body's actual location was established.
As he looked over the crime scene and heard the stories of the witnesses, Lieutenant Morris formulated a theory on which he speculated to his colleagues. The veteran homicide sleuth wondered why the body had been dragged behind the pickup after being wrapped and trussed so compactly. He felt that this indicated the killer was a person of small stature and limited strength - perhaps even a woman - who had been unable to lift the bound package into the back of the pickup.
Whatever had been the case, the investigators, who had worked about every kind of homicide in the books, agreed on one thing: This had to be the most bungled - and weirdest - job of body disposal they had ever come across.
Presumably, after becoming aware that the body in back was no longer aboard, the killer had not bothered to retrace the route ro retrieve it for fear of being seen with the misplaced corpse.
Lieutenant Morris was of the opinion that the body might have been loaded somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Deciding to look for the start of the drag trail, which was visible sporadically along the street, the lieutenant got into his car, accompanied by Investigator Thurman, and drove slowly along the route, scanning the streets that intersected Northeast 10th.
Meanwhile, after the body had been released from the scene by the acting coroner, it was taken to a county building for thorough examination and photographing. Soltis was assigned as the ID man who would record on film the distasteful sorting out of the victim's remains as they were removed from the wrappings.
As the outside covering and plastic bags were peeled away, the investigators saw that the victim had been nude when encased in the crude shroud. The body was that of a well-built man with short reddish hair and mustache. On the right shoulder was a tattoo that could help in making the identification. The red, yellow, and black tattoo depicted a rearing unicorn.
A wound that appeared to be a bullet hole was evident in the victim's forehead, though it could have been the result of the body being dragged on the pavement, the officers thought. As the last covering was pulled away, a shell casing dropped to the floor.
The examination also revealed abrasions on the buttocks and the inside of the thighs, undoubtedly the result of friction during the body's extended drag over the rough pavement.
There was no clothing or anything else that might contribute to the dead man's identification. It looked as though he had been slain while naked or had been undressed after the killing to prevent identification, the investigators theorized.
</doc><doc register="fiction mystery" n="24">
Chapter 1
I LIKE SUNDAYS. Most Sundays, anyway.
Day of rest, day of relaxation. Stay-in-bed-and-read-or-watch-old-movies day. Putter day. Go-out-and-play day. Do-nothing-at-all day. Good old Sunday.
This one, in late June, had clear skies and warm breezes off the ocean and the bay- a pair of surprises, since too many June days in San Francisco are fog-shrouded and cold. Nature's air-conditioning, the locals like to say with pride; keeps the city nice and cool while surrounding communities swelter under the hot summer sun. Wouldn't have it any other way, they tell outsiders, lying through their teeth. If they really meant it, they would not take part, as plenty of them do, in the mass weekend exodus to those sweltering neighborhood communities. It is only on rare June days like this one that these none-too-true-blue San Franciscans stay put and take advantage of what they refer to as the city's 'good-weather attractions.'
So what was I going to do on this fine June Sunday? If Kerry were available, there were lots of possibilities, beginning with a couple of hours of lovemaking and proceeding to a picnic somewhere or maybe to the Giants-Cubs game at Candlestick. But Kerry wasn't available. One reason was that she had her mother to contend with, though maybe not for much longer. Cybil had been sharing Kerry's Diamond Heights apartment for nearly seven months now, the result of her inability to cope with the death of her husband, Ivan, and what remained of her life without him. Difficult and painful situation, made even worse by the fact that Cybil had taken an irrational dislike to me: I couldn't visit without provoking a crisis and could call only when I was certain Kerry was home. This had severely curtailed our love life, added an edge of tension to what had formerly been a pretty stress-free relationship. Recently, though, with the aid of a counseling group called Children of Grieving Parents, Kerry had succeeded in convincing her mother to move into a Marin County seniors complex. Cybil had agreed to make the move by the end of the month. But would she change her mind at the last minute? The whole thing was a tale well-calculated to keep you in suspense, right up to the last act.
The other reason Kerry wasn't available today was that she had work to do on one of her ad agency's major accounts. Kerry Wade, Bates and Carpenter's new Creative Director. The title had been bestowed on her just last week; and along with it and a $5000 annual increase in salary went 'greater responsibility,' which translated to longer hours and an increased workload. Not such an ideal promotion, if you asked me. But nobody had, and I was not about to volunteer anything that might dampen her euphoria. The one time we'd made love since had been terrific.
So. My options for the day were limited. Under normal circumstances I could have called Eberhardt and suggested that we go watch the Giants get it on with the Cubs. But things were not normal between Eb and me, hadn't been for the past two months - since Bobbie Jean had called off their planned wedding, for good reasons thanks to him, and the fight he and I had had as a result. That damned fight. School-boy stuff: I'd lost my head, stupidly, and punched him. He still hadn't forgiven me; it worried me that maybe he never would. We barely spoke in the office, and then only when business made it necessary. The few times I'd tried to talk him into having a beer together after work, he'd flatly refused.
No Kerry, no Eberhardt. Going to the ballgame by myself didn't appeal to me; neither did taking a drive or visiting one of those 'good-weather attractions' alone. Barney Rivera? On impulse I called his number, and got his answering machine. Out getting his ashes hauled somewhere, probably. Barney Rivera, God's gift to women who liked little fat guys with soulful eyes and a line of sugar-coated BS. Mentally I ran down the list of my other friends ... and a pretty short list it was. Devote your life to your profession, turn yourself into a workaholic, and this is what happens to you: short-listed as you approach sixty. The few others were married, had families. Had lives. Get a life, why didn't I?
Too old. Besides, I liked the one I had - most of the time.
Staying home was out. Too nice a day for that, and already felt restless. Open air was what I needed, sunshine on my shoulder, people around me, maybe some familiar faces. No blue Sunday for me ...
Aquatic Park, I thought.
Sure, that was the ticket. I hadn't been down there in a while, and I always enjoyed myself when I went. What better way to spend a quiet Sunday than getting back in touch with your ethnic heritage?
I went and picked up the car and drove to Aquatic Park, to watch the old men play bocce.
IN SAN FRANCISCO, in the last decade of the twentieth century, bocce is a dying sport.
Most of the city's older Italians, to whom bocce was more a religion than a sport, have died off. The once large and close-knit North Beach Italian community has been steadily losing its identity since the fifties - families moving to the suburbs, the expansion of Chinatown and the gobbling up of North Beach real estate by wealthy Chinese - and even though there has been a small, new wave of immigrants from Italy in recent years, they're mostly young and upscale. Young, upscale Italians don't play bocce much, if at all; their interests lie in soccer, in the American sports where money and fame and power have replaced a love of the game itself. The Di Massimo bocce courts at the North Beach Playground are mostly closed these days; so are the handful of other public courts left in the city, including the one in the Outer Mission, where I'd been raised. The Potrero district's Monte Cristo Club is still open on a regular basis, but it's private. About the only public courts where you can find a game every Saturday and Sunday are the ones at Aquatic Park.
Time was, all six of the Aquatic Park courts were packed from early morning to dusk and there were spectators and waiting players lined two and three deep at courtside and up along the fence on Van Ness. No more. Seldom, now, is more than one of the courts used. And the players get older, and sadder, and fewer each year.
There were maybe fifteen players and watchers on this Sunday, almost all of them older than my fifty-eight, loosely grouped around the two courts nearest the street. Those two are covered by a high pillar-supported roof so that contests can be held even in wet weather. Up until a year ago, the roof was so badly weather-worn that it was in danger of collapse. Just when it looked as though the courts would have to be shut down, the Italian Consul General stepped in and hosted a benefit soccer match that raised enough money for the necessary repairs. Viva il console.
Under the roof are wooden benches; I parked myself on one of these; midway along. The only other seated spectator was Pietro Lombardi, in a patch of sunlight at the far end, and this surprised me. Even though Pietro was in his seventies, he was one of the best and spriest of the regulars, and also one of the most social. To see him sitting alone, shoulders slumped and head bowed, was puzzling.
Pining away for the old days, maybe, I thought - as I had just been doing. And a phrase popped into my head, a line from Dante that one of my uncles had been fond of quoting when I was a kid: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.
Pietro and his woes didn't occupy my attention for long. The game in progress was animated and voluble, as only a game of bocce played by elderly 'paesanos can be, and I was soon caught up in the spirit of it.
Bocce is simple - deceptively simple. You play it on a long, narrow packed-earth pit with low wooden sides. A wooden marker ball the size of a walnut is rolled to one end; the players stand at the opposite end and in turn roll eight larger, heavier balls, grapefruit-size, in the direction of the marker, the object being to see who can put his bocce ball closest to it. One of the required skills is slow-rolling the ball, usually in a curving trajectory, so that it kisses the marker and then lies up against it - the perfect shot - or else stops an inch or two away. The other required skill is knocking an opponent's ball away from any such close lie without disturbing the marker. The best players, like Pietro Lombardi, can do this two out of three times on the fly - no mean feat from a distance of fifty feet. They can also do it by caroming the ball off the pit walls with topspin or reverse spin, after the fashion of pool shooters.
Nobody paid much attention to me until after the game in progress had been decided. Then I was acknowledged with hand gestures and a few words - the tolerant acceptance accorded to known spectators and occasional players. Unknowns got no greeting at all. These men still clung to the old ways, and one of the old ways was clannishness.
Only one of the group, Dominick Marra, came over to where I was sitting, And that was because he had something on his mind. He was in his mid-seventies, white-haired, white-mustached; a bantamweight in baggy trousers held up by galluses. He and Pietro Lombardi had been close friends for most of their lives. Born in the same town - Agropoli, a village on the Gulf of Salerno not far from Naples; moved to San Francisco with their families a year apart, in the late twenties; married cousins, raised large families, were widowed at almost the same time a few years ago. The kind of friendship that is virtually a blood tie. Dominick had been a baker; Pietro had owned a North Beach trattoria that now belonged to one of his daughters.
What Dominick had on his mind was Pietro. "You see how he's sit over there, hah? He's got trouble - la miseria"
"What kind of trouble?"
"His granddaughter, Gianna Fornessi."
"Something happen to her?"
"She's maybe go to jail," Dominick said.
"What for?"
"Stealing money."
"I'm sorry to hear it. How much money?"
"Two thousand dollars."
"Who did she steal it from?"
"Che?"
"Whose money did she steal?"
Dominick gave me a disgusted look. "She don't steal it. Why you think Pietro, he's got la miseria, hah?"
I knew what was coming, now; I should have known it the instant Dominick started confiding in me about Pietro's problem. I said, "You want me to help him and his granddaughter."
"Sure. You're a detective."
"A busy detective."
"You got no time for old man and young girl? Compaesani?"
I sighed, but not so he could hear me do it. "All right, I'll talk to Pietro. See if he want my help, if there's anything I can do."
"Sure he wants your help," Dominick said. "He just don't know it yet."
We went to where Pietro sat alone in the sun. He was taller than Dominick, heavier, balder. And he had a fondness for Toscanas, those little twisted black Italian cigars; one protruded now from a corner of his mouth. He didn't want to talk at first, but Dominick launched into a monologue in Italian that changed his mind and put a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. Even though I've lost a lot of the language over the years, I can understand enough to follow most conversations.</doc></docx>

<docx id="file35684422" filename="FROWN_N.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="fiction adventure" n="01">
"That is him," Pérez said. "He wants to talk with you about a serious business deal."
Fenton laughed, then jumped into the conversation. "Now ain't that too bad. That herd is already-"
"Shut your mouth, Dan!" Zach barked.
Fenton frowned. "What the hell's the matter with you, Zach?"
"You got a bad habit of talking first and thinking second," Zach said. "That's how come I ramrod this outfit."
Fenton, embarrassed, shut up and treated himself to a drink. "Sure, Zach."
"So your boss is inter'sted in them cattle, hey?" Zach asked Pérez.
"He has noted them and wants to find out more, that's all," Pérez said. " If things look acceptable to him, he might make an offer." Like his employer, he wanted as little to do with gringos as possible. "I told him I didn't think it worth the effort." He added the last statement to make the bargaining easier for his boss.
But Zach wasn't buying that. "Is that why he's come up here all this way, dragging a big ol' tent and enough men to start a revolution?" He toyed with his glass. "I got my boys out keeping an eye on things, Pérez."
Pérez's face remained stony. "Don Diego Mendoza wants to talk to you."
"He's waiting for me, is he?" Zach inquired as he poured another drink.
"He has instructed me to take you directly to him," Pérez said.
"I reckon I could do that," Zach said. "When does he want to see me?"
"I can take you there now," Pérez said.
"I never seen a Mexican in such an all-fire hurry," Zach said grinning. "This must be real important to him."
"Don Diego don't like to be this close to the border for long," Pérez said. "He want to talk with you, then go back to Rancho Cielo Mexicano."
"I can't fault him that," Zach said getting up. "I reckon if I had me a big ol' ranch with a grand house on it, I'd want to stay close to home too. And I'll bet he's got a perty woman to dally with and an ugly wife, like all them rich Mexicans, huh, Pérez?"
Pérez ignored the remark. "Let us go."
Zach pointed to Fenton. "Dan's coming with me."
"That's fine. But one man only with you," Pérez said.
"That there Don Diego must be a nervous sort," Zach said laughing.
Pérez didn't crack as much as a smile. "He is a wise and careful man." He turned and walked toward the door. "Come! We go there now."
Zach and Fenton followed the Mexican out to the street where all three mounted up. Pérez led the way out of town, taking them down the south road and past the Rancho Cielo Mexicano guards who carefully watched Don Diego's camp. The short trip ended in front of the large tent.
"Wait here," Pérez said. He went inside the canvas domicile. After a couple of minutes he emerged. "Come in." He pointed to Zach. "Only you. Don Diego waits for you."
"Keep an eye open, Dan," Zach said to Fenton. Then he grinned. "O'course there ain't much you can do if all these Mexicans decide to jump us, is there?"
"I can do plenty," Fenton boasted.
"Good," Zach said. "You just keep thinking that way." He followed Pérez inside the tent.
Pérez announced their names for each other. "Don Diego Mendoza. Zach Medford." Then he walked to a nearby chair and sat down.
Don Diego Mendoza was a tall, gaunt man with a large gray mustache, His skin was as white as any European's, making it easy to see that the Mendoza family had bred the Indian out of their bloodline. He sat at the table where a bottle of tequila, a bowl of salt, and slices of lemon on a saucer had been set. "Sit down," the wealthy rancher invited.
"Sure, Don Diego," Zach said. "That's right neighborly of you and I don't mind if'n I do."
"Help yourself," Don Diego said gesturing to the refreshments.
"You rich Mexicans got style," Zach said. "I'll say that for you." He poured himself a glass of tequila, then licked the top of his left hand between the thumb and forefinger. Taking some salt from the bowl, he sprinkled it on the wet spot then licked it up. After downing the glass of tequila in one quick swallow, he grabbed a hunk of lemon and sucked on it.
"You have some twenty-five head of cattle," Don Diego said. "Are they for sale?"
"They was," Zach said. "But I already sold them."
Don Diego smiled slightly knowing the kind of man he was dealing with. "That is too bad. I was interested."
"How interested?"
"I will give you two thousand dollars worth of silver pesos," Don Diego said.
"My buyer gimme three thousand in Yankee dollars," Zach said.
"I will give you two thousand dollars worth of silver pesos," Don Diego repeated.
"You're supposed to bargain up, not stay the same," Zach said.
Don Diego spoke bluntly. "I am not going to bargain. I do not believe you were given three thousand dollars. Therefore, I have made my offer. Do you take it?"
Zach liked the idea of silver coins rather than the paper money that Squint Tallislaw would pay him with. Particularly at double the amount. "Sure." He looked around. "You got it here?"
"Don't worry about that," Don Diego said. "If we make a bargain, I can get it."
"I hope it's close," Zach said. "I'm in a real hurry to wrap up this deal."
"It is close enough," Don Diego said. "What is the matter? Does the first buyer represent danger to you?"
"I can handle him, don't you worry none about that," Zach said. "But it's important to know when I got to make any necessary moves. The longer I dally around here with that herd, the sooner the other feller is gonna find out things."
"I can take over the herd now, if you wish," Don Diego said. "I have enough men."
"You get them silver pesos to me first," Zach said testily. "Then you and your boys can move them cattle. And not a minute before."
"Of course," Don Diego said. "I will give you the full amount day after tomorrow."
"Do you have some boys bringing it up from your ranch?" Zach asked.
"The method of transportation is no concern of yours," Don Diego said coldly. "Nor the time of its arrival. You need worry about nothing except the hour it will be given you. Pérez will fetch you when you are to be paid."
"Sure, Don Diego," Zach said. "That's good enough for me." He stood up. "So we got a deal. Shake on it?" He offered his hand.
"I am sure you shook hands with the first buyer," Don Diego said disdainfully. "That shows the value of the trust that can be put into you. Do not trouble yourself with me. I will not be impressed nor fooled by your insincerity."
Zach laughed. "By God, Don Diego! You're a caution. You're the kind o' man I like to do business with."
"Good day, s<*_>e-tilde<*/>norse<*_>n-tilde<*/>or Medford."
Zach left the tent and joined Dan Fenton who had waited with their horses. "Let's get back to town."
As they rode out of the Mexican camp, Fenton's curiosity got the better of him. "What went on in there? And how come you're grinning like a shit-eating pig?"
"We got a good deal for them cattle from that Mexican," Zach said.
"That's good, Zach!" Then suddenly Fenton frowned in puzzlement. "But you already sold that herd to Squint."
"Well, I'm just gonna unsell it," Zach said.
"Squint ain't gonna be real happy about that," Fenton warned him.
"There ain't nobody with Squint but them two boys of his, is there?" Zach said. "We'll get George out at the herd to go with us. The three of us will let Squint know the deal is off."
"Squint don't do business that way."
"Then we'll make sure he don't give us an argument," Zach said "He won't even be able to bat an eye over the situation."
Fenton laughed. "He ain't got but one eye to bat, Zach!" Zach chuckled. "That's pretty good, Dan. Did you think o' that all by yourself?"
"I did," Fenton said proudly. Then he became serious again. "Them two pistoleros with Squint is good. Maybe we should get Ed and Bill to come in too."
"Somebody's got to watch the cattle," Zach said. "And don't worry. We ain't gonna engage Squint and his boys in a lot o' conversation. When I give the word, you and George get them two gunmen. I'll take care o' Squint."
"That's like the last cards in seven-card stud - down and dirty, Zach," Fenton said.
"Yeah. It sure as hell is." He laughed. "And we're gonna deal a hand to Squint where we know what cards he's got."
The two skirted Junto and went out to the west of the town to a wide-open range. Hundreds of cattle, all stolen, grazed under the eyes of various rustler gangs who jealously guarded their living, breathing loot, while the rustler chiefs worked hard at making deals in Junto. Many of their business associates were law-abiding citizens up in Texas or over in Louisiana. But once in Mexico, they left their moral standards behind them.
Zach and Fenton rode over to their own herd. When they came to a halt, the outlaw leader cast an appreciative eye over the longhorns they'd murdered for. "Damn fine cattle."
George Capper, Ed Maring, and Bill Draper joined the two. Capper gestured at the herd with a nod of his head. "We got them cows sold yet? Me and the boys is tired o' playing nursemaid to 'em."
Ed Maring laughed. "Yeah. It's honest work. Something I ain't real fond of."
"We got a better price from a Mexican," Zach said. "So we're taking that one."
"What about Squint?" Capper asked.
"You're going into town with me and Dan to take care o' that matter," Zach said. "Squint and his gunmen will be in the saloon by the time we get there."
"How're we gonna do this, Zach?" Fenton nervously asked.
"Listen up. I'll go in first, then you two follow. As soon as you're inside and ready, say something about the weather."
"What should we say, Zach?" Fenton asked.
"Any goddamn thing you want to," Zach said. He shook his head in exasperation."Just say that it looks like rain."
Fenton looked up at the sky. "It don't look like rain, Zach."
"That don't mean nothing, you dumb sonofabitch!" Zach almost yelled out loud. "Just say that. As soon as it's out of your mouth, we all draw and start firing. I'll take Squint. Dan you take whatever pistolero is on the left. George, get the feller on the right. Can you do that?"
"Sure," Capper said. "Don't worry none, Zach."
"Then let's ride on into Junto," Zach said. He nodded to Ed Maring and Bill Draper. "You two keep an eye on them cattle."
"That's all we been doing anyhow," Maring said.
The three traveled the short distance into Junto. All were a bit edgy about the double-dealing and killing they were about to undertake. When they reached the saloon, Zach said, "Wait here. I'll peek inside and see if Squint and his boys is there." He walked up to the door and took a quick look. He came back. "Yeah. They're at that back table. Now wait a half a minute before you come in behind me. Act casual, but be ready to shoot fast when you get through saying it looks like rain."
"We're ready," Fenton said. There was a tone of determination in his voice.
"Yeah. Let's do it," Capper said, echoing the feeling.
Zach went back to the door, this time going inside. "Howdy, Tom<*_>a-acute<*/>s," he said to the bartender. Then he feigned surprise at seeing Squint Tallislaw and his men.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="02">
"Get some boys and drag him to the jail. Log him in for murder.""You'll not get away with this, Tom," a BS rider said. "Bull will not see no man of his on the gallows."Tom ignored that. "Van, Parley, take down the names of all these men who witnessed the shooting in the saloon. After that's done, you boys ride back to the Flyin' BS and stay the hell there." He turned his back to them and faced the Carlin House. "You men clear out. Right now. Get the hell to the JC range and cool down.""You murderin' scum!" a woman yelled from the Carlin side of town. "Goddamn trash, all of you!"Sam and Matt stared at the woman. Maybe twenty-one or so, and definitely cute. But with a voice that would put a steam whistle to shame."Petunia Carlin," a shopkeeper spoke from the door of his business. "She's just getting wound up."The young woman then started letting the invectives fly, shouting the curses across the street."My word!" Sam said."I told you," the shopkeeper said."Petunia!" Tom Riley yelled. "Close that nasty mouth of yours and get on back into the dress shop. Move, girl!"Petunia stared at the marshal, stamped her little foot in anger, then gave Tom a very obscene gesture. She stomped back into the shop.A young man stepped away from the crowd and yelled, "You don't talk to my sister like that, Riley!""Pete Carlin," the shopkeeper said. "Petunia's twin brother. Crazy mean man.""Why are you talking to us?" Matt asked, twisting on the bench to look at the man. "No one else in town will.""Shut up, Pete!" Tom told the young man. "Before your butt overloads your mouth.""Aw, I figure you boys is all right," the shopkeeper said. "You just rode into a bad situation and don't have the good sense to ride out." He turned and walked back into the shop."There is some truth in his words," Sam said."You don't tell me what to do either, Tom," Pete yelled. "My pa will skin you and nail your hide to the barn door."Petunia stuck her bonneted head out of the dress shop. "Pete! Shut your damn mouth and get off the boardwalk. You know what Pa said. Move."Pete muttered something and stepped back into the Carlin House.The body of the dead A.T. puncher was toted off, and the BS rider was dragged off to jail. Matt and Sam had not left the bench during the entire episode. Tom walked slowly over to them."That gunny who squatted down and talked to you boys, who is he?""Bob Coody," Matt told him. "From Texas way. He doesn't like me very much.""Why?""He claims I killed a friend of his down along the Pecos.""Did you?"Matt shrugged. "It's a possibility.'""The lid is going to blow off this boilin' pot now," Tom said, removing his hat and wiping first his forehead and then the inside band with a handkerchief. "I expect to see the whole kit-and-caboodle of them come stormin' in.""Petunia appears to be a very nice young lady," Sam said with a straight face.Tom looked at him, astonished. Then he smiled. "Yes. Oh, my, yes. Very feminine. And what you saw today was only the tip if the iceberg, so to speak. Not that I've ever seen an iceberg. You boys really are stayin' out of this mess, aren't you?""We would have backed you if anybody had made a move," Sam told him."I appreciate that. See you boys."The brothers sat and watched the BS and most of the JC riders leave town, galloping their horses and yelling. Pete and Petunia and a few of their hands remained. Matt and Sam sat and watched Petunia and her brother meet on the boardwalk and start up toward the hotel. They were going to pass right by the brothers."You know any of the hands with them?" Sam asked."Not a one. I think they're regular punchers, but just remember they ride for the brand."When the brother and sister and entourage got within hearing distance, Pete and Petunia started whispering and giggling and pointing at Matt and Sam."Lars," Petunia said. "Do something about removing that greasy Injun from my sight, will you?""It'll be my pleasure, Miss Petunia," Lars said."Here we go," Sam spoke softly.Lars swaggered up and said, "On your feet, Injun. Get off the street so's decent women can pass.""I'm very comfortable right where I am," Sam said, and then kicked him right in the nuts with the point of a boot. Lars sank to his knees, his face drained of color, his mouth working open and closed without a sound coming out. Sam put a boot on the man's chest and shoved him off the boardwalk. He landed with a plop and a small cloud of dust."You may safely pass by, Miss Petunia," Sam said. "I assure you, this Indian has never molested a white woman nor taken a scalp in his life.""Ooohhhh," Lars moaned."You trash!" Petunia hissed at Sam."This foul-mouthed wench is calling me trash," Sam said to Matt. "Since you're my brother, I guess that tars you with the same brush.""Foul-mouthed wench!" Pete yelled. "Git up on your feet, Injun, and take your lickin' like a white man. Dave, Batty, watch Bodine."Sam slowly stood up and then uncorked a right that knocked Pete clean off the boardwalk and into the street. Matt left the bench in a rush and slugged Dave hard, knocking the puncher back into Batty. Batty fell off the high boardwalk and landed in a horse trough, his head banging against the side of the trough. He sat there, addled, water up to his neck, and with a stupid smile on his face."Why you son of a..." Dave never got to finish it. Matt plowed in, both fists swinging. One punch caught Dave on the nose, and the other slammed into his jaw. Matt followed in quickly, with a left to the wind and an uppercut that clicked Dave's teeth together and crossed his eyes. Matt measured the man and busted him square on the side of the jaw. Dave wilted on the boardwalk.Sam had punched Pete silly. The young man stood swaying in the swirling dust of the street, blood leaking from his nose and mouth and from a cut on his cheek. Matt checked Lars. Lars was in no shape to do anything except moan."Finish him," Matt said. "Quit playin' around, Sam.""He's got a head like a rock!" Sam said. "He won't go down."Pete chose that time to smack Sam in the mouth and knock him sprawling on his butt. Matt laughed and applauded. His laugh was cut off short as Batty climbed out of the horse trough and slopped over to him and hit him on the back of the head with a work-hardened fist. Matt went to his knees and shook his head to clear the birdies from it.Matt rolled and came up to his boots, facing the big and angry puncher. "I'm gonna tear your meathouse down, Bodine," Batty said.A large crowd had gathered, encircling the fighters. Even Tom Riley was there with his deputies. They seemed to be enjoying the show."Knock his teeth down his damn throat, Sam!" a man yelled."Who said that?" Pete shouted, looking around him.Sam decked him, and the young man landed hard on his butt.Batty swung, Matt ducked, and drove his right fist just as hard as he could into the puncher's belly. Batty doubled over, gasping for air, and Matt hit him with a left that caught the man directly on the ear. Batty staggered to one side in time to catch a punch on the other ear. Batty was in a temporary world of silence, except for the roaring in his head."What happened?" he questioned.Matt gave him a reply in the form of a fist to the mouth. Batty's feet flew out from under him, and he hit the street and didn't move.Sam had literally beaten Pete's face into a pulp, and still he wouldn't go down. Sam finally spun him around, grabbed the young man by the shirt collar and the seat of his britches and drove him headfirst into a hitchrail post. Pete sighed and sank to the ground, his head resting momentarily on a fresh pile of horse shit. His face slowly sank out of sight."Hold that pose!" Ralph Masters hollered, running up with all his cumbersome camera gear.Sam and Matt leaned against a hitch rail and panted while Ralph got several pictures of the scene, laughing and chuckling all the while.Petunia stood on the boardwalk, her face white with anger and shock. Nobody did this to a Carlin. Nobody. Ever. Not and get away with it."You sons of bitches!" Petunia squalled, just as Lars was sticking his head over the rim of the boardwalk. Petunia reached into her purse and hauled out a short-barreled hogleg. She jacked the hammer back just as the crowd began running in all directions.Her finger slipped off the hammer, and she blew Lars's hat off his head. Lars fainted with a prayer on his lips, sure he was mortally wounded.Matt and Sam crawled under the high boardwalk just as Petunia started letting the lead fly. Her mother had probably stood by her husband's side, helping John fight off Indians and outlaws in the early days, but Petunia was no hand with a pistol. She shot out one window of the general store, fractured the striped pole outside the barber shop, blew the saddle horn off of a hitched horse on the other side of the street, sending the frightened animal racing up the road, drilled a wooden Indian outside the tabacco and gun shop right between the eyes, and sent the sixth shot rocketing toward space. Dave was just getting to his feet when Petunia hurled the empty gun in frustration. The pistol caught the back of his head and sent him sprawling back into the street, out cold.Tom and his deputies rushed out form cover, and he told a lady to grab Petunia before she could get her hands on another gun. The ample lady grabbed the girl, and Petunia tore away and socked her on the jaw. The lady rared back and gave Petunia double what she had received. Petunia went down on her bustle with a busted lip and commenced to squalling at the top of her lungs.Tom ran over and not-too-gently jerked Petunia up and marched her toward the jail. "Thank you, Mrs. Jackson," he said to the lady."You're sure welcome, Tom. It was worth a bruised jaw."Petunia stuck out her tongue at the woman and cussed her."Pitiful," Mrs. Jackson said, as Tom marched the young woman up the boardwalk."Where the hell do you think you're taking me, you jackass?" Petunia bellered."To jail, Petunia," Tom informed her. "And you'd best shut that big mouth of yours before I forget that you're a female and turn you over my knee, take off my belt, and give you what your daddy should have given you years back.""Unhand me, you brute!"Van and Nate were dragging the unconscious Pete Carlin up the center of the street. Ralph Masters was working frantically, taking pictures of the event.Lars opened his eyes and gingerly felt his head. "Am I dead?" he asked."No," Parley told him. "Just under arrest.""That ain't good, but it's better than dead," Lars replied.And a lone figure slipped out the back of the Carlin House, made his way to the livery, and lit a shuck for home range. John Carlin was going to hit the ceiling when he learned of this.Matt and Sam crawled out from under the high boardwalk.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="03">
"Why, Mr. Chaney, everyone has to be somewhere," Lily answered.
"I agree," Buck said. "But that doesn't sound like a Texas drawl to me. I'd say it was more Mississippi or Alabama."
For just an instant, the sparkle died in Lily's eyes, and though the smile never left her face, Buck could see way down, deep inside, and he regretted making the comment.
"I'm sorry, ma'am, I've already said too much," Buck apologized. "I reckon we all have things we'd as soon not remember."
Fred, who had been talking to the young girl at the end of the bar, came back to speak to Lily.
"It's Ann, Miss Lily. She says one of her customers is getting a little rough with her. He sent her down for a bottle of whiskey, but she's afraid to go back up."
"He hit me, Miss Lily," Ann said, and Buck noticed then that there was fresh red swelling on her cheek. "Do I have go to back?"
"No, of course you don't have to go back up," Lily said. "How much did he pay you?"
"He gave me a copper chit worth two dollars," the girl answered in a soft voice.
"Fred, give me two dollars from the till," Lily ordered.
Fred opened the cash drawer and gave Lily two dollars. She clinked the coins together in her hand, then started for the stairs. At about the time she reached the foot of the stairs a man, wearing only trousers, appeared at the railing on the upper balcony.
"Hey, you girl!" he shouted down at Ann. "I sent you down there to get me a bottle of whiskey, not have a quilting bee. You've been down there long enough! Get back up here!"
"I'm not coming back," Ann said.
"What? The hell you ain't. You better get back up here now, if you know what's good for you."
"I told her she doesn't have to come back up," Lily said.
"Say, isn't that -" Lance started, but Buck answered before the question was even asked.
"Yeah," he said. "That's Jack Wiggins, the same son of a bitch I threw off the train."
"He gets around, doesn't he?"
"What do you mean she's not comin' back up?" Wiggins demanded. "I paid for her, by God. She belongs to me."
"I have your money here," Lily said, holding up the silver so he could see it. "I'll be happy to return it to you as soon as you get dressed and leave."
"By God, I ain't goin' nowhere!" Wiggins shouted. It wasn't until that moment that anyone realized he was holding a gun. He raised the pistol and pointed it toward Lily. "Now, you tell that slut to get back up here," he said menacingly. "Otherwise, I'm going to put a bullet in that pretty face of yours."
"Wiggins," Buck shouted up to him. "Put the gun down."
Wiggins looked toward Buck, then recognized him. His face contorted with rage.
"You!" he shouted. He swung his gun toward Buck and fired. The bullet slammed into the bar between Buck and Lance. In one motion, Buck had his own gun out and he fired back just as Wiggins loosed a second shot.
Wiggins's second shot smashed into the mirror behind the bar, sending shards of glass all over the place but doing no further damage. He never got a third, because Buck made his only shot count.
Wiggins dropped his gun over the rail and it fell to the bar floor twelve feet below. He grabbed his neck and stood there, stupidly, for a moment, clutching his throat as bright red blood spilled between his fingers. Then his eyes rolled up in his head and he crashed through the railing, turned over once in midair, and landed heavily on his back alongside his dropped gun. He lay motionless on the floor with open but sightless eyes staring toward the ceiling. The saloon patrons who had scattered when the first shot was fired, began to edge toward the body. Up on the second floor landing a half-dozen girls and their customers, in various stages of dress and undress, moved to the smashed railing to look down on the scene.
Gunsmoke from the three charges had merged by now, and it formed a large, acrid-bitter cloud which drifted slowly toward the door. Beams of sunlight became visible as they stabbed through the cloud. There were rapid and heavy footfalls on the wooden sidewalk outside as more people began coming in through the swinging doors. One of the first ones in was a white-haired, heavyset man with a tired, defeated look to his eyes. As he passed through the sun bars, there was a flash of light from the star on his chest.
"What's the trouble here?" he asked, looking around the room.
One of the eyewitnesses chuckled.
"Ain't no trouble now, Marshal Chism. As usual, you're about a day late and a dollar short. This here fellow done took care of it."
"You the one who did the shootin'?" the marshal asked.
"Yes," Buck answered easily.
"Then you're under arrest, mister."
"What? Marshal Chism, have you lost what few brains you have? What are you arresting him for?"
"For the murder of Jack Wiggins."
"Hold on there, Marshal," Fred said. "You're making an awful big mistake here. This man had no choice. Wiggins commenced to shootin' first."
That's the size of it, Marshal," one of the others agreed. "Fact is, he shot twice before this fellow shot once."
"That's right," still another confirmed.
"You arrest him, you're goin' to have every one of us as witnesses for the defense," still another patron put in.
"They're telling the truth, Marshal," Lily said.
Marshal Chism sighed, then slipped his pistol back into his holster. He looked down toward the body. "I don't know," he said. "I'm not much lookin' forward to tellin' the Colonel that one of his men got himself kilt, and I didn't do nothin' about it."
"Try telling him it was self-defense," Lily suggested.
"I'll try. I don't know that it'll do much good, but I'll try." The marshal looked up at the crowd. A couple of the more curious had even squatted beside Wiggins's body to get a closer look at it.
"Where you reckon all his silver is?" one of them asked.
"More than likely, up in the girl's room," another said.
"Marshal, I'll have Fred get his boots and belt buckle. If he has any family anywhere, it ought to go to them."
"All right," Chism said. He pointed to a couple of the men. "You two, get him over to Peterson's hardware store so Pete can get started on a coffin."
"You know the first question Peterson's goin' to ask, don't you, Marshal? He's goin' to want to know who's payin' for the buryin'."
"I'm goin' out to Gold Dust now. I reckon the Colonel will take care of his buryin'."
The two men Chism assigned to the job picked up the body, one under the shoulders, the other at the feet. Wiggins sagged badly in the middle and they had to struggle to carry him. A couple of the other patrons held open the swinging doors while the two men carried him out into the street.
"Miss Lily, I ... I don't want to go back into my room till all his things is gone," Ann said.
"I'll get it taken care of," Lily offered. "Why don't you go on up to my room and lie down for a while?"
"Thanks," Ann said.
With the body gone, most of the customers returned to their own tables to discuss the shooting. It was played and replayed a dozen times over during the next few minutes, and though a couple of the men made some small comment to Buck, most left him alone. For that Buck was grateful. He had only Lance and Lily for company, and that was the way he wanted it.
A few minutes later Jess Langdon came into the saloon, and he walked right up to the bar and shook Buck's hand.
"I just heard what happened. You make quite an entrance into town, young man," he said. He put out his hand toward the bar without even looking, knowing that his drink would be there and, indeed, Fred had begun pouring it the moment he saw Jess come through the door. It was there, just as Fred knew it would be.
"This isn't exactly the entrance I would have chosen to make," Buck said. "But that fellow had a burr under his saddle and there was just no getting rid of it."
"It's just as well it happened the way it did," Jess said. "Jack Wiggins is the kind who would've waylaid you without so much as a second thought." Langdon saw that they were standing with Lily. "I see you met my Lily."
"Your Lily?" Lance asked.
"Yes," Jess said. He smiled and put his arm around her. "She's like a daughter to me. But if I were thirty years younger ... hell, even if I were ten years younger I might ..." He let the sentence trail off. "Believe me, the man who does lay claim to her will have to answer to me first," he went on.
"Don't worry, Jess," Lily laughed. "I'll see to it that you approve."
Jess smiled proudly, then looked back at the two brothers. "Where will you fellows be staying?"
"To be honest, we haven't given that much of a thought," Lance answered.
"Will you be looking for work?"
"Yes."
"Have you ever worked as a ranch hand?"
"Of course."
"Well, it's all settled then. You can work for me. Come on out to the place today. I pay top dollar, I've got a really nice bunkhouse for my hands and there's plenty of room. Besides, I want you to come to a meeting tonight."
"A meeting?" Lily asked. "Jess, what's up?"
"I think you can guess, Lily," Jess answered. "I've invited all the other ranchers ... that is, the ones who are still around ... to come over tonight to discuss what we can do about Barlow. Seems he's just closed up another creek. That'll about do in the Hayes' place."
"We might be interested in coming to this meeting at that," Buck said. "Is Barlow going to be there?"
Jess chuckled. "I hardly think so."
"Too bad. I'm really anxious to meet that fellow," Buck said.
"Yes," Jess said. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and peered at Buck and Lance through narrowed eyes, as if trying to size them up. "Now that I think of it, you two boys was askin' questions about him in Brenham. You even described him. Do you know him from somewhere?"
"If his name really is Barlow, we don't know him," Buck said.
"You mean you don't think that's his name."
"No."
"Well, we aren't that particular about folks' names out here," Jess explained. "Unless they give us reason to be particular. And I must confess, Barlow is giving us more and more reason to be curious."
"Who do you think Barlow is?" Lily asked.
"If he is who I think he might be, his name isn't Barlow. It's Armstrong," Buck said. "Samuel Armstrong."
"Actually, it is Samuel Barlow Armstrong," Lily said quietly.
"What?" Langdon said, looking at Lily in surprise. "See here, Lily. You mean you know this man? I mean, from somewhere else?"
"Yes," Lily said. "I knew him a long time ago."
"Why have you never said anything about it?"
"He knows me, too," Lily said. "I guess we both wanted to leave our past behind. Whatever he's done out here, I didn't figure his past had anything to do with it."
Jess looked at Buck and Lance. "But his past has something to do with what you want him for, right?"
"You might say that," Lance said.
"Wait a minute!" Jess suddenly said, holding up his finger in sudden recognition of the name. "Armstrong, you say? Samuel Armstrong?
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="04">"That's the way they are," O'Brien's son replied on cue.
"Does no one remember the Halahan family? Has their murder been forgotten and unavenged? Bartender, give us another round!"
"Sure, we remember," the son answered loudly.
"Does no one remember poor widow Duncan asettin' in her rockin' chair, and how they split her poor gray head just for a handful of silver?"
"Sure. She never hurt anybody."
"And the Halahans, the poor young couple finally finding freedom from the English tyrants only to see them coming with their sabers and iron bars. Give them credit, they went down fighting, but the wee babes, all the three of them, murdered in their beds, God rest their sweet souls."
"Who did it?" a puncher growled. "We don't allow things like that where I come from."
"The pair locked up in the jail did it. Can you believe the sheriff would've turned them loose hadn't I made such a fuss!"
O'Brien was becoming so involved in his drama that he commenced to make his story fit the way he felt no matter how far he strayed from the truth.
"There they were with the plunder, the horses, the silver, and blood on their hands! And that sheriff said he had to protect their rights!"
"What about the rights of the widow Duncan!"
"What about the rights of the Halahans!"
"What about simple plain ordinary American justice!"
"Hurrah! Erin go bragh!" O'Brien's son at the end of the bar roared.
"I tell you, those babes' blood cries out for justice!"
"Git 'em!"
"I've got the rope!" O'Brien yelled.
"Up the rope they go!"
"Necktie party! Bring the whiskey!"
Lost in fury, the mob of punchers, townsmen, and drummers poured out into the street.
Led by the cock sparrow O'Brien, who cradled his two-bore sawed-off goose gun in his left arm, and sided by his son, who wore his six-gun low, they advanced to the jail, where they encountered the old sheriff and a man wearing a strange badge on his vest.
"Hold it there, O'Brien," the sheriff yelled, raising up his old Dragoon, "you ain't taking my prisoners."
But the pressure of the mob was too much, and O'Brien was pushed up close to the sheriff.
"Give us the keys, Sheriff, and then you can take the night off," O'Brien commanded.
"I'm givin' you nothing, O'Brien, but I'm going to arrest you when your mob strays away and sobers up."
Inexorably the hooting and hollering lynch mob crowded forward.
"Stop it!" the man in the brown peaked hat yelled, drawing his six-shooter. "I'm a U.S. marshal, and I'll count three before I start shooting off the leaders."
Hardly had he spoken than young O'Brien blindsided him with the barrel of his Colt, dropping him like a rock down a well.
That was enough for Sheriff Cook.
"Don't hurt me, boys, I'm just trying to do my job," he whined.
"The keys!"
"On the nail behind the desk."
In went the elder O'Brien with his son coming close behind.
O'Brien took the key ring hanging on the wall and held it high. "Let's go, boys!"
Inside the cell, Thomas Lamb saw the choleric Irishman advancing and said, "Maybe you better start shooting, Sam."
"I thought you was against killing."
"That I am, especially when it comes to somebody killing me."
"We've got to get him close enough to get the keys," Sam said.
"You're always thinking ahead. Quite proper, Sam."
"Out you go, you murderin' scuts!" O'Brien yelled, holding the goose gun in his right hand now, aimed at Sam's head, the keys dangling in his left hand.
"Put the gun down, O'Brien, or I'll kill you!" Sam came back strongly.
"Oh, what brave talk from the murderer of babes! I might just blow your head off right now had I not promised the boys a party."
"I'm not playing party games, mister."
"Then you're mine, and the boys can have the Englishman." O'Brien grinned and slowly pressed the trigger.
"Down!" Sam snapped, and dropping to the floor, he pulled the .45 and shot upward into the pigeon breast of the red-eyed Irishman.
He grunted like a pig kicked in the butt, his fiery eyes bulging blankly. The goose gun rose and went off, sending its charge into the ceiling. O'Brien fell in a tormented heap.
"The keys!" Sam called to Thomas as he aimed the revolver at the younger O'Brien, who, instead of going to the aid of his father, was going for his gun.
Sam shot him in the chest, the heavy lead ball slamming him backward into the arms of the men behind.
Thomas had the bloody keys in his hand and opened the iron barred door without coming into Sam's line of fire.
"Boys, you done made a big mistake, going against the law,"Sam said levelly. "These two were wrong, mule-headed wrong about us, and now they're damned dead wrong. You all just back out of here and we'll join you in the Elephant for a drink in a minute."
The men in the hall spoke tersely to those behind them, and the mob moved like a wave, backward instead of forward.
In the street there was a scramble to get out of harm's way, which panicked those in front, as they felt deserted and betrayed.
"Hey, wait!"
"Where you goin?"
Suddenly, it wasn't a retreat, it was a rout, as even those in front had smelled the stench of fresh blood and knew they had no business being where they were. At any moment another bullet might come blasting out of that six-gun and the angel of death would sweep up another cowboy caught in his own loop.
They fell over themselves, scrambling to get out of the hall, and in a moment the way was clear except for the two bodies lying in a common puddle of blood already glazing over and turning black.
"Quick, friend," Sam said, grabbing from the wall his gun belt with its Remington .44 still loaded, then moving quietly to the back door.
"Here goes," he said, feeling like he was in a leaky boat ready to go over a waterfall.
Slowly opening the door, he looked out into the gloom and saw the steel-dust and the bay, fully rigged.
Still expecting a trick or an ambush, Sam sidled outside, keeping away from the light and watching for any movement.
There was nothing. The steel-dust stamped impatiently.
Sam swiftly mounted. In a second Thomas was beside him on the bay.
"We go slow," Sam whispered, holding up his hand, putting the steel-dust into an easy trot.
Staying in the alleys, they left the west side of town undetected as the mob slowly returned, a man at a time, slightly crestfallen or lying like jack mules that never stop braying.
They'd not expected the prisoners to buy a drink in the Blue Elephant, but it sounded like a good excuse to go on back there and let things settle down.
"Those damn O'Briens, always stirring up trouble."
"Finally paid for it."
"Gutshot<sic!> the old pouter pigeon."
"Gave him a slimmin' lesson he won't forget."
"I popped a lot of caps, but them fellers had the devil's own luck."
"S'pose we ought to go after them?"
The group stared at the speaker silently until he turned away and said to the bartender, "I reckon I'll have another."
The sheriff had his hands full reviving the U.S. marshal without worrying about the two bodies lying in his hallway.
- Damned O'Briens, always carrying a chip on their shoulder. I told 'em, told 'em, and told 'em, but no, they got to show the world they're so tough. So tough they can take a ball in the belly and spit it back. Oh yes, told 'em plenty times, don't mess in my business, you goin' to get hurt.
Frank Taylor, the marshal, groaned and felt the lump on his head, looked at his fingers for a sign of blood, and nodded.
"Hat broke the blow," the sheriff said, helping the marshal to his feet.
"I'll see that sonofabitch in a federal pen," the stocky marshal rasped.
"He's dead," the sheriff said. "His pa, too. Somehow the cowboy got a gun." The sheriff eyed the marshal's left holster, which was empty.
"If he hadn't had the gun, two innocent men would have been hanging, and the guilty ones would be back on their farms bustin' sod."
"I didn't say anything," the sheriff said. "I just live a day at a time and try to stay out of harm's way."
The marshal strode to the back door of the jail and looked out to see the horses gone.
"They made it," he said.
"You goin' after them? Want me to raise up a posse?"
"Better you clean up your mess and then play mumblety-peg with yourself," the marshal rasped, and strode out into the night.
"We never got to the barbershop," Sam said, scratching at the stubble on his jaw.
"I'm just thankful we're free," Tomas said.
"I reckon you're about as gritty as eggs rolled in sand. Good having you along," Sam said.
"British pluck!" Thomas Lamb laughed at himself as he noticed he was feeling overly proud. "All I did was fetch the key."
"You coulda dropped it." Sam smiled in the darkness and wondered if the sheriff was coming after them with a posse.
Didn't seem likely, the way the old man was washed out. Might have been a hell driver once, but he'd started worrying about his old age, and that had damped his powder. Better to just give your best run, and if you starve to death or freeze to death when you can't keep yourself no more, so much the better.
Don't give me too long a life, he asked the stars, just enough to keep me occupied and looking for more.
Salina was dark when they passed through. A couple of dogs ran out and challenged them, but they retreated once they'd said their piece.
"The prairie never stops," Thomas said, longing for a soft bed.
"We ought to come into Lincoln about dawn. We'll shake down there."
The trail west ran along the Kaw River, and an occasional small settlement would be situated along its banks in the places where the water could be directed into a mill wheel. Shady Bend, Tranquillity, Luther's Mill, none of which showed a light, being only lonely beginnings of dreams, and yet there was a sort of magic about the dark, solid buildings where people slept and made love and dreamed and died.
It worked both ways, Sam knew. The solitary family on the prairie could be exterminated by the dregs of humanity wandering loose, or a traveler could ask for a room for the night, and he would end up bashed in the head and et<sic!> by the hogs with all his valuables hid under a rock in the hearth.
Such was the recent scandal of the Bender family down by Coffeyville, who had rented their spare room to eight different travelers before searchers found the remains of the bodies buried in the orchard. It was said that Kate Bender, who did the killing, was a believer in witchcraft. They all left before the law arrived and were never caught.
Travelers were both risky and at risk on the lawless frontier.
As they came up a low rise to a view of the Kaw valley in the coolness of the dawn, they saw that Lincoln had its own Main Street planted to alfalfa and a few buildings on either side.
At the end of the street they found the Windsor Hotel, where Mrs. Lewis, an early riser, greeted them, and seeing the grim marks of exhaustion on their faces showed them to clean beds, where they shucked their boots and hats and fell asleep before they hit the blankets.
When they awakened a little before noon, they discovered that Mrs. Lewis had seen that their horses were fed and grained and that she'd held off cooking dinner until the men first at their breakfast of grits, fried bacon and eggs with ponhaus and fried potatoes, and a piece of cream pie.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="05">How could anyone believe that a bird would understand a man's thoughts?
Free lowered his arms and heeled his roan forward. I looked up at the hawk, certain that the half-breed's behavior was madness. The bird beat its powerful wings above us, then I heard a fluttering sound as the hawk changed its direction, flying high above the canyon floor on a westerly course.
"Impossible," I told myself, watching the hawk lead us down the canyon. "It would have flown that direction anyway."
We changed horses a mile farther into the canyon. I cinched my saddle to the Palouse as Sam swung aboard his dun. Free was riding the bay we'd taken from the cattle rustlers as he led us away from the river, atop his high-withered blue roan. The hawk had gone on without us, proving the spirits wanted nothing to do with our advance upon the Comanche village. Evidently, Free's magic wasn't strong enough to convince the hawk to help us.
My untrained eye found no hoofprints, yet now and then Free would drop off his horse to trace his finger over the rocks. Then, without uttering a word, he would continue on as if he were sure of our destination. I rode along in silence, sleeving sweat from my eyes to see the canyon rim, wondering how long it would be before we sighted the first Kwahadies and heard their shrill war cries. I wondered, too, if I would survive my first month as Sam Ault's deputy. I was beginning to understand why the other raw recruits at Fort Smith wanted no part of the assignment in Indian Territory. They had known something I hadn't about serving with Marshal Ault.
Rounding a bend in the river, my Palouse snorted, pricking its ears forward. Free had already jerked his bay to a halt, standing in his stirrups, shading his eyes.
"Here they come," I said to myself, feeling my heart pound inside my shirt. I couldn't see any Indians, but I knew they were coming just the same.
"Comanches," Sam said, looking over his shoulder at me. "Remember what I told you before. Keep your hand away from your gun."
My hands had begun to shake, so I cupped them on my saddlehorn. We still couldn't see Indians, but my horse sensed something, pawing the ground with a forefoot. We waited in the eerie silence, straining our ears to hear the sound of approaching hooves.
A movement caught my eye on the rim above us. A Comanche stood near the edge of the cliff, cradling a rifle. Free had seen him, too. The half-breed spoke in sign language, with his face turned toward the rim.
The Indian gave some sort of answer, then Free turned to Sam. "I go. You stay," he said.
Sam shook his head. "Take the tintype. Show it to Buffalo Hump and Quannah. Tell him to name his price."
Free took the tintype that Sam dug from his saddlebags. I saw them exchange glances, as if the looks had special meaning. Then Free wheeled his bay and trotted off down the canyon.
"Will he double-cross us?" I asked softly, swallowing away the dryness in my throat.
"Maybe," Sam replied, fidgeting in his saddle.
Suddenly, half a mile down the river, I saw horsemen appear around a bend. I counted them quickly, halting the count when I noticed something unusual about them. I squinted to see them clearly in the heat waves arising from the rocks blinking and fingering the sweat from my eyes. The Indian who rode at the front of the group resembled a buffalo. The Comanche wore a bulky headdress fashioned from the skull of a buffalo. A pair of short curved horns glistened from his furry skullcap, making him look as if he were half man, half animal. He carried a long lance decorated with feathers and other ornaments. A gust of wind rustled past him and then I knew the ornaments dangling from his lance were human scalps, tossed about by the wind.
"Jesus," I whispered hoarsely. I was having difficulty when I took my next breath. "Those are scalps."
"Keep quiet," Sam warned as the warriors rode closer.
My insides had begun to dance. Several more of the Comanches wore the strange buffalo skulls, giving them the same sinister silhouettes as they rode toward us. I saw the gleam of rifles in the sun, decorated with windblown eagle feathers. More feathers hung form their ponies' foretops, dancing with the gait of the animals. I took a deep breath and gripped my saddlehorn, awaiting the first chilling scream.
Free halted his horse when he reached the line of warriors. I saw him begin sign language with the leader of the band. None of the Comanches' rifles were aimed at Free ... for the moment. I forced myself to sit still while the sign talk continued, listening to the beat of my heart.
The talk ended abruptly. Free wheeled his horse away and struck a trot in our direction. Sam's sun-browned cheeks were pale as Free advanced across the rocks.
"Stay, Starman," Free grunted when his horse stopped in front of us. "I make talk with Buffalo Hump. Talk trade. Tosi Tivo woman maybeso here."
Sam seemed to relax, but I didn't find it quite so easy. "Tell Buffalo Hump we give many horses," Sam said, accompanying his words with sign. "Tell him my words are true words."
Free rode off at a trot. I let out the breath I was holding and turned to Sam.
"Can you tell if Free intends to betray us?" I asked.
Sam watched the Comanches wheel their ponies before he gave me an answer. "Not yet. Free stands to gain from the trade, so he won't sell us out unless the bargain falls through. I reckon we'll have to wait and see."
"Why weren't we allowed to go along, so we can identify Melissa Grumann?"
Sam shook his head. "They're too smart to let us see where they've hidden their village. We could lead a troop of cavalry to 'em, and they're being careful. If they've got the right girl, they'll show her to us if Buffalo Hump wants a trade. Horses are the same as money to a Comanche. The price will be high, but they'll prove to us that they have her."
We watched the Comanches disappear around the bend. I looked up at the rim where the Indian had been standing. Now there was only barren rock. The warrior was gone.
"What are we supposed to do?" I asked.
"We wait for Free, and we keep our eyes open," Sam explained, reining his dun toward a rock ledge beneath a cliff on the north side of the river.
We rode across the shallows, to a meager patch of grass where Sam swung down.
"Hobble the horses," he said, pulling the cinch on his saddle as he studied the lay of things. "Build a fire, so they can see our smoke."
Sam uncorked a pint of whiskey and took a deep swallow, then he offered the bottle. "You'll need it before this is over," he remarked. " Steadies your nerves for the waiting."
I stripped the saddle off the Palouse and fitted the hobbles on our spare horses. Sam laid his Winchester beside a rock. I put my Sharps against the rock face, then I set out to build a fire. I kept looking up the rim, watching for the lone Comanche to reappear as I made coffee over the flames. Sam's whiskey was starting to take effect by the time our coffee was done. I could feel my brains swim.
"I saw fish when we crossed the river," I said. "With time on our hands, I suppose I could catch some for our supper."
Sam shrugged. "I ain't got much appetite just now, Mr. Dudley, but if you've a hankering to catch fish, you might as well give it a try."
To pass some time, I dug a string and a hook from my gear that I'd brought along from Mississippi. If I did anything better than I could shoot, it was to catch fish, so I hunted down a grasshopper and walked to the river. I tossed my line in the water and settled against a rock, but to tell the truth, my mind wasn't on fishing just then. I kept seeing Comanches at the far end of the canyon when I stared at the shimmering heat waves.
Dark was the worst time of all. I fried up the fish I'd caught, but only nibbled around the edges. Sam drank whiskey until the first bottle was empty, then he started on another.
"Sure is quiet," I said, listening to a coyote bark.
Sam didn't answer me, he was staring up at the stars.
"How long do you reckon it'll take to get our answer?" I asked.
"Hard to say," Sam sighed, fingering his rifle.
"It sure is quiet out here," I said again, glancing up at the rim. The sky was filled with twinkling stars. A pale half-moon hung above the horizon, lighting up the rocks around us with its silvery glow.
I wanted conversation, frightened as I was.
"What's it like to be married to a woman?" I asked, making small talk when my thoughts drifted to the girl. I wasn't thinking about marrying Sue Hawkins, but I wondered what it would be like to have a wife when I was ready for the idea.
"I reckon it's like everything else, Mr. Dudley. There's a good side and a bad. A woman has an opinion about most anything a man does with himself, whether he wants to hear it of if he don't. A married man gets tired of hearing opinions. Then there's the good side: having the comfort of a soft woman in your bed at night. And someone to talk to. It gets lonely bein' by yourself. Having a woman helps with the loneliness."
I considered Sam's answer, until he startled me with his next remark. "You thinkin' about marrying the girl back at Silverton?" he asked.
"No. I was just askin', is all. I've been wondering what it was like."
Sam stared across the river. "I suppose it's better than being alone," he said after some thought. He took a sip of whiskey and handed me the pint. "I figure you've got little Missy Hawkins on your mind," he said. "This'll help. Right now you'd better think about stayin' alive."
I took a swallow of the bitter whiskey. I'd never developed a taste for the stuff, but it helped when my nerves were on edge. Soon I settled back against my saddle, trying to find a comfortable spot. I watched Sam's face across the flames. His eyes darted from one shadow to the next, and when a mesquite knot popped in the fire, he flinched. The whiskey wasn't doing much to relax him. He seemed more skittish than ever.
"What is it about a Comanche that makes 'em worse than another kind?" I asked, seeking an explanation for Sam's fear. The marshal wasn't afraid of a saloon full of hardcases with guns and knives, but when we entered the domain of the Kwahadies, he was as jumpy as a sinner at a Sunday sermon.
Sam closed his eyes briefly, as if he was remembering something. "I've seen what they do to their enemies," he said, talking in a strained voice. "They take pride in the ways they've found to kill a man slow. They carve up an enemy so he'll live for days, screamin' his head off until the pain drives him mad. It ain't enough that they kill him. It's the way they get it done."
Just then I wished I hadn't asked. I reached for the pint and took a bigger swallow. An owl hooted once, making my scalp crawl inside my hat.
10
I spent the longest night of my life around that fire, jumping at every sound, peering into the dark.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="06">Unlike so many other Overland employees, he did not hail from Texas or one of the slave states farther east. Pretty thin ice to walk on, but Lonaker was short on option.
The night dragged on endlessly. Lonaker endured two hours on the bunk, and when he couldn't stand another minute, cat footed into the common room.
Sancho kept a pot of coffee on the stove at all times. The fire in the woodburner's black iron belly had died down to a bed of orange embers, but the coffee was still plenty warm. Lonaker poured himself a cup, lit a cheroot, and took a seat a the long trestle table, staring into the darkness.
An hour later he stepped outside, rifle in hand, to find Huck sitting with his back against the adobe wall of the station. The moon was about to set. A glance at the stars told Lonaker it was close to midnight. He turned to the brawny reinsman and nodded at the station house door.
"Get some shut-eye. I'll take over."
Huck got to his feet, stretched, and growled at cramped, complaining muscles. He looked like a grizzly bear getting up on its hind legs, ready to attack. Lonaker felt another stab of keen regret as he watched the ex-prizefighter. Huck had been a good friend. The troubleshooter was sorry for the tribulation he knew was going to descend on this man.
"How's the arm?" asked Huck.
"Hurts like hell."
The reinsman stepped to the door, paused on the threshold, brow furrowed.
"The Overland's in big trouble, isn't it?"
Lonaker nodded, his eyes probing the desert night.
Huck slapped the bullwhip against his thigh. "Well, I don't think they've invented the trouble we can't handle, Mr. Lonaker."
"Just watch your back," advised Lonaker. "Remember, you can't trust anybody. He might be a Copper-head."
"You're not. I trust you. See you in the morning. I'm going to get some of that sleep 'that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.' Shakespeare."
Lonaker turned slowly and watched Huck disappear into the black womb of the station.
He waited a half-hour before moving, silent as shadow, to the open window of the sleeping room. Huck's distinctive, wall-shaking snore was drowning out Coffman. Lonaker crossed the hardpack to the Concord, retrieved the saddlebags filled with the Army payroll, and headed for the corral.
The Reno Kid's saddle and bridle were in a shed which served as tack room. Lonaker draped the saddle and the saddlebags on the corral's top pole and climbed over to move slowly through the fourteen horses in the pen. He murmured sweet nothings to keep them calm. He caught up the blazed sorrel without undue trouble, and slipped the bridle over its head. The horse balked some accepting the bit. Lonaker twisted its ear and kept matters under control.
Leading the horse over to the saddle, he noticed Sancho standing on the other side of the corral fence. The station agent was watching him impassively.
"Been expecting you," said the troubleshooter. "You sleep light."
"Si, Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>or Lonaker." Sancho shrugged. "Pistoleros and Apache broncos have been trying to sneak up on me all my life.
Lonaker draped the saddle over the horse and cinched up.
"What's the best way to fight an Apache, Sancho?"
Sancho was an authority on the subject. "Only one way, if you want to live. You must think like an Apache. Move like an Apache. Fight like an Apache. If you don't, you will surely die."
Lonaker nodded. "I'm not fighting Apaches this time. But the men I'm up against are just as cunning. I figure my only chance against them is to be more cunning than they are." He tied off the latigo over the front rigging ring, dropped the fender and turned to the station agent. "I have a big favor to ask of you."
"Anything."
Lonaker gave him the letter addressed to Huck. "I want you to make sure Huck gets this. But don't give it to him in the morning. I reckon he'll go on to Yuma, with Coffman. Wait until the next day, then ride after him."
Sancho took the letter. "I will do as you ask."
"The kid can watch this place while you're gone. Whatever you do, don't let anyone but Huck get that letter." As he fitted boot to stirrup he had a thought. "Wait. If you can't find Huck in town, try the army post. If he's there, or if you can't find him, you can give up the letter to Colonel Dahlgren."
Sancho nodded. Lonaker swung into the saddle. The station agent lowered the gate pole.
"Buena suerte, Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>or Lonaker."
"Thanks," said Lonaker as he rode by. "I'll need all the luck I can get."
Sancho watched him go until the night swallowed him up.
Chapter Thirteen
The town of Yuma had grown to maturity under the protective wing of the federal fort, where the mighty Colorado plunged out of the mountains and twisted like a gigantic brown serpent through the malpais on its way to the border.
The fort, and orderly arrangement of stone and adobe buildings, stood on high ground overlooking the settlement. Standing grim and alone a mile out on the flat was the hulking eyesore of the territorial prison.
With the Army post, the prison and the Oxbow Route, Yuma flourished. It was a rough and ready town, providing recreation for soldiers, prison guards and the lusty men who worked the mining and lumber camps in the mountains to the north.
As he rode into town at the head of a five-man detail - one sergeant and four troopers - Colonel Eric Dahlgren cast a jaundiced <}>eyedeye upon the place. Afternoon heat shimmered off the hardpack of the wide street, deeply scored by wagon and carreta wheels.
A man could break both legs trying to walk across a Yuma street, reflected Dahlgren. And on the infrequent occasions when it rained, these same streets became treacherous quagmires of rust-colored mud. A whiskey peddler, drunk on his own snakehead, had drowned in that alley over there, one stormy night last year.
A perfect example of poetic justice, mused the colonel, a career soldier who held civilians generally in low esteem. He was willing to concede that there were a few worth their salt. But he didn't think any of them resided in Yuma.
Dahlgren fished a handkerchief out of a pocket of the white linen duster he wore to protect his uniform, and mopped the sweat off his face. His features were hawkish. His eyes, the cloudy green color of the fjords in his native Scandinavia, could cut through a man like a saber stroke.
The colonel was a highly intelligent, impeccably honest, and well-educated man. As a naive youth he had believed the poets and philosophers when they waxed eloquent about mankind's limitless potential for greatness. A lifetime of experience since then had plucked the scales from his eyes. He couldn't abide rapacity or stupidity in others. And Yuma was full to the brim with ignorant, greedy people.
He saw them now, in the open windows and doorways and in the scant shade on both sides of the street. Cardsharps, prostitutes, drummers, merchants. All of them preyed on his soldiers. Worse, they held the Army in ill-disguised contempt. It was better to receive a compliment rather than a curse from the thief who picked your pocket.
But these civilians scorned and slighted Dahlgren's soldiers. Until there was danger - until the Apaches embarked on a bloody raid, or bandit gangs started raising hell along the border, or prisoners broke out of the prison. Then the civilians howled for protection from the garrison.
I may not have much of a garrison left, thought Dahlgren, when my men learn that six months of pay in arrears has been stolen.
But the Army got what it deserved, in his opinion, when it placed its affairs in the hands of civilians.
The colonel reined his horse around a corner at the intersection of the garrison road with Yuma's main street. The detail trailed along behind. Now Dahlgren could see the crowd congregated in front of the adobe structure housing the Overland's office - between twenty and thirty men, peeking through the front windows, filling the boardwalk, spilling out into the street.
They all seemed to be talking at once, and irritating babble, but every man fell silent as Dahlgren steered his mount to a tie-rail in front of the Overland office. They knew better than to fire a lot of tiresome questions at the Fort Yuma commanding officer. Dahlgren was better known for his temper than his tolerance.
Like the Red Sea parting, they made a path for him as he crossed the boardwalk. At the door, he turned to peruse the crowd with stern disfavor, then glanced at the sergeant who, with the four troopers, was still mounted.
"Macready."
"Yes, sir."
"Move them."
"Yes, sir!"
The three-striper dismounted with alacrity and bulled his way through the throng with exuberance. The civilians tried to get out of his way, but the burly Irish noncom would not be denied his fun. He knocked one man aside with an elbow. "Excuse me, sir," he said, smiling like a leprechaun. He sent a second man staggering with another cheery apology.
Gaining the boardwalk, Macready turned to block the door through which the colonel had just passed. The sergeant planted big fists on his hips and slowly scanned the crowd.
"Now gentlemen," he said, rolling the words with a thick brogue. "I know ye must have better things to do than to be lollygaggin' out here in the hot sun. So I must ask ye to be on your way."
No one moved. Macready breathed a melodramatic sigh, whipped the pistol out of the flap holster at his side, and fired a round into the sky.
The civilians scattered like quail.
Macready watched their flight with profound gratification.
"Flamin' rabble," he murmured.
Dahlgren was met in the front room by a lanky, sandy-haired man wearing a tin star on his vest.
"Afternoon, Colonel. I sent word up to the fort soon as ..."
"Where are they, Sheriff?"
"Back room."
Dahlgren passed through the swinging gate of a counter, through another door. Long benches lined the walls to left and right. Across the room was a door leading outside. The doorway was filled by the bulk of the town's deputy sheriff. He was tilted against the frame, a shotgun cradled in his arms.
Through a window in the rear wall Dahlgren could see the Overland 'yard', encircled by a high adobe wall. Half of the yard was a corral, where two dozen horses were bunched around a water trough in the shade of an old oak. The only decent shade, mused the colonel, for twenty square miles. In the other half of the yard stood a mud wagon and, closer to the back door, a dust-covered Concord coach.
As Dahlgren entered, one of two men sitting on the bench to the colonel's left jumped up.
"Colonel, I'm Phil Coffman. I ..."
"I know." Dahlgren spared him the merest glance and turned to the other man. "You're Lonaker's driver, aren't you?"
Huck Odom sat leaning forward with his head down and hands clasped between his knees. He didn't look up.
"That's right. Huck Odom."
"Where is he?"
"I don't know."
"I can't believe it," declared Coffman. "I never thought John Lonaker would turn bad. Colonel, I promise you the Overland will do everything in its power to ..."
Dahlgren impatiently raised a hand to cut Coffman short. "Mr. Odom, am I to believe you were unaware of Lonaker's intentions?"
Tight-lipped, Huck slowly raised his head. He met Dahlgren's steely gaze without flinching.
"I'm still unaware of his intentions," said the reinsman, his tone as flat as the bottom of a frying pan.
"They should be obvious ot you. They certainly are to me."
Hand clasped behind his back, the colonel began to pace restlessly, spurs ringing against the floor. He paused once to peer curiously at the bullwhip looped over the deputy sheriff's shoulder.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="07">That's in case you'd want to get down to the marshal's office."
"Yeah, thanks," Lance said.
"'Course, bein' as you brought in a prisoner last night, I don't reckon you'd really have to go."
"I reckon not," Lance said. He strapped on his gun belt, then reached for his hat.
"But I figured you'd be wantin' to," Sam added.
"I reckon so," Lance said. He closed the door to his room behind him, then followed Sam down the hall toward the stairs.
"Lance?"
Lance turned toward the sound of the woman's voice and saw Lily Montgomery standing in her door at the far end of the hall. Lily owned the saloon.
"'Morning, Lily," Lance said, touching the brim of his hat.
"What is it? What's all the commotion?"
"The stage was held up, Miss Lily," Sam said, answering before Lance could. "There was a shootin' too, when the coach come in, the driver was layin' out on top an' the shotgun guard, why, he was inside."
"Oh, the poor men," Lily said. "Lance, be careful."
Lance smiled. "You know me, Lily," he said. "Careful is my middle name."
Lance left the saloon then hurried across the street toward the gathering crowd. Nearly everyone in town had been drawn to the stage by the curious nature of its arrival. By now the driver and the guard had been taken from the coach and were stretched out on the boardwalk in front of the marshal's office. Doc Presnell was kneeling down beside the guard, feeling for a pulse in his neck. He wasn't wasting his time with the driver. With his eyes open and opaque, and a big, black hole in his cheek, it didn't require a doctor to see that Andy McGinnis was very obviously dead.
"'Mornin', Lance," Marshal Dan Efrem said. "I see you found Lattimore. Good job."
"It was easy enough, seeing as he was right where you said he would be," Lance answered. "What do you know about this?" he asked, indicating the two men Doctor Presnell was working on.
"Not much, I'm afraid," Dan said. "Like you, I just got here." The marshal was standing just outside his office with his arms folded across his chest, watching the doctor at work.
"Can I use your door, Dan?" Doc Presnell asked, looking up at the marshal. "We've got to get Seth over to my place and we're goin' to need something to carry him on."
"Yes, of course," Dan replied, and he nodded toward two other men who, quickly, began to take the door to the marshal's office off its hinges, so it could be used a as carrying board. "Is Seth going to make it, Doc?"
"I don't know," Doc Presnell said. "He's got a chance. The bullet went through him high enough that it missed all his vitals, but you never can tell with gunshot wounds."
"Let me know how he's doin', will you, Doc?" Dan asked.
"Sure thing, Marshal."
Dan looked back at Lance.
"What time did you get in with Lattimore?"
"About five-thirty or six."
"Pretty short night for you, wasn't it?"
"I suppose so, but I'll be all right after a cup of coffee."
"There's a pot on the stove," Dan offered.
"I'll get some directly," Lance replied. "Soon as we get a handle on things."
Dan looked over at the gambler. "Johnny, you want to tell us what happened?"
"It was Rufus Blanton," Johnny said.
"Ruthless? Are you sure?" Dan asked.
"Yeah, I'm sure. I've seen him a couple of times before."
"What about you two?" Dan asked. "You go along with that?"
"I've never seen him for real," the rancher replied. "But I've seen dodgers on him and I'd say that's who it was. Besides, I heard Seth call out his name, just before he was shot."
"It was him, all right," the clerk said. "You've seen him before, have you?" Dan asked.
"Well, uh, no," the clerk admitted. "But I have heard him described. And this was him, all right. I don't have the slightest doubt about it."
The undertaker's wagon arrived. The driver halted the team and set the brake, then looked over at Dan.
"If you're through with the body, Marshal, I'll take it now," the driver said. He was wearing a long, black coat and a pair of striped pants.
"Sure thing, Mr. Albritton, but maybe you'd better hold off on doin' anything more with it 'til we hear from the widow," Dan suggested. "I reckon Mrs. McGinnis will be wantin' him brought back home."
"I've no doubt that she will. I'll just get in touch with my colleague over in Risco and keep him on ice until I get further instructions," Albritton explained.
Dan turned his attention back to the three passengers. "I'll tell you folks what has me puzzled. What I don't understand is, why someone like Rufus Blanton would want to hold up the stage between Risco and Barlow in the first place. Why, there couldn't have been more'n ten or fifteen dollars between everybody on board, could there? I mean this stage doesn't even carry a strongbox."
"The money wasn't in a strongbox, it was in a valise," Karpo said.
"The money? What money?"
"A little over three thousand dollars. This fella here, was carrying it."
"What were you doing with so much money?" Lance asked.
The bank clerk pulled himself up importantly. "My name is C. D. Adams, Marshal," he explained. "I work for the Bank of Risco and I was overseeing a species transfer to the Bank of Barlow."
"Damn," Lance said. "Someone slipped up somewhere. Those transfers are supposed to be kept secret. I wonder how Ruthless found out."
"I ... I really don't know," Adams stammered.
"The hell you don't," Karpo replied. "You were spoutin' it off all over the restaurant at supper last night. Everybody heard you. They were talking about it down at the saloon."
"Yeah," Bates said. "I even heard about it down at the feeder lot."
"Is that true?"
"I ... I suppose so," Adams replied.
"What the hell? Why didn't you just take out an ad in the newspapers?" Lance asked.
"I ... I didn't think it would do any harm," Adams insisted. "I was just trying to make an impression on Miss Kirby."
"Miss Kirby?"
"She's the waitress at the City Pig Cafe," Adams explained.
"So, because you were trying to make an impression on a waitress, you babbled all over the place that you would be carrying a lot of money between banks," Dan said scornfully. "And as a result, one man was killed and another may die. In addition to that, you lost all your employer's money."
"I didn't know anything like this would happen," Adams whined. "Honest I didn't."
"Yeah, well, I'm not the one you have to answer to," Dan said. "If I were you I'd get myself down to the bank and start making explanations there."
"You need me anymore, Dan?" Karpo asked.
"No, I guess not. You can go too, Bates," Dan replied. "And thanks for bringing in the stage ... you did a good job."
"By the way, Lance, when is your brother going to get back?" Karpo asked. "We've got a few more hands of poker to play."
"Your guess as to when Buck will get back is as good as mine," Lance answered with a little laugh. "You know how he is. There's always another town to see, another hole-card to draw to, and another bar girl to spark."
Karpo chuckled. "That's Buck, all right. It's sure hard to pin him down. I swear, I never in my life saw any two brothers as different as you two. To begin with, you don't even look alike; you're three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. You're dark, he's light, you're settled, he's wild, the only thing alike is that a man with good sense wouldn't want to get on the bad side of either one of you. Anyway, next time you see Buck, tell him he owes me a couple of games so I can get even."
"I'll tell him," Lance promised.
"Come on in, Lance," Dan invited. "You can drink your coffee while I'm gettin' ready."
"Getting ready? Getting ready for what?"
"I'm goin' after him."
"There's no call to do that, Dan," Lance said. "The fact is, you don't really even have the authority to go after him. The town council hired you to keep the peace here in Barlow, not go running through the countryside chasing road agents."
"I know why I was hired, Lance. But I got a special want for this fella," Dan replied. He looked over at Lance. "You, of all people, should understand that."
"Yeah," Lance replied as he took a swallow of coffee and studied Dan over the rim of his cup. "Yeah, I guess I do."
The 'understanding' Dan mentioned, referred to the fact that Lance Chaney and his brother Buck had arrived in Barlow, Texas a little over a year earlier, hard on the trail of the men who had raped and killed their sister. They had started on their quest from opposite sides, for Lance had been a captain in the Union Army, while Buck was a lieutenant in the Confederacy. However, their past differences were put aside long enough for them to settle the score with their sister's killers, though it ultimately took a range war to get that accomplished.
The range war was over now, but there were still enough gunfighters, holdup men, gamblers, prospectors, cowboys and wild women to keep the place jumping, and to keep the Chaney boys interested. To the two brothers, Barlow meant two different things. Buck, being younger, quicker-tempered, and faster with a gun, rather enjoyed the excitement of the town. He hung around to take maximum advantage of all the experiences a place like Barlow had to offer, supporting himself by his wits ... gambling mostly, though he had done a little bartending and had even hired himself out as a shotgun guard on a few occasions. Buck was friendly with all the women, but so far he had managed to avoid getting too close to any woman in particular.
Lance was the more settled of the two and he stayed around Barlow because, as he said, "Everyone has to be somewhere." There were those, however, who suggested that Lance stayed in Barlow because of Lily Montgomery, the owner of the Easy Pickin's saloon. Actually, there was a great deal of truth to that suggestion. Lily was a beautiful woman and not at all like the average sporting house madam.
Lily could remember the days when she was the daughter of a wealthy Mississippi planter and the 'Belle of the County.' She still had the airs of a fine lady and cowboys who were visiting the saloon for the first time and who knew nothing of Lily's background, seemed to sense that, and react to it.
Lance and Lily had an understanding of sorts, though the parameters of that understanding had not been fully explored. Lance certainly wasn't ready to discuss marriage and he didn't consider himself engaged. Also, since their relationship had never actually been articulated they were free, technically, to see others. It was obvious to everyone, however, that while Lily ran a bar and sporting house and served drinks and a smile to men, she was interested only in Lance Chaney. It was just as obvious that Lance, who had a polite smile for all the working girls of the Easy Pickin's Saloon, was really interested in sharing his table and drinks only with Lily.
When the job was offered to him, Lance pinned on the star of deputy marshal. The new marshal, Dan Efrem, needed a deputy, and Lance Chaney needed work. What made the situation somewhat unusual was that Lance was one of those responsible for getting Efrem to come to Barlow in the first place.
Dan Efrem was a well-known and highly-respected law officer, a former Texas Ranger and United States Marshal.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="08">
The word had spread. When Pettigrew limped into the Rosita Mercantile, pants leg bloody, needing a shave, he drew stares from everyone in sight. But the store owner wasted no time asking questions until after he'd measured a yard of muslin and found a pair of the new Levi's pants, size thirty-three by thirty-three. Pettigrew would have to turn up the cuffs. There were four other customers in the store, but no one spoke. They only stared.
Then, "You're the one that rode in with that woman, ain't you? Is she really the one that was kidnapped up at Pueblo?"
"Yeah," Pettigrew answered, wearily. "Got any crackers or anything? Maybe some sardines?"
"What happened?"
"There was some shooting. She's all right now."
"Who got shot?"
"Some hardcases. Listen, I don't remember when I ate last or slept last. Got anything to eat?"
Back in the hotel room, he rewrapped his wounds, made a meal of sardines and crackers and flopped down on the narrow bed.
Lem Pettigrew slept like a dead man himself, lying on the bed wearing only his shirt, shorts and socks. His dreams were deep and vague and kept shifting scenes. There was the doctor with no name at Hardscrabble, Charles B. Atkinson, his old boss Sheriff Popejoy at Johnson County in West Texas, his childhood in the small town of Johnsonville, his work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and John 'Beans' Gipson. And there the dream dwelled for a time. It was a disturbing dream.
He'd been a deputy sheriff for four years, and resigned when his boss completed his term and didn't run for re-election. It was Sheriff Popejoy who suggested he work for the Pinkertons, and it was the glowing recommendation from the sheriff that got him the job. That, and the fact that he'd done enough work on the cow outfits in West Texas that he could hold down a job as a cowboy. Plus the fact that the JS Ranch in south Texas was losing cattle and needed some undercover detective work done.
Plus, the Pinkertons had no agent who looked at all like a cowboy.
It was an easy assignment. Once Lem Pettigrew got acquainted with a good-looking young cowboy nick-named Beans it didn't take long to figure out what was happening.
Beans and an older man named Newt Waltham were stealing a few cattle at a time and hazing them into a corral hidden in the mesquites that grew along the Rio Grande. A crew of vaqueros drove the cattle from there across the river, delivering them to a Mexican rancher who had two hundred thousand acres to hide them in. The ranchero paid Beans and Newt about half the market price.
Pettigrew got suspicious when Beans ran out of dollars in town one day and couldn't talk a bartender into taking pesos. "God damn Mex money won't buy a piece of ass this side of the border," he'd complained. He shut up like a trap when Pettigrew asked where he got the pesos. Then Newt suffered a broken leg when a horse turned over on him, and Beans needed a new partner. Pettigrew had let it be known that he wouldn't mind raking in more than cowboy wages if he could do it without killing anyone. Beans had found his new partner.
One theft of twenty-five cows was all it took to gather enough evidence. But Pettigrew's work wasn't done. The worst part was yet to come. He had to testify in court.
In his dreams Pettigrew often saw Beans' face when he said, "I never believed you'd rat on me, Lem. I thought we was friends. I never believed you'd -"
It was a knocking on the door that woke him.
"Huh," Pettigrew snorted, jerking upright on the bed. For a long moment he couldn't remember where he was. The knocking persisted. Finally, "Yeah? Who's there?"
A muffled voice came through the door, "The proprietor, Mr. Pettigrew. I've got a message."
"All right, all right. Give me a minute." Bedsprings squeaked when he got up. He pulled on his new pants and went to the door in his sock feet. The clerk with the handlebar moustache stood there.
He said, "Mrs. Atkinson asked me to tell you that she would like to meet you downstairs."
"All right, thanks."
He washed his face in cold water, ran his fingers through his brown hair, and wished he had a comb. He knew his face bristled with several days' growth of whiskers, but he had no razor with him. His boots thumped on the stair steps.
She looked some better, sitting in the lobby, although she needed clean clothes. She even managed a small smile. Two young faces were pressed against the window pane from outside, looking in at her. The proprietor went to the open door and hollered, "Now you kids get away from here."
"I hope you got some rest, Mrs. Atkinson," Pettigrew said as he sat in one of four wooden chairs in the lobby.
"Yes. I had a bath and a nap. I was wondering, Mr. Pettigrew, whether you've talked to the officers of the law here."
"A deputy sheriff. He ought to be gone after the dead bodies now."
"Good. I'm sure he will want a statement of some kind from me too. I'm so weary I hope we can get this over with so I can get back to Pueblo."
"I told him you have to get back as fast as possible. He said a stage leaves every morning going east. I might have to stay a day or two."
"Oh, I hope not. I need your company."
"I hope not too, but ..." He shrugged. "I've been an officer of the law myself, and I know certain matters have to be settled."
"Do you suppose we could have dinner together? I feel so ... so embarrassed all alone."
"Sure. You bet. I'll buy a razor and try to make myself fit to be seen with a lady."
Seated at a table for four in the Home Cafe next door, they had roast beef, mashed potatoes and brown gravy. She ate only half of what was on her plate. Pettigrew cleaned his plate and ordered a slab of pie made of dried apples. They ate silently. She seemed to be deep in thought, and he didn't want to intrude.
They went to their separate rooms after dinner. Pettigrew took a 'whore's bath' out of the wash pan, and wished he'd had enough money to buy some clean shorts and socks. With only a few dollars in his wallet, he'd have to sell his bay horse to get stage and train fare, but once he got back to Pueblo, he'd collect his reward and be rich. Well, working-man rich.
"Uh-oh," he said aloud when the thought hit him. What if Charles B. Atkinson was dead? Would he get the reward he'd earned? Surely, the widow would see that he did. Everybody in Southern Colorado knew a reward had been promised. He sat on the bed thinking. Yeah, sure. Of course I'll get the reward.
Deputy Mulhay got back after dark. Pettigrew lit a coal oil lamp, pulled on his pants and again went to the door in his sock feet. His big toe on the right foot had worn a hole in the sock, but, oh well, the deputy had seen holes in socks before.
"We got 'em down and layed 'em out." Deputy Mulhay said, "and I just talked to Mrs. Atkinson and got her story. It checks exactly with what you said."
"Uh-huh." Pettigrew sat on the bed and motioned the deputy to the one chair.
"What I need now," the deputy said, shifting his gun-belt and sitting, "is to get a jury together. Say, oh ... four or five good men that can read and write, however many I can find, and tell 'em all about it. You'll have to be there, but I told Mrs. Atkinson she could leave on the stage in the mornin'."
"I know she appreciates that."
"Yeah, poor woman. She's had hell. I sure ain't gonna give 'er no more trouble."
"But I guess I'll have to stick around tomorrow."
"Yup. Can't be helped. What Mrs. Atkinson tells me is you saved her life more'n once."
Shrugging, Pettigrew said, "I wasn't trying to be a hero. There's a reward."
"Yup. I heered about that reward. What Mrs. Atkinson tells me is you surely earned it."
"When can you hold this inquest?"
"Not 'til mornin'. Wish we had a telegraph here. The sheriff's gone down to New Mexico Territory to eyeball a horse thief they arrested down there, and I wish I could telegraph 'im to get back up here. But we ain't and I cain't, so I'll do the best I know how."
Pettigrew almost told about having been a deputy sheriff himself, but he decided he didn't want to get into a conversation about that. Instead, he said, "Know where I can sell a good horse? I don't care to ride back over those mountains."
"Sammy buys and sells horses, mules, jackasses, wagons and just about ever'thing else. How much he pays depends on how hard up you are."
Pettigrew managed a small grin. "I'll try to put on a good act."
He saw the stage off with Mrs. Atkinson and three other passengers in it. The woman carried the saddlebags full of money. It occurred to Pettigrew to ask for an advance against the reward, but he didn't want to admit that he was broke. Sammy turned out to be a short, wide man with a nearly new brown hat and baggy wool pants. Pettigrew asked for forty dollars for the bay gelding, but settled for thirty-five. That gave him plenty of money to get to Pueblo, where he would collect his reward.
The town of Rosita had no coroner, but Deputy Mulhay called the gathering of five citizens a coroner's jury anyway. The hearing, in the combination sheriff's office and one-cell jail should have been short, but each juror had questions, mainly to satisfy their private curiosities. They didn't even leave the room to reach a verdict:
The two unnamed men met their deaths at the hands of one Lemual Pettigrew of Fremont County, state of Colorado. Mr. Pettigrew shot them in the defense of a kidnap victim, one Mrs. Cynthia Atkinson of Pueblo County. Therefore, it is the verdict of this coroner's jury that Mr. Pettigrew violated no laws of the state of Colorado.
"You understand, Mr. Pettigrew," a well-dressed juror said, "that this was not a trial, and if at some time the sheriff or the prosecutor decides to file charges against you it would not constitute double jeopardy."
"I understand."
"You're free to go on about your business."
Pettigrew bought a new shirt to go with the new pants. The new Levi's denim pants were cut full to allow for shrinkage, and they were baggy and stiff. He wished he'd bought another kind. He had a good breakfast under his belt, and a beer would have tasted good. But he didn't want to have to answer questions about the woman and her kidnappers, so he stayed out of the saloons. Now was the time to follow the advice of the doctor with no name and give his sore leg a rest.
He was dozing lightly in his room when a knock on the door brought him to his feet. "Who's there?"
A barely audible voice came through the door, "The sheriff."
It wasn't the right answer. Pettigrew drew the Colt .45, and when he opened the door he didn't stand in front of it. Instead, he stepped back, partially behind it.
The man who rushed in had a sixgun in his hand too, and he wasn't Deputy Mulhay.
Chapter Fifteen
In an instant, Pettigrew recognized the man. He fired as the man was turning toward him, then immediately dove for the floor, rolled onto his back and fired at the second man in the doorway.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="09">Listen to me, people. I know Smoke Jensen. He probably don't remember me, but I damn sure remember him. Let me name you some men who had the bad judgment to brace him. Slick Finger Bob, Terry Smith, Tom Ritter, One-Eye Slim, Warner Frigo, Canning, Felter, Kid Austin, Grisson and Clark, Curly Rodgers, Curt Holt, Ed Malone, Boots Pierson, Harry Jennings, Blackjack Simpson. Richards, Potter, Stratton. Smoke Jensen killed nineteen men by himself in a ghost town over in Idaho. Then there's Greeny, Lebert, and Augie. There was Dickerson, Brown, and Necker. Joiner and Wilson and Casey. There was Jack Waters and his three brothers. Then there was Lanny Ball and four of his friends. I think their names was Woody, Dalton, Lodi, and Sutton. Dad Estes had himself and his whole gang wiped out by Jensen. Cat Jennings and Barton and Mills and no-'count George Victor. Utah slim - everybody's heard of him - faced Smoke one day. That was the last thing he ever did. Pig-Face Phillips and a gunhand named Carson called Jensen out. They died in the dirt. You want me to name some more? Hell, I ain't even scratched the surface yet!"
Club Bowers walked the floor, eyeballing each man there. "People, understand something: Smoke Jensen was raised by mountain men. He don't fight like nobody you or me know. And when you get Smoke Jensen riled - and I've seen him riled - he's like ... well, a whole room full of grizzly bears. He's ..."
Jack Biggers waved him silent. "You're lettin' your imagination run away with you, Club. Jensen is a tough man. We all saw that when he fought Mule. But he's still just a man. He ain't got no supernatural powers."
"Injuns say he does," Fat Fosburn said. "I used to have some Injuns ridin' with me in my gang, both breeds and full redskin. They were all scared slap to death of Smoke Jensen. You see, Smoke was sort of raised up by a mountain man called Preacher."
That got everybody's attention.
"Yeah," Fat said with a smile. "Preacher hisself. The most famous mountain man of them all. Mean as a snake and tough as an oak tree. And he brought Smoke Jensen up to be just like him. And done a damn good job of it, too. Now you know why he's so damn mean. Club's right about Jensen to some degree. What we got to do, I'm thinkin', is get us a good back-shooter in here."
"You know one?" Major asked.
Fat smiled. "I've already sent for him."
The man Fat had contacted despised Smoke Jensen with a hatred that bordered insanity. Preacher had killed his father with a knife back in the mid-fifties, after he'd caught the man trying to steal one of his horses. Peter Hankins had been a boy in his teens when it had happened. A boy who was already an accomplished thief, liar, pickpocket, murderer, and just about anything else evil he was big enough to be. Trappers had brought the elder Hankins back to the trading post and dumped him at Peter's feet, telling him what had happened.
"Out here, boy," a mountain man told him. "You don't steal a man's horse. A lot of times, that's like givin' a man the death sentence. Your pa got what he deserved. Let it lie. You go after Preacher, and he'll kill you."
Peter Hankins drifted East and joined the Union Army at the start of the War Between the States. He had always been expert with a rifle, and he was made a sniper. He loved it. He loved to kill from a distance. He especially loved to kill Southerners. He'd won medals for it. When the war ended, he drifted back West, joined a gang of scum and ne'er-do-wells, and a few years later was caught up in a completely unexpected fight with Preacher and a young man named Smoke Jensen. Smoke got lead into him, although Peter doubted the young man knew it at the time. His hip still bothered him because of that fight. So after that, he shared his hatred of Preacher with hatred of Smoke Jensen.
Now he had a chance to kill him and make a couple thousand dollars in the process. It was too good to pass up.
As soon as he received the wire, he bought a train ticket and was on his way, sleeping in the car with his horse and his Sharps 'English Model' 1877 .45-caliber rifle. Peter hand-loaded his own ammunition (2.6-inch casing) and knew almost to the inch what distance they would carry, and they would carry accurately for more than fifteen hundred yards, providing the wind was not kicking up.
Peter would kill man, woman, or child. He made no distinction. He was a man utterly without morals. And he was looking forward to this job.
Smoke stepped out of the house for a breath of night air after another of Sally and Jenny's excellent suppers. The men had staggered off to the bunkhouse, all of them full as ticks. Three days after the fight, and his hands were no longer sore or swollen. There had been no trouble from Biggers, Cosgrove, or Fat. Smoke was not expecting any from Club Bowers. Scoundrel that he was, he was also a man who had been around and could read signs. Smoke had him a hunch that Club would pull out of this fight given just the slightest opportunity.
Van Horn walked up and stood silent for a moment, rolling a cigarette. "When you figure they're gonna hit us, and how do you figure it?"
"Just as soon as they get everyone in here that's coming in."
"You know of a person name of Peter Hankins?"
"Peter Hankins?" Smoke mused. "Yes. I do. He's a long-distance shooter. He uses a special made Sharps .45. Sharps made the rifle for about a year, I think. Made it for target shooters. It had something to do with English marksmanship rules, I believe. I've never seen one. Hankins, huh? My mentor killed Hankins' father. Preacher caught him stealing horses and carved him up. That was years before I knew Preacher. I've known for a long time that Hankins hates me."
"How old a man would he be?"
"Probably in his early to mid-forties. He was a teenager when Preacher killed his father back in '55 or so. I have no idea what he looks like or where he lives. He's a loner. He comes in, bodies fall, he leaves. Usually without anyone ever seeing him. How'd you find out about him coming in?"
Van Horn smiled. "Oh, those sources of mine I told you about."
Smoke chuckled. "You mean the girls at the Golden Cherry, don't you?"
Van Horn laughed quietly. "Not much gets by you, does it, Smoke?"
"I can't afford to let much by me, Van. I have too many people who want to see me dead."
"I do know the feelin'," the old gunfighter said. "But if they attack this ranch, they're gonna be in for a tough fight of it. That's a salty bunch yonder in the bunkhouse."
"They'll attack. It's coming. That's why I sold off most of the cattle, except for the good breeding stock, and had you bunch the rest in that box. Will the girls tell you when Hankins gets into town?"
"Within the hour."
"Let me know. Tomorrow we all work close to the ranch. We've got to get ready for anything that might come our way."
"See you in the morning."
Smoke was up before dawn, as usual, and with coffee in hand, stepped outside to meet the dawning, about a half hour away. Wolf Parcell had been waiting on him.
"What's on your mind, Wolf?"
"Let's take the fight to them. Kill them all," the old mountain man said coldly and bluntly. "End it. Then the girl-child can live in peace."
Smoke smiled in the darkness. Mountain men were not known for their gentle loving nature toward anyone who had openly declared themselves an enemy. And for the most part, that philosophy was shared by Smoke. But he had learned to temper his baser urgings ... to a degree. "Those days are just about gone, Wolf. Besides, we've got to keep public sentiment on our side."
The old man harrumped at that but said nothing in rebuttal for the moment. He drained his coffee cup and stuffed a wad of chewing tobacco into his mouth. He chomped and chewed and spat and finally said, "Two Injun friends of mine come of the bunkhouse last night. Told me a whole passel of gunslingers rode into town 'bout ten o'clock."
"I thought I heard something about one."
"Figured you would. Injuns asked about you. I told 'em you wasn't near 'bouts ugly as Preacher, and you was sizable bigger and somewhat smarter."
Smoke chuckled. And waited. He knew Wolf had more on his mind and would get to it in his own good time.
"Said they was a double handful of the gunslingers," Wolf said, after he spat. "They didn't know no names."
"The odds are getting longer, aren't they?"
"Yep. But we can handle them come the time. You'll cut your puma loose soon enough I reckon. And we'll be right there with you."
"You're looking forward to this, aren't you?"
"I'd be lyin' if I said I wasn't. That's a good girl in yonder. I like her. I ain't got no use for people who'd hurt a girl like that. Riles me up considerable. I take it personal. Bad Dog feels the same way. So's the rest of the fellers. When they come, Smoke, I ain't offerin' no quarter to none of them. I just want you to know that. I'm speakin' for me, Pasco, and Bad Dog. Cain't talk for none of the others."
"Try not to take scalps," Smoke said drily.
"I'll think about it." The old mountain man got up as silently as a stalking cat and moved into the darkness. He stopped and turned around. Smoke could see the faint smile on his lips. "You're a fine one to tell me not to take scalps, Smoke."
"That was a long time ago, Wolf."
Wolf chuckled. "You ain't old enough for it to be that long ago, boy. You got more of Preacher in you than you think. And I think this here fight's gonna turn real interestin'. For a fact I do."
Fourteen
Smoke saddled up, secured his bedroll, and rode out alone, taking a couple of sandwiches with him. He had told Sally, "I'll be back."
She did not question him. He might be back by noon, or he might return the next day. He might be back in three or four days. Sally knew they were in a fight to the death now, for her husband never tried to shield her from the truth. Hired guns were riding in from all over a three-state and territory area. By stage, by train, by horse. They were coming to Red Light to accept the fighting wages of Biggers, Fosburn, and Cosgrove. They were coming in to attempt to kill Smoke Jensen.
And this teenage girl, Sally added, cutting her eyes to the young girl standing at the kitchen counter, kneading dough for bread. They have no right to do that, Sally mused, her thoughts turning savage. She has harmed no one. She has a right to live on the ranch her mother left her, and to live in peace. Damn those men who would harm a child ...
"When you finish with that, Jenny," Sally said, "get your guns. We're going to practice awhile."
"Yes ma'am. Won't Uncle Smoke be alarmed at the gunfire?"
"No. I told him about it." Sally went to the front door and looked for Van Horn. The old gunfighter was by the corral, Wolf Parcell and Bad Dog with him. She walked down to him. He turned at her approach, taking off his hat.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="10">
30
The Air France Concorde touched down at Dulles Airport and taxied up to an unmarked U.S. government hangar near the cargo terminals. The sky was overcast, but the runway was dry and showed no sign of rain. Still clutching his backpack as if it was part of him, Gunn exited the sleek aircraft almost immediately and hurried down the mobile stairway to a waiting black Ford sedan driven by uniformed capital police. With flashing lights and screaming siren, he was whisked toward the NUMA headquarters building in the nation's capital.
Gunn felt like a captured felon, riding in the backseat of the speeding police car. He noticed that the Potomac River looked unusually green and leaden as they shot over the Rochambeau Memorial Bridge. The blur of pedestrians was too immune to revolving lights and sirens to bother looking up as the Ford shot past.
The driver did not pull up at the main entrance but swung around the west corner of the NUMA building, tires squealing, and flew down a ramp leading to a garage beneath the lobby floor. The Ford came to an abrupt stop in front of an elevator. Two security guards stepped forward, opened the door, and escorted Gunn into the elevator and up to the agency's fourth floor. A short distance down the hallway they stood back and opened the door to the NUMA's vast conference room with its sophisticated visual displays.
Several men and women were seated around a long mahogany table, their attention focused on Dr. Chapman, who was lecturing in front of a screen that depicted the middle Atlantic Ocean along the equator off West Africa.
The room abruptly hushed as Gunn walked in. Admiral Sandecker rose out of his chair, rushed forward, and greeted Gunn like a brother who had survived a liver transplant.
"Thank God, you got through," he said with unaccustomed emotion. "How was your flight from Paris?"
"Felt like an outcast sitting in a Concorde all by myself."
"No military planes were immediately available. Chartering a Concorde was the only expedient means of getting you here fast."
"Nice, so long as the taxpayers don't find out."
"If they knew their very existence was at stake, I doubt if they'd complain."
Sandecker introduced Gunn around the conference table.
"With three exceptions I think you know most everyone here."
Dr. Chapman and Hiram Yaeger came over and shook hands, showing their obvious pleasure at seeing him. He was introduced to Dr. Muriel Hoag, NUMA's director of marine biology, and Dr. Evan Holland, the agency's environmental expert.
Muriel Hoag was quite tall and built like a starving fashion model. Her jet-black hair was brushed back in a neat bun and her brown eyes peered through round spectacles. She wore no makeup, which was just as well, Gunn thought. A complete makeover by Beverly Hills' top beauty salon would have been a wasted effort.
Evan Holland was an environmental chemist and looked like a basset hound contemplating a frog in his dish. His ears were two sizes too large for his head, and he had a long nose that rounded at the tip. His eyes stared at the world as if they were soaked in melancholy. Holland's appearance was deceiving. He was one of the most astute pollution investigators in the business.
The other two men, Chip Webster, satellite analyst for NUMA, and Keith Hodge, the agency's chief oceanographer, Gunn already knew.
He turned to Sandecker. "Someone went to a lot of trouble to evacuate me out of Mali,"
"Hala Kamil personally gave her authorization to use a UN tactical team."
"The officer in charge of the operation, a Colonel Levant, acted none too happy to greet me."
"General Bock, his superior, and Colonel Levant both took a bit of persuading," Sandecker admitted. "But when they realized the urgency of your data they gave their full cooperation."
"They masterminded a very smooth operation," Gunn said. "Incredible they could plan and carry it through overnight."
If Gunn thought Sandecker would fill him in on the details, he was to be disappointed. Impatience was etched in every crease in the Admiral's face. There was a tray with coffee and sweet rolls, but he didn't offer Gunn any. He grabbed him by one arm and hustled him to a chair at one end of the long conference table.
"Let's get to it," the Admiral said brusquely. "Everyone is anxious to hear about your discovery of the compound causing the red tide explosion."
Gunn sat down at the table, opened his knapsack, and began retrieving the contents. Very carefully, he unwrapped the glass vials of water samples and laid them on a cloth. Next he unpacked the data disks and set them to one side. Then he looked up.
"Here are the water samples and results as interpreted by my on-board instruments and computers. Through a bit of luck I was able to identify the stimulator of the red tide as a most unusual organometallic compound, a combination of a synthetic amino acid and cobalt. I also found traces of radiation in the water, but I do not believe it has any direct relation to the contaminant's impact on the red tide."
"Considering the hardships and obstacles thrown in your path by the West Africans," said Chapman, "it's a miracle you were able to get a grip on the cause."
"Fortunately, none of my instruments were damaged after our run-in with the Benin navy."
"I received an inquiry from the CIA," said Sandecker with a tight smile, "asking if we knew anything about a maverick operation in Mali after you destroyed half the Benin navy and a helicopter."
"What did you tell them?"
"I lied. Please go on."
"Fire from one Benin gunboat did, however, manage to destroy our data transmission system," Gunn continued, "making it impossible to telemeter my results to Hiram Yaeger's computer network."
"I'd like to retest your water samples while Hiram verifies your analysis data," said Chapman.
Yaeger stepped next to Gunn and tenderly picked up the computer disks. "Not much I can contribute to this meeting, so I'll get to work."
As soon as the computer wizard had left the room, Gunn stared at Chapman. "I double- and triple-checked my results. I'm confident your lab and Hiram will confirm my findings."
Chapman sensed the tension in Gunn's tone. "Believe me when I say I don't question your procedures or data for a minute. You, Pitt, and Giordino did one hell of a job. Thanks to your efforts we now know what we're dealing with. Now the President can use his clout to lean on Mali to shut off the contaminant at the sourse. This will buy us time to formulate ways to neutralize its effects and stop further expansion of the red tides."
"Don't break out the cake and ice cream just yet," Gunn warned seriously. "Though we tracked the compound to its entry point into the river and identified its properties, we were unable to discover the location of its source."
Sandecker drummed his fingers on the table. "Pitt gave me the bad news before he was cut off. I apologize for not passing along the information, but I was counting on a satellite survey to fill in the missing piece."
Muriel Hoag looked directly into Gunn's eyes. "I don't understand how you successfully pursued the compound through 1000 kilometers of water and then lost it on land."
"It was easy," Gunn shrugged wearily. "After we sailed beyond the point of highest concentration, our contaminant readings dropped off and the instruments began showing water with commonly known pollutants. We made several runs back and forth to confirm. We also took visual sightings in every direction. No hazardous waste dump site, no chemical storage or manufacturing facilities were visible along the river or inland. No buildings or construction, nothing. Only barren desert."
"Could a dump site have been buried over at some time in the past?" suggested Holland.
"We observed no evidence of excavation," replied Gunn.
"Any chance the toxin was brewed by mother nature?" asked Chip Webster.
Muriel Hoag smiled. "If tests bear out Mr. Gunn's analysis of a synthetic amino acid, it must have been produced by a biotech laboratory. Not mother nature. And somewhere, somehow, it was discarded along with chemicals containing cobalt. Not the first time accidental integration of chemicals produced a previously unknown compound."
"How in God's name could such an exotic compound suddenly appear in the middle of the Sahara?" wondered Chip Webster.
"And reach the ocean where it acts as steroids to dinoflagellates," added Holland.
Sandecker looked at Keith Hodge. "What's the latest report on the spread of the red tide?"
The oceanographer was in his sixties. Unblinking dark brown eyes gazed from a continually fixed expression on a lean, high-cheekboned face. With the correctly dated clothing he could have stepped from an eighteenth-century portrait.
"The spread has increased 30 percent in the past four days. I fear the growth rate is exceeding our most dire projections."
"But if Dr. Chapman can develop a compound to neutralize the contamination, and we find and cut it off at the source, can't we then control the tide's expansion?"
"Better make it soon," answered Hodge. "At the rate it's proliferating, another month and we should see the first evidence of it beginning to feed off itself without stimulation flowing from the Niger."
"That's three months early!" Muriel Hoag said sharply.
Hodge gave a helpless shrug. "When you're dealing with an unknown the only sure commodity is uncertainty."
Sandecker swung sideways in his chair and gazed at the blown-up satellite photo of Mali projected on one wall. "Where does the compound enter the river?" he asked Gunn.
Gunn stood and walked over to the enlarged photo. He picked up a grease pencil and circled a small area of the Niger River above Gao on the white backdrop reflecting the projection. "Right about here, off an old riverbed that once flowed into the Niger."
Chip Webster pressed the buttons of a small console sitting on the table, and enlarged the area around Gunn's marking. "No structures visible. No indication of population. Nor do I make out any sign of excavated dirt or a mound that would have to be in evidence if any type of trench was dug to bury hazardous materials."
"This is an enigma, all right," muttered Chapman. "Where in the devil can the rotten stuff come from?"
"Pitt and Giordino are still out there searching for it," Gunn reminded them.
"Any late word of their condition or whereabouts?" asked Hodge.
"Nothing since Pitt's call aboard Yves Massarde's boat," replied Sandecker.
Hodge looked up from his notepad. "Yves Massarde? God, not that pond slime."
"You know him?"
Hodge nodded. "I crossed paths with him after a bad chemical spill in the Med off Spain four years ago. One of his ships that was carrying waste carcinogenic chemicals known as PCBs for disposal in Algeria broke up and sank in a storm. I personally think the ship was scuttled in a combination insurance scam and illegal dump. As it turned out, Algerian officials never had any intention of accepting the waste for disposal. Then Massarde lied and cheated and pulled every legal dodge on the books to evade responsibility for cleaning up the mess. You shake hands with that guy and you better count your fingers when you walk away."
Gunn turned to Webster, "Intelligence-gathering satellites can read newspapers from space. Why can't we orbit one over the desert north of Gao in search of Pitt and Giordino?"
Webster shook his head. "Negaitve. My contacts at the National Security Agency have their best eyes in the sky keeping tabs on the new Chinese rocket firings, the civil war going on in the Uraine, and the border slashes with Syria and Iraq. They're not about to spare us time from their intelligence scans to find civilians in the Sahara Desert. I can go with the latest-model GeoSat. But it's questionable whether it can distinguis human forms against the uneven terrain of a desert like the Sahara."
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="11">
VII
(ONE)
FERDINAND SIX
BUKA, SOLOMON ISLANDS
0605 HOURS 7 SEPTEMBER 1942
Sergeant Steven M. Koffler, USMC, woke suddenly and sat up, frightened. His guts were knotted and he had a clammy sweat.
It was from a nightmare, he concluded after a moment, although he couldn't remember any of it.
The feeling of foreboding did not go away. Something was wrong. There was enough light in the hut for him to see that Patience was gone. That was not unusual. Since she had moved in with him, she habitually rose before he did and was out of the hut before he woke.
But then, slowly, it came to him, what was wrong. He heard no noise. There was always noise, the squealing of pigs, the crying of children, the crackling of a fire, even hymn singing.
That image sent his mind wandering. They don't sing hymns here, like in church. It has nothing to do with God. It's just that 'Rock of Ages' and 'Faith of Our Fathers' and 'God Save the King' and 'Onward Christian Soldiers' and the other ones are the only music these people have ever heard. He corrected himself: Plus the Marine Hymn, which of course me and Lieutenant Howard taught them.
Why can't I hear anything?
He felt another wave of fear and reached for the Thompson. He checked the action and then stuck his feet in his boondockers and stood up.
He went to the door of the hut and looked out. No one was in sight.
Where the fuck is everybody?
With his finger on the Thompson's trigger, he left the hut, took one quick look to confirm that no one was visible, then ran into the jungle behind the hut. He moved ten feet inside it, enough for concealment, and then he moved laterally until he found a position where he could observe the other huts.
There was no one there. The fires had gone out.
Even the fucking pigs are gone!
The sonsofbitches ran off on me!
Well, what the hell do you expect? he asked himself. If I wasn't here, they're just a bunch of fucking cannibals; the Japs don't give a shit about cannibals unless they're causing trouble. The worst thing the Japs would do would be to put them to work.
With me here, they're the fucking enemy. The Japs would kill them, slowly, to show they're pissed off. And they'll do it so it hurts, to teach the other cannibals it's not smart to help the White Man. Like cutting off their arms and legs, not just their heads, and leaving the parts laying around.
A chill replaced the clammy sweat.
What the fuck am I going to do now?
He was suddenly, without warning, sick to his stomach. When that passed, he had an equally irresistible urge to move his bowels.
He moved another fifteen yards through the jungle and watched the camp for another five minutes. Finally he walked out of the jungle and started looking in the huts.
The radio was still there.
Why not? What the hell would they do with the radio?
And he found some baked sweet potatoes, or whatever the hell they were, and some of the smoked pig.
A farewell present? Merry Christmas, Sergeant Koffler? How the fuck long are those sweet potatoes and five, ten pounds of smoked pig going to last me?
Oh, shit!
There came the sound of aircraft engines, a dull roar far off.
Fuck 'em! What the fuck do I care if the whole Japanese Air Corps is headed for Guadalcanal?
He walked to the tree house. They'd left him the knotted rope, he found to his surprise. He used it to walk up the trunk.
"Good morning, Steven," Patience Witherspoon said. She was sitting on the floor of the platform, wearing an expression that said she expected to be kicked.
Ian Bruce was leaning against the trunk.
"You heard the engines, Sergeant Koffler?"
"Fuck the engines, where the hell is everybody?"
"The men went to seek Lieutenant Reeves," Ian said. "The women have gone away from here."
"Gone where?"
"You would not know where they have gone," Ian said with irrefutable logic. "Away."
"Why?"
"If it has not gone well with Lieutenant Reeves, the Japanese will come looking for us. If they find this place, with the radio, they may believe there were no other white men. You will come with us to where the women are making a camp. We may be able to hide you."
"You think something fucked up, went wrong, don't you?"
"I think something has fucked up. Otherwise Lieutenant Reeves would have returned when he said he would return."
"Why wasn't I told?"
"Because I knew you would forbid it," Ian Bruce said. "Lieutenant Reeves left you in charge; he told me I was to take your orders as if they had come from him."
"What are you doing up here, then?" Steve asked.
"Watching for the Japanese aircraft," Ian said. "We will need the binoculars."
"They're in my hut," Steve replied automatically.
"I will get them," Patience said, and quickly got to her feet and started down the knotted rope.
"If we're going to hide in the goddamned jungle," Steve asked, "why are be bothering with this shit, anyway?"
"Because," Ian Bruce said, again with irrefutable logic, "we do not know that Lieutenant Reeves is dead. We only believe he is. Until we know for sure, or until the Japanese come, we will do what he wishes us to do."
"Semper Fi, right?"
"I do not understand."
"Yeah, you do," Steve said.
"Is that English?"
"It's Marine," Steve said. "It means ... you do what you're expected to do, I guess. Or try, anyway."
"I see," Ian Bruce said solemnly.
(TWO)
USMC REPLACEMENT DEPOT
PARRIS ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA
2250 HOURS 7 SEPTEMBER 1942
Because he was on a routine check of the guard posts, the officer of the day happened to be at the main gate when the 1939 LaSalle convertible pulled up to the guard and stopped. It had been a long and dull evening and showed little prospect of getting more interesting.
"Hold it a minute," the OD said to his jeep driver.
"Aye, aye, Sir," the driver said and stopped the jeep.
The OD got out and walked toward the LaSalle. The driver was apparently showing his orders to the guard, for the beam of the guard's flashlight illuminated the interior. The OD saw that the car held two lieutenants, neither of whom was wearing his cover.
But what the hell, it's almost eleven o'clock.
"Welcome to sand flea heaven," the OD said. "Reporting in?"
"Just visiting," McCoy replied.
He was a first lieutenant, the OD saw, not any older than he himself was. But he was wearing a double row of ribbons, including the Bronze Star and what looked like the Purple Heart with two clusters on it. The other one was a second lieutenant, and he too was wearing ribbons signifying that he had been wounded and decorated for valor.
Am I being a suspicious prick, or just doing my job? the OD wondered as he reached to take the orders from the guard.
The orders were obviously genuine. They were issued by Headquarters, USMC, and ordered First Lieutenant K. R. McCoy to proceed by military or civilian road, rail, or air transportation, or at his election, by privately owned vehicle, to Philadelphia, Penna., Parris Island, S.C., and such other destinations as he deemed necessary in the carrying out of his mission for the USMC Office of Management Analysis.
What the hell is the Office of Management Analysis?
"Well, as I said," the OD said, smiling, "welcome to sand flea heaven."
"I know all about the sand fleas," McCoy said, smiling. "But how do I find the BOQ?"
"How do you know about the sand fleas and not the BOQ?" the OD asked, and immediately felt like a fool as the answer came to him: This guy was a Mustang. He had gone through Parris Island as an enlisted man before getting a commission. He knew about sand fleas. But marine boots do not know where bachelor officers rest their weary heads.
"Follow the signs to the Officer's Club," the OD said. "Drive past it. Look to your right. Two-story frame building on your right."
"Thank you," McCoy said.
The guard saluted. McCoy returned it. McCoy drove past the barrier.
"Interesting," the OD said to the guard. "Did you see the ribbons on those officers?"
"Yes, Sir. And one of them had a cane, too."
"I wonder what the hell the Office of Management Analysis is?" the OD asked, not expecting an answer.
"I'll tell you something else interesting, Sir," the guard said. "The sergeant major is looking for them. At least for Lieutenant McCoy. He passed the word through the sergeant of the guard we was to call him, no matter when he came aboard."
"Him? Not the OD? Or the General's aide?"
"Him, Sir."
"Well, in that case, Corporal, I would suggest you get on the horn to the sergeant major. Hell hath no fury, as you might have heard."
"Aye, aye, Sir."
"Does this place fill you with fond memories?" McCoy asked as they drove through the Main Post, an area of brick buildings looking not unlike the campus of a small college.
"I would rather go back to Guadalcanal than go through here again," Moore said.
"How's your legs?"
"I won't mind lying down."
"Well, you wanted to come."
"And I'm grateful that you brought me. I was going stir crazy in the hospital."
"I think what you need, pal, is a piece of ass. I also think you're out of luck here."
"Says he, the Croesus of Carnal Wealth," Moore replied.
"What?"
"Says he, who doesn't have that problem."
"What Ernie and I have is something special," McCoy said coldly.
"Hell, I realized that the first time I saw you two looking at each other in San Diego," Moore said. "My reaction then, and now, is profound admiration, coupled with enormous jealousy."
"Your lady really did a job on you, huh?"
"When I got her letter, in Melbourne, I was fantasizing about getting to be an officer and marching into the Bellvue-Stratford in my officer's uniform with her on my arm ... 'Dear John,' the letter said."
"Hell, your name is John," McCoy said. "And you have your officer's uniform, three sets of khakis, anyway ..."
"And thank you for that, too. I wouldn't have known where to go to buy them."
"Horstmann Uniform has been selling uniforms to The Corps since Christ was a corporal," McCoy said. "And as I was saying, your Dear John letter lady is not the only female in the world."
"So I keep telling myself," Moore said.
"Well, there's the club, and it looks like it's still open. Would you like a drink?"
"I'll pass, thank you," Moore said. "But go ahead if you want to."
"I've got a couple of pints in my bag," McCoy said. "I didn't really want to go in there anyway." A moment later he said, "That must be it."
Moore looked up and saw a two-story frame building. McCoy drove around behind it and parked the car. Since he'd packed Moore's two spare khaki uniforms in his own bag, there was only one to carry.
A corporal was on duty in the lobby of the Bachelor Officer's Quarters.
McCoy told him they were transients and needed rooms; and the corporal gave them a register to sign, then handed each of them a key.
"End of the corridor to the right, Sir. Number twelve."
"Thank you," McCoy said and walked up the stairs.
Halfway down the corridor he swore bitterly: "Shit! Sonofabitch!"
Moore saw the source of his anger. A neatly lettered sign was thumb-tacked to one of the doors. It read, RESERVED FOR KILLER MCCOY.
He walked quickly to the sign and ripped it down. He started to put his key to the lock in the door, but it opened before he could reach it.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="12">
EIGHT
FOR DILLON in the Mini-Cooper, the run from London went easily enough. Although there was a light covering of snow on the fields and hedgerows, the roads were perfectly clear and not particularly busy. He was in Dorking within half an hour. He passed straight through and continued toward Horsham, finally pulling into a petrol station about five miles outside.
As the attendant was topping up the tank Dillon got his road map out. "Place called Doxley, you know it?"
"Half a mile up the road on your right a signpost says Grimethorpe. That's the airfield, but before you get there you'll see a sign to Doxley."
"So it's not far from here?"
"Three miles maybe, but it might as well be the end of the world." The attendant chuckled as he took the notes Dillon gave him. "Not much there, mister."
"Thought I'd take a look. Friend told me there might be a weekend cottage going."
"If there is, I haven't heard of it."
Dillon drove away, came to the Grimethorpe sign within a few minutes, followed the narrow road and found the Doxley sign as the garage man had indicated. The road was even narrower, high banks blocking the view until he came to the brow of a small hill and looked across a desolate landscape, powdered with snow. There was the occasional small wood, a scattering of hedged fields and then flat marshland drifting toward a river, which had to be the Arun. Beside it, perhaps a mile away, he saw houses twelve or fifteen, with red pantiled roofs, and there was a small church, obviously Doxley. He started down the hill to the wooded valley below and as he came to it, saw a five-barred gate standing open and a decaying wooden sign with the legend Cadge End Farm.
The track led through the wood and brought him almost at once to a farm complex. There were a few chickens running here and there, a house and two large barns linked to it so that the whole enclosed a courtyard. It looked incredibly run down, as if nothing had been done to it for years, but then, as Dillon knew, many country people preferred to live like that. He got out of the Mini and crossed to the front door, knocked and tried to open it. It was locked. He turned and went to the first barn. Its old wooden doors stood open. There was a Morris van in there and a Ford car jacked up on bricks, no wheels, agricultural implements all over the place.
Dillon took out a cigarette. As he lit it in cupped hands, a voice behind said, "Who are you? What do you want?"
He turned and found a girl in the doorway. She wore baggy trousers tucked into a pair of rubber boots, a heavy roll-neck sweater under an old anorak and a knitted beret like a Tam o'Shanter, the kind of thing you found in fishing villages on the West Coast of Ireland. She was holding a double-barreled shotgun threateningly. As he took a step toward her, she thumbed back the hammer.
"You stay there." The Irish accent was very pronounced.
"You'll be the one they call Angel Fahy?" he said.
"Angela, if it's any of your business."
Tania's man had been right. She did look like a little peasant. Broad cheekbone, upturned nose and a kind of fierceness there. "Would you really shoot with that thing?"
"If I had to."
"A pity that, and me only wanting to meet my father's cousin, once removed, Danny Fahy."
She frowned. "And who in the hell might you be, mister?"
"Dillon's the name. Sean Dillon."
She laughed harshly. "That's a damn lie. You're not even Irish and Sean Dillon is dead, everyone knows that."
Dillon dropped into the hard distinctive accent of Belfast. "To steal a great man's line, girl dear, all I can say is, reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated."
The gun went slack in her hands. "Mother Mary, are you Sean Dillon?"
"As ever was. Appearances can be deceiving."
"Oh, God," she said. "Uncle Danny talks about you all the time, but it was always like stories, nothing real to it at all and here you are."
"Where is he?"
"He did a repair on a car for the landlord of the local pub, took it down there an hour ago. Said he'd walk back, but he'll be there a while yet drinking, I shouldn't wonder."
"At this time? Isn't the pub closed until evening?
"That might be the law, Mr. Dillon, but not in Doxley. They never close."
"Let's go and get him, then."
She left the shot gun on a bench and got into the Mini beside him. As they drove away, he said, "What's your story then?"
"I was raised on a farm in Galway. My da was Danny's nephew, Michael. He died six years ago when I was fourteen. After a year, my mother married again."
"Let me guess," Dillon said. "You didn't like your stepfather and he didn't like you?"
"Something like that. Uncle Danny came over for my father's funeral, so I'd met him and liked him. When things got too heavy, I left home and came here. He was great about it. Wrote to my mother and she agreed I could stay. Glad to get rid of me."
There was no self-pity at all and Dillon warmed to her. "They always say some good comes out of everything."
"I've been working it out," she said. "If you're Danny's second cousin and I'm his great-niece, then you and I are blood related, isn't that a fact?"
Dillon laughed. "In a manner of speaking."
She looked ecstatic as she leaned back. "Me, Angel Fahy, related to the greatest gunman the Provisional IRA ever had."
"Well, now, there would be some who would argue about that," he said as they reached the village and pulled up outside the pub.
It was a small, desolate sort of place, no more than fifteen rather dilapidated cottages and a Norman church with a tower and an overgrown graveyard. The pub was called the Green Man and even Dillon had to duck to enter the door. The ceiling was very low and beamed. The floor was constructed of heavy stone flags worn with the years, the walls were whitewashed. The man behind the bar in his shirt sleeves was at least eighty.
He glanced up and Angel said, "Is he here, Mr. Dalton?"
"By the fire, having a beer," the old man said.
A fire burned in a wide stone hearth and there was a wooden bench and a table in front of it. Danny Fahy sat there reading the paper, a glass in front of him. He was sixty-five, with an untidy, grizzled beard, and wore a cloth cap and an old Harris Tweed suit.
Angel said, "I've brought someone to see you, Uncle Danny."
He looked up at her and then at Dillon, puzzlement on his face. "And what can I do for you, sir?"
"Dillon removed his glasses. "God bless all here!" he said in his Belfast accent. "And particularly you, you old bastard."
Fahy turned very pale, the shock was so intense. "God save us, is that you, Sean, and me thinking you were in your box long ago?"
"Well, I'm not and I'm here." Dillon took a five-pound note from his wallet and gave it to Angel. "A couple of whiskys, Irish for preference."
She went back to the bar and Dillon turned. Danny Fahy actually had tears in his eyes and he flung his arms around him. "Dear God, Sean, but I can't tell you how good it is to see you."
The sitting room at the farm was untidy and cluttered, the furniture very old. Dillon sat on a sofa while Fahy built up the fire. Angel was in the kitchen cooking a meal. It was open to the sitting room and Dillon could see her moving around.
"And how's life been treating you, Sean?" Fahy stuffed a pipe and lit it. "Ten years since you raised Cain in London town. By God, boy, you gave the Brits something to think about."
"I couldn't have done it without you, Danny."
"Great days. And what happened after?"
"Europe, the Middle East. I kept on the move. Did a lot for the PLO. Even learned to fly."
"Is that a fact?"
Angel came and put plates of bacon and eggs on the table. "Get it while it's hot." She turned with a tray laden with teapot and milk, three mugs and a plate piled high with bread and butter. "I'm sorry there's nothing fancier, but we weren't expecting company."
"It looks good to me," Dillon told her and tucked in.
"So now you're here, Sean, and dressed like an English gentleman." Fahy turned to Angel. "Didn't I tell you the actor this man was? They never could put a glove on him in all these years, not once."
She nodded eagerly, smiling at Dillon, and her personality had changed with the excitement. "Are you on a job now, Mr. Dillon, for the IRA, I mean?"
"It would be a cold day in hell before I put myself on the line for that bunch of old washer women," Dillon said.
"But you are working on something, Sean?" Fahy said. "I can tell. Come on, let's in on it."
Dillon lit a cigarette. "What if I told you I was working for the Arabs, Danny, for Saddam Hussein himself?"
"Jesus, Sean, and why not? And what is it he wants you to do?"
"He wants something now - a coup. Something big. America's too far away. That leaves the Brits."
"What could be better?" Fahy's eyes were gleaming.
"Thatcher was in France the other day seeing Mitterand. I had plans for her on the way to her plane. Perfect set-up, quiet country road and then someone I trusted let me down."
"And isn't that always the way?" Fahy said. "So you're looking for another target? Who, Sean?"
"I was thinking of John Major."
"The new Prime Minister?" Angel said in awe. "You wouldn't dare."
"Sure and why wouldn't he? Didn't the boys nearly get the whole bloody British Government at Brighton?" Danny Fahy told her. "Go on, Sean, what's your plan?"
"I haven't got one, Danny, that's the trouble, but there would be a pay day for this like you wouldn't believe."
"And that's as good a reason to make it work as any. So you've come to Uncle Danny looking for help?" Fahy went to a cupboard, came back with a bottle of Bushmills and two glasses and filled them. "Have you any ideas at all?"
"Not yet, Danny. Do you still work for the movement?"
"Stay in deep cover, that was the order from Belfast so many years ago I've forgotten. Since then not a word and me bored out of my socks, so I moved down here. It suits me. I like the countryside here, I like the people. They keep to themselves. I've built up a fair business repairing agricultural machinery and I run a few sheep. We're happy here, Angel and me."
"And still bored out of your socks. Do you remember Martin Brosnan, by the way?"
"I do so. You were bad friends with that one."
"I had a run-in with him in Paris recently. He'll probably turn up in London looking for me. He'll be working for Brit intelligence."
"The bastard." Fahy frowned as he refilled his pipe. "Didn't I hear some fanciful talk of how Brosnan got into Ten Downing Street as a waiter years ago and didn't do anything about it?"
"I heard that story too. A flight of fancy and no one would get in these days as a waiter or anything else. You know they've blocked the street off? The place is a fortress. No way in there, Danny."
"Oh, there's always a way, Sean. I was reading in a magazine the other day how a lot of French Resistance people in the Second World War were held at some Gestapo headquarters.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="13">When I was a boy we had in our home a clay figure of the earth goddess, and she was a delightful fat little woman smiling and making the land fruitful with her blessing. Whenever we looked at her we felt good, and I can think of no primitive gods that were gentler than those of Toledo. I know of few civilizations that came so close to providing an ideal life for their people.
Carved hieroglyphics have been recovered outlining Ixmiq's code of laws, and although it is likely that we are misreading some of them, it is not conceivable that we have misunderstood them all. In Toledo, in the year 650, a woman whose husband had died leaving her with children not yet old enough to work was given a share of the produce of land owned by families with grown sons. On the other hand, a woman who committed adultery once was publicly shamed; on the second offense she was killed. It was conspicuous in the law of Ixmiq that priests had nothing to do with the execution of criminals; this was carried out by civil officials. In fact, in the entire history of these six centuries there is no record of priests being other than the spiritual heads of the community. They lived intimately with the gods and advised the populace of decisions made in heaven.
We have one old stone, dug out of the pyramid in the 1950s, which shows a dignified leader who might have been Ixmiq. He is depicted as a stocky man with a long, straight nose, high cheekbones, Oriental eyes and powerful arms. He wore a towering headdress, probably ornamented in gold and silver, that must have stood about two feet high and that had feathers and flowers streaming from it in profusion. He carried a scepter topped by an animal's head, a ceremonial robe of cotton and feathers, and a bunch of flowers. He was naked to the waist, but wore a kind of sarong and sandals.
Ixmiq certainly was in touch with the Mayas to the far south and with the nondescript tribes that flourished to the southeast around what is now Mexico City, for he had a zoo in which he kept animals from distant areas and in it were birds from the seacoast areas controlled by the Mayas. But he seems to have been ignorant of the dreadful Altomec and Aztec tribes that were gathering strength in their caves to the north.
It is impossible to guess how large City-of-the-Pyramid was in those early days, but my father once estimated that it would have required no fewer than fifteen hundred men to work constantly for forty years to build the first pyramid, and he guessed that each man would have to be served by three others who quarried and transported the building blocks. This would mean about six thousand men, or a total population of somewhere around twenty thousand people. We know from excavations undertaken at the time of the building of the cathedral and the aqueduct that these people, whatever their number, lived in a sprawling Indian city built of mud and wood and located around the plaza that now serves as the center of modern Toledo.
I stress these matters because throughout my adult life I have been irritated by people who glibly suppose that Spaniards brought civilization to Mexican people who had previously been barbarians, when this was clearly not the case.
In the year 600 the civilizations of Spain and Mexico were roughly comparable, except for the fact that the former had profited from the invention of the wheel, the development of the alphabet and the knowledge of how to smelt hard metals. In any event I choose to measure advances in civilization by noting such things as soundness in the organization of the state, the humaneness of the religion, the care given to the indigent, the protection of trade, the advances in sciences such as astronomy, and the cultivation of music, dancing, poetry and other arts. In these vital respects my ancestors in City-of-the-Pyramid were just about even with my ancestors in Spain and infinitely far ahead of all who shivered in caves in what would become Virginia.
In the matter of astronomy, Ixmiq was incredible. He calculated the orbits of the planets and based his century on the movements of Venus, whose behavior he had calculated within an error of only a few days. Unaided, so far as we know, by a single hint from Europe or Asia, Ixmiq solved most of the major problems of keeping time and had even discovered that in the year of 365 days that he had devised, even if he added four days every thirteen years, at the end of his fifty-two-year cycle he would still be one day short of the world's exact movement, so for that time he added an extra day. It is possible that he may have borrowed his major concepts from the Mayas, but everything he took he perfected.
I have mentioned the portrait believed to be that of Ixmiq; there is another - but some argue that it is not Ixmiq - which shows a man as I like to think he must have been. He is seated in the center of a huge stone carving and about him are flutes, trumpets, drums made of snakeskin, and shell horns; pitch pine from the forest serves as a torch. The ground seems to be covered with woven mats and ambassadors are waiting to talk with him.
Ixmiq had fifteen or twenty wives and from one of these sprang the line that ruled City-of-the-Pyramid for nearly half a millennium. Around the year 900 one of these descendants known as Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n inherited the kingdom, which was now somewhat changed from the days of Ixmiq. For one thing, the pyramid had been rebuilt twice in the interim and was now approaching its present size. The enlargements had been accomplished by the simple process of resurfacing the entire structure with two or three layers of new rocks quarried from the original site. Just when these resurfacings took place we do not know, but each probably occupied the community for fifteen or twenty years, for with any enlargement the number of blocks required to cover the structure increased considerably. Thus in 900, when Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n took command, each side of the huge edifice was five hundred feet long with a height of about two hundred feet, producing an enormous flat top for the various wooden temples that now crowded the platform.
The effectiveness of the pyramid as a religious edifice had also been enhanced by a simple improvement. Ixmiq's original structure had resembled an Egyptian pyramid, with straight, unbroken edges running from the ground to the platform above, but in subsequent rebuildings four huge setbacks had been constructed, yielding four spacious terraces on which religious celebrations could be held. Furthermore, to provide a series of terraces, the angle of incline between the various terraces varied sharply, with the result that a worshiper standing at the base of the pyramid and looking upward could see only so far as the edge of the first terrace; the great temples at the top were no longer visible and the pyramid seemed to soar into the clouds.
Up the southern face led a steep flight of steps, which paused four times at the terraces, and it must have been one of the most exciting experiences in Mexico to climb these steps, not knowing what one was to find at the topmost level; at the apex one came upon a broad platform, now larger than in the days of Ixmiq, containing four temples to the rain god, the gods of earth and sun, and the mysterious serpent god that protected all things of beauty. There had still, in the days of Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n, been no man sacrificed to these gods, although turkeys, flowers, musical instruments and cakes were regularly offered at the four altars.
It is difficult for me to write of what happened next, because it shows my Indians in a poor light, and this provides fuel for Christian apologists who preach that when Hern<*_>a-acute<*/>n Cortés invaded Mexico in 1519 he found it occupied by barbarians to whom he brought both civilization and Christianity. Even in 900 Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n's people were not barbarians, but they became so lax in guarding their marvelous civilization that they allowed real barbarians to overrun them.
The events I am about to discuss are genuinely historic, for they derive from records uncovered by archaeologists. Such records, of course, were written in hieroglyphics and not in words, for our Indians had no alphabet, but they are at least as substantial as many related to Europe's Middle Ages. But in the reign of Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n, when the building of pyramids had long since stopped, the civilization of the high valley fell into a curious state of apathy. When wars ceased there was nothing to excite the passions of the citizens; when building halted, there was nothing to engage their energies.
Some years ago I helped excavate an ancient quarry site that proved, by carbon dating, that no significant activity had occurred there for a period of three hundred years. How did the team of which I was the reporter know this? Because at the site we unearthed much pottery from the early Ixmiq age and each subsequent period down to 900. Then for three hundred years, through the 1100s, we found no local pottery of any kind, and when I asked the leader of our dig what this signified he explained: "We often see this phenomenon in Near East digs. It means the locals had acquired enough wealth that they could stop making things for themselves and import them from other regions in which workmen remained at their kilns." But at the upper edge of this dead period comes a flood of Altomec pottery that can be positively dated to about 1200. The record was as clear to us as if work sheets had been kept at the site.
Worship of the old gods seems also to have diminished and a tradition arose that the flowered serpent had left the area to return at some future date. Because the high valley was not plagued by droughts, the god of rain was taken more or less for granted. The sun god lost his fury, and the goddess of earth grew prettier and less motherly in her pottery representations. Peaceful trade relations to the east, south and west had reached their maximum advantage, and practically every good thing known to Mexico at large was now available in City-of-the-Pyramid.
In the year 900, during the reign of Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n, life was probably as good in the high valley as it was anywhere on earth, but some of the older priests, led by their superior, Ixbalanque, eighty years old and clothed with wisdom and power, questioned the status quo. Their view was ably voiced by a fiery younger prelate: "Our citizens are growing soft. They pay no attention to the old virtues. The king ought to launch some significant project to enlist his people's energies." When his companions agreed, it fell to High Priest Ixbalanque to present their concern to the king.
It's not easy, at this distance from the year 900, to define the relationship between the old priest Ixbalanque and the young king Nopiltz<*_>i-acute<*/>n, but it is possible to gain some idea of the story from what the old murals show and what the archaeologists have been able to uncover. Power and responsibility among the Builders was cunningly divided: the king controlled short-term decisions, the high priest those of which the long-term welfare of the people depended. The king could declare war and prosecute it; the high priest determined the terms of peace, but since no wars occurred for long periods, these powers remained in limbo. The king could collect taxes, but the priest decided how the money should be spent for the welfare of the people.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="14">There hadn't been any mention in the dream of what it was that Wren's presence was supposed to accomplish. Maybe it would take another vision to find out.
She grinned at her own impudence and was pulling on her boots when the grin abruptly faded.
What if the importance of her return was that she carried with her the Elfstones? What if she was expected to use the Stones as a weapon against the demons?
She went cold with the thought, remembering anew how she had been forced to use them twice now despite her reluctance to do so, remembering the feeling of power as the magic coursed through her, liquid fire that burned and exhilarated at the same time. She was aware of their addictive effect on her, of the bonding that took place each time they were employed, and of how they seemed so much a part of her. She kept saying she would not use them, then found herself forced to do so anyway - or persuaded, perhaps. She shook her head. The choice of words didn't matter; the results were the same. Each time she used the magic, she drifted a little farther from who and what she was and a little closer to being someone she didn't know. She lost power over herself by using the power of the magic.
She jammed her feet into the boots and stood up. Her thinking was wrong. It couldn't be the Elfstones that were important. Otherwise, why hadn't Ellenroh simply kept them here instead of giving them to Alleyne? Why hadn't the Stones been used against the demons long ago if they could really make a difference?
She hesitated, then reached over to her sleeping gown and extracted the Elfstones from the pocket in which she had placed them the night before. They lay glittering in her hand, their magic dormant, harmless, and invisible. She studied them intently, wondering at the circumstances that had placed them in her care, wishing anew that Ellenroh had agreed last night to take them back. The she brushed aside the bad feelings that thinking of the Elfstones conjured up and shoved the troublesome talismans deep into her tunic pocket. After slipping a long knife into her belt, she straightened confidently and walked from the room.
An Elven Hunter had been posted outside her door, and after pausing to summon Garth, the sentry escorted them downstairs to the dining hall and breakfast. They ate alone at a long, polished oak table covered in white linen and decorated with flowers, seated in a cavernous room with an arched ceiling and stained-glass windows that filtered the sunlight in prismatic colors. A serving girl stood ready to wait upon them, making the self-sufficient Wren feel more than a little uncomfortable. She ate in silence, Garth seated across from her, wondering what she was supposed to do when she was finished.
There was no sign of the queen.
Nevertheless, as the meal was being completed, the Owl appeared. Aurin Striate looked as gaunt and faded now as he had in the shadows and darkness of the lava fields without, his angular body loose and disjointed as he moved, nothing working quite as it should. He was wearing clean clothes and the stocking cap was gone, but he still managed to look somewhat creased and rumpled - it seemed that was normal for him. He came up to the dining table and took a seat, slouching forward comfortably.
"You look a whole lot better than you did last night," he ventured with a half smile. "Clean clothes and a bath make you a pretty girl indeed, Wren. Rest well, did you?"
She smiled back at him. She liked the Owl. "Well enough, thanks. And thanks again for getting us safely inside. We wouldn't have made it without you."
The Owl pursed his lips, glanced meaningfully at Garth, and shrugged. "Maybe so. But we both know that you were the one who really saved us." He paused, stopped short of mentioning the Elfstones, and settled back in his chair. His aging Elven features narrowed puckishly. "Want to take a look around when you're done? See a little of what's out there? Your grandmother has put me at your disposal for a time."
Minutes later, they left the palace grounds, passing through the front gates this time, and went down into the city. The palace was settled on a knoll at the center of Arborlon, deep in the sheltering forests, with the cottages and shops of the city all around. The city was alive in daylight, the Elves busy at their work, the streets bustling with activity. As the three edged their way through the crowds, glances were directed toward them from every quarter - not at the Owl or Wren, but at Garth, who was much bigger than the Elves and clearly not one of them. Garth, in typical fashion, seemed oblivious. Wren craned her neck to see everything. Sunlight brightened the greens of the trees and grasses, the colors of the buildings, and the flowers that bordered the walkways; it was as if the vog and fire without the walls did not exist. There was a trace of ash and sulfur in the air, and the shadow of Killeshan was a dark smudge against the sky east where the city backed into the mountain, but the magic kept the world within sheltered and protected. The Elves were going about their business as if everything were normal, as if nothing threatened, and as if Morrowindl outside the city might be exactly the same as within.
After a time they passed through the screen of the forest and came in sight of the outer wall. In daylight, the wall looked different. The glow of the magic had subsided to a faint glimmer that turned the world beyond to a soft, hazy watercolor washed of its brightness. Morrowindl - its mountains, Killeshan's maw, the mix of lava rock and stunted forest, the fissures in the earth with their geysers of ash and steam - was misted almost to the point of invisibility. Elven soldiers patroled the ramparts, but there were not battles being fought now, the demons having slipped away to rest until nightfall. The world outside had gone sullen and empty, and the only audible sounds came from the voices and movement of the people within.
As they neared the closest bridgehead, Wren turned to the Owl and asked, "Why is there a moat inside the wall?"
The Owl glanced over at her, then away again. "It separates the city from the Keel. Do you know about the Keel?"
He gestured toward the wall. Wren remembered the name now. Stresa had been the first to use it, saying that the Elves were in trouble because its magic was weakening.
"It was built of the magic in the time of Ellenroh's father, when the demons first came into being. It protects against them, keeps the city just as it has always been. Everything is the same as it was when Arborlon was brought to Morrowindl over a hundred years ago."
Wren was still mulling over what Stresa had said about the magic growing weaker. She was about to ask Aurin Striate if it was so when she realized what he had just said.
"Owl, did you say when Arborlon was brought to Morrowindl? You mean when it was built, don't you?
"I mean what I said."
"That the buildings were brought? Or are you talking about the Ellcrys? The Ellcrys is here, isn't it, inside the city?"
"Back there." He gestured vaguely, his seamed face clouded. "Behind the palace."
"So you mean -"
The Owl cut her short. "The city, Wren. The whole of it and all of the Elves that live in it. That's what I mean."
Wren stared. "But ... It was rebuilt, you mean from timbers the Elves ferried here ..."
He was shaking his head. "Wren, has no one told you of the Loden? Didn't the queen tell you how the Elves came to Morrowindl?"
He was leaning close to her now, his sharp eyes fixed on her. She hesitated, saying finally, "She said that it was decided to migrate out of the Westland because the Federation -"
"No," he cut her short once more. "That's not what I mean."
He looked away a moment, then took her by the arm and walked her to a stone abutment at the foot of the bridge where they could sit. Garth trailed after them, his dark face expressionless, taking up a position across from them where he could see them speak.
"This isn't something I had planned on having to tell you, girl," the Owl began when they were settled. "Others could do the job better. But we won't have much to talk about if I don't explain. And besides, if you're Ellenroh Elessedil's grandchild and the one she's been waiting for, the one in Eowen Cerise's vision, then you have a right to know."
He folded his angular arms comfortably. "But you're not going to believe it. I'm not sure I do."
Wren smiled, a trifle uncomfortable with the prospect. "Tell me anyway, Owl."
Aurin Striate nodded. "This is what I've been told, then - not what I necessarily know. The Elves recovered some part of their faerie magic more than a hundred years back, before Morrowindl, while they were still living in the Westland. I don't know how they did it; I don't really suppose I care. What's important to know is that when they made the decision to migrate, they supposedly channeled what there was of the magic into an Elfstone called the Loden. The Loden, I think, had always been there, hidden away, kept secret for the time when it would be needed. That time didn't come for hundreds of years - not in all the time that passed after the Great Wars. But the Elessedils had it put away, or they found it again, or something, and when the decision was made to migrate, they put it to use."
He took a steadying breath and tightened his lips. "This Elfstone, like all of them, I'm told, draws its strength from the user. Except in this case, there wasn't just a single user but an entire race. The whole of the strength of the Elven nation went into invoking the Loden's magic." He cleared his throat. "When it was done, all of Arborlon had been picked up like ... like a scoop of earth, shrunk down to nothing, and sealed within the Stone. And that's what I mean when I say Arborlon was brought to Morrowindl. It was sealed inside the Loden along with most of its people and carried by just a handful of caretakers to this island. Once a site for the city was found, the process was reversed and Arborlon was restored. Men, women, children, dogs, cats, birds, animals, houses and shops, trees, flowers, grass - everything. The Ellcrys, too. All of it."
He sat back and the sharp eyes narrowed. "So now what do you say?"
Wren was stunned. "I say you're right, Owl. I don't believe it. I can't conceive of how the Elves were able to recover something that had been lost for thousands of years that fast. Where did it come from? They hadn't any magic at all in the time of Brin and Jair Ohmsford - only their healing powers!"
The Owl shrugged. "I don't pretend to know how they did any of it, Wren. It was long before my time. The queen might know - but she's never said a word about it to me. I only know what I was told, and I'm not sure if I believe that. The city and its people were carried here in Loden. That's the story. And that's how the keel was built, too. Well, it was actually constructed of stone by hand labor first, but the magic that protects it came out of the Loden. I was a boy then, but I remember the old king using the Ruhk Staff.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="15">
"I'm going to fight," he told Sara the following Sunday. He had been nervous all day about telling her, and as he stood next to her while she prepared a salad he suddenly blurted out the news.
She paused and looked at him. "You're going to box?"
"Yes. In a few weeks."
"But why?"
He told her about Dominic's offer. She listened, but in the end shook her head. "I feel like Lucinda," she said, "I just don't like it. Isn't there another way? Maybe I could go to Mr. Johnson -"
"No, Mam<*_>a-acute<*/>! I don't want you to have to beg from that man. If he knows, he won't say anything. Look, it's just one fight."
She knew how much he had suffered when Junior died, and how hard it was for him to go back into the ring, and it was natural for him to want to know his father. But she didn't like his being mixed up with the attorney who was so rich and always in the papers. Being mixed up with the rich could only bring trouble. She didn't like it, but for her son she would bear it without complaint.
"Go and get Lucinda, I'll finish here," she said calmly. He handed her the vegetables he had cut, and washed his hands.
"It's going to be all right, jefita. It's something I have to do." He kissed her.
"I know, I know," she answered. "Go on, the enchiladas will be ready when you return."
He drove to Lucinda's. She was radiant in a white summer dress. She kissed him and whispered, "T<*_>u-acute<*/> eres t<*_>u-acute<*/>. You're all I want."
Sara had prepared red chile enchiladas, beans, and tortillas. For dessert she served sopa, a sweet bread pudding topped with melted cheese. It felt good to have Lucinda in her home. This was what Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n needed, not the boxing and not the running around and making deals with the big-shot lawyer.
Time was the most valuable ingredient in life, and for Sara it was to be enjoyed with family and friends. She sipped wine and enjoyed the warmth of their company as they ate. Lucinda talked about her life in the mountain village of C<*_>o-acute<*/>rdova. Sara had asked her about her family. <*_>initial question mark<*/>Quién es tu familia? was one of the first questions that was always asked. One was known by one's family.
Lucinda told about her father and how he came to be a santero, and she told them about her mother and many of the old customs in the isolated villages of the Sangre de Cristo. She wanted Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n to visit her family, she said with a glance at Sara. "That would be good for Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n," Sara agreed. "He's a city boy. He needs to see the villages."
"How about the training?" Lucinda asked.
"I can jog up and down the mountain," Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n said. "We'll go on Good Friday, come back after Easter. The doctor gave me a physical, and I'm in great shape."
"I knew that," Lucinda teased him.
"He is in good shape," Sara said as she cleaned up the dishes. "He runs every day, he doesn't smoke, but he drinks beer," she said with a mock frown. "Bueno, let's go in the living room. Lucinda, help me get the coffee and sopa. Then I want Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n to read the beautiful story Cynthia wrote. She was not only an artist, she could write like a poet."
They gathered in the front room for dessert. Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n flipped through Cynthia's diary. "This is an old entry, and it's as close as she comes to describing my father. They went to a matanza in the South Valley, near Los Padillas. It was the day they discovered the bower where we buried her ashes. She never mentions his name. She refers to him only as 'mi <*_>a-acute<*/>rabe.'"
"So he is dark," Sara said. A dark and handsome Mexicano was her son's father, an indio like Ramiro, a dark, curly-haired <*_>a-acute<*/>rabe. She looked at her son and admired him. Yes, he would find his father, it was best to believe that. He had been bound by destiny long enough, now he had to break those old ropes and create his own future.
Abr<*_>a-acute<*/>n smiled at his mother. "Yes. Bueno, aqu<*_>i-acute<*/> 'st<*_>a-acute<*/>."
He read Cynthia's 'la matanza,' the entry that described the killing of the hogs for winter meat:
It was in the fiestas of the people that I discovered the essence of my people, the Mexican heritage of my mother. Other painters had concentrated on the Indians; I went to the small, out-of-the-way family fiestas of the Mexicanos. There is a chronicle of life in the fiestas, beginning with baptism. La fiesta de bautismo. I painted the padrinos at church as they held the baby over the font for the priest to bless el ni<*_>n-tilde<*/>o with holy water. In the faces of the padrino and madrina I saw and understood the godparents' role. The padrinos would become the child's second parents, and the familial kinship in the village or in the barrio would be extended. La familia would grow. I painted a scene where the baby was returned from church by the padrinos, the joy of the parents, the song of entriego, the return of the child, the food and drink, the hopeful, gay faces of family and neighbors.
And I painted wedding scenes. Gloria has my favorite. She has the painting that captures the moment when two of the groom's friends grab the bride and stand ready to spirit her away. The bridegroom is caught off-guard, someone is pouring him a glass of champagne. The fiddler is leaning low, playing away, his eyes laughing. The other m<*_>u-acute<*/>sicos join in the polka, drawing attention away from the traditional 'stealing of the bride.'
Fiestas, I loved the fiestas. There is a series: 'Spring Planting,' 'Cleaning the Acequias,' 'Misa del Gallo,' 'Los Matachines.' I did the Bernalillo Matachines, although my favorite were the Jémez Pueblo Matachines. I painted los hermanos penitentes on Good Friday, the holy communion of Easter Sunday, the little-known dances of Los Abuelos and Los Comanches. I painted a triptych of Los Pastores at the Trampas church one Christmas. And the Christmas Posadas. All the fiestas of life that might die as the viejitos die.
I painted the fiestas of the R<*_>i-acute<*/>o Grande, the fiestas of your people, mi amor, the fiestas my mother used to tell me about when I was a child, because if life had not been so cruel, we would have shared these fiestas.
Do you remember la Matanza in Los Padillas, mi <*_>a-acute<*/>rabe moreno? We were invited by your friend Isidro. His family was having a matanza. We had fallen in love that summer, and suddenly it was October, a more brilliant October I never saw again. The entire river was golden, the <*_>a-acute<*/>lamos had turned the color of fire. Long strings of geese flew south and filled the valley with their call, and we, too, drove south along Isleta. Farmers lined the road, their trucks filled with bushels of green chile, red chile ristras, corn and pumpkins, apples. It was autumn, and the fiesta of the harvest drew people together.
It was my first trip into the South Valley. I was a gringita from the Country Club; I had been protected from the world. But the valley was to become my valley. I would visit the villages of the R<*_>i-acute<*/>o Grande again and again, until the old residents got to know well the sunburned gringa who tramped around with easel, paint, and brushes. I earned their respect. They invited me into their homes, and later they invited me to their fiestas. Their acceptance kept me alive.
The night had been cold, and the thin ice of morning cracked like a fresh apple bitten. The sun rising over Tijeras Canyon melted the frost. Gloria helped, as usual. She picked me up. I told my parents I was spending the day with her. Without her help we could never have had time together. Why did she marry F? What a pity.
The colors of autumn were like a bright colcha, a warm and timeless beauty covering the earth. The sounds carried in the morning air, and all was vibrant with life before the cold of winter. Oh, if we had only known that the wrath of parents can kill!
The matanza was beginning when we arrived. Cars and trucks filled the gravel driveway. Family, friends, and neighbors filled the backyards of the old adobe home. Isidro greeted us.
"Just in time," he said and we followed him to the back where the women were serving breakfast. They had set a board over barrels to use as a table, and on it rested the steaming plates of eggs, bacon, potatoes, chile stew, hot tortillas, and coffee. The men were stuffing down the food. Somebody had already called for the first pig to be brought out of the pen. Whiskey bottles were passed around; those who had gotten up early to help the women start the fires and heat the huge vats of lye-water had been drinking for hours.
A very handsome, but very troubled, young man held a rifle in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. Remember Marcos? I will never forget him; he learned a lesson that day. We all did. At the pigpen the frightened sow was being roped and wrestled out.
The women watched; they goaded the men. My mother was a woman of great strength, I always knew, and I saw that same strength in those women of the valley.
"Ya no pueden," they teased the men wrestling with the sow. The worst thing to tell a macho, especially when he's drinking and doing the 'bringing the meat home' business. But it was a fiesta, and the teasing was part of it.
"<*_>initial exclamation mark<*/>Andale! <*_>initial exclamation mark<*/>Con ganas!"
"<*_>initial exclamation mark<*/>Qué ganas, con huevos! "
They laughed; the men cursed and grunted as they lassoed the pig.
"Don't shoot yourself, Marcos!"
"Don't stab yourself, Jerry!" they said to the young man who held the knife.
Isidro told us that Marcos was an attorney in town and Jerry was a computer man at Sandia Labs. Like other young men who had left the valley for a middle-class life in the city, they only returned once in a while to visit the parents and grandparents. Or they returned for the fiestas. They had almost forgotten the old ways, and so the older aunts teased them.
Who remembered the old ways? The old men standing along the adobe wall warming themselves in the morning sun. With them stood don Pedro, Isidro's grandfather, the old patriarch of the clan. These were the vecinos, the neighbors who had worked together all their lives. Men from Los Padillas and Pajarito and Isleta Pueblo. Now they were too old to kill the pigs, so they had handed over the task to their grandsons. They warmed their bones in the morning sun and watched as the young men drank and strutted about in their new shirts and Levi's. Those old men knew the old ways. Maybe it was that day that I vowed to paint them, to preserve their faces and their way of life for posterity. They would all die soon.
'Hispano Gothic,' I called the painting I did of those old men. The last patriarchs of the valley. And their women, las viejitas, las jefitas of the large families, stood next to their men and watched. These old men and women remembered the proper way of the fiestas, and so they watched with great patience as their uprooted grandsons struggled to prove their manhood. What a chorus of wisdom and strength shone in their eyes. What will happen to our people when those viejitos are gone? Will our ceremonies disappear from the face of the earth? Is that what drives me to paint them with such urgency?
Time has been like a wind swirling around me, my love, since I last touched you.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="16">
I
San Francisco, December 1895
"What do you mean you won't come to my Christmas dinner?" Rosebay Ware fixed a piercing blue gaze on her employer. "I've had it all planned for a month now." Her lower lip quivered. "It was goin' to be so nice." A trace of her Appalachian accent, a remnant of her girlhood, could be detected under the more refined San Francisco overlay.
Tim Holt cast around for some explanation. "I have to take my grandmother to Washington for the holidays. She's much too old to travel alone."
"Stuff." Rosebay pulled off her eyeshade and slapped it down on her desk, whapping it solidly on a stack of ledgers. "Peter's going east, and she's his granny, too. There's not one reason why you have to go."
"Well, my family's all there."
"And you should've thought of that a month ago when you told me you'd come. Hugo's been counting on it."
Tim cast an apprehensive glance down the Clarion's hallway toward the newsroom. Rosebay's husband, Hugo, was supposedly out on assignment, but you never knew. "Rosebay, I just couldn't face it," he said desperately.
"Well, you just got to," Rosebay said. "We made our bed, Tim, and we're going to have to lie in it."
Tim winced. It was too appropriate an expression, but Rosebay would not appreciate his pointing that out. She was a literal-minded soul; puns left her puzzled. She had used the expression in its usual sense. Any reference to the bed that the two of them had once made - or unmade - together would not be a good idea.
Tim looked at her despairingly. Rosebay was a little thing, pale and graceful with a lily-stalk slenderness that he knew covered an interior as tough as gristle. Her hair was so blond it was nearly white, and it framed her beautiful face in a pale aureole that not even a green eyeshade could make ugly. Rosebay Ware was self-taught, and she had a natural gift for mathematics. In a fit of inspiration, Tim's cousin Peter Blake had installed her as the Clarion's business manager. She had the Clarion in the black now, and Tim was fiercely proud of her, particularly in the face of predictions of disaster from the rival Chronicle's accounting office. If the unconventionality of a female accountant was all that troubled him about Rosebay Ware he would be a happy man. Tim hunched his muscular shoulders and dug his fists into the pockets of his frock coat.
"Don't do that," Rosebay said. "It makes you look like a tough. And it'll spoil your coat."
Tim took his fists out of his pockets and ran his fingers through his thick sandy hair, then over his face. In accordance with prevailing fashion, he had recently shaved off his handlebar mustache and couldn't rid himself of feeling that he had lost some privacy. He stuck his hands back in his pockets, but he didn't ball them into fists.
"It's my coat," he said mildly. "Rosebay, I can't come to dinner. I can't stand it. We agreed we'd have to go on as if nothing had happened between us, but seeing you across Hugo's table, carving up Hugo's turkey, is more than I can take."
When Hugo had proposed to Rosebay, Tim, totally unaware that she was in love with him, had cheered her on to marry Hugo. Only after it was too late to do either of them any good had Tim managed to fall in love with her.
"You're going to spoil my table," Rosebay said. "Now I'm going to be one man short."
"Then you'll have to find her another dinner partner," Tim said. "I can't take any more of that, either."
"Tim Holt, I've never done anything but introduce you to nice girls when one happens to be staying with me." Tears filled her eyes. "I was just trying to help."
Rosebay took in boarders in the big old house she and Hugo owned at the foot of Telegraph Hill. Altruistically, she introduced Tim to the pretty ones.
"That isn't going to help," Tim said. "Just take my word for it. I'm sorry to bow out so late, but I've got to. Gran's expecting me." Thank God for Gran, he thought.
"What about Peter?"
"Peter's going direct from here. He's got two big buyers for his motorcars lined up within a week of each other - one here and one in Washington. He hasn't got time to detour through Oregon and pick up Gran."
Rosebay snorted. It was a ladylike snort, but it indicated derision and disbelief.
"I can handle being your boss in the office." Tim said with finality, "but don't expect me to socialize or try to be pals."
"I thought we were pals," Rosebay said sadly. "It hurts too much to be pals!" Tim discovered he was yelling and lowered his voice. He came closer to the desk and leaned over her. "Being friends works fine for you. You've got Hugo, who worships you, and you've got me on a string, too, to see whenever you feel like it. But it doesn't work out so well for me. I haven't even got what you might call half a loaf."
"What about Hugo?" Rosebay demanded. "You going to disappoint him, too?"
"He's just going to have to stand up to it," Tim said sarcastically. He snatched up his hat - he had deliberately chosen to confront Rosebay on his way out of the Clarion building. That way he knew he could cut and run as soon as it was over. "Rosebay, I am not going to be your tame beau forever, and I am not coming to Christmas dinner!"
He jammed the tall hat down on his head and marched out, avoiding both the newsroom and his own office, where some unfortunate soul might have his head bitten off for the crime of needing to talk with the boss.
Outside the weather was cold and dank - one of those gray, miserable San Francisco days when the cold saltwater seemed to come out of the bay and wrap itself around buildings and citizens until everyone felt chilled to the bone and pickled in brine. Even the gargoyle above the Clarion's main door on Kearny Street looked cold and disgruntled. A pigeon landed on the pencil behind the gargoyle's ear and, after fluffing its feathers for warmth, turned itself into a ball. Tim wound his muffler around his throat. There were days when he hated to leave San Francisco. This wasn't one of them.
Maryland
"Sir!" Tim's cousin Frank Blake, aged seventeen, saluted General Wallace (Retired), commanding officer of Hargreaves Academy. Frank's polished boot heels were aligned precisely in the center of the general's carpet, his spine was ramrod straight, and his right arm was cocked at precisely the proper angle. His blue uniform jacket, without a bulge or a crease, was buttoned to the chin.
"At ease, Blake." The general's gruff expression would have struck terror into a stranger, but Frank recognized it as the general's smile. "So you're going home to Alexandria for the holidays."
"Yes, sir. My bags are waiting outside for the station hack."
"Be certain to give my regards to your father. A fine man. You do him credit. I've seen your mid-year marks."
"Thank you, sir." Frank was immensely proud of those midyear marks.
"You might be pleased to know, Blake, that they are not only the highest of any cadet's this year, they are the highest in the past twenty-six years of the school's history. I have a letter, which I wish you to deliver to Colonel Blake, apprising him of the fact."
"Thank you, sir."
The general's gray marble eyes were steely and unblinking beneath a hedgerow of bushy eyebrows. "Have you made any decision about your future, Blake?"
"Yes, sir, I'm hoping to go to West Point if they'll have me."
"They'll have you," the general said. "An excellent choice. Your father will be pleased. Did I ever tell you, I knew your grandfather?"
"I believe you mentioned it, sir."
Frank's grandfather, General Leland Blake, had been a soldier of distinction all his life. Frank's father, Henry, was acquiring much the same reputation. The general viewed Frank with relief. It was gratifying to be able to present to Colonel Henry Blake a son who was so obviously qualified to wear the family mantle - particularly since Frank's elder half brother, Peter, had been asked politely to withdraw from Hargreaves.
The general managed to smile. Francis Leland Blake was the perfect cadet. Even at his young age he had his father's height and bulk - tall, dashing, muscular, and handsome. He cut an imposing figure, from his thick sandy hair, close-cropped now in a proper military cut, to the size-twelve boots, which this year had looked more in proportion with the rest of his frame. In the past he had looked like a huge-footed puppy.
The general presented him with the letter, and Frank snapped a salute.
"Go along now, Blake. Rest and enjoy yourself. Dance with all the girls. We've work to do in January."
"Yes, sir!" Frank saluted again, pivoted in the prescribed patterns, then marched through the general's oiled mahogany door. Outside in the corridor he let out a whoop and threw his cap in the air.
Alexandria, Virginia
Tim found himself lulled by the warmth of the room into a kind of somnolent watchfulness as he observed the workings of his clan's interlocking family machinery. It seemed to him that the farther away the children moved and the older they got, the more their parents yearned to collect them all in one place on holidays. His aunt, Cindy Blake, looked with vast contentment down the length of her dining table and with a kind of happy wriggle settled deeper in her chair. The servants had put all three extension leaves in the table, so that it stretched the length of the dining room and into the entrance foyer.
Tim looked through the window. Outside it was snowing, which it so rarely did at Christmas in Alexandria that everyone considered it a present. The old cobbled streets were covered with snow, and it muted the sound of harness bells and the shrieking of children turned loose from Christmas dinner.
The Blakes and the Holts were still feasting, halfway into a pair of roasted geese and a Virginia ham. Between Cindy and her husband, Henry, at opposite ends of the table, were Tim's parents, Toby and Alexandra, who had driven across the river from their house in the District; Toby and Cindy's mother, Eulalia, dutifully delivered from Oregon by Tim; and all the children. Tim's brother, Mike, and his new wife, Eden, and Tim's sister Janessa, and her husband, Charley Lawrence, had all come from New York, the Lawrences with twins to show off.
Peter had arrived from San Francisco, as had Frank, looking proud and grown-up in his dress uniform. The table was rounded out by Cindy's Midge and Toby's Sally, trying to look grown-up, too, but, being ten and twelve years old respectively, lapsing into Christmas silliness and the giggles.
When was the last time they had all been together? Tim wondered. Probably Grandpa Lee Blake's funeral - not a happy occasion. Eulalia, twice widowed, seemed increasingly frail to Tim, although she had withstood the railway trip well, all the way from Madrona, the Holt home ranch in Oregon. Cindy and Toby, and then Toby's children, had all grown up on that ranch but were firmly rooted elsewhere now. Selling it was unthinkable, and the family joke that Sally had to grow up and marry an Oregon boy wasn't very far from the truth. Toby or Cindy might go back to the Madrona one day, but not so long as Henry was with the army and Toby was in the State Department.
Tim eyed his father, aware that that appointment could change with the next presidential election, only a year away. Grover Cleveland wouldn't run again, Tim mused.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="17">
ONE
Virginia
October 1864
The pain had come to life again.
The seed planted in torn flesh spread its roots and thrust tendrils of thorns through the leg of the tall, gaunt man who limped along the dusty road at the edge of the battered column of Confederate prisoners.
Isom Prentice Olive, First Texas Volunteers, Hood's Brigade, Confederate States of America, tried to ignore the pain along with the bite of autumn wind through the remnants of faded butternut cloth that once had been a uniform. The rough material scraped against ridged scars on his right shoulder and upper back, the legacy of a canister shell in the desperate battle for the place called Gettysburg. The musket ball that seeded the pain in his left thigh was a souvenir of The Wilderness.
It was getting to the point, he thought, where a man could follow the course of the war just by counting the scars on Print Olive's body. At least, by God, he told himself, we dealt out more than we took and we took a hell of a lot; the First Texas never quit a fight -
A sudden stab of new pain shattered the thought.
Print spun to face the Union soldier who had jabbed his rifle muzzle into Print's still-sore shoulder. "Move along, Reb." The guard's thumb rested on the hammer of the Springfield. His thin mouth twisted in a sneer. A flare of rage pushed away Print's pain. He lunged forward, slapped away the muzzle of the rifle and cocked a clubbed fist. A hand clamped onto his arm before he could swing.
"Easy, Print," Deacon Scrugg's voice near his ear said, "don't give the blueleg an excuse. We've been through too much together to get killed now."
The Union guard stumbled back a step, shaken by the unexpected attack.
"You Yankee sonofabitch." Print's voice was low, hard and cold. "You come at me again and I'll stick that rifle up your ass and pull the trigger."
The guard recovered from the shock, sputtered in outrage and thumbed back the hammer of the rifle. A Union sergeant sprinted to the guard and shoved the rifle aside. "Back off, Private! Show these men the respect they deserve! We're here to swap prisoners, not to shoot them!"
Deacon's grip was still firm on Print's arm. "Let it go, Print. It's not worth it."
The Union sergeant turned to Print. "Your friend's right, soldier," he said. "This war's nearly over. There's no sense in getting killed now, for nothing."
Print willed his muscles to relax. His anger was checked more by weakness and exhaustion than by reason. Thirty months of war, almost constant hunger, cold and heat, two wounds, and half a year in a Union prison camp had taken the edge from his body, if not his temper. He fixed a steady glare on the young private. "The next time we meet I'll kill you," he said. "And if it's not in this war, by God, you have my personal invitation to come to Williamson County, Texas, to settle up. Just ask for Print Olive whenever you get tired of living."
The restraining hand fell away from Print's arm. "Come on, Print, let it slide."
Print sighed, turned from the Union soldier and let Deacon Scruggs set the pace as they rejoined the ranks of Confederate prisoners. Deacon was almost a head shorter than Print but packed a lot of muscle into a short frame. He had the powerful arms and hands of a blacksmith, a barrel chest and legs that seemed stubby beneath his massive trunk. A bandage crusted with dried blood covered his left eye.
Deacon twisted his head to look at Print with his remaining eye. "I reckon that sergeant's right, Print," he said. There was sadness in his words. "The Yankees are likely gonna win this war. But we give'em a helluva scrap along the way."
Print grunted an agreement, still struggling to contain his anger, and walked in silence for a hundred yards. Then he glanced at his companion. "Deacon," he said, "I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm hurting. But I'll promise you this right now. No man is ever again going to tell me when I'm whipped. I've been pushed around and ordered around for the last time. And they'll have to kill me before they take my guns away again."
TWO
Williamson County, Texas
August 1865
A gentle southwest breeze flattened the gray-white smoke from the open charcoal pits where slabs of beef, quartered pigs and whole chickens dripped juices onto the smoldering embers below. The scent set Jim Olive's mouth watering as he looked over the growing crowd.
Jim sometimes had trouble accepting the idea that more than twenty years had passed since he, his wife Julia and their two children, Elizabeth and Print, had settled at the Lawrence Chapel community on Brushy Creek. It just doesn't seem that time can get away from a man that fast, he thought. But it had.
Overall, it had been a good twenty years, Jim had to admit. The store he had founded in Lawrence Chapel was doing well. His holdings in land and cattle were sufficient to feed his wife and their nine children. In fact, Jim Olive was a wealthy man, at least in cash-strapped Texas terms. The land and the store were paid for, free and clear, and he had hard cash in the bank. Not a lot, but enough. And enough was a lot more than most of the state's merchants and farmers had.
Now, Print, the eldest son, was twenty-five and a grown man, home safe from the war. He had almost recovered from his wounds and his six-foot frame had fleshed out to its normal hundred-ninety solid pounds. This gathering served a twofold purpose, both on Print's behalf; to celebrate his return and to welcome his bride, Louise, into the family.
Jim's gaze drifted over the crowd. As was usual with a gathering hosted by the Olives, almost half the Williamson County populace was on hand. Not all of them were friends or even acquaintances. Some came just for the food and drink. Jim didn't mind feeding a hungry stranger and his family once in a while.
No one would have any trouble picking the Olive boys out in the crowd, he thought. Print, Jay, Marion and even young Bob carried their mother's stamp. Julia Ann Brashear Olive couldn't deny them. They all favored the dark-skinned, dark-eyed and handsome part Cherokee woman who had helped Jim Olive build a comfortable living from the loamy soil, thick brush and timber of central Texas. If I never did anything else right in my life, Jim thought, at least I picked the best woman any man could want to share a life with.
He wasn't so sure about Print's new wife. His eyes narrowed as he watched Print and Louise greet the latest arrivals. Louise was barely five feet tall, slender, delicate almost to the point of appearing frail. She looked as though she might break in a sudden gust of wind. Her eyes frequently held the look of a frightened doe. Jim knew her life hadn't been an easy one. Orphaned as a young girl and raised by her widower grandfather on a hard-scrabble farm a few miles from town, Louise had known little but want during her young life. If dowries still mattered, Jim thought, she would have been out of luck. A couple of home-made housedresses and one Sunday church outfit wouldn't buy a girl much of a man. Now she had her man. But Jim wasn't sure she was strong enough to survive Print Olive.
Print had always been wild, even as a young boy. Print's quick temper and a stubborn streak wider than Brushy Creek in the rainy season had landed him more than a few stroppings behind the woodpile. There should have been more trips to that woodpile, Jim thought; maybe I could have beaten some sense into Print if I'd set my mind to it. Even as the thought formed, Jim Olive dismissed it. He'd done the best he could, what with Julia always taking up for Print, trying to keep the boy's misdeeds hidden from Jim as much as possible. Print had always been her favorite. In the mother's eyes her eldest son could do no wrong. "He has spirit," was her dismissal for Print's transgressions.
That spirit had led Print, at age ten, to beat a boy two years older and fifteen pounds heavier to a bleeding wreck in the dust of the churchyard over some insult. The older boy never fully regained the sight in one eye. Jim had thrashed Print, more for fighting on the Lord's land than for the fight itself. Eventually, Jim came to realize that punishment seemed only to make the boy more headstrong and moody. He gave up on the trips to the woodpile.
Jim had hoped the passing years would tone down Print's temper. They hadn't. Neither had the war. If anything, the War Between the States had sharpened that temper to a razor edge. A man did well these days to walk soft around Print Olive.
Most young men returning from battle bought a new pair of boots or a new hat as soon as they hit Texas soil. Print's first purchase had been a Remington New Model Army forty-four handgun, the second a Henry repeating rifle and the third a bottle of whiskey. It was not, Jim knew, a good sign.
"God give you strength, Louise Olive," Jim whispered toward the small auburn-haired woman standing beside Print, "because I fear you're going to need it with my son."
The clanging of the cook's triangle put an end to Jim Olive's musings. The crowd surged toward the cooking pits and nearby tables covered with fresh vegetables, steaming bread, pies, cakes and fruit. Jim rejoined his guests, pausing frequently to shake the hand of a new arrival. For now it was enough to enjoy good company and good food. Tomorrow would be soon enough for a talk with Print ...
Isom Prentice Olive leaned against the corral gate, his gaze drifting over the handful of saddle horses as they squealed, bit and kicked at each other over grain in the feed troughs. He glanced up and nodded a greeting as Jim Olive stepped alongside and propped a foot on the lower rail of the gate.
The two men stood in silence for a moment, watching the horses sort out the pecking order for feeding time. It was a ritual that had been followed through the ages since the first domestication of the animal. Print dug a tobacco pouch from a shirt pocket, rolled a cigarette and fired it with a match scratched across a fence rail. "You wanted to talk, Pa?" he said.
"Yes, son. I'd like to know what your plans are now that you've a wife to look after."
Print turned to his father, squinting through the cigarette smoke. "Simple enough, Pa. I'm going to get rich."
Jim stared at his son for a moment, startled by the simple declaration. There was no sign of excitement or indecision in Print's black eyes, just a calm, deep confidence.
"Well, Print," Jim said, "I always have admired ambition in a man. But we've got plenty-"
"Pa," Print interrupted, "you may be satisfied with what we've got. Satisfied with a good farm, a half section of grass, and trading flour and sugar for pennies. It's not enough for me. I want to see the day come that when Print Olive talks, people listen."
Jim Olive reached for his battered pipe. "I suppose you've got this all worked out? Getting rich doesn't just happen to a man, you know."
Print stubbed his cigarette butt against a corner post. "Cattle," he said. "I've talked some with Dudley and J. W. Snyder. They know cattle. They trailed many a beef from Williamson County to the Confederacy during the war."
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="18">
ONE
The two men presented an unlikely appearance: a Catholic priest on his first trip into the West and an Unkpapa Sioux man, returning to his home for the first time in seventeen years. They stood in the aisle of a New Year's Day train running west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, each insisting the other have the privilege of the window seat.
They stood nearly the same medium height, both slim, yet sturdily built. The priest's deep blue eyes and reddish-blond hair contrasted sharply with his black Jesuit cassock. The conductor called "All aboard!" for the last time, and the train lurched into motion. The Sioux man sat down in the aisle seat, and the priest sat down next to the window.
The train was filled with westbound passengers eager to view the solar eclipse expected later in the morning. Although the Sioux man was dressed neatly, no one had wanted to sit next to him. The priest, being the last aboard, had found the aisle seat next to the Sioux the only seat left unoccupied. The Sioux man had risen to offer his choice seat out of respect.
Startled by the articulate insistence from one in braids and buckskin, the priest stared at the Sioux man. "I'll be able to see the eclipse just fine," he said. "Is that why you're being so kind?"
"You don't want to look at the eclipse," the Sioux man said. "It will make you blind."
"Yes, I suppose you are right," the priest acknowledged with a laugh. "So why were you so persistent?"
"I felt that if I were kind to you, maybe they wouldn't make me ride back in the luggage car."
"Oh, I see," the priest said.
"Yes they do that," the Sioux man continued. "When they crossed our lands, the railroad said we could ride the Iron Horse for free. They just didn't tell us where we would be put."
"That isn't quite fair, is it?"
"Not many things in life are fair", the Sioux said. "But now I won't have to worry about my death." He looked at the priest, a smile beaming from his dark eyes. "I've heard that those who are good and follow the Black Robes' medicine are to be favored in the next life."
The priest raised an eyebrow. "I've never heard it put that way before."
"Isn't that the idea, though?"
"Is that what you believe?"
"That's why I gave you the seat."
The priest laughed and extended his hand in introduction. "My name is Father Mark Thomas. I'll do what I can for you, but don't expect any miracles."
"I am Shining Horse, and I've received my share of miracles already," the Sioux man said. "So I won't expect you to perform any in my behalf. But for my people ... well, that's another matter."
"What do you mean?" Father Thomas asked.
"It's going to take a great many miracles to keep my people from losing everything they have," Shining Horse said. "It is a very trying time. Everything is changing, and not for the better. So maybe you're right. Maybe you haven't got the right connections to be of much help to my people. I'm not certain that the white man's god cares that much."
"There is only one God," Father Thomas said. "He represents all races."
"I noticed you said represents and not serves," Shining Horse said. "I am of the opinion that the white race pushes into line first, and if there's anything left, everyone else must fight for it."
Father Thomas studied him without comment.
"Are you shocked by my words?" Shining Horse asked. "Does it surprise you that I can tell you these things so well in your own tongue?"
"I would be lying if I said otherwise," Father Thomas admitted. "I have no doubt that you are well educated."
"I was taken when I was eight and sent to school at Carlisle. I didn't know anything about Pennsylvania or any of the lands east of my home. A rich family wanted to make me into a Wasichu, a white man, and decided I should be James Williams. I was James Williams while I lived back there and went to their schools. Now I'm Shining Horse once again, and on my way back home to my people."
"You are very articulate, Shining Horse. What made you decide to come back out here?"
"No matter how well I speak the Wasichu tongue, I will always be of red skin. The two worlds are very different. I don't know if they will ever be one. Certainly not in my lifetime."
"Won't coming back be a bigger change for you than when you left as a child?"
"It might be so," Shining Horse acknowledged. "I just hope I can remember my own tongue. You don't speak Lakota, do you?"
Father Thomas chuckled. "I must admit that I know very little about your race. But that is all going to change. Very soon."
"I would bet that you're being sent to a mission."
"Yes, as a matter of fact," Father Thomas said, "I'm going to St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud to learn from the priests already there." He pulled a letter from his pocket. "I have orders from my new Provincial, in St. Louis, to bring the word of God to your people."
"I know it is an honor among Black Robes to go on missions," Shining Horse said, "but do you really know what you are in for?"
"What do you mean?"
"My people already know about the Black Robes. They have seen your kind and heard your words. Those who have not welcomed you never will."
"Yes, but that is why I wanted to come out here," Father Thomas said. "I believe I can reach those among your people who have shunned others." He opened the letter. "In fact, my orders state that I am 'to bring the word of Jesus Christ to those on the Sioux reservation who are the farthest away from God.'"
"There are many who will not embrace the Wasichu god," Shining Horse said. "A great many."
"Where are they living?" Father Thomas asked.
Shining Horse shrugged. "All over the reservation."
"But who are the farthest from God?"
"Maybe the Minneconjou on Cheyenne River. Yes, Kicking Bear and his people on Cherry Creek do not have a mission. Sitanka, the one they call Big Foot, he asked for a mission. But Kicking Bear does not want anything to do with the Wasichu god."
"It sounds to me like your people are divided," Father Thomas said. "They don't all hold the same views?"
"There is a lot of bitterness among my people now," Shining Horse replied. "Your government has decided to pick the men among our leaders who best suit its needs and to give them the power to speak and sign papers for the entire Lakota nation. That does not sit well with the older leaders. They are the ones who are keeping the old ways alive. This has caused infighting among my people."
"But that is not the fault of spiritual people, such as myself," Father Thomas said.
Shining Horse chuckled. "They don't tell you much before you come out here, do they? You men of the Wasichu god have your own wars."
"What do you mean?" Father Thomas asked again.
"The Catholics and the Episcopals have a war going between themselves," Shining Horse said. "They both want the exclusive rights to force the Wasichu god on my people. I know about that. Too many different speakers for the same white man's god."
"How do you know so much about what's going on out here?" Father Thomas asked. "I thought you told me you haven't been back since you were a child."
"I made it a point to talk to the delegations who have traveled to the eastern lands over the years," Shining Horse explained. "There have been a number of them, from many different tribes. They come to try to settle some legal dispute, usually a treaty that has been broken. I know what's happening out here."
"I'm afraid I don't know enough about the situation," Father Thomas said. "With God's help, I will do as much good as I can."
"You had better have your god teach you the ways of a warrior," Shining Horse told him. "You won't do any good at Cheyenne River unless you learn how my people think."
"I'm sure I'll be learning more of what you've talked about," Father Thomas said. "I will be given a lot of instruction at St. Francis."
Both men looked out the window as a long shadow began moving across the landscape. Slowly the shadow grew longer as the moon's path took it closer to the sun. Everyone on the train began talking excitedly. Everyone except Shining Horse.
"The eclipse has begun," Father Thomas said. "Aren't you interested in things scientific?"
"I have already seen a great many things scientific," Shining Horse replied. "Including the Iron Horse, which destroyed the buffalo hunting grounds. I do not feel that this event we are now watching should be classified as scientific."
"You are a hard man to please," Father Thomas said. "Very hard, indeed."
"You will see that I am pretty open-minded compared to the others," Shining Horse said. "When you reach Cherry Creek, you ask Kicking Bear and his people what they thought of the sun turning black. I'm certain they will not call it a scientific event. They will call it a bad time, a time when the sun deserted them. Some will be angry, some will be sad. All of them will be changed, and that is what you will have to deal with."
Mako sica, the Badlands, locked in frozen white, showed no signs of life but for a lone Minneconjou Sioux woman riding horseback through the lower reaches of Big White River. Those who knew Fawn-That-Goes-Dancing were not surprised at her taking off alone in the dead of winter, having no fear of either the elements or the prospect of not eating until she reached her destination. But many found surprise in the reason for her journey.
Fawn was torn. She had received a letter from the Holy Rosary Mission at Pine Ridge, written and signed by a Black Robe, announcing that her mother, along with another woman, was to be married on the third day of January in front of the Wasichu god. Fawn had spent a day in the hills shedding bitter tears. It had been hard enough to see her mother leave the summer before to live with an Oglala man at Pine Ridge; but Fawn had never dreamed that Sees-the-Bull-Rolling would make her mother travel the White Man's Road.
Fawn dismounted at a small spring, her face turned against a sharp northerly breeze. She rubbed her hands together briskly, working the circulation through numbed fingers. After dislodging a large, pointed rock from the hillside, she slammed it through the brittle ice at the mouth of the spring, then stepped back while Jumper, her red pinto pony, sucked noisily from the thin flow, his nostrils flaring in the cold.
Fawn pulled the remnants of a tattered woolen blanket closer around her shoulders. Underneath, she wore an old, loosely fitted deerskin dress given to her by her mother on the eve of her first marriage. Her legs and feet were covered with cowhide leggins and moccasins, her feet wrapped in rags for added measure against the cold.
Maybe she was getting too old for this. Maybe she should have stayed back in the village at Cherry Creek and not risked the trek across Mako sica alone. Her younger brother, Catches Lance, had said he would ride with her and bring his closest friend, a warrior of mixed Sioux and Negro blood named Tangled Hair. Though Tangled Hair had argued they should go, Catches Lance had changed his mind and unsaddled his pony at the last minute.
Nothing, aside from death itself, would have stopped Fawn from going to Pine Ridge. She did not want her mother to think she no longer cared for her, even though her mother had decided to travel the White Man's Road and leave her old customs behind.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="19">
NORMAN MANEA
Proust's Tea
The people crowding outside the big, heavy, wooden doors, curious about the spectacle, were perhaps themselves travelers, or their companions, or loiterers of the sort often found in train stations, but on that afternoon not one of them was allowed into the waiting room. Nor could they see what was going on inside. The windows were too high, the rectangular glass panes in the doors too dirty and clouded with steam.
The waiting room was immense; it was hard to imagine anything bringing it to life; everything got lost, swallowed up in it. Crouched over their bundles, people in rags were huddling one on top of the other in clusters from the walls all the way to the center, filling up the room. The din was unending.
Shrill and desperate voices, hoarse voices, sometimes deep moans, grew suddenly louder when the nurses came by. The white uniforms barely managed to squeeze through the tangle of legs and bodies. Hands rose up all around to grab hold of the hems, the sleeves, even the shoulders, necks, and arms of these fine ladies. People were screaming, begging, groaning, cursing. Some were crying, especially those who were too far away and had lost all hope of getting a packet of food and a cup.
Those crowded on the other side of the wood and thick glass doors would have tried in vain to guess ages and sexes from the faces on the mass of skeletons, dressed in rags tied with string, that crammed into the waiting room. The women all looked like old, wretched convicts, and children with oversized skulls popped up all around them like apocalyptic men, compressed, stunted, as if an instrument of torture had shrunk them all.
The nurses knew, of course, that there were no men in the waiting room, nor young women. Had they understood the cries and the wailing around them, they would have realized that it was this very absence that aggravated the panic: the rescued did not understand, nor did they want to accept, that they had been saved. They suspected that this was a new ruse, even more diabolical, that would undoubtedly lead to new tortures, perhaps even to the end. Why else had the men and able-bodied young women been left behind? To bring them here later, on another train? Because there hadn't been enough room? Perhaps someone had objected to piling them on top of one another?
They could have done without those big, luxurious railway cars that swayed like imperial barges... They wouldn't have mined traveling in carts, walking for miles and miles, so long as they'd been allowed to stay together, husbands, wives, sisters, sons and daughters, the old and the children, all of them.
Shorn like the others, her head covered by some sort of burlap hood, the woman before whom the nurse had stopped was ageless like the rest. She made no sound. She had not said a word when the person next to her had taken from her hands a piece of blanket and covered herself with it. She didn't flinch when the old woman on her left, sensing in her silence a confirmation of her own foreboding, became excited, raising her arms to the sky. Finally she lifted her head: a face shrunken, withered, old, like a Phoenician mask. But she didn't move, not even when the nurse passed by. She just kept watching, intense, like the midget resting its small yellowish head on her bare shoulder.
The air in the room quivered with heat. The continuous pulsing rumble of the mass lowered the ceiling and pulled the walls in closer. The hall had shrunk. Everything was happening close to the ground, at the height of the crowd. Only when you threw your head back and looked up did the ceiling recede, like a soaring, ever more unreachable sky. From the heights, the noise lagged, distant, weak, somewhere down below. Those who remained on the ground were deafened by it, drained by fear, oblivious to everything.
She, too, couldn't stop thinking about what might be happening on the train that never arrived. She couldn't have been allowed on board, she knew all too well that she looked like an old woman, no one would have believed that she was not yet thirty. But then she would have had no reason to want to be on the train for men and young women. Surely she too had seen how they had clung to each other without shame- my father and my cousin- the moment they left the lineup. She did not look at them, but without a doubt she had seen everything. Disciplined, she had joined her column, holding in her limp hand the hand of the midget trailing behind her. She didn't even yank at his arm as she helped him climb the high steps onto the train. She saw that the child, when he reached the top of the steps, had turned his wrinkled face toward the two who were left on the platform, sitting on the bench too close to each other. But the woman had not said a word; she sat down on the seat in the train and closed her eyes, exhausted.
Perhaps the commotion of so many confused voices coming from down below overwhelmed her, allowed her to forget, but suddenly she had turned around, pushing against the little midget's scrawny neck and dislodging him from his nest. In any event, her bony, dampish shoulder could not replace, even in the child's memory or dreams, the plump, fresh cheeks of the pillow he craved.
The hands that touched the neck and the matchstick arms of the little savage were those of the lady in the white uniform. The lady was smiling at the little midget, bending over him, the red cross on her forehead shining, coming nearer. She held out the bag of biscuits and the tin cup.
The cup was hot. The little beast's cheeks bent over the yellowish, liquid circle, into the fragrant steam. A pleasure that could not last; a pleasure one should not dare prolong, no matter what happiness one felt. An impossible pleasure, but real, because the hall was real too, and buzzing, and he heard the bag being ripped open over his head, and his hand filled with biscuits.
The boy sipped, numb with pleasure, frightened. He understood that everything was real and, therefore, that it would end; it was he, giddy with delight, who impatiently hastened its end. The cup was half emptied. He stopped drinking and looked at the stubby, fat biscuits in the palm of his hand. He began to nibble, patiently, on one of the grainy, sweet, scallop-edged shells. Only then did he feel hunger. He grabbed the bag with one hand. In the other he held the cup. He shoved a fistful of biscuits into his mouth. A little midget who inspired tenderness however ghastly he looked, and so the lady put an extra bag in his mother's hand.
"Drink the tea also. Drink, while it's still hot."
Perhaps the souls of those we've lost do indeed take refuge in inanimate objects. They remain absent until the moment they feel our presence nearby and call out to us for recognition, to free them from death. Perhaps, indeed, the past cannot be brought back on command, but is resurrected only by that strange, spontaneous sensation we feel when unexpectedly we come across the smell, the taste, the flavor of some inert accessory from the past.
But the aroma of that heavenly drink could not be reminiscent of anything; he had never experienced such pleasure. This magic potion could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called 'tea.'
So it was necessary to look up toward the sky of dirty stone, where black clouds of flies swarmed, and where he expected Grandfather to appear, the only person who would have had an answer.
They had gathered, as usual, around him, everyone was holding his hot cup of greenish water infused with local herbs picked in those alien places, to which Grandfather would add, whenever he found them, acacia blossoms.
High up on the arched ceiling of the waiting room, where the light bulbs attracted billows of insects, Grandfather appeared as if on a round screen, and Grandmother, and his parents, and his aunt. They were warming their hands on the steaming cups, all of them staring at the same point high above, in front of them. Anda was there, too, of course. She took part, humble, submissive, but shameless enough, nevertheless, not to miss the tea ritual to which Grandfather summoned everybody, sometimes looking at each person a long time, letting them know that he knew everything about everybody, even about his son-in-law and this beautiful and guilty granddaughter.
Grandfather did not take his eyes off the little white cube of sugar that hung, as usual, from the ceiling lamp. They all had to stare at it intensely for some minutes before sipping the hot water. Those who remembered the taste of sugar, those, that is, who had the time, before the disaster, to accustom their palates to the sweetness of the little white lumps, gradually felt their lips become wet and sticky. The brackish green drink became sweet, good, 'real tea,' as Grandfather would say.
The ceremony was repeated almost every afternoon, presided over sternly yet not without a touch of humor by the old man, his unkempt beard mottled in black. He was convinced that he would return home, and he conserved as a symbol of that world, and for that world, a dirty sugar cube. While the boiling water was being poured, no one was allowed to look anywhere but in his own cup, and one waited to hear the water splash and bubble in the neighboring cup, until one by one all of them were filled. Then everyone raised his eyes toward the lamp from which a tiny parallelepiped of almost white sugar hung on a string. They had to stare at it patiently for a long time, and had to sip the tea slowly, until everyone felt his lips, tongue, mouth, his entire being refreshed, mellowed by the memory of a world they must not give up, because, Grandfather firmly believed, it had not given them up and could not do without them. The tea steamed in the cups; everyone was silent, all concentrating, as they had been told to, on a small, dirty cube of sugar that Grandfather had had the idea to save and hang up in front of them every day.
Up there, above the din in which the poor wretches tried, uselessly, to return to another life, up there, in an open space, isolated from the huge waiting room, Grandfather, confident in a return that would not come pass, could have assured them that the magic potion was indeed proof that the world had welcomed them back. But even this strange drink did not remotely resemble 'real tea.'
"Dunk the biscuits in the tea. Drink it while it's hot."
"Drink while it's hot," repeated now one woman, now another.
Dunked in the tea, the plump, round biscuits had the very flavor of happiness- had there been time for surrender, utter abandon, a dizzying fullness of feeling, the priceless gifts that only a chosen few can hope to deserve, and that some day must be returned in a miraculous exchange.
The biscuits tasted like soap, mud, rust, burnt skin, snow, leaves, rain, bones, sand, mold, wet wool, sponges, mice, rotting wood, fish, the unique flavor of hunger.
There are, then, certain gifts whose only quality and only flaw is that they cannot be exchanged for anything else. Such gifts cannot, at some later time, be recalled, repossessed, or returned.
If, later, I lost anything, it was precisely the cruelty of indifference. But only later, and with difficulty. Because, much later, I became what is called... a feeling being.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="20">
The Strange Affair of the Spirit Cats
Douglas Kaufman
It was a gloomy night in Khartoum. The Pharaoh's artificial sun had set over an hour ago. The faint glimmer of evening stars was obscured behind an ominous layer of black clouds.
In the alleyway, three shapes floated like ghosts through the darkness and evening mist. Given the state of Earth since the invasion of realities, the chance that they were in fact ghosts could not be dismissed lightly. One of the larger shapes, thinking upon just that likelihood, harrumphed and fumbled about in its waistcoat pocket, as if looking for a lost bit of change.
"G'dam," it muttered. "Jacques, did I give you that Pharaoh's Curse Lucky Charm? What have I done with it?" As he spoke, the third shape approached the other two ... slowly ... ominously. The large shape now turned out his pockets in measured, slightly frantic, haste.
"Ex - excuse me," trilled a pretty, young voice from out of the darkness. "I can't see you very well, but - you wouldn't by some chance be the man known as Lord Cunningham?"
"Goodness!" exclaimed the large waistcoated shape. "Either you're not supernatural or my reputation is such that even the spectres know me!"
"Am I a spectre, then?" A flame was struck from a match, held in the hand of the owner of the pretty young voice. It was, in the vernacular, a Pretty Young Thing who held the match in a white-gloved hand. A small hat stood atop an exquisitely formed face piled high with auburn hair, and green eyes glowed faintly in the red firelight. The small pouting lips, also shining in the match light, held an expression of mock insult. She regarded the waistcoated man steadily, as the match burned down nearly to her fingertips.
Behind Lord Cunningham, the third shape growled low in his throat.
"Jacques reminds us that in this part of town, it's best not to call attention to oneself," said Cunningham, revealed in the matchglow as an immensely fat man with a huge white mustache. He was dressed in the height of fashion and was impeccably groomed - except for an egg stain on the left side of the coat covering his amazing paunch. "There's a dear; just put out the flame and we'll make our way to the club. I assume you are here for the club dinner?" He adjusted the monocle he wore as he spoke, as if to get a better view of the lady.
"Yes indeed," she said from out the dark, but the flush on her cheeks was audible. "The Explorer's Club dinner! How thrilling!"
"Quite," drawled Cunnigham. "Have you an invitation?" There was a rustle of paper, and something passed from white-gloved to meaty hand.
"Can't very well read it here, can I?" muttered Cunningham. "Know I had a light of my own somewhere about here ... damn pockets ... like the Caves of Orion ... Oh, fine," he said aloud. "Come along. I'm sure everything's in order." And without further ado he took her arm unerringly in the dark, and whisked her toward a blank wall. The one called Jacques followed, vigilantly scanning the darkness behind them for signs of unwanted intruders.
At the wall, Cunningham rapped lightly on the third brick up, fifth brick over from the left, and called softly, "Remmy, Moxis, Attun!" The wall slid back and to the side, accompanied by the sound of sandpaper on stone.
"Oh!" exclaimed the lady.
The three passed within, and wall slid shut behind them. The darkness was then disturbed only by the plaintive meowing of a small alley cat.
***
"And now for a proper introduction," said the huge man. In the light of the gas lamps within the club, his girth, florid face, and mustache made him look like nothing so much as a surprised walrus rearing up on its hind flippers. He doffed a pith helmet, graciously took the lady's hat, and handed both to a nearby servant.
"I," he announced as the servant moved silently away, "am Lord Cunningham, one of the founding members of the Explorer's Club. We are a band of adventurers, dedicated to the overthrow of the Pharaoh, otherwise known to us as ..."
"Mobius," she whispered, eyes wide. There was a moment of silent fear as she pronounced the name of their greatest enemy out loud. A hush fell over the club. Several heartbeats passed. Then the hum of conversation resumed within the dark oak and mahogany confines of the room.
"We'll not rest," said Cunningham, obviously quoting something or someone, "until the scourge of Mobius is lifted from the land. And who do I have the pleasure of addressing, my dear?"
"I am the Lady Tria," the pretty young thing replied, giving a slight curtsey. "I was invited by Mr. William Quest, who unfortunately could not be here tonight."
"Old Billy-Q?" roared Cunningham. "That goat! Where did he come across such a treasure as you?"
"I am his niece," she replied, a little uncertain, but still smiling.
"Oh. Quite." Cunningham blew out on his mustache, nonplussed. "And that invitation? Perhaps I should look at it now?"
"I gave it to you, Lord Cunningham," she said. "Outside, in the alley," she added helpfully.
"Oh?" He fumbled again at various pockets. "I seem to have dropped it or misplaced - Jacques! Have you seen Lady Tria's paper?"
The one called Jacques, mostly hidden behind Cunningham's great bulk, made no reply. Lady Tria moved slightly to her left, to try to get a little better look at the silent man.
"Ah, well," sighed Cunningham, making a last ineffectual pat at his sides. "You obviously belong here. Come, you may sit at my table this evening."
"Thank you," she replied daintily. "I - oh!"
At that moment she rounded Cunningham's prodigious left hip, and stared full into the eyes of the man called Jacques - and was instantly lost within the dark confines of his eyes.
The square jaw, dark hair, dark skin, perfect nose, devilish brows and perfect teeth all smiled at her, knowingly. She sighed for all the lost years of her life. "Hello, sir," she managed, squeaking slightly on the upstroke. The faint glistening of a teardrop was visible in one eye.
"My dear, let me present my good friend Jacques," said Cunningham, seemingly oblivious to the smoldering looks that were passing between the two younger people. "Jacques is an apprentice member of the Club, and accompanies me on many of my adventures."
"What an exciting wife - er, life," Lady Tria said. From somewhere she produced a feathered fan and began vigorously cooling herself, staring all the while into the molten pools of Jacques' eyes.
"It is a bit warm, isn't it?" said Cunningham. "Shall I get you a drink?" Without waiting for a reply, he bustled off, leaving a swirl of displaced air in his considerable wake. The lady breathed silent thanks and lowered her eyes, raising them coquettishly to meet a fiery look from Jacques.
Neither spoke for a long time. Finally, impatience winning over social grace, Lady Tria said, "Sir ... Jacques ... I'm afraid I don't know your full name. I trust that, as you are a member here, I will meet you again in the near future, when my patron Mr. Quest brings me again to visit. I look forward to it." She held her breath in anticipation of his reply.
Jacques bowed, then opened his mouth as if to speak. Time seemed to stand still. Various tunes and marches played within the lady's mind.
"Here we are!" bellowed Cunningham, bustling between them like a bull in stampede. "And how are you two getting along?" He handed the lady an unwanted drink.
"Quite well, thank you," the lady replied icily. Jacques said nothing, the merest hint of an amused smile on his lips the only indication of his feelings. The lady continued, "Jacques is -"
"Certainly a mysterious fellow, isn't he?" Cunningham said jovially, throwing a thick arm around Jacques' perfectly shaped shoulders. "Doesn't need to say much!"
"Oh, I don't know," Lady Tria said. She mounted a new attack, trying to sidestep Cunningham and get back next to the man of her dreams. "Do you mean to tell me, Jacques, that you have a reputation for being the strong, silent type?"
"He certainly does," cried Cunningham, before Jacques' lips could even part for a reply. "By Jove, I remember Jacques facing down a horde of villainous minions of Mobius. They taunted him until their faces turned blue, but he never said a word. Never lost that slight, sardonic smile of his. Eh, Jacques?" Jacques smiled sardonically, and said nothing.
"Minions of Mobius! Dear me!" The lady fanned herself prettily. "And Jacques, how did you come to be facing a horde of Mobius' minions?"
Jacques drew in a breath (as did the lady Tria).
"By god, that's our mission here in the Explorer's Club!" cried Cunningham. "We dedicate ourselves to the overthrow of Mobius. We have chosen to oppose him by denying access to the artifacts he so craves. You've heard of Natatiri, his minion in Khartoum? And you heard the rumors a while back, of a mind-transfer device that she was using? Well, the fact that you've heard no stories recently is solely due to the efforts of the Explorer's Club. Without them, that device might still be terrorizing innocent citizens." Cunningham held his own drink in both hands, warming both to the brandy and to his subject.
"The Explorers are all archaeologists extraordinaire," he said. "Adventurers of the highest caliber, men who are not afraid to venture into the unknown and face unspeakable dangers, implacable foes, and nearly unbeatable odds!" Cunningham was getting positively red in the face as he went on. "Jacques," he finished breathlessly, "is one such man."
"I see," the lady said impatiently. "And Jacques." She emphasized the word strongly, to make sure there could be no misunderstanding concerning to whom she was talking. "Is your line archaeology?"
"He's actually more of an explorer," Cunningham interrupted, and Lady Tria made a low growling sound very far down in her throat. "He's strong and brave, and has protected me from harm on many of our adventures."
There was no way around the man, literally or figuratively. The lady sighed forlornly. It was either be socially unspeakable, or speak with Cunningham. As an absent member's guest, she couldn't afford to be rude without taking a chance on being thrown out.
"Lord Cunningham," she said, almost hoping that if directly addressed he would not answer. "..." She had a sudden brainstorm. "How is it that you and Jacques met?"
"Ah, now there's a tale!" Cunningham bellowed.
***
Said Cunningham: On a mission, I was, for the Explorer's Club. Well nigh unto eight months ago, in the very depths of this benighted continent. I was posing as a big-game hunter, hot on the trail of a mysterious talisman said to possess the power to bind spirits and ghosts to the will of the wielder. Well, given the prevalence of sundered spirits, as well as ghosts and other supernatural entities all over the planet, it was deemed High Priority that Mobius not recover this item.
So there I was, Cunningham the 'great white hunter', with my squad of Askaris (that's soldiers to you, my dear), guides and bearers, following an ancient map, recently discovered, whose mystic runes I had deciphered myself.
We were on the veldt, nearing the entrance to an area where, according to the map, the talisman lay resting in a lost temple deep within the jungle. My group was getting edgy, but I knew we had to press on. It was on a day just like all the others - hot, uncomfortable, and fly-ridden - that a maddened rhino suddenly attacked the camp! A rare black rhino, it was, and to this day I suspect that black magic was what made it charge us.
At any rate, I picked up my rifle and calmly shot the beast once in the shoulder - but astoundingly, it barely faltered in its strides as it bore down on us like a runaway freight train.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="21">
DevilÕs Highway
Cross should have filled the water bottle at the liquor store in Clifton, just across the line in Arizona, but a dazed-looking Indian slammed through the door and stood muttering behind him while he paid for the bourbon. He left quickly and went to the pay phone in the parking lot. He called his wife to tell her he would not be near a telephone that night. No way heÕd stay in that town. She replied with words of sympathy, almost sounding like she meant them.
It was accepted between them that she became angry when he traveled. He was free on the road; she was trapped at home. He hadnÕt the kids to care for, no drudgery of laundry and dishes, no whining over every snack and meal. For him, space and time were open: his schedule was his own. He failed to convince her that travel wore him down, that the motels were bad and the food worse, that like it or not, the days on the road were part of his job and paid the bills.
A tractor rig roared by, gears clashing. He shouted into the phone: "There's an old rancher I've got to see in Show Low tomorrow. Probably I'll camp up the road a ways and get there in the afternoon." Her faint good-bye had just a trace of edge.
By then it was dark. From Clifton the road rose to Morenci, then climbed beside the rim of the Phelps Dodge pit, where a mountain of copper once stood. He drove for miles, the pit gaping beside him. There were no other cars. He pulled off the road three times to gaze into the void. Far below, the lights of heavy equipment flickered through clouds of dust, and the growl of engines gusted with the wind.
There was a hole like that in his dream. He slept in the back of the Bronco with the seat folded down and dreamt of falling into a void. The empty darkness pulled him and he wanted to surrender to it, but a cyclone fence, like the fence around the Phelps Dodge pit, held him back. In his dream he searched for a hole in the wire, so that he could be pulled through and fall forever. But the seamless fence held firm, and he found no passage to the welcoming, irresistible abyss.
Awaking from the dream, he felt his wifeÕs anger like a presence beside him. He knew one day she would do something extreme - go crazy or just go away - he wasnÕt sure what. He feared for the boy and the girl, whose guileless affection still surprised him. Would she take them or leave them behind?
It was cold. The whiskey heÕd drunk before turning in had made him thirsty, but he didnÕt want to stir from his cocoon. He pulled the purple sleeping bag around him and gazed at stars through the window of the Bronco. He wondered if his wife ever wakened in the night, sick with worry for him.
He awoke again at first light, with a headache from the bourbon. He was in an empty Forest Service campground where slick-barked trees arched above concrete tables. One cup of coffee would make him well. Two cups, and he would write up his notes from yesterday and take his time getting on the road. He fetched the Nescafé and campstove from his provisions, then went to fill the bottle. He found spigots but no water. The campground was still shut down for winter.
He had to pin his hopes on finding a cafe in Alpine, by the map no more than forty miles away. He stuffed the sleeping bag in its sack and stowed it with his other gear. Then he put the Bronco on the two-lane headed north.
The road cut into a mountainside of bare rock, prickly pear, and scrub. It rose and fell without rhythm, twisting in hairpins. He never touched fourth gear and kept downshifting into second. On his right was the mountain. On his left, the land fell away in cliffs. Canyons and mesas, which the map said belonged to the San Carlos Apaches, stretched to the horizon. He stopped and got out once to take in the view, but a cold wind drove him back to the truck and soon he drove on.
Coffee might have smoothed the rough edges and eased the headache. Without it, he felt disassembled, as though parts of him had elected to go separately through the day and refused to merge. Distractedly he talked to himself as he drove and heard himself repeat his own name, ÒGeorge Cross, George Cross,Ó in the tone of someone trying to remember an acquaintance.
He surveyed the infinity of canyons stretching westward and heard himself speak again. ÒYou couldnÕt justify fifty an acre for that. No timber to cut, too rough to graze without losing cows, too remote for recreation. All you pay for,Ó this was PearceÕs favorite line, Òis to keep hell from shining through.Ó
As an appraiser for the Bureau of Land Management, Cross saw a lot of property like that. Working for the government and valuing land for exchanges and rights-of-way wasnÕt the stuff of high drama, least of all by his wifeÕs standards, but he earned a fair living and, as Pearce his supervisor put it, ÒWeÕre the ones who deal with whatÕs real - with actual values, not with expectation.Ó
After half an hour, Cross had driven a dozen miles, no more. He was rounding a hairpin, climbing slowly in second, when two grizzled men leaped in front of his truck.
ÓBandits!Ó he thought. He had to stop or hit them.
Then: ÒNot bandits. Apaches.Ó He was almost stopped. ÒMaybe prospectorsÓ - they had a weathered look.
The men waved their arms. Grins - or grimaces, it was hard to tell - split their ragged beards. They were brown and very small, their skin sun-baked, the original color indeterminable. Their dingy coats hid layers of shirts that puffed them out, making their arms look as useless as a tickÕs.
When Cross stopped, the men hurried to the side of the road and scooped up a clutch of day packs and plastic shopping bags. Then one came running to the truck; the other shuffled behind.
Cross realized with fear and disappointment he would have to pick them up. The road was empty. They were needy. They were dark enough to be Apache, and hard luck enough as well. He prayed they were as harmless as they looked.
Cross got out and unlocked the back of the Bronco. ÒThank you, man,Ó said the one who had run. ÒGracias,Ó said the other, out of breath, and Cross realized they were not Apache, but Hispano. ÒThis is one bad deserted road, man. We could of waited here forever.Ò
The two wizened men, each a foot shorter than he, climbed into the space that last night served as a camper. He told them to make room for themselves, and they shoved aside his duffel, the cooler, the shovel he carried for off-road trouble, and the cardboard box that held his sleeping bag and other gear.
Cross closed the cargo door. As he climbed back in the driverÕs seat, the reek of unwashed clothes and bodies assaulted him. It was the smell of crowded rooms and shantytowns, and it made him think, ÒA person who is desperate will do anything.Ó Again he felt a surge of fear.
He wondered if they could smell him too, apprehensive as he was. Did they have a gun in one of those bags or the pocket of an overcoat? Stealing glances in the rearview mirror, he put the truck in gear and resumed the slalom of the highway.
He could see one but not the other. The one who had run now sat directly behind him, out of view, but the other, leaning against the cargo box, coughed some, then seemed to drop into a trance, eyes unfocused, face impassive. He was too weathered for Cross to tell his age. He could have been seventy and young-looking. He could have been thirty and old before his time.
ÓWhere are you headed?Ó asked Cross.
ÓSpringerville,Ó came the voice behind him. The one who had run. He pronounced it Sprin-ger-ville, with the g hard. It was not an accent Cross could place but seemed oddly familiar just the same.
ÓI can take you as far as Alpine.Ó
ÓOkay, thatÕs good. Thank you very much.Ó
ÓYouÕre on a lonely road.Ó
ÓYah, we could of freezed last night.Ó
ÓYou slept out?Ó
ÓYah, we had a ride to Morenci yesterday. Then we walked up the mountain from there. Musta been twenty miles. ThatÕs a steep mountain too, we had to rest every coupla miles. When it was dark, we just made a fire and laid down. But I was afraid it was gonna rain, and we could of freezed if it did.Ó
Cross looked in the mirror. The other rider smiled, and coughed again.
ÓSee?Ó said the voice behind him. ÒMy partnerÕs sick. ItÕs too hard for him to travel like this. He was already sick when we left Ju<*_>a-acute<*/>rez. That was April nine. What day is it now?Ó
ÓThe twenty-third,Ó Cross said, and added, ÒI think.Ó But he knew very well it was the twenty-third. The I think was about his growing uncertainty. They were wetbacks. He shouldnÕt be transporting wetbacks. And what about their story? All that time to come as far as most people would drive in a day? And sleeping on the cold ground in the mountains in April - just lying down?
ÓSee? That makes two weeks from Jua<*_>unch<*/>ez to here, no?Ó
ÓYeah, I guess,Ó Cross agreed.
ÓAnd he been sick all along. He has to get home to Cortez in Colorado. He has a wife there, see? But he had to go down to Zacatecas, where he was born, to get some certain papers. Certificates from the church and things like that. They donÕt give a green card without those papers.Ó
ÓDid he get them?Ó
ÓOh, sure.Ó Cross heard the crackle of flimsy plastic as the man dug around among the bags theyÕd brought. Then a white K mart sack was thrust forward. It didnÕt seem to contain much. ÒWith these papers in here,Ó the man continued. ÒJes<*_>u-acute<*/>s can stay legal as long as he wants. They got an amnesty goin now, see. All you got to do is show your papers by the deadline.Ó
ÓThatÕs good,Ó said Cross. HeÕd heard about the amnesty program. The newspapers said lawyers everywhere were making bundles with the filings. ÒHow about you? Are you from down in Mexico too?Ó
ÓNo, I come from Espa<*_>n-tilde<*/>ola. Over there in New Mexico.Ó
ÓYeah?Ó Now Cross recognized the accent. Espa<*_>n-tilde<*/>ola was practically next door. He said, ÒI live in Santa Fe.Ó
ÓI got an uncle, I think he been working at the capitol for many years. Albert Moya, you know him?Ó
Cross thought a moment to show politeness. He knew some people at the capitol but surely not a relative of this man. ÒNo, I guess not. WhatÕs he do?Ó
ÓI donno. Maybe just sweeping up. I ainÕt been back there in a long time. Probably heÕs dead now.Ó
Cross adjusted the mirror so he could see the nephew of Albert Moya. ÓIs your name Moya, too?Ó
ÓNo, Trujillo. Antonio Trujillo. Call me Tony.Ó Tony TrujilloÕs eyebrows were black and bushy, his beard gray. He wore a baseball cap that said ÒMontevista Feeds.Ó Tony Trujillo stretched out a thin brown hand. Cross reached back over his shoulder and shook it. It was as dry as a leaf.
ÓIÕm George Cross.Ó
ÓAnd my partner here is Jes<*_>u-acute</>s Zuniga. He donÕt speak English.Ó Then another brown hand appeared over his shoulder. It too felt leaflike, but warm, a leaf in the sun.
Cross said, ÒMucho gusto,Ó which was about all the Spanish he knew.
Jes<*_>u-acute<*/>s Zuniga answered in Spanish, going on for a minute or more.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="22">
Bees Bees Bees
Joanna Scott
Francis is fifteen years old, ill with a fever. He is asleep, dreaming, and in his dream he is crawling on hands and knees across a narrow bridge. When he reaches the middle of the bridge he stops and pokes his head over the side, expecting to see his own shadow floating on the creek below. Instead he sees a man's hand and part of the arm stretching toward him - the rest of the body is a formless white mass in the murky water. As the hand glides beneath the bridge the boy is suddenly afraid that it will rise up from the other side and pull him off the bridge and drown him. He squeezes his eyes shut, waiting for the worst. Nothing happens. After a minute or so he blinks and peeks out at the water, only to discover that he is back in his own bed, his nurse Nanette is mumbling to herself, and the sky outside the window is the flat gray of another November afternoon.
Just then, to his delight, the gray fills with snow, as though someone standing below the window had broken open seedpods and tossed up fistfuls of white puffs. It is snowing. He is not going to drown. It is snowing in swirls and waves. When he closes his eyes again he sees the snow in his mind. When he opens his eyes a second later he sees nothing.
Bees are the souls of the dead. They are the tears of Christ. They are the offspring of the nymph Melissa, who was transformed by Zeus into a queen bee. If a bee brushes against an infant's lips he will grow up with the gift of song. Bees are spontaneously generated in a bull-calf's crooked horn. Bees are good luck. Bees are bad luck. Bees were sent straight from Paradise by God to provide the wax for church candles. During the winter bees neither hibernate nor die - they fly to Barbary and sing the captured Moors to sleep.
"Francis, where are you, Francis? Nanette is not amused. Not in the least is Nanette amused. Come out now, Nanette has something for you. Aha! You wicked boy, you thought you could hide from your old nurse, such a foolish child. You think Nanette can't see you crouching beneath that chair? Sweet pig, here's a pinch for all the trouble you put me through, here's a pinch for mussing your clothes, and here's a good sharp pinch as a warning.
"Oh, darling pipkin, don't cry. Nanette doesn't like to see you cry. Here, Francis, here's a special treat for you today, so wipe the tears from your face and be a soldier like your papa. My little rabbit, there's so much you don't know yet, including how ugly your Nanette is growing as she grows old, a good thing you're still a baby and too young to care. You won't despise me when you're a man, you won't ever despise me, will you, Francis? A five-year-old boy can do as he pleases but Nanette will never have a choice, no, Nanette is first and foremost your loyal servant, she's born with an instinct and will never waver, for better or worse, all her life long. Now there's a prince, no more sobs, and Nanette will give you a reward. Close your eyes, go on, now open your mouth, open wide, and prepare to taste a miracle.
"Well? You can't tell me you've ever tasted anything so marvelous. Do you want another taste? You don't even have to say please, your smile says enough. For such a smile you will have another taste, and another, two more splendid tastes! Ah, you'd finish the whole jar if you had your way. But Nanette is in charge, she decides how much is good for you, and three spoonfuls, she declares, is quite enough.
"But you are confused. How could you know what you've tasted if you've never tasted anything like it before? You, dear Francis, have just tasted the nectar of bees. You'll never forget the taste, will you? I'm sorry to say this first taste will never be matched, no matter how wonderful it tastes in the future. My unfortunate boy. From now on you'll want more and more, yet no matter how much you get you'll never have enough. Like the taste of woman. Just like the taste of woman. You can blame old Nanette for the introduction!"
Francis Huber was born in Switzerland in 1750. When he was fifteen years old he suffered from an infection of the eye, which left him blind. When he was seventeen his parents moved permanently to their country estate outside Lausanne and hired a tutor to instruct him in various subjects that might be useful later in life: philosophy, theology, Latin. The tutor found the boy rather an indifferent student and soon grew bored with their daily lessons. For amusement he went fishing for trout at night.
One night Francis secretly followed the tutor. Even though he had been totally blind for two years, he had spent every summer of his life at the estate and knew the countryside intimately. He felt his way along a path about thirty yards behind the tutor, trailing after him up the rocky slope of a hill and back down into a creek bed. He hid behind a boulder while the tutor slipped off his buckled shoes and walked straight into the icy torrent.
A few days later the tutor told him to recite in Latin. "What should I recite?" Francis asked. "Anything," the tutor said. "Make up a story." So Francis began a story in Latin about a man who went fishing at night with a lantern and club, but after a few words he slipped back into French. The tutor didn't correct him. He described the round globe attached to a tube of metal three feet long, explained with remarkable precision how the man placed a candle inside the sealed globe and used the lantern to illuminate the river bottom. The trout, fascinated by the light, followed the globe when the man submerged it in the water and rose as he lifted the lantern. When the trout appeared at the surface the man struck them with the club.
All the names and purposes of things Francis knew from his nurse Nanette. She was an inexhaustible source. But his tutor concluded that he was either a seventeen-year-old charlatan who had been feigning blindness, or a genius. After much probing and testing, he decided that Francis was a genius and for the next few years he served as an important ally, convincing the boy's parents, despite Nanette's warnings, to indulge him in whatever he wished.
When Francis was eighteen he was given his first strawkeep of bees. By the following summer he had three separate colonies. After long years of patient study he became an expert, and with the help of a servant named Burnens he carried out a series of experiments that laid the foundations of our scientific knowledge of the life history of the honeybee.
His nurse Nanette grew senile before his reputation was widely established. He was sorry for that. She had been, however unintentionally, his inspiration through his youth. It was Nanette who had nurtured his curiosity in the world - he had her to thank for his expertise.
If a girl leads her lover past a beehive and the bees rush out to sting him, she knows that he has been unfaithful. If a man carries the bill of a woodpecker in his pocket he will never be stung. When a swarm passes a front door it means a stranger will arrive the next day. If a swarm lands on the house, the owner will become rich. If a swarm lands on a rotten branch, it will bring misfortune. And if a man cuts down a tree filled with bees, there will be a death in the family.
Honeybees are skilled in astronomy and long anticipated Copernicus's diagrams in the patterns of their dances. Honeybees can predict rain. Honeybees can even suck their young, completely formed, from flowers.
In general, the eighteenth century had been a dull century for science so far, in Francis Huber's opinion. In the face of the controversy over the source of life, van Leeuwenhoek's compound microscope was consulted with increasing determination, and now that minute structures could be observed directly, scientists set out to describe the particular functions of individual organs, believing that the microscope, in time, would expose the true nature of life. So science was concerned primarily with descriptive work, and the question of a special vital animating spirit was left hanging, like the conclusion of a novel. Vitalists and mechanists alike simply kept on reading and charting the world - they'd find the answer eventually, if they were patient and persistent.
While other men made taffeta pants for toads to collect specimens of toad semen, Francis Huber was exploring the complex system inside the beehive. From the beginning of history, honeybees had been a rich source of metaphorical illumination, used by writers to reveal fundamental aspects of human nature. Francis Huber decided that if philosophers could make so many useful and expansive comparisons, he could do the same under the guise of science - eventually his research would be used to heal the human body, as truth is used to heal the soul.
He had learned from his nurse Nanette the importance of developing his five senses when he was a young boy. She had taught him how to roll a chestnut between the sole of his shoe and the ground and then to peel it with a penknife. She had fed him honey, chocolate, and milk laced with kirschwasser. She had pinched and petted and bathed him and combed his hair until it was as smooth as silk. Thanks to her, Francis was more alive - if life is measured by awareness - than most of us, even after he'd lost the faculty of sight. Each new sensation of touch, taste, sound, and smell had its analogue in a memory that he was quick to retrieve; each new experience evoked a vivid déj<*_>a-grave<*/> vu, and often he felt as though he were repeating his life. Because he seemed able to remember whatever he'd experienced, Francis convinced those around him that he knew everything about everything. His grandeur grew as his experiences accumulated - his parents, his servant, and later his wife considered him the genius that his tutor had announced him to be when he was seventeen years old.
With such sensitivity to sensation, it was natural that he cultivated the parallel faculty: imagination. With remarkable accuracy he could imagine the experiences of others; he had watched attentively for fifteen years, and now with a few sensory clues he could follow people in his mind almost as though he were observing them. The cook seasoning stew, the gardener pulling weeds, children ice-skating, his parents sipping wine - he experienced these in the richest detail. Perhaps empathy rather than imagination would more accurately describe this skill. But whatever it might be called, it was a skill that turned this ordinary man into an extraordinary scientist. His knowledge of bees, tested and confirmed by his servant's observations, went unsurpassed for decades.
A genius? No, he was too steady to be a genius, too content, too appreciative. He had no capacity for a genius's agony. Each little discovery delighted him, sometimes even made him laugh aloud, and opened up possibilities of new discoveries. He spent his days imagining the life of bees and with the help of Burnens comparing his imagination with the facts, facts that were like sweet tastes, like spoonfuls of honey, satisfying and enticing. Somewhere deep inside him was buried a sorrow, perhaps with a tinge of bitterness, over the great loss of his sight. But life to him was too full of pleasant surprises to dwell on what he'd lost.</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="23">
Crocodilopolis
Matt Forbeck
There I was, nursing my lunch at a corner table in Rick's American Cafe and wondering - amongst other things - how I could talk Afif into shutting off the elevator music streaming out of his damned juke-box, when all hell broke loose. The front door of the joint suddenly smashed flat down on the floor. It narrowly missed crushing the bouncer sitting on the bar stool beside the now empty doorway.
Now, I've never been overly fond of that man - I mean the bouncer, whose name I can never seem to remember - but I winced when the first of Wu Han's shocktroopers stomped into the saloon and shot what's-his-name down in cold blood. Immediately after which, of course, I grabbed my beer, turned over the table in front of me and sat down behind it.
I was scrabbled around behind the table. I set down my beer and drew my gun, making sure it was loaded. The rest of the Pharaoh's boys in bronze skin tones waltzed into the place and gunned down everything that was standing. Luckily, the rest of Rick's patrons had taken their cue from the falling door and had quickly found shelter from the hail of lead falling in their general directions. No one else died.
Old joke: Why is Mobius so desperate for cash? So he can afford to buy shirts for his soldiers. Okay, so I only heard it a few weeks ago, but I've been told it's been around for a while.
The bullets hit other things, though. The bottles lining the back wall of the bar burst into sparkling shards of alcohol-covered glass. Light fixtures shattered, half-finished meals spattered off tables and holes pocked the walls. Providentially, a bullet shot right thoughthrough the front of the jukebox and cut short 'The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B' in the middle of its twenty-second playing of the day. Long live rock and roll.
No matter what you may read in your favorite pulp magazine, discretion is the better part of valor. I didn't see any sense in wasting my precious hide by capping one of the uninvented guests with my Peacemaker just to be repaid by being knocked six feet under by a burst from a KK81. So I just sat back, sipped the head off of my beer and wondered where the hell those so-called Mystery Men were when you needed them? The old radio-show Shadow might know, but these real-life downs couldn't find their own shoelaces without directions. Eventually, the racket let up.
Then I heard a voice shout out something in Arabic. Although I never admit it in public, I do have a rudimentary grasp of the language. It comes in handy in my line of work. People say the damnedest things right in front of you when they think you can't understand them. But this was Terran Arabic, Mobius' language, the Arabic of the invaders, and it still gives me problems from time to time. But I did catch the man dropping my name.
Nobody had to tell me that when a squad of shocktroopers beats down the door of your favorite speakeasy and starts slinging lead before even asking your name, it's time to skedaddle. There was a back door near my table. No coincidence - I had planned it that way. Before the guys in the white skirts and way out-of-style headgear could punctuate their question with another round of gunplay, I was gone, lost in the winding, narrow streets and alleyways of Cairo.
This was not the Cairo I had visited in the more carefree days of my youth. It had been changed with the coming of the invaders and now resembled something more out of an Indiana Jones flick than any city ever seen on this earth. Even stranger, the Pharaoh's artificial sun burned overhead, perpetually in the high noon position, adding its heat to the already sweltering Egyptian day. Still, one sun or two, I knew where I was going and how to get there, and I arrived soon enough.
Omar had given me a key to his bar in case of just such a situation as this one. Rumrunners weren't exactly popular with Wu Han right now, and you never knew when you were going to need a safe place to hide. At that point in my life, I was thankful to have a safehouse to run to.
Particularly since smuggling liquor was just a cover for what I was actually doing. I mean, sure, I brought booze into the Nile Empire, but that was only to help pay the bills. It was what I bought out of the country that was important: guns.
To all people in Egypt, I was nothing more than a small time rumrunner. To Omar, my contact with the Egyptian resistance movement, and Pilar, my contact with the Israeli-NATO forces, I was a godsend. The weapons Omar and his people supplied me with went straight to Pilar and her people, who distributed them to the multinational armed forces stationed in Israel.
The soldiers were able to use the Terran weapons throughout the Nile Empire, where their own armament was useless. Thus, Omar, Pilar and myself were able to do some good for our own version of reality and turn a tidy profit for our efforts. Not that any of us cared about the money, though. This had to do with honor. We'd have done the same for nothing at all.
Omar's was virtually empty when I sneaked into it through the back door. The place was in the same state as Rick's had been when I'd left it. The joint's owner and namesake was busily sweeping up when I walked out of the back room and into the saloon. He was the only one there - unless you counted the odd body or two on the floor.
Omar looked up and dropped his broom when I entered. A look of surprise crossed his dark-bearded face, then a smile. "Angel, my friend! I'm so happy to see that you are not dead." We embraced quickly, and then I asked him what had happened.
"You old Spaniard, are your ears stuffed with wax? Wu Han has declared war on illegal liquor, the kind that you bring into this fair city. My establishment is simply the latest casualty in this battle." The burly Egyptian picked up his broom and resumed sweeping.
I checked the faces on the bodies. One of them belonged to Basaam, a bartender who had always served me liberally strong drinks. The others were not familiar. As I stood over the bartender, staring at him, Omar stopped sweeping for a moment and said with great intent, "My friend, they were looking for you."
I stopped feeling sorry for the dead and decided to concentrate on the living instead. "They asked for me by name?"
"Yes, just before they shot Basaam. You look troubled." Concern showed clearly on Omar's well-tanned face.
I explained to him that a similar thing had just happened to me in Rick's Cafe just minutes ago while I'd been waiting to meet Pilar. Omar's concerned look turned suddenly to one of surprise mixed with fear. "Then she is not with you?"
"What? No, I told you I was waiting to meet her. Why?"
"The shocktroopers, my friend, they left you a message, one I did not believe could be true."
Omar was scaring me now. I grabbed him by the shoulders and held him firmly at arm's length, staring hard into his saddened eyes. "What message? What did they say?"
"The leader, he told me that they have her captive. That they are now holding Pilar, but that they want you. If you do not come forward soon, she will die."
I pushed Omar away and tried to absorb what he had said. Failing that, I dashed out through the front door of the cool, dark saloon and into the hot, sunlit street. I leaped over a grey-haired old drunk in filthy robes who was lying outside the doorway.
By the time I made it to my apartment, my heart was pounding against my rib cage like it wanted out. I was almost out of breath. Shouting Pilar's name, I burst into the loft over the corner grocery store, only to trip over a small stool that had been tossed in front of the doorway. Even as I was falling and grumbling to myself about someone's poor choice in rearranging the furniture, shots rang out, and two bullets pierced the air where my head had been.
Lucky.
As I hit the floor, I rolled to my left and took cover behind a high-backed couch that was there. Then I pulled out my gun and took a deep breath. The shots had come from near the window on the other side of the room.
I counted three and then popped up on my knees, saw two soldiers looking in my direction and drew a bead on the man holding the smoking gun. After pumping three bullets into the shocktrooper's bare chest, I realized that I probably should've shot his pal first. He had the Tommy gun.
I ducked back down, hugged the floor and wormed my way underneath the seat of the couch while a burst from the submachine gun stitched a deadly design across its back. Using the barrel of my revolver to poke aside the fringe that hung from the couch to the floor, I saw the soldier glaring nervously at his handiwork. He was probably wondering whether or not it was safe to look behind it.
My first shot tagged him in his right arm, and he dropped his gun. Then he turned and ran for the balcony. I started to crawl out from under the couch, but halfway out I realized that he'd be long gone before I'd make it.
Just as the shocktrooper made it outside, my second shot caught him in his right shoulder-blade, spinning him around against the railing. Pain and fear warred across his face. My last shot pierced his forehead and knocked off his headdress, sending him crashing to the street below.
Crawling out from beneath the couch, I ran to the balcony and looked down. A crowd was already beginning to form around the fallen soldier. More of Wu Han's men would be here soon.
The apartment had been ransacked, torn to pieces, presumably by the two recently deceased men. Could they have been looking for a clue as to the location of Abdul's warehouse? Did these idiots think I'd leave a map to the place lying around?
I kept the location to that place secret, even the fact that I knew where it was. That kind of knowledge can be dangerous to its possessors. As such, I had told nobody that I knew where it was, not even Pilar. In fact, I don't think even Abdul himself was aware of my knowledge, and I wasn't about to tell him.
The man who'd let me in on the whereabouts of Abdul's hideout had apparently been a bit too free with that information for his own good. My favorite English drinking companion, old George Howe, the independently wealthy ex-actor, had stumbled onto the place during one of his infamous binges. Within the week, his body was found in a Chinatown alley. His tongue was missing.
He'd been crawling over the moonlit rooftops of the city in an effort to evade the soldiers that had chased him out of King Tut's, where he'd started a brawl with one of Mobius' men over how silly he thought grown men looked in skirts. A quick fist fight and a dash up a back stairwell later, George found himself leaping from one Cairo rooftop to another, leaving his pursuers vainly hunting for him in the labyrinth of alleyways behind the bar. It was during his escape that George made the discovery that would change his life and mine.
As he was strolling along across one particularly large rooftop, George noticed a patch of brightness streaming out through a skylight before him.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="24">
VERY OLD BONES
fire and brimstone so tortured peter phelan that he had to paint them to get rid of them
fiction
By WILLIAM KENNEDY
IN EARLY childhood Peter Phelan had heard the Malachi events spoken of in cryptic bits by his mother, later heard more from his brother Francis, who was seven when it happened, and in time heard it garbled by street-corner wags who repeated the mocking rhyme:
If you happen to be a Neighbor,
If you happen to be a witch.
Stay the hell away from Malachi,
That loony son of a bitch.
When the story took him over, Peter moved out of portrait sketching into scenes of dynamic action and surreal drama that in their early stages emerged as homage to Goya's Caprichos, Disparates and Los desastres de la guerra. But in his extended revelation of the Malachi and Lizzie tragedy (and mindful of Goya's credo that the painter selected from the universe whatever seemed appropriate, that he chose features from many individuals and their acts, and combined them so ingeniously that he earned the title of inventor and not servile copyist), Peter imposed his own original vision on scandalous history, creating a body of work that owed only an invisible inspiration to Goya.
He reconstituted the faces and corpora of Lizzie and Malachi and others, the principal room and hearth of the McIlhenny three-room cottage, the rushing waters of the Staatskill that flowed past it, the dark foreboding of the sycamore grove where dwelled the Good Neighbors, as Crip Devlin arcanely called those binate creatures whose diabolical myths brought on that terrible night in June of 1887.
His first completed painting, The Dance, was of Lizzie by the sycamores, her bare legs and feet visible to mid-thigh in a forward step, or leap or kick, her left hand hiking the hem of her skirt to free her legs for the dance. But is it a dance? In the background of the painting is the stand of trees that played such a major role in Lizzie's life, and to the left of her looms a shadow of a man, or perhaps it is a half-visible tree in the dusky light. If it is a tree, it is beckoning to Lizzie. If it is a man, perhaps he is about to dance with her.
But is that a dance she is doing, or is it, as one who saw her there said of it, an invitation to her thighs?
In the painting, it is a dance, and it is an invitation.
Why would Lizzie McIlhenny, a plain beauty of divine form and pale brown hair to the middle of her back, choose to dance with a tree, or a shadow, or a man (if man it ever was or could be) at the edge of a meadow, just as a summer night began its starry course? Aged 26, married ten years to Malachi McIlhenny, a man of formidable girth whose chief skill was his strength, a man of ill luck and no prospects, Lizzie (nee Elizabeth Cronin) had within her the spirit of a sensuous bird.
Malachi imposed no limits of space on their marriage, and so she came and went like a woman without a husband, dutiful to their childless home, ever faithful to Malachi and, when the bad luck came to him, his canny helpmate: first trapping yellow birds in the meadow and selling them to friends for 50 cents each, but leaving that when she found that fashioning rag birds out of colored cloth, yarn, thread, feathers and quills was far more profitable; that she could sell them for a dollar, or two, depending on their size and beauty, to the John G. Myers dry-goods and fancy-goods store which, in turn, would sell them for four and five dollars as fast as Lizzie could make them.
At the end of a week in early June, she made and sold 16 birds, all of a different hue, and earned 27 dollars, more money than Malachi had ever earned from wages in any two weeks, sometimes three. The money so excited Lizzie that, when crossing the meadow on her way home from the store, she kicked off her shoes, threw herself into the air and into the wind, danced until breath left her, and then collapsed into the tall grass at the edge of the sycamore grove, a breathless victim of jubilation.
When she regained her breath and sat up, brushing bits of grass from her eyelashes, she thought she saw a man's form in the shadowy interior of the grove, saw him reach his hand toward her, as if to help her stand. Perhaps it was only the rustling of the leaves or the sibilance of the night wind, but Lizzie thought she heard the words "the force of a gray horse," or so it was later said of her. Then, when she pulled herself erect, she was gripping not the hand of a man but the low-growing branch of a sycamore.
Malachi's troubles crystallized in a new way when he lost his only cow to a Swedish cardsharp named Lindqvist, a recently arrived lumber handler who joined the regular stud poker game at Black Jack McCall's Lumber District Saloon, and who bested Malachi in a game that saw jacks fall before kings. Lindqvist came to the cow shed behind Malachi's cottage and, with notable lack of regret, led Malachi's only cow into a territorial future beyond the reach of all McIlhennys.
The lost cow seemed to confirm to Malachi that his life would always be a tissue of misfortune. At the urging of his older brother, Matty, who had come to Albany in 1868 and found work on a lumber barge, Malachi, at the age of 17, had sold all that the family owned and left Ireland in 1870, along with his ten-year-old sister, Kathryn, and their ailing father, Eamon, who anticipated good health and prosperity in the new world. In Albany the three penniless greenhorns settled in with Matty at his Tivoli Hollow shanty on the edge of Arbor Hill. Within six months Matty was in jail on a seven-year sentence for beating a man to death in a saloon fight. Within a year he was dead himself, cause officially unknown, the unofficial word being that a guard, brother of the man Matty killed, broke Matty's head with an iron pipe when the opportunity arose; and then, within two years, Eamon McIlhenny was dead at 59 of ruined lungs. These dreadful events, coming so soon after the family's arrival in the land of promise and plenty, seemed to forbodeforebode a dark baggage, a burden as fateful as the one the McIlhennys tried to leave behind in County Monaghan.
Malachi did not yield to any fate. He labored ferociously and saved his money. And, as he approached marriage, he bought a small plot of country land on Staats Lane, a narrow and little-used road that formed a northern boundary of the vast Fitzgibbon (formerly Staats) estate, and built on it, with his own hands, the three-room cottage that measured seven long paced deep by nine long paces wide, the size of a devil's matchbox. In 1882 Malachi moved into the cottage with his bride, the sweet and fair Lizzie Cronin, a first-generational child of Albany.
After five years the marriage was still childless, and Lizzie slowly taught herself to be a seamstress as a way of occupying her time, making clothing for herself and Malachi. But, with so few neighbors, she found other sewing work scarce and her days remained half empty, with Malachi working long and erratic hours. And so Lizzie looked for her pleasure to the birds, the trees, the meadows of the Fitzgibbon estate and the Staatskill, a creek with a panoramic cascade, churning waters and placid pools. Malachi saw his wife developing into a fey creature of the open air, an elfin figure given to the sudden eruption off her tongue of melodies that Malachi did not recognize. She began to seem like an otherworldly being to Malachi.
In the spring of 1887, two days after Malachi lost his cow, the waters of the Hudson River, as usual, spilled over their banks and rose into the lumber mills, storage sheds and piles of logs that were the elemental architecture of Sage's lumberyard, where Malachi worked as a handler. One log slipped its berth in the rising waters, knocked Malachi down, and pinned his left shoulder against a pile of lumber, paralyzing his left arm and reducing the strength in his torso by half, perhaps more. So weakened was he that he could no longer work as a handler, that useless left arm an enduring enemy.
He found work one-handedly sickling field grass on the Fitzgibbon land, work that provided none of the fellowship that prevailed among the lumber handlers. He worked alone, came home alone, brooded alone until the arrival of his wife, who grew more peculiar with every moment of Malachi's increasing solitude. He topped her at morning, again at evening after she returned from her communion with the birds of the field, and he failed to create either new life in Lizzie or invincible erectness in himself.
To test himself against nature, he sought out the woman known to the canallers and lumber handlers as the Whore of Limerick, her reputation as an overused fuckboat appealing to Malachi's free-floating concupiscence. After several iniquitous successes that proved the problem existed wholly in Lizzie, Malachi abandoned the fuckboat and sought solace again in Lizzie's embrace, which cuddled his passion and put it to sleep. He entered heavily into the drink then, not only the ale that so relieved and enlivened him, but also the potsheen that Crip Devlin brewed in his shed.
Drink in such quantity, a departure for Malachi, moved him to exotic behavior. He lay on his marriage bed and contemplated the encunted life. Cunt was life, he decided. Lizzie came to him as he entered into a spermatic frenzy, naked before her and God, ready to ride forever into the moist black depths of venery, indeed even now riding the newly arrived body of a woman he had never seen, whose cunt changed color and shape with every nuance of the light, whose lewd postures brimmed his vessel. Ah love, ah fuckery, how you enhance the imperial power of sin! When he was done with her, she begged for another ride, and he rode her with new frenzy; and when he was done again, she begged again and he did her again, and then a fourth ride and a fifth; and, as he gave her all the lift and pull that was left to him, his member grew bloody in his hand. When the woman saw this, she vanished, and Lizzie wept.
The following morning when he awoke, Malachi found not only his wife already gone from the house, he also found himself bereft of his privities, all facets of them, the groin of his stomach and thighs as hairless, seamless and flat as those groins on the heavenly angels that adorned the walls of Sacred Heart church. Here was a curse on a man, if ever a curse was. God was down on Malachi - God or the Devil, one.
Malachi clothed himself, drained half a jug of potsheen, all he had, then pulled the bedcovers over his head. He would hide himself while he considered what manner of force would deprive a man not only of his blood kin, his strength, his labor and his cow, but now, also, his only privities. He would hide himself and contemplate how a man was to about living without privities; more important, he would think about ways of launching a counterattack on God, or the Devil, or whoever had taken them, and he would fight that thief of life with all his strength to put those privities back where they belonged.
In the painting he called The Conspiracy, Malachi's nephew, Peter Phelan, created the faces of Malachi and Crip Devlin as they sat in Malachi's primitive kitchen with their noses a foot apart, the condiments and implements of their plan on the table in front of them, or on the floor, or hanging over the fireplace.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="25">
The Land Below
Stewart Wieck
Field Report #083
To: Overgovernor Red Hand
Message Origin: The Land of the Dead
After almost three months of searching and reporting, Field Major Hopten-Ra is confident that we are in the correct region of the Land of the Dead. Soon we embark upon the mission you wisely bade us to pursue. Hopten-Ra has declared a two day stop to rest and prepare for the fantastic journey that is before us.
It is almost humorous where this search has brought us. Following everyone's expectations, we began looking in remote regions of the Land of the Dead, as cited in my earlier reports. It seems that the prize has been under our noses for quite some time. We will begin our descent from a region almost overflowing with mining operations.
When we referred to the diagrams and cross-sectional maps provided by the Operations Office, we immediately noticed a handful of unexplored caverns. Finally, only this morning, a search partly led by Dr. Nasca Belar returned with news of a perpendicular tunnel the scientist feels is our answer. While I questioned your appointment of a scientist such as Nasca Belar to this mission, your wisdom, as always, has been borne out. My magic suggests Nasca Belar's hypothesis is well-founded and thus Hopten-Ra's decision to descend.
Unless this is not the tunnel we are searching for, this will be my last report until we return. I anticipate news of a wondrous discovery that may well allow Pharaoh Mobius to gain an edge over the other High Lords.
Your Loyal Servant,
Engineer Takken Soth
***
Kord stood tensed in the center of the small clearing, his powerful, tall frame ready to respond the slightest signal of danger. The sabertooth tiger stalking him was somewhere in the overgrown brush at the edge of the clearing, but the animal was too quiet to be heard. Too crafty for Kord to see it. So Kord spun every few seconds in a short arc in a random direction. Left. Left. Right. Left. Right.
Then Kord realized that he was simply tiring himself as the big cat waited patiently somewhere nearby. So he tried a strategy he had taught himself in the months past. Still tensed for action, Kord fixed his stance and kept his eyes forward. He flexed his nostrils to make a show of searching for a scent, but he couldn't sniff out the well-groomed and clean tiger.
If he remained poised like this for long enough, the tiger could try a surprise assault from behind, even if he suspected a trap. It was a trap, and a good one.
The slightly luminous glow emitted from the south that illuminated the world was at Kord's back. Kord carefully scanned the ground in front of him.
There it was. A four-legged shadow flashed onto the ground and hurtled toward Kord's own shadow. The almost naked man quickly dropped to a prone position. A well muscled, giant tiger sailed over Kord. The beast's tawny hide was taut over working muscles. A paw raked down at Kord, but the man evaded the tiger.
Snarling, the tiger landed gracefully, the muscles of his forelegs bunching to absorb the impact of the large frame.
Kord couldn't match such a foe, but all he needed to do was evade the beast. Kord did a quick backward somersault. He made ready to dash into the underbrush, but a growl from the tiger brought him short. The sabertooth had already spun around and was facing Kord. If Kord turned his back to flee, the tiger could sink his long curving canines deeply into white, hairless flesh.
Kord smiled as he settled into a ready-stance and prepared for the next assault.
The tiger did not wait long. He sprang and slashed out with a huge paw. Kord sidestepped the blow with reflexes born of survival instinct. The blow went wide.
Already unbalanced from the poor strike, the tiger quickly tried to recover. However, Kord didn't give the animal the chance. He swept a foot at the tiger's other front leg and kicked it from the ground. Now unbalanced, the tiger fell to his side with the help a hard nudge from Kord.
The surprised tiger twisted his body to complete the roll and came up on his feet, but the clearing was empty. Only a slight wavering in the heavy brush told the tiger where Kord had broken through.
The tiger exploded into a run. The same brush which once gave the tiger the advantage of cover, now hindered him more than the long-legged and acrobatic man who bounced and hopped quickly over any large obstructions. The tiger's body was built for ambushing, not high-speed chases.
Kord didn't dare glance over his shoulder. The temptation was tremendous, but when the tiger drew close enough to pounce then he would be able to hear the crashing of the animal's movements.
Moments later, when Kord was halfway to the falls, he knew that he had won. He had escaped. Or so he thought. Ahead, Kord spied the shadow of long, curving teeth. A few steps more, before he had time to slow, Kord was able to make out the animal entirely. He chuckled to himself. It was only Sharsa.
The female sabertooth continued to rest on the jungle floor as she watched Kord flip through the air over her. Kord landed on the run and left a soft 'mew' floating in the air behind him.
Kord wished he could see the reproaching look Sharsa was sure to give the pursuing Shakart. The strong male tiger would be embarrassed for some time over the incident. After all, Sharsa was a young female yet without a mate.
Soon, Kord reached the falls. Where the water dropped off the river was only as wide as three times his own height, but that was too dangerous and probably too far for the bulky sabertooth to leap. Kord could make it easily with the help of a vine that conveniently hung over the center of the precipice.
Expecting the vine to be there, Kord did not slacken his pace. As he drew near he succumbed and glanced over his shoulder to see if Shakart would witness his triumphant escape. The tiger was within sight for the foliage became less thick near the falls.
When Kord redirected his attention on the nearby falls, he startled in surprise. His vine was gone! It was too late to stop. He would slide over the edge and plummet into the churning waters below if he tried. When his toes lipped over the edge of the earth, Kord leaped with all his might. His arms spun in circles in mid-air and he crash landed on the other side.
Kord sprang to his feet, enraged. Shakart growled with pleasure, the vine dangling from a crooked paw. Kord couldn't help but smile too. Kord may have won the game, but the sabertooth tiger had earned the last word.
"Very good, my friend," chuckled Kord. With quick motions of his hands he told the cat the trick was a bit too dangerous.
***
A bare-chested, muscular man kicked sand onto the backs of the sleeping soldiers. "Up, swine," he commanded. "It is time to serve your master, Pharaoh Mobius."
The squad of ten Egyptian soldiers roused themselves amidst mutters of how well they had served during the past three months of tromping through jungles and deserts. Field Major Hopten-Ra returned to his own tent to prepare for the day's descent.
"Get your equipment together, Nasca Belar. I will not suffer delay because you cannot find an all-important transducer," Hopten-Ra continued.
Hopten-Ra hurled the command in the direction of a wizened crone. She sat hunched in the sand over a pile of wires, metal bits, and other seemingly useless equipment. Nasca Belar looked up and squinted into the rising sun. She could make out the confident stride of Hopten-Ra, one of Red Hand's most able commanders and therefore the perfect commission for this quest. Besides, he had helped Pharaoh Mobius conquer several worlds before this one called Earth. Her deft hands continued their work of collecting the pile of supplies even when her attention was diverted. Those hands could perform scientific miracles, so such a simple task was taken for granted.
Nasca Belar watched as Engineer Takken Soth hurried to the entrance of Hopten-Ra's tent. The scientist knew that Takken Soth distrusted her. She did not desire for the attention or appreciation of such an obsequious beast, especially one that was an engineer. But the honor that Red Hand had bestowed upon her, with instructions from Mobius himself, was certainly reason enough to endure the young man's unending genuflecting.
Takken Soth's long robes flowed around him as he stopped at the tent. "Hopten-Ra, I am ready to depart. We must begin our journey at once."
"I knew you were ready, Takken Soth. That's why I did not command you to prepare," came the harsh reply from inside the tent.
Nasca Belar smiled at Hopten-Ra's quick response. The Field Major was impressed by kowtowing. She liked that in him. If she served Mobius well and was rewarded by permission to draw energy from the Pharaoh's Idol, his Darkness Device. She would youthen her tired, old body and let the Major know just how much she appreciated him.
Hopten-Ra stepped out of the tent, now fully dressed in his officer's regalia: a gold-plated headdress, a large medallion of Ra on a thong around his neck, a revolver in a holster strapped to his chest, and a strong steel saber at his waist. He shouted to the soldiers, "Break this tent down." Hopten-Ra's spiked beard stuck angrily in the direction of the still waking soldiers.
However, three of the soldiers were quick to respond. Their headdresses swirled about their faces as they made quick work of the simple task. They packed the tent into separate bundles, strapping them to the backs of two soldiers who did not move quickly enough to help break the tent down. The two soldiers had to carry these packs plus the climbing gear that already burdened them.
The first gust of wind of the new day blew the sand into the faces of the Egyptians as they began the short trip to the nearby slave mines. Hopten-Ra had insisted that he spend his last night above ground in sight of the glorious heavens. Takken Soth, of course, commended him for such dedication, but Nasca Belar knew the Major simply wanted fresh air.
Ten minutes later, the group arrived at the entrance to the gold mines. Slaves, taken mostly from the nearby Israeli front, worked the mines in shift. Most of those who entered the mines spent their lives inside. Only the ones charged with the favored job of pushing carts laden with ore-filled rocks had the pleasure of ever seeing the brilliant golden disk of the sun. They had to shield their eyes whenever they left the mines. The guards told them that it was the forgiving eye of Pharaoh Mobius watching over them, though they knew it was the god Ra watching over everyone.
Hopten-Ra despised the additional delay. The rigid command structure of the Tenth Empire demanded that he deal with Chufu, the bureaucrat in charge of the slave mines. Unfortunately, Chufu was waiting for him, as scheduled, near the mouth of the mine. Hopten-Ra would rather have honored the agreement by stopping, but not waiting for the fat, underworked man to arrive.
"Field Major," Chufu shouted gleefully, clapping his hands in greeting. A half dozen soldiers stood behind where they restrained two Israeli men.
"We are departing, Chufu," Hopten-Ra explained. "Please accept this as your official notification of our departure time."
"Yes, of course. I understand that your mission is of great importance. I hear it even has the approval of the Pharaoh himself." Chufu winked at Hopten-Ra for some sort of verification of the last bit of news, but the Field Major did not bite.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="26">
No Pardon For McAlester's "Mad Artist"
By GLENN SHIRLEY
Conrad Maas was one of the strangest, if not the most unfriendly, characters on the Oklahoma Territory frontier. He was contemptuous of others, taciturn, square-jawed, beak-nosed, and had dark blue, brooding eyes and a long bushy beard. Maas was thirty years old in 1897 when he came from his native Germany to Blaine County - a part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Indian reservation opened to homestead settlement by the land run of April 19, 1892.
Though sparsely settled, the county was blessed with fertile, sandy loam soil, scenic beauty, and plenty of water - bounded on the northeast by the Cimarron River, traversed in the center by the North Canadian, and bound on the south by the South Canadian. It boasted immense crops of wheat, corn, and cotton, and prospects for the next year's crops could not have been better when Conrad Maas appeared in the county seat of Watonga with considerable money and his eighteen-year-old wife, Martha, a buxom blonde woman with sparkling eyes.
The couple took a claim in the most remote of the rural districts, four miles west of Bridgeport - a crossing on the South Canadian to the Wichita-Caddo reservation where cattlemen still grazed large herds under lease agreements with the Indians. In the side of a hill, Maas constructed and furnished a two-room dugout, roofed and lined it with split logs, and equipped it with a fireplace for winter. The following spring, he planted corn and grain sorghums.
Maas worked hard in his primitive surroundings but had difficulty adjusting to the democratic ways of his scattered neighbors. He was especially hostile to the Indians and cowboys south of the river. When he did speak it was with a guttural, almost unintelligible accent that carried a haughty insolence. His saving graces were his unflagging industry and obvious love for his pretty wife. They were often seen in the fields together and walked hand-in-hand on the streets when shopping in Watonga.
Martha adored her husband, and his attitude toward others seemed not to embarrass her. She spoke English better than Maas, and laughed and chatted with the townswomen. She invited some of them to her dugout home to see the heirlooms and artifacts her husband had brought from Europe, but few accepted. Maas's ill-tempered glances made it clear he did not care for visitors.
Many thought he just wanted to keep his young bride to himself; that he liked the country but wanted no truck with the people who lived there. They reckoned he had a right to be left alone.
Watonga's early frame buildings were being replaced by stone and brick structures, and Maas occasionally worked in town as a bricklayer. On the job he squabbled with fellow workers and ate away from them. At night he walked the streets restlessly. He carried himself strictly erect, with squared shoulders and a precise tread that led many to believe he had served in the German army before coming to America.
Such speculation gained credence when he began receiving letters from the old country. Some of them, as Watonga's postmaster revealed, bore return addresses of a Count von Maas and a Count von Hohenstein. One bore the imperial stamp of the Kaiser in Berlin. A German storekeeper in Watonga suggested quietly that Conrad Maas was a high-born member of the Hohenzollerns, Prussia's ruling dynasty.
Maas remained tight-lipped, and Blaine County citizens asked no questions.
As the months passed, Maas grew sullen and brooding. Simple farm life became more and more distateful. He quit his brick-laying job and only appeared in Watonga to make some minor purchase. Martha Maas no longer accompanied him. She complained to Bridgeport neighbor Nancy Banks that her husband spent all of his time examining his old military papers and relics. He was to be restored to the command of his battalion in the German army, which angered her - she had deserted her home and country for love of him and did not wish to return. They quarreled frequently.
On a bitterly cold day - Monday, December 5, 1898 - Maas drove into a Watonga livery stable, saying he would like to board his team while away on urgent business. He carried a suitcase and seemed anxious to catch the train for Kansas City.
Asked about his wife, Maas said, "It iss not possible for her to go -" He hesitated, then confided to the surprised attendant, "She iss going to 'ave a baby. I didn't vant to burden her with care of the animals. But I am vorried about her safety in this country vile I am gone."
"Can she use a gun?" the attendant inquired.
"Martha has a shotgun and iss a good marksman," Maas replied.
"She'll be all right then, if you won't be gone long," the attendant assured him.
"I vill be gone a veek - maybe longer," Maas said.
Word soon spread of the German's departure and his wife's delicate condition. Snow began falling that evening and continued two days. When the weather broke the morning of December 8, Nancy Banks decided to look in on the woman, and drove to the Maas farm.
The place seemed deserted. No smoke came from the chimney and there were no tracks in the snow that had drifted across the doorstep. Mrs. Banks pounded on the locked door but got no answer. Puzzled and alarmed, she returned to her buggy and made a hard drive to Sheriff J.K. Kenney's office at Watonga.
Sheriff Kenney and Deputy J.D. Marion rode to the dugout at once. Unable to rouse anyone, they broke in and found a scene of horror.
It appeared that Martha Maas had just finished breakfast when an intruder surprised her. She had attempted to defend herself with a double-barreled shotgun, which the attacker seized, emptying both barrels at her. The weapon lay in a pool of dried blood under the table. The woman had left a trail of gore from the kitchen into the bedroom, where her body lay on the floor, "clothing badly torn and a large gunshot wound in the left side." The second blast had "blown her head almost entirely off." Stray pellets were imbedded in the kitchen ceiling and walls. Portions of her flesh were "distributed about both rooms, having been torn away and mutilated by rats."
The dugout had not been pilfered, and the lawmen discounted robbery as a motive. The killer had locked the door as he fled, the officers theorized, to discourage early discovery of his crime by a passerby.
While Kenney proceeded with the investigation, Marion hightailed back to town for the undertaker and coroner. By nightfall, the coroner had made a cursory examination, and the body was removed to Watonga. More than a score of angry citizens joined Kenney and Marion during the night in an effort to pick up the killer's trail or a clue to his identity.
"It is a case of cold, cowardly murder," observed the Watonga Republican. "The demon who committed it should be punished to the full extent of the law."
The hunters, like Kenney and Marion, directed their suspicions first toward the enemies of the dead woman's husband. Maas had made many Blaine County people hate him, but most thought it a dirty shame that someone had taken it out on his wife. A few mentioned the trouble he'd had with the Wichita-Caddo reservation cowboys passing through the farm looking for stray cattle; some pointed to the "bad" Indians that hung out drunk in the South Canadian bottoms, none of whom were beyond attacking a lone woman when full of forbidden "firewater."
There was also concern for the introverted German himself. The death of his beloved Martha would only aggravate his sullenness.
The investigation might have gone off on a dozen tangents, except for two things. A final examination of the woman's body revealed she was not pregnant, and that she was already dead the day Maas left town.
Kenney and Marion made another search of the dugout. They discovered that Maas had taken his military relics and nearly all his clothes, indicating he had no intention of returning. What he did leave were several letters he had received from Germany. He had cached them behind a loose stone in the fireplace and apparently forgotten them in the haste of departure.
The officers took the letters to the German storekeeper in Watonga. "Can you tell us what they say?" asked Kenney.
The grocer scanned the writings and his brow knitted.
"Maas was in the army, all right," he said. "Held the rank of major. He's a high-born member of the Hohenzollerns, the ruling dynasty - a friend of young Wilhelm himself, who is head of the Order of Eagles, a secret society sworn to uphold and protect one another. His brother-in-law is Supreme Judge Reiss of Berlin. Count von Maas is a brother and Count von Hohenstein an uncle. They are urging him to return to his homeland. Wilhelm has even agreed to restore his commission if he gives up Martha Muller."
"Who's Martha Muller?" the sheriff asked.
"Must have been his wife's maiden name. Seems he gave up his army career to marry a commoner." The storekeeper flipped a page. "Here it is - this passage, 'When this ridiculous fascination has passed, you will find yourself in need of your own country and your own kind. You understand, of course, that the girl will never be allowed to re-enter Germany.'
"Seems Martha Muller was the root of his trouble - caused him to resign his commisssion and elope with her to America," the storekeeper continued. "Seems your next step, sheriff, is to find Conrad Maas."
The Watonga railroad agent looked surprised when the officers questioned him. "Why, Maas didn't go to Kansas City at all," the agent said. "He took a train east. By now he's probably in some East Coast seaport trying to board a ship for Germany."
Kenney vowed to keep Maas from sailing if he had to "call every port from New Orleans to Boston."
On authority of a murder warrant, issued December 9 by Blaine County Attorney J.H. Campbell, the officers were compiling a list of embarkation points when a telegram from Canadian County Sheriff Cosby at El Reno informed Kenney, "I think we have your man."
Kenney and Marion hurried to El Reno, and heard a startling tale. According to the sheriff, Maas had wandered into his office late Monday night, claiming to be a well-to-do farmer living in Custer County, four miles west of Weatherford. "He stated that his wife had been murdered, and that he had come here to escape a mob," the sheriff said. "I telegraphed Weatherford, but officers there had never heard of Maas and could not establish that any woman had been found dead."
"Maas wrote telegrams to the German consul in St. Louis, which we neither sent nor could understand. Next day he said he didn't know whether his wife had been killed or not, but believed she had been kidnapped about Thanks-giving time. He acted like an insane man, and we kept him in jail. We were starting proceedings to send him to the asylum at Norman when newspapers here picked up the murder story in the Watonga Republican."
The prisoner refused to accompany Kenney and Marion back to Blaine County, and they were forced to put him in handcuffs and chains. County Attorney Campbell accused Maas, saying, "You were threatened with disinheritance and exile if you didn't give up Martha Muller. Visions of your former wealth and splendor kept recurring in your mind until it became the ruling passion of your life, and you knew you could never gratify it unless you returned to your homeland alone. You blamed Martha Muller for your predicament and made up your mind that she would have to die."
Maas staunchly denied that he had murdered his wife. However, confronted with demands for explanations of his claim of his wife's pregnancy to the Watonga livery stable attendant, of his sudden attempted departure from the country, and of the statements he made to the Canadian County sheriff, he became confused and stammering.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="27">
What did he mean? Down at the lower level of his new headquarters? Well, The Penguin supposed since he had made the deal, he had to put up with Max. He never realized how much it would interfere with his work here.
"Plans," he repeated halfheartedly, "Swell. Later."
He slammed down the phone. He'd deal with Max at the proper time. For now, he had to finish off the phone books and his list.
It was a lot of work, but because of this, his final revenge would be that much sweeter. He returned to matching addresses with every single name.
After all, all play and no work made a dull Penguin.
CHAPTER
Eighteen
It was time to prowl.
She could no longer stay in her den, even after it had been transformed. Cats were meant to roam the night.
So she roamed.
What did we have here?
The dirty streets of Gotham seemed to have coughed up some more of their scum. And who is it today? Just your average, garden-variety mugger, who had grabbed a pretty young woman and dragged her back into an alley.
"Help, Batma -" the woman began.
Batman? Is that all the woman could think of?
"Now, now," the mugger smirked, "pretty young thing, nice and easy -"
The victim cowered and held out her purse. "Please. Don't hurt me. I'll do anything -"
The other woman had had quite enough of this.
She leapt from the fire escape, landing squarely on the mugger's back. He flew forward to the ground.
"I just love a big strong man who's not afraid to show it," she mentioned as he rolled beneath her, "with someone half her size."
The mugger had managed to roll onto his back. He stared up at her in astonishment. "Who the -" he began.
"Be gentle," she replied. "It's my first time."
Apparently he wasn't listening, because he leapt up with a growl, intent on grabbing her.
She darted out of the way, and gave him a savage kick. All the breath left him as he staggered back.
Hey, not bad, she thought. But before he could recover, it was time for the talons.
She jumped forward and set to work scratching up his face.
The mugger screamed and fell to the asphalt.
"Tic-tac-toe," she murmured in triumph.
The victim rushed up to her side.
"Thank you," she gushed, "thank you. I was so scared -"
Her defender had had enough of this, too. She pushed the victim back against the wall with one of her claws.
"You make it so easy, don't you?" she asked in disgust. "You pretty, pathetic young thing? Always waiting for some Batman to save you."
The victim cringed again, quaking, expecting something even worse.
She leaned forward to whisper in the victim's ear: "I am Catwoman. Hear me roar."
And with that, Catwoman leapt away, cartwheeling out of the alley to disappear into the night.
CHAPTER
Nineteen
With all these interruptions, The Penguin would never finish!
He looked up to see Max Shreck stepping between the members of the Red Triangle Circus, past the TatooedTattooed Strongman, rippling those belly dancers he had tattooed on his biceps, stopping to let one of the acrobats walk past on his hands. Max grinned at The Penguin. Somehow, he seemed much too cheerful for a businessman.
Max nodded at all the performers around them.
"Ah," he remarked, "your - extended family."
The Penguin sighed. Max was leading up to something. His lists would have to wait for the minute.
"Come on downstairs, Oswald," Max urged. "I have a - surprise."
The Penguin scowled. "I don't like surprises." Sometimes, The Penguin still thought it was a mistake to come out of those sewers.
But Max was insistent. He waved The Penguin away from his desk and toward a spiral stairs.
Hesitantly, The Penguin walked forward. So far, Max had more than held up his part of the bargain. And the businessman certainly knew, should anything happen to The Penguin, his circus friends were very good at revenge.
So this had to be something good.
Still, The Penguin thought of icy waters.
"Don't want to spoil it!" Max explained as he tried to put his hands over the Penguin's eyes.
The Penguin growled. Trusting people was one thing, but certain people were asking for it. Max quickly pulled his hands away.
"Then close your eyes," Max insisted.
Oh, all right. The Penguin dutifully closed his eyes almost all the way as Max led him down the stairs. This had better be good, or he'd let the circus gang practice on Max even earlier than he had planned.
He opened his eyes when they went from stairs to concrete.
"Ta-da!" Max announced.
The Penguin looked around the storefront. It had been transformed from an old drugstore into something bustling and cheerful, full of brand-new desks and state-of-the-art computers and smiling college kids. The place had gotten a bright white coat of paint, too, after which the walls had been covered with red, white, and blue bunting. But the most astonishing things here were the signs and posters, the biggest of which read COBBLEPOT FOR MAYOR.
As if this wasn't enough, there were posters taped all around, and every one had The Penguin's picture on it, along with the words OZZIE VS. THE INSIDERS!
Everyone cheered and applauded. Max's grin got even bigger.
The Penguin was flabbergasted.
"But -" he began. "What -" he added. "I - I mean -" he tried.
He didn't know what he meant.
What was going on here?
"Yes," Max said effusively, "adulation is a cross to bear. God knows I know. But someone's got to supplant our standing-in-the-way-of-progress mayor, and don't deny it, Mr. Cobblepot, your charisma is bigger than both of us!"
"Mayor?" The Penguin replied.
Max smiled and grinned. "Mayor."
But this didn't make any sense, even to somebody who had lived most of his life in the sewers.
"Max," he pointed out, "elections happen in November. Is this not late December?"
Max waved a well-dressed pair forward; so well-dressed that they smelled of money, and success, and power. One man and one woman, both wearing appropriately dark-colored suits, both smiling perfectly gleaming white smiles.
They made The Penguin nervous.
The man stared critically at The Penguin before his smile returned.
"Keep the umbrella!" he announced. "Works for you! I'm Josh. Here!" he shoved something in The Penguin's mouth. "Reclaim your birthright!"
The Penguin glared down at the new object between his lips. It was a jet-black cigarette holder. The woman was circling him now. The Penguin wished he were back upstairs with his yellow notepads.
"I'm Jen," she announced as she grabbed his sleeve. "Stand still for a second while I slip on these little glove thingies -"
Glove thingies? The Penguin glanced over at her handiwork. She was rather attractive under that suit. And he would certainly like to get under that suit. Her smile turned to a grimace as she touched his flippers. It was, The Penguin guessed, just that special way he had with women.
"Our research tells us that voters like fingers," Jen explained as she slipped on the deep black material.
The Penguin frowned at his new gloves. Still, if women liked fingers rather than flippers -
That Josh person, in the meantime, was fingering The Penguin's coat. Now what was this guy's problem? Sure The Penguin's clothes were worn, certainly they were tattered, and perhaps the fabric had stood so much use that it had turned a bit shiny, but as far as The Penguin was concerned, these clothes were a part of him.
"Not a lot of reflective surfaces down in that sewer, huh?" Josh remarked.
Reflective surfaces? Oh, he meant mirrors. Jen laughed. The Penguin liked the way she laughed. He laughed, too. All the people around them started to laugh as well.
"Still," The Penguin remarked, "it could be worse. My nose could be gushing blood."
Josh frowned at that. "Your nose could? What do you mean?"
So The Penguin bit him, quickly, viciously, right on the nose. Make fun of him, would they? Well, the penguins who had raised him had shown him a trick or two!
"Enough!" Max called, pulling the two combatants apart. "Everyone -"
He waved them all back to work as Josh fainted to the floor. The fellow had no stamina at all. Max would have to get a better grade of consultant than that to keep up with The Penguin!
Max led the short man in black over to a quiet corner.
"You're right," Max admitted when they could not be overheard. "We missed the regularly scheduled election. But elected officials can be recalled, impeached, given the boot! Think of Nixon, Meachem, Barry -" he paused, and pointed to the great banner overhead. "Then think of you, Oswald Cobblepot, filling the void."
But Oswald Cobblepot was still watching Jen. "I'd like to fill her void," he murmured.
"We need signatures," Max insisted. "To overturn the ballot. I can supply those, Oswald."
"Teach her my 'French flipper' trick," The Penguin continued. It was amazing, the wonderful things you could learn while working for the circus.
"Oswald," Max persevered. "We need one more thing."
The Penguin blinked. Oh, yes. The Mayor's office; that's what they were talking about, wasn't it?
"A platform?" he suggested. "Let me see. 'Stop Global Warming! Start Global Cooling!' Make the world a giant icebox -"
"That's fine, Oswald," Max agreed all too readily. "But to get the mayor recalled, we still need a catalyst, a trigger, an incident."
Yeah, The Penguin thought, mayor. Now that he had gotten used to the idea, he really liked it. He could hear them now.
"You're doing great. Mayor Cobblepot," he said aloud. Yeah. He liked the sound of that. And more than that. "Your table is ready, Mayor Cobblepot," And how about women? Women like Jen? Hey, once he was a mayor, he would have his pick of women! "I need you, Oswald. I need you now. That's the biggest parasol I've ever -"
"Like the Reichstag fire," Max continued urgently. "The Gulf of Tonkin."
What was Max saying? Perhaps that The Penguin wasn't mayor quite yet. Okay, he would accept that. After all, he used to do twelve shows a day; he could handle anything.
But there was work to do. Dirty work. And The Penguin knew just who could do it.
"Ah," he suggested. "You want my old friends upstairs to drive the mayor into a foaming frenzy."
Max grinned at that.
"Precisely," he agreed. "But they must always come and go via the plumbing ducts that I've provided."
Then Max was suggesting secret sabotage?
"Sounds like fun," The Penguin agreed. "But I -"
He hesitated. This was all happening so fast, he had almost forgotten his true purpose.
Max looked at him questioningly.
"I mustn't get sidetracked," The Penguin explained. "I've got my own -"
"Sidetracked?" Max interrupted. He threw open his arms to include not only their surroundings but all of Gotham City. "Oswald, this is your chance to fulfill a destiny that your parents carelessly discarded -"
Hey. Max had a point there. What was it that obnoxious pantywaist Josh had said? Oh, yeah.
"Reclaim my birthright, you mean?" The Penguin asked. Now that he thought of it, it sounded pretty good.
Max nodded, arms still opened wide. "Imagine." He closed one fist. "As mayor you'll have the ear of the media." He closed the other fist. "Access to captains of industry." He opened both hands and cupped them before him. "Unlimited poontang!"
The Penguin was impressed. "You drive a hard bargain, Max." He paused only long enough to realize he had made up his mind. "All right. I'll be the mayor."
He turned away from the businessman, and walked over to the windows of the storefront, which were hidden behind a heavy set of blinds. Thrusting his new glove between the slats, he looked out at Gotham City at night; a city that would soon be his. He could have it all - the mayor's office first, and then, with the whole city at his feet, he'd complete his sweet revenge.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="28">
The Chekhov Strain
Christopher Kubasik
Wu Han's thoughts raced with the manic energy of a Core Earth kid high on cotton candy. He was a happy man: insidious, villainous, cunning, and malicious. He was an overgovernor of the Empire of the Nile, an evil subordinate to the despot Dr. Mobius and he was good at his job. He awoke each morning and leaped out of bed knowing he would accomplish countless activities that day. He felt himself a part of the universe, a force as strong as a hurricane. He needed nothing and no one, for he was a part of everything.
He loved his life.
He stalked up the length of his council chamber. The scarlet dragon on the back of his silk robe danced happily as he gesticulated wildly with his long-nailed hands. His long Fu-Manchu mustache tightly framed his inscrutable smile. White teeth gleamed against his golden flesh.
"I need a plan!" he exclaimed and whirled around at the head of the council chamber's large table. He spoke in precise English, but his speech was marred by an Oriental accent that had more to do with Western stereotyping than China.
His lieutenants, thugs and thieves from countless ethnic backgrounds, grunted and nodded their heads in approval from their chairs around the table. When Wu Han wanted a plan, life filled with action.
"Duuh, what are yuh thinking about boss?" asked Scourge. Scourge had a quizzical face resembling a bulldog from a Warner Brother's cartoon that had just been smashed by a frying pan.
"Something very large, I believe!" Han exclaimed. A thrill ran through the hearts of his minions, for never had they seen the insidious Oriental master criminal so full of life. The invasion of Earth was going well. Han was inspired.
Han's thoughts now moved like a movie projected at four times normal speed. He began contemplating information he had learned about Core Earth during his journeys into the native lands of the planet. (Just a note: the thought of Wu Han actually taking the time to contemplate was not necessarily an oxymoron, but certainly stretched Han to the limits of his mind. He thought like a gymnast moved, each thought flipping into the next trick in the routine. If there was ever a moment's pause, he did it only to balance himself for the next mental leap. He felt uncomfortable if he paused to consider something for too long. The rhythm of the pulp reality demanded constant motion, physical and mental, from its heroes and villains. Han was happy to oblige.)
"Another Death Maze?" asked Achmed D'uarb, an Arab assassin whose every other tooth gleamed gold.
"Another search deep into the Egyptian desert for an eternity shard?" whispered Scar, whose ruined throat hinted of the long ago splash of acid.
"Another stelae to be planted out in Earth?" put forth Mr. Hoggs, whose immense flesh jostled as he spoke.
"Kill another Storm Knight?"
"Try to betray Mobius again?"
"Agitate tribal wars in Afghanistan so we can run guns?"
"Make another stab at the diamond mines under Mrs. McReady's farmlands?"
"No" whispered Wu Han, curling his long fingers before him. "I need something unique."
A hush fell over the room, a silence created by thrill and ... fear. It was not every day that a pulp villain wanted change. The results could be very profitable ... or completely disastrous and unknown.
"I want something so large, so devastating to the people of Earth, that my reward from Dr. Mobius would compare even with the riches of the ancient pharaohs." The villain smiled a cruel smile. It had worked. He had applied himself to coming up with a fantastic and daring plan, and it had happened. Possibility energy infused Wu Han's thoughts, to the villain's advantage. Events tended to go his way.
"I will poison the earth," he said levelly.
"The water supply?"
"Their food?"
"No! You insufferable buffoons! I do not desire to kill them! We need them alive so we might steal their possibility energy! No, I need a creative way to poison them ... Poison their behavior, make them easier to defeat ..."
"Perhaps we could create some sort of toxic radio wave transmitter?" suggested Scar.
"Shut up," said Wu Han quietly. A deep chill ran through the room as his evilness permeated the souls of his henchmen. Han infused them with the desire and strength to do harm. "I have an idea even more absurd. Something only someone as insidious as myself could ever have come up with. Gentlemen," he said, resting his hands on the table, leering at them, "prepare yourself<&|>sic. We make history in the course of the Possibility Wars."
He walked down the length of the chamber, ignoring the men in the room completely. Then, suddenly, he placed his bony hand on Scar's shoulder. Scar flinched.
"Scar. Arrange the following. I need a library. I require a library containing books and stories from the beginning of this world's Western civilization."
"Books?"
"That's right. Books."
"You mean like Earth's pulp stories?"
"Well, yes, some of them, of course. A sampling of everything. Their religious allegories, their tawdry parlour dramas, their snail-paced English murder mysteries, their existential essays disguised as novels. A whole pastiche of their boring civilization. Begin."
The sound of chairs sliding on stone filled the room as the thugs sprang into action. If Wu Han wanted books, then books it would be, no matter how useless the request seemed.
As the men rushed out of the room, Wu Han smiled. His eyes were distant. If he was thinking about the future outcome of the orders he had just given, there was no way to tell. He was like that. He'd be plotting one moment, and then plotting something else the next.
***
Los Angeles had been deserted when the Living Land invaded. The city had been reclaimed during the Miracle of California. Now it struggled against the hideous reality of Tharkold. The city still struggled to live. Many who stayed behind were actors and directors and technicians and craftsmen of theater and film. They kept working, and beleaguered citizens came to see the shows.
A production of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull had just opened at the Mark Tapper Forum. A rapt audience filled the large theater. The play, like most of Chekhov's work, dealt with loss, and the desire to keep living in the face of adversity. This audience lived in a country at war with invaders who ripped reality away from the conquered. The play cast a spell of truth.
The first act of The Seagull takes place beside a lake. The set of the Mark Tapper Forum's production showed a beautiful sunset that slowly faded as the act progressed. On the left side of the stage, in front of the false lake, was a stage for, as it said in the play's stage notes, 'private theatricals.' It was a stage on the stage. The curtain on the stage upon the stage was drawn shut. It would remain shut until Konstantin, the young writer in The Seagull, opened the curtain. He would present a play he had written to his friends and family. It would be a play within a play.
Wu Han hid behind the curtain of the smaller stage, waiting for the moment Konstantin revealed him to the audience and the actors. Han would take them completely by surprise.
Wu Han was bored, bored, bored.
He had hidden himself behind the smaller stage before The Seagull had begun. He so far had endured nearly twenty minutes of the production. He could not believe that Core Earthers considered such naturalist drivel entertaining. He exerted more energy going to sleep than all the characters in the play used up during the whole show.
The play revolved around a dozen characters living on an estate in Russia at the turn of the century. Most of them were out on the stage at the moment, waiting for the play Konstantin had written to begin. Some of the characters were servants, some writers, some actors. Some were related by blood, some by marriage, some by love. Each wanted something from another character in the play. As it was a Chekhov play, they never got what they wanted.
Konstantin told Nina, the aspiring actress and his young girlfriend, to get ready to perform his play. She started toward her position behind the drawn curtain of the small stage.
Wu Han drew his K08 pistol out of his golden sleeves. Heather Davis, the actress playing Nina, came around the small stage and took two steps up the small ladder to the platform.
She looked up and saw Wu Han, smiling patiently, pointing his pistol at her face.
She froze in fear.
She was young, no more than 20, with pale skin, and straight, thick black hair, a gift of her Native American ancestry. She was at once vulnerable due to her small frame, but, in her eyes, owner of a certain toughness. Wu Han found her charming.
For a moment she considered turning and running. Wu Han shook his head. Then, with his empty hand, he crooked his finger, gesturing for her to approach.
She finished walking up the steps. Han put his hand on her shoulder and forced her to sit. He then placed the tip of his gun against her head.
He then stood quietly. He listened to the dialogue of the play he had read and re-read in Egypt come to life.
On the other side of the small stage's curtain, Arkadina, the famous Russian actress, played by the actress Elaine Sanders, asked her son, "When are you going to begin, dear?" Already, only listening to her for about a quarter of an hour, Han had discovered he was fond of the character's manipulative manner, but could not stomach her petty aspirations. A woman of her skills could easily rule a nation if she applied herself.
"In a minute, Mother," replied the boy. "Please be patient." Konstantin, Wu Han thought, was a useless pup, more pathetic than Han had even expected in his reading of the script. The boy craved his mother's approval on everything. He could not simply write just to write, act for action's sake, for the thrill of simply doing what he wanted. He needed everyone around him to tell him that he was of value. He craved Arkadina's affirmation that what he wanted to do he should do.
Konstantin would last no more than three minutes in the Empire of the Nile.
But that behavior, that despairing inaction, was the core of what Han sought for his disease. It was so perfect he almost let loose an evil laugh.
"'Oh, Hamlet,'" Arkadina began, quoting Shakespeare's Ophelia, "'Speak no more; Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul; And there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.'"
Konstantin countered,"'Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, stewed in corruption, honeying and making love over the nasty sty - '" the sound of a horn cut him off. He turned to his audience: his mother, her friend Trigoran, family members, servants, and hangers on. They sat on wooden benches by a lake, looking toward a small stage. Konstantin stood by the stage, looking back at the assembled group and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, the play is about to begin. Quiet, please, quiet! I begin."
The boy tapped a stick against the ground three times and raised his voice. "O, ye venerable old shades that hover over this lake at nighttime, send us to sleep and let us dream of what will be in two hundred thousand years."
Sorin, Arkadina's brother, said with complete coolness, "There'll be nothing in two hundred thousand years." Han smiled. So weak. All they could contemplate was the final demise of their world, cities, their entire race. Dr. Mobius and the inhabitants of the Nile made plans for an empire that would last for eternity. He fingered the trigger of the pistol in his right hand and looked down at the girl.
</doc><doc register="fiction adventure" n="29">
2
The President of the United States, his jaw firm, his angry eyes steady and penetrating, accelerated his pace along the steel-gray corridor in the underground complex of the White House. In seconds, he had outdistanced his entourage, his tall, lean frame angled forward as if bucking a torrential wind, an impatient figure wanting only to reach the storm-tossed battlements and survey the bloody costs of war so as to devise a strategy and repel the invading hordes assaulting his realm. He was John of Arc, his racing mind building a counterattack at Orleans, a Harry Five who knew the decisive Agincourt was in the immediate picture.
At the moment, however, his immediate objective was the anxiety-prone Situation Room, buried in the lowest levels of the White House. He reached a door, yanked it open, and strode inside as his subordinates, now trotting and breathless, followed in unison.
"All right, fellas!" he roared. "Let's skull!"
A brief silence ensued, broken by the tremulous, high-pitched voice of a female aide. "I don't think in here, Mr. President."
"What? Why?"
"This is the men's room, sir."
"Oh? ... What are you doing here?"
"Following you, sir."
"Golly gee. Wrong turn. Sorry about that. Let's go! Out!"
The large round table in the Situation Room glistened under the wash of the indirect lighting, reflecting the shadows of the bodies seated around it. These blocks of shadow on the polished wood, like the bodies themselves, remained immobile as the stunned faces attached to those bodies stared in astonishment at the gaunt, bespectacled man who stood behind the President in front of a portable blackboard, on which he had drawn numerous diagrams in four different colors of chalk. The visual aids were somewhat less than effective as two of the crisis management team were color-blind. The bewildered expression on the youthful Vice-President's face was nothing new and therefore dismissible, but the growing agitation on the part of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was not so easily dismissed.
"Goddamn it, Washbum, I don't -"
"That's Washburn, General."
"That's nice. I don't follow the legal line."
"It's the orange one, sir."
"Which one is that?"
"I just explained, the orange chalk."
"Point it out."
Heads turned; the President spoke. "Gee whiz, Zack, can't you tell?"
"It's dark in here, Mr. President."
"Not that dark, Zack. I can see it clearly."
"Well, I've got a minor visual problem," said the general, abruptly lowering his voice, "...distinguishing certain colors."
"What, Zack?"
"I heard him," exclaimed the towheaded Vice-President, seated next to the J.C. chairman. "He's color-blind."
"Golly, Zack, but you're a soldier!"
"Came on late, Mr. President."
"It came on early with me," continued the excitable heir to the Oval Office. "Actually, it's what kept me out of the real army. I would have given anything to correct the problem!"
"Close it up, gumball," said the swarthy-skinned director of the Central Intelligence Agency, his voice low but his half-lidded, dark eyes ominous. "The friggin' campaign's over."
"Now, really, Vincent, there's no cause for that language," intruded the President. "There's a lady present."
"That judgment's up for grabs, Prez. The lady in question is not unfamiliar with the lingua franca, as it were." The DCI smiled grimly at the glaring female aide and returned to the man named Washburn at the portable blackboard. "You, our legal expert here, what kind of ... creek are we up?"
"That's better, Vinnie," added the President. "I appreciate it."
"You're welcome ... Go on, Mr. Lawyer. What kind of deep ca-ca are we really into?"
"Very nice, Vinnie."
"Please, Big Man, we're all a little stressed here." The director leaned forward, his apprehensive eyes on the White House legal aide. "You," he continued, "put away the chalk and let's have the news. And do me a favor, don't spend a week getting there, okay?"
"As you wish, Mr. Mangecavallo," said the White House attorney, placing the colored chalk on the blackboard ledge. "I was merely trying to diagram the historical precedents relative to the altered laws where the Indian nations were concerned."
"What nations?" asked the Vice-President, in his voice a trace of arrogance. "They're tribes, not countries."
"Go on," interrupted the director. "He's not here."
"Well, I'm sure you all recall the information our mole at the Supreme Court gave us about an obscure, impoverished Indian tribe petitioning the Court over a supposed treaty with the federal government that was allegedly lost or stolen by federal agents. A treaty that if ever found would restore their rights to certain territories currently housing vital military installations."
"Oh, yes," said the President. "We had quite a laugh over that. They even sent an extremely long brief to the Court that nobody wanted to read."
"Some poor people will do anything but get a job!" joined in the Veep. "That is a laugh."
"Our lawyer isn't laughing," observed the director.
"No, I'm not, sir. Our mole sends word that there've been some quiet rumors which may mean absolutely nothing, of course, but apparently five or six justices of the Court were so impressed by the brief that they've actually debated its merits in chambers. Several feel that the lost Treaty of 1878, negotiated with the Wopotami tribe and the Forty-ninth Congress, may ultimately be legally binding upon the government of the United States."
"You gotta be outta your lemon tree!" roared Mangecavallo. "They can't do that!"
"Totally unacceptable," snapped the pinstriped, acerbic Secretay of State. "Those judicial fruitcakes will never survive the polls!"
"I don't think they have to, Warren." The President shook his head slowly. "But I see what you mean. As the great communicator frequently told me, 'Those mothers couldn't get parts as extras in Ben-Hur, not even in the Colosseum scenes.'"
"Profound," said the Vice-President, nodding his head. "That really says it. Who's Benjamin Hurr?"
"Forget it," replied the balding, portly Attorney General, still breathing heavily from the swift journey through the underground corridors. "The point is they don't need outside employment. They're set for life, and there's nothing we can do about it."
"Unless they're all impeached," offered the nasal-toned Secretary of State, Warren Pease, his thin-lipped smile devoid of bonhomie.
"Forget that, too," rebutted the Attorney General. "They're pristine white and immaculate black, even the skirt. I checked the whole spectrum when those pointy-heads shoved that negative poll tax decision down our throats."
"That was simply grotesque!" cried the Vice-President, his wide eyes searching for approval. "What's five hundred dollars for the right to vote?"
"Too true," agreed the occupant of the Oval Office. "The good people could have written it off on their capital gains. For instance, there was an article by a fine economist, an alumnus of ours, as a matter of fact, in The Bank Street Journal, explaining that by converting one's assets in subsection C to the line item projected losses in -"
"Prez, <tf>please?" interrupted the director of the Central Intelligence Agency gently. "That bum's doing time, six to ten years for fraud, actually ... A lid, please, Big Man, okay?"
"Certainly, Vincent ... Is he really?"
"Just remember, none of us remember him," replied the DCI, barely above a whisper. "You forgot his line item procedures when we had him at Treasury? He put half of Defense into Education, but nobody got no schools."
"It was great PR -"
"Stow it, gumball -"
"'Stow it,' Vincent? Were you in the navy? 'Stow it' is a navy term."
"Let's say I've been on a lot of small, fast boats, Prez. Caribbean theater of operations, okay?"
"Ships, Vincent? They're always 'ships.' Were you by the way of Annapolis?"
"There was a Greek runner from the Aegean who could smell a patrol boat in pitch dark."
"Ship, Vincent. Ship ... Or maybe not when applied to patrols -"
"Please, Big Man." Director Mangecavallo stared at the Attorney General. "Maybe you didn't look good enough into that dirtbag character spectrum of yours, huh? On those judicial fruitcakes, as our high-toned Secretary of State called 'em. Maybe there were omissions, right?"
"I used the entire resources of the Federal Bureau," replied the obese Attorney General, adjusting his bulk in the inadequate chair while wiping his forehead with a soiled handkerchief. "We couldn't hang a jaywalking ticket on any of them. They've all been in Sunday school since the day they were born."
"What do those FBI yo-yos know, huh? They cleared me, right? I was the holiest saint in town, right?"
"And both the House and the Senate confirmed you with rather decent majorities, Vincent. That says something about our constitutional checks and balances, doesn't it?"
"More about checks made out to 'cash' than balances, Prez, but we'll let it slide, okay? ... Owl Eyes here says that five or six of the big robes may be leaning the wrong way, right?"
"It could simply be minor speculation," added Washburn. "And completely in camera."
"So who's takin' pictures?"
"You misunderstand, sir. I mean the debates remain secret, not a word of them leaked to the press or the public. The blackout was actually self-imposed on the grounds of national security, in extremis."
"In who?"
"Good heavens!" cried Washburn. "This wonderful country, the nation we love, could be placed in the most vulnerable military position in our history if five of those damn fools vote their consciences. We could be obliterated!"
"Okay, okay, cool it," said Mangecavallo, staring at the others around the table, quickly passing by the eyes of the President and his heir apparent. "So we got us some room by this top-secret status. And we also got five or six judicial fruitcakes to work on, right? ... So, as the intelligence expert at this table, I say we should make sure two or three of those zucchinis stay in the vegetable patch, right? And since this sort of thing is in my personal realm of expertise, I'll go to work, capisce?"
"You'll have to work quickly, Mr. Director," said the bespectacled Washburn. "Our mole tells us that the Chief Justice himself told him he was going to lift the debate blackout in forty-eight hours. In his own words, Chief Justice Reebock said, 'They're not the only half-assed ball game in town' - that's a direct quote, Mr. President. I personally do not use such language."
"Very commendable, Washbloom -"
"That's Washburn, sir."
"Him, too. Let's skull, men - and you, too, Miss ... Miss ..."
"Trueheart, Mr. President. Teresa Trueheart."
"What do you do?"
"I'm your Chief of Staff's personal secretary, sir."
"And then some," mumbled the DCI.
"Stow it, Vinnie."
"My Chief of Staff ...? Gosh 'n' crackers, where is Arnold? I mean this is a crisis, a real zing doozer!"
"He has his massage every afternoon at this hour, sir," replied Miss Trueheart brightly.
"Well, I don't mean to criticize, but -"
"You have every right to criticize, Mr. President," interrupted the wide-eyed heir apparent.
"On the other hand, Subagaloo's been under a great deal of stress lately. The press corps call him names and he's quite sensitive."
"And there's nothing that relieves stress more than a massage," added the Vice-President. "Believe me, I know!"
"So where do we stand, gentlemen? Let's get a fix on the compass and tighten the halyards."
"Aye, aye, sir!"
"Mr. Vice-President, give us a break, huh? ... The compass we're locked into, Big Man, should better be fixed on a full moon, 'cause that's where we're at - looney-tune time, but nobody's laughin'."
"Speaking as your Secretary of Defense, Mr. President," broke in an extremely short man whose pinched face barely projected above the table and whose eyes glared disapprovingly at the CIA director, "the situation's utterly preposterous. Those idiots on the Court can't be allowed to even consider devastating the security of the country over an obscure, long-forgotten, so-called treaty with an Indian tribe nobody's ever heard of!"
"Oh, I've heard of the Wopotamis," the Vice-President interrupted again. "Of course, American history wasn't my best subject, but I remember I thought it was a funny name, like the Choppywaws. I thought they were slaughtered or died of starvation or some dumb thing."
</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684423" filename="FROWN_P.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="fiction romance" n="01">
"I'm sorry to be late," she said, hurrying to her customary chair beside Lady Louisa. "I was going over the accounts, and I fear I lost all track of -" She broke off, her eyes widening in delight as she spied Mr. Stallings. "Richard!"
"Matty!" He leapt to his feet, his earnest face lit with pleasure as he held out his hand to her. "By all that is holy, I never thought to find you here!"
"I have been at Kirkswood for five years now, since Papa's death,"she replied, her brown eyes shining as she gazed up at the young curate who had once been her father's assistant. The two of them had been quite close, but despite her father's hopes their feelings for each other had never developed into anything deeper than friendship. "And you?"
"Still working as an assistant," he confessed with an affable shrug. "I was at the rectory near Compton for almost two years, but the bishop recently assigned me to Mr. Thorntyn's parish. At the time I confess to being slightly put out, but now that I know you are here ..." His boyish grin and sparkling eyes completed the sentence for him.
"I had no idea you had a connection with Miss Stone." Mr. Thorntyn's remark sounded suspiciously like an accusation. "Odd you never mentioned it."
"I didn't know she was here, Mr. Thorntyn," Richard answered easily, assisting Matty to her chair. "But she and I are old friends. I had the privilege of working with her good father when I was fresh out of the seminary. He was a very good rector, and one of the kindest men I have ever known."
"Your father was a vicar, Miss Stone?" Mr. Thorntyn turned his jet-black eyes on hers. "One would have never guessed."
Matty favored him with a honeyed smile. "Why, thank you, Mr. Thorntyn," she said, as if he'd just paid her a high compliment. "It is very kind of you to say so."
The vicar clearly did not know how to take such sauce, but fortunately Joss did, and adroitly he steered the conversation in another direction. He successfully kept the peace for the remainder of the hour, until it was time for their visitors to take their leave. "It was most gracious of you to have us here, my lord, most gracious," Mr. Thorntyn said, bowing to Joss. "May I hope to see you in church this Sabbath?"
"You may," Joss said, knowing it would be expected of him while he was in residence.
"And you, sir?" He sliced a cool look at Raj.
"I shouldn't think of being anywhere else, Raj assured him solemnly.
"Hmph." Mr. Thorntyn settled his flat back hat on his head. "Come along, Stallings, we've much to do this day."
"In one moment, sir." Richard turned to Matty. "I have been informed by our housekeeper that Lady Kirkwood's companion is responsible for a great deal of the charitable work hereabouts. That must be you?"
"I do make a point of calling on the tenants, yes," Matty admitted, feeling a stab of guilt at the realization that she'd been neglecting that particular duty over the past week.
"Well perhaps you will let me accompany you on your rounds," he suggested thoughtfully. "It will give me the opportunity to meet with my new parishioners and acquaint myself with their needs."
The suggestion brought a delighted smile to Matty's lips. "What an excellent idea, Richard! I've often tried interesting Mr. Thorntyn in helping me, but he never ... that is," she corrected hastily, "I would appreciate the help, thank you."
"When do you next go out?" Richard prudently ignored the first part of her statement.
"I should go out as soon as possible," she replied, her brows meeting in thought. "Tomorrow, perhaps, or -"
"I beg your pardon, Miss Stone," Joss interrupted, his voice cool. "Is tomorrow not the day you were going to take me about?"
Matty gave him a confused look, knowing full well that such plans had never been made. She was about to ask for clarification when the ice in his green eyes stopped her. "Of course, your lordship, in the excitement over seeing Richard again the matter slipped my mind. Naturally, I shall place myself at your disposal." She turned back to Richard.
"I will send you a note," she promised, holding her hand out to him. "It will be wonderful working with you again."
He took her hand and raised it to his lips. "I will look forward to it," he said, pressing a fleeting kiss on the back of her hand. "Until then, Matty, I shall bid you adieu."
The moment the door closed behind them Louisa collapsed against her chair. "Well, thank heavens that is over with for the next few months!" she said, taking a restorative sip of tea. "I know it is unkind of me to say so, but I really can not abide that man."
"He does have a rather ... trying personality," Raj agreed with a wry grin. "The assistant seemed to be an all right fellow, though. Are you well acquainted with him, Miss Stone?" His blue eyes flashed in Matty's direction.
"Very well acquainted," she replied, taking a sip of her own tea. "As I mentioned, he was my father's assistant for several months, and we were quite close."
"And now he is here," Lady Louisa drawled, her eyes lit with a speculative light. "Hmmm, I find that most interesting."
Matty didn't deign to comment on what her employer might mean by that. Instead, she occupied her thoughts puzzling over the marquess's odd behavior. One would almost think he disapproved of her going about with Richard, she brooded, the cup of her tea in her hand quite forgotten. But that made no earthly sense. Unless he felt she was making a play for him, she thought, her lips tightening with indignation. Doubtlessly Lord Kirkswood considered her a dried-up spinster desperate to toss her bonnet at any man who looked at her twice.
As soon as this notion appeared she dismissed it as untrue and unkind. Whatever his other faults, the marquess struck her as being a fair man. Perhaps he genuinely thought they had a previous engagement; they'd once talked about visiting some of the tenants. It wasn't unreasonable to assume he'd mixed the matter up in his mind. Her papa was always doing things like that, and Lord Frederick had never been able to keep a single detail straight in the four or so years she had known him. Yes, she decided with a satisfied sigh, that must be it.
While Matty was congratulating herself on the brilliant way she had solved the puzzle, Joss was silently cursing himself for his behavior. What the devil made him interfere in Miss Stone's meeting with her old friend? he wondered, his jaw clenching with annoyance. It wasn't any concern of his what the minx did on her own time. He only knew he hadn't cared for the thought of her rambling around the countryside with that grinning clergyman dogging her every step. She was his sister-in-law's companion, and that, indirectly, made her his responsibility.
Perhaps that accounted for it, he decided, staring at the fire in the grate with unseeing eyes. He was only concerned for her welfare. Lord knew the chit didn't seem to give her own reputation any thought. He'd slip a discreet word in her ear about the inadvisability of a single lady racketing about with an eligible man, he decided with a flash of self-righteousness. She would probably rail at the very suggestion, but he didn't let that concern him. Over the past few days he had grown accustomed to dealing with shrews, and he was pleasantly surprised to find he had a talent for it.
The next morning Matty was up early to raid the kitchen for supplies. Since the marquess's return, the account with the grocer had been settled to everyone's liking, and the larder fairly overflowed with bounty. Matty was filling the second food box when she suddenly sensed she was no longer alone. She whirled around to find the marquess standing just in the doorway, casually dressed in a riding jacket of green velvet, his muscular legs encased in a pair of deerskin breeches.
"Good morning, sir," she greeted him with a wary smile. "I hadn't expected to find you up and abroad at such an early hour. It is scarce nine o'clock."
"I am accustomed to rising early," Joss said, thinking she made a pretty picture despite her prim gray gown and the awful mob cap perched on her curls. "In India I was often hard at work by seven. It was the only way to avoid the appalling heat."
"Well, in that case I am surprised to see you turning into such a slacker," she teased, recalling he'd said something about owning a fleet of ships. "You'll be sleeping until noon next, and demanding the servants bring you your breakfast in bed."
"You wound me, Miss Stone," he said, pushing himself away from the doorframe and advancing slowly toward her. "I've been up since eight and have already taken my morning ride. If anyone is the slugabed around here, it's most assuredly not me."
She could see the justice in that and gave a merry laugh. "Hoisted by my own petard," she said, placing a tin of biscuits in the box and covering it with a napkin. "Well, that should teach me to be so annoyingly self-righteous."
"Somehow I think it will take more than that to shake that self-confidence of yours," Joss said with a slow smile. "But enough of this. What are your plans for this morning?"
"I thought we would start with the tenants most in need of assistance. Several of our families have suffered rather cruelly this past year, and it may be necessary to extend their leases even if they haven't paid their rents." She shot him an anxious look as if gauging his response.
To her relief he merely shrugged. "Whatever you think best," he said, moving forward to take the boxes from the counter. "I'll have these placed in the carriage and then we'll be on our way."
"Carriage?" Matty seemed startled.
"Certainly a carriage." He gave her a puzzled look. "How do you usually make your visits?"
"On foot," she admitted, "or on horseback if I have a great deal to carry."
Given the conditions of the stables this came as no great shock to Joss, for the horses did not look capable of regular work. But he stiffened to think of a woman as slender as Miss Stone tromping about his vast estate weighed down with packages for the poor. "Well, we have a carriage now, and it will please me if you use it when you are on estate business," he informed her stiffly. "Or, if you prefer, a horse can be made available for your use. Would you like that?"
"My own horse?" Matty's eyes grew wide with delight. "Oh, my lord, I should like it above all things!"
Her enthusiasm pleased Joss, and he resolved to send for a new horse at once. Some gentle, placid beast, he decided as they made their way out to the stables. He wondered if Lady Louisa would also like a mount, and decided he'd ask her the moment they returned from their visits.
The early morning sun was low in the gray-blue sky, but the air was sweet nonetheless with the smell of blossoming flowers and budding trees. Easily handling the carriage he'd rented until his own could be delivered, Joss allowed himself to enjoy the splendor of an English spring. He'd forgotten how very beautiful it could be - or perhaps he hadn't allowed himself to remember. The thought brought another jab of pain.
Their first call was upon a family who had moved into an estate cottage less than six months ago. The farmer was wary, if capable, and after quizzing him on the matter of planting Joss told the startled young man not to worry about his rent.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="02">
Chapter 11
WILLIAM insisted that Sarah go to his doctor in Harley Street, the moment they returned to London. And he confirmed what she had guessed weeks before. By then she was five weeks pregnant, and he told her that the child would be born in late August or early September. And he urged her to be cautious for the first few months because of the miscarriage she'd had. But he found her in excellent health, and congratulated William on his heir, when he came to fetch her. William was clearly very pleased with himself, and with her, and they told his mother when they went to Whitfield that weekend.
"My dear children, that is marvelous!" she raved, acting as though they had accomplished something no one else had since Mary with Jesus. "I might remind you that it took you thirty days what it took your father and me thirty years to accomplish. You are to be congratulated on your speed, and your good fortune! What clever children you are!" She toasted them and they laughed. But she was enormously pleased for them, and she told Sarah again that having William had been the happiest moment in her life, and had remained thus in all the years since then. But as the doctor had done, she urged her not to be foolish and overdo, lest it hurt the baby or herself.
"Really, I'm fine." She felt surprisingly well, and the doctor had said they could make love, "reasonably," he had suggested they not hang off the chandelier or try to set any Olympic records, which Sarah had passed on to William. But he was desperately afraid that making love at all would hurt her or the baby. "I promise you, it won't do anything. He said so."
"How does he know?"
"He's a doctor," she reassured him.
"Maybe he's no good. Maybe we should see someone else."
"William, he was your mother's doctor before you were born."
"Precisely. He's too old. We'll see someone younger."
He actually went so far as to find a specialist for her, and just to humor him, she saw him, and he told her all the same things as kindly old Lord Allthorpe, who Sarah much preferred. And by then she was two months pregnant, and had had no problems.
"What I want to know is when we are going back to France," she said after they'd been in London for a month. She was dying to get started on their new home.
"Are you serious?" William looked horrified. "You want to go now? Don't you want to wait until after the baby?
"Of course not. Why wait all these months when we could be working on it now? I'm not sick, for heaven's sake, darling, I'm pregnant."
"I know. But what if something happens?" He looked frantic and wished she weren't so determined. But even old Lord Allthorpe agreed that there was no real reason for her to stay at home, and as long as she didn't wear herself out completely, or carry anything to heavy, he thought the project in France would be fine.
"Keeping busy will be the best thing for her," he assured them, and then suggested they wait till March, so she would be fully three months pregnant before they left. It was the only compromise Sarah was willing to make. She would wait until March to go back to France, but not a moment longer. She was dying to get to work on the ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau.
William tried to drag out his projects at Whitfield as best he could, and his mother kept urging him to tell Sarah to take it easy.
"Mother, I try, but she doesn't listen," he finally said in a moment of exasperation.
"She's just a child herself. She doesn't realize one has to be careful. She wouldn't want to lose this baby." But Sarah had already learned that lesson the hard way long before. And she was more careful than William thought, taking naps, and getting off her feet, and resting when she was tired. She had no intention of losing this baby. Nor did she intend to sit around. And she pressed him until finally he was ready to go back to France, and couldn't stall her any longer. By then it was mid-March, and she was threatening to leave without him.
They went to Paris on the royal yacht, when Lord Mountbatten was on his way to see the Duke of Windsor, and he agreed to take the young couple over as a favor. "Dickie," as William and his contemporaries called him, was a very handsome man, and Sarah amused him during the entire crossing, telling him about the ch<*_>a_circ<*/>teau and the work they were going to do there.
"William, old man, sounds like you have your work cut out for you." But he thought it would be good for them too. It was obvious that they were very much in love, and very excited about their project.
William had had the concierge at the Ritz hire a car for them, and they had managed to find a small hotel two and a half hours outside Paris, not far from their crumbling ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau. They rented the top floor of the hotel, and planned to live there until they had made the ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau habitable again, which they both knew could be a long time.
"It might be years, you know," William grumbled as they saw it again. And he spent the next two weeks lining up workmen. Eventually, he had hired a sizeable crew, and they began by prying off the boards and shutters to see what lay within. There were surprises everywhere as they worked, and some of them were happy ones, and some of them were not. The main living room was a splendid room, and eventually they found three salons, with beautiful boiseries, and fading gilt on some of the moldings; there were marble fireplaces and beautiful floors. But in some places the wood had been destroyed by mold and years of dampness, and animals who had ventured in through the boards and gnawed at the lovely moldings here and there.
There was a huge, handsome dining room, a series of smaller salons, still on the main floor, an extraordinary wood-panelled library, and a baronial hall worthy of any English castle, and a kitchen so antiquated it reminded Sarah of some of the museums she'd visited with her parents the year before. There were tools there that surely no one had used for two hundred years, and she collected them carefully with the intent to save them. And they carefully stored the two carriages they had found in the barn.
William ventured cautiously upstairs after their initial investigations on the main floor of the ch<_*>a-circ<*/>teau. But he absolutely refused to let Sarah join him, for fear the floors might cave in, but he found them all surprisingly solid, and eventually he let Sarah come up to see what he'd found. There were at least a dozen large sunny rooms, again with lovely boiseries, and beautifully shaped windows, and there was a handsome sitting room with a marble fireplace, which looked out over the main entrance and what had once been the park and the gardens of the ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau. But suddenly Sarah realized as she walked from room to room, that there were no bathrooms. Of course, she laughed to herself, there wouldn't have been. They took baths in tubs in their dressing rooms, and they had chamber pots instead of toilets.
There was a lot of work to do, but it was clearly well worth doing. And even William looked excited now. He made drawings for the men, and drew up work schedules and spent every day from dawn to dusk giving directions, while Sarah worked beside him, sanding down old wood, refinishing floors, cleaning boiseries, repairing gilt, and polishing brass and bronze until it shone, and eventually she spent most of every day painting. And while they worked on the main house, William had assigned a crew of young boys to repair the caretaker's cottage so that eventually they could move there from the hotel, and be right on the site of their enormous project.
The caretaker's cottage was small. It had a tiny living room, a smaller bedroom beside it, and a large cozy kitchen, and upstairs there were two slightly larger sunny bedrooms. But it was certainly adequate for them, and possibly even a serving girl downstairs, if eventually Sarah felt like she needed one. They had a bedroom for themselves, and even one for their baby when it arrived.
She could feel the baby moving inside her now, and each time she felt it, she smiled, convinced that it would be a boy and look just like William. She told him that from time to time, and he insisted that he didn't care if it was a girl, they wanted more anyway. "And it's not as though we're supplying an heir to the throne," he teased her, but there was still his title, and the matter of inheriting Whitfield and its lands.
But they both had more than Whitfield, or even their ch<*_>a-circ<*/>teau, on their minds these days. In March, Hitler had raised his ugly head, and had "absorbed" Czechoslovakia, claiming that in effect, it no longer existed as a separate entity anymore. He had, in effect, swallowed ten million persons who were not Germans. And he had no sooner devoured them, than he turned his sights on Poland, and began threatening them about issues that had been a problem for some time, in Danzig, and elsewhere.
A week after all that, the Spanish Civil War came to an end, having taken well over a million lives, as the well-being of Spain lay in ruins.
But April was worse. Imitating his German friend, Mussolini took over Albania, and the British and French governments began to growl, and offered Greece and Romania their help if they felt it was needed. They had offered the same thing weeks before to Poland, promising this time to stand by if Hitler came any closer.
By May, Mussolini and Hitler had signed an alliance, each promising to follow the other into war, and similar discussions between France, England, and Russia stopped and started, and went nowhere. It was a dismal spring for world politics, and the Whitfields were deeply concerned, yet at the same time they were moving ahead with their enormous work at the Ch<_*>a-circ<*/>teau de la Meuze, and Sarah was deeply engrossed in her baby. She was six months pregnant by then, and although he didn't say so to her, William thought she was enormous. But they were both tall, and it was reasonable to think that their child might be large. He would feel it moving inside her at night as they lay in bed, and once in a while when he moved close to her, he'd feel the baby kick him.
"Doesn't that hurt?" He was fascinated by it, by the life he felt inside her, her growing shape, and the baby that would soon come from the love they had shared. The miracle of it all still overwhelmed him. He still made love to her from time to time, but he was more and more afraid to hurt her, and she seemed less interested now. She was hard at work on the ch<_*>a-circ<*/>teau, and by the time they fell into bed at night they were both exhausted. And in the morning the workmen arrived at six o'clock and began hammering and banging.
They were able to move into the caretaker's house in late June, and give up their rooms at the hotel, which pleased them. They were living on their own turf now and the grounds had begun to look civilized. He had brought a fleet of gardeners from Paris to cut and chop and plant, and turn a jungle back into a garden. The park took more time, but by August there was hope for that, too, and by then it was amazing, the progress they had made with the whole house.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="03">
This whole mad weekend trip was typical of Zach Nevsky, Nick De Salvo thought in admiration. Just yesterday, on Friday morning, Zach's entire company of actors had been stuck up to their eyeballs in a thick miasma of dullness, a vast glue-like bog that was rising fast over their heads. Every last one of the performers, even he, the star, was numb with a supreme lack of interest in the playwright's vision. That word, vision, made him queasy behind his eyes. Vision, ech!
Was vision-sickness some sort of violently contagious virus that only attacked actors who had been struggling in a rehearsal hall for weeks on end? Maybe it was unshakable, unacknowledged insecurity that made them all secretly wonder why the hell they were involved in this silly business of worrying about the vision of some writer, instead of working at a normal job as their parents had suggested, demanded, implored that they do for as long as they all could remember?
He'd been sitting there, word-perfect as always, but mentally flat on his ass with his sudden lack of curiosity about the subtext of the play. Did he give a flying fuck if Hamlet and his mom had a yen to dance the dirty turkey? Did he care if his uncle had done the nasty on his daddy? Did he give a shit if he'd hurt the feelings of that weird nymph, Ophelia, or if she'd always been around the bend? Talk about a whiner! And what sensible guy could worry that if he died, he might - perchance, as the fellow said, per-chance, no less - dream? Weren't bad dreams just about the least of Hamlet's worries, perchance?
Why had he, Nick De Salvo, a dues-paying, seriously major, hot young star, an outstanding member of Young Hollywood, turned down a giant-budget buddy flick at Universal to come back to New York and play Hamlet Off Broadway? So what if all the greatest actors in history had felt they had to have a whack at the greatest play in history? Why hadn't he left it alone, he didn't need to prove to himself that he was as good as Olivier, he knew he wasn't, not yet. Give him time. The guys at Universal weren't exactly hustling him to play Shakespeare, and his agent had all but popped a hernia at the news.
Yeah, yesterday there wasn't an actor in the room who hadn't reminded him of a gloomy, resentful schoolkid kept in unfairly during recess. And then Zach had walked in and strolled around the table without a word, looking at their glum faces in paternal amusement, given each of them a jelly doughnut out of a paper bag, unleashed that big, unguarded laugh of his and told them all to take seventy-two. Not five, not ten, not even the afternoon off, but just to get the hell out of the rehearsal hall and not dare to come back until Tuesday, when they would have had a three-day weekend to recover from too much great language.
"You're all too good to be bad," he'd told them, "you've all got what it takes or I wouldn't let you in the door, but you're forcing it. You can fake an orgasm - yeah, even you guys - but you can't force Shakespeare, so out! Have some laughs before I lay eyes on you again, or I won't let you come play tragedy with me!"
The room had cleared in ten seconds and he had decided to go skiing with Zach. Nothing New York had to offer could be more fun, Nick reflected as he drove along a highway that had been recently cleared of snow after an early, pre-Christmas blizzard. Zach and he had been best friends since grammar school, even though he sometimes got fed up with the guy when he was nudging, kvetching, manipulating, shaking, moving and harping on that vision thing. "I'm not a sieve, Nick, " Zach would say, "I'm there to serve the playwright and I can't do it unless I connect to the vision personally. Directing is about allowing creative people to discover the stuff they've got through me."
Well, Zach was right, as usual. The only time he had been spectacularly wrong was back in seventh grade when he'd tried to be an actor himself. Probably because Zach was the tallest guy in the class, he'd been given a part in the spring play. A real lox, act he could not, no way, but he'd memorized everyone's lines by the first rehearsal and started prompting them when they forgot, and then making suggestions and finally shaping the play to his thirteen-year-old vision, leaving poor Miss Levy, their homeroom teacher and official director of the play, wondering what had hit her.
Being in that play with Zach was the reason he was a successful actor now, Nick realized. Even way back then, Zach had encouraged him, even deep into the first year of puberty the guy had time to have vision and to articulate it. What the fuck, admit it, he'd missed hearing people carry on about the vision thing out on the Coast. Like all the rest of Young Hollywood he'd wake up every morning and wonder if his success was due to dumb luck and timing plus the face he couldn't be proud of because he'd been given it, not worked for it, or whether he could maybe, possibly, really act. Actors lived with fear. The whole town ran on fear. Somehow Zach took the fear away and replaced it with courage. A stint with Zach forced him to dig down the way the camera never did, made him touch the core of the talent he had, allowed him use it to its fullest. His commodity. The ability to act was his commodity, the only one he had to offer besides his face, and every once in a while he needed to work with a director who deeply valued that commodity, who recognized it and didn't inhibit his individual creative impulses. Yeah, he had to admit it, he had the vision thing too. Once you'd been exposed to Zach, you couldn't ignore it. He hadn't been back East for a year - he was overdue for a dose of Zach. Invigoration, thy name is Nevsky. When had the guy learned to ski?
What about the girls? How had Pandora Harper, who was playing Ophelia, and who was hopelessly and, as far as he could see, unsuccessfully, drooling for Zach, managed to horn in on this ski trip? He didn't remember inviting her, but she seemed to be with him, sort of. She wasn't his type, he didn't lust to melt her glacial, well-bred blond beauty, although Pandora, to be fair, could act up a storm or Zach wouldn't have cast her. She'd come from an impeccable background, been Deb of the Year or something equally improbable, yet she had a frightening ambition to succeed as an actress and a lot of the equipment. But, good actress or not, he sure as hell wasn't interested in a girl who was manifestly salivating over Zach in a subtle way only another man could see.
What he didn't get was Gigi Orsini. Was she Zach's date or wasn't she? It hadn't been made plain. Zach's sister's roommate? What kind of relationship was that? It didn't explain how come she made the fourth member of their little winter sports group, especially since she'd never been skiing before. He had to get to the bottom of this because if Gigi was not Zach's date, he personally would be deeply interested in teaching her how to, most efficiently and quickly, take off her ski boots, her ski pants, and her ski underwear, all of which she'd told him she'd borrowed for the weekend. She had zing, tang, zest, zip, all that scrumptious springtime stuff. Nothing dumbly traditional there. Gigi'd be all pinky-pointy and spirited, not well-bred and boring. Yes, indeed. Yum!
What she'd like to know, Pandora Harper thought, was how this Gigi somebody, who couldn't even ski, had attached herself to Nick De Salvo, just about the most happening young leading man in Hollywood. Had Zach, in his divinely dictatorial way, simply dragged her along as a blind date for Nick? Improbable as it sounded, in this day and age, people still got fixed up, as they quaintly put it, and there was every chance that his sister had nagged him to do something about her roommate. Tacky.
Gigi-whoever was a perky little thing, you had to admit, if you liked perky, and she very much did not. You couldn't trust the perky ones, they were sneaky and fast, disappearing behind almost any closed door or into any dark closet to rip off a quickie and no one the wiser. They had a kind of animal cunning, or, as Hamlet said, "methinks it is like a weasel."
Darling, gorgeous Zach, hard as it was to credit, was old-fashioned enough to care deeply for his sister. He was sentimental in a world in which men hadn't been sentimental for a hundred years. And an idealist in a world that glorified everything but ideals. If he weren't the most unassailably sexy man she'd ever laid eyes on, she'd steer very clear of him. Useless idealism and outdated sentimentality weren't her thing, any more than perky. Nobody got famous on them. Or rich, for that matter.
Not that money mattered to her, she had more money than anyone would ever need in a dozen lifetimes, thanks to Great-Grammy's trust, and a good thing too, when you considered that another actress would have to be willing to go hungry working Off Broadway. No, money didn't matter. Fame, oh, yes, fame, nothing less - that was what she was after, and that was what she intended to have. On her way to fame, how divine to find Zach Nevsky, bull-necked, rugged, boiling with energy, and by reputation possessed of the most reliable hard-on in the entire theatrical world of Greater Manhattan. Every fine young actress must screw her quota of directors, and a few extra if possible. Tradition demanded it, and she'd been brought up to obey tradition, particularly when it agreed with her inclinations.
She'd called Zach as soon as she'd heard that he'd lured Nick De Salvo to town. The Prince of Young Hollywood daring to tackle the Bard was bound to draw a flock of reviewers from every element of the media. They would come to bury Nick - a violently handsome boy, but not her type - and end up raving about her Ophelia. Zach had been directing new work by young playwrights for almost a year. It was a clever shift of pace for him to put Nick into the ultimate classic, and to cast against physical type, a Danish prince played by a smoldering Latin who looked as if he belonged to a biker gang. Maybe it would work, but it didn't matter to her how long the play ran; opening night was the only night that mattered. She'd been letting Zach direct her as he saw Ophelia - that unutterably dreary vision thing of his - but on opening night she'd play her as she should be played - Ophelia was clearly a raving nymphomaniac, not just borderline, but seriously batshit. She'd get her hands on Nick's cock and caress it in all sorts of deliciously wicked ways during the "get thee to a nunnery" number. There wouldn't be anything anybody could do to stop her; Nick was professional enough to carry on, and she'd make the sensation and get the attention she was expecting. What could Zach do about it at that point, after the critics saw her doing everything but giving Hamlet head while he nattered away at her? Words, words, words indeed! She'd show them. A doublet and hose were perfect for easy access.
Just thinking about it made her ready for Zach. There had been some nonsense mentioned about her sharing a room with Gigi - she'd manage to get around that barrier somehow or her Great-Grammy would be ashamed of her.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="04">
3
He knows my secret, Beverly Burgess thought as she looked out at the snowy night. He knows my secret, and he'll use it to destroy me.
She was standing in the highest tower of the mansion known as the Castle, and she sometimes thought ruefully of the parallels between her situation and the fairy-tale story of the princess with a curse on her, forbidden to be seen, or to see anyone, locked away as if lamenting the loss of a lover and living out her days spinning ropes of gold out of strands of her hair.
Except that Beverly's hair wasn't gold any more, or even blond, as it had been. It was brunette now, worn in a stylish Liz Taylor shag instead of the French twist that had been Beverly's trademark for so many years. And she wasn't really a princess, there was no lost lover, and the high tower was in fact her office. The Castle was the main building of Star's, the resort she had owned for the past two and a half years.
Her hair wasn't the only thing that had changed; she had a new name as well. Many years ago, to hide her identity, she had changed her name from Rachel Dwyer to Beverly Highland, naming herself after two streets in Hollywood. And then, three and a half years ago, Beverly Highland had 'died.' Now she was Beverly Burgess; she had borrowed her mother's maiden name, but kept Beverly.
The hair and name changes had been made to protect her identity once more, but while the first disguise had fooled people for many years, she suddenly had reason to fear that she might not have been successful this time.
He knows who I am, she thought again as she turned away from the window and looked at the book that lay on her desk. It was called Butterfly Exposed, and the man she was afraid of was its author, the tabloid journalist Otis Quinn, who had claimed during a recent television interview that Beverly Highland was still alive.
How could he possibly know? She had been so careful! The staged death - the car going over the cliff and plunging into the ocean - the funeral and burial at Forest Lawn. Beverly had left no traces of that former life, when she had lived for the destruction of one man in revenge for what he had done to her.
Beverly had come out of hiding three years ago, after a brief sojourn on a Pacific island with a young lover named Jamie, where she had spent a few months living totally for herself, indulging in every pleasure from food to sex. But when Beverly had grown tired of that existence she had decided to see the world. Carefully constructing a new identity and a new look for herself, she had traveled to exotic places, and she had felt the old hunger return - the desire to create a place where people could find happiness among beauty and luxury. That was what Butterfly, the establishment she had created above an exclusive men's clothing store on Rodeo Drive, had been - a place where women could seek sexual fulfillment in complete safety and anonymity, and in elegant surroundings. When Beverly had discovered that she yearned to do that again, to offer pleasure to people, she had searched for just the right place, and she had found it at Star's Haven, high up the slopes of Mount San Jacinto.
The heart of Star's Haven was a huge gray stone estate house, built like a castle, with turrets and towers and battlements, and even a drawbridge - a romantic setting plucked right out of medieval England. Built by the silent-movie queen Marion Star, it was a replica of the set used in one of her movies, Robin Hood. It had stood boarded up for many years after her death, but had come onto the marked a few years ago. Now the forty-two-room mansion was called the Castle, and here Beverly had her executive offices. The resort's main restaurants, ballroom, cocktail lounges, boutiques, and private clinic were also located here, as well as luxury suites for the guests, including four tower apartments that were accessible only by private key-operated elevators. Everything had been going well; the resort was a big success, Beverly had kept her old identity a secret, her past completely unknown. And then this Otis Quinn had decided to exploit the story of Danny Mackay and Beverly Highland and conduct his so-called investigation.
She stared at the book. Although the word butterfly was in the title, Beverly regarded it as if it were a deadly spider. The pages were filled mostly with speculation. Quinn hadn't really been able to prove anything; he hadn't found any hard evidence linking Beverly to the brothel on Rodeo Drive. He claimed to have interviewed women who had patronized the rooms above Fanelli's, having sexual liaisons with the men who worked at the place - 'companions' they had been called - who had performed a variety of sexual acts for money. But Quinn hadn't named any of the women he had supposedly interviewed, claiming that they all insisted that their identities be kept a secret, and so Beverly believed he had made the stories up. Nonetheless, the book was sensational enough to keep it on the best-seller lists for months. Everywhere Beverly turned, it seemed, the black and white cover with its pink butterfly was there to mock her. And bring back memories from years ago...
Young Rachel Dwyer, ten years old, finding a photograph of her mother with two babies in her arms. "Who was the other baby, Mama?" she had asked, and Naomi Dwyer had said, "Your twin sister. She died shortly after you were born."
And then Rachel, fourteen years old, all alone while a fierce New Mexico storm battered the old trailer the Dwyers lived in. Her father coming home drunk, attacking her, inflicting a pain on her body that she hadn't thought possible, and shouting, "We got rid of the wrong one!"
Later that night, Rachel getting ready to run away, asking her mother what her father had meant by "the wrong one," and her mother explaining: "Honey, when I was in the hospital to have you and your sister, we were broke. We didn't have a dime. There was a depression on, and there we were with twin babies and no money to pay the hospital bills. So when a man came to the hospital and said he new of a nice couple who would pay us a thousand dollars for one of our babies..."
Beverly closed her eyes against the memory. She turned away and looked out the window again at the dark December night. She could make out the lights in the valley below, the sparkling spread of Palm Springs - fabled playground of the super rich, home to three former U.S. presidents, where it was said there were more golf courses than anywhere else in the world and more plastic surgeons per capita than any other city. A place where streets were named Bob Hope Drive and Frank Sinatra Drive; a desert oasis affectionately known as the Backyard of Beverly Hills.
And Beverly Burgess - once Beverly Highland, once Rachel Dwyer - was eight thousand feet above above<&|>sic it all.
Beside the window, which was narrow and deeply recessed like the window of a medieval castle, photographs hung on the wall. There was one small one, in a silver frame, black and white but yellowing with age. It had been taken in 1938 and it showed a young woman in a hospital bed with a baby cradled in each arm. One of those babies was Beverly. The other was the twin sister her parents had sold, who had been given the name Christine Singleton, and whom Beverly, after many years of searching, had ultimately not been able to find.
She couldn't help herself; she was drawn back to the hateful book on her desk.
Beverly had been shocked when she had first seen Butterfly Exposed in a bookstore. She had thought it a coincidence that the book should be named for the operation she had established above Fanelli's. And then she had thumbed through it and, in shock, purchased it. One night's reading had brought back all the old nightmares: Danny Mackay befriending a frightened fourteen-year-old runaway, gaining her trust, telling her he loved her, and then installing her in a cheap whorehouse in San Antonio. And Rachel, terrified and homesick, unable to service Hazel's customers, wishing that Danny would take her away from it all, and Danny coming back and sweet-talking her into performing sex with strange men. "Just lay back, darlin'," he had said, "and imagine it's me who's doin' it to you."
And then, when she was sixteen and she thought they were going to get married, Danny taking her to a back-alley abortionist and forcing her to kill her baby. She had begged and pleaded with him, and afterward he had kicked her out of his car, telling her she was ugly, and that he had never loved her, and that she was to remember his name, because he was a man who was going places. Danny Mackay, he had said. Remember that name.
And remembered it she had, almost to the exclusion of all else. The rest of Beverly's life had been a quest for the perfect revenge against Danny Mackay, and when it had finally come, three and a half years ago, she had thought that their secret, twisted story had come to an end at last.
But now there was this journalist, making up lies and outrageous speculations about the relationship between the wealthy socialite Beverly Highland and the Reverend Danny Mackay, who had controlled a multy-billion-dollar TV ministry and who had been one step away from the Oval Office. Everyone in the country, Beverly knew, was either reading Butterfly Exposed or talking about it. And she had heard that a TV miniseries was in the making.
But something even worse than that had happened.
Otis Quinn had declared during a TV interview that he believed Beverly Highland, who was supposed to have died in a car accident the night she had destroyed Danny Mackay, the woman who was in fact responsible for Mackay's death by suicide in the L.A. County Jail, was still alive. And he claimed to have found her.
And now, Otis Quinn was coming to Star's.
Beverly was brought out of her thoughts by a discreet knock at the door. She looked at her watch. It would be Simon Jung, her general manager, making his daily report.
"Come in," she said.
Simon Jung, Swiss born and educated, was a smoothly handsome man in his late fifties, impeccably trim and tailored, whom Beverly had met in Rio de Janeiro at the swank Amanha Restaurant. Simon had an impressive background of over thirty years of hotel management experience, having worked in only the finest establishments around the world. There was nothing he didn't know, it seemed to Beverly, about human nature and pleasing guests, and he was the one person in all the world she felt she could trust.
But even Simon didn't know about her past, that she was the Beverly Highland whom Otis Quinn had written about in Butterfly Exposed.
"Good evening, Beverly," he said as he closed the door quietly behind himself.
As always, the sight of Simon in the Armani or Pierre Cardin suit that had been made just for him caused an unwanted reaction deep inside her. Beverly had sworn off men long ago - except for her brief interval with young Jamie. In her travels, when she had stayed at such exclusive places as the Mount Kenya Safari Club in East Africa, Raffles in Singapore, the H<*_>o-circ<*/>tel du Cap on the Riviera, and she had met such handsome and impeccable men as Simon, she had been immune. They didn't move her.
But somehow, during her two and a half years of working with Simon in a strictly professional relationship, making Star's a place for the best people to come to, Beverly had found her defenses starting to crumble.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="05">Tragedy and great sorrow, I thought, make us grow older very quickly.
Gavin, Edwina and Granddaddy Longchamp arrived late in the evening. Uncle Philip had them put up in one of the guest houses we used when the hotel became overbooked. One look at Granddaddy Longchamp's face was enough to tell me how much the tragedy had crushed and overwhelmed him. In one fell swoop, he had lost his son and the young woman he had always considered his daughter. He looked years older, the lines in his face sharply deeper, his eyes darker and his skin paler. He moved slowly and spoke very little. Edwina and I hugged and cried, and then Gavin and I had a chance to be alone.
"Where's Fern?" Gavin asked.
"No one seems to know," I said.
"She should have been the first one here to help you with Jefferson," Gavin said angrily.
"Maybe it's better she's not. She's never been much help to anyone but herself," I said. "Maybe she's feeling bad that she and Daddy had such a terrible argument the last time she saw him."
"Not Fern," Gavin concluded. We stared at each other. We had just naturally wandered away from everyone and found ourselves in the den. Mommy and Daddy often used it as a second office. There was a large cherrywood desk and chair, walls of bookcases, a big grandfather's clock and a ruby leather settee. Gavin gazed at the family pictures on the desk and shelves and at the framed letters of commendation Mommy had received for her performances at Sarah Bernhardt.
"She was so proud of those," I said. He nodded. "I can't believe it," he said without turning to me. "I keep thinking I'm going to wake up soon."
"Me too."
"She was more than a sister-in-law to me. She was a sister," he said. "And I always wanted to be like Jimmy."
"You will be, Gavin. He was very proud of you and never stopped bragging about you and how well you do in school."
"Why did this happen? Why?" he demanded. Tears flooded my eyes and my lips began to tremble. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, quickly coming to me. "I should be thinking of what you're going through and not be so concerned about myself." He embraced me and I pressed my face against his chest.
"What are you two doing in here?" Aunt Bet demanded. She was standing in the doorway, her eyes wide with surprise. I lifted my head slowly from Gavin and wiped my eyes.
"Nothing," I said.
"You shouldn't be alone here with everyone gathered in the living room," she said, gazing from Gavin to me and then to Gavin. "It's not ... proper," she added. "And besides, Jefferson's not behaving. You had better speak to him, Christie," she said.
"What's he doing?"
"He won't sit still."
"He's only nine years old, Aunt Bet, and he's just lost his mother and father. We can't very well expect him to be as perfect as Richard," I retorted. Her face flamed red.
"Well, I ... I'm just trying to-"
"I'll see to him," I said quickly and took Gavin's hand. "I'm sorry," I said after we had rushed past her. "I shouldn't have been so short with her, but she's been taking over everything and bossing everyone around. I just don't have the patience."
"I understand," Gavin said. "I'll help with Jefferson. Let's find him," he offered. Gavin was wonderful with him, taking him up to his room and occupying him with his games and toys.
Aunt Fern didn't arrive until the morning of the funeral. She appeared with one of her boyfriends from college, a tall, dark-haired young man. She introduced him only as Buzz. I couldn't believe she had decided to bring a boyfriend to the funeral. She behaved as if it were just another family affair. The whole time she was at the house before we left for church, she an Buzz remained aloof from the other mourners. A number of times I caught them giggling in a corner. They both chain-smoked. I reminded her that Mommy hated people smoking in the house.
"Look. Buzz and I are not going to be here that long, princess, so don't lay all the heavy rules on me, okay? The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree," she told Buzz, who smiled and nodded at me.
"Well, where are you going?" I asked.
"Back to school for a while. I don't know. I'm beginning to grow bored with the schedules and the homework," she said. Buzz laughed.
"Daddy wanted you to graduate from college," I said.
"My brother wanted to live my life for me," she said dryly. "Don't remind me. Well, he's gone now and I can't keep worrying about what other people want me to do. I've got to do what I want to do."
"But what will you do?" I asked.
"Don't worry about it," she whined. "I won't be coming around here that often, especially since Philip and his brood have taken over the place," she said.
They haven't taken over the place," I insisted.
"Oh, no? What do you call it: a temporary situation?" she laughed.
"Yes," I said.
"Face reality, princess. You're too young to be on your own. Philip and Betty will become your guardians. Well, I don't intend for them to be mine. Cheer up," she added. "In a few years, you can leave, too."
"I won't leave my brother, ever."
"Famous last words, right, Buzz?" He nodded and smiled as if she had her fingers on his strings and he was only her puppet.
"I won't," I insisted. Aunt Fern could be so infuriating. Now that Daddy was gone, there wouldn't be anyone to watch over her and rescue her from the pools of trouble she usually fell into, I thought. She doesn't know it now, but she's going to miss him more than she ever dreamed. I left them as soon as I was told Aunt Trisha had arrived.
Aunt Trisha had begun her Broadway show and despite her great sorrow, had to perform. I didn't blame her; I knew the show must go on. Mommy always talked about the sacrifices people made when they became professional entertainers. But Aunt Trisha and I had time to cry together and console each other. Jefferson was happy to see her too, and rushed into her arms. She remained at our side from that moment until the end, when she had to leave to get back to New York.
The limousine led the line of traffic to the church. The thick gray sky was appropriate. I could just hear Daddy saying, "Oh, no, the weather's going to make her even sadder still." The hearse had been parked on the side by the time we arrived. The church was overflowing with mourners. Bronson had Grandmother Laura sitting up front. She wore an elegant black dress and a black hat and veil. I saw she had put on pounds of makeup and had especially overdone the thickness of her lipstick. She seemed in a daze, confused, but still smiled at everyone and nodded as we filed in to take our places. Jefferson clung tightly to my hand and sat so close to me that he was practically on my lap.
As soon as the minister came out, the organ master stopped playing. The minister led the mourners in prayer and read from the Bible. Then he spoke lovingly and admiringly of Mommy and Daddy, calling them the two brightest lights in our community, always burning warmly and giving the rest of us reason to be hopeful and happy. He was sure they were doing the same for all the souls in Heaven.
Jefferson listened wide-eyed, but neither of us could shift our eyes off the two coffins for long. It still seemed unreal and impossible to believe that Mommy and Daddy were lying in them. When I turned to leave after the church service, I saw that most people had been crying, some quite hard.
The funeral procession went directly to the cemetery. At the site of their graves, Gavin held my hand and Aunt Trisha held Jefferson. We stood like statues, the cold breeze lifting my hair and making my tears feel like drops of ice on my cheeks. Just before the coffins were to be lowered, I stepped forward to kiss each one.
"Good-bye, Daddy," I whispered. "Thank you for loving me more than my real father could ever dream of loving me. In my heart you will always be my real father." I paused and had to swallow hard before I could continue.
"Good-bye, Mommy. You're gone, but you will never be far away from me."
I gazed up at Uncle Philip who had come up beside me. He was staring down at Mommy's coffin and the tears were streaming freely down his face and dripping off his chin. He touched the coffin softly and closed his eyes and then stepped back with me. The coffins were lowered.
I heard the sobbing. I wanted to comfort Jefferson, but I couldn't stop my own tears. Gavin embraced me. Granddaddy Longchamp had his head bowed and Edwina stood beside him, her arm around his waist. Fern wasn't laughing anymore, but she wasn't crying either. She looked tired and uncomfortable and her boyfriend looked confused, probably wondering what he was doing here. Bronson had managed to get Grandmother Laura back into her wheelchair and down to the grave-site. I could see he was explaining things to her and she was shaking her head, the realization of what had happened maybe just settling in.
"Come, everyone," Aunt Bet said, ushering Richard and Melanie ahead of her. "Let's go home."
"Home?" I thought. How can it ever be home without Mommy and Daddy there? It's just a shell of itself, a memory, a house full of shadows and old echoes, a place where we hang our clothes and lay down our heads, a place where we will eat a thousand meals more quietly than we had ever eaten them, for gone would be Daddy's laughter after he had just teased Mommy, gone was her singing and her warm smile, gone was her kiss and soft embrace to help keep the goblins and ghosts of our bad dreams from lingering behind.
The sky grew darker, the world was angry, and rightly so, I thought. We stumbled away from the gravesites, past the other deceased family, past the large monument for Grandmother Cutler. I was certain Mommy wouldn't have to face her again, for she could never be in Heaven.
"Remember, children," Aunt Bet said when we got back into the limousine. "Wipe your feet before you go into the house."
I looked up at her sharply and wondered if the nightmares had really only just begun.
Compromising
WITH UNCLE PHILIP SO DISTRAUGHT, AUNT BET HAD taken over the management of the reception at our house after the funeral. Just about everyone at the hotel was eager to do anything Aunt Bet wanted. Mr. Nussbaum and Leon cooked and baked what she thought was appropriate. They worked in the house under her supervision. She asked Buster Morris and other grounds people to bring over tables and benches and set them up on the front lawn. We knew there would be mobs of people coming to pay their last respects and console the family. Neither Jefferson nor I were in any mood to greet people, even people who sincerely wanted to show their love and sympathy; but I knew it was something we had to do, and anyway, Aunt Bet made sure to assign us our roles and position in the house.
"You and Jefferson will sit there, dear," she said, pointing to the sofa in the living room. "Melanie and Richard will sit beside you, of course, and I'll bring people to meet you."
"I don't want to meet people," Jefferson said, a little plaintively.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="06">
"Call it off," Sylvia the woman says in a harsh whisper. "Please!"
"Sylvia?" Harry says. There is nothing he can do. He only looks on as the woman opens the door slowly and steps back into the hall. But before she can get the door closed again, the dog bolts after her. She screams and runs toward the stairs with the dog snapping at her spiked heels. He knows that he will not see either of them again.
He closes the door after them and turns the lock. Then Harry goes to the kitchen to get himself a beer.
At the Supermarket
"I don't see the difference."
Sylvia puts her hands on her hips and looks at him sideways. Harry hates it when she does that.
"The difference is," she says, "that I always buy Hellman's."
He takes the jar of mayonnaise out of the shopping cart and weighs it in his hand. "As far as I can see," he says, "the difference is that the store brand costs half a buck less than this one."
Sylvia speaks very slowly, spelling out the words in a harsh whisper. "I ... always ... buy ... Hellman's." She's really angry.
Harry is, too. She isn't making sense. "But if the store brand is cheaper ...."
She sighs. Harry knew she was going to do that. She always sighs when they have an argument. He hates that, too. "Do you know why you're upset?" she asks him.
"I'm not upset."
"Do you know why you're upset? You don't want to be here."
"I'm not upset. I'm just talking about mayonnaise."
She sighs again. "It's got nothing to do with mayonnaise. It's about football, and you know it."
Harry can see the clock above the checkout lanes in front. It's a couple of minutes into the first quarter. She promised they'd be back in time for the kickoff. If he were at home right now, he'd be sitting in front of the TV with a beer in his hand and a bag of cheese balls on his lap.
With a series of dramatic gestures, Sylvia puts the Hellman's back on the shelf, picks up a jar of the store brand, and pops it into the cart. Then she glares at him. That will teach him a lesson he'll never forget.
"We forgot my cheese balls," he says.
Sylvia doesn't reply.
He tries again. "We went past the snack aisle and forgot the cheese balls."
She sighs for a third time. "So go get them," she says.
"I'll catch up with you in a minute," he says, hurrying away down the aisle. He knows Sylvia is glad to be rid of him.
The place is really crowded. Harry weaves his way in and around the shopping carts. Everybody shops on Sunday afternoon, it seems. Almost all the shoppers are women, of course. The guys are at home, watching the game.
Now, while he's wandering through the store looking for the snack aisle - and it's around here someplace, because they went past it just a minute ago - he knows that Sylvia is pushing her shopping cart through the crowd and mumbling to herself. She always mumbles to herself when they've had a bit of a disagreement. Right now, she's mumbling about how she can never ask him to do the least little thing to help out, how he never lifts a finger to keep their place clean, how he won't even empty an ashtray, how he can't give up a few minutes of his precious football game just to make sure they've got some food in the house, for Christ's sake. He's heard it a million times before.
He still can't find the snacks. Harry hasn't been in this supermarket for a long time, but he remembers that the potato chips, the pretzels, the cheese balls and all that stuff always used to be right next to the beer. The problem is, he can't find the beer either.
As it turns out, the snacks are now with the picnic stuff, paper plates and cups, plastic forks, and Styrofoam coolers, right next to the magazine rack. Harry picks up two bags of cheese balls - one for what's left of today's game, another for the game tomorrow night - then spends a few minutes at the magazine stand, thumbing through the current issue of Sports Illustrated. But he's just wasting time and he knows it. He's got to catch up to Sylvia and help her finish the shopping if he wants to get home before halftime.
Clutching his cheese balls, Harry heads for the dairy case at the far end of the store where he knows Sylvia has to stop eventually for eggs and milk. On his way, he looks down each aisle, but he doesn't see her. She might be there picking up coffee or Jell-O or Spaghetti O's, but he can't spot her in the crowd of shoppers and carts. He tries to remember what she was wearing. That white dress with the flowers all over it? The green blouse and jeans?
She isn't at the dairy case, but he waits there for awhile, comparing prices, looking at the more exotic cheeses. Suddenly he's hungry for a grilled Velveeta sandwich. If he were home right now .... But of course he's not at home. He's in the supermarket. Harry's getting angry all over again. Where the hell is she anyway? The thing that drives him crazy about her, the reason he never wants to help with the grocery shopping, is that she just takes her own sweet time about it. The thing of it is, she makes a list before she goes, and if she just picked up the stuff she needed, she'd be done in half an hour. But no, she's got to go up and down every aisle, look at every can and package, squeeze every tomato, and she picks up all kinds of crazy stuff - artichoke hearts, yogurt, salsa sauce, pita bread, stuff that isn't on the list and that nobody would ever eat anyway. So right now, while he's waiting to get out of there, she could be anywhere in the store - in the deli department, in bulk foods, looking at the greeting cards, you name it.
Harry is going to have to find her and get her moving if he wants to see any of that game. This time, though, he decides to conduct his search more systematically. Harry, still carrying his bags of cheese balls, makes his way up and down every aisle. It isn't easy. Now the store seems to be even more crowded than before. The whole town must be here - little old ladies, college kids, retired guys in lime-green golf trousers, young professionals who are overdressed for the occasion, all pushing shopping carts full of goodies. The fact that Harry doesn't have a cart of his own is a real advantage - he's got a lot more mobility than his fellow shoppers. But it's still tough going. There's an incredible traffic jam in the coffee aisle, and in condiments two women are arguing over the last jar of Vlasic Dills.
Even so, Harry manages to cover every inch of the supermarket - from canned meats to packaged dinners, from produce to the bakery section. Then he backtracks up and down the aisles again, this time more slowly. He looks at every woman who even vaguely resembles Sylvia. But he doesn't find her. The only way Harry can figure it is that, just by dumb luck, no matter where he's been looking, Sylvia has just happened to be somewhere else. He knows she's around here someplace, but, for the life of him, he can't figure out where. Sylvia is lost.
Well, actually, Harry is the one who's lost. This is Sylvia's turf, not his, and she knows exactly what she's doing and where she's going. Now, standing in the frozen goods section near the ice cream and looking around helplessly, Harry feels a bit like a little kid who's lost track of his mom. Should he go find the manager and have Sylvia paged over the store's speaker system? No, that would be too embarrassing. He'd never live it down. To tell the truth, the whole situation is kind of funny, and just the thought of hearing Sylvia's name booming over the PA system and interrupting the Muzak makes him laugh out loud.
An elderly woman who's picking through the Sealtest in search of her favorite flavor gives him a dirty look. Embarrassed, Harry turns away and scurries off to the next aisle. Now that he thinks about it, the situation really isn't funny after all. He's still missing the football game, and now he wants to get out of that supermarket more than ever. He just wants to be home in front of the tube with his feet propped up on the coffee table, munching his cheese balls while Sylvia fixes Tuna Helper for dinner.
He goes through the store once again, this time very slowly, department by department. Harry even goes through aisles where Sylvia would have no reason to be - hardware, baby food, pet supplies. He covers every inch of the place, but he doesn't find her. This is getting out of hand. Harry stops in frozen foods again for a free sample of pepperoni pizza and tries to think things through. It's possible, of course, that for some reason she left the store, and she simply isn't there anymore. Maybe she forgot that he came along with her. After all, she usually does the shopping on her own. Maybe her mind was on other things, and she just finished getting the stuff on the list, went through the checkout line, then headed home without giving him another thought. Sylvia isn't usually absentminded, but, well, it could have happened that way.
Harry has another piece of pizza then goes back to the water cooler in produce to get a drink. Sylvia's probably at home by now. The minute she walked into the house and saw that he wasn't there in front of the TV, she remembered. She must really feel like a jerk now, leaving him behind like that. Of course, she can't come back for him right away. She has to unload the car and put the groceries in the refrigerator first. If she doesn't, the ice cream and the TV dinners will defrost. So he'll just have to wait it out at the supermarket until she can come for him. He has no choice.
Well, it isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to him, but he doesn't like the idea that Sylvia just forgot about him that way. By this evening, he'll probably laugh about it, but right now it makes him a little angry. He'd never do that to her, you can be sure of that.
He decides he'd better pay for his cheese balls, then wait for Sylvia out in front, so he starts making his way toward the checkout lines. The crowd hasn't thinned out any. There are people with shopping carts everywhere. Harry is passing through condiments when it occurs to him that maybe she didn't forget about him after all. Maybe she left him behind on purpose.
She was angry about the mayonnaise. Maybe she was so angry that she just stormed out of the supermarket, got into the car, and took off without him. Right now she's at home or just driving around town, still steaming mad. Probably when she cools down, she'll come back for him. But God knows how long that will take.
Maybe she won't come back at all. Maybe she's left him for good. Harry can picture their little red Toyota zipping along the interstate with Sylvia at the wheel. She's free now, free of him and his damned cheese balls and his store brand mayonnaise. She doesn't know where she's going and she doesn't care. She's on her own. And Harry? He can stay there in the supermarket forever, living on free samples or eating cheese balls until he explodes.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="07">
CHAPTER FOUR
A charged silence filled the living room after the door closed behind Katy. Luke was aware of a curious sense of satisfaction. It wasn't easy winning battles with guardian angles. Virtue always had an unfair advantage.
He almost smiled as he listened intently to the sound of Katy's footsteps retreating into the distance. He had her now. She was all his for the next six months. It was a heady thought, even though he was not at all certain just what he would do with her.
"You upset her," Justine said after a moment.
"Did I?"
"Yes. She's normally very calm. Quite unflappable. She's also extraordinarily cheerful most of the time." Justine frowned thoughtfully as she picked up her cup of tea. "I've often wondered how she does it. It doesn't seem quite natural somehow. Nevertheless, she's rather a delight to have around, actually."
"Is that why you've kept her? Because she amuses you?"
Justine did not take offense. "On the contrary, I believe it is she who finds us Gilchrists amusing. When she's not exasperated with us, that is. She needed a job. I gave her one. It's been a mutually beneficial arrangement. I don't know what I would have done without her, especially these past two years."
"I know she's Richard Quinnell's granddaughter." Luke moved back to the window.
"Yes. She's Richard's granddaughter. The resemblance is unmistakable. She got that brilliant red hair and those deep blue eyes from him. Her mother looked just like her at that age."
Luke frowned. "Justine ..."
"I'll never forget that day at the church when we all finally realized your father was not going to show up. Most brides would have collapsed in humiliation. Deborah Quinnell was so very brave about it all. She and her father insisted that everyone attend the reception. Richard said that as long as he'd paid for the food, someone was going to damn well eat it."
"Justine, let's get something straight. If this new association of ours is going to have a chance of working, there will have to be some ground rules. Number one is that we don't talk about the past. You and I are on opposite sides in that old war, and unless you want to refight it, I suggest you don't mention it."
Justine's mouth thinned. "I'm sure you're right. A very logical decision. But you can't blame me for wanting you to understand that there were two sides in the feud between your father and the rest of us. We were the ones who had to face the Quinnells that day at the church."
"And you were the one who called off the merger between Quinnell and Gilchrist right after the wedding. You had made a deal, and you backed out of it."
Justine's expression was suddenly stark. "I had to call it off. Without the marriage there was no real link except that of business between the two families. Who knew what would happen when Richard's daughter married someone else, as she eventually did? I couldn't risk having everything I'd worked for eventually falling into the hands of outsiders. Surely you can understand that."
"Yeah, I understand," Luke said. Because he did. If he had been in Justine's shoes, he would have called off the merger, too. It was a sobering thought. He did not like the idea of empathizing with Justine in any way. His loyalties lay elsewhere.
"Your father ruined everything when he ran off with your mother," Justine snapped, her voice growing stronger as she sensed a small victory.
Luke smiled wryly. "Given that I wouldn't be here if he hadn't fallen in love with her, I'm sure you can understand that I have a slightly different view of the situation. Look, Justine, there are always two sides to a story. But in my case there's no question about which side I'm on. Don't waste your time trying to influence me with propaganda for the other side."
Justine almost smiled. "Katy has frequently pointed out to me that we Gilchrists tend to see things in overly simplistic terms - black and white. She claims we have a problem with the gray areas of life."
"I don't have a problem with them."
Justine nodded."Because you don't even see them. I know. I've been that way most of my life." She paused. "Katy sees them, you know."
"People who deal in shades of gray get bogged down in sentiment and indecisiveness."
"Oh, my," Justine murmured. "It's going to be interesting watching you and Katy interact."
Luke shrugged. "Katy and I will get along just fine so long as she remembers I'm the boss. In the meantime, you and I don't talk about the past. Agreed?"
"Agreed." Justine put down her teacup. "I'm too grateful to have you here at last to risk arguing with you. I must say, however, that I find it ironic that it's Richard Quinnell's granddaughter who has achieved the impossible by getting you here."
Luke narrowed his eyes. "You think I'm here because of Katy?"
"Aren't you?"
Damned if he was going to admit anything to the old witch. The truth was, he was not altogether sure why he had come to Dragon Bay. "I'm here because the Pacific Rim restaurant is a ripe plum. As a businessman, I can't bring myself to pass up such easy pickings." It was partially true. He certainly intended to take the restaurant when this was over.
"Katy Wade is a ripe plum, too," Justine said quietly. "I think you should know that she's been living an almost cloistered existence for the past several years."
Luke smiled grimly. "That figures. It goes with the wings and halo."
"It's because of her brother," Justine said coolly. "The fact that she comes with a teenager as part of the package has put off most males. Her social life has been far too limited for a young woman of her age."
Luke studied the fog. "My social life has been a little limited lately, too. Just what the hell are you trying to say, Justine?"
"Her brother will graduate from high school in another month. Then he'll be off to college, and Katy will be on her own for the first time in her life. She has a right to make up for some of what she's missed out on during the past few years, and I believe she intends to do so."
Luke hesitated. "She said something about business plans she wants to pursue."
"Yes. She yearns to open her own small business. A rather na<*_>i-trema<*/>ve dream, I admit. I am, however, encouraging her to sample some of the other aspects of the freedom she has hungered for in recent years."
Luke arched one brow. "You think she should rush out and have a few passionate affairs?"
Justine inclined her head. "Don't be crude. Perhaps one or two interesting relationships, yes. I would like her to experience some genuine passion in her life. She is, after all, an attractive young woman. I fear, however, that because she has had to postpone so much for so long, she is rather more vulnerable than other, more experienced young women are at her age. I do not want her hurt."
Luke looked at Justine. "Are you warning me off, by any chance?"
"Yes, I suppose I am." Justine's gaze was unreadable. "There was a man a year ago. Nate Atwood. He was dating Katy when he met Eden. He dropped Katy to marry my granddaughter."
"Atwood is the name of the man Eden divorced six months ago?"
"Yes." Justine pursed her lips in fierce disapproval. "I fear he used Katy to get close to the family. His real goal was Eden. He wanted to marry a Gilchrist, you see. Thought he could worm his way into a position of control at Gilchrist, Inc. He is no longer a problem, but I do not want to see Katy hurt again."
"I'll keep that in mind. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go upstairs and start letting everyone know who's running Gilchrist, Inc. these days."
Justine sat forward with sudden urgency. "Luke."
"Yes?"
"I am not entirely certain why you have come here. But I want you to know I am grateful."
"Maybe you'd better wait and see how it all works out before you decide whether or not to be grateful."
Justine eyed him closely. "I think it is you who isn't certain how it's going to work out. By the way, you will be needing a place to live. Have you given the matter any thought?"
"If you're about to offer me a room here in the mansion, forget it. I'll find myself something."
"There are several cottages along the cliffs not far from here. Katy and her brother live in one. I'm sure you can rent one if you like."
Luke considered the suggestion, aware that he was being pulled more deeply into some invisible web. On the other hand, he needed a place to live until he had sorted out Gilchrist, Inc. And he wanted to be near Katy. "All right."
He walked out of the room, ignoring the tight-lipped housekeeper. He let himself out of Justine's private suite. In the hall he took the stairs to the second floor and strode down the south wing corridor to a door that stood open.
The woman at the desk looked up quickly from a book she was reading when he appeared in the doorway. The nameplate in front of her read Liz Bartlett.
"May I help you?" She peered at him through a pair of oversized glasses.
"I'm looking for Katy Wade," Luke said.
Liz's eyes widened behind her glasses as she put down her book. "Yes, sir. You must be Mr. Gilchrist. I'll let her know you're here. She's with Mr. Stanfield." She reached for the intercom.
"Never mind," Luke said. "I'll announce myself."
"But Mr. Gilchrist -"
"It's all right. She works for me now."
He went to the inner door and opened it without knocking. Katy was standing next to a man a the window. The two were huddled in an obviously intense conversation.
The pair sprang apart with guilty haste as the door opened. Katy spun around and glowered at Luke. The man narrowed his eyes briefly and then smiled and stuck out his hand.
"Luke Gilchrist? Welcome to Gilchrist, Inc. I'm Fraser Stanfield, your operations manager."
Luke shook hands briefly. He found himself wondering if this man was one of those who were waiting in line for Katy to be free of her responsibilities to her brother. "Stanfield, you're just the man I want to talk to this afternoon. I'm going to set up an office here in the mansion."
"Justine's old office is available next door," Katy volunteered.
Luke nodded, still watching Stanfield. "Be there at two with a summary status report on the restaurants and on Gilchrist Gourmet."
Fraser's smile faded slightly. "Yes, sir."
"I'll be going into headquarters on a regular basis. Several times a week to start. Set up an office there for me, too, will you?"
"Sure. No problem."
"Fine." Luke turned to Katy. "I'm going back to Oregon tomorrow to pick up a few things. I'll drive back to Seattle in the afternoon and spend the night there. I'll want to meet with everyone at the restaurants and at Gilchrist Gourmet during the afternoon, evening, and the following morning. Have Liz make arrangements for me at a downtown hotel for tomorrow night, will you?"
Katy nodded quickly. She looked relieved. "Certainly."
Luke turned to leave and then paused. "By the way, I'll need someone to look after my dog while I'm gone. I thought I might leave him with you."
Katy's eyes flickered with alarm. "Your dog? With me? I don't think your dog likes me."
"I'm sure the two of you will get along just fine." Luke nodded to Fraser and walked out of the office.
The next morning Katy sat across from her brother at the kitchen table and watched as Matt guzzled freshly squeezed orange juice and downed vast quantities of the homemade muesli cereal Katy had prepared.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="08">
Chapter One
Sunrise was her favorite time of day. Rachel Hathaway stepped onto the apartment's covered porch, noting that the weathered boards could use a fresh coat of paint. The early-morning sky was a pale blue, with a golden flush just beginning to tint the far horizon. The humid air was warm, but without the heat that the August sun would soon be spreading. From the vantage point of the second floor, she gazed through the treetops, trying to catch sight of the Gulf of Mexico just two blocks straight ahead. Inhaling deeply, she caught the familiar salty scent of the sea.
The railroad tracks, overgrown now, were still visible. Years ago, the San Antonio Railroad had had daily runs along there. Beyond were the huge ranches and a smattering of stately southern homes. On the other side of the tracks - Rachel's side - were the older, seedier houses always in need of repair.
Moving to the far left, she leaned forward at the waist as far as she dared. Rachel could just barely make out Main Street stretching westward, the business district that nearly all of Schyler's residents visited at some time each day. Typical of most small Texas towns, the shops and public buildings were all clustered along that thoroughfare, a hodgepodge like so many colorful child's clocks arranged by an unskilled hand.
The morning breeze rearranged her long hair, and Rachel brushed it back from her face, her memory supplying what her eyes couldn't quite make out along Main Street. On the near corner was Herb's Gas Station, then the red brick library with the twin lion statues flanking the double doors, and the post office with the flag flying in front. Next to that was Edna's Diner with its long counter and red vinyl booths, probably not open yet, but it would be by seven. Then there was Hannah's Beauty Shop, the general store, the newspaper office, and across Main, the rest of the stores, most of which were owned by the powerful Quincy family - the Quincys who'd forced her to leave town ten years ago.
Turning, she saw that the old glider was still against the wall sporting new yellow corduroy cushions. With a sigh, Rachel settled onto the swing and pressed her bare feet to the floor to start the gentle swaying. She couldn't help thinking she wouldn't mind having a nickel for every time she'd sat here just like this. Sometimes dreaming, often-times crying. Rarely happy.
Around front she heard a car rumble down the road. Schyler was waking slowly, as it usually did in town. On the large cattle ranches, the hands had been up before the sun, she was certain. Just as she was certain nothing much had changed in Schyler during her absence.
Rachel drew her legs onto the swing, crossing her arms atop her bent knees. She'd slipped on terry-cloth shorts and a loose shirt when she'd crawled out of the tangled sheets of her childhood bed. She hadn't slept much, but then she'd known she wouldn't. She hated being here, hated Schyler, Texas, hated the reason that had brought her back to the town she'd vowed to never visit again.
But she'd had no choice. Her mother needed her today more than she ever had. Today they would bury Orrin Hathaway, her youngest brother.
She'd shed her tears two days ago when her mother had phoned her in California. Tears for the sweet retarded boy who'd died of pneumonia at age twenty-five. Orrin had never developed mentally beyond eight or nine; perhaps this was merciful, for he alone of all the Hathaways had never realized the scorn that Schyler had for his family. For Orrin, she'd broken her self-imposed exile and come back. And for her mother.
Rachel lay her cheek on her arms and closed her eyes, fighting a surge of emotion that threatened to have her weeping again. What was she going to do about her mother?
For all of Rachel's growing-up years, Gloria Hathaway had been a pillar of strength. Abandoned by her husband, the father Rachel scarcely remembered, Gloria had gone to work in the tavern, the town's only 'beer garden and eatery,' as the sign above the door boasted. Waitressing was hard work, but Gloria had managed in order to keep her children together, for along with the job had come the rental of the apartment above the tavern at an affordable rate.
And Gloria was still here in this dingy apartment, Rachel thought with dismay. Still waitressing, even though Bart Mitchell, the bartender who'd hired her, had died a few years ago and shocked everyone by leaving Gloria the saloon and building, such as they were. And Gloria was still smoking even though she had emphysema so severe that she had to sit on the top step after climbing the stairs to her apartment. Still stubbornly refusing to leave Schyler, where scarcely one of the Hathaways could remember having a truly happy day.
Why? Rachel asked herself as she gazed into the sky now bright with the rising sun. Why wouldn't her mother move with her to California now that Orrin was gone and her other son, Curt, was in the Navy? There'd never been anything much for her here in this nasty, unforgiving town, and there never would be.
"No one's going to drive me out of my home," Gloria had told her yesterday, when Rachel had flown in from Bakersfield. Then she'd lighted another cigarette, inhaled deeply and gone into a coughing fit that had turned her face a mottled reddish color. Before Rachel could say another word, Gloria had gone into her small bedroom to lie down, effectively calling a halt to the conversation.
Rachel ran both hands through her hair and let out a ragged sigh. Worried about her mother, she had steeled herself and walked down Main Street toward Doc Tremayne's tiny office located in a two-story building on Barlow Road. Doc, a round-faced man with a bent back and kind eyes, had delivered her twenty-seven years ago, and she'd never known him to hedge. He'd told her the truth she's feared, that her mother was very ill.
Stunned, Rachel had walked back to Gloria's apartment above the tavern, hardly aware of the surreptitious glances from behind the windows of the stores and buildings she'd passed. Strangers and prodigal daughters were treated the same in Schyler - with suspicion. Rachel Hathaway's return had been duly noted the moment she'd stepped foot over the county line.
She could deal with Schyler's rejection, Rachel thought, rising to go stand by the railing again. She had for years. But she wasn't sure how to deal with the knowledge that her mother would soon be gone.
Gloria had always understood Rachel's reasons for leaving, for not returning all these years. They'd kept in touch by phone and mail, both unhappy that they couldn't be together but accepting the way things were. Rachel had harbored the hope that one day things would work out and she'd be able to convince Gloria and Orrin and even Curt to join her in California, to forget Schyler and begin life over. She'd known it would take time, but she hadn't once considered the possibility that at forty-six, time would be running out for Gloria.
"There you are," Gloria Hathaway said from the doorway.
Turning, Rachel smiled at her mother. "I was watching the sunrise. It was lovely."
The inevitable cigarette in her hand, Gloria took a drag and moved to the banister, her gaze taking in the morning sky. "I remember. You used to come out here a lot when you were little."
She's aged, Rachel thought sadly. The blond hair that had been long and thick like her own was thinner now, with strands of white lightening the once-rich color. About two inches shorter than Rachel's five-seven, Gloria still held herself erect, though her shoulders slumped wearily when she thought no one was watching. Her figure, always lush enough to invite admiring glances and more offers to share her bed than Gloria could count, was still good. But her skin had a sallow cast, and the green eyes that Rachel had inherited had lost their sparkle.
Swallowing around a lump, Rachel rose and slipped an arm around her mother's waist, pulling her close for a moment. In the distance, a train whistle could be heard, and somewhere below them, a dog barked in protest. "Remember the time I hid behind that old glider because I was so mad at you?"
Gloria released a stream of smoke, then smiled. "I'd refused to let you have a puppy for your fifth birthday, and I thought you'd run away. I grabbed the boys - they were just babies, really - and I searched all over for you. I was nearly frantic."
"And Edna found me."
"That's right. She'd closed the diner to help me look for you." Gloria's husky voice held a wistful note.
"Did she ever scold me for scaring you! Then she bought me a stuffed dog the next day and told me it would last longer than a real one and was much easier to care for."
Nodding at the memory, Gloria stubbed out her cigarette in a coffee can in the corner. "Doc Tremayne told me you were allergic, that I shouldn't allow a pet in the house. You never liked cats, but you wanted a dog so badly. How do you explain allergies to a five-year-old? But you grew to love that stuffed dog. You named him Rufus, remember?"
"Sure. I found him on the closet shelf last night." Rachel shifted her gaze toward the sea, deciding not to tell her mother that she'd lain awake for hours, clutching the scruffy animal and staring at the ceiling. She'd avoided walks down memory lane for years, but back here again, she was caught in its uneasy grip.
Gloria tightened the belt of her robe, then leaned her elbows on the ledge. "It's hard being back here for you, I know. I'm grateful you came."
"I'm sorry I didn't come sooner," Rachel answered, her voice thick with regret. "Orrin had had so many asthma attacks in the past. I never dreamed he'd ... he'd ..."
Gloria reached for her daughter's hand. "I know. The pneumonia struck so fast that even Doc was surprised. At least Orrin didn't suffer long."
Rachel squeezed her mother's fingers, nodding. "I suppose we ought to get dressed."
Gloria straightened. "I'll make some coffee while you shower. It's going to be a long, difficult day."
"We'll get through it, Mom. We always have." Squaring her shoulders and reaching for the cool reserve that had seen her through many difficult days, Rachel walked inside.
"Are you sure I can't go with you, Daddy?"
Justin Wheeler adjusted the rubber band on the end of his eight-year-old daughter's long, dark braid and smiled down into her round, freckled face. He'd walked her over to the sitter's house located four doors from their own small bungalow, and they'd been locking horns over the day's agenda every step of the way. "We've been over this, Katie. Funerals are no place for young girls."
"But Orrin was my friend, too," Katie Wheeler said, giving her voice that persuasive note that usually worked on her father.
"Yes, he was. And I want you to remember him as someone very special. But I also want you to stay with Mrs. Porter while Grandpa and I go to his funeral." Justin touched her chin and waited until she raised her blue eyes, startled as always at how much they resembled her mother's. "Will you do that for me?"
Katie's good nature never let her argue losing battles too long. She grinned up at him, revealing a gap where two teeth were still missing. Then she jammed her baseball cap sideways onto her head. "Okay, Daddy."
Feeling a rush of love for her, Justin gave her a quick hug and flipped her hat around until the bill faced the back.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="09">
CHAPTER
1
Montego Bay, Jamaica
June 1803
IT WAS SAID she had three lovers.
Rumor numbered those three as: the pallid thin-chested Oliver Susson, an attorney and one of the richest men in Montego Bay, unmarried, nearing middle age; Charles Grammond, a planter who owned a large sugar plantation next to Camille Hall, the plantation where she lived, a man with a long-faced, strong-willed wife and four disappointing children; and a Lord David Lochridge, the youngest son of the Duke of Gilford, sent to Jamaica because he'd fought three duels within three years, killed two men, and tried unsuccessfully, because of his phenomenal luck at cards, to spend his grandmother's entire fortune that had been left to him at the tender age of eighteen. Lochridge was now Ryder's age - twenty-five - tall and slender, with a vicious tongue and an angel's face.
Ryder heard about these men in surprising detail - but nearly nothing about the notorious woman whose favors they all seemed to share equally - on his very first afternoon in Montego Bay in a popular local coffeehouse, the Gold Doubloon, a low sprawling building whose neighbor was, surprisingly enough to Ryder, St. James's Church. The crafty innkeeper had gained the patronage of the rich men of the island through the simple expedient of using his beautiful daughter, nieces, and cousins to serve the customers with remarkable amiability. Whether or not any of these lovely young girls carried any of the innkeeper's blood was not questioned.
Ryder had been made welcome and given a cup of local grog that was dark and thick and curled warmly in his belly. He relaxed, glad to be once again on solid ground, and looked about at the assembled men. He silently questioned again the necessity of his leaving his home in England and traveling to this godforsaken backwater all because the manager of their sugar plantation, Samuel Grayson, had written in near hysteria to Douglas, his elder brother and Earl of Northcliffe, describing in quite fabulous detail all the supernatural and surely quite evil happenings going on at Kimberly Hall. It was all nonsense, of course, but Ryder had quickly volunteered to come because the man was obviously scared out of his wits and Douglas was newly married and to a young lady not of his choice. Obviously he needed time to accustom himself to his new and unexpected lot. So it was Ryder who'd spent seven weeks on the high seas before arriving here in Montego Bay, in the middle of the summer in heat so brutal it was a chore to breathe. At the very least, what was happening was a mystery, and Ryder loved mysteries. He heard one of the men say something about this girl with three lovers. Had the men no other topic of conversation? Then one of her lovers had come in, the attorney, Oliver Susson, and there had been a hushed silence for several moments before one of the older gentlemen said in a carrying voice, "Ah, there's dear Oliver, who doesn't mind sharing his meal with his other brothers."
"Ah, no, Alfred, 'tis only his dessert he shares with his brothers."
"Aye, a toothsome tart," said a fat gentleman with a leering smile. "I wonder about the taste of her. What do you think, Morgan?"
Ryder found himself sitting forward in the cane-backed chair. He had believed he would be bored on Jamaica with backwater colonial contentiousness.
He found himself, instead, grinning. Who the devil was this woman who juggled three men in and out of her bedchamber with such skill?
"I doubt it's cherries he tastes," said the man named Morgan, tilting back his chair, "but I tell you, young Lord David licks his lips."
"Ask Oliver. He can give us his legal opinion of the tart in question."
Oliver Susson was a very good attorney. He blessed the day he arrived in Montego Bay some twelve years before, for he now controlled three sugar plantations since all three owners were living in England. Not one of the owners seemed to mind that he was a competitor's attorney. He sighed now. He had heard every provocative comment and he never showed any emotion save a tolerant smile.
He said with an easygoing bonhomie, "My dear sirs, the lady in question is the queen of desserts. Your jealousy leads your tongues to serious impertinence." With that, he ordered a brandy from a quite striking young woman with wild red hair and a gown that offered up breasts as creamy as the thick goat milk served with the coffee. He then opened an English newspaper, shook the pages, and held it in front of his face.
What the hell was the woman's name? Who was she?
Ryder found that he really didn't want to leave the coffeehouse. Outside, the grueling sun was beating down, piles of filth and offal on all the walkways, thick dust that kicked up even when a man took a single step. But he was tired, he needed to get to Kimberly Hall, and he needed to soothe Grayson's doubtless frazzled nerves. Grayson was probably even now at the dock wondering where the hell he was. Well, he would discover all about this so-called tart soon enough.
He paid his shot, bid his new acquaintances good-bye, and strode out into the nearly overpowering heat of the late afternoon. It nearly staggered him and he found himself wondering how the devil one could even want to make love in this inferno. He was immediately surrounded by ragged black children, each wanting to do something for him, from wiping his boots with a dirty cloth to sweeping the path in front of him with naught more than twigs tied together. They were all shouting <quote>"Massa! Massa!" He tossed several shillings into the air and strolled back to the dock. There were free blacks in the West Indies, he knew, but if they were free, they couldn't be more ragged than their slave brothers.
On the small dock, the smell of rotting fish nearly made him gag. The wooden planks creaked beneath his boots, and there was a frenzy of activity as slaves unloaded a ship that had just docked. Both a black man and a white man stood nearby, each with a whip in his hand, issuing continuous orders. He saw Samuel Grayson, the Sherbrooke manager and attorney, pacing back and forth, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. The man looked older than Ryder knew him to be. When he looked up and saw Ryder, Ryder thought he would faint with relief.
Ryder smiled pleasantly and stretched out his hand. "Samuel Grayson?"
"Yes, my lord. I had thought you hadn't come until I chanced to see the captain. He told me you were the most enjoyable passenger he's ever had."
Ryder smiled at that. The fact of the matter was, he hadn't slept with the captain's wife, a young lady making her first voyage with her much older husband. She'd tried to seduce him in the companionway during a storm. Captain Oxenburg had evidently found out about it. "Oh yes, I'm here, right enough. I'm not a lord, that's my older brother, the Earl of Northcliffe. I'm merely an honorable, which sounds quite ridiculous really, particularly in this blistering sun, particularly in the West Indies. I believe a simple mister in these parts is quite sufficient. Good God, this sun is brutal and the air is so heavy I feel as though I'm carrying an invisible horse on my shoulders."
"Thank God you are here. I've waited and wondered, I don't mind telling you, my lor - Master Ryder, that we've trouble here, big trouble, and I haven't known what to do, but now you're here and, oh dear, as for the heat, you'll accustom yourself hopefully and then -"
Mr. Grayson's voice broke off abruptly and he sucked in his breath. Ryder followed his line of vision and in turn saw a vision of his own. It was a woman ... really, just a woman, but even from this distance, he knew who she was, oh yes, he was certain this was the woman who dangled three men so skillfully. When she bade them dance, they doubtless danced. He wondered what else she bade them do. Then he shook his head, too weary from the seven weeks on board the comfortingly huge barkentine, The Silver Tide, that he simply didn't care if she were a snake charmer form India or the whore of the island, which, he supposed, she was. The intense heat was sapping his strength. He'd never experienced anything like it before in his life. He hoped Grayson was right and he'd adjust; that, or he'd just lie about in the shade doing nothing.
He turned back to Grayson. The man was still staring at her, slavering like a dog over a bone that wouldn't ever be his because other bigger dogs had staked claim.
"Mr. Grayson," Ryder said, and finally the man turned back to him. "I would like to go to Kimberly Hall now. You can tell me of the troubles on our way."
"Yes, my lor - Master Ryder. Right away. It's just that she's, well, that's Sophia Stanton-Greville, you know." He mopped his forehead.
"Ah," said Ryder, his voice a nice blend of irony and contempt. "Onward, Grayson. Pull your tongue back into your mouth, if you please. I see flies hovering."
Samuel Grayson managed it, not without some difficulty, for the woman in question was being helped down from her mare by a white man, and she'd just shown a glimpse of silk-covered ankle. To render men slavering idiots with an ankle made Ryder shake his head. He'd seen so many female ankles in his day, so many female legs and female thighs, and everything else female, that he by far preferred an umbrella to protect him form the relentless sun than seeing anything the woman had to offer.
"And don't call me master. Ryder will do just fine."
Grayson nodded, his eyes still on the Vision. "I don't understand," he said more to himself than to Ryder as he walked to two horses, docilely standing, heads lowered, held by two black boys. "You see her, you see how exquisitely beautiful she is, and yet you are not interested."
"She is a woman, Grayson, nothing more, nothing less. Let's go now."
When Grayson produced a hat for Ryder, he thought he'd weep for joy. He couldn't imagine riding far in this heat. "Is it always this unmercifully hot?"
"It's summer. It's always intolerable in the summer here," said Grayson. "We only ride, Ryder. As you'll see, the roads here are well nigh impassable for a carriage. Yes, all gentlemen ride. Many ladies as well."
Grayson sat his gray cob quite comfortably, Ryder saw, as he mounted his own black gelding, a huge brute with a mean eye.
"It's nearly an hour's ride to the plantation. But the road west curves very close to the water and there will be a breeze. Also the great house is set upon a rise, and thus catches any breezes and winds that might be up, and in the shade it is always bearable, even in the summer."
"Good," Ryder said and clamped the wide-brimmed leather hat down on his head. "You can tell me what's been happening that disturbs you so much."
And Grayson talked and talked. He spoke of strange blue and yellow smoke that threaded skyward like a snake and fires that glowed white and an odd green, and moans and groans and smells that came from hell itself, sulfurous odors that announced the arrival of the devil himself, waiting to attack, it was just a matter of time. And just the week before there'd been a fire set to a shed near to the great house. His son, Emile, and all the house slaves had managed to douse the flames before there'd been much damage. Then just three days before a tree had fallen and very nearly landed on the veranda roof. The tree had been very sturdy.
"I don't suppose there were saw marks on the tree?"
"No," said Mr. Grayson firmly. "My son looked closely. It was the work of the supernatural. Even he was forced to cease going against what I said."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="10">
Chapter One
Off the Carolina coast, 1673
The English Wench, prized by her pirate crew for her speed and agility, had had no trouble overtaking the heavier merchant vessel. Being attacked by pirates was one of the hazards faced by those who sailed along the coast of the Carolinas in the year of the Lord 1673.
While the merchant vessel had attempted to position itself to use its cannons, the English Wench had drawn alongside. Using grappling hooks, the pirates had bound the two vessels together. Even before all the lines were secured, members of the band had leapt from their vessel to the deck of the merchant ship.
Kathleen had watched the battle through a spyglass from the bridge of the English Wench. Captain Thorton's ruthless pirates had won, but not easily. The captain of the merchant vessel and his officers had fought valiantly. Even the crew had put up more of a fight than was usual. These men did not commonly feel a sufficient loyalty to the owners of the vessel on which they sailed to risk their lives in battle. Then there had been the brown-haired man who now stood tall and proud, despite his wounds, among the other prisoners. She judged his age to be near thirty. It was not easy to decide his place. He had moved with the air of one used to being in a position of authority. But he wore no wig. Had he, it would have been a certain sign of rank. However, it was his own natural hair that hung thick and full past his shoulders. Very nice hair, too, she mused, a rich brown like the shell of a hickory nut.
His clothing was well tailored and most definitely the attire of a gentleman. But to her shock she had found her mind going beyond the depth of her gaze. It was difficult to determine the true figure of a man beneath his clothing, but his movements had been strong and lithe, and Kathleen had found herself envisioning strong shoulders and firm legs. Not at all the kind of thoughts for a modest woman to be having, but then she had not lived in polite or refined company for many years. A sudden concern that some of the pirates' lusty nature had rubbed off onto her caused a cold chill. Never!
Her mind returned to the business at hand. The battle was over and the captain of the captured vessel was ordering the healthy prisoners to help the wounded members of his crew. Meanwhile, standing slightly apart form the others, the brown-haired swordsman was tying a make-shift bandage around his arm. A slicing blow from a saber had cut through his clothing to the flesh below. The bleeding had slowed, however, indicating that the wound was not deep. For a moment she wondered if he was one of the owners of the vessel. But noticing that the captain made no move to consult with him, she concluded that he was merely a passenger.
Suddenly realizing how long she had allowed this particular man to occupy her attention, she frowned. "You're wasting precious time," she berated herself aloud. Putting the spyglass aside, she left the bridge. As she crossed the long plank now connecting the two ships, she tried not to think of the blood on the deck or the bodies of the dead and dying.
"I've lost a few of me men today," Captain Lawrence Thorton said, addressing the crew of the ship he had just captured. "If any of you lads are wanting to join me merry band, you're welcome. Just step forward. The rest of you will be set adrift with what remaining officers you have. If you're lucky, the sharks'll eat you 'afore the Indians get you." He laughed at his joke while Kathleen fought back a wave of nausea as she nearly tripped over a severed arm.
As distasteful as such expeditions were, she'd convinced Captain Thorton to allow her to board the captured ships. She'd led him to believe her motives were purely those of mercy toward the wounded. Since he hadn't a single merciful bone in his body, he found this amusing and did not stop her. In truth, while she did try to help the injured, especially those of the captured vessel, her real purpose was to find small weapons she could conceal in a pocket in her petticoat. She was determined that one day she would escape from Captain Thorton. And that day will be very soon, she promised herself as she knelt beside a corpse and guardedly took a dagger and its sheath from the corpse's belt.
Hearing a splash, she glanced toward the rail to find that Captain Thorton's men were already tossing the bodies of those who had died, both friend and foe alike, overboard to the waiting sharks. No formal ceremonies for these cutthroats. Cries for mercy suddenly filled the air as a badly wounded member of the merchant crew was flung over-board along with the dead. <quote>"He'd never of made it, mate," one of the two pirates explained with a gleeful grin when the captain of the merchant vessel protested.
Kathleen's stomach knotted as she heard the body hit the water. After eleven years of sailing with Captain Thorton, she should have grown used to his and his crew's callous disrespect for human life, but she hadn't.
About half of the remaining merchant crew accepted Captain Thorton's invitation to join him. This didn't surprise her. Joining the pirates provided them an opportunity to gain wealth they would never otherwise have. It also afforded them a much better chance of survival than being set adrift in an overcrowded lifeboat.
Hearing a groan, Kathleen turned to see one of Captain Thorton's men lying dazed on the deck not far from where she knelt. She knew that if he did not regain his senses by the time the 'burial' crew found him, he, too, might be tossed to the sharks. Captain Thorton's crew operated on the principalprinciple of survival of the fittest, always keeping in mind that the fewer left to share the booty, the larger their portion of the prize.
A part of her was tempted to leave the man to his fate. He had certainly shown her no kindness. None of Captain Thorton's crew had. They leered at her and made crude remarks, and she knew that should Captain Thorton ever decide to relinquish his guardianship over her, each would be willing to use her foully. Still, she couldn't bring herself to let the man die. Rising, she crossed over to him and helped him to his feet.
He had a large bump on his head, but other than that, he was not injured. "If you want to live, stay on your feet," she instructed him firmly. She saw the glimmer of understanding in his eyes. Reaching out, he steadied himself against the mast.
Moving away from him, she continued around the deck. The blood again caused her stomach to churn. "You can be sick later," she reprimanded herself in a harsh whisper.
The time had come for the officers and those remaining with them to board their lifeboat. Despite the fact that their chances of survival were very slim, with all her heart she wished she could go with them. The passenger who had captured her attention during the battle was in the group. Without even thinking, she moved closer until she found herself beside him. He was taller than she had first thought. Her slender five-foot-six-inch frame did not quite reach his chin. And he was even more muscular than she had judged from a distance. His shoulders were broad and his abdomen was firm and flat. While his manner was that of one ready to accept his fate, she noted that the muscles of his legs were flexed like those of an animal prepared to defend itself. Her gaze traveled to his hands. The palms were callused. He dressed like a gentleman, but clearly he was no man of leisure.
As if he suddenly felt her studying him, he turned and looked down at her.
His features were strong but blended well into a face that could be considered ruggedly handsome. His eyes were a deep brown, a shade darker than his hair. When they first settled on Kathleen, they showed surprise, then they became even darker with disapproval.
A pirate's whore, John thought to himself, as the shock of seeing a woman in the middle of this carnage wore off. He looked down at the fresh blood smeared across the back of one of her hands. He'd once heard that a bloodthirsty woman could be a thousand times more dangerous than a bloodthirsty man. Best to stand clear of this one, he decided, shifting his gaze back to his captors.
Kathleen's gray eyes flashed with proud defiance as she read the disdain in his features. Her head held high, she stepped away from the arrogant prisoner as Mr. Louker, Captain Thorton's first mate, approached and ordered the group to begin their descent into the waiting lifeboat. Oh, how she wished she could go with them.
Suddenly Joseph Yates was at the brown-eyed prisoner's side. "He stays to pay for the death of me brother." Grabbing the man by his wounded arm, Joseph yanked him out of the line. His knife was already drawn to slit the prisoner's throat. As if her own death was being set in motion, a chill shook Kathleen. Without thinking, she raced across the deck and grabbed Joseph's arm before he could do his filthy deed.
"Your brother died in a fair fight," she insisted, her fingers digging into Joseph's arm as he tried to shake her free. Even as she fought for the prisoner, she did not understand why it was so important to her that he live. She told herself her concern was only because he was an innocent human being who did not deserve to die at the hands of these cutthroats. "I was watching from the bridge of the English Wench."
"How me brother died is of no importance. He's dead and I'll have me revenge." Joseph's eyes glistened with hatred as he gave a strong jerk that sent Kathleen sprawling onto the deck.
The woman's attempt to save his life startled John. But he had no time to wonder at her behavior. The pirate's struggle with her had drawn Joseph's attention away from his quarry. John was not one to allow an opportunity to go to waste. He captured the wrist of Joseph's knife-wielding hand in a viselike grip and twisted it hard. As Kathleen scrambled back to her feet, the bloody knife dropped to the deck.
"You're a dead man," Joseph spat at the prisoner, who now held him captive.
"You cannot kill him without the captain's permission," Kathleen warned Joseph harshly. It was the direst threat she could muster. "Or you'll pay with your life."
Joseph greeted her warning with a self-righteous scowl. "He killed me brother. I've got a right -"
"You should listen to Kathleen," a male voice cautioned from behind her.
Glancing over her shoulder Kathleen saw Captain Thorton approaching them. He looked older than his forty-five years. The ocean winds and his own innate cruelty had etched harsh lines into his features. His attire was that of a fancy English gentleman. There were polished buckles adorning his boots, a lace cravat at his throat and a heavy, full wig upon his head. He was only an inch taller than she but the cocked hat he wore, graced as it was with a plume, made him seem taller. His green silk waistcoat strained against his stomach, but she knew he was made more of muscle than fat. His dress and the manner in which he carried himself caused her to think of a strutting peacock, a very vicious, very deadly one.
"She knows better than any member of my crew what disobeying my orders can mean."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="11">
Prologue
Westmorland, England, 1807
Walter FitzHugh looked up from the papers strewn across his desk. His eyes seemed dull, his face haggard, yet he was able to smile when he saw her standing in the hall outside his study. "So, pet, are you ready to leave for Beckworth House?"
Heather shook her head, feeling more lost and confused than she'd ever felt in her ten years.
The baron held out his arms to her. "Come here, child."
She ran to him and hurtled herself onto his lap, into the safety of his arms. Her hands clasped behind his neck as she buried her face against his chest.
"It won't be so terrible at your aunt Caroline's, Heather. My sister might be a trifle vain and arrogant, but she was a FitzHugh before she married the viscount. Once a FitzHugh, always a FitzHugh, I say. She'll make you a good home."
"But I don't want to leave GlenRoyal, Papa," Heather whispered. "Why do we have to leave?"
It was her brother, George, who answered her question. "Because the Duke of Hawksbury cheated at hazard." The fourteen-year-old's voice was filled with bitterness. "Isn't that right, Father?"
Heather turned her head toward the doorway and watched as George crossed the room, coming to stand beside her and their father. "But why does that mean we have to leave our home?"
"You're too young to understand, Heather," the baron replied. "One day we'll be able to come back. I don't know how, but one day ..." His voice faded, the beaten expression returning to haunt his features.
"Let's make a FitzHugh oath." George stuck out his hand, palm down, toward his father and sister. Youthful idealism gleamed in his green eyes. "I swear that I shall do whatever I must to reclaim GlenRoyal for the FitzHugh family."
Heather slid from her father's lap. She stood as straight and tall as she could, not too young to understand the solemnity of taking a FitzHugh oath. She thrust her pudgy arm forward and laid her hand over her brother's. She spoke forcefully, fervently, repeating George's words. "I swear that I shall do whatever I must to reclaim GlenRoyal for the FitzHugh family."
In unison, the siblings looked toward their father, waiting expectantly.
"Children, I ..." His gaze shifted back and forth between them. Finally, he rose from his chair. "I swear that I shall do whatever I must - " His voice broke, and he turned away from them.
Heather felt tears burning her throat at the sound of despair in her beloved father's voice. She wanted to make him laugh. She wanted to make him smile. She wanted the father she'd always known back again.
The baron moved to the window. He ran the fingers of one hand through his graying hair as he gazed outside into the bright summer sunlight. "George, take Heather outside. I won't be long."
Her brother's hand folded around hers. "Come on." His fingers squeezed hers gently. "Father wants to be alone." He led her to the door. "And don't you ever forget what we swore to do."
Insulted by his authoritarian tone, Heather lifted her chin. As if she would ever forget the importance of what they'd just promised! "A FitzHugh never breaks a FitzHugh oath," she retorted, forcing herself to sound brave and sure.
Three horses were waiting for them in the drive, their reins held by the only remaining footman at GlenRoyal.
Heather broke away from George and hurried toward her pretty chestnut mare. She stroked the horse's sleek neck as the lump returned to her throat. At least no one had taken Cathy from her. She'd been afraid when so many things had started disappearing from GlenRoyal, so many things that had meant safety and security to her. But she couldn't have stood it if someone had taken her mare. A passion for horses - for all animals, really - was something Heather shared with the baron. When she was seven, her father had given her the yearling filly, and Heather had helped to train her.
"May I give you a lift up, Miss Heather?" asked Cosgrove, the footman.
She knew that if she looked at him she would burst out crying. She didn't want to say anymore good-byes. So she shook her head. "I can do it, Cosgrove." Thus said, she led Cathy to the mounting block, hiked up her skirts, and tossed a leg over the saddle. She immediately imagined her aunt Caroline's frown of disapproval at such an unladylike act, but she didn't care. She wasn't living with Aunt Caroline yet.
A moment later, Walter FitzHugh appeared at the top of the steps. He kept his eyes straight ahead as he descended the stairs and walked to his horse.
"Good luck, my lord," the footman said as he handed the reins to the baron.
"Thank you, Cosgrove. Same to you." He swung up onto the saddle, then spun his horse away from the house and cantered down the drive, his children following close behind him.
"You know as well as I do that the duke didn't cheat at hazard," Caroline scolded. "You must make George stop saying so, or you're going to cause us no end of grief. Hawksbury is a powerful man. And that son of his is well thought of among the ton. They would never do anything so scandalous as cheat at cards, and well you know it. You'll find yourself called out if rumors begin because of George."
Her brother's response was to lift his glass of port and swallow several gulps.
"'Tis your own fault, Walter. You never could stay away from the clubs and gaming hells. I'm surprised you didn't lose everything before now. Whatever would have happened to you and the children if it weren't for me? Thank heaven I had the good sense to marry a man like Frederick. He shall never leave me destitute. His daughter will never be living off someone else's charity, as your children are."
"Go away, Caroline," Walter grumbled as he refilled his glass.
"You're getting drunk."
"Go away."
His sister shot him a disgusted glance. "All right, Walter, I'll go. But you'd better spend some time deciding what you're going to do now. You haven't a home. You haven't any income left. You surely don't expect to go on living here indefinitely, being waited on hand and foot. I have my own life to lead. I have responsibilities in Society. I can't have people gossiping behind my back about my wastrel brother."
"By George!" he shouted. "Go away and leave me in peace!"
Her face pinched with anger, Caroline twirled away from him and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
"Damn woman," Walter muttered before lifting the glass to his lips. "Never could stand her. Never could."
Now, his Victoria ... there was a woman to love and be loved. If only she'd lived. He'd never failed at anything when Tory was alive. Since her death, life had lost its meaning for him. If it weren't for his children ...
Heather was a lot like her mother. She had the same raven hair, curly and unruly, and the same violet eyes, big and round and expressive. Sometimes it almost hurt to look at his daughter for the sense of loss it brought him. But Heather was stronger than Tory had been. Heather was a fighter. She'd find her place in life all right, no matter what a mess her father had made of things. No, he wouldn't have to worry about Heather.
And George. George had all the best qualities of a FitzHugh and few of the weaknesses. George was well on his way to being a man. He was strong and intelligent. He wouldn't repeat his father's mistakes. He would make the FitzHugh name stand for something again. George wasn't the failure Walter had become.
He refilled his glass and let the port slide down his throat, feeling it warming all the cold parts of his body. Heaven help him, he was tired of feeling cold. He'd been cold ever since that night at Watier's.
His senses might be dulled by the alcohol, but he still remembered every detail of that night at the club at No. 81, Piccadilly, as he'd faced the Duke of Hawksbury and his son across the hazard table. Walter had already lost a phenomenal sum of money that night. In fact, he'd known he was all but ruined. He'd had only one chance to win it back. Only one. He'd demanded that the duke accept GlenRoyal as his wager. He'd been so certain the dice would be good to him on the next roll. He'd been so sure he would nick it, that the chance would equal the main and he would win all the stakes.
But he hadn't nicked it. He'd thrown crabs. With one roll of the dice, he'd lost GlenRoyal.
God only knew why he'd allowed his son to think the duke had cheated by using dispatchers. When George had claimed the dice must have been loaded, Walter had remained silent. Perhaps it was because the truth about himself was too difficult to face. For the thrill of the game, he'd thrown away his son's future, his daughter's security. For the thrill of the game, he'd lost his family's heritage.
Caroline was right about him. He was a wastrel. He was an embarrassment to his children and his sister and his friends. Perhaps it was merciful that Tory hadn't lived to see him come to this.
"Ah, Tory, I need you with me, love. I need you."
Heather sat up suddenly, startled awake by a loud noise. Her heart hammered in her chest as she stared into the darkness of the strange room. She was frightened. Terribly frightened. She longed for her own bedchamber at GlenRoyal and her familiar bed. She didn't care that GlenRoyal wasn't as large or impressive or finely furnished as Beckworth House. She wanted her own home.
Then she heard the voices. Excited voices. Voices shouting. She heard footsteps running up and down the stairs. She heard pounding on the doors. Her anxiety increased. Frightening forms took shape in the corners of the room, shapes that seemed to move and whisper and threaten.
"Papa," she whispered, "come find me."
A thin light appeared beneath her door. She slipped out of bed and hurried toward it, blood pounding in her ears. She yanked the door open, letting a flood of golden lamplight spill into the bedchamber, dispelling the ghosts and goblins that fear had created.
She stepped into the hallway, moving toward the commotion on the floor below. Her hand was on the banister, and she was ready to descend the stairs when George appeared.
His face was white, his green eyes eerily bright.
"Stay there, Heather," he said.
"Why?"
"It's Papa. Papa's dead."
Chapter 1
London, England, 1816
To the many pairs of feminine eyes watching him covertly - and otherwise - throughout the room, Tanner Huntington Gilbert Montgomery, tenth Duke of Hawksbury, was a magnificent sight. Tall, lean, and broad of shoulder, he was dressed fashionably, yet there was something almost indolent about his appearance, as if he were mocking the gentlemen who'd spent hours at their toilet perfecting their starched cravats. His tight black trousers revealed long legs and muscular thighs. A long-tailed black coat fit him snugly at the waist. There was an aura of raw strength about him, a barely restrained power that was both frightening and fascinating.
But it was the chiseled contours of his face that drew the most attention. Ruggedly handsome, he had a wide forehead and an aquiline nose. His mouth was thin with what appeared to be a permanent cynical twist at the corners. Golden-brown hair brushed the back of his white collar, and cool blue eyes stared out at the drawing room with undisguised boredom.
Tanner sipped champagne and glanced over the rim of his glass. The Rathdrum rout was in full swing.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="12">
Chapter One
The last time Lanie Robinson ran away from home she had been eight years old. She had lost her shoe, fallen into a mud puddle and been chased by a dog. By the time darkness came she was more than happy to creep back home to supper with no one ever having been aware that she was gone.
Now, almost twenty-seven years later, Lanie Robinson's Great Escape II was turning out to be almost as inauspicious as her last one. The only difference between then and now was that this time home was almost twelve-hundred miles away. Her plane from Iowa had been late and she had missed her connection in Philadelphia. By the time she had finally arrived in Miami, the airport transportation had already departed, and she had had to find her own way to the port. Her luggage was lost. She was lost.
She paused to catch her breath, letting her heavy carry-on bag, oversized purse and bulky all-weather coat sink to the ground as she struggled to capture, even for a moment, that sense of heady triumph she was sure should be hers. After all, she had done it. Lanie Robinson - who had never traveled more than a hundred miles from home in her life - had scrawled a note, packed a bag and walked out on her home, job and family without a backward glance. She had made it this far; she wasn't about to turn back now.
She only wished she didn't have quite so far to go.
Christopher Vandermere scrawled his signature on the last document just as the chauffeur-driven limousine pulled into the harbor area. He pushed up the tortoiseshell reading glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, scowling into the telephone. "Look, Madison, you can tell him for me -"
"If you don't mind, sir, I'd rather not." The crisp contralto tones of his secretary bore not the faintest hint of reproach - nor, in fact, any emotion at all. It was a pattern of speech that Elizabeth Madison, administrative assistant extraordinaire, had elevated to an art form. "If we might move on ..."
Chris groaned out loud, letting the glasses drop painfully to the bridge of his nose again. "Move on?" He moved the telephone away from his face just long enough to tug the glasses off impatiently and toss them across the seat. Then he started to work on his tie. "I've got a stack of papers here tall enough to keep even you busy for the next month, two tapes of dictation are on the way to the office by special messenger as we speak, and if there's anyone in the continental United States I haven't talked to today it's only because I've faxed them. Please, don't you think I can go out and play now?"
He had been trying for five years to break through Madison's imperturbable facade and elicit a laugh, a chuckle, or even a small smile; mentally he marked down another failure as she replied, perfectly deadpan and without missing a beat, "In just one minute, sir. There are only a few more items we need to cover."
Chris was looking out the window, across the water, watching the harbor traffic with a quickening of his pulse and a deepening of anticipation that was so intense it was almost sexual. Only a few more minutes now and his escape would be complete. Meantime ...
Chris got the tie off and tossed it the way of the glasses. His sigh was resigned as he shrugged out of his jacket and began working on the vest. "All right, go ahead."
The man at the Great Escapes Tours booth had pointed Lanie in the direction of Pier Twenty-one and radioed the captain that she was on her way. He had neglected to mention that numbering the slips seemed to be irregular and optional. The last readable number had been Fifteen, and it felt to Lanie as though she had walked a mile since then. She had to be getting close.
She blotted her forehead with the cuff of her silk-blend blouse - which that morning had seemed so classy and stylish but was now as limp as her brand-new, guaranteed-not-to-frizz hairstyle - and shouldered her bags again with a muffled groan. She was wearing a skirt above her knees for the first time since puberty, and that made her self-conscious enough. But the pink wool was travel-creased and scratchy and completely inappropriate for Miami, even if it was January.
Two weeks sailing on a private yacht, maximum capacity six passengers, exploring small islands at which the bigger ships could never dock, scuba diving on coral reefs untouched by the tourist crowd, gourmet meals every night, being pampered from dawn to dusk ... it was a dream to come true. It didn't matter that Lanie did not know how to scuba dive, that she had never been sailing before in her life or that her idea of being pampered was Chinese takeout on Friday nights. It didn't even matter that this trip had taken every penny of her savings and most of her cash-advance limit on her credit card. This was her chance - quite possible her last chance - to do something exciting, something unexpected, something purely because she wanted to do it. Nothing was going to stop her now ... except, perhaps, missing the boat.
And then she saw Pier Twenty-one, and her spirits soared. The ship - boat, she corrected herself - was even more luxurious than the brochure had promised. Gleaming white and polished teak, it dwarfed its neighbors, both in size and beauty. The black letters across the side proclaimed its name to be Serendipity and Lanie broke into a rueful grin.
Not much about her life or even this trip had been serendipitous so far - but Lanie felt sure her luck was about to change.
Very little of Chris Vandermere's attention was on Elizabeth Madison's voice as he discarded his vest and pushed a button that lowered the tinted glass window. Almost immediately the climate-controlled interior of the limo was tainted by the smell of fish and salt and fuel, thick and humid and warm. Real air, real life. Chris inhaled deeply, unbuttoning the top three buttons of his shirt.
They passed Pier Eighteen, where the Sunchaser, a four-hundred-fifty-passenger cruiser, was docked; Pier Twenty, where the Nordic Queen, fifteen-hundred passengers, seventy-thousand tons, would be returning after a seven-day cruise to the Bahamas tomorrow at six a.m.; Pier Thirty, where the Rendezvous, the newest and some said the most luxurious cruise ship afloat was just now departing amid a rain of confetti and streamers for a two-week cruise of the Caribbean.0
Chris did not have to glance out the window to identify the ships or even the piers they were passing. He knew them by smell, by feel, by the shadow they cast and the sound of their engines. The <tf>Sunchaser, the Nordic Queen and the Rendezvous were his, along with two other cruise ships docked in Miami and another three in Los Angeles. But they were business, and business was something he was in the process of shedding as systematically as he was his clothes. His mind was on the Serendipity.
"The board meeting has been confirmed for the fifteenth," Madison was saying. "That will give you two days after your return -"
"If I return."
That caused Madison to pause, and Chris experienced a small surge of satisfaction for having unsettled her, however temporarily. She recovered in less than a beat, however, and said, "If I may say, sir, that would be ill-advised at present ..."
"I'm cutting this trip short as it is. What's the big deal if I miss one board meeting? There's nothing on the agenda that's not routine and Anthony has my proxy."
Again, a slight pause. Madison did not get along with Anthony and never had, which was one of the reasons Chris had put his brother in charge of west coast operations three years ago. The other reason, of course, was to simply give Anthony something to do.
"To be sure, sir, your brother is a fine young man, but with the situation being what it is I think your presence at the meeting would do a great deal to reassure the board members."
Chris scowled again. The last thing he wanted to think about now was the 'situation' as it was. "The one thing that's guaranteed to worry the board members is my presence at a routine meeting," he pointed out, and not entirely facetiously. "Then they'll know something is wrong."
"Perhaps you're right, sir. Nonetheless -"
"Nonetheless," he interrupted firmly, "if I do decide to extend my trip you are not to send the coast guard looking for me. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly, sir." But Chris thought he detected a note of reluctance in her voice. "However, since you are occasionally out of radio contact -"
"I mean it, Madison."
"Yes, sir."
Score one for executive privilege, Chris thought grimly. But duty compelled him to say, "Is there anything else?" It didn't surprise him that there was.
The gangplank was one of those temporary, rolling structures that seemed to be attached to the boat more through good intentions than mechanical expertise, and Lanie clutched the handrail with both hands, lurching from side to side with each step. Her clattering approach must have been heard through the innermost reaches of the ship, for in only a moment the door to the cockpit opened and a man in yachting whites stepped on deck.
"Afternoon," he said, smiling.
He was middle-aged, fit and friendly-looking. "Hi," Lanie said, breathing hard. "Are you the captain?"
The smile widened into a grin as he touched the brim of his cap. "No, ma'am, afraid not. I guess you could call me the first mate, though. I'm Andrew, and Joel, here ..." he nodded toward a younger man, also in white, who came around the side of the cockpit "... he'd be the crew. What can we do for you?"
"I'm Elaine Robinson. The captain is expecting me." She tried to shift around her carry-on bag and coat to get to her purse, where her boarding card was stored in one of the numerous compartments or pockets. "I'm sorry I'm late. I hope I haven't held you up too long."
There was only the slightest hesitance, and out of the corner of her eye Lanie saw the two men exchange a look. Then Andrew said, still in that warm, friendly voice, "No, you haven't held us up a bit. Mr. Vandermere isn't even here yet. Here, let me help you with that." He came forward to take her bag. "Joel, do you want to show the lady to the main cabin?"
Joel hurried forward with a quick "Welcome aboard, ma'am. Mind your step there."
He took her arm to help her on board, relieved her of the cumbersome coat and shouldered the bag Andrew passed to him. Now this is more like it, Lanie thought as he escorted her toward the main causeway.
Lanie had never been on anything bigger than a rowboat and she was fascinated by everything she saw. Unfortunately Joel moved too quickly for her to have much more than an impression of warm wood and polished brass, framed seascapes on the walls and rich carpeting underfoot.
"This is the main salon," Joel said when they went below deck. "Dinner is served here at eight, and you can find just about anything you want in the way of entertainment here. The galley is just beyond that hatch there, and the crew quarters and guest cabin are forward. Here you go."
He opened the door to another room and Lanie, feeling exactly like the wide-eyed tourist she was, dragged her attention to this new wonder with difficulty.
And it was a wonder. It was more of a suite than a cabin - a presidential suite at that. It was decorated in royal blue and gold with accents of rich wine, and every detail spoke of elegance and taste.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="13">He had a rare serenity, and almost never complained of his aches and pains from the spreading cancer. He believed that everything was God's will, and had no fear of dying. They talked for a while, about the weather, chopping wood, how the caba<*_>n-tilde<*/>uelas calculations in January could predict the weather for an entire year. Then the old man listened as psalms were read to him in Spanish. He closed his eyes and smiled and folded his hands on his chest. He seemed to go to sleep. There was a pause of absolute quiet in the room. The younger man leaned forward to see if the chest was still moving. Then he realized that his longtime friend was held to life by only a flimsy thread. He opened the Bible again and at random read more psalms in Spanish. Though he had long feared the moment, when it arrived he was very calm. He liked the sound of his voice, the snoozing cats, the old arthritic hands clasped in peaceful resignation. The Spanish had a rhythm like poetry. There were longer pauses in his aged friend's breathing....
"That's how it happened," he said. "I read him into the promised land. I never knew exactly when he died. At one point he opened his eyes and looked at me, and there was a twinkle in them. He smiled and said what he always said, when, daily, after every visit, I put drops in his aching eyes: "Ay, que tino de borracho." I guess those were his last words. Even after I realized he was dead, I kept reading the psalms in Spanish. He had loved them very much. I had been reading to him for three years, almost daily. Finally, I stopped and just sat there, listening to the void. Both cats were purring. His body must have felt warm to them for a long time after because of the electric blanket."
"Did you cry?"
"No, nothing. I was relieved. It was very peaceful. His eyes were shut, but his mouth was wide open. I remembered how he used to collect wood together, and he would swing a two-bladed ax all afternoon, at eighty-five years, without growing tired. He almost never took a sip of water. He remembered when there weren't any fences and you could drive a flock of sheep hundreds of miles west to Navajoland without encountering private property, barbwire, or other impediments. I had long enjoyed that space - vicariously - through knowing him."
They buried his old man in a small camposanto up against the foothills. About a foot of fresh snow lay on the ground and powdered the branches of pi<*_>n-tilde<*/>on trees at the edge of the cemetery. It was a cold day, clear and sharp as a blade, very sunny and without a breath of wind. After the service the ushers took off their carnations and placed them on the coffin as it was lowered on the green nylon straps. About ten of them stayed afterwards to fill in the grave. Shovels were brought from a couple of pickups and passed around. People took turns with the palas, heaping dirt onto the coffin. A couple of old boys in their seventies wore dusty suits and bolo ties and polished cowboy boots and weathered Stetsons. The old man's best friend, a plump elderly sheepherder recovering from a terrible bout with kidney stones, worked up a furious sweat moving the dirt atop his longtime companion. In past years the writer had often driven his aged amigo over to his man's camp west of the gorge during the hija-dero. After the lambs were born, and the castrations had taken place, the trasquiladors came down from Colorado and sheared the entire flock in three days. As they shoveled on the dirt, he recalled how the old man had spent much of his youth in the early part of this century tending sheep on the surrounding mesas. During his teen years he had been a trasquilador, beginning on the ranches in southern Arizona in January, and moving north with spring, finally arriving to shear Montana sheep in June. He had loved the borregas, and was deeply attached to his few friends who still ran flocks in the valley. Of course, the herders were dying out. In ten more years they would all be gone.
After the grave was filled in, the men wandered away, returned to their pickups, drove off on the hard-packed snow. One of the old man's grandchildren, down from Denver, tried to arrange a funeral wreath just so on the mound of earth and stones. And juncos disported in the whitened pi<*_>n-tilde<*/>on branches nearby, kicking down sprinkles and dusty puffs of snow.
Thirteen
When the weather cleared they went fishing. She was in a chipper mood, forging ahead on the path, sashaying back to him, giving little shoulder punches, sticking her tongue in his ear, whispering naughty propositions. It was about two miles from the rim of the gorge down to the river. Large pinecones littered the trail; juniper trees were heavy with blue berries. They stopped at his favorite giant ponderosa and got a whiff of the bark. It smelled strong, like vanilla.
The air was warm and languid after the rains. She rubbed against him. He fondled her in all the appropriate places. She laughed and danced away. "Let's build it up to a fever pitch, then go crazy."
She galloped ahead, flicking her fingers at feathery Apache plume and bright yellow chamisa blossoms. Lizards, ignited by her shadow, scampered out of the way. Iridescent purple darning needles drifted to and fro.
He called her off the trail, and together they climbed about twenty feet up onto a ledge used by raptors for an eyrie. He explained, "Every spring for the last ten years great horned owls have nested here."
The rock was littered with tiny bones, owl shit, castings, little skulls, pack-rat droppings. In a crevice they found an egg that had never hatched back in April. Puffy fledge feathers were caught on jagged rocks and in the branches of yellow flowering brickellbush. Above their heads on the sheer rock wall were several hundred mud nests made by cliff swallows, now empty, of course, and silent.
They rested a moment, overlooking the gorge. "You have all these magic places," she said, growing moody and contemplative, opaque. "I envy you."
He pointed: "There's a buzzard." Then he told her that the birds singing in pi<*_>n-tilde<*/>on trees below were Townsend's solitaires.
She hooked her hand through his arm and laid her head against his shoulder. "Do you love me?" she asked.
"Yes ... I love you," he answered.
She squeezed him a little, gently.
Down by the water, poison ivy had turned a bright crimson. Wild milkweed leaves were brilliant yellow. In places, Virginia creeper, flamboyantly red, was smothering the branches of ancient cedars. Watercress half filled the pool of an arsenic spring that emptied into the noisy river.
On a small beach where he liked to set up the rods, at least a dozen ebony-black tarantula hawks with bright orange wings were crawling around in a clump of sawgrass. Several of the wasps, caught in a mysterious torpor, lay at the base of the stems or on the sand, dying.
The more energetic wasps poked and prodded their logy comrades. They nudged and dragged and seemed almost to be performing artificial respiration. They were indifferent to the nearby humans.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"I don't know. Some kind of poison? Perhaps it's a normal ritual of dying at the end of a season."
"Death again: Christ almighty!"
"They're beautiful."
"To a ghoul. C'mon, let's jam."
She grabbed one hand and yanked him upright. He groaned, "Oh my aching knees."
She whacked his arm. "Stop bitching," she said, and laughed. "I hate it when you complain."
"I'm old," he protested.
"In your brain, numskull. I think your body is wonderful!"
For almost twenty years he had fished the river, and he knew it well. He only used a few simple flies, tied by a friend, and moved quickly among the boulders heading upstream. Casting only to trout in back eddies or to holding spots behind rocks in midstream, he passed up most of the water, which was either too deep or too fast for his style. He used a tail fly and one dropper, fished almost on the surface, sometimes with a natural drift, or else skittered across the water. He danced easily across the massive basalt boulders, which were often more than ten feet high and shiny slick from the pummelings of roiling springtime runoff. She was more uncertain of her balance, and fell behind. "Hey," she cried, "you're supposed to be sick and dizzy! Wait up!"
But on the river he was in a familiar element, and the rhythm and momentum were important to his joy. Shadows needed to be on the water for fish to strike, which meant he had only two hours before dark. So he concentrated wholly on the task at hand, reading water, casting quickly several times, then shifting his angle or moving to another pool, hopping effortlessly across the boulders.
"What happens if you fall?" she asked, catching up, breathless and a trifle shaken.
"I never think of that," he said. "I'm not afraid of anything down here."
The water was tinged a faintly green hue. It moved fast, splashing against numerous boulders, roaring loudly so they had to shout to hear each other. But once into it he became all concentration and quit talking. He always checked out pockets on the near shore first, flicking his small badger flies across the back eddies and any quiet and shallow water behind a rock, or into crevices where foam had gathered. Then he climbed onto the higher outposts of stone and cast across-stream with a precision she found remarkable. He could land a fly exactly at the base of rocks on the opposite shore, and more often than not a fish struck instantly as the current grabbed his line. He missed the first two hits, but hooked a brown trout on the third. It went into the air once and then swooped downriver in fast, splashing water. He doubled back downstream past the girl and worked the fish quickly into a quieter pool, then guided it to his net. She came over as he removed the hook, then held the foot-long trout beneath the surface, moving it forward and back, running water through the gills. When he let go, the fish slipped sideways, caught by the current, and was sucked into turbulent darkness.
She said, "You're good at this, aren't you?"
"If the conditions are right for my style, yes, I'm good at it. If conditions are bad, I'm a total flop. I hate to add weight for nymphing."
In the next forty-five minutes he landed and released over a dozen fish; the largest was about fifteen inches. She left him alone to enjoy his evening. His rhythm was fast and precise and fanatical. In almost the same motion that he released a fish he would straighten up and be casting again. He almost never stopped advancing. Every cast was directly aimed at a specific quarry, and almost always the cast triggered a strike. He failed to set the hook at least half the time, not from being slow, but because he was overeager - too fast. He laughed each time he failed, and moved on to the next position.
She had a hard time scrambling over enormous boulders, keeping up. The river banged, hissed, and splashed. Often as not he was silhouetted against angry spindrift, arm pumping, working that skinny line into a perfect cast. He felt absolutely comfortable, happy, on top of the world. And he had no idea if the girl was still behind him.
Shortly before dark the river went dead. He cast for another five minutes, just to be certain, then leaned against an enormous basalt slab and sighed deeply.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="14">Thinking about what had happened - not that being held gently in a warm , loving embrace was all that much - she smiled slightly. Putting the memory away, she asked, "Now, what is the problem?"
"You were going along the Brighton road."
Ah. Not the journey home.
"Helen, you know -"
"We visited the orphanage," she interrupted.
His mouth open, he stared. Then, more quietly, "The orphanage?"
"Sec wished to see one of my projects in detail."
"Couldn't you have taken Miss Alcester along for propriety?"
"I suppose we could. Neither of us thought of it. John, it isn't as if I were seventeen and he a rogue." She watched him for a few more moments. "Is that your only objection?"
"You know it is not." He took the few steps to the windows and back, a frown creasing his brow. "You know I don't trust the man." His scowl softened, and his eyes begged her to understand. "I fear for your future if it becomes entangled with his."
"John, I am four and thirty years old."
"Helen, you are my sister," he said, mimicking her tone, his manner joking but his eyes serious.
She chuckled. "Will you allow that I do very well organizing and running my charities? All of them? That I don't become flustered when faced with a complicated situation? That I understand how to use money and how my fortune is invested and that I watch any changes made in those investments?"
"Helen ..."
"I am not a child, John. I will not hand my capital to a fortune hunter and allow my projects to die. And, leaving aside the money, I often think I am better fitted to understand other people and deal with my emotions than you are with yours."
A wary look crossed John's face. "Well, if you say it was an open carriage...."
"Running away, John? It's all right to berate me about mistakes you think I make, but I may not tell you that your hermitlike existence is wrong? You interfere in my life, but I may not object to yours?"
"Oh, well, if you think I should get out and about more."
"John, why are you so unwilling to spend time among your peers?"
A grimace of distaste crossed John's face. "You truly don't wish to know. Besides, it is but a mishmash of little things. The women's shrill affected laughter; unmarried women's inane and flirtatious ways; deep doings at the club - too often by those who can least afford it." He shrugged. "Things I don't like and have ceased, therefore, to have to do with them." She continued to stare at him. "Helen, I come to London spring and fall to see my tailor and bootmaker. I check, then, with our solicitor so he need not come down here as he does, if needed, the rest of the year. I attend a few parties and see a few friends." He shrugged. "What more do you want of me?"
"Find a wife," said Helen promptly. "You've turned thirty. You don't live the sporting life as do so many of your contemporaries and you've no desire to travel. You love your estate and spend a deal of time caring for it. Surely you wish a son to whom you may leave it." She watched his growing unease. "Get you a wife, brother mine."
John stared out into the garden. "It has crossed my mind."
"Any w-w-woman in particular?" asked Helen, her tone verging on the bright social voice she adopted when embarrassed. When wishing to turn John's thoughts from her future, it hadn't occurred to her she'd do more than irritate him. Now she wondered where the conversation might be headed. He didn't respond, just stared. "John?" she asked, worried now. He turned, seemingly undecided. "Can I help? Have I been b-b-blind? Is it that you've fallen in love with someone who is t-t-tied to another?"
"Nothing like that. I just can't quite make up my mind whether ..." He hesitated, opened his mouth to speak, but closed it. Finally, he said, "Helen, when I decide to wed, you'll be among the very first to know." He walked to the door. Exiting, he closed it softly behind him. Helen was still staring at it when he stuck his head back in. "Sneaky Helen. Just like when we were in the nursery. Will you someday explain to me how it is that when it is you who are at fault, we somehow manage to end up discussing my faults?"
He ducked back out before she could do more than open her eyes wide. Helen turned back to her work, chuckling softly. He was right, of course, although it had taken him a very long time to see it. She'd always used the ploy, and quite successfully, too. Helen raised her pen, her eyes focused on the picture hanging behind her desk. It had occurred to her he was less likely to be tricked by such maneuvers in future. She'd have to think up something else! Helen bent to her writing, only to look up with an impish grin a moment or two later. The next time John complained about Secundus, she'd send him to complain to Secundus. That would fix him.
The day of the party dawned with that odd summer haze which told the weather-wise it would grow bright and warm. Lucy, realizing it at an early hour, also realized she'd forgotten to give Ruth the parasol which went with the dress. She rang for her maid. With the connivance of various servants, Lucy was soon mounted on her favorite hack and jogging along the lanes to the Alcesters'. She arrived just as Robert exited the front door.
"Lucy!" A flustered look crossed Rob's face. "Miss Chalmers, I mean."
She smiled down at him. "You meant no such thing, did you, Robert?" It was the first time he'd used her name to her face and she reveled in it, although using that as an excuse to say his was pure self-indulgence. "Now help me down, please. I must take this to Ruth and return home immediately."
He automatically reached for her waist, set her on her feet, but couldn't bring himself to let her go. "Lucy ..."
"I know. I know, Robert." They stared at each other for a long moment.
Peter appeared in the impetuous manner of his youth and slammed to a halt. He came down the steps to the drive in a more gentlemanly fashion and bowed. "Miss Chalmers? Are your going with us to the party?"
Lucy forced her gaze from her love's, irritated by the interruption to a rare moment when Robert allowed himself to admit his affection for her. She took a second look. "Peter. Why, how smart you are. A regular tulip."
The boy blushed, a red tide rolling up his neck and into his ears. "No such thing!"
"Quite right," Lucy said with the seriousness the situation demanded. "A tulip would demand more in the way of dash when it came to waistcoats, would he not?" Peter still scowled. "But I shouldn't tease you. You look very well, Peter."
Robert took mercy on his brother's embarrassment. "You came to see Ruth, Miss Chalmers? Shall I send up to her?"
"She's in her room? I'll join her there." Lucy wasn't ten minutes with Ruth - just long enough to give a bit of advice about her hair - before tripping down the stairs into the hall. There, instead of Robert whom she'd hoped to see again, she came face-to-face with Paulo. She grasped the newel and blinked.
"Good day." Paulo bowed deeply. "You have been visiting Miss Alcester?"
"Yes." Lucy looked around, wishing someone would come.
Paulo's teeth flashed in an understanding smile. "The family is occupied elsewhere, so I must introduce myself. I am, Miss Chalmers, Paulo da Silva. May I escort you to your steed?"
"You know me?"
"Young Peter said you were here." Paulo crooked his arm, and Lucy placed trembling fingers on it. "Is it true you and Mr. Robert wish to wed, but are forbidden to do so?" he asked politely.
Lucy stiffened. How dare he ask such personal questions? She hadn't a notion how to answer.
He said, "I've embarrassed you, have I not? You must forgive me. I have yet to learn just what one may speak of openly and when one must creep around corners on tippytoes merely touching on the subject."
Paulo helped Lucy up into her saddle. She hooked her knee firmly and settled her skirts. Then she really looked at Paulo. She saw a kind face and dark, warm eyes. She couldn't help but smile back when he smiled at her. Impulsively, she held her hand down to him, and he grasped it. "It is a very private and personal matter, sir, but I'll answer you because I believe you wish us well. Robert and I would like to marry, but at the moment there are difficulties. We'll come about in the end. I'm sure of it."
"Your father wishes you to marry well?"
She sighed. "I'm sure it is the way of all fathers. Good day."
Paulo watched her go before searching out Secundus. "She is a nice little thing," he said. Sec looked blank. "Robert's Miss Chalmers. She would very well for him, I think."
"You do, do you?"
"I think her father is not aware of all the ramifications" - Paulo rolled the word off his tongue with a touch of justified pride - "of marrying into the honored family of the elder Alcester. He forbids the match."
"He does, does he?" Sec looked up from the letter he'd been doing his best to decipher. "Robert isn't good enough for his little girl?"
"It is not, I believe, that Robert isn't good enough for a precious daughter. It's more that he is not wealthy enough."
"Paulo, you're a cynical soul." Sec's eyes narrowed, and the cynicism sounded in his voice. "Surely Chalmers wouldn't blight love's young joy for the want of a few pounds in the three percents?"
"But it seems that he would, oh honored second son."
"Then," sighed Secundus, "I suppose I'd best go about setting up the trusts for my relatives. If I read this rightly" - he waved the letter - "I must go to London anyway. You've been asking about the London office. Now you may see for yourself why I'll find it a dead bore."
"Often and often we've discovered that what you find a bore I find quite interesting," soothed Paulo. "Perhaps this is another such case."
Secundus studied Paulo's face. It was perfectly bland, the eyes steady and giving nothing away, but Secundus's suspicions were roused. "Hmmm." Paulo's teeth flashed in a grin. "Hmmhumm. I see." Paulo tipped his head, questioningly. "Well, perhaps I see ... Poor Gubby," Sec added, his eyes twinkling. "He arrives today and we must tell him we leave for London one day very soon. The man will be quite bewildered by such antics."
"You may tell him you require him to be responsible for your family while we are gone."
"Perhaps I will just to see his look of horror. What fun." Secundus handed Paulo the letter. "See what you make of those hen scratches. I can't read the half of it." They reached a conclusion concerning the business just as the forecourt filled with such racket it drew them into the hall.
Sir Augustus Falconer had arrived. He drove a curricle, with a tiger on the step. Following, was a closed carriage from which an upper servant descended, his nose quite out of joint at the lack of pretension in the house to which they'd come. Then came a more serviceable carriage for the baggage. Behind that was a long dray pulled by six sturdy beasts and filled to capacity with boxes and bundles of all shapes and sizes. Secundus took one look and doubled over laughing. He controlled himself, took another look, and, weakened by more laughter, turned to lean against the door frame.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="15">
Noel turned to Lydia. "Since we didn't have any warning, I'm going to need time to get things ready for you in the office." She headed out of the room.
Kate looked at Lydia. "What's this about not knowing I was coming? Didn't Rebecca call you?
"No," Lydia said.
Kate shook her head. "I don't believe this. I was told Rebecca had set everything up."
"That's some company you work for," Lydia observed. "Are you going to last? I don't want to get involved with this book again if you're not going to be around to see it through."
"I've been there twelve years," Kate said. "I'm not going to leave now."
Lydia smiled. "Okay, it's a deal. It's not my style to leave something unfinished. Gracia - see if Kate would like anything. I'll be back in a minute."
As soon as Lydia was out of earshot, Gracia turned to Kate. "Oh, Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>orita Weston, I am so glad you have come! The Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>ora has been working on the book for such a long time and it has made her so unhappy."
Kate smiled. "I can see how it could be discouraging," she said.
"Gary - Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>or Steiner," Gracia continued, "has known the Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>ora a great many years. He writes the Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>ora's show and is very talented. He wants to help her. I wrote down his telephone number." She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket.
"Thank you," Kate said, "this is helpful."
The next moment, Noel and Lydia reentered the room, and Gracia left.
While Kate waited patiently, Noel and Lydia began to go over Lydia's appointments for the coming weeks. Then there was a loud buzzer-like noise in the kitchen. Lydia looked in that direction and frowned, waiting.
A moment later, Gracia came out and grimaced. "It is Mr. Mortimer Pallsner. He is here," she said.
"He says it is an emergency, Se<*_>n-tilde<*/>ora."
"Mort?" Noel exclaimed. "Why is he here?"
Lydia turned to Noel. "Noel," she said, "you are to take Kate upstairs and you are not - under any circumstances - to come back down until he leaves. Do you understand me?"
Noel nodded.
"Kate," Lydia said, turning to her. "You are to go upstairs with Noel - and under no circumstances are you to allow her to come downstairs until he's gone. Do you understand?"
"Not in the least," Kate said, "but I'll do it."
"Oh, baby," Noel said, smiling, walking over and picking up Kate's briefcase for her, "but you do learn fast."
"Who's Mort?" Kate asked, as they went upstairs.
"The executive producer of Cassandra's World," Noel replied, leading Kate to a large room that was surprisingly cozy, with a double bed, desk, couch, and by the window, a little tea table for two.
Since she was alone with Noel, Kate took the opportunity to grill her about Lydia for the book. Did she have a special diet?
No, Lydia had a basic food plan. Junk food, soda pop, caffeine, white sugar didn't exist in Lydia's world. You could wave a candy bar in her face and she wouldn't see it.
How much did Lydia sleep?
On her own, at least eight hours. When she was working, sometimes as little as four.
Did Lydia color her hair?
A few highlights.
Did Lydia work out?
Did she!
Noel led Kate down the hall to a tremendous exercise room with every exercise machine Kate had ever seen.
"She works out at least an hour every day," Noel said, "most often two." She stopped suddenly, cocking her head.
For a moment, Kate couldn't hear anything. And then, from the front hall, she heard Lydia say, "Mort, the door is this way." Then she heard a loud smack.
"Lydia hit him!" Noel whispered with glee.
"Thanks again for stopping by, Mort," Kate heard Lydia say, and the front door slammed so hard Kate could feel the floor shake.
Mark Fiducia had been astonished when Sarah ran into his office to say that Lydia Southland was on the phone, demanding to talk to someone other than Rebecca about Kate.
"Is this Mark Faith and Trust?" she had said.
"Excuse me?" Mark said.
"Isn't that what Fiducia means, in Italian?" she said.
He laughed. "Yes, yes, it does."
"Okay," she said then, "enough chitchat. Tell me about Kate Weston."
"She's the best, Ms. Southland," Mark was quick to say. "I'd choose her over any editor in town. She also knows how the house has messed up with your manuscript - that's why she's there."
Lydia laughed. "I like you, Mr. Faith and Trust," she said. "Thank you."
Now Kate had been gone only a day and Mark was already bored. There was no one to overhear on the phone saying, "You may speak to me that way, but you are never, ever to speak to any secretary of this company in that tone of voice again. They work hard for next to nothing, so pick on someone your own size!" Then there would be a burst of laughter from Kate and, "Exactly! I don't want her job, you don't want her job, so don't convince her that she doesn't want it. Somebody has to answer the phone!" A breath, then, "Now, about your latest brilliant book ..."
Oh, Kate, Mark thought, we need you. With Kate away, there was no one to come into his office, close the door and collapse on the floor, declaring that her love life would kill her for sure. Mark loved it because then he could see that Kate was less than the perfect person he otherwise thought she was. Take Harris Pondfield, her current boyfriend, and her struggle about whether or not to marry him. The complaints Kate made about him were almost identical to the ones she'd made about all her previous boyfriends. She always dated stuffed shirts, and yet she never saw the correlation. It seemed incredible to Mark.
Of course, Mark was hardly in a position to judge the way Kate conducted her love life. His wife had left him the past year - for a wealthy Wall Street broker. Afterward, Mark had been a total mess.
He'd gotten through it only because of Kate. She listened to his bitter, rage-filled rantings. She called him at home to make sure he ate. She gave him encouragement to believe in himself again. "Now you're free to be who you are," she said. "You don't have to dress to please anyone but yourself anymore."
He had always made himself look the way his wife had wanted him to. So, with Kate's support, he stopped the torture of shaving twice a day and let his beard grow. He put his contact lenses away and was fitted for the kind of horn-rimmed glasses he'd always preferred. And he left the suits his wife had liked in the closet and went shopping for tweed jackets.
Depression about their personal lives was part of what had drawn Mark and Kate so close - and the fact that they were two talented editors working at a company that seemed to be falling down around their ears. Mark could stand it as long as Kate was there. He didn't know how long he could last without her.
"Excuse me ... Mark?"
He looked up to see Sarah standing in the doorway. He checked his watch. "You should get going," he said. "It's late."
"I'm going in a few minutes," Sarah said, "but I just talked to Kate and I thought you'd like to know that everything's going well with Lydia Southland now."
"Great," he said.
"So well, in fact," Sarah said, "she's becoming a part of Lydia's entourage. They're on their way to the studio as we speak."
At the studio, Lydia explained to Kate, they would be reshooting the final scenes of the Calamity Jane episode, the cliff-hanger to end the season.
The car stopped in front of a large trailer and a good-looking man in his early forties came out to meet them.
"There's Gary," Noel said.
Lydia smiled. "Hi," she said when he opened the door for her.
"Hi, Lyddie." He kissed her on the cheek as she got out then looked a bit startled when Kate emerged behind Noel.
"My new editor," Lydia said, "Kate Weston, this is Gary Steiner, our head writer."
Ah, ha. The man Gracia had urged Kate to see about Lydia's book.
"Kate, it's wonderful to meet you," he said, shaking her hand. He had warm brown eyes and wavy brown hair.
"Nice to meet you too," she said. Under her breath, she added, "Gracia said you might be interested in helping on the book."
"Somebody had better," he whispered back. "It's awful."
Lydia swung into work at once, and Kate was amazed at the pace she set. By the middle of the evening, after listening to Gary and Lydia go over line changes, meeting the producers and the rest of the crew, and watching the filming of several scenes, Kate was starting to fade - until they called a dinner break.
She helped herself to portions of everything on the buffet table. Then she noticed Lydia's plate, which had a little tossed salad on it. She looked up and found Lydia smiling at her.
"I don't like to eat after six-thirty," the actress said. "I'm never sure if I'll be up late enough to burn it off."
Oh. Another reason Lydia looked the way she did. Kate made a note of it.
"So how do you like the world of an actress?" Lydia asked Kate around midnight, yawning, pulling off her cowboy boots in the back of the car.
"I wonder how you do it," Kate said.
"I am paid very well to do it."
"But none of this is in your autobiography," Kate said. "You say next to nothing about what your work is like."
"The only thing any other editor has cared about," Noel said, "is juicy gossip: Who were the men in Lydia's life? Who's on drugs? Who stole from whom? You know, the usual."
Kate looked at Lydia. "Is that true?"
Lydia nodded.
"Do you want to write about your work?"
"Of course," Lydia said, exasperated, "but I've had those nincompoops to deal with and we never got anywhere."
"Oh, Lydia," Noel said, "you got somewhere - you managed to trash everybody in town." Noel turned to Kate. "And she thinks she's going to walk on two legs after the book comes out."
"How will you be able to work with people after all the things you have written about them," Kate asked.
Lydia sighed. "This fall will be my last season - and then I retire. Good-bye public life ... and good riddance."
Kate looked at Noel.
"Bummer, isn't it?" Noel said. "But as you overheard at the house earlier, Mort Pallsner didn't like the news either."
Ah, Kate thought, that explained the mystery of the slammed door.
"I don't know what to think," Kate said to Mark on the telephone from her hotel room the next morning. "I've known Lydia less than eighteen hours and I've never been so confused in my life. She says she wants to write the book, she never wanted to write the book, she loves acting, she hates acting, she's leaving the show - I don't know what to make of it!"
Mark was laughing, and Kate knew exactly how he looked; hair a little messy, tie loose. She smiled at the image. She missed him.
"Rebecca's moving forward and selling the book as if a manuscript has already been delivered," Mark said.
She would. So if Kate failed to bring the book back it would be disaster for B,F&C - and for Kate.
The other line on her phone was ringing. She said a quick good-bye to Mark and answered it, just as someone knocked on her door.
"Hi, honey," Harris Pondfield said.
Kate could visualize how Harris would look this morning too; gray banker's suit, pale blue shirt, blue and gray tie. As he talked to her on his speaker phone, he would be taking off his jacket and hanging it up.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="16">
Destiny
He's far too young for her. He's silly. But he's sexy. And if he keeps insisting on being Mr. Right, she might have to take him seriously.
You're feeling old as you deliver your talk to the college physics class. Old and jaded. You look out over the rows of eager young faces, thinking of how much you remind yourself of all the other women you know in their midthirties. You pretend to be more cheerful than you actually are. You talk about aerobics more than you do it and dress a lot younger than you ought to. You're someone these students would never understand.
The talk you're giving is part of a career seminar - really, a sales pitch for cheap labor for the company you work for. Afterward, one of the boys in the class approaches you - David. He says hello with a self-assured grin. His perfect adolescent body towers over yours. You watch the arteries pulse in his neck. Eloquent, he says of your speech. As he talks, he blushes. He is impressed with your wit and your intelligence. Would you like to go out for pizza?
You have to get back to work, approve some press releases, answer your phone messages. "Sure," you say. "I'd love to." David seems so genuine, so unblemished, and you like the idea of just sitting and talking for a while with someone who isn't suspicious of you. You want to believe all men started out this way.
AT THE PIZZA PARLOR, you watch David eat, cramming piece after piece into his mouth as fast as he can. It is awesome to you that a person can be so immersed in eating. You have the feeling that he is not only hungry but driven, as though he would eat anything.
You sip on your soda as he continues his attack. He orders another shake. Occasionally, his eyes move up from the plate, in deference to your presence. "You bored?" he says.
"No," you say.
He shrugs his shoulders, smiling as he finishes the last piece, wipes his mouth with several small paper napkins. Folding his hands in front of him, he looks at you with new interest, as though you have just arrived. He looks at you like you are food.
It's then that you invite him over for dinner. This seems innocent enough. You just want to watch him eat again, marvel at the passion of it.
It's innocent until after dinner, when you find yourself on his lap and he's kissing you like you're the next course, which is suddenly just what you want to be.
So you invite him to sleep over. Your relationship with guilt is of the all-or-nothing variety, so if you're going to feel guilty anyway, as you know you are, then you might as well get something out of it.
In the morning you ask him how old he is. Eighteen, he says. Eighteen, to your thirty-six. You were hoping for twenty-one. Not that this would make much of a difference, except that now you're wondering if you could actually go to jail.
In an effort to encourage him to see this as a one-night stand, you make some comment about those lucky college girls he goes to school with. You sound more awkward than you'd hoped, so you keep talking. You tell him about your marriage - how it lasted just a few scant months, how you no longer trust romance. You've been divorced longer than you were even married.
"Listen," he interrupts, "I know what you're getting at. But I'm not that kind of a guy. I mean, I fall in love with someone and that's it. No more college girls for me."
You understand that he is confused, that it is sex he's in love with, not you. But the more you think about this, the more confused you become. You want to see him again - just one more time, you tell yourself - and you begin to feel the overwhelming need to confess.
You choose the receptionist at work - Lisa, another eighteen-year-old. She, too, is sweet and pure, and she owes you - you're keeping her from getting fired.
You whisper the story of your escapade to her in a corner of the coffee room, watch her tiny features assume a grave and grown-up expression.
"Maybe this will be good for you, Cynthia," she says. "Maybe this will mellow you out."
She's missed your point entirely, how you've so shamelessly acted out a fantasy that can't possibly continue. You begin to wonder if she isn't really as incompetent as everyone else seems to think, but you can't think of any appropriate response, so you thank her and smile in an awkward sort of way, feeling very much like an adolescent yourself.
BEFORE YOU KNOW IT, you've got David's dirty socks and underwear in your laundry hamper. He apologizes, but keeps forgetting to take them with him. The Pop-Tarts he eats for breakfast are out on your kitchen counter.
You're always buying the wine for dinner because David's not old enough to buy it himself. He's not used to drinking it yet either, so when he does, his face flushes and he says things like, "True love never dies."
This embarrasses you and you tell him to stop, that he's just deluding himself. Of course, he doesn't believe you.
"DO YOU LOVE ME?" David's been asking you. Love? Well, maybe you do. Or could. You do, after all, have a lot in common. You both read, and so what if he's reading Ulysses while you're on Jackie Collins.
He is smarter than you. You can't even remember all the names of his scholarships and awards. So it flatters you that he wants you anyway, that he wants you all the time.
Once, before dinner, he said you were the first truly passionate woman he'd ever known, and then he looked at you in a way that made you feel like hot pie filling oozing out the seams of the crust. The hell with dinner, you thought. What could food possibly mean in the face of such passion? So you led him into the bedroom, both of you groping in the dark.
It intrigues you that someone can be so interested, make you feel so much younger than you are. It is the way you always wished you could have felt when you were really as young as you feel now.
You realize that you're becoming exactly what you used to complain about most in men. They had one-track minds, their interest stopped where your neck began. You don't care about David's brilliant mind, at least not in comparison to the rest of him. You feel as though you're using him to satisfy something insatiable. You wonder if you'll start thinking about him the same way you think about your job. You're overpaid, so it keeps you there, in a place you'd rather not be.
ONE AFTERNOON David says he wants to have a serious talk. Great, you say, they're your favorite kind. He looks at you with an expression of longing that makes you want to roll your eyes and laugh. You don't know exactly what he's going to say, but already you're trivializing it, you realize, the same way men have so often trivialized you and your serious talks.
He's making you dinner, at your apartment, before the talk. He says it's going to be gourmet.
It's spaghetti, with some kind of clear garlic sauce and broccoli, pineapple, and raisins on top. For dessert, there's lime Jell-O with Chinese pea pods and artichoke hearts. "I've always wanted to try something different with Jell-O," he says, scooping a large lump of it onto your plate. He watches you as you eat it.
You can't believe how many bowls and pans he's gone through, the dirty spoons sticking to the counters, the stovetop freckled with grease. The kitchen never looks this way when you cook. You're a wiper, a cleaner-as-you-go, an everything-in-its-place kind of person.
David says he wants to talk about the future. He tells you he's not like any of those men you're always complaining about. He doesn't need to be in control or to argue with you. He can talk about his feelings. Ask him anything, he says, anything at all about his feelings and he'll tell you.
But you already know what his feelings are. It's yours that nobody's talking about. Right now you have only one feeling - fear - which you're going to keep to yourself and hope that it goes away.
He's not one of those men who expects to be taken care of, he continues. When he moves in with you, he'll cook and he'll clean and you'll have a lot less work on your hands than you do right now.
Fear is not strong enough for what you're feeling now. You tell him he's not moving in, that he's too young to know what he really wants.
Don't underestimate him, he says; he's probably the only man you've ever known who really appreciates you.
Maybe he's right, you think, but you don't say that. His momentum seems large enough on its own.
He says he's going back to his dorm room. When you kiss him good-bye, his neck smells like soap. His skin is smooth, unblemished. He kisses your eyes. You're aware of the webbing of lines around them, and that he must see it, too, and you're wondering if he is trying to kiss it away, to somehow wish you younger.
You turn off the lights and get into bed, but the streetlight leaks in. You can see a pair of David's socks balled up on the floor and there's one of his physics demonstrations on your bookshelf - a spoon and a fork clamped together, suspended on a matchstick on the rim of a glass. It looks impossible, as though there is some kind of magic involved. But it's just physics, he's said, a demonstration of the center of gravity. He's explained to you why the sky is blue, why gravity makes you shrink. The room seems filled with him, even though he's gone. You're afraid of closing your eyes, afraid of losing him if you do.
AT HOME THAT EVENING, David asks if you'd like to meet his parents.
Of course not. You wouldn't dream of it. In your opinion this kind of thing is best kept hidden.
Well, his parents are already on their way, somewhere in the air between Iowa and Oakland. Do you want to deprive him of seeing his parents?
No, of course not. See them all you want to, you say. You'll stay home for a few weeks. There's a lot on TV you've been missing.
"Just dinner," he says. "Just one dinner."
You're not hungry, you say, and probably won't be for a while. At least for two weeks, maybe forever.
"Coffee, then," he says.
"No."
"A drink?"
HIS PARENTS, Rick and Adelle, are pleasant midwestern people. Rick is wearing jeans with Birkenstocks and a short-sleeved shirt with parrots on it. Adelle looks crisp in white wash-and-wear. Her auburn hair is parted in the middle, blunt cut at chin length. You keep staring at the hair, inspecting it for gray, hoping she is older than you.
No one is saying much. "Highball?" Rick says, unmistakably to you. "Oh, come on, have one. It's on me."
"Maybe a little later," you tell him, conscious of trying to smile sweetly, like someone much younger might smile.
You're not sure how much later it is that the room is swimming before your eyes. David's father has been talking to you about the sixties, when there was so much peace and love and freedom, that 'anything goes' kind of feeling. You suppose he's trying to tell you that he accepts you, that it's all right with him that you've deflowered his son.
Adelle is starting to look rumpled. There's a tuft of hair falling the wrong way across her part.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="17">
The Stranger's Surprise
None of them would ever forget the outcome of this unusual man's Christmas Eve visit.
By Ilse Stanley
"All set, Mr. Harris," said the garage attendant, closing the door of the car. "Merry Christmas!"
"Merry Christmas to you, George," said Mike Harris, and handed him a generous tip for the occasion.
Then he set out for his home on Long Island. He felt pretty good. The office party hadn't been too boring and now there was nothing to worry about but the possibility that he might have forgotten one or two presents for his family. On the back seat was a heap of packages. Now let me see, he thought, the coat for Mildred was to have been delivered. One - two - yup. I think I got everything. And for the children - Well, he knew he had bought more than he had intended to buy. But then, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas if one bought only the things that one set out to buy.
Mike Harris drove along the East Side Franklin Roosevelt Drive toward the Triborough Bridge. Lucky, he thought, just beat the traffic by half an hour. On the bridge, he stayed in the right lane. It was not only the least used but led to his exit on Long Island. He paid his toll, turned on the radio and listened to the news. The commentator warned repeatedly about speeding on the highways, recalled the enormous casualties of previous years, pleaded with drivers to slow their pace.
I certainly will, thought Mike. I'm in no hurry. Amused, he watched other drivers cutting in and out. Silly, he thought. How much time can they save? If they're racing to the airport they should have left earlier to make a plane. There was no one in front of him, the right lane being almost devoid of traffic.
Suddenly Mike stared at the road ahead, startled. There were no cars before him for a couple of hundred yards, but a man loomed up in his view, walking along the road as though he were taking a stroll in a quiet country lane. Mike sounded his horn frantically, but the man was either drunk or deaf, because he did not react. He continued his leisurely pace.
Mike slammed on his brakes, but could not prevent his left fender from striking the man slightly. The shove caused him to stumble, but he did not fall. Traffic began to pile up behind and horns blared.
Mike got out of his car.
"What the devil do you think you're doing?" he demanded. "Do you want to get run over? If you have to get plastered, why don't you pick a quiet street, like Eighth Avenue?"
The man looked almost indignant. "I am not drunk, sir," he said quietly, as though nothing had happened. "I am sober."
Mike felt like calling down all the imprecations listed in the Unabridged. Grab hold of yourself, he thought. Don't forget the Christmas spirit.
"Look, my good man," he managed to say, "don't you know it's suicide to walk along a bridge like this? Aside from the fact that it's against the law. The first cop driving by would arrest you."
"That would be quite all right, sir," said the man.
The cars stacked up behind them were blowing their horns frantically.
"Never mind," Mike said; "just get in the car. We'll have that out later. But it's a hell of a way to hitch a ride."
The man got in, an almost-satisfied smile on his face.
Mike grew a bit suspicious. "What was your purpose in doing that?" he asked. "Are you trying to stage a holdup? I don't have much money on me, you know. Besides, you shouldn't do that on Christmas; it's against all ethics."
"I'm not attempting a holdup, sir," said the man.
"Well, what's the idea of walking along a busy highway?"
"I want to get some attention," said the man. "Are you very angry at me, sir?"
Mike had enough. He was looking for the first exit. "I'd better get you to the nearest hospital," he said. "You might be hurt, after all. Perhaps it would be best if you had a checkup."
"Oh, no," said the man. "I am quite all right, I assure you. You did not strike me very hard, and it certainly was worth it."
"Worth it!" ejaculated Mike. "What's wrong with you? I have a lot of patience because it's Christmas, but this sounds crazy. Are you crazy?" he asked. "Escape from Bellevue, perhaps? Do you have amnesia? Or do you know who you are?"
The man smiled. "I know who I am, sir. Oh, I have not introduced myself. My name is Higgins - A. H. Higgins."
"Glad to meet you," said Mike dryly. "My name is Michael Harris. On second thought, I'm not so sure I'm glad to meet you. The setting is rather unusual. Tell me, how did you get there, anyway?"
"I took a cab," said the man, "from the other side of the bridge. I asked the driver to let me out in the middle. He thought it was a bit odd, but I told him that I was waiting for a friend to pick me up in his car. So he let me out and I started to walk."
"But why?" asked Michael. "Did you want to commit suicide?"
"Oh, no, sir," said A. H. Higgins. "I told you, I just wanted to get some attention."
"You could have easily got more than you bargained for," said Mike. "I happen to be a careful driver; I was only doing about 25 or 30. If somebody came flying along at 60 you would have been a goner. Do you realize that?"
"Even that would have paid, sir, as long as I felt it. I mean, just so I would have remained alive long enough to realize that people were standing around and showing me some attention."
"That's a rotten way to die. In order to get attention!" said Mike. "Why are you so set on getting attention?"
"I never have it," he said simply.
"What do you mean?" asked Michael.
"I never gave it any thought until my doctor mentioned it."
"Your doctor? Then you are ill!"
"No, not exactly. Oh, I had sometimes felt tired and listless. Everyone feels that way now and then. Well, the doctor told me my heart was kind of weak."
"Too much work and too little relaxation, I suppose?"
"Almost exactly his words. Only he said 'too little diversion.' I should take some vitamin pills and get a little attention."
"Did it help?"
"Well, my heart doesn't bother me. I take the vitamin pills, but nobody's shown me any attention. So I thought this Christmas I'd give myself the present of making someone really mad at me."
"Make someone mad at you? Why?"
"Because if someone is mad at you, he's bound to give you some attention," said Mr. Higgins. "Of course, it didn't quite work out," he added a bit sadly, "because you aren't really mad at me, are you, sir?"
"No, I'm not. But that hasn't anything to do with you. I'm just content with the work I've done and the fact that I'm going home."
"That's one of the points I was making," said Mr. Higgins. "When you get home you'll receive a lot of attention, won't you?"
Mike laughed. "Yes. Mostly because of the packages behind me in the car."
"It's worth it," said Mr. Higgins. "I wish I had some packages to pack."
"Don't you have any money to buy some?"
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Higgins. "I have enough money - I've a good bank account. I just don't have anyone for whom I could buy presents. And since no one has any particular reason for liking me, I thought I might at least get some attention by having someone mad at me."
They were by now well on their way out on Long Island.
"Look," said Mike, "I'm probably taking you out of your way. Where do you live?"
"I live in New York; in Manhattan, sir. But it does not matter. I can always take a train back."
"Why?" asked Mike. "Is it worth the ride you're taking with me?"
"Oh, yes," said Mr. Higgins. "Not just the ride, but I can't remember when anyone spoke so many words to me in such a short time. I mean, gave me so much attention. You have asked at least six questions which showed your interest in me. No one else has ever shown sufficient interest in me to ask six questions."
"That's ridiculous," said Mike. "It's beyond me."
"I can understand that," nodded Mr. Higgins. "Nevertheless, it is the truth."
"You have a fixed idea there," said Mike. "Let's analyze this question. You say nobody gives you any attention. Aren't you married?"
"No," said Mr. Higgins.
Mike glanced at him. A. H. Higgins was a rather good-looking man, about 50 years old, hair beginning to turn gray at the temples. He was dressed in good taste, businesslike, and immaculately clean.
"Why aren't you married?" asked Mike. "I realize, of course, that it's none of my concern, but since you like attention, I thought I might as well ask. I can't say that you haven't made me curious."
"Your curiosity makes me very happy," said Mr. Higgins gratefully. "It is difficult to explain why I did not marry. I have thought about ifit often. When I was young, I was too busy. I come from a small family. I studied; worked in the evening in order to be able to go on studying. I never knew my father; he died when I was very young and I helped my mother along. Then I got a good job and felt it was the wrong time to get married; I had to concentrate on getting ahead."
"What do you do?" asked Mike.
"I am a bank manager," said Mr. Higgins modestly.
"A bank manager?" Mike was stunned. "And you don't get any attention?"
"No. I give attention, but I never receive it. People are only interested in a bank manager when they want a check cashed or something like that."
"Why don't you go out sometimes? Have a good time? You make good money, don't you?"
"Oh, yes, sir, I have a very good income. But I've never known how to spend it."
"Well, there are ways, you know," said Michael, laughing.
"Oh, yes, I know. But you see, I am shy. It was difficult for me to get acquainted with women. I did not know anybody."
"But you business associates?"
"Well," said Mr. Higgins thoughtfully. "I guess I am not a very gregarious or entertaining fellow. People like to invite bachelors when they can make themselves useful at parties; when they can tell funny stories, or entertain the ladies, or mix good drinks. I was never very good at either category. I was invited to parties once or twice, but I sat around in a corner feeling awkward, knowing I was boring company. Why would people invite a man who bores their guests?"
Mike shook his head. This was a completely new world to him. He had never been alone. One of six children, he was accustomed to company, parties, had flirted with his sisters' friends, competed with his brothers once or twice for the favors of their girl friends and had always busied himself in his parents' home giving and receiving joy and - as Mr. Higgins called it - attention. He often felt he was receiving too much of it; had too little privacy, too little quiet, too little relaxation. But he was too intelligent to complain about love. It was incomprehensible to him that a human being could exist who was so lonesome, so completely isolated that he had to walk along a busy highway in order to gain some attention.
"You see, sir, I am boring you," said Higgins.
"No," Michael said, "you're not boring me; I was just thinking.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="18">
A recipe for love.
After her divorce from Stan, Tess sewed little black bows all over her sneakers. She wore them everywhere - to work, to her son Nick's seventh-grade basketball games, to parent meetings at four-year-old Robbie's daycare center.
"Why black?" Gary asked.
She grinned. "I'm in mourning. More or less."
Less, Gary decided, and proposed to her the next night.
"Absolutely not," she said. "I'm going to become a nun."
He kissed her. "Be serious, Tess. I want to spend the rest of my life with youryou."
She laughed and patted his cheek. "I had twelve years of serious with Stan. That's enoughtenough."
"The boys need a man around the house. Have you thought about that?" He took her hand.
"I'm doing just fine on my own," she said with conviction.
But Gary couldn't leave it alone. He felt like he was 16 and in love for the first time. All he thought about was Tess, with her big smile and slanting green eyes. She made him feel happy just being alive.
He started meeting her at Nick's basketball games. Gary sat beside Tess, himhis arm looped over her shoulder. Robbie curled up at her feet and drew pictures on old envelopes. Sometimes, Stan was at the games, too, sitting by himself. Gary saw how Tess's face got red when she looked at him. He squeezed her hand and she moved closer to him.
"Marry me," he whispered, holding her.
She traced his jawline with her finger, smiling. "We'll see."
"Just say yes and get it over with. I'm serious, Tess."
"I know. You're always serious."
The next morning, Gary dropped by her place on his way to work. Nick answered the door.
"Mom, your boyfriend's here," the boy called, then turned and walked back to the kitchen. Gary noticed Nick's long toes; they must come from Stan, he thought. Tess had short, stubby toes, which he wanted to tickle whenever he saw them.
Tess appeared at the kitchen doorway. "Gary, hi. Would you help Robbie change his shirt? He soaked it plaingplaying in the sink."
He loved the way she never missed a beat. "Sure," he answered.
He found Robbie under his bed, playing with blocks. Gary squatted down. "Come on out and let me change your shirt, sport."
"No!" Robbie squirmed. "I'm gonna stay here all day. Mommy's not gonna make the pie."
"I'm sure she'll make it when she gets a chance."
"No, she won't." His voice was hurt. "She said she wouldn't, and she never changes her mind."
Gary reached under the bed for the boy's arm. "Come on out and I'll make sure you get your pie. I promise."
Robbie slid out, and Gary touched the front of the boy's shirt. "You're pretty wet, sport." It struck him then that he loved Robbie almost as much as Tess. It wasn't just Tess he wanted to marry, it was the whole family. He gave Robbie a sudden hug, wet shirt and all.
It wasn't until Gary had changed Robbie and brushed his hair that he thought to ask what kind of pie.
The boy looked up at him, his eyes sparkling just like Tess's. "Popcorn pie."
Gary frowned. "Never heard of it."
"You have to," Robbie sang, running out the door. "You promised!"
Gary followed him into the kitchen. Tess was standing at the stove. He went up behind her and ran his hands down her arms. "How about making some popcorn pie?"
She turned her head sharply; her face was bright red. "Who told you about popcorn pie?"
"Robbie. He said he wanted one. I'll make it if you give me the recipe."
She shook her head. "Sorry. No can do."
He was startled to hear her giggle as she turned back to the stove. A knob of anger formed in his chest. "Come on, Tess, tell me. I promised Robbie."
"It's a family joke," she said.
The way she said 'family' made him angry. She was excluding him. He made his voice cold. "I hope someday you'll trust me."
She shook her head, swallowing laughter. "Don't be mad, Gary." She pulled him toward her. "Kiss me."
For a minute, he didn't want to, but her warm lips made him forget everything. When she pulled away, he forced himself to look at his watch. "I have to run."
Robbie confronted him at the door. "She's not gonna make it, is she?"
"Not today, sport." He put his hand on the small head. "Tell you what. I'll talk to her again tomorrow night."
It came to Gary that night while he was watching TV. He would make a popcorn pie for Robbie. He could already see the boy's eyes shine as he presented the pie. It was a crazy thing to do - he didn't even have a recipe. But he wanted to show Robbie he was part of the family, too, that he could share the family fun.
He stayed up late, experimenting, rolling out the crust, popping the corn and then caramelizing it so it would stick together, baking it until the crust was golden brown. When it cooled, he packed it into a box.
He was tired at work the next day. But just the idea of showing the pie to Tess kept him smiling all morning. He felt juiced up, full of his surprise.
Tess called at noon.
"Marry me," he said, his opening line whenever they spoke these days.
"No, Gary. Listen." Her voice cracked. "You can't come over tonight. Something's come up. I can't explain."
"Tess, you owe me an explanation!" he protested.
"I know, I'm sorry, Gary, really. Don't be mad."
But he was mad, furious. Once again, Tess was pushing him away. It was time to put his foot down, make her decide once and for all if she wanted him in her life. But how could he get through to her?
Suddenly, he knew what he would do. He would take the popcorn pie over to her apartment. It was for Robbie, after all; she wouldn't keep him from giving it to the boy. He'd camp out at her doorstep until she let him in. She'd have to talk to him then.
At Tess's door, he lifted the pie out of the box, took a deep breath, and rang the bell.
Nick opened the door.
Gary forced himself to keep smiling. He felt foolish, standing there holding a pie in his hands. "Hi. Where's Robbie?" he asked.
Nick scowled. "In his room. You can't come in." His voice dropped and his scowl deepened. "Dad was here."
"Stan?" Gary stepped past Nick into the narrow hall that led to the kitchen. "What was he doing here? Where's your mother?" But he didn't wait for the answer, just rushed through the kitchen, dropping the pie onto the counter as he ran by.
In the living room, Tess was hunched on the couch, arms around her knees. He couldn't see her face, but he could hear her cyringcrying.
"Tess?" he said gently.
She raised her head. "Gary." She swallowed. "What are you doing here? I told you not to come."
"What was Stan doing here?" He planted his feet firmly on the carpet. "That's why you told me not to come, isn't it? You knew he was coming."
She looked away from him. "It has nothing to do with you."
"It has everytingeverything to do with me." The words were like little iron pellets he had to spit from his mouth. "I have to know where I stand with you, Tess. Do you still love him?"
She sighed. "I don't know. He wants us to get back together. He says it's best for the boys. I said I'd think about it."
Gary sat down beside her, took her hand.
"Is that what you want?" he asked.
"Like Stan said, there are other considerations." Tears rolled out of her eyes.
He realized that he was probably going to lose her. For weeks, he'd been asking her to marry him, but she'd never given him any reason to think she'd say yes. StangelyStrangely, he didn't feel sad. All he wanted at that moment was to see her smile again. Suddenly, unexpectedly, her happiness had become more important than his own.
"Look," he said, "if it'll help, I'll leave. I'll give you all the space you need."
She took a deep breath. "Thanks, Gary." She smiled weakly. "Would you midmind holding me a minute?"
He put his arms around her, and something loosendloosened in his chest. Love, he realized, wasn't something you had to nail down. Love was light and spacious; there was room for patience in it, room for laughter, room for letting go.
Just then, Robbie's voice sounded from the kitchen, high and urgent. "Mommy! Come look!"
Tess stood up and Gary followed her into the kitchen, where they found Robbie perched on a stool, pointing at the pie. Tess stood with her hand to her mouth.
"What is it?" asked Robbie.
"It's a popcorn pie," Gary said. "I made it for you."
"That's not popcorn pie!" He slid off the stool, pouting. "You said you'd get Mommy to make it," he said, stomping out of the kitchen.
Tess spun to face Gary. "You actually made a pie out of popcorn?"
He was surprised to see her grinning widely, her eyes dancing. He shrugged. "So I'm not the world's greatest cook," he said sheepishly.
"Popcorn pie's not food. It's a code name for getting pregnant." She erupted in a burst of laughter. "My family's always called it that," she finally managed to say. "All that bouncing around the baby does inside - it feels like you're popping corn."
He had trouble finding his voice. "You mean Robbie wanted you to get pregnant?"
"He's at that age. Four year olds always want a baby brother or sister."
"Why didn't you tell me? I feel like an idiot," he said.
"No, it's great! It's the first really funny thing you've done!" She kissed his cheek. "I think I've been waiting all along for you to do something a little bit crazy like this."
He stared at her. Then a slow smile spread across his face. "I hope it's edible."
Tess laughed again. "Let's find out."
He shook his head. "notNot until I buy the champagne."
"Champagne and popcorn pie," she said, struggling to keep a serious face. "I thinthink it's time to take the bows off the sneakers."
He pulled her into his arms and kissed her then. Over her head, he saw the pie sitting on the counter. A fat knob of popcorn poked through the brown crust. It made Gary think of Tess's toes. He looked down at her bare feet and his fingers tingled.
Graduation
"The graduation service will be at ten," said Mrs. Angus. "That will be followed by a reception for the special guests of the graduates. Reverend Angus and I will be attending because of his part in the reception. You will be the guest of Pastor Barker."
Anna knew all that, but she smiled and nodded her head. Then an awful thought struck her.
"Does that mean I won't be sitting with you?" she queried.
"Oh, we can sit together for the service. At the reception we may need to sit at a separate table. I don't know the seating arrangements, but by then you will be with the Barker family, so you won't be deserted."
Near panic seized Anna. The Barker family. She had only thought of Mr. Austin Barker. She was sure she could feel reasonably comfortable with him. But his family? How many Barkers were there? Would she be among a whole group of strangers?
"Only his father and mother were able to come," went on Mrs. Angus. "He has three married sisters and a married brother. Austin is the youngest family member. Two of the girls are missionaries and the brother is a seminary professor."
If the words had been meant to encourage Anna, they had quite the opposite effect.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="19">
Infidelity. It's as old as marriage, and there are as many reasons for it as there are men - or women - to commit it. thereThere are no easy explanations for it. One expert will tell you it will destroy a relationship, and another will say it can save one. But there are two indisputable truths that I have learned from experience about infidelity: One is that if you want to understand your marriage, you must understand the reasons for its betrayal. The other is that each tale of infidelity is as unique as the person who has been hurt or healed.
My tale begins with a honey-smooth voice on the other end of the telephone line:
"Is Daniel in?" she would ask.
"No," I would answer.
"Well, when do you expect him?"
"Probably later on tonight."
A pause. "Would you tell him to call Shelia? He knows the number." Click.
I cringe now in embarrassment when I remember that typically 'Shelia' conversation. Her boldness and my naivete seem equally unbelievable. I wonder how I could have ignored the signs that my husband was having an affair, but I chose not to see - or in my case hear - the obvious. My husband is a well-known artist and teacher, and that voice was one of a dozen that regularly phoned him. So I ignored the significance of this particular voice - and the desperation that later began to characterize it.
How, I ask myself now, could I have been so foolishly trusting? But in the same breath I must admit the truth: I could not yet face the reality of the life I shared with my husband.
LIVING LIES
Each marriage has its own ebb and flow, but there are rhythms they have in common. I think what they sometimes call the seven-year itch is one of those common rhythms. Seven years mark the end of a certain era in marriage. You have been together for nearly a decade and have settled comfortably into each other's ways. But that seventh year - or a year or two before or after - can be one of false security. It was for me.
I was well satisfied with my life at that seven-year point. My husband and I had three sons. We were secure financially. I worked as a substitute teacher when I could, but mostly I stayed home with my children. Daniel and I were a 'happily married couple' and we did 'happily married couple' things: We danced together at appropriate times at the parties of similarly 'happily married' couples; we shopped together; we made joint visits to our sons' school. With our home in the suburbs and cherry-red Volvo station wagon, I felt I had an ideal life, the kind you used to see in 1950's sitcoms.
But within our marriage there was an emptiness that neither of us could face; there were the unspoken lies told by both of us - to ourselves and to each other.
My lie was that I completely defined myself and my happiness through other people. I was Daniel's wife, Sean, Winston and Danny, Jr.'s mother, Mr. and Mrs. Payne's daughter. When I married Daniel, I tucked away those parts of me that didn't fit into what I thought our marriage should be.
I am a musician. The Good Hope Baptist Church's substitute organist. I have played the piano since I was 6. I play by ear and by note, and people have always told me I am gifted.
I stopped playing when I married Daniel. Somehow there seemd to be room for only one artist in the family - the life of a musician didn't seem to fit with the kind of life we planned to live. Daniel loved me for my good sense, my practicality - not my artistic spirit. So I tucked away that musical part of me and it came out only when I played hymns on Sunday morning or when I hummed lullabies to my sons at night. We didn't even own a piano.
There were other parts of me that I let go too. I love jazz clubs, but Daniel hates them, so we never went. I love the mountains, but Daniel loves the ocean, so we spent vacations in the Caribbean. Daniel never demanded that I give up anything, but it seemed easier that way. We couldn't afford a piano; the Caribbean was cheaper; we couldn't find a baby-sitter. I was his 'wife' and it ended there.
Daniel lied, too. He was my 'husband,' and he defined his life as narrowly as I defined mine. We closed each other up in a closet of 'love' that nearly smothered us both. There was no spontaneity in our love - no authenticity.
So when I found out about Daniel's affair with Shelia, things changed forever between us. Maybe they couldn't have gotten any worse.
BETRAYAL
The telephone call that changed us came at two in the morning. I found out later it was from one of Shelia's sisters. I was dead asleep, but I vague heard him say "I've got to ..." He stopped, glanced at me and then stared at the wall. "I've got to go out for a while," he said quickly before I could awaken myself enough to ask another question. Curious, but too tired to care, I went back to an uneasy sleep.
I was awakened by the alarm at seven and saw Daniel sitting in a chair across from our bed, his head in his hands.
"There's something I have to tell you," he said. I sat up. The tone of his voice frightened me.
"You know Shelia, the woman who calls here sometimes ...?" he began. I could sense something was up.
"What about her?" I asked, suddenly alarmed.
"The call was from Shelia's sister. Shelia ... Shelia tried to kill herself last night. I just got back from the hospital."
I didn't get it at first. "Why did she call you?" I asked, innocently stupid.
"Lynda, we've ... I've been having an affair with her," he said softly, as if he were talking to a child. "I broke it off last night, I ..."
I stared at him blankly, and then suddenly it all came together - the voice, the working late, the excuses, the call last night. I felt sick.
"You son of a bitch!" I snarled with a ferocity that surprised even me. "You filthy son of a bitch!" I began hitting him with my fists and crying hard at the same time. I punched him as hard as I could - on his back, in his face, on his shoulders.
"How could you do this to me?" I was crying now so hard that my voice was coming in short, hard gasps. Daniel said nothing. One of my smacks had knocked his glasses to the floor, and they lay there reflecting the morning light that was streaming in through the window. He took my blows without flinching.
"How long have you been seeing her? How long have you been lying to me? No more lies, Daniel! No more lies!"
"Two years," he said softly.
I glared at him in disgust and disbelief. Without saying anything more, I pulled on my clothes as quickly as I could. I needed to get out, to get away from him.
I ran to my car and backed out of the driveway fast, without paying attention to signs or traffic, and I headed toward the highway. I needed to go someplace where I could think, where I could breathe; I felt as if I were choking.
I felt violated and foolish. A fool for not seeing sooner what was going on right in front of me. A fool for being happy when my husband was sleeping with another woman. But then another thought occurred to me. Maybe he really loved her. Was he going to leave me? My marriage was everything - my identity, my security, my life. What would I do if he left me for Shelia? I hadn't worked since the birth of my first child. How would I make a living?
My mind was a blank. I felt empty and stupid and used. I drove aimlessly, listening to tapes, crying, wasting time. When it was dark, I headed home.
When my key turned in the lock, I could hear my children running to the door.
"Mommy, where have you been all day?" my youngest son demanded to know. Guilt swept me as I kissed his forehead.
"Shopping," I said.
"Where are your bags?" my oldest son, always the detective, asked. I didn't say anything. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Daniel enter the room. I didn't look at him.
"I left some dinner for you in there on the stove," he said, trying to sound casual.
"Daddy made a coconut cake. He wouldn't let us have any 'til you took the first piece. Please cut it," my middle son eagerly said, dancing around me.
"Okay, tomorrow," I said to my sons. "You all go up and get ready for bed; it's way past your bedtime." I waited until the boys were out of earshot. "Asshole," I hissed under my breath to Daniel as I swept past him into the kitchen. I noisily scraped the plate he'd set aside for me into the garbage disposal, and then I went in to kiss my sons good night. After I'd tucked them into bed, I went into our bedroom and locked the door behind me. It was hours before my bedtime but I was tired. And the questions about Daniel and Shelia gnawed at the edge of my mind. As I crawled into bed, I noticed a sealed envelope resting on a glass on the night table. I tore it open and read it quickly: I love you and only you. Shelia means nothing to me. She tried that stupid stunt because I told her that I wouldn't leave you. Please forgive me. I know I can't live without you. I tore Daniel's note into a dozen pieces, but I breathed a sigh of relief: If anyone left our marriage, it would be me.
A QUIET RAGE
The next day when Daniel went to teach and the children were at school, I threw his clothes on the floor in the spare bedroom. That move marked the beginning of my quiet rage, and in the weeks that followed we spoke to each other only when the children were around.
Angered by my unwillingness to forgive, Daniel withdrew into his work and spent more time in his studio. All I cared about were my kids - and my music, which like some sweet savior had begun to creep back into my life.
I started playing the piano again because I realized that I'd have to make a living if I decided to leave him, and music was the only thing I knew. Ic ouldI could substitute-teach for a while, but music was my God-given talent and I would make it pay. So I returned to it, a betrayed lover come home.
I called the university that I had graduated from 15 years before and found that I could rent a practice room, so three or four times a week I'd drive the distance to play. I would play for hours. I played my rage and pain, and I played for my lost marriage.
Two years of lies. I could forgive a one-night stand, a moment of passion brought to climax in a cheap hotel room or the backseat of somebody's car - but two yearyears took planning, 24 months of betrayal with each whispered phone call and stolen touch. So Daniel and I went our separate ways in a quiet, angry truce.
WHISPERED FUN AND DANGER
One Monday afternoon while I was practicing at the university, there was a rhythmic rap on the window. WheWhen I looked up, my heart skipped a beat. It was Jerome Thompson. I'd known him when we'd both been students. He was a musician now; I'd seen his name in the clubs around town.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="20">
CHARLES DICKENS knew his stuff, you know. Listen to this<\_>" "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result <\_>happineshappiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."
Right on. You adjust the numbers of inflation and what you've got right there is the history of Wall Street. At least, so much of the history of Wall Street as includes me: seven years. We had the good times and we lived high on that extra jolly sixpence, and now we live day by day the long decline of shortfall. Result misery.
Where did they all go, the sixpences of yesteryear? Oh, pshaw, we know where they went. You in Gstaad, him in Aruby, her in Paris and me in the men's room with a sanitary straw in my nose. We know where it went, all right.
My name's Kimball, by the way; here's my card. Bruce Kimball, with Rendall/LeBeau. Account exec. May I say I'm still making money for my clients? There's a lot of good stuff undervalued out there, my friend. You can still make money on the Street. Of course you can. I admit it's harder now; it's much harder when I have only thruppence and it's sixpence I need to keep my nose filled, build up that confidence, face the world with that winner's smile. Man, I'm only hitting on one nostril, you know? I'm hurtin'.
Nearly three years a widow; time to remarry. I need a true heart to share my penthouse apartment (unfurnished terrace, fortunately) with its grand view of the city, my cottage (14 rooms) in Amagansett, the income of my portfolio of stocks.
An income - ah, me - which is less than it once was. One or two iffy margin falls, a few dividends undistributed; bad news can mount up, somehow. Or dismount and move right in. Income could become a worry.
But first, romance. Where is there a husband for my middle years? I am Stephanie Morewell, 42, the end product of good breeding, good nutrition, a fine workout program and amazingly skilled cosmetic surgeons. Since my parents died as my graduation present from Bryn Mawr, I've more or less taken care of myself, though of course, at times, one does need a man around the house. To insert light bulbs and such-like. The point is, except for a slight flabbiness in my stock portfolio, I am a fine catch for just the right fellow.
I don't blame my broker, please let me make that clear. Bruce Kimball is his name and he's unfailingly optimistic and cheerful. A bit of blade, I suspect. (One can't say gay blade anymore, not without the risk of being misunderstood.) In any event, Bruce did very well for me when everybody's stock was going up, and now that there's a - oh, what are the pornographic euphemisms of finance? A <\_>shakehoutshakeout, a mid-term correction, a market adjustment, all that - now that times are tougher, Bruce has lost me less than most and has even found a victory or two amid the wreckage. No, I can't fault Bruce for a general worsening of the climate of money.
In fact, Bruce ... hmmm. He flirts with me at times, but only in a professional way, as his employers would expect him to flirt with a moneyed woman. He's handsome enough, if a bit thin. (Thinner this year than last, in fact.) <\_>stillStill, those wiry fellows ....
Three or four years younger than I? Would Bruce Kimball be the answer to my prayers? I do already know him and I'd rather not spend too much time on the project.
Stephanie Kimball. Like a schoolgirl, I write the name on the note pad beside the telephone on the Louis XIV writing table next to my view of the East River. The rest of that page is filled with hastily jotted numbers: income, outgo, estimated expenses, overdue bills. Stephanie Kimball. I gaze upon my view and whisper the name. It's a blustery, changeable, threatening day. Stephanie Kimball. I like the sound.
"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune." Agatha Christie said that. Oh, but she was quoting, wasn't she? Shakespeare! Got it.
There was certainly a flood tide in my affair with Stephanie Morwell. Five years ago, she was merely one more rich wife among my clients, if one who took more of an interest than most in the day-to-day handling of the portfolio. In fact, I never did meet her husband before his death. Three years ago, that was; some ash blondes really come into their own in black, have you noticed?
I respected Mrs. Morwell's widowhood for a month or two, then began a little harmless flirtation. I mean, why not? She was a widow, after all. With a few of my other female clients, an occasional expression of male interest had eventually led to extremely pleasant afternoon financial seminars in midtown hotels. And now, Mrs. Morwell; to peel the layers of black from that lithe and supple body ....
Well, <\_>Forfor three years, all that was merely a pale fantasy. Not even a consummation devoutly to be wished - now, who said that? No <\_>wattermatter - it was more of a daydream while the computer's down.
From black to autommal colors to a more normal range. A good-looking woman, friendly, rich, but never at the forefront of my mind unless she was actually in my presence, across the desk. And now it has all changed.
Mrs. Morwell was in my office once more, hearing mostly badly news, I'm afraid, and in an effort to distract her from the grimness of the occasion, I made some light remark, "There are better things we could do than sit here with all these depressing numbers." Something like that; and she said, in a kind of swollen voice, I'd never heard before, "There certainly are."
I looked at her, surprised, and she was arching her back, stretching like a cat. I said, "Mrs. Morwell, you're giving me ideas."
She smiled. "Which ideas are those?" she asked, and 40 minutes later we were in her bed in her apartment on Sutton Place.
Aaah. Extended widowhood had certainly sharpened her palate. What an afternoon. Between times, she put together a cold snack of salmon and champagne while I roved naked through the sunny golden rooms, delicately furnished with antiques. What a view she had, out over the East River. To live such a life ....
Well. Not until this little glitch in the economy corrects itself.
"Champagne?"
I turned and her body was as beautiful as the bubbly. Smiling, she handed me a glass and said, "I've never had such a wonderful afternoon in my entire life."
We drank to that.
We were married, my golden stockbroker, and I, seven weeks after I first took him to bed. Not quite a whirlwind romance, but close. Of course, I had to meet his parents, just the once, a chore we all handled reasonably well.
We honeymooned in Caneel Bay and had such a lovely time we stayed an extra week. Bruce was so attentive, so charming, so - how shall I put it? - ever ready. And he got along amazingly well with the natives; they were eating out of his hand. In no time at all, he was joking on a first-name basis with half a dozen fellows I would have thougth of as nothing more than dangerous layabouts, but Bruce could find a way to put almost anyone at ease. (Once or twice, one of these fellows even came to chat with Bruce at the cottage. I know he lent one of them money - it was changing hands as I glanced out the louvered window - and I'm sure he never even anticipated repayment.)
I found myself, in those first weeks, growing actually fond of Bruce. What an unexpected bonus! And my warm feeling toward this new husband only increased when, on our return to New York, he insisted on continuing with his job at Rendall/LeBeau. "I won't sponge on you," he said, so firm and manly that I dropped to my knees that instant. Such a contrast with previous marital experience!
Still, romance isn't everything. One must live as well; or, that is, some must live. And so, in the second week after our return, I taxied downtown for a discussion with Oliver Swerdluff, my new insurance agent. (New since Robert's demise, I mean.) "<\_>CongratualtionsCongratulations on your new marriage, Mrs. Kimball," he said, this red-faced, portly man who was so transparently delighted with himself for having remembered my new name.
"Thank you, Mr. Swerdluff." I took my seat across the desk from him. "The new situation, of course," I pointed out, "will require some changes in my insurance package."
"Certainly, certainly."
"Bruce is now co-owner of the apartment in the city and the house on Long Island."
He looked impressed. "Very generous of you, Mrs., uh, Kimball."
"Yes, isn't it? Bruce is so important to me now, I can't imagine how I got along all those years without him. Oh, but that brings up a depressing subject. I suppose I must really insure Bruce's life, mustn't I?"
"The more important your husband is to you," he said, with his salesman's instant comprehension, "the more you must consider every eventuality."
"But he's priceless to me," I said. "How could I choose any amount of insurance? How could I put a dollar value on Bruce?"
"Let me help you with that decision," Mr. Swerdluff said, leaning that moist red face toward me over the desk.
We settled on an even million. Double indemnity.
"Strike while the widow is hot." Unattributed, I guess.
It did all seem to go very smoothly. At first, I was merely enjoying Stephanie for her own sake, expecting no more than our frequent encounters, and then somehow the idea arose that we might get married. I couldn't see a thing wrong with the proposition. Stephanie was terrific in bed, she was rich, she was beautiful and she obviously loved me. Surely, I could find some fondness in myself for a package like that.
And what she could also do, though I had to be very careful she never found out about it, was take up that shortfall, those pennies between me and the white medicine that makes me such a winning fellow. A generous woman, certainly generous enough for that modest need. And I understood from the beginning that if I were to keep her love and respect and my access to her piggy bank, I must never be too greedy. Independent, self-sufficient, self-respecting, only dipping into her funds for those odd six-pences which would bring me, in Mr Dickens' phrase, "result happiness."
The appearance of independence was one reason why I kept on at Rendall/LeBeau, but I had other reasons as well. In the first place, I didn't want one of those second-rate account churners to take over the Morwell - now Kimball - account and bleed it to death with percentages of unnecessary sales. In the scond place, I needed time away from Stephanie, private time that was reasonably accounted for and during which I could go on medicating myself. I would never be able to maintain my proper dosages at home without my bride sooner or later stumbling across the truth. And beyond all that, I've always enjoyed the work, playing with other people's money as if it were merely counters in a game, because that's all it is when it's other people's money.
Four lovely months we had of that life, with Stephanie never suspecting a thing. With neither of us, in fact, ever suspecting a thing. And if I weren't such a workaholic, particularly when topped with my little white friend, I wonder what eventually might have happened. No, I don't wonder; I know what would have happened.
But here's what happened instead. I couldn't keep my hands off Stephanie's financial records. I wasn't prying, it wasn't suspicion, it wasn't for my own advantage, it was merely a continuation of the work ethic on another front.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="21">
It's Come to This
NO HORSES. That's how it always starts. I am coming down the meadow, the first snow of September whipping around my boots, and there are no horses to greet me. The first thing I did after Caleb died was get rid of the horses.
"I don't care how much," I told the auctioneer at the Missoula Livestock Company. He looked at me slant-eyed from under his Stetson. "Just don't let the canneries take them." Then I walked away.
What I did not tell him was I couldn't stand the sight of those horses on our meadow, so heedless, grown fat and untended. They reminded me of days when Montana seemed open as the sky.
Now that the horses are gone I am more desolate than ever. If you add one loss to another, what you have is double zip. I am wet to the waist, water sloshing ankle-deep inside my irrigating boots. My toes are numb, my chapped hands are burning from the cold, and down by the gate my dogs are barking at a strange man in a red log truck.
That's how I meet Frank. He is hauling logs down from the Champion timberlands above my place, across the right-of-way I sold to the company after my husband's death. The taxes were piling up. I sold the right-of-way because I would not sell my land. Kids will grow up and leave you, but land is something a woman can hold onto.
I don't like those log trucks rumbling by my house, scattering chickens, tempting my dogs to chase behind their wheels, kicking clouds of dust so thick the grass looks brown and dead. There's nothing I like about logging. It breaks my heart to walk among newly cut limbs, to be enveloped in the sharp odor of sap running like blood. After twenty years on this place, I still cringe at the snap and crash of five-hundred-year-old pines and the far-off screaming of saws.
Anyway, Frank pulls his gyppo logging rig to a stop just past my house in order to open the blue metal gate that separates our outbuildings from the pasture, and while he is at it, he adjusts the chains holding his load. My three mutts take after him as if they are real watchdogs and he stands at the door of the battered red cab holding his hands to his face and pretending to be scared.
"I would surely appreciate it if you'd call off them dogs," says Frank, as if those puppies weren't wagging their tails and jumping up to be patted.
He can see I am shivering and soaked. And I am mad. If I had a gun, I might shoot him.
"You ought to be ashamed ... a man like you."
"Frank Bowman," he says, grinning and holding out his large thick hand. "From Bowman Corners." Bowman Corners is just down the road.
"What happened to you?" he grins. "Take a shower in your boots?"
How can you stay mad at that man? A man who looks at you and makes you look at yourself. I should have known better. I should have waited for my boys to come home from football practice and help me lift the heavy wet boards in our diversion dam. But my old wooden flume was running full and I was determined to do what had to be done before dark, to be a true country woman like the pioneers I read about as a daydreaming child in Chicago, so long ago it seems another person's life.
"I had to shut off the water," I say. "Before it freezes." Frank nods, as if this explanation explains everything.
Months later I would tell him about Caleb. How he took care of the wooden flume, which was built almost one hundred years ago by his Swedish ancestors. The snaking plank trough crawls up and around a steep slope of igneous rock. It has been patched and rebuilt by generations of hard-handed, blue-eyed Petersons until it reached its present state of tenuous mortality. We open the floodgate in June when Bear Creek is high with snowmelt, and the flume runs full all summer, irrigating our hay meadow of timothy and wild mountain grasses. Each fall, before the first hard freeze, we close the diversion gates and the creek flows in its natural bed down to the Big Blackfoot River.
That's why I'd been standing in the icy creek, hefting six-foot two-by-twelves into the slotted brace that forms the dam. The bottom board was waterlogged and coated with green slime. It slipped in my bare hands and I sat down with a splash, the plank in my lap and the creek surging around me.
"Goddamn it to fucking hell!" I yelled. I was astonished to find tears streaming down my face, for I have always prided myself on my ability to bear hardship. Here is a lesson I've learned. There is no glory in pure backbreaking labor.
Frank would agree. He is wide like his log truck and thick-skinned as a yellow pine, and believes neighbors should be friendly. At five o'clock sharp each workday, on his last run, he would stop at my blue gate and yell, "Call off your beasts," and I would stop whatever I was doing and go down for our friendly chat.
"How can you stand it?" I'd say, referring to the cutting of trees.
"It's a pinprick on the skin of the earth," replies Frank. "God doesn't know the difference."
"Well, I'm not God," I say. "Not on my place. Never."
So Frank would switch to safer topics such as new people moving in like knapweed, or where to find morels, or how the junior high basketball team was doing. One day in October, when red-tails screamed and hoarfrost tipped the meadow grass, the world gone crystal and glowing, he asked could I use some firewood.
"A person can always use firewood," I snapped.
The next day, when I came home from teaching, there was a pickup load by the woodshed - larch and fir, cut to stove size and split.
"Taking care of the widow." Frank grinned when I tried to thank him. I laughed, but that is exactly what he was up to. In this part of the country, a man still takes pains.
When I first came to Montana I was slim as a fashion model and my hair was black and curly. I had met my husband, Caleb, at the University of Chicago, where a city girl and a raw ranch boy could be equally enthralled by Gothic halls, the great libraries, and gray old Nobel laureates who gathered in the Faculty Club, where no student dared enter.
But after our first two sons were born, after the disillusionments of Vietnam and the cloistered grind of academic life, we decided to break away from Chicago and a life of mind preeminent, and we came to live on the quarter section of land Caleb had inherited from his Swedish grandmother. We would make a new start by raising purebred quarter horses.
For Caleb it was coming home. He had grown up in Sunset, forty miles northeast of Missoula, on his family's homestead ranch. For me it was romance. Caleb had carried the romance of the West for me in the way he walked on high-heeled cowboy boots, and the world he told stories about. It was a world I had imagined from books and movies, a paradise of the shining mountains, clean rivers, and running horses.
I loved the idea of horses. In grade school, I sketched black stallions, white mares, rainbow-spotted appaloosas. My bedroom was hung with horses running, horses jumping, horses rolling in clover. At thirteen I hung around the stables in Lincoln Park and flirted with the stable boys, hoping to charm them into riding lessons my mother could not afford. Sometimes it worked, and I would bounce down the bridle path, free as a princess, never thinking of the payoff that would come at dusk. Pimply-faced boys. Groping and French kisses behind the dark barn that reeked of manure.
For Caleb horses meant honorable outdoor work and a way to make money, work being the prime factor. Horses were history to be reclaimed, identity. It was my turn to bring in the monthly check, so I began teaching at the Sunset school as a stopgap measure to keep our family solvent until the horse-business dream paid off. I am still filling that gap.
We rebuilt the log barn and the corrals, and cross-fenced our one-hundred acres of cleared meadowland. I loved my upland meadow from the first day. As I walked through tall grasses heavy with seed, they moved to the wind, and the undulations were not like water. Now, when I look down from our cliffs, I see the meadow as a handmade thing - a rolling swatch of green hemmed with a stitchery of rocks and trees. The old Swedes who were Caleb's ancestors cleared that meadow with axes and cross-cut saws, and I still trip over sawed-off stumps of virgin larch, sawed level to the ground, too large to pull out with a team of horses - decaying, but not yet dirt.
We knew land was a way to save your life. Leave the city and city ambitions, and get back to basics. Roots and dirt and horse pucky (Caleb's word for horseshit). Bob Dylan and the rest were all singing about the land, and every stoned, long-haired mother's child was heading for country.
My poor mother, with her Hungarian dreams and Hebrew up-bringing, would turn in her grave to know I'm still teaching in a three-room school with no library or gymnasium, Caleb ten years dead, our youngest boy packed off to the state university, the ranch not even paying its taxes, and me, her only child, keeping company with a two-hundred-and-thirty-pound logger who lives in a trailer.
"Marry a doctor," she used to say, "or better, a concert pianist," and she was not joking. She invented middle-class stories for me from our walk-up flat on the South Side of Chicago: I would live in a white house in the suburbs like she had always wanted; my neighbors would be rich and cultured; the air itself, fragrant with lilacs in May and heady with burning oak leaves in October, could lift us out of the city's grime right into her American dream. My mother would smile with secret intentions. "You will send your children to Harvard."
Frank's been married twice. "Twice-burned" is how he names it, and there are Bowman kids scattered up and down the Blackfoot Valley. Some of them are his. I met his first wife, Fay Dell, before I ever met Frank. That was eighteen years ago. It was Easter vacation, and I had taken two hundred dollars out of our meager savings to buy a horse for our brand-new herd. I remember the day clear as any picture. I remember mud and Blackfoot clay.
Fay Dell is standing in a pasture above Monture Creek. She wears faded brown Carhartt coveralls, as they do up here in the winters, and her irrigating boots are crusted with yellow mud. March runoff has every patch of bare ground spitting streams, trickles, and puddles of brackish water. Two dozen horses circle around her. Their ears are laid back and they eye me, ready for flight. She calls them by name, her voice low, sugary as the carrots she holds in her rough hands.
"Take your pick," she says.
I stroke the velvet muzzle of a two-year-old sorrel, a purebred quarter horse with a white blaze on her forehead.
"Sweet Baby," she says. "You got an eye for the good ones."
"How much?"
"Sorry. That baby is promised."
I walk over to a long-legged bay. There's a smile on Fay Dell's lips, but her eyes give another message.
"Marigold," she says, rubbing the mare's swollen belly. "She's in foal. Can't sell my brood mare."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="22">
I WAS A PROM DATE RENEGADE
FICTION BY REBECCA LANNING
"Guess what?" I moaned.
Miranda and I were standing by our lockers just before first period when I told her the depressing news. "Douglass Bartholomew called me up last night and asked me to the prom."
"Oh really," she said with a half smile. "That's nice."
"Who are you kidding?" I snapped as I slammed my locker door. "He caught me off guard. I didn't know what to say."
Miranda shrugged. "So why didn't you turn him down?"
I looked up the hall, hoping I wouldn't see Douglass. He's not hard to spot. He's real tall with a long neck and this orangy hair. I know some girls think he's kinda cute, but he reminded me of ... well, a giraffe. "I guess I was desperate," I confessed.
See, the prom was coming up in less than two weeks, and everyone had a date but me. I was thinking of begging my cousin Julian to take me, but I couldn't handle the humiliation of showing up with a blood relative. I stared down at my feet, at my new red cowboy boots. I'd bought them on a whim, hoping they'd attract the attention of some bold, dare-devil kind of guy. Instead, I roped in Douglass.
"You know," Miranda said. She was playing with her earring, not looking at me. "I'm glad Douglass got to you before -" She bit her lip. "Never mind," she said quickly. But her eyes told me she knew something big.
"What?!" I clutched her arm. "Was someone else going to ask me to the prom?"
Miranda stepped back a little. "Come on, Cammie," she said. "It's a done deal. Don't start stirring things up."
"Tell me!" I pleaded.
"Forget it," Miranda said shaking her head. "Douglass is a nice guy, so let's just drop it, okay?"
I felt like pinching Miranda, or at least tickling her, until her mouth fell open and the truth came pouring out. But I could tell by the way she held her jaw that she'd never back down. She was like a stern mother that way, always thinking she knew what was best for me.
But she didn't really have any idea what it was like to be me. Miranda was a star; I was space dust. I mean, when she made cheerleader our sophomore year, I got elected treasurer of the Latin Club. When she was voted Best Looking Girl of the junior class, I was named Library Assistant of the Year. And this year, when Miranda was nominated for prom queen, I was appointed head of the prom decorations committee.
"Listen," Miranda said before heading off to calculus. "You'll have a great time at the prom with Douglass. He's so smart and funny. Maybe we can even double date."
"I doubt it," I said. The mere thought made me wince. After all, Miranda's date was Rex Riley, the president of the student body, the biggest catch of our senior class. He'd probably wear a tux and dance like Patrick Swayze. Douglass would probably wear some boring blue suit and weird shoes with tassles.
Suddenly, I felt like disappearing for a few weeks, maybe head down to Florida. Take up wind surfing. Come back after the prom with blond highlights and a great tan. I could change my name to CoCo. I mean, it was the spring of my senior year. The air around me was supposed to crackle with excitement. I should be gathering tons of memories to look back on in my old age. Instead, my life was just one big ordinary bore.
In English class this morning, Douglass stared at me for the entire 48 minutes. Then, at lunch, while I was in the art room working on the decorations, he appeared in the doorway. I think, he'd grown an inch since second period. As he brushed back his scraggly orange bangs, he flashed me a big grin. "How's it going!" he asked.
"Fine," I said distractedly. I kept working, cutting stars out of cardboard, covering them with tin foil. The theme for the prom was 'Starry, Starry Night."
Naturally, Douglass didn't get the hint. He wandered into the room and settled down next to me at the long, wooden table. "I like your boots," he offered.
"Gee, thanks," I said and smiled. At least I tried to smile.
Douglass scooted his chair even closer to mine. He had on this wrinkly white oxford shirt and baggy old khakis. He smelled like furniture polish. "Tell me something," he said. "Do you like pork chops?"
"What?" I said.
"Do you like -"
"I heard you. Why do you want to know?" I knew I was being mean, but I just couldn't help myself.
Douglass puffed up his chest like a bird. "I thought I might cook pork chops at my house before the prom. We can have a nice candlelit dinner. I can get some great chops from Sloan's, real thick and tasty."
Douglass worked in the meat department of Sloan's Supermarket. Whenever I ran in there, on an errand for Mom, he'd always follow me around in his white uniform, trying to help me find the bread crumbs or waxed beans or whatever was on my list. Now I tried to picture myself at his house eating pork chops by candlelight. I guess he thought it would be romantic. I could imagine his parents lurking in the next room, barging in every few minutes to snap a photo of Douglass and me trying to chew and smile at the same time. The whole idea gave me the creeps, but what could I say? "Sure, Douglass," I sighed. "I like pork chops just fine."
That afternoon after school, I borrowed Mom's station wagon and Miranda and I went to Longview Mall. While she was looking for some earrings to match her prom gown, I went hunting for some kind of self-help book. Tips for Surviving a Prom Date Disaster. How to Act Nice When You Feel Like Killing Someone.
I was about to walk into the bookstore, when I spotted Bo Grady, the star of the soccer team, heading my way. My knees got all wobby. We'd gone out once in the fall of our junior year. Shortly after that, Bo started dating Samantha Rawlings, and he'd been dating her ever since. But his good-night kiss still ranked right up there on the list of my life's highlights. I think he had electric lips.
"Hey, Cammie. What's up?" Bo said as he approached me. He had on these real faded 501s with holes in the knees and a gray T-shirt that said Class of '92. He was carrying a big shopping bag from Athletic Attitudes. My heart flip-flopped.
"Not much," I said trying to act nonchalant. "Just waiting on Miranda. She's having a total cow about earrings for the prom." I rolled my eyes.
Bo rolled up the end of his shopping bag. "So, I don't suppose you have a date, do you?"
"We- Well, ..." I stuttered. My throat turned dry as a bone.
Right at that moment, Bo stepped a little closer toward me. He smelled good, like a lime.
"Listen," he whispered. "Samantha and I broke up." He sort of checked me out from head to toe. I fell into a deep freeze. "Have you heard anything about it?"
"Well, no, actually, I hadn't heard. I'm real sorry."
Bo shrugged and bit his lip. "I realize this is kind of late notice," he said. "But if you don't already have a date for the prom, would you like to go with me?"
My mind started racing. This was like a dream come true and a nightmare all in one. I mean, why did he and Samantha break up so close to the prom? And what about Douglass? I couldn't back out on him now. Or could I? This was my chance at having the kind of prom night I really wanted. The kind that you remember all your life. I looked up at Bo. Our eyes locked. Suddenly, I didn't care about doing the right thing. Bo Grady was cool. He was popular. He did not remind me of a giraffe. That's when the words, "I'd love to go to the prom with you, Bo," popped out of my mouth.
Bo smiled and threw me a playful punch. "That's great, Cammie," he said. "Maybe we can have dinner first at Le Chateau."
For a second, I couldn't speak. I mean, I'd never been to Le Chateau. But how was I going to work this out? I felt like an outlaw or something. I wanted to hop on a train and make a fast getaway. "That sounds wonderful, Bo" I squeaked. And suddenly, I saw my whole life flash before my eyes.
"Was that Bo Grady you were talking to?" Miranda asked as we headed out to the parking lot. I was walking real fast, and Miranda was eyeing me suspiciously. "Did he tell you Samantha dumped him again - this time for some college guy?"
"Sort of," I said and got behind the wheel of Mom's station wagon. Before Miranda could even fasten her seat belt, I was backing out. "Bo just asked me to the prom." I said it, but still couldn't believe it.
Miranda gave me this look, and suddenly I remembered her hinting around that someone else was interested in being my prom date. "Was he the guy?" I asked as I sped past Fallon Park. "The guy you'd heard might ask me?"
Miranda stared out the window, at the azaleas blooming everywhere. "It was just some rumor," she muttered. "I figured he was on the rebound from Samantha. I didn't mention it because I didn't want you to get hurt. Bo can be kind of thoughtless sometimes."
I whipped the car on to Lassiter Road.
"Don't you think that's something I could've decided for myself?!" I was furious. Miranda: my mom away from Mom.
"I'm sorry," she offered. "I should've told you what I'd heard." Then she pulled her rhinestone earrings out of the bag and held them up to the sunlight. Shiny little dots flashed all over the car. "I guess Bo was bummed when you told him you were going to the prom with Douglass, huh?"
"I'm not going with Douglass," I said matter-of-factly.
Miranda stuffed her earrings back in the bag. "What?!"
"I'm going to the prom with Bo." I don't know why, but I was driving real fast. The engine kept backfiring.
"You're making a big mistake, Cammie," she said. "You're making a HUGE mistake." Miranda kept shaking her head so much I thought maybe it would fall off. "Bo and Samantha are bound to get back together. They always do. What are you going to tell Douglass? You're going to break his heart. You're going to ruin him for life!"
"Get off it, Miranda," I snapped. "He'll get over it. And so will you."
"But Douglass is really looking forward to the prom. This afternoon in chemistry, he was telling me about his pork chop recipe. He really, really likes you."
"You know what? I am really, really sick of your junk," I said. Miranda glared at me. "It's easy for you to sit here and preach to me about keeping my word. But would you go to the prom with Douglass Bartholomew? Would you?"
Miranda sat up straight and clasped her hands together. "If he asked me, yes, I'd go with him."
"But that's just it!" I practically screamed. "Douglass would never ask you to the prom or any place else. You're like some ... some totally up there girl. You can be all friendly with him. But that's because you know he'd never even think about asking you out. You're not on his level, and he knows it. And you know it. And you don't have any right to judge me for going out with somebody I really feel like going out with!"
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="23">THE DAY BEFORE DAVID HOWELL was to leave for college, the weather turned to autumn.
Martin had reluctantly folded down the back seat of the Volvo station wagon to allow as much space as possible to pack everything his son needed for school. "Your mother and I had planned to drive you tomorrow, but now there isn't enough room for both of us. Are you sure you need all this stuff?"
"Mom made out the list." David held up a sheet of notepaper. Dinah recognized her careful list from five months back, but she knew she hadn't suggested that David take his skis. She thought about how she wouldn't be able to see David's room, to get a picture of where he would be living, or even to tell him goodbye.
Martin was wrestling with the skis, trying to fit them in while David reached into the car to adjust them himself. Dinah decided to leave the two of them alone. "I'm going inside unless you need me."
Martin emerged from the station wagon and stood running his eyes over the items that were yet to be packed.
"What's with this damned stereo?" he asked her. "His room would have to be the size of an auditorium to do the thing justice. It must be some macho thing. Like we were with cars."
"Well, at least no one can get pregnant in the back seat of it," Dinah said, turning and making for the house.
Dinah went inside and called for dinner reservations at their favorite restaurant. She had decided as she watched the car slowly fill up with David's belongings that it was important to attempt a modest celebration to mark the beginning of his college career. But when she announced that she had made reservations for seven o'clock, David's face registered irritation.
"I was going to see Christie tonight, Mom. It's my last night at home."
"I'd love to have Christie come, sweetie. We'd like to see a little of you, too, on your last night," she said lightly. "You and Christie will have the rest of the evening." She looked directly at him with an expression of huge good humor that brooked no disagreement.
The Candlelight Inn was the first civilized restaurant to which they had ever taken David and Toby. At the time, Dinah was heavily pregnant with Sarah. On the drive over, Martin and Dinah had instructed the two little boys about not misbehaving.
"Absolutely no diving under the table if you drop your napkin," Martin said. "Or for any other reason," he added.
They had been seated at a table in front of the fireplace; Toby and David were stiff in their blazers and amazingly subdued as they drank sodas and listened to their parents discuss the menu over their drinks. David had opened his own menu and studied it solemnly; and when their waiter had come to take their order, David had looked up at the man and inquired, "How is the lamb tonight?" Without a blink the waiter had replied, "It's very good, sir."
Dinah and Martin's eyes had met in amazement in one of those moments when one acknowledges the utter separateness of one's children from oneself. And because of the waiter's absolute lack of hesitation, The Candlelight Inn had been Dinah's favorite restaurant ever since.
This evening, though, Dinah realized that eating dinner in a public place often affected people as if they were performing on stage. Tonight it was all to the good. Sarah launched into a long tale illustrating the unfairness of her field hockey coach; and Christie sympathized. If there had not been waiters coming and going, however, and diners at other tables who glanced their way occasionally, the five of them would have sat silent in an atmosphere permeated with the tension of David's imminent departure.
Sarah leaned around Christie to speak to David. "Do you remember when we tried to convince Mom that the next time we buy a car it should be something besides a Volvo?" She glanced around the rest of the table, signaling amusement, but David shook his head.
"Oh, David. Don't you remember? Mom was saying how safe they were, that we didn't need to be able to go any faster. That the point of having a car at all is just to be able to get from one place to another." Sarah made her tone didactic.
David smiled. "Oh, yeah, now I do."
Sarah laughed and nodded, and Dinah smiled, too, knowing where the conversation was headed. "Mom pulled up at a stoplight and looked over at this car next to us and she said, 'Now, I can see that a small car like that might be handy for just doing errands around town.' And David and I looked over at it, and it was this incredible white Porsche!"
Dinah shrugged and joined the general laughter. She was glad to have Sarah and David reminiscing. She could hear the fondness in her children's voices. But it was also as if the sharp, first chill of fall had crept into her own spirit, because she came up hard against the reality that she no longer had any power to protect her children from anything at all.
She couldn't, in fact, be sure they traveled only in safe cars - a phobia with her since Toby's death six years ago. She could no longer be sure they wore their seat-belts, put on life jackets when they went sailing. She couldn't keep them from harm. And all her efforts at having done so - "Be home before dark! Don't talk on the phone during a thunderstorm! Plastic bags from the cleaner's are not toys!" - would be relegated to the nostalgia of their youth. She and Martin had become anecdotes in their own children's lives.
MARTIN SLEPT SOUNDLY, AS usual, but Dinah heard David come in about two o'clock and move around the house. She would have liked to go downstairs, but she knew she should give him the solitary run of the nighttime rooms. When she did wake up early in the morning, she was surprised to see that Martin wasn't asleep beside her. His side of the bed was empty. In the kitchen she discovered she was the last one to come downstairs, even though it was only 6:30. Martin had made coffee, and Sarah was having orange juice at the table. Dinah had planned on preparing a grand meal to see David off, but everyone had eaten. Martin and David were huddled over an enormous schefflera in a terra-cotta pot that Christie had given David for his dorm room.
"There's no way in the world we can fit that thing into the car, David. We'll bring it on Parents' Weekend."
"I know I can fit it in. Scheffleras are probably the best plants to clean toxic substances out of the air. They work almost like a scrubber."
"Well, you'll have to hold your breath until October, then."
"Dad, don't worry about it. I'll get it in," David said stonily, and went out to survey the possibilities.
Dinah moved around the kitchen helplessly, collecting cereal bowls, putting things back in cabinets. Martin finished his coffee and poured another cup. He was already dressed, while Dinah had only slipped in her pink flannel robe. "I'd like to get going as soon as we can," Martin said. "If it takes us about three and a half hours, we'll probably be earlier than most, and it won't be so hard to unload."
Time was flying past her, this moment before David would be gone.
Martin was uneasy this morning, too, with a kind of regret and tension that he hadn't expected to feel. He wanted to get this over with.
David came back into the kitchen. "I can fit it in, Dad. There's no problem."
"Okay, then. Ready to hit the road?"
"Yeah," he said, "I'm all set."
Martin rinsed his coffee cup and headed out the door, and David and Sarah followed him. Dinah looked around at the empty room, and her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away quickly with her sleeve before she trailed after the rest of her family.
Martin was sitting in the driver's seat with the door open, unsuccessfully trying to slide the seat back against the immovable mass of David's possessions. David was leaning against the car while Sarah stood by holding the plant.
When Dinah met her son's eyes she saw that he, too, was near tears. She simply moved toward him, and he embraced her fiercely, wrapping his arms around her shoulders and putting his face down against the top of her head.
"Oh, sweetie," she said, overcoming the break in her voice, "oh, sweetie! I hope everything is just perfect. I hope you have a wonderful time and ... I hope ... well, I'm so excited for you! Harvard's lucky to get you."
David held on to her tightly. "I love you, Mom," he said, almost brusquely, and then turned and climbed into the passenger seat of the car and Sarah gave him the schefflera to balance in his lap. Dinah bent down into the car and kissed him on the cheek. "I love you, too, sweetie. We'll miss you." She backed away a bit so David could close the door. Martin put the gear in neutral while he twisted to shift several items, and then the car began to move slowly toward the end of the drive.
"Have a safe trip," Dinah called. David waved his hand up over the roof. Then the car turned onto Slade Road.
DINAH DECIDED TO ACCOMPANY Martin when he took Duchess for her afternoon walk. For the first few weeks after David's departure she had been reluctant to leave the house in case her son might phone. In fact, he had called only once, and nothing he had said had appeased the longing that his busy voice evoked. His classes were fine. He liked his roommate, and his room was fine. She hung up the phone, assuring herself that she was delighted he was content, but she had been momentarily shattered with yearning.
As Dinah and Martin cut across the front yard, Duchess kept circling back on her leash, tangling herself around their legs, wagging her tail in excitement and delight at having Dinah with them. "This will be a good thing," Dinah said. "I never get any exercise."
"Walking with Duchess isn't very invigorating," Martin said.
"Maybe we can train her to heel," Dinah mused, but they both looked doubtfully at the shambling dog whose muzzle was almost completely gray. They made their way along the path fairly briskly, Martin leading the way and Duchess crashing through the brush behind them.
When they reached a natural summit, Dinah was out of breath. She sank down to sit on the ground, bracing herself against the trunk of an enormous spruce, and looked out on the valley. "This seems pretty invigorating to me," she said to Martin, who hadn't sat down, and she looked up at him. "Can we stop for a little while? I need to catch my breath."
Martin lowered himself to the ground beside her, and the powerful scent of evergreens enveloped them.
"You've been thinking about Toby, haven't you?" Martin asked her.
She looked at him in surprise. "No, not really." She didn't want to talk about Toby's death. She thought that with David's recent departure they were both susceptible to opportunistic sorrow, as if the flu had been going around and their white counts were low.
"You know," he said, "I still keep wondering if there wasn't some way I could have avoided that wreck. I've gone over it and over it. I was so distracted ..."
"If you could have avoided it?" Dinah's voice rose a little in consternation. "Don't even think about that, Martin. Of course you couldn't have avoided it. That's not fair to yourself - for you to try to ... oh ... take on the responsibility."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="24">"It cracks me up. She really gets upset at tractors on the road. I just pass them, but my mom follows them for miles. It's so funny."
"You have your license already?" Christy asked.
"No, just my permit. But I drive all the time anyway. Everyone does."
"What about the insurance? What if you got in an accident?"
"I don't know."
"You're kidding!" Christy looked at bright-eyed Paula. "Insurance is a big deal here. Nobody can drive without insurance, and it's super expensive. My Uncle Bob said he'd pay my insurance for the first year if I passed my driver's test the first time I tried."
David turned around and announced, "And she needs insurance! She already had an accident!"
"You did? What happened?" Paula quizzed her.
Christy gave her brother a dirty look before explaining the parking lot incident in a matter-of-fact way, hoping it would come across as no big deal.
Paula giggled. "That must've been embarrassing! Did anyone see you do it?"
"No, just my dad."
"So, did you get your license yet?"
"I haven't taken the test yet. My birthday's not until ..." Christy's eyes grew big and bright. "I can't believe it! I almost forgot all about my birthday!"
"Hey," Paula added, "it's tomorrow, isn't it? With all the Hawaii stuff, I almost forgot too. I'm so sure! You're going to spend your sixteenth birthday in Hawaii. Is that like a dream, or what?"
"You may end up spending your sixteenth birthday in this car, if that motor home doesn't move it!" Mom sputtered.
Christy and Paula turned and made giggly faces at each other, laughing at Mom's anxiety attack. A few minutes later they spotted the reason for the clogged freeway - a stalled truck had closed off the center lane, and traffic had been routed around on both sides.
Once they made it past the holdup, the freeway cleared, but the tension kept building until they reached Marti's. Then the fireworks really began. Christy and Paula watched as the two women acted like teenage sisters, squabbling over why Mom was fifteen minutes late, which car they should take, and why they couldn't have been more organized.
The group ended up in Mom's car, with David in the backseat, his seatbelt tightly holding both him and the duffle bag, and Marti in the front seat with a suitcase under her feet.
"This is precisely why I requested you each fit your things into one suitcase apiece," Marti scolded. "This day is certainly starting out wrong; I've never left so late for a flight in my life!"
"We hit a lot of traffic, and there was a stalled truck," Mom explained, still gripping the steering wheel tightly as she maneuvered back onto the freeway.
"We might be able to bypass some of the traffic," Marti suggested, "if we get on the 405. See the sign there? Stay in this lane."
Mom followed the directions while Marti continued to make plans. "Okay, now, if we do miss our flight, which I certainly hope we don't, then we'll find out when the next flight leaves and switch to that."
As it turned out, they didn't need Marti's alternative. They made it to the airport, checked their luggage, received their seat assignments and ended up with half an hour before they could even board the plane. Mom gave in to David's pleas for a pack of gum, and the two of them scurried off to the nearest shop, leaving a somewhat subdued Marti sitting in the waiting area with the girls.
"We should've gone with them," Paula suggested after Mom and David were out of view. "I don't have any gum, and my ears always bother me on airplanes."
"Paula," Christy pointed out, "you've only been on one airplane in your whole life and that was a few days ago coming out here."
"I know. And I chewed gum the whole time. Marti, would it be okay if we went to get some gum?"
"I suppose. If you hurry. I'll stay here with the carryons. Don't forget, we board in less than half an hour."
"Would you like us to bring you anything?" Paula asked sweetly.
"No thanks, dear. Just hurry!"
Paula and Christy briskly nudged their way through a throng of people lined up at the check-in desk. Christy suggested they make a quick stop at the bathroom too, since Marti had said the flight would take five hours.
"First some gum," Paula directed. "And I saw a magazine I wanted to get while we were running past all those shops on the way in."
Suddenly Paula stopped. "I don't believe it!" she squealed under her breath, or as under her breath as Paula was capable of squealing. Then plunging her hand deep into her huge shoulder bag, she rummaged around until she pulled out a pair of glasses, which she quickly slipped on.
"When did you start to wear glasses?" Christy asked.
That's him! Over there; see him? That's the guy from that TV show -what's that show? You know, there's these two guys and -"
Grabbing Christy by the arm Paula yanked her around the bathroom area and into another section of the terminal. "Come on! He's going this way! Did you see him? What's his name, Christy? I can't remember his name!"
"Paula!" Christy yanked her arm back and yelled at her friend, "Paula!"
Paula turned, looking dazed but still heading toward the movie star. "What? What! Come on!"
Christy hustled to keep up with her. "I don't see who you're even talking about! Come on, Paula! What are you doing?"
"I'm going to get my first movie star's autograph! Come on!"
They blitzed past a large tour group and ended up in a section of the airport that had two wings to choose from.
"This one." Paula grabbed Christy by the arm again. "I saw him go this way."
"Paula! Do you even know who we're chasing?"
"I can't think of his name. He's on that show, you know ..." Paula stopped short. "Where did he go? I don't see him!"
"Paula, I mean it! We have to go back right now! I didn't see anybody who looked famous. This is stupid!" Christy brimmed with anger and exasperation but kept her words brief. "We have to go back right now!"
She abruptly turned and marched away from Paula.
"Okay, okay, I'm coming." Paula caught up. "I know I saw him, though. What's his name? This is going to drive me crazy! He's really cute and popular and he's on that show ..."
"Most movie stars are cute and popular and on shows!" Christy picked up her pace, scolding Paula over her shoulder. "I can't believe you! We could've gotten lost or missed our plane over this phantom movie star!"
"Wait, Christy," Paula urged, slipping her glasses back into the bag and grabbing Christy's arm again, which Christy jerked away. "I want to go in here and get some gum."
"We don't have time!"
"Yes, we do. Your aunt was just pressuring everybody. We have like an hour until the plane takes off."
"Half an hour," Christy corrected.
"Half an hour till we board; then it takes another half hour until the plane even takes off. We have plenty of time."
Paula entered the small souvenir shop and took her time browsing through the magazines before selecting one. She picked up a pack of gum and held it up for Christy to see. "You like this kind?"
"I don't care. Anything. Let's go!"
Paula slipped her purchases into her bag, and the two girls stepped back into the main terminal area and looked around. Neither of them moved. Nothing looked familiar.
"We go this way," Paula said, regaining her self-assurance.
"Are you sure? I thought our gate was over there."
A cloud of uncertainty came over Paula, casting a puzzled shadow on her expression and giving away her feelings of terror.
The noise and constant hubbub from the throngs of people rushing past them made Christy feel dizzy.
"Let's ask somebody," Paula said breathlessly, scanning the bustling crowd, apparently looking for a stranger who appeared approachable and trustworthy.
"We can't just start talking to some stranger!"
"Then what are we going to do?" Paula dug her fingernails into Christy's arm, sounding as panicked as she looked. "What are we going to do? We're lost!"
"Let go!" Christy said. "Where's one of those TV monitors that shows all the flights and their times?"
"Over there!" Paula spotted one on the wall behind them. "What flight are we on? What airline? Do you know? I don't even know what airline we're on!"
"It was United, wasn't it?" Christy asked, as they scrambled closer to the monitor for a better view.
"There!" Paula said pointing. "Honolulu! There's a flight in half an hour to Honolulu. That's us, isn't it? Honolulu is in Hawaii, isn't it? Of course it is. Isn't it?" Her voice rose and became squeakier.
"Yes! Yes! Yes!" Christy's irritation overtook her fear. "But what's the one listed above it? How do you say that - Ka-hu-lu-i?" Christy asked. "I think that's the airport we're going to because that one leaves at the time we were supposed to, and it has a Hawaiian name."
"How do you know it's a Hawaiian name? Honolulu - now that's a Hawaiian name. Kahului could be some place in Bora Bora, or worse, it could be a flight to the Antarctic! We can't go jumping on the first flight we find that has a Hawaiian-sounding name! I think we should go to Gate 87 where the flight to Honolulu is. Everyone knows Honolulu is in Hawaii."
Just then the Kahului line began to blink, and instead of a time being listed, the words "now boarding" flashed across the screen.
"Now boarding, Paula! I know that's our flight! I know it! And they're leaving right now. Come on! Gate 57. Where's Gate 57?"
The girls took off sprinting down the nearest wing of the terminal, then realized it was the wrong one and ran the other way, following signs and bumping into people. Both of them were crying. Panting and blinking wildly, they suddenly recognized the wing they'd started from.
"This is it! I'm sure of it," Christy said, and the girls dashed to the waiting area which previously had been crowded with people. It was empty now, except for Christy's mother, who had her back to them. She stood next to the ticket counter, talking to the flight attendant and using sharp hand motions.
"Mom!" Christy yelled from twenty yards back, not caring who heard her. "Mom!"
"Mrs. Miller!" Paula screeched.
Mom spun around, and instead of welcoming them with a relieved embrace, she planted both fists on her hips. Her face, stern as stone, told Christy everything she didn't want to know.
"We missed the plane, girls," Mom stated. "We missed the plane! Where have you been?"
Christy scrambled to gain her composure and respond as maturely as possible. Before she could say a word, Paula let her emotions rip. With wild sobs, she clung to Mom's arm and went on hysterically about trying to get away from some strange man and getting lost and being afraid the man was going to kidnap them and a whole bunch of other unintelligible garble.
Mom instantly changed her approach and tried to calm Paula down before she drew a crowd. Christy kept all her terrified feelings from being lost to herself and wiped away her tears.
"Excuse me," the flight attendant interjected, leaning over the counter and looking much sweeter and more concerned than she had when Mom had been talking with her a few minutes ago. "Are you girls okay?"
Christy nodded.
Paula could have landed a role in a melodrama with her reaction. She curled in her lower lip, opened her eyes wide and let more inky, mascara-stained tears zigzag down her baby face.
Then softly, to Christy's mom, the uniformed woman said, "We did experience an abduction of an eight-year-old girl at the airport last Thursday. Perhaps I should call security."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="25">
EDGE OF ROCK
Fiction by May Mansoor Munn
This was the last breath of summer, its heat suffocating, weighing her down. Laila is on her knees in her front yard, scraping at earth, when she sees the boy once more loop around in the street on his bicycle. Not more than eleven, she thinks, a small figure of a boy in an odd-looking hat. He reminds her of her son, Omar, when he was that age: a grapevine, resting on air, its tendrils reaching toward the sun.
Her dog, Charlemagne - a gift from her Texas son-in-law - tugs at the chain secured to the porch railing as the boy, welded to his bicycle, weaves past moving cars in the street. Just then, brakes screech and a car comes to a sudden stop in front of Mrs. Rhodes's house. A man leans out the car window, shakes his fist at the boy who has barely escaped with his life - who now races toward the sidewalk, hits the curb, and lands, splayed, near Laila's drive-way. His hat, taking off on its own, lands in Mrs. Rhodes's rose bushes.
"Damn!" he says, loud enough for Laila to hear.
He gets up grumpily, crosses over to the roses and retrieves his hat.
"Guys like him," the boy says scowling, "should be put away."
Laila glances covertly at the house with the rusted car where, she knows, the boy lives. She says, "Your folks might worry ... riding your bike in the street like that. Taking risks."
"Ma expects me to be a sissy, like some girl. But Dad don't worry none." He taps the crown of his hat. "He got me the hat two years back - just before he skipped town." He flashes a grin. "It's been around, that hat. Fell in a creek near Livingston a year ago. And once, it blew out my Ma's car window ..." A small pause. "Dad's a Louisiana man. Last time he wrote, Ma tore up his letter ..." A sly look touches the corners of his eyes. "But I got them pieces when she weren't looking. Made out his address in New Orleans."
Laila marvels at his straw hat, with pheasant feathers forming its headband. Frayed and drooping, it rests lightly on the crown of his head.
He points to the patch of brown earth in the midst of green, and the clumps of wilted grasses at her knees.
"It's against the law, Ma says!"
Momentary fear stings her throat. "To dig in my front yard? To make a garden?"
She understood harassment in a land under occupation. Her land. But not here, in America, from this scarecrow of a boy.
She looks into the restless gray eyes of the boy, their color reminding her of a Wadallah winter sky.
"To build in your front yard. It's the law, Ma says."
"It'll be a fall garden," she explains. "The backyard is too shady for growing vegetables."
But here in the front yard, away from the shade of the mimosa tree, she has chosen a few meters to receive full benefit of sun. Barely a stone to dig, and no edge of rock to scrape or cut into flesh: only rich, loamy earth to weed and till.
Crouching, the boy begins to stroke the amber-splashed fur of Charlemagne. He asks, looking up, "Does he have a name?"
"My son-in-law, the history teacher, named him Charlemagne."
"Funny name for a dog." A reflective pause. "Think I'll call him Charlie, for short." The boy's gray eyes glint in the sun. "My name's Billy. What's yours?"
"Laila El-Fihmi." She says it slowly, carefully, the way her Detroit teacher pronounced it in English class.
Billy scratches the back of his head. "Never heard that name before ..."
"It's an Old Country name." Laila smiles. "Mrs. Rhodes next door calls me Miz El - for short. You can, too."
Billy stands up, looks back at the dog. "Ma don't allow no dogs at our house." A matter-of-fact statement brooking no sympathy.
Tenderness, like a breeze, filters through Laila's defenses. "Come by tomorrow at one and have dinner with us," she says. "You'll get to meet my daughter, Salwa, and her family. You can play with ... Charlie."
Billy shrugs. "Don't promise nothing."
He gives the dog a quick pat, leaps on his bike, and like a young horse-man, gallops across the lawn and back into the street. He turns and waves his hat at her - a small, city-boy, playing at cowboy.
Work in the garden for now must wait. Coring and stuffing the squash for tomorrow's dinner will have to come first. A few weeks before, when Salwa finally persuaded her mother to leave Detroit for Houston, Salwa and her family started to come to dinner every Sunday - the children spilling over Laila's small house, filling its corners with a vortex of motion and noise. Ramzi, five, his brown eyes questioning the hidden meanings of the adult world, often came to her for comfort. Katy, two years older and more self-sufficient, and Jesse, eight, played their noisier games outside, with Charlemagne.
Laila brings out the mound of squash, corer and pan, sets them all on the patio table, and settles down in the porch swing.
As her hands begin to deftly hollow out each squash, she considers the shape and color of the houses on her street. Except for Mrs. Rhodes's brick house, all the houses in her neighborhood are made of wood, with wooden doors and no bars to secure windows.
Their Wadallah house is built of stone, with iron bars across windows and heavy steel doors. Her grandfather built the house to last the centuries.
But here, in this rented house, a thief could easily break glass, or pry open windows and crawl in - unhampered by steel or stone. For the first few days of her arrival here from Detroit, the thought had kept her awake - until Bob gave her the dog, to allay her fears. A dog named Charlemagne.
"He's a half-Sheltie," Bob said and expected her to understand.
In Wadallah she learned her English from a children's book with colored pictures and a dog named Spot - not Charlemagne. And in Detroit, she took 'intensive' English classes after work, but could not quite master American slang.
Her husband, Bakri, remained behind in Wadallah - refusing to abandon the house, the vineyard, and the olive tree to strangers.
"Your brother in Detroit is right," Bakri had said. "Go now, for the children's sake. You can always return when our world is safe again."
A promise and a hope.
Laila's brother, who owned an import store in Detroit, even sent them tickets. But her daughter, Salwa, seventeen, and her son, Omar, fourteen, left Wadallah reluctantly.
Laila worked long hours in her brother's store, and practiced her spoken English every chance she got.
"Is your husband well, Mrs. Brown?" she asked a regular customer once.
"Well enough to nag the daylights out of me," Mrs. Brown replied. "Between you and me, I think he's got bats in his belfry ..."
"And how are the bats in your poor husband's belfry?" Laila asked the next day. Mrs. Brown shook her head, and hurried out with her jar of marmalade, her black olives - perhaps too worried about her husband's condition to answer.
Independence - Laila's children gloried in the word. She raised them to explore their talents, to test their strength. But in the end, each chose a separate path. Her daughter, Salwa, fit into American life like old-fashioned bread around pebbles in a taboon oven. In college she met Bob, with Texas roots, and brought him home to meet her mother. When Laila inadvertently called him "Boob," his laughter exploded in her face. Later, in private, Salwa gave her mother a lesson in accents and American slang.
Her son, Omar, missed his father, worried about political events in their country. Two years ago, at age seventeen, he decided to return to Wadallah to live.
As a small boy, Omar had rebelled against authority and the wisdom Laila offered - probing and testing for himself. Once at six, defying warnings, he climbed their olive tree to the highest branch, and promptly fell, breaking his leg. Her scoldings only served to spur him on toward a second and even third try.
If Laila had her way, he would study medicine. He had the brains for it. My son, the physician, she would say to anyone who asked.
As Mrs. Rhodes hobbles across the yard toward Laila, Charlemagne strains at his leash, the beginning of a growl forming in his throat.
"I've lived in this neighborhood for thirty years," Mrs. Rhodes says, leaning against the porch railing. "But, my dear, this place is fast going to the dogs."
"I usually keep the dog in my backyard," Laila says apologetically. "But today, I thought the change ..."
Mrs. Rhodes's laughter crackles across the yard. "I'm not talking about real dogs. Just houses, and people." She sniffs, drawing up the muscles of her sagging face. "Like that family with six kids down the street. And the dump where Billy lives."
Laila's hands pause momentarily in their task. "How old is Billy anyway?"
"Not a day under fourteen!" Mrs. Rhodes plunges her cane into the grass at her feet. "But he's small for his age. And not too bright. His third year in the sixth grade, you know." She waves her hand in the air above her head. "And that sloppy hat he wears. I bet a dog's ear he sleeps in it."
She focuses pale green eyes on Laila's face. "By the way, what's your son up to these days?"
What can Laila say? Mrs. Rhodes would understand little, if anything. Since even she, his own mother, failed to understand.
In his last letter, Omar wrote, "I've joined the Resistance. I've pledged to fight this unjust military occupation till the end ..."
Concerned, she wrote back that same day, to dissuade him, to ask: "But how will you earn a living? What does your father think?"
She was still waiting for answers.
Laila meets Mrs. Rhodes's glance, allows herself a careful smile. "Omar has been accepted in medical school." She speaks clearly without flinching, waits for words to find their mark.
Mrs. Rhodes curls her lower lip. "When he becomes a real doctor, maybe he can find a cure for my arthritis ..." With a flourish of her cane, Mrs. Rhodes turns and heads back to her own yard.
Midway into their Sunday dinner, Billy walks in, his hat pushed back, his face pink with scrubbing. Hesitantly, he slides into the empty seat between Bob and Ramzi.
Laila serves him the stuffed squash with the sterling silver spoon her children gave her for her fortieth birthday. Billy runs his finger over the raised indentations on the handle. "Never seen real silver before," he says, wide-eyed.
"The rest of my 'silverware' is stainless steel," Laila admits.
Later, over coffee, Salwa looks uncertainly into her mother's eyes. She and Bob are contemplating a possible trip to Mexico - without the children. A chance for the honeymoon they've never had.
Laila feels a surge of compassion for the small girl Salwa once was. At eight, seated cross-legged on the floor, she had tried to fit together pieces of a broken doll. An hour passed before she brought its shattered skull - bisque oozing with glue - and set the pieces before her mother. "Help me this time, please," she said. "I won't ask again. I promise."
Until the next time. And only if absolutely necessary.
Of course, she'd be glad to stay with the children for a week. What were grandmothers for?
Monday morning, when Billy stops by Laila's house on his way to school, she says, "I won't be here next week, Billy. I need someone to take care of Charlie. And to water my new garden."
He stands in the doorway, his hat light and airy on his head. "How much?"
"Five days. Five dollars."
"In advance?"
Laila nods. "If you like ..."
He flicks his fingers at the inner rim of his hat.
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="26">It didn't feel right sitting at a table with just men, as though you were at a meeting.
From the booth Tommy had a clear view of the band and dance floor. He had seen the band before. They were nothing great, although he thought the woman singing lead was good-looking and had a decent high voice. She had tight pants on and a pink blouse pulled low on her shoulders. When she sang the chorus she threw her head back so that you saw the swelling in the big vein in her neck. She never talked between songs. One of the men did the talking. He was a fat black-haired man with curly side-burns and played the guitar. The other two were a skinny drummer with long arms like a monkey and a bass player who closed his eyes when he played.
In front of the band there were fifteen or twenty couples dancing in the open space between the booths. They were moving about in circles, most of them in a shuffling two-step, although a few of the older couples knew how to fox-trot and there were others who could manage the jitterbug when there was a fast song. After each song the fat guitar player made a joke or two and the people on the dance floor turned to look at him. Then all at once the band would pick up again, apparently from some private signal, and the woman would begin to sing, and once more the people would start to move about the floor. Between sets, while the band took a break, the jukebox was turned on and everybody returned to his place and drank.
It was during the break after the second set that Tommy noticed that Bobbie and her friend Jan had come in. They were standing near the bar in that crowd of people. Bobbie's hair had been cut in a new way, in a kind of bob, and she was wearing a short dress. Tommy hadn't seen her since he'd come back to town. He wondered if they'd say anything to one another before the night was over. Maybe they'd at least say hello. Later he might even ask her to dance.
Then he saw that the guitar player was standing beside her. He had a drink in his hand and he was talking to her, waving his glass while he talked; then he must have said something clever because both Bobbie and Jan opened their mouths and laughed. From across the room Tommy couldn't hear any of it, but he saw the women laugh and afterward he watched Bobbie pat the guitar player on the cheek. Then the man was saying something more, something that was funny too, apparently, and he set his glass on the bar and he took Bobbie's hand up and kissed it, bending over her hand as if he were a Frenchman. Tommy watched while Bobbie spread her dress to the man, and made him a little curtsy.
"Hey, Tommy," Leo Hagemann said, "don't look now. But isn't that your wife over there?"
"I see her," Tommy said.
"She's looking pretty good."
"We're getting a divorce."
"That's too bad," said Milt Saunder. "I hate to hear that."
Leo Hagemann said, "I didn't hardly recognize her. She looks different. Tommy, she's looking pretty good."
Tommy looked across the table. Leo was leaning forward with his arms on the table; he had both hands around his glass, turning it in his fingers. He was staring out at the dance floor.
Tommy turned back to watch Bobbie once more. The guitar player was gone now and she was talking to someone else, someone with a red shirt. He was tall man with wavy brown hair. He was lighting her cigarette and she was holding under his hand to steady the match.
"Listen," Leo said. "Hey? What would you think if I asked Bobbie to dance?"
He didn't say anything.
"I mean, if it doesn't bother you."
"I don't know," Tommy said.
"What do you think?"
"I haven't seen her in a year," he said. "We don't even talk anymore."
"I guess that's the green light then," Leo said. He stood up. "Here goes nothing."
Tommy watched him walk across the floor. Leo looked heavier than he had a year ago. The tail of his shirt was sticking out, and he was wearing boots, shiny and black. Tommy watched while he walked over and stood beside Bobbie, patting her on the shoulder. Soon the music started up and Leo took Bobbie's hand and led her out onto the floor. Leo knew how to dance; he and Bobbie were spinning around, making dips and turns in time to the music, and people were making room for them on the dance floor. When the song ended Leo bent her over backward, as people did in the movies, and raised her again and gave her a hug. They stood laughing at one another and as the music started they began to dance again. Tommy watched for a moment longer; then he turned to look at Milt Saunders to see what Milt made of any of this.
When he noticed that he was being watched, Milt Saunders sank his head between his shoulders so that it appeared momentarily as if he had no neck. He reminded Tommy of a bird. Then Milt straightened up and raised his glass and drank from it.
Tommy watched him swallow. He had never before paid much attention to the movement of a man's Adam's apple.
By 10:30 the Legion was crowded and noisy. The band continued to play and everyone had to talk above the music if they hoped to be heard. Under the lights the thick smoke hung in the air like fog.
After a while, when Leo Hagemann went on dancing, Tommy stood up and moved to the other side of the booth. It felt uncomfortable, he and Milt Saunders sitting on the same side with nobody sitting opposite them. They sat across from one another, without talking, watching the dancers.
Later the barmaid came by and Tommy ordered another drink for himself and one for Milt. The barmaid was a young girl in blue jeans and a tight plaid shirt that had snaps instead of buttons. She was working very hard to keep up with the crowd; the hair around her face and at the back of her neck was dark with sweat and her cheeks were bright pink. When she returned with their drinks, she set them on the table on clean napkins and Tommy gave her a twenty dollar bill. She made change and he left a dollar tip on the tray.
"Well, thank you," the girl said.
"You're welcome," Tommy said. "Any time."
She gave him a quick look; then she smiled a little and went on.
"Who's that?" he said.
"She's new," Milt Saunders said. "She's from out of town."
"Who is she?"
"She married that Simmons boy."
"Arnold Simmons? I thought Arnold Simmons was still in high school."
"He was," Milt Saunders said. "But not no more. He graduated."
Tommy watched the young girl move across the floor, moving back and forth between the booths and the bar, carrying her tray of drinks. He wondered if she were even twenty-one yet.
Then someone was pushing in beside him. He turned and it was a woman in her mid-thirties, a little too heavy but with a pretty face, and with long black hair and blue eyes and very white even false teeth. "Hey, stranger," she said.
"Hey," Tommy said. "Marla Kroeger."
"I thought that was you sitting over here," she said. "So I said I'll go over and say hello."
"How are you?" Tommy said.
Marla Kroeger was a bus driver for the Holt County School District. For a year she had come into the bus barn where Tommy had worked as a mechanic; she had been unhappy and he had listened to her while she had talked. She would talk and he would lie on his back under one of the buses and listen to her, and now and then he would look out at her feet and ankles and at her knees if she had a dress on. After they had gotten to know one another, the topic she had talked most about was her husband Darrel.
Darrel was one of the Kroeger boys, a wheat farmer out north of town. He was a huge man, with thick hands and thick wrists and heavy legs that stretched his pants legs tight when he sat down. He was older than Marla by seven years, but he had begun to date her, to take her out in his Oldsmobile, when she was only a sophomore in high school. That was thrilling to her, she had told Tommy, to have a twenty-three-year-old man ask her out and to take her places and buy her dinner and afterward to go driving in the country with him while the stars shone overhead and the radio played the top forty from Denver. It was thrilling, she had said, but by the start of the summer after her junior year she was two months pregnant. So she had to quit school.
"I didn't care about it at the time," she said, "one way or the other. I never liked school anyway. I think I was just waiting for something to happen."
"And then it did," Tommy said.
"Oh, yes," Marla said. "Doesn't it always?"
That summer she had married Darrel Kroeger and they had moved into a double wide trailer northwest of town. Seven months later she had had a little boy. Then three years after that she had delivered another child, a little girl this time. That was enough; she had had her tubes tied after that.
So she'd had her hands full, taking care of the children, managing the house and the yard and the gardening, and doing everything else there was to do, being the wife of a farmer. But gradually the children had grown up and had become more independent, and then Marla was only twenty-six by the time they were both attending school.
"It was so quiet out in the country," she said. "At first I liked it, after the kids were gone. And Darrel, he was always gone somewhere. Darrel, he was always outside, crawling under his machinery or drilling wheat. Or driving off to some auction with his brother."
After a year and then the beginning of another year of this, it had begun to get on her nerves. She had felt raw, in some way. She needed a little excitement. She needed something for herself. "I got tired of standing in front of the picture window, looking out at the wind blow dirt across the yard."
So she had taken what was available. There was an advertisement in the Holt Mercury for a substitute bus driver, and she had applied for the job and was hired; and the next year there was an opening for a full-time driver and they had hired her for that position too. "It wasn't much," she said. "It wasn't legal secretary. But it did get me out of the house."
And that's where she was five years later when she had begun to come into the bus barn to talk to Tommy. She was out of the house, driving the county kids to and from school every day.
But she didn't think she loved Darrel Kroeger any more.
Oh, he worked hard and he wasn't a drunkard. It wasn't that. And he didn't hurt her, not physically, although more and more she wished he would leave her alone in bed. She wasn't interested in that with him anymore. It was getting so she felt suffocated by him. And she wished he would bathe more often. She liked things clean. What good did it do to wash the sheets and hang them out on the line so they would smell fresh of the outdoors, if Darrel wouldn't bathe when he came in at night?</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="27">Cigarettes, mouthwash, leather. "Sure," she said, squinting against the glare of a passing car, trying to look casual, thankful and pretty at the same time. "Wherever you're going, long as it's this way."
"Load on up then. I'm on the night shift down the road a piece. Take you as far as I can." The driver twisted a knob on the dash and lit up the inside of the car so she could see his face. "I'm Panks Gaylord," he said, words cracking as he cleared his throat. "And I'm as safe as I can be."
"My name's Rebecca. Thanks a lot." She pulled the passenger seat forward and laid her guitar and the satchel in back. The Monte Carlo was perfectly clean - no trash or dirt anywhere. Even the floormats were spotless. The soft smell of leather came from a pair of creamy sheepskin seat covers that looked brand new. The ash tray was open - it held two fresh butts - and the radio was playing low, a cut by Waylon Jennings. She took off the oversized suede jacket and tucked her turquoise T-shirt deep into her waistband, feeling the play of Panks Gaylord's eyes. His glance, crude as it was, actually reassured her. Dropping the jacket behind the seat, she drew her long blond hair over one shoulder and lowered herself into the car. The silver-spoke wheels were gliding over gravel before she even closed the door.
She had to wait until he offered her a cigarette to get a good look at him. He was in his early twenties, cleanshaven, with a narrow jaw and pinched, deep-set eyes that looked a little surly in the glow of the dash. He seemed familiar, probably because she had seen countless men like him. Aunt Percy would say he was downright common with the criminal English face of his ancestors, and she'd be right. His ears were large, his neck long, his brownish hair thin and dull, showing thickness only in the sideburns. But Rebecca felt comfortable enough. The best thing about men like Panks Gaylord was that she'd been around them all her life and could pretty much read them like a children's book. She estimated that the difference between Gaylord and Espy Tosh was about one tiny inch, and she'd been going out with Espy for two years and handling him just fine. Besides, she knew that country boys loved to think they were bad and tough, and she'd been playing that game for a long time too. She just hoped she'd be able to talk Panks into driving a few miles extra.
"So where you going with that guitar?" he asked, gripping a Marlboro in the corner of his mouth.
"Outta town."
"You from around here? I thought so. Thought maybe I'd seen you before." He flexed his tanned forearms and smiled. He was still young enough to have good teeth. "You got a last name you care to give?"
"O'Connell," she said, dropping her voice so she'd sound a little shy.He hissed between his teeth, trying to whistle. "Rebecca O'Connell. I play ball against Espy Tosh and I seen you up at The Mill House. My friend Eddie and me sit at the bar near the dart board. You sing good." He turned to her and winked. "I knew I remembered that pretty hair."
She smiled and held out her cigarette for a light. He'd forgotten to do that.
"You leaving town?"
"For a while."
"What's Espy got to say about that? Ain't he got enough money or whatever to keep you around?" Panks lifted his chin and slapped at the steering wheel. She could hear the crackle of rivalry in his laughter as she drew one of her legs underneath her, careful not to dirty the sheepskin. Her chances were improving every minute.
"We're not married or nothing," she said. "Just see each other when we need to."
"Well, if I had a girl could sing as good as you and look fine too, I'd need to see her every day." He drew on his cigarette, both eyes winking. "And every night."
She laughed out loud and reached for the knob of the radio. A fancy, polished song by Barbara Mandrell. One she hated.
"Sorry to say I'm only going as far as Truevine. Got my job to tend to till morning." He spoke carefully, like he was trying to coax a child into sitting still. She almost laughed again but didn't want to interrupt his routine. It was too much fun to watch. "After work I could drive you clear to North Carolina if you wanted."
"Panks," she said, dropping a hand onto his arm where his rolled-up sleeve met skin. "Why don't you take me as far as you're going. Then we'll see what happens."
He took the curves fast, especially the blind ones, showing her how well his car handled and how much pickup the Chevy engine had on hills. She complimented him on his driving and asked him all sorts of questions about his years at the high school, his weekends at the lake or the speedway, anything to keep him relaxed and occupied. She didn't ask him about his girlfriends because she knew it was best not to rush a man, especially if he was older and thought he was in charge. The flirting was easy. It was part of a bargain she'd always understood.
"Hey," Panks said, interrupting himself. "You got me talking your pretty little ear off and I ain't heard word one about you." He twisted his shoulders toward her, his eyes round with playful shock. "Not hiding anything, are you?"
"No," she lied, looking out the window into a black tangle of cornfields. "Don't need to. I'm eighteen and on my own. Like everybody else."
"Shit, yeah. I hear that. I moved in with my brother when I quit school. Been making my own way - my own good trouble too - for nearly eight years." He slapped the open part of the seat between them and pressed the accelerator. The Monte Carlo shot up the hill like it was riding a current of warm air.
"You're lucky," she said.
"I'd say so. Fast car. Good-looking girl. Early enough for work so I can buy you a Coke at the Truevine Store. Maybe put a little J.D. in it, for the road and all."
Rebecca shifted and tilted her face into the palm of her hand. Her hay-colored hair swirled in the crosscurrents of his open window. "Sounds good," she said, reaching toward his shirt pocket for another Marlboro. "I'm all for some fun. What time's work?"
"Need to clock in by eleven, but I'm the watchman so who gives a damn. Jamison owes me a half hour anyway. I cover his big ass all the time."
"I reckon you're a nice guy," she said.
"Tell me about it," he said, smiling even harder.
The parking lot at Truevine Store was empty except for a beige Datsun pickup with a FOR SALE sign taped inside its window. The warm, puddled asphalt glittered with beer tabs and broken glass. Two cold drink machines - one for Coke, one for Dr. Pepper - stood against a wall advertising boat rentals and live bait. The interior of the store was filled with a sickly light cast by the plastic moon face of a Red Man clock.
"You ever seen the paint factory?" Panks asked, getting out of the car and yanking his dark blue work pants out of his crotch. "I'd give you a tour but it's against the rules. Something to see though, if you ever get the chance. Something to smell, too."
"That's all right." She spoke slowly and gently. "I'll take a big old Coke instead."
"Damn. That's my girl. You reach in that glove compartment there and we'll have us a little party."
Rebecca got the pint of Jack Daniels and held it in front of her eyes while Panks hunted through his pocket change for quarters. She watched him waver through the clear amber liquid, then disappear as he got lost behind the bottle's black label. She was more tired that she'd realized. Putting on faces for Panks Gaylord was sapping her strength. Below the fatigue, however, she sensed a fearsome edginess. She wondered if a drink or two would keep Panks driving.
He walked back toward the car like he was crossing a dance floor. "Can you believe that redneck George Philpott wants three thousand dollars for that tiny Japanese thing." He squatted by is open door and waved toward the Datsun. "This world's crazy." He looked at her more closely than before, letting his small eyes rove. Rebecca felt the skin on her neck go tight. He looked even skinnier when he was out of the car, but she had to admit he had nice arms. "You want to stand out here or what?" he asked. "I got some cups in the trunk. Nobody'll bother us if we're quiet."
"I'm gonna drink my drink in here by the radio," she said, pushing her hair away from her face. "Why don't you climb in and keep me company?"
She watched the eagerness run through his hands like a tingle. He stepped back and poured some Coke out of both bottles, then handed them to her so she could add the whiskey. "Fill 'er up. Let's see if I can't get a good story out of you."
He talked about himself until his Coke was half gone. She kept a cigarette lit, one they could share, and listened to him tell about playing second base in high school and for the American Legion team. He claimed to be a real baseball fan and thought the game proved that country boys could keep up with the city high schools and summer leagues. "I halfway dreamed of going pro or semi-pro myself, but soft-handed infielders is a dime a dozen with the niggers and spics around. And I'll tell you the truth. I don't have the world's quickest bat." He sneered and reached over to pat her thigh. "That Espy of yours thinks he's hot shit though. Switch hitter and all. But I'll tell you something, little girl. If he's so great why's he still suiting up for Standard Oil after all these years? I mean I hear he's selling dog food for Dan Hawkins down at the mill. Now Wade Tosh was a great pitcher, real pro-type material. Him getting killed in Nam was a real loss. But little brother Espy ain't squat. You probably love the son-of-a-bitch and all, but that don't matter. Not when Panks Gaylord tells the truth."
"I don't love Espy," she said.
He raised the glistening mouth of his Coke to his eye, then emptied it in two swallows. "Nothing to love."
"I just don't love him. That's all."
"I'll drink to that. You're smarter than I thought." He checked his big black-banded watch. "I got twenty minutes free and clear."
She could tell he was the kind who would take on an ugly swagger if he got too drunk. Her own hands felt as warm and fuzzy as mittens as she looked through the windshield at the low-slung silhouette of the Blue Ridge Paint Factory across the road There was a bit of moon in the sky now so she could just make out the shapes of some railroad cars lined up on a weedy siding. She set her half-empty bottle outside the car and turned the keys in the ignition. It would't hurt to hear the radio.
Panks poured way too much whiskey in their second drinks. Coke and liquor fizzed up over his knuckles and he laughed, lifting his feet to keep them dry. The night was still; the air began to smell sticky and old. They both kept their doors open, Tammy Wynette blending with the slow song of the crickets.
"You must think Espy's right special, you've stayed with him so long."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="28">
Separating
My mom is standing in the rain talking to the guy whose pickup she just rear-ended. It's getting dark. We've pulled off the road and the two of them are under a tree next to his truck. He's younger than Mom, wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and cowboy boots. When they laugh, Mom looks like she does with her dates, these guys that shake my hand and call me Sport. It's Michael, I tell them, but they don't listen to a fourteen-year-old. He gets a notebook and pen from his truck, and they write things down and exchange pieces of paper while I wait in the car. I wait a lot lately, for school to end, or Mom to get home, or Dad to pick me up. They separated four months ago. Mostly I'm waiting for them to work things out.
Mom gets in the car and slams her door, which doesn't close quite like it did twenty minutes ago. She looks at her skirt. "I'm soaked," she says, as though it's a surprise, and she pushes her hair off her face. "He's nice. Lee, that's his name. He says we don't have to tell our insurance." This is big news. Mom's been to traffic school twice.
"What's the catch?" I say, but she's not listening. She's watching the truck.
"He's coming over later to give me the names of some body shops. I told him to come for dinner," she says, and she looks at me and shrugs.
It took Mom awhile to start dating. Dad used to ask me every week, first thing, Is she seeing anybody? And every week I'd shake my head, and Dad would seem half disappointed, half relieved. Until three weeks ago when she went out with Jim, a new teacher at the school where she's a speech therapist, and since then she's been a regular little social butterfly. Dad took it like bad news he'd been expecting.
Dad, on the other hand, has done his fair share. Her name's Darilyn, and she's had pizza with us a few times. She drinks white wine with an ice cube, and never takes her sunglasses off. I stare at her nose when we talk; looking at her body feels weird, knowing what she and Dad are up to, and if I look at her eyes all I see is myself in the reflection of her glasses. I know that nose pretty well. The first time I met her, she and Dad acted like seeing each other was a big coincidence; Dad was shy and excited around her, then on the way home he asked me in a confidential, buddy-buddy tone to please not mention her to Mom. I don't want to hurt her any more than I have, he said. Is she why you moved out, I said, but he wouldn't answer.
Dad called us every day the first few weeks he was gone; sometimes Mom would talk to him, sometimes not. She acted as though he were just on a trip, and got mad if I asked when he was coming home. Then we saw him at the market. He'd seen Mom's car on Lake Street, he said, and he'd followed us. He walked with us through the aisles, saying he was sorry things were like this, asking how we were, was there anything he could do. Would you be quiet, Mom said, we're in the market, as she squeezed our cart past Mrs. Markey, the school counselor, who gave Mom a look. You've flipped, Mom whispered to Dad. If you think I'm just going to sit around until your little crisis is over, you're crazier than I thought. She put some bananas in our cart, weighed a bag of oranges, while Dad and I looked on. Jean, he said, I'm forty-six years old and I felt ten years older than that with you. I felt like things were closing in on me in that house, and he waved his arm as though he meant the market, the town. Us. Mom was tying a knot in the bag of oranges, pulling hard at the corners. What did you expect, that's what I'd like to know, she said, from people like us with a son? You didn't turn out to be the person I thought you were, Dad said, looking away from her. You mean she's not Darilyn, I wanted to say, but I kept quiet. Mom started pushing the cart fast, almost running from him. This is a goddamn market, she said, louder than she meant to. People stared, a cashier stopped ringing things up and looked our way. Mom turned down the cereal aisle, barely missing a box boy putting jars of peanut butter on a shelf, where she abandoned our cart and headed for the exit. Come on, Michael, she said, let's get out of here. Dad tried to take her arm, but she shook him off. Go to hell, Grady, she said, and when he stared at her with his hangdog look, she said, Look, what did you expect? You weren't exactly trying to win some popularity contest, were you? Her words seemed to ring out in the store. I looked at the linoleum floor and kicked at a piece of lettuce as we walked out, wishing we were invisible.
Little things have changed since then. We eat out a lot; Mom says it's a lot of trouble to cook for two. She has the radio on, all the time, news, sports, easy listening, she doesn't care what, as long as it's noise. And the house. Every day Mom puts a few more of Dad's things in the den: books, albums, his tools from the garage, quilts passed down from his mom, his clothes. I hear her late at night, sorting things, moving things, and if I come out of my room she stops, wide-eyed, as though I've caught her at something furtive, then she goes back to what she was doing without saying anything. It sounds like there are rats in our house.
Mom and I drive to Monty's, where Dad's picking me up tonight. Mom doesn't like him coming to the house - she says it makes it hard to keep her distance - so we meet at different places around town, where we try to act like nothing's wrong. Mom likes to get us there early enough to sit down and have something to drink while we wait for Dad. It's always awkward; I think she's trying to be nice to me.
Monty's has dim lights, dark-red vinyl booths, and paper placemats with maps that have gold stars to show where the other Monty's are. Mom and I sit in a corner booth and she orders our usual: a glass of wine for her, a Coke with lime for me. The lime is her idea; she says it's festive.
"Well, we made it to another Friday night," she says. "Cheers," and she clinks my glass. "This must be hard for you. When I was fourteen everything was so set. No ifs, you know?"
"It's all right," I say.
"I wasn't apologizing, Michael." She hands me my napkin, the heavy cloth kind, the same dark red as the booths.
"I didn't say you were."
She straightens her silverware, then looks around like she's trying to find someone she knows. "I didn't think I'd end up like this. A single mom, a place like this on a Friday night."
"The baseball team had their awards banquet here last year," I say. That's the trick with Mom: keep the conversation light, don't let her start considering things.
Mom smooths her placemat where her glass has made it wet. "I think we're doing better. I feel like I'm coming out of this. Maybe it isn't the worst thing that could have happened, you know?"
"You're doing great," I say, my voice high and fake, and I wish again that they wouldn't talk to me about their marriage, or their divorce, whatever it is they have. "I wish it were a year from now," I say.
Mom nods. "I'm not too crazy about the near future either." She sighs. "Who knows? Maybe this is just wife talk, mumbo-jumbo talk. Maybe I just gave you a great big earful of wife talk is all, do you think?" She rubs my cheek and smiles. I started shaving a few weeks ago, just before school started. "You're so big," she says. "We never expected that."
We stare at the table. I squeeze some lime into my Coke, drop the rind into it, and stir it around. I'm getting used to the taste of lime. I try to think about predictable things like geometry, soccer, that great smell of some girls' hair. Then I see Mom look up and sigh, a noise like our house makes in the night, settling, and I know that Dad's here. Mom smooths her hair.
Dad leans down and kisses Mom's cheek, something he used to do every night when he came home from work, but there's an apology in it tonight, and it feels like a small conversation's taken place between them.
"I didn't see you," he says.
Mom nods. "It's dark. I knew there was a reason we never ate here." She won't go to our old places.
Dad's hair is wet from the rain. He seems nervous and excited, and it occurs to me that maybe he has Darilyn stashed in the car. "Your front bumper looks funny," he says, as he stares at the table and moves the salt closer to the pepper.
"I know. I'll pay for it," Mom says.
"I wasn't worried about the money," he says. "You always think I'm going to say something bad."
"Since when do you know what I think?" she says. Dad looks at the ceiling, which sparkles. Mom picks up the check, puts some money on the table, and stands. She smooths her skirt, which is still damp, and Dad and I follow her out.
Dad drives to the pizza place where we go every week. I sit at our same table, the one in the back under the neon Miller sign, while Dad gets a pitcher of beer and a Coke.
"Drink your Coke," he says when he sits down.
"I'm not thirsty."
"Trust me," he says. "Just drink it." He watches me while I down it, then he takes my empty glass, looks around the room, and fills it with beer. This is the second time he's given me beer. The first time was on our second night out when I cried. I don't know why I did that, except that it all hit me at once: Mom's weirdness, Dad's scatteredness, how screwed up everything was. Dad said stupid things about the passage of time, which he knew as well as I did was bull, so he finally just shut up and gave me a beer.
"We're celebrating," Dad says as he puts my glass down in front of me. He clinks it with his mug. "To reunions."
I watch him drink. He puts his mug down and leans forward, anxious, waiting. "Well, what do you think?" he says. "About your mom and me."
I put my glass down a little too loudly, and the waiter glances at us. "You mean like you're getting back together?"
"The very thing," Dad says. "As of tonight." He lowers his voice. "I made a mistake. But it's over now."
"When did you tell Mom?"
"We're telling her tonight. You and me. There's a bottle of Emerald Dry in the trunk. I figured after dinner we'd go home and celebrate. The three of us." I can feel him staring at me, and when I don't say anything he roughs up my hair. "Hey, who died? We're talking good news here."
"What happened to Darilyn?"
He shrugs, looks away. "She went back," he says.
"Back?"
"To her husband, all right?" He glares at me.
"Okay."
</doc><doc register="fiction romance" n="29">
"He is my life."
"If he is alive," said Wil Usdi, "and if anyone knows anything about him, Gun Rod will know."
"Gun Rod?"
"He's an old man. He's a white man who was once married to a Cherokee woman. They had children, but they lost them all years ago to a sickness. More recently Gun Rod lost his wife, too, so he is all alone in the world. I've seen him not long ago, and he seems to know all about what has happened to the People, to many of them. His knowledge amazed me."
"Where can I find Gun Rod?" Oconeechee asked.
He was with your father at the fight at Horseshoe Bend," said Little Will. "Do you know that place?"
"Yes," she said. "My father took me there once to show me where it happened."
"Gun Rod lives near there. It's a long trip for you to make."
"I'll make it."
"He's an old man with long white hair and a long white beard. He lives alone in a small cabin near the battlefield. The Cherokees knew him as Gun Rod, but his white man name is Titus Hooker. Can you remember that? Titus Hooker."
"Titus Hooker," repeated Oconeechee, pronouncing the English sounds with some difficulty. "Titus Hooker. Gun Rod."
"If you are really determined to go there to continue this search of yours," said Wil Usdi, "I'll draw you a map to show you the way to Gun Rod's house from the battleground."
The following morning Wil Usdi left. His ultimate destination was Washington City. At almost the same time, Oconeechee left. She left well supplied for a long journey, but she left with a much lighter heart than she had had on her previous excursions. This time she had a destination. She would not be wandering aimlessly. She had a man's name, and she had a map. In her mind she could see this Gun Rod, this white man with the hairy white head, and he seemed to her to be the very image of the white man's God, and the longer she walked, the more her trek took on in her mind the characteristics of a sacred pilgrimage. This god-like white man, this Gun Rod who had so much knowledge in his hoary head, he would give her the answers to her questions.
The first day of her trip she did not even stop to eat, so anxious was she to get to Gun Rod there by Horseshoe Bend in the land that the whites called Alabama. But the second day, in spite of her eagerness, she deliberately slowed her pace. She was weary from her haste the previous day, and she knew that she must eat to maintain her strength. She also realized that the farther she traveled away from the mountain fastness of Ut'sala and the others, the more dangerous her situation became. She could not allow herself to be captured or harmed, perhaps killed, when she was finally getting close to her goal. And she knew that she was getting close. Wil Usdi had sent her to Gun Rod, and Gun Rod would have the answers. She began to travel more cautiously. When it was possible, she moved at night and found daylight hideaways in which to sleep. She kept away from main-traveled roads, and when she saw people, she quickly hid herself and kept still and quiet until they were gone. She had heard it said that the whites were no longer trying to catch Cherokees to send them west, but Ut'sala and his people still hid in the mountains, and she would be at least as skeptical as they. She would not take any unnecessary chances. She would not trust rumor. She would not be caught being careless or neglectful or overconfident.
Oconeechee was confident, though. Not only had Wil Usdi given her hope by telling her of Gun Rod, but she had also gone to see the old man known as the Breath who lived there among the fugitives and was said to be a conjuror. She had told him about her search for Waguli. The old man had taken from a little bag two beads, one black and one red. Oconeechee did not have to be told the significance of the colors. She knew that the red one stood for success, and the black was ominous and indicated disaster. She had stopped breathing without realizing it, and she could feel her heart pounding in her breast as the old man took up the beads. He held them, the black one in his left hand, the red one in his right, between his thumbs and index fingers. He stared hard at the beads, and mumbled something to them, low, too low for Oconeechee to understand what he was saying. Time seemed to stop. Then suddenly, frightfully, the black bead seemed to take on life. It began to crawl along the leathery old finger of the Breath, and Oconeechee's heart skipped a beat. Then the red bead moved, and the black one moved back to its original position. The red bead seemed to quiver for an instant, then it shot along all the way to the first joint of old Breath's finger. The stored-up wind came out of Oconeechee's lungs. She would have success, the old man had told her. She would find Waguli.
She was sleeping in an open field late one evening. She had found the country through which she was moving to be heavily populated with whites, and she was afraid to travel by day. The field was covered with tall grass, and she had moved a distance away from the road to lie down in the cover of the grass. When the sun was down, she would crawl out and resume her travel. The sky had been clear all day, and she expected a bright, starry night. It would be all right for traveling. She was awakened from her sleep by the noise of a barking dog. She sat up to listen. The dog seemed to be coming closer, and she could hear the voices of white men, could hear them trampling through the grass. She raised herself up as much as she dared and strained to see through the dimming light of evening. There were three white men with guns following a dog, and they were coming straight towards her. They had not seen her, could not know of her presence there. The direction of their movement was just bad luck. Panic-stricken, she wondered what to do. If she sat still, they would surely come upon her. Even if the men walked by without noticing her there, the dog surely would not. If she jumped up and ran, they would be bound to chase her. She might outrun the men, but she could not outrun the dog.
Then off to her left, back in the direction from which she had come, sounded the loud, clear call of a mountain whippoorwill, followed by a rustling of dry grass and a flapping of wings. The dog barked and ran after the sound, and the men yelled and ran after the dog. Oconeechee watched until they had run almost out of her sight, then got up and began to move quickly in the opposite direction.
"Waguli," she said out loud.
She recognized the battlefield when she found it. She could remember it from the time years before when Junaluska had brought her there. Not much had changed. She saw the spot her father had pointed out to her with pride, pride which would later turn to regret, the spot where he had saved the life of Old Hickory, Tseg'sgin. Thoughts of her father brought tears to her eyes, but she brushed them away and brought out the map Wil Usdi had drawn for her. The house of Gun Rod would be just over the hill off to her right. She was almost there, and a good thing, too, for she had run out of food and had been traveling for a day without anything to eat. She was weak and weary from hunger and from physical exertion.
"Gun Rod is just there," she said.
She was pleased with the accuracy of Wil Usdi's map and with how easily she could read it. She started to walk directly across the open battlefield toward the hill which was hiding her goal from her eyes. Her legs seemed to move of their own will. She seemed to be plunging forward. She saw nothing but the hill. She moved across the field in long, jerking strides. Reaching the hillside shortened her steps, but still she moved forward, still straight ahead. As the climb grew steeper, she leaned more and more forward until at last her hands touched the ground that seemed to be rising before her. Then she was crawling. And then she was on top of the hill.
She stood up straight and drew in lungs full of air, her breast heaving in labored motion. Her head felt light, and her vision was beginning to blur, but down below she could see a cabin with blue-gray smoke rising lazily from its stone chimney. It was Gun Rod's cabin. It could be no other. Oconeechee started walking again. She walked faster. She was almost running when she reached the steep downhill grade, and she fell forward tumbling. She scrambled to her feet once, only to pitch forward, rolling again. At the bottom of the hill, she stood up on unsteady legs and walked to the front of the cabin. The old man must have heard her approach, for he opened the front door and stepped out onto the small porch. He was short, though not so short as Wil Usdi, and he was powerfully built. His blue-gray eyes, red nose, and bit of loose flesh below each eye were all that showed of a face through the mass of white hair and beard. He looked down off the raised porch at Oconeechee, dirty and battered there before him, and she thought she could read in those clear old eyes both curiosity and compassion.
"Gun Rod," she said, and then the world began to spin around her, and the last bit of strength left her tired legs. Her knees buckled beneath her, and she sank to the ground unconscious.
22
She went into Alabama
to a place they call Big Bend,
where her father had saved Old Hickory,
and that's where she found a friend.
Bitterly she wailed in sorrow,
"Why am I crying still,
and who has taken from me
my noble Whippoorwill?"
Old Titus Hooker practically jumped off the porch when he saw the girl faint. He ran the few steps from the porch to where she lay, and he knelt heavily beside her with a loud groan. Carefully he rolled her over onto her back and straightened her arms and legs. He listened to her breathing for a moment, and then, satisfied that it was regular enough, he shoved his thick arms underneath her body and lifted her to carry her into the house. Inside, he lowered her gently onto his bed. Then he located a clean rag which he soaked in water that stood in a basin on a small table. He wrung the excess water out of the rag and went back to her side to bathe her face and lower legs. He touched a hand to her cheek and to her forehead.
"No fever," he said. "I expect she's just wore out."
He was speaking English, talking to himself out loud, as he spread a blanket over the unconscious girl. Then he stepped back to look at her. He wondered who this strange young woman could be and what had brought her to his lonely cabin. He was sure that he had not seen her before, but, he thought, she called me by my Indian name. Looks like she's come a long, hard ways to find me.
</doc></docx>
<docx id="file35684424" filename="FROWN_R.txt" parent_folder="FROWN">
<doc register="humor" n="01">
CarsWHEN I TURNED SIXTEEN, the age where I qualified for a driver's license, driving a car became by obsession. My dad had a Kaiser Traveler which he used for the family business and religiously kept away from me. A car for any sixteen-year-old, I guess, was so rare that those few among us who had access became almost magical folk heroes. Happily my close friend Jack Krongold had a red convertible of his own, so at least I was a backseat guy for my key teenage years.
When I reached twenty, I moved to New York, where owning a car completely disappeared from my mind for several reasons; mainly I couldn't afford to park it, let alone buy it.
Fifteen years later I arrived in Los Angeles to be on a soap opera for six months. Since it was Los Angeles, I had to have a car, and since it was the first time I'd really be making any money, I wanted to buy a Cadillac. When I was a boy growing up, only very successful people drove Cadillacs, and even though I wasn't very successful, I thought I had reached sufficient success to buy a Cadillac - a used one. Besides, I probably wanted to really make up in a big way for all my carless years.
A friend of a friend had a used-car lot, with all kinds of cars, and I went over there right away, looking for my Cadillac. It was a huge place - row after row of cars covering two city blocks. I was wandering around for about ten minutes before I saw it - the most beautiful car I had ever seen in my life: a 1958 white Cadillac convertible with red leather seats. I went to the friend's friend, and he followed me out onto the lot to see what I was so excited about. As we approached the car, he began to shake his head. "You don't want that car," he said. Not exactly what we're supposed to hear from used-car salesmen, but he was a friend's friend, and I was young, without much money.
"Why not?" I asked him as I climbed in and started to press buttons that made the seat move back and forth. "She's a femme fatale," he said, "a siren, a looker who will break your heart." This guy was obviously not your average used-car salesman. He went on: "There's a blue Chevy over here I can really recommend."
"Wait a minute," I said, now hitting the button that made the seat go up and down. "What's the problem right here?"
He said, "I've seen it happen a million times. A kid like you buys a car like that and tries to make a new car out of it. It won't work, and it will end up costing you more money than you can think of."
Hitting the button that made the top go up and down, I said, "How much do you want for it?"
He said, "I'll give it to you for seven hundred dollars, no guarantees, and I'm telling you again not to take it."
"Sold," I said. I wrote him a check and drove it right off the lot, as he stood there shaking his head.
I loved it! I got myself a fancy hat and drove it all over Hollywood with the top down. I had more fun with it than anything I can remember ... for about two weeks. Slowly, the problems started. I didn't take particular notice because I was making some money. The repair bills were dollar25 here, dollar50 there, dollar70 there. After a few more weeks it was dollar125 here, dollar175 there. Each time I was convinced that that would take care of that leak or that veering of the wheels or that fairly loud rattle. It didn't. I was doing exactly what the friend's friend had told me not to: trying to make a new car out of it. I couldn't seem to help myself. It always seemed like it was one repair job away from being perfect. Three thousand dollars' worth of repairs later, I was convinced I now had it all under control.
That afternoon the brakes failed, and I ran into the car in front of me. Nobody was hurt, thankfully. I had them fixed, and a week later they failed again, and I knocked down a telephone pole to avoid hurting anyone. I had them fixed again, but now I was starting to get a little wary. And poor.
One day, coming out of the place where I was staying, I noticed a large puddle of fluid under the car. I got in with my friend, another guy who wasn't going to win any prizes for brains about cars, and we headed down a steep hill, looking for a garage. Halfway down the hill the brakes failed again. We were about fifty yards away from Sunset Boulevard at rush hour. I jumped the curb, grazed a tree, and went right through a brick wall of a garage and stopped. Because the 1958 Cadillac was the most powerful thing around next to a Sherman tank, no one was hurt. I had it towed away, repaired, and the brakes fixed for the third time. After that I decided enough was enough. Fearful that the car would eventually kill someone, I decided to junk it, not sell it.
I drove it over to a junkyard and, after they promised me they would make scrap out of it, made a deal to sell my forty-five-hundred-dollar Cadillac for eight dollars.
It was a femme fatale, a siren, a looker that could break your heart - and everything else.
Judging
I'M NOT TOO BIG on judging. Every time someone starts talking about what's wrong with somebody I wonder and often say, "Why don't we criticize you or me or any of us here?" Obviously none of us is perfect, so why sit and judge others? I mean, really extreme bad stuff I can judge as much as the next guy, but on garden variety faults I'm not much of a judger.
There is one exception to all of this. There is one type I'm constantly judging because they drive me nuts. It's the authoritarian know-it-all, lots-of-rules kind of person.
I first ran into one early on in school. If ever someone like this belongs anywhere, it would be as a teacher in school, but I couldn't handle him there either. I was regularly thrown out of various classes for clashes with these control freaks.
My parents weren't like that, so maybe I was just shocked shortly after kindergarten that it felt like I had unwittingly entered the military. In fact, later in the military it didn't bother me at all. It was so extreme there I secretly thought it was funny. Of course, this was peacetime.
In my adult life these authoritarians have been my curse. I've done everything possible to avoid them. Sometimes it's impossible if they're in your family or you encounter them at work.
Work is the one place I've taken these people on. Most recently there was a producer working on a movie I did. The first time I saw this guy he was fairly quiet. It was a big meeting, so I didn't immediately spot what was in store.
One of the main characteristics of these people is their need to be right. I'm sure it's because they were once made to feel so wrong, so impotent, probably in childhood. I'm sympathetic to that, but I don't want to get beat up because they were subjected to childhood villains.
This particular producer, because of his need to win every point about anything, had alienated about fifty-eight people by the time the movie was over. He made haters out of some of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. His first direct assault on me came one morning, when we were shooting a huge train scene with a lot of extras. When I walked on the set, this guy looked at his watch, then at me, then announced, "I've been ready to shoot since eight-thirty." It was now nine, which was when I had been asked to arrive. I looked at him as though he were speaking Swahili to someone else and went about my business. There were other instances of this treatment toward me and everyone else on the picture. Eventually he was discreetly asked to be around less. That's usually what happens to these control freaks. They win some battles and then lose the war. The problem is they never seem to see the ultimate effect of what they're doing.
Sometimes I can feel sorrow and not anger toward them if I think deeply. Sadly I'm seldom that deep a thinker.
The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
- THORNTON WILDER
Animals
I HAVEN'T DONE AS well with animals as most people. On the positive side I find most dogs enormously touching and sweet. On the other hand, one of these sweet guys who actually was in my family once joined a dog pack and came after me snarling a long time ago. Our relationship was never the same. I'd still consider a dog in my life if it weren't for pooper-scoopers and shedding.
Cats are out. I'm allergic - heavily. They have their moments, but I've never quite settled in with all that back arching and hissing. The big cats - a lion, anyway - I can't even watch on television. Someone once said if something extremely strange for which there is no logical explanation is going on in your life, it's probably evidence of a previous existence. Judging by how quickly I change the channel when one of those lions comes on, I was once eaten by one; nothing less explains it. And if a lion comes out of a subway as it used to on those commercials - forget about it. I'm pretty quiet for a long time after that.
Oddly enough, my most memorable experience with animals was with, of all things, buffalo.
Very late one night I was walking home from filming a movie, and a herd of buffalo blocked my path. I was filming on the island of Catalina, which is some twenty-five miles off the coast of San Pedro, California. In the 1920s a movie company had gone over there to film a western and taken some buffalo with them. When they left, they left the buffalo.
I was staying a ten-minute boat ride from the main location. It was the only place near where we were filming that there were any kind of accommodations a city guy like me would be happy. The main location mostly offered tents and rooms with no roofs; the facility there was a boys' camp out of season. And while there were some rooms with roofs, all in all I said I'd take the ten-minute boat ride to the citylike accommodations. When I said that, I didn't know the buffalo herd lived over near my place.
A day's filming on a movie is generally at least twelve hours long. By the end of the day, and especially after a bumpy motorboat ride in the sea in total darkness (the driver held a spotlight in his hand), I was truly ready to go home. Once disembarked from the boat, I had a walk of about two hundred yards up a hill. I was always hungry and tired.
Prior to this I had seen a buffalo here and there on the island, always a fair distance away. I'd eyed them warily and kept going. I was told not to walk up and pet them or taunt them, which I hadn't planned to do anyway. I vaguely had heard stories of people who had tried stuff and were sorry, but I didn't know what they'd tried or how sorry they were. That was the extent of my information that night when I encountered the herd.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="02">
"No, that'll be fine, thanks," said Tricia. "I can handle it now."
"I can call this room number here for you if that'll help," said the receptionist, peering at the note again.
"No, that won't be necessary, thanks," said Tricia. "That's my own room number. I'm the one the message was for. I think we've sorted this out now."
"You have a nice day now," said the receptionist.
Tricia didn't particularly want to have a nice day. She was busy.
She also didn't want to talk to Gail Andrews. She had a very strict cut-off point as far as fraternizing with the Christians was concerned. Her colleagues called her interview subjects Christians and would often cross themselves when they saw one walking innocently into the studio to face Tricia, particularly if Tricia was smiling warmly and showing her teeth.
She turned and smiled frostily, wondering what to do.
Gail Andrews was a well-groomed woman in her mid-forties. Her clothes fell within the boundaries defined by expensive good taste, but were definitely huddled up at the floatier end of those boundaries. She was an astrologer - a famous and, if rumor were true, influential astrologer, having allegedly influenced a number of decisions made by the late President Hudson, including everything from which flavor of Cool Whip to have on which day of the week to whether or not to bomb Damascus.
Tricia had savaged her more than somewhat. Not on the grounds of whether or not the stories about the president were true, that was old hat now. At time Ms. Andrews had emphatically denied advising President Hudson on anything other than personal, spiritual or dietary matters, which did not, apparently, include the bombing of Damascus. (NOTHING PERSONAL, DAMASCUS! the tabloids had hooted at the time.)
No, this was a neat topical little angle that Tricia had come up with about the whole issue of astrology itself. Ms. Andrews had not been entirely ready for it. Tricia, on the other hand, was not entirely ready for a rematch in the hotel lobby. What to do?
"I can wait for you in the bar, if you need a few minutes," said Gail Andrews. "But I would like to talk to you, and I'm leaving the city tonight."
She seemed to be slightly anxious about something rather than aggrieved or irate.
"Okay," said Tricia. "Give me ten minutes."
She went up to her room. Apart from anything else, she had so little faith in the ability of the guy on the message desk at reception to deal with anything so complicated as a message that she wanted to be doubly certain that there wasn't a note under the door. It wouldn't be the first time that messages at the desk and messages under the door had been completely at odds with each other.
There wasn't one.
The message light on the phone was flashing, though.
She hit the message button and got the hotel operator.
"You have a message from Gary Andress," said the operator.
"Yes?" said Tricia. An unfamiliar name. "What does it say."
"Not hippy," said the operator.
"Not what?" said Tricia.
"Hippy. What it says. Guy says he's not a hippy. I guess he wanted you to know that. You want the number?"
As she started to dictate the number Tricia suddenly realized that this was just a garbled version of the message she had already had.
"Okay, okay," she said. "Are there any other messages for me?"
"Room number?"
Tricia couldn't work out why the operator should suddenly ask for her number this late in the conversation, but gave it to her anyway.
"Name?"
"McMillan, Tricia McMillan." Tricia spelled it, patiently.
"Not Mr. MacManus?"
"No."
"No more messages for you." Click.
Tricia sighed and dialed again. This time she gave her name and room number all over again, up front. The operator showed not the slightest glimmer of recognition that they had been speaking less than ten seconds ago.
"I'm going to be in the bar," Tricia explained. "In the bar. If a phone call comes through for me, please would you put it through to me in the bar?"
"Name?"
They went through it all a couple more times till Tricia was certain that everything that possibly could be clear was as clear as it possibly could be.
She showered, put on fresh clothes and retouched her makeup with the speed of a professional and, looking at her bed with a sigh, left the room again.
She had half a mind just to sneak off and hide.
No. Not really.
She had a look at herself in the mirror in the elevator lobby while she was waiting. She looked cool and in charge, and if she could fool herself she could fool anybody.
She was just going to have to tough it out with Gail Andrews. Okay, she had given her a hard time. Sorry, but that's the game we're all in - that sort of thing. Ms. Andrews had agreed to do the interview because she had a new book out and TV exposure was free publicity. But there's no such thing as a free launch. No, she edited that line out again.
What had happened was this:
Last week astronomers had announced that they had at last discovered a tenth planet, out beyond the orbit of Pluto. They had been searching for it for years, guided by certain orbital anomalies in the outer planets, and now they'd found it and they were all terribly pleased, and everyone was terribly happy for them and so on. The planet was named Persephone, but rapidly nicknamed Rupert after some astronomer's parrot - there was some tediously heartwarming story attached to this - and that was all very wonderful and lovely.
Tricia had followed the story with, for various reasons, considerable interest.
Then, while she had been casting around for a good excuse to go to New York at her TV company's expense, she had happened to notice a press release about Gail Andrews and her new book, You and Your Planets.
Gail Andrews was not exactly a household name, but the moment you mentioned President Hudson, Cool Whip and the amputation of Damascus (the world had moved on from surgical strikes - the official term had in fact been 'Damascectomy,' meaning the 'taking out' of Damascus), everyone remembered who you meant.
Tricia saw an angle here which she quickly sold to her producer.
Surely the notion that great lumps of rock whirling in space knew something about your day that you didn't must take a bit of a knock from the fact that there was suddenly a new lump of rock out there that nobody had known about before.
That must throw a few calculations out, mustn't it?
What about all those star charts and planetary motions and so on? We all knew (apparently) what happened when Neptune was in Virgo, and so on, but what about when Rupert was rising? Wouldn't the whole of astrology have to be re-thought? Wouldn't now perhaps be a good time to own up that it was all just a load of hogwash and instead take up pig farming, the principles of which were founded on some kind of rational basis? If we'd known about Rupert three years ago, might President Hudson have been eating the chocolate flavor on Thursday rather than Friday? Might Damascus still be standing? That sort of thing.
Gail Andrews had taken it all reasonably well. She was just starting to recover from the initial onslaught, when she made the rather serious mistake of trying to shake Tricia off by talking smoothly about diurnal arcs, right ascensions and some of the more abstruse areas of three-dimensional trigonometry.
To her shock she discovered that everything she delivered to Tricia came right back at her with more spin on it than she could cope with. Nobody had warned Gail that being a TV bimbo was, for Tricia, her second stab at a role in life. Behind her Chanel lip gloss, her coupe sauvage and her crystal blue contact lenses lay a brain that had acquired for itself, in an earlier, abandoned phase of her life, a first-class degree in mathematics and a doctorate in astrophysics.
As she was getting into the elevator, Tricia, slightly preoccupied, realized she had left her bag in her room and wondered whether to duck back out and get it. No. It was probably safer where it was and there wasn't anything she particularly needed in it. She let the door close behind her.
Besides, she told herself, taking a deep breath, if life had taught her anything it was this: Never go back for your bag.
As the elevator went down she stared at the ceiling in a rather intent way. Anyone who didn't know Tricia McMillan better would have said that that was exactly the way people sometimes stared upward when they were trying to hold back tears. She must have been staring at the tiny security video camera mounted up in the corner. She marched rather briskly out of the elevator a minute later, and went up to the reception desk again.
"Now, I'm going to write this out," she said, "because I don't want anything to go wrong."
She wrote her name in large letters on a piece of paper, then her room number, then IN THE BAR and gave it to the receptionist, who looked at it.
"That's in case there's a message for me. Okay?"
The receptionist continued to look at it.
"You want me to see if she's in her room?" he said.
Two minutes later, Tricia swiveled into the bar seat next to Gail Andrews, who was sitting in front of a glass of white wine.
"You struck me as the sort of person who preferred to sit up at the bar rather than demurely at a table," she said.
This was true, and caught Tricia a little by surprise.
"Vodka?" said Gail.
"Yes," said Tricia, suspiciously. She just stopped herself from asking, How did you know? but Gail answered anyway.
"I asked the barman," she said, with a kindly smile.
The barman had her vodka ready for her and slid it charmingly across the glossy mahogany.
"Thank you," said Tricia, stirring it sharply.
She didn't know quite what to make out of all this sudden niceness and was determined not to be wrong-footed by it. People in New York were not nice to each other without reason.
"Ms. Andrews," she said, firmly, "I'm sorry that you're not happy. I know you probably feel I was a bit rough with you this morning, but astrology is, after all, just popular entertainment, which is fine. It's part of showbiz and it's a part that you have done well out of and good luck to you. It's fun. It's not a science though, and it shouldn't be mistaken for one. I think that 's something we both managed to demonstrate very successfully together this morning, while at the same time generating some popular entertainment, which is what we both do for a living. I'm sorry if you have a problem with that."
"I'm perfectly happy," said Gail Andrews.
"Oh," said Tricia, not quite certain what to make of this. "It said in your message that you were not happy."
"No," said Gail Andrews. "I said in my message that I thought you were not happy, and I was just wondering why."
Tricia felt as if she had been kicked in the back of the head. She blinked.
"What?" she said quietly.
"To do with the stars. You seemed very angry and unhappy about something to do with stars and planets when we were having our discussion, and it's been bothering me, which is why I came to see if you were all right."
Tricia stared at her. "Ms. Andrews -" she started, and then realized that the way she had said it sounded exactly angry and unhappy and rather undermined the protest she had been trying to make.
"Please call me Gail, if that's okay."
</doc><doc register="humor" n="03">For one thing, it consists almost entirely of Japanese people. For another thing, they don't shake hands. They bow. They're not big on physical contact, especially with strangers. They'd be uncomfortable at a typical American social gathering, where people who barely know each other will often kiss and hug, and people who are really close will sometimes have sexual relations right in the foyer.
The Japanese are also formal about names, generally addressing each other with the honorary title 'san', as in 'Osaka-san', which is like saying 'Mr.Osaka'. I understand that, even if two Japanese have worked together for many years, neither would dream of using the other's first name. Whereas Americans are on a first-name basis immediately, and by the end of the first day have generally graduated to 'Yo, Butthead!'
One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals. They faced each other and bowed deeply, which caused both of them to momentarily lose their balance and start to pitch face-first to the sidewalk. Trying to recover their balance, they both stepped forward, almost banging heads. They managed to get themselves upright again and, with great dignity, weaved off in opposite directions. If both of them wound up barfing into the shrubbery, I bet they did it like Alfonse and Gaston, in a formal manner.
I never really did get accustomed to all the bowing. According to the guidebooks, there's an elaborate set of rules governing exactly how you bow, and who bows the lowest, and when, and for how long, and how many times, all of this depending on the situation and the statuses of the various bowers involved. Naturally, my family and I, being large, ignorant foreign water buffalos, were not expected by the Japanese to know these rules. Nevertheless we did feel obligated to attempt to return bows when we got them.
This happened quite often. It started when we arrived at our hotel in Tokyo. As I was descending the steps of the airport bus, two uniformed bellmen came rushing up and bowed to me. Trying to look casual but feeling like an idiot, I bowed back. I probably did it wrong, because then they bowed back. So I bowed back. The three of us sort of bowed our way over to where the luggage was being unloaded, and I bowed to our suitcases, and the bellmen, bowing, picked them up and rushed into the hotel. We followed them past a bowing doorman into the hotel, where we were gang-bowed by hotel employees. No matter which direction we turned, they were aiming bows at us, sometimes from as far as twenty-five yards away.
Bobbing like drinking-bird toys, we bowed our way to the reception desk, where a bowing clerk checked us in. Then we bowed our way over to the elevators, where we encountered our first Elevator Ladies. These are young, uniformed, relentlessly smiling women who stand by the elevators in hotels and stores all day. Their function is to press the elevator button for you. Then, when the elevator comes, they show you where it is by gesturing enthusiastically toward it, similar to the way that models gesture on TV game shows when they are showing some lucky contestant the seventeen-piece dinette set that he has just won.
"Here's your elevator!" is the message of this gesture. "Isn't it a beauty?"
Throughout our stay in Japan, every Elevator Lady managed to give the impression that she was genuinely thrilled that I had chosen to ride her elevators, as opposed to some other form of vertical transportation. I never saw one who seemed to resent the fact that she was stuck in, let's face it, a real armpit of a job. If I did their work, it would turn me into a stark raving lunatic. Within days I'd be deliberately ushering people into open elevator shafts.
Anyway, we got into our hotel elevator, and the E.L. stood outside and bowed deeply as the doors closed. I bowed back, but not too low, for fear of getting my head caught in the doors. Alone in the elevator, I wondered if maybe all the bowing had been some kind of elaborate prank on us, and if at that very moment the hotel employees were all giving each other high-five handslaps and laughing so hard that they drooled on their uniforms.
We got to our room and seconds later the bellmen knocked at the door, bowed their way inside, laid out our luggage, and checked to make sure that the room was O.K. Then - this was an amazing event to witness - they left. They just walked out of the room.
An American bellman, of course, stands around in a congenial yet determined manner, waiting for you to figure out that you had not tipped him yet. If it doesn't dawn on you right away, he'll start telling you about some of the hotel's available special guest services, such as breakfast; or start demonstrating various deluxe features of the room, such as that it has electric lights, which you can operate via switches. If necessary he will stay in your room all night. You get up at 3:00 A.M. to go to the bathroom, and there is your bellman, showing you where the flush handle is and just generally continuing to be helpful until spontaneously decide to give him a token of your gratitude.
But there's no tipping in Japan. You just don't do it. Even in restaurants. When people serve you in some manner, you simply say 'Thank you,' and they don't get angry or anything. In fact, they often seem happy to have had the opportunity to serve you, if you can imagine. This was quite a shock for me, coming from a country where you regularly find yourself tipping people just so they won't spit on you.
The mysterious thing about all this is that Japan - ask anybody who has been there - has superb service. And not just in nice hotels. Everywhere. You walk into any store, any restaurant, no matter how low-rent it looks, and I bet you that somebody will immediately call out to you in a cheerful manner. This happened to us all over. I never understood what the people were saying, of course. They could have been saying: "Hah! Americans! We will eventually purchase your entire nation and use the Lincoln Memorial for tofu storage!" But they always sounded friendly and welcoming. And they were always eager to wait on us. I couldn't help but think of the many times I've been in American stores, especially large ones, attempting to give somebody some money in exchange for merchandise - which I always thought was the whole point of stores - but was unable to do so because the store employees were too busy with other, higher-priority activities, such as talking or staring into space. More than once, in America's stores, I have felt like an intruder for trying to give money to clerks. "Oh great" is their unspoken but extremely clear attitude. "Here we had everything going nice and smooth, and along comes this doofus who wants - of all things! - to make a purchase. In a store, for God's sake."
I'll give you another example of what I'm talking about. We've traveled extensively in the United States, and often our son travels with us, and when he does we always try to arrange to have one of those folding beds for him in our hotel room. Beth always calls the hotel in advance and asks them to please write down that we want a folding bed. She calls later to confirm that there will be a folding bed. When we check in, we always remind them that we need a folding bed.
So needless to say, there has never - not once, in ten years, in dozens and dozens of hotels - been an actual folding bed in our room when we got there. We always have to call Housekeeping to ask for it, and nothing happens, so we call again, and maybe again, and of course Housekeeping is not happy about this - "These damned guests! Always calling Housekeeping and requesting Housekeeping services!" - and then finally, often late at night, our folding bed will be brought to us by a person who is obviously annoyed about having to deliver beds in the middle of the night to people who should have thought to arrange this earlier. Naturally, I always give this person a tip.
In Japan, the bed was always there, at every hotel, when we checked in. This may seem minor to you, but to us it was a miracle, comparable in scope to having a total stranger hold a door open for you in New York City.
I'll give you another minor but typical hotel example. When we checked into our hotel in Hiroshima, I noticed that our bathtub faucet would not produce hot water, so I called the front desk. In America, the front desk would have told me that somebody would be up to take a look at it, and eventually somebody would, but not necessarily during my current lifetime.
In Hiroshima, a bellman arrived at our room within, literally, one minute. He had obviously been sprinting, and he looked concerned. He checked the faucet, found that it was, indeed, malfunctioning, and - now looking extremely concerned - sprinted from the room. In no more than three minutes he was back with two more men, one of whom immediately went to work on the bathtub. The sole function of the other one, as far as we could tell, was to apologize to us on behalf of the hotel for having committed this monumentally embarrassing and totally unforgivable blunder.
"We are very sorry," he kept saying, looking as though near tears. "Very sorry."
"It's OK!" I kept saying. "Really!" But it did no good. The man was grieving.
The bathtub was fixed in under ten minutes, after which all three men apologized extravagantly in various languages one last time, after which they left, after which I imagine that the hotel's Vice President for Faucet Operations was taken outside and shot.
No, just kidding. He probably took his own life. That's how seriously they take their jobs over there.
I keep reading that American businesses have figured out that they need to focus more attention on customer service, but I'm afraid we have a long way to go before we catch up to the Japanese. As I write these words, Beth and I are in a state of seething semihomicidal rage resulting from our repeated unsuccessful attempts to give money to Sears in exchange for fixing some problems with our refrigerator. Beth called the Sears Service Department two weeks ago and spoke to a Customer Service Representative who agreed to schedule a Repair Technician to come out. The Customer Service Representative was willing to tell Beth the day this would happen, but - you appliance-owners out there know how this works - she refused to reveal the time that the technician would be here.
This is because of National Security. If we knew the exact time that our appliance was being repaired, there is the danger that we might blurt this information out in public. We'd be in a restaurant, for example, and we'd have a few too many glasses of wine, and one of us would say, "Well, the Sears Refrigerator Repair Technician is coming to our house at two-thirty P.M. on Wednesday." We wouldn't even consider the possibility that the bus-boy lurking just a few feet away might be an enemy agent, and that we had blown the entire operation.
So when the day came, Beth stayed home all day, waiting for the Repair Technician, who of course did not show up.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="04">She'd hook that little old crooked-legged mule up to the wagon and go down and cut a load of wood like a man. Could ride a horse, bareback, like nothing you ever seen. Shoot a gun. Had her own rabbit gums. That's right.
I've forgotten what that little crooked-legged mule's name was.
She got whipped too. For all the normal things. She got where she'd sit around behind the store and smoke cigarettes. That store had been there since way before cars, and there was a hitching post out in front of it. So ... see, girls didn't smoke back then, nowhere, but she was going out behind the store and smoking with the store-owner's daughter, who was mean. Somebody told Papa, and he made her stand at the hitching post and smoke five cigarettes in a row for five days in a row. Every day the crowd got a little bigger and a little bigger. She stopped smoking, too.
I imagine of all the people in the family, me and her was the closest. She'd go hunting with me, and we had fights. She never forgot some of the things that happened. One time I held up a rabbit from one of my gums to show her, cause she didn't get any that morning, and that rabbit jerked loose and went running off and she fell on the ground laughing. She told about that over and over. She could actually skin a rabbit faster than I could. That's no lie. She was quicker than me in some ways, once she growed up a little bit. I'm talking about when she was around thirteen, fourteen, and I was eighteen or nineteen, before I stopped living up there and then run off after Mama married old man Harper.
Aw, there's a lot of different things that I could tell, you know, about the whole entire country around in there and everywhere from Bethel all the way back to the old mill place and down below up the old ah, ah penitentiary place and all the way coming back into Summerlin, where we used to go and what we used to do, but it's hard to remember a lot of that stuff. And, that was before World War I.
And now here I am with my groin getting eat out. Looks like I would be allowed to go out peaceable. They say He works in mysterious ways. Well, I do too.
Faison
Tate keeps his place pretty nice. I been aiming to put up some kind of blinds, shades, in mine, something on my windows. What's hanging in my bedroom is a poncho, and when I got back from Tate's, I looked through the head hole to see if I could see that dog out back that had been barking for the last two days solid. But there's a row of bushes at the back end of the yard that hides him.
At least I never had this problem living at the motel. Didn't have to worry about no curtains either.
I headed for the kitchen, got a beer.
I was thinking.
Few minutes later, I stood on their porch and knocked on their screen door. I saw them moving in a couple of weeks ago.
One window on each side of the front door. The window shades were pulled down - gold colored. A TV was on somewhere in there. I opened the screen door and knocked. The door come open on its own.
I stuck my head in. TV noises from in there in that first room on the left. Fishing gear was on the floor of a hall that ran front to back. I closed the door behind me, tried to see what make the fishing reels were - one was a Penn. I knocked on the door to the room.
This voice from inside: "Yeah?"
"I need to talk to somebody."
"Just a minute." The door opened. Short, stocky man, reddish hair, scrawny mustache - little clusters of red hairs like. "What do you want?" he says.
"I got a complaint. That dog out back's about to drive me crazy. He's been barking for -"
"It's my brother's, but he's asleep. He'll be leaving in a week or so, and he'll take the dog with him. So you don't have nothing to worry about."
The guy was acting like, hey, no big deal. But for me it was. So I said, "Well, you go wake him up, because something's got to give here. That dog's driving me crazy." He had already started shutting the door.
"Hey," he said, opening the door again. "He's got a nerve problem. I can't bother him right now."
"Can't bother -"
"You live around here?" He looked over his shoulder at the TV.
"Yeah. I live right out there."
"Well, he's asleep now, and I ain't waking him up. He's pretty nervous."
"Look, man, either somebody shuts up the dog, or I shut up the dog. I don't have to sit in my own house and be disturbed by some dog after I give a warning. This is a warning. Okay? I mean this has been going on two whole days and nights. It's driving me crazy."
This is the kind of situation where Uncle Grove would kick ass. I been with him when he did.
"Give me your phone number," he says. He could see I was serious. He writes down my phone number on a newspaper.
"If I ain't heard from him by five o'clock," I say, "I'll figure nothing ain't going to be done."
"I'll give him the number," he says. "He'll call."
So I come on back home and I'm thinking: I go out and talk to this guy. Right? He acts like I'm the one bothering him. He's mouthing off at me. Now ain't this something? This is the guy with the barking dog. And who's mouthing off at who? There's people like this all over the world. They don't think about nothing but theirselves. They're everywhere, and when you bring it to their attention, they go all to pieces. And a bigger problem is the people that let them get by with it. You got jerks all over the place that won't say nothing to these kind of assholes. They'd rather get run all over. They'd rather avoid a little trouble. They're what's wrong with this country.
I got my twelve-gauge Remington automatic out of the closet, found a box of shells, buckshot, in the top dresser drawer, got out seven, dropped them on the bed. By god, if I did end up shooting this dog, the dog wouldn't just be dead. He'd be dead dead. I wouldn't do nothing like this half-ass.
The Remington is my daddy's. Was my daddy's. He probably didn't use it no more than eight or ten times in his life. He gave it to me after he got sick this last time. Last long time. He took me quail hunting a few times when I was little, but hell, I did more stuff like that with Uncle Grove in the six months I stayed with him than I did with my daddy all my life. Hunting, fishing, stuff like that.
Uncle Grove used to have a bunch of guns. He's still got that one that was handed down - the double-barrel with the old-fashioned hammers, handed down from his daddy, my mama's daddy - the gun that was in a fight at a liquor still, got hit with buckshot. Uncle Grove told me that story a bunch of times. His daddy had to pick buckshot out of this nigger's head. Black man.
Mama told me some stuff, too. I remember her letting me sew one time - stick a needle with a white thread through a button hole. And I remember her chasing me around the house one time, and driving me to town in a car. She was pretty.
Phone rang. "Hello." It was the guy with the dog. Okay, I thought, let's see what's coming down here.
"You the one wanted me to call you?"
"Yeah. That dog has been barking for two solid days and nights, and it's driving me crazy."
"I think I can get him quiet," he says.
"That's good," I said. "You want to take him in the house, fine. It ain't my problem. But if I have to, I'll - "
"Where you located?"
"Out your back door and to the left. That's my house." No way to meet this kind of thing but head-on, so I said, "I'll meet you out at the bushes there if you want to."
So I go on out there and when I see this guy, I say, "You're the same guy!"
"Nah," he says. "He's my twin brother."
"You ain't the same one?" They looked exactly alike.
"No way. Now look here," he says, "the dog was just barking, that's all."
"I know he was just barking. That's what he's been doing for two days and nights. That's the problem."
The dog starts yelping. Right then and there. So the guy acts a little nervous.
I yell, "Shut up!"
The dog stops barking. The guy looks at me, at the dog. "Good boy," he says to the dog.
There was a break in the bushes - a path. "Let me see the dog," I said. "I know something about dogs." I do, too. I walked on through.
The dog was in one side of a double garage. A motorboat was in the other side, where the sun shined in, propped up on a little refrigerator. The dog was standing in the shady part, breathing vapor, chain running from his collar through a hole in the back of the garage and all these cages the size of suitcases laying around in there.
Dog wagged his tail, pranced on his front paws. I put out my fist. The dog licked it. "It's a Doberman," I said, squatting down. "Or mostly Doberman."
Another dog, a pointer - liver and white - stood up from behind the boat. He stretched and shook off all over. "Whose pointer?" I said. "He's right pretty."
"Jimmy's. I bought them both, gave Jimmy the bird dog. He is pretty."
"Looks like a bird dog I used to have. I was going to give my boy a bird dog."<quote>
"What happened?"
"He died," I said.
"I had a pit bull die on me three, four years ago. But he'd been eat up pretty good before I bought him."
"My boy died," I said.
"Damn. I'm sorry. What happened? Or ... you know."
"Car wreck." I didn't want to go into all that. "You hunt any?"
"Used to. But I quit shooting the birds. What's your name?"
"Faison."
"I quit shooting the birds, Faison. You know, got tired of it. But Jimmy still hunts. Goes all the time."
Right here I thought, man. Here's a bird dog - good-looking bird dog. Here's somebody at my back door that likes to hunt birds. I hadn't been hunting in a long, long time. "What are all those cages for?" I couldn't figure that one out.
"Snakes. Jimmy's a snake handler. Does shows for schools and stuff."
"Has he got any in there? Maybe that's why -"
"Naw, he's out of snakes right now. He lets them out under the neighbors' houses."
"What? He what?"
"Just kidding. He sells them, lets them out in the woods, different stuff. He's supposed to be getting some new ones. Jimmy don't stay out of snakes long." He patted the bird dog's head, looked at me. "He says he's going bird hunting in the morning. Try out that dog. Dog's been broke. Think you might want to go?"
"Well. Yeah, I'll go bird hunting. I'll go bird hunting."
The pointer had good blood. You could tell. A beautiful dog. "But we got to do something about this other one's barking," I said.
"We'll work something out. We'll bring him inside if he keeps it up. His name is Cactus. Hey, Jimmy," he yelled.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="05">
'I CAN'T GO ON'
WRITER'S BLOCK
"Yes for the last two weeks I have written scarcely anything. I have been idle; I have failed."
- KATHERINE MANSFIELD
"When I see a barrier I cry and curse, and then I get a ladder and climb over it."
- JOHN H. JOHNSON, JOHNSON PUBLISHING CO.
WHAT more can afflict the unfortunate wretches who pursue the literary dream? So much struggeling to be a writer, croaking to sound like one, straining to soar above the crowd! And just when lift-off seems imminent - the ground turns to quicksand. The writer sinks up to the nostrils in muck. Crawling things awaken. The silent screams begin. This is the nightmare they call ... block.
Block. What a nasty word, this combination of blah and blechh, this icky reminder of blocked bowels. The eversuggestible writer has only to hear the word to crumple like Woody Allen when someone says "castration."
WORD BLOCK
Discussions of writer's block usually concern the flow of words and how to get words flowing again when the brain seems to shut down. As if a writer's brain could ever shut down or up for more than five seconds. What the brain does is slip away from drudgery and into the writer's preferred pastime, daydreaming. Daydreaming inspires a literary effort and previews its glorious rewards, but it doesn't do the coal-faced labor of research, organization, drafting, and revising. No writer descends willingly to those mines, where words are hacked one by one from the blackness. Facing that dusty pit feels very much like block, whatever else it might be.
Maddening and debilitating, the condition strikes even the most prolific writers. Charles Dickens described his block in terms of "prowling about the rooms, sitting down, getting up, stirring the fire, looking out of the window, tearing my hair, sitting down to write, writing nothing, writing something and tearing it up ...." But Dickens, if only to pay his debts, got himself going again. So do most blocked writers, some by riding it out, others by heeding the advice of others. Author Barry Hannah views the condition simply as one more experience to file away. "I had a terrible block against writing this summer," he said in an interview, "and even that I'll look at as subject matter."
Every communications pundit can tell others how to beat word block: Just get something down, anything the brain spews out. You can shape and prune later, in revisions and rewrites. Passion first, control second. Shout first, write second. Henriette Anne Klauser splits the artist's mind in Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. The brain's right hemisphere creates, the left one edits. Play first, then work, she advises; blockage comes from trying to do both at once. (And from thinking about cerebral hemispheres at war.)
FLEDGLING writers want to pump greatness from the moment they have a title in mind. They center that glorious title -
Coming of Age in Kankakee
- skip a space, and enter their byline. They wrestle with an opening line. "This is the untold story of ..." They watch the blinking cursor. The story dissolves into scenarios of their own fame. Soon they can hear the echos from posterity - "It was to be her greatest work" - when in truth it was to be her biggest block until she gave up writing and went into real estate. Indeed, William Zinsser describes how aspiring writers set out "to commit an act of literature," an impossible task. Journalism-trained authors like Isabel Allende know better. "I don't think of literature as an end in itself," she says. "It's just a way of communicating something."
Reckless bravado may work for some in launching a project, particularly dramatists who thrive on the theatrical flourish. Lanford Wilson, after winning the Pulitzer, is said to have begun a subsequent work with the heading: "THIS IS THE NEXT PLAY BY LAST YEAR'S PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING LANFORD WILSON." Most writers would rise to this challenge with about nine years of creative paralysis.
For the average writer facing a slow start or a temporary block, here are the more conventional approaches to making the words flow again:
Do a 'freewrite' of unedited, unpublishable banter on your topic. Write fast. Try not to stop. Get it down.
Write yourself a newsy letter or telegram covering the high points; don't bother with beginnings, transitions, or endings but just write chunks that turn you on.
Begin thusly: "What I really want to say is ..." or "I would like to write about ..."
Begin a difficult passage with a question you want it to answer. Answer the question. Then delete the question itself.
End the day's writing in midstream, with a passage that's easy to continue rather with a sealed-off unit.
Don't get hung up on a word. Write a strings of x's and finish the sentence. Later, perhaps as you walk around the block, the xxxxx word will come to you.
You're blocked because you're tired and benumbed. Get away from your desk. Get some rest. Shorten your writing sessions.
You're blocked because you hate the particular project. Cut your losses by backing out. Spend the time you've gained on jobs you can live with.
You're blocked because you're disgusted with the pages you've written thus far. Don't look at them. Brian Aldiss, who writes a novel and several short stories each year, says he places completed pages face down and won't backtrack until the first draft is completed. This way he sustains the necessary "vision" and "creative glow." Later, "creative hope mixed with critical discontent" carries him through the rewrites.
You're blocked because you're distracted. Clear your desk of clutter. Write early in the morning, before the world's distractions begin. Or get out of the house altogether if you can find a work space elsewhere. For San Francisco writer Diane Johnson, "home is home and writing is work." (Better-heeled than most, Johnson chose as her workplace Villa Serbelloni, a historic mansion overlooking Lake Como in Northern Italy.)
You're blocked not because your mind is blank, but because it's overloaded with all the good ideas that have percolated during the day. Now, as you start to write, they want to pour out all at once and seem to evaporate. If you've written them down, as you must, take one idea at a time and work it through. Keep a notepad handy (on or off screen) even as you write; record the new ideas that shoot by and tend to derail you and deal with them later.
You are blocked because it's getting you some attention; because you (or someone close to you) romanticize artistic failure and self-destruction. You and your enablers must grow up. Kate Braverman recalls a time when, "for me, art required certain elements of self-destruction. Becoming a mother was the turning point. Then health and sanity began to have the allure that sickness had had."
You're blocked because you've discovered a problem in premise or structure or some other fundamental aspect that can't be resolved. Annie Dillard's advice: "Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles." Accept it and keep writing, she says. Like with a dying friend, you sit up with your book and hold its hand and hope it gets better. Braverman agrees. "Always finish the failure - you'll never know when there's going to be a mutation."
AN IDEA FROM THE BUSINESS WORLD
The business world hates leaving anything to chance, including creativity. Blocked creativity is money lost. So enter Edward de Bono, a learned Brit who turned a technique he calls "lateral thinking" into a worldwide management-training industry. In Lateral Thinking for Management, one of his avalanche of books, de Bono offers a process of breaking away from the cognitive patterns ("vertical thinking") people tend to use in solving problems. Such patterns produce blah solutions or dead ends. Lateral thinking gets away from choosing the next logical step; it invites completely irrelevant ideas to "intrude" on the continuity of patterned thinking. From these instrusions come disconnected, off-the-wall ideas that seem unrelated to the problem until - bong! - they generate creative and exceptional solutions. Lateral thinking is akin to what writers call intuitive flashes and insights, but more systematic.
For example, de Bono uses the "random word" exercise to introduce discontinuity into patterned thinking. You are blocked. Every idea follows trite patterns. Now, open a dictionary anywhere; the first noun defined on the page (no cheating!) is your unblocking word. Play with all its meanings for about three minutes and see what wild, unchosen connections they might have to your original problem. In de Bono's example, the problem is finding better incentives for a sales force, and the word gong pops up. Instead of the traditional incentives, he begins thinking of gonglike proclamations of top performances, loud and brief incentives such as short-term cash prizes, and so on. If de Bono were struggling to create a fictional salesman, the process might be something like: Gong - Short, punchy. A son named Bong ... Bing ... Biff! Gong - Percussion ... crash ... car crash ... suicide ... car crash suicide and insurance for the family!
THERE are whole treatises on writer's block, including one from the never-blocked advice factory called Writer's Digest. A Wisconsin workshop offers "Twelve Ways to Smash Block" with the cheesy promise, "You never need suffer from writer's block or writer's blank again."
Advice is always easy to give. Jay Parini's essay, "The More They Write, the More They Write," quotes Iris Murdoch and Stephen King, who knock out about a half million words a year between them. "I just keep writing," says Murdoch when asked about being stuck. "I just flail away at the thing," says King. One's own block, however, feels less like being "stuck" than like clinical depression, which it sometimes is. This is the true quicksand, and the harder one tries to climb out the deeper one sinks. Advising severely blocked writers to "write themselves a letter" is like telling depressives to cheer up by joining clubs.
For the big blocks, each writer must find a way to reverse the negative psychic energy that has built up. For Carson McCullers, blocking on A Member of the Wedding at the Yaddo writer's retreat, it was lying stomach-down on the ground and beating her fists on the manuscript and calling "Mother! Mother!" Cry and curse, then find the ladder that John H. Johnson talks about (see head of chapter). Use no polite method; borrow the techniques of sports and combat heroes. Pro football coach Mike Ditka developed a unique method of clearing his mind on the sidelines. As sportscaster John Madden described it: "Now you see, you bend over. You put both hands on your knees. And you spit. And good ideas come."
SPITTING won't be necessary in most situations. Ordinary word blockage is the very toil of writing. Some of it results from the contradictions of creating literature, what Harold Bloom calls "achieved anxiety" and what Plotnikov has described as "controlled crying." Always the questions, Is it too much? Not enough? Everything must be in balance, in harmony, but something must tip the scale. The whole writing business is a pretzel of paradoxes, from the philosophical to the technical levels. These are some of the mixed messages that tie writers in knots:
Just write for yourself; but write to sell.
Just get it down, even if it stinks; but don't settle for anything that displeases you.
Be clever and brilliant; but don't show off.
Avoid big words; but don't use too many little words.
Write with style; but don't let style call attention to itself.
Write something fresh and surprising; but don't go off the deep end.
Tell it as it is; but don't offend the wrong people or expose yourself to libel, invasion of privacy, or obscenity.
Know your subject, write about what you know; but don't overwhelm the reader with detail.
Use forceful words; but not too forceful for the thoughts delivered.
Be sincere; but remember Oscar Wilde's admonition that all bad poetry is sincere.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="06">
THE PROFESSOR
By Lydia Davis
A few years ago I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy. Why shouldn't an English professor say this to herself - living alone, fascinated by a brown landscape, spotting a cowboy in a pickup truck sometimes in her rearview mirror as she drives on the broad highways of the West Coast? In fact, I realize I would still like to marry a cowboy, though by now I'm living in the East and married already to someone who is not a cowboy.
But what would a cowboy want with a woman like me - not very easy-going, an English professor, the daughter of another English professor? If I have a drink or two, I'm more easy-going than if I don't, but I still speak correctly and don't know how to joke with people unless I know them well, and often these are university people or the people they live with, who also speak correctly. Although I don't mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country - to mention only this country.
I told myself I liked the way cowboys dressed, starting with the hat, and how comfortable they were in their clothes, so practical, having to do with their work. Many professors seem to dress the way they think a professor should dress, without any real interest or love. Their clothes are too tight or else a few years out of style and just add to the awkwardness of their bodies.
After I was hired to teach for the first time I bought a briefcase, and then after I started teaching I carried it through the halls like the other professors. I could see that the older professors, mostly men but also some women, were no longer aware of the importance of their briefcases and that the younger women pretended they weren't aware of it, but the younger men carried their briefcases like trophies.
At that same time my father began sending me thick envelopes containing material he thought would help me in my classes, including exercises to assign and quotes to use. I didn't read more than a few pages sometimes when I was feeling strong. How could an old professor try to teach a young professor? Didn't he know I wouldn't be able to carry my briefcase through the halls and say hello to my colleagues and students and then go home and read the instructions of the old professor?
In fact, I liked teaching because I liked telling other people what to do. In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now: If I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people too. I was so convinced of it that my students were convinced too. Still, though I was a good teacher, I was something else inside. Some of the old professors were also old professors inside, but inside I wasn't even a young professor. I looked like a woman in glasses, but I had dreams of leading a very different kind of life, the life of a woman who would not wear glasses, the kind of woman I saw from a distance now and then in a bar.
More important than the clothes a cowboy wore, and the way he wore them, was the fact that a cowboy probably wouldn't know much more than he had to. He would think about his work, and about his family, if he had one, and about having a good time, and not much else. I was tired of so much thinking, which was what I did most in those days. I did other things, but I went on thinking while I did them. I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. I even had to think about what I was thinking and wonder why I was thinking it. When I had the idea of marrying a cowboy I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.
I also imagined, though I was probably wrong about this too, that a cowboy wouldn't be like anyone I knew - like an old communist, or a member of a steering committee, a writer of letters to the newspaper, a faculty wife serving at a student tea, a professor reading proofs with a sharp pencil and asking everyone to be quiet. I thought that when my mind - always so busy, always going around in circles, always having an idea and then an idea about an idea - reached out to his mind, it would meet something quieter, that there would be more blanks, more open spaces; that some of what he had in his mind might be the sky, clouds, hilltops, and then concrete things like ropes, saddles, horsehair, the smell of horses and cattle, motor oil, calluses, grease, fences, gullies, dry streambeds, lame cows, still-born calves, freak calves, veterinarians' visits, treatments, inoculations. I imagined this even though I knew that some of the things I liked that might be in his mind, like the saddles, the saddle sores, the horsehair, and the horses themselves, weren't often a part of the life of a cowboy anymore. As for what I would do in my life with this cowboy, I sometimes imagined myself reading quietly in clean clothes in a nice study, but at other times I imagined myself oiling tack or cooking large quantities of plain food or helping out in the barn in the early morning while the cowboy had both arms inside a cow to turn a calf so it would present properly. Problems and chores like these would be clear and I would be able to handle them in a clear way. I wouldn't stop reading and thinking, but I wouldn't know very many people who did a lot of that, so I would have more privacy in it, because the cowboy, though so close to me all the time, wouldn't try to understand but would leave me alone with it. I would not be an embarrassment anymore.
I thought if I married a cowboy I wouldn't have to leave the West. I liked the West for its difficulties. I liked the difficulty of telling when one season was over and another had begun, and I liked the difficulty of finding any beauty in the landscape. To begin with, I had gotten used to its own kind of ugliness: all those broad highways laid down in the valleys and the new constructions placed up on the bare hillsides. Then I began to find beauty in it, and liked the bareness and the plain brown of the hills in the dry season, and the way the folds in the hills where some dampness tended to linger would fill up with grasses and shrubs and other flowering plants. I liked the plainness of the ocean and the emptiness when I looked out over it. And then, especially since it had been so hard for me to find this beauty, I didn't want to leave it.
I might have gotten the idea of marrying a cowboy from a movie I saw one night in the springtime with a friend of mine who is also a professor - a handsome and intelligent man, kinder than I am but even more awkward around people, forgetting even the names of old friends in his sudden attacks of shyness. He seemed to enjoy the movie, though I have no idea what was going through his mind. Maybe he was imagining a life with the woman in the movie, who was so different from his thin, nervous, and beautiful wife. As we drove away from the movie theater, on one of those broad highways with nothing ahead or behind but taillights and headlights and nothing on either side but darkness, all I wanted to do was go out into the middle of the desert, as far away as possible from everything I had known all my life, from the university where I was teaching and the towns and the city near it with all the intelligent people who lived and worked in them, writing down their ideas in notebooks and on computers in their offices and their studies at home and taking notes from difficult books. I wanted to leave all this and go out into the middle of the desert and run a motel by myself with a little boy, and have a worn-out cowboy come along, a worn-out middle-aged cowboy, alcoholic if necessary, and marry him. I thought I knew of a little boy I could take with me. Then all I would need would be the aging cowboy and the motel. I would make it a good motel. I would look after it and I would solve any problems sensibly and right away as they came along. I thought I could be a good, tough businesswoman just because I had seen this movie showing this good, tough businesswoman. This woman also had a loving heart and a capacity to understand another fallible human being. The fact is that if an alcoholic cowboy came into my life in any important way I would probably criticize him to death for his drinking until he walked out on me. But at the time, I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn't written for me.
At that point I met a man in one of my classes who seemed reasonably close to my idea of a cowboy, though now I can't tell exactly why I thought so. He wasn't really like a cowboy, or what I thought a cowboy might be like, so what I wanted must have been something else, and the idea of a cowboy just came up in my mind for the sake of convenience. The facts weren't right. He didn't work as a cowboy but at some kind of job where he glued the bones of chimpanzees together. He played jazz trombone, and on the days when he had a lesson he wore a dark suit to class and carried a black case. He just missed being good-looking, with his square, fleshy, pale face, his dark hair, mustache, dark eyes; just missed being good-looking, not because of his rough cheeks - scarred from shrapnel - but because of a loose or wild look about him, his eyes wide open all the time, even when he smiled, and his body very still, only his eyes moving, watching everything, missing nothing. Wary, he was ready to defend himself as though every conversation might also be something of a fight.
One day when a group of us were having a beer together after class, he was quiet, seemed very low, and finally said to us, without raising his eyes, that he thought he might be going to move in with his father and send his little girl back to her mother. He said he didn't think it was fair to keep her because sometimes he would just sit in a chair without speaking - she would try to talk to him and he wouldn't be able to open his mouth, she would keep on trying and he would sit there knowing he had to answer her but unable to.
His rudeness and wildness were comfortable to me at that point, and because he would tease me now and then, I thought he liked me enough so that I could ask him to go out to dinner with me, and finally I did, just to see what would happen. He seemed startled, then pleased to accept, sobered and flattered at this attention from his professor.
The date didn't turn out to be something that would change the direction of my life, though that's not what I was expecting then, only what I thought about later.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="07">
THE WHOLE TRUTH
By Stephen McCauley
She told her psychiatrist she was happily married and had taken a lover only because she was afraid of being too close to her husband, whom she'd wed six years earlier. If she'd been more truthful, she'd have confessed that she'd begun her affair with the dentist, whose office was in the same medical building as her own, because she was bored with her husband, and that fear of intimacy with her lover had driven her to sleep with the carpenter who'd come to work on the front steps of the house late in the summer. But she hadn't told her psychiatrist about the carpenter at all, because her indiscretion with him struck her as slightly sordid, and her psychiatrist was a gentle, bald man who sucked on sour balls and nodded eagerly as she spoke and reminded her too much of her father. She thought he might be upset to hear she'd fallen into bed with a relative stranger. Mentioning her ongoing affair with the dentist was surely enough. Besides, the steps were long finished, and she was quite certain she'd never see the carpenter again, let alone sleep with him, even though, in truth, she still thought of him often.
To compensate for her omissions, she transposed her feelings as she spoke. Thus, whenever she wished to talk about her fear of getting too close to her lover, she pretended she was talking about her husband. And when she talked about the sexual excitement of her affair with the dentist, she was really describing her fantasies about the carpenter. If she wanted to discuss the exasperating boredom of her marriage, she talked about a brief, boring first marriage, which she'd invented during her second week of analysis. It wasn't hard to keep track once she had it all down. And, she assured herself, the essence of what she was saying was true; she simply toyed with the names. As long as she was able to keep it all straight in her mind, her analysis would have some value.
It was her husband, who was kind and bald and reminded her a little of her father - and now her psychiatrist - who'd first suggested she seek treatment. She'd confessed to him that she was unhappy, although she'd told him it was because, after all the years of school and training, she was bored with dentistry. She'd hinted, too, but only in the most gentle way, that she was having doubts about their marriage, which, in fact, she was not. She knew she was bored and that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience for her and dependency for her husband. What she was having doubts about was her affair. When her husband asked her, as he did from time to time, what she'd told her psychiatrist about their relationship, she'd report some of the things she'd actually said about him, even though they were, of course, things she really felt about her lover.
Despite what she'd told her husband, she enjoyed her profession and, after four years, had established a successful practice. She and her husband lived in a university town, and many of her patients were young professionals and academic wives, the kinds of people who usually didn't need major dental work but who came dutifully three times a year for a cleaning and a checkup. To please them, she'd decorated her waiting room with old black-and-white photographs she'd bought at antique stores and easy chairs draped with printed cloth imported from India. The decor had first struck her as homey, if a bit cluttered. Now, however, her waiting room had begun to look to her like a psychiatrist's office. She avoided subscribing to the predictable dentist-office publications and instead kept recent copies of literary journals on the table by the door. She'd bought a narrow pine bookcase in which she kept story collections by contemporary writers whom she admired, even though she didn't care much for short stories.
Most of her patients called her by her first name, and many felt to her like casual friends. A number of women always asked her about her husband, and as she worked on their teeth she'd talk about him amiably, describing a man made up of equal parts of her spouse, her lover, and her fantasies about the carpenter.
Her mother lived in Kentucky and was proud of her achievements. The only regret her mother ever expressed was that her husband had not lived to see their daughter graduate from dental school. She was close to her mother, and they talked on the phone once a week for at least an hour. Wanting desperately to tell her about her psychiatrist, but not wanting to alarm her, she told her mother that her husband, who was twelve years older than she was, had started seeing a therapist three times a week. Therapist sounded more benign than psychiatrist. She told her mother her husband was having a mid-life career crisis. Feeling daring, she hinted at suspicions that he was also having an affair. Her mother listened sympathetically and suggested that perhaps she and her husband should go to Bermuda together for a week and try to work things out. She reminded her mother that her husband's therapy appointments made such a vacation impossible. After she'd hung up, she went to her husband and told him she thought he should take a vacation, even though she wouldn't be able to go along.
Her lover was also married. He was severe and serious and driven by nervous intensity. He bit his fingernails and sometimes, after they'd made love, would take her in his arms and weep. He would divorce his wife if she would divorce her husband. The two of them would go off together, set up a practice in a different city, and start life all over. She explained to him that she was tempted, but could not make any moves until she had resolved some things in analysis. When her lover asked her if she was telling her psychiatrist how much they loved each other and the passionate nature of their sexual relationship, she told him that she was, even though when she described to her psychiatrist her longing for the dentist, she was thinking of the carpenter. And when she told her psychiatrist about her desire to leave her husband, she was really describing her desire to break off her affair with the dentist.
She feared that if she confessed to her psychiatrist that she'd been unable to tell her mother about him, his feelings would be hurt, and he would think she was resisting treatment. So instead she told him that she'd told her mother, and that her mother had been understanding and helpful. While she was on the subject, she told her psychiatrist that it was her mother who'd suggested her husband take a week in Bermuda on his own. She didn't want to sound manipulative by admitting she'd suggested it to her husband herself, and her mother had, after all, been the one to bring up the subject of a vacation.
In the middle of November her husband noticed that the floor of the porch on the back of the house was beginning to rot, and he called the carpenter. He told her this one night over dinner, and she felt her heart race and sink and race and sink in a peculiar way, almost as if she were running a fever. He told her that the carpenter would begin work in the middle of the next week, the very Wednesday, in fact, he was leaving for Bermuda. He apologized that he would not be there to oversee the job. She told him that the carpenter had impressed her as reliable and would probably need very little supervision, and she finished her dinner hastily.
The Monday before her husband left on his trip, she decided to test the waters. She told her psychiatrist that a young man would be working on their house that week, that she had met him when he'd come to estimate the cost of the job, and that she had found him attractive. She told him he was a craftsman who painted walls with sponges so the finished surface looked like fine wallpaper. This skill, she felt, made the carpenter sound as sensitive and refined as she was certain he really must be. Her psychiatrist raised one eyebrow inquisitively when she told him this, a gesture that she took as a sign of disapproval. So she dropped the subject of the carpenter quickly, and told him, as if confessing it, that she was looking forward to her husband's departure so that she could spend more time with her lover, the dentist.
She canceled her appointments for Wednesday, drove her husband to the airport, and sped home in a state of confused anticipation. It was an oddly warm day, nearly eighty, and the November sky was blank and murky in the Indian-summer heat. She waited for the carpenter on the front steps of the house, dressed in a long skirt made of thin cotton and a baggy blouse, trying to read a collection of stories recommended to her by a patient.
When he finally arrived, she felt embarrassed, certain that he could read her anxiety and its source on the brow. She was only somewhat relieved to notice that he, too, seemed uncomfortable.
She stayed in the house all day, cleaning and arranging drawers and cautiously looking out the kitchen window to the porch where the carpenter was working. It wasn't until late in the afternoon, when he was sweeping up for the day, that she asked him inside and offered him a drink.
She called her receptionist the next morning and canceled her patients for the rest of the week. Then she called her lover and told him she'd decided to take advantage of her husband's absence by visiting her mother in Kentucky for a few days. She left a message on her psychiatrist's answering machine, explaining that she'd decided to go to Bermuda with her husband after all and would therefore miss her next two appointments.
The carpenter was five years younger than she was, dark-eyed and appealingly stocky. He wore blue jeans and a red T-shirt. He worked diligently on the porch for the next two days. Now and again he'd enter the house, and kiss her teasingly and tell her she was beautiful. When he finished work for the afternoon, he'd come inside, sweaty and exhausted, and they'd make love, though never, he insisted, in the bed she shared with her husband.
On Saturday night she prepared him an enormous, complicated dinner. After the meal, they lay together on the sofa in the living room with the curtains drawn and a light sheet pulled over their bodies. There had been a rainstorm that afternoon, and the weather had turned seasonably cool, though the rooms of the house were still warm. He told her he loved her, and she kissed him thankfully, even though she wasn't young or sentimental enough to believe he meant it.
He told her he was moving to Texas for the winter. He had friends there who had offered him a job for a few months; he'd put his books and his furniture into storage and drive south. He didn't really know how long he'd stay away. She was struck all at once by how wonderfully simple it sounded, by how unentangled and uncomplicated his life was compared with her own. It seemed pure, clean, and enviable. Jokingly, he asked her if she'd like to go with him She told him she would in a soft, choking voice. She buried her face in his broad chest and began to laugh at the idea. Her laughter fed on itself until she lost control completely and discovered that she was weeping.
She rarely cried. She had cried only once in front of her psychiatrist.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="08">
Selling Whiskers
One day Edna Sarah's mother sent her out to sell the dog. He was not an ordinary dog, and certainly it was not ordinary in her neighborhood to try and sell a dog by going from house to house, but Edna Sarah, who was ten, did not have much choice; or so she felt.
When her mother told her what she was thinking, it was during supper, a rather measly supper, but that was her mother's excuse for selling the dog, which Edna Sarah knew was completely false. The house was stuffed with food. The cabinets in the kitchen were overflowing. The refrigerator was threatening to burst. If Edna Sarah opened the door to the pantry, a can from the highest shelf always fell out, so she had given up trying. Besides, her mother had a nose that could sniff out the smallest crack in a bag of raisins, a food Edna Sarah had not thought of as particularly aromatic, crouched last week in the linen closet, the door suddenly flung open, her mother there, her hand quick, no food between meals, she snapped, the bag of raisins gone, the door slammed shut.
In fact, Edna Sarah had begun to think of the food in the house as not food at all but artifacts. She knew that her mother kept boxes of Girl Scout cookies stacked in her closet, and the big chocolate candy bars that kids sold to make money for organizations stuffed in her drawers, six-packs of small green Coca-Cola bottles under her bed, and lots and lots of bags of oyster crackers strewn around the room as though they were decorator pillows. Everything was well-packaged and well-sealed and had a long shelf life.
"I think we should sell Whiskers," her mother said. They were seated at the table in the kitchen, which was bare except for their plates and utensils. Edna Sarah was picking at a Vienna sausage. She had two on her plate. Of course, Whiskers had few whiskers, but her mother had wanted a cat to keep the mice population down. They had no mice and they had no cat, but they did have a purebred West Highland terrier with one eye; and they did have food but it was inaccessible, a word that hit Edna Sarah in her gut and her soul the first time her teacher defined it.
"I don't want to sell Whiskers," she said.
"I know you don't want to," answered her mother. She ran her noticeably thin fingers through her sheer blond bangs. "Who ever wants to sell their pet? Their trusty and beloved pet."
"Somebody, maybe," said Edna Sarah, looking down, "but not I."
"Why can't you say 'me'?" Her mother pierced the remaining Vienna sausage on her plate with a fork. "It's not normal."
"Not me," she answered, twisting the end of her long blond braid. "I'm not going to sell him."
"But, dear," her mother leaned forward, the Vienna sausage clinging to her fork, "can't you see how we've been brought to this?"
"I guess so," said Edna Sarah. She tapped her roll. It made a hollow sound. She could actually remember a Sunday morning last fall when her mother had made pancakes, the warm, buttery smell rising into Edna Sarah's bedroom and her father calling out for her to come. The night before, they had stayed up late, all three of them, lying on a quilt in the grass to watch for falling stars. But even then there were signs: three pancakes each, no more, the rest of the batter scraped into a clean mayonnaise jar to grow mold in the back of the refrigerator. "I haven't lost my commission yet," her father laughed. Her mother tightened the lid on the jar and looked at Edna Sarah. There are never any guarantees, baby. Her father rose from the table, the crossword puzzle in his hand. After the holidays he was gone, a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, away on his ship for another six months.
But they were fine, her mother said when the ombudsman called; and yes, she would be at the meeting, to the Commander's wife; and of course Edna Sarah could go to the movie with Adrienne (even as the food disappeared from their plates, a little here and a little there). These days Edna Sarah ate every bite of her hot lunch at school, paid for with her allowance, and put the non-perishables in her backpack for the weekends. To anyone who asked, she said she was having a growth spurt, but it set her apart, the care she took, even from her friends. She guessed she understood how she and her mother had come to this.
"I guess so?" Her mother's voice rose. "I guess so? The evidence is everywhere." And she swept her arm around the room, across the overstufffedoverstuffed pantry, the burgeoning refrigerator, and the cabinets that would not close. "Whiskers," she called, "come here," and he dutifully came, his ears up, his tail wagging, his nose poised, the one good eye wide and open, the other gone, its eyelid sunken and shriveled. He was a good dog. "Whiskers," she said, "you are eating us out of house and home," and she gave him the Vienna sausage off her fork. He smacked and chewed and licked his lips, and then he came over to Edna Sarah's chair. She looked at her mother's plate and the empty fork. Yes, her mother had given Whiskers a Vienna sausage, although it broke all the rules. So Edna Sarah took one of hers and gave it to Whiskers and stroked him on the head.
"Good God!" her mother yelled. "You have given the dog the last bite of food in the house!"
It was useless for Edna Sarah to point out the remaining sausage on her plate, let alone the roll. They no longer existed. She stood up from the table and pushed back her chair. "How much do you want me to sell him for?"
"Two hundred dollars," her mother answered. "It's the least we can ask for such a fine animal." Then she rose from the table and took her plate to the sink and carefully scraped what was not there into the disposal. "And, dear," she turned back, "please don't come home until you've sold him. It's a terrible thing to ask, I know, but we are simply that desperate." Edna Sarah looked at her mother and saw that she believed every word she was saying.
So Edna Sarah went to the closet and got the new retractable leash her mother had bought only recently and put it on Whiskers - he wagged his tail and grinned - then together they walked several blocks to a part of the neighborhood where nobody knew her. The evening was warm. The light was soft. The day lilies were blooming. She started to whistle, "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain When She Comes," Whiskers sniffing here and there and lifting his leg to pee a little.
The first house she decided to try was on Maplewood, a white house with a red tile roof and a big yard edged with flowers. There was a sliding board and a sandbox and a long swing hanging from a tall tree. She imagined the lift she could get out of that swing, especially with a decent push. In fact, she remembered having once seen a man on his knees at the front flower bed. She rang the doorbell. The man came to the door.
"Yes?" he said, and smiled. He was tall and slender and was wearing a white T-shirt and khaki shorts and looked to Edna Sarah like someone who might like to wrestle with his children on the floor. She had seen some fathers do this. She smiled at the man and picked up Whiskers and held him in her arms.
"Would you like to buy my dog?" she asked. "There's nothing wrong with him, except one of his eyes is missing." Whiskers was quiet in her arms.
The man came out onto the porch. "My mother has a Westie named Duffy," he said and reached out and stroked the dog's head. "What's his name?"
"Whiskers," she answered.
"Hello, Whiskers," he said. Whiskers' shriveled eyelid twitched and he wagged his tail against her arm. She heard the voice of a child inside and what must have been the voice of the mother. She strained her ears. "Why are you selling him?" the man asked.
"Oh, you know," she said, stroking Whiskers' back, "sometimes people get tired of their dogs." Just then a little girl pushed open the storm door and ran up beside the man. She was fair and slender and had a headful of thick dark hair and was wearing a dress.
"Doggie!" she said. "Beautiful doggie!" The man reached down and picked her up and showed her how to touch the dog. Edna Sarah was ecstatic. They would buy Whiskers and she would come back to visit him and they would all wrestle on the carpet and push each other on the swing and she would stay to help the mother fix dinner and eat it.
"Look," laughed the little girl. "He's kissing my hand."
"I know," said Edna Sarah. "He likes you." And she stroked Whiskers' back and smiled.
"How much are you selling him for?" the man wanted to know.
"Two hundred dollars," she told him. "It's the least we can ask for such a fine dog."
"He is a fine dog." Then the man put the little girl down and told her to run inside and ask her mother to help her put on her pajamas; she stared at Edna Sarah.
"I have a boo-boo," she said, "a very bad boo-boo." She pointed to a Band-Aid on the side of her knee, just below the hem of her dress.
"My goodness," said Edna Sarah.
"Do you want to see it?" she asked, and reached for the Band-Aid, just as the mother came out onto the porch, tall and slender with short dark hair. She smiled at Edna Sarah, scooped up the little girl, and they disappeared into the house. Edna Sarah heard the child say, "I was talking to that girl."
"I know," the mother answered. "You're very precocious."
Edna Sarah smiled at the man. "So", she said, "would you like to buy my dog?"
He smiled back but his eyes were tired. "I guess not. The yard isn't fenced in. The house is small. My daughter is unpredictable." He touched Whiskers' nose.
Edna Sarah put Whiskers on the porch and straightened his leash. "I have to be going," she said, then, "come on, buddy," and down the steps they went.
"Good luck," the man called.
"Thank-you," she answered, but did not turn around. She walked straight across the street to the house on the other side, a tall yellow house with dark green shutters and an overgrown sort of yard. Someone had left a wagon with a high, straight handle on the front walk. Edna Sarah rang the doorbell and a black woman opened the door. She was tall and robust and said, "Hi," just as a little boy about the size of the little girl across the street pushed himself around the woman's legs and stood poised on the threshold. Edna Sarah could see that he was not her son, his hair blond and wavy, but he was sturdy, a very sturdy little boy.
"Das a dog," he said.
"Would you like to buy him?" Edna Sarah asked. She picked up Whiskers and looked at the woman. "He's a purebred West Highland terrier with a missing eye, but you would never know it from the way he acts, and he loves children." Whiskers' shriveled eyelid twitched.
"I want to touch dat dog," the little boy said.
"Why are you selling him?" the woman asked, and she picked up the little boy, who stretched his hand toward Whiskers.
</doc><doc register="humor" n="09">
8
In a few days' time, my handcuffs won me an acceptance by the villagers I never would have earned had I simply stayed in the village, even for the rest of my life. The handcuffs gave me a logical occupation, that of prisoner, and a reason for not simply spending my money and leaving. The children who kept trying to sell me Chiclets now desisted. Now, as I stood on the riverbank, they would come up to stand beside me and slip their slim wrists through my free handcuff. Some would solemnly march around the village with me as if they were doing penance. Others thought it was funny to slip a hand into the cuff and hang from it as if unconscious. They loved being dragged by me across the village square.
I almost came to like the handcuffs. I found I could use them to open bottles of beer. The drinking club found this amusing; they made up sayings about the uses of bondage, and their discussions of freedom became humorous and speculative. Some of them could not look at me while they discussed my situation. They spoke to me in the third person. "How is the prisoner today?" they asked. For a while they called me el simbolito, the symbol, and I got a good feeling of how totally abstract their notion of freedom was. One night, Santiago gave the Thinkery a beautiful twist on an old Greek myth. He asked whether the reason the man kept wrestling with the boulder, and never quit trying to roll it to the top of the mountain, was that the boulder was too beautiful for him to leave it alone.
"I have felt such stones," Blind Jorge said, "and I know what you are talking about. They are weighted inside with something significant. They have a heavy coolness about them that becomes an obsession. We must be careful to choose our obsessions wisely."
"Our obsessions should be women," said Jesus. "Women or nothing at all."
This discussion reduced the drinking club to drunkenness and tears. "Pure obsessions purify," Lieutenant Hugo sobbed. "I know this because I am pure." Hugo was wearing a T-shirt that said "Don't ask me. I just work here."
After the eruption of the volcano and the first-ever showing of a movie in the village, the mood of the villagers had been high. They expected good things: some sort of divine good luck from the volcano's blessing and economic progress now that civilization in the form of a Rambo movie had reached the little river's shores. But when nothing obvious happened, they began to suspect a trick. Three rumors came to town that week.
Old man Wilson picked up on Blind Jorge's radio a report that a massive earthquake was predicted for the capital at three that same afternoon.
"Who predicted the earthquake?" I asked.
"The Star Wars people at NASA, in the United States."
"Impossible", I said.
"That's what Hector says. That's what Lieutenant Hugo says. But tell us, why then are all the schools closed in the capital, and why is everyone sitting outside in the capital city's parks?"
"Because they are ignorant."
"That's what Hector says. But tonight in the capital, the people will all camp outdoors. And so shall we."
And they did. They brought out their babies and blankets to the center of the soccer field and they set up a camp. They had a wonderful time. They danced and played volleyball, and the young lovers were able to promenade for a while and then sneak back up to their parents' empty houses. That evening the villagers lit cooking fires. Somebody butchered a pig and soon an aroma of roast pork filled the air. Some young American tourists joined the fiesta and sang folk songs, which pleased the villagers immensely.
Hector, Santiago, Hugo, and I stayed in the cantina, drinking beer and watching the festivities in the field.
"They are fools," Hector said. "I'll tell them when they can have an earthquake."
"They are having more fun than you are," I said.
Hector turned his big, slow eyes to me and shook his head. "I'll show them fun. I've got plans for these monkeys."
Santiago said, "I hope we don't have an earthquake tonight. It would mean years of enlightenment down the drain. Such setbacks to civilization have happened before."
"Don't worry," said Hugo. "I'll be in charge."
Hector belched and walked to the steps. He inhaled, filling his huge rib cage with the savory air. Then he laughed an enormous, evil, low-throated laugh and aimed it at the people in the square.
There was no earthquake that night. About midnight, it began to rain.
The second rumor came the next day, when some Swedish tourists brought in the news that President Reagan was dying. He had a cancer on his nose and it had spread to his brain.
"My God," said Consuelo, "he must look like those poor miscreants in the penny newspapers."
The Swedes had read the story in a capital city tabloid.
"You're sure of this?" I asked them.
They shrugged their shoulders and nodded. They had read it. Reagan had resigned and George Bush was now President.
That evening I ate dinner at Mama Cuchara's and pumped the tourists for information. They asked me what kind of president George Bush would be.
"Better," I said, but I had no idea.
Two days later, Wilson picked up another report on the radio. A four-engine airliner had left the capital and disappeared. On a clear blue afternoon, it had taken off to fly down the Valley of the Volcanoes and then had disappeared with fifty-four people on board. The next day, the radio supplied three new rumors. The first was that the plane had fallen into the caldera of a volcano and the people were all alive but trapped in a land that time had forgotten, a land complete with dinosaurs. The radio announcer interviewed a university professor about dinosaurs. Another rumor was that the plane had been caught in the ray of a UFO and the passengers were all alive but trapped on another planet. The announcer interviewed a psychic medium who had contacted the pilot. The third rumor was that the plane had been hijacked by Colombian drug runners and made to fly to Colombia. It was being used to fly cocaine into the United States and the passengers were all alive but being turned into slaves to labor on a marijuana plantation.
The villagers believed all three of these rumors.
"This same thing happened before," they said, "three years ago. And those fifty-four passengers are still gone too."
That precipitated a thinking club discussion on the consequence of numbers.
"Why did both planes have fifty-four passengers?"
"Maybe that is the number of seats," I said.
"And what is the significance of that number equaling the number of weeks in a year?"
"There are fifty-two weeks in a year," I said.
"So far," they acknowledged, "that has been the case, but that figure is arbitrary, is it not? And numbers are arbitrary and, thus, capricious. Just look at the lottery."
"The lottery is random," I said. "It has nothing to do with anything human. Arbitrary, capricious, or personal."
"Tell that to the fifty-two people on that airplane," they said. "Tell that to the devil on the day you die."
"People who die on Sunday," Jesus politely warned me, "do not always go to heaven."
The next day the radio announced that the United States Air Force had sent an aircraft to assist in the search for the missing airliner. The plane was equipped with sophisticated sensors which could detect the wreckage of the plane beneath the snow on a volcano summit or beneath the canopies of the jungle trees.
This was the report that really disturbed the villagers. "Is this so?" they asked me. "Can this plane see through the trees? With what? With secret rays?"
This time the villagers took refuge indoors, inside the few buildings with tin roofs, which they hoped would shield them from the rays. They kept Jorge's radio on a cardboard box just outside the cantina, and the cantina became the scene of a Drinking and Thinking Club marathon, a forty-eight-hour symposium which discussed and dismissed as hopeless although interesting almost every problem known to man. Santiago assured me he did not believe in any danger, but he said the situation had its good aspect, the gathering of so many fine minds for such an extended time.
Wilson had been hurt on his motorcycle, which Hector had mysteriously gotten back from the soldiers. Now Wilson wanted to sue the Army for damaging his motorcycle, which had led to his accident, which had led to his swollen ankle.
"You need a lawyer for that," Jesus told him. "And all the real lawyers are in the capital city."
"Fine. He'll go," Napoleon said. "Wilson will press for his rights."
"He will need proof he was hurt," Blind Jorge pointed out.
"I have my ankle," said Wilson, and he took off a black rubber boot and displayed his injury. His ankle was black and green.
"Such evidence is circumstantial. You need an affidavit from a certifiable physician. And for that you will need an autopsy."
"How much does that cost?" Wilson asked. "Can I get it free from the Peace Corps lady at Huasipungo Pass?"
"Autopsies are never free," Wilson was told. "Otherwise, they wouldn't stand up in court. The widow Palos has an autopsy for her dead husband, Pedro. It is framed on the wall of her house. It has more government stamps than a letter to Lima."
"Perhaps I could use her autopsy," Wilson said.
"Not a chance, dear Wilson. The widow does not know what an autopsy is. She thinks it is a letter of condolence and honor from the erstwhile President of the Republic, who is now under the government's convenience of a house arrest. She would never part with it."
I told them that autopsies were performed on dead people, to determine what had killed them. They looked at me as if I had missed the whole point of the discussion.
"Thank you for the clarification," they said politely.
Santiago interceded and guided the discussion toward philosophy. "If autopsies are performed on dead people, we must ask, Why?" he said. "And why aren't they more logically performed on living people, to determine what is keeping them alive?"
"It is hope," Jesus said. "They say that hope cannot be found with a surgeon's knife. A dead person has sometimes died through the process of releasing hope, albeit involuntarily. People have seen this hope releasing. It is colored blue."
"Why blue?" Blind Jorge asked.
On the second day of the death rays, Napoleon left the cantina to help Angelina provision her canoe. She drifted away on another scientific expedition, with a group of British scientists who looked at us as if we were fools.
"Santiago," said El Brinco, "your daughter is extraordinarily brave."
At this, Lieutenant Hugo stood up. "Gentlemen," he said. "The time for defense is past. The first barrage of killer rays is over. It is time now to leave our bunker and find our airliner ourselves. Our country for our countrymen. Our dead for likewise. Our duty for the love of our mothers. Now, who volunteers to join in the official search and rescue?"
Everyone looked straight at Hugo and no one said a word. Hugo took this as if he had expected it. He turned to me. "You. I want to believe I can trust you."
I jangled my handcuffs. "Go ahead," I said. "Trust me."
"It is accepted military procedure to allow prisoners to regain their honor on dangerous missions. We march at dawn."
They all looked at one another and then cheered and called for beer. El Brinco ran out of beer that night, and we left the next day in the late afternoon to an absolute absence of fanfare.</doc></docx>