Why I quit politics

Of course you have to do something before you can quit it. I was a novice politician for almost a year in 1993, the year I ran for a seat on the Los Angeles School Board. I walked door to door, badgered people on the street, debated my opponent at public forums and on T.V. I talked to the newspapers, gave them statements, bios, photos. My opponent was the incumbent, well connected in Democratic circles through his political family, fast with facts and figures, thinner and younger than I.

From the start I had dumb luck. Most importantly, the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles, declined to make an endorsement in our race, although they had supported the incumbent in his first campaign. I would have been dead in the water against them.

I also had luck in packaging. I was a classroom teacher, and this turned out to be a greatly saleable ballot label against my opponent's "Board member" (Political operatives have learned about this, and will scrounge deeply to find any past connection between the classroom and their candidates).

I stumbled into a lucky situation with a political sign company. The first company I approached, a major one in L.A., had been stiffed by a series of candidates and was reluctant to commit to me. My father had loaned me two thousand dollars for my campaign, and I blurted out that I would pay this up front in the form of a cashier's check. Within two days hundreds of signs saying "Keep Askin' for Lasken" were all over the turf in contention (so called Region 5, the western edge of the city running north from Westchester to Chatsworth). Compounding this beginner's luck was what I found to be a striking naivety in seemingly sophisticated people. For instance, a school administrator, a follower of news and an activist in neighborhood politics, said in reference to the signs that she had no idea I had so much "support."

My timing with the issues was lucky. The opinion in the San Fernando Valley was almost entirely for breaking up the giant L.A. school district (second largest in the country after New York's), and the west San Fernando Valley, the part in Region 5, was the most intensely pro-breakup. The incumbent was not in a position to support breakup, and I had supported it for years.

The issue of bilingual education worked in my favor. Though I supported California's efforts to help non-English speaking children with native language support, I was opposed to the withholding of English language instruction until higher grades. This played well with voters, anticipating the landslide passage five years later of Proposition 227, which mandated English language instruction in addition to native language support. Newspaper editors, including the Times', liked the topic, and I was able to publish a series of articles on bilingual education; several appeared during the campaign.

One week before the election I got a call from a pro-choice organization. They had been planning to send thousands of mailers in support of the incumbent because he had paid them a sizable fee and, of course, was pro-choice. I had only evinced the latter virtue. It happened that someone in the incumbent's campaign had angered them, and they had decided to support me in the mailer for free.

Topping off my luck, I won a raffle that placed my name first among the seven candidates. The effect of " 1. Doug Lasken-Teacher" was hard to beat as product placement.

The result of my luck: I received 36,000 votes, coming in second behind the incumbent's 50,000 ( turnout was large in this election because of the Riordan-Wu race). Had I taken 1% more of his vote, we would have been in a run-off. The day after the election the L.A. Times referred to "...newcomer Doug Lasken's surprising showing."

I remember standing at a newsstand off Hollywood Boulevard at 6:00a.m. reading, with trembling hands, the Times' hopeful obituary of me. Something sank inside me. The Doors '"This is the End" comes to mind. I knew I would not "capitalize" on my dumb luck, but I did not know why. I did not know why I had, at that moment, quit politics.

Well, perhaps what I didn't know was how to say it. I'm going to try to say it now: Politicians can't say "I don't know."

Politicians, in fact, can't say much at all of what they think. Well "Duh",you say. Yes, but when you're in a political situation where you're setting yourself up as the person who knows what's best, who has an answer to complex problems, there's a certain poignancy that comes with the knowledge that you're constructing a facade, a veil of words that sounds right, while the much vaunted human cortex watches as from the end of a long tunnel.

The above mental state was produced by certain types of questions, such as, "How would you increase test scores?" There is familiar boilerplate to deal with such questions: "Every student must receive quality instruction...We must have accountability and standards... Education must be our number one priority...", etc. Not that there is anything incorrect in such sentiments, but if they contained any important policy ideas we would be experiencing a much larger number of high scoring children. I did my best to sling a few slogans, and I used the English language instruction and breakup issues with some effect, but my brain was uncomfortable, my speech somewhat hesitant, and this perhaps cost me the 1% and the runoff.

Delving deeper into my uncooperative mind, I found something truly scary. It's not just that I wasn't in a position to say what I really thought about raising test scores. My hands hover now above the keyboard, waiting for a sign. No sign comes. Some muse has got me this far, but at the crucial moment she stands silent.

What the hell, here goes. Well you see, the thing is... I didn't really know how to raise test scores. I did believe that breaking up the district might improve efficiency, and that teaching English would improve English skills, but I wasn't completely sure test scores would go up significantly as a result. After all, when we talk about raising test scores we're not really talking about a few numbers going up; we're talking about real improvement in children's intellectual abilities. How do you get fifth graders in large numbers to know their times-tables, and remember them into secondary school? How do you get secondary students in large numbers to read books, really read them, from beginning to end? Why would a few corrective policy changes produce such profound educational outcomes?

Hindsight has justified the hesitation I felt during my campaign. Proposition 227 reinstated English instruction. A well funded "Standards" movement took hold in California and in much of the rest of the country, accompanied by millions of dollars in new textbooks and teacher training. There has been math reform, with renewed emphasis on basics. These reforms have helped a lot of kids, but they have not "raised test scores" in the real sense. In other words, although there have been small jumps in scores, there is no systemic, widespread change in our students. If you walk into a California classroom at random you are unlikely to find kids who can read well, or want to read, or who do math with the facility you find in Asia. Nor will you find this two years from now, or four years from now. It's not happening and it's not going to happen ("Race to the Top" notwithstanding).

Why not? Because the discussion is political, and therefore incomplete. Standards are important, and logical instruction is important. But those are the easy parts.

Back to the reporter asking me how I would raise test scores. Let's say a cosmic force had ordered me to tell the truth. What would I have said? I might have stammered, "Well... I'm not sure." The reporter's brain would then have closed my file, stamping "loser" on it. If he was polite, though, there would be a pause, and then I would begin to think. This in itself, the sight of a politician lost in thought while the world waits, is anathema to a successful image. But if the cosmic force could get everyone to wait a bit, I could have given a decent answer. The discussion might have gone something like this:

Me: Well, we have a fundamental disconnect between our media based culture and the school setting. Virtually every kid is taught by the media to gaze at colored images which ridicule schools and teachers. We have nothing effective to counter this. We have not figured out a modern motivation for students. The U.S.is one of the few countries in the world that has ruled out physical pain as an educational tool (Singapore, much admired by math reformers, achieves the highest secondary math scores in the world partly by beating underachievers with bamboo canes). We do rely on the psychological pain implicit in the report card grade, but because of grade inflation, rampant from kindergarten through graduate school, and the glorification in the media of school failure, grades alone have become a weak motivator for all but a few students.

Reporter: So you advocate beating our students?

Me: Of course not.

Reporter: Then what do you advocate?

Me: We've forgotten economic incentive.

Reporter: For teenagers?

Me: Yes. Our surplus based society has extended childhood, resulting in dependence on parents at later ages, but teenagers are in their physical and intellectual prime, and will remain so into their twenties. They are designed to create and work, but the automation that gave us our surplus has resulted in a more seriously underemployed society than we like to admit. There are over 100,000 gang members in L.A., but there are not 100,000 jobs for them, not even menial ones. The standard curriculum in high school does not relate directly to visible jobs. Perhaps shop and computer classes do, but the thousands of jobs it would take to rationalize that curriculum do not exist. Honors students, the handful of clever kids who know how they will work the system, put up with non job-related curricula because they see a path to employment based on grades and general literacy, but they too have to wait. It is arguable that one of the purposes of secondary school is to serve as a holding facility to keep teenagers out of the job market. The first several years of college may serve the same purpose.

Reporter: So...you would propose.....?

Me: Well, somehow we need to have an economy that can absorb many more teenagers and people in their early twenties, and a school system that clearly feeds into this economy. But our technology, automation, may have made this impossible.

Reporter: How do you propose to remedy this?

Me ( after very long pause): I don't know.

End of dialogue, and career. Even an answer like, " We will have to replace our world economy, built up in haphazard form over two hundred years of industrial revolution, with a completely new, rationally organized economy", impractical as it might be as a campaign position, would be better than "I don't know." Anything is better than "I don't know."

It might seem strange to an extraterrestrial visitor from an advanced civilization that we have no place in our public discourse for "I don't know", since we so often, clearly, don't know, but it's basic human psychology at work. Management theorists have shown that leaders get approval for making decisions, for being decisive, regardless of the results (advice routinely followed by our politicians). This is understandable given the human condition. We really don't know what we are supposed to do on this earth, or even if we are supposed to do something. If our leaders admitted this in public, society at large might collapse in terror. Still though, it can be something of a hindrance to problem solving to maintain at all times that soothing platitudes are solutions.

So after a refreshing brush with the fast lane, I returned, sober but wiser, to the classroom, where I find I can say "I don't know" a lot,to students, to parents, to my colleagues, and they don't seem to mind. Hey wait a minute, these people vote, or will vote...Hmmm.

Bad Words

Isn’t it odd that a word can be bad? Odd, that is, that the word itself is bad, not its referent. And odd that there’s no clear logic behind the bad word’s badness. For instance, “murder” and “torture” refer, in most people’s minds, to bad things, but the words are not bad. The word “cunt,” however, is bad, though it doesn’t refer to anything bad, unless you’re going to say, which nobody does, that vaginas are bad. How would you explain such discrepancies to a little kid whom you had just chastised for blabbing “cunt” after hearing the older kids say it? Actually, of course, we never have to explain such subtleties to kids because they instinctively understand the badness of certain words. But what is it that they understand? And what do we adults understand about what they understand?

Let’s stay focused on “cunt” for a moment. I took as a given that humankind do not consider vaginas to be bad. History shows us, though, that the truth is not so simple. Christian Konrad Sprengel, German naturalist, was the first academician to suggest that flowers are sexual organs. For his pains he was hounded out of polite society and his work vilified. Today it is common knowledge that a wholly female flower is a type of vagina, that male-only flowers are types of penises, and hermaphroditic flowers are cocks with pussies attached that fuck themselves.

Sorry for the cheap shock value of my prose, but I’m trying to make a point. Sprengel turned “flower” into a bad word.

And now full disclosure: As an elementary and high school teacher I strove for years to dissuade children from saying bad words that denoted just such items as penises and vaginas. In this essay I ponder what I was trying to accomplish, and I hope you will find my musings edifying.

I’m one of those crossover people who remember bygone eras. In 1955 my family went to see “Picnic” because we’d heard that William Holden said “damn” (my parents were always looking for the cutting edge). A hushed, almost worshipful audience awaited the big moment, and when the word was uttered a gasp in unison pervaded the theater. The movie producer’s gamble had paid off: box office dividends from a bad word. Few at that time realized that the “damn” was about to burst (sorry).

Not long after this experience my friend John and I distinguished ourselves among our fellow 5th graders by creating the Swearing Club. No one could join unless they walked around the playground swearing with us. One day I said “poop” to Allison Rene (whose mom was a teacher) as she ostentatiously read Shakespeare in class. She recoiled at my foul mouth (evidently not having understood the obscene jokes with which the Bard peppered his opus) and informed the principal. I was summoned shortly to his office, where he allowed me to sit in anxious silence for some moments before uttering, “Do you know why you’re here?” I did indeed. The principal called my father, who, as Mr. Goddam This and Goddam That, was not sure how to handle my trespass. Finally he formulated a lecture in which I gathered that I couldn’t swear because I was a kid. I asked why kids couldn’t swear. His answer, as I recall, was something along the lines of, “Because they’re kids.” The issue was not settled in my mind.

Fast forward to San Francisco State, 1969, and my Chaucer professor has just charged breathlessly into the classroom. Instead of giving us a page number to find, he asks us if we’ve heard what’s going on at U.C. Berkeley. Mario Savio and an army of dedicated young people have taken a stand for free speech, he informs us. We can say “fuck” if we want to! The rest is history.

Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Thank you Mario!

Flash forward again to 1983, when, as a new elementary school teacher in inner-city L.A. I face a demure little black girl who, standing before my desk, has just said, “fuck.” There is no context, just the word, hanging understated in the air. I track down the mother’s work number and call. The mother’s response: “Let me get this straight. You called me at work to tell me my daughter said ‘fuck’?”

“Er…yes…” I stammer, and realize that my approach to the zeitgeist needs adjusting.

Fast forward a few years and I’m a high school English teacher. I hear “mother-fucker” all day long and don’t bat an eyelash.

So what gives? Are words that were once bad no longer bad? Maybe we need to look again at the 60’s. The liberation of speech was part of a broader liberation that was largely sexual. Intercourse was good; therefore fucking was good. This might explain some of the dynamics, but not all. For instance, I don’t recall in hippie dogma any apotheosis of excrement. Hippies still, for the most part, hid themselves away while defecating, wiped themselves clean as a whistle afterwards, and did not excessively talk about the act, at least not in celebratory tones. Yet these days, as we all know, "shit” happens, especially in movie comedy, where many of the lines previously reserved for clever jokes are now covered by the phrase, “holy shit!” drawn out, to increase the hilarity, to "Hooooly Shit!"

Thus it is not sufficient to explain the badness of bad words as an attitude towards their referents. There must be something else.

I offer the Norman invasion, at least for the English language. The Normans spoke French (though they were only two generations removed from their Viking ancestry) and imposed their language on Anglo-Saxons, whom they despised beyond words, especially four letter words. The Anglo-Saxons said things like “fuck” and “shit,” scum that they were, while the Normans, heirs to Latin, could say, in the French versions, “copulate” and “defecate.” Thus Mario’s battle for free speech carried on a thousand year struggle for the Anglo-Saxons’ right to speak the mother tongue.

What to make of all this? Bad words will continue to upset and delight regardless of analysis. Perhaps, ultimately, we think a word is bad just because everyone around us does. What else could explain why the English think “bloody” is a bad word and Americans don’t? The essential concern seems to be a matter of style.

In the high school portion of my teaching career I was able to formulate a policy on bad words for my students. “Plethora,” I told them, is a bad word because it’s ugly and every high school student’s idea of impressive vocabulary, and I forbade its use ("deontological" would be my pick today). Words are not really good or bad, I told them. They are just useful or not. They are useful if they carry meaning and force; they are not useful if they don’t. If I have to hear “mother-fucker” all fucking day, then that phrase is not useful. If you only use it once in a while, well then, maybe….

Extreme Friendliness Disorder

The dog pees in big puddles
in the hall, down from our room
seeming to punctuate, to add something,
but I don't want to complain-
dog pee is just, just to get me
sitting in the vet's waiting room,
where I read "Bark" magazine.
As if a human magazine, as if The New Yorker
should be called "Speech Magazine."
Ha! Ha! Bark! Bark!
And it seems the domestic dog originated
in the Middle East, not Asia,
but the real bark of the study was that
Williams Syndrome, which brings the curse of
Extreme Friendliness Disorder
is traceable, can be seen in dog genes;
Bark magazine does not deal, I think, in irony
in sadness.
Domestication a syndrome
Civilization a disorder
Friendliness a...oh God no...
My tail is wagging

Beware: English Teacher!

Why is it, I’ve often wondered, that when I tell people at parties that I’m a high school English teacher, even adding, since June, that I’m retired, I note a brief wave of anxiety cross their faces? You’d think people would be delighted to have the opportunity to talk to someone who really knows which predicate nominative to use after a copulative verb. But something dawned on me yesterday, during a silence after I’d said, “This is he” to someone who’d asked for me on the phone. Had I really just burdened some poor sod with the equivalent of “This is he whom you’ve called”? Far from erudite, it sounds like Lily Tomlin’s operator asking, “Is this the party to whom I’m speaking?”

It got worse later in the day when I was reading an article about California Governor Schwarzenegger’s attempts to find the state ways to save money. The Governor was quoted as saying, "We literally have to take the ladder from the tree and shake the whole tree." My response: "Really, you're going to literally shake a tree?" Wouldn’t a normal person have wondered how we could balance the books without impacting the needy? Is it really necessary to put Arnold back in the 8th grade for a lesson on the difference between metaphorical and literal?

Here’s the horror of it: “Yes,” I think, “he should be taught the difference.” No kidding, a little creature within me believes someone should advise Arnold about his violations of figurative speech. “That settles it!” you say, “English teachers are like cops who give you a ticket for being the third car in the intersection to turn left while five people just ran a red light with impunity. They’re like robots turned loose on society to keep anyone from saying, ‘She went to the mall with my friend and I.’”

But I protest back that it’s a quality-of-life issue. There are few things more grating on the ears than “I” used as an object. It’s right up there with leaf-blowers. Really, English teachers should be protected from the effects of thoughtless speech. Perhaps disability coverage could be extended to include stress caused by extended exposure to bad usage. Who knows what damage has been done to my nerves over the years I’ve endured “I could care less,” knowing that the speaker means the opposite, that he or she could in fact NOT care less. Or the sleepless nights I suffered knowing that the use of “like” as a replacement for “said” and “all” as a replacement for “emphatically,” as in, “She’s all like ‘I’m not going,’ and I’m all like ‘Yes you are!’” had crept up from the rebellious realms of teenage girl-speak to the very boardrooms and press conferences of the nation! How fruitless were my years spent exhorting America’s youth to communicate clearly and logically! I need the state to cover the skyrocketing prescription costs of sedatives to help me face the demons that mock me in the night. Yes, they mock me, calling out, “Mr. Lasken, behold, if ‘like’ is now synonymous with ‘said,’ and everyone understands it, then your mandate that speech be meaningful has been obeyed! You protest for naught.” And it does not end there. These studious demons torment me with knowledge. “Consider,” they cajole, “that ‘good-bye’ used to be ‘God be with you,’ and you, would-be defender of the faith, would have done your darnedest to have halted that natural progression. See and be doomed! Ha-haaaaaa!”

Silence, demons! I’ll hear no more! Don't you see? It’s continuity I crave, not obstruction. U can change the language all u want, as long as ur aware what’s behind ur usage. Is that 2 much 2 ask?

Personal Inflation (X-rated)

One of the most convenient targets of moral outrage these days is the “obscene” remuneration for corporate CEO’s. “Obscene” is in quotes, not because I disagree with the usage, but because it’s worthwhile to take a look at the word. It’s from the Greek “obscaenus,” meaning the familiar “abominable, repulsive,” but also, surprisingly, “ill-omened.” I propose, in light of this, that in addition to the moral repulsion we feel when a CEO’s pay goes up while share prices go down, we also feel a dread based on our perceptions of the CEO’s "ill-omened" mental state.

Not that overpaid CEO’s are crazy. You have to be pretty sharp to be where they are, and to remain there. But they suffer, in my view, from what I term “personal inflation.”

I define the phrase as a devaluation of one’s personal property, including physical possessions as well as currency, caused by overabundance. Thus, after you’ve made your first $1 million, that million does not have the value that it would for a struggling middle-class family. In fact, it is no longer $1 million. It may in its new form represent an embarrassingly puny sum, compared with the vaster earnings of your new peers. And it doesn’t matter what you buy with your million. A Lexus? A comfy spread in Malibu? These too will be devalued. You’re still keeping up with the Joneses, just new Joneses. So, when someone who is already among the richest people on earth, possibly among the richest people who have ever lived, spends his or her days in frantic search of new ways to squeeze profit from stones, that person is, in his or her mind, a pauper, a subsistence laborer one mistake away from utter ruin.

What does this mean for the struggling middle-class family, or for a family below the poverty line? Why should they worry about personal inflation?
They should worry because personal inflation is a reality at all levels of American society. During my 25 years teaching in public schools, I observed that kids in the free lunch program commonly owned, first movie cassettes, and later DVD’s, implying VCR’s and DVD players at home. The typical low-income kid today owns hundreds of dollars worth of cell phones and Ipods. The point is not that our low-income kids are not really low-income. Their families do face privations, often in critical areas such as health care. But they take as a given ownership of much expensive gadgetry that would have enthralled the wealthy classes of the past. And most of our low-income people are not low-income in the sense that people are in much of the rest of the world, where low-income entails starvation at worst, and at best an entire family sharing the cell-phone (Indian cell phones are now equipped with separately programmable contact lists to accommodate multiple users). But ownership of one’s own cell phone is scant comfort to a low-income kid in America, because personal inflation has devalued the cell phone. Everyone has one; it’s not an element of wealth.

The middle class as well has been hit with personal inflation. The subprime mortgage debacle was made possible by the expectation that the entire middle class is in a position to own a home. Descent to mere apartment dwelling is not taken here as the incredible boon of security that most of the world judges it.

Personal inflation is a worldwide phenomenon, but it has hit the U.S. hardest because of our unprecedented wealth. The post World War II abundance has been so extensive that almost no one has been immune to its effects, and no one knows anymore what the term “luxury” means. Is a cell phone a luxury? What kind of deprivation would it bring to deprive your child of the ability to text? Forget texting; how about indoor plumbing? Poverty used to entail an outhouse and a long schlep to the well with a bucket. Now everyone in the poorest part of town in any American city has a toilet and a tap. It means nothing. The point was brought home to me during a tour of Warwick Castle in England. High in the battlements I discovered the “throne” where King Henry II, among many notables, relieved his royal bowels: an outdoor stone bench with a round opening above a stinking shaft where one heard one’s productions splash into a stagnant pool 100 feet below. Tourists are left to speculate on the nature of the king’s toilet paper, but it’s a safe bet he did not need to be exhorted not to squeeze the Charmin. Nor was there evidence of hand washing facilities.
We now perform our ablutions in a luxury that no king’s treasury could have purchased, but does it make us feel better? Does a trip to the bathroom assuage the rage we feel at the thought of what Goldman Sachs rakes in? No! CEO’s, in fact, use the executive washroom! They have a special key! Storm the Bastille!

What should we do about our personal inflation? Each of us could take a moment to give thanks for our toilet, but I have a special idea for our villainous CEO’s: Meditate on the illusion that your money has lost its value. You are rich; get over it. Then try to figure out how you can use your wealth to help mankind avoid the dangers it appears to be heading for. And make sure we all hear about your efforts, so we can stop worrying about the obscenities.

Our Age

We talk about the Stone Age, Iron Age, etc., identifying the people who lived at those times with their artifacts. We believed for several decades that we lived in the Atomic Age, but that seems to have passed as we've sought ways to fight each other without atom bombs, and ways to generate power without atomic reactions. It's going to be tough to replace "Atomic Age," though, because the changes are so rapid. The Stone Age lasted tens of thousand of years, but our ages last barely decades. We left the Phonograph Age to become the Magnetic Tape Age and then the CD age. We left the Film Age for the VCR Age and then DVD Age. I guess right this second we're in the Internet Age.

The fact is, though, that none of these designations depicts the people in them. In other words, I'm the same human sample now as I was when I banged away in a dank cave on a typewriter, or listened with grunting sounds to my primitive stereo. I don't want a future investigator of our junk to identify me with it. My life goes on fairly independently of all this clutter. I think I'll go for a walk and celebrate "The Age of Walking."

Stoic Irony in Guatemala

The question of where my family would go in the summer of '07 was answered by an invitation from a fellow high school debate coach to her August wedding in Guatemala. Post Gonzales-Gate terror alerts notwithstanding, we made the travel arrangements.

Part of the preparation for me was formation of focus questions, as we say in the teacher biz. Since the trip included a bus tour- with the wedding party- of the country’s Mayan past, my question became: “What can I learn from contemplating a vanished civilization?” and its companion, “Can I glean clues from my travels as to the likelihood that my ‘civilization’ may be vanishing?” I collected literature on the Mayan past and learned from my readings that the Maya were a highly clever people who were able to develop a surplus out of the meager Mesoamerican soil. The surplus led to a stratified society, with a leisure class. As in all leisure classes, high priests evolved who codified and formalized a system of belief around a core myth. For the Mayans, the core myth was that the gods created the world and people by committing suicide, for people consume the gods in the form of maize. This debt to the gods must be repaid with varying levels of sacrifice. When the debt is deemed in severe arrears, a human sacrifice might be in order. Candidates for sacrifice were culled from the nobility ( a practice we have clearly abandoned). In cases of more quotidian debt, the high priest could make lesser offerings, for instance he might stand on the summit of the ziggurat and cut his penis, letting blood drip onto a piece of bark. The blood was then cooked over a wood fire, generating an energizing smoke for the languishing gods.

Lest anyone jump ahead and conjecture that Mayan “civilization” vanished because it was abhorrent or oppressive, keep in mind that at the time of its pre-Columbian demise, around 900 AD, it had run many hundreds of years longer than any of the present western “civilizations.”

A note: I have put the words “civilized” and “civilization” in quotes throughout this essay. Although a working definition of “civilized” is easy enough to come by (my own is: “A civilized society is one in which people are kept from killing each other to the extent that a leisure class can be sustained”), the word has a positive connotation that has never, to my knowledge, been adequately explained.

So the departure day arrived, and I made my first mistake. I had been on cold-turkey withdrawal from the newspaper horoscope section-almost two weeks!- my fortitude maintained by a deep embarrassment that I could be manipulated by so obvious a scam, when as we were heading out the door I saw the paper open to the horoscopes (Susan does the crossword puzzle cunningly tucked into the same section), and I weakened and took a peek: “Not a good day for an outward journey. Take an inner trip instead.” I slapped my head, “Doh!”, Homer Simpson style. Rationalizing quickly, I reminded myself that the Mayans were obsessed with time, as measured by their complex, double-wheeled calendar. Each day had its own gods and purposes, which the priests could interpret for the people. Surely this was a grand precedent for our watered down divinations.

As it happened, the horoscope did not seem far off. Our American Airlines flight to Dallas, for a connecting flight to Guatemala City, was delayed for three and a half hours. We missed the connecting flight and spent a night in the Dallas Ramada Inn, where, at 5:00am, I encountered a hung-over young man in the internet room resting his forehead against a wall. The point of the airline experience is that, just as there is speculation that the Mayan priestly class could not fend off hypothetical ills of Mayan life, so the longevity of our “civilization” might be forecast by gauging slips in what we call “service.” Specifically, in this case, service to the middle class. It doesn’t matter which airline we used; stories from other travelers illustrated a problem across all carriers: If your flight has no trouble, the service is excellent; if there is a problem, you might as well not exist. I refer not to the flight’s being late (that was caused by weather) but to the void in communication and assistance that ensued. The fault lies not with people in the field. The exhausted airline employee who faced us and about 80 other passengers, none of whom had any idea what to do or where to go, was knowledgeable and hard working. The problem lay with her bosses in the priestly class, the CEO’s, who left her, and us, hanging over a pit of uncertainty for many hours until we could sort things out for ourselves. Of course, given the big picture of global misery, one doesn’t want to whine too much because one’s trip to Guatemala is delayed, but trends are important, and decline in service to the middle class is not a good trend.

Through perseverance, then, we arrived at Guatemala City Airport in late afternoon of our second day, to the sight of hundreds of grim faced young men decked out in battle fatigues with automatic weapons at the ready. They were stationed everywhere around the airport, but an especially grim detachment greeted us at customs. Clearly anyone who screamed, “I’m a terrorist and I’ve got a bomb” would be shot on the spot. We remained dutifully silent, covertly doing what we could against the indigenous sport of cutting in line, proffering our papers and flirting with friendly custom agents where possible, and soon we found ourselves in the chaotic baggage claim area.

A quick negotiation got us a cab for the 40 kilometer trip to Antigua, the site of our friend’s wedding. The cab trip brought us immediate exposure to Guatemala’s upcoming national elections. Everywhere in the noisy urban sprawl of Guatemala City, and even in the mountain pass leading to Antigua, were campaign posters. All the exhibited candidates were male, ranging from twenty-something to middle aged, and all were smiling as with some delightful secret. The messages were not revealing of intention. The image of a man named Colom grinned over the caption,“Viva Guatemala!” Victor Hugo’s proclaimed, “Puede!" while former General Molina held out a stern "mano dura" which promised order of some sort. We picked a poster at random and asked the driver if he liked the guy; he laughed and said, “No.”

The final winner in the runoff three months later, by the way, was Colom, popular in rural areas. He beat Molina, popular in the crime weary cities, which wanted his "hard hand." People in the provinces feared the hard hand would be a return to military rule. Colom in turn had to fight charges that a study he made of Mayan religious rites showed he was an agent of the devil. That had apparently played well in the cities. By the end of the election process, there had been 50 election related killings. The devil vs. the devil?

Children learn that the Greek’s invented democracy. Is this what they invented, a flash of handsome face and a sound bite, a moment of choice, then life goes on? It was hard to see any outward differences between the Guatemalan democracy and ours, other than the death count. In either case, it’s a match of pretty faces shouting, “Puede!” Were there any clues to our future health in this system? Maybe we can go on indefinitely with “democracy.” We can only hope.

The first sight of Antigua, the old Spanish capitol, made the hours of aggravation worthwhile. Guatemala has 30 volcanoes, and three very large and looming ones surround Antigua. At intervals they smoke like chimneys, and every few hundred years they provoke intense earthquakes, wiping out the contemporary incarnation of Antigua. The pastels of the low buildings, the majestic and crumbling cathedrals, the scarlet sunset behind the volcanic cones: if this is “civilization,” play on!

We were brought sharply out of our reveries by a sudden halt to the bumpy drive over cobbled streets. At every turn that could have led us to the Hotel Santo Domingo, the ritziest hotel in the country and site of the wedding, we were blocked by armed soldiers, seeming extensions of those in the airport. Our driver haggled with them to no avail, and finally we were told to take our luggage and walk a block up to the hotel entrance. As we trudged past the soldiers, we encountered no smiles; they assiduously did not look at us. I noticed their fingers rested on their triggers. Ethnically they appeared Mayan, but I was told later the army is mostly mestizo. At the hotel entrance, men in black suits talked incessantly into headsets, looking nervously everywhere except into our eyes. At all times during our three day stay at the hotel, the soldiers and men in black were there. The initial explanation offered by the concierge was that there was an international agricultural conference at the hotel. It was not until the day of our departure that we learned that one of the guests was the vice president of Colombia, although nowhere in the country did we see signs of a seething hatred for this man, or even knowledge that he existed.

Several shops near the hotel featured photos of Bill Clinton sampling their wares during a trip in the 90’s. No clue if the army was out front during these photo-ops, but if they were, I would think it would have ruined his trip.

Lesson for civilization in the grandiose “protection” we saw? Constant encirclement by armed troops seems more a sort captivity for leaders than a protection, almost making them appear candidates for sacrifice. Modern “elections” may be a ritualized sacrifice, in which we decide, not so much who the new leaders will be, but whom we get rid of. If the U.S. polity is smart, the next presidential election will feature a Republican candidate closely associated with Bush, so that the electorate can experience his sacrifice. The victorious Democrat, a smiling face shouting “Puede!” will represent, simply, the new.

[Update, 4/11, The victorious Democrat is Obama, shouting something very like "Puede!" to the masses, who have been encouraged to identify him with a popular rebellion]


There’s another aspect of Guatemala’s generous use of its army. The country is still recovering from its 36 year civil war, which ended only in 1996. These grim soldiers with their automatic weapons may or may not face real enemies now, but they face real psychological stresses. The memory of bloodshed lingers with or without an enemy. The ubiquitous troops, found as well in jewelry shops and pharmacies, may be this society’s way of absorbing post traumatic stress syndrome.




Meanwhile, we quickly discovered that the Hotel Santo Domingo is one of the great hotels of the world. It is built among the ruins of a 17th Century monastery. Baroque chamber music plays softly in the long halls and in the ruins. The reconstructed church conducts mass on Sunday. There are niches by the door of each guest room where stand 16th and 17th century Spanish carvings.

The wedding ceremony was held in the chapel, much of whose walls are from the original four hundred year old chapel. The new walls are beautifully integrated with the old. It’s hard not to believe that a wonderful hotel like this would not prolong the life of the “civilization” that produced it.

Every culture needs to produce something beautiful, or at least impressive, to look at, if only a hundred foot statue of its leader. Guatemala might subsist indefinitely on its beauty alone.

The several hotel museums are wonderfully arranged, with compelling exhibits, though sometimes the English captions seemed to either lose, or gain in the translation. My favorite was the caption below a mural of ancient Mayans toiling to build a temple: “The Mayan gods were benevolent if offered human sacrifices.” Doh!

The wedding ceremony was conducted by an attorney friend of the bride’s family. She created an amalgam of Jewish, Catholic and New Age sentiment for the occasion. At the end of the ceremony, she explained that the groom, a Guatemalan, would perform the Jewish ritual of stepping on the wine glass (the bride was Jewish), after which, she said, we could choose to shout “Mazaltov!” “Felicidad!” or “Congratulations!” My colleague Cheryl, back home, had an epiphany after reading Strindberg’s “A Dream Play,” the message of which was that the most productive type of spirituality is “hybridity,” where the seeker “wishes to pick and choose idols of worship and beliefs to espouse without the stale, enduring, bland template decreed by an official institution.” It sounds like an evolutionary, flexible approach. Yet which lasts longer, rigid theocracies with armed guards, or intellectual, hybridistic societies? (Of course this question begs another: Is the best society that which lasts longest?).

Antigua is a wonderful place to walk, though you have to walk carefully (the sidewalks are as uneven as the cobbled streets). On one stroll through the central plaza I came upon a bookstore with outrageously priced paperbacks in English (average price: $60-$70). The books were encased in cellophane so I couldn’t browse them for free, but the book jackets were intriguing enough. Most were about the U.S., specifically CIA complicity in the horrors endured by Guatemala. There was much about United Fruit and the coffee business. The picture was of an indigenous people brutally enslaved by American business interests, with puppet governments ensconced or removed by the CIA. Not for the first time I searched my inner self for guilt or lack thereof. None of my ancestors owned slaves, or shares of United Fruit, yet I live, and eat fruit, where Native Americans were wiped out; I benefit from an economy held afloat by military expenditures. Where is this guilt supposed to lead? If people are to be subjected to guilt, then there’s no end to the fallout, because guilt envelops everyone, the ostensibly downtrodden too. Can a society collapse from guilt, like Hamlet’s stepfather? Did guilt weaken the rulers of the classic Maya?

Another book brought me out of my dour meditations. It was by an American who claims to have discovered that the Mayan accounting of time was based on the real thing, what he called “synchronistic time,” while ours, based on the Gregorian calendar, is fake. Further, the events of 9/11 created a rupture in our fake time, a sort of opening into Mayan real time, and this is a moment of opportunity, which we must not miss (price of book: $65). This, I felt, was not so much hybridization as wishful thinking. That doesn’t make it wrong, just overpriced.

Moving on I found a box of old American paperbacks, reasonably priced for the relics they were. I spent $2 for a 1970 science fiction anthology, edited by Robert Silverberg, called “World’s of Maybe,” featuring stories about alternate universes. The first story, “Sidewise in Time,” by Murray Leinster, first published in 1935, was about a “timequake” that hits the earth. The quake causes various time periods to violate their natural borders, so that a Roman phalanx finds itself marching down the street in a 20th century American suburb, etc. This seemed the perfect reading material for Guatemala, which is itself the product of merging realities, the converging point of five tectonic plates, its volcanoes connecting earth and heaven, all in a temporal stew where Mayan (synchronistic?) time merges with colonial and current time.

The moral, though, for our purposes, is that a society with cheaply priced goods is more likely to survive. The delight I found in my $2 book erased all the guilt of my former reverie. When cell phones and airline tickets are too expensive for the middle class, you can start counting the days.

The day after the wedding we boarded a chartered bus with the wedding party for a tour of Guatemala. We were 31 people in what amounted to a group-honeymoon, a charming and, we felt, practical idea (no room for fights between the newlyweds, no longing for the family). The first stop was Quirigua, where a king from the north conquered the area, killed the former king and his family and commissioned large stelae to proclaim his greatness. Nearby was a ballcourt for the famous game of “fireball” in which a solid ball of burning rubber had to be hurled through hoops, soccer-like without use of arms, with the loser sacrificed to the gods. Mayan society was certainly not utopian, in the sense of “good,” though it was arguably “good” in the sense of “long lived” (almost 1,000 years). On the other hand, as the apotheosis of macho culture, it might be called “good” by some. Be this as it may, a question appears: is classical Mayan culture gone because of a deficit in its governance, or because it’s, well, gone, as everything is sooner or later gone? Will we be gone because we’re making mistakes, or because everything is sooner or later gone? I searched Quirigua vainly for answers (the gloom only partially lifted by our calling out “Stellaaaa….!” Tennessee Williams style).

The next two nights were spent on the River Dulce in a steamy little cabin, the first night especially steamy because our air conditioning unit broke. Tropical downpours alleviated the heat and humidity at intervals, but most of the night was spent in frantic claustrophobia, minimally relieved by staring at a white gecko adhering to the ceiling. The saving grace was a dream I had in the early morning, engendered, so I thought, by the heat. This dream seemed in the form of a docudrama showing that Hitler had come to Hollywood in the 20’s, for unknown reasons. I watched as he fell into a scuffle with local toughs around Highland and Hollywood Blvds. It could be that a culture can be saved by its dreams (I totally reject recent revisionist “research,” funded by pharmaceutical companies in their quest to make psychology an affair of drugs, which claims to show that dreams are meaningless trash, which the mind must dispose of. Trash, maybe-meaningless, no), but this dream got me nowhere.

In between the two nights on the River Dulce we took a boat to Livingston, on the Caribbean. On the way we stopped at an island riddled with caves. A local man led us about 40 feet into one narrow passage that opened up into a small cavern. He flashed his light and we could see other passages leading off into darkness. He mentioned the Maya coming here, and I could feel the sweat dripping down my body, and I thought I might feel the closeness of forces watching, waiting, very patient. Were these forces human? Was my sense wishful thinking, the most disheartening of all possibilities? Actually, I felt no force, just the suggestion of how likely a place this would be to find a force. Still, places with perceived “forces” are necessary for a culture, are they not? What would we do in the San Fernando Valley, a place devoid of obvious “forces” (unless you count the 5,000 year old Chumash well, commemorated with an iron grate in the parking lot of the Pick ‘n Save in Encino) without the nearby Santa Monica Mountains, beautiful beyond words where extant.

Livingston, accessible only by boat, is home to descendants of black slaves shipwrecked off the coast, many of whom intermarried with Amerindians. They speak a language called Garifuna, a mixture of African and Amerindian languages. The groups of black teenagers we saw were very attractive, but not outwardly friendly. In a few cases we heard muted conversation as we passed and then raucous laughter from behind. We spent a hot afternoon there amongst lovely pastel colored plaster houses and quiet streams, covered everywhere with junk and debris. Our boys left us to swim at the beach. We strolled about and I noticed that for the first time on our trip there was an election poster for a female candidate: the indigenous activist Rigoberta Menchu. We surmised that Livingston was a restive place. While wandering, I opened the Triple A book and read that Livingston is full of dangers: thieves everywhere, with armed robbery common on the beach, and the sea contaminated with “jungle runoff” and unsafe for swimming. It was then I realized that in spite of the heat, we had not seen a single person, other than our boys, in the water, or even on the sand, on any beach around the city, and we had passed families of pigs wandering down the residential streets, over gutters that no doubt fed into the sea. I rushed back to find the boys about 100 feet out in the shallow sea, very happy and reluctant to come ashore. When they finally rambled out I gave them the sober news, which they found unimpressive. “What a cool beach,” they agreed. For several weeks I watched for signs of cholera, malaria, salmonella, anything, in the boys, but nothing appeared. Surely it’s a sign of a culture’s probable decline when its most valuable assets cannot be used. And yet, the people in Livingston seemed happy, and we heard no reports of people leaving.

On then, the next morning, to the big prize, Tikal. But just as Dorothy and her friends had to pay a heavy price to enter the Palace of the Wizard, visitors to Tikal are referred to a nasty little town called Flores, full of natural beauty it has no right to. A small island in Lake Peten Itza, with a short bridge attaching it to land, Flores receives its manna from visitors to Tikal. Shopkeepers look at you with a sharp eye and sly smile and say “Tikal?” as if to say, “You idiot.” With the exception of the wonderful Luna Café, which has soulful food and plays beautiful Latin music, the restaurants are indifferent to the finer points of cooking, and of hygiene (bathrooms offer a common hand towel for customers). There is a general worship of noise for its own sake: at 5:00a.m. a boy riding sidesaddle on a motor scooter behind his mother repeatedly screams that he has the new La Prensa; cars speed about through the day blasting election propaganda; even the gas company truck sports speakers that blare some sort of gas related news. Still, there were many kind and charming people in Flores, and the invasive natural world often brought relief. Case in point, we had our first lunch on a floating platform (reached from the restaurant over a trackless construction zone) that bobbed gently on the lake. I spotted a storm to the south, and within minutes a mighty gale with horizontal rain was blasting through the unprotected platform, washing our tables clean and drenching us, as the smiling waiters wrapped up what food they could. It was pure magic, and on its own came close to redeeming Flores.

We assembled at 6:00am for the trip to Tikal. The early start was necessary to avoid the worst heat. The delightful Professor Merritt, of the Rhetoric Dept. (don’t ask) at UC Berkeley, long time friend of the bride’s father, and his witty wife Karen, sat across the aisle from us on the bus, and the professor told us the story of his sister’s childhood. She had the habit, as a young, headstrong girl, of tearing out each page of a book as she finished reading it, crumpling it up in one hand and tossing it in the trash. Often she would sit at the front of her class and offer the teacher an unrestricted view of this procedure. Not surprisingly, she was kicked out of a number of schools. What struck me was the Zen nature of her act. She was living entirely in the now. When a page was done, it was, well, done. How much more enlightened can you get?

To keep from becoming gloomy at the thought of how impractical enlightenment might be, I switched my attention to the current National Geographic, which I had bought at LAX because, coincidentally, its feature story was, “MAYA, How a Great Culture Rose and Fell,” with a photo of Tikal’s Temple of the Great Jaguar, lit up at night, on the cover. Much of the information was familiar: the temples were built during the classic period, around 600 to 900AD, and were mysteriously abandoned, as were all the Mayan cities in Mesoamerica, sometime after 900. The main focus of the article was the current thinking about Fire is Born, the foreign king from Teotihuacan in the Mexican highlands, who conquered Tikal and is thought to be responsible for much of the classic splendor.

We stopped at the gate to the park and learned that the admission price had tripled that day. After much grumbling and counting of Quetzals, we entered and parked. I was excited, though I had a nagging fear that I would once again suffer what I call the Sistine Chapel effect, which I experienced in Rome four years earlier. After marching through the labyrinthine Vatican museum and using up all my art appreciation neuroreceptors (and tolerance for crowds) on the stunning 19th Century collection of Egyptian artifacts, I made it to the Sistine Chapel, looked up, saw God and Adam reaching out to one another, and felt…nothing. I had the same problem with the Mona Lisa. Maybe this should be called "Lack of Affect at seeing a Widely Celebrated Work of Art in Person Syndrome." How awful, I thought, if the Mayan temples of Tikal, subject of many a travel poster, did not move me. My anxiety was for nothing, though. Even the continual stream of sweat down my face did not impede my sense of amazement. These people created an overwhelming work of art to live in, and now it’s gone, the remains covered in dirt and jungle.
"You too will be gone some day," the place seems to murmur. The Pick ‘n Save in Encino will be a piece of rebar sticking out of the ground. Someone will look about and ask, “What destroyed them?”

The Mayans had the same contempt for the past that we have in Los Angeles. The temples are not solid rock, like the Egyptian pyramids, but chambers filled with debris. The debris was produced by grinding up whatever structures the last Mayans in the area had built. I was upset when our city, without a moment’s hesitation, allowed the destruction of the Brown Derby restaurant, a landmark known throughout the world. But we did not just destroy it, we sacrificed it, we ate it, and it was subsumed along with the chaparral forests, and Chavez Ravine and the L.A. River into the new us.

Speaking of sacrifice, I pondered it as I stood atop the massive Temple IV, as it is academically known. Were beating hearts really cut out of chests up here?, I wondered. No one really knows, not even Mel Gibson, but the chances seem good. I wondered if the beliefs associated with this “primitive” site were so different from ours. There is sacrifice all over the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Maya believed that sacrifice was a repayment for the debt of existence. Were Adam's and Eve's bites of forbidden fruit attempts to exist physically, with the "knowing" that entails? Talk about the punishment fitting the crime- they were punished, sacrificed as it were, as we all have been, by the very granting of their wish. The pain of sacrifice, so essential to Jesus' story, may be the pain of separation from the physical and the "knowing." How fitting that "Nirvana" by extension connotes a state of oblivion. The joke will be on our kind if it turns out, after all our efforts, that there really isn't anything to know.

Walking back to the bus I tried to put it all together, but couldn’t quite. My meditations were relieved by spry spider monkeys lurching in the canopy above. At one point a remarkable creature, most likely, from what I’ve been told, a coatimundi, walked down the trail towards me and passed blithely on my left, flinching only when it sensed my uncertainty. Also adding to the ambiance was the cry of the howler monkeys, which turns out to be highly unpleasant and hostile, something between an angry lion and a wheezing gorilla.

That night, our last in Flores, I returned (when the frequently failing electrical power permitted) to the Silverberg anthology. It was diverting to find a 1955 parallel universe story by Poul Anderson, titled “Delenda Est,” (short for “Delenda est Carthago,” Latin for “Carthage must be destroyed!”) with a Mayan element. In this universe Carthage defeated Rome in the Punic Wars, and the result is a modern world in which the Germanic tribes of Europe are minimized and the Celts become dominant. The New World is re-discovered by Gauls in the 9th century, and this leads to the north American state of Afallon. This state is not able to wipe out indigenous culture, but merely stimulates it to compete. The “Mayan empire” thrives under the assault, and far from vanishing in the 10th Century, establishes an alliance with the southern kingdom of “Huy Braseal” and enters the modern age. Anderson’s point seems to be that a rival was the missing element in Mayan survival. The modern United States certainly seems to corroborate this view. What would we have done in the first post-war decades without the USSR? There would have been no space program, probably, but the more sober thought is that there may have been no coherent country. Now we have terrorism as our unifying force. If this is a lesson to be learned from the Maya, it’s a grim lesson.

The next morning our party left on the bus for Coban, but we and the Merritts stayed in Flores, as we had to be in Guatemala City the following morning for our flights home. On our shared van ride to the Flores airport, I regaled Professor Merritt with my theories, and he repaid me by sharing the book he was reading, “The Invention of Morel,” by Adolfo Bioy Casares. I flipped open the book to the introduction by Jorge Luis Borges and saw the phrase “stoic irony” and felt I would not have understood what it meant before this trip. At our bravest, we face the universe with stoic irony.

The twin-prop plane ride to the capitol was fun. The pilot expertly weaved back and forth between thunderheads, and we had a close- up view of the environs of Guatemala City. Of particular interest was the construction of houses along the ridges of hills, sometimes abutting sheer cliffs. Our Guatemalan host, the groom, had told us on the bus that these communities are built illegally, making major swaths of the city illegal. He told us that some such areas are the province of organized crime figures, so that it is not uncommon to find Mercedes parked outside on the dirt roads, and plasma TV’s in the corrugated tin roofed houses.

The trip concluded on a surreal note, as we had reserved a room for our last night at the Guatemala City Marriott. Walking into the shining, vast lobby was like falling into a mad dream of opulence. Employees were carefully respectful, lest we be billionaires. In the hotel restaurant, our waiter asked where we were from. He sounded very Angelino, and it turned out he was from San Bernadino. He told us Guatemala City, outside the environs of the hotel and airport, is a dangerous place, made safe where the army sets foot, but a free-for-all where they do not. He said the hotel sees a lot of adoption activity, legal and otherwise, and later we noticed a number of Caucasian women with brown babies. Our waiter said that $5,000 was the going rate for a Guatemalan baby.

Another bit of stoic irony, Mayan babies streaming into the U.S. Maybe those ancient sacrifices are paying off.

Our flights to Dallas and LAX were on time and flawless. My horoscope: “A good day to go home and think about the trip you were not supposed to take.” I had reached no conclusions, but my questions were clarified.