Lasken's Log

Why I quit politics

2011-04-25T15:21:00.001-07:00

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

2011-03-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

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

2011-01-03T22:10:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-05-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

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)

2010-05-10T18:13:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

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

2007-10-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

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.

What’s Scarier than an Atom Bomb?

2006-10-26T21:59:00.000-07:00

Although in much of the world Halloween is a “holy evening,” designed to console with thoughts of the afterlife, in American culture the goal is to titillate ourselves by dredging up our scariest thoughts of nihilistic mayhem: chainsaw murderers and the like. In a reversal of common wisdom, we reserve the scary images for the kids, leaving for the adults the task of handing out tooth decay pellets or attending ghoulish masquerades with erotic subtexts.

But why should the adults get all the fun? I propose that if the kids have to ritually accept scary images once a year, so should the adults. Such a transition would take some thought. Familiar emblems like the skeleton and black cat would not be effective for adults, associated as they are more with the candy section at Von’s than with deep fears. Adults should go with truly disturbing images and ideas, and there are plenty to choose from: North Korea with nukes, the continuing victory of mortality over science, President Bush grinning as if he knows something we don’t. The list could go on for many pages. Hmm…how to choose? What could be scarier than the atom bomb?

I submit that I have found it! I have stumbled upon the scariest thing in current society, in the October issue of the innocuous sounding British magazine “NewScientist.” Ironically it’s not in an article, but in an “advertising feature,” as it is tastefully labeled in small print. As I do when I come across these semi-frauds in American magazines, I immediately read the “contacts” box at the end. After the usual list of non-profits and benevolent sounding foundations, I came to the actual “author,” the giant pharmaceutical company Wyeth. Forewarned is forearmed, so I set in to lightly peruse the content, which starts off with a rather tedious review of prestigious neruological institutes around the world: their growing associations with universities and the booming demand for neuroscience researchers, accompanied with photos of dedicated men and women peering intently into test-tubes. I was about to quit the piece when, about halfway through, my attention was arrested by the heading, “Good memories.” There is no way to adequately convey what I read under that heading without a thorough quote. Warning: contains graphic language:

“…Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at the N.Y.U. psychology department is working at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience….Among other projects, Phelps works with her colleague Dr. Joseph LeDoux…[to] use converging techniques, including animal models, patient studies, pharmacology and brain imaging, to find out how our fears are learned….One particularly exciting angle…is a drug that may be able to alter unpleasant memories. ‘I have a postdoc looking at a method called reconsolidation that could perhaps alter fear-related memories in a way that could be clinically useful.’”

Getting the picture? Wyeth Labs is paying a magazine to trump a drug that will alter your memories. There’s more:

“Phelps says the great thing about reconsolidation...is that you wouldn’t have to take the drug immediately after the traumatic event that led to a bad memory-it would still be effective if you took the drug after recalling the trauma at a later date.”

What would you guess the odds are, gentle reader, that this drug would work on memories that were not “traumatic,” on all memories, in fact? This seemingly important question is not addressed in the "feature." And Wyeth, if I may be so bold as to identify the company with the text, leaves unexamined the logical images of non-clinical usage suggested by generations of science-fiction: the memory erasing bio-warfare agent, the hoards of amnesiacs trudging through a totalitarian state which publicly bemoans what it has secretly created.

Where are the headlines? We must endure weeks of reporting on our lack of options regarding North Korea’s nukes, while the real horror lies buried in an advertising supplement in a British science magazine: science is working on a way to erase people’s memories!

Happy Halloween!

Proof

2006-07-21T11:19:00.000-07:00

Why do we feel the need to prove things? What does it even mean to “prove” something? “To prove” comes from the Latin “to be in favor of,” so there is an element of contention in proof, as in courtrooms, scientific theories, and political ideas. And from the contention comes the concept that “proven” statements are, by definition, true. The question then becomes, how could a mere human be expected to know if something is true? Thankfully we don’t have to prove things in daily life. If I say, “Hey, I saw Margaret at the store this morning,” you would probably not demand that I prove it. It’s a good thing, too, because how would I prove it? I could say, “Because I saw her with my own eyes,” but you could respond, “You may have hallucinated it, or you might have seen Margaret’s twin sister,” to which I would respond, “Well, there were several witnesses there who will swear that Margaret was at the store and that I appeared to have seen her,” to which you might respond, “Oh yeah, well I have five witnesses who will swear that Margaret never set foot in that store,” and I might then respond that I took Margaret’s picture with my cell phone, to which you could rejoin, “You might have doctored the picture with photo-shop.” At this point I would call Margaret, or better yet drive you to her house, and ask her directly if she had seen me at the store this morning. If she replied “Yes,” I would feel I had “proven” that Margaret and I met at the store, though of course you could then question Margaret’s veracity or sanity.

The fact is, as renowned epistemologists have “proven”- at least to my satisfaction- you can’t prove things. What we mean by “proof” is “support,” so that you support your contention by giving indications that it is correct, but you don’t “prove” it in the sense that you have shown it to be true in some absolute sense.

There does seem to be a special situation in mathematics, where such propositions as the Pythagorean theorem appear to be established with an unusually high degree of certainty. Perhaps they are "proven" in some sense, although it may be that all that's proven is that we lack the brains to disprove them. Apropos of this, the Sept. , 2006 issue of NewScientist, in an aritcle entitled "Burden of proof," states that "mathematicians [in the modern realm of extensive computer mediated proofs] are finding it increasingly difficult to decide whether or not something has been proved," and are "beginning to engage with the increasingly complex issue of what exactly constitutes a proof." That's progress for you.
It is one of the ironies of the sport of debate, which I coach, that the debater must carry on a charade in which he or she appears to believe that a point has been proven, and that the opposition’s point has been refuted. The judge must decide which side gave the most compelling support, but as I tell my debaters, the judge is not deciding which side is “right,” i.e. which side has “proven” something. Recently in Dallas at the National Forensic League tournament, I judged 14 straight rounds of an event called Public Forum, each round with the same resolution: “Resolved, the United States should sign the Kyoto Protocol. “ Two teams of two debaters each first flipped a coin to decide who spoke first. The winner of the coin toss also picked the side it would argue, “aff” (affirmative) or “neg” (negative). Thus the system requires that each team have extensive cases to “prove” either side. At the end of the 14 rounds, I had heard enough aff and neg on the Kyoto Protocol to write a dozen articles, but I heard no “proof.” In fact, at the end of the crash course on Kyoto I was less able to decide my own view than before. There were simply too many pros and cons to mull over.

The question then arises, how is it that in spite of the seeming improbability of proving things, virtually everyone has definite opinions on controversial issues? For instance, if I were forced to make a snap decision on Kyoto, I would say that the U.S. should sign it. Why? Because the pressure to have an opinion and make a decision has forced me to pick the side that, according to my sense of balance and aesthetics, is more convincing. Or you could adhere, as my wife does, to the maxim that “opinions are like assholes; everybody has one.”

I would like to end this piece with the story of the morning doves who nested in a hanging plant on our front porch. The plant, “Superbells Cherry Red,” a Calibrachoa hybrid (a “proven winner,” ironically claims the nursery tag), requires watering every day, so it was a problem when I noticed one morning that a placid morning dove was sitting on a new nest within the slight shelter of the Superbells. How to water the plant without disturbing Mr. and Mrs. Dove? (they took shifts tending the nest). My friend Mark suggested that I stand several feet from the pot and create a light spray with the hose to simulate a refreshing rainfall. The first time I tried this Mrs. Dove watched me and asked what I was doing. “I’m trying to water this plant without disturbing you,” I replied. “All right,” she replied, “ I’ll put up with it this time, but I don’t think I’m going to be entirely comfortable with this every day.” Of course, this conversation was not effected via verbal English; it was transmitted entirely through eye contact, for the brief moments when such contact existed.

Some days Mrs. Dove (I never knew whether I was seeing the mother or father, but generally viewed the attendant bird as the mother) did not care at all for the shower, and flew away with the characteristic staccato chirp (supposed to be caused by the wing flaps). When the expected two white eggs appeared, I decided I didn’t want to shower them directly, so I approached the nest with the hose, and tentatively raised it and its gentle stream to the lip of the pot. My concern was that the sight of the hose would trigger some basic bird fear of snakes robbing nests, but Mrs. Dove told me that she knew it was not a snake because I was holding it. She also said that although we could never be friends, and that she would never consider affection or trust between us, she did understand that I was not a threat, that I wanted coexistence, that I even, in a sense, loved her. And indeed she sat patiently while I dipped the hose over the lip and poured water into soil adjacent to the nest.

When the fledglings appeared, I continued the water ritual, but the fledglings did not like it. As their awareness grew, when I came each day with the hose the dominant of the two would puff up and flap its wings in an instinctual threat gesture. Part of me wanted to say “Oh, I’m so scared!,” but I’m an educator and patience with the young is our calling.

One morning, two weeks after the eggs had hatched, one of the parents stood on the back yard fence, at eye level with me, as I opened the gate to get the morning paper. She told me, very quickly before chirping off, that this day was different, and that our collaboration was soon to be complete. The other bird, the father, I thought, looked up at me from the center of the driveway and confirmed the message, though more brusqely. The two fledgings eyed me steadily, telling me nothing. The next time I checked, a few hours later, the fledglings were gone, as were the parents.

What’s that you’re asking, “Can you prove you had those conversations with birds!” Well, no, but don't you hope I did?

Pelican and Sardine Mandala

2006-07-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I’ll start a personal tradition where I conjure up a new mandala each summer. Last August it came out of a cave in Mendocino. This July 3 it arrived off Pismo Beach pier. Coming down from Berkeley, where we visited our daughter, we were susceptible to suggestive elements, at least I was. Berekely is such a suggestive place anyway, where one minute you’ll be stunned by a giant redwood lurching up out of someone’s front yard and the next brought up short by a mad woman’s eyes. Berkeley is what Frank Lloyd Wright meant when he said L.A. is what you’d get if you tipped the nation to the left and all the loose pieces fell to the West Coast. I'm sure if pressed he would have continued that the pieces that couldn’t fit in L.A. would gravitate to Berkeley. So, to continue, once we were past San Jose on the drive south down the 101, the radio was overcome by rural California, with adds for “big” events in small cities, often involving cars. The biggest event, mentioned by the most stations, was the Fourth of July Fireworks at the Pismo Beach Pier, the following night. By the time we had dragged ourselves through the hot and featureless Salinas Valley (apologies to John Steinbeck- our view was limited to the 101) the promise of sea breezes was irresitible, and we headed into Pismo.

I had not expected the blocks of motels, but how else could the town have handled the throngs of inland tourists arriving for the 4th? At least the two short blocks of “downtown” had retained the charm I recalled, with old two story brick buildings and a carney atmosphere, though the old roller rink had been carved up into trendy stores. In a wink we were at the pier, and wonderful cool ocean air pummeled us. As we sauntered forth, we saw a novel sight: thousands of brown pelicans, wheeling in the sky, diving in groups, sitting placidly on the soft waves, and squabbling with sea gulls. The pelican crowd extended for hundreds of yards on either side of the pier. There was a variety of comment from the fishers as we walked. One woman said, “ They’ve got the whole ocean and they have to mess around here!” One was telling his partner how his fishing line had got caught around a perlican’s neck, and he had to cut the line. I found a spot next to an ol’ timer, who told me he had never seen so many pelicans together before. I searched my mind for references, perhaps in the Book of Revelations, to giant flocks of pelicans (“…and they shall fill their pouches of the fish of the sea and the sea shall become bereft therof…”?) but nothing came to mind. Then the ol’timer pointed out a twisted dark mass, about three or four feet below the surface: sardines! I had to squint, but the black mass slowly resolved itself into myraid black pencils, seemingly frozen in place, not even revolving slowly as they do in cylindrical aquariums at Sea World. I then began a serious study of the hunting habits of the pelicans. They liked to dive in groups of three or more, but not to herd the sardines (as I had read white pelicans do), as the sardines had seemed to have herded themselves close to the pilings. After most dives the pelicans surfaced with distended pouches which shimmered and vibrated from the death throes within. One bird had holes in its pouch, and sardine tails wiggled furiously out of them. The pelicans waited patiently for the fish to drown in the air, then gulped them down whole. Seagulls, unable to dive, grabbed sardines from the mouths of pelicans and darted furiously about to rob each other. The ol’timer told me that the fishermen on the pier were after "smackle"- mackerel- who swam beneath the layer of sardines. He showed me a few of his smackle, about a pound each. They looked tasty.

Then it hit me, my mandala. The pelicans whirling in formation above, diving for the sardines, snatching the life from them, as people reached through the pattern to snatch the life from the smackle on the other side. The hand of the universe feeding itself, eating itself. The picture of predation. Familiar thoughts and questions arose from the unfamiliar mandala. We call the predatory arrangement of our world a “food chain.” Why, in this chain, are the predators considered to be at the top? It’s all about energy transfer- molecules held together in unsteady formations, ready at the proper nudge to erupt in life giving rays. Would not the creatures at the top of the chain be those with the most direct access to the energy? This would be the plants, who merely bathe in manna pouring down endlessley from the sun. Herbivores come next, unable to absorb the photonic manna, but priveledged to munch it second hand from quiescent plants. The predators are the outcasts, latecomers who can’t get any manna from plants, and are forced to steal it violently from herbivores who yield it most unwillingly. Yes, the predators are clever, for they have to steal and get away with it, but they were not clever to be predators in the first place.
As the mandala massaged my thoughts another old question surfaced: Why is there predation? It doesn’t seem particularly efficient, and it fills our world with vast amounts of terror and pain. Why didn't the biosphere evolve a system of peaceful energy transfers, where photosynthesizing plankton recombine and morph into sardines, which blossom into pelicans, while the smackle jump for joy onto the beach to become men and women. Of course, without the predatory tradition so prominent in human evolution, the smackle people would not say things like “Let's barbecue us some hippies!” but would rather gaze around, amazed at the turning of the world and the stars overhead.

Lest I should ever again be possessed of the urge to run for office, let me emphasize that I do not think the human race is in a postion, either philosophically or practically, to engineer an end to predation- just the mention of the idea here has no doubt already limited my options to Dogcatcher of Berkeley. But can we at least stop this charade that those creatures who work the hardest for the energy, and face the most dire scarcity, are somehow at the “top”?

Death Valley and Maui

2006-01-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

Death Valley and Maui

Winter break for teachers is a culture shock. After months of intensive exposure, in an institutional setting, to generations to which you have not belonged in many years, you’re suddenly free, maybe too free. I was able, this winter break, to escape my freedom twice, first via a camping trip with my 12 year old, Connor, to Death Valley, and then a family trip to Maui.
The value of going to Death Valley is that, from the moment you slide into Antelop Valley, you have nothing. The value of nothing cannot be overstated. Without nothing, there would not be something, and there would be no way to survive the something. The word “vacation”, after all, refers to “vacancy.” Not that Antelop Valley has nothing. It has the substantial cities of Lancaster and Palmdale, and the crossroads town of Mojave, where the 14 meets itself, and Edwards Air Force Base, where the space shuttle lands, but it’s big and wide and for the traveller has no newspaper to pick up in the driveway, no routine to automatically follow for 8 hours. I will define “nothing” as the absence of familiarity and required response. We and our traveling companions, the Robinsons (in a separate car) made our usual stop at the Mojave McDonalds, at about 5:00a.m., and savored the nothing over rank coffee and heated pre-packaged breakfast items. Once it snowed while we sat in there, but not this time. Then off we went in a notheasterly jag through the desert, past sparse sandy fields of Joshua tress and rocks, and the sunrise. I had planned to play Julian Bream doing Elizabethan lute as the sun came up, and might have since Connor was asleep (he hates such “gay” music, preferring rap; I often enjoy that genre, but not at dawn in the desert), but I found that the portable CD player near my seat would not play, giving me, in fact, nothing, so I listened to that and it grew on me. After about an hour of bliss and meditation (the pose of a van driver, seated in a high upright chair, feet on floor, hands lightly closed at chest level, may serve in a pinch as a lotus position) we approached the peerless town of Trona, a miasma of chemical residue and stench, its pipes, tanks and chimneys rising up like some Tolkeinesque orc fortress in the otherwise stark and beautiful desert. You smell Trona about fifteen minutes before you see it, through the low canyon approach of Trona Road, where runs the old pipe that brought brine to the early borax and soda ash miners. It’s a sulfphurous air, a hint of man’s depredations here. Rounding the corner you see it, the town named after its product (“trona” means “Hydrated Sodium Bi-Carbonate”)- not a town really, but a string of processing plants ringing the dry lake bed, with desolate shelters for humans over the highway from the plants. Many of the shelters are deserted, their windows boarded up. The first gas station in town is also a relic. Only white smoke billowing from the high stacks indicates human habitation. Further into town are several churches and homes more neatly kept, and a real gas station, then Trona High School, an attractive campus serving teenagers from many miles around. What would it be like to teach here, I wonder? What are the kids like? Are they all white, Hispanic? Any Jews? Do they want to leave? Are they suicidal? Do they get drunk and stoned out in the desert? Are some intellectual, reading Kem Nunn or Hermann Hesse? Do they dream of San Francisco, or Hollywood? Will they carry their birthplace with them througout their lives as a badge of primal ordeal? Or do they cherish it, its mean, self-loving quality? I will never know, my experience limited to stopping for gas and savoring the steamy desert fart for 15 minutes. Escape from Trona then ensues. Off now to the north-east, over rolling hills and narrow canyons and suddenly we lurch over a summit and face the increadibly empty Panamint Valley, the last valley before Death Valley. Panamint is emptier than Death because there is no camping. Other than a few two-lane highways, there is nothing but the vast sides of this huge space. You can almost hear yourself resonate, your soul’s vibrations echoing off the mountain walls. And, inexplicably, it’s not unpleasant when the occasional fighter jet roars over you, on maneuvers from Edwards or Nellis, because they are occasional, and novel, and seeming to carry their own meaning of teenage dreams of power and dominance, divorced from adult politics of the same. Then over Immigrant Pass, a test of your car’s cooling system, and thus a source of anxiety and a break from beauty appreciation. Then over the top and there is Death Valley, an emptiness so big it is not marred by the several commercial centers it tolerates. The first of these , Stovepipe Wells, is a pleasant enough stop, featuring a gas station, a usefull general store, hotel, restaurant, parking lot full of RV’s and trailors. Then on we go, taking a left at the Sand Dunes, driving over the rolling central highway for about 45 minutes to Mesquite Springs camp grounds, located at the low trough of the valley, the dry river bed, where the north and south bahadas meet. At this point the vacation, the nothing, is interrupted by the pressing need to set up camp, which involves significant physical attention to sticks and canvass and folding tables and chairs and boxes of stuff and kids who don't help because they race off in all directions, free at last. In the midst of this came the central theme of my Death Valley story, an animal. Every year in Death Valley there is a different animal theme. We have had kangaroo rats, delightful hopping rodents who scamper across your feet as you sit around the campfire, or roadrunners who look at you politely for a bit of meat, or tarantulas who walk acceptingly across your arm. This year it was a young coyote, almost a pup. While I labored at the tent, he sauntered by like someone’s tired old dog, sitting heavily, for a pup, on the paved road about 20 feet from me, looking at me with world-weary eyes. He broadcast a clear signal into my head, clearer than spoken language: “I know you love me, what I represent. Look at me, look how I sit here before you, unprotected, unafraid, full of wisdom. Am I not the most special thing you have seen in a long time? Do you not love me? Will you not express this love by offering me food throughout your stay?” My first thought was that the coyote would be a useful lure for Connor, pulling him into my sphere of work. Connor was indeed interested, but it was Kendall, of the Robinson clan, our travelling companions, who broke the spell the creature had over me. Kendall has a philosophical bent, but is not quite the hippy sap that I am. “Throw pebbles near it,” he said suspiciously, “It has to know we’re not feeding it.” No way would I do that, however. What’s so bad about wanting to be fed? Especially if you’re a Boddisatvah, a messenger from another dimension. Soon, the tent was ready and Connor crawled in to test it out. He fell asleep, and I walked up the dry river bed. Outside the tent door was a trash bag, anchored with a rock, containg the remains of our lunch, mostly paper and crumbs. Connor awoke to a scratching sound outside the tent door, and I returned to find that the coyote had shredded the bag and devoured its edible contents. Kendall had seen the tail end of this process and tossed pebbles near the coyote, per his philosophy. Connor was sobered at the thought that the creature’s jaws and paws were two feet from his sleeping head during its foray. In the foothills of the San Fernando Valley we know coyotes from their murder of two of our cats and our two beloved chickens, Velk and Sparky, and for the newspaper accounts of toddlers mistaken for small animals whose necks are broken before the coyote realizes its mistake. But we don’t know coyotes as pscychic mauraders, the trickster gods of Native Americans. Later that day the ranger came to tell us of a young coyote that was harassing the entire campground. A lady had put her food on top of her car to temporarily keep it from the coyote while she walked to the toilet facility. When she got back the coyote was on top of her car, its head in the boxes. The ranger advised us to throw pebbles near the coyote, to tell it gently that we were having none of it. Kendall looked triumphantly at us. As it happened, we saw no more of the coyote that day, or the following day. But on the second night, we were contacted. Around the campfire, one of our party told stories he had heard about a single coyote’s ability to “throw its voice,” to sound like more than one coyote. We discussed the weird shrieking and yelling circles of coyotes that we hear throughout the year at home, and speculated on their purose. That night, around 3:00am, it started: a coyote song fest the likes of which I had never heard. They were close, this indederminate group, very close to the campsite, a clearly deliberate choice in the vast uninhabited valley. The song was composed, had special features. It seemed angry, resentfull, full of guile and fury, but artistic in that it had no obvious element of strategic purpose or success. It was a song for us, with our pebbles and our gear and our sacks of food and two-legged attitude. A song composed just for us, by crazy animals in the desert. A gift of the nothing.

Two weeks later, as vacation getaway number two loomed, I had lost some of my lust for nothing, and spent time finding things to fill the trip’s nothing, like a stack of magazines to read on the flight to Maui. One of these, the “Special Edition Scientific American, Frontiers of Physics,” gave me food for thought to supplement the snack box offered by ATA, and I quote: “The electron, the up and the down quarks, the gluon, the photon and the Higgs boson suffice to describe all the esoteric phenomena studied by particle physicists. This is not speculation akin to the ancient Greeks’ four elements of earth, air, water and fire. Rather it is a conclusion embodied in the most sophisticated mathematical theory of nature in history, the Standard Model of particle physics.” Oh give me a break! As much as I love and am awed by human science, it does have a streak of arrogance and conceit that is hard to bear. I find particularly galling the contention, found in the article quoted above, that we are closer to understanding the fundamental workings of the universe than we used to be. Granted the theory of the four elements was a crock, made up, not by scientists of the day, but the same brand of snake oil salesmen endemic to our society, but what a cheap shot to hold up only the ancient claptrap in comparison to modern science, instead of the clever stuff. Question: how is speculating about up and down quarks closer to understanding the fundamental workings of the universe than figuring out, as the Polynesians did a thousand years ago, how to find Hawaii via tiny canoes over thousands of miles of uncharted ocean? Answer: they both reveal the same amount of fundamental knowledge about the universe, namely, none. “Seeing” an island hundreds of miles away by gazing in the water, or “seeing” sub-atomic particles by smashing bigger particles into each other: it’s surface reality either way. Humans are limited to mechanics, lets face it. We’re in a box and we can’t see out. My guess is that no one alive today knows if we will ever see outside this box, and that if the day comes when we do see outside it, we’ll have changed to accommodate what there is to see, to the point that we’re not “human” any more. At that point, it won’t be science or religion, or anything we have a name for. Maybe it won’t have a name. At any rate, such were my thoughts on the flight to Maui. Speaking of Maui, it’s the most interesting of the islands, I think, because it spans old and new. It’s composed of two adjacent volcanoes, one old and extinct, the other with a foot in the hot spot (its last eruption was in 1790). My view of travel essays is that they should not bore the reader with recitations of all the cool places you saw. No one cares. Rather a travel essay should focus on the ideas you had that, presumably, you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t gone to this place. So here’s what I discovered on our trip to Maui: you can get great information from mundane or otherwise awful sources. Case in point: when I mentioned to a travel agent in the hotel that we were driving the road to Hanna that day, she gave me a CD which you were supposed to listen to as you drove along. Upon entering the rain forest, we turned on the CD and I was appalled to hear a cheery woman’s voice, chuckling at innapropriate moments, sounding very much like a pitch for Downy Softness. In my younger days I would have turned off the CD immediately, maybe even broken it into pieces and thrown it ceremoniously in the trash. But age has rendered me patient, and we let the thing drone on. In so doing we learned the following facts:

1. The sacred hula was danced exclusively by men. Female hula dancing was a western invention.
2. Pele, being a female deity, was not allowed to start a fire; she could only tend it.

Good stuff, huh? There was lots more of similar quality. But then you would have to endure something like this: “If you get out of your car in Pa’ai, you might be approached by some, chuckle…chuckle, unsavory characters selling, chuckle…chuckle,
‘Maui Wowie.’ My advice, chuckle…chuckle, just keep on...chuckle... walking, chuckle!” To recap the lesson from Maui: You will get valuable information from anything you listen to.
Bon voyage!

A Night in L.A.

2005-09-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

Faithful Readers, If you've been wondering why it's over a month since my last contemplative sortie, it's because school started several weeks ago. That's right, I have a day job- high school English teacher & Debate Coach. Mundane? Limited in purview to the local universe? Of course, yet extensive and far-flung in its own right. It does, unfortunately, keep me from the blogosphere, which does not, at present, pay the bills. Thus I have seemed to remain silent on such weighty matters as President Bush's comeuppance at the hands of Katrina. His coerced and resentful indirect admission of guilt was certainly historic, but you know he's just waiting for another man-made atrocity to get our minds off it. Such dreary thoughts do not at present have the force to drag me from the quotidien bog, however it is news when occasionally I have an L.A.night, as I did this last full-moon-lit Saturday eve. We went to "Open Mic Night" at the Fake Gallery, Paul Kozlowski's fabulous comedy club on Melrose, where dirt cheap prices get you a night of men and women whose words and voices you know from cartoons, or adolescent Comedy Central stints and sit-coms, or commercials and other platitudinous narrations- always restrained and under the unseen yoke, yet at the Fake they are transmogrified to brilliance, enhanced by an artful simulacrum of low rent Bohemia ( a VERY artful simulacrum). They are funny, much funnier than in their paying roles. Because my son does their sound and lighting, we have discoverd and invaded this most exclusive and select of venues. So, to continue, last night one of the best acts was a young woman named Nun Hung Low, a comedienne with a poignant faux-Asian shtick which I was at pains to appreciate because before she went up on the stage she came over and asked me to accompany her. She seated me on a chair and announced that she would hypnotize me. After putting a red shawl over my head, through which I dimly saw her, she did a quick hocus-pocus and said "Ok, now you asleep! You stay that way, then when I snap my fingers you wake up and think you a big fat fish." The thing is, I've been trying to lose weight, and as my students are always reminding me, trying is everything. I watched Nun warily through the veil as the shtick continued: "...I say I have boyfriend but I no have a boyfriend. I just say I have boyfriend so friends think I'm ok. Like they come over and I say 'I'm so depressed because my boyfriend he so stupid.'" Finally the moment came and she whipped off the veil, snapped her fingers and said "Ok, now you a big fat fish!" Damn if I'm not still one the next morning! Sorcery! Anyway, the weirdness continued at intermission, when I went out on Melrose to breathe the night air and ponder the hidden dangers of comedy. Within moments, however, I heard the thunder of three or four helicopters with searchlights converging on a spot on Melrose several blocks to the west. And coming at us from that spot were a hive of flashing red lights, and a blossoming wail of police sirens. Something was surely afoot. And before I knew it, the foot was clear: it was a police chase. In the lead was a sedan containing four or five Hispanic guys. They seemed to be chilling. The driver had his left arm resting out the rolled-down window and was not driving particularly fast. As he approached the theater, though, he veered over the center divider as if he intended to plow into us, then righted his course. As he and his friends rushed past to their dubious destiny, they were followed by at least twenty police cars, all with flashing lights and sirens blaring, and all of this trailed in the dark city sky by the helicopters, so that the spotlights flashed along Melrose highlighting the frantic parade, like some circus gone mad. I called home to ask my other son if the chase was on the news. It was not, nor was it mentioned in any newspaper the following morning, or on any radio news show. This lack of note, perhaps, is what really made this my Night In L.A. I was born in Bismarck, North Dakota, where a scene such as this would have kept the Bismarck Tribune in a state of alert for two years. But this is L.A., where you can be funny without being lynched, where a parade from another universe is forgotten in the wind, where fame is a form of obscurity, and memory an art, and, sadly, where a total stranger can turn you into a big fat fish.

Boy Bravado

2005-08-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

It’s great to be closing in on 60 and to have a young son. How else could a guy in my demographic tune in so directly to the world of boys? For my son’s twelfth birthday, I drove him and seven other pre-adolescent fellows to a place out in the Mojave foothills called “Mountasia” (just a blistering hop-skip-and jump from Magic Mountain). Mountasia, as an aside, is a very parent friendly little collection of amusements (go-carts, lasertag, bumper-boats and video games). The food was crap but so what? You didn’t have to shlep everywhere to keep track of scattered children, and the place is too tame to attract the gangs Magic Mountain features.
But back to my point. At the park, my wife and I drifted away from the kids ( I read the New Yorker- a fascinating piece about the internecine battle waged by American Protestants in the early 20th Century), so the real interaction was in my van, coming and going. I’m calling what I was subjected to “boy bravado,” and I’m sure you know what that is.
“Dude, did you see Undertaker do a crippler on Big Show last night?” (on WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment, that is).
“Man, he was so in submission!”
“Dude, check that Harley!”
“Cool!”
The Harley in question zipped past us, its purposely defeated muffler allowing an ungodly roar to shatter the surrounding atmosphere. The shaded, leathered and booted man who straddled this machine must have seemed iconic to the boys, a WWE demi-god sent down to redeem our sins. My faithful Ford Windstar, vintage 1995, bearing only the virtue of being paid for, seemed diminished then to my passengers. I was repeatedly urged to “book it!”, but, as I told them with attempted humor, you can only book my van when it’s going downhill.
The boy-bravado continued non-stop during every moment of the journey, both there and back. In addition to wrestling and motor-vehicles, it encompassed recollections from the last school year of various boys and girls who had been humiliated in a variety of ways, perhaps by doing something physically clumsy, or saying or doing something stupid that everyone could laugh at. The experience was almost like conducting a focus group on the elements of boy society. I could have written up my observations and sold them to video game producers, making sure they stocked their scenarios with ample mayhem- as if they don’t already know all about that. Actually, I followed what seemed a more novel line of thought- the continuation of boy-bravado into adulthood. As one can verify from any newspaper, we commonly express the doings of our culture in a male language of conquest and submission. One can translate these expressions into imaginary boy-bravado conversations. Thus, from this morning’s L.A.Times Calendar section:
“Dude! Did you see that ’40 Year Old Virgin’ kicked ‘Red Eye’ down to second place?”
“Shit, ‘Eye’ made a measely $16.5 million!”
“Wait, dudes! ‘Penguin’ is kicking ass for the long term box-office!”
From the Business section:
“Dude, Google is selling another 14 million shares!”
“Oh, dude, they’re going to take in about FOUR BILLION!”
“Shit, dude, they have a MASSIVE acquisition plan!”
“Oh yeah, dude! They’re going to wire up half the United States with Wi-Fi!”
It’s a bit obvious how boy-bravado infuses the front page, with its group upon group struggles, its crime and pain, but, and yes, here it comes, the obligatory gibe at President Bush, has not the President employed boy-bravado as his primary vehicle in the selling of his policies? We had our asses kicked on 9/11, so we have to KICK SOME ASS! RIGHT NOW! Never mind whose ass we kick. Never mind the subtleties of responsibility, of cause-and-effect. The important thing is to kick ass as soon as possible so that we will be a nation of men, not pussies. Behind this patently stupid front, of course, is much sophisticated reasoning, so that huge sums of money can be amassed for insiders, while the rest of us have a WWE event serve as foreign policy.
As we approached Mountasia, the boys turned their focus to the attractions to come. Many had been to the park before, and they opined on which rides were the best. There was consensus that everything was good except the bumper-boats, which were “gay.” This I had to see- gay bumper-boats! It turned out that the best place to read my New Yorker was at a shaded table right next to the bumper-boats. These were large inner tubes seating two, equipped improbably with gasoline powered outboard motors which putt-putted the tubes lazily around a pond, so that every once in a while they bumped gently into another tube and its passengers. Gay, indeed! It was actually a perfect setting to finish my New Yorker article, in which I learned that Billy Graham’s son kicks ass on the liberal wing of the Protestant Church.

Hollywood Bowl

2005-08-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

Angelenos can go a long time without visiting the Hollywood Bowl. My attendance was sporadic through childhood. When I was 12, we went to the Bowl to see our neighbor, an opera singer, in an operatic rendition of Julius Caesar. After what seemed like hours, a baritone guard sang out one line and my dad shouted and pointed: "There he is! That's him!" Then nothing until 1968, when my friend and I watched Janice Joplin rampage across the stage. And then, a long absence, over 30 years, until last year we got season tickets in a box in the frontish section ( one section behind the elite boxes abutting the stage). Most of the time we attended with our two boys, Andrew, 21, and Connor, 11. The box is compact, to put it diplomatically. It's hard to manipulate the fold up tables and sit and eat in a space the size of a large closet, but you are outside surrounded by happy people and once you're settled with your wine it's not bad at all. What I want to write about are the performances. To start with: Electronica. One night last year was devoted to it; and now I know what it is. It's this: some guys go up on the stage with laptops. No musical instruments are apparent. There is also a bank of technicians with elaborate consoles (no musical instruments there either). The technicians push some levers and a backbeat loop begins. The guys on stage, the headline group, listen thoughtfully to the backbeat for a few moments, then they type in some stuff on their laptops which results in lots of synthesized sounds blaring out of giant speakers. The guys then watch the monitors of their laptops, every now and then typing something new, which, one gathers, changes the nature of the music. The sounds are not unlike the "synthetic" music of the last half century; the innovation is that they're attached to a rock beat and are blasted into your ears at deafening decibels. I was thankful I had brought my earplugs. This is not a confession of dotage. I walked out of a Cream gig at the Whiskey in 1969 because of the idiotic volume- and they were my favorite group. But I must say, some of the Electronica was pleasant. At one point, I felt I was being mesmerized. Susan and the boys were happy, and the big crowd around us was definitely happy. A thick smog of pot smoke hung everywhere. Hundreds of people, including ushers, were dancing in solitary joy. It was fun, but I do need to ask this question: How is a guy typing commands on a laptop a musician? If the music was composed previously, fine, but then you might as well have a composer/musician come on stage and put on a CD of his work. Just asking. Another night we heard Wycleff Jean, well known singer in the Rastafarian tradition. Very musical and talented, though it gave me pause during a song extolling pot smoking when he stopped to rap at the young kids specifically. This would include Connor, who was definitely paying attention. Jean said that the kids in the audience were too young to understand the wonders of marijuana, but in a few years they would be old enough, and then they should "smoke dee mari-uaanaa!" It's a free country, right? I suppose someone like me who sees continual signs of erosion of our freedoms should be grateful that I can still pay money to hear a famous role-model tell my son to smoke dope. I will let the righteous and ascended souls among us figure this one out. Anyway, I want to conclude with a description of last night's Yo-Yo Ma concert. Because it was Ma it was sold out, which in itself nuanced the experience. The traffic on the east-bound 101 was quite light, no doubt due to the ongoing heat-wave, but this ended at the Highland offramp, where we came to a miserable crawl. It took almost 30 minutes to travel from the offramp to the Bowl parking lot, where we were informed that the lot was full and given a map to another lot three blocks down at Highland and Hollywood, behind the Kodak center. I let my family out with their tickets and continued, still at a snail's pace, towards Hollywood. At the Franklin Avenue turnoff there were prominent signs reading "Bowl Parking Here!" I foolishly turned in and beheld a vacant lot, vacant that is except for two hundred cars squished bumper to bumper, at a price of $15 each. This was not, in fact, the lot indicated on the map. In high dudgeon I backed out, maneuvered madly back onto Highland southbound, and made my way at last into the Kodak parking lot. No attendants were at the entrance when I pushed the button for my ticket, so I rushed through the lengthy description of charges and determined that though the Bowl was not among the listed validators, the max was $10. Not expecting anything better than this, I started my spiraling descent into the structure, parking finally on the fourth floor below street level. It was at this point, as I dragged myself out of the car and contemplated the stretch remaining between me and my plastic cup of wine, that it began. You know how it is. You go day after day a good citizen, loving your country, honoring your leaders, and then one day, after one dumb vicissitude too many, you crack. I focused my fury on President Bush. What are the chances he would enter the Hollywood Bowl in such an ignominious fashion? He would be escorted via limo through an underground tunnel that led directly to the VIP elevator, which would ascend to a spot located five feet from his box. If he was late, the show would be delayed. Why is this the case? Why does he get his own jet plane? Why, when he gets a check up, does he need no appointment, and is attended by 10 doctors? It's because he's the president. What does that mean? It means he's in the ruling class. My brain became overheated as I rummaged through the car for a pen or pencil to write the location of my parking spot. Yes, we have a ruling class, a privileged class, just like those from which came the monarchies so despised by our founding fathers. We've been lulled into thinking it's a necessity, I fulminated as I searched up and down the lane for a sign indicating an elevator. We've forgotten, if we ever knew, that a competent national manager could do a decent job with just the basic comforts and amenities, and never miss the giant entourage, the mansion, the cooks and maids and drivers and personal jet planes. Then I found the escalator and had a chance to stand and fume. Yes, I realized, by lulling us into seeing this pomp and waste as natural, we had been tricked into having a...a king! Granted a king for no more than two four year stretches, but a king nevertheless who, with the other royal families, perpetuates a system of rotating monarchs while we dumbly scrabble in the ruins looking for parking spaces at the Yo-Yo Ma concert. I emerged then onto Highland, where a fresh breeze took me by surpise. As I walked northward, I started to feel better. This isn't so bad, I thought. It's kind of fun to be walking up Highland in Hollywood, Calif. The people in the cars are glancing at me. I could be in a movie about a middle aged guy having one stupid crisis after another. Ok, George W., you can be a king. Just don't take away my right to revel in myself. Fast forward to me, seated in my box, rapidly pouring my cup of wine. On the stage was Yo-Yo with his "Silk Road Ensemble," an assemblage of "World Music" performers. "World Music" can be defined as music from anyplace on earth except Europe and Russia (at least in their classical forms- exceptions can be made for folkish music). This means that while Zithian Nimble-Squeak played on a stringed miniature bat-gourd is World Music, Bach is not. Be that as it may, the music was nice. An array of World Music instruments- sitar, tabla, santur, ney, kamanche, sanxian, pipa, and shen- and a tolerant mix of Western- guitar, violin, viola, and of course Ma's cello- produced pleasant sounds. Certainly an enjoyable concert. Though I must ask this: Why couldn't Yo-Yo have played just a little Bach? Stretched the rules a bit. After all, Bach's music is better than anything anyone is writing now. Uh-oh, now I've done it! Anyway, I..er...I like the Hollywood Bowl a lot, in spite of the logistical agonies associated with going there. You really should go to the Hollywood Bowl.

Mendocino

2005-07-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

The cemetery tells much of the story. Sloping down the hill above the landside of the mesa, it begins at the eastern edge with the oldest graves: an Irish family, the founder dying in 1805 and the last dying two generations later in 1873. The lives drift by as you wander towards the seaside, ending above the street in the most recent tombstone: 2004. The story I read was between the stones, in the vacant patches of land throughout the cemetery. Over one hundred years has not filled this couple of acres. Mendocino is one of those beautiful, highly desirable spots, inhabited by protective spirits who ward off domination from any quarter. The graveyard will never be full. Location is part of it- in the remote north of California, above a jagged coastline, the spirits do not contend here with the combined force of humanity, as they do in Los Angeles. In Mendocino, the sea and wood gods gave up the Pomo to the Spanish, then shipwrecked the Spanish and later the redwood pillagers who founded the town, driving them off. Periods of bankruptcy, what we in the cities might call "blight," were in fact periods of balm and resurgence for the forces here.
Perhaps some element of those forces possessed the Packard family, so that Mrs. Packard, who owned the tip of the mesa, where the redwood mill used to wreak its carnage, refused in the 1980's to sell the spot for condominiums. We stayed in her old house, now the Packard House Bed and Breakfast, a lovely well preserved carpenter gothic. I felt that I could best encounter the spirits if I woke up early. By 6:00a.m. I stole out the front door. The previous evening, before we walked to the great white tent on the upper bluff for an evening of Vivaldi choral music, we had explored the end of the mesa, Mrs. Packard's gift, and tried out the trails that wound down to the south facing coves. These I now descended, and saw with pleasure that there were no fires or sleeping forms; the high tide at night saw to that. Wandering along the narrow strip of beach, I saw a series of caves, hollowed out over the eons by the patient waves. " A spirit will be in one of these," I thought, and then wondered if there were such a thing as a malevolent spirit as our popular culture and many of the world's religions have it. "Could be," I thought, but I did not sense one. At the southern end of the cove I found a long, low cave, about 25 feet long, perfectly straight and tapered at the end, so that you had to crouch more as you proceeded. I entered and within a few moments was at the end, where I sat on the damp sand, facing out. I saw the flat, smooth sand floor, with only my own footprints as blemish. All around was dark, centering on an oval picture of the primeval beach, an animated picture with langorous rolling waves. Surely there is a spirit here with me, I thought. No mortal may inhabit such a place and claim it as his own. Yet I felt nothing, no presence. I meditated; still nothing. Either I was alone there, perhaps arriving at the interval between nocturnal dwellers and the barking dogs of day, or my presence, loud and clangy from 56 years in Los Angeles, was enough to silence or even banish any subtle company. I did not, in short, fall into a meditative state, gazing at the mandala of the oval until time stood still, and seeing beyond it the question that is its own answer. Instead, like the New Age dropout I am, I left after no more than a couple of minutes, scurried up the trails and headed for Moose's Coffee shop, which featured internet access. A relaxed woman in her thirties took my order. "I'll have a tall latte," I said. "Tall?" she asked, puzzled. "Oops," I smiled, "I'm thinking of Starbucks. They call 'small' 'tall;' I don't know why." She laughed, and it seemed we shared a solidarity against the giant Starbucks, in a town that has defeated giants. And yet, I thought as I carried my coffee to a bank of pc's, I fled the cave. Why was I not still there? Logging on AOL, I gazed at the AOL news. "What is this idiocy?" I wondered. People struggling over ugly, ruined strips of land bedecked only with the hocus-pocus of hatred, while my cave, from which I had just fled, lay unused. "I can't fight what I am," I thought sadly. I took my coffee outside into the lightening morning and headed to the Packard House in time for breakfast. We spent the rest of the day touring the charming shops, and then, around 2:00, we left. I carry that cave around with me now, in Los Angeles of all places. I gaze at the animated oval at the center of darkness.. I feel a presence. I took it with me.