Ann Banks

The Power of Storytelling

2009-03-17T14:39:00.001-04:00

If my grandmother Blanche were around to read the headlines today, I know just what story she would tell: in the mid-1920s, at the height of the Florida land rush, she was working in a real-estate office in Palm Beach. Times were flush and sales were booming. This exuberance was on display in a showy mosaic map of Florida embedded in the office floor.

To highlight Palm Beach, the artist had cemented in a shiny silver dollar. Before long, the speculative bubble burst, helped along by a hurricane. One morning my grandmother and her colleagues arrived at the office to discover that someone had chiseled the silver dollar right out of the floor. Times were that hard.

Blanche ended up losing her house, her car and all the money she had saved for my father's education. Those things, though, she seldom mentioned. Instead, she told me about the stolen silver dollar. It comforted my grandmother, I believe, by reminding her that in her misfortune she was far from alone.

I was raised on Depression stories; this was only one of many told around our dinner table. Hearing them again and again, I became fascinated by the role that stories play during hard times—the way they seem to strengthen people, offering a bulwark against loneliness and feelings of personal failure. That is how I came to find myself spending a year in a dimly lit storage room in the Library of Congress, sorting through thousands of interviews with ordinary Americans telling of how they survived the Great Depression.

The stories were collected in the late 1930s by the Federal Writers' Project, a unit of the Works Progress Administration that employed out-of-work writers. But before the intended series of anthologies could be published, the Writers' Project was Red-baited out of existence. The oral histories—of tobacco farmers, smugglers, midwives, jazz musicians, oil roustabouts and others—ended up crammed in rickety filing cabinets in a remote storage room in the library stacks.

When I learned of these forgotten stories, I decided to try to finish what the project had started by editing an anthology of the material. Sifting through the 150,000 pages in the dusty storage room, I was looking to fall in love. And I did—with a collection of people who were by turns scared, determined, funny and brave, and whose clamorous vitality seemed to burst from the pages. I fell in love with Marie Haggerty, a Massachusetts housemaid who talked about how, when her employer left a $5 bill on the floor, "my face burnt like fire, for I knowed I was gettin' tested." With Irving Fajins, who while trying to organize his fellow workers at Macy's hit upon the idea of secretly distributing the union literature via the toilet-paper dispensers. With Lloyd Green, a Pullman porter who lamented his move north to the big city: "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me."

The inhabitants of those file drawers told stories about how they got by using a mixture of ingenuity and guile. They hawked lucky charms and patent medicine made from "roots and barks and good raw whiskey." They peddled cake flavoring and cased sausages, they auctioned tobacco, they fished and smuggled rum—and sometimes aliens—from Cuba to Key West. They worked in coal and granite and cotton and iron. ("You ain't an ironworker unless you get killed.")

The women quilted and pressed laundry, stitched shoes and danced in burlesque shows. They took in boarders and delivered babies, and when their men ran out on them, they swallowed their pride and threw rent parties, as Bernice Porter described doing in 1920s Harlem.

These days, we may not be passing the hat at parties to come up with rent money, but we are in the midst of an economic meltdown. Now that hard times have returned, I believe storytelling is due for a revival. While the Federal Writers' Project is no longer around, it has inspired a modern version in StoryCorps, a five-year-old oral-history organization that encourages people to "celebrate one another's lives through listening." And we have just elected a president who invited us on his transition Web site to "Start right now. Tell us your story."

We need again to imagine a future that is meaningful in the face of difficult circumstances. Listening to each other's stories may grant us a sense of common purpose that money can't buy.

Talking to Studs

2008-11-03T16:09:00.002-05:00

Telling Studs Terkel a story was not a relaxing experience. He listened really hard. And what he heard was what you would have said, had you been a more expressive and insightful version of yourself. Your job was to rise to his estimation of you. If this was an unnerving prospect, Studs was ready to pitch in and help. His magpie imagination was ever on the alert for stray bits of meaning and chance strands of connection.

You might find yourself absently mentioning a random detail that seemed to have no particular point or place in the narrative. Studs would seize on it, hold it up to the light, and marvel at how brilliantly it illuminated the theme you were developing. “There was something you said earlier,” he’d say, and rewind the tape and show you what he meant. “Listen to this,” he’d say. “You see? You see?”

Studs liked to call himself a guerrilla journalist, but I think that is exactly wrong. Journalism demands a consecutive habit of mind; Studs was much too non-linear for that. He always took the scenic route. And guerrilla implies stealthy tactics, which was never Studs’ way.

It suits most interviewers to distract their subjects from the tape recorder. Just ignore it, they will say, secretly hoping that they can steal off with some juicy morsel the interviewee never meant to reveal. Studs, on the other hand, deliberately drew attention to his mechanical beast, using it to create a sense of theater, the auditory equivalent of a proscenium arch.

The self-consciousness that lesser interviewers try to finesse with their tiny, unobtrusive recording devices, Studs used to raise the bar on his subjects. There was no way, talking into his lapdog-sized reel-to-reel machine,* that you were likely to forget it was there. Instead, he made it feel as though that you and he were going to use the bulky instrument to create something, and that together you would settle on its meaning.

Of course that was only part of the story. The several thousand words of mine that begin on page 43 of American Dreams: Lost and Found were culled from a 50-page interview transcript. As Studs described his method, this “rough, unexpurgated material” was panned for gold, molded into a narrative and given a title. I was “The Wanderin’ Kid,” in his book, and my interview appeared sandwiched between “The Travelin’ Lady” and “The Indian.”

To be honest, it’s embarrassing to read “The Wanderin’ Kid” today. I sound young, which I was, and eager to expound on my every thought. I’m touched that he captured my struggles to reconcile my happy childhood memories of Army post life with the larger meaning of the world I grew up in. The distant boom of guns, artillery practice, sounded like a lullaby to me. But I’m slightly mortified by the undercurrent of resentment Studs detected. My political awakening seems to have been fueled as much by pique that on Army posts men got all the attention as by any misgivings about American imperialism. I told Studs, “The feeling I had was that these men who got to lord it over others, just because they jumped out of airplanes, were macho. My only weapon was to make fun of it.”

Was this my truth, highlighted, as Studs once called the edited oral histories? I might not be eager to admit it, but I imagine that’s what I was thinking in those days. Studs just listened so hard that he got me to say it.

*Later, Studs switched to a smaller, but still dictionary-sized Sony.

Black Like Him

2008-10-25T17:40:00.002-04:00

Remember Susan Smith, the young South Carolina mother carjacked by a black man who drove off with her two sons still in the car? Remember Charles Stuart, the Boston man robbed by a black man with a “raspy voice,” who also killed his pregnant wife? Now Ashley Todd has joined their ranks as creator of yet another lurid tale involving a fictitious black male criminal. Todd doesn’t need remembering, since she has starred in several recent news cycles.

The young, white McCain volunteer decided to stage her very own dirty trick. She would fake an attack on herself by a black man, purportedly enraged that she was working for the Republican campaign. She turned up at a police station in North Carolina with a black eye and the letter “B” scratched in her cheek -- which, a McCain flack helpfully pointed out to a reporter, stood for “Barack.”

You might think that this story would have excited suspicion right from the start, especially since the “B” was scratched backwards, Todd apparently not having figured out to reverse the image in the mirror. In the photographs her stage-makeup black eye looked like it would have yielded to a damp handkerchief, and apparently did, since it had disappeared by the time of her perp walk.

Todd’s story finally unraveled when no record of her was found on the security camera at the ATM where she claimed to have been withdrawing money at the time of the attack. Before she confessed, however, Todd reportedly received sympathetic phone calls from both McCain and Palin, and a concerned note from the Obama campaign expressing the hope that the perpetrator would soon be brought to justice.

Ashley Todd is a disturbed young woman and obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Certainly her failed hoax wasn’t orchestrated by the campaign. Republicans are the party of Karl Rove, after all; they can do better. But it’s horribly depressing to witness the return appearance of this pernicious fabrication. The predatory Black Man. Him, again. He’s 6’4” and is wearing a track suit. Maybe a knit hat. He has a raspy voice. And a gun or possibly a knife. The details vary, but not by much, since the perpetrators of this particular falsehood tend to be imaginatively challenged. So it’s pretty much the same old story.

Our best hope is that the audience for it is dwindling. That would be a change I could believe in.

John McCain's Imaginary Friend

2008-10-23T14:07:00.000-04:00

So John McCain is taking his imaginary friend campaigning with him in Florida. Candidate McCain has just kicked off a bus tour called the “’Joe the Plumber’ Keep Your Wealth Bus Tour.” Joe, being imaginary, will not actually be on the bus. The real Joe, as everyone knows by now, is not named Joe, does not have a plumbing license, and is a tax delinquent. Or he was until a sympathetic Oregon radio host raised $1,200 to pay his tax bill, Queen-for-a-Day-style.

In his famous exchange with Barack Obama, Samuel “Joe” Wurzelbacher fretted that his ability to buy a business would be undermined by the Obama tax plan – although in fact, an Obama administration would improve Wurzelbacher’s bottom line. Since he earns around $40,000 a year, he actually would get a bigger tax cut under Obama’s plan than under McCain’s, according to an analysis by the Tax Policy Center. [http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/]

You’d think that these revelations would enough to make the Republican to tiptoe quietly away from their new Everyman. But wait, there’s more! As one blogger put it in a headline, “Joe ‘the Plumber’ Wurzelbacher related to Charles ‘the Crook’ Keating.” Oops.

It turns out that Joe is a close relative of Robert Wurzelbacher, son-in-law of Charles Keating of the infamous savings and loan scandal that tainted McCain’s early political career. You might think that the campaign would have done a better job vetting the man they planned to reference 22 times in the final debate. You might also think that Joe the Plumber was a Republican plant.

Either way, it makes no difference. A week later, the real Joe’s story is out there, his tax arrears, his unlicensed status, his disreputable relations. Yet Joe the Plumber has transcended these inconvenient facts and become Joe the Political Metaphor. A story in yesterday’s Miami Herald reports on a Florida polling phenomenon they call the “Joe the Plumber Effect,” which apparently has improved McCain’s standing in Florida.

For an imaginary friend, Joe seems to be working out pretty well for John McCain. Better than his imaginary enemies anyway.

McCain Hearts ACORN

2008-10-22T12:41:00.000-04:00

The time: 2006. The place: Miami. The occasion: a rally co-sponsored by ACORN, the community advocacy organization that a Republican spokesman recently called a “quasi-criminal group.” The keynote speaker: a man who is now running for President of the United States.

He addresses the enthusiastic crowd with these words: “What makes American special is in this room tonight.” The room erupts in cheers . . . for John McCain. Yes, the same man who is now “worried” about Barack Obama’s ties to ACORN, says he needs to “explain” them. Here’s the tape: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bV9HX1Tjhyw

So I am worried, Sen. McCain – as recently as two years ago, you were praising the very same quasi-criminals you now deem a threat to our democracy. Can you explain?

Sarah "Pro-Choice" Palin

2008-10-15T10:51:00.001-04:00

Governor Sarah Palin is famously opposed to abortion - even in cases of rape, and even, as she said in 2006, if the victim were her own daughter. Since then, the governor has walked the walk - unlike the hypocritical Rhode Island legislator I once interviewed who voted to bar abortion counseling in that state, and then arranged for his teenaged daughter to get an abortion in New York.

Two years after Palin delivered that speech, her teenage daughter Bristol is pregnant -- though not as a result of rape -- and she will be having the baby. Palin herself has also faced a situation where many have chosen abortion. Pregnant at age 44, she learned as a result of a blood test that the child she was carrying had Down syndrome. Baby Trig now accompanies her on the campaign trail

Yet according to her standard stump speech, the adamantly pro-life Palin apparently did make a choice when told that the baby would have special needs. She and her husband “talked, prayed, reflected and ultimately decided to have the child,” the New York Times reports. According to my thesaurus, “decide” is a synonym for “choose.” A decision is a choice.

Sarah Palin was still a child when many women in this country fought for the right she would later avail herself of, the right to reflect and then to choose. I wonder whether her daughter was allowed the same control over her own reproductive fate -- since Palin also believes that minors should be required to have parental consent to get an abortion.

In her own life, it seems that Sarah “pro-life” Palin is also Sarah “pro-choice” Palin. I'm all for that. You chose, Sarah, as was your right. Think hard about the justice of denying that right to others.

Votezilla

2008-10-06T08:51:00.002-04:00

I've just had my first experience of registering voters and I believe I may have missed my calling. Not only did I love it, but to my surprise, I was good at it. Normally I hate accosting strangers. I may be one of the few women around who would rather get hopelessly lost than stop and ask directions. There's always a tape playing in my head of the reasons someone probably doesn't want to talk to me: they're late for an appointment; it's time for their son's nap; they just had a fight with their husband. Even if they're not in a hurry, maybe they're in a bad mood.

But armed with a clipboard and a fresh batch of crisp white voter registration forms, I turned out to be unstoppable. No excuses. Kids fussy? I'm happy to amuse them while you fill out your form. Need to check in for a doctor's appointment? I'll sit with you in the waiting room while you get this done. Aren't eligible to vote because you are an ex-felon? Wait! The law has changed! Sit right here and we'll get you registered. It will only take a minute.

Not everyone needed persuading. Many people I met had already registered to vote, and some expressed great enthusiasm about our efforts. There were hugs and offers of help. Thus I enlisted several deputies, including Kenneth Eady, a young man who told me that he was planning to attend a vice-presidential-debate-watching party that night at a skating rink. The voter registration deadline was looming and he was sure that some of the guests still needed signing up. I gave him all the forms I had left. “When everyone gets there,” I joked, “just lock the door and don't let them out until they've filled out the forms.”

I phoned the next day to see how things had gone, and discovered that Kenneth also had succumbed to registration fever. After signing up a dozen or so new voters at the roller rink, he'd acquired a second batch of forms from the Vote from Home headquarters. I caught him just as he was about to head out and start canvassing campus restaurants. “There are only two more days!” he reminded me, and I knew someone else had found a calling.

Election '08: Showtime in Ohio

2008-10-06T08:46:00.000-04:00

The energetic young men and women who organized VoteToday Ohio want to impart some crucial training before their crew of 60-some volunteers hits the campuses, neighborhoods, job counseling centers and other places where likely voters may be found. First there are celebrity introductions to be made. Our numbers include people from many parts of the country and as far off as England, we are told. There is even a honeymooning couple, Vic and Yoni, who have been helping to save the redwoods in California and now are wrapping up their wedding trip by registering voters in Ohio. Vic and Yoni are adorable and we all applaud loudly.

The next volunteer to be introduced is Michael Guston. He is a character actor - L.A. Law, ER, The Practice - and he looks familiar in the way that character actors often do. “Everyone thinks they went to high school with me,” he says. But in fact I also look familiar to him, and it turns out that we have been New York City neighbors for many years. He recently moved to upstate New York near the Pennsylvania border and now spends many hours a week canvassing Pennsylvania voters. Guston plays General Tommy Franks in W., Oliver Stone's new movie about the President, which will open at the end of this month. There is sustained applause for him as well.

Finally the organizers present a tiny, elderly woman sitting in the back row. I don't catch her name, but when she stands, the crowd goes wild with clapping and cheering. She is Howard Dean's mother, and in this group there could be no greater claim to fame. She has come to Ohio with friends to register voters during “Golden Week,” a small window in early October during which it is possible to simultaneously register to vote and cast your ballot.

The training session proceeds in a very organized fashion, as the organizers describe what they want to accomplish, and how we should go about it. Politely, for one thing -- we are not to pester people to sign up. The sole note of discord is when the vehicles in which we are hoping to transport voters to the polls are referred to as “vans.” The consensus is that we should call them shuttles instead, as “vans” sounds slightly sinister.

Just as we resolve this weighty matter, a staff member comes in with an announcement: “Good News!” she tells us. “The Ohio Supreme Court just upheld the challenge to the early voting window.” Since we had no idea that the policy was even under appeal we were not as relieved as the organizers - who had wisely decided not to share with us that the entire program was in jeopardy.

Tomorrow is showtime, and we're ready to rumble. Politely, of course.

Politics and Sleeping Bags

2008-10-06T08:44:00.000-04:00

"Bring a sleeping bag and a hearty spirit," the memo says. Sure to the spirit part. The sleeping bag? I don't think so. The memo, written by twenty-somethings, showed up in the email boxes of four women old enough to be their mothers - me and my friends who, in response, are about to set out to register voters for a week in Ohio. The occasion is "Golden Week," a week in early October during which it is possible for Ohioans to register to vote and to vote on the same day. Our posse is eager to help our chosen candidate, but there are limits. Even though the organization we'll be working with has offered to find housing for all the volunteers, my friends and I are well past the age when sleeping on the floor is a viable alternative. We will spring for hotel rooms, instead.

I am reminded of a time when a certain level of roughing it seemed an important part of any political event. It was one of the big marches on Washington to protest the Vietnam War, and I went with friends then, too. We took a long bus ride from my home in New England and crashed on the floor of somebody's living room. I did know a couple of older people, grown-ups with families and professional jobs who attended the demonstration -- and who traveled there by plane.They flew in and out on the same day - no floor sleeping involved. I was appalled. Because they were so rich (by my standards) they were missing out on an essential part of the experience. Fast forward many decades and I am they.

Grass-roots campaigning is a young person's game. People my age usually do things like organize and attend benefits, and write checks. Nevertheless my friends and I will convene tonight at The Surly Girl pub in Columbus, Ohio to meet the (young) organizers of VoteToday Ohio and hear what's in store for us. We're marching in their parade this week, and that's as it should be. It's now their future, not ours, that is hanging in the balance. I'm ready to do anything I can to help. Except sleep on the floor.

Post Office Denies Absentee Voters

2008-09-26T11:19:00.001-04:00

One day last week, Cara Loriz went to the post office in Shelter Island, New York, in search of an application for an absentee ballot. There weren’t any. Earlier this year, she was told, the U.S. Postal Service had ordered local post offices to stop making the forms available in their lobbies. Loriz was not only a prospective voter, however. She also is editor of the local newpaper in tiny Shelter Island, NY (pop. 2800), and she began looking into the story.

She obtained a copy of a USPS directive, dated August 22nd and faxed to post offices nationwide, explicitly banning applications for absentee ballots in lobbies. The directive lumps ballot applications together with partisan political material like flyers. (The directive also told postmasters that the distribution of voter-registration forms was “optional.”) Absentee ballot applications have never before been prohibited, according to a 25-year veteran Postal Service supervisor who spoke to Loriz.

The prohibition caught the Suffolk County Board of Elections off guard. An official there confirmed that it had it had long been standard practice to supply stacks of absentee voter applications to post offices, and indeed, voters calling the Board in search of the applications were still being told to go to their local post office.

Recently the Associated Press issued a report predicting that one-third of the nation will vote early, largely through mailed absentee ballots. Loriz turned over the results of her investigations to Congressman Tim Bishop and Senator Chuck Schumer, who are looking into the suppression of voter access.

Loriz’s story is at http://www2.timesreview.com/SIR/Stories/I-voters-09-25. Her accompanying editorial is at http://www2.timesreview.com/SIR/stories/I-edits-09-25

The Vacation of Lost Things

2008-07-07T12:54:00.001-04:00

Things lose themselves. More and more frequently it seems lately. Or maybe it’s just that the longer we live the more we have had time to misplace. When I think back, I believe I could stock a very nice store with all of my possessions that have gone missing. A favorite blue cashmere sweater. Too many pairs of expensive sunglasses to count. Any number of half-read books, some of them the property of libraries. Single earrings in large numbers. A gold watch chain that belonged to my great grandfather (although that was stolen, so it doesn’t count in the same way.) Not to mention all the umbrellas and pens and subway passes and lipsticks.

Where did all of this stuff go? Perhaps to “the island of lost things,” as in a children’s book of the same name. In any case, they are somewhere, stubbornly elusive, despite in some cases intensive searching. I have been thinking about this lately because my husband and I were recently on the vacation of lost things. Every day there were half a dozen panicky false alarms – the camera, the guidebook, the ferry tickets, the hotel confirmation, all turning out to be safely stowed somewhere.
Among the actually lost items were my notebook, hunted for but never found. (Fortunately I had written most of my notes on odd scraps of paper, and I still had those.) My husband’s watch, probably left on a beach, with no hope of retrieval. And, most seriously, his prescription glasses with their clip-on sunglasses.

We were at a boat ramp helping a friend inflate and launch a rubber raft. At some point the glasses were in the way and Peter distinctly remembered putting them “somewhere semi-safe.” Our friend recalled seeing them in her car. We searched for an hour, tore apart both cars, scoured the ground, inch by inch. They had simply vanished. Finally it was dark and we were forced to give up.

The next day, it seemed the only remaining place to look was in the hidden crevices of the boat, which involved partially deflating it, and removing the wooden floor. Unlikely, but then again, the glasses couldn’t actually have disappeared into thin air. Not there. Then Peter decided to look in the one place we had all agreed they could not possibly be: the water. It took about 20 seconds -- there they were, in five inches of water, immediately beside the boat ramp. We were at the time on a Greek island, where every miracle calls for the building of a commemorative chapel on the spot, but instead we decided to go and get a celebratory beer.

Finding the glasses was very good news, especially under the circumstances. But I couldn’t help imagining that our vacation of lost belongings was a portent of things I would prefer not to think about. Leave it to the poets. One of my favorites, Elizabeth Bishop, perfectly summed this up in a poem called “One Art,” which I include below.

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
-- Elizabeth Bishop

2008-04-26T09:38:00.001-04:00

Raising the Kids: Whose Job?

2008-04-26T09:37:00.001-04:00

In the course of her work, my daughter recently has had occasion to read various “mommy blogs,” an outlet for maternal obsessing that wasn't available when I was a new mother. (Instead I got to bore people in person.) My daughter was horrified by the compulsive preoccupation with every trivial detail of baby care, and it has put her off the whole of idea of motherhood.
She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.

Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.

I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.

Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.

Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends

Garry Trudeau and John McCain

2008-04-26T09:33:00.002-04:00

Remember Mark Slackmeyer, aka “Megaphone Mark”? He was part of the original Doonesbury gang, the 60s slacker/activist who has ended up working for NPR, where he and his politically conservative life partner debate each other on the air. Around where I lived, Slackmeyer was a familiar type. (In fact, it was rumored that a local alternative newspaper journalist, a classmate of Garry Trudeau’s at Yale, was the original model for Megaphone Mark.)

We recognized many of the Doonesbury gang in our own circle. It was fascinating watching them grow up, because, unlike other comic strip characters, they did grow up. Like us, only somewhat more slowly. They left their communes behind, got married, had kids, got divorced, went to law school, got jobs on Capitol Hill, got fired, went into rehab. Ups and downs. Like the rest of us.

But in the last several years, Garry Trudeau has thrown something much tougher at one of the old gang. B.D., Michael Doonsbury’s college roommate, has lost a leg in a grenade attack in Iraq. Since his injury, the football coach and former college jock has turned into a moody alcoholic, now undergoing therapy for post-traumatic stress at Walter Reed Hospital.
This new storyline has won Trudeau admiration and awards in some surprising quarters, including the Pentagon and the Disabled Americans Veterans. Even John McCain has done an about face. In 1995, he went on record as saying he held the liberal cartoonist in “utter contempt.” This past year McCain wrote an introduction to Trudeau's The Long Road Home , a collection of his strips about B.D.'s injury and recovery. (The proceeds will go to a veterans’ charity.)

Doonesbury has always been topical, and often controversial. During the Vietnam War Trudeau’s anti-war cartoons were part of a larger protest movement. Because of the draft, that war was central to our generation’s experience. After it was over, many of those who opposed the war came to regard the veterans as victims, not perpetrators.

In the war in Iraq, decades later, Trudeau’s has directed his focus and sympathy to the soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to writing about their issues, he’s a frequent visitor to the injury ward at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and at gatherings of wounded troops.

On his website, Trudeau has also created a virtual community for soldiers – a sort of "Global War On Terror literary magazine,” as he has written. "The Sandbox," is a digest of military blogs, open to soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Posts on The Sandbox include a list of 63 items every Iraq-bound soldier should pack (baby wipes, webcam) and attempts to compare real combat with the way it’s portrayed in the movies. (Movies are more interesting,” wrote one soldier. “It’s sort of the banality of being shot at.”)

In providing this forum for active duty soldiers, and in writing about disabled soldiers in Doonesbury, the humorist underlines and important truth as effectively in the era of Bush as in the era of Nixon and Johnson.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/

John Adams: The Courage to Sign

2008-04-26T09:31:00.001-04:00

It's not only youth that's wasted on the young, as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked. So is education. Other than learning to read and write, and maybe do the odd sum, is there any point in going to school before you're 40-something or even or 50-something?

Certainly teaching me history was a waste. As a schoolgirl, I was too self-absorbed and my imaginative powers were too undeveloped for me to fully appreciate any historical event. If it happened before I was born, my M.O. was “memorize and forget.”

This occurred to me recently because I am in the middle of watching “John Adams,” the seven-part HBO miniseries about the founding of our country. There are aspects I don't much like about the production, mainly Paul Giametti's John Adams -- he seems to have two facial expressions, both of them cribbed from Homer Simpson.

But I have found the history unexpectedly moving, and have for the first time begun to grasp what it really means. Watching scenes from the Continental Congress, where the terms of Independence were hammered out, I understood for the first time how terrifying it was for these men to repudiate their government -- how extreme an act, and how uncertain of success.
They had reason to be scared. Benjamin Franklin (played brilliantly by Tom Wilkinson) expressed everyone's mood when he said, “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” And so they would have. Because we know how the story comes out, it's hard to fully appreciate the courage and audacity of these 56 men. In signing the Declaration of Independence, they might well have been signing their own death warrant.

Strip away the mythologizing and the pieties of history-books, and the fact remains: those Patriots were extraordinary men. Not only courageous, but also smart. Pretty much the same bunch went on to frame the Constitution and the Bill of Rights; they created a substantially new form of government that has proved durable and important.

Obama Plays the Age Card

2008-04-02T19:19:00.001-04:00

Young people don't vote. That's the conventional wisdom, and this year it's big news that, in the primaries, young voters surged to the polls as they haven't in a long time. In 1970, when the voting age was lowered to 18, 55 percent of the young voters went to the polls, but in recent elections that figure has dropped dramatically.

This year, though, they're coming back--mostly, no surprise, to support Obama. He has delighted them in part by challenging the baby boom generation, whose members, he has said, should "get over themselves."

From an age standpoint, it’s hard to think of another election year that has been as interesting as this one. For the first time ever, three generations are represented in the Presidential horse race. Obama has declared that it's time for a representative of a new generation to enter the White House, namely him.*

Not baby boomer Hillary Clinton, born in 1947, the same year the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. And certainly not John McCain, whose 1938 birth date makes him a son of the Great Depression. The year Obama was born, 1961, was the year John F. Kennedy exhorted Americans to "Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country." Some seasoned political hands say they see in Obama the youth and hopefulness of JFK.

After 16 years of running the country, maybe it is time for our generation to step aside. But it's annoying to hear Obama sound off on the subject. As even he acknowledges, many of the social reforms we now take for granted were initiated by the 60s politics that he now called "tired." If the Democratic nomination does end up going to him, I imagine he will begin to soft-pedal the anti-boomer rhetoric. We are, after all, still the largest generation in American history and we do vote.

*According to some demographers, Obama, with his 1961 birthdate, qualifies as a late boomer. But he counts himself as part of the baby bust, a.k.a. the boomer backlash. If you doubt there is such a thing, take a look at the blog dieboomerdie.
[http://dieboomerdie.blogspot.com]

Uncle Internet is Watching

2008-04-02T19:16:00.000-04:00

Back in the Dark Ages, before there was an Internet, I subscribed to a newsletter called Privacy Journal. It was edited by Robert Ellis Smith, America's leading expert on the right to privacy. Smith counseled that you should never give your Social Security number without asking why, or if, it was needed. I followed this advice for a while and then gave up because it was too much trouble. In fact, privacy itself became too much trouble. There are only so many issues you can be angry about at any one time, and privacy infringements just did not make the cut.

It may be time to rethink that. A recent article in the New York Times reported on the amassing of consumer information by Web companies that track your every Internet search. They can then use this window into your tastes and desires to personally target the ads that appear on your screen. As a marketing executive explained, with more data, it's possible to put the right ads in front of the right people. "That's the whole idea here: put dog food ads in front of people who have dogs."

A while back, I posted a piece about my Googling habit, in which I described my computer Search History as a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography. Now I see that, from a marketer's angle, it's also a wish list. Let's see. Customer Banks orders lots of vitamin supplements; she appears to be a bit of a hypochondriac (though some of those symptom searches were on behalf of others); she's often on the lookout for high-end sheets at low-end prices; she researches more travel destinations than a person could possibly visit; and when she does travel, she is relentless about turning up the absolute cheapest airfare. Lots of possibilities for target marketing there.

Does this matter? Sometimes it might be convenient to get targeted ads, to have Uncle Internet know just what you want. But there's a cost - in privacy, not to mention the general creepiness factor.

The New York Times article quoted one of my favorite-ever New Yorker cartoons from 1993. Two dogs are sitting in front of a computer and one says to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

Now they do.

Are We Scared Yet?

2008-04-02T19:14:00.001-04:00

If you are old enough to remember Lassie and hula hoops, chances are your grandparents lived through the Great Depression. You may have been taught in school that the stock market crash of 1929 sent the country on a disastrous 10-year economic decline; you also may have heard, and heard again, personal stories of that time. Often these stories consist of a single memory, one that is meant to stand in for all the rest, and to convey what it was like to live through such an event.

My grandmother's story was this: She was working in a real estate office in Palm Beach, Florida, before the Crash. Sales were booming and times were flush. This exuberance was reflected in a large mosaic map of Florida embedded in the office floor. At the center of the map was Florida’s Gold Coast, and that the center of the Gold Coast was Palm Beach, marked by a shiny silver dollar that the artist had cemented among the tiles.

Not long after, the Florida boom became a bust and my grandmother ended up losing her house, her car and the money she had been saving for my father's education. But the story she told wasn't about that. Instead it was about the silver dollar – and how one morning she and her colleagues came in to work to discover that someone had chiseled it right out of the map. Times were that hard.

For a while after the '29 stock market crash, nobody understood the extent of the economic crisis. Especially the nobodies. On Wall Street, stockbrokers were jumping out of windows. But lots of ordinary people bought the government’s assurances that the shortage of cash was temporary, nothing to worry about. Then something would happen - in my grandmother's case it was the disappearance of the silver dollar - that crystallized the new reality. Yes, times were now that hard.

I haven't come upon my own silver dollar yet, but I'm on the lookout. It stands to reason, when in the same week, a major Wall Street firm collapses and Alan Greenspan announces the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. (Actually he said World War II, but that is essentially the same thing, since it was gearing up for war production that decisively pulled the U.S. out of the Depression.)

I was raised on stories of the Depression. I still have in my possession a photograph of the beautiful Victorian house my grandmother lost. I admit to being a pessimist about money issues, and I sincerely hope I'm wrong this time. But if I see something that looks like it might be my silver dollar, I will let you know.

"You Had 'em, You Raise 'em"

2008-04-02T19:08:00.003-04:00

In the course of her work, my daughter recently has had occasion to read various “mommy blogs,” an outlet for maternal obsessing that wasn't available when I was a new mother. (Instead I got to bore people in person.) My daughter was horrified by the compulsive preoccupation with every trivial detail of baby care, and it has put her off the whole of idea of motherhood.

She had a similar reaction to a Sex and the City rerun we watched together. It was the famous baby-shower episode, where a mommy character announces that she's given up a career as a corporate senior vice president to stay home with her child. “That is so unrealistic!” Cait said. “No one would ever do that.” “Yes they would, and they do,” I said.

Personally I guess I wouldn't recommend putting a career on the back-burner. Luckily for me I never had to make that choice, not being a senior vice president of anything when I got pregnant. As a self-employed writer, I could shape my work around taking care of my child. I could even channel my maternal preoccupations into my work by writing for parenting magazines. I never had to contend with the heartrending, impossible balancing act of mothers with employers and office jobs.

I wanted to say something reassuring to Cait about how times have changed and there were more options available. I wanted to say that the senior vice president would now be able to take a year of parental leave and return to her previous job without penalty. That the part-time or reduced-hour work week was widely accepted. That there were excellent government-subsidized childcare and education centers, and that these high-quality programs were staffed by trained well-paid workers. That she could contribute to her pension fund even in the years she wasn't working.

Unfortunately, there’s no way I can say such things. Most of these family-work reconciliation measures I mention are taken for granted in Europe. There, caring for the next generation is considered to contribute to the social good. But In this country, we are rugged individualists, where the prevailing attitude is, “you had 'em, you raise 'em.” This backward attitude toward family benefits is unique in the developed world.

Realigning our family policies would be an investment that pays dividends for everyone. Literally. Because these future generations will, if we’re lucky, be paying the taxes that fund our social security dividends

Pious Politicians

2008-03-17T10:05:00.000-04:00

Here's a civics question: What successful candidate for President of the United States, when news leaked that he had never been baptized, announced that he'd get to it when he could - probably after the election? Hint: This didn't happen yesterday.
No recent presidential contender could have gotten out of the starting gate with such a casual attitude to the most basic ritual of Christian faith. The correct answer is Dwight D. Eisenhower. (Baptized or not, Ike considered himself a Christian, and it was he who signed off on inserting “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance.) In the half-century since the Eisenhower years, voters have come increasingly to expect candidates to fervently profess a personal relationship to the Almighty, in the form of the Christian God.

How did it happen that such public religiosity became a prerequisite for high office? This question is tackled in a recent book called “God in the White House,” by Randall Ballmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College. A self-professed evangelical Christian, Ballmer is also a firm supporter of the separation of church and state, and no fan of what he calls the “religionization” of the Oval Office.

It has been argued that this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind, that they believed their new nation would be Christian in spirit. Some did, some didn't. Some did one week and didn't the next. Their writings can be (and often are) selectively quoted to favor either side of this issue. But the law of the land which they wisely chose to put in place holds that the institutions of church and state are to remain separate.

I am very uncomfortable when candidates push the God button. Presidential contenders do this while at the same time

November in My Soul

2008-03-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

Two guys walk into a bar. One says to the other, “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet… “ And especially on those days when “it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off. . . .” Well, then it's time for a change of scene.

Know how you feel, Ishmael. I get a little moody myself sometimes.

Moby Dick might not be high on anyone's list of beach reading, but it's hard to deny that Melville is a master at evoking melancholy. I thought about Ishmael recently because my own frame of mind has been none too sunny, a fact I've tried to hide from all but my nearest and dearest. This is as it should be, I've always thought. Who wants to be called upon to commiserate right and left? It's not as if I'm suffering from anything major enough to qualify for the Life Events Stress Scale. More a generalized gloominess that is hard to explain, let alone justify. Best keep it to myself.

Yet I recently saw a friend take a different approach, and I learned something from it. We were at a cocktail party, and when I asked how things were going, she told the truth. Though she was surrounded by cheerful party chatter, she allowed that her life had lately been seeming like ashes, just ashes. Nothing was actually wrong, she said. There were minor complaints, as there always are. But mainly she was just going through one of those phases, one of Ishmael's drizzly Novembers of the soul.
There was nothing depressing about hearing this. Quite the opposite. My friend's candor freed us both. Cocktail party or no, we were released from the stultifying obligation to pretend. I did hear a few of her minor complaints, but there was no hint of whining. I listened -- no commiseration requested or given. We both knew that her unhappy state, though troublesome, was temporary.

This exchange, I later decided, was a model for how to conduct an authentic life, with all its ups and downs, in a social setting. Step one: Tell the truth about how you are feeling. Step two: Do not try and rationalize it, or explain it away. Step three: No whining. Step four: Stress that what you are going through is a passing phase. Step five: Don't ask for, or entertain, advice.
As remedy for my own low spirits, I am planning to try the Ishmael Cure. He is describing my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, when he observes that “right and left, the streets take you waterward” toward the Battery. You will find there “crowds of water-gazers,” all of them getting “just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.” The water-gazers are still there and I mean to join them.

2008-03-17T09:56:00.002-04:00

2008-03-17T09:54:00.001-04:00

Binge Browsing

2008-02-29T13:23:00.004-05:00

Hello, my name is Ann and I’m a Google addict. For a long time I didn’t think I had a problem. True, when I was home and sitting down, my laptop was usually in my lap. I could always claim I was writing. But a lot of the timeI wasn’t writing. I was “looking things up.” With my favorite search engine at my service, not the slightest curiosity went unsatisfied. Whatever I wanted to know, I could know it. Faust should have been so lucky, I thought.

Free of the tyranny of linear thinking, I’d bound from link to link as one thing reminded me of another and then another. Whatever ran through my mind quickly found expression in my Search History.

I didn’t even have to shut myself up in my office, thanks to the
further liberation of a wi-fi network. I could pursue my investigations
from anywhere in the house and I did. In bed. In front of the TV. On
the kitchen counter and the dining room table. Just as women used to
consider conversing and knitting to be complementary activities, I
could talk and web-browse at the same time – occasionally enlivening
the discussion with a choice morsel I’d come across. And with Google as
my home page, I was the family Answer Lady. “Let’s find out!” I’d say
brightly as soon as anyone ventured a question.

It’s a lucky stroke to have arrived at middle-age at roughly the same time as the Internet. I feel like I have an auxiliary brain. Can’t quite remember the name of the movie I saw last week? No need to wait until my memory reluctantly dredges it up. Just consult Mr. Google.

Needless to say, I have never liked to be parted from my laptop for long. But, thanks to a thief in Washington’s Union Station, I recently spent a webless week. The data were backed up and the machine itself was covered by insurance. But there was no reserve computer available and I was forced to go cold turkey.

Day one was brutal; I felt like someone had cut off my hands. Then I began to notice a contradictory dynamic: Everything took a lot longer to do, yet it felt like there was much more time. The “lot longer” part I had expected. Compared to going on whitepages.com, it seemed painfully labor-intensive to find a number in a phone book. (Not to mention that ours was years out of date.)

The surprise was that I had more time. Frustrating though it was to be
unable to search online for this or that, it slowly dawned on me that
most things I was so keen to look up, I didn’t actually need to know.
The days seemed to lengthen and I began to grasp what had happened to
all the time that had been disappearing from my life.

Where had I been?

On an extended tour of Wonderland, also known as the World Wide Web. I
think I understand why I find cyberspace so seductive. I’ve never been
happy following an orderly progression of ideas down a straight and
narrow path. A web is more my style. Lots of intriguing ways to get from here to there; lots of scenic detours to survey. And with the help of a willing and non-judgmental browser, you can explore each and every one. Taking all the time you want.

My new computer has arrived and I again appreciate its comforting weight on my lap. My Search History continues to serve as a kind of stream-of-consciousness autobiography. But my binge browsing days are over.

Pious Politicians

2008-02-29T13:20:00.001-05:00

McCain's Gay Baiting

2008-01-30T23:10:00.000-05:00

If you were a member of a conservative household in Florida last week, you might have picked up the phone and heard a recording that accused Mitt Romney of being soft on gay rights. The "robocall," as these canned communications are known, featured a woman's voice reminding voters that Romney once "told gay organizers in Massachusetts that he would be a stronger advocate for [their] special rights than even Ted Kennedy."

This was the sound of the John McCain campaign taking the low road. Ironic, but not surprising. Senator McCain learned a thing or two after Karl Rove masterminded a smear operation against him in the 2000 South Carolina primary. This year, who should McCain have hired to help run his campaign but the same Bush operative who orchestrated the whispering attacks against McCain seven years ago?*

Those robocalls in Florida were aimed at stirring up anti-gay sentiment among voters by pointing out Mitt's flip-flop on gay rights. Yet McCain's own record on the issue is not entirely flip-flop-free. Four years ago he called a constitutional ban on gay marriage "antithetical to the core philosophy of Republicans." Two years later, he told televangelist Jerry Falwell that if states didn't pass laws prohibiting gay marriage, he would back a constitutional ban.

It remains to be seen whether McCain's courting of the religious right will succeed. He may be sound on abortion and gay marriage. But his anti-Mitt robocall also stressed that America needs someone who will preserve "the sanctity of marriage." It's a bit rich that John McCain thinks he can out-marriage-sanctity Mitt Romney—who, after all, is still on his first wife.

To refresh your memory, here's a recap of the McCain divorce: While McCain was imprisoned at a Vietnamese POW camp, his wife Carol, a former model, was in a serious car accident. Her injuries left her four inches shorter, considerably heavier, and disabled -- not what McCain expected when he came home, himself still suffering from severe injuries. By his own account, he "ran around" for a while. Then he met a wealthy 25-year-old from Arizona with whom he began a steady adulterous relationship. Soon after, he dumped Carol, who had reared their three children while McCain was in prison. A month after the divorce was final, he married the heiress.

Hypocrisy seems to come with the territory of being a social conservative (examples supplied on request). But how rotten do you have to be to treat another person like this? People carry on about Bill Clinton's character issues, but, really, Slick Willie seems like a stand-up guy compared to John "Sanctity of Marriage" McCain.

What Martin Knew

2008-01-18T11:13:00.000-05:00

On April 4th, 1967, a year to the day before he was murdered, Martin Luther King delivered the second most important speech of his life. It lacked the stirring cadences of the famous "I have a dream" oration and the resolute hopefulness of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Unlike his words at Selma or his address at the base of the Lincoln Memorial, it is rarely taught to schoolchildren. Yet Martin Luther King's least-known speech is uncannily relevant today.

It was called "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence." In it, Dr. King made a passionate plea for Americans to take "responsibility [for] ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents." He spoke from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church to a meeting of the peace group Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam. Condemning U.S. military policy in Southeast Asia, he called our country "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This was a controversial position and not one he took lightly. "Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war . . .. [but] my conscience leaves me no other choice."

Now, on Martin Luther King Day, 2008, we are about to enter year six of another far-off quagmire whose origins are clouded and goals obscure. It seems a good time to reconsider what Dr. King had to say on that April day 40 years ago.

Why should the Vietnam War have come into Martin Luther King's field of moral vision? Good preacher that he was, King counted "seven major reasons." Many of these are astonishingly pertinent to the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and are variations of arguments you may have heard (or may have made yourself) recently. Here are some of King’s points:

** The war was an enemy of the nation's poor:

“I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube."

** We are subjecting our troops not only to the brutalizing process that goes on in any war, but also to a deadly cynicism:

". . . [The soldiers] must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved."

** The image of America is increasingly tarnished around the world:

To make this point, Dr. King invoked the words of a Vietnamese Buddhist leader, "The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat."

In King's analysis, the American government had "[fallen] victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long." He understood that extricating ourselves from "this nightmarish conflict" would be enormously difficult. Confronted with such a daunting challenge, he said, we are always in danger of being "mesmerized by uncertainty."

Halfway through the speech, Dr. King seems almost to lean over his pulpit and speak directly to us today, in our post-9/11 confusion about what is owed us and how we should behave as citizens of the world. "We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate," he said, "or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate."

Martin Luther King paid a price for becoming one of the country's most prominent opponents of the Vietnam War. The mainstream media turned against him; Time Magazine called the speech a "demagogic slander." Even some of his own followers questioned whether Dr. King's outspoken opposition to the war would hurt the cause of his people. Such doubters saddened him, he responded, as their concerns showed that they "have not really known me, my commitment or my calling." Today "Beyond Vietnam" may not be part of the Sixth Grade curriculum but its uncompromising message is central to Martin Luther King's beliefs.

We have a choice, concludes Dr. King. "If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin."

Amen.

Karl Rove's Black Love Child

2008-01-18T09:07:00.000-05:00

Eight years ago this month, John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination. The rest is history--specifically the tragic and blighted history of our young century. It worked in another way as well. Too shaken to defend himself, McCain emerged from the bruising episode less maverick reformer and more Manchurian candidate.

The former crusader against the Republican establishment has since turned into a Bush-hugging, business-as-usual politician who has backed down from many positions that set him apart from conventional conservatives. Before, McCain supported the separation of church and state; now he wants a Christian in the White House. The confederate flag, which he once considered an offensive symbol, no longer troubles him. And he has come to believe that tax cuts are a good idea.

I don't want to say that McCain sold his soul to the devil, since I believe that religious metaphors have no place in politics. But consider this: shortly after losing the 2000 election, McCain told an interviewer that there must be "a special place in hell" reserved for the rumormongers.

Seven years later, who is running McCain's South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting Bridget. If you can't beat them, hire them--even if they've launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

Bridget McCain was a seriously ill baby in Mother Teresa's orphanage when Cindy McCain visited and decided to bring her back to the United States for medical treatment in 1991. John and Cindy adopted her not long after. Now 16, Bridget learned of her role in the 2000 campaign only when she Googled herself. According to the New York Times, when McCain entered the current race, Bridget summoned his aides and asked them to pledge that this campaign would be different.

We can't know what reassurances were offered, but Condon doesn't seem to have repented for his role in the 2000 slander. He told the New York Times reporter that he wasn't surprised about the downward spiral of the Bush-McCain race. "Our primaries have a way of doing that," Condon said. "There is a tradition of it, it is accepted behavior, and frankly it works."

John McCain is now favored to win in South Carolina. The personal attacks of the 2000 election season, he recently told an interviewer, were "long ago and far away." "I had to get over it.... I don't ever think about them or dwell on them." Cindy McCain agrees. "We're past that. We've moved on."

The McCains may have moved on, but I haven't. Bush made a decisive step toward the White House by spreading lies about an 8-year-old child. (Not to mention a couple of decorated war veterans.) These vile tactics are not OK. If something similar were to happen in a high school election, those responsible would be suspended and black marks would be entered on their permanent records. But in politics, it seems, there's no such thing as a permanent record. Consequences do not exist--however blatant the misconduct.

It's time we changed that. In the 2008 election, voters need to send a message that attention is being paid--that this time liars and cheats will be defeated, not given a free hall pass.

Gay Marriage for All

2007-12-04T08:17:00.000-05:00

When I was young, and ferocious feminists roamed the earth, it was a widely held view that marriage mainly benefited the state. Why should committed co-habiting couples need official sanction? Of course, people kept on getting married nonetheless (including formerly ferocious feminists). Except when they couldn't.

It is true that marriage serves the common good. A sizable marriage penalty is written into the tax code; rich and poor, working married couples pay more in taxes than they would if single. Married couples are more likely to fill caretaking roles for each other, saving government money in social benefits for the sick or disabled. And married parents have the legal responsibility to support their children, making the children less likely to become wards of the state.

The government does shell out Social Security survivorship benefits to married people and not to co-habiting couples, no matter how long they have been together. But the cost is small compared to the economic value marriage generates.

Leaving aside all questions of fairness, marriage between committed couples, no matter what their sexual persuasion, should be encouraged simply on the basis of the bottom line. Yet there is heated opposition to gay marriage, much of it on religious grounds.

So why not take the state out of the marriage business altogether? Straight or gay, all couples would enter into the same kind of civil unions now proposed for gay couples. These would be carried out by the government, and would confer the same rights, benefits, and obligations as marriage now does. Couples wishing to enter into a marriage sanctified by a church could do so as a private, supplemental matter. And there would be no need for one group to impose its beliefs on anyone else.

There would be another benefit as well. It would take the divisive issue of gay marriage off the table in the coming presidential election. I find it painful to watch candidates tie themselves in knots over this one, and, frankly, we as a country have more pressing things to worry about.

Pete Seeger: The Power of Song

2007-11-30T18:19:00.000-05:00

On November 15th, 2001, I was in Washington attending a conference celebrating the life of progressive 1930s folklorist Benjamin Botkin. In addition to the usual panels and talks, the organizers had included in the program a musical session with Pete Seeger, his brother Mike and sister Peggy. Together they performed some of the folk standards in their repertoire. Then each Seeger did one solo number. Mike and Peggy sang more old favorites. Then it was Pete's turn. I wondered which of his iconic songs he would choose. This Land is Your Land? Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

On stage, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a creased sheet of paper and unfolded it. I felt a little sorry for him. "He's old," I thought, "it's not surprising that some of his verses have escaped his memory." As he propped the lyric sheet on his banjo case, he apologized to the audience: This song had just been written; he wasn't confident he'd memorized the lyrics yet. Then he sang Tom Paxton's tribute to the firefighters who had died on 9/11. As is his habit, he taught the audience to join in on the chorus: "Now every time I try to sleep I'm haunted by the sound / Of firemen pounding up the stairs / While we were running down."

It's hard to sing when you've given yourself over to weeping, but I tried.

I was reminded of this experience recently when I went to see "The Power of Song," a loving documentary about Seeger's life. He wrote or co-wrote songs that formed the sound track to the social change movements of the last 60 years. From the struggles for unions and civil rights to the protests against the Vietnam War, Seeger's anthems like We Shall Overcome and Waist Deep in the Big Muddy rallied support for the cause. In his late 80s when the film was made, Seeger has become a living monument. Yet there's not a backward looking moment. He's still using his music to tell the story of his times, as he sees it. In reviewing "The Power of Song," the New York Times wrote about Seeger: "He's still busy, still angry, still hopeful, still singing."

For me, the hopeful part is what came through most strongly. Forty years ago Pete Seeger did something so quixotic, so idealistic, so impractical, that its failure was virtually guaranteed. He wanted to help end pollution of New York's Hudson River, which had become a dumping ground for PCBs and other industrial waste. His vision was to build a replica of a 19th century sailing sloop and use it as a floating classroom to educate children and adults about the importance of the river. Since then the Clearwater has been the centerpiece of an environmental education program that has inspired generations of New York residents to advocate for the Hudson. The cleanup is far from complete, but pollution has been steadily declining, the fish have come back, and in some places the river is swimmable again.

Partly because of Pete Seeger's stubborn belief that all is not already lost.

Mistakes Were Made. Again.

2007-11-13T18:15:00.000-05:00

I opened my newspaper the other day and learned that, once again, "Mistakes were made." In this case, the mistakes involved Bernie Kerik, a associate of Rudy Giuliani who is under investigation for suspected entanglements with organized crime. You will notice that the subject of the previous sentence is "mistakes." The former mayor used the same construction in his non-admission of what was a serious lapse in judgment. "There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik," Giuliani told a reporter.

Who made these mistakes? What spectral being or elusive force could have been responsible? Thanks to his adroit use of the passive voice, we are left guessing. If I were Rhetoric Czar – oh, and by the way, I am – I would impose a fine on this affront to candor. When sentences have no subjects – no human ones, anyway – no one is ever accountable for anything. Along with George Orwell, I believe that creeping passive voice is a sign of moral bankruptcy. He wrote in his classic essay, The Politics of the English Language, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity."

It is as true in our time as it was 60 years ago that political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Language dictates thought, and the diabolical part is that language that is intended to mislead and manipulate works—even when we are fully aware it's a con.

Our newspapers parrot Administration phraseology that tries to "name things without calling up mental pictures of them," as Orwell wrote. This is why we read about "the Special Removal Unit" (kidnappers) tasked to perform "extraordinary rendition" (outsourcing torture, also know as "enhanced interrogation"). "Political language," according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable... "

And if there are lies, there must also be liars, right? But not Condeleeza Rice, who merely "misspoke herself," when she testified before the 9/11 Commission that she'd received no warnings about Al Quada's plans.

Then there is "opposite talk," an attempt to legitimize a policy by giving it a name that is directly contrary to its actual aims. The Administration's Clear Skies Initiative, for example, was anything but; it substantially weakened pollution controls. And of course there is the Protect America Act. If there were truth in naming, would be called the Police America Act, as it broadly expands the government's power to spy on Americans.

So who will police the policers? Who will point out to the public the discrepancies between language and reality? Journalism should have a "rhetoric beat," according to an essay by Brent Cunningham in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. He argues that people ought to be following and reporting on the ways that political language is twisted to influence thinking.

Sign me up. As Rhetoric Czar, I will do my best to identify the latest linguistic offenses against clarity and truth as they occur. (With the presidential campaign heating up, I expect an avalanche.)

Ready, Aim, Divorce

2007-11-04T16:22:00.000-05:00

A friend received a card last week, featuring a picture of a noose. This was not meant as a threat to my friend or as a macabre Halloween greeting (though it was Halloween.) It was a divorce announcement. The noose was fashioned out of a belt, apparently the only thing left behind in the departing husband's closet. With symbolism inspired by the season, the card also featured a tombstone inscribed with the letters R.I.P., and the start and end dates of the marriage.

I confess I was taken aback when I heard about the card. In fact, I was taken aback when I first heard about divorce announcements at all, which was just last week, when the New York Times published an article on the subject in their "Weddings/Celebrations" section. [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/fashion/weddings/28field.html]

According to the article, divorce announcements do herald a celebration of sorts, as many of the senders interviewed talked about the importance of reclaiming their lives. The card my friend received was created by the divorcing wife, but when inspiration fails, there are also printed divorce announcements. These seem to divide along gender lines. The home page of Divorce Cards [http://thedivorcecards.com/] seems aimed a bitter guys, with cards saying things like, "My wife left with my house, my car, my money and my best friend... and I miss him." And a postcard with the message, "I lost half of everything I own in my recent divorce, including envelopes. So I am sending you this lousy postcard . . . ."

If this sounds hostile, I found cards intended for the distaff side (as they say in divorce proceedings) that threaten outright mayhem. (Of course these are from Texas.)* Cowgirl Divorce Cards proclaim that husbands are like guns. "Keep one around long enough and you're gonna want to shoot it"Jus' letting you know I got a divorce instead." And "I still miss my ex. . . . But my aim is getting much better."

Some of these divorce cards strike me as pretty over-the-top, yet I realize that strong feelings come with the territory. Catharsis is the purpose of rituals, and if the cards' black humor helps I'm all for it. Because when you are of a mind to inflict bodily harm on your new ex, it's much better to "use your words." As they say in pre-school.

*[http://www.caddylakgraffix.com/ProductInfo.aspx?productid=ADRV001]

How to Raise a Perfect Child

2007-11-01T10:58:00.000-04:00

Helicopter parents? Us? Guilty as charged, I suppose. Or at least half-guilty. Raising our only child, my husband and I traded off the hovering duty, actually. First I would hover over her while he cautioned against it, and then we would swap.

It's annoying when you are following what you believe to be your own unique bent, and some lifestyle journalist comes along and identifies it as a generational trend and gives it a catchy name. I'm sure we baby boomers are more protective than our parents, but that's not necessarily bad. It sometimes seems to me that the post-war approach to parenting was laissez-faire to the point of negligence. I mean it's a miracle we're alive considering some of the things we got up to unsupervised.

What is going on here is a case of generational dialectic. One extreme begets its opposite. I was sure I was doing the right thing when I was being, as my father once cautioned, "too nice" to my daughter. We were visiting the zoo at the time and he got tired of watching me cater to any and all of her whims. I remember feeling indignant over his remark and I failed to consider that there might be a point beneath the provocation.

I still don't want to consider it. Parenting style is made up of hundreds of minute, seemingly insignificant choices every single day. It's hard to imagine that you might have made many of them differently -- might have said no to a second souvenir or soda; might have let your child take the tumble instead of preventing it. You do what you do and things turn out the way they turn out.

Following expert advice does not guarantee that you'll be free of second thoughts. My mother often spoke to me of her regret that she heeded the dictum of a briefly popular childrearing authority who believed that babies should be fed and cuddled on a strict schedule. It didn't matter if they were screaming their heads off and all you wanted to do was pick them up. It was important not to for the sake of their future characters.

Hearing this story, I promised myself to avoid any such regrets. When I became a parent, I would read the current advice books, but I would follow my own heart in child-raising matters. And that is what I did. Until the Zeitgeist shifted, and someone came up with a pejorative term for it.

We boomer parents are now charged with having been narcissistically over-involved with our kids, and having coddled them to the point of undermining their independence. On one level I understand that this is just another swing of the pendulum. On another, I worry that the description fits. In any case, by the time a child leaves for college, the job is done. The choices are adding up as they will. You do what you do, things turn out the way they turn out. You might just as well regret that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

Email Me at Your Own Risk

2007-10-31T22:40:00.000-04:00

If I email someone I don't necessarily expect to hear back right away. Maybe they are busy. Maybe they are in the middle of a break-up or a health crisis. Maybe their son was caught smoking pot and is about to be suspended from school. Maybe they're at a Buddhist retreat or in the middle of a good book. If what I want to communicate is vital, I can always pick up the phone.

I have noticed, though, that this is not everyone's expectation. Take an extra day to answer your personal email and half of your correspondents start to wonder if you're still breathing. Why is this? Back in the horse and buggy era, when people wrote letters, no one thought they had to be answered the second you got them. You had some time to get around to it.

There is no chance that this leisurely timetable will ever be applied to email communications. The accepted practice is, you get it, you answer it. And if you don't the person who sent it thinks that you do not like them anymore, or that you are dead.

So I am working on a new a "Away" message that will explain that I am not dead but merely taking an email holiday:

Ann would really like to get back to you, but all of her circuits are temporarily busy. She is assisting other customers. She has no more available memory, and will resume communications when she has shut down some other operations. She's out of bandwidth and your message will have to wait until she has installed an optimizer, whatever that is.

In short, she is on overload. So, dear correspondents, would you be willing to help by going on an email diet? Nothing too stringent, just a few simple restrictions.

* If I have answered a question you asked in a previous email, it isn't necessary to write back and thank me. It is thanks enough not to have to open an email that simply says, "Thanks."

* No need to forward an article that appeared in a newspaper that I read everyday.

* If you are a member of my book club and you agree with a critical opinion that someone else has expressed in an email, it doesn't really add much to write back, "Me too"

* While I am delighted to be invited to your party, once is enough. I don't have to be reminded via evite.com who else is coming.

* And, finally, if we are both on the same email listserv, and you have something to say to one other member, please do not click "Reply All." "All" will thank you, especially me.

Stupid Smart People

2007-10-15T11:19:00.000-04:00

Stupid smart people. Who are they? I don't mean "Smart People Who Do Stupid things," as in the title of a book by a Yale psychologist. Everyone sometimes does dumb, self-destructive things, including smart people.

I'm talking about people who are widely believed to be smart and yet who are, in fact, really stupid. Stupid smart people typically boast impressive credentials, yet promote concepts and policies that ultimately prove to be false, and even dangerous. Think of them as "idiots who went to Yale."

I'm not referring to a certain White House inhabitant who also attended the Harvard Business School, courtesy of family connections. I mean people who actually qualified for admission to distinguished institutions.

(There also are people who are very bright, but are generally underestimated because they don't have posh educations, or even much education at all. Smart stupid people, if you will. Sadly, members of this group are rarely in a position to influence the public - though they are masters at detecting the bullshit produced by the stupid smart people.)

You will find stupid smart people everywhere, but especially in fields where talking the talk is more important than walking the walk. Politics and academia, notably. Also in foundations and think tanks, home to many has-beens and wannabes in the same lines of work.

Start with Donald Rumsfeld. He graduated from Princeton and was admitted to Georgetown Law School - yet for all his credentials, as Secretary of Defense he clung to his misguided Iraq policy, even when confronted with its disastrous consequences. His famous "I'm not into this detail stuff" illustrates another common characteristic of stupid smart people: they arrogantly defend and excuse their own incompetence.

Academia is a great bastion of stupid smart people. The highest concentration on any given campus is often in the social science buildings. Harvard's Daniel Gilbert, to name one, is a Harvard psychology professor whose recent book on happiness research has been getting a lot of attention. His premise is that both happy and unhappy events have only a brief effect on our sense of well-being. The 2004 presidential election is one of his prime examples. Gilbert contends that we on the losing side may have imagined we'd be miserable if John Kerry lost. Soon after, though, we would seldom think about it.

I don't know about up in Cambridge, but around where I live the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the current administration hasn't let up for a single day. If anything, my friends and acquaintances are MORE unhappy about the election than we ever would have thought possible, thus disproving Gilbert's supposedly ground-breaking theory.

Then there is Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, and possibly the stupidest smart person alive. His utilitarian approach to ethical issues has led him to conclude that senile old people and other "non-persons" should be euthanized to conserve resources for the young. He has long urged readers to "put feelings aside" when dealing with dispensable family members.

Then his mother developed Alzheimer's. He was shocked to find himself unable to follow his own recommendations -- because, he said, "It's different when it's your mother."

Talking the talk carried Singer to a named chair at Princeton. But when it came time to walk the walk, the professor was unable to practice what he had so successfully professed. People do have special relationships with their families, he belatedly came to understand. It is different when it's your mother,

Any smart stupid person on earth could have told him that.

The Truth About Rudy, pt 2

2007-10-15T11:17:00.000-04:00

What is the truth about Rudy? Well, that depends on whether you happened to read page 6 or page 35 of the New York Post last Friday. On page 35 he's gaining on Romney in New Hampshire and very likely to take the nomination. On page 6, he's fast wearing out his welcome among the Republican conservative base. It seems they recently have encountered the flaky (to put it politely) Rudy. Here in New York, we know him well.

Never mind his political positions (which seem to change from week to week anyway), he considers himself exempt from having to behave in socially acceptable ways. All his recent pandering to the Right may be undone by the latest much-reported episode of boorishness. The assembled gun fanciers of the National Rifle Association were not happy when he broke off right in the middle of addressing them to take a cell phone call from his wife.

And then attempted to justify this lapse by (what else?) invoking 9/11. Inappropriate? Arrogant? Bizarre? Yes, yes, and yes. Also, overweening, peculiar and off-the-wall.

In my post a couple of months ago, "The Truth About Rudy," I repeated an ex-constituent's harsh take on "America's Mayor." Columnist Jimmy Breslin spoke for many New Yorkers when he wrote that Giuliani is "seriously miswired."

This latest cell phone incident helps explain why we New Yorkers are more likely to diagnose Rudy Giuliani than to support him.

9/11 Fatigue? A Modest Proposal

2007-10-15T11:12:00.000-04:00

As it has been for past five years, the 6th anniversary of the attack on the World Trade Center was much in the news. This year, though, there is a public debate about whether the time has come to move on. Yes, says Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, who has been pushing the city to let go of its grief. No, says Michael Chertoff, Secretary of Homeland Security. “Some people ask the question: . . . has the time come to move on? I will tell you that as long as I draw a breath, I will not move on and neither will the . . . people in my department.”

I’m with the mayor. I feel sympathy for the victims’ relatives, and believe they should have fitting ceremonies to commemorate the tragic day. But I don’t think they are well served by perpetually channeling their grief into disputes over how their loved ones will be memorialized. And I don’t think anybody is well served by massive granite monuments dedicated to the 9/11 dead. (In general I think all memorials should either be impermanent or in the form of parks that encourage quiet contemplation.)

The attack on the World Trade Center already has the most affecting memorial I have ever seen anywhere. Every year, during the days surrounding 9/11, twin towers of light are beamed into the sky over New York. Every time I see them they take my breath away and I remember.

I have another idea for a memorial, one that might also help the victims’ families to move on. Instead of funneling huge sums into concrete remembrances, why not use those funds to succor the living, the men and women who risked their lives at Ground Zero and who are now gravely ill. Perhaps the most fitting tribute to those who perished would be to care for the people who tried to save them.

My Day at Ground Zero

2007-09-15T18:20:00.000-04:00

On this day six years ago, I boarded a bus full of volunteers and headed downtown to the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. The plan was to unload a truck filled with bottles of water and then return to St. Vincent's Hospital. As we neared the disaster site, the glorious color of that perfect fall day faded to ashy gray. You couldn't tell the air from the ground.

After the water was unloaded, I thought I might be of more use, so when the bus headed back uptown, I stayed. The rest of the afternoon I spent offering sandwiches to rescue workers so dusted in ash that they looked as if they'd been rolled in powdered sugar. No one wanted the sandwiches. During breaks the powdered sugar men just sat and stared. Once I realized that I wasn't serving any useful purpose, I began to feel like a voyeur. I hitched a ride back uptown in an ambulance ferrying a couple of firemen to their station.

That was it. I didn't set eyes on The Pile again until there was no pile left, only a hole in the ground. Yet 18 months later, mysterious things started happening. I couldn't breathe and my skin turned the color of cement. I could barely swallow and lost 10 pounds in three weeks. I had to rest in the middle of climbing subway stairs. There was nothing wrong with me, according to the doctors I consulted. Chest x-ray, sonograms, cardiac exams-all came back negative.

Slowly I improved, even gaining back the lost 10 pounds. Then new symptoms developed. I started coughing and clearing my throat every minute or so. This time the doctors came up with a flood of diagnoses - laryngeal reflux, sinusitis, vocal cord dysfunction - followed by a bunch of treatments -- medication, surgery, voice therapy.

Somewhere in there I began to get inklings that the source of my health problems might not be so mysterious after all. Although I was only at the World Trade Center site that one day, it was on Day Two. I began to read reports that the first three days had been the most critical period for exposure to the toxic cloud. (On Day Four the air was washed by rain.) When I asked my doctors if there could be any connection, they deemed it highly unlikely. I had a hard time believing it myself. Still, my constellation of diagnoses was exactly in line with those that first responders were reporting.

Eventually I called the World Trade Center Health Registry at Bellevue, which in September 2003 began tracking the health of people exposed to the collapse of the Twin Towers. I expected to be told that my exposure was too brief to have been significant. Instead, after a 30-minute telephone survey, I became one of the study's enrollees.

I had a follow-up physical a few months ago, and the report was good. My "WTC cough" is mostly gone and I got an A in lung function. Others in the study haven't been so lucky.

I got sick because I was breathing the acutely toxic air of the first days and probably also because I was particularly susceptible. But my exposure to the smoke and dust only lasted a few hours, while rescue workers breathed the contaminated air for months. Many have developed long-lasting, serious illnesses.

A year ago, a major study affirmed a connection between pervasive health problems and the dust at Ground Zero. Last week the New York Times published an article undermining those conclusions. It reported on a continuing debate about how harmful the dust actually was. Critics contend that the study overstated the extent of the ailments by conflating those who reported lower-respiratory problems with others who merely had itchy eyes and runny noses.

Yet even allowing for this statistical error, the study still reveals a strong link between breathing toxins and serious illness. Subtract the workers with runny noses, you are left with nearly 50 percent of rescue workers reporting potentially grave symptoms.

Evidence of a different kind can be found on a message board set up by The Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. There ailing policemen and other first responders ask each other questions like, "Has anyone else developed lung nodules?" "What about sarcoidosis?" They trade names of physicians and tell heartbreaking stories about lost vitality. “I was a non-smoker all my life,” writes one, “and was not exposed to toxins with the exception of Ground Zero. I was ALWAYS healthy and very active.” “No one seems all that concerned,” says another, “except that I can't walk up a flight of stairs without taking a rest.”

Like those who lost their lives in the WTC attack, ailing rescue workers are victims of 9/11. They may represent only half of Ground Zero workers, but they deserve support, not skepticism. Now that the projected cost of the World Trade Center memorial has climbed to nearly $1 billion, there is no reason to grudge continuing care for the injured and sick.

The Class of 9/11

2007-09-15T18:19:00.000-04:00

In the months after my daughter was born, I was as boring as any new mother. Preoccupied with the arcana of baby care, I readily shared my findings with anyone who cared to listen— mainly other new mothers. To anyone else, I must have seemed like an animatronic theme park figure, intoning product names as if they were prayers. (Desitin? A miracle!)

That was in the daytime. During the long hours of the night, my anxiety over diaper rash was revealed to be merely a cover for what was really on my mind: the terrors of history. Feeling vulnerable as a newborn myself, I became obsessed with reimagining historical atrocities, one after another. It felt like important work, like something a mother should do. Between baby feedings, the killing fields of the 20th century emerged from dark corners of my mind. Dachau. Cambodia. Ypres. Stalingrad. Now I understood what the stakes were, and I was sick with grief and despair. Those things had happened to somebody's children! History was the enemy of mothers; that was certain.

And history always wins. The moment the planes pierced the towers on September 11, 2001, my daughter and her generation of high school seniors came into their collective identity. Just as they were mulling over college application essay topics, they were abruptly handed their lives' true subject, a long-range assignment with no foreseeable due date.

My mother's stories about Pearl Harbor and mine about the Kennedy assassination paled before this new life-defining horror; The "where were you when" question belonged most urgently to my daughter's peers. "Physics lab," Kate will recall for her own children. "I could see the smoke from the window."

At commencement that spring, the speaker didn't exhort the graduates to wear sunscreen or thank their mothers. Instead he spoke about the World Trade Center attack, and reflected on the heavy consequences of that dark event going forward. He dubbed high school graduates of 2001 the "Class of 9/11."

The students didn't like it of course, but now, as the sixth anniversary of the attack nears, it's clearer than ever that the commencement speaker was right. The class of 9/11 faces a grim generational inheritance. We are engaged in an unwinnable war, with more in the offing.

When my daughter and her friends graduated from college a year ago this spring, they were free to make plans that did not include reporting for combat duty. Since there is no draft and since she chose not to enlist, I am spared the sleepless nights of soldiers' mothers. But I watch the war on television, and I know something I didn't quite grasp before my daughter was born: these terrible things are happening to somebody's children.

9/11 Fatigue? A Modest Proposal

2007-09-15T18:18:00.000-04:00

The Favor Bank

2007-09-15T18:17:00.000-04:00

Who's on your caseload these days? And whose caseload are you on?

If the answers are no one and no one, you must be holed up in a cave in the Hindu Kush. Because unless you live in total seclusion, you're bound to get asked to lend a hand sometimes -- to write a recommendation, advise on a consumer purchase, pass along the name of a good doctor, suggest a great restaurant, console a lovelorn friend, read a manuscript, and so on. And then sometimes you're the one in need of a favor. That is when you mentally review your friends and acquaintances and decide who's the right one to ask.

Since each of us has our own needs and our own areas of expertise, the help you give may not resemble the help you get. My best friend, for example, is proficient in Tender Loving Care. My strong point is research - no subject too obscure. Just recently I found an acupuncturist in Wollongong, Australia for my friend's daughter, who has developed foot pains during her semester abroad.

Whatever your specialty, it's all part of the same karmic Favor Bank. One year someone advises your child on the process of applying for college; the next year you do the same for someone else's. Sometimes total strangers come around asking for advice.

My husband regularly counsels people who've heard through the grapevine that he succeeded in navigating the bureaucratic maze necessary to claim dual Italian citizenship. (Possible if your father or mother was born before your Italian grandfather was naturalized.)

When I had a rare pregnancy complication, I sought the advice of anyone I could think of. Later, I wrote about it and for years afterwards I heard from women in a similar situation. I was happy to take their calls because people had done the same for me.

Such favors help make the world a gentler place, so you make time for them even when your taxes are late or you're about to leave for a trip or your kitchen's being remodeled.

Last week my case load consisted of: a college friend of my daughter's who's working on a book and wants advice about agents; a friend of a friend who's celebrating a big birthday in New Orleans and asks for a list of the best places to hear music; a work acquaintance needing a doctor for her son who is a student here in New York.

So whose caseload was I on this month? I had to plan a party for 40, and anxious hostess that I am, I needed reassuring guidance. My friend who throws great parties, apparently effortlessly, came through with useful suggestions and general anxiety-soothing. When the day of the party dawned cold and rainy - the only such day all summer - he called to say, never mind the weather, it will be a great party anyway. And it was.

"You Are Soo Good at What You Do"

2007-09-15T18:16:00.002-04:00

Of all my many million dollar ideas (which so far have failed to earn a dime), the ones I like best involve patting yourself on the back. We need all the praise we can get. But no matter how much we may prompt our loved ones, even the most devoted among them can't lay it on thick enough. Or often enough. Or in enough specific detail.

My latest variation on this "can't-miss" theme is the Positive Reinforcement Fortune Cookie.

This is more or less the business plan: How great would it be if we could get all the acclaim we need exactly when we need it? From a cookie. Had a hideous day at the job? Been dissed? Been dumped? Our customized Positive Reinforcement Fortune Cookies are there for you.

To applaud your brilliance, your beauty, your putting prowess, your key lime pie, your wit, your writing. Whatever floats your boat. You choose the appropriate adulatory messages from our prepared list or write your own. We'll bake them into Positive Reinforcement Fortune Cookies, ready to be cracked open whenever you need a boost.

As all bright ideas must these days, the Positive Reinforcement Fortune Cookie has potential for an Internet counterpart. Imagine being able to click on a virtual Fortune Cookie, in the form of an icon on your desktop, and up pops an admiring message.

Here's a start on the list.

I've never heard such an incisive analysis.

My, you are a handsome woman.

That was awesome.

Nice arms!

You are a rock star!

You're much cooler than all the other moms / dads.

How did you raise such a well-mannered child?

You're HOW OLD? I don't believe it!

How DO you do it?!

Wow!

Any other ideas?

Ann's List

2007-09-15T18:16:00.001-04:00

This is the phase of life when, if you’re not careful, you become more like yourself. And not in a good way. You always do this. You never do that. Everyone knows these things; you’re famous for certain quirks:

You never wear hats, they make you look short.

It’s not a vacation unless you head south.

No weird ingredients in the turkey stuffing; stick with the Pepperidge Farm recipe.

Horror fiction? The genre of arrested development.

Kung Fu movies? Forget it.

Crossword puzzles? Could there be a bigger waste of time?

Harmless prejudices all. Why not just indulge them? The clay has been hardening for years, after all, and who cares if you refuse to wear a hat. The problem is that unless you keep shaking yourself up, pretty soon you’re as set in your ways as a toddler who refuses to eat anything but food that is white. So maybe it’s time to rethink the turkey-stuffing thing, add some pine nuts. Rent Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. Or whatever.

I've been rethinking my own personal "don't go there" list recently and have come up with a few things I might be willing to reconsider. Here's the short list:

1. Try Sudoku.

Despite urging from family members, I have avoided this craze on the grounds that it looks stupid, boring and hard. And it involves numbers.

2. Cook fish.

I like fish when prepared by others, and am constantly promising myself to put it on the home menu. So why don’t I ever get around to it? Truthfully, I think it’s because it feels too slimy – the rawest of raw ingredients. So I'm on the lookout for unintimidating recipes.

3. Read a Stephen King novel.

Horror fiction would not seem like the ideal reading material for someone who is so squeamish she closes her eyes at any hint of screen violence. (Thus I failed to see much of the final dinner scene in the Sopranos, even though nothing happened.) Yet one of my personal favorite American movies, Dolores Claiborne, was made from a Stephen King novel, so I sense that there may be many Stephen Kings. I'm researching which of his books would be best for a sensitive newbie, given that I’m willing to skim the scariest parts

Lighting our for the Territories

2007-09-15T18:14:00.000-04:00

Some people can spend hours browsing through a dictionary or an encyclopedia of medical symptoms or a gardening guide. But when I’m in the mood to curl up with a reference book, I go for an atlas. Leafing through my antique Hammond World Atlas, I never fail to find something new to marvel at, some fascinating geographical feature or relationship that previously had escaped my notice. Look how small Tunisia is compared to Algeria! Is that really where Brunei is – in the middle of the South China Sea? I'd pictured it half a world away, near the Persian Gulf.

Sometimes the poetry of a name draws my eye. The Adaman Islands. (They belong to India, I know, but look how close they are to Thailand.) The Limpopo River. (There's its mouth, in Mozambique!) I can still hear my father intoning in his hammiest voice Kipling's description of “the great, grey-green greasy Limpopo, all set about with fever trees.”

Samarkand has always been my favorite place name. Once a stop on the fabled Silk Road, Samarkand is now part of the Republic of Uzbekistan, and has been recognized as a site worth preserving by the United Nations. The romantic city inspired the Kipling-esque poet J.E. Flecker to write an ode to wanderlust urging travelers to push on, “Always a little further.”

When I finished school, that was my plan. No graduate school for me, I decided. I would travel instead, and mainly to countries that required visas. The idea was that I would work half the year and travel the other half. This worked out fine for a while. My earnings from a hotel job in Germany financed a journey that started with hitchhiking down the coast of Yugoslavia, skirting Albania in a tramp steamer, and sleeping in caves in Crete. (The caves were in a tiny, remote village called Matala, and some years after I visited, I read in Life Magazine that it had become a hippie haven.)

In Istanbul I almost talked myself into joining a Land Rover caravan traveling east to Nepal, but at the last moment I lost my nerve and headed West again, via Syria and Jordan.

Eventually, life intervened -- as it will. I didn't stop traveling, but I was on a shorter tether. Yet all the while I was confining my trips to school vacations, I kept a mental list of the exotic places I would go . . . someday. (I have files of dusty newspaper clippings, now absurdly out of date, on traveling through Kerala in houseboats and the best approach to Angkor Wat.)

Now, the time has come when there's nothing to curb my travel urges -- I could go anywhere. I'd always imagined that when I got to this point I'd feel like I'd been shot out of a cannon. So why am I not on the way to one of my must-see destinations yet? What's holding me back?

As a penny-pinching backpacker, I was convinced that when it came to travel, the more you paid, the less you got. I could see that many memorable experiences eluded those who were bubble-wrapped in luxury, and I vowed that that would never be me. Lighting out for the territories now, so many years later, would mean putting that youthful promise to the test, and confronting how much I have - or haven't -- changed.

Big Brother Scores Again

2007-09-15T18:13:00.000-04:00

So the Protect America Act is now law. (What evil genius creates these names? Whoever it is, I hope the White House pays him the fortune he deserves.) It's official. The government can now spy on you pretty much at will. Your cell phone company or Internet Service Provider is under orders to aid the process.

You’re not a suspected terrorist? No problem. They can eavesdrop anyway. Email a friend in London, and you might as well copy the National Security Agency. Call your daughter in Paris? Expect to be listened in on -- no warrant necessary. Not even an after-the-fact, double-secret warrant, signed at midnight in a windowless room in the Justice Department basement.

(Even these infamous rubber stamp warrants, from the secret intelligence court were obtained under false pretenses, the Washington Post reported in March. FBI agents routinely lied in their testimony to the court, according to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the rubber-stamper-in-chief.)

To guard against potential abuse, the Protect America Act does have an oversight provision. Attorney General and perjurer Alberto Gonzales will design safeguards and submit them for review to a secret national security court.

You couldn't make this up, as they say.

So what voodoo did the Bush White House use to put this one over on a Democratic-controlled Congress? Guess. Or just hit replay.

Imminent terrorist threat. Grave dangers to national security. Secret evidence divulged in closed-door intelligence briefings.

The press release version: Intelligence officials have detected increasing “chatter” among Al Qaeda suspects, much of which is being missed owing to draconian oversight imposed on surveillance efforts. Quick action needed to repair a dangerous situation.

If you believe this, I have some nice “yellow cake” uranium ore to sell you. Amazingly, 57 Democrats did believe it, and just handed the Bush Administration one more victory against civil liberties.

I call these credulous Congressmen the Charlie Brown Democrats. Remember the running football gag in Peanuts? Time after time Lucy promises to hold the football for Charlie Brown to kick, and time after time she snatches it away at the last moment, causing Charlie to fly into the air and land flat on his back. Her plausible-sounding patter and creative excuses for failure always persuade him to overcome his well-founded distrust. He comes back for more. And then more. Or, as Lucy, says, "Again, Charlie Brown ... and again, and again and again.”

Here is Lucy conning Charlie Brown (courtesy of the Peanuts Collectors Club*):

"You have to learn to be trusting.”

"The odds now are really in your favor!!

"Don't you trust anyone any more?"

"I give you my bonded word."

Trade George Bush for Lucy, and you pretty much have the Administration arguments. “Trust us,” they say, and the Charlie Brown Democrats fall for it again and again and again. Charlie himself is never going to wise up, of course; he's a cartoon character. But you'd think we might expect more from (Democratic) Congressmen.

* http://www.peanutscollectorclub.com/football.html

Meet My Avatar (Someday)

2007-09-15T18:11:00.000-04:00

"Don't criticize what you can't understand." That Dylan lyric was a defiant generational manifesto directed at "Mothers and fathers / Throughout the land." Um, that would now be us. I try to keep this admonition in mind these days. So you won't find me instantly agreeing when somebody else my age denounces Second Life, one of the largest 3-D virtual reality communities, as a colossal waste of time.

Sure, it might seem that way now. So far only one friend that I know of has dabbled on Second Life. It seems that when she tried to give her avatar big boobs, she succeeded only in making her fat. (The typical female avatar, according to my friend, is so buxom as to resemble a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving parade.)

No doubt some of our more technically advanced peers (having mastered the mysterious Second Life user interface) already inhabit fabulous, state-of-the-art Internet personas—dazzling avatars that can be found having acrobatic sex in virtual orgies. Maybe the rest of us will catch up someday, playing out our second acts on Second Life. The "old age commune" people my age imagine may come to pass not here on Earth, but in virtual reality.

Then again, it's possible that Second Life has already peaked, what with presidential candidates, marketers and even colleges turning up in the neighborhood. (The University of New Orleans has just announced that it will open a virtual campus on Second Life, where it can hold classes in the event of another major hurricane.)

All the same, I'm still curious to explore this net netherworld. On a website called "New World Notes," I find the perfect virtual Virgil, in the person of Wagner James Au. Au, who describes himself as an "embedded journalist" in Second Life, bravely posts a photo of himself next to his (handsomer) avatar. He keeps track of Second Life events, and publishes interviews with creators of some of the interesting avatars. As I skim his posts, I find myself more drawn to Second Lifers who present themselves as humans, and less so to the "furries," residents whose avatars look like squirrels or chipmunks.

The first link I click on takes me to an interview with Jason Foo, a wounded Iraq veteran. In "Post-War Reconstruction," Foo, who is unemployed, talks about the real-estate business he has started on Second Life, which earns him real money to supplement his disability pension. He has also created a Veteran Fund that accepts donations for other wounded vets trying to build new lives.

"The Skin You're In" is a post about Californian Erika Thereian. The "archetypal white girl of the world's dreams," in Au's description, Thereian spent three months on Second Life inhabiting the skin of a black woman. Her reports on the racism she encountered make me think of the famous 1961 book "Black Like Me," in which a white journalist describes his experiences passing for black in the Deep South. Except that Thereian's transformation was accomplished not with skin dye, but with the click of a mouse, and did not in any way endanger her life.

Then there is the link to "Avatars Against the War," a virtual peace demonstration timed to coincide with a real march on Washington, D.C. last January. The avatars appear to be channeling the '60s peace movement, and they have the drill down pretty well. They march on the steps of a virtual Capitol Hill chanting peace slogans and waving signs saying "Make Love Not War." I remember those aviator glasses and the American flag shirt, though not the 4-inch high heels or the black falcon perched on someone's arm. Well, maybe I remember the falcon.

Now that I've had my brief visit to Second Life, I don't plan to go back for a while. I'm nowhere near ready to be measured for my avatar, but when the time comes, I know just what she's going to look like. It will be easy to recognize her because I am going to make her flat-chested. Coming next: "Flat Like Me."

Advice: the Best and the Worst

2007-09-15T18:10:00.000-04:00

“Hindsight’s 20/20,” goes the old country song, and I find I have accumulated a considerable store of it. Mine takes the form of memories with refrains like “I should have done this.” “That, on the other hand, was a bad idea.” “I wish I’d paid attention when…” “I’m glad I ignored. . . .” Regrets, of course, are never useful. But there’s nothing wrong with stocktaking – if only to distill hard-won wisdom for the next generation:

Advice I’m Glad I Listened to:

*Don’t get your eyebrows tattooed on.*

My mother’s housekeeper had this done and at the time it looked pretty good. Later I heard that eyebrows shift with age so you can end up with a tattoo in the wrong place.

*Spend all the time you can playing with your baby.*

I used an inheritance from my grandmother to subsidize working part-time for a couple of years after my daughter was born. I’ve never been sorry.

Advice I Didn’t Take But Wish I Had:

*Go ahead and join the Peace Corps. It will change your life.*

I applied and was accepted but chickened out in the end.

*Stand up straight.*

I know you tried, Mom, and I wish I’d paid attention. I tried with my own daughter with the exact same result.

Advice I’m Glad I Didn’t Listen to:

*Marry that law student and move to Pensacola.*

Enough said about that.

*Don't have rotator cuff surgery, the rehab is too painful.*

Yeah, but now I can swim laps and push open a door without wincing.

Advice I Shouldn’t Have Listened to but Did:

*This is the wrong time to buy an apartment.*

Maybe it’s changing now, but in my experience, real estate regret goes only one way: you should have bought and didn’t. Five years earlier, and you’d have made a fortune.

*There will be time to teach table manners later; too much stress at the dinner table can bring on anorexia.*

Some things need to be instilled in children while you are still the absolute boss. Wait until later and you’re in trouble.

Daughter Out the Door

2007-09-15T18:09:00.000-04:00

A year after she moved back in, the brainy cocktail waitress is moving out—this time for good.

I hadn't expected her to take up residence in her old bedroom after graduating from college. Following my own graduation, I'd gone directly to Europe, drifting from one youth hostel to the next, working as a chambermaid here, a dog walker there, taking whatever low-paying jobs came my way.

When I came back to the U.S., I stayed with my parents only until they started charging me rent—a matter of weeks, as I recall. Then I moved into a garage apartment—not an apartment over a garage, but the garage itself. It had an overgrown garden with a wooden loading pallet for a deck. A screened-in porch served as the bedroom—not a problem, as the apartment was located in Coconut Grove, Florida. The monthly rent was $60.

Things are different for my daughter. Her newly graduated peers have not wandered off to foreign parts, but have instead searched for career-track jobs or enrolled in professional schools. Nobody's rent is $60 a month. To fund her job and apartment search, Cait did a lucrative stint as a cocktail waitress. Her goal was to find a "real" job, in the "save-the-world" sector of the economy. Now she has one. It comes with regular hours, health insurance, and a salary that's half of what she made serving tequila shooters and pitchers of beer.

Moving out is the next step. It's time. Having finished the grueling marathon that is a New York City apartment hunt, she's more than ready. And so am I, mostly. I look forward to reclaiming her room as a guest room, and have been debating such questions as how long to wait before I can paint over her candy-apple red walls. I'll miss her of course, but the truth is that although technically living at home, she's rarely around the house. And her new place is only a subway ride away.

Something else about her imminent departure is stirring up a storm of feelings. I remember exactly how it felt when I took that step—was it five years ago or thirty? I loved every second of setting up on my own. For the first time I was making choices without reference to the way things were done at home. I was becoming me, writing Chapter One of the life I lead now. Inside my little garage, I was free to do things my way. I might cover a wall in aluminum foil, and I did. I could decide to throw out leftovers right away, instead of storing them carefully in the refrigerator and then throwing them out. I could discover that mushrooms came fresh, as well as in cans. And as I was discovering who I was going to be, my parents were too. Most of the time, I think they took pleasure in watching my adult life unfold, surprises and all.

Last weekend I stood in our storeroom trying to imagine which of our extra belongings would pass muster in Cait's new place. Would the colorful (garish?) rug from Morocco fit in? Or the shower curtain whimsically decorated with a map of the world? What about that old wicker chair that could use repainting? I've always favored furniture that looks like it has been stored in a barn for decades, but my daughter might prefer things with no dents and scratches (patina, to me). I don't know.

It will be interesting to find out. I'm looking forward to it, surprises and all.

Have Connections, Will Share.

2007-09-15T18:08:00.000-04:00

n an article in last Sunday's New York Times business section, columnist and lawyer Ben Stein describes a recent first class flight across the Atlantic on British Airways. Unable to fall asleep in his state-of-the-art sleeper bed, he contemplates how he came to be in such luxurious surroundings. For every step of his successful career as a journalist, attorney, presidential speech writer, and television personality, he identifies the family connection that opened the door for him. They are impressive, starting with a father who was Chairman of the Council Economic Advisors. Whatever Stein wanted to pursue next, someone in his circle “knew someone.”

Stein reveals this behind-the-scenes wheel-greasing to make a point: it isn't available to everyone. What if you don't have a well-connected father or mother?” Stein asks. “What if you are a young man or woman who has some talent and ambition but little or no idea of how to get on the ladder?” Why couldn't a cadre of well-off baby boomers mold themselves into an effective mentoring organization, he wonders. They could share their skills and connections, and possibly make a difference in many young lives. Mentoring programs already exist of course, but Stein envisions a national effort, something on the scale of the Peace Corps

Inequality is a huge problem in this country, as Stein points out. But it strikes me that this inequality involves not only money and opportunity. It's also an inequality of imagination. Before you can do something you have to imagine it, to know that it exists as a possibility. To get your foot on the ladder you have to know the ladder is there. That's where mentors can help.

Of course few people have such stellar connections as Ben Stein. My own family's were much more modest, yet they opened a door at just the right time. I was considered for my first professional job at the University of Miami publications office because my father worked in the administration there.

If all of us who ever received such a push were to get behind Stein's mentoring proposal, it would have a lot of backers. Founding this kind of project would take enormous vision and drive, of course (not to mention lots of money), but signing up volunteer mentors should be a snap. The basic idea is simplicity itself. First step: admit how much help you got coming up. Second step: turn around and help someone else. And what should the organization be called? Connections, of course.

The Summers of Love

2007-09-15T18:06:00.002-04:00

could tell you about a summer night when I was 13. A screened-in porch at somebody's parents' beach house. Slow dancing. A very cute boy asking me to dance, a high school boy. I remember the song though not his name. I never saw him again, yet that dance was the beginning.

All of a sudden, most likely during a dip turn, I got a sense of what was about to happen in my life. The delicious feeling that enveloped me was going to stick around and be part of my future. I seemed to possess a surprising new power, and it was all going to be fabulous. Interspersed, naturally, with bouts of heartbreak.

The same hormones that prompted my dance floor awakening led in a roundabout way, and after many years had passed, to a different kind of summer love. My daughter was a New Year's baby, so by June she had reached the stage of maximum adorableness. She laughed and pointed and turned pages in her baby books. When she wanted to be picked up, she lifted her arms.

During that first summer of her life, I'd stir each morning with the feeling that I'd just dreamed a wonderful but fleeting dream. Then I'd wake up some more and remember that it was true. I had won the lottery. In the next room was my baby, happily babbling away. And when I appeared at her door, she was going to smile one of her big shiny smiles at me.

I'd never been someone who melted at the sight of other people's babies, and I worried that I lacked maternal feeling. At a party once, I asked a proud new father, What's it like? He told me that he'd expected to love his baby, but he hadn't known he'd have a hopeless crush. A crush? I said. Yes, just like in high school. This was hard to believe. Could he really be doodling his baby's name on scraps of paper?

So the extremes of mother love took me by surprise. I turned into one of those boring new parents always carrying on about their uniquely marvelous babies. I remember once being furious at my daughter's pediatrician when at the end of a well-baby visit he pronounced her "fine." Fine? That's all he could say? I would have switched doctors if my husband hadn't calmed me down.

That's the other part of this love story. My husband did not share my trepidations about becoming a parent. He was thrilled right from the start. His enthusiasm soothed my insecurities and gave me confidence that I could be a good mother.

Our vacation that summer was a week by a lake in upstate New York. For both of us this time felt at least as rapturous as our honeymoon. Each day we conjured something new for our baby girl. She encountered a babbling brook one day. The next day it was grass, then sand. She liked hiking in her backpack perch, but cried during a ride on a carousel.

With parenthood, I realized, had come another surprising new power. We were introducing our daughter to the planet and we felt like gods.

"No End in Sight" See it.

2007-09-15T18:06:00.001-04:00

Middle East Conflict Intensifies As Blah Blah Blah, Etc. Etc.’ This headline ran last April in the satirical weekly, The Onion. The story described President Bush’s efforts to boost public support of “whatever the fuck it is he thinks he's doing, [by trotting ] out the same old whoop-de-do you've heard over and over . . . .”

We have heard it over and over. We’ve watched scenes of bloodshed and suffering in Iraq to the point of misery fatigue. So you might suppose that the latest Iraq documentary “No End in Sight,” will meet with viewer resistance – despite having won the Documentary Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival.

I’m betting otherwise. I’ve already told all my friends that they must go see it. No excuses. Just do it. Strong word-of-mouth, that’s called, and it will propel “No End in Sight” out of any “oh no, not another Iraq documentary” doldrums

“No End in Sight” is a clear-headed and devastating indictment of the foreign policy disaster that is America’s ongoing occupation of Iraq. Like the political science professor he once was, filmmaker Charles Ferguson makes a succinct and tightly reasoned argument that emphasizes analysis over polemic.

But for all its dispassionate, policy wonk rigor, “No End in Sight” will break your heart. It did mine. Never mind what I thought I knew about the Iraq disaster, I left the theater stunned by the devastation we have inflicted on this ancient, traditional civilization.

“No End in Sight” contends that Iraq’s insurgency chaos is a consequence of deliberate policy choices made by a small inner circle: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condelezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld..

Step by persuasive step, Ferguson outlines precisely what happened, how it happened, and who, specifically, is responsible. Then – this is the tragic part -- he makes a compelling case that it could have been different. Would have been different, if not for the criminal arrogance and willful ignorance of the President’s war cabal.

From their secure perch in Washington, these would-be paladins felt free to override the urgent communiques of several Iraq-based generals, the Ambassador, the Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and anyone else who counseled the need for nation-building.

Ferguson deftly enlists Administration spokesmen to testify against themselves, showing news clip after news clip in which they utter stupefying remarks. Remember Rumsfeld’s “Stuff happens”? In one chilling frame, the chief architects of the war are lined up abreast like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death.

Watching the film, I imagined what I would do with these perpetrators if they were my hostages for two hours. I could think of no more fitting punishment than to tie them in chairs and make them watch “No End in Sight.”

Happiness for Dummies

2007-09-15T18:03:00.000-04:00

How am I happy? Let me count the ways. Not too often, though. According to happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky, people who three times a week wrote down what they were grateful for were than significantly less happy than those who did it only once a week. Lyubomirsky herself doesn’t do it at all. She told a reporter that she had tried counting her own blessings, and found it “hokey.”

This confirms my theory that people who study happiness don’t necessarily follow their own advice. And I would guess that many of the buyers of their books don’t follow it either. I say “buyers” because buying books on happiness-enhancement is not the same as reading them. I, for example, have a pile of such books, unread, on my bookshelf.

I have no reason to be unhappy, and I’m not. But I’m also not one of those cheery, upbeat people whose mood dial always points to warm and sunny. According to the popular “set point” theory, everyone is born with a happiness baseline to which they will return, no matter what life brings them.

This pessimistic finding has not prevented its author, psychologist David Lykken, from making his own contribution to the how-to-be-happier genre. In “Happiness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment,” Lykken backpedals on his claim that happiness levels are unchangeable. He has come to believe that “There’s a lot people can do to be happier in life.”

For example? According to the latest happiness research, distilled in last week’s Time Magazine, some proven ways to get happier include: Have lots of sex, listen to music, get exercise, get rich, stay positive, stand up straight, have realistic expectations, and smile.

Reading this, I decided it was time to delve into my pile of happiness books, in the hopes I could glean something I hadn’t already thought of. First, I took a look at the best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness,” by Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard. Gilbert contends that the happiest people are those who have the greatest control over their lives. Not true in my experience. One of my happiest times in my life was when I had the least control over my days: as a new mother.

I moved on to “Authentic Happiness,” by the guru of positive psychology, Martin Seligman. Seligman has distilled his theories into an equation: H = S + C + V. Happiness, he believes, is composed of your Set point, plus your life Circumstances, plus factors under your Voluntary control. In the voluntary part, he includes gratitude, forgiveness and – especially important -- reimagining your past and present to make them come out better. But such sugar coating won’t work for me; it would be a professional liability. Writers need to maintain an unflinching view of the past and present.

I began to wonder if any author of happiness self-help books ever admits entertaining a negative thought. I found the answer on my own bookshelf, in a 1935 book called “The Art of Happiness,” by John Cowper Powys. I don’t recall how I came into possession of this slim volume, but I warmed to it, starting with the title. Powys was a novelist, not a psychology professor, and it was promising that he considered happiness-increasing to be an art, not a science.

Powys’s credentials as a happiness guru include having been unhappy. “To confess the truth,” he wrote, “I have once and again. . . pulled myself out of the Slough of Despond.” This disarming admission made me like him all the more. His counsel includes having a flexible mind and paying heed to whatever floats your boat. “The more conjuring tricks we have in our pilgrim’s wallet the better,” he writes, “and I have no fanatical preference for my favorite magic over all the rest.”

And what should be the goal of following his precepts? He quotes a line from Wordsworth, “the pleasure which there is in life itself.”

Gatsy and Me

2007-09-15T18:02:00.000-04:00

have a house on a strange road. The house is a modest-sized 60s ranch and when we bought it, unrenovated, seven years ago there were other, still-more-modest houses down the way. One had been built by its owner, a room at a time, with recycled material from the dump. According to neighborhood lore, no two windows were alike. At the far end of the road were a few big places– at least we thought they were big then -- but nothing that could qualify as a trophy house. Our little road was low-profile and that’s how everyone liked it. One neighbor was outraged when the Highway Department painted a white stripe down the center. She said it was inappropriate for something that’s more country lane than actual road.

But the road fronts on a beautiful view, and over time many of the funkier houses were torn down and replaced by new, much larger places. Still, the people who lived in them seemed to like the low-key character of the road, so the tone didn’t change much.

Then Jay Gatsby moved in. The parallels between our new neighbor and Fitzgerald’s character are striking, from the extreme wealth to the spectacular soirees. A single man in his 30s, he built himself a mansion three times bigger than any of the other houses that we had considered to be mansions.

For his housewarming party, he planned a lavish extravaganza: the party to end all parties (we hoped.) Some 600 people were invited -- attended by a staff of 200. It was to be an Arabian Nights costume party, a surprising theme, I thought, given the conflagrations taking place in that region. The rented tents were not much smaller than the house. For entertainment, there was one contingent of circus performers and another of lightly clad party facilitators whose job was to break the ice. An entire taxi fleet was hired to ferry guests to and from the party. It was said that the whole thing cost nearly $1 million.

Nosy person that I am, on the night of the party I walked down the road to check out the scene. It was interesting. The parking attendants were dressed like shepherds in a school Christmas pageant, and the arriving female guests wore I-Dream-of Jeannie get-ups. There were enough earpiece-wearing security men on hand to guard the President.

I wasn’t happy that such flashy doings had come to our once-quiet road -- especially when the sound blaring from the outdoor speakers rattled our house. But this unabashed display of wealth also ignited a fantasy. Our hedge fund manager neighbor takes in around $60 million a year, so I heard. What might I do if had that kind of income? Give $10 million to a good cause and you’d still have $50 million left (there are no taxes in my fantasy.)

Turns out I can think of a few things. One would be my version of the extravagant party. I’d buy a deserted town out west and turn it into a refuge and eventual retirement community for my friends. Second, I’d build myself a moat. I’ve always dreamed of a house with a moat for swimming. I love to swim but have a low boredom threshold and never like to go back the way I came. So a moat would be perfect. I can picture it–there would be tunnels and grottos and waterfalls and I would swim around it every day.

The Truth About Rudy

2007-09-15T18:00:00.000-04:00

New Yorkers have something we want you to know. By New Yorkers, I mean myself, my friends and family, my physical therapist, a Pakistani cab driver, the elderly lady behind me in the supermarket line, the guy at the corner deli, my recent Amtrak seatmate, and the fashionably clad woman who sold me tinted moisturizer at Sephora. Also, the Ground Zero rescue workers I pass the time with at Bellevue Hospital, while we wait to be screened for WTC-related ailments.

We all have two things in common: we were in New York on 9/11, and we are more inclined to diagnose Rudy Guiliani than to suport him.

In the weeks after 9/11, city residents breathed the dust, smelled the smells, and heard the military helicopters overhead. But we also watched television and saw what everyone in the rest of the country saw: New York's mayor excelling in the public arena. He attended as many funerals as could be squeezed into a day and he gave press conferences that helped assuage the collective grief. I remember an occasion when reporters were pressing him hard to estimate the final number of casualties. The mayor declined to speculate, instead saying simply, “However many people it turns out to be, it will be more than any of us can bear.”

Moments like this caused many in the first weeks after the attack to compare Giuliani to Winston Churchill. Oprah called him “America's Mayor,” the equivalent of knighting him. (Later, that honor also came his way.)

Rudy has since milked his public image as an anti-terrorism leader for personal and political gain -- raking in upwards of $100,000 per speech, and now, preposterously, running for president -- and leading the pack for the Republican nomination.

Here in New York, this makes people’s eyes roll. Jimmy Breslin, the dean of New York columnists, has described the former mayor as “seriously miswired,” and also, memorably, “a small man in search of a balcony.” We New Yorkers know that the heroic, tough-on-terrorism Rudy is a fiction, even though it's one that seems to play well out of town. A few particulars:

Fiction: Giuliani is an expert in emergency preparedness.

Fact: The mayor bears some of the blame for the conflagration that took place at Ground Zero. After the 1993 bomb attack on the Twin Towers, he ignored expert advice and located the city's elaborate new emergency operations center in 7 World Trade Center. Thousands of gallons of diesel fuel the city stockpiled there contributed to a fire on 9/11 that consumed the building and rendered the emergency operations center useless.

Fiction: Guiliani championed the 9/11 rescue workers, who consequently revere him.

Fact: Rudy has few fans among NYC firefighters. Last week the head of The International Association of Fire Fighters declared Rudy “unfit to lead.” Union president Steve Cassidy told the New York Post* that his track record as a leader on terrorism “stinks.” Among the firefighters' complaints: the radios they carried were long known to be inadequate but the Giuliani administration never got around to replacing them. Also, the Mayor was well aware that the air at Ground Zero was toxic, yet within days he assured everyone that it was safe to breathe. He has since downplayed the medical problems of ground zero workers. When the WTC dust was clearly linked to serious and sometimes fatal diseases, he responded by urging Congress to limit the city's liability for “toxic torts.”

Fiction: Guiliani did a good job as mayor of New York.

Fact: His character issues got in the way. Rudy is given to “interminable, bitter, asinine hissy fits," according to a trenchant profile by Michael Wolfe in last month's Vanity Fair. A former congressman describes him as a man with "a deep mean streak." He has a “very, very powerful pathology,” according to Rudy Crew, the Schools Chancellor whom Gulilani ousted and then Swift Boated on the day of his wife's funeral.

So New York's message to the rest of the country is, don't fall for it. On a blog called “America's Madman: New Yorkers Remember Rudy Giuliani,” editorial cartoonist Ted Rall says it best: Rudy Giuliani is no "Rudy Giuliani."

Spies R Us

2007-09-15T17:59:00.000-04:00

The CIA last week spilled 30 years worth of closely guarded secrets. “The Family Jewels,” it calls them. The documents are a shocking litany of Agency misdeeds, ranging from mind-control experiments to unauthorized wiretapping of American citizens. I say shocking, but little in the report will surprise anyone who's paid any attention to “left-wing rags” over the years. Or even the New York Times, which in 1974 published Seymour Hersh’s expose of the CIA’s illegal domestic spying.

One new detail jumped out at me, though: long hair. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the CIA mounted Operations CHAOS and MERRIMAC, part of a widespread effort to spy on and infiltrate campus protest movements. According to one of the newly released internal memos, the agents assigned to infiltration duty constantly griped about having to grow their hair long. The CIA also recruited "Americans with exisitng extremist credentials," who presumably already had long hair.

The CIA boasted that their operations were a great success. No foreign involvement was ever identified, but the peace movement was penetrated at the highest levels -- the levels where policy was decided. There have long been rumors that some of these CIA operatives acted as agent provocateurs, urging violent action in order to discredit the movement.

Now these rumors are confirmed. Eventually the names of the undercover agents are likely to come out. We’ll learn who the guilty parties were -- just as East Germans discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall exactly who among them had been informants. This story will be familiar if you saw the academy-award winning movie, The Lives of Others. It brilliantly portrays the Orwellian impact of the security-obsessed state on individual freedom.

I wonder how long it will be before we see a version of this story set in America, with the CIA playing the role of the Stasi?

On Losing My Looks

2007-09-15T17:58:00.000-04:00

When I was a child I knew how to make myself invisible -- especially where it most counted: in class. I called this cellophaning and fervently believed in its magical power to keep me from getting called on. I couldn't cellophane at will, but I was pretty good at deflecting attention. If I didn't want someone to notice me, they didn't.

That had changed by the time I was 16 and went to Italy for a month. I was traveling with two 18-year-old friends, and we happened to arrive in Venice by train the same day the Italian navy sailed in to town.

As my friends and I lugged our suitcases from railway station to pensione, we found ourselves leading a parade of smartly dressed sailors who alternated between swoons of admiration and offers to carry our bags wherever we might be going. My friends were adamantly opposed, but I eventually caved in, and somewhat to my surprise my volunteer porter shook my hand and politely took his leave at the door.

For the next four weeks we were pestered more or less non-stop and we got pretty good at fending off advances before they had a chance to advance. Then, at the end of the month my mother came to meet us and to my shock and horror, she was subjected to the same amorous attentions. What is more, she was flattered by them.

I can remember that in those days, whenever I complained about unwanted male attention, someone would always annoyingly remark that one day I'd miss it.

It's true, sort of. I thought about this watching the scene in Knocked Up in which Leslie Mann’s character Debbie, gorgeous and gorgeously decked out in a spangled dress, is denied entry to a club because she is “too old.”

That moment arrives for different women at different times (who knows when it arrives in Italy) but almost everyone eventually has a moment of revelation. You have become invisible; no one is looking at you. I remember my friend Nancy's observation about visiting China on a tour. “It's interesting,” she said, “when you are with a group of people and there's an ingénue and it's not you.”

So do I miss it? Not the catcalls and whistles, certainly. But I have to admit that genuine admiration is never unwelcome. I don’t expect it, but last summer I received my favorite street compliment ever. It was a sparkling June day, the kind that makes you want to be exactly where you are. I was walking along a very wide boulevard - this may have been a key factor - and coming toward me on the opposite side of the street was a handsome young African-American man. “Nice arms!” he called out. “You've been working out!” And I had. And somebody noticed.

My Embarrassing Father

2007-09-15T17:56:00.000-04:00

There were so many things my father did that embarrassed me. Wherever he went, he talked to everyone. Sometimes the comments were chatty and engaging, sometimes angry, sometimes tactless—but always in his foghorn of a voice, mortifyingly loud. At his worst, he could be a lunatic. I remember once another driver cut him off in traffic. He took off in hot pursuit, swearing he would corner the offender and give him a piece of his mind. Only the tearful pleas of his children in the back seat persuaded him to abandon the chase.

Another time at a hotel pool in Key West, he struck up a conversation with a young German couple. They were from Heidelberg, it turned out, a place my father had recently revisited, three decades after the war. He shared with the German tourists his dismay at finding so many of the beautiful parks no longer there, ceded to developers. "Hell," he said, "We might as well have bombed the place!" I was so appalled overhearing this that I pretended I didn't know him. Amazingly, though, the Germans did not seem to mind. In fact, they warmed to Dad, and the three chatted away all afternoon.

I couldn't imagine how he'd gotten away with it. Again. Even when Dad was rebuffed, though, it never stopped him. Talking to strangers is what he did. He also brought them home now and again. I have an excruciating memory of a New Year's Eve when I was 16. We were living in Germany and had gone to Vienna for the holiday. It was snowing, I was already sulking at having to spend the occasion with my parents, and the evening's entertainment, a trip to the opera, had not improved my mood. During the taxi ride back to the hotel, Dad got into a conversation with the driver, a hulking Austrian whose most prominent feature was a menacing scar along one side of his face.

The man fascinated Dad, and at the end of the ride he invited him to join us at our hotel. As always when we traveled, there was a bottle of something in the room. And, conveniently, there were three chairs arranged around a table in the corner. My parents and the driver settled down to talk. As the snow muffled the sounds of revelers outside, Gemütlichkeit suffused the room. This German word, beloved of my father, has no exact English translation but means something like coziness and fellow feeling.

They all had a great time. I was beyond aggravated. This was New Year's Eve and I was spending it with not only my parents but also some stranger (the taxi driver!) my dad had randomly recruited from the street. I did my best to tune out the conversation, scribbling angrily in my journal and trying not to listen.

When I think back on that night, I recognize that something significant took place in our snug hotel room – though at the time I was too much the callow adolescent to let myself feel it. Sitting at the table, Dad and the taxi driver began to open up about their experiences as young soldiers. They had been enemy combatants once, on opposite sides of the same war. Now, as the bottle emptied and midnight neared, they raised their glasses in toast after toast. All were variations on a single theme: zum Frieden; to peace. This was way too heartfelt for me—and it never would have happened without my father's keenness to engage with everybody he met. So now, many years later, I would belatedly like to join in the toast: "Happy Father's Day, Dad. Here's to peace."

Poison on the Menu?

2007-09-15T17:54:00.000-04:00

You can’t unbake the cake. That is the message -- both literal and symbolic -- of a recent business story in the New York Times. Headlined “Globalization in Every Loaf,” the story centers on executives at the Sara Lee corporate headquarters, who are concerned about the safety of their cakes, and the rest of their product line. Food processors like Sara Lee increasingly rely on imported additives to bind, stabilize, preserve and thicken their products.

Such ingredients, from hundreds of countries around the globe, now face few barriers to entering the country and finding a place on our grocery shelves. Food imports to the United States have doubled in the past five years, while the number of FDA food import inspectors has fallen by roughly 20 percent, according to Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, and the author of the 2003 book “Safe Food.” She criticizes the government’s scattershot approach to food oversight, citing an alphabet soup of bureaucracies, each with pieces of the regulatory action.

Nestle has argued for the creation of a single agency that would be responsible for all aspects of food, from production to consumption. This is not a popular idea among food industry executives. They prefer the “Trust Us” solution. True, it would be bad for business to poison the customer, and companies like Sara Lee are trying to monitor thier international suppliers. David L. Brown, Sara Lee’s vice president for procurement, told the Times that they had started vetting foreign factories and helping them improve food safety standards. But he also noted, “the more variables you enter into, the more risk you have . . . .”

Leaving aside recent debacles like contaminated cat food and toxic toothpaste, is there a way to protect ourselves from further regulatory failings? How can we avoid spooning up counterfeit chemicals at the dinner table? Here’s one idea, originally proposed by Arthur Agatston, the Miami cardiologist who created the South Beach diet. He argues that highly processed food – the kind that comes laden with additives from all nations – is digested too quickly, which leaves us walking around hungry all the times. So eat real food. Process it yourself, in your kitchen and in your stomach. You’ll be safer and possibly even thinner. Then all you will need is a recipe for making your own toothpaste.

You can find one here:

http://www.pioneerthinking.com/teeth1.html

Sicko: See it and Weep

2007-09-15T17:53:00.000-04:00

Is there anything so satisfying as being manipulated in the service of a righteous cause? That pleasure was amply mine last night, when I attended a screening of Sicko, Michael Moore's documentary indictment of the U.S. health care system. The film ranges from darkly funny to just dark, as ordinary Americans tell heart-rending stories of being refused necessary treatment. Rapacious HMOs executives and their minions play the villains and you want to hiss whenever they appear. The movie is an emotional workout; I laughed, I cried, and when there was footage of the President, I pointed my finger at the screen and pretended to shoot.

Sicko is an unabashed polemic. Moore wants you to walk out of the theater and agitate for universal health care. The U.S. is the only developed country in the world without it, the film repeatedly points out. To underline the failings of our system, Sicko brings us to Canada, England and France, where health care is free and guaranteed. As usual, Moore takes the scenic route, lingering especially in France to digress on the superior quality of life. In France, if you can believe it, the government provides free part-time nannies to new mothers.

Back home, Moore visits a number of 9/11 responders who have been denied care for illnesses they contracted in the course their rescue work. Sicko contrasts this shameful treatment with the superior medical care afforded the prisoners at Guantanamo. In an inspired piece of political theater, Captain Moore loads some of the ailing 9/11 workers onto boats in Miami, with the ostensible plan of sailing to Guantanamo Bay to seek treatment for them. In the waters just off the base, Moore's bullhorned request is met with an ominous siren. So Moore and his sick passengers retreat to Havana, where they are introduced to the marvels of Cuban health care.

The rescue workers receive sophisticated tests that they could never afford at home. They stock up on medications that sell for hundreds of dollars at U.S. pharmacies but cost less than $10 in Cuba. And they meet sympathetic doctors who formulate detailed treatment plans for them. It's impressive, even allowing for the effect of the rolling cameras.

The finale of the trip comes when Havana firefighters, hearing that the 9/11 rescue workers are in town, request an opportunity to pay them tribute. A scene at the firehouse, where the Cubans first stand at attention and then offer hugs and vows of brotherhood, is a major tear-jerker. I know because I was crying - even as part of me was admiring the sheer humbug. It's not propaganda, I decided, if you're of the same mind.

Sicko, scheduled for release on June 29th, already has mustered an army of supporters. Nurses around the country plan to host 3,000 screenings in their communities. They are calling the release of Sicko a “historic opportunity to turn movie audiences into patient advocates and healthcare reformers.”

The President's Stem Cell Fig Leaf

2007-09-15T17:52:00.000-04:00

On Wednesday of last week, President Bush vetoed a bill that would have allowed federal funding for research using embryonic stem cells left over from fertility treatments. A day later, on Thursday, the Sciences Magazine online published a study indicating that the President’s action does not reflect the wishes of infertility patients. Considerably more than half prefer to donate their surplus embryos to stem-cell medical research rather than have them destroyed or passed on to other infertile couples, according to a survey conducted by Anne Drapkin Lyerly of Duke University Medical Center and Ruth Faden of Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.

Embryonic stem cells, because they can develop into any type of cell in the human body, offer a uniquely valuable path to developing potentially life-saving cures for millions of people. So how did President Bush first decide to stymie this research?

He turned for advice to a biologist and a professional ethicist, who, in a 1991 meeting provided him with the fig leaf he needed for his “thumbs down.”

The ethicist was Daniel Callahan, co-founder of the Hastings Center, an influential bioethics think tank. Reading about the President’s recent veto, I was reminded of the time I heard Dr. Callahan speak at a conference four years ago. He was on a panel called “When Morality and Science Collide – The Case of Stem Cell Research.” Dr. Callahan spoke against Federal funding of stem research.

His position was that the embryos were a form of life and so should be treated with respect. He declined to be specific about what that might mean, though he was sure it didn’t involve making use of them in potentially life-saving research.

Having since read more of Dr. Callahan's views on the issue, I have to wonder if the man has even one foot on the ground. He supports the funding ban partly because many of the diseases stem cell research would target afflict mainly the old, who already have lived long enough, in his opinion. This, despite the fact that the panel’s moderator that day was a young man who had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

“There is no necessary correlation, he has written, “between a good life and good health: some healthy people are unhappy and some happy people are unhealthy. A long life is desirable, but a short life is not incompatible with a good life.”

So should we not have bothered with penicillin?

Callahan has made one argument I agree with: he believes that the public should be heard on the issue of stem cell research and its opinions taken into account -- especially since taxpayers would be footing the bill.

Now that public opinion shifted so decisively in favor of this research, I wonder whether Dr. Callahan might make one of those tough moral choices he's always urging on others, and change his mind. And whether he'll advise the President to do the same.

What's Cluttering Your Brain

2007-09-15T17:51:00.000-04:00

I am a recent convert to crossword puzzles. After reading that they help preserve cognitive function, I stopped thinking of them as a way my husband wastes time and started seeing them as protection against AAMI, otherwise known as Age-Associated Memory Impairment. I measure my progress by days of the week that I have any hope of completing the New York Times crossword, which ascends from easy to hard starting on Monday. I am now up to Wednesday (sometimes). But I can’t say I’m pleased.

The problem is not, as I had imagined, confronting the magnitude of what I don’t know.

The real horror is what I do know. Spiro Agnew? Nixon’s vice president is part of American history so I don’t begrudge him space in my brain. But Ara Parseghian? What’s he doing in there? When he was coaching the Notre Dame football team (the “Fighting Irish,” I somehow recall), I was marching on the Pentagon. I didn’t follow sports then and I don’t now, yet an amazing amount of sports trivia seems to have lodged in my head. It takes up space that could more practically be devoted to remembering my own cell phone number, or the first name of my best friend’s brother.

It seems I am right to resent this useless clutter of mental junk. According to Tuesday’s New York Times, new research suggests that if I were able de-accession worthless (to me) debris like Ara Parseghian’s name and occupation, I’d be better able to recall things that are truly important. Just as I thought. I used to imagine the brain as a bowl of ping-pong balls. At a certain point the bowl gets full and then you need to remove one ball to add another. Now I see the brain as more like a ball of Velcro, indiscriminately picking up lint as it goes along, and eventually losing its stickiness. It is much harder to pick out random bits of lint than a ping pong ball.

Another memory expert, Michael Anderson of the University of Oregon, argues that “forgetting is adaptive, that people actively inhibit some memories to facilitate mental focus.” This may mean that our “senior moments” are actually a sign that the brain is functioning as it should. All well and good. But why can’t I confine my senior moments to items like 41 Across: “Myrna of Love Crazy.” Loy’s name is inexplicably stuck to the Velcro, as is the name of Asta, her movie dog.

Professor Anderson told the Times reporter, “Your head is full of a surprising number of things that you don’t need to know.” It certainly is, as my brief crossword career has so abundantly demonstrated. An ideal memory improvement program, the professor suggests, “would include a course on how to impair your memory.” Would such a course enable me to forget 54 across: Natalie Wood’s 1965 title role, Daisy Clover? If so, please sign me up.

The Haves, the Have Mores and the Have Nots

2007-09-15T17:49:00.000-04:00

The person who laid out the front page of the New York Times last Friday must have a dark sense of humor. It can’t be an accident that directly above a teaser for a story about Congress voting to raise the Federal minimum wage for the first time in a decade is another story on the exponentially increasing income gap between the Kings and the Princes of corporate America. As in: a decade ago the chief executive of Office Depot was paid $2.2 million, about double that of his number two. Last year it was $12 million, more than four times the compensation of the second in command.

This income disparity between the Haves and the Have Mores has become a national trend, the Times points out. In the decade after 2005, the top one percent of taxpayers increased their take by 128 percent. During the same period, the income of the top .01 percent quadrupled to an average of $14 million.

Meanwhile, the Federal minimum wage rose not one penny. Until now. The Times story described the bump from $5.15 to $7.25 an hour as “a major victory” for low income workers. (If you are doing the math, you know that this $2.10 increase raised the minimum wage all of 40.5 percent). So, after ten years of going nowhere, how did this spendthrift legislation ever come to a vote? It was attached to the bill authorizing more money for the war in Iraq. Representative John Boehner, a Republican from Ohio, objected to putting the measure “on the backs of the military.” It was, he said, “a sneaky way to do business.” He’s right. It’s just a shame that Congress had to resort to piggybacking to marshal the votes needed to pass this long overdue measure.

The Diagnosis That Wasn't

2007-09-15T17:48:00.000-04:00

The doctor’s office calls just as I am finishing breakfast. The doctor, her secretary tells me, wants me to come in and “discuss the results.” Not good, I think -- especially since this very busy New York specialist has set the appointment for just three working days from now. (Still, there’s a holiday weekend between now and then so it’s a long time to wait). I hear myself calmly saying to the secretary that since it must be something “of concern,” perhaps the doctor could call me sooner with the headlines.

Lungs or sinus? I’ve just had CT scans done of both, as part of a follow-up study of people who inhaled the dust at Ground Zero. Lungs, I expect. It comes back to me that when I first had a chest scan a couple of years ago, the doctor had mentioned that it showed something that almost certainly was nothing. Still, he said, probably I should have follow-up scan in six months. He sounded pretty unconcerned and I never got around to it. A surprising lapse, considering my tendency to overreact and my late-onset hypochondria.

Will I hear from the doctor today? Probably not, I decide. I mean, worst case scenario, you don’t want to tell someone that she has inoperable lung cancer over the phone. I sternly remind myself that this is just the kind of thought I do not need to be having right now.

So I have five days to get through, including the long weekend. How to make the time pass?

The phone rings again and it’s a neighbor in my co-op apartment house. She’s calling about the divisive issue of whether the building’s window frames should be restored or merely painted. She wishes to grumble about the treachery, short-sightedness and frequent idiocy of the co-op board. This is not a subject I normally have much patience for, but now I am all ears for a good twenty minutes.

Then I have to think of something else to do.

I consider going to the gym and swimming laps until I’m exhausted. This would make me feel virtuous, but would it also give me too much time to think? See a lot of movies? That might work.

I end up cleaning out my office, a job I attack with fierce intensity. In the event that life becomes chaotic, I’ll want an uncluttered office, or so I tell myself. But there’s something else. It comes to me that this is a lightning stocktaking. What to keep? What to discard? Taken together, these countless small decisions help me understand where I am in my life.

Sorting through dusty piles and files, I find: a military dependent ID card from when I was 16 and weighed 111 pounds, or so I claimed; a travel story about going snorkeling in the Maldives; instructions, never used, on the proper way to launder cashmere. Also a Mother’s Day letter from my daughter listing all the things she’s learned from me. This makes me cry, and then I feel better.

I work up the nerve to call the doctor’s office again. My new plan is to ask the secretary if she might possibly squeeze me in for an appointment before the weekend. Instead, the doctor herself comes to the phone. Yes, she can discuss the results right now: Sinus scan, fine; lungs, the same. I take a deep breath; bluebirds sing, bells chime. I can go back to being an ordinary hypochondriac.

The doctor keeps talking but I barely listen. Apparently in the vicinity of my thyroid there is possibly something that almost certainly is nothing. It would be a good idea to have a follow-up scan but there’s absolutely no rush, she says.

Of course, I say. Just as soon as I’m ready to be reminded again about being mortal.

TechnoFear Trounced

2007-09-15T17:47:00.000-04:00

Even if I have to drag myself to it kicking and screaming, I refuse to give up on making new technology part of my life. I've learned that it's all too easy to end up looking pathetic. I saw this happen to someone ten years ago. It was at the height of the internet boom and the Author's Guild was conducting a panel on the impact of technology on literary endeavor. Something like that.

The technology-isn't-necessarily-evil position was taken by my husband, at the time a technology editor. Representing the “con” side was a prominent critic, a lovely and literate man, who spoke so eloquently that I was almost swayed. Until he revealed in answer to a question that he still wrote on a typewriter. Game over, I thought. It was like being told that sex is overrated by someone who's never experienced an orgasm.

So now my motto is to at least try. A while ago, when I figured I was ready for some further adventures in personal computing, I signed up for lessons from a pro. Unfortunately the computer tutor and I were incompatible. He had trouble masking his horror over my document-storage practices, and he believed that there could be no higher goal than an uncluttered desktop. I called the employment office of my local university and tried again.

This time I ended up hiring a charming film student from West Virgina. A freshman. He was perfectly happy to help me master personal-computing essentials that were exactly my speed, such as how to change the background color on your screen. (“Master” might be too strong a word, as I don't remember it now.) And in his gentle, understated way, he made a very important contribution to my technical education: he cured my phobia of consulting “help” screens.

It turns out that they are not, as I had feared, the computer equivalent of my utterly opaque, 320-page cell phone manual. They do not whisper to me, “you are stupid . . . you are stupid . . . you are stupid.” They help, exactly as advertised. Who knew?

Today's takeaways:

1. If you need to learn something, hire a kid.

2. Try the Help pages. They help.

No Wretched Refuse, Please. We're Americans.

2007-09-15T17:44:00.000-04:00

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

Tired? Poor? Homeless and tempest-tossed? Don’t even think about it. That's over. Those famous words carved on the base of the Statue of Liberty? We're sending someone next week to chisel them off.

Emma Lazarus's sonnet was fine for welcoming our grandparents, but the situation has changed. We're no longer accepting “wretched refuse,” thank you. True, our forbears were immigrants, but they were honest, hard-working men and women trying to make a better life for their families. Not like the grifters and layabouts of today.

When I hear such prejudices spewing from talk radio these days, I always think about a boatload of Haitians, most of whom drowned within sight of shore. One of the few survivors told a reporter that in preparation for landing in America, “We were putting on our best clothes.”

New York's Mayor Mike Bloomberg is one who doesn't hold with the prevailing nativism. Speaking after a Memorial Day parade, he pointed out the practical implications for baby boomers of restricting immigration: who's going to finance our Social Security? He also urged lawmakers to look to their own history and realize that under the proposed curbs their grandparents never would have made it out of the Old Country. Or if they did, it would be on a round trip ticket.

I have a proposal. As the debate on the immigration bill heats up, lets all wear buttons proclaiming where our families started out. Mayor Mike's would say Poland. Mine would say Wales; my husband's Sicily. The only buttons that would say, “Here” would be worn by the lone group who can truly claim to be natives: Native Americans.

The Warren Report: Yes, No or Who Cares?

2007-09-15T17:42:00.000-04:00

Type “Kennedy assassination” into the search box at Amazon.com and you get 7,308 books. Recently, the genre's total has risen by two, with the publication of a pair of new investigative books by well-credentialed writers. They arrive at completely opposite conclusions.

Voting to reject the conclusions of the Warren Commission is David Talbot, founder of salon.com. His “Brothers,” focuses on Bobby Kennedy's sub rosa efforts to solve the assassination and theorizes that Bobby may have been the victim of the same conspirators he suspected of murdering his brother.

The case for acquittal is made by Vincent Bugliosi, author of Helter Skelter, a book on the Charles Manson case, which he prosecuted. In “Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” he defends the conclusions of the Warren report. There was, in other words, no conspiracy.

Bugliosi was motivated to write the book, he told a New York Times reporter, because polls show that 75 percent of Americans now believe there was some kind of conspiracy behind the assassination - even though they probably have not even read the Warren Report!

Count me among them. I've never read the Warren Report, nor am I planning to read Bugliosi's 1,612 page, six-pound opus. In fact, I try to avoid the black hole of JFK conspiracy theory, a twilight zone in which many have lost reputations and what might otherwise have been productive lives. Gary Trudeau hit the Zeitgeist on the head as usual when Doonesbury spoofed the “30th Annual JFK Assassination Conspiracy Fest.”

So I don't want to hear about arcane matters such as acoustic signatures or suspicious figures on the grassy knoll. I have just two words to say to Warren Commission defenders: Jack Ruby. A Mob-connected nightclub owner murders Lee Harvey Oswald on national television solely out of misguided patriotic zeal? How likely is that?

According to David Talbot, “Commission investigators credulously accepted the word of a Chicago hood named Lenny Patrick that Ruby had no underworld ties, when in fact it was Patrick himself who had run Ruby out of town for stepping on his gambling turf.”

You don't have to be a Sopranos fan to see that as a rock worth looking under.

Of course, there's another question: does it still matter? To me it does, and I suspect that a lot of my non-tinfoil-beanie-wearing peers feel the same way. For many of us the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the defining political event of our early years, as perhaps Pearl Harbor was for our parents. Like the eternal flame that burns at JFK's grave, our youthful outrage over the murder of the country's youngest-ever president has yet to be extinguished.

Who Was My Mother?

2007-09-15T17:27:00.000-04:00

You don't usually think of someone who dies at the age of 77 as having been cruelly cut down in the prime of life, but that is how I felt about my mother. Widowed for less than a year after a long stretch of caring for my semi-invalided father, she'd been making plans for a different kind of life. It had been her turn. Finally. Among the papers left sitting on her desk were a treatise on clay-making techniques, because she'd taken up ceramics; brochures for cottages to rent in Wales, for a visit to relatives there; instructions for computer French lessons, in preparation for a trip to Provence.

Stunned by Mom's unexpected death, I greedily sifted through this evidence searching for answers to a persistent mystery: who was my mother when she wasn't being my mother? While my father was alive, alternately raging and joking and generally chewing the scenery, Mom devoted much of her energy to soothing his temper and serving as a buffer between him and his prickly daughters. By the terms of this unspoken family deal, she tended to keep her troubles to herself. I'd told myself there would be time later to forge a different kind of relationship; to come to know my mother outside the all-consuming aura of my father.

Now all I had to go on was her things, and I ransacked them with a detective's zeal. Desperate for clues, I pored over her final "To Do" list; I sorted out drawers and emptied closets. I checked pockets and rifled through purses. Prying into my mother's possessions had been a favorite childhood pastime, and now I was free to indulge it at will.

There were poignant surprises. Despite relentless family pressure, Mom had defiantly refused to quit smoking, so we'd thought. Yet tucked away in a bottom drawer I came across: a package of prescription nicotine gum and a book called The No-Nag, No-Guilt, Do-It-Your-Way Guide to Quitting Smoking. So she had tried, after all. Apparently, she'd found it easier to withstand our reproaches than to endure the shame of admitting failure.

Forgotten childhood artifacts surfaced as I dug. I was touched to discover that Mom had saved for several decades and through a dozen moves the plaid cocktail napkins I'd sewn and fringed. In the same drawer, I uncovered relics of another sewing project: a set of intricate felt appliques—each symbolizing a different holiday—that she had fashioned for my tenth birthday along with a red felt circle skirt.

On fancy dress occasions as the year progressed, the appropriate applique would be snapped onto the skirt. I wore it decorated according to the season with: a pink birthday cake sprouting white candles and frosting flowers; a Thanksgiving turkey; a green leprechaun hat with a white shamrock; a mortarboard with a real silk tassel; a bough of cherries; an Easter bunny with pink ears and string whiskers; or a valentine that said "I love you."

Overall, my mother's attentions to my wardrobe were spotty, and on many days I left the house wearing mismatched outfits with missing buttons. But there was no denying that my holiday skirt had been magnificent, and I was glad to come across the surviving evidence of it.

Discoveries like these made me feel closer to my mother. But I was in dangerous territory, and I knew it. Snoopers find whatever they find, after all, and it's generally thought to serve them right. Still, I couldn't shake the feeling of shock and betrayal: what was the framed 19th century etching of the Royal Treasury at Petra doing stashed in the back of a closet?

It had been my last present to my mother, intended to memorialize a dream fulfilled. On her 75th birthday, she had traveled by camel to the remote archaeological site in Jordan. She had sent my daughter a postcard saying, "I've longed to come here since I was your age and it's everything I'd hoped—and more." In my Wanderlust, I was my mother's daughter, and I'd been certain she would love the memento of her far-flung travels. So why had she banished it from sight?

Mom had been on the road the very day before her death, completing a solo 3,000 mile car trip across the south. Not knowing she was going to die, she'd failed to call me when she returned, and that missed conversation, that last silence, rippled through my life. As evidence of her elusiveness, this was more than I could bear, and what she couldn't give, I'd set out to steal. In the end, for all my rummaging, I came up empty-handed. Who was my mother when I wasn't watching? Why was my present face down on the shelf? The hardest thing of all was to accept that I would never know.

Ebay Addict in Recovery

2007-09-15T17:26:00.001-04:00

I have a guilty secret—one that I suspect I share with millions of computer-owning Americans, possibly even some on this website. I am addicted to eBay. Or I was, anyway. I tried cutting back and when that didn't work, I went cold turkey. Needless to say, I was a buyer, not a seller. Selling things on eBay is a form of honest toil, and an answer to under-employment, like taking in boarders during the Great Depression. For buyers, eBay is a vast and intriguing bazaar, its self-declared mission to "help practically anyone trade practically anything on Earth." In other words, whatever you've got, some damn fool will buy it. Me, for example.

I started out browsing the "Antiques" category, where I often found things for much less than they would sell for in a store. Brass gooseneck lamps from the early 1900s, for example. A steal! Never mind that they needed rewiring and industrial-strength polishing and also the shades were dented. Heavy old convent sheets from France, too scratchy to ever sleep on but useful for . . . something. And a Mexican ex voto, a captioned devotional painting thanking a patron saint for help in a sticky situation. When my ex voto arrived, after I'd won it in a fierce bidding war, it looked somewhat new for an antique. But I found the story it told irresistible; the painting had been commissioned by a mother in thanks for her daughter's recovery from a broken heart.

From antiques I moved on to jewelry. For a time I became a patron of a young woman who gave her name as Jade Bible, and who made luminous glass bracelets, like none I'd ever seen. I bought a bunch of them for myself and for gifts and in the process of emailing back and forth got to know a little about Jade. She lived on a hilltop in Kentucky, I learned, and when her mother-in-law was unavailable she had babysitter problems. My picture of her as part of a traditional, church-going family was jolted one day she when said she was getting a divorce and would not be able to get to her studio for a while. After that, she vanished completely, owing me a bracelet. (Jade, if you're out there . . .)

Despite this disappointment, what helped draw me to eBay, was the diversity of characters I encountered. In the early days, especially, sellers would tell stories as a way of establishing the provenance of their goods: some old glass cabinet pulls were for sale because "my husband is renovating our early 1900s Victorian house in San Francisco to make way for a larger kitchen."

For a long time, I justified my obsession with eBay on anthropological grounds. The thousands of sellers were contributors to a sort of a collective autobiography, which I found fascinating. But that rationalization wore thin and in the end I had to face the truth. It was time to call my immoderate eBay usage for what it really was: compulsive shopping.

Seabiscuit to the Rescue or How and Audiobook Saved My Marriage

2007-09-15T17:24:00.000-04:00

Should you ever get stuck in a five-hour traffic jam with a grouchy spouse who SAID you should have left earlier, you will need a powerful distraction to preserve any semblance of harmony. You will need the audiobook of Seabiscuit. That was my experience, anyway. Listening to the incredible story of the little-race-horse-that-could was simply more compelling than discussing just whose fault this was.

That experience sold me on audiobooks, and I’ve been a huge fan ever since. Especially for night-time car trips, which fly by when you’re sitting in the dark listening to someone with an evocative voice tell a story. It has to be the right kind of story, though. Not every good book works when read aloud. And some books that you wouldn’t want to curl up with make great listens.

Here are a few things I’ve figured out:

The book has to be well-written. An airport page-turner that I’d happily take on a long flight doesn’t work as an audiobook. You can’t skim; bad writing seems worse.

Unabridged, if possible. You make an emotional investment in the story, so why cut it short? Also, just try following the plot of a John Le Carre novel that has been abridged. Those seemingly extraneous passages contain vital information.

The reader’s voice can’t be annoying. This is obvious, and it’s a recommendation for buying through an online service like iTunes or Audible, where you can listen to a snippet before you buy.

Whatever the format, audiobooks can be expensive, and they’re something you only use once. So I also look for them at yard sales and library exchanges. Ebay is another good source.

We’ve had some misses in our quest for good audiobooks, but we’ve struck gold too – sometimes in the most unexpected places. The audiobooks recommended below are a pretty random list, but each entertained us for many hours. Any additions to the list?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

I’d never have had the patience to sit down and read Michael Chabon’s novel about comic-book artists and golems and amazing, magical feats, but it was enthralling to listen to.

The Killer Angels

A Civil War buff I’m not, but the audiobook of Michael Shaara’s novel brings the familiar cast of characters vividly to life. You can almost smell the gunpowder.

Samuel Pepys Diary

Don’t be put off if you encountered a version of this in high school; probably it left out the racy parts. Pepys’s trenchant observations about life in seventeenth-century London are hilarious, especially in Kenneth Branaugh’s marvelous reading.

Lolita

Listening to Jeremy Irons’s Humbert Humbert made me understand Lolita better than I had when I read the book. Although the novel is narrated by a supremely charming and articulate pedophile, the author makes it abundantly clear in the end just how despicable a character he is.

Rocket Boys

This one’s a real sleeper, though it was made into the movie October Sky. I’m not even sure why I picked up Homer Hickam Jr.’s memoir of small-town life in Coalville, West Virginia, but it’s a unanimous favorite, one of those stories you wish would go on forever. There is nothing like the profound relaxation that comes over you when you are in the hands of a master storyteller.

And, of course, Seabiscuit.

The Last Move is the Hardest

2007-09-15T17:23:00.001-04:00

fter nearly ten years of indecision, my parents moved into a retirement community a few miles from their home in Miami. I'd been pushing for the move and not only for the selfish reason that it would spare me worry. I love the place. Possibly this is because it reminds me of the Army posts where I grew up, complete with sentry gate at the entrance. Residents live in their own units, but there is a lovely common garden and grounds for walking and basking in the sun. East Ridge has its own ceramics studio, woodworking shop, and library. There are regular exercise classes, including yoga, which, to my amazement, attracted my retired Colonel father. My mother decided that 50 years of fixing dinner was enough, and opted for the group meals. They both found like-minded companions, especially among the many University of Miami faculty members who have retired there, and every evening they join friends at a cocktail hour before dinner. Mom is even able to travel, knowing that my father, who is growing somewhat infirm, would be cared for in her absence.

As much as my parents loved East Ridge, it took a lot to get them there. They lived in the perfect Florida house, complete with a mango tree in the back yard, and a huge screened-in patio where they spent most of their time. Even as housekeeping became a burden, they resisted the idea of moving. In the way of adult children, I thought I knew what was best for them, and didn't hesitate to say so. They, for their part, didn't like being pushed. Eventually I got the message and stopped bringing up the subject. When they finally came around, the choice was all theirs.

My sister and I did what we could to make the move easier. We each flew in for a week to help weed possessions and pack. Jane organized a giant yard sale that doubled as a goodbye party for the neighborhood. Mom and Dad were reluctant to spend money on the new place, but we encouraged them to do any renovations that would make it feel more like home.

Once my parents were settled in, my husband and I threw them a housewarming party. No one at East Ridge had ever done this before, it turned out, and the staff was excited about the prospect. The subliminal message was, this is a place people come to live, not to die. The party was a great success, as my parents' old friends got to see them in their new surroundings, and their new acquaintances got to know them a little better.

Moving to a retirement community is not the right decision for everyone, but it was for my parents, and they ended up wishing they'd done it earlier. My husband's parents have come to the stage where they are reluctant to make a move that everyone else thinks they should. Now, though, there is an established cadre of professionals to assist in the transition. Their professional organization is the National Association of Senior Move Managers and they have an extensive provider list.

Million Dollar Ideas

2007-09-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

How many Million Dollar Ideas have I had in my life? Oh, a dozen, maybe two, possibly more. I've forgotten most, though my husband may have a better memory of them. Because when I come up with a Million Dollar Idea I don't shut up about it for at least a month.

I know every family has stories about how some distant relation came up with a Million Dollar Idea, failed to act on it, and then someone else came along with the exact same idea and made a fortune. That is not the case with me. My ideas are all still up for grabs.*

The Refrigerator Hat, for example. The idea is simple: you take a regular baseball cap and sew in a little pouch on the top of the crown part. Then you take one of those flexible ice packs and put it in the freezer over a round head-shaped form. Then when the ice pack is frozen slip it into the little pouch on the hat's crown, and behold -- the Refrigerator Hat!

Not everyone would want one. But I believe that the Refrigerator Hat could be very useful for those who spend long periods of time in non-temperature-controlled environments, such as bone fishermen, migrant grape pickers and Southern Conference football fans. Also anyone whose car air conditioning has been broken for two years and they can't fix it because it's a Volvo and once the air conditioning goes, that's it.

I'm realistic about the prospects for the Refrigerator Hat; I don't expect any late-night TV entrepreneurs read this and pounce. But my friend Leslie had a Million Dollar Idea for a piece of kid equipment that I still think has real commercial potential.

She actually had a prototype made for her own use, which I admired. It looked like a big a bucket with legs, and the idea was that a child could stand in the bucket and be at kitchen counter height. So while mom was fixing dinner the kid could be at her side making playdough pizzas or racing Matchbook Cars. Anyone who has ever tried to cook and entertain a three-year-old at the same time will appreciate the brilliance of this. (If any venture capitalists out there want to get in touch with Leslie, I'll be happy to pass along a message.)

Many people are reluctant to share their Million Dollar Ideas on the grounds that someone will come along and steal them. I no longer feel that way because I've figured out something over the years: Million Dollar ideas are a dime a dozen. The hard thing is actually doing something with them.

Naming Your Baby

2007-09-15T17:20:00.000-04:00

I had two great-aunts, Hazel and Maud. Their sister, my grandmother, was named Blanche. I remember as a kid feeling sorry for them that they had such passé, fuddy-duddy first names. They were lively, forward-thinking women but their names made them seem so old fashioned. Would this ever happen to me? My mother assured me that it would not. She had chosen the simplest names she could think of for her daughters, Ann and Jane. These were classics, unlike her own hated first name, Isabel. It turns out, though, that if she had called me after herself I would have a much more modern sounding name. Isabel is now enjoying a vogue, after a slow period from the 1930s to the 1980s. In 2005, it was the 89th most popular name for girls. By comparison, in the same year Ann came in 650th (in the decade my mother named me, it was the 37th most popular.) And I was right about my aunts' names; Maud peaked at 130 around the turn of the last century and by 1930 it was undetectable.

When it came time to choose a name for my own daughter, I in turn fell victim to fashion. At the time she was born in 1984, Caitlin's name was 87th in popularity, but it's been on a downward slide ever since, to 193rd in 2005.

I learned all this from a fascinating chart called The Baby NameVoyager which tracks baby-name frequency over time, from the 1880s to 2005. If you won't be naming any babies soon, or any characters in novels, this website may not have any practical application. But I found it interesting to contemplate that, as with so many other things, I seem to have repeated my mother's mistake. Specifically, in giving my daughter a name that apparently is going out of style. And that is the same mistake Maud and Hazel and Blanche's mother made in naming them.

The Zeitgeist is hard to escape. I've heard so many stories of people giving their kids names they believed were not part of the latest trend, only to discover that a half-dozen others answered to the same name in the sandbox. Inevitably, these are the names that come to seem dated with time. Has this happened to you? Or not happened? If you had it to do over again, would you still choose the same names for your children?

The Beauty Quandary

2007-09-15T17:18:00.000-04:00

Last week I was having lunch with an old friend—Sara, I'll call her—who happens to be the beauty editor of a major magazine. As part of her job, she reviews all the latest "miracle" products, explores every new laser or chemical treatment and interviews all the most highly regarded dermatologists and cosmetic surgeons. So I couldn't resist asking her what, if anything, she considered worth doing. And, by implication of course, what, if anything, she had had done. Although she's over 50, her skin looked flawless.

Sara was generous about sharing her personal beautification resume. First, she uses Retin-A; she calls it the gold standard in skin treatment. This topical ointment, derived from vitamin A, reverses sun damage and improves the skin's texture.

She has avoided botox, wrinkle-fighting injections that she feels rob faces of expression. Botox supposedly works by paralyzing muscles in order to reduce lines. (I say "supposedly" because I once had botox to reduce the frown line between my eyes. It didn't work at all. My dermatologist was astonished, and concluded that I must have been frowning since birth to have developed such a strong frown muscle.)

Sara isn't interested in doing anything that involves needles, so this also rules out fillers that are injected to plump up wrinkles. And she avoids surgery and lasers. I asked about something called Intense Pulsed Light, a skin rejuvenation program that I'd heard worked wonders for a friend of a friend in Alabama. On the non-invasive end of the scale as skin treatments go, IPL is meant to even out skin tone and reverse sun damage. This Sara has tried, and she said it had made a noticeable difference in her complexion. Before lunch was over, I took down the name of her dermatologist.

My first reaction was to get on the doctor's waiting list. Then I did what I always do when I hear about a new cosmetic procedure. I went on Make Me Heal, a website where real people air their uncensored opinions about various treatments they have undergone. There I found a few endorsements from happy IPL consumers and more complaints. People had written that it hurt like hell, did little good, and, in one case, caused skin to look worse than before. Of course dissatisfied customers are much more likely to post on message boards, and the skill of doctors varies, as does individual reactions to treatments. Still, it gave me pause.

I've been discouraged over the years from pursuing any number of allegedly promising cosmetic treatments by the Make Me Heal message boards. I suppose on some level I want to be warned off; otherwise I'd have long since deleted the site from my Bookmark list.

I can't help noticing that my ratio of approach to avoidance is shifting toward approach. When I was younger I disdained the idea of major cosmetic interventions. Trying to combat aging was a losing proposition, I thought; the dignified option was to concede gracefully. I imagined, too, that the impending signs of age would confer an appearance of wisdom and nobility. Sadly I've now reached a different conclusion: my aging face is not destined to look anything like Vanessa Redgrave's. Frown-y and tired seems more probable.

So if some youth-giving remedy came along that had no negatives on the message board, required no down time, and was guaranteed to be an improvement, I believe I would consider it. Oh, yes, and it has to be painless.

What Women Don't Want

2007-09-15T17:17:00.000-04:00

It was one of those headlines that makes you spit out your morning coffee: “Man Is Stabbed in Attack After Admiring a Stranger.” The man in question, a 28-year-old filmmaker, claimed it had begun harmlessly. He was outside a Greenwich Village movie theater in when he saw a group of women walking toward him. The way he told police, he liked the way one of the women “wore her hair,” and said to her innocently, “Hey, how're you doing?” In response, he said, another of the women insulted his shoes, and in the ensuing melee all eight women attacked him and he ended up nicked in the abdomen by a kitchen knife.

When this story appeared in the New York Times last summer, it caused no small amount of comment - ok, hooting -- around our house. My daughter Cait gave it a dramatic reading at the breakfast table. We didn't exactly say, 'you, go, girls!' but almost.

Of course, this guy didn't deserve to be attacked, no matter what he actually said, and indeed the women’s trial for assault and attempted murder is now underway. The New York papers are all over it and so are we. Under oath, the alleged victim backpedaled on his claim of having said nothing more than “a simple hello,” and admitted to calling one woman an elephant and telling another she looked like a man. These remarks, said the prosecutor, triggered the women’s “vicious and unprovoked attack.”

According to the defense lawyer, the women were merely trying to counter “unwanted sexual advances.” The man was enraged at being rebuffed when the women told him they were gay. After boasting that he could convert them to heterosexuality through his sexual prowess (in the Times's decorous paraphrase), he tried to choke one of them. “These young ladies defended themselves,” the defense lawyer said. “They fought back. They didn't acquiesce, they didn't cower.”

Cait speculates that the women simply snapped. “Perhaps they were sick of the constant sexual harassment (oops -- admiration) that happens on the streets every day,” she wrote in an essay about the incident. “Perhaps for once, they had enough power in numbers to exact punishment, so they did.”

My daughter could relate. So could I. It's old news that street insults are an endless source of humiliation for young women. The carload of teenagers who made obscene catcalls at me have been replaced by the young man who looked Cait up and down and pronounced her, “Nice meat.” The specific comments may have changed, but the feelings of anger and powerlessness have not. It's no surprise we a twinge of satisfaction when the tables were turned.

It's up to the jury to weigh the truth of the conflicting allegations.

But beyond its eventual outcome, the case raises questions about how our society views unsolicited sexual comments on the street. Do they constitute provocation? Or are they essentially harmless?

I know what I think.

Four Abortion Stories

2007-09-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

One

When the Roe v. Wade decision was announced in 1974, I was living in Rhode Island. At the time abortion was legal in New York State, a four-hour train ride away. Anyone I knew, knew that. They would have had no problem obtaining a legal abortion. But that left out a lot of women. In Providence an ad hoc abortion counseling service was formed to inform women of the options open to them. This was breaking the law, as the Rhode Island legislature had deemed it illegal to even tell someone that in New York abortions were legal. When there was a demonstration at the statehouse to try and get the law overturned, one of the legislators came over to offer a private word of encouragement. For political reasons, he had to support the anti-counseling law, but not long ago, his teenage daughter had gone to New York to have an abortion. So he wanted us to know in confidence that he thought we were right.

Two

About ten years ago, I was assigned by the now-defunct American Benefactor Magazine to write a profile of Alexander Sanger, then President of Planned Parenthood of New York City. On my first day of reporting, Sanger was to speak on the steps of City Hall, and beforehand I sat in on a meeting of his security people. It was intense. They discussed who would be stationed where during Sanger’s speech, as well as the exact route the driver should follow in taking him to the site. I wondered if this was really necessary until I learned that Sanger had received some very specific death threats that week. Why? He had written a letter to the Wall Street Journal opposing the ban on late-term abortions that the Supreme Court has just upheld. P.S.: My article was never published, and my editor confided that her boss had not realized quite how controversial Planned Parenthood was when he made the assignment. Sanger now writes a blog on reproductive freedom: http://www.alexandersanger.com/

Three

I wonder what my religious conservative relatives are thinking today? Their church is fiercely opposed to abortion and so are they. Yet when a family member was left at the altar, pregnant, she had an abortion. That is the story I heard, at any rate.

Four

When my daughter was in college she was a volunteer escort at an abortion clinic. She and the clients she escorted were subjected to the usual hatefulness from the right-to-life regulars. She wrote an essay about the experience that was accepted for the opinion column by a major news magazine. The piece was edited and fitted to space and a photographer came to take her picture. And then, just hours before presses rolled, the top editor read the essay and killed it. Too controversial, even for an opinion column, apparently. The essay eventually ran in Newsday.

Homework. Who Gets Hurt?

2007-09-15T17:13:00.000-04:00

When you see "The Homework Wars" in a headline, the story is likely to be about one of two subjects: the nightly skirmish between parents and children to make them finish their homework or the expanding parental crusade to encourage limits on the amount of homework kids are assigned. This anti-homework movement is in conflict with another pair of evergreen education stories -- the academic successes of Asian kids whose parents push them to scholastic achievement from birth, and the ever-increasing difficulty of getting into selective colleges.

The homework-limiting contingent has especially targeted the younger grades, where the trend has been to pile it on even the youngest children. Any parent who dares to question this policy is likely to hear the same excuse: "other" parents are demanding it. I don't know who these other parents are, but they must have a lot of time on their hands. Because here's the dirty little secret about elementary school homework: the parents do it. Much of it is simply too hard for children to do by themselves.

This means that the "parental involvement" that schools claim to value translates into parental over-involvement. Show me an elementary school parent who hasn't spent too many hours "helping" with homework and I'll show you someone whose child has never been assigned to make a papier mache volcano. Or some similarly complex and time-consuming project.

Elementary schools are the worst over-assigners, but high schools do it too. My daughter's high school claimed to limit homework to two hours a night, but apparently neglected to communicate that to the teachers. Cait regularly needed three or four hours to finish, and more on weekends. At the same time, the school encouraged students to be well rounded, to pursue hobbies and take advantage of the cultural offerings available to them. But when, exactly, were they supposed to do this? Even during vacation periods the students were loaded with work. (Just recently New York's Stuyvesant High School, one of the most competitive public schools in the nation, moved to restrict vacation homework.)

This kind of mixed message is typical. Educators routinely caution parents against getting too involved in their children's schoolwork—then turn around and give assignments that virtually demand it. At one point in my daughter's high school career, some of the parents made it known that they were unhappy about the strain placed on their kids by the work load. The school's response was to schedule a meeting at which the principal chided parents for allowing too many outside activities. Then, too, she noted, some kids are just naturally Type A—that's why they were feeling so pressured. Not our fault, in other words.

Clearly, too much homework stresses out kids and cuts into parents' lives. But heaping on the homework shows a special disregard for single parents and for families in which both parents work outside the home. It's hardest on poorer families, where parents may be juggling several jobs (and where in high school the kids may be working too).

This is an issue that anyone who values educational equality should care about, not just people with school age children. The cult of excessive homework is one way in which advantaged families maintain an edge in college admissions. (Especially now that it's harder to buy your child's way into the college of your choice by contributing funds for a new gymnasium.)

It's difficult to imagine how parents struggling to pay the rent can keep up with over-demanding homework. They don't have the luxury of declining a social engagement, as a friend of mine recently did, on the grounds that "we have a big physics project due Tuesday."

"Oh, I'm Sure You'll Get in There!"

2007-09-15T17:12:00.000-04:00

Parents love to tell scary stories about the process by which children enter our lives (childbirth) and depart from them (college applications). Having now experienced both, I can say with conviction that the latter passage is more arduous for all concerned. Compared to “the college process,” as they call it, childbirth is a walk in the park. Trust me. I didn’t believe it either, and found myself mentally apologizing to friends who preceded me through the experience—whose word I doubted, whose behavior I judged as over-the-top hysterical.

It’s hardest on the kids, of course. College applicants are put through a highly refined form of psychological torture. Is there anything you can do to help? Certainly. Stop subjecting any high school senior you may encounter to well-meaning but misguided remarks. Stop saying dumb things and stop asking tactless questions.

A few guidelines for what not to say to a college applicant:

Don’t tell me you’re actually STUDIED for the SATs? When I took them, we went to bed early the night before and that was it for preparation.

-- You were lucky; you came of age in a halcyon era. Don’t rub it in.

How did you do on your SATs?

-- How would you feel if I asked you how much money you earned?

What schools did you apply to?

-- If someone asks me one more time, I’m going to have the list tattooed on my forehead.

What’s your first-choice school?

-- Since I can’t choose a college until a college chooses me, I’d rather not answer that question. Why should the whole world know that I ended up at my safety school?

Oh, I’m sure you’ll get in THERE.

-- Don’t bet on it. Mushroom U. may have been considered a safety school in your day, but it’s since become so competitive that the typical entering freshman has already published a novel and cured the common cold.

My nephew goes there and he just loves it.

-- How nice for him.

But of course he would—since there are so many more girls there than straight guys.

-- Gosh, thanks for sharing.

Why WOULDN’T you get in? You’ve got terrific grades and great test scores!

-- So does just about everyone, believe it or not.

Once you’re in the real world, it doesn’t matter where you went to college.

-- Maybe not, but it matters now.

I’m sure I’d never be admitted to [insert name of alma mater here] today.

-- That’s right; you wouldn’t. See response to first question.

When do you hear? Have you heard anything yet?

-- Hold still! There’s a bug crawling on your arm!

Training to be Old? Not Yet.

2007-09-15T17:10:00.000-04:00

This morning's NY Times had a special section called "Training to be Old." Did I read it? Certainly not, though I will be old soon enough, if I'm lucky. I'm guessing it contains the usual: articles on 'do you have the right insurance?' and, 'is your nest egg enough', and, 'are you worried about memory lapses?' (I paged through it, actually, and found I'd gotten it just about right.) Why would I want to think about those things? They're depressing. I'm not at that stage yet and I don't plan to go to school for it.

I've noticed, though, that I am repeating a pattern. At every stage of adulthood, the next stage has looked disagreeable. I remember that before I became a mother, I pitied those who were. Their lives seemed so circumscribed. They couldn't go out to brunch. They had to plan ahead for everything from movies to sex. Travel became difficult. The lifestyle just didn't appeal to me.

Once I had a child myself, I saw that I'd got it all wrong. True, I lost my carefree life, but I didn't miss it. Everything about motherhood that had seemed so boring? Fascinating. Later I pitied the Empty Nesters. When kids left home to go to college, how heartbreaking would that be? But when I reached that milestone, I discovered that a whole new life had been waiting for me.

I learned from these experiences that things seem different from the inside. Disadvantages that loom so large are there, but they are not the whole picture. Advantages may compensate for them.

I predict that the special section on aging will be followed by many more of the same, as the media seem to think that Boomers want nothing more than to look ahead to the next stage of life—and to be told that they are woefully unprepared.

I can't speak for my whole generation, but I'm not ready for my "getting old" training wheels. But give it a few years, and things may look different. We may discover that being even older than we are is not as bad as it looks.

The Sopranos Club

2007-09-15T17:08:00.000-04:00

During every season of The Sopranos a group of my friends has made a social event out of watching it together. We don’t do if for every episode, but always for the opening and closing of the season, and a couple of times in between. Someone cooks Italian food and of course serves Italian wine, and on special occasions we women do our best to dress like Carmela, (within the limitations of our heavily black Manhattan wardrobes.) Unlike other communal TV-watching -- the Oscars or the Superbowl -- there is an unspoken rule of absolutely NO TALKING during the show. Afterwards we analyze the episode in minute detail. In previous seasons, we’ve talked about the progress of Tony’s therapy or whether Christopher will finally marry Adriana.

Several seasons back we obsessed over the question of how Meadow got into Columbia (some of us were parents of high school students at the time.) We felt she was lucky to have landed an Ivy League berth, her superior high school record notwithstanding. Coming from suburban New Jersey, she had geographic diversity going against her, but then again you couldn’t underestimate the soccer. (Her dad is loaded, true, but that should have been irrelevant, since Columbia practices need-blind admissions.) Of course this was before we saw Carmela blackmail Tony into forking over a $50,000 donation and realized Meadow was a “development admit.” What was next, we wondered, the Anthony Soprano School of Environmental Waste Management?

The family stuff is what we like best, when the Sopranos are concerned about college admissions and mothers who are unhappy in nursing homes. So, even though we plan to continue our tradition for the upcoming final season, my friends and I are facing it with dread. Because the Sopranos are going to end up dead, some of them. It’s a virtual certainty.

Of course we knew this all along; how could it be otherwise? But at least in our little fan club, we’ll be able to console one another.

Family Values Guy Changes His Tune

2007-09-15T17:07:00.000-04:00

Newt Gingrich has finally said something I agree with. Earlier this week, “Family Values” Gingrich declared that the personal lives of Presidential candidates shouldn’t become an issue in the 2008 campaign. This was in the same month that he went on a conservative talk radio show to confess the extramarital affair he was carrying on while he pursued President Clinton’s impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky scandal. We’re used to this by now. Have you noticed that the more adamantly the Family Values Folk insist on high standards of public virtue for the rest of us, the less likely they are to exemplify these standards in their own lives? This is called hypocrisy. Compulsive gambling, drug addiction, consorting with gay hookers, fathering illegitimate children are just a few of the personal foibles of our holier-than-thou public personages.

But Newt is right. Everybody’s private life has its messy patches, so who’s to cast the first stone? Much better to accept that human failings are just that: human. Then maybe all these troubled Family Values campaigners could emerge from their isolated closets and seek help for their problems.

Everybody into the Melting Pot

2007-09-15T17:05:00.001-04:00

Is the melting pot a good thing or a bad thing? Should immigrants to this country be pushed to assimilate, to “Americanize” themselves? When I was younger I would have answered “bad” and “no” to those questions. I felt strongly about the subject because I was working on a book of oral histories of immigrants. It seemed to me that the men and women who had come to this country in the great tide of immigration around the turn of the last century had been robbed of their cultural identity.

I’ve been thinking about these issues again lately, along with everybody else, and I find I no longer agree with my younger self. I’m now on the side of assimilation. It can be carried too far, perhaps, as with my mother-in-law, who prepared traditional Italian dishes, while omitting the garlic. But too fierce an insistence on hyphenated identities undermines the common good. Take bilingual education. It’s fine for native English speakers; deadly unfair for immigrant children. Speaking fluent English is a passport to the larger society and it’s wrong to deprive children of that ability. Yes, you can live somewhere such as Miami and never have to even hear a word of English. But what if you want to leave Miami?

Cultural relativism, the idea that all cultures are equally valid, is one of those concepts that work better in theory than in practice. Especially if you’re a woman. I learn from this morning’s paper that clandestine polygamy has taken hold among Africans immigrants a few miles from my apartment. If this becomes tolerated, where might it lead? Here’s a cautionary tale from Germany, also in this morning’s paper. A German Muslim woman’s request for a speedy divorce on the grounds that her husband beat her was rejected by a judge, who noted that the couple came from a cultural background “in which it is not unusual that the husband uses physical punishment against the wife.”

Recently I spent several hours hanging around the international terminal at JFK airport. I marveled at the diverse throng of arriving passengers, happy that my city was the entry point for such a multiplicity of cultures. Then a frightening apparition emerged from passport control. A woman (one assumes) cloaked in black head to toe, with only the tiniest viewing slit. She wasn’t just veiled, she was enshrouded. She looked like an inky thumbprint, the kind that illiterates affix to documents. Seeing her chilled me in a way I couldn’t have imagined when I was working on my oral history book all those years ago. The world has changed since then and so have I. The sanctity of cultural identity is no longer my paramount concern. I found myself hoping the shrouded one would forsake her veil. Or that she was only here for a visit, and on a short-stay visa.

Everybody into the Melting Pot

2007-09-15T17:05:00.000-04:00

Don't Get Sick at Home

2007-09-15T17:04:00.000-04:00

There’s nothing like traveling to another country to get a perspective on your own. On a recent trip to Argentina, my husband felt sick and started running a fever. On the centigrade thermometer I bought at the pharmacy, his temperature showed as 40 degrees, which some quick arithmetic translated into 104 Fahrenheit. The hotel made a phone call. A doctor arrived within a half-hour. He examined Peter, diagnosed a virus, and told us what he should take to bring the fever down. He could see I was worried and before he left he gave me a hug.

The bill: Nada.

Later we told this story to an Austrian tourist we’d met. “In the U.S.,” we said, “doctors don’t come to you; you go to them.” “But what if you’re really sick?” she wanted to know. No. Not even then. She found this astonishing, and when we thought about it, so did we.

Pet Theories

2007-09-15T17:03:00.000-04:00

Everyone is entitled to hold a certain number of pet theories. So we go along with my brother-in-law whenever he pronounces on the best way to remind someone of something. According to Jonathan, instead of saying “Don’t forget your keys,” you must say “Remember your keys.” Because, according to Jonathan, the brain registers the former as: ‘Don’t forget your keys..’ Thus creating a nueral slippery slope connecting the words “keys” and “forget.” Jonathan can’t recall if he first heard this theory somewhere or if he made it up himself. In either case, he’s convinced it’s profoundly true and is on a mission to spread the word.

I understand, because I set a lot of store by my own pet theory, which is about parking. I know how to find a good parking space when they aren’t any. The secret is to drive to exactly where you want to be and only then to start looking for a place to park. Your passengers will urge you to take the first space you come upon— claiming that “we aren’t going to do any better.” Ignore this. You need to demonstrate to the parking gods that you expect to be lucky. In parking, as in life, you should start by going after exactly what you want. Because you never know . . . .

I Go Zydeco Dancing

2007-09-15T17:02:00.001-04:00

There are always reasons not to try something new. If you've never done it before, how do you know you'll prefer it to staying home and rereading Jane Austin or watching reruns of The Simpsons? I can't recall my excuses all the times I failed to get myself to one of the monthly Zydeco dances held in New York. It's been on my mental to-do list for ages, but I doubted I could corral anyone else to go, and, well, something else always came up.

Until last night. My recent visit to New Orleans reminded me how much I like the music, a colorful website called "Let's Zydeco" gave me the location (Connolly's Bar on 45th St.), and the subway on my corner took me there. I went alone, which was fine, since I'm usually braver that way. A small group, including me, arrived in time for the advertised lesson an hour before the band was to start. Surprisingly, there were almost as many men as women, and Laura, the teacher, paired us up in the same embarrassing way I recall from Sixth Grade dancing class. ("Anyone who doesn't have a partner, raise you hand.") This might have reminded me of earlier dance floor humiliations, but instead it freed me to notice that, what a miracle, I was beyond being embarrassed on this score.

On a less promising note, I turned out to be no better than I ever was at listening to verbal instructions and translating them into movement. I believe the experts now have a fancy term for it: auditory processing deficit. My feet cannot be told anything; they need to be shown. Fortunately I was saved by a strong, experienced partner, who suggested I ignore Laura's shouted instructions and just listen to the music and follow his lead.

John Seltzer had arrived in New York earlier that day from Palo Alto to visit his 96-year-old father. He's an old Zydeco hand and a personal friend of the band leader, Geno Delafose. (PBS called Delafose "a standard-bearer for traditional Zydeco.") John tells me he is a regular at the Friday night Zydeco dances in Alameda, California, which, I later read, attract "a joyously random group of people . . . like an explosion at the Norman Rockwell factory. All races, all ages, all demeanors." That's a pretty good description of the hundred plus people who end up at Connolly's by the end of the evening. There are guys in cowboy hats and guys in suits (one, anyway); guys with dreadlocks and guys with ponytails. Women are just as variously arrayed -- in everything from jeans to swirly skirts and spangled tops. One lovely woman, who told me she was a widow, was wearing fabulous lavender cowboy boots I wanted to snatch off her feet.

It's a friendly, benevolent scene, and if you were of a mind for it, I'm sure you could connect with someone. But that's optional -- there's certainly no sense of people checking each other out. The point is to dance and have fun. Which I do. The band is terrific, and I'm lucky enough to be twirled around the floor by some great partners, who don't seem to mind doubling as dance teachers. But I make myself the same promise I did at Tipitina's: before I return I'm going to take some real lessons. If I can have this much fun faking it, imagine if I really knew how to dance the dance.

Kids Back in the House?

2007-09-15T16:58:00.000-04:00

As far as I know there's never been a sitcom about a brainy college graduate with a brand-new degree in philosophy who moves back home with her parents and gets a job as a cocktail waitress (high heels, fishnet stockings) at a bowling alley in order to support her true life's desire, which is to write fiction. Her parents try not be annoying. Being Baby Boomers, they're in no position to hold up their generation as an example of youthful focus and practicality. But, hey, they are parents. They've learned a few things along the way and so have all their friends. So the long-suffering graduate has to listen as a rotating cast of hippies-turned-grown-ups impart their life lessons. And if one more of them tells her about the scene in The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman is advised that the future is "Plastics!" she is going to scream.

The brainy college graduate is my daughter, Cait, and I must say it's been fun to have her home again. (We weren't entirely surprised by her return; according to one report I read, about half her peers have made a similar move.) Despite familiar surroundings, she's been shocked to discover how much there is to know about life that you don't learn in college. She's even written an essay about it that appeared in Newsweek, accompanied by a photo of her holding a cosmopolitan on a tray.

Recent graduates are on a steep learning curve, and it's always easier to hear advice when it's from someone else's parents. So perhaps you and I might collaborate on working up a hard-earned wisdom archive. What are your choice life lessons from the first years out of college? What did you have to learn the hard way? How long did it take you to figure it all out? Think of it as Life 101: Orientation for Graduates.

Possible chapter titles:

Waitressing, Bartending, Temping, and Other Things You Can Do with Your Philosophy Degree
Taxes for Beginners: Save those Receipts, You Can Deduct Job-Hunting Costs
Breaking the Latte Habit—Now that it's Your Own Money
Insurance and You
How to Squeeze Three Roommates into a One-Bedroom Apartment
Don't Trust Every Landlord You Meet on Craigslist
Should You Move to San Francisco (or some other youth mecca)?

How I Became (More) Tactful

2007-07-04T21:41:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when you stumble across an artifact of your past in some dusty file folder it makes you realize how far you've come. Other times it reminds you that you are exactly the same now as you always were. "Memorize this List" belongs to the second category. It's a fading, crumpled sheet of paper dotted with numerous push pin holes from when it was tacked on kitchen bulletin boards of assorted apartments. I was in my mid-twenties when I wrote it, and I don't remember the specific stimulus. But I can still relate to my original objective. I was trying to teach myself tact. When I heard something I disagreed with, I wanted to be able to come up with an alternative to my usual "That's ridiculous!" I still do. I'd like to think that things strike me as ridiculous now less often than they did when I was 25. But I'm glad I kept the list:

Memorize this List

* What led you to feel that way?
* That's an unusual point of view.
* I never thought of it that way before.
* You may well have a point.
* Hmmm …
* You could be right.
* I see your point.
* I think you just put your finger on it.
* Is that right?
* Tell me more about that.
* I can certainly see what you mean.
* I can see why someone might think so.
* You must have had a hard day.
* That's certainly a bold theory.

Be Honest About Holidays

2007-07-04T21:40:00.002-04:00

Can we set aside one day during the holiday season for truth-telling? Some of you grew up in families where harmony prevailed during the Christmas season—where everyone helped out cheerfully and participated in holiday rituals willingly; where nobody cursed while trying to straighten out the lights and blamed whomever had put them away in such a tangle the previous year; where tempers did not predictably flare on Christmas day and ruin everything; where there was no yelling; where nobody drank too much.

Then there are the rest of us. We wanted our family to look like yours. When it didn't, we felt ashamed. We all knew how Christmas is supposed to be. It is supposed to be perfect. We couldn't pull it off and we couldn't admit it. How could we possibly not be happy? It was Christmas! So we put on our cheerful faces and pretended—with one another, to the outside world, and to ourselves.

It's hard to stop pretending, which is why I have cloaked today's truth-telling in the anonymity of first person plural. We is me, of course. I have tried to change the dysfunctional holiday dynamic in my own family, and I believe I've succeeded to an extent (though sibling quarreling is a constant). It helps that I expect less of myself than my mother did of herself. I'm not adamant about polishing the family silver right before Christmas dinner. I don't send out 400 Christmas cards, each with a personal note. I don't make incredibly labor-intensive German Christmas cookies that involve a deep-fat fryer. Compared to my mother, I do a pretty slacker holiday. So the ambient stress level stays out of the danger zone—most of the time.

I am my mother's daughter, though, and at the very last minute, I am likely to notice that the good silverware is in fact more tarnished than I'd thought. And then I have to force myself not to crossly polish the entire lot… all by myself… on Christmas Eve.

My saner self prevails, generally. I know that avoiding resentment needs to be my No. 1 goal if we are to have a reasonably cheerful family Christmas. I learned this principle from Nancy Samalin, a parenting expert I once profiled. She cautioned parents to not ignore their own needs because, she said, "You can behave a little better than you feel, but not much." It's a good thought to keep in mind when you are making holiday plans.

Should Women over 50 Wear Black?

2007-07-04T21:40:00.001-04:00

Nora, I am horrified. You can't mean it. Do you really think all my clothes are horribly inappropriate, that I should pack them up and send them to somebody younger? Somebody who "would look much better" in them than I do? That when shopping, I should "walk straight to the blacks and browns and not bother with any other section?" You might have come out with this earlier, Nora. Say a year ago. Because that is when, after a long struggle with myself, I started to buy clothes in colors. Before that, it was all black all the time. Black has so much going for it: it's slimming, it doesn't show dirt, it goes with itself. You never feel like an Easter egg or a Christmas tree ornament when you're wearing black.

Still, it's black. If you're not a Sicilian widow, consider the rainbow of hues that is open to you. Why not branch out? I thought. If not now, when? So I talked myself into buying a new wardrobe of clothes that were the colors of eye shadow. Not crayon-bright, but not black either. A little more form-fitting, too. I was pleased. It was about time, I figured.

Well, according to Nora Ephron, it's way past time for us middle-aged women. Face facts, she chides us in the pages of the New York Times Style Magazine. Forget yellow, blue or red. Instead, "you can load up on turtlenecks."

Thanks for the advice, Nora, but I've thought it over and I don't believe I will purge my closet. So maybe I am "avoiding reality," as you put it. But whose reality are we talking about? Just who is this disapproving beholder you imagine, the one who'd be scandalized by the sight of an old lady in a red dress? I'd really like to know. Because the way my color palette is brightening up, that could someday be me.

New Orleans: Seeing It Now

2007-07-04T21:37:00.000-04:00

If you shut your eyes on the way to the French Quarter from the airport, you could visit New Orleans and never know there'd been a hurricane. The city's tourist areas look pretty much the same as ever. You can still eat well and listen to great music. On a recent Saturday the sidewalks were jammed; between the Ferrari convention, the Words & Music Literary Festival, and the jazz funeral parade.

But if you keep your eyes open, as I did on my recent trip, the half-hour ride into town serves as an abbreviated tour of storm damage. I watch through the taxi window as Katrina's now-familiar iconography of destruction slides by: boarded up houses; twisted skeletons of industrial buildings; shotgun cottages scrawled with the ubiquitous spray-painted red x's, indicating each home's post-storm search status. Signs on telephone poles advertise mold remediation, and you can still see an ugly brown stripe bisecting the walls of some houses - the high-water line. Still, I know I'm in New Orleans when I see a sign on a storefront church announcing the topic of Sunday's sermon: "The Gospel is in The Gumbo."

This is my second trip here since Katrina—my husband and I came in April to visit friends and attend the French Quarter Festival—a kind of smaller, local version of the famous Jazz Fest. Certainly there are signs of progress since then. Fewer piles of debris, downed tree limbs, rusty bicycle frames. Over in the Lower Ninth Ward, the huge heaps of splinters that were once houses have been mostly cleared away, leaving an eerie wasteland that was once a neighborhood. There is still a house with a truck lodged on top, but few such Katrina-produced incongruities remain, so it's become a much-photographed tourist attraction. (If you have visited New Orleans since the hurricane, send photos and stories.)

One thing that hasn't changed is that people in New Orleans are really glad you've come. If you were to somehow arrive in the French Quarter with no awareness of the surrounding devastation, you surely would start to wonder why you were being thanked all the time just for being there. And if you were paying close attention you might notice that everyone was trying really hard.

It's heartbreaking. I don't think I've ever seen so many people trying so hard. This was crystallized for me one morning when I was headed to Mother's Restaurant for a cup of chicory coffee. I came across a sidewalk table holding sign-up sheets, work gloves, bottles of water and brooms. Running this volunteer clean-up was Alphonse Martin, director of public space for the downtown district.

He explained that members of the National Association of Realtors were about to start arriving in town for a convention, only the second, large convention since the hurricane. The call for volunteer cleaners had gone out under the banner, "Company's Coming." When the public eye is on New Orleans, it's important that the town look nice, Martin told me. He asked if I'd seen the Saints play on TV that week. "One thing you didn't hear anyone say was that New Orleans looked dirty. Nobody said it looked dirty." That's something to be proud of and he is.

New Orleans: Ways to Volunteer

2007-07-04T21:36:00.000-04:00

New Orleans has always been like nowhere else in America, less "rise and shine," more "bon temps." It's still like nowhere else. But the "rise and shine" quotient is higher now as waves of volunteers bring their elbow grease to town. Since Hurricane Katrina, willing individuals have arrived by the hundreds and put themselves to work. "Bon temps" has hardly disappeared, though. For all the suffering, having fun is still very much on the agenda. If you want to combine good works and good times, this is the place to come.

The Louisiana Office of Culture, Recreation and Tourism has invited me and other journalists on a media tour to observe local possibilities for joining tourism with volunteer activity—voluntourism, it's come to be called. The need here is so great that there's no end to the opportunities. Whatever your particular bent, you can find a suitable way to make yourself useful.

Here are a few:

* If you like digging in the dirt, ReLeaf New Orleans has a job for you. The city lost 50,000 trees during the hurricanes and ReLeaf is bent on replacing them. You can sign up for tree-planting duty at www.parkwaypartners.com. Or kick in funds for a tree – from $300 for a crepe myrtle to $800 for a phoenix palm. (This includes maintenance.)
* Prefer clearing brush? New Orleans City Park schedules Super Saturdays, usually the first Saturday of the month, for volunteers to pitch in with pruning, raking, and clearing away underbrush. Or on any weekday you can show up at the Park's Botanical Garden and help propagate and care for plants.
* You can even cook for the cause. The inimitable Poppy Tooker teaches creole cooking at the Savvy Gourmet, and if you're on the Culinary Voluntourism package at the Windsor Court Hotel (designed for groups of at least 10), you can learn how to make chicken etouffe, for example, and then deliver the meal to volunteer job sites.

It's worth seeing Poppy do her thing, even if you're not on the package deal. She's as much culinary historian as cooking teacher, as she shows us in her entertaining demonstration on how to prepare cala (pronounced ca-LA). Calas are a kind of rice fritter, deep fried and dusted with powdered sugar. They are, Poppy maintains, much more tasty than the better-known beignet, and they have a poignant backstory, as well. In antebellum New Orleans slaves were granted a day off and women often used that time to sell calas on the street, in many cases earning enough money to purchase their freedom. (*See below for Poppy's Cala recipe.)

The possibilities I've just mentioned are voluntourism lite. Lite is fine—you're contributing to the city's recovery, even if you're just there eatings calas. If you'd rather do heavier work, there's another way to go. You can build things or tear them down. More on this kind of volunteering in later posts.

If you want to get involved, www.volunteerlouisiana.gov will match prospective volunteers with organizations needing help.

* Poppy Tooker's Cala Recipe

2 cups cooked rice
6 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon vanilla
Nutmeg
2 eggs
Powdered sugar

Mix the rice and dry ingredients together thoroughly. Add the eggs and when thoroughly mixed, drop by the spoonful into hot deep fat (360 degrees) and fry until brown. Drain on paper. Sprinkle with powdered sugar. Serve hot.

(Note: Maintain mixture below 70 degrees before frying or balls may separate when dropped into the oil.)
Makes 12 servings

New Orleans: Construction by Day, Carousing by Night

2007-07-04T21:34:00.000-04:00

sister is known as the bra lady of New Orleans, so she tells me. Like me, Jane has been a regular visitor over the years. Soon after Hurricane Katrina, she canceled a family vacation to Italy and went instead to New Orleans, where she tried to make herself useful. Now she returns when she can, always bringing whatever donations she can wring out of her friends and colleagues in Indiana. On a trip last fall, it was bras. A member of her congregation was the proprietor of an upscale lingerie shop, and she loaded Jane up with 300 bras. Fancy ones. A negligible contribution in the scheme of things, but greatly appreciated by women who had lost everything to the floodwaters.

You will find lots of people like Jane in New Orleans, ordinary citizens who come whenever they have time, to do whatever they can. Some mount their own personal relief initiatives – from making Easter baskets for homeless children to helping survivors interview one another. Others sign up with one of the many established projects like Habitat for Humanity (New Orleans). At "Musicians' Village," Habitat workers—no skills necessary—are putting up housing for displaced New Orleans musicians. Already one side of one street is filled with compact two-and three-bedroom cottages in bright tropical colors.

I visit one of these building sites just as three women from Casper, Wyoming finish stapling a protective layer of Tyvek onto the bare outer walls. Chrisa DeGraeve shows me how the front walls came out smoother than the back, since they're learning as they go. The women are old friends, they tell me, and they decided to celebrate a birthday by volunteering at Habitat. Their program for the week is construction work by day, carousing by night.

Can any of this make a dent in the enormous problems facing New Orleans, I wonder? What use are Easter baskets, or fancy bras, or new pink cottages, for that matter, in the face of inadequate levees, toxic sludge, and the lack of a coordinated recovery plan?

These are good questions. But the government's conspicuous absence has led to a remarkable presence. New Orleans is now home to the biggest and most long-lasting volunteer movement in American history. If you want to be inspired by the good-heartedness of people, this is the place.

New Orleans: FEMA Got No Zydeco

2007-07-04T21:33:00.000-04:00

On Sunday afternoon I decide to head over to the Fais Do-Do, a kind of Cajun hoedown, at Tipitina's, the legendary New Orleans music club that you might remember from "The Big Easy." This weekly event might not be everyone's idea of a good time.

First, there's Tipitina's itself. The barn-like structure, with its corrugated tin walls and its haphazardly arranged folding chairs, looks like the setting for a tobacco auction. Then there's the Cajun dance music. You have to like accordions. (If you do, you might want to make your own Fais Do-Do playlist and send it in.)

I recall from previous visits that the Fais Do-Do attracts a mature crowd, and one that isn't going gently. Today's prize for flamboyance belongs to a woman with twinkling red lights on her shoes and a pink ostrich feather in her hair. She's dressed in a white ruffled tunic bearing the legend "FEMA Got No Zydeco." Once the music starts up—after the World's Longest Sound Check—couples take to the dance floor. I feel content to watch the graceful waltzing and two-stepping—though I do consider the possibility of engaging a Fais Do-Do gigolo next time. I'm ridiculously pleased when, after a while, someone asks me to dance. I do my best, and because my partner is a strong lead as well as a kind man, I don't disgrace us. Still, I'm a charity case when it comes to Cajun dancing. My family will spend Christmas in New Orleans, and I know I'll want to hit the Fais Do-Do again. So I make myself a promise: before I come back I will take at least one lesson in Cajun dancing.

There are lots of reasons to love Tipitina's, despite its unprepossessing physical plant. One is that the club has taken the lead in rebuilding New Orleans' musical culture. After Katrina, the Tipitina's Foundation started the "Instruments A Comin" program, which has given away $500,000 worth of replacement instruments to local schools and musicians. It also has opened an office that helps musicians affected by the hurricane manage their business dealings.

New Orleans - Never Too Old For Fun

2007-07-04T21:32:00.000-04:00

I fell in love with New Orleans 20-some years ago, when I attended a Writers Conference here. The high point of the closing party was an impromptu Cake Walk procession led by a woman no longer in the springtime of life. She was bold and vibrant and wore a gardenia in her hair -- and she was 70 if she was a day. No one was embarrassed for her. You're never too old to have fun here, I thought, and when I'm old, this is where I will come. (Any other nominations for places where you're never too old to have fun?)

Since that trip I have returned to the city many times. What has most charmed me over the years is a kind of collective sense of humor. Everyone in New Orleans gets the joke, and this turns even mundane transactions into playful encounters. Here's one only-in-the-New Orleans story: I was standing in the parking lot of the Rock n Bowl, a combined bowling alley and dance hall that draws crowds from all walks of life. A black stretch limousine drew up, and from it emerged a Just Married couple, he in black tie, she in full bridal white. Each clutched a long neck bottle of bear. As the bystanders gaped, the groom turned to his new wife and, after an exquisitely timed comic pause, said, "Gee, honey, do you think we're a little overdressed?" (If you have a favorite New Orleans story, please send it in.)

A couple of years ago, I started hearing people talk about moving to New Orleans someday. My sister and her husband began looking at real estate there. It made sense. There was great food, great music, a lively cultural scene, bookstores, sidewalks, universities and teaching hospitals. The winters were warm and you could wear a flower in your hair and lead a Cake Walk at any age.

I pictured New Orleans becoming a Boomer retirement mecca. Hurricane Katrina may have scotched that idea for now, but the city remains a place where older citizens do not subside. Even in death they seem to have plenty to celebrate. I get to see that for myself one afternoon when I fall in with a Second-Line jazz funeral parade. The traditional way to mark the passing of a New Orleans personage is to hold a procession—led by a brass band and open to anyone who wants to follow along.

As the marchers gather outside the Backstreet Cultural Museum, I learn that the decedent, Keith "Flames" Keller, was a blues harmonica player, a sound engineer and a rehabber of houses destroyed by Katrina. The pace is set by two Grand Marshals twirling festooned umbrellas, and the famous Treme Brass Band provides the music. Bringing up the rear is a carriage drawn by two black horses and holding a photograph of Keller decorated with musical notes and a tuba.

The procession winds from the Treme neighborhood through the French Quarter to the Mississippi River, picking up followers all along the way. As we near the Quarter we're at least 80 strong, and, the dirges give way to that most exultant of spirituals, "I'll Fly Away." People begin strutting in time with the brass band. And I decide that a New Orleans jazz funeral is the best kind of send-off anybody could have.

The Favor Bank

2007-01-12T10:11:00.001-05:00

Who's on your case load these days? And whose case load are you on?

If the answers are no one and no one, you're probably holed up in a cave somewhere. Because unless you live in total seclusion, you're bound to get asked to lend a hand sometimes -- to write a recommendation, advise on a consumer purchase, pass along the name of a good doctor, suggest a great restaurant, console a lovelorn friend, read a manuscript, and so on. And then sometimes you're the one in need of a favor. That is when you mentally review your friends and acquaintances and decide who's the right one to ask. Since each of us has our own needs and our special areas of competence, the help you give may not resemble the help you get.

It doesn't matter. It's all part of the same karmic Favor Bank. One year someone advises your child on the process of applying for college; the next year you do the same for someone else's kid. Occasionally total strangers get in touch because they've figured out that you have information they need. I once wrote an article about having a rare pregnancy complication and years later I still heard from women in a similar situation. I was happy to take their calls, because someone had done it for me. And my husband regularly counsels Italian-citizenship-seekers, who've heard through the grapevine that he surmounted the hurdles involved. Such favors help make the world a gentler place, so you make time for them even when your taxes are late or you're about to leave for a trip or your kitchen’s being remodeled.

Last week my case load consisted of: a college friend of my daughter's who's working on a book and wants advice about agents; a friend of a friend who's celebrating a big birthday in New Orleans and asks for a list of the best places to hear music; a work acquaintance needing a doctor for her son, who is a student here in New York.

I didn't include relatives in the above list because family exists outside the Favor Bank. But my biggest recent assist was helping get my 17-year-old niece out of Africa. She'd gone to Guyana with a group to study drumming and when it came time to leave, they discovered that four of the return tickets had been stolen, including hers. After many phone calls from my sister in Indiana to Royal Air Maroc, the kids were no closer to having their tickets replaced. My sister's next idea was that I should visit the airline’s office in New York and plead the case in person, preferably at gunpoint. That's when I had a brainstorm: they should get their congressman involved. I suggested calling the Washington office and asking to speak to the staff person who handles constituent services. Next thing we knew, Julia and her fellow drummers were issued their tickets home.

My sister was gratifyingly full of praise for my red tape-wrangling counsel. “You're so smart and you always know what to do,” she told me, and since she's my sister I asked her to say it again.

Reefer Madness, Anyone?

2007-01-04T17:18:00.000-05:00

On his website, California sociologist Mike Males describes himself as an “irritating” aging Sixties throwback. He certainly has succeeded in irritating me. Yesterday Males published a muddled essay on the op ed page of the New York Times called “This is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad.” According to Males, the nation’s most serious drug abusers are not teenagers, as is widely assumed. Instead, he maintains, they are us: “graying baby boomers.”

Males offers a number of unpersuasive statistics to support his argument. Among other things, he points out that there has been a large increase in the numbers of drug-related emergency room admissions among the 35 – 64 population. Hello. The percentage of the population that is middle-aged is also much higher now. That’s why they call it a baby boom. And then there’s this dubious assertion: Among the drugs that Males claims is sending us medicare-eligibles to the hospital in droves is marijuana.

His anecdotal evidence inspires even less confidence. Baby boomers, he reports, “rarely used illegal drugs as youths.” This claim is undermined by his own website, where he describes himself as having “smoked a fairly small amount of dope.” That counts, Mike. Even if you didn’t inhale.

It’s possible that there are some valid points buried in “This is Your Brain on Drugs, Dad.” But Males’s essay is also a prime example of my own personal scourge, Contrarian Chic. If you’re in the pundit biz, nothing will get you attention faster than asserting the opposite of what everyone else thinks. Never mind nuance. Never mind taking a balanced position. Just beg to differ.

10 Reasons Why I'm a Snorkeler

2007-01-01T23:14:00.001-05:00

A little while ago, TeeBeeDee member atowhee wrote a charming post about his passion for bird-watching. As I was reading his “10 reasons why I’m a birder,” I started making a similar mental list about my own nature passion: snorkeling. It’s not as easily accessible as bird-watching, unless you happen to live within swimming distance of a coral reef. But once you’re there, all you have to do is pull on a snorkel mask and put your face in the water: instantly you slip through the looking glass into a world so splendid and strange that it’s hard to believe you got there without a spaceship. But to get to the list. With a bow to atowhee, here are 10 reasons why I’m a snorkeler:

1. It’s an Endless Learning Experience. I love climbing out of the water after a snorkel and consulting the local fish and coral identification book. What were those weird ferns that resembled neon eyelashes? And what about that flashy reef fish shaped like a Chinese food container and colored chrome-yellow-with-black-polka-dots? How marvelous to know their names.

2. You must submerge yourself in southern seas. Floating in warm salt water means letting go, giving yourself over to the same fluid that supported you before you emerged onto dry land. It’s profoundly relaxing. Add sunshine and a blue sky: subtract stress.

3. Anyone can do it. If you can breathe you can snorkel. An ability to float is a plus, but with appropriate buoyancy devices, not absolutely necessary.

4. Snorkeling is a life-long activity. You can take it up as a young child and continue into old age, long after other sports may have proved too taxing. And on the reef, everyone is equal. A five-year-old may be the one to spot a marine creature her elders missed.

5. You don’t need a bunch of pricey gear. Getting outfitted costs very little. The three basic pieces of equipment are: a mask, fins and a snorkel. Make sure the snorkel is the “dry” type, one with a purge valve meant to keep the ocean out of your mouth.

6. The camaraderie. Hard-core snorkelers are always looking to bond with fellow enthusiasts – especially in the face of condescending scuba divers. Among divers, snorkeling is widely held to be a somewhat wimpy activity usually undertaken by a diver’s spouse who hasn’t worked up the nerve to get certified. This explains an example of snorkeler humor I recently encountered: a button with the legend “Snorkelers look down on divers.”
7. Saving the planet. Snorkeling, done properly, is a low-impact form of ecotourism that draws attention to the potential value of the reef and thus encourages conservation.

8. The time-traveling. You can encounter remarkable creatures like the crinoid, an insubstantial being resembling Christmas tinsel that has been around unchanged for some 400 million years.

9. The over-the-top beauty. Between the extravagant forms and the outlandish colors, there’s nothing understated in the gaudy realm of the reef.

10. The trance. When I’m snorkeling, I stop thinking and simply see. It reminds me of my favorite line from Eudora Welty: “The thoughts flew out of her head and the landscape filled it.” Seascape, in this case.

Given the short learning curve and the overall simplicity, snorkeling is easy. Getting to the right reef is less so.

The shallow water ecosystems in many parts of the world are being undermined by a variety of causes, both natural and man-made. You need specific, unbiased, accurate and up-to-date information—which can be remarkably hard to come by. The beautiful reef touted in a guidebook may now be a boneyard of dead coral. Ideally, there would be a reliable web site that tracked the condition of coral reefs, but I have yet to find one. (There was one I trusted, maintained by a graduate student at UPenn, but it seems to have gone out of business.) Maybe TeeBeeDee can help. If you’ve been somewhere recently with healthy, luxuriant shallow water coral reefs, please write and tell us. We’ll keep a list.

Another – admittedly pricey – solution is to take a guided tour. Joel Simon, of Sea for Yourself, has been guiding snorkelers for decades. I’ve taken one of his trips and it was well-run in every respect. Past destinations have included Bonaire, Belize, St. John, Fiji and Florida (for snorkeling with manatees). The tours are small—no more than 18 participants. http://www.seaforyourself.com/

The Fat Camera

2007-01-01T23:10:00.000-05:00

An “early adopter” I am not. The last thing I want is to be the first on the block to own the latest electronic object of desire. But I was seduced recently by a shiny piece of goods with a high-concept feature.

It was a camera that promises to make you look thinner. The HP Photosmart R927 has other attributes as well, but that is the one that caught my attention. In an absurd way, it makes perfect sense. The camera adds ten pounds, we are always told, so why not invent one that subtracts them too? And with the holiday season coming on, who wouldn’t want a little painless slimming? If the thing actually works you could make everyone at your New Year’s Eve party look very fetching.

Candy, who is this Skeptic’s Skeptic, told me she was planning to buy one of these cameras for TeeBeeDee and I would get to be the first to try it. I was intrigued, but uneasy. “Technology reviewer” is not on my resume for a reason. I extracted a promise from Candy that she would have present the official TeeBeeDee dweeb to help me get started.

First, though, I had to get the thing charged. When the carton arrived holding the new digital camera, I promised myself that this time it would be different. But at the last minute, I broke down: I did not read the instruction manual, nor did I watch the explanatory CD. I dumped the contents of the box onto the bed and proceeded to behave like an intelligent chimpanzee.

I tried poking this piece into that piece until I found two that seemed to fit. I put the wafer-like bit into the wafer-like slot. I plugged together the two parts of the power cord. Then I experimented with inserting the little prong on the end of the power cord into the body of the camera, trying this orifice and that. Nothing. Then I rose to the level of a super intelligent chimpanzee. I looked at the picture on the box and compared it with the rest of the parts strewn across the bed. Eureka! The black plastic thing was a dock. The prong went into that. But what about the clear plastic thing? How did that come into it? And why couldn’t I get the camera to nestle nicely onto the dock?

Time to move beyond higher primate functioning. I asked my husband. And that is how my new HP Photosmart R927 camera came to be tucked snugly into its dock for its first overnight charge. I’d have to wait at least 24 hours before finding out if the slimming feature actually worked or if we were looking at a case of the Emperor’s New Midriff.

Next: The dweeb and I try out the camera.

Fat Camera Fails Test

2007-01-01T23:08:00.000-05:00

The official TeeBeeDee dweeb and I meet up at a food mall called Chelsea Market. The plan today is for him to help me find my way around the new camera. Eliot does not mind being called a dweeb, he says, perhaps because he’s anything but the stereotype. He’s charming and talkative and not gizmo-crazed. He tells me he’s opposed to “technology overkill,” which he defines as when people “spend money on features they don’t need.”

Like a camera that’s supposed to make you look thinner? The HP Photosmart R927 digital camera has many other features, but to me its most intriguing one is the “slimming” option.

I hand over the camera to Eliot. The first thing I notice is that he doesn’t look at the manual either. He just starts pushing buttons. Like me, only to better effect. He zips through the functions at lightning speed, keeping up a running commentary that goes something like this:

“There are these nice help menus tied to the individual functions, so I guess there isn’t one overall help menu – no, that’s wrong, here’s one – it has the top ten tips for taking better photos! . . . And it gives you image advice, if you want it, telling you how each of your photos could be improved. . . Let’s try the panorama feature that stitches the pictures together. Oops, that didn’t work. Oh, I see, I have to select the image first. . .

I can see that he is having a conversation with the camera, as you might with a friend. I don’t want to interrupt, but I’m impatient to get to the main event: from my perspective, the slimming function. We turn to the camera’s Design Gallery, and Eliot shows me how to use the slimming effect and sends me home to try it on my own.

First, I have to find a willing subject. It takes some convincing, but finally a family member, who prefers to be known simply as P, agrees to pose for an experimental portrait. I take his picture and press the magic slimming button. Then we watch the image in the camera as P appears to stretch like a piece of taffy being pulled. The result is quite pronounced, as well as fairly strange. Once slimmed, P. resembles a gangly male version of Alice in Wonderland after she eats the cake. The effect is not flattering.

You can’t say it’s a case of the Emperor’s New Midriff; the slimming setting actually does pare you down. But since you can’t select which body parts are subjected to the reducing treatment, the results tend to be peculiar. Why elongate the whole body? I wonder. Couldn’t they have invented a slimming feature that just lengthens your legs instead?

The Open-Minded Skeptic

2007-01-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

That would be me. Always ready to try the next new thing - but only after I've made fun of it, and teased you for jumping on the bandwagon. Deplore, then explore, in other words. Denounce, then pounce. I regret to say this is pretty much my standard m.o., whenever I'm confronted with something unfamiliar -- from meditation to motherhood. Today's topic is technology.

I'm not what they call an “early adopter,” one of those people who must have the latest service or device. I can never figure out how to make anything work, and as far as I'm concerned instruction books might as well be written in Serbo-Croatian. I carried around the 160-page manual (ok, so half of it's in Spanish) for my new cell phone for weeks, studying it, highlighter in hand, during spare moments. When it refused to yield its arcane secrets, I went back to the store and asked the salesman to demonstrate a few basic functions, and thus my phone and I have carried on ever since.

I have coaxed from it a tolerable ring tone and have stored important numbers. I can make calls and listen to messages. That's about it. For all I know, the thing also can screen previews of all the movies playing in my neighborhood and order tickets. But I don't want it to! Why can't a phone be just a phone? Why do we have to have all these hyphenated appliances? I can imagine a line of gadgets whose selling point is that they do one thing only and have no settings whatsoever. Good-enough gadgets, you might say. These do exist, I'm sure, in some obscure corner of the consumer marketplace. Does anyone know of a good-enough gadget, an easily mastered single-purpose appliance that has no extra features whatsoever? Something other than a disposable camera? Please let me know and I will happily give it a plug.

On the other hand, I refuse to give up on making new technology part of my life -- even if I have to drag myself to it kicking and screaming. My first impulse may be to deplore (see above,) but I've learned that it's all too easy to end up looking pathetic. I saw this happen to someone ten years ago. It was at the height of the internet craze and the Author's Guild was conducting a panel on the impact of technology on literary endeavor. Something like that. The technology-isn't-necessarily-evil position was taken by my husband. Representing the “con” side was a prominent critic, a lovely and literate man, who spoke so eloquently that I was almost swayed. Until he revealed in answer to a question that he still wrote on a typewriter. Game over, I thought. It was like being told that sex is overrated by someone who's never experienced an orgasm.

So now my motto is to at least try. A while ago, when I figured I was ready for some further adventures in personal computing, I signed up for lessons from a pro. Unfortunately the computer tutor and I were incompatible. He had trouble masking his horror over my document-storage practices, and he believed that there could be no higher goal than an uncluttered desktop. I called the employment office of my local university and tried again. This time I ended up hiring a charming film student from West Virgina. A freshman. He was perfectly happy to help me master personal-computing essentials that were exactly my speed, such as how to change the background color on your screen. (“Master” might be too strong a word, as I don't remember how. But I like the background color we picked.) And in his gentle, understated way, he made a very important contribution to my technical education: he cured my phobia of consulting “help” screens. It turns out that they are not, as I had feared, the computer equivalent of my cell phone manual. They do not whisper to me, “you are stupid . . . you are stupid . . . you are stupid.” They help, exactly as advertised. Who knew?

The Short Version::
1. If you need to learn something, hire a kid.
2. Try the Help pages. They help.