2002 annual letter

                                                                                                                        December 2002

Dear Family and Friends,

            Greetings.  We hope that your joys outweighed any sorrows during 2002 and we wish you the best of the season and for the upcoming year.

* * *

            One minor note from last year:  even though we are not particularly religious, one of the more satisfying experiences we had in London was attending an Evensong service at Westminster Abbey.  The guided tour we took of the building was fascinating but taking a tour is one thing; seeing the building used for the purpose for which it was built was a very different experience.  We sat in the Quire (I don’t know why it is the Quire instead of the Choir).  It was interesting to participate in a service that has essentially remained unchanged (or so we were told) since Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church in about 1530 because the Pope wouldn’t let him divorce Catharine of Aragon so he could marry (the pregnant) Anne Boleyn and try to beget a male heir to the throne (which he did not, so he later had her executed).  The choir, composed of young boys and adult men, both sang hymns and chants.  We followed the words but didn’t sing in order to avoid embarrassing ourselves.

Unfortunately, the service was late in the afternoon of the day we arrived (with about 3-4 hours sleep on the flight), so our feet and heads were dragging.  Pat thought we were attending as observers and that she would get some rest from activities earlier in the day; nope, we were right up at the front, standing up and sitting down and participating in the service itself.  (We had plans to take a walking tour that night; instead we went to a pub, had a sandwich and a Guinness and then went back to our hotel and went to sleep.)

* * *

            Another minor note from last year:  You may recall that I regaled you with accounts of the “great normative State of Minnesota” as seen through the eyes of people who came from elsewhere.  One of my faculty colleagues, transplanted from Louisiana but who has been in Minnesota over 50 years, offered this observation on reading those various comments about the Minnesota psyche:

            “While some of the reactions were predictable, others amusing, the clear sense seemed to be that your friend should ‘lighten up’ and ‘get a life’--like quickly! 

            “Having spent 70%, 25%, 2%, 3% [of my life] in Minnesota, Louisiana, East Coast (New England) and West Coast (California), respectively, I think regional differences, serious ones, have pretty much vanished.  And for good reasons:  TV, decline of locally-owned and operated daily papers, travel-mobility, the interstate, airlines, and general prosperity.  It’s entertaining to tell stories which stress regional differences of the past but hard actually to find, now, individuals exhibiting such traits.  Well, if I scrounged around Douglas County I might be able to find an old Norwegian man--or woman--of the ‘Ole and Lena’ story fame.  Whatever difference exists is vanishing quickly.”

            My sense is that that is a pretty accurate summary.  Walmart-R-Us.

* * *

            Elliott was hypothesizing last winter what the members of our family would hate most to see if they were put into 10 minutes of a virtual reality.  “For mom it would be snakes and for Krystin it would be spiders.  What would it be for me?” he speculated.  He thought for a little bit, and then said “for me it would be trays of broccoli.”  He didn’t identify anything for me at the time, but the next night he said “remember that virtual reality we were talking about?”  I said I did.  He said that for me it would be receiving a bill that my taxes had increased by $500,000.  I allowed that I wouldn’t be happy if my taxes were increased by $500,000, because I could not pay them, but I said that a large tax increase didn’t quite fall in the same category as spiders, snakes, and broccoli.  How he decided that my horror in a virtual reality would be a huge tax increase is a complete mystery to me.  As you might guess, given my views on taxes, he has never heard me complain about taxes (although I would complain about a $500,000 increase on our house, especially since it would be a tax levy vastly greater than the value of the house).  An inventive mind, I guess.

* * *

            In one way our kids’ Christmas experience is a little disturbing, given what one sees in the news about the circumstances of children in Afghanistan and plenty of other places around the globe.  Our kids had 3 different celebrations, one with Pat’s side of the family, one with just the four of us, and then one with my side of the family.  Elliott was nearly distraught before Christmas because he could think of nothing to put on a Christmas list (this is a sign of a kid who has too much or whose interests in life are too narrow) while Krystin had a list of clothes she wanted that was a page long.  Krystin got many of the clothes she wanted from her various relatives; we decided that Elliott would get the newest version of the Nintendo video game technology.  With the collaboration of both sides of the family, that meant he essentially received nothing but money to go to the purchase of the game consol.  He was sort of bummed out by not receiving any toys or games but he was thrilled when he finally turned in all the loot he had collected in exchange for the Gamecube.  (He’s so trusting--more than I would have been, even with my own parents:  he had all his cash gifts together the last night, and Pat then dangled a bag with a small wrapped present in it and asked him if he was willing to trade all his money for this little box.  He said “sure” and gave her the money without even hesitating.  I would have wanted to know what was in the box!)

* * *

            Unlike many movies made from books, I think “The Lord of the Rings:  The Fellowship of the Ring” is a magnificent rendering of J. R. R. Tolkien’s book.  We took Krystin and Elliott to see it over the Christmas holiday.  It meant more to Elliott and to me than it did to Pat and Krystin:  I had read it aloud to Elliott within the last year (and went on to re-read the other two books as well, which Elliott did not want to hear). 

I do find it interesting that the books apparently sell as well as they do because I don’t find Tolkien an especially easy author to read.  While his dialogue is perfectly clear, he also writes very long narrative descriptions of places (which he may have had to do since he was making up the entire setting).  As a philologist and student of ancient German and Welsh myths and legends, Tolkien also wove much of his scholarship into the novels; sometimes, if one does not know that background, it is challenging to figure out what the heck he’s talking about.  I often found those lengthy descriptions difficult because words, no matter how artfully used, cannot adequately convey visions of the kind of scenery and locations of which Tolkien, in his own mind, clearly had pictures.  It would be interesting to know what Tolkien thinks of the way his book has been portrayed in the movie.

What startled me is that Krystin plowed through the first two volumes.  She has always been a perfectly able reader but hasn’t always been interested in doing so.  That she chose to tackle Tolkien was commendable.  And remarkable.  And she didn’t finish!  She read the first two books and the first few chapters of the third--so she worked all the way through them and then didn’t find out how the story ends!

* * *

           

            We had a late-winter storm in mid-March that included both snow and sleet/rain.  Elliott and I went out walking one evening a night or so after the storm, when the snow had partially melted and re-frozen over the underlying ice.  Some parts of sidewalks and the street were dry; others were snowy; yet others were icy or appeared to be dry.  Elliott concluded that when one walked in Minnesota in weather such as that, one had to be careful or “you’ll take an unexpected dance lesson.”  He was exactly right—losing your balance on unanticipated or unseen ice, with legs slipping all directions and arms waving in all directions as you try to keep your balance; it is indeed an “unexpected dance lesson.”

            April Fool’s Day was a joke on the Twin Cities:  we received the largest amount of snow for the winter.  Fortunately, it didn’t stay around, but it did push spring off.  April turned out to be the second-snowiest April on record.  The spring was arctic.  By mid-June, only two or three times had Pat and I sat on our back deck in the evening without a jacket or sweater on.

            Came mid-summer, however, and the climate here was more like St. Louis than Minneapolis:  long periods of high humidity and high temperatures (in the 90s).

* * *

            In that high humidity, I was leaving one of my legacies to the world.  I can’t decide which will live longer (apart from my children):  the 10,000+ pages of records of faculty committee meetings at the University or the 15 solid oak/maple doors that I have stripped and refinished.  When we remodeled the house, I put two of the doors on the main floor back to their appearance in 1931:  painted around the perimeter with stained and varnished recessed center panels.  When we bought “new” (old, from an architectural salvage place) doors for the upstairs, we matched the existing doors in the house; they had various amounts of paint and stain on them, so I stripped them down to the bare wood, stained and varnished the center panels, and painted the rest.  This decorating style on the doors, of course, meant that after stripping them I had to apply seven different coats of liquids on each side of a door:  1 stain, 3 coats of varnish over the stain, then primer and two coats of paint on the outer perimeter.  I only realized part-way through the process that each door essentially took 14 days—if I could get one coat of liquid on per day.  I came close to achieving that.

            That left the original doors in the house, which my great-aunt Inez painted completely when she moved into the house in 1940.  I originally simply repainted them when we moved in in 1989, but for 6 years since we remodeled it has bugged me that some of the doors have the stained/varnished center panel while some do not.  Seeking an unimportant consistency, and cleverly picking the hottest and most humid part of the year, I took the doors out to our (new) garage, stripped the center panels, stained and varnished them, and then repainted the perimeters.  Since I only did the center panel, however, I managed to get these doors done in about a week.

            Those doors are my memorial to future generations of homeowners.

            The kids teased me.  It was one of the rare times they had seen me sweat.  It’s not because I have no sweat glands; it’s because I am assiduous in avoiding weather that makes me sweat.  I hate being hot.

* * *

            Pat and I went to see three movies 3 weekends in a row in March, and we had seen “Lord of the Rings” right after it came out, so we saw 4 movies within a couple of months.  We haven’t seen that many first-run movies in probably 20 years.  Three of the movies were outstanding (“The Lord of The Rings,” “A Beautiful Mind,” and “Gosford Park”).  The re-make of “Time Machine” was eminently forgettable, but Elliott liked it, which was the main reason we went.

            “Gosford Park” is set on an English country estate in 1932 and depicts a weekend hunting party (it’s Robert Altman’s sharp critique of the life of the leisured nobility in England between the wars).  The movie depicts the life of the leisure class upstairs and the harried life of the servant class downstairs.  One of the characters in “Gosford Park,” played by Helen Mirren, runs the upstairs (for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress).  She comments to a new lady’s maid something to the effect that she is a good servant, no, “I am the perfect servant,” because she anticipates the needs of the lord and lady of the house and their guests before they even realize the needs.  As a result, to the guests, the house appears perfectly run.  The comment struck me because it is sometimes what I think my job is, too—the “perfect servant” of the faculty of the University--although I am certain the “perfect” is not an accurate modifier.  Maybe “pretty good” but hardly perfect.  I try to make the system appear smoothly run, sort of like the picture of the duck on the water, the essence of placidity above, paddling like hell below the surface.

            Krystin learned about paranoid schizophrenia by watching “A Beautiful Mind.”  I can only wonder what John Nash thinks about the movie about him (apart from the fact that he has said he liked it). 

* * *

            We finally replaced our 1931 stucco single-car garage this spring, with a standard two-car, vinyl-sided version.  A boring, expensive addition to our property that had, for me, all the excitement of buying a washing machine.  It shrank our back yard even more and it chewed up a chunk of my raspberry patch.  The raspberries will recover, of course, since they are only slightly less pestilential than dandelions in their ability to spread.

* * *

            Elliott broke his collarbone in February.  Such an event is not all that unusual for 11-year-old boys.  What is peculiar, in his case, is the circumstance.  Elliott has an aversion to participation in athletics that exceeds mine.  His class, however, was scheduled for a field trip to go skiing and he was really excited about it.  I could not--and do not even now--understand why, inasmuch as the only other time in his life he has been on skis was at Lutsen on New Year’s Weekend, 2000, when he went part-way down the bunny hill with a 5-degree slope and declared he did not want to do this. 

            But he was excited about going with his class.  So they went.  I was in a meeting and was beckoned out by one of the people who works in my office.  I knew this was bad news, because it takes a major emergency to draw me out of a meeting.  One of the teachers had called; Elliott had gone head over heels on the ski slope and landed on his shoulder.  I picked him up and took him to the after-hours clinic that evening; sure enough, a broken collarbone.  He told me he fell when he was going down the black diamond slope (which, I learned only recently, means the most difficult slope).  He said he had done it a couple of times before without a problem but then fell. 

I was astounded.  I also realized his aversion to athletics is to team competition.  Now he’s bugging me to get him golf lessons.

* * *

            I ventured on to eBay as a seller for the first time in April.  It was an opportunity to get rid of accumulated “stuff” that had piled up over the years.  We could have just thrown it all away, which would have been the sensible thing to do, but there remains enough of the Depression mentality in both Pat and me that it seems immoral to toss out items that are perfectly usable.  Before eBay, the only other option was to donate the stuff--and we have done that repeatedly over the years as well--but I have always thought that much of it may still end up being junked.  This way presumably the stuff is going to people who want it (although in the case of much of it, heaven knows why).

* * *

We did more traveling this year than I had predicted.  Florida, Amsterdam and Berlin, and South Dakota—how’s that for an odd mix?  Herewith a few highlights, although my travel writing cannot compare to that of Bill Bryson.[1]

We took the kids to Florida for a week last winter, December 29 to January 6, 2002.  It was darn cold the whole time we were there; the temperature almost never got above 70 and the mornings were in the high 30s and low 40s.  We spent half the week in St. Petersburg (at a B&B owned by a woman we met in London in the spring of 2001 (and her husband)) and half just outside Naples (visiting our long-time friend Merrily Baker, former director of women’s intercollegiate athletics at the University of Minnesota).  Even though we went 2 hours south the second half of the week, it was actually colder in Naples than it was in St. Petersburg.  So much for the warm break during winter.  If we go south in the future, it will be a lot farther south.  (One of the last mornings we were there I looked at the weather page in the Naples paper.  Except for Naples/Ft. Myers, Miami, Tampa/St. Petersburg, at which temps were predicted to reach exactly 70, there was no place in the continental U. S. that was predicted to reach 70 degrees--not San Diego, not Tucson, not southern Texas.  It was cold all over.)

            The highlight of the trip for Krystin was repeated opportunities to shop.  Since the weather was so cool, we could do none of the outdoor/beach activities we had hoped for, so apart from eating at a few good restaurants and seeing a couple of museums, she got to shop.

The highlight of the trip for Elliott was a day-long guided “safari” into the Everglades.  He and I took a boat ride into a mangrove jungle or forest (nothing around for miles but mangroves), walked into the “jungle” to look at the flora and fauna--although mostly flora because it was too cold for the fauna to be out--and took an airboat ride across one of the big lakes.  At one point we stopped along side a dirt road; there was a rather large alligator lying in the sun next to a water canal; Elliott was thrilled that I got a picture of him standing about 6 feet from the alligator.

The guide assured us it was safe; alligators do not eat when the temperature is below 70 because they cannot digest, and the first reaction of an alligator to the approach of humans is to quickly dive into the water.  As we turned to get back in the van, one of the people on the safari moved too quickly for the alligator, who jumped into the water at lightning speed.  The guide noted that one reason people are killed by alligators is that they can move very quickly, pull the people under water, and hold them there until they drown.  No, I was not worried, because, in addition to the reassurances of the guide, there were 10 of us standing around and we were at the back of the alligator, so it would have taken a considerable contortion for him to get turned around and chase any of us.

What he and I saw the most of was birds--birds and birds and birds.  They were beautiful:  ibis, blue heron, great white heron, great egret, anhinga, black vulture, turkey vulture, bald eagle.  On the other hand, there was one blessing to the cool temperatures, we were told:  the mosquitoes were nowhere to be seen and the no-see-ums were all sleeping somewhere (I made that up--I don’t know what they were doing, except that they weren’t around us).

Krystin gets the award for the best line of the trip.  Merrily was giving us a driving tour of Naples and environs and drove us along Gordon Drive, which has large houses on the Gulf Coast.  One that was just being completed was breathtaking in its size; I wager that it was at least 50,000 square feet, if not more.  Certainly not less.  Krystin said about it “this place could have its own area code.”  That’s about right.  I have never seen anything like that, apart from Blenheim and Buckingham Palaces and the like, even in any of the wealthiest suburbs of any city in the United States.  This was really conspicuous consumption.  It was also obscene, in my opinion.

All in all, measured by the standard of providing a fun and relaxing time for the kids, this was not an especially successful trip.  Pat and I got to spend time with good friends (adults), which we very much enjoyed, but the time was less rewarding for the kids. 

* * *

            This summer marked Pat’s and my 20^th wedding anniversary (where did all those years go?), so we had decided some time ago to take a trip.  Early in the year we decided to go to Europe and initially thought we would go to Scotland.  Because of deaths in the family of our friend Christine Grant, whose brother lives in Edinburgh and who loves to give tours, we decided to postpone Scotland to a later year.

            Instead, we spent a week in Amsterdam and environs and a week in Berlin and environs.  While I will not bore you with a travelogue (traveling is most interesting and fun for those who are doing the traveling), there are perhaps a few points of interest, amusing stories, and observations worth noting.

--          Amsterdam (probably like many European cities) is what I describe as “all of one piece.”  The Netherlands has been ruled by the House of Orange (since about 1500) and parliamentary government for close to 200 years.  Apart from revolting against Spanish control from about 1580 to 1650 and forced into Nazi occupation during WWII, The Netherlands has seen more-or-less consistent and continuous government.  Amsterdam also came through WWII undamaged; the Allies did not bomb it and the Nazis did no physical harm (although the occupation had fatal implications for the Jews of Amsterdam, as the famous story of Anne Frank has made clear).

           

            As a result, the center of Amsterdam is the same center (physically) that has existed for over 300 years.  Pat and I sat canal-side at a little pub one night; the building across from us had a 1638 date on it, so it was built 138 years before the American Revolution--and it looked just like all the other buildings in most of central Amsterdam.  The city has something like 1200 miles of canals and 1000 bridges across them; many of the bridges date from the 1600s or 1700s.

            Berlin, by contrast, has seen tumultuous changes in government during the 20^th Century, changes that had direct physical consequences for the city.  It was the capital of imperial Germany to 1918 (at which time the Hohenzollern family, which had ruled first Prussia and then Germany when Prussia led the effort to unify Germany in the 1870s, abdicated and fled to The Netherlands).  It was the capital of Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s (from which there is little physical evidence), it was the capital of Nazi Germany 1933-1945 (and was almost totally destroyed by Allied bombing during the war), it was divided and the capital of East Germany during the Communist era, and is now once again the capital of modern Germany. 

            As a consequence of these changes, and especially the bombing during WWII, when one goes about the city as a tourist one often confronts stark changes.  A visit to a Hohenzollern palace is followed by a tour of the site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters, surrounded all the while by huge ultra-modern buildings such as the new Sony Center with an IMAX theater.  Walking around the city, there are a few remnants of imperial Germany (mostly restored by the East German government during the Communist era--one of the few good things that regime did, in my opinion), many more remnants of that dreary Communist architecture (square, concrete, and ugly), and even more new construction (not as ugly as the Communist variety but of the sort one can see in almost any city anywhere--largely indistinct).

--          I think there is no stairway in Amsterdam that would meet OSHA requirements.  Our hotel room was on the third floor (in an old canal house that did not have an elevator), so we had to troop up all three flights every time we came back.  Pat described them as carpeted ladders, which was about right:  steep and narrow.  All the stairways we ran into in Amsterdam were similar.

--          Amsterdam is the liberal city it is reputed to be.  We didn’t frequent any of the coffee houses (which is the term for places where one can buy and consume marijuana).  We did walk past a couple of them; one could almost get high just from the smoke wafting out the door.  We also walked through the red light district (although it was mid-morning on a Sunday).  There were some quite overweight women sitting in windows offering their “wares.”

And can you imagine the outcry from the religious right if a city in the U.S. proposed to create a memorial to homosexuals?  In Amsterdam, very near the Anne Frank House and partially on the site of the Westerkerk (a huge Protestant church that was once the largest in the world, where the present Queen, Beatrix, got married when she was crown princess) there is a 3-part “Homomonument,” a memorial (in lavender granite) to the homosexuals who were rounded up and sent to death camps by the Nazis.  This is not tucked away in some obscure place in the city.

--          We took a 15-kilometer bike tour in the countryside outside Amsterdam.  I am not in the practice of biking that far at any one jaunt, but on $800 rental bikes and on land that is utterly flat, the trip didn’t even get me winded.  (Those $800 bikes are something--comfortable seats, comfortable positioning of the handle bars, extremely smooth pedaling.)  We learned that Dutch cows produce more milk per cow than virtually any other cows in the world, that thatched roofs (still common in rural areas) last 80-90 years, and that windmills were used for only two purposes:  to grind grain or to move water.  (Now, of course, they are used primarily to generate power.)  Our tour guide was astonished that Americans build homes with exterior wood trim; “Does that mean you have to paint it,” he asked?  (That is, paint it in order to protect it from rotting.)  We nearly goggled at him.  “OF COURSE WE PAINT IT!” we told him.  Every few years.  He couldn’t believe it.

--          The Dutch language is unpronounceable:  the pronunciation of words bears only a slight relationship to the way the words are spelled.  Dutch is also even more guttural a language than German so it is not especially pleasant to listen to.  The great artist we all know of, spelled Van Gogh and mostly pronounced Van Go in English, we learned at the Van Gogh museum is pronounced Van Gawchhhhh--VanGaw and then gurgle, emphatically.  Central Amsterdam is divided by horseshoe-shaped canals (at the open end is the ocean) with names like Herrengracht, Prinzengracht, and Kaisergracht (gentlemen’s canal, prince’s canal, king’s canal).  They are pronounced herrengracccchhhht--the gargle is in there again.  I’m surprised the Dutch don’t have constant sore throats from speaking their own language.

--          Not the normal topic of a holiday letter, but here goes:  We were amused by the endless variety of shapes and materials of the receptacles for human waste--and the variety of mechanisms used to operate them.  Stainless steel inverted cones, ceramic inverted cones, ceramic and stainless steel hemispheres, marble boxes; chains to pull down, chains to pull up, buttons on the back of the toilet, panels on the wall behind the toilets, pedals on the floor.  Such diversity in mechanisms in two small countries, unlike the virtual uniformity one sees all across the United States.  (So is there some federal statute that regulates the shape, composition, and mechanisms of toilets and urinals in the United States?)  The uniformity at least makes for certainty in expectations; on our trip, we always knew it was going to be an adventure to see what we’d find in the restroom.

--          We took a short side trip to Leiden, outside Amsterdam, home to one of the older universities in Europe.  We met the daughter of  long-time friends, who was on an exchange program from her home university in the U.S.  She gave us a tour of the town, including an interesting venture into what were originally built as residences for the indigent:  they were small two-story apartments that opened onto a central courtyard.  They treated their poor with great dignity.

--          We visited in Berlin a display called “The Topography of Terror,” a series of pictures and document reproductions related to the founding and evolution of the SS and the Gestapo.  The display sits slightly below ground level, outdoors, in the bombed-out foundation of the headquarters of the SS and Gestapo at 8 Prinz Albert Strabe.  (In English, Strasse—the wonders of modern software that allow one to use the right characters from another language.  Retired German professor Gerhard Weiss was kind enough to tell me that the β is called the eszett, used in German instead of the double s).  If someone had an appointment at 8 Prinz Albert Strabe, he or she usually never came out.  (One is provided an audio guide to the displays, which is helpful since all of the documents were of course in German, but it was clear that we were not being told all of the details because the audio guide only skimmed over the contents of the documents.  Even so, it took about two hours to go the block-long length of the display.) 

            I was looking at the map of Berlin after we were done, sitting in a small café across the street from the display, and I could not figure out where the heck we were--I couldn’t find any Prinz Albert Strabe on the map.  I finally asked our waiter, who explained that the street name had been changed because it was “associated with Hitler” (he was even kind enough to bring out a book with a picture of the street and the infamous building as it existed before the war).  Later, on a walking tour of the city, the tour guide told us that during the Communist regime, many of the streets had been given new names (for example, Josef Stalin Allee).  When Germany was reunified in 1991, the German government restored virtually all of the pre-war names (and got rid of the obnoxious Communist names) but decided that since (8) Prinz Albert Strabe had such horrific associations for everyone, they gave the street a new and innocuous name.  So poor Prinz Albert, who may have been a perfectly decent human being, lost his claim to immortality because of the building located on the street bearing his name.

            The building was damaged during the war and what was left was bulldozed by the East Berlin government into a pile of rubble.  That pile has been there ever since, now covered with grass and trees.  The German government (East before 1991, unified since) has been debating for years what to do with the site; they have decided to leave it as is as a memorial and to put an interpretive center and archive on the other side of the square block (and move the display inside). 

           

--          I found it ironic that one Berlin building that suffered almost no damage from Allied bombing was the headquarters of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force, headed by Hermann Göring.  Our tour guide explained that that was largely because bombing was far less precise then than it has recently become; the Allies would have loved to have levelled the Luftwaffe HQ but just never managed to hit it.  Anyway, it is an enormous (and classic Art Deco) building.  My reaction to seeing it was that if Göring had put as much money into his airplanes as he did into his headquarters he might have maintained German air superiority a little longer.  (But then he was a pompous, bragging fool anyway.) 

            During the Communist era, the building sat directly on the dividing line between East and West Berlin, so the East German government sealed it up--the Berlin Wall ran right through it.  After reunification, the German government debated what to do with it--it wasn’t damaged and was structurally sound.  They finally decided to renovate it (it now houses the offices of the German Finance Ministry).  I think that was the right decision--an air force simply does its job during a war and I don’t believe the German Air Force, Nazi or not, had any particularly foul associations.  Besides, it’s a beautiful building that should not have been destroyed, even if it was Nazi in origin.  (I am not one who believes that evil inhabits buildings.  They are neither good nor bad.  Of course, if they symbolize something so horrible, maybe they need to be demolished, as was 8 Prinz Albert Strabe, but since most people probably don’t think of an air force per se as horrible, there was no reason to demolish the building.  I probably would have been in favor of demolishing 8 Prinz Albert Strabe.)  An amusing element of the renovation is the end of this story:  We were told that the German government spent twice as much money to renovate the building as it would have cost to demolish it and build anew.

--          Although there’s no particularly interesting story to relate about it, it is perhaps worth relating that we visited the Wannsee Haus, in suburban Berlin.  I have the impression that not a lot of tourists go there; it’s in a secluded residential area on a lake.  It was site of a conference, in January, 1942, convened by Reinhardt Heydrich (head of the SS), that included a lot of sub-cabinet level officers; the purpose was to plan the implementation of “The Final Solution” to the “problem” of European Jews.  Heydrich had sought and received from Göring a memo assigning him (Heydrich) responsibility for wiping out the Jews of Europe (so he would clearly be in charge and could make assignments to other government officers); the purpose of the gathering at the Wannsee Haus was to allocate responsibilities (e.g., scheduling trains to the death camps, securing the necessary supplies, etc.). 

            The conference site is now an historical site and archive.  We had a wonderful young woman give us a talk in the actual conference room (and then, since we were there up to closing, we rode on the bus and the S-Bahn back into Berlin with her; she is a Ph.D. student in German history).  In the conference room there is a copy of a page from a memo from Heydrich identifying the estimated number of Jews in each country in Europe (including countries that the Nazis did not occupy, such as England, Ireland, Sweden) that they intended to murder.  In January, 1942, they probably had every expectation of winning the war; everything at that point was going the Germans’ way, so they were identifying future victims.

            What is really chilling about this is that the conversations that took place in the room, as subsequently related after the war by those who participated, could just as easily have been about manufacturing tires as about murdering people.  It represents the triumph of unthinking bureaucracy:  The activity is irrelevant; what is important is that it be done efficiently and in an organized fashion.

--          One of the tour walks we took was titled “Infamous Third Reich Sites.”  There are not many of the actual buildings left but in this case the tour guide had a 3-ring binder with photographs.  The tour ended, oddly enough, in a rather nondescript parking lot surrounded by apartment buildings.  It was the site of the Führerbunker, the underground bunker where Hitler spent the last days of the war.  (It was outside the bunker that his body, and that of his wife of a couple of days, Eva Braun, was burned by his faithful adherents only a matter of hours before the Russians overran it.)  There is nothing to mark the site.  The Russians partially imploded the bunker; it subsequently filled with water.  The German government decided that it would not memorialize the location in any way--they did not want to provide a shrine for neo-Nazis and their emphasis in memorials is on the victims, not the perpetrators.

--          In the center of a large cobblestone (barren) plaza surrounded by part of Humboldt University (the model for the “research” part of American research universities, such as the University of Minnesota, as they began to develop after the Civil War) there is a peculiar but arresting memorial.  There is a (plexiglass?  glass?) square sunk in among the cobblestones.  Looking down, one sees underground a small room of four sides lined with empty white book shelves and nothing else.  The plaza was the site of a huge Nazi book-burning in 1938--they burned books by anyone and everyone they didn’t like, including Jews, scientists, communists, and so on.  I think the shelf space in the room is such that it would have accommodated about the number of books estimated to have been burned.  The students and faculty of Humboldt University participated, as the accompanying plaque notes.  (Although the language of the plaque, quoting the Nazis, suggests that the faculty and students initiated the book burning, which was not true.)  There is an eerily prescient quote from the 19^th Century German poet Heinrich Heine on the plaque as well, which reads “Dort wo man Buecher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen” (where they burn books, they’ll burn humans in the end).  Which, of course, is exactly what the Nazis did.  (Again, I am grateful to Gerhard Weiss for providing the exact language from Heine.)

--          One of our tours, a day-long venture, was to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, just outside Berlin.  It wasn’t a death camp, it was a work camp (although Pat concluded that given the regimen of the prisoners--little food, punishing work, tortured living conditions, and beastly guards--she would rather have gone to a death camp and just gotten it over with).  This was a camp mostly for people the Nazi government did not like and was not specifically for Jews; the prisoners were political opponents, homosexuals, gypsies, communists, and so on.  After the war Sachsenhausen was used as a prison camp by the Soviets 1946-1950 (and the available evidence suggests that more people died there under the Soviets than when it was run by the Germans). 

            After that, it was converted by the communist government to a memorial of the communist victory over the fascists, not the Allied victory over the Nazis.  The Soviets rejiggered a fair amount of the camp and demolished most of the barracks and other facilities.  Some of the buildings have since been reconstructed, by the reunited German government, as part of making the camp another memorial site.  But the problem with this camp, in my opinion, is that with its open grassy fields (where the barracks once stood), surrounded by tree tops (outside the border wall, which still exists, topped by barbed wire), it’s too pastoral, too bucolic.  We were there on a warm sunny spring day, which only added to the surrealism of the experience.  It was very difficult to imagine the awful surroundings and nature of the place under these quite pleasant circumstances.  I later exchanged emails with the woman who was our guide (another graduate student, a Canadian Ph.D. student at Humboldt University) and said the place needed to be changed.  She wrote back to me:  “My boyfriend was just here from Australia.  He did all my tours and he concurs with your view that Sachsenhausen should be made more ‘gruesome’ (more true?).”

            A part of the story for my faculty friends in particular:  our Canadian graduate student tour guide for Sachsenhausen was ostensibly giving a tour.  I knew right away that she was really a Ph.D. student teaching a class.  She had note cards to remind herself of statistics, dates, and information that were coming out of our ears by the time we were done; the tour was a connected series of lectures to undergraduate students.  She was practicing being a professor.  The rest of the people in the tour group (perhaps a dozen) were entranced with all she had to tell them.  (My problem with these tours in Germany were that I have read so much German history, and WWII history, that there wasn’t all that much that was new to me.  So some of it was rather boring for me; what I found interesting was seeing for myself these things about which I have read so much.  But she was a very good tour guide, without doubt.)

We noticed that there were several school groups also at the camp while we were there.  I can imagine what was going through their minds.  Even though there were audio and visual displays in the barracks, and they had teachers as guides, I bet many of them, on a nice spring day, just blew off the intended lessons and enjoyed the weather.  If I weren’t a history geek I certainly would have.

--          Potsdam, just outside Berlin, was the site of the Hohenzollern summer palaces.  There are about a dozen of them all within 3-4 miles of each other--each King of Prussia (or crown prince) appears to have built his own summer palace.  They clearly spent an enormous amount of money on these huge “summer” places decorated to a fine fare-thee-well.  The last one, Cecelienhof, was built, as our tour guide put it, in the usual display of bad taste and bad timing often demonstrated by the last Kaiser of Germany, Wilhelm II:  it was built during WWI by the crown prince.  The crown prince and his family only had the chance to occupy it for a year before the family fled after Germany lost the war.  Its principal claim to fame is that it was the site of the Potsdam Conference, the last meeting of Allied leaders after WWII (Stalin, Truman, and Churchill/Atlee) to settle on the configuration of Europe.

            The grandest of the palaces is Sans Souci, built by Frederick the Great in the middle of the 1700s (sans souci is “without a care” or “without worry” in French; Frederick built it mostly as a place to get away from his wife, who he did not like very well).  We did not go in but we did walk around it (a trek which could constitute a short marathon) and through the grounds.  I think the palace itself is--literally--about the size of the city block on which we live (and the grounds, of course, are acres and acres).  Adjacent to it are a building Frederick built to house his art collection--and as the first building in the West built exclusively for the purpose of housing art, it may be said to be the first art museum--and the “working” palace (to which he went only to conduct official business--Sans Souci was only for relaxing).

            On balance, the Dutch were very friendly and the Germans were surly.  We are told that if we had traveled to southern Germany, people would have been more welcoming.  It's the darn Prussians, I suppose.

* * *

            Our last trip for the year was quite different.  We took Elliott and his buddy Zach for a week in South Dakota, visiting an old family friend, seeing the Badlands, and then spending time in the Black Hills (in  Custer, SD).  A far cry from visiting American and European cities, it was nonetheless fun (although a week in the area does pretty much exhaust what there is to see and do.)

            The week out west started out as a near-disaster.  The cabins at this resort were not advertised honestly.  We were told we would have two bedrooms and a kitchen.  What we got was 2 rooms and a kitchenette—two bare and dismal white-walled rooms about 10 x 10 (each with a double bed) and a kitchenette with a college-size refrigerator (and tiny freezer) and no oven.  The windows did not open, there was no screen door, and the whole place was frayed around the edges.  The cabin probably dated from the 1960s and had never been remodeled or updated.  We had stopped in Rapid City and had purchased basic groceries for the week, including a fair amount for a freezer.  We unpacked as best we could, moved one of the double beds into the second room to create a “living room” and sat down and had a beer, completely dejected.  This was already beginning to be reminiscent of Indiana.

            We finally went back down to the office and asked if they had any other accommodations.  I commented that for any resort I had ever stayed in, advertising two bedrooms certainly implied that there was a living room and a kitchen implied an oven and small appliances.  (There was also no toaster--I would have gambled a fair amount of money that there would be a toaster.  I have never been in a resort cabin that did not have a toaster!)  The new management agreed that the advertisement and brochures were grossly misleading.   They had one other unit that had been reserved a year earlier but the person had paid no deposit and had not shown up yet (by this time it was 9:30 on Sunday night).  We borrowed a key and looked at the unit.  It was much larger, had a bedroom and two other beds in a good-sized living area, a real refrigerator and stove, and was much newer.  It looked like the Taj Mahal compared to the dump we had.

The woman managing the place decided on the spot that we could have it.  So we went back and packed up again, threw everything in the van, and moved.  And had another beer.  We were much happier there, even if it did cost us more money for the week—it was a small price to pay.

After recovering from the shock of what might have been, we had a week.  We climbed to the top of Little Devil’s Tower, in Custer State Park, and the view from the top was spectacular.  One of the locals, also up there at the same time, told us we could see about 75 miles to the horizon, and he also pointed out the back of Mt. Rushmore.  We took a Park-Ranger-led hike up to see the Cathedral Spires in the park (the Ranger needed to go to school more; she didn’t know much about the flora and fauna of the area and couldn’t answer most of our questions).  Later in the week drove the “wildlife loop” in the park--and we drove and drove and began to despair of actually seeing any wildlife, although we did come upon a prairie dog colony.  We finally came around a corner upon hundreds and hundreds of bison wending their way along the road.  We stopped and watched (and listened) to them for awhile; they got to within 5-6 feet of our van.  Boy, they’re noisy!  Snorting and grunting and clip-clopping on the rocks and dirt.

We also went to the Crazy Horse Memorial, which is going to be a staggering monument once it’s completed in about 200 years (that’s my guess, not anything they are saying).  It’s staggering now:  all four of the faces on Mt. Rushmore fit on the face of Crazy Horse.  The memorial was begun in 1948 and the face was finally completed in 1998.  We had a gabby gus for a bus driver, when we took a tour to the base of the monument; he explained that there has been more completed since 1988 than had been done in the preceding 40 years.  Once the face was completed, the memorial also began to attract more attention--and, as a result, more money.  They now have a full-time crew of 9 blasters (they drill holes and then blast on Mondays and Thursdays) who work year-round, so they do expect to make regular progress.  Even at that, however, I bet it will take decades and decades to finish the memorial because it is so gargantuan.

After that, Rushmore was a little disappointing by comparison—although it was still impressive.  We didn’t stick around for the evening lighting ceremony that everyone had recommended—we had gotten there earlier than we expected, and after going through the visitor center, watching the video, taking the walking tour at the base, it was still nearly two hours before the closing ceremony.  We decided not to stick around for that long.  (And as I looked at the program for the ceremony, I have to say that it looked like it might be kind of hokey.  More on this shortly.)

We drove to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming.  The drive was a jaunt but it was worth it.  On the way we had breakfast in a charming little café in Sundance, Wyoming, the place where the Sundance Kid got his name by robbing the local bank.  What an odd geological formation Devil’s Tower is.  The boys and I climbed the boulders to the base of the Tower—which is as far as anyone can go without registering with the office to be a climber, which I am not and have no desire to be.  Pat was nervous the whole time we walked around the base because one of the information plaques describing the wildlife around and on the Tower said that one might see rattlesnakes.

The highlight of the trip for the boys, however, was Reptile Gardens.  They loved seeing the snakes and lizards and spiders and alligators and crocodiles and tortoises.  They even had displays of cockroaches (behind glass); ugh.  We watched the alligator/crocodile show, which was both funny and informative, and the snake show (I’m not afraid of snakes particularly, but it did give me the willies as the guy was holding up this deadly poisonous snake on a metal rod, with the snake twisting and turning).  Pat speculated that the deadly snakes must be de-venomed, because with as many shows as they do it is impossible that someone would not make a mistake.  Sure, they no doubt have treatment on the grounds but it would be a painful and debilitating event for the employee and it would scare the hell out of the audience watching the show.  But we didn’t ask.

We also drove to Deadwood and Lead, and took an hour-long guided bus tour of Deadwood.  The guy knew a lot of the local history, and we learned all there is to know about Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane (whom he described as a “part-time prostitute and full-time drunk”).  Now I know why I don’t like to sit in a room with my back to the door.

Sometimes in the morning, while having coffee, I would poke around outside the cabin to find minerals and pine cones.  (This may be indicative of how much there was to do when we had no planned activity. . . .)  The ponderosa pines (which we learned about from our Ranger tour) produce the most perfect pine cones.[2]  I have always thought one should be able to do something nifty with big pine cones but I have never been able to figure out what that something is.[3]  Mostly one sees artsy-craftsy kinds of Christmas trees and wreaths that are not our style.  But I brought back two big boxes of the suckers and will now try to figure out what to do with them.  Some guy at Mt. Rushmore saw me walking with one in my hand and beckoned me over.  He told me to spray paint one of them silver and then put it in warm water.  He said it would close up tight, and then I should spray paint it red.  When it dries out and the cone re-opens, the inside will be silver and the tips will be red.  Maybe I’ll try that on one.  I mostly want to put them on the dining room table at Christmas time—of course, I have enough pine cones to cover the main table at Buckingham Palace, let alone our table.

One thing that puzzled us early in the week was that we were so tired all the time.  Sometime shortly after visiting a long-time family friend of my parents over the first weekend of the trip, I noticed a nail planted squarely in one of my tires.  I only noticed it because the van was pulling to the right as I was driving.  I put air in the tire and drove all the way across SD without mishap.  But we did decide we should probably get the tire fixed before driving home so we made an appointment and left the van at a place just outside Custer one morning.  We walked into town (almost exactly one mile), poked around for a bit, and then walked back.  When we drove back to the cabin, we both took a nap!  Mind you, this little walk was about one-fourth or one-fifth as much as we had walked in Amsterdam or Berlin--so I knew it wasn’t age creeping up on me quite yet--and we had been getting a perfectly good night’s sleep, so we couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on.  We finally realized it must be the altitude—Custer is at 5300 feet, and when walked up to the top of Little Devil’s Tower, at 6600 feet, we were huffing and puffing.  It all made sense once we realized the air was thinner.  But we managed and apparently got used to it.  Our two couch-potato/electronic-game boys had a harder time than we did.

* * *

            Krystin was supposed to go camping with friends over 4^th of July weekend; she took off work from the grocery store for five days.  Two hours before they were supposed to pick her up, the friends called and cancelled out on her.  She was really disappointed; it was the only time she was going to be away this summer.

            I felt sorry for her, so I took her to Chicago for a couple of days.  We shared the driving:  she drove down and I drove back.  She drove right into the Chicago loop—and as she was driving down Michigan Avenue, she said “I don’t want to drive any more.”  I laughed and said we couldn’t very well change drivers in the middle of the traffic.  So she drove to the hotel.  We stayed at the Palmer House, a lovely example of those grand old hotels they don’t build any more.  The lobby would, I think, hold about six houses the size of ours.  For some reason I still don’t understand we were upgraded to the “executive floor” (at no additional charge).  Our hotel room was about the size of half the main floor of our house, we each had our own bathroom, and we had both a free (and large) continental breakfast as well as hors d’oeuvres in the afternoon.

            We saw the 4^th of July fireworks over Lake Michigan.  Elliott had already announced that he didn’t want to see fireworks (on the grounds that when you’ve seen one fireworks, you’ve seen them all).  Krystin, however, still did.  So, since it was just the two of us, we went.  I would give the City of Chicago a B+ or an A- because they were quite good with some novelties in the pyrotechnics.  I also took her out to dinner at the top of one of the lakeside condominium towers and spent more on a dinner for/with her than I ever had before.  She was a delightful dinner companion and the scenery from the 70^th floor looking up and down the lakeshore and out on Lake Michigan was spectacular.  We also walked and walked and walked (which I was used to but she was not—but she was a pretty good sport about trekking all over).  Some parents delight in their children when they are small and growing.  I think I will be one of those parents who may delight more in their children as adults.

            I was going to do something else with her over the long MEA (the teachers’ convention) weekend in October—but Pat did, instead.  She took Krystin back to Chicago—at Krystin’s request—and saw more things that we didn’t have time to see.

* * *

            Elliott made one time what I thought was an insightful comment.  He and I were talking about something--I have no recollection what--and I said “if” something, then something.  He responded “yeah, if--a little word with a huge meaning.”

* * *

            We had four “major” parties in Minnesota with candidates seeking elective office:  the Democratic, the Green, the Independence, and the Republican.  The conventional wisdom seems to be that this is a good idea.  I think it’s terrible.  As I have thought about this in the last couple of years, I have wanted to make the case that it is two-party democratic systems that are the most stable (the United States is the oldest constitutional representative democracy in the world; England and Australia are also long-lived.  All three have two-party systems).  On the other hand, the multi-party systems in central Europe and elsewhere often seem to lead to paralysis or instability.

           

            My friend political scientist Phil Shively, however, shot so many holes in my argument that I had to give it up.  He points out that Canada has a multi-party system and it is quite stable (at least long as the Quebecois are not active!) and that England had a three-party system for much of the 20^th Century.  Phil wrote to me that “regarding the question on party systems, it’s a hard case to make, one way or the other.  The Scandinavian countries, for example, are all thoroughly multiparty.  Norway, for example, currently has 8 parties represented in the Storting-- with four of them holding an eighth or more of the seats.  And, a two party system may build up repressed conflict that then boils over--a good example is Austria, which before the advent of Jorg Haider had one of the purest two-party systems in the world.”

            Phil went on to comment on American third parties, however.  “I think the most overwhelming argument against third parties in the United States is that with an elected president or governor there are such compelling reasons to come in first in the election that a party essentially has to be one of the two largest parties to be viable.  Now, a third party may organize itself to try to supplant one of the current two parties, but the fatal flaw in this is that by the time it had succeeded in getting that large it would have had to make a series of compromises that would in effect have turned it into a party just like the one it was replacing.  Given how open our two big parties are to internal take-over, pretty clearly a better strategy for an insurgent group is to work from within one of them.  All you have to do is to compare the success of the American left, with its Green Party, to the success of the religious right in its strategy of trying to take over the Republican Party from within.”  The point, of course, is that the Green party, working separately, is unlikely ever to gain any kind of electoral majority or seats in a legislature while the religious right, working within the Republican party, has had some notable successes.

            The result of having several parties, at least in the American winner-take-all electoral system, is that the will of the majority of the voters is thwarted because they divide their votes.  Thus George Bush was elected in 2000, even though the number of votes on the “left” or “liberal” end of the spectrum was larger than the number caste on the “right” or “conservative” end.  The Green party, in other words, could be said to have taken away the election from Al Gore (of course, Gore was such an awful candidate, and his campaign so dismal, that he also lost the election himself--but given that, he would still have won if the Green party voters had not split off their votes from the “liberal” end of the political spectrum). 

* * *

            Elliott went to camp with his friend Zach this year, a camp sponsored by the Audubon Society.  As he was promised by his friend last year, this camp had indoor shower and restroom facilities and bunk beds in a dorm.  So, fortunately, his miserable experience in the summer of 2001 did not sour him on camps. 

            Given what he has announced as his life and career plans, being outdoors better not be something aversive to him.  At his current age (12), he has decided he will major in biology in college, and then obtain a Ph.D. in biology or zoology with an emphasis in herpetology, and then become a college professor.  He wants to study lizards and reptiles.  That means field work in natural settings.  It also means he would very likely have to go to college elsewhere, since there are few lizards and reptiles in Minnesota.  Even though he has been the world’s model homebody, he has conceded that for college he may have to go to Arizona or Florida if he’s to study reptiles and lizards.  We shall see.

* * *

            I wonder why anyone would hold out business as a model for politics or educational organizations.  As I compose this letter, my telephone company may eventually file for bankruptcy because of bad accounting, my gas company is in financial trouble, and my electric company is being investigated by the SEC.  On the other hand, my employer, the University of Minnesota, is facing a tough budget situation (with the State of Minnesota facing a $3-billion shortfall) but will adjust its finances to accommodate its revenues and expenses.

* * *

            The addressing and composition of correspondence have been on my mind briefly this year.

            (1)  I am both amused and annoyed at the ease and frequency with which people use first names in email correspondence.  When anyone my age or older (and perhaps younger) was taught about writing letters, the salutation was always “Mr. Jones” or “Mrs. Smith” or “Miss Olson.”    “Miss” has gone by the boards except when writing to young girls and “Mrs.” is used only when the recipient has expressed a preference for the married title; both have largely been replaced by “Ms.”  But with the advent of email, titles have gone, replaced by first names.  I am astonished at the number of messages I receive, from people I do not know, have never met, and in many cases never even heard of, nonetheless addressed to “Dear Gary” or even just “Gary.”  I know that Americans, by comparison with much of the rest of the world, have more relaxed manners, but this seems to me a little presumptuous.  Maybe it’s just that I’m more of a stuffed shirt than others, but I have always felt that use of a first name with someone followed an introduction and was based on a personal or professional relationship.  (And no, I am not particularly comfortable calling waiters and waitresses by their first name, even if they do come to the table and say “I’m Sue and I’ll be your server.”)

            (2)  At the same time I am mildly critical of the wanton use of first names, I have myself  abandoned etiquette in another direction:  all of my “thank-you” notes, except for those requiring only a couple of sentences, are written on the computer.  The advent of word-processing software has had two results for my writing, as far as I can tell.  First, my handwriting has gone to hell.  I used to have fairly neat handwriting; now it resembles nothing more than messy scribbling.  I think the constant use of computers over the last dozen years, and the concomitant reduction in the amount of pen-to-paper writing that I do, has made my writing messier.  So I dislike writing anything to someone else.  Second, I think the ease of editing on the screen, as one goes along (as I am doing even as I compose these sentences), has induced a certain intellectual laziness (at least in me):  I no longer have to have a sentence composed, complete and correct, in my mind before I write it.  I can now edit, amend, shorten, and lengthen sentences at will before they ever become final.  Writing a note or a letter on paper, with a pen, is much more of a challenge for me than it was 20 years ago.

            I do not know if the second development is sinister in terms of its impact on intellectual discipline--and perhaps I am the only one in the world who has been affected this way--but I also wager that our Founding Fathers, for example, would have loved to have had Microsoft Word or its equivalent when they were drafting the Declaration of Independence or the U. S. Constitution.  Or the many thousands of letters they sent to each other.

* * *

           

            I was at a faculty retreat in late August.  A faculty friend of mine, in his mid-50s, was relating his dismay at the docility of current university students.  “They’re more concerned about their 401(k) plans than about the society they live in,” he groused.  He said he told them that when the Nazis took over Germany, within a year they had shut down the universities.  “Because the universities were a threat, and the bigger threat was you,” he told his students.  “18-year-olds are a threat.”  Their reaction was one of shock; they looked at him, and at each other, and said “us?  a threat?” 

In order to rile them even further (this was a physics class), he asked them why they had to wear gloves to the demonstration.  They had no idea.  “What demonstration,” they asked?  “Because when the cops throw the tear gas grenades at you, they get hot because of an exothermic[4] reaction.  You wear gloves so when you pick it up to throw it back, you don’t get burned.”  He said they were just aghast--”what, us, throw something at the police?  Why would we do that?”  “Because they threw it at you,” he told them in despair.  (And we did have the police throwing tear gas at students on the University of Minnesota campus in 1972, demonstrating after the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of Hanoi--as the war in Vietnam was going on and on even though the majority of Americans knew it was a lost and futile cause.)

I know he was not really advocating throwing things at the police--contrary to what some may think about university professors, the vast majority are pretty middle-class folks--but he was so frustrated with the inert brains of the students that he had to try to get their goat.  He--and I--remember with nostalgia the days when college students wanted to make society and the world a better place.  Now it seems that all most of them care about is making money and getting ahead in the world and seem to care not one whit for how the society in which they live is doing as a whole.  (And they all probably went home and told their parents that one of their professors was advocating throwing tear gas grenades at the police.  Good grief.) 

* * *

            October 29 was a trying day.  In the morning a number of faculty members and I went to the funeral of one of our colleagues, Professor Mary McEvoy, one of the campaign staff members killed in the plane crash that took the lives of Senator and Mrs. Paul Wellstone and others.  Mary served on one of the senior faculty committees that I work with so I had come to know her.  It was a moving ceremony that lasted two hours.  The church was packed; we guessed there were perhaps 2000 people there, including Senator Mark Dayton, former Vice President Walter Mondale, Mayors Randy Kelly of St. Paul and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis, Senator Roger Moe, and several dozen of Mary’s peers.  The eulogies were alternately teary and funny.  Her husband, at the end of the ceremony, was able to do something I never could:  he gave a sprightly, funny, loving final eulogy.  If my wife had been killed in a plane crash four days earlier, I doubt seriously I could stand up in front of 2000 people without breaking down.  But he did a magnificent job.

            That same evening, Pat and I and my dad attended the reviewal for the wife of an Engstrand cousin--my dad’s nephew’s wife (his nephew is six months younger than he is; the deceased wife was slightly older than my dad).  We spoke with members of the Engstrand side of the family, people we rarely see (for no particular reason that I can ascertain, except that they never get together and seem never to have been close).  As my dad’s nephew commented to me, we seem only to get together at weddings and funerals.

            When Pat and I got home, we watched on TV the last half of the memorial service held for Senator Wellstone and the others killed in the crash.  Most of it was very touching but there were parts of it that seemed to me much more partisan than they should have been.  The newspaper the next morning quoted a number of state Republicans as upset about the tenor of the event; I could not blame them; I had a fit as I listened to Mr. Kahn’s speech go on and on and on.  (The organizers of the memorial didn’t vet the speeches that people gave—who would demand to see what will be said at a memorial service?)  Given the outcome of the elections both nationally and in Minnesota, I am one of a small group who thinks that Wellstone may not have won the election, had he lived.

            By the time I went to bed I was glad to be done with funereal events. 

* * *

I have found a few sites on the web that collect articles from newspapers and magazines from around the world; the subjects range from literature and the arts to the sciences to politics to philosophy to crime to anything else.  I pick out ones that look interesting (and find that I read a fair amount of British and Australian articles, of all things).  I have read a number of essays in the course of several months during the year with their points rumbling around in my head, going nowhere in particular, but they did lead me to think about the American political system and patriotism this year.  I didn’t intend to; it was just one of those things that just happened.

When thinking about patriotism, the extremes are represented by “my country right or wrong” and patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel.  I don’t choose either.  The first could have been—may have been—used by Germans to lend support to Hitler.  The latter can mean one is without a country.

To begin with, I read a book review by Henrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker of Robert Dahl’s book How Democratic is the American Constitution?  Dahl is one of the most distinguished political scientists, democratic theorists, in the country who has won all kinds of awards and honors for his work.  The question Dahl asks is whether the constitution is “‘the best that we can design for enabling politically equal citizens to govern themselves under laws and government policies that have been adopted and are maintained with their rational consent’” (all the quotes are from the book review).

            Hertzberg summarizes Dahl as concluding that the framers were “wise and great” but “their vision was circumscribed by what they knew, what they mistakenly thought they knew, and what they lived too soon to have any way of knowing.”  And they were working at a particular moment in history “which forced them to swallow provisions to which the most eminent among them were strongly (and rightly) opposed.”   American practices have evolved since the constitution was adopted (political parties, allowing citizens to vote for presidential electors rather than having legislatures elect them); some changes were made formally (direct election of senators).  Hertzberg concludes that “although it’s difficult to separate constitutional factors from other factors affecting national well-being, there is no reason to believe that the American system does a better job than the democratic alternatives, and quite a few reasons to believe it does a worse one.”

            One of the worst features of the constitution, its sanction of slavery, was not finally expunged until the Civil War, at a cost of 700,000 soldiers.  One can argue, in fact, that the Civil War “represented a catastrophic failure of the Constitution itself.  The political institutions it created had proved incapable of solving the nation’s greatest problem.  In the war, North and South both claimed to be the true inheritors of the founding generation.  The South probably had the better of the argument, but the North won the war and, with it, the point.”  But even the Civil War amendments did not change the political landscape for the freed slaves.  “Even so grotesque and obvious injustice as apartheid in the public schools was beyond the ability of the national government to correct” and when segregation was finally brought to a legal end, it was accomplished through the action of the “unelected, unaccountable, unchecked, quasi-legislative judicial power.”  Hertzberg says the framers did not know they were creating such power in the judiciary, although they would not have been upset by the power of the Supreme Court to overturn acts of Congress because judicial review was at least implied in the language of some provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  But Dahl says the framers did not foresee that the Court would have “‘the power to make policy decisions that affect the lives and welfare of millions of Americans.’”  They did, however, create a government at odds with itself and “often helpless against the veto power of determined minorities [that is, in the legislative branch]” that left a “power vacuum into which the Court was drawn.”

            After slavery, the most undemocratic provision of the Constitution is the Senate.  Allotting two senators to each state was a concession to a threat of war and alliance with other countries by the small states.  Hertzberg offers two interesting thoughts.  If the Senate were to be structured to represent fairly other groups who were disadvantaged (rather than residents of small states, say it was blacks), then blacks would have 12 seats in the Senate (because they make up about 12% of the U. S. population.  If it were structured to give blacks the representation that is now given to the 12% of Americans who live in small states, blacks would have 44 of the 100 senators.

            The history of the Senate is distasteful for anyone who believes in a role for the government in social progress.  I happen to be reading the third volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson at the same time I read this book review; Caro argues, as does Hertzberg, that the Senate “is a graveyard.  Its record, especially over the past century and a half, makes disheartening reading.  A partial list of measures that—despite being favored by the sitting President, an apparent majority of the people, and, in most cases, the House of Representatives to boot—have been done to death in the Senate would include bills to authorize federal action against the disenfranchisement of blacks, to ban violence against strikers by police forces, to punish lynching, to lower tariffs, to extend relief to the unemployed, to outlaw the poll tax, to provide aid to education, and (under Presidents Truman, Nixon, and Carter as well as Clinton) to provide something like the kind of health coverage that is standard in the rest of the developed world.  The rejection of the Versailles treaty and the League of Nations after the First World War and then preparedness on the eve of the Second are only the best-known of the Senate’s many acts of foreign-policy sabotage, which have continued down to the present.”  Hertzberg continues:  “Some will take all this as proof that the system worked exactly as the framers planned.  But, to believe that, one must believe that the framers were heartless, brainless reactionaries.” 

            Nor is there any realistic chance that this grossly-disproportionate allocation of votes will ever be changed.  The Constitution requires ¾ of the states to assent to an amendment.  But the 37 states representing 95% of the U. S. population could not enact an amendment if any of the 13 smallest states objected.  To anyone who follows American politics, of course, this is hardly news, but I had not thought about the degree of the disproportion for a long time.  Nor had I really thought about the fact that approximately 480,000 Wyoming residents have the same vote in the Senate as 34,000,000 Californians.

            Even the election of the President is “on loan” from the legislatures because the Constitution clearly places responsibility in them for choosing electors (choosing electors is to be done “‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct’“).  Under public pressure, the legislatures have given up the power to the voters—”but this is on loan only, as we learned in 2000, when the Florida legislature made clear its intentions to name its own slate of electors if the recount went forth and came out the wrong way.”  (Irrespective of the merits of the 2000 election, it is an interesting question whether a state legislature could, at this late date, revoke the grant of authority to the voters and resume the power to choose electors.  Based on the plain language of the Constitution, one can make a good argument that it could.  Of course, the members of a legislature who voted to remove the choice from the voters might face an interesting re-election challenge.)

            Interestingly, while America “has been an inspiration to peoples struggling for democracy,” the form of government it adopted has not been replicated in successful democracies.  Of the 22 countries “that have governed themselves democratically without interruption since 1950 [,] only six, including the United States, are federal [and] only four, all federal, have strong bicameralism.  Only the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and France do not use one of the many variants of proportional representation, a nineteenth-century invention.  We get bad marks in ‘democratic fairness’ and ‘encouraging consensus.’  In ‘accountability,’ we’re flunking.  ‘Where are we to place responsibility for the conduct of our government?’ Dahl asks.” 

            Who do voters blame for the success or failure of national policy?  The President?  The House of Representatives?  The Senate?  The Supreme Court?  The states, which have systems that mirror the federal system?  Dahl says that “‘I, for one, am inclined to think that compared with the political systems of other advanced democratic countries, ours is among the most opaque, complex, confusing, and difficult to understand.’“  I personally think this is one of the greatest problems the American political system confronts:  the attenuation of the voter voting and the outcomes of public policy decisions.  I shall return to this topic.

            What I find bothersome—and I have for some time—is summarized in this paragraph from the review.  “In so-called consensual democracies, polls show, voters who are on the losing side of an election are almost as satisfied with the political system as the winners—and both are more satisfied than citizens of majoritarian democracies like ours.  Also [quoting Dahl]:  ‘When the United States is ranked with other established democracies on such matters as the rate of incarceration, the ratio of poor to rich, economic growth, social expenditures, energy efficiency, foreign aid and the like, its performance is something less than impressive.’”

On this last point, I went on the web to find one measure that is perhaps as disturbing as any, one that I have always found distressing.  The American child poverty rate is higher—much higher—than every country in western Europe and some in eastern Europe.  Sweden is lowest, at 2.4%; the Slovak Republic (!), Finland, Czech Republic, Norway, Luxembourg, Belgium, Austria, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Germany are all under 9%.  Hungary, Ireland, Spain, and Poland are under 13%.  The United Kingdom is at 16% and Italy at 19.5%.  (Canada is 15%.)  The United States child poverty rate is 20.3%.  I think that statistic is unfathomable in a nation as wealthy as this one.  The child poverty rate in Russia—whose economy is near collapse—is lower (23.2%) than several U.S. states (Arizona, Massachusetts, and California).  (Minnesota is 15.8%, for the locals who read this letter.)[5]

OK, so I was reintroduced to some of the weaknesses of the American political system.  Then I read another book review,[6] in Prospect, a British news/opinion journal which, as far as I can tell, is apolitical (one of its founders comes from the Financial Times, hardly a bastion of leftist/liberal thought, and its plaudits come from both conservative and liberal British politicians, so I assume it’s at least centrist and perhaps modestly conservative).  Anyway, the book The World We’re In did not get a rave review but the reviewer, Martin Wolf, gave credit to its author, Will Hutton, for a “useful critique” of America, even though Hutton (in the reviewer’s opinion) did “not establish the superiority of European values” (and the reviewer was clearly not unfriendly to the United States).  (The thrust of the book is that Britain should consider itself European and unlink itself from its close connection to the United States.  I don’t know if Hutton made a persuasive case.  If I could read 100,000 books before I die, this might be one of them.)

Hutton argues that America “is in the grip of a malevolent creed that he calls conservatism.   The heart of this creed is a belief—natural for immigrants in an almost-empty continent—in the rights of private property.  For Americans, ‘the purpose of society was to further enjoyment of property and political power was only legitimate if it served this end.’”  Europe’s values, however, go back to the Church and feudalism, where property “is not seen ‘as an absolute right, as it is by U.S. conservatives.  Rather, it is a privilege that confers reciprocal obligations.’”  As a result, “‘Europe has both an idea of the public realm that transcends the formal institutions of democracy, justice and government and a recognition that it is legitimate for the state to act purposively to shape economy and society.’” 

In the world at large, Hutton says, the U.S. is guided by three principles as a result of the prevalence of conservative views:  “unilateralism; an aggressive focus on promoting the interests of U.S. sectors and companies; and an instinctive preference for ‘market solutions and remedies, both as a matter of intellectual conviction, and because over a period of time these render it more likely that U.S. interests will prevail.’”  But American capitalism has not been more successful than European capitalism, it is said.  While a few are “scandalously rich, many Americans remain far poorer than their equivalents in Europe.” 

Wolf says Hutton’s view of history is “potted” but that he makes worthwhile points about the United States.  For one thing, Wolf writes, “in important respects, contemporary U.S. conservatism is rooted in the values and traditions of the south.  Indeed, it is the shift of the south from Democrat to Republican that is the basis of the latter’s resurgence.  Many of the attitudes of the Republican south are profoundly unpleasant for any reasonably civilized person, including civilized Americans.  Alas, the triumph of these ideas does not show that the U.S. is undemocratic, but rather than popular prejudices have greater power than in more elitist European cultures.”

Hutton criticizes recent American economic performance (which is easy to do).  “Much is wrong with the stockmarket-driven capitalism of the contemporary U.S.  Top executives have effectively been stealing from their companies by granting themselves valuable stock options.  Accounting has been subverted.  The majority of mergers enrich shareholders of the acquired companies, managers of the acquiring companies and a coterie of overpaid advisors, but nobody else. . . .  While the U.S economy remains dynamic, innovative and entrepreneurial and its companies correspondingly competitive, its ability to deliver benefits to the American people has not been particularly impressive.  Employment is high, but the standard of living of the poor is below that of their equivalents in Europe.  Social mobility is certainly no greater than in Europe and long-term increase in productivity per hour has been mediocre” (less than most of western Europe).  Nor is long-term productivity better in the U.S.; it isn’t.

I am not sure about the validity of the criticisms, general as they are; I haven’t seen any evidence that the majority of American companies are guilty of the greed and illegalities that have characterized the most glaring cases.  But the data on standard of living and rates of poverty cannot be gainsaid; the U.S. simply does not do as well as other industrialized/developed nations, particularly in Europe.

Some of the general points began to niggle, however.  How can one feel strongly positive about one’s country when it seems that other nations are doing at least as a good a job at being democratic, and in a number instances doing a (sometimes much) better job of providing for its citizens, as is one’s own?  (Child poverty comes to mind as one measure of “providing.”)[7]  And when “patriotism” seems to be a monopoly of the more-right wing, conservative citizens?  All these American flag and “United We Stand” bumper stickers, and claims by more conservative (especially religious fundamentalist) political groups that they represent patriots, make one wonder how to be patriotic without mindless adoration of the flag.

I was struck, for example, by the comments of Miro Drago Kovatchevich after Senator Paul Wellstone’s death.  Mr. Kovatchevich, who was the Minnesota Constitution’s party candidate for the Senate, claimed that Wellstone “‘didn’t leave any “legacy” but that of promotion and implementation of a culture of sterility, perversion, decay, and death.’”  He went on to say (according to the article) that “‘commies, liberals, atheists and perverts are now using the occasion [Wellstone’s death] to crassly promote and further their deadly and destructive agenda.’”  The article noted that the web site of the Constitution Party describes the party as made up of “‘conservative, patriotic constitutionalists’ who oppose abortion, federal income taxes and gun control” and the party’s view that “‘the foundation of our political position’ as ‘our full submission in our Savior and Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ.’”  (The chair of the Constitution Party disavowed these remarks, but they are the ones who nominated the guy.)

If that is patriotism—and I don’t for a minute believe that many on either end of the spectrum would embrace many of Mr. Kovatchevich’s views—then thanks but no thanks.  At the same time, I have always thought of myself as patriotic; I get annoyed, for example, when men at a sporting event don’t take off their baseball caps while the national anthem is being played. 

Michael Kazin, a professor of History at American University, wrote an essay for Dissent magazine, which is a decidedly left-wing publication.  But I was caught by the title, A Patriotic Left, because patriotism always seems automatically to attach to people on the conservative end of the spectrum but not so much on the other end.  Kazin decries those on the left wing who deride and denigrate America.  He opens his essay by writing “I love my country.  I love its passionate and endlessly inventive culture, its remarkably diverse landscape, its agonizing and wonderful history.  I particularly cherish its civic ideals—social equality, individual liberty, a populist democracy and the unending struggle to put their laudable, if often contradictory, claims into practice.”

Kazin goes on to write that “one can . . . curse as jingoistic all those ‘United We Stand’ and ‘God Bless America’ signs and hope somehow to transcend patriotism in the name of global harmony.  Or one can empathize with the communal spirit that animates them, embracing the ideals of the nation and learning from past efforts to put them into practice.”  He notes that a number of “leftists” and radicals of the past relied on the Constitution and appeals to patriotism to advance their agendas (for example, abolitionists, women’s right to vote, the right to belong to a union, efforts to defeat Jim Crow laws). 

Without patriotic appeals, the great social movements that attacked inequalities of class, gender, and race in the United States—and spread their messianic rhetoric around the world—would have never gotten off the ground. . . .  A good deal that we cherish about contemporary American was thus accomplished by social movements of the left, speaking out for national ideals. . . .  Leftists made what progress they did by demanding that the nation live up to its stated principles, rather than dismissing [those principles] as fatally compromised by the racism of the founders or the abusiveness of flag-waving vigilantes.  After all, hope is always more attractive than cynicism, and gap between promise and fulfillment is narrower for Americanism than it is for other universalist creeds such as communism, Christianity, and Islam.

(Interesting thought that America is closer to achieving its ideals than are communists, Christians, or Muslims.  Given what we know about (some) adherents of Islam, and about how communism is/was actually practiced, I am quite glad there is a large gap between ideals and achievement. I hope the gap remains and grows.  With Christianity, it depends on what version one picks; the fundamentalists on the far right are terrorists, in my opinion.)

            Finally, to end my arbitrary and haphazard literature review, I think it is worth noting some of the points Benjamin Barber makes in his Jihad vs. McWorld.  I want to look at his work at some length because, at least for me, he struck a chord.

Barber uses the term “jihad” generically, “a grim prospect of a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed:  a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly-conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence:  against technology, against pop culture, and against integrated markets; against modernity itself.”[8]

The term Jihad, in its strongest meaning, “means bloody holy war on behalf of partisan identity that is metaphorically defined and fanatically defended”; it makes “slaughter of ‘the other’ a higher duty.”  It is something known to Germans and Hindis as well as Arabs, Christians as well as Muslims.  And it may start out innocently, “a simple search for local identity, some set of common personal attributes to hold out against the numbing and neutering uniformities of industrial modernization and the colonizing culture of McWorld.”  Jihad includes not only fundamentalist terrorist Muslims but also groups like the Aryan Nation in the U.S. and separatist Basques in Spain. 

McWorld, on the other hand, “paints the future in shimmering pastels, a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers, and fast food—MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald’s—pressing nations into one homogeneous theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce.”  We are caught “between Babel and Disneyland,” Barber says, and the two tendencies are often “visible in the same country at the very same instant” (e.g., Iranian supporters of the mullahs who also watch Dynasty, Donahue, and The Simpsons on their TVs using satellite dishes).  Under the pressure of these two forces, it seems that “the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment.”  Neither of these forces, he notes, are novel.

            McWorld, Barber’s shorthand for international trade, especially in entertainment, information, and telecommunications (with a decidedly American face) does not like borders; it wants free trade, enforceable contracts (“the state’s sole legitimate function”), convertible currencies, and access to banking.  “The laws of production and consumption are sovereign, trumping the laws of legislatures and courts.”  There are new institutions that undermine national sovereignty, such as OPEC, CNN, and “multinational corporations that lack distinctive national identities and neither reflect nor respect nationhood as an organizing or regulative principle.”  Barber says that “without an address or national affiliation, they are altogether beyond the devices of sovereignty.  Even products are becoming anonymous:  whose national workforce do you fault on a defective integrated circuit labeled:

Made in one or more of the following countries:  Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Mauritius, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines.  The exact country of origin is unknown.

            Jihad and McWorld have something in common, Barber suggests.  “Anarchy:  the absence of common will and that conscious and collective human control under the guidance of law that we call democracy.”  They work in opposite directions, “one driven by parochial hatreds, the other by universalizing markets,” one focused on “ancient subnational and ethnic borders, . . . the other making national borders porous from without.”  But they both “make war on the sovereign nation-state and thus undermine the nation-state’s democratic institutions.  Each eschews civil society and belittles democratic citizenship, neither seeks alternative democratic institutions.  Their common thread is indifference to civil liberty.”  Jihad is “rooted in exclusion and hatred, communities that slight democracy in favor or tyrannical paternalism or consensual tribalism” while McWorld “forges global markets rooted in consumption and profit, leaving to an untrustworthy, if not altogether fictitious, invisible hand issues of public interest and common good that once might have been nurtured by democratic citizenries and their watchful governments.”

            One of Barber’s more telling comments, in my opinion, is that “governments, intimidated by market ideology, are actually pulling back at the very moment they ought to be aggressively intervening.  What was once understood as protecting the public interest is now excoriated as heavy-handed regulatory browbeating.  Justice yields to markets, even though,” according to Felix Rohatyn, those markets are cruelly Darwinian, “‘nervous and greedy.  They look for stability and transparency, but what they reward is not always our preferred form of democracy.’”  Freedom has traditionally been protected by constitutions and bills of rights; Barber cites George Steiner as saying that “the new temples to liberty will be McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken.”

            Neither Jihad nor McWorld, Barber writes, “aspires to resecure the civic virtues undermined by its denationalizing practices; neither global markets nor blood communities service public goods or pursue equality and justice.  Impartial judiciaries and deliberative assemblies play no role in roving killer bands that speak on behalf of newly liberated ‘peoples,’ and such democratic institutions have at best only marginal influence on the roving multinational corporations. . . .  Jihad pursues a blood politics of identity, McWorld a bloodless economics of profit.”

            Perhaps most critical, from my perspective, is Barber’s argument that while “the market imperative has in fact reinforced the quest for international peace and stability, requisites of an international economy,” it has not improved “the chances for civic responsibility, accountability, or democracy, which may or may not benefit from commerce and free markets. . . .  The claim that democracy and markets [go hand in hand] has become a commonplace of statesmanship, especially in light of the demise of state socialism [communism], which has left capitalism’s zealots free to regard themselves not only as victors in the Cold War but as the true champions of a democracy that (they are certain) markets alone make possible.  Thus they have managed to parlay the already controversial claim that markets are free into the even more controversial claim that market freedom entails and even defines democracy.”  Barber is unconvinced. 

            I found this paragraph disturbing. 

Antithetical in every detail, Jihad and McWorld nonetheless conspire to undermine our hard-won (if only half-won) civil liberties. . . .  In the short run the forces of Jihad, noisier and more obviously nihilistic than those of McWorld, are likely to dominate in the near future, etching small stories of local tragedy and regional genocide on the face of our times. . . .  But in the long run, the forces of McWorld are the forces underlying the slow certain thrust of Western civilization and such may be unstoppable.  Jihad’s microwars will hold the headlines well into the next century [21^st; the book was published in 1996]. . . . But McWorld’s homogenization is likely to establish a macropeace that favors the triumph of commerce and its markets and to give to those who control information, communication, and entertainment ultimate (if inadvertent) control over human destiny.  Unless we can offer an alternative to the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, the epoch on whose threshold we stand—postcommunist, postindustrial, postnational, yet sectarian, fearful, and bigoted—is likely also to be terminally postdemocratic.

            Barber maintains that “government has a perfect right, indeed it has a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest.  But it cannot expect the denizens of McWorld to welcome such intervention” or that they will not try to stop governments from doing so.  Nor do corporations understand “foreign policy” because no part of the globe is “foreign”; all of it is a potential market.  But “full employment and environmental preservation are social goods rather than private-market goods; and the proponents of McWorld view markets and their impact strictly from the one-dimensional perspective of capitalist efficiency. . . .  People and nations may shudder at corporate downsizing policies that result in massive job elimination, but the market will celebrate its players’ new competitiveness.”  Capitalists want laissez-faire and don’t like “regulations, tariffs, bailouts, embargoes, wage restraints, employment quotas, environmental restrictions”:  “Leave us alone!  Let us do what producers and consumers do:  sell, buy, produce, consume.” 

Laissez-fair economics was pushed to the side by newer economic views and the welfare state, Barber says.  “The modern democratic state is legitimated by the priority of the public over the private, where public goods trump private interests and the commonweal takes precedence over individual fortunes.  But under conditions of internationalism [trade policies and global markets he calls McWorld] old laissez-faire notions emerge with a new force.  For there is no international state and thus no guarantor or discoverer of an international good.”  This free-market approach “is a battering ram against the walls of the nation-state, exposing McWorld’s antagonism to nationalisms of every kind.”

            The point that links his argument together, in my judgment, is that (at least at this juncture in human history) “in the last several hundred years, democratic and egalitarian institutions have for the most part been closely associated with integral nation-states, and citizenship (democracy’s sine qua non) has been an attribute of membership in such states.  The twin assault on democratic citizenship from the fractious forces of Jihad and the spreading markets of McWorld in effect cuts the legs out from under democratic institutions.  Whether they can secure new foundations either in the parochialism of ethnic identity (and its accompanying politics of resentment) or in the universalism of the profit motive (and its accompanying politics of commodities) is the crucial question.  The bare bones answer . . . is simply this:  neither Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future.  On the contrary, the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism.  The market’s invisible hand is attached to a manipulative arm that, unguided by a sovereign head, is left to the contingencies of spontaneous greed.”

            Responding to critics who thought he was completely anti-capitalist, Barber disagreed.  “Capitalism and the science from which it arises constitute a system of power and control that generates wealth and progress with unprecedented efficiency.  It is not capitalism but unrestrained capitalism counterbalance by no other system of values that engenders democracy.  My criticism of McWorld is aimed at what might be called economic totalism.  If the political totalism of the fascist and communist world once tried, at horrendous human costs, to subordinate all economic, social, and cultural activity to the demands of an overarching state, the economic totalism of unleashed market economics seem now to be trying (at costs yet to be fully reckoned) to subordinate politics, society, and culture to the demands of an overarching market. . . .  Only a democratic polity has an interest in and the power to preserve the autonomy of the several realms.  When other domains wrest sovereignty away from the state, whether they are religious or economic, the result is a kind of totalitarian coordination—in the Middle Ages it was theocratic; in this age of McWorld it is economistic.”  His concern is with civil society and what capitalism and fundamentalist zealotry do to it.

            And it was only in the afterward to the book that I think Barber hit upon a core principle (or maybe it was in the main text and I missed it, but it is crucial).  Those who favor “unrestrained capitalism would like us to think that markets are surrogates for democratic sovereignty because they permit us to ‘vote’ with our dollars or D-Marks or yen.  But economic choices are private, about individual needs and desires; whereas political choices are public, about the nature of public goods.  As a consumer, one may buy a powerful car that can go 130 miles per hour, yet without contradiction the very same person may as a citizen vote for speed limits in the name of public safety and environmental protection.”

            It may not be that Barber has gotten it all right.  But my sense is that he has grasped the core of important things that are happening on the planet.  His description of international corporations seems to me to agree with what one can read in the newspaper any given day; it also makes inherent sense that they would not be interested in regulation by local (that is, national) governments that might be interested in advancing other interests, such as public goods.  One hardly needs look beyond the front page to see evidence of jihad in its many forms.  There have been a couple of criticisms of Barber’s work, to the effect that capitalism is not as hostile to democracy as he maintains.  I think it is difficult to ferret out the “truth” about the relationship between capitalism and democracy, but I don’t take it as a given that unrestricted capitalism simultaneously promotes the interests of the public and a democratic system while it is seeking to enhance the bottom line.

            It doesn’t strike me that there is a necessary connection between commerce and democracy.  Commerce worked in Nazi Germany and it can work in any political system that does not intentionally thwart it (which system will eventually collapse anyway).  Nor is there any connection—quite the opposite, one can argue—between fundamentalism/zealotry and democracy.  There can be no doubt, on the other hand, that capitalism as an economic system works far better than anything else humanity has devised to trade goods and services.

Elliott and I were taking a walk a couple of nights after the November elections.  He asked me who I had voted for and whether or not those candidates had won.  He then asked me why I voted for the people I did.  Gulp.  That’s a tough question to answer in a way that makes sense to a just-turned 12-year-old.  But here was my effort.  I told him to imagine that everyone’s life was running in a horserace and that the horse you ride is a combination of your brains (your genetic inheritance) and family background (your environmental background).  Some people are born riding a thoroughbred and they will always do well in the race.  Most of us in the U.S. are born with average horses that will get us through the race, some in a slightly better position than others.  And some are born with an old burro—and sometimes the burro has a broken leg.  How will those people do, I asked him?  Not well, he thought.  My general approach to politics, I told him, is that the society needs to “take care of” those who were unlucky enough to be born with the burro.  Now, what “take care of” means is a wide-open question about which reasonable people can disagree.

            Quite coincidentally, after I had composed that paragraph, there was an editorial in the Star-Tribune that amazed me for its convergence on what I had written.  Matthew Miller wrote a brief analysis of the philosophy of John Rawls, probably the most well-known political philosopher of the 20^th Century, who had died the previous week.[9]  I have not read Rawls—his A Theory of Justice is one of those books I want to read before I die—but I was struck by his views as Miller described them.  Rawls suggests, as a thought experiment, that to create a just society one can imagine everyone in a “pre-birth” state of ignorance “where no one knows what their own traits will be—whether they will be rich or poor, beautiful or plain, smart or less so, talented or not, healthy or disabled.  (Whether, in my poor analogy for Elliott, they will be riding a thoroughbred or the old donkey.)  What kind of society would people agree on if they were all in that situation?  The central factor controlling where anyone starts is luck, Rawls says.

           

There is the pre-birth lottery that hands out brains, beauty, talent, and inherited wealth.  There’s a post-birth lottery that (via family) bequeaths value and schooling.  ‘The institutions of society favor certain starting places over others . . . yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert.’ . . . The vast inequalities of wealth and position we observe stem primarily from advantages for which people can’t take credit.  Behind a pre-birth veil of ignorance . . . we would agree these inequalities are just only if they most benefit those who end up not winning the pre-birth lottery and if the top spots in life are open to everyone in a system where we’ve made a serious effort to equalize opportunity. . . . ‘The natural distribution (of advantages) is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position.  These are simply natural facts.  What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts.’ . . . [But Rawls’s just society is not committed] to such old-time left-wing fetishes as equal incomes or equal ‘outcomes.’

What this means to a Rawlsian, Miller says, is that the government “tries to ensure equal chances of education and culture for persons similarly endowed and motivated” and guarantees “a decent floor of existence for society’s less lucky.”  Miller then cited two Rawlsian philosophers who added useful points:  one explained that “‘we have a special responsibility to arrange the starting points of American citizens in a way worthy of their claims to equality, but we don’t have a responsibility to save them from their mistakes as grown-ups.’”  Another said that one goal “‘is to set some limits on the power of luck to deform human lives.’”[10]

            If one takes “a decent floor of existence” as a public good, then one might argue that a small suggestion about the validity of Barber’s assertions about commerce and democracy is the comparative poverty rates among developed countries.[11]  The U.S. economy is more unrestricted than those of Europe and it seems to me there is a corresponding devaluation of public goods. There is also a greater concentration of wealth and poverty in the U.S. than in countries with more government intervention on behalf of the public interest.

            In the United States, many voters (and more importantly, perhaps, those many who do not vote) see little or no connection between their vote and what happens.  It is partly for the reasons Dahl explained—the system is complex and no one seems to be accountable.  (Complexity may be inescapable, however; life in the 21^st Century is complex, if only technologically and chronologically.)   That lack of perception of a connection between voting and public policy may also occur because people are not paying attention (anyone who says there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats is decidedly not paying attention). 

            I find it troubling when the nation seems to regard itself as the sheriff single-handedly responsible for law enforcement in a town in the Wild West.  Who likes the town bully?  Nor is clear to me why the U. S. should be the only major industrialized nation in the world that refuses to sign a treaty on improving the environment (the Kyoto accords), on criminalizing genocide, and on banning chemical and biological weapons.  (This is in part another example of the role the Senate plays.)

            I also worry when one sees public goods largely devalued.  The one exception seems to K-12 education; in an election when the voters of Minnesota went in large numbers for candidate who pledged or implicitly promised no new taxes or tax increases—which of course means that funding for public goods will be reduced substantially when the state faces a $3 billion budget deficit—the voters in large numbers also supported increasing their own taxes when they had school referenda on the ballot.  When people see a clear link between the taxes they will pay and the outcome, they appear to support paying more.  But taxes in general seem to many to go into a black hole (the state and federal governments) and do them no or very little good.[12]

            It is difficult to weave all these threads into a common strand and single conclusion.  To return to where I started, the idea of patriotism, I am persuaded by both Kazin and Barber that it is essential if one believes in a democratic society.  Barber because the alternatives are worse; Kazin because the country is the only sphere in which one can accomplish anything.

One of my friends has reacted sharply to recent circumstances.  “Woe to the least among us--the children, elderly, chronically physically and mentally ill, the poor and disenfranchised. . . .  [The author Michael Moore] asserted that in the U.S., both local and national news--in the interest of bolstering viewership and the consequent revenues for the stations that sell air time and the corporations that advertise--engender fear.  Not realistic fears, but fears of killer beas, snakes, school shootings, crazed snipers, aggressive drivers, e-coli, small pox, stem cell research, chronic wasting disease . . . and other people and things that APPEAR more dangerous than the facts warrant.  And what do viewers do with these irrational fears?  Moore argues that they buy guns, of course.  I argue that they might buy guns, but that the bigger threat to our society is that they distract and comfort themselves via consumption, further lining the pockets of corporate miscreants who use their profits to curry favor with politicians.”

“My prediction is that welfare and other safety nets (including social security)--such as they are now--will be gone in 20 years, as will a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body, as will affirmative action programs, as will programs to slow the rate of environmental destruction, and ketchup will once again become a vegetable, to list but a few changes that will set us back a good century. . . . I understand why at worst, so many fear and hate us, or else at best, think we've lost our collective mind.”

“[The author Morris Berman, in The Twilight of American Culture] musters evidence that U.S. society has about 100-150 years left:  1.  The concentration of more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands.  2.  A rising tide against anything that smacks remotely of “elitism”; . . . he views contemporary culture as anti-intellectual  (e.g., dismissing any assertion or acknowledgement of the complexity of things as elitist).  3.  An inner circle of powerful political elites . . . more concerned with fending off imagined threats from outside than with the well-being of the domestic population. . . .   4.  The corporatization of our culture, and its cancer-like spread throughout the globe.  According to Berman, all of these forces mutually reinforce one another.  An ignorant populace seeks self-fulfillment via mass consumption; the electronic media--that feed the consumption mentality and benefit from it--must appeal to the lowest common denominator, further reinforcing misplaced anti-elitist mob mentality; the power elite are more than happy to have the masses deal with their discontent and fear via consumption of Nike shoes and fast food rather than via any form of collective action, including voting based on information and careful thought.”

            I am not that pessimistic.  It is true that I am only looking at the glass as half full when it comes to contemplating the United States; Dahl leads in that direction as does Rawls.  Perhaps that is because my upbringing and education have led me to believe it can do much more.  One is always disappointed in those who do not live up to their potential (such as one’s children, for example) and that is perhaps where I am now.  But I also conclude—I must conclude—that we can do better.  Otherwise I should go live in Perth or Copenhagen or somewhere away from the disappointment at the directions in which my country seems to be going. That’s not going to happen since I have unbounded admiration for what we stand for and what our founding documents stand for—and for the pluralism that we promote.  Since I want my kids to grow up in a better world, and I want my country to help make that better world, I’ll stay put and see what little I can do make things better.  That may not end up sounding like a resounding statement of unbounded patriotism, but I don’t think any thoughtful person could make such a statement at any time if he or she believes the world could be made better and believes his or her country is not doing what it can to make it so.  I am not persuaded we are.[13]

            But the country’s ideals remain worth pursuing.  And I actually think the country is trying to achieve them, although there are clear differences between folks on how to get there.  My own sense is that in some ways the system—much though it is worthy of admiration, even if others have not emulated it—is simply inept.  A Senate with a rule that allows one person, or a small group of people, to kill legislation that the rest of the country wants (with a filibuster) is just not very good government, in my opinion.

            I share Kazin’s sentiments; I love my country.  I certainly would have fought in WWII, as did my father and father-in-law.  But one does end up with a sort of conditional patriotism:  knowing what they do, would my father and father-in-law have voluntarily fought for a country that engaged in genocide against Jews, or Muslims, or (name your group)?  Or on behalf of Saddam Hussein?  I hope not.  Fortunately, they didn’t have to worry about that.[14]

            Although I cannot claim to know a lot about all of human political/military history, there is one element to American behavior in the world that appears to me to be an aberration.  I was recently reading an article (which I have lost and cannot find) in which the author looked at arguments from two guys from think tanks, one relatively conservative and one relatively liberal, about the rise of an American “empire.”  The author concluded that Americans wouldn’t have an empire, mostly because they are uninterested in doing so.  That is what strikes me as the aberration:  is there another time in history when a nation or political entity had such enormous military power but did not use it to conquer people and add territory?  There have been the one-man empires—Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, probably others—that did not outlive their leader.  There have been imperial powers and would-be imperial powers—Rome, the Aztecs, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Dutch.  But the U.S. has generally not imitated its predecessors.  It amassed huge military might in WWII—and as soon as it won the war, it turned around and went home (while lending enormous financial and military support to its defeated enemies).  Nor has its post-WWII behavior been different, right up to the present.  It resisted communism on ideological grounds but didn’t take over any land or people along the way.  Misguided and even stupid as the Vietnam war was, we made no effort to conquer and control (one might say we just quit).  We bailed out of Korea except for troops along the truce line and now we have pretty much bailed out of Afghanistan.  Our small ventures into geographic imperialism (e.g., Cuba, the Philippines) were quickly ended.  Much of the U.S. itself the country bought, for Pete's sake (the Louisiana Purchase, Alaska, parts of the southwest), rather than obtained by war.  This is perhaps a glossy overview that ignores some sordid details but the general direction of American foreign policy seems to me to have been reasonably consistent since about 1900:  if we have to fight, get in, get out, and go back about our business, and let the rest of the world go to hell or someplace better, however it is able.  The fact that the United States has been uninterested in conquering and oppressing/subjugating by itself makes it easy to be a patriot--we seem to want to do good, or resist bad, but without acquiring territory or subjects after the effort is over.  (There is the issue of economic imperialism, but that seems to me to be a more indirect result of the American approach to its economy than conscious “imperialism,” if that term is to have any meaning.  The U.S. government has not put the darned McDonald’s everywhere on the planet.)

            So that's what I've been thinking about the past several months.  Ruminating might be a better term.  This summary may come across as highly negative or depressing but I don't intend it that way.  I'm quite irrepressibly positive about most things in life, including the U.S., so don't infer that I've become anti-American or anything of the sort.  I have not.

           

* * *

            After our travels west in August and the brief trips east to Chicago, life in the Engstrand house remained largely “dull normal,” in the apt words of my late friend Jack Clark.  Nothing of particular interest happened.  Elliott made the transfer from elementary to secondary school and decided, after two months, that he prefers this routine of changing teachers during the day rather than the same teacher all day long (although he concedes that he did not have a teacher in K-5 whom he did not like).  Krystin is in her senior year of high school and contemplating the alternatives for college.  She would like to spend a year in Americorps doing essentially volunteer work for the nation (she can’t join the Peace Corps because of her diabetes), but we learned to our surprise that only about one in five applicants gets in (they don’t have the funding to support any more than 20% of those who want to serve).  So that’s only an outside chance.

            As with schooling, Pat’s and my jobs go on as usual, too.  We both continue to like very much what we do, which is always an enviable position in life to be in. 

            We did see the second Harry Potter movie and will see, after this letter is sent, the second Lord of the Rings movie.  I am looking forward much more to the latter than I was to the former.  The Harry Potter movie was a stitch for this family, however.  Krystin can’t stand spiders and Pat can’t stand snakes; there are fairly long scenes that have large versions of both.  So they each missed part of the movie.

* * *

            As long been our family practice, we cut our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving.  So the house is decorated and we will invite family and friends over to renew relationships and enjoy their company.

I hope you have a fulfilling holiday season and a good year.

           

---

[1] Even if you have never been to Australia, never thought about going to Australia, or don’t even want to go to Australia, Bill Bryson’s In a Sunburned Country is worth reading.  I had never read any travel writing before picking up his book.  It is delightful—and not just because we have been there.  Alas, I cannot match his story-telling ability (or match the interesting things he does when he travels), so you must read my more workmanlike prose about less exciting travels.

[2] The pines also have cracks naturally running up and down and across their bark.  The Ranger told us all to stick our noses in the cracks.  Depending on the individual, the smell from the cracks is either that of vanilla or butterscotch.

[3] I have also long thought the same thing about seashells, but everything I have ever seen made of shells is tacky, tacky, tacky.  So we have a couple of bags of seashells in our basement, collected at various times we have been staying on the ocean, and do nothing with them.

[4] I am informed that “an exothermic reaction is one that produces heat as opposed to one that requires heat (an endothermic reaction).  Once they are started, exothermic reactions generally continue until they exhaust at least one of the necessary reactants.”

[5] The data come from Child Well-Being, Child Poverty and Child Policy in Modern Nations, published by The Policy Press, 2001, edited by Koen Vleminckx and Timothy M. Smeeding and which, according to the press release from Syracuse University, academic home to one of the co-editors, “provides, for the first time, state-based poverty rates that include benefits and taxes not captured by the ‘official’ Census Bureau poverty statistics, and ones that are comparable with those of other nations.”

[6] Yes, I also read books, but I read more book reviews than books because I don’t have enough time to read all the books I’d like to!

[7] I recall a conversation Pat and I had with a Dutch book publisher while sitting having a beer along side one of the canals of Amsterdam.  I can’t now remember the context but the guy commented something to the effect that the poverty rate in the Netherlands was very low because everyone was minimally taken care of.  He said that they could do that because the Dutch are very wealthy and industrious and they can afford to do so.  I could add that Americans are also very wealthy, and industrious, so why can’t we do the same?

[8] I have no idea if Christopher Hitchens read Barber.  But on the anniversary of the September 11 attack Hitchens wrote in the Boston Globe the following comments about Osama bin Laden and his followers:  “Here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. . . .  On the one hand [the open society of the U.S.].  On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. . . .  There’s no time to waste on the stupid argument that such a deadly movement represents a sort of ‘cry for help’ or is a thwarted expression of poverty and powerlessness.  Osama bin Laden and his fellow dogmatists say openly that they want to restore the lost caliphate. . . .  Only a complete moral idiot can believe for an instant that we are fighting against the wretched of the earth.  We are fighting . . . the scum of the earth. . . .  It is important to realize at the outset that a victory for those forces, of which bin Ladenism is only the most extreme, is in two senses of the word impossible.  Impossible, obviously, from a moral point of view and from the viewpoint of survival.  It has taken us a long time to evolve a society that, however imperfectly, respects political pluralism and religious diversity. . . .  A society that attempts to employ the objective standards of scientific inquiry and that has brought us the Hubble telescope and the unraveling of the chain of DNA.  Clearly, there can be no compromise between this and the ravings of those who study dreams and are deluded by wild prophecies and who regard women as chattel and unbelievers as sacrificial animals. . . .  Their degradation is bottomless.”  Talk about a description of jihad.  And I could not agree more with Hitchens.

[9] Robert Dahl is a political scientist who does political philosophy.  John Rawls was (he died in the week before the editorial was written) a philosopher who looked at questions of justice, which clearly touched on political systems.

[10] Few if any in this society have truly made it on their own.  Anyone who has gone to college has had a subsidy of some kind.  Anyone who attended a public university as a resident undergraduate has had 40-70% of their education paid for by the state.  Anyone who has obtained a post-baccalaureate degree from a public university has received a huge subsidy—and anyone who has become a doctor has received a subsidy it would take him or her decades to pay back if they had to repay it.  I do not know what the subsidies are in private universities and colleges but there are subsidies.

[11] Barber offers an opinion in his book that, if he is right, confirms what I have sometimes wondered.  Instead of identifying countries as Third World, Second World, and First World (largely in terms of economic development), he maintains that many in the “Third” world are really in the “Terminal World”:  they have no natural resources or anything else that the world economy wants or needs and they are doomed to relentless chaos and poverty (e.g., sub-Saharan Africa).

[12] On the other hand, I think the evidence of history, as best as I can read it, suggests that capitalism is far and away the best economic system we have devised.  I would be among the last to advocate abandoning capitalism.  I just think it needs restraint.  As, of course, did Theodore Roosevelt, among others.

[13] I would not have gotten a good grade on this little literature review from any professor for whose course I wrote it.  I could not knit it all into a coherent summary.  Maybe I could have pulled all my thoughts together in another month of serious reflection--but I haven’t the energy.  And if I took another month, then this tome would be late!

[14] I am aware that Native Americans would take exception to that comment.  The despoliation of Indian culture in this country, however, took place long before my parents or Pat’s parents were born.  Since I’m not keen on the idea of collective guilt, I do not believe they were fighting in WWII for a country that was committing atrocities.  We do, however, live today with the results of American expansion into the west and its impact on Native American society.  While neither I nor my father is personally responsible for what happened, I am of the school of thought that as a society we have obligations to those whose culture we decimated.