Atheism chic

About a year ago I was writing in this space about the neverending debate between "Darwinists" and "creationists." In using the term "neverending" I'm speaking from a purely pragmatic viewpoint: the debate began "raging" in 1925 with the John Scopes "Monkey" trial, had some kerosene thrown on it 30 years later when a Broadway play based on the Scopes trial hit the boards and then the silver screen, and in recent years has flamed up yet again. 80-plus years of argument does nearly qualify as "neverending," I think.

Last New Year's I brought this subject up chiefly to comment on the poisonous incivility that has informed the issue. The single biggest poisoner: biologist Richard Dawkins, a passionate darwinian who has swallowed that particular version of evolutionary theory whole and finds in it not only justification for atheism, but for a noisy, high-profile crusade against religious belief of any kind.

Nothing new about this of course. Atheists have been screaming about the irrationality of religious belief for centuries. But Dawkins is unusually vehement, even for a typical village God-denier. With sneers, jeers and buckets of snot, he dismisses anyone who refuses to accept the darwinian whole cloth he has swallowed as either ignorant or an idiot or both.

My chief objection, a year ago, was not so much to Dawkins' opinions. As I'll point out in a moment, there is absolutely nothing new about them. Science and secular philosophy have been sneering at religion since Darwin and long before that. No, my main objection was to Dawkins' childishness, his arrogant sense of certainty, that his opinion is the only correct one and that anyone who disagrees with him should be locked up as dangerous. You see, I met a great many Richard Dawkinses when I was in elementary school. They were the often-bespectacled nerdy boys who never got picked for kickball. Resentful of their nerd-status on the playground, they tended to spend recess walking around the perimeter of the schoolyard, talking about Einstein. To compensate for the fact that they never got picked for kickball or asked to run for class president, they put on a cloak of intellectual superiority and went around calling anyone who wasn't interested in the theory of relativity an idiot.

I knew these kids well. I was one of them. But I grew up. Evidently Richard Dawkins didn't.

But now I have something new to object to. For some reason Dawkins and fellow atheist tub-thumpers such as Sam Harris are getting boatloads, truckloads, stadium-loads of publicity lately, and I'm still trying to figure out why.

As I just pointed out, there is absolutely nothing new about atheism. Shelley published a spirited defense of it in 1809. Baron d'Holbach was pitching atheism as part of the French Enlightenment in the mid-18th century.

And you can take it back much, much further. Bertrand Russell, the most famous atheist of the 20th century, claimed that his own view of the universe was essentially that of Lucretius, the 1st-century B.C. philosopher of science who reduced the entire universe to atoms, and is therefore considered by many to be the father of reductionist materialism, the notion that if we can simply reduce everything to the smallest possible components of what it's made of, we will have figured out the secrets of everything. Russell discussed his debt to Lucretius in his most famous book, The History of Western Philosophy. Why Russell, a mathematician, was so proud to adopt the worldview of a man who lived 1,500 years before such basic scientific tools as the telescope and microscope is a question no one ever bothered to ask. I would ask him now, but he died in 1971.

Even as Dawkins and his ilk aspire to reduce biology to chemistry and hence, to pure mechanics, some are arguing that reductionist materialism has taken us about as far as it can. But that still leaves me wondering why Dawkins and company are getting so much press. Dawkins' name pops up on Arts and Letters Daily.com at least once a week. His name was recently on the cover of Time magazine and it also seems to be on an awful lot of people's lips. You'd think the media had never seen an atheist before.

A recent issue of Wired magazine trumpeted from its cover: "The New Atheism: Inside the Crusade Against Religion."

Why have reductionist materialism and its nephew, atheism, become the latest version of radical chic? And why is Richard Dawkins suddenly as big a celebrity as Paris Hilton?

Political explanations have been offered. I privately wondered, not long ago, if atheism's current vogue on the covers of major magazines might not have something to do with President Bush. Cultural trends are always reactions to something, and in the United States anyway, there is no cultural catalyst quite like an unpopular president.

While I was thinking these thoughts, Jonah Goldberg verbalised them for me on National Review Online. Since Bush has been demonized for his supposedly-messianic sense of the rightness of his cause, and moreover since he is a self-professed evangelical Christian, Goldberg suggested that the nearly-pathological levels of hatred for Bush on the left and in academia may indeed lie at the core of the current craze for making Christian fundamentalism, and religion in general, out as the latest great threat to American democracy. Secularists, most of them on the left, are screaming about the "danger" of religious believers and their "certainty" about the truth of their beliefs. (The same people, meanwhile, have little or nothing to say about Islamic fundamentalism, looking the other way while it stages suicide bombings and flies airplanes into skyscrapers.)

Goldberg's logical retort to militant secularists : You decry believers for their "certainty." What about YOUR "certainty?" Dawkins is so "certain" that there isn't a God that he wants to round up and imprison those who are certain that there is. Why is he allowed his "certainty," while those who don't share it are labeled "dangerous?"

I have another question for those who believe that if only we abolish religion from the earth, we'll all be living in a utopia of peace and brotherhood, "relating to each other instead of to some fictitious deity." Religious belief, we are told, has given the world only intolerance, bigotry and genocide. Even if that were true, which it isn't, (Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, has a rich humanistic tradition) if you want to check up on religious bigotry, intolerance and advocacy of genocide, I would forget about Pope Benedict XVI, or even Jerry Falwell, and go talk to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. That's his billiard-cue.

Anyway, here's my question: have any of you "atheist-chic" types taken a look at recent history? Because I have a news flash for you: despite John Lennon's treacly little song Imagine, with its simple-minded vision of a religion-free paradise, atheism does not have much of a track record for promoting peace and brotherhood.

In fact atheism's track record reads more like a rap sheet: Stalin made atheism the state religion of his utopia, and quite a utopia it was: Siberian labor camps running at full capacity, secret police pounding on doors in the middle of the night, innocent people shot through the head in cellars, family members disappearing never to be heard from again, a general atmosphere of terror and paranoia everywhere. But those nasty old churches had been closed and turned into museums, so all of this had to be to the good, right?

More recently we have North Korea, the atheistic paradise in which those caught practicing religion have their heads crushed by steamrollers.

John Lennon sang wistfully that he was a "dreamer," then added "but I'm not the only one." I saw these words on a bumper sticker recently and they made my blood run cold. If atheism's record for compassion is anything to go by, Lennon's dreamy notion that "the world will be as one" after religious belief has been banned is a bone-chilling one. (Or perhaps I should say "bone-crushing.")

But getting back to my original subject, the debate between "darwinists" and "creationists," I really don't think this debate will ever be settled, never mind Richard Dawkins' belief that he's on the verge of great, God-destroying scientific breakthroughs.

Why? Because the two sides are not even speaking the same language. Despite the gaps in Darwin's theory, (and it DOES have gaps in it, never mind what Dawkins tells you: Darwin lacked the equipment and the data to speculate about, for example, the living cell, and his elegant theory, while it does account for much, does not jive with fossil evidence) its proponents claim to be speaking the language of science. "No heaven, No hell, just science," said the cover of Wired.

Well, that's fine. But we have tended, over the past century, to make science the new religion. Dawkins gets points from the secular left for his supposedly-honest desire to subject religion to the same criteria of scrutiny as science. This is disingenuous at best, sheer party propaganda at worst. Why should faith in science replace faith in God? Really, why should it? I believe in the benefits of scientific research, but I see no reason to dethrone God and put science in his place. Science loves to brag about how smart it is, but science has frequently been wrong. Why should we condemn religion for its mistakes and give science a pass for its own? Both are human artifacts.

The enthronement of science in the 20th-21st century mind, believe it or not, has a precedent. The 18th century similarly enthroned "reason," with science under reason's umbrella. The Enlightenment, as led by the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and yes, Baron d'Holbach, convinced thinkers in the West that man was a fundamentally a rational animal who, once he was shorn of his demons and superstitions, would follow reason ever forward into the daylight of peace, tolerance and forebearance.

Then along came the French Revolution, running amok with guillotines, swimming in blood. So much for reason. And if that wasn't enough to convince everyone that reason was a pretty wobbly peg to hang your hat on, there followed the Napoleonic wars, World War I, World War II and everything else they brought in their train.

We have all benefitted tremendously from science. And it is good to keep our minds free of cobwebs. But the enthronement of science as the new be-all and end-all makes no more sense to me than the enthronement of reason proved to be, and by the way I, for one, would not want to live in a world governed by a council of Richard Dawkinses.

Religion, unlike science, requires the leap of faith. This initially made me suspicious of Intelligent Design theory because, like all who were raised in a world steeped in science, I could not take seriously a "scientific" proposition that began with a religious idea, e.g. that there is a God, and that we are going to undertake a study of nature aimed at proving that there is a God. Science doesn't start with such suppositions. It analyses the evidence and then draws conclusions, it doesn't begin with conclusions.

But it's this very leap of faith that will keep the two sides from ever really finding common ground. Michael J. Behe's book "Darwin's Black Box" (1996) calls into question some of the presuppositions of the darwinist flavor of natural selection, and puts forth the idea that the irreducible complexity of nature (significantly, in the living cell) cannot be accounted for by the baby-steps approach to natural selection put forth in Darwin, and therefore must be accounted for by some other means. Behe sees intelligent design as that means. Dawkins hoots and jeers, calling the idea "Behe's empty box." But I see every bit as much "certainty" in Dawkins as in Behe, and not a shred more reason to believe one rather than the other.

With this "debate" having received so much shrill media attention recently, I suppose it's no surprise, the rapidity with which it reached the level of the funny papers. Just a couple of weeks ago, a pre-Christmas entry of Berkeley Breathed's Opus comic, featuring the funny little penguin we all remember from Breathed's 1980's Bloom County strip, had Opus the Penguin and Steve Dallas the sleazy lawyer playing the roles, respectively, of a Dawkins and a Behe. Throughout the strip they conduct their debate at the level of "Was created!" "Just happened!" And neither has any real evidence to back up his claim. Then, at the end, they part in a spirit of yuletide reconciliation...blowing raspberries at each other.

I think that pretty well says it. Bring on the next big debate. And keep in mind what I quoted atheist Arthur C. Clarke as saying in a blog posting a few months ago: "The truth will be far stranger."

Happy New Year.

A Christmas Letter

My counselor urged me to write a letter to my beloved younger sister, Lynn, who died on September 10, 2004. Initially I thought the idea rather silly, but went ahead and wrote the letter. Here it is. This is my holiday offering to anyone who, like me, is feeling sad at this time of year for having lost a loved one.

Dear Lynne,

I’m spelling your name the way you liked it spelled, although since you died, I’ve gone back to spelling it the way it was spelled on your birth certificate. That’s because I’m pretending you’re actually going to read this, and I know you always preferred “Lynne” to “Lynn,” although, personally, I never saw anything wrong with the original spelling. By the way, after you died, I asked Madelon if she knew whether there were any special reason Mom decided to name you “Lynn” when you were born. Madelon said there was no special reason, just that Mom had always wanted a daughter named Lynn. The “Edith” part, your middle name, you know about of course: that was Grandma Winrow's name.

I’m writing this in the midst of a season, and in a place, both of which you loved more than anything. Yes, it’s officially the holiday season now, December 1st as I write this. And guess what? I’m writing to you from Spokane. And guess what further? There is snow on the ground. And on top of all that, I have XM Satellite radio streaming over my computer speakers, and as I type these words, somebody is playing Angels We Have Heard On High on the piano. I’m in the attic of an old Victorian house in Spokane, at Christmastime, in a landscape filled with snow, writing to you as Christmas music streams over the Internet. If you were here, you’d be in seventh heaven, I know. If you were here, I know what we would be doing: stringing lights, putting up decorations, playing the familiar holiday CDs…and laughing, laughing, laughing. That’s what you and I did best together, and most, although admittedly not quite so much at the end.

Except sometimes. Remember the day, I think it was in February or March of 2004, maybe six months before you died, when we went shopping together to Target and Kohl’s out in Eastlake? We were looking, I think, for a bedspread for my bed. It was a Saturday, overcast and gray. Walking around the aisles of the store, we passed the little girls’ section and, spotting a “Barbie” bedspread, you suggested I buy that. Then you added to that a “Hello Kitty” telephone, and we were off and running with another of our hysterical gags. “This is KELLEY’S room? A ‘Barbie’ bedspread and a ‘Hello Kitty’ telephone?” “Oh, you know Kelley, he buys whatever’s on sale.” And we laughed and laughed all the way home. It was like old times.

You remember the old postcard cliché, “Wish you were here.”

Hemingway sought to write “the truest sentence” he knew. And the truest sentence I know is “Wish you were here.”

Wish YOU were here, that is. Christmas in Spokane. Bing Crosby’s home town. Our place. Tonight, or rather this afternoon because you were usually drunk-asleep by evening, we would have the 102,000th running of White Christmas on the VCR, and I’d be rolling my eyeballs because as you know that never was MY favorite movie. I always preferred Holiday Inn, (despite the comically racist "Lincoln’s Birthday” number) mainly because I much prefer Fred Astaire as a foil to Bing Crosby over Danny Kaye, whom I always found just about unbearable. But I liked the music from White Christmas well enough; who could dislike Irving Berlin? Say, do you remember the video I sent you from Moscow, Christmas, 1993? Remember on the videotape, it was about 3:30 or 4:00 in the afternoon and already dark outside because it does that in Moscow at Christmas, and we were waiting for our Russian dinner guests to arrive and I had White Christmas going on the VCR and I panned the camcorder across the TV screen so you could see that we were watching that movie, or at least had it on for background noise? I almost felt you were with me then. Remember, later on the videotape when all of us, Chris, me, Sasha, Nadya, Bob, Masha and Anya, were opening presents, and I panned around the room and had everyone say “hello” to you?

I wish I could do that now. It’s Christmas in Spokane, and there’s snow on the ground and you’re not here. There’s something wrong with that.

How many times did we talk about coming back here? And that’s all we did, just talk about it. And it would have been so easy to make it happen, as Valerie showed me. And by the way, when you quoted Terry Lawson as saying Spokane was “ruined” now, you were misinformed. I’ve spoken to Terry since Valerie and I moved here last spring, and found out what really lay behind that remark: Terry just hates cities, that’s all, and she thinks Spokane is too big a city. Gimme a break. When we moved here in April, she was living in Chattaroy, a wide spot in the road on Highway 2 about 25 miles north of Spokane. She said she “pitied” me living near downtown Spokane. Was she crazy? Spokane is no bigger than Chula Vista. I didn’t think I needed “pity” at all. I was glad to be here. Chattaroy? It’s nothing but a bunch of mobile homes, at least what I could see from the highway. If Terry wants to live in a huddle of mobile homes out in the woods, fine for her. I’d rather be in town, as long as the town is Spokane.

“Ruined?” I’m here to tell you Spokane is still as charming as it was when we were kids and used to ride the North Monroe Street bus downtown on Saturday afternoons. (Remember those horrible old green buses Spokane used to have in the 1960s?)

You would still recognize downtown Spokane, although a few things have changed. Riverfront Park was not here when you and I lived here, but that’s an improvement. We could stroll through it together now. You’d like it. There’s even a carousel. The old Bon Marche building is still there, although Macy’s has engulfed and devoured the Bon Marche store itself. The Parkade Plaza, a landmark in our childhood, is still there, although the Ice Creamery and that place we used to go for German wurst are gone. The old Main and Post Market is gone, and so is the Post Theater, where I remember going to see Thunderball one hot summer afternoon. The old, red Spokesman-Review building is still there, although it’s had a substantial facelift. Clarke’s Old Book Store is gone. The old Crescent department store building, which you loved because it looked like an old-fashioned department store out of I Love Lucy or Miracle on 34th Street, is still there, but it’s no longer a department store. It’s been converted to office space for rental and is now called The Crescent Center.

Perhaps the change you would find most dismaying is that the Woolworth’s where we used to stop for a hot dog and a cup of coffee before boarding the bus for home, is gone. There’s a Nordstrom’s where it used to be, and in fact that entire block is now a three-tier shopping mall. Oh well. There are still plenty of places around where we could drop in for coffee and a hot dog if you were here. There’s a nice little pizza place right around the corner from our house where Valerie and I often go for lunch.

But the river is unchanged, as is Riverside State Park and Bowl and Pitcher monument, where you and I went lure-losing that legendary summer day and where, as you know, Carla and I scattered your ashes on October 29, 2004. In short, Spokane is still much as we left it. The old neighborhood where we lived, around the intersection of Francis and Alberta over on the north side, is almost unchanged, although your old school, Loma Vista Elementary, is gone: there’s a park where it used to be. Jamison’s and Pete’s Pill Box are gone, but that little strip mall where they were located is still there; there’s still a little grocery there, and a Domino’s Pizza.

I have an important issue I want to discuss with you this Christmas. It has to do with your death.

I suppose anyone who loses a loved one is going to try and find some rationale for blaming themselves in that person’s death. I have to tell you that when we told Dr. Leon that Dad was getting more confused in the evenings, and Dr. Leon concluded that it might be due to the Vicodin, and promptly changed his painkiller prescription from Vicodin to Methadone, I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me (it SHOULD have) that since you were taking most of Dad’s Vicodin and Dad wasn’t really getting that much of it, the Vicodin COULD NOT be the culprit. I didn’t think to say that. To my everlasting shame, I remember thinking, when I heard that Dr. Leon had made that decision, that perhaps having the Vicodin taken away from you would “cure” your painkiller addiction. Silly me. But whatever culpability I bear ends there. I’m not a pharmacist; the fact that Methadone is stronger than Vicodin, and lasts longer in the bloodstream, was something I could not be expected to know.

But damn it, our sister Carla should have said something. She’s a NURSE, for chrissakes, she knows about pharmaceuticals. It was she who told me, after you took that deadly overdose, that Methadone is stronger than Vicodin. The whole family knew you were taking Dad’s Vicodin. Carla should have put two and two together and figured that if the Vicodin were taken away, you would naturally start taking the Methadone. And Carla should have sat you down and told you, right to your face, “Look, we all know you’ve been taking the Vicodin. Methadone is actually stronger, even if the pills appear smaller. BE CAREFUL WITH IT.” But she didn’t bother to do that. Nobody said a word to you about the properties of Methadone. And I suspect the reason you overdosed that morning was that very one: the little white Methadone pills were smaller than the ovular, yellow Vicodin pills, so you thought you had to take more to get the effect you wanted. You took three, when one would have been sufficient. The autopsy found 15 milligrams in your bloodstream. Those were 5 mg tablets. Carla should have said something to you. You might be alive now, and helping me string Christmas lights, if she had.

And here’s the supreme irony: the Methadone proved ineffectual against Dad’s pain, and Dr. Leon eventually canceled the prescription. Too late to save you, unfortunately.

After Dad died, we sold the house. I was sad to see it leave the family after 65 years (remember? Grandpa Winrow bought that house in 1941.) But the people who bought it did not tear it down as the lawyer thought they would. They’ve decided to fix the place up. Lord knows it was overdue for fixing up. That makes me feel somewhat better anyway, and I would hope it would you, yoo.

I promised you, in a letter I wrote six years ago this Christmas, that I would never leave you. I’m glad I lived to keep that promise. I’m only sorry I didn’t get to keep it longer.

Kelley

One boy's night at the movies

On Friday night, October 4, 1968, I had an experience that changed my life.

I went to the movies.

Tonight I'm thinking about that night. It was 38 years ago, and I was a few days shy of 13, as tonight I'm a few shy of 51. How many of us get to have a life-changing experience before turning 13? I don't know, but I did.

Sure, I’d been to the movies plenty of times. What kid growing up in the 1960s didn’t go to the movies a lot? But it was on that Friday, a week ahead of my 13th birthday, that I saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time.

How bowled over was I by the experience of this film, that last week that I would be 12 years old?

This bowled over: It was the closest thing I’d ever had, up to that point in my life, to a religious experience.

After 38 years it remains so.

The setting was the Garland Theater in Spokane, Washington, which in those days was a Cinerama theater. To anyone who has seen this film on their home screen, even if we’re talking about 40 inches worth of flat-screen plasma, I have to tell you that there was nothing to compare to seeing it in Cinerama. The cutting-edge moviegoing experience of that era, (and short-lived thanks to its cost) Cinerama used a then-revolutionary three-camera technique to create a screen image so wide that it actually went partially around the audience, creating a you-are-there effect that was simply incredible. The films that were shot in Cinerama, including How The West Was Won, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago, The Sand Pebbles and 2001 used Cinerama to full effect. No one who ever saw one of these, or the handful of other films that were made in Cinerama before the technique was scrapped, will ever forget the experience.

In the case of 2001, there I was, in space, confronting the enormity of the universe and the familiar yet-so-alien sun in the distance, Richard Strauss’ music from Also Sprach Zarathustra bathing the whole thing in a sunrise-glow of C-major affirmation, ironically raising the curtain on a world that, before the film was over, would be many light-years away from the homey, familiar reassurance of C-major.

I went home from the movies that night in the grip of an unfamiliar emotion: awe.

2001 was, and remains, unique. Nothing like it had ever been made before, and no one who wasn’t around back then will appreciate the furor it stirred up when it left many of its early audiences scratching their heads or worse. Some, actually angered by a movie that did not cater to their accustomed notions of plot, dialogue and character development, demanded their money back. The film’s Hollywood premiere, while no rival in the scandal department to that which attended the 1913 Paris premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, nevertheless saw its share of controversy. Rock Hudson famously got up and walked out of the premiere, muttering “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?”

His confusion was not entirely unjustified. 2001 tells its story in a manner heavily visual and hardly verbal at all. In fact the film’s first spoken words occur about 45 minutes after the opening credits. To puzzle it out, a viewer has to be able to recognize and intuit visual clues, something movie audiences of 1968 were not used to, and in fact movie audiences of 2006 would probably have the same problems. It is, admittedly, a problematical film in some ways, and speaking for myself, I had to see it several times, read the novel based on the script and do a great deal of reading about the film before it all made sense to me.

So what was the attraction of this $10.5 million visual enigma to a boy on the eve of his 13th birthday?

Like many boys who grew up in the era of Project Gemini, Project Apollo and the race to the moon, I was utterly infatuated with the romance of space. I wanted to be an astronaut. So did many of my friends. We would greedily glom on to any book, magazine, TV show or movie that had anything to do with space. When we learned, earlier that year, that a big movie with the words “space odyssey” and the odd-sounding but highly intriguing year “2001” in its title was about to come out, we were of one unanimous conviction (never mind that none of us quite knew what the word “odyssey” meant): we had to see this picture.

What was I expecting when I went into the theater that night? I really don’t remember, but certainly nothing like what I got. Amongst ourselves we had established that the film had something to do with life in the future, hence the “2001” of the title, and we knew that it was also going to have something to do with rocket ships. That was all any of us knew or cared about.

I used the term “religious experience” above. Actually, when the film had just been completed, (and it was among the most expensive movies ever made up to that time) Arthur C. Clarke, who had written the short story upon which the movie was based and had collaborated on the screenplay, joked that MGM didn’t know it, but the studio had just “made the first $10 million religious movie.” Clarke, an atheist, thought he was being ironic.

The plot’s main premise gave rise to Clarke’s joke, though, and for those who asked “What was it?” about the famous black monolith in the film but never waited around for an answer, here’s the skinny:

The premise of 2001 was that an ancient civilization from elsewhere in the universe, never identified or even seen but obviously way ahead of ours, was aware, four million years ago, that the primitive ancestors of human beings, the “man-apes” of the African veldt, were on the verge of extinction. Knowing that if these hairy hominids are allowed to die off there will be no human history, they decide to save us. The black monolith is the artifact they mysteriously place on earth. It somehow communicates the idea to the starving man-apes that they can use bones for weapons. They do so, first killing animals for food and then vanquishing a rival tribe of apes that’s monopolizing their water supply. Our ancestors have been taught how to use primitive weapons. Tools will come next. The apes and their descendants – us – are saved.

Then comes the famous scene when one of the apes throws a bone high into the air and, spinning, it suddenly turns into a spaceship – the fastest four million-year leap in film history.

In the film it’s 2001 now, and another one of these black monoliths turns up on the moon, which has of course been colonized. (In the late 1960s, with manned space exploration proceeding by giant, televised leaps, many expected that there would be American, and probably Soviet moon bases by 2001.) Scientists on the moon dig the thing up, quickly ascertain that it was not put there by any natural process, and are of course astounded as well as puzzled. What was it, they wondered along with the audience? Why was it there?

It was ‘The Sentinel’ from Clarke’s original story of that title. The ancient aliens who saved us from extinction knew that sooner or later we would reach our own moon. They planted a second monolith there as a kind of alarm system, which is the reason that second monolith, at the end of the film’s Clavius sequence, suddenly shocks everyone by emitting a blast of earsplitting radio noise at Jupiter. The implied message is that there is some invisible nexus in the neighborhood of Jupiter through which our cosmic saviors can receive information. The radio blast from the monolith is to alert them that mankind has found and dug up that thing, and that soon someone from earth will be heading for Jupiter, seeking what’s on the other end of that radio signal.

Sure enough, we humans being the curious creatures that we are, 18 months later the spacecraft Discovery I, with a crew including astronauts Dave Bowman and Frank Poole (Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood) is on its way to Jupiter in search of what that radio-shriek was all about.

The rest we know: Bowman, the only astronaut left after the somewhat-unbalanced computer HAL tries to eliminate the crew, whom he sees as jeopardizing the mission, ends up passing through that space-nexus himself (the famous “light show” that the era's hippies enjoyed so much after dropping acid) and ends up being assimilated into the ancient cosmic civilization himself after dying a symbolic death in the eerie “white hotel suite” sequence at the end of the film. The “star-baby” seen orbiting Earth at the movie’s close is Bowman, reborn.

When Clarke called this film “religious,” he thought he was making a funny. But when I came to understand the film’s real story, I understood why I went home from the movies that night feeling so shook. The fact that I was not quite 13 notwithstanding, there was a mind-expanding aspect to the movie that should have had a similar effect on any sensitive individual who experienced it.

But I wasn't just a sensitive individual. I was a child. How does a 13 year-old deal with awe? Many years later I saw a “Bloom County” cartoon that illustrated my post-2001 dilemma perfectly. Oliver Wendell Jones, the precocious, baldheaded little black kid with the thick glasses, is up on his roof late at night with his telescope, gazing out at the stars. As he does so, he reflects on the infinity of space, how it goes on and on and on and on and on and on…in the final panel, he’s sitting at the kitchen table with a stricken look on his face, a chocolate-chip cookie in his mouth. “Sometimes you just have to have a chocolate-chip cookie,” he says. That’s how I felt that night, and when I got home I had to have a chocolate-chip cookie. Or my version of a chocolate-chip cookie, which was to ask my younger sister, who had not gone to the movies with me that night but had stayed home and watched the usual cavalcade of Friday-night TV that we always watched, to come down to my room with me, sit there for a while and visit with me while I got into bed. I remember specifically asking her to give me a precis of what had happened that night on The Guns of Will Sonnett, a western starring Walter Brennan and Dack Rambo that we watched every Friday. Coming back from the depths of space and the world beyond, I craved the “chocolate-chip cookie” of a good, familiar western. So Lynn sat there and told me what had happened on The Guns of Will Sonnett that night. After that I was able to calm down and go to sleep.

But awe, like the adrenaline of a roller-coaster ride, can be highly addictive, and I soon became a huge fan of this movie, a regular 2001 groupie. In those pre-VCR, pre-DVD days you had to see a picture where you could see it, and over the next few years, as I progressed through my teens, I went to see 2001 in venues as far and wide as the local drive-in movie, or a boxlike, distinctly non-Cinerama theater in Imperial Beach, CA, or a theater in San Diego which required my friend Randy and me to ride our bikes 10 miles each way in order to see the film. Once I smuggled a tape recorder into a movie theater to record the sound (not much to record in such a non-verbal picture). By 1974 I had seen the film nine times.

1974 was the year something called “Channel 100” came to our house, a primitive forerunner of HBO. The cable era, in short, had dawned. Since cable arrived in our lives, and then VHS and then DVD, I have lost track of the number of times I’ve seen 2001. It’s probably over 100 by now. But no repeat viewing, and no moviegoing experience that I have ever had has been anything like that October night back when Lyndon Johnson was still president of the United States, when the hottest thing on the nation’s television screens every night was the Vietnam war, when the Beatles’ famous “white album” had just appeared, when man had not yet walked on the moon, when the infamous “Heidi Bowl” football game was still a month away and Elvis Presley’s legendary “comeback” TV special was two months in the future; when the crew of the U.S.S. Pueblo was still being held prisoner in North Korea, when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. had only been dead a few months.

And how different the world was then. Part of 2001’s great success, particularly with the younger generation, stemmed from its sub-plot, which parses a struggle of man against machine as Dave Bowman manages to re-enter the spaceship out of which HAL has tried to lock him, via the daredevil stunt of going through the emergency airlock without his space helmet. Remember, this was the Cold War era: the U.S. and USSR were utilizing intercontinental ballistic missile technology in that very race to the moon that had us teenage boys of the 1960s so romantically energized. But many of our elders, the college kids of those years, were highly mistrustful of galloping technology, an attitude you would hardly find dominating any college campus today. Still, it was no coincidence that the very year of 2001’s release saw many of those same hippies who dropped acid and went off to enjoy its penultimate scene as “the ultimate trip” heading for the hills to try and recreate a primitive agriculture-based lifestyle in various drafty, smelly communes.

I’m no longer as awed by 2001 as I was on that magic night when I saw it for the first time. And after 100-plus viewings, it has (incredibly enough) become the sort of cable-TV visitor that I just might surf on past, depending on my mood. But if I put down the remote control, it isn’t hard to imagine myself back to that October night when I came home so shaken I had to be talked back to earth by way of a TV western. And Kubrick’s masterpiece is still the gold standard of movies about space. The 1984 attempt at a sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, was a pathetic bit of formula-plot nonsense, a lame gloss that one critic dismissed as “like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.” Star Wars? Forget it. That’s kiddie stuff, cowboys-and-Indians with laser guns. No; 2001: A Space Odyssey was a once-in-a-lifetime artistic triumph, a product of its time that could not have been produced in any other, which as far as I’m concerned puts it in the same gallery with Handel’s Messiah and Michelangelo’s David. If I’m no longer as awed by it as I once was, I’m aware, as are all who ever truly attempted to appreciate it, that despite its whimsical premise about mankind being saved by space aliens, which prompted Arthur Clarke’s little ha-ha about religion, its underlying message remains unchanged, a message for all time: that no matter how far our technology takes us, no matter how smug we become about what we think we know, it just may turn out that the truth will be far stranger. Those are actually Arthur Clarke’s own words. And they’re good words, words to remember. Words to keep us humble. Because he just may turn out to be right.

Harold Hill? Forget It. Bill Scharf was the music man

Photo at right: Bill Scharf and the author. Rockville, MD, 1995.








I'm listening, as I write this, to an old monaural recording of Beethoven's opera Fidelio.

This live performance, on CD, was made April 26, 1952 in Frankfurt-am-Main, in what was then called West Germany.

I myself would not visit Frankfurt until the mid-1980s. In fact in 1952 I wasn't even born yet.

But William J. Scharf of Cleveland, Ohio was alive, kicking and collecting recordings like this one, and it would be my great good fortune, 37 years later, to make his acquaintance, not to mention the acquaintance of his collection of opera recordings.

And that's not to mention the acquaintance of his remarkable personality. Now that was my great good fortune.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to live to a biblical old age, as George Burns and Bob Hope did.

If you ask most people whether they'd like to live to be 100 years old, most people would say yes reflexively -- dying isn't on the "fave" list of anyone I can think of.

But supposing you did live to be 100 years old. Since so few people live that long, by the time you got there, just about everyone you knew in your life would be gone, that is unless you were still making friends in your eighties and nineties.

My pal Bill Scharf didn't live to be 100. He died Aug. 8, 2006 at age 87. But I just know that if Bill had made it to the century mark, he wouldn't have lacked for living friends. He was that kind of guy.

Take me, for example.

What brought Bill and me together was music. Vocal music, to be precise. Bill was a lifelong, passionate, one might almost say fanatic opera lover. He had the most incredible archive of recorded vocal music I have ever encountered. He aspired to sing opera when he was young, never quite got there, but nevertheless followed it, studied it and enjoyed it with a vengeance throughout his life.

It was around 1989 that Bill and I met, through the mail. I was living in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and working at the American embassy there. Bill was living right where he always had, in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Brook Park. Bill spent nearly his whole life there, and by the way, with Bill gone, how many people are left now who saw, live and in person, Bob Feller pitch for the Cleveland Indians?

And How did a 33 year-old guy living in Brazil and a 70 year-old guy living in Ohio find each other?

Music, like I said. I was searching for a rare, out-of-print Philips recording by the Irish tenor Frank Patterson, a set of Irish songs arranged by Beethoven for voice, piano and cello. I had been carrying this recording around for years on a cassette tape, pirated from an LP that I'd borrowed from the local public library when I was in college. But the tape was getting worn out, and I was looking for someone who might have this recording and might be willing to make me a fresh pirate copy.

I wrote a letter to the Musical Heritage Society, asking if any of my fellow collectors out there might have this recording and be willing to either make me a copy of it or sell it to me. My letter ran in the next issue of Musical Heritage Review. To my surprise, several of my fellow collectors didn't even wait for me to send them blank tapes or postage: they just went ahead and copied this record, or in some cases a similar one by tenor Bob White, and dropped them in the mail to me.

Bill Scharf was one of these generous pirate-copiers, and along with his tape he tucked in a gracious note saying, among other things, that he, too, had a fondness for this recording.

I tapped out a polite thank-you note and dropped it into the mail going back to the U.S. (The Internet and e-mail were still about four years away at this point.)

Little did I know it, but I'd tapped into a gusher of music. It's a common trait among collectors to enjoy sharing their stuff. Bill really enjoyed it -- seldom would I mention a particular composer or singer in a letter to him that Bill would not respond by filling another cassette tape with bleeding chunks and historic tracks and firing it off to me. He had been recording the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts off the airwaves for decades and had an archive of LPs that must easily have been large enough to keep a radio station going for a year. Soon I had a whole shelf full of cassette tapes, riches from Bill's cornucopia of historic vocal recordings.

I wanted to reciprocate somehow, but how? Yes, I was a collector too, but comparing my collection with his was tantamount to comparing Belgium's nuclear arsenal with Russia's. Finally I selected one of the gems of my collection, a recording I'd made off the radio a few years earlier of Karl Boehm conducting the Bruckner 7th, and sent it off to Bill. Bill immediately protested that I mustn't worry about returning his generosity, but I wanted to. "We're collectors, you and I," I wrote back. "One of the things collectors like to do is share their stuff with each other."

Sure, by now I was regularly sending him money to buy tapes with: if he was going to record all these hundreds of hours of music for me, the least I could do was pay for the tapes and postage. But I found other ways to pay him back. A few years after we first met through the mail, I, now posted at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and able to buy Russian tourist goodies by the carload at the famous Ismailova flea market, went around and asked all my friends back in the states who would like a Russian fur hat, and what kind and what size? Soon I was dispatching a parcel to Brook Park, Ohio containing a brown beaver hat for Bill and a white fox hat for his wife Olivia, known to one and all as "Ollie." Bill dubbed me "The Moscow hat man."

We met in the flesh only once, Bill and I. A year or so after the Moscow experience, I was back in Washington, D.C. when the news suddenly came that Ollie had died from emphysema. A nurse for many years, she had nonetheless maintained a heavy smoking habit. Bill wasn't in the habit of talking about his or his family's troubles, so Olivia's death took me completely by surprise (as would Bill's 11 years later.) I got on the phone and called him. We talked for a long time. Bill was a very devout Catholic and was counting on his faith to see him through this. I remember being struck by the stoicism of his comment that "Now it's just me and the dog."

Bill's son, Bill Jr. lived in Rockville, MD., just a short drive from my digs on Capitol Hill. Bill Sr. announced one week that he was coming to Rockville to visit Bill Jr. and his family. Would I like to meet for lunch? Of course I would. The following Saturday, with directions I'd gotten from Bill Jr., I drove out to his house in Rockville.

There I finally met Bill. He wasn't especially tall, but he was physically imposing: big hands, a firm handshake, and the kind of forceful baritone voice you might expect from someone who had once aspired to be an opera singer. After I'd been introduced to Bill Jr.'s family, Bill and I quickly hustled off in my 1990 Geo Storm to get some lunch. We went to a place that made excellent gyros sandwiches and had a nice long chat while we noshed on them. Bill had done a little bit of just about everything in his pre-retirement life, from writing and editing corporate newsletters to selling insurance to painting houses. He had some stories to tell, but none was quite so remarkable as the story he told that dated from his wife Olivia's funeral, just a month or so earlier.

I've mentioned that Bill was devout. He told me of how, the night Olivia died, he had prayed fervently for a sign. Acknowledging that he was way out of line having the audacity to make such a request of the Almighty, he nevertheless did make this request: if indeed Olivia was with God that night, Bill's entreaty went, would God...well, what? He had to think about it for a minute. "Have someone give me a rose," he related praying. "Or they don't even have to give me a rose. Just have someone call my attention to a rose."

That, Bill told me, had been his prayer.

The very next morning, he continued, he went to his daughter's house, where a family get-together had been planned following a memorial service for Ollie.

"I knocked on the door, and I swear, the moment my daughter opened it, the first thing she did was take me by the arm and say, 'Look, Dad! Over here on the table! Someone sent the most beautiful roses!' And there on the table was a bouquet of one dozen absolutely gorgeous roses. Throughout that day, people kept steering me toward that table and pointing out those roses. Finally I whispered, 'Enough, already, Lord. I get the message!"

I countered with my own recent brush with the paranormal. "Okay, you've told me your story. Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous," I said. "The other day I was reading Calvin and Hobbes because I never miss it, and at the bottom of the same page was my horoscope. It said, 'Count your change! Confusion exists with regard to an expense account! If you're not careful, you'll end up paying a bill you've already paid!' Just the day before I'd gotten a notice from the State Department claiming I had $1,750 in unvouchered travel advances from 1991."

I liked Bill's story better.

Watching the calendar as the new millenium approached, I realized that Bill was past 80 now, and I began to wonder, as the years went by, how I would find out when and if he had died, seeing as how he was now a widower. But he moved from Brook Park to another part of Ohio to be nearer some of his children, so at least he wasn't completely alone. By now we were staying in touch, sporadically, by e-mail. His eyesight was going, as evidenced by the typos in his messages. But he wasn't slowing down; as the new century dawned he was in the middle of a new project: transferring his entire massive archive, or as much as of it as he could manage, from the older tape and LP media to CDs.

In one of his e-mails to me in California, where I was by now living, he mentioned having had a complete checkup recently, but then added, "The doctor declared me good for another 100,000 miles."

I was blogging by now. Bill wasn't much of a blog-reader (not surprising, given that his eyesight was failing) but he did take time out from his busy archiving schedule to shoot me a nasty e-mail informing me that what I had just written criticising the teaching of Intelligent Design in biology classes was "bilge." This was the first negative thing he'd ever said to me. But it didn't stop him from continuing to share with me the riches of his collection, now coming packaged in handsome home-burned CDs with labels showing them clearly to be products of the "Scharf Lab and Archive."

It was completely in character for Bill to not bother mentioning that he had lung cancer. But I have a well-developed sense of the ominous, and when an e-mail popped into my inbox around mid-August of this year, with the subject line "Regarding William Scharf," I knew it wasn't going to be anything good. Bill Jr. in Rockville was informing everyone in Bill senior's Yahoo e-mail address book, a large company of which I was part, that his father had passed away a week earlier.

Well, now I don't have to wonder anymore. There's nothing left now but to be grateful. Grateful to Bill for having lived, grateful to whatever God there may be for allowing me to know him, and of course grateful for the 17-year bounty that I was permitted to enjoy through my long-distance association with this remarkable wannabe singer of long ago who made the service of a great art form his life's consuming passion. "May your last thinks all be thanks," as W.H. Auden wrote. Bill, thanks for your life and thanks for the music.

Coming up after Fidelio, Grace Bumbry and Shirley Verrett in Concert, Convent Garden, 4/25/82. I'm gonna crank this baby up loud. Let the neighbors complain if they want. Music, on this night, knows no regrets.

Eek, I did it again

The audience of four or five that reads my blog when prompted to, because it knows that I won't shut up and leave it alone until it does, is familiar with a posting I put up last February, It Ain't Over 'til The Fat Guy Dies. http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/it-aint-over-til-fat-guy-dies.html

In that posting, I discussed the odd phenomenon that every now and then I'll be thinking about a certain person, usually a celebrity, and within a day or two I see that person's obituary in the news.

Just call me the Accidental Reaper. Or The Reaper Unaware.

And it just happened again.

Check out the photo, above right. That is correct, movie buffs. June Allyson, the "Perfect Wife" of all those World War II-era movies, died Saturday at her home in Ojai, CA. She was 88.

I don't know what precise time she died on Saturday, but I shouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was sometime between 1:15 and 2:15 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time.

That's because I was uttering her name, out loud, at that very moment.

Okay, scoffers, scoff away. Just remember that I've experienced this spooky confluence of events, e.g., I think of 'em and then they die, more than once.

Mystics, heads up. We could be talking about a chicken-and-egg thing here: perhaps it's not that my thinking of them bumps them off, but that I have a psychic strain in me that I don't know about and somehow, when one of these celebs checks out for the Great Studio Commissary In The Sky, their departing shade twangs a chord in the universe that somehow one of my neurons is tuned into. I don't know. Could be the same reason I think of the Andy Griffith Show episode about the goat that ate the dynamite, and then find that that very episode is being played on TV Land that very same day. That's also happened plenty of times.

And yes, it could be just a case of heuristic rock-skipping--one thought leads to another thought, which leads to a name, and every once in a seventh-son-of-the-seventh-son blue moon, they all come together in one great crash of coincidence. No causation, just two flies hovering in St. Paul's Cathedral that manage to bump into each other. Don't know. Probably never will. But here's what happened.

On Saturday, July 8, I was driving to Post Falls, Idaho from Spokane, Washington on a routine "liquor run." Liquor is cheaper in Idaho than in Washington, so I buy my liquor there. Why not? Post Falls is only 25 minutes from Spokane; I can drive over there, buy a jug and drive back in one hour.

While cruising along Interstate 90 toward the Washington-Idaho border, I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to Spokane's jazz station, KEWU, broadcasting from Eastern Washington University. On Saturday afternoons KEWU regularly broadcasts a program of pop tunes from the 1930s and '40s. Hearing this World War II music made me think of a radio documentary about those years in America, The Home Front, which was broadcast in the early 1970s. My Aunt, Jessie Billon, who died a few years ago, once gave me a set of cassette tapes on which she had copied this entire documentary. She wanted to share it with me. My Aunt Jessie, you see, and her husband, my Uncle Pete Billon, also dead now, were what you might call "World War II kids." They were married, when both were still quite young, in 1944.

Uncle Pete was a civilian pilot in the war. He would have served in the military, but was classified 4F due to back problems. Instead, an already accomplished, passionate flyer, he signed on with the China National Air Corp and flew cargo planes betweeen India and China. That was before my time, but I saw the photographs. When I got to know him, (I was born long after the war) he was with United Airlines: for 26 years he flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu. Uncle Pete loved to fly. It was his life. (You wouldn't think I was his nephew, by the way -- I hate to get anywhere near an airplane. I fly when I have to, but I hate it. I'd rather travel by train any time.)

Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, for understandable reasons, had a nostalgic weakness for that period, which some others who lived through it, my parents for example, did not. For Jessie and Pete, the WWII years were the years of youth, beauty, love, romance, marriage. Never mind Hitler: they were young and healthy and my Aunt Jessie was beautiful. I know because I saw a picture. In fact I saw it often. In fact that picture is burned into my brain.

My grandmother had pictures of all her children around the house of course, and when we would visit her, we kids would see those pictures. Atop the piano were a photo of my mother, (also quite beautiful) and one of Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken either on their wedding day or right after. There he is in his dapper uniform; there she is, in a WWII-era print dress, with a WWII-era hairdo. Both are beaming. Aunt Jessie remembered that the judge who married them had taken one look at their ages on the marriage license and harrumphed, "Hmmph. Just a couple of kids!" A genuine harrumph.

The music made me think of the documentary, the documentary made me think of my late aunt and uncle, and the combination of the two made me think of that picture.

Now here comes the "combination of the three" moment: I tried to think of an appropriate descriptive phrase to place that old photo in perspective. "It looks like something from a June Allyson movie," I thought. Then I thought it again. Now, confession time: I KNOW that most people talk to themselves in their cars, but I'm going to admit, openly, that I actually do it. I said it OUT LOUD, with no one there to hear but myself, the radio and the dashboard: "That picture looked like something out of a June Allyson movie." Well, yeah, I always thought my Aunt Jessie looked a tiny bit like June Allyson, but the point is, I thought the thought, and said it out loud. Because it wasn't just a question of my aunt's slight resemblance to June Allyson. It was the whole ball of WWII-era wax: the music, the photo, the memory of that set of documentary tapes. I also remembered that my aunt and uncle, again completely unlike my parents, were inordinately fond of the music of that era: Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sinatra, Peggy Lee and all the rest of it. June Allyson was inextricably a part of all that, and the kind of actress more likely to be in an imaginary wedding photo with a dashing young flyer than the Rita Hayworths, Betty Grables and Hedy Lamarrs of that era. Those gals all ended up on the inside doors of GI lockers. June Allyson, as her obituary noted, was the one the boys dreamed of bringing home to meet their parents.

That was Saturday. On Monday I saw June Allyson's obituary on Yahoo.com.

Like I said, scoff away. But I'll tell you what: perhaps, as a public service, I should set up a new blog on which I will post the names of celebrities I've been thinking about today. If you're a celebrity, not dead yet, and your name happens to pop up on that list, you might want to make a quick check and see if your affairs are in order.

That is, if you're not already dead.

I have measured out my life with Wally & the Beav

Surfing the web site of TV Land, the cable channel that spotlights classic reruns, (it took over this function a few years ago from its "parent" channel, Nick at Nite) I came across a commemorative blurb about one of the channel's omnipresent offerings, Leave It To Beaver.

Dave Barry once remarked that it was a sign of how truly innocent America once was that television producers in 1957 would think of creating a show whose main character bore the name "Beaver." Yuk-yuk-yuk.

I've been watching Leave It To Beaver almost all my life, something I'm sure the show's original creators never imagined. Yes, syndicated reruns have been with us since Lucy and Desi first created them, but the idea that a show would go on in syndicated reruns forever is a notion that, I'm sure, occurred to few in the 1950s. I'd be very much surprised, in fact, to learn that even Marshall MacLuhan, the guru of media in the 1960s, ever thought of such a thing.

Leave It To Beaver is, in fact, just one of a list of TV shows that I've been watching since I was a kid, and occasionally still watch if there's nothing else on or if I'm waiting for a ball game to start.

My late sister and I were what you might call rerun aficionados ("junkies" if you're less charitable.) We were so in-tune with the reruns we both loved that we used to stand around and whip lines on each other, each challenging the other to recognize the line and, if possible, come back with the appropriate response. The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy formed the core of our repertoire. (Lynn was such an I Love Lucy fan that she could spot production flaws in some of the shows that she had seen more than 500 times, and would point them out to you.)

There are, let me hasten to add, some reruns I won't watch. As in, "They stunk then and they stink now." I never cared for The Brady Bunch, wouldn't even watch it when I was in junior high school and it first came on the air. Three's Company is another bit of '70s fluff with which I would not bother, then or now. In this same vein, a few years ago one of the cable channels was offering up a real moldy oldie from the early '60s, The Real McCoys. Now, I did watch The Real McCoys when I was say, in the fourth grade and it ran on weekday mornings between Lucy and Pete and Gladys, the December Bride spin-off that put Harry Morgan, who would later play Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H, on the sitcom map. (My mother once remarked that "that damned Real McCoys nearly drove me nuts" on days when, due to illness or holidays, my sisters and I were home from school and planted in front of the tube on a weekday morning.) But when The Real McCoys turned up on cable circa 1999, the 44 year-old version of myself quickly shut it off. Great comedy stays fresh; "sappy" doesn't.

So what is it about Leave It To Beaver? Great comedy it isn't, not like Lucy or Dick Van Dyke. I don't know, but I've tended to come back to it -- sometimes just affectionately surfing by -- over and over through the years. A sheepish confession: a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, when President Bush made his famous prime-time speech announcing the war on terror, a colleague at the office asked me the next day, "Did you hear Bush's speech last night?" "I missed it," I replied. "In fact I forgot it was going to be on. I was watching Leave It To Beaver." Hey, it was nine p.m., I was sitting in my favorite chair, and TV Land happened to be my favorite channel. Ipsi Dixit.

Maybe it's just something like comfort food. You know what's going to happen next, there are no surprises, and nobody's facing any consequences for their actions more serious than a stern talking-to from Dad. It isn't great comedy, but because the show's writers based many of the scripts on the stupid things their own kids actually did, it still has a ring of authenticity. Kids don't talk like Wally and the Beav any more, but they still commit similarly goofy acts. The episode in which Beaver loses the money he was given for a haircut, and rather than confess the loss to his parents, lets Wally give him a truly horrible coif, could as easily have been made in 2006 as in 1958. Some things never change, and the tendency of kids to prefer deception over honesty from a fear of parental punishment is one of them.

But one thing has changed, over the years, in my relationship with Leave It To Beaver. As I'm sure is the case with many of my contemporaries, my attitude toward the show has changed in perfect pace with my own growth from childhood to early adulthood to middle age.

Beaver had already left prime-time when I became a regular watcher. I was two years old when it premiered. It ran until 1963, but my mother was such a stickler for having her kids go to bed early that I was seldom up when the show came on in prime time. I recall getting up one night for a drink of water or some such thing and seeing my parents, on the living room sofa, actually watching the prime-time incarnation of Leave It To Beaver. I became a regular watcher myself a year or two later, when the show had left prime time and gone immediately into syndication. One of the local stations in San Diego began running it in the afternoons between 4:00 and 5:00. I would come home and watch it after school. Its appeal to me at that age was obvious: kids love to watch shows whose main characters are kids.

By the time I got to high school, Leave It To Beaver had gone the way that Captain Kangaroo went when I started the fifth grade -- I was now, officially, too hip and sophisticated for such things. High school kids think they know everything, and they love to think of themselves as pillars of sophistication, way ahead of, say, their parents for instance. I, and my sister by the way, took on a derisive attitude toward the show, and no longer watched it unless it was to sit and mock the corny way its characters talked. "Gee, Beaver," we'd say to each other, our voices dripping with sarcasm. In fact we started referring to the show itself as Gee, Beaver. My best friend Jim and I would get together and literally wince at the dialogue, especially in the later shows when the "Beaver" character was getting to be of high school age himself. The teenager of the early 1960s, to the teenager of the early 1970s, was a laughable dinosaur. We were the only authentic teenagers. Whoever didn't speak our patois was just painfully "out of it," as we used to say in those days, and that included the characters on Beaver. The show became a joke.

The next phase of the show's place in my generation's progress from mumps to Alzheimer's might be called The Nick at Nite years. Not for nothing was Nick the success it was, from the mid-1980s on. From about the time the first wave of Boomers hit their early thirties, nostalgia became a highly marketable commodity. A preliminary flicker of this trend hit around 1982, when "Classic Rock" radio stations coast-to-coast began playing 1960s music, and then the movie The Big Chill came along, a nostalgia trip for the "war babies" generation that preceded ours. Dredging up the TV shows that we had all grown up with couldn't be far behind, and when I returned to the U.S. in 1988 after two years in Europe, I was delighted to find the Nickelodeon channel offering, after 8 p.m., a cornucopia of nostalgic treats for those who were kindergarten-aged during the Kennedy years: Make Room For Daddy, My Three Sons, Mr. Ed and The Donna Reed Show, one right after the other, irresistible as pistachios.

From having been the butt of jokes 20 years earlier, Leave It To Beaver was now a "classic." It had become one of those shows that you, with your nascent middle-aged spread, could tune in after a couple of Scotch-and-sodas and get all misty for home, sweet yesterday, that pre-work-force arcadia when your most daunting responsibility was getting your math homework done, and your biggest anxiety whether your younger brother was going to get more Christmas presents than you did.

And now? Now that the 1960s are too far behind us to even occasion nostalgia, Beaver has become a cultural artifact, a distant mirror into which we can gaze with a telescope and make sage observations about the nature of that age gone by. (Dave Barry's crack about beavers, for example.) The show has traced an arc in nearly 50 years, running from popular entertainment to the butt of cornball jokes to a self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia to something almost approximating a museum piece. Ward Cleaver in his age, like Cliff Huxtable in his and, to a lesser extent, Tim Taylor in his, is held up as a model of what his era regarded as a nearly-ideal dad. Even June Cleaver, who was once the object of feminist derision for her habit of doing housework in high heels and a necklace, (Barbara Billingsley, who played the role of June, explained a few years ago that she wore the heels chiefly because Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who played her sons, were both taller than she was and it didn't seem appropriate somehow for the boys to be taller than their mother) is no longer ridiculed as she once was. We're sufficiently remote from the Eisenhower-Kennedy years now that ridicule would seem gratuitous at best, quaint at worst. The June Cleaver jokes have all been worn out.

Despite its age, the show has that one element of timelessness going for it, to wit, the fact that children are occasionally quite impossible (like Monday through Sunday, for instance.) Since the basic predicaments of childhood haven't changed much in 5,000 years and probably never will, I can see Leave It To Beaver still being in reruns when our children's children are wondering what the heck their children did with that money they were given this morning for a haircut. Or why they have a baby alligator stashed in the tank of the hall toilet. Or how they could be put on a bus together and end up in different cities. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. Viva the Beav.

Poems, prayers and promises with the Provenzas

Photo on left: The father of the bride, flanked by both "best men" from his own 1982 wedding. From left to right, Oliver Glover, Jim Provenza and the author.

Photo above: The newlyweds, dancing the night away.


From my offline journal (often more candid than my blog) :

July 1

Sacramento

Jim and I finally connected by cell phone last night. The father of the bride was calling me from the wedding rehearsal dinner and was clearly in a hurry to get off the phone, so we kept it short. I just wanted to make sure he knew that we had arrived from Spokane and were in town. When I see him later today he’ll be wearing a tuxedo. That will be a first for us two “future astronauts” of long ago.

So Jennifer Rose Provenza, whose birth I recorded in these pages 23 years, six months and 18 days ago, is getting married this afternoon.

Although he’s frequently given to pithy thoughts and witty observations, usually having something to do with politics, in all of the years I’ve known her father I have never known him to be the overly reflective type, either drunk or sober. We were on different continents when his brother died, so we never really had the chance to get “down and dirty” on that subject, and in those few instances when it has come up, he has spoken mainly of its impact on his parents and offered speculation about the circumstances surrounding it. (To this day he suspects that Rick was merely having a beer-soaked reverie over the idea of suicide that evening, and that that police revolver’s going off in his hand was an accident. Well, yes, Colt service revolvers do have hair triggers.) But he has never really delved into its personal impact on himself, at least not in any conversation he's ever had with me. Odd that it should be so, given the fact that Jim worshipped his older brother to an extent that I have never witnessed in any other family. There wasn’t a quantum of sibling rivalry between them that I ever saw; indeed Jim seemed determined to follow Rick in his every ambition, in some cases succeeding where his brother failed, such as graduating from law school and yes, managing to stay married. But that’s Jim: I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body, and to use some extremely vapid ‘60s parlance, he has always been very “other-directed.”

But what must he be thinking now? Since I have no daughter of my own, I can only begin to guess. I do know what I’m thinking: I’m remembering an afternoon in Arroyo Grande, CA. Late October. Jennifer was not quite 3. Jim and Donna had driven up from Santa Barbara to visit me at my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete’s place, where I was house-sitting while they were on a trip to Europe.It was a mild afternoon and I think Jim and I went jogging together. The baby had been fussy before we left the house, crying and whining, and Jim’s mind was preoccupied with that, over and above other topics of discussion, as we walked back to the car. Ever the indulgent Baby Boomer parent, he insisted that we stop at the store on the way back to the house so he could buy her some cookies.I remember thinking this rather odd: in the household where I grew up, children were not rewarded with cookies for whining and crying. I doubt if such was the case in the house where Jim grew up, either. But there you have the key stylistic difference in the way two generations were raised: the Greatest Generation wanted its children (us) to have the educational advantages they hadn’t had. We were all browbeaten to get good grades and get ourselves into college, now that the G.I. bill had made college almost a universal entitlement and not the exclusive preserve of the well-off that it had been before WWII. But perhaps precisely because college wasn’t the Emerald City for us that it had been for our parents, we Baby Boomers merely wanted our own children to be coddled and spoiled as we, in our bottomless narcissism and self-regard, felt we should have been but were not. If we all live long enough, it will be interesting to see how Generation Y raises Generation Z. But in the meantime, good, bad or indifferent, there are the good old rituals to celebrate, the weddings and graduations and all that jazz that’s with us always, and interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to change that much from one generation to the next.

By the way, in addition to that afternoon in Arroyo Grande, I’m also remembering, from that same autumn, an apartment in Lompoc on whose living room carpet copies of Mother Jones shared space with strewn-about Care Bears books. Jim was just starting out as a lawyer, racking up some experience working for legal aid. I was a weekend guest on my way down to Los Angeles, and the sight of Mother Jones sharing the living room rug with the Care Bears struck me as the perfect metaphor for the transforming effect that Jennifer’s arrival had had on the lives of both of her parents, self-styled born-a-bit-too-late leftists who had been very proud of writing language about “working for social change” into their own wedding vows three and a half years earlier. I chuckled as I pointed out the strange confluence of reading matter to Jim. He was good-humored about it, as usual. Despite his passionate campaigning for George McGovern in 1972, (when he himself was still too young to vote) Jim managed never to take himself too seriously. Quite the contrary: he generally maintained an insouciance quite untypical of those earnest young savers-of-the-world who in our youth could talk about nuclear disarmament, and these days can talk about global warming, for as long as ten minutes without blinking once. Jim stopped wearing long hair after high school, switched from pot to liquor after college, and came away from the dreary 1970s almost as cynical about his own party as about the Republicans.

What he mostly was, by 1985, was a devoted family man, the doting father of a little girl. He kept his oar in politics, (today he serves on the Davis school board) but like those happy few among his fellow visionaries who are lucky enough to grow up and find personal responsibility as satisfying as public endeavor, what he mostly is, is a proud father.

I expect that the sight of this proud father in a tuxedo this afternoon may give rise to yet more, and similarly appropriate later-in-life thoughts. Jennifer was precocious as a performer: at age 3 she performed “Georgie Porgie” for a small but delighted crowd, of which I was part, in the middle of a children’s clothing store. I hear she’s going to sing Ave Maria today at her own wedding. She was also a strikingly pretty child, with enormous dark eyes and black hair. “She’s a wop all right,” her father said to me when she was a toddler. And I do expect to see a beautiful bride. Bring it on. Then go ahead and bring on old age for her folks and me, we of the generation so famous for being in denial about such things. Yeah, bring it all on.

End of excerpt from my "offline" journal. Back to blog...

Ah, yes, this business of being a trailing-edge Baby Boomer...(by “trailing edge,” I mean born in the mid-1950s, and hence, about 50 yourself now...)

Reading glasses. AARP membership cards. A bit of morning stiffness in the joints, necessitating extra stretching before you go for that 8 a.m. jog, which by the way is now two miles, not the five it used to be.

Weddings. As in, “of your own children.”

I don’t have any children. What I do have is a friend, born the same year as myself, (1955—and ever since we were in the 6th grade together, he’s held his February birthday over my October one as a badge of seniority) who has two: a boy, 19, who plays bass guitar and has a ring through his lip, and a girl, going on 24, who just came down the aisle all dressed in white.

Jim Provenza, the proud father of the bride, is my oldest friend. This coming October when I mark my 51st birthday, he and I will also mark 40 years of uninterrupted friendship. We met in October, 1966 just about the time I turned 11. The first away-from-school activity I remember us doing together was that Halloween’s trick-or-treating. Jim, as I recall, donned a homemade “spy” outfit. Secret-agent movies were big that year; it was the height of the “James Bond” craze. He decked himself out in a trench coat and snap-brim hat, with an ascot for effect. I was a commando, complete with black turtleneck, black wool cap and plastic machine gun.

I was (co)-best man at Jim’s wedding in 1982. He was best man at my (second) wedding in 2005. He was also present, having traveled 600 miles both times to be so, at the funerals of my mother and my younger sister. I was in Europe when his older brother died, but pounced on the phone and called him the moment I received an e-mail informing me about it. He called me the moment his daughter Jennifer was born, on Dec. 12, 1982. I was in Europe when James Jr. came along five years later, but promptly got an e-mail informing me of that event as well.

Jim’s and my ongoing friendship is remarkable for other reasons besides punctilious attendance on each other’s family joys and tragedies. We only actually lived in the same town for about the first year and a half we knew each other, and only attended the same school one year. Then his family moved, and then my family moved, and we never lived in the same city again. But we stayed in touch, diligently, by letter, by telephone, even for a while, when we were both in junior high school, by sending audiotapes back and forth in the mail. As boys we shared the dream that many boys of the 1960s shared: we aspired to be astronauts. We even belonged to an organization called Future Astronauts of America, which I would be very much surprised to learn had ever graduated a single astronaut. When we moved on to high school, Jim became a debater and decided to focus on a political science major when he went on to college. I got interested in writing and decided I would major in English (I changed that to journalism and history later.) About the time we graduated from high school, Jim wrote me a letter in which he noted the curiosity that we two “future astronauts” should have ended up as English and political science majors.

And that’s not all that makes our friendship special. Our respective politics couldn’t be more different. I’ve been conservative all my life, while Jim, following in the footsteps of his beloved older brother Rick, who aspired to be a 60’s-style Berkeley radical but slightly missed the cut by being born a couple of years too late, is a passionately committed liberal Democrat, yellow-dog to the bone. In spite of all this, Jim and I have never had an argument about politics that I can recall. When we discuss politics, we stick to the things we agree on, such as the fact that most politicians, of whatever ideological stripe, have their price, and it’s usually not that high, either.

I flew to Sacramento to attend his 50th birthday party last year; he reciprocated and came to San Diego to attend mine eight months later.

My wife Valerie and I flew to Sacramento last weekend, this time from our new home in Spokane, Washington, to attend the wedding, in nearby Davis, of Jennifer Provenza and Ian Wallace.

It was a beautiful and beautifully conducted old-fashioned Catholic wedding, a family production with about 150 guests in attendance. The weather cooperated splendidly, at least early on, with unseasonably cool temperatures in the upper 80s. (Later it heated up to 103, but by then everyone was caravanning down to the reception venue, which just happened to be on the Sacramento River delta where it was cooler.)

Thematically the wedding was an ethnic smorgasbord, a sort of haggis stuffed with mozzarella. Ian’s old-world background is Scottish, while Jennifer’s is pretty smoothly Sicilian—she’s a Provenza on her Dad’s side and her mother’s maiden name is Calabria. A Scottish-Italian wedding in a Catholic church: as the guests filed in and took their seats, a bagpiper tootled away at the church door. Later, the groom’s father, of the Wallace clan, belted out “That’s Amore” at a family “variety show” which followed the ceremony. (Bride and groom met in their dramatic arts program in college; almost everyone involved the wedding was some kind of performer.) Jim’s mother got up and sang “The Nearness Of You.” I was amazed. I’ve known Mary Jane Provenza as long as I’ve know her son, and I never knew she could sing solo. Jim has no musical talent whatever; it never occurred to me that others in his family might.

Jim’s “other” best man from his 1982 wedding, Oliver Glover, was also in attendance along with his new bride, Elizabeth. I had not seen Oliver since Jim’s wedding, and we almost didn’t recognize each other. We sat together at the wedding supper and got caught up on what each has been doing in the 24 years since Jim and Donna tied the knot on that courthouse lawn in Santa Barbara, from which I still have some pictures, showing all of us with more hair and smaller stomachs than now.

I don’t know whose idea it was to have the wedding reception at that beautiful mansion house in the delta. I still don’t know. But by the time we got there we had driven so many miles along so many twisting country back roads that I was certain we’d gone off the map. “Okay, whose idea was it to have this thing in Borneo?” I demanded when we finally got there. Jim wouldn’t ‘fess up, neither would he name the culprit. Typical of him. I do know this: he’ll be paying for that party for years.

It was a fine party, with plenty of good food and wine, and the bride and groom, who must have been dying by then to get out of their wedding-cake outfits and slip into Levis, duly made the rounds of every table, greeting all the guests. Nice kids.

I did, however, make certain that we left when there was still some twilight lingering to guide us back to the interstate. I didn’t want to get lost, go off the road and into the river, or have my wife and myself decimated by delta weirdos out of Deliverance. The newlyweds, their parents, grandparents and many other members of the wedding stayed overnight at the mansion. Most of the rest of us had to get ourselves back to civilization, and I didn’t want to be doing that in the dark, especially after a few glasses of chardonnay with my meal.

We flew back to Spokane, by way of Boise, Idaho, on Sunday afternoon. Our two-propeller puddle-jumper slammed into some nasty turbulence -- a thunderstorm -- on approach to Boise, and as we bounced about the sky, some of our fellow passengers screaming with terror, (or perhaps with delighted terror, as you might on the roller coaster at Magic Mountain.) I only hoped my old buddy would appreciate my putting myself through this so that we two old farts could celebrate his daughter's nuptials together. I am in fact no fan of flying, even in the best weather, and he knows that, too. But you do things for family, and after all Jim and I have been through together in close to 40 years, I'd say each of us qualifies for honorary membership in the other's extended clan.

I hear the newlyweds are honeymooning in Hawaii. Add another year or two to how long Dad will be working to pay for all this. But it makes sense to me. At the very least it's perfectly consistent with the ethnic theme of the occasion. Kilts, plaid and bagpipes for a roomful of Provenzas and Calabrias, followed by "That's Amore" and now, tiki torches, surfing and luaus?

What kind of wedding is that?

American, that's what kind.

Have a good time, kids. Don't forget the sunscreen.

To Dad: As the French say "Cheers"

This coming Sunday is Father's Day, and for me it will be the first on which I have no father for whom to buy a gift. My father died last September at age 91.

I had a decidedly two-edged relationship with my old man; we spent as much time not communicating as we did attempting to, not always with a lot of success.

Oh, there were a few things we agreed on. I could count them on the fingers of one hand: 1. Fishing is a good way to spend an afternoon. 2. Baseball is the best game in the world. 3. Businessmen who happen to be old fools with no acting ability should not do their own TV spots. 4. Home-grown tomatoes are better than store-bought.

5. Good scotch is one of life's best pleasures.

Now I'm not here to post an on-line advertisement for Chivas Regal. As it happens, it is not even my favorite scotch. I like Chivas, but it's not my favorite. (That would be Glenlivet, if anyone cares.) I just happened to like that picture, and besides, Chivas figures specifically in the little tale I'm about to tell.

My father and I grew up mostly locking horns. Yes, we grew up together, because he remained essentially about nine years old, emotionally anyway, until the day he died. But this posting is in honor of Father's Day, so I'm not going to highlight his shortcomings. There were quite a few things he excelled at, in fact: gardening for one. He was a very good gardener. He could also touch-type, (back when that still mattered) something I never learned to do. Somewhere along the line he even picked up shorthand, another dead art. To a point, he could fix his own car, and when I was a small child he used to amaze me with his ability to whittle a real-looking pistol out of a piece of wood (I don't think I want to know where he picked up this skill.) He spoke fluent Spanish, and Canuck French, the latter of which he learned in his childhood. He could noodle a little at the piano and knew a few guitar chords. He could play the harmonica. He could whistle so loudly that you could hear him at the end of the block. (Something else I never mastered.) He made great pancakes.

And once, as I was getting ready to go overseas and would be gone for a couple of years, he taught me to sing a French Canadian drinking song.

We were house-sitting for my uncle, who had gone to Europe with his family. It was October, 1985. I had just turned 30; Dad was 71. My Uncle Pete had left us not only the keys to the house, the keys to the car, and orders to eat and drink all the food and liquor on the property, but had also left us in charge of his wide-screen satellite TV. The World Series was just about to begin, and there we were alone on a hilltop in Arroyo Grande, California with a wide-screen TV and a couple of gallons of scotch.

It was shaping up to be a good week.

One night I poured a shot for both of us, and Dad taught me this song:

"Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable,
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux.
Prend un petit coup, c'est rend les gents malade;
Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable.
Prend un petit coup, c'est doux."

Loosely translated, "Take a little drink, it's nice. Take a little drink, it's true, take a little drink, it might make you all sick, but take a little drink anyway."

In the years that followed, this became Dad's and my drinking song. Every time I came back from overseas on home leave or on R&R, as soon as I had stored my bags in the front bedroom of the house and settled in for my visit, there would be the obligatory rendering, usually in the kitchen, of our "Prend un petit coup" song as we clinked glasses with the first drink of the evening.

Now, as I said, I'm not here to do a commercial for Chivas. In fact I hate advertising almost uniformly. But whenever Father's Day approaches, I always remember the one, single advertisement I ever saw that I found touching, perhaps even moving. Whoever dreamed this ad up really knew how to tug the public's heart strings. Or mine, anyway.

As I recall, it appeared in the pages of The New Yorker magazine, and yes, it was an ad for Chivas Regal scotch. A Father's Day-related ad. Its premise was absurdly simple: it showed only a scattered pile of canceled checks. But they were photographed in such a way that you could read every one. As you read them, you quickly got the idea that they parsed, roughly, the first 20 years or so of someone's life, from cradle to college. Each was made out and signed in the same handwriting, with the same man's name. There was a check made out to a diaper service, then one to a pre-school, one to a bicycle shop for a new bike, one to a summer camp, one to an orthodontist for braces, and so on and so on until you got to the big one, made out to a college for tuition. At the bottom of the page, the caption read simply, "You can never thank your father enough. But you can give him Chivas Regal."

Great ad. How great? I wept. Honestly. And I hate ads.

My father began sinking into dementia during the last year of his life. One ability after another went by the wayside, in short order. He lost interest in reading because he could no longer follow the continuity of a book from one chapter to the next. Then he couldn't even read the newspaper anymore. He was writing checks and not entering them in his checkbook. My sister suggested that I should take over paying the bills, so I did. Eventually he could hardly even write anything down. One day, reminded that it was my 49th birthday, he left a couple of $20 bills on my nightstand as a present, and tried to leave me a note saying "Happy Birthday," but he could not even get those words down on paper. In a shaky, wavering hand, (his handwriting had once been elegant -- his was the last generation to learn penmanship in school) the note read, "Happy Juupy Juup Juup Juup Day Day Day!--Dad." That absolutely broke my heart. I still have that note.

From there things just got worse. He started failing to recognize people. He mistook my fiance for my sister. He lost his ability to tell time by looking at the clock, so he was never sure if it was morning or evening.

During his last hospitalization, he could no longer remember whether he and I, and my surviving sister, were father and children or siblings. "Now, you, and Carla and I," he said when I was visiting him in the hospital, "we're brothers and sisters, right?"

"No, Dad," I replied. "Carla is your daughter and I'm your son. You're our father."

"Oh, then that makes me Joey's grandfather!" he said. (Joey was Carla's kid, my father's namesake, and by the way his favorite. But now he couldn't even keep it straight that Joey was his grandson.)

"That's right, Dad. Carla and I are your children, not your brother and sister, and Joey's your grandson," I said.

Soon after that, back home, he started calling me "Bill," (I think one of his brothers was named Bill.) And about that same time, incontinence began. He was wetting his bed almost every night. And he could no longer get himself to bed in the evening or up in the morning. He had to be dressed, undressed, and diapered. Nurses were coming twice a week to give him epogen and to help him take a bath. My older sister told her youngest, my nephew Ricky, to move in with us, presumably to help me take care of Dad.

One night about a month before Dad died, Ricky and I were getting him into his pajamas and putting him to bed for the night. As we were arranging his pillow and pulling the blankets up over him, he began to sing, "Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable, Prend un petit coup, c'est doux..."

We had no drinks, but I sang along with him. I figured it might be the last time we would ever sing that song together.

As it turned out, I was right.

This week, as Father's Day approaches, we are as usual getting bombarded with advertisements to buy this or that for Dad, and as usual it's little except annoying, only now I tend more than ever to tune it out, since everything having to do with fatherhood and fathers is now behind me. I have no children of my own, and with my dad gone, Father's Day, like my parents' respective birthdays, and their anniversary, (my mother died six years ago) has been recycled as nothing more than a date on the calendar.

But that long-ago Chivas ad still reverberates in my memory, as does that little French song, and I suppose they both will for as long as I remember my dad, which means for as long as I last on this old earth myself.

To all of you out there who still have living fathers, let me offer this bit of advice:

Prend un petit coup, c'est agreable. Buy your dad a drink, or if he doesn't drink, the equivalent. Chances are you and your dad have a song you used to sing too, and you never know when you might be singing it for the last time.

The Battle of Groncho

Life in the post-cold war, Internet-based world is just endlessly interesting.

Not that life wasn’t interesting before, it’s just that we’re able to do things now that were simply unimaginable when I was a kid, or even before I turned 40.

I suppose every generation can say that, of course. My Dad was 13 when Lindbergh flew the Atlantic; less than 40 years later he himself was flying to the Far East on a passenger plane. No doubt having the one experience while remembering the other would have given him pause no less than does the fact that I’m able to swap e-mails all afternoon with my pal Vasiliy, who lives in Moscow.

Vasiliy is a nightowl and I’m an early bird. This makes us perfect e-mail pals: when it’s 3 O’clock in the afternoon in California, it’s 2 O’clock the next morning in Moscow. I’m digesting my lunch and he’s pecking away at his computer while Moscow sleeps.

It hasn’t even been a generation since this was unthinkable. It’s only been about 15 years. Not only were the United States and the Soviet Union enemies in everything but name, but in 1991 there was effectively no such thing as e-mail, because in 1991 there was effectively no such thing as the Internet. I went to Africa that year, and a friend of mine suggested that there might be some way we could connect our computers to modems and swap information between California and Africa over the phone. It was an intriguing idea, but it seemed a bit farfetched.

Now Vasiliy and I sit here, 6,147 miles apart, and chit-chat all afternoon (or all night, depending on whether you’re looking over my shoulder or his) like a couple of little old ladies on a park bench feeding the pigeons. And not surprisingly, the topic of conversation is quite often how the world has changed in our lifetimes. Vasiliy is older than I, so his memories go back farther. I vaguely remember Kruschchev and Kennedy; Vasiliy remembers Stalin and Truman.

He sent me an electronic newspaper clipping last week, from the English-language Moscow Times newspaper. The article, by journalist Gyorgi Bovt, was called Playing on the Old Myths, and it addressed, in a Russian context, a depressing, perhaps even scary phenomenon that I have noticed in an American context: young people today don’t know anything.

I’m serious. Young people today can tell you all about the last episode of American Idol. They can show you how to set up your iPod. They’re computer savvy. They’re whizzes at text-messaging on cell phones.

But most of them couldn’t find Washington, D.C. on a map if their lives depended on it; they write “it’s” for “This animal is nocturnal in its eating habits,” and they think LOL is a word. They can’t concentrate for more than four minutes, they consider Grand Theft Auto a productive way to spend an afternoon, and they think John F. Kennedy was some guy who was president back around the time of Lincoln.

Guess what? Russia has the same problem. Playing On the Old Myths began with the writer expressing dismay at some of the questions his daughter asks him. She and her peers know next-to-nothing about Russia’s communist past. The generation born after Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika—which is already 20 years behind us—has no memory of what its parents remember: standing in line for three hours to buy some sausage. Lenin’s picture everywhere you looked. A telephone call if you failed to show up for a Komsomol meeting, demanding the reason for your absence. Having to go into the kitchen and turn on the radio if you wanted to talk safely. The GULAG.

Today’s Russian kids are as uninterested in anything that happened earlier than last week as their American counterparts. And that’s a little scary: some of them even think things Soviet are kind of cool, like today’s blissfully ignorant American 20 year-olds going around wearing Che Guevara T-shirts because the idea of revolution is also, like, you know, kind of cool. They don’t want to hear about Stalin; they barely know who he was. It goes without saying that they don’t read Solzhenitsyn, although I'm told he is required reading in Russian schools now. But, kids being kids, I'm sure that only accomplishes the opposite of what's intended: if you want a young person to avoid a certain author, just make that author "required reading." I was required to read Nathaniel Hawthorne myself, and today wouldn't touch him with a ten-foot scarlet "A." (And isn't that a funny bit of irony: a generation ago Russians were forbidden to read Solzhenitsyn. Now their children are encouraged to read him, but they don't want to.)

For 40 years and more, Russians obsessed about World War II. It was all they wanted to talk about. As late as 1985, an American diplomat noted the curiosity of attending a Soviet embassy dinner and finding that World War II dominated the conversation all evening long. Russia’s experience in World War II was like nothing in modern history: the country was invaded and 26 million people died, many of them civilians. (By contrast, the U.S. took roughly 250,000 casualties in that war, almost all of them military.)

But the difference between our generation and the current one is, we were interested in remembering, even what we didn’t personally remember. I was born 10 years after the war ended, but my school pals and I were steeped in it as history. Was this because we were smarter than today’s kids? No, it was a mass-culture phenomenon. The generation that fought World War II, and the Korean War which followed it a few years later, came home and became a gigantic television and movie audience, and we, its children, formed a vicarious audience for what our parents were watching. Hollywood saw gold: all these people who had experienced the war, or even just military service if they hadn’t actually seen action, were of course going to be fascinated by their own experience. I grew up awash in TV shows and movies about World War II: dramas as true-to-life as Combat! And comedies as silly as McHale’s Navy were our weekly fare in those days. And then there were the semi-documentaries, earnest programs such as Battle Line and Navy Log, which kept our fathers boring us over dinner, correcting the shows’ mistakes.

That all of this would rub off on us kids of the 1960s was inevitable. By the time I was eight I could recite the names of the Normandy beaches on D-Day: Utah, Omaha, Sword, Juno and Gold. (Utah and Omaha were the Americans; Sword and Gold the British, and Juno the Canadians.) We boys often ran around after school re-enacting World War II battles with toy guns. (Today’s parents would be horrified by the idea of giving their children toy guns to play with, but they have no problem with their children playing video games that center around blowing up buildings.) About the same time I was reading a written-for-children account of D-Day, I went to a friend’s birthday party and we boys were taken out for a big treat: we were taken to a war museum at which we were shown a display, under glass, animated by the standards of that day but static by today's standards, that used model ships and electric lights to re-create the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. There was a voice narration, and lights were used to track the events of the attack: ships that had been sunk were illuminated in red; those that escaped were lit green. I cannot imagine an audience of eight year-olds standing still for such a thing today, but we were truly fascinated.

We even discussed the war among ourselves, if you can imagine such a thing. And it was the kind of discourse that only eight year-olds could have. My best pals in the fourth grade were Brown Russell and Marty Jorgensen. Brown’s father was a major in the army, (unusual for San Diego, which is a huge navy town) and Marty’s was a chief in the navy. Not only was re-enacting World War II moments a regular part of our play, but we would teach each other history, the funky history of eight-year-olds to be sure, but it showed where our interests lay.

Marty regaled me one afternoon with his account of “The Battle of Groncho.” Now, I knew all about D-Day, and I knew about Pearl Harbor, and I had heard of Midway, and I knew about Wake Island and ultimately, about Hiroshima, but this Battle of Groncho was a new one on me. I probed Marty with questions. Was this battle against the Germans or the Japanese? The Japanese, was the answer. So it was fought in the Pacific. Which side won? “U.S.,” he answered.

And so on and so on, until I figured out that he was talking about the Battle of Guadalcanal, which he couldn’t pronounce.

I don’t mean to be rough on today’s younger generation (aside from the fact that they’re semi-literate and as ignorant as monads.) In fairness to them, there is nothing in their parents’ past like what we had in ours. There was no global convulsion in the 1970’s and ‘80s comparable to what happened in the ‘30s and ‘40s, reshaping the entire world that came after. But it wasn’t a dull time either (well, once we got out of the ‘70s, which were all in all pretty dreary). There was in fact big global stuff happening in the ‘80s, it’s just that it didn’t involve tanks and guns to anywhere near the extent it did 40 years earlier. And by the way, the things that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev did in the 1980s, did in fact reshape our world almost as dramatically as the guns and bombs of the 1940s. Don’t think so? Listen to this tidbit of dinner conversation I recall: in 1991 my wife and I were invited to Christmas dinner by some friends at the American embassy in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, where I was then posted. It was on that very day that Gorbachev went on Soviet television, announced that he was resigning as Premier of the USSR, wished everyone good night and good luck, and walked quietly off the stage, ringing down the curtain after 74 years on a nation.

Someone at the dinner table remarked, “Have you noticed how much the map of Europe today looks like the map of Europe in 1912?”

Think that wasn’t a reshaping of the world, refashioning Europe, in grand ricorso fashion, so that it looked once again much the way it looked before Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Francis Ferdinand, triggering World War I, which would in turn trigger World War II, which would in turn...

No, Gavrilo Princip is not a rapper. And World War I happened after the American Civil War, not before it. And Albania is a country, not the capital of New York. And...oh, hell. Is it time for Survivor yet?