On March 1st I received the following anonymous epistle in the book drop. I have reproduced it exactly, correcting only several minor typographical and grammatical errors.

"When on the occasion I have picked up your pamphlet on bits of information, it has come to my attention that in every issue there is this need of yours to put down the Christian belief as ridiculous and build up the evolutionist THEORY. Now not being of a hasty nature I have given this some considerate thought before responding.
     The conclusion I have come to is a quote that goes something like this, 'Me thinks thou doth protest too much.' Since you are a librarian, I'm sure you'd know the exact quote and who quoted it...but that doesn't matter.
For you see it is really the meaning behind it that holds anything substantial and lasting.
     Much like people's faith and belief in something more substantial than themselves! In your position I don't think you have the right to impose your constant steadfast appraisal of creationism - to influence youth against what their parents may have considered valuable to them, no more than you want someone undermining your right to raise your children or your right to free press. (At college expense & tuition.) Now before you squawk you should review, in all fairness, how many articles you have written on the above mentioned subject. What are you afraid of anyway--that those creationist might be right -- or you might be wrong? I challenge you to redirect that part of your column to something less offensive and more intellectual, after all that is your forte.
     Have a good day!!!

     Thank you for the response. (By the way, I would encourage you to make yourself known; I certainly take no offense at anything written.) One goal of this publication, never fulfilled, has been to create a dialogue in these pages on issues of current interest. I would like to respond to several of the points made by our anonymous reader.
     It is true that I occasionally have poked fun at creationists. I've also pointed out what I perceive to be aberrations of psychologists, librarians, doctors, teachers, administrators, politicians!, etc. That's the nature of this publication, to provide a little humor, and hopefully some thought-provoking book reviews. I emphasize reviews because I can only report on what I have read, and obviously I read books that interest me. It happens that I'm interested in ethics, religion, paleontology, theology (it's hard to ignore when you grow up in a house where Reinhold Niebuhr or William Sloane Coffin might be over for dinner), technology, transportation, language, education, censorship, hypocrisy, etc. All these topics have been in recent issues. In fact, the last issue did not mention creationism once. (I checked all the issues in the past year and discovered a total of 68 book reviews - I guess I read more than I thought - of which only three had anything to do with evolution. That represents barely 4%, hardly an overwhelming amount. In fact, I reviewed a larger number of books on arctic exploration!) I had not planned to bring up the subject in this issue, but since you raised the point...
     I believe there is a fundamental flaw in your implication that people who believe in evolution deny Christianity. This argument was thoroughly debated among theologians during the 19th century. (See Aubrey Moore's statement later on.) For years it was accepted dogma that the earth was flat. Science has revealed this is untrue. Similarly, the evidence is overwhelming that humans were not created in an instant, but evolved over a long period of time. This does not deny God's participation in the process! To accept evolutionary theory is not to deny Christianity. In fact, it is clear that biological evolutionary theory (a theory is the highest standard of scientific proof: the vindication through evidence of what had been hypothesis. Webster's defines it as "the general or abstract principles of a body of fact") is affirmed by large numbers of Christians. To state that the creationist position is the only Christian position is patently false. It has long been accepted among theologians that there is a vast difference between saying that God did something and debating how it was done. There is also a great danger to any religious belief system that hinges its credibility on belief in something that can easily be proved incorrect. It would be a shame to destroy a valuable ethical framework because one relied too intensely on a fallacious view of the natural world.
     It is certainly not my intent to impose my beliefs on anyone. I am positive that any reasonable person should be able to read a book or article and analyze its content for validity, based on the reader's own set of values. That's what education is all about: to provide many points of view and to prepare the student to make up his or her own mind based upon the evidence.
     I am flattered that you think I may be subverting your children, or influencing their belief system. I doubt that my readership even approaches a fraction of the children who are routinely taught evolutionary theory in virtually every biology class in the country. (I have to admit I'm pleased to be even obliquely compared to Socrates, who was also charged with impiety.)
     You have a perfect right to disagree with anything you read here. I should point out that there is nothing to be gained by identifying anything as a theory. Every time you fly on an airplane or turn on a light switch you show faith in scientific theory.
     I am sorry if you feel dismayed by some of the books I report on. I can only urge you to debate the issues in these pages where I will be delighted to offer space.

* Aubrey Moore, 1843-1890, was very interested in the relationship of science to the church. He wrote:
"The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present day, is that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science had pushed the deist's God farther and farther away, and at the moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, Darwinism appeared, and under the disguise of a foe, did the work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or He is nowhere. He cannot be here, and not there. He cannot delegate His power to demigods called 'second causes.' In nature everything must be His work or nothing. We must frankly return to the Christian view of direct divine agency, the immanence of divine power in nature from end to end, the belief in a God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence of God, the mission of modern science was to bring home to our unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature." quoted in Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, vol. 2, 1870-1914 by Claude Welch (BT28.W394 v.2)

* Otto Eisenschiml was trained as a chemist in his native Austria. He arrived in the United States virtually penniless, but loaded with ambition. He soon recognized there was money to be made working as a consultant to businesses on chemical problems, e.g., how to keep the windows in window envelopes from cracking, and what oil to use to prevent leather gloves from drying out. He accumulated considerable wealth and decided to try his hand at other endeavors -- theorizing that he could apply the scientific method to the solution of historical problems. He delineated three basic steps: find a good problem, solve it, then sell the solution.
The Civil War had intrigued him for many years. In the 1920's there was little reputable scholarship on Booth's motivation for Lincoln's murder, and Eisenschiml thought this would be a good test of his method. Eisenschiml just couldn't believe that Booth's love of the South and his desire to avenge its defeat was an adequate motivation or explanation for Booth's actions. Thus his problem became, why was Lincoln murdered?
     He began to acquire documents and soon had an enormous collection of government papers, memoirs and newspaper articles. Slowly, he thought he discerned a pattern, and in his book Why Was Lincoln Murdered? he proposed that there had existed a sweeping conspiracy led by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the Radical Republicans, who were upset with Lincoln's compassionate plan for Southern reconstruction. The book was quite convincing, but William Hanchett, in "The Historian as Gamesman" (Civil War History, XXXVI, No. 1, 1990, p 5-16), shows how Eisenschiml fabricated his argument against Stanton by building a foundation of pseudo-evidence from questions that already had answers, but which were framed in such a way as to completely mislead the reader.
Given the public's gullibility, unsophistication, and love for the incredible, Eisenschiml's book was an immediate success. Conspiracies sell well and others jumped on the bandwagon. Hanchett suggests that by 1984 most Americans who had any opinion at all on the assassination probably gave some credence to Eisenschiml's thesis. Only in 1979 did professional historians, who had long noted the many flaws in his research methods and theories, finally produce analytical research of the "methods by which he had fabricated his case against Stanton."
Hanchett suggests that it was Eisenshiml's disdain for American universities' professionalism that allowed such an otherwise brilliant man to produce such bad history. " 'As knowledge is pumped into a man's head in college,' Eisenshiml wrote, 'a proportionate amount of natural shrewdness and incentive goes out of him.' Eisenshiml was determined to be original and inventive, a determination that was the basis of his fortune and was perhaps the very essence of his character." The dismissal of his book by professional historians enraged him. He ignored the respect many of them had for other non-academic historians Like Frederick Lewis Allen and Bernard DeVoto. Ultimately Eisenshiml "was less interested in searching for truth in history than he was in being original, inventive, and famous...[he] thrived on controversy." Hanchett asserts that Eisenshiml's Stanton conspiracy was a "deliberate falsification of the American past." An overstatement perhaps. But it did "condition Americans to assume the existence of sinister conspiracies behind other events, past and present...and thus encourage irrationality and the simplistic search for villains upon whom to blame all difficulties."

* Out of pocket costs for health care for those 75 and older are six times higher for Americans than for Canadians. This difference helps "explain why the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) doesn't want the United States to adopt the Canadian System. One of the AARP's most lucrative businesses (more than $100 million in profits annually) is the sale of health insurance to the elderly to supplement Medicare coverage..." Charles Peters, Washington Monthly, Jl/Ag 1992.

* "George Bush so treasured honesty that he used it with great economy."
Mel Lafferty

* "Kill a man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are God." Jean Rostand

* "I don't like her. But don't misunderstand me: my dislike is purely platonic." Herbert Beerbohm Tree

* One of the aspects I particularly liked about Frost the Fiddler (PS3573.E218F76 1992 CS - audiocassette), by Janice Weber, is the realistic (seemingly) detail of the life of a recording artist. Leslie Frost, aka Smith, loves to suit up in black leather and careen around the Autobahn at speeds in excess of 130 mph on her Harley. She is also an international spy, part of an organization more secret than the CIA. Her skills as a concert violinist of international renown provide the perfect cover. Most of the action transpires in Leipzig as the Iron Curtain begins to crumble. She witnesses a murder, falls in love with the murderer, and of course rescues civilization from the clutches of the evil Nazi empire that a few Germans wish to resurrect. So much for the traditional spy novel elements.
What really makes the book different is the author's caricatures of people in the music business. Ms. Weber delightfully parodies the publicist of her record company who wants to create the illusion of a liaison with an obnoxious rock star to help sell Beethoven sonatas. Janice Weber is a concert pianist of some fame which lends credibility to her delightful satire of the music business.

* From the trivia file: The average American male requires more than 4 hours per day in or working toward maintaining his automobile. That includes driving, parking, fueling, insuring, etc. In other words, to drive the average 7,500 miles per year, you must put in 1,600 hours or at a rate of 5 mph. To make things worse the internal combustion engine emits 47% of all the nitrogen oxide in the atmosphere, 39% of all hydrocarbons, and 66% of carbon monoxide. That's depressing. I'm going to recommend we all ride horses to work. Of course, then the sidewalks would be slippery all year round.

* Mix together the Milites Christi, a reactionary new order within the Catholic Church; a secret "Holy Force" that stops at nothing to achieve its ends; a Catholic priest who is an ex-Green Beret and CIA hit man aching to atone for years of massacre and violence in Vietnam; the Trinity, a group of three priests, of radical thought and origin, who are linked by some unforgivable sin committed while at seminary; and several gorgeous women who could shake any man's commitment to celibacy, and you have the basic ingredients of John Cooney's Acts of Contrition (PR6053.O529A66 1991), a marvelous way to spend a rainy afternoon, built around the political intrigues of the Vatican. The story revolves around the conflict between the conservative Church, firmly rooted in 2000 years of tradition and history, slowly moving toward change, but challenged by rich and powerful men who try to create a church within the Church to wrest control from the current hierarchy so they can return to a time when the Church ruled the world.
     Cooney is no stranger to those machinations. He is the author of American Pope: The Life and Times of Francis Cardinal Spellman, which naturally I had to locate and read also. As luck would have it, we had a copy in the paperback collection.
     It's a fascinating study of power and politics. Spellman was not interested in theology -- at one time after the election of John XXIII, he is reported to have said, "I hire theologians" -- but he was enamored of authority and domination. At his peak he was in some ways more powerful than Pius XII, his friend and mentor, because of his position as head of the Catholic Church in New York, the most powerful diocese in the world after Rome. His banquets were de rigueur for politicians of all stripes, and he was noted for his extraordinary ability to raise huge sums of money. They either loved or hated him, but all paid him homage. He was a vicious anti-Communist who was close to Joseph McCarthy and J.Edgar Hoover (presumably not when he was cross-dressing -- see Anthony Summers new book). He eagerly helped the CIA throughout the world especially during the Vietnam War of which he was a vociferous proponent. Not everyone was pleased. William O. Douglas once said of him, "I came to know several Americans who I felt had greatly dishonored our American idea. One was Cardinal Spellman." (two others were Hoover and John Foster Dulles.)
     Pius XII and Spellman both wanted a return to the Church of the Middle Ages, when there was little distinction between ecclesiastical and secular power. King Pepin the Short, in 756, had ceded enormous land holdings to the Church, providing enormous resources. Gradually, the state struggled to regain its lost authority and was aided by the immense corruption which led to the Reformation. By the late 19th century, virtually all its secular power was gone, and church leaders began a movement to enthrone the Pope as the world's great moral leader. The Vatican Council of 1870 which defined the Pope's infallibility was an important part of this maneuver.
     Thus Spellman, who attended seminary in Rome in 1911, was a part of the the Church's redefinition movement. Americans, traditionally not having a state church, could not appreciate how the intertwining of secular and religious power could be to the detriment of both. Spellman was untroubled by this commingling and intimately studied how the ways of the Vatican could be used to obtain power.
As Archbishop of New York, he was an outstanding administrator, reorganizing a decentralized parish financial system that New York bankers had long taken advantage of. Between 1954 and 1959 he personally controlled over $168 million in building projects.
     Business did not always go smoothly with the Vatican. Often Spellman felt it necessary to prove American Catholicism was purer than Rome's. An example was the flap over the movie The Miracle, which had been seen and widely praised in Rome. Spellman, who had not seen the movie, decided it was perverted, and led a vicious campaign to have the movie's license withdrawn. Perhaps his ambivalence about his own sexuality (he was widely assumed to be homosexual) led to his overreaction to a film that treated sexuality with some frankness. His campaign backfired, of course, as these things usually do. The film, which had been doing quite poorly, now began playing to packed houses, and the suit that Spellman brought ultimately led to the seminal decision by the Supreme Court essentially declaring that blasphemy was not a crime. Justice Frankfurter wrote in the decision, "Blasphemy was the chameleon phrase which meant the criticism of whatever the ruling authority of the moment established as orthodox doctrine."
His decline began shortly before Pius' death, when the Pope discovered that Spellman had been trying to extort funds from the Propagation of the Faith, an agency Spellman controlled, but which was under the direction of Bishop Sheen, a bitter enemy. When Sheen finally managed to get the case before the Pope, Spellman made the mistake of lying about his role and was easily proved incorrect. The Pope was not a happy camper.
     Then Pius died, and with the ascendancy of John XXIII, who emphasized the pastoral role of his bishops rather than the administrative, Spellman's decline became precipitous. He had also worked diligently against the election of Kennedy, arguing that a Catholic in the White House would work against Catholics, who would no longer be able to use the "we're victims of persecution and bigotry" ploy to squeeze federal funds for parochial schools. Kennedy himself was not sympathetic and in fact did everything possible to maintain a large chasm between church and state. His election meant a further decline in Spellman's power.
This is a fascinating biography of an important figure in 20th century politics.

* "This guy is a jumper. This time he jumped from the 8th floor. If he gets up and walks away, he'll climb right back on the 9th floor and jump again. He'll go on doing that until he gets to the 32nd floor. He has a genius for improving a misdemeanor into a felony." Edward Bennett Williams, Jimmy Hoffa's attorney/magician, talking about Hoffa, the evening before the jury returned an acquittal in Hoffa's infamous bribery trial. quoted in the New York Review of Books, February 11, 1993.

* "A pickup truck with a comfortable ride and power windows is like jeans with a zipper that zips up the side." Heard on the radio somewhere.

* "Outside of the killings, we have one of the lowest crime rates in the country." (Washington's Mayor Marion Barry) "It gets into quotas, goes into numerical, set numbers for doctors or for, it could go into all kinds of things." (George Bush trying to explain his objections to affirmative action programs.) "If you don't say anything, you won't be called on to repeat it." (Calvin Coolidge)

* It's 1964, Joseph Kennedy is President of the United States, Adolph Hitler is about to celebrate his 75th birthday and his rule over the European Community since the war ended in 1945. Germany is harassed by partisans and terrorists in the Urals who are provided with weapons and moral support by the United States.
A rapprochement between Kennedy and Hitler is in the works, but suddenly several prominent Nazis are discovered dead, either by unexplained accident or suicide. Xavier March, a Berlin SS-Kriminalpolizei investigator, finds the circumstances suspicious, especially when the Gestapo immediately takes charge and closes off all avenues of investigation.
     So begins Robert Harris's Fatherland (PR6058A68854F381992 - whew!). It's a great detective story based in part on actual documents. Enough said - no point in ruining the plot.

* Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all florescent light winking off
and on like a terrible migraine....
Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Think, think.
Sylvia Plath

* "The way to progress is through freedom of discussion. The false falls by its own weight, while the truth lives because of its essential righteousness." Frederic Howe

* Best acronym: ACHOO for autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst; a medical syndrome that causes people to sneeze when confronted by a bright light.

* "Celine" was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, a viciously anti-Semitic, but brilliant, French writer.
     During WW I he was seriously wounded (although there is some dispute about the nature and severity of the injury). His fans have attributed his callousness and hatred to the insufferable headaches and mental noises that plagued him until his death in 1961. "I've learned to get along with my ear noises....I listen to them become trombones, full orchestras, marshaling yards....If you move your mattress...show some little sign of impatience...you go crazy." So he wrote in his autobiographical novel North, finished in 1960.
     Most of his writing, after his most famous novel Journey to the End of Night, is viciously cruel and racist. So suggest reviewers of Frederic Vitoux's recent biography of Celine entitled appropriately Celine. (PQ2607.E834Z95131991)
You wonder, "Where is this going?" Well, George Steiner, in his review of Vitoux's book in the New Yorker, August 24, 1992, ponders the value of such vituperative literature. "The liberal case against all censorship is cant. If serious literature and the arts can educate sensibly, exalt our perceptions, refine our moral discriminations, they can, by exactly the same token, deprave, cheapen, and make bestial our imaginings and mimetic impulses."
     Steiner makes the same mistake that Medved does. Surely no one would ever suggest that anyone reading a "good" book would immediately run out and commit all sorts of "good" works. The inverse must also be valid.
It seems to me we need the literature of the racists and fascists out in the open where it can be read and its flaws exposed. The contrast to literature exalting the best in humanity becomes all the more stark and valid.

* "There are 10 Commandments, not one." Hillary Clinton to Sam Donaldson.

* "We're finally going to wrassle to the ground this gigantic orgasm that is just out of control." Senator Dennis DeConcini suffering a Freudian slip while discussing the balanced budget amendment.

* On the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, May 27, 1987, almost 1,000,000 people showed up to celebrate and to walk across a bridge that was designed using the same basic technology as the infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge. Only about 250,000 were able to squeeze on the bridge, and fortunately no panic occurred as the Golden Gate Bridge began to sway gently from side to side. Hangar cables became slack -- something that was not supposed to happen, and the main span's arch flattened out to a "noticeable degree." The bridge had been over-designed with an ample margin of safety, unlike the walkways at the Hyatt in Kansas City, which were essentially small bridges. Over 100 people were killed when the walkways collapsed. Engineers determined quickly that a change made to make installation of the walkways simpler reduced the ability of the walkways to handle even their own weight let alone that of several hundred people.
Henry Petroski, in To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (TA174.P474), is interested in engineering failures. He suggests these are terribly important to study, for they provide the clues to resolving the inherent paradox in engineering, which is that "...successful structural concepts devolve into failures, while the colossal failures contributed to the evolution of innovative and inspiring structures."
     Structures that never fail -- actually they all will eventually, if one takes them beyond their intended life -- are assumed to be over-designed, i.e., they are much stronger than need be. Engineers, in order to be more economical and aesthetic, will make changes in the design that may ultimately lead to sensational failures like that of the Tacoma Narrows bridge. It's designers ignored considerable evidence that was readily available on the effect of wind on non-stiffened structures.
Petroski is concerned that the current atmosphere of liability and law suits will lead to a suppression of free discussion of the reasons behind structural (and now computer program) failures. "Engineering is a human endeavor and thus subject to error." Catastrophes are rare, but Petroski discusses why failures may be impossible to avoid and also why, paradoxically, we may not want to make them impossible.
     This is a totally mesmerizing book. Two related works that I read several years ago are Normal Accidents: Living With High-Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow (T54.P471984). He explains how human reliance on technology and over-design will inevitably lead to failure precisely because of inherent safety design. The other is The Tower and the Bridge: the New Art of Structural Engineering by David Billington (TA636.B54 1983) -- an absolute classic. After reading this book I wanted to quit work and return to school to study civil engineering. Of course, I made the mistake of mentioning this to my wife, who fell into paroxysms of laughter, saying she had seen some of the stuff I had built at home, and there was no way she would ever go on a bridge that I designed.
Petroski mentions a novel entitled Skyscraper, written by Robert Byrne (the editor of an engineering trade magazine) that has to do with safety factors and failure in high-rise buildings. Naturally, I had to read it and, sure enough it's an above average (maybe) "detective" story. The hero is a consulting engineer who is called in to determine why some windows have fallen out of a new skyscraper. Of course, things get worse and eventually the building falls down with our hero and his gorgeous girl friend stuck inside on the 11th floor (which saves their lives). A little melodramatic, of course, but lots of interesting engineering details. Good quick read. He's written another one about dams.

* "Most people would rather be treated courteously than loved, if they really thought about it. Consider how few knifings and shootings are the result of etiquette as compared to passion." P.J. O'Rourke

* "If it has tires or testicles, you're going to have trouble with it." Ohio State Senator Linda Furney

* James Atlas, an editor for The New York Times, no doubt wishing to cash in on the coattails of such as Allen Bloom and Eric D. Hirsch, summarizes what he considers to be the basic debate between the traditionalists (read Great Books and Dead-White- European-Males) and the radicals (read multiculturalists who would have us read gay and Hindu literature) who espouse cultural relativism. His Battle of the Books: The Curriculum Debate in America (Z1039.C65A74 1992) will not overload your shelves, physically or mentally.
     Tradition, I suppose, is useful for building stability and creating a reference point from which to examine new ideas, but it seems to me that both sides of the issue miss the point; both sides want to operate in a world exclusive of the other, rather than take the best of both.
     Allen Bloom, who started the whole thing, or at least brought the debate into the open, argues that democracy and its desire for equality, really is at fault; that the cultural relativism of the sixties removed us from the traditional values of the "Great Books", which, of course gave us slavery and colonialism. Atlas, who comes down on the side of the "canonists," (those arguing for a traditional canon of reading) -- along with William Bennett -- forget that the classics of today were the radical nonsense of yesterday. Surely a century that has seen genocide and the creation of weapons of universal destruction, can stop to examine the literature of the present in the context of the current century. And, surely, in a world in which all countries must rely on each other, it is useful to examine and understand the history, politics and social milieu of other peoples. After all, Hirsch argues that if we do not all have a common base of knowledge we will not be able to communicate with each other. Surely it becomes important to communicate with other than just ourselves.
     Ultimately, both sides are engaged in a political struggle: the Left wanting more attention paid to the disenfranchised, and the Right fearing the trend away from traditional values. Both sides suffer from an extreme naivete if they believe that excluding the literature of either side will carry the day for their own point of view.
Atlas wanders all over the place, blaming the univerities' "publish or perish" requirement for the decline of scholarship and the trend away from the classics. (How much more can be said about Shakespeare or Milton?) He is a fan of assimilation of other "cultures"; that it's important to maintain the superiority and power and righteousness of the United States of America. (Stand up and salute at this point.) The problem is, of course, that mainstream, white society has never permitted the assimilation of those who look or act differently from their own male WASP society; hence, perhaps, the trend toward valuing uniqueness and values other than those of the Dead White European Males.
     Ultimately, I agree with Brumwich, who argues that the real purpose of education is not to trasmit a point of view, -- although I see nothing wrong with that -- but to help students to think and make rational choices based on knowledge rather than opinion. Whether we've done that, of course, is a whole other debate.

* "It's a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the very best, you very often get it." W. Somerset Maugham

* "Living wills should be very specific about the definition of 'brain dead' and not so carelessly worded that they can be enacted by greedy heirs if your foot goes to sleep." P.J. O'Rourke

* "As one of the few politicians who admits to both having inhaled and having enjoyed it, of course, I support it." Representative Joe Kennedy testifying in support of marijuana for medicinal purposes.

* "Leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermists." Camille Paglia

* "My belief in free speech is so profound that I am seldom tempted to deny it to the other fellow. Nor do I make any effort to differentiate between the other fellow right and that other fellow wrong, for I am convinced that free speech is worth nothing unless it includes a full franchise to be foolish and even...malicious." H.L. Mencken, whose notoriously anti-Semitic and racist remarks would never pass speech codes.

* The debate over the role of vocational training in relation to a liberal arts education is not a new one. Michael Smith, in an essay entitled "Kropotkin and technical education: an anarchist voice," published in For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice, edited by David Goodway, -- I bet half the audience tuned out at the mention of anarchism; hang in there now, the guy's really quite reasonable -- reveals the parallels between the 1880's and 1980's. Perceived deficiencies in economic growth were cause for alarm and hand-wringing in both eras.
Kropotkin believed that education should be "integral," i.e., apply to the whole person. Man's physical labor should be integrated with his cerebral endeavors. The class-based educational system in Britain at the time overemphasized the separation. He wanted a wide variety of skills taught the student rather than have them specialize narrowly on whatever skills industry needed at that time. Often the worker was obsoleted as times inevitably changed and his skills became superannuated. This did not mean an avoidance of specialization, rather an emphasis on enhancing the individual's potential development based on the individual's needs, rather than those of the marketplace.
     The curriculum, which would be egalitarian, had three components: scientific, industrial, and moral. Education would be the same for all children, and it would emphasize the practical nature of knowledge. The key was to make education emancipatory, i.e., provide workers with flexibility and independence, which would strengthen their bargaining position in the job market. Intellectual emancipation would be achieved by participation in the political process. Taking TQM theory further (remember this was written in the 1880's), Kropotkin argued that the entire educational process should be team oriented, with goals and curriculum determined by the group it affected. He even went so far as to suggest that only groups be allowed to register, not individuals. Smith suggests that Kropotkin would have been enamored by the computer and today's technological ability to distribute education even to the home. He would have thought that this would be extremely liberating.
My thanks to Kim Goudreau for bringing this article to my attention.

* Harold J. Morowitz, professor of biology, and James Trefil, who teaches physics, both at George Mason University, have produced what I consider to be one of the seminal books on abortion that I have read. In Facts of Life: Science and the Abortion Controversy (QM601.M768 1992) they examine the concepts of "life" and humanness. They point out that at the molecular level we are indistinguishable from plants and bacteria -- on a chemical level our cells function the same as brewer's yeast, a single cell organism; and we share a 98.5% genetic (DNA coding) with chimpanzees -- which are also "alive." Therefore, the important question one must ask is at what point the fetus or zygote acquires those characteristics that make us human, for no one would deny that we are indeed profoundly different from other forms of life. The point at which humanness is acquired (not personhood, which is a legal concept) becomes important to help distinguish between the rights of the mother and those of the fetus.
     An enormous amount of change occurs from conception to birth, and the authors have examined the biological and scientific evidence to determine at what point this humanness is acquired. From a biologist's point of view, at conception, "two previously existing living things come together to form another living thing." Traditionally the anti-abortion advocates have argued that because the DNA genetic code exists at conception, that is when "life" begins. Morowitz and Trefil suggest that is like saying a building is complete when the blueprints are done. The combining creates the DNA blueprint, but dead tissue excised in a hospital has the same DNA blueprint, and cancerous tumors contain genetic uniqueness, yet no one would call them "life" worthy of preservation. Not to mention the fact that only about 1/3 of all conceptions lead to a successful birth -- nature performs abortions at a much higher rate than humans. (Research being done on parthenogenesis -- birth without conception -- indicates that unfertilized eggs can be stimulated to divide and begin the development of a complete adult: a Gloria Steinem fantasy come true.)
     To make a long, but fascinating, story short, the authors propose that humanness begins at the moment when the cerebral cortex is formed and the synapses begin functioning. This is not a unique nor new position. The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic theologian Bernard Haring have both written that the cerebral cortex is the "center of all personal manifestations and activities." It is here that speech, conscious movement, visual information and sensory stimuli are all processed. The enlarged cerebral cortex is unique to humans, and it becomes a functioning entity sometime between 25 and 30 weeks of development. Coincidentally, that is also when electroencephalographic readings take place. (The absence of EEG readings is now widely used as a determination of death.) Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist, as well as a theologian, regarded the "development of an enlarged cerebral cortex as almost a second creation -- as a sign from God that humanity is, indeed, special, regardless of the fact that we share a common ancestry with all other life." Hence the authors recommend that in the conflict of rights, until the fetus achieves synapses in the cerebral cortex, at about 7 months, the woman shall choose and her rights must predominate. After 7 months, a loss of certainty occurs and one can no longer deny with certainty the humanity of the fetus, and its rights must be considered and protected.
     This book will probably not solve the abortion dilemma, but it goes a long way toward providing a rational and scientific basis for evidence of what constitutes humanness and at what point we achieve that distinction. It should be required reading.

* "Neither art nor the artist has a moral responsibility to liberal social causes." Camille Paglia

* Another addition for those of us who hate to drive without a book on the tape deck is Ramage by Dudley Pope, a Hornblower pretender, (PR 6066.O5 CS -- 9.5 hrs).
Actually a lot of the plot is pretty stupid and the hero, Lieutenant Ramage, is a jerk, but Pope's descriptions of the ships and how sailing of a rigged ship was accomplished are simply marvelous and very enlightening.

* A recent article documents a correlation between the amount of country-western music played on radio stations in a community and the rate of suicide. The authors found that the "themes found in country music foster a suicidal mood among people already at risk of suicide and that it is thereby associated with a high suicide rate." Personally, I always suspected as much. (Stack, Steven. "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide." Social Forces, 71:211-218, Sep, 1992.)

* James Reston once referred to John Foster Dulles as the "supreme expert in the art of diplomatic blundering...He doesn't stumble into booby traps: he digs them to size, studies them carefully, and then jumps in." (Conway)

* "Polar expedition is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised." Apsley Cherry-Garrard

* Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, otherwise known as the "Roshomon" principle, "centers around the idea that if a person knows various things that are not psychologically consistent with one another, he will in a variety of ways, try to make them more consistent. Two items of information that psychologically do not fit together are said to be in a dissonant relationship to each other....A person can change his opinion; he can change his behavior, thereby changing the information he has about it; he can even distort his perception and his information about the world about him." from Readings About the Social Animal, 1973.

* Don't assume anything about me because it makes an ASS out of U and ME.

* Henry Louis Gates, Jr. reviewed Robert Hughes' (author of Fatal Shore) new book, The Culture of Complaint in the April 19, 1993 issue of The New Yorker. Hughes takes aim at both the Right and the Left who are both involved with politicizing culture: "If someone agrees with us on the aims and uses of culture, we think him objective; if not, we accuse him of politicizing the debate. In fact, political agendas are everywhere and the American conservatives' ritual claim that their own cultural or scholarly positions are apolitical is patently untrue."
But Hughes has little time for the "hoary Victorian notions" about how art and literature can be uplifting. For example, the most universally recognized painting of the century, "Guernica" had no effect whatsoever on the conduct of the Spanish Civil War nor on Franco in particular. (One could even speculate that watching the Brady Bunch might have been more formative socially to larger numbers of people given the pervasiveness of visual media.)
     "Joe Sixpack isn't looking at the virtuous feminist knockoffs of John Heartfield on the Whitney wall -- he's got a Playmate taped on the sheetrock next to the band saw, and all the Barbara Krugers in the world aren't going to get him to mend his ways."
     Hughes does worry about the fragmentation of American life; the "us" vs. "them" rhetoric that "John Mitchell called 'positive Polarization.'" We are in deep trouble when "'sensitivity' gets more attention than social justice. Behind our propensity for offering lexical redress to political grievances, [Robert Hughes] suspects, is the hope of creating 'a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.'"
     Ironically, he suggests the cry from the right that Afrocentrism is a political movement is backwards. "The trick of Afrocentrism is to have supplanted real politics with a kind of group therapy. It seeks to redress the problem of poor self-esteem [borrowing language from the ubiquitous self-therapeutic movement] rather than the problem of poor life chances....Afrocentric education is presented [by its proponents] as a technique of social control, one that will contain what white America fears most -- black violence --...culture as therapy....self-love makes the world go round." The problem, of course, is that self-esteem is not just difficult to measure; it doesn't correlate with the behavior it's supposed to support. As sociologist Neil Smelser reported in a 1989 survey "The associations between self-esteem and its expected consequences are mixed, insignificant, or absent...even less can be said for the causal relationship between the two."
Hughes is a proponent of multiculturalism. "...monoculture works poorly. It exhausts the soil. The social richness of America ... comes from the diversity of its tribes. Its capacity for cohesion, for some spirit of common agreement on what is to be done, comes from the willingness of those tribes not to elevate their differences into impassable barriers and ramparts."
     The reviewer suggests that "diversity" is something of a "distraction from the more serious issues of racial immiseration [you won't find this in your little Webster's, at least I didn't -- It means a state of making miserable, great word] and economic inequality." Gates contends that the ubiquitous media or "Coca[cola]-culturalism is far more significant for the destruction of diversity -- that in Nepal ancient Hindu religious practices have been disrupted by the BBC World Service and Michael Jackson more than indigenous social fragmentation and the same thing has happened in the United States -- a kind of corporate culturalism -- which will destroy the individuality of diverse cultures.
This book will be a must read. We should have it in July.

* "There is, as is well known, an extraordinary belief in some circles that politics is an exact science like mathematics, and that there is, so to speak, one correct answer to any problem, all the others being incorrect. It is a delusion, a false theory, and its forcible application has brought untold misery to untold millions of people....The language of the revolutionaries indicates something of the same kind -- a similar belief in a covert policy, as opposed to all others which are incorrect, and therefore opposed to God.
The idea that God has enemies and needs human help in order to identify and dispose of those enemies is a little difficult to understand." Bernard Lewis in an article about terrorism entitled "The Enemies of God" in the March 25, 1993 issue of The New York Review of Books

* May I recommend an incisive and seminal article relating to librarianship: Bookem-Danno, M (1990). "The diagnosis and treatment of obsessive bibliophilia." Hawaiian Journal of Criminal Psychology, 25:50-59.