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August 15, 2008
Family Stories
Family Reunions bring back an awful lot of memories, or a lot of awful memories. When we get together with the family, we can’t avoid the past. It’s there, all around the table, brought back to life by those oh-so-familiar voices and characters, and by performing our long-discarded family roles. Like the taste of Marcel Proust’s famous Madeleine, a spoonful of mother’s best canned tomato soup may bring back every vivid detail of our past life. Most of us, thank goodness, don’t do what Proust did and write it all down in an unstoppable narrative of several million words. But we could, oh yes, we could.
It’s amazing how many people do set out to write their memoirs, not just celebrities but ordinary folks like you and me – or at least like me – who have nothing very interesting to report about our lives. We want to do this because we only have one life, and we need to make some kind of record of it - something more personal than the usual electronic trail of credit card bills, tax payments and medical files. The impulse to tell our stories is very strong, as if in telling them we preserve ourselves.
But memoir writing is a dangerous game, because it demands the kind of truth telling that no family wants to hear. So when we get together we tell each other the stories of our shared lives, but only the edited highlights. In my family, for example, somebody always tells the story of how my father and uncle tried to paper the ceiling one Christmas and ended up practically destroying the entire living room. We tell these stories over and over again, but we never fill in the blanks by saying: “Then nothing interesting happened for five years,” or “That was just before the police took Uncle Bill away.”
In my family, and I suspect in most families, all the most interesting episodes have been edited out. When I was younger I would ask awkward questions about these ‘forgotten’ events. Now I’m old enough to know the value of secrets and silence. How could any family survive without them?
Some cultures have a kind of statute of limitations on family stories. There’s a folk tale, possibly true, about an aboriginal tribe in Sumatra whose memories are held in common by one man, designated the Memory Priest.* He remembers all their family histories, their activities, and their secrets and, from time to time, recites them at a ceremonial meal, not unlike Thanksgiving. The Memory Priest is the keeper of the tribal past. Nobody else has to remember anything. He is their genealogist and their conscience rolled into one. But the longer the Memory Priest lives, the more humiliating and unwelcome his unedited recitations become. He knows too much. Eventually the members of the tribe fall on him and kill him. Their memories are all gone, and history begins again. All the bad things that happened in the past are canceled out and, until a new Memory Priest is trained, everyone is completely happy.
Most families have a Memory Priest, a senior member who has forgotten nothing and likes to tell stories, sometimes accompanied by ancient and embarrassing photographs. Of course we don’t kill them, we treasure them, although sometimes we pray for a little diplomatic amnesia. A family, like a tribe, is nothing without its memories.
*I can’t remember where I read this story, but I think it was told by Paul Theroux.
Copyright: David Bouchier
July 26, 2008
Gap Generation
I was horrified to read, in The New York Times about the terrible fate of some teenagers in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their parking permits had been withdrawn because the school parking lots were full, so they had to take the yellow bus or abandon the idea of education altogether.
It’s distressing to read about such suffering inflicted on innocent young people. One junior, featured in the story, will no longer be able to drive his mother’s Mercedes SUV to school, another must leave her Lexus at home. It seems that seniors without top of the line cars suffer of loss of status in the high school world. “It’s what you drive that counts,” said one seventeen year old, already well educated for a life of mindless consumerism.
One of the most fundamental freedoms is freedom of movement. Young people were not granted this freedom in the past because they tend to move in the wrong direction, and much too fast. But such precautions are ancient history. The end of classes at our local high school produces a kind of demolition derby on the surrounding highways. Younger children, who are forced to travel on the bus, are met by their parents the end of the street with cars. The street is less than a quarter mile long. Do these kids ever make any physical effort, or suffer the slightest discomfort?
At times like this the generation gap seems like an unbridgeable chasm – so let’s make the most of it. Perhaps the only advantage of getting older is that we no longer have to pretend to be young at heart. Being old at heart is so much more fun. We can legitimately complain about the “younger generation,” and legitimately boast about how much harder life was for our own generation – which I will now proceed to do.
Getting to school is one of my most vivid childhood memories. My mind is blank about what happened in the schools themselves, but I remember those daily journeys.
I walked to my elementary school in London. My mother took me on the first day, when I was five, but I refused to go to school ever again unless she let me walk there by myself. This was a mistake. It was only about a mile and a half, but bigger kids lurked around every corner, for the sole purpose of beating up the smaller kids who had no mothers to protect them. I reckon that I was beaten up every day for about four years, until I qualified as a bigger kid and started to lurk in ambush myself. We all walked or bicycled to school every day in all weathers. None of our parents had cars, and there were no school buses that stopped every twenty yards to save us from the danger of unaccustomed exercise.
When the time came to move on to high school I dropped to the bottom of the bullying hierarchy again, and also faced a much longer trip – almost five miles on a busy main road. Again, there was no bus so I made the trip on my bike five days a week, forty weeks a year, for six years. During that time I was knocked off my bike three times – twice by passing trucks and once by a speeding motorcycle, but I survived these adventures.
I endured the mysterious meteorological phenomenon known to all cyclists – when you cycle east the wind blows west, and vice versa. It was often cold, it was nearly always raining, so we had to sit through the school day in soaking wet clothes. Those daily journeys made their mark on me, both literally and psychologically. I still have the scars, chronic sinusitis and a deep conviction that education is not supposed to be fun. I like to think that my character was strengthened by this daily ordeal, but I can’t prove it. The teachers at our school weren’t much better off. The headmaster has an ancient car, but the rest walked or rode bicycles, just like the pupils. When we were wet, at least they were wet too.
Everyone of a certain age has memories like this – true or false – although nobody under the age of thirty will ever believe them. We older persons suffer from simple generational envy. We were born too early for the continuous party. Sex, drugs, and SUVs were not part of our curriculum. Instead we got history, Latin and pneumonia.
But mixed with envy is a sincere concern for the welfare of these young people. They are growing up without fresh air and exercise, and with very bad values. Let’s forget the buses and the parking permits and issue them all with bicycles. It would be good for them, and enormously satisfying for us.
Copyright: David Bouchier
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July 14, 2008
Deep Time
The increasingly warm weather encouraged me to go walking on the beach the other day. As usual I indulged my beach hobby, which has nothing to do with sunbathing. Stones, in my opinion, are the most interesting things to be found on the beach – at least at this time of year. As a child I liked to gather strange looking stones, worn smooth by the sea and revealing astonishing patterns of light and color. They seemed like precious gems to me, and my long-suffering parents always carried home a box of my stones after a trip to the seaside.
At that age I didn’t know anything about geology. But now I understand what’s so fascinating about stones – it’s their age. Stones come from a past so far distant that we call it Deep Time. The stones on our local Long Island beach were left behind by the retreating glacier that shaped the island twenty thousand years ago. But they were ancient even then. Three hundred million years ago Long Island was a dinosaur swamp, and half a billion years before that it was a volcanic wasteland. There’s something very soothing about that thought, and about Deep Time in general. The farther back we go in time the less we know, and the more we can imagine.
The universe is like that – unimaginably ancient and therefore unimaginably mysterious. On a human scale monuments like Stonehenge and the prehistoric painted caves are like that, places of awe and mystery. We can make guesses about them, but we can’t know anything for sure. Ordinary historical time is full of painful lessons, which is why we don’t teach history in schools any more. Deep Time, by contrast, is a mystical and magical place. I held a smooth gray stone I had found among the discarded soda cans on the beach, and thought: “I’m holding a million years of the past in my hands.” I wondered how Long Island had looked when the stone was dropped here, as the glacier slowly melted northwards millennia ago. It must have been a bleak landscape of sand, gravel and rocks, with not a subdivision or a fast food outlet anywhere in sight. Why did that vision felt so good? The answer is obvious, really. Deep Time gives us a perspective on today’s time. In a few million years my tax deadline or my doctor’s appointment will seem like very small stuff indeed. You may think you’ve been waiting a long time for term limits on Congress or a universal health care plan, but that’s nothing compared to Deep Time.
This is cheap relaxation therapy, because Deep Time is all around us. In a book by Richard Fortey called The Earth: An Intimate History he tells of a bar at Paddington Railway Station in London. The bar is made of a slab of granite from the Cambrian era. So, he writes, “If you have missed your train you can lean on a bar that is 1,500 million years old and reflect that a half hour delay is not that bad.” Exactly.
The sculptured gray stone I picked up on the beach sits my desk. I’ll keep it there for a while. I like to imagine that some beach wanderer may walk on that same shore, eons in the future, if Long Island hasn’t been washed away by that time. This remote descendant may pick up an ancient bleached soda can, wondering at its silvery surface and strange shape, and try to guess how such an object was created, and what it means. But he or she will never know. That’s the beauty of Deep Time.
Copyright: David Bouchier
June 27, 2008
The Finishing Line
Most universities try to give a little publicity and pizazz to their commencement ceremonies by granting honorary degrees to citizens of varying degrees of honor and distinction. Degrees are just about the only thing a university has to give away, apart from out-of-date computers and those little bits of chalk that are too small to write with. So they hand out honorary degrees with fine impartiality.
Honorary degrees are a perfect illustration of the principle that “To him that hath shall be given.” Some celebrities have dozens of them. But people who could really use an honorary degree - the poor, the obscure, the intellectually challenged - have to get their diplomas the hard way.
The principle of the honorary degree could usefully be extended. Right now, it’s no more than a public relations exercise. But consider the vast savings of time and money that could be achieved by handing out undergraduate and graduate degrees even more liberally. I’m not suggesting that everyone should get a PhD, although that’s worth considering as a way of leveling this very bumpy playing field. But some students who arrive in college are so bright, so motivated that they might just as well be given a degree at the end of their first year, saving three years of wasted time and a monstrous heap of dollars. In the eighteenth century, it wasn’t unusual for the most gifted young men to graduate from Oxford or Cambridge at the age of sixteen. The professors simply had nothing more to teach them. Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who is believed by many to be the true author of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, graduated with a BA from Cambridge at fourteen, and with an MA from Oxford at sixteen.
On the other hand, some students are so obtuse and lazy that they’ll never earn a legitimate degree in a hundred years. To save everybody a lot of grief, they should be given honorary degrees too - preferably at the end of the first week of their freshman year.
This is, alas, a rational argument, and nobody loves a rational argument. When it comes to things like graduation, we prefer to follow tradition. The college experience must have a fixed beginning, middle and end, the same for everybody. It’s like the speed limit. Some drivers are perfectly safe at eighty on the highway, others should never be allowed to go faster than twenty miles an hour. But we all have to observe the same tedious fifty-five.
So the road towards graduation is fixed in time and frozen as ritual. This teaches the new graduates another important lesson: the road to success is to follow the rules. Alternatively they can just wait and hope that some university will recognize how unique and wonderful they are, and give them an honorary degree.
Copyright: David Bouchier
May 23, 2008
Life Plan
Every year in May thousands of proud and impoverished parents watch their children graduate from colleges all over the country. The ceremony is called, curiously enough, “commencement,” perhaps because it signals the beginning of adulthood, financial responsibility, real work, and all the other horrors of grown up life. It’s a scary time for the graduates, comparable to going “over the top” in the trench warfare of World War One, and facing enemy fire for the first time. That’s why the graduate schools are full. It makes sense to put off the moment of truth as long as possible.
The parents feel relieved, and the young graduates feel slightly lost. Suddenly they feel the need for a life plan that will guarantee a smooth passage through career and marriage to retirement and the nursing home and that final graduation. If you are in this situation, here’s my post-Commencement advice about your life plan.
My best friend at high school, Michael John Charles Young, had a detailed life plan by the age of fifteen. He had it all worked out: a degree in economics, a safe government job, a little house, a wife, two children, and early retirement at sixty to a resort on the coast. I’ve lost touch with him, but I hope he made it. If he did he’s been retired five years by now, and is almost certainly a grandfather.
I never had such a plan, and I never missed it. When I was at school my only life plan was to get out of it. So I escaped from the educational gulag at the tender age of sixteen, only to return and graduate from university a dozen years later. By that time I had a wife, a house, a car, a cat, a dog, and two jobs – the whole catastrophe. I was too busy to go to my graduation, or to think about plans of any kind.
The traditional role of the Commencement speaker is to suggest at least the outlines of a life plan by promoting positive thoughts and values. Unfortunately nobody agrees what these are, so graduates get mixed messages. Some colleges avoid this problem by choosing as Commencement speakers characters from Sesame Street, or other entertainment celebrities who can be relied upon not say anything serious at all.
The trouble with most Commencement speakers is that they tend to offer dumb and discouraging metaphors: life as a mountain to climb, life as a race to run, life as a challenge and a pilgrimage, and even life as a game to be played. But in reality life is a just a series of things that happen one after the other for no particular reason, some of which are amusing and some not. We know from quantum physics that randomness is at the center of how the world is put together at the subatomic level. Experience tends to confirm that this randomness goes all the way up, perhaps all the way to the White House. This is good because, without randomness, life plans might actually work out and we would all die of boredom halfway through.
If I were a Commencement speaker I would advise all new graduates to forget about life plans and go to graduate school. This will extend the period during which they don’t have to think about a life plan for five years, or even ten, by which time it will be too late. Better still I would advise them to spend a few years traveling to exotic places, learning all those things that are not taught, even on the most advanced graduate curriculum.
A certain amount of life planning is necessary of course. Even the freest of free spirits must remember to collect his or her salary check, and stock up with cat food on a regular basis. But there’s no need to overdo it. Long-term life plans, like stock market projections, are dust blowing in the wind. That wonderful eighteenth century letter writer, the Reverend Sidney Smith, advised his correspondents that the secret of happiness was: “To take short views of life, never further than dinner or tea.” By following this advice all of us, and especially politicians, might avoid the embarrassment that ensues when grandiose and improbable long-term plans come to nothing.
That’s my advice to new graduates. Stay focused on dinner, or tea, and you won’t go far wrong.
Copyright: David Bouchier
May 10, 2008
History Past and Future
The news that the remains of an ancient Egyptian city had been unearthed in the California desert gave me a moment of historical vertigo. This, I thought, must lead to some serious historical revisionism. If Egypt was actually in California, then geographically speaking, the Promised Land must be in Utah – and the Israelis and Palestinians have been arguing over the wrong piece of real estate.
But, when I paid closer attention to the story, I realized that the discovery had been somewhat less exciting, although no less bizarre. A filmmaker turned archaeologist called Peter Brosnan had in fact excavated the remains of an ancient movie set, which is just what you would expect to find in California. Back in 1956 Cecil B. DeMille had filmed a lurid overblown epic called The Ten Commandments there, and buried the set under the sand, presumably out of embarrassment.
Of course history moves faster in California than in other places, and artifacts from 1956 must seem very ancient indeed. But I think it’s a pity that this movie set was excavated when it could still be easily identified. In a few hundred more years it would have been a total mystery, enough to make an archaeologist’s head spin.
The fascination of history varies more or less inversely with time. The farther back we look, the less we know, and the more interesting it becomes. Recent history is as dull as yesterday’s news, and stuff we can actually remember is not real history at all. The Second World War and the Trojan War are much the same to the younger generation, except that the latter can be studied at the local multiplex in an epic starring Brad Pitt. But I remember at least one of those wars, and Mr. Pitt wasn’t in it.
Sometimes I think missed my vocation. I should have been an archaeologist, teasing ancient secrets out of the earth. As a kid I was forever digging in the back yard for traces of the past. Once I found a fragment of a German bomb casing, but most of my discoveries were old animal bones and other disgusting things that my mother threw away, although any one of them might have been the key to the existence of some ancient civilization. When we went to the beach I dug deep holes in the sand. The different layers of pebbles, gravel, and shale fascinated me, suggesting as they did beaches below beaches below beaches, and time below time.
We were taught a little geology at school, and I loved it. Geology takes us even farther back, and shows us how to decode those stratified layers in the earth that have accumulated over millions of years – the Cambrian, the Jurassic, the Pliocene, and so on. The layers are distinguished by what’s in them – types of rock, fossils, and other clues – giving us a snapshot of some six hundred million years of earth’s history, during which nothing very interesting happened.
Here we are now, the top layer for the moment, and obviously much more interesting than anything that came before. But it makes you think. The idea of all those other worlds under our feet gives a better perspective on our small vanities. The buried remains (if any) of our civilization will be a splendid puzzle for future archaeologists. How will they interpret a Tastee Freeze outlet, or for that matter the Pentagon? And what will geologists make of our layer a few million years from now? We know already what it will be made of: the ultimate non-biodegradable substance of our age, plastic. Zillions of tons of computers and toys and Poland Spring bottles will be compacted into a geological stratum that our scientific descendants, if they have any sense of humor left, will inevitably label the Plastocene Age.
Copyright: David Bouchier
May 2, 2008
Eyewitmess to History - May 1968
The local community college ran a lecture series called “History’s Children.” The idea was for each contributor to tell the story of some important moment in history that had changed his or her life. I was asked to give a lecture, and I hated the idea at first. History is about the Roman Empire or Richard III or the battle of Gettysburg, none of which influenced my life at all, and which I certainly didn’t experience. Being asked to talk about history as an eyewitness has the same depressing effect as being given senior citizen discounts in hardware stores - it makes you feel old.
But history gets closer all the time. Historic preservationists are saving early hamburger stands and gas pumps now, and the young people I teach regard everything before 1985 as history, which means most of my life.
So I chose to talk about my one indisputably historic experience, which was being caught up in the great student revolution that swept Europe in 1968. I was in London when the university was occupied and the American embassy was besieged; I was in Paris at the height of the revolution that nearly brought down the French Republic. It seemed a good enough slice of history for a short lecture, and I sharpened my best pencil.
Here’s where memory plays its tricks. Almost everything I remembered from those days was absurd and surrealistic; nothing like the accounts in books or newspapers. The first image that came to mind was of myself, as a young faculty member with radical opinions, crawling through a two-foot square space in a barricade of filing cabinets. Revolting students had occupied one wing of the university, and I was chosen as one of the negotiators - not so much because of my radical views, I think, but because I was thin enough in those days to get through the barricade. In the end I stayed on the student side, because they had had the foresight to occupy the part of the building that contained the bar. The negotiations came to nothing. The students were looking for something more dramatic, and they got it: the police were called, and did it their way.
Another vivid image from those days was observing a lecture by a colleague of mine, a dapper historian of fastidious habits, who chose to continue his class on the French Revolution even though the lecture rooms were occupied by protesting students. In this case, just one student was occupying the large room, and he was fast asleep, wrapped in a sleeping bag on the table at the front, where the professor stands. The class - some of them - were in their places, giggling and whispering. My colleague didn’t blink. He leaned his notes against the sleeping body and launched into a lecture on Ninth Thermidor. The student demonstrator woke up, and must have thought he was in the middle of a nightmare. It turned out that he was naked inside the sleeping bag, and couldn’t escape. So he lay there utterly still for an hour, until the lecture was over.
I recalled many more crazy moments, like the day when the faculty at my university, feeling very brave, formed a thin grey line to protect our students from arrest, but were swept away like leaves in the wind when the police charged. But it was harder to recapture the serious side of 1968. After all, this was serious business. People were injured, people were killed, huge institutions were paralyzed. This was when highly privileged middle class students, in Europe and in America, staged a rebellion that seemed to reject everything their parents’ generation cared about. In one sweep, the students trashed capitalism, the work ethic, orthodox sexual morality, discipline, education and (it seemed) civilization itself.
Yet now, twenty five years almost to the day since I was crawling through those barricades, it seems not just unreal but ridiculous. Where did we get the idea that we could change the world? How could we have so thoroughly mistaken the gesture for the reality? How could we have missed the blazingly obvious Golden Rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules?
Perhaps our brains had been fried by the leaded petrol fumes we’d been breathing from childhood. Or perhaps it was, as many people believed, the influence of Dr. Spock’s notorious book Baby and Child Care, which put forward the novel proposition that children should not be frustrated. In 1968, frustration was abolished.
Whatever the reason, the fact is that I couldn’t recover the authenticity or the passion of the moment. And perhaps memory has a built in, merciful mechanism that prevents us from re-living our moments of idealism. Thus all our tragedies are turned into farce and we become, in more ways than one, history’s children.
copyright David Bouchier
April 22, 2008
Too Many Books, Too Little Time
Last month we were staying in a village close to the English town of Rye, which is famous for its sellers of used and antique books. Half a dozen such establishments are scattered along the picturesque high street. One rainy day I decided to hit every used bookstore in town.
I started at the east end, the forbidding Land Gate, constructed in 1369 as part of the town’s defenses against the wicked French invaders. The defenses failed. Nowadays the French come pouring through the Channel Tunnel, and the streets of Rye are full of French tourists. Napoleon would have been delighted. Right beside this ancient monument was the Land Gate Book Shop, its door firmly closed but its window displaying an eclectic selection of Audubon prints, nineteenth century romantic poetry, and modern thrillers.
Just up the hill was ‘The Book Worm,’ where I could have picked up a rare first edition of Trilby by Daphne du Maurier, or a leather bound set of the complete works of Edward Bulwer Lytton – a great but almost forgotten Victorian writer - at a knock-down price. I was almost seduced by a long out-of-print biography of the French composer César Franck. But self-control is built into an expedition like this. The modern economy-class air traveler can’t afford to accumulate books. They’re just too heavy.
Books are solid things. They don’t grow old. It’s the subject matter that ages. Today’s ephemeral celebrity biography or instant Iraq war analysis will be outdated and forgotten before Labor Day. Used book stores preserve the good stuff – books that really tell us something about human nature, life and love - universal books. In these stores the literary connoisseur can discover half-forgotten authors, biographers and poets - whose works are no less good to read for being in faded bindings without colored pictures - and they cost next to nothing.
There are so many tens of thousands, even millions of important and wonderful old books that I should have read, but I haven’t read yet, and that I never will read. And it’s not only books by forgotten writers that make me feel guilty; it’s the sight of shelves and shelves of books by very famous authors whose works are almost never read outside university literature departments, and sometimes not even there. Who has read all the works of Dickens for example, or Twain, or Poe? Who has read The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas, or Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson – two of the best adventure tales ever written? They sit on the shelves, waiting for readers who never come.
My tour took me into the dusty recesses of half a dozen old bookstores, including one called ‘Chapter and Verse’ that had a Latin motto engraved on its glass door: Cave Librum Unum Habentem – which I render in my schoolboy Latin as “Beware of a house with only one book.” I leafed through a well-worn 1802 edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in three volumes, but decided that it’s message was too contemporary for my taste. The first volume alone contains enough material on the collapse of democracy, Caesarism nd the illusions of empire to keep us thinking for quite a while. After a couple of hundred pages we might realize that we’ve been there, done that – and we don’t want to do it again.
It’s daunting to learn from the trade magazine Publishers Weekly that 140,000 new titles were published last year alone. So even if we ever catch up with the good books of the past, we will never in a dozen lifetimes catch up with the good books of the present.
It was the great Dr. Samuel Johnson who remarked that “Of the making of many books there is no end,” and I was struck by the thought – a horribly subversive and even wicked thought for a writer - that there are indeed enough books already. We could spend the next hundred years reading our way through the used bookshops of the world, or even just the bookshops of Rye, and never exhaust this literary treasure house. To save the drowning readers of the world I’m almost tempted to suggest a ten year moratorium on all new books; or most new books; or at least other people’s new books.
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April 7, 2008
NASCAR Nation
For years I never paid any attention to NASCAR. But, recently, the mysterious acronym began to appear everywhere. The airwaves were full of NASCAR Dads, NASCAR Mums, NASCAR Babies, and even NASCAR Nation. On the whole, this seemed to me to be a good thing, although rather puzzling.
To tell the truth I had confused NASCAR with NAFTA (The North American Free Trade Agreement). I was surprised but pleased to hear that, apparently, so many people were getting involved in the international debate about this highly controversial economic policy. But I was wrong, or just over-optimistic. It seems that NASCAR is a kind of stock car racing. I checked it out on a television sports channel, and there indeed were some very strange looking cars zooming around a track, very fast: round and round and round and round. My vertigo kicked in and I switched to the History Channel.
Stock car racing is a fairly harmless sport if you watch it from a safe distance. I enjoyed it when I was young, but then it was completely different. The tracks were bleak and windswept, spectators were few, and the cars were recycled clunkers, rebuilt by the people who raced them. They cost at most a few hundred dollars. Since then the cost and sophistication of stock cars has escalated out of sight. Now it’s more like an arms race than a sporting race.
A modern NASCAR racer costs about a hundred thousand dollars and is pushed around the track by a five hundred horsepower engine. Don’t even ask about the gas mileage (about 6 m.p.g. if driven carefully). NASCAR is a young man’s sport, at least for the drivers. Dale Earnhardt Jr., who won the prestigious Daytona 500 in 2005, was just thirty years old. He drove twenty-nine laps before making his first pit stop. Older men would have to make pit stops more often.
The excuse for building these monsters is that racing technology improves the design of regular cars. But what’s the point of that when the speed limit is fifty-five? What most suburban drivers want is not a two hundred miles an hour top speed and six miles a gallon but video in the back seat for the kids, and a built-in radar detector.
During my brief and dizzy encounter with NASCAR racing on the TV screen I observed that the trackside, the stands, the cars, and even the drivers were covered in advertising slogans. It seems that fans are very loyal to the brands that sponsor their sport, although how they can read the brand names as the cars flash by at 190 m.p.h. I don’t know. All I know is that they are sponsored by huge companies, not by Joe’s Tires and Wrecking down the street.
Other loyalties may be involved. NASCAR culture includes a dash of old-time religion, a dash of patriotism, a dash of militarism, and an easy tolerance for destruction and enormous waste. It’s all a bit of a macho power fantasy, and it’s no accident that President Bush went to the Daytona 500 for a photo opportunity.
It may be pure nostalgia, but I think it was more fun to watch races between amateur drivers in unsophisticated cars with nothing more painted on them than a number. It was also more exciting because those cars fell apart more often. Exploding engines and disappearing wheels were commonplace. No great damage was done because nobody was moving very fast. In my long-ago youth I was quite keen on it, and even went out on the track a couple of times, but it was immediately obvious that my eyesight and my co-ordination weren’t up to the challenge. I was left with nothing but a few interesting memories, a lingering affection for the smell of racing oil, and some minor physical damage.
Huge numbers of people love this sport, and I can’t argue with that. But personally I would sleep more soundly in my bed if those seventy five million fans put their spare cash and passion into cycling, or ping pong, or even debating the North American Free Trade Agreement.
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March 25, 2008
Parallel Lives
The television schedule in general is a monument to the failure of the public education system. But on a recent evening I was tempted by two old British movies – a James Bond, “The Spy Who Loved Me,” and the 1995 film version of “Pride and Prejudice” – both unfortunately showing at the same time. At least old movies are more entertaining than the witless programs made for television.
For a person of my elevated tastes, there was no contest between an excellent BBC adaptation of one of the great English novels and a piece of meretricious, violent, sexist rubbish. I went straight to the James Bond channel.
This Bond movie has one of the best opening sequences of them all – a spectacular ski chase leading to a jump by our hero over a huge cliff to the theme of “Nobody Does it Better.” I was enjoying it so much that I felt guilty so, after about ten minutes I switched to the channel showing “Pride and Prejudice.” The action in Jane Austen’s stories is minimal. “Pride and Prejudice” opens with a couple of horsemen galloping across a field, but then it slows down. When I joined them the hero and heroine, Darcy and Elizabeth, had just seen one another for the first time. Darcy appeared at a dance like the villain in an old wild-west movie swaggering through the swinging doors of the saloon. Elizabeth fixed her eyes on him and I knew at once that he was destined to bite the dust in a hail of words. But I also had to worry about commander Bond who does tend to act in a very rash manner sometimes. I switched back and there he was, getting entangled with the lovely Russian spy Major Anya Amasova, otherwise known as Agent Triple X. I should have known.
James Bond is licensed to kill. This sets him apart from other superheroes such as The Terminator who commit random mayhem without a license of any kind, and probably without even taking a test. Bond apparently has a license for other things too. When I returned to “The Spy Who Loved Me” things were warming up with Major Amasova. But then I didn’t know what was happening to Mr. Darcy who had no license for anything except looking handsome and superior, and whom I had left in a very perilous situation. I switched back to Jane Austen.
This particular form of channel surfing was addictive. I kept flipping back and forth between 19th the century female romance and the 20th century male romance, alternately sipping my glass of sweet sherry and my martini (shaken, not stirred) – a horrible combination. It soon dawned on me that these were two movies with essentially the same plot. Bond, of course, is Darcy, and vice versa. Elizabeth Bennett, the argumentative lady, is Major Amasova, and the two families are represented by the two manipulative secret services – MI6 and the KGB.
Of course there is a world domination plot in the Bond book and not in the Jane Austen, but this is a trivial difference. World domination plots are two a penny these days. The real story is the love story and the different techniques used by the hero and heroine to reach their hearts desire. Bond uses ingenious gadgets and spectacular violence. Elizabeth Bennett achieves the same result by sheer cleverness, and by talking a lot.
These are two amusing fairy tales, which I thoroughly enjoyed in ten-minute segments throughout the evening. There were no surprises – I already knew both plots by heart. But there’s no doubt that the James Bond story is more realistic. Jane Austen’s fable depends on Darcy’s fantastical transformation into a warm and caring lover. But all Bond has to do is to seduce the beautiful Russian ice maiden Agent Triple X and to defeat the ambitions of the mad villain Stromberg. Beautiful spies are invariably seduced and world domination plots are invariably doomed to failure, in literature as in life. But some men never change.
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