The following originally appeared in Science, April 17, 2009, vol. 324. Copyright 2009 Michael Erard.

After a long day in the field, deep in the mountains of southwestern China near the border with Vietnam, retired environmental health professor Gary Shook was surprised to meet another American, Jamin Pelkey, staying in the same government guesthouse. The two exchanged pleasantries.

"I'm collecting tiger beetles," explained Shook, who had found four new species in the region. "What about you?"

"I'm collecting new species of languages," replied Pelkey, then a graduate student at La Trobe University in Australia doing fieldwork for his dissertation. In 2006, Pelkey and his wife were gathering linguistic data in 41 villages in a 100,000-square-kilometer area of Yunnan Province. Over the course of a year, they drove 15,000 kilometers across rugged terrain in a Jeep. At the end, Pelkey had identified 24 languages associated with the Phula ethnic group, 18 of which had never been defined scientifically before. Until Pelkey's work, these languages had been invisible because their speakers were lumped together under a single ethnic label, the Yi, which is officially considered to have one language.

At a time when hundreds of languages are disappearing because children don't learn them and adults don't speak them, it may seem surprising that many existing languages have never even been named (though they are not "new," especially not to the people who speak them). Yet there are potentially hundreds of undiscovered languages in China, Burma, the Amazon, and elsewhere, linguists say.

Pelkey's 24 are listed for the first time this month, in the latest edition of Ethnologue: Languages of the World, an authoritative, worldwide gazetteer of languages maintained and published by SIL International, a non-profit based in Dallas, Texas. This newest edition of Ethnologuelists 6909 living languages from 156 countries, including 83 "new" languages from 19 countries.

Pelkey's new entries are the most from any single country. China is "one of the last places on earth where there are large numbers of unreported and undescribed languages," says linguist David Bradley of La Trobe, who also works in Yunnan. The reasons have to do with geography, history, and politics. Bradley speculates that Yunnan alone may have over 150 languages, and Western and Chinese linguists are now surveying the region more thoroughly. "In the last few years, there's been very much a heightened interest [by Chinese] in their diversity and a desire to study and work on language maintenance," says linguist Arienne Dwyer of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Yet this interest in linguistic diversity sometimes conflicts with the notion of a multiethnic but unified Chinese state. "The reason that language is particularly sensitive is that, in southwestern China, language was the principal way of categorizing people," says Thomas Mullaney, a historian at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.

How can there be so many undiscovered languages in one region? One reason is the remoteness of villages. "Yunnan has so many mountains, and transportation was so limited before the Communists started building roads, and ethnic groups have been proliferating for so many centuries there," Pelkey says. "The astonishing thing would be to walk into the situation and find only a few dozen languages."

Yunnan is most frequently identified by the colorfully embroidered clothes and quilted hats of the non-Han ethnic groups who have called the mountains and lowlands home for thousands of years. Because their languages were rarely written down, linguistic change went unchecked. Local and imperial governments had little interest in languages, leaving them uncounted.

Centuries of isolation widened the gap between varieties descended from the same parent tongue. Today, the 500 speakers of Alo Phola can't understand speakers of a sister language spoken less than 8 kilometers away, says Pelkey. One of Pelkey's main criteria for judging language separateness is "mutual intelligibility," or how well speakers of different varieties are able to understand each other. Among speakers of the 24 Phula languages, mutual intelligibility is so low that if they ever got together, they would have to communicate in a regional variety of Mandarin, Pelkey says.

Many Chinese languages are being described only now in part because a tradition of lumping ethnic groups together has masked the extent of the diversity. Chinese social scientists of the 1930s and '40s streamlined the number of ethnic minority groups, which were based mainly on language. "The logic was, 'It does no one any good to have an ethnic group of 100 people,'" says Mullaney.

In the 1950s, about 50 surveyors spent 6 months in Yunnan and divided a population of 2 million into 20 official groups, even though 212 ethnic group names had been discovered. In 1991, China permanently froze the number of recognized ethnic nationalities, known as minzu, at 56: the majority Han plus 55 minority groups, 25 in Yunnan. Until the 1980s, it was forbidden to suggest that China had more than 55 languages, Bradley wrote in 2005 in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. "Any additional linguistic entities had to be classified as 'fangyan.'" Although the word fangyan is often translated as "dialect," it refers more specifically to "a language spoken in a specific area," or a "topolect," in contrast to yuyan, or an autonomous language.

This legacy has led to some disagreement between Chinese and Western linguists over what counts as a language. "We are very strict, while foreign researchers are very loose," says linguist Sun Hongkai of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. Sun began doing fieldwork in 1953 in Sichuan Province and Yunnan and has helped identify 19 languages. He promotes a method different from that of Western linguists, saying that the boundary between a language and a dialect should be determined by comparing grammatical patterns, vocabulary, and sound rules. If they are similar, the varieties are dialects of the same language.

Other Chinese scholars add that varieties that come from the same parent language and have the same writing system must be fangyan, not yuyan, and reject mutual intelligibility as unscientific. Using such criteria, the roughly 230 European languages would be fangyan of a handful of languages. Chinese linguists "are still constrained by political realities as well as the traditional macro- categories imposed by the Han Chinese majority on their minorities," says Bradley.

For example, in a 2008 report to UNESCO of endangered languages in China, Sun listed a single language for the Yi minzu. Although some of the Phula languages Pelkey described are endangered, they cannot be identified as such because the Yi officially have only one language. So it may be harder to target those languages with revitalization resources.

All the same, since the 1980s, Chinese linguistic diversity has become an open secret, and Chinese researchers have become freer to identify new languages as yuyan, says Bradley. In 1992, Sun helped establish an academy project on new languages, for example. Overall, Chinese linguists have identified a total of 134 languages, and the 80 identified in the last 25 years are called yuyan, not fangyan.

The Chinese have also opened their doors to foreign researchers such as Pelkey, who studied under Bradley. In 2005, Pelkey joined SIL International, the world's biggest player in describing minority languages. SIL has a Christian goal: It describes and analyzes languages to aid in Bible translation and literacy projects. In the past, a Christian organization might have had difficulties in China, but such survey work has been encouraged recently because it helps to provide education in mother tongues and coordinate language revitalization, Pelkey says.

Pelkey did his research using his affiliation with SIL, which has been registered as a nongovernmental organization in Yunnan since 2004. Pelkey stayed 3 to 5 days at a time in Yunnan villages, interviewing 10 or so local people. Using a list of 1200 words, he would say a word in southwestern Mandarin Chinese and show a picture of the object, then record people saying the word in their language. On breaks, he recorded people telling stories and played recordings of people from other villages in order to determine mutual intelligibility.

Originally, Pelkey had hypothesized that the languages associated with the Phula ethnonym were related to each other. They are all tonal languages, have a default subject-object-verb word order and very simple word structure. However, he found that although they have the same ancient ancestry, they're not siblings or even distant cousins. Using a distance matrix, a tool from evolutionary biology that is new to historical linguists, Pelkey determined that Azha (spoken by 53,000 people) and Pholo (spoken by 30,000) don't share the recent ancestry of the other 22 Phula languages. Thus these two would not be fangyan even by Chinese criteria. The speakers of all these languages have been subsumed under the Yi minzu.

For some communities, linguistic description and discovery is welcomed, but others are uncomfortable with losing traditional affiliations, linguists say. In Sichuan, Bradley says, speakers of 20 to 25 languages in the Tibetan minzu strongly reject any claim that they're anything but Tibetan and so don't want distinct languages to be identified as such.

The 24 new Phula languages included in Ethnologue have now acquired something of an official status internationally because they have been assigned identification codes by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Such language codes are used in software, digital archives, and library collections and are an official recognition that a speech variety meets ISO's definition of a "language." It remains to be seen how the Chinese government will react to this recognition. Says Mullaney, "When people start to talk about there being new languages out there, it really starts to pull the thread out of this idea that there are a set number of minzu."

Pelkey hopes a discussion will ensue. "You start out with assumed categories, then you find a lot of diversity inside them, and then you use a scientific approach to modify your understanding," he says. "The two don't have to be in dissonance, and they don't have to be in consonance, either." Otherwise, defining a language invites so much controversy, discovering species of beetles looks like a walk in the park.

-MICHAEL ERARD
With reporting by Chen Xi in Beijing.

It's the nouns and verbs that catch our ears first. The complex words, the sediments of Greek and Latin affixes, the long noun phrases, the passive verbs. The surnames of researchers rising and fallen. The journal titles, the acronyms. You can also hear, in that perpetual dance with certainty, the hedges that soften claims ("it was reported that") or strengthen them ("though inconclusive, the data suggests..."). The language of science, with its specialized vocabulary and clipped rhythm, has a distinctive architecture.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."

This "so" is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation. What follows "so" is another idea, insight, or fact—not because it's merely next in a series but because it's conceptually consequent: "So when chaperone proteins bind to their receptors, the process allows other bound proteins to expose their signal sequences." The versatility of this precursory "so" allows for a remarkable wealth of potential follow-through. The structure of the word itself makes it extremely useful, namely the sibilant "s" and the long, hollow "o," both of which are infinitely extendable and can carry a wild variety of emotional intonation. There's the curt "so," the wondering, wandering "soooooo," the exploratory "so?" In its crudest form it buys one time. At its most elegant, it facilitates the work of intellectual hopscotch—or Twister, if that's your game. "So" is here a verbal teleporter; it facilitates a leap from A to B that spares the listener the complexity in between without simultaneously dishonoring it. It abbreviates all the data, logic, information, or research experience that one might need to understand what follows. "So" is a transition between the "there" of specialized knowledge and the "here" of explanation.
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In this explanatory role, the word frequents the vocabulary of certain groups more than others. While writing his book The New New Thing, Michael Lewis found "so" endemic to Silicon Valley. Microsoft employees claimed it as indigenous to Redmond, Washington, with the rest of their rich lexicon of geek-speak and corporate jive. Employees at Hewlett Packard survived boring meetings by counting the number of "so"s. A joke even circulated: What's the sound of Santa Claus at an HP Christmas party? "So so so!"

An oncology researcher at Johns Hopkins recently confessed to me that he says "so" with such frequency that his patients tease him about it; his colleagues are trying to help him break the habit. He figures he caught it from his boss: "We call it the 'so' virus." Indeed, as a staple entrée into an expository framework, "so" carries with it the attractive connotation of signaling the arrival of privileged information or hard-won knowledge. A mantle of authority easily assumed, if not legitimately earned.

But beyond this, can such a tiny word reveal anything about the metaphorical underpinnings and conceptual structure of scientific endeavors? In the 1990s, Columbia University psychologist Stanley Schachter counted how often professors said "uh" and "um" in lectures and found that humanists said them more than social scientists, and natural scientists said them less frequently of all. Because such words mark places where a speaker is choosing what to say next, Schachter argued, natural scientists' low hesitation rate underscored the hard facts they were communicating. "So" can be said to have the inverse relation for exactly the same reason. It relays a sense of accuracy and rigor. One doesn't have to worry about what to say as much as when to say it. "So" is the organizing device for a logic-driven thought process.

Former Microsoft engineer Alex Barnett wrote on his blog that "so" was a "delaminater" word. To him an idea was a concrete object, much like an onion. "So" was the word a speaker used to convey that another layer was peeling back. This metaphor implies that ideas have a kernel that one could reach with enough "so"s, a notion surely enticing to the problem-solvers and the goal-oriented. I prefer to think of "so" as a vehicle across a landscape of knowledge. It lies not so much in between points on a terminal trajectory, but more on perpetual journey across points of understanding. In this sense it shares some qualities with the infinite "why"s of a two-year-old. Another "so" can always follow the end of a thought. The trajectory is endless; the rabbit hole has no bottom. There will always be more questions for science to answer.

As a word that dwells in the lexicon of those who desire to understand and to learn, "so" is a marker of healthy intellectual tolerance. It is a hallmark of a robust cognitive approach to the world. But this is not to say that the "so" employed by professional explainers is all deduction and dialectic. It also implies an element of faith. This is the faith of any attempt to teach, argue, brainstorm, or present: the conviction that the person who is listening will understand what's being said and comprehend its significance. More than anything else, this fidelity may spring from a need to communicate; a fervent desire to exchange ideas and, in turn, build new ones. This is an inclination characteristic of many people. "So" is just more frequent on the tongues of those who do it best.

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

So you don’t remember Joe. Let me bring him back for you, then. In 1995 I moved from Austin to Alpine, a small town on the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert in West Texas, to spend a summer reading and doing some writing, far away from the city and a girlfriend who didn’t know how to love me. I moved into a stone cottage at a place called Cozy Courts, where Joe also lived. Just five years earlier, he had hitchhiked from Milwaukee, living under bridges and in shelters, to escape the snow and a wife he’d hated for 40 years. When I met him he’d just gotten back from a steamer trip through the Panama Canal. He told me stories about how he mocked the senior citizens at the senior center. This, I thought, is the way I want to grow old; this is how to stand up to life. He was 68; I was 26 and impressionable.

A self-taught man, he read Erasmus at 14, and his spiritual life fed on Charles Darwin. Give me reason, logic, and common sense, he always used to say. In the 1970s he bought yen and made a killing, but he’d grown up during the Great Depression in Brooklyn. To the end of his life, he kept most of his cash at hand, all in small bills, stuffed in boxes of soap and cereal. The man with cash is king, he used to tell me. The man with cash in his house becomes paranoid, I replied. He kept a .22-caliber pistol in a hollowed-out Bible on his dashboard and used to get up early on Sunday mornings, drive to a railroad bridge east of town, set up a limp piece of cardboard, and shoot it full of holes in five seconds. He was practicing for a gunfight, he told me. In the corner of his one-room cottage leaned a baseball bat, a broom, and a black matte double-pump shotgun. He kept a photocopy of the state laws about use of deadly force folded in his wallet. He wasn’t bug-eyed paranoid, but stiff and unapproachable, his back leg always cocked to flee or strike when anyone approached. He may or may not have been a cop in Milwaukee. But he had sold washing machines and taught high school science.

Joe had come to Texas so he could live the life of a boy again: tromp in the desert as he pleased, eat beans from a pot off the stove, read books until dusk sitting under the eaves of a cottage with his dog at his feet and the Southern Pacific rumbling into town on the tracks nearby and the swallows swooping down over the swimming pool and creasing its surface with their thirsty beaks. When I write about Joe I inevitably give more attention to the guns and the money, because I like breaking the dictum that a gun that shows up in the first chapter must be fired by the end of the story. Not so here. For me his character is plot enough.

I want you to know that he was a voracious reader. Entomology. Forensic sciences. Histories of the stock market and the Federal Reserve. Bible studies, mainly books that showed how the Bible recycles Mesopotamian myth. I also want you to know about his generosity and his disdain. If you were a widow or a kid or someone genuinely deserving but were having bad times, he would drive you anywhere and even give you money. If a book was particularly good he would buy an extra copy and donate it to the library. If you were a priest or Christian believer, a stockbroker or a drug addict, he would cross the street before saying “hi.” I don’t want to entomb him in a caricature, but look: This was a man who cackled with delight when he proposed dressing as a devil in red pajamas, horns, pitchfork, and forked tail, and dancing down the aisle of the Baptist church on a Sunday morning. He read so avidly about the crimes of stockbrokers and the madness of crowds, you’d think someone had cheated him out of millions. He was an excellent student of human pride and its kaleidoscopic delusions, a dogged critic of all that was pretentious and vain, a bulldog and a lover of the desert who left not a thing behind beyond what I do to memorialize him. Michael, people are people, you can’t change people.

One day that summer I was outside talking to Joe, leaning on his pickup (which he called, mimicking a Mexican accent, his peekup), when Dennis, a guy in his 30s who was one of our neighbors, lumbered by on crutches like a giant uncomfortable bug. Dennis was a Mormon who went into trances every afternoon around 4 and spoke in tongues. Ha-hee-hee-ko-kuu-me-mee-maa-aa, he chanted, the nonsense syllables drifting among the cottages like bewildering dust. Six months before, while crossing the street, he’d been hit by a bicycle. Both his hips had been broken. Later in the summer I heard a cop say, “That guy? If he didn’t have bad luck, he wouldn’t have any luck at all.”

Dennis turned to us: “Hey Joe, you know what?”

“No, what?” Joe said, after a long pause. Once he’d called Dennis a “space cadet” and a “minister of Gawwwd.”

“They told me I can’t get unemployment benefits anymore,” Dennis said. “What am I gonna do? I can’t get money unless I’m homeless and out on the street. What’m I s’posed to do? How’s a guy s’posed to pay rent, ‘specially if he can’t work?” He said this in a thick, slobbery voice, and for a moment he sounded like he might cry. He pleaded, “What am I gonna do, Joe?”

Joe looked toward the street, up into the tree, down at his boots. Finally he said, “I don’t know, Dennis.”

Without a word Dennis turned away, as if he were familiar with this desert of sympathy, and lumbered on his crutches back to his cottage. When I tried to defend Dennis, Joe turned on me. “We’ve all had a hard life,” he shouted. “I could tell ...” Then he fell silent. I saw and heard flashes of the truth of his life and do not underestimate his resentments or the authenticity of their source. Who knows what he could have told me if he had ever told it all?

Joe wanted his ashes spread in the dry creek beds near Alpine, but maybe it’s just as well that he’s buried in Midland, where he can keep his eye on human conflicts, the sort that defined his life.

Listening to the priest at the funeral, I wanted to grab him and say, “If Joe were alive he’d smack your gilded missal and dance a jig on the Astroturf of his own grave, fling dollar bills to the wind and moon the slabs of granite soon to be his neighbors.”

These days his voice still comes to me: Michael, if you want to write about immigration, you should try the cemetery. They just won’t stop coming.

"The verb," Edward Mr. Vajda, linguistic adventurer, says. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration — and controversy — through his field .

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington, where he came across a book in Russian about a language called Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeneseic, of which Ket was the only survivor. One its siblings, Arin, is only known because a Cossack adventurer named Arzamas Loskutov wrote down words from the last Arin speaker in 1735.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs, a complex string of particles attached to a root that make up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," Mr. Vajda says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in Navajo, a Na-Dene language that he had studied. That was enough to pique his interest to pursue evidence of a connection between Na-Dene and Yeniseian — a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Although traces of tools and genes have established that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever demonstrated that languages spoken in both places are related.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met experts on American languages, on whose shoulders he would eventually stand. Also rewarding was a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, where he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. Mr. Vajda figures he may be one of the only non-Ket in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.

Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old, a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists had thought plausible and prudent. Searching for these sorts of relationships at such vast distances of time and space would get one dubbed a "long ranger," the name for a small, marginal group of linguists who like construct language families mainly by comparing lists of words. Finding homes for Ket, Basque, Finnish, and other isolated languages has been a favourite pastime. Imprudent, the mainstream calls it.

Mr. Vajda proved sympathetic to this big thinking. In 1996, he invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same language family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a CNN report that was seen by Raymond Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and member of the Dene First Nation. "That got us thinking," Mr. Yakeleya remembered, "were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?" Mr. Ruhlen put Mr. Yakeleya in touch with Mr. Vajda, who was by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," says Mr. Yakeleya, who is making a documentary about the Ket. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but as, as Dene, we always wondered about that, too." When asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-straits migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he's heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

Mr. Vajda spent the decade or so building an argument that would convince more than the long rangers. Just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

For help, he turned to the verbs. After learning as much as he could about the verb in modern Ket from its native speakers, he showed it has the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Connecting languages is such tricky work, because the potential confounds grow the further back (and further away) the connection. For one thing, unrelated languages can still look and sound alike because the human brain invented the same grammatical patterns in multiple places. Or, speakers of one language also borrow from other languages. And languages can, by following their own paths, accidentally begin to look like another language. Redrawing language families provides such valuable evidence about the migration and cultures of prehistoric peoples, it's crucial to do it right.

Mr. Vajda saw that comparing verbs wasn't enough. So he attacked another problem, how the languages acquired tone through the same processes of phonetic change. To top it off, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, the word for finger is təq; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'əq. He credited Mr. Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda had his chance to announce his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery, the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen very often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work is remarkable not only because it reaffirms the archaeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Straits. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis showing that Mr. Vajda's evidence is sufficient for establishing the ancient link.

"He has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons," says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist — and self-described curmudgeon — Lyle Campbell remains skeptical of the proposed Dene-Yeniseian connection. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says. For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 miles away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely." For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long. These are short enough to have occurred by chance.

"I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Mr. Campbell rattled off a long list of recent discoveries that have proven important for reconstructing the prehistoric human past. Among them are Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Oto-Manguean — three major language families in the Americas discovered in the 20th century, the last one an open question until the 1970s. The Sino-Tibetan family, Mr. Campbell noted, has been accepted for less than 50 years, and Austroasiatic less than 20 years. "So we do make some progress," he says. "We do find there are distant genetic relationship that we are able to prove."

Even more critical of Mr. Vajda is Merrit Ruhlen who wants credit for suggesting the connection first and who feels wronged by linguists like Johanna Nichols. The news of Mr. Vajda's discovery sparked a heated email correspondence between Mr. Vajda and Mr. Ruhlen, with Mr. Ruhlen airing old grievances and defending his work and Mr. Vajda scrambling to acknowledge previous work made as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

"You have to start off by comparing basic vocabulary," Mr. Ruhlen says. "Every language family has been found that way."

But Mr. Vajda's demonstration has set a benchmark for what's acceptable to the non long-rangers, who insist they're not biased. "I think the main thing [Mr. Vajda's work] does is resoundingly falsify the claim often made by long-range comparativists that mainstream linguists have set some upper limit on time depth and refuse to even consider the possibility of relatedness at a deeper level or beyond established family groupings," Nichols says. "Though difficult and time-consuming, discoveries of new language families are not impossibly rare."

Mr. Vajda also persisted in looking for a Ket-Dene connection in the face of research suggesting that modern Ket and Na-Dene speakers do not share any DNA material. In 2002, University of Kansas Michael Crawford published an analysis that showed that Ket speakers are genetically more related to their Siberian neighbours, and Na-Dene speakers to their neighbours. This doesn't automatically preclude a connection, since languages and genes don't necessarily travel together.

"Languages can be acquired from other unrelated groups, while you cannot 'learn' or acquire a genome," says Mr. Crawford.

However, Mr. Vajda says there is no evidence that the Ket or Athabaskans switched languages. "These two groups are known for their linguistic conservatism, which extends to a general aversion to borrowing foreign words," he says. Mr. Vajda believes that a DNA comparison should exclude people of Haida descent, since he believes that Haida, an endangered language spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, is not related to Athabaskan, Eyak, or Tlingit. Mr. Crawford's analysis included the Haida. And, says Mr. Vajda, the Ket have been intermarrying with their neighbours for millennia.

Raymond Yakeleya and others have welcomed Mr. Vajda's discovery as well. In 2005, he helped organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginals as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S, which strengthened his conviction that the Dene are curious about their origins.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging, too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders meeting in Yellowknife in 2009. When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket?

"Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

This is how those words are put together: Take a word, any old word, and say it to yourself 20 times out loud, until it loses its meaning and becomes just an absurd string of sounds. A word that has fallen far from its Latin source works very well for this: "fluff." Fluff. Fluff. Now restore this absurd string (f-l-u-f) to its meaning (fuzzy, feathery dust or fibers). Now you've glimpsed what a word is: a grafting of the arbitrary onto the utterly conventional.

If you were to forget that a word has these two halves, you would become vulnerable to thinking that words have mystical properties, that words like "fluff" have the very attributes of fluffiness. This is the path to the world of abracadabra peekaboo, in which if you can grasp the secrets of the right words (the thinking goes), the whole world will be revealed.

Words in and of themselves are about as interesting as nails. Which is to say, I find that what one does with words more interesting than the words themselves. A nail is inert unless it's being hit by a hammer grasped by an arm attached to a brain with a plan. So, too, with words. They can be the sharp point of the action, but they're not the actors, and they don't explain the action. If you try to tell the history of architecture through a history of nails, you get lots of blacksmiths, anvils and photos of nailheads buried in wood, but nothing about designing, building, or the other activities of architecture. Likewise, shaking down words for the keys to the secrets of American life, social or political or whatever, is an esoteric practice akin to cabala. It obscures more than it reveals, and is more elitist than it seems.

Being more pragmatic in my outlook, I'm more interested in people and their relationship to words than in words alone. For a real slice of life I prefer phrase books, books that are intended to help the reader do something. Two of my favorites are "Farm and Ranch Spanish" and "Spanish for the Housewife," written in the 1970s and reprinted in the 1990s by two Texans. The books are intended to "give the reader a working knowledge of Spanish, therefore saving much time and getting better results on the job, be it on the farm, ranch or in the home."

They're flawed and narrow but perfect depictions of a worldview. They're also so lily white and proper, I'm not sure how people who use them get "better results." If you don't have words for bodily functions and all the other outputs that make up the cycle of life and death on farms and ranches, how do you get things done? And if you only have the formal Spanish pronoun usted, not the familiar pronoun tu, how do you bring your Spanish-speaking employees into your confidence and social intimacy?

I'm less charged up by dictionaries, which have always seemed like boxes of nails. And I've never warmed to William Safire, who has always put a lot of stock in words and their singular importance. The title of his long-running column for The New York Times proclaims that he's writing "On Language," but it should actually be "On Words." He's billed as a language maven. He should really be called a vocabulary shaman.

Politics is verby. It's full of actors and audiences, people doing, resisting, manipulating, leading, apologizing, dealing, sneaking around. In other words, putting words to work. We're fascinated by the Spitzer scandal because of its salacious verbiness. As static as it has become, the Democratic presidential nominating process is still fairly verby.

"Safire's Political Dictionary," now out in a new paperback edition, is overwhelmingly nouny. He's all about the nails. In fact, his focus is so noun heavy, he doesn't list a verb until Page 40: "ballyhoo." Don't be fooled by "ballot box stuffing" on Page 39; that "-ing" marks the gerund, not the progressive verb. The next verb doesn't appear until Page 44, with "barnstorm." And after that, it's enough nouns to leave you logy: "bedsheet ballot," "benign neglect," "big stick." Ah, here's a genuine political verb: "bloviate."

Want to tell me the language of American politics? Give me in-house style memos at K Street spin shops and Senate men's room graffiti. Give me Google searches as trends over time, then show me the words that political Web site developers use to get their sites higher on search engines. Above all, tell me something about how people make sense of words and images—give me brain scans of average Americans as they watch CNN and Fox News side by side. But don't ask me to believe in the mystical power of words. "This is a lexicon of conflict and drama, of fulsome praise and fierce ridicule, of emotional pleading and intellectual persuasion," Safire writes. But the conjunctions "and," "but," "or" and "so" are also a lexicon of conflict and drama—in fact, little drama could take place without them.

Safire's dictionary certainly has its charms. It charts how some words and phrases became political tools (see the entries "is is, meaning of" and "macaca"), and it's packed with historical and political arcana (see the entry on "root, hog, or die," a political proverb from the 1830s), compliments that are slurs, slurs that look like something else, and even ventures into foreign politics with an entry on Adolf Hitler's use of the phrase "the night of the long knives" and a reference to Winston Churchill's poodle. "Great men do well to have small dogs," the lexicographer writes in the entry "Checkers speech," about Richard Nixon's 1952 speech denying he had received secret funds for personal use. The longest entry appears to be for " CIA-ese," or "spookspeak," which includes the terms "family jewels" and "wafflebottom" ("Rendition" gets its own entry).

But once I realized Safire's book isn't comprehensive enough to be a reliable reference work, it struck me that it's not even a dictionary, and it's not about words. It's not a phrase book either. What Safire has written is a postmodern political novel, arranged in a nonlinear fashion. It's a sprawling epic of American politics from the Revolution to the current day (with special emphasis on Watergate), arranged as fragments full of characters and scenes, in which the narrator, who calls himself "the lexicographer," pops up at random moments of political insiderness, claiming to be tracing the political lives of words. This kind of kaleidoscopic novel about American politics is one that Jorge Luis Borges or Roberto Bolano might have written if Safire hadn't, a novel about a made-up political system.

Scholars and pundits have pumped out a steady stream of analysis of political speaking and speeches, as if digging out the intent that lay behind the words is equivalent to their political impact. This is a dodge. Less and less do these words come from leaders' own pens than from their speechwriters and political consultants' pens. It's hard to stop glorifying the intention, though, because digging in the heads of political leaders is more glamorous than figuring out the brains of average folks. People who study political communication know surprisingly little about how people listen and what makes them change their behavior, even though massive portions of our economy (think advertising, education and health care) are dedicated to those pursuits.

What's needed is a history of political listening, not another one about political speaking; a history of audiences, not more on speechmakers. Not a count of words that were spoken, written, or broadcast, but the list of words that were heard. This is what keeps Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" on the best-seller lists: It discards the mystery of how words and images work and focuses on how people work. That's where the action is, with the hammer, the arm and the brain, but not the measly nail.

Most linguists approach language as just another kind of natural fact, like cells or rocks. Most of the intellectual action takes place in chairs, and it ends less often in triumphant discovery than in quiet revelation.

Then there’s Derek Bickerton. One of the field’s old lions, he has spent the last four decades studying pidgins and Creoles and writing a few novels on the side. A self-described macho “street linguist” for whom fieldwork is part pub crawl, Bickerton has a penchant for big ideas and a “total lack of respect for the respectable” that, judging from his new memoir, has put him at odds with bureaucrats and colleagues. “Bastard Tongues” is gossipy, vain and pugilistic — in other words, all the juicy things an academic memoir should be but too rarely is.

The book opens with Bickerton wading ashore on a remote Pacific island. If we discount bar stools, little of the subsequent action takes place in chairs. In fact, Bickerton always seems to be leaping out of them. After finishing his doctorate, he writes, he’d gotten all the nonsense out of the way and “could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff.” With this same irresistibly headlong tone, he describes jetting off to Guyana, Hawaii, Mauritius, Suriname and elsewhere to explore his ideas about languages without pedigrees.

Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don’t share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will “use words from your language if they know them; if not, they’ll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around.” Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China’s coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies.

Compared with pidgins, Creoles have bigger vocabularies and more grammar; the conventional view is that they are pidgins that became someone’s native language (though some linguists disagree). Many Creoles — like Saramaccan, an English/Portuguese Creole spoken in Suriname, and Seselwa, a French Creole spoken in the Seychelles — have more features in common (like their verbs) than you’d expect from languages that have never been in contact. Is this because they were created when English, French or Portuguese words were laid onto the same bed of grammar as African languages? Or because later generations learned both the pidgin and their parents’ languages, mingling the two? Or because a pidgin was created once, perhaps in a West African slave trade outpost or by sailors, and then transmitted elsewhere?

Bickerton swats down all these theories and explains how he arrived at his own solution, the language bioprogram hypothesis, which he elaborated in the book “Roots of Language” (1981). According to this idea, a pidgin becomes a Creole when children learn it, filling in the grammatical gaps with patterns and words that come not from any specific language but from some universal language template they all carry in their heads. This was an extension of Noam Chomsky’s influential claim for an innate universal grammar possessed uniquely by humans.

You’d expect an idea like the bioprogram hypothesis from someone with the habit of jumping out of chairs. Nailing it down, however, requires more “sitzfleisch” (literally, flesh for sitting) than Bickerton acknowledges having. Amid all the tales of partying with beautiful Brazilian graduate students and bouncing though the Colombian mountains in the back of trucks, he neglects to mention that other scholars (including some of his own students) have delivered some heavy blows to the bioprogram idea in the last decade. They’re unlikely to write memoirs, however, especially ones as diverting as “Bastard Tongues.” Bickerton invokes local histories, social factors and other variables to defend the bioprogram from the claim that all those grammatical bricoleurs in diapers didn’t push their Creoles in the same direction. Here’s where a peculiarity of Creole studies, which has rumbled in the background of the book, comes to the fore: evaluating any claim means whacking through a jungle of detail in which arguments about, say, verbs in some Dutch Creole depend on data about population crashes in Suriname in the late 17th century.

Bickerton may yet be proved right, especially if some reality-TV producer or billionaire philanthropist gets behind an experiment he hatched in the late 1970s. Bickerton proposed marooning six couples speaking six different languages along with children too young to have learned their parents’ language on a Pacific island for a year, to see what language the adults might figure out and how the kids might alter it. The National Science Foundation objected to the project on ethical grounds, and the experiment was not financed. Bickerton is happy to let someone else take up his idea and finally put a stop to all the “word wastage” of arguments about “how much language structure the brain can create.” “I’m out of it,” Bickerton writes — though the reader hardly believes his modesty. “I’ll consult, if asked. ... All I care about are the results.”

How words from far-flung tribes reveal a 10,000-year-old connection

'The verb," says Edward Vajda, linguistic adventurer. "The key to all this is the verbs."

"All this" is Mr. Vajda's announcement of a linguistic link between Asia and the Americas, a discovery that has sent a wave of celebration - and controversy - throughout his field.

In 1987, Mr. Vajda was a new professor of Slavic studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Wash., where he came across a book in Russian about Ket, a nearly extinct language spoken by only 1,000 people in a remote area of central Siberia. It belonged to a language family called Yeniseic, of which Ket was the only survivor.

Reading the book, Mr. Vajda noticed the Ket verbs - a complex string of particles attached to a root that made up almost an entire sentence. "It was intriguing," he says, "because the verb is completely different from anything else in Asia." In fact, they reminded him of verbs in a Na-Dene language he had studied: Navajo.

Although traces of tools and genes have shown that humans migrated from Siberia to North America between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, no one had ever found evidence of a linguistic connection between Asia and the Americas.

Mr. Vajda set out to do just that. Over the next 10 years, he learned as much as he could about Ket, publishing articles about its extraordinary verbs, and met with experts on American languages. On a trip to Siberia on a Fulbright Research Fellowship in 1998, he met Yeniseian scholars and native Ket speakers. (Mr. Vajda figures that he may be one of the only non-Ket people in the world who can carry on a conversation in the language.) Throughout it all, he says, "the more I found out about the Yeniseic verbs, the more I saw parallels."

By seeking such parallels, Mr. Vajda knew that he was flouting academic convention. Any link between Asian and American languages would be at least 10,000 years old - a span of time almost twice what mainstream historical linguists consider plausible. He risked being dubbed a "long ranger," one of a small group who construct big language families mainly by comparing lists of words.

In 1996, Mr. Vajda invited a long ranger, Merritt Ruhlen, to speak at Western Washington. In 1998, Mr. Ruhlen published an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that put Ket and Dene in the same family based on 36 similar pairs of words.

Mr. Ruhlen received some media attention for his article, including a report on CNN that attracted the attention of Raymond Yakeleya. "That got us thinking," says Mr. Yakeleya, a television producer in Edmonton and a member of the Dene First Nation. "Were the Ket our ancestors? Were they our people?"

He contacted Mr. Ruhlen, who put him in touch with Mr. Vajda, by then known as a Ket expert.

"It's exciting," Mr. Yakeleya says. "If you're Scottish, you know where the Scots came from, but, as Dene, we always wondered about that too." Asked about aboriginal myths of autochthonous origins that contradict the scientific story of a cross-strait migration, Mr. Yakeleya says he has heard such stories, but "it's difficult to see because each of the Dene tribes has a piece of the puzzle."

But just comparing lists of words, Mr. Vajda says, isn't proof of anything. "You'll just come up with science fiction if you do that," he says.

He turned to the verbs, learning as much as he could about them in modern Ket from its native speakers. Eventually, he was able to show that they have the same structure and sounds as the verbs in ancestral forms of Na-Dene languages that other linguists, such as Jim Kari and Michael Krauss, had reconstructed.

"I'm not passing myself off as a great discoverer," he says. "If I had to start from scratch, I don't know if I could have gotten anywhere."

Finally, he showed that an unusually high number of Yeniseic and Na-Dene words are similar. In modern Ket, for example, the word for finger is t/schwa/q; in ancestral Athabaskan (a Dene language), it's ts'[schwa]q. He credited Merritt Ruhlen for discovering the shared word for "birchbark."

Late in February, Mr. Vajda announced his findings at the annual Alaska Anthropological Association meeting in Anchorage. Afterward, linguistics blogs and listservs sizzled with news of a bona fide linguistic discovery: the first demonstrated linguistic link between Asia and the Americas. For a field in which big discoveries don't happen often, it was celebration time.

Mr. Vajda's work does more than just reaffirm the archeological and genetic evidence for migration across the Bering Strait. "The news isn't the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection," says Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an expert on the world's families of languages. At the same Anchorage meeting, she presented a statistical analysis that supported Mr. Vajda's evidence.

What's more, says Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, "he has succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons, as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate 'their' languages to others."

But not everyone is popping the champagne. In a telephone interview, University of Utah linguist Lyle Campbell remains skeptical. "I think the evidence isn't as compelling as they think it is," he says.

For one thing, the two language families are now 8,000 kilometres away from each other. "That fact alone says probably a connection doesn't seem very likely."

For another thing, Mr. Vajda matched very short items, like the prefixes of verbs, some of which are only a consonant long - short enough to have occurred by chance. "I think he's made a very good case," Mr. Campbell says, "but I don't think he's demonstrated it conclusively in my mind."

Another critic of Mr. Vajda's work is Mr. Ruhlen, who wants credit for suggesting the connection first. In a heated e-mail correspondence, Mr. Ruhlen defended his work as Mr. Vajda scrambled to acknowledge work done as early as 1923 by an Italian, Alfredo Trombetti.

In 2005, Raymond Yakeleya helped to organize an international Dene meeting in Calgary that gathered Canadian aboriginal people as well as Navajo and Apaches from the U.S.

"It can't only be the white man digging in our past," Mr. Yakeleya says. "We have to start doing some of the digging too."

The goal is to invite Ket people to a Dene elders' meeting in Yellowknife in 2009.

When Bruce Starlight, an elder in the Tsut'ina First Nation, met Navajo attendees at the 2005 gathering, he felt attached to them. "There's a kinship that is just like, you feel it, it's a feeling. It's a brotherhood feeling," he says.

Will he have that feeling when he meets any Ket? "Very sure. I'm very sure," he says.

Michael Erard writes about language and linguistics from Portland, Me.

Jan Freeman, the regular language columnist for the Boston Globe, handed me her space when she went on vacation. This was my piece...

Wildness. We go outdoors, to the mountains or the ocean, to encounter the untamed and untameable. But this quality can be found closer to home, too -- our spoken sentences are full of wildness, right under the threshold of our attention.

I'm talking, of course, about verbal blunders.

By "verbal blunders," I mean one of two things. They can be slips of the tongue -- any moment where a speaker gets sounds out of order or selects the wrong word. The other day, my wife said "the fook I --" (stopping herself on the way) instead of "the food I cook." The same week a colleague pronounced her affairs to be in a "stad sate." Speech errors like these are unintentional accidents; linguists figure that a person makes about one or two of them every 1,000 words.

A verbal blunder can also be what's known as a "speech disfluency": "uh" and "um," repeated sounds and words, fragments of words, and sentence repairs, all of which occur when you're planning what to say next or realize you want to say something else. This isn't the same thing as stuttering, a disorder with neurological roots. I often speak disfluently, and so do we all: 5 to 8 percent of the words we say are somehow disfluent. So if American men and women say about 16,000 words a day (as a recent paper in Science calculated -- and no, women apparently don't talk more than men) that makes for some 800 to 1,280 disfluencies daily.

It's typical to think of verbal blunders as embarrassing slip-ups that we should avoid. But I've just written a whole book about verbal blunders, and I find them fascinating. Why? Because they're signs of the wild. Not in the sense of rough or savage, but because they're pure and untameable. They provide a window into what humans really are: biological organisms who live in complex groups and have really amazing brains. Blunders of the verbal sort may seem like violations of the order of language, but in fact they're spontaneous eruptions of the qualities that gave us this order in the first place.

Verbal blunders are uniquely human: If other species don't have language like humans do, then only we make verbal blunders. There's some evidence that the bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha, who are part of a language program at Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, occasionally make errors in selecting the visual symbols with which they communicate, but these aren't really slips. And though some zebra finches sometimes stutter, these aren't disfluencies in the same sense as the ones humans produce, because the phrases of their songs aren't as long or varied as human speech.

Verbal blunders are also universal -- they occur in every language, both spoken and signed. Every human language provides its speakers with a way to signal some delay, either with a filler word, a pause, or a repeated word. Slips of the tongue in a particular language will follow the sound patterns and word structures of that language; a malapropism or a spoonerism in English will always sound like English, not Cherokee.

Though we might make 7 to 22 slips of the tongue a day, we typically only notice about one a week, and the majority of disfluencies don't even register to our ears. This suggests that we're evolved to perceive a message despite any "noise" in an utterance, and that we filter out most distractions automatically. So noticing someone's "uhs" and "ums" says as much about your filter as about the speaker's style.

Instead of sitting in judgment over blunders, linguists and psychologists use them as tools to pry language open. Slips of the tongue are useful in this way because they possess a surprising amount of order -- for instance, accidental word blends such as "behortment" (which mixes "behavior" and "deportment") will always have the same number of syllables and stress patterns as the original two words. Such patterns suggest, among other things, that words exist as skeletons into which sounds are slotted. Slips of the tongue were the original way linguists came to understand this, before experiments and instruments confirmed it.

Not all interpretations of verbal wildness hold up over time. Sigmund Freud listened to verbal blunders and heard people losing control of their unconscious desires, but contemporary psycholinguists now think that so-called Freudian slips -- despite their hold on the popular imagination -- were fashionable interpretations after the fact, not adequate explanations of why slips happened. And there's never been enough evidence to suggest that slips are rooted in something about the speaker rather than in the act of speaking itself.

Though slips of the tongue and speech disfluencies have different causes, I put them together because of their wildness -- both disrupt the way we want to present ourselves. That's why people either laugh at verbal blunders or try (in the case of disfluencies) to eradicate them. But I like what Elizabeth Zwicky, who grew up with linguists for parents, said about paying attention to verbal blunders. Not only are you always going to be amused wherever you go, but you also become less stressed out by them. It's like being a birdwatcher. "Birdwatchers," she said, "have a richer experience of birds than anybody else."

To see the original layout, go here.

I have one word for you glib, fluent people, you who sound smooth, scripted, and rehearsed, who execute each sentence with crisp precision, because your success may be at stake:

“Um.”

Here and there you can catch a new attitude about this and other hesitations to the ideal, uninterrupted flow of speaking. Barack Obama’s main political consultant, David Axelrod, likes to record video of people on the street for political ads; they inevitably say “uh” or “um,” which he likes, he says, because it’s more authentic.

In the 2005 business language jeremiad, Why Business People Speak Like Idiots, the authors advocate that speakers be more relaxed. “It’s not a bad thing to open the kimono in celebration of those ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ for all the world to see,” they write. (For those of you who are not idiots, “open the kimono” is corporate jargon for “letting down your guard” or “showing one’s hand.”)

When Condoleezza Rice first became Secretary of State, she uttered “uh” and “um” in public statements with surprising frequency, given her experience and position. At first glance (or listen) she was warming up to the new role, but the style has persisted. Whether intended or not, the effect seems to be that Rice isn’t reciting talking points, she’s opening the kimono of U.S. foreign policy.

Americans began to prefer um-less speech in the early 20th century, as an increasingly complex and urbanizing society boosted the value of planning and efficiency. Saying “um” was a sign that the bureaucracy in your head, of your self, was breaking down. Burgeoning technologies drew attention to verbal embarrassment, as the phonograph and the radio captured evidence of the fleeting inefficiencies of everyday speaking.

Teachers of public speaking contributed to this newly valued um-lessness: They boiled eloquence down to a set of traits—among them, not to say “uh” and “um.” By the 1920s, after decades of silence on the matter, books of etiquette urged young men and women to mind their ums, too. In 1928, author Helen Hathaway warned in Manners: American Etiquette that “puncturing our sentences with ah’s and er’s, mincing our words, [and] employing affected tones and gestures, are tricks annoying even to our friends and positively repellant to strangers.” Even psychotherapists frowned on so-called filled pauses. In 1959, psychiatrist Sandor Feldman wrote about patients whose “moaning-like ‘er…er…er…’ is annoying,” in Mannerisms of Speech and Gesture in Everyday Life. The only rule no one seems to have written was that you shouldn’t say “um” when talking to yourself.

Uttering “uh” and “um” is the sign of thought, a symptom of an additional mental load, rather than the absence of thinking. While the fashions of public speaking change, the psychological facts about language remain the same. For instance, we conventionally believe that people who say “um” a lot when they speak are unsure, over-careful, or nervous. However, in the 1950s George Mahl, a Yale psychologist, overturned that theory by measuring the number of times his subjects said “uh” or “um” against their levels of stomach acid—and found no correlation. What he did find was that for more a reliable marker of anxiety, we should notice how frequently a speaker restarts a sentence, repeats a word, or utters a fragment of a word.

One of these “speech disturbances” (as Mahl called them) occurs once in every 4.4 seconds of speaking, on average. About six percent of the words that normal speakers say aren’t pronounced without some sort of interruption, which has probably been true for the 100,000 years that humans have had language. Why? Because everyone has to plan what to say next. Some of us opt for “uh” and “um” at those junctures. It’s as if we can either think or speak—but not both at once. Nearly all of the psychological and cognitive research that has since been done in this area, which was inspired by George Mahl, says that uttering “uh” and “um” is the sign of thought, a symptom of an additional mental load, rather than the absence of thinking. But while it’s rare for someone to be able to have novel ideas and speak perfectly fluently, many of us continue to equate fluency of speech with fluency of thought.

So why the new lenience toward “uh” and “um?” Perhaps it represents a rhetorical resource that hasn’t been exhausted yet. Someone less cynical might suggest that American audiences simply want more variety in their broadcasted voices. It could also be related to the architectural impulse that exposes conduit and pipe in buildings or opens restaurant kitchens—a desire to see the backstages of life where the action really happens—like people on the street talking about Barack Obama. Or it could be an assertion of uniquely human qualities to counteract technological values that have pushed too far. A verbal dissent, so to speak.

But beware celebrating the open kimono. Not all people who say “um” are spontaneous and authentic, just as not all those who speak smoothly and fluently are more intelligent or competent. The phone message that starts, “Uh, yeah, hi, this is Bob,” may still be a telemarketer. “This business of keepin’ it real—it can be carried too far, and it can come across as arrogant,” writes Nancy Franklin in The New Yorker about the television version of This American Life: “Real is earned.”

So let me offer another way out of the style wars that will stand the test of time. A study by Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California at San Diego, showed that about half the listeners to a speech naturally pay attention to the content. The other half listen to the style. But when the content gets boring, obvious, or offensive, the content listeners switch to listening for style. The solution for getting fewer people to notice your speaking style—and those pesky “ums”—is pretty clear:

Be more interesting.

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Read My Slips: Speech Errors Show How Language Is Processed

Researchers are analyzing spoonerisms and other slips of the tongue to help understand how humans--and even apes--can comprehend and use language

Kanzi, a 27-year-old bonobo, knows the difference between a blackberry and a hot dog. But sometimes, when researchers asked him to touch the abstract visual symbol, called a lexigram, that means blackberry, he touched the lexigram for hot dog, blueberries, or cherries instead.

Kanzi's errors weren't random mistakes, nor an indication of apes' language limitations, says Heidi Lyn, a comparative cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, U.K. Rather, they show the complex way in which his mind had organized the lexigrams. For example, if Kanzi made a mistake when asked for "blackberry," he was more likely than chance to choose a lexigram for another fruit, much as you or I might say "red" instead of "black," says Lyn, whose paper on Kanzi's mistakes was published online in Animal Cognition in April and will appear in print later this year or early next.

Analyzing errors for insight into the covert mental processes of animals is a new direction for a technique that language scientists have used for 40 years to study language processing in humans. For all its power, human language remains something of a scientific mystery. Researchers are still struggling to understand exactly how humans hear, comprehend, and produce words and sentences. Slips of the tongue, or linguistic mistakes made inadvertently by speakers who do know the correct form, offer potent clues about language processing in the brain. Speech error research is currently on the upswing with new methods and theories and increased attention to groups such as children and users of sign language--and, now, animals. "We have a long way to go before we understand how to put the multiple pieces of language systems together in the seamless way that we experience it," says psycholinguist Merrill Garrett of the University of Arizona, Tucson, who has studied slips of the tongue since the 1970s. "Error profiles that arise during spontaneous conversation are going to be an important part of the agenda."

Barn doors and darn bores

Early in the 20th century, collecting speech errors was chiefly a hobby, especially for people who found Freud's emotional explanations lacking. (Psychoanalysis had no way to account for the diverse, often mundane slips of the tongue that people make.) In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky sparked a wave of grammatical theorizing that transformed speech errors into theoretical gold. Linguist Victoria Fromkin, among others, argued in the late 1960s that speech errors showed that abstract mental units of sounds and words were also concrete symbols in speakers' minds.

Using speech errors as scientific data posed some problems: Waiting for speakers to make an error required an inordinate amount of time, and some questioned the reliability of what listeners heard. But the field got a boost in the 1970s when researchers created ways to elicit many (but not all) types of speech errors in the lab. One method involved giving people word pairs like "duck bill," "dart board," and "dust bin," then asking them to say "barn door." About 10% of the time, subjects said "darn bore." By eliciting speech errors, researchers can control for higher frequency sounds (in English, "s" is more frequent than "k") and words ("latrine" is more frequent than "tureen"). Words used more frequently are less likely to be involved in speech errors. For example, more errors occur with content words ("cat," "hat") than grammatical words ("the," "in"), because grammatical words are used more frequently. The effect of frequency also implies that what one usually talks about affects how one slips.

Lyn was the first to apply the study of errors to bonobos. Kanzi and a female bonobo, Panbanisha, who now live at the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, can comprehend instructions and descriptions in spoken English, and they can respond by using 384 lexigrams, which they touch on a keyboard. From 1990 to 2001, researchers tested the bonobos thousands of times, showing them a photo or lexigram or saying an English word. The bonobos then had to select the matching lexigram. The apes chose correctly 12,157 times and made 1497 incorrect choices, although no one thought to consider the errors as data until now.

Lyn found that Kanzi and Panbanisha have arranged hundreds of lexigrams in their minds in a complex, hierarchical manner based mainly on their meaning. She coded the relations between all 1497 sample-error pairs along seven dimensions, including whether the lexigrams looked alike, had English words that sounded alike, or referred to objects in the same category. She found that the errors were not random but patterned. If the lexigram stood for "blackberry," the error was more likely than chance to sound like blackberry, be edible, be a fruit, or be physically similar. Errors were also more likely to be associated with more than one category. For example, "cherries" are both edibles and fruits, and the word sounds like the correct one, "blackberries." All this indicated to Lyn that mental representations of the lexigrams must be stored not as simple one-to-one associations but in more complex arrangements. This suggests that, given the chance, bonobos and other apes can acquire systems of meaning that are closer than anyone has thought to what humans do, and that some aspects of language acquisition are not unique to humans. "We begin to see that the biological or species variable is far less important than we thought," says Susan Savage-Rumbaugh of the Great Ape Trust.

Out of the mouths of babes

Lyn's analysis is not the first to study errors in creatures that haven't mastered all the complexities of human speech: For about 20 years, researchers have also used speech errors to study language acquisition in children. Kids do say the darnedest things, but by definition, the true errors are the ones they make with linguistic levels and units they know, explains linguist Jeri Jaeger of the University at Buffalo in New York state, who in 2005 published a book that capped 20 years of collecting kids' slips, many of them from her three children. It was the first study of the same children's speech errors over a long period, allowing her to match their errors with their stages of language development. Jaeger's collection is "unique," says linguist Annette Hohenberger of Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, and shows how slips change over time.

Distinguishing true slips took a linguist's ear and a mother's patience. Jaeger's youngest daughter's exclamation that "She already showed me tomorrow!" wasn't a true slip, because she didn't yet know the meaning of "yesterday." On the other hand, at 16 months, her eldest daughter said "one two three, one two three, one tuwee"--a fusion of "two" and "three," which was a true slip because she knew the two words were distinct and had regularly pronounced them correctly. This anchors Jaeger's point that children only make slips with what they know.

Analysis of such speech errors can provide a novel perspective on how children acquire language. Linguists have debated, for instance, whether children need syntactic knowledge to speak in two-word clumps. Jaeger says no. Her data show that when children begin to combine words, at about age 2, they don't blend phrases or confuse intonations. Such slips require a mature knowledge of syntax. Not until children speak in sentences of three or more words do syntactic errors, such as "sit down this immediately!" (a blend of "sit down this minute" and "sit down immediately") appear.

It's long been known that children make more speech errors than adults, but it wasn't known how or if aging affected error rates. In 2006, Janet Vousden and Elizabeth Maylor at the University of Warwick in the U.K. published the first study tracking speech errors across the life span and reported no significant increase in total errors between young and older adults. However, compared to children, adults made proportionately more errors in which a sound segment was anticipated (frive frantic fat frogs) rather than perseverated (five frantic fat fogs).

That fits with a widely used model of speech errors developed in the 1980s by cognitive scientist Gary Dell of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Most linguists think that words and sounds are stored in a kind of network in the brain, connected by variables such as how they sound, their parts of speech, and their meaning. Dell proposed that when sounds or words stored in such a network are selected, this also strengthens or "activates" neighboring words or sounds, which may be misread as the right ones. In his model, people forced to speak quickly make more errors not because they have more opportunities to do so but because the stimulation of neighboring units has less opportunity to fade. Dell also proposes that practice tends to activate present and future units more than past ones. As a result, the more practice a speaker has, the higher the proportion of anticipatory errors, although overall errors decrease. "Whatever makes you more error-prone makes your errors more perseveratory," explains Dell. Caroline Palmer, a psychologist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, has found the same effect (among others) in piano performances.

Language need not be spoken, and linguists have long been interested in whether speech and sign are processed the same way. German linguists Hohenberger and Daniela Happ and Helen Leuninger at the University of Frankfurt used a newer method for eliciting slips from German speakers and signers of Deutsche Gebärdensprache (DGS, or German Sign Language), in the first slip study of signers in a language other than American Sign Language. In a series of papers, the most recent published in 2007, they asked speakers and signers to narrate a series of pictures under various stress conditions, such as putting pictures out of order.

They found that all types of slips found in spoken German are also present in DGS, although in different frequencies. The slips also occur with the same basic units. This indicates that signs and words are both stored in the brain as clusters of primary elements that can be flexibly recombined, and it underscores that humans possess a single language faculty regardless of how they deploy it, says Hohenberger.

But there are some differences. For instance, both signers and speakers catch and repair utterances that include mistakes. But signing is relatively slower, so signers catch more errors involving exchanges of individual signing elements, such as hand shapes or location of the sign.

Because of this, Hohenberger speculates that slips of the hand may next contribute to an emerging question in slip-of-the-tongue research. Based on ultrasound studies of speakers' tongues as they make sound exchanges (better known as spoonerisms, such as "jeef berky" instead of "beef jerky"), phonetician Marianne Pouplier of the University of Munich, Germany, has suggested in several recent papers that speakers don't substitute one whole sound segment for another as was previously thought. Rather, they attempt to pronounce the two sounds at the same time. This way of thinking about speech errors--as a collision of motor commands rather than as substitutions of mental symbols--might be more reliably investigated in slips of the hand, Hohenberger says, because researchers can capture the slower hand movements more clearly than tongue movements.

Although error studies offer intriguing data, their implications are not always clear. Take the bonobo findings. The apes confused fewer target-error pairs that were either both nouns or both verbs, implying that they don't take note of parts of speech. "This result argues against the claims made elsewhere that Kanzi has spontaneously developed an elementary grammar," says primatologist Robert Seyfarth of the University of Pennsylvania.

But Lyn says the error results don't directly address the question of grammar and don't contradict earlier findings in which bonobos appeared to prefer certain semantic sequences. Instead, she says, "the results support the idea that [apes'] representation of semantic information is much more complex than has been shown to date."

Still, the study of bonobo errors does rebut two frequent criticisms of ape language research: that the apes have simply been trained to respond, and that researchers may inadvertently shape the bonobos' responses. Errors can't be trained, nor can patterns of errors be deliberately produced. And if researchers were subtly guiding the apes by eye gaze or body posture, Kanzi and Panbanisha might have made far more errors based on simple proximity in the keyboard.

Lyn plans to continue analyzing the error data for other insights into the bonobos'conceptual world. "For me, the error analysis was not to just study one aspect of their symbolic representation," Lyn says, "but to get a glimpse of how it all hangs together." Such a big question hasn't been answered for human language, either, but speech errors will likely be central to the search. Says the University of Arizona's Garrett: "We have most certainly not reached the limits of that kind of research."

Call of the Truck Stop: Gentlemen, Stop Your Engines

THOUGH Robert Jordan clocked three million miles in nearly 30 years hauling Wisconsin cheese around the United States, he never considered himself a typical trucker. On the road he listened to educational books on tape. He drove slower than almost everyone else, and he never saw the point of running the engine when the truck wasn't moving.

When he started driving in the late 1980s, idling at truck stops, rest areas and loading docks was common, as truckers sought to keep their cabs and sleeper berths comfortable. ''Trucks were spending more time idling than they were moving,'' he said. ''I said, this is so stupid. This is such a waste of energy.''

If idling is now a popular topic among truckers, it is because the practice is endangered. Sirius Radio's Trucking Network is filled with talk about anti-idling legislation (30 states, counties and cities have laws limiting idling), and the market for technology to reduce idling has exploded as owners adapt to regulations and try to preserve thin profits by reducing fuel costs. Mr. Jordan is in the thick of the discussion: he was named Trucker of the Year in 2006 by Overdrive Magazine, a trade journal, for waging his own quiet war on idling.

In 1993, Mr. Jordan bought his own truck, and eventually, he figured he could save on maintenance and fuel if he didn't idle. To keep warm without the engine running, he tried sleeping in a sleeping bag, which was inconvenient and uncomfortable. Next he hacked the truck to pump coolant from the engine to move heat into the cab, reducing the idling. After he insulated his cabin, he built a heater out of halogen lights.

At one point he cut a hole in his sleeper to install an $88 air-conditioner, which ran off batteries. A million miles or so later, he had worked out the details of an electrical relay that would charge a 100-pound bank of batteries if the cab was hooked up to a refrigerated trailer.

The device, called a reefer link, is attractive because it produces no extra emissions. At any time, only 8 percent to 12 percent of long-distance trucks are hauling refrigerated trailers, but the reefer link also allows the truck to be plugged into truck-stop outlets, called ''shore power.'' And the batteries can power small heaters and air-conditioners that have already been designed for the trucks' cabins. Each reefer-link system costs $6,000 to $7,000, and since he got a patent last December, Mr. Jordan has received enough orders to retire from driving to grow his business. (He says he doesn't miss the road.)

Every day in the United States, almost half a million long-haul trucks are on the road, and most spend part of each day idling. Long-haul trucks idle 500 to 3,500 hours a year, burning a half gallon to one and a half gallons of diesel fuel an hour. According to the Department of Energy, this consumes up to a billion gallons of diesel fuel a year. The Environmental Protection Agency calculates that idling also spews 11 million tons of carbon dioxide, 200,000 tons of oxides of nitrogen and 5,000 tons of particulate matter into the air annually.

Trucking companies used to eat the cost of idling, including paying fines of $50 to $22,500. But rising fuel prices have taken the cost of idling to more than $3 an hour. ''It's to the point where you can get a motel room cheaper than you can idle the truck,'' Mr. Jordan said.

Now freight companies are instituting policies to limit idling, providing incentives to drivers to reduce it or installing devices to shut down an engine automatically. Wal-Mart has put idle reduction technologies in 7,000 of its trucks. Schneider National, a shipping company with 11,000 trucks, is testing two cooling systems, one a 12-volt air-conditioner and the other a coolant storage system; 9,000 trucks already have diesel-fired heaters.

A 2005 survey by the American Transportation Research Institute, involving 55,000 day and sleeper trucks, found that 36 percent used a range of idle-reduction technologies. Respondents said they had spent nearly $8.8 million on these technologies and expected to spend $56 million more.

External power sources at truck stops are another solution. These are attractive to states and cities because they help them meet air quality goals. The Department of Transportation estimates that 60 of 5,000 truck stops in 11 states allow trucks to plug into local power or have equipment in parking areas that pumps cool or hot air into the cabs. The capacity exists, however, for only 30 percent of trucks on the road.

Mr. Jordan was not the only driver who had modified his truck in search of other solutions to idling. In 1984, Rex Greer, a New Mexico driver, bolted a motorcycle engine to his truck to serve as an auxiliary power unit and later received a patent for a diesel version of his invention, which he labeled the Pony Pack. The unit runs on fuel drawn from the truck's main tank, using about a pint an hour. Its main advantage is that truckers can use it anywhere. ''What does a trucker do if he's shut down for three days in a blizzard?'' Mr. Greer said. Since the 1990s, Pony Pack has sold 4,000 units, but this year, Mr. Greer has already received that many orders, signaling that idle reduction is a new priority for truckers.

The biggest obstacle may be drivers themselves. Linda Gaines, a scientist at Argonne Nation

It’s a couple of days after Mel Gibson’s Mayan fantasy Apocalypto opened in the United States, and my wife and I are following a young Mayan man, Agosto, through the Yucatán jungle. A tour guide and biologist, he’s showing us a group of spider monkeys that live on the Punta Laguna preserve run by his village. It’s late afternoon, and while rain clouds gather, Agosto offers to show us around so the other guides can go home. As we walk down the slippery paths, he tells us about the place in a Spanish that’s remarkably easy to understand, probably because, as for us, it’s his second language; his first language is Yucatec Maya, the language that’s notoriously used for what little dialogue there is in Gibson’s bloody confection.

Yucatec Maya (or simply “Maya” if you’re in the Yucatán) is spoken by a million or so people on the peninsula, in Belize, and in northern Guatemala. As we travel, we notice it everywhere: in the markets, the hotels, even written on the plaques at Mayan ruins along with Spanish and English. (In other parts of Mexico, the signs appear in Tseltal or Nahuatl, other local indigenous languages.) Because we’re traveling for nearly a month, I figure wouldn’t it be cool to learn some words of Maya, to be able to bust it out while buying fruit or asking directions, not out of necessity—we can do everything we need in Spanish—but because of all the things one encounters as a traveler, language leads to some pure, real connections. Buying something? In my mind, handing over currency always reinforces who’s a tourist and who’s not, who has money and who doesn’t. Simple greetings and politenesses? That’s real, but anyone can do it. Kissing? Out of the question—this is my honeymoon.

I ask Agosto the Maya word for monkey; it’s something like maax (pronounced “maash”). I ask the word for “howler monkey,” and he says something else. Which is when I encounter the first of several difficulties in my adventure in Maya: I didn’t bring a notebook, and I have a memory like a sieve. Ten feet down the path I’ve forgotten the word for “howler monkey.” And if I did have a notebook, now’s not the time to whip it out, as wet limestone ridges and tree roots block the path we take with our eyes to the trees, hoping to see a monkey chuckle across the sky through the branches.

A lot of the Apocalypto press describes Yucatec Maya as an “ancient” language, which isn’t accurate. Though it’s a descendant of the Classic Mayan spoken by the inhabitants of the empires whose ruins we admire, it’s a very contemporary language, beset by all the problems faced by indigenous languages in Mexico and elsewhere in the world: Young people opt to speak the dominant language; the government doesn’t support indigenous-language education; the indigenous language carries a stigma. This is the next set of obstacles I encounter in my Mayan learning plan: It’s not a language that native Mayan speakers seem to be happy to have outsiders speaking.

At one museum bookstore, I found Maya For Travelers and Students, a remarkable book published in 1995 by the University of Texas Press and written by linguist Gary Bevington. When he describes how to learn Maya—not in classrooms, but in the field, where everyone’s a teacher and no one will cut you slack—he knows what he’s talking about. He set out over multiple summers (many of them in a camper) to learn Yucatec Maya. The book is a lucid guide to the language itself, its grammar and its sounds, which include some interesting consonants pronounced with a popping sound. Because no Yucatec Maya word has a dominant stress on any syllable, speakers have a fluid, singsongy, swishing quality—it’s attractive sounding to my ears, a language you want to hear more of, not less.

Culturally, Maya speakers tend not to go for big, empty promises, Bevington explains, unlike Mexicans or Americans do, so if you want to learn Maya, it’s not enough to say, “I’m really interested in the language.” You have to show people that you’re not just gawking. “Remember,” Bevington writes, “that from the native perspective you are an odd thing that dropped from the sky into the middle of their well-ordered and busy world. You are disruptive and confusing because people of your ilk are expected to be remote and generally disdainful of their world.”

Even if we were planning to return to Punta Laguna, it turns out that we need much more experience in how invested a person is in his or her indigenousness, and what situations will call it forth. Bevington warns against trying to speak Maya with hotel help at tourist resorts, and “anyone who sees himself or herself as official or important or sophisticated” should always be addressed in Spanish. Because Agosto also speaks English and Italian, and works for an Italian primatologist, we assumed we were dealing with someone Western and metropolitan. Someone like us. A person, that is, who understands that pimping out one’s tourism with some words from the language poses no threat.

But Punta Laguna didn’t make that so easy. It’s also an “alternatour” destination for ecotourists from Tulum and Cancun, who are attracted by monkeys, descriptions of ruins (indeed, there’s a small temple on the preserve), and the chance to see and meet real, live Mayas in their houses. One feature of the tour is talking to a Mayan shaman in the jungle who will, under the sacred ceiba tree, demonstrate traditional rituals. Unlike the ecotourists, we camped in the preserve. Early the next morning, Agosto came to wake us so we could see the monkeys moving. As soon as we popped our heads from the tent, we saw two male howler monkeys swing on branches over the road. He promised more spider monkeys, so we followed him on another trek through the jungle, and under the ceiba tree we bumped into the shaman, a man in his 50s with a deeply creased face, sitting near a fire. He also turned out to be Agosto’s father. Agosto introduced us and pointed out the altar, and we talked about the sack of copal, the aromatic tree resin, that he burns for ecotourists.

After we walked away, realizing that we’d just seen a sacred aspect of Maya life tricked out for tourists, I should have just said, in Spanish or English, thanks for introducing us to your father and showing us the altar and the ceiba tree, we’re honored by that. Instead, wanting to compensate for having seen a sacred aspect of Maya life, I said in Spanish to Agosto, “I’d like you to teach me how to say in Maya, ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’” (Because I should be prepared to meet a shaman in the jungle, right?)

Agosto stopped, turned to me, and quickly rattled off a long string of words, what sounded like 20 or 30 syllables. I lamely repeated a few syllables, left in his verbal dust. He rattled off the string again, just as quickly, then gave the Spanish translation. I shrugged. There was no following what he’d just said, and he wasn’t repeating. It occurred to me he might have been annoyed: It was 7 a.m., he’s a biologist, not a language teacher, and the question is ill-timed, a distraction. I was still confused, though. We thought we’d been having a genuine interaction with him. But the dark waters of the tourist sphere, in which the real and authentic are performed and sold, lay closer than we thought. People in Punta Laguna charge admission to their houses, so why not to the language, too? Or was the language where they drew the line? Agosto became chilly and left us behind to look for monkeys on his own.

We talked about Agosto for days, puzzling over what we’d encountered, even once we had reached Tulum, a Caribbean coastal city, to spend some time on the beach. I was going to take a few days off from asking about Maya; once we got back on the road, I’d resume. I still listened, and thought I heard someone say something in Maya that could have been “thank you,” but I wasn’t sure. Later that night, in a group conversation under a darkened palapa that served as the lobby of the hotel, the clerk, a young man named Jesús, asks me if I speak Spanish.

Yes, I say, then joke: “Do you?”

“Sort of,” he says. “I speak more Maya.”

I perk up—this is my chance. “How do you say ‘thank you’ in Maya?”

He whirls around. “Who are you? Where are you from? Why do you want to know?”

I’m from Texas, I say, and I study languages, and we’re traveling in Mexico for a month, so I’ve been picking up some Maya words. He explains that his grandmother taught him that he should guard his language, because it was a secret. Then he tells a story about his uncle, a farmer, who had found a Maya ceramic that he had to hide: If the government knew he possessed it, they’d take it away.

I’m not a missionary, I say, and I’m not looking to buy artifacts, either. I’m just interested in the language. After he’s stated his position and I’ve stated mine, he says he thinks there are powerful intelligences on the planet that we don’t know anything about, and that he believes he is a holy man. He’s a little crazy, but the air seems to clear as far as Yucatec Maya is concerned, and a few words dribble out of him. He’s sitting with a stray puppy on his lap and offers that the word for “dog” is peek’.

“Peek’,” I say. Where’s my notebook? It doesn’t matter. Somehow, I think that one will stick.

“Yes, peek’,” he replies.

Now, I think to myself, we’re getting somewhere.

I am sitting in a cubicle, talking into a telephone headset, asking rote questions of people who have applied for life insurance. Today it's a woman, mid-20s, somewhere in New Hampshire.

"Occupation?"

"I'm self-employed."

"What industry do you work in?"

"Entertainment."

Her obliqueness is costing me money, because I get paid per interview. But I play along. "Who do you entertain?"

"Men."

"Men? Or gentlemen?"

I could hear her smirk. "Gentlemen," she replied coolly.

I held this job for six weeks in 2002, at the start of the bleakest period of my writing career. When I wrote my first column for this site about leaving academe and starting to work as a freelance writer, I felt like a shiny quarter, bright with promise. Life was rosy. Then life became not rosy. Then difficult.

I didn't yet have to strip for my supper, but I needed a gig that would provide a hard revenue stream -- money from my freelance writing was too soft, too irregular. So, here I was, spending eight hours a day in a cramped cubicle, asking a list of required questions about intimate aspects of health, finance, and habits. Did you smoke? Why did you declare bankruptcy? Are you an exotic dancer or a topless dancer? Does the difference matter? (To the insurance companies, it does.)

I wasn't supposed to deviate from the list, which led to bizarre exchanges, such as the time I asked someone's sweet 85-year-old Georgian grandmother if she had ever been skydiving.

"Oh, no," she laughed.

"Do you have any plans to?" Just doing my job, ma'am.

"Oh no," she said. "The only time my feet will leave the ground is when the Lord comes to take me away."

If you could have wheeled some device over my skull that interpreted the electrical patterns in my brain, you wouldn't have seen me regretting my decision to leave a traditional academic career. I knew that was the right decision for me.

Yet you would have seen me a bit puzzled. After all, I had taken my own advice from my first column: I built relationships, I wrote with clarity, I put a lot of research into my freelance proposals. I had passion and a Ph.D.

So what was the problem? As I would eventually realize, I needed a better business model. That brain-reading device would have shown clumps of neurons groping blindly toward each other, hoping to trigger an insight that would get me one of those models.

A business model? In one sense, it's exactly what it sounds like: the way you bring in revenue. There's more to it, of course, but for me, the first step was realizing that this wasn't a race; that I had to plan and measure my success according to sustainable parameters. Moreover, I could set those parameters; I wasn't being judged from the outside. What I jettisoned first was my assumption that all of my income had to come from writing, or any one source. When I realized that I needed a mixed revenue stream, that was the beginning of getting a business model.

You don't have to be a writer or an entrepreneur to have a business model; we all have one, most of us tacitly. The business model is the plan for how you integrate the parts of your life. It combines personal philosophy with economic facts; it's the set of assumptions about how you want to be in the world upon which you make decisions. For me, the following factors were important: I had to decide whom I wanted to write for and whom I couldn't afford to write for anymore. I had to decide if I was going to craft myself as a specialist in some area or write about many topics. I had to think about how I would leverage my Ph.D. to enhance my credibility, or whether I would leave it behind.

I knew I was a "freelancer," but I construed it one way, as a monolithic autonomy, when in fact there are dozens of ways to be entrepreneurial. Each of them, however, involves articulating the assumptions about your preferences and talents. Your friends with "regular" jobs get to leave those assumptions unspoken. (What seems so offensive about tenure is that it enables the ultimate tacitness: the deliberate ignorance of the future.)

Things got much worse on my way to a business model, however. While I worked the cubicle job, I was revising some old fiction and still writing pitches, calling editors on my bathroom breaks. Finally, one of my pitches succeeded, and I was off to California and Missouri to write about a federal prisoner who was resisting medication to make him "mentally competent" to stand trial.

With that assignment in place, I announced at the insurance company that I was quitting, and became a minor hero. I had gone from a bumbling trainee to someone seizing his destiny. As I walked out those doors, life looked rosy again. Then it became not rosy. Then difficult.

And then things improved. After some struggles and some waiting, I began piecing parts together. I found a half-time job working as an editor at my old alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. Now I spend every afternoon there editing grant proposals and research articles written by faculty members, and consulting on writing-related curricular issues.

Being able to have a job where the work comes to me, rather than my having to hunt for it, is an immense relief. It also gives me what a friend once called "institutional juice": health benefits, library access, gym access.

Most important, I have enough time left over to write, and more than half my monthly income comes from writing. I am writing about a broad array of topics for top newspapers and magazines. I am able to write about what interests me -- right now I'm on a jag about religion and technology and am fascinated with theories of social capital. Luckily I don't have to write articles about the fastest way to sexy abs, and I don't have to grind out stock reports (a job done increasingly by software, which I am also writing about).

I've traveled some, interviewing interesting people in various fields. And my work is getting read by millions of people, a thrill I'll never lose.

My most exciting news -- and the biggest sign that my business model is working -- is that my agent is shopping my proposal for a book about verbal blundering, tentatively titled Wonderful Blunderful. That's the goal I've been working toward: the opportunity to write about language and linguistics (which I studied in graduate school) for a mainstream audience.

My business model has allowed me to create continuities between what I studied as a graduate student and the issues of the day, between my doctoral expertise and my ex-academic identity. I have also realized something valuable about myself: I need to write for multiple audiences, and I want my writing to do multiple types of work in the world, from teaching to persuading to entertaining.

When I wrote on this site back in 2002, I boasted that former colleagues seemed to envy my path. "Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills," I wrote.

People still inquire, but I can't claim to know their motives. I'm too busy trying to keep this thing off the ground, to see how far I can go.

You can tell a lot about a profession by the fantasies of its members. Academics, I have found, secretly want to be freelance magazine writers. For a long time, while I worked on my doctorate in English, I suspected as much. But once I became a journalist myself, I attracted sotto voce confessions. They want my job.

Does this mean they want the financial risk, the rejection, and the uncertainties of the market? Of course not. They do, however, want the romance of writing, the freedom of freelancing. Some of my friends from graduate school, now safe in tenure-track jobs, tell me they wish they knew how to write, because they want their ideas consumed out of love, not obligation, and they want their research to matter in the world. I understand that perfectly well. That's why I do what I do.

Other professor friends love to hear what I'm working on now; I wish I could figure out a way to live off their need for vicarious thrills. And when I interview academic experts for a story, inevitably I hear about their desires to write for magazines, usually the ones they have sitting on their coffee tables. I don't extract such confessions; they're freely offered. I feel like the nun in Don Delillo's White Noise, who maintains the trappings of her faith so that her secular, cynical contemporaries are freed from belief.

Perhaps the biggest surprise came in a conversation I had with my dissertation supervisor more than a year ago. It started out as a debriefing on my experience on the academic job market in 2000, right after I defended and graduated. That year I had some interviews at the Modern Language Association, a follow-up phone interview, and an invitation for an on-campus visit, which I had turned down. After five years of teaching while I wrote my dissertation, I needed a break, and I didn't want to move to the hinterlands of Colorado, even if you could cross-country ski to class.

And more than anything else, I wanted to write. I was taking a risk, financially and psychologically, but I felt I couldn't stand in a writing class and encourage students to stretch their language, play with ideas, and put their personal investments on the line if I hadn't done so myself, and for stakes that really mattered. I didn't want to be a hypocrite.

I told my dissertation supervisor all the news, then described what I was doing. "Just hang in there," she said. "You can go out again next year. Something will turn up, I'm sure."

"But I really like what I'm doing," I told her. I was learning to battle the learning curve in areas far from my own expertise; I was becoming professionally curious, and national magazines were paying me for it. I also had an agent in New York City, who was encouraging, even if only mildly so. It was all penury and industry, as a friend put it, but I was traveling, reading widely, and meeting people. And I hadn't abandoned my dissertation topic, either -- an editor was interested in a piece about the future of linguistics.

"I don't know if I want to go back on the job market," I told her. "I'm having a good time doing what I'm doing."

She paused. "Well," she said, "I've always had a fantasy about myself as a freelance writer. You know, go out there and be able to write whatever you want."

As a graduate student, you keep so much under wraps about yourself, for fear that if anyone found out, your professional credibility would be lost, particularly if that person had the power to dictate the shape of the rest of your life. She knew that I wrote, but she considered it a hobby, I thought. Suddenly I realized: I was a threat.

I remembered the time I gave her a photocopy of my short story that the North American Review had published. For some reason I thought that academic colleagues spread the happiness of publication with each other, so I scribbled a note of appreciation to her on the top of the story and gave it to her.

She took the story. Her eyes flashed over it. "What's this?" she asked. Eventually she managed a look of mild pleasure, but I never found out the reason for her restrained reaction. Perhaps this wasn't protocol after all. Or maybe, as a graduate student, I didn't quite count as a colleague yet. Once I heard her secret fantasy, however, I had a better idea. Was she restraining her envy?

All these confessions are not simply cases of greener grass, I believe. Instead it's a symptom of a delirium that's endemic to the profession, particularly in the humanities. Only now do I see it clearly. It's a version of that deep need that crops up among academics, the need to prove that what one does is relevant in the world. It's a fear that what one spends all one's time doing does not, in the end, matter.

In that sense, the rhetoric of the "public intellectual" and the "intellectual entrepreneur" is one way that academics try to professionalize this fear. They do not acknowledge the fear, and they do not conquer it. They merely paper it over.

And what academics do not know is that journalists have a similar fantasy, except it works in reverse. As I've met more journalists and other news-media types, they express surprise that I would actually leave the academy. A fellow magazine writer once asked me, Why would you leave something you're good at? Some journalists I've talked to want to teach someday, to see an audience face-to-face, to change them, to really have an impact on the future. And to be able to write and study one topic in-depth for the rest of your life? Now that's a job I'd like to have.

Ten years from now, jokey newspaper articles about corporate follies will mention why the Chevy Nova didn't sell in Latin America, the hilarity that ensued when company names (e.g., Pen Island) became URLs, and how Google waded into the mighty river of language one day and drowned.

Google has launched an effort to keep people from using their name as an all-purpose verb. According to Michael Krantz on the Google blog, they still think that saying something like "I googled it" is acceptable if it's the alternative to "I looked it up on Google." If you used some other search engine, however, "google" as a verb is "bad. Very, very bad," writes Krantz. "You can only 'Google' on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to 'search' on Yahoo or any other search engine."

Pardon me if I don't feel chastised for googling on yahoo. I'd rather celebrate and encourage the linguistic process that turns a name into a verb, and I think Google should too. Here's why.

To read the full story, go here.

Will Harrell and the New Texas ACLU Lay Siege to the Lege

For an organization that limped through the Nineties with virtually no presence at the Legislature, the Texas state office of the American Civil Liberties Union is enjoying something of a progressive lobbying renaissance this session. ACLU-supported legislation is thus far doing well. As of last week, a bill prohibiting racial profiling by police had passed the Senate, and has good prospects in the House. A historic (if somewhat limited) reform of the state's criminal defense system for indigent defendants is also likely to pass. Two bills on rules of evidence in drug cases are a little shakier, but have moved forward. A bill requiring public access to the disciplinary records of police officers is expected to pass, and another one requiring that the testimony of police informants be corroborated by other sources will pass out of Senate committee soon. And two House bills calling for a moratorium on the death penalty -- unlikely to pass, but receiving surprisingly wide support -- will move to a floor debate soon, as will a similar Senate bill.

At this point in the session, you measure success by how far your bills have moved -- or where they've stalled. But thus far the working atmosphere has been surprisingly good, so that even people who would seem to have a robust, natural antipathy to the ACLU have acquired unlikely enthusiasm. "A year ago, I never thought I'd be saying that I like working with the ACLU so closely," says Dripping Springs Republican Rick Green, who sits on the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee. Ron Delord, a lobbyist for the Combined Law Enforcement Agencies of Texas who helped negotiate provisions of the racial profiling bill, one of the jewels of the ACLU's legislative agenda, admires the ACLU's efforts. "That's a major push to pull that kind of legislation your first session," Delord says. "Normally [the racial profiling bill] would have a ton of opposition. I think that's miraculous in Texas."

What's the logic of the ACLU's success? For one thing, press coverage of the presidential campaign gave many Texans more knowledge of their state's underbelly, and progressives are determined to leverage national attention to reform criminal justice and human services. For another thing, the ACLU hasn't been around much in the last 10 years, and while the absence hasn't necessarily made some people fonder of civil rights crusaders, many are surprised to see that they can still put a dog in the fight. "Even if some of the bills don't get passed this session, they got everybody talking about the death penalty moratorium, people who never would have before," says Keith Hampton, the legislative chair of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers' Association (TCDLA).

And then there's the embarrassing recent past that state ACLU officials want to shuck off. As Steve McVicker reported in January in the Houston Press, until last year a series of internal conflicts had laid the state organization so low that some state board members are still reluctant to discuss it. The fights were about autonomy and money. In 1992, new ACLU rules took power away from Houston's more prominent (and better funded) chapter office and gave it to the state office in Austin; then the national office appointed an executive director to the state. Lawsuits and unpaid dues kept the state organization indebted to the national one, until last year, when Houston lawyer Greg Gladden, president of the ACLU's state board, tried to resurrect the organization. Among some recent, positive changes was a new executive director named Will Harrell, a lawyer and activist with some of the most intense international human rights experience that someone of his generation could get: Guatemala during the last four years of the civil war. A 35-year-old native Texan, Harrell is energetic, articulate, and pragmatic. "I feel the heat and I move," Harrell says, describing his intellectual style. "I go with the feeling and figure it out later."

Because Harrell looks like an ex-jock and talks with the clear-eyed passion of a seminarian, one might be tempted to conclude that this ACLU doesn't resemble your parents' ACLU. (During his stay in Guatemala, one newspaper criticized him for "parece mas como roquero que abogado" -- because of his clothes and the ponytail he wears, they thought he looked more like a rock star than a lawyer.) Indeed, this ACLU won't look familiar to anyone who knew it 20 years ago; it looks younger and has committed to legislative solutions -- and enjoys better preparation for the deal-making that goes along with it. And during this session, the organization's agenda has even attracted the support of powerful conservative Republicans.

But as old Lege hands know, it's not over 'til the governor puts down his pen -- and that's where the real test of the new ACLU will begin.
'Do the Right Thing'
On Wednesday, April 4, Harrell is crouched in the gallery at the front of the Senate chamber, inevitably tieless but suited up in a tan jacket, khakis, and black boots. He's sitting where the union reps often park, because they can make phone calls or get cold drinks out of the office of Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, located just out the door. It's also where the lobbyists go, not so much to see the senators' faces as to make sure that every time a legislator looks up, he remembers that he's carrying water, and for whom. Today Harrell's surrounded by empty seats -- no lobbyists on this one. Hovering over Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff's head like a lone bird of conscience, he balances a yellow legal pad on his knee, jotting notes about the debate on the floor -- they're tossing around Senator Royce West's racial profiling bill (SB 1074) before a vote.

Of all the bills the ACLU has helped shepherd, this is one of the biggest, and not only because it's the one Harrell cut his teeth on. West, a Dallas Democrat and an African-American, points out in his opening comments that it's an omnibus bill that resembles racial profiling laws in nine other states. It doesn't only define and prohibit racial profiling -- it shouldn't have to, given constitutional protections -- but makes communities discover and deal with racial profiling. It mandates how police should collect data on the race and ethnicity of people they stop; it promises to train rank and file officers and police chiefs; it provides $35 million to put video cameras in every police cruiser, as well as an amendment to allow another level of data collection to occur if this funding isn't available.

In the floor debate, West doesn't have to defend these provisions; instead, he's asked by Laredo Democrat Judith Zaffirini whether the bill captures cross-racial profiling -- say, if a black officer stops a Hispanic driver. She also wonders whether a person would be offended if a police officer asked his or her race or ethnicity. "What would happen to that person if he said, 'I'm an American'?" she asks West. "Nothing," West replies. West also fends off a series of dull questions from Troy Fraser, R-Horseshoe Bay, about the costs of the bill. "Isn't the prudent thing to do to determine the cost prior to voting on it?" he asks. "I think the prudent thing to do," West says, "is pass this bill and let it work its way through the system."

Senate Bill 1074 has already come a long way, and Harrell, who knew that he wanted to attack race-based policing back in August, has been present for much of it. He'd heard news of the situation in Tulia, a small town in the Panhandle, where an anti-drug task force arrested 12% of the town's black population in a sweep to pick up supposed crack dealers; he'd been in touch with attorneys from the national ACLU to see if they wanted to build a lawsuit. At a meeting of the Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, he met Hampton of the TCDLA, who was glad that he wasn't going to be lobbying alone for another session. "Just about put tears in my eyes to have compadres with me up there," Hampton says.

Royce West
Photo By John Anderson

By the time the session started, Harrell had been visiting members and their staffs for months. "When I first started coming around, people were like, 'Who are you? Who is the ACLU? We haven't heard from you in years,'" Harrell says. Hampton directed him to Jana Burleson, Royce West's chief of staff. "Young Will," she calls him. "He's a very likable chap. That's very helpful in this process. It's just easier when you're likable." Burleson should know -- she's been in the Senate for 23 years, and she's served as Harrell's most important mentor, chewing him out after one of his first hearings. Harrell, it seems, had called a senator's intentions disingenuous to the senator's face.

"Will," she told him, "You can't say those things to a senator."

"Aren't we supposed to tell the truth when we testify?" he asked her. Burleson describes him as honestly surprised. "He's a really true, honest guy," she says, "who's trying to do the right thing."

Through Burleson, West helped Harrell negotiate down the language of a draft of SB 1074. "At that point, I was frustrated and disillusioned because I thought they were peddling too light," Harrell says. "But what I learned was, if you don't compromise up front, you'll have to do it later and the clock will probably kill your bill."

To introduce police representatives to the bill, West used a tactic from his civil rights days: Pull together opposing groups representing police chiefs, rank and file officers, and civil rights groups (including the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the NAACP) to hammer out final language. Before they began, West gave a short speech: I'm going to get a law. So before we begin, if there's anyone in the room who believes that racial profiling doesn't happen, or if it isn't a problem, you should leave right now. The message: Either you're with us or you're not. "No one moved," Harrell says.

As Lubbock Republican Robert Duncan noted during the floor debate, the bill had to include language that demonstrates it's not intended to create new opportunities for lawsuits. Fearing that cities would be exposed to litigation (and bankruptcy), the Republican caucus threatened to kill the bill that emerged from West's negotiations. To them, the ACLU's presence at the bargaining table was a further sign that cities would end up in court. To allay their fears, in a burst of negotiations the bill was amended so that reported data would not be prima facie evidence of racial profiling; to prove racial profiling, a plaintiff would need other evidence.

"That's it right here," Harrell says as Duncan commented on the amendment. "That was almost what killed this bill." If we didn't have the bill, he says, the ACLU would litigate, but a bill is more effective: Where litigation is a blunt instrument, legislation creates political will and reflects cultural norms. Harrell is satisfied when the bill passes, 28-2.

Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, as the old saw goes. That's how you should work when the Legislature's in session, if you want to get your bills passed. Police reps like the Combined Law Enforcement Agencies of Texas (C.L.E.A.T.) didn't want police officers accused of racial profiling to be vulnerable to criminal prosecution. "During the debate," says C.L.E.A.T. lobbyist Ron Delord, "we were able to get them to tone down what they were trying to do." But they all compromised, says Harrell. "He's been a very smart adversary," says Delord. "We don't agree on every issue but I've found him to be -- he's a professional. I think what you've got with him is someone who has gotten the ACLU involved in issues and increased their profile. He's probably turned them around from no name ID to name ID in the state of Texas."

Harrell has received praise from conservative legislators as well. "Of all the people I would normally disagree with on most issues, Will Harrell's the one that's the easiest to work with and who I enjoyed the most," Rick Green says. "He doesn't label me and I don't label him, we just try to find some common ground. There was one day, he testified for two or three bills that I supported too. I told him if he keeps bringing such good legislation to us, I'm going to join the ACLU." He pauses. "I was joking."
'Kill Kill' vs. 'Kill Kill Kill'
If the work of one activist leader can be so crucial to finding legislative solutions, how long can he or she remain effective, particularly when subject to the same withering pressure that's co-opted other advocacy groups? It's possible that Will Harrell, a resurrected state ACLU, and the Bush-Campaign Hypothesis don't really matter. Yet another hypothesis -- we might call it The "Nitty-Gritty Triangulation Hypothesis" -- posits that legislators like to have somebody oppose bills. Otherwise, legislators who keep an open mind on issues get cheated out of other points of view, or they hear issues only in legalistic terms. Moreover, dissenting voices in committee hearings give swing legislators cover to oppose a bill, or maneuvering room to negotiate. Under this theory, legislators appreciate the ACLU because they appreciate the cover.

Another hypothesis -- call it the "Libertarians-in-the-Woodwork Hypothesis" -- suggests that the ACLU's current success is something of a fluke: If conservatives have joined up on this year's agenda, it's because it contains libertarian bills. But an ACLU that's rallying against the death penalty, or making a pro-choice stand, might not gather the same kind of support. "We're the friends of certain Republicans who like the fact that we have a pure stance on constitutional rights," says Kathy Mitchell, a longtime Austin activist who was tapped last year to coordinate the ACLU's volunteer lobbyists. Says Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, the House sponsor of the racial profiling bill, "It's likely that the ACLU is going to find support from Republicans more and more often -- Republicans like me are more in the vein of reinforcing civil liberties, and making less government and open government more of a priority."

Kathy Mitchell
Photo By John Anderson

Others argue that -- with or without nitty-gritty politics and libertarians -- Harrell's leadership has been indispensable. "You can have the Republicans ready to accept things," says Ann del Llano, a state ACLU board member and an Austin police accountability activist. "But if Will and his group weren't up there, there are very few people standing up in the hearings speaking on behalf of civil rights."

She recalls the ACLU's work with Tulia, where she saw Harrell at his most effective. Within 24 hours of reading about Tulia in The Texas Observer (reprinted in the Chronicle at austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2000-07-28/pols_feature3.html), Harrell was on his way to the Panhandle with other attorneys and on the phone to the national ACLU office. Soon the national media was covering the story, and the Criminal Justice Reform Coalition was funding trips for Tulia victims to testify in Austin. In other words, says del Llano, within six months, there's a civil rights lawsuit, formal complaints to a criminal justice coalition, a formal complaint to the Texas Attorney General, national media attention, and legislation drafted to limit the power of informants, open police records, and narrow what evidence judges can admit in drug cases. "Without Will's energy, none of that would have happened," Del Llano says. "Before, the case would have sat there for a long time until someone made a decision to pursue it. Then it would have taken more time to find a lawyer. And we would have ended up with a civil suit somewhere."

Harrell's ability to testify credibly on a number of topics (in a recent bout of testifying, he spoke on nine bills before four committees, all of which started at the same time), as well as his good humor, are proven assets. In one instance, a manufacturer was lobbying for a bill to allow police to use a recording technology that analyzes the stress in a speaker's voice. Officers would receive training and certification from the manufacturer. Senators on the Jurisprudence Committee were prepared to believe the rep's claim that no voice stress evidence could be admissible in court -- until Harrell passed a note to Royce West: Can it be used in indictments or to get a warrant? When the lobbyist admitted that those were legal uses, the bill's viability became estimably dimmer. "So I decided to have some fun," Harrell says. He told the senators that he wasn't connected to the polygraph industry, but he wanted to be certified as an expert resource witness because for two months he's operated a Palm Pilot. The senators roared with laughter. "Then I made my political point," Harrell recalls. "I told them, I've seen the movie Gattaca, and Brazil, and I've read George Orwell's 1984." The committee got it. "This bill was Big Brother in your face," Harrell says. It never left the committee.

But not everyone can use a sense of humor. "He had to earn the respect in order to be able to make those comments," Jana Burleson says. "He's testified before [the Senate Jurisprudence Committee] so much that he comes with an inherent amount of respectability."

In another instance in the same committee, Harrell helped sort out the confusion between a bill that would give juries in capital cases the choice of opting for life without parole instead of the death penalty, and another bill that denies juries that choice. Prosecutors were supporting one bill, but they disagreed about which one to support. As Harrell puts it, "there are some prosecutors who are fanatical, 'Kill Kill Kill,' and there are some who are just 'Kill Kill.'" Senator Ken Armbrister, D-Victoria, called up Harrell and Hampton, then faced them off against rotating pairs of prosecutors. "I was really proud of that," Harrell says. "I'd testified before that committee many times, and at this point they've found I'm credible." Those interactions quickly made it clear that prosecutors weren't all on the same page. "It was beautiful how it unraveled," Harrell said.

Another asset is Harrell's hair. At first you think his ponytail operates only to keep his dark hair off his face, but it's also a device sending complex political messages. "He's announcing: I'm not part of this three-piece, button-down world, and it's a welcome sight," says Keith Hampton. "He's sincere and he's passionate and to a bunch of people who've heard the same script from the government for the last 10 years, it's like a brand- new show." It wouldn't be the first time someone's hair figured into their political stature (is Rick Green really gubernatorial material, or is it just his telegenic coif?) but Harrell's hair is in effect a political strategy. Says Jesse Salazar, a former drug prosecutor who is now a staff aide for the Criminal Jurisprudence Committee who met Harrell this year, "When you see this guy in a ponytail, all your preconceived notions of a liberal are going to come up." Having engaged an audience's stereotypes (ideological and rigid, soft-headed, knee-jerk, self-absorbed), Harrell out-performs them. "Will's a crusader," Salazar acknowledges. "But he's learned you can't just come into the legislative process and ram yourself through. Other ACLU guys are balls to the wall, but sometimes it takes compromise."

When he was in Guatemala from 1992 to 1996, Harrell received regular death threats; at one point, one of his law clerks, Elioto Lopez, was beaten to death by the police who were firing on the campus of the La Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala. And Harrell still pays the costs of his principles. Sometimes he wakes up in the morning and thinks he's still in Guatemala, he admits, because the "blunt racism and ignorance" and the power of the religious right in Texas "aren't unlike the Spanish oligarchy in Guatemala." Doesn't he think the comparison is overstated? He replies by reference to the recent headline Austin case of wrongful homicide conviction, and the now-notorious James Byrd Jr. murder in East Texas.

"Look," he says, "Why don't you ask Chris Ochoa or James Byrd what they think about that?"
The Long March
If it's not your parents' ACLU, why does it look so familiar? Because it relies heavily on volunteer activists, for one thing. The day that Harrell is sitting in the Senate gallery, a group of about 15 ACLU volunteers are testifying, preparing fact sheets and talking points, or visiting legislators. Every Friday morning at 7am, they meet at a local restaurant to plot the next week's strategy. Most of them aren't lawyers, which is one advantage of legislative work, explains Kathy Mitchell, because it allows nonlawyers to get involved. "We've been effective at bringing in young people who don't have baggage," she says.

Mitchell, who has a long ponytail that rivals Harrell's, coordinates the volunteers so well that at any given moment, she knows where they each are: "One volunteer spent a few hours today discussing Internet filtering software with staff of members on a committee that may be poised to vote out a library filtering bill. Someone else made visits all afternoon to prepare members for a police accountability bill of ours posted for tomorrow. One volunteer is preparing information to support a good bill that actually reduces penalties for small marijuana possession; someone else prepared talking points on three bills so that two volunteers could testify today, and someone else is in Transportation testifying on the Pro-Life license plate bill."

Once the session is over, Harrell plans to begin work revitalizing the state ACLU's various chapters, increasing membership, and fundraising. During the session, they've waged a guerrilla-like campaign -- a comparison Harrell makes explicit -- but even though a number of people have felt the urge to do more under Harrell's leadership, he still faces a battle for resources. Currently, the office receives 1,000 requests for help every month, and 250 e-mails a day; the answering machine fills up by 3 o'clock every day. "In some ways, I inherited a defunct organization that's been on the downhill for years and years," he says. "But we're lightening up, and with that will come funding, and with that will come staff."

An even bigger challenge will be preparing for the day when the reception both in and out of the Legislature isn't so warm. "You can get a lot of mileage out being the new kid on the block," says Keith Hampton. But once the ACLU becomes as influential as Harrell, Mitchell, and others intend it to be, it will be a bigger target for a backlash that's almost inevitable, when the national media have gone home. Already this seems to be happening: Republicans are massing on party lines against the death penalty moratoria and the hate crimes bill, and one of the so-called "Tulia bills" -- the one that requires judges to admit evidence of innocence -- has been defeated in committee. The complexities in that issue will require an interim study, Harrell says. "The problems in Texas are profound, and they predate me by a long shot. Nothing's going to get resolved tomorrow. But the ACLU is well-prepared, and I'm here to stay." end story

Austin-based Stratfor Attempts to Make Smart Money on Global Intelligence

On November 22, 1999, an Austin company called Stratfor sent a bold e-mail to 15,000 recipients around the globe. Its subject line: "Philippine President's Days Are Numbered." In the brisk prose that has become its trademark, Stratfor's evaluation of the political situation in Manila contained bad news for the fortunes of actor-turned politician Joseph Estrada. "Whether removed by force or by the broad coalition arrayed against him," the message concluded, "Estrada is unlikely to fulfill his six-year term in office." The forecast was part of a "Global Intelligence Update" (or GIU) that Stratfor produced daily and sent to its registered subscribers for free.

In Manila, the forecast was used by anti-Estrada forces to mobilize popular opposition. Meanwhile, Estrada supporters dismissed the Stratfor analysis as mere Internet dross, unattributed and unsourced. Most dangerously, they said, no one had paid for it. "It's like the crank predictions about the end of the world, which we read from time to time," Senator Francisco Tatad told the Manila Standard. "It is rubbish, pure and simple."

Stratfor -- the company's name is a contraction of "Strategic Forecasting" -- was doing for the Philippines what it does for every region of the world: vacuuming up all far-flung bits of information from Internet sources, analyzing them, then illuminating the global balance of power in forecasts that it sells as business and military intelligence.

Yet the company itself was struggling -- and appears to have just staggered again. Despite its own rosy financial forecasts only a few weeks ago, last week Stratfor closed its recently opened Washington, D.C. office and reorganized its Austin staff (see "Stratfor Staggers?" p.26). Six people (of roughly 35 full-time staff) will lose their jobs or be offered other positions in the company.

Stratfor president and CEO Don Kuykendall called the moves "a reallocation of dollars that will help us develop products" for several new corporate customers, though Stratfor's founder, George Friedman, cited some tensions that have long challenged the company: journalists vs. analysts; Washington, D.C., vs. Austin; Web content vs. consulting. Every business has inherent contradictions, Friedman argues, and you succeed if you can manage them. "The fact that there's a tension represents a vibrancy," Friedman says. "It doesn't mean that the organization has failed to define itself."

While company spokespeople describe these changes simply as part of Stratfor's ongoing evolution, the balancing act demonstrates how hard it is to make the World Wide Web an actual source of profit for mainstream businesses.

A Toll Booth on the Information Superhighway?
As an "open source intelligence provider," Stratfor could exploit unclassified Internet information better than even the Central Intelligence Agency (which was undergoing its own post-Cold War identity crisis). But was it a consulting business? A publishing company? Another Web content provider? In the multibillion-dollar business intelligence market, would it succeed? The answers weren't clear. Its Web site, www.stratfor.com, was always a media favorite, but visits were falling off. There was no business plan. A December payroll was missed.

The Philippine stock market was cowering -- two weeks after Stratfor published its forecast, the market lost 2% of its value, a 30-point drop worth $90 million; given that the stock market trades only 30 companies, it was a significant drop. Yet at the same time, Stratfor itself was running out of funds, its seed money exhausted.

Nearly two years later, President Estrada is gone -- ousted in a January 2001 popular uprising. Stratfor, however, is still here. Long after the glow of the NASDAQ meltdown has subsided, Stratfor retains the sexy glint of money. (Yes, they were right on Estrada -- more on that below.) According to CEO Don Kuykendall, a few weeks ago the company was about to turn profitable for the first time, with gross revenues between $2.5 million and $3 million. Was that a prediction, a certain future foretold (something Stratfor says it doesn't do)? Or was it a forecast, which tells a particular future's likelihood? "It's both," Kuykendall told the Chronicle. "It's based on identified business coming in and business going out."

Stratfor says it counts 27,332 subscribers, about 10,000 of which are individuals, the rest corporate subscribers. A $50 annual subscription, eventually rising to $80, buys individual access to the entire site, and it'll cost business customers upwards of $1,000 for five users. This means revenues stand at about $3 million annually. Two-thirds of subscribers are from the U.S., and the Web site receives visitors from 134 countries (including Greenland, Australia, Rwanda, and the Vatican). Thirty or so people inhabit half a floor of the Chase building at Lavaca and Fifth Street; in 2000, the company opened a D.C. office, with five more employees (now laid off). There's even been a software spin-off company -- Infraworks -- also based in Austin, that's developed and launched digital security software, such as a virtual "shredder" for deleted computer files and an application for sending self-destructing e-mail. (Infraworks is said to be unaffected by the latest changes.)

Stratfor's influence is truly global -- this cartoon regarding the company's predictions about Philippine President Joseph Estrada ran in the Dec. 3, 1999 edition of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

It was tempting to look at Stratfor's declared success as the potential future of content delivery on the Web -- until last week, when the balancing act between Web content and consulting apparently slipped.

Like other Web portals (Salon, Britannica.com, theStreet.com, Inside.com), Stratfor recently switched to a paid-subscription model. Since early August, visitors must buy Stratfor's forecasts, even their formerly free GIUs. But other than that the porn industry has made millions from it, no one knows much about the online subscription model -- whether consumers will pay for Web entertainment and opinion, it's still hard to say. The subscription model might work. It might also be an exquisite form of autoerotic strangulation.

But Stratfor doesn't produce opinion or entertainment, which makes it less like Salon than Congressional Quarterly or the National Journal (two subscription-based publications from Washington, D.C.). What Stratfor produces is the information economy's equivalent of guns: knowledge about the world that can change the world, quickly and irrevocably. Information doesn't want to be free; information wants to be dangerous. So if Stratfor succeeds, it's because more individuals and corporations want access to information that helps them dissect an unstable world -- and are willing to pay steady bucks for it. At the same time, this is information that's accountable to no one -- and as Stratfor's forecasts about the Philippines demonstrated, that's what makes information dangerous.
Analysts, Guns, and Money
"Stratfor does not normally talk about itself," read the GIU in early December of 1999, as controversy in the Philippines raged. "We are constantly deluged with e-mail demanding to know who we are, who funds us. ... We usually ignore these demands. Normally, Stratfor doesn't talk about Stratfor; this week, we will."

This GIU was broadcast, as all Stratfor products are, without a byline, but everyone knew who wrote it. Employees maintain that no product belongs to any one person, because it's been hammered out among analysts and editors. (And as chief analyst Matt Baker admits: "You can tell a lot about a company by finding out who works there.") But in this case, the person taking a stab at Stratfor's own existence was probably the only person who could. The author was Stratfor's founder, George Friedman, a former professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and a highly regarded intelligence analyst (a recent New York Times Magazine story on space war quoted him several times). In 1995, he founded Stratfor's prior incarnation -- the Center for Geopolitical Studies -- at Louisiana State University, in order to marry objective foreign policy analysis with advanced technologies (an early funder was Sun Microsystems). "Foreign policy had turned into a Crossfire kind of thing," Friedman says. "But there aren't only two points of view, and you don't need to shout." In 1996, after LSU administrators failed to grasp why the Center for Geopolitical Studies mattered, Friedman left for the private sector, pooled what Center funds remained, put in money of his own, and started an intelligence consulting firm called Stratfor. ("I'm going to write a novel called Start Up," Friedman says. "Nowhere else do you see the human condition, except perhaps in war.") In the summer of 1997, Friedman and his team came from Louisiana to a place with an intelligent population, even if it's not known as an intelligence town. Austin did have a pool of bright young people, a large research library at a major university, and a significant tech presence.

The original idea was to build a brand name as a smart private intelligence firm by disseminating free GIU forecasts -- attracting corporate clients who need to know how the calculus of power in Azerbaijan is going to shake out in the next two quarters, whether Euro futures are rising, or what butterflies in the Marañon are up to. The company's profile rose when it correctly forecast the Asian economic crisis in 1996, and again during the Kosovo conflict in 1999, when Stratfor set up a real-time intelligence center that was scooping CNN and more entrenched intelligence agencies. Part of Stratfor's advantage was having GIU subscribers on the ground in Kosovo sending reliable e-mail reports back to Austin. "It would have cost the CIA a fortune to put somebody on the ground in Kosovo in the middle of a war," Friedman says. "But a Hotmail account costs nothing." (To maintain this resource of discount eyeballs on the ground, Stratfor still provides a free intelligence briefing, even after discontinuing the free GIU in August -- which at its most popular went to over 100,000 people.)

What most caught people's eyes was Stratfor's style. Its positions were often contrarian, and it persisted in supporting them with evidence. It also persisted in being correct. The analyses didn't always list their sources, but that didn't matter. "Journalism has trouble following foreign policy," Friedman muses, "because they want everything to be sourced. Like in China -- where you can't get a picture of what's going on there, because you don't have access to the other side." But in the best tradition of Kremlin-watching, Stratfor spun inferences from afar; unlike old-school Kremlin watchers, Stratfor had better data via the Internet. Also distinctive was Stratfor's dispassion. On any ideological chart the analysts flatlined, and their prose was crisp, free of jargon. "No one knows what side we're on," Friedman says. "In Belgrade they think we're working for the CIA, and in Washington they thought we were getting paid by the Serbians. When [Nation columnist] Alexander Cockburn praised the same article that Rush Limbaugh did, I knew: we were in."
The Art of Being Surprised
Before it goes out into the world, Stratfor's global intelligence begins as caffeinated morning conversations.

On a recent Thursday morning, 10 Stratfor analysts gathered in a conference room to hash out forecasts and make editorial plans. (Another analyst, Latin American expert Jack Sweeney, was patched in via phone from D.C.)

At the head of the table sits Victor Gobayev, the director of intelligence management, a retired Soviet military intelligence officer. A slight red-haired man with a surgeon's smooth hands, he'll talk about the many places his missions have brought him -- just don't expect him to relate what those missions entailed. Gobayev lets his analysts lightly tease him, because "we have to have an enjoyable atmosphere," and he lets the seven men and three women pounce on each other's ideas about Palestine, cyber warfare, and East Timor. Over the next hour, the meeting combines the head-knocking intensity of a graduate seminar, the speed of an editorial meeting, and the emotional distance of a game of Stratego or Risk. Often they're fiery. "That's why we put in red carpet," joked Kuykendall, "To hide the bloodstains."

"My piece is an attempt to get away from the euphemism, 'cyber war,'" says Matt Baker, the boy-faced chief analyst who is a former student of Friedman. "Are you talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger with a metal head, or are you talking about three nerds in the back room?"

"Be careful with that last sentence, because there are many systems that control everything," fires back Peter Zeihan, a thin man with a black goatee. For a moment, the two tussle:

"That's to be determined," Baker retorts.

Chief Analyst Matt Baker
Photo By Jana Birchum

"There's a federal task force that's been working on this for the last six years," Zeihan says.

"But the systems aren't as accessible as you're assuming."

"Wells Fargo and Chase had a good portion of their operations cut down by hacker attacks, and that's people with little resources."

"Put it this way," Baker says, brushing aside Peter's information. "In cyber war, you need a different bullet for every soldier on the battlefield, to bring down each system. That's why a nation is different from an individual launching a harassing attack -- so cyber war falls out of the realm of cyber terrorism."

Despite their general smarts, their Web savvy, and their multilingualism (in the room are speakers of Russian, Hungarian, Korean, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic), the 10 analysts make unlikely spies. Except for Gobayev, they're all under the age of 35. None have served in the military or worked in the government. Their direct experiences of foreign places seem to be mostly of the junior-year-abroad type. On the other hand, their youth makes them adaptable, more easily plugged into Stratfor's "proprietary methodology." (This plugging they actually call "being Stratfored.")

Most of the methodology simply involves rigorous thinking, but some of it involves "the art of being surprised," as George Friedman calls it. "If you lose that art, you've lost everything." Richard Parker, the executive editor and chief operating officer (and himself 37), points out another advantage of the twenty- and thirty-something analysts: As members of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-Cold War generation, they "hold little in the way of ideology." So -- the Stratfor argument goes -- they see the world with clearer eyes. (They're also much cheaper by the pound than seasoned professionals, as employees at the Washington bureau last week found out.)

During Baker and Zeihan's exchange on cyber war, the youngest member of the team huddles in a fleece jacket. Meredith Doherty, who is 23, doesn't say much this morning -- the conversation hasn't turned to her region of specialty, Asia. The GIU about Joseph Estrada's presidency didn't have a byline either, but everyone in the office knows it was her call. So when she does talk, people are inclined to listen.

At the time of the Estrada GIU, Doherty was still a senior at UT-Austin, hired at Stratfor the previous August. In November, her supervisor assigned her to investigate the likelihood of a coup in the Phillipines. Doherty, who was studying Government and French, did "intense" research with open-source materials: all of the English newspapers coming out of the country and any bios of Estrada. After two weeks, she knew who owned the Philippine newspapers and their ties, if any, to the president. She knew the status of court cases involving his friends. She knew his daily schedule. "I know how to sort to the truth," she says. Importantly, she knew a crucial piece of cultural information: that if Archbishop Jamie Sin publicly criticized Estrada, then the people of a strongly Catholic country were likely to follow. "It was obvious that he wasn't willing to behave the way he should if he wanted to stay in office," Doherty says. "So I decided there's no way he's going to finish his term."
Scholars or Mercenaries?
Journalists have a hard time reporting on Stratfor for the same reason they have difficulty reporting on foreign policy. As Richard Parker puts it: "If you know about Kathmandu but don't have a context for that knowledge, then it's relatively useless." Most media stories about Stratfor treat the company like a Kathmandu, preferring to bask in the company's aura of espionage, throwing in a colorful quote from Friedman. (Explaining why it's better to be in Austin rather than an "intelligence town" like Washington: "We don't go to cocktail parties.") As a result, virtually the only analysis of Stratfor's influence on the world was the one done by Friedman himself.

"We view ourselves as outside, disinterested observers," Friedman wrote in his GIU about Stratfor, which disavowed any responsibility for what was then happening in the Philippines. Developing countries were used to being "ignored or manipulated, but not observed," Friedman wrote, and what the Internet has made possible is that "Stratfor, without a crisis or an interest at stake, made a forecast" that was important in the country but ignored elsewhere.

But Stratfor did have a stake in the Philippine outcome: its own business imperative, which is to be right. (In a phone interview, Friedman put it more subtly: "We're not trying to be infallible, but we're trying to load the deck, in order to improve the probabilities of correctness.") Successful forecasts give them credibility, which sells more subscriptions. "The problem with any forward-looking analysis," Parker says, "is that you don't only go out on a limb, but you have to define a narrow limb."

Does Doherty think her limb was narrow enough? After all, Estrada's term was up in 2004, which gave her forecast a large window. "I didn't know how the coup would happen, or when," she says. She never had a more specific claim that her colleagues urged her to back off from, in the pursuit of being right. "If we know when something's going to happen, we say."

Retired Soviet military intelligence officer Victor Gobayev
Photo By Jana Birchum

Then and now, Stratfor's status depends on its ability to capture a piece of the business intelligence marketplace, estimated between $12 and $70 billion. Robert Steele, the president of Open Source Solutions, once estimated that the market for raw information, including commercial imagery, is worth $10 billion; data conversion, storage, visualization, and desktop-access tools are worth $20 billion; and "value-added processing and human services" like Stratfor's are theoretically worth $30 billion.

A former member of the intelligence establishment, Steele dismisses Stratfor's products as "a random, unordered series of unsourced opinions." Steele, who made a name for OSS.net several years ago by winning a competition to see who could use open sources to collect the most information about the nation of Burundi, says of Stratfor: "They're puppies." (Responds Friedman: "He tried our model, and it failed. I'm sorry if that's created some professional animosity.")

Stratfor executives actually count as their main competition two British firms, The Economist's Intelligence Unit (which relies upon 750 economists, consultants, journalists, and editors from more than 195 countries) and Oxford Analytica, founded in 1975. Like Stratfor, those companies produce custom intelligence for corporations using experienced analysts. Unlike Stratfor, they rely on networks of for-hire experts whose time is expensive. As Stratfor executives like to point out, those products are more expensive, starting in the thousands of dollars for each one, while a membership to Stratfor's entire site currently costs $50.

Stratfor provides intelligence for "people who don't know any better," Steele says, but for Stratfor that's not a bad thing. That's why Stratfor's clients sign up. The democratization of information is really the search for a larger market for that information, and Stratfor still believes it has found one among businesspeople who need detailed, reliable information about specific regions of the world. According to an analysis by Earle Palmer Brown, a PR and marketing company, 26% of Stratfor's readers are executives, 21% are managers who want to know, "Do we send the engineers to Colombia this month or wait until next year? Do we okay the credit to Indonesian shippers, or not?" (The information not only gives them an edge on the business competition but also on the smart, young kid down the hall.)

Other demographics are equally revealing. Stratfor readers are mostly male (86%), educated (47% have a graduate degree), American, and earn over $50,000 a year. In the U.S., there are eight million individuals who fit this profile. "For the EIU and Oxford Analytica, the idea of producing a low-cost product to 9,000 individuals would be anathema," Parker says. For Stratfor, that's the market. "There are people in this country who are dealing with the effects of globalization, from businesses to mom and pop shops, and all they know is, this is a thing they need to understand." The question remains: Will enough of those folks pay enough for that understanding to sustain the company?

Opponents of globalization should look more closely at companies like Stratfor, because if more and more businesspeople are willing to spend money mapping the paths their investments will take, the same businesspeople have no illusions that globalization -- read "global economic integration" -- will bring peace, prosperity, and brotherhood. They're not likely to chuck bricks at Seattle cops, but they are directly concerned with how globalization occurs. In that sense, Stratfor -- if it survives -- might not be a bad thing. As Steele points out, in 2000, there were 26 wars that killed more than 1,000 people, 78 persistent conflicts between nations, and 178 violent internal struggles, all of which supports a central assumption underpinning Stratfor's view that the world is an unstable place. "The way the world has been for 2,000 years is the way it will be for the next hundred," Friedman says. "We provide the tools for wending your way through this world."

"What we're able to do is provide value to people who aren't in the Philippines who wouldn't have noticed the situation at all," says Richard Parker. "Can we actually change the global situation? I don't think we can. What did we change in the Philippines? Nothing. The processes were under way, and we said what would or would not happen."

On the other hand, Stratfor isn't accountable to anyone -- except its clients. Thomas Adams, writing in Parameters, the U.S. Army War College Quarterly, discussed the dangers that actual mercenaries and "information warriors" like Stratfor may pose. Nations have always hired soldiers to fight their wars, and they have frequently hired experts to train their soldiers. A third type of mercenary is emerging, Adams writes, in the form of private companies that provide highly specialized information services (such as actual and virtual surveillance) that can be bought by military or civilian concerns.

"From the point of view of the nation-state," Adams writes, "military corporations are dangerous for a far more fundamental reason: They generate military power that does not reside in the state itself."

If Stratfor is indeed able to turn itself around financially, it will be evidence of just how many corporations and individuals want the power that dangerous information provides. Stratfor's attempt at recovery is employing several catalysts. For one thing, the company acquired a business staff, among them Don Kuykendall, a former banker and owner of several radio stations (among them KVET), who now acts as president and CEO.

Also transforming was a yearlong gig to provide content for the external and internal Web sites of American International Group, a Fortune 500 insurance and financial services company. A major engagement, it wasn't the standard "one-off" consulting job, where a client buys a product then leaves the consultant to hope they buy another. When Stratfor's new business staff realized that they could sell their products more than once, a new business model was born. But last week's reorganization came on the heels of news that corporate sales are down -- what else might the company have to do to save itself, if that's possible?

Last summer Stratfor got a consulting gig to study the international computing business -- information that's now part of Stratfor's inventory of intelligence. "If we get asked a question, we first query ourselves, to see what we already have," Parker says. "You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time."

This model is designed to make money. "It's not a fancy Internet business model," says Parker. "You charge people for the information. That's it." But as Parker learned the hardest way last week, if not enough people are buying what you're selling, all the knowledge in the world can't save you. end story

Eyesore, money pit, or romantic ruin, Intel's Ozymandias awaits its fate

Ozymandias I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

Gripes and grackles love the Intel building, but the grackles know something the gripes ignore: Before it was an eyesore, a civic embarrassment, a symbol of Austin's high tech downturn and the costs of Smart Growth, or a sober allusion to other buildings' grimmer fates, it was a building -- what the Intel Corporation calls "AN-2."

What kind of building? Five stories of naked concrete, whose upper columns are tufted with rebar, AN-2 now looks like a cutaway illustration from some David Macaulay book on How Skyscrapers Are Built. Its raw bulk springs out in the sky, night or day. An architect would call AN-2's current appearance a "wireframe": a three-dimensional wire model of a structure that's been peeled apart to show its crucial innards. With the final four stories unbuilt and no exterior, AN-2 is so spindly it resembles a parking garage, a prepubescent one. AN-2, the flat-chested parking garage.

Readers of the Chronicle will recall how AN-2 got this way ("Deconstructing Downtown," April 20, 2001, austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-04-20/pols_feature.html). In January, Intel announced it would finish AN-2's exterior but postpone moving its chip design activities there. A month later, Intel said it would halt construction altogether, citing a downturn in the chip market and a drop in Intel's stock price. The halt meant that 1,500 Intel employees wouldn't be contributing to the downtown economy, Intel wouldn't be paying full property taxes, and, worst of all, the construction site would stay as it was. The current rumor is that Intel is looking for a buyer for the property; the company says only it will announce its plans for the building at the end of the year. Intel has until January 15, 2001, the date its building permit expires, to decide whether they'll sell the property, complete it -- or perhaps even demolish it.

Until then, think of AN-2 as an archaeological ruin: a physical reminder of a disappeared empire. The building is "a colossal wreck," as Percy Bysshe Shelley put it in his 1817 poem "Ozymandias." As Shelley's poem recounts: At the base of a broken statue which is all that remains of an ancient city, reads an arrogant inscription from King Ozymandias, "Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair." The Romantic poets loved ancient ruins, and often rhapsodized about them (Horace Smith, a friend of Shelley's, also wrote a deservedly lesser known sonnet about Ozymandias, titled "On a Stupendous Leg of Granite"). They loved to imagine the fragility of their own civilization. Obsessed also with Being Artists, they imagined how poems -- like statuary, or buildings -- are set adrift in time.

You can't convince everyone that AN-2 is visually compelling. "Come on," Madeline Aubry barks, and suddenly the interview is over. "I don't know how you can call it a building. It isn't a building. I don't know what you call it," she says. For Aubry, three jetliners crashing into buildings in New York City and Washington, D.C., on September 11 provided her with the right metaphor for AN-2. "It looks," she says, "like a bombed-out building."

Aubry and her husband, Bruce Deatherage, survey the skyline from the seventh floor of the Regency South, an apartment building at 10th and Nueces. They have lived downtown for 12 years, and they expect their vista to be dynamic. They tell the story of the city in terms of what they once saw but now can't. "We used to be able to see the Capitol," says Deatherage, untangling an American flag from its pole. He points to the east. "Then they built this parking garage." To them, new buildings always block old views and fill gaps. But AN-2 doesn't block, and it isn't a gap. It doesn't do either. It's undecided, and that's what they can't quite stand. If you're not often faced with paradoxes, AN-2 will drive you nuts.

Looking eastward from the site of the Intel building downtown
Photo By John Anderson

On the phone Aubry insisted that AN-2 is an eyesore right out her front balcony. But from her apartment on the third floor of the Regency South, one can barely see AN-2 above the trees. So to get a clearer view, Aubry and Deatherage go up to the seventh floor. But AN-2 doesn't look more imposing up there, either. It's over a quarter of a mile away, and the cranes and concrete forms of the Nokonah building to the west, at Ninth and Lamar, are closer. If there wasn't so much activity, you'd call them unsightly too. But they're not abandoned ruins.

Or, as a Romantic poet would say: not yet.

Gravity or Opportunity?
Until its future is decided, AN-2 is a structure more interesting than the disappointment Austinites feel about it, and more compelling than their disgust.

For starters, let's put AN-2 in the context of global real estate. If you think one unfinished building is unsightly, the Asian economic downturn in 1997 blighted Bangkok with 389 of them, representing some 200 billion baht (more than $6 billion) of investment. By 2000, the construction industry in Thailand had stabilized -- but because the cost of building materials had increased by 30%, analysts expected that most of the buildings would be knocked down. Demolition has been the strategy of choice elsewhere, as well. In the overbuilt Hainan province in China, not a country known (at least since 1949) for its conscientious urban planning, city officials use a law that, according to China Online, allows them to "dismantle any unfinished construction project considered an eyesore in the cityscape." A real estate bubble in the early 1990s left at least 200 buildings unfinished. In 2001 the wrecking ball took down 100 of them.

That's Asia, you say, the land of irrational exuberances and popular delusions. Yet it happens in the U.S. too: In one fiasco, the Eastland Mall in Tulsa, Okla., was left half-finished in 1976, when the general contractor went bankrupt. Construction didn't begin until 1984, when the property was bought by a developer. A few years later in east Dallas, hundreds of half-finished condominiums sat empty while vandals damaged them so badly they had to be bulldozed.

But demolition doesn't happen often in the U.S., not when real-estate development is a lucrative way to park cash and the American government will back speculators who lose big. In the late 1980s, so many unfinished condos and office high-rises were strewn around various American cities (including Austin) that a term was coined for them: "see-through buildings." A "see-through" is a building, usually enclosed with a glass or precast "skin," that doesn't have an interior. Houston was one city famous for its see-throughs, some of which didn't have tenants for over 10 years, among them a three-story building near I-45 and FM 1960. Once used for medical records storage, it mostly sat empty. Without ceiling tiles, and a candidate for arson, it wasn't a very potent symbol of anything.

A surplus of office space can translate into economic advantage. In Houston, see-throughs were crucial for the city's next round of economic growth. During the 1990s, more than 200,000 immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa moved in, and cheap real estate helped them buy houses and start businesses. Now, according to Reason magazine, over 30% of Houston business is minority-owned.

The Way to San Jose
It's also interesting to put AN-2 in the context of what other tech companies -- and bona fide high tech cities -- decide to do with their construction plans. Like Intel, Cisco Systems, the San Jose-based manufacturer of networking hardware, suffered the effects of a downturn. During the 1990s, their phenomenal growth had led to rapid construction as well. In 1990, their sales totaled $69 million; by 2000, sales had risen to $19 billion -- with profits of $5 billion. But in 2001, sales dropped 30%. Cisco stock lost 76% of its value, about $400 billion. The Los Angeles Times reported, "the company also halted a building binge and plans to install windows on empty shells to prevent the incomplete structures in San Jose from becoming eyesores."

The San Jose skyline currently contains "a couple of hundred thousand square feet" of see-through office space, according to Steve Emslie, the deputy director of the planning department in a city that's inured to the upticks and downturns in the technology industry. "It's just that this time," says Emslie, "it happened so quickly."

Even so, San Jose isn't dotted with concrete wraiths. "All of them will be secured and the exterior completed," Emslie says. This is because if a building stands unfinished for too long, the city takes enforcement action -- for instance, citing an unwrapped building as a public nuisance. That's why Emslie, who hadn't heard about AN-2, was bemused at the news. "It's hard to believe that they wouldn't close it in," he says. "We're not immune from this kind of thing, but it's a lesson that cities need to be careful, and make sure there are plenty of checks and balances in place to keep this from happening."

But the checks and balances that are available in other parts of the country, where attitudes about private property tend to be less absolute, aren't available in Texas. City of Austin officials assert that because Intel is a private company building on private land, the city cannot require them to finish the building. "The city can require that the 'remains' of the building be left in a condition that is not detrimental to public health and safety," says Sue Edwards, the director of redevelopment services, who negotiated Intel's $15.1 million incentive package.

"Bulletproof" (l-r): Ian Searcy, Katie Phillips, Ryan Thompson, and Carolyn Moore, with panels from the project behind them
Photo By John Anderson

Janet Gallagher, the director of the city department that grants building permits, described how AN-2's remains were prepared: The perimeter fence was strengthened; buffalo grass was planted as erosion control inside it. Exposed steel was painted, along with other "patch-work so we don't have destruction problems, to protect the steel and concrete." Concrete stairs between floors were taken down and portable folding stairs, enclosed in locked chainlink cages, were installed, and "polymer concrete caps" were placed at the top of each column to protect it from water damage.

Not much more needs to be done, says Sharon Woods, a professor of civil engineering at UT-Austin. The concrete in bridges and other exposed structures usually contains a mixture that creates millions of tiny air bubbles within it that allow it to expand and contract without cracking. AN-2 wasn't built with such additives, but it isn't in danger because central Texas doesn't have severe freezing and thawing cycles. "The only issue," Woods says, "is that you have some exposed reinforcement [steel] that could start to corrode." But starting again is easy: "You clean it before you start."

Upticks, Downturns, and Decisions
When the chip market nosedived, Intel halted 20 construction projects around the world, said company spokesperson Jeanne Forbis. The last of these was AN-2. In downtown Austin, AN-2's hulk may be colossal, but as one project among 20, it doesn't seem extraordinary at all. Back in January and February, it was easy -- and sort of comforting -- to imagine Intel's centers of operations around the globe all similarly dotted with concrete skeletons.

But as Forbis discovered later, a full list of 20 projects isn't available. Why not? As it turns out, Intel didn't have 20 projects -- or more precisely, not 20 projects that had broken ground or been publicly announced. Forbis now says that the Santa Clara headquarters isn't releasing this information. "So I said," she says, "'Can I have the list of projects that were publicly announced?' Now I'm negotiating with [Santa Clara] about what they can give me."

At press time, a full list still wasn't forthcoming, either from Forbis or her bosses in Santa Clara. However, a Web and published database search confirms only five other outright Intel construction stoppages, four of them in the United States and one in Ireland (see "Best-Laid Plans," below left). After recently laying off 250 workers in Ireland, Intel has publicly committed to restarting the project in 2002 -- depending on the market.

According to sources in those locales, these delays haven't impacted any downtown areas like the AN-2 stoppage. Normally Intel builds in suburban office parks, where halted construction isn't strikingly visible. "Here everybody's worried about them slowing down," one source in Folsom said, "but there's no hue and cry about construction."

So far, Intel has portrayed its decision to halt AN-2 as a response to factors that are beyond its control: the chip market, the stock market, consumer confidence, corporate technology investment. "We're hoping by the end of the year to be able to make a decision as to when we can restart the building," Forbis told the Austin Business Journal last March. "It's really based on economic conditions." In fact, however, Intel maintains a high degree of control over its decisions. That is, the company didn't halt construction on AN-2 because it was forced to. It halted construction because it wanted to.

According to the trade papers, Intel usually acts quickly to redirect capital, halting projects on nonessential infrastructure. AN-2 was one of those projects, even though Intel's investments in construction and new equipment in 2001 have risen. Says one industry observer who participates in Intel analysts' calls, "They say R&D is a primary concern. So is making sure they have production capacity in place, for when the chip cycle starts back up." This explains why Intel actually invests more when revenues are low. In 2001, at the height of the downturn in the chip market, the company has budgeted $7.6 billion for capital expenditures, whereas it spent relatively less during the two previous years (around $10 billion). If chip demand goes up in 2003, as many experts had been forecasting, then Intel's capital expenditure strategy will have paid off.

But the climate since Sept. 11 has changed all that. Shekhar Pramanick, a securities analyst with Prudential Securities in San Francisco, predicts that forecasts might have to be adjusted several quarters. Even before Sept. 11, the outlook wasn't good. On October 17, Intel announced that its third quarter sales were down by 25% and that per-share earnings were down 94% from the same period last year. The industry had been predicting increased demand from hand-held manufacturers -- but demand for hand-held devices has also flattened.

Hans Mosesmann, an analyst at Prudential who follows Intel closely, doesn't have an opinion on AN-2 specifically. "However," he says, "Intel's current renewed focus on core businesses translates into more R&D located near their newer fabs or in Silicon Valley."

O Bla Di, O Bla Da --
To attract Intel downtown, the city of Austin offered the company $15.1 million in waived fees, deferred costs, and infrastructure subsidies. Intel has already gotten half of that amount in fee waivers. Meanwhile, Intel pays $500,000 a year in property taxes on its Austin sites (including $218,000 on AN-2), valued at $20 million. On a total value of $69 million for a completed AN-2 ($160 per sq. ft.), the annual property tax would be around $1.7 million.

One of the rejected designs for the "Bulletproof" project. The actual panels will portray a view of Congress Avenue looking toward the Capitol.

Then there's AN-2's evolving relationship with the downtown scene. Contrary to the gripes, its concrete innards apparently haven't slowed growth. "We've got a lot of projects to carry us through," says Charlie Betts, the executive director of the Downtown Austin Alliance, citing two hotels, four residential projects, the new city hall, the two CSC buildings, and the convention center. "When you put Intel into context with everything that's going on right now," Betts says, "it just pales in comparison."

One of the residential projects -- the Plaza Lofts, a 10-story apartment building under construction across Republic Square Park from AN-2 -- is said to be selling well. According to Alan Holt, a sales representative for the Sutton Company, the developer of that property, about half of the 60 units in the building are sold. And he says AN-2 hasn't impacted sales at all. "Life goes on. The news of the event turned out to be more significant than the event."

What does he think of AN-2 as a building? Holt hesitates. "I'll just say this," he says. "It's the cleanest concrete I've ever seen. They must have had someone in there sweeping it every day for two months. That is one heck of a clean site."

Taking Our Time
The building site plans for AN-2 describe it as 348,833 square feet. But only when I stood inside it did I realize its massive volume -- each floor is more than 100 feet across, and the bare ceiling is more than 20 feet high. One day in September, I visited the site with Jeanne Forbis and Todd Patterson, the site manager, who pointed out elevator shafts, staircases, doorways. "This is where employees will enter," he said. "And over here is where the trucks would have come in." I asked him which verb tense is the right one: is, would, will? "Would," he said.

From the outside of the white plywood and chainlink fencing that surrounds the block, AN-2 looks like any construction site on an off-day. Officially it's been inactive since the middle of July, when the cranes were removed. But when I looked beyond the walls, what I saw weren't "lone and level sands." (I also didn't see Aubry and Deatherage's building.) From inside AN-2, the view of the city's color and movement framed by the gray-brown ceilings and floor is a good sell for the city. Intel could dissolve its public relations worries by letting people roam around the premature wreck with their cameras, like tourists at Macchu Picchu.

Some people have become professionally attached to AN-2's present state; among them are four UT design students hired by Intel for $30,000 to design and produce some piece of public art for AN-2's exterior. Turning the building into something productive -- or at least visually compelling -- is a deft public relations move, perhaps spurred by two separate design competitions sponsored by the Chronicle (May 11, 2001, austinchronicle.com/issues/dispatch/2001-05-11/portfolio.html) and the Statesman. Yet it's also unique in the world of design and architecture, which generally shuns buildings that don't do what buildings do (shelter people, signal status). For the moment, AN-2 is being re-conceived as an opportunity for Intel to produce something witty, aesthetically pleasing, and civically responsible.

Whether or not Intel gets a good return on its $30,000 investment depends, in large part, on what the students produce. Carolyn Moore, 21, Ian Searcy, 25, Ryan Thompson, 21, and Katie Phillips, 21, are thoughtful, earnest, and smart enough to realize the civic importance of their project -- particularly after Sept. 11, which puts AN-2's potential impact on the city's architectural profile into an abrupt historical perspective. It also depends on whether the project, called "Take Time," ever goes up, and if so, how long it stays.

The students have been working since June, when they first presented a set of three designs to the Downtown Austin Alliance. Someone at the meeting was so impressed with their presentation that they told the academic advisor, Dan Olsen, that the students' designs were "bulletproof" (hence the name for themselves they're currently kicking around: Bulletproof). One design featured glittering plastic fronds hanging inside AN-2, and in another, adages and facts about the building were tiled on huge sheets of plastic that would be removed, one at a time, to reveal an image of a half-empty glass of water. What Bulletproof is now planning for AN-2, they say, isn't quite so arch. Instead, it's playful, but philosophical. "We wanted to give Austinites a visual pause," Moore says. On further details they're understandably cagey, since the project is scheduled to be announced soon, perhaps this month.

Bulletproof is giving Intel what it wants. Intel wanted an object that changed over time, and they didn't want a corporate logo. The company also wanted something that would address AN-2's current state. "They felt that if they tried to hide the building, it would be a lot worse for them. They weren't afraid of making fun of themselves," says Searcy.

After touring the site, climbing to the top floor, driving around and photographing AN-2 from different perspectives, Bulletproof members say they're attached to the hulk, and that Take Time reflects the beauty they see in it. "We feel kind of defensive, because we like the building," continues Moore. "We didn't think it was this big ugly eyesore, so we wanted to protect it in a way." They all like AN-2 because it's unexpected and new. "I like the raw color of the cement," Thompson wrote me later, in an e-mail from the entire group. "It has a sort of ancient ruin quality, void of any ornament or architectural flourishes."

"I like the rebar coming out of the top of the columns," Phillips wrote.

"I like the building's emptiness," Searcy wrote. "Empty of people and of the usual architectural clutter."

"When we were first given a tour of the building I was amazed at the view of downtown Austin from the top floor," Moore wrote. "The concrete slab created a new horizon, bleached white by the sun, that simply dropped off at the building's edge."

Such is AN-2's currently paradoxical nature: The material fact of the concrete skeleton isn't disgusting, but aesthetic evaluations reduce it all the same. And, while it doesn't fit the canonical definition of "a building," it does much of what a building does. It's not there, but it is. And if the building is ever completed, it will be a shadow of its current self, less interesting and more determinate: a ruin of a ruin.

In the City of Ideas, the people with ideas are the ones with day jobs

Jill Bedgood cracked one day, in a bathroom down the hall from her office. It was 1983. After two years of graduate work in studio art -- the first time in her life she'd focused on her own art -- the sculptor found herself working clerical jobs, again, to pay the bills, and scraping up time at night and on weekends, again, to make art. She had to have a Day Job.

For Bedgood a better job as an art instructor didn't exist; no one in her class had one. "That life I'd lived as a grad student, that life of doing my art every day, was gone," she remembers. "I thought I was going to go crazy." She left her desk, locked herself in the bathroom, beat the wall, and screamed.

The Day Job is a hidden fact of economic and psychosocial life here in Austin, the City of Ideas. Many of the people with Day Jobs are the ones with the ideas -- the people who helped create the thriving cultural scene that's attracted so many people who can make a living from "creative" pursuits while having their nights free. Looking at who has a day job and who doesn't is a good way of making sense of today's Austin economy and exploring the civic commitment to building tomorrow's economy on creativity.

In the city's vision of its future, all idea workers fuel the economy, and in the city's version of its past, everyone's been doing their creative thing for years and spurring Austin's phenomenal growth. The truth, which lies closer to the ground, is a different thing altogether. The infrastructure upon which the City of Ideas was built was not supplied by City Hall or by the best and brightest minds of urban studies. It was supplied by the Day Job.
The Great Big Creative Class
Jill Bedgood, for instance, now keeps it together as an adjunct art instructor at local colleges and universities, an admittedly unstable job. She also chairs the Austin Art in Public Places Panel, which advises the city's AIPP program, one of the major ways in which City Hall spends public money on creative enterprise. It took public funding for her art -- a residency from the Texas Commission on the Arts -- for Bedgood to "catapult" away from clerical work in the late 1980s. Along the way, grants and art shows, many in places other than Austin, buoyed her spirits and forced her to keep working. She took another artist's residency in New Hampshire, even though she knew she'd have no job at the end of it. But by 1989, she was back in an office, again.

This time, however, her attitude was different. Bedgood picked up accounting and grant-writing experience, which she used in her slow creep toward becoming a small-businessperson, as successful artists must become. And in this office, she was encouraged to integrate more of her artist self into her workplace self. She worked for Barrie Kitto, a biochemist who, luckily for Bedgood, liked to talk ideas and swap perspectives. Himself a jewelry designer and knife maker on the side, Kitto treated Bedford like a fellow creative, not like a secretary. It was an extraordinary piece of good luck. The two often discussed creativity in science and art; the scientific work fascinated her. Kitto gave her old lab equipment, petri dishes, and glass beakers, and came to her art shows.

Artists and scientists have much in common, and it's tempting to subsume them all into one big happy creative group. That's what Carnegie-Mellon economist Richard Florida does in The Rise of the Creative Class, his bestselling book of pop urban studies, in which he anoints Austin the nation's second-most creative city (after San Francisco). For Florida, the creative class is big enough for Kitto and Bedgood -- plus architects, engineers, teachers, librarians, writers, actors, and musicians, as well as bureaucrats, financiers, and sports stars. Kitto and Bedgood get along well enough, but Lance Armstrong, too? Sure, Florida says. These are the people "whose economic function is to create new ideas -- new technology, and/or creative content," he writes. They wield "creative capital," the crucial raw material of the New Economy.

However, the traditional capital that fuels both new and old economies doesn't treat all idea workers the same way; while an artist's and a computer scientist's economic functions may be the same, their economic interests aren't. It's like saying that because cotton and chocolate chips are both inputs to a manufacturing process, chocolate chips, like cotton, can be left out in the sun. A strategy to promote a "knowledge economy" has to acknowledge that artists, wannabe rock stars, intellectuals, and tech geeks -- all of which Austin has in abundance -- want and need different things, and that those things may be in conflict.

One of those things is a good supply of Day Jobs.

We're told that 39% of Austin's population is part of Florida's "creative class," but that statistic tells us little about their income range; Florida's work only gestures at the artist or the rock musician. He extols the lifestyle of the creative class, but he presumes the finances of a techie entrepreneur. Florida does not need to sell the romance of creativity; it's already deeply embedded in our culture. He is selling a different kind of romance -- that creativity inevitably leads to wealth and prosperity.

You can think up dozens of counterexamples fairly rapidly (Michael Dell, a creative man?), but accepting Florida's arguments at face value still poses serious problems for what Austin should be like. Since The Rise of the Creative Class came out, a series of follow-up reports in the Austin American-Statesman by Bill Bishop, a friend of Florida's, has mentioned only once the income disparity between, say, programmers and teachers. But the disparity is an important one. Rational economic analysis, holding that people will always act in their best financial interest, is beggared by the example of real-life creatives in Austin and elsewhere, who have chosen lower standards of living -- who work Day Jobs precisely so they can devote their best creative impulses to their own work. And as Austin has become a big-business tech town, the rising cost of living and the cyclical job market has made it harder, not easier, for creatives to strike this balance. This is a fundamental contradiction in the vision of creative utopia that Richard Florida and his fans -- including those at City Hall -- would have us adopt.
Like Father, Like Son
It was not always this way. Barrie Kitto came to Austin in the mid-1960s, always intending to return to his native New Zealand. In those days, the University of Texas was flush with research money, and scientists enjoyed the freedom to explore whatever they wanted. Kitto met people. He and his wife raised three children. His New Zealand plans evaporated. Thirty-five years later, he runs a lab with an annual research budget between $400,000 and $500,000, three-fourths of which comes from public sources. The trend, he says, is for money from industry to increase.

From the comfort of a tenure-track job, Kitto specialized in harnessing serendipity. In the 1970s, at a jewelry class, he met Guy Bush, an entomologist who was studying a new species of fruit fly in Wisconsin and needed a biochemist to explain how it differed from its nearest relative. After Kitto presented his research at a scientific meeting, officials from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture asked if he could develop a cheap, efficient chemical assay for measuring the amount of insect material in stored grain. "Give me money," Kitto said, "and I'll think about it."

It was relatively easy, since he'd done graduate research on the biochemistry of insect muscles. Eventually Kitto spun off a company to develop and market the assay, at a time when UT actively frowned on such entrepreneurial activity. (It now encourages it.) In the meantime, he's started two other companies as well, one doing software and the other graphic design. "Revenue from these companies has typically been a small percentage of my UT salary because most of my share of the money has been put back into the companies to fund expansion," he says. At its highest, revenue from his companies supplied 20% of his income.

Meanwhile, Kitto's eldest son, David, worked 24 to 40 hours a week at Whole Foods during the day for $9 an hour, and played out at night through several generations of the Austin music scene. Now 38, David began playing trombone in elementary school, continued in marching band, and in the early Eighties played in a punk band, the Big Boys, and in a New Sincerity band, the Dharma Bums. Until four years ago he played with a reggae band, the Killer Bees -- his first regular-paying musical gig, earning him an average of about $250 a week.

Juggling his supermarket hours with long weekend road trips wore David out, and he lost two relationships because he either wasn't home or was too tired. "It was rough," he says, "but it was really good. I had always wanted to realize some minor success in music. The enjoyment I got out of playing live with this band on good nights, yeah, it was worth it."

For a while, Kitto says, the day job and the music existed in neat psychological equilibrium. "Say I'm tired of stocking groceries or whatever, I'd think that we're going to play in Temple tonight, that's cool," Kitto says. "Then I go, 'God, I'm sick of dealing with these knuckleheads in the band, I just want to get out of here and go to work.'" He lived to play solos at a Killer Bees show, but he "became tired of playing basically the same set night after night." For a while he played on some recordings, then for his own enjoyment, then stopped altogether. Now he works full-time as an assistant grocery manager at Whole Foods and plays a lot of disc golf.

The Day-Job Infrastructure
Whole Foods Market is not what Richard Florida would call a creative enterprise, but it's one of the many employers that have helped Austin's creative class. Perhaps Florida's most maverick theoretical contribution to his field is the argument that individual employees, not the firms they work for, drive the growth of cities. Thus his gospel -- that you have to attract the individuals, not the firms -- which has become so popular that Florida himself now makes $10,000 a pop speaking to civic groups around the country.

Since he holds up Austin as an example of what a creative city can be, it's a safe bet that Florida tells the South Indianapolis Optimist Club and the Fresno Committee for Urban Development how to reproduce Austin's phenomenal growth of the 1990s. Hopefully he is also telling them that their equivalents in Austin -- the boosters, the chamber of commerce, and most notably City Hall -- have done little to foster Austin's cultural scene. Little, that is, as compared to specific individual employers -- the entities Florida suggests are obsolete as planks in an economic strategy -- who provide the people who want to be in Austin with the means to be here. That is, the employers who offer Day Jobs.

Ask musicians or artists what the city has done for their art, and they'll likely shake their heads. Ask them what an employer or workplace has offered them, and they can go on and on. In the last 30 years, several places in Austin have emerged as traditional employers of the creative set: the School for the Blind, the Legislative Council, Thundercloud Subs, Whole Foods, Wheatsville Co-op, and of course, UT. Occasionally, one hears about a painter who works as a stripper, or a graduate student who designs porn sites. But the majority of day jobs are more utilitarian, the "low-skill" jobs modern cities are supposed to ignore.

They pay little and offer few benefits and few opportunities to advance, and leave employees' creative skills untouched. Yet the creatives apply for them in droves. According to David Kitto, his workplace, the Whole Foods store at Gateway Shopping Center, has 10 licensed massage therapists on the floor at any time. John Hunt, rhythm guitarist for Fivehead and manager of the Star Seeds Cafe on I-35, reports he gets five applications a day.

Such jobs attract artists because they offer flexible shifts, generous comp time, and sometimes both. These are laid-back workplaces where you won't be drug-tested, can wear what you want, listen to your CDs, and enlist your workmates to come to your shows. Managers understand -- maybe because they once were, or still are, creative types themselves. (A number of people suggest that now that Whole Foods Market is a publicly traded corporation, it's cracked down on workplace appearances and, as a result, isn't as much a haven for creatives.)

And not everything about the day job is an ordeal to be endured for the privilege of making art. A day job can take pressure off the artist to make commercially appealing works, says Patti Lou Ryland, a floor manager at the Wheatsville. And sometimes day jobs lead to creative synergies that wouldn't otherwise be possible. In 1998, a bunch of musicians, including members of Pong, Sixteen Deluxe, and Ed Hall, all of whom worked at Wheatsville, put out an album, The Wheat Album. "No other grocery store has its own rock album," said Pong's Shane Shelton, who had to dig behind a row of salt shakers on a shelf under a bin of potatoes to find the CD. "But it didn't sell very well," he admitted.

A visit to Wheatsville on any given day will turn up painters in the deli, a rock keyboardist wheeling boxes of beer, a jazz drummer picking up a paycheck, and a visual artist in charge -- Dan Gillotte, the general manager. Though Wheatsville has no official policy for managing creative types, the store typically tries to be flexible in its scheduling, is open to shift-switching, and allows people to return to their old jobs after two months of touring or recording. "We don't lay people off," Gillotte says, "We lay people on."

Such practices make employees loyal, though Gillotte admits they also increase the competitive pressures on the store. Still, he says, "we don't want Wheatsville to be more formal and strict than we need it to be." Gillotte himself is a painter who helped animate Waking Life, working from 9 to 6 at the grocery store, then from 6 to 10 at the studio. Exhausted, Gillotte decided to scale back his art-making when the movie was finished. Now he sells paintings and animation cels on eBay, a side outlet for his art ("because I don't like the gallery thing") that requires tending only a few hours a week.

'No Starving Artists!'
For those who study the economics of labor, none of these are unusual profiles. According to Greg Wassall, an economist at Northeastern University in Boston who studies artists' employment, a national survey he conducted shows that at least 12-15% of artists hold second jobs, as compared to 7% of the population as a whole.

Even so, Wassall says he found unexpected results. According to his study, an artist's second job is most likely to be as an artist -- and it's not artists but rather firefighters, athletes, and bartenders who are most likely to hold second jobs. Wassall and his colleague, Neal Alper, interpret this to mean that people take second jobs for many reasons. "It's not always about financial distress," Wasall says, "and it would be hard to limit [moonlighting] to artists."

One question that Wassall and Alper are now pursuing is how the economics of the artist's life play out over the course of an individual's career. When they are young, artists pursue creative activities for a range of incentives, from social status to money to a desire for self-expression. For some artists, like David Kitto and Dan Gillotte, those attractions eventually take a back seat to other responsibilities; when one is no longer young and hungry, the Day Job becomes larger and the art career smaller. Do these incentives stop working, and if so, when?

And, if so, how, if at all, does the public sector need to step in to help artists continue to be artists? Should taxpayers fund only the infrastructure -- the theater space, the rehearsal rooms -- for creative endeavor? Or should it also give money to individual artists to work on specific projects? In Austin, people are interested in art, but they appear less interested in artists; many arts reformers prefer high-profile investments in theaters and museums, not housing or studio space. And the city's cultural contracts program -- which does give money directly to artists and arts groups for specific works -- is inherently politicized and controversial. As for the much-vaunted "tolerance" that Richard Florida says characterizes successful creative cities, it may only apply to certain kinds of creative endeavors. Barrie Kitto says he's had very few conversations about science with other Austinites outside the university, and the daily newspaper doesn't even report on science any more.

Once you begin thinking along Florida's lines -- about artists, not the arts, or about idea workers, not ideas -- then other questions come up. Should public funding try to help as many artists as possible, or should funders strive to remove only a few artists from the market economy so that they can focus solely on their art? Right now, the city's arts programs are in some flux, and it's not clear how the existing cultural contracts program will be reinvented. But the City Council has already approved moving arts activities into the Economic Growth and Redevelopment Services office -- following Florida's advice, after the fact.

Artists differ among themselves on answers to these questions. In 2002, Salvage Vanguard Theatre's motto, a mini-manifesto, was "No starving artists!" Says the theatre's director, Jason Neulander, "It's ridiculous that in Austin people can't make a living doing art. The city has used the arts community to further its own agenda, but it hasn't put its money where its mouth is."

But artists can pay their own way, can't they? "I find the idea of a day job to be ridiculous," Neulander says. Good art requires time, he argues. "The pianist who's sitting at a desk job for eight hours isn't going to have eight hours to spend on their art." He described a recent period of his life when he read the biz magazine Fast Company and thought you could apply a business model to nonprofits -- an idea he discarded because it's impossible, he says, to put a monetary value on art, particularly ephemeral arts like performances.

So Salvage Vanguard began a fund-raising campaign to release as many artists as possible from the day job. The rationale was self-evident. "If the people making the art could be paid enough not to have to work elsewhere for 40 hours per week for the duration of rehearsals and performances, the work will be better," says SVT's fundraising letter. "If the work is better, more people will come to see it. If more people come to see it, there will be more money available to pay more artists. And then, instead of the very best Austin talent leaving the city because they can't make a living here (which happens all too frequently), artists from around the country will be coming to Austin because of the professional opportunities the community has to offer."

With its motto, the theatre raised $16,000 -- an increase of $2,000 over the previous year -- and one of the artists it supported, Dan Dietz, went on to win places in new play venues. "Now he's one of the hot and up-and-coming artists," Neulander says with obvious pride. "All it took was a little bit of support."
Life Outside the Market
But other artists say that a creative life without a day job seems like a needless luxury. "That would be great to have that kind of well of creativity to be able to sit there and create all day," says John Hunt, Fivehead guitarist by night, cafe manager by day. "With a job, you're forced to deal with other people. If you don't, you can cut yourself off." Not everyone shares Neulander's insistence on public funding. "What are they gonna do, restring your guitar for you?" Hunt asks. "It's your responsibility. The moment you have to rely on other people, the more you'll be disappointed." For him it boils down to one simple maxim: "If you're getting paid to do your art, that's great. If you're not, then don't complain about it."

Hunt began washing dishes three nights a week at Star Seeds back in 1996, after putting in a full day as an intern at Richard Linklater's studio. He worked his way up to waiter, then was promoted to manager a year ago. "I don't hate the managing, but I do hate the waitering. Sometimes I just really hate people," he admits. He writes no songs about his day job, he says, though he could. He's a rock & roll guitarist who hires and fires, who turns away dozens of unemployed people every week -- and who, in the strangest twist of all, employs the owner of the record label that's putting out the next Fivehead CD. "When he doesn't do his sidework, I can't say anything because he's putting out my record," Hunt says, "so I just do it myself." He's also accumulated a cache of good Day Job tales, such as the time a patient from St. David's Hospital, across I-35, walked into the restaurant, dressed in his hospital gown and carrying his IV stand, and asked if anyone had a cigarette.

Maybe it's easier for an Austin rock musician, in touch with the working-class roots of that artistic tradition, to strike a self-reliant pose, or maybe it's simply easier for someone with a working-class background to accept the Day Job from the outset. Yet there are those who believe that the Day Job doesn't exist -- that it's a state of mind, not of the wallet. One artist who appears to never have resented doing someone else's work is actor and playwright Steve Tomlinson, who argues there is no such thing as a day job, not in his life, anyway. "The notion of a day job implies a fundamental disintegrity that as an artist, I reject," he says. "I think that if you're doing something for money that you hate, you should either quit the job or you should find the thing in that that you love, and use that as the lever to bring more of yourself into it."

Tomlinson may have a unique perspective as an unusually lucky performer: A professor of finance at UT's School of Business, he writes and performs one-man shows about the spirituality of money. On one hand, he's worked to integrate his interests in theology, his expertise in economics, and his skills as a playwright, so that "from my perspective, there is no such thing as a day job. I don't know what that is." On the other hand, he's been gifted with a secure, prestigious job and the financial capital that allows him the space with which to integrate. Tomlinson recognizes the gift: "I've been extraordinarily lucky to have people pay me to do things that I always enjoy doing. I guess a day job is the thing you do for money that you don't like."

Tomlinson also holds a frank, social Darwinist attitude about how artists succeed. "Art has to find its market," he says. "That's what art does." And yet, artists in Austin find a variety of ways to thrive outside "the market," turning survival itself into a creative pursuit -- which in Austin may still be sweeter than it is anywhere else. April Mathis, an actress with Salvage Vanguard, worked stints with a dot-com and a publishing company, then in 2001 moved to New York City, where she finds people desperate to survive. No one there indulges in worrying that they won't be able to make the art, she says, unlike Austin, where people get too involved in trivial things.

At the same time, she says, Austin's a place "where you're free to explore and play and be uncompromising. I've seen a lot of great stuff in Austin, and I've paid a lot of money to see shitty stuff in New York." In both places, she says, there are many ways to be creative. "Thinking of yourself as a creative person means being creative with money, and having a creative business head. And collaborating with people. And seeing how we can make money doing what we like to do."

An interview with SWT's Arturo Mancha, whose novel in progess was a recent break-in casualty

Arturo Mancha would have called the theft of his debut novel five years in the writing devastating. Titled Auroboros, it would be the diamond in his sky. "The way I think about it," the 26 year-old writer said, "is if a person could lay out all his or her works on a table, this novel would be the centerpiece of my table. Everything else would be second in pride." Two years ago, he joined the creative writing MFA program at Southwest Texas State University to get advice writing what he intended to be his only novel. For the past five years, "it's brought me to brink of examining everything I've ever known," says the 26-year-old writer. "I've lost friends, and made friends because of it. It's been physically and emotionally draining." He intended to finish school, publish the book, and then move back to Eagle Pass to teach writing at the community college and help his family run their print shop and party-rental store.

Then, on April 10, a thief entered Mancha's East Riverside apartment and stole a cell phone, his DVD player, and the Compaq Presario 1250 laptop that contained nearly all his work on Auroboros to date, including notes, research, and hundreds of pages of drafts. They say manuscripts don't burn, but the bad guys sure can put a dent in them: Vanished also are 200 crucial pages of brainstorming that formed the backbone of his writing process.

Based on a Native American creation myth, Auroboros (named after the snake that eats its own tail) tells the story of an autistic boy named Salvador who constructs a new religion from the message he decodes in the number pi, and its mix of esoteric numerology and impious theology was told in myth-like prose. Over lunch last week, Mancha struggled to sum his novel up. "It's kind of hard to explain," he said.

Fiction writer Debra Monroe, his workshop instructor this semester, called Auroboros "sprawling and apocalyptic," a combination of Rudolfo Anaya and Edward Spencer. "His determination to get the story told has been dogged, tenacious," she said in an e-mail to the Chronicle.

Luckily, 120 pages exist in hard copy, which two classmates have offered to retype for him. "It's absolutely amazing how many people have offered me help," he says. He's been set up with a free computer, and his University of Texas officemates took up a collection. Debra Monroe also gave him a sweet deal: Don't worry about handing anything in for next class.

"Right now I feel lost and empty because I'm at ground zero with my writing," Mancha says, "But I can also say that I feel loved and cared for because of the people who held out their hands to offer me help. I feel lost, and at home at the same time, you know what I'm saying?"

Will the loss change anything about the way he writes? "It definitely makes me want to write perfectly the first time around," he says. But, says Dr. Tom Staley, the director of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, he might rely more on paper. As tempting as is the myth of the single white hot passion draft, there's a group of writers who, though relatively young and computer savvy, print successive drafts and make corrections on paper because "their habit is still to get to the tactile element, where you can follow the tracery on paper. Or," Staley says in an aside, "Maybe they're trying to wait and sell it to the HRC.

"I feel so touched by [Mancha's] story," he adds. "Most writers now, though, they always have a backup disk."

But today Arturo Mancha has two goals: start writing again, and get his stuff back. Before he cancelled the service of his cell phone, he managed to get three phone numbers the thief called, then those addresses and one name. Until the police call him back, he has hit a wall. He won't play vigilante, even though he has driven by the apartments. "I don't want to go down there and fuck something up, because that might affect us getting our stuff back," he says. Still, he says, he fantasizes about revenge. "I wouldn't want to hurt them physically. That type of pain heals. I would want them to be tortured every time they hide in dark corners, or every time they look over their shoulder, or every time they see a shadow."

Another of his past workshop professors, Tom Grimes, has lightly suggested that, vengeance or not, Mancha might end up ahead. Most authors hype their books after they're published, Grimes told him. "Congrats on the publicity," Grimes joked in an e-mail. "You know now that all future articles about you will begin, 'He called the loss of his first novel five years in the writing devastating. But today Arturo Mancha ...'"

Hermetic Studies has been marginalized academia since the enlightenment. Can a UT professor and grad student editing a journal change that?

You might think that a periodical devoted to the study of alchemical thought from ancient Egypt to Harry Potter could easily get money -- when the universe resonates with the harmony of aligned planets, go salvage some hubcaps, pop-tops, and old bullets and transmute them into gold to pay the printer. Barring that, why not ride the pop-culture groove that's allowed J.K. Rowling, James Redfield, and Umberto Eco to make gold of their own?

When two members of UT's English department took over the editorship of Cauda Pavonis: Studies in Hermeticism, an academic journal, they were determined to get start-up money the old-fashioned way: Ask the dean.

"We spent lots of time getting lots of stuff together for a minuscule grant," moans Kate Frost, an English professor who describes herself as serving her students and the English Renaissance poet John Donne. But the dean turned her down, as did the English department, because "they said the department has enough journals. I mean, they turned down the Chaucer Review," Frost says.

Sitting in Frost's dim, cool office is Roger Rouland, a graduate student who is writing his dissertation on alchemy and poet Edmund Spenser, under Frost's direction. Rouland, who once taught an American literature survey course that pulled out alchemical threads in the work of writers as contemporary as Annie Dillard, says, "People hear the field, alchemical studies, and they think, 'flake.'"

"Crystal balls," Frost rejoins.

"Wicca."

"We're fighting the money battle and the image battle."

Asked if the two are linked, Frost says, "We got turned down out of hand." Now they figure that $10,000 would be enough to launch a real journal and an attractive, forward-looking multimedia Web product. Maybe, someday, the money will come from foundations or some rich individual. For the time being, Frost and Rouland are relying on scholarly love, that ancient art of protecting and disseminating sacred knowledge. And to get out their first issue, Frost will conjure that faithful handmaiden of scholarly devotion: family money. "It's a family inheritance I'm willing to spend on it," she says. How much has she spent so far? "I'd rather not say."

What's at stake is a scholarly field called hermetic studies, which has never really been given its due. Like the alchemists themselves, the people who study it have always been heterodox practitioners at the margins. Many of the original subscribers to Cauda Pavonis don't have e-mail addresses. "They're little old people still writing with quill pens," Frost says.

Cauda Pavonis had been edited since 1982 by Stanton Linden, a professor at Washington State University who did groundbreaking work in hermetic studies, publishing in 1996 Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature From Chaucer to the Restoration. Linden explained that the journal's name is a Latin phrase, full of alchemical symbolism, that means "tail of the peacock." Alchemical writers used "tail of the peacock" to describe a variegated color of red, blue, and green that was a sign of one substance turning into another.

"Hermeticism" is the name given to a group of magical practices that includes alchemy, astrology, sacred geometry, and numerology. From the Middle Ages onward, people in Europe practiced these arts under the direction of mysterious texts supposedly written by a quasi-mythological, ancient Egyptian figure named Hermes Trismegistus, or "the thrice-wise Hermes." Trismegistus had sat at the feet of Moses, carried an emerald upon which was recorded all of philosophy, and, according to the English occultist Francis Barrett, "had communicated the sum of the Abyss, and divine knowledge to all posterity."

In 1614, the legend of Hermes Trismegistus was debunked by Isaac Casaubon in De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiaticis Exercitiones XVI, which showed that the texts attributed to Hermes were actually written in the Christian era by people with the agenda of linking their Christian thought to an older philosophy called neo-Platonism. Alchemists of the Middle Ages had effectively put the cart before the horse, Frost says. "The reason [Hermes' writing] sounds so Christian is because it was written by Christians."

In the meantime, nearly all the poetry, music, art, and architecture from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance had been based on hermeticism. Even after it was driven underground by the Inquisition and the Enlightenment, it persisted quietly, reappearing in Nazi Germany and then in the U.S. in the 1970s in the form of New Age thought.

"There has always been a large market for alchemical studies and astrology, or studies in witchcraft or magic, but lots of it is very popular," Linden says. "But the identity of Cauda Pavonis is much more with the serious academic pursuit." A typical issue of the journal would contain articles on alchemy and magic, ancient Egyptian philosophy, Renaissance poetry, medieval architecture, the early history of science, and modern efflorescences of hermeticism in pop culture like Led Zeppelin lyrics and Jorge Luis Borges short stories and Harry Potter novels.

Linden took the journal's name from an even older newsletter that had been published sporadically in the 1970s by a professor at the University of New Mexico, Eugene Cunnar, and turned it into a bona fide peer-reviewed academic journal. That makes Cauda Pavonis the oldest continually running journal of hermetic studies in the U.S. In its heyday, Linden sent out 400 copies; more recently it has been cut to 100, and costs $16 for two issues a year, which is a bargain as academic journals go. In Europe, where hermetic studies have always been more robust, some older journals exist, the most established of which is Ambix, the journal for the history of alchemy and early chemistry, which was founded in England after World War I.

In 2001, Frost was giving a paper at a conference with Linden, who mentioned he was retiring soon and shopping for a home for Cauda Pavonis. Otherwise, it would die. On the spot Frost snapped it up, but not for herself; she called Rouland that day to tell him she had the best Christmas present but that she wouldn't give it to him until she saw him in person.

Rouland accepted the gift with an arm-pumping "yes!" What Frost knew was that he'd wanted to be the editor of Cauda Pavonis since the early 1990s, when he became interested in alchemy as a grad student in Illinois, met Stanton Linden, and even published a paper in the journal. When he graduates and moves on -- "to an academic job," Frost says, knocking on the plastic veneer of her desk -- he'll take Cauda Pavonis with him to help secure the future of hermetic studies. The goal is not only to fend off what Frost derides as "New Age" ("We want to keep our scholarly cool," she says), but to bring hermeticism to the attention of literary scholars.

"You know that literary studies really don't study literature anymore. It's all cultural studies," Rouland says. "But hermetic studies is the real cultural studies. This is the foundation of everything. Cosmology, cosmogony, everything. That was the culture back then. So when [scholars] focus on the shoes women were wearing in the 1590s -- who gives a shit? This is why they might have been wearing those shoes."

Frost stresses that she doesn't practice astrology or alchemy and hates it when people ask her what her number is. But just like real-life practicing alchemists, the life of the alchemical scholar is a lifestyle, not a fashion. It's a vast field that makes serious JFK conspiracy, UFO studies, or cryptozoology look like weekend hobbies. "It's hard; this stuff is hard," she says. "You have to read. My brain is like an attic. It's like an airplane hangar. That's why people ignore hermetic studies. You can't read only the books from the last five years."

Yet what makes hermeticism so popular is that it addresses a basic human need. "Everyone is searching for the recipe," Rouland says. "We're all seeking purification, perfection, refining. We're all trying to get rid of the dross. We're trying to reach perfection. For people to say the spiritual alchemists are 'flakes' is not quite right, because we're all engaged in that search."

"If we could only get some money!" Frost exclaims.

"This stuff is everywhere. We want to show it to you. We don't want to be a footnote," Rouland says.

Is not wanting to be a footnote more elementary than the desire for transformation?

Rouland thinks for a moment. "That's the quagmire that the alchemists had to face," he says. "Before they faced their quest, they had to be purified. Part of being purified is not to be vain."

In the new issue of the magazine The Next American City, Richard Florida, the author of the bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class – in which Austin plays a prominent role as a model "creative Mecca" – has answered his critics. Or so claims a breathless press release from the magazine, which is based in New York City. "His new work finds that creative regions generate not only more jobs, but also higher salaries, more innovations, and more high tech growth," gushes the release.

But in the essay, titled "Revenge of the Squelchers" (online at www.americancity.org), the Carnegie Mellon professor does not, in fact, answer his critics. He provides some graphs that are supposed to serve as evidence that innovation is, in fact, linked to job creation and that diverse populations do lead to creativity. He's obviously saved the best evidence for his new book, The Flight of the Creative Class. Otherwise he simply reasserts what he calls his "core message," which is that "human creativity is the ultimate source of economic growth" and that "every single person is creative in some way."

Why is that message such a hard sell? Because, Florida argues, his critics have politicized his arguments. He responds to them according to their position on the political spectrum, accusing them of providing ammunition to the "squelchers," whom he defines as civic types who are afraid of new ideas. He seems astonished that his work has been attacked from both the political right and the left. "Such heated rhetoric puzzles me; I harbor no hidden agendas," he writes.

But The Rise of the Creative Class is hardly nonideological; it argues a Clinton-era, Third Way hybridization (or bastardization) of the progressive's pursuit of social justice and individual fulfillment, the venture capitalist's search for lucrative risk, and the manager's devotion to the bottom line. The cracks in this ideology had already begun to show by the time Florida's book appeared – notably here in Austin, where the boom Florida extolled had already begun its bust, and where city leaders rushed to embrace strategies Florida implied, and perhaps assumed, already existed.

By now claiming neutrality and nonpartisanship, Florida avoids addressing his most serious critics: his academic peers who take issue with his definition of the "creative class," which includes everyone from pro basketball players and computer programmers to lawyers and fine painters. Saskia Sassen, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics, argues that Florida should distinguish among workers who provide services for producers (say, advertising and finance) and those who provide services for consumers (such as flipping hamburgers). That, she says, produces more useful analyses and allows one to see how a city is linked to global economic processes, not just local or even regional ones. No matter how creative a city is, it can't imagine itself out of global economic systems, a matter that Florida fails to address, but which his supposed Austin avatars have come to realize all too well.

The history and habits of a not-quite-extinct-yet Austin species

Do you know that little stone house at Eighth and Waller streets, set up high on a stone retaining wall, behind a stand of agaves and redbud? That's where I live. That's the house I'll be leaving soon. I write to deliver a piece of news; in the last two months, my landlord, Ramiro Diaz, and his wife, Mary, have both died, and the estate is selling the house (asking price: $180,000). When it passes into new hands, there will be one less great cheap rental house in Austin.

Good houses, renting cheaply, once roamed the neighborhoods of the central city, but I live in the house that time forgot. Two bedrooms, 1000 square feet, well built by Mary's father, Jack Guajardo, in 1946 – strong, solid, not a dump. "Impossible!" the real estate agents crow. My friends often admired it, some urging me to buy it (I wish), others plotting revisions of their own to the architecture.

The neighborhood, laid out on rolling streets, is no slum, though it long bore the stigma of being on the Eastside, which helps explain, in part, the rent. Now, for many, the Guadalupe neighborhood is simply "central." I will miss that fact – I ride my bike eight minutes to my job at the university, or five minutes in the opposite direction to Town Lake. I'll also miss the original wood, the pale stone of the facade, how high it was from the street, the grand view of the new Hilton and Frost Bank Tower from the back patio – a sort of bohemian's penthouse. But even with the Downtown view, the house possesses an ineffable stillness that makes you feel as if you're in the deep woods. This is a house with charisma, not just architectural character, in a neighborhood that has always cared for its own.

From May to November 2002, I paid $475; in November, the rent rocketed (after a very apologetic phone call and letter from Mr. Diaz) to $500. Since March of this year, I've split the $500 with my girlfriend. This means I pay $75 less now than when I came to Austin in 1993 for graduate school, when I split a $650 duplex in the 2800 block of San Gabriel. Low rent was just as crucial to my lifestyle as a graduate student as it's been for me now as a writer, and I'm grateful.

But arrangements like mine, once endemic to Austin, have for years now been viewed as not just endangered but extinct. Doomed by the inexorable march of progress, etc. Housing talk tends to the nostalgic, wistful for the days when redneck rock was still a-rising, even though all these years at least one exemplary specimen of the Cheap Austin Rental survived at Eighth and Waller. Unfortunately, all I have to show as evidence is the corpse, as if I pulled up a giant squid in my fishing nets, or realized that the dove I just shot (if I shot doves) was actually a passenger pigeon.

Still, we can ask: What happened to keep this one alive so long? Did it persist for exceptional reasons we cannot duplicate, or for common ones we could still preserve? Might there still be specimens of Cheap Austin Rental out there, like salamanders hidden in the depths of caves? And can we breed them in captivity and release them back into the wild?
Friends and Neighbors
To get some historical perspective, I called Phil and Janet Crossley, who rented the house at Eighth and Waller from 1995 to 2000. The previous renters, friends of theirs who had lived here since 1985, recommended the Crossleys to the Diazes, who sealed the lease with a handshake. (In 2000 the Crossleys passed it to other grad school friends, Sergei Bogdanov and Lisa Redford, who passed it to me.) Phil, now a geography professor in Colorado, reported that during their stay, the rent went from $450 to $475.

That means that since 1995, the rent has increased about 11%, even though the assessed value of the property (according to the Travis Central Appraisal District) jumped nearly 400% (from $46,606 in 1998 to $191,353 in 2002, though it's fallen to $163,599). During the same period, housing prices in the U.S. went up about 50% (though to keep things in perspective, you have to realize that prices rose nearly 125% in Spain and 115% in Britain in the same period).

But Ramiro Diaz was not a rent raiser. Back in the 1960s, he had run his father-in-law's grocery store, then sold it and bought a radio station, and over time accumulated houses in the Guadalupe neighborhood and elsewhere. This wasn't the only house whose rent he kept low – and whose occupants didn't complain about the lack of deadbolts or grounded electrical sockets, or who just installed them on their own. (To give Mr. Diaz credit, he was always prompt with serious repairs.)

There are actually two houses on the property at Eighth and Waller, one occupied by a family, the Hernandezes, who rented from Ramiro for 15 years. According to Ramiro's son Roland Diaz, his father often forgave them months of rent if they hit hard times, then would bring by bags of groceries.

The low rent, Phil Crossley surmises, helped Ramiro Diaz find and keep dependable, decent, respectable renters who fit his reputation. Even though the house was long paid for, and the Diazes had themselves moved elsewhere, Crossley says, "he considered himself part of the neighborhood [and] he didn't want the neighbors bad-mouthing him because of who the renters were." Crossley thinks Diaz knew precisely what money he could make on the property, but chose not to because other priorities mattered more.

The rare Cheap Rental, spotted in the wild at Eighth and Waller
Photo By John Anderson

According to Katherine Stark, the director of the Austin Tenants Council, it is the landlords with small portfolios, like Mr. Diaz, who are easiest to deal with, most flexible on rents, least likely to do credit checks or background checks. If you're a student or a creative type looking for cheap rent, Stark advises that you drive the neighborhoods and look for signs. "It's the same advice I give to people who are felons," she says.

The house's family history also plays a role. I live in the house that Mary and Ramiro, at the time an employee of Jack's at the Guajardo grocery, lived in when they first married; when Jack died, Mary inherited it. What kept the rent low was this personal history, which seems fairly common. I've lived in other such houses in Austin, like a white clapboard three-bedroom bungalow at 46th and Red River, where I paid one-third of $750 rent from 1995 to 1998. (The rent went up to $1,000 in 2000, after I moved out.)

Could both families have made gobs more money? Sure. Are people who profit from selling family homes any less attached to them? No, not necessarily. But in both cases, a sentimental attachment to a house stayed the invisible hand of the market. In the case of my current house, this trade-off helped at least three people to begin careers, start families, and put down their own Austin roots.

It is also common for a house passed among friends to have lower rent. Such social connections give an advantage to landlords: A friend of a friend comes with an automatic reference. Economic research demonstrates that denser social networks keep prices low; social disconnection raises prices. The University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker has shown that the prices of stock options are less volatile when options are traded among a smaller group of stock traders. Contrary to what you'd think, a smaller market (because it involves fewer people) is actually the more competitive one; the larger social group has to deal with too much information to make decisions that could be considered rational.

If my house remained in the Diaz family, and within the circle of friends who've been its tenants, its rent could remain low, but Roland Diaz says he's not interested in being a landlord. (Fortunately, according to Katherine Stark, the number of small landlords is remaining steady in Austin, particularly on the Eastside.) So the rent on this house will rise, as it will on the 800-square-foot, four-room casita where the Hernandezes live. At one point I figured we should try to buy the property, my girlfriend and I, and use the rental income from the Hernandez's house to help with the mortgage.

But when we toured the casita with the real estate agent, we were stunned by the amount of work that would need to be done – the amount of work that Ramiro Diaz had let accumulate. Martin Hernandez, the head of the family, was pointing out repairs he'd done himself. I asked the real estate agent how much she thought the casita could rent for. "If you fixed it up," she said, "you could get $950 for it."

The Hernandezes were watching us: Martin, his wife, his kids, his mother, who was lying on one of the four beds pushed into each of the bedrooms. And I decided I didn't want to be the one responsible for removing this family.

Right now, I can get a mortgage, so we're buying a house. What will the Hernandezes do? I don't know. (Note: I've since learned that the house was purchased by architect Tom Hatch, who lives across the street; while he and his wife are planning to fix up the casita, they intend to accommodate the Hernandezes.)
Economy and History
The market – any market – is not just an economic phenomenon, but a social one that emerges from history. Eighth and Waller was a Cheap Austin Rental for many reasons, but it and all its neighbors were cheaper than most because they lie east of the arbitrary historical artifact of the highway. Back in the early 1900s, today's Guadalupe neighborhood was a relatively swanky suburb for Anglos who – like they do now – want to live near Downtown.

But in 1928 – the year of the founding of my neighborhood's namesake landmark, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church – Austin's first adopted city plan called for "all facilities and conveniences for the Negroes" to be located in today's Central East Austin, as an incentive for African-Americans to move out of established minority neighborhoods elsewhere (like Clarksville and Wheatville). This led to an exodus of Anglos, and then to a further influx of Mexican-Americans; by 1937, when the nation's first public housing projects broke ground in East Austin, it was already established as the nonwhite part of town.

Later, integration and fair-housing laws brought another wave of change. Says Mark Rogers, the executive director of the Guadalupe Neighborhood Development Corporation – a nonprofit that builds and owns affordable housing in the area – from 1970 to 1980 the Guadalupe neighborhood lost one-third of its population and one-third of its housing to demolition and arson. Rehabbing, infilling, and concerted efforts by folks in the neighborhood had made the place a desirable place to live again by the mid-1990s.

But for a while before then, Rogers (who's lived in the neighborhood since 1986) says, "the neighborhood was rough. You'd clean up the hedges and find multiple syringes, pick up the condoms. Friday and Saturday nights from 10 to 4 in the morning, it was an Indianapolis 500 of trucks driving around and around. It was prostitutes, people buying drugs, gunshots, getting stabbed, all that stuff." For every person who swooned at the big, cheap, charming houses, nine were scared away by the crime and vice. Only devoted newcomers like Rogers stayed.

You don't need to be so devoted nowadays, as evidenced by the Saabs and Lexuses swooping by now to peer at my house – they wouldn't be swooping by if this were 1985. On the morning the house was listed in the Austin Multiple Listing Service, the real estate agent received six calls in the first hour. A flood of people trooped through the house. A "For Sale" sign sprouted in the front yard. The end was near.

It's become clear to me that Eighth and Waller isn't really the last Cheap Austin Rental. Last week, I heard about a two-bedroom house at Second and Waller, where two men were living for $100 each, paying an elderly owner. That owner just died. All good deals come to an end. Now the owner's daughter is moving into the house, apparently to rehab it and sell it again. And the herd of Cheap Austin Rentals will again diminish by one. end story

How Books Can Save American Democracy

Citizen Critics
By Rosa Everly
University of Illinois Press
189 pages, $39.95.

In an appendix to her provocative new book, Citizen Critics, Rosa Eberly gives her reader what seem to be odd instructions: call a radio talk show, make an argument, and support it. "What I’m asking you to do is to enter the entertainment-oriented sphere of local talk radio and use it to make an argument about something you feel requires comment," she writes. The assignment isn’t for the reader, it’s one Eberly gives her undergraduates at UT-Austin, but it does suggest one way the reader might approach this book: read the appendix first, then let the chapters answer the question: Why does something as seemingly innocuous as speaking on talk radio–or annoying, depending on what radio station you listen to–have such considerable value as a political act?

Citizen Critics isn’t about radio, but uses it as an example of the "public sphere"–in the words of German theorist Jürgen Habermas, a place where "public discussion among private individuals" occurs. A book intended for academics but readable by attentive, patient people who care about literature, education, and the media, it is part of a series co-edited by Robert McChesney, author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy. Eberly’s focus is the literary public spheres surrounding four controversial novels: Joyce’s Ulysses, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, and Andrea Dworkin’s Mercy. In robust, detailed chapters devoted to each novel, Eberly looks at the public contributions (usually letters to editors) by non-expert readers and shows how the themes of these discussions differed from those of literary "authorities," expert readers and critics who often stole, adapted, ridiculed, or ignored those themes, sometimes even co-opting the terms of public debate for increasingly narrow commercial purposes.

In this sense, Eberly isn’t writing about literature per se but testing the health of American publics, and hence democracy, too. In literary public spheres, she argues, literature becomes newslike–that is, a controversial novel can galvanize people to talk and write about social values, the meaning of art, and the contact between public and private lives. Citizen critics make texts meaningful for each other, reporting from the middle of their private lives on what they read. In other words, they don’t need commercial media–that is to say, mediums of commerce–to tell them what to think or believe. The connection with democracy is this: in healthy public spheres, citizens can engage perfect strangers on the themes of the day. Following rhetorical theory, these themes are called topoi, the ancient Greek word for "places." Such spatial metaphors aren’t irrelevant, because Citizen Critics maps public discussions in order to help figure out how to protect and engender the public spheres that are necessary for the existence of democracy.

However, public spheres in America are withering. "Few citizens feel willing or able to join the fray anymore," Eberly writes. "Most novels do not become public issues, at least not in the sense that their publicity leads to democratic participation and public judgement." Her chapters provide evidence for declining literary public spheres. She writes, "the ‘news’ [Joyce, Miller, Ellis, and Dworkin] offered was to some degree excluded from public debate by discussions of the aesthetic merit of their work or by a media culture that increasingly does not invite citizens to understand their views of cultural products as anything other than demographic preferences." Hence talk radio, where a semblance of the public sphere–what for Eberly has the potential to be a "sustainable public"–remains.

Non-expert readers are the "citizen critics" of the title, and the chapter on Ulysses in America defines their work most clearly. From 1918 on, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of a literary magazine called the Little Review, published chapters of Ulysses until they were stopped by court order in 1921. In that time, they also printed letters from "Reader Critics," a small but devoted group of readers who deliberated Ulysses fervently, as if their lives depended on it. Perhaps it is a mark of how far our public spheres have come (and gone) to be surprised to read how one person wrote, "I read [Joyce] each month with eagerness, but I must confess that I am defeated in my intelligence. Now tell the truth,–do you yourselves know where the story is at the present moment, how much time has elapsed,–just where are we?"

Other readers were less sanguine: "I swear I’ve read his ‘Ulysses’ and haven’t found out yet what it’s about, who is who or where. Each month he’s worse than the last…Joyce will have to change his style if he wants to get on." The editors, trapped in the avant-garde’s paradox, responded by defending a Modernist definition of "the artist" unbound by public taste, while expressing a similarly Modernist distaste for the bourgeois audience who either didn’t subscribe to the Little Review or didn’t understand what was published in it: "Sometimes I grow a bit weary of these kindergarten questions by people who have failed to read before asking," Heap sighed.

It would suit Eberly’s argument if non-expert positions provided the arguments for the court cases that eventually overturned the ban on Ulysses, thereby providing the earliest legal precedent for what counted as obscene. However, this isn’t true. In 1921, Heap and Anderson were fined and publication of Ulysses halted; in 1933, United States v. One Book Called "Ulysses" overturned the initial ruling. In his decision, Justice Woolsey claimed that Ulysses could not be obscene for two reasons: Joyce was clearly an artist, and much of the novel was too unintelligible to be obscene. This argument showed the power of themes raised and argued by Heap and Anderson. Ultimately, Eberly writes, "Ulysses entered the United States not because of the topoi of citizen critics but because of the topoi of elites, most of which were repeated in legal decisions." That is, once legal discourse centered on aesthetics, Joyce was safe. That citizen critics "lost" is not important, because "well before its canonicity was settled, Joyce’s book got people arguing with each other, deliberating by writing in public about issues of common concern." And this, to Eberly, is all that matters.

How to make more citizen critics? Often anonymous, citizen critics are people who write and talk about "issues of common concern from an ethos of citizen first and foremost–not as an expert or spokesperson for a workplace or as a member of a club or organization." Their material doesn’t appear in bibliographies. In each of the four cases, Eberly finds that they didn’t write about aesthetic issues as much as intelligibility, obscenity, the scope of community, and the limits of government–that is, they took less interest in the artistic value of Tropic of Cancer than they did in how to define a community and how to preserve its values.

There are two ways to look at this. In a way, citizen critics are the literary world’s equivalent to undecided voters in the recent presidential election: unwilling to play by the dominant rules, admired for their independence, yet chastised all the same for their small-mindedness, and–it is important to remember, about swing voters and citizen critics–the demos part of the democracy calculus. On the other hand, it would be easy to romanticize their populism, that desire for sweet, easy, uplifting narrative, their demand for easy language, images, happy endings, the answers. To her credit, Eberly doesn’t wax nostalgic. She doesn’t slam individuals, either, whether they are journalists, academics, or authors of horrific novels. (Bret Easton Ellis is perhaps the best example of misplaced irony run amuck.) The time for condemning the actors has passed.

Onward, to make more citizen critics. That’s why Eberly gives the talk radio assignment to her students. And in the classroom, we have one of the only spaces left where American strangers face each other and talk about what matters. In this sense, Citizen Critics offers the best radical teaching for a radical democracy: strangers bound as one, familiar strangers grappling with a fragmenting unity.

Looking for Meaning at the Texas Books Festival

Around 2 o’clock that afternoon, the protesters filed loosely up the Capitol ground’s main drive, and that’s when the Texas Book Festival started to get spicy. It was Saturday, day of rest and leisure, we were there for books, and they were mounting the Capitol steps, about 300 strong, waving signs and clapping their hands. What they were protesting wasn’t immediately obvious (the death penalty? the drug war?), and mixed among tourists, bewildered festival-goers, and men in military uniforms standing near Veteran’s Day wreaths, they seemed out of place–until I heard their chants, led by a woman with a bullhorn: "Every vote counts! Every vote counts!" After they massed in front of the Capitol, clean cut and mostly hempless, I recognized them: Despite all the sharp anti-Republican pith of their placards, they looked all the world like Nader voters hungover with guilt by association.

State troopers were soon in place. I asked one demonstrator what organization they represented. "Just concerned citizens," he said. He’d read the call to protest on a Yahoo message board. "We were over at the Governor’s Mansion just now, but the Bush people were sticking their signs in front of ours, so we came over here," he said. Now photographers had clean shots of the signage, which was as much a gauge of the nation’s mood as a kind of folksy punditry invented by a soundbite-savvy, media-saturated, and very sarcastic folk: "Abolish the Electoral System," "Look in the Bushes for the ballots!" "Who put the Duh in Dubya?" and "241>19,000: Fuzzy Math?" When someone paraded through with a huge American flag, so giant he had to sprint to keep it patriotically off the ground, the crowd cheered wildly, but they reserved their volume for the arrival of the most partisan sign, which is, according to certain well-known theories of affective phonetics, also the most satisfying one to say: "Bush is a Punk-Ass Chump."

I ran into the protests on my way to the House chambers. By the time I got in, the room was crowded with people listening to Michael Beschloss, television’s resident presidential historian, who was well into a series of anecdotes about American presidents, some easy, polished stories that sounded as if they’d served a postprandial function more than once. From my balcony seat, Beschloss looked handsome and confident as he told the story about the letter he wrote to LBJ as an eight-year old boy, then found wrapped in cellophane in the LBJ library as a presidential historian. He also related how he secured access to LBJ’s tapes of private conversations when they were first discovered, adding that he listens to them "sometimes 10 hours a day." It was hardly insightful analysis of the current situation, but Beschloss succeeded at assuring us of one thing: As long as we, the American people, expect our presidents to provide good entertainment, then the history of the American presidency is safest in the hands of entertaining historians.

As Noam Scheiber wrote in a recent issue of The New Republic, in the last 10 years Beschloss has emerged as a prominent, if inescapable, TV personality because "[he’s] figured out how to appeal perfectly to producers and hosts who want the aura of a serious historian without the substance." That afternoon, Beschloss proved (with occasional shouts from the protests outside penetrating the windows) that he can serve up American presidents, though not without a substantial helping of Michael Beschloss on the side. To let us know the presidency was stable and remained important, he told us about standing up with three ex-presidents et al. at the White House’s 200th anniversary dinner and singing "God Bless America." He also confided that he feels sometimes as if he’s the only person who believes that Oswald acted alone. By the end, he did talk about the 2000 election: "In a year," he said, "We’ll be amazed at how small a blip this is, and how we all found courage in crisis."

Meanwhile, in front of the Capitol, the demonstration had swelled into a raucous, less joyful kind of thing. When I came outside, I found the pro-Gore army, now a larger group, on one side of the street. Many of them wore bandages on the sides of their faces (in reference to George W.’s post-election boil), and some of the bandages featured slogans like "Democracy is infectious." Behind black, official Bush-Cheney signs, on the other side of the street, stood a phalanx of Bush supporters who were so well-groomed for a Saturday they made even the DPS officers look rumpled. The two groups were locked in a scrum of shouting, chanting, and sign-waving, and if it weren’t for the dozen officers between them, they seemed ready to launch at each other.

Suddenly, I noticed Beschloss, a tall, slim figure in a dark suit, haunting the edges of the demonstration, bemused at the din. When I approached him, I realized he was wearing makeup, his hair dyed–in other words, that serious, scholarly aura he exuded from the dais is really a thin layer of spritz. I wondered if he jigs offstage before a public appearance; he doesn’t seem the type, but neither did Al Gore. Beschloss craned his head around, scanning for a TV camera. He did not see one. "Looks like democracy is working," he told me pleasantly, before hopping into a golf cart, which whisked him away to his book signing.

The morning after the election I’d felt gray and choked and a little shaky, as you might if you’d mixed beer, cigarettes, and election returns at the Horseshoe Lounge, though only when I went to get the newspaper did I realize bigger headaches than mine had blossomed overnight. At 1:20 a.m., when they called Florida for Bush, I’d gone to bed, hoping that sleep would soothe my heart and make it its own thing again, something I’d recognize–only to wake up and discover that sleep had undone the stitches of the world. It was cold and rainy; the day felt like Christmas Day gone awry. Where the hell is Santa Claus?

The puzzlement and uncertainty prepared me to be satisfied by what this year’s Book Festival offered: The feeling that books, writing, and writers still matter–not in the sense that reading a book is a good use of time until Florida settles down, but that writers of truth and integrity and what they give us can and does persist, and that we can return again and again to find ourselves changed by them. True, all the political writers were pestered for analysis or prophecy. At a Saturday morning panel, Nick Lemann (a political writer for The New Yorker and one-time editor at Texas Monthly) deflected the questions by pointing out if he could call the future, he’d be a stockbroker, but by Sunday afternoon’s panel with Larry Wright and Stanley Crouch he’d grown more promiscuous. Still, the Book Festival was the healthiest, safest place to be, a place with room for reflection, beauty, integrity, negotiated ways of speaking and reading, the work whose products endure. Democracy was simple arithmetic, as events in Florida were proving; literature solves for x.

I liked how poet Edward Hirsch expressed a similar idea in his reading from How to Read a Poem: "Poems add up to a certain kind of spiritual information we cannot get otherwise." To a crowded room in the Capitol Extension, Hirsch spoke gently but passionately, a man with an intellectual immediacy that made the most fragile abstractions seem like polished creekbed stones in his pocket. Poetic forms such as the sonnet evolve "not because people like them," Hirsch argued, "but they live on because they are vessels for those things we cannot get at otherwise. A poem is a certain kind of argument; a poem makes a certain kind of case." What Hirsch espouses seems obvious, and it differs little from what art critic Dave Hickey (who was in town for another conference) claims about works of art–that they are "sites for the adjudication of value." Yet such sheer, naked enthusiasms aren’t widely shared, particularly among professional academic readers, and discussions of value are frequently controversial. As Rosa Eberly writes in Citizen Critics, works of literature matter most for the types of public conversations they can sustain, and the health of such conversations is crucial to democracy. What’s important is that such discussions take place, but we need more books that tell us how to do this, and more public arguments about why writing matters.

It helped my mood most that John Graves was honored at the Festival. I admire him greatly, because Graves is a writer who has built arguments and only elegant ones about what matters. Even this formulation, about what "matters," is distinctly his. "The sky matters greatly to people, of course, and has always mattered," is how he began his introduction to Wyman Meinzer’s book of photographs, Texas Sky (1998). Forty years ago, in his first and perhaps most famous book, Goodbye to a River, he argued for the Brazos River, its ecology, and the value of the history of the land and people on its banks. His next book, Hard Scrabble (1974), stands up for "four hundred acres of rough limestone hill country, partly covered with cedar and hardwood brush and partly open pasture." From a Limestone Ledge (1980) collects essays on chickens, fences, dogs, and bees, among others. These books and essays make a particular case we could not get any other way, the case for what we should keep around, preserve, and protect, what needs our attention, and what we like. Graves is not shy about this cause.

The hard work of being a writer such as Graves is evident in a new Graves-related book, John Graves and the Making of Goodbye to a River: Selected Letters, 1957-1960, edited by David Hamrick and annotated by Graves. Using letters from the Knopf Archive at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT-Austin, Hamrick assembles a portrait of the artist as warm and consistent, as well as a noble stickler for the details of his own vision. It’s also a portrait of Goodbye as a labor of love. Making changes some ideas I had of Graves–gathered from Hard Scrabble–that he hewed to his work and his work alone, and let the world come to him; also that he’s isolated and curmudgeonly. ("I have only scant understanding of the quirk that has made me need to find out so many things in life the hardest way, by doing them or being done to by them, myself alone," he writes in Hard Scrabble.)

As Making makes clear, it’s indisputable that Graves has his own image of his work and will stubbornly fight for it. Many of the letters are models of how to explain your ideas, your stylistic choices, and most of all your judgment respectfully yet with force to an editor in New York who holds your career at the whim of his regard. But the notion that Graves isolated himself at his Glen Rose ranch turns out to be wrong. He also displays a finely turned courtliness. He didn’t live in Terlingua, after all, but relatively close to Fort Worth and Dallas. And because he circulated among urbanites, his own fortunes rose. In this regard, because it is so telling, Graves’ own annotation of a letter from John Schaffner, his agent, is worth quoting: "My wife Jane was a designer at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and we were occasionally invited over to dinner at Stanley and Billie Marcus’s home. These were rather grand affairs, usually with a sprinkling of notables from the fashion world or the arts. At some such function we met the publisher Alfred Knopf, a formidable figure whose face registered great reserve when he found out I was a writer…But when I mentioned that some work of mine was in the hands of his editor-in-chief [Harold Strauss] he pricked up his ears and turned affable, and after returning to New York he obviously talked with Strauss about the book."

At a Saturday morning session at the Books Festival, Graves was introduced first by former Texas Monthly editor Bill Broyles, then by nature writer Rick Bass, who bravely attempted to have an amplified "conversation" with Graves as both of them sat on the dais of the House Chamber. But the conversation was too stilted, the questions too meandering, to be consistently interesting. If I’d been Bass, I’d have asked Graves how he became so attached to the topics he writes about and, more crucially, where he discovered and decided to employ that intransitive yet peculiar, powerful verb, matters. Looking the word up in the dictionary, I notice that as a verb, it has fewer senses than as a noun, in fact only two: "to be of importance; signify" and "to form or discharge pus; suppurate." I’d hesitate to have this interpretation run by Mr. Graves lest he call it nonsense, but you don’t have to be a semiotician to see how signs and suppurations are related. For one thing, a wound signifies where someone has been as well as what dangers he has faced; for another, the presence of pus is a positive sign that a body is working as it should. Abstractly speaking, arguing about what’s important is the sign of a literary (and artistic) immune system at work on a damaged (or damageable) social body.

In this way, Graves’ writing marks both crisis and solution, and "matters" distills his whole project. The crisis is what you might expect: the state of the land, the landscape, the integrity of people’s attachments to it. The solution isn’t as straightforward. Instead of specific prescriptions, Graves often makes room in his writing for the situation as a whole. In general he is not an activist, and he abjures the polemic, for reasons he explained to Rick Bass when they spoke together on Saturday morning: "If you put a lot of force into an argument, that’s great. But if you win, you make your argument immediately obsolete. If you lose, you make your argument obsolete."

When writing about John Graves, it is easy to focus on his language, particularly if you don’t have the terms for evaluating his moral compass. Graves writes beautiful sentences, hard and uncompromising but not brutal. ("I myself live on the edge of that big country, have spent about half my life in a part-time effort to renovate a patch of rocks and cedar brush–steeply rolling prairie when virgin–for use as a stock farm, and do not even now have the grace to regret the time and effort thus squandered," he writes in Texas Sky.) But Graves matters most not for his language, in fact, but for the way he makes plainly visible the choices before us. Around the Book Festival I heard laments that we do not have enough of his writing. Even Graves himself is apologetic that he’s wasted so much time (and some out there might be surprised to find Graves a theoretician of time: "My theory seems to have been that if you write some decent prose about the ways in which you have wasted time, you have to some extent justified doing so.") One writer should always wish another a long and happy productivity, but I wonder if the laments are only polite wishes. To the degree that "mattering" is hard work, taking place as it does on the hard scrabble of public attention, as much Graves as we have is exactly what we need.

One way in which Graves makes plain our predicament is to acknowledge the threats to what matters, often extending poetry even to it. This is clearest in Chapter 19, the last (and shortest) chapter of Goodbye to a River. If you can read no other John Graves, you should read this scene, all 100 or so words. After picturing him in a canoe, on sandbars, in hermits’ shacks, suddenly he’s at a party, having finished his 1957 trip. Talking to a woman, he’s also conscious that "far far up above all of it in the unalive silent cold of space some new chunk of metal with a name, man-shaped, was spinning in symbolism, they said, of ultimate change." She asks if on his trip he was lonely. As he answers, he thinks of the satellite called Sputnik (which means in Russian "travelling companion"), then: "‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘I had a dog.’" And this is the book’s last line. Where a polemicist might only assert the dog’s value, Graves sets the dog and the satellite next to each other without commenting. This opposition suggests others: warmth and chill, fur and steel, simplicity and system, organism and technology, human connection and human escape. Having provided reasons throughout the book in support of the dog and what she symbolizes, Graves lets the reader swing the way she will. By the end of Goodbye, you should swing to the dog. The party feels claustrophobic; you wonder where Graves is going to light to next. But he leaves the choice open. No matter how many times you return to the book, it’ll remain open. Warmth or chill? In 100 years, maybe readers will prefer the satellite, knowing something about "the stark pleasures of aloneness and unchangingness" that we don’t, or want to just yet.

§§§

After the Bass-Graves conversation, I spoke with the person sitting next to me, a tall, solid man in a suede jacket named Wells Teague. He turned out to be an antidote to the protests, the prognostication, and the anecdotal histories; Teague is something of an anti-Beschloss. You get the feeling that if he had anything to hide, he’d be honest about it sooner than go looking for pancake makeup. A writer, until recently Teague has been away from the page, though this year Wildcat Canyon Press is publishing his book, Calling Texas Home. We sat until people began filing in for the next reading while he told me about meeting Billy Lee Brammer, a Texas writer whose novel The Gay Place is also 40 years old this year, while Teague was writing a magazine article about Austin’s Driskill Hotel in 1974.

"The meeting didn’t last very long," Teague said. "I was interviewing whoever I could find there in the restaurant. I’d interviewed the manager, but I had the run of the place, so I talked to whomever was around. When I went back in the kitchen, there was a fellow with this big rack of ribs. He had on a white coat and one of those big hats that cooks wear, and he was just a real nice fellow." It would be Brammer’s last job. "We chatted a minute about the operation. When he told me his name, I said, ‘You gotta be the writer. I’ve read some of your stuff.’ He said, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ And that’s all he said. He was very mild, and a nice guy. Last time I saw him, he disappeared into the innards of the kitchen."

The working writer easily could have taken advantage of the writer/chef’s situation to advance his own fortunes. He could have told an anecdote about how quick he was to recognize Brammer. He could have pursued Brammer into the innards of the kitchen, asked him about his real-life acquaintance with LBJ or his fictional Texas politician, Arthur "Goddam" Fenstermaker, who owes much to Johnson. Instead Teague gave Brammer a cameo appearance in the article, which ran in an inflight magazine called Texas Parade. "At four o’clock…Chef Bill Brammer heads upstairs to deep-fry several pounds of Port Lavaca breaded shrimp and a box of meat and shrimp egg rolls," he wrote.

His mention of Brammer is brief, he explained to me, because any more detailed mention "I didn’t think was fair. I figured out who he was, and it was real apparent he wasn’t too proud of what he was doing. So–I just left that out."

If you are a 17-year-old boy and your sister who is 16 has a friend with long legs and big brown eyes, you’ll behave. Right? Damn. If you come home and they’re perched on the couch, you’ll be polite as something newly hatched, especially if your sister’s friend is gangly herself, a girl who hasn’t grown into her beauty yet, a girl who isn’t sure how to put her hands but knows how bright her eyes should go. It makes her interesting. A girl who can just adjust her volume but doesn’t know what music she broadcasts. Which is more than okay. She might not know it yet. But she will.

Heather was tall, four or five inches higher than me, her lunky laugh and her brown eyes like odd candy that’s good for you. She wasn’t comfortable with her height so she sat down a lot, and if she couldn’t sit down she’d keep her shoulders dropped, her back curved. If she could find an empty chair she’d sit in it. This story is from that time when she’s 16 and sitting down all the time and I’m 17 and want to discover something about life so new and surprising that even the world has never known it, a discovery that will make anyone else stop looking for what they were looking for. Especially my parents, who seem to have forgotten what they were looking for. I hate them for forgetting this. I swear I’ll never do the same.

I asked Heather to see a movie. She said yes. Once I’d danced with her at a high school dance, a slow dance, pulled her up from a chair and held her waist for the entire length of "Free Bird." So it seemed natural for me to ask, and for her to understand why I wanted to.

When I reached her house, her mother was immediately apologetic. She was a handsome woman who liked to chat with me, and I liked the attention until I realized she was trying to convert me to Christian Science. "Heather isn’t going to be able to go out tonight," she told me.

Heather was on the couch in the living room, her leg propped on a chair, her knee swollen and red, her eyes teared. She couldn’t walk, her voice faint. As she’d fallen from the horse, she told me, her foot got caught in the stirrup and the horse had dragged her a distance. They won’t get medical help, she said, and I can’t have drugs, not even aspirin. Christian Scientists don’t believe in it. We weren’t going to the movie, but selfishly, I didn’t mind–we sat on the same couch, nearly the same height. This might be good, I thought. Until I realized that her parents were not going to leave the room soon, if ever. In fact, they wanted to pray.

"Did you want to stay?" they asked.

At first I was shocked, but then I stayed, even read some Bible. During a break, while her mother and stepfather were fetching lemonade and graham crackers from the kitchen, I went out to my car, found packs of aspirin. When I returned, I felt proud of my arrogance, of outsmarting. Sitting next to Heather, I pushed my fist across the upholstery so that my hand touched her thigh and nearly went under it but opened and tucked the packages into the space between her thigh and the couch. She knew what I was doing. She smiled.

When I was in college, she moved to Canada, where her skinny shoulders became an asset and her misplaced hands found their places and before I came home for the summer she was working as a model. I haven’t seen her since. That was 15 years ago. She married a rock star and they have a child, a beautiful boy, my sister reports. Now Heather lives in a huge glass house on a windswept rock overlooking the mist and smashing waves of the Pacific. Her husband has hit records. She’s very happy.

This woman–the one I remember but haven’t yet met–used to be a girl whose bra straps were always slipping off her shoulders and her fingernails were always chewed. For the most part, this has been true. She was the kind of girl who arranged nematodes on popsicle sticks and collected them in shoe boxes that lined up under her bed, neatly like toes. Who on rainy days spread her stamps out to stack and count like a mogul. Who persuaded a gang of children to visit each house in the neighborhood collecting butter and sugar and then, in a secret basement clubhouse mixed them together, pounds and pounds of the mixture, and made the other kids eat it until they got sick all over each other. Incorrigible and sly she’ll be.

A girl more awkward than ungroomed, and fresh–not used up. She’ll run at swim practice, oh she’ll run all right, but only when she wants to. On the whole, nerdy is good because someday she will lose her honking laugh but keep her punchlines and her general smarts.

I know this like I know gravity: Nerdy will keep her nose clean, her skin soft and white, and her sarcasm stropped like a razor. And it will be her own brand of sarcasm, a sassy incredulity always ready to show that razor and slice some sorry thing clean open with a flash. No TV-irony, though–mass media gets cut to the core of its bloat. Vapid commercials and sitcoms whose implausible plots revolve around single misunderstandings also stagger away, holding in their guts. She lopes and jokes at afternoon practice at the stadium track, last across the line, last into the team van, but in a real race, that is, where she pretends that someone else’s stakes are hers too, she churns her legs, her hair loose and flying. Then she laughs because she wants to win and here she is winning; that’s the biggest mischief of all.

As a woman she has science fair trophies and silk scarves and an illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra and bowls of polished rocks from the mountains she’s climbed without oxygen. How interesting, how nonstop. Feet with high arches and legs on the verge of speaking for themselves. A woman who could be a sidekick of Doctor Who, as played by Tom Baker. Wears plaid skirts; down with multidimensional space travel; unfazed by space creatures and bad special effects.

I know the kinds of women I like. Women who sprout big laughs: a burst, a yip, a chitter yitter falling down chirpy pow. Women who cook lamb stew. Whistle through their fingers. Who stay up all night talking and then want to make out on the dock as the dew falls. Who read The Economist and Vogue. Perform delicate neurosurgeries wearing no underwear and sing in a rock-n-roll band. Or she will speak Russian and run sub-three marathons and theorize about subatomic particles, then in underground laboratories build machines intricate and sensitive for locating these particles in the vast universe. Capture one for a single hot nanosecond and brutally interrogate its checkered past. Also, she will heal fast and she will remember her dreams.

Okay, so maybe not Russian. But it’s okay to dream.

Women who charm me: You’re lovely and long. When you enter the room, spies and priests duck. Your presence halts assembly lines. Cantors mumble, lose their places. Inert gases oxidize. A man would blurt passwords into your eyes; against your ruby lips his vocations would escape him.

You get me drunk in the fake Irish pub after I tried to persuade you to write a book with me. Remember? Still smarter than me, you refused, making me slur to you all the reasons why I can’t do it alone. I need your help, a collaboration, we could write it together, but you, too smart a fish to be merely stubborn and too polite that night for your usual modes of escape. On the walk to the car you volley my appeals, and then, no longer rapt with my chatter, you swooped me coolly off the sidewalk into all the darkness along the buildings, confirmed my secret ardors with your lipstick lips. I’d been had. I liked it. And the book? Funny how it never came up.

You wore glossy black shoes and asked me out for a drink and afterwards invited me up to your apartment to look at your Exner’s Rorschach test clinical guide, to which I said yes for the simple charm of the invitation’s transparency. After the two-minute tour of your one-rug apartment, we turned to each other and kissed with the force of something held apart for a long time. While the cat watched. Took turns pushing each other against the refrigerator in your dark kitchen. I discovered: more glossy black shoes stacked in the closet.

You’re the red stripe in the candy cane, the bright glossy color twirled in the mundane white. Every six months or so, you appear in town, take me to dinner; in the morning I don’t remember the drive from the airport, I don’t remember the drinks or the grilled mahi mahi, but I do remember the moment when we’re alone for the first time in months, when we have no explanations to offer for that gap in time. There is no gap. It’s erased by that moment I remember, of your body’s singular regard for mine.

But this is how it really happens. What it comes down to in the end: She recorded her voice on my computer when I wasn’t looking, I guess before she went back to her husband. Why did she go? Because she’d figured out I didn’t deserve her.

The other day I was cleaning old files off the machine and found her gift. It came loud and clear, like a small bomb in the middle of my day. Her lilt and pressure, "Michael, I am loving you." Her gentle drawl. I haven’t seen her in two years, haven’t talked to her in one. I probably should have made her stay with me but how could I have known that at the time? Still, it was such a pleasure to hear her voice, a shock and a pleasure.

"Michael, I am loving you."

I mean the fidelity was incredible. Of course I didn’t want to erase it, but of course I did.

Laura Dunn takes Green back to Louisiana's Cancer Alley

We’ve been on the road to Baton Rouge for an hour when Laura Dunn, a 25-year-old student filmmaker dressed in bell bottoms and platform shoes, snaps in a CD playing "Gasoline Dreams," a song by hip-hop band OutKast. "All right! all right! all right! all right! all right!" the song begins, prompting a burst of dancing in the front seat from Dunn, who will prove on this trip that she is as willful as she is energetic. Her light brown hair bobs, and she laughs, which she does easily. "Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline!" the song booms. Suddenly the dancing stops and Laura is still. "Hey, that could be our theme song," she says to David Carroll, a 34-year-old musician who approached her after a screening and said he wanted to help. He does media relations; today’s he’s driving to Baton Rouge. "Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline. That’s so perfect."

It’s a cold, rainy Saturday, and we’re going to Louisiana for a week-long trip to bring Dunn’s documentary movie, Green, back to the people she filmed, the residents of small, poor, and mostly black communities on the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a 100-mile stretch of river often called "Cancer Alley." Her 50-minute movie, which covers the impact of petrochemical pollution on these communities, is ambitious, technically tight, very pretty, and sincere–a fresh take, she hopes, on a situation that’s received coverage from "60 Minutes," ABC News, CNN, E Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The Nation. Most recently the chemical industry was examined by Bill Moyers, whose PBS documentary "Trade Secrets," on the health risks posed by chemicals and the industry’s failure to inform workers of these risks, was clearly intended to use Moyers’ reputation to force companies to be more accountable to the public and not just to markets. His documentary also starts in Cancer Alley, but focuses on uncovering evidence that will damn the industries’ own rhetoric.

In contrast, Green sews together real stories of people who live along the Mississippi, provoking its viewers, though provoking them into doing what isn’t always clear: Shut down chemical plants? Join the cause for environmental justice? Feel bad and sorry? This raises a set of broader questions. What should a documentary try to do? If it’s pretty and political, how do you know which your viewers are responding to? Dunn’s approach is hard to pull off because it’s novel, says Don Howard, Dunn’s advisor at UT-Austin’s Department of Radio-Television-Film. Unlike other left-progressive movies, he says, "it both challenges the audience to confront the emotions of the situation and also trusts them to make their own judgments about it." That’s not all, though. Dunn’s approach is hard to pull off because its message scatters like a shotgun blast–where you’re already standing determines how much you get hit.

Dunn and Carroll want Green and the tour to direct media attention at environmental issues in Louisiana, and their sense of purpose is directly related to how much of it they receive. Which right now–except for me in the back seat–is none. I’m along because I want to see how Green is received in Louisiana. I admire Dunn’s sense of duty about bringing her movie back to where it began, and I know that somehow this tour is going to change her.

With OutKast pounding, we slide by a tanker truck, a cylinder of glossy metal, radiant even in the rain. "Here’s our first sign," Dunn says, "That we’re entering the chemical zone."

The daughter of a plant geneticist and a cardiovascular surgeon, Dunn was born in New Orleans. After her parents divorced, she was shuttled around the country, developing the performance skills that also gave her a minor career as a child actor in repertory theater. As I see in Louisiana, Dunn films people who satisfy something she needs: warm men, tough women, and dying children, all of them living in a hostile environment. By the time she got to Yale, she wanted to study acting, but in her first semester, disillusioned with the self-centeredness of other actors, she quit. To this day, she hates to have her picture taken. When she was a senior, her class voted her "Most Likely to Join Heaven’s Gate," referring to the California cult that committed mass suicide several years ago.

As a junior at Yale, she chronicled a year of custodial strikes in a 30-minute documentary, a filmic personal essay on the unskilled labor that makes possible the privileged lives of Yale students. Along with Kyle Henry’s University, Inc., a documentary about the closing of the Texas Union theater at UT-Austin, Subtext of a Yale Education has screened at dozens of film festivals and college campuses. Dunn doesn’t sit around; she’s already at work on a third movie, tentatively titled Thirty Spokes, an impressionistic piece about politics, energy, and the intersections of both–wind farms, presidential inaugurations, oil wells.

She started Green in December of 1998, when she read an article in The Wall Street Journal about the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, whose activities were curtailed by the Supreme Court of Louisiana after the clinic was involved in a successful, high-profile fight to keep Shintech, a Japanese chemical company, from building a polyvinyl chloride plant in the town of Convent. Dunn called then-clinic director Bob Kuehn, who invited her to a meeting of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Committee. On that trip, she met many of the people she put into Green, assigning herself the task of bringing their stories to larger audiences. Over two years, she was in Louisiana for a total of 10 weeks, finishing with 100 hours of footage. A rough cut was ready in April of 2000; the movie was finished the following December, when it screened in Austin for the first time.

That month, along with a review of Green, the Austin Chronicle ran a photo that depicted Dunn as an ethereal wood nymph emerging from a bamboo grove. She hates this photo, because it suggests that she’s a young woman who’s as naïve as she is exotic. A female professor told her the photo had damaged her credibility, and Dunn fears becoming the hot, new character in the Cancer Alley story, what she calls "the commodification of Laura Dunn." She seems overly alarmed–it’s not as if McDonald’s is casting Happy Meals toys in her likeness. Often her reluctance to appear self-promoting dissolves into genuine shyness. "I don’t know why people just don’t watch the movie," she told me. "I just want to be transparent."

Our first stop in Baton Rouge is Willie Fontenot’s house, a bungalow with Mardi Gras beads hanging from the blooming camellia bushes. Fontenot, a native Louisianan, is national chairman of Clean Water Action, as well as a community liaison specialist at the Louisiana Attorney General’s office. A historian once called him "the grandfather of Louisiana environmentalism," and he’s Dunn’s tour guide and political guru. She sees him as a father figure, and he returns the affection. An owlish man with thick glasses, he likes telling how she showed up with her cameraman, a strict vegan. After they’d spent two weeks filming and eating only textured vegetable protein, he took them out to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant.

Dunn brings him up-to-date on Green news, still disappointed that NPR didn’t bite on the story. "Everyone’s saying it’s an old story, Willie," she complains. "Everybody’s saying it’s been done. It’s jelly bracelets. It’s Chinese shoes. It’s so Eighties. It’s over." Wade Goodwyn, a Dallas-based NPR reporter, was "really into the story," Laura says, but when he pitched it to his editors, they told him Cancer Alley had been amply covered. ("There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the story," David Sweeney, acting national desk editor at NPR, told me later. "But it turned out to be not new news for us.")

If you were going to make a documentary about Cancer Alley, not so long ago you might take this tack: Divide the world into oppressed people and bad corporations; toxic waste sites and beautiful gardens; good chemicals and bad chemicals. Call this version the Purified Story, in which you assign every character the appropriate white or black hat, then force them to stick to their role throughout the rest of the tale. Because the white hat-black hat model no longer explains the world–spin doctors can put a white hat on anyone, for one thing–you need a new mode of story-telling, one that’s deft and fast, as technical as it is poetic, as sociological as it is funny. Call this the Emulsified Story.

Willie says the whole story has never been told once–too many plants, too many rivers to tell it all. Green comes close to being an Emulsified Story, but what comes closer are Willie Fontenot’s "toxic tours," a road trip (such as the one we take the next day) around chemical plants on which Willie rolls out hydrology, photography, former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards, and toxicology, among other topics. In the small absurdities you see how the area is saturated with hazard. We drive by a manicured recreation area for employees at BASF; Willie points out that it’s built next to a hazardous waste dump. While driving next to rows of large tanks whose corporate logos have been hidden under paint, David points to two narrow pipes running parallel to the road.

"What’s being transported in those pipes?" he asks.

"Oh, I don’t know," Willie deadpans, "Baby formula. Distilled water."

Because the plants required large pieces of real estate, the easiest corporate purchases were the fields of old plantations. Dunn spent $6,500 (from the Texas Filmmaker Production Fund) hiring a helicopter, a former Vietnam war pilot, and a freelance cameraman named Vance Holmes to shoot the weird proximities of this geography from the air. The footage takes the viewer along the banks of the Mississippi, over plantations and cane fields–and directly over the chemical plants themselves, an illegal and dangerous bit of movie-making that helps Green’s arguments by association. As it turns out, the palette of industrial toxic wastes is often popsicle-gorgeous, full of lemons, oranges, and limes. The bristling refineries are stacked with plumes of steam and filigreed with fire. For people who live around these plants, such shots are powerful. Normally you’d only see the edge of a complex, towering over you; from the air, you see its massive spread.

"This is evidence," says J. Timmons Roberts, an environmental sociologist at Tulane. "It’s gut evidence. It’s filmmaker evidence. It might not be a sociologist’s evidence, though."

After our afternoon jaunt, Dunn decides to stop in to see Amos Favorite, a legendary environmental activist in the region. He lives off Highway 61, in a small brick house with a carport and a Cadillac parked in the front yard next to a small vegetable garden. Amos’s son comes to the door. He tells Willie and Laura that Amos, who fought hard to have trucks carrying hazardous waste banned from Highway 61, isn’t the man they remembered. He’s lost a leg to diabetes and is heavily sedated. Laura leaves a video for him, then we head back to Baton Rouge. For the rest of the day, Laura is subdued. The emotional universe of the film, which has started to look like the universe of her life, feels emptier. "He’s like one of the best people I ever met, my whole life," she says.

That night in the Iberville Parish public library in Plaquemines, six people show up. With so many empty seats in the large room, Green seems easy to abandon. After last night’s screening at the LSU campus, where nearly 200 people came, Dunn, Fontenot and Carroll are disappointed with the turnout. (Tomorrow in Gonzales, there will be 30 people, including a representative from Harris Deville, a public relations firm for the chemical industry.) These are the people for whom Green was made: activists, neighbors, workers in chemical plants, academics, students, interested folks. All of them howl when Dale Givons, head of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, and Kevin Reilly, head of the Office of Economic Development, say that any abnormally high incidence of cancer in Louisiana is due to spicy food. They also smirk knowingly when Duke King, a worker at BASF, a German chemical company, compares company monitoring of toxic emissions with a traffic speeder turning himself in.

Green opens with Emily Dickson, a cancer survivor, telling how surgery scars have changed her life. Later in the movie, Don Lewis describes what vegetables he used to grow in his backyard garden–and how he stopped when the EPA discovered toxins in the soil. "Especially after we lost the child," he adds, referring to his 16-year-old daughter, who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Such stories provide an opening for others to tell theirs, too. After the Gonzales screening, a woman relates how she and her female friends counted up their miscarriages, a number they found frighteningly high; all of them lived near a plant or had fathers or spouses who worked in them.

But Green isn’t designed only to be an emotional experience; Dunn wants to use it as a political tool. After the disappointing turnout in Plaquemines she feels strongly that she should use the film to organize local groups. I had my doubts as to whether this movie could be really effective. As I see it, the film provides an opportunity for people to gather and vent. In this sense, Green works. But as an argument that Cancer Alley demands immediate attention, the film won’t be equally persuasive to all audiences. Dunn doesn’t seem to have taken this into account. Whenever scientists criticize Green’s lack of evidence, she takes it as proof that they’re corrupt; she never says she didn’t make Green for them, anyway.

Distribution is another obstacle. Besides taking the movie on the road, Dunn is trying out an innovative marketing model. After PBS’s documentary series, "P.O.V.," rejected Green, she signed a distribution deal with an Austin-based Internet company whose own success is due largely to word-of-mouth. The concept, known as "viral marketing," is one few filmmakers have tried, but Dunn hopes to make Green a self-sufficient entity, a product she can spend little time taking care of while she shoots other movies.

Finally, environmental politics in Louisiana pose still another obstacle to Green’s long-term viability. During the panel discussion following the LSU screening, Damu Smith, a Greenpeace activist, stands up to praise the film, inserting news about his recent activities into his comments. Two days later, Smith shows up at the screening in Gonzales and carefully lays out Greenpeace literature on a side table. (When I talked to Smith in Gonzales at the union hall, he praised Green, claiming it will be "very central" to "the indigenous resistance of the community.") As Dunn explains to me, his enthusiasm is somewhat ironic. "I must have called him fifty times, and he never returned a phone call," she says. "To him, I’m just a little white girl."

Nor has the film received unanimous praise from environmentalists, some of whom must balance their goals with their need to appeal to both activists and plant managers. Says Jerry Speir, a professor of law at Tulane and coordinator of the annual Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, "I would caution my environmental friends about leaning too hard on the cancer issue." Hanging all the activism on the cancer story, Speir says, draws out so much "statistical noise and interpretive shenanigans" that the discussion gets sidetracked.

Last December, Dunn screened Green in Washington, D.C., at the National Academy of Science, where she encountered an audience of scientists for the first time. The meeting was not a happy one. "I kinda lost my cool," she admits. In a discussion after the movie, Dunn says that Roger Herdman, Director of the National Cancer Policy Board, criticized Green for lacking persuasive evidence. "Where’s the evidence? I’m a fucking filmmaker. He’s the epidemiologist," Dunn says.

But statistical evidence plays an important role in public discussions. When I spoke with Herdman several weeks after the Green Tour, he spoke plainly about the resistance that Green might encounter. "Laura Dunn is a filmmaker, but she’s talking to scientists, and the scientists will say, don’t you have an obligation to make the point for causality as strongly as you can?" Anecdotes identify areas for investigation, he says, but given the low socioeconomic status in the river parishes, "you’ll be able to collect endless anecdotes about people who are sick in those communities." Jerry Speir echoed this sentiment: "You can attempt to move the political process with that appeal to those personal stories. But you may or may not succeed. At this point it would seem we haven’t succeeded."

Since 1998, there’s been an abundance of literature–particularly from spin doctors opposed to "junk science"–to the effect that "Cancer Alley" is a myth. In a 1997 paper published by The Journal of the Louisiana Medical Society, based on data collected by the Tumor Registry, the incidence of cancer was no higher in the river parishes than in other places in the United States. "In short," wrote Michael Gough, director of science and risk studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, "there is no Cancer Alley." When I called Dale Givons, the director of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, he stood by this conclusion. "Cancer Alley is a myth," he told me. "Any media about Cancer Alley should be based on science." But Dr. Patricia Williams, who heads the Occupational Toxicology Outreach Program at LSU, would ask: Whose science do you mean?

The Tumor Registry and the Department of Environmental Quality are "packaging the data, so they’re misrepresenting the data that’s really there," Williams says. The Tumor Registry runs mathematical models that study only populations of 10,000 or more, still much larger than populations along the river. In addition, the "regions" they studied aren’t parishes or health districts but largely gerrymandered, grouping small slices of industrial areas with large rural areas. Finally, the Registry doesn’t distinguish child from adult cancers. Currently Williams, along with a group opposed to white collar crime, is attempting to get a court order to force the Tumor Registry to release its raw data.

As Willie Fontenot points out, the story is far bigger than Green and can handle many more tellings. "It’s a thousand-pound gorilla," he says. One night in a student dive near the LSU campus, we drink beer and listen to Willie tell stories. "Laura’s caught only a small number of people involved in the struggle. She’s only touched the surface," he says."It’s like we’re in the middle of this huge lake, and she’s just"–he dabs his finger at the tabletop, then again– "and there are these ripples. These are the ripples she’s making." At five the next morning, I return to Texas from the city of the Red Stick, which is full of blooming azaleas and camellias. Laura Dunn had seven screenings to go and the 1000-pound gorilla of Louisiana environmental politics to wrestle to its knees.

The next time I see Laura, we’re back in Austin, the day after the South by Southwest Film Festival. The road trip has stripped off a layer of her youth, but it’s also energized her. It’s as if she had to go back to Louisiana to understand that she makes movies to bring people together. She also makes movies to connect with people who trust her, whom she can trust. After a screening at the University of New Orleans, a young woman showed Dunn lesions on her neck and told her that doctors regularly cut lesions from her back and stomach. The student lived at the Agriculture Street landfill project, a HUD and City of New Orleans-subsidized housing project for first-time home-buyers, where in 1992 the EPA found elevated levels of 150 toxic chemicals, including arsenic, mercury, and lead, and began a clean-up in 1998. Dunn filmed the site but wasn’t able to screen there—the group she filmed has since disbanded, broken and disillusioned.

"Then I came back, boom, I’m at South by Southwest, all these companies are giving me their cards, awards ceremonies—all this stuff seems meaningless," she says. After the festival’s award ceremony last night, she felt especially lost. "I felt like I couldn’t reconcile that juxtaposition," she says. "I’ve gone from one extreme to the next, and I’m in the middle, and I felt so unfocused." When she woke up this morning, her sense of her activist self was stronger than it had ever been, so she wants to bring Green to the 14 sites in Texas where Title XI complaints have been made to the EPA. Her company, Two Birds Film, has received grants and donations to hire staff through the summer. The website has generated sales; they sold 50 videos on the tour and have 50 back-ordered, and her Yale venture, Subtext, is bringing in some money. The Green engine, though small, is moving forward, if only by the force of Laura Dunn’s will.

"I thought I was going to go to Louisiana and do the screening and go on with my life," Laura Dunn says. "I talked about touring other communities, but it was just so draining, because I’d lost so much hope in humanity. But I got so much hope from all these activists. They’re not giving up. Who am I to give up?"

The Bush Dyslexicon
by Mark Crispin Miller
W. W. Norton
304 pages, $24.95.

Each time we hear President George W. Bush open his mouth, we should hear the sound of rushing air, argues media critic Mark Crispin Miller in his new book, The Bush Dyslexicon. A 76-page essay tacked onto 180 pages of verité quotes and transcripts, organized by categories ("Kosovo," "Bob Jones University"), it's a compendium of Bush's best-loved (and most feared) linguistic manglings and, more importantly, an attempt to make sense of what they mean. Fervent W. bashers will buy Miller's line. But Miller actually knows very little about language, and the damage he does with it makes one wonder if the partisan advantage has actually been served.

In some ways, The Bush Dyslexicon is a sequel to Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's Shrub. Where they interpret W.'s political record, Miller reads W.'s linguistic record for deeper clues about his intelligence, his personality, his moral universe, his real politics, and the squandering of his privilege. Ben Sargent For him, verbatim quotes and transcripts represent what actually was said, and they prove what should be an obvious political conclusion: W. isn't deserving, and because we (Miller gets cagey on who "we" are) fail to recognize this from his language, democracy is endangered. That rushing air is the sound of W.'s moral vacuity, as well as the abyss into which Miller would say we've stepped. It's also the sound of a mainstream media in the bathroom brushing its teeth, fixing up its little blue (or in this case, red) dress.

Compared to lists of Bushisms that circulate via email, The Bush Dyslexicon places Bush's literacy and speech in refreshing historical context. Measured against other presidents, who have been cultivated writers and orators, W. doesn't look good. At the same time, as Miller points out, elitist charges of illiteracy have been a common feature of presidential campaigns. In 1828, John Quincy Adams launched a mud-slinging campaign against Andrew Jackson, charging that he lacked the requisite proper breeding and "cannot spell more than one word in four." According to Adams, Jackson was "a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name." (Jackson himself encouraged the view, in part because it allowed him to draw Adams as a sissy.)

Among contemporary figures, W. has more peers. Miller compares W. to Dan Quayle, himself a deft malapropist ("We [Republicans] understand the importance of having the bondage between the parent and the child"), and to Bush pére. But it's Nixon that Miller stands W. up next to, with the charge that, just as television never lied about Nixon, we'll look back at W.'s tenure and realize the danger and deception we'd seen but never comprehended. He calls "pure Nixon" the tactic by which W.'s linguistic abilities constantly become transformed into political virtues. Only in an anti-intellectual America could this be true, where W., like Andrew Jackson, encouraged criticism about his speaking abilities in order to draw Gore as the East Coast egghead sissy. "Intelligence itself, in this equation, is a sign of wickedness," writes Miller. "Thus Bush's plain unbookishness was taken to evince his godliness, while Gore was just too goddamn smart for our own good."

Miller warns his readers against the crafting of W. as a "cheery cretin" (though he clearly enjoys exercising his thesaurus, calling W. in the space of two pages a "dim bulb," "plain half-wit," "cheerful moron," and "idiot prince"). You either have to know W., have followed his dealings for a while, or studied his linguistic record to know that he is actually "extraordinarily shrewd." Calling him anything else provides the administration with cover for its deeds, not to mention a winning political formula. During the presidential campaign, Miller writes, "Everybody knew that Bush could not pronounce 'subliminal', while few had heard--or ever would hear--of his neglected military service, his many shady business dealings, or his close ties to the likes of Representative Tom DeLay."

Yet the Bushite strategy for dealing with W.'s speech has not always been successful. For one thing, W. too often looks like he's misreading the talking points some starch-shirted intern has just handed him. W. can seem to be ticking off a list--and failing. "We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know--secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time--that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics."

For another thing, W.'s over-handled language has coincided with a fondness in the print media for quoting politicians with all their spoken gaffes, garblings and perseverations intact, one result of the fact that when a campaign focuses its messages, rehearses its candidate and feeds him lines, the blurts and blunders that every human makes as a normal part of speaking take on amplified importance. Ordinary garblings, such as W.'s nervous defense of his appearance at Bob Jones University, come to signify the decadence of the political system itself. "I did denounce it," W. said. "I de--I denounced it. I denounced interracial dating. I denounced anti-Catholic bigacy--bigotry... No, I ­ I ­ I spoke out against interracial dating. I mean, support--the policy of interracial dating."

And when access to a candidate is sharply limited, or when the candidate resists a journalist's probing, the verbatim becomes, by necessity, material for portraiture. I'm thinking here of Nick Lemann's profile of Bush in the January 31, 2000 New Yorker, which reproduces large chunks of the interview and pays a lot of attention to the quality of Bush's voice, as if Lemann were buying a violin. ("His voice isn't a fabulous instrument, either: the range of tone and volume is too flat; it lacks richness and roundness.") If Bush becomes a bug under a magnifying lens, it's only because Lemann has subjected W.'s language to such scrutiny, and that's because Lemann was given relatively little time with the candidate.

Miller is right in one respect: lists of Bushisms have a limited usefulness. So in order to make W.'s speech evidence of a national political dysfunction (and to make his book seem more like analysis, not propaganda), Miller cooks up a handy metaphor. As he puts it, W.'s linguistic record is a symptom of a "strange new national disorder." "It's as if the U.S. body politic were itself afflicted with a corporate version of dyslexia," he writes. "Seeing that it's all gone wrong yet always hearing, from on high, that everything is perfectly all right, we each feel--whether we can read or not--as helpless and perplexed as any undiagnosed dyslexic faced with street signs, menus, newspapers and exams." But the ideas about language that underpin this metaphor turn out to be discriminatory, when they're not wrong. As my father used to say, sooner or later all metaphors fail. Miller's metaphor fails right out of the gate.

§§§

When it comes to language, everyone's an expert. Unfortunately, most of what people say about language is flatly incorrect. They defend their own dialect as the "best." They pipe French and Japanese lessons to their unborn children. And they mistakenly equate how someone speaks with how they think. This fallacy leads them to conclude that speakers of any non-standard dialect--teenagers, foreigners and babies--are cognitively impaired. Fortunately, Miller avoids this last fallacy, though it doesn't keep him from slamming into some others. Take his diagnosis of W.'s "illiteracy," for example. No matter how much academics squabble about how much inability to read and write constitutes illiteracy, it certainly doesn't include misspeaking, even of W.'s caliber. Thus Miller's statement that "George W. Bush is so illiterate as to turn completely incoherent when he speaks without a script" is plain wrong--if anything, an illiterate person would turn incoherent with a script.

So too with the charge of dyslexia, first suggested by Gail Sheehy in a Vanity Fair profile Actually, from a linguistic point of view, it's more likely that W. is aphasic, not dyslexic. (More on why dyslexia is politically preferable below.) The possibility of aphasia was first raised about Bush pere in a 1992 New Republic article by Jesse Furman, "Is Bush Brain-Damaged?" Aphasia is a brain disorder that causes a broad range of linguistic dysfunctions, but neurological experts warned Furman that not everyone with symptoms of aphasia--"frequent grammatical errors, talking around subjects, groping unsuccessfully for the right word, and substituting one word for another of close meaning or similar sound"--actually has it. It's seemingly counterintuitive, but the longer someone has had aphasic symptoms, the less likely it is that they actually suffer from it, since it's most often the result of a stroke, Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. "I've been talking the same way for years," Bush said before the 1988 election, "so it can't be that serious."

When I asked a speech pathologist friend what she thought of W.'s speech, she demurred on the grounds of professional ethics; apparently you can't go around diagnosing people without their consent. (However, she admitted that activity on a speech path listserv had recently exploded with people doing just that.) You don't have to be a trained linguist to see patterns in W.'s disfluencies, which suggest a deeper disorder, not common stupidity. Of the websites devoted to W.'s language, my favorite is at www.geocities.com/presidentialsyntax, which unlike Jacob Weisberg's more famous list of Bushisms on Slate, categorizes errors and attempts some linguistic analysis. One recurring problem is basic agreement between subjects and verbs ("Laura and I don't realize how bright our children is..."), and between pronouns and the nouns they refer to ("This administration is doing everything we can..."). Along with the plural ­s and the past tense ­ed (suggesting a basic inability to process words), W. stumbles at the boundaries of clauses, particularly between independent and dependent clauses. For example, in the sentence "I liked that dog that ran away with the coyotes," W. would fall into garbled grammar between the independent clause that ends with "dog" and before the dependent clause that begins with "that." He's likely to produce a sentence that goes, "I liked that dog, you know ­ I hope not to see a dog run away, ever again ­ he was well-trained, so I'm surprised..."

Given this evidence, even as informal as it is, why does Miller propose that W. is dyslexic, not aphasic? For one thing, because it's a linguistic disorder whose stigma is appropriately pitched for the times: It's incurable, but dyslexics remain fit for society ­ with "proper" will and educational remediation. Plus, you can't really accuse political culture of aphasia.

In other words, Miller uses dyslexia because it serves his political purposes best. Many writers have equated linguistic confusion with political confusion, and linked the body of an individual speaker with the political body. British journalist and novelist George Orwell, for example, argued that certain types of language endanger the conditions in which a political system ideally operates. In two works, the novel 1984 and the essay "Politics and the English Language," he showed that manipulating words and grammar damages the free thinking required in a democracy. Even seemingly benign language commentators like William Safire keep the English vocabulary groomed free of nits because a clean, combed lexicon, he might argue, is one safe for democracy.

But dyslexia itself interests Miller only to the degree that he can make it resemble the political system. Aphasia, with its multiple symptoms, doesn't translate. Like any number of other diseases and disorders (tuberculosis, cancer, AIDS, multiple personality disorder), dyslexia is a condition whose reality is often overshadowed by the metaphorical work it does in public life, where it's too easy to forget that real people suffer from the literal condition. If Bush really is disordered, then Miller is creaming the people who really are illiterate, dyslexic, aphasic, disfluent, stutterers, phobic about speaking in public, or non-native speakers of English, all of whom make up the last slurrable group in America. (And you thought it was poor whites.) W.'s not the first Hispanic president; he's the first president to belong to a linguistic minority.

But this isn't the book's most serious failure. What damages Miller's argument is that he pretends that his metaphor about linguistic disorder and the body politic substitutes for political analysis. This metaphor's a neat one, easy and catchy and glib, but it's too simplistic, and all the sardonic prose in the world can't disguise the fact that Miller lacks a model for how political language actually works. (Ironically, it's a problem endemic to media studies and communication theory.) Even if he got the linguistic facts right, he makes his metaphor do too much work--which means that he can't explain how nearly half of the electorate did, in fact, interpret W.'s political messages perfectly well. The result of the 2000 election doesn't have anything to do with linguistic dysfunction, literal or figurative. It has everything to do with politics. And you can't get to politics through a close reading of the linguistic record, even if it's verbatim.

Michael Erard, a former college professor, has written about language for Brill's Content, Lingua Franca, and the Atlantic Monthly.

Dueling Media Campaigns About Sexual Abstinence Let Everybody Off the Hook

It’s difficult to be enthusiastic while you’re telling teens not to have sex, much less look hip and cool about it, which is why the Texas Department of Health spent about $395,000 producing the public service announcements that anchor its new sexual abstinence media campaign, "Zip-It!," now showing in five major markets in the state. The TV spot (there’s a radio spot, a logo, a t-shirt, and a keychain, too) is recognizable by the slogan, "You don’t have to prove your love." The words flash like a marquee to the beat of a hip-hop song, while a camera peers through a fisheye lens at a DJ scratching a record in a narrow booth. According to Sherry Matthews, whose Austin-based Sherry Matthews Advertising Agency researched and produced "Zip-It!" for TDH, the music was developed by Los Angeles hip-hop producer Milk Chocolate, and Rolling Tiger films shot the video on the same set as the ‘La Vida Loca’ video. The biggest threat to "Zip-It!" is that teens will feel patronized by it, so no "Zip-It!" material identifies the sponsor as TDH, and a "Zip-It!" website won’t be linked to TDH’s. "The point was to make this something that’s really hip and cool for the kids, to position it as something they can really buy into," Matthews says.

All this "hip and cool" has its origins in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. When Congress overhauled the welfare system, it also tacked on a funding program to promote abstinence-only education. The Welfare Reform Act established the ground rules for fundable programs through what’s now called "the A to H definition." Abstinence-only programs must contain these eight features, labeled "a" through "h" in the federal law, the most controversial of which states that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity." The congressionally stipulated requirements are unsupported by scientific evidence. To qualify for federal funding programs must teach that "sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects" (also unsupported by evidence) and also teach "the importance of attaining self-sufficiency before engaging in sexual activity."

In Texas, the promotion of sexual abstinence via media campaigns has hit an unintended snag: competition among "brands" of abstinence. The tension over whose definition is right is especially intense given the evidentiary vacuum: Though national and state evaluations are underway, no one knows if nearly half a billion dollars in the last four years has been well-spent on effective programs. For people like Marilyn Ammon, the director of the McClennan County Collaborative Abstinence Project (McCAP), "Zip-It!" is obstructive, obfuscating, and a potential violation of federal law. For Ammon, "abstinence" means "abstinence-only-until-marriage," strictly heterosexual, no teen dating, and all hands above the table (or the bedspread). The problem with "Zip-It!" is that it’s "non-directive," according to Ammon–the audience gets no clear message about sexual abstinence, because the TV spot never mentions the words "sex" or "abstinence."

A former coach and health educator, Ammon became head of a speaker’s bureau at a local crisis pregnancy center in 1995. Then she became a local beneficiary of national politics. In 1997, McCAP received the largest abstinence-only grant in Texas, well over $600,000, to bring abstinence-only presentations into local schools, educate doctors about sexually-transmitted diseases, organize youth development programs in churches, and develop an abstinence media campaign by partnering with KXXV-TV, the local ABC affiliate. At McCAP’s inaugural ceremonies in 1997, then-Governor Bush spoke, leading to rumors that Ammon was powerfully connected, which she denies. A forthright woman, she cultivates an image of herself and McCAP as beleaguered. Prior to speaking to the Observer for this article, she hasn’t spoken with the media since 1998, when the Waco Independent School District, one of 18 school districts in McLennan County, cited church-state conflicts and opted not to let McCAP into its schools. (McCAP, however, is also one of the six programs included in a Congressionally-mandated three year national evaluation.)

Ammon holds some odd views. For instance, she believes that "safe sex" campaigns are conspiracies to create consumers for condom manufacturers and the "abortion industry," also that information about sexually transmitted diseases has been deliberately hidden. Ammon says she showed the TV spot to her 15-year-old son, who didn’t get the abstinence connection. She also complains that the keychain looks like a condom, and that the "Zip-It!" logo, which is a zipper in mid-zip, focuses people’s attention on bodies and clothing. "It’s a body part campaign," she says. Ammon’s complaints to the Governor’s office about this may have held "Zip-It!" up–though data that kids liked "Zip-It!" were available in January, the spots weren’t broadcast for six more months.

A year ago, McCAP produced six TV spots of its own, with the help of KXXV. According to Ammon, these six scripts were vetted by "informal focus groups" that McCAP had gathered. These spots are unapologetically not cool: A single actor sits in what looks like a basement, faces the camera, and delivers a script like this one:

(GUY)

"A guy I know told me that the way he had it figured, girls were stupid. And the way he said he knew that was that all he had to say to a girl was that she was ‘special,’ and she’d have sex with him.

"That got me thinking.

"Someday I want to marry a girl who’s smart enough to know she’s worth waiting for. If she’s strong enough to stand up against all the guys who push her for sex, then she’ll be strong enough to stand by me when I need her. Now that’s special!

"Save sex–stay strong for me–and I’ll stay strong for you!"

Or like this one:

(GIRL)

"I used to think if I didn’t have a boyfriend right now I’d die of loneliness! So I’d have sex with a guy just to hold on to him. But you know–it never really worked.

"Then I decided I didn’t like living out of fear. So I set my own limits–no more sex before marriage. I made some guy friends, and it’s cool–I know they like me, not the sex!

"Now I’m living my life instead of letting fear live it for me. And I’m not lonely at all!

"Save Sex–Live Your Life."

Five of these spots are currently airing in Waco. (In a sixth spot a young African-American woman complains that when she decided to wait for marriage to have sex, her black friends accused her of acting white. Ammon says that on the advice of African-Americans in Waco, McCAP decided not to release it.) She’s also frustrated that the $1.2 million price tag of "Zip-It!" would have been better spent on programs such as hers. If the Health Department doesn’t follow the full "A through H" definition, then it’s violating Congressional intent, she says.

TDH’s reading of the law is rather less fundamentalist. "The feds say that the states must not conflict with the eight points, but they do not have to emphasize all eight," says Shelley Bjorkman, TDH’s media campaign coordinator. "[Our reading] is very defensible because it doesn’t conflict with any statements, and it doesn’t single out any one statement." Is "Zip-It!" non-directive, as Ammon charges? "I don’t see it as non-directive," she retorts. "It’s ‘zip it,’ as in, ‘Don’t have sex.’

§§§

It might be tempting to dismiss Ammon’s criticisms, but they highlight both sides’ facile assumptions about media campaigns, particularly the political cover that the supposed success of "social marketing" provides. As the battle to reduce teen sexual behavior rages around the country, media campaigns like "Zip-It!" have become favored tools–in 1998, almost half of the 48 states that received federal funding planned media campaigns. It’s easy to see why. For one thing, they’re less costly, politically and economically, than pushing sex education into public schools. Given the acrimony of the sex ed debates of the last 20 years, you can’t really blame officials for going this route. Still, it seems to pretend that a whole knot of questions about cultural norms, moral standards, and public health evidence, not to mention the proper scope of the government’s role, don’t exist. After all, a media campaign literally goes over people’s heads, reaching more people more quickly. Showing now in the state’s five major media markets (Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Fort Worth), "Zip-It!" reaches 80% of the households in Texas. There’s also an enjoyable irony here, since a 30-second TV spot that urges kids to remain virgins uses the same channel of information that saturates American society with pro-sex messages.

In other words, the virginity movement isn’t a phenomenon bubbling up from the masses, it’s the product of major marketing muscle. For "Zip-It!" Sherry Matthews’ agency spent $114,000 on teen focus groups and groups of mothers. The teens ranged from the age of 13 to 16 (even though "Zip-It!" targets 10- to 14-year-olds), and represented a range of economic and ethnic backgrounds. They viewed spots from campaigns in other states, such as the Maryland-based nonprofit "Campaign for Our Children" and a campaign from Maine, "Not Me, Not Now." According to Matthews, the teen tests corroborated some eternal verities: Kids want to be cool, they don’t want to be left out, and they don’t want to be preached at. According to Bjorkman, the "Not Me, Not Now" spots were deemed "too future-oriented," and "didn’t click with kids, especially with young teens, who are very much in the here and now." This was the same group that was open to an abstinence message. "They wanted a message as a way of dealing with peer pressure," says Chris Sharman, a producer at Matthews’ agency. "So a girl can say to a guy, ‘Zip-It!’ It’s a quick snappy comeback, instead of this encompassing message."

"Zip-It!" will generate political capital and real capital as well, by drawing down matching revenue for the federal grants. Bjorkman says it will generate between $1.6 and $2.2 million in matching funds during its 16-week run around the state. (TDH pays for a certain amount of airtime but television stations donate several times that amount, which TDH calculates as in-kind donations at the going market rates.) For TDH, this is a good thing. Despite Governor Bush’s support for the abstinence movement, the Legis- lature never approved new funds to match the state’s $4.9 million federal allotment. Instead, TDH was required to generate the match out of their administrative budget. Now, with "Zip-It!" the agency hopes to recoup some of those funds.

Media campaigns are preferable for one final reason, and in this Ammon and Bjorkman are unified. Simply put, it’s easier to claim that media campaigns are effective. Most public health professionals want evidence that a sexuality education program achieves three things: reduces the teen pregnancy rate, delays the age of sexual debut, and reduces the STD infection rate. For a number of methodological and political reasons, however, these are difficult numbers to document.

That’s why, according to the Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs, only nine states will evaluate the effectiveness of their media campaigns via a long long-term decrease in the rates of sexual debut. However, 18 states will "assess the general awareness of the campaign message among the target audience or audiences," as TDH has done with "Zip-It!" Because marketers deal with image, attitude, and intentions, they can ask teens if they remember a slogan or intend to change their sexual behavior. For instance, after "Zip-It!" was piloted in Austin in late 2000, telephone surveys found that three-quarters of the surveyed teens recalled having seen or heard it; of that group, two-thirds had recognized the abstinence message. People in the field report that "Zip-It!" is durably catchy, too: Little kids are walking around humming the "You Don’t Have to Prove Your Love" song. The song might be catchy, but it’s not catchy songs that anybody should be interested in.

Televangelist James Robison Weighs In On the WTC

No one in the Bush administration seems to want to talk about how U.S. foreign policy has put us in the crosshairs of terrorism. Yet, at least one dissenting note has been sounded by an unlikely source: Bush spiritual advisor James Robison, the Euless televangelist who speaks and prays with the President on a regular basis. In a September 15 New York Times story, Robison outlines an argument worthy of Noam Chomsky. "Arrogance in relationships with Third World and foreign countries, plundering other countries for resources while supporting their despots, and indifference to others’ poverty and pain," has brought us to this juncture, the Times paraphrased Robison as saying.

Reached at his ministry in Euless, Robison did not disavow his remarks. His views stand in marked contrast to those of other evangelical Christians, a difference he’s not interested in playing up. "Right now we don’t need to be pitting people against each other," he says. Yet it’s undeniable that the cause of evangelical Christianity took a hit on September 13, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claimed on Falwell’s popular television program that secular, liberal, and homosexual America had angered God so much that He had "lift[ed] His protection from us." These comments eventually drew a rebuke from President Bush, and Falwell later apologized, claiming he was quoted out of context.

A reading of the full text of Falwell’s comments shows that, in or out of context, the exchange was disturbingly Talibanesque. Yet painting all of evangelical Christianity with that label may be using too broad a brush. Robison’s take demonstrated a much more sophisticated sense of what goes on outside of America’s borders. It’s an unlikely view for an evangelical Christian, according to Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and author of Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want. Smith points out that most evangelicals focus on individual sins and have little concept of what Smith calls "systemic sins." At the same time, they’re inclined to help the poor, both at home and abroad. "Lo and behold, some of them end up out in the world," Smith says. There, they see things that change their minds. For example, much opposition to Ronald Reagan’s support for the contras, Smith points out, came from people of faith who’d worked in Central America and had seen human rights abuses on the ground. Conservative Christians have built coalitions with left-progressive forces before, amalgamating theological and secular, even Marxist, critiques.

James Robison seems to have had a similar experience. He began preaching in 1962, at the age of 18. As he’ll tell you himself, his mother was a rape victim who gave him up for adoption, then retrieved him five years later. The two of them lived behind an East Austin dump. In 1968 he launched a TV ministry, the James Robison Evangelistic Association, which in 1992 became LIFE Outreach International (LOI), a mission aid organization that works in 20 countries, including Mozambique, Rwanda, and the Sudan.

Most Christian missionary groups save souls, not bodies. With LOI Robison promotes the social gospel–feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, clothing the naked. What various Christian groups have dismissed as irrelevant, Robison sees as crucial for evangelical ends. "Jesus made it pretty clear that if you do one, you do the other," Robison says.

Doing this work has apparently made Robison more sensitive to the systemic sins committed by his own country. Robison, who has travelled to 40 countries, can reel off any number of global hotspots, though he was reluctant to name specific places hurt by U.S. policies. Overall, he says, "We’re going to have to look at diplomatic relations, not just at economic gain. In some instances, it looks like we have sacrificed human rights for economic gain." Also, his work has inspired–and forced–him into ecumenicism. Once he visited a Muslim-run feeding site on the Somali-Kenya border, where refugees were, as Robison puts it, "compelled, not with force or cruelty, to recite Islamic verses." What did he do? "I thanked them for saving the children’s lives."

Robison says he’ll recommend to Bush that the U.S. forgive Third World debt. One of the best weapons against terrorism, he believes, is foreign aid. LOI is currently working on a school feeding program, in which one million African children will be fed and educated. In Bush terms, it might be called a faith-based foreign policy. But Robison isn’t just converting people to Christianity; he’s converting them to America. "We have to let people see the goodness of America," Robison says. "We need to demonstrate the compassionate character of this country."

Team Sanchez Ponders What It Means To Be Hispanic

Given that language and politics are so linked, it’s remarkable that linguists and political professionals rarely mingle. So when George Lakoff, a Berkeley linguist, traveled to Austin for a day-long meeting with Democratic political consultants back in August, he was anxious. "I’m the novice," he said at the time. "They know their candidate, they’ve been around for years." Lakoff was being a little demure–it was hardly his first foray into electoral politics and public affairs. Lakoff’s no stranger to rhetorical battles, either; he survived fierce infighting among linguists in the late 1960s and 1970s; he later helped shape a popular discipline called cognitive linguistics. And his 1996 book, Moral Politics, applies cognitive linguistics to the political world.

Lakoff is the Democrats’ next tool for securing a portion of Texas’ two million Hispanic votes in 2002. Back in June, Glenn Smith, a political consultant, invited Lakoff to Texas for a mini-seminar to discuss how Democrats can use the Hispanic family as a model of political centrism. But by August, the election cycle had swung into gear, making the meeting a strategy session with definite outcomes. One result of this timing put Lakoff, a self-described pragmatic progressive, in the position of indirectly advising a more conservative Democrat, gubernatorial candidate Tony Sanchez, whose advisers were in attendance–Smith now worked as Sanchez’s campaign manager, speechwriter Kelly Fero was a spokesperson for the Democratic ticket, and Michelle Kucera, a former staffer for Tipper Gore, had replaced Robin Rorapaugh as Sanchez’s communications director. Also present were consultants Dave Gold, James Aldrete, Jeff Crosby, and Marge Becker. To Lakoff it didn’t matter that Sanchez is a Democrat when it’s pragmatic, rather than a pragmatic progressive. "As far as I can tell, he’s not my perfect candidate," admitted Lakoff, who hadn’t met the multi-millionaire from Laredo. "But he’s so much better than the other guy."

Ambitions like Lakoff’s require years to bloom. Getting a political party to communicate its values is a long-term, national project. "It took [the Republicans] thirty years and millions of dollars to do it," Lakoff said.

"We have," Smith replied, "fourteen months."

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How Lakoff got into politics–and what he has to offer Democrats in Texas–is an odd story that properly starts with a rainstorm in 1978. One day in class, a young female student interrupted Lakoff, who was starting to discuss the assigned reading.

"I can’t do this today," she said, "I’ve got a metaphor problem with my boyfriend." She’d come into class late, weeping and drenched from the rain. (The rain is salient, Lakoff says, because at first they tried to pretend that her tears were raindrops.) As everyone listened, she related how her boyfriend had told her that their relationship had "hit a dead end." Puzzled, she asked her classmates for help interpreting the comment.

So professor and students listed expressions in which love is conceived as a journey. We’re spinning our wheels. It’s been a long bumpy road. We can’t continue this way. In each case, lovers are travellers; the relationship is a vehicle; the common life goals are destinations, and the difficulties are obstacles. At the newly discovered generalization, Lakoff was ecstatic. They’d discovered a widely shared cultural conception about love.

"I don’t care about your generalization," the woman said. "My boyfriend is breaking up with me. He’s thinking in terms of these metaphors."

Happily, the weeping student is married now, the chair of a linguistics department somewhere in the West. Lakoff won’t name her, yet everything he’s written since 1978 is an attempt to make sense of her comment. How can you "think in terms of a metaphor," especially when the entire tradition of Western philosophy says you can’t? According to the classical conception, a metaphor works by imagination, not logic, and it’s simply a renaming when, for instance, you call an argument a "war of words." For Lakoff, metaphors are deeper. They underpin all language, all culture, and all thought, and in his books he’s argued, to paraphrase William James, that it’s metaphors all the way down. The statement, "argument is war," isn’t just a more colorful renaming; we treat as real its consequences, for instance, that arguments have winners and losers, that shouting is tolerated, that defections, betrayals, and subterfuge are expected. And while some metaphorical underpinnings are common across cultures–for instance, the conception of the future as physically in front of us–others are culturally specific. Only in Dyirbal, an Australian aboriginal language, is there a category containing words that have something to do with women, fire, and dangerous things (the title, by the way, of Lakoff’s most popular book).

As a result, the theory goes, you can uproot a group’s metaphors in order to understand the conceptual framework with which they order the world. In 1994, Lakoff looked at the G.O.P’s Contract with America and wondered if conservatives had any sort of coherent worldview. What did discouraging teen pregnancy and keeping U.S. troops from serving under U.N. command have to do with each other? Come to think of it, Lakoff thought, I can’t articulate my morality clearly, and most conservatives and liberals can’t either.

After looking for an underlying metaphor that would unify political positions that seemed contradictory, Lakoff hit on the metaphor of the nation as a family, a metaphor that structures the politics of conservatives and liberals, as he shows in Moral Politics. Conservatives prefer a "Strict Father Family" model, he argues, while liberals prefer a "Nurturing Parent Family." Such generalizations seem dangerous, but the method produces a reliable map of American political discourse. For instance, it suggests why supporting the death penalty but criticizing abortion rights aren’t contradictory conservative viewpoints (a mistake that liberals often make), because the Strict Father punishes moral inferiors and protects moral dependents. And it’s why there are relatively few liberal thinktanks and scholarships for college students–liberals spend their money compassionately, not strategically. In a new afterword to the book’s next paperback version, Lakoff explains that Bill Clinton’s dalliance with Monica Lewinsky upset conservatives because, "It was an affront to strict father morality," he wrote. "It was literally a family matter."

The book, published by the University of Chicago press, has landed Lakoff several consulting gigs. Last spring he met with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic lieutenant governor of Maryland. He’s also tentatively lined up to do work for Robert Casey Jr., a likely Democratic candidate for governor in Pennsylvania. Would he ever work for a Republican political campaign? "Not a chance," Lakoff says. Last year he also refused to support or work for Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign. "I was asked by many people," he says. "I was asked by his sister [Laura Nader, an anthropologist at Berkeley], by one of the founders of the California Green Party, by one of their major funders. I just bawled them out. I said, you all shouldn’t be doing this. I might like what he’s saying, but he’s absolutely dead wrong on this and destructive."

In other venues, Lakoff’s ideas are used to communicate progressive political values and complex scientific ideas to the general public, notably by two think tanks, the Rockridge Institute in California (which he co-founded) and the Frameworks Institute in Washington, D.C. This is, perhaps, fancy PR with academic credentials that depends on its intellectualism to be attractive. But if you can systematically collect and analyze the conceptual models people use to organize their experience, Lakoff argues, you also know the metaphorical resources they possess, some of which might be ignored and untapped, and which you can use to articulate ideas more effectively. On these principles, one of Lakoff’s former students, Joe Grady, and a colleague, Axel Aubrun, operate a consulting firm called Cultural Logic in Washington, D.C. In one recent project, they interviewed flea collar shoppers at PetSmart, asking them to explain why they put strips of toxic chemicals on their beloved pets and let them walk around inside the house. Usually people focus on the size of their pets relative to themselves and conclude that the toxic danger, like the dog, is small. But when Aubrun and Grady reframed the question, to focus on the shared environment, the shoppers’ reasoning broke down. That difference, Aubrun and Grady figure, may help predict which pro-environment messages are likely to fail and which will succeed. Normal pollsters are interested in surface phenomena, Aubrun says. "They’re interested in the weather. We’re interested in the climate."

§§§

All of this brought Lakoff to Texas in August, to help get Texas Democratic operatives up to speed on how to appeal to Hispanic voters by producing messages that have a mix of values that are neither purely conservative nor liberal, in theory mirroring the values of the traditional Hispanic family. On one hand, Hispanic families (at least in their idealized forms) are led by strong male authority figures; on the other hand, they also extend compassionate regard to the extended family. In a Hispanic family, members find both discipline and nurture. "You don’t find extreme individualism, that isolated sink-or-swim attitude that you find in the right-wing use of the family metaphor," Glenn Smith said. "Even though there’s a strict hierarchical nature to the family, there’s an egalitarianism in which everybody cares for everybody." Within the "nation as family" metaphor, the Hispanic family becomes a model of political centrism.

One drawback is that Republicans already have an organizational advantage among Hispanics, at least in the highly visible presidential campaigns that build party loyalty. According to Federico Subervi, a UT-Austin professor who studies Hispanics, politics, and the media, the Republicans have consistently targeted Hispanic voters more effectively, hiring San Antonio ad mogul Lionel Sosa for his expertise at marketing Coca-Cola and General Motors to Hispanics–or "Hispanics," since it’s less a homogeneous group than a collection of politically distinct subgroups with certain cultural affinities. Republicans, Subervi says, know this better than Democrats do. In 2000, the Latino Outreach Office at the Democratic National Committee was in such disarray that they goofed up Latino TV spots, did not use Spanish-language media (particularly Univision) as well as the Republicans did, and, most tellingly, failed to mobilize the traditionally Democratic Puerto Rican population that won Florida for Clinton in 1996.

But the biggest problem with the approach is the notion of the "Hispanic family"–it’s largely a fantasy that idealizes a cultural Other, critics say. As Cruz Torres, the director of the Hispanic Research Program at Texas A&M, points out, the sociological reality of Hispanic families is diverse, so much so that the political model breaks down. Moreover, as Latinos become more economically independent, they rely on extended family networks less. It’s difficult to separate what’s an embedded cultural norm from economic survival strategies, but the potential success of the Hispanic family model depends on whether political messages can tap into a lost or forgotten cultural heritage.

The consultants think they can. As one Austin political consultant puts it, Hispanics have a "latent ethnic gene" that can be targeted; in Federico Subervi’s words, Latinos increasingly rely on a "situational ethnicity," in which individuals recognize situations where ethnic expressions are acceptable and valuable. What Lakoff’s model might help Democrats do, in other words, is to create a political environment in which Hispanics realize that the Democratic Party shares their values, then vote Democratic as an ethnic expression.

Will the outcome of Sanchez’s campaign validate the Hispanic Family model, and Hispanic families and Lakoff along with it? In a state like Texas, and with a candidate like Sanchez, it will be hard to tell. When Hispanic politicians like Sanchez sign on, it validates the Hispanic model, though it says less about a sociological reality than a political one, and one that defines ethnic expression according to narrow political goals.

Lakoff’s ideas will more likely win the center for the Democrats in other ways. In the short run, the Dems will save some money on polling; with the metaphorical model you can deduce your messages from your armchair. The party might be able to clarify its new theme, that it’s family-based. Back in August, Lakoff argued that the Republicans had gained exclusive use of "family values," "responsibility," and "care," and he criticized Democrats for letting them do it. Democrats should steal these words back, he said. And steal the American flag back while we’re at it. Back in the 1960s, the Left "screwed up" by letting pro-war patriots appropriate the flag, Lakoff said. "It was their biggest mistake."

§§§

There’s one irony to these new pages in Lakoff’s portfolio. More than 30 years ago, Lakoff and other M.I.T.-trained linguists mounted an attack on theories of language forwarded by Noam Chomsky. In the discipline, it’s widely held that Lakoff’s approach failed to work, and he was banished from mainstream linguistics. If Lakoff seemed triumphant, it’s because he sees his political sideline as more relevant than Chomsky’s, his old mentor and nemesis, who has a substantial career doing anarcho-syndicalist media criticism. "I see [Chomsky’s political work] as very much like his linguistics," Lakoff said, "Where he’s got a philosophical view of language and doesn’t apply it to real language." Cognitive linguists pride themselves on doing work that can be applied to people’s lives. "[We’re] anti-Chomskyan," he said frankly. "It’s a democratic thing. We’re not trying to get converts by obfuscation."

In Austin, this approach seemed to make the day go well. Like dutiful graduate students, the consultants were prepared to discuss the assigned reading. "That’s kind of impressive," Lakoff said afterward. "I mean, liberals don’t read." For his part he played the role of prickly outsider, while the eight consultants nodded and scribbled notes. With the Democratic Leadership Council’s State and Local Playbook sitting in front of him, Lakoff bluntly told them what Democrats have done wrong.

"It’s a dream come true," Lakoff later admitted. "For years I’ve been cursing: These people shouldn’t be saying this. Well, guess who’s telling them what to say?"

The Slow Work of Evaluating Abstinence Education

Does abstinence-only sex education work? Buzz Pruitt and Pat Goodson, two professors of health education at Texas A&M, can’t say. Not yet, anyway. In the last two years, they have received nearly $360,000 from the Texas Department of Health to do a rigorous scientific evaluation of the state’s 31 so-called "abstinence contractors." "Every-one wants to know the bottom line," Pruitt said. "We don’t have that information yet."

They’re not alone. Since 1997, over half a billion in federal funds has flowed into the states to teach abstinence. President Bush has long been a backer of such programs. "We must convince youngsters to resist opening the Pandora’s box," he told an audience at the 1999 Governor’s Conference on Right Choices for Youth, "not just to avoid death or disease, but to embrace a life that is physically, and morally, and emotionally healthy." In his 2003 budget, Bush requested an increase of $33 million for abstinence education, for a total of $135 million–all of it without a lick of scientific evidence that these programs do what people want them to: lower the teen pregnancy rate and reduce sexually transmitted infections.

What’s taking so long to get answers? Measuring the outcome of a public health intervention like abstinence-only is always tricky, as much for political reasons as for methodological ones. Fortunately for Pruitt and Goodson, their funding comes from the Texas Department of Health’s (TDH) research division, not the abstinence program itself, so they are objective and somewhat insulated. But not entirely. They’ve had to build relationships with suspicious contractors, who tend to look on them as "TDH police" and who, all things considered, would rather see the money spent on their programs.

"You have to look at the fact that there’s got to be some conflict of interest in an organization that also funds family planning programs," says Marilyn Ammon, director of the McClennan County Collaborative Abstinence Project (McCAP) in Waco. Ammon, who has called safe sex campaigns conspiracies to create customers for condom manufacturers, is considered something of a hardliner in the community. Back in 1999, the Waco ISD school board refused McCAP’s services, arguing that their existing sexuality curriculum–which teaches contraception–works better than Ammon’s hardline version of abstinence-only-until-marriage. The combative Ammon even called for an audit of abstinence money–which stopped Pruitt’s work for several months–because she didn’t trust TDH.

Ammon isn’t the only one suspicious. "Philosophically, they’re not a good fit," says Starla Kelley, a contractor in Amarillo, referring to Pruitt and Goodson. "They came in with a preconceived notion of what abstinence was, and that it didn’t work." She does welcome the opportunity to find out what parts of her program can be improved. But she’s not happy that a prominent researcher named Doug Kirby is a consultant to the evaluation. Widely considered in the abstinence community to be a "condom pusher," Kirby’s name is anathema in some circles.

Pruitt and Goodson showed up "four years after that train left the station," as Pruitt likes to say. As a consequence several contractors had already begun collecting data on their own, but in an unscientific mish-mash. "How are they going to get us to abandon the efforts we’ve already come up with?" says Bonnie Auburn, the director of a 10-county abstinence-only program in Paris, Texas. "They’re going to have their work cut out for them." McCAP in Waco and Worth the Wait in Pampa have already hired Jeff Tanner, a professor of marketing at Baylor University, to evaluate their programs.

One of Pruitt and Goodson’s first steps was to spend about $10,000 to purchase 40 different sets of abstinence-only curricula, which are used in various ways by the state’s 31 contractors. It is now the largest such collection in the state. In a small white office in College Station, two floor-to-ceiling bookcases are crammed with large plastic tubs, each of which contains an abstinence-only curriculum and its teacher’s guide, activity packets, videos, and games. The curricula have titles like, "Baby, Think it Over," "Not Me, Not Now," and "Character Counts," and they’re not cheap–prices ranged from $350 to $1,500, highlighting the business side of abstinence-only. Three schoolteachers spent a summer evaluating each curriculum, then assigning it a quality score. As a sign of the times, they borrowed criteria from both sides of the teen sex debates–from ETR Associ-ates, the California-based educational publishing company where Doug Kirby works, and from the pro-abstinence-only Medical Institute, based in Austin. The move is less ecumenical than it appears: Without its point of view represented, each side is more apt to cry foul.

Next the researchers broke down the contractors’ 31 grant proposals to TDH, which represented a variety of approaches–some work in schools, others in health care settings, while some gather youth after school or educate parents. Pruitt and Goodson boiled it all down by asking one question: How will the programs teach and promote the factors that lead to sexually abstinent behavior? To this end the researchers produce a map of all the various "inputs" to abstinent behavior, which they gathered from the scientific literature in the field. A student questionnaire will help the researchers evaluate how well the programs enhance each of these inputs for students.

Developing that questionnaire has proved to be no small task. Each question has had to run a gauntlet of interested parties. Many parents object to "graphic" terms on questionnaires, such as questions about anal and oral sex. "That’s what gets everybody’s dander raised," says abstinence contractor Bonnie Auburn. "Even though all the reports we get from kids is that it’s going on in the parking lots." Nevertheless, conservatives remain attached to the idea that children have a fragile "latency period," and that puts them in conflict with evaluators who are obligated to ask explicit questions about sexual behavior.

Pruitt and Goodson deleted questions about oral sex on a middle school questionnaire. "Both the [sex education] field and TDH felt they were too ‘frank’ and would not yield high quality data," Pruitt says. On the other hand, there is support for asking such questions of high schoolers. "We are all–including the Governor’s office–interested in getting to the question of whether youth are participating in activities such as oral sex as a means of preserving ‘virginity,’" Pruitt says.

Others in the abstinence community insist that the order of questions can bias a test. If you’re teaching abstinence-only-until-marriage, they argue, the question about intending to remain abstinent should come before the one about their sexual behavior. Some don’t want questions about contraceptive use, even if such questions are motivated by public health concerns. "If I’m really teaching abstinence-to-marriage," says Amy Stephens at Focus on the Family, "I’m not interested in the success of the condom message." Focus on the Family, an influential, multi-million dollar conservative Christian organization based in Colorado Springs, is run by nationally known radio personality James Dobson. The group, which claims millions of listeners across the heartland, recently thanked Bush for his increased funding support for abstinence-only education.

To answer such objections, Pruitt and Goodson say they’re combing their questionnaire for phrasings that might bias the data, vetting questions with the Governor’s office, clearing them with the contractors, and checking them with experts. Even then, the gauntlet’s not over. Before they field-test the questionnaire, they plan to review the items with parents, although they won’t get to see the entire questionnaire. Once they pass that trial, no item is secure, even if it’s scientifically sound. "We will decide on an item-by-item basis whether to keep, modify, or toss," Pruitt says.

Once they get a test that works, they have to find groups willing to take it. Many public schools don’t want to participate in sex research. Pruitt and Goodson will have to secure six levels of permission to give their questionnaire: two institutional review boards to clear human subject test protocols, the school board, the superintendent, the principal, the parent, and the student. If they receive a third year of funding, they plan to begin collecting data in the fall of 2002. Until then, they are resigned to talking a lot about how they don’t have the bottom line. "There’s no story in, ‘We don’t know,’" Pruitt acknowledges.

Nevertheless, Pruitt and Goodson now know more about the abstinence community–or culture, as Goodson prefers to call it–than they once did. For many health educators, the abstinence movement is easy to criticize as theoretically unsound. In fact, Goodson says, though most of the contractors aren’t trained health educators, their work is not without theoretical footing. Pruitt and Goodson were surprised that the contractors’ map of inputs to abstinence largely matched that of professional health educators. The one big exception, they found, is that the contractors tended to have an inordinate fondness for supposing that when kids know the risks of sexual behavior, they won’t have sex. "The notion that knowledge equals behavior is not supported by the literature," Goodson says.

What’s also been surprising, they say, is how heterogeneous the abstinence culture is in method, motive, and previous experience. One contractor is a mother of three. Another is a former English teacher. Several gave up productive careers elsewhere to start non-profits. "These are good folks, well-meaning, and well-intentioned," Pruitt said. "Most of them are people you wouldn’t mind having dinner with." Only a few of them, such as Marilyn Ammon, are politically active.

Pruitt and Goodson also found that the contractors don’t share a uniform definition of abstinence. For some, it means eschewing all risky behaviors, not just sex; for others, it means teaching kids to embrace smart decision-making. In other words, not all definitions of abstinence treat sex, or sexual feelings, negatively. But this is overshadowed–and perhaps explained–by the discovery that many abstinence programs aren’t actually sexuality programs at all. While they hold dances for teens, they don’t teach the basic "facts of life": how babies are made, how puberty works, all the interesting ways that women are different from men. "They might be youth development, they might be character development," Pruitt says, "but it’s an absolute mistake to call it abstinence-only sex education." Goodson, a trained sexuality educator, says she raises the point with the contractors. "Do they expect that kids on their wedding nights will suddenly become experts on sex?" she asks rhetorically.

To be fair, some programs do teach basic human sexuality, but there’s no explicit charge in the federal program to do so, particularly not to middle school kids, where pregnancies and infections are startlingly high. The absence of a federal position on sexuality education means that local communities have to pick up the slack. In many Texas communities–where the word "condom" sends school boards into paroxysms of disgust–that simply does not happen.

Ironically, Pruitt and Goodson credit Bush for giving them the institutional support to produce a scientifically valid and politically durable evaluation. "As the governor, he was very concerned with validity and also willing to give us time. They genuinely want to know whether this stuff works." It makes sense: The CEO governor (now the CEO president) wanted to make sure that taxpayer dollars were well spent. The problem is, there’s no guarantee that anyone will listen to the science, no matter how conscientious the scientists have been. Pruitt and Goodson both acknowledge that evidence, or lack thereof, has little bearing on policy and law–look at the original 1996 welfare reform act, which started the federal push for abstinence education in the first place. For right now, they don’t think about how the best scientific findings aren’t safe in the funhouse of politics. They just want to do their job right. "Our motive is to publish papers," Pruitt said, "and you can’t publish crap."

Every group of people, every place, has it own economy of belonging, and in each new place, in order to show you’re not dangerous, you have to spend the local currency. Otherwise the locals may murder you, or refuse to feed you, or somehow shun you according to their custom. Every summer for about five summers, my younger brother worked at a hotel on an island off the New Hampshire coast, which you get to by taking a ferry from Portsmouth 10 miles out until the mainland appears as a sliver of land. Then, just as you think you’re headed for open ocean, the great white bulk of the island and its assorted clapboard outbuildings suddenly rise up, stretched across the rock of the island and its primrose thickets.

Star Island is only 44 acres big, which seems like a lot unless you know that on any given day in the summertime there can be 500 people swarming around it. Hundreds of visitors who are affiliated with the Unitarian church come weekly for conferences on spirituality that are held at the hotel, which is staffed by a hundred or so high school and college students. The island’s also a favorite picnic spot for daytrippers, who take the ferry out in the morning, receive a good whipping by the sun and sea wind, and go back in the afternoon.

On an island so small and so populated, it is difficult to get away. This is one of the first things I learned about the place. One strategy that the young staff employ to create barriers is to invent words and pronunciations that can be cuttingly exclusive. "Ducats" means money and sometimes you don’t use the plural, as in "fifty dollar." Except you say "fitty," for no reason except that someone came up with it and it stuck. "Pass the brown" gets you the ice tea at dinner, while "pass the red" gets you fruit punch. "Yellow" is lemonade. Someone on the crew that takes luggage and supplies off the ferry decided it was good to speak in a German accent. Everyone else affected a speech disorder that made them say words like "infirmary" and "incinerator" like "en fail mail lail" and "en cin el ail tail." Each year this slang blooms like flowers, then dies away. Next year it was the same island and mostly new kids, and in the same soil the same needs bloom, but in different shapes.

§§§

I’ve tried to write about this place a dozen times since I first visited it 10 years ago, because it is the most charismatic place on the planet I know. But each attempt I’ve dropped–not because Star Island is so ineffable that it escapes language, but because I’ve never worked out if I’m writing to share or withhold. Do I want you to think you should get to Star Island quickly? That I’m cool because I went to Star Island, which is so cool, though you’ll never know? That what I write can capture the mood of the place? Here, have it, be satisfied. Or was it because I wanted you and me to look askance at the kids who thought they were cool in this place?

None of those, exactly. But yes, all of them. Why? Not because I’m a snob, but because that’s what Star Island inspires in people: A desire to keep the place all to yourself, to know what others don’t, and a desire that’s worth struggling with, when it doesn’t seem right. I’ve prowled the broad wooden porch of the hotel at night and wrapped myself in my jacket and listened to the slapping water and the foghorn and believed I was alone, my experience unique over all others, even though a dozen other people were sitting there doing the same thing. That was the way I felt after my first three days. Imagine what a summer does to you. Or if you were raised there, as some of the staff were.

One summer I had a girlfriend who worked out there, one of those who’d been raised on the island, who believed it to be hers and no one else’s, who withheld with such intensity that I think she considered burning down the hotel to be a fair strategy, even a moral one. Yet she shared the place with me. Whenever I visited, she showed me all the secret places, and gave me the island in ways I could carry in my heart like a secret lozenge.

So she brought me to the massive tanks of saltwater in the attics (stored in case of fire) to the musty crawlspaces under the hotel, up the fire escapes. We snuck into the kitchen and ate cereal from the bins, crouching low so no one could see us through the windows. Sometimes these places were forbidden; if you went, they’d fire you, no questions asked. One such place was the roof, where we could see the twirling lights of the ferris wheel on the gaudy beach on the mainland. She swore she’d seen ghosts rising in the cemetery, which to her was a message from the island. She was its steward.

We’d met at a party during the winter, then she came to visit me the same night a blizzard blew in and trapped us for a week. We drank whiskey and read and made love all with great seriousness, as if to keep in practice for a life we lived for real somewhere else. It was improvisational living, to keep us loose in the joints. Why we stopped doesn’t matter. But the snow melted and the roads cleared and we parted with equally great seriousness.

That summer I visited every few weeks. Whenever I got off the ferry, she greeted me at the pier, a sunburned girl with long black hair, her jeans dirty and salty. She was thinner than the last time I saw her, the hard work of the summer had burned off fat and made her strong. We hugged and walked off the pier to the hotel, past the wooden pavilion where the string quartets sometimes played, into the wide lobby and up the wooden stairs to her bedroom, where we took off our clothes, made love, and then talked for a while before she had to go back to work. I stayed in bed and listened to the honking of the gulls, the slapping of the water at the pier, and the wah-wah rasp of the captain’s voice over the ferry’s loudspeakers as the boat pulled away. I was here.

It was the next morning that I saw the seal. We’d eaten breakfast– oatmeal and coffee from cold plastic dishes. Then she went to work and I walked toward the eastern rocks on a rough path bordered by spruce and primrose, where no one walked or worked so early. Far ahead I could see the waves slapping the rocks.

I crossed the slabs of granite where the fractured arms of the rock ran down into still pools of clear water and then up out of them, and I clambered into the chasms of the rock where the arms of rock embraced clear pools lined with crushed shell and speckled with blue and purple seaweed. Sometimes there were flapped fronds of seaweed like slick combed hair on the dark slippery rocks.

And as I climbed out of one chasm and continued on, and came up over one of those ridges, I saw it, though I didn’t recognize it at first–I was hungover, and my mind wasn’t prepared to see carefully. First I saw motion, then the shape. A squat round body, dark, heaving itself over two rocks. Dark and wet. A seagull chick? A fish? Mermaid even crossed my mind as I crouched, moved closer. There I recognized it, a seal, it was a baby seal, not even two feet long, squirming over some rocks and disappearing. It knew I was there, and it knew what I was.

As I came over the next line of rocks down into a long, deep tidal pool, I saw how the seal had become trapped. The outgoing tide had stranded it in a slight valley, and no other seal was returning for it. I watched it swim the length of that pool for several minutes, back and forth, looking at me fretfully with each pass. It had gray fur with blue spots, shining in the water. At one point it hid behind a rock with its head sticking up and the black wedges of its nostrils heaving open and shut, and then swam the length of the pool again. It went under the surface, disappeared, came up behind a rock with seaweed draped on its head. A trick?

Even as I saw it I knew I would withhold it from her. I didn’t know if seals were rare, but it would be my secret knowledge, what I would never tell her or anyone else. I would take it away with me; it would be my secret about the island. Finally I left the seal, hoping the tide could lift it out, and the next day I walked to the pier and got on the ferry, where she stood and waved goodbye. It’s a charming custom they have at Star Island, to come down to the ferry and chant, "You will come back, you will come back." Maybe you do, maybe you don’t, but it’s an electric moment when they’re telling you you’ll come back while they’re pushing the ferry away from the rock pier with long poles and throwing the ropes away. It’s not a lie. It’s the push and the pull of the truth. That’s how it works.

As the ferry pulled away I had to turn away, so I ducked out of the wind and lit a cigarette. When I finally looked back, the pier was too far away, too far to distinguish any faces.

Irishman Carlos Salinas O'Gortari

On the day I flew into London, the news of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had been pushed to The Guardian’s eighth page. Hospitalized with a stomachache while his lawyers appealed a British court’s decision, a weakened Pinochet appeared to be stalling his inevitable extradition to Spain, where he would face charges of torture and other violations of human rights. London was a layover on my way to Ireland, where another former Latin American head of state was reported to be hiding out. I was determined to use some of my time there to track down Carlos Salinas de Gortari, president of Mexico from 1988 to 1994.

After a week of vacation I headed to Dublin, to find out what Salinas had been up to since he left Mexico in early 1995 in a tempest of controversy, as hated for the consequences of the neoliberal economic policies of his presidency as Pinochet is feared in Chile for his fascism. When I arrived, he wasn’t in Ireland – he’d moved, for the moment. An Irish Times reporter told me that a cell phone number no longer worked, and the Mexican ambassador said Salinas was seldom seen anymore.

So I wouldn’t interview Salinas, and I could never ask him the question that had pestered me as I drove around the island: why was he living in Ireland? He could have led a successful self-imposed exile nearly anywhere, and Latin American countries would make far better bases from which to wage a campaign to clear his name and restore his place in Mexican history. So, why Ireland?

A professor of literature at the University College of Dublin, Declan Kiberd, got a clue when Carlos Salinas waited in line with students on a quiet Wednesday in May, 1996.

"It was a strange interlude. Looking back, it seems very Borgesian – to meet someone and later find out who it was," Kiberd remembered. The man came into the office wearing a wool cap, which he never doffed, and a scuffed suede coat. Kiberd described him as "shambling but pleasant," and took him to be a fellow academic – perhaps a Latin American economist, though he told Kiberd he had a background in political science. "I assumed he was someone who had fallen afoul some regime. I’ve met quite a few of those. Sometimes they will tell you what happened to them, and often it’s quite terrible, but this man never did." After forty minutes, Kiberd excused himself – he had students to meet. Could they get together for a pint? the foreigner suggested; sure, Kiberd said. Several weeks later, the professor saw a Sunday Times article, with a photograph of Salinas, capless and bald. Only then did Kiberd realize who he’d talked to – and that he was an economist, with a Harvard Ph.D. "In retrospect," he said, with a tinge of regret, "I might have given him more time."

Salinas had called round to talk books (he hasn’t rung yet about that pint). "He knew his literature. I was impressed by his arguments," Kiberd told me. The previous fall, Kiberd had published Inventing Ireland, an authoritative 700-page volume whose post-colonial bent challenged standard views of the history of Irish literature. Salinas, who’d read the book, was intrigued by Kiberd’s implication that in Ireland and Latin America, artists and writers involved in post-colonial struggles for self-determination have been central to the formation of national identities. In this sense, the novel narrative modes of James Joyce resemble the mythical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Luis Borges, because for each writer, "the shattering of older forms permitted the breakthrough of a new content, a post-imperial writing."

Kiberd observed that "Salinas talked like a man who was trying to root himself here. Like he was trying to transcend his present troubles." Was the ex-president creating a home in Ireland, the land of exile and homecoming? The massive emigration from Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some have argued, created the notion that a person only became fully Irish while abroad, because only far from its reality could he nurture an idea of Ireland. And not only emigration created exiles. Large numbers of rural people headed for the cities, where their children were educated in English, not Irish, and in this way "a life conducted through the medium of English," Kiberd writes, "became itself a sort of exile." Thus, the Irish Renaissance of the early twentieth century was as much about the construction of an idealized cultural "home" as it was a rediscovery of what really had been lost.

Did Salinas believe that artists, not technocrats, had shattered the old Mexican identity? In order to make NAFTA a reality, he had to convince Mexicans that cooperation and free trade, not ideological conflict, were the keys to prosperity; that in such circumstances, a national identity defined against a real or imagined U.S. imperialist threat would be a liability. Salinas was praised in The Wilson Quarterly in 1993, for his role in helping Mexico "shed much of the debilitating ideological baggage of the past." And as Mark Falcoff wrote in American Enterprise, "Mexico is ceasing to be ‘Mexico.’ That is, Mexico has begun to discard an entire set of civic values and practices that for more than seventy years defined its national identity." All of this under Salinas’ leadership, so when the peso collapsed late in 1994, Mexicans had no one to blame but one of their own.

• • •

From that Sunday Times article, Kiberd would have learned that Salinas was now dubbed "the Elvis of former presidents" – sighted at leisure (in shopping malls, at jazz festivals) all over the world. On March 15, 1995, he’d jetted from Mexico, the reputation of his once-proud presidency ruined, the Mexican peso devalued and the economy in collapse, and his brother, Raúl Salinas, arrested for murder and "illicit enrichment." After a plaintive hunger strike in the home of a working-class Monterrey family failed to gain him the sympathy of the Mexican public, who were by then burning him in effigy, Salinas was welcomed in a number of places – New York, Montreal, Havana, the Bahamas – and from each he was quietly pressured to leave.

Salinas drifted, a man in search of that one place where he could live almost invisibly, in what some said was his part of a secret deal with his successor, Ernesto Zedillo. Meanwhile, in Mexico, mortgage rates reached 85 percent; credit card interest rates were 140 percent, and thousands of cars, homes, and new businesses were repossessed. Investigations into Raúl Salinas’ finances showed that he’d socked away $300 million in foreign accounts, and Swiss officials later arrested his wife for trying to withdraw $83 million from accounts. When rumors suggested "drug money," Carlos pleaded ignorance of his brother’s "investment fund."

During this period, journalists leaped to interview Salinas. Unable to confirm his physical location, the Mexico City Times published an e-mail address, a move which flooded an innocent Amnesty International administrator named Carlos Salinas Córdova with e-mail from around the world. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that he received requests for interviews, invitations to functions, and angry criticism. Salinas Córdova was good-natured about the attention. "But I am not bald," he said.

I showed some photos of Salinas in his wool cap and suede coat disguise to some Irish friends; they remarked how Irish he looked – "like a farmer," someone said. Back when the Irish police first commented on reports that Salinas had found refuge in Dublin, they supposed a "moustachioed Latin American" would blend in with difficulty. As it turned out, he cunningly blended so well that only after a rare August 1996 interview with an Irish Times reporter did the Irish police begin "discreet" inquiries into his status. The Irish government, stung by scandals in the nineties in which passports were sold to rich Arabs, denied that Salinas would be given special status, though he’d well overstayed a ninety-day visitor’s visa. Salinas applied for a resident’s permit, but other events in the spring of 1998 assured his permanence in Ireland: his wife of three years, Ana Paula Gerard Rivero, gave birth to a son, who automatically received Irish citizenship. (Grateful, he named his son Patricio.)

Salinas keeps a low profile but isn’t hidden, surrounded by bodyguards and careful with his movements, difficult to reach by phone but not unresponsive. Journalists approach him, but he rarely grants interviews. (When he does, he goes to paranoid lengths to avoid offending the current president – one journalist told me that Salinas had asked him not to include an illustrative Oscar Wilde quote, for fear that Zedillo might link Wilde’s criticism with The Importance of Being Earnest.) From time to time, he issues press releases that attempt to discredit prosecutors in his brother’s case, and he also flies to New York for directors’ meetings of the Dow Jones Company. He is also seen in museums, bookstores, and restaurants. The family and its entourage live just south of Dublin, in a house described as "modest but secure" and valued at $1.8 million (a steal compared to the $80 million Salinas family house in Mexico City). Down the street from Sinead O’Connor, Bono, Van Morrison, and other rock star recluses (well, except for Sinead, who recently flung herself at the public by being ordained as a Catholic priest), the house is reportedly owned by Tony Ryan, an airline magnate and Mexican Honorary Consul in Ireland.

As I built a list of Salinas’ Irish friends, I began to think he’d chosen Ireland for the company. Not only rich and prominent, some friends were themselves controversial politicians, such as former prime minister Charles Haughey, a charismatic Fianna Fail politician so corrupt he makes the old-school los dinosauros of the PRI oligarchy look more like kittens than lizards. (Salinas has claimed that his political reforms angered such "entrenched interests" and "established privileges," and the case against his brother, as well as his own exile, are politically motivated.) A conservative Irish nationalist, over his thirty-year political career Haughey survived accusations and investigations into his gunrunning, suspicious property deals, perjury, and influence peddling, only to fall in 1992 to charges of tapping the phones of his political opposition. Not only does he own a twelve-bedroom Georgian manse located on 300 acres outside Dublin, he also owns a house offshore, as well as helicopters and a yacht, "The Celtic Mist," to get him to the island. Impressively, he also owns the island – all on a prime minister’s annual salary of $150,000.

Clearly, Carlos Salinas would feel quite at home.

Perhaps he chose Ireland because its new-found economic prosperity reminded him of that brief period of optimism in Mexico in the early nineties. In the eighties, Ireland had a debt load that was 115 percent of its gross domestic product, and a higher per capita debt than Mexico. In the nineties, after tightened fiscal policy, subsidies from the European Union, and access to European markets to sell beef and other agricultural products, the country has been transformed – its new nickname is "the Celtic Tiger."

Foreign firms, among them Microsoft, Intel, and Dell, have located there, encouraged by a young, highly-educated workforce. While I was in County Donegal, the Donegal Democrat reported that a California healthcare company will open a claims processing facility there, creating over 200 jobs. Each day, after offices close in California, claims will be sent electronically and prepared by native English speakers for the start of the next day in California. Salinas would understand the concept of an information-processing maquiladora, where value is added to information rather than auto parts and tennis shoes.

The island is awash with money and an optimism about the future. The streets of Dublin are gridlocked with new cars, and young people easily get home mortgages in Dublin’s hot real estate market. I asked a bartender at a pub near the American embassy about Salinas. He didn’t recognize a photo of Salinas, though he thought Salinas’ wife was familiar; he ended up describing how he’d just bought a house himself.

The only dangers seem to be inflation and xenophobia. The most recent unemployment figures, 6.4 percent, are the lowest since such figures have been calculated, down from 20 percent in the late eighties. Many industries complain of labor shortages. For so long, Irish youth had to leave the island to find work. Now Ireland reluctantly admits foreign workers, many of them Romanian and Bosnian refugees. (Welcoming former heads of state is less difficult. Many people didn’t know Salinas was there, and those who did seemed pleased.)

• • •

I walked in the rain to the neighborhood where one newspaper report said Salinas lived. The day was, in Irish parlance, "a soft one" – Salinas did not pick damp cold Ireland for its climate, where there is a word for every flavor of rain, including "pelting," "lashing," and "pissing." That morning, the city bustled in mist. Dublin is a city of walkers; people trickled from small neighborhood lanes, joined the streets’ streams, down to the rushing thoroughfares which lead to the city centre.

On my way, I passed rumpled schoolboys with novels in their pockets, and a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit came out of a bank and put garbage bags full of shredded paper on the curb. Having heard that Salinas takes walks in parks, I stopped at Herbert Park, and while three tawny pomeranians jousted and tumbled on the verdant lawn, I read the park’s fifty rules inscribed on a bronze plate. The twenty-fourth rule demanded that "No person shall in any open space sort rags, bones, refuse, or matter of like nature or mend any chair or other article," and the twenty-sixth required that "No person shall in any open space discharge any gun, syringe, squirt, catapult, or other instrument, or shall wantonly or recklessly throw or discharge any stone or missile or make any bonfire or let off any firework or perform military evolution or practice gymnastics." As I looked up from the sign, a man in a tweed cap approached, making me jump, but I knew it wasn’t Carlos.

In another park in another place, a plaza in an elegant, historic Mexico City neighborhood, one of the strongest ties between Mexico and Ireland is memorialized on a small brass plaque that lists the names of the San Patricio Battalion – 200 Irish men who, under the command of John Riley, fought with the Mexican Army against the U.S. from 1845—47. Deserters from an exploitative U.S. Army, they fought under an emerald flag decorated with a shamrock and a harp against a country which they’d found xenophobic and anti-Catholic. They fought bravely until 1847, when they were defeated defending the monastery of Santa Maria de Los Angeles at Churubusco. The surviving two-thirds of the battalion were captured. Fifty men were hung as deserters; fourteen were branded; Riley himself was whipped, branded, then reduced to begging. About him, little more is known.

In this decade, a spate of high-level diplomatic exchanges have strengthened relations between Mexico and Ireland. But for all the trade, investment, and cultural swaps, the two countries lack an extradition treaty – and in the end, this is perhaps the most salient reason for Salinas’ stay. Some analysts figured that Zedillo’s half of the secret deal was not to investigate Salinas, if the ex-president made himself scarce. But as Raúl Salinas went on trial for the murder of his former brother-in-law, a high-ranking member of the PRI, investigators wanted to question Carlos. Though the former president said publicly that he would answer questions "anywhere, anytime," investigators from the Mexican attorney general’s office did the travelling. In 1996, they visited Dublin, and at the Mexican embassy, they grilled Salinas with 300 questions about the 1994 assassination of PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta.

Salinas claimed he hadn’t chosen Ireland for its lack of an extradition treaty. Instead, he praised the Irish – his official reason for residing in Ireland. Declan Kiberd recalled that he "was very friendly about the Irish," and during their conversation, they discussed what the Mexicans and the Irish have in common: "they’re both emotional, they’re very traditional, and they’re not too materialistic," Kiberd said. In the Irish Times interview, Salinas highlighted his fascination with the Irish people, to the point of being "florid in his tributes to Irish hospitality," David Shanks wrote. "They trust a lot," Salinas told Shanks. He also compared Irish and Mexican struggles against imperialism. "Both have ‘one small stream’ – the Irish Sea, the Rio Grande – separating them from powerful neighbors," Shanks reported. In Ireland too, Salinas could say, in homage to Porfirio Díaz, that he was tan lejos de Diós, tan cerca de los imperialistas.

While Salinas was singing the praises of the Irish, his own fortunes took a further turn for the worse. In October, 1998, Swiss officials wondered whether Carlos knew about his brother’s links with drug traffickers, including a $500 million bank account. In a November Newsweek essay, Salinas defended his brother – and himself – calling the accusations "outrageous, absurd and an affront to all Mexicans," and claimed the four-year investigation into his brother’s activities was unjust and politically motivated. This did not stop a Mexican judge from handing down a murder conviction in January of this year, and sentencing Raúl to fifty years in jail.

Carlos Salinas’ dissertation is dedicated to his brother: "To Raúl, companion of a hundred battles." They’ll soon fight their hundred and first – according to The New York Times, Carlos Salinas left Ireland for Cuba, where he was meeting with his brother’s lawyers, helping them prepare for an appeal. He then briefly returned to Mexico, for his first public visit since he fled the country, resulting in protests in the streets of Mexico City. And when he’d made his excuses, he returned to Ireland.

Carlos Salinas chose Ireland because he could stay there – in the sense that it was agreeable to reside there for a while, and also in the sense that he could not be forced to leave. Meanwhile, the Irish seemed happy to let him stay. As a man who had fought his country’s fight and was reviled for his heroism, now living as an outlaw, he must have seemed as familiar to them as Ireland felt to him. He’s been described as a comet fallen from the sky, compared with a spurned lover, hailed as an economist and a politician, reviled as just another corrupt technocrat, his name occasionally even linked with the hated Pinochet. Perhaps it’s simply easier to think of Salinas as an Irishman. He thinks of himself that way: a First World man with Third World memories.

The children of activists struggle with their parents' choices

One spring morning in 1989, Rob Meeropol woke up with a political vision bright in his mind. Since the mid-1970s he’d been leading an effort to reopen the case of his parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 for conspiring to steal atomic secrets. The existential crisis this caused him was acute: Mired in the past, he was too busy to spend time with his own wife and children. To make matters worse, he also worked, unhappily, as an estate attorney "in the belly of American business," as he puts it. He wanted to be politically active but he wasn’t sure how. He wanted to be a son of the Rosenbergs, but in his own way.

That morning, he suddenly knew the answer. To make his private trauma public and useful, one that dealt with the future, not the past, he would start a foundation to help children like him and his older brother, Michael, the sons and daughters who have suffered for their parents’ political choices.

Since then, Meeropol, the father of two daughters and prominent in radical circles as a Rosenberg son, has become something of a political father to several hundred children who receive money from the Rosenberg Fund for Children, the foundation he started in 1990. They’re the children of "targeted" activists who have been harassed, arrested, jailed, or killed as a result of their activities. "Regardless of tactical and political differences we may have with these activist parents," Meeropol wrote in an early letter to his supporters, "their fate is a result of political action they took…Their children are completely innocent."

In 13 years Meeropol has given $1.2 million to 328 children in 119 families. Most of the grants pay for activities–piano lessons, gymnastics camp, intensive Spanish classes–that restore peace and play to childhood. A smaller portion of the money pays for travel expenses so children can visit their imprisoned parents. "We don’t impose our values on any of our beneficiaries, but I think the most important thing is for children to be free to be children," Meeropol says. "I feel we’ve done positive work if we’ve had a positive impact on a young person’s growing up to be a healthy functioning adult."

For over a year I have contacted RFC beneficiaries and talked with them about their relationships with their parents, politics, and the RFC. They know little of the intricacies of the Rosenberg espionage case, which has re-entered the public eye: June 19, 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of the execution of the Rosenbergs for conspiracy to commit atomic espionage, and Meeropol this spring published his touching, honest memoir, An Execution in the Family. Yet like the Meeropol boys, the RFC beneficiaries are innocents whose lives have been altered, often painfully, by their parents’ political choices. They need to be protected from the often harsh judgments of mainstream society and soothed after watching their parents undergo punishment by the government. They also need to be rescued from their own parents.

One of Meeropol’s surrogate children is Sandi Pruitt, a tall, gentle woman with brown hair who was born in Washington state. She was a third grader in 1985 when her mother, Genevieve, an anti-nuclear protester, upended her childhood. Trident submarines in Puget Sound were waiting for nuclear warheads carried from Texas on the White Train, and a nonviolent group, Ground Zero, was mobilizing protesters to try to block it. Before the protest Genevieve was excited–it was her first major anti-nuke action. The next day the photo of her arrest appeared on the front page of the local paper, The Columbian. In a matter of hours Genevieve was out of a job, again, a single mother whose commitment to progressive causes taught her three children how to be poor, rootless, and ostracized in a small town in southwest Washington.

Time and again Sandi and her family were shown the door. An entire Brownie troop disbanded when Sandi’s older sister joined. When her brother graduated from high school, the family ate a celebratory picnic lunch from paper plates on top of stacked boxes filled with their belongings. The next day, they left town.

"At the time I didn’t understand why we were never part of the community," Sandi, who’s now 26 years old, explained to me. "Now I realize it was because of my mother’s political views."

In 1995, Sandi applied to the RFC and received $500 each semester for three years to buy books for college. She discovered an organization that supports the children of a rainbow coalition of activists who have lost jobs, suffered physical or mental injury, been harassed, jailed, or killed: Earth Firsters, Puerto Rican nationalists, Chilean political prisoners, Guatemalan torture victims, black separatists, anti-WTOers, tax resisters, and workers for peace, human rights, labor, medical marijuana, reproductive rights, and gay and lesbian rights. With grants going to practically every radical or progressive movement in the United States, the RFC has its thumb on the progressive grassroots pulse of the country, which Meeropol calls the "RFC seismograph." Currently it’s telling him that post-9/11 repression is taking an increasing toll on families, and he expects the number of applications to rise.

In a newsletter that goes to donors, RFC staff write thumbnail sketches about the families of people who work on the front lines of progressive politics in nearly every state in the United States–including Texas, where a five-year-old boy recently received a $1,000 grant to visit his father, an indigenous rights activist, in prison. Meeropol actively scouts for deserving recipients for the more than $1.5 million the RFC has in its endowment.

Of the 41 grants they gave in the first half of 2002, $4,000 went for school tuition to the two children, four and five years old, of a peace activist who faced 6 years in prison for disrupting a ‘Star Wars’ test. (Normally the families don’t receive the money; the organization providing the service does. "We don’t want to have to play police," Meeropol says.) A grant for $2,000 bought a computer for a college-bound 18-year-old young woman. Her father had been fired for organizing resistance to his employer’s training of military officers associated with genocide in East Timor. The RFC also gave $4,152 for music and art instruction for the three children, age 10 to 16, of a peace activist attacked by authorities for his work, as well as $2,000 for adoption costs and childcare for the 2-year-old son of domestic partners organizing for parental rights of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual community.

The RFC gets its money from individual donors and family foundations; Meeropol no longer applies for money from progressive foundations because they don’t know how to categorize his work. "They fund activism," he says. "We fund activists, by supporting their families." As he’s found, the Rosenberg name turns out to be an effective money-raiser. With it, Meeropol claims to have raised tens of thousands of dollars for the legal defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Even so, the RFC doesn’t receive unequivocal support, Meeropol reports. Some people think the RFC represents merely "feel-good" politics. A board member of one foundation rejected an RFC application to help pay for a retreat, asking, "Why should we give money so that kids can have a good time?" From conservatives the response is what one might expect. In 2002, writer Edward Renehan criticized Meeropol and the RFC–which he said was "named for traitors"–for links to Mumia, a "cop-killer," and to Tom Manning, a "domestic terrorist." "Of course, as regards day-to-day RFC grantmaking," Renehan wrote, "the children of real political prisoners around the world need not apply. Their parents–Cuban and Chinese dissidents imprisoned for aspiring to the type of freedom that [Leonard] Peltier, [Linda] Evans, Manning and Meeropol find so abhorrent–are not ‘progressive’ in the eyes of the RFC."

Meeropol says the RFC has little contact with conservative groups; his biggest battles occur with other leftists. In the late ’60s he was a member of the Students for a Democratic Society arguing that student leftists should join forces, not fight each other. Another student leader ridiculed him by saying Meeropol could be the head of the "Mush-Head SDS." Even some parents of RFC beneficiaries consider Meeropol’s political ecumenicism to be soft-headed. "I think there are parents who would say I’m too easy," he says. "They say, ‘No! There’s gotta be a struggle, and we have to be strong, and [the RFC] is feel-good politics, this is not real politics.’ Most people seem to like what I’m doing, but there are people who look down their noses at it."

The irony is that these are the people who are neglecting their families in the process of engaging the world. Meeropol thinks they’re ignoring the long-term political picture as well, because they run the risk that their children will abandon the politics of their parents. He’s too optimistic to demonize the beneficiaries’ parents, but love and honor and betrayal have intersected with political choices too many times in his own story for him to ignore where life is most fragile. The judge who sentenced his father and mother to death once accused them of loving the Communist Party more than they loved their sons, and Meeropol’s uncle, David Greenglass, who was also arrested as a part of the alleged espionage ring, implicated Ethel, his own sister, to get a reduced sentence for himself. Many years later Meeropol placed family before politics when he pulled out of the effort to reopen the case. "I want you to be my Freedom of Information attorney, not my divorce lawyer," he told his attorney, Marshall Perlin.

It’s no modern novelty to have political ideologues more interested in ideas than people, but what is rather recent is the absence of communities to care for their children. Historically children whose parents have been jailed, deported, or killed have received succor from their parents’ community. The wife and two children of Nicola Sacco, executed in 1927 with Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were supported by immigrant Italians in New England. During the 1970s and 1980s the three children of peace activists Philip Berrigan and Elizabeth McAlister were raised by members of a religious community near Baltimore during the years their parents spent in jail.

In America’s progressive past, tight-knit political communities also supported participant families. In 1912, the Socialist Party took care of the children of families on strike, and the Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1950s sustained families as well. But urbanization, political fracturing, and the erosion of cohesive neighborhoods has taken its toll on these kinds of resources. Add to that the fact that such movements typically consist of the poor and disenfranchised, and self-supporting communities become even harder to maintain. "Since [the 1950s] there has been no substantial political community that I know of that could serve that function," says leftist historian Howard Zinn. "I believe the Rosenberg Fund for Children is a unique phenomenon in the progressive movement. I know of nothing like it."

The family has long been conceived as the cradle of politics, its most basic unit. For millennia family structures have provided models for government, and in each historical age family members have taught political values to the young. What happens in many families, regardless of their political bent, is that the transmission of values breaks down. This failure is most striking in two instances: among conservative family-values types whose real families can destroy individuality, and among progressive social-values types who work so hard to realize their vision of a better world they have little time to realize it for their own spouses and children.

In a "strong, loving family that is healthy," Meeropol says, that doesn’t happen. "If the parents actually pay attention to the children and don’t think of their children as little appendages of themselves whom they can move around like little chess pieces on a chess board, and let the children be children and grow into their own politics if they want to, the chances are they’re going to end up with a better relation to their parents and a better relation to their parents’ politics."

This is the case for Sandi, who is descended from a long line of troublemakers on her mother’s side. She grew up waving signs at protests to which Genevieve dragged her. She wants to be political and active like her grandmother, a Communist, who jumped trains to go to rallies during the 1930s, and her coal miner great-grandfather, who was blacklisted for organizing unions. The human costs give her pause, though. "When it comes to my turn to have a family and I have two choices," she says, "I’ll take the choice that keeps my family together, not the one that will tear my family apart."

Sandi isn’t bitter at the people who fired her mother or who ran the White Train–not as bitter as she is at her own mother. She resents Genevieve. "Sometimes I look back and wish my mother had made other choices, and wished she’d put her energy into her family, not her activism," Sandi says.

To Meeropol, reactions like these aren’t callow or immature, they’re a signal of a breakdown in the transmission of values. To overcome it, Meeropol believes, someone outside the family has to connect the child to his or her parents’ values in a positive way. "If you create positive connections for the next generations," he says, "It is more likely that they will follow in their parents’ or grandparents’ footsteps to one degree or another." He acknowledges that how a child develops politically is beyond his control. "There are children we support who will become apolitical. There are children we support who will ultimately become conservative. But I think we increase the likelihood [they will embrace their heritage] by creating this positive connection."

Talk long enough with Rob Meeropol, and you’ll peel back several layers of a political philosophy which, for all its common sense appeal, out-radicals the radicals. As Meeropol sees it, the romantic image of the radical type, a Naderesque ascetic in brown shoes, puts off ordinary people who aren’t ideological fundamentalists. "If we’re going to become a more activist society," he says, "then we have to have ordinary people with ordinary lives participating in that." In the last youth revolution the personal was made political. Now, Meeropol seems to be saying, the next youth revolution will occur when the ordinary is mobilized–a difficult struggle that the RFC kids know intimately.

Not surprisingly, there’s also a layer to this project that answers a deep need in Meeropol for revenge. "Constructive revenge," he calls it. Meeropol sees the nascent community of progressive offspring that he has gathered under his umbrella as the next generation of critics and troublemakers. Aimed at the people who killed his parents, they are his secret weapon.

§§§

Healthy and cheery, Meeropol, at 53, isn’t too old to identify with the RFC’s beneficiaries, whom he calls "kindred spirits." Out from behind his beard and glasses he bounces into your attention like a favorite uncle, the candid one, someone who possesses intimacy as a social gift. That means he charms you into expecting the secret he’s always on the verge of spilling. He’s always on the verge, and you’re always expecting.

His aptitude for being public and private simultaneously is how he adapted to the circumstances of being thrust into history against his will at 6 years old, when his parents, who had been members of the Communist Party, were jailed, tried, and executed. Afterwards he and his older brother, Michael, moved from home to home for a few years until they were finally adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol. (Abel, a songwriter, wrote the song Strange Fruit, an anti-lynching song made popular by Billie Holliday.) To those people who helped the boys survive, the RFC is Meeropol’s gesture of thanks. "Some of them made great sacrifices. People took chances to benefit me. So I can’t pay that generation back, but what I can do is carry their support, pay them back by doing the same thing for another generation," Meeropol says. "It was the McCarthy era, don’t forget. If you helped out the Rosenberg children, you could end up losing your job."

As Meeropol knows, community is more than money, so in 1999 and again in 2001, he organized two retreats so that several dozen beneficiaries could meet each other–and so he could meet them, too. "I had always been reluctant to meet many of our beneficiaries," Meeropol writes in his memoir. "Would these young people see through my veneer and expose who knows what beneath it?" The kids, most of them people of color, put on skits, wrote poetry, and hung out. They bonded, talked about themselves, for the first time with people who understood. Hungry for attachment, many of them became close friends.

On the second or third night of both retreats, all the youngsters, along with Meeropol and his wife, Elli, sat in a circle and listened to each other’s stories. It was an exercise Meeropol had learned during the RFC’s early days, when he paid for group therapy sessions for Guatemalan children. Their parents, indigenous activists, had been disappeared, tortured, killed. A psychiatrist explained to Meeropol that the children shouldn’t be considered "victims," but "survivors." The measure of health, he said, was when they could share their stories. They weren’t fully recovered until they became public members of their community speaking out against what had happened to them.

Sitting in the circle were Robyn Pitawanakwat, who is now 25, and her older brother, Brock, who is 27. They had flown to the Massachusetts retreat from Regina, Saskatchewan. Robyn was three years old when her mother, Mary, explained to her in tears that she couldn’t take the people being mean to her at work any longer. Her initial complaint of sexual and racial harassment turned into a 10-year legal fight against the Canadian government. She lost her job, just as her ex-partner tried to get custody of the kids. Robyn says she was in court almost every week, sometimes in Ottawa thousands of miles away from home, where they lived in small hotel rooms.

"I definitely felt like a freak," Brock says. "Like when other kids ask what your parents do, and you say my mom’s unemployed, she’s on federal assistance, and she’s fighting a case against the federal government."

Mary had fought hard to escape the poverty and alcoholism of the First Nation where she’d been born, to give her kids a push into the middle-class, and now she was slipping. All these feelings, Robyn says, "it’s stuff you don’t want to tell outside of the cause, because people would look negatively on your parents. And you want to keep up the image that the whole family is together on this. But the kids were secretly wishing the parents would give it up."

In 1996 Mary won her case, receiving the largest single settlement of its kind in Canadian history–but not before she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died a year after the judgment. Through her fight she’d become a prominent voice for First Nations people. (An RFC grant program specifically for Canadian indigenous activists was established in her name.)

After her death people turned to Robyn and Brock to be spokespeople for anti-racist causes. Brock is pursuing an academic career in Native Studies. Robyn is more reluctant. Angry at the people who opposed her mother, whom she admires, she says she still doesn’t want to become a poster child. "Unfortunately I’m getting pushed more to the front," Robyn explained to me in her placid voice. "My mom’s case is the most well-known and successful, so people want somebody to talk about her case. But I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to end up like her: stressed out and dead. So I stay in the background."

Also in the circle sat Rosa Toro, 22 now, the only child of two former political prisoners in Pinochet’s regime, Victor Toro and Luz de la Nieves Ayress Moreno, who work for a variety of community causes in a poor neighborhood in the South Bronx. Most of Rosa’s friends’ parents are on welfare, in jail, or addicted to crack, so when it comes time to explain why her mother has scars on her body, or why she was born in Cuba, not Chile or New York, she skips it. "My friends look at me and say, ‘Okay…’ It’s hard to explain. They say, ‘why would your parents protest the government?’ I went to [Washington] D.C., for a Mumia protest, and they were all, ‘why are you going to that?’"

At first Rosa kept her face shyly hidden in her hair, when I met her in a coffee shop in Albany, New York. As she explained her tense relationship to her parents, particularly her father, her face emerged, bright and strong.

"A lot of people romanticize my parents," she said. "And I say, it’s not that easy to romanticize if you see it from the inside."

When she was 16 years old, she and two friends mobilized the neighborhood to fix up an abandoned building where a girl, a friend, had been raped and killed. Rosa isn’t the type to shrink from what needs to be done. Still, her father, a founder of a leftist movement in Chile and one of 40 Pinochet torture survivors living in New York City, expects her to rally, occupy, get arrested.

"You have to be involved, don’t be scared," he told her.

"It’s not about being scared, it’s that I don’t want to have kids the way I was raised," she retorted.

He denies the problem, Rosa says. She’s still mad at him for missing her high school graduation, for which he’s apologized. "I had to be in court that day," he says.

"But if you hadn’t gone to that rally," she says, "you wouldn’t have had to go to court. You always make time for the meetings, but you don’t make time for me."

As a teenager she felt they were more dedicated to their cause than to her. Then, suddenly, she realized: This is who they are. "They don’t do it for profit. They genuinely believe it," she says. Now Rosa feels more comfortable with their work. She credits the RFC retreat for moving her in that direction.

At the 2001 retreat, Meeropol thought that the beneficiaries, in addition to hearing from each other, should hear from an adult. "Someone on the other side," as he puts it. For the sharing circle he chose a "pretty mild person": Betsy Corner, a tax resister who sits on the RFC board of directors. In 1989 she and her husband, Randy Kehler, were evicted from their house, which was then auctioned by the I.R.S. Their daughter, 9 years old at the time, later became an RFC beneficiary.

Rather than sympathy, Corner’s story sparked an angry response from some beneficiaries. Corner, pleading a bad memory, doesn’t remember what she said, and Meeropol called the incident "a blip." The fact that some of the beneficiaries have strong memories of what happened is a sign of how deeply their frustration at their own parents can run.

Sandi Pruitt had been hired as a counselor for the retreats, which she describes as "revolutionary." She recalls clearly the year Betsy Corner spoke and how the beneficiaries reacted. "People were really furious that she was there," Sandi recalls. "It was incredible. People were: Why is she here? She’s disrupting our bonding. She’s disrupting what we have. And what we have is nonjudgmental acceptance of each other, because we weren’t the ones who made these choices. We almost don’t want to look at if the choices were bad or wrong or difficult to make or easy or what was behind them, but we accept each other because none of us made the decision. So when there was someone there who had made the decision, and who had the choice, people were pissed!"

When Sandi listened to the kids’ stories, she wondered if she was being selfish when she criticized Genevieve–who had her limits, after all. Now Sandi remembers standing in the hallway listening to Genevieve explain why she’d never, ever, become a tax resister. Some activities were just too extreme for a woman with children, her mom explained.

Sandi also realized that others had lived more painful lives than she had. That same year she sat next to Mazi Jamal, who was 22, listening to a reggae band that Meeropol had hired for entertainment. Before they played "Buffalo Soldier," the band dedicated the song to their hero, Mumia Abu-Jamal. Sandi says she looked over at Mazi, whose face had gone totally blank.

"Some people are bitter that they’re only known for what their parents did," Sandi explained to me. "They come to the retreat because they want to get away from that."

Being one of these children is a long life of coming out of the closet, Meeropol explains, and you never get quite used to people assuming they know who you are on the basis of what your parents did.

§§§

Sitting in his office in a converted textile mill in Easthampton, Massachusetts, Meeropol concedes that Betsy Corner’s 2001 visit "might have been a mistake." He shrugs it off. He’s still learning. At the next gathering, a retreat for entire families in the summer of 2004, he’ll try something else. "I find that kids are all over the map vis-a-vis their parents," he says. "We’re all accidents of history brought into our families. We all react in similar ways: anger, hostility, distance, or by embracing."

He stops and muses for a second. "A number of the beneficiaries have asked me how come I don’t seem angry," he told me. "And all the time, I always took that question as why I wasn’t angry at the government for what they did to my parents.

"It’s only recently I’ve come to realize, and this has only been through bringing the beneficiaries together, that some of them were asking me, ‘why wasn’t I angry with my parents?’ I had repressed that aspect of it so deeply that I didn’t, you know, I didn’t even realize that was the question they were asking."

After 13 years of helping children deal with their parents’ political choices, Meeropol is still coming to terms with what his own biological parents did or didn’t do. For several decades the Meeropol brothers had persuaded the public that their parents hadn’t received a fair trial, that their mother had been set up (by her own brother), and that, above all, they were innocent. Meeropol is convinced that his mother was entirely innocent. Yet over the years, Meeropol writes in his memoir, he has confronted the possibility that his father may have conspired to pass on secrets, though likely industrial in nature, not atomic. Such a conclusion is supported by evidence recently released from Soviet archives. Meeropol does not discount the possibility that these new facts could have been concocted by the CIA or FBI. In that case, his father, like his mother, was innocent.

"The simplest way to describe my position on my father," Meeropol now says, "is that I am an agnostic about his involvement."

Were the Rosenbergs guilty? Such bones the old dogs of the Cold War will continue to gnaw. To Rob Meeropol’s charges, the answer matters little. And when their mentor emerges from his private garden of forking paths, if he ever does, they will be waiting for him, hundreds of them, in the clear.

This was a eulogy for Jim Sledd, a professor in the English Department who was retired by the time I was a graduate student but famous for his crankiness, his book on dictionaries, and his fight against bureaucrats and racists. I only met him once, when a fellow grad student, Chris Pearce, and I went to interview him. I talk about meeting him in the piece, which I did for the Observer--Sledd used to write for the Observer and was a friend of former editor Michael King.

Teaching writing to freshman college students–teaching writing to anyone–is like digging fencepost holes on the prairie. It is necessary work: without a hole there’s no post; without a post, there’s no fence; without a fence–everything falls to entropy. It’s also endless work. After you dig one hundred thousand holes, the horizon’s still no closer, and somehow the feral-minded children popping out of the undergrowth seem wilder, and younger, than ever.

The late James Sledd, who died on July 21, 2003, a professor emeritus of English at The University of Texas and longtime contributor to the Observer, dug many fencepost holes himself, first as a graduate student at Texas from 1939 to 1945, then as a professor from 1964 onward until 1985. In the interim he taught at the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Berkeley, and in London and Sri Lanka. Trained in the history of English, Sledd spent the early years of his career writing about and teaching Chaucer, the sound patterns of English, American dialects, English as a world language, and the history of dictionaries, before shifting his focus to the teaching of writing, which is where he left his greatest mark on the University of Texas and on the state itself.

In 1969 he became the director of freshman writing at UT and discovered that fencepost hole digging had fallen on hard times. The teachers were exploited graduate students, forced to populate the seminars of tenured professors, who refused to dirty their hands digging holes. All of it violated Sledd’s notion that, though it is post hole digging–hard, mind-breaking, Sisyphean–the teaching of writing is also service to society. Service may require humility and sacrifice, but it doesn’t deserve degradation and poverty. Sledd spent the rest of his career puncturing and haranguing the department, the University, and, every two years, the Texas State Legislature on this erosion of service and the corruption of the academy. "I became the most hated man on campus," he told me. Meanwhile his colleagues built small empires of theory, writing textbooks and histories of the field.

"I could indulge no dreams of empire," he wrote in a 1999 essay, "I was compelled to busy myself about such lowly matters as faculty chicanery and intrigue, plagiarism by football players, and pot-peddling by TAs; and I quickly discovered that no conceivable rhetoric would check the ambitions of careerist colleagues, imbue the mind of Darrell Royal, head football coach, with reverence for scholastic honesty, or mitigate the authoritarianism of John R. Silber, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences." He wrote those words in an essay he sent to the Modern Language Association, which had asked for 250 words on "the past and future of literary study"; Sledd responded with 30 pages. "If the statement’s too long," he wrote in the cover note, "Then cut out the third paragraph. If you want a blurb, not the truth, you asked the wrong man."

Sledd came from an old Georgia family and went to college at Emory. His prose style combined the Southern verbal elegance one might expect with a snappish Northern utility, an American form of prose produced after the Civil War. Yet his writing also had a touch of gamboling wit reminiscent of Restoration comedy, almost as if British sensibilities offered a grace that crude American ones didn’t (his wife, Joan, is English; they met when he was at Oxford in the 1930s). From the mid- 1960s Sledd favored jeremiads most, but a good example of his early humor was a 1957 paper, "Prufrock Among the Syntacticians," which he presented at a Texas conference where an up-and-coming linguist named Noam Chomsky faced off for the first time against senior members of the field. (Later Sledd spent a year teaching at MIT and became friends with Chomsky, about whom Sledd told me, "He’s the smartest man I ever met. He’s got real guts.") The opening to "Prufrock" was not atypical: "I am here to be publicly puzzled. This I can do. I have so long cultivated a natural gift that I misunderstand as quickly and tenaciously as any man alive."

The published version of the paper has the following footnote:

Mr. [Archibald] Hill as editor removed the wisecracks from this paper. When I objected, he said that the wisecracks might be put back but that I must add a note to justify them, since other readers would find them as objectionable as he does. I am sure that he is right, for flippancy may be malicious. A man who knows that in spite of himself he will often be foolish should pretend that he is always a fool. By laughing first, he can keep the other fools from laughing, and if now and then he manages to talk sense, they will eventually take his most sincere stupidity as a cunning pose. Academic gardens are full of real toads with imaginary jewels in their heads.

When John Silber was Dean of Arts and Sciences at UT, he and Sledd engaged in battles so spectacular that, in at least one instance, a public meeting to decide a relatively minor policy had to be held in the Texas Union ballroom, and people waited in a line that snaked down the stairway to see the rhetorical fireworks. In one apocryphal story about that battle, Silber waves his withered arm for rhetorical emphasis, and Sledd, who had lost an eye in an accident as a youth, makes the only response imaginable: he takes out his glass eye and begins polishing it on his sleeve.

In all, Sledd spent two years in charge of freshman writing–and then quit the position to wage his own battle as an ordinary professor, writing letters to the newspaper ("I think the Austin American-Statesman has a block on my name," he told me), giving provocative papers at conferences, and sticking up for post hole diggers wherever he could. "Professor Sledd had fought as well as he could for the English department of whatever tomorrow we can foresee," Ronnie Dugger wrote in Our Invaded Universities. "He lost." In 1977 Sledd surveyed the state of student writing at UT and published the results in a paper titled, "Or Get Off the Pot: Notes Toward the Restoration of Moderate Honesty even in English Departments."

Even after his retirement he didn’t let up. In the late 1990s Sledd could still generate controversy and a good fight, continuing to call the heads of freshman English "boss compositionists" who headed "composition plantations" staffed by exploited graduate students who did the bulk of the teaching. The bosses were chagrined; graduate student fencepost hole diggers cheered.

§§§

Not so long ago, I was a hole digger at UT myself, where the work was still underpaid, but where an active community of graduate students tried our best to do it better. In 1999 a draft of a paper by Sledd, advancing the boss compositionist thesis, circulated the English department and caused great uproar. That’s when another graduate student, Chris Pearce, and I decided to interview Sledd. We knew him only by reputation, but wanted to connect his history with our work. The conventional wisdom said that he was an irascible firebreather tilting at irrelevant windmills, who hadn’t received the news that in our new religion we had returned to service: we had computers, we had dignity, we had theory, we good people were preparing students for democratic discourse, onward!

Nearly 85 years old, Sledd agreed to meet us in the office he kept in the basement of the Undergraduate Library. When we sat down to talk, we found a frail man, as quick-tongued as people had promised, who was also genial and patient and easy to laugh. He spoke plainly, with an old Georgia accent (no r’s, broad vowels), without once saying "um."

He wanted nothing of the new-timey writing religion. Over and over our conversation returned to the notion that one could not make oneself heard anymore, because corporate control of the media is too strong. That would put a damper on the fundamental assumption of me and my co-religionists–what’s the use of preparing students for public discourse if what’s public has already been sold? But we pressed on and kept him talking for nearly two hours. Sledd genuinely liked students and wanted to help, but the interview must have felt like torture to him. At one point I mistakenly asked when he became pessimistic.

"Am I pessimistic?" Sledd asked. "I think it’s stupid to talk about the perfectability of man. Horsefeathers! In all of the scope of history as I know it, to the extent that I do know it, it’s disaster after disaster. I don’t see any reason to expect that to change. That’s not pessimism, that's the way the world is, and the job is to recognize the way the world is, and to realize there's damn little you can do about it, and at the same time to try to do that little. And when you try, you will fail. You just do the best you can. And when it’s all done you go have a beer."

He did provide some insight on his more overt political work. The conventional view is that Sledd refused to ally himself with anyone. But he told us about going to the Legislature to ask for help in fighting against a set of "phony courses" that the University made teaching assistants take:

I managed to make myself heard quite by accident, through Mr. Billy Clayton, who was the Speaker of the House. For some reason, he backed what I was doing–up to a point. And then when the big guns began to fire, he backed off. But there was a bill in the Legislature, which passed the House, that was going to limit the number of TAs that could be used, and so on. When it got to the Senate, it fell into the hands of a committee whose leader was supposedly a great liberal; he wouldn’t even give it a hearing. I went to see him with the man who had sponsored it in the House, and I said, look, I know this bill won’t pass, but if we can get a hearing in your committee, it would get publicized. People would hear what goes on at UT.

But they didn’t. There was no hearing. At one point in our conversation I asked Sledd if he had made the right people angry. "I made so many people angry, " he replied, "some of them are bound to be the right people." We all roared with laughter. When we quieted, he said that if he made some people angry unnecessarily, that was just the way he was. "But unless you make some people angry, in this society, you haven’t done your job. This society is corrupt, the people who run it are incredibly brutal, and you ought to say so. Unless you’ve made people mad, you haven’t done what you should."

We live in times when idealists and purists, even of honorable ideas, are called radicals, and Sledd disagreed that he was one. In a rare autobiographical essay, written in 1961, Sledd described himself as "a middle-aged conservative white Southern academic from an educated middle-class Protestant Christian family." Thirty years later, he boiled that down. "I am a paleo-Methodist," he said in an interview in 1993.

He was interviewed by a former student, Richard Freed, who now teaches at Eastern Kentucky University and collected many of Sledd’s essays in a book, Eloquent Dissent. There he wrote that Sledd is radical, "primarily in his insistence on integrity, regardless of the consequences, though his basic values are as traditional as humanism itself." Throughout his own academic career, Freed says he has kept Sledd’s ethics as his standard. "I always ask myself, is what I’m doing worth doing? Is it honest? Am I hurting anybody? What would Jim do?" For all the political thunder and theological lightning that surrounds what Sledd wrote and did, it is worth remembering that everything he lamented and criticized was intended to benefit one group of people: students. He did not romanticize them, but he didn’t also resent them. "You can’t teach writing unless the students want to write, and most of them don’t want to," he told me and Chris, and hole diggers that we were, we knew what he meant: you have to take off your gloves and use your hands and cajole, frighten, entice, and persuade people into knowing better than they do. Such humility before the work, and the work itself, is the center of the educational project, and that is the center that James Sledd tried to hold.

After a two-year hiatus, contributing writer Michael Erard is again digging post holes at UT.

To read my previous Texas Observer piece about George Lakoff, go here.

Whoever wins on November 2, the fight over reality and political language will continue

The conventional view of politics says that people are swayed by words, images, or facts. But that’s false, according to Frank Luntz and George Lakoff, two of the most successful practitioners of political reality construction. They believe that increasingly political forces will clash less over reality than over how it’s shaped.

At first glance, both men appear well equipped to deal with a complex world. They have PhDs (Luntz in political science and Lakoff in linguistics) and run consulting operations (the Luntz Research Companies and the Rockridge Institute, a think tank), and they’re gurus to opposing political parties (the GOP and the Dems) to whom they push, as they’ve done for years, what is essentially the same idea about language in politics. The idea? That the basic building blocks of political communication are “frames” (as Lakoff calls them) or “context” (to use Luntz’s word).

The most important resource that politicians have, they both argue, is the ways in which people understand the world. Their values. Their worldviews. (Lakoff adds to this: their brains.) If you tap into those values, inform them, tweak them, focus and reflect those values back at an electorate—that’s the way to win power.

In this struggle to control political reality through language, you don’t dispute specific words or rebut the facts; you don’t even attack your opponents’ frames. What you do is assert your side’s frame, making it so big, so omnipresent, so unavoidable that it’s as natural as talking about the roundness of the Earth. Disputing such a fact seems counterintuitive. Even heretical.

A prime example in this election season is the phrase “war on terror,” which evokes a tangible, winnable conflict. Done right, the framings should be invisible, not the product of human hands. They should give the impression that the world actually is that simple and hasn’t merely been simplified. For conservatives, this is easy because they have invested decades into creating their frames. Liberals, meanwhile, have so much catching up to do that they have to be taught how to frame explicitly. Enter George Lakoff, who over the last year has boiled conservative language down to its bare bones in books, numerous interviews, and presentations. (In 2003, the Rockridge Institute finally received funding to start building a response to conservative frames.) Until now, the left hasn’t had anything like Lakoff or Rockridge, partly because of liberal pride. To some people, Lakoff’s ideas smack of propaganda and spin, which they find morally objectionable. Still others suffer from a sort of intellectual arrogance.

“The people on our side have been brought up to think from an Enlightenment perspective, to think that the facts will set you free, that you can just negate the other guy’s frame,” Lakoff says. “But that’s not how it works.”

Regardless of the outcome of the November 2 election, Luntz and Lakoff will continue to be at the forefront of a growing conflict over American values, political language, and the intersection of the two. Call it the frame war. It’s not a battle of style over substance because truth is not at stake. Truth has nothing to do with it.

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Most Americans believe that SUVs are safer vehicles to drive. Not only SUV drivers think this—any parent whether they feel more at ease with their teenager in an SUV or a Mini Cooper, and they’ll choose the SUV even though SUVs aren’t actually engineered to be safer than other vehicles. They’re only bigger. That makes them less safe: They roll over, they’re less maneuverable, and they take longer to stop. Yet “bigger is safer” is a frame that you can’t shake loose with the facts.

Lakoff says that we engage frames in the simplest acts of thinking or talking. “Framing is the most ordinary everyday thing,” he says. “Every word we use comes with a frame, and the conventional frames are there in your brain.” Take a more political example: the word “war.” In the same way that the size of an SUV resonates “safe,” “war” evokes not only battles, but also sacrifice, martial glory, and an ultimate victory. It’s not simply a figurative or a poetic connection—it attaches to the way people see reality and determines how they act. Every use of the word “war” ratifies this frame.

This is why the phrase “war on terror” has been so devastatingly effective. It’s so engrained that it gathers conservatives and so effective at explaining the world that people who aren’t conservatives find it appealing. The phrase can be strangely soothing. Clarity oozes from it. It subtly encodes a frame in which an intangible, terror, can be targeted and conquered, partly by recycling a Cold War frame in which we waged war on another intangible, Communism. And we won! The phrase offers the promise that we can win this one, too, because it invokes a history of military victories and strength. America, after all, wins its wars.

Of course, America doesn’t win all of its wars. The conservative frame depends on the martial fantasy of inevitable victory, and that is why John Kerry’s criticism of the Vietnam War angers Republicans. It also depends on the rush that absolute moral victory provides, which explains why the administration was able to both attack Kerry and shore up the common sense behind the “war on terror” frame when it criticized the senator for stating that the nation’s goal should be to make terrorism a nuisance.

Kerry and his team could have done a better job of asserting their own frames, but fortunately for them, Bush let the conservative one slip. Frank Luntz says that invoking the “war on terror” set up the conditions for an electoral win by Bush. “If the public sees what the president’s doing as a war on terror, he wins. If they see it as a war on Iraq, Kerry wins. What is the context of what the president is doing? Define it one way, you have one outcome; define it another way, you have a different outcome.”

In the first and second debates, Luntz says that President Bush failed “somewhat” to keep the focus on his advantageous frame. “Look how rarely he talked about the war on terror. He was responding to Saddam Hussein. Was Saddam Hussein a threat? Rather than, was Saddam Hussein a contributor to terror? He did not change the context of the question. He did not reset the way the public would look at the issue.” Once Bush let the simplifying “war on terror” frame slip, all the complexities of domestic policy, especially economics, hung out in the air, unexplained.

It’s a strange admission for Luntz to make, as he’s one of the pillars of the conservative infrastructure, whose frames he helps prop up. He regularly gives presentations to GOP groups, to whom he circulates memos that tell people the right way to talk about the environment, terrorism, or other topics. He’s also partnered with former Oklahoma congressman J. C. Watts to form a communications firm, Watts-Luntz Communication. Luntz is most famous for “writing” the Contract with America in 1994. He’s also been successful at coming across as an objective social scientist—mostly. To borrow a term from a recent New York Times Magazine article, Luntz casts himself as a member of the “reality-based community,” someone who studies the world as it is. In fact, he is part of a media apparatus (MSNBC) that’s creating reality for the rest of us, and part of a GOP apparatus that gives the media its talking points. His status as an “objective” social scientist has also been questioned. In 1997, he was censured by the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers for refusing to disclose the methods he used to conclude that 60 percent of Americans apparently agreed with the Contract with America.

In the frame wars, the people who do the frame work are themselves framed, shaped, buffed, and branded. Lakoff is the “professor,” an instant credibility that can work to his advantage, though it’s also damaging—people immediately assume that what comes out of his mouth is too hard to understand, divorced from reality, impractical. (An interview in a recent Believer magazine labeled him a “mandarin.”) In person, Lakoff is actually down to earth and will answer nearly any question clearly and succinctly. His political analysis is keen, his sentences brief. (“Deep but simple,” observed Glenn Smith, a Democratic political consultant who was instrumental in bringing Lakoff to Texas in 2001).

Luntz, meanwhile, has successfully allied himself with the forces of common sense, one reward of playing for the side that has control of the frames. But that image has begun to fray as Luntz is challenged on his objectivity. For the debates, MSNBC sidelined Luntz after a liberal media group complained about his GOP affiliations. While Luntz has a fatter portfolio, Lakoff has gained access to national Democratic leaders, and his ideas have become increasingly visible. His 1996 book, Moral Politics, was required reading by the Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich campaigns. His new book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, a stripped down version of the earlier tome that includes a punchy to-do list for progressives, is selling well on Amazon.com. As a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute, Lakoff can’t advise campaigns, but as a private citizen he’s an advisor to Kerry. None of this proves that his ideas are viable, but it does suggest that Lakoff might be on the cusp of becoming the new common sense.

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In Moral Politics, Lakoff applied a theory of language and mind to political beliefs, and the result is a useful pocket guide to conservative and liberal worldviews. Conservatives, he argues, believe in a family led by a strict father who protects moral dependents, punishes moral inferiors, and aims to raise independent children to fend for themselves in a dangerous world. Liberals believe in the family led by a nurturing parent who encourages children’s inherent goodness so they will treat others with fairness and equality. All policies and positions shake out from these models and help predict what each side will do, according to Lakoff.

From this perspective, Bush’s accusations in the first debate that Kerry sends “mixed messages” about Iraq are akin to calling him a poor father. In the strict-father mentality, a father lays down the law unwaveringly and never reflects on his authority. (It’s a line that social conservatives in the sexual-abstinence movement also use to bash the pro-condom sex educators: Saying “Don’t have sex, but if you’re going to, use a condom” is a mixed message.) Whether or not Bush wins the election, Republicans will also continue to push the language of the “ownership society.” It’s a phrase that resonates with people’s desire to have equity, even if they’ll never own much property. It trades on the promise that government makes to citizens through social programs like Social Security, and it replaces that promise with what’s more culturally desirable: the ability to work hard and be rewarded.

How can progressives respond? They have to figure out what they believe and then put words to it. “When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas,” Lakoff writes in Don’t Think of an Elephant. “Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily.”

The frames for progressives to use to counter the “ownership society” will probably reflect how they value fairness, accountability, and opportunity. What words and images they use won’t mention those values explicitly; they’ll evoke them, and make them seem like the only values worth having.

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One of the more thorough critiques of Lakoff that combines conservative thought with language expertise comes from Justin Busch, a computational linguist who lives in San Diego and blogs about politics at www.semanticcompositions.typepad.com. Busch says that “Lakoff’s problem, and this is one area where Frank Luntz just by virtue of his job has a real advantage…is that he doesn’t see enough ordinary people and discuss these things.”

To Busch, Lakoff simplifies the world the wrong way, citing the linguist’s assertion that environmental progressives see the Earth as the goddess. “This is straight out of cloud cuckoo land,” Busch says. “You and I know that unless he’s dressing up in druid robes and going out to Stonehenge, that he doesn’t really think that. The Earth is goddess is just something that he tossed off as poetic and imaginative, but it’s also freaking disastrous.” As Busch sees it, Lakoff doesn’t offer hard evidence for his claims about what conservatives or liberals think, and he relies too much on his own stereotypes and experiences in his simplification of conservatives. Lakoff counters by saying that his books are empirically based and that more evidence for the models is on the way.

A key to victory in the frame war is the way the ideas about frames are themselves accepted and disseminated. What makes liberals open to Lakoff’s ideas is that they believe in openness. But the same profile, drawn in terms of the family metaphor, exposes a few other liabilities about liberals. For one thing, liberals are invested in an intellectual egalitarianism that can be crippling. (Conservatives may be more content with a division of labor in which some people do the thinking and others do the shouting.) “A lot of liberals don’t want to admit that they don’t have all the ideas,” Lakoff says. “It’s a major problem. A lot of liberals think, ‘Well, I don’t have the words, but I have all the ideas.’ The fact is, they don’t.”

A glance at the liberal blog www.dailykos.com gives you some idea of the readiness of the troops that Lakoff is sending into battle. In late September, the site’s main blogger, a Berkeley, California, lawyer named Markos Moulitsas posted a short review of Don’t Think of an Elephant, calling it “the best book this cycle.” In the thread of responses that followed, the liberal stereotypes were on parade. The moralist: “I hate pr/marketing/spinning.” The feminist: “Ummm...wonder what he’s got against women?” The post-feminist: “I don’t want to be known as the Mommy party. We’re the party of Solomon.” The literal: “I’m not the child of the government.”

As long as liberals and progressives insist that having the facts on their side is all that matters, they are doomed to impotence. The next move for the left in the frame war is to accept that it’s okay to cherry-pick reality as long as it conforms to a frame that’s morally acceptable. According to Lakoff, we already do it every day.

Contributing writer Michael Erard is writing a book about verbal blundering.

Jonah Ottensoser leans over the white stovetop to tweak its settings, giving me a full view of the black yarmulke on his head. But he's not about to bake a cake. Ottensoser, a large genial man with a gray beard, is an engineer, not a cook, and he's brought me to the kitchen in his Baltimore office to show off his proud creation: a stove that Jewish consumers will buy just to please God.

From sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, Orthodox Jews are forbidden to work, write, and drive. In all, 39 activities are off-limits to those complying with the Torah's fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath holy. In the home, that means no cooking or fire lighting - or its modern analog, moving electricity through a circuit.

For decades, observant Jews have found ways to work around Sabbath restrictions in the kitchen. They taped down the button on the refrigerator door frame to keep the light from turning on. Or someone unscrewed the bulb before Friday sunset. They turned on an oven in advance - that way, they could warm food on the Sabbath without altering temperature settings. In recent years, however, well-intentioned appliance makers have been installing safety features that automatically shut off ovens after 12 hours. That meant a unit turned on at dusk Friday would be cold before lunch on Saturday. When companies learned this was complicating dinner preparation for some Jews, they supplied an optional override. Thus, a rudimentary "Sabbath mode" was born.

But as appliances got more high tech - gel-pad touch controls; LED screens with temperature and burner settings; digital humidity gauges - creating a Sabbath mode became more difficult. Mayer Preger, a salesman at the Manhattan Center for Kitchen and Bath, noticed a problem when fridges started using sensors instead of simple light switches. "You can't hack the new refrigerators like you used to," he complains. "There's all these computer chips in them."

That's where Jonah Ottensoser comes in. He doesn't hack the fridges so much as work with manufacturers to give appliances a kosher seal of approval. A retired helicopter engineer who is himself Orthodox, Ottensoser teaches Sabbath law to technical teams at companies like General Electric, Electrolux, and Viking. His job: to guide them in building electronic brains and mechanical guts that are Sabbath-compliant.

Ottensoser works for Star-K, a nonprofit that certifies food products as kosher. Of several hundred kosher agencies in the world, Star-K is the only one that certifies technology, and Ottensoser is the firm's only appliance consultant. That makes him the world's lone kosher geek, the man tasked with certifying that the movement of every electron in an appliance is sanctioned by God.

Since he was hired seven years ago, Ottensoser has helped nine companies design Sabbath modes for more than 300 types of ovens and stoves, and dozens of refrigerators. When the feature is enabled, lights stay off and displays are blank; tones are silenced, fans stilled, compressors slowed. In a kosher fridge, there's no light, no automatic icemaker, no cold-water dispenser, no warning alarm for spoiled food, no temperature readout. Basically, Ottensoser converts your fancy - and expensive - appliance into the one your grandma bought after World War II.

One of the hardest parts of Ottensoser's job is explaining to engineers the intricacies of Jewish law. He starts by focusing on the concept of indirect action. Sabbath law prohibits Jews from performing actions that cause a direct reaction; that would qualify as forbidden work. But indirect reactions are, well, kosher. In Hebrew, this concept is called the gramma. There are two types of grammas, Ottensoser tells me. Say you hit a light switch, but it doesn't come on immediately - that's a time delay, a time gramma. There's also a gramma of mechanical indirectness, like a Rube Goldberg contraption in which a mouse turns a wheel that swings a hammer that turns a key that launches a rocket. You can't claim the mouse actually launches the rocket.

Ottensoser gets manufacturers to build the easier time gramma into their products. Rabbis differ on how much of a delay is required; the Star-K rabbinical authority, Moshe Heinemann, authorizes a 5-second lag. To be on the safe side, Ottensoser increased the delay to 15 seconds and a random wait of as much as 10 seconds. Why? "An indirect action is one where you can't predict what's going to happen," he says.

He explains it to engineers with the following example: Opening a fridge seems like a harmless action without consequence. But every time you open that door, you let warm air in and cold