This blog is more and more becoming the ramblings of a guy crossing the threshold into old age. That guy is me, unfortunately. I’ve already gotten some junk mail from the good old AARP. Those address databases are darn good, had my 50th birthday pegged.

Well, I haven’t joined the AARP yet. I’ve got bigger problems to deal with right now. One of them is my home computer. Actually I shouldn’t complain; the thing has been pretty good. It’s a Dell Dimension P3 tower from the class of 2000. Windows 98 SE has been good to me. SE might have had a second meaning, i.e. “Stable Edition”.

Nonetheless, I had a growing hardware problem. My burner and the Adaptec Easy CD application seemed to be losing it. My CD “coaster” supply was starting to get out of control. Thus, it was finally time to act. I did some research, took a deep breath, and decided it was time to replace the burner. No turning back.

So last night I went over to the local CompUSA to get a Sony 52X CDRW (sorry, I don’t think the Dimension could do DVDs). And it was the usual store crap, the box is behind a locked glass cabinet so you’ve got to go searching for the sales staff. You finally find some unimpressive guy, and he tells you that he doesn’t have the keys, you’ve got to find the manager; “I think he’s over there by the monitors”. Well, you find the manager and of course he’s busy with someone else. So you wait, wait, wait, while he takes his sweet time. Finally you ask him if you can buy a burner, and he reluctantly agrees, like he’s doing you some major favor. I mean, if these stores need to keep stuff locked away, why can’t they just have a desk where you go to get the high-price stuff. Guess that would be too easy.

Anyway, I wake up this morning and realize that the day of reckoning has come. I finally have to take the cover off my computer. Actually, I did that once at work, trying to attach an SCSI scanner drive to an obnoxious Compaq that gave me nothing but trouble (but hey, it was the company’s, not mine). The drive didn’t take and the tech support guys had to come in. They later told me that they couldn’t get it to work either. So I didn’t kill anything, but I didn’t get anything done that time either.

Well, I looked over the instructions after breakfast and realized that they weren’t written for “starting-to-get-old” people who perhaps haven’t done stuff like changing hardware components before. I was on my own. I started unplugging cables and fiddling with a pull-back tab on the top, finally getting the cover off without anything snapping or flying off into the void. When that happens, you get a sickening feeling in the stomach and a strong sense that things aren’t ever going to be the same, i.e., it’s gonna cost you to have someone fix what you just broke. Anyway, there it all was, the burner, the floppy drive, the power supply, the motherboard, the hard drive, lots of wires … and lots of dust! (Remember man that you are dust, and to dust you shall return … ) Darn, this thing really needed a spring cleaning, even though it’s autumn. There were cobwebs down near the bottom; I saw a spider running along over the motherboard!

Then came the main event. The surgery was about to begin. I started shaking a bit and had to take a few deep breaths. Told myself, don’t rush anything and don’t force anything, as my Dad used to tell me as a kid (when I used to force everything I touched, with predictable results). So I used a light touch to jiggle the connectors around and nothing seemed to happen. But finally some things did happen. The old box came out and the new box went in. Connectors were plugged back in, the cover went back on, and cables were reconnected. Now came the real moment of truth. Time to boot up and face the consequences of plug and pray.

Will miracles never cease…. The system recognized the component. I put a data CD in, and lo and behold, Windows Explorer let me open a file on it. Next, an audio disk. I’ll be darned, I still have music! And now, time to put in the burning software. I wish it was Roxio or Nero, but Sony gives you B’s Recorder, whatever the heck that is. Well, I guess it ain’t that bad. It seems to work, although not without some typical modern software sleaziness. First, the drag and drop program only works with CDRW’s, whereby the good old Roxio-Adaptec Direct CD let you do it with regular CD-R’s. Growl. Second, “B” has a CD ripper that lets you save to MP3 … sounds like a nice bonus, except when you find out that you can only do it for 20 songs, then you’ve gotta pay to get the upgrade. Yea, right, well maybe I’ll just rip to WAV and use my CoolEdit 2000 to convert to MP3 (darn that was a good, reasonably priced application … curses on Adobe for killing it).

So, it looks like I got thru an adventure in PC-land in one piece (so far, anyway …). The new burner is supposedly 52X, but they really don’t think you should go over 40X. And actually, the new software seems to go thru more steps than the old Adaptec, so the process of burning may actually now be slower! But if it stops all the coaster production and gives me nice CD burns that I can still use in five years (should I live that long), it will have been worth it.

Speaking about being older but wiser, I’ve also decided to start using decent CDs. I once lost about 40 hours of work once on a Memorex CD that went bad, and saw some other ones corrupt on me at the wrong time. I just got a spindle of TDKs rated for 52X, figuring that if I run them at 40X it will more likely give me an accurate, stable burn. No more buying the cheap stuff (which was maybe why my old burner went south). Well, actually, maybe I’ll still use the cheap stuff for transfer purposes, e.g. when you want to give someone some a few pix or files on a disk and you don’t expect to get it back. But as to archiving stuff (so as to keep your hard drive from clogging up), stick to the good CDs.

Hey, when you get my age, you realize that you aren’t going to be remembered very long after you’re gone. So it’s important to put your thoughts and creations on good CDs, as form of digital legacy. At least then you can live and die with the hope that something that you did will be of interest to someone in the future, and will be available on a readable disk. Perhaps Verbatim will soon advertise its CDs in the AARP magazine, calling them “Data After-Life Plus”.

THE PROBLEM WITH MONKS AND MONASTERIES, PART 2: This is a follow-up to my last entry on Monday. Again, be warned that it’s a yawner, unless you’re a semi-religious introvert like me.

I have visited several monasteries and had even considered joining one. Admittedly I was influenced by those current-day writers who have rediscovered monasticism and have glorified monks as 21st Century gurus (e.g., Kathleen Norris’ “Dakota” and “Cloister Walk”, and Frank Lentriccia’s “Edge of Night”). These writers were drawn by the strange medieval beauty of the monastic ceremonies. I myself have experienced the feeling you get from standing in a circle in a dank, dark basement chapel at 4 in the morning holding flickering candles and chanting verses from the Psalms. There is something to it, something that overcomes the insult to the body of being up in the pre-dawn chill.

But after watching monks live their daily lives, I decided against making a career out of it. I now think that monasticism is an idea whose time has gone. Why should a modern American or European voluntarily give up the many possibilities for human enrichment that our society offers? E.g., travel, education, career achievement, art, culture, public service, and yes, romance and sexuality? I’ll be the first to admit that society has very distorted guidelines about what “the good life” means, tainted by materialism, politics and sexual immaturity. But to deny all these possibilities for a life of severe simplicity, strict authority and repetitive worship seems to be throwing out many babies with the dirty bathwater.

Monasticism has been protected and preserved mostly by the Catholic Church, because many of the Church’s social ideals stem from the medieval world where monasticism reigned supreme. I suggest that it’s time for the Catholics and Orthodox to take monasticism off life support and let it die a natural death. The days of Cluny are long gone, although the Vatican still deals with its flock as if they weren’t.

However, there is something to be preserved from the monastic legacy. Being a monk for life was NOT something that Jesus would have recommended. However, Jesus did recognize the value of getting away from it all for a while, i.e the forty days in the desert. Monasticism as a permanent vow makes no sense at all; but a year or two of a disciplined, ascetic life of prayer, away from the over-stimulation of modern society, would probably do wonders for most of us. (And a week or two retreat every now and then is a good thing too). Monasticism is not in itself an authentic life, but it could well be part of an authentic life’s formation. And not just for priests or nuns or other gurus, but for everyone.

And I’m not just talking about Catholics here either, although they and the Orthodox are most heavily invested in the monastic tradition. This idea works just as well for Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Moslems and Buddhists (interesting that the Buddhists have their own form of monasticism).

All the major religions should make it possible for adults to “drop out” of their lives for a year or two when the time seems right, as a means of spiritual realization and inner formation. Two good years of manual work and regular chanting and getting up at 3 am and not watching TV or using the net or seeing hyped-up images of sexy strangers everywhere you look would do a lot of good. It would help put life in perspective and deepen one’s faith in this crazy universe. And you’d be doing it with others, building community and friendships that could last the rest of your life. The churches would never have a better chance to help people make the basic decisions that would help them to become better people.

Sounds great. Where do I sign up?

THE PROBLEM WITH MONKS AND MONASTERIES, PART I: This one is probably not going to make the high priority list of the Google gods (nor the Yahoo gods, nor the Netscape Search gods, nor the AOL Search gods, etc.). But hey, the world has a lot of stuff that bores the heck out of most people, but someone had to care about it or else it wouldn’t be there to bore the rest of the crowd. So here’s my shout out on a real thriller …. the problem with monks and monasteries.

(No, this rant is not about the sexual abuse crisis within the priesthood. That seems to be a problem mostly for parish priests. Which is not to say that monks don’t have their sexual problems, or that some of the Benedictines who run high schools and colleges haven’t done some bad things with their students. But I have nothing to add to that topic, since thankfully I wasn’t a victim of it. I want to consider some of the overall problems with the idea of being a monk. So no, this ain’t about sex — although in a way it is. Sex is one topic you can never really get away from.)

I’m not much into religion these days but I’m still interested in monks and monasteries. I secretly hope that a religion will emerge someday that I can believe in and that believes in what I do. Monastic mysticism will hopefully be a part of that religion. Monks represent the quiet, introverted side of religion. They go about seeking a mystical oneness with God in a quiet and humble manner — in theory, anyway. Being a born introvert and a wanna-be mystic, that appeals to me. But as to there actually being monks and monasteries in this new religion, well…

Christian monks and monasteries go way back to the Third Century. The idea of heading out into the desert to live a life of prayer and silence didn’t exactly come from Jesus — he kept his desert retreat down to six weeks. Still, by the end of the Third Century, many Christians felt that isolation was a great way to follow Jesus. So, the idea took off — remember that Christian were still being persecuted by the Romans at that point, and the desert was perhaps a safer place to be. Not that monks and hermits were ever really mainstream — even at the peak of their popularity during the Middle Ages, monks were probably never more than 10% of the Christian population. So it was a fringe group, but a highly favored one. Monks took a vow to be unquestionably obedient to their abbots and to the church. Because of the sacrifices that monks made, i.e. no sex, no personal property, and no luxuries, the Pope and his bishops got to like them. Monks were seen as being the spiritual Marine Corps. Church leaders started saying that they were closer to God and to Heaven than the average village slob and wench who got married and raised kids.

If you studied the Middle Ages in any detail, you know that there were thousands of monasteries in Europe around Y1K, each with hundreds of monks in residence. Just about every river valley had one. Today, there are maybe a hundred or two in Europe (somewhat more if you count the Orthodox ones), perhaps another hundred or less in the USA, and maybe another hundred throughout the rest of the world. Each of them has perhaps 20 to 50 monks, mostly old men. And even that represents a revival; between 1750 and 1850, the monastic movement was thought to have been wiped out by the Reformation and the various revolutions going on in Europe.

So why was monasticism once such a hot ticket, and why did it die off in modern times? The answer to the second part is easy: sex. It just ain’t easy these days to live without it. When you’re fed properly, your body is programmed to reproduce; the urge is very strong. Back in the Middle Ages, people generally weren’t fed properly. Aside from sex, another issue is self-autonomy … who wants to be the servant of some sexually frustrated old abbot? Or even worse, some unfrustrated old abbot … (see, you just can’t get away from the topic of sex).

My hunch is that giving up sex and personal independence wasn’t such a crazy thing when you consider what the options were in the Middle Ages. Living on your own as a peasant with a plot of land or as a tradesman in some village, it wasn’t too hard to die young from some plague or some bandits or some invading army plundering the land. You really had to struggle to get through the winter; if you lived, you were going to be cold and miserable most of the time. By comparison, the monks didn’t have it so bad. Strangely enough, monasteries were one of the few “economic engines” of the Middle Ages. They were organized as miniature collectives with strong leadership such that they cleared land and farmed crops and practiced crafts more efficiently than anyone else. Many monasteries came to own a lot of land and became rich, despite their theoretical devotion to poverty. So, in return for a pledge to do as told and not to have sex (which wasn’t always enforced anyway), a monk had a lot more access to food, warmth, shelter and security than the average peasant.

But of course, times eventually changed. Along came the Renaissance and monasteries were no longer the only way to get rich. Also the Protestants came along and exposed the spiritual hypocrisy of wealthy and powerful monks. Then came the Enlightenment and its revolutions, and the monks were picked clean and told to go back to their native villages (if they weren’t beheaded or burnt at the stake).

And yet, monasticism somehow survived, although on a much smaller scale. Monasteries managed to take root within America after 1850. In the 1950s and 1960s, monasticism gained a popular spokesman, the writer Thomas Merton (a Trappist monk from Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky; Merton died in 1968). Merton’s books attracted a lot of men to the “holy life” of the cloister, and by 1960 monasteries seemed to be making a comeback. But along with Merton, the spiritual appeal of monasticism got swept away in the social turbulence of the late 60s. Today, most of the monasteries barely hold on. Few young men in the US or Europe want to give up so much in exchange for an ancient and uncertain path to inner fulfillment. (However, monasteries in Africa and South America are supposedly doing better — that’s not surprising, given that conditions in those places are often similar to Europe in the Middle Ages).

To be Continued … yawn.

THE GOOGLE GODS: Just a note of thanks to the gods of Google. You have looked down upon my humble little abode on the World Wide Web and decided to allow me a few bits of space on your world wide servers. OK, so most of my pages don’t make your high priority list. But hey, I’m not complaining. I acknowledge your power. Once or twice I wrote something that got your attention and you moved one of my pages into the spotlight. The hits came fast and furious — well, sort of, anyway — until you lost interest and sent me back to the minor leagues. Well, what the heck. That’s the way it is these days — one day famous, the next day forgotten. (And hey, no offense either to MSN, Yahoo, AOLSearch, etc.).

THE JESUS DIET: I still can’t believe the diets that people are eating these days. The big thing now is to scuttle the carbs and gorge on fats and proteins. You know, Atkins, South Beach, all that stuff. To be honest, it all seems rather crude to me. Lots of meat, no grains or veggies — the breakfast of killers. Maybe it’s just a sign of the times. Aggression is in the air today. The summer of love is long gone and forgotten. The idea is to fight and kill for your chance to own a McMansion, drive a Hummer, and leave behind three or four nasty little inheritors of your assertive genes. Arnold Schwarzenegger is your new Caesar. Diets that make you feel mellow, peaceful and humble are not in vogue at present.

Personally, I still like mellowness and peacefulness. I eat plenty of bread and other carbs, some vegetable protein, and very little fat. I’ve maintained 130 pounds for the past 20 years. And as you might guess, I don’t own a McMansion (nor any other sort of real estate), don’t have a track record of on-going career achievement, don’t have a Hummer nor any other sort of SUV, and don’t have any kids. So call me a loser; I guess that all those carbs have made me lazy and sleepy. I mostly slept through the 1990s, and the 00’s haven’t shown me much reason for waking up either.

I suppose that my own high-carb, low-fat diet ain’t gonna be selling many copies anytime soon. It does keep you skinny, but people today want to be skinny and successful. Well, have fun. I’m gonna keep on breaking my daily bread every noontime and sunset. If a certain food was important enough for Jesus to have mentioned in his credo, it’s good enough for me. (And yes, I do bake my own sometimes — a religious experience in itself … see pic below).

We’re going through a big management shake-up where I work, and it make me think about the nature of evil. Yea, evil. Just what is evil? I guess we know it when we see it or experience it. Unfortunately, we don’t see it as clearly when we’re a part of it.

Is evil really a primary force of the metaphysical universe, or is a side effect of something else? Way back in ancient Persia the Zoroastrians saw the metaphysical realm as being governed by a good god and an evil god who were in constant battle. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Devil was given his due as the prince of evil. But as a fallen angel, the Devil was of a lesser rank than God. The Devil was given a realm called hell, but with moral strength we could avoid that place.

The Christian religious philosophers emphasize evil as a side effect of free will. The Buddhists see the world as inherently evil, or sort-of anyway. Actually, anything you say about Buddhism has to be prefaced with the phrase “sort-of”. It’s hard to pin them down. But they don’t seem very optimistic about finding happiness in this world or through any experiences available in this world; annihilation of desire and world-consciousness seems to be their recommended path to Nirvana.

The secular philosophers also ruminated on the idea of evil. Plato and Aristotle pondered the existence of evil in the human character, Nietzsche went beyond good and evil (where that was, who the heck knows), and others tried to integrate the dark side of humanity into a sophisticated theory of everything.

In the world of folk legend, there are many different evil spirits out there. Some of them do nasty things in a direct if ghostly way, e.g. poltergeists, while others act as corrupting agents in the souls of men and women. That’s the kind of evil spirit that interests me. Not the Linda Blair version, the devil spirit that turns children into yellow-eyed monsters (who needs a devil to turn kids into monsters anyway?). I’m thinking more about social factors that make regular people capable of doing terrible things (domestic violence, child molesting, selling drugs, torture, murder, etc.).

In the New Testament, Jesus certainly seemed to believe that people got infected with evil spirits. He was able to call those spirits out of people, being an exorcist extraordinaire. Just what did those spirits do to people? In the Gospels, they seemed to make people rather sick and unsociable, but not necessarily dangerous. The idea behind New Testament demonology was that people are essentially healthy and good, but they sometimes get infected by something foreign. With proper attention, though, they can be ridded of the foreign influence and brought back to health.

Interestingly, Jesus didn’t see evil spirits within the context of criminology. The people who came to him for help didn’t seem to be liars, cheaters, robbers, murders or rapists. So, we can’t quite use the New Testament as the basis for a theory of criminal evil. But my gut feeling is that evil is some kind of accumulation of bad karma that overtakes a potentially good person and turns him or her into a criminal. Everyone has some evil in them, everyone has done bad things and hurt others. But some people just live in extremely bad circumstances, and wind up being corrupted to the point of being dangerous to society.

Like Jesus, though, I’d like to think that everyone is still potentially good in nature, and no matter how much bad they do, you shouldn’t lose faith that the evil in them can somehow be pulled out (even if we don’t quite always know how). That is why I’m against the death penalty.

As to my own work situation, amidst the people who are sworn to fight crime, there’s a sub-criminal form of evil going on. Because of all the uncertainty and fear caused by a new management situation, many people are going around “stabbing” others in the back through innuendo and blame passing. I’ve already had some of the mud splashed at me; I’m an easy scapegoat target. Well, hopefully the situation will calm down and the mud will stop flying. But if not, I’m tempted to show up there one morning with holy water and perform an exorcism.

Or at least play a Charlie Daniels CD, i.e. “The Devil Went Down To Georgia”.

OK, so it’s October now and it’s starting to get cold again and dark earlier. Summer is over. It’s a good time to think about times of taking.

The October Atlantic Magazine has an interesting fiction piece about a guy who BASE jumps off the Gateway Arch in St. Louis during the night. He gets into a relationship with a college girl who wants to become a BASE jumper in order to deal with her fears. Toward the end of the story when the relationship is falling apart, the guy concludes “it’s a time when things are taken away”. He’s having a big thought about life right then. Zen-man that he is, he realizes that things run in streaks. Sometimes life gives us plenty of good things, and sometimes the good things are taken from us whether we like it or not.

What kinds of things? Friends, lovers, money, jobs, cars, favorite hangouts, our good times, our health, eventually our lives. The theory here is that there’s some sort of cosmic force at work, something much bigger than all of us, something that variously gives and takes from us throughout the course of our lives.

Here are a few manifestations of this theory. In this past week’s West Wing (TV show), President Bartlet / Martin Sheen was reunited with his daughter Zoey after she was kidnapped by terrorists. Bartlet had temporarily given up his office during the crisis (to John Goodman, for Pete’s sake!), but he was now back in command. In his “I’m back” speech to the nation, he used the old line about God giving and God taking away. Furthermore, there’s the Old Testament book of Ecclesiates, saying there is a time to seek and a time to lose (recall the lyrics of the 1960s Byrds song “Turn Turn Turn”). So, the idea has been around for awhile.

I think this is a good way of looking at life. You might as well accept that there are times of ecstasy when much is given to you, and there are painful times when much that you value is taken away. Perhaps all that you value will be snatched away … nothing is secure. And when the time of taking comes, there isn’t much you can do to stop it. All you’ve got at that point is damage control, and hopefully some faith. Faith that the times of giving will come back someday, somehow, if your faith can persevere. But no, it sure ain’t easy or fun.

INTERESTING PICTURE: I’ve got a lot of interests that are quite various and diverse. There doesn’t seem to be any inherent connection between them — except in my own little world. Back in my early childhood I got interested in trains and railroads. Yea, I had a Lionel train set when I was five, and my uncle used to give me copies of Trains Magazine. So for whatever psychological reasons, trains seemed like neat things to me, both the models and the real thing.

Another thing that interested me as a boy was the city of Newark, NJ. On Sunday mornings after church, my father used to take me and my brother away from our suburban abode for a quick road trip while my mother cooked the Sunday dinner. One morning he drove us up Broad Street in Newark. I was impressed; a major city just a few miles away from us (Manhattan was only 12 miles away but it was hard and expensive to get to, given all the traffic and the tolls at the bridges and tunnels). Up to that point all I had known about Newark were the riots and the burning buildings that we saw on TV in 1967. But on that Sunday morning with dad, Newark didn’t look so bad. The buildings were tall, Broad Street was broad indeed, and there were some nice looking parks and old churches. There weren’t many people on the streets at the time, but the place seemed to have possibilities.

When I got a little older, early teen years, I got a camera and started riding busses to various places where I could watch and photograph trains (sometimes I would also ride the trains). The busses mostly ran to Newark, so I often had to make a transfer there. That was OK with me; despite it’s nasty reputation out in the ‘burbs, Newark had a certain quality to it (although you had to watch out for yourself, and still do). Those railroad expeditions were unintentionally turning me into an urbanologist. Little did I know at the time, but Newark was where I was going to spend my college and grad school days and the majority of my working life (as a commuter, anyway — admittedly I never lived there).

One day in early 1969 I was in Newark’s Penn Station watching the (pre-Amtrak) Penn Central passenger trains coming in and leaving. I had my camera and was taking occasional shots of train cars that looked old, rare and otherwise interesting (to me, anyway). A train came in from St. Louis with some Pullman cars, so I went over by it to get a picture (it was a tough shot since it was a rainy day and the platform canopy blocked out the light). I was lining up for a flash shot of a Pennsylvania RR duplex sleeper from the 50s (those cars all had interesting names per railroad tradition, e.g. “Catawissa Rapids”) while a middle-aged African-American woman with a big hat got off with some luggage. I waited for her to walk away from the train so as not to clutter my view of the duplex; conveniently, most people who see someone taking pictures on a train station platform get away as quickly as possible, figuring that the guy must be a nut.

However, this woman seemed to think that her arrival back in Newark after visiting family somewhere out in Ohio or Illinois was a legitimate reason for some unknown photographer’s interest. So she stopped right there, put her luggage aside, and posed next to the car for a shot. I wanted to say, hey lady, you’re blocking my view of a streamlined PRR duplex sleeper. But then something else inside told me hey, this is Newark, go with the flow. So I pushed the shudder, the flash went off, and the woman grabbed her bags and headed for a bus or taxi for home. I just sighed to myself and went over to another platform for a shot of the shiny new Metroliner train to Washington.

Now, looking back 35 years, I’m glad that I got that shot. Perhaps you’ve heard the theory that we are all linked by no more than six degrees of separation (e.g., cousin of a friend of a sister of someone who went to school with …). Well, given all my involvements in Newark over the years, I’d have to believe that that lady and I have no more than three degrees of separation. Maybe she had a neighbor whose nephew worked where I did, or maybe her daughter had a friend who went to the Episcopal church that I used to go to (on Broad Street, of course). Whatever.

So here’s the pic. Turned out to be worth a thousand words after all.

That Live in Japan CD by the Ventures (see last post) brought back memories regarding the way things were in the early 1960s. And just how were they, you ask? Well, there was hope in the air. You could sense it in the tunes that the Ventures were playing (which were all over the pop radio stations at the time). The biggest thing to fear back then was the Soviet Union and Communism. Communism was the evil empire, the thing that threatened to swallow us up and end all the good times. But actually, you knew that Soviet Communism (or the Chinese version of it) couldn’t beat America. Not so much because of our nuclear bombs and jet bombers and intercontinental missiles and subs and aircraft carriers. The Commies had as much of that stuff as we did. What the Sino-Soviet Block didn’t have was coolness. And coolness was what the Ventures conveyed.

Ventures songs were tributes to people surfing in Hawaii and rockets blasting off in Florida. Just listen to Telstar, the tribute to the first communications satellite (better the studio version, as the live version didn’t come out as well). Every time I hear that number, I recall the optimism that it conveyed, the notion that satellites and moon shots were the forbearers of a bright new world, a golden age of civilization. It seemed as if things were just going to get better and better. John F. Kennedy was President at the time, and he was pretty cool. Twenty times as cool as any Soviet premier that ever was or would be (save maybe for Gorbachev). And no comparison with anyone the Chinese Communist Party put up (Chairman Mao was totally uncool, despite the admiration he gained from some American college students waving their Little Red Books around back in 68). Why would anyone anywhere in the world want to be like the Russians, with all their snow and mud and drunken peasants and the huge, grey, ugly buildings across their land? And the Chinese? Shoot, that was like being a worker ant lost in a colony. You’re just another insect, forget about any form of self-expression. Weren’t any surfer dudes catching the pipelines along the beaches near Shanghai (and may still not be).

Today, we’re living in a different world. Communism is gone and terrorism reigns as the sum of all fears. If you could go back to 1963 and tell people this, they’d be very glad to hear that the Russians collapsed and the Chinese sold out to fascist capitalism. But they’d ask, just who is terrorizing America and why? Why would anyone not like the vision that we present to the world, the vision of youth and smartness and fun? Why would anyone not like a place that was dancing to the twist and making computers and playing with hula hoops and sending spaceships to the moon? Back then, we were sure that anyone in the world who got to know America would want to become like us, not undermine us. So what went wrong?

Dang, but that’s an awfully tough question. Today we ask, why do so many Middle Easterners hate us so much, especially the ones who have been in America and have studied here? Why would they want a religious dictatorship instead of a liberal democracy?

Tom Friedman has written a lot in his columns in the NY Times about the forces underlying all the Middle East hatred. This past Wednesday he talked about how President Bush and our leadership go out of their way to protect our cotton farmers and textile industry from foreign competition, as to maintain their wealth (commercial farmers are businessmen, not people who live off the land). If the USA lowered tariffs and allowed fair competition, many of the poorest Middle Eastern countries (like Pakistan) would be selling a lot more cotton fabric here. Sure, we’d lose some jobs, but the Pakistanis would gain a whole lot more. With more jobs and income, the Pakistani people wouldn’t have to send their kids to fundamentalist Islamic schools that provide free education and free lunches in poor villages. Those fundamentalist schools teach the kids to hate the US. And guess who supports those schools? The Saudis. And guess where the Saudis get their money? From selling us billions of barrels of crude oil. So, what are we doing to slow that process down? Designing cars that use less of it? Nope. Instead, Mr. Bush proposes tax incentives to encourage Americans to buy bigger cars that burn more oil.

And then, of course, there’s Israel. Our primary ally in the Middle East. With friends like that … Hey, I’m not anti-Semitic. I know about the Shoah, I’ve read the history of the Jews as an oppressed people. I know that if Israel wasn’t so tough it would have been pushed into the Mediterranean long ago. But this Palestinian thing is another kind of game. Israel was able to get the respect of the Arab nations by beating them at war. But that tactic doesn’t seem to be working with the Palestinian people, who aren’t a nation (thanks in large part to Israel). Nations lose wars and adjust their attitudes. Un-nationalized people don’t, as the Viet Cong showed us in Vietnam. Israel tried to control the problem by building settlements on “enemy ground”. And in return they got a whole new level of terrorism and suicide bombing. And now they think that a wall is the answer. When in history did a wall against an enemy ever work? It’s just a formula for more Middle Eastern hatred, hatred that could spill over once again onto American soil. (I pray not, but…)

America won the battle with Communism for the hearts and minds of this planet because it offered something better, something smarter, something cooler. It now faces a new battle, and it’s relying on the spin doctors and image consultants to make the world at large think we’re still better, smarter and cooler. But we’re ultimately going to win or lose this war based on what lies within, not what the façade looks like. The Ventures were able to win the hearts and minds of the Japanese, enemies only two decades before that concert, because the Ventures were smart and cool and talented Americans, full of positiveness. Could any of our current pop heros go to Pakistan or Algeria and win friends? Eminem and Metallica, live in Karachi? Lil Kim and Madonna do Oman? Or do the culture heros of today reflect something inauthentic about us that the citizens of those nasty parts of the planet clearly see through? I’m not trying to make heros out of Al Qaeda’s and Hama’s killers. All I’m saying is, maybe we need a closer look in the mirror, maybe we need to ask if there is some small part of the Islamic fundamentalist criticism of America that is accurate, perhaps we need to see if there are some areas where we could do better in terms of being responsible citizens of the Planet Earth.