Rich Geib Frequently Asked Questions
(FAQ)

Below I take a stab at answering some of questions I get asked the most frequently! This FAQ has gotten ridiculously long, as I keep inserting questions over the years as they are asked of me. Some of the more prurient questions I have left out in consideration of good taste. Some of them I have left out for privacy's sake. Some of the more ridiculous questions have been included below in the hope that people will read them here and never ask me again.

I have created this page so that you, humble reader, may know the slant of my mind. My thoughts being much prone to wandering, to read this URL is to come as close as you ever will to being inside my head. If you should manage to read this whole page, you will know me better than many who have known and associated with me for years. It is perhaps a hopeless task to dress a man in words and make him live again in print; nevertheless, I endeavor here to do my best.

At any rate, I hope you find something useful or interesting, or perhaps which even makes you laugh. Developing this FAQ has provided me with untold hours of creative entertainment! Being so fun to write, I suspect at least a few readers will find it equally fun to read. Enjoy!

Here I stand naked in front of the world, so to speak. Knowing this, it is unreasonable that you should wish to continue.

"Ecce Homo!"
Behold the man!

Questions or comments?, I do my best to get back to everyone who e-mails me, but, HEY!, we all get busy sometimes.

last updated March 13, 2000

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Q: Why are you wearing sunglasses in your picture? Is there something wrong with your eyes?
A: Why not sunglasses? There is nothing wrong with my eyes.

Q: In all your pictures you are wearing ties. Are you really so preppy/conservative?
A: Hell no! It's just an act! I never wear a suit if I can help it! I might wear some kind of tweed professorish-thing to work, but if I wanted to wear a grey or blue suit to work everyday I would have become a lawyer like everyone else in my family.

Q: Would you pose naked and post the picture on the World Wide Web?
A: Sure! I already have!

On my main welcome webpage to my site, I initially wanted to post a picture of myself standing there completely naked except for that pair of sunglasses while holding an open laptop to cover my groin. I was dissuaded from doing so by friends and family.

Q: Rich, Your webpage is so extensive! Don't you have a job?
A: Sure! I did the majority of it at night while I was a full-time teacher near downtown Los Angeles. Most of the time instead of watching "Friends" or "Seinfeld" I just wrote and thought in my spare time. However, the first ten months I spent putting up the foundation of my webpage were intense and sometimes it cut into my sleep.

Q: How old were you when you started this webpage?
A: 28. But there are portions on it which in one way or another date back to college.

Q: Would you do it again?
A: Sure! In a minute!

Q: Don't you like TV?
A: I hate the damn thing! Yet I know if I had one in my room, I would watch it and more often than not waste my time. So I have not owned a TV for some ten years.

Q: Is that a problem?
A: Not really. But sometimes between not watching TV and not liking to watch sports I feel like a stranger in my own country. I remember my students freaking out once because I thought Nick van Excel was one of the "Power Rangers." Or I will be in line at the grocery store and I will pick up a copy of "People" magazine and not have the slightest idea who are half of the famous rock stars or celebrities of the moment. In such a moment (as I said) I might feel like a stranger in my own country, but at the same time in looking at "People" magazine or something similar I have the sneaking suspicion that learning about those "celebrities" would probably not be worth the effort.

Q: You don't like sports?
A: I love sports and have played them all my life. I just don't like to spend hour after hour on my ass watching them on TV! It's boring! It's like a drug!

Q: What do you do at night if you aren't watching TV?
A: I like to read, write, and think. I like to stay up all night contemplating life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Q: Why do you like to do that?
A: Well, I enjoy reading, thinking, and writing because I can do it anywhere, it costs nothing, it is enormously rewarding, I don't need a license or permission from anybody to do it, and, most importantly, it is fun! The best things in life (love, literature, knowledge, art, music, community) are free. Yet at the same time they are enormously expensive in terms of effort and concentration. I think one of the biggest fallacies of our time is that you can buy happiness and fulfillment. If it were only that easy!

Q: But I think you do yourself a great disservice if you do not watch or even know about important cultural events such as "Seinfeld" or the NBA Playoffs! These are important events which give us as a society words and images that serve as a sort of cultural shorthand between people, providing a sense of community and belonging.
A: I am less and less interested every year in belonging to a community, as you define it, based on television or sports events or celebrity trivia. The idea that we as a society need a television show to provide us with a common point of reference to talk about around the water cooler at work sells us short as human beings with rich inner lives and imaginative insights to offer each other. I can only speak for myself, but I can think of about five thousand more interesting and more fruitful ways to spend any precious brain energy I have left at the end of the day than watching television. (And more directly speaking, I have often felt -- when a TV is running in a room -- as if an open sewer was backing up into the room.)

In the end, I am only partly interested in the exigencies and quirks of our society and the people who just happen to be walking the earth right now. I am more interested in studying through art and philosophy and history that which links mankind over the ages. That to me is interesting and enriching; the caprices, circumstances, individual tastes, adventures of this actor or that public figure or this company pale in comparison, to put it mildly. If this is the flavor of our public culture, I want little or no part of it.

Q: How is surfing the World Wide Web any better for you than watching television?
A: Often it is no better, since it all depends on where you go on the Web. But that is the difference: the Web is not centralized, and it is not pushed at you like television. You can actively go onto the Web and choose what you read and view without being held hostage by TV advertising. Instead of sitting back passively and just watching, you have active control of the process. That, in my opinion, is a HUGE difference!

Q: In many ways it feels like in you I have stumbled upon my long lost twin. A kindred spirit, at the very least. How I marvel (and envy) your education!
A: It makes me nervous to hear people talk about me like that - I blush a little to hear you say you "envy" my education. Trust me, we are all ignorant, myself as much as anyone. We are just ignorant in different areas. But thank you for the nice thought.

A teacher friend, upon recently checking out my webpages, told me with some astonishment, "I cannot believe how well-read you are!" Such a comment makes me feel nervous and uneasy; many are the persons you will find out there who are so learned as to make me look ignorant in comparison. I told my friend as much, and she countered, "Maybe. But there are also only about a billion people who are less learned!" Both statements are probably true.

Q: In places you sound somewhat opposed to our modern world of regulations and bureaucracy.
A: True enough. I have made my peace with this world of accountants, middle-managers, bankers, salesmen and assorted other bean counters, licensers, hypocrisy and greed, but I am no lover of the status quo. Yet I honestly do not claim to know a better way to run the world. And I enjoy the comforts of technology and civilization as much as the next person thanks to those who grease the wheels and keep the machinery of modern life running. Nevertheless, I cannot help sometimes thinking I would be happier in a post-Apocalypse "Mad Max" world. Well, either that or the world of "Little House on the Prairie."

Q: Isn't that kind of strange, or, at least, unusual?
A: My last roommate used to call me a "weirdo." He would come into my room and see me reading "The Brothers Karamazov" in Spanish translated from the Russian and incredulous he would bark at me: "You are a weirdo! Scratch your nuts, grab a Budweiser, go to a baseball game - be a regular guy!" I strongly objected to such a characterization, as I scratch my balls whenever they itch and did pilfer many a Budweiser from the refrigerator when we lived together.

I am as big an idiot most of the time as the next person. Some of the time, I am even a bigger idiot than usual. I don't want to sound too aloof.

Q: Do you have any hobbies?
A: No. I do my job as well as I can - that takes major amounts of time. I do my best to stay in excellent physical condition - that takes major amounts of time. Finally, I listen to music intensely, read with all my concentration, write as strongly and perceptively as possible - and that takes all the rest of my time. I enjoy my friends and family in off moments. Where would I cut corners to have a "hobby"? I already wish there were more hours in the day!

Q: This is an interesting, stimulating, and slightly intimidating website. This might have been a bit over ambitious, but you're actually sincere and serious (but not too much).
A: There is no reason to be intimidated by my website. Look, any personal webpage of consequence is a bit like a real person - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. And so it is with my website. I think it sufficient here to report what I am, what I think, what I feel - all in the expectation that readers (any reader) will find my account at least remotely interesting.

Q: It sounds like you have some basic differences in outlook with that friend of yours with whom you used to live. Does that ever constitute a threat to your friendship?
A: If he and I were to ever really sit down and argue politics or the concept of the ideal life, we might end up in a heated shouting match and even violence - we differ that much! But part of the subtle but important art of friendship, in my opinion, is knowing how to rise above such partisan differences and see the essential humanity of the other person. I see it as did Thomas Jefferson: "I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend." Yet it seems in real life this is not so easy to do, and plenty of friendships end over these "differences of opinion!" The caluminating passage of sluttish time can afflict in a thousand minor cuts and scrapes which can combine to deface and tear down the edifice of even the most august friendship. Dr. Samuel Johnson advises us never to let a day pass without repairing our friendships which so often require self-command, maturity, patience and great generosity of spirit. I think he is right.

Yet I am lucky enough to be able to say that my best friends today generally are the first friends I ever knew. This is an aspect of my life which yields ever-greater dividends with the years. As Jefferson again described it, "I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial."

Q: But the famous 19th century Prussian General Karl von Clauswitz tells us: "There are no permanent friends; there are no permanent enemies, only permanent interests."
A: That is not permanently true. Look at how Jefferson and John Adams were leaders of bitterly rivalry political parties yet still remained the best of friends until they both died on the 4th of July in 1826! Hearty and generous spirits can rise above narrow self-interest and partisan differences.

Q: Aristotle thought that goodness of character was the basis for a real and stable friendship.
A: I tend to agree, although the vague nature of "goodness of character" makes me a bit suspicious. I prefer Dr. Johnson's more specific and concrete requisites for a "real and stable" friendship: self-command, maturity, patience and great generosity of spirit. Do you understand me better now?

Q: Yes. But Richard, it is the most difficult thing in the world for a friendship to last until the very end of life. Either it ceases to be mutually advantageous, or people's political views change and affect their relations with one another. And another thing that changes, he added, is a person's character; it gets altered, by the blows of misfortune or the increasing burdens of age.
A: Well said! What you say it true, but the phenomenon is perhaps not as rare as you make it out to be.

Q: But how does it feel to be a "weirdo," as your friend describes you?
A: I have no problems with it. However, whenever I read the engagement announcements in the newspaper and I see a happy attractive couple about my age with the man working for an investment firm and the woman a doctor or something, I feel a little envious and isolated from the "mainstream." When I am in my hometown of Newport Beach, CA, and I run into some tanned and fit housewife in the parking lot of the supermarket in her Land Rover with her 2.5 freshly-scrubbed kids seat-belted into the back seat, I feel a little alienated. In such a moment, I wonder if I would not be happier selling copier machines or something. But mostly I feel OK.

I read somewhere that a sense of alienation from the larger society is as indispensable for the writer as it is for the bank robber. I think there is truth in that.

Q: I am a writer for an alternative newsweekly. I detect in you a similar outsider's contempt for assimilation and mainstream culture.
A: I do not feel such a contempt; rather, I chose a different path in life than most. I never was personally attracted to the role of political-socio rebel Moses-on-the-rock yelling at the deluded and misguided multitude á la the "alternative" press. It is not my style. At least most of the time.

Q: Somebody told me they thought you "talked too much" in your webpages.
A: Well, then let them go to somebody else's webpage that has more "X-files" information and/or naked pictures of Pamela Anderson, since that is what they are probably looking for anyway! It is not that kind of person for whom I wrote this webpage.

I wrote these webpages for people like this or that - and sometimes for other teachers. I have noticed that often the more educated visitors are the ones who appreciate sections like the "Thoughts Worth Thinking" ... 'tis found most noble by the noblest. If a person can read one of the most famous love letters in history and remain unmoved, I do not much care about their opinion. I would in these webpages (and this FAQ, especially) try to frame my opinions with nuance, a moderation of my own personality, and some respect for, and faith in, my intended audience. This will either agree with one's palate, or not. End of story.

Q: No, no, I like that you are actually articulate! It is refreshing to see some intelligent commentary and writing on the web versus inarticulate rantings and links to "nekkid chicks"! I think I've scanned the majority of the page and will cruise by for the updates now and then.
A: Cool! I will try not to write anything too stupid!

Q: It's proper, I suppose to address someone you never met in a first letter as "Mr. Geib." But having spent an hour or two at your Web site I seem to know more about you than about most of my friends.
A: Please call me "Richard."

Q: As you wish. Finding your site is one of the spectacular spontaneities of this World Wide Web. In typical fashion it was pure serendipity: I stumbled across it while trying to get information to confirm the year of the Tiananmen Square protests. A Yahoo search turned up your China pages. I skimmed through, found confirmation of the 1989 date, but was compelled to read more--find out who put this site up and why. I was struck by your response to an e-mail from "Erin." I liked not only when you said but how you said it. It was balanced, thoughtful -- and informed.
A: Thank you. I first saw that message as I telnetted into my California account from a public Internet terminal in downtown Hong Kong, and it enraged me so much I spent a good part of my time in China formulating my response. Re-reading it months after having written it I see the flaws in the essay (re: repeating myself) but my heart, I believe, was in the right place.

Q: I soon found this was the tip of an iceberg. Before long I discovered your FAQ. I was struck by your sense of perspective: someone complains that you are too indulgent with going on about yourself. No one's forcing you to stay you appropriately respond. You don't like to waste your time with TV, but you don't rant and rave against it and tell other people they should feel the same way. Kudos to you!
A: Thank you!

Q: Usually when I run across "long winded" sites such as yours it is the work of some ideological extremist with an axe to grind. They go on and on attacking some perceived religious or racial or government group -- or all the above. I found your long-windedness instead clearly personal and compelling. Perhaps cathartic.
A: Thank you again! All of us sometimes, and most of us always, live in a forest of our illusions. Perhaps this webpage is an attempt through the written word to gain a higher level of self-knowledge and emerge some from the darkness of this forest. That is never easy to do; the struggle never ends. We just become perhaps less ignorant - if we are lucky and work at it. "Nobody in this world," proclaimed recently deceased writer Leo Buscaglia's father, "should go to bed as stupid at night as they woke up in the morning, and so you've got to learn something every day."

Only knowledge is power and freedom; and the only pleasure that lasts is the pursuit of knowledge through learning and the joy in its discovery. They can take all your possessions away and put your physical body in jail forever, but the mind remains free to all those who would exercise that freedom.

Q: The mind can make us free! I like that!
A: So do I! I had one of the most powerful moments in my life recently during a beautiful, golden sunset at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington D.C. I stood there at the base of the monument and stared straight ahead along with Jefferson's statue across the reflecting pool of the National Mall at the concentration of pure power in the the White House, some half-mile in the distance. I then looked up at the Jefferson's thundering words inscribed in marble on the side of the Roman Pantheon-style edifice, "I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTER OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN!" Along with Jefferson, I think freedom chiefly a function of the mind and spirit, with the rest necessarily following behind like cold weather precedes snow.

Q: You seem to like Jefferson a lot!
A: Thomas Jefferson -- notwithstanding the many areas in which I vigorously disagree with him -- has always been for me the ideal of what the life of the mind can be: vibrant, dynamic, alive. What I would not give to spend one evening's dinner at Monticello listening to Jefferson over fine wine ruminate on politics, music, philosophy, science, history, architecture!

They say you can tell a lot about person by their heroes. You may judge me accordingly.

Q: Are there any people whom you especially like to visit your webpages?
A: In particular, I extend a warm welcome to "newbies," or people new to the Internet and World Wide Web. Also, I very much like to see elderly persons cruising the Web. I read an article recently about how many retirees ease loneliness and a sense of isolation with computers and have taken to the online world like fishes to water despite having to learn new technologies, etc. To those in the autumn of their lives and perhaps braced by the chill of loneliness, I consider my webpages a special gift from me to you. You are not alone in the world.

And if you are ever in need of a kind word or thought, just let me know and that "word" will soon be on its way towards your corner of the Internet. That goes for persons elderly and otherwise.

Q: There are a lot of pretty lonely people in the world, eh?
A: That is sad but true. It seems to me many people live lives which are bitterly lonely; and anything which ameliorates such a tragic isolation is a good thing, in my opinion. I think a lot of these kooky millennial cults that pop up here and there find recruits in persons who feel their needs are not met by what they see as a "soulless consumer society" and so resort to extreme measures in looking for self-fulfillment. It is up to each one of us to seek out and find what works for us -- and hopefully that will not take the form of joining a cult or in sacrificing your autonomy to some self-professed demagogue-messiah! But it is all a sign of the times...

Perhaps my webpages could make one websurfer per day feel a little less alienated and lonely in front of their monitor at work or at night before they turn in. That would make it all worth it. That would make me feel good - make all the work worth it. I get a goodly amount of e-mail from stressed out overachiever college students on the edge which truly frighten me! It seems so wrong to be so young yet so despondent! "Faith! Courage!" I want to scream importunately at them across the vast stretches of cyberspace.

We humans are such an embattled lot, and I just want to cry when I see the hard and lonely lives some people lead. I have lately been thinking a lot about what a heroic act it is simply to survive and to be a decent human being in this world where there is so much pressure to be the opposite. I wonder if it are not such small everyday victories like that which keep the world from going completely to hell!

Q: Lonely hard lives as the reality for many, eh? Do you think this is a new phenomenon, or the same as it always has been?
A: I think it has largely been thus always. However, in today's society more and more people move around constantly and live alone. In 1900, only 5% of U.S. households consisted of one person living alone. Today 25% of Americans live alone, and individuals live more and more unconnected to others. I am one of the 25% of Americans who live alone.

Q: In living alone do you get lonely?
A: Just because I live alone does not mean I am lonely. And I could not imagine living in a crowded situation with everyone in my business; I read about those neighborhoods in cities or rural areas where people live in a fishbowl with no secrets or privacy and I think it would be my idea of hell. I think it is better to have a good blend of community and solitude. I tend more towards solitude and become more so with each year.

Q: I agree with you that isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time.
A: Just because I live alone and enjoy solitude more does not mean I lack "profound contact" in my life. My friends mostly all have wives, families, careers, etc., and to see them less often is natural; but when I do see my friends it is twice as sweet for being twice as rare. As I get older, I have less of a need to live in the company of others like when I was a child; but that does not mean that my friends and family are any less important to me than in the past. And I have strong connections with many of my students.

Q: But living so alone must have its costs!
A: Because solitude can be difficult does not mean it is unworthy. Yet I have read studies recently claiming that living alone brings with it negative consequences: that woman who feel "isolated" are three-and-a-half times as more likely to die of breast, ovarian or uterine cancer; that men who feel their wives don't love them suffer 50% more angina; that male medical students who don't feel close to their parents are more likely to develop cancer or mental illness years later; that heart patients who felt unloved had 50% more arterial damage than others who felt the most loved; that unmarried heart patients who live without confidants were three more times likely to die within five years; and that heart-attack survivors who live alone were more than twice as likely to die within a year.

This all gives me reason to pause and think. However, another part of me thinks that the most "comfortable" life is not the one I want to live. If I wanted to live a "healthy" life, I wouldn't work with teenagers as a teacher. I reflect on the trauma and tediousness which often is teaching and the daily stress... the adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones that routinely flow through your body in the hundred minor crises which develop in a classroom everyday. That is the stuff which will kill you! Yet I would not change my choice of career. And who wants to live forever?

Q: I believe the net effect of modern technology has been to pull us into our homes and into darkened rooms by ourselves, where we're not interacting with other human beings. The characteristic of modern technology -- this is partly television and partly the Internet -- is to privatize our leisure time and thereby weaken our civil society as we become strangers to each other.
A: I think you overestimate both the effects of technology on things such as friendship and citizenry and overrate the need for people to live in each other's laps to belong to a community. But I think you may have a point: The world is smaller yet more splintered every day, as I hold a conversation about art with someone in Buenos Aires via a worldwide communications network yet don't know the name (or even face) of the person living in the apartment next to me! People searching for happiness, and having trouble making human connections! On the other hand, I never was big on getting to know my neighbors - none of them ever showed much interest in discussing philosophy or poetry! (And remember what I said about my idea of hell being to live in a dense inner-city neighborhood or small rural town where everybody was into everybody else's business.) I like my solitude and my privacy! I like living in Los Angeles where even surrounded by people you are alone! I never wanted to join a bowling league or participate in a reading club! I like bowling alone!

Q: But is this webpage - which is public and not private, after all - not an offering to your neighbors?
A: Yes, but it is the public offering of a rather introverted neighbor who was always better expressing himself with words than anything else. I would offer it to them in the same way Petrarch and Boccaccio held public poetry reading of Dante's poetry in the Florentine piazzas as the Dark Ages came to a close and the Renaissance began.

I read recently of a remarkable individual who got a donation of thousands of books of poetry and then proceeded to drive around the United States in a van for six months handing them out for free on the streets and cafés to the ordinary citizenry. This webpage is my way of doing the same thing. I, like Emerson, feel like hugging a stranger when I see them reading a famous book on the train!

Q: But it is posted to the World Wide Web! You offer your webpage also to those who are neither countryman nor immediate neighbor?
A: Of course. I would humbly present this very personal webpage to all citizens of the earth - to anyone who would take the time to read it.

Q: There is in man's nature a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which, if it be not spent upon some one or a few, does naturally spread itself towards many, and makes men become humane and charitable; as it is seen sometimes in friars.
A: Maybe you are right! Perhaps if I were married and had a family I would not have this webpage!

Q: Every man who reads knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting.
A: I completely agree.

Q: I used to read philosophy, history, etc., but now it seems that I only have time for technical and work-related literature. I'll come back here from time to time to get nuggets from great thinkers of the past and present. (Don't tell me to read books instead. I know!)
A: Yes, that happens when we become adults and have all the responsibilities, duties, etc. of career and family. Your comments remind me of some men who when they were young found nothing more sublime in the world than to write love poetry to a beautiful woman, wine and dine and seduce and fall in love with her, etc., but when they reach middle age discover that they prefer making money and amassing prestige and power. Such men come to prefer a trophy wife or to simply buy sex rather than have to earn it through actually becoming emotionally involved. But you never truly get the pleasure or the pay back unless you put in the work and personally invest yourself.

Not that I say any of this applies to me! I just am trying to say - in a roundabout way - perhaps we all need to discipline ourselves and make room for the arts and that which is tender and best in us. I understand fully well that by the end of the long, awful workday many or most of us aren't looking to be uplifted, except perhaps into bed, through "difficult" reading and thinking: this of course dictates so much of the trashy television and pithy novels produced by the commercial powers that be in terms of supplying an existing demand and giving the people what they want. However, if one is (as the expression runs) what one eats, then the same is doubly true for reading and thinking: "For as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." My mother described the direct relationship between what one chooses to run through the mind and what comes out thusly: "Garbage in, garbage out!" As Emerson claims more grandiloquently, "What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so we are." So the dreamy idealist in me hopes that we might fill our minds with better thoughts and nobler ideas rather than with the "trash" which is so drearily omnipresent in contemporary America's "entertainment" culture and its drugs of choice -- celebrity worship and easy money. As Thoreau once said, "Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all."

Q: I noticed a typo here and there. It doesn't look good; and even small mistakes distract the reader, and at worst detract from the argument.
A: Give me a break! This is a one man operation here and I have no editors or proofreaders. I would urge you to read my webpages without an overly captious eye; don't let minor errors cloud the larger effect.

Q: Fair enough! What do you sound like?
A: I sound like this.

Q: What is your motto?
A: The following phrase by Johann Wolfgang Goethe: "One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."

Q: I see you like classical music. Do you have any advice on enlarging my tastes beyond what I hear in the elevator? I listen to a lot of classical music which I don't like.
A: That makes two of us! I listen to a classical music station when I answer my e-mail at night and half the time I barely pay attention to what they are playing - and God knows a lot of it is pretty terrible (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, etc.), but they do play lesser known gems that grab you by the throat! I write down the names and then later go buy that music. That is the best way I have found to expand your knowledge of classical music. Going to the store and blindly buying unknown music from a composer you like often just results in a waste of ten bucks. This I have learned the hard way. And don't ever buy those pathetic "Mozart for Breakfast" or "Dvorak for Dummies" compilations! Take your time and learn the music whole.

Q: But isn't your whole "Thoughts Worth Thinking" section nothing more than a compilation of some of the most famous literature, philosophy, and art?
A: Ouch!! You have a point! Yet it is the nature of the web that I am not going to be able to list many of the works in their entirety. Who is going to read the entire "History of the Peloponnesian War" or "Federalist Papers" on one URL? I have tried to give readers a taste hoping that they will go out and becomes gluttons.

Q: You seem to really like classical music. Who is your favorite composer?
A: That would have to be the master, Johann Sebastian Bach.

Q: Why?
A: Well, that is a hard question to answer in a few words. It is very personal. The more perfect instances in J.S. Bach's "English Suites" and other pieces for me hearken back to a time when music was tenderly severe - an ancient discipline mastering feeling, an art proud and austere while not descending to pity or bathos, challenging me to raise my own mind to reach its level. As poet Adrienne Rich lauded the music of Bach, "...A too-compassionate art is half an art. / Only such proud restraining purity / Restores the else-betrayed, too-human heart." Unique in this time of art (especially music) lacking integrity and profundity, Bach does not pander to his audience nor does he offer the cheap thrill. I envision Bach laboring his whole life in relative obscurity as a rural church organist searching out and expressing through the terminal end of his numinous music the dim outlines of the Forms and Ideas and Forms of Plato, the God of Christianity - the vague and veiled truth looming in the penumbra of the human soul.

Bach's repertoire covers the gamut of emotions and is a hearty meal one does not devour and process lightly or quickly. The felicities of the structural logic in Bach's best music gives rise to qualities we perceive as atmosphere - introspection or loneliness, melancholy or exuberance - depending on the certain moment in a piece as profoundly varied as "The Goldberg Variations." This complexity is why I have listened to the genius of Bach my entire life without in the least tiring of his music. I needed to study certain of Bach's most difficult and abstract works -- "The Art of the Fugue," for example -- in what has probably amounted to thousands of listenings over years and even decades before I began to truly appreciate it as it should be appreciated.

Q: No Beethoven in your Top Ten list of music? No opera? Have you lost your mind!?!
A: I prefer the more complexly delicate chamber and court music performed for small intimate gatherings to the more bombastic operatic and symphonic works written for larger public concerts. In other words, I prefer nuance and subtle polyphonic counterpoint in music to the overweening force of emotion and dramatic showmanship.

This is of course a generalization; rest assured the music of Beethoven, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky often issue forth from my CD player. But my heart of hearts resides with the old masters Bach, Pergolesi, Mozart, Vivaldi, Couperin, Handel. I rarely - if ever! - will listen to an opera by Rossini, Puccini, Berlioz, or Wagner from beginning to end.

Q: Do you like the 20th century atonal classical music of Alban Berg or Arnold Schoenberg?
A: Yuck! That cacophonous music sets my teeth on edge, gives me a headache. No, I don't like it much. Harmony has been the glue of Western music since the Middle Ages; and with the advent of atonal music, I see classical music in the 20th century as having entered a new Dark Ages where extreme abstraction has caused it to lose its audience. It as if having a pleasing melody is retrograde and passé! Why?

Honestly, I can after various listenings achieve a certain intellectual appreciation for a piece of modern atonal music. But it never will, like Beethoven or Mozart or Wagner, make me cry at its beauty or tragedy. It will never raise me up so high, like Handel or Bach do in their best sacred music, that I look down on heaven! Atonal music is entirely an intellectual appreciation, in my opinion.

Q: Do you ever go see live classical music concerts?
A: Yes, unfortunately. There is nothing more depressing than going to a classical music performance and looking around the audience and seeing only two or three persons my own age - in a sea of gray hair and coke-bottle glasses of a great multitude of elderly people! What is it about classical music that makes young people today spurn it? Is it because it takes patience to properly appreciate? Is it because subtlety and finesse are lost in an age where music is loudly "in-your-face," designed for immediate gratification, and written to appeal more to your gut rather than your soul?

Q: You referred to Plato? I tried reading some of his stuff and it was pretty hard to understand.
A: That's true. But it is precisely because it is hard that I like it. Francis Bacon said that some books are "to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." I like those few books which takes years to read well. There are a handful of books which I have read many times in my life and never failed to find fresh insights and wisdom as I mature myself. That is why I like books like Plato's "The Republic", Dostoyevski's "Crime and Punishment" or Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and dislike almost everything by John Grisham, Danielle Steele and Sandra Cisneros or writers like them.

Well, it is not like I dislike them; I simply find them to be lightweight. Their books are like Chinese food that pass through my system in a couple of hours and leave no trace in their wake. Their art does not nourish for a long period of time, and I never hurry to return to them.

Half the time I absolutely hate what Plato has to say; I am never indifferent.

Q: Com' on, Rich! All that stuff is ancient history (re: Plato, Dostoyevski) and does not speak to us in our unique social circumstances. We need to look at authors primarily in a social context. Haven't you kept up with all the latest theories of Derrida and company?
A: I think the idea that all text is "social" and must be "deconstructed" and understood apart from the intention of the author one of the most desiccating and dispiriting ideas to recently come out of postmodernist miasma of the universities (and that is saying a lot!). I have little or no patience for all those fashionable theories of academic criticism which are so divorced from real life and contain such contempt for ordinary readers; we struggle desultorily amidst a flood of clever literary critics, and then good books die on the vine due to a drought of serious readers who simply enjoy reading! How did we get to such a pass? Who will lead us out of this dessert?

I am a romantic in that I look for authors who speak directly from their soul to mine and seek to pierce the veil of this world into a parallel universe, where truth is beauty and beauty is truth and lives forever. This is why I like Shelley and Keats so much. It is difficult literature which is hard to understand and requires me to really raise my own level of thinking up to that of those authors, but it gives me a lasting enjoyment and spiritual nourishment which I do not get from reading the newspaper, Time magazine, Tom Clancy, or Alice Walker. And I firmly believe we can read enjoy literature without having to "decode" it.

Q: Your laggardly approach to self-intellectualization leaves a great deal to be desired. All right-brained wussy glop and sentimental idealization. You need tons more analytic and "real world/how things really happen/how things really get done" fodder for your brain to chew on.
A: I have lived in the "real world," as you call it, ever since I graduated from college and bitterly have found it to be mostly a great disappointment. As a child they tell you that love makes the world go around; I have discovered that business and taxes mostly do that! So much of "how things happen" in this world revolves around mere appearances, pointless striving, chasing of money, etc. I should like to concentrate on what is ultimately more important in the spiritual rather than material world. It are the forms and ideas which last, not objects and possessions.

And my "self-intellectualization"? I don't even know what that means!

Q: Greetings; I have some questions to put to you, it is up to you to answer them. I hope that you have the time, but if not, no loss... When you think about writers, do you ever compare? For example, do you have favorite, or at least, some that you esteem higher than others? If so, what is your value system?
A: I have no secret scientific "value system" for rating or comparing writers. I think that a bit foolish; and I have never gotten too excited about the battles on who should belong to the literary canon (even as I regret the politicization of literature). The best writers speak to my soul and I respect that connection enough not to look too closely into why that is the case. Art in the highest realms, in my humble opinion, is a sort of miraculous human conversation across the centuries where we can pierce the veil of the merely physical world and see into a parallel universe where truth is beauty and beauty is truth, imitations of immortality being made accessible through use of the imagination. Although patterns emerge, I think it is ineluctably subjective to rank writers able to do that; there is no such thing as a neutral "values system." So I can only speak for myself.

It would be difficult to say who is my favorite writer.... each is special in his or her own way. I think Shakespeare the most amazing through the sheer volume of his eminently readable prose and verse; it all begins with him. (To sit down and read in one sitting all of Hamlet is for me a singularly terrifying experience!) Perhaps Steinbeck is the closest to me personally, and I live in somewhat the same area as did he and feel him in the hills of California and laconic wisdom of the men and women I meet in the streets and so much of what is right and true in the world. Whitman sings the body electric with his barbaric yawp; Emerson rarely fails to leave me simmering; Montaigne is a never-ending font of wisdom; and I never fail to return to Plato and the eternal questions he raises. The same with Dostoyevski and Tolstoy and a constellation of minor geniuses... but always I return to the English Romantics of Keats, Shelley, and Byron when in need of inspiration. Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Pericles, via Thucydides for me make the most inspiring res publica reading. I could go on all day. All serious reading being re-reading, I chew and chew again on many of these difficult thinkers and poets year after year without tiring of them or feeling that I have exhausted or fully understood their genius.

On the other hand, many are the readers and thinkers I do not like. Although I read them, I do not come back to them again. I prefer to let my silence with regards to them speak my judgement.

Q: The first thing naturally when I enter a person's study or library, I look at their books. I get the notion very speedily of their tastes and the range of their pursuits by a glance round their book-shelves.
A: I agree with you completely! And I do the same thing!

This can also be a source of amusement: Look in the library of a beautiful house lavishly furnished with the best furniture and accouterments, and you most likely will also find a substantial library of quality leather-bound "classics" lining the wall. Nine times out of ten you will find the tomes are for decoration more than for use, as it becomes apparent the owner has never even opened the vast majority of these books. It is folly to think you have acquired great learning by simply buying a large library. On the other hand, it is obvious that to inspect a man's library you see a portrait of his mind. In their library one descries a person's interests, quirks, and beliefs much better than one would do through their conversation! You look at the books on the shelves and feel a sense of accomplishment in what you have read, as well as humility in the books you haven't.

But then, you ask, what of a person who has no books in his room or house? Yes, there be some such people, but I have problems taking them seriously past a certain point. "A room without books is like a body without a soul," as Cicero said. Aldous Huxley correctly claimed, "The proper study of mankind is books." And a society without any book learning is never going to progress past a certain level.

Q: You know what? I spent twelve years in the American educational system and I studied nothing of Plato. Is he really that important a thinker? Is the historical city-state of Athens that important to us?
A: Look at what other seminal thinkers have said about the literary, artistic, and political legacy of ancient Greece. A. N. Whitehead said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Oscar Wilde claimed, "Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medievalism." Shelley, in his grandiose way, tells us, "We are all Greeks..." Of course the modern American multiculturalists would claim that the African, Asian, and pre-Columbian Native Indian cultures are as important in the civic religion of the United States as ancient Greece. That is ridiculous.

I was never taught anything about Plato until college either (and I learned precious little about him even there). And this fact, in my opinion, is as powerful an indictment of the modern American educational system as can be found. We have currently in the humanities a curriculum characterized by style over substance, cultural criticism instead of literary criticism - all overburdened with political considerations and rampant mediocrity (and worse). But again there is always the library. Longfellow tells us, "The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one." But then a person who can read but doesn't hardly claims any advantage at all over the rank illiterate. "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them," exclaimed Mark Twain.

After his inauguration as President of the United States in 1933, Franklin Delanor Roosevelt went to see Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. at his Washington DC home. A retired Supreme Court Justice, Civil War hero, and aged 92-years old at the time, many considered Holmes to be the greatest living American. Roosevelt found Holmes in his study, pondering over one of the dialogues of Plato. "Why, Mr. Justice, are you reading Plato?" asked Roosevelt. What he wanted to say is this: why, at your age, are you studying Plato? "To improve my mind, Mr. President," Holmes replied. How perfectly put! You can buy a Plato's "Symposium" for almost nothing at a used bookstore and benefit greatly from its timeless poetry about the ennobling power of love, but most people are unwilling to put in the time and effort to read a difficult, complex writer. John F. Kennedy once wrote: "A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on." But the ideas only live on if new generations take the time to learn them. Enough said.

Q: We would do better to ignore and move beyond Plato. He is a totalitarian, fascist, and a sexist!
A: So it might seem at an incomplete investigation of his philosophy. Plato is almost all things to all people who read him closely, as almost all present day polemics can find their roots in a book like "The Republic". "Plato is philosophy, philosophy Plato...," Emerson tells, "Out of Plato come all things that are still written and debated among men of thought." I think Emerson correct in spirit if not in fact when he took Omar's compliment to the Koran and awarded it to "The Republic": "Burn the libraries, for their value is in this book." An education without a foundation in Plato will always be woefully incomplete, in my opinion. And like all complex thinkers of any depth, Plato resists being buttonholed in one category or another; nuance and subtlety have a way of cutting across ideological borders and partisan lines. And one learns even from one's enemies, if they have something to teach.

Q: But I was taught in the university that such an idea was "essentialism," and is nothing more than the ruling class's way of defining truth to its own advantage. In the real world, every group has its own consciousness of truth, which it then tries to impose on everyone else. We need to aid the powerless of the world by undermining old authors like Plato!
A: Hogwash. And, yes, I plead guilty of the "essentialism" your professors taught you was a sin. I ultimately care only about the permanent things of humanity and think them to be pretty much the same in all cultures and times. The shapes and appearances change, but the soul of the matter stays the same throughout different historical periods and divers societies.

Q: A wonderful stylist of course, is Plato; but have you ever been convinced by anything he said?
A: Very little -- but that ultimately does not matter very much. Plato and Socrates (whom we see only through the eyes of Plato) set the mold; it is left for us to wrestle with this and then to fashion our own ideas and beliefs -- living "examined" lives of contemplation and struggle. Remember what Justice Holmes said about improving your mind through study...

Q: What about Derrida? Sartre? Foucault? What about Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard and all the other most "advanced" and fashionable literary theorists from France?
A: They only make me wonder how the long and distinguished French literary tradition could have descended to such drivel from the lofty heights of Zola, Dumas, Hugo, Rousseau, Voltaire and Montaigne. I consider all that French intellectual verbiage so much sound and noise signifying nothing. Or to put it more plainly, look at what you have when you take away all the jargon and artificial pseudo-speak language: nothing. I think one could get as insightful a point of view in talking with the bartender at the local watering hole. I have studied their ideas enough to have come to that conclusion.

Jacques Lacan, for example, borders on the absurd descanting on the power of the penis in the following unfortunate psychobabble:

"It is thus that the erect (male) organ comes to symbolize the place of climax, not in and of itself, nor as an image, but insofar as it is the missing part of the desired image: that is why it is equatable with the square root of minus one of the highest significance produced, of the climax which it restores by the coefficient of its utterance in the function of a lack of signifier: (-1).''

No ordinary blockhead could think up such nonsense; for this, we need a European intellectual! I can see Voltaire turning in his grave and spitting with contempt over how the mighty intellectual tradition of France has descended to such gibberish. No wonder the world no longer speaks French! Clear writing should be the result of clear thinking; the converse is also true, as evidenced by the preceding quote.

And it is not only French intellectuals. For example, I just read the following literary gems in a scholarly publication devoted to protesting the American globalization of commerce and politics. A Masao Miyoshi, trying to define globalization, calls it "an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts." Saying the power of capitalism around the world can withstood, Enrique Dussel writes, "The globalizing world-system reaches a limit with exteriority of the alterity of the Other, a locus of resistance from whose affirmation the process of the negation of liberation begins." Chinese author Liu Kang defines nationalism thusly: "An ensemble of discursive practices, functioning through interaction between historically changing fields of struggles and habits of discrete dispositions, in which ideologies are legitimized and delegetimized." Look at that ! We should not be surprised if the ideas of such thinkers have lost touch with reality in equal proportion to their prose.

Creating mountains of abstractions in the breezy lairs of their intellects, the activity of too many scholars today has descended into game playing with linguistics that has lost sight of what is really important, and they have forgotten how to transfer any real understanding they do have to others. They have lost the ability to speak to people and communicate their ideas effectively and artfully; most interestingly, they have effectively silenced themselves by over-specializing and employing the jargon of the other five professors who can understand (even if no one else can) what they are trying to say. And these are the "intellectuals" supposedly holding the standard for our civilization today! How sad. And these trends -- so often having been ensconced in American university faculty departments, exported from there through the academic world, and then being ignored by everyone else -- have their origins originally in France...

Q: But France is a great country still! As Charles de Gaulle proclaimed, "France is not France without greatness!" The world can learn much from France today --
A: -- How?!? What, besides cheese and wine and clothes, does 20th century France have to offer for imitation? A glorious military record? A fluid class structure? An economic policy based on reality? The 1998 World Cup victory?

Let us be frank: the glory of France lies in its distant past and not relative present. There is nothing more sad at the end of the 20th century than watching the French wallow in an identify crisis ("la fin de l'exception française") amidst an English-speaking sea of globalization. This reality makes for painful memories of Napoleonic glory in an age when "intellectual" and "French" were synonymous.

Q: That's interesting - but such a view probably won't make you popular in France. Hey!, didn't you buy me a drink once at "Bob's Frolic" in downtown Hollywood off Wilcox St. and the Boulevard?
A: It's entirely possible.

Q: Was that you on the table there doing the Macarena?
A: Not a chance in hell that was me.

Q: If you could ask God one question, what would it be?
A: Why do men reach their sexual peak at 18 and women at 37? Is it a joke, or is God trying to mess it all up for us?!?

"I love younger men," said singer/entertainer Madonna recently. "They don't know what they are doing, but they can do it all night long." Very perceptive.

Q: That reminds me. Do you know where I can get any of that Viagra drug which supposedly increases sexual potency for men? Didn't you use to sell it in the back of that bar "Bob's" in Hollywood?
A: No. And you cannot prove it.

Do you take Viagra?
A: Yes.

Q: Do you worry about the side effects?
A: No.

Q: Would you throw away your Viagra if it caused tooth decay?
A: No.

Q: If it caused horns to sprout from your head?
A: No.

Q: If it caused asteroids to smash into earth, devastating cities but not yours?
A: No.

Q: We men are such beasts! What we won't do for sex! But it seems kind of pointless to take drugs to increase your sex drive. I mean, most men are incredibly horny as it is without artificial assistance. For example, can you imagine President Clinton taking Viagra?

Q: The idea is frightening! Have you ever bought and used Viagra?
A: No, I haven't. I strongly suspect my money and time would be more efficaciously invested in romancing a woman with wine, song, and attention.

Q: What do you admire most in people?
A: Idealism, tempered by a strong dose of reality.

Q: What do you admire least?
A: Illiteracy.

Q: What is the worst thing that has ever happened to you?
A: Lose respect for myself of lose hope in the future.

Q: What is the best thing that has ever happened to you?
A: Enjoy the fruits of some project which cost years of effort to complete. Fall in love.

Q: I am a screenwriter who lives in Hollywood. I never heard of that "Bob's Frolic" place you mentioned. Do you ever go to any of the popular Hollywood retro-style cantinas like Skybar, Tempest, C Bar, El Carmen Café, Akbar, Lola's, or Les Deux Cafés?
A: No, never. Those places are full of cellular phone bearing "industry" people hanging out to exchange information about scripts, deals, hirings and firings. "Bob's Frolic" is populated by booze hounds, illegal immigrants, heroin addicts and wannabe rock-and-rollers. They are very different scenes; and I always felt more at home at "Bob's" where I can just sit in the corner peacefully and enjoy my drink without the pressure and stress of all the "right" people looking each other up and down appraisingly.

Have no idea about any of those places? Think about the aristocratic salons of 19th century Romantic novels where witty people came to make clever conversation and hear the latest buzz about who is hot and who is not: I would prefer to be any place but there.

Q: But all us young people who move to Hollywood are trying to make it big somehow in the entertainment business! You and I are of a generation that was raised on movies, computers and video games! Why end up trapped in some low paying dead-end job you loath?
A: Yes, we did grow up that way. But I do not loath my job.

Q: But why not get rich and be powerful as a part of the entertainment industry which is our country's biggest export extending to every corner of the earth where one finds televisions, VCRs, or CD players? Why not be at the heart of the global message center? Why not one day pay cash for one of those big houses up in the hills with the pool and the panoramic view? Why not be a player with your name in the news shows?
A: Because I do not want to.

I don't want to hang out with the rich and the powerful and live in a palace. I do not want to be a "celebrity" or have my life smothered under the klieg lights of the rapacious mass media. I didn't go to Hollywood to "make it big" but to teach in the ghetto. And nothing would make me more happy than to perhaps one day write a book people still find worth reading five or six decades after it was written.

Implicit in your question is that we are what we earn, our body and spiritual worth equivalent to our gross net. Perhaps it is true with some people are conditioned to accept that our identity is tied to our jobs, of course. In this respect, I am no different. I am a teacher, and that affects vast regions of my non-professional life. Nevertheless, I could never make the next leap to believe, as do some, that the value of a human being is estimated by what he or she can buy and then consume. Money, power, prestige -- these may or may not be good things, but they do not in of as themselves guarantee you happiness or fulfillment. Maybe you lose sight of that, Mr. House in the Hollywood Hills with the Panoramic View.

Q: Write a book?!? Man, books are so passé! So boring! Video and music and images and the beat is where it's at nowadays --
A: -- enough already! We agree on next to nothing, and nothing will come of nothing. Let us agree to disagree and follow our disparate paths. You like to frequent the scene at Skybar and I prefer the crowd at "Bob's Frolic." That say's all that need be said.

Q: I see you grew up in Newport Beach? You must be a rich kid!
A: Yes, I was lucky enough to grow up in an upper middle-class household. But there have been times in my adult life when I have been very poor and that is a deeply humbling and humanizing experience. Everyone should be poor at some time in their lives as the world appears very differently from that perspective. "The poor man is never free; he serves in every country," said Voltaire. We Americans especially lose sight of this.

Q: Would you apologize for welfare fraud, street crime, child neglect and other misbehavior by some poor people?
A: I would neither apologize nor defend poor people or their actions per se and I am neither a district nor defense attorney. I would only suggest that while life is not easy for anybody, it is perhaps hardest and saddest of all for the poor. Using my own eyes, this is what I have observed.

Q: Are you defending affirmative action or rationalizing gang violence by claiming --
A: -- Stop it already! Don't try to introduce the morass of politics into this. I simply said I felt empathy for poor people struggling hard to make it day-to-day. I want to neither attack or demonize nor defend or rationalize the poor. It is more complex than that.

Q: That sounds like cowardice! Are you for the Right or Left? Rich people or poor people? Why don't you take a stand on the issue?
A: Because that all too often means in practice committing to either conservatives who would lift not a finger to improve a lamentable situation or radicals who would make it worse that it was before. It are those with your attitude of regarding politics as combat which bring out the worst in man the political animal and make politics so often among the most miserable of human activities ("The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity," according to Yeats; or as Confucius tells us, "The gentleman is easy of mind, while the small man is always full of anxiety."). So many writers determined to drive their rhetoric into our hearts! So many thinkers trying to cram their ideas down our throats!

And I have spent considerable time working and living with both the poor and the rich, and I cannot imagine that one is essentially any worse or better than the other. I refuse to see the situation in the context you place it in.

Q: Well, I am not a big believer in political labels. What exactly do you mean when you said you were "conservative?"
A: Well, I would have to say that philosophically I am somewhat conservative in contrast to many other more bumptious "conservatives." You will hardly see me listening to Rush Limbaugh or Pat Buchanan. The Los Angeles Times editorial page, for example, has a "Column Left" and a "Column Right" with mostly polemical writing from the extremes of both sides. I dislike the "Right" view as much as that of the "Left" most of the time; I am strongly opposed to both the multiculturalism of the left and religious nativism of the right. To put it more plainly: I greatly appreciate common sense and insight no matter from where on the political spectrum it may come.

In fact, I think I get more hostile e-mail from the mad militiamen in the mountains of the Black Helicopter caucus than from the fire-breathing "workers of the world unite" social justice revolutionaries. May a plague of common sense fall on both such political temperaments!

Q: Who scares you most between the social justice revolutionaries and the millennial mountainman militia-types?
A: That is hard to say. Do I hate Beelzebub or Lucifer more? Is extortion worse than fraud? Yet I think the mouthbreathing-types on the far Right scare me more. The other day I received a severely critical e-mail from someone who ended their missive, "For Christ and Constitution...." after castigating me for not putting "America First" blah blah blah. This latter-day Know Nothing nativist Buchanan-partisan crank was about as unattractive an intellect as I will likely encounter in this world. These right-wing extremists coaching their language in Country and God strike me as sacrilege to both those august ideas.

Q: Did you flame that person back?
A: No. One simply cannot talk common sense with such persons. I am more and more saving my brain energy for more edifying conversation via the Web.

Q: I sense some ambiguity in your so-called Republicanism...
A: I am a California Republican with libertarian leanings; I am not a Dixie Republican from South Carolina on fire for Christ. I like less taxes, live my life just fine without the government telling me how to feel or what to think, and agree that the United States should be on guard with respect to defense matters in a dangerous and unpredictable world. The Kennedy-esque romanticism of the 1960s means next to nothing to me; LBJ's Great Society and FDR's liberalism appear, at best, an anachronism: I came of age in the time of Ronald Reagan and his "big tent" conservatism! I generally approve of the direction America took towards the end of the Cold War, and I am profoundly unmoved by the few but loud critics of Reaganism. End of rant.

But I am not sympathetic with the social activism of the fundamentalist Christian wing of the Republican Party. To be more specific, I am not in disagreement with the current gun control or abortion laws - as is much of the Religious Right, rabidly. I frankly do not care what odd people in the privacy of their bedrooms do to each other in San Francisco (ie. homosexuality) on a Saturday afternoon. I like smoke-free bars and favor a greater protection of the environment! I prefer Thai sweet rice and chicken to traditional steak and potatoes, South American pisco to Jack Daniel's whisky. I got off an airplane once in Charlotte, North Carolina, drove onto the Billy Graham Expressway (named after the popular preacher), and felt like I had just entered the Twilight Zone! Again, I am from California. I think I would last about two weeks as a teacher in some Bible-belt part of rural Montana before they lynched me.

At the end of the Cold War and consequent dissolution of the external communist threat, Republicans Jack Kemp and Jesse Helms took a look at each other and both exclaimed, "What are you doing in my party!?!" In this battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party, I stand solidly behind Kemp on most issues. I don't always feel like my side is winning in this struggle. Enough said.

Q: Yet you said "philosophically" you were a "conservative?" What exactly does that mean?
A:Karl Marx, a profoundly radical and destructive thinker, once stated: "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." I disagree. Like Edmund Burke, I believe in a certain "wisdom of our ancestors" and in the unspoken contract between the eternal society of the dead, the living, and the still unborn. The sages and heroes and poets of the past: They are still speaking to those who would only listen to them! That is in part why I agree so completely with David Gelernter when he claimed recently: "History is inspiring. Bravery is inspiring. It is shameful that we no longer teach this to our children." I think humanity has learned some important lessons from a painful and tragic past which we throw away or ignore at our own peril. I suspect the bonds of law and tradition much weaker than commonly supposed: the wolf is always outside the door. The children of parents are the parents of children, the students of teachers are the teachers of students; it will never end, and this is what is known as "tradition" -- a dialogue in which many voices participate over time. But tradition is frail, as it depends on the constancy of human beings who can either forget it or refuse to pass it on.

Q: But we live in the post-Holocaust world where "everything is permitted!" Philosophy must come to know, without any mitigation, why the world -- which could be paradise here and now -- can become hell itself tomorrow.
A: The answer to our future, in my opinion, rests in a careful study of human nature and history; and this leads me to rather dark conclusions. It seems clear to me the mad passions of men to blame; mankind is -- at some level, to a certain extent -- a vicious animal still, ready to go for the jugular. Chekhov says viciousness is a bag with which man is born. Who can argue with him? The never-ending monotony of man's inhumanity to man! How dispiriting it is! How wearisome!

So experience and study have led me to conclude with more than a little sadness that we are what we are more than what we may be. As Plato claims, "...in all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep." The beast is always just around the corner. I am cautious, therefore, and a bit pessimistic about the human condition, deep down. I am therefore more disposed to see a certain amount of injustice and cruelty in the world as unavoidable and natural to we homo sapiens. But this being "conservative" is, of course, relative; and I am a flaming radical to the Right when I am with certain friends (The GOP machine) and a reactionary to the Left in certain contexts (Latin American authoritarianism, Eastern despotism). I respect the magistrate, priest and police officer; but in no way do I feel undue awe of those in authority merely because they hold power.

Power might be a dangerous thing, but I do not see it as inherently an evil thing. I am constantly torn between the radical attitude of Thomas Jefferson and the more conservative temperament of Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton usually wins out, but I would in no way do away with the Jeffersonian and a certain..... keeping those in power honest through vigorously challenging them. But the response to corruption and misuse of authority must be its reformation or replacement and not the abolition of power and law, as some anarchists would foolishly have done.

With neither people nor ideas do I believe in an inflexible hierarchy which affords no possible improvement; I believe in judging a man by his character and achievement and not by anything so circumstantial as skin color or parents or social rank or sexual preference or ethnic background; and I violently dislike the tendency extreme radicals and extreme reactionaries share in viewing persons always in classes and groups. I will take individuals seriously and respect their dignity if there be anything respectable about them. But I dislike the radically egalitarian belief that all people are or should be the same; I believe that some people and ideas are simply better than others. Or maybe it is simply that all of us are composed of certain relative strengths and weaknesses according to our native temperaments and talents.

Hence I have never been fond of those who preach complete equality in a return to the Golden Age of harmonious and tranquil relations (indeed I doubt such a time ever existed). Politics should be the art of the possible, and not the construction of the ideal or building of paradises on earth (a concept I do not believe in, this side of the grave) a lá communism, first or second comings of redemptive messiahs, other utopian collective movements/madnesses, etc. A certain degree of inequality in a society does not rank as a reason for me to rent my clothes and tear my hair (although I believe huge inequalities as dangerous and a fluid class structure desirable) and I would not jump into the dark ill-considered when it comes to radical reform simply because the present is imperfect and unjust. As bad as things are, they - in the United States, at least - can clearly get much worse; and I never would accept the radical overthrow of accumulated tradition and lawful order without great provocation and a plausible idea of what might come next. On the other hand, I am not opposed to common sensical and well-conceived programs of moderate and gradual reform which actually have a chance of success.

The reader will not fail to notice a certain ambivalence here... but I am, as the ornery ol' Ambrose Bierce, in his Devil's Dictionary, put it:

con·ser·va·tive : (k&n-'s&r-v&-tiv) noun. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

That says it pretty well, I think. It has been said that a Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who has never learned to walk. It has also been said that a Liberal is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air. Both claims are correct - in the extreme. But most people are a blend of both the Liberal and Conservative persuasions.

Q: But it is only through the overthrow - violent overthrow if need be - of the unjust and old that we new that mankind can return to the beneficent natural egalitarian way of life which modern civilization has corrupted! It is the inequality and greed in society which is the source of all other evils!
A: Yes, I have also read Rousseau. The radical 19th century Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who believed in equality above all, thought that universities should be abolished because they bred learned men who behaved as if they were superior to the unlearned, and this propped up social inequalities. This is the same radical thinking which motivated Mao during the Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution to brutalize and humiliate so many aging college professors and classical musicians by urging mobs to physically attack some, while forcing others to work long hours with the peasants out in the countryside. It is the same thinking which prompted that villain Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to evacuate the entire capital city of Phnom Penn at gunpoint and then once in the countryside to kill nearly all Cambodians who could speak a foreign language or wore eye glasses in their desire to start a new radically egalitarian rural society of collective bliss. Radical egalitarianism usually equals barbarism in practice; I cannot read Rousseau without thinking this.

I believe that for those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge there is no return to paradise. I believe, along with Sir Karl Popper, that the only way is to struggle forward and search in the untidy world of reality rather than stifling any progress with calls for a return to the golden age of yesterday when life was idyllic. If we turn back towards a putative "state of nature" by use of the crude power of the State - if we turn back from our personal responsibility to advance human knowledge - then we will go directly the way of Pol Pot and Robespierre towards the beasts. The esteemed reader might detect my strong distaste for Rousseau.

This highly dangerous but intellectually distinguished trend of utopianism dates all the way back to Plato and his famous philosopher-king who would "restore us to our original nature, and heal us, and make us happy and blessed." It is in the end a cop out - an escape from the complexities and difficulties of today and terrors of tomorrow by use of the nostalgia of yesterday. It is the same thinking which led so many otherwise intelligent and reasonable Germans in Weimar to vote for Hilter so as to escape their national crises by means of the heady wine of romantic German myths of old. "What a mess we are in!! Why don't we give that Hitler fellow a chance to get the trains running on time!" All the rest is history, so to speak.

But this is not merely an academic exercise in seeking to understand the past; I see much the same dynamic at play in the tribalism of the contemporary Russian nationalists, Muslim fundamentalists, and American anti-governmental extremist organizations.

Q: But what about all the homeless people!
A: What about them?

Q: Don't they just piss you off?
A: Sometimes they do. When I get virtually assaulted by some smelly wacko demanding money from me, I want to just knock the person on their ass! Obviously a lot of homeless are that way, in the words of Jim Washburn, because "they're such [drug] user assholes that they've burned every friend they could turn to for help." I have little sympathy for such obnoxious people. I have lived and worked in places where you could hardly swing a cat without knocking down such an in-your-face street person "demanding" something.

On the other hand, many homeless are victims of circumstance, mentally ill, or simply weak. And when you see - as I did recently - a white-trashy mother and her young daughter wearing dirty clothes with the hollow, beaten look of the long-destitute etched into her face and living out of an old decrepit brown Datsun while the father begs for food on a nearby corner holding up a cardboard sign that says: "MY FAMILY IS HUNGRY - PLEASE HELP US GET FOOD!" you have to be completely dry of the "milk of human goodness" not to feel for them.

A lawyer I know refers to poor people in the following terms: "If they don't like it, let them go to law school!" Such Marie Antoinette reasoning does not serve our society well.

Q: It seems to me your being "conservative" has more to do with a particular way of looking at the human condition than any specific economic theory or political program!
A: You are very perceptive.

Q: What would you do if you had enough money?
A: You mean like enough money to buy enough food so nobody in the world goes hungry, pave the streets with gold, pay off everybody's credit cards bills (imagine that!)?

Q: No, not that much. Maybe ten or twenty thousand dollars.
A: Take all my friends to Baja California for some craziness in the sun. I would fly in Tom Jones and James Brown to sing live for us, tequila and beer would be the only permitted beverages, nobody would be able to wear undergarments, and the party would last for a week.

Q: What do you normally do with any discretionary income?
A: Buy BOOKS! I am the same as Erasmus in the 16th century when he said, "When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes."

Q: Do you have many books?
A: I have hundreds and hundreds of them. They fill up my whole apartment.

Q: Sitting there in front of your computer, which book do you reach for most often?
A: Believe it or not, the dictionary!

Q: But you are an English teacher! Surely you have moved past having to reach for the dictionary!
A: Don't you believe it! One never rises above the need to consult with the dictionary! I reach for it all the time.

Q: Thomas Jefferson claimed, "I cannot live without books." If you were put in jail with no access to books, could you live?
A: Of course I could live. But now I am old enough where I think if I were to live in jail without books, I would bring at least a large portion of the libraries inside my head. But it would be a hard blow.

Q: Which books figures most prominently of all of those books on your shelves?
A: "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie. I choose this book not because of its literary value but because the author had a price put on his head for writing it. If the boneheaded Iranians mullahs would kill Rushdie for writing a book, let them come and kill me also!

Q: Did you actually read that "The Satanic Verses?"
A: Yes.

Q: Did you like it?
A: I didn't understand most of it.

Q: Which are the books closest to your heart?
A: That would be hard to sum up in a few words. But there seems to be an area of some 60 or 70 books which I could not live without. Year after year I am reading from these relatively small number of books: Homer, Plato, Hemingway, Herodotus, Milton, Tolkien, Plutarch, Steinbeck, Shakespeare, Dickens, the Bible, Gibbon, Whitman, Aeschylus, Thucydides, Shelley, etc. and other numerous slightly lesser minds.

I sometimes reflect with no little wonder how the greatest books of all are so few in number and cover not one whole wall of my apartment... so much wisdom crammed into so little space! I empathize completely with Emerson when he said: "I visit occasionally the Cambridge Library, and I can seldom go there without renewing the conviction that the best of it all is already with the four walls of my study at home."

Q: So you're a teacher?
A: Yeah. You gotta problem with that?

Q: No, no problem. What is your favorite part of being a teacher?
A: The kids!, teaching literature and history to young fertile minds, helping the next generation grow up straight and true with adult love and concern.

Q: What is your least favorite part of being a teacher?
A: Paper work, massive bureaucracy, poor working conditions, miserable pay, and students who are rude; but I think the hardest thing practically speaking is the stress. I have caught myself recently daydreaming about doing something less stressful. I am in the grocery store and I wonder how nice it would be to simply ring up people's groceries all day long. I am in traffic and I look over and idly speculate how simple it would be to just be a bus driver. You know, non-stressful relatively mindless jobs without huge amounts of responsibility - and I would make about the same amount of money! Then I tell myself that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, etc. etc...

Q: What is your favorite kind of student?
A: Those who are intellectually curious and have a natural enthusiasm. I like my students opinionated but not mean-spirited. I like it when they are precocious and self-confident in their abilities yet not above laughing at themselves.

Some teachers are more interested in pleasing their students than in challenging them. I am not one of those. And I think the ideal teacher is somewhat of a benign tyrant, and I am not adverse to a spirit of competitive contentiousness in my classroom. As Milton put it, "Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making."

Q: What is your least favorite kind of student?
A: Those who are bullies to other students! A painful fact for me about teenagers is that theirs is a very tribal society where people are often mindlessly cruel to one another; this seems the very nature of the beast of adolescence, and I almost always seem impotent to reconcile the various rivalries and petty feuds that spring up among teenagers in my classes. *sigh* I also dislike students who are apathetic. Apathy is the death of learning! I am driven to distraction by the girl who just wants to paint her nails and look in the mirror and the boy who only wants to go out and play basketball. Unfortunately, it are often such unsuccessful but "cool" students who are precisely the ones others want to emulate! Coming to school without much desire to learn, these lazy and unmotivated students proceed to waste my time and their own. I often wish that they would leave my class and go do what they really want to do instead of pretending that occupying a seat all day long equals an education. School for them is not about learning, it is about gossiping with friends and the social and athletic scenes. *sigh* Dr. Johnson has claimed, "Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it." Looking out at students who are reluctant to invest the hard work required to learn deeply, I sometimes suspect he is right. *how sad!*

Yet I have also seen turnarounds where such students suddenly catch fire and there is nothing more exciting! They go from "F" students to the top of the class! Enthusiasm and attitude are everything!

Q: What about those students who cannot learn?
A: In years of teaching, I have never met a student who "couldn't" learn; I have met many who did not want to learn. There is a big difference between the two.

Galileo was correct when he said, "You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him to find it within himself." Nobody is always ready to invest what is necessary to truly learn, and some people never are ready to do so. That is reality. I sometimes hear professor from some university education department -- who has not taught in a real classroom in twenty years -- harp about how teachers "must" ensure conditions that all students achieve success in their classes. This is pie-in-the-sky baloney! Good teachers flunk those students -- and there will be some in almost any group of adolescents -- who, for whatever reason, don't make the grade. Teachers who pass all their students are probably not doing their job as it should be done. I constantly tell myself I should fail more of my students, but I lack the heart. Think about what it is like to be told, "I fail you!" On the other hand, I remind myself it is often an indispensable form of adult love to be hard with a young person. Adult responsibility -- as any parent worthy of the name will tell you.

I have failed classes in my past and been told I had to try again and do better. That was very much a valuable learning experience, in the larger scheme of things. But so many people today are so afraid of hurting the "self-esteem" of students that they let them slide and slide and slide. This does them a disservice. This also partially explains how so many young people arrive at adulthood having "passed" many grades of secondary education without being able to read or write very well. The most corrosively pernicious trend in education today, in my opinion, is the fact so many American schools have made self-esteem and emotional fulfillment more important than academic achievement. Instead of learning how to think and read and write, students come to look at school primarily as psychological health and social life stop-in center where the whole world revolves around them and their "feelings." There is plenty of time in school to examine feelings and identity -- in an English literature class, for example, in a narrative essay or in poem -- but school should not primarily be a giant therapy session. School should be a place where young adults are challenged to perform their best in their academic studies so they can acquire the skills to succeed in adult life.

Q: But in the same vein of thinking, do you think a teacher who flunks large amounts of their students incompetent?
A: Probably, although maybe all his/her students are numskulls. But I think it would be at least an unambiguous strong sign that something is going very wrong. But the reverse is equally true: if a teacher is passing all their students and yet they are two or three years below grade-level, something very much is not right.

Q: I have a teacher who cannot teacher his/her way out of a paper bag and is driving me crazy! As a teacher, do you have any advice?
A: That's a tough one. I would try to appreciate the fact that I could even go to school in a world where most people are too busy trying to scramble to get food to eat and eek out a living. Concentrate on that. Education is an individual responsibility. And even when teachers are bad or biased, the library remains as the great treasure house of knowledge; as Samuel Niger put it, "A good library is a place, a palace where the lofty spirits of all nations and generations meet." Competent, enthusiastic and helpful teachers are always a help; but the responsibility for learning lies primarily with the learner.

I was watching a movie about a ghetto school where one gangster in class shouts out, "This school sucks! I don't learn nothing!" A girl sitting to his left shot back at him: "It's your own damn fault! You can get an education at a drugstore if you want - there are books there!" I couldn't put it any better. Make the best with what you got and take responsibility for your own learning.

Q: I am a first year teacher struggling to learn the job. Do you have any advice?
A: Yes. Don't try too hard to be "friends" with your students. They already have their friends; they need you as their teacher. They badly need you in this role, and your failure in your job will stay with them for the rest of their lives!

In fact, a good friend of mine is doing the first year teaching thing and having the usual rough time. I would appreciate it if you would send Kylie a short e-mail with a few encouraging words!

Q: When do you want to kill elementary school teachers?
A: When I have students who arrive at the secondary level who cannot read! On the other hand, when well prepared and thoughtful students arrive to my classes I want to take all their elementary teachers out to dinner at an expensive restaurant.

Q: My God! How can someone not know how to read?
A: It astounds me. Like walking and swimming, I cannot remember a time when I could not read. I reckon there are some people whose brains are just not hitting on all cylinders. And there is the abject poverty where individuals who struggle to survive never look at books and reading and writing as much more than the machinations of an alien world. That thought depresses the hell out of me.

Q: What is the deal, Rich? Is the Internet and technology going to save the educational system or destroy any literacy still present in our society?
A: In my opinion, it will do neither. Intelligent and curious minds will have a powerful new tool to help them and those who could care less about learning or exploring will not benefit at all. My "C" students will still be "C" students and my "A" students will still be "A" students. I get a little scared for some reason when I see administrators getting ready to spend billions of dollars on technology for the classroom - it runs towards that "throw money at problems" solution that has never worked in the past with education. Attitudes need to change first. Until they do, no amount of money or high technology will measurably improve the American educational system, in my opinion.

I doubt the intractable old issues of literacy and learning will essentially change. For example, what does it matter that the great works of literature and philosophy are now freely accessible online when many people cannot read well enough to understand them? Or if they don't care? Yet for those who do care the Internet will undoubtedly be an invaluable tool for research and communication. I have found it invaluable of a number of different levels; I am almost more interested in the Internet as an idea than anything else. It seems to me a unique forum for intellectual disputation - even if most people use it more for entertainment or business.

I look upon the rise of the World Wide Web with much the same fervor as Walt Whitman looked at the creation of the telegraph in the mid-19th century could serve to build a "vital public sphere of communication can foster free and diverse speech, a sense of community, and purposeful action." But a truly global computer network brings with so much more opportunity than a simple telegraph! When in human history has an individual like me been able to independently post my ideas to so large an audience (40,000 visitors a month) worldwide for so little money (400 dollars a month in access and usage fees - a big chunk of my disposable income, nevertheless)? Is it not an exciting time to be alive!?! (I sometimes think it would be fun to philosophize about the Internet from the larger picture of the Guttenberg printing press, telephone, pluralism, microchip, etc. for a few hundred pages. But then I also think it might be more worthwhile to write a good romantic love novel.)

I find the Web fascinating and often thrilling - and sometimes utterly strange! I do not look at the Internet - as some do - in a context of "how to keep Johnny from getting to the Playboy Web website" (In the words of Jon Katz). I am unable to attend ancient Athenian drinking parties with Aristophanes and Socrates; I have, however, been privileged to enjoy fruitful e-mail exchanges on philosophy, history, love and life via the Internet. I thusly see the Web at its best as a vehicle for the sharing of ideas and debate and discussion.

Q: But you seem to know something about computers. Didn't they teach it to you in school?
A: When I was in school, there was an equally large amount of hyped rhetoric and frenetic carrying-ons about the dire need for training "tomorrow's leaders" to become computer literate in a world of "dramatic new technologies" altering the nature of society. Consequently, school officials had us study BASIC where we dutifully learned to write little programs which made smiley face appear and blink on the screen. This instruction had nothing to do with any education I received in school which substantially contributed to my mature worldview or ability to think critically. Although mildly interesting, computer instruction was pretty much a waste of time. (And this condemnation of computer instruction in the schools comes from a bona fide member of the first revolutionary generation to come of age as computers became an integral part of everyday life. A unique time in human history, no? It was -- still is! -- exciting to be a part of it!)

I think kids should learn about computers not in school but the way me and all my buddies did: screwing around with them late into the night in our own free time. We teachers have enough important stuff to teach without wasting time in class explaining how to use exotic non-essential tools like computers. Learning how to use a computer is easy; learning how to write clear English prose is hard. Learning how to think is the hardest skill of all; so let me re-phrase my earlier assertion and argue that schools should not push computer instruction when it does not teach them to think rationally and logically. To learn to think critically and independently, and to communicate to others something insightful is the work of a lifetime. Conversely, you can train a monkey to copy files, surf the World Wide Web, and play video games.

Q: But having so much information at their finger tips! It revolutionizes learning! Students today can --?
A: -- Information is not necessarily knowledge or wisdom, and too much information simply confuses the mind (especially the young mind). It does not matter how much information by itself can be accessed; it matters how much information can be effectively assimilated and internalized into your life and that is why teachers can be effective guides where computers cannot. Teachers serve as filters and interpreters, and this is important with children who lack a sense of context and the larger picture. Nine times out of ten, I get more out of an hour curled up with Milton or some other wise old sage than I get from three hours of Web surfing (and crawling into bed with a good book on a rainy day with nothing pending for the rest of the afternoon.... that is heaven!).

Perhaps the most important thing you can do in an age offering a surfeit of information is to make decisions about what is worthy of your time. As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Dost thou love Life? Then do not squander Time; for that's the stuff Life is made of." And searching out diamonds in the rough while filtering out all the crap is a waste of time; there is a big difference between websurfing and book reading. (I try to communicate that to my students. Online life can be perilous for those not grounded in a thorough education which gives perspective and a sense of the "bigger picture" to a young person as information explodes around them.) The whole Web to date archived onto many terabytes of storage is not the equal of the hundred or so pages of Plato's "The Republic" and Milton's "Paradise Lost," in my humble opinion. More information does not necessarily mean better information.

I think in the first part of life we accumulate experience, and then later on one tries to get rid of what's unnecessary. In this spirit, I try to read only the very best recent literature (last +-200 years), as well as all the Roman and Greek masterpieces, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Milton, Emerson, the Bible. In the future, I hope to pare my reading down even closer to the vital core. I like Quaker immigrant William Penn's advise to his children about books and reading:

"Have but few Books, but let them be well chosen and well read, whether of Religious or Civil Subjects... reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation. Reading your selves and Nature, in the Dealings and Conduct of Men, is the truest human wisdom. The Spirit of a Man knows the Things of Man, and more true Knowledge comes by Meditation and just Reflection than by Reading; for much Reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World."

That is what is meant by living a contemplative and thinking life. In contrast, the ability to quickly crunch millions of bits of information has nothing to do with thinking. Computers can only simulate the process of the human brain; they can only operate according to stores of logical instructions; and with respect to imaginative thinking, computers are a complete zero.

Q: I think a degree of space and isolation is required for a healthy sense of self. Don't you believe this is threatened by the constant stream of other people's opinions on computer networks in a wired world? Are we drowning in information?
A: No. I have a filter in my mind which allows me to use what I find useful and informative and discard the rest. In fact, most people always have had - and continue to have - such a filtering mechanism.

If an individual doesn't have such an ability, they have much deeper problems than simply being "threatened" by too many "opinions". It goes much deeper than that - and the power of the world's knowledge at one's fingertips is worth any distraction! I doubt that a true intellectual would back away from the challenge and adventure presented by the Internet. But the true worth of anyone's learning is not the amount of information consumed but the quantity of learning which results - the two are not synonymous by any means. True learning is the result of the processing and assimilation of raw information. As Roger Rosenblatt has said:

"Information is but one aspect of learning -- not as wide as knowledge nor as deep as wisdom. And though it may serve as the grounding for both knowledge and wisdom, information, in and of itself, is simply information."

To have access to vast stores of information, in of as itself, does not ensure learning. To have a physics textbook on your shelf, after all, does not mean you know the physical laws of nature.

To truly study and really understand difficult material takes scads of time and enormously hard work! Those program courses ones buys through the mail which promise to teach you Spanish in "three easy weeks" by merely listening to audio cassettes are lies. There is no substitute for blood, sweat, tears - and many years of hard work. We teachers make students memorize poems, read "A Tale of Two Cities," learn the Latin and Greek roots of words not commonly used, listen to a symphony. We do this not because it always is fun or easy, but so that students learn to habitually exercise the gray matter between their ears. Train the to think critically and effectively, and then in adult life the brain can be used productively.

Q: Interesting - but back to education and the Internet. But what about students whose parents don't have enough money for a computer?
A: Again, I think, nine times out of ten, those households also don't have any books on the premises. I think the better investment would be made buying some books. And if a computer still is a priority, you can buy used 80486s for two or three hundred bones. If you are a student of mine, I will even come to your house at night, hook up your computer, and install any Internet software you need for free. Money shouldn't be an impediment - you might not be cruising the Web in a cadillac, but you will be getting where you want to go.

Q: I am a parent. What books would you suggest that my child read?
A: That I cannot say. But I would guide your child to any books which cater to his or her tastes and let a natural enthusiasm take hold. I agree with Dr. Johnson when he said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both: read anything five hours a day, and you will soon be learned." But I would also say that the best thinking is the result of reading the best books. Don't waste your time on mediocrities!

No child - nor adult for that matter! - can be taught to read or write; but mentors/cheerleaders/role models are indispensable when individuals teach themselves how to read and write. When it comes to affairs of the mind, I am a Protestant who does not believe in any sort of priesthood mediating between myself and the Word. Nevertheless, mentors/cheerleaders/role are invaluable no matter what form they might assume; and the lack of such mentors, in my opinion, explains illiteracy in contemporary America more than any other single factor.

Q: Can you tell the difference between students who are avid readers and those who only read only when they are forced to (if then!)?
A: Definitely! The critical divide I see between successful and unsuccessful students is the ability to read well; this gap which separates the two types of readers starts out small but quickly grows larger with time. Years and years of reading and more reading fundamentally changes a person as intellects grow stronger and imaginations expand; the result is evident in lettered and thoughtful young adults. Conversely, I often see that reluctant readers by high school already have certain opportunities closed to them by virtue of their poor reading skills. And I suspect those who grow up without finding joy in books rarely change their ways later in life. I like the way Gabriela Mistral put it:

"La faena en favor del libro que corresponde cumplir a maestros y padres es la de despertar la apetencia del libro, pasar de allí al placer del mismo y rematar la empresa dejando un simple agrado promovido a pasión. Lo que no se hace pasión en la adolescencia se desmorona hacia la madurez relajada.

"Volver la lectura cotidianidad, o según dice Alfonso Reyes, 'cosa imposible de olvidar, como lavarse las manos...' Hacer leer, como se come, todos los días, hasta que la lectura sea, como el mirar, ejercicio natural, pero gozoso siempre. El hábito no se adquiere si él no promete y cumple placer."

Either accomplishing this or not is what separates a truly educated person from someone who is not, in my opinion. If I were a parent, I would be worried if my child sat in front of the computer hour after hour. But if my child always had his or her nose in a book, I would be both relieved and proud

Q: Interesting. What would you do to improve the American educational system?
A: Abolish the education departments in universities and government and take all the money and give real life teachers the TOOLS to get the job done. Classroom teachers are the gatekeepers of learning and we currently have too many bureaucrats sitting in their offices writing position papers and too few teachers actually teaching young people. Learning takes place in the classroom and not in some office in Washington D.C. or Sacramento. And as for the "research" coming out of Education Departments in universities nationwide, 99.9% of it isn't worth the paper on which it was printed, in my opinion. I certainly have found precious little of it to be helpful in my classroom. Yep, too many chiefs and not enough indians. It surprises me sometimes that more people don't see the problem.

And then I would graduate students from high school at 16 and send them to community colleges for general education classes; the last years and a half of high school are largely a waste of time, academically speaking. I would also move to collegiate block schedules instead of this factory-schedule everyday grind. And I would raise the standard of what is expected and then hold students accountable. Failing students would not automatically move to the next level in the disgraceful "social promotion" style that goes on today.

Q: What do "chiefs" and "indians" have to do with education? I don't understand!
A:Learning takes place between the teacher and the student. I read somewhere recently that the classroom teacher is the gateway to learning, the infantry of learning. Let me say it one more time: We have too many colonels and generals and not enough sergeants and lieutenants in the education war. The dramatic, in-person relationship of teacher to students will always be the essence of education. School boards and college education departments are peripheral to this and ought to humbly accept their merely supportive roles and endeavor chiefly to help improve classroom instruction by giving teachers the tools they need to succeed. But the opposite occurs in the form of tedious reams of official paperwork, petty regimentation, waste of time meetings, weak academic standards, lack of support and resources, poor pay, etc.

The reality is that education in the United States is politicized far beyond what is healthy in the past 30 years and everyone wastes time arguing and speechifying about social ills or planning utopias rather than rolling up their sleeves and getting to work teaching young people how to think!

Q: You know what, Rich? There are two kinds of people in this world. There are those who go to meetings, and those who get things done.
A: I agree! Public education in America is besieged with the former and badly needs more of the latter.

Q: This is not a critique of your site per se, but rather a thank you. Being a product of the American public school system, it is absolutely fascinating for me to be able to actually hear "nitty-gritty" and challenging accounts of morality and actions instead of being spoon-fed a politically correct version. Great of you to do so!
A: Thank you!

Q: What do you like most about your students?
A: Many are honest and curious young people whose minds soak up ideas like a sponge. They are enthusiastic and almost always interesting. Their energy can be infectious and it can make you feel young.

Q: What do you like least about your students?
A:The "pack mentality" where students band together and then turn on their peers who don't "fit in" or who aren't "cool." Young people can be cruel to each other in ways adults rarely are. Young people can also tire you out, as you try to keep up with their often unfocused, random energy.

Q: What single facet of the function of a teacher do find most attractive?
A: Being (hopefully) the partial conduit of accumulated human civilization and wisdom to the next generation. Following in the footsteps of Socrates.

Q: What facet of the function of a teacher do you find least attractive?
A: Being an authority figure.

Q: You can avoid being an "authority figure?"
A: As much as I would like to, I think not. I am hardly one of those teachers who are at heart frustrated drill sergeants. However, most teenagers simply are not mature enough to make rules for themselves and obey them consistently (nor are many adults!). Through hard experience, I have found that setting firm limits to what is acceptable and punishing those who violate them is absolutely indispensable to being a good teacher.

That is my least favorite part of the job. That and calling my student's parents. I would almost rather kiss a gorilla than call a stranger on the telephone.

Q: That "setting limits" stuff makes me feel uncomfortable. It sounds fascistic!
A: Oh, yeah? You obviously have never been the parent of a teenager (or teacher of them). It is my experience that young people (and old people too!) like to know what are the rules (provided they are reasonable) and then have them consistently enforced by authority.

Q: You obviously have seen many, many young persons come through your classroom. Any suggestions for a man who struggles to be as good a father as possible?
A: I do not know exactly what to say. Although I have no children, I have worked as a teacher long enough to have a healthy respect for the challenges, trauma, and joys of parenthood. Yet I would perhaps repeat one maxim I read recently and which experience has driven home to me in my students again and again: The best thing that a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Q: Interesting. If the kids around you seem to be doing inappropriate stuff at the moment they are just rejoicing in being kids and so they should, but I guess you know that already.
A: I will try to keep as much in mind the next time my patience is at an end.

It has been hard, but it has been fun - hellish as my students can be at times. One moment they love each other, and the next they're beating each other up or making faces while others are trying to work - no different than some adults I've known. Sometimes I go to professional "in-service" seminars and am astonished that my fellow teachers cannot shut up and listen attentively to the speaker. You think they would be sensitive to that! They are no different than their more recalcitrant students!

All I've wanted to do is be around students and to provoke and make them think; and the biggest thrill I get in life is watching their response.

Q: That's interesting how you talk about there not being terribly much difference between misbehaving children and adults.
A: Sure. I remember one psycho student who was arrested out of my class for having a large hunting knife, hand cuffs, and duct tape in his backpack. He had been threatening his classmates. One day a reporter is going to approach me and ask, "Mr. Geib, did you know Giovanni was going to be a psychopath years ago when he was in young class?" Sure, I knew. (Students, for violations less weighty than bringing weapons to school, are sent to the principal's office for breaking the rules. Adults, in a different stage of life, go to jail.) The converse is equally true. "Did you know Monica was going to be an inspiration to countless millions of struggling people?" Sure, I knew.

I often speculate on the kind of adults my students will become in the fullness of time. Parents, teachers, friends, fate - they will help to shape the form of their characters, but you can see the essential personality already in young people. The tree might grow this way or that with the years, but the slant of the frame is there already. It is interesting.

Q: Aren't you worried about losing your job to some computer? I think computers are going to replace teachers in the future.
A: Really? As my hero Clifford Stoll said:

"In the past, schools tried instructional filmstrips, movies, and television; some are still in use, but think of your own experience: name three multimedia programs that actually inspired you. Now name three teachers that made a difference in your life.

"I do remember that whenever I saw an educational film in high school, it meant fun for everyone. The teacher got time off, we were entertained, and nobody had to learn anything. Computers and the Internet do the same thing - they make it easy for everyone, but damn little teaching happens."

I concur completely with Stoll. (FYI: Stoll is a serious computer jockey and astronomer and knows whereof he speaks.)

Teaching and learning in the classroom (especially for children!) is a "human" activity, and will always be different than making widgets on the assembly line. As long as students and learning is "human" in this sense, I doubt teachers will be replaced by mechanical devices. Still not convinced? Look at the following quote by Thomas Edison in 1922:

"I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks."

Television and the entertainment industry as revolutionizing education in a positive manner? How is that for irony!

Q: How can you say that perhaps far into the future technology will not have radically changed learning and enabled us to learn by taking pills, implanting cells or information in our brains, using the subconscious, etc.
A: You may very well be right. However, I wonder if we will not have lost something in the translation in such learning. I truly do not believe there can be such shortcuts; education is never free. They journey is as important as the destination in life; you cannot omit the former without gutting the latter. The best teachers or teaching aides open the door, but you have to enter by yourself.

But who can say? Maybe they will find some way to learn calculus overnight by hypnosis or foreign languages through surgery. Perhaps they will discover the path to human happiness through pharmacology or biological engineering. In this 20th century we have made scientific breakthroughs enough to stagger the imagination of even the most scientific-minded of the 19th century! As Sir Francis Bacon claimed, rightly, "Time is the greatest innovator." What will the passage of time bring to the 21st century! Who can rightly say?

Some say we shall enjoy unparalleled understanding and knowledge through science and the reach of information technologies. Others say we will know less discomfort and greater leisure and pleasure through "progress." They may be right! Let the coming generations attain happiness and knowledge. They surely ought to ask themselves for what did their ancestors live, for what did they suffer? The branches move onwards and outward, but the human roots will remain forever the same.

Q: Let me get this right. I am reading the VERY EXTENSIVE website of a teacher who says that the Internet is overrated as an instructional tool?
A: I believe the Internet and its role in education is shamefully overhyped and exploited by politicians and school administrators. I think the Internet may one day play an important role in education, and it already is vital for professors and scientists exchanging data. However, learning (and teaching!) is a slow and painful process which often is no fun at all. That is the painful but honest truth. The idea that we can spruce it up and make it essentially more palatable to young people through computers is specious and seductively misleading. It leads to unrealistic expectations.

I plan on using the Internet seriously in my work, although I doubt we ever will be doing serious hacking during class time. I plan to use the Internet as a tool which will SUPPLEMENT teaching that I hope will be outstanding in the same way I was taught by my best teachers, they by inspired teachers before them, etc. The end remains the same, even as the means change.

Q: Technology is the devil - a creeping totalitarianism no less dangerous than the Soviet or Nazi versions, only more insidious. People like you who buy into -- consciously or not -- the modern effort to clean up human messiness, to find a nice, rational, hygienic short-cut to a plastic (ie. false) happiness via technology. It is a specious "improvement" in our collective human condition. It is a moral cowardice and self-deception on your behalf not to speak out against technology, let alone to contribute to it as you have in this webpage. Technology is inherently anti-human.
A: Creeping totalitarianism? Soviets and Nazis? The devil?? Technology is only a human tool which we can apply or misapply to human ends that do not change over time. I don't care per se about technology; I care about how I can use it to improve my life. I do use it, obviously; but I don't use it for its own sake: it is for me a tool and not a toy. I don't see technology as the centerpiece of my life. I don't think my life would be all that different without it.

My grandfather lived in a time mostly innocent of our relatively high-technology. I move smoothly in our world of omnipresent microprocessors and globalized digital communication. But I disagree that my life -- in any essential way -- is much different than my grandfather's; although I never knew him well, many persons have commented on how my grandfather and I are so alike in our adult lives: our shared passion for the art of J.S. Bach and P.B. Shelley, a tendency to womanize in our youths, the ability to recite by memory long passages of our favorite poetry extemporaneously. That is what is important in life, that tells people who we are; and the technology and other external trappings are mere window dressings of strictly secondary importance. So my grandfather lived in a time with less technology? So I live in a culture defined by a relatively higher technology? So what! I can show you the direct line from my grandfather to me.

I don't agree that technology is as important or tyrannical as you claim it to be and find such neo-Luddite arguments exaggerated. But I also reject the idea some people put forth that technology should be the inexorable pacesetter: that computers are the measure of all things, that man should conform to the machine. I see it as did Henry David Thoreau when he said, "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end." Humanity changes yet always remains the same; there is the never-ending change of Heraclitus, the essential continuity of Parmenides: the same as it ever was, different than it ever was.

Q: You speak in paradoxes and contradictions?
A: Sometimes I do.

Q: Wait a minutes! So you don't think books and the written word will be replaced in our society by movies, music videos, and video games?
A: Hardly! I think some of the very best movies qualify as art in the highest sense of the word, but those are relatively few in number. Books are the cornerstone of our civilization, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. As Emerson said, "In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity." As Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed, "A book should teach us to enjoy life, or to endure it." I usually read three or four books at a time from different authors, different centuries. Knowing these books await me at the end of a long day makes life more livable. When I am disappointed or dispirited I invariably pull Emerson or Thoreau off the shelves of my library; upon hearing their words, I almost always feel better about myself, my friends, my country, and the world generally. Such authors speak directly to me and my struggle to be happy and to live a life of principle towards some definite purpose. They inspire me to fight on, even when the odds seems sharply in my disfavor and sadness and worries assail me from all sides.

But I digress from your question...

Q: Shit, Rich! I mean, the world in the era of computer video games, global communications, and rapid technological and economic change no longer has the patience to read a compound sentence!
A: You are mistaken. I enjoy a good compound sentence and enjoy a good ¢50 word when used appositely; and there are many like me in the world. Moreover, I suspect 20 years ago the average Joe on the street was not so much better educated and eloquent than today. I suspect yesterday was not so happy as some might have you believe; and the techno-barbarians are not presently knocking on the gates to sack the libraries and burn the universities. Dr. Johnson reminds us, "Though it is evident, that not more than one age or people can deserve the censure of being more averse from learning than any other, yet at all times knowledge must have encountered impediments, and wit been mortified with contempt, or harassed with persecution." How true!

Q: It is a mistake to think that books have come to stay. The human race did without them for thousands of years and may decide to do without them again.
A: You may be right! Maybe a new Dark Ages will descend on us! But wherever a few books survive here and there, they will just be waiting in cave or abandoned cellar for a new generation to discover them. It is a hard thing to eradicate books and literacy from the world entirely.

Q: I think it is insightful how you talk about the future and the present. In a thousand years maybe we'll fly explore other galaxies, the cut of jackets will be different, we'll have discovered a sixth sense, maybe even developed it -- I don't know. Bit life will be the same -- difficult, full of unknowns, and happy. In a thousand years, just like today, people will sigh and say, oh, how hard it is to be alive. They'll still be scared of death, and won't want to die.
A: I agree with you. Completely.

Q: Do you enjoy the books you read in the classes you teach?
A: I read a lot of literature for my job which doesn't interest me too much. It is appropriate material for students in adolescence, but as adults we should strive for more and challenge ourselves - really push the envelope. I don't dislike what my students read. But I would not be reading it on my own. Still, I bet it is better than a lot of the cheap thrillers and romances what I see in the aisles at the supermarket. And I have no control over the books which are assigned in my literature classes.

I totally agree with Robert Maynard Hutchins when he claimed over 50 years ago: "We have been so preoccupied with trying to find out how to teach everybody to read anything that we have forgotten the importance of what is read. Yet it is obvious that if we succeeded in teaching everybody to read, and everybody read nothing but pulp magazines, obscene literature and Mein Kampf, the last state of the nation would be worse than the first." And the situation is much more grave today than it was in Hutchin's time! How many copies of Howard Stern's autobiography did they finally sell? We should look to more from the best literature than entertainment or political consciousness raising.

We should read for instruction as well as for entertainment. (Unfortunately, we in the United States seem to be a culture much more in tune with "entertainment" than "instruction.") Any book which I read merely for entertainment I consider a waste of precious time, as I usually forget all about it within a week or a month -- the same goes for movies and other works of art. It is like Chinese food which passes through my system within an hour and leaves hardly a trace that it was ever there. I can think of many "blockbuster movies" and "record selling" popular rock music songs from my lifetime, for example, which nobody will remember one hundred years from today.

Q: But those cheap Harlequin romances which sell by the gazillions are the only real romance being written and read today!
A: You may be right! I like the irony! And what does that say about our culture?

Q: Do you like hardcover or paperback books more?
A: Neither. But I do prefer older books which wear their years on them rather than brand new ones which scream "factory mass production." I like books with personalities.

Q: Books with their own personalities? What in the hey are you talking about?
A: Perhaps my favorite book is an old and musty copy of Emerson's "The Conduct of Life" that travels with me in my car and from which I read almost everyday. I bought it from the Berkeluow's Used Book Store in the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco, and the soft delicate leather bound book is almost 90 years old and fairly wreaks of all the agelessness of the words of wisdom found within it. I behold this great book with a spirit of reverence and treat it with considerable care and attention lest it fall apart. Conversely, I look upon the stacks of slick hardback copies of Donald Trump's "The Art of the Deal" fresh off the presses in the bookstore as symbolic of all the imperious arrogance and superficiality of that man. Such a book is not and never will be my friend.

Does that make it any clearer?

Q: Yes, thank you. I heard you are teaching at a new school. Does that school have a lot of technology?
A: Yes. But the reasons why the school provides an excellent education to its students has to do with factors that only tangentially have anything to do with computers.

At my present school, I look at the students straining and complaining under the weight of two hours of homework every night. I look at the teachers pushing, pleading, cajoling, threatening their students to do better and achieve more. THAT is what makes the education profound. Show me a computer which can do that.

Q: It is different than being a teacher in the inner-city?
A: I am still in culture shock! It is so different that I hardly know where to begin explaining. Nearly everyday I give thanks in having been offered a job in my present school.

Q: I see you taught in a troubled inner-city as a new teacher. Now that you are an experienced teacher, would you be willing to give it another try?
A: No way. When children are coddled and undisciplined in the schools, they are the first to suffer, the teachers second, and families most of all. I learned life is too short and precious for that; I get tired just thinking about trying to do that job again.

Q: You spoke of your frustration in finding so few of your Pico-Union students without computers at home. Well, duh, fuck it, THEY ARE SURVIVING AND TRYING TO PROVIDE FOR THEIR CHILDREN'S FOOD AND CLOTHING AND HOUSING AND ELECTRICITY AND HEAT. I know that you know this too, but you just sounded so much like a whiny white boy gone to the ghetto and complaining.
A: I didn't care so much about my students not having computers as their not knowing how to read - or so many of them not caring about learning how to read. If they don't learn how to read, the chances of them making it out of the ghetto are next to nil!

My reaction to the insanity of that whole area was to get a giant broom and sweep it all clean... but that we call "vigilantism" and is against the laws of the land which mean so little there. That may be "whiny white boy" talking, or it might just be common sense from a person who gave a shit. I'll let you decide.

Q: I don't have time right now to read your story about teaching in Pico-Union in complete detail, but I have read enough to know I am in a very similar situation as to the one you describe. It's been a horrifying, learning experience. Thank you for sharing yours, I don't feel so alone.
A: You are most welcome; you are not alone. Make a plan, get teaching experience; and then get out and teach someplace better. You are not the first to have gone down this particular path, and you will not be the last.

Q: Tonight I spent an hour reading your L.A. inner-city blues teaching experience. Even though I am in Sacramento, 3,000 miles away, the situation is largely the same. Your web page comforted me -- we are not alone. It reminded me how it is healthy to be angry at the broken glass on the yard where the children play, about the drugged mothers who won't come pick their children up from school. I share your frustration that the children are so behind. When I taught Kindergarten last year I was struck how these five-year-olds in my care knew less than my three-year-old niece in Vermont. These kids come to school never have seen a book, let alone having been read to!
A: That is recompense enough for the fifty or so drafts I made of that page! I sat there in my classroom outraged as I struggled to do that near impossible job, and for years I let germinate in my subconscious the story I would one day write and tell to the world. "The world must know!" I said to myself, seething in the indignation of outraged youth.

My boss there, principal Esther Rivera, did her job about as best she could. She certainly was certainly not responsible for the gangs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare, etc. of Pico-Union, Los Angeles. She did not make LAUSD district policy but merely implemented it. But I still feel angry somewhere there in a classroom in that poor-excuse-for-a-school with no experience whatsoever and let me twist in the wind; and it gives me enormous personal satisfaction to know that, years after the fact and a stage or two later in my own life, some 1,000 people per month still read about how pathetic the circumstances were at her campus. This page is my revenge, and revenge is always a dish best served cold.

Q: Do you like to be praised for your webpages?
A: Sure! It beats getting slammed. But I would be less praised and more understood, if I had my any say in the matter.

Sometimes people write me saying, "I didn't like what you said about this political issue or that contemporary problem! It upset me! It made me feel anxious and uneasy!" Of course I welcome reader opinions; but I did not make this webpage primarily to get people to like me but to express what I think and feel. If that hurts some people's feelings... well, that does not bother me overly much. Anyone who stands up and speaks honestly from the heart will incur the wrath of certain persons who bitterly disagree with them. That is natural. But it is worth it in the long-term to stand up and say your piece, in my opinion. Not every disagreement in opinion is a disagreement of principle.

Q: It must float your ego to get hortatory e-mail!
A: It does not impress me or inflate my ego much, since I do not judge myself and my writing against Joe Blow on the Street (or his opinion of what is "good") but by the old masters who hold my deepest respect. As such, it can be very painful to reflect about the quality of my wepbages. Some parts are not so bad, but it is a long way from what it could be. So it goes.

Q: OK - back to your job. What do you like most about your new school?
A: I finally feel like I am just one more scholar (in my own humble way) in a learning community. I feel like I am in a place devoted to learning and the life of the mind. In my last school, many of the teachers were more youth counselors or social activists than independently curious scholars pursuing the truth. To be specific, many teachers in that old school shared the socialist orientation that the point of human life (and school) should be the satisfaction of needs or the actualization of potential; this is subtly but importantly contrasted with my view that life (and school!) should be a test or a challenge, and that it is when we are tested and challenged that we truly achieve. I always set very high standards (challenging them!) for my students and enjoy watching them sweat, bleed, and cry to meet them, but some teachers (the "socialist" minded) have claimed that I crush the less talented and unmotivated by setting the academic bar too high. I am unmoved by their arguments.

I am also relatively unsympathetic to the similar argument, put forth now and again to me, that young people are "damaged" by being given work that is "too difficult" for them. In my experience, young adults are more often than not bored in school by work that is uninteresting and rarely challenging. My students may never take a fancy to the subjects I teach, but I hope at least they can see I will not waste their time in how I teach them: I rarely assign rote exercises or demeaning busy-work, and almost all essays are open-ended where students can employ creativity and individual initiative in their answers (ie. there is no one "right" answer). I will work my students hard, and I will work hard myself as their teacher -- I never ask of my students a level of intensity I am not willing to equal! But exhausted students can then rest happy at the end of the semester knowing that through the blood, sweat, and tears they learned something of value. The teacher (myself!) can rest easy and satisfied knowing he taught his fingers to the bone. In my experience, if you challenge students to perform above what they are accustomed to they often respond. And what about those who didn't? Well, they probably were not going to respond anyway! And if I set the standards high for myself with ambitious goals, I also get excited! This enthusiasm translates into more commitment and better teaching on my behalf.

I lend a ready, sympathetic ear to all my students who have problems in their familial or social lives, but I never lose sight of the fact that my primary obligation is to TEACH them the liberal arts (ie. language and history) that I am licensed and paid to teach. Life is serious, life is real. No excuses. Enough said.

Q: How is the new job going?
A: Stressful. I am teaching in both the English and social science departments and so that means two sets of curriculum, bosses, meetings, etc. I feel overextended, and my apartment is a mass of scattered papers, books, etc. in preparation for classes. Thank God I don't have a family also clamoring for my attention! But I am growing both as a learner and a teacher, and that is everything to me. So it goes well, thank you.

Q: What do like least about it?
A: The extreme preoccupation with grades and test scores. Never having cared much about those when I was a student, it is at times hard for me to understand why a person becomes undone and despondent over a "C" on a test or essay. And the idea that grades or test scores properly gauge a person's education or learning (much less intelligence!) is one of the strangest ideas I have ever heard! In my experience, those who have the highest grades in my classes are those who work the hardest, not necessarily those who have learned or know the most.

Memo to Parents: Much as I appreciate your enthusiasm, it is not helpful to attack me with respect to your child's grades. How can your child do better? That's easy: Do ALL homework, study harder, perform better on tests and essays.

*sigh*

Assessment is perhaps the least favorite part of being a teacher for me. I am a Romantic, and would teach for the love of my subject and desire to proselytize love poetry and the philosophy of the ancients to my students for free (if I didn't have to eat and provide a roof over my head). But all too often teaching in reality is a job for me, school too often for my students simply a way to someday get a good job. An education could (should!) be so much more!

In my own experience, philosophy and literature of the highest rank which I encountered transformed me and, hopefully, enriched my life. I was no longer the same after reading, pondering, and internalizing it. How do you give that a grade? If I had my way, I would not give any grades out at all!

Q: But then how would we hold young people accountable for their learning? How would we motivate them to strive and achieve?
A: Yeah, yeah, yeah... I know all about that! Let's change the topic; this is not something I really want to get into.

Q: That is fine with me! Let us move on. There seems so much press about teenage boys committing violent crimes, abusing drugs and alcohol, getting their girlfriends pregnant, etc. As a teacher, how would you propose to solve these problems?
A: Teenage boys made hyperkinetic by torrents of testosterone coursing through their quivering bodies will forever be dangerously prone to reckless and anti-social behavior - I was no different myself at that age. I think the best we adults can do is engage that amazing energy in tightly scheduled days of school, sports, studying, school, sports, studying, school, sports, studying.... until at the end of the day the boys collapse with fatigue in their beds. That is the best way to channel adolescent energies into positive paths. In my experience, it is when teenage boys get bored that they start getting into fights, abusing drugs or drinking, chasing girls, looking for trouble, etc.

And every teenage boy in his life needs at least one adult male presence who if he loves and respects he also fears. This is important, I think. James Q. Wilson, the UCLA professor emeritus and social critic, has observed that it is mothers who establish the moral tone of a community, but fathers who enforce it, and that the absence of fathers -- through divorce, abandonment, drug abuse, violence, and just plain parental malpractice! -- is a big factor in the chaotic social climate of the most troubled inner-city neighbors. When armed teenagers, drug pushers, and vagrants are permitted to set the tone in public parks, it is not the police who lose. It is the poor urban families who lose their backyards. And it are not only poor urban areas which suffer this blight.

Q: Of course you have met many fathers who are superb role models for their children?
A: Of course. I can tell a lot about a child by meeting their parents.

Q: Still there will be some that continue to act out and become more seriously involved in illegal activities?
A: That is probably true. I heard recently the following which puts it well: "One type learns from books. One type learns from observations. And one type just has to urinate on the electric fence himself." There are those who never learn and just keep on urinating on the electric fence over and over. That is why we build prisons.

Q: That all sounds very macho. I'm not sure if I like that.
A: Well, I'm sorry about that. But I just mentioned certain "truths" about masculinity as I have learned them. To ignore or deprecate them is to only create more problems - too many feminists try to feminize men or disrespect masculinity and we all see the negative consequences of that. We need to embrace and honor what is masculine the same as the feminine.

Men are the way they are and no amount of gnashing of teeth will change that. I sometimes hear men bitching about women and I think that is equally counter-productive - the "why can't women be more like men?" and "why can't men be more like women?" arguments get us nowhere. The sexes will never truly understand each other, yet we should always respectfully work towards acceptance and appreciation. Attitude is everything.

As Camille Paglia recently claimed:

Masculinity, much as bitterly anti-male ideologues like Gloria Steinem, Marilyn French and Susan Faludi may detest and fear it, is something real, positive and, yes, natural. When it is denigrated and denied in a culture, boys spend a lifetime trying to be men. It is other men, not women, who set the rules of manhood. Women's complaints will always be endless, since men can never be women. Men who listen only to women have castrated themselves.

I like how she says that. Very insightful.

Q: I am a mother who fears sometimes for my two boys who seem continually bent on self-destruction. In your opinion, do I worry too much? Is it going to turn out OK for them?
A: I do not know. But I was a very aggressive young man and my father still bitterly recounts all the phone calls he got from me telling him I was in the emergency room again with yet another concussion or broken bone. And my brother was worse than me! "You make these beautiful babies," my father still laments, "and then they proceed to destroy themselves!" But he does overstate things; boys will be boys, and you have to let them. I, in the end, grew up to be a mostly sensible adult. With a little luck, your boys will also make it safely into manhood.

Q: I think you gloss over the risks of being adolescent, for both boys and girls. You say that sports and studies will keep them away from dangerous activities. Is that not cutting the Gordian knot? Is it that simple?
A: I never said involvement with sports or academics is some sort of magical bullet providing immunity from "dangerous activities." In my experience, plenty of young people (and not so young people!) start running with the "bad crowd" and get into drugs and the drug culture (with violence and often crime accompanying it) not so much because they love drugs as that they have failed to find what they need in worship, good works, spiritual exercise, and the discipline of living a good life. They live lives free of challenge or purpose, their routines revolve around material comfort and shallow self-interest; and so of course they are bored out of their skulls. In looking to fill the vacuum inside themselves, they start looking around; these are teenagers into experimentation and rebellion, after all, and are in the process of establishing their own identities and resolving inner conflicts. But too often they have been raised to expect never to have to suffer. They want a pill for every ill. They regard pain and alienation as abnormal and intolerable; it are drugs that offer a cure to the curse of being human. Drugs promise a release from the guilt, embarrassment, and the rejection. Drugs are easy; all you have to do is acquire and ingest them. You feel better for a spell. They help you cope with the boredom. They calm you. They pep you up. Why not?

And so for many teenagers drugs are a crutch, an easy-out, a way to find an identity. Drug taking is often a way to find acceptance in a culture -- the drug culture, a way of coping. You'll have friends with which to share something. You'll have an identity. You'll have an explanation for the many troubles you had long before you discovered drugs and druggies. The dynamic is no different with the gangs and the gang subculture: it is all a Faustian agreement where a young person would sell their soul and risk everything in search of a purported good. They are looking for positive ends, but they are looking in all the wrong places! As a teacher, I see this almost everyday in certain of my students. It breaks my heart, and often I am seemingly unable to do anything about it.

This explains, in my opinion, much of the unhappiness and discontent which spurs young people to join gangs or cults, see therapists, gurus, and spiritual advisors, or drug themselves into a stupor. The rate of suicide has for people fifteen to twenty-four has tripled since 1960! Drug abuse has gone through the ceiling in that same period! And look at how some teenagers today come to campus heavily armed and then try to murder as many of their classmates and teachers as possible and blow up the school! When a young person (or any person!) finds what they need through sports, art, politics, religion, or academics, they live lives with direction and set goals they can work towards; and this at least has the potential to help and not drag them down as they try to learn to live successfully and make sense of the world. Adolescents left to their own devices have less luck finding such paths. When adults don't take the time and effort to guide youth and inculcate positive attitudes and values in young people, then you have this cultural drift towards nihilism and a generalized confusion in the United States that I condemn time after time both in this FAQ and in my other webpages. (Much of this problem I lay at the feet of the baby boomers who preceded me, a generation of mostly failed teachers and parents! A generation stuck in the adolescent!)

I hope you understand me better now.

Q: Yes, bit it has always been the case that the kids who are so ready to throw away their lives are relatively few in number. But as seen in these recent school shootings, even a small minority can cause serious havoc!
A: True enough! Every time I see one truly screwed up teenager, I look back at all the other ones I see daily who are decent people headed towards successful, well-adjusted lives. Some violent, tragic incident occurs with teenagers and then the entire adult world hysterically throws up its hands and declaims, "What has the youth of today come to!?!" A bit of common sense is called for here, methinks. It is not like adults don't ever show up to their workplaces and shoot the place up! It is not as if adults never overdose on drugs or commit suicide! We should then be a little less disingenuous when it comes to teenagers and their trespasses.

Q: Yes, bit it has always been the case that the kids who are so ready to throw away their lives are relatively few in number. But as seen in these recent school shootings, even a small minority can cause serious havoc!
A: There is no doubt about that, in my opinion.

Q: But if you are pre-disposed to self-destructive or aggression and violence, you can find like-minded people in high school and they will validate your experience. You can become part of an isolated group that family and friends don't know about, and that group can exchange information on getting or making weapons or consuming drugs.
A: There is no doubt about that, in my opinion.

I believe we have exhausted this sad-sack subject of seriously troubled teenagers. Let's move on!

Q: I agree, so let's move on. That's interesting. What is the single most important thing you try to impart to your students?
A: To be respectful and considerate in dealing with others. I cannot abide rudeness in students! There are many things we can't be in this world, through no fault of our own; but we can always be polite. It is not so hard!

Q: Do you have any advice to former or current students?
A: Ahhhh.... Be you familiar, but by no means vulgar... give every man thy ear, but few thy voice... neither a borrower nor a lender be... to thine ownself be true...

Q: - No! No! No! Something original!
A: Original? Well, I would suggest to my students that if they wanted to truly be unique, simply be a nice person in this world. That is the way to be the biggest rebel of all today! As my hero Walter Miller put it in our age of rap music and "in your face" culture: "Being truly nice is the true counterculture of our time."

I wish more young people would be rebels in this way. As Dr. Charles Ross Parke wrote in his diary during the feeding frenzy of the California gold rush in 1850:

"Many human beings, like dogs, are mere followers. They lack the disposition to lead. They imitate. Such men are Christians, pagans, or devils according to their surroundings. Step by step, they go one way or the other."

I wish my students would look deeply into who they really are and what they want to do with their lives and act accordingly - and not simply the follow the crowd or mouth the words that others speak without really believing them, following the path least taken, so to speak. And also that they find loving nights to follow happy days!

Q: When you were a student did you ever give your teachers problems?
A: I was pretty much a good kid, but I had my moments in middle school. Almost everyone has their bad days at that age, or so I have learned in being a teacher myself.

I regret those few ungraceful moments with my parents years later.

Q: Did you get good grades in school?
A: I was not a standout student at all; I earned an amazingly diverse number of "F's" and "A's" in my classes. If I liked a teacher and a subject, wild horses could not stop me. If not interested, I would do absolutely nothing and stare stubbornly into the teacher's glare.

In college, I was even more of an irregular student as life seemed to offer so many more educational opportunities than could be found in the classroom. And I hated my professional teacher education classes so much I almost did not finish the program - even after having invested years of my life and thousands of dollars in it!

Q: So you would whine then and say you did not deserve any of the bad grades you received!
A: No. I deserved the bad grades I got. I just refuse to believe they are very important. One of the most repugnant ideas of the current educational system is the equating of grade point averages and test scores with educational achievement, in my opinion.

Q: Any chance of you going back to school for an advanced degree?
A: My father has urged me to do that - and even graciously offered to pay my tuition, but I have learned such a distaste for universities that I have been unable to bring myself to do it!

Q: When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?
A: Believe it or not, I wanted to be a soldier or a policeman! That did not long survive seeing people die violent deaths or associating with those who caused people to die such deaths.

Q: A soldier or a policeman?
A: Yep. The soldiering is a tradition in my family and the policeman comes from a naïveté of wanting to put violent predators in jail. It came from actually seeing murdered persons. I learned it is not at all so simple. I was young. I was idealistic. I would have been one of those persons that volunteered to go fight in Vietnam if I had been born twenty years earlier. Do you understand?

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it best:

"At one time my only wish was to be a police official. It seemed to me to be an occupation for my sleepless intriguing mind. I had the idea that there, among criminals, were people to fight: clever, vigorous, crafty fellows. Later I realized that it was good that I did not become one, for most police cases involve misery and wretchedness - not crimes and scandals."

Q: Are you a pacifist or something now?
A: No. I believe in evil as an distinct and independent force in the world, and not as mere accident or result of social circumstance. As I concluded after years of hanging around downtown Los Angeles: "It is a sad but true fact that in this world there exists violent and depraved individuals with whom the only profitable discourse may be had over the barrel of a gun." It is just that I prefer to give such persons a wide berth nowadays.

Q: You are dehumanizing those people who grew up in violent circumstances and are only products of their environment!
A: I am dehumanizing them? You are patronizing them - not taking them seriously! We all are born with the freedom to choose our paths or change our ways if we have erred - especially in adulthood. I have all the sympathy in the world for some poor kid who grew up painfully in some Godforsaken place surrounded by abuse and chaos, but as he arrives at adulthood and hardens into a monster I think he deserves to be blown out of his socks next time he tries to take something (money, respect, life) from another person.

This is what experience has taught me.

Q: What do you mean, "That is what experience taught you?"
A: When a predator wants something from and you and is not disposed to listen to reason, you had best find the biggest stick you can and hit the person as hard as you can. To stand there toe-to-toe with such an individual pleading that "surely there must be some mistake! I have done nothing to you!" is to surrender yourself as a victim. Fight for your life!

Q: That sounds like a pretty American cowboy-ish take on violent conflict!
A: Really? I highly doubt it would be any different for somebody in the jungles of Rwanda, slums of Rio de Janeiro, back alleys of Jerusalem, or Algerian countryside. Murder is murder. And being a victim is the same everywhere - it is a truly international phenomenon which links untold millions today, tomorrow, and throughout history. Conversely, everyone has the right to defend themselves.

Q: But truly it is never too late for a person to repent if they have done wrong to others?
A: True enough.

Q: Your insensitive comment lacks heart. But heart is a feminine virtue. Heart does not glorify war, violence, or hate. Heart does not say killing the bad guy will solve the problem.
A: Heart is a human virtue, not an exclusively "feminine" one. And the heart must combine with the mind to create a balanced mix; too much of one without the other leads to imbalance and infirmity. Soft-headed thought is as dangerous as cold-hearted sentiment.

Q: I am a feminist and see in your attitude about guns and violence the virus of the culture of honor which teaches males to avenger perceived slights and insults. We as a culture need to diminish the social disease of violence by combating the belief that only through aggression and lethal force can disagreements be settled. Too many young men today are raised by their fathers to use and value guns all through their lives.
A: I dislike strongly the extremes of the "culture of honor," as you put it, where men vainly fight ridiculous duels over personal insults to their "honor" - such as the one which took the lives of the brilliant Alexander Hamilton and Alexandre Pushkin so wastefully. But there are reasons why I would kill another man -- or woman, for that matter -- and guns are an excellent way to do that. I do not regret having learned about them. I would not regret teaching others.

I hardly believe that violence is the best way to settle disagreements. Nevertheless, it is sometimes the only way. After working in the county jail and seeing the unbelievable people who live there, I promised myself I never ever would live without a gun - even as I have learned to dislike them intimately in adult life. Guns are effective tools for killing other people, and I hold it an important skill that I do not regret to have learned how to use them - even at a young age. My father taught me much of this and experience has only served to reinforce the wisdom his teachings. If I ever have a child - male or female - I will teach the same as my father taught me. If you would believe that anyone who has the least interest in owning a gun is criminal, testosterone-challenged, or an ill-educated redneck, think again.

I hope you understand me better now.

Q: We CAN as a society defeat macho codes of masculinity! The Vikings were once the most aggressive and barbarous of men, but today in Scandinavia you don't hear about squadrons of marauding berserkers!
A: True. But the 20th century descendents of the Vikings proved to be made of stern enough stuff in that fateful year of 1939 when the Soviets invaded Finland and the Nazis invaded Norway. The Scandinavians showed themselves able to shoot straight as they fought valiantly and fiercely against vastly superior forces. They had not completely forgotten how to fight!

It is important to know how to fight. I learned that lesson relatively young and never forgot it.

Q: When I read about the debate over gun control in this country, I can't even take sides, I can't even breathe properly, because with children dying all around us I cannot believe we are even having a debate! I think your teaching your children how to shoot a gun is almost parental incompetence! You wouldn't teach your children to have sex, drink alcohol, gamble for money, or partake in other adult activities! Why then would you endanger the lives of other people by teaching children to use deadly weapons more effectively?
A: Your argument is a specious one in that you equate the ownership and ability to use a firearm effectively with being inherently a threat to the community; and you also mistake a chronic irritant to society such as gun violence for a full-blown crisis: millions and millions are the fathers past, present, and future who have taught their children gun discipline, responsibility, upkeep and marksmanship without any resulting deadly accidents or murders. Reading the newspaper or hearing of some knucklehead treating a gun as if it were a toy, I often think that MORE young people rather than less should receive this kind of instruction from their elders. In a thousand subtle but invaluable ways we do teach young people -- for better or for worse! -- through our examples almost every day how one should handle firearms, drink alcohol, make love, gamble, and comport oneself generally. Because young people lack life experience does not mean they are stupid; they have eyes, they can see.

One afternoon when we were kids my brother and I were running around the house animatedly emulating Bonnie and Clyde in the middle of one of their bank robbery sprees. "They were self-centered cowards!" spoke my father to us sharply, making us stop dead in our tracks and causing my blood to run cold. Being so usually a placid and gentle man, my father very seldomly spoke to my brother and myself that way. "They shot people just for money! People with families, with children, people just like your mother and me! If someone shot us, would you want people to glorify their lives like that?" Now look at the nuance of the lesson as a child I am hearing: the example of this bookish man that reads Yeats' poetry to his children at the dinner table is upbraiding his sons for making light of gun violence but who also served as a soldier in war, taught his children to use a firearm effectively, and believed in standing up for yourself and what you believe. Yes! Our parents are our first and foremost teachers! Not only in youth but all throughout our lives is this evidenced!

Look: I sometimes meet people like you (usually affluent and naive, with someone else to fight for them) who have this attitude that guns -- no, all weapons! -- by themselves are evil things to be shunned by peaceful people of good will. Such an pie-in-the-sky attitude is not justifiable in a thorough examination of life on earth where there exist people who will harm you, if you let them. To love peace and abhor violence is one thing; to be a soft-headed dreamer and potential lamb for the wolves is quite another. And I fear with only people like you raising the next generation we would become a nation of mewling puking milksop men!

Q: As a mother of young boys and as a citizen of this country, I find your attitude towards guns to be incredibly irresponsible and dangerous!
A: We obviously disagree on this issue...

Q: If you ever had children, would you teach them how to shoot a gun?
A: Yes, exactly as my father taught me.

Q: Don't you see? Don't you admit that this is a terribly dangerous activity to be teaching children? You're equipping young people to become violent killers!
A: Well, as a woman you're equipped to be a prostitute. But you're not one, are you?

Q: It are violent, macho men such as yourself who do so much damage to the world and humanity!
A: The world is equally burdened with brutal, vain soldiers who lack subtlety, and with spineless equivocators who lack vigor and fortitude. I believe in the "Golden Mean" between the two extremes where a person could act according to specifics of the situation. I like the way Plato, in one of his dialogues, defined the mix of an ideal education:

"The one [extreme] producing a temper of hardness and ferocity, the other of softness and effeminacy," I replied.

"Yes," he said, "I am quite aware that the mere athlete becomes too much of a savage, and that the mere musician is melted and softened beyond what is good for him."

"Yet surely," I said, "this ferocity only comes from spirit, which, if rightly educated, would give courage, but, if too much intensified, is liable to become hard and brutal."

I agree with Plato and think it bad to be "brutal" and "savage" like someone who is merely an "athlete," and equally bad to be too "effeminate" and "soft" like another who is only a "musician." I always idolized the many English classicists who survived the grinding misery and prolific death of the WWI trenches as soldiers to return to civilian life and go on to produce first-rate translations of Aristophanes or Horace. Wandering around the musty corridors of Cambridge University at all of 23 years of age, I wrote the following: "To my mind, this English soldier/scholar is almost a Renaissance man who is able to move skillfully through the mud and danger of wartime Europe as well as through the Greek of Homer or the 'Lives' of Plutarch."

This glowing opinion of the ideal of the English gentleman-officer has not changed at all in the years since. A mixture of hardness and softness, subtlety and directness, "atheletes" and "musicians" -- that is the mixture we need! As Thucydides eloquently placed in the mouth of a Pericles, extolling the soldier-scholar virtues of Athenian soldiers killed defending the city-state: "Instead of looking on discussion as an obstacle to action, we think of it as an indisputable preliminary to any wise action. Other men are bold in ignorance, while reflection will paralyze them; but the bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what lies before them, glory and danger alike, and yet go out to meet it." Those are the men we need! Indeed!

Q: You aren't another of those fellows who thinks life would be nothing without Plato and the ancient Greeks, or Milton or Boswell's "Life of Johnson," are you?
A: Yes, I am one of those persons!

Q: Well, don't you think the violence in Los Angeles would greatly diminish if we could take all the firearms away from the gangsters and make one giant bonfire with all of them? What about gun control?
A: When Cain wished to slay his brother, he was at no loss for a weapon. The violence one wreaks on another is more the result of the murderer's intention than product of a dumb tool. I think if you burned up all the L.A. gangster's guns today, by tomorrow you will have only immeasurably increased the gunsmiths' business - and within six months or two years it would be just life like before. One needs look to first causes.

I think the gun control advocates are so outraged by the so many senseless murders that they focus their anger on the mere weapons themselves rather than the deeper dilemmas of cruelty, human frailty, and evil. The only true way to stop the intractable violence, in my opinion, is to fight the prolific culture of gangsterism which seduces so many young people generation after generation in Los Angeles. I believe the greater willingness to shoot one another for next to nothing in the streets comes more from the fraying of civic culture and loosening of any sense of common morality in the past few decades than from the simple availability of these lumps of steel people use to kill each other. Almost every other household in Switzerland houses an occupant in the army reserves who keeps his military assault rifle in the closet. But the Swiss don't shoot each other down like they do in Los Angeles, even with such a high concentration of deadly weapons in the community. But there exists in some Americans - indeed, there has always existed - this stupidly wasteful "outlaw" mentality, and they reap what they sow.

Q: But I see you do not agree with the gun nuts. You don't belong to the National Rifle Association?
A: No, I will never belong to that organisation! I think the NRA are full of extremists with whom it is difficult to speak reasonably about the tension between individual freedom and societal self-protection with regards to guns. I don't favor private ownership of assault weapons, machine guns, grenade launchers, or flame throwers. I recently wrote a philippic against what I consider to be the worst aspect of the Democratic Party: the ACLU. I am just waiting for the NRA -- an organization which embodies the worst of the Republican Party -- to send me something so I can roast and post them on the Web, too.

I try to take a common sensical stand on firearms in a society where it is becoming harder and harder to do so. The controversy over gun control, in my humble opinion, is like that surrounding the issue of abortion where the two sides that form the parameters of the public debate are equally unreasonable and extreme. Common sense on that contentious topic is like water in the desert!

Q: You know, I often wonder what it is that gives the Americans that ... mentality they have. 'Americans' in general give me the idea of being very ... stupid. No offense! I just would like a reaction. Are you all really th`t plain?
A: Well, you read my webpage. Do I seem stupid? I am as American as the next person.

Q: Yes, but there is this lack of advanced linguistic theory, cultural criticism and textual analysis! Americans are so ignorant of all the latest research coming out of universities! Such puritan prudery! The utter lack of polish and charm! I am from Paris and the intellectual life here is so much more --
A: -- enough already! I do not agree that a Parisian coffeehouse intellectual is any more capable of offering up insight and wisdom than the average man off the streets of Baltimore. I empathize completely with Buckley when he said that he would rather be ruled by the first two thousand names in the Boston phone book rather than the combined faculties of Harvard or MIT.

I do not place much value in building theoretical constructs of the intellect; and once I find something to be true in my heart, I try not to question it excessively and instead choose to believe it faithfully and try to comprehend it. Man knows the things of man in his heart, as the Quaker William Penn claimed, if he takes the time to look into it; and I also wonder if too much reading encourages a person to lose touch with what is most important - hence the so many senseless scholars populating the cafés on the Boulevard St. Germain-des-Près in recent decades blathering emptily about the fundamental emptiness of man in a godless world, snarled as they are in the cul-de-sac of despair and defeat.

I believe in the knowledge which comes from living a decent and upright life as Howard Fast describes in his novel "April Morning" where in 1776 a colonial American tells his son the following:

"We are plain people. Not poor - for we are blessed with more than a necessary share of the world's goods, and we have a good house with good furniture and good food on our table, for which we thank the Lord in His mercy - but plain and thrifty people. Yet we, your mother, myself, my father, and my grandfather - we have always prided ourselves that we are in a sense the people of the Book. My brothers and I were raised, and I make every effort to raise my own children, not as blackguards and loafers, not as soldiers or tavern sots, but as thoughtful and reasoning creatures, men who honor the written word, who respect intelligent writing, and who, like the ancient philosophers, look upon argumentation and disputation as avenues toward the deepest truth. I am a farmer who tills the soil to earn his daily bread, but there are three hundred and odd books in this house, well thumbed, well read. Nor are my neighbors unlike me. That is why, Adam, we are what we are."

That is the same legacy my mother and father leave for me. And I would compare the wisdom of humble American farmers with that of Parisian intellectuals in their aristocratic salons any day to see who has prospered and brought more lasting change to the earth over the last 200+ years. I would try as much as possible to combine native common sense with cultivated refinement and intelligence.

A combination of heart and mind, I think best; like Boethius asserted, "As far as you are able, join faith to reason." One without the other is impotent. There are truths the heart feels to be correct; but the intellect then must struggle long and hard to encompass and understand them. It is rarely easy.

Q: As my old English teacher used to tell me, "What you feel in your heart must travel to your brain and be made sense of and understood there before it can travel down to your hand and then out onto the paper.
A: How true! We know not what we truly feel until we have taken the time to think about and write it down!

Q: I am from Ireland and having visited your country once or twice, and having spent considerable time talking politics amongst 'the American youth', albeit having sojourned (and worked!) in New England, I do not believe that free speech is possible in America since so few young people are aware of the current affairs in their own country, not to mention of others', thereby making the preponderance of ideas a little difficult. This is not an attack, just an observation from someone who feels that that is a very sad state of affairs for one of the richest countries in the world to be in.
A: You are perhaps right that many young people in the United States would much prefer to listen to the latest vacuous rock band or TV sitcom than to learn about the world which surrounds them or past which preceded them. But be careful about generalizing about "young Americans"; I fit that category and you will observe that I am not untraveled, unlettered, nor unaware of the state of affairs of the world. Nor are many of my compatriots unlike me.

A highly literate Spaniard once wrote me, "How American your webpage seems to me, the confessional impulse, this assertion of self, the insistence on justification." This is most likely a more acute cultural observation than the one you make.

Q: I am from a Muslim country and travel around the world very much. I came to your pages to try to find something , someone's thoughts what has been going on in The American society, where "Americans" values and priorities are is the reason why I stayed all night along reading your "educational" things, experiences, thoughts. Reading it by my bloody eyes.
A: I hope you found something of value in my webpages to justify your "bloody eyes." (My advice to you is some "visine" for the eyes and a good night of sleep.) If you were searching for something about "America," let my voice then stay with you in your travels to other countries; but keep in mind that I wrote these webpages as a human being first, an American second.

Q: I really enjoyed your web page, in my every day life it's not often that I come across such intelligent people. Where I'm form ignorance runs rapid, and it makes me sick. In school I consistently am ridiculed for my beliefs (I'm into the Wiccan brand of witchcraft). I love how you quote poets and authors, they are the basis of our society and people don't realize that.
A: There are all kinds of intelligence in the world, as are there a multiplicity of manners of ignorance. I most gently advise you neither to overestimate my putative "ignorance" nor underestimate the "intelligence" of the people in your everyday life.

Q: I notice many different strands of contrary traditions in your philosophy. You in places praise the emotionally Romantic tradition in history, in others the rational Enlightenment. You sometimes talk of the Judeo-Christian familial hierarchy and the Law, in other places you speak like a skeptical Greek in search of intellectual freedom and discovery of truth.
A: Of course you are right - the moody Romantic rose up in opposition to the rational Enlightenment, the Jews thought Hellenistic culture was profoundly immoral and posed a direct threat to Judaism, the early Christians looked upon the earthly power of Rome to be anathema and inexorably corrupting to the City of God, the rise of Socialism came in reaction to the dawn of Capitalism, etc. etc. But we in 1998 can rise above all these particular dialectics and find individually some happy middle ground in the synthesis of all past creeds and movements. The various strains of philosophy and aesthetic taste throughout history swirl endlessly in my mind and I pick and choose what I find to be most useful and true, and I discard the rest. To answer your question: I do not look at competing ideas as an either-or, zero-sum game.

A wise man will adopt into his philosophy anything which he finds useful from any culture or historical period. Ethics and aesthetics, language and religion and the arts, the legacy of our past -- all these "liberal arts" are what one studies when one tries to form a broad social vision and philosophy of life. But all that has changed in the last fifty years: in place of religion and philosophy we have substituted psychology and sociology to our great detriment, in my opinion. We used to study about truth and justice in the schools; now we learn about women in the work force and recycling.

But to answer your question more directly: I admire and respect the long tradition of the Law in the Judeo-Christian tradition and use it as a guide always. But if my reason and/or conscience were to lead me to find it mistaken, I would break that Law. Jefferson has said the following:

"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."

Although even more cautious than Jefferson, I agree heartily with him in principle. One need keep up with the times and resist the urge to become a curmudgeon. As Burke claimed, "A State without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation." Whether it be on a personal or collective basis, an orderly reform is preferable to a riotous revolution, in my opinion; and the former can obviate the need for the latter. But then every once in a few ages, only a revolution will do the trick.

Q: I see strongly the influence of that Edmund Burke fellow in you!
A: You are very perceptive.

Q: You studied the "liberal arts" in college?
A: Among other things -- and I think it sad how more people today study the financial arts (in terms of Masters' in Business Administration) than the liberal arts. Everyone makes jokes about how you cannot get a job with a liberal arts degree. But what is that compared with the tools with which one lives life. I learned much in college, but I have learned much more since I left the university. My tastes in learning are pretty catholic.

But my reading has taken a strange turn in the last years where I read less and less wholly new works and instead re-read the most important sections of absolutely critical books. For example, a quandary or question arises in my mind and then a moment in history or particular thinker and his commentary in response. So I pull out a tract by Voltaire, place in my CD player the courtly "Les Nations" by François Couperin, and in my imagination I hear the wry, ironical voice of Voltaire conversing with Frederick the Great over dinner in Berlin or find myself at the foot of the "Sun King" Louis XIV at Versailles, as court composer Jean Baptiste Lully directs the royal orchestra for His Majesty's pleasure. In listening to Robert Schumann's "Manfred Overture," I am transported to the Swiss Alps where Lord Byron hosts Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley in 1816 and the poets tell ghost stories ("Frankenstein") over nighttime bonfires on the shores of Lake Geneva amidst the political reaction of Metternich and the curious wonder of the Rise of Science - back in the day when men and women had much less formal education yet greater literacy. And so a piece of music might move me to break out a poem or tract of philosophy from my library, and vice versa. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher capture it well in the following poem:

That place that does contain
My books, the best companions, is to me
A glorious court, where hourly I converse
With the old sages and philosophers;
And sometimes, for variety, I confer
With kings and emperors, and weigh their counsels;
Calling their victories, if unjustly got,
Unto a strict account, and, in my fancy,
Deface their ill-placed statues.

Thus my evenings speed by in busy but profitable exploration. It is the time of the day by far when I am most alive.

Politics, music, philosophy, math, poetry, history, religion, science - they all come together at the highest, most abstract levels to conjure up a vision in my mind of where we human beings have been in the past which helps to give meaning for me as to where and who we are today. And when I learn more, that vision becomes deeper, more colorful, and more richly meaningful. The brain is like a dynamic web, with all the most valuable and individual thousands and thousands of bits of learning related to each other in one organic whole. The mind seeks to synthesize and make sense of the whole from its parts, to integrate knowledge and understand the complexity of God's handiwork. Even after a lifetime of reading you will not even approach understanding the entirety, but if you remain a steady, focused learner you will always know more tomorrow than you did yesterday. That is something.

Q: In other words, the process is more important than the goal, eh?
A: Exactly! You don't have to be smarter or better read than anyone else, you only have to make yourself better than you were previously. It is all about concentrating on filling up one's own cup, not on how much your neighbor holds in his cup.

Dr. Johnson claimed, "A desire of knowledge is the natural feeling of mankind; and every human being, whose mind is not debauched, will be willing to give all that he has, to get knowledge." Prove that your mind is not "debauched," and give your "all" to "get knowledge."

Q: So it would make sense that you are a teacher!
A: Indeed! My personal life as a thinker and professional life as a teacher are almost completely enmeshed! For example, I recently finished teaching Christianity and am now teaching Islam. At night in my free time I was reading a book about Paul of Tarsus and his portion of the Gospels during the pax Romana; now I am reading about the phenomenon of fundamentalist Islam and its refutation of Western modernism. It is an existence revolving around the life of the mind, and I find that very rewarding; I teach a topic during the day, and then I learn more about it at night. Even when you feel poorly or have suffered some reverse over which you have little or no control, you can always learn something new and find satisfaction in that at the end of the day. That much is always within your control. A great consolation, it is.

Q: What you say makes good sense. Reading in general is one of my methods of recuperation; consequently it is a part of that which enables me to escape from myself, to wander in strange sciences and strange souls.
A: I agree! Well said.

Q: But talk so much about history! I have hated history ever since I was a schoolgirl! History is nothing more than the crimes and misfortunes of mankind, and I say poetry is better than history because it is more serious! Poetry is chiefly conversant about universal truth, history only with the particular!
A: History is much more than only crimes and misfortunes of vain and sinful human beings, believe me.

The only history I find remotely interesting or important is that which can be assimilated and made sense of in terms of the poetry of all human existence and learning from the time mankind first started walking on two legs (and even before that!) up until this very moment. Poetry and history -- at the highest level -- are virtually indistinguishable. Or at least this is how I see it. I think a great danger in this time of rapid and complex change is that people get the impression that we are all that counts: that we can learn nothing from the accumulated wisdom of the centuries of human history. It leaves young people without a compass or any valid points of reference to react to the challenges of today which will determine the shape of tomorrow.

People often ask me whether I prefer to teach History or Literature. I cannot rightly answer the question, since I see them as the twin sides of the same coin. How can you teach the one and not the other without impoverishing them both? We have today divorced the various academic disciplines and separated them in various colleges which eye the others with suspicion and hostility, like rival armed camps competing for influence and clout. In the old days of Greece, Aristotle was both a noted physical scientist and philosopher of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Franklin and Jefferson were men of affairs and letters, influential authors as well as devoted scientists, both serious statesmen and artists. But today we artificially divide knowledge into categories and "subject areas," losing in the process the larger picture of it all, in my humble opinion. How long has it been since a thinker had the audacity and ambition to claim, "ALL KNOWLEDGE IS MY PROVINCE!" It is discouraging. It is dispiriting. Thinkers seem to artificially limit what they think they can know.

Q: That's interesting. I heard you were in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Was is scary?
A: It was sort of like having a freight train pass through your bedroom. It was loads of fun.

Q: I heard you were in the Los Angeles riots, too.
A: Yes, and that was also lots of fun. Lots of smoke and people running everywhere.

Q: The riots were fun?
A: No, they were not.

Q: What do you think in the end those riots were about?
A: Free stuff for poor people. When I would ask my students what a riot means, many would shout out, "Free stuff!" That and a bellyful of hate and rage.

Q: Surely not all your students felt that way!
A: Of course not. One will find as much diversity of character and morality in poor people as among anyone else. In my experience, even in the worst places one will find many decent and hardworking individuals. It makes me mad when people write off an entire group. As Ovid said, "Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few."

Q: Damn! My computer just crashed! What should I do?
A: Don't get upset! The crash of your computer is God's way of saying that it is time to get up and stretch a little. Everyone's computer crashes from time to time. (especially if you have a Mac)

Q: Rich! This FAQ is too long and I cannot focus any longer on the words! My concentration span is only ten minutes! AHHHH!! It burns!!!
A: This is God's way of telling that you watch too much @#!$^?*&%*@!# television! The proper remedy is to throw your TV out the window and make a visit to the library! You would be surprised how much better you will feel.

But for now, go visit the bathroom, grab a cold drink out of the fridge, and then come back and sit down. We still got a long way to go before we are finished.

Q: OK, I'm back again. I feel better now! Can I use some of your material for a research paper?
A: Of course. I hate the idea that someone could "own" an idea! But put it in your own words and don't be cheesey and copy it straight into your paper as if you came up with the idea. I suspect a whole generation of students is getting through school "cutting" and "pasting" away their reports off the World Wide Web and probably not learning very much on their own.

This notwithstanding, I think imitation the most sincere form of flattery and I am happy to contribute in my own small way to other people's work (as long as it is their own work). If you look closely, you will see writers and thinkers echoing each other's words throughout history and being greatly influenced by each other. This is natural. Goethe once said that 1,000 people wrote his books. As Northrop Frye has claimed, "Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels." Thus has it always been. The following quote was attributed to Voltaire: "Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed from one another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all."

Q: I have noticed the echoes of old poems in the works of new poets!
A: Of course... look at how the African American poet County Cullin -- a great proponent of the Harlem Renaissance, that magnificent explosion of music, of poetry, art and just plain good fun in the 1920s -- writes to the famous Romantic English poet Keats (who died some 100 years earlier) in his poem "To John Keats, Poet, at Springtime":

I cannot hold my peace, John Keats! There never was a spring like this. It is an echo that repeats my last year's song and next year's bliss. I know, in spite of all men say of beauty, you have felt her most. Yea, even in your grave, her way is laid. Poor, troubled, lyric ghost, spring never was so fair and dear as beauty makes her seem this year... John Keats is dead, they say. But I, who hear your full, insistent cry in bud and blossom, leaf and tree, know John Keats still writes poetry.

Joseph Brodsky has said, "A poet writes to please his predecessors, not his contemporaries." One will see in much of the greatest art this playing, arguing, conversing between poets and prose-writers past and present. This is normal, and I am no exception (and I too know John Keats is not dead! Long live Keats!).

The great visionary poet and artist William Blake said that poetry and art were ways to converse with paradise. I agree with Blake that life should be lived as poetically as possible in order to raise us up high enough through the power of the imagination so as to gain a glimpse heaven. As Emerson ably described the ecstasy of the true literary enthusiasm: "If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public and heeds only this one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism."

Q: Jeez... I don't know, Richard. Guns and poetry... you sound like a pretty complicated person!
A: You are probably right.

Circumstances combine so that at times I find myself at cop parties full of ultra-aggressive policemen who talk excitedly about high-speed pursuits, furious gunfights, and violent criminals. Other times I am forced to go to writing conferences with mostly female teachers who talk and talk and talk about emotions, relationships, and student development in what amount to group therapy navel-gazing sessions. The one favors an excessive introspection which seems to paralyze any possibility of effective action; the other leads people to act impetuously and unwisely. One is entirely too passive and wants for fire in the belly; the other is all bluster and action lacking sophistication and subtlety. Both cultures represent the polar opposites of my life and lay claim to my heart, but I feel "at home" in neither. I try to lay a course between the two, but they is little middle ground they share. It is difficult...

Q: You sound like a Gemini with this schizophrenic dual personality!
A: Yes, I am a Gemini! Maybe that is it!

Q: Do you have a mailing list?
A: Hell no! I figured this webpage is vain enough for TWO people, thank you.

Q: Why don't you have an on-line diary?
A: Not that I have anything against the practice, but I don't think anyone really wants to hear about what I had for dinner or what happened to me today. If I have the urge to write about something, I will find a context and place for it in my webpages, thank you very much. However, by no means do I have something to say everyday and I am not a big fan of stream of consciousness emoting. As Tolstoy once told some young poet, "When a man has something to say he must try to say it as clearly as possible, and when he has nothing to say it is better for him to keep quiet."

Q: Do you ever get writer's block?
A: Sometimes I have not the desire to create. But, no, I don't ever get into a tizzy because the prose does not flow.

I always try to go with the flow where the creative process is concerned, but it's so hard to completely understand what underpins it. I have times when I just can't do it at all, especially if I'm distracted, upset, or very tired. Creation is often exhausting, because it takes so much out of your head, heart, and even physically from your body. I simply wait until my energy recuperates and then ideas do not fail me.

When at a loss for words Hemingway used to go look over the rooftops of Paris at night and say to himself, "Do not worry. You have always written before, and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence, and then go on from there." I think it is that simple. And you must have faith and let the urge to create come naturally in its own good time.

Emotional blows, however, can cause more damage to your inner world, methinks. I used to be an avid poet who wrote verse incessantly - it was part of the air I breathed, the way I processed the world. Then a serious love affair failed, and I have not written a line of poetry since. It has been some five years now. So the answer to your question is rather complex.

Q: Are you famous?
A: Not even close!

Q: Has your webpage ever been written up in the print media?
A: Yeah. Twice. And both times I only found out about it after people e-mailed me saying, "We saw your picture in the paper and had to check out your site..." I find reading such a message to be unnerving. I wish someone just scribbled off an e-mail to me saying, "Mr. Geib, whether you like it or not we are going to write an article about your webpage..." Common courtesy.

Q: What did those reviewers have to say?
A: Not much. One compared my front page to the Monarch of Oz, and the other articles were similarly unimpressive. They talked about me and made deductions about my personality and what makes me tick. I was not impressed. One could learn more by simply reading my webpages directly and drawing their own conclusions. It is ridiculous to try and explain the philosophical bent or life story author of this webpage in a few paragraphs; an individual of any complexity is not one person, but many people -- the interior richness of life! -- and I am no exception.

I have always thought second-hand post-mortem explorations of somebody else's personal life through their art sort of stupid and beside the point. Comes to mind the specter of the author Jorge Luis Borges being presented with a biography of himself and remarking that it was probably fine, but that he was not interested in the topic.

Q: I have noticed very few poets have biographies. They seem to be content to leave their art as their biography.
A: It is hard to generalize, but I have seen that trend, too. Especially in a medium as emotionally charged as verse, what is left that you can say better about yourself, your passions, and your ideas in prose?

Q: What about elsewhere on the web? Where else out in cyberspace are you reviewed?
A: I check that out once in a blue moon, shamelessly vanity surfing the World Wide Web. I have been claimed by some as an ACLU-style free speech activist, military aficionado, new age spiritual-type, and inner-city teacher battling the odds to save souls. That is funny!, because I don't look at myself primarily as one of those. In fact, to reflect thusly is a source of no little amusement to me! I am clearly not the man they think I am. They are talking about some other person. A careful, perceptive reader will not fail to note that I have multiple identities and allegiances. Their overlapping mutiplicities do not trouble me -- although it seems to trouble others at times.

But it is all about connecting with other people. In my opinion, you know your writing has been effective when others see themselves in you and empathize with your humanity. I like it when readers claim they feel like they "know me" after they have read my webpages: when they see in me certain feelings, values, beliefs and opinions which they share. They might not "know me" in the conventional sense, but after any significant jaunt through my webpages they will know me in all that is most important to me. I have always wanted visitors to my webpages to feel like they could sit down and drink a beer with me afterwards without feeling like a stranger.

That is what the written word should be all about: communication straight from my heart to anyone who would lend me their ear for an hour or two. I hold such a reader/writer communion to be almost sacred, and as such scrupulously try to avoid writing anything stupid or nonsensical and thereby waste my esteemed reader's precious time. I think I usually succeed; and that much is not so easy to manage, but it gives me a deep and lasting pleasure and satisfaction.

Q: Why don't you have any graphics of awards, webrings, links, etc.?
A: Because I want this to be a semi-private affair. I am not overly concerned about being part of a "online community" or other collective force. Not that there are not many valuable and worthy such communities, but that I have always been a loner and my webpage is no exception.

Instead of people coming to my site and then bouncing right out immediately, I would urge them to take off their jacket and stay awhile; the total value of my site taken as a whole is more than that of its individual dismembered parts. I sometimes wonder if the Web does not militate against sustained concentration as people simply surf the World Wide Web and let momentum carry their thoughts and not vice versa. They say the average websurfer looks at an average seven URLs and then clicks away someplace else. This is perhaps not the best aspect of the web.

Q: Anything else interesting?
A: Well, I recently found out that the Los Angeles Police Department Internal Affairs had a "Sgt. Velasquez" investigating my webpage for almost five weeks in what must have been the most petty and pathetic investigation in history. They were calling old employers, etc. trying to find out about a certain webpage I wrote. They thought a friend of mine who had made some private comments on that page about his job as a cop in South-Central Los Angeles worked for the LAPD (he doesn't) and wanted his head on a platter (they didn't get it).

It makes my blood boil to think of the police man hours they expended investigating my homepage! In the violent Pico-Union neighborhood near downtown where I used to work as a teacher, people routinely die violent deaths with nary a cop in site. But only a mile or so away, there sat some detective in a cubby hole of the Parker Center poring over my webpages (I heard they printed large portions of it out on paper). It would be laughable if it were not so pathetic. The arrogance of LAPD bureaucrats who would jump over mountains to screw one of their own kind is the stuff of legend. Now I can put some fact to the legend.

I have new respect for the First Amendment protections that every American enjoys with regards to freedom of expression. I see the wisdom of Madison and other Founding Fathers putting into law ironclad protections enabling individuals to express opinions which might prove uncomfortable to the powerful. It allows me to look upon the LAPD's investigation with contempt, where in a country like Mexico I might be physically at risk for criticizing the police.

It is a strange feeling to be investigated.

Q: Wait a second! They investigated your webpage for that long and never even e-mailed you!?!
A: Yep. I would have answered their questions immediately and the whole affair would most probably have ended. But that would have been too logical, I guess.

Q: Wow! The mindlessness of bureaucracy can be pretty astounding, eh?
A: Tell me about it! It is all about image and covering your ass. I have no doubt that was the LAPD's motivation in all this.

Q: I just took a new job in an area not unlike the Pico-Union area where you used to work. Do you have any advice for me towards not getting murdered?
A: My advice to you is the following: never ever show fear, never look anyone in the eye, and always keep moving. I spent years living and working in such environments (wearing a tie no less!), and while I never lost sight of where I was neither did I feel an omnipresent fear for my immediate safety. And that has everything to do with the aforementioned rules.

Q: But surely if you run across the wrong person at the wrong time, those rules can be of little help to a person!
A: True enough. If you cross paths with some hardcore individual, then you are in a world of hurt! There admittedly are factors one cannot control in life; but I believe with Machiavelli that fortune is like a mighty river which -- while it might rage and even flood uncontrollably across the countryside -- is well worth attempting to direct through vigorous human efforts:

"I am not ignorant of the fact that many have held and hold the opinion that the things of this world are so ordered by fortune and God that the prudence of making may effect little change in them, indeed it is of no avail at all...

"I believe... that it may be true that fortune controls half of our actions indeed but allows us the direction of the other half, or almost half. I would compare fortune to a river in flood, which when it breaks its bonds, deluges the surrounding plains, tears up trees and dwellings, here washing away the land and there building up new deposits. All flee before it, everyone must bow before the fury of the flood, for there is no checking it. Yet though this be so it does not signify that in quiet times men cannot make some provision against it, building levees and dikes so that when the river it may follow a channel prepared for it or at least have its first onrush rendered less impetuous and harmful."

It is worth it to take an active approach and finesse the situation; it simply won't do to be passive and just sit there nonplused until you get hammered!

Q: But surely I can stay away from those dangerous neighborhoods and significantly reduce the risk of crossing paths with some violent predator!
A: True enough. If such a concern is paramount for you, I suggest you stay away from places like Pico-Union.

Q: Do you have a resume on-line?
A: No.

Q: Are you going to put one on the Web?
A: No way. Smacks of desperation.

I hate resumes - like you can accurately sum yourself up on one piece of paper. They also remind me of looking for a job which is very possibly my least favorite activity in the world. I feel like a salesman trying to sell myself, and I know better than to buy that product!

You will never see a resume on my website and you will never see one of those cheesey "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" graphics.

Q: I visited your Windows95 Sounds page and liked some of the audio files. Could you e-mail them all to me in a *.zip file?
A: Sure. Just e-mail me and ask for it. The file is 599kb in size.

Q: Do you ever feel vulnerable putting up some pretty personal information on your webpages?
A: Yes, but it is all pretty much ancient history.

Q: I'm wobbling between feeling as if your site is shamelessly unreticent and wishing I'd done one just like it.
A: "Shamelessly unreticent?" Interesting combination of words. Let me think on that one a bit...

Look, it is true I reveal much of myself in my webpages, and not a few persons have warned me of the dangers of doing so. But I think we hear, so that we can speak. We read, so that we can write. We think, that we might learn. I chronicle the slant of my mind in these pages, and there is not a little pleasure in this creative process. I am who I am and would hardly alter my opinions because others read them. I incline naturally towards candor; and I would not be ashamed to write here what I am unashamed to think.

Q: We ultimately count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.
A: I agree with you!

Q: It is obvious that you spent some time and effort writing about sections of your past? Why?
A: I wrote about that so that I could be free from it. There is something in us humans that makes us want to hold onto ourselves and everything and everybody familiar to us ("The world is too much with us; late and soon / Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers..."). Writing down some of what has happened to me was my way of acknowledging the past and then letting go. It is like sloughing off the old skin and making way for the new.

It is a good feeling to let go and simply be open to what life throws at you next.

Q: Why don't you just collect all this writing and put it in a book, try and publish it, and make some money!
A: Because I don't want to. I want people to read it free of charge and THINK and hopefully find something interesting, beautiful or helpful.

"Freely have I received," Martin Luther claimed of his writing, "freely given, and want nothing in return." I offer up my webpage in the same spirit.

Q: But people never appreciate things they get for free! They only really value things for which they have to pay!
A: I don't believe that. I believe good ideas and quality writing always have a way of shining out sooner or later. In matters of ideas and art, I am a Social Darwinist: the best shall win out in the end.

Q: We're living in an information society now, and every idea is valuable. People who provide freeware or shareware on the Net for others to download are just so stupid. What a waste of effort! As for others such as yourself giving people ideas for free via the Net, you'd have to be a half-wit. Why let someone else profit from your ideas?
I personally applaud independent software writers who seek to make a buck without working for some huge company by going it alone online with Shareware products. I have even bought a program or two online that way. And those people who are willing to write software and place it on the WWW for free are some of the more selfless people out there, in my opinion. Philip Zimmerman for years posted - and still posts - PGP this way and so has given individuals the power to encrypt data to the point that supposedly no government can crack it. Profit is not for everyone the overweening motivational force in life which it seems to be for you.

Q: Without money, there is no freedom. Without money, there is no art. Say what you want, but it's true: When you walk in the door with money in your hand, people start listening.
A: Van Gogh was able to pain due only to his brother buying him brushes and canvasses. He was broke almost all the time. Does this mean he produced no art? Edgar Allen Poe died a penniless drunk in the gutters of Baltimore. Like Van Gogh, he was almost always improvident and impecunious. Will you say he created no art? Your argument is reductionist!

Look, I am no genius or authority which everyone quotes or reads, but people visit my website and use "my ideas" (many original sources, some Rich Geib opinion) to write reports or research papers, hopefully learning something in the process. Nobody is making any money off "my ideas." Yet I would add my two cents to the evolving intellectual mix of my time and the future - typing in famous historical documents onto the Web late at night for free and maintaining this site with my own spare cash - in order to hopefully further this humanity thing we are involved in. (Et lux in tenebris lucet!) I am more than re-paid by the odd e-mail telling me: "I thank you for the work put in to your most excellent "Thoughts" section, but also for clearing a bit of the grime off my worldview." That kind of "thank you" no amount of money can buy.

The more I think about it the more I dislike the selfish tone of your questions. By nature I am a generous person who spends no small amount of my disposable income cash buying school supplies and books for my students to read over vacations. And I can hardly forgive those thinkers and artists who are niggardly with their ideas. And I hardly feel as if I have to justify myself to you or anyone else!

Q: Sorry, sorry. Let's move on. Your site consists of numerous webpages. Which one is most special to you?
A: That is easy. My mother's obituary. I put that page up after my mother died and I advertised it on the search engines under "Stage-4 Adenocarcinoma Lung Cancer" because that is exactly what I went looking for in October of 1995 when my mother was first diagnosed with that terminal disease. I searched and searched the World Wide Web and found many impersonal sites for doctors with graphs, etc. that told me very scientifically and comprehensively that my mother was a dead woman and that she was going to die painfully. It was a sobering experience which provided me the information I wanted in the most dry and unsympathetic manner possible.

Consequently, I wanted others in the future who might be in a similar situation to see something which puts a human face on a deadly disease and offers some degree of dignity and grace to what it means to die. As a result, I have received dozens and dozens of e-mails from relatives of patients and patients themselves of that disease telling me how beautiful they thought the webpage was, sometimes writing the e-mail through tears. Many were in exactly the same position I was in October of 1995, stating in their e-mails to me: "...I just found out that my mother has Adenocarcinoma lung cancer today and I found your beautiful site and can tell how special a person your mother was and how very much she was loved. My family is devastated right now, but can you tell me how it was like and what treatments...?" This kind of human interaction is twice blest; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes... I would like to think it helps people in some small way.

"...to shine on those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace."
Luke 1:79

As for me, I like visiting it now and again to look at my mother's smiling face now that I no longer can do so in real life.

"Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o'fraught heart and bids it break."
William Shakespeare

Q: I just lost my brother to cancer about six months ago and I still sometimes have a hard time with it. It helps to know that I'm not "the only one" in the world who is in this kind of pain. Thanks for being there.
A: It was my pleasure. You are not the "only one," trust me; we are all in suffering made equal.

Q: Seven hours ago I lost my mother to cancer. I was just wondering how you dealt with the pain of losing her? My mother was diagnosed a little over a year ago with I believe the same kind of cancer your mother died from. It was in her lungs and they thought the chemotherapy had gotten rid of all of it. But 6 weeks ago it came back first in her brain, then spreading to every part of her body. I was with her when she died along side my father and sister also my 13 year old niece was there. I hope you don't mind the ramblings of a man in mourning, but I bet you've walked the same road I'm standing at the beginning of. Any help would be appreciated.
A: First of all, I am very sorry for your loss. I too was at my mother's side when she died, and that was a very good thing ultimately - even if it hurt like hell at the time. I think the only thing I can tell you is to hang in there and be strong for your family. You have all the time in the world to assimilate your loss into your experience later on. Be strong, be open to feel the loss, rely on your friends and family, and roll with this blow. Your mother still lives somewhere as long as you can remember her smile from when you were a child, the lessons she taught you all during life - and is teaching you even now in her death.

I will say a prayer tonight for your mother's soul. Even in moments like this, life is good and worth living. Don't think anything to the contrary.

Q: My family also lost our mother a year ago to lung cancer. This is what brought me to the beautiful tribute to your mother. And I am sure that you found, as we did, that the process of losing someone is very painful. And yet, it is a profoundly touching experience. At no time had I ever felt so spiritually connected to my family and the larger network of life.
A: I agree about the intensity of losing someone close to you, although it is difficult to put into words. Even in its most bitterly tragic moments, life is still revealing its beauty to you as your heart breaks; and we should keep our eyes open to this bittersweet beauty. We Americans think because something is sad, it is negative and to be shunned in favor of happier moments. It is a superficial view which does not serve us well in our real lives.

Life often is terribly tragic and cruel, and sadness comes to all: anyone who has a modicum of life experience learns this, often much too young. But one need sit with the sadness until it passes. Repressing the tragic or sad does not resolve the feeling; putting on a happy face for the world and seeking to convince ourselves we are happy when we are sad solves nothing. You can run, but you ultimately cannot hide. One need ride the wave of loss and sorrow until it crests and becomes something else.

Q: Hello Richard, I am from Israel and ran across your beautiful and fitting tribute to an apparently remarkable person and mother, bursting with energy and full of life. I am looking for information on this form of cancer hearing about it striking my uncle, only 50, young like your blessed mother. I was moved to send you my regrets due to your mother's beauty and your love for her, but also because of the date of her passing, the same day Prime Minister Rabin was murdered here in Israel. They were both warm and loving members of your human race and great losses to the same. I hope they were able to meet on the way across. My greatest condolences.
A: I was not previously aware of that coincidence! Wow! And thank you for the very kind words with respect to my mother. The sentiment is especially appreciated because tomorrow is Mothers' Day here in the United States and I am not feeling so great about it. I just want to go hide and be alone all day tomorrow but such a nice message as yours is a salve to a still open wound.

Thank you again; and I will say a prayer this evening for your uncle.

Q: How are you doing in the grieving process?
A: I am doing so-so. Curiously, my father says that suddenly he has stopped dreaming about my mom (as he was constantly doing), but now that time has passed I think about her more often. I look back at the totality of her life and make certain judgments from an adult perspective about what she did. She was a mother, and lived selflessly for her children. She was not perfect, but she did the best she could and raised three children pretty well. I have such a new respect for that! That is really where the future of humanity lies, in selfless fathers and mothers. All these little things my mother would do for me: pick me up from school and take me out to lunch, write me short letters, leave messages on my machine when I was away at college, etc. And all this she did all during my life -- not only in childhood. She would remind me, without actually saying so, that I'm someone's child and loved very much. I do not forget.

But I am beginning to fit the fact that she is "dead" into my world vision. For example, I think about how I hooked up with my parents in Austria and had such a special time. Then I think to myself, "That was five years ago, when she was alive. But now she is dead and it all really is in the past." It is still hard to believe my mom is gone, and I miss her very much. But tomorrow is another day and then I will feel better. The awful memory of my mom's fading and then passing is no longer so bitter but rather is sad; and a sweet feeling comes over my heart when I think of my mom, her marriage, her life, and the job she did in raising me and my siblings. I realize now that it is the nature of things that we should live and then die; and I think Franklin is correct when he says that we are not completely born until we are dead. Life goes on, and we continue with our memories and regrets. It will not be too long before we also are dead.

Q: More than a year and a half after her passing you are thinking more than ever about your mother and her death? Why is that? That doesn't make sense!
A: Perhaps it makes no sense. But during the actual trauma of her dying and death (which took over a year) I think I was so busy being strong for my father and family that only now am I processing the events emotionally.

I was so traumatized at the time that I was on autopilot for months. But I have my private moments with her now that everyone (thankfully) has stopped asking me, "How are you doing with your mom's death?" This is not necessarily a bad feeling - or maybe the sadness and the happiness are all mixed up. I relish my time with my mom now and am saying "good-bye!" to her in my own time and in my own way. Lots of bittersweet moments. I feel my mom's presence acutely most Friday evenings for some reason just as I am sitting down to eat. It is hard to explain, but I treasure those moments.

I think back when I was young and she was healthy, and also towards the grim end when she was in pain and drugged and quasi-demented. I sit with the memories of those last coherent moments with her, a strange and surreal pain-laden time for me (will I die like that?), which (in the words of Emily Dickinson) were...

...the hour of lead, Remembered, if outlived, as freezing persons recollect the snow. First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

Q: I am impressed by your wide arrays of knowledge both in literature and music. But don't you sometimes find that as you become wiser, you become sadder? Don't you become melancholy after you read some poems?
A: Yes, perhaps with knowledge comes sadness. In Ecclesiastes it says: "For in much wisdom there is much sorrow, and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief." In my more guarded moments, I suspect privately that most knowledge worth knowing is gained primarily through suffering. But up to a point such suffering and sadness is no bad thing, in my opinion; and I would prefer some gravitas in life to the superficiality of those who live Walt Disney existences. I was present in the hospital room when the doctor broke the bad news that my mom had inoperable cancer. The doctor was loathe to go into details in front of my parents, etc., and I finally had to corner him privately and demand more information,"How long... Will she suffer... etc.etc.." As I see it, the bitter truth I know is better than the truth I suspect (or dread) to be true. Many of us Americans run away from our pain and sorrow, or covering it up with going shopping or eating chocolate or some other luxury; but we should embrace our pain and sorrow with tenderness to find out what is the deep source. Maybe then we can gain the insight that will liberate you from suffering.

To return to your question, I would prefer to be weighted down with the burden of knowledge rather than remain "blissfully ignorant." "Where the light is brightest the shadows are deepest," exclaimed Goethe; and I think happiness and sadness (like hate and love) often intimately enmeshed. I think it eminently healthy to be profoundly sad once in awhile, to just embrace the sadness and appreciate its texture and essence rather than repressing the feeling. Even when you are unbearably sad, life is still showing you its beauty. Some of the most beautiful poems I know are terribly sad.

Q: Let's move on. What do other people consider your best section?
A: I cannot speak for other people. However, my father likes most of all my journal entries from Europe. He says they are "fresh and spunky." I might agree, but I nearly blush when I read some of the extemporaneous baloney I wrote as a hormonal young man adventuring in foreign lands for the first time. Yet reading those tales years later, I have to admit there is nothing like the enthusiasm of youth!

I think people like my "Thoughts Worth Thinking" page best. But I can hardly claim credit for that; those are merely a compilation of the ideas and images of some of the most famous people in history. If I enjoy any success there, it is upon the shoulders of great persons innumerable who came before me and not in my arranging the flowers of their thought.

Q: I just wanted to drop a line expressing my deep gratitude for your web sight on Winston Churchill. There was a quote which I desperately needed from him and voila!, you had already posted it on your sight. Thank you so much for taking the time to put up your page, it has been of great service to me!
A: You are very welcome!

Q: How did you learn Spanish?
A: In the country jail, UCLA emergency room, a thousand fast food restaurants all over SoCal, unbelievably cheesey Spanish language telenovelas, living in Los Angeles for ten years, past friends and girlfriends, etc. Oh yeah, my FM radio broke in my car and I never fixed it so I would be forced to listen to Spanish language talk radio. That was over five years ago.

Q: Did you ever study Spanish in school?
A: No. I am almost entirely self-taught.

Q: You taught yourself? How can you do that?
A: Why are you so surprised? It isn't like the Spanish language is a secret! And I didn't exactly lack for people to practice with in southern California. All it took was thousands of hours of concentration and years of patience.

Q: Has Spanish helped you in your life?
A: Sure! When I go to Carl's Jr. or somewhere and I cannot understand the cashier's English, I can ask him in Spanish. Being bilingual got me my first teaching job and I can also talk to my father's maid for him. And I get better prices in Mexico and can bribe the cops better when they pull you over there. But there still is nothing like going down to Baja California with my friend Francisco! Most importantly, I have been able to read the famous Spanish poets from the Golden Age of Spain in the original language. It is like reading Shakespeare in a completely new and beautiful language!

Q: You like interacting with the Latino immigrant community in Southern California? Many people don't.
A: I have nearly every day had positive and courteous interaction with immigrants from Mexico and Central America over many years. I feel very comfortable in the Latino community - the vast majority of whom are honest and hard working individuals just trying to make a living. I feel very differently about the street gangs which plague those communities.

There is a pessimism born out of long-suffering with which I have always empathized: the idea that, in the end, every man suffers for the life he leads. The Mexicans supposedly greet their children upon exiting the womb, "Child, you have come into this world to suffer: suffer, endure and hold your peace." This is not a worldview shared by aggressively successful Americans pursuing business and affairs of state in their busy, prosperous lives. By upbringing and education I belong to this world, but I prefer the company of often poor and barely literate Mexican immigrants - and generally speaking find less interesting progressively Chicanos (Americans of Mexican descent) as they become more "Americanized."

Q: But surely you can never truly "fit in" to those Latino communities coming from a very different background.
A: Perhaps. But I have always liked being an outsider anyway.

Q: But you are talking about poor Mexicans! What about wealthy Mexicans?
A: I have met wealthy Mexicans who received world-class educations at prestigious American universities, speak perfect English, and have fond memories of bracingly cold New England winters as young college students. They, despite their Mexican nationality, have more in common with those busy, prosperous Americans than with campseinos from their own country.

Generally speaking, I prefer to hang out with the campesinos.

Q: You seem to have an appreciation for Mexico and the culture there. What do you think of the latest elections there where the Provisional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was defeated for the first time after seven decades of uninterrupted rule?
A: I have trouble understanding the larger political culture of Mexico. I know enough to realize that everything that matters happens outside of the view of the public and so am suspicious of what I read in the newspapers - although recent events indicate that might be changing. The concept of true political pluralism surely is heady stuff for Mexico and I wish that country well. When I think how they voted en masse against the sycophantic toadies and self-satisfied patrones of the autocratic PRI, I think to myself, "Good for them!"

However, the more I think about it over the years the more I come to the same conclusion: the Mexican people are by and large very kind and decent (who if they only had one plate of beans would give you half), but the government is bad to its very soul. Corruption is as Mexican as tortillas de maiz - always has been, always will be. I would love to think this might change, but then Mexico without a smoke-and-mirrors political culture would be a place I would hardly recognize! All the talk of elections, Zedillo, GNP, foreign investment, PAN, and economic growth fail to convince me otherwise. We shall see. "Time will reveal everything," Euripides tells us, "it is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked."

Q: Do you think then America is any better than Mexico?
A: I think the question irrelevant. America is simply larger and more powerful - and that nearly defines the whole relationship. Better? Just different. And many Americans if they had only one plate of beans would let you starve rather than give you any. One campesina told me with some disgust that a person can live and starve in the streets like a dog in Los Angeles and no one will give a damn. On the other hand, that is hardly a rare spectacle in Mexico where large parts of the population still live in the feudal age -- in a country governed by elaborate codes of honor and rituals of respect, and an unfathomable corruption. Paradoxical.

But I have come to greatly enjoy Mexico after I learned to appreciate it on its own terms and not look at it only through American eyes (ie. as dirty, poor, full of potholes, venal authorities, children begging in the streets, etc.). There is much we can learn from Mexico - I have personally enormously from stepping outside my own culture and looking back at it from the outside. A wise man takes what he finds useful from all cultures and assimilates into his own philosophy.

Q: What about the drug trade and all the problems it causes for U.S.-Mexican bilateral relations?
A: What about it?

Q: Which country is to blame?
A: That is so easy I cannot believe you are asking me! Both are to blame. We Americans are to blame for not having anything better to do than waster our time and money getting high. The Latin Americans have no better way of making money than producing and selling death (drugs). The effects are equally serious and pernicious on both sides of the Rio Grande.

Q: What do you most like about visiting a country like Mexico?
A: The more relaxed pace and cheaper price of living. I have a ritual upon crossing into Mexico where I take off my wristwatch, put it in the glove compartment of my car, and care not a jot what time it may be until I return to the United States. After a couple of days, I am completely relaxed and in-tune with the slower Mexican way of life. It is a nice contrast to the frenetic, hyper-competitive life in the United States!

I eat ¢.35 fish tacos and sit and watch the world pass in front of me. I talk with the local bartender about any old thing for the entire afternoon. I walk along the beach and await the sunset. I let the old lady at the tortilla stand drone on and on about her family. In the United States, I could hardly think of anything I would be less likely to do! This is what I like most about being in Mexico.

Q: What do you least like?
A: In Mexican cities, as in most Third World locales, an obvious foreigner will be tailed by dozens of small boys trying to sell him every imaginable kind of junk. "Chicles!" "Regalitos!" It is most annoying! One tires of saying "no thank you, no thank you" over and over again to stubborn street urchins. No matter what you might do, in the eyes of many Mexicans you will always be a rich gringo to overcharge outrageously for some piece of tourist trinket/trash. They see you, and they see an opportunity to make some much needed cash which might be the difference between them going to sleep hungry or not, from keeping one's head above water or sinking. They see a dollar sign instead of a human being.

It is the ironic inverse relationship with the gigante del norte I have noticed in Latin Americans: they hate and decry the power, arrogance, and meddlesomeness of the norteamericanos, but they desire and need the gringo's money, technology, and efficiency. Latin Americans during the Cold War complained about norteamericano intrusions into their economies and politics, but now they carp that the United States ignores the region and lets them starve through inattention and lack of investment!

Q: But as a teacher, you are hardly a "rich American"!
A: I know! But it is all relative: anyone who has more than the absolute minimum appears affluent to someone with next to nothing! To a Mexican campesino, my modest American teacher's salary is a lot of money. Ironic, no?

Q: You said many Mexicans see a dollar sign instead of a human being when they see you. Do you see a poor person instead of a human being when you see a Mexican?
A: I can hardly generalize so much! And I have too much experience with Mexico and Mexicans to fail to see the humanity of the people there. But in terms of the context in which you have framed the question, I answer that I see a poor person scraping to get by who -- because of the tragic, semi-feudal nature of his country and its unfortunate history -- will most likely always be poor generation after generation after generation: having spent more than a little time turning this phenomenon over in my mind and inspecting it from a variety of different angles, this is how I see it. I would like to be idealistic and see a better future, but I am also pragmatic and see few reasons for optimism.

There is really no exit -- other than immigrating to the north, which is why so many millions of Mexicans do so. A part of me thinks maybe the Mexicans should stay in their own country and fix their own problems once and for all instead of running away from them, but then I can see that would be futile and like peeing into the wind.

An educated gentleman from Columbia recently wrote me after having read much of my website. He had much to say about calls for social justice, the futility of political violence, and the general tragedy of Latin America over many centuries. He asked me for my honest opinion about what I thought should be done. "What would you do," he wanted to know, "if you were me?" Struck by the earnestness of his tone and nonplused by the complexity of the problems, I could find no happy answer. I finally in all truth answered him, "I would immigrate to Europe or the United States." That is the best answer I could -- and still can -- find.

Q: Let's change topics. Where is that "wisdom we have lost in knowledge" quote in your .sig file from?
A: From a poem by T.S. Eliot written at the very dawn of the Information Age. I read part of it one day while reading a book review about Bill Gates, found the poem three hours later, and it has been my .sig file ever since.

Q: That reminds me: Don't you consider Microsoft the Evil Emprie and Bill Gates as the Dark Lord?
A: Microsoft is a large and successful software company and not the Nazi, Bolshevik, or Chinese Communist Party; and Bill Gates is a business magnate and not some latter day Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, or Mao Tse-Tung.

I personally believe intellectual liberty and freedom of speech on and off the Internet will be alive and well long after Bill Gates is dead and buried. Besides businessmen and businesswomen, the Internet has its philosophers and poets who are as important in the larger scheme of things. In my opinion, persons like this, that, this, that, this, and that are as important in the organic development of the Internet as any investor or vaunted Captain of Business. Money is only so important; man does not live by bread alone. Baudelaire claimed, "Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry." Baudelaire was absolutely correct, and computer nerds like Bill Gates who have no poetry whatsoever in their lives come across to me as stale and, more importantly, sterile -- in the long run, that is! They have all the money in the world, but they have nothing more permanent to hand down to future generations.

Q: You are wrong! Gates is MORE insidious than the other earlier and more crude political dictators! And most people do live by bread alone! Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by the politicians and their propagandists and by sheer greed. The well-fed television watching young don't care about freedom; they only care about getting the hottest and newest gadget or making lots of money and having a luxury automobile and retiring young. If Gates offers enough bread in terms of money and perks, 99 individuals out of 100 will do anything he asks of them. Be a good little obedient employee, and Gates or someone like him will reward you. And if enough bread is daily given to the average man in America today's consumer culture in terms of a salary, he will in the end lay his freedom at Gates feet and be completely happy. He will have his pretty clothes and spacious home and computer toys and video games and a fast car and occasional casual sex and recreational drugs in a vacuous excuse of an intellectual and spiritual life in terms of mindless special effects laden movies and the utterly banal rock and roll music ("Love me, love me! Oh baby, oh baby!") and celebrity scandals of contemporary pop culture. He will be entirely uninterested in freedom and art and philosophy. The spirit of hope exemplified by the utopian ideals of human harmony and brotherhood will be replaced in him by the minutiae of technophilia and serious political debate will be stifled by grubby scandal mongering. He will be a comfortable slave unaware of the invisible walls which imprison him. He will be new evidence to bear out Juvenal's old truth that "people long eagerly for only two things: bread and circuses." Gates is as bad as Stalin or Mao, only a more subtle and insidious despot!
A: Yes, yes, yes... I have heard this argument many times from a hundred different mouths, and perhaps there is some truth to it. But I do think you go a bit far. Many individuals today do not shirk from freedom thusly, as not everyone cares so much about their salary and material goods. There are still plenty of people today who live for the beauty of art and poetry and wisdom of philosophy and religion. Your argument is too clever by half. In defining contemporary society this way, you mistake the forest for the trees. People made the same argument about John Ford and Andrew Carnegie and Civilization seems to have survived in the United States despite them. Let us agree to disagree.

The more I reflect on it, the more I think the idea that Microsoft and Bill Gates have the power to control our lives and thoughts is a total myth. Although I have used Microsoft software for my own purposes nearly everyday for the larger part of my life, I cannot see how Gates or his company has in any way influenced my views on politics, art, or life in general. Apart from being a sort of influential prototypical engineering/business nerd, I don't see Bill Gates as a threat to my personal freedom or that of the world. Gates is a builder of businesses and innovative shaper of industry. He is not a man of ideas nor a molder of men's minds and philosophies. One day fortune and fate will lay low his business empire, too.

Q: Who cares if Gates doesn't have anything to do with philosophy? He is rich and powerful! Baloney talks but money walks!
A: Then you are entirely in synch with the cult of money and consumerism which rules our age. However, if you look at the bigger picture throughout history I believe you will find that philosophers - in a thousand different guises - are the ones that truly rule societies. As I read in Time magazine recently:

"They [the influential among us] have got other people to follow their lead. They don't necessarily have the maximum in raw power; instead, they are people whose styles are imitated, whose ideas are adopted and whose examples are followed. Powerful people twist your arm. Influentials just sway your thinking."

And I would add that ideas and thoughts last much longer than personal wealth and power!

Q: You are wrong! We have come into an electronic dark age, in which the new pagan hordes, with all the power of technology at their command, are on the verge of obliterating the last strongholds of civilized humanity... unless we fight!
A: I am not ready yet to flee to a postmodern Monte Casino monastery and hide myself from the tyrannical onslaught of informational capitalists and their rampaging data networks, by any means. A new "electronic dark age?" I sometimes stumble across millennial thinking such as yours claiming the end is near with the electronic beast come slouching home to Jerusalem, and I am more than a bit amused! I read critics accusing technology and computers as "promoting a network society that devours itself, losing the sense of continuity of life across generations, and so denying the future of humans as a human species," claiming that "computers and global capitalism are the death of traditional society", etc, etc, etc... and I want to laugh at points of argument taken to logical extremes and then through hyperbole made thoroughly risible! A dose of perspective and common sense is called for here!

An individual once e-mailed me claiming that all the information available through the Internet is useless unless it can be made over into knowledge, our knowledge trivial unless it can yield wisdom. Thus far, he got no argument from me. However, he concluded, "The great vice of the age of information is that it is complicit in destroying synthetic knowledge and thus wisdom." That is a leap I am not prepared to make. After all, as a young, cutting-edge teacher of the humanities on the cusp of the 21st century I integrate technology seamlessly into my classroom, but I teach the Western intellectual tradition as it has been handed down to me by countless earlier scholars in a manner essentially no different than theirs. Computers and digital technologies are new tools towards the implementation of old goals; I see it no differently than did Thoreau in the middle of the 19th century: "All our inventions are but improved means to an unimproved end."

Q: So you don't think Gates and his minions will simply invest billions of dollars and then gain a strangle hold on the 'Net and quash any --
A: -- Stop right there. The Web by nature defies centralized control and I predict the Internet is one battle Bill Gates will not win.

Q: You dare to bet against the great Bill Gates! Impudence!
A: Jeez. The man will probably always be richer than Croesus (enjoy the irony of that one!) yet let us not ever speak of the legacy of a man until he is dead. Bill Gates is just a mortal human being like you and I. He may be powerful, rich, and all that dross; but let's not ascribe supernatural powers to him. And the winds of fortune are capricious as hell on this slippery earth!

I have read that Bill Gates lays awake at night worrying about competitors and the future of Microsoft. He is the leader of the pack and all the others are sharpening their long knives for him. Why would anyone want to live like that?

Q: How do you greet the much heralded convergence of the World Wide Web and television?
A: With a yawn. I think it will happen, but if the WebTV content is as boring as it presently is I and many other people will be appearing at the Fox Network or MSNBC websites as infrequently as we currently turn on the boob tube/idiot box. The Web is big enough for everyone, and so I think TV can take its mostly classless act onto the Web without adversely affecting others.

The Web has, in my experience, been typified by lots of open space, few rules, and a continuous sense of discovery. Gates and the introduction of popular culture (entertainment industry, TV) to the Web might to some degree "mainstream" the Internet and (ie. make it a bit like a virtual corporate theme park with slick brochure-cum-webpages as far as the mind can imagine), but there will always be people out there on the edge pushing the limits. But maybe the World Wide Web could use a few more brain housewives and insurance salesmen and fewer system administrators, college students and professional writer/rebels. In the past few years the Internet has gone from being a "revolutionary" technology to a conventional staple of middle-class homes. Homemakers are trading Beanie Babies on the Net, businessmen are booking airline reservations via the Web, and kids are checking their homework online. Grandparents stay in touch with the newer generations, and those with niche interests can find people of similar interest worldwide. Author Bruce Sterling has said, "Web-surfing is a genuinely popular enterprise - it's like Monday Night Football or line dancing." I think this development is good! When I first got on the Internet, it was mostly the exclusive domain of system administrators, computer geeks, social outcasts, libertarians and hate groups. Not that I have anything against either sysops or those with a burning interest in some faction of political thought, but diversity of opinion and orientation is healthy in any collective setting. The artificial world of cyberspace, in my humble opinion, badly needed some of the lifeblood of the real world to make it more truly "human."

Yes, the World Wide Web clearly is threatened by the forces of consumerism. Yet while people like myself and many others still have access to the Internet, the Web will not be driven into a brain coma inducing, TV-like conformity dominated by those bloodless soul suckers in the mass media marketing industry who would make the Internet more a shopping mall than a library. Consider that a promise from me to you.

Q: But what about when the cable TV people offer bandwidth which makes video and truly interactive entertainment over computer networks a reality? Don't you think TV will swallow the Web as we have traditionally known it as "Seinfeld" and "NYPD Blue" move onto the Web?
A: Maybe. But I don't care too much either way. How does "Seinfeld" moving onto the web affect me and my humble webpage? Katz predicted about the coming victory of TV over the Web: "Websites will also become subject to TV's laws of commercial survival: Reach lots of people and make lots of money - or die quickly and brutally."

I pay for this site out of my own pocket and am not subject to TV laws. I am content to make no money and reach only those who stumble upon my page by word of mouth and search engines (about 40,000 visitors a month, and that is quite enough for me, thank you.).

Q: With all due respect, it's still going to come down to the marketing dollar on the World Wide Web. Whatever else happens, however many millions of people go online, because of the way that we live over here in the West it's actually going to come down to how many dollars are spent on making that site or that thinker, bringing up their awareness, bringing up their profiles. It's all going to be about shouting and getting people's attention in a world where everyone is clamoring for your attention.
A: You assume that I want to have millions of persons visit my site as I try to raise my "profile" and compete in the consumer marketplace for attention. Let me be plain: I want no such thing! I don't want to be the center of attention or be a figure of public record. I like being a little fish in a big ocean. My ideal visitor discovers my site while searching for something else, and then he/she is pleasantly surprised and spends a couple of hours perusing everything. They decide to bookmark my URL and return once every couple of weeks to explore more during precious free moments. They arrive by 1's and 2's and not by thousands and hundreds of thousands. And that is the way I like it!

When I first launched my domain in 1996, I assiduously registered all my URLs in the search engines immediately after I posted them. I wanted to get as many visitors as I could, but that has long since ceased to be the case. I have enough as it is now, and I rarely register any new URLs with search engines. So please don't try to buttonhole me into the business model for websites. My domain is a way for me to communicate with the world, and, almost more importantly, with myself. Again, I am not in it for the money.

Q: But then you will only have a niche in the online world? Don't you think that is limiting to you and your message? What about the vast majority of the world's population who don't even have phones, not to mention computes or Internet access?
A: What about them? Who cares about being only a "niche" presence?

I have no ambition to be a major force on the Web or developer of new and clever ideas. I just felt moved to put some essays, pictures, and experiences onto the web for those who would like to check them out. I have tried to put up some accessible and original content that would make a visit to my website worth a person's time. It is very simple, and I would like to keep it that way. "A writer should write what he has to say," Ernest Hemingway told the Nobel Committee when he won the prize in 1954. It as simple as that. If I feel something in my heart, I try to understand it with my mind and then transmit it onto the page with my hand in the writing process. Enough said.

Q: You are a breath of fresh air, an oasis of all things beautiful on an ugly internet. No offense, but commercialism and Fox NewsAtTen will purge you though, we stand no chance against the unwary sucker ("consumer") who, en masse, insist on giving "them" all their money, making "them" richer, stronger, and ourselves weaker in the process.
A: I have set up my personal finances in such a way that my webpage will be around long after Fox NewsAtTen is gone. I might not make as much money as that show nor be "richer" or "stronger," but that is not the point of my webpage. This is not a competition; ultimately, I don't think Fox NewsAtTen and my webpages even have very much in common. And it is highly doubtful that I will ever pay dollar one to Fox NewsAtTen or be "purged" by them. They have not that power over me, a private individual. I am not for sale. I don't even watch television. What do I care that other people give Fox NewsAtTen all their money?

Contemporary culture has become so sensationalistic and popularity seeking! I recently watched a movie where a rapaciously ambitious weather girl says: "You're not anybody in America if you're not on TV. What's the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody's watching?" It is lamentably no different in politics. "Unless the media, particularly broadcast media, refer to an issue," explains UCLA Professor Shanto Iyengar, "it doesn't exist." That sums up much of what is wrong with America today, in my humble opinion. I don't want my site to be bombarded with visitors. I want to have Web surfers here and there stumble upon my pages and then unexpectedly enjoy some beautiful poems and pictures when they thought they were going to do something else that evening. I like the low-key approach.

Q: Fair enough! How old are you?
A: Not so young, sir, to love a woman for singing, nor so old to dote on her for any thing: I have years on my back thirty one.

Q: Spare me the Shakespeare! Speak in plain English, please!
A: OK. I just turned 32.

Q: How does that feel?
A: Surprisingly good! I think we tend to overrate the 20s in our youth-oriented culture. I found my 20s to be very difficult. You're supposed to be an adult - you have all this information on your side, but you don't have the experience to judge it. I look forward to enjoying this new decade now that I generally have a clue about life. I've taken the world's measure, and I fit in it more comfortably than I did 10 years ago. That is a good thing.

Q: How is it being 32 compared to 22?
A: It is both much better and much worse.

Q: Are you excited to start your third decade?
A: Yes. They say you spend your 20s understanding who you are and your 30s figuring out where you fit into the world -- like I just said. I am ready with a clean slate and a new decade!

Q: Are you single?
A: Yes. Next question.

Q: What is it that you like most about a woman?
A: I believe I have spoken about that elsewhere.

Q: What about your likes and dislikes in general?
A: I also have discussed my likes and dislikes elsewhere.

Q: Do you have any children?
A: God forbid! I have enough trouble taking care of myself.

Q: What is your e-mail address?
A: I usually use rgeib@rjgeib.com and a couple other e-mail addresses posted to this domain. I also have an e-mail address not publicly available that I use for my friends and family and that electronic mailbox takes priority over all the others! As for work, my e-mail address is rgeib@mchschool.org. Amazingly, I also still get e-mail at the Los Angeles Unified School District at rgeib@lausd.k12.ca.us even though I quit that job years ago! It will probably take them another couple of years to figure out I am gone and cut off my access! And finally I have a couple other e-mail addresses that I never use.

Q: Do you get a lot of junk e-mail?
A: I am getting more and more. The amount increased exponentially when I registered for "free" to gain access to the "New York Times" online edition. I am sure they immediately sold my e-mail address to about a hundred media advertising firms, and now these pathetic missives trickle into my electronic mailbox claiming I can "make big money online!" This junk e-mail seems to be even stupider than junk snail mail. And that is saying a lot.

However, I never get junk e-mail at that private address I hold reserved for only friends and family. That is another major reason I keep it out of public view!

Q: Do you actually read your e-mail?
A: Yep. Every last one of them. No matter how briefly.

Q: Why didn't you answer my last e-mail?
A: I wanted to... but I just.... you know how it is when your mailbox fills up and you forget who you responded to and next thing you know there are more e-mails. Don't get me wrong, I love receiving mail (in English, Spanish - even in Spanglish!) and wish to be niggardly with neither my attention or consideration. It is just that responding to it can get so, well, tedious (especially after I come back after a week of not being online and there are eighty messages waiting for me), and everything there is to know about me is on-line anyway. Try e-mailing me again and pop off this time a little. Like, "HEY, Rich my man! Where the hell are you!" That should do the trick.

If I still don't answer you, think about it. Was that e-mail you sent me the kind YOU would return?

Q: What is the first thing you do after reading an e-mail?
A: If it is remotely interesting, I trace its route through the Internet and/or check out the homepage of the provider in an attempt to determine the physical location of the sender. Often respondents make comments about URLs I hardly even remember writing, and so I have to go back and re-read what I once wrote so as to understand the context of the remarks.

Q: How do you trace these routes through the Internet?
A: The vast majority of the time we leave electronic footprints that indicate our paths through the Internet. People have less anonymity/privacy of the Internet than they think! I get people sending me threatening/offensive messages obviously thinking that I cannot find out who they are and from where they originate. They are often mistaken; embarrassment has been the result more than once or twice on their part.

Q: What do you usually say to those people who e-mail you or sign your guest book?
A: I generally thank them for their time and invite them to come back and visit my webpages whenever they want. I have a kind word or two for almost everyone. But often the e-mail piles up to the point where I am negligent in acknowledging all such respondents.

Q: Do you get a lot of e-mail?
A: I don't get more than I can usually handle, I am happy to say. I get maybe fifteen or sixteen e-mails from perfect strangers everyday in addition to those my friends and family send me. However, it all begins to add up! I currently have approximately 55 MB of e-mail sitting on my hard disk!

And I never fail to continually update my "How Is Life Treating You?" page with respondents from all over the world! I think it's pretty cool! Check it out!

Q: I see in your webpages you have several quotes from Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. What do you think of convicted mass murderer Timothy McVeigh invoking Brandeis's dissent in the Olmstead ruling ("Our government is the potent, the omnipotent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by example.") immediately before he was sentenced to death in justifying his killing of 168 people and wounding over 500 others in the bombing of the Arthur P. Murray Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1994?
A: I look upon it as blasphemy! I can imagine ol' Judge Brandeis turning over in his grave cursing to the skies that a little learning is a dangerous thing! Let me answer McVeigh's out of context appropriation of Brandeis with another Brandeis quotation from that same 1928 ruling:

"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

It has always been a fundamental tenet of American political thought that change in government come through PEACEFUL means, as democracy has always been about choosing the ballot box over the bullet.

The notion that violence is a technique of last resort, to be adopted only when all other attempts to attain justice have failed, is rejected by McVeigh and his other militia buddies who reveals themselves to be enemies of free society and not freedom fighters (as they would like to be seen). McVeigh and too many of his militia buddies in their towering haughty hatred of the government are possessing of a rare and dangerous kind of stupidity -- a stupidity of the heart. Fanatacism is the unhappy result, terrorism and bloodshed the consequence.

Before his comments preceding his sentencing, I did not care much whether they executed McVeigh or put him some hole forever. But in reading his remarks and observing his "tough guy" revolutionary/militant demeanor and unapologetic "iceman" pose, I think maybe this terrorist deserves to die. As the Mexicans say, "Muerto el perro, se acaba la rabia."

And McVeigh's specious comments highlight one of the most unattractive tendencies in the modern American character: the blaming of other people for our actions. As Marsha Knight, whose daughter died that morning in the Oklahoma City bombing, claimed after hearing McVeigh seem to blame the government for causing him to murder her daughter and 167 other human beings: "He may think it's easy to put it off on somebody else. But we all set an example by what we do." I would have retained maybe a tiny bit of respect for McVeigh if he had come clean and simply said, "I hate the U.S. government, and so I blew up one of its buildings!" Now I will hardly even pay attention when they kill him. Good riddance!

Q: Then it is safe to say you don't see Timothy McVeigh as a modern day Patrick Henry?
A: Hardly. The day I lose my vote, ability to seek redress against the government in a court of law, and right to speak my mind in public and online is exactly the day I begin to fight my government. Yet even if such a fantastic day were to arrive, I sincerely doubt I would resort to blowing up buildings full of everyday working men and women (with day care centers full of children no less!).

Let's change the subject, please.

Q: Just a bit longer, please. You seem to support what I consider a barbaric policy contrary to the spirit of civilized behavior: the death penalty. Do you really think killing killers is an appropriate response to killing? Do you think the death penalty really deters criminals from committing murder?
A: I do not think it deters murder. But I support the death penalty with regards to the most heinous murderers for various reasons. I support it as a symbolic, ritual act which communicates to everyone - especially the family, friends, and acquaintances of the murdered - that it is wrong to unlawfully take the lives of others with malice and that we show our respect for the dead and proclaim the value of innocent human life by taking the trouble to execute murderers. You may think it contradictory to kill killers to show respect for life; but I consider it worse to simply chalk up another murder victim to uncontrollable crime and pay hardly any attention to yet another brutal murder as is the case in a contemporary America which is all too often desensitized to even the most violent acts.

That a person could take multiple hostages in a robbery and then force them to drink chemical drain cleaner and consequently die horrible painful deaths and then afterwards have the gall to say they have the right to live is what galls and offends me! Such a criminal deserves to die! The pathetically weak sense of outrage to murder shown by many is what galls me! That a vicious murderer is convicted lawfully and then executed in as painless a manner as possible? It does not overly trouble me.

I would support the death penalty for only the most brutal and remorseless of murderers. Capital punishment should be to put a final stop to human killing machines who will likely keep killing, whether inside a prison, where they have little to lose, or outside, since murders are notoriously adept at getting released, whether legally or by other means. I look upon it as a drastic form of societal self-defense. I would never consider a public execution a happy event to be celebrated (as some do). On the other hand, I would save my pity for those who deserve it. I have chosen a career and lived in such a way as to avoid most murderers, but I have had some experience in that realm and do not speak only in the abstract -- so believe me when I say there are some who deserve death as clearly as any rabid dog. You might argue that a man is not a dog, and so his killing is something more grave. I would agree with you, but it is only a matter of degree. You might argue that for a society, in the interest of justice and self-defense, to match a depraved criminal's act of killing with a killing, to deny him even life, is for a society to lose its very civility. I would counter that society can kill a killer without losing its essential civility, and to argue otherwise is to be a bit too fastidious for my tastes.

For example, a Mr. Richard Ernest who prision officials said called himself "The Rainbow Warrior," was recently executed in Utah by lethal injection for stabbing another man to death. Held by thick leather straps and with intravenous lines full of lethal drugs flowing into his arms, this "warrior" Mr. Ernest was relaxed as he spoke his final words: "My love to my family and friends. And the Rainbow Warrior rules!" The rainbow flag is a symbol for the gay community, you understand; and Ernest was hitchhiking back in 1987 when he was picked up by a driver who he claims made homosexual advances towards him (a contention refuted by the evidence), and so he killed that guy and bragged about his feat later in prison. "Good riddance to him! I say. The day before that another man in Texas, who nicknamed himself "Animal", was also executed by injection for raping and killing an 18-year-old high school cheerleader, one of three people killed during a day long murder spree in 1986. This individual, a Mr. Jerry McFadden, 51, made no final statement. This execution, performed in the name of the "people," troubled me not at all as a citizen. I slept just fine that evening; I did not mourn their deaths. Like I said about such extreme cases: muerto el perro, se acaba rabia.

When I see people so concerned about vicious killers like these, I think perhaps they would like to adopt them and take them home to live with them? Maybe even sleep on a couch outside their bedroom?

Q: But the State sets the example! When they employ capital punishment as an instrument of revenge or as ritualistic ceremony they tell us that killing is an acceptable social tool!
A: But killing is and has always been an acceptable social tool within narrowly proscribed circumstances (ie: the law)! Why are police empowered to carry pistols and to shoot people sometimes? Why do we pay for and train large numbers of soldiers in the ancient art of killing other soldiers in war? Killing human beings who will not listen to any other language but brute force is an important behavior in any society I ever heard of; and to conclude otherwise is to be naive and to have an overly rosy opinion of mankind as a species, in my opinion. Writer John Updike has claimed that in a world "indelibly stained by Original Sin, peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle." Who, that has lived many years and looked around long and steadily around at the world, can argue with that?

A police buddy of mine has shot two men dead in the line of duty. They were both tattoo-covered recently released ex-cons carrying guns on their persons - one who was in the midst of a robbery spree. These desperate men pulled their guns and one had already fired on my friend and consequently put him in a position where he was obliged to shoot him to save his own life. Society paid for my buddy's gun and training precisely so that he could defend himself and others by killing such a person. It is a hard burden the people lay on my friend the police officer in this; but I am much happier these armed and dangerous ex-cons happened to run into my armed friend the lawman than you are I (unarmed ordinary citizens) at some automatic cash machine in the middle of the night. Killing is an acceptable social tool, in my opinion. And they most likely will give my friend another medal for shooting this latest armed robber.

Q: Years ago I began to recognize my kinship with all living beings…
A: And?

Q: I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a prison, I am not free.
A: Then you will never be free, always in prison. It is very high-minded rhetoric you use which we rightly admire, but the kind of world you are looking for is not to be found this side of the grave. If you have been to prison and actually mixed with the "criminal element," you might have a different take on all this.

Instead of trying to perfect the whole world and probably making things worse, I suggest you simply strive to live a life of principle yourself. You might find that hard enough to accomplish. And I think you have more power and reach in rolling up your sleeves and getting to work helping those immediately around you than with everyone in the world.

Q: OK. I am ready to change the topic. I see you passionately and eloquently argued against the Communications Decency Act (CDA). There are a great many of us that one may call "ultra-conservative" who are fighting tooth and nail to keep freedom of speech on the Internet. We are also doing everything we can to preserve our 2nd amendment rights: to keep and bear arms. Alas, so many who seek freedom of speech balk when we speak of the need to keep our teeth, as well as our tongues. What do you think? Do you support us?
A: Yes and no. I support being able to own a handgun, shotgun (as I do), or a hunting rifle. I do not support public ownership of assault rifles, machine guns, flame throwers, or grenade launchers.

If such a theme interests you, check out this where I explain myself more fully. I find most "ultra-conservative" militia gun nuts almost as irritating as I do "ultra-liberal" social justice revolutionaries. They are the flip sides of the same coin.

Q: I guess it is all relative, eh?
A: Without a doubt. Thomas Paine was a radical firebrand in colonial America but well nigh a reactionary in Jacobin France before the onslaught of the Robespierre and Company. Paine fit in perfectly with a bunch of angry farmers in revolutionary Massachusetts but found himself languishing in prison awaiting Mdme. Guillotine during the Terror. Context is everything.

A moderate conservative in the United States, I fear I might be a "subversive" in Pinochet's Chile in the seventies or Castro's Cuba or contemporary Singapore, finding myself in prison or worse. In Hitler's Third Reich, I hope I would have had the guts to go to a concentration camp. That is where decent people of conscience belonged in Nazi Germany.

Yet I am not one of those anti-authoritarian types who fought with my teachers as a child just to be a pain in the ass. Yet when Authority gets up in my face without justification and makes unreasonable demands upon my person violating the sanctity of my private space, I can be unbelievably stubborn. I am OK as long as I am afforded a measure of privacy and space; but when my sovereignty is infringed upon, my anger is towering and intense. For example, I was rarely a discipline problem in the relatively relaxed public school, but I spent one miserable year as a teenager in an authoritarian Catholic school where I was on the verge of becoming a bona fide "angry young man."

Q: Catholic school? What do you think of the Pope? If you met him, would you kneel down and kiss his ring?
A: No, man. I kneel down to no man on this earth in that way; such obeisance is why angry farmers started a revolution two centuries ago in New England and I see no good reason to resume the practice. The Pope may be an intelligent and highly spiritual man - the chances are very high that he is so. Yet the Pope is still a man who is prone to human error, and I for the life of me will never listen to him as if he were the Mouthpiece of God or the divine embodiment of the Universal Church. In the end, I will listen to his message and weigh it according to its merits or lack thereof as I would that of anyone else. But I will also disagree with him - be he Pope, or no - if that is where my thoughts lead me. And it will be a cold day in hell before I bow down and kiss his ring finger.

I almost got into it once with a Catholic priest in the catacombs of Rome who pulled that I-am-a-minor-aristocrat-who-must-be-respected-because-of-my-collar attitude. In Italy, it is obvious many priests are so treated; but I was damned if I was going to feign obeisance to another man simply because he was a priest! I will treat him with no more or less respect than I would anyone else, and he will consequently earn or not any additional respect! And this priest was American! He must have spent much time in Italy, as he would hardly have gotten away with that arrogant attitude long on the streets of a city in the United States.

Q: You speak about rights you have under American law. What about other rights? What about the right to food, shelter, health and education?
A: I do not see the government owing those things to me. I only see as "inalienable" certain basic rights such as the liberty to think my own thoughts and choose my own manner of living - and the freedom from being terrorized by my own government or by enemies domestic and foreign. Food, shelter, health care... all these are responsibilities which I will provide for myself through the sweat of my brow and fruit of my labor. I do not look to the government to provide for my basic care and upkeep.

There is a basic difference here. You seem to see "freedom" as a freedom from necessity which the government exists to reduce. This is the view of most socialists, persons who concentrate more on the "losers" of society who lack education, initiative, talent, etc and are offended by differences in outcome and opportunity between individuals in a society. Others define "freedom" as an absence of restraints or censorship imposed by government, and this is the view of most conservatives. I am torn between these two healthy points of views; but with every year it seem that often you could invest any amount of time, effort, and money on the lowest performing members of society without any marked improvement. Consequently, I think it a better use of limited resources to concentrate on those who have talent and, most important of all, motivation.

Q: Each according to his need, each according to his ability! Jesus and Mohammad tell us the poor have a preferential place in the house of God! Those who lack talent, motivation, and learning are no lower in the eyes of the Lord! They are also children of God, and they deserve more because their need is more!
A:I never said they were not also the children of God or undeserving of a place under the sun; but personally I prefer people who have spunk, talent, and expertise in abundance. Educators in America who share your priorities usually become "special education" teachers specializing in students with physical and emotional learning disabilities -- or they work in "disadvantaged" areas with low levels of literacy and achievement among the local population. They are concerned primarily with equality and meeting the needs of individuals and making the most of their potentials. In contrast, I see the work of the ideal teacher as challenging all students to meet very high standards and then rewarding those who meet those standards and punishing those who don't. Exceptional students may be "poor" or not, but all such students who excel in their studies deserve more attention than the others because nine times out of ten their effort and commitment is much greater than in the mediocre or worse students who lack "talent, motivation, and learning." This seems to me common sensical.

All students deserve a certain minimum amount of attention, and the idea of huge disparities in achievement is unwelcome; but I am more interested in individual excellence than in collective equality in a school. This opinion would make me decidedly unpopular in my country (people would decry me as an "elitist"), but I must admit it is how I feel. With a certain indifference a teacher sees many Chevrolets and Yugos pass through the classroom, but those few Cadillacs make it all worth it. One lives for those Cadillacs! The ferociously Christian populations of Medieval Europe were made almost all equal in their simple, God-fearing lives; the Renaissance, in contrast, saw huge disparities of wealth and education in society. But the "Age of Faith" in Europe interests me very little, and I find cuattrocento Florence and its artists and thinkers endlessly fascinating. The pious Geneva of John Calvin or Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini seem to me very dull, but I would give almost anything to be able to attend one dinner party with Socrates in Athens or Thomas Jefferson at Monticello! Does this make sense?

So as to Jesus, Muhammad, and the poor: take my values on what constitutes the ideal school, affix them to the larger society, and then you have the answer to your question.

Q: But you are a teacher in a capitalist country where the starting salary is $23,000 and entry-level investment bankers with the same education make $93,000. Surely that grates on you as an injustice!
A: It does at times. Nevertheless, I made the decision myself to become a teacher. If money were so important to me, I would have chose some other profession, like banking or law. I do not doubt I would have made a lot of money if I had put my energies into that route. Yet I currently have enough to survive and do not want for any of the necessities. I pay my way through life and am a burden to no one.

It is really rather simple, and I like that way.

Q: Is it really that simple?
A: Well... I do feel pangs of envy when I drive by a beautiful house and think about how I never will live in such a place with a beautiful wife and children. But then I tell myself I have chosen another path in life and to make the best of that path by exploiting fully the advantages I do enjoy. Anybody can carp about the grass being greener on the other side of the fence. I strive to take responsibility for my life and complain as little as possible about my position.

It is an interesting question that you ask... I have read so many books, but I feel as if I know less and less; and sometimes I even wonder if I have not unwisely invested my life's energy. The wisest man in history is reputed to have said he knew only that he knew nothing; and I know that to be a rhetorician's sleight of hand: we know what we know, and to know something is to know more than nothing. Even if we know less than we think (often the case) or have the humility to realize all that we don't even know we don't know (rarely the case), to know anything is to know more than nothing. If I have lost some of the vigor and brashness of youth, it has been replaced with other, more patient virtues more proper to a lifetime of reading, thinking, and learning. I realize this is what it takes: years and years of incessant reading and, more painfully, critical thinking and evaluating. I tell myself something good must come from a life of study and close attention to the world around and inside him -- deeper knowledge, even wisdom. But it is always woefully incomplete, and adequate or superior only in comparison. It never ends, and it never gets any easier.

One can look back and recognize progress, purchased with blood and sweat; one can transmit, or be the vehicle for transmission, of knowledge to others. This must count for something. But in the United States, if one does not make an ample financial score, then no matter what one's line of work or their accomplishments, one feels, somehow, a flop. If you are neither rich nor famous, our whole culture implies, you must be a chump! I wish this did not bother me, but it does. I have argued to myself the merits of my case countless times, but still I come up short.

Q: I'm a frustrated third grade teacher in N.C. who is going nowhere fast! Your article grabbed my attention while Net Searching for a job in the L.A. area. Well, more preferably the outskirts of L.A. (Especially after reviewing your article!)
A: And?...

Q: In N.C. we teachers are treated as professionals but not paid as professionals. Living on $22,000 a year going on my third year is outrageous....not to mention the district (Charlotte) won't even pay for us to go back to school! I heard that California State will pay for teachers to continue their educations. I'm also interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature or Education.
A: Sorry, it is no better here in California. Times are tough for teachers everywhere. As a professional teacher, you can improve and improve over the years and amass a mountain of honors, and still make the same modest salary as other teachers. You will most likely receive neither more nor less acknowledgment for your work.

It will be a hard life being a teacher, one without much appreciation or material comforts. You study long years to acquire the necessary knowledge and wisdom, work long hours instructing often difficult students, are paid little for it, encounter many obstacles and suffer much frustration along the journey. But hopefully it will also be without remorse or regret.

Q: Rich, teachers are the bottom of the status scale in our nation. In other nations, they are near the top. The U.S. public has a ridiculous attitude toward the profession of teaching--we are consulted about nothing and blamed for everything. In what other profession are you told "You should be doing this for love, not for money"? In what other profession are you limited to a lifetime of making the salary of a locksmith? In what other profession are you assumed to be a jackass for choosing it, but expected to be a cross between Jesus Christ and Einstein in order to "succeed" in it?
A: What is your point?

Q: It must be difficult to be a teacher in a country where that profession garners little respect. How do you treat that issue with your students?
A: Well... many Americans respect teachers as idealist and indispensable to the future - nowhere have I seen this more than in parents. However, not many want their children to become teachers themselves because of the low salaries. I think because teachers are not very well paid, many students unthinkingly hold them to be less than completely exemplary individuals - persons not to be taken entirely seriously ("If you are so smart, why are you only a teacher?"). Our heroes in America are more often sports figures or rock stars or entrepreneurs or CEOs or actors; we equate, in what has always seemed bizarre to me, personal worth with material wealth.

I would hardly speak defensively to skeptical teenagers how in other societies teachers are considered among the most honored and respected people in all of society; or how Plato thought the teacher/philosophers should be the leaders of the country, and society would suffer until that time (a position of Plato's I violently reject). It won't change my student's point of view. So I just try to shut my mouth and do my job as well as I can, trusting that my students learn in my class and know it. When they get older, they might discover that Buying and Selling and Winning and Building and Marketing and Earning are not all they are cracked up to be, and then they might as adults look back upon their teachers with different eyes. They might one day learn that a man is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has. It is the fullness of heart and depth of life that makes one happy. A rock star, CEO, or successful entrepreneur might have such a depth of heart along with their material wealth, and they might not.

Q: Rich, I am in college and almost self-sufficient, but I grew up in a household where both my parents were teachers and I got a good look at the crap they put up with. There is the bureaucracy, the miserable working conditions, the low pay, the obnoxious students. I now ask myself why anyone would want to become a teacher?
A: I think you know the answer to that question. Or if you have forgotten already, go ask your parents!

Q: No, wait a second! Why would I, or anyone else, earn a college degree and then get a teachers' license to prepare for an occupation that qualifies me for low-income housing? Why would I prepare for a career that makes me hold two or three jobs in order to support my family? Why should I want a job that requires me to take three or four hours of work home every night? Why should I take a job where I have to work in old, deteriorating buildings without heat or carpeting? Why put up with administrators and politicians who seemingly conspire to make you fail in your job?
A: You do it because you love the material you teach and cannot imagine doing anything else. The best teachers, in my opinion, are those who see it as much as a vocation as a profession -- similar to those who go into the clergy or become artists. They would teach almost for free. They do it for the joy of doing it rather than for the money.

And I think you exaggerate the low-pay. I have never known a teacher that took three hours of work home every night, and neither myself nor most teachers live in low-income housing. We teachers are also re-paid in ways that cannot be accurately measured through the hash of cash; there are many kinds of riches in the world, and money is only one of them -- and not even the most important, at that!

Your summation of the life of a teacher is too narrow by two times. I am never in my life more happy than when I recite animatedly Shakespeare's love sonnets to my classes. My voice booms, my face flushes in a sort of literary ecstasy, I go on and on from memory, and I look my students straight in the eyes as I recite the lines. The students more often than not conclude I am a weirdo and some with nervous laughter dismiss me as such, but they will not forget their old English teacher who acted (and lived!) as if poetry were the most lordly of man's creations. They might gently mock me as the eccentric who refuses to own a television and spends most of his spare time reading, writing, and thinking, but the example will lay dormant in their minds perhaps to be re-examined in later life when adulthood brings to them the earnest import and tragic seriousness of life.

Q: But do you ever experience the pang of envy?
A: Unfortunately, yes. With not a little unease, I have noticed in the last couple of years the insidious sensation of envy creeping into my breast.... envy for one the well-paying job of another, a particularly felicitious period of my past, prestige and respectability of another in the eyes of society, beautiful and classy fiancée of a friend. I realize the disagreeableness of this emotion which is so intimately enmeshed with my dissatisfaction with myself, but I cannot help feeling as I do. Envy is insidious and a sort of continuous self-laceration: invidia festos dies non agit. Like Othello's towering jealousy, 'tis the green-eyed monster that doth feed upon its own meat. I seek to avoid the poison of envy and to enjoy that with which God has seen fit to bless me.

Q: Othello? You speak of Othello? Get thee to a police station! Seek to make conversation with a therapist!
A: Let's not exaggerate things! It is a minor not major problem with me; I wonder if everyone does not feel some degree of envy in their lives. And I also recognize and am truly grateful for that with which I have been blessed.

Q: Everything vexed and in opposition! Simplicity and complexity, with nothing betwixt 'em. God help thee, strange man, thou art confusing! What kind of man be this?
A: Sir, I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, buy that I wear, owe no man hate, try to envy no man's happiness, be glad of other men's good, live content with my harm; and the greatest of my pride is to see my webpage grow and my students learn.

Q: Your webpage "grow"? You make it sound like it is alive!
A: I like to think my webpage is like a garden which needs constant attention... a bit of pruning here, some growing there. Augustine Birrell said, "Libraries are not made; they grow." A good webpage is no different.

It involves endless work, but the labor is the reward.

Q: Let's change the topic. What do you think about Ted Kaczynski, the suspected Unabomber?
A: I don't think much about him at all. Why?

Q: Well, what do you think about Kaczynski's manifesto against modern technological society?
A: I didn't read it. And I didn't read it on purpose. A person need do more than blow people up to get my attention, and I suspect Kaczynski belongs more to the realm of deviant criminal psychology than decent political discourse.

There are so many other worthy ideas and authors to read! Why waste my time on that guy? After all, I didn't read Charles Manson's autobiography either! Some guy on the Web wrote: "Anonymous terrorist action designed to seduce world media is second in contemptibility only to torture... Maybe the Unabomber had some good ideas, but if he had to blow people up to get his ideas out, how good can they really be?" I like the way he put that. The persons I have known that I respect the most -- in brilliance of intellect, strength of moral vision, and in unimpeachability of integrity -- were never persons who inspired fear in me or made violence the center of their philosophy. Their strength was of the earth, as old and rooted in the soil as a great ancient oak tree... "Nothing is so strong as gentleness; nothing is so gentle as real strength," claims Francis De Sales, rightly.

But back to the Unabomber. Truthfully, I did briefly browse his long-winded jeremiad against the world when they originally published it in the "New York Times". However, I wasn't tempted to unravel Kaczynski's twisted ideas any more than I wanted to seek to understand the wacko theology of those Heaven's Gate people who committed mass suicide last year.

Q: But Kaczynski is simply a proud but dispossessed and alienated rebel fighting against a barbarous industrial-technological system run amok! He is a victim! I think the Unabomber should rank with Odysseus and King Arthur as an epic hero!
A: What a bunch of crap! Kaczynski is no heroic victim fighting the Machine in a lonely fight for a better world. He is a KOOK who kills people and then RATIONALIZES it! How is the world a better place now that Theodore Kaczynski has lived among and apart from us? I can give you many examples of how we are worse off. And what did he ultimately change?

Kaczynski did kill 3 people and injury badly 23 in 16 separate attacks during a 17 year anti-technology bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995. He sent bombs to people in the mail and then cloaked his actions in words! That is COWARDICE! Anyone who thinks otherwise should try opening a letter bomb for a dose of empathy in terms of what it is like to be blown up. And make sure nobody else is around when you do so.

Q: But Kaczynski is alleged to have sent bombs and killed people! He has not been convicted yet!
A: No, he recently pled guilty as charged. Ask me about something else, please. I'm getting upset.

Q: One more thing. The Harvard-educated Kaczynski supposedly crafted his homemade bombs over months with loving care and expertise, making components out of common items such as matchsticks, lamp cords and batteries - meticulously polishing his bomb parts to prevent any trace of fingerprints, etc. Don't you find that interesting? I mean, most such types are not so well educated and resourceful! Don't you find the story interesting of this former brilliant Berkeley math professor with an IQ of 170 turned homicidal mountain recluse? And his views! I mean, he was willing to kill for them! They must have something to them.
A: I find it remotely interesting, and more than a little repugnant and sad. And I no way conclude that since he is willing to die or kill for an idea it inherently follows that the idea is worth dying or killing for; many are the highly intelligent people who have killed and died for almost no good reason at all! The Nazi Third Reich was full of engineers and scientists engaged most industriously in the construction and development of concentration camps and gas chambers, crematoriums, etc. Many hyper-educated German doctors performed gruesome experiments on humans as if their lives meant nothing for the greater glory of the Third Reich. Intelligence and education untempered by human affection can create monsters, as history shows us.

Just because someone is well educated does not mean they have a highly developed moral sense, by any means. And the well educated people in this world who are evil are more dangerous than the rabid dog knucklescraper types which fill our worst jails, in my opinion. As the creed of my father's alma mater Phillips Exeter Academy asserts: "Goodness without knowledge is weak and feeble, yet knowledge without goodness is dangerous." Which is more dangerous? An illiterate gangster with a handgun, or some deranged megalomaniac with sufficient scientific knowledge to assemble weapons of mass destruction? Think about it.

David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist disfigured in a 1993 Unabomber attack, caught well the moral spirit of such a man in his imagining Kaczynski's version of the of the Lord's prayer: "May the Lord strike you dead, or better yet may I strike you dead and the Lord merely grant me the necessary skill with explosives." I have not the least respect for that kind of intelligence or resourcefulness (which could have proved so useful if the individual possessing it were not so warped and morally disfigured a wreck of a man). Intelligence alone doesn't mean a damned thing, as Kaczynski proves. You don't have to be smart to be a decent person. You don't have to dumb or uneducated to be a monster.

Q: You are correct: Kaczynski pled guilty May 4, 1998 to being the Unabomber and was sentenced to life in prison in a plea bargain with prosecutors designed to avoid the death penalty. At his sentencing, Kaczynski was unrepentant and claimed the government was trying to discredit his anti-technology views by discrediting him personally. What do you think? Should he die for his crimes?
A: I think life in prison without the possibility of parole an appropriate sentence. I like how Lois Epstein, the wife of University of California geneticist Charles Epstein who lost part of an arm from one of Kaczynski's bombs, cited what she described as the biblical precepts of her Jewish faith, saying that Judaism rejects a literal interpretation of the passage "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." She told the court at Kaczynski's sentencing, "May your eyes be blinded by being deprived of the light of the moon, the stars, the sun and the beauty of nature for the rest of your life." Susan Mosser - the widow of advertising executive Thomas Mosser killed in his kitchen after he opened one of Kaczynski's bombs sent through the mail at his northern New Jersey home two weeks before Christmas in 1994 - was less poetic in addressing the judge: "Lock him so far down so that when does die, he'll be closer to hell! That's where the devil belongs!"

More introspective was Gary Wright, who still finds shrapnel in his skin from the bomb Kaczynski left outside a small Salt Lake City computer store where Wright worked in 1987. "Kaczynski stole my ability to fully trust in the people around me," said Wright, who was 26 when he picked up a burlap bag in the parking lot behind the building where he worked. "I lost my innocence to this man, and I fight a daily battle to find the carefree happiness of a child that was so unjustly taken away from me." What takes years - even decades! - of nurturing and growth in the active involvement of hundreds of people in the upbringing and education of a person can be cut so drastically short in one brief moment when someone squeezes a trigger or detonates an explosive! Rude egalitarianism of violence! Mindless leveler! And then what about the scars on the soul after the physical violence recedes into the past? "Pain, pain, pain" -- forever! The killing itself is one thing. How we process it and how it changes us afterwards on the inside is quite another. It is for these reasons I apotheosized healing and forgiveness!

I will say it one more time: Just because a person is willing to kill for an idea does not mean that the idea is worth killing for. Now I will refuse to expend any more mental energy on the twisted character of Theodore Kaczynski.

Q: Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
A: Education can be a weapon, and often is of the most powerful of weapons without which an individual is relatively impotent. (Who is more dangerous? A muscle bound idiot with a handgun who can kill a few persons before running out of ammunition and being overpowered? Or a physicist who has the working knowledge to construct an atomic bomb which can flatten an entire city?) But if you look through centuries of history, those whom we most idolize and revere as most learned did not use their knowledge to hurt and kill but to lead and teach. In one way or another, the future is in the hand of teachers - in whatever form they might appear. And no teacher who aspires to walk in the footsteps of Socrates, Jesus, and Bhudda would speak of education as do you.

An education – in the fullest sense of that word – should not be about learning to defeat your opponent or to amass riches but to control oneself and live a good life wherein we might make ourselves worthy of happiness and even happy. It is not so hard to make a bomb, detonate it, and thereby kill another man; it is immeasurably hard – a task which continually challenges the wisest of us! – to live a life worth living all the way until it be our time to die.

Knowledge is power, truly, and can confer on an individual or a society the ability to kill en masse; but wisdom is the knowledge of when to kill and when not to kill. (One could argue very convincingly that currently we have more power than wisdom on this earth!) People who kill others simply because they can are akin to the teenage boys who pull the wings off the summer flies because they are bored and want for entertainment! Look, any reading and consequent learning worthy of the name is not simply a game of the intellect which enables you to control or defeat another; it is, rather, a way of understanding the world, and once undertaken it often proves difficult to control or contain -- as does the genie once it escapes the prison of his bottle! If you think to use knowledge as an instrument to foist onto others so as to gain allies and defeat your enemies, then beware of that weapon having a dual edge that your pupils may use against you! You may very well educate another who proceeds to disagree with you. You kid yourself if you think there are fewer ways to understand the world (ie. your way) than there are people in the world.

Q: OK, OK, let us harp on that string no longer. You have a lot of "intellectual" stuff on your site. Do you view with favorable eyes e-mail from people who don't have college degrees? Do you welcome e-mail from the swinish multitude?
A: What a stupid question! College degrees! This culture of ours with so many "educated" people with elegantly framed diplomas hanging in their offices...

Understand this: education is a way of life and NOT a piece of paper. I would MUCH prefer to receive e-mail from thoughtful individuals who had kept searching in their lives and might read the selections from my 'Thoughts Worth Thinking' pages with a curious and inquiring mind than someone who spent four years in a university, passed some tests, hardly opened a book again as they closed their minds yet considers him/herself "educated." How much can you learn in four years anyhow? As author Ray Bradbury has stated, "You must live feverishly in a library. Colleges are not going to do any good unless you are raised and live in a library everyday of your life." I strongly suspect if you passionately and voraciously read books from a handful of disciplines in your spare time over the space of four years you will be more "educated" than 90% of graduated college students.

We are ALL ignorant, just in different areas. I've read many a book in my day, but I can hardly change the oil in my car. Consequently, I hold auto mechanics in high-esteem and feel a certain embarrassment whenever I deal with them. In the same spirit an auto mechanic might explain the workings of an engine to me, I hope auto mechanics might enjoy my webpages.

A gentleman recently wrote to me: "I really like your pages on the net. Really deep stuff for me - a power plant worker from Kansas. I hope you don't mind..." He hardly need have qualified his statements. Shit, I think I probably much prefer receiving e-mail from power plant workers from Kansas than from some deconstructionist, feminist, or multiculturalist-type of our modern day intelligentsia! It is that kind of environment which produces Unabomber-think!

Q: Surely some of us are more ignorant than others?
A: You are probably right.

Q: But the e-mails you receive from "power plant workers from Kansas" are probably not masterpieces of erudition.
A: So what! I get many e-mails (especially from young people) who have the enthusiasm of an amateur actively constructing an opinion or worldview. I often prefer to read something like that (misspellings and grammatical peccadilloes notwithstanding) rather than yet another bland and impeccably written editorial by warring spokespeople in "The Wall Street Journal" or "New York Times." In my opinion, it are the amateurs who make it interesting since they have not yet been conditioned to stay in the conventional ruts. It are the amateurs who are free to explore new and exciting territory.

On the other hand, I have received unsolicited e-mails about art or politics which have been as ferociously insightful and well written as anything I've read in books or the "traditional" publishing. "Do you know," asked Emerson, "the secret of the true scholar? In every man there is something wherein I may learn of him; and in that I am his pupil." In this sense I welcome e-mail from anybody and everybody.

I get irritated when I read some "authority" pronounce the Web a new Tower of Babble devoid of content populated by the unwashed and unlettered masses. A true intellectual is not some curmudgeon clinging to authority, power, and musty notions of culture, but an individual of real vision, courage, imagination, and curiosity. Anton Chekhov put it well when he claimed: "A condescending, disdainful tone towards little people, only because they are little, does no credit to the human heart. In literature low ranks are as indispensable as in the army - thus speaks the head, and the heart must say it even more emphatically." With literature, the older I get the more I personally trust the heart and find the head unsatisfactory.

Q: You really can't expect prospective interlocutors to read this gargantuan treatise before being qualified to speak with you.
A: Nobody need be "qualified" to speak with me. What a ridiculous notion! But if you want to find some basic information about me, you will most likely find it and more here.

Look, I will let you in on a secret: I keep up this FAQ to chronicle various running arguments that rage in my mind as much as to communicate myself with you. I get down in writing various points here, and then I can refer back to them when I expatiate at some later date. This FAQ is, in the end, a sort of writer's personal workbook; and recognizing it as such might be the key to understanding this whole dialogue.

Q: The one thing that has bothered me about the page is WHY?? I - a college freshman - just don't understand who you are and why we should spend time listening to you opinions? Have you published any books? Or are you a lawyer? WHAT?!?!?!? I find it hard to believe any o' person walking down the street, I need credentials and evidence of good will!
A: Virtually anything you might wish to know about me personally is on my website.

Yet I would urge you to simply hear what I have to say, filter it through what you already know and have learned, and reject or accept what you wish. It is the thought which ultimately counts, not the author. If my ideas/opinions don't interest you, it hardly matters who I am. And I write these webpages because it gives me pleasure and I enjoy expressing my ideas/opinions and discussing them with others. It is all about communication and making something hopefully beautiful, useful, creative.... and a unique expression of myself.

Maybe you should pay more attention to the people on the street and less to your professors. I have spent much time listening to both types, and found that the person on the street often has as much to offer as any cloistered professor.

Q: But two-thirds of the world's population have never placed a phone call, much less gone online. The Web seems a little overhyped in terms of the free transmission of ideas worldwide.
A: True enough - but remember that only fifty years ago very few people had ever seen a movie or listened to the radio. We are just at the beginning of things here. Even in deeply repressive China from Beijing in the north to Guangzhou near the border with Hong Kong in the south, breathless news reports insist that the country's traditional greeting, "Ni chifanle ma?" - Have you eaten? - is being replaced. Now any forward-looking person asks, "Ni shangwangle ma?": Are you wired? The thing will snowball, as did other technologies before it.

Q: What about all the promises to revolutionize marketing and changing the way economies work through the Internet?
A: I do not know. The only thing I buy online right now are book from Amazon.

I have always been more interested in the Internet as an idea or way in which we can spread ideas and conversation than as a money making machine. I see it more important as a global forum in which individuals can browse publicly available information systems, exchange private messages, log onto remote computers - all of which opens vast amounts of free information to anyone with the desire and drive to look for it! I see this as a powerful tool for promoting the idea of open pluralistic societies as opposed to repressive and closed authoritarian ones.

There is a lot of truth in Josef Stalin's statement to Leon Trotsky's plan for developing a modern telephone system in Russian following the Bolshevik Revolution: "It will unmake our work. No greater instrument for counter-revolution and conspiracy can be imagined." And we certainly have come a long way since the inception of the mere analog telephone! Despots would like to use the 'Net to keep economically competitive in global market, but the Internet can also be a cultural and political Trojan horse which defies centralized control.

Q: I see next to nothing about the noted linguist Noam Chomsky on your website. It astonishes me that any contemporary intellectual would not make reference to him! What about it?
A: I was force-fed my share of Chomsky in college, and it was much of this Ivory Tower-creating grand schemes, rarified speculation, and overarching systems of all-explaining paradigms and empty categories which have so turned me off to much of what passes for modern scholarship. There are truths that lawyers and postmodern pundits like Foucault or Chomsky can make us forget, but philosophers and poets like Plato and Milton makes us remember. The spirit of Chomsky and the other sophisters, economists, and calculators currently ensconced in the universities has a lot to do with why I fled them in disgust never wanting to come back.

In my opinion, this is the crux of the intellectual crisis in the West today: too many "deconstructionists" academicians and lawyers-for-sale and not enough lovers, poets, and philosophers of the heart and soul. What was the last novel written recently which you think will still be read eagerly 300 years hence? Think about that for a minute. Chomsky epitomizes all this for me. I dislike him for the same aloofness and detached professorial tone which has driven me away from Aristotle. Chomsky and too many ultra-specialized contemporary academicians remind me of Seneca when he described how if you cut anything into tiny pieces it just becomes a mass of confusion.

The modern mind groans under the weight of so many senseless scholars like Chomsky - so many facts, figures, charts, vainglorious "advanced" research of "trained" social theorists, so little understanding; so many "learned" words and extraneous paragraphs and so little knowledge of the Word. Like Plato and Spinoza, I believe that intuitive and spontaneous knowledge reveals more truth than a laborious acquisition of facts.

As Emerson said:

"In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee...

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Yep, too many anemic academic writers penning specialized treatises for the other 20 professors in their narrow field of study, drained of the lifeblood of truth and spirit of humanity. Nobody wants to read that crap; and except for those other 20 professors, nobody does. They remind me of the bloodless scholastic philosophers of the Medieval Age. I would argue a new Renaissance of wide-ranging curiosity and excited credulity to counteract the winter of our specialized and disinterested art and skeptical academics. Q: I agree with you in your judgement of modern scholars, constructing vast, airy intellectual constructs that glitter like spider webs in the penumbra of the mind but which mean nothing to real people living in the real world and helps nobody to live better or be happier. When a man employs himself upon remote and unnecessary subjects, and wastes his life upon questions which cannot be resolved, and of which the solution would conduce very little to the advancement of happiness; when he lavishes his hours in calculating the weight of the terraqueous globe, or in adjusting successive systems of worlds beyond the reach of the telescope; he may be very properly recalled from his excursions by this precept [Know Thyself], and reminded that there is a nearer being with which it is his duty to be more acquainted; and from which his attention has been hitherto withheld by studies to which he has no other motive than vanity or curiosity.
A: Vanity, that explains so much of modern scholarship. Professors get their tenure and then spend years collectively pull the oars of the ship of university, incestuously searching for answers to "problems" few others would even admit are problems.

Q: Wait a second: Plato, Spinoza, Petrarch, Emerson... these are figures from long in the past and have no relevance to us today. They must be understood primarily in their historical context and cannot speak directly to us today in very different historical and cultural circumstances!
A: I completely disagree. When I read Plato, Spinoza, Petrarch, or Emerson I feel like they are talking directly to me across time and culture; and I have no doubt that was their intention when writing. Who cares today about the politics of Regency England in the time of Shelley and Byron? Yet their poetry tells us so much about the ideal and the dour face of authoritarianism. The immortal poets and philosophers make us acutely aware of the permanent things and speak directly to us of the human condition in all its splendor and its misery. Is love any different today than when Byron spoke of it? Has the essential nature of tyranny changed since Shelley originally penned "Ozymandias" at the beginning of the 19th century?

I like the way T.S. Eliot wrote put it in "Little Gidding":

And what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with the fire beyond the language of the living.

Everyone of us comes into the world at a certain moment in the human history, inheritors of particular advances in human knowledge. This knowledge is always their successors' creation, according to Eliot, made by the living for the needs of the living. And so we add to the Great Poem, as Shelley described it, which all poets of all ages come together to construct. Not only is it the work of times past, but its writing progresses today and will continue tomorrow unabated -- a grand work in progress!

How will you live your life? What will be your legacy? What will be your contribution to this Great Poem?

Q: In this age of cynicism, nihilism, and mindlessness, that sounds somewhat vague, unprovable and romantic.
A: I am a romantic by taste and temper. This is why I feel so very alienated in this utterly un-Romantic Age in which I live. I have this credulous streak in an era of marked incredulity. It often makes me come across as naive or quaint.

*sigh*

None of us can choose the age in which we live, I reckon. But all of us can control how we choose to live and view the world.

Q: It seems as though it is more of a perpetual question rather than a credo. What is expected is a concise statement in bullet form of the basics in your credo followed by a detailed defense of each belief subject to the type of scrutiny you would receive from a professor of political philosophy and or cultural history.
A: There is the germ of something good in that Credo section, but I consider the rest a mess which needs dire re-organization. I would love to get to work on it - and will sometime. As for now, I am too busy trying to earn a living.

I always was very much more a believer in the mystical spirit of a Plato or Emerson rather than lying out my ideas in cogent and bloodless prose á la Aristotle; the world is already drowned in a flood of cold-blooded professorial treatises and I do not feel the compulsion to add to it all.

Q: It is nice to see a thinker who is a zealous autodidact, rather than a careerist ass-kisser for a change. I am a professional sociologist suffering in a university overrun by a grand alliance of structuralists, postmodernists, semioticians, cultural relativists, hermeneuticians, anti-humanists, historical fictionists, and radical skeptics. Yet instead of decrying the modern university, can you not empathize with my plight? Have you no pity?!?
A:I pity you very much indeed. My sincerest regrets, etc.

Q: I'm a very late bloomer - I'm a 32 year old university Sophomore surrounded by mostly 19 - 20 & 21 year old kids. At times I think collegiate life in general is very cloistered, it has a tendency to perpetuate mediocrity, it loses it's focus on truth, it panders to prestige & power, and that it is basically full of baloney. At other times I forget all this when I meet a "remnant" of good people in the educational world and they keep me going.
A: Your experience mirrors mine very closely.

Q: I never went to college and feel sort of bad about it? I have always wanted to go back, but you know how it gets with career and family. Any advice on how to further my education?
A: The idea that one must go to college to become "educated" is one of the strangest I have ever heard! If you want to learn, buy the books and start reading. The more you read, the more "learned" you will be - and almost all "difficult" books have excellent introductions which will serve at least as well as any professor's twenty minute lecture.

You have the power to educate yourself without having to rely on anybody else. Want to learn about politics? Read Machiavelli and Thucydides; or read the very divergent positions of Hobbes and Locke. Economics? Read Marx and Adam Smith. Want to learn Spanish? Go find an old Spanish grammar book lying around. And so on and so on. The library is always available to those who wish to learn. Almost 200 years ago Thomas Carlyle said, "The true University of these days is a Collection of Books." It is no different today.

In my experience, many of the most original and potent intellects are autodidacts. All you need do is devote thousands of hours and years of your life to reading and thinking. It is that simple and that difficult. This idea that a person need go to school and pass tests to be "educated" is a complete and total fallacy. Learning is learning, whether it take place in a school or not.

Q: Who are these "warring spokespeople" to which you were referring earlier?
A: Oh, you know! The professional pleaders working as spokespeople in think-tanks, the lobbyists in Political Action Committees, the professors married to some ideological social cause... all the people committed to their positions and who have nearly a 0% chance of ever changing them - those who get paid not to think and never to change their minds. Right-wing organ attacks left-wing event; left-wing organ publishes a not-dissimilar attack; right-wing responds in kind... utter boredom is the unhappy result.

I would prefer to read the prose of human beings, not humans paid to have fixed opinions (in the words of Katz). Academia and the traditional media has become so stodgy that many editors and professors wouldn't recognize an interesting idea if it bit them on the butt! It seems like the same small incestuous group of people arguing with each other and over again.... a scene fit for one of Dante's upper levels of hell!

Q: That's the truth! I haven't read a newspaper in months! Do you read the newspaper?
A: Yes, I read it cover to cover everyday. It is almost the highlight of my day! However, I am beginning to read it faster and faster as I skip the blather and search all too often in vain for something interesting and/or applicable to real life. Where is all the sex, death, or honest debate about the existence of God? The traditional media seems to have been corporatized and handed over to the mass-marketers and feel-good hucksters who would kiss a pig to sell a few more widgets.

All the sensationalism and tabloid-press gossip is so dispiriting! When was the last time you were really excited about a newspaper article?

Q: Ummmmmmmmmm... some time back in the Bush Administration, I think. Rich, do you prefer e-mail from older or younger people?
A: Both. But I sort of consider the e-mails from younger people to be more important. There is often a callowness and lack of gravity in teenager's ideas (and a strangely attractive ingenuousness) appropriate to that age when people are starting to formulate opinions and a set of core beliefs. However, almost more than advice or instruction I think young people need encouragement and support. I will always have time (or I will find it) to liberally give both. This is an obligation that all adults have, even if some of us are too "busy" to fulfill it.

On the other hand, I was thrilled to recently receive an e-mail from a Heikki Huttunen, 71 years of age, from Konginkangas, Finland, who answered my guest book question "how is life treating you?" thusly: "Enjoy every day! Another foot in the grave...." He then wrote to me, "Hello, you computer-wizard, young man. Go on! You're terrific!" That is so cool! A 71 year old guy surfing the Web like a pro! What spunk!

Q: You know, most senior citizens aren't just waiting around to die. We can actually learn a thing or two.
A: Good!

Q: To get where we are today, I suspect we have all been raised at least partially on the shoulders of those who went before us. Do you agree?
A: That is very true for me - on a variety of different levels. And as an adult, I see such an investment is returned many times over when teenagers grow into adults in their own time and reflect in their person what you invested (I would right here record a debt I can never truly repay to my parents, coaches, and teachers for their investment of time, attention, resources, and love. There are pieces of them everywhere in these pages - imperfect and incomplete as they are! - which I hope not unworthy of their generosity and wisdom. All mistakes are purely my own.).

Teenagers are not nearly as self-confident and "adult" as they would have you believe, and they need benevolent adult involvement as much as do younger children (even if they are not always gracious or polite about it). It is in setting an example and pointing to the good in life that we adults have power over young minds (and not simply carping about the bad). That is why I think one should ideally write for the young of today, the critics of tomorrow, and to be borne out as correct 100 years in the future.

Q: Teenagers can be a pretty caustic and ungracious bunch. Surely you receive some pretty obnoxious e-mail?
A: Sure enough. And sometimes I get that precocious e-mail with a tone smacking of sarcasm and bravado letting me know in no uncertain terms that they have seen through the bullshit of the adult world. I read somewhere that smart adolescents are desperate to prove to the world that they're in-the-know -- nobody's pulling the wool over their eyes! They prefer the comfort of sarcasm to the self-exposure of choosing a belief and risking being proven wrong or feeling left out. This can be annoying.

Any argument which I respect opposing some action or idea should proffer an improvement on it. It is not enough to say, "It is all sucks!" A person should ground their argument in a larger world view which has a rational alternative to what is not presently ideal. Too many teenagers don't do this, in my opinion. Unadulterated teenage angst and sarcasm can be very irritating. It is the very heighth of sophomorism.

Q: But you are simply pooh-poohing youthful enthusiasm and idealism! Maybe they will be dedicated and intelligent enough to actually bring about a radically improved society through political consciousness raising and revolution! They are not doomed to make the same mistakes as their predecessors! They are not doomed to live in this hard cold world! They can do it!
A: That is possible, but I doubt it. I hold with the Book of Ecclesiastes where it says, "What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is missing cannot be supplied." I instinctively don't believe in a perfected humanity and the living in experimental communes, etc. I think such are tragically doomed to failure, the result of our misguided longing for utopia. "Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built," claimed Immanuel Kant over 200 years ago, and attempts by man to fashion a Heaven on Earth in some future utopian society by any and all means necessary is inevitably doomed to end in only further cruelty, mass violence, suffering and finally failure. I think it ambitious enough to try to leave this world a little better than I found it. I empathize with Emerson when he tried to "leave the world a bit better..... to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." I ironically think such limited personal goals also have a much better chance at success.

I fear I have lost the fire of adolescence where the world seemed a very stupid place which I could cure if people only put me in charge. "And good riddance to that feeling!" I think now! A world run by teenagers is not my idea of utopia! Think about a community dominated by armed teenagers (ie. certain gang-infested inner-city neighborhoods) and that is my own personal dysutopia. And I have no grand answers as to how to put right what is currently wrong, unfortunately. Well, maybe some humble "suggestions" but no "answers."

Q: But you don't understand how young people have the most noble and pure points of view! We must follow them wherever they lead!
A: You sound like an adult who is trying to get teenagers to follow you for some ulterior reason. For what goal do you need teenagers to follow you? What are you trying to sell them?

Q: Yikes! That is harsh! Do you even like teenagers?
A: Yeah, I am fond of very many - don't get me wrong! I have found that I like or dislike them at about the same rate as I do adults. Even in adolescence, you can seen the emerging adult personalities coming to the fore (adolescence being a stage of development for most). I either get along with them or not as individuals, not as an age group. I try to treat them as adults as much as humanly possible and that has garnered me the best results. But sometimes they don't act like adults and then come the problems.

But most of all, I think young people need to be handled tenderly (if firmly) - "Be gentle with the young," Juvenal urged. I try never to lose sight of my own youth and the impossible confusion, explosive pleasures, dark grief, and eternal restlessness of adolescence which I suffered as a teenager. You are just learning certain hard life lessons in adolescence and an understanding and empathy of this by adults is important, in my opinion.

Q: Being a teenagers or an adolescent is really a devastating time of life. I think you do them harm if you tell them that the pain is only temporary and that things will get better. Kids know better! They see their father come home from work saying, "Some rat at work got the promotion I should have had!" They see their mother frustrated. They see that life isn't filled with happy things. You are telling them lies in telling them about happiness and all that!
A: Teenagers often see for the first time that the real world is not as simple as Disney has been telling them since they were babies; they see that there exists hypocrisy, injustice, cruelty, and evil in the world. But to fail to develop a broadly sophisticated complex social vision and personal philosophy on how to live life is to wallow in adolescent angst forever! It is to never make the transition from childhood to adulthood! I have always urged young people to look at the world as something which one needs to explore ambitiously and examine aggressively.

Look, the world can be an incredibly bleak place. But the only thing worse than adults giving young people false hopes, in my opinion, is to give them no hope. An education - in the broadest and most important sense of the word - is the learning to live the good life, as the ancient philosophers defined it. It is a specious and dangerous argument to tell young people they cannot be happy in an imperfect world. Life is an opportunity where, with a little luck, we can make ourselves worthy of being happy and maybe even happy. But nobody will find happiness who believes it to be impossible. I think Lincoln was essentially correct when he said, "Most people are about as happy as they want to be."

Q: Are you really willing to spend your precious time helping teenagers with their homework for free?
A: It depends on the request for assistance. For example, the following e-mails I just ignored:

"IM JUST ABOUT TO READ THIS BOOK THE SCARLETT LETTER FOR SCHOOL. CAN U HELP ME WITH CHARECTER SUMMARYS, PLOTS AND MAIN EVENTS IN THE BOOK. THANKS IN ADVANCE"

or even worse...

"WILL YOU WRITE ME AN ESSAY ABOUT THE SCARLETT LETTER?"

On the other hand, I spent about three hours helping the intelligent young lady who wrote me below giving her ideas and reviewing her rough drafts:

"I was wondering if you could give me some ideas on how to approach my report for AP English Rhetoric. We have to write about the definition of freedom, its principal uses and abuses, according to Fyodor Dostoyevesky. The well known author of 'Crime and Punishment.'"

She made good use of the advice I gave her; it was well worth my time to help this young scholar. I would do it again in a second (my busy schedule be damned!)

Q: What if you don't know the answer to the question?
A: Then I cannot help.

Q: There sure are some smart teenagers out there, eh?
A: Yes, there are; and we should remember such individuals when we sweepingly complain about the lack of respect, values, education, etc. among the youth today. I routinely get e-mails from sharp college students commenting with great insight into complex themes based on very high levels of previous reading and requiring abstract thinking. Upon reading their e-mails, I wonder with astonishment and admiration that someone so young would be wrestling with questions so large! I reflect how, when I was their age, I was more interested in trying to seduce the beautiful brunette with the impossibly long legs sitting one row below me in the lecture hall.

Q: Sometimes these kids write to you for advice on personal issues?
A:Amazingly, yes. I am amazed at some of the people who write me desirous of advice. I hardly think I am any kind of "expert" on life or living.

Q: According to a recent report by the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute, current college freshmen in the United States spent less than six hours a week studying during their senior year in high school and are among the most politically apathetic on record! College students e-mail you, Rich! Do you think this augurs ill for the future?
A: I think you and everyone else doth complain too much. Surely there are some shallow and near-illiterate "college students" out there who can hardly perform adequately at the high school-level. Yet I hear from 20 to 21 year olds all the time who are intellectually precocious far beyond their years; at that age, I myself was more concerned with seducing co-eds than in paying attention to professors. And maybe if we adults didn't indulge in so much postmodern scientific skepticism and instead embraced the more passionate role of the prophet this would change. We have too much turned education and teaching into another dismal science when it should be looked at an art form and near-religious vocation. And then we are surprised when students are less than "engaged"?

Q: In many ways young people today in America are uniquely privileged. They've grown up in a period of sustained prosperity and haven't had to worry about the draft (as their fathers did, in the Vietnam debacle) or cataclysmic global conflicts (as their grandfathers did, in WWII and the challenges of fascism and communism). Cable and the Internet have given them access to an almost infinite amount of information. Most expect to go to college, and girls, in particular, have unprecedented opportunities; they can dream of careers in everything from professional sports to politics, with plenty of female role models to follow.
A: True it should be an exciting time to be a young person! But I also see much loneliness and emptiness in many young people in America who have grown up without many engaged adults in their lives. Often their parents are divorced or work long hours. They are desperate for guidance but receive little of it from the older people who know better; and so they construct their own little fantasy worlds with their peers which bear little relation to reality. This escape from reality doesn't serve them well in growing up; if you live primarily in the "virtual" world of television, video games, pop music, and the Internet, then you are not really living at all. One needs keep it all in perspective.

Q: It is indeed all very confusing. But you know what, Rich? I am one of those "politically apathetic" young people you spoke about. But I am really more confused than apathetic. The many problems in the world seem so complex and I hear advocates from all different sides making cases which all seem reasonable and fair. I don't know what to do or think! I don't know who to trust or follow! It all seems somewhat beyond me!
A: Any hired-gun lawyer or professional Sophist worth his or her salt can make an excellent case for or against any cause or idea - I am old enough to remember Western apologists claiming that the gulag was an unavoidable tax upon the "just" socialist society! I can only urge you to read broadly, think deeply, and then filter the information through your life experience and native intuition in the hopes that knowledge and a closer understanding of the truth might be forthcoming. If you wish to become an optimist and understand life, you should not believe what others say and write but observe and discover for yourself. Strive mightily to understand the world and what goes on in it and then reach deep down and make a stand. Work hard at it! Look back upon your heroes and those who have inspired you in the past with their examples and messages, and then decide what you - and only you! - really believe to be the truth of the matter. As author Jack London urged:

"Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it... WORK all the time. Find out about this earth, this universe; this force and matter, and the spirit that glimmers up through force and matter from the maggot to Godhead. And by all this I mean WORK for a philosophy of life. It does not hurt how wrong your philosophy of life may be, so long as you have one and have it well."

Cynics say most young people today don't want to lead interesting lives, they only want to watch them. Prove such a person wrong! As the Muslim saying goes: "The world belongs to God, but he loans it to the brave."

Q: Let me get this straight: you would rather a person have a wrong than a right philosophy of life?
A: No, but I would rather a person have a wrong philosophy than no philosophy at all. The people who live mindlessly and have no personal belief system or credo are those who exasperate me most of all!

Look, it can all be a painful and never-ending process, this searching; but there is no alternative if you want to be a considerate and thoughtful person who would deign to have anything intelligent to add to the world - seeing clearly the light of truth instead of the misshapen shades and shadows of error in our intellects. As John Keats so well put it: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination." After a long and arduous introspection, what does your common sense and judgement tell you? What is ultimately most important? What do you feel in your heart? Stand up and say it to the world!

One should take sides, but remain his own man; I always disliked the aloofness of the Swiss who would remain neutral to the crises of the world (and even profit off them). Naturally you will get things wrong, but then you can correct them in time with the coming of greater experience and understanding. As George Orwell lamented the "smelly little orthodoxies which are contending for our souls," we must to ourselves and visions of the truth be faithful:

Dare to be Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known.

Q: But I see these politicians around the world on CNN speaking loudly and angrily into the cameras! Is it unsettling to see so much contention and hostility!
A: Be philosophical: such is politics, and theater and passion is never far removed. Moreover, keep things in perspective: think about earlier in this century with villains like Lenin, Hitler, and Mussolini haranguing the world and screaming at their audiences, as if barking gunpowder. It could be – and has been – worse!

Q: But the media and skeptics seems so practised at tearing down those who appear to be heroes but then end up with feet of clay!
A: I would advise using your gut instinct to see past the mudslinging and character assassination of all these pundits and critics seeking to screw other people over towards their own greater profit and power. "If you give me six sentences written by the most innocent of men," boasted the machiavellian Cardinal Richelieu, "I will find something in them with which to hang him." One bit of advice: Trust your instincts on people and look at the larger picture when considering individuals caught up in the caluminating maelstrom of public life.

You are growing up savvy in the Information Age. I admonish you to use the appropriate sophistication in your filtering and interpreting of information.

Q: But all these various pundits and commentators seem so threatening! The economists tell us the next great financial crisis is imminent, environmentalists prophesize the coming global ecological meltdown, moralists predict the end of morality as we know it, technologists tell us science will turn our world upside down, etc. It makes me shirk from even trying to understand where we are and where we are going!
A: I would take all these "experts" and their messages of apocalyptic simplicity with a grain of salt. Look at Lord Salisbury's sagacious advice:

"You should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense."

This is all of course a part of becoming a sophisticated "consumer of information," as it is cold-bloodedly called today. And the advent of the Internet and World Wide Web and the consequent explosion of available information only makes such a sophistication in filtering of points of view more important than ever!

I believe one should study the lessons of the past in history, the universal human condition through literature, the various opinions and assertions of contemporary thinkers, and then by means of concentrated ratiocination filter it all through the lens of your own personal life experience and common sense. This hopefully might result in an approximation of the truth in a given matter; and there is unfortunately no other more simple path in this, in my opinion.

Q: I am trying to make it as a writer. I am confused as where to start and who to emulate? There are so many writers I like! There seem so many different trends and schools of writers? Where should I start?
A: I think you should ignore them all and remain true to your own unique vision of art. As you are an individual which the likes of which this world has never seen before nor will see again, try to translate that uniqueness into your own prose and poem. If you can do this, rest satisfied - and bother yourself not at all about the adulations of the people who just happen to be walking the planet right now, this or that recently arrived talent, etc. Write for your literary allies in the past, and for an audience which consists of all of humanity.

Horace's Odes did not meet with a warm reception from the Roman public when they were first published, as we learn from Horace himself, who, in a later epistle, asks Maecenas: "Do you want to know why the ungrateful reader praises and loves my poems at home, but once abroad gives on the hunt for the votes of a fickle public by giving dinners... I listen to good writers and return their compliment, but I don't canvas the tribes of literary critics." But we still read Horace with pleasure today and care not at all about the vast majority of the more topical Roman writers of that day! I urge you to write with all this in mind. Be yourself. Trust yourself.

Q: But who am I?
A: That is a very much more difficult question which only you can answer.

Q: I must thank you for reminding me of some of the lessons which the best of my high school teachers attempted to instill in me -- the idea that ultimately being an educated person means that you must learn to think for yourself as opposed to accepting whatever some pseudo-expert throws at you.
A: Thank you! What a nice thing to say!

Q: What about war?
A: What about it?

Q: Would you militate against war and work for world peace? Is war always wrong?
A: I think sometimes it is mistaken and wrong, other times absolutely necessary. I think peace nearly always the ideal, but to not fight is sometimes worse than to fight. One has to take it on a case-by-case basis.

But I always thought "world peace" something not quite real or of this earth - like heaven, angels, or fairies. I have seen nothing in human nature or human history which has led me to side other than with Plato when he claimed, "Only the dead have seen will the end of war." I would love to read something to convince me otherwise! War is as old as human civilization itself.

Q: If only we could all love each other enough then the war would disappear from the world! If only men didn't hate and --
A:-- Right. But more to the point, if men didn't hate, and if nations did not compete for influence, and if history were not so cruel, and if revenge were not sweet, and if war had not been a constant for thousands of years among men, and if everyone treated everyone else the way they wish to be treated, and if good intentions were all that counted, then the police and armies would be out of a job and they could use prisons to breed bird dogs and we could beat all our swords into plowshares!

But until then, I think "world peace" a concept incompatible with "human society."

Q: What has been your personal reaction to warfare?
A: In my lifetime, I have only had a few occasions to contemplate my own country at war. But I have felt the following emotions personally at the onslaught of hostilities:

• frustration, that no peaceful exit could be found out of the problem/s leading to armed conflict.

• anger, that the foolishness of mankind would AGAIN lead to generalized legal bloodletting.

• apprehension, that my fellow countrymen and women might die violently in combat.

• hope, that those in the American military know what they are doing and can win a victory as quickly and painlessly as possible - with a minimum of loss of life both friendly and hostile.

The larger and more intense the fighting, the stronger I feel these emotions.

The United States has been pretty lucky in the last thirty years in the fortunes of war. But in looking at history, such a happy fate for a nation (especially powerful nations!) never lasts forever -- and I wonder if we are not due for a harder time of in the future. One always hears of wars and rumors of war... and I will keep my fingers crossed for peace and prosperity!

Q: What about for me, someone of military-service age? Should I serve if we go to war?
A: That is a question only you can answer. But I advise caution, as to not fight will brand you forever as someone unwilling to shoulder their civic duty and to decide to fight could get you killed. Think very seriously about what you would do. Be careful -- and if you decide to fight, keep your head down, watch your butt, do your job, and come back alive. Don't shirk your duty, but be smart about it. Death is forever, and death in combat is overrated.

There are in the world glory hounds who live for the guns and the feeding of their egos by teaching others to fall in love with death. George Patton, a man not unhappy with his image of himself, once claimed, "Practically everyone but myself is a pusillanimous son of a bitch." It is one thing to be a kick-ass, fire-breathing, hard-charging general officer in the rear echelon. It is another to be a front-line combat soldier fighting, suffering, bleeding, and dying. Do your duty with as much courage, honor, and valor as you can muster; and do not lose sight of the fact that there are causes worth fighting and dying for! But come home alive, if at all possible.

Youth should be a time of discovery and of falling in love; older people -- those possessing wisdom but lacking vigor -- should be the ones to fight wars. But the world has its ironies and so we send out the flower of youth to die in wars!

Q: But I am not interested in war!
A: So what? I think it was Trotsky who said, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." If you live your entire life untouched by war, you will have been afforded a luxury which is rare on earth. To stick your head in the sand and refuse to think about or study warfare does not mean it will go away. What the radicals who propose "world peace" never could understand, according to that passage I mentioned earlier in this FAQ by author John Updike, is that, in a world "indelibly stained by Original Sin, peace depends upon the threat of violence. The threat cannot always be idle." I agree with Updike.

Q: I am opposed to every war but one… and that is the worldwide war of social revolution!
A: Oh, no... another social justice zealot.

One tires of hearing from would-be angels who in the name of goodness would drown the world in blood in the name of the Revolution. The thirst of your ambition will be slaked only by rivers and rivers of blood!

Q: What care I that I am called a drinker of blood? Well, let us drink the blood of the enemies of humanity!
A: You drink and you drink the blood, but the happiness of humanity only recedes and recedes.

Q: What! Do you think you can make an omelet without breaking eggs? You cannot make a revolution with silk gloves!
A: 20th century history shows us you break eggs almost innumerable, but the omelet seem more and more elusive! Enough already!

Q: No, I have only just begun! Terror, as the demonstration of the will and strength of the working class, is historically justified, precisely because the proletariat was able thereby to break the political will of the intelligentsia, pacify the professional man of various categories and work, and gradually subordinate them to its own aims within the fields of their specialties.
A: Let us let history judge if this "terror" be "historically justified."

Q: Dictatorship is power based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is power won and maintained by the violence of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, power that is unrestricted by any laws.
A:Rather than your dictatorship, I would prefer a nation of laws - thank you very much.

Laws are sometimes bad, and can be amended or abrogated. Dictators are often very bad, and almost always can be gotten rid of only with much pain and difficulty. I will stay with the rule of law.

Q: Ah, yes! You remind me how the worst enemies of the new radicals are the old liberals!
A: You have that right! I would have my whole life stand as a refutation to scorched-earth authoritarian thinkers such as yourself!

Q: All right, let's change the topic before I get a headache with all that communist dictatorship jargon. (Did you actually use the word "ratiocination" earlier? What the hell is that?) What do you hate most about the Internet?
A: Getting e-mail or guest book signatures insulting my mother and threatening to do great physical violence to parts of my anatomy from people who use a fake return addresses.

Q: What do you like most about the Internet?
A: Getting e-mail from countries (Turkey, India, Bolivia, Pakistan, Bahamas, Sri Lanka) which are not known for thriving on-line communities. Via the World Wide Web, I make acquaintances, enjoy fruitful conversation, and build friendships with individuals whom I never would have met if not for the Internet. That is pretty cool.

Q: Why do you hate America Online so much?
A:Because it confirms to me tragically that a company which heavily markets their service can make money even if that service sucks! There are more people on America Online than all the rest of the ISP's combined and it is all because they have carpet-bombed the United States with all those pesky free disks! I can't open my box of cereal in the morning without stumbling across one of those "50 FREE HOURS!" AOHELL disks.

I cannot honestly begrudge newcomers to computing and the online world their decision to use America Online. However, if they stay with AOL rather than getting direct access to the Internet once they figure out how to send e-mail and use the World Wide Web then all bets are off.

Q: Why do you hate babyboomers?
A: I have met many fine babyboomers individually, but I think of them in general as mostly a generation of failed parents and teachers. As a babyboomer friend herself told me: "We broke down traditions, but did not replace them. Our revolution I think led to a lot to the malaise of today's America, and I believe the worst part is the breakdown of the traditional family." Amen.

Q: But we boomers of the so-called "counterculture" fought for the greater freedom you enjoyed growing up - especially the sexual freedom!
A: There is truth in that - and I would thank you for fighting for my right to freely vent my hormones as I saw fit as a young man. I look back at previous more straight-laced generations of Americans and I cannot imagine having to live according to such strict social mores. It astounds me to hear people who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s talk about how their peers often got married relatively young in part for sex! Or worse, how they therefore visited prostitutes! In the cultural context of the late 16th century, playwright Christopher Marlow writes in his play "Dr. Faustus" the following: "I am wanton and lascivious, / And cannot live without a wife." I grew up in a different milieu, something for which I am very much grateful; for my generation, sex was not - to put it mildly - hard to find (jucundum cum aetas florida ver ageret). Sex today is relatively easy to come across; but finding intimacy is entirely more difficult. And loveless sex -- even when it is passionate -- can become so tedious! As Kingsley Amis writes, "Sex is a momentary itch / Love never lets you go." And Margaret Atwood put it perfectly when she claimed that "nobody dies from the lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." So if sex before the 1960s was too much shackled in rules and restraints, it now suffers (in my humble opinion) from becoming too often a sort of recreational activity divorced from love and commitment (used cynically by marketers to try to get you to buy something). At the end of the 20th century America can be such a complex, confusing place precisely because so many of the old rules have broken down but no new commonly accepted norms have been yet established. *sigh* Americans (including myself) enjoy much more freedom in how we choose to live our lives in comparison to 50 years ago, but this liberation was not all healthful: think of the millions of families lost to divorce, the growth of out-of-wedlock birth rates, plunges in academic standards, fraying of social ethics, etc. If women are free to choose to embrace the career path outside the home, they are also free to neglect their roles as mother and wives to their children and husbands (as often happens). If men are free to walk away from their wives and children because it restricts their freedom and ability to enjoy life, then the results are more single-mother families greatly reduced in their abilities to succeed in life. If men can trade in older wives for newer, prettier ones without unduly harsh societal disapproval, they denigrate marriage and in the process make it look like another simple commercial transaction.

So I wonder what was lost in the vast social transformations in terms of personal responsibility, community morals, and plain decency during the last few decades. And I will never to my dying day look back on the youth culture of the 1960s as a hallowed Golden Age of Idealism and Creativity; I cannot for the life of me understand why Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger or Jim Morrison are supposedly thinkers worth taking seriously. "I will never to my dying day look back on Woodstock as some great point in American history I think it was a national embarrassment. People stoned. People peeing, you know, next to some stranger. People screwing in the grass," claims comedian Steve Allen. "I mean, I'm all for peeing and screwing. I'm not trying to get 'em made illegal. But in public? I don't think so." The rebellious 1960s had much to say about what people were against (ie. their parents, their parent's values) in the fever of contumacious youth, but that did not translate into any kind of lasting message as to what people should be for in the real world of adults. Sometimes it is a function of growing up to realize your grandparents did some things right. In the 1960s and 70s baby boomers warned each other solemnly, "Never trust anyone over 30!" Many baby boomers today are much older than 30 but still have that adolescent mentality.

Q: But we baby boomers had a shining moment back in the 1960s.... back in a global moment when a feeling of potential charged the air like pollen... and ideas seems nourishing enough to sustain life!
A: I am against the romanticizing of the 1960s in this way. Pop culture, having come of age in the 1960s both America and in much of the rest of the developed world, exploits the adolescent, making adolescence look like something not only normal but sacrosanct with its glorified message of rebellion and rejection. I do not look on the rebellious yearnings of horny idealistic young people in their late teens and early-20s as the apotheosis of the human endeavor; I strongly suspect the 60s were a bunch of affluent Western young people doing what young people do and idealizing it into an epic drama. But now it has become big business and the stuff of myth, in my opinion.

Q: You weren't there! You don't understand that shining moment of idealism! If Woodstock had a message, it's what the Beetles were saying: "All you need is love!" That's the precise thing. That's what gets you through!
A: Wrong. You also need intelligence, hard work, perseverance, and good luck.

Q: I don't like your uptight attitude! Why do we need to be miserable and work like dogs? Why live so uptight? I reject your puritan work ethic! You sound like you could use a lysergic (LSD) vacation! As we said back in the Age of Aquarius, "Tune in, and drop out!" -- someone pass this guy the bong!
A: Skating through life with all the hard edges softened and difficult moments dulled by chemicals is not a wise response to the challenges life presents. Some of the people I have known personally with the worst (often life-threatening; heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, etc.) chemical abuse problems initially started "using" by raiding their neo-hippie boomer parent's drug stashes. This little fact, in my opinion, speaks volumes about what I said earlier of babyboomers so often being failed parents! Not all babyboomers fall into this category, of course. But many do. The babyboomers preached sex, drugs, and rock and roll; the next generation (my generation, to be exact!) reaped the effects in AIDS, broken families, and homelessness. This seems clear to me.

There is this very dark side to the changes in American culture wrought in the 1960s. In particular, I think the United States is a much harder place in which to be a young person. Parents use the television as a socializing agent-baby-sitter rather than actually spend time with their kids. Many children -- given too much freedom by their boomer parents -- are sadder and lonelier without the cocoon of love and authority that many stable traditional families used to provide. Young people are encouraged in public to have self-esteem but receive little guidance in private about what behaviour is estimable from parents who are so often divorced-absentee-disengaged. I know this is a generalization. But I also think it is generally true. As a teacher, I see many, many young people pass through my classroom.

Q: Whine, whine, whine! Yeah!, you sound like one of those stereotypical "slackers" who are tattoo-ridden, permanently unemployed, smoke pot all day long, and have earrings hanging from four different locations of their physiognomies complaining about their parents!
A: Well, I have a career and a professional license, wear khaki and denim, am a registered Republican, have never smoked pot or done any illegal drugs, am innocent of tattooing or body piercing; and I still think marketing is the most invidious force in our society and believe a person should never sell out his/her core values for cash. Stereotypes suck. And they usually are at least partially inaccurate.

Q: Wait a second. You earlier generalized about babyboomers! You're contradicting yourself!
A: Do I contradict myself? Well, then I contradict myself. (The world is founded on contradictions and ironies and perhaps without them nothing would come to pass in it.) But I also heavily qualified (ie. mostly, in general) what I said about the quixotic boomer generation. The assertion stands. I could think of a few generalizations for my generation that would be equally valid.

Q: Like what, for example?
A: We would rather travel or get more education than work 80 hours a week or marry ourselves to a corporation. We get married and start families later and have more freedom than we know what to do with. We are short-term cynics and skeptics but long-term optimists and individualists. We are guarded in our belief, but once you persuade us we won't flop in the wind with every shift in the weather.

Q: Do you think all that is good or bad?
A: I don't know. It probably is both good and bad - like most things.

Q: I am a baby-boomer, an affiliation over which I feel deeply ambivalent. I think your generation -- "Generation X," the one immediately following mine -- has gone from being cynical to being idealistic, whereas my generation went from being idealistic to cynical.
A: I think there is truth in what you say. We are idealistic, but our idealism is more rooted in reality and the achievable, less prone to overblown rhetoric and utopian goals which never can be realized. We would try to work locally and make a difference that way rather than seek to change the world and inevitably fall short, become discouraged, and give up.

Q: I think we baby boomers, now arriving at old age in our many millions, will have a unique opportunity to teach society the virtues of wisdom and experience through our examples. Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, we will be around for a long time! Watch us!
A: That is the typically narcissistic attitude of many boomers who have come to see their role as central to America by virtue of their relatively large numbers in society. They go to college in the 1960s and 70s and apotheosize the natural idealism, rebelliousness, and lust of brutal youth. They then swing 180 degrees in middle age and sell out to big business and money in the 1980s, and make a myth out of it. As they continue to age in the 1990s, they create a whole host of cottage industries out of cosmetic surgery, artificial conception, low sodium diets, and physical exercise as they seek to combat the ravages of time on their bodies. And in the future they will make a thriving industry of old-age homes and geriatric nursing.

I think you baby boomers would show more grace and maturity in dying off in the natural rhythm of life instead of clinging to weakening and wasted bodies - not ready to let go of the spotlight, bandaged and propped up for the moment by modern medicine, awaiting the inevitable. It is the self-centeredness of the baby boomers; and for my part, I see your generation more as a litany of missteps and mistakes I would not have repeated. I will live my life, do my work, and make as good a death as possible; but I won't make a Wagnerian opera out of it, in contrast to you. There is a dignity in living quietly, modestly, and peacefully.

Q: I am a person - such as yourself - who has enjoyed more personal freedom than my parents or grandparents as to how I wish to lead my life. I can marry and have a family or not. I have a good education and prestigious career, enjoy a generous income, can live wherever in the world I wish. Yet I wonder if don't have too many choices and suffer a certain angst in having to choose. I often think I would be happier to have less freedom and more purpose and meaning in my life.
A:To do the family route or the professional one? To take one road, or go another way? Adult life is never easy; and when you choose to have one thing, often you must give up something else: you cannot have it all. Yet you have to choose, and then forge ahead on that route without Hamlet-esque second-guessing. The freedom to choose your own identity and route can be a burden, but I suspect you would resent it if you did not have that choice. You have to take responsibility.

There are many people who cannot bear the heavy burden of personal freedom and so embrace "traditional" ways of life where they can hand over their freedom in exchange for security. Life can be less confusing that way. But I think it is a cop out.

Q: That rings true with me! I am a professional woman who faces some of those quandaries. To be specific, I have learned that finding the right job is much more difficult than meeting the right man. Although I have a fulfilling career, I wonder if I will never meet my "soul mate," marry, and have a family of my own! What good is achieving "success" if true love remains elusive?
A: I think many persons - male and female - find themselves in the same position. But at least your job is going well! Many people don't even have that! You could be a poor, illiterate peasant in some Third World country! Relative to the majority of the earth's population, you are enormously privileged!

Here we are airing plangent sentiments over the road not taken in life via HTML and the World Wide Web... I think it wise to remind everyone that more than half of humanity has never even placed a phone call, not to mention accessed the Internet! Let's keep things in perspective here! About 1.5 billion people in Third World nations earn less than the equivalent of $1 per day, a recent U.N. report claimed. In South Asia, half the children younger than 5 are malnourished, and almost two-thirds of all South Asian women are illiterate. In sub-Saharan Africa, a third of the population is unlikely to live past age 40. Be happy you don't find yourself numbered among those unhappy statistics!

Q: You know what, Rich? Those statistics bring up something which has weighed on my mind a lot. Peoples' expectations have gone global, but their affluence has not. A peasant in Bogota or Indonesia can see how people live in Europe or America on TV, but they cannot hope to raise their standard of living to that level.
A: I think you are right! Back during the Cold War, Eastern Europeans groaning under the yoke of communism found inspiration in listening to Western music and watching American movies smuggled in on VCR tapes. They saw that life was different in other parts of the world, and they consequently wanted out of the Soviet sphere of influence. (I think the music of "The Beetles," blue-jeans pants, and the "Dallas" TV sitcom probably had more to do with the fall of communism than Periclian or Jeffersonian rhetoric! How ironic, no?) Even the poorest people in the world today have access to radios and television sets. They can see the affluence of a section of the world, and will inevitably compare it to the poverty of their own nations. But the inequality persists; it is easy to see the affluence of another, difficult to emulate it - especially if you live in a country with intractable social problems, few natural resources, little education, and no political stability. Yet life in the prosperous parts of the world holds out its hand... the hopes and dreams of a better future to mock the present and pique the conscience.

Q: Another recent United Nations report claimed twenty percent of people in high-income countries account for 86% of the world's private consumption, while the 20% of the world's population consume only 1.3%. The richest fifth buy nine times as much meat, have access to 50 times as many telephones and use 80 times more motorized vehicles and paper products than the poorest fifth. Two billion people now live on incomes of $400 billion annually (in rich countries, the average is $19,300). According to the same United Nations report, Americans spend more annually on cosmetics and Western Europeans on ice cream than it would cost to provide primary education, safe drinking water and sanitation to more than 2 billion people, nearly one-third of the global population, who lack such basic services! Damn, nearly half of all Africans live on less per year than what the average American family pays for an annual cable television subscription!
A: That sounds right to me! How ironic! I often wonder about that fateful moment in the 16th century when Europeans first started exploring and colonizing the larger world and when divergent world cultures - for the first time in human history - began to come into contact and collision with one another. To a Portuguese ship captain in the middle of the 15th century, a native of western Africa being sold as a slave by Arab traders must have seemed more like a creature from another planet than a fellow human being; and they consequently spoke of explorers as discovering "different worlds." (I think this lack of human empathy explains much of the consequent slave trade.) Today when the world is so much smaller and so many more people are so much better educated and traveled, there are still these gaps between the experiences of peoples! There are human beings routinely traveling to all corners of the globe, exploring outer space, discovering the secrets of the sub-atomic world, cloning other organisms, and living a cultural and political life on a worldwide basis. And then there are those living no differently than the tribesmen of Africa five hundred years ago: unable to read or write, realize they live in a nation-state, or know the names of the continents of the earth - enjoying only the most rudimentary means of medicine, communication, and transportation! It is a great irony of our modern world!

I really wonder how this will pan out over time. Will all of humanity finally rise to higher levels of education and prosperity? Or will the gap only increase in the future? When we human beings start colonizing space, will we bring illiterate people with us in the name of the "diversity of humanity?"

Q: You and others (who speak so matter-of-factly about the division of the world's resources between rich and poor) must come to realize that the billions of fellow men and women in abject poverty in places like suffering Africa are in co-existence with you, not safely quarantined in isolation.
A: I don't doubt I co-exist with them on this planet. However, the more I read and study the current sad-sack state of affairs in Africa and the vicious circle of war and manmade humanitarian emergencies, the more it seems to belong to another planet! It is as if murder and misery are expected as a natural part of the African scenery! I think about the mess of that continent in the form of civil wars, famines, endemic corruption, pervasive illiteracy, and I don't think the place at all amenable to improvement from outsiders! I lose hope! And the more I inspect the reality on the ground in Africa in terms of intractable disorder and violence, the more I am glad it is so far away from me.

A part of me agrees with you and would love to live to see the day Africa is not a Godforsaken corner of the earth; but those hopes crash against the rocks of reality. It is good to dream of a better future for humanity and float upwards towards a heaven conjured up in your imagination; but one must also look reality fairly and straight-in-the face, in my opinion, while keeping your feet firmly on the ground. I have not really heard any realistic suggestion as to how to improve the situation in Africa, apart from humanitarian half-gestures which only make the present misery less acute. No amount of outside investment is going to help those countries if there is no political stability; and political stability is clearly not going to arrive to Africa via the outside world. What to do? I don't know.

I remember talking to a guy who had worked several years for the Peace Corps in various corners of the world. He told me those sent to Latin America became very political, as they saw the overwhelming bridge between the rich and poor in those countries. Volunteers who traveled to Asia are said to return home very spiritual, as they imbibe the ancient religions of that continent. Those sent to Africa simply come back alcoholics, seeing so much grinding poverty, wholesale underdevelopment, and senseless violence that they took to drink like fish to water. There is most likely something to this.

Q: But we humans can do whatever we want to do! We CAN change things!
A: I am very sorry, but study and experience convince me otherwise. Look at the chaotic, violent state of affairs in Africa today: the corruption, the savage civil wars, famine, poverty, illiteracy, health crises, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. In many countries the government has disintegrated with what is left of society descended into patterns of violence, pillage, civil war, banditry, and massacres that have reduced to shambles much of the state's institutional capacity to manage crises and reconstruct the material bases of life. What can I do? Individuals and countries from more "fortunate" parts of the world send money and aid to Africa and it all seems to disappear down a black hole! Do you remember when the United Nations sent troops to Somalia where any sense of lawful government had collapsed, warlords fought everywhere, and the people were dying of famine by the tens of thousands? The multinational forces of soldiers were there to ensure the simple delivery of food to the starving but were dragged into the internecine local conflicts, took casualties, and hastily left the country. Outside intervention was not going to solve an intractable problem which had its roots in local conditions.

The more I read and hear about conditions and societies in the more unfortunate parts of the world, the more I feel enormous sadness for their harsh plight in my heart and contempt in my head for their lack of social organization. For example, while enjoying the hospitality of Mexicans in their country and appreciating the beauty of the land, I am repelled by the incredible poverty and atrocious living conditions. "Do something with your country, for Christ's sake!" I think to myself in frustration. "Quit sitting around! Grab a broom! Clean up the garbage in the streets and fill the #@)%!* holes in the road!" But everything conspires so that most Mexicans (as well as other poverty stricken peoples) lead lives so different from my own in conditions and with histories so alien to mine that I have difficulties looking at us both as "citizens of the earth." They might as well be living on a different planet, and for the life of me I cannot pragmatically see how that can be changed! This is honestly how I have come to see it. Although I get along with nearly every one of them I have ever met, I don't look at a Mexican peasant as some sort of kindred twin; and neither do they look at me that way. We both understand the vast differences in education and social standing, even as it doesn't prevent us from getting along just fine.

Look, at the end of the 20th century there are some 6 billion of us Homo sapiens inhabiting the earth. An teacher living in the United States, I am by no means rich relative to the majority of my fellow countrymen and women. In fact, it is not uncommon for my students here in California -- who even at a young age have imbibed this perception from the larger culture -- to joke about how little money teachers earn. ("Everyone knows teachers don't make any money!") It is true I need to watch my money and plan for the future, but I still have enough for the essential with some spending money left over. I have the time and means for travel and entertainment. I can learn what I need to learn and am able to find whatever else is not readily available. I want for none of the immediate necessities. I am self-sufficient and free to live as I wish. I am a common specimen from the "developed" First World.

Now let us take a look at some statistics -- in a world population of 6 billion, remember you! -- from the "developing" Third World:

• A billion adults are illiterate;

• 750 million are chronically undernourished;

• At least another billion are malnourished;

• Perhaps two billion people are infected with the tuberculosis bacillus (with hundreds of millions more under threat from other infectious diseases).

• Roughly 580 million people (or, four fifths of the world's population) live on average annual incomes of approximately U.S. $1,100 or less annually.

If it were so easy to bridge such the huge gap between the "First" and "Third" Worlds, someone would have done it already. *sigh*

In my more optimistic moments I reflect that it took centuries of experimentation and often painful maturation for the countries of Europe and North America to arrive at their current level of political stability and economic prosperity. Perhaps "developing" societies in Africa and Latin America simply have different timelines with happier ages ahead than behind them. Even as I would like to think so, I am far from sure!

Q: Nature is cynical in her sunrises, Rich. The stars shine as beautifully over a rose garden in California as they do over a massacre site in Rwanda.
A: How true!

Q: The greatest threat to our value system comes from Africa. Can we continue to believe in universal principles as Africa declines to levels better described by Dante than by developmental economists? Improved global communications bring different cultures into closer contact, making us uncomfortably aware that we were anything but equal regarding the production of exportable, material wealth.
A: I do think you overestimate the importance of Africa to countries not located on that continent. The liberal democratic ideals of equality under the law and natural rights that carry water in the United States I would like to extend to Africa; but the reality on the ground over there is a bit beyond me and my fellow countrymen and women, I must say. That any sorry sap off the street in the United States can sue the government while 95% of all Africans are completely without a voice in politics strikes me as normal, not abnormal -- and I cannot remember when it was ever otherwise! Am I too despairing?

Q: You are not despairing enough!
A: What do you mean?

Q: Look at communications and technology, Rich! Virtually all U.S. and Western European homes have phone service; half of all Americans have a computer at home. But there are only 14 million phone lines in all of Africa, fewer than in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and almost no computers in private homes. One of every three Americans now uses the Internet, but only one in 10,000 residents of India uses it. Incredibly, there are now more Internet users in the United States than in the other nine most-populous nations combined! Technology will only exacerbate the inequalities you mentioned. The distance between richest and poorest countries was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1992. In 1997 it was roughly 727 to 1! This is all due to disparities of technology, educational levels, and infrastructure development in different parts of the world. In the Age of the Internet, it will only get worse!
A: Perhaps you are right. We will have to see. They use to talk about the chasm between the "First" and "Third" Worlds, but now they have added a "Fourth World" of the most bitterly poor African and Asian countries. It seems that people in these Godforsaken places have become much poorer, but that other parts of the world have become richer. And I think you are right that technology is driving much of this. In many parts of the developed world, many already take for granted telecommuting, borderless business and 24-hour connectivity. These individuals travel the world, speak many different languages, and are as comfortable in Tokyo as they are in New York or Zurich. On the other hand, there are another 2 billion people on the planet who have never made a phone call. They know almost nothing beyond their little corner of the planet. The two types of persons hardly to be of the same species!

Q: Yes, because for those in the world who can effectively use technology and computers — who have the required skills, money, computers, intellectual flexibility, institutional support, information, and social approval —the Internet provides such enormous advantages that it will often make the difference between competitive success and failure -- wealth or poverty, in short.
A: And?

Q: Both inside and outside of the United States, the Internet and technology will allow the skilled, affluent, computer-literate, flexible, and simply lucky to pull rapidly ahead of the uneducated, illiterate, innumerate, and those trapped in inflexible situations or societies that cannot adapt to the pace of Internet-driven change. Many organizations, people, and nations are not particularly well prepared to flourish in such an environment and will pay for it, both within nations and between them. The available statistical evidence, while not as reliable as one would like, suggests that this is already happening, both in the United States and elsewhere. The divide between poor and rich countries has always been large, but technology and globalization have expanded it to nearly incomprehensible breadth. Technology drives economic performance today, and poorer peoples and nations have hardly any technology -- and no prospects for getting much in the future.
A: Yes, we are in agreement. What is your solution, then?

Q: I don't know, but I do know this may all just sound like economics but at bottom it is a moral issue: It is unconscionable to do nothing while 3 billion people living on less than $2 per day recede further into oblivion! It is our responsibility! The assets of the world's three richest people, Bill Gates, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz and Philip F. Anshutz, are more than the combined gross national product of 26 of the world's poorest countries! The assets of the world's 200 richest people are more than the combined income of 41 percent of the world!
A: If you have any reasonable suggestion towards lasting improvement for those unable to help themselves, I would like to hear it. The United States has only very limited ties with large parts of the most bitterly poor countries in Africa or Asia. Our national security is not threatened by them. Our economic fortunes are not affected by them. Our societies and circumstances are so different that we don't begin to understand each other. We hardly live on the same planet. I read recently, for example, that 95% of all children who die before age 5 live in the "developing" part of the world. Incredible!

I sometimes hear pundits claim the following: "Poverty, death, violence, and oppression anywhere in the world dehumanizes people everywhere! You are your brother's keeper!" I look around at the ineffable messiness of the world... the ethnic and religious hatreds, the civil wars and anarchic conditions in many places, the lack of education and backwardness so seemingly omnipresent... and I think what folly it is to try to take all the problems of the world onto one's back and to try and solve them. What hubris! Talk about the labor of Hercules! The United States has a hard enough time with its own uneducated and badly employed. According to a 1999 U.S. Commerce Department study, Americans with college degrees are nearly 16 times as likely to have home Internet access as those with a grade-school education, and a wealthy Asian-American household is 34 times as likely to have Internet access as a poor African-American one. So you have these divisions inside the United States in terms of education, Internet access, and as a consequence, material wealth. It is not so hard to understand.

But back to your query about Africa, since it is the poorest area of the earth. I would like to think like the ancient Roman writer Terrence (an African, by the way) who said, "I am a man, therefore I regard nothing that is human as alien to me." On one level, who can argue with that? We all feel hunger, pain, and pleasure. On the other hand, the more I read and travel the more I encounter situations and peoples whose reality, location, and history are so far removed from my own that I feel little more than a vague kinship with them and do not quickly identify with their experiences or social conditions. A citizen of my own country can appeal to me as a fellow citizen, but a person from an entirely different continent and tradition with whom I have no contact and share little in terms of politics or education has only tenuous and abstract claim to my affections and attention as a "fellow human being." Much of this has to do with the dawning realization that outsider help so often achieves so little; if any concrete, lasting changes are to come to disintegrating and anarchic African countries like Sierra Leone or Somalia, the solutions will need be conceived locally. You have to clean up your own mess; you cannot leave it to outsiders.

I don't know. Perhaps in a future with more technology and development the diverse peoples of the world will come so much in common that a truly "global" culture can evolve. I doubt it, however. I think by then we will most likely (hopefully) start colonizing other planets and moving beyond the parochialism of planet earth where we are in so many places burdened with ancient bloodsheds and hopeless struggles and where human beings are so often their own worst enemies; and Africa again comes to mind, in particular.

Q: The stories of Africa today -- of famine, civil war, AIDS and genocide -- keep this land and its people at a tragic distance. The countries there deserve more than pity.
A: Do you have any better solution to the Godawful mess which is Africa? If the situation were easier, do you think someone would not have already fixed what is broken?

Q: Whatever purposes may be served by rewarding the talented and the ambitious in developed nations, why should untalented and unambitious people in under-developed countries deserve any less of the world's good things?
A: It is not a question of "deserving" anything less. It is a question of being able to go out and get some of those "world's good things." If you happen to live in a country with few or no natural resources situated next to large and hostile nations, then your chances for success as an individual are limited. For example, if you find yourself living in a country subsumed by political instability and intractable corruption, then the place most likely will be as big a dump when you die as it was when you were born. Life will be hard. Opportunity will be little. All these hard facts explain why both today and tomorrow so many people emigrate from less to more fortunate parts of the earth.

Q: In reading your comments, I find you (no matter how unconsciously) to be callous, ignorant, complacent, nationalistic, and contemptuous of cultures and philosophic traditions other than those found in "Europe" and "North America."
A: Perhaps. But I am describing the scene exactly how I see it; and we shall see in 100 years how insightful and accurate my comments prove to be.

Q: Let's bring things back to the immediate and personal instead of the abstract and general. What makes you most mad?
A: When I find out one of my students has been molested or abused by their parents. Makes me want to drive to their house and knock some sense into people.

And also MTV. I seriously think the shrewd business people in charge of MTV exploit the hell out of young people and consequently make money hand over foot off them. The exploitation is subtle and seductive (I too grew up watching MTV), but it is no less cynical for being so.

Q: Is it only MTV? Or do you object to all of television?
A: Almost all of television.

Aristotle began his Metaphysics by claiming that "all men by nature desire to know." In my opinion, television is threatening to replace that noble maxim with "all men desire to be entertained." We are being conditioned to sit back, turn off our minds, and expect a good laugh or ironical storyline by Hollywood and the mass media. I sometimes think in the United States we have too much prosperity for our own good and have become spoiled, soft, shallow, and hedonistic in the lives we lead. We are becoming consumers of information (in the form of canned laughter and kitschy pre-digested movie plots) rather than seekers of meaning or explorers of the world of ideas.

Q: What is wrong with that?
A: What is wrong with that! It cheapens the quality of our inner lives made radiant by the dyamicism of our imaginations which has traditionally been nurtured by the centerpieces of Western civilization: Books! Our imaginations will always through the written word conjure more vibrant and powerful worlds for us to explore than will mere images and sounds in motion pictures. Francis Bacon has said, "Libraries are as the shrines where all the relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed." The imagination is everything!, and the real world is often a poor substitute, in my opinion. The world as presented through the mass media on TV is usually an even less satisfactory alternative. All this is a regression and not a progression, in my opinion. It is the explosion of literacy and science starting in the 15th century which helped bring about the civil societies in Europe and the United States that have brought us prosperity. Now people would piss it all away in empty decadence!

Q: Can't average, everyday people do something about these stupid movies and television shows? It seems a bit out of control!
A: Those are exactly the people who watch television! I think the "average" American watches like four or five hours of TV a day! The most courageous thing you can do is turn off your television set. Go ahead! It ain't so hard!

The only way you will get the attention of the slick suits of the broadcast networks and movie studios is to ignore the world they have created: throw away your TV set! But they know you most likely don't have the fortitude or clarity of mind to do that! "The stupid bastards," the executives think to themselves of the "average" people who watch television, "they don't even vote!" But you have more power than you think! Turn off the TV!

Q: What about rock music? Do you like what you hear on the radio?
A: I am divided. The music is catchy and sometimes innovative, but too often it is vulgarly vacuous stuff that I can hardly remember three weeks later. I have to admit I am more than a little out of the loop since, like I mentioned, I listen only to Spanish-language radio. I am pretty clueless when it comes to contemporary music.

Yet I kind of like what Edward Abbey had to say about rock music: "...imitation Afro industrial music; music to assemble Mack trucks by. Slave-labor music. Music to hammer out fenders by." I don't feel nearly as strong about it, but I dislike all the media feeding frenzy and marketing hysteria/hype which tells people you must have this record album if you want to be "cool" and "current" and then everybody trots off lemming-like to hand over their money to music industry moguls and their kept performing monkey musicians.

Q: Edward Abbey? The eco-terrorist?
A: And writer. He is one of the truly independent thinkers in our time, in my opinion - Edward Abbey, who would walk the earth upright and vital, speaking the truth to any who would listen! I hardly ever agree with his practical politics; but it is a breath of fresh air to see someone say what they really think in this age of cant and hypocrisy. As a counterforce to all that, I respect Abbey enormously. He follows the advice of Bill Stout: "In your writing, be strong, defiant, forbearing. Have a point to make and write to it. Dare to say what you want most to say, and say it as plainly as you can. Whether or not you write well, write bravely." Not enough people do this today, in my opinion. Or they are mindlessly defiant and speak unadulterated nonsense.

A thoughtful defiance!, now that is a rare and precious thing! Anyone can shout that the world sucks, etc. ad nauseam. In my opinion, half of rock music is like that and as such never rises above the adolescent. And don't even get me started about rap music!

Q: But not many people bought his books? He was never popular with the literary critics?
A: So what! What do the people know? What do the reviewers know? In my opinion, it is a sign that someone is saying something special when they are so roundly denounced by both the Right and the Left as was Abbey.

Q: I have never seen a movie about Edward Abbey. Neither have I seen him on television or in People magazine. I have never seen his face. Never even heard of his name before! Therefore I cannot believe he was truly a great man! It cannot be true!
A: Just because people believe something is true does not make it so. In a recent poll, when questioned supposedly a majority of adult Americans thought the nation of Belize was in Africa. In fact, it is in Central America - no matter how many people think otherwise. I dislike this democratic trend which concerns itself more with what people believe than what is true.

There are too few writers like Abbey who, in the words of T.S. Eliot, are "preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue." Because a person's face is unknown to TV or the larger mass media does not mean he/she has nothing of value to offer us. The converse is also true - probably more true!

Q: But the whole postmodern ethic starts from an exaggeration of Nietzsche's claim that "there are not facts, but only interpretations." This seems to say that facts are not the basis for knowledge.
A: The postmodern world believes that in its own folly. Nobody outside of academia pays any serious attention to that, thankfully.

Q: Go back a bit. What exactly is it about all this new post-modern literature you dislike so much? Put it terms I can understand, please. I am not a professor.
A: It is like this: If you ever read artificial make-up words someone wrote with a straight face such as "vocalities," or even better, 'multivocalities' - or an expression like "intertextual" or "post-colonial others," than you have stepped in a pile of postmodern doo-doo. I suggest walking -- or running -- in the other direction.

Q: Were you not raised in a religious household?
A: Yes, I was. I was raised Roman Catholic.

Q: Do you still go to church?
A: As a condition for living in my father's house and eating his food, I was obliged to go to church every Sunday until I was eighteen. After that age, I did not see the inside of a church unless someone died or got married. And it is getting harder to go there even for those important community occasions as the years progress! "Church" or "mass" and "Richard" are not words that often collide in the same sentence.

I never feel more out of sorts or claustrophobic as when I am in a church. I never was much of a joiner of organized communities or bodies of believers. I hate group dynamics, and it is frankly impossible to see myself going to public meetings or serving on some committee, or joining a political activist organization "demanding" drastic change "now." As Theodor Adorno stated, "Weak and fearful people feel strong when they hold hands while running."

If I hate anything, I hate a mob. And if I am suspicious of anything, I am suspicious of organized religions mixing themselves in practical political matters. The results are so rarely happy!

Q: I don't understand. What exactly is your problem with organized religion?
A: No problem. I just feel better when I am not in a church. That's all. It surprises me to get e-mails from people who get the idea from my webpages that I am anti-religious. I am not. On the Internet, some of my most fruitful and satisfying contacts have been with deeply religious people. I would hardly deign to insult their faith!

On the other hand, I find nowhere bigger scoundrels and blowhards than the religiously motivated extreme political Left and Right when they look for a radical social transformation that will supposedly produce on earth the harmony and individual fulfillment that Christianity offers in the hereafter. I find both the Catholic Worker of Dorothy Day and liberation theology-types on one side and the fundamentalists like Jerry Fallwell and rabid anti-abortion-types on the other to be equally anathema. To overly inject religion into political matters is to play with fire, in my opinion. Moderation in all things - but especially so when it comes to religion!

Q: Through simple observation, I have deduced you believe in and embrace God, though you do it not through religion or holy texts. You seem rather to find God through beauty and intellect first. I applaud you for that show of intelligence and independence.
A: Thank you, your observation is most acute.

Q: But God is not a concept produced by deliberation. God is an outcry wrung from the heart and mind; God is never an explanation, it is always a challenge. It can be uttered only in astonishment.
A: I do not see it that way, and indeed never have, perhaps unfortunately. And I am a bit cautious in saying that God is "never" this way or "always" like that: If there indeed exists a God, I doubt His Purpose would be so facilely defined in a sentence or two.

Sometimes in a rare moment without terribly much to do I over the Internet listen to various Muslims sing the Adnan (the Muslim call to prayer) in different parts of the world -- Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt. I strain my ear to try and distinguish the various unique interpretations in how each individual Muslim sings to Allah in his own way, the religious rapture ringing out in his song. I look upon such a highly personal prayer with a mixture of curiosity, admiration, and, most of all, incomprehension. I cannot empathize with how it must feel. "What is that person feeling as he sings?" I ask myself with a combination, awed.

For example, the Psalms of the Bible. I can appreciate them as supposedly great poetry, but they are poems that do not speak to my heart. It is as if I am listening to another man talk lovey-dovey pillow talk to his girlfriend, and it just sounds a bit silly to me since I don't love that women as does he. To such a conversation, I am essentially an outsider.

Q: Have you ever thought of converting to Islam? I have a feeling that Islam will provide you with a wonderful homage. I do not know you but I have thought of passing to you this important message. Nobody has ever told you this and I pray that you take it very serious -- Asallaam Aleikum.
A: No thanks. But I appreciate your concern.

Q: I just want to say that you have a good mind. And I hope that you will go on to look into Islam. Hope that Allah will show you the right path. No evil Allah will not help His servant when he is asking Him for the right way. If you want more information on stuffs, feel free to ask me.
A: Thank you, you are very kind; but there is something off-putting about how you talk about the "right path" and "right way." I felt exactly the same when Pope John Paul II recently claimed that through Roman Catholic theology the "word of God reveals the final destiny of men and women and provides a unifying explanation of all they do in the world." That is saying a bit much - perhaps too much.

Q: A loyal American Catholic my whole life, it makes me sad to see that the next generation has mostly lost its uniquely Catholic orientation, with so many young persons such as yourself absent from church every Sunday during the Lord's day. When Sunday loses its fundamental meaning and becomes merely a part of a weekend, it can happen that people stay locked within a horizon so limited that they can no longer see the heavens.
A: I neither need go to a church to see the heavens nor need join a congregation to enjoy a sense of community. I would have thought you would have noted as much after having read this far in my FAQ.

Q: An unconscious rationalism has made biblical revelation seem at best, a noble fiction. A closed individualism had made it very difficult for men and women to form binding and enduring relationships; the resulting loneliness is one cause of hedonism and the frantic pursuit of pleasure. A kind of practical atheism has drained life of some of its mystery. And the distortion of freedom into an assertion of the individual's will-to-power has uncoupled freedom from truth.
A: One need neither be a loyal follower of the Church to form "binding and enduring relationships" or to employ freedom in the pursuit of truth. And neither does a belief in individualism mean a person's life is drained of mystery or devoted to mere hedonism. Reading this far in my FAQ, I thought you would have recognized so much by now.

Q: Do you get a lot of strange e-mail from religious fanatics?
A: Unfortunately, yes, I do get those odd messages with the air of wild-eyed fanaticism. Sadly I sometimes think that with 95% of the religious people in this world if you scratch the surface you will find underneath - despite fine words and high rhetoric - religious bigotry.

Q: I do believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and I do confess him as my Savior. My theology is fairly conservative but I don't believe in forcing my religion down other people throats (I have to pull the logs out of my own eyes first - thank you very much). From my perspective, I think it's interesting to see how religion divides - even among us Christians. Shouldn't religion unify rather than divide? Maybe this is why I have branched out to the humanities a little bit. Oh well, what do I know?
A: I like your attitude which is unfortunately not shared by all religiously-minded persons. Deep down, I am convinced most people believe their religion is the only true one and that the others are at least partially mistaken. Orthodox Jews consider the Reform Jews to not be "true Jews," Protestants and Catholics have fought bitterly and bloodily over the smallest points of doctrinal disputation, the Shiites and the Sunnis nurse centuries old grudges into fresh mutinies; the Christians think that without accepting Jesus Christ into your heart you are going to hell, the Muslims that hope and salvation lie only with Allah, the Jews that they are the chosen people of Yahweh. Read the below commentary by an Iranian cleric:

"Men, human beings, exhibit many different kinds of religious worship on this earth. However varied the ways of worshipping God, only one of them can be the correct way. We Muslims examine all the other religions logically, and philosophically. We respect other beliefs and ideas: Christianity, Judaism. But, logically, we have had to conclude that only Islam is right. The Koran shows the right way."

This could just as easily have been spoken by a Christian or a Muslim in explaining their religions -- I have heard with my own ears individuals from both those faiths say more or less the same thing! It is as tedious as it is sad, this divisive aspect of religious passion. In the 18th century Jonathan Swift observed, "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." Precious little has changed since then. Q: Rich, man is a religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion -- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat is his theology isn't straight.
A: How true! Religions habitually pay lip service to "respecting other beliefs and ideas", but that is honored more in the speech than in the breach. Dostoyevsky's famous Grand Inquisitor describes better the reality:

"Man, as long as he remains free, has no more constant and agonizing anxiety than to find as quickly as possible someone to worship. But man seeks to worship only what is incontestable, so incontestable, indeed, that all men at once agree to worship it all together. For the chief concern of those miserable creatures is not only to find something that I or someone else can worship, but to find something that all believe in and worship, and the absolutely essential thing is that they should do so all together. It is this need for universal worship that is the chief torment of every man individually and of mankind as a whole from the beginning of time. For the sake of the universal worship they put each other to the sword. They have set up gods and called upon each other, 'Give up your gods, and come and worship ours, or else death to you and to your gods!' And so it will be to the end of the world, even when the gods themselves have vanished from the earth: they will prostrate themselves before idols just the same."

Again: I honestly think that if you scratch the surface of 95 out 100 devoutly religious persons, you will find that they believe they are correct and the other faiths are at least partially wrong. It is sad. It is religious bigotry.

Q: Yeah! Look at how Martin Luther and the Catholic Popes fought each other tooth over bloody nail!
A: True! I think Christians would be infinitely better off imitating the example of Christ rather than dispute endlessly the dogma of this or that churchman. Is there anything more barbarous than the Wars of Religion during the Counter-Reformation of the 16th century when for decades European Christians slaughtered each other in the name of the "true" Christianity? Obviously, the gap between that religions profess to and what they do is painfully apparent. Any Christian who glories in Christ's example and mourns so many of the deeds that, over the course of 2,000 years, were undertaken in His name can testify to that!

Q: You speak of the Reformation. Between the persons of Luther, Calvin, and Loyola, which do you like most?
A: None of them. The Reformation was a time of intolerance and bloodshed and not a propitious moment in history for heroes. (Look at the fate of Erasmus! Look at Thomas More!) I am happy for the Reformation only in that it effectively ended the deadening, corrupt reign of the "universal" Roman Catholic Church and led indirectly to the rise of pluralism and the liberal democracy we enjoy today. You cannot understand the political freedoms promulgated in the 18th century in the West and slowly and painfully brought into reality in most of those countries over the subsequent two centuries without studying the Reformation.

Q: All religions are inherently authoritarian with obedience to a person or ideology deemed unchallengable and infallible. Look at all the religious charlatans and petty tyrants who use fear, threats, and insults to control their followers! Look at all the lives ruined by organized religion!
A: There are many such demagogues cloaked in the mantle of religion, true enough. But there are also many selfless teachers and philosophers from which a seeker can learn much. Let's not throw out the baby with the bath water!

Q: You, my friend, are a true genius in an age of morons. I am 15 years old and live in small town in America were 95% of the population is white Christian and anything that is foreign to them is wrong. It is nice to see someone fully expressing themselves without fear of criticism.
A: I am no genius, trust me. And you have only three more years until you can graduate from high school and move on to the larger world of the university. When you live in a fishbowl, even the guppies seem large; but trust me when I tell you it is a wide and wonderful world we live in which is well worth learning about in life. Do what needs be done in your "small town" and then move on to bigger and better things.

Some people can't live in small towns. Some people cannot live anywhere else. You appear to be of the former caste. So make a plan for the future and act on it.

Q: What do you mean when you were talking about the "religious left"? I realize who you are talking about when you refer to the religious right? What is the religious left?
A: I mean the religious left as the following: radical multiculturalists, American Civil Liberties Union, "social justice" activists, National Organization for Women, etc. etc. The "true believer" of the religious left is as dogmatically noxious and vexing a busybody to me as any hyperactive fundamentalist Bible thumper.

Take abortion, for example, an explosive issue about which most people feel strongly ambivalent. The religious right paws the ground. The religious left is dogged and inflammatory. Angry voices assault us from all sides, and humorless "spokespeople" and "talking heads" are everywhere. The vast majority of people consequently tune them both out and the official public debate carried forth between politicians and other elites in the media and in Congress takes on an unreal air. Most citizens thusly remain as they began: divided, uneasy, scratching their heads in confusion. It does not serve society well.

Q: I am a good ten years younger than you; and my generation was the first one to grow up after abortion was legalized. If you were born after 1972, you are a survivor! One-third of our generation has been killed before birth! I often sit in class and wonder about all the other teens who would be with me if were it not for abortion.
A: You make a very interesting point. I think it one of the nasty, dark secrets of modern America the millions of abortions that take place.

Q: My friends and myself gather to pass out anti-abortion literature at high schools and protest in front of abortion clinics. We have to stand against what is evil! We need to expose the unfruitful deeds of darkness! Will you support us?
A: No, I will not. I am very divided about abortion...

Q: Well, let me then hear some of your thoughts on the issue.
It is astounding how many people conceive in this country by accident. Pro-abortion people like to play this down, and make it all look like a minor surgical procedure to abort a fetus - like excising a growth or removing one's wisdom teeth! It is a potential human baby being aborted! It is not so simple as to say it is inside a woman's body and therefore it is only her concern - end of argument. We are talking about the life of another person growing inside her!

On the other hand, a fetus -- in the form of a mass of growing cells -- in the first handful of weeks after conception is hardly a sentient human being with all the rights of a newborn baby crying out for sustenance and love. No matter what you do, people are going to get pregnant by mistake; and I think it better to abort an unwanted baby than to bring it into the world unwanted. In an unfortunate and tragic situation, I think abortion can be the option which brings the least long-term pain. I feel very differently about late-term abortions...

Abortion is one of those incredibly explosive topics which I discuss with almost nobody. Some say it is murder, others say it is a violation of the absolute right of a woman to control her body... it is hard to speak reasonably and ambivalently when the argument is framed as such.

Q: Well, would you at least support us in our effort to get young women to abstain from sexual activity until marriage?
A: What do you mean? You want me to tell young women never to have sex outside of marriage?

Q: YES! True love waits! Sex only in marriage!
A: No, I don't think it my place to say either way on that... I am nobody's parents!

Q: I know that! But I really am interested in your opinion. True love waits, and I'm going to wait for God to give me the right man! I try to let other girls at my high school know that true power comes from abstaining from sex. We pass out literature and speak in the quad at lunch. We pray together in the parking lot.
A: Well, that is very idealistic and noble. I wish you luck in your path. But it sounds a bit narrow and constrained to me; and it is somehow unpleasant to hear cocksure young people at the ripe age of 15-years haranguing their peers and hectoring them so importunately as to how they should live: you always have more power through your example than through your pontificating. (It is essentially no different with the adult evangelists who occasionally knock on the front door and want to "have a word or two" with a complete stranger about his "relationship with God.") Teenagers fall in love for the first time, watch their bodies mature, begin to feel the primal stirrings of sexual attraction... and then you would have me say, "NO!" It sounds a bit simplistic, too negative. The loss of one's virginity can be a very happy and unique moment in a person's life... and to say you need wait for marriage is too constraining. It did not happen that way for me; and I would do nothing differently, in retrospect. I think about some of those absolutely glorious moments in my past, and I get choked up and find it hard to speak...

Q: Where is the person in the 1990s whose life has not been touched by sexually-transmitted diseases or abortion? We need to train our brains to say "no" to sex! It is an act of survival! A matter of life and death!
A: There are plenty of people untouched by sexually-transmitted diseases or abortion; you are getting a bit hysterical here. Look, I wish you much luck in your life. But I will not jump on your bandwagon.

Yet I don't dispute much of what you say. It is obvious many young people cause themselves enormous grief in becoming sexually active too young. Look at all the teenage pregnancies! Abortions! Diseases! Heartache! There is nothing more depressing than looking at a group of cigarette-smoking "rebellious" teenagers with tattoos, pierced navels, and strange hair-cuts sullenly eyeing the world - all while trying to kill off their innocence as quickly as possible. Why some people want to grow up so quickly, I have no idea! (The problem, most likely, lies in their families and in themselves.) But there seems something unnatural and unhealthy in the forced, self-conscious precociousness of some teenagers who more ape what their parents say than think for themselves.

When I first moved to Los Angeles I was only 20-years old; but I would watch the L.A. teenagers dress in such a sleazy way as to draw attention to the sexuality of their bodies, drink alcohol surreptitiously in fast food restaurants, and use a four-letter expletive in every other sentence... and I vowed right then and there I never was going to raise kids in Los Angeles! Partying all the time - plenty of sex, I am sure. There were maybe 15-years of age, but they acted like they were 25; and I am sure that is exactly how they wanted to appear. But they were not 25 and they acted the part artificially and with little grace. Even at 20-years of age, I was old enough to see that growing up that way was going to scar and burden many of these kids with lifelong chemical, emotional, attitudinal, and developmental problems. I definitely am not in favor of that!

Q: You still have not answered my question! Stop your circuitous reasoning and tell me: do you think teens should have sex or not?
A: Look, sexual activity is an adult behavior requiring a certain level of emotional maturity and good judgement. Many adolescents are on the verge of becoming adults and being ready for that stage in their lives, but that dividing point will come to diverse individuals at different ages. There are 15-year olds, for example, who are ready -- and then there are 30- or 50-year olds who are not (and probably never will be). So it is a delicate, complex situation. But give me a minute or two please, and I will answer your question, hopefully.

When I was approximately 13 years of age, my father called me into his study, closed the door, and proceeded to give me an hour-long "birds and the bees" speech. (His father simply gave him a thick, thoroughly antiseptic book on human sexuality written by some doctor; consequently, my father wanted to do a better job explaining sexuality to his son.) I was bored and embarrassed at the time, and could not wait for the lecture to end. But my father said one thing which stayed with me, "Richard, sex can bring you enormous happiness in your life. But it can also bring you untold suffering and misery." It took me many years to be able to understand the wisdom in that statement, and it is very wise. Looking around me as I gain experience, it seems truer and truer every year.

Q: You were 13? Did you run out and experiment with the opposite sex? What happened?
A: No, it was still another seven years until that all began for me. But that initial flowering was one of the most special and unique moments in my life. I honor it as such today! Others might look at such a moment as full of risk and danger, and of course there was some of that; but also there was beauty, love, intimacy, and immense personal growth. It was nothing less than a prima lux which divided my life into "before" and "after." To look at young adults becoming sexually aware as an inherently negative and dangerous life experience is to expunge much of the beauty and joy from life, in my opinion.

The whole phenomenon is pretty removed from me now that I am more than a few years removed from adolescence, and I feel a bit sympathetic for parents and their children who have to navigate such delicately sensitive (but vitally important) territory. Again, complexity is the operative term rather than simplicity. But the stridency of some people is off-putting.

Q: I hear what you are saying and agree with you in part. But all that beauty should be reserved for marriage! Only in marriage does God smile on us as sexual beings!
A: Why is that? Would you dare speak for God, as well as for everyone else? I am singularly unimpressed with that argument. I believe in the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage and respect the conjugal bonds which require husband and wife to be faithful to one another. But youth should be a time of exploration and learning (both for good and ill). To get married too soon is to risk an early divorce: I have seen that happen more than once! "Too soon marr'd are those [young brides] so early made," warns Shakespeare. Everything in the fullness of time; but I see not why it be ideal to marry in a state of virginity (ie. inexperience). Our romantic lives are either to be made beautiful or ignoble according to how we conduct ourselves. It is the sentiment and intention which counts - not the marriageable status.

Q: But the Bible says, "... --
A: -- you will need do more than quote the Bible and resort to religion to convince me of a course of action! You need also argue cogently with common-sensical reasoning! I know a lady who once told me, "Birth control is immoral." She has nine children, you see -- and she claims, "Children are a blessing from God, so He'll meet your needs." (I note of course neither her nor her husband graduated from college partly because they got married so young. I note they live close to the federal poverty line in large part because they have so many children.) Another acolyte of Christ told me, "It is never justified to use violence; we must look at the message of Jesus to overcome with love and acceptance those who would hurt us. We must always turn the other cheek." (I note of course he lives unmolested largely because other men and women with guns protect him, ready to fight predators who would devour him.) Religion and Scripture are often good arguments; they cannot be the only arguments. As if there were less ways to interpret a religious metaphor or commandment than there are people to read and think about it!

Q: So you hate religion? Disapprove of it, do you?
A: No, of course not. Sometimes I think that there is nothing more pure and noble than spirituality and the love of the divine in the human soul, as religion brings meaning and spiritual sustenance to untold millions. On the other hand, I sometimes marvel at the ravenous beast of religion whose appetite for blood and dissension cannot be sated, polarizing people as much as it unifies them. One looks at some of the truly bloody wars in history waged over minor points of theological disputation and it boggles the mind that a body could get so worked up over so minor a thing! And then of course you need not look far in the world today to see the problems religion causes. A strange and tragic paradox, this religion.

Q: Your secular liberalism seem to underestimate religion as a centrally motivating factor in people's lives. You seek to exclude from politics what gives many people's lives purpose and shape: God. To one who truly believes, you need to obey God in all aspects of your life. God is all!
A: That is fine. But if you wish to persuade me as to a course of action, you need do better than appeal to the Truth, as you and others see it. You need to argue in terms open to all reasonable citizens, not the language of a particular dogma or creed. We in the West do not live in a theocracy, and have not since the darkness of the Medieval Ages; your argument might work in a place where Islamic is the bedrock of political life, but not in the United States of America (and thank goodness for that!). It does not rule the day even in moderate Muslim countries, such as Turkey. It is entirely possible to surrender oneself to the truths of a religion without it becoming an all-encompassing way of life; a religion can be a religion without it having to become a complete social system. But religious zealots, whether they be the Imams of Iran or the ayatollah Christians in Western countries, base their theologies on a fear of God or Allah; and this breeds despotism, since the fear of God or Allah implies the fear of authority: this is the path to cruelty and oppression, leave no doubt about it. As Emile Cioran perspicaciously observed the danger of "he who loves unduly a god, forces others to love him, ready to exterminate them if they refuse." One needs a degree of skepticism to dilute the pure drug of idealism, filtering it through the prism of common sense and proportionality -- whether the idealism in question be of the divine revelation genre including Islam, Judaism, or Christianity, or of the secular religions of Fascism, Communism, or Liberalism.

Now perhaps you understand me better.

Q: Shouldn't all citizens have a say in political decision making, in whatever language they have to make themselves understood?
A: Yes, but religious people often deal themselves out of elections by not spreading more broadly their arguments to appeal to the non-religious. If you cannot reason with those who do not go first to the Bible when deciding for whom to vote, you cannot hope to gain much currency in the marketplace of ideas and thereby obtain political power. Difference of opinion being natural among mankind, to try and move religion to the forefront of political life is to ineluctably begin excluding some. It is dangerous stuff, and such fundamentalist religious thinkers should always be eyed with suspicion. They see themselves seeing the Truth so clearly that if people will not go along with them peacefully, then it might be necessary to drag them into Heaven and away from Hell. Again, look at the Imams of Iran and the Inquisitors of Medieval Europe! And then of course someone who feels their authority is conferred upon them from God or Allah will have little compulsion to justify his regime to the choice of the people, or to listen to their wishes and satisfy their needs. It all too easily descends to oppression.

Let me try and put it more simply. The most annoying (and potentially dangerous) people I ever meet are those who think and speak about nothing besides religion or politics. The second most annoying (and amazingly vacuous) people I encounter are those who never think and never talk about religion or politics. You need to be somewhere in the middle ideally, methinks.

Q: You place too much faith in reason and not enough in God, and your ignorance of the true word of God will therefore lead you to paths of Evil. (And others too, I fear!) I will pray that you may someday see your way out of the darkness and ignorance.
A: Thank you for the prayer, but I am doing just fine - thank you very much.

Q: You might be able to rely on your reason to get you through, but most people need rules to succeed. You give most people too much freedom, and then they proceed like children to make themselves miserable through a lack of maturity. Freedom quickly descends to license; and communal life degenerates to chaos, anarchy, and then dictatorship. You are idealistic in believing in reason, but you are unrealistic. I say it again: People need rules more than freedom!
A: People can rely on others to tell them how to think, if they wish. But I would preserve that essential intellectual freedom of thought and conscience which makes me an individual able to think and choose -- rather than merely listen and obey.

Voltaire was satirizing himself and you when he facetiously claimed, "I want my lawyer, tailor, and my wife to believe in God, so I imagine, I shall be less robbed and less deceived." At least the Islamicists truly believe they have found the one and true way! Your reasoning smacks of enlightened self-interest.

Q: Wait a second, Richard. This lack of a firm belief in universal truth is part and parcel of the moral relativism that has caused so much confusion, chaos, and ultimately, violence, in this 20th century. It is one thing for a society of philosophers to exist peacefully, but men are seldom philosophers and the masses need a rewarding and avenging God to provide a moral framework.
A: You might be right...

Q: In the last few decades the situation has spun somewhat out of control: ideas and values which have been the bedrock of belief for hundreds of years have been turned upside down overnight. It would be hard to imagine, for example, the gulag of the Communists and the death camps of the Nazis taking place in the 19th century or before.
A: I am not so sure. Tomás Quemada of the Inquisition might have gone so far if he had had the power and the reach; so might have Martin Luther, in the name of the Reformation. There is little new under the sun.

Q: But you don't understand. The 20th century is a new beast come slouch home to Jerusalem, and the Lord only knows what awaits us after the year 2000. The precious, fatal trait of fanatics like the Communists and Nazis of our modern times is that they have no sense of sin -- which surely Quemada and Luther possessed in spades. It may or not be debatable whether a man can live without God; but, if it were possible, we should pass a law forbidding a man to live without the sense of sin!
A: In this we agree; you are speaking sense now.

It is amazing to read the words of men like Lenin and Hitler and see how they were utterly without scruples as to means and ends; they speak not of mercy and love, but of "necessary campaigns" and the need for of drastic surgery on the edifice of society to avenge injustices. It is frightening, indeed! The Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran I saw as much the same: a man who never smiles, has an otherworldly detached aspect to him, as if he knows from heaven exactly how the world needs to be cleaned up and will unflinchingly do what is needed -- the costs be damned! Do we need to kill 10,000 people to bring about the correct reign of Allah on earth? Then let it be so!

On a hilltop almost 2,000 years ago, Christ taught us that we should love our enemies, and I never completely swallowed that radical argument: life has shown me that sometimes it is necessary to fight. Nevertheless, I much prefer such a messenger to a Lenin or a Khomeini or Hitler who would have us implacably hate our enemies and destroy even our own friends if they fall into ideological disfavor with the "objective truths" of the dogma of the day. Hitler and Lenin in the middle of this century held whole categories of persons (ethnicities, social classes) to be evil a priori, subhuman, and therefore outside the normal rules of moral behavior. They had no doubts about their actions nor felt much need to justify themselves to their peoples or to the larger world; they made not even the attempt to convert their enemies, but sought to physically eliminate them! They are people who speak much less about ends and concentrate almost solely on means. We should not be surprised consequently that the ends remain forever out of reach.

O brave new world! You are beginning to persuade me, Mr. Respondent. What will this approaching 21st century bring? In looking backwards at our recent past, I am almost afraid to ask the question!

Q: It all comes down to God! Without believing absolutely and unequivocally in God, man is blind and destined to walk down paths of evil. God is all! Without Him and His grace, there is only darkness and ruin!
A: You go a bit far now, my friend.

Q: I sometimes think what historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for we modern men: We fornicated and read the papers. After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may so, exhausted.
A: Speak for yourself!

Q: Wow! You get some e-mail from some far-out people, Rich! Where do these people come from? From whence such bizarre ideas? Do you get much deranged and hateful e-mail?
A: Unfortunately, yes -- especially the hate mail. I could spend all my time responding to the hate filled messages - and many of them are from people who are as rude as they are deluded and deranged. (It is one thing to read that someone thinks you are going to hell; it is quite another that someone is going to violently send you to hell!) My friend John put it well: "I think you ought to refrain from reading the psychotic e-mail that gets sent to you by all of the wackos in the world. Give yourself a break and read things that are edifying." These people -- badly educated, full of resentment, lacking any of the social graces - who can hardly speak without using profanity, "Why the fuck should I vote?..." It seems like there are more and more such losers out there nowadays.

Most of my e-mail is polite and complimentary. A minority is not. And the temptation to flame the eyelids off those people is strong.

Q: Why are you so negative?
A: I'm not. You're just asking me about all my pet peeves! Ask me a nice question for a change!

Q: What is your favorite color?
A: That's better. My favorite color is blue. Ask me another question which is not so "heavy."

Q: Where did you learn HTML?
A: I am entirely self-taught. It is not like learning Chinese or Swahili or anything.

Q: If you were an HTML tag, which one would you be?
A: <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="> ; I have tried to create a webpage full of content rather than a business flier-style exercise in public relations (with next to no content) like this one.

Q: What HTML editor do you use?
A: I don't. I just use MS Word and save everything as text. Let's just say I do a lot of cutting and pasting.

Q: Can I 'borrow' any of your graphics?
A: Sure! But do so caveat emptor since God knows where I got them from.

Q: Can I 'borrow' some of your ideas?
A: Sure - the idea that someone can "own" an idea seems absurd to me.

I once received an e-mail from a Random House lawyer asking me where I got "permission" to post William Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Imagine the audacity of that! To try and hoard a prize piece of public language about mankind, atomic weapons, and literature like that world famous, world-important speech of hope and perseverance from the darkest moments of the Cold War in 1950! That lawyer would tell me his company owns that speech. I would counter that it is rightly the property of all of mankind.

These mammoth, avaricious publishing houses - not content with already huge profits - would copyright ("©") the Bible and Collected Works of Shakespeare, if they could! They would charge us to merely think the thoughts of someone else, if only they had the ability and had purchased the "rights"!

Q: Good, as I am presently trying to put together a website for my Senior English Lit. class. Not that they really care about my venture into this new technology, of course, but it makes me feel that I am keeping up with the times. This is important to me because as a teacher at 51 I find myself mired increasingly in nostalgia: a condition marked by futile negativism and a constant loop of 1960s music echoing in my brain.
A: Use anything off my webpage you would like; one of the major reasons I built, maintain, and continue to pay for this site from my limited teacher's salary is to disseminate information to anyone who would make use of it. As Jefferson put it, "He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine." Take anything you find valuable and pass it on.

I hesitate to say this, as I assume from your 1960's allusion that you have probably been teaching since I was in elementary school. Moreover, I hardly know the conditions in which you teach. I started my teaching career in downtown Los Angeles and was disposed to shoot myself in despair after only a few years there. This being said, I hope the "futile negativism" you mentioned is an exaggeration and venting-as-coping mechanism. Dealing with frustration is a part of adult life - and not only in teaching; and even if our lives are sometimes mean, let's not treat life meanly. As Dr. Johnson says, "He has learned to no purpose, that is not able to teach."

It is true we see many jalopies and junkers pass through our classrooms, but there are also those rare Mercedes Benz and Cadillacs whom we have the privilege to teach. If for nothing else, let us teach our classes with passion for them! I have to remind myself sometimes that teenagers are more appreciative of our efforts than they let on (or at least some of them are). Sometimes it just takes them a few years for them to recognize this. I bet at least some of your students today were chattering away in the halls with humor and sincere interest about this webpage their English Lit. teacher was building!

Q: Thanks sincerely for the permission. Please don't take my previous missive wrong - a product of the "dark humor" which bubbles up in me late at night. Please understand that as a product of "secular humanism" I have long known the importance of what I do.... the negativism is generally directed at those who know nothing about education and simultaneously try to control it. I truly love my students and after 30 years of teaching that has not changed. What has changed is my desire to leave something behind me, something valuable, something precious. It is my hope that my teaching will be that legacy. I hope that some of the energy and humor that I try to use in my classroom will creep into my webpage. I tried to put one together last year, but basically felt my way, experimenting as I went.
A: Good! They say that teaching is the closest one will come to immortality: teachers are those who show how to live in the present time, in times past, and also in times to come; in the oceans of time, all men swim together, but some can hardly see beyond the few yards of their immediate circumference -- those are our failures. But we did our best, and perhaps better teachers will walk in our footsteps.

I urge you to keep the faith! I suspect good teachers -- in whatever capacity they serve that role! -- are often what keeps things from completely falling apart. Don't lose sight of that! Tomorrow morning, into the breach one more time...

Q: Hey, you know your site looks really nice but I'd really appreciate it if it wasn't white on black because I'd like to print it out and use it for a project but it won't print like that?
A: Sorry about that. But I like black background with white writing. Simply save the HTML file and graphics onto your hard disk and then change the code to alter the color of the background. Then you can print out no problems by reading the HTML document of your hard disk.

Q: But I don't know how to do that!
A: Then learn! Teach yourself! It is not difficult, trust me. The only way you ever really learn about computers is by fooling around and thereby teaching yourself. I see people take classes on how to operate Windows95 or Microsoft Word and I scratch my head in wonder.

Q: Keep in mind I am only in high school --
A: -- just because you are in high school does not mean you are helpless. It is not so difficult if you try.

Q: What was your first Internet Service Provider (ISP)?
A: Netcom Communications, Inc. And that was back in the day when you had text-only connections and had to use UNIX for e-mail, Archie and Veronica searches, and reading the newsgroups. It sounds frightfully archaic to talk about all that now!

Q: UNIX?!? AHHHH! Didn't you hate having to use that user-unfriendly operating system?!?
A: I kind of liked it actually. It was a challenge, and I liked being able to use a serious mainframe computer - even if it was only by remote user. But I would not go back to those days, thank you. Still, I am surprised how well the UNIX (and MS-DOS) experience has served me in terms of learning about computers and operating systems in general.

Q: How exactly has UNIX helped you recently?
A: Well, I was able to read and write e-mail renting space on a computer in a computer store in the middle of downtown Hong Kong last March by Telnetting into my account in California and then taking care of business with the UNIX Pine program. I was able to do the same in the one of those cybercafes in the El Bosque neighborhood of Santiago de Chile in April. That is pretty cool!

Q: It didn't matter that you were physically thousands of miles away from your Internet account?
A: No, it doesn't matter at all. Electronic data moves at the speed of light, even as it is subject to bandwidth capabilities, etc. Physical distance becomes relatively unimportant in this wired world. And by using Telnet, you can gain access to your ISP by backdoor methods.

Q: Are you happy with your current ISP?
A: I am very happy with Delta Internet Service, Inc., and have been with them for almost two years now. They offer outstanding service, and how many people can say that about their ISP? I found my provider by checking out what all the serious computer geeks (as opposed to wannabe geeks like myself) used for their personal service. Deltanet is a smallish company that does not advertise overly much and dedicates themselves to keeping the dedicated and mostly knowledgeable customers they do have by offering excellent service. How rare is that in the rapacious dog-eat-dog Internet business where signing up more business than you can reasonably support is commonplace?

And it pays off for them, I believe. I have personally put some six or seven new customers on Deltanet and not one of them has left or been dissatisfied. And if I ever need to do some serious conversing with the techies or support people, I just drive over to their headquarters and do it face to face! How nice is that in this world of being placed interminably on hold and suffering awful customer service? I recommend Deltanet in the highest terms as a blow against that trend.

Q: Man! My ISP sucks! Do you have any advice to keep in mind when looking for another one?
A: Go local. Don't sign up with one of those huge companies where you will be just another one of the hundreds of thousands of customers. Check out what company the people who know what they are doing use in your community and then use that one. There are many niche ISPs which offer excellent service even as they don't have the name recognition. Go with them; they are often more interested in offering good service rather than making money at all costs.

Q: I live in a country where the backbones to the Internet are not so powerful, and there is only one inefficient telephone company which offers poor service as exorbitant prices! Getting on the Web here is a royal pain! You don't know how well you have it, Richard!
A: Yikes. Well, it should get better for all of us in the future. Cable modems are just coming into widespread use here in the States.

Q: What kind of computer do you use?
A: A Pentium 166mhz with all the usual accouterments. But I have a 17" monitor that is worth every cent of the serious cash I paid for it! Your monitor cannot be too big.

Q: Do you see yourself upgrading in the near future?
A: Fortunately, no. As mainstream applications like spreadsheets and word processing were evolving rapidly in the late 1980s and 90s, there was a big jump in the processing power you needed. But the hardware caught up and now there's a gap in developing software that delivers value out of the higher-performance systems. I have used the latest 400 MHz Pentiums and they are only a fraction faster in the software applications I routinely use. The "too slow" does not come from the microcomputer processor today, it comes from communication - the network; my computer is no longer "cutting edge," but it has more power than I currently need! Until the communications infrastructure is modernized (re: more Internet bandwidth), I don't think I am going to need a more powerful personal computer. And such an infrastructure is going to take years to construct.

CPU speeds might no longer capture my imagination; but again I cannot empathize how awesome it is to have a quality 17" monitor! I look at those 14' and 15' screens now and the experience is so much less! YES! SIZE DOES MATTER!

Q: What is your favorite software application?
A: Adobe Photoshop. That program is the best thing since sliced bread and worth every penny of the $500 or whatever dollars it costs. I also very much like Eudora for e-mail.

Q: Are you going to voluntarily rate your site according to PICS (platform for Internet content selection) or RASC (Recreational Software Advisory Council) standards?
A: No. Not a chance in hell of that happening.

Q: Then some parents will be able to keep their kids away from your webpage!
A: Well, maybe that is a good thing - I certainly would not tell a parent what their child can and cannot do. Yet people who want to get to my page will get there by hook or crook - especially teenagers who know more about computers than do their parents.

Why would I want to artificially label my personal site by somebody else's standards when in a similar spirit I have decided not to join webrings, etc.? The thought of rating some love poem by Donne or Whitman strikes me as the most vain folly - as well as taking away from the page.

"Nothing is more important as making this medium [the Internet] family-friendly," claimed that bonehead America Online Chairman Steve Chase. Let the PICS and RASC people create some sanitized corner of the Web for children, while the rest of us can engage in in-depth adult dialogue without boundaries. Our culture is already overly-juvenile as it is.

Q: Yet then a teenager might be researching some famous poem for school and stumble upon a picture of ... A NAKED WOMAN!?
A: So what! Maybe that teenager will begin to associate the impossible beauty of the female body with a timeless expression of love or romance. Would parents prefer their children learn that from MTV?

Q: Yet that teenager will have stumbled across a pornographic image without being warned and.... BEEN TRAUMATIZED!!
A: Balderdash. Looking at a tasteful picture of a naked woman is not the same as being sexually abused no matter what intellectual contortions might be attempted towards painting it as such.

Q: Naked women? Isn't your use of those pictures gratuitous? Where are the pictures of the naked men?
A: There aren't any. I do not feel the same way about the male body as I do about the female. After all, I live in a male body and there is hardly any novelty or mystery (boring!) there. I am sure you can find other people who feel differently. I suggest you go to their websites if you are looking for male beefcake. It shouldn't be hard to find.

Q: Thanks for posting Paul Johnson's "10 Commandments." I especially liked:

"Beware of those who seek to win an argument at the expense of the language. For the fact that they do is proof positive that their argument is false, and proof presumptive that they know it is. A man who deliberately inflicts violence on the language will almost certainly inflict violence on human beings if he acquires the power. Those who treasure the meaning of words will treasure truth, and those who bend words to their purposes are very likely in pursuit of anti-social ones."

A: Glad you liked it! I found that book worthy enough to buy the our of print book for an outrageous sum and type the whole final chapter into my computer!

Q: Rich your site is so good. The only negative is the pornography. Though an art form, the human female body is a too-powerful stimulus to indiscriminately publish. My advice is to remove it from your excellent website.
A: I did not post those pictures indiscriminately, and I cannot think of a more powerfully appropriate instance to view a sensually photographed female body than in an erotic love poem on one single URL.

My answer to your advice is: no.

Q: But I found some 30 URLs on your site with naked women on them!
A: And when I stumble across another erotic poem I wish to post to the World Wide Web, there will then most likely be 31 URLs with pictures of naked women on them!

I recently received the following e-mail:

dear richard.....you have a very enjoyable site......it is rare on the net .......good taste yet a little naughty......very nice......and some of my favorite writers.......thanks again........love and light to you!.............steven mcd......(poet and writer)

I like the part where he says, "Good taste yet a little naughty." That is as one should be.

Hopefully you understand me better now.

Q: But pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to cast dirt on it. That is unpardonable!
A: D.H. Lawrence says that what is pornography to one man is the laughter of genius to another. He should know, as his novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was legally banned in the comparatively liberal United States for many years by busy fools who could not understand that despite a host of four-letter words there was not one single obscenity in that great book of redemption through sexual love.

But, for the record, I do agree with you about the sliming of sex by hardcore pornography. I can imagine few things more tedious than an "adult movie" which is really only naked aerobics in front of a camera - dispassionate sexual gymnastics by bored people "acting" to a bad soundtrack and worse script! I haven't watched more than five minutes of one of those movies since I was 15 years old.

Look, there is not a single heterosexual man in the world -- well, in the United States and Europe, at least -- who has not seen pictures innumerable of naked women in magazines or movies, and probably live naked women in his own life in the bedroom often enough. One sees so many naked women they all begin to blur together! But the only thing of value that is left is the eternal unknown, the mysteriousness, the never-changing beauty of the sexual act and human body. That is the difference between hardcore pornography which is crude and vulgar and sensual works of art that bring to life a living moment, a sensation, or a sentiment through a word or group of words, a picture, statue, song, etc. There is a difference, you know.

Q: Rich, we must not make others uncomfortable. You seem to offend certain young and sensitive university English majors and others with those pictures. Don't you think it would be a good idea to take them pictures down so as not to upset them.
A: No. I won't consider it at all; I'm a fan of softcore pornography. Next question.

Q: This female English major thinks the pictures decorating the pages of the "Thoughts Worth Thinking" pages are profoundly relevant to the material being showcased.
A: Thanks for the back up. I am glad some young women enjoy tasteful erotica and do not suffer this terribly Victorian hang-up on the beauty of the naked female body.

The very act of a woman spreading her legs and wanting sex is degrading in the eyes of anti-pornography feminists and right-wing conservatives. It is its absence rather that I would eye with suspicion; such an act has always seemed to me most natural and healthy in an adult woman. But the feminists will tell you all sex between men and women is rape, and the right-wingers seem to harbor some image of woman as "above" the more visceral motivations of lust and desire - or, if women do have "urges," it would be best not to mention it. Nonsense!

Q: Thanks for compiling such great access to many literate ideas. I teach senior high school and will share many of these quotes with my students. I would direct them to your site but probably won't because some of the more explicit sexual themes. That aspect aside, I appreciate the rest of your work.
A: I cannot contemplate ever divorcing "literate ideas" from their adult and often sexual context. I am not sure you serve your high school students well by seeking to whitewash those ideas - the most important, in my opinion, being often the ones which are sexually explicit. And I also suspect your high school students are not as naive sexually as you might expect. Even when you consciously direct students away from what you call "explicit themes," you are still teaching them a lesson -- even if you would prefer it otherwise. Just because you cover "it" up does not mean "it" does not exist.

Q: I am a teacher of teenagers, the same as you. There is no way I would ever post personal information for my students to see because some of them would use it as a weapon against me. Are you sure you know what you are doing?
A: Teaching adolescents is not a job for the thin-skinned, and I understand where you are coming from. However, I look at things differently. Check this out if the answer interests you further.

Q: In my humble, lowly, and meek opinion, there are some things in you site that are not suitable for children (I'm a dad & I'm protective what do you expect?). Nevertheless, generally speaking, your site is very interesting, educational, informative, and fun.
A: I would of course not begrudge you your parental right to limit and supervise what your children view over the World Wide Web.

Q: I really love your site but since I don't have a computer at home, I have to view your pages at work. I work in an extremely conservative office and I've noticed that several of your "thoughts" pages contain nude photos. Would it be possible for you to mark pages that contain nudity with an asterisk so that people in my situation can have some indication of which pages not to view for fear of reprisal by my bosses?
A: Mark with an asterisk those webpages which contain nudity? I am sorry for your situation; but I say to hell with your bosses! No. I absolutely won't label or rate any of my pages. Forget it!

Q: I am a teenager in the Islamic Republic of Iran. My father has a satellite dish and I can watch Western television shows and MTV music videos. The images they present are so.... provocative! I cannot study anymore! I have become impatient, weak and nervous. I feel crippled.. these images of naked and near-naked women are so vulgar and stimulating!
A: You sound like a typical horny teenage boy to me (just a lot more immature than most). Two words of advice to you: GROW UP! - and don't think you are the only one to ever have gone through this. (Don't I remember well being trapped in the male adolescent body with testosterone pumping through my veins! It can be a living hell!) Have patience, fall in love with a flesh-and-blood girl your own age, cultivate a normal relationship with her, and you should emerge relatively unscathed from the abyss of adolescence... this too shall pass. Patience.

Q: You sound passionate about the female of the Homo sapiens species.
A: I am! It is difficult to describe in words the ineffable mystery of femalekind. All the way from the way women can often so strongly believe in secrets to the way they are so different than men in their physical passion and view of the world. I truly do believe men and women are different by nature but.... I treasure this difference as one of the most hallowed aspects of the complex fabric of humanity fashioned by God! So often women just kind of grab me by the reptile part of my brain and possess my utter and undivided attention in a way men do not.... beyond that, I find it so difficult to accurately describe something so personal and intimate to me.

The uniqueness and divinity of femalekind - and especially female sexuality! - is something I do not believe one cannot look straight in the face; I have to close my eyes and feel its presence, like a massive omnipresent power that can be sensed rather than seen by the peripheral vision. If you try to directly view it, she disappears; but if you avert your gaze and let it come then you will feel the approach of her immense power and how it pervades and overwhelms you... this makes no sense, I know, and so I will shut up.

Like believing or not in God, or treasuring the music of Mozart almost more than life itself, I believe past a superficial analysis I cannot describe certain things. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "About what you cannot say, you should remain silent." I am absolutely of his opinion.

Q: It seems like almost a reverence for womankind, no?
A: True enough! I like the way you put that! Reverence!

Perhaps the best e-mail I have ever received was from some young woman from Singapore who read a poem of mine and then wrote to me saying it made her feel good about her body - something she had not felt in a long time. I could hardly have received an e-mail which would have made me feel happier about something I had written. It comes back to that spirit of reverence.

Q: How about her mind? Do you revere a woman's mind as much as her body?
A: Of course. I might be a piggy sexual cliché or just a healthy heterosexual man in that I am an utter slave to the female body, but I am a man who thinks a woman's mind and character are every bit as sexy (or not) as is the rest of her. For me to love a woman's naked body is to love her soul -- well, to at least try to love her soul; and I cannot but believe that God created the beautiful bodies of women for an end which is much deeper than mere procreation or sensual satisfaction. This is something I feel deep down to be true. Body and soul. But It is not only about "beautiful bodies," by any means. I have met very plain-looking women who because of a certain... je ne sais quoi, I felt immense attraction towards. Conversely, I have eagerly dated beautiful women whose personalities proceeded to turn me off to them.

In fact, as I get older a woman's character and mind seems to become more important than her body. Someone told me Proust said classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination, and I think there is truth in that. A man and a woman meet each other and either have a connection or not. If there is no such connection, one might as well just call it a night and go home rather than push it: you have to respect the process. (If the attraction is not there, why force the issue? Why become importunate? A man who cannot win a woman by a kiss or in wooing will hardly win her by blows or through threats!) But it is all important in this complex process of romantic attraction which I hardly claim to understand well.

Sigmund Freud, in his neurotic way, would sit and wrack in his brains in agony trying to answer the question, "What do women want?" I think a better attitude to take is that of Oscar Wilde when he claimed, "Women are made to be loved, not understood."

Who can understand "what women want"? What do "men want"? What do "all people want"? It is to enter into a quagmire!

Q: All these discussions of "men are like this and women are like that" are so frustrating! I have to way, wait a minute, men are like this under these circumstances, and each one is subject to individual variation.
A: I could not agree with you more.

Q: Do you think women should look at men in the same way? As a man, does that bother you?
A: Hell, no! God help us if women stop looking at men's bodies with a certain hunger!

Q: Does all this waxing eloquent about the naked female body have to do with your lack of actually seeing one recently?
A: You may very well be right. But I wrote that poem years ago when that was not a problem.

Q: A long time, eh? I am sorry, but I just don't believe you! I will find you twenty lascivious turtles ere one chaste man.
A: My! Cynical, aren't we?

One goes through barren and fruitful stretches, in that aspect. Those "fruitful" stretches are a large part of what we live for, but the "barren" times are also healthy and help to keep everything fresh and in perspective. Both stages serve a purpose; and even if you presently have no lover, you can live a very sensuous life filled with desires and struggles. In my experience, it are those people who enjoy sensual lives above and beyond what goes on strictly in the bedroom who make the best lovers!

Q: You talk about "beautiful women." Would you be willing to go out with a women who was something short of drop dead gorgeous?
A: Surely. Sometimes I listen to guys complain about a certain woman actress on television or in a movie not being quite beautiful enough and I wonder how I would die to go out with someone like that! I ain't so picky! I live in the real world and not in fantasy-land; it is not exactly like I am God's gift to women. Damn, I am happy sometimes just to have a date!

Q: Rich, about this sensitive matter: the worship of women. I cannot really understand what all the fuss is about. I am not a sexist, but I do believe that you overestimate them, I could even say that you consider them superior to the male sex.
A: I hardly believe women to be "superior" to men or vice versa! The sexes have different roles to play, as each brings with it certain strengths and weaknesses; and I think to compare the sexes and to say one is "better" to be beside the point. Men and women need each other, they learn from each other. Too much of one without the other brings disharmony.

But I do not believe I "overestimate" women. In fact, I despair that through my feeble skill in arranging words I have been unable to create the appropriate apotheosis of the female sex! The feeling I have deep down in my gut cannot be translated efficaciously into the appropriate words. I do not possess the skill, sadly.

Q: And what about homosexuality then? What is your opinion on that controversial matter?
A: I speak about homosexuality at more length later in this FAQ. If you are interested in that subject, have a little patience.

Q: What would you do then if you lived on a planet comprised entirely of men?
A: You mean there would be no women at all? All men?

Q: Yup. Only men.
A: I would die of dreariness and boredom! I would not want to live in such a place, to put it mildly.

Q: Yesterday I went over your quote from Franklin on older mistresses. Recently I met a man who was so anxious to tell me how happy he is to be a man, that he is going to be so attractive in his fifties while my beauty is going to fade away because I'm a woman. According to Franklin probably my ass is still going to look good, but I have to be kind so that some kid would dare to discover it. Interestingly, an older man lover cannot be praised for the simple fact that he might lack some efficiency although the good Viagra may help. I did not like the quote. Because I have a sexy brain. I'm surprised that you put it there. Because your brain seems sexy too. And some of these things improve with age.
A: I did not put that letter on my webpage because I wanted to make a Big Statement. I put it up because I thought it was funny. Despite being a famous scientist and stateman, Franklin was also an earthy individual who took pleasure in life and laughed at it, too!

I think you could lighten up a little. And I am sorry it ruined your visit to my webpage, but I reckon you never get the rose without the thorn. And Franklin agreed with you about age improving "things", "every Knack being by Practice capable of improvement."

Q: Rich, I don't know about you. But I am sick and tired of the #@$)*#$* of American women! I dated yet ANOTHER one who kept bitching about her body being her own, the true nature of feminism, how she can do everything men can do, about the necessity of fulfillment, how her relationship with her mother is improving, blah blah blah blah... Why do American women have such a chip on their shoulder? Why are they so caustic? I see that you have dated foreign women. Is it any better/easier with non-American women?
A: Oh, I really don't know. I honestly would have to say I have experienced cultures where women seem more comfortable with their femininity and less conflicted in being soft and ladylike... which is what most men like in women, after all. That is a nice change! And I agree with you to a point that many America women have an ax to grind in proving to men they are so strong, independent, assertive, and equal... and consequently they are insufferable to be around -- grim and hectoring, insufferably so.

But I don't know... I think it a bit of a cop out to blame your frustrations on the unworthiness of the entire American female population; I cannot imagine but there are millions and millions of beautiful and gracious American women out there well worth getting to know who are not out to break your balls. (Many of these women are lonely because someone like YOU didn't make the effort to meet them! Or maybe there is something in your approach to a woman which brings out the bitchiness? It was the actor Lee Marvin who said, "The only way to resolve a situation with a girl is to jump on her and things will work out," and was predictably many times divorced during his lifetime.)

So to answer your question: No, below superficial cultural cues and rules, I don't believe there is a fundamental difference between women from different countries and cultures (although I do believe level of education and social class DO tend to separate people everywhere). Women, in my limited experience, pretty much all want the same thing: to be loved, cherished, respected, protected, accompanied through life, etc. Let me put it this way: While I believe women in general are not essentially any different in Kenya than in Kentucky, there are nearly an infinite variety of individual unique women in this world with distinct personalities and differing tastes and preferences. (And why see the world in binary tones of "men" and "women" when they are so nearly human beings innumerable all with their quirks, talents, and demons?) I humbly suggest you use your discretion more and stop dating bitchy women no matter what might be their nationality (and I have met PLENTY of bitchy women who were not American; bitchy is a universal language). Where you see an "abrasive American woman" and then generalize on all women, perhaps you should look more closely as simply see one woman who is "abrasive" in a way that does not define all of womankind. When you complain about American women being caustic and unpleasant, I hear some lady similarly complaining about men being, loutish, messy, insensitive, and helplessly programmed to chase any tail that comes across their path.

This credo of innate difference ("anatomy is destiny!") so often descends to the easy argument that all women are this way or all men are that way, because of evolutionary progress or the inherent biology of our bodies; but the more I think about it the more I think this is a specious premise at best and plain hogwash at worst! Compared to the immense diversity of personality and tastes within each sex, I think the inherent psychological differences between men and women to be relatively few in number. Or to put it more bluntly: I think a woman's behavior is dictated much more by her life experience and way she has learned to view the world than through her gender or sex organs. Not that sex or the very different gender roles men and women occupy are unimportant -- the reality of biological differences I do see as undeniably real; but it is not the only reality, or the most significant reality, and I see them as neither everything, nor even as remotely the most important thing -- as many feminists and misogynists seem to do. So if you meet one of those "abrasive American women" who is so clearly ugly and unloving (through her personality, not her appearance) and with whom you can hardly speak one civil word, I suggest you go talk to someone else whose conversation is more pleasing and enriching. If walking down the street you see a rabid dog barking in someone's front yard, would you not cross the street to avoid it? As it is with frothing-at-the-mouth dogs, so I see it with human beings who exist to bark, bite, and scratch at their fellow creatures.

Do I explain myself better?

Q: Yes, thank you. What's the most difficult thing you have ever done?
A: Get my father online and then defeat all the legion of subsequent problems/questions/crises that pop up. Let me say one thing: Nobody can quite screw up a computer like a rank beginner! Trying to instruct my father how to use a computer makes teaching contumacious teenagers look easy in comparison.

Q: What's the most painful thing you have ever done?
A: Run the Los Angeles Marathon after partying all night long.

Q: What is the most romantic thing you have ever done?
A: I once asked a woman to go to Paris with me on the second date. I grabbed her, pushed her against the wall, kissed her hard, and then asked her to come with me to Paris. The trip didn't turn out so well, but it was well worth it all simply for that moment when I asked her and I thought she was going to have a heart attack from the look of surprise on her face.

That is the answer which sounds good. But the truth is that I have written a love letter or two from my heart and presented them in a unique manner - more I cannot say. That is the most romantic thing I have ever done - by far. John Donne once wrote that "more than kisses, letters mingle souls." I agree.

Q: What about all those scars you have?
A: Well, I was pretty reckless and stupid when I was young with martial arts, motorcycles, fast living, etc. But after I got my sixth concussion in my mid-20s, I made some lifestyle changes. They say that injury to the brain is cumulative with each successive concussion, and I believe it because after the last one I blacked out for about half an hour and then couldn't remember where I lived or what was my name! That served as a definite wake-up call and I haven't suffered another serious head blow since. I protect my head nowadays.

Q: Who are you most likely to be hanging out with on a Saturday night these days?
A: My pops. We are the two most pathetic bachelors in the world! There is nothing more pathetic than my father and I going to the grocery store or attempting to cook.

Q: You get along well with your father?
A: Yeah! He's the greatest! But I dislike his passive/aggressive hinting that I should hurry up and get married and start a family of my own.

Q: What is the most liberating thing you ever learned?
A: That 95% of everything in the newspaper or on TV is total bullshit. And that the other 5% is pure gold.

Q: From your website we can assume you read a lot. Do you ever lack for good reading material?
A: Are you kidding? There are so many books I want to read yet lack the time! Reading for me is more a case of prioritizing what I suspect will be most rewarding and reading that instead of all the other books clamoring for my attention. I could literally read continually until the day of my death and not read all I want to read.

Q: Do you mostly read books off the "New York Times" bestseller list?
A: Almost never. I find all the trendiness and popular currents of contemporary literature so distracting. I hold it to be no bad thing that a book survive fifty or a hundred years, and I rarely read anything more current. And so much modern literature seems so "psychological" or "clever." For example, way too much modern poetry is barely disguised gibberish or unadulterated obscurist nonsense, in my opinion. Poets never used to disrespect their readers in such a way! Maybe that is why so many fewer people read poetry today.

My heart lies with Boris Pasternak when he asserted that ideally "art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence." Whatever happened to the great Romantic artists and love and passion and the power of a vibrant humanity? Modern art to me is all head and no heart! Who will write the "Doctor Zhivago" of our age?

As Paul Johnson described it, "Most people regard contemporary art as a remote phenomenon which has lost contact with social reality, something for 'them' (vaguely believed to be a cosmopolitan stew of pseuds and sodomites)." Now that is harsh towards the homosexuals and coffeehouse intellectuals of the chattering classes of literary New York and San Francisco, but I think there is more than a little truth in Johnson's statement. Modern art has divorced itself from real life and all too often nobody (me included) can make neither heads nor tails of it. One almost need be a writer oneself to understand much of contemporary fiction. The chummy, insular culture of urban sophisticates; writers writing for other writers: YECH!

I cannot live without intellect and the world of letters; and I cannot live without others who share this passion. On the other hand, I easily tire of pie-in-the-sky intellectuals who are so enraptured by theory and mental constructs that they don't walk with both feet anchored to the ground! Writers are almost always guilty of this to one degree or another; they tend to become effete, they look for connections between different phenomenon and theorize endlessly in grand abstractions and often begin to lose touch with reality and real life. As an antidote to this, I turn from airy intellectuals toward practical men of affairs: soldiers, engineers, shipping tycoons and so on. Such persons deal with the brute physicalities of the material world and cut through the