April 1991

Toward a Safer Car Seat A recent revolutionary improvement in the design of a car seat is making cars safer. A driver suffers major injury in a head-on collision that propels him out of his seat against the steering column or the windshield. When the force of this forward propulsion is lessened, injury is reduced, or even eliminated.

A seat that holds the driver even after a major frontal impact has lately become available in America. Devised by inventor Randy Beauvais, the seat slides forward as the car comes abruptly to a halt. Through an arrangement of pins moving in inclined slots on the seat rack the seat rises as it slides. The front of the seat rises more than the back.

This rising motion increases the friction that prevents thighs from sliding off

the seat, thus keeping the driver secure and protecting thighs, knees, and pelvis.

The rising phenomenon also gives the driver a few more centimeters of forward motion; it has been seen that travel through just this little extra distance has a profound influence on reducing injuries to head and chest. Moreover, the rising of the seat converts some of the linear stopping energy into rotary motion that lessens the forward speed and the force of the impact, thus enhancing safety.

In the photograph (below right), despite the fact that he is not wearing a seatbelt, the driver remains in the seat after a 70-kilometer-per-hour collision; the photograph (below left) shows how much the seat has risen.

When this seat design is combined with airbags or passive-restraint seat belts the occupant of the car is that much safer. A computer simulation of the crash shows the lack of forward motion of torso and pelvis of the safety-seated driver (bottom left) compared to the unbelted driver (bottom right). .

Further refinements in the design of the seat are now being made. Says consultant and mechanical engineer Neil Singer, "We know the mechanism works. We're going to be using more computer simulations to find out what kind of improvements we can realistically expect. Then we'll make the changes needed to improve performance. "

SPAN One look at our cover and it is obvious that gardening is a major topic in SPAN this month. And a timely one.

Trees, shrubs, and flowers have been in bloom practically everywhere in India for the past several weeks. I particularly enjoy driving along New Delhi's wide boulevards, or walking through Lodi Gardens, and spotting flowers on such trees as the bottle brush, kachnar, and seemal; finding hibiscus shrubs, begonias, and bougainvillea returning to color, and annuals such as marigolds, hollyhocks, and dahlias almost everywhere. I have also noticed homeowners working in their gardens.

In our cover story, Juliet Bruce writes about the popularity of gardening in America and reports on the economic activity that it has spawned. The amount of money that an American homeowner spends on seeds, plants, fertilizers, tools, and even machinery can be quite startling. A companion article reports that for more and more Americans, gardening is becoming an alternate career choice. Many are finding it to be a more peaceful and emotionally satisfying-if not economically rewarding-way to make a living than pursuing the status and wealth associated with some of the pressure-packed careers of the modern world. Finally, we have a picture story about a successful educational program in California that teaches science to elementary schoolchildren by having them tend their own vegetable gardens.

My wife, Joyce, and I count ourselves among the 80 million Americans who, at least to a limited degree, enjoy digging in the soil to beautify the landscape around our homes. We have gardened in America as well as at homes overseas. Bruce could have been thinking of us when she wrote: " ... many people pull up roots every few years to move to better jobs and are isolated from friends and family. A backyard garden is a sanctuary, a place to put down roots again and reconnect."

We had six lemon trees on our terrazza in Rome. They bore beautiful fruit, starting in December. We also had a our dog kept eating sage plant that grew beautifully-but it. Fortunately, she showed no interest in the oleander, which, I'm told, is poisonous.

In Delhi, we haven't been able to decide what to plant in which season. I carried back from the United States a bag of sweet potatoes, bedded them down, and, when they grew shoots, cut them up and planted them in late September. The vines grew green and lush and spread across the rows of corn, soon taking over the entire vegetable garden, but produced no potatoes. The maliwas loath to dig up such beautiful vines, so we left them. More than a year after the planting, we harvested just enough potatoes for our Thanksgiving dinner.

Our gardening efforts have been modest, but they have given us an appreciation for those who turn a plot ofland, large or small, into a piece of colorful artwork. The Mughal Gardens in New Delhi come to mind, with their neatly sculpted trees standing sentinel over quadrants of thick, green lawns interspersed with flowers.

"Earth laughs in flowers," Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. Earth also, I'd like to believe, takes pleasure in the efforts that each of us takes to make our surroundings more pleasing and attractive.

2 Smart Maps

by Edward Warner

6 The Lens and the Paintbrush

8

A Man for all Products by Randall Poe 12 On the Lighter Side 13 State Constitutions-Rights and Freedoms

by Steven Pressman

17

20 22

Why Rabbit had to Go by John Updike A Semester in Blacksburg by Sakuntala Narasimhan The Joy of Gardening by Juliet Bruce From the Fast Track to the Garden Path

by Trish Hall

Educational Spadework

30 Focus On ...

32 A Conversation With Sissela Bok 37 A Classic Debate by Benjamin McArthur

by Bill Moyers

41

The Evening News Every Morningand Vice Versa by Guy E. Olson 46 Preserving a Heritage Front cover: While public gardens such as this one in Mount Vernon, Virginia, the home of George Washington, have always attracted crowds, in recent years the cultivation of private gardens has become the most popular outdoor pastime in America. See pages 22-29.

Back cover: A mask from the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. Story begins on page 46.

Publisher, Leonard J. Baldyga; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Himadri Dhanda; Associate Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; Senior Editor, Aruna Dasgupta; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistants. Rocque Fernandes, Rashmi Goel; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, Y.P. Pandhi; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Se'rvices Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentatio}1 Services; American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-© Marina Schinz. Inside front cover top-Reprinted from Popular Mechanics, December 1989 © copyright The Hearst Corporation. All Rights Reserved; bottom-Mechanical Dynamics. 2-3---<:ourtesyIntergraph Corporation; insets courtesy Greenhome and O'Mara, Inc. 5---<:ourtesy Environmental Systems Research Institute. 6-7-all except 7 top left from Smithsonian News Service, courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; 7 top left-Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, F.M. Hall Collection, Univer~ity of Nebraska. 21 bottom-So Narasimhan. 22-23-© Derek Fell. 26-27 top left-© Wayne Partlow; bottom left © Ken Druse; right-© Michael McKinley. 3<J-.-AvinashPasricha. 3I---<:ourtesyIndo-U .S. Joint Business Council. 32-34---<:ourtesyBrandeis University Photography Department. 41 insets and 44 top right-Turner Broadcasting System. 46-back cover---<:ourtesy National Museum of the American Indian.

Published by the United States Information Service, American Center, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001 (phone: 3316841). on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited.

Faridabad, Haryana. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government. Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For perm;sJ:ion write to the Editor. Price of magazine. one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs. 30; single copy, Rs. 5.

When a government program offered Canadian oil companies financial incentives to drill more wells, Canadian Occidental Petroleum wanted to drill as many as possible before the program ended. Because drilling just one oil well costs at least $500,000, the company didn't want to proceed helter-skelter, so it created a computerized map that simulates the "lay of the land" hundreds of meters below ground.

The map, based on how sound waves reflect off layers of underground rock, shows the pockets between those layers where oil might be found, explained Frank Mayhood, manager of computer graphics at Canadian Occidental. . Without the map, he added, the company would have been able to drill only about six wells. With it, the company was able to drill 12 wells-receiving an additional $2.5 million in government incentives. Canadian Occidental is a pioneering commercial user of digital, or electronic, mapping.

In the United States, city governments and federal government agencies were quick to recognize the advantages of digital maps, and mapmakers use them to automate production of paper maps.

Because digital maps can be with changed easily-sometimes just a click of a computer mousethey are popular for designing roads and power-line networks and for updating information.

What is new in digital mapping is the coupling of electronic maps with external databases, such as the U.S. Bureau of the Census information, or a city's propertytax rolls. The resulting geographic information system (GIS) Reprinted with pennission. High Technology Business magazine. Copyright Š 1989 by lnfotechnology Publishing Corporation, 214 Lewis Wharf. Boston,

Massachusetts

02110.

SMART MAPS Digital maps have revolutionized cartography.

With their ability to zero in on specific features, these electronic maps can help design roads, site power plants, or locate the ideal site for a new shop. enables users to zero in on specific features. For example, a topography indicating house and building locations can be displayed on a screen, and each structure's assessed tax value or how much electricity it consumes can be accessed from the GIS's database.

Business users are a prime market for GISs, said Jack Dangermond, owner of Environmental Research Systems Institute (ERSI), a major GIS software vendor in Redlands, California.

A GIS of a city, with census data for each address, f<;>rexample, would show a retail chain the optimum site for placing a new store-near a neighborhood where incomes and ages are typical of its customers. Pennsylvania Power & Light, a regional power utility in the northeastern United States, uses census data and its GIS to find homes that might be ready to convert from coal or oil heat to electric heat. The utility also uses its GIS to route its meter readers, and help find the right locations for establishing new power plants, said land-use-systems planner Douglas Heivly.

Dataquest, a market research company based in San Jose,

Left: A color-coded map of the metropolitan area of Decatur, Alabama. reveals a wealth of information useful to regional planners, municipal officials, and businesses. The map highlights roads and highways (red) .. rivers and lakes (blue) .. railroad networks (solid (broken yellow), yellow) .. and various local boundaries-municipal county (white), postal zones (green). and census tracks (pink).

California, projects that the digital-mapping market in the United States will grow from $390 million in 1987 to $779 million in 1992. Of that 1992 total, it added, $616 million should be GIS sales. Going a step further, Pete Shaw, director of environmental-applications marketing for Prime Computer, believes GIS products are now in such demand that "there is no difference between the digital-mapping and the GIS market."

One reason for the American digital-mapping industry's fast growth is the long-term commitment to digital mapping of its largest customer-the U.S. government. The government's primary map-making agencies, the Defense Mapping Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and the Bureau' of the Census, will be the big users of G ISs. The USGS conversion alone involves 55,000 topographical maps that comprise nearly the entire United States landmass.

Because the agency sells the digital "topo" maps, which show settlements, waterways, and roads, they represent a convenient means for businesses to sample digital maps.

The U.S. Bureau of the Census released the first nationwide digital street-map system in 1989.

These maps make digital mapping widely useful for vehicle routing, said Keith Druhl, an account representative with Geographic Data Technology Inc. (GDT), the firm that sells the bureau's digital maps and complementing software.

Claiming that $500,000 million is spent each year in the United States to transport people and goods, GDT President Donald Cooke said that digital mapping can yield a five percent to 15 percent increase in routing efficiency. He estimated that that efficiency could save American business as much as $75,000 million a year.

Routing via digital-map systems promises to become a hot item. For example, customers of Pizza Hut, an American res-

taurant chain that specializes in home deliveries of pizzas, can call a central telephone number in some 20 U.S. cities, where an employee takes each order, and uses a digital map to route the order to the closest Pizza Hut restaurant. United Parcel Service (UPS)~as a result of its 1986 purchase of Roadnet Technologies, a Maryland-based producer of routing software~is about to launch digital-mapbased routing nationwide for its delivery fleet. Observed UPS spokesman Ken Sternad: "If a traffic light goes out somewhere, in a matter of seconds, the software can reroute all the vehicles in the area."

Also encouraging the digitalmapping industry's growth is the decreasing cost of the minicomputers that run GIS packages.

Pennsylvania Power & Light, which had a mainframe-based digital map as early as 1978, recently converted to a more sophisticated GIS that runs on a desktop minicomputer. Personal computcrs (PCs) are also powerful enough to run digital-mapping systems. Mapinfo Corp. offers a $750 program for the PC, with which users can create digital maps from their data.

Thc granddaddy of GIS packages, the l8-year-old Ultimap, declined in price from $300,000 to $50,000 in two years. That includcs thc software and an Apollo minicomputer, reported Jcrry Robinson, president of Ultimap Corp., the company that licenscs Ultimap from its developer, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Ultimap has allowed Minneapolis to reduce its staff of street designers from 90 to 30 since 1974, observed Bradford Henry, head of the city's street design section. Henry estimated that the city has saved $25 million with Ultimap, not including the revenues from its licensing arrangement with Ultimap Corp.

Ultimap's database-management system~its newest feature---enabled Minneapolis to

compare the response times of fire trucks with the locations of fire stations. Several fire stations were relocated as a result. It also pinpointed the ideal locations for a new garbage-burning facility and a convention center.

S

uch uses have spawned the boom in the use of digitalmapping systems by city governments in the United States. Among the cities that have created digital-mapping systems are Louisville, Kentucky; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Indianapolis, Indiana.

The Indianapolis GIS, which is called IMAGIS and covers a 1,279-square-kilometer area, provides information accurate to within half a meter, and, if printed, would produce 54 layers of maps. The U.S. Forest Service plans to create a GIS to better manage each national forest.

The increasing iriterest in GIS products has been great news for companies like Intergraph, which began life as a computer-aided design (CAD) supplier, and now earns one-third of its revenues selling the hardware and software that comprise GISs. Intergraph has the lion's share of the U.S. systems market, variously estimated by analysts at around 35 percent. Its competitors include IBM, DEC, and Prime, which recently sold a $64 million digitalmapping system to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Administration. Also profiting from digital mapping's popularity are GIS software suppliers, such as Environmental Systems Research Institute and Geographic Data Technology Inc., and companies such as Analytical Surveys Inc. that create customized maps.

Even the makers of paper maps stand to profit from digital mapping, because such systems automate map drawing. Although automation is expensive, "Once you create that digital database, you can create new maps using the same basic information," said

Rand McNally spokesman Con Erickson. A few years ago, Rand McNally published its first paper map created with a digital-mapping system: A streetfinder for the Detroit, Michigan, area. Ultimately, said Erickson, the Rand McNally Road Atlas, which includes some 17,000 small changes a year, will be produced with a digital-mapping system.

Companies that make systems strictly for automated map drawing, such as Scitex America Corp., are also delighted with the digital-mapping boom.

Scitex supplies systems to such giants of map production as the National Geographic Society.

Ironically, digital maps are usually created by hand. Working with an aerial photograph or a paper map, a technician highlights points on the landscape, such as roads, waterways, and elevations. A photograph or paper map cannot simply be entered into a computer with an optical scanner, because the image would remain static~a picture that cannot be manipulated.

Besides, "most people don't want all the information contained in a photo," said GeorgÂŤ Southard, vice president of Analytical Surveys Inc., the maker of Louisville's digital map.

T

hat's not to say that customers don't want small details; for example, Analytical Surveys' digital map of Louisville and its surrounding county shows all parking meters and signposts. Nor is it to say that photos aren't important to digital mapping. To give a digital map an underlying color or topography, equipment from Intergraph Corp. allows a digital map to be laid atop a photo of the landscape.

Other images often added to a digital map are infrared satellite images that show soil types and old paper maps that show the sites of abandoned waste-storage facilities~information that can help business and real estate

developers choose building sites on solid ground free of hazardous wastes. Digital maps consist of several overlays~separate submaps for roads, electrical lines, or waterways, for example. Also, the user can choose to view the digital map with only one overlay or in a close-up view.

Digital mapping holds great promise for commercial and government applications, but the consumer market so far is largely untapped.

In the early 1980s, Etak Inc. marketed a dashboardmounted computer called the Navigator, which displayed a digital map showing the driver's location. "As you drove," said Andrew Pitcairn, senior Etak account manager, "the map moved past your location; what was ahead of you out the window appeared ahead of you on the map." The company sold about 2,000 Navigators~fairly impressive given the product's $1,500 price tag.

Etak has since exclusively licensed the Navigator in the United States to General Motors, which has yet to incorporate it into a production auto. One reason may be that the Navigator's maps are fed into its computer from digital tape, a limited means of data storage.

A map of California's San Francisco Bay area alone fills three tapes. However, Etak recently began shipping a version of the Navigator that uses CD-ROM discs, which can each store up to 500 megabytes of information. Pitcairn believes this will hasten the consumer market for digital maps.

Until then, though, it's a paper-map world as far as consumers are concerned. And, said Rand McNally's Erickson, "The price and convenience of paper are going to retain the advantages of paper maps for some years 0 down the road."

About the Author: Edward Warner is afree-Iance writer specializing in articles on technology.

The Lens and the Paintbrush For years, artists have used photographs in preparing their works. Some project them onto canvas, then faithfully replicate every nuance of focus, shadow, and composition. Still other artists paint over them. German neo-expressionist Anselm Kiefer even adds layers of straw and lead to further obscure the camera images.

In the years following photography's invention in 1839, many artists perceived the new medium as a threat to their craft, but they eventually embraced it as a tool for study. Says art historian Van Deren Coke, "Artists used the camera image in the 19th century much as sketches had been used in earlier periods, either as notations when copying from nature or as a means of authenticating details."

One American artist who followed this scientific approach was Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). A painter celebrated for his incisive realism, he was also a prolific photographer. He made a series of nudes, portraits, and motion studies, using them mainly as reference points for his paintings. Recently, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., showed 43 examples to underscore the role the photographic medium played in Eakins's work.

Curator Phyllis Rosenzweig observes, "Eakins didn't intend that his photographs be regarded as art, and they were never physically part of his paintings. Rather, he ...appreciated the accuracy with which

this new device could record light, volume, anatomy, and other aspects of reality tha t he wanted to capture in his painting. Eakins seldom turned portrait photographs into

paintings .... Perhaps the fleeting quality of the camera image seem'ed static to him when translated into paint."

Eakins may not have been America's greatest photogra-

pher, but he embraced the possibilities of the new medium with an enthusiasm perhaps unrivaled for a painter in the early decades of photographic technology.

0

The painting at left is a rare example of a portrait that Thomas Eakins made from a photograph taken by him (above).

He didn't finish the painting, perhaps because he realized that an image based strictly on a photo was too static.

The artist's card-size motion studies, like this jumping man (below), were often used by his art students to study anatomy. For his photographs, Eakins used one camera, one plate, and multiple exposures from a rotating disk.

Eakins took up photography in the 1880s to capture movement and the play of light on the human figure (above).

Although his photographs have been admired by students of the medium, they were never exhibited as art.

Searching the table as he speaks, McMath can't seem to find what he's looking for. Then he spots it. Buried under a tiny mountain of space-age juices and cheese sauces is a "microwaveable hot mint fudge sundae" made by Johnston Inc. in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. "The ice cream stays cold but the sauce heats up," says McMath. "The jury is still out on this.

A lot of people say you just don't put ice cream in the microwave."

The lean, graying McMath looks like a retired professional basketball player who has wisely invested his money. But there is nothing retiring about this 61-year-old man, who 23 years ago founded Marketing Intelligence Service Ltd., a firm that publishes a wide range of reports on new products. One of the most widely read such reports is Product Alert, a fact-packed weekly that details new-product introductions throughout North America. For $600 a year, Product Alert provides comprehensive descriptions of new products, their ingredients, and packaging-with feisty comments scribbled in the margins by McMath, who personally examines about 70 percent of all new products dropped on the United States each year. In a recent issue of Product Alert, McMath noted that "Dry-Roasted Peanuts from Fisher Nut Company" boasted of "more peanut flavor." In the margin he remarked: "How does a peanut taste more like a peanut?"

In a world increasingly governed by computerized models, McMath is distinctly unorthodox. He relies not only on old-fashioned intuition but also on a comprehensive knowledge of new-product launchings during the past 23 years. "He's one of a kind," says a business friend. "He knows as much about a new jelly unleashed by Smucker this week as he does about a Procter & Gamble detergent that didn't make it 20 years ago."

Modestly, McMath observes, "I sure don't guess right about new products all of the time, but neither do those guys with their computer models. I have always believed that it's important to know some history, to have a sense of what's gone before so that you don't repeat all the old mistakes and keep reinventing the wheel."

In the unlikely small town of Canandaigua, New York, about 50 kilometers south of Rochester, McMath has assembled one of the world's largest collections of packaged goods. Now numbering more than 75,000 items, they range from brand-new and still-being-market-tested rookies to sluggers in the profit hall of fame. His enterprise lures executives from as far away as Known as "a living encyclopedia of new Japan, Mexico, Britain, and other countries, and from some of the biggest American consumer products," Robert McMath (left) attracts execgoods manufacturers. utives from consumer goods manufacturers Many of the products in McMath's collection around the world for advice on and evaluaare famous flops. So many, in fact, that his tion of the latest products on the market. enterprise has been called the National Hall of

obert McMath, who may have watched the birth and death of more new products than any living American, peers at the long table in front of him.

It is cluttered with shiny new products. He leans over to scoop up a package of lasagna layered with five kinds of cheese. Called Top Shelf, it's a new product from George A. Hormel & Company. "It's kept on your shelf, not in the freezer," he announces.

"Two minutes in the microwave and it's ready to eat."

McMath slides it across the table so that it kisses a package of lemon fillet of cod. Then he gets hold of a package of Del Monte Corporation's Blue Lake green beans, one ofa new series ofvegetables cradled in plastic microwave dishes. Like a magician pulling items from a hat, McMath lifts boxes of Lunch Buckets from Armour Food Company and Meals- To-Go from R.B. Rice Company. "All this is being caused by the microwave," McMath repeats, making the word microwave sound as powerful as nuclear energy. "It's the most important new appliance in our history because it's not just changing the way we eat but the way we live.

Nearly 70 percent of all American households now own one. And today's microwave will have as little in common with the next decade's as the CD (compact disc) player has with a phonograph."

A

MAN

FORALL

PRODUCTS

Shame and the Village of the Vanquished. A Nabisco executive recently named it the House of Lost Dreams. McMath is more businesslike. He calls it the New Products Showcase and Learning Center.

It is open by appointment only. Executives pay $500 and up per day to preview the latest new products, look at a special wing of innovative entries, and a department crowded with golden oldies. They also receive a briefing from McMath, who is a living encyclopedia of new products. Groups of executives pay considerably more (up to $20,000) for intense two-day seminars. Products cover seven basic consumer areas: Foods, snacks, beverages, pharmaceuticals, health-and-beauty aids, household products, and pet supplies.

The Showcase, which sprawls across the second story of a quaint old building on Main Street, is part of Marketing Intelligence Service Ltd., now owned by Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency. Apart from providing information on new products, the company also operates a database of more than 50,000 new items and a special unit that purchases and delivers those products to companies throughout the world. While the company itself is based in Naples, New York, McMath and his Showcase operate out of Canandaigua, a half-hour's drive away.

"The new-product marketplace has become a jungle," says McMath, frowning. "There will be over 6,300 new products launched this year, and at least 80 percent will fail or be major disappointments. " But McMath has a professional soft spot for losers. He believes companies can learn more from failures than successes.

He explains that winners often triumph because of individual brilliance, common sense, and raw luck-all unlearnable. Newproduct failures, on the other hand, often provide striking lessons in human nature. Among McMath's favorite flops: • Singles from Gerber Products Company. A 1970s attempt to reach the growing number of Americans living alone, particularly adults, with gourmet dishes, such as sweet-andsour pork, beef burgundy, herb-flavored vegetables, and creamed beef. "The meals were made for adults but came in baby food jars and were perceived as baby food," McMath says. "They had the wrong name and the wrong packaging. The name connotes loneliness. It reminds people that they are alone, something they don't want to be reminded of. The company says it's going back into the adult food business. I don't know what they're going to do, but I doubt they will go back to baby food jars."

• Wine & Dine dinners from Heublein Inc. An early effort to profit from America's growing appetite for exotic foods, the package meals, ranging from chicken chablis to beef chianti, were accompanied by miniature bottles of wine. McMath

explains, "A lot of people thought they were supposed to drink the wine. But it was cooking wine, spiced and salty. The package did not make it clear what the product was. A lot of people were disappointed. Today, differently positioned and with a different name, this product could go."

• I Hate Peas from American

Kitchen Products Company.

Trying to profit from a deep American aversion-many kids still loathe vegetables-this Maine-based company gave kids an alternative in the late 1970s. It smashed up peas, spinach, and other green things and camouflaged them as French fries.

The company hyped its product this way: "If your family hates peas but loves crisp French fries, try I Hate Peas. The new way to vegetable goodness." The bogus fries sold well for a while (mothers and fathers bought them), but the kids didn't bite. "It became clear that the kids thought they still tasted like peas," says McMath.

• New Cookery from Nestle Foods Corporation. Detecting a growing American physical-fitness fad, the Swiss company created a large menu of foods containing almost no salt, sugar or fat. "The problem was that they had 36 different entries," says McMath. "This gave their competitors a chance to lower prices." He explains, "When you come out with 36 different items, you'll always have 25 competitors begin doing everything possible to knock you out of the ballpark. The experiment cost the company an estimated $100 million to $250 million, but it has come back' with a very profitable line today known as Lean Cuisine. Pet had a similar experience when it came out with 27 different pastas and Italian dishes. The local pasta guys lowered their prices and began to knock them out across the country. Pet dropped the line finally, but bought Progresso and apparently is doing fine."

eneralizing about common mistakes in marketing new products, McMath finds that problems occur most often when the product does not differ significantly from the competition's; does not feature significant differences that consumers can recognize, need, or want; is not familiar or in sync with consumer expectations, or does not live up to claims.

"The original Pert shampoo sold itself as the product that would make your hair bounce and behave," McMath recalls.

"Well, people didn't find their hair bounced or behaved.

Anyway, it's hard to confirm whether your hair is bouncing.

"The name of the game today is innovate or abdicate," says Robert McMath.

"This is producing some strange new products."

The product has been repositioned many times since then."

McMath emphasizes the importance of effectively describing and explaining what the product is and does. "The Wine & Dine dinners are a case of bad communications," he notes.

The list of product failures is endless, and McMath adds to his collection almost weekly. Included are Touch of Yogurt, a shampoo featuring "living yogurt cultures," which McMath says may have done better if it had been sold in the dairy case. It also includes Top Coverage, a messy spray paint aimed at the heads of bald and balding women, and Gorilla Balls, malt candies injected with vitamins.

And not to be forgotten is Napa Natural, an early-1980s beverage that enjoyed booming sales when it was first marketed.

Its problem was that it contained 67 percent pure fruit juice, enough to cause it to ferment in the can and explode on shelves.

McMath traces the trend toward exotica to the early 1980s when Americans began rebelling against what he calls "the monotony of taste." "During the last recession [1987], Americans began doing something they had never done before," he says, fingering a package of microwaveable Texas peanuts.

"They stayed home. They stopped going out. They even quit drinking beer. Slowly, they began turning against hamburgers, peas, and French fries. They began experimenting with spicier, more expensive, more ethnic foods .... But they want all of this very fast, which is one reason for the microwave explosion."

As he talks, McMath begins to look around the office for a new line of microwaveable sauces. But the phone rings. A group of Japanese executives wants to come to look at a new generation of superpowered detergents. A television reporter wants details on new microwaves that will do everything from letting you can fresh foods to drying your clothes. "The canning thing is a do-it-yourself kit called MicroDOME," says McMath to the reporter. "It's a canningjar with a pressure-type top. You put it in the microwave for eight minutes, and when it whistles, your food is canned. The microwave dryer for your clothes is coming out soon."

Soon, somebody calls to visit "the museum." McMath politely books the gt:oup but lets me know that his Showcase is no museum. He glares, in fact, at the sound of the word.

"Museums," says McMath, "deal with the dead. If this ever became a museum, it would rapidly become obsolete. We are constantly adding new products and items that are not even on the national market yet."

He is especially amused by the growing trend toward what he calls "rebellion products." These are items that challenge existing trends. A successful case in point is Jolt Cola, which is brazenly advertised as "the soft drink with all the sugar and twice the caffeine." Jolt is doing well, McMath reports. "It is being marketed successfully overseas, and the company is bringing out a diet version."

McMath answers another phone call, this one from a group wanting him to speak at a conference on new flavors. Then he scoops up a large can of Harley-Davidson Heavy Beer and hands it to me. "Another protest," he says, "a full-bodied beer coming out at a time when people are drinking light beers or no beer at all. But this one is not doing so good."

Yet another of McMath's bizarre new entries is a canned spaghetti called Roland Rat from Britain's HP Foods Ltd. It's pasta designed in the shape of rats, a product that has done amazingly well in market tests in Britain. One survey showed that 79 percent of the kids say they would love to eat rodentshaped pasta. "The name of the game today is innovate or abdicate," says McMath. "This is producing some strange products. " There is a twinkle in McMath's eyes as he drags out new products. He plainly loves his work. The irony is that he created Marketing Intelligence Service to occupy his spare time in 1968.

His real business was running an import company in northern New Jersey. But when he lost control of the company, he was forced to turn his attention full-time to the new-product wars.

In 1974, he moved Marketing Intelligence to Naples, where his brother ran Wild Winds Organic Farms. He began the business with two employees and seven clients. Today, the firm has 20 full-time professionals and hundreds of clients all over the world. McMath sold it a few years ago but continues as chairman. He lives with his wife, Jean, in a condominium on the shores of Lake Canandaigua, the westernmost of New York State's princely Finger Lakes.

McMath still goes on shopping soirees. He likes to hop into his aging Lincoln, put on some Debussy tapes, and just drive.

One reason he enjoys living in upstate New York so much is that it is close to some of America's best test marketsRochester, Syracuse, and Jamestown in New Yark, and Pittsfield in Massachusetts.

"Our shoppers send in a wide variety of new items, but I like to buy the innovative stuff myself," says McMath. "Like this," he says, reaching down to the floor to get a two-headed plastic bottle. 'One end pours out shampoo, and the other end contains a hair conditioner."

He smiles, looking at it. "Too many socalled new products today are only me-too stuff."

McMath wife, however, does not share his taste for collecting .. When he returned from a recent shopping tour, his car stuffed with new products, she greeted him with a hot dinner. It was an innovative item he had purchased more than ten months earlier and had left in their freezer. "New-style pizza covered with tofu," says McMath. "Unfortunately, it was well past its prime. But I can't throw anything away."

0 About the Author: Randall Poe is the director of communications of The Conference Board, New York, publishers of Across the Board.

"One day you 'Il realize that the people capable of running the country are too smart to get into politics. "

Reprinted with permission a division

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Just as each American state has its own designated bird and flower (as seen through U.S. postage stamps illustrating this story), each one also has its own constitution. And judges and lawyers are discovering that many state constitutions are more liberal than the federal Constitution in granting their citizens legal privileges.

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mericans enjoy constitutional rights far beyond those penned by their nation's Founders. That is true because all of the 50 states also have their own constitutions, many of which provide rights and freedoms that are nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution.

State constitutions usually have not attracted much attention. But a quiet legal revolution now under way is pushing state constitutions out of the shadow of the U.S. Constitution, and shifting the way that many of the basic constitutional rights of Americans are protected.

Legal scholars have described this movement as the "new judicial federalism." The label does not evoke front-page headlines, but there is nothing dull about the increasingly active role that state court judges are playing as they look to state constitutions to decide a variety of controversial legal issues that come before them. The late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., who served on the U.S. Supreme Court from 1956 to 1990, described this trend as "probably the most important development in constitutional jurisprudence today."

America's highest court, of course, remains the final arbiter of the federal Constitution. And under the U.S. legal system, states cannot fall below the minimum federal constitutional standards spelled out by the U.S. Supreme Court. But there is nothing to prevent the states from relying on their own constitutions to expand individual rights and freedoms beyond those found in the U.S. Constitution. In recent years, this has resulted in hundreds of state supreme court decisions reaching beyond federal opinions in areas involving the rights of criminal defendants, abortion and other privacy matters, local zoning

regulations, church-state issues, and other controversial legal disputes. The Hawaii Supreme Court once described the U.S. Supreme Court as "merely another source ofauthority ... which we are free to accept or reject in establishing the outer limits of protection afforded by the Hawaii Constitution."

Justices Brennan and John Paul Stevens, who has been on the U.S. Supreme Cou~t since 1975, have been leading advocates of having states rely on their own constitutions to extend individual rights and freedoms beyond the minimum protections outlined in U.S. Supreme Court rulings. In criminal matters, for example, Brennan wrote in a 1975 decision that "each state has power to impose higher standards governing police practices under state law than is required by the federal Constitution."

On a political level, the growing popularity of litigation based on state constitutions poses ~ilemmas for both liberals and conservatives, though for different reasons. Liberal groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, have been pleased with many of the decisions coming out of state supreme courts in areas involving individual rights. Yet they worry that too much reliance on the states could undermine the need for strong national standards and enforcement of individual civil rights. During the 1950s, for example, state judges in the South often were hostile to civil rights claims of blacks, who depended on the protection of federal courts to preserve their rights.

Conservative Federal Judiciary To a large extent, the explosion in state constitutional law has been triggered by the increasing conservatism of the federal judiciary. State constitutions were all but ignored during the

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1950s and 1960s when the U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, ushered in an era of expanding federal constitutional protections with a string of landmark decisions that began in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court declared that separate public schools for black and white students were inherently unequal. For the next 15 years, the Supreme Court dramatically made constitutional history by decreeing bold new rights for criminal defendants, outlawing prayer in public schools, mandating more equitable voting representation, and handing down other decisions that altered the nation's legal and social landscape.

The tide shifted when Warren retired in 1969, and President Richard Nixon replaced him with Warren Burger. (Federal justices are appointed for life by the U.S. President, with the approval of the U.S. Congress, and can be removed only by the Congress through impeachment.)

Besides Burger, Nixon named three other justices to the Supreme Court: Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and William H. Rehnquist.

B1ackmun proved to be a moderate on many issues, but the others helped to form a solid conservative bloc of justices eager to slow down the activist constitutional interpretations of their predecessors. President Ronald Reagan selected Rehnquist to become chief justice when Burger announced his retirement in June 1986, and he named three others to the Supreme Court: Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony M. Kennedy-all conservatives.

"Once Earl Warren stepped down and Nixon made his appointments to the court, one-dimensional constitutional thinking no longer sufficed. That's when we began slowly and gradually thinking about state constitutions," says Ronald K.L. Collins, a visiting law professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., and a leading expert on state constitutional law. "State constitutional rights always existed, but they weren't consistent with the emphasis then placed on federal rights."

At first, the rebirth of state constitutions was touted largely in scholarly law review articles, prompting relatively little notice elsewhere. Eventually, these articles prodded practicing lawyers and judges to begin reading more closely the fine print contained in state constitutions. When they did, they discovered many of the same fundamental freedoms included in the U.S. Constitution, though often spelled out in far greater detail in the state charters. For example, the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guards against "excessive bail" in criminal cases but falls short of a guaranteed right to bail. By contrast, nearly 30 state constitutions include the right to pretrial bail in noncapital cases. The U.S. Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantees only that criminal trials be public; a

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quarter of the states require that all court proceedings be open to the public and the press.

In many cases, state courts in the United States, relying on provisions in their state constitutions, have presaged landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court. At least two states were well out in front of the nation's highest court when it handed down its famous 1963 decision, Gideon v. Wainright, which said states had to provide legal counsel to a criminal defendant who could not afford to hire a lawyer to represent him in court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court reached the same conclusion under that state's constitution in 1859. Tennessee's high court announced a similar ruling in 1951.

Eighteen states have added equal-rights amendments to their constitutions, providing that men and women are equal under the law. The equal-rights provisions in Wyoming's constitution date back to 1889, years before the women's movement in America first began pushing, so far unsuccessfully, for a national equal-rights amendment. The constitutions in nine states include explicit protection of an individual's right to privacy from government intrusion, a key legal premise when it comes to litigation over controversial issues such as abortion rights and widespread drug testing. State supreme courts in California, Texas, New Jersey, and elsewhere have relied on such privacy rights to strike down state laws restricting abortions and requiring polygraph (so-called lie detector) tests. In 1975, the Alaska Supreme Court cited the state constitution's right to privacy in overturning a law that prohibited the personal possession and use of marijuana. The more detailed state constitutions "invite judges and lawyers to think about questions that might be out of bounds to a federal judge," says A.E. Dick Howard, a law professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

State Courts Focus on Criminal Law Since 1970, state supreme courts have handed down at least 500 rulings that have relied solely on state constitutions in individual-rights cases, without considering federal constitutional issues. Many of these cases have involved criminal law matters, which is not surprising given the conservative shift that has taken place at the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justices Burger and Rehnquist. "Truly, state courts have responded with marvelous enthusiasm to many not-so-subtle invitations to fill the constitutional gaps left by the decisions of the Supreme Court majority," former Justice Brennan, a liberal, said in a November 1986 speech at the New York University School of Law. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court pleased law enforcement officials by carving out an important exception to the 74-yearold "exclusionary rule" that forbids the use of evidence seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban against unreason-

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able searches and seizures. In the case of U.S. v. Leon, the Supreme Court, at the urging of the Reagan Administration, decided that illegally obtained evidence may be used at a trial if the police officers who seized it had obtained a search warrant and thought they were acting legally.

A year after the Leon ruling, the highest courts in Mississippi and New York flatly rejected the U.S. Supreme Court's "good faith" exception to the exclusionary rule. The Mississippi Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals said the exclusionary rule created by their state constitutions would not permit the kind of exception that had been permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court. In a November 1985 decision, the New York court said the purpose of the exclusionary rule would become "completely frustrated" and that illegal police behavior would be tacitly encouraged if it adopted the Supreme Court's precedent. The Mississippi justices rejected the Leon ruling after concluding that a relaxation of the exclusionary rule "more reflects a shift injudicia1 and political ideology than a judicial response to demonstrable and felt societal needs."

Privacy Rights Cases In areas other than criminal cases, state constitutions have provided the foundation for controversial state-court decisions that have differed from U.S. Supreme Court rulings. State supreme courts in New Jersey and California have ruled in recent years that state legislatures could not constitutionally prohibit the use of public funds to pay for abortions for indigent women. These rulings flatly contradicted a 1980 Supreme Court decision, Harris v. McRae, that upheld the socalled Hyde Amendment, by which the U.S. Congress barred the use of Medicaid funds to pay for most abortions.

A year later, the California Supreme Court said state lawmakers could not enact similar legislation because a woman's right to an abortion was protected by privacy rights included in the state constitution as well as by the U.S. Supreme Court's historic 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. In fact, the California court recognized a state constitutional right to an abortion on privacy grounds four years before the Roe decision was handed down in Washington, D.C. Some constitutional lawyers predict that privacy rights will continue to be a major legal issue in America as government agencies and private companies make efforts to subject employees to drug tests and polygraph examinations.

Some state courts, however, already have struck down similar testing programs on state constitutional grounds. The Texas Supreme Court in October 1987 banned the use of polygraph tests for state employees. The case arose after the Texas Department of Mental Health decided in 1984 to administer lie-detector tests to its employees. The court said the state agency had the right to question employees in evaluating their

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performance. But the court cited an implied right to privacy in the Texas constitution in concluding that polygraph tests went too far. Similarly, courts in New York and California have barred urinalysis and polygraph testing of state employees on grounds thatsuch procedures violated state constitutional rights.

Courts in New Jersey and California, citing violations of state constitutional rights of privacy and due process, have struck down local zoning ordinances that limit the size and type of buildings that can be constructed in town, or how existing buildings can be used. The California case arose after the city of Santa Barbara passed a zoning regulation prohibiting more than five unrelated persons from sharing one house. At the time of the California Supreme Court's 1980 decision, nearly 40 municipalities around the state had similar zoning restrictions.

Six years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had upheld a comparable zoning restriction, stating that no fundamental right to live together could be found in the federal Constitution.

California Supreme Court Justice Stanley Mosk has credited an "alliance of convenience" between liberals' and conservatives as an important element in furthering the rise of state constitutional law. For liberals, state constitutions provide "the prospect of continued expansion of individual rights and liberties" begun during the Warren court years. "For the conservatives," Mosk has written, "state constitutionalism represents the triumph of federalism. Crucial decisions about the apportionment of rights and benefits are decided by state courts r~sponsive to local needs rather than by a distant United States Supreme Court, perceived as insensitive."

This view has been echoed by some conservative legal scholars who have disagreed with individual state-court decisions while applauding the basic notions of federalism that underlie the trend in state constitutional law. "The whole purpose of having states is to have citizens disagree about what is a fundamental right. You've got to tolerate differences in law if you want to tolerate different sovereignties," says Bruce Fein, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. "Insofar as the state~ want to think for themselves, I think that's positive."

The U.S. Supreme Court itself has not been left out of the growing debate over the use of state constitutions and the proper balance between state and federal courts. On the contrary, some of the court's justices have been engaged in a sparring battle over the Supreme Court's own policy of reviewing state-court decisions. Some observers believe that the court's more conservative members are upset with many of the liberal state supreme court rulings and are determined to find ways to strike them down. "Despite protestations of federalism, the United States Supreme Court is currently engaged in a duel of sorts with state supreme courts, going out of its way at times to overrule cases in which state courts extend greater constitu-

tional protection," writes James C. Harrington, legal director of the Texas Civil Liberties Union.

During the 1970s, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed 20 state supreme court decisions, many in the area of criminal law, that upheld claims of individual rights on federal constitutional grounds. But the Supreme Court for decades had followed a policy of not reviewing state-court decisions that relied on state laws or state constitutional rights. Under this policy, state courts might cite federal laws or constitutional provisions, but were able to insulate their decisions from federal judicial review by resting their opinions on "independent and adequate state grounds."

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a new test for deciding when the justices might review state-court decisions.

In Michigan v. Long. the court said it no longer would assume that a state court was relying on its own state law unless its opinion included a specific statement to that effect. Opponents of the decision quickly interpreted it as an effort by the Supreme Court to grab more authority over state-court decisions. Justice John Paul Stevens, who dissented in the Michigan case, has accused the court of a "further advancement of its own power" in seeking to review more state-court decisions.

But supporters of the Michigan decision say that it was intended only to clarify the Supreme Court's rules when it comes to reviewing state-court decisions. "Our court has neither the authority nor the inclination to oppose efforts to construe state constitutional provisions more liberally than their federal counterparts are construed," Chief Justice Rehnquist said in a January 1988 speech to the National Conference of Chief Justices in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Whatever the case, the Supreme Court's decision in Michigan v. Long has focused further attention on state constitutions.

Shortly after the opinion was handed down, the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided a criminal case that made it perfectly clear that its decision rested solely on state constitutional grounds. "When state constitutional issues have been raised, this court has a responsibility to make an independent determination of the protections afforded in the New Hampshire Constitution," said the court. A year after the Michigan decision, Justice Stevens sternly rebuked Massachusetts's highest court after the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a 1984 decision that went in favor of the defendant in a search-and-seizure case.

Stevens criticized the Massachusetts court for basing its opinion on the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution rather than looking to its own constitution, where more expansive rights could be found.

American lawyers have their own new set of responsibilities when it comes to the increasing attention paid to state constitutions. Any lawyer representing a client who is seeking some constitutional protection without looking to a state constitution "is

skating on the edge of malpra.ctice," Oregon Justice Linde observed a few years ago. Partly at his urging, the Oregon Supreme Court today regularly decides issues on state constitutional grounds without relying on similar federal constitutional claims.

State supreme courts in Washington, Maine, and Vermont also have earned reputations as judicial tribunals with keen interest in their state constitutions. In a 1985 case involving a challenged criminal arrest, the Vermont Supreme Court first declined to issue an opinion; instead it ordered the parties in the case to file a new set of briefs that discussed the state constitutional issues. "This generation of Vermont lawyers," Justice Thomas L. Hayes wrote in the case, "has an unparalleled opportunity to aid in the formulation of a state constitutional jurisprudence that will protect the rights and liberties of our people, however the philosophy of the United States Supreme Court may ebb and flow."

Despite Hayes's words, many constitutional lawyers still think in federal terms when they research cases and take them to court. State supreme courts for the most part will only rule on claims raised by the lawyers in the case. "The reason more state courts don't render state constitutional opinions is because the litigators aren't raising the issues. And the reason litigators aren't raising them is because the law schools aren't teaching them," says Collins, who is preparing a book on state constitutional law for use in law school courses. He claims that many of America's most prestigious law schools are "out of touch with reality" because they continue to emphasize federal constitutional law in their curriculums.

But Burt Neuborne, a law professor at New York University, believes federal courts are likely to remain the most common forums for litigating constitutional cases. Neuborne, a former national legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, says the recent emphasis on state constitutional law might be a "little overstated" because of the number of cases still being tried in federal courts. He acknowledges, however, that part of the reason is because most top law schools in the United States still focus on teaching federal constitutional law and federal court procedure. The bias toward federal courts is further enhanced because high-ranking law students often wind up clerking for federal judges, giying them even more grounding in federal cases and procedures.

Still, Neuborne agrees with those who believe that the new attention being paid to state constitutions in the United States is part of a growing trend. "I think the notion of opening a second front in constitutional litigation can only be good," says Neuborne. "To the extent that people are interested in protecting fundamental human rights in two court systems rather than one, this can only result in a more efficient protection of those rights."

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WhxRabbi1 had 10 Go In remarks made before the American Booksellers Association, the author (below) talks of how he came to write the four "Rabbit" novels and why "Rabbit" had to be finally put to rest.

Rabbit at Rest is the fourth and last of my so-called Rabbit books. Each of them occurs in the ninth year of a decade and was written, more or less, in the ninth year of the decade.

The first one, Rabbit, Run, was written in 1959 with no thought of there being a sequel. It was composed by a youngish man, 27 I believe I was, who had received a Guggenheim grant by promising to write a novel-hence, having accepted the grant, I felt obliged to write the book. I had published one previous, quite short novel, The Poorhouse Fair. My sense of myself was of a sort of sprinter. My name, if known, was known by way of contributions to The New Yorker magazine. My original concept had been to write two novellas, to be bound into one volume, which would contrast two approaches to the game of life: One would be the rabbit approach, a kind of dodgy approach-spontaneous, unreflective, frightened, hence my character's name, Angstrom-and the second was to be the horse method of coping with life, to get

into harness and pull your load until you drop. And this was eventually The Centaur. But I began the rabbit book first.

It was subtitled, in my conception of it, "A Movie"; I imagined the opening scene as something that would happen behind credits, and I saw the present tense of the book as corresponding to the present tense in which we experience the cinema.

There is no real past in the movies; things happen, one after the other, right there in

front of us. The present tense, in the late 1950s, was not at all a common device in American fiction. The only instance that I had encountered was in a novel by Joyce Cary, the British writer, called Mister Johnson, about an African civil servant. I don't know if it's remembered or forgotten, but it's a wonderful book, one of the best novels about Africa--eertainly one of the best books written by a white man about Africa that there is. I have been told since that Damon Runyon wrote in the present tense, but for me Joyce Cary opened the door.

I discovered as I began to write how delicious the present tense is. Instead of writing "she said and he said" it's "he says and she says," and not "he jumped" at some past moment, but "he jumps," right now in front of you. Action takes on a wholly different, flickering quality; thought and feeling and event are brought much closer together.

And so the present tense proved to be a happy one and I wrote on and on in a little room in the corner of East Street and County Road in Ips-

wich, Massachusetts, a town I'd moved to in an attempt to get away from the charms and distractions of New York City. I was there provisionally, seeing if I could be a free-lance writer. I had had a job in New York, I had don~ my New York thing, I could tell Uptown from Downtown, I had undergone the Manhattan initiation rites that writers should undergo, and was up in New England experimentally, out on a limb as it were. I sat in that little room, the old sewing room, looking out at a very complex telephone pole, and the excitement of writing a novel was so great for me that my feet, in scuffing, wore two bare spots on the floor, which might still be there.

Anyway, I completed the book; it was indeed a full-length book, too full-length to include with the horse novel, which I then made into another separate book.

And that of course is the way we accumulate a shelf of books, every idea subdivides and becomes two and then four, and that way you can have written 37 books and not have had very many ideas.

Rabbit, Run was published, with mild sales, fair reviews. People asked me about the ending; they found it ambiguous.

What really happened? The hero is last seen running. I thought that Rabbit's immersion in the blind act of running was a sufficient ending for the novel; it didn't occur to me we needed to know more about this man.

But the decade passed, a decade that brought me good news and bad, and that brought the country a lot of news. The 1960s were an exceedingly newsworthy decade, from John F. Kennedy's assassination on. A lot of things happened, things that were more or less distressing to Americans older than 30.

I had written a book called Couples, which had sold en'ough to make me feel entitled to write a long poem, all about myself, under the false impression that that would be interesting to people. But I made the useful discovery that in fact an author is interesting only as a storyteller, only as the conduit whereby certain imaginary events get onto the page. And so my poem about myself, called "Midpoint," fell quietly into the void-more

quietly than a stone down a well, which at least does make a sort of little plip.

It was then my notion to complete a kind of Pennsylvania tetralogy. I'd written a book that took place in the future, The Poorhouse Fair, one that took place in the immediate present, Rabbit, Run, one that took place in the remembered past, The Centaur, and I wanted to write a historical novel about James Buchanan, Pennsylvania's only President-a fascinating man, at least to me. I did so much research I began to dream about him. One day I woke up and told my wife, "James Buchanan is my best friend."

Well, it was one thing to fall in love with James Buchanan but another to try to write a historical novel. I found that I couldn't bring myself to do all the fakery necessary in writing a historical novel.

Never having lived in a log cabin, I found myself inhibited about describing one; never having participated in a Washington 19th-century political parley, I found myself at a loss to imagine exactly what went on. Even things like buggies and spittoons loomed as mysterious. So I found myself balked in the attempt to write the Buchanan novel and I finally made it into a play, putting upon the director and the set designer all these difficult particulars that eluded me.

By now it was high time for me to write a novel. I had made a deal with myself at the beginning of this free-lance career I've spoken of: I would give my publishers, to make up for the losses they'd suffered on the intervening books, a novel every other book, with collections of something or other in between. So the rhythm would go, presumably, loss, small gain, loss, small gain. It was novel time, and Buchanan hadn't worked out as a hero.

And there was all this distress around me-Vietnam distre;;s, race riots, marches, agitation of all sorts. Suddenly it seemed to me that Rabbit Angstrom of Pennsylvania, about whose future somepeople had expressed curiosity, might be the vehicle in which to package some of the American unease that was raging all around us. And so I wrote Rabbit Redux.

It felt good to be back in the present tense and good to try to locate in this small

section of southeastern Pennsylvania echoes and ramifications of the national and international disturbances that were so preoccupying in the late 1960s.

Having composed, then, one sequel, and having had the sequel fairly well received, obliged me, it seemed, to write another; one sequel leads to another. A motive of the artistic life, after all, is the completion of sets. That childhood instinct we have to make collections, to tidy up and round out, affects adult enterprises as well.

But in the meantime, I had a whole decade to live, on my own track. People would ask me, "What's Harry doing?" as though he was a real person, but I had no idea what he was doing. For one thing, I lived in Massachusetts and he was living in Pennsylvania. I didn't even know he'd become a car dealer.

When the time came, when 1979 came-each novel, by the way, was written in a different house, as it turned out, at a different address-I was in a different town, I had a different wife, a different sense of myself. I was full of beans, really, looking back on it from my present relatively beanless condition. I was in my mid-forties, just a kid. The town we lived in, I should say, was away from the sea and in size and social atmosphere reminded me of the town in Pennsylvania, Shillington, that I had grown up in. The house was even the same shape-long and narrow, with a deep backyard. From the room I wrote in, I saw rows of yellow school buses. I was at home in America, all right.

I needed a hook, into 1979. I mean, what can you say? Although the first novel had had a few overheard news items in it, it wasn't really in a conscious way about the 1950s. It just was a product of the 1950s; it was a helplessly 1950s kind of book written by a sort ofhelplessly 1950s guy. The 1960s were much more selfconscious, much more conscious of themselves as a decade. The 1970s seemed somewhat amorphous.

But we happened to be in Pennsylvania, staying with some friends of my wife's, and it was June, and there was

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death of Updike's mother "became interwoven with my own sense of aging and my hero's even more severe sense of aging. "

some anxiety about our getting away because there were terrible gas lines all over the state. And my host was so hostly, or else so keen on our departure, that he rose very early in the morning and got in my car and went and waited in a gas line to get me gas to get out of there. So the gas crunch became my hook: Running out of gas, which is the first phrase in Rabbit Is Rich. The general sense of exhaustion, inflation, Jimmy Carter's fainting during one of his trots-all that seemed to add up to a national picture.

The paradox was that although the theme was running out of gas, I was feeling pretty good. And so the book is kind of an upbeat book in spite of itself. r t's really a cheerful book, very full, it seems to me insofar as I can be a critic, of itself and its material. I really had to cut it short at the end-it was threatening to go on forever. Tennyson said what he wanted was a novel that would go on forever, but it's not what I want. So I moved briskly to the arrival of Angstrom's granddaughter in his arms; the book is really about his becoming a grandfather, written years before I myself became one. He is rich in a number of ways, and discovers of course that to be rich is just another way of being poor, that your needs expand with your income and the world eventually takes away what it gives.

But it's a big, basically bouncy book that won prizes. Why some books win prizes and others don't is a mystery. In part it was that by this time, I'd been around so long, and was obviously working so hard, that people felt sorry for me and futhermore hoped that if Rabbit and I received a prize we would go away and put an end to this particular episode in American letters. But no, I've felt obliged to produce a fourth!

Again, I groped for the hook. It was quite easy to have a blank mind about the 1980s; there was a distinct fuzziness about

it. It was Ronald Reagan's decade and very cool, in the McLuhanesque sense, and all I really knew was that my hero would be ten years older and probably feeling no better than I did, and maybe even a little worse-since he had peaked earlier than I did. I saw him in Florida. I thought a new state might perk up Rabbit readers. The Updikes-a branch of them, my father's brother and sister-went down to Florida in the 1920s when their own father, my grandfather, became ill with tuberculosis, and so Florida has some personal relevancy for me-a warm spot in my heart, you might say. Also, my mother for almost as long as I knew her had been trying to write a novel about the discoverer of Florida, Ponce de Leon. So I made some trips, in 1988 I think it must have been, to gather background.

I couldn't wait to begin the book; the opening of it occurs late in 1988, after the presidential election and just after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in Lockerbie.

In writing, I several times had to stop to let real time catch up with my fictional time. The private events are the main thing, of course, but you don't want some public event, atomic war or a giant earthquake, to cancel the world and make everything anachronistic.

A few months. after I began, in April of 1989, my mother was hospitalized, and from then on I had to keep making trips to Pennsylvania to check on things. I had a hard time keeping momentum, and noticed in rereading, even on the last set of proofs, some repetitions and inconsistencies.

You might say it's a depressed book about a depressed man, written by a depressed man. Deciding to wind up the series was a kind of death for me. Even though I left Pennsylvania in the early 1950s, as long as my parents were alive I had a living link with the state. My father died in 1972 but my mother lived on, and so I had continuing reasons to visit Rabbit's territory, to refresh my sense of it and check up on changes. But as she became older I saw that my link would end someday, and end with it my grip on Rabbit's world. My mother died in October, ten days after I finished the first draft; her dying became interwoven with my

own sense of aging and my hero's even more severe sense of aging.

Yet all those visits, to her in the hospital and out of it-I hadn't had such a strong dose of my native turf since leaving it for college. My fictional city of Brewer is, I guess it's no secret to say, based on Reading, in Berks County. And though r was raised in a suburb of Reading, I had never lived there, and putting Rabbit into Brewer in Rabbit, Run was actually an act of fantasy, something like the country of Kush in The Coup, and I got the geography all scrambled up, and it's all rather vague and, as it seemed to me at the time, enchanted.

In Rabbit at Rest it's less vague-the area at last, in my taking leave of it, began to make sense.

Another reason for winding up: I felt that if I was going to make a kind of meganovel out of the series, and bring all the threads to a gathering, four novels was about the limit. We've all heard of tetralogies, but after that there's no word for it. And with sequels, there is an accumulation of loose threads, of characters you invented and used, so that the elements increase geometrically, and beyond four would become very messy.

Even so, each Rabbit book has been longer than the preceding, and Rabbit at Rest is the longest.

The action ends in October; I used Hurricane Hugo to round out the climax, but of course the events that now seem important about 1989-the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe-occurred quite late in the year. But Rabbit feels them coming-at one point he asks himself, "If there's no Cold War, what's the point of being an American?" His sense of being useless, of being pushed to one side by his wife and son, has this political dimension, then. Like me, he has lived his adult life in the context of the cold war. He was in the army, ready to go to Korea, hawkish on Vietnam, proud of the moon shot, and in some sense always justified, at the back of his mind, by a concept of freedom, of America, that took sharpness from contrast with communism. If that contrast is gone, then that's another reason to put him, regretfully, to rest.

D

A Semester in Blacksburg Bumper stickers describe Blacksburg, Virginia, as "A Very Special Place." That seems an appropriate phrase, for the town combines scenic beauty with academic excellence.

Blacksburg is nestled between the Blue Ridge and Allegheny mountain ranges, about four hours' drive from Washington, D.C. It is a very picturesque place, with undulating terrain, tall trees, and an air of tranquillity. The city is home to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, a top-rated institution of higher learning. Tech-as the university is popularly called-has more than 24,000 students. Blacksburg's population is about 32,000.

I spent the spring semester of 1990 as a Fulbright scholar-inresidence at Tech, teaching a course on women and development in the Third World.

In its effort to offer a modern broad-based curriculum, Tech has in recent years added a number of new courses and disciplines. The women's studies program is one such, and, for 1990, it was decided to have this course focus on women and development in the Third World, with special reference to India and other South Asian countries. My assignment was to draw up a syllabus for this course and deliver three lectures a week that would sensitize American undergraduate students to the aspirations and problems of the people, especially women, of developing countries.

Most of the students who enrolled in my course, I discovered, had only a superficial awareness of the Third World, and their preconceptions about the Orient were based mainly on stereotypes. But, once the lectures got under way, they showed a remarkable enthusiasm to learn and know more about developing countries that had earlier seemed "far removed" and not of much relevance to their academic pursuits. They would supplement their classroom study with research in the library, and then correlate book-learning with reports on the Third World in newspapers and magazines from around the globe, including The Times of India, to which the university subscribes. My presence helped them to transform abstract theory into concrete real-life examples.

That students took up their study seriously became evident when they submitted their midterm assignment papers. Thoroughly researched and documented, these papers covered such wide-ranging topics as the status of women in Korean society and the implications of widowhood in Nigeria. I must admit that I learnt a great deal from these presentations. It was very educative for me to discover parallels in customs and traditions between India and other developing nations-the society's attitude toward widows in Africa, for instance, or the preference for male offspring among Central American communities.

Only one male had enrolled for my course, and his presence

added an extra dimension to discussions on Third-World women. He provided his perceptions of gender and work patterns, family relationships in a changing ethos, and the issue of cultural empowerment in a society in transition.

The class also included Deepali, a second-generation American ofIndian origin who grew up in the United States, and is, in many ways, more American than Indian. One day she made a class presentation of her own experiences, which helped students better appreciate the cultural conflicts that immigrants, particularly women, experience. Deepali's observations on arranged marriages, dress codes, ambitions, and career plans for women straddling the East-West divide sparked lively discussions.

What I found most exciting about the American education system is that it is not confined to book learning; students don't just expect to be "lectured to." In comparison with Indian undergraduates, American students are less inclined to take their teacher's word as the gospel .truth; they question and cross-question the teacher until they are satisfied. This meant that I had to do my homework too in order to be on sure ground. But the questions made my assignment that much more enjoyable and meaningful; each lecture became more a discussion than a monologue.

Apart from my regular teaching assignment, I was also asked to guest-lecture for courses in other disciplines. In the English literature class, for instance, I read one of my short stories, and followed it up with a discussion on Third World women's writing. For the course on feminist theory, I, along with two other visiting women teachers (from Chile and Israel), gave lectures on how feminism had affected and changed our lives in comparison with our mothers' generation.'

In addition, there were the midweek meetings and seminars arranged by the office of women's programs and the Association of Women in Development at Tech. Over a brown-bag lunch, men and women, faculty and students, listened to talks by specialists on myriad subjects of topical interest. Common to these events, as in the classroom, was a barrage of questions and answers after each talk.

There is also an air of informality at American educational institutions, some aspects of which seemed a bit disconcerting, if amusing, to me in the beginning. It is not rare, for example, to see students walk into class with a Coke can in one hand and a half-munched apple in the other, and everyone calling you by your first name. Even the youngest undergrad called me Sakuntala-something not quite imaginable here in India.

To give my class a taste of the "fun and festivity" in Third World women's lives, we organized an India Day on

Left: Student Michelle Hanrahan, seen with author Narasimhan, is dressed as an Indian bride at an India Day celebration. Below: Each year Virginia Tech holds an International Week for its overseas students. Indian students make dosas at the street fair, which is a highlight of the celebrations.

March 7, with the help of local Indians. We decorated the Cranwell International Center on the campus with Indian tie-and-dye fabrics, soft silks with gorgeous gold lace, embroidery, and handicrafts from different parts of India.

Food stalls offered various Indian cuisines. A group of American undergraduate girls put on a colorful Indian fashion show.

We dressed up Michelle Hanrahan, one of my students who was to be married soon, as a typical Indian bride-with silver anklets, toe rings, bindi, and a rich-red bridal sari. It was all great fun.

India Day brought me in close touch with the Indian community in Blacksburg, which is about 400 strong, and forms the second largest group of non-American students on the campus (Koreans are the largest). Most Indians are graduate students, too busy with their studies. The older Indiansfaculty members or expatriate professionals-have an Indian Association, and they meet once every month for socializing, and they also celebrate such events as Republic Day, Diwali, and other Indian festivals.

Tech, in a manner of speaking, epitomizes the world. It has a very large overseas student community, drawn from more than

90 countries. In April each year, the university organizes an International Week. Its highlight is a colorful, gorgeous street fair, which provides a rare opportunity to foreign students, many of them donning their ethnic dress for the occasion, and their American hosts to mingle, and get a glimpse of the infinite diversity and variety that makes up our world. One could stop at the colorfully decorated Thai stall, buy a memento and savor their spicy cuisine, or move on to the Turkish stall or the Pakistani booth for delicious kababs and to view their exquisite handicrafts. The Indian stall had a group of students manfully trying to flip dosas on an electric griddle. For those who preferred other Indian preparations, there were puris, masala channa, and even laddoos.

With the aroma of oriental and occidental cooking filling the air, and the flags of each group fluttering overhead, the campus was turned into a feast not only for the palate but also for the eyes. I was fortunate to attend it in 1990.

April also meant that exams were close, so while the students burned the midnight oil, I busied myself with preparing their question paper, then grading their answer sheets and filing the evaluations in the office, before preparing to pack up and return home.

Mary Rojas of the Office of International Development, who was my faculty associate, organized a farewell party for me to say good-bye to my colleagues and friends. As a memento from that evening,'! have a beautiful Jefferson cup, a specialty of Virginia. My entire class came over one evening, and presented to me a handcrafted Appalachian basket of an unusual shape-also a Virginia specialty.

I will treasure both these souvenirs. But perhaps what touched me most were cards and letters from my students. Says one: "I just wanted to personally thank you for everything you taught and gave me this year." Says another: "You showed me and our class a different culture which gave, at least me, a different perspective that I will keep long after this course is over. Thank you."

And one I discovered outside my door on the day I was to leave. It reads: "Dear Sakuntala, the material you covered awakened a whole new area of interest for me. I've become far more sensitive to women and have a whole new reading interest.

I will remember these months as a very fulfilling time in my life .... " So will I. For me that little bit of America has become, truly, "a very special place."

0 About the Author: Sakuntala Narasimhan, aformer assistant editor of

Femina, is a Bombay-based free-lance journalist. She writes a fortnightly column on women's issuesfor the Deccan Herald.

The]oyof Whether the benefits are therapeutic, aesthetic, or economic, gardening instills a sense of fulfillment.

"What is the purpose of life?" asks Voltaire at the end of Candide. His answer: "To tend one's garden." And that's exactly what 80 million Americans do every summer. From suburban lawns to city rooftops and terraces, from the rocky soil of the Maine coast to the adobe clay of the Southwest to the rich humus of California's Napa Valley, more than 78 percent of American households are planting, watering, mulching, pruning, fertilizing, and spraying their gardens.

Gardeners' interests vary as much as the landscape. Verne Nelson, a graphic designer, raises hundreds of flowers and vegetables, including 50 varieties of apples, on his 1,000-square-meter plot in Portland, Oregon; Adam Purple of New York City converted three tenement lots on the Lower East Side into an oriental design he dubbed the "Garden of Eden"; and employees of the Staley Company, a construction firm in Decatur, TIlinois, raised $45,000 worth of food in company gardens working in them during lunch hours and weekends one year.

According to a recent poll taken for the U.S. National Gardening Association (NGA), gardening has become the most popular American outdoor pastimemore popular than jogging, swimming, golf, or tennis. With eight million new gardening households expected by the end of the decade, that trend should This California garden mixes j!Olrers ll'ilh herbs and vegelables.

continue to bloom and prosper.

Why are so many Americans choosing to kneel and sweat in dirt when they could. spend free time relaxing beside a pool or on a golf course? NGA President Charles Scott says the phenomenal popularity of gardening is due in part to the maturing of the baby-boom generation. In 1985 alone, three million people between the ages of 30 and 49 started gardening. This generation, born in the years following World War II, came of age during the I960s, with that era's interest in ecology and the environment. Most of them are in their late thirties and forties now, and many have become homeowners.

"In many cases, the concern with the environment in the 1960s has been domesticated," says cultural historian Morris Dickstein. "It's turned from a political and social issue into a concern for one's immediate environment and living a healthier life."

Many Americans think of their yards as part of their homes, an outdoor room, according to Bruce Butterfield, research director of the NGA, and they are willing to invest as much time and resources in their gardens as they would in any other home improvements. In fact, in a recently released home landscape videotape, Texas landscape architect Howard Garrett instructs do-it-yourself landscapers how to design their gardens as carefully as they would their living rooms, by visualizing large shrubs as sofas and chairs; smaller, ornamental shrubs as lamps and coffee tables; and flower beds as table accessones.

"We live in a stressful world," says author and suburban garden expert Jeff Ball. "I can't think of a better way to ease that stress than spending a couple of hours each week puttering about on a little piece of earth." Keeping up in a rapidly advancing technological society often means striking a balance between demanding jobs and equally demanding family responsibilities. Time becomes so precious that there is little room for contemplation. In addition, many Americans pull up roots every few years to move to better jobs, and are isolated from friends and family. A backyard garden is a sanctuary, a place to put down roots

again and reconnect with nature.

Roger Ulrich of the University of Del aware in Newark has conducted studies of stress reduction. By measuring students' alpha waves--brain waves indicating deep relaxation-he has found them to be more serene near vegetation. In a study of apartment dwellers, Rachel Kaplan of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has also found that those who have access to gardens and parks have a more positive outlook about themselves, their neighbors, and their work. "Nature matters to people," she contends. "Trees, glistening water, chirping birds, and budding bushes and flowers-these are important ingredients for a full life. To have these available only rarely ... deprives people of tranquillity and spiritual sustenance."

That's why, in Lewis's view, so many new office buildings, apartment complexes, and hospitals are designed around plantfilled a tria.

doles out water at predetermined rates.

Another $30 will purchase a moisture meter that tells the timer to turn off the faucet when it rains. Then there are the "season extenders." Gardener's Supply Company in Burlington, Vermont, sells a polyethylene "blanket" to cover the entire garden as protection from cool spring winds and early autumn frosts; a soil heater that raises the temperature of the soil as much as seven degrees Celsius; and a miniature greenhouse that sits indoors by a window for starting seedlings.

The mail-order gardening business is booming, too, in the United States.

According to a 1985 NGA poll, the latest for such data, more than 35 million households had turned their gardens into miniature truck farms, and sold $15,000 million worth of produce. While some

Marketing to Home Gardeners Gardening has always been a popular pastime in America. Recently, however, it has grown from a pleasant diversion into a major industry. In one recent year, sales of gardening supplies totaled $17,500 million. The average gardener spends $251 a year on plants, supplies, and equipment.

The biggest spenders are baby-boomers, who account for more than 50 percent of gardening sales at an average rate of $293 per household.

Almost 7.5 million power mowers, tillers, and tractors-machines that were once used exclusively by farmers-were purchased

by American families and businesses in 1987, according to the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute, an association representing manufacturers of such equipment. Drip irrigation systems, for example, in which water drips slowly out of porous hoses buried in eight-centimeter trenches, were once used mainly by California farmers. But they have since become popular with gardeners in the East and South.

The rudiments-a soak hose, pipes, and connectors-average about $100 in the United States. For $200 more, an electronic timer hooks to the faucet, and

W

eeding and raking and digging and planting have not typically led to high-status careers. But

being a gardener in the United States is starting to sound better and better these days.

"It's fashionable,"

said Rosemary

Kern,

director of education at the New York Botanical Garden. "It is a way of making a statement, like nouvelle cuisine."

It is also a way ofleaving

the fast track for

something that may have offered solace as a hobby, and so horticulture schools throughout the country are seeing a steady increase in adults who are thinking of leaving their careers to dig in the dirt for a living.

Of course,

it is not all spadework.

range from greenhouse

Jobs

chores to designing

elaborate plantings or overseeing estates.

Horticulture training can also lead to work in floral design, conservation, educausing plants tion, and even psychotherapy, to soothe patients.

It is not embarrassing

nowadays

Wall Street for a career in gardening.

to leave Greg-

ory McKinney, 39, is a foreign exchange trader who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two young children. He risks millions of

gardeners are interested in saving money, most say better-tasting, better-quality fresh food is their purpose. Before growing season begins, homeowners often start planning their gardens by leafing through mail-order catalogs of plants and seeds. The catalogs grow thicker every year, and there are special catalogs for everything from herbs to cacti to tomatoes. Tomato Growers Supply Company in fort Myers, Florida, offers 126 varieties bf tomato seeds. Another catalog displays miniature vegetables that were once available only from commercial farms that supply gourmet restaurants.

In his book Earthly Pleasures, Roger B. Swain observes that seed catalogs are almost like candy stores: "There's 'Candystick' and 'Sweet Slice' and 'Sugar

Rock,' but these aren't types of candy, they are varieties of sweet corn, cucumber, and muskmelon ....And it's no easier to make a selection than it is at the candy counter."

The inexact science of gardening also breeds profits for publishers of gardening books. Each year a new crop of magazines and books floods the American market, spelling out the advantages of raised beds and intensive planting, the principles of organic gardening, the secret to successful canning, and recipes that bring the garden to the table. The topics are not novel, but the ranks of gardeners expand so much each year that there's always a market for new books and articles. Among the most popular of the recent publications is Jeff Ball's Sixty Minute Garden, so named because it only

requires an hour of work each weekideal for busy professionals and their families. Ball's system uses canopies of clear polyethylene film and trellises in raised beds, and he claims that cultivating a 20-square-meter area with the system will yield 135 to 180 kilograms of food a year.

The latest gardening equipment and techniques, however, cannot assure success. According to Robert Nuss, an extension specialist in horticulture at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, "The uncertainties of garden" ing are such that the average small family ...can't expect to outdo commercially grown products in quality. The real benefit you get from gardening is the

From the Fast Track to the Garden Path dollars in split-second decisions and makes so much money, he says, that he pays cash

fied people at all levels of the industry," says Terry Humfeld, the executive director of the

from high-stress medical jobs are showing an interest in horticulture. At Merritt College in

for his cars.

It's the pressure. ears," he said.

Professional

No degree is required to be a gardener; like a chef, an aspiring gardener can start at the

Oakland, California, nurses make up about ten percent of the horticulture classes.

But the business and financial community

minimum wage and learn on the job. Formal

seems to be the New York

training can range from a year or so of study to two- and three-year programs that include

area's largest source of prospective ers, instructors say.

McKinney

"I hear my pulse in my

is taking

New York Botanical

night classes at the Garden

and plans to

Plant Growers Association.

earn enough credits for a certificate in landscape design. He hopes eventually to buy a

academic

small landscaping will be happier.

physiology.

Henry J. Euler, who runs a 21-month horti-

In Cambridge,

company,

and is sure he

Massachusetts,

applica-

tions for a part-time program of landscape design run by Radcliffe College have been growing so steadily that "we've run out of space," said John Furlong, the program's coordinator.

"We

are

making

it

more

selective," he said.

At the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, interest in landscape architecture-which is to gardening what city planning is to bricklaying-is

also rising. The

class this year has 45 students, up from the usual 30. Applications for the course that will start this fall are twice as high as usual.

Trained gardeners are finding plenty of demand for their services.

"There is a tremendous

shortage of quali-

courses

in

botany

and

plant

culture program at the New York Botanical Garden, said he has seven jobs for every graduate. "The killer is what you get paid," he said. "Starting salaries are [very low]."

Susan Lathrop,.executive

garden-

Spar, who lives in

gave up a long-held

partnership in a market research company to take a job in a nursery in nearby Scarsdale, where she found the work physically tiring but satisfying.

"I didn't have to go to meetings with

of the

people that drove me up the wall," she said

American Association of Botanical Garaens and Arboreta, said that people who are

recently. "I didn't have the tension."

Spar started studying full time lit the New

switching careers for jobs in gardening often apply for internships that pay only $5 or $6 an hour. [The minimum wage in America is

York Botanical Garden, where she could wear jeans and not worry about the dirt under her fingernails.

$4.25.]

The money

"I was there yesterday, watering the plants, and I'm hearing them all drinking," she said. "It's a great feeling."

0

factor

director

Last August, Elizabeth Hastings-on-Hudson,

metropolitan

discouraged

many

would-be gardeners in the 1970s, during the first flush of the environmental movement.

But salaries are beginning cause of the labor shortage, Throughout the United

to increase beHumfeld said.

States refugees

About the Author: Trish Hall, a writer with The New York Times, is the author of The New Connecticut Yankees.

Top: Deck of a row house in Washington, D.C., is a green, peaceful refuge. Above: Fortnight lily and horsetail surround fountain pools in a San Francisco garden. Right: Brick stepping-stones accentuate a backyard garden in Charleston, South Carolina.

Educational Spadework

U

nder a program known as Life Lab, these elementary school students in the state of California are getting an education by growing their own vegetables. They do much more than just cultivate the soil, plant seeds, water plants, and harvest crops. They analyze the soil for nutrients, take daily measurements of temperature in a compost pile to understand the action of microorganisms, and study the environmental consequences of their actions, among many other things.

Teachers Gary Appel and Roberta Jaffe founded the program in 1979 at Green Acres Public School in Santa Cruz, California. Life Lab has since spread to more than 50 other schools in California and to schools in many other states.

"Science is too often taught as a dead subject," says Appel. "Taught out of a textbook it is the antithesis of what

science is and should be."

The program is flexible. The original curriculum called for one hour a week of class work and one hour of gardening.

However, a number of schools have also folded reading, art, and other subjects into visits to the garden, thus spending as much as half a day on work related to Life Lab. "The lessons really involve the children," San Francisco school principal

Shirlene Tong told The New York Times.

"Of course, it's much more meaningful than reading about it in a book. You can read about how a seed sprouts, but if you don't actually see it happen, it's not the same."

The National Science Teachers' Association, the California School Boards Association, and the National Science Foundation have all cited Life Lab as an exemplary instructional program.

0

1. California students proudly exhibit a harvest. 2.

Teacher leads a class in hands-on science. 3. A fourth-grade student rushes to fill a watering can. 4.

Boys prepare a plot for planting. 5. Girls cut apples donated to the school. 6. Boys turn apples into juice with old-fashioned press. 7. Girls check thermometer reading in a compost pile.

FOCUS Four teenagers of Indian origin have joined an exclusive band of American whiz kids of science. They are among the 40 finalists in the Westinghouse Electric Corporation's national Science Talent Search, the most prestigious science competition for U.S. high school students.

More than 1,500 students entered the competition this year.

The four Indian Americans are Rageshree Ramachandran of Fair Oaks, California; Mehul Vipul Mankad of Mobile, Alabama; Nupur Ghoshal of Ames, Iowa; and Venkataramana Kuntimaddi Sadananda of Springfield, Virginia. Ramachandran placed the highest in this group, winning tenth place in the competition and a scholarship of$1 0,000.The other three received $1,000 each.

What distinguishes these budding scientists is their mastery of esoteric scientific subjects. For her Westinghouse project, Ramachandran, for example, performed complex computer-intensive research on the adequacy of a proposed numerical model of the oceanic and atmospheric phenomenon known as the EI Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). ENSO is the Earth's most significant interannual climate variation, characterized by abnormal surface warmth, wind shifts, torrential coastal rains, and fish scarcity. Ramachandran says she chose this project because of its practical applications and its importance in research. And Sadananda developed a computer simulation of the onset of heart attacks owing to irregular interactions of stimuli. "It gives a better understanding of what happens when the heart goes into arrhythmia," she said.

Winners of the top three slots were Ashley Reiter of Charlotte, North Carolina, who received a $40,000 scholarship for her project on fractal geometry; Denis Lazarev of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, who won $30,000 for his work on molecular genetics; and William Ching of New York City, who got $20,000 for his neurobiological research on the optic nerve.

Going by the record, the Westinghouse wizards are clearly achievers.

Since the program began in 1942, most of the Science Talent Search alumni have gone on to earn a PhD or an MD, five have won the Nobel Prize, two the Fields Medal (the math equivalent of the Nobel), and eight the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for research in the physical and life sciences.

President George Bush addressed this year's finalists, 17 girls and 23 boys, at a banquet in Washington, D.C., in which awards totaling $205,000 were handed out to them.

Last month in New Delhi American and Indian industrialists met under the aegis of the Indo-U.S. Joint Business Council (JBC) to discuss ways and means to expand business ties between the two countries. Paul Griesse, vice chairman of the JBC's U.S. section, headed the eight-member American delegation. The 11-

member Indian team was led by Hari Shankar Singhania, chairman of the Indian section of JBC, and included Raunaq Singh, cochairman of the Indian section.

Officials of the Indian government and the American Embassy also attended.

The meeting noted with concern the declining trend in IndoU.S. trade and investment over the past year. India's exports to

Early last year the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized an exhibition, "Romance of the Taj Mahal," in Los Angeles, California, as its tribute to the Indian monument that has for centuries fascinated the world.

The exhibition has since been shown in many other U.S. cities.

When the show opened at the Asia Society in New York City in February this year, Indian sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan performed.

Music critic John Rockwell of The New York Times wrote: "Not to mince words, Amjad Ali Khan ...is the most charismatic performer of north Indian ragas to appear since the glory days of

the United States during January-October 1990 went down by 3.1 percent over the corresponding period in 1989. Similarly, American investment in India declined appreciably in 1990. The two sides stressed the need to step up Indo-U.S. trade and investment.

Griesse underscored the need for open markets and liberalizing measures in the Indian economy

Ravi Shankar in the 1960s....Mr. Khan can be brilliantly virtuosic, especially since he uses the edges of his fingernails, rather than the fleshy tips of his fingers, to lend a sitarlike brightness to his playing. But his most compelling moments came in hushed intimacies, amplified but not overamplified, in which his playing sometimes almost disappeared into elusive silence."

Accompanying the ustad on the tabla was Sukhwinder Singh Namdhari who, noted Rockwell, "is an exhilarating percussion virtuoso in his own right." On the tanpura were Amjad Ali K~an's young sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash.

to create a 'better climate for American investment. He said, "It is vital that we confront and remove the unnecessary impediments ....The world is changing quickly around us, and Indo-U.S. commercial relations must change with it or be left behind."

The American delegation also had similar discussions with businesspeople in Calcutta, Bangalore, and Bombay.

"-"

WIHflWlla.~-"

General

Editor:

S.P.Agrawal

TRANSNATIONAL LIBRARY RELATIONS

Last month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded Rs. 8.29 million in six grants to support joint Indo-U.S. agricultural research projects at five Indian institutions.

The Orissa University of Agriculture and Technology in Bhubaneswar has received two grants totaling Rs. 3.27 million for research on rock phosphates and nitrogen use efficiency of plants.

The rock phosphates project aims at providing recommendations for processing natural minerai deposits into usable fertilizers. The nitrogen project will try to determine why plants utilize only a very small portion of nitrogen in fertilizers, and how the rest disappears from the soil-plant system. Better understanding of this phenomenon, it is hoped, will result in new methodologies under which plants can utilize nitrogenous fertilizers far more efficiently.

The Central Soil Salinity Research Institute in Karnal, Haryana, is the recipient of Rs. 142 million for a three-year project to study how poor quality water can be successfully used in irrigation projects. The study will also suggest potential solutions to many complex problems related to contamination of surface

and groundwater, downstream irrigation, and environmental protection.

The Regional Station of the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh, has been awarded Rs. 1.24 million for a five-year project to collect, evaluate, and preserve temperate fruit and nut species in India. It will be a major step toward ensuring the preservation of this important food source against threats posed by insects and disease.

The Panjab University's department of zoology has received Rs 1.23 million in grants for a study to determine the role of trace mineral nutrients in fish reproduction with a view to developing systems that might safeguard the reproduction and survivability of freshwater fish.

The sixth grant-Rs. 1.13 million-has gone to the Konganadu Arts and Science College in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, for research on the characteristics of the PTTH growth hormone in the tobacco cutworm, a major crop pest in India and in a number of other countries Manipulation of this growth hormone could be an environmentally safe and effective method to control the pest.

The JBC was set up in 1975 by the U.S. and Indian governments to enable business decision-makers of the two nations to maintain a continuing dialogue with a view to strengthening bilateral economic relations. The coullcil, through its working group committees, formulates policy recommendations on specific commercial and trade issues to present to their respective governments.

Although many books have been written on various facets of Indo-U.S. relations, there hasn't been any significant work on the bilateral interaction in the field of library science until recently when M.B. Konnur published Transnational

Library

Indo-American

Relations.'

The

Experience.

A well-researched work, the book gives a brief history of libraries in America and India, and critically examines the growth of cooperative links between libraries in our two countries.

Among the first American librarians to visit India were w.A. Borden and A.D. Dickinson. Borden came in 1910 on the invitation of the Maharaja of Baroda to become director of the state's library department, and Dickinson came in 1915 when he was appointed librarian of the Panjab University in Lahore.

The book's major thrust is on bilateral library linkages since India's independence in 1947.

It gives a detailed account of the role played by the U.S. government through its various programs, such as the India Wheat Loan Educational Exchange Program, and private American organizations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the Asia Foundation in assisting Indian libraries.

Konnur also dwells on the contributions made by USIS libraries in India and the American Studies Research Centre in Hyderabad in advancing the cause of Indian scholars and students doing research in American subjects. The American Institute of Indian Studies in New Delhi and Varanasi, on the other hand, has helped American scholars of Indian studies.

Another important element of this cooperation has been the U.S Library of Congress's PL-480 Acquisition Program, under which the library buys Indian books for American libraries each year. The program, Konnursays, has helped generate a lot of interest in Indian studies in the United States.

An interesting aside in the book is a chapter on the contributions of Americans of Indian origin to U.S. library science Perhaps the greatest of them is S.R Ranganathan, a pioneer in the modern library science field. In its tribute to Ranganathan on his 71st birthday in 1965, the American Library Association said: " ...all of us are your students ...we are proud to be in your debt."

-K. Prem

From right to lelt: Paul Griesse, Hari Shankar Singhania Raunaq

and Singh.

A Conversation With Sissela Why do people-and governments-lie?

Are our moral standards going down?

Can violence give way to peace?

Journalist and author Bill Moyers discusses these and other questions with teacher-philosQpliel' Bok, who has wrilten several books, including Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life; Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation; and A Strategy for Peace.

QUESTION: Your writings explore the psychology of lying, the consequences of deception, and the perils ofkeeping secrets.

Why do these subjects interest you?

ANSWER: The subject of lying connects

for me with all of communication and with the amazing fact that we human .beings quite often do communicate with one another rather well. But lying is a way of gaining power over other people through manipulating them in various ways. This is something that children learn. They also learn to keep secrets.

Sometimes secrets are deceptive, and sometimes they are not. If we are to mature, we have to unlearn any enjoyment of that power.

From Bill Moyers: A Wor/do/ldeas by Bill Moyers. Copyright Š 1990

by Public Affairs Television, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday

Dell Publishing

Group, Inc.

Any enjoyment of deception and the power that deception allows you to have over someone else? Why do you have to unlearn that?

an amateur liar. But you're right. It's a question of having to unlearn that it was okay to deceive, okay to dissemble, to evade.

You have to know that the power is there, and then you have to see if you can possibly live without it. That doesn't mean you never get into a situation where lying might be necessary, but on the whole you try to lead your life so that you can communicate with other people without trying to manipulate them.

Yes, especially because lying can happen so easily. Sometimes people just slip into it without even stopping to think .

That's another thing I wanted to do with both Lying and Secrets: To see if people who read the books might say, "All right, I am going to stop to think: Why am I doing this now? Do I really need to do this now? Are there other ways, perhaps, of communicating with people, of achieving my goals without going this way?"

When I was White House press secretary [under President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965-66], I thought often of the line, "I am not a professional liar, and I'm surprised at the extent to which in my infirmity I'm an amateur one." I kept being surprised at the extent to which I could be

Do you find people actually through that process of t~inking?

going

Yes, I do, quite a lot. Sometimes, for instance, people go through that process

Bok who have had problems with addiction, where lying and secrecy,are very much part of keeping up a mask. And we face these questions when we are involved in some professional undertaking, or in government, or in sales, or sometimes as parents, or with friends. People tell me, "You know, I am trying to change, and I am realizing that in fact it's more possible than I thought." And then some of them say, "I also find that now I respect myself a little more because I know that other people can trust me, which I was pretty sure they couldn't do before."

worthy. But when somebody comes to public light who is not, that sets an example. Somebody said that examples of this kind are very contagious-and I think that's true.

Someone said to me recently that he thought all of American life was built upon deception. Given the pervasive influence of advertising, which is usually deceiving; given what's happened to political rhetoric; given the ambitions of each interest group to advance its interests, and each individual to advance his or her interests at the expense of someone else, deception has now become the household furniture of American life. Do you think that's a fair assessment?

First of all, that's something people have said since the beginning of time, and it seems to happen particularly when they reach middle age. All of a sudden they begin to think that when they were children everything was much better, or maybe they look back 100 or 200 years and say', "When our country was young, everything was so I1luchbetter." But then when you ask them, "When was this golden age? Was it, for instance, in America during our period of slavery? Was that so great? Was it so wonderful for women?

Who, exactly, was benefiting from thes~ high moral standards?"-then they become more hesitant. I don't think we can show that as a general rule, .everything is slipping. Certainly, there are problems that are getting worse-for instance, drug addiction ....

No, I don't think so. If that were true, then I"don't think our society could function at all, and, after all, it does function reasonably well much of the time. I don't think that human relationships could function if everything were deceptive.

Very often, in fact, advertising is not deceptive. You know, there is much factual, informative advertising. We learn to look at certain activities like advertising in a very different way and to listen to what it says in a very different way, so that we develop certain kinds of protections.

In politics and business there are quite a few honorable, upright individuals around. The sad thing is that whenever somebody comes into the news who has done a lot of deceiving, then it casts suspicion on all the others. You hear that quite a lot from the people who tell you why they're not going to vote. They simply have no confidence anymore in public officials. That is terribly wrongheaded, because most public officials are trust-

There is a general lament in the United States that we're slipping, that our ethics are going downhill, that this generation isn't as good as the previous generation, that moral standards are deteriorating.

You mention this in your book when you quote somebody else saying that civilization is on the decline. What's your own appraisal?

But alcoholism was rampant in colonial days.

Yes, so that I'm not sure we can say that things are getting so much worse. On the other hand, I would say that we face more difficult problems than any society ever has, if we take society to mean our world at the present time. We are threatened with extinction, either from nuclear weapons or from environmental problems. Nobody else has ever been threatened in that way. Past generations failed to see these problems coming up. We somehow have to do better. So it's not a question of whether we're getting so much worse. I think we could cope if we

tried; but the question is whether we're going to try.

You suggested in Lying that there was a crisis of trust based upon a proliferation of lies-personal lies, professional lies, political lies. You said then that the social environment is every bit as precarious and threatened as the natural environment. Ten years have passed since you wrote this.

What's your assessment today?

The social environment is just as important as the natural environment because that's the environment in which we make all the decisions we want to make, in which we communicate, and in which our families and societies exist. It requires a certain amount of trust and, I would say, also cautious distrust. We obviously have to be careful with respect to potential enemies, for instance.

Skepticism virtue?

is a form

of democratic

Yes, I think skepticism is very important. On the other hand, if skepticism veers off into total distrust so that one decides to have nothing to do with voting or with one's government, then that's very destructive.

Can a republic die of too many lies?

I think a republic definitely couldespecially if the lies are also covered up by various methods of secrecy. If you combine lying and secrecy, and if you also bring in violence so that secrecy covers up for schemes of lying and violence, then I think a republic can die. I don't think it's. possible for citizens to have very much of an effect if they literally don't know what's going on.

Excessive secrecy denies people the right to an informed vote. How do we know how to cast our vote if we don't really know what our government has been doing?

That's right. All one has to do is to look at some very secretive governmentstotalitarian governments and others. Nobody knows what's a lie and what's the truth. We certainly don't want to go in

that direction. On the other hand, sometimes people in government say, "Well, those totalitarian governments have it rather well, you know. They can really control information. We have to struggle with the media and everything else."

Well, every President at heart is given to the democratic impulse and understands the strengths of America. But he is also trying to make things happen, to get policy enacted, to accomplish his goals, and he is sometimes frustrated to the point of paranoia about the opposition.

There is to some extent a desire on the part of every government to have greater control over information. Many members of government feel that with secrecy, they can get more things done.

If only they didn't have to worry about what was lawful, if only they didn't have to worry about elected representatives of the pe?ple, they could get a lot more done. So there's always that. But in the United States there have also always been limits to secrecy imposed from the outside. Danger would definitely come if, for instance, the government succeeded in permanently cutting back on the Freedom ofInformation Act. Now private citizens [in America} can sue the government, if necessary, to get information from within the government out of the hands of the bureaucracy.

The Freedom of Information Act provided that all information should be free with certain exceptions, such as national security and personnel documents. The burden of proof is then on the government to show why something should remain secret.. ..

Rereading your book on secrets, I was struck once again by your point that partisanship causes people to condone abuses for their particular ideal that they would never condone in their adversary. It's that parochial loyalty that can corrupt one's own judgment and standards.

When it goes too far, it does that

corrupting. Of course, any community needs the cohesiveness of some loyalty.

But when the partisanship goes so far as to say that in order to preserve loyalty within our small group, we can do anything to those other people-we can send terrorists into their country, we can spew forth disinformation, we can do anything-then it has become pathological.

And then people don't, once again, stop to ask questions. They have' simply blinded themselves to the kind of harm they're doing to the outside.

Your new book, A Strategy for Peace, talks about "our present predicament."

How do you define our present predicament?

may finally be coming true. That's a hope I share-but history argues otherwise. Previous generations didn't take principled, collective action in time to stave off the threats they faced in their own day. What makes you think we can do it better or differently?

It's true that a number of societies have collapsed because they didn't take issues of survival seriously enough. On the other hand, they have never been in the predicament that we are in now. We're all in it together. That may force us, for the first time, to take the common interest into consideration.

I'm not at all wanting to say everything is rosy. I think, on the contrary, that it's a very serious situation-but there are reasons for hope. Our century has been unbelievably violent and brutal and filled with tyranny, but it has also brought forth countervailing powers. We've had popular movements seeking change nonviolently and, in fact, succeeding more and more often ....

Another development is that we have research that people didn't have in past generations about how to solve conflicts nonviolently. We have better history. We know much more about how wars start and how they can get out of hand.

The predicament we're in now, and that we have been in for some time, is the threat of extinction from nuclear weapons, and the threat of extinction from environmental sources. It has simply never been the case before in human history that all ofli fe-no t just human life but really all of life----couldbe wiped out.

That has made an en'ormous change for us. At the same time, this is also an extraordinary opportunity. People are to some extent making greater efforts. Governments are trying harder. We have had a treaty on intermediate-range nuclear forces ....The fact is that we're bringing I want to believe you, but when I look at certain wars to an end, and there seems to our centuryJrom Stalin's genocide against be greater hope for the moment than his own people to Hitler's genocide against there has been for quite a long time. It millions, to ... what's happening [now in difcomes, in part, from the awareness of this ferent parts of the world}, I say that hope is predicament. afragile bark on which to sail into the 21st century.

You take seriously all the present talk about governments slowing the momentum of the arms race?

Yes, I do. I think that there is understanding on the part of governments that we simply can't continue to exist the way we are. That is too dangerous. Even if a nuclear exchange were to begin by accident or miscalculation, that's something we can't risk.

You say in A Strategy for Peace that our problems are so severe that unless we can marshal a principled, collective response, all the worst predictions of social collapse

Yes, and I certainly don't think we should sail on hope alone. There's only so much individuals can do. But I think they do need to have some hope. It's much too early to give up hope.

Do we need predicament?

a new

ethic for

this

I don't think we need a new ethic at all. Some people insist that nothing will change until our consciousness changes, or we develop some new way of thinking, or we become much more altruistic and charitable. But I think, in a way, it's a little too late to hope for that. I'm

not at all sure that the human race can change in that way, or that, if there were some cataclysmic change of consciousness, it would be for the better. It could very easily be for the worse, as happened in Nazi Germany and elsewhere. So we don't need a new ethic at all. But we do need to concentrate more than we have before on the moral principles and values that we have in common with people of other religions and other cultures. The two most important factors are: Nonviolence, to the extent possible, and truthfulness, or the avoidance of lying.

If violence or deceit gets too powerful in any society, the society becomes oppressive and may break down. Wherever you look-at Buddhist literature, or the Bible, or Hindu scriptures-avoiding violence and deceit are stressed. Every community that has any kind of law, for instance, struggles against violence and fraud.

True. But there's so much evidence of Muslim against Jew, Christian against Christian-

The trouble is that those principles have never been held very high when it's come to outsiders. What we need to do now is to take those same principles and expand the coverage so that

it becomes just as awful for us to take an innocent life in some other country as it is in our own. That will take a little rethinking on the part of a lot of people. But it's not a transformation of the human spirit.

Now a third principle is that of the constraint on betrayal, or breaches of law, or breaches of promise. Every single culture has hadto develop some notion of promise-keeping or of covenant, and the notion that breaches constitute betrayal.

Those are three very, very ancient principles.

In addition to avoiding violence and deceit and betrayal, there is a fourth principle that's very much newer, and that is a constraint on excessive secrecy. If we don't constrain secrecy, then all the other things can go on, and we don't even know they're going on. There can be violence within communities or on the part of governments, there can be deception, there can be betrayal, and violations ofiaw, and so long as secrecy covers up all of that, then there is not much that we can do about it. The constraint on excessive secrecy is really an 18th-century phenomenon. You don't see much criticism of secrecy in the Bible or in Buddhist texts.

The greater the stress on constraining secrecy, the greater the stress on publicity or openness.

Do you think that we could begin to shape a minimum moral framework in which the world could cooperate for survival?

Yes, a number of governments are trying to do this. And, of course, international law is based to some extent on those four principles.

You point out in your book that 17 million people have died in violent acts and wars around the globe since the end of World War II. The tendency seems to be in the opposite direction from the collaboration and cooperation you're calling for.

...The more governments undergo democratic and peaceful change, and the more willing they become to abide by international law and to deal nonviolently with other nations, the fewer there will be of the others. And then, perhaps, the world can focus on the pockets that still remain of war and oppression.

Bring this down to the level of one person, one citizen. So many people in Americafeel helpless to effect any change.

They'll say, "How can I make a difference?

What can I do? She's talking about international organizations and governments. beyond my reach. What can I do to

Can Movies Teach History?

The Sounds of Cajun In the I960s when Americans began searching anew for their roots and yearning for unspoiled folkways, they discovered the music and culture of the Cajuns of south Louisiana. The current popularity of Cajun music has brought stardom for some of its shy, reclusive musicians.

The Natural Way

Today more and more people are

Increasing pollution and the decreasing effectiveness of agrichemicals have spurred a renewed American interest in natural farming practices. Synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides are giving way to cow manure, cover crops (which can be plowed into the soil as green manure), and crop rotation.

~t)ยง~:iEI~;i~fs (1' Clarke School for the Deaf The Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, served as an inspiration for Leelavathy Patrick, who founded the Clarke School for the Deaf in Madras in 1970, which today has more than 500 students.

make a difference?"

Wel1, look at some of the movements of social change that have grown during our century as never before: They started in very piecemeal ways. People began doing something in one community and then expanded. Gandhi started that way. Martin Luther King started that way. And although we often hear that there are no heroes, there are lots of heroes. For instance, in many vil1ages in India individuals and groups are trying to make peace between Sikhs and Hindus.

In the Middle East and in South Africa many people are struggling heroical1y in their own communities-and they're having an effect. Now, you may say, "Maybe they're not going to win out in the end"-but maybe they are. It's worth making the effort.

I cherish the notion in the conclusion of your book about starting personal and piecemeal, about carving out a space in one's own life where one begins to practice personally what one advocates politically and publicly.

Yes. Let's say that you want to carve out in your own life what Gandhi some-

~]PROGRAM

[

VO/Cf~::"f'ICA

SUNDAY THROUGH

times called a zone of peace. Just say, "In my family and at work and wherever I have human contacts, I am simply not going to engage in the manipulation of people. I'm not going to be coercive or violent with respect to others." Already that wil1make a difference. That wil1have an effect on other people. Then one can say, "In our community we're simply not going to deal with one another this way," or "At our workplace, in our factory, or in our government office, there is going to be another way of operating." It seems that when people begin to do that, it does have an effect. This is a form of maturing, of saying, "All right, I know that I can get my way by manipulating people, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to see if I can work another way."

So in this personal zone, I don't act violently against my family. I keep my promises, my vows, my oaths. I don't deceive. I prac(ice in that small circle what I hope my neighbor and my government would practice.

Yes, but then I don't give up on the government at all. If I'm engaged in this practice, I must make every effort to see to it that the government doesn't slip into further practices of secrecy, that there are protests when misinformation takes

place, and that there is concern for innocent civilians who are being killed. That means that the private individual, while working within that personal zone, must also reach outward toward the professions and the government.

You think that it's because we have these new threats of annihilation from nuclear war or environmental catastrophe that people might take out the old moral armor that has been growing rusty in disuse?

Yes. These threats concentrate the mind wonderfully, as the saying goes. We have to rely on principles in larger societies and between nations that we know are indispensable within small communities if anything is going to get done.

Now that may not work out. We may fail, as many societies have in the past. But we have certain advantages. Just as we have new fuels and new technologies in combating environmental deterioration, so we also have new ways of arbitrating disputes and new ways of achieving agreement. We have information that was lacking in the past about how disputes get out of hand, and how wars happen. So we are in a somewhat better position to respond to the threats you mention. That doesn't mean that we shall succeed. But it certainly is not the time to give up.

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A Classic

Debate In the past few years a debate has been raging in American universities over the direction of higher education in the United States. The author, a professor of history, assesses the controversy and traces its roots to arguments that arose decades ago with the publication of the Great Books of the Western World.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind must surely be the most unexpected happening of American intellectuallife in recent years. It is an erudite, closely argued book of philosophy and cultural criticism (see SPAN June 1988).

That it should sit atop The New York Times best-seller list for II weeks and produce a hardcover sale of a half-million copies defies book publishing's common sense.

U.S. society's admirable habit of rewarding its severest critics does not explain the Bloom phenomenon completely. By raising fundamental questions about the very basis of modern education, Bloom started a war of ideas within the American intellectual community. After an initially warm reception by most reviewers and continued endorsement by conservative thinkers, Bloom's work came under heavy fire. "A most enticing, a most subtle, a most learned, a most dangerous tract," Benjamin Barber wrote in Harper's, "one of the most profoundly antidemocratic books ever written for a popular audience."

The usual tempest-in-a-teapot nature of academic fights has taken on larger dimensions with the battle passing over into the political arena. On the left, the Reverend Jesse Jackson joineQ demonstrators at Stanford University in Copyright

Š

1989 American

Heritage,

Inc.

All rights reserved.

Reprinted

by permission

from American

Heritage,

February

1989.

California protesting the traditional required Western Culture course. They demanded and got a broadening of the reading list to include works of "women, minorities, and persons of color." Calling this event another example of the "closing of the American mind"-because it appears to replace a concern for classic standards and values with a narrower focus on current problems-the former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett mounted the ramparts on the right alongside Bloom, warning of a "nation at risk" because of mediocre schools and exhorting colleges to "reclaim a legacy" of humanistic learning.

We are, in short, witnessing another round in the war between the ancients and moderns first described by Jonathan Swift in his mock-heroic satire of 1697, "The Battle of the Books." In the struggle set in the royal library, the modern volumes envied the ancient volumes' privileged position on Mount Parnassus. The ancients' refusal to come down provoked the moderns to attack. But where the classic authors commanded the heights in

Swift's day, in ours the battle lines have reversed. Science and the apparently limitless march of knowledge overshadow older axioms and make uncertain the very notion of absolute, "classic" truth. The Closing of the American Mind, then, represents something of a rearguard action on behalf of traditional authorities.

But Bloom is not the first to lead an American counterattack against modernist philosophy. His diagnosis of America's ills (educational shallowness) and his prescriptions for its cure (diligent study of Plato and other philosophers of antiquity) continue a line of argument developed by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler more than half a century ago.

By the same token, the sparks Bloom's book struck rekindle memories of the reception given their Great Books seminars in the 1930s and the publication of the Great Books of the Western World in 1952.

The story of the Great Books-the most ambitious championing of the classics in American history-has several facets. It is an account of America's national genius for marketing culture. It is another example of its penchant for selfdevelopment. But, above all, it is about the search for a proper democratic education and raises the question: "Have we of the 20th century anything to learn from

CLOSING

AMERICAN MIND

great literary works of the past?"

Through the 19th century that was a question cultured people would hardly have considered asking. The speeches and letters of public figures of that century reveal an impressive familiarity with the classics of Western civilization. These were considered to be the repository of wisdom and culture, and an educated person-by definition-knew them well.

But as the old-time classical curriculum of the colleges gave way to the more utilitarian-minded elective system of the new universities, the voices of Plato; Tacitus, Euclid, and even Shakespeare began to wane. Undergraduates sought "useful" learning that prepared one for "real life."

By the 1920s the fragmented curriculum prevailed at many U.S. colleges and universities. The Great Books movement began as a counterrevolution to these changes in higher education.

The modern Great Books curriculum was born at Columbia University in New York in 1919 when a professor of English named John Erskine first offered his General Honors course. Its format was simple. Once every week the class would meet and discuss a single classic. Erskine had been dismayed by his students' lack of acquaintance with the great texts of Western culture and their lack of any common intellectual grounding. The deficiency not only resulted from the nlw style of higher learning but also reflected a Columbia student body more heterogeneous and less patrician than before. The Great Books, Erskine and his colleagues believed, would be a means of sharing the mantle of culture with the brightest of the immigrant sons.

But Erskine's General Honors course remained a little-known preserve of humanistic culture at Columbia until it discovered two champions with an eye for public relations-Hutchins and Adler.

In 1929, at age 30, Robert Maynard Hutchins gave up the deanship of Yale Law School to become president of the University of Chicago. His youthfulness in itself caught the public's eye, but when he attacked the prevailing form of higher education and set out to establish Chicago as a model of collegiate learning,

educational hell broke loose. From the early 1930s until his retirement from the presidency in 1951, Hutchins kept the university at the forefront of public consciousness.

"It is not a very good university," he was fond of saying, "it is simply the best there is." With its leader twice on the cover of Time magazine, the University of Chicago became identified with its president in a way no other American university has since Charles W. Eliot's tenure at Harvard in the late 19th century.

Hutchins accomplished this through a combination of personal magnetism, gritty determination to redirect the inertial forces of the universi ty, and a circle of accomplices who shared his vision. For the Chicago president intended to reunify learning along the lines of the medieval universities. Inspired by Aristotle and Aquinas, Hutchins envisioned a higher education based on an updated version of the ancient trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy). The idea that the modern university should surrender its devotion to research and the scientific method in the pursuit of timeless, unified truth brought outraged charges of medievalism and even fascism from academic critics.

Faculty opposition prevented Chicago from becoming a 13th-century University of Paris. But it did not stop Hutchins and Adler (who was a product of the earlier Columbia experiment in Great Books) from inaugurating in 1930 a reading course that was the inspiration for the later, much expanded Great Books reading program and the eventual publication and marketing of a series of volumes called the Great Books of the Western World. The Chicago Great Books classall the more novel for having the president teaching freshmen-attracted national attention and a procession of distinguished visitors.

The Chicago faculty wondered how students, many just freshmen, could possibly read a classic a week. The eminent classicist Paul Shorey put this question to Hutchins, recalling that "when I was a senior at Harvard, it took us a whole year

to study Dante's Divine Comedy." "The difference," Hutchins shot back, "is that our students are bright."

Given faculty suspicion, the Great Books curriculum at Chicago always faced an uncertain future. But Hutchins and Adler's vision, transplanted to St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, became the basis for the most thoroughgoing Great Books approach to education in America. The third oldest college in the United States, St. John's was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy in 1937 when Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan-refugees from the Chicago wars-agreed to attempt its revival if they could have a free hand. They instituted a completely prescribed four-year curriculum based on discussion of the Western classics by small groups. All tutors were to be sufficiently versed in the St. John's reading list of more than a 100 b60ks so that they could lead discussions of them all. The result, proclaimed an admiring Life magazine, was a student body holding a "broad grasp of the history of ideas that would put to shame the students of larger colleges."

Despite his successes, Hutchins believed that the future of the Great Books movement lay in adult education. The very definition of a "Great Book," after all, was one that repaid a lifetime of study, and the greater experience that adults brought to their reading would enrich understanding.

The university's active adult extension division began carrying the benefits of Great Books culture to the public in 1939 by sponsoring off-campus discussion groups. The most influential of these was composed of Chicago's business elite.

This so-called Fat Man's class resulted from the suggestion to Hutchins by Wilbur Munnecke, university vice president

and a former Marshall Field executive, that businessmen desperately needed the broad understanding and right purposes that the Great Books could provide.

The years after World War II witnessed a great expansion of Great Books discu~sion groups. The 167 participants in 1943had multiplied to some 50,000 in 300 cities by 1948. Much of this growth resulted from establishment of the Great Books Foundation in 1947. Its primary mission was to train discussion leaders and otherwise promote the reading of great books.

Propelled by energetic leadership and organizational support, the Great Books became something of a fad. In the autumn of 1CJ48 Chicago's mayor declared a "Great Books Week." Adler's endless trips around the country as a kind of "Socratic traveling salesman" carried the Great Books idea to the farthest reaches of America.

Why the renewed curiosity about the classics? Clearly more was involved than salesmanship by Adler or Hutchins. The challenge of a recently defeated fascism and a still-threatening communism involved rethinking the foundation of America's democratic faith. Scientific materialism, the new coin of academia, was tainted by its association with totalitarian horrors and now seemed an inadequate base for democracy. Hutchins had been preaching since the early 1930s that an "education for democracy" must rest on the immutable tenets laid forth by the great works of our Western tradition.

That message won a wide hearing in a nation hungry for guidance.

Publication of the Great Books of the Western World followed a parallel yet independent path from the Great Books Foundation. William Benton, founder of the Benton and Bowles advertising agency, later an associate of Hutchins at the University of Chicago and a U.S. senator, complained of the difficulty of obtaining the classics. A swashbuckling, enterprising businessman, he had

engineered an unusual joint publishing venture with the university and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Benton now suggested to Hutchins that Britannica produce a quality set of the Great Books to be marketed much like the encyclopaedia. Hutchins endorsed the project only on the condition that a way be devised to ensure that the books would be taken off the shelf and read. In attempting to answer Hutchins's challenge, Adler soon found himself embarked on one of the largest ventures in American book publishing.

To say that any individual is qualified to become the authoritative guide to Western thought would seem presumptuous. Yet Adler came closer than anyone else to filling that role, with the Great Books as the testament to his success.

Though he followed the usual academic path of a PhD followed by a university appointment (at Chicago), Adler remained always an outsider to academia.

Compulsive, combative, intensely intellectual, he was temperamentally incapable of compromise on educational issues.

Selecting the books to be included in the Great Books was assigned to an advisory board, aided by Adler and Hutchins. Authors were divided up rather like it football team-into first and second strings. "We had no differences of opinion about which Greeks to include and only a few about Roman, Hellenistic, and medieval writers," Adler recalled. "Our disagreements became more numerous as well as more acerbic when we considered modern authors from the 17th century on." The criteria of selection were not simply originality, literary merit, and historical significance but also the importance of the works in speaking to the great ideas that have persisted in Western thought. The editors also determined that because they lacked the perspective to judge the significance of contemporary thinkers, the set would end with William James and ~igmund Freud.

But even more challenging than deciding what to include and what to leave out was finding a means to make the set something other than a dust catcher on

the shelf. Adler tried to solve this problem with an index. Not an ordinary index, but an index of staggering proportion and intent. This "Syntopicon" (a term he coined) would be a guide to the major ideas of Western thought. It would allow the reader who wished to read in the set rather than tackle the whole works to do so by topics, exploring, say, the idea of fate as commented upon by Dante, Goethe, and Marx.

Adler's Syntopicon sprang from the central philosophical belief that there has been through the millennia of Western culture an ongoing discussion of the primary issues that face all humanity. This "Great Conversation," the title of Hutchins's introductory volume to the Great Books, "began in the dawn of history and ...continues to the present day."

But producing this "Baedeker to 30 centuries of Western thought," as Time called it, proved to be a task offar greater magnitude than Adler expected. He won approval from Benton and the Britannica officers in 1943 for a $60,000 budget over a two-year period.

Ultimately, the project consumed $2 million and took eight years. Deciding on the essential ideas of Western thought took two years in itself. These were finally reduced to 102, with further subheadings for all of them. At that point the staff of more than 30, consisting largely of University of Chicago and St. John's students, pored through 443 works, compiling references to each idea. Before personal computers this meant thousands of index cards laboriously handwritten and then typed by a large secretarial pool.

In 1952the Great Books of the Western World, with its 32,000 pages and more than 25 million words, came off the press.

Their long-awaited appearance stirred much comment. Most reviewers were sympathetic to the goal of adult liberal education and to the effort involved in producing the set.

While Great Books supporters-the ancients-insisted on the classics' continuing vitality in providing the answers to contemporary American dilemmas, the moderns just as firmly denied this. Many of philosopher John Dewey's followers

saw the Great Books as simply the culminating product of the wrong-headed careers of Hutchins and Adler. The search for eternal truths embedded in a set of great books offended America's strong pragmatist tradition, which emphasized progressive, changing truth. The philosopher Richard Rorty's recent critique of Bloom continues the pragmatists' dispute with Hutchins: "Deweyans cannot see why knowledge should be thought of as a unity (rather than, say, as a bag of tools). The university as flea market. ..is fine with us."

Another line of attack was aimed at a troubling corruption of high culture believed implicit in the Great Books.

Dwight Macdonald scored some damaging hits against the project in a New Yorker article, "The Book-of-the-Millennium Club." Besides questioning the assumption that the average reader can appreciate Aquinas's disquisition on "Whether an Inferior Angel Speaks to a Superior Angel?" or other passages of esoterica without some introductory notes, Macdonald went on to indict what he saw as the raison d'etre of the set: The Syntopicon. Adler's obsession with classifying the great ideas and seeing them as part of a seamless transmillennial conversation tended to universalize the diverse phenomena of life. To believe, as Adler apparently did, that ideas, like words in a dictionary, can be reduced to a row of "definite, concrete, distinguishable entities" is mistaken. "An idea," Macdonald countered, "is a misty, vague object that takes on protean shapes, never the same for any two people."

For Bloom the early promise of the Great Books program was not fulfilled. It was thwarted by what he sees as the

philosophic poverty of universities today.

His accusations have aroused even more vitriolic comment than Hutchins or Adler even knew. Perhaps part of the antagonism stems from the provocative tone Bloom delights in employing. What was once said of Hutchins applies equally well to him: "His way of saying things is so annoying that good men cannot keep their minds on what he is saying."

But some did listen carefully to Hutchins and were disturbed by what they thought they heard. In the 1930s Dewey detected a nascent authoritarianism in the Hutchins program. Similar charges are lodged today against Bloom. Why should a diverse student body be subject to a single curriculum? Isn't this sort of rigorous classical education intrinsically elitist? Who is to determine the "truth" that students will be given? And isn't the pursuit of social justice, after all, more important than a quest for a holy grail of truth? These criticisms, laden with political and ideological implications, have in the eyes of some tainted the entire Great Books. progmm as being simply an adjunct to a New Right agenda.

Nevertheless, for an American public searching for some moorings of belief in an unsettled world, Bloom seems to have his finger on something important. In the pendulum swings of American culture we are clearly on the return arc from the experimentalism and tradition bashing of the 1960s. Political conservatism inspires a similar mood in education.

Where Hutchins and Adler appealed to a fear that the free world leadership required more wisdom than our colleges were giving, Bloom speaks to a society anxious lest its international competitiveness become compromised by inferior schooling.

Just as Hutchins's Chicago reforms reacted against the dominance of progressive educational theories, so former Education Secretary Bennett and others are responding to the liberalized curriculum of the 1960s and 1970s.

Though the battle of the Great Books has increasingly been waged with political cudgels, there is nothing intrinsic to the study of the classics tending toward a particular political persuasion.

In truth, the Great Books are both profoundly conservative and perilously radical: Conservative because they assume there is a repository of wisdom containing abiding truths; radical because engagement with them can upend unexamined assumptions and arm one with whetted knives of critical thought. A Great Books education, as Bennett attested from experience, can "shake you up a little, get you breathing, quicken your senses, and animate a conscious examination of life's enduring questions."

This may be a laudable goal, but it is a view of education normally alien to a culture steeped in utilitarian values.

Americans avoid philosophic speculation, Tocqueville noted, and use tradition only as a source of useful information in their perpetual quest for better ways of doing things. Bloom, frustrated by this characteristically American disdain for the life of reflection, has nevertheless found the United States in agreement with him as it undergoes one of its periodic moods of guilt over alleged cultural philistinism. The rush to buy The Closing of the American Mind, the renewed sales vigor of the Great Books of the Western World, and the increasing number enrolled in adult and junior Great Books programs testify to a new affirmation that "ideas do matter."

Yet certain points of agreement do not augur any final truce in America's battle of the books. Its culture is split between what American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson called "the party of the Past" and "the party of the Future," the former upholding tradition and its wisdom, the latter looking ahead to greater days and new ideas. The party of the' Future maintains the loyalty of most Americans at most times. That is why the ancients must struggle just to hold their ground. Yet Americans will not call for their surrender. For as the United States sails swiftly into an uncharted future, it will always throw wistful glances at its past, the only compass that can provide a heading.

0 About the Author: Benjamin McArthur teaches history at Southern College in Tennessee.

ention television news The advent of satellite technology, of these days, and the mind course, had made the point of origin instantly thinks of three largely irrelevant for national or letters-CNN. The sud- international broadcasting, someden and overwhelming success of this thing that the visionary Turner worldwide network, which broad- understood as well as anyone. casts news 24 hours a day to pracCNN interrupted its first commertically every country in the world, cial break with an update on the seems to have caught just about shooting of a U.S. civil rights leader, everyone by surprise. Everyone, that Vernon Jordan, and has gone on is, except the network's flamboyant since to score a series of coups in the and iconoclastic leader, Ted Turner. highly competitive art of first-strike 'Turner, an Atlanta, Georgia, journalism. These include the live businessman, is chairman of the telecast of hearings from the U.S. board and president of Turner Senate; coverage of assassination atBroadcasting Services, of which tempts on President Ronald Reagan CNN is but one of four networks. and Pope John Paul II; England's Turner made his mark in the early Royal Weddings; and the assassina1960s by taking over an ailing bill- tion of Egyptian President Anwar board business from his father and Sadat, to mention a few.

"CNN has become an interturning it into a profitable enterprise, becoming a millionaire along the national party line for the world's way. He entered broadcasting in 1975 leaders ...," says the Washingtonian, when he purchased a foundering At- the monthly city magazine for Washlanta television station and an- ington, D.C. "Foreign leaders routinely use the network to com" nounced plans to create a national cable-television service. He gained municate with each other or to get a greater notoriety, however, when in message out to the world."

1977 he captained his yacht, CouraThe network won prestigious geous, to victory in the prestigious journalism awards, the Peabody and America's Cup race. the Overseas Press Club, for its coverA brash, outspoken outsider age of the 1983 downing of Korean among the sedate American yachting Airlines 007 jetliner, the bombing of establishment, Turner was called U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, Captain Outrageous, a sobriquet that and the U.S. action in Grenada. would give way a few years later to It is expected to garner other awards another, The Mouth of the South, for its coverage of the war in the when he announced grandiose plans Persian Gulf. CNN scooped the to create a second cable network as world's news media for days because it an around-the-clock news service. He was the only network to have an open called it Cable News Network, or circuit out of Baghdad. It was coverage CNN. Cynics quickly dubbed it of the war, more than any other event, Chicken Noodle News. that catapulted CNN into the teleTurner assembled a newsstaff of vision consciousness of the world. seasoned professionals from other India is a good example. Visitors stations and newspapers, and enthu- crowded into the TV-equipped bars siastic graduates just out of journaland coffee shops of five-star hotels ism school. On June 1, 1980, CNN around the country to catch the latest began broadcasting from its studios developments in the Persian Gulf. At in Atlanta. The location only served the same time, entrepreneurs were to reemphasize Turner's outsider sta- scrambling to sign up customers for tus since New York was head- cable-system services, promising that quarters to America's 'three major CNN would be part of the assortnetworks-CBS, NBC, and ABC. ment of international programs to be

M

beamed to viewers' homes.

Meanwhile, broadcasters around the world were picking up feeds from CNN and rebroadcasting them over their own networks. Peter Vesey, director of CNN International, said: "In Britain, three of the four broadcast networks carried us live. So did five out of six French networks. In Sydney, Australia, they carried us continuously for almost two days. In Japan and Brazil, they attempted to do simultaneous translation. In China, long excerpts on tape were seen in [millions of] households.

When the final tally is made the audience may be measured in billions."

Now that the war has ended, the rush to view CNN has abated somewhat, but the demand for its service is certain to grow here and around the world. CNN boasts an audience of millions in more than 110 countries ..

This includes more than ten million cable homes outside the United States, in addition to some 250,000 hotels, embassies, stock exchanges, businesses, newspapers, and even oil platforms in the North Sea. CNN has 25 foreign and domestic bureaus-more than any other American television network-plus stringers around the world. Under terms of an agreement with Doordarshan, Delhi news and current affairs producer Rajiv Kumar has been filing reports to CNN for the past year-and-a-half.

"We have a good relationship with CNN," Kumar says. "They are very keen for stories from India." Kumar prepares at least one or two stories every week for a special prerecorded world report that CNN broadcasts.

In addition, he has presented "a couple of live reports from India" on breaking news events, induding Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar's announcement of the resignation of his government. Kumar spent 1989 as a Fulbright scholar at Syracuse University's Newhouse School of Communications in New York and visited CNN in Atlanta as well as

ABC, CBS, and NBC in New York.

He says that since CNN began broadcasting reports from India, the other three networks are showing more interest in events here.

"CNN has become the first place to turn for breaking stories of importance around the globe," says Benjamin Bagdikian, a media critic and professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "They have given the world a round-the-clock video newswire that nobody thought would work and turned the network news business on its ear."

CNN, in addition to offering 24hour-a-day news reports, is also doing more with its news than anyone else. In the business world, this is known as packaging. CNN International, the service seen in India and everywhere else outside the United States, contains a heavier dosage of international stories than what appears on the American domestic service, which includes more reports of purely American interest. Headline News, which appears on a separate channel in the United States, provides boiled-down reports of news stories for the viewer who wants a quick summary of major events without all of the supporting interviews and on-scene reports that may be included in a regular CNN broadcast. CNN radio does the same.

Newssource offers reports to independent broadcasters without the CNN logo so that the station can make it appear as if the report is its own. CNN Newsroom is a l5-minute educational news program that is beamed to some 6,000 schools. Then, there are plans for other services: â&#x20AC;˘ Reel News, a takeoff of the cinema newsreels of yesteryear, would offer five-minute news summaries in movie theaters. â&#x20AC;˘ Checkout Channel, a repeating strip of news reports a few minutes in length, would be shown on television screens at supermarket checkout lines, fast-food restaurants, airport ticket counters, and wherever the public

gathers for short periods of time.

In addition to hard news reports, CNN offers business, sports, and weather reports that get updated throughout the day, and several weekly discussion programs. "Larry King Live," an interview show with celebrities and newsmakers, invites viewers to phone in questions. "Special Assignment" presents reports from a team of investigative reporters.

In opinion polls, Americans historically have given low marks to the media in the areas of trust and approval. However, in a recent article, "What the Media Wants From the Press," scholars Michael J. Robinson and Norman J. Ornstein report that "the only news organization in recent surveys that has done better during the past five years in earning public regard" is "television's all-news Cable News Network. Viewers say CNN consistently gives them what they want-unvarnished, hard news."

5

orne of that public confidence was tested during the Gulf War. CNN reporter Peter Arnett's reports from Baghdad and his interview with President Saddam Hussein stirred considerable debate in the United States. Critics said that Arnett's censored reports were little more than propaganda for the Iraqi regime. CNN President Tom Johnson responded that the network has interviewed leaders from around the world without knowing ahead of time what they were going to say. "This is a global network. Why should I censor Saddam Hussein? Isn't the audience sophisticated enough to see we should present all sides?"

New York Times reporter Walter Goodman wrote that the question was whether CNN, in reporting from Baghdad under highly restricted conditions, was "performing a service for viewers.

"I think so. As long as CNN and

Mr. Arnett continue to acknowledge the conditions under which he has to work, there is some value in hearing and possibly seeing what he is allowed to see." In printed messages on the television screen, and spoken ones from anchors (persons who read the news and introduce reporters in the field), CNN would notify viewers whenever restrictions or censorship had been applied to a correspondent's report.

Outside the United States, CNN has come under criticism for its distinctly American format and perspective. The practice of interrupting a newscast every ten minutes or so for commercial messages, a common practice on American television, can be jarring to viewers in countries where television either does not broadcast commercials or confines them to pauses between programs.

CNN's international reports often have an American bias, and its domestic stories sometimes are of little interest to viewers beyond America's shores.

Turner was asked about this issue during an interview with East Asian journalists last year on World Net, the satellite broadcasting service of the U.S. Information Agency. "The point is well made," he said. "In time, we would like to have a truly international edition that tries to move away from such a great U.S. bias that we have now."

Two programming steps taken by Turner in that direction are: "World Business Tonight," a business-news show produced in London; and "East Meets West," a Tokyo-produced show that presents breaking news from Asia as well as reports on the arts and culture of the region.

Just a few years ago business analysts were predicting the demise of Turner's broadcasting empire. He had made a costly, abortive attempt to take over the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and, in the minds of experts, had paid far too much for the film library of the ven-

Clockwise from above: When only audio portions of Peter Arnett's reports were available from Baghdad during the Gulf War, CNN would show his picture against a map of Iraq; CNN reports President George Bush's visit to an elementary school; a 1983 live press conference from Moscow on the downing of KAL Flight 007; Nelson Mandela at a South African rally; the appearance of Holi on an international events calendar; and the price of shares on the London stock exchange.

erable cinema-production company, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). It took an infusion of capital from a group of cable-owning companies to resuscitate Turner Broadcasting. In the process, Turner's share of his company's stock dropped from 80 percent to 40 percent. This means that he no longer has carte blanche to do as he wishes. He must seek approval for major decisions from a board of directors.

In 1988 the board approved the creation of his latest nationwide cable network, Turner Network Television (TNT), which offers that treasuretrove of classic films from the MGM library, plus feature films of its own making, and sports events. As its explosive initials might suggest, TNT has been hugely successful.

"The demand for classic movies was unrecognized even by our cable partners," Turner says. "But I knew they would be popular."

Turner Broadcasting began showing

an operating profit in 1989 for the first time since 1985. Though CNN was spending an estimated $1.5 million a week during the Gulf War, the continued growth of the news service and the popularity of Turner Broadcasting:s other services should keep the' company in the black for years to come.

"The raffish and unpredictable outsider has become an industry leader," Time magazine said of Turner last year, "and the critics who once forecast his demise have for now been silenced."

America's other broadcast networks are fighting back, investing in services to syndicate their news programs and reports, and in cable systems. The British Broadcasting Corporation recently announced plans to launch soon an international satellite television service.

But for the time being, Ted Turner is sailing on a wave of success at the head of the pack and has earned a new sobriquet: Captain Comeback.

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The Joy of GarileIli1l$ sense of personal fulfillment. Getting close to nature also has a therapeutic value, and community gardens in urban areas have a social benefit in encouraging people to work together for a common cause. And when you're out in the fresh air working the soil, it makes for healthy physical exercise."

Community Gardens: Green Oases in the Concrete Jungle Community gardens cover 37,200 hectares of America's urban landscape-often in rundown, inner-city areas where property values are depressed. On the west side of New York City, for example, in what used to be called "Hell's Kitchen," the Clinton Community Garden grew vegetables year round under a huge geodesic dome, and fed more than 100 families. The garden lost its lease to a developer when the neighborhood began to improve, but has since negotiated for a new $7,000 garden atop the parking garage of the luxury condominium built on the site. In Detroit, Michigan, St. Andrew the Redeemer Church took over several abandoned lots to grow okra, tomatoes, and black-eyed peas to feed the needy. A neighborhood garden in the heavily Hispanic South Bronx in New York transformed an urban ruin into a profitable enterprise.

El Sol Brillante-Bright Sun-sells its flowers and herbs to some of New York City's finest restaurants.

Community gardens blossomed in the 1970s when inflation and economic difficulties caused people to look for ways to save money. Based on World War II "victory" gardens (during the war, Americans were urged to grow their own fruits and vegetables so that commercially grown produce could be sent to U.S. troops overseas), community gardens can now be found in cities in eight states from Massachusetts to California.

Jerry McNulty of the Coney Island Community Garden says, "We're not just out there gardening, we're talking about the news of the day, socializing, forming

relationships."

Besides food and flowers and companionship, community gardeners also harvest safer neighborhoods, a heightened sense of community, improved diet, and an average savings of $350 per family a year. "The community garden is a great vehicle for community involvement and improved aesthetics," says Tom Fox in his book Struggle for Space: The Greening of New York City.

Many corporations, banks, and foundations apparently agree, since they provide more than $2.6 million annually to the city's community gardens.

The biggest challenge these gardens face is finding and keeping space. Despite success in turning empty lots into productive land, most community gardens are on city-owned property where it is difficult to get long-term leases. To a local government, the tax revenue to be gained from selling land to commercial interests may outweigh the advantages that gardens bring to the community. In New York, for instance, once a property is assessed at more than $20,000, the community garden loses its eligibility for a long-term lease. George Thabault, special projects director for NGA, warns, "The urban philosophy is to use land for the 'highest and best use.' I'm afraid that usually refers to economic return rather than the highest and best social use."

Gardening as Therapy Community gardens also are popular outside the inner city. For people with limited creative outlets, the mysterious bond with the earth that gardening provides is a healthy tonic. There are hospital gardens, gardens for the handicapped and mentally retarded, and gardens where nursing home patients nurture young seedlings.

Even some convicted criminals have a chance to sow a new crop. In 1978, NGA's Nancy Flinn persuaded Vermont officials to experiment with garden therapy in state prisons. The results were positive. At the Chittendon Correctional

Center in Vermont, for instance, a group of eight prisoners raised vegetables for the entire prison, sending the surplus to a nearby nursing home and homeless shelter. Since that first tentative experiment, garden programs have spread to prisons across the country. "It gives these guys who've never been successful a nonthreatening chance to accomplish something," says Flinn.

Whether the benefits of gardening are therapeutic, aesthetic, or economic, gardeners share a universal sense of fulfillment. For some, the simple pleasure of tending their yards-a Saturday afternoon spent mulching the marigolds while listening to a baseball game-is enough; for others, the aim is more extravagant.

"My goal is to make my entire landscape edible," says Verne Nelson, pruning a kiwi vine that has crawled up the side of his house. Gardening also can be a relief from a grueling work week or a way of regenerating a neighborhood.

Some gardeners believe that those who garden together become friends, and envision the activity as a bridge across troubled international waters. Will Wrap, president of Gardener's Supply Company, hopes to exchange tomato seed varieties with Soviet gardeners; Robert Rodale, publisher of many self-help books and Organic Gardening Magazine, envisions a Peace Corps in reverse, in which gardeners from developing countries come to America to teach their skills. The Master Gardener movement, taught through state university extension courses, sees sharing gardening techniques as a way to alleviate world hunger.

Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson looked out over the vast gardens at his Virginia home, Monticello, and mused, "No culture is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of gardening."

Eighty million Americans agree.

D About the Author: Juliet Bruce is a free-lance writer based in Washington, D.C.

Preserving a Heritage New York's Museum of the American Indian will soon have a new home for its spectacular collection.

1. Sand painting. Navajo Indians made paintings with colored sands and vegetable pigments to invoke the supernatural to cure the sick. Although the Navajos are enjoined to destroy them after the ceremony, sand paintings have recently been made on board or woven into rugs to preserve them.

2. Whistling vase. Although the Mixtecs of Mexico werefamousfor their gold work, this vase with its graceful figurine is a fine example of their skill in ceramic sculpture.

3. Comb. The Iroquois believed human hair to be endowed with magical, life-giving powers. They embellished their combs with animal, human, and plant shapes, symbolizing a range of cosmological, genealogical, and political concepts.

4. Pottery jar. Exquisite designs and bold colors characterized most of the pottery of Mexican Indians.

Museum of the American Indian in Upper Manhattan, New York City, which has one of the world's largest and finest collections of American Indian artifacts from North, Central, and South America, is testimony to the magnificent obsession of its founder, George G. Heye.

Born in 1874 in New York, Heye studied electrical engineering at Columbia University. After college, he got a job with an engineering company that sent him to Arizona, where, wandering near the houses of his Navajo work force, he saw the wife of one of his American Indian foremen working on her husband's deerskin shirt. The shirt so fascinated him that he bought it. "Naturally, when I had a shirt," Heye later wrote, "I wanted a rattle and moccasins.

And then the collecting bug seized me and I was lost."

Helped by a fortune inherited from his father, a Standard Oil executive, Heye traveled all over in his chauffeur-driven limousine, snapping up anything American Indian that he could lay his hands on.

Over the years, he also organized numerous expeditions across the hemisphere aimed at buying tribal artifacts.

By the time the museum opened in 1922 in a cramped four-story building off the beaten path, Heye had already acquired 400,000 items-and more were constantly being added.

The sheer size of the museum's present holdings is overwhelming: They total one million items, which include such priceless treasures as tribal masks from the Northwest Coast, painted garments from the North American plains, Hopi kachina dolls, figurines from the Maya civilization, and prehistoric arrowheads.

But Heye's acquisitiveness also became

the museum's dilemma-the dilemma of space. What do you do when you have some of the most spectacular, breathtaking tribal objects, and you can't provide them with a home that is big enough to display them in all their grandeur, and that is also easily accessible to the serious scholar and the general public?

With just 1,400 square meters of exhibition space, only 10,500 artifacts are on display. The rest of them are tucked away in vaults, shelves, and drawers at a warehouse about 20 kilometers awaybeyond the reach of scholars, but not beyond the danger of damage to the fragile artifacts. The museum's other dilemma is its 40,000-volume library, which is at yet another location in the city.

For decades, the museum's trustees have been trying to seek a solution to their predicament. Short of funds to buy a larger building of their own, they first explored the possibility of enlisting financial support from private and public institutions to relocate it at another site in the city. Heye, who died in 1957, had stipulated that the museum must remain in New York, but when the trustees failed to muster enough support, they considered moving it to another city to keep the priceless legacy intact. That's what has now been worked out.

Under an agreement signed in 1989, which was later legislated by the U.S. Congress, the Smithsonian Institution will receive the bulk of the musej.lm's collection. It will be housed on the Mall in Washington, D.C., in a new building that will open in about six years.

The National Museum of the American Indian-as the Heye museum has been rechristened-will finally have a house that will do justice to its monumental collection.

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1. Acoma jar. Of all the Pueblos with pottery traditions, the Acomas produced the greatest variety in designs-shapes from nature, human and animal life, and geometric patterns. Their pottery painting was also always exact, often with a preference for fine parallel lines .

2. Wooden kero; carved leopard head.

Vessels for drinking, keros were common throughout ancient Peru. They were usually used in pairs during drinking ceremonies.

3. Gold crown. Along with weaving and pottery, native Indian craftsmen of ancient Ecuador excelled in fashioning delicate, exquisite jewelry.

4. Painted buckskin shield. Painting on a variety of objects was a prominent activity with the Arapahos.

They believed that painted shields offered protection against evil.

Back cover: Mechanical mask.

Kwakiutle Indians were adept at making masks with mechanical contrivances, or interchangeable parts, which enabled wearers to completely change the character of the mask during a dance presentation.