October 1992

I have been in India now for a little more than a year.

One of the things I have enjoyed doing most is traveling around this vast and diverse land. From Dehra Dun in the north to Trivandrum

in the south, and most major

2

Almonds Are for Everywhere

6

The Shifting Sands of Public OpinionIs Liberalism Back?

cities in between, I have seen some fabulous sights and met some fantastic people.

One visit I cherish highly is the one I had with P. Lal at his home in Calcutta. lisher, transcreator,

Lal is a teacher,

scholar,

pub-

and writer of prose and poetry. He

is also a kind, generous, sincere, engaging, and energizing human being. In a packet of articles in this issue, we examine the phenomenon

of middlebrow-that

vast,

uncharted land of the arts between the high and the low.

Don't look for P. Lal here. He's strictly highbrow all the way-but

not an austere, recondite,

clusionary

highbrow.

Whether

ing, or teaching, Lalleads inclusionary,

impenetrable,

he is publishing,

writ-

you gently along a humane,

clear path, and directs your gaze upward.

I was deeply moved by Lal's profound extraordinary something

ex-

humanity,

10 19

Lessons For Life

27 28 32 34 37

Help and Hope

insights, and his basic love oflife. We had

very much in common

with death-or

to discuss, a brush

a near death experience (NO E), as it is

called. Lal has written

about

his experience

He describes the illness that put him into the hospital midwestern

American

by Boyd Gibbons

by Jim Fuller

Help and Hope in Bangalore Luck

by Lee Adair Lawrence

A Short Story by Richard Bausch

On the Lighter Side In Praise of Middlebrow

by Tad Friend

by Joan Shelley Rubin

Don't Look Now

by Madhu Jain

40

The Mad MAD World

44

Art High and Low

48

Focus On ...

in an

eloquent and inspiring book, Lessons. in a medium-size

by P. Lal

Alcohol-The Legal Drug

A Short History

his

by William G. Mayer

city and the

friends, strangers, family members, and medical personnel who came to his aid. The book is many thingsamong them a celebration oflife, a giant thank you card, a testament

of human goodness

and spiritual power.

And, as the title suggests, a collection

of thoughtful

Front cover: A recent controversial art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York included such works as Philip Guston's Head and Bottle, 1975, oil on canvas, 166 x 174 em. See pages 44-47.

lessons. I am sure you will be moved by the excerpts ofthe book we have pieced together for this issue.

Reading the book brought back vividly memories of the heart attack that I suffered two years ago. Knowing that you are near death can focus your mind on some basic questions.

Among those that confronted

me as I

was being rushed to the hospital by an ambulance Is there something

were:

Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson 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, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

I wish I had done differently in my

life and with my family? And, when was the last time I told my wife that I loved her? When I realized that the answer to the latter question was "45 minutes ago," I was serene.

In one of the foreword

sections

to his book,

Lal

Photographs: Front cover--eourtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York. 2-5--eourtesy Blue Diamond Growers, Sacramento, California. 5 bottom inset-Avinash Pasricha. 1012--eourtesy Borgess Medical Center, Kalamazoo, Michigan. 14, 18-Avinash Pasricha.

24-25-Š National Geographic Society. 27-Š 1990 Jim Goss. 41-R.K. Sharma. 4447--eourtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York. 48-top and right-R.K. Sharma; bottom-Ramesh Choudry.

writes: "God gives no answers; he is a good Professor who sets difficult questions. Learn before you start living, or face an NDE-or

even' a DE. Life's a bloody messy

business for the ignorant.

Erratum: In the first paragraph of page 21 in our September 1992 issue, in lhe article UCreative Solitude~~'we made an erroneous reference to "Nazi Poland:' The sentence, about writer Eva Hoffman, should have read: "She had transliterated them in her autobiographical work, Lost in Translation, a book that recorded the pain of growing up in Nazi-occupied

Poland."

We regret the error.

Since you can't say, 'Stop

the world, I want to get off,' the time to start learning is now."

Now there is a lesson for all of us.

Published by the United States Information

Service, American

(phone:

Embassy,

3316841). on behalf "f the American

Center,

New Delhi.

24 Kasturba

Printed at Thomson

Gandhi

Marg,

New Delhi

Press (India) Limited,

110001

Faridabad,

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 permission write to the Editor. Price afmagazine, one year's subscription (12 issues) Rs, 60; single copy, Rs. 6.

Haryana.

Almonds Are lor ,err¡here

The Indian market is only one of many tough nuts that Blue Diamond has cracked in its campaign to sell almonds around the world. The Japanese shell out some $100 million annually to add the company's nutritious products to their diet.

T

he San Joaquin Valley of northern California is the world's largest producer of almonds, and Blue Diamond Growers is the region's premier almond company.

Blue Diamond is a cooperative that was founded in 1910 when 230 almond growers banded together with this game plan: They would deliver their harvests to strategically located receiving stations, and cooperative employees would take over from there-processing, promoting, and marketing the growers' almonds for the best price they could get. Photos here provide glimpses of the process in action.

Today Blue Diamond ranks among the Fortune 500 with annual sales of nearly $500 million. It produces more than 90 million kilograms of almonds per year for sale in every U.S. state and 94 foreign countries. One of those countries is India, which began permitting Blue Diamond imports in 1977. Onerous tariff duties and licensing procedures, however, held sales to just a little more than one million kilograms a year. Blue Diamond protested that these restrictions were unfair and in 1988 persuaded

Farms in California's San Joaquin Valley ( 1), which covers 1,554 square kilometers of rich agricultural land, benefit from a Mediterranean climate that is ideal for almond production. California is the only American state that grows almonds commercially. In early July, almond hulls (2) begin to split. When the split widens a giant hydraulic shaker (3) comes along to harvest the almonds. The crop is mechanically swept (4) into windrows for pick up. The hulls are separated by machine (5) and used for cattle feed.

Then, the almonds are delivered to one of Blue Diamond's receiving stations such as this one (6), the world's largest, in Sacramento, California. Here (7) the crop is weighed, sampled, and temporarily stored by variety (of which there are four).

the U.S. government to hold talks with Indian authorities on the maUer. India agreed to lower its barriers, and sales of California almonds improved dramatically-from some 1.4 million kilograms in 1988 to 6.3 million kilograms 1991.

Savvy marketing strategies at home and abroad are responsible for much of Blue Diamond's success. It launched its Smokehouse roasted almonds by persuading major airlines to serve them as a snack on their flights. This led to the introduction of a complete line of flavored almonds on American supermarket shelves. The result: 80 percent of all U.S. households that eat almonds, eat a Blue Diamond product.

The fact that almonds were not a part of the Japanese diet did not deter Blue Diamond strategists. When they learned that most Japanese brides take cooking lessons, they began sending representatives to cooking schools offering free supplies, recipes, and instruction. A taste was acquired, and sales quickly boomed. When they learned that the government wanted to increase the calcium content in school lunches, Blue Diamond developed Calmond, an almond and dried-sardine snack, for the school lunch program. Calmond has since become a popular snack food for Japanese adults as well as schoolchildren.

These and other creative efforts have boosted Blue Diamond exports to Japan dramatically since the early 1980s, reaching a record 22.2 million kilograms in 1990. Its nuts are distributed through an arrangement with Coca-Cola, which already had established strong roots in Japan's rigidly controlled marketing areas.

Blue Diamond almonds are used in more than 2,000 different ways-roasted, smoked, flavored, candy-coated, diced, sliced, chopped, ground, as paste, and for oil, to mention a few. The company is test marketing almond butter among other new products. A major selling point for the almond in any form is its nutritional value. The nut has no cholesterol and is rich in protein, calcium, iron, and vitamin E. When Blue Diamond began, California accounted for less than three percent of the world's almond crop. Spain and Italy were the big producers during the early years of this century.

American consumers showed little interest in the product until the 1930s when producers began marketing the nuts without their shells. During World War II and the Korean War, almond sales boomed when the U.S. Army ordered almond chocolate bars for its soldiers.

California farmers devoted more and more land to the growing of almond trees, and in the 1960s they mechanized their operations. Today they produce approximately 70 percent of the world's almond crop.

Many members of the Blue Diamond cooperative descend from five generations of almond growers. Others are newcomers

Then comes final processing (8, 9) in which the almonds move down 13 stories by gravity and travel more than a kilometer on conveyors for cracking, secondary cleaning, size grading, electric-eye sorting, andfinal manual inspection. Some of the almonds go directly to slicing, dicing, slivering, blanching, or some other form of processing; others are sold in their whole natural form.

More than 60 percent of the almond crop is . shipped (10, 11) abroad primarily in bulk form for customers in India ( 12)-where Blue Diamond competes with several Indian importers of California almondsand 93 other countries.

who previously worked in nonagricultural business areas. Some depend on the almond for their entire livelihood; others have careers outside of farming or grow other crops.

Cooperative members, since they have a say in the business, generally can count on receiving higher returns than independent almond growers. Two years ago, iQ fact, growers protested that. too much money was being put into market development at their expense. Blue Diamond directors responded with some changes.

They made staff cuts, including 32 plant supervisory jobs, eliminated several low-profit products, and increased the minimum order to reduce order-processing costs.

"Management, at the direction of the board, has really taken a good hard look at how the co-op conducts business and undertaken cost-saving steps wherever possible," grower Joe Martinez told The Sacramento Bee newspaQer. "And it wasn't done because we were in trouble or had problems, but out of long-range foresight."

To foresight add innovation and quality, and you end up with Blue Diamond's recipe for success.

0

Is Liberalism Back?bYWILLIAMGMAYER The final polls won't start to close on the night of November 3, 1992, until 7 p.m., but a few hours later, with most of the actual votes still uncounted, politicians and pundits will already be arguing about how to interpret them. Such debates have become a recurrent feature of American elections. Most presidential contests, and even many mid-term elections, are closely scrutinized by our national sages and prognosticators to see what they reveal about the elusive and fickle "mood" of the American public. The general tenor of such analysis is probably familiar to most political observers. In 1960, it was .said, the American people were restless, ready for something new. In 1964 they lurched sharply to the left. In 1968, depending on whom one talked to, they had either become liberal because of the Vietnam War or conservative because of crime. Over the next three elections, they moved right, center, and then right again, a little bit like a drunken sailor.

For most of our nation's history, such speculation was unavoidable. Elections and mass protest movements were our only real clue as to what ordinary citizens (as distinct from political elites) were thinking about the issues of the day. Since the 1930s, however, it has been possible to measure the public pulse with considerably more precision, through the use of mass sample surveys. Even with all of their well-rehearsed limitations (the problems of question wording and question order, the often-disregarded complexities involved in putting together a true probability sample), public opinion polls, properly conducted and interpreted, provide us with a considerably more accurate means of assessing the changes and trends in public opinion than any other alternative.

Surprisingly, however, not until rather recently have pollsters and scholars started to take full advantage of this resource. After the 1980 [presidential] election, as we will see, there occurred a sharp debate about whether Ronald Reagan's victory signaled a decisive shift to the right in American public opinion. And while significant voices could be heard on both sides of this issue, very few of the disputants ever bothered to examine more than a tiny part of the available evidence. But for those with a serious interest in pursuing such questions, the picture has now become considerably brighter. A number of major survey archiveschief among them, the Roper Center at the University of Connecticut-have collected and cataloged the past results of commercial and academic pollsters. And many survey organizations-in particular, the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago-have shown increased appreciation for the value of taking regular, repeated soundings of mass attitudes on a wide range of significant issues. When these data are brought together and analyzed, they provide a

fascinating perspective on recent American political historyand on the context of the 1992 elections.

While many of the most interesting issues in voting analysis are now shrouded in a dense fog of methodological controversy, there is little dispute as to the best procedure for tracking changes in public opinion. One simply looks for cases where a survey question has been asked, with the same wording, on several different occasions over an extended period of time. In 1956, for example, the Gallup Poll asked a national sample of American adults: "Do you favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?" Gallup then asked this same question once more in the 1950s, five times in the I960s, on five occasions in the 1970s, and then six times between 1980 and 1988. Obviously, the results will fluctuate a bit due to sampling error. But if the percentage who say that they favor the death penalty shows a large and sustained increase, we can interpret this as showing that American public opinion became more conservative on this particular issue.

Alternatively, if opposition to the death penalty increases, we have evidence that public opinion has moved to the left. In this particular case, public opinion drifted slowly to the left from 1956 to 1966, then broke in a sharply conservative direction.

Between 1966 and 1988, suppoit for the death penalty increased by about 35 percentage points.

Drawing on polls from a dozen different survey organizations, I have assembled similar time-series data on almost every major controversy in recent American politics: Busing [to achieve school integration], school prayer, marijuana, abortion, and the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]; defense spending, arms control, foreign aid, and military intervention; taxes, domestic spending, welfare, regulation, and the environment.

The results, summarized in Tables I to IV (see page 8), show the balance of ideological changes that occurred during four different periods that are generally thought to define the most significant "eras" in recent American politics: 1960-65, 196673, 1974-80, and 1981-88.

1960-65: Stability Usable survey data for these years are rather thin (the Gallup Poll was almost the only survey organization doing regular polling during this period), and my interest in them, in any event, was partly as a way of establishing a baseline for the changes in the other three periods. What evidence is available, however, strongly suggests that this was a time of fairly stable attitudes. Liberal trends appear in a small number of issues, including racial equality and capital punishment. With the exception of race, however, the changes were rather small; and they were counter-balanced by an almost equal number of conservative changes.

Since the early 1980s, American public opinion has taken a definite swing toward liberalism on policy issues.

The author says this will have an important bearing on the U.S. presidential election next month.

Particularly striking, in view of the policy changes that occurred during these years, is the total absence of evidence to indicate that public opinion was becoming more liberal on economic issues. Over the past decade, a small army of leftleaning political scientists has written books and articles vehemently denying that public opinion took a right turn during the 1970s, and complaining bitterly that the "Reagan revolution" was built upon a foundation of misunderstanding, distortion, and manipulation. While I will dispute this verdict below, it is interesting to note that the Great Society [of President Lyndon Johnson] may have been based on just such a misperception. Though many claim that John F. Kennedy inspired the nation to a new commitment to public service, or that Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory over Barry Goldwater showed a growing public determination to expand federal welfare and regulatory programs, such assertions find little support in the available survey data. I can find no indication that the public's thinking about domestic economic issues during the heyday of [Kennedy's] New Frontier and the Great Society changed very much from its position in the 1950s.

1966-73: Liberal Shift The late I960s and early 1970s, by contrast, definitely stand out as a time of increasing liberalism in public attitudes. The popular image of these years as a time of rapid and wrenching social change clearly does have a strong basis in fact. Particularly large changes occurred in a number of cultural issues, such as premarital sex, abortion, racial equality, and the role and status of women; in foreign policy, where popular discontent with the Vietnam War led to noticeably more liberal stances on military intervention, the defense budget, and relations with the Soviet Union; and in growing cynicism about the performance of business.

In 1965, for example, only 15 percent of an NORC sample said that a pregnant woman who did not want any more children should be able to obtain a legal abortion. By 1973, 46 percent supported abortion in this circumstance. Between 1969 and 1973, the number of Americans who felt that "sex, relations before marriage" were not wrong jumped from 21 percent to 43 percent.

Where only 19 percent of a Gallup sample said that this country was spending too much on national defense in 1960, 46 percent took this position in 1973. The number who agreed that "there's too much power concentrated in the hands of a few large companies" increased from 52 percent in 1965 to 75 percent in 1973.

1974-80: Right Turn There are two different "conventional wisdoms" about the changes in public opinion that preceded the 1980 elections.

Among practicing politicians and journalistic commentators, Reagan's landslide victory, coupled with the large Republican gains in the Senate and the House of Representatives, was widely interpreted as showing a substantial shift to the right in American public opinion. And that perception, in turn, played a major role in Reagan's legislative successes throughout 1981 in cutting social spending, increasing defense spending, and reducing taxes.

But academic studies of the 1980 election took a decisively different view of the matter. The first major academic analyses of the 1980 vote began to appear in early 1981, and, almost without exception, they rejected the contention that American public opinion had become more conservative. To the best of my knowledge, of the numerous books and articles that appeared soon after Reagan's victory, exactly one (published in the British Journal of Political Science) showed any sympathy at all with the "right turn" hypothesis. Indeed, there is now a rather substantial secondary literature on the 1980 election that, starting from the assumption that no change in public opinion actually occurred, views the widespread clamor about a new¡ conservative mood as evidence of a right-wing bias in the news media.

Yet, as I have noted earlier, while many academics denied that a conservative shift had taken place, relatively few bothered to collect or analyze the kinds of data discussed above. Most such studies produced evidence only on the quite different question of whether a partisan realignment had taken place, and thus looked at such matters as party identification, aggregate voting patterns, and economic performance indicators.

The data I have assembled, however, leave little doubt that the conservative shift was real, substantial, and broad-based.

American attitudes really did become more conservativeoften substantially more so-about a wide range of issues: Crime, the ERA, relations with the Soviet Union, military spending and intervention, taxes, the role of government, domestic spending, regulation, job creation, the causes of inflation, and environmental protection. In a 1974 Gallup Poll, only 12 percent of the public felt that the United States was spending too little on national defense. By 1980, 49 percent endorsed greater defense spending. In 1970 only 15 percent of Americans said that they were "worse off as a result of government control and regulation" of large corporationsbut 40 percent said they were worse off in 1981. Support for American military intervention if the Soviet Union attacked our "major European allies" jumped from 48 percent in 1974 to 74 percent in 1980. In a series of Roper surveys, the

Capital punishment. Racial equality.

Legal regulation of birth control.

Gun registration. Labor unions.

Religious beliefs and practices. Role and

Gun ownership. Business. General opinions of communist China.

status of women. Balance of military strength. Relations with the Soviet Union.

Regulation.

Admitting communist China to the UN. Taxes. Abortion.

Wiretapping. Racial equality. Centrality of religious beliefs. Sexual mores. Divorce.

Abortion. Religious practices. Business.

Military spending. Legalizing marijuana.

Military intervention. Government

Gun registration. Religious beliefs. Size and power of government.

United Nations. Gun ownership. Crime and punishment. Taxes. Federalism.

Labor unions. Foreign aid.

assistance for the poor. Environmental protection. Role and status of women.

Conceptions of the family. Legal regulation of birth control. School prayer. Relations with the Soviet Union.

Relations with communist China.

Racial equality. Nuclear energy.

Premarital sex. Role and status of women.

Conceptions of the family. Legalizing marijuana.

Gun registration. Homosexuality.

Divorce. Abortion. Foreign aid. United Nations. Religious beliefs and practices.

Laws regulating sexual behavior. Wageprice controls. National health insurance. Balanced budget amendment.

Business.

Crime and punishment. Gun ownership.

Military spending. Military intervention.

Taxes. Federalism. Equal Rights Amendment. Relations with the Soviet Union. Central Intelligence Agency. Size and power of government. Government assistance for the poor. Job creation.

Labor unions. Regulation. Environmental protection. Domestic spending. Causes and cures for inflation.

Racial equality. Busing. Military spending. Taxes. Size and power of government. Nuclear energy. Domestic spending. Discrimination against gays.

Relations with the Soviet Union.

Relations with communist China. Role and status of women. Conceptions of the family. Environmental protection.

Gun control. Sexual mores. SGhool prayer. Business. Central Intelligence Agency. Federalism. Foreign aid.

Religious beliefs and practices.

Government assistance for the poor.

Balanced budget amendment. Laws governing sexual behavior. United Nations. Military intervention.

Crime and punishment. Legalizing marijuana. Divorce. Abortion. Economic rights and privileges. Business profits.

number who blamed inflation on "too much government spending on domestic programs" rose from 26 percent in 1973 to 43 percent in 1981.

1981-88: Liberal Resurgence To examine the survey record of the late 1970s is to gain a renewed sense of appreciation for the political "antennae" of elected officials. Whatever the source of their judgmentselection results, press reports, or conversations with voterspoliticians appear to have developed a very accurate portrait of the popular mood (much more accurate than most academic observers), and of the way it changed between the early 1970s and the end of the decade. And it is for precisely this reason that the trends in public opinion between 1981 and 1988 come as such a surprise. For little in the political rhetoric or journalistic commentary of recent years reflects the extent to which this has been a time of generally liberal changes in mass attitudes.

Across a vast range of issues-induding military spending and relations with the (now former) Soviet Union, taxes, domestic spending, and environmental protection-liberals have made up much of the ground they lost in the late 1970s. Where a majority of Americans wanted to increase defense spending in 1980, by late 1982 only about 15 percent expressed such a preference. In 1980, 49 percent of the public said that "the government in Washington is getting too powerful for the good of the country and the individual person." In 1988 only 33 percent felt this way.

The belief that federal income taxes were too high dedined from 68 percent in 1980 to 55 percent in 1988; while support for spending on the environment, health care, education, and even welfare all increased. In late 1980 Americans supported "stripmining for coal, even if it means damaging the environment" by a 44 percent to 41 percent margin. By 1986 only 20 percent supported strip-mining while 68 percent opposed it.

How can we account for such changes-and for the widespread failure of politicians and journalists to take greater notice of them? In some cases, one can only say that much of the political mythology of the past decade has been exaggerated or mistaken. Take the case of civil rights. Although civil-rights leaders have often claimed that one effect of the Reagan presidency was to relegitimize once-discredited forms of racial prejudice and discrimination, the survey record provides no evidence that this actually occurred. In a few cases, in fact, the Reagan years witnessed advances for the civil-rights cause. For example, almost every year since 1972, NORC has been asking its samples whether they favored or opposed "the busing of black and white schoolchildren from one district to another."

Between 1972 and 1982 support for busing did not change-but it rose by 13 percentage points between 1982 and 1988.

In many cases, however, these changes are probably best interpreted as a kind of backhanded measure of Ronald

Reagan's success. In order to understand this point, it is worth drawing a distinction between two different types of survey questions, and how each of them measures ideological change.

Consider, on the one hand, these three survey questions: • Are you in favor of the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?

• Should it be possible for a pregnant woman to obtain a legal abortion if she became pregnant as a result of rape?

• Do you favor or oppose the Equal Rights Amendment?

Now compare

them to these three questions:

• Do you think we are spending too little, too much, or about the right amount for national defense and military purposes?

• Do you think there is a need for more government regulation of business, is the present amount of government regulation about right, or do you think there should be less government regulation of business?

• Do you consider the amount of federal income tax which you have to pay as too high, about right, or too low?

The first set of items are examples of what I have called determinate policy questions. They ask respondents for their opinions about specific policy options whose meaning and content remain essentially constant over time. "The death penalty" means the same thing today that it did in the 1930s or the 1950s. The wording of the ERA was the same in 1975 as it was in 1982. The second set of questions, by contrast, are what might be called comparative policy questions. Respondents are asked how they would like to change a particular policy as compared to the status quo. Hence, the state of current policy becomes, implicitly. or explicitly, an important-and constantly changing-factor in how the public interprets such questions.

Both types of questions do measure real changes in public opinion, but the changes in comparative questions have a more ambiguous meaning, as the defense-spending question quoted above illustrates. Although the Gallup Poll has used this same question wording for the past two decades, in a sense the meaning of those words is constantly changing-because the size of the defense budget is constantly changing. Thus, when the percentage who favor increased defense spending declines, as it did in the 1980s, two interpretations are possible: • Americans have decided that the defense buildup that they so urgently wanted in 1980 was a bad idea, after all. Having seen the results of that buildup-its apparent lack of effect in many situations, the horror stories about $700 screwdrivers-Americans have become decisively less militaristic.

• Public opinion about the ideal level of defense spending has really stayed pretty constant over the past decade. Most Americans have always wanted a level of defense spending that was greater than this country had in 1978-but not as high as many conservatives were proposing in 1984 or 1988. What changed, in other words, was not public attitudes, but the reality that the public was being asked to evaluate. Most Americans approved of the first several Reagan budgets and (Text continued on page 36)

For Life Writer, teacher, and publisher P. Lal went on a lecture tour of Canada and the United States in the winter of 1989. He caught a cold and fell deathly-literally deathly-ill. Family, friends, strangers, and some outstanding medical personnel all came to his rescue. When it was all over, Lal wrote a tender, moving account about his experience and what it taught him about life, death, and his fellow human beings. The result is Lessons, which Lal calls "a strange amalgam of a book: An 'autobiography,' almost a 'self-obituary,' also a travelogue, a confession, a small shraddhanjali to the dear and respected departed, a

Among the many physicians who treated P. Lal at the Sorgess Medical Center in Kalamazoo, Michigan, were, clockwise from above, Hi Sung Park (kidney specialist), Sri) Dewan (gastroenterologist), David Davenport (infectious diseases), and John Collins (surgeon).

reminiscence of sentimental memorabilia, a 'philosophical' statement of sorts, a detached survey of personal and impersonal events, a celebration of the simple fact that one is alive (the alternative being so otherwise). But, above all, it's about Lessons, and about learning, and the love of learning, from big and small people,jrom big and small things and happenings; and it's intended for those who want to learn, and who are in love with learning."

Lal kindly gave SPAN permission to weave together a series of excerpts from his book. Here, in a highly condensed version, is his story:

I

write this in the first half of May 1991, the time-slot of Tagore's arrival here from the Great Beyond. I am asprawl in an easy chair in the veranda of Room 12 of the graciously, colonially chic S.E. R. Hotel in the tranquil town of Puri, the Pith&, the pilgrimage center of Purushottama the Supreme Spirit, Jagannatha, the Juggernaut of the Cosmos. In front of me, through soughing coconut fronds and stubborn, sand-rooted, indomitable thorn trees waving branches like arms of M anipuri dancers, I can see the Bay of Bengal segment of the Indian Ocean. Vishnu reclining on the Ocean of Eternity, his white teeth Serpent of Kala, glistening in foamy horizontal phosphorescence-the Ananta-Naga, girdling the Earth in the clutch of Newtonian gravity.

And I see before me, one by one, a procession of private faces-I cannot help it-faces dear to me, blossoming like sea-foliage from the other side of silence. Precious ghosts, menials and friends and relatives and mentors and gurus ....

"What are you doing there?" they ask in muted sea-sibilants. "I am living," I reply. "We have lived," their spray-wet voices whisper, adding, "you who are living-do you know what life is?" "No," I answer truthfully. This time the waves become rollers, their murmur a roar: "Learn. Learn."

I

nJune 1987, through the good offices of Robert Sykes, compleat gentleman and officer of the Calcutta British Council, I was chosen to represent India at the Literature Seminar in Trinity College in Cambridge. Present among the imposing two dozen delegates from allover the world was Greg Gatenby, a hard-boiled organizer of elaborate poetry and prose reading festivals in Toronto known as the Harbourfront Reading Series.

The next thing I knew I had received an invitation from Greg to read my poetry at the Harbourfront Festival in February 1989, all expenses paid and a handsome fee to top it plus an assurance of book sales at the site of the reading during the entire highbrow week. All flesh is human, mine specially so; I prickled with pleasure and accepted the seduction.

Toronto is fiercely cold in winter-not a fit place out for man or beast. Poetry hath charms indeed to soothe the rajasika breast, but I doubt if it has heat enough to warm a thin-blooded bourgeois babu of Bengal when icy winds do blow up the bay in Toronto.

But, to get back to the Harbourfront 1989 engagement.. .. "In this Festival," explained the invitation letter, "the emphasis will be on the English-language poem and the contemporary poet." Among the invited were Josef Brodsky (now the very dedicated and determined Poet Laureate of the United States), Gwendolyn Brooks, Hayden Carruth, D.J. Enright, Carol Kizer, Karl Shapiro, Louis Simpson, Anne Stevenson, R.S. Thomas, Richard Wilbur, and Patricia Beer.

The week-long Festival was from February 6 till February II, my turn coming on February 9.

Canadians, I soon discovered, are great culture-fiends (which is very

different from ill-bred and show-off culture-vultures) and, wonder of wonders, avid book buyers. But the cold! The shrewdly slicing wind, the nipping and demonic air! I have been to Sioux Falls in South Dakota, to Holland on Lake Michigan, and to Seattle in the icy northwest in the height of the North American winter on different occasions, but an unheated Canadian warehouse on the Toronto bayside sets not just one's bones but one's very genes chattering. And what's a pathetic Nehru suit and a plain worsted overcoat against the ravaging chill that pierces through hapless East-of-Suez epidermis like an ice pick through sweet dahi? Huddle as I might, in addition to copious draughts of coffee and tea fortification, and neck and ear muffling, it did not help. By the end of the fourth evening, after I finished reading my poems which revolved on a half-hour theme that I called "An Experience of Calcutta," I had picked up a sniffle .... Nothing to worry about, though; or, indeed, to write or ring home about. I had an itinerary planned till the third week of February, and a little bit of home-grown yoga, coupled with total bed rest for the day, would, I calculated, spring me back into shape.

I had promises to keep.

To begin with, I had planned a series of talks to be given in Albion College. In his letter of 15 December 1988, Professor James Cook began: "Dear blood-brother Lal-ji [more about this blood-brother business later]: I'm sure my cable did not adequately convey my joy at learning of your trip to our part of the world. My eyes hunger after the sight of your distinguished self [James Cook is a master of the ironic put-down). We are planning great things for you for the week beginning February II, including a reading of your own poems (and some others if you wish), a talk to classes, a talk to a class in modern Indian history taught by one Minnie Sinha-a classmate of Ananda's at Illinois University-and other honorific occasions. Don't worry, though, I'll keep the schedule light so that you don't get worn out...."

What happened next happened so swiftly and so unexpectedly that I do not ha ve a clear recollection of the sequence of events. Vivid flashes of memory alternate with total blankness of mind. Time is all a jigsaw jumble from February 11 till February 24, 1989.

I do remember feeling feverish and very uncomfortable while boarding the flight from Toronto to Detroit. I remember the inexpressible surge of relief when I saw the familiar figure of my blood-brother Jim-ji right outside the airport disembarkation gate. Something between us had clicked over a quarter ofa century ago when I stayed in his house on 703 Irwin A venue, Albion, on one of my lecture tours.

Two staid academics had then vowed to become "blood-brothers," brothers under the skin, that is, true blue protectors, in the best cowboy buddy and boy scout style, of each other's well-being. Why "blood" -brother, I do not know, for, in accordance with Camelot and Rajput traditions, this nonconsanguineous knight-errantry bond was stronger than any provided by Rh factors. Shades of Amitabh and Dharmendra in Sholay!

"Lal-ji!" he exclaimed. "Welcome! But you're not looking your chipper self." ''I'm not well," I replied. "Thank God I'm home. A little rest and I'll be fine. How's Barbara? And the children?"

It's a good two-hour drive through February snow and slush from Detroit to the college small town of Albion, an idyllic oasis equidistant between Chicago and Detroit in south Michigan. I remember arriving tired and apprehensive if I would be fit to meet my speaking engagements in Albion College.

"No arguments," admonished Barbara. "You will have a glass of cold milk, and snuggle into bed right away. And take two Bufferin

tablets-and you'll be all sunny side up tomorrow morning."

I drank the milk, and swallowed the tablets. I was so exhausted that I hurriedly slipped into the pyjamas of my sleeping suit but slid into the warm bed with my polo neck shirt on without changing into the night shirt. The roll collar, I surmised, would provide additional warmth. I was shivering slightly.

I couldn't sleep.

Half an hour later, feeling queasy, I went to the bathroom. It came out like a torrent.

Horrified, I looked down.

The bowl of the commode was awash with bright red blood.

I rushed to the Cooks' bedroom, a few steps away from mine, on the first floor.

"Jim-ji," I said, ''I'm bleeding, blood-brother."

"Where?" he asked. "How?" In my terror, as if to hide the enormity of the truth, I had flushed the commode.

"It's my stomach," I said weakly. "A gush of blood."

"Not to worry," he said. "It's probably piles. Try this grandmother's remedy. Fill the bathtub with lukewarm water-more luke than warm-and sit in it. The bleeding will stop."

It wasn't piles.

Grandmother's remedy created a macabre Psycho scare.

The entire bathtub was a pool of blood.

It was then that Barbara Cook drove me posthaste to the Albion Community Hospital.

I remember being asked by someone to lie on a bed. I remember blood and other tests being done. Barbara saying, "A small emergency surgery will have to be performed." I smiling, agreeing. I am in the best of hands-the love and affection of the Cooks.

I

was operated on. A "Third World" ulcer was removed. (A Third World ulcer is a wicked fungal phenomenon that afflicts inhabitants of the less opulent areas of this globe. It is contained so long as it is confined to those areas, but has a tendency to flare up and assert itself in an antiseptic, apparently nonhostile environment such as that prevailing in the developed West and, who knows, the developed East as well, such as Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan.)

I was sewn up. I nourished a fever. The fever should have gone; instead, it raged fiercely, touching 105 degrees. Dr. Siddiqui, my surgeon, alarmed, contacted the Borgess Medical Center, a large, splendidly equipped sophisticated hospital in Kalamazoo, an hour's drive away.

It was touch and go. Every minute mattered. An ambulance was risky.

A hospital helicopter was arranged. My son Ananda in Calcutta had been rung up by James Cook and informed; he in turn phoned my wife, who was visiting our daughter Srimati in Delhi. He flew into the States on February 24 at 2 a.m. and stayed with the Cooks.

I recall only-and in a twilight limbo of semiconsciousness-the 15minute whirlybird flight. No pain; only a delicate, soft listlessness, like the tender tail-end of an afternoon siesta.

Like it's all over, the whole show.

Big deal. It had just begun.

Report by Dr. KalinolVsky of Borgess Medical Cenler. Reason for consultation: Azotemia.

"Name: Lal, P. Patient No. 309960-1. Room NCU N767-0. Admitted: 25 February 1989. His/ory of Present !/Iness: This patient is a 59-year-old Indian male, who resides in India. The patient was admitted to Borgess Medical Center

on 25 February 1989 after being transferred from Albion Hospital. He was admitted there on 20 February 1989 with a three-week history of flu-like symptoms, with fever, but began having bloody stools the day of admission to Albion. There in Albion he was taken to the operating room and was found to have a perforated duodenal ulcer. Therefore, vagotomy and pyloroplasty were performed.

The patient continued to have fevers, and was then transferred here on February 25."

So much for Azotemia which, in layman language, is "an excess of nitrogenous bodies in the blood as a result of kidney insufficiency associated with kidney disease or secondary to diseases in other organs." In still simpler language, kidney failure. Or, bluntly, I was poisoning myself. What happened?

What went wrong in Albion?

Report by Dr. Ross, Borgess Medical Center. Reason for consultation: Unexplained fevers.

Name: Lal, P. His/ory of Presel11 !/Iness: P. Lal is a 59-year old Indian male, Professor of English, poet, and translator [note how the clinical matter-of-fact medical practitioner is chary of giving me the grandiloquent sobriquet of "transcreator"], who was on a lecture tour around the world when he became ill in Toronto ....The patient continued on his tour and came to Albion, Michigan, where he developed symptoms in addition to fevers and chills ofhematochezia.

He saw a Dr. Siddiqui in Albion, and during Dr. Siddiqui's examination, projectile vomiting of boody vomitus occurred. The patient was admitted to hospital for laparotomy. On 21 February 1989, an exploratory laparotomy, ligation of bleeding duodenal ulcer, trunkal vagotomy and pyloroplasty were performed. Findings at surgery included the presences of pus around the first and second part of the duodenum. The duodenum was found to contain a bleeding gastric ulcer. which had involved the gastric duodenal artery. An abnormality was seen in the transverse colon as well and this was felt to represent scarring, associated with old colitis. The liver and gallbladder were found to be normal. The patient stayed in Albion Hospital from February 21 until February 25, when he was transferred to Borgess Medical Center. During that period of time, he continued to run fevers and to have white counts within the mid-20,000 range. A culture performed by Dr. Siddiqui of the exudate within the peritonial cavity grew only yeast on aerobic culture; aerobic data are not available."

Warmer and warmer.

"Presences of pus ...abnormality in the transverse colon ... white blood count in the mid-20,000 range .... " Gangrene.

My entire physical system was getting mucked up by pus, yeast, gangrene. The high, unremitting fever was my body's pitiful attempt at fighting one of the most venomous viruses known to man.

Gangrene means amputation. But I had already been "amputated" for duodenal ulcer.

A second amputation?

Another surgery? There was no choice.

Gangrene offers no option, no second thought.

All hell had broken loose. God's hand had reached out-"shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly"-as far as Kalamazoo in the deep American Mid-West. Hah! And what does God do, when His hand is outstretched thus? Look the other way? And by so doing, give the divine in man a chance to survive triumphantly the trial devised by Lucifer? What happens if the examinee is not sufficiently prepared?

God knows [wasn't prepared. Certainly not for the Pandora's box that descended on my head with such satanic fury. I wasn't insured, neither physically nor morally, nor financially, against the $400,000 bill slapped on me in the next four months. I was, in no way, "covered."

A

t

the Borgess Medical Center Dr. Collins performed an investigation by cutting open the stomach again. The entire intestinal tract from the chest down was found to be infested with Candida fungus, a deadly, large, white Third World worm. The colon, infected with gangrene, was removed; and an ileostomy created to serve the need of bowel evacuation.

But the bloodstream had already been poisoned, and infected liquid had entered the chest. Chest tubes were inserted to drain this fluid, as were J.P. Drains to remove fluid in a dangerously distended stomach.

Since the entire bloodstream was getting contaminated with two species of deadly bacteria (ascariasis and pseudomonas), the attending physicians warned my wife, who arrived in Kalamazoo on March I, "You know, Mrs. Lal, you had better be prepared."

Bacteria had started emerging from under the skin to the top of my epidermis.

The blood-bacteria, sepsis and fast-spreading gangrene proliferated because of the trauma following the two surgical operations. The blood pressure fell perilously low, requiring drug support.

The feet swelled, the urea increased, the stomach bloated horrendously, urine production ceased, internal bleeding became hard to control ....

I was breaking apart. My component parts were beginning to perish.

It's the Dominoes Principle.

To stop the gangrene from spreading, you prescribe Amphotericin, a potent antibiotic.

Amphotericin knocks out the gangrene. Fine. It also debilitates and slowly destroys the kidney. I got 1000 mg. of Amphotericin. "What do you want?" they asked my wife. "His life or his kidney?"

Then the liver is affected.

And the pancreas. On March 15 total renal failure began. Blood pressure falls, the immuno-defense system weakens, the lungs get congested.

You need drugs to keep the pressure up, you need dialysis every other day to clean your blood, you need a ventilating machine to breathe with (for the tracheostomy), you need daily shots of insulin to bolster your sugar deficiency .... You can't move, because you are strapped to half-a-dozen blinking, sneezing, whirring, chortling, gurgling, wheezing, coughing, whistling, warning hunks of high tech that monitor every gesture, conscious, unconscious and subconscious, of the human vegetable that exists without living, thinks without acting, breathes without feeling, expects without hoping.

You are-well, the word is "hooked."

From March 4 to March 30 I am "critical." The Twilight Zone. The Near Death Experience (NDE).

An NDE can happen in many ways, of course, but the commonest cause is trauma terror. Proliferating bacterial infection convulses the system with seismic waves of such intensity that the battered body wilts, bends, twists, breaks.

"Any significant disruption in the body's immune system--eaused, for instance, by severe burns, chemotherapy, or major abdominal surgery-allows rod-shaped bacteria to multiply out of control and invade other parts of the body, eventually entering the bloodstream.

Once there, one part of the bacterial cell wall called endotoxin can trigger a cascade of lethal effects, culminating in multiple organ failure and death, sometimes within hours."

Thus Time magazine reporting on medicine in its issue of 20 February 1991.

Weirdly enough, these "gram-negative" bacteria-so called because they do not retain a laboratory stain devised by the Danish bacteriologist Christian Gram-are normally harmless. In fact, they snuggle "on the skin and in the gut" and they aid in digestion.

But give the body a strong enough jolt, and they go haywire.

Gram-negative bacteria are directly responsible for as many as 100,000 deaths each year in America alone. I could have been the 100,00 Ist in 1989.

So, as I explained earlier, they hooked me on to that miraclemonster. They also drilled a hole in my larynx and hooked me to a "ventilator."

They pulled an intestine out of the right side of my stomach, and hooked me to an ileostomy. They plugged three tubes daily into my veins and squirted three colored liquids intravenouslyimagine, having a choice of green hors d'oeuvre, blue entree, and red dessert-and so hooked me to machine-fed liquid sustenance. They blood every tied me to a dialysis gizmo to cleanse my bacteria-botched other day.

No problem, they said. You won't feel any pain. Relax. It's dolce for niente. Sweet doing nothing. Like lolling on the Puri sea beach.

They were dead right. There was no pain. No pain, ever.

It was heavenly, being so thoroughly cared for.

Celestial, this spineless moksha of pain-less tranquillity, this supreme solicitude, this lotus-eating intravenous obliviana.

No problem.

They hung a 21-inch color TV in front of my bed. I could watch the world flash by on CBS, ABC, and BC networks. I could watch stupid movies and stupider sitcoms. I had a choice of Laurence Welk and the Hee-Haw Show (no Steve Allen-that was in the intellectual I960s).

There's a lot less varied TV fare in the mid-West than in the hectic, hedonist 12-channeled East.

No problem, Professor Lal. Get hooked on TV. I did have three problems, though.

One: With around a hundred bottles of blood pumped into me, I was beginning to wonder who I was. A Hindu? Or a comic-strip world mutant? An ethnic dilemma.

Two: I was losing all sense of time. The only way to tell time was passing was to watch TV-for instance, on Sunday the box had an endless inane stream of pious pep-talk preachers and an equally unending cavalcade of rambunctious baseball and hep football (American). If heaven was this kind of drifting, dreamy datelessness, I didn't want heaven, no, thank you.

Three: I was beginning to love my drugs. I was getting gooey on Amphotericin and a plethora of other pills which I had to take every day. I didn't want the dateless TV heaven, but I was beginning to cherish my passivity, my serenity, my uselessness, my anonymous nirvana, and all the fussing and massaging and changing and smiling that a battalion of doctors, nurses, and visitors were showering on me. It was one helluva heaven to be in.

And why not? It was a Near Death Experience, wasn't it?

D

ying is a very living subject in America. There are college and university courses devoted to death and dying. A popular academic text is an anthology of essays on the nature and experience of death, each chapter opening with an appropriate quotation from Rabindranath, who, while very much attached to the joys of living, was simultaneously half in love with easeful nonexistence.

The twin-faced bonding of life and death, as if they were inseparable, obsessed him and triggered some of his most insightful songs.

There's sorrow there's death -separation-fireStill there's ananda there's shanti -ever-awake eternity ..

Every time I light a hope Every time you snuff it out ..

"Sorrow/shanti," "death/waking," "light a hope/snuff it ouL. .. " You are tempted to ask, "Gurudev, whose side are you on anyway?"

Life's or Death's?

Why not say, as Jean Giraudoux does in The Enchanted, "Death holds no horrors. It is simply the ultimate horror of life."

Or Seneca, in The Trojan Women: "There is nothing after death, and death itself is nothing."

Or Samuel Butler, in his Note-Books, published in 1912, ten years after his death: "To die completely, a man must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead."

Epicurus, in his letter to Menoeceus: "Death, the most dreaded of evils, is therefore of no concern to us: for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist."

Turgenev, On the Eve: "Death is like a fisherman who catches fish in his net and leaves them for a while in the water: The fish is still swimming but the net is around him, and the fisherman will draw him up-when he thinks fit."

T

hat's very sensible no-nonsense. But, taking Gurudev's side, one can argue: Life makes sense, and, up to a point, Death makes sense too. So you have to have both with you; you must offend neither. Don't take sides.

But what is this in-between Trishanku state called the Near Death Experience? Are you dead, or are you not? On what authority do you dare to describe death unless you are really, truly, and finally kaput?

Take the case of the broadcaster Michael Bentine, felled with an illness that "killed" him: He recalls the experience vividly. "There is no mistaking agony. It was 'Oh Christ, I've died!'-and I had, according to the doctors. There was the darkness of the Tunnel, but I had no vertigo when I pulled back from the light." When he opened his eyes he found a Roman Catholic priest and an Anglican priest "debating ownership of his soul" and he greeted them with: "Piss off! I'm alive!

After all, when you've seen the glory, you don't want to deal with the underlings."

A recent American film, The Flatliners, is about a group of young rebel doctors who are persuaded to glimpse the after-life and play God with their own destinies. The flat line on the normally undulating heart monitor in a hospital stands for death. The young doctors "kill" themselves with lethal injections; they revive each other, and describe their NDE. [an Wilson, in his book The Ajier Death Experience, has documented the versions of adults and young children--even seven-year olds, declared clinically dead but who survived. There are many common threads in their recollections: A feeling of floating above the body; disembodied listening from high up to the words of the doctors and nurses attending to them; whooshing through a dark tunnel and suddenly emerging on a celestial, peaceful light which bathes the faces of loved dead friends and relatives. And, after the return to life, there is no more any fear of death, no morbid or macabre curiosity about it; only a profound feeling of thanksgiving and a renewed passion to

live richly and deeply and beautifully.

When did I "die"? On Monday, 21 March 1989; indeed, I was in deathlike limbo, after the second surgery and commencement of kidney failure, till March 30.

Ironically, part of the reason for my "death" was surely the large doses of hard-core drugs that had to be administered to keep me alive. (That makes for a very discussable paradox, I think.)

I was being doped, stupefied into submission by a disciplined phalanx of attractively colored pills, jabbed and injected on the left (my left arm and thigh were smarting pincushions of insulin infiltration), drained and depleted on the right (ileostomy pouch and urine catheter tube).

One sweet smiling nurse after another would come morning and evening, with the insulin hypodermic.

"Picky-poke, Dr. La!!" And a swift jab in my thigh.

Another nurse would bring a trayful of pills, like a houri offering shining gems .... "One now ... this three hours later ... this in the afternoon .... " Then the dialysis machine, the blood-regurgitating Gangaganglion ....

The ventilator, which took over the work of my exhausted and collapsed lungs ....

There were only two things in the world I really had any talent for and could do reasonably well-talk and write.

I was reduced now to a total sunyata silence, or making animal noises and gestures. Writing? I could wriggle a pencil or a ballpoint pen and, with agonizing slow-motion and freeze-frame effort, inscribe two or three indecipherable words on a pad placed below the ventilator's tubes on my chest, taking special care to see it did not rub against the dialysis subclavial vent near my upper left shoulder.

The horror struck on the morning of the 19th of March. I was halfawake, in a state of drugged somnolence.

I open my eyes and see four unknown faces, white Caucasian males, in hospital attire, take up positions around my bed.

Without saying a word, they lift me and place me on a wheeled stretcher.

Outside my room, they are joined by two young nurses, pinkcheeked and blonde-haired.

Without warning, they start running, propelling the stretcher, with me on it, through the hospital corridors ... through strange rooms ... through more and more corridors ... more unfamiliar rooms ... rooms I have never seen ... rooms that shine with a grim, blank, white, silent, engulfing emptiness ....

And they are not ',Valking ... they are in a tearing hurry ... they are running ... they really are ... sprinting ... nonstop ....

Why? Why? Where are they rolling me?

I am terrified.

Am I dead? Are they going to bury me?

It's a nightmare straight out of Kafka and Ingmar Bergman and the Twenty-five Tales of a Vampire.

Oh my God! I am dead!

Where is my wife? Where is my son Ananda? Where did they disappear?

Where are my doctors? Dr. Ahmad? Dr. Riley? Dr. Park? Dr. Collins? Dr. Ross?

Where are my nurses? Jewel and Joy and Sherry and Hannah and Lauralee and Ken and David?

Where are these strange people taking me?

And then, the worst happened .... They stopped in front of the elevator. They pressed the bell. The doors opened. They wheeled me in.

I am now convinced. Lying supine, I see the red digitals blinking balefully above the elevator door. ..7 ... 6 ... 5.. .4 ....

We are going down. I'm dead. It's the underworld. They are going to bury me outside. Or cremate me. I don't know. They are in a hurry.

I open my mouth in a silent scream. No one listens.

I raise my hands. I flail at the roll-away stretcher's sides. I hit out at the white sheet covering me. 1 thump my clenched fists on the aluminum railing of the stretcher.

Suddenly they stop. One of the pretty nurses looks down at me, smiling, but worried.

"It's all right, Dr. Lal," she says gently. "Just a routine examination.

Relax. Take it easy."

No! No! I scream, silently. I want to ask: Who are you? 1 don't trust you. I've never seen you before.

1 beat my fists in desperation.

1 stare at her angrily.

No! No! She turns to one of the males in white. "I think he wants to say something. Get paper and pen."

I'm handed a Borgess letter pad and a pen.

1 write laboriously: "W-I-F-E. S-O-N." In block capitals. I cannot write a running hand.

"Where's his wife and son?" she asks. "Are they here? Find them.

He's all tense and tired. Poor guy."

1 wait. They leave, all six of them. Oh my God! No one will ever find me here, in this remote room, where I'm all by myself, in the middle of the sanitized Borgess wilderness. Abandoned. Marooned.

They've given me up. I'm dead, and I'll rot here. No one will ever know.

I pass through an eternity of numb, mounting terror. If those 15 minutes could be such an aeon of agony, what must the eternal Christian consignment to hell feel like? No wonder Hinduism doesn't have a permanent hell.

My wife and son are in the Borgess Center cafeteria on the ground floor, skimpily choosing for their daily $2 brunch. (Money was very, very tight. One of the major worries was who was going to pay, and how, for the astronomical hospital expenses, averaging more than $2,000 a day.)

"Mrs. Lal, hurry! Your husband wants you."

She pacifies me, this petite, five-feet-one lady to whom 1 proposed in 1955 because she was, I felt, gentle, sweet, undemanding, pliant and graceful, frail and sensitive, and unobtrusively intelligent in the way the Indian tradition expects women to be. (And an egregious punstress to boot!) How was I to know that in a fearful crisis she would be like Savitri with Satya van-strong and bright and straighter and more stubbornly assuring than even the I,OOO-year-old nonrusting steel pillar they excavated from the ruins ofKonarka and planted in front of the Jagannatha Temple in Puri?

She looks at me with a dignified smile.

"Nothing is the matter," she says patiently. "They want a nuclear scan done. There's no danger. I'll be outside the room. Be calm. It's a routine check."

She takes my left hand in her small right hand, a generous gesture for a conspicuously undemonstrative person.

I indicate that I want a pad and pencil.

1 write slowly, forming each letter as legibly as my febrile spasmodic energy allows: "I A-M S-O-R-R-Y, D-O-C." 1 am wheeled into the nuclear scan lab.

A nuclear scan contrivance is an enormous amphitheatrical structure that presses on you with the finality of a womb or a tomb. It does not touch you; it rests a quarter of an inch away from your nose, like a coffin lid closing. A relentless dome of stainless steel, staining the white radiance of eternity. Brahmanda: the Cosmic Energy Egg of the Divine Creator.

1do not want to recall that experience. I do not know how long I was kept under that funereal, foetal device. I closed my eyes, and shut out the truth.

I see now why all the great religions say: Look within.

Humankind cannot bear too much reality.

T

he next day: March 20, morning.

I am back in my room on the seventh floor, strapped to the chittering and chortling and cheering life-saving contrapbut there's no harm in tions. (The correct term is "life-supporting," being humble and gracious: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has shown how machines respond positively if proper respect is given them.)

A family meeting is in progress. The agenda: me.

In a semicircle, around my bed, beginning from my left, are: Jim Cook, Barbara Cook, my wife Shyamasree Devi, my son Ananda.

"All's O.K." "The scan went off well," says my blood-brother.

(That's what he says/) Barbara smiles. The sweetness of her smile fills the room.

Ananda is quiet. He doesn't speak much anyway.

"You're on the mend, Lal-ji," assures Jim Cook.

(That's what you think/) "I have work to db," he adds. "So does Barbara. We have to be back in Albion. We'll come and see you as often as we can."

(They're leaving me') I gesture for paper and pen. I have made up my mind.

"Ananda's been here a month now, staying with us in Albion," adds Jim-ji. "He has to return to Calcutta."

Barbara smiles. The compassion in her smile fills the room.

I write: "N-O." Then they look at They look at the near-illegible monosyllable. each other.

"No what, Lal-ji?" he asks.

I write again: "N-O." "You don't want us to go? I mean, you want us to stay?"

1 write: "Y-E-S." They look at each other, perplexed.

"Who?" asks Jim-ji.

I point the pen at him; at Barbara; at Shyamasree; at Ananda.

They can't believe it.

"Write it down, Lal-ji."

I write: "JIM. BABS. WIFE. SON." And under each name: "STAY." This is my family, isn't it? He is my blood-brother, no? And that makes Barbara a blood-sister, yes?

He's now looking a little worried. And hurt. I'm driving him, and them, round the bend.

"Lal-ji. I have to teach. I have work to do. O.K. I promise I'll come once a day. Not Barbara. She ... " I lift the pen, and swiftly jab "STAY." "But, you see ... " 1jab again at "STAY." "He's made up his mind," he informs the others. "I know him."

(Jim~ii was once a Methodist chaplain. He should know the meaning of "1(0 man ask to go with him one mile, go with him twain." And I'm his blood-brother') Ananda has a blank, stark look.

"Say that again, Lal-ji."

Once again, I jab swiftly and, this time, viciously at four "STA YS" under the four names.

"All right," he says. "I'll do what I can."

He looks at me, pointing to Ananda.

"Ananda has to leave. The doctors say it's all right. His presence isn't essential. Kisha will be here. Don't force him."

I jab at "STAY" under "SON." My wife comes up and stands near me. ''I'm not going," she says. "I'll be here night and day. They're letting me sleep on the couch here some nights. Let him go."

I stare at her.

"It's important. He has to go back. There's no one to look after our house in Lake Gardens. Swati needs him. Shuktara needs him. We have a home that needs him."

(Ananda had his schooling in St. Xavier's as 1 did. "A man shall leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife. ") I speak to Shyamasree with my eyes.

1 do not jab "STAY" this time. I do not write "G-O" either.

On the 2 Ist of March 1989 James Cook drove my wife and Ananda to Lansing, a small airfield that feeds major flights out of Chicago.

Ananda's flight left around 7 a.m., after which Jim-ji brought my wife to the Borgess Medical Center.

As soon as they approached the Reception Desk, the girl on duty said, "Mrs. Lal, hurry! Your husband's bad."

The medical report ("For Professional Use Only-Do Not Remove From the Hospital") says my kidneys had failed and I had developed a "heart murmur."

My wife says I was the ghastliest sight she had ever seen in her life.

She rushed to my side. I was shaking convulsively, my eyes, lips, nose twitching monstrously, mechanically. My complexion was pitch black. My stomach was distended like a gas dirigible.

Lauralee was adjusting my vigilant bodyguards, the life-supporting monitors.

Shyamasree ran her hand over my sweating brow. Tears rained down her cheeks.

With one hand fiddling the monitor controls, Lauralee caressed my wife's head with the other.

Dr. Park, a specialist from Korea, who had taken charge, hovered round like a benign sanguine Buddha, soothing and reassuring. He kept asking Shyamasree, "Does he relate? Does he relate?" She looked at him blankly. What did he mean? He was asking if I could recognize my brain. her. I cou.ldn't. He feared the poison had contaminated That's what I learnt later. As far as I was concerned, I had "died," and I was dead till the 30th of March.

I know nothing, I remember nothing of the time slot between March 21 and March 30,1989.

There is of course the Hospital Report which mentions a "heart murmur" on March 21, and gastrointestinal bleeding on March 23. In

the report, which was prepared very carefully by Dr. Iftiker Ahmad, he adds that on March 23 "an esophagogastroduodenoscopy was snaky tube was performed," which means that flexible camera-topped inserted through my gullet to enable the doctors to get an overview of the condition of my infected insides.

It was-bad. "The patient continued to have persistent temperature and a high leukocytosis."

The report continues: "On March 24 his white blood count was 22,800. His maximum temperature was 103 F. "On March 25 it was noted that he had a rising bilirubin, SGPT and GGT alkaline phosphatese .... The patient had, throughout the course of hospitalization, a significant amount of blood loss, and had required numerous amount of blood transfusions .... [IOO bottles!]

"On 29 the patient became hypotensive; he responded, however, to fluids and treatment with Dopamine.

"On March 30, chest X-ray revealed significantly large cardiac shadow .... Computed tomography of the chest also revealed increased pericardial effusion, as well as a small collection of fluids adjacent to the candate lobe of the liver."

That's facts. Medical gobbledygook. The truth?

My body was in Borgess: my psyche was elsewhere. Where?

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conclave of caring people gets together to decide what must now be done. Jim Cook, Fr. Ralph D'Cruz, Ken Lamphear, my wife, Dr. Iftiker Ahmad, and Nandini Nopany. ¡She suggests I be immediately flown to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, in next-door Minnesota; Dr. Ahmad says there is no objection from him or his department, but indicates the possible danger of a new, totally unfamiliar environment. Jim Cook and Fr. D'Cruz leave the decision to my wife. She puts her gentle foot down. "He will stay here, with friends and doctors he knows."

It is brief. A blurred day, that's all. As they say, is it for real?

Who is it happening to? It is not happening to me, because I am elsewhere. The strapped felon, the grinning Clown, the lady in red are chimera. .

And then, back to the pills, the Dopamine, the willed unwilling acceptance of a cabbagy existence ....

Soon it will be April. April, with its sweet showers that pierce the drought of March to the root...April which can be a very cruel month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain ... April the season of Easter, of death diminished and destroyed by resurrection .... (I am in a Catholic hospital; there are large crucifixes in every corridor.) April, the 1st of Vaisakha, the Bengali New Year, the season of bursting pods of flaming krishnachura, buttery and bright yellow radhachura and . aromatic tuberoses and white-jewel jasmines ....

But not for me. I have decided to give up. Unconditionally.

Into Thy hands ....

I mean, how does it matter? Let them come, let them go. When have they ever stopped coming and going? How does it affect me?

I am free.

They stand around a crushed crab and smile and make clucking noises of sympathy and whisper words of concern and consolation and look respectably hurt and shocked, and after that they go about their daily busyness for there is a lot of humdrum business to be done and who else to do it but they, and so they leave you behind-regretfully, shruggingly, reluctantly, tearfully-but they leave you because, why not face the truth, you are after all a drag and, come to think of it, you are quite, quite dispensable and the world can carryon very well

without you, better, in fact, thank you, if you really want to know the truth, which you don't of course, but how long will you, can you, must you cocoon yourself from things as they really are, from the world as it really is, from people as their gunas of satlva-rajas-tamas have really meshed them?

There's a nine-line telegraphic poem by Kamala Das, "A Request," in a volume of hers called The Descendants which I published in 1967 which sums up in 37 syllables, all of them singly terse except one: When I die Do not throw the meat and bones away But pile them up And let them tell By their smell What life was worth On this earth What love was worth In the end.

My wife remembers, after the major second surgery in Kalamazoo and the commencement of the life-saving drug Amphotericin, one of the doctors saying, "The real trouble starts now. He'll start accepting and looking forward to his drugs. Everything will become sweet, painless and passive. He'll lose the will to live. We've done all we could.

The rest is in his hands. In his mind."

Look at my bloody helplessness.

The Intensive Care Unit of the Borgess Medical Center is located at 1521 Gull Road, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 49001, USA. I am in a room on the 7th floor. Every day, Sundays and holidays included, I am looked after, 24 hours a day, by a small army of dedicated nurses: 7 a.m.-3:30 p.m. (At the Desk) Gloria Mejeur: A Mother Mary figure, the Matron in charge Amy Glesson Terry /rmen Sandy Peek Nurses at Life-Supporting Machines Mary Logan Jill Reynolds 7 a.m.-7:30 p.m.

Tom Barroll'.¡ Black-haired, dark-eyed, affable Mila Beck Jennifer BrO\rn: "Yep, what can I do for you?"-brisk and cheerful Joy Hannah: Lovable, worldmotherly Sherry Gallaugher Rorce Heflin: Jovial, blonde, svelte, surgery nurse Ken Lamphear Louise Langll'ortln' Sue Louis Darlene McNabb

Lauralee Neal: Petite, blonde, sweet, fantastically efficient and sensitive 3 p.m.-11:30 p.m.

Lori Deisch David Hudson: Shy, strong, hillbiliy-gentle, exquisite masseur Rachel Hughes: Worked in Middle East with Red Crescent Pauline Rocha Louise Wegner 7 p.m.-7:30 a.m.

Jamie Cree: Soft-spoken, flowery, saint-like Maryann Dark Carole Dolores Zelma Hall Je.rel Lammers Cindy Miller 11 p.m.-7:30 a.m.

Connie Keene Ken Leene: Dandy, smiling, great one with the girls Kim Luke Dolores Rawlings

There are doctors too, surgeons, specialists, absolute ustads in their knowledge of specific bodily organs and how to correct physical malfunctioning--eight wondrous people, all focusing their healing skills to the troubled, tortured, cadaverous mass of protoplasm that I have become.

What a marvelous country the United States of America is. Come to me, you homeless and destitute and distressed-and, let's add, ill and diseased. What passion is devoted here to the task of saving life! What respect for the sanctity, the preciousness of the single human being! They've enshrined their dedication in the Constitution itself: "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness .... " Life first; then Liberty; then, assuming that Liberty will be used wisely, Happiness. A large assumption. Liberty, after all, is Liberty; one is free to choose wrong, and the pursuit of happiness can go awry; there is always, of course, the freedom to self-correct along with the freedom to selfdestruct. You pays your money and you takes your choice; aint freedom grand?

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t'sthe night of March 30. How late I do not know. I have lost almost all coordinates for the passage of time. Punctiliousness and exactitude are for the living; the dead and semi-dead slumber in the embrace of eternity.

I think I am sleeping.

I hear a soft voice.

Am I dreaming?

There is a shape near my bed. A human shape. Kneeling on my left.

It is the night nurse Jewel. Jewel Lammers.

Her eyes are closed. Her palms are clasped tight in supplication.

She is praying.

I am not dreaming.

She is saying: "Dear God, this man is a stranger. He has come from a far land. He is alone and helpless. Help him. Save him, God. If you help him, I will make a pact with you. Tell me what you want me to do, God, and I will do it. But save him."

Jewel's eyes are closed. In the dim night light I see tears trickling down her cheeks.

She thinks I am sleeping.

She rises, looks at me, and leaves quietly.

I feel a slight shiver.

Who is she to me; or I to her, that she should pray for me?

What have I done for her that she should care for me?

What can I possibly do for her that she should feel for me?

In what way am I special for her, precious to her?

She is not related by blood to me. She is not my friend. I hardly know her, except as a gentle, efficient, smiling, lovely nurse.

Why is she ready to sacrifice anything at all for me?

I feel tears coming to my eyes.

All right, then. If a stranger has so much faith in me, what right have I to lose faith in myself? .

She is not even the same religion as me.

What possible interest can she have in me?

She is not a missionary. She is not after my soul.

In a flash it comes to me. All that I have been spouting in my lectures about the moral dynamics ofindian culture is embodied in this simple, feeling girl.

She has gone beyond the trammels of the good act, which brings a selfish heaven, and the bad act, which brings a selfish hell, and the absurd act, which brings a selfish nothingness. She's licked Karma.

She has done the pure act-the act of complete compassion. "The Pure Act" was the title of our talks I gave in Albion College during my four-month tenure there as Prentiss Brown Professor in 1973.

Dear God, I don't know if you will listen to her, but I am not going to disappoint her.

I am going to live, because this Jewel of a girl wants me to live.

Medical Report: "On April I, the patient underwent a pericardiocentesis without difficulty by Dr. Azevedo. No evidence of any bacterial contamination of the pericardial fluid was noticed ....

"On April 3, it was felt that the patient had adequate trial of antibiotics, and therefore they were all discontinued, except for Amphotericin. The patient's white blood count decreased to 8,400. The patient remained afebrile.

"On April 7, attempts were made to wean the patient off the ventilator for the first time, which were successful for two hours. [The first words I spoke were addressed to my wife: Kmon Acho, Kisha Devi?} "On April 10, with gradual advancement the patient remained off the vent for about eight hours."

And then, victory! Death, where is thy sting?

"On April 12, Amphotericin was discontinued, as were Ceftazidime and Flagyl. The patient continued to be afebrile, with a white blood count in the normal range. Intensive physical therapy was initiated. The tracheostomy was plugged on and the patient tolerated spontaneous respiration well. Sutures from the tracheostomy as well as retention sutures of previous exploratory laparotomy were removed. The patient was eventually found to have good spontaneous respiratory support.. ..The patient remained afebrile, and was discharged on 5 May 1989, to return every other day for hemodialysis ....

Condition on discharge: Stable."

On April 14, my wife's birthday, and the Bengali New Year, with Yama at bay, she splurges. She festoons the room with colored paper, tapes a plethora of Get Well (Got Well!) cards on the window plate glass, writes in bold letters Suvo Nababarsha and distributes 40 slices of chocolate cake to doctors, nurses, and other hospital workers-and to a beaming Dr. Ahmad who, being a Bangladeshi, is sentimentally overwhelmed and bursts into Bengali beatitudes and hosannas.

On April 27 I am shifted from the Neurological Care Unit to a "normal" room (No. 385) and I stay there, practicing a crash course of intense physical therapy till the date of my discharge.

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ischarge. But where? I still need dialysis every other day.

James Cook in Albion is an hour's drive away. Too . unpractical.

My wife and I become recipients of an unprecedented avalanche of kindness and hospitality

by NRI Good Samaritans-the Indian Association of Kalamazoo-too many to name here individually, and each family more wonderful and helpful than the other.

Shyamasree had taken a British Airways flight from Bombay to Chicago on February 27 and she arrived at the Borgess Medical Center at dead of night on March I. Purely by chance, the Secretary of the Indian Association, having heard of my surgery over the local radio, happened to be there to enquire about the Kalamazoo calamity that had overtaken Professor Lal, a fellow Indian.

Seeing my wife, forlorn, with $15 on her and just one overnight bag and no other item of luggage-there was no time to pack, and who wants to pack in an emergency anyway-he said: "Madam, you will stay with us."

Which she did, from March 22, the critical D Day + I of my illness.

And with a dozen other families, for two of the three months she was there, each family vying to have her as guest, each family driving her to and from their home to the Borgess Medical Center, lavishing care and love and money on her. All Gujaratis.

So it was natural that we moved into a Gujarati-owned motel during

the period of my convalescence: Room 128 of the University Inn. It was run by a young couple, the Patils, who made it a truly cozy home for us, with microwave oven and color TV and videocassette player, cooking and cleaning and fussing with a sweet civility that comes so easily to well-bred Indians, until the day of our departure, May 24, by British Airways Flight 124 from Detroit to London, connecting with BA Flight 145 London-Bombay on May 25.

After a three-hour dialysis the morning of May 24, I returned to my motel and, propped in a wheelchair, watched James Cook help my wife pack. He and Father Ralph D'Cruz drove us to the airport in Detroit, two-and-a-half hours to the east.

Father D'Cruz! The slim, tennis-playing chaplain of St. Mary's Catholic Church, attached to Borgess. A gracious, handsome Keralite, he had spent more than 20 years in the States. Forgive me, Father.

When you first came to my ICC room and stood there, looking at me prayerfully, with folded palms, I must confess that I misunderstood, I suspected your motives. Later you became an utterly indispensable friend and confidant, an unbelievably unselfish, totally helpful and trusted escort of my wife, a pillar of spiritual strength to me, till I began to wonder how it was possible for such deep intimacy to grow between two strangers from two religions. You drafted the appeal for monetary assistance which appeared in many American papers, including The New York Review of Books. Ifever I have met a practicing humanist, in the best connotation of that much abused title, it is you. You have now returned to India for good, to care for and rehabilitate drug addicts in the south. It is no wonder that Christianity spreads, with sacrificing gentlemen and humble devotees of the caliber of Fr. D'Cruz around.

Your solicitude, complete and casual, your munificent gift of your time, your heart, and the little much your purse could afford, saw my wife and my life through the dark days of my hospitalization.

An uncanonized saint. Thank you, Father; I offer you my pranams. My total respects. Your rewards are elsewhere: "Insofar as ye do it to the least of your brethren, ye do it to Me." Not that you ever looked for any rewards. But bread cast on such waters has a tendency to return in largesse after many days. We are all gathering treasures, one way or another. I treasure you.

I land in Bombay on May 26 at 11:55 a.m. I am in a wheelchair.

There is no customs check: No delay whatsoever. From wheelchair to stretcher, I am sped by a waiting ambulance to the Bombay Hospital. I am investigated. Everything stable. The doctors are bewildered. I am kept under observation for ten days. Tests done, consultations made, opinions provided. I am stable. Dr. Kripalani says, "It cannot be. It's a miracle. But we can't afford to take risks. Let's give him a dialysis anyway." I am given my last dialysis on June 5.

On 6 June 1989 my wife and I return to Calcutta.

Eighty-three kilograms when I landed in Toronto earlier, I am now a skin-and-bones 50. But alive!

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P. Lal is founder-director of Writers Workshop, Calcutta. He is an honorary professor of English at the University of Calcutta and at St. Xavkrs College, and has lectured on Indian literature at more than 100 American colleges and universities.

Raising a glass of alcohol is one of mankind's most distinctive rituals. Yet alcohol can also exert nearly satanic power. It ruins lives, destroys families, and kills thousands on the road.

THE LEGAL DRUG First the man takes a drink Then the drink takes a drink Then the drink takes the man.

-JAPANESE

PROVERB

I was maybe nine, sitting in my grandfather's house truck beneath a hissing Coleman lantern with him and his hunting companion somewhere in the dusty Sonora desert in southwest America. We had had a hot day chasing quail (I was the bird dog), and now at dusk the loving cup was making the rounds: An empty tin of Bishop's Hard Candy refilled with 100-proof Golden Wedding Whiskey and 7-Up glistening over big chunks of clear ice.

The kid was allowed a few sips. It was sweet going down, and the sips became gulps. "Hey," my grandfather said, "take it easy."

I went outside, and the stars were doing flat spins in the Mexican sky.

An aversion to the whirlies in no way prevented me in college from trying all the robust permutations of dumb drinking, and eventually I settled down with a lawn mower and azalea fertilizer-a sociable man, a social drinker not longing for replays of the Stupid Period.

Why I drink, why anyone does, gets at why alcohol has pervaded human society from the beginning. It is an intoxicating drug that has carried amity and an altered state to an awkward, lonely, and inquiring species. Passing my grandfather's loving cup lacked the religious symbolism of Communion; nonetheless it was for me a profound communion.

Yet the "temperance" cultures of North America and northern Europe tend to be ambivalent toward, if not polarized by, alcohol. So much so that the "war" on drugs-attacking inquiry into one cocaine, heroin, and other contraband-omits of the most prevalent drugs in the world.

And a respected expert on addiction, after telling me why it is so important to identify early the 20 percent of drinkers who can potentially become the five percent whose lives are shattered by addiction to alcohol, leans over a beer and says, "Don't quote me, but for maybe 80 percent of the population, About the Author: Boyd Gibbons is a senior staff writer with the National Geographic magazine.

alcohol is relatively innocuous."

If most who drink alcohol enjoy its considerable pleasures with few difficulties, many others cross the line-and those who do will deny it furiously. That is the paradox of alcohol.

Ethanol (the alcohol that's drunk) and carbon dioxide are the natural excreta of yeasts consuming-fermentingsugar. Sugar is in fruit, grains, sap, nectar, in all plants. Yeasts are ubiquitous. The Babylonians and Egyptians found that if they crushed grapes or warmed and moistened grain, the covered mush would bubble and become a drink with a kick.

Louis Pasteur discovered that yeasts are single-cell, living fungi and that fermentation is their act of survival. Yeasts can't get at grain directly until brewers first "malt" their barley-that is, moisten and warm it so that it germinates just enough to release enzymes that convert starches into simple sugars.

As alcohol is a toxin, fermentation is self-limiting. Once alcohol concentration reaches about 14 percent, or the sugar runs out, the multiplying yeasts die and fermentation ends. A stronger drink requires distillation.

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he origins of distillation are obscure. The Arabs get credit not so much for the process, but for the word. AIkohl is Arabic for finely ground antimony used as eyeliner, and it came to mean any exotic essence.

So far as is documented, alcohol was first distilled in the Middle Ages, at a medical school in Salerno, Italy. Considered an important medicine, wine was boiled and the vapors then cooled and condensed to produce a more powerfully concentrated drug. A Spanish scholar gave this ragged brandy the name aqua vitae, the water of life.

Distilled alcohol evolved in Russia as vodka, in Holland as juniper-flavored jenever (the French called it genievre, which the British blunted to gin), and passed through charred barrels, peat smoke, and across the Irish Gaelic tongue as uisce beatha, or whiskey.

There are all sorts of alcohols. Methanol, originally made from wood, now mostly from methane, is converted into formaldehyde, and from that into plastics. If drunk, methanol

swells the optic nerve, causing blindness. Ethylene glycol is the alcohol used as antifreeze. Isopropanol is rubbing alcohol.

There is alcohol in rose and geranium oils, in fruits, berries, red seaweed. Traces of ethanol turn up in orange and tomato juice. It is used in gasohol in the Midwest and, mixed or pure, as a fuel in Brazil. Its low freezing point (minus 117 degrees Celsius) makes it useful for certain thermometers, and it once was common in compasses-that is, when the sailors weren't drinking it.

Ethanol is a solvent. It is used in lacquers, varnishes, and stains. To make fragrances and flavors, it pulls jasmine from the flower and vanilla from the bean. When you put Chloe behind your ear, it is ethanol that makes it miscible in the bottle and floats it to your nose.

I clean the capstans of my tape deck with "denatured" ethanol. That's a euphemism for poisoning ethanol with something like methanol so I won't divert it to a Tom Collins, and to spare the manufacturer an excise tax. he first neolithic buzz remains unrecorded. But Solomon Katz, an anthropologist at the University of Penn sylvania, has a persuasive theory that alcohol may have been responsible for the earliest agriculture-to secure a dependable supply of beer.

Beer was easy to make, a good deal tastier than gruel, and far more nutritious. And like wine-which pushed the cultivated grape from Mesopotamia and into Egypt, and eventually throughout the temperate world-beer had a delightful effect.

"Most modern beers are very thin, but ancient beer was a food," says Katz. "Fermentation added needed B vitamins, essential amino acids converted by the yeast. And yeast also deactivated sevenil toxic compounds in the barley, making it more palatable. Beer was better than bread in the sense that it also had alcohol in it."

Historically, people drank alcohol when they could get it: As food, in place of fetid water, as relief from the misery of life, to chase after pleasure-at births, weddings, and festivals. Wine poured down the pagan hatch, Dionysian and Bacchanalian.

Alcohol was not only acceptable, it was esteemed, revered.

The Old Testament prophets had long issued warnings against excessive drink, Moses proposing death for rebellious, drunken sons. But eventually rabbis worked wine into ritual and ceremony-sanctifying the Sabbath, blessing the Passover festival.

Christ used wine as miracle by transforming it from water, and, at the Last Supper, imbued it with the symbol of his blood.

Wine in early history was often vinegary and drunk diluted with water. The church rescued the vine from neglect in the Dark Ages and elevated fermentation of the grape to an art when monks began producing and aging fine wines.

Wine makes glad the heart of man, wrote the psalmist.

The 12th-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam-with his book of verses, jug of wine, loaf of bread, and thou-saw in wine a refuge from the hopelessness of ever knowing

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the ultimate mystery and penned this: Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare; To-morrow's Silence, Triumph, or Despair: Drink! for you know not whence you carne, nor why: Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

All things in moderation, say the philosophers. Although heavy drinking over time can damage the heart muscle, a small amount of alcohol may help lower the incidence of coronary heart disease. Apparently something in alcohol increases the level of HDLs (high-density lipoproteins, or "good" cholesterol) in the blood, which helps reduce atherosclerosis, the piling up of fat in the arteries.

"The epidemiologists have known this for years," says Curtis Ellison, chief of epidemiology at Boston University's School of Medicine. "But they were reticent to publish it because they were afraid of encouraging people to go out and drink and kill themselves in accidents. This isn't a plea for teetotalers to start drinking. But people who have a drink or two daily-less for women-and are not prone to abuse should know that there's nothing wrong with moderate drinking. In fact there are some benefits."

National Prohibition in the United States did not spring suddenly from the loins of the Anti-Saloon League. The excesses of drink are there in the Bible: Noah passed out in his tent.

Socrates warned, "If we pour ourselves immense draughts, it will be no longer time before both our bodies and our minds reel."

In 16th-century Germany, drunken burghers raised more than the eyebrows of Martin Luther, who himself raised many a tankard: "But to sit day and night, pouring it in and pouring it out again, is piggish."

In the early 1700s cheap gin flooded into working-class London, a spectacle rendered on canvas ("Gin Lane") by William Hogarth.

Across the Atlantic Scotch-Irish settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier had fired up their pot stills, whiskey being a profitable way to move excess grain. This attracted the interest of Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, whose whiskey tax precipitated in 1794 a brief Whiskey Rebellion.

By 1830 Americans were on a colossal binge, drinking nearly three times as much alcohol per capita as today. Early temperance organizations did not oppose drinking in moderation.

They went after inebriety and the custom of paying workers in liquor. But the Protestant revival eventually infused evangelism into the movement: Prohibit liquor, period. Converts signed their temperance pledges "T.A." for total abstinence from alcohol. Teetotalers.

Saloons glutted the cities, most visibly in the slums, and moved west with the multitudes of young, aimless men who found nothing much to do but toss back whiskey until they were bungey, crack'd, gold-headed, wet, dagg'd, lappy, or moon-eye'd.

A National Prohibition Party formed an alliance with the

Women's Christian Temperance Union, with momentum from the woman suffrage movement. In 1919 the Anti-Saloon League pushed through the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (repealed in 1933). National Prohibition was law, and nearly 200,000 saloons were destroyed.

Consumption (and liver cirrhosis) fell in the early years of Prohibition, especially among the poor. But moonshining and smuggling gave drinking back to the middle and upper classes, brought the mob into the business, and prompted a rash of blindness and deaths from drinking wood alcohol.

Prohibition ushered in the speakeasy and a lot of defiant drinking. The cocktail party had come of age. In time, booze became romanticized on film: Bogey showing his teeth after a slug from the bottle, Gary Cooper and his shot of rye in the saloon, executives pulling scotch from the drawer, crystal decanters in every living room. It looked so sophisticated, so deliciously adult. Out of this era comes an interesting cohort: Of the first six Americans to win the Nobel Prize in literature, five-Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O'Neill-were alcoholics.

"The popular mythology of alcohol," wrote Berton Roueche, "is a vast and vehement book ... perhaps, the classic text in the illiterature of medicine." A shot of brandy chases the chill. (It actually makes you colder.) The French can't have many alcoholics, because they drink wine. (Not true. They have a high incidence of alcohol-related problems, with twice the rate of death by liver cirrhosis as in the United States.) Similar defenses are made for beer, yet most alcoholics in Britain are beer drinkers, because beer is still predominantly what the

From. top: Patrons drinking during intermission at the San Francisco Opera; alcoholics at a detoxification center in Moscow; and the effects of alcoholism on the heart-it is almost twice the normal size.

British drink. It's not what you drink; it's how much alcohol goes down your throat.

Ethanol is a simple molecule; its affinity for water takes it everywhere in the body that water goes. Blood, being mostly water, is the transport, and the amount of alcohol in it is expressed as a percentage, say 0.1 percent blood alcohol concentration (BAC). Because of differences in metabolism and a greater proportion of body fat, a woman will tend to feel the effect of alcohol more quickly than a man of the same weight. Fat does not easily absorb water, thus concentrating alcohol in the blood.

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lcohol enters the bloodstream through the small intestine and, to some extent, through the stomach. (A fraction exits in breath, sweat, and urine.) If you eat while you drink, alcohol is absorbed more slowly and with less effect. But on an empty stomach or if carbonated-ehampagne, whiskey and soda-it moves more rapidly to all vital organs.

In the brain, alcohol crosses easily into and out of the nerve cells, somehow altering neuronal transmission to bring on its intoxicating effect. Expectations are important.

A heavy drinker with the shakes orders a vodka tonic from a distracted bartender who forgets the vodka. Unaware, the man drinks, and feels momentary relief.

Alcohol is chiefly metabolized-ehemically deconstructedin the liver, through which the entire blood supply circulates every four minutes. Enzymes in the liver metabolize alcohol into acetaldehyde, a highly toxic chemical, which is then converted (in the liver and elsewhere) into acetate, and finally into carbon dioxide and water.

The process is slow, roughly three hours for each ounce of pure alcohol. Despite a vigorous folklore, virtually nothing will speed up the liver or sober up the intoxicated. Coffee on top of a toot only produces a wide-awake drunk.

Alcohol is a depressant of the central nervous system. By depressing both inhibitory and excitatory neurons, alcohol can produce in different people (in different settings and with different expectations) the life of the party, the bore, the morose recluse, the fighter, the rake. "It provokes the desire," wrote Shakespeare long before science examined the endocrine system, "but it takes away the performance."

Alcohol is a historical but hazardous anesthetic, with a narrow range between deadness and dead. At a BAC of 0.4 to 0.6 percent, the comatose drinker goes into respiratory failure.

Alcohol poisoning is death by asphyxiation.

A few drinks may make you drowsy, but they can also interrupt patterns of sleep. Over time heavy drinking can bring on brain and heart damage, gastritis, pancreatitis, anxiety, malnutrition. It can depress the immune system. Heavy drinkers show a ,higher incidence of throat cancers (they're often heavy smokers-likely a synergy at work). Depression is more often the result of heavy drinking than its cause.

A pregnant woman takes a drink. Within minutes her fetus has the same drink. Alcohol is one of the leading known causes

of mental retardation in the Western world. It can damage the vulnerable developing brain and may impair placental function as well.

Fetal alcohol syndrome (F AS) brings into the world skinny and retarded babies. A far greater number (those with fetal alcohol effect, FAE), however, have more subtle symptoms that are rarely attributed to mothers drinking.

"You don't have to be an alcoholic to hurt your baby; you just have to be drinking enough and pregnant," says Ann Streissguth, one of the University of Washington team that first defined this syndrome. "A really dangerous time is before you know you are pregnant, so the best recommendation is not to drink when planning a pregnancy. As few as one or two drinks a day, or four or five at a time, even if done infrequently, may have an effect. I don't necessarily mean retardation.

We're talking about subtle deviations, mostly behavioral. The FAE youngsters often have trouble paying attention and thinking abstractly. The research on F AE kids is just so meager. They could be a huge population."

Mrs. K, age 55, was lying face up on stainless steel. I knew her name because it was printed on her thigh with a felt-tip pen. She was slit open ready for autopsy, the vital organs on a tray at her feet. A wood block was beneath her head, her mouth wide open in a terrible last gasp.

Martti Tenhu, the chief medical examiner for Helsinki, Finland, and environs, was holding Mrs. K's heart in his hand.

"This is the heart of a typical alcoholic, twice the size it should be. I expect she drank a truckload of vodka in her lifetime."

He scissored open the coronary arteries, which supply blood to the heart muscle.

"Smooth as a baby's. Typical of a daily drinker. Alcohol must help somewhat in fighting arteriosclerosis, but the bad effects of heavy drinking overwhelm this good effect. Alcohol is toxic to the heart muscle and the brain."

He snipped open her stomach, the upper end reddishly irritated by her heavy drinking. "That's hemorrhagic gastritis."

"The heart pumps 35 million times a year," Tenhu said.

"This one is so flabby and enlarged from heavy drinking that it wasn't pumping very well, so the blood accumulated in the lungs and caused edema, or excess fluid. It bubbles up like Coca-Cola when you squeeze them." He placed Mrs. K's sodden lungs on the scale-twice the normal weight. He squeezed them and they fizzed.

Nearly one-third of her heart muscle was useless scar tissue, caused by drinking. "There wasn't enough blood to supply this large heart with sufficient oxygen. These heavy drinkers may get heart arrhythmia a hundred times during their lives. Then one day, like this lady, they drop dead of heart attack."

In downtown Seattle, Washington, Dutch Shisler found Tommy collapsed on a bench at a bus stop, his scalded face vacant of expression, his mouth gaping as though he had run out of air and had expired with his eyes open. Fetid and bruised, Tommy was as near death as any human I had ever seen.

Tommy was undoubtedly malnourished (chronic alcoholics

often avoid food, prolonging their drunk, eating empty calories from the bottle), but he was deceptively huge, and bloated.

"Come on, Tommy," Shisler said, touching his elbow, "we'll get you help."

Shisler runs the county detox vans. He picks up drunks in the downtown core, its fulcrum at Pioneer Square on Yesler, the original Skid Road (from which "skid row" is derived) that once sent logs off the hill to Puget Sound. Shisler chucked Thunderbird empties into a trash can.

S

evere alcoholics will drink anything containing alcohol-Sterno, Old Spice, Windex, Nyquil, Aqua Net, Lysol-but they prefer cheap fortified wines that even wealthy alcoholics living behind security gates have been known to buy in order to conceal their expenditures. Only a small fraction of the ten million or so alcoholics in the United States slide into skid row. Alcoholism hides behind a collaboration of denial-in the boardroom, the East Room, the Capitol steps, out on the tractor.

Shisler and his partner, Dennis, lifted Tommy into the van and headed for Harborview Medical Center.

"We got 15,000 calls last year," Shisler said, "most of them for the same 4,000 drunks. The guys all know us, and they love us. We treat them with a lot of respect. We know they're not scum. We've been through it."

Sitting there in his black slacks and white cotton sweater, a bald fireplug of a man with a waxed mustache, Shisler looked the picture of buoyant health. He has been sober 21 years. "I want them to see how good you can look when you recover," he said. "I should be dead."

From a life of heavy drinking Shisler had developed cirrhosis of the liver, a potentially fatal disease in which alcohol kills liver cells and plugs the liver with fibrous scar tissue. Shisler's belly had swollen with fluid, and blood pressure had built up in the fragile veins of his esophagus. They ruptured, and he was hospitalized for a year, during which he bled 56 pints of blood.

"Then I went out and drank for seven more years. Alcohol gave me courage. I couldn't ask a lady to dance unless I had a few drinks."

For 20 years Shisler tended bar, drinking the profits. He ended up boozing on skid rows all over the country, finally waking up in Seattle after a blackout, not knowing where he was or how he got there. "Alcoholics like to take 'geographic cures,' thinking they're starting over. It's really an excuse to drink, because you can't face life. You go off and drink where nobody knows you or gives a damn."

Through a nurse at the Veterans Administration hospital (he married her) and Alcoholics Anonymous, Shisler quit drinking.

As we pulled up to the hospital, Shisler turned in his seat. "I was just like these guys, eating out of garbage cans. Now I put my hand out to people. I want to help them stay sober."

Shisler and Dennis got Tommy onto a gurney and rolled him into the emergency room.

Alcohol, in excess, is by far the most devastating of drugs-

wrecking families and friendships, impairing health, fillingjails, hospitals, and morgues. In 1990 it cost American society an estimated $136,000 million and more than 65,000 lives, 22,000 of them on highways.

The invoice for damages does not lie entirely on that severely afflicted minority we call alcoholics. Much of it is from other heavy and even moderate drinkers-there being so many more of them-who are not yet, but could become, alcoholics. (The point where heavy drinking merges into alcohol dependence is blurry.) Ten percent of drinkers in the United States drink heavily-they account for half of all alcohol consumed.

The scale of damage dramatically reflects shifts in national consumption. The French remain the world's heaviest drinkers, but in drinking a third less than they did in 1955 their alcoholism deaths have dropped by nearly 60 percent. In 30 years, as Hungarians have nearly doubled their drinking, deaths from liver cirrhosis have risen more than fivefold.

The problems vary with the drinking patterns: The binging Finn who would never drink and drive but falls on his knife in a drunken fight, the Italian who doesn't get overtly intoxicated on daily wine but dies prematurely (and painfully) from a cobbled, cirrhotic liver that never got a rest.

Why people overdrink is as complex as the drinkers and the cultural milieu in which they drink. Habits, customs, attitudes, and relative price all influence abusive drinking and the vulnerabilities-genetic and otherwise-of alcoholics.

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any experts, especially in Europe, are troubled that rigid adherence to the disease concept (you either are or you aren't an alcoholic) has made it more difficult to get at problem drinkers before they develop a severe dependence. "Tell a young, five-a-day drinker that he's an alcoholic and has to give up drinking for life," says Yedy Israel of Ontario's Addiction Research Foundation, "and he'll walk out of your office."

Alcoholism cannot be explained simply by heredity, but a history of alcoholism in the family is a sign one is at higher risk.

Scientists are also looking for biological markers-possibly variations in neurotransmitters like serotonin, certain blood platelet enzymes, and brain waves. What the researchers eventually want is to identify the influential genes.

Henri Begleiter, a neuroscientist at State University of New York's College of Medicine in Brooklyn who uncovered a brain-wave marker in sons of alcoholics, told me, "There are different types of alcoholics, just as there are different types of diabetics and schizophrenics.

A little elevated blood sugar doesn't necessarily make you a diabetic, but you could be on your way. There are people-Churchill was a perfect example-who put away an enormous amount of alcohol and function rather well, and do not suffer any notable effects. Are they alcoholic? My answer would be no. You need a cluster of symptoms leading to dependence. Craving is pivotal.

"There are those who drink because they are depressed, and it makes them feel better. The risk takers seem to drink just to

get a high. Others say, 'It makes me feel normal'-and they may actually perform better when drinking. Still others say they drink to feel different. The truth is that most people drink at various times for all these reasons.

"Alcoholism is different from Huntington's chorea, a directly inherited disease caused by a single gene-you have the gene, you get Huntington's. What you inherit in alcoholism is not a disease, it's a predisposition. I'm speculating, but this predisposition is probably neither unique to alcoholism itself nor characteristic of it. You probably inherit some genes, each with small effect, that make you susceptible not only to alcoholism but also to a number of dysfunctional behaviors influenced by your environment.

"I believe very stronglythough this is conjectural-that while biological factors predispose you, environmental factors determine the final outcome. The old nature versus nurture argument is meaningless. We are dealing with a behavioral disorder in which biology interacts with the environment.

An alcoholic is made, not born."

About half of Orientals carry an altered gene that makes drinking unpleasant. The mutation renders inactive an enzyme that metabolizes acetaldehyde, prolonging the buildup of the toxic chemical. In a range of reactions from mild to severe, faces flush, people sweat and sicken.

Yet in countries like South Korea and Japan the social pressures to drink are so powerful that most of the men (and now half of Japanese women) drink nonetheless. In the past 30 years South Koreans have had an explosion of heavy drinking. The' country now consumes more spirits per capita than does any other nation.

On the streets of Japan you can pull a lever on a vending machine and get scotch and soda in a can.

The Japanese drink about twice what they did in the 1950s. Perhaps in no other nation is drinking so expensively and tightly woven into business. Drinking after work

is not only an extension of the company, it is virtually a requirement. Refuse the boss's offer to go out drinking, and your standing in the firm begins to slide.

Drinking talk in Italy is food language (aperitivo, a vermouth before meals, and digestivo, a brandy after-parenthetical to the dominance of wine at the table). The osterias are not dark and furtive. They open onto the street, where kids go for ice cream and old men have their coffee (and maybe a brandy) and play cards.

Alcohol consumption in Italy has been going down, as in many parts of Europe, but it is still relatively high. This is wine country, and most Italians drink. The shame in Italy is not that you drink too much but that you can't hold it.

It may be rare to see a drunk Italian, but 20,000 Italians die each year of cirrhotic livers. Roughly nine percent of the population are estimated to be alcoholics. The sports cars roaring away from the discos often end up resembling alu-

minum foil. The police almost never test for blood alcohol.

"Culture gives you rules, which are important, but no guarantees," says Amedeo Cottino, professor of sociology at the University of Turin. "Italy has had alcohol problems a long time, but always hidden. My grandfather drank only one glass of wine at meals-a one-liter glass. Recently an advertisement for Martini & Rossi announced, 'You can drink it anywhere, anytime, with anybody.' That breaks all our rules, which link

ALCOHOL AND THE UNBORN CHILD Ellen O'Donovan (not her real name) was drinking "a bottle of vodka a day" when she discovered that she was two months pregnant. She quit "there and then," but it was too late: Her son, Malcolm, was born with fetal alcohol syndrome (F AS).

Alcohol in the mother's bloodstream can be toxic to the developing fetus. depending on the stage of pregnancy and how much she drinks. FAS damage can range from subtle to severe, causing behavioral problems, stunted growth, disfigurement, mental retardation. Whatever the condition, F AS is irreversible.

According to his doctors, Malcolm was undersized at birth, with kidneys and a stomach that didn't work properly; he was tube-fed until he was 14 months old.

His head is smaller than normal, and he also has facial abnormalities-small wide-set eyes, a thin upper lip, a short upturned nose, and a receding chin. He was born with damaged corneas, and his eyelids drooped. Surgery later gave Malcolm limited sight in his right eye.

alcohol with meals. This Anglo-Saxon pattern of drinking is coming, but accepting it seems to me to be dangerous. We don't look for excuses to drink. Our country doesn't require it. In your world you drink to get happy. In the Mediterranean world you drink if you are happy."

Drinking has gripped the Russian character like a python. It is a custom of inexplicable tenacity, with roots beyond memory, beyond Grand Prince Vladimir's pronouncement: "Drinking is the joy of Russia. We cannot do without it." This was not lost on the Japanese at Mukden, Manchuria, in 1905, who came upon thousands of drunken Russian soldiers and skewered them on bayonets.

When a Russian wants to drink, he flicks his throat. Peter the Great, a phenomenal boozer, is said to have rewarded a loyalist with free drinking privileges by branding him under the chin.

The man could then walk into any dismal kabak (bar), flick his throat: I'm the guy, set 'em up.

Russian drinking is by toasts and to oblivion. Straight, roomtemperature vodka, down the hatch, no sipping, three glasses in a row-for starters. To your health, to your mother, to the moon-invent something. "Come on, drink up!" and the guest had better. Toast a birth-"washing the baby." A soldier plops his medal into a glass of vodka, passes it around the table of expectant lips. Washing the medal. Repairmen in the apartment demand vodka. Washing the walls.

Explanations for this are thin. "Our national tradition," a Russian said, "is to drink for any reason, or for no reason."

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev slammed the lid just shy of prohibition, closing distilleries, breweries, bars. Alcohol poisonings, which were killing as many as 40,000 Soviet citizens each year, dropped, but everything from shoe polish to insecticide began appearing in autopsied stomachs. And samogon (moonshine) drew down sugar supplies almost overnight.

Controls have eased, but there are still few places to drink.

The restaurants are impossible to get into, and flats are crowded with disapproving relatives. Russians drink "under the blanket" in the alleys, the parks, on the sidewalks.

Buying a bottle requires inestimable endurance-three, four hours in line, assuming they don't run out before you get there.

So you slip up the alley where well-lubricated workers in blue coats run a nice little blue market off the loading dock.

[One] night I attended a meeting.

"My name is Slava, and I am an alcoholic." Slava, a former KGB man, was speaking to the Rubicon Group, one of Russia's nascent experiences with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

"I never liked the taste of vodka, I liked the effect. But eventually I didn't get the effect. I tried to kill myself." Across Slava's wrists and forearms were corded scars.

The meeting was in Hospital 17, the largest one of its kind, full of alcoholics hospitalized for six months and forced to do scut work at the ZIL automotive factory. The participants described "torpedoes" containing a drug like Antabuse surgically implanted in their buttocks, causing toxic acetaldehyde to build up, with consequent pain and nausea, should

they ever attempt to drink again.

Alcoholics who refuse hospital treatment are imprisoned for two years. They can't get jobs once out, and if caught drinking are thrown back in. Alcoholism is a punishable disease.

Slava said, "AA is the only way out." he Rubicon stories resonate with the ones I heard in the United States and Canada. Each different, each similar.

Tales of incredulity ("I had no idea it would come to this"). Tales of elaborate deception (Jill, the "lace curtain housewife," watering her husband's decanter to disguise the whiskey she sneaked, hiding Dixie Cups of vodka around the house. Gabrielle, wearing a sweat suit to medical school to hide the bruises from falls in the shower). Tales of extraordinary wreckage (Jake, whose wife drank herself to death, whose alcoholic son and daughter both committed suicide), and tales of white-knuckle sobriety.

None are compelled to speak at AA, but they do, often in vivid detail-the shapes of bottles, the names of bars and brands, the taste (wretched and delicious), the craving, the hurt, the candor, the jokes (Alcoholics Alias-you keep drinking, but under an assumed name). Founded in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, by two desperate alcoholics, a stockbroker and a surgeon, AA could count in four years only a hundred members. It now exceeds two million worldwide. AA remains a remarkable fellowship of mutual and spiritual support that has endured in simplicity. No dues, no bureaucracy, no minutes, the only condition for membership being a desire to stop drinking. The cornerstone of the program is abstinence.

But AA has its limitations, as does every method of treatment. "Prolonged inpatient treatment appears to contribute nothing additional to outcome ... alcoholism is a disease that is highly treatable, bUL.will require great responsibility from the patient," writes George Vaillant of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

"In alcoholism, as in much of medicine, we dress the wound; the individual's own resources heal it."

American Indians are seen less for their diversity than for stereotype: Noble savage or drunken Red Indian. What this simplistic convention misses is history. Many American Indians refused to drink. And if other American Indians couldn't hold their liquor, neither could anyone else. The trappers drank like fools. The frontier was awash in sots.

Yet the collective reality is grim. Alcohol is implicated in three-fourths of all traumatic American Indian deaths. American Indians have a high incidence of F AS, and three times the overall U.S. rate of death by cirrhosis.

Dale Walker is a psychiatrist and director of addictions treatment at the Veterans Administration hospital in Seattle.

He is Cherokee. "There is tremendous pressure in this country to conform. And when a group like the American Indian doesn't, there's a sense of failure. Wouldn't it be nice if whites were right that American Indian alcoholism is a genetic weakness? This ignores their tremendous cultural depression over (Text continued on page 31)

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Louis Marsit began stealing bottles of beer from his father when he was nine years old. This was followed by repeated episodes of drug abuse, brushes with the law and suicide attempts. By 18 he had dropped out of school, and eight years later he was in jail. At his court hearing, he asked the judge to send him to a therapeutic drug and treatment center in Maryland called Second Genesis.

A year later Louis is free of drug addiction and a working member of his community.

Speaking at the opening ceremony of a new treatment center recently, Louis expressed his firm belief: "If it wasn't for Second Genesis I know I would not be here today. I would be dead."

Louis's poignant story is similar to that of millions of former drug and alcohol abusers who credit their extraordinary rehabilitation to one of the thousands of therapeutic communities that have been set up in the United States and around the world during the past decade.

One measure of their success in the United States is the fact that the number of people abusing drugs has declined dramatically-from 23 million in 1985 to less than 13 million today.

There are about 700 therapeutic communities in the United States, providing treatment to all classesof people and all age levels.Treatment programs can last anywhere from three months to three years.

After drug users have completed their treatment programs, they often need extra time before they feel confident to go back to their families or to liveon their own. To help them in this intervening period, many American cities have set up halfway houses. For example, Kansas City, Missouri, has nine Oxford Houses (above), where these people can live for as long as they like. As these houses are run by former drug addicts, occupants receive strong moral support from kindred souls.

Therapeutic treatment centers, says Robert Martinez, director of President Bush's Office of National Drug Control Policy, instill the kind of tough, meaningful values that are largely responsible for the decline in drug use. "Many if not most successful treatment programs are based on an ethos of personal accountability, adherence to tough rules, personal sacrifice, and sanctions for misbehavior," he says.

The therapeutic community employs community-imposed sanctions and penalties as well as earned privileges as part of the recovery process. Members of the community are part of a "family group," not patients in an institution, and they playa major role in managing the community and acting as positive role models for others to emulate.

David Deitch, vice president of Day top Village in New York, says the therapeutic community model is based on the notion that drug dependence is a problem of the whole person. Attention is thus given to social, moral, psychological, educational, and family issues. "The model insists on the ideas that new behaviors are possible, no matter what," Deitch says, "and we will use community life as a way of fostering that change."

Day top is the largest nonprofit therapeutic community in the world, treating as many as 3,000 people and providing dozens of programs to meet the educational, emotional, and psychological needs of participants.

"While we do have a hard pocket of regrettably large chronic drug users who need to be treated, we have seen a slow reduction in the spread of drug use that was occurring in the late 1970sand early 1980s," Deitch says. "That's a critical point. Treatmentdoes work, and that's one way it's been demonstrated. " Studies show that more than 90 percent of those who completed treatment remained drug-free afterward.

One of the major factors behind the success 0 ftrea tmen t centers is their ability to rekindle an individual's self-esteem, says Andrew Mecca, president of California's Policy Council on Alcohol and Drugs.

"That self-esteem is promoted within an environment to which somebody feels they can belong, that makes them feelsignificant, acknowledged for their efforts and recognized for their competence," he says.

Another factor behind their success is psychiatric intervention for many drug abusers. Studies have shown that one-half of the people with a substance abuse problem have a diagnosed mental illness and that 28 percent of those are afflicted with depression or manic-depressive syndrome. Researchers have also found that the use of illicit drugs serves as self-medication for many of these people, because they can't deal with their everyday environment, an environment often filled with poverty and hopelessness.

Benny Primm, administrator for treatment improvement at the U.S. Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration, says, "If we can recognize the need for strong psychiatric intervention early in the treatment process, perhaps we can change the face of addiction in society."

Getting to the ca-sual or recreational user of drugs is the key to stopping the spread of drugs, according Herbert Kleber, deputy director for demand reduction at the Officeof National Drug Control Policy. "The hard-core addict is not the role model," he says. "No one wants to be the stumbling drunk, the psychotic cocaine user, or the burnt-out heroin addict. The role model is the individual who can use drugs, get high and still keep hisjob, family, health, and possessions."

But this role model is a myth, he says. It can only be broken by experts demonstrating the dangers of drug use and by the example of "unfortunate public role models" whose lives have been wasted by drug use. The highly publicized death of a University of Maryland basketball star from a cocaine overdose in 1986sparked intense public education efforts in the United States.

Another myth, according to Kleber, is that most drug addicts in America are poor and unemployed. He says that 68 percent of drug users are employed and that 70 percent or more belong to majority, rather than minority, groups.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, drug abuse iscosting American employers more than $60,000 million a year. To curb drug use and reduce accidents in the workplace, 28 percent of the largest companies, according to a study by the Gallup organization, now use drug testing. Two-thirds of these companies also offer drug treatment 0 programs for their workers.

Help ...and Hope

Help ... and Hope

in Bangalore Text by LEE ADAIR LAWRENCE Photographs

by A VI NASH PASRICHA

CA 1M-the letters stand for Chemical Addiction Information Monitoring-is a rehabilitation center on the outskirts of Bangalore where Indians and Americans are working hard to save the lives of people who would otherwise die, directly or indirectly, as a result of their addiction to alcohol or other drugs.

Jack Young, CAlM's American volunteer program coordinator, says CAlM offers addicts "India's only long-term therapeutic recovery home." It is a place where addicts can live and undergo a six- to eight-month program that strives to tailor American therapeutic techniques to Indian conditions.

CAlM attacks addiction in several ways. It establishes an environment of firm discipline in which patients learn the Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) Twelve-Step program. This forces them to take a hard look at themselves, recognize their powerlessness over chemicals, and seek help from a power greater than themselves-"God, as we understand him," in the words of one counselor. This introspection is supplemented by daily hatha-yoga exercises, private meditation, and one-on-one counseling with a psychologist.

At the same time, CAlM emphasizes group activities: For oneand-a-half hours each day, patients gather in clusters of eight to 12 for intense group sessions. When possible, they meet with relatives under the supervision ofa counselor for family therapy.

Other rehabilitation centers in India have successfully incorporated AA's Twelve Steps, family therapy, and other therapeutic techniques, but their programs last on average one month or less. CAlM officials feel this is not enough. "The longer the treatment," Young insists, "the greater the chances of a full recovery."

CAlM stands out for other reasons as well: It is not housed in a gleaming clinic, but in a converted movie theater, the first suitable site the founder of CAlM could find; and its counselors are neither doctors nor social workers, but former addicts and alcoholics.

More important, CAlM looks at addiction and alcoholism in a way that is still new in this country. Lalitha Ragupathi, a social worker in Bangalore whose alcohol and drug awareness programs have received high accolades, says: "India is now where the United States was in the 1960s. Alcoholism and addiction are not yet considered big enough problems to rate a specific term. They are still social stigma."

Not so at CAlM. The center's nine counselors, one psychotherapist, and its part-time clinical psychologist all act on the

belief that addiction, be it to drugs or alcohol, is a disease rather than the secondary symptom of another problem. This contrasts sharply with traditional thinking. American clinical psychologist, James R. Milam, author of Under the Influence, has written: "The psychogenic model is based on the nearly universal belief that alcoholism is a symptom or consequence of an underlying character defect, a destructive response to psychological and social problems, a learned behavior."

On the other hand, the disease theory, or biogenic paradigm, he says, "recognizes that alcoholism is a primary addictive response to alcohol in a biologically susceptible drinker, regardless of character and personality." The continuous use of alcohol or drugs induces personality changes in much the same way as a brain tumor might. In Milam's diagnosis, "body, mind, and spirit (including 'willpower') are compromised and subverted at their biological source to serve addiction."

According to this theory, the personality traits of an alcoholic or addict-be it stealing, lying, aggressive or violent behavior, depression, suicidal tendencies-are all due to chemical changes in the brain.

The aim of CAlM's treatment is to clear the body and the brain of harmful chemicals, restore the patient to sanity and selfhood, and give him the tools he needs to stay away from the substance to which he was formerly addicted by teaching him to enjoy life without it.

"I never knew I had a disease," says Tom, a former user of marijuana, prescription tablets, and "brown sugar"-a lowgrade heroin that is usually smoked or "chased." Like many patients at CAlM, Tom underwent treatment at other centers and relapsed. "There they de to xed you," he says, "but there was no counseling. Here, I'm able to see things in a better light; I am learning to manage."

Jatin, who came to CAlM from north India, puts it another way: "There they don't work on us as addicts but as people with hang-ups."

Sitting at a table in the cavernous hall of the converted movie theater, Jatin says he is clearly relieved he found CAlM. "I once thought there was no way out."

In its ten-year existence, CAlM has offered a way out to more than 600 people, including 15women. Most of them were placed in CAlM by their families, though the percentage of voluntary admissions is steadily rising. A majority of them are from the middle and upper classes, but not all. By applying a sliding fee

Right: As Jack Young. looks on, Dr. Aravinda Jawali, a psychotherapist, holds a question-and-answer session with a counselor, designed to teach the counselor how to interact with patients. Far right: In a confidence building exercise, counselors and patients take turns donning blindfolds and being led around the campus by the other.

scale and helping individuals obtain private subsidies, CAlM has been accommodating lower-income patients as well.

The mix of patients has not affected the recovery rate, which on the whole is around 60 percent. In some instances, it has been even higher: Out of 55 alcoholic employees that Bharat Earth Movers Limited has sent to CAlM for treatment, 70-75 percent are recovered, according to the firm.

By contrast, AA in the United States claims a 50 percent success rate after five years, and recovery rates at individual centers are estimated to range from 33 to 75 percent.

Like so many rehabilitation programs around the world, CAlM grew out of one individual's war against addiction and his desire to share the excitement of recovery with others. That war was declared in 1982, when a Bangalore businessman known as Bindig came to terms with the fact that he could not stop drinking. With the support of an American recovering alcoholic who happened to be visiting Bangalore, Bindig went cold turkey, broke his addiction, and kept sober by attending AA. Elated, Bindig set out to help others like himself. He held support sessions in his office after-hours. He helped alcoholics through detoxification, a process that usually lasts four to seven days and can be physically painful and emotionally draining.

Soon, however, Bindig found himself at a dead end.

"I was going to people, asking them if they wanted to recover," he says. "And I was hitting this tremendous wall."

Enter a second American, Margaret, a therapist who was traveling in India and studying yoga during time off from her job at a drug rehabilitation center in England. "Margaret gave me two cardinal rules of running a center," Bindig recalls. "Let them come to you and go in for small, small changes in attitude."

Following her advice, Bindig had by 1985 established what he now terms "a half-baked halfway house." He had also angered the local AA groups in a replay of a conflict that divided the American therapeutic community in the 1960s.

The AA camp maintained that its Twelve-Step program should be free to all. Persons such as Bindig countered that residential programs should be allowed to use AA techniques

even if they charged fees. To Bindig, the argument was crystal clear: AA meetings for many were not enough; there was a crying need for intensive, residential programs that cost money to run; and these would be far more effective if they incorporated the Twelve Steps.

Bindig has since made his peace with Bangalore's .AA chapter, but at the time he worked in isolation. That changed when yet another American landed in Bangalore. His name was James Crossen, and he had come to India to pursue his interest in Gandhian philosophy. Like Margaret before him, Crossen met Bindig through AA, and it emerged that Crossen ran the treatment center at the North Hollywood Hospital in California. He spent a week with Bindig, during which time he turned the halfway house into a full-fledged treatment center.

From that point on, Bindig and his counselors improvised, experimented, and improved on what Crossen had taught them and on what they had read. They moved into the old movie theater. They converted its main hall into a dormitory and the projection room into a detoxification unit.

Six years later, perhaps no longer trusting that fate would send him another guide, Bindig advertised in the U.S. press for counselors who would like to volunteer their time and expertise.

More than 200 persons applied, among them Jack Young, a certified chemical dependency therapist with a string of degrees and years of experience in the United States. He is also a' devotee ofSai Baba, so a six-month volunteer job at CAlM was ideal: He could work in his field while living close to the guru's ashram outside Bangalore.

Last January he joined CAlM's staff, laden with textbooks, AA materials, and tapes, all donated by American institutions and individuals.

"The wonderful thing about CAlM is that they developed a program that is superb without formal help or academic training," he says. "In many ways it is an indigenous program, and some of its spiritual aspects far exceed what we have developed in the United States."

As for ;CAIM's staff, Young describes them as "the most

ALCOHOL innately talented dependency counselors I've ever seen. They have natural therapeutic abilities."

Talent and goodwill notwithstanding, CAlM had made mistakes as it groped in the dark. "We took the 'tough love' approach too far," says V. Harish, one of the counselors. He is referring to a controversial approach developed by American parents of alcoholic and drug-using teenagers. The parents had found that no amount of cajoling, nurturing, and understanding helped their children give up alcohol or drugs. So they resorted to "tough love," which entailed sometimes locking the children out of the house, withholding financial support, restraining them with "soft ties" or cushioned ropes that would not bite into their skin.

At CALM, "tough love" sometimes entailed physical punishment. "The message we were trying to convey," says Harish, "was 'see, we are willing to do anything, even ifit means fighting you physically, in order to keep you here and get you well.'"

Though psychiatrists in Bangalore still speak of CALM's unorthodox methods, its staffis now committed to a nonviolent approach. "If a patient is at the risk of hurting himself or others," says Harish, "we will restrain him. We might even put him in isolation, but we will never hit him."

Young has also improved other aspects of CAlM. With the enthusiastic support of the administration and staff, Young has raised standards of hygiene and upgraded the food. He has introduced the use of medication for those patients who, in addition to their addiction, suffer from such disorders as schizophrenia. At times, the staff may also administer medication during the detoxification period, but, as with dual-diagnosis patients, this always takes place under close medical supervision.

Young also initiated art therapy, leisure outings, and a treeplanting project-activities designed to lift patients' self-esteem, teach them to have fun in sobriety, and focus some of their attention on helping others. Yet none of this is allowed to undermine the discipline established at CAlM nor to distract patients from the arduous task of recovery.

"This is not a holiday," Young is quick to remind. "People are here to focus on their dependency, to learn self-esteem and discipline."

Unlike camp counselors, CAlM's American and Indian staff are not here to entertain patients, but to direct and guide them, while always striving to improve the program. Karl Sequeira, the center's senior counselor, hopes to increase the amount of family participation. Bindig wants to reach out to a broader segment of the population. Harish would like to see a separate facility for women patients. All are keen to see a second CALM open in Madras.

Given its track record, there is little doubt that CALM's staff will succeed, always learning, experimenting, and saving lives.

0 About the Author: Lee Adair Lawrence, aji'ee-Iance Americanjournalist who \l'GS living in Madras for fhe paSf few years, recenrly shifted fo Washingfon. D.C.

continued/rom page 26

many, many years. Their alcohol problems are huge. But the reasons are so perplexing. You hear the Alkali Lake success story, and you hear the sadness."

Alkali Lake is a tiny American Indian reserve (1.6 kilometer square) in the interior of British Columbia. By 1965 virtually the entire village was fulminously alcoholic. Bootleggers sold openly from the trunks of cars. There were drunks in the street, gang rapes, family brawls, fractured ribs, broken windows, abandoned children.

This was dramatically reversed by the prodigious efforts of Phyllis Chelsea and her husband, Andy, who was chief, to quit drinking and get the rest of the village to sober up. With guidance from a Roman Catholic oblate, they started an AA group. For the first year no one else came. Then Mabel showed up. One night Evelyn walked in.

Andy encouraged the Mounties to shut down the bootleggers (he had been one himself), got the council to put welfare checks on vouchers (good at the store for food only), and pressed the drinkers to go to Alberta for treatment. There were threats.

Andy thought it wise to carry a rifle in his pickup.

"There is a healthy environment here today," said Phyllis, now 19 years without alcohol, "but as people began living sober, they had to learn how to work together. And that involved a lot more than staying sober. We still have people who drink. They have to hide it. I imagine there are people out there who think that moderate drinking is O.K., but we don't think so."

Her cousin Freddy Johnson got drunk and burned down his house. He almost killed his father in a fight. Today he is the school principal, sober, articulate.

"It doesn't make any difference how well educated or how rich you are," he said, "you can become an alcoholic. I don't want to blame the government for our alcoholism, but this little [place] has something to do with it. Unemployment here is about 40 percent. Being sober and having nothing to do is as bad as being drunk and having nothing to do. We just drank to get drunk, to get back to that high feeling. But I'd always go beyond that. And that's when problems came.

"Alcohol is a real mystery."

Sunday afternoon I assume the autumnal position of American Guy (supine on couch) to watch football, a sport subdivided by that quintessential American art form: The warmbuddies beer commercial.

A cynic might see something slightly cockeyed in these scenes of robustly handsome yuppies coming off their lobster boats in flannel shirts and teased mousse hairdos, backlit by the slanting glow of sunset, punching shoulders, and retiring to the company of incredible-looking women in the coziest tavern on the coast of Maine.

Am I envious? Sure, having never found anything quite like this chummy tableau. These commercials have captured on one minute oftape all the romance, the yearnings, the fellowship of alcohol and mankind.

0 But then life isn't a beer commercial.

Luck I

came back in no time with the burgers, and when he reached into the bag I smelled it on him. I didn't say anything. He got his burger and opened it, talking goofy like he does. "Best car ever made was the Chevrolet, Ray." "Right, Dwight," I said, but my heart wasn't in it.

He sat on the stairs, and I sat in the window seat of this place.

We'd done the walls and the first coat of trim. We had a lot of touch-ljp to do, and if he was going to start drinking, the work wasn't going to get done. Outside, we still had the porch railing. It was a big, wraparound porch. Two days' work at least, with both of us pushing it.

"Dad," I said.

He was chewing, shaking his head. He liked the hamburger.

All his life, 1 think, he enjoyed things more than other people.

"Man," he said.

It was getting dark. We still had to finish the trim in the dining room-the chair rail. "Well," 1 said. 1 was watching his eyes.

"You know," he said, "1 do good work. Don't I do good work?"

"The finest," I said.

He smiled. "And you help me."

I concentrated on my food. 1 could've maybe figured I'd made a mistake until now. But this was the way he talked whenever he was on the stuff. 1 started looking

around casually for wnere he could hide it.

"You're a good son," he said. 1 might've nodded. 1 was eating that hamburger and trying not to show him anything.

"Twenty years ago 1 painted my first house," he said. "Helped a friend one summer. I've told you this. Never dreamed I'd have a son to help me. You ought to be in college, son. But I'm just as glad you're here."

1 thought he might start crying.

"Best get back to work," I said.

He was sitting there, thinking. I knew what he was seeing in his mind. "Your mother sure can pick them," he said. "1 don't know what she saw in me."

1 stood. I had what was left of my burger in my hand. 1 put it in the bag and went over to the paint can.

"Hey," he said.

I said, "Hey." "I said 1 don't know what she saw in me."

"Me either," 1 said.

"Good thing you look like her," he said.

"Right, Dwight," I said.

"That's the truth, Ruth," he said. He was still sitting there.

"You want me to do the second coat in here?" I said.

"Naw. Get the dining room."

1 said, "Okay." "!-iey," he said. "What if! take you and your mother out to din-

ner tonight?"

"That'd be all right," I told him.

"Okay," he said. "You're on."

"Great," I said. It was getting dark. We'd been eating burgers.

"You think she'll feel like going out?" he said.

"Got me," I said.

"She's been staying in the house too much. Working too hard. She doesn't need to put so much time in every day. Right?"

I said, "Sure."

"Yeah," he said. "And you've been working hard."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"You think we did a good job here, so far?" He stood up and looked around at everything.

I did the same. I saw that over the kitchen cabinets, where he'd been painting when I left to get the burgers, someone was going to have to do a lot of touching up.

He'd missed some places. He'd been hurrying it. You couldn't mistake a thing like that. Back before he was too bad, when I was small, he used to take me through the houses when he was finished with them, and he would point out where other painters cut corners and he didn't. He'd show me where he'd taken the extra step and done it right. He was teaching me. Do a thing, boy, you do it right the first'time. You take pride in what you do. He drummed it into me. You go that extra mile. You take pains. People remember good work. People remember excellence. And when I worked with him summers and he was okay, he'd do a thing, put the last touch on something, and he'd stand back and look at it, proud as hell. "New money," he'd say.

And I'd say, "New money."

You could hear the satisfaction in the way he breathed, looking at what he'd done.

That was when he was okay.

"Little touch-up over the sink," he said to me now.

I didn't answer.

"Well. I better get off to the

bank before they close the drivein window."

"The bank," I said.

He didn't look at me. "The bank, Frank."

I

just stared at him. For a long time we were like that, you know. Staring at each other from opposite sides of the room, with the tarpaulin and the paint cans between us, like we were listening for some sound.

"How'm I going to take you guys out to eat without some money, honey?" he said.

"Oh," I said. "Right."

"You go ahead and finish what you can in the dining room."

I nodded.

"We straight?"

"Straight," I said.

It was what we had always said when he'd had to discipline me and he'd come in afterward and explained the punishment. We'd been saying it as a joke between us since I was sixteen.

"Sure?" he said.

"Very, Jerry," I said.

He put his hand out with the thumbs-up sign. "I'll be back, Jack."

"Okay," I said.

I watched him get out of his coveralls, because I thought it might fall out of one of the pockets. He laid the coveralls across the kitchen counter, smoothed his hair back with both hands, and looked at me. "Don't bust yourself," he said. "We did enough for one day."

"Right," I said.

I knew what would happen now. He went into the bathroom and flushed the toilet. When he came out, he went to the door and got himself through it quick, calling back to me that he'd be five minutes. I stood by the front window and watched him get into the truck. He wouldn't be back tonight. He wouldn't be back for days, maybe. A week. Then we'd get the call. We'd go get him.

He'd be in the hospital again,

going through the treatment.

This is all stuff you know. You don't need me to paint the picture.

I went back into the dining room. We still had a lot of work to do. These people were supposed to occupy in two days, and now the painting wasn't going to get finished. No way. But I started on it just the same. I was sick, thinking of what tonight was going to be like. Everything she went through, over the years.

And the thing was, there didn't seem to be anything in particular that triggered it. When she met him, she told me, he was a kid who liked a drink. She did too.

He'd get plowed, and sometimes she'd get plowed with him. But they were always okay afterward, and she couldn't say when he began not to stop. She'll tell you now she doesn't know where he went over the line and the stuff got ahold of him. You have to know that he was never the kind that got mean or violent either.

That was the thing. You could always walk away from somebody who knocked you around.

The worst he ever did was disappear, and he did that often enough for me to know that it was happening again. But when he started, it was always how much he loved everybody. He'd cry and be sad, and incredibly gentle. And when he was sober again, he was always very contrite. Sometimes he was good for months at a time, and when he was, you couldn't find anybody better as a companion and a friend. You could trust him with your life.

Which was why I let him go like I did, knowing what he was up to.

I didn't for the life of me have the heart not to trust him one more time.

Anyway, I was going to paint all night. I was going to get it done. I figured that after a while, when we didn't show up, she'd come looking for us, and she'd (Text continued on page 35)

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"The way I see it, nothing is going to change for you and me no matter who wins."

know. She'd pull up and see the truck gone, and all the lights burning. I didn't want to have to look at her when she knew again, but I couldn't see a way around it.

I worked maybe an hour. I got into the work, into the rhythm of the whole task. We had the blaster there, but the tapes were all his: The Beatles and the Stones. Aretha Franklin. Rockand-roll. Guitars and drums. The music sounds enough like what I like so I never complain. But I was just working in the quiet, and so I heard the truck pull in. I can't say what that did to me. He had gone to the bank, like he said. I mean that's what I thought. I heard the engine quit, the door open and close. I worked on. I wanted him to find me working.

Then I thought I'd give him something. I put the Beatles on.

The Beatles were all over that house. Revolution. I was in the dining room, moving myself to the music, and when I turned to smile at him, I saw the guy who was having this place built, the owner. Big, heavy bearded guy, looking like somebody with not much patience.

I'd seen him walking around the lot when we first knew we were going to have the job and his house was nothing more than a hole in the ground.

"Hey," I said.

He was standing in the doorway, looking at me. I went over and turned the music off. He walked on into the family room.

"You do nice work," he said. He was looking at the mantel. I saw several places that needed a touch. "Is it dry?" he said.

"Not quite yet," I said.

"Listen," he said. "Are you going to finish in two days?"

I nodded. I felt awful.

"You work fast," he said. "I was in here yesterday, and none of this was done yet."

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Looks good," he said. He was moving around the room now,

appreciating everything. It was good work. We had done real good work together for this part of it.

When we got to the living room, which was the most finished, I said, "My dad's the one who painted in here."

"He does nice work," the guy said. "Very nice."

"Yes," I said. "My dad always says-you know, do a job with pride." If I started crying, I thought I might hit him. I never felt that way before. If he noticed something wrong anywhere, Ijust wasn't sure what would happen.

"It shows," he said, smiling at me. "The pride shows."

"Yeah," I said.

"You must be very proud of your dad." I looked at him. For a second I wasn't sure what he knew.

"What's it like, working with your father?"

"It's great," I said.

W

ell." He turned and appreciated the room.

"You don't find quality work these days. It's refreshing to find it."

"If you don't do ajob right..."

I said. Ijust wanted him to get out of there before something happened. I was breathing hard. I had this awful tightness in my throat, asifI were a kid and I'd got caught doing something wrong.

"These days," he said, "you give a kid an inch and he takes a mile, you know? Does your father trust you?"

"Sure," I said. I was watching the way his hands moved near his mouth. Something was on his nerves, and it made me nervous.

"You work like hell to give them something and a lot of them just throw it in your face. You know-drugs.

Disobedience. Insolence, really. Hell, defiance. I think working like this, working alongside your father-I think that's a good thing. I wish I did something that my son could do

with me, you know?"

I just nodded.

"You can't ask a kid to help you sell stocks in the summer. It's not a thing you can do together."

"No," I said.

"When I was your age, you know what I wanted to be? I wanted to be a carpenter. I sometimes wish I'd done it."

"Never too late," r said.

"I wouldn't know." He was thinking hard about something, looking off. Then he said, "I guess you communicate pretty well."

I didn't know what he meant.

"You and your father."

"Oh," I said. "Yeah." couldn't look at him.

"Must-must be nice."

"It's okay," I said.

"You're about my son's age, aren't you? Finished high school a couple years ago?"

"Year ago," I said.

He nodded. "It's nice to see such respect for a father."

I didn't know what he wanted me to say to this.

He was quiet a long time, standing there looking at the room.

"Well," he said finally. "Tell your dad I think he does very handsome work."

"I will," I told him.

"It sure looks nice," he said.

"Hard work," I said.

He smiled. "New money."

"Right," I said. "New money."

I couldn't believe it.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"Nothing.

My father says that-'new money.'''

"Oh, yeah. I don't know where that comes from."

"It comes from my father," I said.

He was thinking about something else. "Right," he said.

"Well."

"That's the only place I've ever heard it," I said.

He looked at me with this expression, like he might ask me for a favor. It was almost hangdog.

"I hope you both realize what you have."

I said, "Oh, right."

Then we stood there, looking at the room. It seemed like a long time.

"I'll let you get back to work," he said, and I headed away from him. "It's a nicejob," he said. "An excellent job."

"People notice good work," I said. I was just mouthing it now.

"Your dad teach you that?"

"That's it," I told him. I thought something might break in my chest. I just wanted to know why he wouldn't get out of there and let me get on with the job.

"That's what I learned," I said.

And for halfa second I could see it in his face, what he was thinking: How, between me and the man with the money to buy a big house like this, with its wraparound porch and its ten-acre lot and the intercom in the walls and three fireplaces and all the nice stuff tha t was going to be moved into it soon-how, between that man and me, I was the lucky one. 0 About the Author: Richard Bausch is a novelist, short story writer, and songwriter. He has published two collections of stories (The Fireman's Wife and Spirits and Other Stories) and several novels.

the large defense-spending increases they contained. But by about 1982, they had parted company with Reagan. He wanted further increases, whereas they felt that the current defense budget was fine, or even too large.

It is this second interpretation, I think, that most accurately describes many of the issues listed in the liberal column of Table IV. Ronald Reagan, I have argued, did receive something of a mandate in the 1980 election-but it was a fairly limited mandate. Particularly in the area of economic policy, the public was not asking for a wholesale dismantling of federal welfare and regulatory programs, but for a series of rather modest adjustments: A little less domestic spending (or perhaps a slower rate of growth); a slight relaxation of environmental regulations in order to produce more energy; a little more reliance on individual initiative in dealing with the problems of poverty. And by about 1982 or 1983 substantial parts of the American public seem to have concluded that they had already received most of what they wanted. And who can blame them for drawing this conclusion? The Reagan legislative program of 1981 had, indeed, increased defense spending, reduced the income tax, and imposed at least some cuts in many social programs.

At this point, the public might have reacted with unrestrained joy and gratitude toward Reagan-and in a sense voters did, by overwhelmingly reelecting him. But most survey questions on policy issues are not concerned with "What have you done for me lately?" but with "What should you do for me tomorrow?" And on this score, the survey evidence suggests that voters increasingly came to the conclusion that Ronald Reagan was headed in the wrong direction, particularly in the areas of defense and domestic spending. For whatever their other limitations, comparative survey questions capture one element of the American political system quite accurately. The advocates of zero-based budgeting notwithstanding, the entire federal budget is not debated and constructed anew each year.

The starting point is the current budget, and the options discussed are incremental changes-a little more here, a little less there. As elected officials sat down to consider what those marginal changes might look like, they faced a markedly conservative climate of opinion in 1980, but a considerably more liberal one by 1988.

Starting in about 1982, then, and building throughout the rest of the 1980s, one begins to see the emergence of a new public mood that might best be summarized as follows: We like Ronald Reagan personally and we approve of most of the policy initiatives he has taken in the past. But we're not sure that we want to continue heading in the same direction. We think too much money has been devoted to defense and we're increasingly worried about a growing accumulation of unmet domestic needs in such areas as education, health care, and the

environment. We don't like taxes or big government but we're not as concerned or threatened about such matters as we were when Reagan took office.

Some of the best appeals to this mood can be found, ironically, in the 1988 campaign speeches of George Bush. On social and cultural issues, like crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, the Bush strategy plainly rested on an attempt to defend conservative orthodoxy, while painting his opponent as an unrepentant liberal. But on economic issues, the Bush campaign clearly seems to have understood that its candidate could not win simply by promising four more years of Reaganite policies. With the major exception of his pledge not to raise taxes, Bush's speeches were an artful attempt to retain his conservative base while nonetheless distancing himself from substantial parts of the Reagan legacy. He would seek a kinder, gentler nation; make education a top priority; and resurrect the fallen banner of environmentalism.

Above all, the Bush presidency would be more than just a holding pattern. As Bush often declared in his campaign speeches, "We are the change."

These most recent changes in public opinion, and the new mood they embody, obviously have important implications for this year's election. At a minimum, they indicate that new Democratic initiatives in such areas as education, day care, and health care will receive a considerably more sympathetic reception than they would have 12 years earlier. On almost every major policy issue that is relevant to such proposals, recent trends have clearly been in a liberal direction. Not only is public opinion today more supportive of domestic spending, it is also less responsive to such traditional conservative themes as taxes and big government. Of course, the popular "mandate" for such programs is probably just as limited as Reagan's mandate in 1980. Nothing in the survey data suggests that the public is looking for a massive new expansion of federal domestic programs to rival that of the New Deal or the Great Society. If Democrat Bill Clinton does get elected this year, it is probable that within a few years the public will conclude that he, too, has exceeded his instructions, and public opinion might then start to shift back in the opposite direction. But that problem (if it ever should come to pass) is years in the future.

For the present, public attitudes on an important range of economic policy issues have moved a long way from their position in the late 1970s.

The changes summarized in Table IV are not, of course, George Bush's doing. They occurred prior to his own ascension to the presidency. Conceding that, there seems little doubt that Bush has greatly complicated the conservative predicament and considerably magnified the Democratic advantage. True, a President's capacity to mold and shape public opinion is distinctly limited. The dominant trend of public opinion changes during the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan administraLions

were all in the opposite direction to what each President would presumably have preferred. But given any particular constellation of public attitudes, Presidents have substantially greater freedom in deciding how to respond to and channel such demands. It was Ronald Reagan's intuitive understanding of this point that helps explain why liberalism was so timid and dormant up through the end of his administration.

If Reagan was unable to effect a fundamental restructuring of American economic thinking, he did show the importance of a President's ability to dominate the public debate: To elevate some issues and proposals (and not others) to the center of the national agenda, and to help determine the context in which issues are framed and understood.

It is precisely this power that George Bush has largely abdicated, particularly in the realm of economic policy, over the past three years. By endorsing a tax increase after repeated promises to the contrary, for example, Bush has substantially neutralized the Republicans' strongest counter-argument to new Democratic initiatives. Consider, too, the issue of education. Between 1978 and 1988, the number of Americans who wanted to spend more money for "improving the nation's education system" rose from 48 percent to 64 percent. If Bush has decided, for fiscal reasons, not to comply with this request, he might at least have responded with a significant educational program of his own and then pushed hard for its adoption.

Such a course of action might have redirected the debate away from how much should be spent to what the money should be spent on. To those most concerned about the issue, it would have sent the message that the President understood the urgency of the problem, and differed only as to the best means for solving it.

In fact, however, Bush's approach to the education issue has oscillated between timidity and boredom. After delaying for several years, he finally delegated the task of policy formation to his secretary of education-and then showed no inclination to push very hard for the package that emerged. Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum; Bush's lack of leadership on education has helped give the impression (undeserved in my opinion) that conservatives have very little to say about the issue.

In the end, the combination of incumbency, lower interest rates, Bush's record in foreign policy, and public conservatism on social issues may still give the President a substantial reelection victory. In the meantime, however, it is hard to ignore the signs that the long-dormant forces of American liberalism are finally beginning to stir from their slumbers-or to avoid the conclusion that George Bush has played an important role in this reawakening.

D About the Author: William G. Mayer is an assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.

In Praiseof Middlebrow What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.

-First lines of Erich Segal's Love Story Everything follows from this principle: that the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is "unreal," i.e., intractable. Whence the choice ofa "dramatic" method which renounces examples and rests on a single action of a primary language (no metalanguage).

-First lines of Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse

W

hich book would you rather keep reading? Chances are: Segal's. Love Story was a best-seller for seven months, while A Lover's Discourse quickly bounced into remainder bins. But which book would you rather be seen reading? Chances are: Barthes's. The most pernicious modern cultural taboo is the one against admitting that you like popular culture. Not pop culture, but culture that is meant to be popular. Best-sellers. Serious Hollywood movies. Broadway plays. Public television. George Gershwin. The stuff critics call middlebrow, as opposed to the refined highbrow and the schlocky lowbrow.

We live in a time when highbrow has never been so high-so removed from daily life. And lowbrow has never so mesmerized

the masses or carried such chic with intellectuals. But we have lost appreciation for the art that was once the mainstay of American culture and the unguilty delight of intelligent readers, listeners, and viewers: The art of middlebrow.

Hounded for years by highbrow derision-by broadsides flowing scornfully from the pens of such culture guardians as T.S. Eliot and Dwight Macdonald, among many others-most of us now feel ashamed for preferring Elmore Leonard to Luigi Pirandello, The Graduate to Black Orpheus, and Stevie Wonder to Erik Satie.

But no matter how we lash ourselves to the mast of the "quizzical" and the "refractory," our hearts still quiver when serenaded by pure middlebrow emotions such as sadness and joy.

The derogation of middlebrow, in short, has gone much too far. It is time to bring middlebrow out of its cultural closet, to hail its emollient properties, to trumpet its mending virtues. For middlebrow not only entertains, it educates-pleasurably training us to appreciate high art. It is the spoonful of sugar that makes the medicine go down.

Middlebrow lacks highbrow's self-conscious "grand manner." Where highbrow is labyrinthine, middlebrow is direct.

Where highbrow is angst, ennui, schadenfreude, middlebrow is anxiety, boredom, envy.

In a culture riven by a choice between Koyaanisqatsi and Porky's, between works contrived to tickle the rarefied palates of the few and those constructed to microwave the permafrozen brains of the many, middlebrow reconnects the intellectual with the emotional. It provides some unity in a culture where political, social, and intellectual fragmentation is now the norm. To neglect middlebrow is to deal yet another blow to a civilized and informed discourse, one in which we can all participate and have some clue about what everybody else is talking about.

So what are we talking about? Defining middlebrow is a notoriously tricky endeavor, one that depends in part on an understanding of the neighboring realms of highbrow and lowbrow.

Middlebrow lacks highbrow's self-conscious "grand manner." Where highbrow is labyrinthine, middlebrow is direct.

Where highbrow is angst, ennui, schadenfreude, middlebrow is anxiety, boredom, envy. Middlebrow is distinguished by technical competence, singleness of affect, purity of emotion, tidiness of resolution, and modesty of scope. Georgia O'Keeffe paintings are textbook middlebrow; so are the better 30something episodes; almost any striking and widely disseminated photograph-Cartier-Bresson's picture of an impish lad carrying wine bottles; Kris Kristofferson's "Me and Bobbie McGee"; and Marcel Marceau's miming a prisoner palming the walls of his cell. Each tells a story in familiar fashion, is memorable, and is readily understood by all.

Context-the frame through which a work is seen-plays a key role in determining its brow. The question "Who farted?" is patently lowbrow--except when Estragon poses it in Waiting for Godot. Then it is highbrow. The frames that the culture guardians most often surround middlebrow work with, thus raising it to highbrow, are the British (consider that Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey seem tonier than Sam Spade, and that the much fawned over Upstairs, Downstairs was just Dallas with kippers); the otherwise foreign (the Philippines' F. Sionil Jose is in; Chicago's James T. Farrell, despite similar themes and prose, is out); the neglected (it is cooler to be caught reading a dog-eared copy of Edgar Allan Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym than his Telltale Heart); and, especially, the abstruse (witness the critical pother over Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which, stripped of its formidable theoretical scaffolding, was just a chilly murder mystery).

Middlebrow is also affected by the sweep of time and taste.

Popular entertainment that outlasts its era gets re-examined by new critics, re-presented to a new audience, elevated, and enshrined. Thus Chaplin and Keaton, once middlebrow, are now unimpeachably regarded as high art. So too Harold Arlen, Matthew Brady's Civil War photos, and the movies of The Godfather, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and The Shining; all taken from middlebrow books that remain middlebrow. If Frank Sinatra were dead, he would be high art; time has already beatified Pasty Cline and Jim Morrison. A populist Rossini opera like William Tell or Barber of Seville was once clearly middlebrow; now all opera is widely perceived as rarefied-hence highbrow.

Occasionally, of course, the process works the other way, and high art becomes middlebrow. So Hemingway, once avantgarde, is now a roasted chestnut. Shakespeare's problem plays (Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Coriolanus) rise as worthy of dissertations, and his war horses (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, The Tempest) sink toward middlebrow, their values supposedly diminished by constant production. Shakespeare's themes in the old favorites are brilliantly middlebrow, because middlebrow essentially elaborates one strong theme, such as love, revenge, or ambition. The problem plays require intellectually mediated reactions, and our sympathies don't lie as readily with one or two characters.

The manifold ways in which middlebrow infuses our culture are either ignored or crudely caricatured by culture guardians.

To them, middlebrow is exemplified by a grandmother rocking on a porch somewhere near Decatur, Illinois, wearing a hair net, drinking a glass of Crystal Lite, and furrowing her brow over a Reader's Digest condensed Ben-Hur. For readers of a magazine such as The New Republic, middlebrow is much closer to the taste of a well-educated sophomore: Pet Shop Boys and U2 on the stereo; an "encore episode" of The Fugitive on the Art & Entertainment Channel (it is classier now than it was on ABC in 1963); Au Bon Pain croissants in the fridge; and the walls plastered with Renoir's boating party, Monet's lilies, and a shadowed black-and-white photo of James Dean.

This highbrow stereotyping of the middle stems from cul-

tural and intellectual insecurity. Such stereotyping is rare among those who genuinely respect high art, since they are less threatened by middlebrow than merely uninterested in it.

Where high art is work of complex passion, highbrow is merely a stance of complexity. It fetishizes difficulty for its own sake, as a way of asserting cultural superiority over the less learned.

Emotion and passion are largely valueless here because they don't fit a narrative schema, can't be diagrammed, pigeonholed, reduced. This misplacement of priorities leads us to waste time listening to Anton Webern, reading John Ashbery, and watching plays directed by Peter Sellars.

The most common contemporary expression of highbrow is best called highlowbrow, in which highbrow condescendingly co-opts low. (It is O.K. to see the Steven Seagal movie Hard to Kill if you make bets on the body count.) The high low sensibility sees all lowbrow in quotation marks. So we can revel in the New York Post's lurid headlines-"Teddy's Sexy Romp!"-any C. David Heymann celeb bio (Poor Little Rich

Girl, A Woman Named Jackie), Gilligan's Island, and the Archies' song "Sugar Sugar" without, in any sense of the phrase, a second thought.

This trivia-surfing sensibility leads to intellectualized but fundamentally mindless art. The problem with art that aims at this higWow sensibility is that it often lacks sympathy for-or belief in-our common humanity. So pervasive has high low cynicism become that many readers of this magazine would have difficulty even saying "our common humanity" without an ironic edge.

Lacking faith that a wide audience will approach their art with trust and goodwill, highlow artists turn precious and diffident.

Martin Amis, Jonathan Demme, Laurie Anderson, David Lynch, and David Byrne all rummage through lowbrow as dispassionately as they would through a clothes hamper, fascinated by unsorted "Americana."

While they have had successes-Money, Something Wild, the early episodes of Twin Peaks-they will, in time, seem increasingly marginal; art that is only slumming has no claim on greatness.

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page 42)

A Short History In the three decades following World War I, Americans created an unprecedented range of activities aimed at making literature and other forms of "high" culture available to a wide reading public. Beginning with the Book-ofthe-Month Club, founded in 1926, book clubs provided subscribers with recently published works chosen by expert judges. "Great books" discussion groups appeared.

Colleges and universities, accommodating an expanding student body, augmented their curricula with extension programs in the humanities and other disciplines, some offered on the new medium of radio. By the 1930s broadcasting also routinely enabled literary critics such as Alexander Woollcott to bring their commentary directly into American living rooms.

Innovations in print journalism-the establishment, for example, of the New York Herald Tribune's Books section and the Saturday Review of Literature-similarly enlarged the critic's opportunity to guide readers through the increasingly bewildering task of book selection. At the same time, older institutions such as correspondence courses, night schools, and women's study clubs flourished; it was a "golden age" for the speaker on the lecture circuit and for the expansion of public libraries.

By the 1920s, the popularization of literature was routinely referred to as "middlebrow culture." The reference to the height of the brow originally derived from phrenology

and carried overtones of racial differentiation. By the l880s, "highbrow" was already synonymous with "refined"; 20 years later, "lowbrow" came to denote a lack of cultivation. Shortly thereafter, essayist and critic Van Wyck Brooks, condemning the division in American life between effete guardians of art and practical, vulgar materialists, looked in vain for a "genial middle ground" on which cultural life could thrive.

In 1933 Margaret Widdemer, reducing the label to a description of the reading public in the Saturday Review, identified as middlebrow the "men and women, fairly civilized, fairly literate, who support the critics and lecturers and publishers by purchasing their wares."

Located between the "tabloid addict class" and the "tiny group of intellectuals," middlebrows represented, in Widdemer's view, simply "the majority reader."

In other hands, though, the word acquired more potency. Virginia Woolf, in an essay published in 1942, derided the middlebrow as a person "betwixt and between," devoted to "no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige." Her association of "middlebrow" with the corruption of taste by commercial interests reverberated through every subsequent discussion of the term.

In 1960, Dwight Macdonald, whose Partisan Review article "Masscult and Midcult"

remains the most famous critique of American middlebrow culture, heightened that term's pejorative connotations.

Macdonald revived Woolf's view that "midcult" was more harmful than mass culture because it was the enemy within the walls: "It pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them." Singling out, once again, the Book-of-the-Month Club, along with the Saturday Review, and such authors as Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Thornton Wilder, Macdonald deplored the tendency of proponents of "midcult" to debase the "discoveries of the avant-garde" by reducing them to banality and commercialism.

"It is one thing," he explained in a footnote, "to bring High Culture to a wider audience without change; and another to 'popularize' it by sales talk." Macdonald rejected the idea that democracy permitted-and required-a broadly diffused commitment to art. Placing his hopes instead in the creation of "smaller, more specialized audiences," he concluded: "So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care about good writing, painting, music, architecture, philosophy, etc., have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction with Midcult."

-Joan ShelleyRubin

Reprinted

by permission

of

the

author

and

publisher

from

by Joan Shelley Rubin.

Copyright Š 1992 The University of North Carolina Press.

The

Making

of

Middlebrow

Culture

World

The Mad In some ways, my one single guest appearance in MAD did more for me than 30 years of cartooning in India. It gave me an instant, readymade passport to the international world of humor. My seven years in The Statesman, my 22 years with The Hindustan Times meant nothing. The name MAD was magic.

I went to New York City and the offices of MAD magazine in the summer of 1970, a guest of the U.S. government, carrying a packet of wordless cartoons under my arm and wearing my heart on my sleeve. There I was, a peddler of humor from the exotic East entering the Sanctum Sanctorum of Satire, the Honeycomb of Humor, the Mecca of Mirth. I encountered perfectly normal people with no visible evidence of madness! Editor Al Feldstein, Art Director John Putnam, Associate Editors Jerry de Fuccio and Nick Meglin.

Cartoonist Al Jaffee floated in and Dave Berg was bent over his strip in the next room. As my cartoons were passed around, I sat there speechless. Suddenly Feldstein remarked: "These are cute. Can we use them?" My paralysis was over.

The late publisher. He created MAD for a joke, and the world laughed.

Publisher William Gaines, as large as life, bounced into the room to say hello. Seventeen stone of boundless energy, he announced to his delighted team that in 1974 they were going to India! A foreign excursion used to be an

SUDHIR DAR: Have you heard of places in America where MAD magazine is forbidden, like schools or ... ?

NICK MEGLIN: It used to be. Teachers throughout this country used to frown upon any kind ofliterature that had nothing to do with what they were teaching. MAD, of course, would be in that category ... because if young people are reading the magazine, rather than school books, and laughing and having fun, of course, those young people would get into trouble. However, we're now ~ ~ getting a lot of mail from teachers who are actually using MAD as a device to get young ~.I ~(--" people to read, since they are reading a lot less for 1111 enjoyment and entertainment and they're becoming an electronically influenced society. They play the computer games-they're very attached to computers, CDs, VCRs, tapes, anything where you press a button and get instant gratification without having to work for it or read it. The best education is from the classics, from books, and children are not reading them. So teachers are now introducing MAD ....

Do you get a lot of hale mail?

J~~

annual ritual at MAD, a special bonus. One year Gaines took the entire editorial team to London, Copenhagen, Moscow, Leningrad, and Amsterdam. Another year, Haiti. A third year, the Far East. They never came to India, though.

One enduring-and humorlessmemory of my visit to MAD is my meeting with strip cartoonist Dave Berg. "So, when are you coming to India?" I asked politely. ''I'm not coming!" He was dead serious. "Why not?" I persisted. "When I was young I saw poverty," he said grimly, "I don't want to see it again." I was chilled to the core.

A lot has changed at MAD since William Gaines passed away in his sleep on June 3 of this year, aged 70. Of the old team, only Nick Meglin remains. He came to MAD when he was almost 20, and this is the only place w!)ere he has worked. Nick now shares the editor's job with John Ficarra.

Thanks to a USIS telephone hookup, I spoke to Nick in the middle of September. Our conversation went on and on. Here for all MAD fans are some quotable quotes from the editor himself.

Very rarely. The only time people get very, very angry is if they belong to the segment that does not like freedom of choice and freedom of mind. Since we have always had fun ridiculing the policies and mistakes of whoever is in office-be they Republican or Democrat-we have no one side. We will always reflect the total pict ure.

What kind of age group are you aiming at?

Well, we've never aimed at any age group and never will. We don't have advertising, so we don't ? know who our readers are. We always try to create a magazine for ourselves. Granted, some of ~ ~... the things are for a more adult readership, but (' there're also some ideas that are just whImsical, ~ ~ Just humorous, like SergIo Aragones's work, and younger readers tend to go in that direction. So our readership we find, from the mail that we get, is probably between 12 and 18. That's the bulk of it, but we get many adults reading MAD and we also have younger readers, nine and ten years old who are very bright, who are imitating their older brothers and sisters.

What sort of influence have you had on Ameri-

U

The onetime ~

cartoonist talks ...

='"MAD

America and the American way of life than you know about us ... thanks largely to Hollywood, the media, and MAD magazine. can humor over the years? Have you set new trends?

Yes, we know we have. We have had great influence on advertising because we looked at the ads and made fun of these campaigns with their ridiculous claims and their stupid approaches to get people to buy their products. So, before you knew it, a lot of the MAD readers grew up into advertising men and there're a lot of them out there now. Some of them are so funny it looks as if MAD created them. We have influenced movies and television. We kind of led the way.

What are you guys like in real life?

Well, I don't know what your perception of us was, but I've never seen a radical change in anyone's personality, among all the artists and writers that we've dealt with-I've been here 36 years. More times than not, our people are very shy and quiet and you would not believe they had anything to do with MAD. They're family men, they have wonderful values, they're not people who do strange things or crazy things or live a crazy lifestyle.

We seem to think that we know a lot more about

... with the longtime ~

editor.

That's for sure. Well, we seem to be at the center of the target, if you wilL.I'm surprised that MAD magazine would have that much influence in other countries. Our humor is so pointed toward daily American life. We're always surprised that the foreign editions-there are 12 foreign editions of MAD presently, and now that the former communist countries are more open to Western ideas, we even anticipate that in the next two or three years there may be more foreign-language edi- . tions--even appear in these countries, that the other countries even know what we do.

What is your total circulation?

Worldwide, we're more than a million when you count the other editions. We used to be like two million worldwide and now we're considerably less. We're running at about 60-70 percent of what we used to be. The United States has had a reduction in babies, we've had a reduction in the number of young people. By the way, a lot of mergers are taking place in the whole publishing industry-books, magazines, newspapers in this country-just to survive, and a lot of magazines,

in fact, have fallen by the wayside because the reading public has diminished so much.

How far in advance do you work?

Three months to six months. We only come out eight times a year.

With the U.S. elections on November 3, a lot of people are hoping that we'll have a lot of fun. We can't, because the issue we're currently working on is coming out in January.

So you can't have last-minute additions?

No, nothing at all.

With the kind of stuff you produce, how often have you been sued and by whom?

We have not been sued often, because we have the First Amendment, freedom of the press. We don't do libelous things. We don't create facts, we only reflect facts.

Have you ever had to apologize?

Never!

I was sorry to hear about Bill Gaines.

Yes, Bill Gaines is a tremendous loss to us, as a friend as much as a publisher.

So who has taken over from him?

No one really. Anne Gaines, Bill's wife, who worked with him as a sort of business manager, is now assuming more responsibility. We're hoping to fill the void with not one particular person, just the group that he always had around him.

Tell us about Bill and the secret of MAD. Bill Gaines was a very successful publisher of horror and crime and science fiction comics. He had space for another magazine, so he and Harvey Kurtyman created MAD just for ajoke. They were making fun of other comics and comic strip characters. When the comic industry really failed, MAD emerged as the most popular of all the magazines.

So Bill changed it from a comic book to a comic magazine format, raised the price, went into black and white, different size, made it into a formidable magazine. Ninety percent of MAD's artists and writers who have come along have been free-lancers. We don't have an art staff or a writing staff. We never did.

Who created Alfred E. Neuman?

The face was around before the turn of the century. It was used in different advertising, for dentists and all kinds of things-you know, with the missing tooth. We started using the face as an afterthought, but through the years we began to realize that, very much like the Playboy rabbit, he had a visual trademark, and he emerged out of that.

There was no copyright? You could just use him as a mascot?

Yes. When we started to create him as our logo, as our thing, then, of course, he was copyrighted. The name, the face, the look, every thingnow it's copyrighted. But when we first found him, it was long before the copyright law. We have traces of faces that look like him from the 1870s and 1880s.

One last thing, Nick. When I came to MAD in 1970, Bill Gaines had promised to bring all you guys to India in 1974 but you never came.

No, it never worked out. We really had wanted to, but it never materialized and since then it has been very difficult. The trips have dwindled down to very local places and every other year instead of every year. The profit margin has really decreased, Sudhir.

I doubt very much if there's a trip anywhere to the East in the near future.

0 About the Interviewer: Sudhir Dar is the award-winning political cartoonist of The Pioneer, published from New Delhi and Lucknow.

Aristotle's two criteria for art-that it should entertain and instruct-have not been improved upon. Great high art does both. The culture guardians' fear is that we-the laggardly masses-ean't feel and think at the same time.

Susan Sontag wrote of camp, the harbinger of highlow, that it "incarnates a victory of ,style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over 'morali ty,' of irony over tragedy." Middlebrow exactly reverses that formula-its emphasis is on content, an accessible message. Often that message is just one emotion: Being misunderstood (James Dean), dreamy (Monet), in love with someone who wears a beret and reads Roland Barthes (Doisneau).

Middlebrow is never, ever hip. This is actually its greatest virtue; it defines and preserves an enduring set of common American values. The generations that could quote Longfellow's "Hiawatha" are now the generations that flocked to Dances with Wolves, but both works reflected and rekindled a longing for the lost American frontier.

To be sure, bad middlebrow delivers not truth but soggy sentimentality. For instance, the wretched line from Our Town that "there's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being." Everything James Michener has written.

Anything issuing from the Wyeth family. Or the cowlicked barbershop boys of Norman Rockwell, the singsong iambs of Joyce Kilmer, and the compose-by-numbers melodies of Andrew Lloyd Webber. All substitute bald sentiment and preachy, phony, or mollycoddling formulas for argument and style. They sink toward lowbrow, which unites us only in leaving our "leisure hours" untroubled by thought, in providing smooth passage from workstation to dreamless slumber.

They lack verve.

But when that bald middlebrow sentiment is bewigged and given a little thematic styling mousse, you have something wonderfully underappreciated: Directness. It is the forcefully forthright artists who stir up social change. The two novels that have most affected American life-Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Sinclair's The Jungle-were crafted with frank middlebrow intent.

Middlebrow's strength (and, of course, its limitation) is its lack of irony. Warhol's Brillo boxes and Lichtenstein's Benday dot comics paintings, originally highlow hybrids, soon became middlebrow icons in the American narrative, thereby shedding much of their intellectual content and their irony. We now experience Look Mickey and Campbell's Soup Cans with unwrinkled brow; no Brechtian alienation makes us question how and why we're experiencing them, makes us wonder if we need a visa for art's new frontier. So David Hockney, Anne Tyler, and Spike Lee, forceful stylists and passionate thinkers all, are middlebrow by virtue of their accessibility. Where highbrow excludes, middlebrow includes, even welcomes. In a culture of conflicting signals and input overload, where so much art dares you to understand it, this is no small virtue and no small relief.

This ease of apprecIatIOn leads to another middlebrow virtue: By demystifying art, by bringing it within reach, middlebrow begins a conversation with the viewer or reader that encourages further, more complex and articulate dialogues. We are not born admiring Debussy and Strindberg; we have to work up to them, apprenticing in the foothills of middlebrow.

Chopin's "Chopsticks" leads us to his mazurkas; reading Jorge Amado's magical realism is excellent preparation for Marquez's more demanding pyrotechnics; and much of the luminosity of Cezanne's apples derives from their being unlike any of the round, red, still-life blobs we have previously learned to recognize as "apples."

Middlebrow's tutelary function in turn provokes an attack against it from those who fear, with Dwight Macdonald, that middlebrow values are too seductive; that "instead of being transitional, [they] may now themselves become a debased, permanent standard."

Why the fuss? Aristotle had two criteria for art that have not been improved upon~that it should entertain and instruct.

Great high art does both. The culture guardians' fear is that we~the laggardly masses-ean't feel and think at the same time. Of the two, they would rather we were thinking. Unfortunately, as we have seen, their treasured highbrow tends to lecture rather than instruct. Good middlebrow, on the other hand, offers more amusement and less instruction, but both are present and neither is slighted.

There is, in short, nothing wrong~and a great deal right~ with art that is content thoughtfully to amuse. To be genuinely entertaining, you have to appeal to your audience's common humanity~yes~to include rather than exclude, to interest by a considered appeal to intelligence. If you do it badly, people like me will make fun of you. But if you do it well, only the culture guardians will get mad, because you will be furthering the notion that art, all art, should disclose not secrets to the few, but treasures to the many.

0 About the Author: Tad Friend is a contributing Esquire magazines.

editor to Vogue and

Don't Look Now Promise Ihem Derrida, bUI give them De. All those tomes of Del' rid a, Lacan, Veena Das, and those dog-eared issues of the EP W (Economic and¡ Political Weekly) and Contributions to Sociology and the odd issue of Seminar look good under the armpils. Or jutting out prominently from dusty bookshelves. The authors' names a nice-sounding litany in coffee houses or university canteens. Milan Kundera and Amitav Ghosh, and, of course, Salman Rushdie (whose name acquired the resonance of a !TIantra, so often has it been taken) can puff you up of a social evening.

But all this must-read literature is rapidly gathering the dust of indifference. It does serve its purpose as a nice introduction-like a calling card with all the degrees, positions, and postings. But increasingly, and to an extent unabashedly, it's the delicious lowbrow that brings the gleam to the eye. And sends the book sales soaring. And enlivens those cocktail parties where a sprinkling of the glitteratiliterati goes well with the canapes. A copy of Kundera's lmmortality or Omni can safely lie round the office for a week. Leave De's Starry Nights or a copy of even an old Cosmopolitan for an instant and it's gone, gili, gili gone.

We've come a long way-from cosmonauts to Cosmo-nuts.

The Economist, The Economic Times, and lndia Today are a must on coffee tables-signs of having arrived, of being cultured, and in the swim. Those lustrous travel books to places

you can hardly spell and glossies on ethnic crafts also help furnish the drawing rooms, setting off beautifully the elegance of those rough and self-patterned pottery and large black urns with latest plants from Bangalore and perhaps that half-eaten wooden door picked up from Rajasthan.

Bedrooms bring out the real preferences, the true colors: The Daniele Steeles, Judith Krantzes, and Tom Clancys, and, and, yes, Cosmopolitan and Vanity Fair for those who can afford them. But it's the bathrooms for the real stuff, the heart of the matter, that which quickens the pulse. Stardust, Cine Blitz, in much perused conditions. And, yes, detective lore with all the blood and gore nestling amongst all the hair dyes and aftershaves. Not P.D. James, or Ruth Rendell-those have graduated to the bedroom-nice middlebrow stuff. It is those books with lurid covers in which the body count is high and lots of body on view, that high-protein diet of sex and violence. And the staple Archie and Mills and Boon that do more to bridge generation gaps than anything else. In fact, that generation gap has now all but vanished with all the manna coming from heaven these days. We now live at the hour of Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful: And, of course, the only thing that keeps Indian television afloat: Chitrahaar, the original MTV if you will.

Mason, he of the witty lines and sardonic demeanor (Santa Barbara), holds even Indian

intellectuals TV-bound.

Will he marry the woman he does not love to spite his father is a question as critical to us here as to which journalist actor Anupam Kher will slap next.

Or, who's with whom in Bollywood.

Art's pretty these days, but i(s only as "high" as the prices. The chattering classes talk about buying M.F. Husain by the square meter. And the latest parlor game of the nouveau collector is to seek out those rare Ganesh Pynes: "I've just managed to get a Pyne," is like saying I've just climbed the north face of Everest. And what's really filling living rooms are the copies of old masters being cranked out by artists in various corners of the country.

Ours then is a multilayered society: Just about everything can peacefully coexist at the same time and in the same place. East and West, low, middle, and highbrow. So, it's highbrow for the living rooms in which the' neo-documentary is a respectable conversation piece-talking of the latest film on rape or police atrocities and MandaI while sipping delicately on piiia coladas or kir. The bedroom for the middlebrow: The Clancys and those lovely soaps and Pakistani plays. And the bathroom for the lowbrow: Gossip mags and roadside stuff. Where you can, safely, take off the brown paper.

0 About the Author: Madhu Jain, an associate editor with India Today magazine, writes on the arts, culture, media, and trends.

Jasper Johns, Painted Bronze II, 1960, painted bronze, 14 x 20 x 12 em.

Claes Oldenburg, Floor Cone (Giant Ice-Cream Cone), 1962, synthetic polymer paint on canvas filled with foam rubber and cardboard boxes, 137 x 345 x 142 em.

Art High and LoW" Philip Head 1975, 166x

Guston, and Bott/e, oil on canvas, 174cm.

J. Walter Thompson Company created this ad for Ballantine's beer in 1935.

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For most of this century, serious artists have often looked to popular art forms-eomics, posters, ads, newspapers, even graffiti-as raw materials and sources of inspiration. Picasso pasted bits of newspapers onto his early drawings; in the 1960s such American pop artists as James Rosenquist made giant paintings that resemble colorful bil1board ads; and the late Keith Haring, one of the most admired young artists of the 1980s, buil t his style around the look of New York subway cars vandalized by anonymous "graffiti artists."

"Modern art and popular culture," explains Kirk Varnedoe, head of the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, "create a dialogue which carries the viewer into the next phase of modern art."

Varnedoe, along with Adam Gopnik, art critic of The New Yorker magazine, recently organized an

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exhibition, "High and Low," at MOMA with modern art and popular culture as its theme. The controversial show, comprising more than 250 works by West European, Russian, and American artists, traced the ever-shifting line between "high art" and popular design. The bulk of the show paired artworks with the sources that inspired them: Actual comic strips next to the very comicslike paintings of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; an advertisement for Ballantine's beer alongside the bronze beer cans created by Jasper Johns.

When the exhibition opened in New York, it created a furor in the art world. Critics attacked the show's premise on various grounds, but it was a crowd-pleaser, and attendance was high. Jack Flam of the Wall Street Journal questioned whether popular imagery has any artistic merit and complained that the show's organizers had given little attention to the ways modern art has

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However, Robert Hughes, Time magazine's art critic and one of America's most respected arbiters of contemporary art, wrote that understanding "this vernacular, as Gopnik and Varnedoe rightly argue, is essential to a grasp of Cubism, Dada, Russian Constructivism, Surrealism, and their European offshoots, along with a great deal of American art produced after 1950. Artists have always been much less snobbish about their sources than the idealizing critics who erect value systems on the back of their work."

The exhibition later traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

0

Joseph Cornell, untitled (Medici Princess), 1948, construction-wood box with mixed media, 45 x 28 x II em.

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Roy Lichtenstein, Tension, 1964, oil and magna on canvas, 173 x 173 em.

Tony Abruzzo and Bernard Sachs, artists; Ira Schnapp, lettering, panel from "Give Me an Hour," in Girls' Romances magazine, January 1962.

Arjun Singh, Minister for Human Resource Development, participated in a program last month at the American Center in New Delhi marking the 30th anniversary of the local field office of the U.S. Library of Congress (see SPAN August 1992).

Singh said the Library of Congress is a model for countries around the world, and he praised the role of the New Delhi field office in acquiring books from India and other South Asian countries.

"In a country like ours with a vast multicultural past, the problem of storing the great Indian memory, as it were, is truly of epic dimension," Singh said, "and I do hope that we can learn a lot from the library in this behalf.

"Information and knowledge are in many ways central to the democratic ethos. No democratic polity can survive without the right to information and knowledge being guaranteed to all its citizens." He said that libraries, in addition to being repositories of books and other materials, are "democ-

Harvard University's Din and Tonics is one of the most popular student singing groups in the Boston metropolitan area, where it gives two-three concerts every week of the school year. Recently, the troupe performed at New Delhi's Maurya Sheraton Hotel. Their eclecticand electric-repertoire included a cappella renditions of jazz, pop, rock, and classical numbers. Through manipulation of their voices, they created the sounds of instruments and interjected choreographed movements and delightful theatrics.

Left to right: Ambassador Th.omas R. Pickering, Minister Arjun Singh, and Librarian of Congress James Billington.

ratizing instruments" that make knOWledge and wisdom available to all.

James Billington, the librarian of Congress, picked up on the theme of democracy in his address to the gathering. "libraries are, in a sense, temples of democracy," he said. "Just as democra,ey was inconceivable without the culture of the book, so libraries are temples of the pluralism that exists within a democracy because each book is there next to another book that may contradict the one previous to it and all are open to the public.

"Incidentally, I think it is very appropriate that an institution (the New Delhi field office) so central to democracy ...should be located in the world's largest democracy. In any event, it has enabled exposure to the linguistic diversity and the cultural heritage of South Asia, which I must say, as a cultural historian myself, I find a particularly rich

"Our aim is the total entertainment act," says Edwin Outwater, the student musicdirector of the Din and Tonics, a breakaway unit of ¡the famous Harvard Glee Club. "We mix the traditional and the innovative with a whacky style of our own."

and deep and rewarding mine of the world's memory. And this has fostered an enormous expansion of South Asian studies in North America during the last 30 years, an impressive body of American scholarship on this region and a growing band of scholars conversant in the languages of the subcontinent."

Billington, a renowned scholar on Russian history and culture, has headed America's national library since 1987. He previously was director of the prestigious Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a research institution in Washington, D.C. In remarks opening the program, U.S. Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering said the New Delhi field office had "forged a notable link in the remarkable chain of ties between our two nations" and he noted that "outsiqe of this country, the world's largest collection of materials on postIndependence India is housed in the Library of Congress in Washington."

"We are paid like a professional performing group," says Jason Meil, business manager. However, the money does not benefit the members individually but goes into a fund to finance their tours abroad.

Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering recently signed an agreement under which Essar Steel Limited will receive a grant of $500,000 from the U.S. Trade and Development Program (TOP) to conduct a feasibility study on the introduction of a more energy-efficient steelmaking process in India. Shashi Ruia, chairman and managing director of Essar Gujarat, signed the agreement on behalf of Essar Steel.

The Indo-U.S. study will assess the Westinghouse plasmafired cupola process for melting sponge iron produced at Essar Steel's Hot Briquetted Iron (HBI) plant at Hazira, Gujarat. It will also provide engineering information on which to base a cost estimate for adopting the HBI sponge iron for steelmaking on a commercial scale for the first time in India.

The U.S. Trade and Development Program provides funding for American firms to carry out feasibility studies, consultancies, and other planning services for major projects in developing countries. To date, the TOP has made grants aggregating more than $8.5 million to a broad cross section of Indian public and private sector companies, giving them access to state-of-the-art U.S. technology.

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