The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Their Just Dessert

    “ST. PAUL — A lawmaker who had hoped to stop Minnesota prisoners from getting desserts met with an unexpected problem this week: Turns out it would cost the state an extra half million dollars to stop.” —Associated Press, April 5

    I’m kind of sorry that Rep. Marty Seiferts’ no-dessert proposal for state prisoners wasn’t taken more seriously. I mean, hey — you can see where he was going with it. Just trying to save a few bucks here and there. Even though our hoosegows are closer to Super 8s than Hiltons, you can always squeeze another few pennies out of the budget. Put the money to better use than tossing chocolate parfaits down the necks of evildoers.

    And if it weren’t for those outdated feel-good nutritional guidelines gumming up the process, we might have had something here. But no, if we deny our prisoners dessert ($), we then have to replace it with an item of comparable caloric value. Like fruit or cheese ($$$).

    I say we get rid of the guidelines and just send them to bed without any supper. I mean, they’ve been bad, right? And instead of rehabilitation programs, let’s just get my mom to go over there, and she’ll give ’em a good talking to. Hey, it worked for me. Well, mostly, anyway. And, for the super tough cases, I’ve got a friend who’d love to go over there on Saturday nights to dole out spankings, free of charge, just because he’s into that kind of thing.

    Another scheme that got the kibosh before the House Judiciary Committee was a plan to hire private companies to house state prisoners. Jury’s still out on that one, and considering the troubling number of Minnesota-based businesses wallowing in red ink, perhaps this is one proposal we should think about carefully. Do you think Musicland could re-organize in time? They could put Lifers in the Oldies section. Assault and Battery convicts in World Beat? All they have to do is snap those magnetic shoplifting tags on the prisoners and they’ll never get past the Cinnabon before the guards open fire.

    And how about Northwest Airlines? They’ve got some awfully big hangars out at the airport, and loads of high visibility zip-up jumpsuits. Plus, the staff is already adept at maintaining the discipline of large unruly groups, performing cavity searches, and dishing up cheap food.

    My favorite recommendation for thrifty incarceration, however—even better than Gov. Pawlenty’s brainwave of charging political protesters for their luxurious accommodations in the klink—is Rep. Seifert’s plan to serve brunch on weekends and holidays. By adopting the program already in place at St. Cloud State Prison, the state will save almost $250,000 each year. And brunch sounds so festive! I can just see the inmates rioting if there’s not enough whipped almond butter for their scones. Since Martha Stewart may soon be joining the ranks of Cellblock H, perhaps she can lend her special touch to planning the repast. It’s a different kind of state dinner than she’s used to, but I’m sure her classic good taste is appropriate for any occasion. And I imagine we’ll have far fewer escape attempts with Martha designing the Big House menu. Instead of The Shawshank Redemption, it’ll be The Lamb Shank Reduction. (Slice thinly with shiv and serve warm.)

    Still, maybe we don’t need to get rid of the nutritional guidelines altogether to make this thing work. I mean, if ketchup is a vegetable why couldn’t water be classified as a thin soup? We haven’t exhausted our options. What about road kill? Make it into jerky and nobody’d know the difference. How about putting all the prisoners whose height/weight ratio doesn’t match up on Slim Fast? A delicious shake for breakfast, a delicious shake for lunch … a case of the shakes by dinnertime. Like I said, I don’t blame Seifert for trying. He wanted the money saved to go into funding areas of public service that are doomed to be cut this year. Meals on Wheels for one. And if that gets cut, maybe we can just serve the inmates a new Hormel product… Soylent Green!

  • When Loyalty Hurts

    The most important decision most people will ever make is picking the person who owns the last face they see at night and the first face they see in the morning. My mother used to warn my sisters and me to avoid being “unevenly yoked” as we shopped for spouses. For me in particular, that meant “no white women.” She drilled into me that I had a duty to stay “within the race” so that decent black women like my sisters would have someone to marry. (I broke the rule.) My mother did not even worry about my sisters being in a white man’s romantic sights. Oh yes, she told us that white boys loved having sex with black women, and pointed to the many hues of black folk today as proof.

    Ironically, she also said that if that day ever came when white men were willing to marry black women, she would view “brothers playing in the snow” a little bit differently. Well, Mama, the day has come, forcing a confrontation between racial loyalty and personal fulfillment.

    According to the 2000 census, 20 percent more black women attend college than black men. A quarter of all black working women are in professional-managerial jobs, versus less than a fifth of black working men. A staggering three out of every ten black men are caught up in some part of the criminal justice system. Black men drop out of high school and abuse drugs at much higher rates than black women. And finally, black men date and marry interracially at higher rates than black women.

    Now, these statistics are hardly a news flash. There are many reasons for these numbers. However, they present black women with what many see as a difficult choice. According to a recent Newsweek cover story, many black women have decided they are going to “hang with the brothers,” even if it means dating or even marrying men who are far less accomplished.

    Unfortunately, many of these unions are doomed from the start. Sociologist Donna Franklin reports that highly educated black women have a higher divorce rate than other women. Franklin believes the fact that these women make more money and have better educational pedigrees than their husbands is a crucial destabilizing factor.

    Instead of settling for a less accomplished partner, or railing against white women for “taking all the good ones,” more black women have decided that playing in the snow ain’t half bad. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of white men marrying black women increased 260 percent. Granted, these marriages still represent a small portion of all marriages, yet the trend is unmistakable.

    More importantly, white men are beginning to actively pursue black women. When Adrian Brody went to claim his Best Actor Oscar last week, he grabbed presenter Halle Berry and gave her the mother of all smooches. The next day, one film critic remarked that Brody got to act out every man’s fantasy by lip-locking with Berry. Berry has become a desirable actress whose blackness enhances her appeal. I for one am glad to see white boys (and yellow and brown ones) drool over her.

    No one should limit his or her romantic options out of some misplaced sense of racial loyalty. In the Newsweek piece, one black woman was quoted as saying, “We need to think about getting a man when he gets out of prison…you’re not going to find one out here because most of them are either in jail, gay, or taken.” Now, I do not believe that being incarcerated should automatically eliminate a man from the marriage pool. However, skin color alone does not nullify that portion of one’s resume, nor should it. Character really does count. And if a sister happens to find a white boy with character, commitment, ambition, drive, and connections, she should go for it.

    Talk show host Star Jones agrees. “We have to look at all our options, and that means people of all colors.” In other words, black women should do what most women (and men, for that matter) have always done when it comes to matters of the heart—get the best person you can. The race will survive just fine.

  • Forgiving the French

    The early monks of the Egyptian desert often faced their demons head on. Abba Antony in the hot sandy silence of the wilderness found himself attacked by several wild beasts at once. They roared and hissed, they buffeted his makeshift cell until it shook. He stared them down. They gnashed their teeth and left.

    Often, though, subtle means were needed. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers is full of stories which show how simplicity and discernment (and often humor) learnt from long consideration of the human condition can outwit violence, distraction, and despair. There are plenty of later analogs: Sherlock Holmes caught his murderers by identifying myriad varieties of tobacco ash. Miss Marple and Father Brown recognized killers by applying to the motives of their fellow men the results of a lengthy and patient observation.

    Maybe it was something like this that the French Foreign Minister meant when he said France is an old country. He could scarcely have meant it literally. The present French constitution, that of the Fifth Republic, is substantially younger than the present President. Its ultimate ancestor, the constitution of the First Republic, emerged more than a century after the first constitution of Connecticut (supposedly the world’s oldest written constitution).

    In fact, France was drawn together as a single state only after the 16th century Wars of Religion. In the Middle Ages what is now French territory was home to two distinct Romance languages, the langue d’oc and the langue d’oui, named from their words for “yes,” the former derived from Latin hoc (“this thing”), the latter from hic ille (“this is it”). Large parts of it were ruled for centuries by the Kings of England.

    Wisdom, however, does not arise simply from the passage of time. It can grow out of reflection on shared suffering. As boys we were taught that French cooking might be good but it had evolved as an act of self-defense; the sauces and sausages had to be tasty because they needed to disguise dodgy meat cooked while French cities were being besieged by the armies of Henry V, the Duke of Marlborough, and other heroes. Our teacher had a point. As recently as the Prussian siege of 1870, the inhabitants of Paris were obliged to consume the inhabitants of their zoo, including the baby elephants Castor and Pollux.

    But French country cooking, like that which Elizabeth David taught us to love, grows from the judicious use of hard-won ingredients by sapient peasants making the best of a hard-scrabble life. Cassoulet is one of the splendid achievements of the southern region named (after its old language) the Languedoc. It consists of pork and duck, goose and beans (good for your heart) cooked together over several days. It is the foster-child of silence and leisure. An invitation from my friend the Philolog to her annual Cassoulet Dinner was therefore an act of kindness and one which deserved the offering of an appropriate libation.

    The wine would clearly need to come from the Languedoc, the hot Mediterranean coastal area across which Hannibal and his pachyderms passed on their way from Spain to the Alps. Languedoc produces lots of wine, but not all of it slips down easily. I recall a Corbières some years ago which was the color of red ink and tasted a lot like sucking the nib of a fountain pen. (No, I don’t. Not often anyway.)

    This time, though, Fortune smiled. The 2001 vintage of Domaine de la Brune, a property in the Coteaux de Languedoc, is a heartening dark red (and about $10 a bottle). Only a tenth of it comes from the Carignan grape, until recently the most commonly grown grape in the Languedoc. But that’s enough to give it an edge. It is mostly Syrah, the grape of great Rhones such as Hermitage, sweetened and softened by some Grenache. The whole is pleasantly rounded, redolent of sunshine and alcohol.

    Redolent too of craft and patience on the part of the winemaker who produced this pleasing balance. One should be suspicious of a wine that seems to make one wise (or, for that matter, a superior driver). This one encourages the drinker to recognize something better: the wisdom of the man who made it. Soyez sage.

  • Jell-O Salad or High Art?

    The sun is peeking out, the snowman who stood sentry in my neighbors’ front lawn has surrendered, and though some of us will get itchy eyeballs and stuffy noses, we’re all going to get a present soon: an extra hour of daylight. I can’t help but get mushy like Mr. Snowman this time of year. I’m springing ahead.

    This surge of goodwill usually bubbles inside me until I’m compelled to do something nice. Last year, that meant volunteering to help at the annual Ladies Aid spring salad luncheon fundraiser held in my church’s basement. You might be thinking, “Hey, church basements are usually the most un-spring like environments in the world!” Well, gotcha! Because when I showed up ready to be put to good use, Nettie and Helen had already made and hung the construction-paper daisy decorations.

    Now, I don’t know Nettie and Helen. I’d seen them before, of course, but not in a social situation outside of chapel. And I’m sure that one doesn’t just step off the mean streets into her first guild event and snag the plum decorating job either. So I marched off to the back kitchen, where I met the head lady, Adele. Silver flip ’do, steely green eyes, and a fuchsia stain on her lips, cheeks, and nails. Ninety pounds of will, and at least 20 pounds of that had to come from the shoulder pads that were sewn into her sequined, exotic animal-print cardigan sweater. Think “Cher’s Grandma.” She was too small to be a tackle, but definitely could be a tight end.

    “You!” she commanded, looking up at me as though I weren’t fit to spit-shine her rhinestone mules. “Get over to the prep table and start cutting squares and plating the salads.” In the distance, I saw a trembling mass of jewel-like blocks, molds, and towers. A skyline, for all its rubbery backbone, that shouted “Doubt!” And “Hope!” Some slabs were plain, but I could tell in a glance that others held petrified chunks of sugared pineapple, and various canned fruits. Some were mysterious, boasting tiny celery smiles. And—egads!—some even had pink chunks of what could only be described as meat, lurking in Kool-Aid tinged psychedelic freak out, man, daring you to guess fish or fowl, beef or pork.

    If we were downtown, Adele would have been awarded a Bush grant and been the toast of the avant-garde community. Note to Matthew Barney: To hell with sculpting in tapioca and Vaseline. Gelatin is the new (old) medium.

    The glistening molds were a Mondrian-style feast, more of a commentary on food than actual food. Genius. When fruits and vegetables have been manipulated that way, can you still call them “salad”? The only unsullied vegetation in the room was a head of romaine lettuce, which was to be arranged around the chunks and blocks and slices to soften the edges—a little like lingerie for Jell-O.

    I smiled to introduce myself, and suggested that, with my extensive service-industry background, I might be better suited to rolling the coffee cart and pouring. Adele shot me a withering glance. “Not dressed like that, you won’t. You’ll stay in the back.”

    I looked down at my T-shirt and Indiana Jones cargo pants. Not my best effort, but honestly, not my worst. Peeking out to the dining room, however, I saw that Adele was right. A thousand twinkling lights bounced and scattered off the overhead fluorescent tubes. The ladies from the guild wore their sweaters like armor. Scaled with doodads and ditsys. Floating slowly and regally past the cafeteria tables like great exotic Technicolor fish. Peaceful as prayers, offering napkins to sticky sweet fingers. Murmuring low and husky reassurances to the congregants.

    Next to them, I was no lady. I would have looked fine handing out samples at Home Depot, but this was a feast of celebration. Good intentions notwithstanding, I would have been as jarring as arugula in a bowl of shredded iceberg. Sometimes you’ve got to do a little extra work to make things easier to swallow. Call it the Parable of Jell-O.

    Lesson learned, I turned to the prep table and tried to slice the particolored salads as perfectly as possible. My internship with polite society had begun.

  • “Are you my daddy?”

    In Porgy and Bess, caddish Sportin’ Life lures Bess from virtuous Porgy by crooning “the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, well, it ain’t necessarily so.” Sportin’ Life could just as easily have been talking about the assumption that most men make—that their children are really their children. Many times, well, it just ain’t necessarily so.

    According to the American Association of Blood Banks, 30 percent of men taking paternity tests in 2000 were not the biological fathers of their children. And we are not just talking about Joe Six-pack single men, either. Minneapolis family attorney Nancy Berg reports that she has married clients from Edina who get the rude surprise of a tomcat from the cheating side of town. Berg says, “Married men can and do find themselves paying for kids that are not their biological offspring.”

    Consider the story of Texas engineer Morgan Wise. His wife Wanda gave birth to four children during the marriage, one of which had cystic fibrosis. After the divorce, Wise took a blood test to find out which cystic fibrosis gene he carried and, to his surprise, found that he did not carry the gene at all. Since both parents must be carriers for a child to inherit the gene, Wise could not possibly be the father of that child. Later tests confirmed that only one of Wanda’s four children were his. (The Texas courts not only rejected his request to reduce his child support payments; Wise was later forbidden to have contact with any of the children because he violated a court order by telling them the truth about their parentage.)

    Patrick McCarthy, a New Jersey man who discovered after his divorce that his 14-year-old daughter was fathered by another man, founded New Jersey Citizens Against Paternity Fraud. His organization convinced New Jersey Assemblyman Neil Cohen to sponsor legislation allowing men to use DNA tests to disprove paternity and end financial support.

    In both cases, where was the biological father? Laughing all the way to the bank. Not surprisingly, many women’s groups and child advocates are fighting the New Jersey effort every step of the way. A National Center for Youth Law staff lawyer in Oakland, California says, “Families are much more than biology.”

    Until now, Minnesota judges believed that the “child’s best interests” trumped biology nearly every time. St. Paul’s Lionel Suggs and lawyer John Westrick, however, recently convinced the Minnesota Court of Appeals that it ain’t necessarily so. Suggs’ girlfriend had duped him into believing that he had fathered her child. After the child was born, Suggs’ found out through a DNA test that, as Michael Jackson sang in “Billie Jean,” that the kid was not his son. Ramsey County judge Joanne Smith said the “best interests of the child” required keeping Suggs on the child support hook. The appellate court begged to differ, making it clear that biology, not the child’s best interest, would be (in the words of Suggs’ attorney) the “trump card.” At least as far as that goes, for Lionel Suggs.

    According to family law guru Berg, Turner v. Suggs has taken a “man’s issue” and used it to unleash a Pandora’s box of clashing policy issues. “Ever since Genesis, men have wondered, Is the kid really mine? And ever since Genesis, all women have secretly hoped and prayed that the baby looks at least a little like the father because they know how men think. Families that would have rolled along reasonably happy and content are being torn up by information that, in an earlier time, would not have seen the light of day.”

    Does that mean that biological fathers should evade child support just because another man is available? Berg is torn. “I do not think we should start down a road that could compromise family relationships from the very beginning.”

    Why not make paternity testing a routine part of the birthing process, just like we routinely test for sickle cell and myriad other things? For most couples, there will not be any surprises. And for those who find out that it ain’t necessarily so, why not get that information out in the open and make sure the real papa helps to pay the bills?

  • Oranges and Persians

    Those few of us who spend our working lives in the Roman Empire find current events depressingly familiar. The superpowers of Late Antiquity, Rome and Persia, spent much of the half-millennium before the rise of Islam at war. The Persian Empire incorporated not only modern Iran, but also Iraq. The cockpit of imperial confrontation was precisely where modern Turkey, Iraq, and Syria come together.

    The Persians were generally the aggressors. During the invasion of 359 AD, a Roman staff officer was taken by a friendly highland chieftain into the foothills of the Kurdish Alps to look down into the Mesopotamian plain. This is one of the great vistas of the world. Through the heat haze, you can sense the curvature of the earth as you look out from the escarpment across the plain below (even if you have drunk nothing stronger than Turkish beer—a refreshing beverage called Efes Pilsen). The staff officer counted the Persian troops, their knights, their archers, their siege engines, and other weapons of mass destruction as they crossed the Great Zab River. The traverse took over three days.

    Romans never enjoyed any success following the Persian invasion route in reverse, i.e. south through modern Iraq along the valley of the Tigris. Once or twice they invaded successfully down the Euphrates (a route which cuts off a substantial corner of what is now Syria) and were able to besiege and burn the Persian capital, near where Baghdad is now. But such expeditions often ended in tears or worse; one emperor died from a thunderbolt during a desert storm.

    Despite being the aggressors, the Persians seem more sympathetic than the stuffy Romans. Persian courtiers hunted and played chess, which they called euphonically chatrang. Their silver drinking vessels display reliefs of dancing girls with bellies beautiful to behold. The genial king Khusro II liked to have his financial statements submitted on sheets scented with rosewater. Wine was certainly one of the pleasures of his court, as it was of the Persian poets who told stories about him and his wife Shirin (“Sweety”) well into the Islamic period. What the wine was like is anybody’s guess. Attempts to associate ancient or medieval Persia with the excellent modern grape called Shiraz seem pretty tenuous.

    The drink I associate with Persia is, oddly enough, Cointreau. It’s purely a matter of atmosphere. Cointreau is an after-dinner drink made out of oranges, and the orange is not recorded in Persia until later. Cointreau is distilled at Angers, in northwest France, from fruit grown in the West Indies, Brazil, and Spain. In its early days, in the mid-19th century, it had rather anti-clerical, rationalist overtones, in contrast to the sticky liquids made by monks—Benedictine, Chartreuse, and the elixir of Père Gaucher.

    But for me Cointreau means Persia. Thirty years ago, I was over there sorting pottery shards for an archaeologist. I came to drink rather a lot of it, courtesy of a friend who was house-sitting in North Teheran for a British diplomat with (thanks to the diplomatic bag) a well-stocked drinks cupboard. Foreign alcohol was available but was fiercely expensive; polite people in the suburbs seemed caught up in a dust-devil of conspicuous consumption. Western goods, such as good drink, were conspicuously consumed (it all came crashing down when the Shah fell). Anyway, my friend knew she could afford to replace only one bottle. So it was the Cointreau we polished off, looking out over the fruit tree blossoms, the melting snow from the mountain behind us pouring audibly down the nearby streams.

    The liqueur is clearer than a trout stream, sweet but not oppressive, a relief from the rosewater omnipresent in Persian sweetmeats. The oranges, in fact, make Cointreau somewhat astringent, like the coarser cuts of Tiptree marmalade (manufactured, of course, from bitter Seville oranges and not the watery things which go into inferior brands). One senses springtime and contentment, but not at the expense of rationality (and at the expense hereabouts of only about $10 for a little “pony” bottle), the Merry Monarch might have approved. I don’t know if the diplomat did, or if he ever knew. But then such folk are sent to lie abroad for their country.

  • Don’t Panic, It’s Organic

    Enough tension-building hysteria. Yes! The polar ice-caps are melting! Yes! Migration habits are disturbed! Yes! The ozone layer has more holes in it than I-94 after the spring thaw! (Rim shot, please.)

    Environmentally, politically, socially, morally—we’re screwed. As humans, I believe this state of events is our natural habitat. That doesn’t make it right; it just is what it is. And I pledge to do my part. I hereby swear not to jump into my luxury mink-seated SUV, late to pick the kids up from school, and go barreling into traffic among those tiny, pious, Toyota Tsk’s, with half an eye on the road, as I yammer on to my stockbroker, making secret insider trades while cell-phone cancer eats through the last brain-stem inhibitor I have left that keeps me from shouting at the TV, Fat Elvis-style, whenever regularly scheduled programming is on.

    I have gladly quit smoking, my lawn is free of pesticides, and my ten-dollar-a-week Aqua Net habit is a thing of the past. But it’s not enough. Nor will it ever be. I subscribe to the notion that human lives could never ever be cruelty free. Even the best of us, or even the best parts of us, are woefully fallible. We are doomed to repeat the same selfish, sinful mistakes of our ancestors, only as each generation goes on, more stylishly, and more efficiently then ever before.

    Well, a clean heart, mind, and conscience might well begin with a clean colon, so I looked up a friend who espouses the virtues of clean living. For the sake of this story, I’ll call her Megan the Vegan Pagan. Her body is a temple and it only accepts certain offerings. She dragged me to the co-op, and lectured me on the error of my ways, which she diagnosed as partly dietary, but mostly a species of moral failure. In her worldview, eating clean is only somewhat about health. It’s more about feeling ethical. I decided to accept her counsel. After all, I’ve got my wellness to think about.

    As we first strolled into the meat aisle, Megan dismissively pointed out the free-range chicken, ostrich steaks, and fresh fish, stating that she “never eats food with a face.” “Even Gummi Bears?” I kidded. But this was no laughing matter. Did you know that Gummi Bears are made with gelatin? Which is derived from bone marrow? Me neither. Since Gummi bears are not on the generally accepted food pyramid, I decided this was not such a great loss.

    We went on to produce, where I couldn’t help but notice that, while the fruits and veggies resembled the fruits and veggies I usually buy, they were, on average, smaller, dirtier, and more expensive than what I’m used to. How European! Megan explained that these fruits were organically grown, without scientific hocus-pocus and therefore they looked like what real produce should look like, not like those hormone-injected Pamela Anderson cantaloupes like they have in the supermarket. (By this reasoning, if Moby ate hamburgers addled with Bovine Growth Hormone, he’d look like Vin Diesel.)

    In personal care products, I picked up a baking soda tooth powder, which tasted like penance for all my sins, but got my teeth so clean they squeaked when I smiled. Plus a natural deodorant crystal the size and texture of those ice formations that you get under your wheel well this time of year. It said on the back of the box that the rock had a street value of $5.99 and that it was a year’s supply, but I wasn’t sure if I should crush it and snort it, or cook it on a spoon and mainline it into the affected stinky areas.

    Later, over dinner and—what else?—organic red wine, Megan admitted to me that progress is the goal, not perfection, when it comes to living the virtuous life. She said new information comes out every day, and it would be impossible to stay on top of what was ethically acceptable to shop for and where to shop for it. I let this sink in. “You mean, I could be offending Mothership Earth right now and not even know it?” She nodded sadly, and then excused herself to have a smoke out on my back porch. I grabbed her pack of butts and shook them in the air, pointing out to her that this was a perfect example of human incongruity. She snatched the pale blue pack back and snapped: “They’re American Spirits. They don’t have any additives.”

  • Free The Jackson Five!

    Just like a three-year-old defiantly staring down a plate of overcooked Brussels sprouts, I told the world I was not going to write about race stuff this month. I even promised my 16-year-old son that no matter what, I was not going to be The Rake’s resident “spook by the door,” spewing endlessly about skin color. However, that was all before president Bush ordered his Justice Department minions to prepare a brief opposing the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action plan before the United States Supreme Court. (I am a graduate of that law school—go Blue!)

    In 1978, a pre-med student named Allan Bakke convinced the Supreme Court that the University of California gave his spot to a “less qualified” minority student. According to the Court, affirmative action, if it meant setting aside spots for certain kinds of people, was bad. However, taking race into account was still okay. Now “W” says it’s not okay.

    The Bushies don’t understand two crucial points. First, the term “affirmative action” is a misnomer that does not convey the duplicity of our legal system in perpetuating racial discrimination. Second, Bush does not seem to understand that making sure Americans of all hues get into our nation’s universities adds value because it enhances the education of all students. That’s a goal to be achieved in itself.

    Lyndon Johnson was one of the first to use the word “affirmative” when, as he signed the 1965 Civil Right Act, he challenged America to actively reverse the legacy of government-sanctioned discrimination. I think LBJ would have done us all a favor if, at the time he signed the bill, he had said something like the following: “My fellow Americans. We are taking certain corrective measures because our society screwed over black people in a very big way. This ‘corrective action’ we are taking should be considered a ‘settlement in lieu of a lawsuit.’ We all know America stole hundreds of billions of dollars in free labor from our fellow African Americans. We raped their women and lynched their men. If they were to get together and sue us over slavery and its aftermath, it would beggar us.

    “In fact, if there was ever a case for reparations, this brutal treatment would be exhibit A. However, there is not enough money in the world to compensate them, so we are going to make sure that our Negro citizens have places in our nation’s colleges, universities, and professional schools. We are going to do it to make up for the hell we put them through and because it enhances the education and training of all Americans to make sure that black people sit at the educational table, too. We are not giving them anything other than the opportunities that slavery and Jim Crow robbed them of. And, unlike Reconstruction—which was done half-heartedly and was undermined by unrepentant Southern whites—we as a nation are going to do this thing right. It will take some time—generations.”

    Words like this from the beginning of what we now call affirmative action would have made it clear that America was finally taking responsibility for what American society had created. With the University of Michigan litigation, “W” has a golden opportunity to do the right thing by reminding Americans that we still have much to do. Bush could use the Michigan case as a teachable moment by emphasizing that higher education will best fulfill its mission by having racially diverse classrooms where students teach each other how to thrive in a multiracial society. Instead, the Bushies exploit “affirmative action” and “race-neutrality” (the current phrase of choice) to conjure up images of black people getting something they do not deserve, while at the same time eviscerating constitutional safeguards against discrimination.

    Finally, as the University of Michigan fully understands, there is no better way to correct the ravages of past discrimination than to ensure that our nation’s universities contain black and brown Americans. Our presence at the country’s top schools adds value to the education of all students. As long as Michigan can demonstrate that race alone does not give one a spot in its law school and that, once there, all students must meet the same standards, then “W’s” cries of reverse discrimination are exposed as the shrill, race-baiting taunts they are.

  • Sushi and Sauvignon

    It always seems to happen on a Friday. The phone rings and someone says, “Do you speak Latin?” and I reply “Well, I teach it,” or something equally noncommittal. Then comes the question. “What is the Latin word for ‘color’?” Phew, that’s easy. “Color, spelt the way Americans spell it.” “Well what’s the Latin for enhanced?” “It depends what you mean.” “Okay, then, what’s the Latin for shampoo?”

    That one was a local soap company brainstorming the name of an enhanced product. Over the years, I have furnished love-legends for engraving on wedding rings, an inscription for a cake for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and translations of choice phrases in a doctor’s letter to his patient’s lawyer (sui generis perversus, that sort of thing), which had clearly been left in the chaste obscurity of a learned language for a good reason.

    The most engaging inquiry was also the most serious. Someone rang from the Medical School (again, a Friday afternoon) wanting to know the origin of a word meaning “pain during intercourse.” He was doing research and wanted to coin a similar word for pain during anal intercourse, and please could I oblige. The term we came up with was proctalgia, derived from Greek “alge,” meaning pain (as in analgesic) and Greek “proktos,” denoting the posterior passage (as in proctophone, one who speaks through that part of his body). Proctalgia is surely a word which deserves a broader usage, for instance, in reference to a tiresome acquaintance, “the fellow gives me acute proctalgia.” I leave it with you.

    One hopes that local government appreciates such pleasing contributions to our land grant mission, but it certainly does not discharge a fraction of the service to the state which is rendered by the University’s Classics Department. The hard humanities are as necessary as the hard sciences.

    But such telephonic repartee does inspire me to go straight from the office to the new sushi shop to sample the exact pleasures of contrasting fish. (It is, after all, still Friday). Seafood supposedly inspires a kind of cognitive precision, especially sushi. A molecule of mackerel follows a soupcon of salmon. I am reminded of the Latinate epicure newly arrived at Boston’s Logan Airport anxious to sample the local New England delicacies without delay. “Take me,” he said to the cabbie, “to where I can get scrod.” “That’s the first time I’ve heard that in the pluperfect,” came the reply.

    A sushi-enhanced sharpness of mind should lead you, too, to the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc from an Argentine winery called Bodegas Norton. This is a light and pleasing wine, a fine complement to raw fish (it would be overpowered by anything smoked or canned). The color is pale, the taste is clean, with a faint fizz, and a hint of the blackcurrant flavor which is more pronounced in, say, Pouilly-Fumé, a wine from the Loire valley in western France, made from the same grape. Above all, it is young and refreshing, serious without being intense.

    For all its youth, this is a wine with an interesting history. Sir Edmund Norton was one of those bold Victorian engineers not afraid to take his art to the undiscovered ends. In the late 19th century, Argentine agriculture was transformed by being able to transport its produce to distant markets, not least to Britain and the United States. Immigrants arrived to work the land—readers of Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia will recall the communities of Welsh cattlemen with names like Pedro Evans and Sancho Jones. The secret of this success lay in the railways, largely British-built, and Sir Edmund Norton designed and constructed railway bridges. He married a local woman and settled in the wine country; Bodegas Norton is in the upper Mendoza valley, three and a half thousand feet above sea level, in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.

    Those who want the Sauvignon without the sushi can find it for less than $8 all around town. You do not need to be a Latin lover to like this wine. (Remember how Dan Quayle was going to find his Latin handy in Latin America?) But it certainly will put a spring in your step. This wine says “Thank God it’s Friday.”

  • Alarming Conversations

    I have a clock radio from 1978. It has two volumes, “Way Up” or “Silent.” The alarm is stuck between KQRS and buzzer, and after the Exxon Valdez coffee/hairspray spill of 1989, the on/off button is gunked up and doesn’t work. So I either plug it in, or I don’t. But it still does the job. It’s more like a time bomb I set for myself every night, so I can be assured of dragging my can out of bed when it’s absolutely necessary.

    But this is a story about a morning when I didn’t have to get up. A day off. I got up anyway. Because I forgot to unplug my alarm. One moment, I’m dead to the world. The next, the alarm goes off. I was shocked into Bachman-Turner Overdrive. With so much adrenaline coursing through my body, I had no choice but to stay awake. Because it was my day off, I was at loose ends. I decided to call my mother, who is the only person I know personally who is up early in the morning every day for no other reason than that “it’s the best part of the day.”

    My mother is old. And I’ll let you in on a little secret about old people. They don’t sleep. They put on their pajamas like you or me, but it’s all for show. If you called my mother at 2 a.m., she’d answer on the first ring and conduct a lucid discussion on the subject of the Marie Osmond doll collection versus the Precious Moments figurines. (Just an aside here: I don’t like how, at a certain age, dolls become socially acceptable collectibles again. My grandmother has an entire roomful of two-foot tall Victorian villagers. Not one of them has kung fu grip, or can wet their knickers. Inaction figures. If this weren’t bad enough, she also has a “shame baby.” This is a doll who is perpetually in a “time out” position, standing in a corner, hands shielding its eyes in eternal disgrace. I couldn’t understand why anybody would want to immortalize this particular childhood rite of passage, and then I figured out that maybe my grandmother is nostalgic for yelling at children. At any rate, the last time I was there, when Nana wasn’t looking, I carefully posed a steak knife in the dolls’ little foam hand, so it could at least look like she had done something worth being yelled at for.)

    Back to the story. I looked at the clock. It was around 5 a.m. I dialed the number, and to my horror, my father answered. My father is the original strong silent type. He distrusts the telephone. When the telephone rings, it’s either trouble, or somebody who wants to talk. And either way, that’s trouble. Small talk is out of the question, because it implies a weakness of intent in life that my dad finds unsettling. Quickly, I decided to talk to him about something that I had recently purchased, because the one thing that is sure to engage Dad is the threat of expenditure.

    Right down to lunchbox apples, no purchase is too mundane for my dad to wrestle over. He’s got a system, and it’s served him well. The Four W’s. If you want to buy something, ask yourself, why, why, why, and why. If you find that you can answer all four questions clearly, wait three weeks and see if you’ve forgotten what you wanted in the first place. And if you must spend, before you crack open your wallet, think “double duty.” Two years ago, my dad bought each of his kids a case of Jimmie Dean Lambrusco, an amber vintage the color of iodine, with a sausage-y afterthought. He proudly read from the back of the box: “Says right here this wine goes with beef, chicken, and fish!” My Mom interjected, “I’m pretty sure it would go with franks and beans, too, Hon.” Still high from his splurge, my father replied, “You know, it doesn’t say anything about pork, but let’s try that tonight!”

    Anyway, as soon as Dad answered, I launched into a filibuster about my broken clock radio, hoping to either trick him into conversation, or trick him into handing the telephone to my mother. In record time, he handed the phone to my mother, who, hearing my voice, breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, I thought it was your grandmother.”
    “Why? Is there anything wrong?”
    “I think she’s going batty. She called us up at 3 a.m. last week because one of her dolls pulled a knife on her.”