If not, try the scheme my wife and I devised. From the day our daughter was old enough to have a defined “bed-time,” we made it our firm policy that bed-time was bed-time, no excuses or exceptions—unless she were reading, in which case she could stay up as late as she pleased. The most precious prize any child can attain is a few minutes’ awareness past bed-time. She went for the bait like a hungry trout…and was invariably chosen as the Narrator in school plays because of her fluency in reading. Today she works for the largest advertising agency in the world.
Doubtless there are other schemes. But one thing I promise: if we leave the problem to government, or the educational system, or a mythical animal called society—if we leave the problem to anyone but ourselves—we will effectively be surrendering the battle and giving our children over into the hands of Geraldo Rivera. As Mr. Heinlein said in his immortal Stranger in a Strange Land, “Thou art God—and cannot decline the nomination.” Our only options are to do a good job, or not.
You Never Forget the First Time
FIRST PRINTED NOVEMBER 2001
NEUROSCIENTIST LAWRENCE FARWELL, a former faculty member at Harvard Medical School, runs a company in Fairfield, Iowa, called Brain Wave Science. Drew Richardson, once chief of the FBI’s chemical and biological counterterrorism team, quit his job to join this company. Its funding comes from private investors, but David Akin, who authored the November 2001 Globe and Mail article “Brain Wave,” writes that one is the CIA, which has already kicked in over a megabuck. What does it make? Deja vudoo.
Dr. Farwell says—and offers impressive hard evidence to prove—that the human brain reacts differently if it is seeing something for the first time than if it has ever seen it before. He says he can accurately detect the difference, which he calls the P300 Effect…with something approaching 100 percent reliability. No one except my wife is perfect, of course, but in repeated double blind tests, Dr. Farwell has yet to rack up a single failure.
Think that through. You are a Muslim foreign national who seeks to enter the United States. An FBI agent or Immigration official wires you up with Dr. Farwell’s gear. He shows you an al-Qaeda training manual. It’s not the first time you’ve seen it? You’re going love the climate at Guantanamo…
That’s as far as Mr. Akin’s article took matters: immediate implications for the War on Terrorism. Fair enough, that was his assignment. But I’m a science fiction writer: I can’t stop thinking about the social implications of a new technology.
I’m your wife, and you suspect I’m cheating on you with my secretary Joe. So you ask me to visit Dr. Farwell with you. He hooks me up, and shows me a photo of Joe’s bedroom, from inside. Oops: P300 Effect proves I’ve seen it before. But you want to be sure about something like this. So we use a digital graphics program to put Joe’s face on a generic male body of the right proportions—nude and rampant—and behold, it turns out I’ve seen that before, too. I can now probably forget alimony. Unless we get the same results with you and your secretary…
You say you didn’t rob that bank—but it turns out you’ve seen the inside of the vault before. You swear you’ve never sold drugs—but you seem to have seen a pound of raw cocaine somewhere. You insist you were nowhere near that mugging, never laid eyes on the victim—but we can prove you’ve seen him, bleeding on the ground. Oops…
Now turn it around. You’re my drug-running buddy…but when I have a defrocked disciple of Dr. Farwell hook you up, I find that you have seen every page of the Police Training Manual before. Bang…
You’re my publisher, and it seems you’ve seen, somewhere, royalty figures for my last book in black ink, meaning that the book has earned out its advance…contrary to the royalty statements you sent me. Judgment for plaintiff…
Naturally there are already critics. We all want to believe accurate lie detection is impossible. Well, perhaps it is. This is just a strictly limited kind of truth detection. The machine doesn’t care what you say about the al-Qaeda manual…it merely reports whether in fact you’ve seen it before or not. So far, nobody’s caught Dr. Farwell in an error. The FBI once sent him twenty-one people, telling him some were agents and some were not, period. He told them which seventeen were and which five weren’t, correctly. One man has already been proven innocent of a felony by this technique…after serving twenty-two years. (Tragically, he’s still in prison. The law is always baffled by new technology and frequently baffled by the truth.)
Much remains unclear, of course. Ben Bova, during the years he edited Analog Magazine, famously read at least the first and last two pages of every single submission. Call it a gazillion manuscripts in round numbers. If I pick the least memorable page of the least memorable story, and show it to him again…will his brain really realize it’s the second time?
Suppose you show me a picture of something I’ve frequently fantasized seeing before. Couldn’t that produce a false positive? You show me a picture of the Taj Mahal, and P300 Effect says it’s not the first time I’ve seen it. But…have I seen the Taj itself before, or just other pictures of it? Are you certain?
Show me a photo of my own home…taken from an angle I’ve never seen it from before. What does my brain report, P300-wise?
Okay, I’ve seen the al-Qaeda manual. Can you prove I didn’t see it on CNN? Or in a Schwarzenegger movie? Are you sure it was a pound of cocaine I saw, not a box of laundry detergent? Suppose I’m simply mistaken about whether I’ve seen a given place or face before. Is the P300 area of my brain mistaken, too? Or does it have a better memory than I do? (If so, is there any way I can tap into it?)
Another point to ponder: you can only show me that al-Qaeda manual once. No retakes, no do-overs. Of course, if there’s still any ambiguity afterward, you can show me photos of known terrorists, or devise other traps…but the point is, no trap can be tried more than once.
Finally: if you want The Man to be able to catch terrorists this way…then be prepared for him to hook you up to Dr. Farwell’s gadget, too, should you ever be suspected of a crime. Under what circumstances should which authorities be allowed to candle your head? If your lawyer arrives before they hook you up, is it moral for him to show you a photo array of incriminating objects and places, to spoil the test?
Deja vudoo, indeed.
Lay Off the Lady
FIRST PRINTED JUNE 2003
WORDS CANNOT EXPRESS my contempt and disgust for the pack of weasels currently snarling at the heels of Martha Stewart. All of them deserve to be pantsed, painted blue and sent back to kindergarten to start learning all over again, from the top, how decent people are supposed to behave. For it was back in the schoolyard that they went fundamentally wrong, and their entire lives since have been warped by what someone failed to teach them there. You remember them from that age: the sniggering little snots who gathered at recess to make up vicious lies about whichever girl was clearly prettier, smarter, sweeter, better bred and raised and—most unforgivable of all—more confident than the rest. The ones who had to tear down anyone taller than them, so that they could endure being pygmies. The rotten part, the part that hurts to remember, is that we let them get away with it and even laughed at some of the vile slurs they disguised as jokes, merely because the jokes were funny.
We should stop now. Martha Stewart has done nothing wrong that anyone can prove. What she is accused of having done is so obscenely trivial, so monumentally inconsequential, it’s simply not conceivable that any prosecutor could honestly believe she belongs anywhere on the Top 500 White Collar Criminals list, much less at the head. Every one of the trough-swilling headline-hunting swine currently hounding her is a disgrace to their office, and I sincerely hope a day comes when Ms. Stewart is able to sue each of the slimy bastards into a poverty approximating that of their souls. I’ve only slightly less contempt for the media jackals who’ve aided and abetted them, and for the mob of cackling yahoos who’ve joined the parade with torches. Shame on all of them. In a land overflowing with thieves in suits, Enron end-runners, real
ly evil snakes who’ve routinely robbed and raped the helpless all their lives, sick bastards who’ve gutted entire industries for profit or simple amusement, toads who’ve conspired to start wars or support terrorists, the brave defenders of justice have all managed to saddle up and ride down on a woman whose basic offence is to be a successful businesswoman with superb taste. They haven’t the time or resources to run down the guys who stole billions, let alone mere millions—but a whole platoon of the chair-warming civil serpents are available to hound a woman they claim ripped off $45,000. Even if that were true this would be a bogus bust, a major hummer.
And they know it isn’t true. If it were true, they would try to prove it in a court of law. They know damn well they can’t. So the Pharisees have pulled a Reverse OJ, and gone after her, not in criminal court, where you have to prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt, but in civil court, where the persecutors—pardon me, prosecutors—need only “a preponderance of evidence” implicating the accursed—excuse me, the accused.
But that wasn’t enough. Just to make absolutely sure even semiliterate yak herders in Lo Monthang know them as Orwellian masters of hypocrisy so monstrous it would gag a maggot, they announced that Ms. Stewart had committed another crime…by protesting her innocence. This, they say, had the effect of unfairly manipulating her company’s stock price. She should have allowed them to reduce it to zero without protest. She did not have the legal right to say, “But that’s not true!,” even though it wasn’t. I take the failure of these whited sepulchres to be destroyed by bolts of lightning from a cloudless sky as conclusive proof of the nonexistence, or at best malfeasance, of God.
Until recently I held no strong opinion about Martha Stewart one way or the other. I never really grokked either MarthaMania or the immediate backlash. As I understood it from her infrequent appearances on my radar screen, what she stood for and packaged for sale amounted to Not Sleep-walking Through Life: trying to put a little style into what you were going to have to do anyway. I can see where someone who’s proud of being an oaf could find that wearing. So could the desperately overworked, of course, but where would they find the time to come across Ms. Stewart?
Of my own experience I can report only one thing: Ms. Stewart’s employees like her. They’re not afraid of her. I know this because my daughter Terri spent a couple of years as Print Production Coordinator for Martha Stewart Living magazine in New York, and one day when my wife and I were in town we visited her at work. She gave us a tour of that amazing building—the kitchens alone are worth a column—and at one point as we strolled a corridor she suddenly gestured with her eyes, and there was Martha, talking to a dozen or so employees. I noticed their body language—both the ones she could see and the ones out of her field of vision. None of them was terrified of making a mistake, saying the wrong thing, not having an answer ready. They were attentive—but from interest, not terror. I know when my kid’s afraid, and she wasn’t. She was not in a hurry to get her weird parents out of the boss’s sight.
Terri hasn’t worked there for several years. But last week she was present in the green room of a TV show I was taping, and when people began telling Martha jokes—because it’s not possible to be in the media and not hear Martha jokes today—my daughter spoke up and defended her. Both as a boss, and as a businesswoman of integrity. She mentioned that Ms. Stewart makes a point of taking every department of her empire out to brunch at regular intervals, getting to know each employee. This happened to be Mary Walsh’s crew, so they were familiar with that sort of thing, and that sort of loyalty. But you could tell they’d never expected it from Martha Stewart.
School Will Be Ending, Next Month
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 2003
IN AUGUST, school is at the very bottom of the list of things any healthy child wants to think about, well below Hmong poetry, hemorrhoids and the heat death of the universe. Why? Society’s default answer is: because modern children are lazy irresponsible hedonists, and school represents hard work and serious (i.e., difficult) thought.
These would indeed be excellent reasons to hate school. But they miss the point. As summer rounds the clubhouse turn, every teenager in the land is working as hard as hell, learning things hand over fist—useful, important, practical, fascinating things about life as she is actually lived—and in another month, they’ll once again be reined in and locked away for nine months in a place where almost nothing they’re compelled to learn will be of any perceptible use.
For a North American liberal arts education, I think mine was fairly broad and deep; it was certainly varied. Catholic school (nuns) until first grade, Catholic high school (brothers) with Junior year spent in a seminary, two years of Catholic college (priests) and five more years of secular university—all resulting, barely, in a B.A. In addition to extensive studies in English literature and composition, I was taught physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, six kinds of mathematics, history, geography, geology, sociology, French, philosophy, psychology, economics, linguistics and probably half a dozen other things I’ve omitted. Of all these, the only course I have used often, and expect to use often in the future, is a biology course I took in my last year of university. It was taught by the department chairman, Dr. Elof Axel Carlson, and titled Biology for Liberal Arts Majors Who Need A Science Credit. In it he told us about the startling big developments in biology that were going to come along and change our lives in the next twenty or thirty years and invited us to plan how we’d handle them when they arrived. I’ve thought of him every year since; I named the villain of my first novel after him. That, and cockiness, are all I have to show for nineteen years of—trust me—expensive education.
Here’s a (very) partial list of the utterly essential life skills school did not teach me, would not have dreamed of teaching me, which I had to learn myself by trial and painful error:
How to cook. Yes, we made muffins in Home Ec; that has nothing to do with how to cook. Nobody ever taught me, for instance, that the secret of perfect bacon is to cook it in the nude…so you won’t set the heat too high.
How to do simple household plumbing and carpentry. I don’t mean making an ashtray in Shop, I mean how to make the damn tap stop dripping.
How to build a fire
How a ninety-year-old man splits firewood
How to balance a checkbook—and what to do when it cannot be balanced
How to fill out a tax form—with particular attention to red flags that commonly trigger an audit
How to start a business
How to operate a business
How to fold a business
How to buy a car or house without getting burned
How to drive—not as a short, extracurricular offering, but as a serious, in-depth, yearlong study, with simulators, intensive training in proper emergency reflexes, tours of morgues and burn wards, etc.
Basic, and advanced, first aid for common emergencies
When to kowtow to a bureaucrat, and when to bully him
How to bully a bureaucrat (one of the most underappreciated skills in the western world)
How, and when, to offer someone a bribe
What to do if you’re arrested. What not to do.
How to lie effectively and elegantly. Useful in every profession and occupation.
How to spot the lies in a commercial, ad, speech, newscast or newspaper column
How to spot the traps, cons and loopholes in a legal contract. Perhaps these last four items could be bundled together under the heading of Bullshit Detection.
How to find the third harmony in a song
How to apologize
How to give a good backrub and footrub
How to drink. For God’s sake, how hypocritical can we be? We all know they’re going to do it; why must they fumble their way to responsible drinking? Why must their experiments be utterly unsupervised?
Which drugs are really dangerous, and which are really harmless. Really.
How to cool conflict, calm rage, defuse t
ension, keep a crowd from becoming a mob. How to handle a drunk.
When and how to demonstrate. The rights, and obligations, of a demonstrator.
When and how to meditate. Anything whatsoever to do with spirituality (as distinct from religion), really.
How to deal with a racist, religionist or sexist joke
How to make a difference in local politics. How to organize, generally.
How to type! And how to use a computer effectively. Again, not as a brief summer elective, but as a serious subject.
How to research. How to use the library, newspaper, morgue, museum, county courthouse, people. And oh yeah, the Internet.
Some of the important universal truths of the universe, that are not self-evident and don’t seem to fall into any particular subject’s jurisdiction. Here’s one, for instance, that for some ridiculous reason can take a man decades to figure out on his own: anger always—always—turns out to be fear disguised. If you’re enraged, you’re terrified. Or here’s another, that actively contradicts some of what they taught you in physics: shared pain is lessened, and shared joy is increased. If I’m hurting, and I share it with you, somehow we end up with less than half a hurt apiece. If you share your joy with me, somehow it more than doubles. Awesome. And another, so counterintuitive you might never stumble across it without help: when you’re at rock bottom, at the very end of your rope…the thing to do is find somebody worse off, and help him.
The Crazy Years Page 12