The Pitfalls of Identity Politics

by Joshua H. Liberatore

The tenuous balance between substance and image in the public perception of presidential candidates has been a constant feature in previous elections (at least since the first televised debate between Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960), and this year’s battle for the White House is certainly no different. Both Barack Obama and John McCain have used the disparity between appearance and reality as a weapon of public relations and political gain, and reflexively, both have sustained (and so far survived) attacks in this category. The themes of these attacks are well known and don’t need further rehearsal here, until the debates bring these two men face to face in rhetorical combat, when voters and pundits alike will see for themselves who fares better in parrying real-time thrusts that concern character versus political wind, a favorite tender spot in viciously partisan American politics. In the days following the closing of the Democratic National Convention in Denver and before the spotlight shifts to John McCain, one niche in the trend of delicate identity politics that has been on display for the past four days seems worthy of further inspection: the dangers of personal identification campaigns.

    Long accused of residing in a dreamy, heady elitism and Ivy League aloofness by both his rival John McCain and his former adversary Hillary Clinton, Obama has been at pains in recent months to portray himself as an ordinary mortal, with a family, a rustic background, and proud Middle Western roots. As the convention proceeded and gathered force, we heard countless stories – or “testimonials,” as NPR correspondents unabashedly called them – from high profile national politicians and anonymous convention delegates that attested to Obama’s bona fides as a regular guy. Michelle Obama’s now famous speech even featured a broadcast conference call that linked the Obamas’ two young daughters with their father, out on the campaign trail (guess where: the Midwest). It was a forgivable Hallmark-variety skit perhaps, but absolutely devoid of political import and wholly designed to humanize the candidate. We had Obama’s sister, Maya – who came to the stage as “We Are Family” resounded in the Pepsi Center – praising her brother for his many admirable qualities, among which she numbered his being a “good listener,” his belief that hard work leads to success, and his sense of responsibility. And while none of these attributes are in doubt, and we certainly welcome their novelty in Washington, they don’t speak to the core of what should be and is his campaign promise: dramatic policy changes.

    In other speeches, we heard repeated references to Obama’s being raised by a hard-working single mom, his grandfather who fought in Patton’s army in World War II, his grandmother who sacrificed her own comfort to save money for Obama’s first-rate education. Obama himself, in his Thursday evening acceptance speech, drove all of these themes home with a complex message: yes, I’m different, my “pedigree” is unusual (and yet thoroughly American), and I’m just like you. From the sounds of it, excited conventioneers and radio callers were eating it all up, many claiming that they “saw themselves” in Obama, could relate to his experiences; they too were raised by single moms or were themselves single moms who took comfort in his family narrative. Meanwhile, my wife and I wondered: Did they also graduate with honors from Columbia and edit the Law Review at Harvard? Probably, most did not.

    So, amidst all this cozying up to Obama the man, we must pursue some thorny philosophical questions. First, why do we want to see ourselves in our leaders, especially the most powerful of them all, the President of the United States? Second, is personal identification a plausible political strategy? Does it work? And what risks does it entail? The first of these questions is rooted in basic psychology, I suppose. We speak of “trusting” candidates, “believing” in them, “connecting” with their backgrounds, which are all emotional – rather than intellectual or even ideological – aspects of our favoring one and not the other. Simply put, we just like one and don’t like another, or we just like one more. (For the physical aspects of our attraction to political candidates, I defer to the many insightful comments that have been written about the subject from the famous Kennedy-Nixon debate in which television audiences thought the handsome, heavily made-up Kennedy trounced the gray, badly shaven Nixon, whereas radio listeners thought Nixon the clear victor; to Clinton’s famed good looks and charm giving him the advantage over pinch-faced, nasal-voiced George H.W. Bush in 1992, with a little help from that chipper quipper, Ross Perot.) Sure, we like to believe our preferences are based on “the issues” and a candidate’s platform, but we can’t ignore how much our choices come down to emotional factors.

    What’s troubling about this trend is that the practical demands of the President’s job, when we really think about its day-to-day workings, require of someone anything but ordinary traits in intellect, stamina, leadership capacity, eloquence, and charisma. In short, the job requires extraordinary talents, which frankly most of us just fall short of possessing. I’m perfectly comfortable admitting that I don’t want someone I can identify with as the Commander in Chief of our nation, the principal spokesman of our foreign policy, and the face of our public image. On the contrary, I want someone smarter, more ambitious, more energetic, more decisive, more articulate, and more self-disciplined than I am. I’m quite happy with any elitism that formula presupposes; it seems clear to me that the job demands someone really special, someone of the elite. If nothing else, the past eight years have shown us what happens when someone thoroughly mediocre gets the job. George W. Bush, for all his regular-guy appeal in two campaigns, for all his triumphant lack of elitism, is the illustration par excellence of an administration short on ideas, intellect, and curiosity, and long on appeals to our trust, our faith, our fears, our emotional attachments to the solid American virtue of being average. Remember the oft-cited poll in which more Americans claimed to prefer the opportunity to sit down for a beer with George W. Bush than with his duller, more technocratic-minded opponent (whether Gore or Kerry, does it matter?) and the outrageous irony that Bush doesn’t even drink. Let that serve as a sober (sorry!) reminder that our perception and our judgment, when it comes to the appearance and painful reality (beer or no beer) of a “regular guy” at the helm of the free world, needs to be scrutinized more candidly.

    What about the overall effectiveness of a political strategy catering to personal identification among many voters? Let’s consider some of the risks. Here Obama’s somewhat contradictory appeal – I’m different, I’m new, but I’m just like you – shows some peculiar vulnerabilities and provides a perfect illustration of the pitfalls of identity politics. What individual voters “identify with” is by definition incredibly diverse and therefore, extremely narrow. Facing this paradox, politicians must generalize in making their “human” outreach, and in doing so, aggressively dilute their own identity for maximum constituent coverage. Here the lowest common denominator is not only, well, very ordinary in its calculated lack of precision, but it is also profoundly uninteresting. Thus, listening to the speeches, the pageantry, and all the “human interest” testimonials this past week, ramping up to last night’s acceptance speech, I suppose I was expected to identify with Obama because I also had a Midwestern grandfather who fought heroically in World War II. Is that all? Because beyond ideas that we may share or policy initiatives I may agree with, as far as personal identification goes, we just don’t have that much in common. And in that pitiably narrow connection, my attention is drawn away from getting to know those ideas, those policy initiatives, and away from evaluating them on their own terms.

    Writing about Obama’s candidacy as an existential crisis in America’s race politics, conservative critic Shelby Steele, in A Bound Man, explores Obama as a politician straddling two conventional trajectories for the black man. As a “challenger,” Steele contends, Obama must bolster his credentials as a fighter for “black” interests and position himself as a loyal ally to the “black community” (a construction Steele critiques), whose goals and aspirations may appear threatening and too radical for the white majorities he must court in order to win. And yet, as a “bargainer” – Steele cites Louis Armstrong and the early Bill Cosby as prototypes – Obama’s mainstream successes and broad appeals to majoritarian platforms, his dreams of unity and post-partisan politics, his attractive “hybrid” pedigree, his overall rhetoric about America’s potential as a source of hope and shared narratives, could very well damage his reach among black voters. In Steele’s analysis, in other words, it’s very difficult to be both a “challenger” and a “bargainer” (witness Bill Cosby’s controversial footing), especially under the full weight of national scrutiny (i.e. we’re not in Illinois anymore). His strength as a “hybrid” original, consequently presents a more difficult balancing act than what a more cookie-cutter politician faces in building an effective consensus.

    In the penultimate chapter of Steele’s probing if slightly hostile treatise, he reflects on Obama’s claims to originality and his chances for success in the presidential arena:

Today, both blacks and whites see Barack Obama’s presidential bid as potentially a new signal from history. He makes whites hopeful for a new racial configuration in which they might get more benefit of the doubt; he makes blacks (though primarily the black leadership) anxious at this same prospect. Already, his bright success as a bargainer suggests that white America may be sending a signal of its own: that it is exhausted from forty years of being challenged and is therefore doubly grateful to blacks who approach with at least some faith in the fundamental decency of whites. And yet, apart from whatever he may portend, Obama is today a bound man who cannot serve the aspirations of one race without betraying those of the other. It is easy to have the impression, given all the excitement that attends him, that he is, as they say, ‘fresh,’ ‘new,’ and unconventional. But in many ways his truest problem – the reason he is bound – is exactly that he is so utterly conventional. Barack Obama works entirely within the current configuration of race relations – the masks of bargaining and challenging, the need in whites for racial innocence. And he exploits that world to move himself ahead, not to advance a new configuration of race relations – or to end such configurations altogether. He is neither a revolutionary nor even a reformist. He is simply infatuated with the possibilities of his own skin color within the world as it is, not as it should or could be. His genius is to know his own currency within the status quo (126).

This is a notion likely to be too cynical for most Americans to confront and it opens up areas of identity and self-construction beyond the scope of the more basic point in our present inquiry. For example, one feels moved to remind Steele that there are more than two races in America and that many people don’t feel the need for loyalty per se to any one of them. Nevertheless, Steele frames Obama in a way that many Democrats are desperately trying to avoid doing (and understandably: they want him to win). I quote this passage at length simply to illustrate the complexities of Obama’s careful politicking – whether premeditated or merely necessary – and to underscore its hidden fragilities.

    In closing, let me say that I actually believe Obama is more interesting for his ideas than for his background, more compelling for his leadership talents than his grand projections of American roots and messianic message of hope. I only wish I knew those ideas in more detail and that they received more attention at the convention. The key note speeches that touched on his ideas – Bill Clinton’s and Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer’s come to mind – were among the stronger moments of genuine substance amidst the fanfare. Interestingly, John Kerry, among others, attacked McCain for attacking Obama’s character and popularity to conceal his own lack of ideas, but even he didn’t get very specific about the strength Obama’s ideas. There’s a sense almost that these ideas are accepted without argument and can therefore afford to be tucked away without proper exposure. When Obama himself took the stage on Thursday evening, even he seemed hesitant about rolling out either his own intellectual credentials or spending too much time articulating the particulars of his platform (his innovative tax plan and energy initiatives were notable exceptions). Whether bowing under the tremendous pressure of the moment or following the trend of the three days of speeches that preceded his, Obama kept the narrative comfortable, easily applaudable, and personal – and not surprisingly, it was a hit. I guess he’s experienced enough to know that the details of policymaking bore most people, and his campaign handlers have no doubt told him that too much intellect may alienate voters.

    So he kept things rousing and simple. Like him, I suppose I’ll have to wait until the debates for the serious intellectual combat that America needs to overcome the eight years of sinister mediocrity we have endured in our leadership. When Kennedy – to whom Obama has often been compared – accepted the Democratic nomination on July 15, 1960 in Los Angeles, he warned Americans of similar dangers posed by the identity politics with which we are concerned. He said: “I hope that no American, considering the really critical issues facing this country, will waste his franchise by voting either for me or against me solely on account of my religious affiliation. It is not relevant.” As is well known, Kennedy won the general election – and perhaps not quite fairly – by one of the narrowest margins in electoral history. Democrats need to hope that Obama remembers the Kennedy example, and from this moment on, starts beating John McCain based on that understanding of political relevance and no other.

Confounding the Stimulus Package

by Joshua H. Liberatore

When asked about his strategy for improving the moribund U.S. economy, President Bush keeps reminding us about the potential gains from the recent stimulus package, which needs to run its course before we can determine with confidence whether it worked or not. The “stimulus package” is a political phrase for a $600 tax rebate, which was intended to boost retail sales and fuel economic growth (recovery) by trickling up to all the right places, infusing the very machinery of our economic infrastructure with a spark of capital. I’m not an economist, and Economics 101 at the University of Michigan (lecture hall: 500 strong) didn’t furnish me with the financial wherewithal to calculate how an input of $600 from each tax-paying American consumer might multiply and diversify across an economy as enormous and complicated as ours. But in my layman’s understanding, the figure of $600 seemed peculiar in many different ways.

    My first instinct was to contemplate what an average consumer could do with $600. By the way, my musing here is completely theoretical. Because I was working overseas during the tax year for which the rebate was intended, I could not claim the minimum $3000 taxable income required to qualify. Too bad for me, since after all, $600 can be stretched out quite far in Thailand where I was living. It pays for a week-long trip to nearby Lao (for two!), if done modestly. Don’t worry: we took the trip anyway. But back to our purpose; let’s consider, for a moment, possible purchases in the intended stateside market: a month’s worth of gas, a new bicycle, a root canal, a flat screen TV, a weekend trip to New York City (staying with friends)?

    The possibilities are indeed both exciting and varied. Would any of these things, when multiplied by the millions of Americans who, Bush reminds us, now have some “extra cash in their wallets,” provide the desired “stimulus”? Let’s take the TV, for example. If everybody bought TVs, the Best Buys and Circuit Citys (even humble Radio Shacks) of the world would enjoy quite the field day, wouldn’t they? Just imagine: The shelves are cleared quickly and need to be restocked (retail sales boost); a need arises for part-time help, so extra stockers are brought in (job creation?); the warehouses and regional distribution centers are madhouses (economies of scale); a new fleet of trucks (or subcontracted trucking companies) is marshaled, and so much more gas purchased (industry revenues peak); suppliers, parts manufacturers, factories in South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Mexico all feel the surge, the handful of Japanese companies behind them flush with windfall profits (global economic implications); and back to investors, shareholders, and dividend recipients . . . even more “cash in the wallet” (happy bull market) At each stage of the transaction, the individual input might create a modest but palpable bubble of temporary bliss.

    And then what? More Americans are watching the evening news on 36 inches of crisp, exquisitely proportioned, moving-image machines. Where is the long-term boon? We could repeat this mental exercise for any number of ordinary consumer-ready products valued at $600 with amusing results (the flurry of root canals presents by far the most titillating picture), all temporary in impact. Is our economy so fragile that it can be stimulated with such an oddly round yet paltry sum when multiplied by the millions who were and are expected to inject it directly into the retail matrix of perpetual consumption?

    In other words, the rhetoric has suggested that one was expected to spend the extra money in one’s wallet all but immediately. Our government was explicitly advocating a one-, or two- or six-item spending spree, individual gratification for the good of the whole, the great American fallback toward collective fiscal self-help. Naturally, when contemplated further, this thread of thought leads to some more worrisome notions. Might not such a state-sanctioned receive-and-spend mentality be symptomatic of some much larger, more deleterious policy choices on the macroeconomic scale? Notice that nobody was explicitly encouraged simply to save the money for the proverbial rainy day, invest it in a nine-month certificate of deposit, even at the pitiably low rates of interest currently available. Nobody said, Tuck that $600 away for your child’s (or grandchild’s) college education or your own retirement. Nobody suggested using it as a down payment on a solar panel or wind turbine that might pay for itself in savings within a handful of years. In short, nobody offered a long-term goal toward which the money might be used – less satisfyingly perhaps but more effectively in the broad scope.

    I find that specific type of myopia extremely disheartening but all too predictable; after all, it characterizes the very mentality our government uses to plan and justify its own spending patterns. After all, can’t we just always borrow more money? Our credit is good, isn’t it? In a recent editorial, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman treated the Bush administration’s double failure to respond to policy crises constructively: “After 9/11, Bus had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on breaking our addiction to oil. Instead, he told us to go shopping. After gasoline prices hit $4.11 last week, he had the chance to summon the country to a great nation-building project focused on clean energy. Instead, he told us to go drilling” (July 20, 2008). Friedman has studied the Chinese example closely; he knows that gas won’t be getting any cheaper and that our economy won’t get any stronger through stop-gap measures alone.

    How fitting that our immediate response to an economic downturn or a period of less than spectacular growth in wealth is to borrow – that’s what a tax rebate is after all, a taxpayer-financed loan to taxpayers – a nominal sum and spend it immediately on something tangible, serviceable, and ultimately, disposable. And we call it generosity. And we call it Republican virtue. How long can we delude ourselves, and let our government delude us, in this way?

    Let’s shift the terms now and imagine a different purview, one perhaps all too naïve for this era. I remind you that I am not an economist, but I’m tempted to wonder what would happen to that same $600 if applied directly (through a government subsidy) to every American student enrolled in a public school. Ignoring the gross inefficiency and spendthrift reputation of our public school systems for a moment, if that money could be tracked and accounted for, imagine the impact it might have when filtered through underfunded institutions in rural and inner-city America. According the most recent U.S. Census data, American public schools serve just under 50 million students, which when multiplied by $600, gives us a lump infusion of almost 30 billion dollars. By comparison, total budget outlays from the U.S. Department of Education in 2007 amounted to just 66 billion dollars, just over double the amount of money represented by our imaginary cash infusion. Granted, the Education budget is intended for a lot of different programs, ranging from special education services to college loan financing. Better to look at our national average for spending per public school student, $8,700 in FY 2005, most of which comes from state and local tax revenues, not the Federal budget. In other words, our little bonus would augment that modest per student figure by nearly 7 percent, a sizable increase.

    But that calculation is a little abstract. Instead, let’s think of schools as more typical American consumers that spend money when they have money. Consider what an individual school might purchase with this “extra cash.” For one school, it might mean a complete overhaul of outdated, ragged textbooks; for another, a new computer lab or a better, more healthful cafeteria. Some schools would decide they could best use this money to hire an additional teacher (or five) to reduce their student to teacher ratio and increase contact exposure, shrink its class sizes, offer additional subjects, or expand arts programs or supplemental tutoring services.

    Nobody, of course, could see or measure the economic impact of these investment choices right away, but ten to fifteen years down the road, the net economic gain might be quite significant, observable in a better-qualified workforce, a more thoroughly educated population, a responsible “first” world education system, and enhanced competitiveness with our increasingly better-educated Chinese and Indian counterparts and our long better-educated European rivals. Imagine what just $600 could do, when invested properly, in a long-term growth package that provides more than just a stimulus – the word itself smacks of short-term gain, an indulgent purchase, a profligate quick-fix – but rather a sustainable model for genuine improvement and prosperity.

Resisting the Total Explanation: Four Biopics

by Joshua H. Liberatore

No other genre in film seems more familiar to American audiences in recent years than the biopic. The years 2005 and 2006 featured the release of such big-budget successes as Cinderella Man and Ray, both of which got Oscar attention and a modicum of critical acclaim. Most recently, Walk the Line, featuring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon’s virtuoso performances as Johnny and June Carter Cash, has captured audiences with its dazzling soundtrack and heart-rending narrative. Less prominently (and understandably so), Kinsey and Capote explored two intellectual innovators of the past century, revealing personalities no less complex or conflict-rich than the likes of Ray Charles or Johnny Cash. The sheer number and tight spacing of these releases speaks to a telling, and perhaps culturally significant, theme in American movie tastes and narrative fancies.

    The past few years have also witnessed the twin trends of a waning preference for the reality show and a rising disgust toward a failing war abroad and political malfeasance at home. As we continue to lose interest in the dreary and unsavory narratives of our various “realities” – both the commercially contrived and the inescapably palpable – we find ourselves turning more and more to the complex lives and personalities of a wide array of American heroes as fitting subjects for fictional retelling in the form of a highly wrought and engaging movie experience. Not all of these films succeed, however, in capturing our lasting affection and admiration, and because we have seen so many of them, we are invited to compare them, not only on the basis of the characters they present, but also on their artistic merits as films.

    First, let’s consider Ray, the most broadly profitable of these films by seemingly wide agreement. Jamie Foxx took the 2005 Academy award for best actor, and no doubt he deserved it. His brilliant channeling of Ray Charles, down to subtle voice patterns and idiosyncratic mannerisms, was an immaculate achievement in impersonation. Thanks to his obvious gifts as a musician, Foxx makes the rendering of Charles as pianist and singer both authentic and convincing. Where storytelling suffers and founders on cliché, Foxx brings life into the scenes and so overwhelms his audience with down-home charm and silky charisma that the clear structural flaws of the film are almost concealed under the spell of his captivating performance. It’s too bad that Foxx’s director Taylor Hackford relies so heavily on flashbacks and filmic effects (triumphant headlines bouncing across the screen, creepy hallucinatory sequences) to condense an entire life and artistic career as intricate and varied as Ray Charles’s into a 2 ½-hour movie. Rather than letting the telling details of the story speak for themselves, the film handles its audience at every turn toward a neatly fabricated interpretation: that Ray Charles’s decisions and personal idiosyncrasies can be adequately explained as the result of the self-hatred and guilt stemming from his supposed complicity in his younger brother’s untimely death. Reckless womanizing, drug abuse, erratic behavior and paranoia toward his friends and most loyal supporters, and most of all, his incurable megalomania – all find a tidy logic in his terrible suffering and inner torment, the residue of a painful childhood. The film tries desperately to bring meaning to this familiar pattern through memory sequences and flashbacks, at the expense of a more detailed emphasis on the music that should perforce anchor the story of an innovator like Charles.

    Had it not been for Foxx’s impressive performance, which holds the movie together at its most threadbare moments, Ray could not have been the commercial success it was. The acting of the supporting cast falls flat in comparison, and major achievements and milestones in Charles’s career (for instance, his famous, albeit off-the-cuff, refusal to play a segregated venue in Georgia) are mentioned, but glossed over at tremendous expense to the movie’s thoroughness and rhetorical impact. Thus failing in its ambition to provide a total explanation (which appears to have been its main goal), Ray’s virtue as a film, and as a biographical retelling, comes down to a single actor’s superb skill.

    Bill Condon’s Kinsey falls into many of the same traps that reduce Ray to such a muddled combination of heavy-handed direction and amateur psychoanalysis. In this case, however, Liam Neeson’s disappointingly weak performance as Alfred Kinsey is not enough to salvage what turns out to be another ambitious, but ultimately banal, biopic in 2004. Kinsey too is shown confronting a troubling past, explored per formula through memory sequences and flashbacks, tritely assembled to provide an explanation of his career decisions and character failings. Here it is not the death of a brother but a puritanical and domineering father who caused the trauma, providing a tempting narrative trope with which to buttress the film’s attempt to deliver the total explanation. Kinsey’s obsession with sexual behavior and his dogged pursuit to document and categorize the myriad sexual habits of Americans of all persuasions, though ostensibly grounded in the interest of good science, stem – we are taught in the film – from his inability to please his father. Add to this Kinsey’s personal quest to escape sexual inhibition and latent shame at a childhood spent in sequestered fits of masturbation and unsanctioned desire. We see Kinsey’s principle struggle as a lifelong quest to escape his father’s disapproving stance toward his choice to become a biologist rather than a minister, even as the father remains distant emotionally (but omnipresent psychologically) throughout the film.

    Instead of abusing drugs and courting self-destruction on the model of the over-indulgent, misunderstood celebrity, Kinsey works himself to the bone, and pursues his professional objectives so fanatically that even his wife (Laura Linney) is left to wonder whether sex is something he can enjoy anymore, so scientific and theoretical becomes his interest. Under Condon’s direction, Kinsey becomes almost a tragic figure, who must suffer because of his own raw ambition, sealing his demise. Unfortunately, the film’s tepid conclusion leaves us feeling not pity but only disgust toward Kinsey’s choices. We observe no genuine pathos, and hence, get rewarded with no satisfying catharsis, except perhaps the feeling of relief to have been born in a more sexually comfortable era.

    By the time I came to see James Mangold’s Walk the Line, I was hoping to find something that either complicated or dismantled the formulaic treatment that had in my opinion ruined Ray and Kinsey as potentially interesting character portraits. I was refreshed and encouraged by what I saw. This film’s fine acting and meticulous composition hold it together nicely, even when its story arc treads a fine line between predictability and generalization (precisely where Ray and Kinsey droop) and exquisitely structured narrative. Many of this film’s most successful moments and attributes only underscore the failings of others in its league: its acting performances are superb across the board; its gestures toward explanation and general analysis remain modest and pleasantly trusting of the audience’s intelligence; and best of all, its chosen terms of inquiry are more compelling and endearing, because more focused.

    In Walk the Line, we are grateful not to be regaled with flashback storytelling that has become de rigueur for the big-budget biopic. There is a simple, almost classic, linearity to the plot structure that speaks to Mangold’s faith in the authenticity of his characters and his audience’s ability to make connections and remember critical story points at the right moments. For example, as the film opens to a shot of Cash gently thumbing the blade of a table saw in the Fulsom prison woodshop, the crowd of expectant inmates thumping and pulsing out of view, we can sense the psychological significance of the scene without being told to do so. Later, when we confront Cash’s older brother’s death (table saw accident) and see how the guilt his father made him feel for leaving his brother that day affects him even as an adult, we realize that we have been prepared to recognize the significance of this burden from the opening shot of the film. Rather than resorting to flashbacks and filmic effects to raise the emotional registers and to remind us of the enduring turmoil of Cash’s guilt, Walk the Line shows Cash confronting his troubling memories in a way that most of us can relate to: through conversation with the one person he trusts and can confide in, the love of his life, June Carter. When his career sees a major turn-around, marked by the 1968 Fulsom Prison concert, which seems to coincide with his recovery from addiction to pills, the audience is likewise prepared for it through a simple sequence showing Cash reading letters from devoted fans, many of whom are incarcerated and encourage him to consummate his hard-fought image as a penitentiary icon. His authentic overture to them, beginning with his proud march to the executives at Columbia records to pitch the idea, constitutes a redemptive act, both convincing and rich with meaning on its own terms, without any cinematic flash, just good storytelling.

    By the time we return to the scene with which the film opened and confront the image of Cash backstage in the prison workshop contemplating his next move, we are not dependent on a flashback to the childhood scene in Arkansas, but the understated meaning is clear: Cash has forgiven himself and has put the past behind him, allowing his artistic success to take new and bounding leaps forward. This success in turn generates the confidence he needs to convince Carter to marry him after their long and troubled courtship spanning many years and the film’s entire space. Although Walk the Line teeters on the same precarious ledge that cripple Ray and Kinsey in their hubristic attempts at total explanation, it escapes the clichés of its predecessors and leaves the audience gratified, but without the thick gravy of sentimentalism that mutes the subtle flavors beneath.

    As a delightful counterpoint to the reigning formula in the biopic genre, Bennett Miller’s Capote stands alone with the courage to focus with utter clarity and precision rather than generalize. Instead of offering a total explanation for the life and career of Truman Capote, the film allows us to concentrate our gaze on one formative moment that defined a great author’s legacy and fame: the writing of In Cold Blood in 1955. Because Capote avoids the temptation to present a comprehensive portrait of a complicated personage, it can explore with much more detail and coherence its principle subject, thus revealing the distinct advantages of nuanced study over panoramic generalization. We aren’t burdened (or coddled) with childhood trauma, trite flashbacks, or psychoanalytical suggestions, but are simply allowed to enter a character fully and thoroughly through a structured composition and first-rate acting. Philip Seymour Hoffman is spectacular as Capote, having mastered his flamboyance, his vast intelligence, and his peculiar sense of humor (not to mention the tinny, nasal timbre of Capote’s unparalleled voice). But the film is not totally dependent on a single performance; it is full of excellent performances (Chris Cooper as the beleaguered Kansas sheriff is a standout). And like June Carter in Walk the Line, Capote’s companion, Harper Lee (Catherine Keener) balances her friend’s eccentricities and character shortcomings to form an impressive team, complementing the idea that great geniuses do not always work alone, but as in the case of Cash and Capote, often owe much to a devoted and self-effacing counterpart.

    The psychological depth and narrative grip of Capote’s portrayal are rare treats indeed, providing audiences with a viable alternative to the conventional biopic. We see Capote not as larger-than-life (a status toward which Charles and Kinsey seem to strive at their directors’ behest) but convincingly present in the depth and detail of his work, which becomes the centerpiece of the film’s drama and energy. We are left with the option of feeling moral indignation at what appears to be Capote’s deliberate and selfish interference in a murderer’s legal case or admiration for an indefatigable artist who stops at nothing to accomplish his goal to understand something to his satisfaction: in this case, to get inside the mind of a brutal killer and try to make sense of his mind through dramatic reconstruction in literature. In other words, we leave from the movie not feeling that we have been instructed to feel certain things; we are left to decide for ourselves based on what we have seen. As far as biopics go, a film like Capote is almost guaranteed not to make as much money as its more commercially palatable counterparts, but when considered in sequence with so many others, seems more plausible and useful as a work of art.

    Perhaps we find ourselves in a time of such moral and political ambivalence that we are moved to seek entertainment in genres that instruct us about how (and how not!) to process traumatic events and personal disasters. Capote never published another book after In Cold Blood (interestingly, neither did Harper Lee), inviting the suspicion that the experience of writing it was so powerful and exhaustive that Capote was left with nothing else he could say, or that it so depleted him morally and psychologically, that it effectively ended his career as a writer. As the story is being told, there are no easy or clear reductions to be made, and so the audience is left thinking about Capote, and perhaps, even moved to learn more about the film’s subject, will revisit or read for the first time the book that forms its narrative core. (In Cold Blood rediscovered itself on the New York Times Bestseller List for nearly 50 weeks after the movie’s release!) In short, the movie serves as an invitation into the complexity of its subject, and in its resistance toward total explanations and narrative arcs, asks us to seek other sources of information and learn more. For my $9.50, I’ll take more biopics on that model.

Circle of Fifths

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Toes curl, scrapes of sand between rough reminders
of yesterday’s maiden swim: radiant pellucid sky displayed
vague sense of threatened calm – both wonder and fright to behold.
The rushing cool, immersion swift, warmer than one hoped
Fragrant suds of unknown depths enjoy a brief flash of fame
then gone, brought back down, folded in,
Only the tide spanks with the deafening certainty we covet.

A playground for fools and souls reborn, the coming bath beckons
like a savage call to arms that brings meaning to days of toil
and forbearance – all washes away in the brisk and beautiful throes
of aqueous battle and surprisingly tender strife.

Normalcy finds a brave revival in the comforting blanket of weightless pride,
its bliss uncovered in the quick shocks of this secular baptism:
thin fabric keeps things civil, but nothing hides the elemental joy
and dangerous euphoria of a good dip in the drink.
Through which the grown become young again, austerity receding
into the slick crystal plunge – ablution aside, or (perhaps) exacted.
Sheer will manifest in one dread purpose – to float, and paddle,
and glory in the benevolent support of buoyant embrace, unasked and unpaid,
but never unwarranted: a birthright of sorts.

Absorbent flesh retains its medium, tissue bloats and pinches
Vessels contract, a chill spills down arms – inviting us back to shore.
We go reluctantly, never without fear of what we leave behind
What we recover seems too secure, too easy, even trite.
Growing quiet, to each his thoughts, of returning tomorrow or next week
Persuading ourselves: just one of many likely immersions, but -
Nobody seems too sure. Regret and refreshment mix awkwardly
As oily skin and heavy eyelids shorn now of liquid support
find solace in adjustment, the perfunctory return to terra firma.

Only the sand clings with great tenacity to feet hesitant to be reshod,
shoulders catch against sun-warmed cotton, their moisture,
their innocent spoil, chafe gently at what cannot be rejected outright.
As if to make clear our bold error, the hot car infernal with reproach,
its violence restored. On the horizon, folding shines seem to wink
in deft conspiracy with those cloying grains of silicon – our betrayal made final.

The Activists’ Banquet

by Joshua H. Liberatore

Katherine picked me up around eight for the event, which was to be held in the second-floor ballroom of the Student Union. “Well, we’ll be a little late. It doesn’t matter. I’m sure no one will save the world without us,” I said with a laugh. Katherine grinned. Although we had met only that October, she was already well accustomed to the more biting moments in my humor. I’ll even say she appreciated that about me, perhaps seeing in herself as well the incipient bulge of a growing skepticism about many things. As for me, the afternoon in the library had already imbued the day with a certain cool, almost elevating, bitterness. Long hours with the Scottish Enlightenment and Tolstoy will do that to a student of ideas sometimes, if only because the sense of inspiration and high purpose gleaned from the efforts of past great minds contrasted too painfully with the disappointing shallowness of present-day politics. Saturdays were often like that.
    Our student group was part of a coalition effort to raise money for the families of political prisoners in Nicaragua, and the heads of various student organizations on campus had put together an evening benefit, to which we had haplessly invited all of our friends in hopes of breaking even on the event. By which I mean to say friends in other groups, friends outside the group, friends who weren’t “active” per se, even friends who simply didn’t care about what we were doing, but we loved them anyway. And who could blame them for not showing up? Ten dollars for a plate of vegetarian lasagna and a bunch of activist clones patting themselves on the back for their paltry achievements in the local leftist movements wasn’t exactly the preferred form of weekend recreation among college students, even among my own friends, who constituted a decidedly unique, if not totally disparate, subset of American undergraduates. I went through the familiar sham routine of inviting them, encouraging them to come, telling them the discussions would be interesting, and finally, forgiving them for having something better to do. Hell, I thought, in all honesty I had something better to do, as morsels of my afternoon reading slowly turned themselves over in my mind’s mouth, still savory from the page. I grabbed my vest, and walked out the door, pausing to receive Katherine’s understanding look, that conspiratorial blink of the eyes that I had seen before from her. For an instant, I wondered whether I had said something out loud. Then we were off, and I knew it didn’t matter.
    We arrived as things were just getting started. James was introducing the panel. I scanned the audience of two dozen or so familiar faces. As per usual, there were no surprises. But, it was still early at least. There was still time for the stragglers to show up. We never had more than twenty or so right at starting time. But who was I to talk? I couldn’t even get there on time, I observed, straining to look at the watch on my companion’s wrist, which, as if in earnest, was playfully eluding my inquiry at the bounce of our hurried march. People would trickle in little by little, I reconciled, looking up, and I felt Katherine tugging at my sleeve as James nodded for us to sit down. I felt a slight twinge of guilt spike through my brain at the look of him, tall, thickly built, with that serious brow that suggested to me the most curious combination of fierce anger and lofty idealism, of which only fastidious activists like James, veteran social workers, and weary priests seemed to be capable of evincing. In my experience anyway, it was those types who shared that look. Those who believed in what they were doing, I had no doubt, but all with that burdensome backlog of nearly perpetual hopeless cases, which inevitably tempered the satisfaction of every success. This was a serious brand of folks, and our own leader was a budding young champion.
    James the great organizer. On the other hand, I could never help thinking that he was somehow cruelly misplaced in the world, his brawn more befitting an athlete than an organizer. He had the look of a fighter, alright, but there was always the hint of a physical battle he would much rather be fighting than the war of ideology and rhetoric in which he was officially engaged. I had known him two years already, and I couldn’t shake that impression from the first. He scared me in a way, I guess. Maybe it was his size that threatened me, his overwhelming physicality that called out the more significant gulf separating us. He should have my body, I remember thinking, to fit better the sixties prototype of the tall, gangly orator, whose piercing physiognomy added an element of intensity to the seriousness of his words, made somehow more convincing by the singleness of purpose chiseled into his face. But not sturdy like James. No, you wanted the impression that this was someone who was picked on as a kid, who had been a little uncomfortable around the big boys at the playground. You wanted to believe he was still a little angry about that early, but substantial, abuse. It somehow solidified the image of his discontent and gave credibility to the enormity of his claims. It made you believe he could accomplish anything, by virtue of his private suffering alone. But James was big and strong and commanding and was a living relic of a much older mythology. Sadly, though, his bulk didn’t seem to fit his contemporary role. And how did he get so big anyway on an all-vegetarian diet? I wondered, suddenly returning to the room, the microphone, and the smell of garlic and broccoli. Yes, something clearly was not right about his shape. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
    “Morris Feldman is here from Amnesty International to talk discuss their latest efforts. . . .” he bellowed, as I settled into my chair next to Katherine. Damn, I was already perspiring from the walk and the heat of the lights and the podium burning down on my chest from the stage. I removed my vest to correct it.
    “Is it hot in here?” I whispered to Katherine, she leaning down to catch my words.
    “I’m fine,” she whispered back. Same blink. Same smile. She’s on to me, I thought. Too perceptive, Katherine. She can see my doubt streaming out of me, coming out at every pore. It made me terribly uncomfortable that she knew my secret. At the same time, it put me strangely at ease. I would either have to tell her about it one of these days, I thought, or this is it for me.
    “Did you guys hear that Richard’s flight was delayed? He’ll be a little late,” a voice informed us in a whisper from behind. Leslie Thompson, another interesting specimen. Very intelligent, very contradictory. Quite pretty actually, but she dressed so sloppily and neglected hygiene so exuberantly, I always had the feeling that she had the most to hide of any of us. She had that remarkable talent of appearing to care so much while not really caring at all. It was pure theater. I couldn’t decide whether I was amazed or disgusted by her. Maybe I was attracted to her, intoxicated against my will by her slovenly earthiness, her vibrant aura of sexual permissiveness, her pungent aroma. She was a total mystery to me, which turned me on at times so profoundly I felt weak in her presence, defeated by my wretched lust for her. And yet I felt repulsed by her. God, what a mess! She was smart, maybe that was it. She read books, I knew, not just books about organic farming movements in Costa Rica, but interesting books. Novels. Joyce. She was an English major. She knew Shakespeare. But what a charade, I thought. As if she could pull off this brilliant performance and no one would detect her shallowness, her flagrant hypocrisy. No one would suspect her, because she was beautiful and she seduced you with her radicalness. She escaped all definition, and people were drawn to her. But it was a travesty, I reminded myself. I don’t buy into her game for a second. Neither does Katherine, I surmised, drawing my shoulder from Leslie’s receding touch to look up at Katherine. No way, I confirmed, she doesn’t buy it at all!
    Richard Farley was our keynote guest, a prominent political activist and writer for a major leftist magazine. He was flying all the way from Washington for our humble little gathering. A little late, I thought. I wonder how late. He might have just cancelled altogether and I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised. He probably had real work to do anyway, no time for this sorry hand-holding with middle-class guilt. I didn’t blame him either, no more than I blamed my own friends for not coming. He might be better off not witnessing this sad assemblage of neoliberalism, the squirrely hair and tattered clothing, the tired eyes of late-night discussions in coffee houses, the pathetic evidence of futile organization for a revolution in ideas that would never be realized. His not showing up certainly wouldn’t be the first disaster of its kind that I had witnessed.
    I recalled with a flash of irony and good humor how embarrassed I had been when the environmental tea and granola break I had organized in high school went terribly and irrevocably awry, when I had foolishly let school administrators and the cafeteria director intervene in the planning. But I couldn’t possibly do all the work, I thought. Why not let them help me order the supplies? The student council doesn’t have the money anyway to bankroll this event. At least they are showing interest in the cause, I had figured. Then I was scandalized to show up at my own event only to find the tea being ladled out in Styrofoam cups and the granola bars wrenched from their double-sealed factory wraps, the hungry masses of hormones and morning eagerness grabbing for seconds and thirds, while the meeker were left in line without their share.
    Perhaps this course of events had been somehow preordained, and I had simply showed up at the right audition. Perhaps I had been cast unwittingly for this absurd role . . . or was this just small-town provincialism and high school small mindedness that were keeping me from effecting real change? Or worse yet, was I part of some larger farce, of which I would become cognizant only now, a handful of years and as many organizational failures later? Was this the apex of my abortive career as an enlightened mind, a socially responsible person? Was it really that hopeless for change?
    And there were other attempts, all variations on the same theme of well-intentioned uselessness. Of course, there were the trees we spent Saturdays planting around the schoolyard, the front lawn, beautifying the parking lots, already overstuffed with the handsome sedans and expensive jeeps of our spoiled coevals. We had chosen the hardiest species, those that would fare well, we thought, against years of unwarranted attack from lawn mowers and snowploughs, the clumsy bumpers of imprecise parking jobs. Our main enemies were the machines, right? We didn’t consider then the scars left by key-wielding teenage suburban angst that I would eventually discern on the atrophied trunks of abused saplings. We couldn’t predict the amputated branches, the plucked leaves, the careless footfalls. How could we have? We thought we were doing good. We thought others would understand.
    And was I even exempt from such carelessness? I myself drove a ‘77 Cadillac, which, because it was old and cost me only $700, felt guiltless compared to the lavish consumerism that surrounded me. How did I reconcile the low fuel efficiency and thick emissions that nullified any “sacrifices” I was making for the cause? I don’t remember how I convinced myself of my own impunity. I just remember how mad I got when someone ripped the beautifully intact hood ornament out of its socket and made off with it while I was in class one day. The car itself didn’t last much longer anyway, and many cold winter afternoons my brother and I ended up walking home from school, leaving the car to rest in the parking lot, sometimes for weeks on end until it would start again. And it wasn’t even that far for us, just shy of a mile. Later, when I finally did abandon driving altogether and went away to college, that distance would seem almost negligible to me. We’d felt so inconvenienced at the time, though, but at the same time slightly vindicated by the ease with which we survived the crisis. Still, I don’t know how many times I thought of just getting rid of the old thing and becoming a full-time pedestrian. I guess I wasn’t willing to go that far. That and the element of hypocrisy hadn’t yet occurred to me.
    Yes, now it made perfect sense to me in retrospect. I’d never really committed to any movement, either out of skepticism or just immaturity. Now, though, I knew it wasn’t immaturity that was pulling me from the group, it was plain old skepticism. Or realism, to be more precise. I guess that now I was finding real reason to doubt that any of this was actually worth anything, no faith that it would successfully change anything or anyone. It seemed a big waste of time. We prided ourselves on being “active” and fancied ourselves superior to fraternities and other meaningless student affiliations that didn’t actually do anything productive. I had bought into that claim at one point, maybe because I thought I was finally part of something that mattered, to which all those failed attempts in high school had been mere stepping stones. But now I wasn’t so convinced.
    So we put up flyers, we screened documentaries, we discussed the horrors of sweatshop labor in Indonesia, the evils of multinational corporations, the doublespeak of NATO; we carried the occasional poster, signed the occasional petition, participated in the occasional demonstration. So what! It was all such a farce, because no one ever talked about ideas anymore. No one ever came up with anything original. No one ever said anything that Rousseau hadn’t said better. I was tired of the buzzwords, the burned-out slogans, and the bankrupt mission statements. We weren’t any more successful at getting people to think about real questions than our seventh grade geography teacher who hollered at us for misspelling Luxembourg. Christ, we weren’t even thinking ourselves. It was all warmed-over material from a lost generation anyway, who themselves were rehashing what had already become trite among the Beats. It was a farce. It was all semantic distortion. No one even paid attention to the words he was using anymore. No one knew what the words actually meant. And I was tired of it. At least fraternities aren’t pretending to be anything different from what they are, plain as day. It’s the speciousness of it all that’s exhausting.
    That’s right, I remembered, Katherine and I had talked about this before. Down in Georgia, at that rally. I had heard some one cry out in earnest, “No More U.S. Intervention!” brandishing a sign to the same effect.
    “Now there’s a cogent thought!” I quipped. Katherine and I were making our way around the periphery of the action, the stammering podiums, the booths disseminating leaflets, the worn-out looks of weary travelers. That’s about all we had done all morning: walk around. No one was actually doing anything, and nothing was happening. The crowds of angry people lined up at the gates of the Army base didn’t seem to be disrupting anyone’s day. No one seemed to be watching. The TV camera crews were all at ease, waiting for a story.
    “Yeah, intervention where?” she added. I saw my opening.
    “Exactly! What does that mean anyway? I bet he can’t tell you.” I proceeded cautiously, still testing her complicity.
    “It doesn’t matter what it means, or what he thinks it means. Either way he expects you to believe it and repeat it without thinking about what the words mean. He’s just saying it, after all, without any pretense of explanation or corroboration.”
    There was my green light. I went ahead now, full throttle, sensing in her someone capable of real dialogue. “That’s just it,” I added. “But I don’t think it’s even a question of believing it or thinking about it. Nobody is even listening. They’re hearing the words, they recognize certain syllables, but they’re not listening. They don’t process what’s being said, and that’s how the implication of the words gets totally lost in transmission. Look at these girls, for example,” I said, pointing to a long booth, where a young girl and her sister were passing out pamphlets denouncing the atrocities of the infamous School of the Americas, a military unit of Latin American mercenaries trained by the U. S. Army to brutalize the citizens of their respective countries and provide armed support for whatever dictator our government was backing that month, blah, blah, blah, for which cause we had all gathered down in Georgia to protest.
    I continued, “I mean, she probably hasn’t even got to the Pearl Harbor lesson in her elementary school social studies class and she already propagates the ‘No More U.S. Intervention!’ that her parents have brainlessly adopted without even explaining to her why a School like this might possibly exist on God’s green earth. She’s been fed on organic vegetables from infancy, but do you think she understands why the apple she is eating costs three times what I paid for mine, and that probably less than one percent of the world population knows a standard of living that affords them such luxuries? Do you think she can envision what the world would be like without U. S. intervention, whatever that means? Do you think she knows what that might mean?”
    “Do you know what that world would like?” Katherine interrupted, stopping to look up at me, a little taken aback by my sudden diatribe.
    “No, of course I don’t,” I replied.
    “Of course you don’t,” she repeated with finality, starting to walk again.
    “But that’s not the point. The point is that no one really knows what that world would be like, and certainly not these people,” I gasped, drawing my hand across the panorama of bodies surrounding us, by now amorphous and frightening to me. “No one knows, and no one can know. But that’s not what bothers me the most. A lot of people talk about things they don’t really understand, especially in our cozy little college town, so famously liberal in its views. What bothers me is that people aren’t appreciating the complexity of things when they say something like ‘No More U.S. Intervention!’ People aren’t thinking about the web of implications that that statement contains. And what’s more: they don’t want to. They’re afraid to. I know at least that I am afraid to.”
    “Well, you came down here anyway. Explain that to me!” she challenged.
    “I’m afraid to.” I repeated and we both laughed. I was glad to see a little humor returning to our conversation. Katherine had a good sense of humor. That’s why I didn’t mind talking to her, didn’t mind exposing myself a little bit. Because she knew how to see the absurdity in things, and that’s exactly what I wanted someone else to recognize. I couldn’t quite get there with the others. They were over the fence a little too far. I couldn’t reach them. They would be quick to call me a cynic and fault me for thinking too philosophically about what they called “real problems.” The real problem, as I saw it, was that they weren’t thinking at all. Katherine was though. Katherine was thinking. So I talked to Katherine.
    “Well, I was just wondering why you came down here if that’s the way you feel,” she prompted.
    “It isn’t the way I feel, it’s just what I think,” I parried.
    “What’s the difference then?”
    “The difference is that one of them I can explain and one I can’t.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” she offered, now with a smile.
    “Look,” I said. “The truth is: I don’t know why I came down here. I’m not exactly enjoying myself. I don’t feel right about this and I don’t belong here.”
    “When did you start feeling that way?”
    “About three hours into the drive. It was already pretty late, it was my turn at the wheel, and you remember, by then our plan to hold the vans in caravan formation hadn’t really worked out, so our van was separated. It was quiet, and the whole thing seemed kind of surreal. Most people were sleeping. Some kid was babbling on about ‘how socialism works on a small scale’ to some girl, who was inevitably listening in pathetic rapture. . . .”
    “Oh, Rob, from the Labor Rights group?”
    “Yeah, whatever. It was crap, that’s all. He was going on and on, and it was all straight out of some damn pamphlet and I thought I was going to be sick. After a while, though, they finally shut up and I kind of struck it up with the guy in the passenger’s seat, because I was starting to get a little sleepy myself and needed something to get me through my shift. We had put the music really low so people could sleep. Anyway, he’s a nice guy. Anthony, I think. We talked for a while.”
    “Where’s he from?”
    “He’s actually from down here, Atlanta, he said.”
    “No, I mean. What group is he with?”
    “I don’t know,” I mused. “I think he’s an independent.” We laughed again. “Anyway, I mean it: he’s really from Georgia or something. I mean, his parents have since moved to the Midwest, but he grew up down here. He said it was weird for him to be driving all night to make it down South. He said Georgia never really seemed like much of a destination to him. He’s a little older, I think. Been out of school for a while. Our conversation was fading though, and I could tell he didn’t really feel like talking anyway, so I just started focusing on the stream of white under me and put the cruise on, sat back a little bit. Drove like that for quite a while. Everything is quiet, except the tape player is softly playing ‘Homeward Bound.’ And the only thing I could hear besides the music is this real soft sniffling, like somebody was crying. I glanced behind me to check the cabin, and everything was totally still, perfectly calm, as it had been for the last hour or so since Engels had shut up at last. I couldn’t figure out what was making that noise. It sounded like somebody quietly weeping, but too soft really to be sure, could just be breathing, or some whistling snore. It was so quiet and surreal and late that I didn’t really know what to think. Maybe I was just so damn awake all of sudden, my ears were experiencing some sort of hypersensitivity. I just turned forward and looked at the road ahead. And a feeling of profound sadness suddenly came over me. I don’t really know how to describe it other than that the van just seemed really heavy all of a sudden, like it was just overloaded. The air was kind of stale, and just sad, really sad. By the time I realized that I had heard someone crying, the noise was gone. I happened to look over at the only other person who was awake, hoping he could share the strangeness of the moment with me, or at least shake that silence with a word or a joke or something. Something. But when I glanced at him quickly and saw him rubbing the reddened sockets, where a second ago the glasses had been, I snapped my head back to center, trained my eyes on the road ahead, and didn’t move them until my shift was over and we crossed the Kentucky border.”
    Meanwhile we had stopped walking, having long reached the end of the periphery. Now we were facing an interlude of small houses that seemed to fade, almost imperceptibly, into the sleepy town that was adjacent to the fort complex. Neither of us spoke, letting the quietness of the scene sink in. I observed privately that the strangeness of that abrupt, yet subtle, change of backdrop was remarkably similar to the one which characterized the outer edges of our own college town, that invisible border across which one suddenly saw no signs of student life. Instead the eerie absence of university buildings and the reappearance of school-age children and well-kept lawns dominated the view, suddenly replacing the littered walks of campus and the blooming kiosks of yesterday’s flyers, as if one had entered an entirely different realm altogether, a realm that was not only physically detached from the institution that was its economic epicenter and very lifeblood, it was also blissfully indifferent to its inevitable distractions, its wild commotion, its frenzied insularity. Here it was calm, quiet, and had the look of home. The few times I passed into that realm for the rare babysitting job or the seasonal visit to the local cider mill, I was immediately struck by the overwhelming comfort of the place, the familiar anonymity of quiet living, gardening in the spring, lemonade stands in the summer, raking leaves in the autumn. In a word: the life to which I genuinely aspired. My true ideal, maybe. I wondered. . . .
    “Wow. I thought I might have lost you there, captain.” Katherine was nudging me. “You still with me here?” she queried, smiling at my brief, if substantial, departure.
    “Yeah, I’m here. Here is right where I want to be.” I returned with a grin, coming out of the thick haze of memory and fantasy, which had gripped me so suddenly.
    “I think I know what you mean.”
    “I had a feeling you would.”
    “Well, should we head back and catch up with the group?” She winked.
    “Guess we should.”
    We turned around and walked back to the demonstration area, where, judging by the sound of things, something different was happening. Shivering a bit, I zipped up my vest and followed Katherine’s lead back to the excitement.