Reflections  

Live from the Improv, it's Jimmy Carter — Imagine an America in which prayer was part of the daily ritual in public schools. Imagine an America in which most of those schools celebrated Easter, and virtually all of them celebrated Christmas, with songs and pageants. Imagine an America in which abortion and homosexual behavior were illegal almost everywhere, an America in which even liberal politicians routinely invoked the Christian God, and "Pray for Peace" was a common postal cancellation. Imagine an America in which divorce disqualified candidates for high public office.

That's the America in which I grew up, not many years ago. In the Michigan grade school that I attended, teachers led their students in saying grace over lunch, and the day's activities often began with the Lord's Prayer. Students were assembled two or three times a year to be instructed in Christian doctrine by a minister from the Rural Bible Mission. The great political issue was whether a Roman Catholic was qualified to be president.

That's the America that was known to me, and millions, but has been completely forgotten by modern liberals — at least on the evidence recently presented by their current ideological champion, former President Jimmy Carter.

Carter has been on TV a lot lately, plugging his new book, an opus breathlessly entitled "Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis." The crisis, according to him, has resulted from the attempt of fundamentalist Christians to destroy "our sacred value," the "wall of separation between church and state" — such an attempt, he says, as was never before witnessed in our great nation.

The first question that occurred to me when I heard these extraordinary assertions was the one that occurs to me whenever I run into somebody who actually takes the New York Times seriously: "Hasn't this guy ever been on the west side of the Hudson?" But of course Carter has. He's from Georgia — and he's an evangelical Christian, to boot. And he's a great deal older than I am. He was actually born during Prohibition, a national experience that ought to provide some inkling about what can happen when churches really interact with the state.

So what can account for his seemingly hallucinatory statements about the old America?

That's what I wondered, until it occurred to me that the former statesman must be indulging a rich, though hitherto well concealed vein of humor.

His claim is that fundamentalists are objectionable because they are "always certain that they are right," and that they therefore continually misinterpret reality. Now, what could constitute a greater, more willful misinterpretation of reality than the contention that America formerly had a wall of separation between religion and politics? Just consider the most faithful supporters of Carter's own political projects, African-American fundamentalists and the white religious left. Have they ever separated religion from politics? And is there any person in the country who is more habitually certain that he is right — no matter what — than Jimmy Carter?

My conclusion is that Carter is now atoning for his many and grievous sins of self-righteousness with a gargantuan act of self-parody, a show in which he pretends to blame other people for the stupidities in which he himself has inveterately engaged. I, for one, regard this as one of the funniest acts of our time. — Stephen Cox

I walk the line — To show my opposition to Washington's new smoking ban, I plan on doubling my tobacco consumption: now I will smoke two clove cigarettes each month instead of one. According to the public service announcements running before the vote, this is the same as me spraying twice as many people in the face with pesticide, or cornering twice as many Bambi-eyed waitresses and exhaling directly down their tracheas.

Today I'm smoking while standing on the dashed yellow line in the middle of Water Street, in front of Liberty's stately office building. The street is about 60 feet wide, so I can take maybe two steps towards either sidewalk before I have to extinguish my cigarette, lest some business owner risk a $250 fine on my behalf. See, Washington voters weren't content just to close loopholes for bars, restaurants, and bowling alleys left open by an earlier Clean Indoor Air bill; no, they dreaded the possibility of little groups of smokers congregating outside, socializing, making friends — groups that have become so chic in other smoking-ban jurisdictions (California, New York City, even Ireland) that some take up smoking just to gain admittance. Thus the referendum specified that no one could smoke within 25 feet of a door, window, or vent — basically, within a 25-foot buffer zone around the entire building.

Supporters of the ban (and that's nearly everyone; there was no organized opposition) helpfully pointed out that businesses can petition city councils for an exemption — not from the ban itself, but from the 25-foot zone. Some cities in eastern Washington may prove more lenient, but I have no doubts that every town west of the Cascades will exact a high price from bars to let their patrons smoke outside: remodeling for disability compliance, or retrofitting for the historical council — or just old-fashioned palm-greasing.

The sun is setting over the Olympic Mountains. A few weeks ago, I would have headed straight for the deck at the local pub, to enjoy nature's beauty with Kentucky bourbon in one hand and Carolina tobacco in the other. Today, I grind my cigarette into the asphalt, and get out of the road. — Andrew Ferguson

Bohemian rhapsody — The battle between bourgeois and bohemian was probably the longest-running vaudeville comedy act in Western history, each thwacking the other with rolled-up newspapers for about 150 years, so maybe it's just as well that it's been given the hook. Too many priggish, bloated blowhards denouncing perfectly good artworks and sexual pleasures, and too many bad artists and crackpot theorists denouncing perfectly good middle-class customs like baths and private property, for too long. Still, the vanishing of a bohemian option in life, nicely symbolized by the thousands of identical, franchised Starbucks stores selling overpriced sugar-and-cream confections in the guise of being coffeehouses selling coffee, is worth regretting. Yes, many bohemians were pretentious, dissolute fools and fakes, as were many of their respectable bourgeois counterparts, but if you walk around Greenwich Village in Manhattan, an upscale, casual professional-class neighborhood like all the other upscale, casual professional-class neighborhoods in New York or Boston or Burlington, Vt., or Santa Barbara, Calif., or anywhere, you can't help being haunted by the ghosts of Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Sloan, e.e. cummings, and other free spirits who inhabited it before it became a preserve of investment bankers and corporate lawyers and media celebrities, and you would be similarly haunted in San Francisco's North Beach, London's Soho, the Latin Quarter and Montmartre in Paris, and wherever else rebels and eccentrics used to congregate. At their best, bohemians formed a kind of aristocracy without the manors and manners, an impoverished subterranean elite with something of the same aristocratic frankness of speech, boldness, playfulness, drunkenness, artifice, love of art, and penchant for ceremonial, symbolic dress (as in "the red vest of Gautier" or bohemian black). Bohemias provided an experimental space for art, literature, sexuality, clothes, and food,Ê and some of the successful experiments made their way into conventional society, which became a little less conventional.

In fact, whereas upper-middle-class people once aped the patrician upper class in dress and demeanor, today they're more likely to be trying to give the impression that they are some sort of artist. This is why Picasso, a consummate bohemian, a prolific, experimental, Mediterranean, life-loving Zorba the Spaniard, is the chief saint in the upper-middle-class religion of art, venerated in our museum-temples and in the holy writ of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. Dead bohemianÊartists are sanctified, the most foul-smelling bohemian poets are taught to clean-cut suburban kids in university classes, but bohemias and bohemians themselves have essentially disappeared. The cheap fringe cold-water-flat neighborhoods, the little mom-and-pop Italian restaurants with checkered tablecloths and flickering candles, the seedy bars where struggling young artists and writers gathered to argue and get drunk and fight over women and aesthetics, are no more. Now, in the Village and the other once-bohemian New York neighborhoods that have fallen in succession to theÊgentrifying onslaught, like SoHo, Tribeca, the East Village, or Williamsburg, a struggling young something-or-other would have to cough up a vast security deposit and prove that he or she is plugged into the corporate-bureaucratic system with income-tax forms and credit checks to get an apartment and work in an office to pay for it, and as a result there are virtually no struggling young artists and writers anymore. Instead we have artists who can't draw but are skilled in public relations and gallery-museum politics, and writers who graduate from writing seminars and workshops, use the connections they have acquired in them to publish something somewhere, and then start teaching their own writing seminars and workshops. They live among other, nearly identical young professionals, computer programmers, pharmaceutical reps, and sports therapists, in neighborhoods where Dylan Thomas once drank and Joe Gould once ranted, unmindful of the raffish ghosts. — Eric Kenning

Tooth, nail, and justice — At one end of Terminal C in the Minneapolis airport there is a large mural of the African veldt, with a running antelope and cheetah. After a moment's reflection, one notices an anomaly: the antelope is running behind the cheetah. And then one notices the statement at the bottom of the mural: "Under the Rule of Law All Are Equal."

I first noticed this mural when I saw a mother explaining it to her young boy. "Before," she told him, "the wild cat would chase the antelope, but now the antelope is chasing the cat."

I submit that this little tableau, this passing of information from one generation to the next, catches much of what Americans now believe about the law, and why libertarian thought has lost the battle of ideas.

What does the rule of law provide? Equality? No, it provides payback for past grievances. Once blacks were enslaved. Now they deserve affirmative action. Once women could be violated by their husbands with impunity. Now they can barely be cross-examined in court when they accuse someone of rape. Once cheetahs chased antelopes. Now antelopes get to chase cheetahs. The idea they might be running together as equals never even occurred to the woman, who no doubt wants the best for her child, while providing him with an understanding of the rule of law more suitable to Hobbes' state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short. — Ross Levatter

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