The REAL Sanctity Of Marriage

The sanctity of marriage as a constitutional issue? One blogger—Burningbird (Tilting At Windmills Since 2001)—has demanded the inclusion of a divorce prohibition in the sanctity of marriage amendment. If marriage is so important, the greatest threat to monogamous marriage is D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Homosexual couples bear little threat to monogamous marriage compared to a 50% (and climbing) divorce rate. If marriage must be preserved (at any cost), Burningbird is correct. Spring's Mimosa Wisdom is correct, too. If this is (fair & balanced) polemicism, so be it.

[x Mimosa Wisdom—Blog]
Sanctity of Marriage
July 9, 2003
by Spring

A lot of the fuss and the bother that the religious right is flinging up about the Supreme Court's decision regarding the Texas sodomy law has to do with the door being wide open now for gay marriage, allegedly violating "the sanctity of marriage". They keep saying they want to protect marriage in this country.

"I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between -- what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined -- as between a man and a woman."
Bill Frist
Senator (R-TN)

"This case will be ammunition for a full-scale assault on the institution of marriage by the homosexual lobby. What this decision will be used to do is to try to deconstruct marriage, as Justice Scalia recognized in his dissent, and to empty the word of any meaning."
Ken Connor
President
Family Research Council

These people don't know what the hell they are talking about. They are seriously trying to suggest that marriage as it's been traditionally practiced has been approached with anything remotely resembling sanctity.

My big rosy round arse.

Why do people get married? Honestly, take a big step back and ask yourself and others - just why is it that people decide to get married? How do they execute it? How do they maintain it once it's been started? Look around you at all your married friends. If you are married yourself, or have been, look at yourself and your partner(s). Look at your parents and your grandparents, aunts and uncles. Why did they get married? How did they do at it?

Just what exactly does marriage mean in this day and age? What did it mean before? If it has/had sanctity, what sanctified it?

The only really big difference between marriage as it was practiced in the youth of our grandparents and the way it's practiced now is that people are allowed to get divorced without massive social stigma. People still get married for the same reasons they always did, but now if they find out they've made a grave mistake, they can opt not to traumatize themselves or their children with the side effects of domestic violence, drug or alcohol abuse, or chronic emotional dysfunction that previous generations report as being the direct result of living in a poorly made marriage. Nope, now people get to get divorced and start all over again, with a whole new batch of worries like custody battles, single parenthood, recombinant nuclear families with steps and halves, out-in-laws, multiplication of grandparents, abuse issues arising out of these, jealousies and manipulations, and the general failure of people to understand each others' lives.

It's enough to make you scream, isn't it? It's not that we are losing the sanctity of marriage - it's that we are now failing to conceal that we didn't have it in the first place, and we darned well need some.

It's not gays who are a threat to the sacrament of marriage. It's not poly folk or bisexuals or swingers. It's not people who "live in sin" until they grow old and die together. It's our entire reckless approach to marriage in the first place, this social expectation that we must marry as soon as we find Prince(ss) Charming and are relatively sure that we can stand them in somewhat large doses. It's asking each other, "So, when are you and [insert name here] gonna take it to 'the next level'?" It's asking our children, "Well just when am I going to have some grandkids? I'm not exactly getting any younger!" It's setting up our preschoolers with little boyfriends and girlfriends. It's the constant prod - pair off, procreate, hurry up and then come back for a mortgage!

It's frivolous application that devours the sanctity of marriage - people getting hitched because it's "the next level", people joining up because they're now expecting to be parents, people getting married for money or status or convenience, people getting married because they don't know what love is. It's people getting married to people they hardly know, people making allegedly lifetime commitments on a whim, or even a series of whims, people (like me) bowing to the powerful biological drive to reproduce.

It's the way things are done. Frivolous. Frivolous, I tell you!

People get married for all the wrong reasons, and then they don't work on what they have. They don't make a point of communicating openly and honestly. They let all their insecurities get in the way. They second guess their partners, third and fourth guess them, even. They don't plan together. They don't compromise. And then when it's plainly failing to work out, they might go to a counseling session or two, but they're already looking for the way out.

In that mental exercise up there, did you come across some couples who seem to embody that "sanctity of marriage" ideal? If so, how did they get like that? Did they go through some rough spots? Did they help each other out? Did they stay committed?

Do you think whether or not they used the missionary position might have had anything to do with it? Do you think the ink on the paper of their marriage certificate, or whether it was a church wedding or a courthouse ceremony, made much of a difference? Or was it something else? Was it love? Was it commitment? Was it loyalty perhaps?

The devil, you know, is in the details. We pay far too much attention to things that do not matter, and miss the larger picture. The sanctity of marriage is in the embodiment of loving and cherishing another human being, and making their happiness and welfare sacred and paramount. Yes, Senator Frist, it's a sacrament, and it's not about sex and gender. It's a sacrament to the holiness of love.

Copyright © 2003 Mimosa Wisdom

Alistair Cooke Signs Off

Alfred—er, Alistair—Cooke has signed off BBC. At 95, he will speak seldomly, if ever, again. He calls scotch, "the wine of Scotland." Well said, Alistair. If this is (fair & balanced) appreciation (for Omnibus, Masterpiece Theater, and Alistair Cooke's America), so be it.

[x NYTimes]
Alistair Cooke Says Farewell From America
By FRANK J. PRIAL

wo weeks ago last Friday, on Feb. 20 to be exact, Alistair Cooke slipped a sheet of yellow paper into his ancient Royal manual and typed, "Letter From America No. 2869." It was to be the last, the 2,869th, of his weekly BBC radio talks. A journalistic odyssey that had begun 58 years earlier was coming to an end. He made no mention of it in that final letter, which incidentally was about Saddam Hussein and the two George Bushes. Mr. Cooke, now 95, was winding up his long, eventful career.

"We were going to announce it after that weekend, when the show had been on the air," he said, "but of course it leaked out. My friends tell me the British papers went crazy." He added with a grin, "One of them said it was as if the queen had died." One of America's favorite Britons was lounging on Thursday in his favorite chair in the handsome Fifth Avenue apartment he has occupied for more than 40 years. His once elegant frame is bent now, he cups a hand over his ear to listen, and he moves slowly when he rises. But he swirled his one evening Scotch, "the wine of Scotland" he calls it, with the elegance that characterized his long years in the public eye.

It was earlier in the week, on Tuesday, that the BBC formally announced to Mr. Cooke's estimated 22 million listeners around the world that he was retiring. The World Service said he had decided to sign off on the advice of his doctors, and that they would broadcast letters from the Cooke archives for several more weeks. "I can no longer continue my `Letter From America,' " he said in a statement. "I have had much enjoyment in doing these talks, and I hope some of it has passed over to the listeners, to all of whom I now say thank you for your loyalty and goodbye."

He was asked, Would he miss his work?

"Well, I was used to the routine," he said. "I would pick my topic on Monday and spend the day researching it. On Tuesday I'd type two or two and a half pages, all my arthritis would allow me. I'd type the rest, another three pages on Wednesday, 1,700 words total — 13 minutes 30 seconds air time.

"Then I'd beat the hell out of it, getting rid of all the adverbs, all the adjectives, all the hackneyed words. Do you know what Mark Twain said about the perfect word? The difference between a perfect word and a near-perfect word is like the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

"On Thursday we'd record the show right here, and on Friday it would be on the air from London. We record here because I haven't left the apartment in two years on doctor's orders."

Illness may have confined Mr. Cooke to his apartment, but he spent much of his earlier life on the road as a reporter. He was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot and killed. "Down on the greasy floor," he stated in his BBC letter that night, "was a huddle of clothes, and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child, lying on a cathedral tomb."

"I was a reporter," he said the other day. "I was never an ideologue." Perhaps not but he admitted that of the 11 presidents he has covered, Franklin D. Roosevelt was his favorite, and he once observed that "Americans seem to be more comfortable with Republican presidents because they share the common frailty of muddled syntax." He thought Jimmy Carter was the most intelligent of the presidents he has known.

Were there reports or events he was particularly proud of? He answered: "My favorite column was the one I delivered last Christmas Day, and speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974 was one of the memorable events. It was the 200th anniversary of the First Continental Congress, and nothing like that had ever happened to me before."

Raymond Seitz, a former United States ambassador to Britain wrote: "Cooke was the quintessential foreign correspondent. Politicians and diplomats come and go, but Cooke's weekly lessons have, for half a century, translated one nation for the understanding of another."

Mr. Cooke's formal education included a degree in English with top honors from Cambridge University, but he said he absorbed his prose style from E. B. White, Twain and H. L. Mencken. He once defined Mencken as "a humorist in the classic American tradition, about halfway between Twain and Woody Allen."

While still a student in England Mr. Cooke corresponded with Mencken and later became a colleague and friend. Together they covered the 1948 presidential campaign, Mencken's last.

The elegant apartment Mr. Cooke inhabits with his wife, the portrait painter Jane White, was financed less by the "Letter From America" series, for which he once disclosed he was paid about $1,100 a piece, than by his books, several of which were best sellers, by his lectures, and especially by his years on television. He was the host of "Omnibus," the first important cultural television program, from 1952 to 1961, and of "Masterpiece Theater" on PBS from 1971 to 1992.

Like any television personality, particularly a cultural one, Mr. Cooke was ripe for parody. He became Alistair Cookie (for "Monsterpiece Theater") on "Sesame Street" and was sent up regularly on "Saturday Night Live."

Alistair Cooke was born Alfred Cooke in Manchester, England, in 1908, the son of an ironworker and lay preacher and an Irish immigrant mother. At Cambridge he legally changed his name to Alistair, which he claims had been a nickname until then. He first came to the United States in 1932 on a two-year followship to study theater direction. He spent one summer in Hollywood working on a film about Napoleon with Charlie Chaplin. All that came out of the project was a profile of Chaplin in Mr. Cooke's 1977 book, Six Men.

After several years back in London as a BBC theater critic, he returned to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1941. In 1945 The Manchester Guardian, now The Guardian, hired him to cover the founding of the United Nations. He was the Guardian's United States correspondent for the next 26 years. He worked simultaneously for the BBC and broadcast his first "Letter From America" on March 24, 1946. It told of a voyage he took on the Queen Mary with several thousand war brides on their way to the United States.

Mr. Cooke was a man about town in his younger days, haunting the 52nd Street jazz clubs and playing jazz piano at parties. His circle included figures from the Algonquin Round Table and even now he can regale friends with stories of James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, Robert Benchley and the acerbic Brendan Gill.

William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, lived for many years in the same building as the Cookes. "He lived on the third floor," said Mr. Cooke, who lives on the 15th. "He never came up here because he was afraid of heights."

While there were indeed 2,869 letters from America, they were not broadcast every week since their inception, nor did all of them come from the United States. In the program's early years it was off the air for as long as three months at a time and would occasionally emanate from London while Mr. Cooke was there for business or vacation. He did not miss a single show after 1966, however, recording the show from a hospital bed when necessary.

While proud of his reputation as a pundit, a prose stylist and an impressive speaker, Mr. Cooke is prouder still, he says, of his ability to single out the small gesture, the terse quote or the insignificant event that speaks to larger issues. "I think I've lasted," he told William H. Honan of The New York Times in 1988, "because I found out that what people really wanted to know was anything that you notice in life, and especially things that touch everybody, touch a bishop and a farmer."

Not all of his efforts have met with unalloyed enthusiasm. The Times Literary Supplement in London criticized his book Alistair Cooke's America for its "random explanations," and the American historian James Flexner said that the television program based on the same book was "full of historical errors."

An unruffled Mr. Cooke said, "Academics just hate squatters on their territory."

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company

Information Unchained

Google Me. I did. My search produced 7 pages. A few of the links were to publications by a jazz critic named—Neil Sapper (no relation)—and the British author of the Bulldog Drummond series of crime novels. This proves that even Google produces nonsense. If this is (fair & balanced) self-deprecation, so be it.

[x Washington Post]
We Wanted Answers, And Google Really Clicked. What's Next?
By Joel Achenbach

In the beginning -- before Google -- a darkness was upon the land.

We stumbled around in libraries. We lifted from the World Book Encyclopedia. We paged through the nearly microscopic listings in the heavy green volumes of the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. We latched onto hearsay and rumor and the thinly sourced mutterings of people alleged to be experts. We guessed. We conjectured. And then we gave up, consigning ourselves to ignorance.

Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do we see how dim and gloomy was our pregooglian world. In the distant future, historians will have a common term for the period prior to the appearance of Google: the Dark Ages.

There have been many fine Internet search engines over the years -- Yahoo!, AltaVista, Lycos, Infoseek, Ask Jeeves and so on -- but Google is the first to become a utility, a basic piece of societal infrastructure like the power grid, sewer lines and the Internet itself.

People keep finding new ways to use Google. It is now routine for the romantically savvy to Google a prospective date. "Google hackers" use the infiltrative powers of Google to pilfer bank records and Social Security numbers. The vain Google themselves.

It was about three years ago that the transitive verb "to Google" entered the lexicon, but it was only last year that Google passed all rival search engines in the number of queries handled -- now upwards of 200 million a day. So phenomenal is its success that some industry watchers think an initial public offering of Google stock could raise $20 billion and trigger a second dot-com boom.

"You build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door," Stewart Brand, computer guru and president of the Long Now Foundation, says of Google. "A wider path, I think, has never been beaten in the history of the world. It's an astonishing mousetrap story."

In the dot-com world, nothing stays the same for long, and it's not clear that Google will forever maintain its dominance over such ferocious rivals as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But the business story of Google is less interesting than the technological one: If information is power, then Google has helped change the world. Knowledge is measurably easier to obtain. Google works. Google knows.

The world used to be transformed by voyages of discovery, religious movements, epidemic globe-circling diseases, the whims of kings and the depredations of armies. But over the centuries, technology has emerged as the primary change agent, the thing that can shrink a planet, undermine dictators and turn 14-year-olds into publishers.

The question is, who's going to build the next mousetrap? What will it do? The laboratories of Internet companies are furiously trying to come up with the next generation of search engine. Whatever it is and whatever it's called, it will likely make the current Google searches seem as antiquated as cranking car engines by hand.

Mom, What's a Library?

The transition into the Google Era has not occurred without some anguish. The stacks of a university library can be a rather lonely place these days. Library circulation dropped about 20 percent at major universities in the first five years after Internet search engines became popular. For most students, Google is where all research begins (and, for the frat boys, ends).

A generation ago, reference librarians -- flesh-and-blood creatures -- were the most powerful search engines on the planet. But the rise of robotic search engines in the mid-1990s has removed the human mediators between researchers and information. Librarians are not so sure they approve. Much of the material on the World Wide Web is wrong, or crazy, or of questionable provenance, or simply out of date (odd to say this about a new technology, but the Web is full of stale information).

"How do you authenticate what you're looking at? How do you know this isn't some kind of fly-by-night operation that's put up this Web site?" asks librarian Patricia Wand of American University.

Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the "Dark Web," the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books with unique call numbers, plus another 9 million or so in unusual formats, but most have not made it onto the Web. That may change, but for the moment, a tremendous amount of human wisdom is invisible to researchers who just use the Internet.

"For a lot of kids today, the world started in 1996," says librarian and author Gary Price.

And yet Berkeley professor Peter Lyman points out that traditional sources of information, such as textbooks, are heavily filtered by committees, and are full of "compromised information." He's not so sure that the robotic Web crawlers give results any worse than those from more traditional sources.

"There's been a culture war between librarians and computer scientists," Lyman says.

And the war is over, he adds.

"Google won."

Advanced Search

In the early days of search engines, finding information was like fishing in a canal: You might hook something good, but you were just as likely to reel in an old tin can or a rubber boot. Now you often find exactly what you want.

One reason Google works so well today is that there's so much for its robotic crawlers to explore. Google initially searched about 20 million Web pages; the company's home page now boasts that it searches 3,307,998,701 pages.

"In 1996, if you tried to Google someone, if Google existed, it wouldn't have been a very satisfying experience," says Seth Godin, author of a number of best-selling e-books. "We hit a critical mass of really valuable stuff that was online, I think, about 2000."

The expansion of the information universe makes the navigational tool all the more valuable. And yet the search function at first seemed to be an unglamorous computer application. The pioneering search engine companies, including Yahoo!, Excite, AltaVista and Lycos, wanted to transform themselves into something snazzier, a "portal," the full gee-whiz Internet Century home page that would offer the user a link to everything between here and Neptune, plus plane tickets.

But the history of computer technology is full of companies that failed to see the potential glory right in front of them. In the early 1980s, IBM thought that the "operating system" within the computer wasn't nearly as important as the hardware, the box itself. And then Microsoft, which benefited from that oversight, became so focused on software programs that it was slow to capitalize on the Internet revolution, leaving Netscape to create the first commercial Web browser. And then almost everyone underestimated Search.

Not Google. When the company debuted in September 1998, it looked like a throwback. This wasn't a portal. The home page showed mostly white space, anchored by a little rectangle, a box, perfectly blank. Fill in blank and get results. This was plain ol' boring Search, without news headlines, plane tickets, e-mail or any other bells and whistles.

But what results! Google has farms of computers working in parallel. You can put in a couple of words and -- gzzzzt! -- get 600,000-plus results within some preposterously brief amount of time. (Google brags about it: "Search took 0.17 seconds." Showoffs!)

Google, the creation of Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, is like many other search engines in its basic operation. It has powerful software programs that automatically "crawl" the Web, clicking on every possible link, scouting the terrain. What has made Google special is that, in assessing the quality of sites, it takes note of how many other pages link to any given page. This is an old idea from academia, called citation analysis. If many Web sites link to a particular page, the page rises in Google's vaunted "page rank" and is more likely to be on the first page of the search results.

"You're getting the advantage of the group mind," says Paul Saffo, a research director at the Institute for the Future.

This is a key concept: As the Web has grown, it has developed a kind of embedded wisdom. Obviously the Web isn't a conscious entity, but neither is it a completely random pile of stuff. The way one part links to another reflects the preferences of Web users -- and Google tapped into that. Google, in detecting patterns on the Web, harvested meaning from all that madness.

This points the way to one of the next big leaps for search engines: finding meaning in the way a single person searches the Web. In other words, the search engines will study the user's queries and Web habits and, over time, personalize all future searches. Right now, Google and the other search engines don't really know their users.

For example, Saffo isn't really interested in the stuff that most people look for when they do a Web search. He's one of the premier futurists of Silicon Valley and fondly recalls the days, back in the 1980s and early 1990s, the pre-Web era, when the Internet was the reserve of the technological elite who posted their brilliant thoughts on electronic bulletin boards. Now, everyone from about third grade up has an e-mail address and loiters around the Web as though it's the corner 7-Eleven. The results of a Web search reflect the tastes of a broad swath of ordinary Americans who in some cases are still wearing short pants.

"The more people get on the Web, the more the Web becomes the vaster wasteland that is the successor to the vast wasteland of television. I don't care what the majority of people are looking at, because the majority of people are really boring," Saffo says.

He needs a better search engine. He needs one that knows that he's a big-brain tech guru and not an eighth-grader with a paper due.

"The field is called user modeling," says Dan Gruhl of IBM. "It's all about computers watching interactions with people to try to understand their interests and something about them."

Imagine a version of Google that's got a bit of TiVo in it: It doesn't require you to pose a query. It already knows! It's one step ahead of you. It has learned your habits and thought processes and interests. It's your secretary, your colleague, your counselor, your own graduate student doing research for which you'll get all the credit.

To put it in computer terminology, it is your intelligent agent.

Calling Agent 001101

No one knows how the intelligent agents of the future might really work, and once you venture more than a few months out you're already into some seriously fuzzy territory. But you might imagine that this intelligent agent could gradually take on so many characteristics of your mind that it becomes something of a digital doppelganger, your shadow self.

To borrow and slightly distort something from "Star Trek," it's like your personal digital Borg, having absorbed your thoughts and melded them with an existing software program.

Perhaps this digital self could become a commodity, something marketable. Imagine that you have to write a paper for a class about the future of search engines. You don't want to use your own lame, broken-down, distracted, gummed-up-with-stupid-stuff virtual secretary to do your research. You want to download Bill Gates's intelligent agent, or Paul Saffo's, or Sergey Brin's, to help you ask smarter questions and find the best answers.

There are primitive intelligent agents already. Amazon.com makes book recommendations based on your previous purchases and the judgments of others who have liked the same books you've liked. But this form of collaborative filtering is still fairly crude.

Microsoft senior researcher Eric Horvitz describes a variety of new and future technologies in which software is more active, more of an entity, no longer just some inert codes waiting for the user to issue a command. For example, there's a program he already uses called IQ, for "implicit query."

"As you're working, we continue to formulate queries in the background, that the user doesn't even know about. They're happening very quietly," Horvitz says.

But Horvitz is keenly aware that people don't want a program that's too pushy, that's constantly interrupting. Humans have limited powers of attention. Software, says Horvitz, "needs to be endowed with the kind of common courtesies we'd expect from a well-mannered colleague."

And lurking over the future of such programs is the dilemma of privacy. There's valuable information in the way people use the Web, but they may not want others, or even a machine, to pay close attention to every place they venture. How do you create an intelligent agent that knows when to look away? How do you avoid what Horvitz calls the "monster possibilities"?

What everyone wants is a reasonable, discreet intelligent agent, like an English butler. It should be one that can get things accomplished, to take the extra steps even without being prompted.

"I don't think anyone wants a search engine," says Seth Godin. "I think people want a find engine."

Find, and do. Solve problems. Make it so.

"I often use the analogy of Web agents being like travel agents," says James Hendler, a computer science professor at the University of Maryland. "When I go to my travel agent and say where I want to go, they don't usually just say, 'Yes, you can get there.' They give me some options of different ways to get there. They think about some things I might have forgotten. Do I need a car, do I need a hotel reservation? And then they go do it for me."

Computers as a general rule do only what they're told to do. They don't have artificial intelligence in the classic sense. They have no common sense. IBM's Gruhl, the chief architect of a new product called WebFountain, points out that no computer has ever learned what any 2-year-old human knows.

A computer, he says, can become easily confused by the sentence "Tommy hit a boy with a broken leg." The computer doesn't understand that a broken leg is not going to be an instrument used in an attack. "Common sense, how the world works, even something like irony, are very difficult for computers to understand," says Gruhl.

Semantic Discussions

To achieve common sense, the Web needs to go through the infantile process of self-discovery. The Web doesn't really understand itself. There's lots of information on the Web, but not much "information about information," also known as "metadata."

If you're a robotic search engine, you look for words in the text of a page, but ideally the page would have all manner of encoded labels that describe who wrote the material, and why, and when, and for what purpose, and in what context.

Hendler explains the problem this way: If you type into Google the words "how many cows in Texas," Google will rummage through sites with the words "cow" and "many" and "Texas," and so forth, but you may have trouble finding out how many cows there are in Texas. The typical Web page involving cows and Texas doesn't have anything to do with the larger concept of bovine demographics. (The first Google result that comes up is an article titled "Mineral Supplementation of Beef Cows in Texas" by the unbelievably named Dennis Herd.)

Hendler, along with World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, is working on the Semantic Web , a project to implant the background tags, the metadata, on Web sites. The dream is to make it easier not only for humans, but also machines, to search the Web. Moreover, searches will go beyond text and look at music, films, and anything else that's digitized. "We're trying to make the Web a little smarter," Hendler says.

But Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, points out that the current keyword-driven searching system, clumsy though it may be and so heavily reliant on serendipity, still works well for most situations.

"Part of the problem is that keywords are so good," he says. "Most of the time the words do what you want them to do."

Billions of dollars are at stake in this race to invent the next mousetrap, and Google faces serious challenges. Yahoo! has long had a partnership with Google, using it to power many of its searches, but Yahoo! has since acquired two other search engine companies, and plans to drop Google in favor of its own Web crawlers. Microsoft, meanwhile, is sure to make search a fundamental element of the next version of its operating system , due in 2006 and code-named Longhorn.

Will Google get steamrolled like Netscape?

"We spend most of our time worrying about ourselves and not our competition," says Google's Norvig.

Technology creates a horizon beyond which human destiny is unknowable, because we can't anticipate all the crazy stuff that brilliant people will invent. The author Michael Crichton has pointed out that a person in the year 1900 might have contemplated all the human beings who would be on the planet in the year 2000, and wondered how it would be possible to obtain enough horses for everyone.

And where would they put all the horse droppings?

Specific predictions are usually wrong. But a general trend has emerged over the course of centuries: Information escapes confinement. Information has been able to break free from monasteries, libraries, school-board-sanctioned textbooks, and corporate publishers. In the Middle Ages, books were kept chained to desks. Information is now completely unchained.

It has a life of its own -- and someday perhaps that won't be just a metaphor.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

The Four Horsemen Of Political Satire (With Special Emphasis On The Lake Wobegon Boy)

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau, and Al Franken had dinner together in December 2003. Together with Michael Moore, they are the Four Horsemen of the Satiric & Loyal Opposition. Compared to the alternative, the best W's side can claim is Dennis Miller. Ann Coulter is an unintentional humorist on the Right with her wacko neo-McCarthyite blithering. I pity the foolish Rightie who invites those four on a talk show. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration, so be it.

[x The Guardian]
Minnesota Zen master
Born in the Midwest to a fundamentalist Christian family which frowned on entertainment, Garrison Keillor's main ambition was to write. But he first worked as a radio presenter and went on to make his mark by broadcasting comic tales of a fictional small town, Lake Wobegon. His quirky stories and novels, with some echoes of autobiography, are now bestsellers, writes Nicholas Wroe
by
Nicholas Wroe

Just before Christmas last year, Garrison Keillor, Garry Trudeau and Al Franken met for dinner at a New York hotel. Despite the absence of Michael Moore, this informal meeting of friends was in effect the high command of the American satiric opposition in session. Trudeau's treatment of the Bush administration in his Doonesbury cartoon strip is well known to Guardian readers and the thesis behind Franken's best selling book, Lies And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (2003), needs little further explanation. However, to many people in the UK, Keillor would not be naturally bracketed in this category. He is more generally seen as a rather folksy and avuncular figure whose tales of life in his fictional Minnesota home town, Lake Wobegon, have provided a soothingly wry view of life in small-town America. That description of him still applies, but particularly in the US Keillor has also built himself a reputation as a consistently astringent critic of the Right.

"But when I talk about politics it is in a very light-handed and in-passing way," his reassuringly rich-timbred voice slowly deadpans in his apartment the next day. "Republicans might be heathens and out to destroy all that we hold dear, but that doesn't mean we need to take them seriously. Or be bitter or vituperative just because they are swine. I think one can still have friends who are Republicans."

The three men were meeting after a live New York broadcast of Keillor's long-running radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, which for two thirds of its season goes on the road, the other third coming from Minnesota Public Radio in St Paul. Among the usual combination of sketches, poems, live music and, of course, Keillor's monologue with news from Lake Wobegon, "where all the women are strong, all the men all good looking and all children are above average", Franken had played Henry Kissinger in a sketch, and Keillor had woven in a running joke about Republicans. Keillor started the show 30 years ago after a visit to the legendary Nashville country music radio programme Grand Ole Opry.

The novelist and critic Jane Smiley, who has written extensively about life in the Midwest, says that from the beginning Keillor "seemed to set himself up in a sort of loving opposition to Midwestern values. He'd hold up these values for amusement and you had the feeling that while he was aware of their virtues, he didn't precisely share them." Franken says that while Keillor "is clearly a Democrat, he is not overtly political on the show. But his politics have become more salient in recent years and the tone of his gentle jibes does tweak his targets in a way that may sometimes be more effective than the type of humour I use, which is to go straight at them."

Keillor explains: "I am culturally quite conservative and being a writer is the purest form of entrepreneurship there is. And I am a Christian and had a fundamentalist upbringing and Republicans assume all fundamentalists are on their side. So I am a sort of conservative Democrat and the Republicans do find that odd." A review in the conservative journal, National Review, typifies the Right's frustration. It complains about his "moralising about the moralists" and categorises him as "a horrid left-liberal scold, dripping with contempt for nearly everything Middle American, who has grown rich and famous off ridiculing his fellow Minnesotans for the benefit of smirking elites everywhere".

Peter A Scholl, professor of English at Luther College, Iowa, has written a critical biography of Keillor and says that his style of humour is in a long tradition of American literary comedy. "But he is not just a parasitic revivalist of those traditions," says Scholl. "He may take on the pose of the crackerbarrel philosopher, a 19th-century yarnspinner, but he also revitalised these modes and traditions, and he adopted modes and played roles that had little precedent in those earlier times."

The novelist and critic Alison Lurie sees a distinction between English humour, which tends to understatement, and American, which enjoys overstatement. "In one of his early stories a man has dug a car, which had been used as a septic tank, out from a field and is dragging it down Main Street to the dump," she says. "Coming the other way is the homecoming queen in her robes and a crown, who is on an ancient army tank garlanded with flowers. Both these things are funny in themselves and then their meeting on Main Street is also funny. He really piles it on in a way that very rarely happens in English humorous writing. But in America, which is a big country, the bigger it is the funnier it is."

As a writer, Keillor's career began in earnest when he first sold a story to the New Yorker in 1970. Happy to be Here, his first collection of Lake Wobegon stories, was published in 1982 and he has gone on to write nine more books since. As a young writer in the early 1970s he would go on driving trips through central Minnesota to remote towns where he would sit in coffee shops just to listen to the conversations. Friends and family say they can easily identify the sources of characters in his books and he has also drawn on his own life. A cursory glance at the synopsis of his latest novel, Love Me, published here this week, suggests some biographical echoes. The story is about an ambitious Minnesota writer who makes it to a cubicle at the New Yorker magazine but finds when he gets there that his political, emotional and creative equilibrium have been disastrously disturbed. Of course, Keillor's literary and radio personae are sturdy creations, not autobiographical facsimiles, but he nevertheless acknowledges the importance of his own experiences. "You use almost everything from your life," he says. "It's your material. Every story starts with some piece of fact and in anything I've ever written you'll be able to find that fact even if it's just a tiny sliver of a thing. In the case of this new book the ambition to write for the New Yorker is a fact but all the singing in a choir is fiction. The apartment where they go to make love is a fact but the jazz concert in Minneapolis is fiction. Why invent everything? We've all had a life so use what you have. And in the final work these are the places where the tyre meets the pavement."

Gary Edward Keillor - he didn't adopt the ostensibly more literary Garrison until submitting poems to magazines while in high school - was born in Anoka, a small town outside Minneapolis, in 1942. His father sorted mail on the train between St Paul and Jamestown, North Dakota, before working as a carpenter converting basements into living space. The family were Plymouth Brethren and Keillor was the third of six children. Although he left the sect as a young man, he says he has "no choice but to accept that it was a very happy upbringing. I did grow up among fundamentalist people whose theology was very stark and absolute. But to their own children and relatives they were nothing but kind and generous and being among Christian people meant that cruelty was profoundly repressed. When outsiders look at this upbringing they look at the long list of prohibitions. But none of that bothers you as a child. You never went to movies or dances and so it seemed a perfectly reasonable way to grow up."

They lived in an area that is suburbia now but was country then and where farmers still ploughed fields with horses. He had "all the fears and trepidations of a kid and also all sorts of religious spooks to deal with as well. But it was a fine life. There were ravines and woods and places to go where you were never under adult observation. The Mississippi river was a stone's throw away and in the summer you could get to an island. It was a childhood that belonged to the 20s and 30s but was still true for us in the 50s." Keillor remembers himself in high school as "a pale, awkward lad of no great acumen" whose nickname was "Foxfart or Doc or Spaz". But Bill Pederson, who met Keillor on their first day at school in 1948 and went on to become a senior hospital administrator, says Keillor was both "very clever and very very kind. And he was well liked because he was such a nice kid. If I had been asked then which child would become a writer I would have said Gary. There was no question about that. But he was very quiet in high school and so the entertaining part has come out of the blue. That is not something he did when he was younger."

When Keillor went to the University of Minnesota in 1960 to read English he was an earnest young man. "When I look back on my early 20s I don't find drunkenness and I find great sexual caution, which wasn't that unusual. This was before the pill and the life of a college student was so different just a few years later." But he responded to a sense of cultural excitement - Bob Dylan had recently begun his journey from Minnesota to greatness - and a wave of political change. He was a strong supporter of JFK even though his parents believed Christians shouldn't take part in the affairs of the world. "They also thought they should stay apart from the whole business of selling your personality. Influence and hobnobbing where friendship and business intersect really went against my parents' theology. They looked with great suspicion upon wealthy people. They found it hard to imagine any good way they could have got rich. For my parents, wealth implied corruption and while my politics might not have fitted with that exactly, it also wasn't at odds with it."

From 1960 to 1968 Keillor was attached to the university. He dropped out for a time in 1962 to work for a local newspaper but even when he was on campus he spent most of his time working on a college newspaper and literary magazine - "to the verge of being kicked out of school" - and for the college radio station. Keillor married Mary Guntzel in 1965 while still a student. Their son, Jason, who works for Keillor's radio production company, was born in 1969. The couple divorced in 1976 and Guntzel died in 1998. She had worked with mentally handicapped adults in Minnesota, one of the major characters in Love Me is based closely on her and the book is dedicated to her memory. "I really admired her," says Keillor. "She was someone who found herself when she dared to take a role championing people who were not capable of standing up for themselves. Her great cause was working with people coming out of state-run hospitals who were not used to having civil rights and being independent. It was something that deeply engaged her in ways that being married to a writer and moving in a writer's circle did not. She found it awkward and painful and it made her feel self-conscious and inferior."

Throughout the 60s Keillor's primary ambition was to write, but it was radio that first provided him with an income, although he saw the work as "a fallback, something anybody could do and get paid for". Bill Kling, president of Minnesota Public Radio, which still broadcasts A Prairie Home Companion, remembers Keillor applying for a job as a classical-music announcer in 1969. "He had a good voice and he knew how to pronounce the names of the classical composers. And he wasn't asking for any specific salary," recalls Kling. Keillor then "hardly spoke to anyone," says Kling. "He was the 'shy Norwegian bachelor farmer' he talked about." But despite any off-mike reticence, Keillor was a natural broadcaster.

Suzanne Weil was head of performing arts at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis in the late 60s. She remembers his morning radio show where he would play records - "Mahler would be followed by the Beach Boys" - and tell Lake Wobegon stories. "It was a cult around town. Every morning at the office people would talk about what they had heard on the way to work." It was Weil who got Keillor into poetry readings and she can claim some credit for his later radio career when she put him and some musician friends in a show called A Prairie Home Entertainment. "It was around the same time that he first appeared in the New Yorker," she says. "Of course it was a big thing for him, but there were a lot of us who knew him and his work who were very excited as well."

Keillor's first New Yorker story was a 400-word cod newspaper article called "Local Family Keeps Son Happy". New Yorker fiction editor Roger Angell says he remembers it "just came in over the counter and it was terrific. It was about the parents of this 16-year-old boy who were worried that he was rather quiet and unresponsive. So they moved in a local prostitute for him and his problems disappeared. One of her accomplishments was cooking 'fancy eggs' and he ended the piece with the recipe. I'd never seen anything like that before and it was just wonderful. We got in touch with him straight away and he began to send us some great stuff."

With the New Yorker paying close to $1,000 for each story, Keillor was able to earn a living from writing and he gave up radio in 1973. The rent on his home was just $80 a month. The following year the New Yorker assigned him to write about the Grand Ole Opry, which inspired him to put together his own show and the first A Prairie Home Companion was broadcast later that year. Jason Keillor says he grew up with the show. "I remember my mother driving the musicians and artists back and forth to performances and then me picking up popcorn from between the seats after the show." He says his father "had some tough years" in the late 60s and early 70s until his morning radio show propelled him into A Prairie Home Companion. "Suddenly he was speaking to a group of people that public radio had not previously appealed to. He had a dream in childhood that he never wavered from despite having parents who were very negative about anything related to entertainment. It was hardest for Garrison's father to say, 'wow, you done great'. For a long time he disapproved of what [my father] was doing but after 25 or 30 years of success I think it did catch on with my grandparents eventually."

In 1980, Minnesota Public Radio began to distribute the show nationally. Since then it has had some changes of name and format but is essentially the same mixture of songs, sketches, poems, and guest musicians. It broadcasts live for 35 weeks of the year, with about a third of the shows coming from St Paul and can be heard in the UK on the digital radio station BBC7, or on the web at www.prairiehome.org. Keillor still writes most of the show, producing 40 pages of script in a few days each week. And the highlight is still The News from Lake Wobegon, an extemporised 20-minute monologue that Time magazine described as an "out-of-body experience".

Jane Smiley says she always thought of the shows as being like a Sunday church service. "It has the singing and the audience responses and the sermon which is the Lake Wobegon story. He must live like a 19th-century vicar having to write his sermon every week. In some ways that's why it is so reassuring."

Happy to be Here, Keillor's first collection of Lake Wobegon stories, was published in 1982 and became a bestseller. Franken says: "There is a consistent quality in what he does and to the people who follow him and like his work he is Mark Twain. Of course there is a demographic factor involved. A friend of mine worked for Bill Cosby when Garrison was on the cover of Time magazine with a headline saying he was the funniest man in America. Apparently Cosby said, 'yeah, that's true if you're a pilgrim'." The Time cover came in the wake of the 1985 publication of a collection of stories called Lake Wobegon Days. And in Keillor's case the pre-laptop aphorism applied: when an English writer finds success they get a new typewriter, but when an American writer finds success they get a new life. Keillor's relationship with a producer of his show, Margaret Moos, ended around this time and at a school reunion he met Ulla Skaerved, who had been an exchange student from Denmark in 1960. They married the same year but two years later, in 1987, after a series of acrimonious privacy disputes with the local press, he announced the end of the radio show and that he was moving with Ulla to Copenhagen. However, after a few months of speaking "the Danish of a 12-year-old who's been married twice", the couple were back in America, but this time, on Ulla's prompting, living in New York. Keillor says he then "finagled" himself an office at the New Yorker and speaks with an aching nostalgia about the thrill of writing for the magazine.

Angell says "he was made for the New Yorker in that he was original and light and assured and intelligent. He reminded me a lot of EB White, who had the same general combination of talents." Scholl says he sees this time "as a watershed in his career. In contemporary jargon, this period, for around five or six years, marks a 'mid-life crisis'. After ending the long continuous run of Prairie, he was much more willing to express political views, to use more 'daring' - sexualised - material, and didn't try so hard to remain 'in character' as the Man from Lake Wobegon."

In 1987, Keillor published his next Lake Wobegon collection, Leaving Home. Spalding Gray, another American master of the monologue (who was recently in the news when he was reported missing), claimed that at their worst, "many of these stories are like honey-coated breakfast cereal. They give you a sugar rush only to let you crash by mid-morning", but more often he admiringly observed how "each detail collapses on to another" so the stories "fall together like a row of dominoes, leaving you more with a memory of motion than of content. When these tales work, as they often do, they are like American Zen, about 'sweet single-minded people' who work when they work and eat when they sit down to eat."

Another collection, We Are Still Married, came in 1989 and in 1991 his first full-length novel, WLT: A Radio Romance, which was set in the period just before television became the primary source of mass entertainment. Smiley says: "I thought it was a wonderful novel. Its particular charm was his insight into how his characters at the radio station sent their best selves out over the airwaves and once they had done that they were left with a residue of resentment and lust and all their worst feelings. I think that is quite a profound evocation of being. It works on a metaphorical and philosophical level." Kling says Keillor is himself "a perfectionist while appearing to be very casual. He's so much better at what he does than anyone else is or can be that he gets very little really useful help. So he writes most of what is heard on the two-hour show and no matter how loose it might be on Friday or even Saturday morning, it comes off perfectly, live on Saturday night. He's demanding and needs to be. He can be incredibly generous and kind while having no ability to suffer fools (unless he's studying them for material). He can be warm and distant in the same day."

In the early 90s, when Tina Brown was appointed editor of the New Yorker, Keillor resigned, bemoaning the loss of the magazine's soul. Some eyebrows were raised that he, although a relatively recent recruit to the New Yorker staff, should have taken it upon himself to become the publication's conscience. But it is indicative of the magazine's place in his writer's psyche. At around the same time Keillor's marriage to Ulla ended. He moved back to Minnesota and is now married to violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson, who has played on the radio show and with whom he wrote the children's book, The Sandy Bottom Orchestra (1996). They have a daughter, Maia, who is six. Keillor published his second novel, Lake Wobegon Boy, in 1997 and a bildungsroman, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, in 2000. In between came a satiric autobiography, Me, of a character very much like the wrestler turned Minnesota governor, Jesse "The Body" Ventura.

While Lurie says she can appreciate a critical reservation sometimes levelled that Keillor's novels can be uneven, she says "he is probably our best American humorist and yet he is much more than just a humorist. I think he might not be appreciated by serious readers as much as he should be because he is funny and has such a popular following. He has a lot of feeling for a wide range of people. America is so many different places, but there is a very large section of America that people on the coasts sometimes call 'flyover America'. And there are many, many small towns where people will absolutely recognise Keillor's world. There are many more places like Lake Wobegon than there are places like Manhattan."

Scholl says that while he doubts any of Keillor's published writings will ever attain the canonical stature or status of a book like Huckleberry Finn, "I do believe he has already equalled the recognition and staying power of 20th-century humorous writers such as James Thurber and essayists like EB White, one of his early idols."

And Keillor is determined to keep himself in a position where he can carry on writing. After giving up smoking three decades ago, he gave up drinking two years ago. "I was drinking too much so I thought why don't I just stop. All these years you tell yourself you're doing it because you enjoy it and not because of some dark compulsion. I realised that if that was not the case I would have to go off on some programme and sit on folding chairs and drink coffee out of styrofoam cups and weep with a group of people I really didn't want to be with. I enjoyed drinking alcohol a great deal. But you get to a certain age and you have to weigh the cost of feeling that the next morning. I like to write in the morning and I didn't like to wake up feeling foggy. This is more so as you get older - and I have a lot of work I still want to do."

As well as the radio show and his magazine articles, he is working on a Lake Wobegon film project with director Robert Altman and is finishing off a book called Why I Am A Democrat. His friend Pederson says that perhaps earlier in his career he was more conscious of his audience's reaction to political content. "But his views haven't changed that much and now that he is so established I think he regards it as his moral duty to speak out. It is something that is important to him."

"Initially my publishers were not keen on the book but now they are," says Keillor. "The time is right for it and the primary reason I am a Democrat is that they take the idea of justice seriously and justice is the sine qua non of our society. The simple idea of a social compact is required for civilised life. If you are in serious need I'll rally to your side, and you will do the same for me. That is the assumption that enables us to travel around the world and get outside our tribe: without it all life is brutal. And looking around, it is a tragedy that life is indeed brutal for a great many people in America today."

Life at a glance

Gary Edward Keillor

Born: August 7 1942, Anoka, Minnesota.

Education: 1957-60 Anoka High School; '60-68 University of Minnesota.

Married: 1965 Mary Guntzel (one son, Jason) divorced; '85 Ulla Skaerved, divorced; Jenny Lind Nilsson (one daughter, Maia).

Career: 1962-63 journalist; '69-73 radio announcer and presenter; '74-87 and '93- host, A Prairie Home Companion; '89-93 host of The American Radio Company; '87-92 staff writer The New Yorker.

Books: 1982 Happy to be Here; '85 Lake Wobegon Days; '87 Leaving Home; '89 We Are Still Married; '91 WLT: A Radio Romance; '94 Wobegon Boy The Book of Guys; '99 'Me: The Jimmy (Big Boy) Valente Story'; 2001 Lake Wobegon 1956; '04 Love Me.

Love Me is published this week by Faber and Faber, price £10.99. To order a copy for £8.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979.

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